The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul '26: Ring (1998), directed by Hideo Nakata

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Video Killed The Radio Star", by The Buggles 

Funny how things just explode in popularity from seemingly out of nowhere. Like those couple months in the late 90’s when the swing revival topped the billboard charts, or the way Korean stuff is very popular these days. Or in the 00’s when an adaptation of a Japanese film became a film sensation.

It’s a bit strange, right?  I mean it feels like The Ring has been a consistent presence in pop culture for a while now; It’s been referenced in plenty of TV shows, one of the Scary Movies had a bunch of stuff about it, you might even give it credit for the short-lived wave of English adaptation of Asian horror like The Grudge and Pulse. Yet it’s not like it was a hugely successful franchise, in America at least there was just the one movie. A very different case in Japan, where it was and still is a successful franchise, with spinoffs and all the stuff you’d expect such a piece of pop culture to be. And it’s Japan where we’ll be taking our movie blog today.

In Ring, or Ringu if you’re a weeb, Nanako Matsushima stars as Reiko Asakawa, a journalist and single mother who is investigating the mysterious death of a teenage girl, which actually turns out to be the mysterious death of several teenagers. All sudden, all unexplained. The common thread? They’re all said to have watched a video tape and received a phone call exactly one week before their death. What could this mean? Is there really some sort of killer video? And there’s probably no issue with watching random unlabeled VHS tapes you find in cabins, right?

It is, unsurprisingly, very Japanese in its mindset. Spirits, urban legends, curse, all things which exist everywhere which seem to hold a special place in the heart of Japanese pop culture, from my own limited point of view. Especially curses which just torture and kill you for real reason, Japan loves that particular trope. It’s like creepypasta land over in Nippon, doesn’t matter if you are a living saint, if you do literally everything right all the time, if you do this one innocuous thing one time then you’re fucked for all eternity. Do not pass Go, do not collect 100 dollars, go straight to hell.

It is also, perhaps surprisingly, not all that scary? Of course with the amount of horror movies I’ve seen I’m desensitized to this kind of stuff, but there wasn’t anything that happens in the film that even slightly unnerved me. Really Ring is more of a mystery film with some horror elements to it, like Lady in White or other such films. Which is fine, Reiko uncovering the origin of the tape is fairly interesting, but if you look at the posters or see a spoof of a woman coming out of a TV and you're expecting some kind of hellride of terror then you’re going to be disappointed. Your average episode of X-Files is more bone chilling.

I dunno, it feels like I’m ripping on this film a bit too harshly. It wasn’t bad really, it was a very digestible scary movie with a simple premise, it’s no wonder why it was able to see the success it did. I just wasn’t able to keep my interest with it. Maybe one day if I ever rewatch it I’ll be able to revise my opinion, but for now it’s a ‘no’ from me.

STATUS: NOT RECOMMENDED

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul '26: Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984), directed by Joseph Zito

The Trailer

and

 The Appropriate Tune - "Love Is A Lie", by Lion

Originally today’s post was about the 1978 iteration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, starring Donald Sutherland. But when I went to watch it, it decided to disappear off of all the streaming services I use. Great. So instead of writing about something I was prepared for, let’s just talk about one of the Friday the 13th movies instead.

It’s Friday the 13th yet again, and with Jason Voorhees totally dying in the last film, young adults are free to start sucking and fucking once again at Crystal Lake. Young adults like Trisha Jarvis (Kimberly Beck) and Jimmy Mortimer (Crispin Glover). Except it turns out that Jason isn’t dead at all from being killed in the last movie. He’s totally alive, and he’s out for blood. I’m not talking donations to the American Red Cross either, this is the murdery kind of blood. And there’s plenty of it to go around.

Ironically enough it’s taken until the 4th film to reach what might be called the definitive Friday the 13th movie. You’ve got Jason as the killer, he’s got the hockey mask, there’s no silly 3-D gimmicks, if you asked someone who had never seen Friday the 13th to describe a Friday the 13th movie, this is round about what they would describe. Perhaps in presenting what they market as the ‘final chapter’, the idea was to strip the concept down to the bare bones. No characters you care about, no storylines, just some dude in a mask killing people for 90 minutes. Which it pulls off quite well.

