Three Films Make A Post: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Witches’ Well (2024): A successful horror writer (writer/director/producer/editor/cinematographer Amanda K. Morales) on a research trip to Edinburgh encounters a stalker faking supernatural phenomena, and perhaps something supernatural as well.

This short and to the point piece of POV horror by (nearly) one woman band Morales is a pretty neat piece of work that tells a simple but not too simple story efficiently, doesn’t overstay its welcome with its one hour runtime and even gets a couple of decent stabs at the nature of belief in.

An Unknown Encounter: A True Account of the San Pedro Haunting (1997): This “documentary” about an actual paranormal case as directed by Barry Conrad, one of the men who concocted (or experienced, if you’re the eternal optimist) it, is a glorious mix of bullshit, genuinely creepy nonsense, bad science, bad faith, the kind of “actual footage” that manages never to film anything supernatural occurring because (what a surprise) nobody ever points the camera in the right direction at the right time, and perfectly cheesy “recreations” of everything these guys didn’t manage to capture on film (which is basically everything supernatural that couldn’t be easily faked).

While I believe not a single word of it – and abhor the obsession with orbs, the last resort of the desperate paranormal bullshitter – the whole thing is great fun when taken as the fiction it is. Bonus points for being a wonderful time capsule of the unsexy 90s I remember from my teenage years and featuring some excellently overblown narration and presentation by Ferdy Mayne.

The Widow (2020): Clearly heavily inspired by elements of my beloved Blair Witch Project, though only intermittently using POV horror elements, this Russian production by Ivan Minin is a perfectly fine little horror movie that features some impressive Russian forests right out of the most gothic of folk tales, and all the greatest hits of lost in the woods stalked by a witch horror, shot moodily and paced well enough for a fun evening of people dying in various somewhat horrible ways. There are even some moments here that go a bit further – shots of people whose faces shaded by hoods may not exist, haystacks randomly stacked up in the forest for no reason beyond the folkloric (the best reason) – these are the sorts of things I watch random cheap horror for.

Ghost Killer (2024)

Passive and more than a little alienated college student Fumika Matsuoka (Akari Takaishi) goes through life with only the minimum required amount of enthusiasm. She likes to introduce herself with “just another college student”, which might be the purest expression of non-suicidal youthful ennui possible. Her life takes quite a turn when she picks up a bullet casing on her way home.

Suddenly, Fumika finds herself haunted by the ghost of murdered assassin Kudo (Masanori Mimoto), one of those near-mythical super-fighters doing that kind of job in the movies instead of the boring psychopaths of real life. When she invites him in by giving him her hand, Kudo can even possess Fumika and pilot her body. Kudo believes that he might be able to pass on if Fumika lends him her body to kill the people responsible for his death, which might be preferrable to having a middle-aged dead guy hanging around you for the rest of your life.

Fumika, a woman of a generally non-murderous disposition, isn’t into the idea of lending her body for bloody vengeance at first, but after Kudo helps her out with some toxic masculinity problems that turn out to be not completely unrelated to his former business, his vengeance might also save her life.

Kensuke Sonomura is the action and martial arts choreographer of the rather wonderful Baby Assassins movies, but his own directorial efforts until now suffered from scripts too bare-bones even for action movies. Getting Baby Assassins writer/director Yugo Sakamoto to do the scripting honours and teaming up straight action actor Mimoto with half of Baby Assassins’ leads in form of Takaishi finally brings out the best in the guy – turns out Sonomura’s love for intricately choreographed and highly technical martial arts fights also mixes wonderfully with Sakamoto’s sense of humour and humanity when Sonomura’s the man on the director’s chair. There’s a sense of human stakes here Sonomura’s earlier films lacked for me. As in the Baby Assassins films, Takaishi’s style of expressive acting is a wonderful foible for the more limited talents of a great action actor/actress in this regard, while she is by now able to show off some pretty great on-screen action chops as well, though the film does shift to Mimoto’s body for about half of the action.

