Note: The version of this Cantonese-language movie that I was able to watch had an issue where longer subtitles were cut off at either side, which diminished comprehension somewhat, but not to a degree that I feel compromises my ability to review it in any meaningful way.
Year: 1985 Director: Philip Chan Cast: Melvin Wong, Philip Chan, Patricia Ha Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes
Plot: Night Caller (Ping an ye) begins with the brutal murder of model and single mother Jessica (Terry Hu). The only witness is her daughter Edith (not credited in a manner that I can read), who is in shock and has not spoken since the incident. This leads her to be more or less adopted by the detective on the case, James Wong (Melvin Wong of Yes, Madam!), and his wife Kiki (Deborah Sims). Meanwhile, the buttoned-up James and his loose cannon partner Steve Chan (Philip Chan of Hard Boiled, also the director of this here movie) use their investigative skills and, naturally, their kung fu prowess to try and solve the mystery as more bodies begin to pile up.
Analysis:Night Caller has a simply incredible opening sequence. Somebody must have been making a mint off dubbed Dario Argento tapes in Hong Kong in the early 1980s, because just like 1982's He Lives by Night, the introductory kill is giallo as all hell. It's exquisitely crafted from top to bottom, disorienting you with jagged editing as it combines beautiful cinematography and crisp shadows with extraordinarily violent imagery (including an apple being smashed into Jessica's face during her struggle for survival). It is exquisite. It is horrible. It is pure cinema.
Nothing else in Night Caller quite lives up to this sequence, but that's hardly a knock against it. I couldn't imagine improving on that opening. Nor can writer-director-star Philip Chan, evidently, because the buddy cop comedy stuff kicks in more or less instantly after this scene. (Look, it's a Hong Kong movie. If you're not ready for the genre to change every 45 seconds, you're going to have to take two aspirin and go to bed straight away.)
I'm not saying it's a bad buddy cop kung fu comedy romance family drama movie, either. However, it reaches its aesthetic heights in the horror scenes, which also include the scene where James brings Edith back to her dark apartment to try and jog her memory and the movie's second kill (which is also the last proper body count kill, alas). Said second kill can't match the sheer audacity of the opening sequence, but it does involve a man being stabbed and falling from a catwalk, whereupon his corpse dangles upside down from a cable. After having fallen through a box of glitter. A box of glitter that was suspended over a catwalk full of models. On live TV. Y'all, this movie is kind of great.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. The aesthetic value of the movie drops off sharply every time it's not doing a horror scene. And while the inclusion of kung fu fight scenes in a slasher movie should provide a frisson of camp, only one is lit well enough to properly see what's going on. This seems like a peculiar misstep for a kung fu veteran to make, even if working behind the camera was never exactly the thing he was known for.
However, whatever that aspect of Night Caller lacks in camp value is made up for by the killer, Bobby (Siu-Fung Wong), who wanders into the movie at about the halfway mark and simply makes herself known, preventing the movie from adding "whodunit" to its roster of genres. Every time we see Bobby after the "big" reveal, she is wearing a new ludicrous outfit (in one scene, she is simply wearing mud) and psychosexually torturing a shirtless, handcuffed James. Now that's more like it!
I think I like this movie more than I love it, because the extremely tropey buddy cop material is front and center when it really shouldn't be, given how little effort was put into it. However, the horror is effectively horrifying, the comedy is frequently very funny (even during its darkest turns, such as the scene where a woman who discovers a valuable clue suddenly dies of a brain disease before the cops can ask about it), and there is always some inexplicable moment waiting behind every narrative corner (like the gang of punks who squirt ketchup on a restaurant owner's face and try to put his wife's fingers in the toaster).
