Ken and Robin Consume Media: Bugonia, Freaky Tales, and Junji Ito’s Cat Diary

November 4th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

Elegant Beast (Film, Japan, Yuzo Kawashima, 1962) A family of con artists living in a cramped apartment looks for an angle when the ambitious but dim son (Manamitsu Kawabata) is outmatched by his unflappable ex (Ayako Wakao) in an embezzling scheme. In a visual scheme mirroring the maneuverings of the characters, this satirical drama of post-war moral rot shoots its confined space from every angle. Also known under a much worse English title, The Graceful Brute.—RDL

Freaky Tales (Film, US, Anna Biden & Ryan Fleck, 2024) Four interweaving stories featuring anti-Nazi punks, up and coming rappers, a weary leg-breaker (Pedro Pascal), a corrupt cop (Ben Mendelsohn), and a katana-wielding basketball hero (Jay Ellis) celebrate the spunky underdog culture of 80s Oakland. Genre-hopping hometown valentine nods to the less frequently stolen pages of the Tarantino playbook.—RDL

Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu (Comics, Junji Ito, 2015) Horror mangaka Junji Ito depicts the incursion of new cats into his life: “cursed face” Yon and new kitten Mu, both courtesy of his fiancée “A-ko.” The slim manga serves as self-parody both of Ito’s own style and of the emotional over-commitment of even “normal” cat owners, all under absolutely quotidian tales of escape, vet visits, and weird feline emotional availability. A small delight with a hidden bite, much like its subjects.—KH

Queen of the Deuce (Film, Canada, Valerie Kontakos, 2022) Biographical documentary tells the jaw-dropping story of Chelly Wilson, an indomitable figure who fled Salonika’s Jewish enclave one step ahead of the holocaust, arrived in America with five bucks in her pocket, and parlayed a hot dog counter into a lucrative pornography business in wild 70s New York as theater owner and film financier, becoming a doting if eccentric grandmother along the way.—RDL

Good

Black Magic (Film, US, Gregory Ratoff, 1948) Faith healer Cagliostro (Orson Welles) uses his hypnotic powers for revenge against the count who had his parents hanged, embroiling himself in a scheme to embarrass Marie Antoinette (Nancy Guild) with a faked jewel purchase. Wildly ahistorical even by 40s Hollywood standards and stitched together with narration to cover connective scenes missed in principal photography, this gothic swashbuckler is worth a look for Welles’ magnetic journey from anti-hero to monster.—RDL

Death of a Borgia and The Duke and the Veil (Fiction, Caroline Stevermer, 1981) As “C.J. Stevermer,” fantasy author Caroline Stevermer started her career writing detective novels featuring the English alchemist Nicholas Coffin, living in Rome under the Borgias. (The occasional visit to a reclusive Nicolas Flamel aside, the novels have no fantastic component.) Rome and Cesare Borgia are competently sketched, the mysteries play basically fair; this is good journeyman work by someone who switched genres to find her true metier.—KH

The Green, Green Grass of Home (Film, Taiwan, Hsiao-Hsien Hou, 1982) As an idealistic new grade school teacher (Kenny Bee) settles into his new small town post, his three least ruly students get into a series of scrapes. Episodic slice of life drama with an overbearing, sentimental score at odds with its gentle, observational tone, made before the director adopted his characteristic slow cinema style.—RDL

Okay

Bugonia (Film, US, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025) Conspiratorial fanatic (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps lingo-spouting pharma CEO (Emma Stone), believing she’s an alien infiltrator poisoning the planet. Nihilist provocation shows that just because you can make a more emotionally real version of the 2003 Korean grand guignol black comedy Save the Green Planet doesn’t mean you should.—RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Gothic Giallo, Satanic Piano, and a Hallucinatory Steppe Quest

October 28th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Film, US, Joe Talbot, 2019) Aided by his aspiring playwright best friend (Jonathan Majors), melancholy nurse Jimmie Fails (Jimmie Fails) sets up a squat in the gorgeous Fillmore District house where his family once lived. Big music cues, poetic shot composition, and an initially Beckett-like dialogue rhythm build a haunting style for a story of loving a city that doesn’t love you back.—RDL

