Back in May, I noted how far behind target I was — at the time, 15 films. Since then, it only got worse… but this month, it finally improves!

Although not even to as far behind as I was in May, unfortunately — I’m still 17 films off where I should be. That means I have to average 13 qualifying films every month for the rest of the year to make it to #100. The last time I managed that many films in a single month was December 2024, and the last time I managed it for four months on the trot was in early 2021… but there’s still hope! A fool’s hope, maybe, but that was good enough for Gandalf.

#39 Death Trap (1962) — Series Progression #5
#40 Flavia (2026) — New Film #8
#41 Thor: Love and Thunder 3D (2022) — 50 Unseen #4
#42 The Black Phone (2021) — Wildcard #8
#43 Woman in the Dunes (1964) — WDYMYHS #3
#44 The Singing Ringing Tree (1957) — Failure #8
#45 Robot Monster 3D (1953) — Genre #3
#46 Point Break (1991) — Rewatch #3
#47 Dersu Uzala (1975) — WDYMYHS #4
#48 Dragonfly Squadron 3D (1954) — Genre #4
#49 Quatermass and the Pit (1967) — Series Progression #6

• I watched 10 feature films I’d never seen before in August.
• That makes it the first month to hit my minimum first-time watch goal since last November. Hooray!
• All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
• I last saw that rewatch, Point Break, in 2007, the first year of this blog. The same was true of This Is Spinal Tap before I rewatched it in March. It feels fitting for the blog’s 20th year to be rewatching films from its first — maybe I should try to do that for all of this year’s rewatches? Except I’ve already messed up such a plan by not doing it for the first one (The Greatest Showman, which I previously watched in 2018), so maybe I won’t bother.
• Quatermass and the Pit is the first Series Progression film this year that isn’t from the Edgar Wallace Mysteries series. Will they make up 50% of that category this year, or will it be more by the time I’m done? The next four months will, of course, tell.
• This month’s WDYMYHS films were surreal Japanese drama/thriller/horror (it doesn’t often get branded a horror, but I thought it was one), Woman in the Dunes; and also kinda Japanese, but also Russian, in that it was directed by Akira Kurosawa but was funded by Russia and is in Russian and was made for Russians, Dersu Uzala.
• No Blindspot film this month — I concentrated on getting WDYMYHS up to the same level instead.
• From last month’s “failures” I only watched The Singing Ringing Tree.

Favourite Film of the Month
My pick for film of the month came right at the end: Hammer’s third big-screen adaptation of a BBC TV Quatermass serial, Quatermass and the Pit, which is more driven by sci-fi ideas than you might expect of a ’60s flick from a studio renowned for their lurid horror.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Fitting more in the stereotypes of its era, Robot Monster is pulp ’50s SF in all the worst ways. I only watched it because it was shot in 3D, and that’s actually moderately successful — it resists the urge to poke stuff at the camera, as you’d expect from such a schlocky effort, but instead offers reasonable depth and dimensionality, and even a couple of sequences that play with ideas like showing different images to each eye.

September will need to be my most film-filled month of the year if I’m to even stand a chance of getting to #100 in December. But I’ve bought myself that extra time rather than it already feeling impossible, so that’s something.