Viewings: September 2025

It's been a rotten film year thus far, but Zach Cregger's Weapons is a noteworthy highlight that goes against the grain, and a reason to still remain positive. A gem of a film balancing dark humour and dread filled horror with aplomb.

 

Film:

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sidney Lanfield, 1939) 

Missile to the Moon (Richard E. Cunha, 1958)*

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Terence Fisher, 1959)

Teenage Gang Debs (Sande N. Johnsen, 1966)*

A.A.A. Masseuse, Good Looking, Offers Her Services (Demofilo Fidani, 1972)*

Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods (Sauro Scavolini, 1972)

Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998)

Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky, 2025)*

Dracula: A Love Tale (Luc Besson, 2025)*

Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025)* 

 

Television:

 Earth - Season 1 (Various, 2023)*

Mastermind - Episodes 7-11 (Bill Wright, 2025 / 2026)*

 

*First time viewings.

 

Dada Debaser Notes:

• Torn over which is the best Sherlock Holmes film adaptation I watched this month. 20th Century Fox's 1939 film boasts Basil Rathbone, the definitive actor to have played the great detective (even after the time jump), but I can't help being mesmerised by Hammer's gothic technicolour splendour in the 1959 film.
• A.A.A. Masseuse, Good-Looking, Offers Her Services is an awful giallo that focuses more on its lead actress getting in and out of her kit for most of the film than anything else. Predictably dull and only notable for its relative obscurity (until recently).
• Sauro Scavolini's Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods is a twisted psychosexual drama before veering into giallo territory near the end. Definitely an acquired taste, but I enjoyed revisiting this again.
• Manhattan bad girl Terry (Diane Conti) moves into a Brooklyn neighbourhood and quickly moves up the ranks of a local gang — thanks to being complete dynamite in the sack  — in the largely plotless Teenage Gang Debs. It's a juvenile delinquency movie where the teens look around thirty, dance like your parents at a wedding and wear knitted cardigans at a knife fight. It's been done better elsewhere, but I did enjoy parts of it, though.
• Keep forgetting to make notes for Alex Proyas's Dark City, as I really want to review it, but too much time passes by where I'm no longer in the right zone to cover it. Incredible film, regardless.
• Style wise, Luc Besson's utterly awful Dracula: A Love Tale borrows heavily from Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation, initially. After that, he's mining the perfect scent scenes from Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) and Jamelia's Money music video. Even with all the makeup, Caleb Landry Jones still looks like Axl Rose than the titular count, and the CGI stone gargoyles can't be taken seriously.
• Apart from featuring every bloke's sci-fi fantasy — a planet populated with extraterrestrial babes (there's always going to be a cat fight, eventually!) — the best thing about Missile to the Moon are the laugh out loud rock monsters:

Missile to the Moon | Rock Monsters Scene

Richard E. Cunha | 1958 

 

Other Stuff I Enjoyed This Month:

The third part in Crab Apple's incredible run down of BBC 2's Horror Double Bills; The Martorialist's favourite Female Rap Songs of the 2020s; The Flashback Fanatic's review of Heavy Metal (1981), Chris Wood's review of Assault (1971) and Dave Parker's epic Top 25 Horror Movies of 1982 video essay.

Picks of 1985

You can sum up 1985 as the year when Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris and the legendary veteran Charles Bronson earned higher body counts than Prince. On the subject of 80s action heroes, let it be known that Sylvester Stallone did more for world peace than any stoner hippie, glorified philosopher or corrupt politician by ending the Cold War with one of the greatest movie speeches of all time. 

After Hours (Martin Scorsese)

Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis)

The Boys Next Door (Penelope Spheeris) 

Brazil (Terry Gilliam)

The Breakfast Club (John Hughes)

Commando (Mark L. Lester) 

Day of the Dead (George A. Romero)

Death Wish 3 (Michael Winner) 

Flesh + Blood (Paul Verhoeven)

Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (Danny Steinmann)

Fright Night (Tom Holland)

The Goonies (Richard Donner)

Invasion U.S.A. (Joseph Zito) 

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller, George Ogilvie)

The Mean Season (Philip Borsos) 

Mr. Vampire (Ricky Lau)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Jack Sholder)

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (Tim Burton) 

Phenomena (Dario Argento)