Qas (Film, Kazakhstan, Aisultan Seitov, 2022) Afraid to leave him unprotected during the 1931 famine, a gravedigger takes his eight year old brother on a mission across the trackless steppes to seek aid in the district capital. Strikingly composed hallucinatory survival quest.—RDL

Good

The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (Film, Italy, Giuseppe Bennati, 1974) Relatives, lovers, and hangers-on of the rich aristocrat Patrick Davenant (Chris Avram) arrive at his family’s ancestral mansion, now a long-disused theater, and trigger its murderous curse. Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians provided the basic outline of several Italian “someone is killing these rich jerks” movies; Bennati’s version aims for gothic horror that begins as undertone beneath the giallo murder mystery and ends up as the key note. Less gory than most gialli (modulo one murderous crucifixion), this one prefigures the American slasher with ample nudity, weirdly masked killer, and idiotic victim behavior. Carlo Savina’s score is a real standout, adding lush theatricality to the sordid goings-on.—KH

The Mephisto Waltz (Film, US, Paul Wendkos, 1971) Music critic Myles Clarkson (Alan Alda) allows himself to be cultivated by dying piano maestro (and secret Satanist) Duncan Ely (Curt Jürgens) despite the misgivings of his wife Paula (Jacqueline Bisset). This Rosemary’s Baby knockoff has great potential, sadly mostly squandered by Alda and producer Quinn Martin, who over-indulges his TV-movie sensibilities. The hip Satanic cult swaps Duncan’s soul into Myles’ body, but Alda is smarmy with either soul in him. Bisset completely out-acts Alda, and Paula outclasses Myles so much as to deform the story. There are some great scenes of Satanic party goings-on, and Jerry Goldsmith turns in a score (of increasingly atonal Liszt riffs) far better than this movie deserves, enough in fact to give it a solid Good rating.—KH

Tigers are Not Afraid (Film, Mexico, Issa Lopez, 2017) A girl whose mother has been disappeared by the local cartel joins forces with kid orphans of the drug war — and a source of dark supernatural vengeance. Strong performances from a preteen cast drive an uncompromising social realist ghost story.—RDL

Okay

Psycho Beach Party (Film, US, Robert Lee King, 2000) Perky teen Chiclet (Lauren Ambrose) pursues her surfing dreams despite sexist beach bums, a serial killer rampage, and her latent multiple personalities. Easy-target spoof turns the gay subtext of the beach party movies into text. Adapted from his stage play by Charles Busch, who appears as hardnosed cop Monica Stark.—RDL

Not Recommended

Customs Frontline (Film, Hong Kong, Herman Yau, 2024) In tandem with his bipolar mentor (Jacky Cheung), a duty-bound customs officer (Nicholas Tse) takes on the heavily equipped forces of a ruthless arms dealer. Gigantic action sequences held together by morose, catharsis-deficient melodrama and an earnest anti-war message about a conflict between made-up countries.—RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Snowy Witches, an Evil Cat, and a History of Crime Fiction

October 21st, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

Evil Cat (Film, Hong Kong, Dennis Yu, 1987) When his nemesis, a body-possessing feline spirit, emerges for its  its semi-centennial rampage, a dying wizard (Chia-Liang Liu) hastens to train a young chauffeur (Mark Ho-nam Cheng) as his successor. Pell-mell ghost action comedy dishes up all the genre-hopping, tone-shifting and extreme lighting of its period, while toning down the broad schtick by a notch or two.—RDL

A Quiet Place: Day One (Film, US, Michael Sarnoski, 2025) A despondent cancer patient (Lupita Nyong’o) attempts to survive an invasion of NYC by sound-seeking alien monsters while saddled with an anxious law student (Joseph Quinn.) A rich cinematic text layered with references and resonances, this horror disaster movie stands as the best prequel ever made, taking only what it needs from the franchise it extends.—RDL

