TEN YEARS OF CREEPY CINEMA: A CCC Blog Retrospective

TEN YEARS OF CREEPY CINEMA: A CCC Blog Retrospective

I have reviewed 271 films in the horror, thriller, comedy, science fiction, and fantasy genres during the month of October from 2014 to 2022. That is INSANE. Over those nine years I’ve also written seven reviews for TV shows/miniseries’ and six horror-themed top ten lists, and this year I’ll be bringing the grand total of film reviews up to 301. I look at that number and I can hardly believe it.  

What ended up turning into a decade-long tradition started out as simply a personal challenge. I asked myself this: can I write one horror movie review to post to my blog for every day of October before the end of each day? I accepted my own challenge, and just barely pulled it off—but, I had so much fun doing it and felt so rewarded in accomplishing the challenge that I set myself the same one again the next year. And again the year after that. And again the next year. And again.

Why do I do this? I don’t have to do it. I don’t make any money from doing Clayton’s Creepy Cinema every October. Well, I mainly do it for two reasons. The first is for myself. It keeps me writing and it keeps me watching movies, fueling two of my passions at once. I really just love sharing my interests, and that’s what this blog has always been about first and foremost. Sometimes I’ll talk about something current, but mainly I like to bring my unique voice and perspective to what I write about and get all of the thoughts and ideas and opinions and knowledge down into words and sentences and paragraphs to form reviews, and this blog is a way for me to put all of it out there for whoever might see it.

The second reason I do it is to share my knowledge about horror films with others, and to entertain and inform my readers. I know a few people follow my blog quite consistently, but I also know that readership has ebbed and flowed over the years. There were a couple times in the past few years where I ran into someone out in public who I hadn’t seen in a long time and one of the first things they told me was they loved my blog, and that really stuck with me. These were people I had added on social media, which I only really use to share my blog now, but knowing someone found what I was doing entertaining made it feel worth doing. It can be a hellscape out there in the digital world with so much worthless content clogging everyone’s Facebook and Twitter feeds. The idea of contributing something to a few of them that at least serves a purpose (to inform and to entertain) and gives even a brief break from all the other social media dredge makes me feel good.

The reason I specifically choose to do horror movie reviews throughout October is because I’ve always loved Halloween, but Halloween just isn’t the same when you’re an adult. I was never someone who liked going to big parties, so when I outgrew trick or treating I didn’t really have anything else to do other than carve pumpkins and watch scary movies. Then, after my first year of university, I decided I should start a blog, since I was studying creative writing and needed a hobby to keep me writing. One of my biggest inspirations, YouTuber/filmmaker James Rolfe, had reviewed horror movies every day of October since 2007, so I thought, why don’t I try that, too? I can look forward to watching one of his reviews and post one of my own, as well! He originally started Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness for the same reasons I started Clayton’s Creepy Cinema, and when he quit doing marathons after ten years, I felt like I was still carrying on the tradition, in a way.  

 

October 2023 will be the last Clayton’s Creepy Cinema horror movie review marathon. 

 

It has been a tradition I have thoroughly enjoyed sustaining for the past decade, but even the best traditions have to be laid to rest at some point. My life has changed plenty since I first started. In some ways it’s become less busy, but in other ways it’s far busier, and the marathons inevitably take up a lot of time to make. I’m sure it’s no surprise to hear that it’s been tough to get that many reviews out that fast all in one month year after year in addition to all the other projects I work on, and while I have enjoyed it, I’m ready to make this the final time I do it so I can invest the writing time I have into those other projects and new ones.

This is not the end of my blog. Far from it. This isn’t even the end of me writing content for the month of October. What started as a personal challenge will end the same way. I wanted to keep going with Clayton’s Creepy Cinema until I had achieved a full ten years in a row of doing it in the same style, just like James Rolfe did with Monster Madness, and when October 31^st 2023 comes to an end, that will be a reality.

It has not been an easy feat. In fact, it’s often been extremely challenging, and there were even a couple times when I considered giving up. But, I persevered, and now, with the last marathon looming in the very near future, I thought it would be fun to do a little retrospective of the previous nine Octobers here on the CCC blog and look back on what I’ve created. Long time readers may have forgotten some of the earlier marathons I did, and newer readers might not be aware of just how many movies I have reviewed. So, I’m going to break it down year by year and give insights into each marathon, and even if you’ve been a constant reader since October 1^st 2014 you might find enjoyment in some of the anecdotes about behind-the-scenes inspirations, challenges, and surprises I faced along the way.  

