Great interview! I was aware of many of the films mentioned (not all though; I’ve got homework to do), but hadn’t clocked the connective tissue between them. Glad to hear about someone who’s doing the work to continue telling original and marginal stories.
At this point, it seems to me the most consistent thing about the Resident Evil franchise is it’s willingness to reinvent itself. Even before the seismic shift from traditional survival-horror to B-movie action that RE4 represented, the 2002 REmake was intentionally mucking around with the original game’s flow and mechanics in the name of keeping things fresh, even for returning players.
You say there are no recognizable elements from any of the games, but I see a creepy, deserted house in the middle of nowhere which someone enters after encountering troubles outside. At some point, the intruder discovers the house is not as deserted as it appears, as there is a monster or monsters within. That, to me, is all that’s strictly necessary. Admittedly, I wouldn’t mind seeing a few iconic RE monsters make an appearance (especially ones which have not been featured in other adaptations, like hunters, or a drain deimos), but if they provide me something new, I’ll be even happier.
Oh, as a connoisseur of garbage, The Cannon Group is near and dear to my heart haha. Of course, being more immersed in the Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, JCVD-type Cannon output, it was refreshing to see their logo on a real “film”.
I long for a successor to their throne, even if I have to concede that their model barely functioned while they existed, let alone its viability in today’s environment lol. Ebert hit the nail on the head in 87: “no other production organization in the world today—certainly not any of the seven Hollywood majors—has taken more chances with serious, marginal films than Cannon.”
Watched that for the first time over the winter. It was enjoyable enough, but I think some of the themes went over my head, and I have a hard time reconciling Voight and Roberts’ Oscar noms with their performances. Not bad per se, but hard to imagine either were among the best of 1985.
I’m guessing that it probably hit different at the time, if my assumptions about the film’s Cold War allegories are correct.
The Lair of the White Worm (1988) dir. Ken Russell. Starring Amanda Donohoe, Hugh Grant, and Peter Capaldi. A very loose adaptation of the 1911 Bram Stoker novel of the same name, which can be reductively summarized as “What if Dracula, but snakes?”.
This was a total unknown for me. Purchased the movie out of a bargain bin at Walmart based on the cover art alone. Did no research on it beyond learning it was a Stoker adaptation, and that it was a surreal horror-comedy with some psychosexual elements. Considering how much I enjoyed Coppola’s adaptation of Stoker’s more famous novel when I finally got around to watching it, that was enough to get me in the door.
In fact, I had such a good time discovering what this movie was, I’m hesitant to talk about all of the things I loved about it. So, I’ll leave it at this: if you like Coppola’s Dracula and you like Rocky Horror Picture Show, there’s a better than good chance you’ll like this. I absolutely loved it. 4.5/5
Underwater (2020) with Kristen Stewart. What can I say? I’m a product of my triply landlocked environment, and I find the ocean in general to be primally terrifying, let alone whatever antidiluvian secrets may be mired in the sea floor. Like The Descent (2005), I found myself relaxing as the scares became more about what was stalking the characters than the hostility of the environment, but it’s an enjoyable enough creature feature in the back half. Also, while I was initially unsure of the practically en medias res opening and the occasionally jarring edits which scream of scenes deleted (apparently this movie languished on the shelf for three years before getting unceremoniously dumped in January), it’s nice to see a big budget studio picture with a 90 minute runtime. There’s kind of a twist towards the end which I can imagine will be divisive, but I was on board with it, and I don’t want to spoil it if anyone is unaware. One thing I will spoil, in the name of selling the movie, is that there are two really gnarly deaths in this (which surprised me given the PG-13 rating), and one of them belongs to TJ Miller. 3.5/5
Unfortunately, I bet it’ll clear a billion.
Didn’t start enjoying this until they finally gave up all pretense of being a “Serious Horror Movie” and leaned into the zaniness.
Call me a prude, but I don’t think you get to have a scene where a goopy evil entity forces it’s way inside of an abducted 8 year old girl, AND a scene where said girl headbutts her abuelita so hard her dentures fly out. One or the other, movie, never both.
This week I dabbled in two legacy revivals of 80s sword and sorcery properties which approach the genre from radically different perspectives.
Deathstalker (2025), directed by Steven Kostanski, is an irreverent comedy held together by campy gore and creature effects. It’s basically, “What if Army of Darkness had the tone and gore of Evil Dead 2, and the budget of Evil Dead 1?”. That last point is key. While I knew this was a low-budget offering, I thought that meant 10-20 million. Therefore, I was initially harder on the movie than I think it deserved. I kept thinking that the whole thing felt like an ambitious series of YouTube shorts more than a feature film. Turns out, the director did indeed come from a YouTube background (though, it should be noted, he has several features under his belt at this point), but I was way off about the budget. Rather than $10,000,000, the production budget was closer to $100,000, raised primarily on Kickstarter. Once I discovered that, I recalibrated my expectations and started to have a real good time with what was on offer.
The following evening, I spun up Red Sonja (2025), directed by MJ Bassett. Maybe it’s because I had just finished lowering the bar for Deathstalker, but I found myself really, really digging it. While still “low budget” the productions had about $17 million to play with, so it’s feels more like a “real” movie than Deathstalker. To some, that will make the concessions to budget stand out all the more (such as several characters having their voices seemingly dubbed over non-English performances, or some ropey CGI), but, like Deathstalker, I felt like I saw every dollar of the budget on screen.