The Snow Woman (Film, Japan, Tokuzô Tanaka, 1968) An apprentice woodcarver (Akira Ishihama) does not suspect that his loving wife (Shiho Fujimura) is the killer frost spirit who, struck by his handsomeness, once broke the rules to spare his life. Simple, sublime practical effects underline the beauty and horror of this Lafacadio Hearn adaptation.—RDL

The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (Nonfiction, Martin Edwards, 2017) Edwards charts the development of the mystery genre from 1901 to 1950 in 100 (actually 102) book essays. Each entry provides a spoiler-free plot hook, a note on the work’s influence in the genre (the criterion for inclusion is a book’s importance more than its pure merit), and a brief summary of the author’s career, making it a trifle crowded and necessarily incomplete on all those fronts. Fortunately each chapter (they begin historical and turn thematic) provides more context and more titles; only Edwards’ parochial neglect of American authors (5 out of 102, 6 counting John Dickson Carr) mars this handsome and useful work.—KH

The White Reindeer (Film, Finland, Erik Blomberg, 1952) Anxious for her new husband (Kalervo Nissilä) to quickly return from the snowy uplands, a young woman (Mirjami Kuosmanen) performs an ill-considered sacrifice, becoming a murderous witch able to assume the form of a white reindeer. Horror folk tale told with an ethnographic simplicity.—RDL

Good

Litan (Film, France, Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1982) During a village festival revolving around the wearing of creepy masks, a frightened woman (Marie-José Nat) tries to avert her nightmare premonition of her surveyor boyfriend’s (Jean-Pierre Mocky) death. Despite its epic body count, this dreamlike excursion into reality horror is more about surrealism than scares. Easily repurposed into a Yellow King scenario.—RDL

Okay

Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters (Film, UK, Benjamin Field, 2024) Interview subjects provide comprehensive info on Hammer Films’ creative phases and personnel, but are undercut by distracting visual devices and cutaways. Worse for a film history documentary, the clips are carelessly chosen or used as gags.—RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Play Dirty, Short Spy Stories, Livestreaming Horror, and Meta-Reacher

October 14th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

Black Angel (Film, US, Roy William Neill, 1946) To clear her wayward husband of a death row murder rap, a loyal wife (June Vincent) teams with the victim’s alcoholic songwriter ex (Dan Duryea) to get close to their prime suspect (Peter Lorre.) Cornell Woolrich adaptation ticks along as slightly off-kilter for its first two acts, then spins into full nightmare noir.—RDL

The Calder & Behrens Stories (Fiction, Michael Gilbert, 1962-1981) Calder and Behrens, both middle-aged British WWII veterans, do “distasteful” jobs for a special counterintelligence committee using a combination of fussy brio and unfussy brutality. Perhaps the hardest genre in short fiction to pull off is the espionage short, and Gilbert succeeds virtually every time at bat. Only when read in rapid succession do the stories seem even slightly formulaic, but good luck reading one short and not immediately inhaling both volumes.—KH

Freeway (Film, US, Matthew Bright, 1996) When cops haul off her crackhead mom (Amanda Plummer) and stepdad, an irrepressibly survival-minded at-risk youth (Reese Witherspoon) hitchhikes to Grandma’s house and is picked up by the sinister Dr. Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland.) Fairy tale retold as blackly comic juvenile delinquent flick derives its charge from the contradictions between the director’s gleeful midnight movie impulses and the absolute commitment of its deeply stacked cast.—RDL

GonJiam: Haunted Asylum (Film, South Korea, Jung Bum-shik, 2018) Click-hungry college age ghost hunters livestream their illegal exploration of a derelict mental hospital. Familiar premise skillfully executed, for example by cleverly establishing how the characters can be shooting their found footage from every possible angle.—RDL

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery (Film, Canada, Ally Pankiw, 2025) Documentary traces the origins, explosive growth, and loving vibes of Sarah McLachlan’s late 90s feminist touring festival. Focuses primarily on the show’s emotional impact on artists and audiences, while laudably finding time to depict it as a business enterprise.—RDL