Killer: Bobby (Siu-Fung Wong) Final Girl: James Wong (Melvin Wong) Best Kill: Accept no substitutes for the opening kill of Night Caller. Sign of the Times: When Bobby's accomplice Mickey (Kei Mai) introduces himself, he starts maniacally singing Toni Basil's "Mickey" (which is honestly the only way to sing it). Scariest Moment: An off-brand Chuck E. Cheese mascot character who looks like a bedraggled Hills Have Eyes mutant grabs Edith while she's at the arcade. Weirdest Moment: Mickey performs a scene from Taxi Driver to himself in the mirror while in blackface. Champion Dialogue: "I'll be back to add a few holes to your ass." Body Count: 7
Jessica is stabbed 29 times, with the final stab going in the gut before she falls through a window.
Ho Tak is stabbed in the chest.
One-Eyed Neighbor is shot in the head and burned to death offscreen.
Lady Who Finds The Ring dies of brain disease offscreen.
Newbie Cop is shot.
Bobby is shut.
Mickey is drowned in a mud bath.
TL;DR:Night Caller is a little more of a generic cop movie than I wish it was, considering its extraordinary facility at being a Hong Kong giallo. Rating: 7/10 Word Count: 958
People keep asking if I'm back, and I haven't really had an answer, but now, yeah, I'm thinking I'm back!
Welcome back to Census Bloodbath. For those who have forgotten what the hell this thing is in the years since I last did much of it in earnest, my mission is to watch and review every slasher movie from the 1980s. We're just over halfway through! And it's been more than a decade since I started, so here's hoping it doesn't take another 10 years to finish.
My slasher writing got interrupted by a few very good updates in my life, including getting paid to write about other things full time at ScreenRant and penning a murder mystery novel that I hope to drag out into the light of day at some point. I'm not going to sit here and promise five reviews a week or nothing, but I'm hoping to get back to posting semi-regularly, in the new, slightly truncated format I developed the last time I didn't have time to do this project. Without further ado, let's hop back into 1985. Where were we...
Year: 1985
Director: Donald M. Jones
Cast: Eli Rich, Rochelle Taylor, Dennis Gannon
Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes
Plot:Murderlust follows Sunday school teacher Steve (Eli Rich of The Jigsaw Murders) using his free time to pursue his secret passion: murdering prostitutes and dumping their bodies in the desert, a nasty habit that has earned him the moniker "The Mojave Murderer."
Analysis: As I've worked on this project, I've noticed multiple sub-subgenres emerge from the overall morass of the 1980s slasher. Over the years, you get stuff like the "rubber reality" slashers inspired by A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Lifetime-esque movies that I have dubbed the "women's picture" slashers, and so on.
One sub-subgenre that I have considerably less enthusiasm for is the "women be dying" slasher. These titles combine the faults of the "hero killer" format (by following the killer rather than the victims, the victims frequently become paper-thin characters whose deaths have no import) with intense indulgence in the misogyny that is always quietly simmering beneath the surface of the slasher genre. These movies, which are largely a hangover of the grindhouse pictures of the 1970s, typically feature a string of rapes and violent murders of women that are barely hung together on a "story" about a male killer wandering around, seeking out new victims.
Some of these movies, or others like them, can be quite good, or at least compelling. I was pleasantly surprised by Eyes of a Stranger (which, to be fair, has two final girls as its protagonists rather than being a hero killer movie). But when you're getting down and dirty in the muck with the likes of Don't Answer the Phone, it can be an entirely unpleasant experience. While Murderlust seems to fancy itself a successor to Maniac, another of the better examples of the sub-subgenre, it is instead just another speck of grime on the undercarriage of the slasher. Literally the best thing I can say about it is that at least Steve isn't a rapist. Mostly.
Murderlust is a scummy, scuzzy experience with no redeeming value. The best down-and-dirty horror movies leave you with the feeling of needing to take a shower, in a good way. But this one just rubs your face in muck and kicks you in the ribs out of pure meanness, because there are no aesthetic, tonal, or narrative niceties that allow you to feel like you've actually gleaned something from the experience.
