Crystal Lake (2026, 8 episodes, Peacock). Three stars

Rev., Oct 17 2026

Note: References to movies in the series simply as One, Two, Three, Four, etc.

As Friday the 13^th (1980) turned into a franchise which went into double figures, my guess is that each time out makeshift decisions were made to fill in the blanks, and expand the turf, and they were satisfied with that. As I listed in my review of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I thought many of the sequels were bad, but, somehow, the badness of the franchise captured the energy of the posthumous life of Jason Vorhees. Also, there are the novelizations, which I have not (yet) read, and the art there is to keep to the script but elaborate with enough wobbles to incite a circling back interest in the original script with a bit more insight. It is a nifty art, in the subbasement of popular culture. The surprising thing about this series right out of the gate is that the people who put this series together are serious, they think Friday the 13^th is iconic, and want to honor it with further interest in for example the pain of Pamela Vorhees, Jason’s mother. Again, in the movie, it always shocked me that What’s My Line contestant Betsy Palmer ended up as her, it was incongruous, unconvincing. Nor does the way that her and dead Jason kind of fuse into a psycho killer, dead Jason talking in her head, dead mother revivifying his head, convince. Anyways, this series succeeds because of its seriousness, and its remembering the rule of sequels and novelizations, the purpose of elaboration is to intensify and amplify the original horror, not to dissipate it in rationalization (as I fear Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, this season, has done). So, right away episode one gets to the original sin that touched off this torrent of vengeful blood against irresponsible teenagers. Jason is playing at camp, the original date of occurrence has been generationally updated to the 1970s, not 1958, the other kids like or dislike him, based on the deformity of his looks, on a kid by kid basis. The make out couple of teens who were making love when Jason drowned, in I think Four, in the movies, are also up to it, leaving the girls to watch Jason. But when Jason goes out into the lake to fetch a ball he drowns. A preteen, Grace, witnesses the couple having sex in the barn, at the terrible moment, which is to turn out to be an important plot point. When Jason drowns his mother, Pamela, jumps in to save him, so things are more direct, and I should say at this point her willingness to jump fully into her role as Pamela Vorhees means that the entire series rests on the confident shoulders of Linda Cardinelli, who is fabulous throughout. The cop Levon with an interest in her tries to pull her out of her grief by taking her to a picnic but the parents disregard of recent tragedy triggers her. She has a hard time controlling her anger, part of just, part of it mysterious. We hear about the mystery when two thugs come to kill her, and here Pamela shows her murderous instinct for the first time, taking them down. When she checks their wallet we see that they were sent by Subsun, and that she is really Pamela Wittering, facts which will be left hanging til episode seven. She takes a purification pink bath, which is provocative, and leaving the body to the bears has a monster to monter smelling encounter with the bear, like in Alien. The movie then rather amusingly recreates the ending of One, where Levon stops at lakeside to call out to Pam who is in the boat where the final girl in One was, and when she looks down to imagine to see her drowned boy, he lunges up at her, she wakes up. It is an interesting rethink, especially as that event created so much question about what exactly Jason is?

In Episode two Pamela agrees to go bowling with the friendly we’re just friends Levon, and then a pal in town recommends that she and Pam go to an ESTlike 70s cult seminar on the Janov model in which you are to release your angst by a primal scream of sorts. We obviously, nor do we, know what kind of volcano of primal screaming he is dealing with in Pam, they have a dalliance in bed which she then breaks off. When she returns to whack him, she is spared exposure for her murderous frage against his carelessness when another angry customer comes up and takes half his face out with a knife, I think. I suppose the purpose of this not very horrific segway is to explore Pamela’s anger, its depth beyond any instant therapy fix. Somewhere along the line the bodies that Pam hid in the woods were fed on by bears, and are found by the police chief, Levon. His hack assistant thinks it is Crazy Ralph who has done it, as he lives out in the woods, warning all that there is something in the woods. The reclamation of Crazy Ralph as a somewhat sympathetic Vietnam war veteran who is trying to live in the world after the war is surprising, and a bit rationalized, but he retains his dignity, whereas of course in the movies One and Two Crazy Ralph was a proverbial town crier nut.

