You’ve surely heard the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. You know the Headless Horseman, Brom Bones, and Ichabod Crane. This is a retake on this story in a very Y2K Tim Burton fashion featuring Burton favorites like Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, and Christopher Walken.

Here, Ichabod Crane has been made a sallow twink developing early forensic techniques. Katrina is a witch. Brom Bones is an extremely handsome Red Shirt who does less to get between Katrina and Ichabod and more to establish the strength of the villain. And the Headless Horseman himself is an agent of the devil, under the control of evil, terrorizing the town of Sleepy Hollow.

This flick is a fun genre mashup of mystery and dark fantasy that could pass for urban fantasy were its setting modern. A lot of its elements satisfy urban fantasy tropes: mystery focus, battling the supernatural, people wearing leather, a proper villain monologue, and a serviceable romance secondary to the external dilemma.

I can’t quite call it horror. Although there’s blood and some scares (mostly for younger viewers), it’s not really meant to scare you. It’s just kinda spooky to look at. The Headless Horseman is essentially just a murder weapon, and the question remains who wields him, to what end.

That said, it doesn’t have an especially twisty story, although it tries. That’s not really the point either. It’s just a pleasant feature.

Sleepy Hollow feels like Halloween recorded directly onto a film reel. It’s among Tim Burton’s finest executions of aesthetic. Danny Elfman also Danny Elfmans on the score to satisfying effect.

I’ve really got no complaints about Sleepy Hollow. I’m not as excited about it as I was in my youth; I kinda prefer actual horror movies these days. But this is a very fine Spooky Season entry that I watch every single year regardless. It’s like The Nightmare Before Christmas with a lot more blood. And Christopher Walken saying, “Gnyaahhh!” “Hrrggghhh!” “Agghhghgh!”

I recommend this to anyone with any tolerance for horror who also likes mysteries. It’s really fun. I can’t do Halloween without it.

(image credit: Paramount Pictures)

I like to think that horror movies occur in seasons. Some movies, like Chopping Mall, are best watched on Valentine’s Day, whereas the brightness and title of Midsommar make it prime for watching on a steamy summer afternoon. Of course, something like Scream or the homosexual masterpiece Saw is an actual Halloween horror movie.

Then you’ve got Krampus, which is a November Horror Movie. The kind of thing you watch between Halloween and Christmas. You know, like The Nightmare Before Christmas.

There is no better November Horror Movie than The VVitch (2015), directed by the same fellow who brought us The Northman. That’s because it’s not a *transitory* horror movie, indicating the switch toward Christmas. It just feels like a November movie. You can’t watch this in June to feel a June mood; it’s too late to watch it in December. You gotta put this on right around American Thanksgiving. (That’s the last Thursday in November for you foreigners.)

Growing up in America means all sorts of stories about Pilgrims and Puritans. We grow up with coloring pages of people very much like the outcast Protestants in this movie, distributed exclusively in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Most of my early holiday memories involve drawing hand turkeys and then some guy farming in a town surrounded by wooden barricades. There might have been goats. My memory might be getting a little creative with that one.

So the same Thanksgiving fuzziness I feel from Sleepy Hollow falls in a haze around The VVitch, which is a better movie if only for its paucity of Johnny Depp. Also the feminism.

In The VVitch, a family is sent away from their village and left to fend for themselves. They face a brutal winter amid a hostile, barren forest with naught but a couple of goats, a horse, a dog, and way too many children to feed.

You won’t be surprised to hear things go rapidly downhill from there.

The baby immediately dies to the hands of a forest witch. This happens at the beginning of the movie and must be spoiled, since I ordinarily can’t handle infant death and you gotta know about it going in. But it’s a very easy death. The baby simply goes missing. We get a low-stress shot of the baby before the witch murders it (no distress), and then that part of the movie is over. You can’t even get that upset about the mother’s grief for her baby because the mother is a major antagonist, quick to blame her eldest daughter for the baby’s death.

A newly adult Anya Taylor Joy leads this movie as the accused daughter. She’s very cute here — an adult teenager who could pass for fifteen. Her character absolutely doesn’t deserve the hate she gets from her parents. She doesn’t help herself very much, though. When her horrible twin siblings torment her, she tells them that she is, in fact, the witch in the forest.

