teach me the art of war

(When I start posting streams of film reviews all at once, just assume I'm in bed with a virus. That seems to be the way of things at the moment.)

Casablanca (1942): Casablanca, my beloved! I have previously seen and loved chunks of this movie but never, as far as I can remember, watched it the whole way through. It is so good. So utterly charming. Rick is an American expat who runs a popular café/bar in Vichy-controlled Casablanca, Morocco during WWII. After having had his heart broken by his beautiful ex-girlfriend Ilsa, Rick presents himself as a hardened cynic, out for himself and indifferent to the plight of all the refugees pouring through the city in their desperate efforts to escape from wartorn Europe. The act is not especially convincing. He has a long track record of fighting for the antifascist side in recent other wars, and is surrounded by a small core group of friends and employees who have been with him for years and to whom he is clearly unswervingly loyal. Nevertheless, he manages to more or less keep up the pretence until Ilsa unexpectedly shows up in town on the arm of Victor Laszlo, a famous Czech Resistance fighter who is on the run from the Nazis. Rick has it in his power to get Ilsa and Laszlo the visas they need to escape to America. Local Vichy and German leaders are bearing down on him. His own bitter feelings about Ilsa's betrayal tempt him closer to the dark side than any political pressure ever has. But the ending is perfect, and the whole film plays with the tension between political ideals and personal desire in the most touching, human way.

I need to watch a bunch more Humphrey Bogart films. He's just so unbelievably charismatic, and has a knack for turning roles that could be obnoxious into lovable forever favourites.

Violation (2020): ( Spoilery plot summary )

The only other rape-revenge movies I've seen so far are the I Spit On Your Grave remakes, and this was like their perfect polar opposite. The rapist is a normal dude who has a close established friendship with his victim; the rape is "non-violent" and papered over as a misunderstanding. The film basically took a death-grip hold of that "was it ~really rape, did it ~count as a trauma, is it actually my fault, did I not fight hard enough" feeling so endemic to our rape culture and did not loosen it for even a moment - fucking harrowing stuff, but harrowing in a completely different way than a more graphic, brutal rape scene is harrowing. There's a far heavier focus on the relationships involved than on the act of sexual violence; Miriam's strained bonds with her sister and husband seem as much a part of the trauma as her brother-in-law's betrayal. Most of the screentime is devoted to long, almost painfully intimate scenes of completely mundane human interactions. Miriam's revenge by contrast is almost surreal: she executes a meticulously planned murder and disposes of the body with nauseating thoroughness. Far from catharsis, the murder only seems to traumatise her worse than ever.

The cinematography was exquisite, albeit heavy-handed. I am not film literate enough to know what to properly call this but it felt like the audio-visual equivalent of what in a novel we might call MFA writing: polished to an almost distracting shine, packed full of "elevated" metaphors, reluctant to say anything in a simple character beat that could instead be said through several long minutes of obscure atmospheric shots. Extremely pretty! Very artistic! SO pretentious! There is one quite surprising scene immediately before the murder where we zoom in super close on the rapist's naked erection. I don't think I've ever seen a head-on shot of an erect penis outside of porn. I thought the choice to show that so explicitly was an interesting contrast to the rape scene, which was filmed in this uncomfortably evocative, eroticised but completely non-explicit way: lots of heavy breathing, undulating fabric, grabbing hands, zero other skin on display.

I have loved nonlinear narratives in written fiction and I'm sure there are many ways I'd love them in film; in this case it felt like one abstraction too many, and I had a much better time once I gave up around the one-third mark and looked up a linear plot summary on Wikipedia. I guess in summary I'm not entirely sure what I make of this film, but watching it sure was an Experience.

Ready or Not (2019): On her wedding night, Grace's obscenely rich new in-laws rope her into a family ritual: she must play a game with them, chosen at random by drawing a card from a black box. All but one of the games are harmless; the "but one" is a murderous game of hide-and-seek, where the family has until sunrise to hunt down the target and ritually slaughter them. Guess which card Grace draws.

