scumbelievable

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e02 'Pressure's Looking Good So Far'

“Here it comes,” says casino employee Bill (David DeLao) to Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) as they wait together for the gaming floor’s overhead lighting to shift. This is Asher’s sole apparent contribution to the world, a lighting scheme designed to subliminally encourage gamblers to keep gambling. Not only that, but ...

December 2023 Schedule: Tears in the Rain

12/3, 1pm & 7pm: MINORITY REPORT
12/6, 7pm: ROBOCOP
12/10, 1pm & 7pm: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
12/13, 7pm: BATTLE ROYALE
12/17, 1pm & 7pm: BLADE RUNNER
12/20, 7pm: DREDD
12/24, 1pm & 7pm: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
12/27, 7pm: CHILDREN OF MEN

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e01 'Land of Enchantment'

“There’s no such thing as a perfect city,” says Elizabeth Siegel (Emma Stone), donning a dazzling fake smile for the benefit of the empty closet in which she’s recording voiceover for the reality TV show she and her husband Asher (Nathan Fielder) are making for HGTV. Espanola, NM, certainly lives up to that pitch. Bli...

In the Flesh: Scavengers Reign

How often do you get to watch a medium evolve right in front of you? Before Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner’s Scavengers Reign, adult genre animation in America hadn’t so much as twitched a limb in years. Now, like the myriad tenacious life forms which inhabit the alien planet Vesta, it feels alive with unkno...

In the Flesh: Barton Fink

In the sticky heat of early morning, frustrated writer Barton Fink (John Turturro) stares at his sleeping lover Audrey Taylor’s (Judy Davis) back as a mosquito lights on her and begins to feed. The parasitic insect’s whine recurs throughout Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink, driving Barton to distraction, leavi...

November 2023 Schedule: Work in Progress

11/1, 7pm: 8½
11/5, 1pm & 7pm: BARTON FINK
11/8, 7pm: MADELINE'S MADELINE
11/12, 1pm & 7pm: THE FOUNTAIN
11/15, 7pm: ONE CUT OF THE DEAD
11/19, 1pm & 7pm: CLOSE-UP
11/22, 7pm: ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD
11/26, 1pm & 7pm: MISERY

The Deadlights Theater Halloween 2023 Marathon

Noon: ROPE  
2pm: HALLOWEEN  
4pm: AMERICAN PSYCHO  
6pm: IN THE CUT  
8:30pm: HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER  
10pm: CURE  
Midnight: STOKER

To join, just up your pledge to $10 or more and you'll get an invite to the screening discord! We have about 350 members, lots ...

In the Flesh: Berserk (1997)

Don’t come near me, thinks the wounded and broken Griffith (Kevin T. Collins) as Guts (Marc Diraison) races after him. If you come close to me, if you so much as touch my shoulder, we’ll never… The thought trails off as apocalypse engulfs the world around them, Griffith’s dream of ascension to godhoo...

In the Flesh: Killers of the Flower Moon

“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” asks the caption of an engraving in a book on Osage tribal history and custom. It’s a child’s question in a book for children, the equivalent of a “spot the differences” side-by-side comparison in Highlights magazine, but for a man like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo ...

In the Flesh: The Exorcist III

Penned and directed by William Peter Blatty, author of the original Exorcist novel and screenwriter of its famous adaptation, The Exorcist I

Penned and directed by William Peter Blatty, author of the original Exorcist novel and screenwriter of its famous adaptation, The Exorcist III is a bit of an oddm...

WYRM Download Link!

A PDF of my new novella, the medieval dinosaur epic WYRM! I'll have exciting news about it soon, but in the meantime, enjoy!

In the Flesh: Alien 3

“In every seed,” says religious convert Dillon (Charles S. Dutton) as the mangled bodies of Newt and Hicks, Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) surrogate daughter and love interest respectively in the series’ previous entry, are consigned to the flames of a gigantic smelter, “there is the promise of a flower.” At the same...

In the Flesh: The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

If Mike Flanagan didn’t suffer from such a pressing need to feed us a spoonful of treacle along with every pound of glass and rusty nails he dishes up in The Fall of the House of Usher, he might have had something pretty close to perfect pulp. Instead we must content ourselves with a series fundamentally, if only s...

In the Flesh: Fellini Satyricon

A rich man, Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), holds a mock funeral for himself, pressuring his friends and hangers-on to mourn him as they would upon his death. A guest recounts the story of the Widow of Ephesus, a woman whose devotion to her dead husband is so legendary it outlives its own existence, compelling people to believe...

The Deadlights Theater: Halloween Marathon 2023

Hi everyone! So excited to announce a day-long Halloween marathon of serial killer movies, beginning at noon with Hitchcock's ROPE and ending at midnight with Park Chan-wook's STOKER! Trailer by Vincent Ash Renee!

Noon: ROPE, Alfred Hitchcock
2pm: HALLOWEEN, John Carpenter
4pm: AMERICAN PSYCHO, Mary Harron
6pm:...