Reacher Said Nothing (Nonfiction, Andy Martin, 2015) Martin, a Cambridge lecturer in French literature, watches thriller author Lee Child from the first keystroke to the last as he writes Reacher novel number 20, Make Me. An extremely interesting look at one writer’s process made even more interesting by Martin’s simmering undertone of flailing to justify his own project to himself. Reacher would never.—KH

Good

KPop Demon Hunters (Film, US, Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans, 2025) Demon-hunting kpop trio Huntr/x (Arden Cho, et al.), accelerate their project of locking demons away from human souls, leading the demon lord Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun) to retaliate with his own boy band Saja Boys (Ahn Hyo-seop, et al.). Delightful animation and catchy songs do the necessary in this somewhat rote urban fantasy story that could use a skoosh more violence and horror to cut the anodyne flavor.—KH

The Last of Us Season 2 (Television, US, Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann, 2025) A shocking event sends Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and her new ride-or-die (Isabela Merced) to Seattle on a mission of vengeance. With a high level of execution, this downbeat post-apocalyptic western took me to a place I did not particularly want to go, leaving me with the feeling that the filmmakers chose to punish the audience for a characters’ sins .—RDL

Play Dirty (Film, US, Shane Black, 2025) Master thief Parker (Mark Wahlberg) assembles a crew including regular sidekick Grofeld (LaKeith Stanfield) when an accomplice who betrayed his last crew (Rosa Salazar) points him to a treasure taken from a shipwreck. Terrible Parker movie; kinda fun Shane Black movie.—RDL

Okay

Play Dirty (Film, US, Shane Black, 2025) Heist planner Parker (Mark Wahlberg) survives betrayal by freedom fighter Zen (Rosa Salazar) and recruits his old crew including Grofield (Lakeith Stanfield) and Ed Mackey (Keegan-Michael Key) to get his own back. Ridiculously awful CGI in an early scene sets the low bar for this clunker, which in addition to miscasting Parker decides to make him Dortmunder to boot. Flashes of cleverness persist, annoyingly.—KH

Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City (Film, Japan, Takashi Miike, 2010) The schoolteacher (Shô Aikawa) who once saved the world from alien parasites as a striped costumed hero resurfaces as an amnesiac in the grim police state future of 2025. Sequel dives right into freaky tongue-in-cheek imagery without a pause to shape the narrative.—RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Wednesday, Edgar Allan Poe, and a Murky Found Footage Reveal

October 7th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

18×2 Beyond Youthful Days (Film, Taiwan/Japan, Michihito Fujii, 2024) Ousted from the company he founded, a Taiwanese video game designer takes a trip to Japan, meandering his way to the home town of the girl he loved half his life ago. If you’re going to spin an essential plot point around Shunji Iwai’s 1995 Pinnacle Love Letter, you’d best deliver a beautiful, evanescent drama, a challenge Fujii more than meets in this exploration of travel and memory.—RDL

Devo (Film, US, Chris Smith, 2025) Arts documentary profiles DEVO, the band who took a Dada sensibility hardened in the Kent State massacre and the industrial dolor of Akron OH and briefly managed to inject it into the pop culture mainstream through such delivery systems  as Warner Brothers Records, SNL, MTV, and The Merv Griffin Show. Freedom from choice, it’s what we want.—RDL

La Dolce Vita (Film, Italy, Federico Fellini, 1960) Tabloid journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) spends a week in his native environment, the celebrity party scene of Rome, and finds himself dissatisfied. Lush and beautiful, this episodic film allows Mastroianni’s layered acting to convey his character’s emotional journey; a stellar supporting cast fills out this slice of the sweet life as Fellini’s story adds the amaro. Vital if not quite transcendent, this must-watch remained on my list of unseen shame for far too long.—KH

