An example of fine visual storytelling with minimal dialogue. The problem is there’s no story — or if there is, someone forgot to tell it. Scarlett Johanssen appears to have prepared for her scenes by injecting herself with massive doses of thorazine before the cameras rolled. A 100+-minute assemblage of cool images around the theme of the unimportance of superficial beauty vs the beauty under the skin. Seriously? I will say that the scene at the beach and its aftermath was =very= disturbing.

FF=4

Black, black humor.  I loved it.  Very different, with a sneaky message.  Very much worth seeing and listening to every word.

FF=0

This didn’t make a lot of sense but was fun to watch once you hit the OFF switch on your brain.

FF=2

A mostly unwatchable 1983 slasher film.  I hung in to the end because I’d been told the last scene was a shocker.  I guess it is – but hardly worth slogging through the bad acting and improbable murders.

FF=5

Fell asleep 30 minutes in on the first try.  Made it through on the second.  Good performances, an erratic pace, an odd structure (holding off showing the massacre of the athletes until near the end – why?) You wind up shaking your head at the final fade out: This will never end.

FF=0

The true story about a 20-year-old caddie who won the 1913 US Open as an amateur.  Chock full of the usual clichés of all underdog sports films, but it’s a charmer.

FF=0

Truly unique.  It’s based on the H.P. Lovecraft story published back in 1926 and made in the style and with the techniques available at that time.  This means it’s silent, with crude miniatures and even cruder stop-motion.  But somehow it works.  (I happen to love silent films so this wasn’t an impediment in my case.)  It’s very faithful to the source material.  It’s short so I watched it a second time because I was distracted during the first.

FF=0

This Roger Corman film really creeped me out when I saw it as a kid.  (Co-written by Mark Hanna who later gave us Attack of the 50-Foot Woman – which held out the possibility that one might indeed return to the womb, but I digress).  It did not creep me out sitting there with Tom (yes, we screened a triple feature) under the influence of Cuervo Gold.  I’ll give it points for originality, but it looks like it was shot with a wind-up 8mm through homemade day-for-night lenses.  Damn near impossible to see what was going on at times.  But again, only 67 minutes long, so the FF rating is low,

FF=1

After Half Light we watched this 1964 Terrence Fisher film in which the Earth neither screams nor dies.  The shooting budget was equal to what Demi Moore’s pedicurist got paid on “Half Life” and moved at almost as slow a pace.  The runtime was only 62 minutes but even then we felt the need to goose it along.

FF=2