 

YEAR ONE

I had no idea what I was doing when I started Clayton’s Creepy Cinema. Even the very name I still question. I wanted it to retain the use of three C’s like my blog’s name but make it clear that it was horror-focused. While I eventually changed my blog’s official name because I didn’t want people to think of me as a “critic” the marathon name ended up sticking because, well, that’s the best I could come up with, and I didn’t want to just rip off Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness (which has a similar use of alliteration), but the name was the easiest part. I had to figure out what movies to review and what kind of structure to give the marathon. For whatever reason it seemed important at the time to have the whole month divided up based on different themes, while still giving readers something new every day.

I came up with five general categories that would define each week of the month, starting with Freaks and Fiends from the 1^st to the 4^th, then Mutant Mayhem for seven days, then Hair-Raising Horrors, Creative Killers, and finally Remakes and Rehashes for the last six days. I reviewed 31 films and organized them by release date, starting with the oldest and ending with the newest. Looking back on it, I can’t believe I tried to correlate release dates and weekly themes. I never tried to do something like that again because it made it unnecessarily difficult to find movies that fit within the weekly category and fit into the release date chronology.  

Looking back at it, I get post-traumatic stress thinking about how I would leave some reviews until the absolute last minute to complete, and I think it sometimes showed in the quality of my writing. I kept the whole marathon simple—no graphics, no deep dives, no countdown lists—and made all the reviews short, less than 1000 words each. I mainly reviewed movies I had in my collection or had seen recently, which meant some of them were utter trash, but I thought it would be fun to review bad movies because I could make fun of them and write funny insults or jokes. To save time I even reviewed movies I had previously covered in early top ten lists and copied things I had already said about them! I forged ahead and hoped nobody would notice. I learned a lot from doing that first marathon, though, like how to structure a short film review and create my own style that I could more or less replicate each time no matter what movie I was reviewing, and I realized it’s better to review movies that are either really good or so bad that they’re entertaining, not movies that are just plain bad that I don’t end up recommending.  

 

YEAR TWO

In 2015 the luster of having started a new blog had worn off. I had posted over 80 times in the first year and was experiencing burn out with trying to maintain consistent blog writing plus keeping up with my classes and homework and part-time job and friends. But, in the summertime, I started thinking about a second October review marathon, and in the same way Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness had done month-long themes, I wanted to do a whole month dedicated to just one particular corner of the horror genre, but what would be unique? I realized a number of movies I owned were in what I learned was called the “natural horror” subgenre, but I didn’t like that name for it, and still don’t. I thought of them more as killer animal movies, because those ones in particular were the ones I enjoyed the most—Anaconda, Lake Placid, Piranha, and many others.

I announced the second marathon in late September as Clayton’s Creepy Cinema: Animal Mayhem! One of my favourite things about doing the first marathon was building up the hype for it and coming up with creative ways to tease what was to come each week/day, so I doubled down on that effort in year two and came up with the first Creepy Cinema banner, which I created in Microsoft Paint and it definitely doesn’t show at all. While I think my banner-making skills have improved very slightly since then, that banner was my favourite one to make. It was almost as fun as writing the actual reviews.

Overall I found Animal Mayhem much more fun to assemble than the first marathon. I bought a dozen DVDs and Blu-rays early in the summer just to watch for reviewing purposes. The one hiccup I faced was trying to find a DVD copy of the movie Bats, so I reviewed the unofficial sequel Bats: Human Harvest instead, but then ended up finding Bats in September, so I watched it and reviewed it and did a double review, meaning I actually reviewed 32 movies in October 2015, and I went more in-depth than I had the year before.

Once again I fixated on creating a weekly framework, but disregarded release dates. It was easier to group the films based on the attacking animal in question, so it started with Three Crazy Creature Features, because October 1^st was on a Thursday (again, I don’t know why it mattered so much to me at the time to have such a rigid weekly structure), then the first full week was Slithering Serpents, followed by Creepy Crawly Critters, What a Croc, and Something Smells Fishy. I reviewed a lot more good-to-great movies, and while I had seen a number of them before, over half of them I had never seen until that summer. I started working on that marathon way earlier and more intensely than the year before, even taking notes while I watched the films. Ever since year one I have begun preparations for Clayton’s Creepy Cinema in the summertime, but every year it seems to get earlier. I was still working on Animal Mayhem reviews well into the month of October, but getting them all done on time felt less stressful than it had before, and by Halloween I felt even more satisfied with how the month had went.  

