Reading/Watching Log #121

 No prizes for guessing what this month’s theme was: I have been very into Christmas ghost stories since October, and was looking forward to diving back into the vibe – even though here in Aotearoa, we’re facing high twenty-degree weather. I’m sure something atmospheric is lost given that there’s no snow or darkness outside, but perhaps one day in years to come, I’ll be able to revisit all this material in its rightful setting.

I also took a mad dash to squeeze in as many of this year’s most prominent genre films (Sinners, Weapons, Wake Up Dead Man, K-Pop Demon Hunters) because I need some material for my annual “Best Moments” list. Two more Babysitters Club books, more Magical Girls and the final season of Doctor Who for the foreseeable future, and the year ended on a relative high.

I dearly wanted to see the Twelfth Night that played recently at the Delacourte Theatre in New York, but unfortunately PBS didn’t allow for international viewing – given that I started this year with Twelfth Night, it would have been nice to finish with it too, but I had to contend with some clips and the hope it’ll turn up available in due course.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. If possible.

9 to 5 (The Court Theatre)

I got a frantic text from dad while at work: mum wasn’t feeling well, so would I take her place in going to see 9 to 5? I didn’t really have much of a choice.

This is obviously based on the 1980 film starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, which I’ve never seen and knew very little about. To be honest, I thought it was a serious drama about harassment in the workplace, but apparently it’s more of a zany comedy? I was also warned in the car that it was a little sexist, which it isn’t – it’s about sexism, which anyone who’s seen the film would know.

In any case, newly divorced Judy gets an office job for the first time in her life after her cheating husband leaves her, much to the exasperation of Violet, the longtime employee who can’t get any further up the ladder, and the excitement of Doralee, the buxom Texan girl who can’t understand why the other women in the office don’t like her.

It’s because their boss Franklin has been spreading rumours that the two of them are sleeping together, but after the air is cleared and the women start bonding over what they’d do to Franklin if given the chance (leading to three dream sequences of a film noir nightclub, Western hoedown and Disney princess movie) Violet accidentally ends up putting rat poison in his coffee. Hijinks ensue.

This probably wasn’t something I would have gone to see of my own volition, but there were colourful costumes, great dance numbers, and a very engaged audience. At one point Doralee threatened to shoot Franklin’s balls off and she practically got a standing ovation. The set design was good too, with three large seventies-style hexagon alcoves in the back wall where the characters could act out quieter, more intimate scenes at their homes.

Obviously “9 to 5” was sung, and I didn’t find out until afterwards that Dolly Parton wrote the rest of the musical numbers as well! This was also my first time visiting the newly opened Court Theatre, the original having been damaged in the Canterbury earthquakes, which was over a decade ago at this point (though I’m going to kind of miss the transition theatre, which had great seating and parking). In all, a fun and unexpected night out.

The Story of Clara (Sydney Arts Centre)

In the midst of all the scary ghost stories, I wanted to enjoy something more overtly Christmassy this month, and a take on The Nutcracker seemed my best bet. As it happens, the Isaac Theatre Royal was hosting their own production this Christmas, but I’ve already splurged on two ballets this year, and couldn’t justify any more (I found out later that they went for a New Zealand-themed take on the material, with the story set at a beach house and things like pavlova and kiwifruits taking the place of the traditional confectionaries and… well, call me a traditionalist, but I would have preferred the old-school variation).

I’m not entirely sure how this ended up in my hands, but it’s a library DVD so I probably ordered it and then forgot about doing so. And as it turned out, this is also an unconventional take on the story. Tchaikovsky’s entire score is present and accounted for, but instead of a magical dreamscape adventure, it tells the story of a retired ballet dancer who relives her career during the holiday season in Australia. Devised by Graeme Murphy, I did a little internet digging and it’s apparently quite a renowned production across the ditch.

Definitely not what I was expecting, but some interesting changes were made throughout. The first act is danced almost entirely by a woman of advanced years as she invites her elderly friends into her home, reminiscing with them over Matryoshka dolls and a black-and-white film reel from their collective youth as ballet dancers. Clara then falls into a strange dream involving giant rats dressed as Nazi soldiers, and a young doctor who morphs into her former lover.

The second act takes us properly back into the past, seeing Clara first as a child at ballet school in Russia, and then transforming (via some magical mirrors) into a young woman and prima donna ballerina. From there she falls in love with a soldier, loses him in the war, and eventually emigrates to Australia – at which point she dances her final performance and becomes her older self, dying peacefully in her sleep alongside her two younger incarnations.

Some of the new takes on the material are very well done: The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy becomes Clara trying to evade the attentions of some over-amorous older men, while the Arabian Dance takes place in Egypt, with dockhands rhythmically pulling at ropes while Clara watches from a passing steamship. Unfortunately, others don’t. The Chinese Dance is a very quick, upbeat tune, but is here set to people practicing very slow Tai Chi while Clara is pulled around in a rickshaw.

Meanwhile, the Russian Dance is what scores the parting of the two lovers and his eventual death in battle. That’s not even close to being appropriate music for a man getting shot through the heart.

But any fresh take on old material is always worth a look (though if I have to pay, I’d rather pay for the old-school stuff) and this was suitably Christmassy for a southern hemisphere show.

