Horror movie reviews and stuff
My review of The Unborn is one of my most viewed posts, probably I called it ‘The Unborn’: Panties, Glorious Panties! So I made a reel. My oldest kid directed and my middle stood in for the creepy ghost. They crushed it.
My son being menacing:
His Will Byers from Stranger Things impression:
My review for this is inexplicably one of my most-viewed posts, so I made an Instagram reel for it.
Every so often I think of a movie I saw once, years ago, and I wonder if my perception of it would change over time. Because I’ve grown as a person and all. I’m ever so evolved and mature, you see. I saw Cloverfield in the theatre in 2008 and haven’t seen it since, and I was wondering if I would still loathe it with a passion eighteen years later.
Synopsis: Six New Yorkers are extremely perturbed when a giant alien creature, depositing smaller but also deadly alien creatures, shows up in their fair city and promptly destroys the Statue of Liberty and lots and lots of people.
This is one of those found footage movies that is notorious for making people sick. The camera is constantly panning, zooming around in multiple directions. It’s meant to simulate a first-person experience, our cameraman wildly looking around and trying to see everything at once and document it for posterity. But Jesus fuck, skillful technique or not, 80-ish minutes is a very long time for such continuous swishy camera movement. The shots are exceedingly quick, and it’s hard to tell what’s happening. With CGI monsters of course less is more, but even when they aren’t around, it’s hard to distinguish who’s getting blown up and trampled.
I was pretty cranky right from the opening, which features Rob (Michael Stahl-David) skulking around his girlfriend Beth’s (Odette Annable, née Yustman) apartment narrating his every thought and filming her topless without her consent. This is a flashback, and from there we get Rob’s going-away party, where there is boring expositional drama because Rob and Beth have broken up. Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and his partner Lily (Jessica Lucas) are trying to make sure everything is filmed at the party, and filming responsiblity is handed over to Hud (T.J. Miller), who’s crushing on Marlena (Lizzy Caplan). Despite my being much more familiar with the cast this go-round and impressed by their horror pedigrees, it doesn’t make the characters more appealing to me; these upper-class narcissists do not hold my attention before the carnage, and after it’s underway, they get only mildly more compelling.
A good deal of the plot has to do with guys pining away for ladies, and frankly I’m much more interested in the monsters than in Hud creepily staring at Marlena or Rob playing knight in shining armor to the profoundly whiny Beth. (Though to be fair I’d be profoundly whiny too if my apartment building fell on me.) The female characters leave a lot to be desired. Lily does little more than scream and cry, though she is pretty hardcore to be traipsing around the wreckage in high heels and then barefoot. Marlena is the most respectable of the bunch, clobbering extraterrestrials (see below–it’s terrifically difficult to get good stills from this movie, but I did my best) and stoically cleaning her nasty wounds with bottled water and cracking jokes–but not in a cheesy action movie one-liner way. The dialogue does come across as very natural.
The special effects and creature design are top-notch. I didn’t find it very scary, but I did admire one scene when they’re in a subway tunnel and behold a sea of rats ominously fleeing from…something. There’re a few moments of suspense while Hud gets the night vision going on the camera, and then, boom!
It’s a prime example of movies in the aughts reflecting fears about 9/11. This scene below in particular highlights that fear plus a theme throughout the film of the modern need to document (Hud continues to cling to Jason’s camera even as he’s endangering his own life): people are taking pictures on their cell phones of the Statue of Liberty head even while more explosions are imminent–it’s not real to them unless they’re experiencing it through a screen.
Overall, on this rewatching I’m feeling snarky but definitely more respectful towards the filmmakers and the hard work they put into the watching experience. I’m glad I revisited it.
I’ve given up my precious but difficult to see glitter pens. Still can’t draw to save my life.
My sister Leslie and her boyfriend Kevin have been together for 25 years; they’re one of the strongest, happiest couples I know. And they don’t have kids. They don’t want kids. They in fact have a running list of reasons why they don’t want and have kids. I myself have three children. I love them, more than life itself, more than Jordan Peele’s oeuvre. But being a parent can be horrifying. Here are five things I want to gripe about.