Episode three is fun because they went back to the town in New Jersey where One was filmed, and this time when the old truck driver who gave the first kill in One a lift, still sitting at the bar, she says nope, I will walk. Ha. Levon’s sister is a reporter who begins to sniff around trying to find out the identity of the two men killed, whose bear-mangled bodies were found in the woods. This story line is entirely extraneous to the movies but tries to weave a red streak back to a rewrite of the origin of the what is Jason? question. A fun event is the arrival of the hippies, as the camp at Crystal Lake is going to open. So, really, storywise, we are in the prequel time before, in fact, the first Jason murders. The music, like Herman’s Hermit, tries to remind us of the slightly dorkyness of kids then, but these hippies are true Manson cult evil hippie stereotypes and for some reason it is just a lot of fun that the movie comes down so hard on them (in Three the older potheads are just helpless roadkill). Pam is so upset at Grace’s mother, moving forward I think to episode four, that she puts her face in the boiling water in the kitchen at her restaurant, and burns the place down. But I think Pam’s fantasy to adopt the abused Grace is contested when Grace becomes fascinated with Harmony, the beautiful blonde Joanie Mitchell type hippie Manson girl who even has powers to speak to the dead.  She is played by Manon Gage, in a terrific and real in-character performance. When she does a rcard eading for Grace, and freaks her out, by seeming to go to true paranormal, making contact, Pam is outraged. Back at Crazy Ralph’s it seems like the “something in the woods” has taken a girl and hung it at his place so the deputy arrests him. Pam at this point, then, is chalking up about one murder per episode. Though Cardinelli is herself passionate on the surface, there IS some deeper reason why she takes so quickly to the axe, no? In the implication of psycho or ghost of Jason around her, her characterization retains a slightly supernatural feeling that keeps things safely inside the bounds of horror. In five, Pam’s interest in Grace becomes more central, as if to compensate for her loss of Jason. She also talks caring words to another loner at the camp, where, by the way, she has been hired to be the cook (so we are still in the prehistory of One, back in 1958-as-1974ish here). But Grace is being seduced by Harmony, who, really, again, is terrific as the careless contradictory hippie girl of the era. When she gives Grace pot, maybe not realizing she is 13, that is a problem. But then Grace tells on the boyfriend of the cute camp counselor that he slept with Harmony (Grace is very upset when they close the door against her). The girlfriend comes to confront Harmony and she is like, I used to be Mary Ann Sacrimoni, a Catholic girl, don’t sell me your Christian ethics. She also gives a little speech on sex positivity, if girls sleep around they’re sluts right, if boys, it’s just boys being boys. The reason for all this is to entangle Pam in the back and forth so that finally the girlfriend confesses to Pam, who listens in shock, that they were the ones who were not looking after Jason when he drowned, and while Pam hugs her in compassion for her guilt, the look on Cardinelli’s face is pure rage. The evil hippies go one step further when they decide to do a sort of cult group thing taking of Manson’s drug of choice, orange sunshine, Like Manson used to do, he walks for tongue to tongue administering the holy eucharist of the hippie era. The boss reminds them that what you see is the drug not you, but enjoy. Grace, of course, is so upset at seeing Harmony go into the bus to fuck the boyfriend again, she sneaks some for herself. A funny scene is that Harmony brings the cheating boyfriend in for round two but he is put off by her outofitness, then bolts when a sunshined guy comes in for a threesome, 70s homophobic panic played for laughs! Because no American production post hippies can be considered cool without giving us a show of the wonders, Grace sees the sky spiral close up above the treetops, not a bad effect. But it is in that state that she also sees the “something in the woods.” Wait, so now a sort of time spin. It is only NOW, so everything else was before it, including the original sin? it is only now that the happy teen couple make up singing Tom Dooley and go to the attic to fool around. And so the first kill sequence in One is replayed in a frame-by-frame reproduction, both of them are killed. EXCEPT, it is Grace, on orange sunshine, that does the killing, Pam discovering her. But then when she figures out those evil hippies dosed Grace she wants to kill them all, which she does her best to do. She stabs a girl on top approaching orgasm in the back, I can feel you penetrating my soul, says the song,  ride the rainbow, says the man, kill me now, says her exposed ass to Pam. So Pam gets her from behind, her blood to then baptize the guy, both dead. This feels like a murder out of Four. A few others go, if I recall. At this point Levon has received a file that identifies who Pam really is, care of his sister’s investigations. I think moving on to the next episode she meets on the boardwalk with the scientist whose project we begin to guess distorted Jason, but he is killed by thugs, then she is accosted by Hamish Linklater, who is so menacing and nice, turns out it is his project that failed, they cannot let her go. All of this, whatever it is, really does give off an aura of life and death, they want to kill to shut up whatever secret they are hiding. It is a bit ironic that I did not think Mike Flanagan’s Carrie reviewable because this series lifted some of his ideas from him, including the complete break to a total break backstory, and here this is the wtf that is episode seven. Here we find out that Pam was a singer on variety show whose career was ruined when she began to bleed from below Carrielilke on stage. Miscarriage, but one that survived, so that is odd. Hamish Linklater marrries her, he works for a scientific company in a frighteningly brutal 70s style corporate headquarters in Houston, and he sweeps her into his life. They have the baby, but the baby is malformed. Again, in the press surrounding the original One, I think Tom Scavini said he conceptualized Jason as a “mongoloid,” the unhappy word used in the pre1970 era to describe a child with Down Syndrome. So, I assumed that is Jason’s original issue, only made worse by living on as a homunculus of vengeance at the bottom of the lake. Maybe so, maybe not. So, in any case by tetrologizing Jason’s birth defects to the all but acromegalic or “waterhead” dimension, it is kind of a dodge. Then, it seems they take Jason home, to a picture perfect 70s ranch style pastel palace, but he keeps having trouble so Linklater brings him back in. He disappears from Pam’s life, she becomes angry. On the night of a big gala in which Linklater is the guest of honor, and then explains their latest experiments are designed to develop humans genetically so that like cockroaches they can withstand the shock of an atom bomb, we  realize with true sci fi body horror horror that that is what they are doing to Jason. Dad has given up on his freak son but will make use of it in any case as a guinea pig for beyond experimental science. Pam only discovers Jason’s pain when his sunny children’s drawings turn dark, with evil doctors, being hooked up to a machine, being trapped in a machine, the writers even try to convince us that mad Jason could draw the HQ building to tell mommy where he is being tortured. In a terrific sequence, though why in a Friday the 13^th series? maybe to give to it the jolt to otherness that Halloween 3, appalling fans at the time, did for the Halloween series? In any case she goes to get Jason, finds him amidst all the formaldehyde jars of two headed babies, kills the doctor in charge, steals him, and drives out of that life. So, that is the backstory, a sci fi Broodlike Cronenberg horror movie about an evil birth monster. And that is always why Linklater is behind the men who he sent to kill Pam, in episode one. Got it? So, final episode. Pam finally reveals to Levon what is going on. They are in trouble, men are coming. When they do, they have a Mexican standoff in the sherriff’s office, until the hack deputy sparks a shootout that they surprisingly win. This also, all of it, is tense, life and death tv, though not exactly horror. Finally, Pam sets out into the woods to find the “something in the woods” which she now knows is her Jason alive. Grace had told her that she and Jason as kids had a special house in the woods, the house in Two in the movies, where Jason kept the cult of his mother’s head, and here she finds him, the tall bag-headed man in Two, but so does Linklater. He then gives Jason a face-to-face pep talk about how much he and they can do, contributing to science. Jason uses his thumbs to put his eyes out, like the assassins in Halloween 3. Jason and Mommy then reconnect, but I guess Jason gives her the vibe that they can communicate but he must be on his own, he goes off to be, then, the ‘something in the woods’ she laughs the woods are ours now. The series ends then with the campfire story telling moment at the beginning of Two, told with the sincerity of legend, spooking all the new counselors, only, this time, this is not a joke, this is really happening. Overall, then, a surprise, especially after having watched Jane Schoenbrun’s send up of the Friday the 13^th movies as every kind of phobic except the number one phobia, fear of death, a reworking that entirely respects the legend of Jason Vorhees, and that even tries to make sense of it, by delving into the events that lead up to the events that sparked it all, in a convincing way, all of it held together by the gripping, firmly gripped, entirely believable performance of Linda Cardinelli.

