The Return of Ichi the Chiller
Gonna be doing this a little more regularly again
It’s been a while. A lot’s changed. I left New York. Now I’m back in New York. I’ve watched a heaping shit ton of movies. I missed talking about movies here. So I’m starting this thing back up, although it might be a little different, a little like The Return of Godzilla or Twin Peaks: The Return, it’ll be weirder and darker. This is gonna be a little run down of what that might look like.
In the past I’ve covered a wide range of movies from modern day to the dawn of the medium, and outside of a few exceptions I’d like to narrow that focus down. I’ll get into it more in my 2023 movies post that I’ve been saying I’ll write for over a year now (I promise it’s finally done now), but I’ve really lost interest in most modern movies. It felt like an obligation to have an opinion about the big new releases and I’d much rather tell you about something weird you might not know about. So once I get that 2023 (and now a little bit of 2024) post out don’t expect too much stuff made after 2008 (the year the MCU began). Of course there will be some ooze that seeps through the cracks, but I’m really trying to keep it to a minimum.
Something else that might be a little different is the format. Usually I’ve had each movie contained into its own section because that felt right for film criticism. But I’ve never really thought of myself as a film critic. Sure, superficially I am saying what I do and don’t enjoy about movies, but I’ve kind of thought of these as more like personal essays that use movies to explore my relationship with art and my life experiences. So I’m not going to be dividing them into their own sections with the movie title bolded and the movie posters separating them into little bubbles. I’m hoping this will let the ideas flow better and help people see the connections I’m trying to draw.
I also won’t be doing the monthly roundup posts with mini-reviews for every movie I watch anymore. It takes too much time and I have too much other stuff I want to work on. If you want to track what I’m watching, 2025 is the first year I’ve been logging everything I watch on Letterboxd rather than just rating them and moving on. If you follow me there you might catch the rare instances where I’m compelled to leave a review too, and probably find some cool gems that won’t be covered here.
I’ve got a lot planned to form this new era of Ichi the Chiller. Some things to look forward to in the coming months are that 2023/2024 post, a Halloween season 2024 series, an update to an older post, revisiting some of the movies I previously covered but want to go more in-depth and give a better chance to (like Cannibal Holocaust or Blood Massacre), a sequel to the sharksploitation post, a series on pornographic movies from different eras and regions, and plenty of other surprises and weird connections.
I’ve also got a lot of other stuff cooking that exist beyond the boundaries of this blog. I talked before about how I was starting to write poetry again. I’ve written a lot for my book, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. The book started out as a collection of grief poems that focused on my emotional state dealing with a major loss, but I’ve been thinking of death more conceptually lately and want to explore that more as the book takes shape. This is gonna add at least another year to the writing process as I develop and incorporate these new ideas. But that’s not all, I’ve got another expansion for the project that will add even more time! You see, the book isn’t really just a book anymore. There were a lot of things that led to this I’ll talk more about when it’s in a more complete state, but the book is now a collage film. This means once I’m done writing and editing, I’ll record myself reading the poems and pair the audio with clips from movies, footage I filmed myself (on my phone), music videos, episodes of The Simpsons, etc. This not only means that I’ll be adding to the writing process by having to consider how to incorporate audio/video elements, but I also don’t know how to edit. I’ve been playing around with iMovie and you can see the result on my, ugh, YouTube channel (I’m so sorry).
The first thing I made was the Junesploitation 2024 Mixtape, a compilation of trailers and clips from the movies I watched for F This Movie’s Junesploitation challenge. One of the movies, Iced, didn’t have a trailer I could find at the time so I threw together my own, and snuck in a little Smirnoff Ice reference for the real ones. And if you didn’t think I could say trailer in any more in this one paragraph, the second thing I made was a trailer for my trailer compilation. This was a lot of fun because it required something closer to actual editing as I had to condense every movie into a three and a half minute canto-pop song. Please check them out and keep an eye out for more while I continue to mess around with iMovie and eventually graduate to a real deal editing software.
And this brings us to the final piece of business, and I hate to end with something so vile, so despicable, but I have to. Podcasts. Yes, podcasts as in more than one podcast. I know, I’m sorry, just know that one day I will face the consequences of my actions when I’m called to the stand of my final judgment. Anyways, when I started this blog I was also working on a podcast where my friend and I would watch every Palme d’Or winner called Cannes We Do It. I’ve been sitting on a handful of recordings for over a year and have made no attempt to edit them. That’s my bad, but maybe someday we’ll start recording again and those will see the light of day. And now for the second podcast.
This is still in the embryo stage so I’ll be brief, another friend and I have been talking about a podcast discussing mid-budget movies. It’s still pretty far, but is something else on the horizon. Seems like a lot, a book, a blog, editing projects, some podcasts, oh my. But if I’m a Good Girl it’ll be less of a juggling act and more like strategically moving things on and off burners. So expect a lot more stuff happening here, I promise there won’t be any more year long gaps between posts, but also keep in mind that there may be the occasional break in content as I shift focus between other projects. Thank you for continuing to read and I look forward to babbling in your general direction more soon.
Hell Yeah!!