Did I stop keeping these or what.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - dir. by Steven Spielberg
* batteries not included (1987) - dir. by Matthew Robins
Fire In The Sky (1993) - dir. by Robert Lieberman
Communion (1989) - dir. by Phillipe Mora
Dark Skies (2o13) - dir. by by Scott Stewart
Nope (2o22) - dir. by Jordan Peele
The Arrival (1996) - dir. by David Twohy
Contact (1997) - dir. by Robert Zemeckis
Death Becomes Her (1992) - dir. by Robert Zemekis
Rabbit Trap (2o25) - dir. & written by Bryn Chainey [disappointing as folk, to coin a phrase, but nice effort on the production end, and definite points for introducing me to the music of Lucrecia Dalt, so hardly wasted. just... not what Sig & i ordered]
Predator: Badlands (2o25) - dir by Dan Trachtenberg [disney made a predator movie and it's a star wars style tie-in to the aliens hulu seri who fucking CARES this is the worst predator movie i've seen and i watched THE predator. started. didn't finish. only made it 38 minutes in]
Weapons (2o25) - dir. & written by Zach Cregger [perfect]
Keeper (2o25) - dir. & written by Osgood Perkins [you already know my thoughts]
The Monkey (2o25) - dir. & written by Osgood Perkins [great comedy. great prop. "I took liberties like a motherfucker," quoth the director, and King onscreen has never been funnier. top perkins]
Removal (2o1o) - dir. Nick Simon / co-written by Osgood Perkins & Nick Simon [quite simply did not like this. a first movie that shoulda been a student thing. obvious debt to fight club with none of the charisma]
Cold Comes The Night - dir. Tze Chun / co-written by Osgood Perkins & Nick Simon [ruled]
The Girl In The Photographs (2o25) - dir. Nick Simon / co-written by Osgood Perkins & Nick Simon [i like some of the intent and certain of the execution but the Nick Simon partnership feels like a weight, creatively, like maybe there's some overwriting; too many scenes, too much indulgence. also, opens with a william s. burroughs quote. pretentious, and i say this as a pretentious ass]
Gretal & Hansel (2o2o) - dir. & written by Osgood Perkins [maybe my favourite? will return...]
Wake Up Dead Man (2o25) - dir. & written by Rian Johnson [started it, twice, never finished it. didn't even get halfway. couldn't fuckin' care less]
Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2o21) [started it, ate cookies, tuned totally out, then my husband came home and we watched Plur1bus, attentively, instead]
Gretal & Hansel (2o2o) - dir. & written by Osgood Perkins [watched it with Siegfried. he dug the art production. it's one of the most visually stylistic things i've seen in a minute. it's got some joan of arc, it's got some jodorowsky, it's got some cosmatos. it leaves me feeling really tuned into a thing that's been made almost wholly by hand. like i know there's digital in this but i'm not trying to pick the digital out. mostly it's the practical sets and the unheimlich configuration of the witch's house that make me love this as much as weapons, or eggers' own vvitch, even though it's slower & less bogged down by plot mechanics than either. it's aspirational, as horror does, and it makes longlegs look like a mistake]
O Fantasma (2ooo) - dir. João Pedro Rodrigues [unexpected. best DVD i have ever found in a little free library. full stop. siegfried quite honestly couldn't have been more rapt. we never knew where the movie was going next. not a likeable protagonist but compellingly watchable. absolutely gorgeous night photography too]
Since everything STILL aches and I can only read so many comix, decided to try a recent Osgood Perkins flick. Not 'The Monkey', the OTHER one he released this year. 'The Monkey' was the sweet swing for some cash from an industry & a film industry press that keeps on asking inane questions like "Can Osgood Perkins Save Horror?" No, I watched 'The Keeper', which you probably haven't heard much about.
I sha'n't sell. It's not for anybody who isn't interested in answering the aforementioned question. Osgood seems a little invested in it, himself, because 'The Keeper' is marketed explicitly as Folk Horror, as distinct from Found Footage or Surival Horror or any of the other microgenres. It's a movie being pitched at this moment & audiences of This Moment-- at Netflix addicts who've watched 'The Summer Hikaru Died' & multi-culti casuals who think yokai are spoopy b/c Japan --a moment in which 'Weapons' (2025) was successful in leveraging Folk Horror into the greater cultural conversation, beyond the hardcore no-lifers who watch documentaries like 'Woodlands Dark & Days Bewitched'.
I'm not saying it's successful at being Folk Horror. I don't give a folk, frankly. But it is cannily marketed, and it is ruthlessly targeted, on people who care about such shit, and to people who really want to know if Norman Bates' Son & Acting Double Is The Future Of Horror. Because beyond marketing, the other number one preoccupation of this thing is The Woman Problem, or rather, what is Osgood Perkins' problem with women, and why does he seem to be writing them like he's trying to settle a score with his mother.