So things keep going downhill for our heroine and the family at large.

Ultimately, The VVitch isn’t a *scary* horror movie. You’re not going to get jumpscared. It’s mostly bleak, and even moreso a delicious horror aesthetic. It’s intimately similar to The Northman, which treats Viking mythology like it was completely, literally true; the Protestants here get a similar treatment of their mythology and puts forth a very classic kind of witch without subversion. A bewitched boy vomits a rotten apple. Witches are creepy crones. Satan talks out of a goat. That kind of thing.

It’s so Thanksgiving!

The VVitch ends with something very much like actual wholesome feminist vibes. “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” asks goat-Satan, offering butter and pretty dresses. Considering the alternative was starving to death in a forest with a family who abuses you, joining a coven of naked women dancing around a bonfire feels like a genuine victory (even if it demands a baby’s blood-oriented skincare routine).

I avoided this one for a long time because I thought it might be too much for me, but it’s really not. Sit in your least comfortable rocking chair and watch this one by candlelight. It’s such a mood.

(image credit: A24)

In Annihilation, a strange shimmer is growing around a Florida lighthouse. Anyone who goes inside doesn’t return. The only person who does comes back terribly sick — so his wife, who thought he was dead, decides to enter the shimmer and find out what happened to him.

The movie Annihilation is an adaptation of a book by Jeff VanderMeer which I haven’t read. I’m given to understand that it’s dramatically different from the movie, and Annihilation (the movie) has become so precious to me, I’m not really interested in another version of it. (I’m weird about this kind of thing.)

So when I’m talking about the movie, it’s with zero information from the book. I don’t think that the book and the movie are about the same thing anyway. Alex Garland’s adaptation is its own story. And one thing I love so fiercely about Annihilation is how the story is entirely metaphoric.

I like to assert my Sara’s Unified Theory of Annihilation to anyone who will listen. You ready for it?

All of the woman characters are Lena, the biologist.

DETAILED SPOILERS FROM HERE ONWARD.

Early in the movie, Lena shows her students video of cervical cancer cells dividing. She identifies them as belonging to a woman in her early thirties. I think these cancer cells came from Lena herself. This cancer is the vortex around which the entire plot revolves: Lena’s internal journey through grief and self-destruction, the trauma of the sickness, ruining her marriage, and — eventually — chemotherapy that saves her life.

The first woman to die is the softest, gentlest, sweetest of all the women. She lost her daughter to leukemia. In fact, I think Lena lost the *idea* of the daughter she wanted to have when she got cancer. Cervical cancer meant hysterectomy; she would never have children. At the same time, Lena lost the softer, gentler, sweeter version of herself. What remained were the likes of Anya (a heavy-drinking soldier quick to anger) and Josie (broken and self-harming).

Ventress, then, is representative of Lena’s overarching side as a biologist: the cold, scientific mind who can’t help but be fascinated by the cancer. Ventress is identified as having terminal cancer, in fact.

A lot of the dialogue in the movie feels sort of strange and prosey for this reason. They aren’t real people talking. They’re the sides of the same person engaged with one another in grief over the same problem.

One of the many ways Lena annihilated herself was by entering into an affair, and this is one of the things that drove Kane’s annihilation. His team, too, was likely just a collection of his own sides. Remember how tenderly Kane cuts open his other teammate, as if performing a c-section? And there is life inside of him? Kane had to grapple with the idea he’d never have kids with Lena as well. Kane had to deal with his wife’s sickness, pulling away from him, and cheating on him with a colleague. No wonder he vanished and took on this suicide mission.

The faceless being that Lena confronts at the end is herself. The cancer is Lena. It’s her own cells.

You will also note that the tunnel under the lighthouse is distinctively vaginal in shape. The cave is the womb. Instead of birthing a child, Lena births cancer — a hostile piece of herself.

When we wonder whether Lena and Kane are clones at the end of the movie, we’re kind of missing the point. Both of them are dramatically transformed versions of themselves. They are simply post-trauma Lena and Kane who annihilated, almost to completion, then came out the other side. It’s actually a really happy ending: forgiveness, healing, and moving on as their altered selves.

