scumbelievable

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e02 'Pressure's Looking Good So Far'

“Here it comes,” says casino employee Bill (David DeLao) to Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) as they wait together for the gaming floor’s overhead lighting to shift. This is Asher’s sole apparent contribution to the world, a lighting scheme designed to subliminally encourage gamblers to keep gambling. Not only that, but his original patterns had to be adjusted to produce the desired effect. It’s dust in a sandstorm, just another finger reaching into the pockets of tourists and gambling...

December 2023 Schedule: Tears in the Rain

12/3, 1pm & 7pm: MINORITY REPORT
12/6, 7pm: ROBOCOP
12/10, 1pm & 7pm: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
12/13, 7pm: BATTLE ROYALE
12/17, 1pm & 7pm: BLADE RUNNER
12/20, 7pm: DREDD
12/24, 1pm & 7pm: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
12/27, 7pm: CHILDREN OF MEN

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e01 'Land of Enchantment'

“There’s no such thing as a perfect city,” says Elizabeth Siegel (Emma Stone), donning a dazzling fake smile for the benefit of the empty closet in which she’s recording voiceover for the reality TV show she and her husband Asher (Nathan Fielder) are making for HGTV. Espanola, NM, certainly lives up to that pitch. Blighted by rapidly unfolding gentrification and negligent slumlords with a monopoly on local housing, the city is caught between growth and decay, expansion and oblivion. T...

In the Flesh: Scavengers Reign

How often do you get to watch a medium evolve right in front of you? Before Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner’s Scavengers Reign, adult genre animation in America hadn’t so much as twitched a limb in years. Now, like the myriad tenacious life forms which inhabit the alien planet Vesta, it feels alive with unknown potential. Clearly influenced by sources as diverse as Jean “Moebius” Girard, nature documentaries, psychedelic film, Ursula K. le Guin, the Jim Henson Workshop, S...

In the Flesh: Barton Fink

In the sticky heat of early morning, frustrated writer Barton Fink (John Turturro) stares at his sleeping lover Audrey Taylor’s (Judy Davis) back as a mosquito lights on her and begins to feed. The parasitic insect’s whine recurs throughout Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink, driving Barton to distraction, leaving him with painful bites. It feeds on him as W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney) feeds on Audrey, using her unacknowledged talent to sustain a writing career left hollowed out b...

November 2023 Schedule: Work in Progress

11/1, 7pm: 8½
11/5, 1pm & 7pm: BARTON FINK
11/8, 7pm: MADELINE'S MADELINE
11/12, 1pm & 7pm: THE FOUNTAIN
11/15, 7pm: ONE CUT OF THE DEAD
11/19, 1pm & 7pm: CLOSE-UP
11/22, 7pm: ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD
11/26, 1pm & 7pm: MISERY

The Deadlights Theater Halloween 2023 Marathon

Noon: ROPE  
2pm: HALLOWEEN  
4pm: AMERICAN PSYCHO  
6pm: IN THE CUT  
8:30pm: HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER  
10pm: CURE  
Midnight: STOKER

To join, just up your pledge to $10 or more and you'll get an invite to the screening discord! We have about 350 members, lots of active film fans, community screenings, and great discussions.

In the Flesh: Berserk (1997)

Don’t come near me, thinks the wounded and broken Griffith (Kevin T. Collins) as Guts (Marc Diraison) races after him. If you come close to me, if you so much as touch my shoulder, we’ll never… The thought trails off as apocalypse engulfs the world around them, Griffith’s dream of ascension to godhood claiming the lives of his followers and boon companions in a Boschian orgy of violence. What path is so unthinkable to Griffith that the destruction of everything he ho...

In the Flesh: Killers of the Flower Moon

“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” asks the caption of an engraving in a book on Osage tribal history and custom. It’s a child’s question in a book for children, the equivalent of a “spot the differences” side-by-side comparison in Highlights magazine, but for a man like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) it’s the wrong question altogether. Ernest knows who and where the wolves are; he’s one of them. His Osage wife, Mollie (Lily Gladstone, who plays her role ...

In the Flesh: The Exorcist III

Penned and directed by William Peter Blatty, author of the original Exorcist novel and screenwriter of its famous adaptation, The Exorcist I

Penned and directed by William Peter Blatty, author of the original Exorcist novel and screenwriter of its famous adaptation, The Exorcist III is a bit of an oddment in the annals of 80s and 90s franchise horror. The film was conceived of by Blatty himself, and while studio meddling saddled him with a shoehorned exorcism scene and...

