Three Films Make A Post: Time Flies

The Adam Project (2022): If you ever feel the need to watch a film that’s perfectly neutral, never reaching heights you’d call good but never evoking so much negative emotion anyone could call it bad, this Shawn Levy science fiction/action/comedy joint starring Ryan Reynolds and child actor Walker Scobell, as well as Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Garner, Zoe Saldana and Catherine Keener has you covered.

As regular readers know, I’m not at all one to be screeching at blockbusters like this as the End of Cinema™, but this specific one’s as bland as certain critics pretend all movies of this kind are, never doing anything that could get anyone watching too excited or too emotionally involved, yet also never doing anything to annoy a viewer too much. This is the louder movie equivalent of wallpaper: it’s there while you watch it, but it never feels like an actual presence.

The Last Slumber Party (1988): This SOV slasher by Stephen Tyler is quite the thing, or rather, it’s quite the thing for people like me who have developed a tolerance for films/emanations like it. The normal viewer (welcome, stranger!) will most probably be bored out of their minds by it. If, one the other hand, you’re the type to be entertained by a mix of tedium, quotidian weirdness, and a final girl who breaks all the rules by most probably not being a virgin and uttering so many casually homophobically coloured slurs of the kind I alas remember from my youth, too, you might be entertained, diverted, and probably even enjoying yourself, while cringing more than just a little.

It just is that kind of a movie.

The Eyes of Charles Sand (1972): TV lifer Reza Badiyi directs this tale of the titular Charles Sand (Peter Haskell) inheriting The Sight, to be plagued by visions of the dead and the living, and other vaguely defined parapsychological powers. Our hero stumbles into a gaslighting plot full of bad melodramatic acting (oh, the screeching and the eye-bugging) that makes not a lick of sense. Hilarity and a surprising amount of boredom ensue.

There’s alas very little to this one. From time to time, Badiyi stumbles upon a creepy camera angle or directs a halfway mood scene, but mostly, he bets on his actors screeching through a very stupid plot, and they’re really not screeching well enough.

Virgil Finlay

If all the great illustrators of the pulps, Virgil Finlay has always been my favourite – not just because of the amount of work he did for Weird Tales. I particularly love the special Weirdness that comes with using photo references and the naturalism that tends to come with this to then depict the strange and the properly un-natural, a technique that is on display in quite a few of his pieces.

To my delight, a hero of the Internet has compiled a huge amount of Finlay’s interior illustrations for the Internet Archive. The works are properly sorted and can be found following this link.

(Found here on the blog of John Coulthart, who is another favourite artist of the Weird).

In short: Shifter (2020)

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Theresa (Nicole Fancher) had to give up on college and every future she hoped for to take care of her sick father. Now, after his death, she’s isolated and lonely, working a crap job in a factory, living on the failed farm where her father died and she grew up. Struck by depression and social anxiety, and frankly surrounded by very few people who’d be worth anyone’s time, her only joys in life are her cat and the time machine she has built in her barn. Though she apparently doesn’t love the cat so much she’s not going to use her as a test subject for her device.

When the kitten comes back in one piece, and Theresa herself gets pretty angry after yet another excruciating encounter with the outside world, she drunkenly decides to test the device on herself next. The time travel bit certainly works, but somehow, her test has unmoored Theresa in time completely, so that she jumps back and forth in irregular manner, her body slowly dissolving in the process.

Jacob Leighton Burns’s Shifter seems to be a rather underappreciated movie, unfairly so, I believe. It is clearly made on a shoestring budget, but it is the kind of movie where a low budget means focus, not shoddiness. So it is well shot, visually thoughtfully composed, and clearly the sort of film that knows what it wants to be about and the feel it wants to have. It also knows how to achieve what it set out to do, and goes about its business with confidence and just the right amount of style.

