Cale Morsen – Page 3 – Reel Film Chronicles

Halloween (2018)

{field 2} | dir: {field 3} | {field 4}m Halloween is one among many John Carpenter masterpieces that he has deigned to bestow up the world, and I have, of course, watched it many times. The rest of the sequels… not so much. As part of my annual horror movie marathon this October, I decided to get caught up the rest of the Halloween series. Much to my dismay, I discovered that much like the Friday the 13th series, the sequels to Halloween represented at best diminishing artistic and entertainment returns and at worst head-scratchingly terrible movies, the scripts for which probably wouldn’t receive a passing mark if they had had been submitted as creative writing assignments in a grade 4 class. Yes, I’m looking at you Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and Halloween: Resurrection. These are sequels that are so bad that it felt like they were made specifically to insult and alienate fans of the series (or at least of the original film). The Halloween sequels seemed to go off the rails almost immediately, adding increasingly nonsensical aspects to the Michael Myers mythology that made the character less impactful and…

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

2016 | dir: André Øvredal | 99 m I don’t know if it says more about me or about the horror industry that when I first heard about The Autopsy of Jane Doe, I immediately assumed necrophilia was going to play a large part in the plot. (Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.) I’m not sure why, exactly, but my mind kept trying to connect it with Deadgirl, a movie that involves some teenage boys, a zombie girl, and a whole lot of lube. Although, I’m not sure whether sex with somebody who’s only mostly dead counts as necrophilia or it’s really more of a grey area, zombiphilia. Either way, the point is The Autopsy of Jane Doe was actually nothing like Deadgirl, and I definitely don’t have a fetish for corpses that can legally be proven in a court of law as far as you know. I picked up The Autopsy of Jane Doe for a good price at FanExpo last year, but for some reason, it never made the cut in my yearly Halloween horror movie marathon. I mean, I guess I…

Collector’s Corner: 12 Monkeys

Almost since the beginning, Terry Gilliam has been a mainstay in my movie collection, and my DVD copy of 12 Monkeys has been around since university. It easily claimed a spot on the list of Essential Cinema that my friends and I hashed out over countless drunken nights and weekend marathon gaming sessions of SSX Tricky. So I was super stoked to upgrade to the Arrow release of 12 Monkeys a couple weeks back when Ryebone and I made our annual pilgrimage to FAN EXPO, it being a staple of my cinematic diet for so long. And also a little sad. Not at the superior visual and audio quality of the new Blu-ray version, which is awesome, but at the replacement of the specific DVD copy that has been a part of my life, literally for decades now. For some, sentimentality over a particular copy of a particular movie that was mass-produced around the world may be difficult to grasp. It’s the same basic drive that fuels all sentimental connections, I suppose; that particular thing is associated in one’s brain with another thing that occurred in…

Spider-Man: Far From Home

2019 | dir: Jon Watts | 129m The Marvel Cinematic Universe is, by this point, a well-oiled machine that basically prints money on command. Spider-Man Far From Home, the second solo outing for Peter Parker and his alter-ego in the MCU, seemed destined to be a smash success, as most Marvel films are these days. And, of course, it is raking in a tonne of dough. There’s no question it’s a financial success for Marvel Studios and their evil overlords at Disney. It did what it was designed to do, and exactly nothing more. I went in to Spider-Man: Far From Home as a fan of the MCU in general: a few terrible films, a few great films, a lot of solid films somewhere in between those two extremes, but always well-thought out and part of a larger plan. I remember walking out of Avengers: Infinity War and thinking that this is probably as close as I would get to experiencing a cinematic event that people watching The Empire Strikes Back for the first time in theatres must have shared. I’m impressed at the MCU’s long-form storytelling,…

Collector’s Corner: Prince of Darkness

John Carpenter. When you absolutely, positively have to scare every last bubble-gum chewer in the room, accept no substitute. Some people live with no regrets; regretting stuff is pretty much all I do. With regards to my video library, one of my current regrets is the lack of John Carpenter films, which I’ve started to remedy with my recent acquisition of Prince of Darkness, an integral entry in his self-described “Apocalypse Trilogy” alongside The Thing and In The Mouth of Madness. In this company, Prince of Darkness is the weakest entry, but it’s also a great entry. Any time you can get Donald Pleasence, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, and Alice Cooper in the same film about an ultimate evil force trying to bring about the end of days, you can’t go wrong. Carpenter’s pantheon is the perfect complement to the films of David Cronenberg. Both filmmakers came out of the same school, focusing a great deal on horror and sci-fi, and both have a very economic form of storytelling. Some days I want to watch an epic Scorsese drama; other days I want to be kicked…

Ghostbusters (2016)

For whatever reasons, call it fate, call it karma, call it creative bankruptcy, I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe that we were destined to get a Ghostbusters remake. It’s a real shame that the dialogue around the Ghostbusters remake released in 2016 was tainted by misogyny and general vitriol from armchair critics and trogloditic neckbeards that dwell in the deepest, dankest corners of the interwebs, because it was a genuinely mediocre summer blockbuster that in most other universes probably would have have been the start of a movie franchise. Or at least, some more marketable merchandise that would have helped grease the wheels for all those involved for a little longer. I remember being pretty sour on the general concept of a remake of the 1984 cult classic Ghostbusters. Admittedly, it has to do at least in part with the fact that this was a beloved film from my childhood. I grew up watching Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II as well as the animated The Real Ghostbusters. To this day, I will still sometimes find myself randomly singing quietly to myself or in my head the Ghostbusters theme song, or the…

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of a New Trailer

For those of us with our fingers on the pulse (and not far from the pulse and straight up somewhere very uncomfortable (no, not the back of a Volkswagen)), news of a teaser trailer for the upcoming Star Wars film was not entirely unanticipated. This past week in Chicago, Star Wars Celebration was underway, an annual expo dedicated to all things Star Wars related. With the end of the Skywalker saga slated for release in December of this year, this is prime time for the release of updates, teasers, and various other miscellaneous info to start dropping for one of the most highly anticipated films of… let me check again… ah yes, ever. And drop the trailer for Episode IX has. And along with the trailer came the reveal of the name, which is (drum roll please) The Rise of Skywalker. Now, those who know me know I’m not prone to rash decisions, but my initial reaction is that this title sucks. Hard. I know I risk falling into that old cliche of “Nobody hates Star Wars like a Star Wars fan,” but I’m not suggesting that the film is…