Post a shot from a film that blows you away 🖤

#Watched Black Bag (2025) - Why do all the grown ass MI6 agents in this act like a bunch of horny catty teenagers in a high school manga? (mind you, I’m not sure that’s a flaw 😆)

Terrific interview with Sylvia Chang here by @swenryan.bsky.social metrograph.com/sylvia-chang...

FYI, if you’re looking for something super chill and breezy to watch, noticed this on TCM’s site now.

Lethal Panther is the truest cinema of all time.

Ugh, realizing how far behind I’ve fallen in logging my Letterboxd entries since August, 18 films, including: 4 2025 releases 3 Red Peony Gambler flicks 3 old Doctor Whos 2 Bronson flicks 1 Dolph Plus misc (including a Boyka, an Agatha Christie, a Stephen Chow, and some others)

New Orleans TV horror host Morgus the Magnificent performing some unlicensed dentistry

#Watched On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024) - like Nyoni’s previous I Am Not a Witch, this is in the Sembene tradition of darkly comedic cultural critique. Men are monstrous or ineffectual, women are obsessed with appearances, acting as enforcers or enablers. And the youth suffer for their failures.

I missed that Muromachi Outsiders dropped on VOD last month. Another really good recent samurai picture along the lines of 11 Rebels and Kubi. It's been a great year for them, so I expect to see a lot of Japanese movies on all your year-end lists. www.thechinesecinema.com/nyaff-2025-p...

#Watched Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc (2025) - I love the Chainsaw Man manga but never got around to the anime. This adaptation is solid, but only really transcends its manga origins in the battle sequences as the animators cut loose with Trigger quality action abstraction, for 5m there this just SINGS.

So disappointed to click through to this article and learn it wasn’t a murderous group of 5 foot tall Cossacks.

👇👇👇 Go watch it! It’s awesome!

Grappling hooks

And no, I don’t think adding a bit of sophomoric and blindingly obvious commentary on the tech class and VC warrants unbalancing your narrative with a superfluous character and plotline. Juice not worth the squeeze.

Have we gotten to the point where people are looking at those shitty ass poorly animated CGI wolves and deer in Frankenstein, and saying, “oh yes, that looks perfectly acceptable”? Because if so, that makes me sad. Especially in what is otherwise a GORGEOUS movie.

#Watched Frankenstein (2025) - solid Frankenstein take, Top 10 at least, occasionally too sappy and obvious (“you are the monster” - no shit, we’ve been watching the movie too). Visually sumptuous though, glad I saw it in the big screen (does anyone else use deep scarlets and crimsons like GDT?).

Let’s also not forget that Nakadai was the first guy who got to gush an absolute geyser of blood in a samurai movie, a happy accident that became a trope. (this short interview with Nakadai is delightful)

RIP Tatsuya Nakadai. Man was a towering legend and he was in EVERYTHING, so just want to mention a couple of minor roles I love. He’s such an electric wild card in Kon Ichikawa’s Conflagration as the lead’s unreliable bohemian friend - the movie shifts gears every time he appears. /

Ah man, RIP Nakadai Tatsuya. One of the greatest of the great in everything from all-time classics by the likes of Kurosawa, Naruse, and Kobayashi to Peter Mak and Tsui Hark’s insane Wicked City adaptation.

Instead of Alien: MONDAY we get Predator: MONDAY and it’s just a Predator in the office telling stories about what a great hunt he had over the weekend and how badly he needs coffee.

Must say while I love when the comics and movies get into silly Predator lore, it does always make me wonder about, you know, their economy. Like, are there Predator stores? Do they have currency? Are they just pirates, do they live on shit they steal from people they hunt? Do they … farm?

Am I the only one who thought the first 15 or 20 minutes were way too dark and murky? I saw it in the theater and I seriously considered getting up and asking if they were projecting it too low.

#Watched Predator: Badlands (2025) - Trachtenberg has gone full 1990’s Dark Horse Comics Predator and I’m here for it - goofy team-ups, space gribblies, death planets, good fun. By the final act I was fully on board with a sulky teenage Predator protagonist giving constant Blue Steel (those eyes!).

