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)

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 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.
• Manhatten 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.