This was so much fun! Between this and Jennifer's Body, I've started feeling like Adam Brody should be some kind of Big Deal in last decade's horror movies, though Wikipedia tells me he hasn't actually appeared in much else. More to the point, Samara Weaving put on a truly fantastic performance. Grace had a grit and a will to live that were incredible to watch; all she was doing was trying to survive, but she quickly made herself a terror to the rest of the family, and I very much enjoyed her journey to becoming as much of a threat to them as they were to her. Her husband was the kind of spineless sack of shit it feels truly good to hate. I have a little while to wait before the sequel comes down to a sensible rental price on streaming platforms (it is very new and currently costs a full movie ticket amount to watch, but that won't last) and then I'm very much looking forward to seeing the continuation of her adventures.

Hush (2016): Maddie, a deaf woman and successful author, lives alone in the woods to work in peace on her next novel. One night she becomes the target of a sadistic serial killer. This was so damn good. Scary as fuck, sparing but VERY effective with its gore (the hand scene alskjhfalsjffd owwwwww) and has another wonderful female protagonist who never wanted any of this but, since she can't escape it, throws herself into the fight harder than her tormentor could ever have predicted. It is pure chance that I watched this and Ready or Not back to back, but between the fierce table-turning heroines and the hand gore, they make an unexpectedly good pairing, lol. The killer also put in a fantastic performance. I feel like he's going to stick in my head as a memorable villain for exactly how UNmemorable he is: normal dude, personable, casually chatty, utterly sick fuck. He is not the brightest spark, and there more than a few "dude how are you fucking this up so bad" moments, but I don't necessarily have a problem with that; there's no law that says killers all have to be ultracompetent masterminds!

Apparently there's also a TV show called Midnight Mass that is supposed to be an adaptation of Maddie's fictional bestseller. I'm finding TV shows harder to commit to than movies at the moment, but it has good reviews and I'd like to give it a go at some point.

Had a fantastic time at the movies yesterday watching this entirely pointless, strategically incomprehensible, frankly fucking batshit addition to the Star Wars movie canon. I have no idea what Disney was thinking. I guess maybe they learnt from the Rise of Skywalker fiasco that trying to pander to everyone at once doesn't work, so instead they decided to pander to basically no one? This one goes out to all the fans who feel they've been seeing too many human faces in their live action movies lately and would prefer a cast made almost entirely of CGI, puppets and masks. To the slug-fuckers. To the Babu Frik superfans. To everyone who's tired of storytelling stakes and would prefer to just kick back and watch a bunch of stuff Happen while a soundtrack composed of equal parts orchestral music and synthwave swells to dramatic peaks at near-arbitrary moments. SO much fun. 10/10 experience.

So basically, this unfolds less like a traditional three-act film than like a highly compressed TV season. Last time we saw Mando, he had pledged himself in service to Bo-Katan and then promptly fucked off to live on a cute little homestead on Navarro. Now, he works for the New Republic while insisting he's an "independent contractor" who's just in it for the bounty-hunting money. For reasons that are supposedly to do with hunting down the remnants of the Empire, he has to go rescue Jabba the Hutt's son Rotta from gladiatorial enslavement. Rotta the Hutt is incredibly jacked and has rippling abs and his own big beat theme song, and for some reason speaks perfect English with an American accent. All the CGI aliens speak perfect English with American accents, except for the Anzellans, who eschew their own established canonical language in favour of speaking broken Babu Frik English even amongst themselves.

Because oh yeah, there's also a big chunk of the screentime devoted to four Anzellans and Grogu all going on a rescue mission together. If you liked Babu Frik in TROS then you will love this part. (I loved it.) If you're one of those joyless fans who likes to get angry about how cutesy critters with silly voices are ruining the otherwise totally serious and artistically disciplined Star Wars movies then you are going to want to throw up.

In as much as this movie can be said to have a heart, it's in the relationship between Din and Grogu, as Din steps more fully than ever into his role as a toddler dad while Grogu fully leaves behind his pram-bound sack-of-cute-potatoes phase in favour of nonstop squirmy, giggly, mischievous motion. There were a few cheap jokes I didn't find funny about Grogu being treated as a pet - Din ordering him to heel, Rotta feeding him scraps like a dog, etc - but overall he really gets to be a person in this movie, a full-blown character who is exploring his power in the world (not Force powers, but ordinary little-person-growing-up powers like "get a rise out of Dad" and "acquire food I'm not supposed to eat"), and it's an absolute delight.

