Issue #403: Celebrate Halloween With Modern Horrors of Human Invention
Everyone ventured deep into their history of local music for this week’s Music League.
Apple Music (missing a song)
Feels like everyone is a little behind. I just finished listening to the playlist today. There’s a very high proportion of local rap songs. There’s a song from a compilation with FAMU’s Marching 100 on the cover. Some inside baseball: you can find Jaybo and Jaaybo represented among the tunes. Judging it against all our playlists, this was my least favorite. Certainly, there are more songs I hate on here than any other (between three and five). But I learned about The Wards and DJ Uncle Al, so it’s not all bad.
Early signups for Music League season two are available here. I’ll repost again once we are closer to the November 19th start date.
This week’s newsletter is entirely movie quick hits, and I want to start by celebrating Kathryne Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite (2025). I don’t usually do this, but I am just gonna quote my Letterboxd review:
The American Conclave. Bigelow gets a ton of mileage out of tense talking. Unlike Conclave, this is a “thriller” in the sense that it thrills and maintains the general shape of a thriller, but it ultimately lacks the formal structure of the genre. This makes the movie better, though, rather than worse.
I think Succession popularized the “adults in the room” phrase in U.S. pop culture. A House of Dynamite emphasizes just how absent the adults are in every facet of American government and military. Even Ferguson’s performance as mother of the year couldn’t escape the overwhelming infantilization of all the characters. Elba has devils and an angel on his shoulder but reminisces about his college days while reading out his strategic nuclear reprisal option.
The exception among the characters is Basso as Jake Baerington. He is electric, born to play this kind of stressed, out-of-his-depth soldier, agent, or bureaucrat. He’s the manifestation of the liberal fantasy of the reasonable, life-preserving pacifist among the decision makers about what missiles get sent where. Ideological as the soothing quality of his character is, he is cast as the sole adult in the room among the panicked children. This is a reversal he is able to get across quite strongly, as a deputy national security advisor who shouldn’t even have been there in the first place.
Elba doesn’t really sell the flustered, first time president act. He’s not built for it. Ferguson is much more suited to her role, but I’ll watch Basso in however many more White House potboilers they cast him in. I’m still not going to finish the second season of The Night Agent, though. There're some depths even I won’t plumb.
My enthusiasm for the film should be obvious, but there is plenty more I can say about it. Bigelow does a remarkable job of making screens and incremental countdowns exciting. There’s a kind of fast-talking contemporary American scriptwriting I credit to Sorkin, but probably really finds its origin point in mid-30s alongside the inception of spoken dialogue in cinema. Bigelow gives the script by the notorious Noah Oppenheim some room to breathe, though.
I would like to think the brute facts that A House marshals for its plot don’t strictly correspond with reality, but Bigelow paints a dire picture of just how close human society is to absolute nuclear extinction. This film’s ideal viewer is not inherently repulsed by depictions of the military-industrial complex and has an appetite for “palace intrigue” films, but I think A House of Dynamite may be underrated this year.
The Mastermind, on the other hand, I suspect will be correctly rated. It is a great, clever film with an ironic title. I would not call it a heist movie, but it does induce anxiety. And it takes place in Massachusetts. Josh O’Connor is marvelous as a man who is absolutely incapable of understanding his circumstances.
Finally, there’s Good Boy (2025). It is a horror film. It is not among the horror films I write about below because it is not good. Nothing will save a movie from a dog’s point of view from being a gimmick. The Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, Indy, who is the film’s star and principal character (somehow) is absolutely outstanding. I can’t deny that. The number of takes to get what they got must have been ceaseless.
The film is very well thought through. An example of what I mean: as Indy and Todd (Shane Jensen) arrive at the haunted cabin where most of the film takes place, Todd uses an electric lantern rather than a headlamp. The lantern rests mostly right below Todd’s hip, his arm in the upper part of the frame where Indy is centered. Sometimes he puts the lantern down, but he never holds it up. He uses the lantern instead of a flashlight, a phone, or a headlamp. This ensures Indy, and the camera’s relatively low area of focus, is well lit. There are countless little details with the film’s production design and cinematography that make a movie focused on a dog, and from a dog’s perspective, work.
But then there are the weird ASMR cuts of random stuff in the house or rocks or swaying trees that make the movie feel like a youtube video from a Japanese or Korean camping influencer. And there’s the fact that the dog is so particular. The movie panders to its audience of dog lovers more than it delivers anything of meaning, substance, or interest. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Horror’s Hidden Gems for 2025
There’s less than a full week left of October. I’m sure those of you who watch more horror movies than usual, or try to watch 31 across the month, are neck deep in flicks. I wanted to highlight a few less popular films I’ve stumbled on but enjoyed quite a bit across the last year or so.
