The Howling (1981) | 31 Days of Gore

It’s the tenth anniversary of 31 Days of Gore, in which I feature one horror movie each day for the month of Halloween.

I’m in love with the way director Joe Dante opens The Howling: in the fast paced world of a television news station. Behind-the-scenes personnel are rushing around as the on-air talent get into makeup. Meanwhile, Karen White (Dee Wallace) is nervously walking down the scuzzy, neon-lit streets of Los Angeles’s grindhouse district, wired with a radio that’s transmitting her voice to the police. We have no idea what’s going on at first, but it’s instantly engaging as Dante drip-feeds the information to the audience.

We eventually learn that Karen has agreed to take part in a sting operation to catch a serial killer (an exceptionally effective Richard Picardo) who has become infatuated with her. The killer instructs her to meet him in the back of an adult video store containing a private movie booth. Once there, the killer forces her to watch a snuff film of his own making before the cops manage to shoot him dead. Karen is so traumatized by the event, her therapist suggests she should vacation at the countryside resort where he treats patients in a group setting.

While Karen finds trouble connecting with her husband intimately (whenever he tries to kiss her, she flashbacks to a close-up of the killer’s flickering tongue), her newsroom buddies discover the killer’s body has gone missing from the morgue. Their investigation leads the reporters to an occult bookstore run by Dick Miller who, as far as I’m aware, has never not appeared in a Joe Dante film. Miller tells the reporters they may be dealing with a werewolf and suggests they buy a box of silver bullets. When they ask him if he really believes in that kind of stuff, he replies, “What am I, an idiot? I’m makin’ a buck here!”

I don’t want to spoil who’s a werewolf and who’s not, but I will say the reveal is amusingly macabre. There’s a huge cast of character actors including Christopher Stone (who Dee Wallace married in real life), Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, and Slim Pickens. Dante also packs the film with uncredited cameos by his buddies: Roger Corman, Forrest J. Ackerman, John Sayles (this film’s writer), and Mick Garris were the ones I recognized. I’m sure I missed others.

While I think the showdown between Karen and the killer should have been a bigger deal (and a little less routine), the finale does not disappoint. We also see what has to be the longest werewolf transformation ever captured on film, the effects of which are provided by Rob Bottin, who would later go on to work on The Thing. Rick Baker is also credited for the effects, though he jumped ship (with Dante’s blessing) to work on John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, which is overall the inferior werewolf film in my book.

By my count, there are two similarities between this picture and Romero’s Dawn of the Dead: both films open in a news station and both films feature unusually strong character work in their middle sections. In this film, John Carradine’s character watches two young lovers on the beach with a sense of longing and regret that’s expressed entirely without words. It’s a moment that’s extremely rare in these types of movies, elevating it to one of my favorites.

The Toxic Avenger (2025)

Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage), the janitor at a corrupt drug manufacturer, has just been given six months to live. That night, the single parent gets drunk and roams the streets as he wrestles with the fear of leaving his stepson (Jacob Tremblay) alone. How he ends up in a tutu is less believable than how his counterpart, Melvin Junko, ended up in a tutu in Lloyd Kaufman’s original film of the same name. (This time around, the Toxic Avenger’s origin story isn’t part of a cruel prank, so one wonders: Why didn’t he just take the tutu off before leaving the house?) Ultimately, Winston decides to rob his employers and finds himself in the factory’s toxic runoff, which hideously deforms him, but gives him superhuman strength.

The large cast of villains (I especially like the henchman who never misses an opportunity to do a flip) are led by the corporation’s evil CEO, played by Kevin Bacon, who surprisingly understands the kind of movie he’s making, but at no point tries to hams it up as Hollywood actors tend to do in these kind of films. His runt of a little brother is played by Elijah Wood, who seems to genuinely enjoy appearing in oddball genre affairs ever since securing his massive fortune in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Meanwhile Peter Dinklage perfects the right amount of grounded acting and comedic timing.

As a lifelong fan of the original, I went into The Toxic Avenger fully expecting it to suck as reboots ~~of cult classics~~ almost always do. I was surprised to find the most competently paced of the five films and, overall, I’d place it second only to the 1984 original… and if you were to rate it higher, I wouldn’t feel the need to fight you. Recently, there’s been much hullabaloo about The Naked Gun reboot potentially resurrecting the spoof film. Here’s literally the same type of cathartic laughter.