For those gorehounds in the audience, Part IV might not be as violent as they might hope. There is certainly death in the film, blood, violence and all that, but it seems very reluctant to do so, with audiences only seeing a second or two of the killshot before cutting away. Studio interference perhaps, I believe the series had a lot of issues with censorship and whatnot, nut in any case it results in this contradictory movie that feels incredibly violent but is also squeamish about it.

It turns out, The Final Chapter would not turn out to be the last Friday the 13th movie. If it had been, it certainly would have been a better sendoff than most horror franchises get, and better than the purgatory than the franchise resides in these days. As it is, it’s an alright slasher movie with much more Corey Feldman than its peers, which might be the most terrifying thing of all. Pick it up for an alright movie night.

STATUS: RECOMMENDED

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul '26: Silent Hill (2006), directed by Christophe Gans

 

The Trailer

and

 The Appropriate Tune - "You're Not Here", by Akira Yamaoka

 

 

Used to be that the words ‘video game’ and ‘movie’, when combined, produced such a powerful stink that no human being could stand them. A terrible combo it was, the filmmaking side unwillingness or inability to meet the source material on its level mixing perfectly with the studios disinterest in anything besides money. Nowadays of course it’s different, you can sit down to your Sonic or Mario movie with your 55 dollar popcorn, play spot the reference and have a charming 7 out of 10 evening. But those 30 years since Bob Hoskins pretended to be a plumber? Those are the wilderness years, the years that spawned the loudest and also loudest of youtube movie critics the world has ever known. And now, in my hubris, and because I drew the poster, I must see for myself these horrors. I must take a visit to Silent Hill.

Based on the famous Playstation survival horror series, Silent Hill stars Radha Mitchell as Rose De Silva, a mom whose daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) has a unfortunate case of sleepwalking suicide attempts, all the which mentioning a town named Silent Hill. Now most parents whose children have seizures while screaming the name of a town they’ve never been to might try taking them to some kind of ‘hospital’ to be examined by ‘doctors’, but Rose clearly knows better than any experts, so she kidnaps her daughter and takes her to Silent Hill, which will surely cure her of what ails Then her daughter disappears. Then the town goes crazy. So now Rose must traverse this crazy town and find her lost and now in danger daughter, because clearly just leaving her daughter at home with her dad and doing her own investigation would have been way too hard.

I’ve not played a Silent Hill game, but I’ve seen enough secondhand material to have an idea of what the series is. They’re games principally about trauma and loss, where characters are trapped in this surreal, eldtritch place which twists and turns in order to torment them over things they’ve done, or don’t want to admit. Everything about the games, to the way NPCs interact with your character, to the places they go to in Silent Hill, to the design of the creatures they protagonists face, reinforce this detached, tortuous nightmare they are in. Silent Hill the movie…doesn’t do that really? Rose is basically an innocent bystander who stumbled into all this for good-hearted reasons, and while while the movie is technically about trauma, it’s much more personal and I guess humanized, rather than the ethereal tone of the games. Which is okay in a fashion, adaptations aren’t always 1:1 with the source material, but the logic should still be consistent. If Pyramid Head is in the movie, there should be a reason that he’s in the movie, just as there was a reason in the games. If the creatures in the movie look a certain way, there should be a reason they look that way, as there was in the games. Otherwise it’s just form without substance, references for the sake of references, without engaging with what Silent Hill is trying to say.

To give the film some credit, I think the film does quite well aesthetically. Christophe Gans and crew do a good job at capturing the ghostly void of the town, and the industrial decay of the other world. The soundtrack also feels suitably downtempo, and with series mainstay Akira Yamaoka contributing some of the music there are moments in the film that truly feel as one with the games. To take back some of that credit though, the CG looks like ass and they use a lot of it. I was already complaining about CG with Lake Placid so I don’t want to keep going back to that well, but the way they pour it on is just weird. Using CG to do the shift between the town and the other world? Sure, makes sense, I’d even say they do it well. But why are you using CG with Pyramid Head? Pyramid Head is a buff dude with metal on his head, I’m fairly certain just having a real buff dude there for the five minutes that PH is on screen would have been a lot better and cheaper than however much you had to pay to get a computer to do it. Same goes for the other monsters, which all look like they could be done naturally but are instead done with CG and look kind of shitty.

