Welcome to my monthly “Failures” column, where I look back at some of the films I could, would, maybe even should have watched last month… but failed to.
It’s not what I mean by “failures”, but Digger undoubtedly was one at the box office this month, as it looks likely to become the first Tom Cruise-starring movie for almost 20 years not to make over $100 million. It always looked weird and I guess that plus weak reviews did nothing for it. As much as I don’t really follow these things, October’s releases were littered with films that I vaguely heard weren’t great (Verity, Other Mommy, The Uprising, Ali G: Who Iz I? (already streaming on Prime), Klara and the Sun) or heard surprisingly little about (The Social Reckoning, Street Fighter, Clayface). On the other hand, it sounds like the new Laika, Wildwood, is as good as hoped, and I heard good things about big screen sitcom continuation Ghosts: The Possession of Button House. I don’t know if I actually heard positive noises about Wicker or if the trailer just left me optimistic.
Even more muted was the reception of streaming originals this month, which included Ben Affleck’s High and Low-alike Animals on Netflix, and a bunch of stuff on Prime Video so minor I only encountered them on the site’s own front page: Stanley Tucci heist movie Masterplan (I mean, that’s enough information to get it on my watchlist, to be honest), Renny Harlin survival thriller Deep Water (who knew Renny Harlin was still making movies?), and Covid-set romance Love of Your Life. Or there’s always Matchbox: The Movie on Apple TV+. How such a Netflix-y idea ended up on Apple, I don’t know. I was going to say they’re usually more reliable, but they’ve had their fair share of dud-sounding wannabe-blockbusters at this point.
As usual, there’s a bit more excitement in the films making their subscription streaming debut… although not a huge amount this month, frankly, as it’s more or less limited to The Magic Faraway Tree on Prime, Scream 7 and Mortal Kombat II on Sky Cinema / NOW, and the live-action Moana on Disney+. I can’t say any of those excite huge excitement to jump up my wishlist (indeed, I’ve not seen Scream 6 or the previous Mortal Kombat yet), but they probably stand a better chance of getting played than most of those originals.
Premiere-adjacent (in that it’s already been on Prime but is now, unusually, on Sky/NOW) was Robbie Williams sort-of-biopic Better Man, which going more-or-less the other direction, Wicked is now on Netflix… but both parts remain on NOW. It’s the kind of thing I feel I should devote the time to, for some reason, but can’t muster up the desire. Elsewhere in the back catalogue, the Purge movies popped up on Netflix again, which is particularly of note as there are three I’ve not seen (Election Year, The First Purge, and The Forever Purge). BBC iPlayer improved my life by featuring a “recently added” row again, which allowed me to notice the timely addition of a bunch of horror movies — The Blackening, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Get Out, Halloween, Horror Express, Longlegs, The Mist, The Monkey, Starve Acre, The Substance, The Wicker Man, and The Witches remake — as well as general fare, like Borderlands, The Dead Don’t Hurt, The Great Escape, The Man Who Would Be King, and Selma. Mixed quality there, for sure, but it’s not as if the BBC are more curated than any other streamer.
What should be curated is my disc collection, although I don’t know if my “merrily buy every passing fancy” approach to collecting qualifies for that. Hitting that spot this month were Anti-Worlds’ releases of Ben Wheatley’s Bulk and Divergent View, a box set collecting a trio of Bertrand Mandico films. I don’t know if I’ll actually enjoy any of those, but they all sound interesting. Other never-seens that didn’t feel like quite so much of a punt included ’70s Japanese actioner Manhunt from new label Toy Robot, Japanese sci-fi comedy Summer Time Machine Blues, and Japanese murder mystery classic The Inugami Family from ever-reliable Radiance, alongside Abel Ferrara’s adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk neo-noir story New Rose Hotel. The only known qualities were new 4K editions for two films I haven’t seen for a while but used to like a lot, Tony Scott-directed / Shane Black-scripted The Last Boy Scout, and Anne Rice adaptation Interview with the Vampire — bringing us full circle to Mr Cruise, coincidentally. I could make that seem planned if I put some thought into this, but I’m going to put as much effort into it as I do actually watching the discs I buy: not much.