The trailers don’t convey how solid the movie is; Lloyd Kaufman’s films flew in the face of Hollywood conventions while the reboot prefers to satirize and indulge in them equally. In some ways it feels like a throwback to the superhero film of the 90s, before they became monotonously noisy and bloated with clap-bait for nerds. I know the competition is extremely incompetent, but director Macon Blair has crafted one of the least insulting reboots I’ve ever seen. This is as good as a mainstream Troma movie can possibly be.

My only complaint is they didn’t kill the cat. What’s a Troma movie without a handful of “that’s so wrong” deaths played for shameless entertainment? In the original you had old ladies beaten to death and children’s skulls crushed by moving cars. You could say this one pulls its punches in that respect, but that doesn’t feel like its intention. It’s just doing its own thing, in its own way, and it does it especially well.

Frankie Freako (2024)

When Conor’s wife gets dolled up in lingerie for date night, she tells him she was thinking that maybe they could do a little more than hold hands for a change. “What more is there?” Conor asks incredulously. There are many movies (most of them) in which I simply wouldn’t accept a joke as lame as that, but it’s less about the joke and more about the way it’s told. In his previous film, Psycho Goreman, director Steven Kostanski included a scene that had me laugh uncontrollably for several minutes straight; it involved a telepathic connection taking place, without warning, in a bathroom.

In an even earlier picture of his, Manborg, Kostanski crafted an entire feature held together by a few hundred bucks, duct tape, and a load of guerrilla creativity. That movie relied heavily (and charmingly) on the kind of CGI that wouldn’t convince a toddler, but boy was it fun. The bigger his budgets get, the less he relies on CGI and the more he employs the kind of practical effects that tickle me to pieces. In Frankie Freako, I’m thrilled to report the creature effects are obvious puppets.

Conor, frustrated by the fact that even his boss thinks he’s a hopeless square, decides to call a party hotline as advertised on TV. Perhaps it’s more of a Canadian thing, but I ate, slept, and breathed late night television in the states and I absolutely do not remember any such advertisements for party lines that didn’t promise scantily clad women would call you, but I digress. Upon waking up the following morning, Conor discovers he blacked out while partying hard the night before. His trashed home is now inhabited by three prankster creatures of the Ghoulies variety who refuse to leave until Conor learns to lighten up permanently.

It’s not long before the evil corporation that subjugated Frankie Freako’s entire planet catches wind of the creatures’ whereabouts and kidnaps them along with Conor. The bad guys are voiced by the Red Letter Media regulars, which was particularly surprising as I clocked Rich Evans’ voice in Psycho Goreman immediately, but in this one, I had no idea he had such a large role (the main villain, in fact) until the credits rolled. At any rate, Conor must let his freak(o) flag fly in order to get back to earth and rekindle his relationship with his wife. All the while, Kostanski has fun with the kind of absurd plot conventions that were only routine in the coked-up 80s.

As of this writing, the movie is available on Shudder.

28 Years Later

I can’t remember the last time a trailer gave away so little plot information. It advertises a man and his twelve year old boy will leave the safety of their fortified island community to explore the mainland, which has been overrun by those infected by the psycho-virus Rage for twenty-eight years. This accurately represents perhaps twenty minutes of the film’s runtime. What happens next feels like truly uncharted territory… which is fitting for the crazed subject matter.

The enigmatic trailer also gives us only a fleeting glimpse of Ralph Fiennes, looking absolutely insane with his bald head and red skin. His mysterious character is spoken about in hushed whispers throughout the first half of the film, adding to the suspense of his eventual reveal. You think you have a pretty good idea of who he is and what kind of role he’ll fulfill, but you probably don’t. To say I was hyped to see this character is an understatement. I wasn’t let down in the least as he’s the best part of the movie.

As with 28 Weeks Later, this movie opens with a flashback to the first year of the virus’s spread. The opening isn’t as intense as the one which featured Robert Carlyle making an impossible decision, but it’s comforting to see Danny Boyle hit the ground running for his return to the series. You’d think the director’s Oscar might’ve gone to his head, steering this sequel straight into “elevated horror” territory; instead he has a group of infected psychopaths shred through a roomful of helpless children before descending on a hysterically laughing priest. Anyone who’s spent any time reading this blog will know this is exactly the kind of horror I cherish: the kind that isn’t embarrassed of the genre’s roots.