It is rather a pessimistic movie, where all of our protagonist’s attempts at finding a life where she can be happy are disrupted and destroyed, all her attempts at fixing what she has set in motion are doomed to failure, and she is not just doomed to die but to a kind of unmourned total dissolution, at best turning into the ghost from her own childhood ghost stories. Obviously, the film’s not just talking about time travel accidents but about the way when decisions you couldn’t have avoided making the way you did can lock you into an unhappy course for the rest of your life. About how destructive forces of depression and anxiety can feel – sometimes actually be – as inevitable as the laws of physics, especially when you’re poor, and how failed attempts at breaking out of cycles that oh so clearly aren’t good for you can lock you even more into your own private trap. How much fun a film about shattered hopes is to watch is of course another question, but then, fun’s not always the point.

Though Shifter, particularly in its early stages is actually pretty fun, too, the kind of fun that needs to come before the hammer truly falls to make it hit harder.

So Dark the Night (1946)

Warning: even though I’m not explicitly going to spoil the ending, I’ll have to imply things!

Brilliant Parisian police detective Henri Cassin (Steven Geray, who was from Hungary in real life) has finally been talked into going on vacation, after apparently eleven years without one. Which might explain a lot of what happens during the course of the movie.

Cassin’s friends in the police have arranged a stay in a picturesque country inn, where the policeman should find all the peace and quiet his usually intense lifestyle doesn’t allow him. As it turns ou, the inn and the surrounding countryside are a pretty place indeed. Even better, the much much younger innkeeper’s daughter Nanette (Micheline Cheirel), does seem to be rather interested in our protagonist; though if it is actually him as a person or the idea of PARIS(!!!!) she’s clearly none to sure herself. Things do develop in the direction of an actual love affair, though there are problems, and not just that Nanette’s father isn’t terribly excited about his daughter courting a guy his own age. There’s also the little fact that Nanette is engaged to her childhood sweetheart Leon (Paul Marion), a local farmer. Though she says their love has always been a childish thing, she’s clearly wavering.

Eventually, the at first sceptical Cassin – who well understands about differences of age and culture but also can’t really resist a pretty young thing throwing herself at him for the first time in a life full of work and nothing beyond – and Nanette make up their minds to get serious and marry. But before that can happen, Nanette and Leon disappear, only for the girl’s body to be found strangled some time later.

Obviously, Cassin investigates the case himself, but the solution ever eludes him, as obsessively as he may work himself.

While the solution to Joseph H. Lewis’s noirish mystery and proto-psychological thriller may be a bit Freudian and implausible for today’s tastes, its actual execution as a movie is flawless. In a rather ironic development, given the film’s pretend-Frenchness, its tone and style somewhat prefigure what would become the French manner of the latter genre, particularly in pacing and tone.

I found myself rather convinced of the film’s moments of Freudian implausibility by Lewis’s – and his DP Burnett Guffey’s – staging of details large and tiny, an ability to suggest much of the film’s psychological structure via camera angles, the positioning of characters in physical spaces, and the succession of natural light and shadows.

In fact, prefiguring the sunlit noirs of the 50s, quite a bit of So Dark takes place by daylight in actual exteriors. Most of those later films don’t make use of movements from the real outside into interiors, artificial light and expressive shadows like Lewis does here, though. It is an approach that is all too fitting for a movie that’s very much about the gap between the rational mind and our desires, and a man’s inability to bridge this gap ending badly for others as well as him.

Very typical of the part of Lewis’s humungous output I’ve seen, there’s a great flow and sense of movement to nearly every scene, never letting the director’s obvious love for the meaningful and composed shot drift into the realm of the static.

This combines well with the already mentioned sense for the importance of little details, be it in the way the camera is angled upwards or downwards in dialogue scenes, or in the shifting of an actor’s shoulders.

That the solution to the mystery plaguing Cassin makes more sense on a metaphorical level than one of actual human psychology matters very little in a film shot as artfully as this one; Freud read as the stories a man told himself about the world does after all make for pretty great fiction, too.

In short: Love Brides of the Blood Mummy (1973)

Original title: El secreto de la momia egipcia

The 19th Century, or thereabout. One member of that breed of noblemen who also tend to be mad scientists acquires the ancient remains of an Egyptian prince. Despite the promise of the title, it’s not actually a mummy, for the guy was purposefully preserved to be revived in the world of the living, not that of the dead. And wouldn’t you know it, our nobleman/scientist believes that modern science, particularly the works of Mesmer (science, I tell you, science!) and Galvani, combined with the papyrus how to guide on reanimation of the dead helpfully included with the dead man, will find a way to bring this particular dead body back to life.

