Graveyard Shift (1990) – There are so many unimpressive movie adaptations of Stephen King short stories that they can form a grading continuum. This one isn’t as bad as The Mangler (1995), but not as good as Children of the Corn (1984). The problem here is that the adapters obviously had to add things to bring the short story up to feature length, but they stuff they added didn’t matter much and didn’t make much sense. The protagonist is ostensibly an over-educated drifter who comes to a small town whose economy hinges on the textile mill, and gets the crap job of cleaning out the rat infestation in the basement. Why a drifter? Dunno. His past never comes into the picture, and he doesn’t really bring anything to the circumstances that the locals couldn’t. The mill foreman is obviously evil and brutal because this is a Stephen King story, but there’s no reason why he goes from “d-bag” to “bark-at-the-moon, paint-his-face ‘Nam flashback” in the course of one scene. And there’s something about the town cemetery, but that subplot must mostly be in footage that was cut because it just kind of shows up, waves, and leaves.
Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) – The wartime socialite infamous for being a cluelessly bad singer (and giving the single worst concert ever in Carnegie Hall) is given a hilarious yet kindhearted biopic; she’s not thoughtless or conceited — rather, her health has been precarious for fully half a decade, and her husband arranges things so that she can enjoy participating in the art that she loves so much, even though she has neither talent nor awareness of her lack of talent. Let he who has never done something objectively indefensible in the service of another’s happiness cast the first stone.
The Vampire Doll (1970) – One of the first of the handful of vampire-related movies made in Japan in the early ’70s, all heavily influenced by Hammer Films more than native Japanese folklore. This one concerns a girl whose boyfriend comes to visit her at her country home after his long stint overseas, only to find that the girl just died in a car accident… and then when the boyfriend doesn’t come back from the country, the boyfriend’s sister and her own guyfriend try to trace his footsteps and find out what happened to him. Subtle and disquieting, with more than a little Poe influence.