Thoughts on Who Killed Teddy Bear?

    On Criterion, I watched Who Killed Teddy Bear?, a 1965 crime thriller directed by Joseph Cates and co-written by comic book writer Arnold Drake and Leon Tokatyan. The film stars Juliet Prowse as Norah Dain, a nightclub DJ and aspiring actress who lives in Manhattan, and keeps getting obscene phone calls from a creepy guy claiming to be watching her. She is disgusted and calls him out for being a pervert. She finds a decapitated teddy bear in her apartment, and calls the cops. The police detective, Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray) investigates her case, and takes a personal interest in Norah. His wife was raped and murdered, and he openly listens to audio recordings of his interviews with Norah and other women talking about obscene phone callers, with his ten-year old daughter in bed listening to the recordings. He is a red herring, as his suspicious behavior makes Norah uncomfortable and worrying that he may be the caller, but he isn't.

    The reveal of the caller happens a little earlier than I would've liked, but I still found the film interesting as a depiction of Times Square as a sleazy place in the mid-1960s. Norah works as a DJ at a club, where there are creative camera angles from below of people dancing and doing shimmys and hip twists and very 1960s dance moves. 

    The movie explores a lot of mature themes like voyeurism, pornography, incest, and lesbianism, and feels more like a B-movie getting out from under the censorship of the Hayes Code.

    I liked Juliet Prowse's performance as Norah, where the film gives her agency as a woman who doesn't want the obscene phone calls to stop her from living her life as a DJ and actress, to be an independent young woman in New York City. Prowse's performance made her feel more like a person and less like a movie stock character.

    Sal Mineo was great in a supporting role as Lawrence, a waiter at the club who lives with his sister, Edie (Margot Bennett), who is 19 but talks like a child due to a brain injury from a childhood accident. Lawrence struggles with taking care of his sister and dealing with his own traumatic issues, and Mineo gave a great performance as a guy who focuses on making himself look fit and handsome on the outside, but is wrestling demons with his mental health on the inside.

    Elaine Stritch was fun in a supporting role as Marian, a manager at the club where Norah works, and she cares about Norah's safety as a young woman being stalked. There's a heartbreaking scene where Marian is trying to comfort Norah, but Norah mistakes it as Marian making a lesbian pass at her, and is horrified. Marian doesn't fully understand why Norah is angry, but is annoyed that she misinterpreted her act of friendship for something she found devious. It's a great scene that Stritch played excellently.

    I really liked this weird, lurid little movie, and the b/w cinematography by Joseph C. Brun was gorgeous.

Thoughts on When a Stranger Calls Back

    On Criterion, I watched When a Stranger Calls Back, a 1993 made-for-TV psychological horror film written and directed by Fred Walton, and is a sequel to the 1979 horror film When a Stranger Calls. This film aired on Showtime, and starred "scream queen" Jill Schoelen as a teenager named Julia, who comes over to babysit for a family, and while the kids are asleep, she is doing her homework in the living room, and a mysterious man knocks on the door, asking to come in to use the phone because his car has broken down. She doesn't want to let the man in, and offers to make the call herself, but when she tries to call, the phone lines are down. She doesn't want to let the man know that, so she lies and says she called the auto club. The man initially walks away, but then keeps showing up throughout the evening, asking for help, even as Julia is getting scared and telling him to leave her alone. He taunts her and says that he saw someone upstairs and that she isn't alone, and she goes to the kids' room and sees they aren't there. She comes downstairs and there is an intruder there, and she screams and runs out, into the arms of the children's father, just as the parents have come home.

Five years have passed, and Julia is now a college student. The children were never found again, and she has been through psychological torment for years. She has bolts on her apartment door, and lately, strange things have been happening to her in her home, where she comes home and sees things have been moved, or a window is open, or other clues that the children's abductor may be stalking her. Jill Johnson (Carol Kane), the heroine of When a Stranger Calls, is working as a counselor at Julia's college, and offers to help her, as the police have been dismissive of Julia's worries and thinking she's imagining things. Jill has been through this trauma herself, where the children she was watching were killed, and she is understanding of Julia's predicament, telling the cops, "I'd be willing to bet that her apartment is pretty bare, not cluttered. You would know if a book had been moved." She contacts the now-retired detective John Clifford (Charles Durning, also reprising his role from the original movie) to investigate the stalking and home invasions, going over Julia's apartment and figuring out who the stalker is. Jill also advises Julia to get a gun to protect herself, and offers her space to live in her loft for safety.

