Am I still here? Yes. Okay. My internet is flirting with death, which is unfortunate. Welcome to my world. I am at 0% uploading, so. Oh, me too, actually. Sweet. Okay. Well. If this ends up being a lost episode, it ends up being a lost episode. Let's just roll with it. So welcome to Imported Horror. This is the podcast that brings you the very best of cosmic nightmares, gray scaled titans and European serial killers on Tubi from Beyond the Shining Seas. I'm Marcus.
I'm here with one of my creepy co-hosts. Grady. And we have sad, tragic news to report. I hope you're sitting down when you hear this, but Melissa will not be joining us because her cat Lucy, better known as Lucy Fur. Get it, get it, get it. Do you get it? Do you get it though? Like Lucifer? Like the devil, like the adversary.
Lucifer the fallen star. Anyway, Lucifer slept on Melissa's face all last night, and Melissa did not wake up and she suffocated to death on Satan's butt and now she's dead. Well, I think deep down, we both knew this was how she was going to go. I think she wanted it this way. Yeah. Once a strong word resigned. Acceptance. Maybe. We will be doing the celebratory New Jersey farewell.
We will buy a 40 and go a bridge and drink a little bit of it, and then probably just drop it over into the water and that'll be it. Are we also firing our guns in the air or am I confusing Jersey and Texas again? I don't know. Let's just try it and see what happens. Okay. She lived in two different worlds way She would have. Yes, Lucy, meanwhile will move on. Probably. You made. Us do this, Melissa. Probably claim Dan next and then who knows?
The world is his terrifying oyster. Her terrifying oyster. I'm actually not sure it's her. I think. I'm 90% sure of that. If only I remember when they first got her, she was in heat and they were really afraid that she'd get res. Ah, that's right. Yes, yes, yes. Well, and the antichrist transcends gender in many traditional and nontraditional ways. So. As we learned from the latest version of the omen. Yes. Yes, yes. There you go. There you go.
So pour one out for Ms. Persia and in the meantime we've got this. Week her ghost may or may not be back next week. We'll see. I might say on skills are Rusty. This week we've got into the Abyss, a trippy sci-fi noir that I found on Tubi from Argentina, and I watched Godzilla minus one minus color on Netflix, which there's not a whole lot to say that we haven't talked about, but I still want to touch on it. Sure. Gritty also found a Tubby movie.
Yes. I will be talking, well, first of all, I'm going to be talking about where, which is what Melissa did last time. I promised somewhat Ill-advised Lee to be the moderator because you and Melissa had some, I don't even remember if y'all had disagreements, but something caused me to say, okay, I'll see this movie and tell you what I think.
And even though Melissa's not here, even though she has disappeared up Satan's butt or whatever the hell story you made up about why she's not here this week, I am going to give my thoughts on where, because I paid actual real world money to watch where and I refuse to let that go to waste. I think that's reasonable. No argument. I also watched angst in a cult movie from Austria from 1983. It is, as Marcus alluded to also on Tobe.
It is a semit true story about a serial killer, and I will get into that when we get into that. That's cool. That's cool. Well, in the meantime, we have two drops to talk about over the next week. So both these are from Southeast Asia. August overall is pretty dry because I suspect the spooky season is right around the corner. Emily and I are already strategizing our trip to Spirit Halloween because we are going all out this year and maybe this.
May very will be the first Halloween that Roz has memories of. So you need to go out out this year? I think so. I think so. So I don't know when we're going to do it. If we want to September 1st, or if we want to wait until the last week of September, I don't know. We're still on the fence, but gothic fences will be a part of the aesthetic we've already decided. But one of these is on Shutter, the other one is on Netflix. The first is Shutter on Friday, August 16th, and that's Dancing Village.
The curse begins from Indonesia, and I got to say that's a killer title. I love that title. And I took the IMDB and I cut it down and I reworded it. So this is DI. MDB was loaded with spoilers it again more than I. No, it was just kind of lengthy and the copy editor in me had to just print. It. It's really only funny when it's about Du I understand.
Shaman instructs Myla. Mila Shaman instructs Mila to return a mystical bracelet, the atu, a mystical bracelet to the dancing village, a remote site on the easternmost tip of Java Island when she decides to return it without the help of a missing village, elder Mila must help curse someone to dance for the rest of her
life. And there's a little bit of backstory, you might not know this is a prequel to KKN and I'm sorry, my Indonesian is even worse than my Spanish did Ari, which is the highest grossing Indonesian film of all time. So there's that. Interesting. This one I think is getting a wider shutters, picked it up. It's getting a wider release here in the States. You can find the other one, but I think it's a little harder, and I'm totally here for dancing horror.
