The League of Dead Films

Turned out that I did not manage to repeat my experiment with doing a series of Fall blog posts that totally would stand up in court against a claim of copyright infringement by the lovely Carol Borden since they were not trying to be her amazing Spookoween write-ups. At all. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not still watching movies! While I continue to be a parent and have joined the dreaded ranks of library administrators, I am, in fact, always watching movies. If you want to read some mini-reviews, I highly recommend checking out my Letterboxd stream. League member Sean Frost continues to run a podcast with the inestimable Tim Lehnerer-The Fiasco Brothers Watch a Movie. Sean and Tim, the titular Fiasco Brothers, discuss a new movie every other week, chosen randomly from their own list of possible titles.

Not having a podcast of my own and not genetically blessed with the ability to shut up, I of course wanted to join the pair to talk about a movie and they booked me to discuss Death Wish 3 (one of our former Movies of the Day) on Episode 9 of The Fiasco Brothers Watch a Movie: My Roscoe Goes Ka-Chee. Awesome times were had, and when they were setting up their second season, I was invited to pick a movie…and, again, I picked a former Movie-of-the-Day, Brand Upon the Brain. You can listen to Episode 47: Rube Goldberg Machine of Despair below….and you can also read my review from ten years ago (so that’s where I got that list of Maddin themes from!). Will I return to writing here regularly? Honestly, chances are greater that I’ll show up on the Fiasco Brothers again first but you never know…and until I totally give up the ghost you can not tell.

https://soundcloud.com/fiascobrothers/47-rube-goldberg-machine-of-despair-brand-upon-the-brain?fbclid=IwAR2gFDCy4O06nMesFUvNqK4k2SBsQBAH48EopIr-7_BzGWQgRT6FiTl792E

September 19th: The Baroness and I watched Crooked House, my obligatory Agatha Christie story for this season (I wasn’t able to find the 1974 Ten Little Indians and somehow this ended up on my list instead). I’d need spoiler space to get into which 1950s horror sub-genre foundational work this prefigures*, but in any case, Crooked House boasts a great cast and seems to have been inexplicably panned. If you like high production value adaptations of Christie’s work with actors like Terence Stamp, Glenn Close, Gillian Anderson, and Christina Hendricks, this is a lot of fun. (Yeah, technically this should’ve been part of the last post…somehow it got left out! In my house we blame Phoebe, the ghost from BVH’s childhood home-Editor)

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