Saw a Takashi Miike picture called The Great Yokai War. "Yokai" is a Japanese term for monsters from folklore, as opposed to the more familiar kaiju. It's a kids' picture, about a young boy from Tokyo sent out to live in the countryside with his older sister and his intermittently senile grandfather. When a vengeful spirit appears, the boy gets caught up in a war between warring groups of yokai and must find his courage to become the "Kirin Rider", the hero who will set everything to rights. It's not a bad picture - nothing deep, but an amusing story. Some of the yokai are really trippy, Japanese folklore can get pretty "out there", apparently.
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A local theatre had a preview showing of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma last night, on a double bill with 1983 cult slasher Sleepaway Camp, with which it has significant intertextuality. I've watched it before, but not on the big screen.
Me, being stalked by a standee in the theatre lobby.
TSaDaCM is the kind of film that has viewers saying things like, "significant intertextuality." The film has been hitting the film festivals and special showings and, I think, opens the final week of August. The full house appreciated it. I really liked about 95% of the movie. Directed and written by Jane Schoenbrun, it's a dark comedy commenting on the slasher genre and, let us say, its problematic nature-- and on identity and sexual awakening. It stars Hannah Einbinder as a queer director tapped to reboot a once-popular horror franchise that has been tainted by the original franchise's homophobia and transphobia, and Gillian Anderson as a reclusive actress connected to the once-popular series. The film delves into the sexual subtext of so many horror movies, and (in particular), the history of queer-coded and queer-as-deviant elements of many horror movies, and, even more in particular, the controversy (well, the main one) surrounding Sleepaway Camp. But this is a tragically self-aware film, which echoes every slasher ever, every proto-slasher, as well as things like Return of the Living Dead, Tales of Halloween, and, expressly, Sunset Boulevard. Granted, most people probably don't think of Sunset Boulevard as a horror movie, but it has a significant impact on the genre, with a straight line from it to Psycho and the entire Hagsploitation genre. I digress, but so does Camp Miasma.
Short version: it's well-acted and stylishly directed, frequently hilarious and, in a genre already haunted by parodies, often highly original. But I also saw it with its audience, people steeped in horror movies and likely to be particularly entertained by a dark horror comedy with an epistemological headache, even one that somewhat crawls up its own aspirations in the final scenes. I'm impressed-- but this thing also has "cult film" stamped all over it.
"A good slasher movie doesn't have to be well-acted, believable or suspenseful. It’s quite enough that it keeps you entertained, includes several good, violent set pieces, and leaves you shocked. Robert Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp is a perfect example of such an effort. It's an exceptionally bad movie but a very good slasher" (Bartlomiej Paszylk, The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. McFarland, 2009).
We knew what to expect from Sleepaway Camp. The somewhat smaller crowd that remained (and were joined by some newcomers) loved it for what it is, a seriously problematic but weirdly entertaining low-budget entry into the slasher that plays like Meatballs meets Friday the 13th meets Bad News Bears meets Psycho, whose makers had the stones to cast actual tweens and teens to play the film's tweens and teens. It also wouldn't, possibly couldn't, be made today. If you've never seen it and plan to, don't google it; you'll spoil the ending.
Doc Beechler > JD DeLuzioAugust 15, 2026 at 2:07pm
I'm very much looking forward to this one. Sleepaway Camp was one of those 80s rentals that is now infamous for that final shot.
JD DeLuzio > Doc BeechlerAugust 15, 2026 at 4:17pm
It's also had a few sequels, but none of them, I have been told, capture what makes the original memorable.
JD DeLuzio > Doc BeechlerAugust 21, 2026 at 10:52am
The big screen makes some things very obvious. The local cop has a cop moustache. However, they obviously had to reshoot, or shoot his scenes at very different times, because in his final appearance, his real moustache gets replaced with a laughable fake. And by "laughable," I mean, the audience was laughing hysterically at his close-ups.
I'm really looking forward to this. I loved I Saw the TV Glow, and have been interested in Camp Miasma since it was announced. I'll probably see it tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow night.
Those martial arts movies I was watching last week are so bad that I was reluctant to get back into them. But Tracy was eager to "get to the other side" of them, so last night we attempted to watch a movie called The Snake, the Tiger, the Crane (1975), but the DVD wouldn't play...
Tracy was determined, however. she had read an online summary and though it "sounded good." I suggested looking for it on YouTube, because just about every time I've gone there looking for a trailer, I've found the full movie as well. So now, without further ado...
