Boy howdy do I hate summer, especially August. I can’t stand being hot. To paraphrase the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, “I was pouring sweat. My blood is too thick for Virginia: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.”

It flat out just scrambles my brain. I can’t think straight, I’m miserable, and I can’t get comfortable. Fact is, I can’t ever be cold enough. I like to be able to hang sides of beef in my living room. Oh the cruel irony that brought me to Norfolk, Virginia 30 some years ago.

Yeah yeah, I can just hear someone out there saying, “Norfolk? Then you’re right near the coast! How great to live by the beach and go whenever you want!” Fair, except A) reread that first paragraph up there, and B) the beach encapsulates everything I loathe: heat, people, sunlight, sand, happiness. No thanks. Best stay inside and watch movies.

8/7 The Oracle (1985)

Odd little flick with some not great acting. A woman comes into the possession of a ceramic hand that holds a feathered pen. Turns out it’s an automatic writing planchette. People who try to destroy or get rid of this thing predictably end up dead. There’s an okay amount of blood to be had although some of the practical effects look like something I could put together in a weekend. The end is a predictable twist. Overall though, I gots ta say I didn’t hate it.

8/8 Barbie (2023)

I mean, I had to sooner or later, right? I loved this movie. I thought everyone in it was fantastic, and I love Greta Gerwig. Promising Young Woman is one of the most criminally underrated and darkly comic movies I’ve seen in a good long while, and subtle as it is, some of that darkness seeps into Barbie here and there as well (like men having as much power in Barbie World as women have in the real one). I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get past Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, and I was happily surprised that, at least for me, it turned out to be a nonissue.

8/9 ParaNorman (2012)

It’s been a minute since we did a double feature on Podferatu, so we decided to do so for an the Episode 73 this week. At Jorge’s behest we picked ParaNorman and Monster House. Animated PG horror isn’t normally my thang, so I have to admit, I was pretty wary going into these. ParaNorman, however, is from the makers of Coraline which I loved, and because of my love for Ray Harryhausen, I do have a soft spot for stop motion. Also, Alvin, the bully, looks an awful lot like Moe, Calvin’s nemesis in Calvin And Hobbes.

8/10 Monster House (2006)

What surprised me about this and ParaNorman was how dark they were willing to get. Both deal with a surprising amount of death, cruelty, and loss. ParaNorman involves the death of a young girl at the hands of a bunch of frightened Puritans (ugh…fuckin’ Puritans) while Monster House has the death of a man’s wife by freak accident. Of the two, I think I prefer ParaNorman, but they’re both enjoyable and would serve nicely as pretty safe entry-level horror.

8/18 Psycho Beach Party (2000)

We landed on this for our August Tubi Tuesday episode. We were pretty excited for this as an option, and hoped we’d roll it, and we did. And then we were disappointed. So. Bitterly. Disappointed. Some entertaining moments but would have benefited mightily be leaning harder into either the humor or the gore. Charles Busch’s screenplay is taken from his off-broadway play of the same name. As Busch is a drag queen (and plays the movie’s female detective), I gotta wonder if the play was drag. I have to hope that it was and can only wish I could bear witness to such a spectacle.

8/19 Aquaslash (2019)

At first I wanted to watch Dude Bro Party Massacre III to kinda stay in the Psycho Beach Party realm, but then this popped up, and I said to myself, “Self, why the hell not?” Turns out there’s a damn good reason why the hell not: the big waterslide kill. It was bloodsoaked and gross; I’ll give it that. But the slog to get to that last 20 or so minutes was so tedious that the payoff almost became anticlimactic, setting the bar wwwaaayyy too high for the budget I’m assuming this movie had. Once the first group hit the trap, I thought, “Well it’s about damn time,” and then things slid (see what I did there?) into diminishing return territory right quick.

8/21 Organ Trail (2023)

Well it sounds like horror and was at least partly marketed as such, even as a horror western (exacerbated by the fact that there’s a horror video game with the same title). Being a huge fan of Bone Tomahawk, I was all in. Hot damn had I been hoodwinked. This isn’t even in the same zip code as horror, and as for western, okay, yeah it’s set in the West. There are guns. And horses. Great. Neigh neigh. Bang bang. There’s some blood to be had. I’m not saying I hated it, but even as a revenge story, it remains ho-hum. I suppose one could argue there’s a half-decent sort of horror element late in the third act, but I’ve been more surprised by most Scooby-Doo reveals.

8/24 Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments (2004)

This was a rewatch. I was bored one night but just couldn’t land on anything I really wanted to put my heart into watching. So, given my absolute adoration for and devotion to previews and compilations of movie clips, I popped on the YouTubes and looked for this. Seriously, I could watch stuff like this all day. I still don’t agree with #1, but I can see why it’s there. If you don’t know, check the show out. It’s loads o’ fun.

8/25 Heck

This was the proof of concept short that was then developed into Skinamarkink. Full review here.

8/25 Island Of Terror (1966)

Who doesn’t love a good Peter Cushing/Terence Fisher/Pinewood Studios outing? Okay okay, so this wasn’t one of Cushing’s standout performances. Okay okay, so the monsters looked like cast-offs from a Tom Baker Dr. Who set. It was still kinda fun. We start with some scientists doing cancer research that involves radioactive isotopes. Well there’s a lab oopsie in the cold open, and those zany nerds have up and created a silicon based life form that eats bone, thereby throwing the locals into turmoil and disarray. Highlights include Cushing and Edward Judd donning flimsy plastic suits whilst handling strontium-90 and contaminating the local cattle with said strontium-90 so the monsters would eat them and die. Oh, and much is made of how time is of the utmost essence, but when Cushing loses a hand, there’s plenty of time for Judd to surgeon him up. Like I said, good fun.