He’s right, too. Alas, even revived, the Egyptian gentleman is in dire need of fresh blood, preferably coming from nubile young women. To help in the acquisition, not-Mummy Guy puts the mind-whammy on our scientist’s servant and imprisons his reanimator. From then on out, the film devolves into a long, long series of sequences in which either the servant or the not-Mummy chase young women around the castle or a bit of country-side with a very dramatic coast line, whip them, and do some blood-drinking.

And if I say “long”, I mean that at least eighty percent of Alejandro Martí’s film consist of these scenes, eschewing the goofy and potentially creepy promise of early proceedings for what amounts to nothing of any interest whatsoever. To make matters even more boring, the yellowed-out, wobbly, though fan-subbed, VHS version of the film that seems to be the only way to see it is obviously a Spanish censor-friendly cut, so that there’s not just a lack of entertainment value but also one of exploitational value. Indeed, this version – it simply can’t have been the only one - is so squeamish, people are even whipped while being fully clothed, something that could be an interesting quirk in a movie not this pointlessly, endlessly lacking in any points of interest.

Music Monday: Arawak Uhuru Edition

You Are Not My Mother (2021)

Teenager Char (Hazel Doupe) lives with her mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken), her grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie) and her uncle Aaron (Paul Reid) in a housing estate in Dublin. Quiet, intelligent, and sad, Char’s the favourite victim of her school’s bullies. At home, she has trouble coping with Angela’s clinical depression. She’s rather close to her grandma, though, and the general vibe of her family life is very strained but not fatally so.

Things take a strange turn when Angela disappears mysteriously, only to reappear just as mysteriously a short time later. Clearly, something must have happened to her, for after her return, she at first seems rather more lively and healthy than she had been for quite some time, so much so that Char is at first happy to see these changes in her mother. But something’s not quite right with her behaviour. Angela seems to be missing some of the cues of normal social behaviour, at the very least. Going by the looks Rita gives her daughter, the old lady suspects something rather terrible that hasn’t anything to do with mental illness; and given how Aaron assists her in things like hindering Angela from going away with Char for a weekend, he shares these suspicions. Obviously, things are only going to get worse from here on out.

Writer-director Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother is a highly accomplished example of how to mix social realism with folk (or at least folklore based) horror. I don’t believe it is a spoiler to say that it is yet another variation on changeling folklore; it is also pretty much the best film I’ve seen using this particular part of Irish folklore. That’s not just because the film varies the tale’s typical structure by using a mother instead of a child as the spirited away and replaced part of a family, but because Dolan uses this change to explore usually unexplored and unspoken dynamics between children and parents, dynamics that are changed but not stripped of love and true human connection by mental illness.

Indeed, that last part is one of the film’s greatest strengths. It does use its supernatural threat to explore how depression can change familial relations and the toll mental illness takes on those of us suffering from it as well as the people who love us, but it never equates the two.

The film’s treatment of the bullying Char suffers is also rather excellent, constructed with an understanding of the differences between various types of bullying demonstrated through a very precise depictions of social subtleties. Dolan is so good at this stuff, she absolutely sells even the part of the story where one of her bullies becomes Char’s friend, something that could be either implausible or mawkish in hands less adept.

The film’s portrayal of poverty is equally excellent. It never shies away from showing poverty – the version of poverty where you’re probably not going to go hungry and homeless but that’s all – but it lacks the sense of touristic wallowing quite a few British films certain critics eat up tend to show, films in which poor people can only be portrayed as suffering 24/7, as if only that would be enough to convince an audience of the intrinsic worth of the poor as human beings. But I digress.

Apart from Dolan’s precise, tight and often cleverly moody direction, the film is further enhanced by some fantastic performances. Doupe’s unsentimental portrayal of all of Char’s hurts, awkwardnesses and pains as well as her strength and the short bursts of teenage joy she is allowed is particularly moving, whereas Bracken very effectively delineates the difference between the depressed mother at the film’s start and the un-human thing that is taking her place.