The Last Starfighter is an 80s science fiction movie about a teenage boy who gets a high score on a video game that is meant to recruit people to an actual war in space. His big score leads to an alien abduction and joining a small class of others destined to pilot a Gunstar for the Star League. He’s a reluctant hero, but he does become a hero. The eponymous Last Starfighter.

It’s a fun concept, and it works great for kids. I loved this one when I was young. So did my mom, who was barely out of teenagehood when it released. There’s something near-universally appealing about the fantasy of being swept out of your ordinary (crappy) life into a bigger world. The hero, Alex, is very much a chosen one: it’s believed humans can’t even have the aptitude for piloting Gunstars, yet he’s the one who stops the Zur and the Ko-Dan Armada.

The Last Starfighter is obviously coming for Star Wars’s wig, using a lot of the same mechanisms. It’s an extremely straightforward Hero’s Journey screenplay. The humble hero comes from a humble trailer park rather than a dead-end moisture farm on Tattooine. The grand score absolutely competes with that of Star Wars. And the 3D graphics — among the first extensive uses of them in a movie — are more sophisticated than the miniatures and film etchings used for Star Wars.

What TLS misses is that much of the Star Wars charm comes from the quality of the writing, not its use of tropes. You really can’t undervalue what Marcia Lucas did to that original screenplay. It radiates humanity and adventure. TLS mostly focuses on hitting the beats of the Hero’s Journey, and it relies on (admittedly wonderful) charming actor performances to give it life.

But it feels like it’s missing a whole act. Remember how Luke Skywalker needs to develop his skills with Obi-Wan Kenobi? How he’s defeated but rebounds? How Bilbo Baggins takes on side quests so we can actually see him develop? The time Katniss Everdeen takes to repeatedly fail before she develops enough to figure out survival?

Here, Alex isn’t given that time, and what time he gets is spent on Earth — a total misfire that loses the opportunity to develop the Star League beyond a few brief, shallow scenes. The focus on his Beta replacement is funny, but does no good for the story whatsoever.

I think the screenplay is so anemic because of the limited imagination of the filmmakers. See, they blew their load on about a half hour of spectacular CGI, which was only matched in its era by Tron. There are a couple of simple science fiction sets we only see for a short time elsewhere. They can’t imagine any other way to utilize those spaces to work around lacking more Gunstar and combat, so with the budget expended, they just return the story to the trailer park. Even when Alex is being rewarded for his victory at the end, it’s done on a bare black screen, rather than with the grand matte painting of Leia bestowing medals on Luke, Han, and Chewie.

The trailer park just isn’t the right place to spend time in a movie that’s about escaping the drudgery of life for a space adventure. It’s a really nice depiction of a trailer park, though. I mean it! Can you think of another time that a trailer park is painted with such warmth and sentimentality, without even a hint of classist sneer? We just shouldn’t have seen it between his abduction and his return at the end. There’s no sense that Alex has grown bigger and changed and can’t go back home anymore. He’s barely left.

Absent of an act really letting him develop out in a great big galaxy, The Last Starfighter feels like a hollow grasp for Star Wars-like fame. It’s not an adventure so much as a bunch of conversations, and then also some pretty excellent early CGI.

If you love all the character stuff, you might love this movie. A lot of people still do. It’s an extremely polished cult classic. My 13yo found it adequate. My mom still giggles adorably through it. I was less impressed with it now than when I was a kid, and I wish we could do some reshoots on some cheap sets to flesh out the middle. I can think of so much science fiction that taped together great stories from very paltry budgets. What’s the excuse here?

The score is still one of the absolute greats, they’ve got a good Gandalf/Obi-Wan, and this is another fun use of a Delorean. But there are much better, cheaper science fiction movies worth your time than this, and the contemporary box office numbers agreed. Show it to your kids, though.

(image credit: Universal Pictures)

I have nothing but biased opinions about Lord of the Rings. I think of this as the greatest movie trilogy of all time, and I won’t listen to any opinions that say otherwise.

