Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Phantoms 1998

  ★★★ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  I vaguely remember the novel Phantoms as one of the better efforts from the second-most famous 90s mainstream paperback-horror writer whose last name begins with K- Dean "No, I'm not Stephen King" Koontz- by which I mean that I remember it having a very creepy first act that nevertheless deteriorated into the vaguely new-age neo-religious clutching-at-straws that Koontz's final acts often suffered from, and which even as a teenager I found pretty exasperating. The movie follows my memory of the…

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  Doppelganger 1993

  ★★★★ Watched 14 Mar 2025

  Only a human being could write a script this weird; and if an AI ordered to produce a pastiche of Lynch, De Palma and Altman's Images turned in something like this, its programmer would disconnect it and send it for repairs. It is not just where the plot ends up going, by the way; the dialogue is nuts, too. I predict that over the course of the next decade, as we outsource more and more of our creativity to the…

Popular reviews

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  Last Straw 2023

  ★★½ Watched 24 Sep 2024 2

  Awfully hard to root for a manager who fires someone for talking back.

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  New Nightmare 1994

  ★★★ Watched 07 Mar 2025 6

  I honestly find Freddy pretty lame- he'd be ten times scarier if he just shut his mouth and let his killing do the talking- but this one at least has a fun concept and some creepy setpieces. The conversation between Wes and Heather about the screenplay put a big smile on my face and I wish there'd been more of that kind of thing, but the meta/mythological stuff gives way to the "is it a dream or isn't it?" stuff, which eventually gets tiresome, and the last twenty minutes or so are pretty embarrassing.

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