Pleasantly, and frankly surprisingly, given how Japanese films often go, there are no attempts at sexualising the relationship of the main characters – in fact, the early victims of some righteous ass-whupping are the only creeps of that sort on screen here. In fact, one of the ways the film justifies the increasing violence is by showing us an action-movified version of the kind of crap women all too often have to go through in real life.

While the action is as fast (and I mean fast), furious and regular as one would hope for, and the jokes as well-timed as expected, the emotional beats are just as important to Ghost Killer, so these characters in their somewhat absurd world and situation feel believable  and real enough to care about. And even though Kudo is quite the bad-ass, this isn’t the case of a Steven Seagal bully “hero” – there are physical and emotional stakes here that turn this into more than a pure action display.

The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (1968)

Original title: 一代劍王

Swordsman Tsai Yieng-Chieh (Tien Peng) is obsessed with vengeance. He is hunting down the men who killed his family to acquire a valuable sword when he was still a child.

But his straightforward way to slaughtering a quartet of vile men is getting increasingly complicated and morally grey. Even though he is trying to keep´cool and removed from the world, connection is not to be escaped: he gets help, if he want to or not, by people with agendas of their own. There’s Flying Swallow (Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) who saves him from a deadly poison for reasons having something to do with not repeating the injustices of previous generations (and probably love, as well), and who will indeed turn out to be the daughter of one of the men Tsai is planning to take vengeance on. Then there’s Black Dragon (Chiang Nan), the greatest swordsman in the martial world (he’s got a little medal that says so), who helps out our protagonist because he just needs to have a duel with him when the whole vengeance business is over and done with.

Eventually, even one of those horrible killers Tsai has set out to kill right back will turn out to have repented, and be quite helpless now.

I really have underrated director Joseph Kuo. Some of his films may have been shoddy attempts to jump on the newest trends, but at least this early in his career, he was also able to make a proper masterpiece like this wuxia. At first, it appears to be a well-shot but straightforward vengeance tale, with a straightforward hero hunting down straightforward villains for straightforward reasons in a straightforward manner. But with every additional character Kuo introduces, things become less easy and less clear, vengeance turns out to not be just in every case, and the obsession of the martial world with very clear and strict rules of conduct not fit for the more complicated world of the human heart. These rules turn out not be an ethical way to lead one’s life, but a cage one traps oneself and others in.

Visually, Kuo couches this tale in often beautiful and poetic nature shots that position the human drama in a world that mirrors and comments on it, and at times dynamic, at times focussed swordfights. It’s all wonderfully of a piece, where what at first appear to be distractions will turn out to be important parts of the film’s philosophical argument – it’s rather astonishing coming from a typically distractible director like Kuo.

Three Films Make A Post: Torment is just the beginning.

The Butterfly House aka Pernikahan Arwah (2025): A couple’s wedding preparations are disturbed when the groom’s family curse starts making things difficult. For reasons of symmetry, this curse has quite a bit to do with weddings.

I found Paul Agusta’s piece of Indonesian horror to be a pleasant example of the form. It is neither as gruesome as some horror films from the country, nor as soap operatic, instead inhabiting a middle ground of the perfectly decent, with nice enough horror sequences, good enough acting and a decently flowing script.

1978 (2025): I expected a little more of a film set during the Argentinean military dictatorship where some torturers and their victims encounter something perhaps even worse than themselves. Unfortunately, Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s film makes little use of the metaphorical space screaming to be filled here – the torturers could be any random shit heels from any place and time in history and nothing at all would change about what happens to them and how they react to it, and the occult forces unleashed are run-of-mill Satanic business.

It’s not a terrible movie – some of the effects and monster designs are really neat for this budget bracket, and the directors know how to keep things flowing – but there’s nothing of real interest going on here.

