Watched Budd Boetticher’s The Tall T a couple weeks ago - remarkably brutal, unsentimental 50s Western about an independent sort of guy who ends up on a stagecoach that gets held up and the rich couple with them held for ransom. Manages to give all the villains some level of humanity, even the psycho named Chink, while never downplaying how awful their behavior is. Good movie!

Went to my local microcinema’s free secret cinema event last week, they showed Wicked Ways, or A Table For One. Truly strange domestic drama of sorts from 1999, Rebecca de Mornay plays Ruth, a deeply unstable woman with a habit of setting booby traps around her rural home, married to Michael Rooker, who has a secret family in the big city. Another troubled couple moves in next door and things get increasingly tangled. It’s kind of like a Lifetime movie where every character is a devious psycho. Reminded me a little of Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye but I genuinely had no idea where it was going the entire way through. De Mornay’s performance is pretty incredible - the scene of her pointing a gun at her husband while shouting “tell Ruth the truth!” is really going to stay with me. Highly recommended, available on Tubi!

The next day went to the same cinema to see Belinda M. Wilson’s Black Mamba. Was introduced with “y’know, when talking about this movie, people will bring up Neil Breen and Tommy Wiseau, and I hope we don’t offend anybody, but fuck those guys, this is the real shit.” They were right, this might genuinely be the most insane movie I’ve ever seen. Black Mamba is a magician/witch doctor who makes potions with her collection of demons in jars and has the ability to transform people into furniture or send them to Hell. Various people come to her for help - a couple wants to be able to have a child, a young woman wants to be beautiful, a dude wants to meet some mermaids - and she provides them with potions and very specific, usually gross, instructions. Invariably their wishes go horribly wrong and their lives are destroyed. It’s kind of impossible to describe how nuts this movie is, the green-screen usage is out of control, the actors are giving community theater-level performances but are also doing blood-covered sex scenes with full frontal male nudity. There’s very little information out there about anyone involved, though supposedly the writer/director claims that Black Mamba is based on a family member. Go see it if you get the chance, buy Black Mamba stock early, it’s going to the moon.