Monthly Archive: June 2021

Censor (2021)
Directed & Co-written by Prano Bailey-Bond

In the early 1980s British society collectively clutched their pearls at a wave of releases of violent and graphic films that they dubbed ‘Video Nasties’. These films were blamed for all manner of social problems by just about everyone, which was certainly a lot easier than trying to solve any of those problems, and by the mid-80s, a newly empowered Film Classifications Board stepped in to protect the British Isles from the terrible siege of movies they deemed harmful through the magical power of censorship. My thoughts about censorship are probably easy to guess – like a lot of horror fans, it rubs me the wrong way. But there is at least one good thing to come out of this era, the British horror film Censor.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
Directed by Michael Chaves

I’ve talked about two spin-off movies from The Conjuring Universe, Annabelle Comes Home which was alright, and The Nun, which would have been tough to sit through if I had been sober, but I haven’t talked about any of the main series yet, and there’s a reason for that: I don’t like them. That’s not to say I hate them, I recognize that The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 are slick well-made movies that happen to not appeal to me in any way at all. It’s not that I dislike exorcism or possession movies, I happen to love The Last Exorcism, but there’s just a blandness to The Conjuring series that I can’t stomach. I’m going to try to be fair here, but I wanted to make my starting point clear as to my thoughts on this popular franchise. All that said, let’s talk about The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Remove The Number From My Title!

Slaxx
Directed By Elza Kephart

You may be wondering why I’m talking about a movie you’ve probably never heard of when there’s a shiny new Conjuring movie that was just released. The honest answer is, I’m on vacation right now. My vacation started before Conjuring 3 came out and is still going on as we’re nearing its second weekend in theatres. I do plan on seeing this as soon as I get back but for now, a movie that I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while is going to take the spotlight. Also, I should probably see The Conjuring 2…and rewatch The Conjuring because I remember next to nothing about it. Now that that’s all out of the way, let me tell you about the Killer Jeans movie you didn’t know you needed in your life, Slaxx.

Separation
Directed by William Brent Bell

A lot of you are probably wondering what this movie is, which is a sensible question because even though it was out in theaters for weeks, I never saw a single ad for it. Not a trailer, not a poster, no buzz online, the only way I found about it was from glancing through the ‘Now Playing’ list at my local theater, and even then I was a little apprehensive. A lot of what’s playing right now, Spiral, A Quiet Place II, that new 101 Dalmatians thing, I saw trailers for all of them before the movie theaters shut down last year. Not so for Separation. Separation was snuck into theatres right as they were opening up, and now it’s being ushered out when real movies like A Quiet Place II will be taking up that real estate. I can’t blame anyone not wanting to promote Separation though, because it is mind-bogglingly awful. Such a shockingly bad movie that I’m fascinated how it even got made and how no one caught any of the mistakes that any viewer would notice no matter how little attention they were paying to the screen. Now that I’ve played my cards and revealed how I feel about Separation I’ll just say that spoilers are incoming and this is going to be more of a rant session than a review. Hope you can still have fun with that.