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part of the fun of the original alien is the horror of the nostromo itself imo. it’s a cell of corporate greed ferrying narrowly-trained workers across barren space. it’s huge and yet claustrophobic, cockpits crammed with machinery giving way to yawning berths dripping chains and water. the supercomputer is named mother in a stroke of human anthropomorphization, but instead of providing comfort or protection, it’s only a courier between its creator and its wailing brood. ripley yells “mother! mother!” at a matronly-voiced computer that speaks calmly over her helplessness. the ship is full of endless details and patterns and unlabeled buttons and dials the audience can’t entirely make sense of; to do anything on the ship is a rigorous, technical process, and we must depend on the characters to know it. the internal mechanics of the ship are so alien that a literal alien can hide among the bits and bobs and not be noticed. it’s great.

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GET TO KNOW ME MEME: 5/5 MOVIES ▸ BRIDE OF CHUCKY

Barbie, eat your heart out.

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BRIDE OF CHUCKY (1998) dir. Ronny Yu

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRIDE OF CHUCKY!!!

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Bride of Chucky (1998)

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BRIDE OF CHUCKY 1998, dir. Ronny Yu

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BRIDE OF CHUCKY dir. ronny yu

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Bride Of Chucky (1998)

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Bride of Chucky

A Review

Ronny Yu made the correct choice working with the one and only father of Chucky, Don Mancini. I feel like Don's seamless continuing control over the Chucky franchise paired with Ronny Yu's absolute lack of knowledge of the Chucky franchise (and his love of the monster) made for a one-of-a-kind franchise installment.

Writing- 5/5

This entire script takes the snark we know Chucky for and dials it up by giving him a dominating sparring partner in Tiffany Valentine. There are some jokes that kinda feel needless (repeating the "what a crock" joke only got an "eeh" out of me), but Voodoo for Dummies?

And lines like:

"For God's sake Chucky, drag yourself into the 90s"

"Martha Stewart can kiss my shiny plastic butt!"

When Chucky tells Tiffany to "act natural" and this is her response

The entire weird sex scene conversation that 100% does happen in a film about two sentient dolls? It was only a matter of time before we got here, let's be honest.

The addition of Tiffany Valentine allows for a totally valid reason to shake things up- creative kills, high-speed freeway chases with two DOLLS holding two whole adult humans hostage, and the film's only gay character (spoiler but RIP David) getting absolutely blasted by an 18-wheeler for no reason other than Don probably just realized the cast needed to shrink real quick.

Special mention-

The honeymoon suite kill scene. Yeah, it looks a little cheesy, but you best believe before I was old enough to watch horror movies, my older cousin was telling me about this scene in vivid, terrifying detail (much scarier than reality, but what can you do?)

Soundtrack- 4.5/5

Living Dead Girl starts this movie off with a bang and a moment I haven't forgotten for one second of my spooky sapphic life. These are the moments in which horror icons are made.

The soundtrack is mostly upbeat drums and chugging guitar riffs which I loved (it especially added to the freeway chase) I just didn't go full 5 stars because I didn't notice it as much as I'd want to in a party movie like this (because yes, if I ever do host a halloween party I will be popping in this exact VHS to play on repeat).

Also shout out to my boy, Graeme Revell. Been a legend since The Crow in my eyes (but also for so much iconic 80s and 90s horror....and Sharkboy and Lavagirl) and I'll always get excited when I see that name in the credits!

Effects- 4.75/5

First let me say Chucky looks fantastic. Can he emote as well as Tiffany with those pencil-thin eyebrows? Maybe not but this is the opus version of Chucky, so.

The animatronics are still my favorite thing to watch in a Chucky film because you forget that these aren't sentient dolls almost constantly (except when Chucky's body double is crawling on all fours- that's some nightmare fuel). Their faces are so expressive (for rubber doll faces) and there's even a shot of Tiffany walking across the floor of a Winnebago (maybe?) without a wire in sight! Oh, how far we've come.

The effects in some scenes are a little cheesy (the honeymoon suite kill, the gross, fleshy title card, etc) but it's easily overlooked because Chucky and Tiffany are by far the main event of the sfx team.

Extra ratings?

Queerness-3/5

Written by an out gay man, HELLO!

Alexis Arquette!! Easily the second-hottest person in this movie, I loved seeing her camp it up (in a masc role, but goths love to play with androgyny so I'll take it) as the try-hard Damien.

This also unexpectedly features the gbff trope usually reserved for rom-coms in David, a guy whose queerness isn't painfully exaggerated like some portrayals were at the time, and who's probably the most level-headed of the bunch.

RIP, -2 because David got blasted by a big rig and not in the fun way.