In the Flesh: The Casanova by Federico Fellini

It begins with a woman leaving. The statue of Venus, ceremonially raised from the lagoon of Venice to commemorate the dawning of a new season, sinks back beneath the tranquil waters, the ropes supporting it snapping one by one, scaffolding and pulleys collapsing under its weight. Her eyes, which have only just broken the surf...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e08: The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord

Why does Ezra wear the stormtrooper helmet when he reunites with Hera and the Republic forces? As a human being, why would he risk being shot for no conceivable reward beyond, I suppose, surprising a friend? As viewers are we meant to be surprised when, having seen Ezra drag an unconscious Stormtrooper away to steal his armor...

In the Flesh: ZeroZeroZero

In a dead house, a dying man ignores his stooped, haggard reflection. Adriano Chiaramida plays don Damiano “Minu” La Piana as something between lich and mourner, his milky right eye reflecting a world in which he no longer has any purchase, his face and body ravaged by a lifetime of betrayal, violence, and struggle. For t...

October 2023 Schedule: BLACK SABBATH + HALLOWEEN MARATHON

8/1, 1pm & 7pm: GOOD MADAM
8/4, 7pm: IMPETIGORE
8/8, 1pm & 7pm: THE WITCH
8/11, 7pm: HAGAZUSSA
8/15, 1pm & 7pm: THE NEON DEMON
8/18, 7pm: SUSPIRIA
8/22, 1pm & 7pm: SATOR
8/25, 7pm: HELLBENDER

8/31, noon to midnight:

ROPE
HALLOWEEN
AMERICAN PSYCHO
IN THE CUT
HENRY:...

In the Flesh: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

It’s a rare scene in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover in which Michael Gambon isn’t talking. “Talking” doesn’t do it justice, really. He rants. He bullies. He declaims and hectors, gibbers and bellows and froths. A quick once-over of the screenplay reveals the obvious: he talks more than every o...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e07: Dreams and Madness

After last week’s light snack of fun fantasy stuff, it’s back to starvation rations for Ahsoka. The show’s seventh episode opens with an airless courtroom drama scene on a set that looks like something out of a fan film. Filoni has no ear for political dialogue, and no apparent comprehension of how governments,...

In the Flesh: Foundation

You’d think Western cinema would be out of things to say about intelligent machines struggling with the idea of their own humanity. Roy Batty, Priss, AM, WestWorld’s sad sack torture dolls, the self-loathing fundamentalist replicants of Battlestar Galactica, HAL 9000’s frantic attempt to exterminate hi...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e06: Far, Far Away

It’s stark how much better this (still bad) show is when it gets away from its ostensible protagonists. Even with sets that wouldn’t be out of place in 2000s-era Doctor Who? and a script that reads like a protracted attempt to do the least funny ‘Who’s on first?’ riff in history, Ahsoka’s sixth e...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e05: Shadow Warrior

In the singular hands of writer, director, Chopper the droid voice actor, and showrunner Dave Filoni, Ahsoka’s fifth episode pulls off the impossible: it is measurably worse than the four lackluster duds preceding it. We spend our first half-hour cutting between Hera flying back and forth over the ocean and Ahsoka ...

In the Flesh: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

The Last Voyage of the Demeter isn’t going to pull in many accolades for its script, which at its best hits its marks and knows its lines and at its worst blunders into rushed and jumbled exposition, but the bestial Dracula (Javier Botet) is so chilling and the film’s scares and shocks so substantial and unnervin...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e04: Fallen Jedi

“Don’t worry about me.” “I’m not. Should I be?” “What?” “Worried.” “Nope.” If the first fifteen seconds of a game of Pong, that pixel moving like molasses across the screen only to be deflected back where it came at infinitesimally greater speed, really gets your dick hard, then boy i...

In the Flesh: Bottoms

With Shiva Baby, her stunningly confident and masterful debut feature about a young Jewish sex worker and the cloying, interdependent, overwhelming community around her, director Emma Seligman set herself a high bar to jump. Bottoms, a screwball comedy about unlikable lesbian high schoolers PJ (Rachel Sennot...

The Deadlights Theater September 2023: You Are Receiving This Broadcast As a Dream

9/3, 1pm & 7pm: Big Trouble in Little China
9/6, 7pm: Escape from New York
9/10, 1pm & 7pm: The Thing
9/13, 7pm: Starman
9/17, 1pm & 7pm: Christine
9/20, 7pm: In the Mouth of Madness
9/24, 1pm & 7pm: The Fog
9/27, 7pm: Prince of Darkness

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e03: Time to Fly

There’s no need to set Ahsoka alongside Andor to make its failings abundantly clear, but when it transplants Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) from Andor’s tense, sweaty, sexually charged and politically complex environment to the kiddie games of Filoni’s show, it’s begging for a comparison....

In the Flesh: Kafka

There’s always been something gay about Jeremy Irons, some quavering inner sissiness to his poshly gravel-voiced demeanor and roughened cut-glass features. His ability to radiate this uncertain inner fragility through any number of exterior personas serves him beautifully in Kafka, Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 thrill...