2024 Horror Part Twenty-Five

STILL LIFE WITH GHOSTS
Dir - Enrique Buleo
Overall: GOOD

This episodic anthology comedy serves as the full-length debut from Spanish writer/director Enrique Buleo, Still Life with Ghosts, (Bodegón con fantasmas), taking a look at the La Mancha region where people nonchalantly deal with various aspects of the supernatural.  A co-production between Spain and Serbia, each of the five tales takes place in the same locale, three of them dealing with ghosts who have visited the area to either change the name on their tombstone to that of their identified gender, get a priest to get them out of purgatory, or warn people of otherworldly hoaxes.  The other two vignettes spliced in between are more indirectly linked to the afterlife as one man tries to assure that he will return from the grave by leaving a toothpick hobby project unfinished, and a woman goes to obscure lengths to find love.  Most of the characters are middle-aged or elderly, and everything touches upon societal aspects and superstitions in a matter-of-fact way where the scenarios are ridiculous, but nobody seems excitedly phased by them.  In this sense, to say that the humor is "dry" would be an understatement, and nothing is laugh-out-loud funny.  Yet Buleo's arid tone is deliberate, showing us people who are entrenched enough in their ways, their beliefs, and their desperate hopes of what lies beyond that when some evidence befalls them, they take it in stride, sigh with relief, or just get frustrated.

ADULT SWIM YULE LOG 2: BRANCHIN' OUT

Dir - Casper Kelly

Overall: MEH

A direct sequel to the previous year's absurdist Adult Swim Yule Log, Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin' Out does a commendable job of keeping itself as randomly wacky as its predecessor while trying to expand into further silliness.  That said, it is also inevitably less successful than the first movie which was so peculiar and unreadable that it got by more on its boldness than anything else.  In other words, we know the "no rules apply" universe in which these films exist now, and writer/director Casper Kelly mostly offers up yet another stream of arbitrary goofiness where some of the characters are deliberate cardboard cutouts, others behave as if they are real people, and none of the events that happen to them have any semblance of reality.  The now tested and successful formula works as much as it can, and Kelly picks up the narrative exactly where it left off, finding Andrea Laing inexplicably surviving what happened in the first movie, having PTSD from it, and hilariously winding up in a holiday Hallmark movie.  This wisely gives Kelly another genre to make fun of, and he goes full nod-and-wink meta by even switching the aspect ratio and color grading to different extremes depending on how horror or non-threatening romantic comedy the situation is.  He often does this in the exact same shot where Laing picks up on the fact that she has stumbled into one more bizarro movie within a movie.  All of the humor is purposeful and most of it is worth a chuckle, but the shtick fails to strike lighting twice, or at least strike lighting as much as it did the first gobsmacked round.

THE BUILDOUT
Dir - Zeshaan Younus
Overall: MEH

Mislabeled as both a horror film and found footage film, (it is neither), Zeshaan Younus' crowdfunded, full-length debut The Buildout is well-shot and well performed, but it meanders frustratingly.  While the protagonists, (Jenna Kanell and Hannah Alline, respectively), bring along a camcorder on their bonding quest into the desert where both of them are grieving the loss of a close friend/sister, one of them has gotten sober and joined a religious cult that we learn virtually nothing about, and the other is skeptical yet supportive, otherworldly elements are nearly non-existent.  The movie opens with a random woman spouting long-winded poppy-cock about finding a spiritual hotbed after years of searching, we occasionally cut back to her and another presumed cult member doing even more vague and inconsequential things, all the while the main trajectory of Kanell and Alline reveals little of interest.  This is through no fault of the actors, both of whom have a natural chemistry with each other and exhibit plausible emotional struggles when things rise to the surface.  The problem is that Younus has an unfortunate sense of pacing, peppering the film with lingering shots, cutaways to scenery or more vapid montages of the two cultists doing whatever, and both Kanell and Alline taking their sweet time going over what we already know they are going over from the onset.  No mystery is built up because the entire movie feels like a first act, and what minuscule amount of curious occurrences happen, (enough to count on less than one hand), are never followed up, nor do they convey any sense of atmosphere or spookiness.  Naturally, the whole thing ends abruptly which is to be expected after such wheel-spinning, and it is clear that Younus failed to flesh out any of her ideas before she hit the evocative-on-paper, rural California landscape.