The score was, as I already mentioned, fucking magnificent, albeit mismatched to the actual content of the movie. Even if I hadn't been having so much fun with the rest of it, it would have been worth the price of my ticket just to sit for two hours and listen to Ludwig Göransson's latest in surround sound.

The CGI, on the other hand...wasn't great? I was surprised by how janky it was, given how good the TV show always looks. Zeb especially looked out of place in every shot. He also didn't actually have anything to do; it was like they decided to include him as fanservice for Rebels fans (or possibly just for Dave Filoni's own amusement) but couldn't be bothered coming up with a proper role for him, so he just hung around being Din's pilot on missions for the New Republic (because for some reason Din needs a pilot now). That was disappointing. I love Zeb and I'm not sorry we had him, but I wish they'd taken more advantage of his presence.

But look, my complaints are minor. In terms of actual plot significance, this movie is such a nothingburger that it doesn't feel worth the energy to pick apart. But as a Star Wars fan whose default position is "yay more Star Wars", I cannot deny that this was, indeed, more Star Wars. My GOD it was some Star Wars. It was nothing BUT Star Wars. All the goofiest, dweebiest, most embarrassing parts of Star Wars left in an intensely concentrated sticky paste at the bottom of the pot after all the other ingredients finished boiling off. The gladiatorial slug fight. Fucking hell.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, trans. Polly Barton: osprey_archer wrote in glowing terms about this book, and then just recently, a copy jumped out at me from a library shelf - so really, what was I supposed to do? It's about a journalist, Rika Machida, who gets in over her head while covering a sensational story about convicted female serial killer Manako Kajii, who is claimed to have lured in her victims through marriage-oriented dating apps, seduced them with her cooking skills, milked them to fund her luxury lifestyle and then callously disposed of them. The most controversial thing about the case, far more viscerally appalling to the public than the lives lost and ruined, is the fact that Kajii is fat. The idea that a fat woman could convince multiple men to want her so badly that they'd shower her in money and finery has people bemused at the absolute best and frothing with hateful rage at the worst.

Did Kajii really commit the murders? This novel doesn't give a fuck! The true-crime-journalism angle is mere set dressing for what is actually a passionate story about female hunger in a society where misogyny, rampant body shaming and a general pressure to conform make it taboo for women to actually want almost anything at all. It is fluffy and heartwarming in places, horribly dark in others, and slathered all over with vivid, sensuous descriptions of food. Everything revolves around Rika's dangerous growing closeness to Kajii, and the corresponding distance opening up between her and her best friend, Reiko; both relationships are characterised by obsessiveness, insecurity and unexpressed yearning, with strong homoerotic undercurrents. (These are not just wishful thinking on my part; I know Japanese homosocial norms are different from Western, but Yuzuki herself is explicit, if inconclusive, about the fact that lines are being at the very least toed right up to.) I am a fairly fast reader - partly because suspense is not my friend (I need to know what happens, damn it!) and partly because I so enjoy the dopamine hit of successfully crossing a task off my mental to-do list - and this is the first time in ages that a first-time read has had me regretting this about myself, because I really would have liked to luxuriate for longer in the deliciousness and complex psychological honesty of these pages.

( On the other hand... [cut for candid and personal weight/fatphobia talk] )

Above disclaimer (tldr; big trigger warning for ED sufferers) notwithstanding, this might be my favourite thing I've read this year so far.

Deadloch season 2: This was good telly, but compared to the flawless first season, I feel disappointed. Detectives Eddie and Dulcie, along with Dulcie's civilian wife Cath, have gone caravanning up to the Northern Territory to investigate the possible murder of Eddie's previous detective partner. Instead, they get embroiled in a completely different murder case, involving the deceased owner of one of the town's two competing crocodile tour companies whose body has started washing up in pieces along the river. The formula is the same as last season: it's crime/black comedy with a sharp eye for misogyny and a major subplot focusing on queer relationships. The ongoing workings-out of Cath and Dulcie's marital issues were my very favourite thing this season, followed closely by Eddie's exploration of her/their newly discovered queerness, conducted in the most maximally brash, eccentric, Eddie-ish way possible. Fantastic stuff. Unfortunately, the main plot largely did not work for me this time.

Part of my annoyance is with the cultural depiction of Australia. Last season took a very nuanced and diverse view of small-town Tasmanian society, which rang true even (maybe especially) at its most satirical; this season, the supporting cast was dominated by exhaustingly loud Top End bogans whose portrayal imo tipped a bit over the caricature line. The Kates are southeasterners (and to be fair, so am I) so I guess it makes sense that they have less of a wealth of experience to draw on for their portrayal of the NT, but...idk, I'm not even saying those kinds of people don't exist, I'm just saying they're not ALL that exists up there, and I would have really liked a bit less screentime chewed up by making fun of them. Not least because they are exhaustingly loud. Eddie's antics were funny when Eddie was the clown to everyone else's straight man; once the other clowns all trooped in, and it was just a big crowd of clowns trying to out-clown each other, it stopped being enjoyable to watch.

The other annoying part was the murder mystery itself, which lacked all the sharp, twisty urgency of the previous one. I spent so much of last season compulsively trying to guess who the culprit was, feeling tantalisingly close to putting the pieces together, only to have all my conclusions thoroughly (and pleasurably) swept away by the finale. This time it took me the whole first half of the season to even start caring whodunnit, and by the time I did start caring, the rough shape of the answer was obvious; the twists thrown in at the end to try and make it more of a surprise felt cheap and tacked on. And CONVOLUTED. Holy fuck, the finale was convoluted. Too many threads tied in too loose a knot, with most of them completely unnecessary to the actual structure of the rope.

So I'm not sorry for the time I spent watching it, and I'm very happy with how things worked out for the main characters, but I'm also not sorry it ended in a way that seems to preclude any further sequels. I would like to keep my memories of the absolute pristine perfection that was season one as untainted by later missteps as possible, so here is definitely the place to stop.

Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai: Florian Herscht, a young German man with no family and an ambiguous learning disability, has become convinced that he - and perhaps he alone - can see the end of the universe coming, due to his misunderstanding of an adult education class in particle physics. What is to be done about this? Why, he needs to inform Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel will know just what to do. In his free time Florian writes letter after letter to Angela Merkel; the rest of the time he works for the Boss, who runs both a cleaning company (Florian's business) and a unit of militant neo-Nazis marshalled in their fading, impoverished former industrial village (not Florian's business, despite the Boss's ongoing efforts to indoctrinate him).

The cover of this novel is emblazoned very prominently with its author's prestigious awards (he is last year's Nobel laureate in Literature and has also received an International Booker) but that's not why I read it. I read it because my sister's boyfriend pressed his unwanted copy on me with the irresistibly flattering remark that he absolutely hated it but that I, a more serious reader than him, would surely be equal to its challenge. This worked on me a little too well and I devoured the book over two and a bit days, despite the fact that it is, in fact, quite difficult.

Specifically, it is difficult because the whole thing is written in a single sentence. At least in its English translation (by Ottilie Mulzet; the original is in Hungarian) this obviously involves some abuses of grammar, and with no chapter, paragraph or even sentence breaks, you don't really feel like you can stop. I spent the first fifty pages or so involuntarily trying to dismantle the prose into more traditional units in my head before I finally got into the flow of it; after that it was a dreamlike, slightly bewildering reading experience, where I gave up trying to keep strict track of the chronology (it jumps around all over the place, back and forth in time as well as freely between characters' heads) and just let the story wash over me. Set shortly before and during the COVID pandemic, it is perhaps around 70% supremely petty goings-on between a community of ageing smalltown Germans and their beloved village idiot, and then 30% appalling Nazi violence; the result is darkly funny, depressing, infuriating, and quietly apocalyptic in its portrayal of a way of life that is in irreversible global decline. I'm not exactly hoping the prose style catches on more broadly, but I did very much enjoy myself.

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig: This has been marketed all wrong! It's neither romantasy nor fantasy proper, and if you try to read it as either, you get major structural and stylistic problems. What it actually is - and what it does a really good job of being, imo - is a fairytale. An original, longform, gothic fairytale updated to millennial/gen z sensibilities. If you've ever read one of those "feminist fairytale retellings" that have been so prominent on bookstore shelves in recent years, that's going to give you the closest sense of what reading this book is like.

