Lizzie Monroe (Marie Madison) is a famous pool player who has turned her back on playing tournaments and now hustles clueless men in pool halls. Because they all think that a blonde can’t possibly play pool, it’s easy for Lizzie to take their money. Lizzie mentors another young female pool hustler named J.J. (Chexy Grace) but when J.J. goes against Lizzie’s wishes and enters a national tournament, Lizzie enters too. Teacher and student go against each other for the championship.
This movie looks like it was filmed on someone’s phone and the actors seemed like they were just people some found out at a bus stop. I’m not much of a pool player but even I could tell that Lizzie and J.J. weren’t really making any of the shots. This was a film about women dominating their male competition but the movie couldn’t decide if it wanted to be exploitive or empowering. A lot of obnoxious men lose but the camera lingers on J.J. and Lizzie’s cleavage whenever they lean across the table. ‘Personally, I didn’t care whether the move was empowering or not. I just wanted it to make up its mind who it was trying to appeal to. It probably wasn’t made for pool purists. Virgin Pockets makes pool look extremely easy and all of the hustles looked like things that anyone could do. I was surprised J.J. needed someone to teach her how to do most of them. Maybe I should work on my game and make some money!
What type of title is Virgin Pockets anyway? When you saw that title, you didn’t think this movie was about pool, did you?
The new version of Salem’s Lot, which has finally been released on Max after sitting on the shelf for nearly three years, is not very good.
At the same time, it’s definitely not terrible. There are a few effective scenes. The finale, which is a bit different from what happens in the book, is enjoyably berserk. The film made good use of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown and, as a history nerd, I appreciated the fact that the movie used the book’s original 70s setting as opposed to trying to update the whole thing. When writer Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) wants to investigate the history of the old Marsten House, he has to go to the library. People looking up stuff on microfiche is always, from a cinematic point of view, more compelling than them pulling up Wikipedia.
Ultimately, the movie is just kind of forgettable. It’s mediocre in the bland way that so many recent horror films have tended to be. The movie’s style has far more in common with David Gordon Green’s unfortunate forays into horror than to anything done by Mike Flanagan. While it may not have originally been meant for a streaming release, streaming is where it begins because it feels like something that would get dumped on Netflix without much fanfare.
It’s a shame because Salem’s Lot really is one of Stephen King’s better novels, written at a time when King was still embracing his pulpy side and without any of the self-important commentary that’s come to mar some of King’s more recent works. The novel is essentially a small town soap opera, documenting the often sordid lives of the citizens of Jerusalem’s Lot. King introduces a vampire to the mix and most of the town’s problems are solved by folks dying and then coming back from the dead. Ben Mears is a typical King protagonist, a writer from Maine who is trying to deal with a childhood trauma and who discovers that ‘Salem’s Lot has a long and apparently cursed history. In both the book and the movie, Ben teams up with a group of vampire hunters to battle Kurt Barlow (played here by Alexander Ward) and his human servant, Straker (Pilou Asbaek).
The book works because it takes the time to turn Salem’s Lot into a vivid community and, as such, it’s hard not to feel the loss as the town dies off as a result of Barlow’s vampiric invasion. Clocking in at less than two hours, the movie really doesn’t have time to do that. The movie’s version of the town just comes across as being another stereotypical New England town, full of flinty characters and mudrooms. The community never comes to life and, as such, there’s not much emotional resonance as the community dies off. (It’s not a coincidence that the most successful adaptation of Salem’s Lot was a miniseries.) Add to that, the 2024 film features some truly unfortunate acting, which again makes it difficult to accept the town as a community with its own traditions and culture.
There are certain character types and themes that seem to appear in all of Stephen King’s novels and the subsequent adaptations. At its worst, the new Salem’s Lot feels like it’s quickly going through a checklist of all of the expected Stephen King elements. It’s like, “Main setting — check! Writer protagonist — check! Schoolyard bully — check! Child in danger — check!” The end result is a film that feels almost like a parody Stephen King, containing all of his familiar tropes without any of the literary flair that made the original book a classic of vampire literature.
The good thing is that the Tobe Hooper adaptation holds up well and it’s also available on Max. Check it out this weekend.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting Mario Bava’s Baron Blood!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime and Tubi! I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy
Viewing Plan 9 From Outer Space during October is a bit of a tradition around these parts and here at the Shattered Lens, we’re all about tradition. And since the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ed Wood, Jr. is just a five days away, it just seems appropriate to watch his best-known film.
Speaking of tradition, this 1959 sci-fi/horror flick is traditionally cited as the worst film ever made but I don’t quite agree. For one thing, the film is way too low-budget to be fairly judged against other big budget fiascoes. If I have to watch a bad movie, I’ll always go for the low budget, independent feature as opposed to the big studio production. To attack Ed Wood for making a bad film is to let every other bad filmmaker off the hook. Ed Wood had his problems but he also had a lot of ambition and a lot of determination and, eventually, a lot of addictions. One thing that is often forgotten by those who mock Ed Wood is that he drank himself to death and died living in squalor. The least we can do is cut the tragic figure some slack.
Plan 9 From Outer Space is a ludicrous film but it’s also a surprisingly ambitious one and it’s got an anti-war, anti-military message so all of you folks who have hopped down the progressive rabbit hole over the past few years should have a new appreciation for this film. I mean, do you want the government to blow up a Solarnite bomb? DO YOU!?
Also, Gregory Walcott actually did a pretty good job in the lead role. He was one of the few members of the cast to have a mainstream film career after Plan 9.
Finally, Plan 9 is a tribute to one man’s determination to bring his vision to life. Ed Wood tried and refused to surrender and made a film with a message that he believed in and, for that, he deserves to be remembered.
Now, sit back, and enjoy a little Halloween tradition. Take it away, Criswell!
The cliche view of Rob Zombie is that he is a shock rocker who branched out into horror filmmaking. With the song and the music video for Foxy, Foxy, Zombie shows that he is just as much a descendant of Lynard Skynard’s as he is of Alice Cooper’s. And though the video may not have the horror themes that most people expect from a Zombie production, the song itself was at least partially inspired by a Lon Chaney film, He Who Gets Slapped.
Yes, that is Sheri Moon Zombie showing up at the outdoor concert.
Through the Shattered Lens 