That sounds flip, but... Nope, I'm pretty sure I'm on the money with it. It's Perkins ironing out his issues onscreen, again, only with maybe a better sense of how to write a female protagonist than 'Longlegs' or 'I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House'. There are some recurrent themes: the house that hides a madness-inducing, mind-bending secret. The protagonist who seems to be focal subject of every drifting strand of plot, yet is deprived of all agency. The men who just have to deceive / destroy the female figures in their lives. It's not that Perkins is writing the same story over and over. He's not, precisely. But he's been putting us through the permutations, and I suspect 'The Keeper' may be Osgood's solution to the question of should he keep punishing his mom's ghost, for keeping his father's private life (& the reasons for his less-than-private death) secret from his kids.
This is all very clinical and says sweet f.a. about the film itself. The technique, the setting, the acting, the cinematography. It's a good-looking movie, overall, if you strip out some of the stuff that's actually AI-cg. It's too long, perhaps. But the ending... I'm a little torn, because the ending is so self-aware it manages to recontextualize the whole film for me to the extent that I simply can't treat it like its own story. It's not just a movie: it's a movie about Osgood Perkins' personal hangups, and how he feels about being That Guy Whose Fame & Fortune Are Tied To His Family History (or, maybe, how he feels about being That Guy Whose Entertainment Largely Trades In The Virtual Sacrifices of Female Scapegoats). It's a movie about what it means to be Osgood Perkins, in a ceaseless love-hate intergenerational cycle of mythmaking.
Which, fuck, sure. It's better than Aronofsky's 'Mother!', and probably less misogynistic.
I'm sure there are other, better ways to read 'Keeper'. Probably committed by people who aren't familiar with Perkins' filmography. For me, these reads are inescapable, and that's unfair to the performers & the creative crew who all came together to craft this thing that's so much more than just a bunch of tropes & post-production with an increasingly Famous Name in the director's chair. I don't know who's doing who a disservice, in this instance. Perkins, for doing what writer-director Critical Darling types are empowered to do? (Honestly, I could make most the same essential complaints about sexism & power dynamics-- by picking scabs on any David Lynch film you care to name.)
Or am *I* the critical dorkling, for not being able to retreat into my theraflu haze and watch a damned movie like a normie?
Osgood Perkins released two(!!) movies this year. He has a third in the can, for release in '26. Ya gotta stoke the fire while the pig-iron is hot, I guess. Let's see whether these nitpicks o' mine are still itchin', come next popcorn season.
Twin Peaks: s1 e5-7 (1990) - directed by Tim Hunter, Lesli Linki Glatter, Caleb Descanel, & Mark Frost [ you know what i think already. i mean, i'm rewatching this stuff. it's inexcusable, at my age, really. but it's a fascinating bit of americana with a little 'a'. i look at this and i think, yeah. i know how we got here. we trusted the fbi to take care of us. and i think that's where lynch & frost were coming from, too. to say so, on television, and to con an unsophisticated vast audience, purely by chance, during a writer's strike (i mean, isn't that why this hit the way it did? because television SUCKED?) to con all those millions of viewers, for a little while, into being invested in solving a crime no-one really wanted solved-- least of all, lynch --well. like i said: i think i know how we got here. don't you? ]
Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces (1992) - dir. by David Lynch [ "Don't take the ring, Laura. Don't. take. the. ring." ]
Twin Peaks: s2 e1 (1990) - dir. by David Lynch [ along with ronette, this cycle, i'm really watching andy. circle brand indeed! and madeline ferguson. and bobby's relationship with his dad (& the white lodge: a dream, as distinct from a vision). and audrey's unintentional playacting as laura palmer. as well as donna's. "I've told you: don't wear my STUFF!" there's some real moving & shaking going on with the side cast, all touched by The Weirdness in subtle ways. and while we're on the subject of moving & shaking, can i just say the dinner theatre at the hayward household gets more profoundly unbearable every time i watch it. sarah palmer is crawling out of her skin in that scene in a way that prefigures her inevitable eruption as judy in s3. best feature of the ep, of course, is gersten hayward wilding on piano in the credits. finest closing jam you're liable to hear outside s3's roadhouse, buddy ]
Twin Peaks: s2 e2 (1990) - dir. by David Lynch [ with the introduction of the tremond/chalfonts, coop's trangic past, and the introduction of elder briggs to margaret lanterman, all the major pieces are in place. "Just you / And I / Together / Forever." i've always been a vibes guy on lynch. i'm not into it for the plot logic of these things, or even the dream logic: but that stuff's totally there, if you do what the creator is asking of you, and dig for yourself. and what twin peaks was doing from the very beginning was ripples. little crests & troughs, ominous pitches of signal & noise, doppling ]
