Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023)

Margot (Bridget Rose Perrotta) and her girlfriend Rebecca (Destiny Leilani Brown) spend much of their free time visiting the – mostly supposedly haunted – sites of mysterious and unsolved murder cases for Margot’s YouTube channel. Rebecca’s only there for Margot, who tends to get a bit obsessive about “her cases”, whereas Rebecca takes care of the more real business of things like actually earning money when Margot isn’t dragging her around the creepiest parts of America.

For their newest case, Margot has also invited her brother Chase (James Liddell) to join in on the fun – perhaps not the best idea if one keeps in mind he’s just had some kind of mental breakdown.

Particularly since Margot has rented the Carmichael Manor for their newest excursion, the scene of unexplained murder/disappearances, and supposedly so haunted, nobody actually wants to stay there for longer than a night. As it turns out, the place and what happened there is connected to the Abaddon Hotel as known from the other Hell House LLC movies, and comes complete with a set of creepy clown costumes on mannikins that look rather a lot like those creeping around some viewers’ brains since the earlier films in the series. Margot and company will indeed figure out what happened at the Manor, and find it – or something very much like it - happening to themselves to.

I really liked the first Hell House LLC by director/writer Stephen Cognetti a lot, with its mix of genuinely interesting characterisation and creative shocks that made great use of the POV horror format. My interest in the sequels flagged rather heavily – there was so much explaining of the horror’s background myth, I felt myself exposited into disinterest.

That’s not a problem with this fourth Hell House LLC film. Cognetti’s still interested in worldbuilding, but here, he again hits the spot where explanations are hinted at and connections shown instead of explained out loud, leaving the space wide open to create an actual sense of dread.

Which the film does very well indeed. There’s some perfect creepy mood building throughout its first act that creates a delightful feeling of dread which very effectively underpins all of the nice little shocks to come. And Cognetti is truly great at creating little horror set pieces, jump scares and moments of outright creepiness of a type that’s perfect for the POV horror format. There’s nothing of the coyness of not showing anything here that can haunt POV horror/found footage. The direction uses deliberation and intelligence to decide what to show and what to insinuate, combined with an excellent sense of timing to create some memorable moments. The basic creepiness of the clown suits may even detract from how good Cognetti is at this sort of thing.

Which – along with the effective if not deep characterisation – makes Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor a wonderful outing in the series.

Case of a Young Lord 1 & 2 (1956)

Original titles: 若さま侍捕物手帖 地獄の皿屋敷 & 若さま侍捕物手帖 べらんめえ活人剣

These two one hour films directed by Kinnosuke Fukada (about whose body of work I otherwise know very little) are really one two-part movie, so I’m treating them as such here.

Edo era Japan. The somewhat excitable city is struck by a curious series of break-ins into the warehouses of a recently deceased pawnbroker during which nothing is stolen. These break-ins are perhaps committed by a mysterious samurai wearing a female oni mask. Because violence appears to be imminent, and indeed soon a murder occurs, the police ask for the help of a young man who’ll only ever be called the Young Lord (Hashizo Okawa) during the course of the series.

He’s apparently a rich loafer from a somewhat important family (one might argue he’s the most important young loafer in the whole of the shogunate), spending his youth on sake, a geisha with a huge crush on him and occasional song, but he’s also a brilliant amateur detective. The Young Lord soon figures out some connections between the break-ins and a plate once bestowed upon the family of a hatamoto by an earlier shogun, the noble marriage market, and other things of interest.

Apart from that mysterious masked samurai, there are others with an interest in the whole affair. Some of them of the kind of murderous disposition (and a bunch of henchmen) that makes it a happy coincidence the Young Lord is also a brilliant swordsman.

For a sick day morning of light entertainment, there’s little that’s better than this sort of jidai geki/chanbara mystery Toei were so adept at at the time. This series – two thirds of which are available with decent English subtitles if one knows where to look – is based on a newspaper series by Masayuki Jo, and adds a lot of pulpy fun to the nicely plotted mystery business, including not just that delights like that samurai in the wonderful mask (whose identity reveal is even more delightful in a “were they even allowed to do that in 1956?” sort of way), running battles with hordes of assassin mooks, and an honest to the godhood of your choice mechanical death-trap.

This joyful pulp goodness is filmed by Fukada with a sense of verve and the usual high technical skill of Japanese studio filmmaking of the era. The night sword fights are particularly well staged, even though this still belongs to the “waving swords around” era of sword fighting choreography, and doesn’t feature the blood or cutting noises that would come to be so stylistically important to all sorts of Japanese genre cinema in the coming decade.

Ozawa makes for a pleasant lead, and shows a particularly effective ability of shifting from lightness to grimness and earnestness, so we the audience have no problem believing that his pretty young man is also very dangerous indeed when ne needs to be.

Three Films Make A Post: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Witches’ Well (2024): A successful horror writer (writer/director/producer/editor/cinematographer Amanda K. Morales) on a research trip to Edinburgh encounters a stalker faking supernatural phenomena, and perhaps something supernatural as well.

This short and to the point piece of POV horror by (nearly) one woman band Morales is a pretty neat piece of work that tells a simple but not too simple story efficiently, doesn’t overstay its welcome with its one hour runtime and even gets a couple of decent stabs at the nature of belief in.

An Unknown Encounter: A True Account of the San Pedro Haunting (1997): This “documentary” about an actual paranormal case as directed by Barry Conrad, one of the men who concocted (or experienced, if you’re the eternal optimist) it, is a glorious mix of bullshit, genuinely creepy nonsense, bad science, bad faith, the kind of “actual footage” that manages never to film anything supernatural occurring because (what a surprise) nobody ever points the camera in the right direction at the right time, and perfectly cheesy “recreations” of everything these guys didn’t manage to capture on film (which is basically everything supernatural that couldn’t be easily faked).

While I believe not a single word of it – and abhor the obsession with orbs, the last resort of the desperate paranormal bullshitter – the whole thing is great fun when taken as the fiction it is. Bonus points for being a wonderful time capsule of the unsexy 90s I remember from my teenage years and featuring some excellently overblown narration and presentation by Ferdy Mayne.

The Widow (2020): Clearly heavily inspired by elements of my beloved Blair Witch Project, though only intermittently using POV horror elements, this Russian production by Ivan Minin is a perfectly fine little horror movie that features some impressive Russian forests right out of the most gothic of folk tales, and all the greatest hits of lost in the woods stalked by a witch horror, shot moodily and paced well enough for a fun evening of people dying in various somewhat horrible ways. There are even some moments here that go a bit further – shots of people whose faces shaded by hoods may not exist, haystacks randomly stacked up in the forest for no reason beyond the folkloric (the best reason) – these are the sorts of things I watch random cheap horror for.

Ghost Killer (2024)

Passive and more than a little alienated college student Fumika Matsuoka (Akari Takaishi) goes through life with only the minimum required amount of enthusiasm. She likes to introduce herself with “just another college student”, which might be the purest expression of non-suicidal youthful ennui possible. Her life takes quite a turn when she picks up a bullet casing on her way home.

Suddenly, Fumika finds herself haunted by the ghost of murdered assassin Kudo (Masanori Mimoto), one of those near-mythical super-fighters doing that kind of job in the movies instead of the boring psychopaths of real life. When she invites him in by giving him her hand, Kudo can even possess Fumika and pilot her body. Kudo believes that he might be able to pass on if Fumika lends him her body to kill the people responsible for his death, which might be preferrable to having a middle-aged dead guy hanging around you for the rest of your life.

Fumika, a woman of a generally non-murderous disposition, isn’t into the idea of lending her body for bloody vengeance at first, but after Kudo helps her out with some toxic masculinity problems that turn out to be not completely unrelated to his former business, his vengeance might also save her life.

Kensuke Sonomura is the action and martial arts choreographer of the rather wonderful Baby Assassins movies, but his own directorial efforts until now suffered from scripts too bare-bones even for action movies. Getting Baby Assassins writer/director Yugo Sakamoto to do the scripting honours and teaming up straight action actor Mimoto with half of Baby Assassins’ leads in form of Takaishi finally brings out the best in the guy – turns out Sonomura’s love for intricately choreographed and highly technical martial arts fights also mixes wonderfully with Sakamoto’s sense of humour and humanity when Sonomura’s the man on the director’s chair. There’s a sense of human stakes here Sonomura’s earlier films lacked for me. As in the Baby Assassins films, Takaishi’s style of expressive acting is a wonderful foible for the more limited talents of a great action actor/actress in this regard, while she is by now able to show off some pretty great on-screen action chops as well, though the film does shift to Mimoto’s body for about half of the action.

