One Plague After Another

One of 2025's great under-appreciated movies was writer-director Charlie Polinger's The Plague, which starred Joel Edgerton as the swim-coach (not as sexy as it sounds -- he didn't even wear a speedo once even though we've seen him rock one before dammit!) -- for a bunch of shitty abusive teenage boys. There those two are above, looking like the co-kings of the prom together. The Plague wasn't really Joel's movie though -- it belonged to Griffin in Summer wunderkind Everett Blunck who had one helluva 2025; Everett played the main character, who begins to lose his grip under all the peer pressure of teen-dom, which sees the movie flirting with body horror as it grows more nightmarish. Anyway The Plague's ace so if you haven't seen it yet, do. 

The reason we're here right now though is Polinger has announced his next movie and I can't beleive I forgot to mention this earlier, when this news first dropped a few weeks back -- for A24 he's making a new film version of one of my all-time favorite horror films, Roger Corman's Poe-adaptation The Masque of the Red Death with Vincent Price. The film is already set to star recent Oscar-snatcher Mikey Madison, and today they've announced that Léa Seydoux will be in it as well. 

"While A24 is mum on the official plot but does describe the project as wildly revisionist and darkly comedic. Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Madison is playing twin sisters in a story that sees a mad prince take in the noble class into his castle while a plague devastates the peasantry. The story sees a long-lost twin, hidden among the lower class, enter the castle and into a decadent world of orgies, opium, power schemes, revenge and decapitations.... Seydoux will play a scheming lady-in-waiting who is conniving her way to the top."

As much as I adore Corman's movie (I dressed like Price in it one year for Halloween!) I love the idea of re-adapting the Poe stories -- they're so lush and dark and repellant and perfect. Mike Flanagan's recent The Fall of the House of Usher was my favorite season of his Netflix work. So bring it on! That said of course now I'm just curious who'll be the "mad prince"... casting thoughts?

Mason Gooding's Pointy End

While you can never go wrong with watching the original My Bloody Valentine every February 14th it's nice to have a few options, so it was cool of Werewolves Within director Josh Ruben to give us a new one with his rom-com meets slasher Heart Eyes, starring the gorgeous Mason Gooding and Olivia Holt, that is out in theaters today -- click on over to Pajiba to read my thoughts upon it! Honestly Valentines is my second least favorite holiday (after New Years ugh) so watching lovers be butchered is always my kind of way to celebrate. But you do you! 

This Valentines Day remember there is a slot for every hole!

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— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 3:25 PM

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1946

There is a prompt going around Bluesky (ahh remember harmless fun prompts on social media?) asking people to name a favorite movie of 1975 and it reminded me -- I still have a few entries in my "Siri Says" series left to do! It's been so long since I've done one of these posts (since November of 2022 for god's sake; time has absolutely no meaning anymore) let me remind you what the hell I'm talking about -- "Siri Says" began with me asking my phone to randomly choose a number between 1 and 100 and then whatever number it gave me I would pick my favorite movies of that year. For example the last time I did this all those many months ago I got the number "56" so I shared my favorite movies of 1956. 

The game has sort of changed over time though -- since I only have a handful of numbers left (less than ten) I wrote the remaining years down on pieces of paper and I blindly choose one (since otherwise it would take me a billion years to get Siri to narrow it down to a number I hadn't done before). Yadda yadda I was tired of doomscrolling social media this afternoon so I decided to spend some time on one of these posts (they eat up a surprising amount of effort) and here we are. Today I picked the year 1946. And so now I give you...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1946

Notorious

(dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

-- released on September 6th, 1946 --

It's a Wonderful Life

(dir. Frank Capra)

-- released on December 20th, 1946 --

A Matter of Life and Death

(dir. Powell & Pressburger)

-- released on December 26th, 1946 --

Dragonwyck 

(dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

-- released on April 19th, 1946 --

Beauty and the Beast

(dir. Jean Cocteau)