You can have a ton of fun with the body horror and the dancing and the rhythmic. I think. That's one of the scenarios in Betrayal at House Sun Haunted Hill that we've actually gotten. Yes. I think I remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like an evil. Music box or something that made players dance uncontrollably, something like that. Yes, yes, yes.
Yes. This movie does look creepy. Questionable. CGI, snakes Aside, and it looks like it's going to go in some really scary impedes directions, but there's one scene from the trailer that I keep getting hung up on, and that is where apparently the fact that this girl drank the coffee with the sweet and low in it means that she is being selected to be the debts or she is getting sacrificed to this village as equivalent of the wicker man.
And as far as barbaric lotteries and creepy villages go, that one feels ripe for abuse. Call it the Starbucks treatment. Yeah. I'm sure there's some cultural thing that I'm not getting, but that's where I got hung up. Yeah, yeah, I could see that. I could see that. It could be, I mean, they're pretty serious about coffee down there. Java, the term is from the island, or at least named after the island. But yeah, I dunno.
It does look like it could be creepy, but the dancing that we saw in the trailer was sort of clumsy and awkward, almost looking like it was clumsy and awkward by design, which that wasn't, if you tell me dance horror, I want to see some freaky dance moves with my horror. Sure. They may just not be putting that in the trailer, but speaking of someone who took an East Asian religions class in college, the awkward dancing, that's a lot more true to life.
And you can play with that too. I don't know. It made me think of the Suspiria remake, which has some controversy because, well, not even controversy, it just has very little to do with the original ria and they took the name and it's basically different movie, but it does have that dancing angle. And dancers do some freaky dance body horror stuff, and it's very different kind of dancing, but there's plenty of room there. So I'm hoping that they play with that.
They really double down on the dancing part of it. I have no rhythm in case anybody is curious. The only dance I can do is to Macarena. And even that, it's been a little while. I have no physical rhythm. Give me a rhythm based video game or a musical instrument. I'm there if I have to physically move to rhythm myself, that shit ain't happening. What was that game with the, it's like Zelda, but it's to a beat, like a rhythm, rhythm dancer. Yes, yes, yes.
This gave off those vibes. I. Have never made it past the second level in that game. That has nothing to do with my sense of rhythm and everything to do with the fact that that game is fucking hard. It looks hard, but I can see this being a lot of fun. So I hope it's good. I hope it works out. I can move in rhythm just fine. I just can't keep track of when the skeletons are about to attack or not are very tiny. Sliding difficulty of some sort. On Tuesday the 20th we have, oh, okay.
That's why it's coming out on a Tuesday. That makes it, okay. The title of it is Terror Tuesday Extreme from Thailand. It's dropping on Netflix, a collection of haunting hit stories inspired by the Terror Tuesday radio program with terrorizing twists and turns that are dialed up to the extreme. This is an eight episode anthology series. I'm totally here for the radio angle station. I'm totally here for the radio station angle.
I dunno how extreme the trailer looked, but you give me some radio looks I. Can work. It looks actually going to go some places. I'm reluctant to admit this because it exposes how ignorant I am sometimes of the things we review and the countries they're from. But my first thought when watching this trailer was, oh God, please don't tell me this is Indonesian. I said, in my Nightmares and Daydreams review that it was the only part of this big
Netflix push in Indonesia that is relevant to our show. If I miss this, it's going to make me look like an idiot. And then I checked on, I was like, oh. Yeah. It does look kind of similar in some ways though. Anthology series from that part of the world, maybe not as much, but at least a little bit. Yeah, my personal guess, just based on the trailer, and I will review this eventually, maybe not next week, but sometime is I'm guessing it's going to be less stylish than Nightmares and daydreams,
but a bit more intense. I mean, yeah, the Nightmares and Daydreams is by Joko Andmore, but he really only got his joko more on in a couple of episodes, whereas this, at least from the trailer, feels like maybe it'll only go up to an eight instead of a 10, but it'll go up to that eight a lot more often. I can see that. I can definitely see that. I do wonder about Tuesday. That's got to be the least scary day of the week. Right?