Pleasantly, and frankly surprisingly, given how Japanese films often go, there are no attempts at sexualising the relationship of the main characters – in fact, the early victims of some righteous ass-whupping are the only creeps of that sort on screen here. In fact, one of the ways the film justifies the increasing violence is by showing us an action-movified version of the kind of crap women all too often have to go through in real life.

While the action is as fast (and I mean fast), furious and regular as one would hope for, and the jokes as well-timed as expected, the emotional beats are just as important to Ghost Killer, so these characters in their somewhat absurd world and situation feel believable  and real enough to care about. And even though Kudo is quite the bad-ass, this isn’t the case of a Steven Seagal bully “hero” – there are physical and emotional stakes here that turn this into more than a pure action display.

The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (1968)

Original title: 一代劍王

Swordsman Tsai Yieng-Chieh (Tien Peng) is obsessed with vengeance. He is hunting down the men who killed his family to acquire a valuable sword when he was still a child.

But his straightforward way to slaughtering a quartet of vile men is getting increasingly complicated and morally grey. Even though he is trying to keep´cool and removed from the world, connection is not to be escaped: he gets help, if he want to or not, by people with agendas of their own. There’s Flying Swallow (Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) who saves him from a deadly poison for reasons having something to do with not repeating the injustices of previous generations (and probably love, as well), and who will indeed turn out to be the daughter of one of the men Tsai is planning to take vengeance on. Then there’s Black Dragon (Chiang Nan), the greatest swordsman in the martial world (he’s got a little medal that says so), who helps out our protagonist because he just needs to have a duel with him when the whole vengeance business is over and done with.

Eventually, even one of those horrible killers Tsai has set out to kill right back will turn out to have repented, and be quite helpless now.

I really have underrated director Joseph Kuo. Some of his films may have been shoddy attempts to jump on the newest trends, but at least this early in his career, he was also able to make a proper masterpiece like this wuxia. At first, it appears to be a well-shot but straightforward vengeance tale, with a straightforward hero hunting down straightforward villains for straightforward reasons in a straightforward manner. But with every additional character Kuo introduces, things become less easy and less clear, vengeance turns out to not be just in every case, and the obsession of the martial world with very clear and strict rules of conduct not fit for the more complicated world of the human heart. These rules turn out not be an ethical way to lead one’s life, but a cage one traps oneself and others in.

Visually, Kuo couches this tale in often beautiful and poetic nature shots that position the human drama in a world that mirrors and comments on it, and at times dynamic, at times focussed swordfights. It’s all wonderfully of a piece, where what at first appear to be distractions will turn out to be important parts of the film’s philosophical argument – it’s rather astonishing coming from a typically distractible director like Kuo.

Three Films Make A Post: Torment is just the beginning.

The Butterfly House aka Pernikahan Arwah (2025): A couple’s wedding preparations are disturbed when the groom’s family curse starts making things difficult. For reasons of symmetry, this curse has quite a bit to do with weddings.

I found Paul Agusta’s piece of Indonesian horror to be a pleasant example of the form. It is neither as gruesome as some horror films from the country, nor as soap operatic, instead inhabiting a middle ground of the perfectly decent, with nice enough horror sequences, good enough acting and a decently flowing script.

1978 (2025): I expected a little more of a film set during the Argentinean military dictatorship where some torturers and their victims encounter something perhaps even worse than themselves. Unfortunately, Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s film makes little use of the metaphorical space screaming to be filled here – the torturers could be any random shit heels from any place and time in history and nothing at all would change about what happens to them and how they react to it, and the occult forces unleashed are run-of-mill Satanic business.

It’s not a terrible movie – some of the effects and monster designs are really neat for this budget bracket, and the directors know how to keep things flowing – but there’s nothing of real interest going on here.

The Big 4 (2022): As much as I usually like the films of Timo Tjahjanto, this action comedy about violent idiots killing other violent idiots for reasons of FAMILY is dire. That the humour is unfunny and ill-paced is bad enough, but somehow, the deeply action-affine director also can’t seem come up with any action set pieces of note. The problem isn’t just the humour, or the somewhat slighter amount of blood and gore than usual in Indonesian action. The film shows a lack of imagination and weight – or the proper kind of weightlessness – I find genuinely confusing coming from this particular filmmaker.

Mutant Ghost War Girl (2022)

In the confusing future of 2077. Superpowers acquired through gene editing are apparently now a thing, and international gangs/companies of evildoers use this technique to build themselves fighters they apparently mostly use for blood sports and only the occasional assassination.

An operative known as Ghost (Muqi Miya, apparently a Chinese-internet-famous yoga instructor) is sent to infiltrate the evil Medusa Company/Network to acquire super-secret data of some kind. This she does indeed acquire, but she is also mutated by the bad guys before her colleagues can rescue her. Now, after a rescue mission gone bad, she’s on the run from Medusa Corp through the mean streets of future South Korea.

Zhou Yang (Li Mingxuan), some kind of Korean intelligence agent is helping her out, though not via logical things like calling in any reinforcements. Instead he’s hiding her at his place for a bit, until they team up to acquire more of the mutating juice for…reasons.

Eventually, there’s a climactic fight with the leaders of the bad guys.

If all of this sounds vague and confusing, that’s firstly because Liu Binjie’s Chinese cyberpunk-y science fiction action movie comes with a set of subtitles that completely defies comprehension for at least half of the time, and defies sense even when the words used manage to combine into something you might confuse for a proper sentence. I’m not sure this is to the movie’s detriment, for this may very well be the sort of film made more enjoyable if you don’t understand what’s supposed to go on. At the very least, this incomprehensibility does add to Mutant Ghost War Girl’s mood of deep peculiarity.

Liu clearly loves western science fiction and superhero media so the film is as stuffed with quotes, borrowings and stolen parts from these films as much as Zhou Yang’s place is stuffed with fan tat (he even proudly displays a bust of Iron Man, Marvel’s trademark lawyers be damned). Liu does tend to like very peculiar parts of his western idols – you will encounter a character who is Jared Leto’s Xtreme Joker, and a scene borrowed nearly directly from the atrocious Ghost in the Shell abomination with Scarlett Johanssen, but again, this of course only adds to the film’s personality.

While all of this is pleasantly weird, MGWG also shows off some more than decent filmmaking chops: the production design is weird in a coherent and always fun to look at manner – mixing Western ideas of Cyberpunk Asia with actual Asian aesthetics – and the action scenes are fast, imaginative and silly in the best rule of cool manner.

Hell, even Muqi is a pretty good CGI action star for a yoga instructor.

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

College student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is plagued by recurring nightmares of a big, bloody and very digital catastrophe in a sky-view style restaurant. It’s getting so bad, her once famous academic prowess is suffering. Because these dreams star a young version of her grandmother, she decides to return home to dig for family secrets.

There she encounters an older generation that doesn’t want to talk about family secrets like the fact that Grandma is living in a weird cabin in the middle of nowhere thereby trying to stave off the death of her whole family line (or is plain crazy), and a younger one wont to not very interesting whining. Everyone’s also prone to the kind of melodrama without which the amateurish script would screech to a halt. One can’t blame death for trying to wipe them out in the series-standard gory accidents. One can blame him for taking his dear time with it.

Sometimes, you should really cut your losses – unless somebody with an actual sense of imagination gets their hands on the Final Destination franchise again, there are only ever drearily “funny” death pinball entries in the franchise’s future.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, the former of which already tried my patience with crap like Dead Rising: Watchtower and Leprechaun: Origins a decade ago, or one of the five people listed with scriptwriting and story duties try to turn the whole death business into a family affair, during which death doesn’t only try to wipe out the unplanned survivors of catastrophes but also their spawn, I mean, descendants. And yes, of course the film is not going to really hold to these new rules, because that would take actual effort by the filmmakers. Obviously, the only effort anyone’s taken here with anything are the death scenes. Ironically, these try a bit too hard to be clever and twisty in the way only the most stupid things do, so there’s only a small degree of joy to be found here. The film’s painfully digital look – not something I tend to complain about – robs most of the killing of any physical weight anyway, and the film’s insistence on digital blood really doesn’t help here at all.

The character work is dull and mechanical, with everyone being either bland or annoying, probably to fit better with the CGI.