So if Silent Hill the movie doesn’t do anything that would satisfy those who like Silent Hill the game, is there a reason to watch? Not really. I mean there are a couple movies out there about towns you shouldn’t go to to out there to choose from, and movies that more competently evoke a surreal, dreadful atmosphere. The visuals are okay, the music is okay, the acting is okay, everything is just okay. That was enough for it to warrant a sequel I guess, studios will do as they will, but it arouses no passion in my soul. You’re probably better off just watching a longplay on youtube. Or, you know, playing the games yourself.

STATUS: NOT RECOMMENDED

 

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul '26: Diabolique (1955), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Goodbye Earl", by The Chicks 

 

 

We’re taking a quick detour out of the States for this one, to the country of France. Actually I’ve had my eyes on this one for a while, mainly because of that cool poster they use when it shows up on the streaming services. That black and white one with the angled lines? Yeah, that one kicks ass. Anyway let’s get to the movie.

Diabolique, or Les Diabolique, stars Vera Clouzot (Henri-Georges’ wife, and acclaimed actress in her own right) as Christina Delasalle, the principal of a Paris boarding school of the same name. Christina’s life sucks, to be brutally honest; Her passion for teaching kids and her bank account is attacked at every turn by her husband Michel (Paul Meurisse), a miserly, abusive bastard who would glady feed children rotten food if it meant one more franc in his bank account. Hell it’s so bad that even his mistress and employee Nicole (Simone Signoret) feels sorry for her, so she suggests a foolproof plan: kill him. But you can never just kill somebody in a movie and get away with it, and sure enough the whole caper soon threatens to collapse like a house of cards. What will be the fate of these devils, these…diaboliques?

If you’ve ever read this blog before, you might know that I’m a big fan of Rope, Alfred Hitchcock’s take on the infamous Leopold & Loeb murder case. In that way, you could think of Diabolique as a sort of counterpart to Rope, a film which deals with the aftermath of a murder rather than the murder itself. Although in Rope part of the enjoyment at seeing things unravel is because the protagonists are upper middle class shitheels, you want to see them get caught. In Diabolique, Clouzot spends a lot of time showing Michel is a total piece of shit, smacking his wife around, verbally abusing kids under his care, giving kids food poisoning with stank ass fish, there’s not much else you could do to make a guy who’s asking for a visit from the Grim Reaper. So the tension for the audience isn’t that legal but moral justice is served, that the bad element is removed and the rest can flourish. And maybe it’s just me, but I end up feeling a bit annoyed at Christina for consistently acting like the most guilty person who has ever lived. Like feel bad that you might end up killing these kids with food poisoning, not that you helped kill a guy who was practically wearing a ‘I’m asking for it’ T-shirt.

So I’m a bit annoyed, but on a technical level I think the whole unraveling is done pretty well, both the murder and Christina’s mental condition. Even has a bit of a Columbo vibe at one point with a detective character who always seems to know just the right thing to say, and I love me some Columbo. You want some of that fresh, organic noir, then throw this on the tube.

 

STATUS: RECOMMENDED 

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul '26: What Lies Beneath (2000), directed by Robert Zemeckis

 

The Trailer

and 

The Appropriate Tune - "What Lies Beneath", by Breaking Benjamin 

 

 

Here’s another one that I picked almost entirely because I wanted to draw the poster, but in my defense this one appeared to be much more of a sure thing. I mean you’ve got Harrison Ford, who went from an incredibly successful career in the 80 with movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars to an incredibly successful career in the 90s with movies like The Fugitive and Air Force One, and Michelle Pfeiffer, who had been making waves with Batman Returns and The Age of Innocence. Plus Robert Zemeckis in the director’s chair, who would release Cast Away later that same year and then prove the end of his prime by putting out Polar Express a couple years later. That’s an impressive pedigree, you have to admit.