Dawn’s Family Feud by Anne M. Martin

You know what’s fun? Reading about families incessantly squabbling with one another. Such is this book.

Dawn is excited because Jeff is coming to stay in Stoneybrook for a week, though Richard is a little nervous since he’ll have to entertain his stepson while the girls are at school and Sharon at work – and he knows full-well that they have very little in common. Heck, I don’t think they’ve even interacted since the wedding.

Richard suggests to the family that they take the opportunity to have a short vacation to Boston, which everything is enthusiastic about. Jeff arrives and things start off pretty well, though soon Jeff is grumbling about the chores he has to do and the fact his Stoneybrook friends (that is, the Pike triplets) seem to have moved on. Dawn naturally sides with Jeff, while Mary Anne defends her father (whose attempts to bond with Jeff over sports he has zero interest in does not go well) and tensions are high as they set off for Boston.

There’s not a lot more needs to be said: everyone is miserable, including the reader who has to read all this, and we get the greatest hits of what I can only assume was the ghostwriter’s last vacation to Boston: whale watching, the Freedom Trail, Fanevil Hall Marketplace and so on. A lot of the chpaters are filled with Dawn’s postcards to the other Babysitters Club members, full of sniping and complaining about Mary Anne – I bet they loved reading those. Things get nasty to the point where the Schafers and Spiers are spending the days doing completely different activities, until the parentals finally put their feet down and tell everyone to stop being spoilt little shits.

It doesn’t work and they’re still squabbling once they get home, all the way up to their family portrait. Everyone is so angry and stressed that the photos look like crap (the real victim here is the photographer having to put up with all this) but for some reason it all makes them laugh and get over it. Then Jeff goes home almost immediately afterwards.

The B-plot involves a brand-new family called the Dewitts, whose divorced patriarch Franklin is dating Natalie Barrett. In what’s inspired by either The Brady Bunch or Step By Step, the family kids – get this – don’t get along. The two parents are just as flaky as each other, which means that they don’t realize until very late (as in, about to leave for a day’s outing) that ten people aren’t going to fit in one car. The kids act pretty hostile until the babysitters point out they can have much more elaborate games if they play together, leading to an end to hostilities.

Other notable things: early on, Richard encourages the girls to keep the house tidy for Jeff, leading to Mary Anne saying: “I like a clean house.” Dawn thinks: “I know Mary Anne didn’t mean for her comment to sound like a dig at my mom, but it did.” (Oh honey, she meant it). In the same chapter Mary Anne makes a joke that Tigger won’t surprise Jeff, but “purrsprise” him, which is apparently so hilarious that “Mary Anne and I laughed so hard we collapsed onto Jeff’s perfectly made bed.” Is there anything more tedious than being told characters are in fits of laughter over the lamest puns imaginable?

While babysitting the Barrett kids, Dawn watches them draw pictures of their favourite junky snacks, which disgust her so much that: “I drew my own picture of a spinach salad with avocado slices on whole wheat toast.” Oh, bugger off Dawn. There’s also a bizarre little interlude in which we’re privy to some of Jeff’s interactions with the Pike triplets, even though Dawn (the narrator) isn’t present and there’s no way she would know what’s going on. Sure, the babysitting chapters not featuring our protagonist have always been told second-hand, but I’ve always surmised they’ve been put together by details left in the club notebook. For Dawn to know exactly what’s going on between Jeff and the triplets feels out of left-field.

Mary Anne is as insufferable as always, getting snotty when Jeff hears of the writer “Holmes” and asking if it’s Sherlock, and sniping: “Oliver Wendell Holmes – Sherlock Holmes is a made-up character.” Then she turns around and asks if the Boston Tea Party was: “an actual party?” Come on, I know jack shit about American history, and even I know what that is! I chose to believe the ghostwriter doesn’t like Mary Anne either.

Stacey’s Big Crush by Anne M. Martin

Boy-Crazy Stacey is back, and this time she’s Hot for Teacher. This is such a prevalent trope in these sorts of books that I’m actually shocked it took them this long to get to it. Anyway, it’s spring in Stoneybrook (because time does not exist there) and Stacey is skeptical on hearing that there’s going to be a new student teacher taking their math class, assuming he’ll be a real Poindexter.

Instead, she walks in the next day to find a guy who looks like Tom Cruise waiting for her – a comparison that hits pretty differently in 2025. He’s called Wes Ellenburg and she describes him as “drop dead incredibly hunkified gorgeous.” There’s not a lot else to say – obviously this would be a very different book if Wes actually reciprocated her feelings, and so Stacey instead spends thirteen chapters getting as increasingly delusional and analytical as the Bylers did over her chances: “I knew it was a harmless statement but he didn’t have to say it. He could have said ‘see you in class,’ which had been what he usually said. But no. He had specifically mentioned the dance to me.”

It culminates with her (and this one gave me full-body cringe) writing him a love poem and handing it to him personally. He’s understandably too flustered to reply to her right at that moment, but then makes the mistake of not shutting her down straight away. Before the letter, he actually asks her to help him sort files after class, and afterwards he dances with her at the spring fling. It’s only after she propositions him for a slow dance that he very firmly gives her the “you’re too young for me” talk.

