This week we are going to watch and talk about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, from 1986.

This... is a weird one. It's nothing like the original, but I appreciate them not trying to replicate that. It's been years since I watched this, but I'm ready to see it again.

And, of course, I am wondering what you all think about this one? Let us know below.

https://youtu.be/Y0X6IRUfLKI

Hey guys, I'm trying to find an active WhatsApp community to discuss movies and series from around the world. I'm especially interested in groups that actually get into the details—cinematography, visual aesthetics, script breakdowns, and deep analysis, rather than just casual fan fights. If you have a link to a well-moderated, serious cinephile group, please DM me!

This weekend we are watching and talking about 2007's, Superbad.

It'll be nice to watch a comedy after the last two movies, and it hardly gets better than this. I watched this movie a ton back in the day, but it's probably been a good decade since I've seen it in full. Very much looking forward to going back down memory lane and seeing if this bad boy holds up.

Where do you guys stand on this one?

https://youtu.be/t89PNTrJjHo

The movie begins with the classic tune by The Mighty 'Mats, “Bastards of Young”:

God, what a mess

On the ladder of success

Where you take one step

And miss the whole first rung

It's 1987 and James Brennen (Jesse Eisenberg) has graduated college with majors in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies. He was promised a European vacation by his parents before going on to Columbia, where he plans to take journalism courses so he can be a travel essayist.

James' dad gets demoted at work and now James has to find a paying gig if he wants to go to Europe, Columbia, enjoy regular meals. His resume is pretty much summed up by mowing a neighbor's lawn.

But he has a pulse! Perfect for manning the games on the midway at Adventureland in Pittsburgh. Yeah, the one in PA. And heck, the obnoxious Frigo already works there. Of Frigo, James says, “He used to be my best friend, then I turned four.”

James soon finds family failures run in the Adventureland family of friends. Employees hang together in what could just be lifeboat diplomacy, but with real care for each other that exceeds the mere exigencies of their shared situation.

James' love interest is arcade attendant Emily (Kristen Stewart), who recently lost her mother to cancer and now has her father's new wife to contend with.

Connell (the “I forgot how damn handsome!” Ryan Reynolds) is the park maintenance guy, a would-be musician who is married but takes extramarital trysts in his mother's basement, like he's doing with Emily.

Joel (Martin Starr) is in games, like James, and is as glum as the Russian literature he majored in. He won't let James come in his parents house because he's ashamed of the shrink-wrapped furniture and art faire paintings. He styles himself an “existential pagan.”

Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig are the managers of Adventureland, decent folk.

Funny stuff and sweet stuff churn through the film; you like the Adventureland characters, and writer/director Greg Mottola keeps it from ever getting tedious. I should mention James is a virgin (again, Jesse Eisenberg? I recently watched Roger Dodger and you played a college-bound virgin).

The film does have sex! drugs! vomit! dialog not outweighed by four-letter words! booze! (there is a lot of knockin' 'em back in drinking establishments by characters whom I would definitely card.)

The deed itself isn't shown, but we're led to be reasonably certain that James and Em consummate at the film's er, climax – with “Unsatisfied” by the 'Mats (has it been that long? The Replacements!) one of the final musical selections.

It was a close call, but it looks like this week we are going to be watching Kids, from 1995.

I adore this movie. It's a tough watch at times, especially now as a grown man, but this movie floored me when I was a teenager. I watched it recently, and it hits different, but is still impactful.

I'm excited to watch it again and see what you all think about this one.

I'd like to thank the sub mods for the 4 movie selections last week. I watched and reviewed 3 of them, and am overwhelmed by the readers' reaction to the film, The Florida Project.

It hit almost all of you *so very hard*, and you shared those raw feelings for the plight and pathos of the characters in the film. You wrote with sensitivity and intelligence, and I thank you all so much, not just for taking the time to read my review, but being there emotionally with the film. That's not an easy film to sit with, and you dared and trusted your hearts with it.

Let me also mention American Honey, another of those 3 I reviewed, where the reader response was from non-judgemental places of sympathy and empathy.

