One Shot (2021) / One More Shot (2024)

The main selling point of James Nunn’s tale about a Navy Seals squad lead by Jake Harris (house favourite Scott Adkins) having to survive a terrorist siege when they’re about to guard the transport of an inmate of one of those US torture camps for prisoners that officially don’t exist anymore is that is indeed a one shot movie. Logistically, that’s a rather impressive feat even in the age of digital editing, particularly since the film’s action sequences are often surprisingly complicated; I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to get an choreography together for the hand to hand combat.

Despite the pretty unpleasant torture camp setting, and the restrictions of the one shot style, there’s quite a bit of decently effective character work here as well, enough so that every character at least has believable motivations – even some of the villains are allowed to be human beings. Human beings played by some fine character actors and a very game Ashley Greene to boot, so there’s a surprising amount of humanity in between the exciting murder and explosions.

Made three years later or so, One More Shot takes place only a couple of flight hours after the first film. Harris, the only survivor of his team and his prisoner Amin Mansur (Waleed Elgadi) land not exactly in the country they were expecting to end up in, and soon find themselves thrust into a mercenary attack on the airport, as masterminded by one Robert Jackson (Michael Jai White). As it turns out, the supposed Islamist terrorism case is only a set-up for an attempted coup in the USA.

Harris, not exactly the biggest fan of Mansur after the first film, finds himself dragged into protecting the man as well as Mansur’s pregnant wife while also figuring out what exactly is going on.

This second film is a nice escalation of the first one, sharing most of its virtues – character actors doing their stuff admirably (hi, Tom Berenger) under one shot circumstances, and action sequences that look bigger and even more complicated to set up. The car crash bit does frankly look a bit insane to me to actually have been pulled off.

The plot’s turn into the more convoluted does sit better with me as the old evil Muslim thing but it also does make the second movie somewhat less plausible. Fortunately, I’m not really going into a Scott Adkins movie looking for plausibility – everything else you might want from a low budget action movie, these two films deliver.

Three Films Make A Post: Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they can't see you.

Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch (2024): I still find Durch Marich’s Horror in the High Desert movies some of the most likeable projects in American (the Japanese side operates on a whole different level) POV horror low budget cinema. But with film number three, I – not a viewer typically needy for explanations – do find myself growing rather impatient with the film’s unwillingness to even show or say so much you’d need an explanation for it. In film number three, there’s great set-up work in the first act, much flabby nothing in the middle and a climax that has two or three shots but delivers so little it’s difficult to truly think of it as a climax, and not just a stopping point for the inevitable fourth movie, in which again little of import will happen (not happen – you know what I mean).

Beautiful Noise (2014): Eric Green’s music documentary is billed as an “in-depth exploration” of the roots of the genre the film goes out of its way not to call shoegaze, but in truth, it is a painfully  superficial and surface-level exploration of it. Instead of focussing on a handful of bands as a core for style and sound, this tries to squeeze a dozen or more of them into ninety minutes, chasing through soundbites and interview bits and pieces that could be revelatory in the proper context without ever arriving at anything like an argument or a point. There were bands, they were making music, their sound was sort of revolutionary and very influential, and that’s all we truly are allowed to learn through this approach.

Then there’s a terrible reliance on interviews with “famous fans”: Billy Corgan is rambling, on drugs, wearing the worst hat, and has no clue (as expected), Wayne Coyne appears comparatively sober (gasp!) and has little insight to add, and only The Cure’s Robert Smith appears to provide any musical insight.

Mayhem! aka Farang (2023): Despite the excitable English market title, this (mostly) Thailand set French action movie by Xavier Gens with the excellent Nassim Lyes as a man with a past finding his new-found family peace disturbed by old grudges is a rather slow affair for the first hour or so of its runtime. What’s there of action early on seems rather perfunctory, and the too-slow build-up of all the expected clichés of this sort of affair make the first two thirds a bit of a slog to get through, though certainly a professionally shot one.

Once the action comes, it certainly is gritty, bloody, and competently staged, yet I found myself watching it from a certain remove, too much of it having been spent on building up the expected early on, and a just as expected “plot twist” later.

I also have to say that I’m a bit tired of action movies killing off the female lead to motivate their male heroes to violence. At least when it’s done in as mechanical a fashion as it is done here.

