Busy week, so there's not a lot here. But if you're just craving more, don't forget about the new podcast episode from my wife and I.
Movies
Dumb even for one of these movies, and the deaths aren't nearly as elaborate as the best in the previous films. But I got a real chuckle out of the part when the guy's guts got sucks out of his butthole by the pool drain, so it's not as if this is irredeemable. Grade: C
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
I have nooo idea what to do with this. It's all kind of ugly and dumb and nonsensical, but on purpose? You don't just have Joe Berlinger direct and co-write something and have it accidentally end up like this. There's something here about how this purports to be a dramatization of real events, as opposed to the original Blair Witch Project's claims of being actual footage of real events, and it's theoretically interesting the way that the film is littered with scenes presented through viewfinders and screens until finally the "reality" of the film breaks with what is presented on those screens. But I just don't know, in practice this movie is so joyless and dull, and whether or not it's purposeful, it looking like a cheap TV movie just never works for me. It's beside the point that this lacks the primal, cursed power of the first movie, but well... Grade: C
I guess one of the central questions with any eschatological story is whether humanity will ultimately fall back upon its communal tendencies for mutual aid or instead resort to isolating, resource-hoarding shows of strength and dominance—i.e. will the "good" or the "bad" human psychologies survive. But one of the things that is so deeply horrifying about the prospect of nuclear war (and, to a not dissimilar degree, the climate crisis) is that the very premise of there being powerful nation-states in possession of weapons with the capability of making our planet unlivable for vast swaths of the population means that those in global power have on some level already given up on the idea of a collective good. In Threads, we never see these powerful people, who presumably have already retreated to their Dr. Strangelove bunkers. Instead, the first half of the film is focused on the predominantly working-class population of Sheffield watching helplessly (and in some measure of denial) as the United States and the USSR escalate toward nuclear conflict over proxy control of the Middle East—nations these poor people are neither part of nor can control. It's obvious what's so horrifying about the second half of the film, after the bombs have been dropped and we are subject to possibly the most graphic visual account of the effects of nuclear war ever put to film (if there's a more graphic one, don't tell me about it, please—this one at least has the levity of the slightly goofy way that human beings apparently forget to speak in full sentences a decade into the nuclear apocalypse), but I actually found the first half of the film even more sickening because it takes that all-too-familiar feeling of panickedly watching world leaders act with impunity as they ruin the lives of millions and cranks it up to nightmarish levels with the literal threat of nuclear annihilation. Only the worst part is that it's not a nightmare. The madmen who control nation-states are still sitting on a stockpile of nukes, and if that doesn't get us, there's the game of chicken the wealthiest nations are playing as they watch the climate crisis wrecking the formerly colonized world as they wait for the bottom to fall out for the rest of us. I don't think I'm an anarchist, but I've never so profoundly felt what anarchists mean about the ethical illegitimacy of the modern state than I have contemplating, as this movie forces you to, that every single world government with nukes knows that holding onto their arsenal means leaving the door open to a future like the one depicted in this film, and yet they keep their nuclear weapons anyway. I'm not sure how healthy it is to mildly traumatize myself with movies like this, but there is a kind of catharsis in seeing my absolute worst fears put up onscreen, which I suppose is one of the roles of horror media. Yay, October? Grade: A
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