Film Trace

The first film in our new Existential Thrillers cycle is Alex Garland's bizarre and bold Men (2022). Alex Garland has quietly made himself into one of the more exciting filmmakers of the A24 set. The former novelist turned screenwriter turned auteur exploded onto the arthouse scene with his first film Ex Machina (2014). The success of that film led to his major studio debut Annihilation (2018). Th...

The sixth and final film in our Self-Aware Horror cycle is the landmark exploitation film, The Last House on the Left (1972).  Made off the proceeds of a successful pornographic film, this genuinely gonzo horror film sparked the careers of two kings of horror, Wes Craven and Friday the 13th creator, Sean Cunningham. On the surface, this rape-revenge exploitation film plays it straight: shock,...

The fifth film in our Self-Aware Horror cycle is 1982's mashup of George Romero and Stephen King, Creepshow. Creepshow is an anthology horror film created as an hommage to the trashbin mid-century comic series, EC Comics. Romero and King grew up with EC Comics and its twisted tales of the macabre. Here the comic's ghastly ethos is distilled into five different segments starring big names of the ti...

The fourth film in our Self-Aware Horror cycle is 1992's gonzo horror splatterfest Dead Alive aka Braindead Dead Alive is a shocking film for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most astonishing is that it came from the same man who helped create the most recognized and beloved films of the last 20 years. Peter Jackson became famous for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film series. They exist alongs...

The third film in our Self-Aware Horror cycle is 2002's zombie renaissance 28 Days Later 28 Days Later reanimated the zombie subgenre of horror, which had been left for dead and maligned where it always had been. Yes, technically speaking, the infected in the film are not zombies. But they might as well be. Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake came a couple of years later in 2004 and helped pushe...

The second film in our Self-Aware Horror cycle is the 2012 postmodern bonanza The Cabin in the Woods. What happens when the Post-Scream style of ironic horror goes past the event horizon? The infamous Joss Whedon teamed up with Drew Goddard to create this send-up of the horror genre. The Cabin in the Woods is in many ways the paradigm of self-aware horror. It doesn't really work unless you are a h...

We are back! We are doing something different this season of Film Trace. Instead of covering new and old films at random, we are choosing a theme for each group of episodes. Our first theme is Self-Aware Horror. First up in our Self-Aware Horror cycle is Scream 5 aka Scream 2022. We are both huge Scream fans, so we felt like we had to do a deep dive on this requel. I hate that term, and we discuss...

A Wes Anderson double-header to close out Season 5 of Film Trace. Chris and I return to our roots as teenage film nerds. Wes Anderson was our first love as budding cinephiles, and despite the tumultuous last 20 years (Darjeeling anyone), we still get a jolt of excitement with every new Anderson film. The French Dispatch is Anderson's first portmanteau film, and the results are whimsically mixed as...

At the height of Jim Carrey's fame in the mid 1990s, this bizarre pitch-black comedy was released as a summer blockbuster. The Cable Guy is a historical and creative anomaly, especially for millenials old enough to have seen it in the theater. For the last twenty-five years, we have all been trying to piece together and understand the strange feelings this movie put inside of us. The genre here is...

As the box office finally begins to be resuscitated, albeit largely with the help of the comic book movie crowd, straight-to-streaming films now seem to either cater to cinematic schlock addicts or art film dorks, and the latest from the IFC Midnight imprint, We Need to Do Something , falls in a strange but intriguing gray area between the two. The first feature narrative from director (and known...

Let's get bummed. Back in 2006, the USA was deep in the 2nd term of George Bush II, aka the idiot king, and his 2nd Iraq war was raging. As a leftist, it felt like a total nightmare, but Alfonso Cuarón heard our cries. His Children of Men, a bleak dystopian manifesto , landed mostly with a thud when it was carelessly released on Christmas Day in 2006. A stellar cast helmed by Clive Owen and gorgeo...

Is nostalgia poison? It felt nearly impossible to avoid cynicism while watching this new Home Alone film, the 6th film in the series unceremoniously shipped off to Disney Plus. The critical response has been contemptuous. The audience reaction has been mutinous. But we can't help but wonder, how would a movie like this actually succeed with critics and audiences? Corporate reboots and fanboyism ar...

