mistressofmuses

Last week we watched the first three of the V/H/S films. We had already seen the first two, though it had been a while, so didn't really remember them terribly well. (There are also a fourth, fifth, and upcoming sixth film, but unfortunately those are all Shudder exclusives. Maybe this will be the year I chuck an extra $6 per month at my TV for a couple months for more horror stuff, but I haven't yet.) We watched them out of order, but I'll review them in order, lol.

These are all anthology films, each featuring a frame story that chains the other short films together. As is fairly typical, this leads to a little bit of variable quality in the segments, but at the same time I really do like anthology films in the broad sense. There are some ideas that really ARE best expressed as short stories, and stretching them into a feature-length film makes them less punchy and more prone to filler, and it's relatively difficult to find an audience for short films outside of anthologies.

V/H/S
The frame story ("Tape 56"), directed by Adam Wingard, is... nothing to write home about, but it serves its purpose of giving the rest of it an excuse to happen.
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"Amateur Night" is pretty good. I like a lot of the feature films this director (David Bruckner) has gone on to do: The Ritual, The Night House, the new Hellraiser... he also did a segment in Southbound which is one of my favorite anthology horror films I've seen.
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This segment was expanded into a full-length film called Siren, but I haven't seen it!

"Second Honeymoon," (directed by Ti West) isn't too bad, but is probably my least favorite of the segments.
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"Tuesday the 17th," directed by Glenn McQuaid is one I enjoyed. It's got a fun "unexplained" angle in my opinion.
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Also, I like the title's reference to Friday the 13th.

"The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger", directed by Joe Swanberg, is one of the least gory, though it's the one that's most disturbing in my opinion, because despite the supernatural element to it, the "real" horror is gaslighting and abuse.
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"10/31/98", directed by the Radio Silence collective, is another one I like. It's probably in the middle of my list in terms of which ones I enjoyed the most. It's not a super complex story, but I feel like it did a simple premise well.
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V/H/S/2
I feel pretty similarly about the first and second films. I think both have some great segments that stand out pretty well, and overall I enjoyed both of them.

The frame story in V/H/S/2, "Tape 49", directed by Simon Barrett, has more of a twist to it than the frame story in the first movie, and is similarly decent in its utility as an excuse to chain the other segments together.
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It's a less subtle spooky than the first film's frame story starts out with, but it does its job!

It's a bit interesting to me that the frame story has more of a twist to it this time around, because the various segments actually rely far LESS on having twists to them as compared to the first film. In general, I feel pretty neutral about that? It was sort of a nice throughline for all the stories in the first set, though as a whole I don't think these feel like they're missing something by comparison.

"Phase I Clinical Trials", directed by Adam Wingard, feels a bit like a Black Mirror episode, and it's one that I could see being a pretty decent longer-form film. Or at least an hour-long Black Mirror episode, ha.
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"A Ride in the Park" was directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale (of The Blair Witch Project fame.) I enjoy this one for being a bit blackly funny.
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"Safe Haven", directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans, is another one that I would watch as a longer film, and is definitely my favorite of the segments.
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"Slumber Party Alien Abduction", directed by Jason Eisener, is by far my least favorite segment, which makes it a little sad to me that it was the one that DID get turned into a feature film.
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V/H/S:Viral
This one sucked. Lol, I did discover that was not an unpopular opinion: it is by far the worst-reviewed of any of the franchise. But yeah, I did not like it. That was a bit of a bummer, because I did enjoy the first two, and particularly found segments out of both the first two films that really stuck with me. The third one? Nah.

The frame story this time is "Various Circles", directed by Marcel Sarmiento.
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Dante the Great, directed by Gregg Bishop was... kind of mediocre.
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Parallel Monsters, directed by Nacho Vigalondo was a more interesting idea, but it came across as a bit sillier than I think may have been intended.
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Bonestorm, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead is definitely my favorite of the segments, but that's a bit of a low bar this time around.
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As a whole, I think this one lacked the at least sort of cohesive feel that the other two did. As mentioned above, the larger scale frame story felt to me like it changed the tone of the series, and not in a good way.

Well that shit got long and kept getting longer.

I would recommend the first two films, on the strength of their best segments, if nothing else. I would not recommend the third, ha. Be advised that there is absolutely a lot of gore and nudity (including multiple instances of full-frontal female nudity), definitely sometimes falling into the “gratuitous” camp.

The Most Obnoxiously Sparkly Owl

This was a better week, I think. Weirdly social, between the album release party later in the week and seeing a friend on Tuesday to pick something up. I also managed to get all my goals for the week done. I did have some midweek frustration about time management, and while those issues are still present, I felt better after.

