Studio 666 (2022) - Movie Review

Medicine At Midnight is a weird-ass album. I love the hell out of the Foo Fighters (Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace is one of my favourite albums from any band), but hearing them go into full-on DFA-style dance-rock was quite jarring. It’s like a midway point between a standard late-period Foos album and a Bee Gees cover album, which the Foos also released just a few months later under the name ‘Dee Gees’ (it’s called Hail Satin, and it’s surprisingly good; Dave can hit those high notes). For a former post-grunge band rubbing up against disco, it’s certainly not as embarrassing as Nickleback’s She Keeps Me Up, and even in the larger spectrum of aging post-grunge, it’s a hell of a lot better than whatever the fuck Aaron Lewis is doing nowadays, but it’s still very odd. To paraphrase a YouTube comment under their cover of You Should Be Dancing, it shows the Foos entering the “because we fucking can” phase of their career.

I bring all this up because, even with all that in my head beforehand, the most interesting aspect of Medicine At Midnight isn’t on the album itself. Rather, it’s to do with where Grohl and company recorded the thing. They shacked up in a 1940s mansion in Encino, Los Angeles, where, according to Grohl, weird shit kept happened. Like, ‘this house might be possessed’ kind of weird shit. They had to sign an NDA with the house’s owner, so they’re unable to get into their own supposed filmed evidence of this stuff, but basically, the Foos’ softest record to date was recorded under some pretty metal circumstances.

And from that background, the spores for this film came forth, with a script based on Dave Grohl’s experiences and the band itself starring as fictionalised versions of themselves. Hell, the main shooting location is the Encino property this all originally took place in. I had next to no expectations going into this, but out of respect for both the Spheres and Dave Grohl himself as the nicest guy in rock, I was definitely curious to see what kind of production could spring out of such an idea. The end result of it all, however, is confusingly muddled.

Pet Sematary (2019) - Movie Review

While it didn’t get a lot of love back in the day (and judging by reactions to today’s film, that feeling persists), Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary is a fucking great horror flick and one of the better Stephen King adaptations. Having King himself penning the screenplay certainly helped, but as a look at how people react to grief and why it is vitally important to come to terms with that grief, it is a seriously intense ride, if an occasionally goofy one.

I’d argue the point in remaking the story in the first place, but considering the recent crop of King adaptations and their combined consistency, I’m not entirely against the idea. Hell, this one has an uncredited David Kajganich working on the script, and given how well he did with last year’s remake of Suspiria, this could turn out good. However, as I’m about to get into, this film ends up being a mish-mash of underperforming, overperforming and just outweirding the original and not all in good ways.