Circle of Fear: Death’s Head, (1973), two and a half stars.

Rev. Oct 4, 2026

A funny thing about aging. In the 1960s into the 70s, if you were a young thing in 1960, by 1973, if you were 43, it was kind of like you were an old woman. You undertake dating and mating rituals that seemed decidedly middle aged, and seem corny now. Anyways, that thought again occurred to me watching janet Leight, now 43, try to entice sexual attraction from Rory Calhoun. Currently, he is in the friend zone, but she is bored with her husband and needs sex, and needs it bad. When they go to a state fair, Leigh sees a booth selling potions, and thinking she can get Calhoun to look at her again, he buys a magic potion. But that night, softening on her husband, she has a second thought, maybe if I just spice things up with her lepidopterist husband so that he will look at her again, that would be enough. Unfortunately, in this story written and directed by William Castle, is has poion in it, and he dies/. She then begins to panic, because she thinks she is seeing faces in the moths her dead husband pinned to the wall. She returns to the seller gypsy, who is not remotely a gypsy, who explains that the spirit of the dead roams until it finds a place to rest in, another person, and body. It is only by possessing the other that it can stop flying about and settle down. With this in mind, and hoping still that Calhoun will be interested in him, she calls him for help, he explains that he really doesn’t feel that way about you, but I will come help as a friend. She still gets all dolled up in a see through nightie and invites him over. Janet Leigh, this is Janet Leigh, at 43, tries her best, but no go. So she still has a roving spirit in her house. Next morning she wakes up to hearing a spinning and a fluttering. Now only in her night gown the bats away at a sort of tinnital presence with a flickering visual element, which is chasing her around the house. Seeing Leigh bat her arms up and down out of that gown is worth the cost of admission. She is shocked to see t hat the moth spirit form of her husband has destroyed his study. Now sweating heavily, in a black out scene, with Leigh’s neck muscles doing some impressive clenching, she calls Calhoun for help again, he is like, I thought I told you, but still he comes. Finally, Leigh just about sweats through and out of her gown as the spinning tinnital blur makes a full on wallpressing attack on. He shows up, the house is a disaster zone, but no one is where. The show ends with a close up of the deaths head moth on the wall, and there is Leigh inside it, at rest again. A very odd story by Castle, but nicely told, if at tv production value level, and with Leigh in a night gown, it has a classic air about it, even exploring what the heck is the visual equivalent of a tinnital attack.

The Holy Beast, (1974, Japan), three stars.

Rev,. Oct 4 2026

A pretty young Japanese women hits the town in Tokyo, to meet up with a man to have tea, and then they go home have sex. The sex scene extends beyond the norm by following her leg up through her hip to her face to see her exhale in orgasm to then turn away, drop her head upside down and pshaw, why? because this will be the last sex, she thinks, in her life, as tomorrow she is to report to her life in the catholic convent in town. At least that is her impression. But turns out, she is wrong. The problem with convents and their rules of repression as to matters of sex is that, and this same theme played out in Euro nunsploitation, these are young women with urges and it is hard to drive them down. Even worse, there is an occasional eruption of eros hidden at the bottom of the order and convent too. When she is invested as a nun she stand nude in front of the altar for a veil to be lowered over her as if to symbolically remove her from the realm of the body, to live in a heaven on earth, it is startling reversal of the usual prostration of Euro nun horror. She even gets to kiss the crucifix, while nude, so that is pretty darn erotic. That night, she is woken from sleep in the dormitory. It seems that the girl next bed to her got all turned on by the ceremony and is having thoughts of masturbation, so to remain good she steps to the end of the hall to strip to her waist and beat herself with a whip. The newbie is confused, and all turned on by a very sexy sweaty woman whipping herself, but the girl in the next bed over explains, that is how we do it, if we get the urge, we whip it down. Next morning group bath is no less sexy, though the girls must wash through a wet t shirt robe, still. To see all these virtually exposed women washing in their crevices, this is quite the convent. One nun disappears because it turns out she had a baby from her lover, and the head nun, of course, by this point an old woman, who were thought to have transcended sex, explains to the women that if you don’t have sex, no baby will come out. But when another nun gets in an argument, how does this randy nunnery solve. They have the two stand tit to tit topless before each other and whip each other to the victory. This draws blood, and I have to say the close up shots of breasts, and hips being whipped, it is a strange sort of beautiful opera. But now the lust is up, the novitiate hears a noise in the greenhouse and comes up a nun giving cunninglingus to another, another nun later graphically shows her how that is done, with her tongue and fingers. Novitiate is sweating up a storm, voyeuring, Now the older nuns realize they have a kind of epidemic of eros sweeping through these young bodies so do a full search of the dormitory and are shocked, shocked, to see that one nun has a stash of magazine porn with a lot of dirty pictures, nicely shown, mother superior, though turning every page, cries out, how awful, they look like beasts, and then has the brilliant idea that the criminal might be hiding another porn pamphlet under her garments so almost comically when she strips a nun to find her wearing modern flowered panties, she almost faints at the evil of it all. How shameful, they cry, take those off, she obliges, her behind to them all. As per the conventions of the genre, a bishop or male leader gets involved to patrol the morality of the nuns, but of course he fucks one in his office, getting her pregnant. One nun jumps from the wall, where she had a bag with civilian night clothes in it to dress to run to a disco in town to dance and fuck. When two nuns break into the convent, one nun is surprised when one of them gets on top of her and enters her with a how did that get there penis. The escape nun is stripped to her waist and wrapped in barbwire for all the pull on her doing her maximum scratching. Her bloody writhing is slowed down by a camera that seeks to catch every drop of sweat and scratch up of blood, it is a highly baroquely erotic sequence. Things get dramatic and worse when we hear the novitiate’s history, born after Hiroshima, orphaned, etc, she was a bastard from a union between priest and nun, I think. At one point mother superior tries to push her over a cliff into the ocean below. Back at the convent she is charged with being a witch, and they use a method which they proudly declares goes back to the seventeenth century and sounds like an inversion of swimming a witch in Europe. They sit her in a chair, and ply her with too much water. Below her spread naked legs they have set a strange tray with a crucifix pushed into a field of clay, If by this feeding her water, she pees into the box, that means that she is a witch. All the nuns encircle her, the camera spins their rage, then we look down into the box and wait for the inevitable urination, voila, she is a witch. They then try to hang her but I think she goes out the window, to be speared by a gate spike on her. Meanwhile, in the grand finale, the hypocrite bishop is visited by the quite scary blue skinned ghost of the one he caused to kill herself, and I think he is killed. We are lead to believe that the Novitiate finally has had enough, and bolts, leaving the order. It is quite the spectacle in Japanese erotic masochism, served up out of the cover of nuns’ habits.