    

    I really liked this film a lot. I haven't seen the original movie, so I can't compare it, but this stood on its own, with the first thirty minutes being Julia terrorized by the intruder outside, and building a lot of suspense and uncomfortable dread, as she can't use the phone, doesn't want to open the door to a stranger, and is trying to sound calm and composed on the other side of the door. It worked really well on its own as a horror story.

    

    I liked how the film was about the police's inactivity to believe a young woman was being stalked, thinking she's just a paranoid college student, and how Jill was advocating for self-defense (she is shown teaching a self-defense class and advising the women to fight for their lives even if they don't believe in violence), and how John seemed to be the only person with police experience caring about Julia's case and believing her.

    I've always liked Carol Kane for her eccentric charm and talent as an actress, and I really liked Jill Schoelen in the 1991 horror B-movie Popcorn, so I watched this for both of them, and am happy I checked this out, this was better than I had expected.

Thoughts on By Design

     On Tubi, I watched By Design, a 2025 absurdist, body-swap comedy written and directed by Amanda Kramer. The film has an artsy, avant-garde feel to it, with sequences of a group of dancers representing the emotions in a character's mind, as well as the characters speaking in a very clipped, overly proper way that is intentionally stage-y. 

    Juliette Lewis plays Camille, a depressed woman who is lonely and feels unappreciated. She has weekly lunches with her friends, Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney), who have more money than her, who complain to her about their problems because Camille is a good listener. Camille gives advice about not envying other women, saying that if aliens came to Earth, they wouldn't see any different between the women, and to appreciate what they have. She repeats the old adage of jealously being "drinking poison while waiting for the other person to die." Despite that Camille is a good friend, she feels depressed and empty, and wants to be loved.

    The women go into a furniture showroom store, where they look at assorted chairs that are centered in the room, until Camille comes across a chair that just speaks to her in an emotional way. She wants the chair, but the saleswoman is cagey on the price, assuming that Camille can't afford it, going, "We don't do installments." Camille comes back the next time (budgeting with her checkbook to skip some lunches with her friends to afford the chair), but the chair has already been sold. Camille is insistent on touching the chair, even as the saleswoman is telling her to accept that it's not hers and to leave. Camille sits on it anyway, and in a dance sequence in her mind, the chair and Camille have swapped bodies. Camille's body slides off the chair, and while she is breathing, she cannot move or speak. Camille's spirit is now in the chair, and her spirit makes the chair more mesmerizing and attractive to others.

    The chair is bought by Marta (Alisa Tores), a wealthy woman who bought it for her friend, a jazz pianist named Olivier (Mamoudou Athie), who is immediately attracted to the chair, and he also pictures dance sequences in his head when he is falling in love with the chair. He is so in love with the chair that he becomes very possessive of it, bringing it to a dinner party instead of sitting in another chair at the table, and having to be pried off of it when others want to sit in the chair too.

    Meanwhile, Camille has been laying on her mattress on the floor in her bedroom, unable to move or communicate, and her friends and her mother (Betty Buckley), and they continue to pour out their emotions and problems to Camille, still seeing her as a good listener and taking advantage of her. Only later when they do realize that she can't speak or move do they realize something is wrong, and make the connection with the chair to try to make things right away.

    The film is narrated by Melanie Griffith, and she has this sweet, soft voice that makes the film feel more like a dark fairy tale, about a woman who wanted to be appreciated, but instead was more loved as an object than as a person. I liked that the film cast the friends with Gen-X actresses who are all in their fifties, and who look more natural and aged and don't have a Hollywood look to them, that made their characters feel more real to me. 

    Juliette Lewis was really good in a physical role where she is often limp and being propped around, while still conveying sadness and emptiness on her face. There is a darkly funny sequence where a prowler (Clifton Collins, Jr.) breaks into her home and drags her out onto the balcony, threatening to rape her or kill her, but is disappointed that she isn't fighting back, and instead starts crying about his ex and unloading his problems onto her as everyone else has done.

    Mamoudou Athie has a very graceful and quiet quality to his acting that I've enjoyed since I saw him in Archive 81 and Unicorn Store, and he really gets into the dance sequences and using his body as an instrument of pleasure and ecstasy. 

