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HARK!
I hear..a creepy synthesizer…
Around the country, it’s Halloween week. Here at the FilmBar, one of the jewels of HARK Valley, it’s Halloween week.
The downtown flick house has John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher-piece playing Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Halloweenday.
Working on a shoestring budget, Carpenter composed the music himself, using a cheap synthesizer to create some of the most memorable creepy-chords in the history of scary movies.
Also on FilmBar’s weekend bill: Labyrinth Of Cinema, Nobuhiko Obayashi last film, completed shortly before his death last year. Sounds like Bill & Ted’s Excruciating Adventure: friends time travel through all of Japan’s wars.
And, going with the Carpenter main dish, the FilmBar also packs in four more Hallo-movies: Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas; the 1985 classic shock-flick Re-Animator; and Halloweens 4 and 5. It's a monster mashup...
FilmBar Halloween mashup
Best part about the FilmBar (815 N. 2nd Street, Phoenix, AZ 85004) weekend? It’s free!!!!
According to a post from the moviehouse:
FREE movies, popcorn, and swag this Saturday & Sunday at FilmBar! We've partnered with our friends at Pluto TV to bring you some great Halloween films...Follow this link to find a movie you want to see:
https://bit.ly/3EhnJDf
THEN, enter the promo code PLUTOTV in the appropriate place to grab your free ticket!
Meanwhile, Halloween Kills is playing in first-run theaters and streaming on Peacock TV.
More horrible than horrorville.
Jamie Lee Curtis is back for another battle with Michael Myers but Carpenter is only on the paycheck-receiving line here; David Gordon Green directs, more or less…
Much better on the playing-and-streaming front: Dune, a remake of David Lynch’s weirdness (or weird mess) from 1984. It’s streaming on HBO Max and also just hit theaters.
Director Denis Villeneuve, a French Canadian best known for Sicario, puts some great visuals on the screen, but…
Major complaint: Not enough worm time!
Anyway, a pretty solid cast keep straight faces as they tackle this bizzaro set in 10191. The action takes place on a desert landscape where creepy-looking dudes battle over a drug/space-traveling tool called Spice...so, yeah, it’s kind of like Phoenix.
Oscar Isaac plays Duke Leto Atreides; he has a relatively small role, but a fierce beard.
Isaac is also on HBO in an even bolder remake: Scenes From a Marriage.
It’s one thing to tackle Lynch’s epic catastrophe (Roger Ebert pretty much nailed it: “This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.” https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dune-1984 )
But a Bergman?
Isaac plays Jonathan Levy to Jessica Chastain’s Mira Phillips; both are exceptional in this marriage-horror story.
There’s no menacing, knife-wielding villain...just menacing, stabbing emotions.
The boogeyman, here?
Existence.
Hagai Levi, who did the adaptation with Amy Herzog, directs the pitch-perfect first four episodes—and the over-the-top, deeply unsatisfying finale, as pretentious and fake-weighty as its title, "In the Middle of the Night, in a Dark House, Somewhere in the World.”
Ug. Paging Mr. Myers, please report to the editing room ...