Three Films Make A Post: The Greatest High Adventure Ever Filmed!

Festival of the Living Dead (2024): After having started out strong, the Soska Sister Jen and Sylvia don’t seem to be able to get a movie together that’s even vaguely in the ballpark of American Mary. It’s all sequels, ill-advised remakes and cheap guff, typically decently enough made but well beyond the filmmakers’ talent levels.

This Tubi Original flirts a little with being an actual sequel to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but mostly, it’s a movie of braindead idiots sleepwalking through zombie movie tropes. Energy levels are low, and there’s little on screen here to tell me why I should watch this above the other dozen crappy zombie movies coming out every month.

Companion (2025): If there’s one thing holding too many “progressive” horror movies back right now – and I say that as a socialist much closer to their political ideals than MAGAs, incels and other real life horrors – its the smug self-satisfaction about the rightness of their world view that reminds me of myself in my twenties, with its complete inability to realize that it’s all to easy to win arguments when all you ever do is argue against straw men. Worse, this brand of smugness tends to lend films a particular self-satisfied air with any little twist, any half-bright idea in their scripts, and an inability to look at one’s own work and see its flaws.

This goes very much for Companion, a film of middling twists it very clearly believes to be incredibly deep and intelligent, and a slick surface of ultra-competent filmmaking that has very little of any depth or interest going on below its polished surface.

The only thing this really has going for it is the rightfully admired Sophie Thatcher. Who also happens to be in Heretic, a great example of how to do progressive horror without intellectual shortcuts.

The Guns of Navarone (1961): Speaking of intellectual shortcuts, during the course of the German election, I really needed to watch a movie where a lot of Nazis are killed. J. Lee Thompson’s war/spy movie classic fit the bill nicely. It also has a starry cast playing your typical Alistair McLean bunch of competents, rather a lot of great action scenes – during which indeed a heart-warming amount of Nazis die – and a couple of absolutely icy war is hell moments.

Gregory Peck is particularly great in this one, mixing the reticence of a man who has already seen and done too much in this war with the coldness of a man willing to do even worse if necessary.

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988)

Original title: Teito monogatari

Yasunori Kato (Kyusaku Shimada), a horrifyingly powerful, deathless onmyoji who looks as if he stepped right out of a Suehiro Maruo manga, has a burning desire to destroy Tokyo.

Beginning in 1912 and continuing through the next decade, he makes various attempts at awakening the vengeful warlord Tairo no Masakado, whose head is buried somewhere below Tokyo to protect it, but who’d destroy everything around him once awoken. Kato’s main enemies are the good – or at least not batshit insane – onmyojis of the Tatsumiya line. As Masakado’s descendants they are, ironically, also the ideal mediums to wake up the grumpy old sleeper if controlled by Kato.

In a myriad of side and parallel plots we witness the plans of cigar-chomping millionaire Shibusawa (Shintaro Katsu) to drag Tokyo into the modern age via the dubious magic of urban development, listen to scientists and mystics espouse wild theories and just as wild exposition and witness a city changing at lightning pace.

It’s all rather confusing, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that this is an adaptation of several volumes of Hiroshi Aramata’s influential “Teito monogatari” series of fantasy/horror/weird fiction. A body of work which has alas not been translated into a language I speak or even dabble in. Basically, this often feels like several seasons of a modern streaming show pressed into a two hour runtime, with frequent leaps in time and space, and subplots and characters that disappear before you can blink.

I suspect full comprehension of the film would need a better understanding of various aspects of Japanese philosophy and religion than I have as well as actually having read the books.

It’s all very Lynch’s Dune in this regard, and even though this approach certainly isn’t the most obvious approach to filmmaking, one might even call it somewhat perverse, I can sympathize with a film just not wanting to compromise with its audience in any way whatsoever. Either you’re getting on board, or this thing is simply going to roll over you.

At the time this was made, it was apparently one of the highest budgeted Japanese movies ever produced, and you can indeed see every yen spent on it on screen. While the plot – and the clearly huge amounts of philosophical and social subtext – can fly over a Western viewer’s head, one can’t argue with the intense visual power of the film, full of memorable shots that do more for the emotional understanding of the film’s content than another hour of detailed plot or characterisation, its intense aesthetic mixture of historical authenticity and late 80s neon, nor the way its star-studded cast (including favourites like Katsu and Shimada, the incredible Mieko Harada, Jo Shishido and dozens of other Toho stalwarts) fills the underwritten characters with life by the sheer power of their presence. Well, returning to the subtext, even I understand that this is very much a film about the pace of the changes to Tokyo and Japan in the first three decades of the century, and the toll this took on the national psyche, the difficulty of reconciling the traditional and the new without falling into insanity and sick dreams of empire.

That this is portrayed, among other things, via duelling magicians, wonderful stop motion creatures, and a steam-driven (I believe) robot just makes the whole thing even more wonderful, obviously.

Responsible for this astonishing, overwhelming film is Akio Jissoji, well known around here as a director at home in pink cinema, arthouse about matters sexual and spiritual and tokusatsu TV – if I had actually seen more of his stuff, he’d be a patron saint around these parts, that much is clear.

Even having seen perhaps half a dozen of his films (and a few tokusatsu episodes), it’s clear that Jissoji managed to get his personal handwriting and a focus on certain core interests into whichever kind of project he worked on – Last Megalopolis certainly isn’t some disinterested work for hire bit, but something created with full artistic focus and passion.

That I have the feeling I’ve barely understood half of it, and even less of the intricacies of its plot, doesn’t make Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis less of an achievement.

Harms (2013)

Professional criminal Harms (Heiner Lauterbach) gets out of jail after the usual fourteen, fifteen year span movies use in these cases. He’s getting bored rather quickly with sitting around and having sex with prostitute Jasmin (Valentina Sauca) who appears inexplicably fond of him.

So he’s taking an opportunity to get back into the game, when a not at all dubious character (Friedrich von Thun), invites him into handling a big armed robbery for him.

Harms grabs some members of his old crew, some hacker dude his shady partner finds, and goes to work. The planning phase is made difficult by a variety of problems, most of which need to be resolved by violence, and the actual robbery does feature some sudden and inevitable betrayal.

Which isn’t a spoiler, because prime among the weaknesses of Nikolai Müllerschön’s Harms is a script that feels the need to include every gangster and heist movie cliché ever seen in a movie while putting very little effort into properly connecting them. It’s not as if I expect originality from this sort of affair, but some care, focus, and judicious excision of superfluous side business would have done wonders here.