It's like Monday you don't want to go back to work. No, Wednesday is hump day and you're just thinking about Thursday and Friday. Saturday isn't scary. No, I mean it's the day that, I mean, Friday and Saturday are the day that you get most horror things, but it has nothing to do with the day itself being scary. It's the day that you can stay up as late as you want watching horror crap. Yeah. Yeah. I dunno. Yeah, I mean, Monday the 13th would not have had the same impact or that doesn't work.
So Tuesday, Tuesday is an interesting choice. Maybe I'm just missing something about there Thai work week, or maybe there's something about Tuesday. I dunno. It's the only day of the week that begins with a hard tea and they had to iterate it with terror. That's true. That's true. The alliteration is important. That's clutch. This could just as easily have been Taco Tuesday Extreme, but Island isn't as big about tacos as we're. I'm a big fan of tacos though. Taco Tuesday. I'm here for that,
which I did not. So I was in, oh, we were off last week partly because I was out of town at a conference and partly just because everybody had, Grady had stuff to do. Melissa was busy getting suffocated by her cat and want to thank Philadelphia for y'all's hospitality. It was a great conference. We were right near the Reading Terminal market, which is like a big calling it a mall isn't accurate, but it's just a ton of restaurants and food stores and
tourist trinket places and everything. It was really good. Got some good cheese steak, got some good food, but I was not brave enough to try the barbecue or the tacos in Philadelphia. And I hope y'all don't take it personally. I'm not brave enough to try the tacos in anywhere north of here. I was going to name a specific state and then I started having this paralysis of wait, do they have good wait, do they have good tacos? Am I going to offend our audience?
Do I care about North our audience about this? No. I've decided I don't, I'm afraid to try tacos in Tennessee. I definitely don't want to try them in Philadelphia. Yep, yep. That is the correct answer. And I lived in San Antonio for more than a decade. I am allowed to be in elitist brick about tacos. Oh god. San Antonio. Oh, I loved it. Oh my God. So do you, tell me your thoughts on where, which is the Romanian werewolf horror movie that we talked about last week?
Well, I'm just going to go ahead and rip the mandate off this movie was bad. What? No. But there's a very specific element of it that bad that I think deserves special mention. See, I think both the procedural legal drama first half and the super violent werewolf, second half would've been better if Gavin the douchey British ex-boyfriend was not in the movie. He is the Jar Jar Binks of this movie.
I mean, that may even be a little unfair to Jar Jar because I think we have room to have a redemption conversation about Jar. I think maybe he was treated a little unfairly. Well, I. Say this guy, maybe not so much. I'll say this about Jar, and it's actually kind of a similar thing I have to say about this movie. Jar Jar was not the only bad thing about Star Wars episode one.
Yes. Whereas Gavin is not the only bad thing about where there are plenty of issues with where the legal drama, if you have almost even a passing knowledge and law if say you were raised by a lawyer and a judge, it's a lot of the first half of wer is just going to seem like dabbling nonsense to You. I can just see your dad watching this, which is this confused look on. So this is where my opinion actually kind of differs from Melissa.
I actually really liked the second half when what we're going to charitably call a werewolf was tearing shit up. There were some gore effects in this movie that were actually well done. And yeah, he wasn't a werewolf in the standard sense, but the bad werewolf, whose name I forget, the one that does most of the killing. He was genuinely creepy. And then Gavin started shaving himself for no reason once he got infected. And I don't understand why he did that. That was so poorly established.
I mean, I think Twilight Fanfic may not be a completely unfair description of this film. I guess. It's mean, but maybe accurate. I dunno. There was a lot about that character that rubbed me the wrong way. Just he was such a punchable douche in a way that I tolerate in horror movies only in very small doses. And only if something very specific happens to them later that
spoilers because I don't care, did not happen to Gavin. And it also added, and I mean this may just be a pep peeve of mine because I'm ace, although I've heard plenty of non ace people complain about this kind of thing in movies. It added a romantic subplot to a movie that didn't need it. Yeah. I think that's fair. Yeah. Not all stories need a romantic subplot. Most stories don't need a romantic subplot. Movie writers. It would be nice if you stopped adding them. Yeah, I could see that.
You add them, write them better. But you don't understand Grady, Grady, Grady, he had really big feelings and he didn't need any of his body hair. So how do you reconcile those two things, big feelings, body hair. I want to pose that to our audience. How does it feel when you have big feelings and lots of body hair? What can you do but shave yourself and run around having Twilight showdowns under the full moon? I mean, he had no choice.