The Possessed (1977), Two and a half stars,

Rev., Oct 4, 2026

Starring james farentino as a defrocked priest, and Joan hackett, who I liked a lot, as the master of the girls school, this one is nice if rather aloof entry into the evil girls schools double subgenre of the era. I don’t exactly know why Farentino drops out of the order, they try to show why at the beginning, but he is only going to be dropping by because he has become a kind of demon hunter, and there is something wrong at the school. The girls area nice group, with Ann Dusenberryas the super cute one, and PJ Soles of Halloween fame, next year, the sassier one. But something odd is happening at the school. When encircled by her expressionistic drawings Dusenberry starts to strip in her room the curtain catch fire, and it is quite the inferno. The girls in their coats, chased out into the night, are confused, but have already developed a sense that something is wrong. The police and fire department come up with no evidence of wrong doing. Next up one girl in a rehearsal for graduation starts to speak when her robes catch fire. A teacher gets her hands burned when the typewriter she is using bursts into flames, She is the one who contacts Farentino, who is nonplussed for a time. Now and then an I think TV movie like this has a nice idea, and there is a sequence when he approaches the building to look things over when the camera pans down through the fog and the fog is so thick and atmospheric it tells him the answer right there, though he is too rational to get it. Throughout this all Hackett is supportive, but in the middle of a conflict, some of the staff, or her partner, I forget which, wants to shut down the school, it was struggling in any case, but if there is an arsonist on the loose, attedanced will empty out to bankruptcy level, it is a major stress. She holes up in her lepidopterist office refusing to give in and face up to reality. Farentino gets a weird vibe from her, but by and large the movie remains, what is the word, nonfigurative, abstract, we witness a series of mysterious fires, and no cause is ever discovered. At last, however, Farentino pulls out the priestly guns in confronting hackett beside the school’s indoor pool. Confronted, suddenly, Hackett turns blue, and begins to growl. In a real surprise, because she always played the diligent, serious one, it turns out that she is possessed by a demon, and it is as if the friction of her animosity through the air that has been setting fires to anything she feels threatened by or envious of. It is a stunning revelation, and areal surprise. But then, they are right next to the pool, does Farentino throws her in and see if like the Wicked Witch of the west she hates water, no, he goes total Fr Karras, he grabs Hackett, hugs her hard, and cries out take me, he feels the demon then come into him, in a process that I guess you can only call extracourse, and a strange way to work out the unspoken sexual tension between the two, and then HE is the one who, having taken the demon into himself, jumps into the pool. It then flares up like it has an oil slick on it, all the girls watch in surprised wondrous shock from the door, the indoor pool fire is quite the scene, and then the surprise it, Farentino completely disappears, Hackett is like what just happened, and that is that. The girls graduate, hackett gets to stand in front of the school’s Undying Monster windows, which in the English tradition will bend but will not break, and they move on. A mystereious little number, with a great ending, even if entirely borrowed whole cloth, except being wrapped in rationalization, from The Exorcist three years before.

Zabriskie Point (1970). Three stars.

