Three Films Make A Post: Mary thinks there is something alive under her bed. Mary is right.

The Gate II: Trespassers (1990): Where the first The Gate was a prime example of the early inspired phase of straightforwardly good to great films in the directing life of Tibor Takács, this sequel pretty much marks the man’s career turn to the more goofy nonsense side of the street. Unfortunately, unlike many a later of Takács’s films of this kind, Gate II doesn’t turn its silly ideas and plot full of goofy supernatural bullshit into anything of much entertainment value. It feels less like an attempt to go all out with fun – if not intelligence – like much of later period Takács, but instead like a failed attempt at making a proper teen horror movie, situating the film in that awkward place where it’s not just not a good movie, but also a damnably uninteresting one. There are a couple of okay scenes in here, but if you go into this for something even approaching the level of the first film or of I, Madman, or the pure fun of Mansquito, you will be sorely disappointed.

Redline (2009): Whereas this SF anime (apparently seven years in the making) about a far future rogue racing event as directed by Takeshi Koike is pure, goofy, fun insanity. While the plot of the thing is pretty damn minimal, every single frame of the film is stuffed full of ideas, framed by parodies and mutations of visual elements of Japanese, European and US graphical art, and set to a pounding techno beat (finally a reason for me to use that cliché!). This visual mix is surprisingly beautiful to look at, a Japanese style lens distorting and transforming ideas of other artistic streams into a beautifully grotesque, majestically goofy thing all of its own. It hardly needs mentioning that the film is breathlessly paced, full of characters shouting – often pretty funny – declarations while around them stuff explodes, nor need I say that it moves very fast or looks utterly bizarre (or, in the movie’s favourite move, all of this together). Surprisingly enough, the film finds time and space for a romance that’s actually sweet and likeable, even suggesting something like (gasp) partnership between a gal and a guy.


Waltz with Bashir (2008): And now to something completely different, yet still animated. An animated narrative documentary made by a filmmaker who has never worked in animation before, which sounds like a hard sell, particularly when said filmmaker, Ari Folman, uses the animated form to speak about his – and others - past as a soldier during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and his attempt to reconstruct a war he has lost most of his memory of. However, the result is actually a brilliant movie, speaking about memory, guilt, and the way they converge in our dreams as loudly as about the experience of war. The animated form turns out to be the only right fit for the film, providing Folman with an opportunity to turn his dreams into moving pictures without a hundred million dollar budget. At times, this is as heart-wrenching a film as I’ve seen, driven by an honest willingness to confront the repressed – be it personal or political.