Twin Peaks: s2 e3 (1990) - dir. by Lesli Linki Glatter [ peaks giveth, & taketh away. lesli does her best to emulate lynch. engels does his best to imitate frost. we're gonna lose both for a while, after the harold arc ends. so savoring the flavor while i can... ]
Twin Peaks: s2 e4 (1990) - dir. by Todd Holland [ royal dano! ROYAL DANO!!! you cannot convince me lynch didn't love 'messiah of evil', man... ]
Bullet Train (2022) - dir. David Leitch [ one overstuffed, & undercooked, calzone ]
Twin Peaks: Northwest Passage (1989; "european" vhs edit) - dir. David Lynch [ "hey, buddy! got a nickel?" *dies* ]
Twin Peaks: s1 e1-4 (1990) - dir. by David Lynch, Duwayne Dunham, David Lynch, & Tina Rathborne [ doing peaks with my husband, albeit slightly out of sequence because he's seen all of it, once, whereas i am a lifer with all the dialogue etched on the lobes of my brain where most folks keep their multiplication tables. i'm just admiring the creators' bullshit, this go-round. the amount of riffing & making it up as they go. bluffing the network into just letting them play. and the unabashedly hack tropes they're playing with! stock characters & casting choices that were old when the players were all young... it really was something. now that we've finished the first day of cooper's life upon entering peaks, fire walk with me is next. for my husband's benefit, because he's never seen david lynch do a horror movie ]
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) - dir. by David Lynch [ "the trees... the trees..." ]
The New Mutants (2020) - dir. Josh Boone [ complete your collection of CG failbear today! ]
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) - dir. Jack Clayton
The Dunwich Horror (1970) - dir. Daniel Haller
All That Jazz (1979) - dir. Bob Fosse
Tap (1989) - dir. Nick Castle
Down Low (2023) - dir. Rightor Doyle [the TL;DR version: cringe school gay hijinx for fans of 'The Hangover'. because who tires of stories about babysitting idiots who can't handle their drugs? more of those. lest i sound like a terminal hater there's a genius edit in the 2nd act, just an old woman moaning in horror in a closet, that's absolutely clutch. overall? movie made all the choices-- opening with relentless Gilmore Girls quippiness, filling in the center with a joke writer's steamer trunk of gay generation gap gags, & ending (natch) at murder husbands. having made all these choices, the director chose to not cut ANY, resulting in a paint-by numbers third act which left me distracted & wondering how obsessively the director studied the underwater photography of 'Under The Skin', 'You Were Never Really Here' & Hannibal s3, considering the payoff. not sure the punchline makes any visual sense, because it sure fails to emotionally. but what the fuck. netflix, right?]
Evolution (2015) - dir. Lucile Hadžihalilović [uncomfortably bizarre]
Willy's Wonderland (2021) - dir. Kevin Lewis [not the cage i screened it for. neither 'mom + dad' nor a 'colour out of space', definitely not a 'mandy' or a 'longlegs', this is a one gimmick flick, and that note was politely lifted from cosmatos: make cage grimace & grunt, throw some lens flare, judder the camera & hose nick down with dark gorp. instant cinema. my most-cagehead mate talked this up, and sure, it's servicably straight-to-video, but... miles to go. still haven't done 'joe', 'unbearable weight of massive talent', 'renfield' or 'pig'. c'mon, let a brotha catch up with all this late stage cage!]
The Monster Squad (1987) - dir. Fred Dekker [quick fun flick to watch with your husband]
Chime (2024) - dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa [HOT DAMN, in the line of 'cure' & 'retribution'. nobody does movies about being haunted like kiyoshi kurosawa. most refined essence of k.k.: simply staging, lighting, & actors reacting to horrors beyond the frame. great stuff. extraordinary sound design + scientifically applied sensory overload. unnerving from end to end to end, and only 45 minutes.]
The Birds (1963) - dir. Alfred Hitchcock
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - dir. Jim Sharman
Earwig (2021) - dir. Lucile Hadžihalilović
Hellraiser (1987) - dir. Clive Barker [sig's request]
Cuckoo (2024) - dir. Tilman Singer
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1993) - dir. Francis Ford Coppola
Longlegs (2024) - dir. Osgood Perkins [en español]
River's Edge (1986) - dir. Tim Hunter [this is how you get twin peaks, pt.#7,362]
Don't Look Now (1973) - dir. Nicholas Roeg [sig's curiosity]
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) - dir. Robert Fuest [because my mom loved Vincent Price]
Penda's Fen (1974) - dir. Alan Clarke [marking it off the 'important queer film' list]
The Black Tower (1987) - dir. John Smith
Stoker (2013) - dir. Chan-Wook Park
The Exorcist (1973) - dir. William Friedkin [3/4s, sound off & subs on]
Look Back (2024) - dir. Kiyotaka Oshiyama [sig took me on a date]
The Host (2006) - dir. Bong Joon-Ho
The Timekeepers of Eternity (2021) - dir. Aristotelis Maragkos [from 'The Langoliers' (1995) - dir. Tom Holland]
Night Tide (1961) - dir.Curtis Harrington [1/2, research]
