Death of a Unicorn (2025)

Ridley (Jenna Ortega) and her father, Elliot (Paul Rudd), drove through pristine mountains en route to a lodge.  They were to spend the weekend with the Leopolds.  During the drive, Elliot was distracted and struck an animal on the road.  To their shock and amazement, the animal proved to be a unicorn!  It was not dead.  When the horn began to glow, Ridley touched it.  She had a vision of creation.  Oh, the wonders!  She snapped out of it when blood hit her face and her father beat the unicorn to death with a tire iron.  "You were having a seizure," he explained.  Though Elliot sought to hide the incident from the Leopolds - his employers, it was soon revealed.  Moreover, the unicorn blood appeared to have healing properties.  Odell Leopold (Richard E Grant) owned a pharmaceutical company; the unicorn is a godsend.  His wife, Belinda (Tea Leoni), and son, Shepard (Will Poulter), are likewise ecstatic.  Researchers arrived within the hour.  Ridley had seen tapestries at the Cloisters in New York which told the story of unicorns.  By the very discovery of a unicorn, that story took on new meaning.  She interpreted it very darkly.

This is a campy horror film.  Despite their equine figure, they have teeth like a wolf.  These are carnivores, not herbivores.  Though traditionally white, these unicorns change color depending on mood; their hide is very dark when hunting for humans but quite bright when dashing along in the sunlight.  Rather than work with horses, the unicorns are mostly - possibly entirely - CGI creations.  As their blood has magical healing properties, they are understandably hard to kill.

Ridley had a mark against her with that nose ring and made things worse when she broke out the vape.  Though the heroine of the movie, she comes across more as a scold than the voice of reason.  Paul Rudd is stuck with a bland and barely likeable character.  He's a coward through most of the movie and generally a pushover.  Richard E. Grant plays Richard E. Grant, which is quite fun.  If he was drawn as a cartoon character, Odell would have dollar signs for pupils.  Tea Leoni matches Grant's greedy nature, but is generally uninspiring in her role.  Will Poulter is over the top as the rich son with a history of drug use; his experimentation with unicorn parts is hilarious. Grind down horn to snort like cocaine, smoke like tobacco, or use as an additive to whatever he is drinking.

Not a great horror film, but still entertaining.

Baffled (1972)

Racecar driver Tom Kovack (Leonard Nimoy) was well in the lead when he suddenly had a vision.  He saw a manor house in England and a screaming woman.  The vision ruins his concentration on the racetrack.  He spun out and crashed.  Luckily, he was not injured.  Later, during an interview, he detailed the vision to the reporter.  Michelle Brent (Susan Hampshire) was watching and she quickly realized that Tom had psychic powers.  She asked him to travel to England and save the screaming woman.  He viewed that as ludicrous.  However, when he had another vision which saw him falling from a cliff into the sea, he reconsidered, especially since he awoke on the floor covered in sea water.

Actress Andrea Glenn (Vera Miles) traveled to England with her daughter, Jennifer.  They planned to meet her long estranged husband at a manor house owned by Mrs. Farraday (Rachel Roberts).  Much to Jennifer's disappointment, he was not there.  Or is he?  Jennifer begins to act strangely and Andrea becomes deathly ill.  Worse still, efforts were made to kill both Tom and Michelle.  As Tom and Michelle investigate - often with Tom's clairvoyant talents, they discovered that occultism and psychic powers are being wielded against Andrea, her daughter, and themselves.  Can they counter this hidden villain before one of them is killed?

This was made as a pilot for a potential series and even ended with Tom having a vision that required them to travel to Paris next.  Much as I like Leonard Nimoy, he was not the best choice for the role.  Perhaps that is because I've typecast him as Spock.  Susan Hampshire plays both love interest and sage of psychic powers.  If this had launched into a series, how long would her schtick of explaining clairvoyance and the occult have been valuable?  The series would doom Tom to being an eternal noob with regards to powers that he had and she did not.  The villain (Mike Murray) had a small role but managed to be both slimy, creepy, and scary.  He looked like an evil version of Michael Palin.

Just okay.

The Monkey (2025)

Airline pilot Pete Shelborn (Adam Scott) walked into a pawn shop with a toy monkey.  The monkey had a drum in its lap and drumsticks in each hand.  The pawn shop owner gives it a quick look and declares it broken.  He's not interested.  Shelborn is desperate to sell.  Then the monkey strikes the drum.  Through a ridiculous Rube Goldberg series of events, the pawn shop owner is killed.  This does not surprise Shelborn in the least.  He grabs a flamethrower from among the pawn shop's inventory and screams maniacally as he roasts the toy monkey.

