Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 38

Halloween Horror Binge: Day 5: Saturday Shorts

Read about and follow the links to see the the short films at The Terror Test.

Halloween Horror Binge: Day 4: Three Cases of Murder (1955)

You can read the review at The Terror Test.

Halloween Horror Binge: Day 3: Viy (1967)

You can read the review at The Terror Test.

Halloween Horror Binge: Day 2: Count Dracula (1970)

You can read this at The Terror Test.

Newly Lost in Arkham and The Halloween Horror Binge

I’m kicking off my new spot over at The Terror Test with a Halloween Horror Binge–a month of horror films! Day 1 is Lords of Chaos.

The Coven of Lonely Gourds

This was originally a Thirteen Days of Halloween that I made with artist Reed Randolph. You can read the whole thing here.

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Little Billboards #80

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Electric barns.
Xenophobic, queer barns.
Petrified Barns.
Gravestone barns.

Little Billboards #86

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News was serious.
He read the Ladies and Gentlemen bulletin.
The mask was warm, luminous.

Might as well, again. 2016 Edition.

Evidently I’ve enjoyed a lot of what I’ve seen from 2016.  When I made the original list, I had only viewed Neil Breen’s Pass Thru, which is still here, of course. I linked the short films to where they can be seen for free. If you have any questions about the features and what I liked about them, just ask in the comments.

You can read the previous posts on this film list here.

Short Films

“And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow’s Eye”
A ghost and a dead herd of cows in a wonderfully mysterious and incredible looking short film from Chile. Directed by Francisca Alegria.

“Deer Flower”
Autobiographical stop-motion film from South Korea about a young boy’s experience drinking deer blood. Directed by Kangmin Kim

“Hydrangea”
I’ve got this listed as 2016, but on IMDB, it’s 2017. In any case, I just found out it’s part of a series called Still Life, three one-shot short films. I mentioned one of them previously and haven’t seen the other. The less you know, maybe the better. The director Jim Cummings has this and other shorts on his Vimeo, which I keep forgetting to check out.

“Pussy”
A fun and surreal cartoon short about one woman attempting to pleasure herself. Directed by Renata Gąsiorowska. For mature viewers and obviously NSFW.

“Second to None”
Two brothers–maybe twins if I remember correctly–take first and second on everything they do since birth order. As they are becoming the world’s oldest people, the youngest hatches a plan to be…well, you can figure it out. Great looking stop-motion short directed by Vincent Gallagher.

“Superbia”
A genre- and gender-bending animated short by Hungarian artist Luca Tóth. While it doesn’t look like it, it reminds me of something like Fantastic Planet or Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories like “Those Who Walk Away from Omelos,” that set up difficult and interesting alternate worlds. “Superbia” has more of the surrealism of the former.

Feature Length 

The Alchemist Cookbook
The Autopsy of Jane Doe
Doctor Strange
Endless Poetry
I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House
Moonlight
Pass Thru
Prevenge
Swiss Army Man
Under the Shadow
The Void

Documentary

Author: The JT LeRoy Story
Cameraperson
John Berger or The Art of Looking
Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World

With the kids:

Ballerina

The BFG
My oldest loves Roald Dahl and has a book collection plus we’ve seen about three versions of this. I’m hoping to watch James and the Giant Peach after she reads it. I haven’t seen it since it was in theaters.

Finding Dory
Kubo and the Two Strings

Moana
I cry every time I see Moana grow up. Every time. 

Sing
The kids just belly laughed through this one.

Trolls
Our youngest got watch-it-twice-a-day-every-day obsessed with this movie one summer. I thought it was fun, and every time I hear those pop songs I think of her singing and laughing. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Party Zone: Recent Viewing

When Kanopy sent an email celebrating their Joel Potrykus collection it didn’t mean anything to me until I scrolled down far enough to see that he had made a favorite of mine, The Alchemist Cookbook (2016). Ultimately, I fell for the promotion and decided to check out another one. Then I watched them all.

“Coyote” (2010) 
The first part of Potrykus’s Animal Trilogy is a short available on Vimeo. I love that it was made on 8mm which I like the look of anyway, but here, it also fits the content. “Coyote” hints at a werewolf story, but it’s also about addiction. What I like about Potrykus’s movies is their mix of tones and subject matters that ends up feeling like Chantal Akerman making a Troma movie. There’s even a dance scene reminiscent of Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964) on a bridge that suggests the famous running sequence of that film. 

Ape (2012) 
I wrote about this one recently.

Buzzard (2014)
My only complaint about the movie is that the dialogue sometimes feels like Beavis and Butthead working in Office Space (1999). Too many dude/mans. The dialogue about work though is funny and cutting and sometimes sad. When Derek tells the protagonist Marty Jackitansky that he has the right-of-way because ”I’ve been here three months longer than you,” I howled out loud. As I watched these scenes play out with Derek, whose party zone is his parents’ basement, there is a sadness that creeps in, because I got the sense Derek is serious about what he’s saying. 

Derek’s a jerk, but I can’t help like him. So much of this movie is about trying to live and enjoy one’s time while being broke and working in America.

The buzzard of the title is Jackitansky, played by Joshua Burge, the lead in all three of the Animal films. Jackitansky is living off the detritus of America, stripping what he can from capitalistic carcasses. Coupon scams. Checking account okey-dokes. Free cereal.

Potrykus includes bizarre horror aspects and stellar, poetic moments. There’s a sequence of Burge in a fluffy white hotel robe eating a pile of spaghetti and meatballs in real time that somehow works. The ending of the film, the last images, I thought were perfect. 

Oh, and Jackitansky uses a Power Glove as a base for a Freddy Kreuger claw, which besides being a fun and striking image, reminds us that the movie is about the distribution of power and labor and independence–video games and dreams and the controllers of both.

Relaxer (2018) 
A sci-fi version of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child or Beckett’s Endgame. I want to watch this  again because it’s really rich, despite being told in one room (if I remember correctly). There’s something here about transformation or the inability to transform or take action.

The movie takes place on the eve of Y2K and the main character has been challenged to beat all the levels of Pac-Man by his abusive brother. He’s being filmed and he isn’t allowed off the couch. But that’s just a kind of surface story to the whole thing. Josh Burge makes me think of Buster Keaton trapped in a Saw movie.

The movie gets gross, but not necessarily gory. 

Potrykus’s films are punk in some of the best senses of the word: an alienation and critique of society and the nature of work, with bonus humor and gross-outs. I enjoy his juxtaposition of high and low aesthetics. I also like that I never know what’s going to happen in these movies and he almost always nails the ending, the most difficult thing to do. 

I’ve wondered if Potrykus grew up with Channel 50? He’s based in Grand Rapids, and I grew up in a few different places in Michigan, mostly near Flint, but Channel 50 showed everything. I always felt like it was a part of why my tastes range from no-budget to super-budget and from trash to art films.

Kanopy is a film service that’s free or free with certain limits through many libraries. I get six movies a month. They have a wide selection and have started a kids channel that I haven’t looked at since my kids run our other streaming platforms.