In more than one interview, Danny Boyle has tried to make the case that the 28 series aren’t zombie movies. In this movie, screenwriter Alex Garland has a Swedish soldier wash up on shore and flat-out refer to the infected people as “zombies,” perhaps jokingly. This is a jarring thing to hear when actual zombie movies typically go out of their way to avoid the “Z” word (which is even riffed on in Shaun of the Dead), as if they take place in a universe in which George Romero never existed. Speaking of the soldier, I previously pointed out that these movies are at their best when the military forces are absent. I’m happy to report the military presence in this one is applied even more sparingly than it was in the original picture.

In his genre movies, Danny Boyle has had a strange tendency to go off the rails in the final act (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Trainspotting 2) with wildly uneven results. This time Boyle tempers his tendencies… until the final two minutes, at which point he gloriously doubles down. Before that, however, 28 Years Later delivers the most emotionally satisfying conclusion, which relies less on spectacle and more on character and performance.

Movies like this tend to grow on me with time as I forget all but the most memorable scenes. It will likely be another ten years before I can honestly say which I enjoyed more: the original or this one. I would not be a bit surprised if it’s this one. There’s so much I want to discuss here, particularly the effortlessness of Jodie Comer’s performance, but I wouldn’t dream of spoiling what the trailer didn’t.

28 Weeks Later (18 years later)

The best part of 28 Weeks Later is its unforgettable opening, which is set during the events of the first film. In case you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil the first ten minutes by discussing them here. It’s interesting that this film is at its best when it’s treading familiar waters, which proves how good the original was. When the story jumps twenty-eight weeks after the Rage virus initially spread, we learn that American military forces have moved into Britain to restore order. Survivors are now living in fortified safe zones where work and play has more or less resumed, albeit heavily surveilled.

I won’t tell you how all hell manages to break loose, either, as that would also spoil key events of the opening. When U.S. soldiers are ordered to start shooting infected and uninfected peoples alike, Sergeant Doyle (Jeremy Renner) deserts his sniper perch to help a band of survivors escape the rapidly collapsing city. One of those survivors is conveniently a research scientist who has discovered a breakthrough regarding the disease (Rose Byrne). The escape is the second most compelling scene of the movie, which adequately establishes Doyle as the right guy to lead the characters to safety.

Not that there’s much safety to be had beyond the walls of the safe zone. With the horde hot on their trail, the survivors scramble to reach an LZ where one of Doyle’s helicopter buddies may or may not be willing to pick them up. One of the many reasons I loved the first picture is because it does what so few of these types of films do: it solved problems without guns (until its oddly disconnected third act). Doyle is certainly an extremely likable character, but nearly every problem is a nail and his gun is the hammer. I don’t know. I just find these movies more interesting without the military elements.

Yesterday, I asserted that 28 Days Later was not a zombie movie as Danny Boyle didn’t bring the baggage of zombie movies to the table. I suspect director Juan Carlos Fresnaldillo was, in fact, modeling his film after zombie movies whether he intended to or not. While I wouldn’t call 28 Weeks Later a conventional movie, it’s a lot more conventional than its predecessor. It’s not at all bad, mind you, just more of what we’re used to. I think it’s worth anyone’s time, but especially fans of the original.

The cast also includes Robert Carlyle, who gives the best performance of the entire movie, Harold Perrineau from HBO’s Oz, and Idris Elba.

28 Days Later (22 years later)

My favorite horror movie of all time is George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I’ve waxed poetic about it many times on this blog, but long story short: I love everything about it. When a film becomes exemplary of its genre, I don’t clamor for more. I don’t want endless knock-offs and sequels. Which isn’t to say I did not thoroughly enjoy a handful of other zombie flicks like Day of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead and Shaun of the Dead, but in general, the last thing I actively want for is another zombie movie because—let’s face it—I’m at least halfway to dead myself and I’d rather just watch Dawn again.

When 28 Days Later came along, early internet forums were rife with Negative Nancies confidently stating, “Zombies do not run.” Simon Pegg later poked fun at running zombies, stating, “Death is not an energy drink.” A particularly snide critic in a local paper wrote, “If you can’t afford to make a movie with a decent camera, you can’t afford to make a movie.”