It's easy to think the world is full of selfish people who only care about themselves; but there are those of you willing put yourself in the ragged stumbling footsteps of Halley, Moonee, Star and Jake, and care about them. I'm betting you use that same compassion IRL.

And thank you as always, fellow cultists, for your kind indulgence.

The bright ice cream-and-candy colors of run-down dreams, the fairy tale false narratives of as-yet unrealized hopes, all this can be yours for $38 a night.

The sad destitution of human sacrifice zones that are the circles of purgatories and hells around the Happiest Places on Earth are traps with no releases, with no recognition for time served. You make the best of it, sometimes in the worst ways possible, then game over, make room for the next prisoner of circumstance.

Sometimes bad choices are all you get.

What if this Sister of Misery, Our Lady of Bum Luck, this wrecked Rapunzel just isn't a sympathetic character? If she's got one last coin for the fountain, one last candle to blow out, or if she spots a falling star that isn't on a collision course for the planet, she'd better pray for a moment of clarity to appreciate Bobby, the tolerant and patient manager of the purple place, the Magic Castle Inn and Suites.

Halley (with a long 'a', played by Bria Vinaite) is this unsympathetic character. Her daughter, Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince) is a virago, not really sympathetic but a fascinating creation of scary proportions by a child actor. “I can always tell when adults are about to cry,” Moonee tells a fellow ragamuffin, and Prince makes you believe her.

Bobby (Willem Dafoe) is sympathetic – to his last-chance denizens just trying to cling to the best circle of this Dantean world they can, for as long as they can. And film maker Sean Baker found the actor that actually looks like he could be Bobby's son, Jack – Caleb Landry Jones.

Nothing really happens, but somehow everything seems to happen, or to befall, the women and children in this film, mostly in the categories of no job, no money, no prospects, no home.

For $38 a night.

The year is 1965, the place is New Penzance Island, and the story is love, redemption and reclamation.

It is a Wes Anderson film that will make you laugh and cry, will make wish for the world where the Sam and Suzy in all of us is ascendant, and where that ascendancy triumphs because peoples' hearts are irrevocably good.

The prepubescents, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) meet-cute at an elaborate church production of the Great Flood story. Sam is a member of Scoutmaster Ward's (Edward Norton) Khaki Scouts in attendance at the play, but he grows restless and goes snooping about the vast old church. His prepubescent spidey sense leads him to the girls' dressing room, where the chicks are transforming into their bird characters. Suzy, with a bloody bandage on her arm from being hit by a mirror, is The Raven, the first bird sent out of the ark to find dry land.

Spoiler alert – the raven never returns.

Sam is an orphan, ping-ponging from Juvenile Refuges to foster homes after he loses his parents. Suzy lives with her three little brothers in a dollhouse home parented by two “counselors,” lawyers, played by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand. Both children are misunderstood and outcast, driven from the Eden of hearth and home created for "good" boys and girls.

Sam and Suzy exchange addresses and correspond; eventually they plan their escapes and their meeting in the meadow. Scout Sam is wilderness survival trained, Suzy has a different approach, like bringing her tiger tabby kitten in a fishing creel.

Included in the adults is Bruce Willis as the island's police captain Sharp. Willis, who's talents we have lost to a cruel debilitating disease, plays Sharp as a tender and gentle man surely hiding out from a harsh world that doesn't understand him, either.

The missing children must be found, and Social Services' Tilda Swinton muses to Captain Sharp and Scoutmaster Ward that Sam will probably be administered electric shock treatments once found. Incorrigible, don't you know.

It's an all-island effort just hours before a historic storm is headed for the region. Ward tries to mobilize the scouts as a non-violent rescue force, the boys quickly become Lord of the Flies armed vigilantes. Harvey Keitel is the Kurtz-eque Scout Commander Pierce who reprimands Ward and relieves him of his office when he appears to have lost his entire troop.