The only moment of actual humanity here is the final appearance of Tony Todd in a scene not even Lipovsky and Stein can rob of it. Still, I would have wished the man could have gone out with a film worthy of him.

Three Films From 2025 I Didn’t Care For Still Make A Post

Ballerina (2025): I’m of two minds about the John Wick movies – no, really, I think half of them are pretty brilliant, the other half very much not – and alas, spin-off Ballerina, as directed by Len Wiseman belongs to the very much not  part of this equation. Featuring pointless cameos, not a single interesting (or just fun) idea and an interminable number of action sequences that are technically very accomplished but also bland and empty as these things get (one might suggest the term “soulless”), this is a joyless example of franchise “content” nobody involved seems to actually wanted to create. Why we are then supposed to want to watch it is anyone’s guess.

Drop (2025): In the case of Drop, the problem may be as much me as the film. It is not exactly director Christopher Landon’s fault that I find US dating culture as presented in movies not just difficult to relate to but aggressively boring. Nor is it his fault that I find twisty thrillers generally a bit of a hard sell.

What is Landon’s fault is that most of the twists here are painfully generic, the surprises perfectly unsurprising, and much of what is presented too absurd to work in the way it is presented. Stylistically, this often feels like a show reel for its director instead of a movie, something you can get away with when you are Brian DePalma; Landon, as much as I enjoyed some of his earlier movies, is not.

Murder at the Lighthouse (2025): This little Lifetime movie at least has an excuse for not being any good – it being a Lifetime movie comes with a decided lack of budget as well as a dearth of talent before the camera – although everybody including the crazy stalker cop ex-boyfriend looks absurdly well groomed.

Director Eric D. Howell clearly liked Misery, so much so he’s eventually getting up to turning this into a decidedly lesser version of the King adaptation (or the King novel). On the plus side, this lacks the painful camp and irony of too many Lifetime thrillers, so at least Howell was trying instead of just throwing his hands up going “it’s all ironic, you see”.

Noboru Ando’s Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex (1976)

Following an attack on a business man he ordered, gang leader – historically he wasn’t a “proper” yakuza - Noboru Ando (Noboru Ando) has to go on the run. A process that consists of a lot of drinking, watching TV, and spending time at all of his many girlfriends’ places. Most of these women love Ando very much indeed, so he has to cope not just with proving his potency again and again, but also fending off various attempts from the various ladies to follow him on the lam.

As you may or may not know, before he became an actor, Noboru Ando was an actual criminal, clearly a darling of the Japanese yellow press, and just as clearly pretty damn awesome at building his own public mythology, like a John Ford western character gone mad. This isn’t even the first movie to dramatize the misadventure that earned Ando the prison sentence which in turn earned him his acting career, but it certainly is the first and only one based on the decision to turn the whole affair into a mix of standard yakuza tropes, some broad satire, and pinku style sex.

Directed by softcore auteur Noboru Tanaka, this puts a heavy emphasis on typically highly unerotic – and often very funny - sex scenes during which Ando does his very best not to move a single facial muscle. Does he enjoy the act as much as his writhing, moaning, love-sick partners do? He certainly ain’t telling. Also appearing are a “sexy”, hot dog based dance (not committed by Ando, because not even yakuzasploitation like this would be that cruel), tuberculosis jokes (I got nothing), and a climactic fight during which a very young looking Renji Ishibashi holds off the police while Ando attempts to finish a bit of spontaneous sex with a random partner. Which he doesn’t manage, so we finish on an indelible scene of Ando jerking off in a police car while cops look on, displeased. Again, I’ve got nothing.

If you’re of a certain mindset, this will make Chronicle sound like a slam-dunk of the weird and the wonderful – and I haven’t even mentioned the scene of Ando and Ishibashi walking a beach philosophising about being bacteria in the national host body. Indeed, when the movie is on point – particularly during its final twenty minutes or so – it is quite the experience of smut, absurdity and weird energy. But it is also slow, lacking in any dramatic progression or tension, and incredibly repetitive – watching Ando not moving a facial muscle during sex one time is great, watching this ten times causes it to lose a considerable amount of its lustre, so the whole thing is more than just a bit of a slog.

Still, the idea of the film alone is worth some mind space and time, and the moments when Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex is as bizarre as it promises to be make up for all that unsexy sex and scenes of watching characters watch TV, at least to a degree.

Three Films Make A Post: Insert Clever Title Here

Mojin: The Lost Legend aka 鬼吹燈之尋龍訣 (2015): A trio of traditional-official tomb raiders return from dubious retirement in America to China to rob a particularly mysterious tomb. This high on very digital looking effects adventure directed by Wuershan (and based on one part of a long and complicated sounding series of novels) is a whole lot of fun if you like this kind of blockbuster at all.

It’s like a Chinese Indiana Jones with more supernatural action, some surprisingly snarky remarks towards the Cultural Revolution (though it isn’t called by name), and quite a bit of the sense of anything goes that made Hong Kong cinema so enticing but not generally translated to mainland China cinema like this. This really has everything and the kitchen sink in it: romance, zombies, Shu Qi, Shu Qi cursing a lot, complicated mechanical traps, a weird cult, bizarre humour, Shu Qi, and more good and bad ideas than most film trilogies.

Mojin: The Worm Valley aka 雲南蟲谷 (2018): And three years later this happened: none of the actors nor the director of the original return, and with them also leaves the spirit of fun of the first film, as well as parts of the budget. There’s something rote and mechanical about the whole affair – this is pretty much the empty and lifeless spectacle too many people pretend all blockbuster style cinema is, lacking in fun, joy, and the ability to actually deliver the promised rollercoaster ride as a rollercoaster ride.

Deadful Melody aka 六指琴魔 (1994): Welcome to 90s wuxia land. Various martial world weirdoes attempt to steal a magical lute that also happens to be the most powerful weapon this side of your favourite magical sword, while a mysterious, sometimes cross-dressing woman played of course by Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia takes bloody vengeance for the death of her family. Also featured are a not terribly young Yuen Biao as the young hero and Carina Lau Ka-Ling as his love interest and comic relief.

The rest of the film mostly consists of a breathless series of shots of people flying, making shit explode with their Qi, a lot of twirling and a good amount of flying body parts, blue fog, blue light, blue everything, all presented by director Ng Min-Kan with the manic energy of Joel Silver on a real coke binge. This is absolutely awe-inspiring if you enjoy this wuxia revival as much as I do, and aren’t afraid of headaches.

The usual summer break

because the skin of eldritch abominations tends to dry out in the heat. What I laughingly call normal service around here will resume on August, 9th.

Possession (1981)

The marriage of Mark (Sam Neill) – vaguely involved in the kind of espionage business one expects in a film set in Cold War era Berlin – is on the skids.

While Mark has played the usually absent dad and husband, his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) has started an affair with macho new age weirdo Heinrich (Heinz Bennent). She sure as shit didn’t learn any yoga from the guy though, for she and Mark proceed to work through their crisis through shouting, writhing and a bit of self-mutilation or spousal abuse when the mood strikes.

And that’s before Anna births a tentacled thing in the subway she’s starting to feed with human blood.

So much has been written about Andrzej Zulawski’s much-beloved arthouse psychodrama horror masterpiece by some of the more insightful critics, there’s certainly very little new I can add to the corpus. But from time to time, just jotting down personal impressions can be a bit of fun – at least for this writer; my imaginary readers are long-suffering anyway.

I find it rather interesting how closely related Possession is to a kind of arthouse movie I can’t stand at all, the type where everyone communicates in pseudo-philosophic portentous sentences that aren’t as deep as the writers appear to think they are. Really, the dialogue here is mostly exactly this, but is heightened in effect and meaning through the brutally physical performances – particularly by Adjani, who sometimes appears to drag Neill bodily into the mind space of insane intensity and actual madness the film takes place in – and direction that goes all out in every aspect.

Zulawski working though his own demons by way of European 70s horror influences as much as the more classy stuff he imbibed is a sight to behold, or actually, feels like a director conjuring up aspects of himself any sane person would hardly want to acknowledge, certainly not show to an audience in a form feeling this raw. This is not the work of an edge lord flirting with the dangerous life by acting like an asshole child – this is much darker, much more genuine, and, perhaps, actually dangerous. At the same time, this is also a movie featuring a scene where Isabelle Adjani fucks a tentacle monster, and Sam Neill drowns a guy in a toilet, so Zulawski is certainly not afraid to let his genre arthouse movie actually be a genre movie, not too far from the traditions established in Italy and other parts of Western Europe.