Haunting Soul from the Dark Building (1989)

aka Haunting Ghost from a Dark Building

aka Haunting Soul in an Old Building

The soundman (Chen Xiguang) of a mainland Chinese movie project lives in a run-down apartment building that features dubious neighbours, a sleazy and mildly threatening caretaker, and a cellar nobody has entered in years. It also has the most wonderful room sound in its staircase, so our soundguy does invite the film’s lead actress (Pan Jie) to walk up some stairs for him there when he’s not satisfied with the sound on set.

She’s got a creepy feeling in the place, though, and begins to have visions of the rape and murder of a teenager that must have taken place in that cellar during the Cultural Revolution (when nobody cared much about one murder more, the film suggests, somehow getting that past the censors). At the same time, the soundman is suddenly able to record bits and pieces of the future on his equipment. Thus drawn into the apartment’s mystery, the two team up to find out how killed the teenager.

All of this apparently excites the kid’s ghost quite a bit, and it begins haunting and killing people.

Haunting Soul is that rare example of an actual horror movie from mainland China. Stylistically and thematically, it is firmly anchored in the tradition of Asian ghost horror as I know it quite well from other countries in the area. Some of its ideas run parallel to those that would later make up the core of the J-horror explosion but never quite lead to as interesting and horrifying places as these later films would reach. But then, not being on the level of Kiyoshi Kurosawa or Hideo Nakata when he was at his best, is not such a terrible failure.

Yet, while they are clearly knowledgeable about the traditions of films about hauntings, and do like to borrow from those traditions, directors Mu Deyuan and Ming Liang seem at times somewhat insecure in their approach to horror cinema, perhaps on account of a certain lack of practical filmmaking experience with the genre in their national cinema. There’s a certain clumsiness and awkwardness in some of the horror scenes that isn’t helped by highly misguided ideas of how a flying doll head can be made creepy (note to directors: probably not make it look quite as much like it were on some very bad drugs), and sudden outbreaks of bizarre nonsense like the synth version of “Also sprach Zarathustra” that underlies a supposedly dramatic scene. Elements that, of course, make the whole affair pleasantly psychotronic even though they weaken its effect as a proper horror film.

On the other hand, Haunting Soul has moments of actual dream-like dread – everything having to do with the characters’ visions is particularly nicely done - and has quite a bit of fun with using the movie making background as part of its horror. It’s meta, but only as much as the film can actually carry without becoming completely silly.

The apartment location is wonderful as well, looking as Gothic as a modern building can look with its improbably large cellar, light that always threatens to turn the colours of horror and as many hand-placed artificial cobwebs as one can dream of. I also suspect some of this would look like a proper time capsule to the right Chinese audience; it does at least have that feeling from over here in Germany.

This being a mainland Chinese horror movie, there is, of course, the dreaded “natural explanation” for everything we’ve seen to appease the censors, but the directors clearly don’t care about convincing us they actually mean it. Seldom have I seen less effort and screen time sacrificed to this particularly kind of nonsense; so much so that the whole “it was all a tale mental patients told each other” bit feels more of a satire on rational explanation endings than a proper one.

King Kong vs Godzilla (1962)

Original title: Kingu Kongu tai Gojira キングコング対ゴジラ

While a reawakened Godzilla makes his way back to attack Japan, some ad men are sent on an expedition to a mysterious island. After some misadventures with the local natives, the guys manage to capture their god – King Kong. The ad-men’s boss decides it would be great ad copy if the pharmaceutical company they work for would officially sponsor Kong, and they’d get him to beat up Godzilla. Monster fighting ensues.

Some would argue that here, finally, Showa era Toho kaiju cinema has arrived at the overtly childlike and silly yet also often thematically rich tone it would keep to until the era’s end in the 70s.

I don’t exactly disagree, but would also suggest that Toho – as well as director Ishiro Honda – already had arrived at that tone much more successfully with the preceding, Godzilla-less Mothra. Where Mothra does a comparable thing a lot more effectively, here, the satire of capitalism, its expression through a modern media circus and consumerism turns at times gratingly unfunny and drags down the pacing of too much of the first two acts.