2024 Horror Part Twenty-Four

IN OUR BLOOD
Dir - Pedro Kos
Overall: MEH

Documentary filmmaker Pedro Kos takes a stab at his chosen field's parody half, In Our Blood being a found footage mockumentary amongst gallons of them.  While it deals with potent themes, (namely the fact that homeless people and/or recovering drug addicts are regularly discarded by society and left to survive within environments that can all too easily re-condemn them), it also takes some bold swings in the third act, swings which lock it into the horror camp and deserve kudos for their sheer chutzpah.  Unfortunately, these late maneuvers fail to pass the icebox test, as clever as they initially seem.  The tricky thing with wild twists is that they throw everything that proceeds them into question, and while Mallory Westfall's screenplay does its best to dot its Is and cross its Ts, (delivered in expository dialog fashion no less), it still fails to justify the fact that what we have here is a convoluted plot that has no business reaching the ninety-minute mark in any plausible reality.  Also, we get a flimsy excuse for the documentary-within-a-movie to be filmed in the first place, (almost always an issue with this particular sub-genre), and Kos makes the horrendous mistake of opening the film with a spoiler, assuring that many viewers will be able to put the pieces together all the easier before they are spelled out in unambiguous detail.  It is a shame since the world of found footage desperately needs more shots in the arm to stop these properties from stumbling into the same pratfalls one after the other, and while this one is better and certainly more ambitious than most, it still drops the ball.

MR. CROCKET

Dir - Brandon Espy

Overall: MEH

This full-length debut from co-writer/director Brandon Espy takes a stab at creating a throwback supernatural baddie that is a cross between Freddie Krueger and Mr. Rogers, but the noble attempt is hindered by a script that shines glaring lights on Espy's narrative shortcomings.  Mr. Crocket is an expansion of an episode of Bite Size Halloween, a Hulu anthology series that Espy contributed to in 2022.  The concept is worthy of such a fleshed-out treatment, and Espy crafts a handful of clever, twisted, and practical effects set pieces that bask in the type of schlocky gore that 1980s/90s B-grade horror movies indulged in.  Also, Elvis Nolasco, (taking over from Cam Montgomery Jr. in the Bite Size Halloween short), knows the assignment as the title character, chewing the scenery like any R-rated movie monster is supposed to and all while exhibiting deep-seated rage and mad dysfunction that warp his already skewed sense of child-protecting justice.  The way the movie gets from point A to point B is borderline incompetent though, the plot feeling consistently rushed and sloppy, with all of the otherworldly rules seeming as if they are created on the fly in order to desperately keep up with the frantic pace.  Both the adult and youngster characters are underwritten, unlikable, randomly find each other and team up, behave erratically, and/or quip at inappropriate times, and the tone stumbles through goofiness, traumatic events, and themes of severe child abuse.  Some of its blunders are more forgivable than others, but is is a frustrating watch nonetheless.