Three Films Make A Post: In 1987, Oakland was hella freaky.

Freaky Tales (2024): I’m not sure where I caught the case of optimism, but I expected an anthology movie with this particular title to contain tales somewhat freakier than the one about the punks who are attacked by Nazis, decide to fight back the next time, and then fight back the next time, or the one about two young women who are invited to a rap battle, take part in the rap battle, and win the rap battle. This is more Tales of the Bleeding Obvious material.

Apparently, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are big fans of classic exploitation movies, but their modern version of them is bland, antiseptic, and just too nice to truly get the spirit. That the blood and gore is all CGI is absolutely telling in this regard. Doing a proper left-wing style exploitation movie seems like a fine goal to me, but this surely isn’t it.

Clown in a Cornfield (2025): As far as modern retro-slasher comedies go, Eli Craig’s Clown is a perfectly decent time – it’s certainly well-made, has a couple of jokes that actually hit, and a fine final girl in Katie Douglas. It’s also less sadistically minded than rather a lot of modern slashers at the moment, and doesn’t feature endless, boring, torture sequences; it falls in the opposite direction a little, so the violence is a bit too weightless and too cartoonish to ever produce much suspense, proving that you really can’t satisfy me in this regard.

But really, it’s the kind of perfectly decent film, most probably made by perfectly decent filmmakers there’s very little to say about.

Eclipse (1977): This film about a very awkward Christmas dinner with the alcoholic wife of a deceased twin and his neurotic brother, close after the accidental (or was it?) death, was only rediscovered thanks to the efforts of its male lead Tom Conti.

It’s an interesting film, building a mood of tension out of occasional flashbacks, awkward and tense social interaction and a pretty fantastic synth score.

In its general tone the film is a sibling to some of the weirder and more abstract regional films from the US (this is a Scottish film), particularly in its insistence on getting by on a mood of tension and dread alone – there are no revelations coming you didn’t expect, and there’s a slightness to these particular sets of neuroses that sometimes gets in the film’s way.

But unlike the other two films in this entry made fifty years later, Eclipse really strains for something unique, and gains a certain power from it even if it doesn’t quite succeed.

A True Story of the Ginza Private Police (1973)

Original title: 実録・私設銀座警察

1946, Ginza shortly after the end of World War II. A group of traumatized and incredibly violent soldiers realize – as much as these guys have the self-consciousness for it – their shared nihilism. Thus enabled to embrace their worst selves, they begin taking over the district’s organized crime business through rape, murder and all kinds of blunt-force trauma.

After a time, when Japan starts to stabilize a little, and hunger and desperation become less of a valid factor (or excuse) for vile deeds, the comparatively less insane Iketani (Noboru Ando) strikes out on his own to build a somewhat more civilized criminal empire based on blackmail and rather more controlled violence. Something a group whose main killer is a drug-addicted soldier (Tsunehiko Watase) who murdered a baby and beat his wife to death in the film’s opening scene cannot offer.

I’m not often going around calling films “nihilistic”, but Junya Sato’s early entry in the cycle of ripped from the headlines, “realistic” jitsuroku yakuza cycle is absolutely that. From that still shocking beginning you really have to see to believe to an ending where everybody loses in the most brutal manner and the world clearly doesn’t care whatsoever, this is feel bad cinema of the highest (lowest?) calibre. The characters are all pieces of shit – whose lack of humanity is explained but never excused by their war trauma – doing horrible things to innocent and guilty alike for the whole of the film’s running time with a complete lack of remorse, moving through a society too tired and bitter to even react to them with the proper outrage or willingness to defend itself against what they embody.

The fruits of their crimes are the most basic creature comforts, and the greatest plan anybody of them can imagine is to grab more and more power he’ll perhaps sometimes use to finance an underling marrying his mistress – and even that will cost a lot of people their lives.

Sato portrays post-War Ginza as an utter hellhole without human kindness or even the good old beauty growing from the gutter – there is nothing here to strive for, no happiness, no future, and a past that’s just going to make the characters more angry at the world and themselves.

Visually, this is an absolute assault on the senses with a blaring free jazz score and later some freeform noise ascribed to Masanobu Higurashi over jittery handheld camera and barely a scene that isn’t drenched in mud, blood, or screams. The film is so intense, the violence still so direct, it borders on an actual assault on the audience. True Story is absolutely relentless, daring its viewers to look.

It’s a masterpiece of its kind, though perhaps not the kind of film to watch when you’re already on a low point of your opinion on humanity.

Flora and Son (2023)

Flora (Eve Hewson), a mostly single Mom in Dublin – the father Kev (Paul Reid) is around but is clearly useless in most regards – can’t really connect with her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan). She’s not quite grown-up as fully as you’d expect of a proper movie mom, after all, and is rather more abrasive than Hollywood rules allow for being a good mother.

On a wine-driven lark, Flora signs up for online guitar lessons from Los Angeles never-quite-made-it musician Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Not unexpectedly, they do fall in long-distance love, but, this being a John Carney movie, the romantic aspect isn’t everything, so Flora discovers certain aspects about herself through the power of music and their connection that will in turn help her connect with Max.

So yes, this is pretty much a typical John Carney film in its use of romance movie tropes it doesn’t quite subvert but also clearly isn’t feeling slavishly beholden to, where the lovers not getting together in a romantic embrace isn’t actually a sad ending, and where re-connecting a family isn’t part of some kind of conservative impulse to put things back in order, but an example of human connection.

Human connection that in Carney’s films is typically enabled and enhanced through the power of music, or really, the power of songs – in a way where genre and approach matter less than the nearly spiritual way making music together as an act of creativity can connect people in unexpected ways.

This nearly never glides off into the realms of kitsch because Carney also knows that songs do not magically solve every problem, that problems may indeed not be solvable, and isn’t afraid to leave room for characters to grow or screw up after the movie is finished. His sometimes a little abrasive but never cruel sense of humour certainly helps keep things honest as well.

Which makes Flora and Son, like all of Carney’s musically minded movies, the kind of film to watch when you want to feel all little better about humanity without feeling like you’re being lied to - a perfect thing, really.

Another Three Shaw Brothers Movies Make A Post

The Deadly Knives aka Fists of Vengeance aka 落葉飛刀 (1972): This is a very standard tale of dastardly Japanese and traitorous Chinese getting vengeanced by a virtuous stand-up Chinese guy. Director Jang Il-Ho doesn’t add much to the Shaw house style, and often stands in the way of getting to the good parts of the material or even in the way of framing those good parts as effectively as he could.

Not that the choreography is that great: like a lot of work that Yuen Woo-Ping did for the Shaw Brothers, this may not be standard Shaw choreography, but it’s not that great at actually being different – quite the contrast to what he would get up to only a few years later. On the plus side, this features Ching Li (though a lot of actually good Shaw movies do as well, so…).

Duel for Gold aka 火併 (1971): This is Chor Yuen’s first film made for the studio, and this wuxia version already shows some of the hallmarks of my favourite director of the studio’s wuxia output – the less heroic view of the martial world that still leaves space for acts of traditional heroism, the love for multi-way climactic fights with shifting allegiances, the strong hand for characterization even in movies that take place in a pretty damn weird world, the re-emphasis on women as important players in the martial world, and the ability to get the best from his cast – here featuring Ivy Ling Po, Wang Ping, Lo Lieh and others.

Visually, this wuxia version of the Treasure of the Sierra Madre with greater gender parity doesn’t quite feel like a Chor Yuen wuxia yet but keeps closer to the Shaw standard of 1971. Fortunately, that standard’s so high, the film’s still great.

Shadow Girl aka 隱身女俠 (1971): Come for the ultra-traditional tale of clashing martial arts families and stay for the practical effects shenanigans of an invisible Lily Li Li-Li - invisible by day, visible by night thanks to experiments conducted by her crazy grandma, no less.

Taiwanese director Hsin Chi’s film is generally good fun – the practical effects alone should warm the coldest of hearts – but a little uneven with a somewhat slow middle and a few more characters hanging around than is good for it. On the other hand, this also features a floating evil legless hermit and his just as evil brother, whose martial arts powers are based on the magic of jump cuts, so there’s no way for me not to have fun with it.