 

YEAR THREE

I had the idea for a marathon of reviews for Stephen King movies long before October 2016. Once again I ended up buying a number of new DVDs and blu rays, but this marathon proved to be a lot more work than year two. Out of all the Stephen King movies I ended up reviewing I had only seen six of them before that year. The other new challenge I faced was a more limited supply of films. As October got closer and closer I started to get concerned I didn’t have enough to fill 31 spots. I watched and reviewed Riding The Bullet extremely quickly because October had already started, so I couldn’t do any movies that were too old because I couldn’t go back, I was doing them in chronological order of release date, with only one out of chronology on purpose, because I knew Cell (the most recent Stephen King movie in 2016) was going to suck, so I reviewed my favourite scary Stephen King movie on Halloween, Misery, instead. I ended up cheating a little and split my review for the 1994 miniseries The Stand into two parts, reviewing Part One and Two on October 20^th and Part Three and Four on the 21^st. In total, I reviewed 26 movies and 4 TV miniseries spanning five decades.

At this point it might seem like I made more work for myself than I needed to with Clayton’s Creepy Cinema, which is 100 % accurate. I tend to do that with a lot of things, and I’m better about doing it less now, but back then I made everything harder than it needed to be (this was true of my university projects, too, and not just the writing kind). In the end, though, I think King-a-thon was a success, and having a purpose at the start of it made it fresh for me, too. I intended to determine that most movies based on the works of Stephen King are not that bad, which was contrary to what I had heard for so many years prior. Many of them were bad, yes, but even though I followed up King-a-thon with a recap and two countdown lists of the best and worst Stephen King movies, I still didn’t really answer the question of whether or not more were good than bad…oops.

 

YEAR FOUR

2017 was a great year for me overall—I finished my degree at the end of 2016, then went on new adventures, worked new jobs, and met new people—and instead of making the fourth October marathon stressful for myself, I made it more fun. I poured more creativity and more time into the visual aids and diversified my picks for what I would review, first creating a large graphic for advertising the marathon in September, then making posters for each day of the week in addition to the banner. Monster Madness had ended over at Cinemassacre the year before, so I paid tribute to James Rolfe by following a daily framework similar to what he had done for his tenth and final(ish) year. I had Sci-Fi Sundays, Modern Mondays, Top Ten Tuesdays, WTF Wednesdays, Thriller Thursdays, Free-For-All Fridays, and ‘Saurus Saturdays. This gave me more opportunities to talk about some of my favourite genre movies, including more mainstream films, countdown lists (including a whole entry dedicated to talking about Monster Madness), and classic dinosaur movies. I reviewed 25 films, made 5 top ten lists, and even reviewed a TV show for a change of pace. 

 

YEAR FIVE

I thought I made a great collection of horror content for Clayton’s Creepy Cinema 4, but for year five I wanted to go back to doing a whole month-long theme. I didn’t write as much for my blog in 2018, but I felt personally obligated to continue the October tradition, especially because I had received lots of great feedback the year before and it had been a lot of fun to do. So, I chose a theme that would allow me to cover some of my favourite horror films without needing to watch as many new ones, and thus work on Sequel-a-thon began. I reviewed 29 movies and 2 entire TV shows spanning seven different franchises: two sequels to Creature from the Black Lagoon (my favourite classic Universal monster movie), all films in the Alien and Predator franchise up to that point, all adaptations of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels, two sequels to Ginger Snaps, all Scream films directed by Wes Craven, and the Evil Dead films, ending with the show Ash vs. Evil Dead on Halloween. Even though I enjoyed exploring the different franchises in-depth, I think it was around this point that I had considered quitting. I had lost some of my creative spark and didn’t have any ideas for what to do the next year at that point. 

 

YEAR SIX

In order to get reinvigorated for the sixth annual review marathon I opted for no theme again to make it more like year four, and then tried to go back to doing weekly themes. I found a way to incorporate more movies that I had recently chosen to watch just out of my own personal interest instead of seeking out specific movies to review, and what I ended up with was this: the three Jaws sequels, a handful of dinosaur movies, a couple monster movies, and some random ones that didn’t really relate to anything else. I figured out a way to brand this marathon as Schlocktober (the majority of the movies I would focus on were either not well made or very low budget), and I captured the cobbled-together-nature of it with the banner, spelling out Schlocktober using different letters from the posters of some of the movies I was reviewing. I covered 31 movies, and used that marathon name specifically because I had seen it used by multiple other movie reviewers, in hopes of drawing new readers who were looking for the kind of content I was creating and finding it by accident.