Because Honda was one of the great directors of his time, there are still moments of great joy in the first fifty minutes or so: the Japanese people in brown face pretending to be South Sea islanders dancing to a sleeping Kong is pretty incredible (also thanks to Ifukube’s wonderful theme) if “problematic”, and there’s even a bit of fun smashing going on when the film bothers to get away from ad-men and expositing scientists.

The final act, on the other hand, is flawless in its mixture of the silly, the outrageous (there’s for example an incredible bit of dialogue about an electrified Swiss postman only a giant ape wouldn’t love), and the utterly bizarre, wonderful and impactful fights the title promised.

It’s no wonder the US cut – for a long time the only version of the film you could see outside of Japan – decided to cut quite a bit of the material in the first acts. Unfortunately, the news reel style nonsense they replaced it with was even more grating and boring, while sanding away any attempt at depth.

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner in one of my favourite performances of hers) has the middle-aged blues. Her marriage to her high school sweetheart Charlie (Nicolas Cage) is practically over, and she doesn’t seem to quite have had the life she hoped for when she was young. There must have been some happy years with Charlie in-between, though, and they produced a daughter (Helen Hunt) who clearly has turned out fine and loves both of her parents.

Still, her daughter’s emotional support notwithstanding, Peggy Sue’s feeling bad, and she’s even worse because she has to go to her 25th high school reunion right when she’s having the worst time of her life. When she faints while being crowned reunion queen, she suddenly awakes in 1960, her graduation year, in the body of her younger self (though the film keeps us seeing her as Turner).

Peggy Sue has no idea what’s happening to her, but with twenty-five years of experience and a knowledge of her accumulated mistakes, she decides she’s going to correct what must have gone wrong with her life. Though she just might add some new mistakes of the “live a little” type on the way.

Looking at Francis Ford Coppola’s career beyond the obvious classics, one can regularly encounter semi-hidden gems like Peggy Sue Got Married. On the surface, this is a pretty typical time-shift comedy probably made possible by the success of Back to the Future. Consequently, it goes through quite a few jokes of the kind you’d expect from the set-up – see Peggy Sue’s parents freak out over her sudden grown-up behaviour, see Peggy Sue predict the technological future – and has some space for what you’d probably call boomer nostalgia for pop culture.

There’s nothing wrong with these aspects of the film to my eyes – the jokes are good and the nostalgia actually feeds into the narrative effectively and thoughtfully. If the film were only that, there’s still be a lot to like about it. However, Coppola fills a lot of the proceedings with a genuine sense of melancholia and quiet sadness. This is core to the film’s emotional honesty: whenever it talks about who Peggy Sue was as a teenager and who she grows up into, it avoids seeing the teen perspective as wrong and the more cynical adult one right or the other way around. Instead, the film emphasises again and again, it’s a matter of perspective born in the moment, and life’s not an abstract.

Which also means that Charlie – played with a mix of mania and insight by Cage that’s pretty damn irresistible - does turn out not to be a mistake to be avoided but a guy who genuinely cares about Peggy Sue deeply – in the sort of young person’s way we tend to forget we could feel when we get older – and whose own growing into imperfect middle age is not a thing to be changed by clever tricks but a process that can’t be avoided, though perhaps understood and thereby gotten through as much as Peggy Sue’s own middle-aged sadness can. The film presents no easy answer there but a quiet hope.

In general, there’s a quiet kindness to the way the film treats its characters, which in many ways is mirrored by the small kindnesses middle-aged Peggy Sue as young Peggy Sue spends on most of the people around her this time around, be they useful to her plans of building a better future, or not. One of the philosophical main tenets of Peggy Sue Got Married appears to be “don’t be an asshole”, and why would anyone want to disagree with that?

Break-ing News

I'll dry my tentacles in the summer heat for a bit. Normal service on the blog will resume on August, 21st.

Three Films Make A Post: Will you win, Godzilla? Will you win, Kong? The battle of the century!

Copycat (1995): There are two reasons why Jon Amiel’s serial killer thriller is anything more than a slick adaptation of an overconstructed script. And since these reasons are called Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, and both are in their fullest screen presence modes, this silly concoction about a serial killer who is basically a serial killer cover band turns into a tour de force commanded by two actresses who drag every bit of possible substance out of very little. This sort of thing can absolutely elevate mediocrity into a greatly entertaining movie, as the film thoroughly proves.

Malasaña 32 (2020): Some of the set pieces in Alberto Pintó’s movie about a Spanish family in the 70s moving from the country into what turns out to be a haunted apartment are very well done and effective. However, this is the type of horror movie that can only ever treat and see its supernatural threat as a reason for set pieces and plot twists, and never manages to cohere the political troubles of the time it suggests, the family’s experience moving from the country to the city in hopes of a better life, and the backstory of the supernatural threat into any kind of thematically coherent argument.

The horror pieces themselves tend to the grab-bag approach where thematic coherence or coherence of mood never appear to be of interest to the filmmakers, either. All the easier to borrow heavily from all kinds of sources, be it Poltergeist – a much superior film – or creepypasta.

Embrace of the Serpent aka El abrazo de la serpiente (2023): There’s a certain kinship between Ciro Guerra’s film and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Cobra Verde and Fitzcarraldo in the way naturalism and sudden outbreaks of the surreal intertwine, as well as in its location.

However, this is a film made by someone from a very different time and place, so there are as many differences in approaches and world view as there are similarities – Guerra certainly isn’t a Herzog cover band. The film’s treatment of colonialism, Western scientific and Amazonian traditional culture comes from a very different direction, but Guerra generally doesn’t simplify and keeps certain differences unresolved, philosophical questions answered from two opposing directions at once.

As a film this is an act of deep worldbuilding, making ways of looking at and being in the world understandable by slowly drawing a viewer into them, full immersion in a style only a handful of directors use these days (Robert Eggers comes to mind).

Three Films Make A Post: No man left behind.

Life After Fighting (2024): Lead actor/martial artist/director/producer Bren Foster’s directorial debut climaxes in forty minutes or so of incredibly impressive martial arts madness of the naturalistic, bone-crunching style, presented in a direct and visceral way. To get there, you have to work your way through eighty minutes or so of much too slow build-up, pointless side-plots, and scenes that – in classic indie tradition - never seem to want to end when they really should have ended minutes ago.

I do appreciate Foster’s willingness to go slow and actually ground his character emotionally – this certainly beats the “egomaniac martial arts asshole” you always fear in this kind of project – but there’s providing the ground for things, and then there’s scenes crawling by at a snail’s pace for no good reason.

The Heroin Busters aka La via della droga (1977): This Enzo G. Castellari joint with Fabio Testi (playing a character named Fabio in case he forgets) and David Hemmings as cops (well, Hemmings is playing an Interpol agent) on a rampage starts out pretty slow as well, but it doesn’t take more than half of its running time to gather its speed. Once it dies get going, there’s no holding its series of probably highly dangerous to stunt people action sequences back for even a second. There’s a manic, dangerous energy to Castellari’s action at its best, and here, he holds that level for the whole last act of the film, while doing much less feet-dragging than Foster’s movie before.

Land of Bad (2024): Despite the military-based version of the action film being my least favourite type – I dislike some of the sub-genre’s inherent assumptions even less so than those of vigilante films – it is difficult to find fault with the way William Eubank and a game bunch of actors (several Hemsworths, Ricky Whittle and Milo Ventimiglia in an actually good performance, as well Russell Crowe chewing scenery delightfully as the Man in the Chair) present a series of theoretically tired old clichés. In a style I find by now typical of Eubank, he leaves no cent of the budget not visible on screen, so there’s an always entertaining series of gunplay, explosions, unarmed combat and more explosions shown off in the most effective manner possible.

The character bits are clichéd but also just work, so there’s enough emotional backing to the violence. If you squint and look at the film in the right light, you might also see it as a mild critique of the detached ways of modern technological warfare in some scenes, of course in between the film milking modern technological warfare for the funnest possible action.

Nighty Night (1986)

Original title: 真夜中の悪夢

An intro of a girl reading a version of Little Red Riding Hood to some toys (or is she?) is followed by four unconnected tales of horror. A teenage birthday party turns into a massacre of the certainly no longer repressed. A floating girl that looks like an idol leads young men to their deaths and the realization they can’t actually walk on air; or perhaps it’s the other way round. A geeky girl has to fight off an astonishingly freakish looking monster while she’s trapped in the rules of a video game. Yet another girl adores the preppiest boy in school. When he reciprocates, her body image problems turn into body horror.