    I liked how this film felt more like a weird art piece about women being objectified, mixing in the dance sequences with the narrative scenes, and it felt really interesting and unusual to watch.

Thoughts on Emily the Criminal

     On Tubi, I watched Emily the Criminal, a 2022 crime thriller written and directed by John Patton Ford. The film stars Aubrey Plaza, as Emily, a young woman who has $70,000 of student debt and is working menial jobs in the gig economy to get by in Los Angeles. She is having trouble getting a steady job because of her past felony conviction for assault, as well as a DUI arrest, and is stuck in dire financial straits.

    A coworker connects her to a "dummy shopper" service that turns out to be part of a credit card fraud ring, where she can earn $200 in an hour if she buys a flat screen TV with stolen credit card numbers and a fake I.D. She does it and wants to do more, so one of the organizers, Youcef (Theo Rossi), sends her out to buy a car, with the same credit card scam. However, when she is about to drive away with the car, the dealer discovers the scam, and tries to drag her out of the car, assaulting her, but she maces him with pepper spray, and drives off, demanding the $2000 owed to her by Youcef for pulling off this dangerous scam.

    Emily gets more into the criminal underworld, even as she is hoping that her friend Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke) hooks her up with a job at the advertising agency she works for. Emily's criminal background, quick temper to fight, and tenacity makes her quickly adept at moving products through scams, though it puts her at more risk for violence and retaliation from others. All she wants is to pay off her student debt, do her painting, and have a steady, decent job, and she sees the crime as a temporary means to an end.

    I had seen this movie before, and really liked it. Aubrey Plaza is great at playing these dark characters who are morally gray, who are relatable even if their actions are questionable, and depicting how far someone who is in deep debt would go to pay off their loans, while also dealing with blocks in their career from past criminal records. She feels realistic as someone who would work in the gig economy to get by, while being angry at the system that is setting her up to fail.

    Theo Rossi as Youcef is really great in this film as well. He plays Youcef initially as a streetwise scammer, but is revealed more to be a funny and likable person who also has turned to a life of crime to survive. His dreams are to own an apartment and be financially stable, having immigrated from Lebanon with his family. A romance sparks between him and Emily, which makes his cousin Khalil (Jonathan Avigdori) more suspicious of Emily getting too involved with the fraud ring and jeopardizing their anonymity as scammers.

    This was an interesting little crime thriller to watch, and I'm happy I revisited it.

Thoughts on Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and Lovedolls Superstar

    On Criterion, I watched Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, a 1984 underground film directed by David Markey, shot on super-8 film, that focus on a fictional all-female punk rock band called the Love Dolls, made up of teenage runaways who are trying to survive on the streets of Los Angeles. Kitty Carryall (Jennifer Schwartz) and Bunny Tremelo (Hilary Rubens) break out of their homes and form a band together, finding a drummer, Patch Kelly (Janet Housden), and fight rival gangs and bands. A manager named Johnny Tremaine (played by then-teenage Steven McDonald, of the band Redd Kross) offers to take them under his wing, but uses them for sex and to make money off of them. The Love Dolls want to get revenge on those who have hurt them, and make it as a huge rock band.

    The movie has a lo-fi vibe to it, with awkward and bad acting, though it's intentionally hilarious at times, like how one of their moms is clearly played by a young man in drag playing up a "nagging old lady" stereotype that is too ridiculous to take seriously. Or when Bunny tells Kitty that Johnny Tremaine assaulted her, going, "Johnny raped me," and Kitty blows right past that with, "Don't worry, we'll make it to the top. We'll show them that we're no tramps, we're real rock stars." "OK!" It was so silly that I thought it had to be intentionally dumb.

    The movie is short at 49 minutes, and has a great soundtrack of 80s punk rock like Black Flag, White Flag, the Bags, as well as several songs by Redd Kross, as McDonald and his brother Jeff act in the film. This movie has a very genuine feel to it, of being a part of the Los Angeles punk rock subculture of the 1980s, and its roughness makes it feel more charming.

    The sequel, Lovedolls Superstar, came out in 1986, and was also directed by David Markey, and is longer at 81 minutes. Following the events of the first movie, with a recap at the beginning like a TV episode, the band reunites after having fallen on hard times, like Kitty sleeping in the gutter, and Patch has become the lead of an acid-damaged religious cult. Bunny is replaced by Alexandria (Kim Pilkington), a sex worker on the streets of Sunset Boulevard, and Johnny's twin brother Rainbow Tremaine (also played by Steven McDonald) comes out of his hippie desert life to look for his brother, who met an ill fate in the last movie.

