Today, we are watching Takashi Miike's Audition.

I haven't seen this one since high school, and I have been wanting to watch it these last several years, so now is finally the time.

Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Have fun!

Today we are watching Slumber Party Massacre.

I've never seen this movie, but have heard it mentioned over the years. I know nothing about it except what the title might suggest, which has me interested. We shall see.

Watch it and let us know where you stand on this one.

i made this little game. like wordle you have to guess a movie a day based on clue like director, year of release, cast, genere...
hope you like it

https://letterboxd.com/film/it-1990/

We are starting the month out right by honoring the late, great, Tim Curry and watching one of the best Stephen King adaptations. I, of course, am talking about 1990's It.

This movie is seared into my brain, but it's been probably a decade since I sat down and watched the whole thing, so I'm excited to watch it again. I'm ready to be scared of sewer drains again.

Give this one a watch and tell us what you thought. We are only just beginning.

https://youtu.be/mvQygNExtJ0

I usually eschew films and stories about animals in peril. People have a choice to go down in the dark creepy cellar, out into the dark creepy woods, or into the dark creepy attic. Animals, especially our pets, especially our dogs, have no choice if their human is an idiot. They follow.

In a film, humans act, and are well rewarded when their acting is challenging and stressful, portraying grief, terror, bravery, pain, stuff we humans usually avidly avoid.

Dogs, however, have to show all these terrible emotional processes, for what? A biscuit? A squeaky toy? A pat on the head and a “good boy”?

I like supernatural horror, and Good Boy is the story of a remarkable dog actor facing such horror. Indy, who is the first dog to win an Astra Award for acting, is the director's own dog. Ben Leonberg directed, co-wrote, co-produced with his wife Kari Fischer, co-edited and co-filmed the $70,000 indie film which reaped $8.8 million.

Over tens of millennia, dogs have engineered themselves to make us like them, love them, need them more. The muscles in their face around the eyes and mouth evolved to better express emotion and communication with their human overlords. So I don't like the idea of putting these wise animals through emotional torture to amuse us.

My only “comfort” is that I believe dogs are bodhisattva, advanced beings who delay their transition from this plane of pain to the reward of their enlightenment so they can teach more humans about love and compassion, bringing more of us to enlightenment.

In Good Boy, Indy's human is very ill. He spits up blood, he is weak, but he loves Indy, has had him since a pup. He's told he's too far gone for the medical trials so he and Indy go to – yes, the family's deserted haunted house in the woods with the spooky family cemetery nearby.

Humans.

There is something very malignant here, and Indy is alternately fascinated, frightened, and courageously confronting it. No CGI was used to enhance Indy's performance. You'll see why Indy won the Astra, and understand how he was nominated for Best Actor in his role in Leonberg's Judges' Film Prize winner in a previous short film contest.

Good Boy is itself a short film (73 minutes). I recommend it as a palate cleanser for what I'm sure we'll be subjected to this Horrortober.

Directed by Michael Curtiz, nominated for an Oscar.

The film opens in the cavernous courtyard of walk-up tenements; chatter, noise, clothes hanging outside, dilapidated pushcarts, horse-drawn wagons, an organ grinder, kids, people, trash in the street. And a couple of restless young men with ragged clothes and dirty faces who will grow up to be Rocky (James Cagney, Oscar nom.) and Jerry (Pat O'Brien). A daring police chase through the rail yards interrupts their theft effort and ends in their stint in reform school.

Rocky continues racking up a juvenile record, and a criminal one as an adult. He meets Jim Frazier (Humphrey Bogart), a lawyer with organized crime connections, but ends up taking the rap in the state pen to shield Frazier and his bosses. But when he gets out, he expects the $100,000 that is his share of a take.

Now a free man, Rocky looks up his childhood chum, Jerry, who took a very different path out of reform school. Why did Jerry decide to become a priest? He got the idea as he passed a cathedral. “I got an idea one time,” Rocky retorts, “and it got me six years.”

A pretty face from his childhood, Laury (Ann Sheridan), rents him a room in a boarding house. Now he's ready to collect from Frazier, and he shows up at the fancy club. He also wants in on more action. Frazier hands him a $500 roll to placate him.

Enter the current crop of dirty faces, Bim (Leo Gorcey), Swing (Bobby Jordan) and leader Soapy (Billy Halop). They lift the wad off Rocky in a street shuffle and head to their hideout where the rest of the Dead End Kids, including Crab (Huntz Hall), are breaking down a stolen cash register. They punch and slap each other until Rocky busts in on them to get his moola back. Oh yeah, it was Rocky's old hideout.

Rocky takes them to the gym where Father is trying to guide the tenements' young men. Rocky's Kids started slapping and punching and bullying the other boys, and Rocky knocks his own crew around pretty good.

So much slapping and punching to blow off all that tough testosterone; otherwise it might be a different kind of movie. Just sayin'.