WYRM Download Link!

A PDF of my new novella, the medieval dinosaur epic WYRM! I'll have exciting news about it soon, but in the meantime, enjoy!

In the Flesh: Alien 3

“In every seed,” says religious convert Dillon (Charles S. Dutton) as the mangled bodies of Newt and Hicks, Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) surrogate daughter and love interest respectively in the series’ previous entry, are consigned to the flames of a gigantic smelter, “there is the promise of a flower.” At the same moment, somewhere in the bowels of Fiorina 161’s correctional facility-cum-foundry, an alien bursts from the belly of a thrashing, anguished dog. Director David Finche...

In the Flesh: The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

If Mike Flanagan didn’t suffer from such a pressing need to feed us a spoonful of treacle along with every pound of glass and rusty nails he dishes up in The Fall of the House of Usher, he might have had something pretty close to perfect pulp. Instead we must content ourselves with a series fundamentally, if only slightly, flawed from its inception, a hard-hearted retelling of A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge refuses again and again to learn the lessons time and Death an...

In the Flesh: Fellini Satyricon

A rich man, Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), holds a mock funeral for himself, pressuring his friends and hangers-on to mourn him as they would upon his death. A guest recounts the story of the Widow of Ephesus, a woman whose devotion to her dead husband is so legendary it outlives its own existence, compelling people to believe her own outlandish nested story, concocted to protect her new lover, of her husband’s body’s ascension. Who tells the story, and why do they tell it, and to whom? Ea...

The Deadlights Theater: Halloween Marathon 2023

Hi everyone! So excited to announce a day-long Halloween marathon of serial killer movies, beginning at noon with Hitchcock's ROPE and ending at midnight with Park Chan-wook's STOKER! Trailer by Vincent Ash Renee!

Noon: ROPE, Alfred Hitchcock
2pm: HALLOWEEN, John Carpenter
4pm: AMERICAN PSYCHO, Mary Harron
6pm: IN THE CUT, Jane Campion
8:30pm: HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, John McNaughton
10pm: CURE, Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Midnight: STOKER, Park Chan-wook

In the Flesh: The Casanova by Federico Fellini

It begins with a woman leaving. The statue of Venus, ceremonially raised from the lagoon of Venice to commemorate the dawning of a new season, sinks back beneath the tranquil waters, the ropes supporting it snapping one by one, scaffolding and pulleys collapsing under its weight. Her eyes, which have only just broken the surface, disappear into their own reflections. She is the first of Giacomo Casanova’s (Donald Sutherland) automatons, though his reaction to her departure is hidden by his ...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e08: The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord

Why does Ezra wear the stormtrooper helmet when he reunites with Hera and the Republic forces? As a human being, why would he risk being shot for no conceivable reward beyond, I suppose, surprising a friend? As viewers are we meant to be surprised when, having seen Ezra drag an unconscious Stormtrooper away to steal his armor, he shows minutes later wearing said armor? Is the show attempting to fake us out using information we already have? Why do Ezra, Sabine, and Ahsoka remain with...

In the Flesh: ZeroZeroZero

In a dead house, a dying man ignores his stooped, haggard reflection. Adriano Chiaramida plays don Damiano “Minu” La Piana as something between lich and mourner, his milky right eye reflecting a world in which he no longer has any purchase, his face and body ravaged by a lifetime of betrayal, violence, and struggle. For the sake of the 'Ndrangheta, one of the oldest Italian organized crime rings, he killed his son. For the same reason, he kills his grandson. In his final scene, we see him...

October 2023 Schedule: BLACK SABBATH + HALLOWEEN MARATHON

8/1, 1pm & 7pm: GOOD MADAM
8/4, 7pm: IMPETIGORE
8/8, 1pm & 7pm: THE WITCH
8/11, 7pm: HAGAZUSSA
8/15, 1pm & 7pm: THE NEON DEMON
8/18, 7pm: SUSPIRIA
8/22, 1pm & 7pm: SATOR
8/25, 7pm: HELLBENDER

8/31, noon to midnight:

ROPE
HALLOWEEN
AMERICAN PSYCHO
IN THE CUT
HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER
CURE
STOKER

In the Flesh: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

It’s a rare scene in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover in which Michael Gambon isn’t talking. “Talking” doesn’t do it justice, really. He rants. He bullies. He declaims and hectors, gibbers and bellows and froths. A quick once-over of the screenplay reveals the obvious: he talks more than every other character in the film taken together. It wouldn’t be appropriate to call his performance as Albert Spica, a local crime boss who fancies himself a gourmand and has...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e07: Dreams and Madness

After last week’s light snack of fun fantasy stuff, it’s back to starvation rations for Ahsoka. The show’s seventh episode opens with an airless courtroom drama scene on a set that looks like something out of a fan film. Filoni has no ear for political dialogue, and no apparent comprehension of how governments, or the people in them, function. Why is Senator Xioni (Nelson Lee) able to call a court martial when he apparently isn’t even on the New Republic’s defense council? ...