    The movie gets even more bonkers than the first one, with newcomers vowing to kill to avenge their loved ones, and an obsessed Lovedolls fan (Jeff McDonald) becoming an assassin to target a Bruce Springsteen impersonator. There are guest appearances from Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, Vicki Peterson of The Bangles, and Sky Saxon of The Seeds. There's clearly more money in the budget for the soundtrack, with music by Sonic Youth, the Dead Kennedys, the Meat Puppets, as well as Redd Kross and Black Flag returning. And there's a lot of fun humor in the band being openly antagonistic towards a feminist talk show host, or commanding their fans to kill and thinking they're stupid.

    Despite that it's a short movie, it feels like it could have been cut down even more, as it often feels like padding for a movie with a slightly bigger budget, and even not by much. It can be messy to watch, but like the first one, it has the same kind of DIY heart and energy that I liked. And although Steven McDonald is a bassist and not an actor, he was a lot of fun to watch in both movies as the cock-rock sexist manager and the blissed-out desert hippie.

    David Markey is a filmmaker and musician, and his work has documented the Southern California punk scene of the 1980s, and he has worked with many of the bands featured in these movies.

    I watched these movies on Criterion as part of their programming of movies featuring all-female rock bands, and this was cool to come across these underground cult hits depicting the 80s L.A. punk underground culture.

Thoughts on Only Yesterday

     On HBO Max, I watched Only Yesterday, a 1991 Japanese anime drama written and directed by Isao Takahata, based on the 1982 manga Omoide Poro Poro by Hotaru Okamoto and Yuko Tone. The version I watched had a 2016 English dubbing cast of Daisy Ridley, Dev Patel, Alison Hernandez, Laura Bailey, and Ashley Eckstein. The film jumps back and forth between the past and present of Taeko Okajima (the adult version voiced by Daisy Ridley, the child version voiced by Alison Fernandez), a 27-year old unmarried office worker who lives in Tokyo in 1983, and takes a summer trip to the countryside to work on picking safflowers for the harvest season, and reminisce on how much she loved visiting the countryside as a ten-year old child in 1966.

    Adult Taeko is nagged at by her family for being single at 27, saying she can't afford to be picky, and they don't understand why she prefers the rural countryside, or going there to do farm work as a vacation. On the sleeper train there, she reminisces about when she was a child, and often feeling picked on by her family for not being good at math or for being outspoken, with her mother admonishing her behavior and her older sisters mocking her. Her mother would scold her for not eating all of her lunch, saying the food was going to go to waste, and not listen when Taeko would say she doesn't like onions. At school, the lunch rules would allow children to leave only one thing on their plate, which leads to a mock debate on whether that was wasteful of food. As those scenes take place in 1960s Japan, with the parents having survived WWII, a lot of postwar anxiety about struggle and hunger and not being wasteful would carry over into their parenting, and carrying generational trauma onto their children.

    Taeko at school would struggle with embarrassment over crushes, and when the girls would talk about puberty with breasts and periods, and how one girl was an "early developer," and her mom wrote her a note to skip P.E. when she was on her period, which carries over as a rumor that any girl who skips P.E. is on her period, leading to Taeko feeling angry when she has a cold and has to sit on the sidelines and be mocked by boys for supposedly having her period and "cooties."

    She was much happier as a child when she got to go to the hot springs in the countryside, bathing and feeling like she was almost drowning, both literally and in a state of contentment, like she was where she belonged. Her adult self holds a lot of nostalgia for her time in the countryside, while feeling like she is romanticizing too much as an adult and not thinking about the downsides of farming, like droughts or bad seasons.

    When Adult Taeko arrives at the country town, Toshio (Dev Patel), the second cousin of her brother in-law, is there to greet her, and she barely knows him. But they connect and bond over their interests in organic farming and the countryside, and later, he talks about how the rural landscape was built by farmers as a collaboration with nature, instead of nature building itself, as outsiders would see it as, pointing out the irrigation ditches and gardens that people built. It's a wonderful way to see it as humans and nature working together to support one another, and it brings Taeko and Toshio closer together, even as she knows her time in the countryside will be brief before she returns to her city life.