THE SNAKE, THE TIGER, THE CRANE (1975): "With invaders overunning the land, the defeated Ming Emperor decide to commit suicide to prevent his capture. Also, hioping to spare his daughter, he attempts to kill her but only cause her to lose an arm before she escapes the palace prior to the invaders' arrival. Now in hiding with the aid of a female loyalist warrior, the two are aided by a young handsome hero who helps to help the princess defeat the leader of the invaders and return her family to power."
This is one of those movies it's so bad it's good... well, almost. The dubbing and voice acting is so bad. There are only a few main characters, and they have to provide the voices for all the bit parts as well, and there are a lot of them, especially at the beginning. The voices end up sounding like cartoon characters, and try to match the dubs with the mouth movements only makes the delivery more stilted and awkward. (One character is given an accent from the American South.) Anyway, at one point the proncess ends up masquerading as a mad woman and the hero ends up marrying her to make his mother happy before she dies. Tracy is disappointed that of all the movies on all the discs, this is the one that would not play.
Unfortunately there's no trailer, but here is THE FIRST FOUR MINUTES and HERE'S ANOTHER FIVE. (The last minute of the second clip will give you a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, it stops just shy of "guy from the South.")
Gags the Clown (2018): a guerilla promo for the original short film (2016) had the film's creepy clown wandering around Green Bay at night and freaking people out. That went viral and, in all probability, was the major reason for the Clown Scare of 2016.* That dubious success led to investors financing this full-length version. By the time it came out, it played like a belated cash-in on the phenomenon it had helped create, and a poor imitator of the 2017 It adaptation. This isn’t great cinema, but it’s not bad, either, a horror-comedy about a mysterious creepy clown wandering around Green Bay. Several disparate plotlines eventually converge. The acting is uneven, and there’s less character development than we might like, but it’s far more entertaining than its reputation might lead you to believe, assuming you even know its reputation. The cheap promo for the original short film proved far more successful than this movie ever did.
Director/co-writer Adam Krause uses an effective visual blend. The movie effortlessly transitions between regular filmmaking techniques and in-world “found footage” from security cameras, characters’ cellphones, police bodycams, podcasts, social media posts, news reports, and so forth. The approach probably also kept the budget down.
Aaron Christensen, apparently a regular in the Chicago theatre scene, gives a highly entertaining performance as a blustering podcaster.
* Krause took his inspiration some 2013 incidents, where a creepy clown in Carrickfergus, Ireland and another in Northampton, England, briefly went viral on social media. Of course, they are not the first creepy clowns in history.
THE HEADHUNTER (1983): "The jungle warfare in Viet Nam created Hong Kong's deadliest hit man Hong Kong's top action star, Chow Yun Fat (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) teams with famed action director Joghn Soa Liuto to create a chiling portrayal of a deadly hit man whose techniques of execution are as unorthodox as they are gruesome. Don't get in the way of this revenge-minded killer who's totally out of control."
That capsule description makes the movie sound better than it is. Actually, the Wikipedia summary is better: "Yuen Lik (Chow Yun Fat) is a Vietnam war veteran who becomes a hit man in Hong Kong. He later falls in love with Vickie Lee (Rosamund Kwan), a news reporter who's trying to solve the string of murders in the city." It has been more than a week since we last watched a bad movie. I can't thihnk of a single genre that has put us off more than this string of martial arts movies, except maybe a string of five or six Hercules movies in another set (if "Hercules" can be considered a "genre"). Judging from the titles, we'll be martial arts-free for the next four or five movies.
We caught up on two highly-rated watches from 2023:
The Holdovers: Alexander Payne’s multi-nominated comedy/drama about the relationships between the people left during Christmas break at an elite private school in 1970 New England. In particular, it focuses on Paul Giamatti’s curmudgeonly teacher and Dominic Sessa’s bright but troubled student. A bit lengthy and containing some predictable elements, but worth seeing.
Stamped from the Beginning: a brilliant documentary on the history of anti-Black racism in America demonstrates exactly what the current crop of people banning books, censoring museums, and threatening schools don’t want students to see. It’s not about "teaching people to hate their country"; it’s about teaching a country’s entire history, in order to understand the presence and build a better future.
This was the first time I saw Carol Kane, who later became more well known for her comedy parts in Cheers and The Princess Bride.
This is a pretty good move. I saw it in 1979 and just saw it for the second time. Even if you haven’t seen it, you probably know that a babysitter is terrorized by phone calls. Eventually, the police trace the call and say that the call is coming from inside the house, from a psychotic killer.