Winter’s Flower (1978)

Original title: Fuyu no hana

After fifteen years spent in prison for murdering a friend and traitor to his group, yakuza Kano (Ken Takakura) is released.

Not much awaits him outside. Well, there’s an empty apartment bought for him as a make-up gift for his sacrifice, and, for complicated reasons, the now teenage daughter of the man he killed. While he was in prison, Kano wrote letters “from Brazil” to the girl, pretending to be her uncle, while providing her with money and protection through his yakuza friends. Now, outside, he’s circling around the borders of her life. She has turned into a symbol of a life not lived where guilt and the daughter he never had meet, and he’s sad and wise enough to know that actually meeting the girl would not lead anywhere good.

So the sad middle-aged man goes back to the yakuza life. He’s doing so only reluctantly, and he is encountering old friends and associates that mostly seem just as dissatisfied with it as he is, just less conscious of how much they are going nowhere. Unlike Kano, they are blaming the times instead of themselves.

Mirroring what happened fifteen years ago, there’s pressure for Kano’s group to unite with another, bigger, more powerful, more modern and more ruthless one. Very much despite of himself(or is it because of himself?), Kano is letting himself be drawn into repeating the same bad choices he made when he probably didn’t know any better.

Yasuo Furuhata’s Winter’s Flower is very typical of the yakuza films Ken Takakura starred in at this stage in his career, when the genre wasn’t as successful anymore, and Takakura had been doing predominantly other types of films for quite some time. In the yakuza films he still made, often directed by Furuhata, and not really fitting into the ninkyo/jitsuroku divide, Takakura was always a man of his actual age, either having left the yakuza life only to be drawn in again, or not quite managing to in the first place.

These are films dominated by a quiet, very middle-aged, sadness and melancholia. It’s not the railing at the skies of the young, but the quieter kind of desperation of lives badly spent, promises broken and hopes that have just faded away, perhaps alleviated by a hope for some kind of simple, quiet contentment that the men in these films inevitably can’t quite keep their grips on. These are qualities Takakura embodied as much as those of the upright yakuza of his earlier years, with a subtle, and never whiny, gravitas that feels as if it came from lived experience – his performances in this part of career are all deep gazes and small gestures as far away from melodrama as possible, and feel as true to an actual inner life expressed this way as I can imagine.

This is how Winter’s Flower works as a whole – there are opportunities to great melodrama and violence in the plot, but Furuhata decides to focus on quieter readings of situations and characters that develop the pull of truthfulness by an insistence on quietly observing Kano and his world. Melodrama is for the young, and this is a movie neither about, nor for, them, and so the unflashy, steady direction doesn’t try to sell this tale to them.

As a middle-aged guy myself, I can relate.

Three Films Make A Post: What We Fear We Create

Fight or Flight (2024): I really enjoyed Bullet Train, and apparently, so did James Madigan. In fact, he enjoyed the film so much, he made his own version of it, with the brilliant twist of making everything in it a little – or a lot – worse. So we get an airplane instead of a train, Josh Hartnett instead of Brad Pitt, crappier hallucinations, less absurdly fun characters and inferior action choreography.

The result is one of the more puzzling films I’ve seen this week – I really can’t quite figure out why it exists.

Project MKHEXE (2025): Whereas Gerald Robert Waddell conspiracist POV horror that turns into cosmic horror clearly exists as a labour of love. It’s a film full of genuinely good ideas, well realized. It includes some moments of genuine eeriness, and shows a willingness to end on a downer note that’s deserved instead of cliché.

I particularly enjoyed all the little bits and pieces taken from different styles of POV horror that make up much of the film’s middle part – this solves the problem of the genre’s tendency to have boring middles quite nicely and provides the film with a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the scope of what’s going on in it without breaking the bank.

As to weaknesses – well, the acting’s not always quite up the ambition – particularly when it comes to the grief horror parts of the film – and the film’s ten minutes or so longer than it exactly needs to be. For this kind of indie project, these are hardly problems worth mentioning, however.

Stranger (1991): The early days of Toei’s V-Cinema subdivision really were an anything goes time, apparently, so between classic exploitation, yakuza comedy, insane low budget action, or 70s heist revival, there was also space for this suspense thriller by Shunichi Nagasaki about a loner female taxi driver (Yuko Natori) finding herself stalked by what turns out to be a killer. There are a couple of obvious influences – Spielberg’s Duel for the rather wonderful car action parts and the usual suspense suspects – but Nagasaki’s film is such a great portrayal of loneliness as well as of a woman under threat protecting herself, these influences begin to pale behind the tight, focussed, filmmaking and the general intelligence of the film.

The Lady Assassin (1983)

Original title: 清宮啟示錄

The Qing emperor (Ching Miao) has come to his final years and is beginning to think about his successor. His favourite for the role is the 14th Prince (Max Mok Siu-Keung). Fourteen is young, he’s inexperienced and, as events will show, more than just a bit of a shallow idiot, whose more interested in looking righteous than the difficult business of actually being it. But least, he appears to not be actively malevolent. This can’t be said about the 4th Prince (Lau Wing) – he’s a man deeply in love with himself, palace intrigue and more often than not being evil for evil’s sake. Four has gotten wind of who his father plans to make his successor, and is not at all against murdering his own brother (well, half-brother, one hopes for the women involved).

The 4th Prince’s problem when it comes to assassinating his rival is that his brother has a very capable bodyguard and advisor in form of virtuous and highly efficient martial arts expert Tsang Jing (Norman Tsui Siu-Keung) – coming pre-packaged with his two female servants/martial arts students/probably lovers Jade (Yeung Ching-Ching) and Pearl (Daisy Cheung King-Yu) – and Tsang Jing isn’t just making the 14th Prince look like a better man than he actually is, he’s also easily thwarting most assassination attempts.

Eventually, the 4th Prince will acquire his very own martial arts expert in form of the ambitious Min Gen Yiu (Jason Pai Piao), but even then, a successful assassination seems doubtful and risky. So much so, the 4th Prince seeks out the help of Han revolutionary leader Lui Liu Liang (Ku Feng), promising him to get rid of the laws that suborn the Han Chinese under their Manchu conquerors. If, that is, Lui Liu Liang, or rather, his redoubtable martial artist niece Lui Si Niang (the incredible Leanne Lau Suet-Wah) help him access the decree in which is father has set down his designated successor.

Of course, helping out a man like the 4th Prince might not turn out as happily as one would want.

And that’s only about half of the plot of Tony Lou Chun-Ku’s breathless Shaw Brothers palace intrigue/wuxia mix The Lady Assassin, a film that somehow manages to run breathlessly through an amount of narrative that would provide for three or four seasons of a modern streaming TV show, features about a thousand different fights, yet still has room for rather a lot of complicated characterisation.

In most wuxia films, Lau Wing’s villain would be a one-note moustache twirler, but here, the guy’s abhorrent but also much more nuanced than you’d expect. As an example, the scene in which he convinces Lui Liu Lang and his family to throw their lot in with him by perfectly emulating a man of honour and conscience is a perfect portrayal of the kind of narcissist who always appears to believe in his own lies and empty promises a little (if you’ve never seen such a thing in real life, I can’t recommend the experience), and always finds a bad excuse for not acting on them he also appears to believe, however untrue it may be. Still, enjoying his own ability to pretend to be an honourable man, he will even try to implement his promises, until he gets the tiniest pushback. Then, he folds like the utterly weak man he is at his power-grubbing core.

As a whole, this is one of those wuxia where the most honourable characters – Tsang Jing and Lui Si Niang are genuinely good people – find themselves tied to the will and plans of characters whose nature is abhorrent to them once revealed, and can only break free from obligations, rules, and lies through acts of insane violence. Being in any contact with power can apparently only be cleansed through blood and vengeance.

Speaking of acts of violence, the martial arts choreography by Poon Kin-Kwan is absolutely insane – fast, vicious and only occasionally totally fantastical, this is all about speed and movement. Director Lou stages the fights – like everything else in the film – exclusively in angles and shot compositions of maximalist dramatic impact. There’s not subtlety to the direction, but as Lou uses his hammer here, everything doesn’t just look like a nail but indeed is one. It’s pretty incredible, as is how powerful much of the acting is – Lau Wing is a particular standout, but the burning fierceness of Leanne Lau’s gaze, or the dignity only slightly marred by the cynicism of permanent defeat of Ku Feng’s performance, are just as impressive.

