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Tonight we screen famed French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot’s horror suspense thriller LES DIABOLIQUES (1955). The legend goes (and it very well may be fact) that Clouzot had beaten none other than Alfred Hitchcock by mere hours to option the source novel and the resulting masterpiece so infuriated Hitchcock (because it was as brilliant as Hitchcock knew it would be) that Sir Alfred immediately optioned the novelists Boileau-Narcejac’s D’Entre Les Morts which became Vertigo.

So in that weird cosmic way that never quite makes sense to us mere mortals…

“We’re not talking about any ordinary prisoner, Hoffman! We’re talking about evil on two legs!”

Okay, so, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers takes place a decade after Halloween and Halloween II, when, as you remember, Michael Myers gets shot 13 times, including twice in the eyes, and also gets exploded and burned to death on camera, mask and all. Dr. Loomis, who set the explosion, totally exploded in that explosion. No more Michael, no more Loomis, definitely the end forever no take backs.

Now here we are, ten years later, and Donald Pleasence has top billing! Can we but hope that he is the twin brother of the exploded Dr. Loomis? I fear ‘tis not to be. And, when it comes back down to it,

“It was the boogie man.”
“As a matter of fact, it was.”

So, I decided to watch all twelve Halloween films this month, and also blog about them for Secret Movie Club, an idea I may live to regret by mid-month, but it starts out strong with this classic…

This was a trailer that my friend Blake and I saw that made us really excited to see the movie, but unlike like Free Guy, which kept coming out with more and more trailers than ended up spoiling all the best bits of the movie, this stuck with just one trailer, and it was intriguing but…

As a filmmaker ages, one often expects for them to decline in the twilight era of their career. Seldom do they make something that would be considered one of their best.

Paul Schrader is one of the few exceptions in that age…

In the following decade after World War II, filmmakers around the world were faced with the scars that were left by the war, so many of them made meditations to show the beauty that was in life along with the suffering…

“You are being considered for the amazing opportunity that is life.”

I have not heard a single solitary word about this movie, not a peep, not a breath. Then I listened to last week’s episode of the podcast Filmspotting…

“I let the audience feel and think.” Those are the words said by the late German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was coming out of an age in European film where intellectualism was the driving point for many filmmakers, but Fassbinder was a rebel…