I tacked on Son of Kong and Ghost Ship to the Jaws sequels to fill in the first week, which became Sea-Faring Schlock, then week two I called Experiments and Slashers, with the idea that the movies might be about slasher villains, science experiments, or social experiments (pretty random, I know), then it was Aliens and Apocalypses, Prehistoric Monsters, and for the last five days I reviewed food-related horror movies, which was an unofficial subgenre I had discovered accidentally a few years earlier with my cousin, and we had watched a new one every Thanksgiving since (a tradition that, as of writing this, we have somehow maintained for nearly as long as I have maintained Clayton’s Creepy Cinema).

I didn’t really advertise each week as clearly as I had in past marathons that had weekly themes, and while I think I made some pretty entertaining reviews out of some pretty silly movies, I wasn’t as happy with this marathon overall, despite having completed all the reviews in record time, reviewing movies I had wanted to review for a long time, and getting some more positive feedback. It just wasn’t as cohesive or as consistent. I had had big plans a few years prior for making an elaborate review of the movie Thankskilling and doing it as a short-film-style video, but that time of my life had passed me by, so I felt like I was giving in by just writing a regular review for it as the Halloween review that year. I’m over it now, but I can still picture what that review would have been like, and I know it would have been infinitely more work than writing it the way I did, but super fun to make. 

 

YEAR SEVEN

When I wrapped up the Schlocktober marathon in 2019 I had no idea that only a few months later I would be writing about the movies I had watched in quarantine, because a worldwide pandemic was going to confine us to our homes for over a month and the rest of the year would be unlike any year of our lives. Looking back on it, I don’t think I had the worst time during the height of the pandemic, but one of the things that kept me going during those extended periods at home was working on the seventh annual review marathon. I decided on another month-long theme again, and recalled how James Rolfe had repeated the Sequel-a-thon theme a second time back when he did Monster Madness. 

Instead of doing more sequels I thought back to my favourite Creepy Cinema marathon, and revisited the subgenre of killer animal films. Clayton’s Creepy Cinema: Animal Revenge was my most ambitious marathon yet. I reviewed a total of 35 films and created a top ten list of best (and worst) killer animal films for Halloween. Thanks to streaming I was able to watch over a dozen new movies I had never seen before without needing to spend as much money on DVDs and Blu-rays. I had a blast reviewing them, and having invested more time into it that summer I was able to complete every review and have them all ready to go before October, which was a first. It was nice to be able to resume the October tradition like normal that year when nearly every other aspect of life had been altered because of the pandemic. 

 

YEAR EIGHT

Every new Creepy Cinema marathon has felt intentional to me in how I choose to approach curating the films I’m going to review, and in the wake of 2020 I felt I needed to open myself up to more possibilities to match the overall feeling I went into the new year with: 2021 was a fresh start. A lot had changed from when I had started working on Animal Revenge in summer 2020 to when I had started thinking about the eighth annual marathon. Aside from the pandemic, plenty had happened in my personal life, too, and I was halfway through my second degree (which I had completed almost entirely online) with only one semester left. I decided Clayton’s Creepy Cinema Year 8 did not need a theme but did need to have a little structure just to keep me focused. I made every Tuesday a new entry in my Favourite Films Series (where I talk about only my absolute favourite movies of all-time and go as in-depth and personal in my writing about them as I can) and every Friday was dedicated to reviewing a new horror movie (meaning ones that had come out within a year), because the world had been so neglected of new movies the past year with theaters being closed.

I think this marathon had the greatest variety of all so far, covering exactly 31 films, ranging from mainstream to obscure, and I was pleased that I was able to let each review be whatever it needed to be. Some were short, some were long, but like the best years before, I got some great responses and look back on it now quite fondly. It left me actually looking forward to making the next marathon, and I was pretty sure I knew what I wanted to do. Unlike previous years, I decided on the theme far in advance. 

 

YEAR NINE

Just like the seventh year was a repeat of a previous month-long theme, so was year nine, which I branded Sequel-a-thon 2. By the end I was feeling the creative strain, but I also knew when I was finished assembling the reviews for that marathon I would be making the next year my last year of doing this. Going into 2022 there were still a number of horror movies that I knew I wanted to review, so I wanted to give myself the chance to finally cover them. I reviewed the original Wolf Man and all sequels, all the Critters films, the Phantasm sequels, the Scary Movie franchise, the Underworld franchise, and the Resident Evil films starring Milla Jovovich, which I calculated perfectly so it ended up being 31 reviews. I had put off a second Sequel-a-thon because I knew it would be a lot of work, but I didn’t realize how much more work it would take by postponing it for so long.