To my eyes, The Lady Assassin is an absolute classic of the late period Shaw output, a film as perfect as its final freeze frame.

The Bells of Death (1968)

Original title: 奪魂鈴

Some travelling martial world evil doers murder the family of young woodcutter Chang Wei Fu (Chang Yi) just for the heck of it, and kidnap his sister. The distraught young man soon stumbles upon an experienced swordsman who eventually – after some running and shouting by our hero – teaches Chang Wei Fu martial arts so he can avenge his family.

Some time later, Chang Wei Fu begins hounding his psychopathic – other wuxia villains at least have motives for their misdeeds - enemies with his newly developed skills and the tinkling of an anklet with bells his mother used to wear. He will also acquire something of a love interest – it’s complicated – in one Hsiang Hsiang (Chin Ping) and have a reunion with his sister (Chiu Sam-Yin). None of this will get into the way of vengeance, of course.

The other wuxia directed by Griffin Yueh Feng I’ve seen tend to a certain stodginess and aesthetic conservatism (or perhaps a conscious classicism pointing at earlier style of wuxia, in whose production Yueh was also involved in?). So colour me surprised by The Bells of Death, a grim tale of vengeance that looks and feels like an Italian western, and not just because the tinkling of bells stands in for a harmonica. There’s a lot of dynamic editing, close-ups, and hand-held camera here, not just copied like the newest aesthetic fad but used with deliberation and intelligence, always in service of making the fights feel more brutal, the melodrama more intense, and the mood more doom-laden.

From time to time, Yueh Feng adds some of the more fantastical flourishes of wuxia martial arts – Chang Wei Fu’s mastery is so large, he can even use leaves as weapons - but never lets them get in the way of the grimness of proceedings. There’s impressive tonal coherence to the work, not always a strength of the genre.

The Bells of Death keeps to its grimness throughout – there’s never any doubt this will end with the kind of vengeance that leaves nobody standing at all; what the film thinks about this is difficult to say, for this has none of the love for philosophical discourse of a Chor Yuen/Ni Kuang joint nor even just the more thoughtful moments in Cheng Cheh’s filmography, when even he paused and thought about the prize of slaughter.

If that’s a virtue or a flaw will very much depend on a viewer’s mood.

Three Films Make A Post: Family over everything.

Shadow Force (2025): Joe Carnahan always has been a bit of a hit or miss filmmaker for me, though when he hits, he does tend to find the bullseye.

This piece of action cinema, though, does feel like the product of someone who can’t even be bothered to look in the direction of the target. Everything here, from the bland direct to DVD actioner look (this is not actually a direct to whatever movie), the lifeless script without character or style, the blandly generic action choreography to a script that can’t even be bothered to be interesting enough to be called clichéd, and finally the deeply dull performances by a cast that could do so much better, lacks so completely in personality and life, it’s difficult to even call this a movie. Hell, even “content” might be too friendly a description for something this lacking in soul.

Invader (2024): Certainly not lacking in personality is this brutal serial killer movie by Mickey Keating. This time around, the stylistically very varied director goes all out on jittery, nervous energy, often shaking, handheld camera that perfectly puts into picture the sense of looming threat and paranoia its main character (Vero Maynez) suffers as a foreigner in the USA. Particularly this USA, at this point in time. And though this is mostly a highly efficient, condensed, and often quite nasty, horror movie about a woman threatened by a killer, it works all too well as a mirror of how its time and place feels.

The Executioner (1974): One can’t help but hope the Japan of 1974 did feel like this Teruo Ishii action movie starring beloved Sonny Chiba as the youngest descendent of the Koga ninja clan, gone down in the world to steal a bunch of drugs from the Japanese franchise of the Mafia with a former policeman and a sex pest. For its combination of bizarre violence and the violently bizarre is pretty delightful.

Sure, Ishii has directed weirder things – he’s mostly doing Man’s Adventure with tongue planted firmly in cheek here – and Chiba has been in weirder and/or better movies, but if I’d start judging their movies, or any movies, on that bar, there’d be a very limited amount of joy to be found in my movie watching world.

As far as the world of silly, violent Toei exploitation movies go, this is doing its job of entertaining me more than just fine.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat (1991)

Original title: 女囚さそり 殺人予告

Warning: spoilers for one of the core points of the plot are inevitable!

A young woman (Natsuki Okamoto) is working as a very capable assassin for hire. She’s not exactly a posterchild for feminist self-realization, though, for she is controlled – mentally and sexually – by her handler, who turned a traumatized girl into his own private kill and fuck device.

Her newest mission is rather peculiar: she is to go undercover in a woman’s prison to murder Nami Matsushima, known as Scorpion, a woman whose influence and unbreakable spirit are so large, she has been held in a cave below the prison for years, so she can’t infect the other prisoners with her indomitable spirit. The powers that be of the prison are just that afraid of her.

And no wonder, because as it turns out, for at least half of the prison population has turned Nami into a near mythical figure who will some day get everyone out of the hellhole, and might even threaten the structures of violence and oppression outside.

But there’s something hinky about our assassin’s mission beside the plain weirdness of the situation, a hidden truth, as well as the realization that she, like any other woman, is only a thing to be dropped and destroyed at a man’s convenience.

There have been intermittent attempts to revive the Female Prisoner Scorpion films over the years. I believe this one, directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, who lived at the wondrous place where exploitation and arthouse met, is the most ambitious attempt of them all.

This early in Toei’s V-Cinema cycle, there appears to have been something of an anything goes approach to the types of films that could be made, if they contained a bit of action and nudity, at least. So making a film that’s a sequel to the first two films of an old 70s exploitation series – the rest of the films can’t have happened in this film’s world – that turns the originals darker by virtue of their heroine having been murdered, her dead body walled in must have sounded like a good idea to someone. While I generally don’t like that kind of set-up – let heroic achievements of earlier movies stand – I can’t help but admire what Ikeda does with the idea here.

This is very much a film about how a religion gets started, how a person’s life becomes mythical, how a poetical truth about someone becomes the only truth actually worth anything. Nami the Scorpion, the film argues rather obviously, is the patron goddess women need to survive what men do to them.

Ikeda doubles down on the mytho-religious aspects repeatedly – our protagonist is crucified, and later has a moment of bizarre revelation in which Nami’s dead body gives her the iconic sharpened spoon, literally turning her into an avatar of the Scorpion. All of this Ikeda stages without any irony, but as moments when borders between dream and reality grow thin and the mythical remakes reality in its image. It’s an incredible thing to do in a film that could be a lazy cash-in on a beloved series, but then, the space where the mythical, the real, and the commercial reality of the exploitation movie meet is something of a speciality of Ikeda. His probable masterpiece Mermaid Legend did something very similar some years earlier, perhaps even more successful than he is here.

Death Threat is also simply very satisfying as the kind of exploitation movie where all men, especially men in power, are bastards, but where those men are eventually punished by women who aren’t staying their victims. If that’s not invigorating, I don’t know what is.

Crazy Heart (2009)

Outlaw country musician Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) is going nowhere. An aging alcoholic, he’s stopped writing songs and is mostly working the nostalgia and bowling alley circuit with his old hits, pick-up bands, whiskey and an air of bitterness. Bad’s former, much younger and sexier, sidekick Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) has hit the big time of country music stardom, but his intermittent attempts at helping out feel more like dominance plays and the kind of hand-outs that do not sit well with the rest of dignity Bad still possesses somewhere.

Bad comes to a crossroads when he meets younger journalist and single mom Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and falls for her – or perhaps the idea of falling for her and the different kind of life she stands for.

Sometimes, it’s okay for a director to step back and let their leads, their script and – particularly in this case – their musical experts do most of the work. There’s an admirable ability to shut off one’s director’s ego for a bit needed to do that properly, and Scott Cooper apparently possesses it, and can use it without making a film that looks and feels bland. Rather, this one’s simply focussed on performance and tone, centring Bridges and to a degree Gyllenhaal (whose story this isn’t it, but who always shows she possesses one outside of Bad’s life).

Bridges is in finest form, presenting a character as a relatable human being who might have become either a caricature or just unpleasant in the wrong hands, without attempting to make Bad better than he actually is. He’s also a really great old man outlaw country singer when provided with the right material.

There is a deep sense of compassion running through the film and its treatment of Bad that doesn’t make excuses, either. Yet Crazy Heart carries with it a not uncomplicated hopefulness that feels grown-up and deserved instead of perfunctory and calculated for its market.

