horror – Page 17 – PopCult Reviews

PopCult Podcast – Speak No Evil/Jack

Some horror movies do not effect us like we would prefer. Maybe it got lost in translation? And, Coppola delivers one of the oddest films of his career.

Solo Tabletop RPG Review – Thousand Year Old Vampire

Prologue
I did not grow up playing tabletop roleplay games. If you regularly read this blog, you know that I was homeschooled from Kindergarten through High School and then attended a private Christian college. If you know the type of people choosing to homeschool their children in the 1980s, you probably have a good picture of what I was dealing with. My parents did not make a lot of sense, and now I can reflect on it and realize they were just reactionaries. We have Focus on the Family and some of its satellite publications coming into our home. My parents regularly listened to Rush Limbaugh. I remember we also tuned into G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show. It’s pretty ugly when you look back on it.

PopCult Podcast – Top 5 Most Anticipated Films of 2023/Bram Stoker’s Dracula

2023 means new movies are coming. Plus, we take a look at the 1990s work of one of the great all-time movie directors.

Seth’s Favorite Television of 2022

While we are in the midst of watching Better Call Saul, I decided to hold out on including it on a list until we finish in 2023. It would be on here if I didn’t. That said, there are some incredible shows I got to see in 2022. In a media landscape that is exploding like the universe after the Big Bang so many things get lost in the shuffle. Have you ever just browsed Netflix and found dozens of shows multiple seasons in that you have never heard of before. Warner Discovery started what could be a horrific trend this year, by shelving completed and close to finished projects for the sake of tax write-offs. I am guessing it is scary time to want to develop your own series, afraid to pursue you passion project as it might become someone’s tax loophole and your potential audience never sees it. In these instances, piracy is an ethical act, a form of curation & preservation that the major media conglomerates are blind to. There were animated series made by queer & BIPOC creators that got trash canned by Warner this year, even physical DVDs pulled off the shelves. Fuck that corporation and fuck the new owners. My hope is we can see creative people using the self-distribution models and smaller streaming platforms to get their passion projects out there. Let the big boys starve to death. They deserve it. On to my favorites.

Movie Review – Bones and All

Bones and All (2022)
Written by David Kajganich
Directed by Luca Guadagnino

A recurring trope in American cinema is the story of a pair of lovers, lost in a world without much to offer them, traveling across desolate landscapes and having strange encounters. Most notably, Arthur Penn told us this story with Bonnie & Clyde and Terence Malick with Badlands; the list is ever-growing. More often than not, these stories serve as commentary on the plight of the current youth, a means to examine what makes it challenging to be coming into adulthood at a particular time and how young people respond to these obstacles. Luca Guadagnino’s latest, Bones and All, is one of those movies. He’s not brand new to these ideas; they were explored with a lot of depth in his HBO mini-series We Are Who We Are, albeit with a more grounded concept.

Movie Review – Red Desert

Red Desert (1964)
Written by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

One of the marked changes to the Western landscape following World War II was a boom in technological innovations, particularly the transformation of industrial models. Plastic manufacturing took off, leading to the production of household items that were cheaper as they could be cranked out by machines rather than made by hand. Antonioni had been using landscapes, particularly those shaped by humans, as a constant source of alienation for his characters. They find themselves lost among the new buildings whose architecture looms over them in sinister coldness. In Red Desert, we find ourselves in a unique setting; we are no longer in the cities of Rome or Milan. Now we are in industrial Northern Italy, in a place called Ravenna. Factories sprawl across the landscape pumping bilious clouds of toxins into the air. The noise of machines drowns out the calm of nature. A river is saturated in pollutants.

Movie Review – Skinamarink

Skinamarink (2022)
Written & Directed by Kyle Edward Ball

When you are a child, a dark house can be the most foreboding thing in the world. Something that was once familiar in the daylight becomes absolutely nightmarish when the sun sets. As you grow into an understanding of the world, those fears subside and are replaced with more “adult” anxieties. Yet, something remains in the back of your head. Some cold autumn night when you have to go down into the basement, or you wake up and need to use the restroom down a blackened hallway, those childhood terrors begin slithering back from the corners of your mind. This is the atmosphere that Kyle Edward Ball is attempting to invoke with his experimental horror feature Skinamarink.

Movie Review – Piggy

Piggy (2022)
Written & Directed by Carlota Pereda

Being fat is not fun sometimes. As a fat person growing up in a fatphobic culture, I have struggled with my body image. I know it’s far worse for women than me. Experiencing a disconnect between body and mind can be a horribly traumatizing experience. Piggy explores a terrifying weekend in one fat girl’s life when she becomes entangled in the murder spree of a serial killer in her small Spanish hometown. Much like Julia Ducournau’s work on Raw and Titane, this movie seeks to tell an intensely violent story while exploring issues surrounding being fat and being a woman.

Book Update – September/October 2022

White Noise
by Don DeLillo

Jack Gladney is a Professor of Hitler Studies at his Midwestern college. He’s married to Babette, his fourth wife, and they live with four children to make up their contemporary, for 1985, family. Consumerism dominates the family discourse; everything is analyzed through this critical lens. The pressures of modernity manifest in the form of a toxic airborne event that threatens to kill anyone exposed to it within 30-40 years. Death is a constant theme in this family’s life despite never really coming close to it. Their fears are based more on the concepts of mortality and the idea of being the last one left and watching the others pass away. To remedy this, Babette begins taking an experimental medication behind Jack’s back that makes her immune to these morbid thoughts but also distances her from the family as a side effect.

PopCult Podcast – Pearl/Top 5 Horror Films/Barbarian

The horror is upon us with this Halloween special. Learn the terrifying truth about the girl on the farm. Marvel at the best horror has to offer. And journey into the depths of an AirBnB gone wrong.