A DIFFERENT MAN

Dir - Aaron Schimberg

Overall: GOOD

Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man is one of those thrillers that does not reveal itself to be one for almost its entire running time. Instead, it behaves like a thoughtful and sly commentary on how "normal" folk relate and react to those with physical abnormalities in a more comparatively enlightened age.  Think of how different The Hunchback of Notre Dame would play out if it was set contemporaneously in New York instead of fifteenth century Paris.  As the title would suggest, the film is about transformation as well, how other's perceptions of us fuel our own perceptions of ourselves.  The individual whose point of view we are given for this is a sheepish struggling actor with neurofibromatosis, someone who is as skilled of a thespian as he is a ladies man.  As such a socially awkward schlub, Sebastian Stan handles mountains of prosthetic makeup in the first act until he is overnight transformed into, well, a different man.  Yet from that point on, the guy is still the same guy, and he goes through the rest of his days projecting a literal image of himself that inevitably boils over since the circumstances that he puts himself in have no hope of sustaining the ruse.  Interestingly though, they do in fact sustain the ruse, and much of the film's humor is how everyone is oblivious to Stan's world falling apart except for him.  The arrival of an effortlessly charismatic Adam Pearson, (a British actor who actually has neurofibromatosis), kicks Stan's downward spiral into motion, nearly to the finish line before things get deadly.  It is all expertly handled by Schimberg who stylizes everything as a quirky 1970s New Hollywood comedy, with Umberto Smerilli's jaunty music keeping the tone far away from severe even if the plot is always careening towards such a thing.

2024 Horror Part Twenty-Three

NOISE
Dir - Kim Soo-jin
Overall: MEH

For her full-length debut Noise, South Korean filmmaker Kim Soon-jin and screenwriters Lee Je-hui and Kim Yong-hwan craft a topical supernatural yarn that directly addresses various issues that overcrowded tenants face in the country.  Namely, (and as the title would suggest), these are noise issues due to shoddy construction and insulation, as well as unregulated garbage dumping and the list of complaints that go ignored by officials who have their hands tied by the urbanized system's faulty inner workings.  Throwing in malevolent spirits and characters who are "gifted" to see and interact with those who have passed on places this in the horror camp, but even then, such otherworldly occurrences are brought on by the type of trauma which only their palpable surroundings spawn.  It is a lot to chew on for a genre movie, but many of the best genre movies throughout cinema's history have thrived by rooting themselves in contemporary struggles, giving them more weight than your average empty calorie popcorn fare.  Unfortunately, the script is bogged down by grating tropes such as authority figures ignoring completely reasonable concerns and suspicions willy-nilly ghost activity, plus some half-corked ideas that are merely there to provide more hair-raising set pieces at the cost of establishing any type of supernatural rules to follow.  It is only partially successful then, meritable in its themes yet failing to bypass the types of horror pratfalls that need to be bypassed in order to better connect its intentions.

BONE LAKE
Dir - Mercedes Bryce Morgan
Overall: WOOF

Delivering another horror film after her full-length sophomore effort Spoonful of Sugar, director Mercedes Bryce Morgan's Bone Lake takes an icky premise and follows predictable terrain, becoming more unpleasant, stupid, and pedestrian as it goes along.  This begs the question of why watch it in the first place and that is indeed a good question since the movie offers nothing unique let alone enjoyable in its trek to mine the gaslighting and manipulation suffered by its protagonists.  A couple arrives at an isolated mansion that they have rented for the weekend, they noticeably have a few obstacles in their relationship to work through yet nothing detrimental, and then another couple arrives claiming to have double booked the same vacation.  These additional characters are obnoxious and clearly untrustworthy from the onset, rendering every last one of their maneuvers easily foreseeable as their quest to toy with their new "friends" leads to more disturbing and deadly avenues, failing to make an impact because we the viewer are well aware that we are watching a horror movie before it officially becomes one.  It gives the film nowhere to go, and probably because of this, the tone frequently dips into comedic absurdity to compensate, which would be fine if the villains were not so pathetically one-note in their harebrained scheme and vague motivation to expose every couple as untrustworthy saps.  The four person cast do their best with the trite material, though pretty boy Alex Roe is so punchable as a smart-ass dipshit psycho that it is cartoonish.  While Morgan and cinematographer Nick Matthews maintain an interesting visual flair at least, the script by Joshua Friedlander's is just dead on arrival.

