Three Films Make A Post: The past has a mind of its own

Documenting the Witch Path (2017): I have a higher tolerance for POV horror bullshit than most people, but I’ve seldom encountered a 65 minute movie that felt quite as long as this Swedish one. There’s amateur filmmaking – which is perfectly okay in my book – and then there is a film that exclusively consists of circular dialogue sequences during which characters tell each other about the phone call they and we just fucking heard, dudes reading lore at the camera, and awkwardly edited nothing. Camera angles are apparently chosen at random, and nothing is happening, at all.

Heck, there’s not even a single actually effective shot once the characters finally kinda-sorta begin following the titular Witch Path.

Kshudhita Pashan aka The Hungry Stones (1960): The first half of this poetically shot Bangla language movie by Tapan Sinha based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore is a kind of ghost story you can encounter in many countries, at least in its larger outline. A young tax inspector is sent to a country town to set various things in order. He is quartered in a large, empty palace the locals won’t stay in at night, and has various encounters with a female ghost. At first, these encounters are dream-like and frightening – shot in beautifully realized shadows, but soon enough, a doomed romance starts between the living and the dead. Before we come to the doomed part, the film turns out to be a tale of reincarnation, and so the backstory between these two lovers is revealed in an extended flashback. Which I found somewhat weaker than the film’s first half, though still shot and staged with great care and a sense of true visual poetry. As a tale of doomed supernatural love and mild spookiness, this a lovely thing, made even more so by its wonderful locations.

Mother aka Maza (2014): This only directorial work by great (and in Japan beloved in his public persona) horror and humour mangaka Kazuo Umezu aka Umezz is a somewhat uneven film in acting and direction but there’s quite a bit to be said for any movie that turns parts of the manga career of its director into a horror tale including dark family secrets and the evil ghost of his own mother. It’s certainly not your typical biopic.

As a director, Umezu isn’t as great as when he’s working in manga. The film’s timing is often a little off in a way that suggests difficulties to adapt to the needs of a different form of storytelling, and while there are some fine, creepy sequences, some of the horror here is surprisingly bland.

But hey, there aren’t too many movies in which an actor portraying the actual filmmaker gets into physical altercations with the ghosts of their mothers, so I can’t say this isn’t interesting.

The Breakthrough (1975)

His superiors in the scientific government bureaucracy send young scientist Saunders (Simon Ward) to a somewhat isolated research facility to check out what lead scientist Maclean (Brewster Nichols)is actually doing with the project’s time and the government’s money. Instead of closing anyone’s purse strings, Saunders quickly finds himself drawn into the project. That’s little wonder, for the researchers appear to be surprisingly close to an answer to the question what truly happens to their consciousness at the moment of a person’s death. Sure, they are using a mentally ill child as a kind of medium and a dying man as their core research subject, but that’s just science, right?

This seventy minute TV movie was part of the BBC’s “Playhouse” strand of teleplays, based on a tale by Daphne Du Maurier. Despite her huge commercial footprint at the time, Du Maurier today looks like a bizarrely underrated writer of often very interesting and thought-rich supernatural tales and weird fiction, as well as her core modernized gothic interests.

It was adapted by Clive Exton (who’d end up as one of the credited scriptwriters for the Brigitte Nielsen Red Sonja movie, of all things, and did write the incredible, for a long time underrated, original Ghost Story for Christmas “Stigma”, in between, among other things) and directed by Graham Evans. There’s a lovely mix of the “serious, scientific” approach to the supernatural so beloved of the 70s (see Nigel Kneale, Legend of Hell House, parapsychological research in the real world, and many other examples), as well as suggestions of the truly unmeasurable in the film’s ideas, and some wonderfully atmospheric landscape shots, as typical of this strand of British TV.

The movie does suffer somewhat from – also typical of British TV of the time – fact that only its exteriors are shot on film, and there’s only a very limited degree of mood to be squeezed out of shot on tape interior sequences. So there’s a lot of talk – most of it interesting –, a bit of mood and only a limited amount of the kind of actual action (in the sense of “things happening”) that would cost money. And much of what happens can be a bit overshadowed by the – also very typical of this time and filmmaking place – tendency of actors to perform emotion exclusively via DRAMATIC SHOUTING. But then, mid-70s TV sound and picture probably needed that approach to reach an audience watching on TVs very different from what we use today.

In any case, there’s quite a bit to recommend The Breakthrough: the already mentioned moody, calm exterior shots, the mixture of science and the supernatural, as well as the film’s willingness to present ideas and ambiguities and – despite the shouting – let the audience sort out what to think about the whole thing for themselves.

Seasonal break, as always

 Things are getting kinda squamous around here, so my incessant nattering about movies will have to cease for a bit.

 Normal service - for good and for ill - will resume on January 4th. If me make it that far, of course.

I wish everyone reading this who isn't a bot - those can fuck right off - some peaceful and quiet days between the years, and if you're keeping to any holiday traditions, happy ones. 

The Black Phone 2 (2025)

Warning: I’ll not spoil the second act, but certainly parts of the ending here

Years after surviving his kidnapping by the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in the first movie, Finn (Mason Thames), now a late teenager, struggles with his clearly untreated trauma, with pot and violence his main methods of control. Recently, his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has been having terrible nightmares featuring the ghosts of dead children at a snowy summer (winter?) camp and other curious details. These nightmares are now beginning to turn into feats of rather impressive sleepwalking, one of which leads Gwen to the Grabber’s old house and the black phone with the direct line to the dead in its cellar. There, she has a phone conversation with her and Finn’s dead mother. Some research and a bit of luck suggest to Gwen where the camp from her dreams is situated and because she’s convinced this is not a thing she can just ignore and hope it’ll go away, she, an unwilling Finn, and her prospective boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) make their way to snowy Montana (I believe), as camp counsellors in training. There, Finn, too, will have phone conversations with the dead again, and all will be haunted by the shadow of the Grabber.

On paper, The Black Phone 2, like the first one directed by Scott Derrickson and scripted by Derrickson and his eternal writing partner (lieutenant of Megaforce) C. Robert Cargill, is yet another exercise in 80s horror nostalgia, remixing elements of the original movie with A Nightmare on Elm Street. Particularly the establishing scenes hit that kind of nostalgia pretty hard, not just with pointedly cheesy bits of dialogue but also aesthetically. However, while the 80s never go away, they turn out only to be one of the movie’s touch stones, and are really an easy way to establish an aesthetic reality things then begin to deviate more and more from.

Once the dreams start in earnest, and even more so once the characters end up in the snow and ice, the film begins to let other eras, film stocks (well, probably digital filters to emulate other filmstocks, but it’s so well done, this really doesn’t matter), and ideas take over. The film then proceeds to create a mood of liminality, of drifting between dream and reality, of borders crossed and uncrossed without the characters realizing in so brilliant a manner, I found myself perfectly okay with its at its core very straightforward narrative and characterisation. But then, straightforward doesn’t mean bad – particularly the characters are likeable and clearly drawn, and some of the differences in how Gwen and Finn relate to their respective traumata feel as if they’ll become rather less straightforward on second or third watch. It’s also nice to watch a really well-made contemporary horror film that allows its characters to triumph about the monster (and work at their trauma) for once. I’m all for 70s horror downer endings, but have grown somewhat annoyed by serious contemporary horror’s insistence that fights are always hopeless, grief insurmountable, and so on and so forth. This is a movie that is convinced sometimes, you can ram evil’s face repeatedly against a frozen surface. A message I approve of.

But really, it’s the mood and the film’s consistently thought-through aesthetics that particularly excite me: Black Phone 2 is a mood held for the length of a whole movie.

Three Films Make A Post: When it rains it pours…BLOOD!

The Corruption of Chris Miller aka La corrupción de Chris Miller (1973): This Spanish giallo directed by Juan Antonio Bardem is about as close to Sergio Martino in his most erotic/sleazy mode as you can imagine, carrying the same sense of actual decadence. Bardem isn’t quite the stylist his Italian peer is, but then, late Franco era Spain isn’t exactly an easy place to do eroticised, violent glamour and glamourous violence in, and given the context, this is beautifully done.