Chinese Ghost Story II (1990 Ching Siu-Tung) feels like 'we made a ton of money on that first one, let's make another', but is so full of charming performances, funny moments, and extraordinary special effects that it becomes completely irresistible.

Just received Dynamite's classic THUNDER CATS collections and I'm fascinated by how much they don't look like other modern reprints of comics from the pre-digital era. Dot patterns, coloring errors, printing artifacts, all still right on the page.

Sometimes people ask, what did cocaine ever do for humanity (other than Maximum Overdrive), but you need look no further than USA Network in the 90s.

Remember Acapulco H.E.A.T. ? The most 90' intro possible (with Fabio) And I just discovered that H.E.A.T stand for "Hemisphere Emergency Action Team" 😅 youtu.be/q3Xosci4hQ0?...

I was trying to explain Silk Stalkings to someone and they didn’t believe me that it was a real thing. Whither Mitzi Kapture?

#Watched Bugonia (2025) - not seen Save the Green Planet in 22 years, but the Lanthimos remake remains a sick joke worthy of a Douglas Adams. I tell you though, man it’s gotten harder to laugh at violent conspiracy theory black comedy in an era ruled by RFK Jr and Luigi Mangioni and QAnon.

meanwhile everyone freaking out over the Mamdani win and what it means for national politics, and I’m like, it means fuck all for national politics, what is that dude going to do about the goddamn BQE collapsing, ‘cause that is the mayor’s actual fucking job and everyone else has whiffed it

my entire right side is bruised, and I don’t even know why 😆 it’s possible it’s from when a 12 foot tall praying mantis attacked me on the dance floor. Or from the lucha libre ring. Or I just fell down some stairs and don’t remember.

Man, recuperating from an absolutely unreasonable amount of mezcal, dancing, and flying, but did manage to catch some stuff on the flights, the new Naked Gun, Soderbergh’s Black Bag, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, and a couple eps of the Baby Assassins show.

Now found people to do my face as both El Baron Del Terror and Kamen Rider Skull 😆

Mole enchiladas

Halloween show. Never danced in a wrestling ring before, thought we were going to collapse that thing. And found someone to paint my face like El Barón del Terror (sorry, cropped myself out of the pic with Garconne as the Bride).

Lalocura - drank an unreasonable amount of mezcal

Pan de muerto

Will be mostly offline the next five days, so might have to finish up reporting on all my Shocktober stuff when I get back. Here’s where I’m at though, 30 movies and I’ll probably get one last one in.

#Shocktober Seven Notes in Black aka The Psychic (1977) - It’s not Shocktober without at least one Fulci! Turned this on expecting gory supernatural horror, and was surprised to find one of Fulci’s earlier restrained and classy gialli. But brimming with his trademark oneiric atmosphere.

Hmmm, is Bugonia a horror movie? I can’t decide. I lean no.

Just voted for the silver spoon/red diaper nepo baby with no skills or experience who pretended he was black in a failed bid to get into Columbia and keeps making promises he can’t keep, bc he’s considerably less revolting than the alternatives. Don’t f this up @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social

#Shocktober Senritsu Kaiki File Super Kowa Too! Fear Adventure: Kokkuri-san (2015) - Kudo and Ichikawa are back, baby!! So happy to see everyone’s favorite maniac, slapping around teenagers and wolfing garlic. This time vs Kokkuri-San (Japanese Ouija knock off) and a spirit that looks like “Alf.”

My friend showed this to me recently www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNno...

I wrote about the 20th anniversary of Showtime's Masters of Horror, an anthology series that gave some of the genre's all-time greats a chance to relive their creatively liberating glory (gory) years. www.inverse.com/entertainmen...

#Shocktober The Lost Boys (1987) - Pure undiluted 1980’s - cook that shit up and inject it directly into my veins. Seeing it on the big screen, I think after all these years I must finally embrace that this is a five star film.