WHAT HAPPENED TO DOROTHY BELL?
Dir - Danny Villanueva Jr.
Overall: MEH

The found footage sub-genre continues its stuck-in-the-muck trajectory with the second full-length from writer/director Danny Villanueva Jr., What Happened to Dorothy Bell? undermining its earnest tale of an ancient evil destroying a family with an insulting lack of originality.  Movies are expensive and found footage movies are theoretically cheaper to produce than most, so it makes practical sense why so many independent filmmakers take a stab at one.  Yet all too often, there is still the desire to hide a conventional film in there as well, and Villanueva Jr. breaks the rules frequently here while piling on one hackneyed scare tactic after the other.  Loud screechy monster noises, blurry ghost photographs, supernatural entities taking their sweet time merely to stretch the film's length, characters getting possessed and opening their mouths really wide, (sometimes with black goo around their eyes or teeth), characters standing with their backs turned facing a wall, a cursed book, a demon with a silly name, a paranormal expert brought in for exposition purposes, an Ouija board, etc.  Worse yet are two different moments where Villanueva Jr. inexplicably shoots from mid-air angles with zero explanation as to why all of a sudden we are seeing shots that are not captured from any of the protagonist's cameras.  Newcomer Asya Meadows turns in an aloof performance as a troubled woman trying to get to the bottom of her grandmother's, (the title character's), violent deterioration, an aloof performance which is intentional mind you, but most of the dialog is stilted and unconvincing so that everyone on screen looks all the worse for delivering it.  Villanueva Jr. shows a spec of creativity here or there, blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments that are promising or borderline unique, but the majority of his work disappoints while lazily cherry picking from overused tropes.

2023 Horror Part Thirty-One

CRUMB CATCHER
Dir - Chris Skotchdopole
Overall: MEH

There are several issues undermining writer/director Chris Skotchdopole's full-length debut Crumb Catcher, but the overarching one is that everything that happens in it is either implausible or aggravating.  A thriller which plays on social niceties and extortion to fuel its plot, it grows so ridiculous on paper that one could argue that it is trying to be a black comedy, and maybe it is, but the people on screen are so unlikable and moronic that one can scarcely find humor in their asinine behavior.  When our protagonists are a newly married couple who at no point seem to even like each other let alone love each other, that is a problem as far as caring about what happens to them.  It is also a problem in believing the lengths that they go to in order to keep it together once things go south in the third act.  The antagonists seem unhinged and "on the spectrum" long before their tormenting starts when things fail to go their way, so the film becomes an icky waiting game as every viewer will be yelling at every person on the screen to either shut up or stop careening into danger.  This is all how Skotchdopole builds tension, and the small handful of performers know their assignments well, but every situation presented seems like it exists in a screenplay that simply needs things to happen in order for more things to happen.  Perhaps the most frustrating aspect is that one can see a better movie hiding in here somewhere.  There is style and ambition, and the stakes would matter if the characters were completely rewritten, but the actual results are just a mess.

UNSEEN

Dir - Yoko Okumura

Overall: MEH

While a seventy-six minute feature in this day and age is always appreciated, the second full-length from director Yoko Okumura still overstays its welcome.  Scripted by Brian Rawlins and Salvatore Cardoni, Unseen has its heart in a noble place, pitting two Asian-American women up against violent, entitled, and discriminatory Caucasian scumbags while they each empower each other to do so.  The problem is that the plights of Midori Francis and Jolene Purdy are neither interesting nor plausible, despite Okumura's often successful efforts to make them white-knuckled.  A woman who is so blind without her glasses that she needs another woman via video call to inform her if she is going to walk over a expansive geographical ledge in broad daylight is a stretch, as is a scenario where people are cartoon character-level rude, bust out firearms, and scream in slow motion.  Of course this all creates a schlocky tone that is meant to be heightened, engaging us in exaggerations in order to emphasize the theme of women having to work that much harder to still garnish no respect or boundary adherence from white privileged psychopaths.  Perhaps the whole thing flies too close to the sun then, since it is an exhausting watch that is too miserable to be funny, too silly to be believable, and too extreme to land its commendable ideas.

