Viewings: October 2023

The two highest ranked films watched in October were Peter Bogdonavich's Targets and Brian Duffield's No One Will Save You. The latter being my favourite 2023 film thus far.  However, what with it being Halloween, it's only appropriate that Boris Karloff's mug from Targets graces October's screenshot, don't you think?

It wasn't by design, but the majority of other notable films discovered this month were set in a pub: Revenge, Hotel Coolgardie and The Royal Hotel.  The exception to the rule being Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby which is the type of amazing movie you stumble upon on late night TV when coming home half cut from the pub.

 

Film:

Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)*

Figures in a Landscape (Joseph Losey, 1970)*

Assault (Sidney Hayers, 1971)

Family Life (Ken Loach, 1971)*

Quest for Love (Ralph Thomas, 1971)*

Revenge (Sidney Hayers, 1971)*

All Coppers Are... (Sidney Hayers, 1972)*

Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (Tsui Hark, 1980)*

Hard Rock Zombies (Krishna Shah, 1984)*

Der Todesking (Jörg Buttgereit, 1990)

Singapore Sling (Nikos Nikolaidis, 1990)

Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (Matthew Bright, 1999/2000)*

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (Mike Hodges, 2004)*

Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror (Stacy Title, 2006)*

Death Sentence (James Wan, 2007)

The Baader Meinhof Complex (Uli Edel, 2008)*

The Canyons (Paul Schrader, 2013)*

The Dyatlov Pass Incident AKA Devil’s Pass (Renny Harlin, 2013)

Night of the Rat (David R.L, 2015)*

Hotel Coolgardie (Pete Gleeson, 2016)*

Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023)*

Bottoms (Emma Seligman, 2023)*

The Equalizer 3 (Antoine Fuqua, 2023)*

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (André Øvredal, 2023)*

The Meg 2: The Trench (Ben Wheatley, 2023)*

Night of the Hunted (Franck Khalfoun, 2023)*

No One Will Save You (Brian Duffield, 2023)*

The Nun II (Michael Chaves, 2023)*

The Royal Hotel (Kitty Green, 2023)*

Saw X (Kevin Greutert, 2023)*

Suitable Flesh (Joe Lynch, 2023)*

Totally Killer (Nahnatchka Khan, 2023)*

V/H/S/85 (Scott Derrickson, David Bruckner, Mike P. Nelson, Gigi Saul Guerrero & Natasha Kermani, 2023)*

Television:

Batman - Season 1 (William Dozier, 1966)

Ghosts - Season 5 Epsiode 1 (Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard & Ben Willbond, 2023)*

Mastermind - Episodes 6 - 10 (Bill Wright, 2023)*

Only Connect - Season 19 - Episode 16 (Chris Stuart, 2023)*

 

*First time viewings. 

Dada Debaser Notes:

• The Meg 2: The Trench is further proof Ben Wheatley has fallen off since he can't even make a half decent creature feature.
  
• Night of the Hunted is an inferior American remake to the Spanish thriller Night of the Rat. The cringeworthy political commentary really ruined the film. Can't believe Khalfoun and Aja made this.
  
• All for the current trend of action heroes acting like slasher villains, but you don't see Jason Voorhees cotching all day in a café when he's not slaughtering people like Denzel Washington does in The Equalizer 3.
  
• Nice of Nikos Nikolaidis' son to upload his old man's explicit noir uncut and in HD on YouTube. Won't ever see a kiwi fruit in the same way again.
  
• Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid and André Øvredal's The Last Voyage of the Demeter turned out to be major disappointments for me.
  
• Marc Wilkinson's music for depressing mental health drama Family Life is perfectly suited to a vintage horror and completely wasted in a Ken Loach film.
  
• More a silly teen comedy than a proper horror film, but Totally Killer ended up being a suprisingly decent timewaster. Kudos to the film makers for featuring one of my favourite ever 80s jams in a slasher:

Totally Killer (Heather's death scene)

Nahnatchka Khan, 2023