Rev., Jul 10, 2026

At the time when Michelangelo Antonioni was taking on America with Zabriskie Point it could be said the youth film market in the wake of Easy Rider was filled with movies like Medium Cool and Strawberry Statement and Taking It, in which student demonstrations against this or that injustice of the system, involving taking over administration buildings, often ended in violence, but as a kind of burst of excitement to stage the finding of true love with your perfect hippie chic. We see the love among the ruins in Strawberry Statement with Kim Darby  for example, it was the type. And then along coms Antonioni and from the first half hour of this movie you will think, he too is going to sock it to the man, and raise his fist for the revolution. In his depictions, the cops surround a black student union, and have to flushed out protestors inside with tear gas. We sit in one one of those insufferable bull sessions in which hippies sat around getting castigated by the Black Panthers for being bourgeoisie, at last the black girl in charge seems to have a sense of humor,  All of this is watched by Mark, the tall and handsome Mark Frechette, a non actor walk on that Antonioni bumped into a liked because he was “twenty and hates.” At one point, inspired by the revolution, he goes buys a gun, and then takes his beat up truck back to college to watch the demonstration. It is not clear if he takes a shot at a cop, but I think he thinks he shot the cop, as a cop was shot. That, he knows, is the end of his revolution. He flees. And, wow, does he flee. At this point, the movie makes an odd pivot, it is really about him fleeing, than him revolting. Antonioni loses him in the maze of the billboards of American capitalism, lining the highway of his departure, we get 7 up, Schmitts beer, sandwich spreads, he sits by a smog inspection station, he walks under the flags of a used car lot, he poses by the statue of liberty head in a United Airlines lets get away from it all billboard about New York. Finally, he has an idea, he is near an airport, used mainly for private jets. Likely the Van Nuys airport, and sneaks onto the tarp and steals a one engine. And so he if off, and, boy, he really enjoys being up above it all, seeing all of LA in all its spread our highway spaghetti beauty. Soon, he comes out over the desert, unsure where he is going. At this point we cut to Rod Taylor worrying about the whereabouts of his daughter Daria, played by Daria Halprin. She, it turns out, has headed out to dad’s desert house I think in Arizona, unsure why. But she stops at a deserted western town asking directions, and of course shocks the old timers with her easy manner of dress. Turns out the town is really just a few trailers. If I remember she is looking for some escaped radical, but all she gets is a bunch of kids ruinning free who chase her onto a stage to spin about her in sexual curiosity. It is the first little spin of allegorizing like at the end of Blow Up that Antonioni springs, and though she gets back on the road the allegory radar is up. We are leaving reality, entering the desert of meaningless, over which allegory floats. At one point, way out in the desert she has to stop to cool off her car engine with water and gives us an eyeful bending over doing the work. This bend also catches the eye of Mark who just happens to be flying over. He then does an aerial love dance which looks like the menacing circle of North by Norhtwest, but is clearly making eyes at her. At last he lands, and so magically out in the middle of nowhere perfect looking hippie chic meets perfect looking hippie boy, and he agrees to ride with her some ways, sure, as he is good looking, and obviously girls come in his direction, that he might be getting some out of this. They stop at Zabriskie Point, which a sign says is a ten million year old lake turned to gypsum. They cavort, tumbling down hills of sands in the most famous shot in the movie. At the bottom they alsotumble into each other and after some preliminary pecks strip off to undertake what I imagined when I saw it first and still think now must be the most uncomfortable place on earth to make love it, given that fluid and lubricant is required, the middle of the desert. Antonioni then entwines us in their symplegma, a form that I think gestaltic of the time’s ambitions for communal love, and suddenly all the dunes are topped by hippie couples making love. In the parting shot I count 28 couples fucking. So, what can it mean? The truth? Or the truth of movies? That the whole revolution was just a device used by the popular kids to get more sex out of each other? That it really was all about love not war, sex not the violence back on campus. And yet I wonder, to put a desert between penis and vagina is to put a blockage of dryness likely precluding sex, so, is it really a surrender to the meaningless of it all. In any case, now officially have consummated as a hippie couple, daria agrees to go back to the plane to help Mark refill. AT one point they are stopped by cops, and what half an hour after making love Daria sees Mark secretly pull a gun and though the cop goes off she is like out you out of your fucking mind? The meet a willing old time who helps them then turn the plane by painting it into a vehicle of the revolution. Oddly enough the front engine is made the nose of a witchy demon’s face, the wings are popped out into two very flotational boobs, the under wings are on fire, it is a symbol of the sexual revolution, make love not war. But for some reason, Mark decides to fly it back to LA, I suppose to make the news. And the new he will make because the cops are all sitting waiting for him for his return, and sure enough he does return. And the story old as time clicks in, Mark lands but tries to make an averting gesture at cop cars in the runway so one of the shoots him dead. So in the desert of meaningless, he found love, and meaning, but that meant he flew back into it, and in it if you resist a cop in a vehicle, twas ever thus (as four years later Polanski would show in the contested ending of Chinatown). Two points. One, Frechette was so handsome that for a moment in the sun he was a hot property in the magazine and fashion world, gets jobs all over. He was also an off screen boyfriend with Daria and wiki says that they were declared the world’s first countercultural couple. But he joined the Lyman family cult in boston, described in Mindfuckers, and a few years later was killed in prison after being arrested for a bank robbery to fund the family. He tried to enlist Daria, but she balked, and returned to private life. Two. The idea of love and sex dropping without effort into a man’s lap is of course a male fantasy, as men do not like to work for it, the trope still endures in porn. Then and now I groused because it is only the man who meets the type of the geist of the zeit that gets that attention, us hoi polloi never get a lap drop. Then, too, it is mysterious trope, one being killed on the same day that one had perfect sex and had found love. The French call orgasm le petit mort but maybe it means true love is not something of this world. In any case, Daria continues on her way to dad’s Arizona rocktop mansion, a doozy of modenist excess. She sees that dad is already there talking some business partners into a new project. She is repelled by the bikini wives at the pool, she baptizes herself in a rock cave waterfall, and then though dad is happy to see her, she leaves. As she departs, having heard on the news that Mark was shot, we look back in anger at her dad’s house, and, suddenly, in her mind, she blows it up, one, two, three, four, five, six times. And then the explosion effervesce into a kind of floating Jackson Pollock blowing to smithereens, beach furniture, whole libraries of fluttering books, wardrobe, flying dresses, splinters of housing, all the food in the kitchen, all of those bikini’d women’s wardrobes, a cloud of Wonderbread, an avalanche of magazines, and the media, per se, in other words, the whole materialism trip man*, I think when I first saw it I thought Daria a terrorist who really blew up daddy, but it is obvious this is in her mind, and that Antonioni has picked up the rage of the famous generation gap which made it so hard for the postwar and the hippie generation to talk, but his conclusion, just because you want to blow up the world, doesn’t meant that that is going to do anything. As the sunset falls, Roy Orbison no less croons Zabriskie Point, which is, precisely, perhaps, that moment of meaning, which means nothing. (* watching this in 2026, the Washington Post reports that the Baby Boomers as they die will be willing to their offspring that largest transfer of wealth in human history, so so much for that, I always saw the demonstrations as a training ground for future capitalists).
 