It's a go-nowhere movie that just sits there idling for the majority of its runtime. It seems to be trying to horrify the audience by juxtaposing Steve's prim and proper Sunday school persona with his violent nature behind closed van doors, but we spend too much time with him for that to feel like a clear divide. Even in other professional/public parts of his life such as his job as a parking lot security guard or his interactions with his weird neighbor-cousin Neil (Dennis Gannon), who seems to be an ancestor to Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, Steve is a crude, boorish, lazy lout who is constantly braying at people who annoy him. Which is everyone. Rather than being horrifying or enlightening, spending time with him is simply irritating.
The slasher element is also repetitive and boring. He kills all of his victims in the same way (garroting them with rope), and their slayings are all overseasoned with misogynistic rambling. If Steve blaming women for all the world's problems and lobbing insults at them is meant to lend insight into his motive, Murderlust has defaulted on this loan.
The only thing that prevents this movie from becoming absolute bottom-of-the-barrel garbage like Victims! is the fact that its dialogue is frequently actually kinda good. When Steve is flirting with women before revealing his true colors, their reparteetends to sparkle, and the movie opens with him having a tête-à-têtewith a sex worker that actually manages to have a little insight into how someone can wield various forms of social currency (charisma, money, power) to convince someone to do something that would otherwise go against their better judgment.
I suppose I'll leave this part of the review on a high note, so I'll add two more things that I write. Although the movie only barely lurches toward having a proper final girl at the very end, her fight for her life is chaotic and brutal in a compelling way. Also, the real-life Mojave Desert scenery that pops up every 20 minutes or so is lovely to look at, but this is simply more proof of how hard it is to fuck up shooting a nice landscape, because the cinematography is doing its darndest to make everything as bland and flat as possible otherwise.
Killer: Steve Belmont (Eli Rich) Final Girl: Cheryl (Rochelle Taylor) Best Kill: They're literally all the same, so I'm going to pick Debbie's, because it takes place offscreen and saves us from wasting another three minutes of our lives on this movie. Sign of the Times: When Steve is accused of molesting a Sunday school student, the board of the church doesn't believe the alleged victim for even one single second. They don't even pretend to consider believing her, which is what I assume they would do nowadays. Scariest Moment: The opening shot of the movie is Steve staring directly into the camera with a blank look for like five full seconds. Weirdest Moment: Steve badgers Neil into helping him move a trash can containing a corpse into his van and he keeps bleating, "it's traysh, Neil, now push!" Champion Dialogue: "God is a big drag, and he doesn't exist anyway." Body Count: 5
Prostitute is garroted with a noose.
Prostitute #2 is garroted with a noose.
Teenage Girl is garroted with a noose.
Debbie is killed offscreen.
Steve succumbs to his gunshot wounds while crawling through the desert.
TL;DR:Murderlust is a complete waste of time, in spite of boasting slightly sharper writing than one might expect from a down-and-dirty, misogyny-forward slasher movie.
I assumed that Paris Hilton's sophomore album would all be shitty club tracks (more on those later). And while the whole thing is maybe a little underproduced, it really surprised me on a lot of levels. A major standout was this dance track about pondering mortality, a tune that is surprisingly sincere, catchy, and really hits me in my own personal sweet spot.
#9 "Eye of the Night" Conan Grey
Last year, I ranked Conan Grey's "Never Ending Song" at No. 6 and said, with great rapture, that Grey crafted "a song that genuinely feels like you would have seen it on MTV 800 times in 1987." Well folks, the album to which that song was the lead single has come out, and every track is exactly that. This one appeals to me the most, though, because of its sinister moonlit pavement vibe and - of course - that soaring chorus.
#8 "dumb boy energy" The Pussyboys
Transmasc indie pop punk band The Pussyboys rushed out of the gate with this glorious, laid back ode to gender euphoria and living life to its fullest without thinking too hard about it even a little bit.
#7 "The Devil is a Barmaid" Versengold
This neo-medieval band typically performs in German, and I wish I could have chosen one of those tracks, which are also great, but "The Devil is a Barmaid" is undeniable. It's one of those songs that truly feels like it fell out of a wormhole from centuries ago and was resurrected with modern instrumentation.
