(Back! Back in the saddle again!) Evil Aliens is the goriest film I saw all week. You know what you’re getting when a rotating spiky probe hits someone’s delicate rear end within the first five minutes of the movie. Sploosh! It’s also a total riot. Everyone’s comparing it to Evil Dead, which is exactly accurate. You get all the gore in the world, a wickedly nasty sense of humor, plenty of self-aware parody, and evil alien monsters. I laughed all the way through when I wasn’t cringing in shock. There weren’t any really scary bits; the aliens are gonna do damage and people are gonna die and none of that comes as any kind of a surprise. There are a couple of jump scares, but the point is definitely blood, a bit of sex, and funny stuff. Also, the scene with the harvester is the best use of music in a horror movie ever, no really. ...

I’m blithely reading Daily Kos, and there’s another post on a Congress race that’s looking like it might be competitive for the Dems. Not unusual this year. Huh, that name rings a bell for some reason. Wait. Darcy Burner (original)? That’d be the same Darcy who I knew at Harvard; who filled the co-chair spot at HRSFA after I stepped down; and who was one of my four roomates at the House on the Borderlands back in whatever year that was. (And then I bumped into her again while I was working at Alexa, which is not a very interesting company unless you know that the non-profit side of Alexa was the Internet Archive before Alexa was bought by Amazon.) Well, cool. She’s an awesome person and I have a huge amount of respect for her.

I would like to call attention to some foolish people and some people who are abrogating their responsibility. Representatives Bob Ney (R-OH) and Walter Jones (R-NC) arranged to remove French fries and French toast from the House of Representatives cafeteria menu. This is about the stupidest symbolic act ever. Duh. But heck, why stop with Ney and Jones? Ney is Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, which is responsible for this change. The other members of the committee are certainly culpable: Vernon J. Ehlers, (R-MI), John L. Mica (R-FL), John Linder (R-GA), John T. Doolittle (R-CA), Thomas M. Reynolds (R-NY), John B. Larson (D-CT), Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA), and Robert Brady (D-PA). (Apparently being named John is one of the criteria for being on this committee.) ...

Let’s go to the tape, Chumley. I amended two grades; in retrospect, Wilderness was a touch better than I gave it credit for, and Samurai Commando 1549, while excellent, was not quite “I’d want to own it on DVD.” Which is the requirement for an A grade. B grades I’d recommend seeing. C grades, well. And D grades I’d recommend avoiding. Grade A The Great Yokai War (A+) Isolation (A+) Train Man (A+) All Out High (A) Evil Aliens (A) Reincarnation (A) Widerness (A, improved grade) The Echo (A-) Pusher 3 (A-) ...

Fantasia lists this as The Order of One, but IMDB has it as Order of One. Who knows? The official website (original) uses the article, so there you go. It’s a total DIY low budget indie flick, shot for under $100,000 in and around Montreal. The big bad evil martial arts master is played by a real sensei from a local dojo, and I’d bet on a bunch of his thugs being students from the dojo. This makes, anyhow, for some pretty fun martial arts scenes — I can’t complain about that. ...

And finally… The Great Yokai War. Just, whoa. Miike isn’t one of my top five artists in the world (David Cronenberg, Richard Thompson, Wong Kar Wai, George R. R. Martin, probably Aimee Mann; list subject to change), but he’s the guy I’d like to play Being John Malkovich with. I want to see what he’s thinking while he works. I want to figure out what he’s trying to do, and I want to figure out how he keeps up his insane multi-movie-per-year pace while still churning out heart-stoppingly beautiful, perfect moments of film. ...

Saturday was our children’s movie day. Aziris Nuna was the first of the pair, and it was pretty much a generic children’s movie. It’s somewhat looser than you’d expect from a US flick of the same style, and a little more leering, but all in all it didn’t go anywhere weird or wild. The opening shots were incredible: pyramids rising behind Moscow, and a ship of some sort kinda drifting over the city. This had me considerably excited, since the Fantasia blurb said “Aziris Nuna is set in an alternate reality that sees the architecture of Moscow blended with Egyptian temples and pyramids.” Alas, this was not the case — it’s set in our reality, with a bunch of time travel, and the opening shots are just cool effects. ...

The first time I saw Five Deadly Venoms, I was not as kind as I might have been. I enjoyed it a lot more this time — perhaps because I was in the mood, perhaps because it was on the big screen, or perhaps because I saw it in good company. It’s still a sort of mystery with a lot of varied kung fu style, but I was ready for the pacing. I dug the range of fights quite a bit on second viewing; there’s great distinction between the five venoms. I was also forewarned that Lizard was played by Philip Kwok, who I have a fondness for from Hard-Boiled, so it was cool watching him mug around. ...

A combination of slight illness and scheduling mishaps is about to lead to a slightly early departure. Alas! The remainder of the reviews (everything up through The Great Yokai War) will come when we get back to Boston. It’s been an excellent week.

I have absolutely no idea what Resonnances (original) was doing on the program. I mean, there’ve been some movies I didn’t enjoy, but I get why they were there — interesting ideas, or love of the genre, or whatever. But this just bit. The program says that Philippe Robert, the director, worked on a number of French flicks. When I finally found him on IMDB, it turns out he was a camera operator (and Ressonances isn’t listed at all). I’m surprised that his first feature film was so damned muddy and impenetrable; it looks like it was filmed at night with very little lighting. You’d think a camera operator would know better. ...