Movies: the nocturnal edition, I guess!

Silent Night Deadly Night (2025). A nice young man who sometimes puts on a Santa suit and murders naughty people as directed by the voice in his head meets a nice young woman who sometimes really loses her temper.

This was a delight. I had the BEST time. It's a remake of a 1980s slasher I haven't seen, but the premise of that one sounds like it's played straight as a "guy in a santa suit goes on a psychotic killing spree" kind of thing, and this one is a lot more complicated/enjoyably weird in its execution. The lore of this movie is absolutely bananas, just total nonsense, but is never overexplained, which it seems like is where so many of these kinds of bonkers movies fall down. The script is surprisingly smart overall, I felt, with a lot of care and affection for its characters. It doesn't hurt that I adore Ruby Modine, who previously had smaller parts in Happy Death Day (the roommate) and Satanic Panic (the daughter). And the ending is *chef's kiss*. I would watch the hell out of a sequel that follows what happens next.

On a personal note, as someone who loves Christmastime but has had less opportunity/excuse to indulge in it as I've gotten older, I really enjoyed the over the top Christmas theming of this.

It does have a couple of awkward lines about gender(tm), which maybe are trying to do a thing, but do not succeed in my opinion. There's also an incident with a white supremecist which would have felt more successful if we'd seen, like, a single non-white person by that point in the movie. The movie also does not look great; it's kind of all sludge. Oh well, we can't have everything.

I think this movie is already almost out of theaters. If it sounds fun to you at all, I would absolutely recommend chasing it down for some Christmas-flavored horror cheese.

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100 Nights of Hero (2025). In a misogynistic dystopia, a young married woman (Maika Monroe) whose inattentive husband is away on business must cope with a would-be suitor (Nicholas Galitzine) with the help of her maid and best friend (Emma Corrin).

I checked this out because the descriptions I saw were sending gay signals, and indeed, this is very gay! Monroe and Corrin's respectively repressed and hidden gay longing is great. It also, unlike the movie above, is beautiful and stylish, even though they were clearly working with a fairly small budget. The aesthetics are top-notch. And Galitzine (of Red, White, and Royal Blue, among other things) does a great job playing a hot himbo whose sense of menace is undercut by how dumb he is.

Unfortunately, the actual story a) is not my kind of thing and b) IMO sucks pretty hard on its own merits. If I had realized quite how much of a satirical fable it was, I would not have gone to see it. This takes place in a universe where women are killed for such sins as literacy, extramarital sex, and not getting pregnant within nine months or so of getting married. This last one is the key for our sad wife Cherry, whose husband and the villain of the piece simply declines to have sex with her, even when the local Puritan-flavored but fictionally religious order says she'll be executed if she doesn't hurry up and get pregnant.

I do get that we're trying to critique men's control of women's bodies, but like... this is not a scenario that has widespread analogue in the real world. Men refusing to have sex with women, even when the women's lives are at stake, is not a thing! RL misogyny is bad enough, you don't have to make shit up! The fact that it's suggested (but not confirmed) that the husband is either gay or ace makes it worse, as he's the only possibly queer man in the movie, and it makes it much much much worse that he's also played by the only actor of Middle Eastern descent that I noticed. In fact I think he's also the only character of color still alive at the end of the movie; all the various women of color have died. (Including Charli XCX's character, who along with her two sisters is executed for knowing how to read.)

This movie makes the Barbie movie look subtle. I would say I don't know who it's for, but apparently it's for the other five or so people on bluesky who've seen it, all of whom gave it gushing reviews. IDK man.

[ART] Night of the Red Sands, The Divine Cities Series - Robert Jackson Bennett. A gorgeous, dramatic painting as described in the novel. Can be appreciated canon-blind!

You're Gonna Need A Softer World, Jaws, A Softer World remixes. Every one of these is hilarious and absolutely spot-on.

Do Automatons Dream of Albino Eels?, Sunless Sea/Citizen Sleeper, gen, 6k. A zee-captain finds a mechanical stowaway and must decide what to do with it. I'm not familiar with the Citizen Sleeper, but the crossover character fits really naturally into the Fallen London universe. Great atmosphere all the way through, so many deliciously horrible little bits of worldbuilding flavor, and a satisfying arc of the stowaway automaton and the crew learning to care for one another.

fix it (how can you fix it?), BtVS, Spike/Buffy, 3k. Buffy's soulmark signifies that her soulmate died before she was even born. I really enjoyed the extra details of soulmate worldbuilding this added, and if Spike and Buffy were soulmates, I could definitely see it going exactly like this. <3

The Beat Goes On, At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie, 6.6k, gen. The scandal at Bertram's Hotel is a major news story—apparently too major for Beatrice to be trusted with it according to her editors, even though she's always been the one to cover stories about Lady Sedgewick. A very cool timestamp featuring an OC I loved immediately, a female reporter trying to make it in a man's world, and doing whatever she needs to to get the story, including going back home to visit little old Miss Marple. IMO you don't need to remember the novel to enjoy this (because I did not remember it, lol).

All Systems Red (2017) by Martha Wells. A humanoid cyborg created to do wet work jobs finds itself giving a shit about a human research team it's supposed to be protecting on an alien planet.

I can see why people love Murderbot itself; it's a big old angst bucket desperately trying to pretend it isn't one. I've seen people characterize this type as an iron woobie, and it's fandom catnip.

However, I did not connect with any other part of this novella. It's so damn insubstantial. There are other characters, but they're mostly indistinguishable. There's a strong whiff of claustrophobic found family that made me DNF the one Becky Chambers book I tried, with the same element of "the one character who doesn't buy in without question is treated as an antagonist." There's some worldbuilding, but extremely thinly drawn. The prose is conversational, which can work great in a lot of cases but here just feels like one more missed opportunity to give me anything I might be interested in.

I've read a lot of pro SFF novellas over the years, and I genuinely can't think of one that felt less deserving of its length than this one. You can pack a lot of thoughts and ideas into a novella! But this didn't even try. If it'd been a third of the wordcount, I probably would have liked it pretty well.

I've heard the second and third in the series are the best, and I might try them at some point, but tbh I think I'd have better luck with the show, which at least has real actors to lend some weight and complexity to the characters.

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The Tainted Cup (2024) and A Drop of Corruption (2025) by Robert Jackson Bennett. The first two books of his Shadow of the Leviathan series, a Sherlock and Holmes riff (or possibly a Nero Wolfe and Archie riff) about an idiosyncratic middle-aged(?) female savant and her long-suffering young gay assistant solving murders in a fantasy world where basically all technology is organic in some way.

These were great fun. Bennett seems really into both cosmic horror (the "leviathans" of the series are mountain-sized monsters that crawl out of the sea and wreak havoc every wet season) and body horror (more terrible plant-related things happening to bodies than you can shake a stick at). Even when this world is running the way everyone wants, it's still so damn weird (complimentary). Augmentations that turn your skin purple and gray! Immortality treatments that stop aging and cause you to just grow forever, like an iguana! The augurs in the second book who pattern-match to such a degree that they can't handle spoken communication: A++, and they reminded me a bit of parts of Anathem.

Ana Dolabra, the foul-mouthed savant detective is far and away the best part. Her assistant Din Kol, from whose perspective the stories are written, is a real sad sack, both due to circumstances and apparently innate temperament, and sometimes that can be a bit of a drag. I also felt like his renewal of purpose in A Drop of Corruption came way too easily; it almost felt like it happened off screen.

Overall, though, these are just a great time. It sounds like Bennett is on a roll, and I can't wait for the next one.