-- released on October 29th, 1946 --

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Runners-up: Gilda (dir. Charles Vidor), The Big Sleep (dir. Hawks), The Stranger (dir. Welles), The Spiral Staircase (dir. Robert Siodmak), The Postman Always Rings Twice (dir. Tay Garnett), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (dir. Lewis Milestone)

Never seen: The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. Wyler), The Killers (dir. Siodmak), The Yearling (dir. Clarence Brown), Paisan (dir. Roberto Rossellini), The Blue Dahlia (dir. George Marshall), Great Expectations (dir. David Lean)

-----------------------------------------

What are your favorite movies of 1946?

Rest In Peas, Veal, Cream Sauce, Et Cetera

Today marks the 31st anniversary of the death of my hero, the legend Vincent Price, and y'all know what that means -- my annual Vincent Price Dinner is happening this weekend! Stewed and brewed from the dusty, blood-scrawled pages of Price's legendary cookbook Treasures of Great Recipes, we've been having a select group of special people over every October for several years now and dining like Vincent did -- he did us a solid by kicking the proverbial bucket (I say that with love!) right before Halloween so it makes for a perfect grown-up way to have a Halloween party. Cocktails, heavy meats, and spooky thoughts, oh my! Anyway those are my weekend plans -- y'all have a good one and celebrate Vincent in whatever way you see fit! And if I have any good photos to post I will post them on the Insta per usual... 

30 Years After Vincent

Our hero Vincent Price died on this day in 1993, making it 30 years we've been without him. As we have done in my household every year for the last several years we will be throwing our annual Vincent Price Dinner this weekend, where we cook recipes out of A Treasury of Great Recipes, the cookbook that Vincent edited and published in 1965 -- taken from his favorite chefs at his favorite restaurants around the world the book is a classic (indeed it just got republished a couple of years ago) and I recommend everyone else also spend a portion of their Halloweens this way! Just be prepared for lots of heavy creams and mustards and aspic, oh my -- the cuisine of the 1960s was a whole 'nother beast y'all. But it's a fine tribute to the fine man who fully embraced his over-the-top horror-movie image while also funneling some culture to the masses on the side. Anyway keep your eyes on my Insta this weekend, where I will surely post some photos from the celebration! And I'm sure I've posted this before but below is John Waters' TCM tribute to Vincent from a decade ago -- it's always worth another watch.

I Wanna Be Haunted

Color me shocked -- I did not go into Kenneth Branagh's A Haunting in Venice expecting to walk out of it satisfied, as that hasn't happened with any of his previous Hercule Poirot movies. But (mostly) satisfied I was -- click over to Pajiba to read my review. I actually summon up the name Vincent Price and I am not using his eminence as a cudgel to bruise either! This is easily the best of Branagh's three Poirot movies, and it's not even close. Below is the trailer -- this is in theaters right now!

Happy Valentines Day

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn 

is just to love and be loved in return."

Love to you all on this dumb ass holiday!

Happy Halloween Weekend!

I know I know, Halloween isn't until Monday. And we'll celebrate appropriately then too. But most people will be partying this weekend one imagines, so have fun, be safe, and put on a cool costume even if you're home alone. We'll be having our Annual Vincent Price Memorial Dinner on Sunday and I'll surely post photos for you come Monday. Our "13 Toilets of Halloween" series will be continuing over the weekend as well, so make sure to check back in every day for that! Stay spooooooky, my lil ghoulie friends!

A Jolt From My Electrodes

A couple of weeks ago I directed y'all to a list I made at Mashable of "The 11 Scariest Movies on Streaming" that I made -- well this weekend I made a list of its exact opposite, and if you click on over to Mashable I have written up a list of "10 Not Scary Horror Movies" that are streaming. These are for those of you (cough wusses cough) who want to partake in the ghoulish time of year but don't like being actively terrified by your movie experiences. They're more "Monster Mash" vibes than they are Thriller" basically. They're all fun movies, along with one of my all-time faves...

