Okay so, I got a little carried away this month. The thing is, it’s October now, and people might want to watch horror movies, so I wanted to add some new horror movies. So I made a list of every horror movie I’m interested and tried to hunt them all down and now here we are. Classic 1960s J-Horror? Slashers? Comedy horror? Modern art house horror? Asian horror revival? All the remaining Japanese Godzilla movies? The entire Alien franchise including special editions of (I think) all of them? We’ve got something for everyone, as long as that person is looking for horror movies, and I’m pretty sure that’s the only thing you’re legally allowed to watch during October anyway. There’s also some other things too though I guess.

Server Updates

• I learned how editions work on Plex, and implemented them. This not only provides more info but also unlocks some extra films that had been kinda hidden invisibly behind metadata collisions with others (ie, the Despecialized Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy, the Complete Edition of Watchmen).

• I also implemented a few media collections, so far mostly based on franchises, so that if you’re looking at, for instance, a Godzilla movie, Plex will make it easier for you to navigate to other Godzilla movies.

• Started adding local poster files here and there, to deal with the annoyance of Plex regularly deciding to change the poster images for everything on the server when new images pop up on TMDB/TVDB. (I’m sure you were all also very annoyed by that and it definitely wasn’t just me.) This will be an ongoing project.

• I haven’t written out specs for the new additions this month, partly because I don’t want to spend such a long time writing it all down, partly because it makes the list harder to read, and partly because I don’t think there has been any cause for it to be relevant yet. Suffice it to say that by and large all additions going forward are HEVC video in the highest resolution I could find with some kind of easily streamable audio track and generally at least English subtitles. If anyone encounters a problem with any files we can work that out on a case-by-case basis.

• Uploaded new copies of Shin Godzilla (2016), the Alien (1979) director’s cut, the special edition of Aliens (1986) and the Alien 3 (1992) assembly cut.

New Additions

• Redline (2009)

• Signs (2002)

• The remaining seasons of Sailor Moon, including the films for Sailor Moon R (1993), Sailor Moon S (1994), and Sailor Moon SuperS (1995) (wow they sure were cranking those out huh)

• Highlander (1986)

• Silent Möbius (1998)

• The Wheel of Time (2021) (season 2)

• Outlander (2014) (seasons 6 and 7)

• Air Crash Investigation (2003) (seasons 4-13, 16-17)

• The Millennium era of Godzilla films, comprising:

  • Godzilla 2000 (1999) (lol)

  • Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)

  • Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)

  • Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002)

  • Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003)

  • Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)

• Godzilla Minus One (2023) as well as the Minus Color edition

• A Field in England (2013)

• Do the Right Thing (1989)

• Kaiba (2008)

• Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

• Interstellar (2014)

• Juice (1992)

• Alien: Resurrection (1997), and the Extended edition of same

• Prometheus (2012)

• The Village (2004)

• Magic Knight Rayearth (1994) (season 2)

• The Eccentric Family (2013)

• Alien: Covenant (2017)

• Flag (2006)

• Occult (2009)

• All The President’s Men (1976)

• Tokyo Drifter (1966)

• Branded to Kill (1967)

• Citizen Kane (1941)

• Possession (1981)

• Alien: Romulus (2024)

• Alien (1979) (theatrical edition)

• Aliens (1986) (theatrical edition)

• Alien 3 (1992) (theatrical edition)

• Log Horizon (2013)

• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

• Near Dark (1987)

• The Eye (2002)

• Cat People (1942)

• Poltergeist (1982)

• Jennifer’s Body (2009)

• Crimson Peak (2015)

• The Hunger (1983)

• From Beyond (1986)

• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

• Eraserhead (1977)

• Evil Dead II (1987)

• Audition (1999)

• Onibaba (1964)

• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

• The Evil Dead (1981)

• Solaris (1972)

• Barbarian (2022)

• House (1977)

• I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

• Lake Mungo (2008)

• Mad God (2021)

• Midsommar (2019)

• The Host (2006)

• The Cell (2000)

• eXistenZ (1999)

• Jaws (1975)

• American Psycho (2000)

• Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)

• Dark Water (2002)

• Event Horizon (1997)

• Kuroneko (1968)

• Paranormal Activity (2007)

• The Omen (1976)

• The Devil’s Backbone (2001)

• Presence (2025)

• I Saw the Devil (2010)

• The Witch (2015)

• Memories of Murder (2003)

• Videodrome (1983)

• Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

• A Page of Madness (1926)

• Incantation (2022)

• The Last Broadcast (1998)

• The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)

• Butterfly Kisses (2018)

• Silent Hill (2006)

• Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

• We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)

• Baskin (2015)

• The Orphanage (2007)

• The Medium (2021)

• Nosferatu (1922)

• Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

• Aniara (2018)

• Us (2019)

• Julia’s Eyes (2010)

Changes

• None

Deletion Proposals

• None

What’ve I Watched?

