Postcards from Oz - AU Edition

Movies: the nocturnal edition, I guess!

Silent Night Deadly Night (2025). A nice young man who sometimes puts on a Santa suit and murders naughty people as directed by the voice in his head meets a nice young woman who sometimes really loses her temper.

This was a delight. I had the BEST time. It's a remake of a 1980s slasher I haven't seen, but the premise of that one sounds like it's played straight as a "guy in a santa suit goes on a psychotic killing spree" kind of thing, and this one is a lot more complicated/enjoyably weird in its execution. The lore of this movie is absolutely bananas, just total nonsense, but is never overexplained, which it seems like is where so many of these kinds of bonkers movies fall down. The script is surprisingly smart overall, I felt, with a lot of care and affection for its characters. It doesn't hurt that I adore Ruby Modine, who previously had smaller parts in Happy Death Day (the roommate) and Satanic Panic (the daughter). And the ending is *chef's kiss*. I would watch the hell out of a sequel that follows what happens next.

On a personal note, as someone who loves Christmastime but has had less opportunity/excuse to indulge in it as I've gotten older, I really enjoyed the over the top Christmas theming of this.

It does have a couple of awkward lines about gender(tm), which maybe are trying to do a thing, but do not succeed in my opinion. There's also an incident with a white supremecist which would have felt more successful if we'd seen, like, a single non-white person by that point in the movie. The movie also does not look great; it's kind of all sludge. Oh well, we can't have everything.

I think this movie is already almost out of theaters. If it sounds fun to you at all, I would absolutely recommend chasing it down for some Christmas-flavored horror cheese.

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100 Nights of Hero (2025). In a misogynistic dystopia, a young married woman (Maika Monroe) whose inattentive husband is away on business must cope with a would-be suitor (Nicholas Galitzine) with the help of her maid and best friend (Emma Corrin).

I checked this out because the descriptions I saw were sending gay signals, and indeed, this is very gay! Monroe and Corrin's respectively repressed and hidden gay longing is great. It also, unlike the movie above, is beautiful and stylish, even though they were clearly working with a fairly small budget. The aesthetics are top-notch. And Galitzine (of Red, White, and Royal Blue, among other things) does a great job playing a hot himbo whose sense of menace is undercut by how dumb he is.

Unfortunately, the actual story a) is not my kind of thing and b) IMO sucks pretty hard on its own merits. If I had realized quite how much of a satirical fable it was, I would not have gone to see it. This takes place in a universe where women are killed for such sins as literacy, extramarital sex, and not getting pregnant within nine months or so of getting married. This last one is the key for our sad wife Cherry, whose husband and the villain of the piece simply declines to have sex with her, even when the local Puritan-flavored but fictionally religious order says she'll be executed if she doesn't hurry up and get pregnant.

I do get that we're trying to critique men's control of women's bodies, but like... this is not a scenario that has widespread analogue in the real world. Men refusing to have sex with women, even when the women's lives are at stake, is not a thing! RL misogyny is bad enough, you don't have to make shit up! The fact that it's suggested (but not confirmed) that the husband is either gay or ace makes it worse, as he's the only possibly queer man in the movie, and it makes it much much much worse that he's also played by the only actor of Middle Eastern descent that I noticed. In fact I think he's also the only character of color still alive at the end of the movie; all the various women of color have died. (Including Charli XCX's character, who along with her two sisters is executed for knowing how to read.)

This movie makes the Barbie movie look subtle. I would say I don't know who it's for, but apparently it's for the other five or so people on bluesky who've seen it, all of whom gave it gushing reviews. IDK man.