✓ kingstoken's 2025 Book Bingo: Non-Human POV

Mirror Lake is the third book in the Shady Hollow series by Juneau Black. The series' titular town is occupied by a cast of anthropomorphic woodland animals who keep getting embroiled in crimes. In this one, a picturesque autumn is disrupted when a rat from neighbouring Mirror Lake suddenly declares that her husband has gone missing and has been replaced by an imposter.

...okay, is it weird that I wanted the story about a fox named Vera Vixen solving playing sleuth to be more twee?

I think when I heard "cozy" and "anthropomorphic animals" and saw the book cover, my mind went to things like The Wind in the Willows and Frog and Toad Are Friends, and the addition of a mystery made me think of the Dimension 20 campaign Mice & Murder. Which was to say, I went into this expecting something a lot more stylized, with the animal conceit either adding a lot of whimsy or providing the counterweight to a darker or more satirical story.

Then again, maybe I would have also found The Wind in the Willows disappointingly contemporary if I'd read it in 1908? I definitely think it's true that imaginary Edwardian!me would bounce off the country squire stuff as hard as present!me bounces off the idealized generic upstate New York type village vibe going on here. (And the thing where the only character with a non-WASP name is a panda named Sun Li, which felt like it should have been in the early 20th century book and not the 2020 one.)

All in all, the mystery ended up being what kept me reading this one, since it had an additional twist beyond just a murder whodunnit. It's a short book, but it still dragged a little for me—I think because of the presence of a lot of conversations and very basic/straightforward descriptions that are probably intended to be the thick icing on a cupcake if you're someone who's going to fall in love with the setting. I also didn't really click with the protagonist, but I recognize that I'm coming into this series on the third book and there might have been developments in the first two instalments that would have given me a better sense of her.

But if you are someone this setting appeals to, or if you devour a lot of cozy mysteries and are always up for a new gimmick, or you're someone for whom anthros are an automatic bonus, this might be your thing.

(Also, now I really want fic where Frog and Toad have to solve a mystery. Or where Mole is framed for murder and Rat has to prove his innocence.)

( An Excerpt )

Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns. In John Carpenter's episode of the horror anthology series, a guy (Norman Reedus) who finds rare movie prints is hired to find one that may no longer exist after horrific violence broke out on the night it was shown. I love stories about haunted media, and the haunted media parts of this were solid. Unlike Antrum: The Deadliest Movie Ever Made, this mostly resisted the temptation of actually showing us the cursed movie, but the effects as our guy gets closer to finding it are satisfyingly disturbing. It even gets pretty gory towards the end, which I was not expecting.

That said, it's weirdly paced and very talky, and the main character should have been played by someone older, because Norman Reedus with his baby face absolutely cannot sell this role. Also, IMO it really mishandled the reveal ( spoilers )

--

Sator (2021). A man lives in a cabin in the woods while trying to discover what happened to his mother, who may have been taken by a demon that she and her mother both claimed to hear messages from. This movie doesn't have much dialogue, is very poorly lit, and relies heavily on the viewer being able to recognize and distinguish faces to distinguish what's happening, which I'm pretty bad at, so overall I understood only the broadest strokes of this movie. I think I would really like the movie that I think it was trying to be, a story of an inherited gift/curse and how it affects and has affected different members of the family, but I need a bit more than this movie could give me.

In particular,
( spoilery questions )

I will say the spooky woodsy vibes were very good, and despite being objectively pretty slow, I was engaged the whole time. Also, the actress playing the grandma with dementia was fantastic. Loved her.

Overall I don't recommend this one, but if you watch it, I would love to know what you think happens in it.

It's been a minute since I did one of these!

V/H/S/2 (2013). Too much gross, way too many zombies. The zombie helmetcam segment is supposed to be a classic, but a) gross, and b) HOW ARE WE SPLICING IN A WHOLE OTHER SOURCE OF FOOTAGE INTO THE HELMETCAM FOOTAGE. I will allow cutting in found footage but I refuse to accept editing in entirely other sources. I watched the Kill Count for the segments I missed and was not even a little sorry I skipped them. I like found footage, I like anthology movies, but I think I'm done with this franchise.

