Frank's Movie Log

As a comet arcs across the night sky, a woman talks to her boyfriend on her cellular while parking her car outside a friend’s house. She’s arriving for a dinner party. Before she can finish the conversation, her phone’s glass screen cracks in her hand and the phone goes dead. She enters the party and relates the strange occurrence. Other guests arrive. Wine and stories flow. Then a blackout. The entire neighborhood sits dark save a house a few blocks up the street. Two guests venture out. Weirdness begets mystery, which begets existential horror. Spoilers follow. Continue reading...

A woman chairs a meeting of like-minded women. Afterwards, some attendees stop at a local market for wine. A chance encounter escalates to confrontation and a series of dreadful choices. Continue reading...

A young couple dine at Hawthorn, the restaurant of reclusive chef Julian Slowik. It sits on a private island, charges $1250 a head and serves twelve customers a night. But what begins as a traditional fine-dining experience grows more confrontational. Continue reading...

It was a good run. Since the original Saw, a sequel every year for six years. Each trying—with varying degrees of success—to serialize a single labyrinthine story. I applaud the effort. Continue reading...

Possession is about the bitter dissolution of a marriage. There are… other elements, but we’ll get to them later. Continue reading...

Following the events of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Freddy Krueger languishes in hell, forgotten by the children of Springwood. To rekindle their fear, Freddy resurrects Jason Voorhees and unleashes him on Springwood. As the bodies pile up, the town’s older residents fear Freddy has returned. This fear feeds Freddy, returning him to full strength, but he finds reigning in Jason a challenge, leading to a battle of the monsters. Continue reading...

The screen’s first Raymond Chandler adaptation. It takes the setup and principal characters of Chandler’s novel, Farewell, My Lovely, transplants the location to New York City, substitutes gentleman detective Gay Laurence (aka The Falcon), played by George Sanders, for Philip Marlowe, and grafts on a pair of sidekicks. The result underwhelms. Continue reading...

The deleted scenes reveal the sequence involving the National Archives employee began as a post-credits tag. Continue reading...

The Watch TCM print lacks the synthesized score dubbed onto most distributions.

Aboard an ocean liner just docked in Veracruz, Mexico, William Bendix bursts into Robert Mitchum’s cabin pointing a gun. Bendix wants something he believes Mitchum stole. “You’ve got the wrong man,” Mitchum says. Continue reading...