scumbelievable

I Would Like to See It: Throne of Blood

No one shoots a crowd like Kurosawa. Throughout Throne of Blood, loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, rooms and courtyards full of men fairly seethe with mass emotion. Whole formations of soldiers recoiling in fear as Lord Washizu (Toshiro Mifune, his dashing good looks...

I Would Like to See It: The Boxer's Omen

A Buddhist monk travels to Hong Kong to do battle with a dark sorcerer. With a single gesture he reduces the man to a bubbling pile of slimy, greenish flesh which then crumbles away, a time-lapse shot of worms eating through the facsimile of of a body to expose the withered crone beneath, who in ...

I Would Like to See It: Klute

Among the fast-talking, hard-nosed, sexually aggressive ranks of film’s great noir detectives, its Marlowes and Gitteses, its Spades and Diamonds, John Klute (Donald Sutherland) is an oddity. He is soft-spoken and reserved, not sexless but not smooth either, and his lack of resources is neither...

In the Flesh: King Kong (2005)

No one could accuse Peter Jackson’s 2005 adaptation of King Kong of being a perfect movie. Its racist Adventure Film of Yesteryear elements look worse now than ever, some of its CGI feels unfinished and iffy, and it is without a doubt overstuffed in that lovingly nerdy way only Jackson...

In the Flesh: Cure

As inspector Takabe, Kōji Yakusho is like a crumbling monolith, his initial patience and even affect disintegrating as Cure progresses until either nothing remains of the man he was or else his true self is exposed. It all depends on how you look at it. “My wife is a burden,�...

In the Flesh: Pulse (2001)

Little of what occurs in the first hour and a half of Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s seminal 2001 techno-horror flick, involves special effects of any kind. Aside from a single moment-long glimpse of an impressively real prosthetic throat, the rest is shadow and light, makeup and performanc...

I Would Like to See It: In the Cut

“The only thing I won’t do is beat you up,” says detective Giovanni Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) at the end of a spiel about the kind of boyfriend he could be to Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan). He says it like it’s a selling point, a rare feature one might shop around for, and in the supersaturated we...

In the Flesh: Dune (2021)

About five minutes into Denis Villeneuve’s sprawling adaptation of the first half of Dune, author Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi classic, it becomes abundantly clear that the high water mark of the film’s visual imagination is roughly equivalent to a 2000s-era HALO game. B...

I Would Like to See It: Three Outlaw Samurai

Three samurai, retainers of a cowardly and treacherous magistrate (Hisashi Igawa), burst into the chamber where louche prettyboy swordsman Kikyo (Mikijirō Hira) lies smoking opium with his lover. In a flash the camera is on the move, whipping out through a narrow gap between sliding screens and ...

I Would Like to See It: Andrei Rublev

Hundreds of bodies heave on cords of hempen rope, hauling a newly-cast church bell out of its casting pit as a crowd of thousands looks on in a rapture of nervous excitement. The hawsers creak. The scaffolds groan. Ton upon ton of human machinery strains against gravity and friction to unearth th...

In the Flesh: The Perfection

The Perfection is an odd one for me. To start, it has multiple glaring flaws. The lighting is intermittently terrible, washed-out and lifeless. The dialog sometimes veers too deep into corny therapy-lite dreck. The “rewind” effect used to pull us through the ever-changing plot is hac...

I Would Like to See It: What Keeps You Alive

“Why are you doing this?” Jules (Brittany Allen) sobs to her wife Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson as an adult, Charlotte Lindsay Marron as a young girl) after the other woman first attempts to murder her, then stalks her through the forest intent on finishing the job. Jules wants a reason. Ever...

Goblins, Ghosts, and Gabaghouls 1.01: People Come Here to Die

A bloody hand slips from a butcher’s cleaver as a man collapses to the floor, leaving streaks of red across the polished steel. Boys with toy pistols run beside an empty swimming pool, mimicking the sounds of gunshots as the mouth of the forest yawns black and deep behind them. And in the entra...

I Would Like to See It: Witchhammer

An altar boy sees an old beggar woman (Lola Skrbková) steal the host during mass. When he tells the priest (Jiří Holý), he sets off a chain reaction of suspicion and petty grudges which culminates in the devastation of the parish and the surrounding holdings of Countess de Galle (Blanka Wales...

In the Flesh: Black Mass

The last time I reviewed Mike Flanagan’s work, I panned it. His The Haunting of Hill House-inspired adaptation of the same name was saccharine sludge, full of overwrought monologues and wooden performances, everything lit in a flatly ghastly greenish-gray like some kind of purgatorial ...

I Would Like to See It: The House that Jack Built

“I’m not stupid,” says Jack (Mat Dillon), the film’s eponymous serial killer, moments before we see him bluff his way into a woman’s (the great Siobhan Fallon Hogan) home by first claiming to be a police officer who’s lost his badge, then pivoting to revealing himself as a pension man...

In the Flesh: Malignant

Malignant looks pretty good for a James Wan flick, which is to say it resembles a modestly ambitious episode of CSI — the original series, not the Florida one with David Caruso. Lighting is uniformly blue-gray, blood is shoddily CGI’d in, and every set looks like part of the...

I Would Like to See It: Hana-Bi

Why water dead flowers? Why fly a kite without wings? Hana-bi, Takeshi Kitano’s 1997 Yakuza film, concerns itself largely with the beauty of caring for things that we’ve already lost. Kitano’s movie is structured around absences, from the specter of ex-cop Yoshitaka Nishi (Kitano) ...

I Would Like to See It: Phantom of the Paradise

To paraphrase my dear friend the game designer Jeeyon Shim, William Finley understands that acting is a profession totally devoid of dignity. As Winslow Leach, the film’s titular phantom, Finley has a gangly, wild-eyed physical sincerity teetering on the verge of cartoonishiness, a larger than ...

In the Flesh: Faust (1926)

Vast black wings unfurl over a medieval German city. A sooty face grins from the shadow between them as smoke boils through the streets below. Faust himself, played with a hawkish yet vulnerable intensity by Gösta Ekman, hunches over his alchemical paraphernalia, his strong, severe countenance b...

In the Flesh: Brand New Cherry Flavor

Disclaimer: One of Brand New Cherry Flavor’s three principal writers, Matt Fennell, is a friend of mine, though I didn’t know he’d worked on it until after I’d watched it

Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Lost Highway, Under the Skin, and ...