A return from my blogging break... with more movies!

The Substance

This movie was amazing and disgusting like all good body horror should be.

A horror movie where the main villain - the root of all the evil in the movie - is our societies insane beauty standards. A bold, feminist piece of fuck you led by the always excellent Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. Featuring some truly shocking transformations for them and tons of gross out gore. I cannot recommend this movie enough. Make sure you watch it with a nice loud sound system, the foley work is next level good.

V/H/S Beyond

The 7th entry into the V/H/S series and Shudder's fourth take on it. This time the loose theme is "Cosmic Horror".

Over all it's really good. Mike Flanagan written and Kate Siegel directed "Stowaway" is maybe a bit slow to start, but a super effective bit of cosmic horror. Justin and Christian Long's Fur Babies is probably the low point of this entry but also has an extremely charismatic Kathy Bates in Misery lead - Libby Letlow. I'd love to see more of her in a horror or thriller setting. "Stork" is the most obvious entry to use as a jumping off point for a new standalone movie like Siren and Kids vs Aliens were. "Dream Girl" is the first Indian entry in this series, complete with awesome Bollywood-esque song and dance which I loved. Rounding it out is another Radio Silence feature called "Live and Let Dive" which is kind of a call back (in my opinion) to the GoPro zombie apocalypse in V/H/S 2. All in all it was a very solid set and probably my third favorite of these movies after the first two.

The Pope's Exorcist

I liked it, but it's not amazing. Skip if you don't want spoilers.

High points: Russell Crowe as an Italian priest, complete with better than you'd think but still bad accent. Decent throw back to The Exorcist.

Low points: They spend awhile world building with a conspiracy to cover up that the Inquisition was actually the work of the Devil from an exorcist being possessed. It's fine but... eh. Boring.

Awesome: The film is relatively restrained till the last 10 minutes or so, at which point a naked woman (she's a demonic apparition) covered in blood shows up, attempts to strangle our main character's plucky Spanish priest sidekick, who then slaps a crucifix on her head, and after a Transformers like powering up noise explodes her into a shower of gore. awesome. I was so taken aback by the noise I immediately rewound it to make sure I did, in fact, hear that. Yup. Then it's used to send another apparition down into a pit of lava, complete with second powering up noise. AWESOME. I would describe this as going full "Fast and the Furious" (i.e. rule of cool is all that matters.) and I'm here for it.

We may be getting more sequels and I hope they double down on the absurdity of the last 10 minutes of this one.

Troy

Yeah I know this is the odd one out, it's been a weird month okay?

I've never seen this. I get why it got grief when it came out, but also... I liked it. It was a fun sword and sandals movie with dumb melodrama, some scene chewing, and some halfway decent fight scenes. You could do worse. I won't be watching it again but I enjoyed my time with it. Also Brad Pitt is extremely moody and petulant in this and it made me laugh.

End

I'll be back soon with some more blogs folks, I just finished up playing 20 games for Steam's Next Fest and will probably post about that next.