Believe it or not, I technically first started working on the Sequel-a-thon 2 reviews back in early 2021! I wrote a review for Critters Attack! and let it collect digital dust on my hard drive for a year and a half, then re-watched the other four films in summer 2022. I watched (or, in most cases, re-watched) nearly everything before I reviewed it, I wrote some of my most in-depth reviews ever, and I had everything written and edited and waiting in the wings well before the end of September. How was I able to invest more time and energy into Clayton’s Creepy Cinema than ever before? Remember that second degree I mentioned earlier? Well, I finished that degree and went on to become a teacher, and the thing about teaching is it means getting the summers off, but also means working more the rest of the year, and in my case my creative writing was channeled largely into that job as soon as September hit. Going into that summer I knew in the back of my head I had to have 90 % of the October marathon completed and ready to go as early as possible because I was not going to have any extra time in the months of September or October, and I had stressed myself out needlessly enough in past years. I might not be the fastest learner, but I had learned.

The marathon came and went, and afterward I felt a lot of the work I had put in was not energy well spent. For the past ten years I’ve known that writing reviews is a hobby and writing fiction is my real passion, and as much as I love doing Clayton’s Creepy Cinema, it takes up more time every subsequent year because it requires more and more planning ahead and more work to watch the movies and review them, and it shouldn’t feel like work if it’s supposed to be a fun hobby, right? This is why I’ve decided the tenth year will be the final year, but I still plan on celebrating Halloween on my blog in new ways in the future. Even James Rolfe has brought back Cinemassacre’s Monster Madness in a few different forms over the past few years. I’ll still do something, it just won’t be another marathon of 31 horror movie reviews every day of October. 

YEAR TEN

Now here we are, with the tenth and final marathon of October horror movie reviews coming in just three weeks! You might be wondering what I’m going to do to make Clayton’s Creepy Cinema X: The Final Marathon special. Well, I have 30 movie reviews and 1 TV show review lined up, so here’s the promo, as always:

Comprising all the best parts of every past marathon, this year has a little bit of everything I’ve done before only new: classic horror movies from the past, new ones from the present, killer animal movies, a Stephen King movie, horror movie sequels, schlock movies, giant monster movies, dinosaur movies, food-related horror movies, movies YOU the readers have asked for, and lots more!

 

Schlock Sundays – cheesy genre fare that is guaranteed to make you lactose intolerant

 

Ani-maul Mondays – killer animal and natural horror films

 

Timid Tuesdays – more family-friendly films that still have horror elements

 

Requested Wednesdays – reviews for films that readers have asked for over the years

 

Throwback Thursdays – classic horror films from the 1960’s and older

 

Frightful Fridays – a grab bag of scare-your-pants-off fright fests

 

Sequel Saturdays – horror movie sequels that don’t suck

 

Join me this October as we count down to Halloween with 31 reviews for the last time! It’s Clayton’s Creepy Cinema 10: The Final Marathon! 

 

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003): Favourite Films Series

 

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003): Favourite Films Series

 

The first film in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is probably up there as one of my favourite movies that I’ve watched the most. I saw it from beginning to end no less than a dozen times between the ages of 10 and 15 alone, never mind that I’ve seen it as an adult likely just as many times. The three big reasons for that were, 1) It was among the earliest additions to my DVD collection, 2) It was a movie that pretty much everyone I knew enjoyed, making it easy to watch with my mom and dad or friends at a sleepover, and 3) it’s simply a great movie. For this Favourite Films entry I’m going to try to focus on just the original because that’s the one that has always been and always will be my favourite, but I’ll touch on the others here and there as I unpack some of the reasons why I consider The Curse of the Black Pearl to be one of the most fun and exciting movies I’ve ever seen.

If you don’t know what this one is about, here’s what you’re missing. Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has arrived in Port Royal to commandeer a ship so he can take back his own ship, the legendary Black Pearl, from the pirate Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) who led a mutiny against him and marooned him on a deserted island in the middle of the Caribbean, which Jack somehow escaped. Now, he has to team up with the son of one of his deceased mates who is trying to rescue the love of his life, kidnapped by the same pirates who mutinied Jack, and they are all destined to convene on the Isla de Muerta, where Barbossa and his crew stole some cursed Aztec gold that made them turn immortal. The only way to lift the curse is to return all the coins to the chest they came from with the blood of the coin’s original takers on them. Action ensues, including intense sword fights and ships getting blasted with cannons, and there’s deception, lies, laughs, love, and even an undead monkey.