CANNIBAL MUKBANG

Dir - Aimee Kuge

Overall: MEH

Not without its commendable qualities, the slick indie debut Cannibal Mukbang from filmmaker Aimee Kuge comes up short in its warped, blood-soaked trajectory.  The set up has been frequented before where a socially awkward guy meets the girl of his dreams, and all signs point to the situation being too good to be true even before it is proven to be too good to be true.  As our disturbed couple, Nate Wise has a metal plate in his head from a childhood car accident, and April Consalo seems out of his league as a flirty professional mukbanger, which for anyone not familiar is when people eat food in camera on their social media platform and actually make a living doing so.  Their chemistry is believable enough even if the circumstances of their romance start off dubious and only get more off-the-rails, but Kuge seems unsure of her tone.  The premise is ridiculous and needs to be played for laughs, (which it is at times), but once we realize how twisted the couple's co-dependence is, the film becomes tragic and uncomfortable.  Kuge can be applauded for what she does NOT do with her script, as there are several instances that could have had Consalo wielding her manipulation in a more hackneyed "crazy hot girl" manner.  The movie looks fantastic and the two leads turn in solid performances, (Clay von Carlowitz as Wise's scumbag playboy brother, not as much), but Kuge opens too many doors that she fails to go through.  We are presented with an impossible scenario, but nothing is said about these broken characters, the nature of their addiction, nor the consequences of their actions that has not been better explored in better movies.

2022 Horror Part Thirty

ADULT SWIM YULE LOG

Dir - Casper Kelly

Overall: GOOD

Having already made a name for himself with Too Many Cooks and a handful of other oddball shorts and TV work, filmmaker Casper Kelly crafted his absurdist full-length debut Adult Swim Yule Log.  Also doubling as the network's first full-length, it is an impossible film to classify by design, Kelly utilizing a random concept such as someone walking into a yule log video and then taking it to wild terrain that no one could possibly foresee.  His sheer vision is commendable as this is one of the most unpredictable genre movies of any kind, spiraling into everything from infantile-brained home invasion serial killers with psychotic mothers, to UFO landings, to surreal deals with the Devil, (or something), to curses, to animated objects wreaking bloody havoc, to spontaneous flashbacks, to themes of relationship commitment, moral relativism, and slavery of all things.  It opens with two lengthy single takes, only switching to more conventional camera setups at the thirty-six minute mark, and it shifts through characters as much as it arbitrarily detours into nonsensical narrative twists and turns.  Taken as a whole, it is a mess that collapses upon itself, but it never seems to be going for coherency in the first place.  Working with a brisk shooting schedule and little money with local Atlanta actors, Kelly swings for the fences at every turn, crafting something that breaks as many rules as possible and keeps the viewer as confused as they are engaged.

DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS

Dir - Sam Raimi

Overall: MEH

Suffering from Phase Four MCU burnout, corporate tethering to other properties, shallow screenwriting, and an endless stream of numbing action sequences, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness squanders its potential for cult director Sam Raimi to collide the two genres that have made him a household name for the first time since 1990's far superior Darkman, that being horror and the superhero movie.  The horror moments are sprinkled in more as window dressing than anything.  We get Elizabeth Olsen going all red-eyed villainess who looks like a walking corpse at times, one of the alternate reality Benedict Cumberbatches literally being a walking corpse, CGI monsters galore, and a mild amount of bloodshed.  Everywhere else, it is just another two hours of embarrassing platitudes and pedestrian character development shoehorned into a cacophony of unremarkable, loud, and cartoony computer generated spectacle.  Every last set piece is so visually nauseating and boring that it makes the movie feel twice as long, which is a shame since this is the most gargantuan budget that Raimi has ever worked with.  He could have had so much free reign to go hog-wild with the universe-hoping, but the results are generic at best and squander the celebrated filmmaker's singular and quirky mannerisms.  This is Sam Raimi doing a competent, by-the-books superhero movie, nothing more.  Which begs the question of why get him on board in the first place if all that he was able to do was shoehorn in his Oldsmobile Delta and a Bruce Campbell cameo, otherwise completely playing by the stale MCU rules.