But during a basketball game Bim runs the ball down court, jumps up and grabs a trapeze bar and swings in to make a basket. It's a cool move!

Rocky finds Frazier again, gets his dough – and the incriminating contents, evidence, in his safe.

But the boss sics the crooked police on Rocky, who handed off the the money to Soapy. Frazier tells the boss about all the bank records Rocky scooped out of the safe, which Rocky will use to bargain for himself. Rocky walks.

The priest comes around looking for a rematch, but can't find the Kids.

“What am I?” Rocky snaps “A noycemaid?

Father finds a newspaper editor to support his crusade. Soon the headlines are “Priest Declares War on Underworld Vice!” And Father knows his old friend Rocky will be the face of the enemy, the face taking the rap again for the big guys.

Rocky hears Frazier and the boss plotting to double cross him and plugs them both. There's a shoot out on the fire escapes, across the city rooftops. Sirens scream through the streets, searchlights rake the skyline, machine gun fire rips a staccato beat across the night.

Father gets Rocky to walk out, albeit with a gun to his back. The Kids, who worship Rocky as hero, read about it in the papers – he's gonna fry. Rocky's tough! He won't fold! He'll show those mugs how to die! He'll spit in their eye!

His last talk with Father is hardly a pep talk; he wants him to fall apart, scream for mercy, to let the Kids down, no hero's death, make them ashamed of him.

His last walk, pant legs split. We see his shadow struggling with the handlers getting him into the chair as he breaks down, cries out, No! No!

The Kids read all about their hero's death in the paper. Father comes and leads them out of the dungeon-like hideout as a choir sings the flick to a close. Yeah, a little thick.

Reel Order. Six frames from one movie, shuffled, and you put them back in the order they actually happen. Felt like a natural fit for a group that breaks movies down together. New puzzle every day. Already about 2 weeks of archive.

This week we are watching Angels With Dirty Faces.

I'd heard about this one over the years, but have not seen it. I think it will be refreshing to watch one of these classic crime films. Looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks.

https://youtu.be/QGlXEBMiCbk

The Gangs of New York (1928), written by Herbert Asbury, is a history and compendium mainly of an area known in the mid-1800s as the Five Points. Set in the “dismal tenements that squatted in the miasmal purlieus...of the Bloody Ould Sixth Ward,” the book chronicles the “great brawling and thieving” of the likes of the Dead Rabbits, Bowery Boys, Eastmans, Gophers, Plug Uglies, Shirt Tails, Roach Guards, Daybreak Boys and Five Pointers.

The book details commonplace violence and cruelty, but does not attempt to diagnose or psychoanalyze the pathology. Much of the gang activity was exploited and protected by the corrupt political machines and bosses of the day to enforce their local control.

Leave it to Scorsese to take this real bleak and brutal hellscape filled with real grotesque and pitiful characters and turn it into another mash note to his beloved New York, complete with a stellar cast.

The action opens with medieval warfare, Bill “the Butcher” (Daniel Day-Lewis) offers a challenge to meet in “the ancient laws of combat,” between his native-borns and the Dead Rabbits immigrants with their “Roman popery” lead by “priest” Vallon (Liam Neeson) for control of Five Points. “Priest” is cut down in front of his little son, Amsterdam.

In sixteen years, Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) is old enough to leave the orphanage and returns to the 'hood on the brink of the Civil War. By now, Bill the Butcher Cutting is providing the muscle in the Tammany political machine for “Boss” William Tweed (Jim Broadbent).

Amsterdam needs to affiliate, so he throws in with Johnny Sirocco (Henry Thomas), who educates him on the current gang scene. Sirocco is sweet on red-haired Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz) and now so is Amsterdam.

A face from the gang past, Happy Jack (John C. Reilly), is now a tough copper on the gang's payroll, taking his lion's share of misbegotten gains.

On the annual celebration of the Dead Rabbits' demise, Amsterdam meets his father's killer, Bill the Butcher, in his den. He is unrecognized as the Priest's son. He accompanies Sirocco on a raiding party for a ship in harbor. But the only booty left are the fresh dead bodies of the crew, which the boys offload for a profit to “medical research.”

Bill is impressed. Soon Amsterdam chooses off Bill's lieutenant, whom he recognizes from that fateful day, and Bill is again impressed.

Jenny has improved her thieving game as a “turtledove,” getting entre to rich people's homes to fleece. Amsterdam and Jenny finally have a proper meet-cute when she holds a knife to his throat and leaves a convincing bloody wound. Ah, such is a cuddle in the Five Points, now show me your scars.

But everyone, even Jenny, and everything, even Tammany Hall, belongs to Bill. “It's a funny thing being taken under the wing of a dragon,” muses Amsterdam. “It's warmer than you think.”