Bride of Frankenstein retelling 5/5

It's pretty obvious on rewatch, but this is a whole Bride of Frankenstein retelling. It even follows the title convention (I tell my younger self who completely missed the comparison). I haven't read the dissections of the original that explain why the bride is a metaphor, but in a more literal sense, this Bride has the power unlike her predecessor. Even though she falls in with a toxic ex, she has autonomy and pushes back, eventually sort of kind of helping the two teens (who are not interesting enough to put in this review) stop Chucky. And she gives birth to a weird demon baby while mostly charred through a non-stretch plastic vagina so. That's pretty metal.

Tiffany Valentine 11/5

TIFFANY VALENTINE THE WOMAN THAT YOU ARE

THE COSTUMING

THE TRAILER SET DRESSING

But most of all the performance!!!

I may be looking through heart eyes, but I'm not wrong!

Overall, Bride of Chucky will never not be one of my favorites. The addition of Jennifer Tilly allowed the Child's Play series (and all future iterations), to have fun, but to also play with the tone of its installments. Seed of Chucky and the Chucky series tend to focus on Chucky (and friends)'s humanity and personalities, whereas Curse and Cult of Chucky take the franchise back to an exciting, sometimes scary, and eventually openly queer and complicatedly sapphic place. Ignoring the reboot (which he was thankfully not responsible for), Don Mancini's got quite a legacy going, and Ronny Yu had a key part in that.

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Jane Schoenbrun and the Screen Trilogy

Director Jane Schoenbrun’s “Screen Trilogy” seems set to define a period that feels deeply personal to those whose adolescence was shaped by the meteoric rise of the internet and the isolating comfort of technology.

Using a cohesive blend of glowing cool-toned hues, long, lingering shots, and scores and soundtracks that perfectly evoke teen ennui and lonely melancholy, Schoenbrun has used the allure of the screen to craft dreamlike meditations on identity, isolation, and transness that leave viewers feeling so seen.

A quick glance at the tumblr tag, letterboxd reviews, or TikTok videos shows one common thread: Thank you, Jane. And it's well-earned from the beginning. (More under the cut)

With the first installment of the Screen Trilogy, Schoenbrun tackles the questioning of identity through fears generated from unrestricted childhood internet access (something that usually gave the millennial generation something we can never unsee). we’re all going to the world’s fair follows Casey, a teen who partakes in the viral World’s Fair Challenge that leads to an ambiguous separation of self that leaves the audience questioning whether Casey was truly losing herself or merely participating in an elaborate, creepypasta-fueled MMORPG. When speaking about the film with The Hollywood Reporter, Schoenbrun says,

“It really resonated and reminded me of something I went looking for online in my own youth, which was an effort to remove myself from my body and my identity and exist in a space where I could express myself creatively, and perhaps even explore myself personally, outside of ‘the real world.’”

Casey mentions at one point that she can feel herself leaving her body, adding to the overarching theme of dysphoria.

This and many other vulnerable moments are shared through video which is really the only way the audience gets to know Casey, a key piece of information when JLB comes into play. Like us, JLB sees Casey expressing a number of concerning symptoms and thoughts. JLB reaches out to Casey, an adult man reaching out to “save” a teenager he knows nothing about. The adolescents of the internet age know this character all too well.

Between the unspoken disquiet of JLB’s “guardianship” and the time spent with Casey out in the barn in the middle of the night watching ASMR videos with her stuffed lemur, Poe, Schoenbrun’s work reaches out to the kids who, like them, found solace on the internet. We found a world that was bigger than our little towns, we found ways to self-soothe (visual stim videos come to mind as the new ASMR), and sometimes we found people like JLB (we basically made Chris Hansen the hero he is- we love Chris Hansen). For the first time, the isolated, sometimes trans or questioning, internet kid in us felt seen.

Schoenbrun slapped us with nostalgia again in 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow, a magenta-saturated amalgamation of teenage ennui and suburban melancholy that pushes through your ribcage, reaching for your heart without you even noticing until 2/3 of the way through, your frantically beating heart is ripped from your chest among screaming tv static and sparks, leaving you silent in the face of wails of unimaginable pain and need.

Soft-spoken 7th grader Owen meets 9th grader Maddy who’s reading the episode guide for The Pink Opaque- a Buffy-style 90s paranormal teen show Owen has only caught glimpses of, but that he’s totally fascinated with. The two watch an episode together, and as Maddy leaves Owen tape after tape to watch on his own, the pull of The Pink Opaque becomes impossible to ignore.

Schoenbrun is open about it- “I really did live and breathe Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I cared about Buffy more than I cared about my real life”. The same was true for a lot of us. Millennial kids weren’t quite the latchkey kids of the 80s but also weren’t yet the iPad kids of the late 00s. Parents were still learning how to parent and were either too controlling (like Owen’s parents) or too absent (like Maddy’s). Piggybacking on the theme of identity from world’s fair, the kids that didn’t see themselves reflected in popular media or the cliques at school would become masters of escapism, using books, movies, or TV shows like Buffy (it was Charmed for me) to create an inner world where they felt safe, wanted, seen.