MONOLITH

Dir - Matt Vesely

Overall: MEH

The first collaborative effort between the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival initiative "Film Lab: New Voices", Monolith is refreshing and ambitious in its approach, despite its foibles.  Apparently, director Matt Vesely and screenwriter Lucy Campbell's project beat out sixty-three other entries, and it is a shame that it comes up short despite what it does correctly.  A gimmick movie, Lily Sullivan is the only actor on screen, playing a disgraced podcaster who speaks to various other people over the phone as she attempts to uncover a bizarre story for her conspiracy-adjacent program.  The plot details are unsettling, strange, and engaging enough to keep the claustrophobic setting, (an isolated and spacious house that we barely see any of), from feeling stale, even if there is still some wheel-spinning along the way.  Campbell's script seems more interested in building up the creepy mystery than either solving it or getting to the bottom of the questions that it raises about privileged people who may be due some comeuppance for past injustices.  While Sullivan does fine if one-note work as a humorless woman who has gone through an emotional ringer even before we meet her, much of the voice work is melodramatic and forced, plus the ending fails to land despite its progression from the film's most WTF moment.  Clean some elements up while diving more into others, (and leave Vesely's low-key style untouched), and it could have been something special, but instead, it just has the potential to be something special.

2020 Horror Part Twenty-Five

COVEN

Dir - Pablo Agüero

Overall: GOOD

A sobering look at a once thriving exploitation genre, Argentine-French filmmaker Pablo Agüero's Coven, (Akelarre, Coven of Sisters), pulls off a nifty trick where it plays with ambiguity via a historical context.  That is to say that this is not a witch-hunting film where the supernatural is irrefutable.  The devil is not made flesh, and the accused women do not take to the skies on brooms while cackling wildly.  Yet, there is still an enchantment that transpires between the helpless and doomed young women who are captured, tortured, and condemned by men in authoritative positions with unwavering bias and no basis of evidence.  This is of course because what they are accused of does not exist, yet that did not stop the Labourd witch-hunt of 1609 form putting seventy people to death, mostly peasant women who were helpless against such onslaughts.  It also does not stop Alex Brendemühl, (portraying the real life historical figure Judge Rostegui who led the charge and authored what was then considered authoritative texts on the subject of witchcraft), from falling under a spell that promises to provide evidence of the akelarre, aka Witches' Sabbath ceremony.  As the captured girls play into their predicament with plans to escape when the village men return from their fishing expedition, (it is interesting to note that at this time, men were both the captors and saviors of women who had no rights to speak of), Brendemühl becomes entranced with their charade, desperately clinging to it as the illusion promises full freedom from the burden of fanatic dogma.

PENINSULA

Dir - Yeon Sang-ho

Overall: MEH

Yeon Sang-ho's Peninsula, (Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula), serves as the sequel to 2016's Train to Busan, though the animated prequel Seoul Station was also released that same year.  This makes Peninsula the third in the series, but not the last time that Yeon would rehash the same formula of infected people ravenously attacking surviving humans, (see 2026's Colony).  In any event, it is a forgettable action-horror hybrid with the usual detriments.  It is nearly two hours long, the middle section drags, the characters are either charisma-void dead weight or cartoonish villains, the plot has foreseeable dramatic beats, and most of all, 28 Days Later-styled rage-jacked zombies are inherently overdone and boring.  Yeon got away with them in his previous live action film due to the gimmick of having everyone trapped on a high speed KTX 101, as well as giving its main protagonist a humanely justified arc to redeem himself as a parent, come hell or high water.  The characters here have their own stakes and trauma from living four years now in a post-apocalypse, but their one-note nature and the movie's humorless tone just makes for a stagnant watch no matter how many Mad Max set pieces we get, or how many snore-inducing hordes of ferocious undead fly at the screen via CGI.  It is an impressive production and fits the template of a sequel going bigger and louder, but this does not stop it from also being front-to-back dull.