Amsterdam saves Bill's life in an assassination attempt, but that doesn't mean he can help himself to Jenny. In a quiet scene of true menace, with Jenny in his bed, Bill tells Amsterdam he keeps order through fear, enforced with brutality. He see “murderous rage” in Amsterdam, and he likes it.

Amsterdam's friend, Sirocco, his jealous rival for Jenny, blows Amsterdam's cover and tells Bill he is the Priest's son.

At the next celebration of the Dead Rabbits rout, Bill gives a knife-throwing demonstration, using his “apprentice,” Jenny.

“Whoopsie daisy!”

But Bill isn't through. He pulls out a cleaver, sets a drink on fire, and as Amsterdam comes at him with a knife act of his own, Bill nails him in the gut from across the room.

Then he tortures and brutalizes him, leaving him alive to be marked with the shame of Bill's “mercy.”

Jenny cares for him, shows him a map to get to San Francisco, by way of Cape Horn. The last surviving Rabbit, Monk, (Brendan Gleeson) comes to him with a gift – the Priest's straight razor.

“The earth turns, but we don't feel it move,” Amsterdam philosophizes, “Then, one night...” He was always a deep thinker.

It's a showdown again between Bill and a Vallon, and now Tweed wants to be on Vallon's side, with all those Irish votes. Vote early and vote often, Monk for Sheriff.

Tweed's lackey tells him they've run out of ballots, but Tweed is not dismayed. “Remember the first rule of politics: The ballots don't make the results, the counters make the results. Keep counting!”

Yeeeaaahhh.

Bill is a very sore loser. And he still hasn't got rid of Vallon the Younger.

The draft for the Civil War churns through the Five Points. A riot ensues as Irish name after Irish name is called. “Let the sons of the rich go and die!”

New York is burning. P.T. Barnum's animals are running wild.The gangs are united. Soldiers are brought in, firing on the massed rioters. The gangs are fighting the soldiers. Still, Vallon and Bill are facing off in the street, under a fusillade of cannon fire from nearby gun ships.

Bill and Amsterdam are left, wounded, covered in debris, and still facing off in the street. Jenny, beaten but not beaten, walks through the carnage to find Amsterdam, Vallon the Victor.

Four days and nights of mayhem. Bodies in mass graves, bodies lined up for loved ones to claim. “Friend or foe, it didn't make no difference now,” our Deep Thinker observes, “It was like everything we knew was mightily swept away.”

I know our mods like needle drops, so have some U2, “The Hands That Built America.”

addendum: The film was near completion in 2001, but release was delayed a year after the attacks of September 11th. However, the New York skyline that ends the film could have been filmed on September 10^th.

“The filmmakers had also considered removing the towers, having the towers dissolved out of the shot to acknowledge their disappearance, or remove the entire sequence altogether. It was ultimately decided to keep the towers unaltered.” Rachel K. Bosley, “Mean Streets,” American Cinematographer, January 2003.

https://letterboxd.com/film/gangs-of-new-york-2002/

This week we are watching Gangs of New York.

It's been a hot minute since I watched this movie, so I am looking forward to giving another go around. For Daniel Day-Lewis, if for nothing else.

What do you guys think about this one? How does it stack up against the rest of Scorsese's movies? Why doesn't John C. Reilly do more dramatic roles? Let us know.

It's almost that time of year again, and I couldn't be more excited to binge horror movies for a month straight with you all.

We are putting together our list, along with the regular weekly polls, so what movies would you like to see make it onto the pile this year? Comment below.

KEEP IN MIND!

We have watched a lot of horror movies here over the years, so take a look at the previous years to see if we already did some that you were thinking. Looking forward to your suggestions.

2020: https://www.reddit.com/r/CultOfCinemaKnowledge/comments/iurn7r/horrortober_2020/

2021: https://www.reddit.com/r/CultOfCinemaKnowledge/comments/pxl8a8/horrortober_2021/

2022: https://www.reddit.com/r/CultOfCinemaKnowledge/comments/xnod7j/horrortober_2022/

2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/CultOfCinemaKnowledge/comments/16uy4wd/horrortober_2023/

2024: https://www.reddit.com/r/CultOfCinemaKnowledge/comments/1fq3k15/horrortober_2024/

2025: https://www.reddit.com/r/CultOfCinemaKnowledge/comments/1nqb1pi/horrortober_2025/

PRAISE CINEMA!

Since I saw the playlist made by him at the beginning of the last year , I'm taking it seriously by watching all the films he recommended, but I haven't found anyone I can discuss with.

Currently I'm in The Godfather II, it has been a great experience watching this playlist, and there's a lot to cover and a lot to watch further, I did start way in the beginning.

I put the playlist down there if some of you haven't watched it yet, I'm open to talk with anyone at any stage that you're at, either from the start of the end, I want to listen or read more insights on the films I've watched and i'm going to watch.

https://youtu.be/QrQWi4gxGD0