In a vaguely pointless subplot (unless you want to count the fact that it inspires Stacey to have a “Heidi and Peter sort of fantasy, in which we were goatherds in the Alps together” about Wes) Mary Anne and Dawn look after a baby goat called Elvira from the farm up the road while the owners are away, and take it on babysitting jobs where it’s incorporated into all sorts of games – including a performance of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, which naturally goes all wrong.

Charlotte Johanssen is also being pestered by a boy with a crush on her (who stands under her window and yells: “roses are red, red’s the same as scarlet, sugar’s sweet, and so is Charlotte”) leading her to the conclusion that boy are: “just dumb. It’s stupid to even think about them.” Good advice for Stacey, but the story ends with her still rather bruised from Wes’s rejection – which isn’t going to be nearly as bad when she looks back on all this in ten years and feels mortified instead.

Tales from the Dead of Night: Thirteen Classic Ghost Stories selected by Cecily Gayford

The best thing about this collection was being pleasantly surprised by it. For example, did you know that E. Nesbit (yes, the children’s writer) also wrote many evocative ghost stories? Her story “The Shadow” was the highlight of the entire collection, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been dramatized yet. She’s an expert in slightly unreliable narrators whose obvious biases overlay the narrative and in not pointing out the obvious, letting the reader connect the dots by themselves. Please, seek this one out, even if you don’t pick up this specific anthology. As one character says:

“All the ghost stories are so beautifully rounded off – a murder committed on the spot, or a hidden treasure, or a warning – I think that makes them harder to believe. The most horrid ghost story I ever heard was one that was quite silly… it doesn’t lead anywhere.”

That’s an ongoing theme of the collection, in which spooky things happen without rhyme or reason. It’s also found in “The Clock,” which is conveyed as a letter to a friend in which the writer is sent on an errand inside a stranger’s house, and Ruth Rendell’s “The Haunting of Shirley Rectory,” which fascinatingly posits that a house can be haunted by something that hasn’t happened yet: “it’s as if all this time the coming event cast its shadow before it.”

Rudyard Kipling’s “The Phantom Rickshaw” concerns a guilty conscience in India, and M.R. James is naturally included with “The Haunted Doll’s House,” though in his afterword he half-apologizes that it’s very like “The Mezzotint” – “I can only hope that there is enough of variation in the setting to make the repetition of the motif tolerable.”

“The Crown Derby Plate” by Marjorie Bowen and Hugh Walpole’s “The Tarn” are also interesting, evocative reads, and altogether it’s a great collection, with no real weak spots in all thirteen stories.

The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories edited by Tara Moore

Amusingly, the opener to the previous anthology, Nesbit’s “The Shadow,” references Scott’s “The Tapestried Chamber” – then lo and behold, that’s the story that starts off this collection!

As with Tales from the Dead of Night, this also contains thirteen stories, though all are derived from earlier sources. As the title says, these are Victorian Christmas ghost stories. Four of them were written anonymously, though more familiar names are Walter Scott, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

In her introduction, Tara Moore explains the many types of ghost stories that the Victorians enjoyed: the ones that had reasonable, didactic explanations to seemingly supernatural activity (usually involving a skeptic “testing” a haunted house), ones concerning the return of an emigrant (that is, an individual dying in a foreign land and then appearing to their family at home) and ones referred to as “laying the ghost,” – that is, finding out why a spirit is haunting the living, and laying them to rest. There’s very little horror or suspense as we would consider it, but there are other similarities between them. Many take place in country houses, not only because it’s easy to incorporate the concerns of bequests and inheritances, but because (as Moore theorizes) there was a sneaky pleasure in watching the destabilization of the powerful gentry.

Many were also written by women, from the point-of-view of governesses or servants, while others are presented as true accounts to try and elevate them from the sordid status that ghost stories had back then. Mostly, it’s important to note that these were stories written and shared in a specific time and place. To draw on Sarah Clegg’s book on the subject (see below), they were part of a midwinter tradition of telling ghost stories around the evening fire; a far more domesticated affair than the Christmases of yore, involving guising and wassailing and Krampus runs. And yet their creepy, sensationalist content goes hand-in-hand with the earlier revels: ghosts and ghouls, shrieks and screams, blood and bones. Even the Victorians had to get their thrills somehow.

A Christmas Ghost Story: A Chilling Tale for Dark Days and Long Nights by Kim Newman

 With that title, I couldn’t not read this, though it was creepy in a way that didn’t really appeal to me – the grotesque sort of creepy instead of the sustained atmosphere sort of creepy.

The prose is quite scattershot, almost like stream-of-consciousness as it jumps from one occurrence or observation to the next, and in hindsight I’m not even entirely sure what happened, only that I felt a little grossed out by the end. Not creeped out, grossed out.

Angie and her teenage son Rust are hold up un their little Somerset cottage over Christmastime, and receiving strange holiday cards in the mail everyday – though they’re not entirely sure how the postman is delivering them. Each one depicts a winter forest with creatures lurking inside, gradually coming closer with each daily card (yes, rather like in M.R. James’s “The Mezzotint,” which gets namedropped here, along with A Ghost Story for Christmas on the BBC). Neither can shake the feeling that the cards are a herald for something that’s getting closer, and Rust grows increasingly ill as Christmas Day draws near. Tonally, it actually sits quite nicely between M.R. James and Sarah Clegg’s Dead of Winter, though I still have very little clue as to what happened.