SHE DIES TOMORROW

Dir - Amy Seimetz

Overall: MEH

Existential Dread - The Movie, She Dies Tomorrow is a frustrating psychological zone-out, something that merely toys with dark humor and intense themes as if it has every aim to keep the viewer at a distance.  The second full-length from actor-turned writer/director Amy Seimetz, it is not so much that she dangles a carrot in front of us since the nature of the story is an unwavering and mysterious assurance of one's own demise that leaves everyone on screen as confused as we are.  To her credit, Seimetz avoids copping the obnoxious and self-indulgent style of Lars von Trier, who frequently tackles similar nihilism through meandering monologues and dehumanizing behavior.  Refreshingly then, each of the characters deal with such a revelation without being egregious.  Inhibitions vanish, honesty comes to the forefront, will power deteriorates, numbing contemplation sets in; it all depends on the individual, though none of them loose their cool.  It is difficult to grade the performances since they all succumb to a different form of aloofness, and Seimetz' plot makes sure that it goes nowhere, disorienting us with spontaneous flashbacks, perspective changes, nature closeups, and jarring camera angles.  Everything here seems to be here on purpose, so one can not call it a failure of intention, but it is too stuck on pause to be either profound, scary, or funny.  Instead, the movie just kind of sits there and goes "Huh...".

Tim Curry - In Memoriam

April 19th, 1946 - August 25th, 2026

Another legend fallen. A towering figure in cult cinema, Tim Curry's break-out role as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in both the initial stage and film productions of The Rocky Horror Picture Show would have been enough to endure him with adoration, but so many of us have grown up with a laundry list of his other defining performances on the small screen, the big screen, and the stage.  He was Wadsworth the butler in Clue, Darkness in Legend, Pennywise in the It miniseries, King Arthur in Spamalot, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the Broadway debut of Amadeus, the Grand Wizard in The Worst Witch, an entire family of demented hillbillies in the 1993 Tales from the Crypt episode "Death of Some Salesmen", the hotel concierge in Home Alone 2, Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, the guy who said "I am your WORST nightmare!" in Loaded Weapon 1, etc.

These are but a handful of examples which either rank as the first thing that any of us saw him in, or yet another thing that we saw him in having already fallen in love with his undeniable charisma and versatility.  To lose Tim Curry even at the age of eighty and even after being wheelchair bound for fourteen years following a stroke is still a staggering blow.  To lose him only a day after we lost Dolly Parton, (another eternally and rightfully beloved icon who was also eighty years old), is just a cruel example of "When it rains it pours."  Yet though his career had slowed down significantly as his life approached its expiration date and it is less shocking than inevitable, there is a void left by his abilities and character that is difficult to accept.

Channeling his inner Dolly.

Like many children born into a military home after the devastation of World War II, Timothy James Curry and his family were relocated every year and half, and had to make due with unavoidable inconveniences, if not hardships.  His father was a Royal Navy chaplain who eerily enough also suffered a stroke, yet he died merely at the age of forty-nine when Tim was only twelve.  A life in the arts was forthcoming after showing promise as a boy soprano in his youth, his affinity for and ability to belt out with the best of them being something that entered into his professional performance career, not to mention a handful of years where he gave it a go as a rock vocalist, cutting three albums in the late 70s/early 80s.

