Noiseless Chatter Archive

I wonder how many years running I’ll be able to start these announcements with “What a fuckin’ year, eh?” Anyway, last year we celebrated Halloween by leaning directly into the worst tendencies of man with George A. Romero’s First Dead Trilogy. This time, let’s just have fun with some silly movies that have no social relevance or satirical value at all. None! I promise! Why are you looking at me that way?! Beginning Oct. 17, join me for Trilogy of Terror VII: Vehicular Homicide. It will consist of longform analyses of the following films: Duel (1971) – coming Oct. 17 Death Race 2000 (1975) – coming Oct. 24 Christine (1983) – coming Oct. 31 I’m posting this announcment far in advance so that you will have plenty of time to seek out and watch the films, if you’re interested. Death Race 2000 appears to be available in its entirety, for free, on YouTube. Christine also seems to be there, albeit in parts. Duel is available for purchase or rent through Amazon, iTunes, and pro...

This is how the world ends, not with a bang but…actually, there are a lot of bangs, and they’re mainly fired by and at the few remaining survivors. But what else is new, eh? Continuing my tradition of not wanting to see these films, I ignored Day of the Dead for years on the grounds that it was “the bad one.” Okay, yes, we got three actual bad ones after this (though I do have a soft spot for Diary of the Dead , which I think has a lot of good ideas) but of the good ones, this is the bad one. I heard people complain about how it’s boring. About how it’s unnecessary. About how the acting is hammy and over the top. I didn’t actively avoid it, but whenever it came time to sit and watch a movie I hadn’t seen before, I kept picking other things. Why wouldn’t I? It seemed my time would be better spent elsewhere. This was absolutely my loss. When I finally got around to seeing it a few years ago, it immediately became my favorite in the series. No amount of rewatching this or a...

I spoke last week about how I didn’t want to watch Night of the Living Dead because I knew it would scare the hell out of me. Much later, when I learned about Dawn of the Dead , I didn’t want to watch that, either. This time, it was because I knew it couldn’t possibly live up to its potential. Across the entire series, this is the film I most often heard spoken about as “the best one,” but that in itself meant little to me. What made it seem to have so much potential in my mind was its setting; Dawn of the Dead is a zombie movie set in a shopping mall. From the moment I learned that fact, I braced myself for disappointment. It was such a perfect concept that any execution would have to be flawed. One hears “zombies in a shopping mall” and the mind races. The imagination goes wild. The movie that existed in my head, even if it were just a series of disconnected moments, would have to be better than anything one person with some cameras could actually achieve. I was wrong; ...