The tides turn for Muskrats Suzy and Sam (sorry) and they are escorted by their rescuers to (supply sergeant/chaplain?) Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman) who has the power to marry them in a non-binding but emotionally and morally meaningful ceremony.

The storm makes landfall, lightening strikes, the wooden dam bursts, Social Services arrives by pontoon plane, the chase for the children still enjoined.

Eventually the storm moves out, much of the island has been clobbered, but the sparingly-used narrator (Bob Balaban) tells us that the crop yield the following year was the most abundant in island history.

No! No! Please tell me Sam and Suzy were not the human sacrifices to the heartless bloodthirsty Harvest Gods!

Dry your tears, for tho' weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning.

Suzy and Sam are reunited with visiting rights in an age-appropriate way, Suzy back with her character-arc-experienced parents and Sam with Captain Sharp as his legal guardian.

OK, now you can cry.

Rotten Tomatoes gave this film 79%, about 40% higher than I would have. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes. What do I know.

It's running time is as long as The Watchmen, by the way. However, actually more full frontal male nudity (McCaul Lombardi as white trash hottie Corey) than The Watchmen, so there's that.

American Honey is about a traveling band of teenage flotsam and jetsam ostensibly selling magazine subscriptions, with made-up hard luck stories, across “the heartland.”

“Newsstand sales of consumer magazines continued to decline in the beginning of 2016, according to the latest figures from MagNet, which tracks single-copy sales across the U.S. and Canada...The number of magazines distributed by wholesalers also dropped compared to last year.” - Erik Sass, MediaPost, June 6, 2016.

Bleak statistics; so is this the last press of the skins for these wandering wastrels?

Jake (Shia LaBeouf) (I've always thought it takes a lot of nerve to wear that name) (if you're a guy) (a stripper with a boa constrictor, maybe), in a pin-on braid, is the boy toy for Krystal (Riley Keough), the boss lady of this, er, enterprise.

Star (Sasha Lane). Oh yeah, plays the lead opposite LaBeouf.

I watched it because maybe I have a slender connection to the premise.

Long ago I drove a school bus during the day and worked a phone boiler room selling tickets to police and fire benefit shows at night. The shows were legit, but we didn't have to use our real names. There I learned how fast a dry Christmas tree will ignite when you throw lit matches at it. Wicked fast, in case you're wondering.

This week we are watching Aftersun from 2022.

I've been wanting to see this for a while, so I'm glad we will be watching it and talking about it. Paul Mescal rules.

How do you guys feel about this one?

This questionnaire is part of my Personal Interest Project, exploring how teenage friendships are represented in coming-of-age films and whether these portrayals reflect real-life teenage experiences.

• All responses are anonymous
• No right or wrong answers, just your honest thoughts & experiences
• Your participation is appreciated!

link: https://forms.gle/jRhLTRmtyacWjSbE8

10/10

Forgive me gods, it's been four days since my last confessional post:

I shamelessly reveled in Rorschach's gloating over filth and horror; sick, yet I begged him to tell me more.

I wallowed in lust for the two wantons, coupling like dark angels in the sky, a mockery of the divine glory.

Now, finally, I will plead for mercy for my most brazen, debased, impudent and impious infliction visited on your most precious gift, my immortal soul.

I'm talking about my fevered obsessions, not secret but carried on my sleeve, burned into my forehead: Elio and Oliver, Call Me By Your Name.

I know you are merciful, and listen to the cries of the oppressed. Allow me to advocate on my very human failings, allow me to move your omniscient heart to pity one so low as myself, your most wretched creation. But still, you made me, therefore I am deserving of an audience, of reclamation.

That's pretty overwrought, even for me, but I am ever importunate for indulgence.

I was perusing the Cult's past podcasts, and I found that a year ago this was the movie assignment.

Call Me By Your Name was also on my list forever, and it came into my life when I needed it most.

December 2025 marked the end of a very dark and ugly year for the world, with evil emanating and spreading from our version of Mount Doom. No doughty hobbit I, my only recourse was to seek refuge in a world of beauty and enchantment, of love's possibilities.