Where world’s fair is about the loss and search for identity, I Saw the TV Glow tackles the question of “what next?” What do you do when you know time isn’t moving right, that life isn’t supposed to feel like this? When you learn exactly how to fix it but it sounds absolutely terrifying and insane?

Maddy has no hesitation. “I’m getting out of this town…I’ll die if I stay here. I don’t know how or when exactly, but I know it’s true.” Owen, like Isabel in The Pink Opaque, Maddy says, is afraid of what’s inside him. In Variety, Schoenbrun comments on their differences.

“What we experience through Maddy is this ultimate self-liberation: you have to destroy yourself totally in order to be reborn as who you really are. … Maddy knows that there’s somewhere where she can be full and it’s not worth staying in this place.”

The film encloses a number of deeply disturbing, viscerally upsetting scenes in monologues that connect the audience with feelings of dysphoria, of the disjointed way trans people experience time, and the fear of that time running out in conjunction with the fear of the future. Like world’s fair, the conclusion is ambiguous, but more hopeful in its way. It acknowledges the pain, the fear, the sheer exhaustion of transitioning, but proves it as a method of survival, and reassures the audience, “there is still time”, before leaving them with a cut to pink static where they can cry it out to some Frances Quinlan.

Not too much is known about their third installment, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but Schoenbrun explains that it both pays homage to and critiques the lineage of trans and queer villains as sexual deviants. The New Yorker sums it up as follows:

“[Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma] follows a queer filmmaker hired to direct a new installment of a long-running slasher franchise. The director fixates on the prospect of casting the “final girl” from the original movie, and the two women descend into a frenzy of psychosexual mania.”

Slated to be gorier and funnier (thank God) than the previous installments, Schoenbrun is now turning to the aftermath of transition and the reclaiming of identity through sex, an important and often overlooked facet of transness. They’ve also sold a book, Public Access Afterworld, originally meant to be a TV show but now taken down in literary form. Schoenbrun hopes it will rival franchises like Sandman or Lord of the Rings in its scope, finally giving trans media an epic of its own.

All this fan can say is I can’t wait.

Sources:

Jane Schoenbrun Finds Horror Close to Home | The New Yorker

'I Saw the TV Glow' Director Jane Schoenbrun on A24 Film's Trans Meaning (variety.com)

How We’re All Going to the World’s Fair Grew Out of Internet’s Subconscious (hollywoodreporter.com)

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Deeply intensely cool thing in I Saw The TV Glow where as a child Owen finds The Pink Opaque (the act of transitioning) as the coolest most amazing thing ever, completely changing her view of the world and making her obsessed with this thing that's changed her life, then as she grows up and gets beaten down by her repressive father and capitalistic hell she buys a new cool LG TV and streams it only to find that all of a sudden The Pink Opaque (the act of transitioning) is corny, it's embarrassing, it's annoying, its not good, just to wrap it all back around again and have the show confront her with all her pain and suffering and dysphoria to the point that she tries to kill herself.

I don't think I've ever seen a film, show, or even a novel depict transitioning and how society beats us down into belittling it, changing our views on it, hiding the truth of it, better than this movie.

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My “I saw the TV glow” experience:

First 40 minutes: haha this must be how I look when I talk about the X-Files lmao

Every subsequent moment: this cuts too close this cuts too close this cuts too close this cuts too close this cuts too close this cuts too close this cuts too close

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i saw the tv glow is kinda the embodiment of that meme that’s like “i think i’m trans but i have a job so i’m not gonna worry about that right now”

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As much as I Saw The TV Glow is about the anxiety and fear that comes before you transition it's like. I think it's like, so great about showing what being a latent tgirl looks like and what it feels like and like yeah. Here's this person that looks like a dude and who thinks they're a dude but like it's just not-quite right, but still they have to play along w/ the whole boy thing no matter how not-quite-right it is just out of inertia and others' expectation. And here's how like this profound feeling identification w/ another girl and girlness in general looks like as it plays across their face. And this is how having that affects your relationships. Oh and here's the moment when they dip their toes into occupying a girl's role socially and it just makes so much more sense, but then how scary that is for someone that everyone expects to be a boy, or a gay boy or something. And here's how immense and valuable it is to them to have a relationship w/ someone who doesn't expect that from them. It's such a dramatic position to be in and like. God what a movie, it did it so well

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You can tell that I Saw The TV Glow has had a profound effect on people because one of the main characters looks directly into the camera and says "i pissed and shit my pants" and people aren't really even making jokes about it