All of this takes place in the confines of modern as of 1986 Japanese homes and quotidian urban spaces that breathe a lovely air of an authentic time and place for the bizarre and the supernatural to break into. Apparently hardly anyone saw this when it hit the Japanese video market for about five minutes, but Internet archaeologists have not just uncovered a very watchable looking copy but also produced a documentary about the film’s production, with full cooperation of its director Hirohisa Kokusho. Some days, the Internet does provide what it promises.

For reasons only known to the filmmaker, Nighty Night starts off on its weakest foot. While it sets up the shorts’ thematic through line of turning teenage malaise into horror (an old but dependable tradition), it does have a certain film school stiffness bound to turn potential viewers off, even though it does go all out on the nihilism.

The floating idol killer tale is a lovely little trifle, putting one idea into moving pictures and then getting out while the getting is good.

Then follows my personal favourite of the tales, which doesn’t just feature that pretty damn incredible monster I don’t have words to describe but also makes a more than decent grab at Zuni Doll style one woman versus monster suspense with added blue lighting. Even the horror movie bullshit ending is delightful.

The final story returns to taking teenage horrors very seriously indeed again, but the metaphor is more interesting and better realized than the one in the first tale, and there’s at least a bit of a spring in the step of the editing and camera work here, ending Nighty Night on a face Screaming Mad George would probably have enjoyed creating, and a troubled dead teenager.

What’s not to like about that?

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024)

So apparently what happened in the first Blood and Honey wasn’t necessarily what actually happened in the world of its sequel but may have been the sensationalist adaptation of the true travails of Christopher Robin (Scott Chambers). Monstrous grown-up killer versions of Pooh and co. going on a woodsy killing spree were part of the truth, mind you. I’ll take that as an apology for the quality of the first film.

Christopher Robin is understandably traumatized by the ordeal as well as that movie. Worse still, only a few people – including his friend Lexy (Tallulah Evans) – actually believe the whole killer Pooh thing, so Chris is ostracized in his small town as a potential spree killer.

As if that weren’t enough trouble for a sensitive guy, Pooh (Ryan Oliva), Owl (Marcus Massey) and a particularly deranged Tigger (Lewis Santer) feel rather ostracized themselves by humanity, all of whom either don’t want to be killed by them, don’t believe in them, or want to kill them right back, so they start on another killing spree. This time, they’ll even come to Christopher Robin, if Christopher Robin won’t come to them.

In between killing scenes, we regularly pop in with Chris, who slowly discovers the horrible/hilarious truth about the nature and identity of Pooh and his murderous buddies, and their connection to his other childhood traumas.

Where the first Blood and Honey was just a cheap shot piece of crap, returning director/writer Rhys Frake-Waterfield appears to have put a lot more thought and effort into the sequel. This time around, there’s actually a point beyond sales value for the whole Pooh connection, and the film puts some serious effort into creating a grim and gritty murder background for our childhood friends.

That background is pulp as all get out and very silly indeed, but treated to earnestly, I couldn’t help but be charmed by it.

Because this is 2024, this is of course also a film that utilizes grief and trauma as the motivating factors for its main character. Its portrayal isn’t going to win any prizes, but does provide the film with a bit of emotional grounding and backbone, which is really all a slasher needs to work.

Speaking of slashing, the kills here belong to the drawn-out, sadistic Terrifier 2 style of murder that’s en vogue these years. Even though I’m not a big fan of that approach – turns out very long murder scenes of the type just get boring and a bit unpleasant for me – these are realized via fine, practical effects that demonstrate a decently macabre imagination. Plus, this is still a pleasant ninety minutes long and not two and a half hours, so the Terrifier 2 effect of stealing my time for no good reason does not feature here.

Blood and Honey is a very nice step up from the first film – and hey, this isn’t even to be read as damning with faint praise – so much so I’m genuinely excited for what Frake-Waterfield is going to do in the planned mega match-up of public domain characters that appears to be next on his plate.