Resurrection (2022). Rebecca Hall plays a mother who (thinks she?) spots her past abuser/rapist at a conference and completely loses her mind over it. Hall is so good at psychological tension, TOO good in this case. I could not handle it, especially combined with the abuse dynamic. Apparently the movie got even weirder after I stopped, complete with on-screen pseudo-mpreg? IDK, psychological realism combined with plot surrealism is not my jam.

Psycho Goreman (2021). Two kids discover an ancient evil emperor of the universe and get him to do tricks for them. I think in order to like this movie I needed to be a huge fan of a certain kind of cheesy 80s fantasy movie, and alas I am not. Also the kids are really obnoxious, especially the sister.

The House October Built (2011). A camera crew goes on the road to film haunted houses people have set up for Halloween. This opens with the most excruciating "one (1) woman and a bunch of annoying men bicker" found footage scene I have seen in a long time. I lasted less than five minutes. Why is there always one woman max in found footage movies? Why is there basically NO found footage with majority women? Found footage is so cheap to make, why aren't there bunches of these movies by and about women? (Recs welcome.)

Stopmotion (2024). A repressed woman becomes increasingly obsessive about completing her mother's stop-motion film. This was slow and tedious, and I am so tired of movies about quiet, introverted characters inevitably becoming obsessed, deranged, and losing their entire grip on reality. And again with the surrealism, ugh.

Left for Dead (2007). A horror-western about a woman looking to kill a wanted outlaw, with the blurb "Saw meets the spaghetti western." When I bought this for $4 at Goodwill, I want to stress that I did not expect it to be good, but it may be the actual worst movie I have ever watched in my life. Somehow this movie has a wikipedia page, where we learn it was filmed in twelve days. There is copious slow-mo. Every single change of camera angle is preceded by a freeze frame. It is impossible to articulate how painful every second of this movie is, and I strongly recommend you hunt it down just to experience a couple of minutes of it for yourself.

Blink Twice (2024). Two women get themselves invited to a CEO's party island, and then they start losing parts of their memory. Or so I hear; I didn't even get as far as the island invite because the social embarassment squick hit me so hard. Then I looked up spoilers and discovered that the answer to all the mysteries in the trailer is RAPE because this is a RAPE island where the CEO and all his friends are RAPISTS. Did I mention this is a movie about RAPE? (And also about a drug with truly remarkable capabilities in selective memory suppression.)

Gothic (1986). Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, Lord Byron, and a couple of others party at Byron's house with a lot of laudanum, and stuff happens. This is by Ken Russell, who did Lair of the White Worm, but that movie is a romp and this is... a series of events which may or may not exist within the same narrative? They're not even interesting events. It's like unsexy erotica, interpersonal drama, someone maybe hallucinates a monster, more unsexy erotica. Timothy Spall wears a corset at one point. With half an hour left I turned it off and read about Mary Shelley on wikipedia instead, which was a much more enjoyable use of my time.

Sinners (2025). Twin brothers return from organized crime in Chicago to open an all-Black juke joint in their hometown in Mississipi with their cousin Sammie playing the blues as entertainment, and then vampires.

I held off reviewing this after I saw it the first time because I wanted to process and see it again, and honestly after seeing a second time I don't know what I can possibly add to what's already been said. This is an absolutely gorgeous movie, amazing music, all the acting is great, all the relationships are compelling. Director Ryan Coogler has packed so many interesting historical angles and so many themes that it's a challenge to unpack them all, but a fun challenge. I am especially compelled by all the depictions of religion, Christan and otherwise, and how that intersects with the spiritual power of music as depicted in the film.