What Lies Beneath stars Michelle Pfeiffer stars Claire Spencer, a former concert musician living in Vermont with her husband Dr. Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford). Feeling a bit out of sorts with her daughter having recently left for college, Claire is looking for ways to spend all her free time. However, something finds her instead: the wife of her neighbor mysteriously goes missing, doors opened and close without anything acting on them, and other strange happenings. Is it just a series of coincidences, or is there something more bizarre, more supernatural at play? Well the movie is over two hours long, so you hope something will happen.

So yeah, that’s a fun little twist to the story. You think at first that the movie is going in a Rear Window kind of direction, it even has that kind of string-heavy orchestral score that you saw in lot of those thriller remakes in the 90’s like Cape Fear, but then it gives you the ol’ swerve and puts you in a different, equally thrilling lane. Which I appreciate, because if you’re doing the whole ‘someone knows something but no one believes them’ trope, it’s a lot more tolerable to not believe in ghosts rather than domestic violence.

It is a slow burn movie, to be sure. Seems like Claire really takes her time being freaked out and thinking she’s crazy before settling down and trying to be proactive about things, which is realistic, but there’s a lot of time treading water waiting for the plot to movie forward. Plus, while Claire is freaking out, I don’t know if there’s really anything for a thrill-loving audience to chew on up until the last 15 minutes or so. Some jump scares, but nothing that would get the dander up of someone who had seen a Friday the 13th movie, or even previous movies on this list like Lake Placid. Just enough juice to get those folks on the Oscar committee to jump, if those people actually watched movies.

What Lies Beneath is an okay thriller. Pfeiffer and Ford put in a good performance, and Zemeckis tells a competent story. If you’re a fan of these kinds of women in distress movies, there’s no reason not to give this one a try if you’re curious. Double feature it with Cape Fear or something like that, you’ve got yourself an evening.

STATUS: RECOMMENDED

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul '26: Fade To Black (1980), directed by Vernon Zimmerman

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Fade To Black", by Metallica 

 

 

        Fun fact, I had never actually heard of this movie until a few days before writing this review. I’ve taken up drawing as a hobby, and I was looking around the free streaming services for movie posters to draw, and I stumbled upon this movie here. The poster looked cool, so I decided to watch the movie as well. No reviews, no rotten tomato score, just based purely on the poster, just as god intended.

Fade To Black stars Dennis Christopher as Eric Binford, the worst, most degenerate kind of person you could imagine: A movie fan. Eric leads a life of quiet desperation in Hollywood, harangued by his invalid aunt, bullied at his deadend job at an advertising firm, until one day he happens to meet aspiring model Marilyn O’Connor (Linda Kerridge), who is the spitting image of Eric’s favorite actress, Marilyn Munroe. Despite the odds Eric actually manages to score a date on that first meeting, but little does he or anyone else know that this will be the catalyst for Eric’s spiral into insanity and murder. Also Tim Thomerson is in this movie, which is cool.

You remember that movie High Fidelity? It was pretty popular among some of my friends at the college radio station, because it took place in a record shop and the characters namedropped bands that a specific breed of music nerds were familiar with, the exact kind of nerds my friends were at the time. That’s kind of what Fade To Black is, but if instead of John Cusack complaining about his love life he was a cosplaying serial killer instead. Just about every scene in this film features some kind of reference to a movie; there’ll be posters on the walls, characters will drop names or say lines, sometimes they’ll just insert clips of other films into this one. Even Scream seems tame in its cinematic obsessions when compared to Fade To Black. I mean Matthew Lillard didn’t pretend he was James Cagney for half of his movie.

That’s the crux of what would make this film a cult classic, I suppose. If you are a movie buff, particularly older films, then there’s an extra level of enjoyment to get out of this compared to non-buff viewers. If there’s a scene where dresses up as Dracula and quotes Bela Lugosi (despite the clips used being the Christopher Lee Dracula), does it mean more if you’ve seen the ‘31 film? When Eric falls into delusions of being James Cagney, does it matter if the audience knows who James Cagney was or the type of characters he plays? Is there even a movie without these references? Is the only reason this movie stands out in a sea of slashers is this association with film history? I don’t know, maybe. Kinda seems like it.