Witches Brew (1980), Two and a quarter stars

Rev.;, Aug 10 2026

Starring Teri Garr as a witch wife protecting her husband Richard Benjamin this one certainly starts out as a silly witch movie along the lines of Witches of Eastwick and such, that is, witchery as a harmless expansion of healing and good luck precautions in life. As we open Garr is having her husband, Behjamin, lie out at night for a few hours inside a spell created by various herbs and solutions, for unclear reasons But finally he begins to balk, and at last begs his wife to stop casting good luck spells over his life, so that he can live a bit more freely. You can guess the turn of the plot, he begins to have nothing but bad luck. But Margaret also has friends who are witches, and somewhat more serious in their avocation than she is. One of them, I think Susan, sees a spell for some sort in a very sharply illustrated old book, pretending to be a grimoire, and to work it out, because it seems hard magic, she goes visits Vivian Cross, the senior witch in town, played by Lana Turner. Turner has an odd practice featuring a kind of tarot in the sense of placing cards in such and such positions vis a vis each other with the humorous part being that they appear to be gingerbread cookies. I think Susan developed witchcraft to create a large egg to hatch as a demon, for unclear reasons, and it is funny to see it sit as classic plop art on campus and Joshua to agree to stand for a polaroid, she only uses polaroid, in front of it. He thinks it is all fun and games. There is some little kerfuffle that develops between the women which makes them want to use their magic to get even, never a good thing, though I did not quite get what the problem was. But one day Joshua gets up, and coming home from work that night he is accosted by an honest to goodness horror movie demon, a green slimny humanoid with lasar eyes and devil’s horns.It is a startling development, in such  a lightweight movie. When Cross, Lamar, is called in, she has yet another deligfhtful current way to cast a counterspell, With a stylus and a magic slate she makes a series of symbols which stand for wherever in the mind or universe the demon dwells. As it is bearing down on Joshua’s car and roof and putting him into serious trouble, time is of the essence. And that is where the magic slate comes in. Seems all Cross needs to do is write out the spell, and then pull the sheet up. Voila, erased, and, correspondingly in the world, sudden the fabric of the night air as if tears, there is what appears to be some lightning but is in fact the demon disintegrating, and then as this demon has come in from the outer reaches and now is going back a kind of rocky avalanche falls down where he is sucked back into the ether, and, wow, for this sort of movie, it is a pretty sharp demonic sequence. But now Margaret, Garr, suspects malice from one of her friends, so she walks out of her front door next morning  to kiss her hub goodbye and there is a dead chicken hanging in front of her door, a curse. When Garr senses that the other one, either Susan or Linda, is pissed off, she calls Joshua telling him to be careful. But their call is interrupted by a loud shrill whir that is being sent as interference to their line by Susan with some sort of device and this then back in the room with a ghostly painting where Joshua is standing this whir spell makes all the albums in his record collection come shooting at him ay a lethal speed. They knock him down, he dodges hit after hit, the records shatter, into shards, other hit him in the chest. To see a black vinyl record spin in a movie is a sign that death is near, so this sort of super instrumentalized version of it means that in addition to that intent the reason is someone is upset and had enough of Joshua being a broken record. The odd thing is that this sort of thingt might have stuck to Richard Benjamin typecasting because his trouble in Portnoy’s Complaint started when he came home to pick up his wife, Karen Black, to go to a big dinner at city hall, and she balks, berating him for being a broken record criticizing her. He came in to a record that was bumping idly in the space past the last groove, a sure sign of th death (in this case, relationship), and here he is again, dealing with broken records flying at him. Maybe by 1980 his smart alec humor had become dated and the sickofitness of it was subtly communicated in this self deprecatory way. In any case, he figures out how to break the spell, sitting next to a smoking phone, on a carpet littered withi broken record shards. I it quite a scene with the haunted stereo and record player doing a threatening take very similar to the eyes of Eichelberger as they dissolved to bloody headlights in the 1974 Great Gatsby. It seems that this breaks the war between the witch wives. But it turns out, for the big finale, Cross, Lamar, was being friendly with the junior witches because she wanted something greater. She is dying, and like all old witches she wants her soul to jump into a younger body so that she can live another whole life, it is call dancing in the skin, see Witches, 1966, and she chooses Margaret’s body as the body she wants. This is done primarly with picture magic from a hospital bed but when Garr gets wind of it, or feels the tug of another soul against her soul, she launches her own picture magic and I think her way of blocking the spell is to burn a picture of her. Then Joshua stands at bedside and watches Margaret flare up in a blue flame like in She and she burns brighter as the soul lavs her, and returns to Cross, Lamar, to die. This too is a surprisingly interesting rendering of picture magic, and of soul transfer. At one point Joshua is so shocked by it all he collapses, for a moment we fear he was killed, but it is Cross that dies, and the great crisis is over. The movie ends as it began, only now Joshua is totally on board with spousal witchcraft and has no trouble sleeping out in the backyard at night for however long the spell needs him to to work, ha. It’s a lightweight affair, but it is anchored by three solid performances, Garr, Benjamin and Lamar, which is quite a line up, and then its early triviality sudden blossoms into some serious witchcraft which actually gets fun and interesting,

Undertone (2025), Two and a half stars.

