Maps to the Stars (2014) David Cronenberg

This was the first movie Canadian director David Cronenberg filmed (partially) in Los Angeles. All his earlier movies were shot in Canada and the UK. Maps to the Stars comes across as an attack on Hollywood but I don't know if it really was since the people in it had issues you can't blame on the movie industry. There was  middle-aged actress Havana (Julianne Moore). She had been sexually abused by her mother, a great movie star who died fairly young. Havana wants to star in a remake of a movie her mother had gotten an Oscar nomination for, and now she's having hallucinations. She sees her mother in a bathtub saying terrible things to her. 

And there was Benji (Evan Bird), an exceptionally bratty 13-year-old star. He has a dangerously mentally ill sister who had just been released from a sanitarium. His parents didn't know that their marriage was incestuous until it was too late. The poor kid's a recovering drug addict and is starting to hallucinate himself. 

We see Benji hanging around in clubs with other tween celebrities, the girls referring to an actress in her early 20's as "menopausal" and a teen idol who tells about his sewage being stolen by the teamster charged with maintaining his trailer and sold to a deranged fan.

Evan Bird was great in this movie, but he hasn't appeared in anything since. Maybe it turned him off to show business. The scene in this that stood out to me was Benji hanging around at his friend's house. He unloads the family revolver and starts playing with it. He puts it to his head a couple of times and pulls the trigger. We saw him unload it, but you know nothing good can come of this.

With Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattison and John Cusack.

Available on The Criterion Channel, or you can pay a few bucks to see it on Prime, Apple TV or Fandango.

Gotti (2018) John Travolta, Spencer LoFranco

I probably held it to a different standard since I saw it on TV, but that's the only way anyone's going to see it. I didn't think it was terrible, just a straight telling of what a monster John Gotti was. I don't know what people wanted from it. We see him in prison still browbeating his family. We see him murder people. Nothing glaringly wrong with the movie but I can see why people didn't go for it.

I watched it because one of the stars, Spencer LoFranco who played Gotti's son, just died at 33, poor devil. Gotti was his last movie. I don't know if its failure sent him spiraling into drug addiction. He was pulling himself back together when he died. He had face tattoos removed and was going to take another stab at acting.

Free on Prime, Pluto, Tubi, Roku Channel, and Fawesome.

Timothee Chalamet, Adam Sandler

Timothee Chalamet is dating a Kardashian and now he says that Adam Sandler is “ONE OF THE BEST FUCKING ACTORS OF ALL TIME!" I guess it's all subjective. I don't really watch anything with Adam Sandler, so I may have misjudged him and I've seen Chalamet in a few things and never saw what the big deal was. I understand why people like him, but why do they like him so much?  If you're going to state an opinion that will make you look stupid, don't use the word "fucking". He's pushing 30.

Flying Disk Man From Mars (1950)

It sounded interesting, an early UFO movie, but it turned out to be a serial. Had bad fist fights that drag on and on in every episode. Some of the cars looked beautiful, but they had these chases with guys driving while shooting at each other. Communists from Mars are out to dominate the Earth. Criminals use this as a front for their smuggling operation. The picture quality was really good.

Free on Tubi.

Rust (2024) Alec Baldwin, Patrick Scott McDermott,

I was curious about the movie. I wanted to see it, but I didn't want to spend $6 to watch it on Roku. How did I get so cheap? I looked it up online. $6 today is equal to $2 in 1985, and in 1985 I'd have cheerfully spent two bucks to see it on lousy quality VHS.  

If what I read in one review is correct, Halyna Hutchin's son will only receive compensation for his mother's death when the movie turns a profit. Assuming she was an employee and not an "independent contractor", the family would get something from Workman's Comp and the kid would get Social Security survivor benefits, but, according to critic Susan Granger: 

In 2022, Halyna’s widower Matthew settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the film’s producers, who were protected by an LLC listing only one thing of value: the movie. That resulted in his billing as one of the executive producers, and their son Andros will receive profits from the film. But inevitably, ‘creative’ bookkeeping will determine how much that is.