#6 "two" bbno$
This is a great music video, but don't let the goofy, engaging visuals fool you. The music itself is just as goofy and engaging. bbno$ (pronounced "baby no money") has great flow, but it's in service of lyrics that never teeter too far into taking himself too seriously. Pure fun. Also the kids' chant motif is a work of mad genius that simply shouldn't work, but really, really does.
#5 "Commas" Ayra Starr
Ayra Starr is the queen of music for staring out of car windows on long road trips, and I mean this as the highest compliment. Something about her work unclenches my shoulders instantly, and I'm not someone who likes "relaxing" music. But "Commas" is chill without sacrificing bouncy rhythms, dragging you directly into its welcoming atmosphere.
#4 "Joyride" Kesha
I was really worried that the completely misguided experimental sound of Kesha's most recent album, Gag Order, would indicate that her career was careening wildly away from anything I might find remotely musically interesting. However, by reclaiming her joy rather than focusing on the anger that drove Gag Order, she has also found the right way to make something that feels weird and aggressive while also being an absolute blast to listen to. I dare you to listen to this deranged polka pop track and not have a smile on your face by the end.
#3 "Gateway Drug" Daniel Seavey
This very well might be the sexiest song this side of Childish Gambino's "Redbone." The way those raspy verses inexorably slide into the floaty falsetto of the chorus is just perfectly designed to deliver the tinglies. This is absolutely necessary, considering how much musical support is required by the sheer self-confidence of the lyrics. If every part of the production wasn't perfect, the song would fall flat on its face. Luckily, that ain't a problem for Mr. Seavey.
#2 "The Code" Nemo
I am almost always of the opinion that Eurovision awards their top prize to the wrong song. That is not the case this year! In addition to being a fun, melodramatic lyrical dismantling of the gender binary, "The Code" does the same thing to the idea of genre itself. What is this song? Is it Europop? Glam rock? Rap? Opera? The answer, my friends, is a resounding "yes."
#1 "Eurostar" Nemo
I usually limit myself to one song per artist, and I just couldn't ignore that delicious opera motif in Nemo's "The Code," so I almost discarded "Eurostar" in its favor. But this unabashed party anthem is simply perfect, so I had to make an exception. This song has slightly fewer genres that it's playing with than "The Code" does, but if you know me, I can't not be caught up in a chorus that soars into the air and sweeps me off my feet. Wow, does this song succeed at that. It basically runs you over with a sonic bullet train every 50 seconds or so.
Bottom Five Songs of 2024
#5 "A Twink and a Redhead" Grant & Ash
When a viral comedy duo pivots to music, it doesn't have to be a bad thing. But this twink and redhead are paying homage to the shitpop churned out by Real Housewives stars, which needs to be performed without a shred of irony in order to work even a little bit. In addition to that failure of core principles, the chatty lyricism is awkward, the jokes simply aren't funny, and the thesis is baffling. Since when is the phenomenon of one twink and one redhead hanging out iconic? It's not, like... a thing.
#4 "BBA" Paris Hilton
So, Megan the Stallion is pretty great here, as she usually is. But the album version of "BBA" is just Paris alone, and let me tell you, this song needs Megan like Cookie Monster needs chocolate chips. Everything around her is tinny, shitty club music peppered with lazy patter that is neither compelling nor really makes all that much sense lyrically. This is exactly what I was worried the entire album would sound like, down to the parts where Paris tries to shoehorn her ear-witheringly awful made-up slang term "sliving" into the lyrics. Stop trying to make "sliving" happen, Paris. It's not going to happen.
#3 "I LUV IT" Camila Cabello feat. Playboi Carti
This one's tricky. The verse is a little off, but kind of inoffensive. So it hooks you just enough to keep listening until it hits the blisteringly repetitive chorus, which somehow isn't even the worst part of the song. That would be the screechy post-chorus bit with the shrill staccatto blasts of synth and random grunting.