I didn’t realize it as a kid, but looking back on it now, Pirates of the Caribbean’s mainstream success is thanks largely in part to the director bringing his horror-movie-making sensibilities to the project in the same way as 2002’s Spider-Man. I wasn’t allowed to watch too many scary movies as a young child, but I loved Spider-Man, and I loved Pirates of the Caribbean, and one reason I loved them both is because they were serious interpretations of ideas that were very appealing to kids, and they had a lot of freaky moments and eerie atmosphere. Sam Raimi made his mark in Hollywood with The Evil Dead many years before he got the Spider-Man gig, and the year before Curse of the Black Pearl came out, director Gore Verbinski directed The Ring, which proved to be one of the biggest horror hits of the 2000’s. Even though Curse of the Black Pearl is not that scary and the PG-13 rating was more a result of the constant action (it’s worth noting this was the first Disney-produced film to have that rating), many of the best parts are supposed to be creepy, and effectively are, with Elizabeth’s realization that Barbossa and his crew are all undead being the one that stands out the most to me.

I don’t want to blow this aspect of the film’s success out of proportion because I recognize the main reason for its success was due to Johnny Depp’s performance as Captain Jack Sparrow. I mean, what more can I say about him that hasn’t already been said? I think Roger Ebert said it the best in his review: “There has never been a pirate, or for that matter a human being, like this in any other movie.” Even though Depp got all the credit for making the first movie so great and funny and engaging and went on to get a bigger role with each sequel, I think Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley are also great as Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan, respectively. I especially like that Elizabeth is clearly not your typical damsel-in-distress right from the very beginning, and even though she needs to be rescued, she has her own agency amidst Captain Barbossa and his crew and doesn’t just need Will to save her, and then she ends up saving Will later on. Will is an interesting character because of his resistance to pirates, but he has no choice except to cooperate with Jack, which makes for an amusing and frequently tense relationship. Every character’s wants are clear and easy to follow, and therefore everyone is easy to root for.

As great as the primary characters and the actors portraying them are, I think the side characters are what really give this movie and the sequels their unique charm. It doesn’t feel like there are too many characters in this one because some are just in the background a lot of the time or only have one or two lines—or, as in the case of the pirate Cotton, have no lines (he had his tongue cut out and has a parrot that talks for him), but the comedic moments come from all corners of the cast, not just Depp. Obviously the characters and acting and dialogue are all excellent, but I think the screenplay is also a huge reason it’s so good, and while future Pirates movies had arguably better action or special effects, I don’t think any of them have been as well written as the original. I do think Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and At World’s End (2007) are great follow-ups that satisfyingly conclude the unresolved parts of the story left when Curse of the Black Pearl ends, but they just aren’t as well balanced or as well paced. The story is over after At World’s End. On Stranger Tides (2011) didn’t feel like a worthwhile continuation, in my opinion, and I never even bothered to watch Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) all the way through. Jack Sparrow is a great supporting character or co-lead, but getting him as the main character following Curse of the Black Pearl seemed like an idea that everyone thought would be fun, only it didn’t live up to the hype.

Something I’ve noticed about nearly all of my favourite films is that the original scores play an integral part in how memorable the movie is and how emotionally affected I am by them. This is not a hot take—the greatest film composers are always aiming to create a theme or piece of music that perfectly complements and enhances the film and will stick with the audience after they leave. If you hear the Pirates of the Caribbean theme, you know adventure is afoot. It’s no wonder the track “He’s a Pirate” became used in memes so many times and has reoccurred in every sequel. The song Elizabeth sings, Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me) comes from the theme park ride the movie was inspired by, but the memorable themes for Jack and the Black Pearl were mainly written for the movie by Hans Zimmer. He collaborated with Klaus Badelt, whose name ultimately ended up on the soundtrack, even though both Zimmer and Badelt had help from several other composers to finish the score in just three weeks (including Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djwadi), and though Zimmer would go on to score the next three films, I think the first film has the best overall score. Some critics have lamented that it doesn’t sound “swashbuckling” enough, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. When I think of epic orchestral pirate music, this is what I think of, and any future epic orchestral scores for any cinematic pirates will be held to this standard. 