So I paid to see it on Amazon Prime.

Far better than I expected. It was over two hours but didn't seem overlong. It looked beautiful and it was infinitely better than other recent low budget westerns I've seen. It was violent enough and it proves that there's nothing wrong with digital muzzle flashes and smoke instead of firing blanks. It's a shame they didn't do that in the first place. 

Rust himself was kind of a jerk. He pistol whips his tween grandson and carries him out of the jail instead of just telling him he was there to save him from being hanged. 

People keep comparing it to spaghetti westerns but I didn't see the similarity. I didn't know how I'd feel about Alec Baldwin in a western, but he was fine, the kid, Patrick Scott McDermott, was good. The beginning of the movie with the two orphaned boys struggling to survive on a primitive farm was depressing enough that accidentally killing a man, being sentenced to death and fleeing into the countryside was really the best thing for that poor kid.

In this age of streaming video, it was very clever giving the movie such a short title, only four letters that were all next to each other in the alphabet. Searching for it on Roku was almost effortless.

There's a scene in a town where there's a sign that says "Joe Souza Trading Post". The movie was directed by Joel Souza. Maybe he shouldn't have done that.

I didn't find the two brawling hog farming brothers funny, but they didn't annoy me the way they did some critics. 

Bones and All, Timothee Chalamet, 2022

Bones and All, Timothee Chalamet's teen cannibalism movie, is now showing on The Criterion Channel. I turned it off at the start of the first big cannibalism scene. A few seconds of that was enough. The movie got a long, standing ovation at a classy European film festival. Why would anyone watch that? Couldn't they just show people eating pot roast and say it was human? 

A better cannibalism movie was Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain (1959) about Japanese soldiers in The Philippines. I assumed the cannibalism was allegorical, then I saw The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987), a documentary about a former Japanese soldier who survived the allied invasion of New Guinea. He wanted to find out what happened to his friend who, it turned out, was murdered and eaten by Japanese officers when their food ran out.

The Criterion Channel keeps showing crap. For a while they had posted the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and they showed a couple pornographic movies made during a brief period when that sort of thing was considered "chic". 

Boardinghouse (1982) Death Park: The Beginning (2021), Death Park: The End (2021)

Boardinghouse (1982)

Shot on video---VHS according to Indiewire, but that may not be true. They had U-Matic video back then which had a better picture. Camcorders didn't have flying eraser heads then, so they didn't have clean cuts between shots. So you had to edit which meant loss of image quality.

Because it was shot in somebody's house reportedly on VHS, I assumed it was terribly cheap, and it was. The estimated budget was $10,000 according to imdb.com, but that was over $30,000 today. They spent far more than that to make a tape-to-film transfer to release it to theaters.

Movies that cheap today are made today without paying anyone, so I was surprised by the amount of nudity. It doesn't seem like actors should do that for free.  

Horror movie, somewhat bloody, had a gore scene with pig's intestines.

Death Park: The Beginning (2021), Death Park: The End (2021).

Made for $180, according to IMDb. Another site said $680. I would quip that I wondered where all the money went, but that wouldn't be true. They had a large cast, a couple of topless scenes, quite a bit of presumably fake blood and a number of simple practical effects. I had the feeling it was made for Community Access TV, but there was nothing to indicate that.

Not much to it. People go into a park and a man in a Donald Trump mask murders them with a knife. 

They always cut to another shot before the stabbing. It goes from the guy beginning to plunge the knife in the victim's direction, then it cuts to a shot of the knife stuck in them. It's nice that the unpaid cast was never in any danger. Although I hear you can get workman's comp on unpaid volunteers, so an on-the-job injury could have been their only hope of being paid. There was a scene where a woman flees the killer but trips over a rope the killer stretched across the trail and this was also accomplished through editing. I'm at a stage of life where I would consider lying down on the ground a stunt.

So, it was all right. It seems like they could have taken greater advantage of the truly low budget. They were free to do whatever they wanted plot-wise. They had almost nothing to lose. 

All three movies are free on Tubi.