I mean, that's completely accurate and true, but I feel like that's an issue that that is a corner that the writers could have avoided writing themselves into. Well, yes. Yes, that's true. If he had had less body hair, none of it would've been an issue. It was not a good movie just.
And also the shaky cam did not bother me as much as it's starting to make me realize something, and I may not actually hate Shaky Cam, I may just have disliked just about every shaky Cam movie we've talked about for the podcast for reasons completely independent of them being shaky Cam, because my only issue with the shaky cam in this movie is that there was absolutely no reason for it to be shaky Cam. That made no goddamn sense. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm agreeing right there with you.
But other than that weird camera choices. What you think of, I know it's been a few years, but what'd you think of not 10 Cloverfield Lane, but Cloverfield? The original that I. Liked it by virtue of it being a Kaiju movie, and I think I may have pared it in the comic at one point, but I think that had more to do with just the fact that I wanted to write a Kaiju story where one of my characters grew giant, and that was the most recent Kaiju movie. But I remember liking it.
I have not bothered to seek it out in the years since it's come out, so I'm not sure how well it's held up. Yeah, me neither. I. Think especially after seeing Godzilla minus one, most Kaiju movies that aren't Godzilla minus one are going to look like horse shit. So I'm probably not going to seek it out anytime soon, but I remember being fine with it when it came out. Yeah, yeah. That's my recollection too. But if that one didn't weird you out on the shaky camp, then nothing will.
Oh yeah, I saw that in theaters. It had no problem. I would remember if the movie made me physically ill. I saw it between one of our other college roommates, dwindle Who, yes, that's his name, his self described nickname that he chose, that dwindle on one side, and then a woman I didn't know on the other, and I was fine, but both of them were really having a hard time with it, and I was convinced that if one of them spewed, the other one would as well.
And they had warning signs all over the theater going in, this could give you motion sickness. And Dwindle was like, no, I can handle it. I'm a big boy. I mean, granted it wasn't on a big screen, but I remember him watching Blair Witch with us and taking it like a champ. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They held it together, but I was just sort of resigned for a little while there. If they both threw up, you were going to throw up. I mean, that's just how it works.
I was in the splash zone. There was no way I was going to avoid. It for reasons. Completely independent of the movie, just you were going to have vomit on you. Yes. When the added dimension of smell would really just ratchet that experience into uncharted territory. So I think it's safe to say you would not recommend where. Not if you have to pay money for it, which as far as I can tell is it's not available on any streaming services that you'd have and just
have it there for free. Paying for the streaming service, I think can only get it on demand. And that's unfortunate because it is not good enough to pay for. That would honestly be a fun hate watch to watch for free if you had that option available to you. If it were on Tubi or something, I'd say get drunk and go for it. So I think it's been on Tubi before, I just think it maybe be rotated an older movie, so I'm sure it's been on stuff and off stuff. The economics of streaming.
I've looked everywhere for a way to watch it without having to pay money for it. Yeah, well keep an eye on it. Sooner or later it'll probably be everything winds up on two B sooner or later. It's a gr inevitability. So speaking of Godzilla, I watched, so at the conference in Philadelphia the night before, I should have been working. I should have been doing all sorts of stuff.
And instead I was like, no, actually I'm going to put Godzilla minus one minus color on in the background because a lot of hotels these days, you can log into your Netflix in the smart pv and that lasted about 15 seconds. And then I realized, no, my entire being is going to be focused on Godzilla for the next two hours. That's just how it's going to be. And I was fine with. That. Yeah, there are some movies that you can have on in the background while you work. This is not one of them.
And I thought, well, I've seen it before, and yeah, I had, but also I hadn't the black and white version. I think it's a yes and type of thing because it is a gimmick in a way, if not a gimmick, a vanity project, it's a film snob move for film snobs. This is not going to be widely viewed. This is not what people are going to consider the definitive edition of this movie. Now this is someone at Toho thinking on a whim that this was a good idea and having enough clout to make it happen.