The Dead of Winter: The Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas by Sarah Clegg

Last year I read and enjoyed Sarah Clegg’s Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi, a non-fiction exploration of the goddess Lamashtu and how she’s evolved over the centuries. Along with the subject matter of ancient goddesses, Clegg and I also share an interest in the way stories and customs and rituals are shared and passed on and reshaped throughout various cultures. That, along with an exploration into the dark side of Christmas celebrations, made this book an obvious addition to the month’s reading.

It’s a much slenderer book than Woman’s Lore, but covers a range of Christmas traditions: wassailing, the Mari Lwyds, the Krampus runs – she even touches on the Carnival season, arguing that a lot of its traditions originated with Christmas (which in turn derive from the Saturnalia and the Feast of Fools), thanks to the changing calendar year and how certain rituals have been switched around. For instance, trick or treating at Halloween is clearly related to Christmas guising; thus the lyrics “we won’t go until we get some [figgy pudding]” in “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Meanwhile, all the pageantry and glamour of Carnival is to be found in the old mummer’s plays, traditionally performed at Christmas.

Written a bit like a travelogue in which she shares her firsthand accounts of many of the enduring traditions of Christmas (as she visits and sometimes participates in the rituals) she then adds her own impressions to the customs before exploring the history behind them.

In delving into the origins of all these traditions, she expresses disappointment that many are a lot more recent than we might assume (“following a tradition back as far as it can go and then watching it slip into unknowable darkness is almost as disappointing as discovering that the English death and resurrection mummers plays are only three hundred years old”) and that James Frazer’s hypothesis:

“All ancient religions were fertility cults and revolved around electing a sacred king and then sacrificing him. A new ruler would then take up the mantel of kingship – a symbolic ‘reviving’ that mirrored the death and revival of nature. According to Frazer this went on left, right and centre, in multiple religions and across the world, and one of his many ‘examples’ of this happening was the Lord of Misrule and Saturnalia celebrations which, he claimed, actually involved the mock king elevated for the festival being murdered.”

… was a load of very compelling bollocks.

Obviously she goes into things like St Nicolas and St Lucy’s Night, but also more obscure characters, like Jólakötturinn the giant cat belonging to an ogress who eats children that don’t wear their new Christmas clothes. It’s the whole melting pot of traditions and cultures and how it all came to be – at least so far as historical record will allow us. Why we do the things we do, basically. It also touches briefly on how all this Christmas darkness lent itself to folk horror, with mentions of M.R. James, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Gawaine and the Green Knight, and A Christmas Carol.

It’s always the little details that are the most fascinating: tidbits like how Diana is the only pagan goddess mentioned in the Bible, or how Shakespeare uses the phrase to “out-Herod Herod” in Hamlet because that character was already renowned as a high-camp character due to the Christmas parades. Then there’s how the penny in the Christmas pudding derives from the tradition of baking a bean in a cake, and the person who finds it being crowned the Lord of Misrule (this is also why we wear paper crowns at Christmas, and yes – this scenario featured in the CW’s Reign).

The unruly traditions of early Christmases is also why Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is filled with drinking, pranks and crossdressing, and in some areas, St Nick hangs out with Knecht Ruprecht, his more threatening counterpart who punishes little children. “Knecht Ruprecht” essentially translates to “Santa’s Little Helper,” and yes – in the German dub of The Simpsons, this is also what Bart’s dog is called!

Some of her footnotes are a little twee (though at least she limits that tone to the footnotes) and there are a few too many typos (most notably “reign” is used instead of “rein” in one instance), but it’s incredible how it all connects, and makes for a good Christmas read – though probably better suited to northern hemisphere folks, who can read it in the midst of the winter that she describes. As she puts it: “no matter how brightly our fires burn, or how many fairy lights we turn on, Christmas is still spent deep in the shadows.” Well, not where I am!

Sinners (2025)

I somehow feel wholly unqualified to talk about Sinners, but here goes. First of all, between this and Weapons and K-Pop Demon Hunters, it was exhilarating to watch a compelling story that wasn’t a prequel, sequel, interquel, legacyquel or any other kind of quel, which had a solid beginning, middle and end without concluding on a hook for any future instalments.

Smoke and Stack (real names Elijah and Elias, both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their home state of Mississippi, having seriously pissed off the Italian and Irish mobs in Chicago – take a look at their hats, that’s a nice touch. Their next objective is to purchase a sawmill to convert into a barrelhouse for the local Black community. The day starts off well: they recruit musicians, cross paths with former lovers, and hire two Chinese storekeepers as their supplies – and then the vampires turn up.

There’s three at first, but plenty more party-goers are turned before the twins realize the danger, and then it’s a From Dusk Til Dawn situation in which the survivors have to fend off their assailants until daybreak.

There is so much to love about this film, let me count the ways. The seamlessness of Jordan’s dual performance, in which you’re always aware which twin is which. The fact that vampires feel scary again, with their eerie glowing eyes and mastery of flight (hands down the most terrifying shot is Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary walking away from Jack O’Connell’s Remmick, and the scene cutting away just as he starts to levitate behind her. The sharp depiction of this particular time and place, from how the Asian characters can cross segregation lines to the infamous scene of Sammie’s music breaking down the walls of space and time, and drawing in dancers and musicians from the past and future.