Rev Jul 8 2026

Undertone drops down to that micro level of almost nothing happening which has made a success in recent years of Skinamarink. In the crawlspace of the mind between doing a podcast on the paranormal from her mother’s dining room table, and taking care of her bedridden hospice-dying-soon mother in a bed upstairs, Evy, Nina Kiri in classic good looking inquisitive brunette stereotype, slowly, very slowly, sonically, comes undone. Sonic hauntings are usually more insidious in that they creep in like a tinnitus and one can perhaps hear more apophenic words in it than one sees pareidols in figures in corners or in the clouds. Adding to the weirdness is that mother was a very religious Catholic woman whose faith in later years precipitated into an apotropaic effort to keep her house and her family safe, so not only is there a classic da Vinci’s last supper in the dining over Evy’s back as she podcasts, but there are ceramics of angels and saints on shelves. There is a byzantine icon on another wall, there are a number of  crufixies, and, overall, such shelved figuration wrinkles up a lot of possibilities for seeing things too. But mainly the plot is about her work, and that is that with her partner, who seems to have moved out of town, they go over a series of ten files given him by an unknown source, and we get to listen to the haunting of another woman. Meanwhile evy has to go up now and then to feed her mother and change her mother, we see a glimpse of this less attractive chore once, and as things progress it is almost as if the echo or ring of the tapes she is listening to leak into the house and she begins to hear voices in other rooms and possibly even entertains the fact that while she is podcasting mother is up and about and collecting to her her favoriate little religious statues for safe keeping. This actually means that a small bedside table Virgin mary, who looks like it may have one been a night light, keeps showing up at mother’s table, then evy puts it back where it belongs, but then it is there again. When maybe a third time this happens, the statue seems in close up to scream, so Evy puts it away on the top shelf of the closet for good, though when she closes the closet door, which has a mirror on it, we get a glimpse of a ghost of mother standing in the room. The tapes seem to be preoccupied witih nursery rhymes that had horrible underpinnings in real life. We get a lot of them. But this means that there are a good many creepy Victorian illustrations of these stories, which reinforces the agency of the retrograde Catholic imagery to place us in a very culty place of imagining the spirit world. There is one picture of boys having to kneel atop their bunk beds for bedtime prayers at some catholic school which is choice, catholic school pictures from the pre 1970 era, a rich trove of creepy imagery. As Evy gets more spooked by unexplainable noises, and odd movings of objects in mother’s room, she hears by phone that, yes, she is pregnant, and is not sure what to do about it. At the very same moment, we get into the added little wrinkle zone of audio recordings going way back to the Exorcist, and the Paul is Dead era of the dying Beatles, and that is backmasking, or backwards playing words on the file tape. The Uozyba in emoc is rather too easily seen in reverse by the naked eye as come in, and then we get the name of a demon, Abyzou, who has shown up in some horror movies of later, and is like lamasthu, and Litllith, a baby stealing demon who seeks to curtail and cancel out any births so suddenly we, if noy Evy, realize that if this tape is magically leaking into her house and its contested mother-daughter space, Evy is going to be under attack by Abyzou, which does not want her to have that baby. Justin, Evy;s podcast partner, rolls out the whole research on Abyzou very effectively, scaring the daylighhts out of you with horrifying case studies of mothers killing their children, and even throws in the name of a very rare severe saint to seal the deal (this too a trope), saying the devil made them do it. After finding a decrepit old lamp turned on in mother’s bedroom, she gazes at her byzantine icon of Hodegetra or whatever Madonna, and seems to feel a twinge of abyzou entry in the visual rhyme between its needlepoint jitter and the polygraph up and down of the audio bumps on the recording, nicely done. By saying come in abyzou, the woman in the tape invites it in, for it to do ill, and it being 3am withcing hour (the witching hour is actually, in real life, 4am), we get a sense that the demon has been called in for real. At this moment you realize, holy shit, this podcasting from your mother’s dining room table, site of all that talk, this is really very similar to a séance, and it is very possible that by microphone and audiotape she has called the demon in. And then comes the movie’s most interesting trope. I love children’s drawings in horror movies, going back decades. Earlier, in a drawer, possibly done by mother, because hospice carers usually think elders are no good for anything beyond a coloring book, a drawing of a girl. Now it turns out that throughout the podcasts Evy has continued to rather absently draw drawings of a scary girl without even being totally aware what she is doing. And she cannot see the big picture because it turns out that the big picture is only formed when she has done all the drawings and we see them laid out on the table like a paper rose. I am not sure I have ever seen this before (though I did just quote kinderman with his case papers in The exorcist, the book). And when we see that, we then, through evy, also see, this part I have seen before, the wall at the stairs, the landing, the walls of the upper floor, all of it is scrawled with the same picture of a witchy woman, when Evy sees this, as a red light goes on in the house, and a ghost comes up on the tv, she sees it is her mommy, whom maybe she really hates and wants to kill, for maybe her wanting to kill her, and as she tends to her mother on what she now thinks is her death bed, we see her mother fully manifest in ghost form in the bathroom, the end. Evy is a theres no such thing as a  vampire rationalist, so her disbelief, continually challenged, adds traction to the movie, the ton of strange visuals from children’s nursery rhymes to odd Catholic art all over the house add to the atmosphere, imo having a specific demon do the haunting is always a good idea, the movie runs into a bit of a problem as to wrapping things up at the end, because it has played it so cool throughout, but overall it works. 

The Witches of Pendle (1976), Two stars.

