Apologies for the long hiatus! We’ve struggled to find something that we loved enough to cajole you into watching it or hated enough to save you the trouble, but we’re beyond that now. The time has come to review David Mackenzie’s brilliant Texas heist flick - HELL OR HIGH WATER.

This dusty gem of an outlaw picture almost passed us by. We caught the trailer before SWISS ARMY MAN (satisfyingly strange!) and immediately wanted - needed - to give it our money. If you’d seen the trailer before whatever summer blockbuster you’ve supported, it would have opened nationwide and been the blockbuster you didn’t know you needed. Currently playing in select cities, please consider HELL OR HIGH WATER.

Two brothers, an ex con and a divorced dad, decide to rob branches of the bank that holds the reverse mortgage on their childhood home, pay off the bank with the returns, and start a trust for the divorcee’s two sons. The ex con (Ben Foster finally returning to my life) is a bit of a loose canon but played and written so well that he can believably walk the line. The father (Chris Pine) is the antihero (or hero? It’s so hard to tell these days!) of our tale. The ranch just struck oil, and he’ll be damned if the bank is gonna see the profit off of black gold. Two aging Texas Rangers (Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham) pursue the duo across west Texas, trading barbs and talking about retirement.

Laced across the literary work of genius is the economic reality that many creative projects are currently mining (MR. ROBOT, etc.), and of which I wholeheartedly approve. I can’t even fault Taylor Sheridan for including so few scenes with female characters, as it only reminds me that there are no small roles in this play, and his SICARIO script was such an amazing turn for Emily Blunt last year. Mackenzie’s direction flawlessly shifts from the one liners to the tense, gritty action sequences, and even to a heartbreaking loss in the final act, and I feel compelled to watch all of his work that I missed between YOUNG ADAM (2003) and now. If enough of us watch HELL OR HIGH WATER in these select cities, maybe this will even make it to west Texas. And it sure as hell should. - Jenna

HELL OR HIGH WATER is Texan as hell, and nails small town Texas characters: the good ol’ boys, the old timers, the concealed carry cowboys, and the rattlesnake waitresses. But I’m not sure I’ve seen such a perfect film in a long time. The only flaw this movie has is that it was shot in New Mexico and not in Texas. But this movie fulfills all of my fantasies of robbing small town Texas banks, shooting at Texas lawmen, and winning money from Okie casinos. If you’re like me and complain that Hollywood doesn’t produce enough Texas outlaw movies these days, then get out and give some money to HELL OR HIGH WATER. - Levi

We spent most of the day after Christmas at the movies in order to bring you this review of Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film THE HATEFUL EIGHT. Also, you know, to catch it in “glorious 70mm.”

I miss Sally Menke. While there are some projects that Menke worked on that I could pass on ever watching again (KILL BILL), I do worry that we will never see a great movie from Tarantino again, and I believe he had just hit his stride with INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and DEATH PROOF. After DJANGO UNCHAINED and THE HATEFUL EIGHT, I can only think that in Menke Tarantino had (and lost) an incredible collaborator who was able to influence his pictures in the best way. Something else might be going on, but the bottom line is THE HATEFUL EIGHT is not an incredible achievement worthy of what the mantle I once considered a Tarantino film.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is long. Clocking in at over three hours with two overtures and an intermission (for the roadshow version - the wide release will be twenty minutes shorter - I wish the roadshow had been), I can’t help but feel a little miffed that Angelina Jolie Pitt gets accused of making BY THE SEA as a vanity project*, but this doesn’t. Let’s call a spade a spade and admit that reviving 70mm with printed programs, intermission, and a three hour stretch definitely falls in the category of vanity. I don’t know that vanity should connote lack of quality or gravitas, like it does, but reinventing the wheel for a passion project does sound like vanity to me.

The overture is beautifully done by Ennio Morricone. Tarantino’s decision to finally have an original score composed is brilliant and the best part of the movie; although, he does include a few overtures from other pictures as is his usual M.O.. The snowscapes of Colorado look gorgeous on 70mm, but there aren’t too many wide exteriors after the opening montage of a coach and horses racing to beat a blizzard. 

The story begins with bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) trying to hitch a ride with another bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell), who is transporting another bounty - this one alive - Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock to hang. Warren gets his ride, and Ruth punches Daisy in the face, coldcocks her with his pistol, and I think something else violent and heinous happens to basically the only woman in the story within the first five minutes. She’s supposed to be a bad person, but c’mon, are you fucking kidding me? Zoe Bell, thankfully, is in the movie, albeit briefly, but the lack of women and insane level of violence committed upon them by men in their few minutes of screen time is pretty jaw dropping, even for Tarantino. I would also like to add that DEATH PROOF, which is probably my second favorite QT picture, is usually dismissed by Tarantino as a lesser work, and that JACKIE BROWN and KILL BILL have terrific female protagonists. I couldn’t hazard a guess as to why women have been excised from DJANGO and HATEFUL, but I loathe the trend.

The performances are excellent across the board with HATEFUL 8 (#SO to Walton Goggins!), and the gore is at an absurd maximum here. I found several exchanges of dialog and wit to be quite fun, but pretty much nothing happens except chatter for the first half of the movie, aka an hour and a half of my life. The story unfolds like a play, squandering the 70mm on interiors and conversations instead of the epic mountainsides which are photographed so beautifully. Tarantino and Director of Photography Robert Richardson’s choice of shots to tell the story is just as brilliant as the rest of Tarantino’s work, but the story is bloated and even a little futile. I give Tarantino credit for at least confronting the elephant in the room (i.e. solution ‘A’ would solve your problem and change the entire course of this story), so I wasn’t left scratching my head and thinking the final showdown could have been avoided. It was not enough to carry the story for me, though, and I wish someone (Harvey Weinstein? Bob?) would hold him to a two hour movie again. Also, it’s too bad DJANGO or INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS wasn’t shot on 70mm. Those stories would have been served well by an epic lens. Alas! - Jenna

Levi took the yellow stripe up his back for sitting this one out. We’ll see if Hollywood drums me out for this review? Haha.

*I have not seen BY THE SEA and cannot comment on its content. As I’ve said on this blog previously, movies with people arguing in a room are not my cup of tea, but I guess I got stuck with HATEFUL 8 anyway. Sigh.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with the five hour original (actual?) Indian gangster flick by Anurag Kashyap - GANGS OF WASSEYPUR on Fandor.

A veritable masterpiece in the gangster genre, GANGS OF WASSEYPUR covers three generations of the Khan clan in a corrupt mining state in northeast India. The Khans vie against the Singhs for power, control, and revenge. This is a little more like watching Fredo raise a family than capturing Michael’s astute rise to power, and it’s all the more fun for it. We don’t get enough of the catalytic patriarch Shaheed Khan (Jaideep Ahlawat). We spend a little too much time with his philandering asshat of a son Sardar Khan (Manoj Bajpayee), but even he occasionally amuses and leaves us with several sons sparring for the role of don. The ultimate godfather being Faizal Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who is certainly my favorite.

The movie is admittedly long (technically 2 parts). It could be shorter if the montage sequences set to music (but not dance!) were cut, but I’m not sure I would want that. The soundtrack is dope as fuck, and while the story isn’t really moving during the not quite Bollywood as I knew it music scenes, the lyrics and beats are killer. GANGS opens with a one shot capturing an attack on the current Khan in charge. I didn’t think the action scenes could be more epic than the opening, but I was mistaken multiple times. Also, what an excellent use of slow mo! This movie is not for the faint of constitution, but if you’re a HARDBOILED fan, do yourself a favor and check out GANGS OF WASSEYPUR. - Jenna

So… we spent the holiday watching the 5h 14m Bollywood epic, GANGS OF WASSEYPUR. How do you review a 5 hour film that spans 70 years and 4 generations of family? As quick as possible. This was like watching 5 seasons of Game of Thrones, in the way that it’s crazy violent and every time you learn to love a character… they’re killed by their literal fatal flaw. My only complaint here is that there were a few points where you can tell the writer forced characters to make stupid choices and die instead of the characters themselves. But oh well.
But let’s get to the important thing here: the music. Being a Bollywood film, it had several sequences where there were song and dance numbers that fit into the reality of the movie. The soundtrack killed it (with the exception of a few weird electronic tracks), and also made me realize how bawdy Bollywood lyrics are. Every single song was explicit enough to force me to think of comparisons in English… of which I’ve come up with none. The F-bomb is not used nearly as poetically over here.

Killer sound track. Killer action. Killer characters. Definitely the best 5 hour movie I’ve seen. The one thing that made me sad, is that the my favorite character in the movie (maybe best actor too?) punches his time card very, very early. Oh! I forgot that this movie taught be a valuable lesson – if you’re going to India, avoid Wasseypur. - Levi

Daniel Craig, Sam Mendes, and John Logan are back together for 007′s latest non-assignment - SPECTRE.

I’m so glad it’s their last. Good grief. The most interesting thing about SPECTRE is above and beyond Daniel Craig’s seeming war of attrition against the property itself (and perhaps the hurdles one has to jump in order to be in a mega blockbuster action picture these days). Click here for his comments on misogyny and Bond (briefly) sleeping with a woman his own age and here for him (jokingly?) saying he’d slit his own wrists rather than play Bond again. Note that they cut out the part of the quote where Craig says Monica Bellucci is his own age in the Times mention. Also, Idris Elba for Bond!!!

Now for SPECTRE itself. What a snoozefest. The opening scene in Mexico City was riveting; although, the helicopter twirling through the sky was outsized maybe even for Bond. The movie quickly tanked after that with Bond being under house arrest again. Sneaking out. Again. People died. Cars are destroyed. The story gets pretty convoluted. There is a major plot on excessive surveillance, which could have been great but simply wasn’t.  Christoph Waltz is sort of wasted as the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E., which used to be so fun in old Bond pics. The studio doesn’t seem to want to bring the infamous syndicate of evil back for the long haul, and I’m a little bummed. 

Now for the ladies - as much as the Monica Bellucci quote got bandied about the internet - the real Bond girl who isn’t tragically killed off at the end like everyone’s favorite Vesper Lynd (the genius Eva Green) is 30-year-old Lea Seydoux to Craig’s 47 years of age. Bellucci gets two scenes. The Seydoux/Craig romance is haphazard, as most of Bond’s seem to be excluding the aforementioned CASINO ROYALE and ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE, and pretty banal, just like the rest of the movie. Seydoux as Dr. Madeleine Swann assists in a kill, and then they ask, ‘What should we do now?’ A roll in the hay, obviously. (If you’re going back to old, campy Bond, just go all the way already)

Perhaps my biggest regret with SPECTRE is that is employs the gravitas of CASINO ROYALE and SKYFALL without any actual dignity. Pass me a martini. Just make it strong. - Jenna

First, I just gotta say I miss the days where Bond films stood on their own. Villain of the year. But this current Daniel Craig run keeps building off the last movies like it’s an ongoing serial. I don’t remember who Bond fell in love with 3 movies back. I don’t remember who died last movie. I don’t remember anything at all from QUANTUM OF SOLACE. This isn’t LOTR, where people watch the other films in the franchise again leading up to the new release. As a result, I was confused by a good chunk of this movie, and bored by the rest of it. Someone needs to tell Hollywood that car chases suck. I know there are guys that put together “top 10 car chases” lists, but they all suck. BULLITT sucks. FRENCH CONNECTION sucks. Unless it’s MAD MAX, where the chases are heavily armed bat shit crazy car battles – you’re just watching a big budget car commercial. This Bond movie was full of those sort of boring set pieces. A boring car chase. A boring foot chase. A meh shoot out.

Still, I’d forgive boring set pieces and forgotten backstories if the villain was awesome. (SKYFALL) But this Christoph Waltz villain was so bland and boring that I literally couldn’t tell you anything he did or said. Hell, if I had to pick him up in a lineup I’d probably tell the cops my memory was kinda fuzzy. Oh! Oh! Oh! I almost forgot. The opening credits montage was the most absurd of any Bond film. It delves heavily into weird Japanese tentacle pR0n, and lots of naked Daniel Craig. I want my 3 hours back.* - Levi

*Note from Jenna - OMG. I can’t believe I forgot about the erotic opening credits with Daniel Craig nude, oiled up, and flames licking his chest. I feel like this alone makes my argument against CGI. Bring back credit sequences like FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE!

Our final review for this month, and two Iranian female directors two days in a row! Maybe times really are changing? (ha) It’s Marjane Satrapi’s THE VOICES 2014.

I remember looking through the Sundance reviews in 2014 and thinking, man, THE VOICES is so up my alley. I can’t wait til that comes out! Marjane Satrapi is, of course, better known for her graphic novel and movie adaptation of PERSEPOLIS, but that should never take someone out of the running for an utter gorefest like THE VOICES. A fragile young man loses his grip on reality, and his pets start giving orders. His cat, Mr. Whiskers, really wants blood.

I’m a Ryan Reynolds fan. Take that as you will, but when he cares about material, the guy delivers. Reynolds splinters his own personality by voicing the dog and the cat, good and evil if you will, and the result is bananas in all the best ways. THE VOICES is highly stylized and even has a musical number (squee!). It also fantastically balances the quirky horror comedy of the plot with the much heavier conceit that this man is very unwell. You feel sorry for Reynolds, and Satrapi’s direction really allows you to build up empathy for the character before pulling back the curtain to show the massive extent of skeletons in his closet.

Now for the bad news, I also missed this in theaters. Not because I wasn’t paying attention, but because big Hollywood didn’t put any money into a marketing campaign. I will say that this was partially because no one knew what to do with the movie since everything has to go in little boxes in this town. I will also say that, whether consciously related or not, the director is a woman, and significantly less money seems to go toward marketing our movies than men’s movies. Are you guys fans of Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s THE GUEST? Then you would looooove THE VOICES, but THE VOICES didn’t get the PR. You’re stuck with this basic Tumblr telling you that it’s awesome. Please watch and request movies made by a plurality of people. Not just straight, white dudes. Thanks! - Jenna

We’re on a tear with awesome cats. This movie has a cat so evil that he makes Salem from Sabrina the Teenage Witch look like a pussy-cat. I hate Ryan Reynolds as much as the next guy, but he kills it in this. If you let me spend a year in a room guessing what the creator of PERSEPOLIS would choose to be her first script to direct (without writing it herself) … I wouldn’t guess a pop dark comedy about a serial killer that keeps Dahmer'ing the women he loves at the behest of his homicidal cat. 

Were there tonal inconsistencies? Screw you. Tone is just an idea professors made up to help them sleep at night. Otherwise they’d have to deal with their own thoughts and emotions instead of what they think someone else intends them to feel and think. But I digress. This movie is at least the third movie we watched this month (that also came out this past year), which included insanely awesome dance numbers: A GIRL WALKS ALONE AT NIGHT’s transgender balloon dance, EX-MACHINA’s master/robo-sex slave coordinated dance number, and the end credits of this movie. What does this mean? If you want to please crowds these days, juxtapose a dance with something super dark. - Levi

You can find me (Jenna!) online, on Twitter, on Facebook, and on YouTube with my channel and my ZOMPIRE VIXENS FROM PLUTO! channel. You can find Levi on our couch. Stay tuned for less frequent missives, but more reviews and news all the same. Thanks!

Day 30, folks! Can you dig it? Tonight we visit Iran, by way of California, with Ana Lily Amirpour’s A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT 2014.

WHOA. I am so, so sorry that I am late to the party on this one. I showed up at Cinefamily to catch it on the big screen when it was running, but the show was sold out. I heard a few people call it slow and no rave reviews from friends, so I let it slip out of theaters. I’m a sucker and totally screwed up. Please give me another chance? Anyway, a lonely vampire vigilante stalks the streets of Bad City and unexpectedly finds a companion.

The pacing and breathtaking beauty of each shot reminds me of ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, but this movie actually has a story. Our vampiress, known only as The Girl, strikes down the most heinous drug dealing maniac within minutes. Take that, pacing! She proceeds to enchant a handsome loner with a gorgeous ride who seems to be stumbling through this world. She warns him that she’s bad, but damn, I wouldn’t care either. 

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT drips with mood, and not just because of the stellar black and white photography. It walks on the seedier side of life but tries not to judge unless your vice causes collateral damage. In which case, The Girl might be right behind you. Amirpour’s direction is nearly flawless. The racking focus seemed excessive, but this movie is amazing. Don’t fuck up your life like I almost did. Go watch A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE right meow! - Jenna

First, let’s all give a round of applause to the best cat acting of the year: Masuka the Cat. Masuka! I was told that this movie was slow, and that’s one of the reasons I put it on hold. But to me, a slow movie is Transformers 2 – a bunch of nothing happening as bright lights pulse signals of boredom back to your cerebral cortex. The second half of this movie essentially played out as 4 separate music videos with character just standing or sitting around looking at Masuka, or being looked at by Masuka. And I loved it. 

It’s my second favorite “young love” vampire flick behind LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. I don’t even want to bother analyzing whatever heavy handed metaphors were being thrown at us with the river bed of corpses or the transperson dancing with a black balloon. Screw any deeper meanings. I could watch “dracula” on E slowly edge toward the Girl with a soundtrack of White Lies songs in the background for the rest of my life and not think I wasted a moment. Oh, and there was some guy that looked like the Persian version of Ninja from Die Antwoord, who needs his own prequel. Dude was legit, with a tattoo game that knows no shame. He had the word “SEX” tatted across his throat!  My only complaint is that he and Masuka didn’t have their own slow mo music video together. *cough* Prequel *cough* - Levi

It’s the final countdown! Tonight we head to the Philippines for Yam Laranas’s THE ROAD 2011.

There is a road that nobody leaves, and I hope I won’t be visiting if/when I ever see the Philippines. In THE ROAD, the answers to a 12-year-old cold case are slowly uncovered when three teens take a joy ride down an abandoned road.

First, don’t steal your mom’s car. Just don’t. Now that we have that out of the way, the first part of this movie is pretty scary. There are many ghosts and unexplained phenomena, and it is very simple, strange, and creepy. The next two parts delve into the backstory more, and it becomes a crime thriller, losing the terror factor. I’m not saying I wrote this (because I didn’t), but I did call most of the twists and turns. With this film, it was much more fun to find out that I was right than it was a clichefest. 

The way Laranas set up the back story was compelling, and as I understand it, ghosts are a much bigger part of Philippino culture than American culture. I could see this as being very unsettling if you grow up where almost anyone who passes never really leaves. - Jenna

This was a solid movie circling around an abandoned road. It was divided into three parts. The first first was scary in a “we’re driving down the road… and weird ghost stuff happens” sorta way. Then the second part was sort of a SAW/HOSTEL style torture porn flick. Then the third was a PEEPING TOM/PSYCHO-type of messed up childhood story.The three wrapped up together pretty nicely. 

My only complaint is that the ethereal scares cease to exist after the first part, and the set-up of the “mysterious road that never ends and is haunted and stuff” never really pays off or makes sense. Bad shit happened on the road… so why are the ghosts of these victims now killing more innocent people? But that’s sort of a universal flaw of most ghost stories. I think there’s also a bunch of problems with the timelines in the movie, and some of the characters have illogical actions only to progress the story/misdirect the audience… but who cares. It’s a fun ride, and… I think I just realized something. Maybe the ghosts were just trying to getting people’s attention and accidentally scaring them to death along the way? Moral of the story: Ghosts are stupid jerkfaces that probably deserved to be traumatically murdered in the first place. - Levi

We arrive at our second found footage phenomenon, the movie to which we owe our eternal [fill in the blank] for theaters being awash in shaky cam scares - Oren Peli’s PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2007.

The movie that started it all. A couple in a McTownhouse begins to receive visitations from strange phenomena while recording it with, at the time, a top of the line consumer camera.

I had never seen this movie until tonight and for good reason. This really isn’t my type of flick. I respect it for its perhaps outsized influence on the horror landscape of the past ten years (and that budget!), but I am just not into EVPs, improv, shaky cam, or, honestly, jump scares. This movie has all of the above in spades, and you can check out the live tweet along on the subject.

