The Pull List

I have been so busy that I have fallen way behind on movie blogging, and then I've been out sick with a miserable cold for most of a week, which has only added to my backlog because of all the time I've spent on the couch. But here's a start to digging myself back out of the hole!

Fall 2: Deadpoint (2026). After the events of the first movie (reviewed with spoilers here, one of the characters’ friends talks the character’s sister into tackling the next item on her unfinished adventure to-do list: doing the ancient plank walk around a butte in Thailand. Or: more women with fraught relationships being stuck VERY HIGH UP together, which is a theme I respect.

I was totally shocked to find out there was going to be a sequel to Fall, but apparently the first one was a big hit on streaming and got memed on TikTok? Anyway, it’s hard to say this is dumber than the first one, because the first one was already just about as dumb is it gets, but Fall 2 somehow manages to retread a lot of the emotional ground of the first one with brand-new characters while also having less charm.

What the first one has going for it is two actors who work well together as they go through actual trials and travails in the process of filming their movie, while also being practically shot in a way that makes it feel really real. They really are at the top of a purpose-built tower on the edge of cliff; they really are VERY HIGH. The verisimilitude goes a long way. Here, the main duo spend most of their time stuck on a part of “ancient plank walk” (visibly anchored with, presumably, ancient concrete and rebar) on the side of world’s fakest looking concrete cliff overlooking what my friend tells me is very standard RPG-style CGI landscapes.

(OTOH, this does feel less like a direct rip-off of The Descent than the first one, so there's that.)

There’s also a whole plot that involves running drugs over the top of this butte sticking up in the middle of the landscape, rather than AROUND IT, but honestly the baseline stupidity of these movies is part of the charm.

What really bums me out is that this did poorly enough at the box office that we’re probably not going to get the planned third movie teaming up the survivors of the first two, who have pre-existing friction and should definitely resolve it by kissing. Then again, who knows, maybe streaming will come to the rescue again.

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Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). After a panicked patient is murdered by a mysterious figure who promptly commits suicide afterwards, the attending doctor and the patient’s daughter investigate the mystery of his death in a small town run by the local toy-making company.

The rumors are true: Halloween III: Season of the Witch not only has nothing to do with the other Halloween movies but is explicitly out of continuity with them, because the original Halloween is a movie that exists in this universe. We see clips of it on TV, including the title. This movie also doesn't have witches to speak of, nor really any of the things shown in its poster. What it does have: masks, Irishmen, robots, and a surprise Stonehenge cameo. And Halloween, I suppose. It does have that. It goes some places, is what I’m saying! I genuinely had no idea what those places might be until we got there!

The main guy is a huge douche who frankly deserves everything that happens to him (specifically a douche in that way where you’re not sure the movie realizes it), but the daughter and various secondary characters are all a lot of fun. I adored both the toy saleslady in town to pick up a shipment and the wife of the salesman touring the factory.

Great ending. Impressed by how hard it went.

Regal showed the first three Halloween movies over Labor Day weekend in a joint promotion for the new Halloween video game. This is the only one I made it to, but it was a great one to see in a crowd. Everyone responded to all the moments of silliness, the cheerful workplace sexual harrassment, the gas prices. Absolutely elevated the experience.

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The Faculty (1998). A disparate handful of students fight against an alien takeover of the faculty of their high school and their whole town.

What a late 90s who’s who of a cast. Clea Duvall and Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett in a haircut so bad I literally didn’t recognize him, Shawn Hatosy, Famke Janssen, Usher, freaking Jon Stewart???? And then people that I thought surely I must know and then didn’t even recognize their names, like Laura Harris and Jordana Brewster.

Overall this is a silly time, generally entertaining, mostly not mind-blowing. The CGI is period typical, which is to say not great. The treatment of Duvall’s character as “not actually a lesbian, just a loner who let people call her gay so they’d leave her alone” is, likewise, very Of Its Time. This movie is overall VERY straight despite the mixed gender ensemble cast. In particular, what did blow my mind was when I finally clocked that Hartnett’s character and the shy mousey teacher were one of the endgame ships. I get that he’s definitely an adult because he’s repeating 12th grade, but even so!

Didn’t hate it, was entertained, enjoyed that the end credits music is a lesser-known and very thematically appropriate Oasis B-side.