scumbelievable

The Deadlights Theater: The Last Temptation of Christ + The Age of Innocence

Today's first double feature begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, with an encore at 7pm EST!

The Dunk Tank: The Prophecy

There’s a lot to like about The Prophecy, Gregory Widen’s surprisingly influential 1995 horror fantasy about disaffected angels squabbling over the fate of mankind. Christopher Walken’s performance as the archangel Gabriel is a wonderful little oddity, birdlike and bemused. The film’s practical effects are frequently sensational, from gnarly burn makeup to ghastly images of thrashing angels impaled on stakes. There’s even a matte painting thrown in to spice up a fantasy vis...

The Deadlights Theater: Raging Bull

Today's screening of RAGING BULL begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

The Deadlights Theater: The Wolf of Wall Street + The Color of Money

Today's first double feature begins begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, with an encore at 7pm EST!

In the Flesh: A Wounded Fawn

Critic’s Disclaimer: I am friendly with this film’s star and with its director. While I have given friends and acquaintances less than stellar reviews many times before, I believe in full transparency.

We begin with a bronze sculpture of the erinyes, the furies of Greek and Roman myth, tormenting a criminal. At once, director Travis Stevens establishes a firm command of the close-up, snapping from detail to detail as a packed auction house seethes over the collector’s ite...

In the Flesh: The Yellow Wallpaper

“I was moving toward something,” says Jo (J. Kiernan O’Brien) to her boyfriend Jack (Christian Clements), whose often intertwined coddling and micromanaging form the background of her struggle to form a cohesive sense of self in the wake of her gender reassignment surgery. Jo’s transition is, to mainstream thinking, “over”, or “complete”, but with no more mile markers to chart her progress she finds herself feeling adrift and unable to relax. “If this last big thing doesn’...

The Deadlights Theater: Bringing out the Dead

Today's screening of BRINGING OUT THE DEAD begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

In the Flesh: Resurrection

Losing a baby ends your life. I can still remember the feeling when I heard my sister’s son had passed shortly after birth. It was like a building coming down around me, a thunderous rain of masonry and choking dust swallowing up all other thoughts and experiences until all you can hear is the distant rumble of your ongoing burial and all you can feel is the reverberations of each impact slowly reducing you to a bag of jellied flesh and pulverized bone. We first meet Margaret (Rebecca Hall)...

In the Flesh: They/Them

Blumhouse has made a name for itself producing bland-looking horror billed as socially progressive, and writer/director John Logan’s They/Them slots neatly into place among its tedious and underwritten catalog. Set at a gay conversion camp and featuring a large and diverse cast of queer teens playing opposite genre stalwarts like Kevin Bacon and Carrie J. Preston, Logan’s film is in a self-evident rush to be relevant, with camp administrator Owen Whistler (Bacon) spouting bioesse...

The Deadlights Theater: Cape Fear + The King of Comedy

Today's first double feature begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, with an encore showing starting 7pm EST!

The Dunk Tank: Battlefield Earth

I’ve never seen a movie that looked like it was actively trying to escape the frame, or at least I hadn’t until I consigned myself to Roger Christian’s would-be Scientologist blockbuster Battlefield Earth. That the film, based on a novel by the cult’s founder L. Ron Hubbard, was a colossal flop — it made back less than half of its then-titanic seventy-three million dollar budget — hardly needs saying. Its every shot see-saws violently, opposing Dutch angles rendering spac...

In the Flesh: Prey

The original Predator is, charitably speaking, kind of a mess. It has its gonzo 80s charms, but its characters are largely forgettable, its themes a jumble of military adventurism and confused Vietnam-era commentary, and unlike its sister film and frequent point of comparison Alien it lacks both Ridley Scott’s cool, thoughtful camerawork and H. R. Giger’s unimpeachably threatening creature design. Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey sands off the original’s stylistic fa...

Gwoss Dispways of Power

Four years ago I jotted down some thoughts concerning moral puritanism’s hold on our relationship to art, posted the finished article to Patreon, and fell asleep. I woke up to a firestorm of debate, hundreds of strangers accusing me of being a pedophile, and thousands more groaning, “Finally, somebody fuckin’ said it.” That essay, I Don’t Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You), specifically interrogated the desire to punish others for their artistic preferences. For watching t...

The Deadlights Theater: The Full Marty

For August we're watching the films of Martin Scorsese!

Wednesday 8/3, 7pm: AFTER HOURS

Sunday 8/7, 11am and 7pm: CAPE FEAR and THE KING OF COMEDY

Wednesday 8/10, 7pm: BRINGING OUT THE DEAD

Sunday 8/14, 11am and 7pm: THE WOLF OF WALL STREET and THE COLOR OF MONEY

Wednesday 8/17, 7pm: RAGING BULL

Sunday 8/21, 11am and 7pm: THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Wednesday 8/24, 7pm: KUNDUN

Sunday 8/28, 11am and 7pm: GOODFELLAS and ...