I think the problem with those naysayers is simple: 28 Days Later isn’t even trying to be a zombie movie. 28 Days Later shares more in common with George Romero’s The Crazies than Dawn of the Dead. The distinction is small, but apposite; when Quentin Tarantino said he admired Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City as a zombie film, the Italian filmmaker took offense, shouting, “Zombies?! What zombies?! It’s an infected peoples movie!” (Incidentally, here’s my review of Nightmare City, which I think you’ll agree is not a zombie picture even though that’s what producers hired Lenzi to make.) Danny Boyle himself has said his movie is not a zombie movie and he hardly seems like the type who’d watch many of them.

So if 28 Days Later is not a zombie movie, why, then, did I choose to reiterate my affection for George Romero’s 1978 zombie masterpiece at the top of this piece? For one: I can’t resist taking every opportunity to talk about it. Two: Because 28 Days Later is the Dawn of the Dead of infected people movies. It’s exemplary of its genre.

In the opening scene, well-meaning activists break into a Cambridge laboratory. They aim to free the chimpanzees who are undergoing cruel experiments there. What they don’t know is the primates are infected with a virus known as Rage. The moment one gets loose, Rage rapidly spreads across Britain, turning its hosts into primal psychopaths. For all the survivors know, it may have even spread across the entire world.

Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma twenty-eight days after the infection destroyed modern civilization. As he roams the empty British streets, he bumps into a couple of survivors, Selena and Mark, who catch him up to speed. They agree to take him to his parents’ house even though they warn him they’re likely dead (or worse). When Mark is bitten at Jim’s childhood home, Selena doesn’t hesitate to kill him. What’s especially striking about a post-apocalypse picture set in the UK is the relative lack of guns; there’s not always a merciful way to kill an infected companion.

Continuing on, Jim and Selena happen upon two survivors who are holed up in a high-rise apartment: a daughter and her father (Brendan Gleeson). The group of four decide to take a road trip to investigate the source of a radio signal promising salvation. I won’t tell you what happens when they get there, as the climax proves nearly as divisive as Boyle’s third act in Sunshine, but there’s a hopeful middle section in which the survivors bond with one another and even have some fun.

The sequence in Dawn of the Dead that sets it apart from so many horror movies in my mind is after the heroes have successfully fortified the shopping mall. It’s the first time we see them relax since the movie began—the first time there’s a glimmer of hope in the bleak situation. Boyle allows his characters a similar reprieve in his picture. For a brief moment they allow themselves to believe things may be alright, which only makes the subsequent horrors all the more impactful.

This was my first time watching the movie since I saw it in theaters twenty-two years ago. The prosumer camera Boyle’s crew used for most of the picture really did look like shit on the silver screen. It looks much better on televisions as that’s what the camera was made for. The brain is convinced that what it’s seeing is real because it feels less like a polished movie and more like civilian-shot war footage. Now that I hear there’s a 4K UHD on the way, I call shenanigans; you can’t “restore” footage of a movie that was originally shot in 480p, the resolution of a standard DVD (4K has sixteen times the resolution). I fear that whatever method this new edition employs will sacrifice the very identity of this movie. Is Sony really the distributor you trust to archive this flick?

Final Destination 6: Destination Finaler

The Final Destination franchise is the rare example of a horror formula done right. In the first act, the hero has a premonition of a freak accident that will kill a large group of people. Armed with this knowledge, the character can avoid (but not always stop) the tragedy, saving loved ones in the process. Unfortunately, it won’t be long until Death returns to finish off those who were “supposed to die,” usually in a predictable order.

I find the concept irresistible. If we can have hundreds of movies about vampires, zombies, and superheroes, why can’t Final Destination be a genre? The films still have a lot more steam in ’em than Freddy or Jason had by their sixth installments.

Final Destination Bloodlines is a lot more creative than its generic title would suggest. The film begins in 1968 at the grand opening of Skyview Tower, a preposterously tall restaurant that resembles Seattle’s Space Needle on growth serum. There’s a single elevator and a narrow set of hard-to-find stairs (nobody knows they exist until an employee points them out) which leads me to believe fire marshals must not exist in the Final Destination universe. A young woman named Iris foresees that the glass dance floor will crack as the restaurant nears capacity, which will kick off a hilarious chain of events that has victims being roasted alive, crushed by pianos, and impaled left and right.