I will find any excuse I can seize to sell Paperhouse https://t.co/sewaAsJDYD pic.twitter.com/veKW7OlA6v

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) October 24, 2022

5 Off My Head: The Mad Count Chris

The singular legend Christopher Lee was born one hundred years ago today! While I've made no secret about the fact that when it comes to May 27th Horror Legend Birthday Boys I'm more of a Vincent Price (who was born 111 years ago today) than I am a Christopher Lee, that doesn't mean I don't love Lee! I love him loads. Indeed ever since Severina couple of years ago  put out that amazing "Eurocrypt" boxed-set of more obscure Lee titles (which is on sale for a measly 85 bucks right now, by the way) I've found a new appreciation for him -- and also on that note Severin recently announced they're putting out a second set of even obscurer titles (out in July you can pre-order it over here) so I'm sure there'll be even more amazingness to be mined. That said given what a truly epic run Lee had career-wise, working across eight (!!!) decades of the movies, narrowing down one's faves is a fool's errand. But I'm gonna try anyway, because I am nothing if not an epic fool.

My 5 Favorite Christopher Lee Performances

Count Dracula, Horror of Dracula (1958)

Saruman, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Count Drago, The Castle of the Living Dead (1964)

Lord Summerisle, The Wicker Man (1973)

Duc de Richleau, The Devil Rides Out (1968)

-----------------------------

Runners-up: Hugo, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Horror Express, The Whip and the Body, Hercules in the Haunted World, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Corridors of Blood, Star Wars 

What are your favorite Christopher Lee performances?

7 Off My Head: Halloween 2021 Watches

Did everybody have a nice Halloween? Sad to see my favorite holiday in the rear-view but I actually had a really lovely holiday week this year. Stretching from my 4th Annual Vincent Price Dinner last Tuesday (see photos here if you missed it) through getting to see one of my new favorite old movies on the big screen on Saturday night -- 1973's Messiah of Evil, thanks to the ongoing "Folk Horror" series at Anthology, which I posted about previously here -- and then up to the actual day itself, yesterday, where I had myself a little binge. I watched seven horror films I'd never seen before; there's even a Twitter thread...

Gonna do a HALLOWEEN WATCH THREAD -- got off to a late start this morning but #NowWatching RATTLERS (1976) pic.twitter.com/Y0Uo8jbloZ

— My New Dead Pants (@JAMNPP) October 31, 2021

But who wants it to end there? Not me. Halloween all year long! Or at least through this afternoon, anyway? We'll go little steps. I thought instead of just letting the movies I watched yesterday evaporate into the ether like so much I watch these days I'd rank them! Give you a little idea, out of the seven what's worth your time, if any are new to you too. Well I say "seven" but I actually can't speak of the seventh film yet -- that one isn't out until December. Treated myself to a brand new screener to end the evil night with. That movie is called The Scary of Sixty-First and it will hit the Quad Cinema here in NYC on December 17th before hitting some more theaters as well as streaming platforms the following week. Here's its trailer:

I will have more to say on that one closer to its release. But that leaves six movies --Six! Wah ah ah! -- that I watched otherwise yesterday, all of them old things that I can totally share my crusty thoughts on. So let's! Ranked from worst to best...

My Halloween 2021 Watches

6. Rattlers (1976) -- Listen, this was absolutely watchable crap. But crap nonetheless. It was the perfect first film for my fest though -- nothing better than watching some garbage as you wake up on Halloween morning. And this was one hundred percent worth it for the scene where a camping couple's tent suddenly fills with the titular snakes when even more suddenly out of nowhere a soldier with a machine gun bursts into said same tent and starts firing the gun everywhere. Absolute nonsense.