Plus, Jean Seberg and Marisol are fantastic as the film’s core psychosexually messed up duo taking in a drifter who may very well be a serial killer but is most definitely a 70s kind of guy in all other ways.

Carnival of Sinners aka La main du diable (1943): Vichy era France wasn’t a great place to make films in that weren’t running with the Nazi party line – though quite a few French filmmakers managed – so there was a tendency to retreat into more fantastical material, as this tale of a talentless painter who buys a talisman in form of a hand – sometimes moving – that turns him very talented indeed. Of course, this also means he’s made a pact with the devil – here a small bureaucrat without a bit of Milton in him – and thus his talent doesn’t actually buy him the happiness he craves.

All of which isn’t exactly easy escapist material, and one can’t help but read rather obvious political points into Maurice Tourneur’s film. The film has its lengths – particularly in its middle part – but there’s the poetic power of dark legend in its scenes more often than not, typically intercut with surrealist imagery and a bit of humour.

Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl aka Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken (2009): Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu, this belongs to that school of often pleasantly insane, cheap, gore comedies a small group of Japanese directors tuned out in the early 2000s. These aren’t movies making promises they can’t keep, so the title is definitely program, the humour is broad, and blood – curiously digital and practical – is as copious as a sense of crazy, often very funny and grotesque body-shifting fun (personal favourite: Frankenstein Girl using her legs as a propeller to fly).

This does take some time to get going and tests the audience’s patience early on with what amount to not terribly funny comedy skits about high school subcultures, but the film’s second half is a series of increasingly bizarre and inspired bloody nonsense that’s bound to put a smile on the face of anyone watching a movie with this title on purpose.

If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952)

Original title: Si muero antes de despertar

School kid Lucio (Néstor Zavarce) is a bit of a trouble maker – at least that’s what his parents and his teachers tell him so often, it can’t help but become true. In truth and to modern eyes, the boy seems perfectly fine and does his darndest to live up to the pressures of a restrictive society – Argentina in the early 50s clearly wasn’t fun and games for a child – and a father (Floren Delbene) who can’t divorce the pressures of his job from his home life. Not that Lucio realizes much of this, of course, unlike the film’s viewers.

When a girl from his class Lucio is sometimes friendly with is murdered, Lucio is the only one who knows about her connection to a stranger giving gifts to little girls in exchange for a vow of secrecy. Then, gift giving and later a disappearance happen to an actual friend of Lucio, who by now has realized there’s a connection between the mysterious giver of gifts and young girls getting murdered. Alas, Lucio has sworn to his friend not to tell anyone about her “friend”, and exactly those pressures that are supposed to make him a “good boy” are now keeping his mouth shut. Not that anyone believes him when he eventually can’t help himself and does talk. Since the grown-up world is of little use, Lucio will have to save his friend all by himself.

This 70 minute Cornell Woolrich adaptation by Carlos Hugo Christensen – at this point still working in his native Argentina before fleeing from the Peron regime into exile in Brasil – was initially meant as the third tale in Christensen’s omnibus movie Never Open That Door but was retooled as a stand-alone movie to keep the other film to a saleable length. This doesn’t feel bloated up for a feature release however. Rather it is a concisely told tale with little fat on its bones – and everything that’s superfluous to the plot speaks very eloquently about growing up as being in a state of perpetual pressure from demands by a grown-up world that never seems to be there when it is actually needed, and so strengthens the film’s theme as well as its plot engine.

This is an entry into the small sub-sub genre of childhood noirs, a group of films – with Night of the Hunter as the most obvious example (unless you don’t count that film as a noir, but we can’t help that, can’t we?) – that typically mix the crueller realities of childhood with the air of dark fairy tales, something that’s bound to resonate well with the dark shadows and intensity of everyone’s favourite non-genre. Christensen commands the space between the visually darkly poetic and the heightened realism of the film’s ideas about childhood alienation (or the child’s world as something separated from the reality of the grown-ups supposedly taking care of them) very well indeed, creating the melodramatic intensity so typically of Woolrich until things culminate in a pretty incredible wilderness (of the fully artificial and therefore particularly wonderful kind) climax, including prayers, traumatized children and a father trying to purge his own failings by violence.

It’s all very impressive, and in mood and style stands shoulder to shoulder with the US noir cycle.

Primitive War (2025)

Warning: there will be some spoilers, but since this is all pure pulp nonsense nobody should be too afraid to read on

During the Vietnam War. Colonel Jericho (Jeremy Piven in a performance so bad you have to admire the rest of the cast can keep a straight face around him) sends Baker (Ryan Kwanten) and his “Vulture Squad” of soldiers of dubious renown but high efficiency on a somewhat vaguely defined rescue mission into a particularly deadly valley. The Green Berets our protagonists are supposed to rescue there were meant to do something about a research base hidden deep in the valley, but that’s all need to you and apparently our soldiers don’t.

Turns out the valley is full of dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes that, ahem, “fell through a wormhole in the past”. Said wormhole was created by evil experiments devised by evil Soviet general Borodin (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) – yes, like the composer but then, there’s also a Soviet character named Tolstoy which I believe is what goes for wit in this one – who attempts to do something – presumably evil and most certainly world-threatening – with particle accelerators.

Eventually, after many an adventure with dinosaurs, heroic sacrifice, and teaming up with an Eastern German scientist and dinosaur exposition expert (Tricia Helfer, whose bad German accent attempts actually sound like very bad Russian accent attempts), our heroes will have to take the fight to Borodin’s base.

It is very difficult to argue against a film that fulfils that old childhood dream of every good nerd to see soldiers fight against dinosaurs – as long as one doesn’t expect Luke Sparke’s movie (apparently based on a novel by one Ethan Pettus, but I’ll just take the film’s word for it) to be actually a properly good movie. Fortunately, this one does fall deeply under the “it’s not a good movies, it’s a great movie” umbrella where its myriad of flaws also happen to be insanely entertaining.

Firstly and foremost, this is such a deeply stupid movie it’s actually impressive – starting with the whole dinosaurs dropped, sorry, fallen, through a wormhole (probably landing with a big whomp sound effect) by Soviet mad science during the Vietnam War business, the film’s utter inability to convince anyone this actually takes place in 1968 however much CCR plays on the soundtrack (kudos to whoever managed to get the rights for the songs), and dialogue of such deep, clichéd stupidity it becomes nearly transcendent. Personal favourites here are the scene where Baker radios in his squad’s dinosaur problems to his superiors, and one of the dumbest “big rousing” speeches I’ve ever experienced, which is certainly not helped by Sparke’s decision to loosen the tension with a fart joke. No, really.

The special effects are all over the place – turns out cheap CGI dinosaurs with feathers are even more difficult to realize than dinosaurs without them – but make up for their wavering quality by the quantity and diversity of included dinosaurs. Plus, while it isn’t always good effects work, it is still done with visible love and enthusiasm.

While deeply, unironically stupid, this love and a sense of earnestness are really why this is so fun. Someone here must actually have put thought into details like the noise T-Rex jaws barely missing a victim must make – though the resulting noise is pretty damn silly. Which makes it somewhat bizarre that nobody put the same amount of thought into plot, dialogue, pacing or narrative structure, but hey! Soldiers versus dinosaurs and every damn war movie cliché plus every damn dinosaur movie cliché in a single movie! And even some romance – between two T-Rexes, in fact.

So thanks, Australia, this was deeply stupid, but also incredible.

Three Films Make A Post: Ghoulish Delights

Halloweenville (2011): Gary P. Cohen, of Video Violence fame, and one Paul Kaye, document the intense Halloween shenanigans in Lambertville, New Jersey, which turns into a giant, tacky and lovely piece of Halloween kitsch for a week a year. Embedded in cheesy commentary and the cheapest default editing tricks the directors’ editing suite can provide, are interviews with various local Halloween enthusiasts and many a verité (or awkwardly framed, if you prefer) scene of the place’s insane Halloween festivities. It’s enough to make any ghoul cry tears of joy.