#2 "Hey Rudy" Jimmy Fallon
Do I even need to write a blurb for this? Just... listen to 12 seconds of it. It's Jimmy Fallon Christmas music where he calls Rudolph "Rudy" and tries once more to convince everyone he can sing. You don't need my help pointing out its worst qualities.
#1 "club classics" Charli XCX
Oops, this is where I come out as a Brat hater, isn't it? Oh well, it had to happen eventually. This song starts off as a generic annoying club track where the same phrases are repeated over and over again. Then that ill-fitting music cuts in, making it sound like an ad accidentally started playing in another browser window. Then comes the bit where atonal chant-singing is paired with squelching synth farts. I simply cannot understand how this is meant to be a pleasant experience for my poor ears. This sounds like if somebody took "Joyride" out of the fridge and accidentally left it on the counter all night.
Worst Mashup/Remix: "Can You Feel the Love Tonight (From "A Whole New Sound")" - Pedro Sampaio Remix
Hiring Simple Plan to cover a song from The Lion King was already a weird choice, but now we're remixing that while still keeping it midtempo and throwing in some tropical EDM vibes and chopped-and-screwed bad DJ rap? It's sounds as if the Main Street Electrical Parade is trampling through Rio de Janeiro like a ravenous kaiju.
Best Music Video: "Taste" Sabrina Carpenter
I was actually resistant to this at first because people were like "you like horror, you'll love this video!" and I wanted to be like "You don't know me! Nobody knows me!" But I regret to inform myself that sometimes I'm a curmudgeon for no reason. This video is great, and a hell of a lot of fun. Plus, it co-stars Corey Cunningham from Halloween Ends, which is the deepest possible cut in a video chock full of references.
Worst Music Video: "Woman's World" Katy Perry
I didn't want to jump on the bandwagon of hating the song itself, because it's simply mediocre, not truly awful. But the music video is an absolute disaster, with a muddled thesis that somehow reinforces the gender binary even harder by trying and failing to show women doing typically "masculine" things. And why does the video for this empowerment anthem end with her stealing a phone from a woman of color? It's a rhetorical seven-car pileup, and I haven't even mentioned the sheer body horror of her being squished flat by an anvil, reinflating herself, and then inserting a fuel pump into her asscheek.
Best Collaboration:
"Chasin'" Paris Hilton & Meghan Trainor
Aaaaaand we're back on the Paris hype train. My parasocial relationship with this woman is so toxic, but what a roller coaster it is. "Chasin'" is basically the spiritual sequel to "Stars Are Blind," musically speaking, and it is by far the best thing that Meghan Trainor has been involved with in at least half a decade.
Worst Collaboration: "Now or Never" Pitbull x Bon Jovi
Pitbull has never been a good rapper, but he is usually charmingly daffy. This is just bad, and there is absolutely no need to drag poor Jon Bon Jovi into all this. Just sample him and leave it at that!
Best Guilty Pleasure: "Hands Dirty" Descendants: The Rise of Red Cast
Descendants 4 was a train wreck, but it perks up for this one brief sequence that's incredibly charming and mostly actually listenable, if you discount the shitty Disney rap bits.
Worst Guilty Pleasure: "Karma" JoJo Siwa
But it's soooooo catchy.
Best Comeback: ur pretty
Be honest, you're surprised I didn't say Paris Hilton. But as much as I like a lot of that new album, the most exciting comeback of the year was the X-rated pop punk maven ur pretty, which is one of the pseudonyms of the rapper Jake Hill. Even though ur pretty came first, so to speak, in recent times, Hill has largely turned his genius for writing filthy gay lyrics toward his country music alter ego Dixon Dallas. So imagine my delight when this new song dropped and I learned that pop punk was, indeed, not dead.
