Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

Nosferatu

4/16/2025

B+

Directed by Robert Eggers

Starring Lily Rose-Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Willem Dafoe

Review by Jon Kissel

Whatever the opposite of presentism is, that’s how Robert Eggers makes his films. It’s a perfectly fine choice to apply the standards of today to whatever time period a film is taking place in, but it’s not for Eggers. He instead immerses himself in the norms and cosmology of his setting, with the present as some far-off place that has no bearing on the onscreen proceedings. This is irresistible for history-inclined viewers like myself, and Eggers reconstructs his direct pipeline into my brain with Nosferatu. A remake of the 1920’s classic, itself adapted from Bram Stoker, the film is drowning in period detail, era-appropriate lighting, and the ironclad beliefs of 19th century Germans. It’s their perspective which Eggers molds the film around, and that perspective is terrified of the occult, the mysterious east, and female sexuality.

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Longlegs

11/20/2024

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D+

Directed by Osgood Perkins

Starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage

Review by Jon Kissel

There’s a part in the excellent documentary Hail Satan where a member of the satirical Satanic Temple talks about the irony of the Satanic Panic, where seemingly all of American culture imagined ritualistic sexual abuse and demonic rituals in every dark basement with a heavy metal poster on the wall and Dungeons and Dragons in the cabinet, only for that same vision of sexual abuse to be later uncovered in churches perpetrated by priests and ministers. Osgood Perkins’ horror hit Longlegs wonders, what if James Dobson was right? What if Satan really was infiltrating families in the form of an effeminate metal freak, corrupting them in the service of the dark lord himself? This Robert Eggers-esque approach, where the belief system of a subculture is treated as true, utterly fails in Longlegs. It’s one thing to conjure Norse mythology or Puritan paranoia, and it’s another to plumb a phenomenon so recent, that the falsely accused continue to rot in prison.

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Seven

9/15/2023

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A-
3.67

Two detectives hunt down a serial killer who's using the seven deadly sins as an inspiration.

Directed by David Fincher
Starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Gwyneth Paltrow
Review by Jon Kissel

David Fincher’s first film, Alien3, infamously begins with all the hard sacrifice from its action crowd-pleaser predecessor up in smoke before the opening credits are finished. Ellen Ripley’s surrogate daughter and potential love interest that she’s both saved from the alien queen don’t survive a crash landing on a prison planet, and the movie continues without them. That kind of ruthlessness will be with Fincher throughout the rest of his career. As bleak as his debut is, he tops himself with his smash hit follow-up Seven, a serial killer noir that constructs the worst contemporary world possible and dares the viewer to find a glimmer of hope. Featuring career-changing performances from its main cast and a series of unforgettable images, Seven stamped Fincher as a major filmmaker, an iconoclast who rejected audience expectations and kept coming back to whatever fucked up thing popped into his head.

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Scanners

6/23/2022

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B-
2.67

A telepath is recruited by a defense contractor to find a rogue telepath.

Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Stephen Lack, Michael Ironside, and Patrick McGoohan
Review by Jon Kissel

I once attended a lecture about South Korea exporting its culture under the assumption that it was going to be about the gonzo, transgressive films of Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. Instead, the lecturer discussed K-pop and its unique brand of manufactured wholesomeness, a phrase totally unfamiliar to fans of Oldboy and Memories of Murder. Of course, as great as those films are, K-pop has a much wider appeal and dominates the global interpretation of South Korean culture, and I, not being a fan, am a narrow-minded fool who thinks everyone interprets culture the same way I do. It’s like if all I knew of Canada were the films of favored canuck son David Cronenberg, and expected every Canadian to have an opinion on which of the dozens of fleshy vestigial appendages in his films were their favorite (Videodrome stomach or Dead Ringers connecting tissue for me). For all of Canada’s stereotypical courtesy and niceness, Cronenberg has been his own stalwart maple tree, pumping out acidic, dystopian sap for five decades with no signs of tapping out. Scanners fits squarely within his early career, where Cronenberg is still figuring his formula out and putting the pieces together. It’s not yet the total package of body horror, corporate satire, and taboo behavior that he’ll hit on shortly after Scanners, but here, things are coming together for this cinematic master even as he’s blasting prop heads apart.

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The Brood

6/15/2022

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2.33
C+

A divorced man grapples for custody of his daughter with his ex-wife who's undergoing intensive psychological therapy.

Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Art Hindle, Samantha Egger, and Oliver Reed
Review by Jon Kissel

Of all the auteurs who write and direct their own movies, David Cronenberg doesn’t leap to the top of mind as the creator of personal films. His combination of body horror, cultural satire, and psychodrama is unique enough without having to read details from Cronenberg’s life into his work. With The Brood, an early Cronenberg entry made in the wake of a bad divorce, one can see that a mind as acidic as his can go to some dark and cruel places when people from his life are subbing into his movies, particularly when the protagonist’s mother is depicted as a cultish monster who’s trying to keep her kids from her ex-husband. However, perhaps it’s the getting all of his ugly feelings onscreen that puts Cronenberg on his path, moving away from the gorefests that predated The Brood and towards the richer territory of what comes after. Characters expelling their psychological baggage to transform into their higher selves is a hallmark of Cronenberg’s career, and his divorce and the film he made about it may well serve as the catalyst.

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<<Previous

Nosferatu

B+

Longlegs

D+

Seven

A-
3.67

Scanners

B-
2.67

The Brood

2.33
C+

Authors

Categories

Archives

Nosferatu

B+

Longlegs

D+

Seven

A-3.67

Scanners

B-​2.67

The Brood

2.33​C+

Authors

Categories

Archives

A-
3.67

B-
2.67

2.33
C+