Jack O’Connell puts on a great show as the terrifying yet charismatic Remmick (fandom is desperate to assure you that he’s not racist, and though that might technically be true, I don’t think it counts for much when he wants to assimilate everyone around him into his own hive mind) while the theme of being Doomed by the Narrative is potently drawn throughout the story – especially when you consider that if the vampires hadn’t attacked the joint, the Klan would have killed everyone in the morning.

If I have one complaint, it’s that the leadup to the vampire attack is a bit to protracted. I like a slow burn as much as the next person, but the setup feels like it lasts longer than the actual vampire material (which let’s be honest, is the best part of the film). Also, what happened to the Native Americans from the start of the film? Yes, I know they were smart enough to just get the heck outta dodge before night fell, but damn – they were so interesting and yet so many unanswered questions remain.

What else can I say? Watch it, watch it, watch it.

Weapons (2025)

Okay, I have to admit something strange: I’m a big horror fan, but I’m also a giant wuss. So before I watch any horror movie (like The Witch) I always read the Wikipedia summary, just so I know what I’m in for. And I kind of regret that, as this film is very much a puzzle-box plot, with twists and clues strewn throughout which I would have really enjoyed to see unfold on its own terms. Alas, I am a wuss, and knew exactly what was happening and why from the get-go.

The premise is a slam dunk: one night all the kids from Justine Gandy’s class get up at 2:17, leave their homes and run off into the night. No one has any idea why, or where they are now. Blame naturally falls on their teacher, and tensions in the community of Maybrook are running high.

SPOILERS

Now, there are some misconceptions at work regarding what this film is actually about. After watching the trailer but prior to reading the summary, I wondered if this would be an unsolved mystery, à la Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which the disappearance of the children is just an unexplained catalyst to exploring the broken ways in which America copes with tragedies like school shootings. And sure, it touches on this a little, as seen in the hostile, blame-slinging community meeting, or when it becomes abundantly clear that the parents of the missing children barely know each other, but the story quickly shows its hand as a modern fairy tale, complete with an youth-devouring wicked witch that works better as an analogy to alcoholism than mass shootings.

Had I gone in cold, I think I would have been a bit disappointed by this, as despite Amy Madigan’s terrifyingly campy performance and the mastery of the way various characters’ viewpoints are all tied together, it’s a bit of a clichéd reveal to such a riveting mystery. I mean, an old witch? Seriously? That’s straight out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs!

As stated, the film is structured by taking one of six characters and exploring the situation from their point-of-view: Justine the teacher, Archer, a bereaved parent, Paul the cop, James, a drug addict, Marcus the school principal, and finally Alex, the one child from Justine’s class who didn’t disappear. They weave in and out of each other’s storylines, and we gain more insight and context to what’s really going on with each new subplot – and by the time we get to Alex (whose house is at the epicentre of all this confusion), we know we’re about to see some shit.

All the characters are sketched incredibly well: pretty awful people in a lot of ways, but also trying to do their best in a baffling situation. The teacher who falls off the wagon but isn’t afraid to overstep boundaries in search of the truth, the principal who is a stickler for boundaries until the one time it truly matters, the belligerent father who can’t say “I love you” to his son, the pitiful druggie who in any other version of this story would be the hero…

 Zach Cregger is an absolute master of drawing the viewer into any given scene. If you’ve already seen it, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say the car and the scissors. I don’t think I’ve ever squirmed so hard in my life. Towards the end, the film takes another sharp turn into black comedy, but somehow the famous sequence (you probably already know the one) works perfectly.

There are some grating plot conveniences: honestly, the ineptitude of the police simply cannot be quantified. I mean, even for a cop-critical film, it seems inconceivable they wouldn’t trace the missing kids’ location from the doorcam footage (as Archer did) or wouldn’t be keeping tabs on the one kid that didn’t disappear. I mean come on, he’s CLEARLY the key to the whole thing. And on that note, if you were an immortal witch who comes to anew town to prey on the lives of innocent people, wouldn’t you want to be a bit less obvious about how you selected your victims? I mean, spread it out a little! Don’t take them all from the same class, especially if you’re still sending one out to do your grocery shopping! And why the hell did she keep popping up in people’s dreams? Was that her doing or just a weird side effect of her presence in the community?

Look, it’s easy to poke holes, though the truth is, this film is expertly put together, with a premise so rich, you could tell this story a dozen different ways, from a multitude of perspectives. It ends on a note of such vicious cathartic glee that I knew even before I saw it that it’d make all the “best scenes of 2025” lists.

(Though a part of me was more partial to the scene in which Archer is denied access to a doorcam by one of the bereaved mothers – so he just waits until her husband gets home to waylay him in the driveway. It’s such a pointed demonstration of how men like Archer have not the slightest bit of interest or respect for a woman’s feelings, and know all too well they can “pull rank” by approaching men instead).

Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

The third film featuring Benoit Blanc is not quite as memorable or exciting as its predecessors (as evidenced by the complete lack of buzz surrounding it) but it still makes for a great evening of entertainment: eccentric suspects, pithy social commentary, and Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc. What more could you want?