That might also have cut down the cast of characters to a number Müllerschön could actually handle – as it stands, there are a lot of characters in the movie who aren’t terribly important, and quite a few actors who seem unprepared for the kind of naturalistic tough guy acting the film clearly asks for. In typical German overcompensation, the dialogue often tries rather too hard for tough guy strong language in ways that feel ridiculous instead of believable – it’s not just that nobody would be talking this way, it’s that nobody involved manages to convince they indeed are.

Lauterbach is pretty good, though, apparently enjoying the opportunity to break many of the rules of German screen acting and work more via physical presence than overenunciation.

From time to time, the film manages to get up to a good scene or two, but its lack of focus prevents Harms from capitalizing on this enough to become a good movie. Or really, to become more than a series of scenes.

Three Films Make A Post: Turn the darkness into light

The Secret of Kells (2009): I dare say there’s not exactly a load of animation out there that is highly influenced by the art of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. It doesn’t fit too many narratives, I assume. Yet where would this be more appropriate than in a tale about a mediaeval illuminated manuscript?

Directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey made some interesting choices in other regards, as well, often slipping into the – to the modern eye strange – mindsets of their protagonists, while appearing to make a film that’s philosophically at once pagan, Christian and modern humanist. Which most of the time makes for a narrative full of surprising details, even when it hits a lot of the tired old Hero’s Journey beats. It’s also so damn beautiful I probably wouldn’t even criticize it (much), if it were only the Hero’s Journey stuff.

The Flowers of Evil aka Aku no hana (2019): This adaptation of a much loved manga and anime feels nothing at all like what you’d expect from a Noboru Iguchi film. If that’s a good thing or a bad one depends on one’s tolerance for melodramatic, pseudo-intellectual teenage bullshit with a wee bit of sexual deviance included taking the place of absurdist gore as an expression of all possible human feelings.

Mine isn’t terribly high, so I very quickly lost patience with these particular characters, their small town malaise and their inability to read Baudelaire without drenching their books in dramatic rainfalls; your disgust with misuse of books may vary.

Nightmare aka Nattmara (1965): Apparently, not only Jimmy Sangster over in the UK found himself thinking about what to do with the Hitchcock model of what we’d now call the domestic thriller. Arne Mattsson over in Sweden certainly thought along the same lines as Sangster with this tale of gaslighting. The resulting film is at times beautiful and moody, painfully obvious, crude and elegant, with a curious idea of how to time plot revelations running into moments of deep intensity.

Thus, the whole thing feels rather disjointed, though it is never without something interesting happening on screen.

Dark Match (2024)

Some time in the late 80s. A wrestler going by the nom de plume of Miss Behave (Ayisha Issa) has grown unsatisfied with her lot as a heel in a low-rent part of a big wrestling federation. She still dreams of championships, but given her actual position, her gender, and her blackness, there’s really not much of a future there. So she sleeps with sweet has-been colleague Mean Joe Lean (Steven Ogg), and gets increasingly angry at her counter-face Kate the Great (Sara Canning) – blonde and corn-fed enough to have hopes for the big time.

Things take a turn when the troupe’s manager agrees to a private side gig in the backwoods for them. Their employers are surprisingly happy to see the wrestlers, given their actual status on the wrestling totem pole; they give good parties; and they are also a probably dangerous cult under a mysterious leader (Chris Jericho), who’ll make himself known a little later.

The little private competition will turn out to be somewhat more deadly than expected.

Dark Match by Wolf Cop director Lowell Dean is the first real movie surprise I’ve encountered this year. The Wolf Cop movies were fun enough for what they were, but this, an at once very silly but also much more serious piece of horror is miles beyond these earlier films.

It’s only a comedy to a minor degree, but the kind of Wrestling horror movie Santo would never have partaken in, with some lovingly created practical effects, a zippy, twisty but not annoying plot and a sense of drive, fun and purpose that reminded me of the low budget movie traditions of decades past as much as it did of my beloved lucha cinema.

Dark Match looks absolutely fantastic, thanks to Karim “Mandy” Hussain’s photography in all colours of the neon rainbow, full of clever little visual touches that add excitement and impact to what could be a somewhat rote affair in lesser hands. Same goes for the production design – there’s a loving touch to these aspects of the production that suggests filmmakers who care about their silly little wrestling horror movie, so much so it doesn’t actually feel all that silly anymore when you’re watching it.

Speaking of care, the other pleasant surprise in Dark Match is the quality of its characterization. The film shows an impressive amount of love and respect for these people on the lowest rung of their chosen profession, and never aims scorn or its jokes at their places in life. In a move not always common in gory low budget horror, the film clearly likes its characters, and manages to impress this, as well as a sense of compassion with them, on the viewer.

This opens doors the actors – again playing on a much higher level than the film strictly needed – are more than willing to walk through, and suddenly, this is a silly wrestling horror movie populated by characters one can’t help but like and root for.

It’s a lovely achievement all around, particularly since this also does very well with its action and horror elements. Dark Match feels like a film that is exactly what it wants to be, in tone, style and mood, and I find it absolutely impossible not to love it for this.

Der Skorpion (1997)

Josef Berthold (the inexplicably popular-in-Germany at the time Heiner Lauterbach) heads an anti-drug crime department of Munich police. He’s rather on the zealous side, so his relationships with his wife Lili (Renate Krößner) and his insufferable late teenage son Robin (Marek Harloff) are increasingly strained.

For the local drug lords, Josef is just too damn successful. In what appears to be an attempt to demonstrate certain dangers to him, Lili is drugged in a restaurant and nearly dies in an accident caused by her state. This doesn’t exactly suggests a reason for backing down to Josef. Rather, he’s now out for blood instead of putting people behind bars; at the same time, his relationship with Marek further deteriorates.

Marek flees into a rather sudden relationship with a porn actress (Birge Schade), drugs, and general teenage raging.

While that’s going on, someone appears to begin killing their way up the chain of the local drug business, particularly the parts most probably connected to the attack on Lili. Josef would be the obvious suspect here.

The films of Dominik Graf, with their often somewhat crazed intensity, their intense, rough, brilliant 35mm camera work and their love for maximalist low budget genre filmmaking are a curious fit for German TV, yet still, he’s been making this sort of thing for decades and is somehow still at it, even getting a good number of German TV prizes for material these things would typically not take a second look at. Hell, he even managed to smuggle a very late, nearly perfect giallo into the world of German crime TV in 2011 in  form of the astonishing “Polizeiruf 110” Cassandras Warnung.