This is thrilling stuff. It usually is, but the humor’s been turned up a skosh. The producers wisely stop just short of jumping the shark entirely, but manage to give the audience more of what they want. Consider how “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” plays from a tinny radio as the diners come falling out of the sky on the valet attendants. I really believe the first stories our prehistoric ancestors ever told was probably “Things That Can Kill You” and the Final Destination films tap into that primal excitement in a darkly funny way.

Fast forward to modern times and we learn that the premonition has in fact become a recurring nightmare for Iris’s college-age granddaughter, Stefani, whose grades are beginning to slip because of her intrusive visions. In an attempt to banish the thoughts and get her life back on track, Stefani travels homeward to meet Grandma Iris, who convinces her their entire family is cursed; Death will come for them in order of oldest to youngest.

You’ve seen this before. You already know that everybody who escaped Death the first time will gather with varying levels of skepticism while the hero struggles to convince them of the danger they’re in. Because they’re dealing with a faceless enemy which can’t explain its motivations (the franchise’s biggest strength), there will be some wild assumptions and leaps of logic that rarely prove right for the characters. In order to get scant insight into their predicament, they’ll have to speak to someone who actually knows what’s going on.

That knowledgeable character is usually the mysterious undertaker played by Tony Todd, who this time around gets a brief origin story. I rolled my eyes at the news that this installment would flesh the character out. Thankfully, his backstory is handled about as well as it could have been. But the rest of his scene? Not so much. I’m sure a lot of fans will appreciate Todd’s real-life send-off, but the way he verbalizes the previously unspoken moral of the Final Destination films comes off so hackneyed that I kinda expected him to turn to the camera and say, “And that’s the final destination.” Wink.

That doesn’t matter. I’m nitpicking a great movie. In a post last year, I said Final Destination may be my favorite horror franchise of all time. That’s still true. I’m looking forward to future installments (so long as soulless studio execs don’t go down the dreaded “reimagining” route). If the filmmakers keep it simple and only innovate just a little in each installment, this franchise could go on forever as far as I’m concerned.

See it with a crowd.

What’s Magma? My Love-Hate for Disaster Flicks

The year is 1997. I’m fourteen years old and I’m about to watch Volcano, a disaster movie in which the titular rupture forms in Los Angeles like a geographic zit. I’ve been dying to see it ever since I saw it advertised on E!’s Coming Attractions, which is where ancient people used to watch movie trailers. The previous summer had seen a monumental leap in special FX technology with the likes of Independence Day, Twister, and Mission: Impossible. This summer, moviegoers expect nothing short of awe. What they get instead is some of the worst CGI in history: Air Force One, Spawn, and yes, Volcano.

The first notable offense in Volcano comes early on: Tommy Lee Jones squints at Anne Heche and asks, “Magma? What’s that?” I couldn’t believe my ears: Magma! Did this moron just ask what magma is? I get that he’s supposed to be a salt-of-the-earth type (That’s a stretch for Tommy Lee Jones, huh?), but come on. How can you root for a character this stupid?

Shortly thereafter, the head of the transportation authority, who previously ignored warnings to shut down underground transit, sacrificially redeems himself by leaping into lava so that he can throw an unconscious subway worker to safety. The moment his shoes make contact with the lava, he sinks like a rock in water. In reality, lava is as thick as the sap that oozes out of this idiotic picture. I have managed to block all other memories of this film (other than a Rodney King joke at the end, which I’m sure has aged well) thanks in part to South Park’s classic spoof. Volcano was, by far, the worst movie I’ve ever seen in theaters.

In an oft seen example of films twinning, the trailer for Dante’s Peak was shown before Volcano. Disaster movies often come in twos; I distinctively remember the trailer for Chain Reaction, in which Keanu Reeves outruns a city-flattening explosion on a Moped, being tacked onto the beginning of Independence Day, a film in which many characters outrun several city-flattening explosions in a variety of vehicles. Don’t ask me how I remember this thirty years later, ask why screenwriters think explosions are so slow. I digress.