That said, he’s not as central to the proceedings this time around. Previous instalments have included deuteragonists such as Ana de Armas and Janelle Monáe, but here Josh O’Connor’s Judd Duplenticy very much displaces Blanc as the true main character of the piece. He’s a young priest who has been sent to the little town of Chimney Rock after an altercation with another deacon, where he’s brought face-to-face with Monsignor Jefferson Wickes, a man of God who is now more interested in preaching venom and discord and fear than spreading the peaceable gospels.

The two men openly dislike each other, which is why Judd ends up as the prime suspect after Wicke dies in an impossible locked room scenario. Cue Benoit Blanc to try and get to the bottom of it all.

On reflection, what’s missing from this particular mystery are the dramatic perspective flips of the previous two films, such as when the audience finds out early on in Knives Out what exactly transpired between Marta and Harlan Thromby, or when the reveal that Blanc and the murder victim’s twin sister have infiltrated the island in Glass Onion.

This is a straightforward murder mystery, no more and no less, but being such a big fan of Jonathan Creek meant I figured out the solution to the initial murder almost at the same time it was happening (the film namedrops John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, but if you’ve ever seen “Mother Redcap,” you’ll know how Wickes’s murder was done).

Furthermore, many of the characters seem completely superfluous this time around, largely there to provide a wider pool of suspects. But why am I complaining? This is an old school murder mystery with a great cast, atmospheric setting and plenty of fun twists. You’ve probably already watched it.

K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025)

I have nothing to prove this, but I was here for this movie on the ground floor. Despite Netflix’s complete lack of promotion, I happened upon a trailer, thought it looked cool, and added it to my Tumblr queue. Then, long before it reached the top, the film had exploded over social media and my enthusiastic tags about how good it looked became redundant. But I knew it was going to be big –you’ll just have to take my word for it.

What fascinates me is how this movie did the impossible: it’s girl-centric, it’s based on Korean pop-culture, there was virtually no promotion – and yet it found its audience and became a massive hit, wholly on its own merit. I’ve no doubt the anti-woke trolls would have been snarling over it prior to its release if they’d known it even existed, but because of how it gradually grew in popularity they can’t find any viable bad-faith angle to come at it with. It did everything right.

Having watched it, I can say it’s far from a perfect film. The characters are a little thinly sketched, the story beats are very trite (there’s the secret, the exposure, the fight, the reconciliation), and the main character’s romance with the leader of their rival band isn’t remotely convincing – but it’s more than made up for by the colour, the visuals, the music, the songs! All of this undoubtedly carried the film into becoming the hit that it was, and it’s a true feast for the senses.

In fact, the entire premise of the film is a slam-dunk: three K-pop stars are secretly fighting the forces of evil with the power of their voices, friendship, and obscene levels of wealth. Every teeny-bopper’s dream.

I gotta admit, I love a story in which a woman’s voice holds genuine power (see also: Black Canary, and Buffy’s prolonged shout to blow up the Gentlemen in “Hush”) though the group’s lead singer Rumi conceals an Elsa-from-Frozen-like secret: she’s the offspring of a demon and a human, which means… well, I’m not sure what exactly. That she poses a potential threat? What exactly will happen to her if she doesn’t seal away her demon-side? It’s not really explained.

But her heritage is marked on her very skin: like all demons, she has tattoo-like patterns all over her body that she keeps covered up, and which she’s been told will disappear when the girls permanently seal the demons away with the power of the Honmoon (which is like a magical shield powered by their voices). Naturally things start to go wrong with Rumi’s voice just when they’re on the brink of completing this task, and further complications arise with the debut of a super-popular boy band that threatens to steal away their fans (and who are demons in disguise).

The film in its entirety is bursting with ideas, from how demons embody the nasty voices in a person’s head, to how the power of song connects people to such an extent that it forms a magical protective barrier. A lot of things could have used some more fleshing out, such as Rumi’s parental situation, why she was trained in the first place if she potentially posed a threat, her fraught relationship with her mentor Celine, and the possibility that demons possess souls and feelings (which throws into question everything the hunters have been doing for centuries).

I was also expecting some sort of moment in which the fans end up doing something for the singers (à la the Sunnydale High students giving Buffy the Protector Award in “The Prom”) simply because the film in its entirety is essentially a custody battle between Huntrix and the Saja Boys for the love and support of their audience – but aside from lending their voices during the final song, it never really happens.

But the whole thing is a lot of fun, with plenty of great songs (even the hateful diss track is catchy!) and scenes in which our three female leads are allowed to make silly expressions and stuff their faces with food. In many ways it reminded me of an extended take on the DC Superhero Girls episode where the team have to save the audience from being brainwashed by singing a boy band song.

More than the story itself, I love that the film managed to be an unexpected success story by finding its audience with no in-built expectations or hype; just the joy of discovery. Now here’s hoping we don’t have to witness it get run into the ground.

W.I.T.C.H. Season 1 (2004 – 2005)

My travails through the Magical Girl genre continue, with W.I.T.C.H. as the obvious next stop after Cardcaptors and Winx (in fact, it has a lot in common with Winx, as both originate in Italy. But there are only five girls this time around (though I suppose a significant supporting female character could take the number up to six) and it’s taken me this long to learn that each of their names starts with the letters of “witch”: Will, Irma, Taranee, Cornelia and Hay Lin.