Goals for the week:
- I posted Chapter 3 of All Strange Wonders
- I finally sent back comments and clarifications on the previous chapter in my friend's book
- Alex and I went to Vicki and Dana's house to pick up some stuff they'd picked up for us at a model event.
- I did write more than 5000 words on Outbreak
- I did read a bit more of Seasonal Fears though my momentum keeps stalling out
- I did my July check-in for Get Your Words Out: 37,201 words for July (a total of 137,433 words for the year so far.)
- We went to our friend's album release show.

Tracked habits:
- Work - 5/7
- Household Maintenance - 3/7
- Physical Activity - 2/7
- Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 0/7
- Wrote on 2nd+ Draft - 4/7, all of which were over 1000 words
- Meta Work - 6/7
- Personal Writing - 7/7
- Other Creative Things - 2/7
- Reading - 5/7, a mix of rereading some fic and reading Stranger Things
- Attention to Media - 6/7 - a lot again this week. We worked our way through a lot of Hulu's "Into the Dark" movies. Monday - Finnish horror called Hatching with descriptive audio, Culture Shock which I really liked, and Flesh & Blood which was fairly average. Tuesday - Pooka and Good Boy which were both mildly silly but entertaining horror. Wednesday - Blood Moon and Crawlers which were both pretty average horror. Thursday - My Valentine and Midnight Kiss which I liked okay, and A Nasty Piece of Work which was more of a dark humor horror. Friday - watched the season finale of Alone, and then half-watched School Spirit and Uncanny Annie which were both fairly so-so.
- Video Games - 0/7
- Social Interaction - 7/7

Total words written: 6035

Media roundup of the week:

What I've Been Reading:

- Strange Grace by Tessa Gratton (slowly)

( Still enjoying it. Slight spoilers and my thoughts a bit past the halfway point: )

What I've Been Playing:

Pokemon Sun, but just for a brief period one evening. Doing some backtrack stuff on the first island still.

What I've Been Watching:

- Umma
Amanda, a Korean immigrant, lives a seemingly peaceful life with her daughter Chris on an off-the-grid farm. Then the remains of her estranged mother arrive, with the expectation that she will be responsible for them. Unfortunately, her mother's spirit is not at rest, and intends to assume control over the family the way she wished to in life.

This was really good! 9/10 if I was giving it a rating.

I like Sandra Oh, even though I haven't seen a lot of what she's been in. Killing Eve has been on my list, though.
While a lot of the individual elements aren't like... brand new unique ones, I really liked the way it was explored. It's relatively straightforward horror where the ghost is very real, but the horror is more about coping with intergenerational trauma. There are three generations of the family present. The deceased grandmother, who abused Amanda in part due to her own trauma and pain, who as an angry spirit is still trying to exert control over her family. Amanda, now an adult with a daughter of her own, lives on an isolated, off-the-grid farm, refusing any kind of electricity due to her abuse as a child and the very clear PTSD she still suffers. And then her daughter, Chris, who has consistently been Amanda's only real support, who is now wanting to start her own life.

I appreciated the ultimate conclusions that the film came to. There's the repeated theme that so often comes with abusive family - "I've done all of this for you" as well as the fact that children often don't know what their parents have gone through. It lets those dynamics stay complex. That yes, the older generations also suffered and were hurt, but that does not give them the right to do the same. But also that they deserve to have that pain acknowledged, and doing so doesn't justify or excuse the harm they in turn caused.

There's the extra layer also of cultural conflict and how that is reflected in generational gaps as well. From a woman who felt forced to come to a country where she was an outsider, to her daughter who chose to reject that part of her heritage, to the third generation who never got much of a choice.

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Okay, so, Alex and I watch bad movies on purpose sometimes, and on Prime, at some point, we picked what sounded like a bad Lifetime thriller type. It was a bad Lifetime thriller. Now Prime thinks we very much want to keep watching bad Lifetime thrillers. Worse, we do keep watching them, lol. (They tend to be pretty silly entertainment, as predictable and not-good as they usually are, and they're easy background noise.)
This week we've had Love Thy Neighbor, Nanny Cam, and Fatal Flip. None of them were especially good or remarkable. They follow the rigid formula.

I'm being dismissive of the Lifetime thriller genre (in part because there are SO MANY that follow a rigid enough beat sheet that you can almost pick out the culprit (if it's meant to be a mystery) based solely on when they showed up.)

But there was one Lifetime original movie that I absolutely unironically enjoyed the shit out of, and that was Imaginary Friend. I wish they hadn't been cowards and had gone for a gay ending (though it was so close!) That one I watched a few years ago, but I had a good time the whole time.

- Back Roads
This one was a pretty grim, miserable film. I guess that's why it got a good general rating, but I really didn't especially enjoy it.
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Spiderweb washi tape, to go with the blue and purple colors this week.

This was an... okay week. I felt pretty unmotivated for most of it, though to be fair, I was also dealing with feeling pretty cruddy from my booster shot, so that was part of it. Even so, I didn't get most of my fairly long list of goals completed, which leaves a lot left that still needs to get done.