5. School Dropoffs and Pickups
School parking lots are a nightmare. Cars, cars everywhere, impractical one-way entrances and exits, pedestrians who don’t look where the fuck they’re going. Everyone’s irritable and in a hurry. (School crossing guards: you are god’s angels. A thousand thank yous.) My eldest child Layla started at a new school for sixth grade in Kentucky when we moved there abruptly from California, and picking her up was especially difficult, as she is partially blind and had a hard time finding my car in the sea of other vehicles three rows deep. I quickly learned to come ridiculously early to get a spot right by the curb, but the first day we showed up on time like noobs. My husband tried to get out of the car and was aggressively greeted by a parking lot attendant enforcing the no-getting-out-of- the-car rule, even after my husband explained our situation. And then from there I had to pick up my middle child Orion from a different school and again had to show up ludicrously early to get a spot.
4. Lack of Sleep
Aside from India.Arie’s voice, there is no sweeter sound to my ears than the soft breathing of my sleeping children. When babies are new to about four months old, they wake up every three hours around the clock. It is, no hyperbole here, torture. My youngest, Jack, who’s four, is autistic, and he still wakes up regularly in the night. If I’m lucky he’ll just come climb on me or the husbo and settle down, but if he’s feeling feisty, he’ll roam the house looking for things to get into. Once I found him sitting in the hallway about to take a swig from a whole-ass jug of tea.
3. When They’re Sick
I never realize how much I take my kids’ health for granted until they’re ill. When once they were spirited and fun, they become listless and miserable, which is hard to watch while not being able to do anything about it. As a parent, I’m rending my clothes and crying to the heavens, “Take me instead! I’m old!” When Layla, never one to do anything half-assed, gets sick, she gets sick. Last night she went to the ER because she was coughing so violently it made her vomit, for days on end. It turned out to be a severe respiratory infection. Which leads me to my next point.
2. Kids Are Gross, Y’all
Kids will eat things off the floor, eat things that aren’t food, including the contents of their nose and the contents of their diaper, not bathe enough, poop while they’re bathing, pee in your face, pee in their own mouths (that last one is only while they’re babies, unless they’re extraordinarily talented). If you’ve ever been pregnant, your baby is peeing and pooping inside of you. Once my dog and one of the kids were coincidentally suffering from diarrhea at the same time, and I couldn’t help but think of the scene in Full Metal Jacket when a new Marines recruit at the end of his rope is reminded he needs to get back to his bunk after lights out or he’ll be in a world of shit and he roars, “I am in a world of shit!”
1. Their Toys
Kids’ toys are obnoxious and needy. Jack in particular loves toys that have buttons and light up and sing horrible, repetitive songs. He has one that if he quits playing with it, it’ll guilt trip him, sighing, “Goodbye…My friend…” The toys also sometimes have a mind of their own. Jack has an electronic reader for a series of corresponding Paw Patrol books. It’s meant to read the books aloud for him, but we had to hide the books because he was ripping the pages out. So the reader, bored and friendless, comes to life and screams things from its catalog of phrases. Except Jack, loving repeating sounds, has it trained to stick to small bits of dialogue. Last night around 10:30, it started shouting “Paw Patrol! Paw Patrol! Paw Patrol!” I stealthily removed it from the bedroom while it shrieked, and no one woke up. But the bloody thing kept whooping and hollering off and on through the night, so I had to stow it in a far corner of the house. Did I mention there’s no off switch?
In closing, this is a model of a talking Cryptkeeper head I had in the ’90s that used to cackle and waggle its jaw loudly when the mood struck it. Enjoy!
My four-year-old son Jack is autistic, and for limited, supervised periods of time, I hand over my phone so he can browse YouTube and indulge in his short attention span/repetition-loving urges. He’s not into anything bad, but some of the stuff he likes can verge on unsettling to me.
5. Nerdcore
He’s been watching nerdcore since he was a wee baby, when his siblings put it on. It’s when gamers make music videos for songs they wrote about video games, and they often perform in costume as the characters. His favorites are The Stupendium, Dan Bull, and Random Encounters. (Though to be honest, I love them too.) Below is his top pick of the moment. He doesn’t scare easily.
4. Disorder
There are videos consisting of people pouring things into a toilet, sometimes to see whether they will flush, sometimes just…because? Jack also enjoys the ones when people fill balloons with various colored liquids and pop them on the floor, making an absolutely unholy mess.
3. Demolishing Things
These involve people ruining things just for the sake of destruction. They run over colorful items with their car or huck breakable objects down a flight of stairs, or in one trend that particularly makes me cringe when I think of how I would fall down and bust my head, jump on alternating steps to squash a balloon.