Police Story (Jackie Chan) 

The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy)

Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos) 

Ran (Akira Kurosawa) 

Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon) 

Rocky IV (Sylvester Stallone) 

The Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon)

Silver Bullet (Daniel Attias)

The Stuff (Larry Cohen) 

To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin)

Weird Science (John Hughes)

Witness (Peter Weir) 

Blindspots & Incomplete Viewings:

The Coca-Cola Kid (Dušan Makavejev); Come and See (Elem Klimov); Confessions of a Serial Killer (Mark Blair); Crimewave (Sam Raimi); Into the Night (John Landis); The Last Dragon (Michael Shultz); Legend (Ridley Scott); Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader); Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood); Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky); Teen Wolf (Rod Daniel); Typhoon Club (Shinji Sōmai)

1985 was a treasure trove for perfect musical montages and needledrops gracing various films. A personal fave is the scene from William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. when Willem Dafoe makes counterfeit bills and Wang Chung's City of the Angels plays.

To Live and Die in L.A. | Making Counterfeit Money Scene

William Friedkin | 1985 

Children of the Night

Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025)

Never really understood the praise for Zach Cregger's Barbarian (2022). Despite an intriguing concept, revolving around an Airbnb in a derelict neighbourhood, it was let down by some idiotic characters, particularly its lead, along with a ridiculous final act. As a result, I found the film to be somewhat mediocre and indistinguishable from the glut of other overrated horror titles released at the time. Therefore, with Cregger's latest effort Weapons (2025) receiving an abundance of love via critics and movie goers alike, I was more than willing to let its hype die down before even mustering the strength to see it. Fortunately, Weapons is a considerate improvement over Cregger's previous film and a welcome surprise.

Centred around the mysterious disappearance of a classroom of third graders from their homes one night, Weapons is a non-linear film broken up into multiple intersecting chapters; highlighting the ripple effect of the event via various characters. School teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) the town's pariah blamed for the disappearance of her classroom, and Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), father to one of the missing children, embarking on his own personal investigation of the mass disappearance, have more screen time than some of the other featured characters, such as the school's comical principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong). The final and most expository chapter in the film deals with Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the only child in Justine's class not to disappear into the night.

Performance wise, Garner and Brolin are very good in their roles; the former managing to play a deeply unlikeable character initially and turn it around into a deeply flawed and sympathetic individual, whilst the latter delivers an intensely emotional state of a parent coping with the loss of his child. However, it's Amy Madigan's performance as Aunt Gladys, best described as looking like the missing link between Kathy Griffin and the Joker, who will undoubtedly be most well remembered here. Partly because she resembles an old hag, with an ill-suited orange wig and terrifying grimace, but it's also due to how great she is playing such a manipulative and chilling character. No doubt, this won't be the last we'll see of Aunt Gladys.

Much like his previous film, Cregger injects dark humour throughout this mystery tale. Considering its premise, these comedic scenes are both cathartic and very welcome relief. Cregger also laces surreal dream sequences that tread the line of conventional horror films and art-house surrealism. Other highlights include some disturbing scenes that won't be forgotten in a hurry. Seeing a bloody and bug-eyed Benedict Wong running through the town like an absolute lunatic is one such example. Additionally, it's refreshing for a film to not cop out with a vaguely ambiguous explanation for an ending. An annoying cliché, which is both pretentious, unsatisfying and a blight upon many films. 

At a little over two-hours long, Cregger's slow burn thriller is just a bit too long for a film of this ilk. It's largely due to Cregger investing so heavily in multiple characters receiving a dedicated chapter. While these chapters are executed with entertaining satisfaction, I'm not entirely sure the film needed so many segments. Both the cop and junkie storylines could have probably been streamlined better, or possibly omitted. Still, along with a few plot holes, it's not a serious gripe in what's otherwise a genuinely entertaining film with a hilariously disturbing Benny Hill ending.

Hollywood occasionally delivers a large budget, mainstream horror that actually delivers the goods; Weapons is definitely one of those films for me. Given how mediocre I found Barbarian, I'm kind of glad I gave Zach Cregger a second chance as he might be the go-between of 2010s era James Wan and pre-up his own pretentious arse Ari Aster. Which subsequently has me eager to see what Cregger delivers when he tackles the Resident Evil franchise.

Recommended.