The Big 4 (2022): As much as I usually like the films of Timo Tjahjanto, this action comedy about violent idiots killing other violent idiots for reasons of FAMILY is dire. That the humour is unfunny and ill-paced is bad enough, but somehow, the deeply action-affine director also can’t seem come up with any action set pieces of note. The problem isn’t just the humour, or the somewhat slighter amount of blood and gore than usual in Indonesian action. The film shows a lack of imagination and weight – or the proper kind of weightlessness – I find genuinely confusing coming from this particular filmmaker.

Mutant Ghost War Girl (2022)

In the confusing future of 2077. Superpowers acquired through gene editing are apparently now a thing, and international gangs/companies of evildoers use this technique to build themselves fighters they apparently mostly use for blood sports and only the occasional assassination.

An operative known as Ghost (Muqi Miya, apparently a Chinese-internet-famous yoga instructor) is sent to infiltrate the evil Medusa Company/Network to acquire super-secret data of some kind. This she does indeed acquire, but she is also mutated by the bad guys before her colleagues can rescue her. Now, after a rescue mission gone bad, she’s on the run from Medusa Corp through the mean streets of future South Korea.

Zhou Yang (Li Mingxuan), some kind of Korean intelligence agent is helping her out, though not via logical things like calling in any reinforcements. Instead he’s hiding her at his place for a bit, until they team up to acquire more of the mutating juice for…reasons.

Eventually, there’s a climactic fight with the leaders of the bad guys.

If all of this sounds vague and confusing, that’s firstly because Liu Binjie’s Chinese cyberpunk-y science fiction action movie comes with a set of subtitles that completely defies comprehension for at least half of the time, and defies sense even when the words used manage to combine into something you might confuse for a proper sentence. I’m not sure this is to the movie’s detriment, for this may very well be the sort of film made more enjoyable if you don’t understand what’s supposed to go on. At the very least, this incomprehensibility does add to Mutant Ghost War Girl’s mood of deep peculiarity.

Liu clearly loves western science fiction and superhero media so the film is as stuffed with quotes, borrowings and stolen parts from these films as much as Zhou Yang’s place is stuffed with fan tat (he even proudly displays a bust of Iron Man, Marvel’s trademark lawyers be damned). Liu does tend to like very peculiar parts of his western idols – you will encounter a character who is Jared Leto’s Xtreme Joker, and a scene borrowed nearly directly from the atrocious Ghost in the Shell abomination with Scarlett Johanssen, but again, this of course only adds to the film’s personality.

While all of this is pleasantly weird, MGWG also shows off some more than decent filmmaking chops: the production design is weird in a coherent and always fun to look at manner – mixing Western ideas of Cyberpunk Asia with actual Asian aesthetics – and the action scenes are fast, imaginative and silly in the best rule of cool manner.

Hell, even Muqi is a pretty good CGI action star for a yoga instructor.

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

College student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is plagued by recurring nightmares of a big, bloody and very digital catastrophe in a sky-view style restaurant. It’s getting so bad, her once famous academic prowess is suffering. Because these dreams star a young version of her grandmother, she decides to return home to dig for family secrets.

There she encounters an older generation that doesn’t want to talk about family secrets like the fact that Grandma is living in a weird cabin in the middle of nowhere thereby trying to stave off the death of her whole family line (or is plain crazy), and a younger one wont to not very interesting whining. Everyone’s also prone to the kind of melodrama without which the amateurish script would screech to a halt. One can’t blame death for trying to wipe them out in the series-standard gory accidents. One can blame him for taking his dear time with it.

Sometimes, you should really cut your losses – unless somebody with an actual sense of imagination gets their hands on the Final Destination franchise again, there are only ever drearily “funny” death pinball entries in the franchise’s future.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, the former of which already tried my patience with crap like Dead Rising: Watchtower and Leprechaun: Origins a decade ago, or one of the five people listed with scriptwriting and story duties try to turn the whole death business into a family affair, during which death doesn’t only try to wipe out the unplanned survivors of catastrophes but also their spawn, I mean, descendants. And yes, of course the film is not going to really hold to these new rules, because that would take actual effort by the filmmakers. Obviously, the only effort anyone’s taken here with anything are the death scenes. Ironically, these try a bit too hard to be clever and twisty in the way only the most stupid things do, so there’s only a small degree of joy to be found here. The film’s painfully digital look – not something I tend to complain about – robs most of the killing of any physical weight anyway, and the film’s insistence on digital blood really doesn’t help here at all.