This much earlier TV movie made for the ZDF (Germany’s second public TV channel) is Graf at his most intense, featuring a plot that includes general crime business, a giallo-esque serial killing (with a totally not giallo-esque solution), many highly improbable random turns, and heightened family melodrama. Added to this is the most teenage scenery chewing ever to chew scenery by Marek Harloff - who manages to be so improbably annoying his extremity makes him feel like a real teenager again or rather like all of them at once - gratuitous sex and nudity, highly effective suspense sequences, and sudden bursts of quiet nearly as intense as the film’s breathless loudness. It’s as if a bit of worthy, bland German crime TV had been bitten by a radioactive Italian filmmaker or possessed by the ghosts of certain 70s attempts at establishing a German genre film (something Graf made two documentaries about).

It’s the visual and narrative energy that holds this whole thing made out of disparate parts together, a willingness to just follow through with weird ideas, but also Graf’s skill with every disparate part taken separately: he can do the melodrama, the thriller, the arthouse coming of age, the German cop show business, and appears to never have heard you’re not supposed to do them all at once. I’m certainly not going to disagree with the man.

Three Films Make A Post: His Battle To Save The Alaskan Wilderness And Protect Its People Can Only Be Won…

On Deadly Ground (1994): Steven Seagal can’t act, Steven Seagal can’t fight, Steven Seagal can’t direct, yet he’s still doing all of it, at this point in his career at a major studio budget level with a cast that includes Michael Caine, Joan Chen (playing an Alaskan native American, because of course she is), Billy Bob Thornton and a horde of beloved character actors. There’s a commendable pro-eco message (including an absurd lecture in the bored tones of Seagal himself after he has murdered his way through dozens of people) that’s permanently made absurd by Seagal’s bully asshole thug persona, and the huge amount of “Native Spirituality” kitsch that’s funnier than it is offensive.

Also very funny are Caine’s attempts at pretending to be American, Seagal’s attempts at philosophy, and Seagal’s attempts at looking like a badass instead of the guy who pays you so you pretend he beats you up.

Schrei – denn ich werde dich töten! (“Scream – for I am going to kill you!”) aka School’s Out (1999): At the turn of the century, German cable TV did hope for a bit of that sweet, sweet Scream money. Thus this low-gore slasher by Robert Sigl (who once made the pretty wonderful Laurin but then had to make his way through the German cinematic and TV wastelands) with a script by German weird fiction luminary – though you wouldn’t notice here - Kai Meyer.

As far as Scream-offs go, this is one of the less comedic attempts at the style, and, apart from the bits Sigl nearly quotes directly from the Craven film, more like a mid-level giallo with teens and more competence than stylistic brilliance on screen.

It’s pretty good fun on a rainy Sunday morning, though.

Das Mädcheninternat – Deine Schreie wird niemand hören (“The Girls’ Boarding School – No one will hear your screams”) aka Dead Island: Schools Out 2 (2001): Sigl and Meyer re-team for this sequel that finds final girl Nina (Katharina Wackernagel) getting into trouble with a killer in a nun costume in an island boarding school/mental health institution. There’s less direct Scream in here than in the first movie and even more giallo, though this again doesn’t come together as well as one could hope for given the actual talent involved on director’s chair and script. The acting isn’t bad either, yet there’s a certain lack of energy here that gets in the way of any actual tension.

This, too, isn’t a bad little movie if one is in the appropriate mood, mind you.

Friends of Friends (2002)

Original title: Die Freunde der Freunde

Gregor (Matthias Schweighöfer) is a boarding school pupil, a couple of months before final exams. To be precise, he’s going to a Gymnasium, the type of school you’d go to in Germany when college is a realistic proposition for you. In combination with the boarding school, and the way the kids in the movie relate to money, there’s a class assumption here – none of these kids has parents working in a factory, that’s for sure. Gregor’s closest friend is his roommate Artur (Florian Stetter), and these two are a study in contrasts – where Gregor apparently carries quite a few romantic notions about life and particularly love, Artur’s the wild one (if not an actual sociopath) who we can well imagine to get into the kind of trouble he won’t be able to slip out of easily in the future.

Right now, he’s just doing stuff like lying rather a lot – and implicitly betraying Gregor’s truancy habits to school authorities early on in the movie, though it’s never going to outright tell us thus – and encouraging threesomes with his girlfriend Pia (Jessica Schwarz) and Gregor.

Gregor’s drawn to Artur’s incipient dangerous life, but becomes distracted when he meets Billie (Sabine Timoteo), a young, single mother, with an evasive air of mystery and the kind of background rich kid Gregor clearly can’t quite comprehend. While Gregor is instantly smitten, Billie is acting hot and cold, perhaps using Gregor for things he’s not worldly enough to understand, perhaps genuinely feeling drawn to his still schoolboyish kind of innocence and having to step back for reasons of her own.

At the borders of the plot, there are elements of the strange: Gregor’s belief that there’s some fated other for everyone seemingly being true, ghosts that have appeared to Billie as well as to Artur at the moments of someone’s death.

Whenever I write about German films, I tend to lament Germany’s deplorable lack of proper genre filmmaking. That’s certainly not director Dominik Graf’s fault, for Graf has made a career out of making genre films wherever he can get away with it, be it in the often much too worthy format of German TV crime movie series like “Tatort” and “Polizeiruf 110”, or in TV movies like this.

Proper genre movies, but not exactly straightforward ones, mind you, for one of the director’s main strengths is a willingness to be strange (or even outright Weird), hopefully causing a maximum of confusion in your typical German viewer of Saturday evening crime.

It has been ages since I’ve consciously watched anything directed by Graf, so I’m not even sure I wasn’t terribly confused or even annoyed by him the last time I encountered them myself.

The film at hand has elements of a crime drama, but these are mostly kept at the borders of what’s going on, suggested to be the parts of Artur’s life Gregor has just learned to ignore or choses not to see, as he choses to ignore or not see rather a lot of things around him.

I rather prefer to see the film as a ghost story, one told sideways and at an angle of the way ghost stories are usually told, but one carrying quite an emotional impact quite beyond the realm of jump scares, an impact that’s entwined with a sense of melancholy and sadness, a feeling of characters drifting in directions quite beyond their grasp, control, or perhaps even understanding.