The Deadlights Theater: After Hours

Today's screening of AFTER HOURS begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

In the Flesh: Nope

“That’s the dream you don’t wake up from,” growls renowned cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) in his tar-and-whiskey voice. He’s speaking to fast-talking, relentlessly self-promoting Emerald “Em” Haywood (Keke Palmer), whose desire for fame and success drive her like a motor through a life of hookups and half-assed gigs. Even her quiet, socially withdrawn brother OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) spends his life chasing the dream of Hollywood fame, albeit through the more reserve...

In the Flesh: Gonjiam

It takes skill to build mood, to find the right beats and pace to bring a viewer fully into a manufactured emotional reality. We watch Youtubers Seung-wook and Sung-hoon do just that to their unsuspecting fellow performers, a team of supernatural “experts” and newcomers put together by haunted location exploration Youtube channel owner Wi Ha-joon for a livestreamed tour of the titular Korean asylum. The pair move props, manipulate environments, and generally collude to frighten the other ...

In the Flesh: Incantation

It’s not often I need to pull a blanket over my bare legs during a horror movie these days, that talismanic action any child can tell you is the difference between whatever’s under the bed getting its scabby claws around your ankles or not. By about twenty minutes into Kevin Ko’s Incantation my comforter was up to my chin and the prospect of getting out of bed, of so much as looking at my partially open bedroom door, filled me with paralyzing dread. Ko isn’t reinventing the w...

The Deadlights Theater: We're All Going to the World's Fair

Today's screening of WE'RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD'S FAIR begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

In the Flesh: Jurassic World: Dominion

“Are you saving these dinosaurs because they need us, or are you saving them to absolve yourself?” asks Claire’s (Bryce Dallas Howard) fellow dinosaur liberation activist after the two free an ailing ceratopsian calf from an illegal breeding facility. That the line is godawful is, after the last two movies, a given. That the delivery is only a little less wooden than brand new oak flooring is equally predictable. What sets this single lifeless, aimless moment — which exists solely so ...

I Would Like to See It: Hellbender

Too often in fiction about the arcane and occult, artists treat these forces as a sort of Mortal Kombat-esque move set. Reproducible gestures and words conjure reliable effects. That there are rules governing the magic in John and Zelda Adams’ and Toby Poser’s Hellbender is certain, but those rules are cruel, primal, and simple in the extreme: no power without blood, no blood without violence. Kept in isolation by her mother (Toby Poser), sixteen-year-old Izzy (Zelda Ada...

The Deadlights Theater: Knife+Heart

Today's first screening of KNIFE+HEART begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, with a second showing tonight at 7pm EST!

The Dunk Tank: Mac and Me

When I closed the media player window after watching Mac and Me I hissed “shut the fuck up” at my computer, and I meant it with every fiber of my being. This movie is craven, dull, off-putting, and repulsive as only a true top-to-bottom corporate product can be. Its attempt at providing entertainment is a cold, unfeeling tertiary objective, like a crocodile lurking in the river whose armored back incidentally provides fleeting refuge for small birds. Where Troll 2 seemed...

The Deadlights Theater: The Den

Today's screening of THE DEN begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

The Dunk Tank: Troll 2

Written in pidgin English by a director unable to communicate with his talent as a way to sublimate his wife’s irritation with her vegetarian friends, nonsensically renamed mid-production in the vague hope of capitalizing on an unrelated film, and starring among others a local dentist and a cataclysmically stoned man on a day trip from a nearby psychiatric facility, Troll 2 came into a world with all the vitality and pedigree of one of those little benign tumors full of hair and te...

The Deadlights Theater: The Conversation

Today's first screening of THE CONVERSATION begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, with a second showing tonight at 7pm EST!

The Deadlights Theater: Pontypool

Today's screening of PONTYPOOL begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

Under the Stairs

Once upon a time they said that I corrupted children, that my books invited Satan’s forked and flickering tongue into the ears of the innocent. It used to make me cry. I thought of those children in their harsh, cruel houses, pale little faces hiding in the shadows under the stairs. I would think of my own children and imagine hot tears on their cheeks and the harsh red prints of a palm on their backsides. I spoke to these children at signings sometimes, to the emancipated teenagers they be...

The Deadlights Theater: The Ring

Today's first screening of THE RING begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, with a second showing tonight at 7pm EST!

In the Flesh: Christine

As a metaphor for the sort of rugged masculine individualism around which American identity has long revolved, the car is hard to beat. To skinny, bullied loser Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), the battered 1957 Plymouth Fury he buys off the yard of the physically broken and emotionally soured George LeBay (Roberts Blossom) certainly represents the powerful, independent masculinity his own underwhelming puberty has denied him. The titular vehicle, Christine, is the sort of muscular Detroit ro...