Three Films Make A Post: Fear comes to the surface

The Ice Road (2021): Look, I don’t expect a movie about Liam Neeson doing dangerous ice road trucking to save some miners to have a deep, involving script, but the series of painfully obvious clichés and embarrassing “characterisation” writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh offers here really doesn’t cut it. The writing’s so needlessly bad, you won’t be surprised to realize Hensleigh’s one of the main writers of sodding Armageddon; and unlike J.J. Abrams, he has apparently learned nothing in the decades between.

Compared to the writing, the action sequences are downright decent, but not so good as to be able to make up for how crap and boring the script is. Neeson phoning the phoned in script in doesn’t help, but you only could help this one out by having a hundred minute Nicolas Cage-style freak-out – and not even Cage would be putting that amount of effort into a film this bad.

What Lies Below (2020): Fish people still want to inseminate human women. Spoiler, I suppose? Anyway, speaking of films with weak scripts by their directors, this one always threatens to become good or interesting and to explore any of the themes it just touches on the surface a little, before running away afraid of its own courage. So if you’re looking for a film that explores the horrific elements of budding sexuality, the rifts even in happy families, or the destructive abilities of a really hot guy, or even one that just tells its tale of theoretically fucked up interspecies sex in the appropriately sordid manner, this ain’t it. I’d love to say what Braden R. Duemmler’s movie actually is. Alas, the film itself doesn’t seem to know what to do with material rich in resonance and can’t even manage to get its easy (given the set-up) #metoo points in. Let’s not even speak of finding an identity beyond mishandled horror and suspense sequences, and a tendency to mess up scenes by showing too little. An extra raised eyebrow to casting a grown woman (Ema Horvath) closer to thirty than to sixteen as your sixteen year old lead.

Vampira and Me (2012): After the horrors of the first two movies in this entry, Ray Greene’s loving and exhaustive documentary about Maila Nurmi aka Vampira’s short time in the spotlight feels particularly wonderful: it’s a film made by a guy with great love and personal knowledge of his subject, with a great ability for digging out archive material as well as an eye for the use of found footage. Greene does great work putting his friend Nurmi into her proper historical context, arguing for her importance and import in a convincing and non-manipulative manner, and painting a picture of her life and times through rare interview footage of a very intelligent and charming elderly Nurmi and all those enticing and interesting details he managed to dig out. One could argue that Greene’s a bit too close to his subject but the film seems so driven by genuine compassion and love, critical distance just isn’t the point. Bonus points for avoiding the talking head effect.

The film’s only weakness is that the writing of Greene’s narration can tend to the overblown (“Midnight struck hard. And then it wouldn’t leave.”), but it doesn’t get quite this silly often enough this would threaten to overwhelm everything that’s great about the film.