My goals for the week:
- I did read more of When Sorrows Come
- didn't finish chapter 5 of CotH
- didn't dust off the small bookshelf
- Did get my covid booster!
- didn't do edits on Ch10 of my friend's book
- only kind of picked an idea for my NaNoPaiMo entry
- didn't start any sort of prep on the model
- did get crickets for BCB
- got our Xmas tree and decor put away
- hung up a string for my pothos plant to help it climb the wall
- didn't write thank you cards

Tracked habits:
- Work - 4/7, stayed home sick one day
- Household Maintenance - 7/7
- Physical Activity - 2/7
- Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 1/7, with 6 additional days of less than 500 words; wrote every day!
- Wrote on 2nd+ Draft - 0/7
- Meta Work - 3/7
- Personal Writing - 7/7
- Other Creative Things - 0/7
- Reading - 7/7, mostly When Sorrows Come, but also reread my fic "Potentials" because I wanted to.
- Attention to Media - 3/7; Watched The Faith Community, which was deeply mediocre found-footage horror movie; rewatched Living Dark, the film adaptation of "Ted the Caver" the earlyish internet horror story, which I still think was surprisingly good; watched Butterfly Kisses, which was a pretty decent found-footage horror about an urban legend; and Followers, which was an okay found-footage horror with a weird later-half twist.
- Video Games - 0/7
- Social Interaction - 7/7

Total words of fiction written: 1724 words on Connections of the Heart

Oops! My mom texted me to remind me that tomorrow at approximately fuckoclock is our appointment to sort out the title for the truck. I completely forgot!

So now I have to head back over to her house, because the appointment is stupid early, so it's better for me to just stay the night.

I was hoping for a comparatively responsibility-free weekend, but alas.

At least I'll presumably get to hang out with Taylor tonight. Not great for attempts at productive writing, but fun!

Tomorrow is still birthday gift shopping day.

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Today's main productivity was getting Cy a bath. He's all soft and not stinky now. He definitely doesn't *love* baths, but he's resigned about them. He just gives you the "why are you murdering me" sad eyes the whole time. We paid to use the local small-business pet store's self-wash - the raised tubs are SO much easier than the bathtub at home.

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I do occasionally have thoughts about stuff that would make for decent essay-style DW posts, but do I remember them when I could actually make those posts? Nah.

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Watched a fairly decent horror movie last night, though it has pretty low ratings elsewhere, so maybe I'm alone in enjoying it.

It was called The Unborn, but is NOT the horror movie that came out some years ago with that title. (Which was ALSO a pretty good horror movie.) This one came out in 2020.

This one was about a pair of security guards in an abandoned building, when creepy shit starts to go down. It felt video-gameish, and honestly, I think it would be a really FUN horror game. The atmosphere was pretty creepy, it did a good job playing up their semi-isolation, and there were some pretty good monster-y effects. It's a little ambiguous about what the ultimate creepy thing really WAS, but in a way that I kinda liked.

It reminded me of a good version of "The Abandoned", which was a movie that I inexplicably remember from five years ago. That one was also about security guards in an abandoned building that had creepy shit start happening (creepy child-related shit, even!), but it featured one of the WORST attempts at a "twist" ending that I remember ever seeing.

Part of me really does wish I'd stuck with doing horror reviews, I just feel like I already struggle so much with time management that I wouldn't have time to go back to them unless I sacrifice something else, ugh.

Kind of mixed feelings about this one...

I actually thought this one was pretty good.

This wasn't a BAD movie, but it wasn't a GOOD movie either. Short review here.

I actually wrote two reviews for my horror movie blog today. I have a bunch written now... of course that means somewhere between diddly and squat if I never post anything. :P But still, it's been a while since I even poked at that, so it's a step in the right direction.

I know that one of the best things you can do with regards to any kind of blog (especially a topic-oriented one, as opposed to something personal like this journal) is to have a consistent and fairly frequent update schedule. I've been wanting to get on that. For a while I'd been aiming for a M/W/F schedule for the horror review blog, but that doesn't seem sustainable. For now, when I have 20-some reviews written, that's perfectly reasonable, but once the backlog is gone, I don't know that I could commit to three movies and reviews each week. At one time that was very possible, but maybe not now. Twice a week sounds more reasonable to me, that it'd be frequent enough that there's a reasonable amount of content, but not so much I can't keep up. I was considering Mondays and Thursdays as update days.

That does mean I should get on watching horror movies again. Not that that's a huge hardship. Seems like two a week should fit in somewhere!

Unrelated: I slept for almost twelve hours last night. It actually didn't throw my whole day off, though I still have been tired for much of the day. Considering I've been around at least two sick people in the last few days, I'm not questioning it if my body thinks I need some rest.

Also, one week before I start my internship!