Having been burned by Volcano, pun intended, I didn’t bother watching Dante’s Peak until it showed up on Starz some time later. I’m grateful because it’s only a slightly better movie. Pierce Brosnan plays Scientist Guy who tests the acidity of the water leaking into his family’s boat by touching it with his bare fingers—in case the fact the water was smoking wasn’t enough of a warning. In yet another contrived show of sacrificial heroism, Grandma hops out of a boat and tugs it through the lake of acid after it renders their oars and motor useless.

Why are disaster movies and gooey melodrama inexplicably intertwined? Consider the ol’ “You’re too low! Pull up!” cliche in Independence Day. Then there’s the fact aliens can exterminate billions of humans, buildings, and vehicles at the push of a button, but a dog can leap into a maintenance closet and emerge without so much as a singed hair (people cheered in the theater I was at). Disaster movies insist on huge ensemble casts, but the universe must be awfully small if the same guy who drags an unconscious alien into Area 51 to meet the curiously apolitical president is married to the stripper who coincidentally saved the First Lady’s life halfway across the country.

I remember an introduction to the paperback edition of Speaker for the Dead in which Orson Scott Card laments the fact that so many stories don’t focus on families. Disaster movies, by contrast, are all about family. And guess what: families are boring in popcorn flicks. When you pay money to see the San Andreas Fault ripping apart like Velcro, the last thing you give a shit about is The Rock repairing his relationship with his wife and daughter. Huge casts are fine in movies that have the bandwidth to deal with such dynamics, but when you spread your cast so thin and force them to run away from crumbling infrastructure, they have too little time to grow. If there are too many characters to care about, you care about none of them.

Consider Armageddon, which concocts a romance between Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, then pits Bruce Willis against them because “macho man wants better for his girl.” This B-plot has potential, sure, but when it’s fighting for screen-time with the sheer epicness of an end-of-the-world A-plot, both get watered down. The cinematic twin to Armageddon is Deep Impact which, among its myriad cast members and apocalyptic excitement, begs us to care about a blossoming romance between teenagers who have no bearing on the story’s conclusion. Incidentally, Téa Leoni’s performance in this turd is the biggest disaster of all… imagine announcing to the world that the end is coming with no expression whatsoever.

I’m sorry, is the end of the fucking world not dramatic enough? Must they keep cramming unearned feel-good moments into the pictures where famous landmarks go boom? How many times can we stomach seeing a lead character search for their offspring in the aftermath of Extremely Bad Thing? How many heroic sacrifices until we’ve finally had enough?

There’s potential for organic drama in a movie about characters facing the end of all humanity. Some films have touched upon this to varying degrees, but I wouldn’t necessarily call them disaster films. Melancholia is an honest examination of depression at the literal end of the world, both pre-existing and inflicted. Wisely, it focuses on a manageable group of characters and how they’re affected by the film’s crisis—not boring pedestrian drama. Though you might not like its characters very much, you do care about them… funny how that works in good writing. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for action, you’re not going to get it from this one, and it’s about as fun to rewatch as toe surgery.

Then you have Threads and The Day After (not to be confused with the especially idiotic The Day After Tomorrow), twin made-for-TV movies about mutually assured destruction by way of thermonuclear war. Both feature ensemble casts, proving that even this disaster trope can be manageable, but both films largely focus on the problem at hand instead of inconsequential relationship dynamics. In The Day After, the moment John Lithgow looks at the sky and sees American ICBMs on their way to Russia, he correctly surmises it means one of two things: the Russians will launch a counter-attack or this is the counter-attack. The moment is chilling, but again: not much action to be found in either of these films.

As for viral disaster flicks, 1995’s Outbreak is another movie I regret seeing in theaters (Siskel gave it a thumbs-up, which is exactly when I realized my tastes tend to align more with Ebert’s). The only fun I got out of that piece of shit was my prankster mother coughing out loud to freak the other moviegoers out. On the flip side, Contagion is a movie that does scratch that itch I have for good drama in disaster movies. One: it’s a stroke of genius to kill off a star like Gywneth Paltrow in the opening act so you know this is serious business; two: I think Matt Damon’s understated reaction to learning she died is perhaps one of the boldest acting decisions he’s ever made. His wife’s death isn’t tangential to the plot. It’s happening because of the plot.