In the late 90s, Hal and Bill Shelborn (Christian Convery) are twins who dislike one another.  Hal is the butt of jokes at school, having a very difficult time.  One night, they go through their father's things; mom (Tatiana Maslany) had said their father left without explanation.  Among his things, they find the monkey.  They soon discover that someone dies whenever the monkey beats the drum.  Efforts to destroy the monkey fail.  After several deaths, they agree to toss the monkey into a well.

In the modern day, Hal works at a pharmacy.  He has scheduled a week off to spend with his son, Petey (Colin O'Brien).  No sooner does he arrive at his ex-wife's house to get Petey than he learns his aunt has died a horrible death.  The monkey is back!

The movie plays as a comedy-horror.  The deaths are so graphic that it jumps into comedy.  Hal finds himself splashed by buckets of blood, dodging flying limbs, and even witnessing Death riding a pale horse through town.  "Over the top" does not begin to explain some of the events.

Good popcorn fun.  Recommended.

Blowing Wild (1953)

Jeff Dawson (Gary Cooper) and Dutch Peterson (Ward Bond) are wildcatters in South America.  They have sunk all their funds into a patch of land where they hope to discover oil.  However, bandits arrive.  The bandits - led by El Gavilan (Juan Garcia) - demand money for 'protection.'  Jeff and Dutch have no money, so the bandits blow up the well and steal their only horse.  The pair hike back to town with plans of getting a job.  Hungry, Dutch attempts to steal just enough money from a random man to pay for a meal.  The man proves to be Paco (Anthony Quinn), an old friend of Jeff and Dutch.  He gladly pays for them to have dinner and arranges for rooms.  In fact, he offers them a job.

Jeff, Dutch, and Paco had been in business previously, but Jeff left suddenly and Dutch left with him.  It soon becomes apparent that Jeff left on account of Paco's wife, Marina (Barbara Stanwyck).  Her relationship with Paco is difficult, all the more so now that Jeff is back in the picture.  Clearly, she has a thing for Jeff.  If Jeff wasn't in such a financial pickle, he would hightail it immediately.  To make matters worse, Paco is also having difficulties with the banditos.

Gary Cooper plays his usual stalwart, do-right fellow despite his poverty.  Jeff Dawson proves to be a highly skilled oilman who should have been turning down job offers rather than desperate for the first one to come along.  He is a paragon of virtue whose only flaw is repeated bad luck.

Barbara Stanwyck plays the bad girl.  She has a husband who loves her and provides well, but she doesn't reciprocate.  She could tolerate him well enough when it was just the two of them, but Jeff's return has rekindled her desire to find another man.  Her efforts in that direction grow in intensity as the story unfolds.

Anthony Quinn is more talk than action.  He's constantly boasting and is often oblivious to the feelings of those around him.  He repeatedly forces himself on his wife while Jeff is in the room, he presses to give Jeff money while ignoring Jeff's pride against handouts.  Constantly with the big talk, but when it comes to saving one of his wells, it is Jeff who risks himself rather than Paco.  Was it Jeff who set Paco's operation on the path to great success before he fled from Marina?  It looks that way.

Ward Bond plays his usual sidekick character.  Dutch is amiable but lacks Jeff's rectitude.  He reads the room well and makes an excellent friend.  There are none of the rough edges that are typically a feature of his characters.  He figures prominently in the first act but is sidelined after an encounter with the banditos.

Ruth Roman plays Sal Donnelly, an American woman stranded in South America.  She initially approached Jeff with hopes he might pay her way back to the States.  When it turned out he was flat broke, she practically sneered.  However, despite that, he offered to pay her way once he came into money.  His repeated concern for her welfare sparked interest.  Plus, she looks quite good in an evening gown.  Marina is openly hostile to Sal.

The movie is not clear on what it wants to be.  There is the love triangle of Jeff-Marina-Paco.  There is another love triangle of Marina-Jeff-Sal.  Then there is the repeated bandito trouble that always leads to gun fights and explosions.  In the opening, it felt very like Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Ward Bond begging a fellow American to front him a meal.  Then, Jeff and Dutch get a job where they get stiffed on pay.  Happily, it diverges from there.

Just okay.

President Autopen

In recent days, it has been discovered that many of President Biden's signatures are identical.  Previous presidents have used an autopen.  For example, President Obama used an autopen to sign a law extension before a deadline while he was in France.  Generally, the autopen is used to sign correspondence, photographs, or other non-official documents.  Where most presidents issue only 50 or so executive orders a year, the use of an autopen would be unexpected.  Surely, the president can sign a document a week, especially an executive order that he crafted or a pardon he authorized.  Well, it turns out that President Biden couldn't be bothered.  Or maybe he wasn't even consulted.  The combination of President Biden's mental decline and that the autopen provided his signature on both executive orders and pardons is troubling.