One of the overall biggest criticisms the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has received since the beginning is every film overstays its welcome. All of them are undeniably stuffed with action and have runtimes that are over two hours, and both of those things became truer with each sequel, though they did reduce the lengths a bit for the fourth and fifth. There’s a part in Curse of the Black Pearl when a ship gets blown up and we think Will was still on it, only for it to be revealed he survived moments later, and this is always the part where I become aware of how much time still remains in the movie, for whatever reason. I disagree that it’s too long and too action-packed, though. I think we get to spend enough time with the characters and in each setting to be invested in the adventure, but I always feel satisfied with how much action there is, and maybe that’s because I just like well-done action in movies, but I also think the action in this one in particular is well balanced with genuine intensity, comedic moments, and great coverage without too much shaky cam or any repetitive shots. One of my all-time favourite moments that brings all of these things together is when Will is under the blade of a pirate in the streets during the raid on Port Royal, and the pirate shouts “Say goodbye!” seconds before a cannonball hits him, launching him into a building, and without missing a beat Will replies, “Goodbye!” 

I can see how this movie’s success helped shape the template for modern blockbuster movies to use in the years that followed, but to me, it is still more than just another one of those all these years later. It isn’t all just jokes and action, there’s a balance to everything, and an undeniable authenticity to the world building. When you watch Curse of the Black Pearl, you feel like you are actually in the days of the pirates. The ships and the buildings and the natural environments all feel real, even though most of them were sets built for the production, and the CGI blends in quite naturally, with effective techniques used that don’t shatter the reality too often. While Dead Man’s Chest pushed the boundaries with more CGI characters, bigger action set pieces, and deeper lore, it didn’t capture quite the same simplistically satisfying story as the first one, and At World’s End became too comedic and too sprawling, though both sequels have scenes that are truly captivating and new characters that rival those of the original. All of the most successful parts of the sequels that followed, though, originate in the first movie.  

In grade three we had to make a time capsule for a class assignment and fill in a sheet with all of our “favourites” in that moment, and I put Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl as my favourite movie, which I think is funny looking back on it, because I wouldn’t put it in my top ten of all-time anymore, but it’s definitely still up there as one of the best fantasy/action films of the 21^st century for me. Even though I know swaths of dialogue off by heart and every action and story beat, I never get tired of going on the adventure again and again.

“Drink up me 'earties. Yo ho!”

Barbenheimer: The Cinematic Phenomenon

Barbenheimer: The Cinematic Phenomenon

 

One of my best friends texted me the other day and asked when we were going to see Barbenheimer. I knew exactly what they meant, and not just because our group chat is called movie bubs. Barbenheimer is not just Barbie, the new fantasy comedy from director Greta Gerwig based on the best-selling toy by Mattell, and not just Oppenheimer, the new biographical drama from director Christopher Nolan about the scientist who played a pivotal role in developing the atomic bomb, but both, in a double feature on the same day.

Normally if I’m talking about a newly released film, it’s in the form of a review, but today I’m talking about not just one but two new movies—two vastly different movies, at that—in a different kind of way than usual. I’ll consider these two mini-reviews, because I will give some of my initial thoughts on them, but I figured I might as well talk about this curious summer movie event that I don’t think anyone could have predicted would take off the way it has.

I am a pretty big Christopher Nolan fan, but not to the same degree I was a decade ago. The Dark Knight and Inception were two defining movie-going experiences for me in my teenage years, and while I enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises well enough, Interstellar was a disappointment, and I initially didn’t love Dunkirk, but found I appreciated it more upon subsequent viewings. Tenet also disappointed me, but Oppenheimer intrigued me because it was a departure of sorts from the usual Nolan stories. This was a story based on a nonfiction book that covered the true history of a man involved in the Manhattan Project, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. I was pretty much anticipating the film from its announcement, but when I discovered just how stacked the cast was, my anticipation grew exponentially.

Honestly, I wasn’t initially that curious about the Barbie movie beyond the idea that a movie was being made based on a toy that has been heavily criticized in more recent years for giving young girls unattainable beauty standards, but the fact that it was being helmed by Academy Award nominees was quite surprising. Margot Robbie was cast as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken, which gave the film the right kind of star power. I avoided the trailers because I didn’t really feel the need to know exactly what a movie based on the famous doll would be about, but I had heard enough internet buzz to know it would be in the realm of absurdist comedy, and as the hype for it built, I warmed up to the idea of going to see it, even though it still didn’t really seem like something designed with audience members like myself in mind (if you know my movie interests at all, I don’t need to elaborate further, and if you don’t know, I mean, take a look back at Gamera-thon just for starters, that’ll be enough of a hint).