The O.G. disaster flicks—Airport, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, and The Poseidon Adventure— illustrate the biggest problem with the genre: the formula hasn’t changed in fifty years. The only thing that ever changes is the disaster itself and even that’s up for repeats. And when was the last time you saw an original disaster? Ron Howard’s once-planned film adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves could have been a shot in the arm, but I see two problems with that ambitious production: the novel is too big to faithfully adapt and, frankly, it’s too smart for financiers to take a chance on. I personally don’t think American audiences are too stupid to understand complex disasters (unless you’re talking about the real-life disaster of climate change), but Hollywood execs disagree.

Why else would they have their characters explain fucking magma to us?

8 1/2: The Film About Itself

I was torn about which movie I should watch first on my new TV. It’s kind of a big deal. Whenever we got a new TV or made a change to the surround sound, the go-to in the house I was raised in was True Lies, but there hasn’t been a definitive way to view that film since it released on DVD. So I wanted the momentous movie to be something I’ve seen several times, for comparison purposes, and something that would demonstrate the inky blacks and high contrasts possible on OLED display technology. (Who am I kidding? I didn’t even know what the “O” in OLED stood for.) I deliberated over this decision for what felt like hours, halfheartedly testing big budget Hollywood flicks here and there, before going all in on 8 1/2.

A sixty year old black and white movie may not seem like the perfect test drive for a new TV, but I marveled over every pore in Marcello Mastroianni’s face, scrutinized every wrinkle around his haunting eyes, and distinguished every armpit hair on the beautiful Italian women who surround him. Considering I first saw 8 1/2 on a badly worn VHS, then a handful of times on plain ol’ DVD (which I believe was $40 at the time), to say the Criterion Collection’s latest restoration is an upgrade is an understatement.

8 1/2 is Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical tale which, by his own count, is his eighth and a half movie. The film depicts a director who’s torn about what his next picture is about, so much so that he frequently dodges his eager collaborators’ inquiries. Constantly hounded by his wife, her protective friends, his mistress, his producer, a brutally honest film critic, and a chain-smoking entourage of jackals, Mastrioanni portrays Guido as a filmmaker who glides along the edge of stress-induced madness, avoiding his problems whenever possible. (At one point he’s literally dragged to a press junket like a tantrum-throwing child.) The meta aspects emerge as he’s told he’s too young and inexperienced to make a film about childhood memories, which is ultimately the very thing Fellini himself is doing.

The film opens with a famous dream sequence in which Guido levitates over gridlocked traffic and takes flight through the clouds. Moments later he frantically tries to untie the rope he discovers fastened to his ankle, but it’s too late: the man flying him like a kite laughs as he jerks the semi-fictional movie director back down to earth. The “real” Guido awakens from the dream-turned-nightmare with a start. Florescent lights flicker to life as Ride of the Valkyries plays and, for the first time, we see Guido’s face framed in a mirror, his weathered eyes suggesting he’s weighed down by far more than your average forty-something.

Guido is a man who copes with the pressures of the real world—poorly—by escaping into childhood memories and self-serving fantasies. His last picture was a rousing success and everyone’s dying to know what’s next, but even Guido’s not sure. He just knows a lot of people are counting on him and he’s the reason an enormously expensive film set has been constructed on the beach. Guido has postponed production, ostensibly to relax at a spa where all the other guests move in lockstep with the music. There the line between fantasy and reality is blurred yet again as he’s served mineral water by his ideal starlet, Claudia Cardinale, who haunts his thoughts like a ghost.

You can never be 100% sure what is real and what is fantasy, if Fellini even cares to make distinction. It sounds like a muddled mess. It’s not.

Terry Gilliam on Fellini’s 8 1/2

In one flashback/dream/fantasy which perhaps represents Fellini’s own sexual awakening, a twelve year old Guido and a handful of his delinquent friends visit Saraghina, a large woman who lives on the beach and dances seductively for anyone who’ll watch. The boys rally for her to emerge from the remnants of an abandoned building, which she does like a vampire raised from the dead. Later, Guido imagines all the important women from his life (including Saraghina, a showgirl, his wife, his mistress, and a woman he merely saw in passing once) living in a harem where they feed, bathe, and pamper him. There they live only to serve until they reach the age of forty, at which point they must ascend to the attic, never to be seen again. However, even this juvenile fantasy devolves into a nightmare as the imaginary women revolt against his misogynistic ways. The fact that even Guido’s fantasies become self-critical represents another facet of his conflicted character; consider how much he hates the film critic and simultaneously values his suggestions. Still, Guido fantasizes about the critic hanging himself in a theater.