    I really loved this film. It's a mix of being very sweet in parts, like with crushes and being excited as a kid to perform songs and watch children's TV shows, while also being honest about the more hurtful parts of being misunderstood as a child and being talked down to, holding onto small moments as core memories.. The film switches between the different ages of Taeko in a way to tie them together, for her to understand her past and figure out what she wants in life, and it culminates in a spectacular finale.

Thoughts on Resident Evil (2026)

    In Manhattan, I went to see Resident Evil, a 2026 horror film directed by Zach Cregger and co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten, based on the Resident Evil video game franchise. The film stars Austin Abrams as Bryan, a medical courier who is fighting infected monsters while trying to deliver a last-minute package to a hospital in Raccoon City, the fictional city where the Resident Evil stories take place. He is trying to get the package there in under an hour, but he is facing icy and snowy conditions on the road, but constantly faces obstacles with the monsters, when he just wants to get home to his girlfriend Michelle to talk about her being newly pregnant.

    The film begins with Bryan as a medical courier in a hospital delivering an organ in a cooler bag while talking on the phone to his girlfriend Michelle (voiced by Sara Paxton), who found out she's pregnant, and him being unsure on how to talk about it, saying it could be a false positive, and things like that. He delivers the organ, and a doctor immediately offers him twice the pay to go to Raccoon City to deliver another item. Despite that Bryan promised his girlfriend that he'd be home in twenty minutes, he takes the job for the extra cash, and makes his way driving through icy streets, and accidentally hits a woman on the road. He goes out to find her, and she's frozen up and bloody. He brings her into his car, and the mayhem starts from there, with her being an infected monster, killing a cop who had pulled him over and offered to escort him to the hospital, and Bryan, who has only ever shot guns in video games and not in real life, is freaked out and inept. He can't shoot well, he accidentally electrifies himself when he jumps an electric fence to escape her, and throughout the night and on his way to the hospital, he encounters many monsters, with tentacles coming out of their bodies to grab him and mutate with him.

    It's a really fun horror movie, that has an atmospheric, creepy vibe to it, with the dark snowy night, that evokes the style of the game without using any stories from it. Austin Abrams, from Cregger's previous film Weapons, as well of Euphoria fame, is a really likable, relatable lead in it. As Bryan, he is a normal person working a gig job, who messes up with his girlfriend when he is trying to be supportive but sounds indecisive (when she asks him what he thinks of the pregnancy, he goes "It's your body, your choice," thinking that's the feminist boyfriend answer she wants to hear, but it doesn't help her); finds that shooting a gun is much harder in real life, like when he can't shoot padlocks off of chains or has trouble assembling a gun (as he says to Paul Walter Hauser's scientist character, "I'm not a gun guy."); and accidentally shoots the engine of his own car when trying to defend himself from the first monster. The humor helps the film feel more engaging in a "you wouldn't be able to survive this either" kind of way, like with Bryan's constant cursing or his muttering to himself anytime he's annoyed by somebody lecturing him.

    Without getting too much into spoilers, there is a scene where Bryan is at a dire moment after surviving a lot of monster attacks, and he leaves a voicemail message for his girlfriend, not being certain if he will further survive. It’s a really good scene, and it reminded me a lot of a scene from the 1986 horror comedy Night of the Creeps, where alien slugs get into people’s brains and kill them. The main leads are two male best friends, and in the scene, one of them is listening to a message his friend left him after he got attacked, as a goodbye message and describing what the slugs feel like inside of him, and it’s a really sad and heartbreaking scene. I don’t know if Zach Cregger got any inspiration from this scene, but it came to my mind while watching Resident Evil. 

   There's an excellent elevator sequence late in the film, a sequence with Bryan screaming and running down a city street as people fall from buildings onto parked cars, and a POV shot modeled after first-person shooter games like Resident Evil, Doom, and Duke Nukem. It really does well in the survival horror structure, and makes the film more immersive to watch. I did feel that the film ended abruptly, when it felt like it could have still gone on a few minutes more, so that felt a little jarring as a viewer. But overall, it's a really good adaptation of the video game, and Cregger, an alum of the 2000s comedy sketch show The Whitest Kids You Know, has excelled in the last few years as a horror film director with this, Barbarian, and 2025's Oscar-winning Weapons. I recommend this film for fans of body horror and survival horror.