Which does seem appropriate for something based on a Henry James tale of all things - though I doubt James would have been terribly happy with the nudity and the sometimes realistically coarse language in the film. Nor seems Graf’s masterful treatment of the confusion of being young very Jamesian to me – I am pretty sure Henry James was born middle-aged.

Die Freunde’s impact is carried by two things that stand very much in contrast – highly naturalistic acting by a great cast (young Schweighöfer was quite the thing, but Timoteo, Stetter and Schwarz are on the same level) and an incredibly thick mood of unreality. Graf shoots in the kind of grainy digital video that makes quite a few art-minded films of this era look ugly and cheap as hell, but hits exactly the point where this look turns the world of his film strange and off-kilter even when nothing strange or off-kilter is actually happening on screen. There’s a washed-out quality to the film’s reality that suggests a drift towards something inexplicable, and to my eyes, it’s pure magic, particularly combined with an electronic score by Sven Rossenbach and Florian van Volxem that is at once utterly of its time and perfectly outside of any time.

How Graf managed to get this approved by the never exactly weirdness-affine people in charge of German Publicly Owned TV, I can’t imagine. I’m just glad that he did.

End of Days (1999)

It’s 1999, and instead of going to a proper party, Satan possesses the body of Gabriel Byrne and goes out to rape a particular young woman named Christine (Robin Tunney) – because thusly, the world is going to end, and Satan would win his game of cosmic whatever against God.

Some rogue (the film takes great pains to show the Pope disagrees) Catholics are trying to get in Satan’s way by simply murdering Christine. This, however, is not actually as easy as it sounds, particularly since mercenary bodyguard Jericho Cane (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an alcoholic with a tragic dead family past, becomes involved, and starts protecting Christine from both sides. How centrist of him. So its’s Schwarzenegger against Satan and his gang and the churchy murder people, hooray.

Alas, poor Arnold. In a film like this bizarre mix of millennial horror and action movie, you really need to be able to utter the portentously idiotic lines Andrew W. Marlowe’s script offers with the proper dramatic weight. Schwarzenegger doesn’t appear to even understand what the hell he is saying most of the time, so all he’s left with are old action movie poses, an air of the overly chiselled slowly going to seed and utter confusion. Which isn’t enough when a movie demands actual acting from one to only be somewhat silly instead of completely ridiculous.

Everyone around Arnold knows what kind of film they are in, so Gabriel Byrne, Robin Tunney and even Kevin Pollak chew the scenery to various appropriate degrees, leaving our supposed star in the dust in a manner I found almost cruel.

House favourite director Peter Hyams doesn’t seem to be able to draw Schwarzenegger’s old limited yet effective charisma out either, and he’s clearly either not willing or not able to get the rest of the cast to make the poor guy look any better. Where’s Carl Weather’s when you need him? Because Hyams is Hyams, the action sequences are effective, efficient and absolutely competent, though they certainly aren’t the least bit inspired.

So as a viewer, all one is left with is the whole affair’s utter ridiculousness, the stupid but very funny dialogue, the confused mythology, Byrne’s absolutely shameless performance, and a lot of explosions.

Which certainly doesn’t make End of Days any kind of hidden gem, but a rather entertaining bit of nonsense despite of itself.

Three Films Make A Post: Winning is all in the execution.

The Killer’s Game (2024): J.J. Perry’s undemanding action comedy mostly recommends itself through a series of increasingly strange set pieces – blandness certainly isn’t a problem here – and through featuring a bunch of actors I always have time for: Dave Bautista, Ben Kingsley, Sofie Boutella, Terry Crews, Alex Kingston, Scott Adkins (with an outrageously silly Scottish accent) and more – all seemingly having fun doing their part with comically broad stereotypes, general silliness, and bloody murder.

Bautista and Boutella are actually able to sell their romance well enough you can’t help rooting for them – that’s more than most action comedies manage, if they even try.

Project Silence (2024): Keeping with bread and butter fun, Kim Tae-gon’s film about super soldier military dogs on the rampage on a bridge mixes elements of the disaster movie with those of horror and action film, stirs in some sneering at the political caste and a bit of conspiracy business and makes an enjoyable enough movie out of it.

This isn’t one of those Korean movies that first fulfil all genre expectations to then go off into the more interesting directions they have in mind, but one that’s simply aiming to be a straightforward piece of genre cinema. It does this with enough of a sense of pace and style to never overstay its welcome.

The Sadness (2021): For thirty minutes or so, I actually found myself believing the (a couple of years ago) hype Rob Jabazz’s extreme version of the infected style zombie movie had going for it. For a time, Jabazz’s slick direction, the very human performances by leads Berant Zhu and Regina Lei, and the gratuitous (at times sexual, generally grotesque) violence really promise something rather special, but the film quickly loses steam, going off on tangents of ultra-broad satire, and the kind of edge-lord business meant to shock that these days only manages to annoy me. Still looks great, mind you, and you could probably make a great fifty minute long short from the film’s best material.

Nosferatu (2024)

Ironically, Robert Eggers’s version of Nosferatu takes even more elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula than did Murnau’s delightful original example of spirited copyright infringement. In quite the move, it appears to do so via Coppola’s version of Dracula, with which it shares the erotic intensity/fixation, the emphasis on artificiality, the love for loopy accents, and the willingness to stick to an aesthetic even if this will cost you half of your potential audience, because it’s simply the right one to use for the material, damn it.

Despite this, Nosferatu 24 stands in direct dialogue with Murnau’s film. It may use very different aesthetic methods yet it achieves the same atmosphere of dreams turned haunting/haunted, while dragging to the surface certain things Murnau couldn’t quite articulate (or intertitle) concerning Ellen’s sexuality, or really, sexuality as a whole. There are yawning abysses of subtext here, and I look forward to a the next few decades of film academics coming up with ever weirder interpretations, particularly now that David Lynch has decamped.

The concept of virginity and clear-cut sinlessness saving anything or anyone is right out in this century, obviously. Instead, Eggers goes for a much more complex reading of guilt, and lust, and self-sacrifice that feels more dramatic as well as more true to the inner life of actual people. Zulawski’s Possession is an obvious touchstone here, and not only because Lily-Rose Depp’s approach to the role of Ellen Hutter seems possessed (mere inspiration isn’t enough for this film) by the spirit and hair of Isabelle Adjani from that film.