Put on your finest linen sports coat and/or effortless flowy sundress. Pack a handkerchief as well. This week we tackle the moistest noir seared onto film, 1981's Body Heat . We take exotic thrillers for granted now, but before Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct , we had Body Heat, a steamy take on the classic noir Double Indemnity . Palm Beach Florida and its fictionalized incessant humidity tak...

When Paranormal Activity came out in 2007, old school ads showing actual audience members jumping in their seats in night-vision green theaters gave the whole thing a real gimmick feel. The Blair Witch Project wasn't the first found footage movie ever made, but it was by far the best (still is) when it came out in 1999. Paranormal Activity felt a little johnny-come-lately, but the masses didn't ca...

Juno landed like an atom bomb. Diablo Cody's zeitgeist script mixed with the chemistry of Elliot Page and Micheal Cera became a cultural phenomenon in the winter of 2007-8. Millennial hipsters and their boomer parents, along with everyone in between, flocked to see this little slice of plucky Midwestern smarm. Cody's script won an Oscar, and Juno was nominated for Best Picture.  Diablo Cody w...

Where did it all go wrong? The Halloween films have been an uneven mess since John Carpenter forsook his creation back in the 1980s. Much like the Nightmare on Elm Street series, nothing quite touches the original. Halloween Kills is the 2nd film in the newest Halloween trilogy (its 3rd reboot no less), which will culminate in the finale Halloween Ends next year. All the right elements are in plac...

Dust off that clear plastic case to find a BASF video on the inside with the handwritten title "Toy Soldiers" on the spine. It is hard to trace the cult status of the 1991 teenage action flick Toy Soldiers, but it might have something to do with young women bootlegging the movie during free HBO weekends. Or perhaps, it is so hokey and anchored to the awkward cultural transition from the 1980s to 9...

The pandemic film has mostly become a term of derision. Filmmakers rushed to stay busy as the entire industry shut down, and we were subject to claustrophobic diary vomit ( Malcolm & Marie) and pretentious claptrap ( Songbird). Even the good pandemic films, like Host, felt underwhelming. On paper, Ride the Eagle reads like a bored creative's first draft of lil indie film: Nick from New Girl, a...

In October 2001, only a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a bizarro coming-of-age film was dumped in 58 theaters to die. Donnie Darko's trailer prominently featured a plane engine falling from the sky into a suburban bedroom, crushing an empty bed. It was terrible timing, but it is hard to say if Donnie Darko would have ever done well at the box office. It is one of the strangest films relea...

Great art can often seem to appear out of nowhere. It can also be hidden in genre and forms that don't always carry the clout of prestige. A trilogy of straight-to-streaming slasher films is not exactly where a film scholar would go to find depth or richness. Yet, the farther we dug into the Fear Street trilogy, the more we tended to find. The experimental release strategy of three feature films b...

Did we just cancel John Landis? Of course not, how could we! It's the 40th anniversary of his groundbreaking horror classic, An American Werewolf in London. We celebrate the great: Rick Baker's astonishing practical effects, Griffin Dunne's career-defining performance as a slowly decaying best friend, and Landis's ability to balance and blend extreme gore with witty humor. We also look at what has...

What are we to do with Steven Soderbergh? His prolific cinematic output is matched only by his recalcitrant refusal to stay in a single lane, style, or medium. Maybe we should rethink the term auteur as Soderbergh defines and transcends the term at the same time. His work has no signature other than you feel his presence in every shot and cut. With No Sudden Move, Soderbergh dives back into the he...

I'm with Cancer . That was the original name of this cancer comedy that somehow got produced in the early 2010s. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen pilot this wobbly feature towards a miraculous smooth landing. It is a genre paella where you can pick out the best bits and scrape off the rest: still funny boorish chauvinist improv humor from Rogen, Levitt staring into the middle distance, Bryce Da...

James Wan just wanted to make a fun haunted house movie when he accidentally launched a 2 billion dollar cinematic universe with The Conjuring in the summer of 2013. Wan is a modern horror master. Saw, Insidious, and the entire Conjuring Cinematic Universe are all his spawn. His creative spark has begotten us 8 CCU films in less than 8 years. Here we have the 3rd mainline Conjuring film starring t...

One Fine Day is a time machine back to the 1990s Rom-Com boom. It was a simpler time: you got ink on your hands while reading the newspaper, people talked into large grey bricks called cell phones, and all women, regardless of age or relationship status, were supposed to flirt aggressively with George Clooney. We dive deep into the inner workings of romantic comedies with our special guest, Michel...