Michael Walters
Notes from the peninsula
Welcome!
This is my little word garden on the internet—Michael Walters, author (it’s true!). I have a speculative fiction novel, THE COMPLEX, out with Salt Publishing, and I’m deep in the writing of a follow-up. I would love it if you gave it a try.
I use Bluesky to connect with people, Letterboxd to track films, and StoryGraph to track books. Follow me and say hello in all those places.
And if you want more of my thoughts on writing in particular, you can subscribe to my posts on PATREON. There’s a Weird and Wonderful tier if you want to support me with a donation, and that now includes notes on the novels I’m reading, but I post regularly to all patrons.
Director: Joe Begos
Release year: 2022
A grimy, low budget, fun-but-annoying mashup of Terminator, every sleazy slasher ever, a hangout movie, Texas Chain Saw Massacre and… First Blood? I don’t want to criticise too hard because it’s clearly a labour love made with no money and some ingenious effects to bridge the funding gap.
Tori runs a record/video store in a small Californian town. It’s Christmas Eve, it’s snowing, and she has a Tinder date lined up. Her clerk employee Robbie convinces her to spend the night getting drunk with him instead. Neither of them have accounted for the malfunctioning military-grade RoboSanta that is at the local toy store, and when they meet friends there after hours for a festive drink, the robot sets its sights on killing them all.
The first thirty minutes is an improvised hangout movie, and the banter between Tori and Robbie, which is natural and fun to a point, tips into annoying and expletive-laden posturing, so that when the killer RoboSanta arrives it’s a relief they stop talking. An unexpectedly disturbing sequence where the couple have sex while the robot slaughters the family next door, with the edit cutting back and forth, is a particularly odd choice.
There’s a police ex-boyfriend, a joke about pegging, real explosions, Tori screams a great deal, the robot just won’t die, etc, etc. It was clearly made with a ton of love and enthusiasm and about $10,000.
Violent Night
Director: Timmy Wirkola
Release year: 2022
Santa Claus is drunk in a bar, despairing of children’s greed, and thinking about giving it all up. While delivering presents to a rural mansion, he interrupts a robbery, and to save good girl Trudy he has to call on his skills as a Viking warrior.
You can imagine the pitch—Die Hard meets Home Alone with Santa—and it plays out exactly like that. There are some outstanding fight scenes between Santa and the mercenary military home invaders, but the first half is a struggle because it’s not as amusing as it thinks it is, the characters are annoying, and you just want to see Father Christmas fight people. Once he gets his sledgehammer, it becomes far more fun.
It’s exceptionally violent. There’s a sequence where the girl, Trudy, hides in the attic and sets a series of Home Alone traps, and the ensuing mutilations are grim and hilarious. There’s a heart of gold beneath the broken jaws, cracked limbs and decorations in eyeballs, I just wish it was twenty minutes shorter.
Saint Maud
Director: Rose Glass
Release year: 2019
Maud, a private nurse from a care agency, starts a new job looking after acclaimed dancer Amanda who has Stage 4 cancer and is close to death. Amanda still lives a hedonistic, drama-filled life which clashes with Maud’s newfound faith. When Amanda affectionately calls Maud her saviour, Maud takes this as a sign to try and save Amanda’s soul.
This is writer and director Rose Glass’s first film, and with cinematographer Ben Fordesman, she makes Scarborough, which is not far from where I live, shine with a (forgive me) religious light. Morfydd Clark’s Maud is a terrible delight, oscillating between a lost, unsure woman with a troubled past and determined follower of the voices in her head. It’s disturbing to see reality flex under Maud’s psychosis.
Amanda is a fascinating figure, bored with dying, used to a far more social and exciting life, and stuck up in a big house on the cliffs. She’s already halfway to heaven, but Maud can’t let her be, confused by Amanda’s sexuality when she has her own orgasmic relationship with God, and convinced she needs saving from damnation before she dies. Amanda calls out Maud’s meddling in front of friends at a birthday party—her scorn comes back to bite her.
The Day of the Beast
Director: Álex de la Iglesia
Release year: 1995
The first real Christmas movie of my #31DayofBlackXmas, it’s a real horror comedy to repair the damage of Polanski’s vampire farce. A priest thinks he has solved the puzzle of when the Antichrist will be born, and goes to Madrid to stop it which involves giving his soul to the devil.
The genius of this film is that it’s funny, but not too funny, and grim to just the right level, and director Álex de la Iglesia shoots with a strong streak of Almodóvar. The dialogue is sharp, the action anarchic, the horror served reverently even when surrounded by comic actors.
The threesome of the priest, record shop metal head and conman Satanist makes for surreal, violent fun. To sell his soul, the priest has to do evil deeds, and do them he does. There are a couple of moments of true devilish horror scattered throughout, including the devil as a horrific goat, and a homeless man being burnt alive as a symbol of the coming apocalypse. Surprisingly excellent.
Director: Roman Polanski
Release year: 1967
I wanted something light. I remembered not enjoying this a few years back but loving it as a kid, so I gave it another go. It’s a farce based on a mixture of Hammer horror and Universal Monsters. Roman Polanski directed such amazing films in this period, but this is still disappointing on second watch.
The set design and consumes are wonderful. Watching these shallow comedic characters flap around is made more bearable when the locations look so exquisite. Sharon Tate is luminous, some of which is because we know her fate not long after this was made, but also she shows great comic timing in her role as the captured daughter of the innkeeper our intrepid non-heroes are staying with.
It’s the pacing that kills it. There’s not much story because it’s a pastiche, deliberately similar to all that’s come before. The characters spend too much time running around the beautiful sets and being too goofy for my taste. I did enjoy the arrival at the inn after recently watching Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing rock up at the original in Terence Fisher’s Dracula.