Which segues nicely into something I haven’t said about You Are Not My Mother until now: it is indeed also a highly effective horror movie, one of those examples of the genre that uses social realism and supernatural horror to open up different ways to talk about difficult things, yet that’s also highly effective as a piece of supernatural horror. Because these aren’t approaches to horror that stand in opposition but, handled well, only strengthen one another. Particularly the final act also simply has a couple of brilliantly effective set pieces.

Three Films Make A Post: Hope Burns Brightest in The Cold

Black Crab aka Svart krabba (2022): Some time in the near future, when Sweden is struck by a civil war between groups the film doesn’t bother to define for us, a group of soldiers is tasked to ice-skate over the ocean behind enemy lines to transport some canisters that’ll win the war for their losing side. The movie directed by Adam Berg is going for the whole universal/archetypal thing, apparently, so giving the audience the space to decide if they actually want these characters to achieve their goal is not in the cards; or any actual, concrete politics. Also not in the cards is anything amounting to characterisation for anyone but Noomi Rapace’s character. She gets a lot of superfluous flashbacks to early civil war life with her daughter that do very little for the movie yet take up quite a lot of time.

The film is a war movie made by people who somehow managed to miss how films in this genre understood how to speak about something universal by focussing on the specific, and decide that vague handwaving is the way to go instead. We do get as many war movie clichés as we never wanted, all of which I’ve seen realized in so many better films.

Windfall (2022): I liked director/co-writer Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love from a couple of years quite a bit as a very clever contemporary and adult movie-length Twilight Zone episode. This thing with Jason Segel, Lily Collins and Jesse Plemons is rather less successful, playing out like an attempt to make a somewhat contemporized version of a Coen Brothers film in the Fargo mode crossed with a TV show bottle episode. Just one that can’t seem to get up the imagination to give any of its three characters any amount of depth – after the first couple of scenes, you really know all you need to know about everyone, and nothing of interest will be revealed about their personalities. Also missing are a sense of timing – the ninety minutes drag as if they were three hours – and really much of a point.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982): Fortunately, this P.D. James adaptation by the usually rather more experimental than he is here Christopher Petit rides in to save this post – or rather its writer – from complete frustration. The seldom seen on screen Pippa Guard plays secretary turned private detective Cordelia Gray with quite a bit of presence, generally finding something interesting to add to any standard detective movie scene. And there are a lot of them in a film as chock-full of detective movie tropes as this one is. Petit and his fine cast use most of these tropes for good, making a pretty meandering film whose sense of meandering isn’t a weakness but very much the point of the whole endeavour, because it provides ample opportunity to think about class, gender and obsession.

Short Film Friday: The Sky

Is this some sort of... "spring break"?

Whatever my unknowable reasons for anything I do, I'm going to take a little time off from the block. Expect my triumphant return to the usual on Friday, the 22nd of April.

Three Films Make A Post: Everybody loves Otley…well, almost everybody

Otley (1969): I can’t say I love Dick Clement’s Otley, either. As a spy comedy about a ne'er-do-well played by Tom Courtenay stumbling into a complicated and somewhat cynical spy plot, the film’s simply not terribly interesting. It does very little you won’t have seen done better in other spy comedies.

Fortunately, the film does have an ace in the hole as another kind of movie: a perfect time capsule of London of its time, focussing on the bits populated by more everyday people, and showing no interest at all in the touristy parts of the City. There’s also a lot of pretty awesome fashion to gawk at. All of which doesn’t make the movie better as a spy comedy, but certainly does turn it into an interesting watch if you do like this time capsule aspect as much as I did.

The Cursed aka Eight for Silver (2021): Despite a handful of atmospheric shots and a couple of neat and creepy ideas, this film by writer/director/producer/cinematographer and potential hobby cook Sean Ellis, is rather a drag that suffers from a pretty terrible script. There’s a completely unnecessary framing device without a payoff, pacing that drags endlessly thanks to a lot of needless repetition of already established concepts, a bizarre problem with creating scene transitions in a movie already this slow, characterisation that’s paper-thin while also being portentous, and writing that’s generally so lazy, the film even felt the need to put the Beast of Gévaudan affair that’s a plot point a hundred years into the future (unless our protagonist is meant to be 135 years old).

