glovered

This was not one of the rounds where I managed to write lots of things, alas. I did receive some lovely gifts, though! I found some other great stuff in the collection as well.

My gifts:
Calling, True Detective: Night Country, implied Danvers/Navarro, ghosts.
Offering, Re-Animator, Dan/Herbert, recurring dream.
He Knows a Lie When He Hears One, Re-Animator, Dan/Herbert, them being soft and weird!
likeness, Sinners, Smoke/Stack, some incesty porn.
so I can die easy, Sinners, Smoke/Stack, if Stack turned Smoke.
Two Sides Of A Curse (Still I'll Admire You), Sinners, Smoke/Stack, after Stack turns Smoke.

Other recs:
fear no evil, Sinners, Smoke/Stack, a neat bit of canon divergence.
indulgent respite, The Mummy, gen ensemble, a peaceful interlude.
they call it internet technology, Stardew Valley, Sebastian & Harvey, tech support.
Planned Obsolescence, Blade Runner 2049, K character study.
Incident Report, OW, Ghost Haunting the Museum That Used to Be His Estate & Stressed Out Afterlife Bureaucrat, completely charming.

The Shining (1980). I honestly can't find much to say about this. It's beautiful; the sets are amazing, there's a lot of gorgeous shots. It felt very ~cinematic. It's too bad about the Jack Nicholson of it all! I could have done with at least 80% less Jack Nicholson. Every time he was on screen I was like, we could doing literally anything else.

The kid actor was good, and after all the shit I'd vaguely osmosed about Wendy Torrance (or just about the actress), I was extremely impressed with how effectively she protected herself and her kid, even when she was scared out of her mind.

Honestly I mainly watched this so I could finally watch Doctor Sleep. Mission accomplished, I guess. I also want to reread the novel now.

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Until Dawn (2025). On a road trip to find closure over a friend who went missing, a group of five twenty-somethings stumble into a house that traps them and kills them over and over.

This movie tried to do too many things and half-assed most of them. The characters got at most half a personality characteristic each. The monsters were boring. The plot/explanation got increasingly convoluted, with more and more stuff stuck onto it. The main sets around the house all felt weirdly artificial. There were a handful of great horror reveals (the bulletin board, the guest book), but the movie didn't really know how to capitalize on them.

I did like ( spoilers )

There were some okay kills, if that's your thing. There's one particular kill that I was not expecting at all, and the movie made a lot of hay out of it. It's like they found One Cool Trick and kept hitting that button, for better or for worse.

In conclusion: big meh.

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Clown in a Cornfield (2025). In a tiny midwestern town, sometimes a clown murders one or more people in a cornfield. Enter Quinn, a high schooler who's just moved to town with her father while they both grieve her mother's death.

This was completely delightful. The novel this was adapted from was written by a high school teacher, and I think that really shows in the affection for the teen characters. The fraught father/daughter relationship is good too, though! I also really enjoyed the romance, which I thought was very sweet.

There's also themes! A late stage reveal that made me think of a completely different movie that I will not spoil you for! Lots of fun kills!

This is far and away my favorite of these three movies, but it's hard to articulate why except that it's a lot of fun and the characters feel like real people with real relationships, which is saying something in a movie about a killer clown. The clown gets the marquee, but the characters make the movie. If this sounds like your jam at all, I highly recommend you check it out.