This is broad, obvious slapstick comedy with strong Jewish roots. The actors seem to be having fun, but I didn’t find it funny, which is a killer blow for a comedy. I did admire lots of the camera work and character comedic details though. It was more enjoyable than last time, I’ll give it that.
The Appointment
Director: Lindsey C. Vickers
Release year: 1982
Ian and Dianna live a comfortable existence with their daughter Joanne in a rural English town. The local wood has been fenced off to stop schoolchildren walking through it after a girl was murdered in it three years before. Ian has to tell Joanne that he’ll miss her big musical recital because his company is sending him away the next day for an urgent meeting, triggering a night of anxious dreams and possible premonitions.
The opening five minutes are properly disturbing as we follow a schoolgirl on a path through some woods after we’ve heard words from a police report describing her death. The way she’s pulled into the trees by an unseen force is terrifying and looks amazing, even on such a low budget in 1982. Joanne regularly talks to someone through the fence sealing the wood after school, and it’s unclear if it’s the ghost of the dead schoolgirl or something else.
Joanne isn’t just a daddy’s girl, her relationship with her father is uncomfortably intense, which he brushes off to his wife, but she is clearly bothered by. Joanne is fourteen and seems to always get what she wants from Ian, and in an angry scene Dianna tells him that their family is out of balance and Joanne has created for herself a dangerously delusional world. Ian seems perplexed and disbelieving, but it could also be interpreted that there’s something sexual between him and his daughter, and he has certainly mixed his daughter with his wife unconsciously, and Dianna’s picked up on it.
All of which gives the second half of the film it’s bite. Whatever is in the woods, through Joanne, attacks Ian through woozy dreams and nightmares that blur with their nightly reality. As Ian sets off on his long trip away from his family, the ending seems inevitable. This is a film about minding boundaries. If you don’t, whatever is in the woods will get you.
I Saw the TV Glow
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Release year: 2024
Nostalgia is both comforting and soul crushing. Owen bonds with Maddy over a TV show she’s obsessed with, The Pink Opaque. Maddy is miserable in her life, and decides to run away from home, giving Owen a choice that will affect the rest of his life.
Owen is suffocated at home by a father he’s terrified of. His mother is protective but terminally ill. In Maddy, he finds a kindred spirit, someone who understands him and will leave him videotapes at school when his father won’t let him stay up to watch his new favourite show. Owen is full of confusion and self-doubt over his sexuality. Watching The Pink Opaque, as dark and insidious as it is, he feels safe.
The Pink Opaque is about two friends, Tara and Isabel, who share a psychic connection with each other, have pink ghosts tattooed on their necks, and are in a good-versus-evil battle with a moon-faced Mr Melancholy. It’s a queer allegory, a trans allegory, and also an allegory for anyone who’s felt constricted and denied by the adult/capitalist/religious world.
Both Owen and Maddy work long hours in poorly paid jobs that snuff out their teenage playfulness and curiosity. Only Maddy finds an escape route, and it’s not clear how real even that is. Owen’s final call for help, a scream of agony and despair, is zipped up and apologised for. It’s not enough to keep our real life alive on the inside. We all need help in being real on the outside too.
Red Rooms
Director: Pascal Plante
Release year: 2024
Kelly-Anne turns up every day at the trial of a high profile alleged serial killer who is charged with broadcasting on the dark web the torture and murder of three teenage girls. She meets a groupie of the suspect who believes he is innocent, but Kelly-Anne’s motives remain elusive.
Having a main character who lacks empathy is a tricky thing to pull off, but director Pascal Plante and actress Juliette Gariépy do an incredible job of keeping us involved in her unclear quest and guessing at her motivations. She has the mannerisms of someone who might be on the autistic spectrum, and she’s a loner, seemingly a hacker, who loves to take controlled risks. Her sense of morality is different to those around her.
It’s a film about living online today, making a living with software, trading in bitcoin, using the information about us online to hack our emails and our homes. It’s about desensitisation to violence, our cultural love of true crime and serial killers, how our media covers trials, the trauma we carry with us from childhood, and the trauma that can be inflicted on us by the attentions of a psychopath. I couldn’t recommend this film more.
The Card Player
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2004
Rome detective Anna Mari pairs up with rogue Irish cop John Brennan to find a gambling serial killer who challenges the police to games of online poker to save the lives of kidnapped women. Twists and turns (but not that many) ensue.
Some people seem to hate that the poker game in this hasn’t aged well graphically, but I prefer to think of how much it would cost a director today to replicate a period technological thriller set in 2003 and just enjoy it for the time it’s set in. It’s an odd film, though. Brennan starts the film as an aggressive idiot and never really becomes believably likeable as the love interest for Mari.
There’s one outstanding set piece in Mari’s apartment where the killer breaks in to kidnap her, but apart from that there’s not much here to make it stand out from most procedural serial killer thrillers. It’s dramatically empty—we just lurch from one game of online poker (on Windows 2000!) to another.
This might be the most disappointing Argento so far. Say what you like about his The Phantom of the Opera, but it tries for something new.
Sleepless
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2001
Young Giacomo watches a hidden figure stab his mother to death with a flute. Police Chief Moretti promises the boy he will catch the killer, and he does, but seventeen years later the killings begin again. The retired Moretti teams up with adult Giacomo to catch the Dwarf Killer who seems to be back from the dead.
Doesn’t that sound like the most Argento film ever? And it’s good! It doesn’t match the pizazz of his seventies giallo films, and it’s too long, but it has many other charms, especially the opening murder on the Italian night train. Argento is always looking for the interesting shot, the killings are imaginative and brutal, the Goblin score is great, and Max von Sydow as the elderly, forgetful Moretti brings an unexpected class and lightness of touch to the otherwise pitch black story.