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Oval Portrait (Film, Canada, Adrian Langley, 2025) Antique dealer Whitlock (Michael Swatton) interests old-soul artist Ava (Pragya Shail) almost as much as his oval portrait interests area thief Julian (Paul Thomas). Adaptation of the Poe short-short expands in the direction of crime and melodrama, with a nicely satisfying ghost story underneath both. The score by Andrew Morgan Smith perfectly evokes the mood of this Hammer-Hallmark blend that plays out like the 1960s B-pictures it’s modeled on.—KH

Poison in Jest (Fiction, John Dickson Carr, 1932) Visiting old friends in Pennsylvania, detective sidekick Jeff Marle discovers a house full of deadly pranks, secrets, and (soon) a serial poisoner. Carr lays on the atmosphere thick in this breathing-space novel written the year before he launched his Gideon Fell series. Not as polished as his later masterpieces, but featuring surprisingly strong characterization for Carr.—KH

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Film, US, Jeff Rowe & Kyler Spears, 2023) Adolescent humanoid martial arts chelonians (Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, Brady Noon) who yearn for acceptance in the world of humans battle a monstrous fly (Ice Cube) who plans to destroy it. Kinetic animation and an innovative visual style bring fresh energy to the franchise. I especially loved that the action scene featuring Splinter, voiced by Jackie Chan, follows the rules of a classic Jackie fight.—RDL

Tribe (Film, US, Dan J. Asma, 2025) Retired professor Devon Adams (Asma) heads into the Cujamaca Mountains outside San Diego in search of an explanation for his cult-raised best friend’s suicide. Asma cuts big-budget trailers as his day job, which makes this one of the more effective found-footage films even as the editing is so good that it can break suspension of disbelief. The big reveal is appropriately murky, conspiratorial, and apocalyptic, and Asma picks powerful visuals that overlap with the story suggestively without drowning it.—KH

When the Tenth Month Comes (Film, Vietnam, Đặng Nhật Minh, 1984) Undone with grief on learning that her husband has been killed in action in a border clash with Khmer Rouge Cambodia, a rice farmer enlists a schoolteacher to help conceal his death from family and neighbors. Heartfelt drama with touches of mystical realism examines the dynamics of trauma suppression.—RDL

Wednesday Season 2 (Television, US, Netflix, Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, 2025) Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) trains her knack for investigation on undoing her psychic vision of werewolf roommate Enid’s impending death. Avoids the sophomore slump by devoting more screen time to the perfectly cast other classic Addams characters and with a tightly plotted arc rarely seen in serialized streaming.—RDL

Good

Beyond the Drumlins (Film, US, Dan Bowhers, 2025) Archaeology professor Rust (Michael Kowalski) leads four others into the woods to find an archaeological site for next semester’s dig. Wisely downplaying interpersonal drama, the film depends on the scares to work, which is great until you discover that it’s all the same scare over and over. Some of the segments very effectively spook, and the mysterious structure in the woods is an all-time irruption that absolutely sells it, but as a whole the film never reaches takeoff.—KH

The Bowstring Murders (Fiction, John Dickson Carr, 1933) When the eccentric and awful Lord Rayle is found strangled with a bowstring in his own armor museum, alcoholic criminologist John Gaunt is called in to solve the case. A borderline locked-room mystery solved with Carr’s traditional brio, but the setting is too over-the-top to be believable, and Carr doesn’t put in the work to keep the cast real enough for us to really care who the killer is.—KH

The Harbor Men (Film, US, Casey Malone, 2025) During the outbreak of a hallucinogenic virus at the docks, vaccine denier Steven Dorre (Aidan White) retrieves a mystical musical instrument from a murder scene. For a while, Malone’s inventiveness and creepy visual sensibilities carry you along, but whatever payoff you thought was coming peters out in mysticism instead of horror.—KH

Okay

Maggie Moore(s) (Film, US, John Slattery, 2023) Widowed small town police chief (Jon Hamm) investigating the murders of two women with the same name tentatively romances the next door neighbor (Tina Fey) of the dumbass perpetrator (Micah Stock.) Nick Mohammed stands out in this blend of rom com and Coenesque neo-noir with his atypical delivery in a stock character role, the deputy who acts as Hamm’s confidant / sidekick.—RDL