Of course Curry is wildly known for his work either in front of a camera or on a stage, not just being behind a microphone.  Though to be fair, he did pay the bills with a steady stream of voice gigs, namely on The Wild Thornberrys, The Clone Wars, and slew of other cartoons and video games.  Yet landing and helping to shape Rocky Horror's Dr. Frank-N-Furter during the fringe stage production's infancy was what launched him from promising young London actor to someone who stole all of his screen time, an ability that he would continue to possess throughout the rest of his career whether he liked it or not.  There was a reason that he got the roles that he got; people wanted to work with him.  They wanted that guy from Rocky Horror, that guy from Clue, that guy from It.  Throughout it all, Curry was able to heighten his portrayals when necessary, he was able to be hilarious and menacing, he was able to chew the scenery without making a fool of himself or derailing the material that he was given.  Curry instead enhanced the material that he was given, and he got that material because the people casting him simply wanted Tim Curry.

"That guy with the dashing eyes and wonderful voice who only had five lines in The Shout, he needs to be the Devil!" - Legend's casting directors, presumably.

One of the most respectable aspects of Curry's many decades in the public eye was how he navigated keeping things out of the public eye.  He was never married, bore no children, had no high profile relationships, and intentionally kept his private life to himself.  As he bluntly puts it in his fantastic 2025 memoir Vagabond, (which wrapped up his life right on time), "And specifics about my affairs of the heart or the bedroom are - respectfully - none of your fucking business".  In a culture where celebrity is coveted and people garnish individual fandom for themselves, (be it unintentionally to a degree on Curry's part), it is always refreshing to see someone recoil from the spotlight when they have no interest to when not in the spotlight.

Just like anyone, Curry had a stable of close and trusted friends, a social life that was conducted on his terms, and hobbies like gardening which he was particularly dedicated to throughout a small handful of homes that he owned.  He of course also happened to be an extraordinary actor, and a working actor at that, who made no qualms about doing random episodes of television, a B-movie or piece of popcorn schlock when it was convenient, oodles of cartoons, or documentaries exploring his more celebrated work.  In other words, Curry was no actor snob.  He gracefully navigated the ups and downs of his career, kept busy longer than he needed to, and also kept whatever relationships he had to himself.

The Lord of Darkness in his natural habitat.

As a personal aside, my earliest memories of Tim Curry was watching him simply own the movie Clue, no small feat considering the other heavyweights in that movie.  Madeline Kahn, Martin Mull, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Eileen Brennan, Coleen Camp, Lesley Ann Warren, even Lee Ving; Curry was the guy you watched and laughed with the most.  It remains my favorite of his performances, largely and admittingly due to nostalgia yes, but also because he was able to morph into the heavy with impeccable comedic timing.  The overarching theme of Clue is convolution, with Cold War politics, blackmail, and FBI scandals all thrown into anything but a simple whodunit framework.  Yet Curry sails through it as the guy with all the answers because as it turns out, he is the guy with all the answers.  Starting from my youth, I have watched this movie upwards of a hundred times, and Curry's frantic, dialog-drenched performance and mastery of physical and verbal comedic jabs is ceaselessly hilarious.

Whatever any of us may know and love him for, (and again, just take your pick), he was a commanding presence in it.  Even in subpar to downright lousy things like Home Alone 2 or It, he made those things watchable.  Sometimes he did so on his lonesome, (Congo anyone?).  Tim Curry was always someone we were excited to see.  "Hey, Dr. Frank-N-Furter is in this!" = fuck yeah.  Furthermore, realizing that the same guy who could be a Transsexual Transylvanian mad scientist could also play it straight with the Muppets, that the same guy who could become unrecognizable in gallons of prosthetics to be the most badass satanic entity in screen history could also sing "Anything Can Happen on Halloween", that the same guy who could run around doing pratfalls and spitting hilarious rapid-fire exposition as a butler could also play the world's most famous composer, just goes to show how much of a one-trick-pony he was not.  Curry was a LEGEND, (I make no apologies for puns), and we should be so grateful to have so much of his work to cherish.

The Doctor has finally gone home.  Long live the Doctor.