Worst Comeback: "I'm an Albatraoz"
I actually really love the 2014 AronChupa song "I'm an Albatraoz," which is wholly inexplicable but kind of a bop. But this 10th anniversary remake seeks to add reams of material to make every last line explicable, which is a fool's errand. Nobody was wondering why the mouse named Laurie was a bitch, y'all. Just keep making weird Europop, it's fine.
Best Album Cover: Mountainhead, Everything Everything
I like that this album cover edges toward minimalism but yet has so much going on. The texture of the titular mountain head is excellent, and I love the bold stripes of color juxtaposed against the greyscale image at the center.
Worst Album Cover: 143, Katy Perry
I know it's popular to dunk on Katy Perry these days, and I've tried not to do that too much. But come on, she's making it so easy. What's with this lazy-ass design where it looks like you're taking a look at her bad Wonder Woman cosplay through a jizz kaleidoscope?
Best Cover Song: "Holiday Road" Kesha
Leave it to Kesha to take one of the cheesiest songs of the 1980s (Lindsey Buckingham's theme for National Lampoon's Vacation, no less) and transform it into a superb, haunting dance track.
Worst Cover Song: "Good Luck, Babe!" Franz Ferdinand
It's probably a mistake for men to cover Chappell Roan in general. But the work of a pop star where the vocals are so important to her vibe should not be converted into typical alt-rock bleating. It's a crime against the ears.
Most Random Pivot to Music: Ronan Farrow
I guess it's not terrible? But yes, that's the author of Catch and Kill jamming with the lead singer of Sixpence None the Richer and singing about his breakup with Pod Save America co-host Jon Lovett. The world really is a magical and confusing place.
Best Promotional Campaign: "Gay Americana" Cole Redding
Yeah, Cole Redding literally just posted these flyers around town, with no mention of his new single, then ate In N Out while the song played on a boom box and about 50 people watched and cheered. Of course I was one of those people. Grassroots marketing has never been better.
Best Song Title: "Single Soon" Selena Gomez
She knew she was birthing a thousand memes when she announced that her single, "Single Soon" was coming soon.
Worst Song Title: "Diet Pepsi" Addison Rae
This tells me absolutely nothing about the song, and it's got a gross corporate sheen that someone like the TikTok star Addison Rae should be keen to avoid until she establishes herself as a proper musician.
Best Lyric: "I think I finally hit my rock bottom / Should probably go and tell my father I / I killed my genie with a bottle" - from "HEY ROSE" by Mikolas
That genie thing just really gets me. It's such a simple poetic reversal of the type of bottle we associate with them, I don't have much to add. I just think it's so effective.
Worst Lyric: "Say you can't sleep, baby, I know / That's that me espresso" - from "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter
And now we move from a simple way to change common language to elicit deeper meaning to a simple way to change common language that makes an absolute hash of the whole thing. "That's that me" is unacceptable even within the astoundingly lax parameters of Top 40 pop songwriting,
Best Sample: "i'm not crazy" charlieonafriday
I used to hate samples with a burning passion, but I've since come to really appreciate them in a variety of contexts. This particular one I enjoy because it doesn't mind tweaking the original lyric, as well as its overall meaning, so it's actually engaging with Matchbox Twenty's "Unwell" in an exciting intertextual way, even if it's in service of a kinda generic fuckboi anthem that sounds like a castoff from The Kid Laroi.
Worst Sample: "I Don't Wanna Wait" David Guetta & OneRepublic
Now here's where you take the concept of twisting a sample way too far. This is just playing a lazy game of telephone with O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei" (also known as "Numa Numa"). I have no time for it, especially when the same sample was already used better literally 16 years ago in Rihanna and T.I.'s "Live Your Life."
Top Five Song Discoveries
#5 "Superhuman" Clean
This is actually the theme song to that bad-good Australian queer series Single, Out, and it is by a country kilometer the best thing about the whole affair.
#4 "Breathe In, Breathe Out" Blanks
This song is bouncy and delightful, blending ennui and positivity in the space of a single line.