There are also riffs on various better movies (hey, John Carpenter, how are you?), an awkward attempt at ingratiating itself to the social justice oriented parts of the audience that comes over as gratuitous rather than meaningful, and a lot of characters, most of whom have nothing to do. The practical effects are rather great, to be fair; the digital ones, on the other hand, are on the level of the script.

Misono Universe aka La La La at Rock Bottom (ugh) (2015): This one’s probably not one of the better movies of Japanese indie movie veteran Nobuhiro Yamashita (who started out with the great wave of this sort of thing in the middle-aughts, making movies like the glorious Linda Linda Linda and never stopped making films), though it is still a movie that makes emotionally affecting use of all of the hallmarks of its style: a minimal plot, elegant and meaningful framing and blocking, a sense of humour of the driest kind, and a deep understanding of how to make a slow-paced movie that’s slow-paced for a reason and not because the writer has no clue on how to pace something.

The acting is of the sparse and naturalistic kind you’d expect, too, with Subaru Shibutani, Fumi Nikaido and a lot of faces you’ll know when you’ve seen Japanese movies of this style doing their things very well indeed.

The film also is a good example of how different stylistic treatments can change the meaning and effect of a plot: an American movie would take the same plot of an amnesiac Yakuza turned singer in an amateur band, and turn it into something at least slightly triumphalist, loudly praising the human spirit; the Japanese indie approach turns the same material into something that’s somewhat hopeful, and quietly human that would just shake its head in unbelief at the less quiet approach.

Short Film Friday: Guest

In short: Night Game (1989)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the film’s unique selling point!

A serial killer murders women in Houston with something that may be a meat hook; or at least something comparable. Being a romantic, he does so preferably on a beach and in an amusement park that’s close-by, because all films should have a murder taking place in a cabinet of mirrors.

Veteran, tired police detective Mike Seaver (Roy Scheider) is on the case. That is, when he isn’t mired in some godawful jurisdictional trouble/political pressure sub-plot, or making out with his much, much younger fiancée Roxy (Karen Young). How young is Roxy? She’s so young, her mom is Mike’s high school sweetheart. Which is indeed a plot point rather than a joke in dubious taste.

In a good turn of luck, Mike’s also a big baseball fan, and thanks to his extra special Houston Astros fandom, as well as a bit of luck, he eventually figures out that the killer is only committing his deeds on nights when a specific Astros pitcher wins a game. Unfortunately, the guy has a pretty good year.

Whenever Peter Masterson’s Night Game gets around to actually be about its somewhat giallo-esque thriller plot, and takes time out from its long and deeply uninvolving digressions into painfully clichéd jurisdictional trouble business (exactly the kind of cop movie subplot nobody but the people writing them ever wanted to experience, I believe) and all those perhaps just a tiny bit awkward interactions between Mike and Roxy and Roxy’s Mom, and stops telling painfully stupid jokes, it suddenly begins to be downright entertaining. While Masterson is a somewhat bland director here, at least the murder sequences are competently staged, showing influences of giallo and slasher alike, and so are pretty good fun. Set-up and backstory of the killer turn out to be adorably bonkers, as well. Delving deep into spoiler territory, he turns out to be a former professional baseball pitcher with a big future who is using his hook hand to kill after the accident that destroyed his career has ever so slightly unhinged him.

Scheider is good even in a role as undertaxing as this one is, of course, and the rest of the cast do their respective clichés well, too. The film’s script is clearly written with the most patient viewer in mind, however, and between the “comical” farting around, the subplots nobody asked for, and a general tendency for things to drag, and then drag some more, there are perhaps thirty percent of the runtime reserved for the film’s supposed meat.

So Night Game may very well be one of those cases where reading enticing titbits about stupid yet awesome murder motives and hilariously awkward romantic pairings is preferable to actually watching the damn thing.

The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967)

aka The Blood Demon

Original title: Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (“The serpent pit and the pendulum”)

As luck will have it, neither Dr. Sadism (the surgeon you can trust) nor a pit full of snakes make an appearance. Go figure.