Despite its more truthful psychology, this, as the Zulawski movie – and certainly all versions of Dracula important to this Nosferatu -really isn’t interested in “normal” human psychology expressed via the often empty gestures of psychological realism at all. Every expression and emotion here is gigantic, Gothic in a sense that would make Byron and Poe nod approvingly (just don’t look at what they’re doing with their hands), creating the/a truth of life through being larger than life. As much as this is the most Gothic of horror movies, it is also a very folkloric reading of vampire mythology, not in the “folk horror” sense, but in how it treats the supernatural and its rules not as some kind of weird science, but as something truly inexplicable in its nature and its ways of being.

Visually, this is a feast of the Gothic and the macabre, full of shots that feel as if they came from half-remembered dreams that will now be very hard to ever forget again. At the same time, parts of the movie look and feel as if they were taking place in the same physical spaces as did Murnau’s original, or as physical as the also always metaphysical and occult spaces of this film can be. This never feels like Eggers wasting energy on ironic nods, quotations or movie nerd self indulgences, however, more like an evocation of the actual physical presence of Murnau’s original, if that makes any sense. Clearly, to me, this is the kind of film that invites a drift into the fanciful and the mystical, but then, this a film that left me breathless watching it for its sheer power. There are shots, whole scenes, in here my typically very forgetful self will never lose now until dementia takes me – something this shares with the original, fittingly.

Which is appropriate for a film that’s so suffused with various characters’ obsessions, all too often with Ellen as their centre, the fulcrum who eventually ends most of these obsessions by an act of self-sacrifice that’s not so much tragic than it is an act of the kind of self-actualization that also ends the self.

On a less high-falutin’ note, I find it pretty damn difficult to watch Willem Dafoe’s version of not-Van Helsing here, and not imagine him sticking a good-natured middle-finger in the face of Sir Anthony Hopkins, CBE.

It’s What’s Inside (2024)

A group of “friends” who hate each other with a passion and would hate-fuck each other at any given opportunity, because they are all hot young things and all dumb as rocks, come together to the pre-wedding party of two among them. The couple doesn’t even seem to like each other much, either.

For reasons, they have also invited Forbes (David Thompson), who never belonged to the peer group – not pretty enough and too nerdy, obviously – but is now a tech mogul and was involved in that middling big secret of the past nobody wants to talk about in oh so meaningful ways that’s always part of the plot in these movies.

In his role as tech biz whiz, Forbes has brought with him not just a grudge (on account of that dark secret) but also the newest gadget he sells as a party game: a device that lets a group of people transfer their minds into another’s body. Obviously, these nincompoops will reveal all their petty, boring desires and less than riveting secrets when body-swapping.

The zoomer identity crisis movie must be one of the least interesting horror sub-genres right now, like the just as bland home invasion movie was a decade or so ago. This version – as written and directed by Greg Jardin - is about the usual for the genre: underdrawn characters of about the depth of the classic jock/slut/nerd slasher triangle, but with more valley girl-isms, a judgmental streak a mile deep that seems to belong to someone who never even heard of the concept of punishments fitting the crime, and a directorial style that uses all the best toys of the day but can’t seem to do very much with them.

The set-up would be great for an exploration of various screwed-up psychologies, but there are no characters here, only a bland set of tropes about as convincing as these idiots are as a friend group. So there are only gestures at depth and interesting ideas here, but no actual depth in content or execution. Do films about superficial people’s lack of depth all have to be so damn superficial themselves? Or am I just getting old?

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Twilight aka Szürkület (1990): I found György Fehér’s adaptation of a much-adapted Dürrenmatt novel to be a rather frustrating experience. There are moments here, many moments even, where its Hungarian slow cinema style, the long shots of foggy, murky landscape accompanied by an ominous score create an incredible mood of dread, a feeling of wrongness highly appropriate to its plot about child murder and a retired policeman obsessing over the case.

But whenever characters start to speak, that very sinister spell was broken and I felt thrown into what I could only read as a parody of the same Hungarian slow cinema style, dialogue scenes that go on and on and on (and on and on) because characters pause for endless seconds after every second or third word in a sentence, as if the actors had painful trouble remembering every single word in every damn line they say. Call me a barbarian, but that ain’t art.

Seedpeople (1992): Probably not art either is this Full Moon Production film directed by the typically entertaining Peter Manoogian. Instead, it’s a seed-based version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, but with more gloopy rubber monsters. It’s rather good fun in its very undemanding low budget movie manner, and while the acting is nothing to write home about, and the script doesn’t really add much (and subtracts a lot of subtext) from its, ahem, inspiration, you can’t argue with gloopy rubber monsters, or at least I’m not going to.

Mostly because they use mind control, and/or turn you into a plant person.

Get Away (2024): Speaking of things that are undemanding but good fun, this horror comedy by Stefan Haars about a British family coming to a remote Swedish (shot in Finland) island to witness a curious play and stumble into a plot of folk horror and perversity isn’t terribly deep either. You’ll either notice its big plot twist early on, or get distracted by those wacky, creepy Swedes (portrayed by Finns), and you’ll enjoy the very, very bloody climax, or you won’t.

If this sounds as if I’m going for the classic “you’ll like this sort of thing if you like this sort of thing” move here, indeed I am, because there’s little else to say about the movie apart from that. Well, it’s always great to see Nick Frost.

Night is Short, Walk On Girl (2017)

Original title: Yoru wa Mijikashi Arukeyo Otome 夜は短し歩けよ乙女

The Girl with Black Hair (Kana Hanazawa) walks through a very long Kyoto night that somehow encompasses all seasons of the year in turn. She’s walking in an attempt to follow her fate, which to her seems to mean to have as many interesting experiences as the night can throw her way. As it turns out, there are going to be a lot of them.

Parallel to that, the Girl’s Senpai (Gen Hoshino) is trying very hard to be noticed by her, though in the most obtuse way possible. He’s attempting to “accidentally” bump into her as often as possible, until she must believe it’s fate, and clearly, they are meant to be. The alternative of simply talking to her is obviously much too bizarre to even contemplate.

The adventures of these two lead through drunken debauchery, debate clubs, the dance of the sophists, a night second hand book market, guerrilla student musical theatre performances and much more, as well as encounters with one of the most wonderful casts of eccentric weirdoes anime has to offer. Both our main characters may very well learn something about the world and themselves, the difference between egotism and love, as well as the problems with walking on without noticing what one leaves behind.

However – and fortunately - one of of the strengths of Masaaki Yuasa’s very non-traditional looking anime is how little this feels like a film about characters learning valuable lessons, but rather like one that treats life as an adventure and as a wonder. You can and will learn things along the way, but the way’s the thing.

This is a film that delights in the strange, surreal and the outré, throwing so many gags and ideas at the audience it should become overwhelming and rather random. Yet, the film never falters under the weight of its overboarding imagination – every random aside, every random idea is actually a part of a well-constructed whole, but one so deep as well as broad, you’ll hardly believe it.

There’s such as sense of joy and discovery running through the whole of Night is Short - a feeling of wonder, the air of the kind of night that indeed feels as if it could and should go on forever. Consequently, I found myself feeling happier and happier the longer this particular wonder went on.

Even better, the film carries such a lovely, compassionate heart below the loving strangeness, the funny asides, and the bizarre ideas, some genuine insight into kinds of loneliness and how it can end, joy is the only proper reaction to it.

Carry-On (2024)

Junior TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) and his partner Nora Parisi (Sofia Carson) have a rather exciting Christmas Eve. It’s not just that working on Christmas sucks, and even more so doing so at LAX, as they both are. Nora has also just told Ethan that she is pregnant, and his reaction is rather more complicated than one would probably hope for from a new father, though, to be fair to the guy, his reaction is based on self-doubt instead of the old deadbeat dad routine.

After some dithering, Ethan does decide to take this as an opportunity to get himself out of the motivational slump he has been in ever since he didn’t make it into cop school. Alas, his new-found go-getting attitude does put him in the crosshairs of a mysterious Traveler (Jason Bateman), who really, really needs Ethan’s help to get an object on an airplane. If not, a bullet just might collide with Nora’s brain.

Ethan’s doing his best to outwit his tormentor without endangering lives, but that turns into a very difficult proposition.

After going through a bit of a Rock-shaped slump, Jaume Collet-Serra is back making the kind of genre movies he’s shown himself to be oh so very good at. As always with the director, the initial set-up and characterization of Carry-On (not to be confused with the Carry On films for my imaginary readers from the British Isles) are taken somewhere out of cliché central. Once the plot gets rolling, however, that sort of thing becomes utterly irrelevant to the enjoyment gleaned from the film’s tightly constructed series of escalations, where every single move Ethan manages to make only appears to make the situation more dramatic and acute. There’s the proper and pleasant breathlessness to proceedings Collet-Serra does so well, and a kinetic energy that belies the fact this is taking place in a comparatively small number of places.

But then, one of the touches that give the film its extra kick is how well it uses the very quotidian locations inside of an airport for maximum excitement. Who knew baggage conveyor systems could be so exciting?

Also exciting – at least to me – is how well Carry-On uses the cliché characters and relations it establishes to further its dramatic impact. While Ethan is certainly the film’s protagonist, Nora and certain other characters are actually doing things as well, which of course makes it easier for a viewer not to see them as some kind of narrative furniture.

So yes, it’s Jaume Collet-Serra making a very Jaume Collet-Serra movie again, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Three Films Make A Post: Even if I kill you, I won't forget.

Werewolves (2024): This werewolf plague movie by Steven C. Miller is absolutely a SyFy original movie script of the style before these films discovered “irony” someone threw a bit of money at. As such, it is pretty dumb, doesn’t think about any of the actual implications – the mind-breaking horror and utter trauma - of its set-up that would make for a more interesting movie, and instead turns into a Frank Grillo and company versus werewolves shoot ‘em up with occasional cool gore effects.

Which I’d be fine with if Miller’s direction were a bit more inspired, or a bit more dynamic, or a bit grittier instead of being workmanlike and okay, and so full of lens flare some scenes genuinely look as if someone had farted light at the screen.

Flow aka Straume (2024): If it were nothing else, this is a brilliant example how much individuality and personality can fit into unashamedly digital animation – these things really don’t all need to look like Pixar. Of course, there’s quite a bit more to Gints Zilbalodis’s tale of a cat and her increasingly large group of animal friends roaming what looks a lot like the more pleasant part of a post-climate apocalypse world. There’s no dialogue here, but a lot of expressive animal noises (watching this at home with a cat would prove interesting, I believe), and animation so emotionally expressive, I certainly wasn’t missing dialogue or voice overs.

There’s a sense of wonder as well as one of melancholia running through the film, and where its plot is at its core simple and very generic, its artistic impression is singular and individual, leaving an immense emotional impact.

Heavier Trip aka Hevimpi reissu (2024): Where the first Heavy Trip was a delightful example of a comedy about misguided but loveable enthusiasts, its sequel by original directors and writers Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren is rather less successful.

Too much of the film consists of re-treads of rock music comedy standards that hit only about half of the time; everything here feels more generic than it did in the first film, less heartfelt and more professionally competent.

Which doesn’t turn this into a terrible film, just one I don’t see myself returning to very often, or at all.

Baby Assassins: Nice Days (2024)

Original title: Baby Walkure: Naisu Deizu

Everybody’s favourite teen assassins Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) go on a work trip in Miyazaki for this outing. It looks like a bit of a walk in the park for our favourite murderous friends, so the girls treat the escapade as a holiday with occasional murder for money.

Alas, they are not the only ones trying to assassinate this particular target. Mightily disturbed independent contract killer Fuyumura (Sosuke Ikematsu) is not only onto the same target as the two, he is very concerned with this kill being his body count anniversary. Consequently, he reacts very badly indeed to our heroines’ attempt at stealing “his” kill. The prospective victim, of course, uses the conflict between his would-be assassins as an opportunity to escape.

The assassin’s guild don’t tolerate this sort of thing, so they team Mahiro and Chisato with a very rude local co-worker and her not terribly bright bodybuilding partner to fix the situation, kill Fuyumura and then the target. The problem is that Fuyumura is so dangerous, even four assassins might not be enough to beat him.

In between murder and carnage, there are of course the expected scenes of bickering, female friendship of the kind that basically writes its Lesbian fanfic itself, and absurdity, all presented in the Japanese style.

Apparently, writer/director Yugo Sakamoto had a bit more of a budget to work with for the third Baby Assassins film, so there are more action sequences and a bit less comedy in this entry into the series.