Of the three movies, whichever one I’m watching at the moment is my favorite. Today, The Two Towers was my favorite. It’s got some of my favorite parts of the trilogy, anyway: great speeches surrounding Helm’s Deep, the most amazing satisfying battle, gorgeous goth Arwen, a score that makes me cry evry tiem, the Dead Marshes, po-ta-toes, “What Do Your Elf Eyes See?”, Faramir proving himself stronger than Boromir, and on and on and on.

It’s difficult to review any individual part of the trilogy without the rest, since they’re a cohesive unit. Nine to twelve hours of flawless filmmaking, depending on what edition you’re watching. (I always watch the Extended Edition.)

You’d expect the middle movie to be the saggiest entry, since you’ll find saggy middles throughout most movies, series, books, and media in general. There’s definitely some parts that stretch out longer than they need to. I’m not exactly bolted to my chair with all the Ent stuff — even though I love the Ent stuff too! — and everything with freeing Rohan from Wormtongue’s sway feels a little bit like a side quest you don’t *really* want to do in the game. I also feel like things slow down a lot once Frodo is with Faramir. It’s more of a jarring moment of quiet than a moment of needed respite from the high energy of the fighting going on elsewhere.

But I’m really straining here to find something balanced to say, and also kind of lying, because I love every moment of this.

I mean, c’mon. This movie starts with Gandalf fighting the Balrog and ends with Gandalf bringing Eomer’s men to rescue Helm’s Deep from the brink of death. It’s incredible. Why don’t I have a fell beast? I deserve a fell beast.

It’s awesome to see the effects after more than twenty years too. Nothing looks as realistic as it felt at the time (I was 14), but it doesn’t matter. There’s a really cohesive artistic vision happening here. Everyone was given space to do their jobs right, and that means the bigatures, nascent mo-cap, photo composition, and other CG all come together to look *right* even as it ages.

Truly this is amazing cinema, amazing fantasy, and I think I could rewatch this trilogy every week for the rest of my life without losing the excitement. I get such chills throughout Helm’s Deep, it almost hurts. It’s that good.

(image credit: New Line Cinema)

How the heck do you review a movie like Martyrs?

The story is this: a ten-year-old girl escapes extreme torture, and nobody knows why she was being tortured in such a way. She meets another girl at an orphanage. The two of them grow up together and become extremely close. Fifteen years after her escape, she seeks revenge, and things…don’t go great.

As part of the French New Extremist movement in cinema, Martyrs (2008) is intended to be unpleasant to watch. The director said it himself. The plot of the movie involves subjecting young women to so much pain that they transcend it and become martyrs (witnesses) to the afterlife. To paraphrase the director, simply watching the movie is meant to somewhat turn viewers into martyrs too. It’s that kind of unpleasant. Cruelty is the point.

I often review movies based on my enjoyment, so how do you review something you’re not meant to enjoy?

Certainly I found the project thought-provoking, though not in all good ways. It seems terribly convenient that a man would write a script claiming young women are the best martyrs, which then lets him make a whole movie where beautiful young (often mostly naked) women are pantomiming extreme suffering. I’ve come across way too many men who get their jollies off on women who suffer — but also women who *transcend* the suffering, giving the men a sense of benevolence, because the women are better than being broken by it. I’ve got a particular loathing for this kind of misogyny. It’s all over Martyrs…and horror in general, honestly.

You’ll hear fans (is anyone a fan, really?) say that Martyrs is making a point about the way society uses women and their pain — or horror itself uses them — but if it’s meant to be criticism, then it’s the kind of criticism where they do exactly the thing they criticize. You know? How much of a critical leg does someone have to stand upon when they do the thing they say is bad? Why would you do it if you *really* think it’s bad? Creators are in full control of their message and its execution, after all. He could have said this in a way that didn’t involve a bunch of attractive naked actresses acting extreme suffering. But he did. So he must bear the same criticism ~fans claim the movie is making, in my opinion.

That said, it’s kind of naive to expect horror (especially of this movement) to do anything else. I feel like I have to set aside the above because Martyrs is what it is.

