Moose And The Movies

I went 31-for-31 in January -- 31 movies in 31 days. Nine of them were rewatches, which I wrote about here . The rest were movies I saw for the first time, most all of them streaming on Prime Video. I bought a subscription early in the month to see Abigail, which I had heard so much about. So while I was there, I decided to pick off as many watchlist entries as possible before my subscription expires I have a few more days and movies on my Prime watchlist. I'll finish that up soon and move on, back to Paramount+ and my still-growing disc collection. In the meantime, here are my first-watches from last month, ranked bottom to top: 22. Dead End, 2003, directed by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, streamed on Prime Video, 0.5 star. This is the worst movie I've watched in quite awhile. It fails as comedy, it fails as horror, it fails as mystery, it fails completely. It earns a half-star because it's the minimum rating on Letterboxd. 21. The Calendar Killer, 2025, directe...

Nine of the movies I watched in January were rewatches. A couple of them I have seen several times, favorites from my DVD library from the early '00s. The rest are films I remember watching only once before. Here are my tier-list rankings of those rewatches. I'll be back in the next day or two with a recap of all the movies I saw for the first time, and I also plan a combined ranking. 9. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, 1978, directed by Philip Kaufman, streamed on Kanopy, 2.5 stars.   I had always remembered this as a pretty good film since I saw it probably during its first theater run. But it didn't hold up for me at all, mostly because of all the plot holes. 8. V/H/S/2, 2013, multiple directors, streamed on Prime Video, 2.5 stars. You need more than one excellent and one decent segment to hold up a five-segment anthology. 7. Southern Comfort, 1981, directed by Walter Hill, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars. A decent thriller about a National Guard unit lost in the swamps ...

These are the eight films I watched for the first time in the first 14 days of January 2025, ranked worst to best:  8. Terrifier, 2016, directed by Damien Leone, streamed on Prime Video, 1.5 stars. This got my attention because of some buzz around Terrifier 3, which hit theaters in October. I stumbled across it on Prime Video and decided to give it a spin. I enjoyed the first 10 or 15 minutes of Terrifier. The staredown scene in the pizza parlor between Art The Clown and Jenna Kannell's character was mesmerizing. Tara could not look away from the freak taunting her, and you just knew unspeakable terrors were about to rain down on her. And then the unspeakable terrors started happening, and they were purely gratuitous and disgusting. The problem was that we were given no context, nothing to make us understand the point of any of it. The entirety of the second and third acts of Terrifier existed solely to shock us. Kudos to the great practical effects, but they meant nothing. Everyth...

I watched 13 films in the first 14 days of January 2025. Five of those were movies I had seen at least once before. Here is my ranking of those five. 5. V/H/S/2, 2013, multiple directors, streamed on Prime Video, 2.5 stars. I dove into this the night after I saw V/H/S, which I'll discuss in a later post. A couple minutes in, I realized that I had seen this one a year or so ago. It's a found-footage anthology, consisting of a wraparound story that leads us into four separate self-contained short stories. Two of the segments aren't very good, the wraparound is just OK, one segment is entertaining and one segment is tremendously batshit crazy. Unfortunately, the batshit-crazy segment, titled "Safe Haven," lands in the middle of the movie, and is followed by the anthology's worst segment and the inconsequential conclusion of the wraparound. So instead of going out with my head spinning round, I was left pissed off that I had to sit through 20 minutes of anticlimac...