Our heroine, Sybil, was taken into Aisling Cathedral as a child and has no memories of her life before being inducted as one of her faith's six Diviners. These girls - always girls - have the power to foretell the future through their dreams as they are drowned to unconsciousness in a magical spring. But as the Diviners' ten year period of service nears its close, and the now adult young women look forward to their freedom in the wider kingdom, they start vanishing one by one. Sybil flees the cathedral and sets out on a quest to discover what has happened to her sisters, helped along the way by an adorably eccentric gargoyle and a devilishly handsome, abrasive knight named Rodrick Myndacious.

(Yes, his name is actually Myndacious.)

The worldbuilding in this story is a lot of fun but not at all to be taken seriously. The characters all read like ordinary modern people who have agreed to live under a feudal system for the #aesthetic but see no actual reason why that other guy over there (the king of the realm) should think he's any better than them! Get over yourself, Your Majesty! The Diviners are Vestal Virgins who smoke fantasy marijuana, have casual sex to their hearts' content, and affectionately call each other "shrews" instead of "bitches". The kingdom's economy is in the silliest state since the king from Sleeping Beauty ordered all his land's fibrecraft to a halt: there are only five hamlets, each of which is entirely devoted to (respectively) the crafts of Scribe, Forester, Fisherman, Merchant or Weaver; the earth just tills itself, I guess. The author also spoon-feeds every moral message and plot development with such fondly infantilising care that I had accurately guessed the entire book's trajectory by the time we were done with the set-up. But this is kind of why I'm harping on genre: nobody reads fairytales because they're in serious suspense as to whether Sleeping Beauty will really wake up, or whether Cinderella will really get her prince. I would have liked it even better if I'd been allowed to feed myself, but at the end of the day, the stuff on the spoon tasted really damn good.

This book is only the first in a series called The Stonewater Kingdom; the next instalment is due this September, and I'm going to have to read it, because the ending of the first is too dark to be left alone. I mean, I can pretty much already guess how it's all going to resolve, but I won't feel satisfied until I see it happen. The final book of The Hurricane Wars trilogy is also due out shortly after, in October, so I guess the back end of this year is going to be heavy on enemies(ish)-to-lovers popcorn reads with endearingly silly worldbuilding for me.

I've slowed my horror movie roll a bit, mainly because the work I'm doing on my fanbinding project lends itself to the same headspace and timeslot as movie-watching. But I have not lost interest! Today's unintentional mini-theme is toxic female friendship, yay.

Jennifer's Body (2009): A struggling indie band turns to Satan to give them their big break, but the girl they chose for their virgin sacrifice was unfortunately not a virgin. Instead of dying, the ritual causes Jennifer to become possessed by a demon, and leaves her devoted best friend Anita ("Needy") struggling to come to terms with a Jennifer who is mostly the same cool, hot, vacuous, slightly mean teenage girl she's always been, only now she feeds off the flesh of her male classmates.

I'm boggling that I never saw this in cinemas when it came out, because it was fucking laser-targeted at my demographic (emo kids who were coming of age in the late 2000s), but I can't recall any of my friends even talking about it. I recognised almost every band on the soundtrack. I recognised a lot of faces too: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Sedaris, Chris Pratt, that guy from The O.C. Anyway, it was a great time! If I hadn't been out and rug-munching for several years by the time it was released, that Jennifer/Needy makeout scene would have given me the mother of all sexual awakenings too, lol. Those heady teenage hormones were off the charts.

Fall (2022): A year after her husband's death in a rock climbing accident, Becky allows her best friend Hunter (a youtuber who has built her brand on daredevil stunts) to goad her into climbing a decommissioned TV tower together. The tower is 2000ft/610m high, rusted through, and due to be demolished soon. They tell no one what they're doing and pack no food or survival gear. The ladder gives way beneath them, and the two end up trapped on a tiny open platform right at the top.

