Homophone Double Feature (3 of 4)

Jul 27, 2023

I’m puttering away on The Journal of Wordplay, and if you’re waiting to hear from me about your piece, you won’t be waiting much longer! Meantime, as promised, here’s more of the series I started last week.

Four of these movies are a bit on the B-movie side, to be honest. But collectively, they still make interesting pairings.

[•REC] is a found-footage zombie film considered one of the best, maybe the best, of its kind. Reporters doing a ride-along with firefighters find themselves sealed in with an infectious evil. Wreck is another horror movie about being trapped and a legendary monster—Bigfoot this time—but it’s nowhere near its homophone in quality. (You’re better off with the new horror-comedy TV series on Hulu.)

Warning: These are horror movies…don’t click the video trailers or samples unless you want to see!

Made for Each Other is a Jimmy Stewart dramedy about making it work when you get married after a single day’s courtship. (There are a couple of other romcoms by that name which, trust me, you don’t want to know about.) Maid for Each Other is a Nell Carter buddy movie featuring a rich woman and her maid fleeing a gang of mobsters and trying to gather evidence to put the mobsters away before their luck runs out.

In Officer Down, Stephen Dorff plays a cop with a shady past investigating a series of murders at a strip club. In Officer Downe, Kim Coates plays a cop resurrected from the dead to attack bad guys and, uh, that’s about it for the plot. Down and Downe both play up the action-movie schlock, but Down is just exaggerating it a little, whereas Downe is as goofy as it gets. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really have the budget to make its silliness look cool. Neither movie is especially popular or good or notable, but they might start a discussion of how cop-hero flicks have fallen on hard times in the 2010s.

Finally, one more night-and-day juxtaposition for the road. Toni is an overlooked Renoir gem from 1935, a favorite of modern-day director Wes Anderson, about a star-crossed lover in France. The movie helped usher in the use of amateur actors and Tony is an award-winning portrait of a London serial killer: not for the squeamish but more a character study than a traditional horror story.