5. 13 Ghosts (1960) -- I was tempted to do a double-feature of this with its 2001 remake because I've never actually seen that one either, but more than that impulse I wanted to veer wildly from genre to genre and that instinct won out. I'll save the 2001 film for next year (I am definitely doing this again). Anyway this is one of the William Castle movies I've somehow never seen and it's totally fun -- I enjoyed every movie I chose -- but it probably lost something not seeing it with an audience, and not having the red-blue Ghost-finder glasses that Castle created as a go-along gimmick. 

4. Pledge Night (1990) -- A jaw-droppingly sleazy frat-boy possession slasher that I can't believe I hadn't seen before - so so gay, this thing. There's a long hazing sequence involving frat boys in jockstraps carrying cherries from one side of the room to the other clenched between their butt-cheeks, for god's sake -- talk about appealing to my interests! It's also outrageously nasty in its violence -- I don't know where this movie came from or where it's been all these years but I can sense it becoming a standard in my house.

3. The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) -- I needed a giallo at this point in the night and this beauty's about as giallo as they come. There's a half-dozen indistinguishable blonde women, a sleazy dude in a robe that's way way way too short, an extended fashion shoot sequence, a red-caped man-woman-killer with a gigantic golden dagger (James Wan had to have been referencing this with his murder weapon in Malignant, I think). Everything to scratch your giallo itch! There's also a flooded castle at the end, and god I love a flooded castle.

2. Black Moon (1975) -- I reviewed this movie called Mayday earlier this year at Tribeca that stars Grace Van Patton, Mia Goth, Juliette Lewis, and Theodore Pellerin (see the trailer here) that's about this girl (Van Patten) who, shades of Alice, falls into  a strange world where Men and Women are literally at war with one another, and I wish I'd seen Louis Malle's Black Moon beforehand because talk about some similar riffs. Black Moon's a better film -- it is made by Louis Malle -- but the similarities are striking. Anyway I love a weird dreamy Alice in Wonderland riff always, literally always, and Malle's movie has Joe Dallesandro wearing golden jewelry while fighting an eagle with a sword, so winner.

1. Beauty and the Beast (1978) -- As soon as I saw and fell in love with Czech director Juraj Herz's film The Creamator on Criterion Channel a few months back -- see it! -- I wanted to see more of (read: all of) Herz's films, but no more than his 1978 riff on Beauty and the Beast, because if there's one thing I love more than weird riffs on Alice in Wonderland it's weird riffs on Beauty and the Beast. And this one did not disappoint. Nightmarish, baroque, surreal, beautiful, this was so very up my alley. It's not the greatest Beauty and the Beast film ever made -- nothing will ever top Jean Cocteau's 1946 film -- but it's probably second best for sure. And come on...

Okay we should probably take a moment to recognize what the Beast looks like in human form in this movie, cuz goddamn pic.twitter.com/oeroc2HSUv

— My New Dead Pants (@JAMNPP) October 31, 2021

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Have you seen any of these movies?

And what did you watch this weekend?

10 Off My Head: Siri Says 1965

It's somehow been four months since we've done one of our "Siri Says" posts! And that's a darn shame. I know y'all enjoy them, and I do too, so let's reboot the season this week (although no promises we'll keep any momentum going given how I've got several film festivals lining up real quick for our immediate future) with a look at the Movies of 1965, after the lady who lives inside my telephone whispered the number "65" in my ear when I asked her for a number between 1 and 100.

One, I am surprised I hadn't done 1965 yet -- there are still good years left scattered about, although the pickins have admittedly gotten as slim as Jean-Paul Belmondo's waist. And Two, I was surprised by how many damn good movies there are from 1965 when I got to digging; movies I truly adore. So instead of our usual five movies I chose ten faves. And it's almost all foreign cinema? Foreign or genre film, anyway. The 1960s have all sorts of gems to offer once you escape Hollywood's bloated lameness.

