Fantastic female leads and two road trips to hell: Mid-January first watches

I watched eight movies for the first time from Jan. 15-23. Here is how I rank them, from least favorite to favorite.

8. Dead End, 2003, directed by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, streamed on Prime Video, 0.5 star.

Mercy, did I ever dislike this one. Opening scene is a family traveling in a car bickering and attacking each other over dumb shit. I hated all five of them from the top, and it continued for several minutes. I ended up spending about 82 minutes hate-watching this 85-minute film. And I spent a good 70 minutes of that trying to figure out what this film was trying to be before I figured out where it probably was going.

Absolutely nothing here worked for me. Even the predictable ending, which did sort of tie everything together, missed the mark.

I'm not going to waste any more time on this one. You shouldn't, either.

7. Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, 1974, directed by John Hough, streamed on Prime Video, 1 star.

This is not the worst movie I saw this month. I enjoyed the cinematography from those beautiful rural Northern California locations, and the stuntwork was pretty cool. But everything else really sucked. Bad writing, atrocious acting, a dumb title for a movie with three central characters (Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Another Guy Riding Shotgun).

I read it was a big hit, made a ton of money in its day. Still, I think a lot of people named Fonda should have been embarrassed by this.

6. Foxy Brown, 1974, directed by Jack Hill, streamed on Prime Video, 2 stars.

This is a classic of a genre (blaxploitation) I have known of forever but had never experienced until now. I can say that I appreciated it for its place in history, but I cannot say I enjoyed it.

It definitely is a movie stuck in its own time. The racial hatred going both ways is shocking to my 2025 sensibilities, the misogynistic violence is shocking, the amateurish screenplay and directing and acting is shocking.

I'm glad I watched it. It satisfied my historical curiosity. But I'll probably not watch another one of these ever again.

5. Suspiria, 1977, directed by Dario Argento, streamed on Prime Video, 2 stars.

This one was a big experiment on my part. A couple of YouTubers I follow are big fans of Italian horror and have cited Suspiria as a classic of the genre. And they cite Dario Argento as sort of the godfather. So I dived in.

Nah, not for me. I loved a couple of the technical aspects of this movie. It looks fantastic with its vivid use of color and lighting. It sounds great with its brilliant prog-electronic score. But other than that, I didn't like it much at all, Mrs. Lincoln. The plotting felt like just a random assortment of scenes, the practical effects seemed amateurish, the editing was choppy, the acting was terrible.

I dunno. I love Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, and Suspiria suggests to me that spaghetti horror is quite derivative of that. But it didn't really work for me here. After this disappointment, I'm going to postpone my investigation of the giallo subgenre for the time being.

4. The Stepfather, 1987, directed by Joseph Ruben, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars.

Back in December, I saw an awful 2009 movie on Paramount+ titled The Stepfather. I later learned that was a remake of this one, considered a cult classic that spawned a couple of sequels. And I saw that this one starred Terry O'Quinn, whose work I enjoyed in Alias and Lost in the '00s. I had to see it.

The Stepfather was pretty much the movie I expected going in. It's a solid psycho-thriller that tosses in a little slasher gore for good measure. It's a movie I would have enjoyed as a competent if unspectacular genre piece. But I did really enjoy getting this look at early-career O'Quinn, who carried this film pretty well. I don't know why it took so long for his career to pay off well for him. But I'm glad it did. He deserved it.

3. Life After Beth, 2014, directed by Jeff Baena, streamed on Prime Video, 4 stars.

I'll watch just about anything if Aubrey Plaza's in it. She has done so many movies since Parks and Recreation that I don't even try to keep up. But if I stumble across one of them browsing a streaming catalog, I'll dive in. I have yet to be disappointed.

She's still batting 1.000 in my book. Life After Beth is an odd little morsel, a weird zombie-apocalypse take that got me giggly once the smooth-jazz joke kicked in. As the lead zombie character, Aubrey flexed a bit of that April Ludgate muscle, which I'm always down with. Anna Kendrick was great in a small role later in the film, and Paul Reiser brought along his best Paul Buchman for a few amusing clueless-Dad scenes. John C. Reilly got eaten.

Have I mentioned yet that April Ludgate zombie had me in stitches?

I learned after watching this movie that it was Jeff Baena's directorial debut, the project that put him and Plaza together. I never knew anything about Baena, but my heart still hurts for Aubrey. Prayers, girl.

2. Copycat, 1995, directed by Jon Amiel, streamed on Prime Video, 4 stars.

This was a great double-barreled star turn for Holly Hunter and Sigourney Weaver. Both of them are outstanding. Hunter is the ultrafocused homicide detective and Weaver is an agoraphobic psychologist who team up to stop a serial killer whose MO is to copy the MOs of historic serial killers.

Copycat came along during a wave of gritty, high-profile serial-killer movies -- Silence Of The Lambs, Se7en, Natural Born Killers, et. al. It holds its own as a solid second-tier crime drama from that period. We solve the mystery late in the second act, and we get a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase the rest of the way. Both Hunter and Weaver are great to watch throughout.

I ate up those Tarantino-spawned crime thrillers from the 1990s. This one got by me somehow, but I'm very happy I found it now.

1. The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane, 1976, directed by Nicolas Gessner, streamed on Prime Video, 4 stars.

What a revelation this movie was. I found it on Prime Video, knew nothing about it except for the plot description, intriguing enough for me to check it out. Turns out, it was 13-year-old Jodie Foster's first starring role, coming on the heels of her work in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. And son-of-a-gun, there's Martin Sheen, looking and sounding and acting a lot like creepy Charlie Sheen.

This story originally was written as a stage play, and the movie for the most part plays that way. It's heavily dialogue-driven, rarely with more than two or three people onscreen, mostly in one setting. But the mystery is intriguing from the start, the script is sharp and sleek, Sheen is fascinatingly despicable and Foster brings impressive heft to the central character.

This picture keeps the momentum building from beginning to end. The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane at times makes you feel like you're watching an old Hitchcock movie.

And I'm pretty certain that Ti West saw this movie. Fans of West's X trilogy will know exactly what I'm talking about if they watch this movie through the closing credits.

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Amazon purchase links (I am an Amazon affiliate, and your clicks help support this blog):

Dead End

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry

The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane