IMPORTANT NOTE: please use a VPN whenever visiting Hextube, or anywhere else on the internet, for that matter. Protect your privacy.

For this Friday Movie Night, first up is Onibaba (1964), a Japanese Sengoku-period folk horror about a woman whose son goes off to war, leaving her to live with her daughter-in-law. The son dies, and the DIL starts an affair with their neighbor; the mom grows jealous and uses an evil demon mask to scare off the DIL, jokerfying herself in the process. Spookiness ensues. This is one of the most acclaimed Japanese horror films of all time, and is considered one of the best films of renowned auteur Kaneto Shindo, who is otherwise best-known for Kuroneko (1968), which we will also have to watch sometime. Looks neat; let’s check it out.

After that is Challengers (2024), the latest from Call Me By Your Name (2017) and Suspiria (2018) director Luca Guadanigno. A young tennis coach (played by Zendaya) seeks to get her tennis-player husband out of his losing rut by enrolling him in a low-level tournament, where he just so happens to be matched against her ex-boyfriend. What’s more, they start woogin’ for each other, and they form a throuple, and the competition heats up in tandem with the romance. Critics are raving about this one; it is one of the top-rated films of the year so far. So, we’ll give it a whirl.

We’ll start at 8PM EST on Hextube – no, wait, scratch that, Hextube is down, so we’re meeting on the old Cytube room:

https://cytu.be/r/hexbear

Be there, comrades!