I fucking loved this, okay? Looking at reviews after I'd finished watching made me feel kind of dumb, because everyone else was all "too much suspension of disbelief" and "saw the twist coming a mile off" and "leads are so dumb they deserve it" while I was just there like 🤯🤯🤯. Hot women with a dangerous physical hobby! Extreme heights! Confined to a single location with literally no room to maneuver, and somehow still heart-stoppingly tense and exciting the whole way through! Yes the leads are a bit dumb and yes the filmmakers are less than 100% married to realism the whole way through. (There's no point me defending the twist, because I am a very naive viewer; most twists catch me off guard, whether they're well executed or not.) But all I really wanted was attractive, dysfunctional women and vertigo-inducing aerial shots and to spend a decent portion of the runtime yelling "no no no don't do that!" through my fingers, and you couldn't get a purer, more intense experience of those things than this film if you injected them intravenously.

In Fall-adjacent news, I am greatly amused by the existence of this Getting Stuck in Terrible Places Cinematic Universe list on letterboxd. Some of these films I have already seen over the years; some are on my watch list; others I have never even heard of. But a person who can put Saw, The Hunger Games, Snowpiercer and The Blair Witch Project all together on a themed list and have it make perfect, intuitive sense is a person I can respect.

I'm just. I'm ALL OVER THE PLACE. And have drunk rather a lot of gin this evening, meaning you guys get to hear the unfiltered reactions while I'm too compromised to try and make myself sound smart about any of it.

Reading: Saint Augustine's Confessions (blowing my mind, this guy can really Theology) and Elyne Mitchell's The Silver Brumby (haven't read since I was like eight, but remembering everything literally beat for beat as I read, this is honestly such amazing children's literature and I can't wait to post about it in more detail when I'm done).

Watching: The Autopsy of Jane Doe (scared the everloving shit out of me), Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (didn't scare me even a tiny bit, I literally set up a VPN just so I could access this, everyone was saying it's so scary but it isn't), and Inside the World's Toughest Prisons (are you guys going to think I'm a complete fucking weirdo if I admit that this is a semi-regular comfort watch for me).

Listening: Iron Maiden. So much Iron Maiden. I've been trying to do deep dives into a bunch of different albums, but right now I'm so in love with A Matter of Life and Death that I don't want to move on to a different album, and it's rather hampering my progress.

I'm bouncing around the media landscape like a pinball at the moment. No idea why but I'm having a great time! Icon in honour of Bela Lugosi, who is forever and always a vampire in my heart if not in this specific film selection.

His Girl Friday (1940): This is a really fun screwball comedy about a slick, dodgy newspaper editor trying to win back his journalist ex-wife by manipulating her into covering one last story for him. Hildy is a brilliant reporter who excels at her aggressive, fast-paced job and is very much "one of the guys" among her colleagues - including her ex-husband Walter, hence the divorce. Walter's life revolves around the newspaper; he even cancelled their honeymoon so they could both rush to the site of a breaking story. Hildy pines for a more traditional feminine life in which she is romanced and protected, free to maintain a peaceful home and raise children while her husband works a steady, predictable job to provide for them. To that end, she has left Walter and become engaged to insurance salesman Bruce. The meat of the movie is a chaotic farce in which Walter deploys a wild barrage of sneaky, often criminal tactics to lure Hildy away from Bruce and reawaken her love for her career (and, by assumed extension, for him).

The gender dynamics in this were fascinating. Hildy's professional competence is about the only thing the film takes seriously; through all the wacky hijinks she is universally respected as a good reporter, with no trace of any "for a woman" caveat. (Nearly every other woman who appears onscreen is a secretary or telephone operator, and in brief interactions Hildy is as collegial with them as she is with her more "esteemed" fellow reporters, but they don't really feature much one way or another.) Of course Hildy's whole inner conflict revolves around the unchallenged premise that women, as a class, belong in the domestic sphere; but Hildy herself is the only character who seems to view the issue along gendered lines. For everyone else, it's about journalists vs non-journalists; people who can be satisfied with staid domestic life (of whom Hildy's classically masculine new fiancé is the prime example) versus people who crave the thrill and challenge of the fast-paced media world. The other career reporters all shake their heads and predict a swift end to the whole Hildy/Bruce business. No way will anyone as thoroughly like them as Hildy be able to stand the tedium of the American picket-fence dream for more than six months. I'm not saying it was some kind of feminist statement in the modern sense; I just enjoyed the nuance of how Hildy's femininity was handled. She was a great character.