Rev., Jul 10 2026

The witches of pendle is an odd entry into the folk horror boom in British movies in and around the Wicker Man of 1973, when an interest in witches spilled out into real life, and witches be a part of the goddess worshippings of the hippie gods. It is a dramatization of a 1912 trial of witches and for that documentary reason it uses actual transscripts of antiquated talk, deep dive in local l ore and life, and a cinematography of closeups to crop out any mention of time since. We come upon a young woman at a crossroads who quite naturally, as she was taught, takes magic protective action against a crow. She will later deny it, but we hear her and there is no doubt that her invocations of protective spirits sounds like witchcraft. When an old man in town is afflicted with seeing a close up of a demon every time he blinks or closes his eyes, the town thinks they might be infested, and who would be to blame. They chose the comely blonde girl and take her to the Three Raven Inn where the trial is heard. The movie is notable for, as far as I know, though there were some sensationalized instances in German or continental horror, the only detailed upclose depiction of the search of the witches’ nude body for marks of the devil upon it. That could be a wart or a birthmark, or sometimes a bruise, anything which if pricked and she feels nothing, exposes her as one kissed by satan. She modestly drops her dress, but clings to cover of her breasts. Then a rather too salacioius inspector prods her he creases and crevices, the backs of the knees, of course the armpits, behind the kneeds, back of the ankle, Satan ommonly leaves some marks, he explains, as he gives a full swipe over her lovely bare back. They lift up her breast, and check around, they drop to the nether regions, off camera, for to spread and spread again, and again in back, they inspect her hair, which they would have know of in delousing days, that intimacy of bodies that bore daily incursion of fleas, through all of this we see exactly one nipple, no it is a one nipple movie, prurient, but perhaps not quite enough to make of sexploitation. OF course, since what body does not have tags and warts, or freckles or moles, they find one and declare her a witch. Then having failed hat test, they bring her to the master of the big house, and it is one of those creepy Elizabethan glass palaces rendered creepy by the trope I call the Undying Monster Winter, as her case is examind again. But this time, the girl decides to blow up the town, and in particular take down her granny. She says that granny tells her orient dreams, I wonder what those are, and they always come true. Three nights she went with granny to a sabbath and she knows the devil because she has lived before this life. Sometimes she dreams that she is in hell, her hands have the power to crumble rats in  them. Rats and frogs and other slimy things come out of her belly. She strips naked at night and rubs her skin all over, then James comes with a salve and rubs it all over her and it makes her think she is flying. Granny brings her a stick greased, so she can fly with it. At the sabbath they get fat from eating dead bears. And it is from these bears that granny boils up a potion, and it is with that potion when she sticks the stick between her legs she seems to fly, The attending officials are of course shocked, this is how it went, for some reason, hyseria, or panic, or resignation, charged women often did let loose with a tide of fantasy in court, just to shock the judges. The fact that a comely girl, recently viewed nude, makes it all almost intolerably erotic, almost as if she is describing a mastubatory fantasy. In other words, shetells the judges exactly what they need to launch a purge. I would argue that it is at this point where we see the judge by a great window, and see the great window fill the screen as we transition to a grander room and yet a third level of trial, that those windows signify that release. In one room in the castle we see the witch now given the reward as prize witness, a soft bed. In another window, lords convene, to hear more testimony. I sort of lost track of the process at this point, but I think the officials finally get their confession of a murder plot by t he witches to have their way, I don’t think there is a burning. Overall, it is more a careful procedural, attempting to be as authentic as possible, and it is, the pricking sequence, and then the known fact that hopeless women then indulged in condemning fantasy, it is quite true, and well done, leaving you to question at the end, what exactly was that all about?

The Tell Tale Heart (1953), three stars.

Rev., Jul 10 2026

Known for having received an Oscar nomination for the animation of Pat Matthews, and voiced by James mason, this one is significant for taking on an Edgar Allen Poe story which, being mostly aural, and the mania of hearing a beating, for requiring animation that penetrates to the internal mind. This one does first by casting all the animation as if lit from a light emit from far off left of stage, this sort of solarizes the scenes, to make them all seem ghostly. Then the animator chose to represent the worsening of the beating heart by capturing its interior crepitus in external forms of a spider web run amuck, moons carved out by foggy menace, broken china scattered on the floor, shadows creeping three times the length of a man sitting, reaching all the way across to a grandfather clock. All of these visuals capture the throbbing of a tinnital horror in the ear as visualized by the hypnagogic mind in the lattice position, on the verge of spinning. Finally, at one point, the clock tick takes over and walks the eye up and down a maze of stairs, this I think is the whoosh into nightmare. Finally, it is as if the house is hollowed out by the beat of it, driving him crazy, and so things end. Animation often exceeds even the surreal art of the time by being able to latch onto a local mental state and give figure or form to pure fear. This was the decade of the geometry of fear artists in England, and the Freudian abstract expression in the US, so it is no wonder people responded to it then, and now. That James Mason trembles between his earlier Gainsborough career and his career to come of grand old man in adventure and horror adds the perfect voicing to it all. Nicely done.

The Possessed (2009). Two/ one and a half stars.

Rev Jul 8 2026

This very poorly compiled documentary purports to explain the so called Watseka wonder which happened in 1877 in Watseka Illinois south of Chicago where, very oddly, Lurancy Vennum became possessed, not by a demon, but by the soul of a girl in town who had died 12 years earlier, Mary Roff. One day Lurancy began to talk as if she was of another family, all her memories were of another family, a local family, the Roffs recognized who she was talking about, and it was decided for her to come live with them for them to have their dead daughter back in the form of Lurancy channeling Mary Roff. She lived in the Roff family for 111 days until she snapped out of it. You can read the Watseka wonder pamphlet published at the time on IA, as spriritualists of the time were quite interested in the odd wrinkle of the case. Among catholics of time it was still thought that a poor soul in purgatory, if it felt it was not getting enough help with suffrages of prayer and masses from living catholics, would come back up and haunt and possess people. I don’t know what model protestant spiritualists would use to explain this odd pairing. But you will not really find out in this shoddy documentary by Christopher Saint Booth, who seems to have gone to Watseka, but then shuffles before you what look like souped up versions of the old clippings. There is a lot of ominous music, and many of the favorite qualifiers of specious arguments, certainly, there may have been, it well could be, etc. all make things seem squishy. Since I have not found a number of the socalled old prints shown, especially one implying that Lurancy was really possessed by a devil, I suspect. We see a fake 1877 picture of Lurancy as Mary do an Exorcist style, head to foot levitation, I don’t  think she did that. To reinforce the possibility the story jumps eighty years to Bavaria to listen to a tape from the anne Liese excorism case of the4 1970s. Surprised, the narrator reports “she was actually Catholic,” when, of course, she would almost have to be, if you knew anything about Bavaria. And again, magic, she was actually able to read through bandages, another actually. And then when the girls both died, we get the permission to expound, as that very well could have been the end of the story, but we jump to a story of a boy who did drawings in a state where his mind was awake while his body was asleep. Not only could draw sleep waking, the spiritualists scall it, I call it syngogy, but he could hear everything around him (this I think a symptom of very light sleep hypnagogy), and to a report that he grew worse we get another spiderwalk thrust of his body up, in a fake print. Then since he was speaking gibberish they introduce the Ovilus, which is a handheld device, that uses a dictionary of only 512 words by which it can create words and thus communicate with the other side. I don’t recollect how this had anything to do with Lurancy. But, as we bring down the curtain, there is a happy ending. Thirty years later, it seems that Mary Goff returned to possess Lurnacy while she was giving birth, to  thank her for helping her tell her story, to spare Lurancy the pain of childbirth, such a nice ghost.