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Lynne marta laugh in11/8/2023 You May See Butterflies at Galerie Francesca Pia, featured on Contemporary Art Daily In: Venus und Sonne im Zehnten Haus, Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin Screening at Shhh, Silent Film Festival 2023, Monokino, Oostende, Belgium In: Monotypes, Edition VFO at Kunsthalle ZurichĬoupes, Public artwork realized for Un été au Havre edition 2023, Le Havre In: Hoi Köln (Begrüssung des Raumes Im Bauch der Maschine Albtraum Malerei) The Raw and the Cooked: The Power of TransformationĬurated by Madeleine Schuppli, Bechtler Stiftung, Usterĭozie Kanu Emil Michael Klein Kaspar Müller In: Foto/Industria Biennale, MAST Foundation, Bologna Nothing New, New Museum, Lobby Gallery, New York Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) If you find the poster and the premise irresistible, Blood Beach isn’t awful, but I can’t really call it a good film, either.In: LUFF – 22nd Edition, Lausanne Underground Film & Music FestivalĪn Evening with Ericka Beckman, Redcat Theatre, Los Angeles This feel ultra low-budget and I’m guessing the majority of the $2 million budget was just locking down actors you recognized. It’s clear that the actors are all trying, doing everything they can, and whatever joy there is to be found in the the majority of the film comes down to Bloom letting his actors riff off each other. But with a human cast this packed with solid character actors, this should be more fun in-between the monster moments, and it’s not. I like the actual design of the monster and I think the film wisely holds the reveal until the right moment. There’s something brute-force-effective about the image of a person being eaten by the sand, and director Jeffrey Bloom stages those scenes well. It’s a film that leans on monster-movie cliche, but it is not entirely without merit. , and it establishes Harry (David Huffman), the guy who went swimming, as our lead. This sets up a running joke that we’ll see duplicated by Blake Edwards in S.O.B. A lady sits on the beach watching a man go out for a moonlight swim, but instead of him getting attacked, she’s the one who gets eaten by something that pulls her under the sand, leaving her dog behind. This movie shamelessly borrows from Jaws, among other sources, and the movie’s opening scene is a clever inversion of what we expect based on Jaws. Fun, right? So why isn’t the film actually fun? For one thing, it’s way too focused on the cops who are investigating the disappearances. You’ve got John Saxon, Burt Young, and Otis Young (no relation) all starring. A movie about monsters that live under the sand of a Santa Monica beach, eating people, is fun. Unfortunately, there are not enough of them. There are a few moments in this film where it lurches to life and you get a glimpse of the fun, unapologetic exploitation film it could have been. Let’s just say there was a boner… and it might have gotten pulled.īut before we get there, let’s jump back in with the next to last weekend of the month and a movie that had a great poster… I still don’t think this is a great line-up, but at least there’s a wide range of titles.Īlso, there’s a little something special at the end of this installment, a regular feature from the podcast that I was hoping I wouldn’t have to break out for the newsletter. When I’m breaking these up, I like to have at least one “big” film in each installment, but a month like January 1981 really tests that, and just by the luck of the draw, it feels like this last installment is the meatiest of the three. There’s a rhythm to this that I remember from recording ‘80s All Over, a way that each year in the ‘80s is shaped, and the start of the year is always going to have a few months of very strange programming before we launch into the real meat of the release schedule. Time to wrap up this first month of 1981.
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