Their adventure begins when they meet a dimension-hopping freedom fighter who grants them mystical powers so they can – er, okay, the details get a little vague at this point. Basically they can summon the power of the five elements (the fifth being quintessence) and open portals in order to battle the evil villains of Meridian.

Unfortunately, a lot of this ground has been covered before, from Star Wars (the plucky rebels against an oppressive regime) to the powers the girls wield (the same as the Planeteers, and the benders from Avatar: The Last Airbender). In fact, the most interesting part of the story belongs to Elyon, a friend of the other girls who is secretly the lost princess of Meridian, and gaslighted by her evil brother into thinking the W.I.T.C.H. guardians are her enemies (which granted, makes her a bit stupid, but it’s more interesting than what the others are up to). That said, even her subplot feels recycled: a girl who discovers she’s the princess of another world after unknowingly being raised by foster parents in this world? That’s also DG’s story in Tin Man.

Besides this, there’s just something missing. The characters aren’t very well drawn, the animation is shoddy, and the dynamics aren’t particularly compelling (you’ve got five main heroines, plus a hunky rebel and a lost princess, yet none of the relationships garner much interest). Sorry for being a Debbie Downer, but I was hoping for more from this – though I notice that Greg Weisman comes in as showrunner for season two – that is, the creator of Gargoyles. This is a man who knows what he’s doing, so I’m looking forward to whatever happens in the second season.

And hey, even if it doesn’t improve, I’m glad I caught up with another seminal cartoon from the noughties. These were my high school years, so I didn’t have a lot of time for them, though I knew about the likes of Ben 10, Danny Phantom, Samurai Jack, American Dragon, Kim Possible… going on in the background of my life. It’s nice to finally meet some of the characters that shaped the childhoods of the generation below me. Also, it’s staggering to settle down with a show and realize there are twenty-four episodes per season. It just feels so luxurious.

A Ghost Story for Christmas (2005 – 2023)

I had hoped to watch all of the revival episodes of this anthology series (the first batch having run from 1971 to 1978, and the second airing on-and-off since 2005) but I could only find five available on YouTube. Ah well, at least I know there’s more to enjoy for next year.

“A View from the Hill” has a historian visit a country estate in order to catalogue and value an archaeological collection. It’s a bit more fanciful than other M.R. James stories, since he ends up finding a pair of binoculars that allows him to see the restored state of a ruined abbey, but there’s a great autumnal atmosphere and a strong performance from Mark Letheren (I liked that he was purposely a little off-putting). Pip Torrens is here too, playing the exact same character he’s been playing for over thirty years, but doing it so well.

In “Count Magnus,” Jason Watkins visits Sweden to collect material for his travelogue, only to become fascinated by the tomb of an old count who has many dark stories told about him – specifically that we once went to the Holy Land “on unholy business,” and brought something back with him. This is a pretty straightforward scary story, with James’s familiar formula of discovery, backstory and impending doom.

“Number 13” has Greg Wise (I’ll always see him as the dastardly Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility) check into a hotel with all the usual bumps in the night – but uniquely, also a door labelled “13” that sometimes isn’t there at all. I like this short story from James, which explores liminal space and shrinking/expanding dimensions in a way that’s vaguely Doctor Who-ish (didn’t Amy Pond’s house have a door that sometimes wasn’t there?) but they don’t manage to make it very scary, and add some scenes involving Tom Burke as a wastrel and the protagonist’s inferiority complex around women.

“The Mezzotint” is one of my favourite James stories, in which Rory Kinnear purchases the titular mezzotint depicting an English estate, only to realize that a strange figure on the periphery seems to be in a different position every time someone looks at it. (The mezzotint is described in the short story, but I actually think they could have gotten away with never showing it in the episode itself, and simply relying on the characters’ unsettled reactions instead). As he delves into the history of the mezzotint, he discovers the origins of the creature – but I had an issue with the ending, one that’s repeated in “Lot No. 249.”

This is the only episode featured here that wasn’t based on a James story, but very much taps into the early nineteenth century obsession with Egyptology. Kit Harington plays against type as a rather prissy student at Oxford University who discovers that a fellow scholar (Freddie Fox, who popped up a lot this year) has an ancient mummy in his possession, and is using necromancy to get rid of his rivals. Because it’s based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, it also features John Heffernan as a pre-Baker Street Sherlock Holmes in a little cameo – I suppose Mark Gatiss couldn’t resist.

But you know what else he (and pretty much every single other horror writer working today) can’t resist? Giving the story a cruel last second stinger that destroys our protagonist. In James’s “Mezzotint,” the protagonist simply observes the change in the picture, gets thoroughly creeped out, and then researches the history behind it. But here, the episode ends with the mezzotint depicting his house and the creature breaking in through his window. In “Lot No. 249” the protagonist successfully destroys the mummy and gets on with his life. But here, it turns out that his foe had another mummy (what are the odds?) and sends that one out to kill him.

As in films like It Follows and Drag Me to Hell, these last-minute twist endings get on my nerves. Why is it so important that evil triumph? Why can’t the protagonists just win? If you’ve done your job properly, you don’t need these GOTCHA endings to spook the audience, and the proclivity of them, to the point where I expect things to go wrong at the last minute, is now rather tedious.