Most of the movies are contemporary. Perhaps these movies, for my purposes, benefit from non-theatrical releases to maintain their status as undiscovered. There are two pairs of pretty similar films. Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project (2025) and Hostile Dimensions (2023) are both — you won’t believe this — found footage films about making a film. Hostile Dimensions has a lot of jokes about Monsters Inc. (2001) among its Letterboxd reviews. I’m not sure this is totally fair. But, yes, the movie involves a lot of doors that go to different places. It looks a bit more like James Gunn’s second season of Peacemaker ripped it off.
Hostile Dimensions involves a documentary investigating a missing woman. There’s some psychological drama which more or less bounced off me. The film is strong in the effects department, especially given the self-evidently meager budget. Worlds behind the doors aren’t just decent looking, but are also imaginative in their design. Graham Hughes, the director, may seriously want to consider legal action against James Gunn. The similarities are very pointed.
Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project shares the premise in broad strokes, but deals with making narrative film rather than documentary. It is also a horror comedy, and it is funny. It’s a few rungs down from One Cut of the Dead (2017), but there are some legit gags in Found Footage. I was impressed, but I had the benefit of not having anyone tell me it was even a passable film.
Haunted Ulster Live (2023) and Transmission (2023) share a much less common premise, dealing with a TV broadcast and presenting as the film, primarily, the ‘fictional’ broadcast that is happening within the movie. Haunted Ulster Live is a little more conventional and less rigid in its formal structure; the point of view is behind the scenes of the production rather than the audience watching whatever is getting broadcast. Haunted Ulster comes across as a more real movie, but Transmission is very interesting. It is exacting because what’s presented to the audience is what some random person sees on their couch late at night. The non-speaking, unnamed POV character is not the protagonist. If there is one, it’s Rachel Roth (Nicole Cinaglia), but the film channel surfs, moving between different programs. There’s a news program, a documentary about a filmmaker, one of that filmmaker’s films (coincidental…), and some sitcom. The relationship between all this stuff ranges from obvious to obscure, but it all has a purpose. It’s a movie, after all. Transmission is a genuinely creative work, even if it’s not always delivering the height of cinematic excellence.
Night of the Reaper (2025) stands apart from the rest of the films as a pretty standard slasher. There are touches of creativity and good performances for the film’s weight class. Director Brandon Christensen is becoming, in my view, a very workmanlike horror film director who delivers watchable films very reliably. This is the fourth of his I’ve seen, including Z (2019), Superhost (2021), and Puppetman (2023). Some of those I’ve liked more than others. Not to damn him with faint praise, but Christensen seems like a director made to be successful behind the camera of big budget franchise films.
The final film I want to talk about is not a hidden gem by any stretch. From Beyond (1986) is another Lovecraft adaptation by Stuart Gordon with the same creative team and cast as Re-Animator (1985). From Beyond is his second most well-known film. But I talked to some friends of mine on Saturday singing the praises of Re-Animator and not recognizing From Beyond. It’s fantastic. More serious and disturbing than Re-Animator, Gordon is a master of adapting Lovecraft’s material into something campy, unsettling, and memorable.
Weekly Reading List
This was a pretty enjoyable half-hour video for me as a longtime Magic player. About 80% of these printings were new to me.
On tour, Conner O’Malley is making a joke about how he gets all his grocery shopping done in the checkout line at Marshall’s. In this director’s commentary, he makes some other jokes.
Event Calendar: Noirvember at Brattle Theater
Any theater running “Noirvember” programming is good news for me. The Brattle will be showing the following films, all screenings on the event calendar:
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Pickup on South Street (1953)
Cry Danger (1951)
The Prowler (1951)
Pushover (1954)
Clash by Night (1952)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
The Killing (1956)
Touch of Evil (1958)
The Crimson Kimono (1959)
I haven’t seen most of these, but I can guarantee Sweet Smell of Success and The Killing as must sees.
Touch of Evil is one of my favorite movies of all time, but it looks like Brattle will be screening a 4K restoration of the original theatrical version of the film. I’ve actually never seen anything but a few scenes from it, but Orson Welles begged the studio not to show their cut. Seemingly validating his abundant critiques, the movie was panned by critics until being re-cut according to Welles’ detailed recommendation to the studio. He closes his letter with a line that has always stuck with me, “I close this memo with a very earnest plea that you consent to this brief visual pattern to which I gave so many long days of work.” With all that in mind, it feels a little funny to me to screen the theatrical cut. But I’m still inclined to check it out.
The Crimson Kimono is also quite good, though more drama than film noir. Brattle screened this around the same time last year.
Otherwise, I’ve got a lot to see. The Prowler is way on the top of my list but I’ll try to make it to every screening I can. More writing about film noir coming soon, probably.
Until next time.