Sins of Youth (1975)

Also known as "So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious", this Italin explotation film is essentially a meaner and more graphic, unauthorized remake of the 1958 Otto Preminger film 'Bonjour Tristesse'. Both films are set in Europe and concern a love triangle between a wealthy older man, his 20ish blond daughter, and the middle aged red head he wants to marry. Heck, Dagmar Lassander even looks a bit like Deborah Kerr, and both movies have the same ending. 

Getting to that ending their are some noticeable differences, including that the perspective step-mother/ step-daughter pair seem to want to fuck each other. There are some artie stylistic elements, but this is still Euro-trash, soft core stuff. At an hour and 16 minutes it's about the perfect length for what it is. **

Demonoid (1981)

  I heard Quentin Tarantino recommended this on a podcast as one of the better entries in the "crawling hand" sub genra of horror movies. Samantha Eggers travels to Mexico where her husband Roy Jensen has invested most of his money in a 300 year old silver mine, but is having trouble getting his superstitious local workers to go very far inside.

 Jensen and Eggers go down deep to prove to the workers that it's safe, they find what looks like a hidden temple inside and take a hand shapped silver container out with them. They were not able to open the container but that night the cursed hand inside gets out, it attacks Roy and possesses him and then the old hand crumbles into dust.

The next day Jensen goes to the mine, hurrangs most of the workers to go inside, then detonates explosives killing and trapping miners inside, he then flees the country. Eggers eventually catches up with him in Las Vegas where a seemingly magical betting streak has attracted a lot of attention. Jensen soon ends up dead, but the spirit of the evil hand proceeds to jump bodies in an effort to get back to and punish Samantha, as she was one of the people who released it from the cave.

Jensen's body is shipped home to California and buried. Eggers tries to convince a skeptical old priest played by Stuart Whitman (who principly worked in Westerns and low budget horror fare) of the reality of the cursed hand. It takes a bit, but Whitman becomes convinced and it's up to him and Samantha to defeat the hand for good. And they do... or do they?

Odd but fun, both tight and all over the place at 92 minutes. **

Weird: The Al Yankovich Story (2022)

 This is a satirical, faux bio-pic of "Weird" Al Yankovich made by Funny or Die for Roku and starting Daniel Radcliff in the lead; the real Al Yankovich was also involved in the production and plays a record producer. There are many recognizable faces in cameo parts throughout, it is essentially one long skit but holds together remarkably well. Reminiscent of a personal favorite of mine: "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story". Evan Rachel Wood does a very good Madonna. **1/2

Golden Exits (2017)

 After a bad breakup, Emily Browning travels from Australia to New York City to work as an intern for archivist Adam Horovitz. Adam Horivitz's current project is archiving the papers of his recently departed father in law (notably the film never tells us what the father in law did for a living, other then that he was apparently a reasonably significant figure in that field, at least in the NYC area). 

Chloe Sevigny is Adam Horovitz's wife, Adam Horovitz cheated on Chloe years ago, he's been pretty contrite since, but Chloe is having trouble fully letting it go. Chloe's sister Mary-Louise Parker low level hates Adam, Adam thinks she's a bitch, a sentiment shared by Mary-Louise Parker's personal assistant Lily Rabe. Lily Rabe in turn vents about this to her sister Lio Tipton, who is married to Jason Schwartzman who is the son of a friend of Emily Browning's mother, and Emily Browning has had a crush on him since she was little and is hoping to reconnect now that she is in New York working for Adam Horovitz, whose good friend Craig Butta is also friends with Jason Schwartzman.

You get the picture, a spidersweb network of soap opera style inter relationships. On occasion the film flirts with semi profound themes. It also makes most of its characters pretty unlikable, trys to shed new contextual light on some of them late in the film, but it dosen't quite work since they've been so unlikable. It has a few moments, but never quite congeals into anything of lasting substance. **

Backrooms (2026)

 Backrooms: Directed by the 20 year old Kane Parsons and based on his web series of the same name, which in turn was inspired by... a meme? The concept of liminal space? The fact that furniture store basements can be creepy? (For this last one I recommend a visit to the Sterling Furniture Comapny in Sugarhouse Utah.)

In San Jose, California in the year 1990, furniture store owner Chiwetel Ejiofor, while investigating the cause of a power drain that has been impacting his utilities bill, discovers a portal to a vast labyrinth that is a kind of Bizaro version of his store. He becomes obsessed with this and eventually convinces some of his employees, as well as his therapist Renate Reinsve to go inside. That experience proves to be something that can not be recommend.

I do however recommend this film. It very successfully balances the surreal discomforts of its horror movie plot, with the psychological discomforts of its two very flawed protagonists. On a budget of only $10 million it has already grossed over $221 million at the box office, making it one of the stand out successes of yet another lackluster year at the movies (It's June and this is the first 2026 release that made me want to actually go to the theater) and makes Kane Parsons the youngest person to have ever directed a blockbuster film. ***

Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)

 This is the sequel to 1985's 'Return of the Living Dead', which it's self was an early example of a meta-sequel, in this case to 1968's 'Night of the Living Dead'. The comic chemistry between James Karen and Thom Matthew's was a great strength of the first film, but those characters die there in, so the actors are brought back as different characters with the same dynamic.

The first films A plot is largley replicated in the B plot here, but the first films B plot is replaced by a very different A plot; so the movie does a good job of staying true to what worked in the original, without being too much of remake/rehash, a problem with many an 80s/90s sequel. Still this isn't on the level of the 85 film, though I found it mostly enjoyable all the same. **

Slam Dance (1987)

 'Slam Dance": Hong Kong born American indie director Wayne Wang working from a script by Charlie McFadden from the Criters movies.  Amadeus himself Tom Hulce is a Far Side-esquse newspaper cartoonist who seems to enjoy his job, but chiefly uses it to finance his passion for painting. He has a young daughter who he loves, played the ill fated Judith Barsi, he's married to but separated from her mother Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, whose also an artist. 

The couple is separated largely because of Tom's tendency to sleep around. One of the women he's been sleeping with is Virgina Madson. When Virginia Madson is found dead, Tom is a chief suspect. Detective Harry Dean Stanton is on the case, he quickly determines that Hulce is not the killer, but that Virginia's death is related to a sex scandal involving powerful congressional representative Bobby Nye and corruption inside his own police department.

'Slam Dance' starts out as mostly a character study, but then slowly develops into a murder mystery, with Virgina Madson not turning up dead until roughly a half hour in. I thought the movies change in emphasis worked for it, because their is really not enough here for either a 100 minute character study or a 100 minute mystery, but plenty for a hybrid of the two. The film has one very good twist in it, though the denouncement is only so-so. ***