The best, though, will always be Jaws.
Honorable mention goes to Witness for the Prosecution.
The Fly (1986)
This showed last night as part of the Chicago Critics Film Festival, one of my friends from growing up is now a film critic and member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, had reached out to me to let me know that he was hosting the movie. I brought my 18-year-old son, who is a fan of the body horror genre and who also once yelled out at the end of a screening of Labyrinth “Big Trouble in Little China is awesome!” (It makes sense in context).
I really enjoyed watching the movie again – I hadn’t seen it in more than 20 years, and I thought the story held up well. The actors in it (Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, and John Getz) all did a good job though they did seem fairly dry at the start of the movie. The movie is also fairly funny, something I didn’t remember, and I even jumped at a couple jump scares even though I knew they were coming. The effects are good and Brundle’s deterioration into a fly monster is gruesome and fun. The vomiting was still super gross (spoiler!). Probably the only knock is that the final monster puppet really doesn’t look as good as everything preceding it, but that’s a minor quibble I think.
My teen definitely loved it and said that it’s one of his top 3 movies (right behind The Truman Show and Scooby-Doo! And Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery. He is now a Cronenberg fan.
I still remember the line, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
There were a lot of cheers in the audience when Davis said that line.
I’ve always felt that Marathon Man was a strong entry in this category as well.
What a cool kid!
I’ve not seen it in years, but surely The Man Who Wasn’t There is another great not-Hitchcock. It even has a title suitable for it.
Devil Wears Prada 2
A pretty movie about pretty people wearing pretty clothes in pretty places. A fun date movie. Possibly lesser than the original, but since it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen the original, it didn’t matter to me.
The Luckiest Man In America on Hulu (2024 picture, released in 2025, about the Press Your Luck incident from 1984 on CBS wherein one Paul Michael Larson of Lebanon, OH, BKA Michael Larson [known as an ice cream truck man and AC repairman], played by Paul Walter Hauser, went out to Television City in Hollywood and got on Press Your Luck w/Peter Tomarken [Tomarken played quite well by Walton Goggins, IMO], and took the Tiffany Network for $110,237 by some quite questionable and unorthodox means [like waiting for the spinner light to light up to certain squares on the board, and stopping it at those areas, and even celebrating the moment he got what he got, instead of waiting for the moment to register, and then reacting]).
The picture is a pretty darn good one in its just over hour-and-a-half, but it has two faults that detract somewhat: one, that it took liberties with the events of that fateful day in game show history (of course, practically all biopics and docudramas take liberties), and two, that it had its fair share of cursing, like many modern pictures (one notable part being when Larson hit his one and only Whammy of that match; he cursed quietly, unlike how Jim Hess would do in real-life on the show in 1985 [nonetheless, he was admonished to keep it clean, as PYL was a daily game show on CBS, and the people who saw it then daily would not have been expecting that language]).
One really good thing about it, however, is that there is practically no violence (outside of Bill Carruthers [David Strathairn] smashing a plate with the Whammy on the floor of the control room in anger; that moment was it on that score).
Still, The Luckiest Man In America is a fine biopic/docudrama, far better than others of its kind, and I think you’ll enjoy it like I did.
Charade is one of my all-time favorites. But I think that Mirage (written by Peter Stone, who also wrote Charade) has a better claim on the title of “Best Hitchcock movie not directed by Hitchcock”. But Charade is more like “happy” Hitchcock (as in North by Northwest), while Mirage is more typical dark, paranoiac Hitchcock.
The Mechanic 2011 Jason Statham, Ben Foster, Donald Sutherland
Paramount+
It’s jarring to see Sutherland still working in 2011. I don’t know if the wheelchair is a prop or something Donald needed at 75. He continued working a heavy schedule of films and tv until passing in 2024.
This film is a remake of the Charles Bronson film. A aging assassin trains his apprentice. Is he a successor or replacement for the older character?
Pretty good. It’s more violent than Statham’s later films. I liked The Mechanic better than the sequel (Mechanic: Resurrection) that’s on Peacock.
Rating 6 out of 10
He was walking around just fine in the Hunger Games movies, which came out after that.
I’m glad to hear he was using a prop in The Mechanic. Donald looked good and very alert in that 2011 film.
He is, thanks! I’ve been exposing him to a steady stream of cult films, offbeat comedies, and some cinematic oddities over the years (as well as the mainstream stuff like Star Wars, Marvel movies, etc. etc.) and he loves them. He even showed Repo Man and Suburbia to his friends after watching the movies with me.
My family made me binge watch The Hunger Games, I had only seen one before and I wasn’t sure which. Meh. Catching Fire may be my favorite, light and campy, like YA fiction should be. The more serious it gets the weaker the entire universe feels. YA books are written for YA minds and while they can handle heavy topics they’re handled in a cartoonish way, which is fine for the audience of YOUNG ADULTS. By the end film it was like seeing a herd of grown men in line for rides at Disney World, two worlds colliding in a bizarre and dark way.
If you want some weird sci-fi body horror, have you shown him Cronenberg’s eXistenZ?
I never found that one to be all that good. He is very hit and miss, to be honest.
I found the Crimes of the Future movie from 2022 mostly boring with about one or two moments of strangeness that made it briefly interesting.
His most recent film The Shrouds is even worse. Just incredibly dull and boring. There are a few moments of something interesting, and then it ends. Likely because it was originally supposed to be TV series.
Cronenberg, Spielberg, Kubrick, Lynch and Lucas, all overrated directors as far as I’m concerned (though probably not Lucas that much, really only one of his films is).
Little of Cronenbergs is good, IMHO, Spielberg has long since stopped being good, Kubrick did one great movie, Lynch, well, marmite, I can see how people like him but not me, and Lucas, well, probably a shit director with the top spot on “basic” film fans list.