At first I thought this idea of seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer back-to-back was something only huge movie fans like my friends and I were planning to do, or just a funny proposal a few other people had shared online—we have jokingly been referring to it as Barbenheimer for a few months, or, alternately, as Oppenbarbie, depending on the order they were being seen in. Some proposed seeing Barbie first because it was the lighter, fluffier film, then to end with the epic, serious tale of the father of the atomic bomb. Others, like myself, felt it was more appropriate to see the longer and more depressing film first, then cheer up with Barbie second and give our minds and spirits a break. But then, as the opening weekend neared, I discovered the internet really had taken the idea of Barbenheimer/Oppenbarbie to heart. It started as a meme, but when I started seeing things like sold-out IMAX showings for Oppenheimer at 10:00 PM and lines of people waiting outside the theater all dressed in pink clothing, I realized these movies really were going to do considerable business. 

This phenomenon or trend or fad or whatever you want to call it is a big deal for a few reasons, but mainly because neither of these films are sequels, nor are they part of a Disney-owned franchise. People are excited for both for very different reasons, but the contrast between the content and tone of the films was part of the catalyst for the phenomenon. Once the actors started talking about it leading up to the premieres and fan posters combining the two movies started popping up, it became clear this was not just a joke—people were actually booking their tickets for both on opening weekend. Barbie is a Warner Brothers production, and Oppenheimer is from Universal, which is the first Christopher Nolan film not distributed by Warner Brothers in over two decades (I won’t get into the nitty gritty of why but it’s related to streaming), so this is a win-win for both studios, and for Hollywood in general, because it’s showing that audiences are interested in films from respected directors that aren’t just about superheroes and spectacle.

My girlfriend and I went to both over the weekend, and we even went to two different movie theaters just to have the Barbenheimer experience. I don’t really know how this whole thing came to be so widely embraced (I don’t get the impression it was ever intentional on the studio’s part) and I don’t know if we’ll see more unofficial theatrical events like this in the future, but I’m all for it. Here are my mini-reviews of the actual movies, in the order we saw them.

 

Oppenheimer Mini-Review

 

I loved it. I haven’t been that immersed in a Christopher Nolan movie from beginning to end since Inception. Emily Blunt was quoted as saying it was a biopic disguised as a thriller or vice versa, and she is right. It is shot, scored, and told (in a non-linear way) just like some of Nolan’s other best films, but it is an intimate character study, and the acting across the board was solid, but Cillian Murphy was excellent as Oppenheimer. My biggest qualm is how the story moves at a frantic pace to begin with, then settles into the primary narrative, but it builds to a climax too early, and while I was still engaged and enjoying it for the last half hour or so, it felt like too much of a denouement. Another small thing I didn’t like was the way a particularly famous line spoken by Oppenheimer was used—it came out in an odd way at an odd moment, and while there were a couple other lines that felt purposefully inserted just for audiences to raise their eyebrows, I didn’t have many other issues with it. It is definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen so far this year, with incredible sound design, music, and cinematography, all in addition to the acting and dialogue.

 

Barbie Mini-Review

 

I thought it was OK. I wasn’t too surprised to find it wasn’t really aiming for my demographic, but I was a little surprised with how it tried to play to viewers who were older and remembered Barbie dolls fondly, and to those who were in their twenties or thirties, with well-aimed jokes (one of which my girlfriend felt personally attacked by), and to teenagers, and to very young kids, all at once! I don’t know if they’ll hit every target they were aiming for, but I did find it pretty funny at times, and like everyone else is raving about, I agree that Ryan Gosling as Ken kind of stole the show. I’d forgotten how funny he’s able to be, and was reminded fondly of his surprising comedic turn in The Nice Guys, though he’s funny in a different kind of way as Ken. Margot Robbie was good, too, especially given the way her character (credited as Stereotypical Barbie) was written. My favourite aspect to the film was the visual design. I didn’t expect to be more curious about the making of the Barbie movie than the making of Oppenheimer. The sets, props, and costumes were all impeccably done, and clearly having Greta Gerwig behind the camera made this movie more than it could have been—visually, at least. The plot reminded me of Elf and The LEGO Movie, many jokes fell flat, and what I liked the least was how meta it became. It was almost too self-aware at times, to the point of making me feel alienated instead of laughing.

 

Final Thoughts

If you have considered going for the Barbenheimer experience at the movie theater this summer, I would recommend it! I enjoyed both, I would endorse them as a double feature, and I could probably keep saying more good things about both, but you should just go join in on the fun yourself. I definitely liked Oppenheimer more, which didn’t surprise me and probably won’t surprise anyone else, and if you only want to see one of the two films, that’s the one I would recommend for the cinematic experience. As for which one will have more staying power ten years from now, I’m not sure what the answer will be…

…but obviously it will be Oppenheimer.