The Devil Bat (1940): Bela Lugosi stars as a mad scientist with a vendetta against his employers, the owners of a cosmetics firm who have gotten rich off his designs while paying him only a tiny fraction of the profits. His genius plan for revenge is twofold: firstly he has engineered himself a giant bat large and strong enough to kill a man, and secondly he has trained the bat to become enraged at the scent of a specific chemical, which he has put into a specially formulated aftershave. Target applies aftershave to neck. Bat swoops in to tear out jugular. Bam! Greedy capitalist gets what he deserves.

This was every bit as ridiculous as I hoped it would be. It's billed as straightforward horror, but it's really more of a bat-themed, lightly murderous comedy. A lot of the action is driven by a pair of madcap journalists investigating the story, whose antics include things like using taxidermy to produce fake photos of the devil bat, doctoring out the wires that made it fly but forgetting to remove a label from the wing that says "Made in Japan". I was honestly cheering for the doctor, partly because his evil plan is so delightfully (ahem) batshit, and partly just because, you know. Bela Lugosi. Unlike the other two films in this post, this one is very much not a must-watch of 40s cinema, but it's certainly a why-the-hell-not, especially since its runtime is barely over an hour. I had fun.

The Maltese Falcon (1941): Hardboiled private detective Sam Spade gets hired under false pretences for a job that leads to the death of his business partner and ends up embroiling him in a violent, competitive criminal scheme to gain possession of an unthinkably valuable historical artefact known as the Maltese Falcon. This is, of course, one of the films noir and has all the elements you'd expect: a cynical, street-smart protagonist, a beautiful femme fatale for him to have dangerous chemistry with, a supporting cast of gangsters who are forever double-crossing each other.

I'm kind of drawing a blank on what to say about this one, but I honestly really loved it and it has whet my appetite for more film noir. The pacing is much slower than today's modern crime thrillers and that really worked for me; the latter tend to stress me out so much that I have to be in just the right mood to watch them. This was tense and exciting without forcing me to lie down afterwards. The whole chiaroscuro aesthetic was absolutely gorgeous. My favourite moment was when the femme fatale slaps a gangster, who goes to hit her back, only for Sam to leap in and bellow in the man's face, 'When you're slapped, you'll take it and you'll like it!' Iconic, honestly. Sam Spade is a true ally to femdom fans everywhere. More men should learn from his example.

Help, I started watching these notorious, near universally panned exploitation films because I was in a bad mood and wanted something to be angry about, except I accidentally ended up thinking they were KIND OF FUCKING GREAT, ACTUALLY, and now I am forced to declare myself a card-carrying member of the Dead Rapists Cinematic Universe fanclub. I swear with hand on heart that I'm not trying to be iconoclastic here. I just. I thought these were good films. I enjoyed them. I can see where the critical consensus is coming from and I don't think it's Wrong, per se, but I also really just completely disagree, which I guess means that I am either a bad feminist or (I'd prefer to think) just vibrating on a different frequency than the mainstream in this case.

Anyway, backing up a bit: I Spit On Your Grave is an extremely controversial rape-revenge horror movie franchise. It's about...well, I guess the genre label is pretty self-explanatory. A rape survivor exacts murderous revenge on her rapists. The original film was released in 1978, and widely banned or censored around the world for its graphic depictions of sexual violence. (A brutal gang rape scene takes up 30 full minutes of runtime.) A remake came out in 2010, followed by a couple of sequels; in 2019, the original director and lead actress returned with a sequel to the 1978 version. So far I have only watched the 2010 remake and its 2015 direct sequel. I plan to watch the 1978 as well but will probably skip the 2019 sequel (which apparently kills my first movie Final Girl blorbo) and am undecided on the 2013 middle movie of the remake trilogy (unrelated plot with all-new characters).

I'm going to put the entire rest of this post under a cut for obvious reasons. But tl;dr, if you can stomach the sexual violence, these movies absolutely have a place in the feminist conversation imo and are very impactful, successful horror in their own right.

( Potentially triggering discussion of potentially triggering films under the cut )

Has anyone else here watched any of these movies? Or want to use my "objectively" bad taste new obsession as a jumping-off point to gush about your own favourite exploitation media? Just tell me I'm not alone here in actually really, really liking something I'm by all accounts supposed to hate.