My 10 Favorite Movies of 1965

War and Peace 

(dir. Sergey Bondarchuk) 

-- released on July 1965 --

Darling

(dir. John Schlesinger) 

-- released on August 3rd 1965 --

Pierrot le fou 

(dir. Jean-Luc Godard) 

-- released on November 5th 1965 --

Juliet of the Spirits

(dir. Fellini) 

-- released on October 19th 1965 --

The 10th Victim

(dir. Elio Petri) 

-- released on December 2nd 1965 --

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

(dir. Russ Meyer) 

-- released on August 6th 1965 --

Doctor Zhivago

(dir. David Lean) 

-- released on December 22nd 1965 --

Gamera the Giant Monster

(dir. Noriaki Yuasa) 

-- released on November 27th 1965 --

Planet of the Vampires

(dir. Mario Bava) 

-- released on September 15th 1965 --

Repulsion

(dir. Roman Polanski) 

-- released on May 19th 1965 --

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Runners-up: Die! Die! My Darling! (dir. Silvio Narizzano), The Nanny (dir. Seth Holt), My Hustler (dir. Andy Warhol), Invasion of the Astro-Monster (dir. Ishirô Honda), Bad Girls Go To Hell (dir. Doris Wishman), The Sound of Music (dir. Robert Wise), War-Gods of the Deep (dir. Jacques Tourneur) 

Never seen: Sandra of a Thousand Delights (dir. Visconti), Who Killed Teddy Bear (dir. Joseph Cates), What's New Pussycat (dir. Clive Donner), Simon of the Desert (dir. Bunuel), Up to His Ears (dir. Phillipe de Broca), That Darn Cat (dir. Robert Stevenson), Cat Ballou (dir. Elliot Silverstein), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (dir. Martin Ritt), Help! (dir. Richard Lester), The Naked Prey (dir. Cornel Wilde)

---------------------------------------------

What are your favorite films of 1965?

The Price Is Right!

As I said back in April when Funko announced their John Waters Funko Pop figure -- which is out in July and which you can pre-order here! -- I'm not the world's biggest Funko Pop fan; I kinda hate them. They're just the Beanie Babies of now. That said as with John Waters there are exceptions and their recent announcement that they're dropping a Vincent Price figure falls under that category and then some! I love his little burgundy tuxedo! This one comes out in September and you can ore-order it right here. As I said with the John Waters one I wouldn't be mad if they released entire lines on these figures -- with John give me a Divine and an Edith Massey while we're at it, and now with Vincent I am gonna need a Dr. Phibes and an Egghead and a Prince Prospero and on and on...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from: 

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) 

Dr. Vesalius: Human error won't stop him.

Inspector Trout: Why? What do you mean?

Dr. Vesalius: He's had years to hide, to plot this

damnable thing. He's compelling himself to follow

exactly the classic death pattern of the G'tach.

It's the psychic force that holds that man together,

this maniacal precision. If we could just throw it off,

interrupt the cycle, then he might be stopped

by his own inflexible standards.

A happy 50 to one of my favorite Vincent Price movies -- no really it is, it made my Top 10 list earlier this year! -- which was released on this day in 1971. It actually made my Top 5 Films of 1971 list as well, so you really know this one's special-says-me. (Here is a fun "Ways Not To Die" post from this elaborately death-riddled movie.) I mean listen to this factoid off its trivia page on IMDb:

"Originally advertised in the US with the tag line, "Love Means Never Having to Say You're Ugly," a parody of a famous line from Love Story, which had been released the previous year; however, that was replaced after the first week, as opening box office was disappointing and it turned out audiences had no idea what sort of film this was supposed to be. A new advertising campaign made it clear it was a horror film, and afterwards it became a box-office hit."

As you can see that wonderful tagline remains on the film's original poster, though -- wish I had one of those on my wall! Anyway as stated above this movie was a hit for Price and eventually summoned forth an inferior but fun-enough sequel the next year called Dr. Phibes Rises Again -- well I say it's "fun enough" but I can literally never remember a whit what happens in the second one. But Vincent Price is there so it's worth watching, aka The Goldenst Rule of them all.