#3 "Ain't No Doubt About It" Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3 Cast
This is one of the best onscreen sequences in the franchise, but the song is also super catchy and cute, perfectly capturing the exhilaration and angst of being in a relationship in your senior year of high school.
#2 "cross your mind" ROLE MODEL
ROLE MODEL has dropped a lot of great songs this year that unfortunately just barely missed making the cut. But this older track is still one of my favorites, with its laid-back, oh so cool, big city unrequited love song vibe.
#1 "don't shop when ur hungry !!" salem ilese feat. vaultboy
This song is a blast! The extended food and drink metaphor really scratches my brain, but I love the musicality too, especially with the way it works the checkout counter beep into the orchestration.
2024 Crush: Benson Boone
I gotta hand it to him, for someone who's so desperate for my attention, he's certainly found many ways to earn it. Flipping all around the stage, being shirtless at every possible opportunity... I really can't be mad about it. It won't make me listen to the music, but I'll watch the videos!
BOOKS
Top Five Books of 2024
#5 The Eyes Are the Best Part, Monika Kim
I have some quibbles with this book, which has a tendency to flatten supporting characters and their dialogue. But following a budding Korean-American serial killer and her obsession with eating eyeballs provides for some majorly effective grossout moments that I won't forget anytime soon.
#4 Disney High, Ashley Spencer
This was a breezy read filled with plenty of backstage Disney Channel drama. A real nostalgic treat for a latter-day millennial like me. Honestly, I wish it hadn't stopped where it did and just plowed through later Disney Channel projects like Good Luck, Charlie, Teen Beach Movie, and Z-O-M-B-I-E-S.
#3 Rough Pages, Lev AC Rosen
Lev AC Rosen, who is one of the most prolific authors out there right now, continues cranking out delightful period piece mystery novels, exploring the queer underbelly of post-WWII San Francisco and all the exciting nooks and crannies hidden within it.
#2 The Brightness Between Us, Eliot Schrefer
This was the sequel to my #3 book of 2021, The Darkness Outside Us. While it lacks the compulsively readable forward motion of that book, it expands the sci-fi world around the main characters in a deliciously compelling way and introduces just enough new people into the mix to allow the character study to deepen and remain just as emotional and interesting.
#1 Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Tasha Coryell
I'd place this right alongside last year's Yellowface (my #2 book of 2023!) in a new genre I'm calling "millennialcore thrillers." Both books follow aimless, underemployed women who find themselves stuck in strange situations and feel compelled to find more and more rickety ways to justify their questionable actions. In this case, the character is a true crime obsessive falling for an accused serial killer and convincing herself she's in control of the situation. It's a rough read at times, but an utterly compelling one.
Best Book Cover: Your Shadow Half Remains, Sunny Moraine
I love images where a thing is also another thing (see: the poster for 1978's Halloween), and this one is also a third thing, just for good measure!
HERE'S SOME STUFF THAT I DID IN 2024
Podcasts!
I didn't guest on many podcasts this year, but I did visit my friends at The Friendchise to talk Alien: Romulus! And I talked about a whole bunch of horror movies, among other things, all year at Alternate Ending.
Events!
I got to report from a bunch of cool places for ScreenRant this year! I went to San Diego Comic-Con for the first time, which was a formidable but entirely rewarding experience. And I got to travel to São Paulo for CCXP24, which was a total trip in every meaning of the word. While there, I got to interview Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller! Read about it here!
Rotten Tomatoes!
My reviews at ScreenRant have earned me an official spot on Rotten Tomatoes! I got to be one of the proud people who worked to push Hot Frosty down from the inexplicable 100% score it started with, so you're welcome, everyone.
New Tattoo!
For my 30th birthday I wanted to get a new tattoo and I decided to honor a sorority from a 1980s slasher movie in the frattiest place possible. I landed on Delta Rho Chi from The Initiation, and I'm very happy with how it turned out!
And that's gonna be it from me for 2024! Let's try to make 2025 as nice as we possibly can. I know it's gonna be hard. But 28 Years Later comes out, so that's cool at least.
