#week h

[chuthulhu-watches]

Week H: The Happening (2008)

Oh No

Is it good? No. Not it very much is not. And whether that’s on purpose or not, it’s still just… so awkward. Nobody in this film speaks to each other like a human, with some “conversations” seeming more like random exchanges of non-sequiters than anything else. John Leguizamo is the only person here not made of wood—giving Zooey Deschanel the line “I don’t like to show my emotions” does NOT save that performance. The premise is a good horror premise but it loses the fear the more it gets over-explained and over-explicated—like, some of the extended shots of the wind blowing through grasses and trees could have been pretty and ominous if the idea of plants releasing neurotoxins was left as an implication and wasn’t over-discussed again and again by heavily concussed people. The horror of being one of the handful of random people who seem to be immune while everyone around them commits horrible suicide is a very compelling horror, but we get only brief moments with those people and then a lot more time watching Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel stagger around having a terrible relationship and having bizarre reactions to watching teenagers get shot in slow-mo

Is it fun? I mean it’s probably fun to watch with your friends while drinking but not generally no

Is it queer? No

Have you seen The Happening? What did you think/ If you’re struggling under a giant to-watch list, watch something beginning with H and tell me about it!

[chuthulhu-watches]

Week H: Hackers (1995)

Is it good? Oh god no. Very little of this resembles how computers have ever worked, the plot's messy and the romance is godawful, and it REALLY wants you to see Angelia Jolie's barely-legal tits. I respect the cast largely giving their cheesy nonsense parts 110%, though. Trying to pass off 20-something Johnny Lee Miller as just 18 is kinda hilarious because I don't think that man looked like a teenager when he was one. Matthew Lillard and Laurence Mason are also, while delightful, ABSURDLY out of place in a high school classroom.

Is it fun? VERY much so. Like, you forgive a lot of the nonsense because it's fun cheese. Fisher Stevens is so hilariously annoying as Mr The Plague. I feel like this is less what computer hacking was like in the 90s and more what 90s computer users hoped the future would be like--more grunge, more skateboarding, hackers being super cool sexy criminals who took down big bad corporations and who Angelia Jolie wanted to have sex with.

Is it queer? Razor and Blade were gay anarchists, right? Pretty sure Phreak and his leopard-print tank top were also never meant to come off as heterosexual.

[chuthulhu-watches]

Week H: Hazbin Hotel

[ID: The posster for Hazbin Hotel depicting the main cast--Husker, Angel Dust, Alastor, Adam, Sir Pentious, Charlie, Vaggie, Niffty and Lucifer--wreathed in flames, some of them singing and some looking grumpy with the singing. End ID.]

I finally got around to binging this without giving Amazon a penny and I had a good time! My favourite character's definitely Alastor, because I enjoy the shit out of a Token Evil Teammate who is genuinely evil and ridiculously powerful and just so happens to be pointing all that power in the same direction as the good guys... for now. They're a lot of fun! The 20s radio presenter voice is also just inherently comedic to me, I'm a simple creature easily entertained by an old-timey presenter accent saying some deranged shit

Is it good? The animation is a matter of taste but I really enjoy the energy and creativity and the songs are unambiguously bangers performed extremely well by a very talented voice cast. The storyline is trying to keep a lot of balls in the air at once and wobbles a bit in the execution, especially because its internal morality is... kinda messy? Which is partly intentional--none of the angels know what the criteria for getting into Heaven actually are and the criteria for getting into Hell seem to be overly broad and then people just get worse once they're in there as a self-defense mechanism (much like prison). On the other hand, I did notice a trend that made me uncomfortable in how the overall narrative handles sex and sexuality; it's entirely expected that Hell would be full of abusive, unhealthy sex (and Angel Dust's song Poison about it is one of the best) but it seems to lump in the suggested trip to a BDSM club--one where nothing shown is unsafe or unconsensual--with unhealthier expressions of Angel Dust's sexuality. The main couple of Charlie and Vaggie, the closest thing to straight-up good characters that the show has, are noticeably chaste and don't so much as kiss until the last episode despite being in a multi-year relationship. I wanna emphasize there's absolutely nothing wrong with having little or no sex in a relationship if that's what you and your partner want (or don't), it's just that in context it comes off like good people have little or no sex while only unhinged assholes or the painfully broken have lots of sex or non-vanilla sex (Adam, one of the biggest assholes in the show, also never shuts up about having raunchy sex). Points for apparently both of Adam's wives having ditched him for Lucifer (who implicitly gives more than he gets), but overall there's a possibly unintentional but still present pattern that makes me uncomfortable as a queer person who reads history; pathologizing/criminalizing safe, sane and consensual sex between two adults always leads to defining queer people doing anything in public (such as holding hands or wearing a rainbow earring) as an extension of that kind of eeeeeevil sex. We'll see where it goes in S2.