I’m going to do a shorter, more freeform review section this week because I’m a bit sick and that’s already delayed this newsletter a couple days, and also most of what I watched this month isn’t terribly remarkable. Starting on a higher note, I finally finished Dirty Pair (1985), a comedy adventure space opera that is in some ways a bit of a forebear to shows like Cowboy Bebop and Firefly. It features the episodic adventures Kei and Yuri, two “trouble consultants” for a sort of para-governmental public aid/law enforcement organization, as they traipse around the galaxy racking up apocalyptic amounts of collateral damage and trying to convince their handler to approve more vacation time for them. It is at once a very shallow show and frequently a very progressive one (for its time at least), with episodes about proto-fascist lab rat revolutions and sweets-obsessed experimental cat weapons right next to episodes about how transphobes deserve to be shot into space.

Then, with our recent Shyamalan marathon rolling directly into the start of spooky season, I rewatched Signs (2002) and The Village (2004), two movies that are in some ways much more of a kind than I remembered. Both continue and intensify Shyamalan’s tendency to make very cool looking movies structured around a thought-experiment-like premise, which seem ultimately unable to fully think through that premise to the conclusion of a satisfying story, and are structurally hampered by having bizarrely bad pacing, especially in their closing acts. As a child, I remember finding a bright line between these two where Signs was one of the good ones, and The Village was garbage that convinced me to no longer be interested in his work, but on revisiting them they are much closer in quality than I found at the time, and I’d go so far as to say The Village is the better of the two, at least for being the more visually striking, thought provoking, and less frustratingly conservative in its message (extremely 2000s ableism aside).

Next was The Eye (2002), cult classic horror film from Hong Kong directors Oxide and Danny Pang and subject of a 2008 American remake during that era when Hollywood was obsessed with Asian horror remakes. The story of a blind woman named Wong Kar Mun who receives a corneal transplant and gradually realizes that with her new sight has come the ability to see the ghosts of the recently deceased, the classic premise is unfortunately let down by almost everything else in the film around it. It’s at its best early on, as Kar Mun’s new vision slowly resolves into clarity and she and the viewer together realize that some of the figures she’s been seeing weren’t really there. The film seems not to know how to resolve this plot however, and its second and third acts collapse into a fairly stock investigation into the social tragedy that produced Kar Mun’s haunted eyes, and then a tonally discordant final act in which the film awkwardly transitions to briefly be an action thriller that resolves the plot of the film with comical serendipity. Despite its occasional charms it’s hard not to view the film as a lesser alternative to its peers, with the tragic revenge story deployed much more effectively in 2004’s Shutter, and the surreal melancholy of its imagery already done much better by 2001’s Pulse. As strange as it is to be worth noting, it was constantly distracting how terrible the music was, tonally inappropriate and sloppily edited, as if it had been pulled from a stock library and dumped into the film with no care. I’ve truly seen YouTube videos that put this movie to shame with their scoring.

Finally, in light of the newly released Silent Hill f taking up all the games conversation of late, we returned to Christophe Gans’ cult classic (?) Silent Hill (2006). A film I watched so many times in high school that my enjoyment of it eventually soured into a toxic loathing. Through the first half of the film, I found myself regularly thinking “This is actually much better than I gave it credit for,” and then in the second half was regularly reminded of why I hated it so much. It’s high points are that, on the surface, it does do a pretty good job of capturing the look of the Silent Hill games. It’s fun, as a fan, to see the film evoking the look of early 2000s Playstation draw distances with the oppressive fog, fun to see rusty industrial gore of the dark world, or the camera moves taken directly from the opening act of the first game, or a lying figure dripping acidic bile in the best (??) CGI 2006 had to offer. I’m not going to get into my well-rehearsed tirade about how damming it is that the film attempts to tell the story of Silent Hill 1 using all of the monster designs and motifs of Silent Hill 2, but it is indicative of a reading of the games that fails to go anywhere below surface level. The pacing of the film, especially in its opening, is dragged down with ham-handed exposition and explanation that really didn’t need to be there except that they needed some reason for Sean Bean to be there, and all it really serves to do is undermine our faith in Rose’s relationship with her daughter. The third act is then drawn out through dull sequences of characters simply facing the camera and explaining their motivations to the viewer, interminable circular conversations, and long sequences of violence that border on the pornographic. It’s a film that seems to spend most of its runtime spinning its wheels, unsure what it’s supposed to do except show us the monsters and scenes we recognize from the games, and at the same time throws away all the most interesting parts of the game’s story by completely removing Dahlia’s relationship with Alessa from the movie and replacing it with a boring pseudo-Christian apocalyptic purity cult. For all his supposed fondness for the games, it’s clear from watching this movie that Gans completely misunderstands their symbolism.

Miscellany

• Nothing much. Get your flu and covid shots y’all.