I got most of the references, so I guess I’ll recommend it. It takes a while to shift into gear though, and Tim Thomerson’s character feels like both a jab at social workers and an afterthought with how irrelevant his role is, but otherwise it’s an okay quirky little horror movie. And no naked breasts either, if you’ve got issues with female nudity. You will have to see Dennis Christopher jack off instead, but hey, you can’t have everything.

 

STATUS: RECOMMENDED 

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul '26: Lake Placid (1999), directed by Steve Miner

 

The Trailer

and

 The Appropriate Tune - "Crocodile Rock", by Elton John

 

 

    Humanity has been menaced by a lot of big things across cinematic history. Giant ants, giant grasshoppers, giant rabbits, giant women (though some might find that less menacing than others and so on and on. Occasionally the giant thing is even something that was already pretty dangerous to begin with. Like remember The Meg? The one where Jason Statham plays Jason Statham fighting a giant shark? Or Meg 2: The Trench, where Jason Statham plays Jason Statham fighting a giant shark, again? You might as well show Jaws to your five year old, no one is gonna be scared of some normal ass fish anymore.

Enter Lake Placid. Bridget Fonda stars as Kelly Scott, a New York paleontologist who, after an awkward situation with her boss/ex, is sent to Maine to study a tooth found in the half of a diver dragged out of a very placid lake. The result? Crocodile, but who ever heard of a crocodile setting up camp in Maine. So Kelly joins up with Fish & Game Warden Jack Wells (Bill Pullman), local sheriff Hank (Brendan Gleeson) and eccentric mythology professor Hector (Oliver Platt) to locate and take down this beast. As long as it’s a regular sized crocodile and not some kind of huge super croc, I think everything will turn out all right.

If I were some kind of weirdo who grouped movies into lists and I needed entries for ‘popcorn horror movies’, then you’d definitely see Lake Placid in a prominent. Not in the derogatory way that the term often implies, but in the way that it is a very accessible horror film. There’s gore but not excessively so, there’s suspenseful moments and more action-packed thrills, there’s some explosions, it’s funny, just a little bit of everything that builds up to a solid picture. The kind of movie that you’d pick during movie night when no one can agree on something and everyone ends up having a great time. Well, the kids might be a bit traumatized seeing a dude’s head get bitten off, but hey, they might be better off in the long run.

And yeah, Lake Placid is pretty funny. Not in the gross out humor way, like in that plague of Scary Movies that infested the 00’s, it’s just well-written with good actors bouncing off each other. It’s also hard not to love seeing the late Betty White calling a cop ‘Officer Fuckmeat’, just an atomic blast of a line that comes out of the blue. And importantly, these bits of levity don’t undercut the tension that the film has built. When these people are in danger they behave like it, they just have the ability to crack jokes about it if they survive.

If there’s any nits that really need picking, I suppose it’s the CGI. Lake Placid has scenes using a crocodile model (done by Stan Winston’s studio), and ones that use a CG croc. The crocodile model looks fantastic, the CGI looks like CGI. Not bad CGI really, there are certainly worse examples of it in 1999, but it’s there. That being said, the big danger in CG is overexposing your monster, allowing the audience to recognize its artificiality and breaking the suspension of disbelief, and I don’t think Placid reaches that point. I don’t know if Miner is following the Jaws mindset, but I think the balance he ended up with works out.

As I said, if you’re looking for a fun evening, maybe you’ve got a few friends and a few beers, then you’re going to be okay with throwing Lake Placid on the screen. It’s got that Jurassic Park everyman quality. If you’re looking for sterner stuff, then this probably won’t satisfy. And avoid the sequels. I haven’t seen any of them, but it’s a horror movie franchise man, if you’re trying to find a good sequel you might as well test your luck panning for gold instead.

 

STATUS: RECOMMENDED