And he was, or whoever they were was right because they didn't just slap a filter on there and go with it. They actually did a lot of work editing it to where it looks like a movie from the forties or fifties, especially when Godzilla isn't on the screen. If you had told me this was shot in 1954 when the original one was shot, I would've believed you. It looks like an old samurai flick,
an old Japanese movie. It looks a lot like some of our older westerns. It, it's just the way the shots are composed and colorized. They did their homework and it looks really, really cool. Godzilla is clearly not a dude in a suit, and it was a little bit harder to square the modern CGI with the 1954, the vintage aesthetic. It worked. It just also kind of defied that suspension of disbelief at that point, you know.
Watching. Yeah, it would've been interesting to see them try to recreate the whole movie of practical effects, but I feel like at this point they would just be lighting money on fire for the sake of it. So I get why they didn't do that, as cool as that would've been. Well, and Godzilla looks great in black and white, don't get me wrong. Especially when he's, he does his nuke blast and the tail and all the spines light up.
This was an awesomely designed Godzilla is just clearly been designed and animated using techniques that were not available in 1954. And that's going to cause some whiplash if you watch this version of the movie. Yes, yes, yes. Other than that though, it was really well done. And I'm sitting there, it's like 1230, I have a panel in the morning. I should not be up. I should not be in.
I'm just sitting there on the bed fighting back tears by the end of this movie because it's just grabbed me emotionally again. And I knew what was going to happen and I knew, did you. See the thing on the neck this time? I did. Yes, I did. And it is sort of a blank and you'll miss it, but it is clearly there on purpose. I don't know what that means. I dunno. I chose to ignore it in the moment because the ending works much better
that way, I think. But I did see it. You're right. And that is a real clever, and the camera does kind of linger on it for a bit. So. I noticed it on the rewatch because I was kind of debating with myself, okay, does this ending work? Does this ending not work? Is this a compound? What the hell is that? What the hell is that? Yep, yep, yep. But I think it's a good example of a movie.
It would've had an emotional impact on me a couple of years ago, but now, especially with Roz, because there's a little girl in the movie that just, it's a shorter route to gut punch for a lot of movies. And this one's up there. So I don't know if you're a film guy or a film person and you just really into the black and white style, absolutely watch it. If you're a casual viewer, are you going to like it more than the color? I dunno.
But the AV Club has an article about a lot of movies that did this, and it's a lot more than I thought, and it is sort of usually an art house or a maybe not vanity project, but definitely a really passionate creation for a relatively small audience. Dude at the studio thought it would be neat and made it happen.
Yeah. The one that I hadn't thought about that I want to see now is there's a black and white version of Mad Max Fury Road I didn't realize existed, and I could see that working really well in black and white too. And again, is it Vanity project? Yes. Is it cool also? Yes. That one's a little bit of a harder sell for me just because Godzilla. Yeah, I think black and white, because Godzilla has a history that starts in the black and white film era, fury Road.
There's some connections there that my brain's not making. Yeah, I mean, that's fair. That's fair. Let's see, what else was on the list? Raiders of the Lost Arc? Steven Soderberg did a black and white version that I could. See, that I can see based on the old Pulp Action Hero movies of the past, so that I can see. Let's see, Logan, the Wolverine movie that was kind of a neo western Logan Noir. I could maybe see that. If it weren't tied into X-Men.
Yeah. That's the only, yeah, no, the general tone of the movie. If you can divorce yourself from the fact that it's Wolverine, then yeah, it's totally a black and white noir movie, but it is impossible to divorce your brain from the fact that it's Wolverine because he's. Wolverine. Yes. Nightmare Alley, which was said back in the thirties, I think. So that makes sense too. I wanted to see that one. I just haven't gotten to it yet for literally no reason.
So maybe a mixed bag, but I think it's a cool option, and odds are if you're listening to a niche horror podcast, you're probably the niche kind of movie fan that would at least be interested in some of them. So yeah, you want to tell me about serial killers from the eighties on Tubi? Oh my God, I'm getting chills just hearing that out loud. I'm getting chills. Alright, so
I did angst from 1983. It's from Austria, and I picked this movie the way that I often pick movies when I don't have the specific one in mind. I type foreign horror movie into Google, and I sort through the AI generated list that it provides me until I get to one that we haven't done for the podcast yet. And that's actually foreign available from streaming and is in fact a real movie because sometimes AI generated are going to lead you a stray.
And this week it gave me something that's kind of out of my wheelhouse, but I'm going to do my best to do it justice. The IDB summary, A troubled ma'am with an unsettling resemblance to Conan O'Brien gets released from prison and starts taking out his sadistic fantasies on unsuspecting family living in a secluded house. I added the part about Conan. No, but I could see it. I pulled up the IMDB myself and. He looks like Conan O'Brien in a Tommy wig.
