Three Films Make A Post: Give the devil his due.

Under Paris aka Sous la Seine (2024): Apparently, there was a a clearance sale for shark movie clichés in France, and Xavier Gens managed to catch them all. He also brought all of the screenwriters, for he shares various writing credits with six other people here. Given that the whole film plays out like a shark movie as written by ChatGPT (no surprise some film company suits believe replacing writers with AI is a near future prospect), that’s some kind of achievement at least.

As is how unoriginal and culturally unspecific a movie about sharks in goddamn Paris can feel if the filmmakers only not apply themselves properly to their craft. For much of its running time, this isn’t even stupid fun, for the film lacks the energy needed to pull that off, as it does apparently lack the intelligence to realize how silly it is.

This last problem actually turns into a virtue in the final twenty-five minutes or so, when a degree of entertainment manifests – most probably through the magical power of the script’s impressive amount of accrued bullshit becoming sentient.

The Mysterians aka Chikyu Boeigun (1957): It is curious to compare Ishiro Honda’s alien invasion movie with its temporal genre siblings from the USA. Both strands do share a – in Honda rather surprising – today uncomfortable trust in institutions and the military – the latter even more surprising in Honda – but where the Americans most often feel rather po-faced and stuffy, there’s a poppy playfulness surrounding the Japanese film I find irresistible.

This is often a question of design: not only the film’s colours – which do indeed pop – but the colourful and silly-awesome environment suits with capes the Mysterians wear, how the kaiju the aliens use looks a bit like Ro-Man’s cockroach brother, and so on. There’s very little here that doesn’t align itself with a certain idea of directness, brightness and fun.

The Hangman (2024): For at least half of its scenes, Bruce Wemple’s (written by Wemple and lead LeJon Woods) movie is an exemplary piece of low budget cinema, with a sense of mood and forward momentum, and a good idea of the kind of ambitions it can actually pull off, budget-wise. The other half of its scenes tend to meander through ideas, tone, and way too much exposition, and action movie one-liners that have little connection to the emotional core about fathers, sons and trauma, leaving a film that’s generally competent enough to be entertaining but could have used quite a bit of tightening to fulfil its eminently reachable deeper ambitions as well as one would have wished it to.