Coming soon, 9 April 2026

Seen before a screening of Exit 8.

I really enjoyed Exit 8. It's a very uncanny, unsettling, trippy Möbius strip of a story. I probably spent more time looking for anomalies onscreen than was necessary. Towards the end of the movie our hero, The Lost Man, and his young companion are beset upon by a swarm of lab rats with human body parts sewn on them or grown in them. This brought to mind the opening scene were the guy is doom scrolling a social media site on his phone while on the train. We see one of those rats - the one with the ear on its side - in the feed and I immediately struggled to recall what else we saw on his phone in that scene. I recalled posts showing flooding and so it was no surprise when the hallway floods with less than salutary looking brown water.

What else was shown on the phone that manifested in the hallway?

Ultimately this is a story about a man's internal struggle but was it all in his head? The Walking Man's story would suggest otherwise. But who knows. I thoroughly enjoyed this ride.

Tangentially, I watched a recent conversation between James Kreul and Rob Thomas in which they previewed the opening weekend of the Wisconsin Film Festival. At one point Thomas makes a cynical comment - though I cannot recall what prompted it - about frequently being in a Madison theater with only 6-8 other people or something akin to that.

While there's more than a grain of truth there, I think it should be noted that the screening of Exit 8 had somewhere around 20 people in it. The showing of The King's Warden I attended had 30+ people in it. Ginormous numbers? No. They weren't sell outs even in the small theaters they screened in. I don't know how AMC and Marcus feel about these numbers, but they don't seem too shabby for foreign language movies in a city of only 300,000 or so people.

As for the film fest, my fest starts today. I'll be attending everyday through Thursday, though I am not seeing multiple movies each day. I'll be seeing 25 Cats From Qatar because, well, cats! I was absolutely thrilled to see that Dead Mountaineer's Hotel would be screened this year because I heard about it just a few months ago after doing a spot of reading at Rachel Cordasco's Speculative Fiction in Translation site. The movie is based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novel of the same name and I stumbled upon her review there and it sounded like it would be right up my Straße.

Everybody who's been attending the festival for a while has their own gripes about the current incarnation every year. Honestly, I don't have many complaints beyond missing the midnight movies at the Orpheum. I fondly remember seeing the Irish horror flick Isolation there late one Thursday night.

My fest begins at 6 tonight with Man on the Roof followed by The Spies Among Us. I will be seeing a couple flicks on Sunday with someone and a lady I know will be at the screenings of 25 Cats From Qatar and Nadja that I'll be at. I think this is first time I will be accompanied by someone at a screening in years. I used to go to the fest with other people more often back in the day. And I don't run into people I know very much anymore. I will say it was nice to find myself seated next to Lewis Peterson of Four Star Video last year at the screening of Pavements but chance meetings like that are the exception these days.

Looking back, my wife and I stopped attending the fest together several years ago and, in retrospect, this was an early sign of our marriage coming apart. So there's a lesson for everyone: keep your relationship strong by going to the Wisconsin Film Festival together!

OK. Onto the trailers!

Curiously enough, I cannot find the trailer for Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo. At first I was surprised to see a new film by Takashi Miike, he who did Audition, Ichi the Killer, 13 Assassins (which screened at the Wisconsin Film Festival back in 2011), and one of the shorts in Three... Extremes among many others. But those are the ones I recall having seen. My surprise continued when it was revealed to be a Bad Lieutenant movie. It's been a while since Werner Herzog made his contribution to the series.

Look! An Irish horror movie that would have been perfect for a midnight screening at the Orpheum for the festival.

Only 3 trailers vs a million at AMC. But we also got commercials from Eli Lilly and Company and Rolex.

Coming soon, 8 April 2026

Seen at a screening of The Yeti.

I was surprised to learn that The Yeti made its debut only on 3 April at a festival in Chicago yet was playing here in Madison just a few days later. To the programmer at AMC Fitchburg, I salute you.

It was a really fun monster movie about a rescue mission seeking to find out what happened to a previous expedition into deepest, darkest Alaska in 1947. The look and style was old school and it appears there was no CGI which makes it all the more retro. The title font looks like it was from a 1950s b-movie and one scene even had a newsreel look and feel to it. We had the overreach/hubris of scientists, a horror shown largely only in shadow or as a hazy figure shrouded in fog. We'd get an arm here or a tuft of fur there but the movie smartly let the creature exist as sound for quite a bit until the end. A growl or some strange noise or the cries of terror of its victims.

A genuine creepfest full of horror as the crew of the rescue mission are picked off one by one. But the movie also mines a vein of rich thematic material as the Yeti is shown to be less evil, perhaps, than just another facet of Nature doing what creatures do. Plus 2 members of the rescue mission are the children of 2 of the missing explorers. At 90 or so minutes the movie does not mine this vein deeply, I grant you, but it did so just enough to add color and turn the story in another direction which I found to be interesting and in keeping with the movies of yore that The Yeti seeks to invoke.

I arrived to the showing late and missed a trailer or 2 or 3.

 

This one flummoxed me. It was very confusing and weird but I am unsure if that is actually representative of the movie or if it was a ploy. Weird is good! I just found this trailer odd and it deviated from the norm. Could be good, though.

 

This was, unsurprisingly, a red-band trailer. On Monday I ran into Lewis Peterson, co-owner of Four Star Video, who was attending one of the mystery movie screenings at AMC and he was eagerly anticipating it being this one.

Coming soon, 29 March 2026

Seen before a screening of Alpha which I thought was OK. I enjoyed the themes of family and loyalty but found that it was a bit too dark for my current mindset. The fault, dear reader, is not in Julia Ducournau, but in myself.

Sadly I cannot find a trailer for Passenger, a horror flick from Norwegian director André Øvredal. It looked overly laden with jump scares and so didn't pique my interest. However, Øvredal directed three very fine to excellent flicks: Trollhunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Maybe the trailer just isn't doing it justice.

This was a red-band trailer.