2. AI Atrocities
People make AI videos for a variety of reasons, sometimes trying to pass them off as real, but Jack likes the ones that are purposely fantastical, like a series of ladies getting into beds made of distinctly un-bed-like materials. It’s seriously supposed to be relaxing, but often the woman starts sinking and merging with the bed. Or there are the ones that are meant to be cute, like the anthropomorphized fruit globes that are squashed open by disembodied hands to reveal animals. In the picture above, that watermelon has eyes and appears sentient–what kind of Cronenbergian body horror is that?! I can’t decide which are more nightmarish: those or the ones of babies made of fruit practicing cannibalism.
1. Me
I have a YouTube channel for movie reviews. It’s been basically defunct for oh about the last four years, but it’s there. He prefers my video about Season of the Witch.
Overall, to me the creepiest aspect of these channels is the randomness and surrealism. But it makes sense to my son, so carry on ya weirdos. Thank you for making him happy.
Celebrating one month of Instagram reels! My oldest kid filmed.
Instagram reel! My oldest filmed and my middle let me throw confetti at him.
*Author’s note: all warehouse images are stock photos I found online, because I’m not trying to get fired or sued, y’all.
We don’t need to rehash my employment history, but to contextualize this article, I currently work in a warehouse. It has its ups and downs, and I’m here now to focus on the more disturbing aspects of it. However, because I am a grateful person, I must emphasize that I am very glad to have a job, particularly one that is autism-friendly, pays fairly, and allows me to listen to headphones while I work.
5. Robots
No, not humans acting like robots! Actual robots! I work in the stow department, so some of my coworkers roll around and bring me pods to store items for later purchase. On the upper floors, they stay in their own blocked-off section where they can’t get out, but on the first floor they trundle around loose. They look like giant Roombas. Except they have eyes. And boy can they flatten shit in a hurry if they run over it. They’re also kind of clumsy. Here’s an artist’s conception:
4. Rate
Almost all departments in my warehouse have a rate of some kind. Thankfully someone has many chances to get up to an acceptable speed, but it is possible to be fired over not being fast enough. The policy at my work is being in the bottom five percent and being given six warnings, spaced out over a two-week period each. I do find the rate pretty steep, though. Ideally we stow 250 items an hour, or roughly 12 seconds per item. For the better part of ten hours straight. It’s doable, but it’s not always a picnic, particularly during busy times, when mandatory overtime gets up to 60 hours a week.
3. Cameras, Cameras Everywhere
An important aspect of stowing is making sure I don’t block the camera that is tracking my every movement. It does so in order to take note of where the item I put away is for future reference. We’re being recorded pretty much everywhere but the bathroom (I hope). It can be unnerving to be watched all the time. It puts me in mind of the song “The Data Stream” by The Stupendium. It’s about consumerism and companies dehumanizing and controlling people:
2. The Merchandise
When I stow, I have a series of plastic tote boxes that I reach into and get products out of. I scan them, check my computer screen to make sure what I scanned matches what the computer thinks it is, then I stick the item in a pod. I never know what I’m going to find in the totes. Often it’s just basic stuff like books or crackers or weighted vests. But sometimes I’ll scan a nice, nondescript box and check my screen to see it’s a dildo, with a nice, graphic depiction in all its veiny glory. Or, as what happened the other day, I picked up a bag that felt wrong. To borrow an adverb from Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel Starve Acre, it squished spongily. I scanned it to find out that it was freeze-dried cow eyes. Just a bag of eyes, intended for dissection. I’m not squeamish, but I was gagging.
1. Safety Issues
Warehouse managers by necessity are big on safety. My work isn’t exactly a deathtrap, but it’s quite easy to get injured if you’re not careful. Your ass will get sent home if you’re not wearing shoes with nonslip soles and either steel or composite toes. Don’t sit on the ladder, don’t use your phone on the work floor, don’t run in the parking lot. You also better be wearing your hair above your shoulders, because you do not want it getting caught in a belt. Remember that scene in Saw IV?
I once worked at a different company warehouse, and I’ll never forget at orientation our host’s description of personally witnessing a “de-gloving.” If you’re unfamiliar with that phrase, I think you can guess what it means by context. Nope, not that:
But in the end, it’s not all debilitating injuries and surprise sex toys. I don’t think? Hey, here’s a mini cow getting groomed like a dog!
Instagram reel! My oldest kid filmed, and my middle shows up to be pelted once again, this time with fruit, because I don’t have a firehose or fake blood. The cue cards are below.
GhoulieJoe 