Strong recommendation for this double feature. Deathstalker appeals to my inner teenage boy, sitting atop a stack of Fangorias, and Red Sonja…also frankly appeals to that teenaged boy (hang a lampshade on it all you like movie, you’re still dressing the main character in a chainmail bikini), but there’s also a femininity brought to story by the chief creatives which I found refreshing in this genre.
Fun! Police Story and Wheels on Meals are probably the Jackie movies I’ve seen the most, and are excellent entry points to his pre-Hollywood work. Out of curiosity, did you watch the og Drunken Master from the 70s, or the sequel from 94?
looks over at the copy of The Terror that I’ve just started
Uh-oh
Sorry, best I can do is this Anthrobussy.
I’m not saying it’s a brilliant name. Im arguing it is an inconsequential detail that does not matter in the context of the story, and it should be treated as such. You called it “possibly the stupidest artistic choice in cinematic history”. I guess I just find that to be at least as ridiculous as “unobtanium”, if not moreso.
I agree with you in all of the particulars of your argument, but am ultimately unphased by the use of the term. Cameron stopped one step short of calling it MacGuffinite, and I can understand why that would annoy some people. However, within the context of Avatar, it just doesn’t bother me.
If I wanted to conjure an in-universe reason for it, I can do so without straining my credulity too much. Aerospace engineers in the 50s develop a term for a hypothetical wonder material that they can’t get their hands on: unobtanium. Fast forward hundreds of years, and a material is discovered on Pandora which possesses qualities which were previously only thought of as theoretically possible. Perhaps jokingly, perhaps sincerely, the new wonder material is called unobtanium, referencing the fact it is no longer hypothetical, but it’s still damn hard to get a hold of.
Now, I recognize that 1) none of that is explained in the movie, so it’s just head canon, and 2) as you say, calling a material you are actively mining ‘unobtanium’ is stupid. However, I don’t think it’s any more or less stupid than your suggested alternative courses of action given the context of the plot.
If unobtanium had ANY relevance to the story beyond “this is the source of conflict”, I’d wish for more juice there. But Cameron is nothing if not a functional screenwriter. No matter how much lipstick you put on the pig, the sole purpose of the scene is to telegraph the third act conflict (and allegorize the Iraq War, to some extent, but he does more with that elsewhere). The screenplay spends only bare minimum amount of time covering that detail before speeding along to more relevant thematic matters.
So, I agree that it’s a dumb contrivance that is clunky. However, it’s just so irrelevant that I don’t care. Call it whatever you want to, the name, like the material itself, is completely inconsequential. Frankly, I’m actually warming to the idea of calling it MacGuffinite. Put a line in that it was named after the first marine to die on Pandora or some such bs. Have your cake and eat it too, a plausible in-universe name, and a tell to not think about it so much.
Well, I’ll start by disagreeing with the premise that an “objectively poor” artistic choice exists, at least in this context. There are choices that work for you and choices that don’t, but neither are objective. The name unobtanium was chosen because it represents a hypothetical substance that is everything that Cameron needed it to be to tell his story in a single word. He’s practically telling the audience, “look, guys, don’t think about it that hard, I’m speeding through the set-up because I know everyone is here to look at pretty shit in 3d”.
In another story, one where the specific properties of unobtanium were in any way relevant (beyond being valuable), that sort of handwavey shorthand might perturb me. However, as it stands within the context of the film, it’s fine. It’s functional screenwriting, and that, to me, is a hallmark of Cameron’s style.
Also, I’m not suggesting unobtanium was a placeholder for Cameron. I’m saying that it doesn’t necessarily strain my credulity to believe that, if scientists are pre-conditioned to refer to a hypothetical wonder material as unobtanium, and then they actually discover a wonder material, they might continue referring to it as such. Or, if not scientists, at least corporate ghouls like Ribisi who probably can’t pronounce the “official” name, if one exists.
Per the internet, so grain of salt and all, unobtanium predates Avatar by some time, typically used as a brainstorming device. You know how a physics problem might say “assume a frictionless environment” or something of that nature, in order to focus on a specific point or phenomena? Unobtanium is sort of like that. Picture a bunch of aerospace engineers in the mid-50s, talking about how they’re gonna put a person in space. They’re throwing all their spaghetti against the wall, hoping some of it will stick. One guy stands up and says, according to his calculations, if they can get the mass of the launch vehicle down to X, he’s confident they can do the thing. Unfortunately, material science being what it is at the time, there is nothing that would be light, strong, cheap, and workable enough to fashion such a vehicle, but the math all checks out. These engineers jokingly start referring to the hypothetical material that would satisfy all their needs as “unobtanium”, while they search for practical solutions.
Fast forward 60 years, and Cameron is writing his Pocahontas in Space movie. He needs a name for his MacGuffin, but, being a MacGuffin, it’s entirely irrelevant to the plot outside of the fact that the characters are destined to fight over it. So, he decides to call it unobtanium, since that’s pre-existing shorthand for “rare material that does everything you need it to”, and that’s literally all this material needs to be for the plot.
It’s still silly, sure, but no more or less silly than mechs fighting giant blue people that fuck via ponytail sounding.
I’ve sunk so many hours into Conquest campaigns in Gates of Hell. I’m always a fan of strategy games which showcase artillery, and GoH is among the best in terms of visual and audio design. Of course, it’s a little incongruous when you roll out your big guns, and see they’ve got a range max of 350 meters, but I guess concessions must be made if you’re making a tactical scale RTS.
It’s bots all the way down