Some bits I particularly liked:
- The Chinese immigrants running stores in the Mississippi delta
- The difficult and heart-breaking situation of Hailee Steinfeld's character, who is one-eight Black
- How much Ryan Coogler loves cunnilingus
- Stack's hand tremors, presumably from WWI nerve gas
- How incredibly shippy the MBJ twins are. "You're the best part of me" and "I'm nothing without you." !!!
- The fact that it's set in 1932 and the Depression isn't mentioned even once, presumably because these people's lives were already scraped to the bone. (This movie has got to be Coogler's response to O Brother Where Art Thou, right? Also set in Mississippi during the depression, also full of diagetic music, also featuring the Klan, there's even a scene here driving along the road passing a chain gang. The Black blues player in that movie could BE Sammie Moore from Sinners; even the timeline would line up okay.)

Anyway, this movie is incredible. You absolutely should see it.

--

Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes (2021). German psychedelic horror(?) film. The official one-line blurb is something like "A couple visit the rundown castle they've inherited and become trapped in the reality that only exists within its walls," which sounds very cosmic horror, and I guess maybe it's not NOT that? But boy is it a lot of other things too. There might be reincarnating gods? At one point ( spoiler ) and then there's another hour of movie.

It's very low-budget and definitely not what I came for, but it's a trip. Comps might be Triangle if it gave up on trying to make sense or, from a different angle, A Bucket of Blood (1959). If this sounds like your jam, it's worth giving a try.

--

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025). A young woman visiting the grand opening of Not The Space Needle in the 60s has a premonition of disaster and saves the lives of everyone there; decades later, her granddaughter starts have recurring nightmares of that night and realizes that death is coming for her and all her family members who should never have been born.

This is my first FD movie, which I saw solely on the logic that it was free (or "free," because I have a Regal subscription) and I needed something fun and cheesy. And this was indeed that! All the characters were reasonably likeable, and some of the deaths were quite inventive. This movie makes a LOT of hay out of body piercings, and the entire sequence with the MRI machine was inspired. I also really enjoyed everything with the long opening sequence in the 60s and found the young woman very charming. That was probably my favorite part of the movie, actually.

I would not say this was a good movie. For one thing, I have become That Horror Fan, because I found a lot of the CGI pretty annoying and kept wishing for some practical effects for the deaths. I also was entirely unpersuaded by the poor man's version of Laurie Strode and family from Halloween 2018. The generational trauma was all tell, no show, and even the plot logistics with the grandma didn't make a lot of sense given other information we have.

Still, yeah, a cheesy fun time.

Fandom 50 #20

Untitled Ouizzy Neighbor AU by derekstilinski
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationship: Frenchie/Izzy Hands
Medium: Gifset
Length: 3 gifs
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: romance, happy ending, getting together, constructed reality, au: modern, domesticity, nature

Description:

In the first gif, Izzy wanders out into a field and happens upon Frenchie, who's sitting alone and obviously having a bad time alone with his thoughts. In the second, the two men are each in their houses, looking out the window at each other's places. In the third, they've finally come together, Frenchie handing a wary Izzy a cup of tea.

I am such a sucker for constructed reality graphics and vids, and all the ways a little tactical harnessing of the Kuleshov effect can bring us the crossovers, AUs, and visual adaptations we crave. I've got a few from this same creator to rec, but I'm starting with this Neighbor AU that imagines a modern day Frenchie and Izzy living next door to each other in the country and catching each other's eye.

First off, I just love how it's put together, from the progression of running into each other by chance, then scoping out each other from their houses, to finally coming together for tea. But I also love how the choice of sources colours the story being told here. I'm pretty sure the Con O'Neill clips are from Vengeance Is Mine and the Joel Fry ones are from In the Earth. These are both harrowing movies where the actual characters are going through some awful things. I appreciate how those scenes get recontextualized here into something cozier that nonetheless paints a picture of both characters having gone through some rough times.

You can easily imagine that this modern Frenchie has just as many terrible things locked up in that little box in his head as his 18th century counterpart had, and that this Izzy has just been through an emotionally and/or physically traumatic breakup with Ed, and now here they are, a little bruised and cautious but finding some potential comfort and love in their own backyard.