Recently, the phrase “it’s coming from inside the house” has been used on TV regarding aspects of the Trump administration. Also in use: the term “Spidey sense” and the terms Earth-1 and Earth-2 (we’re on Earth-1 and Trump and his true believers are on Earth-2).
Replies
A local theatre had a preview showing of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma last night, on a double bill with 1983 cult slasher Sleepaway Camp, with which it has significant intertextuality. I've watched it before, but not on the big screen.
Me, being stalked by a standee in the theatre lobby.
TSaDaCM is the kind of film that has viewers saying things like, "significant intertextuality." The film has been hitting the film festivals and special showings and, I think, opens the final week of August. The full house appreciated it. I really liked about 95% of the movie. Directed and written by Jane Schoenbrun, it's a dark comedy commenting on the slasher genre and, let us say, its problematic nature-- and on identity and sexual awakening. It stars Hannah Einbinder as a queer director tapped to reboot a once-popular horror franchise that has been tainted by the original franchise's homophobia and transphobia, and Gillian Anderson as a reclusive actress connected to the once-popular series. The film delves into the sexual subtext of so many horror movies, and (in particular), the history of queer-coded and queer-as-deviant elements of many horror movies, and, even more in particular, the controversy (well, the main one) surrounding Sleepaway Camp. But this is a tragically self-aware film, which echoes every slasher ever, every proto-slasher, as well as things like Return of the Living Dead, Tales of Halloween, and, expressly, Sunset Boulevard. Granted, most people probably don't think of Sunset Boulevard as a horror movie, but it has a significant impact on the genre, with a straight line from it to Psycho and the entire Hagsploitation genre. I digress, but so does Camp Miasma.
Short version: it's well-acted and stylishly directed, frequently hilarious and, in a genre already haunted by parodies, often highly original. But I also saw it with its audience, people steeped in horror movies and likely to be particularly entertained by a dark horror comedy with an epistemological headache, even one that somewhat crawls up its own aspirations in the final scenes. I'm impressed-- but this thing also has "cult film" stamped all over it.
"A good slasher movie doesn't have to be well-acted, believable or suspenseful. It’s quite enough that it keeps you entertained, includes several good, violent set pieces, and leaves you shocked. Robert Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp is a perfect example of such an effort. It's an exceptionally bad movie but a very good slasher" (Bartlomiej Paszylk, The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. McFarland, 2009).
We knew what to expect from Sleepaway Camp. The somewhat smaller crowd that remained (and were joined by some newcomers) loved it for what it is, a seriously problematic but weirdly entertaining low-budget entry into the slasher that plays like Meatballs meets Friday the 13th meets Bad News Bears meets Psycho, whose makers had the stones to cast actual tweens and teens to play the film's tweens and teens. It also wouldn't, possibly couldn't, be made today. If you've never seen it and plan to, don't google it; you'll spoil the ending.
I'm very much looking forward to this one. Sleepaway Camp was one of those 80s rentals that is now infamous for that final shot.
It's also had a few sequels, but none of them, I have been told, capture what makes the original memorable.
The big screen makes some things very obvious. The local cop has a cop moustache. However, they obviously had to reshoot, or shoot his scenes at very different times, because in his final appearance, his real moustache gets replaced with a laughable fake. And by "laughable," I mean, the audience was laughing hysterically at his close-ups.
I'm really looking forward to this. I loved I Saw the TV Glow, and have been interested in Camp Miasma since it was announced. I'll probably see it tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow night.
Those martial arts movies I was watching last week are so bad that I was reluctant to get back into them. But Tracy was eager to "get to the other side" of them, so last night we attempted to watch a movie called The Snake, the Tiger, the Crane (1975), but the DVD wouldn't play...
Tracy was determined, however. she had read an online summary and though it "sounded good." I suggested looking for it on YouTube, because just about every time I've gone there looking for a trailer, I've found the full movie as well. So now, without further ado...
THE SNAKE, THE TIGER, THE CRANE (1975): "With invaders overunning the land, the defeated Ming Emperor decide to commit suicide to prevent his capture. Also, hioping to spare his daughter, he attempts to kill her but only cause her to lose an arm before she escapes the palace prior to the invaders' arrival. Now in hiding with the aid of a female loyalist warrior, the two are aided by a young handsome hero who helps to help the princess defeat the leader of the invaders and return her family to power."
