Documentaries, Horror and Wholesome, Now Available to Stream

For this latest dispatch from Quarantinage Wasteland, I don’t want to dwell on the miserable injustices and scary statistics the world is dealing us right now, because my goal is to minimize the time spent screaming into the sky and terrifying the deer. Praeterition has always been a preferred rhetorical device of mine, so I just want to say that we’ve got to do better at taking care of each other. And this means you, Gov. Bill Lee.

Anyway, look back at my past streaming recommendations in the March 26, April 2 and April 9 issues of the Scene, and read on for what’s on deck this week. (Links to trailers are included with each film.)

808 on Amazon Prime

If you’ve been missing the Belcourt’s Music City Mondays series, here’s a music-related documentary that will put some pep in your step — and contains no rockist clichés whatsoever. Detailing the history of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, 808 is a vibrant and perceptive doc about the way sounds pollinate creativity, and its soundtrack is peerless, covering the worlds of dance and hip-hop with a curator’s eye and a party’s ear. See also Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami on Amazon Prime, one of the best films of 2018 and a fitting tribute to one of the unheralded icons of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.

Eyes of Laura Mars on The Criterion Channel

This taut and glamorous American giallo is so quintessentially ’70s that its very existence feels like a day well spent at the museum of sleek lines and cocaine excess. Fashion photographer Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway at her best) creates raw and shocking work that incorporates sex and violence to sell all sorts of things. But it seems she’s also including visions of actual murders in her work, and once the killer knows he has a psychic audience, the game is afoot! This film is artful mayhem and disco decadence and beauty and horror all mixed up, and it’s why director Irvin Kershner was assigned The Empire Strikes Back, which was released two years later. It features René Auberjonois and Tommy Lee Jones, along with two different amazing psychic disco freak-out sequences.

The Sender on Hulu

Part of the lineup at the Belcourt’s 2019 installation of the all-night horror fest 12 Hours of Terror, The Sender, released in 1982, is a smart and subtle thriller about a psychologist (Kathryn Harrold) with a new patient (Željko Ivanek). Ivanek’s character is recovering from several decades of trauma, and he can broadcast his dreams and subconscious thoughts across great distances. This is a weird and beautiful film with one of the greatest slow-motion effects shots in the history of cinema — you can see the Chris Cunnigham/Aphex Twin visual aesthetic being born here. The Sender features a moody, melancholy tone that complements its Georgia exteriors.

Pooka Lives on Hulu

The first sequel in the ongoing series and Blumhouse/Hulu collaboration Into the Dark, Pooka Lives finds the weird/lovable/terrifying Pooka (a fluffy friend with giant, beacon-like eyes and a circuit to record the last thing you said and repeat it back) brought back with an archetypal backstory and a date with destiny. A copywriter invents a creepypasta-based mythos for the toy, which gains strength from the collective belief of the internet, and then before you know it you’ve got a ghoulish, jokey riff on Halloween III for the Influencer Age. Jonah Ray almost completely steals the whole thing.

The Straight Story on Disney+

A G-rated David Lynch film streaming on Disney+. The Straight Story is beautiful and devastating, with incredible performances from Sissy Spacek and Richard Farnsworth. (Yeah, giving that Best Actor Oscar to Kevin Spacey for American Beauty sure has aged well on every possible front.) This is the act of forgiveness given the proper cinematic and moral weight it deserves, following one man across the country on a lawnmower as he tries to make amends. You will cry your face off.

Strike a Pose on Netflix

If you’ve seen Madonna’s Truth or Dare, or the HBO special about her 1990 Blonde Ambition Tour, then you know her ragtag troupe of backup dancers. The mostly gay, Benetton-diverse, incredibly gifted dancers worked (and werked) nightly all over the world’s stages, but they also helped bring the magic and the mundane of being a gay person and living your life to audiences who might never have experienced that before. The intervening years have been fraught on many levels, and it’s tense and right to meet back up with these performers (with the unfortunate exception of the late Gabriel Trupin). This movie is going to put you through it. It’s a great complement to Season 2 of FX’s Pose, where so much hope was placed on how “Vogue” was lifting and amplifying voices that the mainstream had never gotten to hear before. And it’s always entertaining to spend some time with the Madonna who was determined to be as fun as she was provocative. But this doc does address the complicated nature of who Madonna is and what the legacy of Truth or Dare is, and it is essential viewing for that, and for letting these dancers tell their stories.

The Limey on IMDb TV and Tubi

Before he won Best Picture for Traffic and collectively leveled up the way audiences processed multiple stories happening at the same time, Steven Soderbergh made one of the most influential films of the past 40 years. The Limey is Terence Stamp, heading to Los Angeles to find out why his daughter died of an overdose. But The Limey is also the film that allows viewers to unlock the way that the process of editing helps tell stories. It’s a brisk and relentless story, with a killer supporting cast (Lesley Anne Warren, Joe Dallesandro, Nicky Katt and Luis Guzmán!) and an inevitability that you feel in every cut. Truly one of the great films of 1999.