November’s darling is the crossover of surrealist and psychotronic film in the Venn diagram of cinema. Dementia is a strange anomaly from its era where overtly serious cinephiles and degenerate fans of exploitation can find common ground. Recommended viewing for anyone with a taste for oddball films.
Regarding the small screen, The Penguin threw its top hat in the ring as the most enjoyable new show I’ve watched in a long while.
Film:
Dementia (John Parker, 1953/1955)*
Bad Girls Do Cry (Sid Melton, 1954/1965)*
Tales from the Crypt (Roy Ward Baker, 1972)
Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (Ted Kotcheff, 1978)*
Bloodbath at the House of Death (Ray Cameron, 1984)*
Entrails of a Virgin AKA Guts of a Virgin (Kazuo Komizu, 1986)
Entrails of a Beautiful Woman AKA Guts of a Beauty (Kazuo Komizu, 1986)
Rusted Body: Guts of a Virgin III AKA Female Inquisitor (Kazuo Komizu, 1987)*
Evil Dead Trap (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988)
The Reflecting Skin (Philip Ridley, 1990)*
Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki (Izô Hashimoto, 1992)*
Serial Mom (John Waters, 1994)
Welcome to the Dollhouse (Todd Solondz, 1995)*
Black Cab (Bruce Goodison, 2024)*
La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023/2024)*
The Contestant (Clair Titley, 2023/2024)*
Cuckoo (Tilman Singer, 2024)*
The Demon Disorder (Steven Boyle, 2024)*
The Last Stop in Yuma County (Francis Galuppi, 2023/2024)*
Maid Droid Origins (Rich Mallery, 2024)*
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)*
A Quiet Place: Day One (Michael Sarnoski, 2024)*
Red Rooms (Pascal Plante, 2023/2024)*
Smile 2 (Parker Finn, 2024)*
V/H/S/Beyond (Jay Cheel, Jordan Downey, Christian Long, Justin Long, Justin Martinez, Virat Pal, Kate Siegel, 2024)*
Television:
Doctor Who - 'The War Games' (Sydney Newman, 1969)*
Blake’s 7 - Season One (Terry Nation, 1978)*
Mastermind - Episodes 11-14 (Bill Wright, 2024/2025)*
The Penguin - Season One (Lauren LeFranc, 2024)*
*First time viewings.
Dada Debaser Notes:
- Managed to fulfil some notable titles from past wish lists this month. Most of them turned out to be major letdowns, sadly.
- Nick Frost was perfectly cast as a psychotic taxi driver in Black Cab. The muddled supernatural elements felt terribly shoehorned in and really hurt the film.
- Heard great things about La Chimera. My brain automatically checked out once it became immediately clear this was some wannabe Fellini film. A rancid looking Josh O'Connor being insufferable and a predictable plot made this boring shite an endurance test. Ought to have called it La Douchebag Vita!
- Naomi Scott deserves an award for her performance being too good for the film. Still, Smile 2 was a significant improvement over its predecessor.
- Enjoyed Red Rooms, but in terms of quality, it's little different from the average TV drama made for water cooler chatter. Essentially a tech thriller about serial killer groupies and the dark web, with a soulless protagonist being utterly great at everything.
- First found out about Nasubi, the real life equivalent of Truman Burbank after reading about it in Cinema Sewer (RIP!). Fascinating subject matter, but The Contestant, the documentary about it, ought to have been more in depth.
- Curiosity got the better of me, I wrote about the worst film of the year and potentially, the decade.
2 comments:
Camel Lips 🤟
A mate of mine really likes those V/H/S movies, but I've yet to see 'em.
V/H/S/2 (2013) is the best of the lot, everything after that has been largely weak. Sometimes there's a short story that's a genuine diamond in the rough. The directors of Deadstream did To Hell and Back for V/H/S/99 (2022) which was creatively entertaining.
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