Fortunately, this is a case of a careful escalation of scope of the action and of more conciseness in the comedy rather than an awkward attempt at making things more mainstream or cleaning them up too much. It’s simply more joy on both sides of the Baby Assassins equation.

It does help that the comedy still is often very funny indeed – if you like your humour deadpan and Japanese – and becomes part of the emotional language of friendship between our protagonists in the film, as it sometimes does in real life between friends.

The action for its part is even better choreographed than in the earlier movies. Izawa’s speed is still the film’s not so secret weapon there, but Takaishi has stepped up nicely as an action actress, and there’s a greater ambition and sense of scale in the choreography.

Pleasantly, even the fights Mahiro and Chisato aren’t involved in don’t feel like filler, but rather like generous additions to the whole affair’s variety.

So generosity seems to be the third Baby Assassins' watchword, which I generously accept in the spirit it is offered.

Tarry-Dan Tarry-Dan Scarey Old Spooky Man (1978)

I found this British TV movie via this excellent post.

A Cornish coastal town. Teen Jonah Grattan (Colin Mayes), working-class scruffy and the kind of dead-end rebellious that’ll guarantee he’ll end up in the same kind of nowhere his social class would nearly guarantee him however he acts, becomes obsessed with the town’s very own creepy tramp Tarry-Dan (Paul Curran).

There’s something truly strange going on with the man: children have been singing a mocking playground ditty about him for generations, as if he’d been a feature of the town’s life from the beginning, and Jonah has dreams about the man and a battle – presented as animated version of a stained-glass window – that somehow concerns himself as well as the strange old man. The teen becomes convinced that the old man is evil, and he is somehow destined to slay him; the truth is rather less nice.

Directed by John Reardon in a very typical late 70s BBC style of moody 16mm outside location shots and drab shot on video interior sets, this was written by Scottish TV playwright (that was an actual thing once upon a time) Peter McDougall, who otherwise appears to mostly have been involved in more socially realist endeavours.

As often happens when this kind of writer turns towards the supernatural, there’s an especially strong sense of the predominantly metaphorical around the non-realist bits – being cursed here turns out to be very much the same thing as being from a no-future working class background just with rather a lot more drama – but McDougall makes up for this sin by his ability to easily, and seemingly off-handedly, portray the drab world of Jonah and his small group of not-really friends, which in turn makes the elements of folk horror (or more properly myth horror, I suppose) more grounded.

It’s a lot like a Cornish version of a Bruce Springsteen song with added folklore, the old tale of a poor, not necessarily nice, young man finding himself trapped in a life he had no hand in choosing.

Which probably wasn’t – even expressed as folk horror – exactly new to anyone in 1978, and certainly isn’t today, but then, cycles repeating themselves is built into this narrative for a reason. In any case, Tarry-Dan tells this tale with tightness, insight and a sense of the local, and is much too good at it to be damned to an existence as a blurry VHS rip on YouTube.

But why not have a look yourself:

Three Films Make A Post: Where there is no more death we shall meet again.

Laurin (1989): This is that rare example of an interesting, moody German horror movie. Of course, director Robert Sigl shot in Hungary with predominantly Hungarian actors and crew, so few Germans were actually involved in the production.

This is an example of Gothically inflected, psychological horror concerning the business of a girl starting to grow up, a serial killer, and possibly ghosts, slow-moving yet emotionally and metaphorically intense. Sigl is rather good at imbuing small gestures with a depth of complicated meanings, which traditionally tends to be the sort of thing I like. This being a serious German movie, certain weaknesses show whenever there’s a need for traditional suspense (which isn’t something we do in Germany), but the mood of childhood nightmare is so thick, I won’t blame Sigl for not understanding how to stage a chase scene effectively.

Black Cab (2024): On the plot level, Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab isn’t a terribly original mix of urban legends and contemporary horror tropes, but as a mood piece, it has considerable strengths.

There’s a dreamlike unreality to the various night drives under duress here that make the involvement  of the outright supernatural utterly plausible via the mood provided. Another strong element is a pleasantly deranged performance by Nick Frost as a very sinister taxi driver that greatly strengthens the impact of some well-chosen moments of the kind of dread women suffer from terrible men on a daily basis.

If this sort of thing works for you, you might be as willing to forgive the film the weaknesses of its plotting as much as I did.

Suzhou River (2000): Finishing today’s trilogy of vibes (see how hip I am, fellow kids?), Lou Ye’s play on (and with) elements of noir and Vertigo is all ambiguous doublings of characters, moments and movement, hand-held camera that signals subjectivity instead of authenticity, mermaids and the curious beauty of an industrially wasted river.

Lou’s play with the meta-level of his narrative mostly manages to avoid getting annoying (there’s typically little worse than a filmmaker getting precious about this sort of thing to me) by the amount of ambiguity it shows: this isn’t meta to show how many movies the director has seen, nor to make a precise point, but because it is a movie about ghosts and phantoms, on the screen and off, and the ghost of old movies are ghosts as real as any other.

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far concerns Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ ill-fated attempt of winning the World War II early via an ill-conceived operation in the Netherlands. Ill-fated because – at least in the film’s telling – valuable intel was ignored, important equipment was unusable and anyone at all managed to survive the waves of background incompetence because the men on the ground where particularly tenacious – and probably so used to the War’s combination of idiocy and horror by now, they had learned to cope with it.

Attenborough clearly wasn’t a fan of General Montgomery, and thus the man becomes an off-screen incarnation of bad planning and wilful ignorance – however much one reads this as historically accurate, it certainly isn’t an invalid opinion. In general, Attenborough has little time for those upper echelons whose boots never touch a war zone and let others do the dying, and focusses on characters – all played by an astonishing amount of acting talent – who live or – more often - die by those decisions. The film also spends some time on the impact Operation Market Garden had on the civilian population of the Netherlands, and eventually ends on a handful of survivors in a haunting shot that shows little enthusiasm for any war, even a just one.

Tonally, this is a very strange film: about a third of it feels and sounds like a stodgy but extremely high budget British war movie with a terrible score and performances of a style that belong in this sort of thing (old chap), even when it’s, for example, the usually not at all stodgy Michael Caine hired for it; another third is a series of very 70s New Hollywood style vignettes featuring guys like Gould, Caan, Redford and Hackman (with a bad Polish accent) doing their very different thing in the kind of scenes you’d expect them to be in. The final third mostly concerns the particularly unpleasant adventures of one Lt. Col. Frost having to go through a kind of synthesis of Old Britain and New Hollywood, with a measured and careful performance by Anthony Hopkins, full of moments that are just as bitter and human as those in the American part of the film yet still feel very British in perspective and manner.

