Halloween in March, Kershner Exploration

I don't work, so I have a lot of dead time to fill and I like to set up little watch projects to work through over the course of the year to feel a little accomplished when I waste time with a film or show. The first couple months of this year were absolutely crazy, I was out of my apartment nearly as much as I was in it, so I didn't get much movie watching done let alone plan out projects. But I think I have some that are finalizing and that I will utilize this simple little blog to document.

Last year my two biggest projects were rewatching the entirety of the two classic slasher franchises, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. This year, I'm gonna do another classic slasher franchise with Halloween, watching all the Michael Myers films (sorry Halloween 3, though I do love you) through Resurrection in the early 00s. If I get through this quick, I might then add the Rob Zombie Duo and DGG trilogy. I will write my feelings on each of these films here as I watch them. I want to get a LITTLE bit more modern this year, away from all the 80s, so since I happen to own 7 of them on a used DVD collection I picked up for next to nothing, I thought I might do the Saw franchise cause I think I've only ever really seen the first three or so though I'm generally familiar with the plots of others (thanks Wikipedia).

A special project I got cooked out was motivated purely by curiosity. Irvin Kershner directed one of the consensus greatest films of all time in The Empire Strikes Back, and delivered entries in the RoboCop and Bond (unofficial) canons, but not a lot of people talk about the many films he directed in a long journeyman Hollywood career. So I want to, entirely for the first time, check out some of his non-franchise directing work and see what gems there are to be found!

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The Green Mile (1999) - Syrupy Collection of Great Character Actors

The Green Mile was a film that was in a regular rotation for my mom and stepdad when I was growing up, so I saw it many times in the late 90s and early 00s. My love of Stephen King mostly comes from my dad, who owned the first King book I ever read myself in late elementary school (Skeleton Crew) and numerous others I looked at on his shelf all the time and showed me miniseries like IT and The Stand. However, my mom contributed a little bit too with the likes of Creepshow and some of his other 80s adaptations and of course The Green Mile. So I figured why not revisit it since I own it? My biggest problem with The Green Mile is one I share with its spiritual sibling in The Shawshank Redemption which is that it is just very sentimental and sometimes even downright corny. Movies seemingly designed to make middle aged dads get in touch with their emotions by layering that syrup on thick. There’s a place for that and I understand why people really enjoy it, but it just simply isn’t ...

Cat's Eye (1985) - Kitty Across America

There are two important facts about me, two important obsessions that haunt me: a love of anthology series and a love of Stephen King adaptations of all shapes and colors. As sometimes I imply on here, I’m a regular collector of physical media from VHS and Laserdiscs to DVDs and Blurays, and a big bulk of my DVD and Bluray collection are horror or other genre anthology TV series and you better bet I own physical copies of a number of anthology films too including both closely associated with King (as part of the same $20 box set): Creepshow and Cat’s Eye. One day I will formally write a review of Creepshow but I’ll spoil my feelings about it by saying it is absolutely one of my favorite horror films of all time to the point that it is almost certainly in my top 20, maybe top 10 favorite films of all time. So the first time I watched Cat’s Eye, which I believe was maybe pre-Covid, I had one of my favorite films ever made to compare it to and it sagged in my estimation as a result...

M (1931) - Even Better than Peter Lorre's Haunting Eyes

Anybody who knows me knows my biggest vice in life is true crime as guilty and gross as I feel about it quite frequently, and unfortunately as a true crime junkie you end up hearing about a lot of cases involving abused or dead children. So of course I joked to my main group chat of friends when I decided to watch M the other day that I needed to take a break from all the stories about dead kids I’d watched that day so I was going to put on a movie about a serial child murderer. To be honest this might be kind of a short review compared to some I’ve written, because I don’t have that much negative to say. Some of the performances seem a little “big”, but so soon after the silent era that is to be expected and that is just kinda of body language analysis since I do not speak German at all. Also it does something that a lot of films of its era does, which I’m guessing had something to do with cameras speeds at that time, where instead of showcasing people naturally running it inst...

Blue Ridge Ben

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