The 18th Century or thereabouts. Lawyer Roger Mont Elise (Lex Barker) is just an orphan boy, whose last name was given to him on account of a misinterpreted medallion that was part of the baby package. He seems puzzled but okay with his unclear birth identity, as far as Barker’s never changing facial expression can be interpreted, but when a one-legged Moritatensänger (German for a medieval “singer of ballads”, though the guy doesn’t actually sing his material) appears and gives him an invitation to the castle of one Count Regula (Christopher Lee, in a couple of scenes) in which the Count promises to disclose the truth about Roger’s heritage, he’s off to the far away “Middlelands” (I have no idea) at once.

As is usually the case in these situations, once our hero has reached the town supposedly closest to Regula’s Castle Andomai, the local populace is less than helpful and rather fearful when asked about how to get there. Eventually, our hero manages to acquire the information from an elderly gentleman walking around carrying a large cross over his shoulders, and goes on a long, long, long, oh so very long coach ride to the castle, meeting up with what will soon turn out to be a fake priest (Vladimir Medar). During that excruciatingly long coach ride, Roger saves one Baroness Lilian von Brabant (Karin Dor, never one of my favourite German actresses of her generation, and here actively bad instead of just her typical combination of very pretty and so bland being pretty is no help) from a group of masked riders. Well, Lilian and her servant Babette (Christiane Rücker), but Roger cares so little about her, he doesn’t even help her up when he finds both women knocked to the ground by the riders. What a hero!

Obviously, love is in the air. As it turns out, Lilian has also been invited to the Castle, though in her case, it’s something about an inheritance.

After further spooky coach riding, everybody eventually arrives at the castle, which turns out to lie in ruins. But don’t fret, there’s a creepy undead servant (Karl Lange, ironically giving the liveliest performance in a film full of people emoting like the walking dead) around. The dead man is out to revive ole Chris Lee with the blood of thirteen virgins, so Regula can take revenge on the parents of our young couple by murdering their descendants, who were responsible for quartering him for the murder of twelve virgins. The fact that Regula’s servant did indeed murder the parents of our protagonists, and Regula therefore has actually been avenged already notwithstanding. Christopher Lee’s gotta murder somebody, right?

Schlangengrube’s director Harald Reinl was one of the better directors of the Edgar Wallace cycle, mostly distinguishing himself there by providing his films with some actual pulp energy. Energy is not something you’ll find in this German attempt to jump on the Corman Poe adaptation train, for everything here happens in the slowest and most tedious manner imaginable while also lacking any and all of the deliciously clever subtext Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont were wont to bring into Corman’s films. Writer Manfred R. Köhler sure wasn’t Matheson, Beaumont, or even Del Tenney.

The film may deserve to be looked at as a record holder when it comes to the length of the coach ride that eventually will bring our protagonists to the castle, but I don’t think gothic horror is improved by drifting off into the realm of a very slow and boring version of Stagecoach. To be fair, said coach ride – which does take up about three hours of the film’s eighty-five minute runtime, I believe – does contain one of the handful of good gothic horror moments Schlangengrube delivers, when the superstitious driver is confronted with blue fog that reveals trees full of human limbs, in part growing out of them like branches. That’s obviously the sort of tone and content I wish Reinl would have emphasised, but director and script seem to go out of their way to underplay the truly fantastic elements of the film, and instead puts a lot of energy into scenes of various characters making circles through the castle cellars. Scenes that also happen to lack in in pace and energy, even though these elements of the filmmaking art should be right up the director’s alley.

The art department – lead by Gabriel Pellon and Werner Achmann - really seem to have been the only members of the production who actually got why the Corman productions this is trying to haplessly imitate were as good as they were, and do their best to create a bunch of interesting and expressionistically weird sets, only to have camera and direction put them into the worst possible, and most certainly least interesting, light. It’s a bit of a shame, really, but all too typical for German genre cinema after the silent era.

In short: 88 (2015)

Gwen (Katharine Isabelle), suddenly finds herself in one of those archetypical US diners in the middle of nowhere. She has no idea how she got there, and doesn’t seem to be too sure who she is either. Parts of that will come back in a series of disjointed, out of order flashbacks to two different points in time when she seems to have been two very different persons – the rather mild-mannered version remembering this again, and a pretty damn murderous woman on a killing spree calling herself “Flamingo”.