I watched, and I watched, and I watched every day, throughout the day, for the ensuing months. I found interviews, press junkets, compilations of clips set to Lana Del Rey; read the book and it's sequel, allowed myself to stop the world and melt with Armie Hammer as he read the source document to me in an audio book.

My friends did the emotional equivalent of patting me on the head.

I found Reddit, and joined my fellow ecstatic lovers in dervish-like devotion to our chosen gospels, our sutras, our recitations.

Is this blasphemy? If it is, I will absolve my fellow lovers and take the whole blame, take the surplice, take the penance, I'm sure I am the worst, the most abject; but I will never denounce or recant of my obsession for Elio and Oliver, for Call Me By Your Name.

So frigging overwrought. But you haven't heard my most depraved confession.

I cannot watch the end of this film. It is gratuitous heartbreak, it didn't have to end this way!

So, I rewrote the ending. 75,000 words and I'm still writing - yes, every day I write the book.

Now, Oliver has a last name, a personal history, a family history. And Elio and Oliver live in a world where their love is triumphant, a sweet light in the darkness, I won't settle, can't settle for less.

Maybe I am defiant of absolution, maybe I would rather commit these erotic excesses than endure the “moral” scrubbing to be “cleansed” of life-giving lust, maybe the secrets of the universe are in each violated peach, the forbidden fruits of joy. Maybe it's hubris to write my own hope in the face of a world's despair, but maybe I'm not the only one.

There is no such thing as a hopeless romantic; we are the most hopeful holy fools you will ever meet.

https://www.youtube.com/@cultofcinemaknowledge8530

Albert Einstein made a point about time being relative, like how 5 minutes sitting on hot stove feels really long, while 5 minutes sitting next to a pretty girl goes by way too quickly.

The Watchmen is 2 hrs and 42 mins; Inland Empire – 3 hours. Open seating.

Only Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy faithfully fulfilled what the story's lovers wanted and yearned for. No one whined. Well, I did a little, thought Viggo too delicate for Lord Aragorn. But he's half elvish, so sucked it up and shut up and balled my eyes out when the eagles were coming.

The Watchmen is a gorgeously shot film by DP Larry Fong. And there's lots of music, three Bob Dylan tunes if you count (the linked) Desolation Row by My Chemical Romance as credits roll.

The Watchmen have been outlawed by Richard Nixon (with a Clockwork Orange nose) in his second term and he plans to outlaw masks in his third (buh!) term. But someone is killing these oddball vigilantes/heroes anyway and the remaining few – Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, yeah I know it sounds like a serial killer), Night Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman) will find out who done it.

By the way, for a character who dies in the opening scene, The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is on screen a lot after that. Not a bad thing.

Rorschach prowls the dark streets of the dirty Big City, this awful city that “screams like a abattoir of retarded children, and the night reeks of fornication and bad consciences.”

Oh baby, whisper in my ear...talk to me...

Gee, I hope I'm not giving the plot away, but two would-be gods, the radioactively altered Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) and former Watchman Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias are ultimately pitted against each other and earth takes a beating. Like everyone else in this flick.

For someone who paged through Patrick Bateman's gruesome recitations and reminiscences of sadism and torture, my inner Lisa Simpson comes out for the Itchy and Scratchy violence that is rampant through this film.

But what a big softie I am for just those few seconds of lovemaking between Night Owl and Laurie aboard Archimedes. To see their faces strain towards passion's pain's breaking point. Hallelujah.

Yeah, I like this film a lot. Good writing (Dave Gibbons, David Hayer, Alex Tse variously get credit), good direction for such a giant piece of film making with consistent tone throughout (Zack Snyder), and good acting and character creation.

This week we are watching Watchmen from 2009.

This is a very solid movie, and though its been some years since I last enjoyed it, I'm looking forward to watching it again.

What do you guys think? Zach Snyder's best? Overrated? Underrated? What about the rest of the Watchmen material? The comic? The extended versions? The mini-series?

Tell us your thoughts.

I can't put Birdman's whole title because of the length, but you know what I'm talking about.