🍿 The Ring (2002), held up rather well, though with more jump scares than I remembered. It’s the lack of gratuitous gore that makes it scarier than some other attempts. Gloomy Washington state standing in for gloomy Japan was an inspired choice.

🍿 Evil Dead, the 2013 version, had nothing of the qualities that made the original trilogy enjoyable. “Thank you”, CGI, for turning a campy gross-out horror comedy featuring plastic puppets squirting purple slime into yet another festival of gore.

🍿 The Hound of the Baskervilles has had many shots at the silver screen, but the 1988 version made for the tube and starring the canonical Sherlock Holmes is yet to be topped — even with Brett being visibly bloated and sluggish from the lithium he started taking the year before.

If Mad Men gave you any kind of 1960’s nostalgia, watching Boston Strangler on Hulu will be a good antidote: dour people living dour lives in dark, musty apartments. It’s no wonder that all those concrete toombs sprang up in the same decade.

🍿 Jumanji: Welcome to the Junge was as silly and mindless as you would expect, and sometimes (often!) that’s exactly what’s needed. Jack Black’s role in particular was a delight — just enough to soothe the pain of switching the mechanics from board games to video.

From the essay Zombies in Western Culture, which a friend recommended I read:

Clearly, the zombie has transcended the constraints of its own genre. Whereas early zombie films closely adhered to horror tropes, more recent renditions have wed themselves to comedy and romance (Zack Snyder released the comedic Shaun of the Dead in 2004 to critical and popular acclaim), and broken away from melodrama.

Emphasis is mine, and I still can’t get over this mistake. Clearly the comedic masterpiece Shaun of the Dead is Part 1 of Edgar Wright’s Cornetto triology ⊕ Part 2, Hot Fuzz is even better! and has nothing to do with Zack Snyder.

Is this an intentional troll? Zack Snyder does attract a lot of 4Chan attention. But how am I supposed to take the any of the essay’s many meandering philosophical references ⊕ And I thought medical jargon was bad… seriously if they can’t get this one basic thing right? Submit myself to voluntary Gell-Man amnesia?

🍿 The Pale Blue Eye was big on feels, short on plot. For a murder mystery, that is a death sentence. I do want to see more of Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe but please, Netflix, let’s not turn this into another franchise.

🍿 Three Thousand Years of Longing was an unexpected delight. If the theme of Fury Road, George Miller’s previous, was chase, the theme of Longing is story, within a story, within a story, masterfully weaved and presented without irony. More of this, please.

🍿 White Noise starts off as a Wes Anderson and almost finishes as a David Lynch before veering off to a Little Miss Sunshine finale. There are stops at Allentown, Hitchcock City, Bruckheimerville, and many others along the way. Enjoyable, if a bit too self-serving.

🍿 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is on the regular re-watch list. Think what you will of Tim Burton’s style — and I don’t think it fits this particular story — the movie works almost as well as the book in being a didactic tool for toddlers and pre-teens.