Movies I watched in 2025: March
Well. I'm in the middle of a couple of other movies, but I didn't finish them, so we just have two for the post this month. Dang.
The Velvet Vampire
1971, Rothman dir.
This caught my attention because it was in Criterion's email of films that would leave the streaming service at the end of the month.
It's an extremely low-budget film, or so wikipedia said, directed by Stephanie Rothman -- and the basic idea, according to the Criterion blurb, is that a vampire who lives out in the desert invites a couple to her home in order to seduce them both.
A woman directing a film in the early 70s with a bisexual vampire is what I got out of that, and yes, that is correct.
The bit of plot summary I should probably give is that they meet at an art gallery, and the man of the couple -- Lee -- hits on the vampire, whose name is Diane. This is after we see the couple pretend not to know each other so they can flirt like strangers. The woman in the couple, Susan, quickly gets irritated as Lee wanders off with Diane.
So they go to her place, but only after an argument that immediately made me pause the movie because it nailed in a perfect way a particular kind of shithead man type -- "Fine," he said, "we just won't go." This is after climbing in the tub naked with her after she told him not to. So, good, great, fantastic, we've got unadmitted marital troubles here, great.
Most of the movie is kind of a take on the victim in the vampire's castle, except it's a luxurious home out in the desert. Diane LeFanu -- yes, that's her name, in reference to the author of the first lesbian vampire story, "Carmilla" -- takes them out in her dune buggy to abandoned mines, ghost towns, and the graveyard where her husband is buried. You'll be shocked to discover that the mine closed after too many people died to some kind of wild animal that tore their throats out.
The thing about the plot is not only that it's a crazy bisexual disaster version of the typical vampire seduction, it's also dreamy. Literally. Diane has a one way mirror and she watches the couple in bed, sending them dreams of her joining them in lovemaking.
There's a bunch of nudity here, by the way.
I won't go into the latter portion of the plot. The movie's only an hour and twenty minutes, just about the perfect length for a film. It has a couple of twists, of course, one of which I wasn't really expecting and one of which I said, yeah, yeah, of course. I watched enough bad horror movies on mst3k to know a lot of them want to do certain things at certain points.
This isn't a bad movie, mind you, but it's in that lineage, because it's so low budget and old enough to have been upstream of the others. I think the blurb also describes the film itself as poetic and dream-like, and that's often true as well.
Mad Max: Fury Road
2015, Miller dir.
I watched this in theaters, but last night I wanderd into the living room to check on my partner who'd left the office to rewatch a Bollywood movie, and as soon as it ended she just sort of started Fury Road and I sat down. We watched the whole thing; she stayed up too late honestly, given her schedule.
You don't need me to tell you this movie kicks ass. You know this. Everyone knows this. We knew it in 2015.
So I guess what I can talk about instead is how I kept noticing the careful use of, let's say, the way people are or aren't careful with resources.
we're all probably familiar with the motif in post-apocalypse fiction that people are careful with their resources, that everyone's picking over trash heaps for food, clothes, ammunition whatever. And we see that, right? Furiosa has the escaping women counting their ammunition, pairing it with the right weapons, so they have a clear inventory of what they can use.
But they also stop after a fierce chase to have a bath, dumping water directly onto the sand instead of any sort of receptacle. Furiosa immediately smears car oil back on her face afterwards, too, for other reasons. And nearer the end, we learn one of the women Furiosa was seeking out plants a seed everywhere she goes, even knowing they mostly die -- instead of, we might imagine, waiting for a chance to find a place in which the seeds will grow. And Max, our nominal hero, who's survived three of these movies already, drinks straight from the hose, wasting probably three times as much as he drinks.
I'm not criticizing this in the sense of saying they're bad people. Anyway, they're not people, they're characters. But go with me on this.
Obviously we're all familiar with how Joe is wasting resources, but he's the villain, right? But even this ties in a little to the second thing I noticed.
Anyway, for this first thing, it's interesting that Miller knows people have a habit of conserving in proportion to what they have -- if you have a lot of water, you don't really save any. And for five or six people, that tanker is carrying a lot of water. It's just an interesting, truly-realistic look at behavior that we tend to cover up with a genre expectation, that anyone surviving in the wasteland is counting every calorie, every drop of water, and so on.
The other thing I noticed is that pretty much everyone in the movie gets a moment to be sympathetic, including, and this may be weird, Immortan Joe. Joe's an asshole, I'm not pulling that "well actually" thing with him, I promise. And the movie is clear he's an asshole -- when he cries out for his unborn child to be returned to him, he says "it's my property." That's not Good, Actually, it's just Bad.
But when he learns his child is dead, he genuinely mourns, so much so that one of his lesser warlords gets annoyed and fucks off to hunt the escapees on his own, nearly killing them all instead of bringing them back safe because he thinks nobody's paying any attention. And look this doesn't "soften" his character or anything but it's interesting that we have a fucking cartoon supervillain whose face we never see until it's ripped apart getting a moment of grief that mirrors Furiosa's later in the film.
Max, meanwhile, is just some guy, you know? If you watched the film when it came out you probably remember all the folks mad that Max isn't really the main character, and the other folks equally ecstatic that we get a scene where he admits he can't hit a mark and gives Furiosa the gun.
What I noticed this time is that also she has a gun rest he didn't have: Max. She succeeds not only because she's a better shot (she does seem to be though, so that's also true); she succeeds in part because Max is helping her. He's a kind of catalyst in the film. They would not have succeeded without him, but he is most ways himself unchanged by the experience. Not entirely, he comes back to help in a way that's apparently out of character for him now.
So in the end, the movie is sort of constructing a narrative around needing to find people to trust, even if they're weirdos who barely speak to you. This is not a revelatory thesis. It is in fact probably what I would have said ten years ago. But more now, I guess? I didn't promise these reviews would be intelligent.