Curiously enough, this disparate mix works for the A Bridge Too Far, at least to a degree. Perhaps because it mirrors the very different approaches to warfare brought by the different Allied fighting forces, or perhaps because it simply speaks to my sense of perversity.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Or really, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, for even though Coppola at the time insisted on pretending this to be a close adaptation of the Stoker’s novel, this runs as roughshod over the original as is the norm for movie Draculas. This isn’t a bad thing, I believe – I, for one, don’t need a one to one adaptation of a Victorian novel, as much as I like that particular example of its form. This one is about as close to the original as Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce. Where Hooper chose to retell Dracula as a Quatermass movie, Coppola’s Dracula is the Dario Argento version of Dracula that Argento’s actual Dracula isn’t.

The main project of Coppola’s version appears to be a bit of projection: of the director’s own middle-aged horniness on the novel, overplaying the sexual subtext of a novel that does indeed have rather a lot of sexual subtext so intensely, one repeatedly wants to recommend cold showers to the filmmaker as much as to his characters. Some study of the dictionary entries for “sledgehammer” and “subtlety” might have been of use, as well. All of this has something of the air of watching a high budget Jess Franco movie without the crotch shot obsession but it with even more sexy (and “sexy”) writhing.

That’s not a bad thing in my book, mind you, but rather is an inherent part of what has turned this initially often maligned film into a bit of a classic: sex – eroticism tends to be subtler – is absolutely and always at the core of Dracula’s aesthetics, created out of thin air and celluloid, through the operatically overblown and utterly beautiful production design, the incredible number of bad accents by hot actors who should have known better (as well as Keanu Reeves), and Coppola’s insane/awesome decision to only use effects and filmmaking tricks reproducible on set and in camera (actual theatrical magic).

Thus, Coppola manages to create a mood of highly artificial, overheated and oversexed beauty that never lets up for a single shot – the film’s aesthetics are its actual point, its mood irreproducible and uncreatable by any other means. This may very well be the best possible example of the cinema of style as substance not made by an Italian.

Three Films Make A Post: This murder is set on repeat.

Time Cut (2024): You can’t convince me this thing wasn’t written by ChatGPT following a prompt like “write a script to a nostalgic time travel slasher”. That’s the only explanation to characters quite this generically lifeless, dialogue quite this empty and bland, and a plot this shamelessly cobbled together from other, generally better or at least more interesting films.

This is the sort of thing that gives Netflix originals a bad name, but there’s really nothing in the Netflix approach that explicitly forbids a filmmaker to make a good movie or at least one that shows an occasional sign of life – many manage, after all.

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (2024): I am a bit disappointed that this Christmas thriller/murder mystery pretending to be a Christmas slasher is by far my least favourite of the films directed by indefatigable British low budget indie horror director Charlie Steeds.

On the other hand, given the man’s output (this is film number three or four this year, depending on who is counting), they can’t all be winners. This one suffers from a somewhat limp script (by lead and frequent Steeds collaborator David Lenik) that clearly wants to be sharp and snarky and clever, but can’t quite hit the right notes – certainly not in the dialogue, which isn’t helped by a cast that often simply isn’t quite up to it.

Appointment with Death (1988): On the other hand, I still enjoyed this lesser Steeds quite a bit more than this limp Peter Ustinov Poirot directed by Michael Winner for Cannon films.

You’d think Winner would have sleazed up the material a bit – something I rather like to see done to the works of Christie (but then, I’ve never been a fan) – but instead, this is a mix of about forty percent tourist footage of Israel and sixty percent draggy, unrhythmic dialogue, snoozed through by an on paper fantastic cast. Even Peter Ustinov – a man typically not letting go of any scenery coming his way – seems bored and disengaged, and if you manage to make Ustinov look bored, you’re doing something very wrong indeed.

Gandahar (1987)

Paradisiacal Gandahar – apparently a state of mind nearly as much as it is a city state – is threatened by a mysterious, evil force that turns the people of the outlying parts of the place to stone via inexplicable rays. The sort-of-government of Gandahar send their best man for this sort of thing, the not completely enthusiastic Syl (voiced by Pierre-Marie Escourrou) to find out what is going on.

Syl soon stumbles into love with the beautiful and typically naked Airelle (Catherine Chevallier), and finds out about some of the darker secrets of his beloved home in form of definitely not beautiful but glorious mutants exiled from it. Rather quickly he understands the threat to be an army of robots and the giant brain – the product of a too successful Gandaharian experiment - that controls them. These are the less strange bits of our hero’s adventures, however.

This third and final of French filmmaker René Laloux’s gloriously weird pieces of full-length science fiction animation is an appropriately mind-blowing tale of weird science, weird time travel, weird romance, and the kind of (weird) visual imagination the French seem culturally predisposed to lavish on their science fiction be it in graphic novels, animation or film. French cinema in this mode is in the business of turning dreams, symbols and most probably drug visions into moving pictures of the most peculiar kind, and Laloux and his various collaborators do this in ways profoundly beautiful and strange - in all of his films.

In this, Gandahar is absolutely of a piece with the director’s other works here. As it is in a philosophical slant that seems fascinated with the concept of communities, or rather, focussed on imagining how collectivism and individualism can be reconciled without fascism rearing its ugly head. Gandahar certainly is anti-fascist, among other, much less clear things, as much as it is dream-like, strange, and peculiarly individual. There’s a mix of sharp intelligence and naivety to Laloux’s writing, and really, his world view, that counteracts the elements in it that could be too hippiesque for some tastes.

The film’s visual design is strange, and often utterly astonishing in its matter of fact treatment of strangeness and otherness that asks its audience to accept all the strange bits and pieces it comes up with before trying, and probably more than just occasionally failing, to understand them.

Of course, Gandahar’s visuals do have to put most of their weight on the design, for the actual animation of these designs in it is pretty terrible. The North Korean studio it was farmed out to did a terrible job with it, animating so lazily and inefficiently, you’ll imagine amateurs at work instead of the professional animators these people actually were.

The thing is, Laloux’s vision is so strong, this hardly matters for the film as a whole, or rather, it’s a mild annoyance in comparison to the rest of Gandahar’s strange, dreamlike beauty. To some viewers, it might even enhance it.