Apparently, much of the violence has to do with taking vengeance on her former boss, psychotic drug lord Cyrus (Christopher Lloyd) for the death of the love of her life Aster (Kyle Schmid). Things get messy and violent in every one of the film’s timelines.

There is obviously quite a bit of Memento in the DNA of April Mullen’s film, but where Nolan’s film was very strictly structured, 88 is often confusing and disjointed. That’s not bad filmmaking, I believe, but rather a conscious decision by Mullen and screenwriter Tim Doiron (who also plays a supporting role on screen) to let the film mirror the shattered psyche of its protagonist, leaving the viewer often just as confused by the way things in her world and in her personality hang together as she is for most of the film. Mullen’s visual style adds to this feeling, giving everything a woozy and unreal quality that works well for what she’s doing here, at least for my taste, and also helps keep up a certain pulpy energy.

Isabelle is pretty great, too, providing a visual and personal anchor to proceedings, at once playing three – Gwen I and Gwen II are not perfectly consistent with one another – very different characters yet signalling clearly who is who while also showing a coherent emotional core.

Music Monday: Hunters in the Snow Edition

The Shadow of the Bat (1968)

Original title: La sombra del murciélago

Retired wrestler The Bat – El murcielago – (Fernando Osés) has quite the interesting life. Disgraced and crazed after a ring accident that left him disfigured, always wearing his bat-like ring mask, he’s dwelling in an old, dilapidated mansion that rather looks a lot like…some kind of…bat…cave with his main henchman Gerardo (Gerardo Zepeda) and a couple of hench-hangers-on. Despite being lit by torches, the place does at least have a TV though. Also, the Well of Rats and the Room of Bats. Still, a mad wrestler does tend to get bored from time to time, so the Bat regularly sends out Gerardo to catch him a beefy guy to wrestle with. Alas, Gerardo’s not very good at choosing victims, so nobody seems to even cause the Bat to break into a sweat; Gerardo also has the habit of murdering the wrestler’s involuntary sparring partners instead of just dumping their unconscious bodies in the city as he is usually ordered. Excuses like “I accidentally dropped him, now he’s dead, oopsie” seem to be a regular occurrence, making the Bat rather angry but never so angry as to convince him that all that kidnapping is a bit of bad idea, nor of suggesting the idea of replacing Gerardo with someone ever so slightly less murderous.

While hanging out in front of his damp cave TV set, the Bat watches a performance – certainly not the last one we will see in full during the course of the movie - of torch singer Marta (Marta Romero). She’s obviously the love of his life, so he decides to meet her and invite her to a nice dinner. No, wait, that would be insane! Obviously, he sends out his henchpeople to kidnap her.

Marta’s not that easy to catch, though, for her boyfriend Daniel (Jaime Fernández) is perfectly capable of fending off a less dangerous party of mooks. And when the next attempt at catching the Bat a singer looks as if it were to actually work, who just happens to drive by but everyone’s third-favourite crime-fighting luchador, Blue Demon (Blue Demon)!

Driving off the bad guys in his inimitable fashion, Blue then decides to involve himself in the case, helping to protect Marta as well as lending the police a hand in solving all the Bat-caused mayhem. And yes, there will be scenes of masked, be-caped, bare-chested investigative work before the climactic face-off between Blue and the Bat.

In a good week, Federico Curiel was able to direct a very fun and silly genre movie, and Shadow of the Bat must have happened in a very good week indeed, for this is a particularly fun lucha movie, the sort of thing that’ll leave people who love this kind of thing like me pretty breathless with enthusiasm about how enjoyably Curiel builds up this corner of the lucha-verse. It is, as you might know and/or expect, not just a place where masked wrestlers tend to be the police’s best friends, and the greatest heroes imaginable (cue half of the characters telling us how admirable Blue is, as if we wouldn’t see), but are also the best at pretty much everything else (except for remembering encounters with strange plants), and usually doing it shirtless, and often wearing a cape. In fact, I don’t think Blue’s ever not bare-chested in this one. But I digress.