This is one of those movies it's so bad it's good... well, almost. The dubbing and voice acting is so bad. There are only a few main characters, and they have to provide the voices for all the bit parts as well, and there are a lot of them, especially at the beginning. The voices end up sounding like cartoon characters, and try to match the dubs with the mouth movements only makes the delivery more stilted and awkward. (One character is given an accent from the American South.) Anyway, at one point the proncess ends up masquerading as a mad woman and the hero ends up marrying her to make his mother happy before she dies. Tracy is disappointed that of all the movies on all the discs, this is the one that would not play.
Unfortunately there's no trailer, but here is THE FIRST FOUR MINUTES and HERE'S ANOTHER FIVE. (The last minute of the second clip will give you a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, it stops just shy of "guy from the South.")
Gags the Clown (2018): a guerilla promo for the original short film (2016) had the film's creepy clown wandering around Green Bay at night and freaking people out. That went viral and, in all probability, was the major reason for the Clown Scare of 2016.* That dubious success led to investors financing this full-length version. By the time it came out, it played like a belated cash-in on the phenomenon it had helped create, and a poor imitator of the 2017 It adaptation. This isn’t great cinema, but it’s not bad, either, a horror-comedy about a mysterious creepy clown wandering around Green Bay. Several disparate plotlines eventually converge. The acting is uneven, and there’s less character development than we might like, but it’s far more entertaining than its reputation might lead you to believe, assuming you even know its reputation. The cheap promo for the original short film proved far more successful than this movie ever did.
Director/co-writer Adam Krause uses an effective visual blend. The movie effortlessly transitions between regular filmmaking techniques and in-world “found footage” from security cameras, characters’ cellphones, police bodycams, podcasts, social media posts, news reports, and so forth. The approach probably also kept the budget down.
Aaron Christensen, apparently a regular in the Chicago theatre scene, gives a highly entertaining performance as a blustering podcaster.
* Krause took his inspiration some 2013 incidents, where a creepy clown in Carrickfergus, Ireland and another in Northampton, England, briefly went viral on social media. Of course, they are not the first creepy clowns in history.
THE HEADHUNTER (1983): "The jungle warfare in Viet Nam created Hong Kong's deadliest hit man Hong Kong's top action star, Chow Yun Fat (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) teams with famed action director Joghn Soa Liuto to create a chiling portrayal of a deadly hit man whose techniques of execution are as unorthodox as they are gruesome. Don't get in the way of this revenge-minded killer who's totally out of control."
That capsule description makes the movie sound better than it is. Actually, the Wikipedia summary is better: "Yuen Lik (Chow Yun Fat) is a Vietnam war veteran who becomes a hit man in Hong Kong. He later falls in love with Vickie Lee (Rosamund Kwan), a news reporter who's trying to solve the string of murders in the city." It has been more than a week since we last watched a bad movie. I can't thihnk of a single genre that has put us off more than this string of martial arts movies, except maybe a string of five or six Hercules movies in another set (if "Hercules" can be considered a "genre"). Judging from the titles, we'll be martial arts-free for the next four or five movies.
No trailer, but here's the FIRST FOUR MINUTES.
We caught up on two highly-rated watches from 2023:
The Holdovers: Alexander Payne’s multi-nominated comedy/drama about the relationships between the people left during Christmas break at an elite private school in 1970 New England. In particular, it focuses on Paul Giamatti’s curmudgeonly teacher and Dominic Sessa’s bright but troubled student. A bit lengthy and containing some predictable elements, but worth seeing.
Stamped from the Beginning: a brilliant documentary on the history of anti-Black racism in America demonstrates exactly what the current crop of people banning books, censoring museums, and threatening schools don’t want students to see. It’s not about "teaching people to hate their country"; it’s about teaching a country’s entire history, in order to understand the presence and build a better future.
When a Stranger Calls(1979)
This was the first time I saw Carol Kane, who later became more well known for her comedy parts in Cheers and The Princess Bride.
This is a pretty good move. I saw it in 1979 and just saw it for the second time. Even if you haven’t seen it, you probably know that a babysitter is terrorized by phone calls. Eventually, the police trace the call and say that the call is coming from inside the house, from a psychotic killer.
Recently, the phrase “it’s coming from inside the house” has been used on TV regarding aspects of the Trump administration. Also in use: the term “Spidey sense” and the terms Earth-1 and Earth-2 (we’re on Earth-1 and Trump and his true believers are on Earth-2).
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