Is it fun? EXTREMELY taste-based, but I really enjoyed it. I can see how it can come off as thinking humour consists entirely of cartoon characters saying fuck and making sex jokes, but I'm enjoying the shit out of the clever, snappy writing in the musical numbers and the creative art designs, and Niffty's general existence never fails to entertain me.

Is it queer? Yes, with Charlie and Vaggie canonically being in a WLW relationship, Angel Dust doing a lot of gay porn, and Alastor being referred to as asexual (though he doesn't seem to know what that means).

[chuthulhu-watches]

Week H: Holes (2003)

[ID: the film poster for the 2003 film Holes. The main cast of teen or preteen boys are in the foreground, just behind a wide-eyed lizard. In the background are semi-transparent images of Mr Sir and the Warden. End ID.]

Okay so everything I heard about this film gave me a WILDLY warped perception of what it's about. Literally thought this was entirely a period drama about a sweet but ultimately doomed interracial romance. I had absolutely no idea that the present-day portions even existed, or that baby Shia LeBouf is in his first lead role here??? Nobody warned my lesbian ass that Sigourney Weaver was gonna show up in a cowboy hat and sunglasses??? There's a plotline about the prison-industrial complex exploiting the labour of unnecessarily incarcerated children (the majority of whom are black or brown) interspersed with flashbacks of a revenge quest against the racist hate mob who murdered a black man for kissing a white woman???? Eartha Kitt is here?????

Is it good? The music and editing choices are uhhhhhhhh VERY Disney in the way that works better in animated films than live-action ones, imo, but I gotta say the story goes a lot harder than I expected it to. The budding friendship between Zero and Caveman is lovely, as is the backstory romance between Kate and Sam. The Yelnats family curse is one of the zanier elements that the film probably could've done without, as it doesn't really thematically fit with the other two storylines and isn't as well-intertwined with them, though the curse being healed by Zero and Caveman's friendship is really sweet. Ultimately I'll say I'm pretty astonished at how good it actually is, and how it really did make me cry at the end!

Is it fun? Mostly it's actually pretty dark, but I gotta say, I HOWLED at "this boy's too stupid to read! You might as well teach this shovel to read! D-I-G! What's that spell?" -small black boy immediately hits racist, condescending 'counsellor' in the face with a shovel- "DIG!" That was a Blazing Saddles-ass moment before we went right back into the darkness of the camp staff discussing how to destroy the escaped child's records so nobody could prove he was ever here or that they left him to die in the desert. There are several points where the film legit makes you think you're about to watch a child die onscreen (spoiler: no children die onscreen, we're good), though of course it has a Disney feel-good ending.

Is it queer? No. A conversation could be had about illegal romance between two happy adults being fundamentally queer, though. And predictably enough I am gay for Sigourney Weaver's evil camp warden with her rattlesnake-venom nail polish. You could take a transmasc read on Mr Sir being so insistent on being addressed as Mr Sir, rather than the feminine first name that the arresting police at the end address him by and the comment of "didn't know that's a man's name!" "It ain't!" but you gotta do the work yourself.