As a director, Curiel is a particularly good hand at filming villains’ lairs, here having a lot of fun with the Bat’s icky, shadow-drenched cabinet of weird wonders, where a shaft full of rats for the punishment of crime-fighting luchadores or incompetent henchmen makes total sense. But the action seems to be of a better level than in most other lucha movies, too, with rather more dynamic staging as well as more creative choreography than can be the case in these movies. For once, there’s little ring-side action in a lucha film (hurray) – instead the film keeps the wrestling quota up with the Bat’s wrestling hobby, which integrates the lucha side of business a lot better into the actual plot than is usually the case, and even gives these scenes a bit of dramatic heft.

Another of the film’s strength’s is how fully it buys into the comic-book-like nature of the film’s oversized characters like Blue and the Bat (hopefully somebody’s new band name), and leaves reality in the most delightful way, while keeping to a logic of its own. So, for example, when Blue needs information about a peculiar plant connected to the crimes of the Bat, he’s not going to a botanist for his clues, but steps into Gothic horror land for a scene to visit a witch (Enriqueta Reza), which provides the film the opportunity to go through a whole awesome spiel of silly witch tropes.

The film is full of details like this. Another favourite is when Marta – who does of course eventually end up kidnapped despite Daniel’s and Blue’s best efforts – withstands a long and hilariously toxic masculinity 101 monologue from the Bat, who decides to punish her for not falling for his “your female softness will make me less crazy, love me or I’ll kill you, ain’t I a catch” shtick by imprisoning her in his very own lock-up for loves of his life. Of which there seem to be at least half a dozen at this time.

Osés, an important guy in the genre, and a bit of an expert in playing lucha villains as well as a regular scripter for these films, plays up the Bat’s particular brand of craziness rather wonderfully, making the guy bathetic, pathetic and physically impressive in a way that makes his somewhat peculiar lifestyle feel perfectly logical for him. Blue is, of course, Blue.

Three Films Make A Post: It's a cold, cruel world - but Jackson can hack it!

Fresh (2022): I’m not as excited about Mimi Cave’s variation on common horror tropes as quite a few other viewers seem to be, mostly because adding a bit of gloss to keep a more mainstream audience watching something usually done sordid doesn’t seem to be much of an achievement to me, and does not for a terribly interesting movie make to these eyes. I also found the film’s feminism very superficial and pretty bland, not really adding further insight to anyone’s view of the world nor doing much I haven’t seen before to the tropes of its sub-genre. It’s certainly well-filmed and well-acted (with Daisy Edgar-Jones giving a likeable turn, and Sebastian Stan giving the oversize crazy performance every filmography needs) on a technical level, but it’s also twenty to thirty minutes too long. Particularly the never-ending (and not in a good way) climax is a problem here.

Unmasked Part 25 (1988): Anders Palm’s very low budget slasher comedy romance from several decades earlier is rather more creative with the tropes of its sub-genre, providing many a moment of handmade gore as an additional attraction, thinking through and against the basics of the slashers genre, skewering bodies as well as poetry-quoting self-serious sad sack men, and actually building a world for his slasher (Gregory Cox) to inhabit. The jokes here are trying to hit on every level, from making fun of genre tropes – be they horror or romantic comedy – to peculiar sex jokes to plain deadpan weirdness, and as is par for the course for the shotgun approach, not all of them hit. But there are so many of them, you’re already laughing or shaking your head at the next one.

Bride of the Nile aka Arouss el Nil (1963): Practically everything I’ve seen of classic Egyptian movies like this romantic fantasy comedy by Fatin Abdulwahhab fits very much in style and taste to classic Hollywood formulas, and it’s very easy to imagine a US version of this tale of a grave-disturbing engineer (Abdel Moneim Ibrahim) first being haunted by and then falling in love with the spirit of the last bride of the Nile (Lobna Abdel Aziz) without many changes to the script or the filmmaking. We don’t actually need a US version, happily, for the film at hand is really all you could want from the kind of whimsical, fantastical romance this material promises, with many a superimposed image of Lobna Abdel Aziz waving her hands so that some telekinesis can happen, the expected assortment of musical numbers and pretty great costumes, and a general sense of fancy that never seems to get tired or old.

Short Film Friday: The Trunk