Happy Thursday, everyone! We're 10 days out from Halloween and I hope your horror film viewing is going well, if you're into that sort of thing (I'm way off my usual pace on movies but looking to get that picked up a bit as the nights get colder and you just want to stay home under blankets and cats). So let's look at what I've found recently!
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I sadly still haven't gotten around to the latest (and possibly last) of the Halloween franchise, over on Peacock, but I did pick up what my be my favorite of the original sequels before the series went off the rails. Famously conceived as a lunching point to move the series away from Laurie Strode and Michael Meyers and into an anthology series of loosely connected films, audiences rejected Halloween III: Season of the Witch and the studio went right back to Michael Meyers. But man, this movie is a weird little gem. It has androids. Stonehenge. A performance by Dan O'Herlihy that almost sounds like a racist caricature except that he really was Irish. The great Tom Atkins as a doctor who investigates a mysterious death for...reasons? (Seriously, there is no reason for him to get involved and he's a hilarious terrible investigator, stumbling around and waiting for people to tell him things). It's one of my favorite goofy horror movies that also has a legitimately harsh ending.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch is available for rent and purchase at the usual places and is streaming on Peacock and USA.
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John Frankenheimer is known for a dizzying variety of classic films. Gotta love a man whose career spans The Manchurian Candidate, Black Sunday, Seven Days In May and The Train. But for some reason, Seconds seemed to be for a while kind of forgotten in his filmography. And it's an interestingly smaller one, one that doesn't have the sweeping thriller scale that he could do so well. But for my money, this is one of his best films, a paranoiac thriller about a middle-aged businessman who gets the chance to have his entire identity and start a new life, now played by Rock Hudson in what me his best performance. (I have thoughts about how Hudson's excellent career was overshadowed by the circumstances of his death and how he was abandoned by the Reagans.) I can't recommend this enough, a movie that is the dark side of the psychedelic '60s and shot beautifully and paranoiacally by the great James Wong Howe.
Besides the usual places, Seconds is currently streaming on Kanopy and PlutoTV (with ads).
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Kings was one of the odder shows NBC has aired this century, a political melodrama/soap opera based on the story of David, Saul and Johnathan from the Hebrew Scriptures. Lavishly shot and very well cast (we'll get to that), it only lasted the one season back in 2009 (the ratings were just not good), but I always think this could find a new audience again. Because jeez, the cast here knows what they're doing; you have Ian McShane as Saul, Susanna Thompson as his Queen, Sebastian Stan, a few years before Captain America, as Johnathan and so on and so forth. (Dylan Baker, in particular, is doing his usual very, very fine work.) It's a weird show that I totally understand not finding an audience at the time, but you can get the DVD set for cheap as hell and it's worth your time. Now, enjoy the usual fun of "what previous credit do they use for each actor?"
If it helps, it was created by Michael Green, who has gone on to feature writing since then and has a very well-deserved Oscar nomination for the screenplay for Logan.
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