But talking about plot and meaning completely misses the point of a Fellini film—those elements don’t even become clear on the first or second watch. It’s like praising the the set design in a porno… why? What really drew me to his movies (and, I imagine, literally every other fan in existence) was the eye candy. The poetry of his camera movements and precise blocking is unrivaled. Every scene contains more richness than most filmmakers muster in an entire film. The camera frequently pans to performers who seem to be standing in place, waiting for their cue, but it’s always intentional as if Fellini wants us to believe that their actions are only significant if we are watching. Many have tried to ape his style and end up looking dreadfully pretentious.

Martin Scorsese on Fellini’s 8 1/2

I could watch Fellini films every week of my life—and damn nearly did for a significant chunk of my twenties. 8 1/2 is my favorite of the director’s films, precisely because the eye candy is laid on so thick. Some people enjoy rich fudge. I’m one of ’em. Even if it’s not your cup of tea, you gotta admit: Marcello Mastrioanni sure looks cool in sunglasses.

Final Destination may be my favorite Horror Franchise of All Time

As absurd as it is to believe that humans could intuit some sort of grand design, such premises are irresistible in movies, where even stinkers like Nicolas Cage’s Next can be engaging. The Final Destination series has two great premises: A) What if you could cheat Death? and B) What if by cheating Death you merely bought scant time alongside a hefty penalty? In the original Final Destination, Devon Sawa’s Alex is treated to a premonition of his impending demise, which allows him to save himself and a handful of his doomed acquaintances… initially anyway.

You would have a hard time naming many mainstream films that deal with ideas as unsettling as predeterminism—and that’s before you begin to ponder what, exactly, Death is and whether or not there’s an equal and opposite force that wanted Alex and company to live. Perhaps his premonition was merely a supernatural glitch—a bug in the cosmic code. Wisely, the series has yet to ruin its emergent questions with answers, although reports say the next installment will flesh out Tony Todd’s undertaker character, presumably because Hollywood screenwriters are allergic to mystique.

Great premises can only take you so far, but the series exhibits fine execution as well. Whenever Death’s preferred design fails, it devises Rube Goldberg levels of wildly entertaining events to correct its mistakes. The fourth film in the series, idiotically named The Final Destination, is the worst of the bunch with its SyFy levels of production value, but even it features a white supremacist getting dragged down the street by his own vehicle while somehow setting himself on fire in the process. If that’s the worst you have to offer, you’ve got yourself a solid franchise. Incidentally, my favorite Final Destination is the most recent entry despite some rather stupid character decisions, which is notable because there’s no other franchise in horror movie history that manged to save the best for last.

The formula is so novel, it holds up the weight of five films with ease. In the opening reel, our hero must find him or herself dying in a horrible accident that kills dozens if not hundreds of innocent bystanders. Moments later, the hero will wake up to find it was a bonafide premonition of the future, a future which can be changed. Unfortunately, it won’t be long before the large cast of expendable characters learn that Death will come back for them with a vengeance. What’s interesting about the formula is the filmmakers keep tweaking it with new rules that don’t conflict with the old ones.

In the first film, the principal characters learn that Death comes back for them in the order they were originally supposed to die, picking them off one by one like an invisible slasher. The second film reveals that Death, if unable to carry out its hit list forward, will work backwards (this one is the least logical Destination film because its heroine has multiple premonitions for no other reason than it’s convenient to the messy plot, but overall it may very well be the most entertaining). The third outing seems to suggest Death has at least enough consciousness to taunt its victims with photographic clues of their demises. The fourth expands the mythology in no discernible way at all, which is probably for the best considering it’s the least imaginative entry. And the fifth movie introduces the most radical expansion to the rules to date: Death will give you a pass if you willingly take someone else’s life. This leads to a boringly routine climax (a Final Destination movie really didn’t need a shootout scene), but also the most satisfying twist ending ever put to film.

Yeah, I said it. Eat your heart out, Shyamalan.

There’s a lot of silly stuff in these movies, most of it intended, which compliments the heavier implications. Nothing is more thrilling than cheating Death. Unfortunately, Death always wins in the end, it just so rarely does in the movies.