Finally, I managed to find four retellings of M.R. James’s short stories on YouTube, as told by Christopher Lee. The gist is that a number of Oxford students have gathered in the dean’s rooms to hear his stories, and Lee simply recounts the tales as though he experienced them firsthand. Getting Lee to tell M.R. James stories is a no-brainer, and included are “Number 13,” “The Ash Tree,” “The Stall of Barchester” and (my personal favourite) “A Warning to the Curious.” You can watch them here, if you’re interested.

Doctor Who: Season Fifteen (2025)

Or is this season two? I honestly don’t know how we’re meant to be enumerating this show anymore.

I began to watch this season of Doctor Who with some trepidation, wondering how on earth Russell T. Davies managed to squander the goodwill he garnered with David Tennant’s return and Ncuti Gatwa’s casting in just eight episodes. But between this and the salivating hatred currently being directed at the Duffer Brothers, I find myself exhausted by onscreen vitriol, so I’m going to go easy on him.

Gatwa’s second and final outing as the Doctor sees him teaming up with Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu, who played Cinta on Andor), a companion who is a little older than most, and interested only in getting home after she’s inadvertently whisked off to another planet for timey-wimey, self-fulfilling time-travel reasons. Though they get waylaid plenty of times, the narrative thrust of the season is the Doctor trying to get the correct calculations to return her to 24th May 2025, the day she disappeared. It’s solid characterization that Belinda remains largely unimpressed by the Doctor, though early moments in which she calls him out on his behaviour (as when he tests her DNA without asking permission) are sadly brushed under the rug.

There are some good standalones here: the duo investigate an old movie theatre and discover a sentient cartoon, there’s a return to Midnight in which the Doctor faces the eldritch creature he was only barely able to escape in season four, and Ruby returns for a Doctor-lite episode that deals with the nightmare of online trolls and conspiracy theorists. They genuinely got me with the twist – I did not see Conrad’s flip coming.

There are plenty of great guest stars: I loved seeing Linus Roache play against type as a gentle, nebbish, bespeckled theatre projector (I’m so used to him as alpha males like Thomas Wayne and King Ecbert that I almost didn’t recognize him here) and casting Jonah Hauer-King as Conrad was a stroke of genius considering he’s played Laurie in Little Women and live-action Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid – so even if you haven’t seen those projects, you might subconsciously equate him with kindness and decency… making his character twist all the more horrible.

It's also nice to see the team at UNIT again (though Shirley returns, only for Morris to go missing) and Ncuti Gatwa is as glorious and magical as ever. I will profoundly miss him, and always feel cheated that we were not able to have him for longer.

But… here come the buts.

The first episode of the season might have been a little silly, mostly due to how Belinda takes everything in her stride, in stark contrast to how companions used to have more grounded, realistic reactions to space-travelling two-hearted aliens, but I suppose there’s only so many times you can write the same wide-eyed discovery of the exact same thing. But having disposed of Belinda’s trait of pushing back against the Doctor’s overreaches, the finale ends up failing her utterly. It’s a hot mess, to put it lightly. I’ve heard rumblings of behind-the-scenes complications and rewrites, but I honestly don’t have the strength to delve into it. So yes, we’ll just say the jumbo-length finale is a mess: wasting Archie Panjabi, saddling Belinda with a child she didn’t want or ask for, leaving half-a-dozen questions unanswered, and ending on Billie Piper.

I’ve spoken in the past about how Rose Tyler has always been RTD’s Creator’s Pet, but even I was not prepared for the Doctor to actually regenerate into Billie Piper. I mean, FFS. It’s actually beyond a joke at this stage; I feel second-hand embarrassment for how obvious his favouritism is.

Also, as someone who hasn’t watched much of Old Who, the reveal that Mrs Flood was the Rani was a bit lost on me.

Finally, the episode I was most looking forward to ended up being infuriating. The Doctor and Belinda attend Eurovision in the far-flung future, only for terrorists to storm the arena and attempt to kill all the attendees. Their motivation has to do with the fact that their home planet is being destroyed and their people murdered so that honey can be harvested for a corporation, and they’re desperate for the rest of the galaxy to simply realize what’s been going on, despite all the propaganda that’s been spread about them.

Look, I’m obviously not condoning mass murder, but SURELY we can come up with something better than: “these people are so desperate and angry over the rape of their home planet for resources that they become terrorists, but despite having a justified reason to take drastic action… we all have to be nice to each other anyway, and can only draw attention to genocide by singing a lovely song. THAT will solve the problem.” (Spoiler alert: it does fuck all).

The whole thing is so trite, especially in the wake of recent current events, that it’s rather sickening.

I honestly would have been satisfied watching a feature-length episode of Eurovision with other planets and alien lifeforms competing instead of countries – no plot necessary. Heck, they could have even set up a website where fans could vote for their favourite act, just like the real Eurovision. That could have been doable, right? It’s the kind of low-stakes fun this show has been missing.

Aside from that episode, and Billie Piper’s inability to just leave this show permanently, I didn’t hate anything. There’s too much to despise in the real world to bother getting angry about a television show.