I prefer a well-spun ghost story with deliberate photography, mood lighting, and crafted dialog. I guess I won’t be checking out any of the other entries in the series. - Jenna

The first time I watched this movie was alone, in my room, in the middle of the night, with the lights turned off. It was on my computer, and at the exact moment that the first BIG DEMON BANG happens in the movie, my monitor short circuited. That coincidence (was it?) meant this movie scared me more than anything else I’ve ever seen. Now I watched it well lit, with Jenna, on a nice TV, while she live tweeted and I figured out why we have to pay more in rent this month. This time around I wasn’t scared, so much as annoyed with Micah and constantly rooting for the demon to kill him. - Levi

We watch good and evil try to best each other with Timur Bekmambetov’s NIGHT WATCH 2004.

It’s been several years since I’ve seen this, and I have to admit it didn’t age well. The NIGHT WATCH keeps an eye on evil forces to make sure they don’t step out of line, but a regular night on the job leads to an epic struggle for control over the key to a prophecy.

The special effects were still kind of cool, but ten years have passed. CGI has improved tremendously. The script felt clunky and pacing slow now that I was actually paying attention to them, and even though there are many supernatural elements to this, like witches and vampires, it’s more of an action movie and not much for horror. If you missed this the first time around, perhaps it’s best left on the shelf. - Jenna

Ughh… this is the only movie this month that should not have been on this list.* This strikes me as one of those movies like RUN LOLA RUN that seemed super cool when it came out, but now is just pathetic. Kind of like a prom king at the 10 year high school reunion. This movie felt like a big budget version of a “WRITTEN BY A KID” episode; the mythos was lazily thrown together, the plot was randomly disconnected from itself, the allegory was heavy handed, and the characters seemed to only exist/act for the convenience of the other aforementioned parts. 

And don’t get me started on how the supreme ruler of darkness plays a shitty PS2 fighting game (somehow moving his character with the select button?) as preparation for the greatest battle in history. No, actually, do get me started. It was stupid, like a hacker hacking into someone’s life. This movie beat KUNG FURY to the punch by a decade, but with complete earnestness. I never thought I’d say this about anything, but UNDERWORLD (a movie that came out around the same time) is a better version of this. - Levi

*Levi is a total liar. We have seen a ton of tragically underwhelming ‘horror’ films.

Tonight we imperil ourselves (from the couch) with Neil Marshall’s THE DESCENT 2005.

Holy hell, that was an intense two hours. I wasn’t going to have a drink, but here I am two cocktails later. A group of women (one might say frenemies) heads out on a caving adventure that quickly descends into a nightmare. Yes, cocktails are the ambrosia of puns. Also, for the record, spelunking would never have been my holiday of choice, even pre-DESCENT.

If you’re looking for a high stakes,  unrelenting roller coaster, then look no further. Marshall masterfully sets the pace early and pretty much keeps it up for the whole movie. I have a few qualms, which I’ll discuss, but overall, I will say this movie scared me like I haven’t been scared in a few years. I think the last time was Ti West’s THE INNKEEPERS. Just watch it.

Now for the cons. Like our recent BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, there was a lot of infighting happening here. Also, a few too many NO, DON’T DO THAT’s for my taste. I think with a little script finessing most of those could have been more logical or at least practical. The action scenes are too choppy with a lot of, Who? and What? I blame Paul Greengrass, but I will say that Marshall directed my absolute favorite episode of GAME OF THRONES. Everyone was talking about some other one shot that season from TRUE DETECTIVE, but you guys know that the Watchers on the Wall battle was a one-r and it fucking ruled, right?

Lastly, the final few minutes feel like a bit of a cop out. It was such a wild ride that I was super bummed the last few shots went in the wrong direction. I’m trying not to spoil it, and, frankly, Levi had to point out the larger meaning. I was still pouring whiskey to console myself. - Jenna

I remember watching this back when it came out, and thinking, “We haven’t seen any monsters, and this is already the most terrifying movie I’ve seen in years.” This is my second time watching it, and I’ve got to say it’s hands down the most terrifying movie we’ve seen this month. This time around, I see that the monsters are actually just humans that were trapped in the caves several generations or millenia back. (A la Lovecraft’s THE BEAST IN THE CAVE, that he wrote when he was 14…) 

Quick aside: why do they not react to fire? I get that they can’t see it, but why are none of them like “oh, what’s that strong source of heat over there? It hurts my cave skin when I get near.” I’m also surprised how killable those things are. If they don’t bite your throat immediately, it’s pretty much game over for them. Cave life softens you up. - Levi