Once I get over all that, I’m left with the impression of a masterfully made movie. It’s shot beautifully, sorta, as much as a gory movie can be beautiful. The sound design (mostly a lot of screaming) is more impactful than the visuals, and the visual effects are beyond impressive. The editing is great. The score is lovely. The tender relationship between characters is genuinely touching, and they didn’t have to center such loving relationships in such a shocker of a film.

Very little is explicitly stated in Martyrs, which leaves ample room for interpretation. I always enjoy that. Why did Mademoiselle do what she did at the end, for instance? You have to comb back through the movie and watch the actress closely to draw your own conclusions about the motivations from character, plot, and theme. There is a sense of meaning — albeit possibly illusory meaning — to all the pain, and the way it demands time for analysis manages to make the film itself transcend torture porn to become actual art.

This is why I’m left giving it a four star review, even though I might wanna fight the director if we ever ate dinner at the same restaurant, and it wasn’t fun to watch, and I’m not sure I’ll watch it again. Martyrs is really skillfully made and it’s worth thinking about.

All the above said, I might actually watch it again because I think I missed whole levels to the flick. For instance: I didn’t realize the two main women would be considered nonwhite by the French filmmakers. I’m an American, and we absolutely have tons of racist biases, but I honestly just registered them as French. I feel so silly typing that out! But it means there is not just a gendered element to the people chosen as Martyrs, but also a racial element I didn’t begin considering. I mostly thought about gender, Catholicism, and the creator’s desperate need for therapy (said lovingly).

It makes me wonder if I even have enough context on French culture and cinema to really crack this movie. I’ve got to be missing tons of nuance. And I do think there’s lots of nuance.

Martyrs is the kind of movie you can’t really recommend to anyone, but if you think you can stomach extremely bleak and violent horror, it’s good to swing by at least once. Don’t watch it. I think I have to tell you not to watch it just in case.

(image credit: Wild Bunch)

In The Wedding Singer, the titular character gets left at the altar at his own wedding, then falls in love with a woman about to walk down the aisle with her jerk fiance. But make it 80s! In 1985, CD players are brand-new exotic technology, hair is enormous, and all fabrics look like they belong on Barbie dolls. The Wedding Singer is Adam Sandler’s romcom love letter to perms and synths. But also an extremely adorable Drew Barrymore.

This is easily my favorite Adam Sandler movie. It’s heartfelt, sincere, and has some of the funniest delivery of the simplest lines.

He plays Robbie Hart, who’s completely out-of-step with the Greed Is Good attitudes of the 1980s. Since leaving his high school era hair metal band, he’s been mostly making money by singing at weddings. He also teaches music locally in the community. But he’s not really someone who invoices others, so he gets paid in, say, meatballs dumped directly into his palms.

It’s not that he’s without ambition; he still writes songs and cares passionately about music. He just doesn’t desire grand financial gain. He does it for the love of music and the love of making people happy. His fiancee, Linda, can’t understand this; she leaves him at the altar. But a waitress who works the same weddings, Julia, finds this extremely charming.

Unfortunately Julia is with the biggest d-bag on the planet. He’s got a Delorean, popped collars, and a penchant for cheating. He’s marrying Julia only because he doesn’t want to break up and he trusts that she isn’t after his money.

Robbie helps Julia plan her wedding instead, since the evil fiance is disinterested, and Robbie and Julia fall for each other. Hard. Thanks to Billy Idol, they get a happily-ever-after.

You know what’s surreal about The Wedding Singer in this, the year of our Lord 2024? It was only thirteen years between the movie’s setting and its release (1985 vs 1998), so an equivalent movie now would take place in 2011. They wouldn’t be singing Boy George. They’d be banging hits by The Black Eyed Peas. They’d wear those glasses with the slats in them, business casual everywhere, and modeling themselves after Disco Stick-era Lady Gaga.

Now we’re almost 40 years away from 1985, which is the same distance that 1985 was from 1945 (the immediate postwar period). Isn’t that weird? Isn’t time’s slippery nature strange and unsettling? Don’t worry about it! Robbie just wrote a really cute song for Julia! They have similar values! They’re practicing the altar kiss!

I love this movie so much. My only regret is that streaming-era versions of the movie don’t have the post-credits karaoke, like the VHS did. Wait, how old am I?

(image credit: New Line Cinema)