Yeah, he kind of does. Yeah, maybe a little younger, but yeah, I could. Oh, yep. There's no escaping that. Yep. So this movie is loosely based on the Real Life Murderer Warner Music. I probably didn't pronounce this right, but this guy's a scumbag, so I don't care who tortured and killed a family of three shortly after being released from prison on parole.
And this was a gruesome case with severe repercussions for the Austrian criminal justice system that I can't really go into too much detail because this movie followed that story closely enough that doing so would just spoil the crap out of the movie. But if you want, you're a big true crime guy, or if you don't feel like sleeping tonight, feel free to look the guy up.
And because of him, Austrian prisons are a lot more selective about which criminals they let out on parole and they do psychiatric evaluations now, and that's a whole thing. When was the crime? Was this a recent, so the movie was 83? Yeah, I probably should have put that in my notes. I want to say mid seventies. Okay, so not. Immediate, not super recent, but yeah, not like a rip from the headlights. Close. Enough.
This movie was also a band in most of Europe for being too violent and nice was actually not distributed in the United States in any capacity. No DVDs, no streaming until a couple years ago. And now it's on to me. Now it's on Tub Me. God, I love you. Tubi never changed. That said, our standards here at Imported Horror, it's pretty tight, but the fact that it was censored at all is just interesting to me and I thought it was worth mentioning. Yeah. Well it was. Probably on the.
Yeah. I was going to say it was probably on the video nasty list. Oh, almost certainly. And that's always a fun list to look over. I just said that I wasn't going to go too into the guy's real life history because it would spoil the movie. There is one thing about this movie that I am absolutely going to spoil because I know that the mystery of it would maybe negatively impact some people's enjoyment of it. I am going to spoil the fate of the family's wiener dog.
Who has a line in the credits. Actually, Cuba. Yes. Was the dog's real name? Yes. Now, given the tone and how messed up the villain is, it's going to seem incredibly likely that the dog will die in a gruesome fashion. The dog does not. The dog survives the movie mostly because it is hilariously indifferent to the plight of this family. For example, I. Shouldn't be laughing, but that's great. When the killer, and I'm not being vague with Garita or anything, no one in this movie has names.
When the killer is going after the elderly woman of the family, the dog cares way more about eating the elderly woman's dentures, which is presumably a treat that the dog has been often denied. They're making any effort to protect his owner whatsoever. The dog actually decides at some point through doggy logic that the killer is his new best friend and just happily follows him around the house and gets in a car with him. The killer feeds him a sausage.
Which I mean, maybe that's some deep emotional metaphoric take on crime and punishment, or maybe it's just the dog was having a blast and the actor and the dog really got along. It could literally be anything with this kind of movie, because to me. And on a second watch when I wasn't worried about, oh God, what is he going to do to that poor dog? That part was really funny to watch. Well, sadly, this was Cuba's only appearance, his only IMDB credit, and there are no photos of Cuba on imdb.
So I think we need justice for Cuba. He is a wiener dog. Picture a wiener dog. You've got. Uba. The cinematography in this movie was really cool. It was mostly a bunch of really weird angles and long tracking shots. A lot of them were kind of focused on the killer. If this weren't made in the eighties, I'd swear he had a GoPro attached to him. And just kind of focusing on his face as he just gets more and more unhinged as he's wondering the house. And there's also almost no dialogue between the
characters. And pretty much all of the expedition that we get in the movie is the American psycho esque narration from the killer's perspective. And Z goes into his backstory and why he is doing all this stuff and what he's planning to do next. And being brutally honest, I kind of feel like the movie could have done without it. Yeah. Part of it is because, and it also ties into why I had to watch it twice. This movie is only available in subtitles.
And when the narration is only tangentially related to what's actually happening on screen, that's a problem. If you don't understand the language that's being spoken and have to read it underneath on the bottom of the screen and rewatching it, and not paying attention to the subtitles whatsoever made me realize, Hey, none of that needed to be in this movie. It was all kind of cliched anyway. Well, there was in a violent nature, I think just hit Shutter is about to hit shutter,
but the camera's just following a creepy serial killer. And there's no, to my knowledge, there's no reasoning, there's no logic, there's no exposition. It's just murder. Murder, gruesome murder, gruesome murder, maybe sort of a similar vibe. And yeah, that's what this movie should have been too. Two, really nothing was added by the running commentary of, wow, my stepdad was mean to me, and now I like to scare people before I kill them. Wow. The movie didn't need that. Yeah, I could see that.