While this is certainly not done artfully, there’s so much genuine enthusiasm here, presented fully in the cheesy version of the spirit of the season, it’s impossible not to love this.

The Raven (1963): This adaptation of Poe’s poem as a comedy has never been a particular favourite of mine among the films of Corman’s Poe cycle. On this recent rewatch, I actually fell in love with the film. Price, Lorre and Karloff mugging it up in this tale of duelling wizards, Hazel Court doing a femme fatale bit, and young Jack Nicholson looking confused in front of Daniel Haller’s gorgeous gothic sets, filmed by Corman with the élan they deserve – what’s not to love?

Particularly when I’ve actually grown old enough to find the general silliness rather diverting, find myself actually laughing at jokes I’ve shrugged at a decade ago, and enjoy how much Corman and company make fun of a style they themselves put a lot of effort into creating.

Plus, the climactic sorcerous duel is one of the prime moments of pure, silly, imagination in cinema.

The House of Usher (1989): Speaking of Poe adaptations that don’t exactly keep to the text, Alan Birkinshaw’s bit of late 80s cheese is pretty fun if you accept it as what it is and what it isn’t – there’s certainly joy to be had in Donald Pleasence running around with a drill hand pretending not to be mad, Oliver Reed being dastardly while chewing scenery, some tasteful mutilation and decapitation, a rat eating a guy’s penis, and come curiously fine set design that goes for some sort of modernist gothic. All of this doesn’t make terribly much sense, but certainly looks pretty great.

Landlocked (2021)

Following the death of his father (Jeffrey Owens), Paul (Paul Owens) returns to the old family home. His father had sent him a video message recorded on actual videotape in which he explained that Paul and his brother Mason (Mason Owens) had exactly a year after his death to take from there what they wanted or needed – afterwards, the building would be pulled down, as already arranged by him.

In the house, Paul finds a strange video camera that apparently has the ability to show and record videos of the past when you look through its viewfinder. Between bouts of grieving, reconnecting with Mason, and soaking up the house’s negative atmosphere, Paul re-experiences parts of his own past with his father, as well as some of the moments he has been absent for. However, the longer he uses the device, the more other things seem to drift into the backgrounds and unexplored spaces of the past, things that seem if not actively inimical to Paul, at least unwise and horrifying to engage with.

This piece of American liminal art house horror (really the sort of thing the French made the fantastique label for) by Paul Owens (and family) about grief and an increasingly weirdened past was partially constructed from actual family videos of the Owens family. It is quite the experience: slow, somewhat meandering in its middle part even with a short running time of 75 minutes, it is also drenched in an atmosphere of genuine strangeness, like very abstract weird fiction turned movie. The film starts from a point of naturalistically exploring grief yet becomes increasingly strange and even horrifying without ever leaving the realm of believable human emotion. In his treatment of the material, and despite the slow pace, Owens shows a great amount of control while also being highly imaginative inside of the borders he has set himself.

At first an effective exploration of grief as absence, the turn towards supernatural horror suggests a slight influence of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, once the things Paul (the director/writer also being the lead actor here) sees and increasingly experiences become strange and threatening and not just heart-breaking, and might begin noticing him noticing them.

There’s an authentically haunting quality to the film, a sense of reality that makes the eventual turn towards the more traditionally supernatural – though not traditionally scary movie-like – particularly effective in a way M.R. James might have approved of, though never done quite this way, as well.

Pestilence Break

Normal service will hopefully resume around next Sunday.

Loop Track (2023)

Socially extremely awkward Ian (Tom Sainsbury) is going on a walk through the forests of New Zealand to get away from all those pesky people, and perhaps some concrete aspect of his life he believes he has screwed up particularly badly.

Instead of peace and quiet, he soon finds himself socially pressured into walking together with three randos he meets and that won’t leave a guy completely unable to actually tell them he wants to be alone go on his way alone. Increasingly, Ian believes there’s something bad going on in this beautiful forest. Someone or something seems to be following them, though his attempts at convincing the others of it only make them look increasingly askew at the guy who didn’t want to be involved with them from the start.

Tom Sainsbury’s Loop Track attempts to fuse the comedy of social anxiety and people being people, the expectedly pretty landscape of New Zealand (filmed low-key) with a bit of the monster movie tradition. While certainly a well-made film, it never comes quite together for me – there’s such a heavy emphasis on the social anxiety there’s actually very little room for the monster movie parts here, and – even as a sufferer of some of Ian’s symptoms – I never found myself quite connecting to him, and certainly not the other characters and their single defining character traits.

For a film that appears to be this interested in the characters’ psychology, I found everyone rather lacking in complexity, with every character’s first scene already defining everything about them.

The stalking is played too low-key, and despite a fantastic monster reveal, I’m really not sure why this needed the horror elements at all – it’s not as if it puts them into dialogue with Ian’s internal life.

Having said that, I didn’t exactly mind the film – I just don’t think it does anything much with its potential.

Three Conjuring Spin-offs Make A Post

The Nun (2018): I’ve never been much of a fan of the The Conjuring movies. Their combination of James Wan as usually wasting his considerable talents on bland scripts and these movies’ idolization of two genuinely horrible people simply rub me the wrong. Plus, I often have problems with straightforward Christian horror – I don’t even connect to The Exorcist beyond seeing its obvious technical achievements.

So colour me surprised I actually enjoyed two out of three of today’s Conjuring spin-offs. The Nun I’d even call a genuinely great horror movie. But then, there’s very little of the Warrens in here. Instead, director Corin Hardy basically turns out a loving Blumhouse mainstream horror homage to Italian horror – gothic and not – with a smidgen of Hammer gothic mixed in. This sort of thing is catnip to me, particularly when a movie fills the time between quoting Fulci and Bava and the ridiculous and very fun big budget (at least in comparison to its idols) special effects climax (re-)creating such a lovely mood of dread, decay, and the irrational as this one does.

Taissa Farmiga also makes a great horror heroine, filling the film’s more awkward moments – which is to say, everything to do with character bits – with life and personality.

The Nun II (2023): She’s also the only good thing about Michael Chaves’s sequel. Chaves is a curious case to be the guy to have taken over the series from Wan as a director, seeing as he has now repeatedly proven he can’t structure or centre a narrative to save his life, and can never sell his horror set pieces as anything but set pieces. Admittedly, he isn’t helped by a script that doesn’t understand how to tell the story of an investigation, not to speak of telling it engagingly.

Annabelle Comes Home (2019): This third Annabelle movie – and the only one worth mentioning – as directed by Gary Daubermann (who also co-wrote this and the first Nun) does contain rather too much of the Warrens, but at least, this is a film where the possessed doll becomes the ringleader of all the monsters trapped in the Warren’s badly secured creep dungeon (how badly? A fucking teenager gets in) to terrorize the Warrens’ daughter and assorted teens (worth mentioning are Madison Iseman and Katie Sarife). There’s a grumpy wedding dress, Black Shuck (apparently a hellhound), and much delightful running around and screaming through all of the tropes of seriously fun but mostly (monster) kid friendly horror. It’s probably not exactly art, but it is certainly a very good time.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Original title: Baron Prásil

Landing on the moon, an astronaut (Rudolf Jelínek) is greeted by the men who came there before him: the protagonists of Verne’s “De la Terre à la Lune”, Cyrano de Bergerac, and last but not least the great Baron Münchhausen (Milos Kopecký) - as he’s called here in Germany. It’s Baron Prásil in Czechia. Because they don’t need silly science stuff like space suits, the gentlemen assume our astronaut who very much does need one, to be a proper moon man.

Münchhausen decides to take the young man under his wing and show him the wonders and adventures of Earth, which indeed he does. Once there, Münchhausen also insists on getting in a love triangle between the men and Venetian princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová), though none of the young people is actually that into him.

All of this really doesn’t describe the beauty, wonder and utterly unbridled imagination of Karel Zeman’s version of the Münchhausen material – here mostly based on Bürger and particularly Doré’s illustrations to Bürger’s narrative. Technically, this is a mixture of live action and all kinds of animation you could even imagine in 1962, at once naïve, deeply aesthetically constructed, real and unreal thanks to the many ways Zeman mixes special effects techniques and real people. The film is ever shot like a moving paean to the human imagination and filled to the brim with a sense of wonder that should make every viewer a child again for at least an evening.

The characters are of course, not surprisingly given their placement in a series of beautiful and bizarre tall tales, archetypes without normal psychological depths, but from time to time, whenever he finds space between a dozen sight gags and coming up with sights no human being has beheld before on a movie screen, Zeman does hint rather heavily that archetypes are archetypes because they have quite a bit to say about the unchanging parts of the human psyche. Just because young lovers aren’t original or deep does not mean a pure and naïve idea of love isn’t real or important.

But really, if there ever was a movie that exists just to be experienced instead of interpreted or talked to death film school style, it is this one.

Super Happy Forever (2024)

Sano (Hiroki Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) visit a coastal resort motel in the last days of its existence. Sano is clearly beside himself, walking around in something of a fugue, looking for a red ballcap lost there five years ago. Soon enough, we learn he has good reason for his state of mind, for he has lost his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) just a couple of weeks ago. The hotel and the town are where they first met five years ago, and Sano appears to still half be looking for Nagi, or signs of her passing.

After forty or so minutes, the film turns back to the past of five years ago. Now, shown from Nagi’s perspective, we see how the couple first met and learn to understand some of the echoes of their encounter left five years later during Sano’s return.

Beginning slowly and not terribly interested in explaining itself at first, Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever turns out to be a film about loss, love, the physical presence of the past in the now, and the small, hidden connections between people and places. It is also a love story told through absences: at first, we can only perceive the shape of Nagi’s absence in the now, Sano’s moments of short memories and the things about their relationship his behaviour hints at. But then, the flashback, while filling in some of these holes also doesn’t fill in any of the actual relationship between Sano and Nagi (which apparently wasn’t all that happy) – we’re only ever witness to its beginning and its aftermath, and none of the joy or pain in between.

There’s nothing sentimental about the film’s approach to this, or of the patness of esoteric bullshit Miyata has fled into, but nor is there any cynicism here. Instead, this is a film of genuine sadness, genuine love and a genuine longing for human presence and connectedness – coming together into a form that feels quite special, in a way that’s self-contained and lacks showiness, and never indulges in the painful overintellectualization arthouse cinema can fall into.

Three Films Make A Post: Dare to play.

Night of the Reaper (2025): For that part of its running time when it is a period-set throwback slasher with a procedural element that reminds more of a giallo than a cop movie, Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper is an exemplary and quite entertaining low budget movie that looks and feels the part it wants to play very well indeed. For its final third, it does turn out to be a very 2020s kind of film, alas, and we end up in the realm of “clever” plot twists that not only strain belief in the context of what the audience has seen before (or not been allowed to see on a pretty obnoxious level) but also replace what should be an exciting climax with fifteen minutes of the movie explaining itself to us.

It’s a shame too, for before that, this is a really fun little movie.

Witchboard (2024): This remake (of a very free kind) of Witchboard by veteran director Chuck Russell isn’t so much a throwback to the more freewheeling world of 80s/90s horror but simply a film made by a director who lived the time and apparently has no interest in changing his way of filmmaking. This is messily plotted and loves to go off on wild tangents, but what it loses in tightness thereby, it wins in the joys of wild abandon. This is a movie that’s probably going to go there, or find something that’s even more there to go to. Add an openness to add some sleaze/sexiness (often completely absent from horror these days, because people apparently don’t fuck anymore) to the gratuitous – and often pretty awesome – violence, and you have quite the concoction of the best clichés, tropes and bad yet awesome ideas a viewer could hope for. Well, if you can ignore the digital blood splatter, which never works.

Blood Ritual aka 血裸祭 (1989): Speaking of wild abandon, this Hongkong horror/action/comedy/kitchen sink CATIII wonder directed by Lee Yuen-Ching wavers so wildly between non-supernatural cult horror, sleazy softcore sex, brutal action choreographed by Tsui Siu-Ming, broad romantic comedy and info dumps about “evil religions” at least this viewer got quite dizzy. Which probably is the right state of mind to appreciate a film that seems to be a perfect expression of the kind of maximalism for a minimal budget HK cinema at this point in time was particularly fantastic at.

Ghost-Cat of Arima Palace (1953)

Original title: 怪猫有馬御殿

Being a mere greengrocer’s daughter, young and beautiful Otaki has few friends in the inner chambers of the titular Arami Palace. Add to this classism their Lord’s main concubine’s fear of being replaced by a younger model, and Otaki’s life is a sheer nightmare.

The other women hound her to her death with measures of increasing cruelty (since they start with pressing her into giving away her pet cat, you can imagine how bad it gets). Before you can say “bakeneko”, Otaki’s little cat – returned for the occasion like a proper pal - drinks her dying blood. The resulting cat demon goes on a bit of a rampage of vengeance, as is tradition.

At least here in the West, this short – 49 minutes – piece of Daiei bakeneko horror directed by Ryohei Arai is more than a little obscure, as is much of the horror output of Japanese studios of this decade beyond some core texts, so I’m not really able to put the film into the context of other movies from the second row of the genre.

What I can say is that this is a lovely little thing. Otaki’s suffering is properly upsetting, the human villain’s are deeply hissable in their nasty, grabbing ways, and the film goes out of its way to dispose of the Otaki cat after she has gotten her full and proper vengeance (something not all ghost cat movies I’ve seen do).

Once the film starts in on the supernatural shenanigans, they are rather wonderful – there’s a great scene during which the ghost cat uses her powers to puppet her victims into supernatural acrobatics like a poltergeist on steroids, and there’s some impressive and creative business with flying heads of the sort that’s bound to make the right viewer – that’s me – gleefully happy.

There are other, perhaps slightly more high-brow, aspects here as well: apart from the Lord, the film is very female-centric, so much so, we get to see the female part of the inner chambers is guarded by armed women, and we do even see them fighting against our cat hero/villain with what look like naginata to me. Earlier, the film also puts emphasis on being taught to fight as part of the proper kind of education the lower class Otaki lacks. This isn’t something you see in many jidai-geki – at least not that I’ve seen.

I also found the emphasis on class hatred surprisingly clear and direct for a film of its time and place.

All of which adds up to lovely hidden gem of a film, the sort of thing I’d hope some boutique Blu-ray level can pick up, package with two or three other films of its style, and make me very happy indeed.

Three Films Make A Post: He's every parents' worst nightmare.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025): For once, this is an entry in the typically boring PublicDomainsploitation canon I’d actually watch a second time instead of rueing the moment I pressed play. It’s still a movie that turns a public domain children’s story into a mid 2020s slasher, but it does so with a degree of competence, with decent acting, an actual script and direction – responsible here is British low budget regular Scott Chambers – that does understand the rules of straightforward horror films.

Even the characterisation is not without interest this time around, and the film’s interpretation of Peter Pan as a delusional drug user feels less tacky in practice than it sounds. The whole thing is an actually well-made low budget slasher, daring to follow through on some of its ideas.

Hotspring Sharkattack aka Hot Spring Shark Attack (2024): I went into Morihito Inoues sharksploitation film expecting a lot of sleaze and a bit of gore. What I actually got was very little sleaze but an absurdist and ambitious sharksploitation epic that lovingly mocks everything from urban development to amnesiac protagonists. The film’s reason for being is to turn everything shark movie up to eleven, make Sharknado look like a sensible little tale, and throw all kinds of genre elements and clichés on-screen with wild abandon, yet also a curious sense of control. This film knows where it is going: the dream underworld of bad CGI and hand puppet shark bites Joseph Campbell wrote about in his little-read sequel “The Hero’s Journey II: Sharks, so many sharks”.

Cult aka Sekte (2019): But let’s end on a comparative downer note with another amnesiac protagonist finding herself tucked away in an isolated house full of weirdoes who will turn out to be a Satanic cult. Director William Chandra manages a couple of atmospheric scenes here – I was particularly impressed by the one in which protagonist Lia (Asmara Abigail) finds the cult’s corpse depository – but for much of the running time, the film’s in the business of presenting as deeply mysterious a mystery its own damn title already reveals. So yes and alas, this is the kind of movie that climaxes on an endless series of flashback-filled “reveals” that bring every bit of the momentum the film might have developed before to a screeching halt with an astonishing amount of stupid ideas.

Jack-O (1995)

It’s Halloween in one of those typical American small towns we all know from direct to video productions shot in Florida. After a graveyard disturbance, a gentleman with a large light up pumpkin for a head and wielding a scythe is wandering around very slowly indeed and killing everyone he gets his hands on. Apparently, his appearance is part of a curse a warlock (some archival footage of poor John Carradine) cast on the descendants of the Kelly family, whom he held responsible for being burnt at the stake. Mind you, until the final act, Mr Pumpkinhead shows no preference for killing Kellys.

Nonetheless, we do get to spend a lot of time with the family, experience their haunted garage spook show, follow discussions of the joys of Halloween, thrill to their babysitter troubles, and so, and so forth. Eventually, Mr Pumpkinhead does shamble along to threaten the family’s youngest.

If you’re looking for cosy, nostalgic horror for the sad post-Halloween time Steve Latshaw’s low budget masterpiece of tacky American Halloween mood has your back. It’s a film haunted by the ghosts of Halloweens past. Pumpkinheads, a Linnea Quigley shower scene, a tasteful decapitation, horror hosts (in this case an archival Cameron Mitchell), home-made horror houses and horror-loving families are there and accounted for, as are the ghost of John Carradine, a knock-off synth score, fog, bad acting of the lovely kind, and the shambling and dreamy rhythms of childhood memories of movies that’ll turn out not all that frightening once you’ve grown up.

It’s a vibe, as they apparently say, a movie that feels as if the script to a cheap kid’s horror Halloween film had been spiced up with a bit of nudity and blood – the actual stuff of a horror movie childhood dreams. How could I not love Jack-O?

R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead (2025)

Following the in today’s grief-struck horror mood obligatory death of the father of the family, Cassie (Kendra Anderson) and her sons, seventeen-year old Finn (Seth Isaac Johnson) and thirteen-year old Sam (Bean Reid) move to a small farming community in what I can’t help but call the sticks.

Sam is particularly unhappy, not just because he’s a kid in puberty who has lost his father and is moving town, but also because he feels more than just a little excluded from the closer, easier, relationship between Cassie and Finn. As kids do, he acts out. Unfortunately, he decides to steal the annual “Prized Pumpkin” (actually an ugly thing nobody would want to eat, or even look at) of the farmer the locals somehow see as responsible for the town’s agricultural luck turning to the better some years ago. Finn, who is a perfectly good brother, decides to help Sam avoid some nastiness with the farmer by bringing the pumpkin back for him the night of the deed.

Alas, Finn has a rather nasty supernatural encounter on the farm and doesn’t return home. Worse still, none of the grown-ups, not even Cassie, can remember Finn ever existed at all, and can’t even perceive any proof of his existence. As the Sheriff’s daughter Becka (Adeline Lo), who had already befriended Sam and warned him against having anything to do with the farm, explains, this sort of thing happens somewhat regularly in town – kids disappear, people who hit the age of eighteen or are above it forget them, crops grow. She’s willing to help Sam in his attempt to get his brother back, whatever has happened to him. Also involved will be the local hermit Rusty (Matty Finochio), a nasty protective scarecrow thing with very bad breath, and one of those grimoires of the facebook type.

Tubi Originals tend to be less than great movies, often lacking in verve and cleverness as much as in budget. Jem Garrard’s Pumpkinhead – based on the favourite kids and teen horror writer of a lot of North Americans of a certain age – is only a bit lacking in the last one, but never lets this lack of funds stop it from doing basically everything right for the kind of kids horror film old-ass people like me can enjoy as well.

The characters are simply but effectively drawn, the young actors are doing pretty well – Lo could certainly have an actual career in front of her – and the script finds the fine balance between goofy humour, proper horror, and knowing winks to tropes and genre conventions. “You don’t come to the forest hermit for a straight answer” is pretty great, to take the most obvious example for the last one.

The film isn’t afraid to be a bit grotesque when it needs to be – the final pumpkin head form is not something I’d have expected in a contemporary kids’ movie made for the US market, even if it is actually made in Canada like this one, and the scarecrow thing is genuinely creepy, as well as enthusiastically played.

Pumpkinhead is worthwhile in other regards as well. Character motivations and their emotional background make sense (at least for the kind of world this takes place in), and the film clearly knows what it is doing when it is talking about love and friendship by example instead of moral. It’s not terribly deep, but it’s genuine and believable in context. Because it does emotions this well, it also manages to sneak in an ending that actually becomes darker the more you look at it in context of what the characters fear and desire here, not the usual horror movie bullshit ending but a genuine price to be paid.

Visually, this is nothing fancy, but Garrard knows how to create mood and tension, and works around the budgetary constraints of the production really well. There’s nothing here that seems truncated, missing, or undeveloped, which leaves R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead as one of my surprise highlights of this Halloween season.

Santet (1988)

A rather isolated village somewhere in Indonesia. Local crime lord and all-around bad guy Bisman (I. Gusti Jagat Karana) poisons his wife because she’s been annoying him with being ill for too long. Because he’s just that kind of a guy, he then proceeds to blame a local cleric for the killing as a work of black magic, burns the man alive (in a stunt that makes one fear for the stuntman involved), and then start in on an attempt to rape the cleric’s wife Katemi (Suzzanna). Katemi does know where rapist shits hurt, and manages to escape unscathed, at least bodily.

Out in the wilderness, she meets actual black magic sorceress Nyi Angker (Joice Erna), a woman whose human head sits on the body of a crocodile for half of the month. Nyi Angker sees in Katemi her chosen disciple, and convinces the woman to learn and use black magic to take vengeance on Bisman and his allies.

While Katemi does things like eat fresh baby placentas and bathe in crocodile-filed waters to prove her willingness to become a black magician, Bisman starts off a black magic scare in the village with the goal to become the local mayor, with his and his allies’ talk of magic also a useful distraction for the murders he commits himself. Things become interesting indeed when Katemi starts closing in with actual black magic.

Santet isn’t my favourite cooperation between great Indonesian horror and exploitation director Sisworo Gautama Putra and Indonesian Queen of Horror Suzzanna. There’s just a bit too much incidental comedy – even devolving into a musical number at one point – in it for me to fully embrace the film, particularly in the middle act when the jokes sometimes threaten to bring the film to a complete standstill. To be fair, the humour is only annoying when Suzzanna doesn’t join in – whenever she does some black magical joking while looking about impishly, I’m perfectly happy with it, perhaps because it is always fun to see this very dramatic and dignified actress cut loose in a different way from time to time.

The romance – between Suzzanna and the old mayor’s very pious son – is a bit undercooked as well, but then, it seems mostly to be in here to provide the opportunity for a fully clothed dream sequence that’s all hands rubbing “erotically” on cloth and to point towards an easy happy end Suzzanna’s characters don’t get too often (so I won’t complain).

Whenever the film focusses on the actual business at hand, we get the expected Indonesian madness, with many a body part exploding and snakes and what looks like eels crawling and/or slithering out of various natural and unnatural bodily orifices, bodies swelling and popping, and some choice human-animal hybridisation that would give the mad scientist around the corner ideas. Sometimes, these scenes have a truly phantasmagorical quality; at other times, they’re just gloriously weird and strange.

As a bonus, we also get a neat magical duel, Indonesian style, to wrap things up, though, alas, dear Suzzanna isn’t involved in it as anything but a bystander.

But hey, we will always have the indelible picture of Nyi Angker’s human/crocodile form rising out of a pool to say hello.

Good Boy (2025)

Warning: spoilers are inevitable to get at the emotional core of this beyond the film’s central gimmick

Titular good dog Indy (Indy) is taken to a cabin in the woods by his owner Todd (Shane Jensen), following some very bad news about Todd’s health. The thing is, this is the cabin where Todd’s grandpa (Larry Fessenden in various home video diaries being extremely Fessenden, as he should be) died with his own dog from an illness that looks a lot like the consumption Todd apparently suffers from.

And something’s very wrong with the cabin, too. Some ghostly, and increasingly present thing is haunting the place, hovering around Todd to hurt and possess and make him disappear.

Indy, who sees if not understands the threat earlier than Todd does, is trying his best to protect the central person in his life, but there’s only so much even the best boy can do against the fact that loss is inevitable.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy is a gimmick film, at least in so much as it is laser-focussed on its central gimmick – telling its tale of a haunting through the eyes of a dog. But then, being a gimmick movie doesn’t mean it has to be a lazy movie, so Leonberg really embraces his gimmick – and his canine star (and I mean star) – trying to do as much with it as possible to twist and shape genre standard scenes and scares until they fit into the dog’s eye view without making the film something as boring as a deconstruction of the genre.

At the film’s best, this makes it a clever, often exceedingly well staged example of how little twists and turns to the comfortable and cosy shapes of tropes and standards can make them feel fresh again; in its lesser moments – few as they are – it at the very least never shies away from its gimmick even if it were easier to do so.

Unlike other gimmick movies, this also happens to have a genuine emotional core, even beyond the obvious “look at this lovely doggo!” (I’m more of a cat person anyway, sorry, Snuff), and manages to draw an emotional yet not too sentimental portrait of love and the things dogs (or people) might be willing to do for it.

Though, in the end, this isn’t a film about holding on as it is one about letting go, with the haunting as a perhaps somewhat too obvious metaphor for illness, and the narrative very much one about how we have to accept loss.

Thankfully, Good Boy handles this well enough so this doesn’t become too much of a teachable moment sort of thing or some ill-advised take your medicine cinema. Here, as well, Leonberg hardly takes a wrong step while keeping to the core ideas of his film.

The Cursed Palace (1962)

Original title: El-Qasr el-Maloon

Young Lawyer Hasan (Salah Zulfikar) comes to the mansion of Fahmi Bey (Mahmoud El Meligy) to help the rich yet virtuous man sign over most of his wealth to his daughter Yusriyyah (Mariam Fakhr Eddine). The film never explains why this can’t be handled via a will, so I assume the contemporary Egyptian audience would have known why and just take this as a given. Hasan and Yusriyyah very quickly fall in deep, pulpy looking book-trading, love with one another. The business aspect goes well enough, or so it seems, despite Fahmi Bey’s sister being pretty disgruntled losing out on her future inheritance.

But then, one dark and stormy night – Egypt’s very windy in this movie – Yusriyyah finds the dead body of her father, only to encounter a very alive version of the same shortly after. Not surprisingly, this freaks her out rather badly. Her state of mind is not at all improved by the various hauntings she then experiences – skeletal hands at her window, the face of her father where it can’t be, that sort of thing. About half a day later, Yusriyyah is in no mental state to sign any documents that might make her very rich indeed, and her rambling about her father who is dead while she is standing right next to a very living one sitting in his wheelchair is not helping her case at all. Fortunately, Hasan starts investigating, while creepy things continue to happen in the mansion.

I suspect even in 1962, an audience wouldn’t have fallen for anything of what is going on in Hasan Redha’s The Cursed Palace as actually supernatural. We are very much in old dark house territory here, the sort of Old Hollywood set-up Egyptian popular cinema as far as I understand it was very comfortable with. Apart from this type of creaky yet always fun thriller, there’s also a clear influence of the kind of thriller that would follow in its stops, and it wouldn’t be difficult to put The Cursed Palace next to, for example, the kind of post-Psycho thriller Jimmy Sangster wrote for Hammer when they weren’t doing gothic horror.

Stylistically, however, this is a horror movie through and through, praying at the altar of Universal, full of creaking windows, dramatic coach rides, improbably large expressionist shadows, Dutch angles and a camera that seems forever located low, shooting upwards, turning reticent servants into figures of menace. Right at the end, there’s also a sequence that feels as if it were taken directly from a giallo, when the black-gloved villain of the piece, in nearly subjective camera, goes for his final, plot-deciding, murder attempt.

Like most of the handful of Egyptian movies of the era I’ve seen, The Cursed Palace is a stylishly shot, well-acted – in the highly melodramatic manner befitting its material – and well-paced film that’s a joy to watch, uniting some specifics of its place and time with internationally popular ideas about genre filmmaking, and thus a very nice entry into its niche of horror.

Hollywood 90028 (1973)

By day, loner cameraman Mark (Christopher Augustine) shoots porn reels – not even proper porn movies – for the low-rent outfit of one Jobal (the impressively named Dick Glass). He’s clearly not happy with this state of affairs and dreams of less morally dubious work. When he’s not dreaming of his traumatic childhood, that is, which has caused some pretty major issues with women.

So by night, mark picks up women in bars, lets them take him home, and strangles them to death. Which doesn’t even seem to make him any happier, adding sad-sack-ism to his deadly misogyny.

Things change when he meets accidental porn actress Michele (Jeanette Dilger). They start on a courtship made less than ideal by the fact the audience knows about Mark’s more typical nightly endeavours, and Michele clearly sometimes catches a vibe from him that suggests more to her than “somewhat difficult guy”. Mark is curiously seriously about their relationship, though. Why, he even stops murdering women, in a somewhat ironic twist on monogamy. Of course, these things can’t last.

Christina Hornisher’s Hollywood 90028, unfortunately her only feature film, has long been underseen and undervalued but thanks to some champions in the film world it is now available in a restoration that look better than it will ever have looked when it hit the grindhouse circuit, and is now presented in environments sympathetic to a film that treats pretty typical early 70s grindhouse-style exploitation material with a low budget arthouse style and rather a lot of feminist subtext.

If you’re of the film school interpretative shape of mind, you’ll find much to think about here concerning the male gaze, the camera as a method of male domination, the problems with the porn industry; if you’re somewhat more bread and butter you might be astonished by Hornisher’s willingness to still treat her male serial killer as a complex human being without ever forgetting/or letting us forget, that he’s also a horrible one.

Obviously, this never tries to be a straightforward serial killer thriller, but there’s a heft and believable violence to the murders that keeps this a horror movie; just one where the violence is equalled by an ability to portray softness as well as paint a picture of a very specific part of Hollywood at a very specific point in time.

Visually, Hornisher often shows her background in experimental film, breaking up moments that feel verité through edits and dissolves that are anything but, very consciously tunnelling under the reality she has at first established so well. There is a slightly disorienting quality to this approach, as if time and place were slightly out of joint, or as if we were subtly pushed into sharing some of the wrongness that lurks in Mark.

Then, there’s that incredible final shot that belongs high up in the pantheon of final shots in (sort of) horror cinema finishing up a film that has been quite a revelation to me in an area of film history I thought I’d pretty thoroughly exhausted by now.

Count Dracula (1971)

Original title: Hrabé Drakula

The Victorian era. Jonathan Harker (Jan Schánilec) is sent to Transylvania to finish some real estate dealings with one Count Dracula (Ilja Racek), who is acquiring a new, gloomy, home in England. Well, and if you don’t know what happens next, you might want to make your way to Project Gutenberg.

This Czechoslovakian TV movie is more than just an interesting artefact for being the only Dracula adaptation I’ve ever heard of directed by a woman, Anna Procházková. It is also a genuinely fine film that makes much out of what clearly were very limited means. Stylistically, this fluctuates between some moody and appropriately bleak locations – the castle corridor and snowy Transylvania are the greatest example here, and the director milks them for mood and impact for all they are worth – and not terribly detailed interior sets. The latter are often used during cramped closed-ups – probably to help people on the kind of TV most Czechoslovakian viewers must have had at the time to see any damn thing at all – that are still highly effective and curiously moody. It often comes as a bit of a shock when the camera gets further away from the action, and this, too, Procházková uses very well, emphasising the moments of danger and strangeness.

Squeezing Stoker’s novel into a running time of seventy-five minutes would have been impossible, so there are heavy cuts to the material – Quincy Morris goes gets the shaft as he always does, but so do Renfield and the last voyage of the Demeter – and what’s kept in of the material is often heavily compressed for time. Though, unlike many an adaptation, Procházková and co-writer Oldrich Zelezný have a great idea of which core set pieces of the novel they want to keep and why they want to keep them. It’s genuinely impressive work that manages to do the novel’s mood in its best chapters justice throughout.

Empusa (2010)

When out and about with his best buddy, fisherman Victor (Antonio Mayans), former actor turned beach bum, tarot reader, writer on the occult and lover of all kinds of substances, Abel Olaya (Paul Naschy, sometimes dubbed by another actor, because he didn’t figure out the trick of speaking from beyond the grave, to everyone’s disappointment), finds a severed female underarm (including the hand) on the beach. Despite vigorous protests from Victor, Abel doesn’t call the police but takes the arm with him to research the mysterious tattoo on the arm, storing it in his fridge for the duration, right above his salami.

Turns out, empusas – in the film’s interpretation hot, very old, more durable female vampires – are slowly invading the quaint coastal town, turning the old men populating it into normal vampires through the powerful lure of hot goth girl sex, and plan to do something or other. Eventually. One supposes. They are also nibbling on Abel a little, but since he’s extra special – Naschy does after all script and direct – they have more interesting plans to acquire his “wisdom”. He, on the other hand, believes he’s destined to kill all empusas.

Though this isn’t the last film that came out starring Spanish horror king Paul Naschy, it is the last film he directed and wrote before his death in 2009. By this time, he had made something of a minor comeback, starring regularly in direct to video films that weren’t as fun as those he made during his heyday, but typically provided a couple of scenes of Naschy doing Naschy things like turning into a werewolf or a vampire and charming all the decades younger ladies with his increasing decrepitness, or wisdom, or whatever.

While nobody would ever call Empusa a good film, or even a consistently entertaining one, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as anybody’s first Naschy film, there’s a good-natured, ambling quality to the cheap looking thing that at the very least makes it a rather likeable film for the Naschy enthusiast, which I certainly am. In part, Naschy simple goes through many of the greatest hits of his interests – apart from lycanthropy – by now having grown out of the bitterness that made some of his 80s films pretty hard to watch. Spending one’s final years making silly horror movies with some friends and a surprising number of pretty young women willing to pretend one is the hottest thing on legs, do silly dances, or just drop their clothes in front of the camera does seem like the proper way for Naschy to go out on.

This feels companionable rather than exploitative, in large part because Naschy makes many jokes about the absurdity of the whole affair in the tone of somebody who knows very well who he actually is, but has fun embodying a fantasy version of 70s manliness, continued into old age, and there’s very little meanness in any of the jokes and asides here that could spoil this impression.

Rather than an attempt at some kind of no budget late period masterpiece that would only break everyone’s hearts (just look at Jess Franco’s final years), Empusa is the product of a guy who is just having a bit of fun at the end of his life, and who could blame him?

Death Carries A Cane (1973)

Amateur photographer Kitty (Susan Scott) witnesses the brutal murder of a naked woman by a someone dressed all in black – of course wearing the mandated black leather gloves - through a telescope. This isn’t going to be the last murder committed by this particular killer, who takes care of witnesses as much as of his core victims.

Curiously, the murders seem somehow connected to Kitty’s social circle, and soon, the investigating Comissario (Jorge Martín) seems so interested in Kitty’s boyfriend, the not the least bit suspicious and shifty Alberto (Robert Hoffmann), Alberto feels motivated to do some amateur sleuthing to save his own skin.

If ever you wanted to see a “typical”, made completely out of tropes, middle of the road, giallo, Maurizio Pradeaux’s Death Carries A Cane has your back. It is fair to say the film has no ideas of its own, but it has studied its giallo contemporaries and forebears well enough, it is able to apply the ideas it has borrowed from them consistently and coherently (as far as any giallo ever aspires to coherence). Thus this base-line giallo is also a very satisfying watch that gets what the genre is all about and what an audience likes about it.

The film’s only nearly original element is that it can’t quite decide who its central amateur detective is going to be – first it’s Kitty, then Alberto, then it’s back to Kitty again – which does hamper its narrative focus from time to time yet also keeps the audience on their toes.

On the level of style, this isn’t up to par with Argento, Bava or Martino, but Pradeaux does make great use of the contrast between run-down looking exteriors and the fully fashioned up interiors all giallo characters are bound by law to inhabit. The killings are also rather well done, often very effectively using dark blues and deep shadows before we get to the artificial red of cut throats. The climactic stalking – with a Kitty who has by now descended into hysteria – is particularly fine and again makes great use of locations and all the colours of the dark.

There’s little of substance here, of course, but some October nights, you just want to see a tale of pretty people of dubious moral fibre, a killer with a great fashion sense, and brutal murders. Well, make that most nights.

Waxworks (1924)

Original title: Das Wachsfigurenkabinett

A poet (William Dieterle when he was still called Wilhelm) looking for a paying job wanders into a waxworks that appears to be part of travelling circus. He is quickly hired to write tales about the three waxen main exhibits (I suppose for dramatic readings to paying customers=. He also finds himself inspired to romance - perhaps because the pretty daughter of the cabinet’s owner apparently has no concept of personal space and hovers nearly on his shoulder while he’s writing.

The tales he writes – all with Dieterle and the actress playing the daughter also taking on the romantic leads in them – make up the meat of the movie.

First, we learn how the calif Harun al Raschid (Emil Jannings) lost his arm in a macabre-grotesque bit of the kind of orientalism the 20s and 30s particularly loved, the “exotic” location providing the possibility to suggest a degree of cruelty and corruption in those in power you’d probably not have when setting your tale in Weimar or Berlin or the contemporary USA. This is segment is a bit long in the middle, but also features a surprisingly dynamic action sequence with Dieterle making his way over the very expressionist roofs of fantasy-Baghdad and ends on a gag macabre enough, my jaw dropped a little.

Next up in the cruel foreigner parade is Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt), being crazy, evil and sadistic until he finally succumbs to madness in a climactic – expressionist – freakout. Also featuring are a poisoner and his giant hourglass and as much sadism as you were allowed to suggest in a movie in 1924 (decidedly more than in a movie made twenty years later).

Finally, the film ends on the shortest tale, in which the Poet gets tired and dreams and reality begin to mix so much, he believes Spring-Heeled Jack (Werner Krauss) – whom the film appears to confuse with Jack the Ripper – is murdering the Daughter. This segment of the film is appropriately dream-like – in part thanks to some spectacular directorial tricks, the general air of unreality expressionist German cinema always carries, but probably also because the only remaining cuts of Das Wachsfigurenkabinett are missing about twenty minutes. Given how short the Spring-Heeled Jack segment is, it is probable these missing bits and pieces would belong to it and turn it into a more conventional story.

As it stands, the fragmentary nature of this last segment does make it even more nightmarish, like the actual product of a mind that has spent perhaps a little too much time on the morbid nature of the tales that came before it.

While Das Wachsfigurenkabinett isn’t quite the movie about wax figures coming to life some older write-ups of it promise, it is absolutely a film standing with both feet in the tradition of the macabre. This feels very much like an attempt to get as close to the tone of contes cruels and grand guignol as possible, using the visual elements of German expressionism to embody the characters’ cruelty and obsessive natures through pretty incredible sets.

Co-directors Leo Birinsky and Paul Leni use quite an impressive amount of dynamic editing techniques, creating suspense before the concept even had a technical term on the silver screen.

It’s a highly impressive movie, at least for those viewers who can stomach the problematic nature of its portrayal of non-Western cultures – though I’d argue the film’s whole feel is so unreal and clearly belonging to the world of nightmares, suggesting there’s any attempt here at saying much about actual historical figures or countries seems an ill fit to the film at hand.

Hellish Spiders (1968)

Original title: Arañas infernales

The planet Arachnea appears to be suffering from something of a food shortage, particular when it comes to the proper feeding of its Supreme Ruler, a queen who just happens to be a giant spider with the voice of an old woman. Fortunately, the Arachneans’ intrepid explorers have found a nice space pantry - a planet its supposedly sentient population likes to call Earth.

Turns out the inhabitants of that insignificant little planet have exactly the kind of food the Arachneans need: human brains. By now, Earth, or rather, its cultural centre, Mexico, has been secretly invaded by the aliens, walking around in human form and making a list of the most nutritious human, to be kidnapped and eaten shortly, without even checking twice.

Fortunately for brains in Mexico and the rest of the world, wrestler and all-around champion of justice and not-eating-brains Blue Demon (Blue Demon) begins thwarting the spider aliens’ plans. He’s such a superior example of humanity, the spider queen even forbids her people to kill him with their death ray – he’s just too good to waste. Thus, the usual tricks of lucha villainy – paralysation rays, the kidnapping of sidekicks, smuggling the Arachnean champion Arak (of course Fernando Osés) into the lucha ring to fight Blue – have to suffice.

This, directed by the sometimes inspired, sometimes not, Federico Curiel, is the pure stuff, a great example of the joys of lucha cinema, and proof that Blue Demon is just as glorious as El Santo.

This doesn’t just have everything you may want from a lucha movie, but also very little of those things you’d rather avoid: there’s no comic relief character! Only mildly boring ring fights! And musical numbers are kept over there where El Santo sleeps!

Which leaves much space in the film for the good stuff: Blue giving a scientific explanation for the phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion (“when there’s a neutrino imbalance, the thing or individual involved is ignited and it’s all over”) to his completely befuddled sidekick; Blue thwarting many an attack or kidnapping attack by wrestlers, I mean aliens, in pretty dynamic fight scenes; Blue casually solving cases for the police (as he regularly does, of course) in between wrestling matches; flying saucer effects that care not about your stupid tasty-brained human believability; curiously abstract alien base interiors that sometimes suggest you’re watching a really peculiar art film and not lucha pulp SF horror cinema; lots of brain eating; and a dude whose hand turns into a spider he then attempts to shove into Blue Demon’s face (which would be an illegal move in any wrestling match, if the referee hadn’t fled screaming).

If that’s not enough to make any friend of the adventures of heroic luchadores happy, let it also be said that Curiel may not have had much of a budget but a really good week when shooting this, so the film is actually well-paced, makes as much sense as this sort of thing needs to, and turns some sets – like that strange, strange spider alien base – into abstract-expressionist dreamscapes. It’s a genuinely impressive effort.

Also impressive, and pretty uncommon for the genre, is how much of the dialogue hits my personal sweet spot for the kind of pulp dialogue that nearly becomes a sort of unschooled poetry – there’s quite a bit of talk about humanity’s insignificance in the cosmos, and a lot of high-toned speechifying among the Arachneans who may not want to explain their plans to us humans, but surely have a great love for gloriously pompous announcements among each other. And who’d ever forget Blue Demon’s science lectures?

Lost Soul (1977)

aka The Forbidden Room

Original title: Anima persa

Tino (Danilo Mattei), a provincial late teen without much of a clue what to do with his life, comes to Venice to try his hand at studying art. He’s taken in by his uncle, the engineer Fabio (Vittorio Gassman) and aunt Sofia (Catherine Deneuve) to live with them in their decaying palazzo. Half of the place isn’t in a fit state to dwell in anymore, and Sofia and Fabio are very adamant about Tino not going into the attic. That’s pretty much the only thing husband and wife are agreeing on, though: Fabio is a dominating, verbally abusive hypocrite who very casually belittles Sofia, and she is fearful and neurotic about things Tino can grasp even less than the audience does.

Tino quickly – so quickly I’d hardly call it a spoiler – finds out there’s somebody else living in the house. His uncle’s brother is locked up in the attic room, incurably mad, raving, with Fabio his only human contact. Well, and the prostitute that visits once a month, apparently doing her thing with the madman while Fabio watches.

Given how quickly we learn about the man in the attic, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise there are more secrets in the palazzo, some concerning the dead daughter of the couple and the effect her death had on the marriage. Eventually, Tino will find out about all of them.

Dino Risi’s Lost Soul is not your typical Italian Gothic horror, but rather a somewhat arthouse-minded classy drama that thoughtfully takes influences of European Romanticism and Gothic horror to explore ideas of bourgeois hypocrisy and the loss of innocence through a revelation of family sins. Until its final revelations suggest that coming at things from this sideways direction of Gothic horror will still very much leave you making a horror movie. In fact one whose final revelations suggest a depth of perversity and sad corruption, Risi made the right choice not including Christopher Lee and his whip collection.

It helps Risi’s case for the sideways Gothic that Venice – particularly shot as clearly and moodily as DP Tonino Delli Colli does here – seems the perfect place to tell a tale of modern, sadly Gothic decay. It is, after all, a city grand but clearly on its slow way towards nowhere, full of stories terrible and wonderful (there’s an indelible, short sequence where Fabio explains some of the stories surrounding some palazzos they pass on their way to Tino’s school), enticing, but probably smelling of death below its perfume.

As a narrative, there’s very little actually happening here on the surface, but what’s lacking in action is made up by thoughtful and complex dialogue sequences full of allusions, suggestions, and the sharp needles of truth, filtered through fantastic performances by Deneuve (who is so good, you nearly buy her utterly counterfactual bits about the horrors of her aging which in reality are not at all visible on her face) and Gassman. There are layers of meaning – personal, philosophical, political – in the dialogue, but it feels not at all as if it were straining to carry them all. Risi’s touch appears so light, it can only result from a great feat of control.

Obviously, this is not a traditional Italian Gothic, but a film that uses choice elements of the form so well, it still is one of the hidden gems of the genre.

Three Films Know What You Did Last Summer

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997): Unlike its contemporary Kevin Williamson-scripted Scream, this adaptation of a Lois Duncan YA novel really didn’t want to be all clever and funny in its combination of slasher and giallo tropes. Instead, this is all about sexy people shot sexily, chases that take their time to stop being bloodless, and slick youth market filmmaking in a late 90s style.

Being the kind of guy that I am, really prefer this approach to the Scream way of doing things. This one’s all about big, loud, fun. In this, it is much closer to the spirit of the classic slasher, or rather, the perfect studio update to the formula. Sure, half the cast can’t act their way out of a wet paper bag (to be fair, most of them got better over the years), the plot makes very little sense, and the killer has even greater superpowers than Jason Voorhees, but there’s such a lack of pretension here, I’m bound to have fun with this one even when I’m not falling into 90s nostalgia (which I won’t anyhow).

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998): Danny Cannon’s sequel is ridiculous in all the right ways, even slicker, potentially sexier and most certainly quite a bit bloodier, and features the sort of plot that falls to pieces when one applies even the slightest bit of logic to it. It also, following a sad cue from the first film in the series, appears to be the start of the neo slasher’s inability to kill off main characters for fear of hindering franchise potential. Also features Jack Black as a rasta ganja dude OCR, which is a thing I’d rather not have had to witness or even just contemplate.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025): Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s legacy sequel is often much more of a comedy than the first two films, and spends just as much time on the supposedly charming girlfriends pair of Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders as it does on murder and mayhem. Whenever the film gets around to being a slasher legacy sequel of fun chases and awesome violence, it is great fun, and focussing on character relations could actually induce a viewer to care about what happens to them – a trick the first movies never managed with me. Of course, for this, you also need to forget the reason why the killer is after these assholes. But then, I’m rather sure the script does exactly that about halfway through.

Some fans of the originals apparently aren’t too fond of the way the film treats Jennifer Love Hewitt’s and Freddie Prinze Jr.’s characters (both of whom have really improved as actors in the ensuing decades, as I promised above), but for that, you probably need to have given a shit about them in the first place.

Otherwise, this is a fine example of mainstream legacy horror and all of its strengths and weaknesses.