Shocktober: The Hitch-hiker

The Hitch-hiker (1953)

The discussion over what is and what isn’t a horror movie is one that we’ve rubbed up against over countless Shocktobers and is, quite frankly, a little boring. That said, we’d be lying if we didn’t admit that Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-hiker is a little closer to the noir or thriller genres than horror, but we wanted a reason to talk about Lupino regardless. With Dorothy Arzner’s retirement in the mid-1940s, Ida Lupino became the most prominent female Hollywood director of the ’50s, while this was the first film noir directed by a woman during the genre’s golden age. It also happens to have a very scary antagonist at the heart of it who — horror villain or not — shows that a woman director could send an audience home just as unnerved as any man could. Continue reading →

Shocktober: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

Note: I was supposed to review Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark today, but in between the time I volunteered to review it and last night when I actually sat down to watch it, it disappeared from streaming. Whoops! John says I’ve seen it before anyway. I guess it’s lucky we didn’t announce the schedule in advance, but since John mentioned Bigelow in his intro post, I wanted to let you know up front we won’t actually be looking at any of her movies this year.

Ten years before the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, in 1982, Frank Zappa gave a name to a certain type of affluent, young white women in California’s San Fernando Valley: The Valley Girl. To Zappa’s chagrin, his song helped popularize the stereotype and Valleyspeak, spreading the culture throughout the country. It helped create a new market for stories about ditzy, privileged girls and set us off on a long, dark road that somehow includes in a Nicolas Cage movie and I guess ends with Modern Family? Another man, a worse, hateful piece of shit named Joss Whedon, was apparently inspired by this trend but left wondering one thing: could he fit these girls into his nerdy fantasies? And thus one of the great media franchises of the late twentieth century was born.

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Shocktober: 15 Days of Fright

Welcome boils and ghouls to Mildly Pleased’s 12th Annual edition of “Shocktober”! This year we’re celebrating some of the finest female directors or dare I say “FEARmale” directors the genre has to offer.

We’ll cover established auteurs like Karyn Kusama, Kathryn Bigelow, Mary Lambert, Mary Harron, just to name a few. We’ll also cover some up and comers, a few husband and wife teams, even an aunt and nephew directing team. Because this blog is all about family.

We have films from Austria, France, Belgium, jolly old England, and of course the scariest place of all… America. So join us as we countdown Fifteen Days of Fright starting tomorrow. Also, we’re only posting on the weekdays, so don’t get too confused by that 15 days thing. Anyways, I’m sure you’ll find it appealing or dare I say APPALLING?!?

The Pick: Venom

With Venom: Let There Be Carnage hitting theaters this week, we’re taking a look back at the original film, the rare case of a superhero movie that we all basically just ignored. It’s hard to say whether Venom convinced us to see this new installment, but at the very least it gives us a reason to see whatever bizarre acting choices Tom Hardy will be up to this time. Apart from Hardy’s madcap performance, we talk about the character’s history, its relation to the overall Spider-verse, and why Sony can’t help but milk it for all it’s worth. Continue reading →