Before Genevieve Bujold got her breakout role in Anne of a Thousand Days, she had a lead role in the Canadian art film ISABEL (1968).
The tomboyish Isabel returns to her rural home town to see her dying mother, discovers Mom’s dead but everyone around thinks she should stay in town anyway. And isn’t it funny how all her plans in the city seem to be falling apart? At least that’s what I think occurred — this bounces between present and past to the point I’m unclear what happens when, plus it simply didn’t engage me. Awesome poster, though. “Your mother made real fine butter.”
After Leigh Whannel’s chilling The Invisible Man, I couldn’t resist watching his THE WOLF-MAN (2025) when I found it streaming on Peacock. The result is, as they say, 100 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
In the opening, young Blake and his father go hunting in the Oregon woods, meet something not of nature born … and we jump twenty years or so into the future when Blake (Christopher Abbott) is a writer with a charming daughter and a strained marriage. When he gets word his long-vanished father has been declared dead, he suggests a vacation at his dad’s isolated home — the kind of place where there’s nobody around for miles and zero cell-phone reception. And their vehicle crashes driving up there and the local giving them directions gets pulled away by something hairy …
Where The Howling broke fresh ground in werewolf movies, Wolf-Man does nothing fresh; it’s not a good sign that I found myself wanting an explanation of what these things are and where they came from, rather than enjoying them as something new. And where Invisible Man‘s strength was Elizabeth Moss’s emotional hell, the character elements in this are half-baked, too vague to give it any depth. Oh well, not the first bad movie I’ve watched by a long shot. “Sometimes when you’re a daddy, you’re so afraid of your kids getting scared, you become the thing that scares them.”
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