It is also a joy to see a film that treats country music with an actual eye from the inside, with many small telling details about this particular intersection of showbiz and working class art that demonstrate how much the filmmakers get it. The involvement of T-Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton and Ryan Bingham on the musical side will certainly have provided some of the stuff of reality for the film – in any case, these guys do provide Crazy Heart with a tonally and sonically perfect soundtrack.

Three Indonesian Horror Films Make A Post: The thing with the flying coffin happens all the time here

Trinil: Kembalikan Tubuhku (2024): After a three month long honeymoon, a couple returns to the Javanese plantation Rara (Carmela van der Kruk) inherited from her Dad. The place is plagued by a curious series of worker suicides and disappearances, and a flying witch’s head – a kuyang – makes frequent appearances. Rara acts increasingly aggressive, while her hubby mostly cringes and cowers. All of it has something to do with dark secrets of the near past. Fortunately the cowardly male half of the couple has a friend who is a psychiatrist and an exorcist at the same time, so whatever could go wrong?

The very broad, sometimes hilariously so, acting, the just as broad direction, and the melodramatically twisting plot can give the impression that Hanung Bramantyo’s Trinil is some kind of crazily mutated plantation soap opera. If one can imagine a soap opera with kuyang (the beloved witch with a flying head figure), quite a few lobbed off heads, virtual bodies buried basically everywhere and a properly insane climax too fun to describe. None of this is exactly good, or exactly well made, but it has a crazed energy and a complete disregard for good taste that makes it a lot of fun to watch.

Kuyang: Sekutu Iblis yang Selalu Mengintai (2024): Speaking of kuyang, this Borneo-set tale of the misadventures of a young teacher and his pregnant wife taking on a position in a completely normal (see title of this post) isolated village and stumbling into a choice bit of folk/black magic horror features not one, but two of the creatures, who will even duel for a (alas only very short) bit.

This is shot with a bit more style and moodiness, the acting is a little better, and the plot makes more sense than that of Trinil, though the too long series of scenes where something utterly outrageous happens but everyone just kind of shrugs it off can strain one’s patience a bit. On the other hand, this film, too, climaxes wonderfully, with some beautifully macabre images and a lot of kuyang action.

Do You See What I See (2024): Of these three, Awi Suryadi’s movie is the classiest and most subtextually resonant, as well as the film whose director has the most control over his material. But then, Suryadi is one of the core directors of the decade’s Indonesian horror cycle, and knows how to set up lingering mood pieces, as well as short, sharp jump scares and is one of the directors who created the filmic language with its mix of very Western contemporary mainstream horror influences and old-school Indonesian horror the country’s horror directors speak in at the moment.

Apart from the obligatory – and often increasingly wonderful – horrors, this is a film about female friendship and empowerment, where the only actual male character is a pretty, vapid, and untrustworthy idiot, and love for a man is mostly treated as a threat to sanity and a young woman’s mental well-being – particularly when the lover turns out to be dead.

Apart from Suryadi’s obvious strengths, I particularly admired his willingness for keeping things off-screen here. We never get to see the ghost lover as poor Mawar sees him – in fact, for much of the film we see him only reflected in the changes he inflicts on her. There’s also quite a particular kind of daring to making a girl power film that still goes for a 70s downer ending.

The Silent Star (1960)

Original title: Der schweigende Stern

(There’s also a cut-down, re-cut, English dubbed version of the film called First Spaceship on Venus – I’m not talking about that one here)

The Near Future. Scientists discover a curious alien artefact in the area of the Tunguska meteor impact. Its origin is apparently Venus, and it contains what appears to be a message in a language linguists – first among them a Chinese (Hua-Ta Tang) and an Indian (Kurt Rackelmann, in brownface) expert – are trying and failing hard to decipher.

Still, the scientific community, gifted with the Soviet spaceship initially meant for a Mars expedition, decides to send a mission to Venus to find our intelligent neighbours. Apart from the gentlemen already mentioned, the crew is international in a way to give the current US president a heart attack while screeching about “DEI” or “wokeness”. Even an American scientist (Oldrich Lukes) takes part, though to the unhappiness of his bosses at “the Consortium”.

There’s some drama on the ship – cue a painful doomed romance between the traumatized astro-medico (Yoko Tani) and the German, hot shot pilot with the receding hairline (Günther Simon) – but eventually, once they arrive on Venus, the crew make exciting discoveries in what turn out to be the ruins of a civilization that took a wrong turn.

Science Fiction, called “Utopian” literature there (as often here in Western Germany as well), was a popular literary genre in the DDR (or German Democratic Republic, Eastern Germany). Whenever the political stars of censorship and propaganda aligned correctly, there were attempts to also make SF cinema happen.

This first SF film produced by the DEFA (the state’s very own film company) – in cooperation with Poland and an abortive attempt at working with French Pathé – was directed by Kurt Maetzig, a higher-up in the DEFA structure who apparently had the clout to get it made, if going through three different batches of writers on the way, in turns making it less, then more, then less propagandistic. This is based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, but I don’t know how it compares.

Technically and visually, this is quite the achievement, presenting a future visually not only inspired by western SF cinema on film but also by choice pulp SF cover art. There’s an orderliness and cleanliness to the designs that rubs this Alien-made viewer emotionally the wrong way a little, but objectively, the mix of grandiosity and sobriety is utterly beautiful.

Once we arrive on Venus, the film appears to prefigure Bava’s Planet of Vampires, presenting a planet full of objects the characters themselves often can’t categorize as artificial or natural. There’s an alienness to this part of the film that’s very Lem (in a specific mode), and still works to be somewhat disquieting.

On the level of narrative and characters, Silent Star is considerably weaker – its first half is a bit of a slog, full of the international cast speaking slowly in the emotionless German dub, and a de-emphasis on the more dramatic elements of what is happening on screen that sometimes feels nearly perverse.

Thematically, the Hiroshima and heroism-doomed romance fits the darker elements of the film  well, but its execution has an antiseptic quality that never suggests this may be about actual human emotion instead of fitting thematic material.

Speaking of themes, this is absolutely a film standing in the shadow of the H-bomb, seeing this use of nuclear power as a kind of (perfectly atheist) original sin, or rather the great crossroads of humanity: do we use this power responsibly and go off into a bright future, or do we vote for egotism and self-destruction like the Venusians? Not the sort of thing you’d get treated this earnestly in many American SF films of the era.

It is of course fascinating to see a film that works from very different ideological assumptions than much SF material on screen. The emphasis on international cooperation and serious and respectful co-existence between all kinds of people appears rather earlier than in western screen SF. It is presented a little demonstrative, of course (this is after all also a propaganda piece). Still, from the perspective of 2025, this kind of future feels like an impossible dream, and I found myself feeling melancholia and nostalgia for a future that never came to be. Hell, the Eastern parts of united Germany are one of the hot beds of racism and right-wing thought in my country these days, so there’s also some sad irony to be had.

Death Whisperer (2023) & Death Whisperer 2 (2024)

Warning: some spoilers included!

Death Whisperer takes place in Thailand in 1972. We’re mostly concerned with a farmer family whose many children all have names starting with Y – there’s Yard, Yam, Yos, Yod, Yee, Yen and Yak - which makes it somewhat difficult to keep them straight in dialogue until about the final act of the first movie. As if having a Dad who is badly trying to be a traditional patriarch and terrible at giving his kids names weren’t difficult enough, the family are beset by attacks of a supernatural entity that seems focussed on the youngest, Yee (Nutthatcha Padovan). For some time, it is not at all clear if the spirit wants to eat or possess her; what is clear is that it likes to put families through the emotional wringer, delighting in wreaking emotional as well as physical pain. The local shaman, Sarge (Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul), is of some help, as is the return of Yak (Nadech Kugimiya), the son who didn’t want to become a farmer so much, he became a soldier instead, yet the spirit’s attacks become ever more disturbing.

And this willingness to get increasingly weird is one the two main strength of Taweewat Wantha’s Death Whisperer. It also stands in marked contrast to the aesthetically conservative streak of the film: this is very much a film that takes elements of the contemporary Southeast Asian horror mainstream (particularly Indonesian horror), some bits and bobs of the Conjuringverse and films like the South Korean The Wailing, and transplants them into the Thailand of the early 70s without doing much with the historical context. This mostly works out okay for the film because it is good at picking and choosing the pieces that work for it, and because Wantha manages to use them in a way that doesn’t let them feel like magpied bits of other films, but rather parts of the one at hand.