And the soundtrack was good. It was aggressively eighties horror. Nice. Heavy on the synths. Nice. And the family that The killer targets are super weird and probably deserved to be in their own movie in sort of a Austrian Texas chainsaw massacre kind of vibe. Okay. Because they live in this big empty house that kind of looks run down. And the Doist reason for it is obvious. This was a small, independent film.
This is probably the only location they could get, but the Watsonian reason for why they live this is just completely open to interpretation. And the family consists of the elderly woman, her adult daughter, and her mentally challenged adult son. And the mentally challenged adult son kind of feels like a Michael Palin playing a character in Amani Python skit, which is super distracting. But minor spoilers, he is not in the movie long enough for that to matter too much.
And the other thing that jumps out at me is that the serial killer is super incompetent, but they actually managed to play this for scariness and not for laughs because the fact that he's so bad at what he is doing means all of the terrible stuff he's doing to this family just takes longer now. Yeah, that's a fine line to walk. Yeah. There's this one scene where the young woman escapes and is running through the house in the dark trying to get away from him.
And on paper, it should be funny because of how easily she escapes from the truly half-assed way that he had her captured. And he doesn't know her name, so he is just saying, Hey, lady Lady, and trying to call her like a dog. And he's also moving really weird because of other things that have happened to him throughout the movie, but the way it's shot and just the ominous buildup actually makes it kind of scary. I can see that. And a big part of that is the actor the
killer. His name is Erwin Litter. I'm probably not pronouncing that right. He's a prolific German character actor and unsettling similarity to Conan O'Brien aside, he is really good at playing a creepy, violent weirdo. Yeah, I pulled up his, he was in Das Boot, the original. Yeah. He's got, I mean, let's see here, 120 titles on imd. Good Lord. Yeah. If you know German cinema, he's basically that guy that's everywhere. Yeah. Motion picture, Terra Scale. I will give this a solid three.
Just the movie is actually good at being creepy at points. Quality is a four for such a small budget. This movie was shot really well. The cliche backstory and some filming choices that were kind of weird for the sake of being weird, kind of hold it back from being a five enjoyment. I'm going to give it a three. This movie was perfectly good for what it was, and learning about the real life stuff was interesting.
But at the end of the day, true crime isn't my jam, and this movie didn't really do much to change my mind. That's fair. That's fair. I can see that. I would recommend it to both you, because I know some of the tracking shots of cinematography are going to be right up your alley, and I'd recommend it to Melissa because I know the true crime thing will be up her alley. She would've loved to watch this before she suffocated to death. Yes. Very sad. Yes.
Well, I'll check it out. I'll mention it to Emily too, if not the movie, the Guy, because she listens to so much true crime stuff. I'm sure she's heard of him, so that'll be interesting. Well, the other one, so before I left the Philadelphia that Saturday night, I was in kind of a weird mood, and I didn't want to watch a bad movie because I didn't want to be disappointed, but I also didn't want to get too into a movie too invested in something.
And that's a real fine line to walk when you're looking for. Okay. And it was starting to rain in real life. And I stumbled across on Tubi, a movie called Into the Abyss, and the Spanish title is me Contrera Pro. Desmo, which translates to you will find me in the depths of the abyss, which is just objectively a better title. 10 out of 10, no notes. That's fantastic. So much better. The IMDB summary, trying to escape danger in a post-apocalyptic world,
then in realize that his existence will be put to the test. Okay. Well, so it's horror with love, crafty, monster things, and it's basically somewhere between 28 days later and Blade Runner. Okay. Because most of the movie is this guy wandering around through this broken city at the end of the world with big love crafty monsters and smaller person sized screechy, love, crafty and monsters chasing him through everything. Those are almost worse. Yeah. Oh,
they're definitely scarier. They're definitely scarier than the big ones. And there's not a ton of backstory. There's not a ton of exposition. There's not even that much dialogue. There's just a ton of rain and a ton of atmosphere and a ton of vibes. And it looks like a darker, maybe more rundown version of the opening scene from The Matrix, but without the Kung fu, the cityscape, imagine it darker traipsing along the rooftops and everything else.