In the Flesh: Foundation

You’d think Western cinema would be out of things to say about intelligent machines struggling with the idea of their own humanity. Roy Batty, Priss, AM, WestWorld’s sad sack torture dolls, the self-loathing fundamentalist replicants of Battlestar Galactica, HAL 9000’s frantic attempt to exterminate his human handlers, the megalomaniacal psychosexual menace of System Shock’s SHODAN — it’s all been done, both well and poorly, a dozen times over. Yet here�...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e06: Far, Far Away

It’s stark how much better this (still bad) show is when it gets away from its ostensible protagonists. Even with sets that wouldn’t be out of place in 2000s-era Doctor Who? and a script that reads like a protracted attempt to do the least funny ‘Who’s on first?’ riff in history, Ahsoka’s sixth episode is far and away its breeziest and most entertaining. A planetary ring of space whale bones? A village of nomadic crab people brought to life as adorable puppets en...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e05: Shadow Warrior

In the singular hands of writer, director, Chopper the droid voice actor, and showrunner Dave Filoni, Ahsoka’s fifth episode pulls off the impossible: it is measurably worse than the four lackluster duds preceding it. We spend our first half-hour cutting between Hera flying back and forth over the ocean and Ahsoka and the Force ghost or mental manifestation or whatever of her former master, Anakin Skywalker, sparring and trading dull platitudes. Filoni’s script punches straight t...

In the Flesh: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

The Last Voyage of the Demeter isn’t going to pull in many accolades for its script, which at its best hits its marks and knows its lines and at its worst blunders into rushed and jumbled exposition, but the bestial Dracula (Javier Botet) is so chilling and the film’s scares and shocks so substantial and unnerving that it hardly matters what the underdeveloped characters are saying. Would it be a better movie if they were all a little more fleshed out? Sure, but they’re the for...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e04: Fallen Jedi

“Don’t worry about me.” “I’m not. Should I be?” “What?” “Worried.” “Nope.” If the first fifteen seconds of a game of Pong, that pixel moving like molasses across the screen only to be deflected back where it came at infinitesimally greater speed, really gets your dick hard, then boy is Dave Filoni the screenwriter for you. Every conversation with even an inch of tension or character present plays out as a tedious back and forth, characters setting eac...

In the Flesh: Bottoms

With Shiva Baby, her stunningly confident and masterful debut feature about a young Jewish sex worker and the cloying, interdependent, overwhelming community around her, director Emma Seligman set herself a high bar to jump. Bottoms, a screwball comedy about unlikable lesbian high schoolers PJ (Rachel Sennot) and Josey (Ayo Edebiri) starting a fight club to get pussy, opts instead to sprint in the other direction. It’s a bold move in an era where studio comedies h...

The Deadlights Theater September 2023: You Are Receiving This Broadcast As a Dream

9/3, 1pm & 7pm: Big Trouble in Little China
9/6, 7pm: Escape from New York
9/10, 1pm & 7pm: The Thing
9/13, 7pm: Starman
9/17, 1pm & 7pm: Christine
9/20, 7pm: In the Mouth of Madness
9/24, 1pm & 7pm: The Fog
9/27, 7pm: Prince of Darkness

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e03: Time to Fly

There’s no need to set Ahsoka alongside Andor to make its failings abundantly clear, but when it transplants Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) from Andor’s tense, sweaty, sexually charged and politically complex environment to the kiddie games of Filoni’s show, it’s begging for a comparison. The results are less than flattering. Take Mon Mothma’s first conversation with her husband, Perrin, during her introductory episode in Andor. You can see the...

In the Flesh: Kafka

There’s always been something gay about Jeremy Irons, some quavering inner sissiness to his poshly gravel-voiced demeanor and roughened cut-glass features. His ability to radiate this uncertain inner fragility through any number of exterior personas serves him beautifully in Kafka, Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 thriller which transplants the famous author into a sort of melange of his own subject matter. The historical Kafka, tormented all his life by sexual fantasies, some of them qu...