Joe Biden was not calling the shots during his presidency.  He was a front man, a figurehead.  Much as it was eventually revealed that Joe McCarthy was right about communist infiltration of the government and President Wilson was an invalid during the last 18 months of his presidency, it will someday be exposed who was the guiding the executive branch during the last 4 years.  Until then, we can refer to that person as President Autopen.

Meet the Tiger

Simon Templar, a man who has been dubbed the saint on account of his initials (ST), arrived in the ocean-side city of Baycombe in England.  He was on the trail of a mysterious bank robber known as the Tiger.  The Saint was a gentleman adventurer, a man willing to skirt the law in order to bring the 'godless' to justice and perhaps get rich in the process.  Though Baycombe was a sleepy town with only a couple of automobiles (the story takes place in the 1920s), the Tiger and his cohorts - playfully called 'tiger cubs' by the Saint - have laid up here until the time is right to split the spoils.  The question becomes, who is in league with the Tiger and who is just an ordinary citizen.

Much of the tale involves the Saint having snarky conversations with the various suspects to see if something slips out.  Surprisingly, a good chunk of this is outsourced to the lovely and gracious Patricia Holm.  Patricia was orphaned and has lived either at schools or at her Aunt Agatha's house in Baycombe.  Every description of her aunt paints her as a man in drag, which later proves to be the case.  Yeah, that was a pretty weak part of the book.  Back to Patricia, she has such a large part in the book that she is the co-main character with Simon.

The Saint doesn't care for guns.  He is armed with a knife named Anna that is perfectly balanced for throwing.  The Saint has buckets of confidence, an unshakeable certainty in his inevitable success, and a generous portion of charm.  He also has a sidekick named Orace, a military man with a heavy accent, an imposing physique, and a limp.

Though it might have been unprecedented when published in the 1920s, the story feels very cliche.  The mystery of who was the tiger proved less difficult than hoped.  I had my suspect early and it proved to be the correct guess.  When revealed by the Saint in the climax, the Tiger was a disappointment.  What looked like it might have been clever maneuvering on his part was instead nothing but happenstance and, as it turned out, incompetence.

This Simon Templar is very different from the one played by Roger Moore on the long-running TV series.  Here, the Saint is out for a reward - the finder's fee for recovering the gold that the Tiger stole - rather than random do-gooderism.  Where Roger Moore disdained weapons in general and weekly resorted to fisticuffs, the literary Simon likes his knives.  I have no idea how Val Kilmer's Saint became a master of disguise.

The Saint is dangerously reckless throughout the book and only survives because the villains don't shoot him when they have the chance.  He pins his life on the timely arrival of allies or the intervention of fate on his behalf.  Oh, so reckless.  Sure, it dials the suspense and tension way up, but it also paints the Saint as foolhardy rather than courageous.  Just okay.  It has not aged as well as Ian Flemings Bond novels; read those instead.

The French Connection (1971)

Marseilles, France

A detective surveilles a meeting and trails one of them.  Afterward, he buys himself some bread and heads back to his apartment.  He has hardly opened the door when an assassin guns him down.

New York City

Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) takes down a drug dealer while dressed as Santa Claus.  His partner, Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider) suffered a knife-wounded during the arrest.  Rather than go home, Popeye convinced Cloudy to get a drink.  This soon turns into a stakeout of Sal Boca, a convenience store owner with a criminal record.  Popeye has a hunch that something big is coming and Sal is part of it.  However, the mastermind of the drug dealers, Alain Charnier (Fernado Rey) is quite clever himself.  He quickly spots Popeye following him and takes measures to lose him.

It is a gritty movie that spends the majority of its time in the dark underbelly of New York's drug culture.  It's cops, drug dealers, and innocent bystanders.  As the Charnier and his sidekick are French, they only speak French to each other; the Amazon version of the film has no subtitles, making their conversations a mystery.  

Gene Hackman won the Academy Award for his role as Doyle.  Doyle is a loose cannon cop with anger management issues and poor taste in hats.  To the positive, he is a workaholic with a nose for finding the bad guys.  Overall, he is not a particularly likeable person.  He's abrasive and abusive.  On the other hand, he has an endless supply of persistence.  Hackman's range as an actor was truly impressive.  He could be hard-as-nails dangerous (this movie or Unforgiven), funny and devious (Lex Luthor from the Superman series), or goofy and harmless (Young Frankenstein).  RIP