Atmospherically, the vibes were 10 out of 10. It was raining. I'm imagining like a dark city sort of situation. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not black and white, but it feels kind of black and white just because it's all atmosphere. It's pensive, it's moody. It is all kinds of weird, and because it's slow and because they rarely stop to tell you anything, it is actually really scary. So it's a slow burn, but you also feel it.
And the Blade Runner with all the rain and the sci-fi, it just vibe wise, it totally worked for me. It's vague, I think purposefully. So it never really tells you what the monsters are or what happened. You just get snippets and it escalates in ways that might feel kind of strange.
It worked for me partly because there's one blink and you miss it line of dialogue that changes the entire framework of the movie and made it actually, I took it into a place that's really consistent with my worldview and my background. I don't know if that's just me seeing what I want to see or if, if that was actually intended. I have no idea. Part of it comes down to a translation question, and it's not a translation. Spanish and English. This movie is Argentinian.
It's something more complicated than that. We would've the same issue with the same word in English. So if you're not feeling ambiguous and maybe a little weird, actually not, maybe a lot weird. Definitely a lot weird. Then this isn't your movie, but especially if it's raining outside, oh, that was the perfect, but it's gloomy vibes. It's atmospheric weird. And I normally don't like post-apocalyptic stuff, and this one really worked for me. It is murky,
and there's not even that much dialogue. It almost felt like a video game, like a survival horror video game, because Bannon, the guy you're following, finds a walkie-talkie, and he finds a frequency on the wall. So he dials into the frequency and he just starts talking and somebody answers. And so most of the movie, he's just talking to the walkie-talkie and avoiding the things, the lovecraft and things, the aliens, the whatever they are, he's avoiding them.
So it feels very video gamey because that whole setup and the atmosphere. Yeah, I gave it a three on Letterboxed, it probably deserves a three and a half just because, yeah, the ending, either it'll work for you or it won't, but the vibes are just scratch that itch. If I need something different and I need something, I don't need to think about too hard, but it's still captivating. And this just nailed that for me.
So I don't know that I'd pay money for it, but it's on Tubi and I feel like a fanboy like Tubi, yay, go. But that's sort of where I'm at right now. That's Fair. Tub has a place in our popular culture. Yeah. And I think you'd like it for the video game vibes. I think Melissa might, I'm curious if either of y'all ever watch it, because I want to know if you catch that one line of dialogue and you take the same thing from it, or if you catch something else or if it,
yeah. And not that much has been written about this. That's the other thing. There are a couple of reviews, but way, way less than I was expecting. Or noir sci-fi horror. Yeah. That's cool. Have check it. So yeah, probably enjoyment was probably a five. The tear scale, maybe a two, maybe a three. Quality. Yeah. Three, maybe three and a half, three in the moment. But I also tend to be kind of generous and I'm trying to fight that. So maybe it deserved a little more than that.
So do we want to spin the wheel or do we want to give it another break? I actually have no idea what I'm doing next time. So why don't we spin the wheel. Got to find the wheel. Where'd you go? Wheel, you're on my phone somewhere. There you are. Onibaba from 1964 maybe. Yeah, this looks like something that I would pick. Okay. Okay. This is definitely, oh, it's on Max. Delightful. So this is 1964. It's from Japan. You can tell that just from looking at the poster. Yep. Yep. Oh yeah. No,
this does look cool. I think I remember reading about this. Two women kill Samurai and sell their belongings for a living while one of them is having an affair with their neighbor. The other woman meets a mysterious samurai wearing a bizarre mask. I think this is an old school folk, folk horror. And I think I read about it in an article or an anthology collection of Fulco. Yeah. But this looks cool. Okay, sweet. I'll absolutely do that next week. Nice. Thank you,
will we very much appreciate it. Well, if you're still listening, follow us on Threads and Letterboxed. Give us a shout out over email or your social media of choice. Tell your friends about it, tell your family, tell anybody into horror. Hey, these guys are cool, and have a podcast. You should listen and send condolences to Melissa for her tragic demise at the hands of her cat. Yeah. Hopefully she won't be back from the dead next week.
Maybe it'll be like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer season seven. And we'll have the seance and she'll claw through the grave and she'll be all pissy because we pulled her out of heaven. And it'll be like a little, maybe it was season six. I don't know. After Buffy was good. I think that's reasonable. Anyway, we'll talk to y'all next week.