The film’s other main strength is its great hand when it comes to the kind of set piece that suddenly ramps up the tension or the ick-factor. These are nearly always well-placed and effectively realized – just look at the first teeth-stealing (it’s a whole thing in these movies) scene.

Death Whisperer 2 takes place three years after the tragic ending of the first one. Everyone in the family has tried to move on – Yad (Jelicha Kapaun) is even engaged to be married and move away – except for Yak, whose disgust for horror movie bullshit endings has caused him to team up with Sarge and become a rural exorcist and ghost puncher (no, really, he’s punching ghosts on the regular). The latter term, I’ve borrowed from a Letterboxd review from the great Gemma Files, because it’s the only, and perfect, term to describe Yak’s new occupation. Yak is specifically hunting the ghost who killed his sister, but leaves nothing else supernatural unexorcised and/or unpunched on the way.

Eventually, Yak punches his way to a haunted forest, where he, Sarge, and some macho assholes are getting a ghost history lesson while encountering a lot of disturbing, not always punchable, things that go bump.

At the same time, the remaining family members are threatened by the spirit as well, until things climax on the evening of Yad’s engagement do.

Where the first film does go for a somewhat generic, atmospheric ghost horror with incursions of weird vibes, the second one externalises most internal horror into a wild tale of Yak-centric ghost action and one of the best funhouse-style horror climaxes I’ve seen in quite some time. There’s macho posturing, one-liners like “You fucked with the wrong family, you godamn ghost!”, and a general sense of filmmakers who have been given a blank check after a very successful first film to do whatever the hell they want – which is apparently a tale of ghost punching and shotguns with magic bullets.

All of which could be dumb, and a bit of a disappointing tone shift, but actually feels like a perfect way to escalate things. Wantha’s still great at the more traditional spooky bits, but he also excels at the more action-heavy parts of the movie by absolutely, unironically, embracing the cheesiness and the silliness while keeping the creepy parts creepy. It’s the sort of thing young Sam Raimi would have been proud of, and one could imagine Don Coscarelli nod at approvingly, and makes Death Whisperer 2 the superior kind of sequel I always hope for in any horror movie sequel.

Three Films Make A Post: Every night a different nightmare.

Until Dawn (2025): There’s very little substance to David F. Sandberg’s horror videogame adaptation (which apparently isn’t any kind of close adaptation, people who actually played it tell me), but as an amusement park horror piece that sets off from a somewhat clever high concept to provide a series of ever-changing set pieces of suspense and gore, this is actually great stuff.

I’m not always the biggest fan of “fun horror” (it’s me, not the fun), but for me, this supernatural slasher variant simply hits all the right notes, is well paced and staged, and features a bunch of characters that isn’t too annoying to spend a hundred minutes with. Plus, once you’ve hit the spot where a series of messily exploding characters is just one of a dozen of good little gore gags you provide, you’re doing alright in my book.

Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025): This Netflix thing directed by Matt Palmer, on the other hand, is as bad as slickly produced horror gets. It must have been difficult to follow up on Leigh Janiuk’s brilliant Fear Street trilogy with its mix of all horror genres, ever, and its treatment of race and class, and the feeling of doom teens of the underclasses carry around with them, but surely, the way to go there shouldn’t have been to not even try to reach the level of the previous movies.

As it stands, this is the epitome of laziness: boring 80s nostalgia, and over-reliance on plot twists, acting that suggests a complete absence of directorial guidance, perfunctory gore, and writing so disinserted and flat, the whole thing doesn’t actually feel as if anybody involved cared even so much to create a good product, let’s not even speak of a decent movie.

Demon City aka Oni Goroshi (2025): Speaking of films that don’t even feel like good product, this (again) Netflix outing by director Seiji Tanaka somehow manages to make a movie about a super assassin waking up from a coma to murder the corrupt real estate development cultists that killed his family (on the day of his retirement, of course) I can’t get behind.

Well, I say “somehow”, but really, simply by an inability to stage and choreograph a decent action scene, an unwillingness to really make its weird villains feel weird (or silly) instead of just faintly stupid, and a tendency to drown the soundtrack in the shittiest “rock” guitar thrashing I’ve had the displeasure to hear in a long time.

The Black Tavern (1972)

Original title: 黑店

Stopping off in a tavern, one of those singing beggar monks (Dean Shek Tin) that apparently roam the martial world sings a merry song about a corrupt official who has retired and is now transporting his ill-gotten gains via snowy backways to his future home. This really catches the imagination of a number of evildoers. First and foremost, this is Zheng Shoushan, the Whipmaster, (Ku Feng) and his minions, but also robber teams and individuals with delightful names and shticks like the Five Ghosts of Xiang Xi, the Three Headed Cobra, the Iron Arm, as well as the somewhat more respectable swordsman Zha Xiaoyu (Tung Li).

An increasing number of these guys and gals descend onto yet another tavern everyone is convinced the ex-official must come through on his way to Mar del Lago. It’s already the kind of place guests never leave, unless as mutton, so the influx of murderous martial artists doesn’t exactly make it less safe. As it goes with people like these, they do start killing each other rather quickly, for various reasons, mostly greed.

Sneaking around the tavern is a swordswoman who dresses like the Lady Hermit herself – as it will turn out, Shih Szu reprising her role as Zhang Caibing/Cui Ping from Meng Hua-Ho’s film of the year before.

Teddy Yip Wing-Cho’s The Black Tavern isn’t quite as great as that wuxia classic, but it is certainly a nice diversion from some of the standard tropes of the wuxia, telling its story a little differently. While Zhang Caibing does eventually make quite an impact – there is after all very little that’s better than a heroic swordswoman played by an actress specialized in that sort of thing – much of this plays out like a bottle episode of a TV show whose lead is only there for a third of the shooting schedule, which fires the producers up to make something out of a handful of sets and another handful of character actors.

Cool sets and character actors are things the Shaw Brothers had rather a lot of, and so this a film carried by newcomers and veterans like Ku Feng strutting their stuff, typically great (though not brilliant) fight choreography, and the special delight of some weird but rather nasty people making the world a better place by following their worst impulses and murdering each other gorily. There is a surprising number of decapitations on screen.

As is often the case, the combination of obvious budget constraints and talent leads to a highly entertaining film.

Danger Point: The Road to Hell (1991)

Original title: Danger Point: Jigokuhenomichi

A couple – and that description can very effectively be read literally, depending on how you read the film’s final scene – of hitmen (Jo Shishido and Sho Aikawa) get curious when their latest victim offers them more money than they could ever get their hands on through their usual work, while grabbing the photo of a hospital nurse (Nana Okada). Too curious for their handler, who drops them after a single, polite question about what the dead man might have been talking about.

This new state of being out of a job to pay for suits and sunglasses does of course make the thought of a lot of money even more enticing, and so the killers turn detectives, though the sort of detectives that let Mike Hammer look like a nice guy. Soon, they are on the trail a group of gangsters and a corrupt cop, and indeed a whole lot of ill-gotten money.

If the new Arrow Blu-ray box with early Toei V-Cinema films teaches me anything, it is certainly that these early examples of the form were a meeting place of veteran talent making their way from TV or other low budget work, and the young guns that I’ve only known at the forefront of the conversation in western circles about it.

Here, it’s Jo Shishido – all sagging chipmunk cheeks and mild yet cold expression – starring alongside a young Sho Aikawa demonstrating a mixture of casual brutality and eager to please puppy dog charm very fitting to the relationship between these two, and Hideo Murota doing one of his patented villain – though our protagonists are obviously also villains – turns.

The film is directed by exploitation – and at this point TV – veteran Yasuharu Hasebe – not an unknown quantity to Shishido. Hasebe’s direction doesn’t have the energy of his early films, or the sheer nastiness and excitement of his 70s roman porn work, but there’s a moody, bright day neo noirish quality to his filmmaking that makes the simple, slow-moving plot genuinely engaging even in the many moments when there isn’t actually much going on on screen. Hasebe still uses some of his old stylistic flourishes whenever there’s action or violence to emphasise, but there’s a degree of calmness to his work here I don’t remember from his younger and wilder days. He’s rather more Shishido than Aikawa.

This provides the film with limited appeal as an action film, so Danger Point mostly lives off the interplay between its leads and its mood of doomed, brutal struggle, which does turn it into an unexpected joy.