The character work is dull and mechanical, with everyone being either bland or annoying, probably to fit better with the CGI.

The only moment of actual humanity here is the final appearance of Tony Todd in a scene not even Lipovsky and Stein can rob of it. Still, I would have wished the man could have gone out with a film worthy of him.

Three Films From 2025 I Didn’t Care For Still Make A Post

Ballerina (2025): I’m of two minds about the John Wick movies – no, really, I think half of them are pretty brilliant, the other half very much not – and alas, spin-off Ballerina, as directed by Len Wiseman belongs to the very much not  part of this equation. Featuring pointless cameos, not a single interesting (or just fun) idea and an interminable number of action sequences that are technically very accomplished but also bland and empty as these things get (one might suggest the term “soulless”), this is a joyless example of franchise “content” nobody involved seems to actually wanted to create. Why we are then supposed to want to watch it is anyone’s guess.

Drop (2025): In the case of Drop, the problem may be as much me as the film. It is not exactly director Christopher Landon’s fault that I find US dating culture as presented in movies not just difficult to relate to but aggressively boring. Nor is it his fault that I find twisty thrillers generally a bit of a hard sell.

What is Landon’s fault is that most of the twists here are painfully generic, the surprises perfectly unsurprising, and much of what is presented too absurd to work in the way it is presented. Stylistically, this often feels like a show reel for its director instead of a movie, something you can get away with when you are Brian DePalma; Landon, as much as I enjoyed some of his earlier movies, is not.

Murder at the Lighthouse (2025): This little Lifetime movie at least has an excuse for not being any good – it being a Lifetime movie comes with a decided lack of budget as well as a dearth of talent before the camera – although everybody including the crazy stalker cop ex-boyfriend looks absurdly well groomed.

Director Eric D. Howell clearly liked Misery, so much so he’s eventually getting up to turning this into a decidedly lesser version of the King adaptation (or the King novel). On the plus side, this lacks the painful camp and irony of too many Lifetime thrillers, so at least Howell was trying instead of just throwing his hands up going “it’s all ironic, you see”.

Noboru Ando’s Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex (1976)

Following an attack on a business man he ordered, gang leader – historically he wasn’t a “proper” yakuza - Noboru Ando (Noboru Ando) has to go on the run. A process that consists of a lot of drinking, watching TV, and spending time at all of his many girlfriends’ places. Most of these women love Ando very much indeed, so he has to cope not just with proving his potency again and again, but also fending off various attempts from the various ladies to follow him on the lam.

As you may or may not know, before he became an actor, Noboru Ando was an actual criminal, clearly a darling of the Japanese yellow press, and just as clearly pretty damn awesome at building his own public mythology, like a John Ford western character gone mad. This isn’t even the first movie to dramatize the misadventure that earned Ando the prison sentence which in turn earned him his acting career, but it certainly is the first and only one based on the decision to turn the whole affair into a mix of standard yakuza tropes, some broad satire, and pinku style sex.

Directed by softcore auteur Noboru Tanaka, this puts a heavy emphasis on typically highly unerotic – and often very funny - sex scenes during which Ando does his very best not to move a single facial muscle. Does he enjoy the act as much as his writhing, moaning, love-sick partners do? He certainly ain’t telling. Also appearing are a “sexy”, hot dog based dance (not committed by Ando, because not even yakuzasploitation like this would be that cruel), tuberculosis jokes (I got nothing), and a climactic fight during which a very young looking Renji Ishibashi holds off the police while Ando attempts to finish a bit of spontaneous sex with a random partner. Which he doesn’t manage, so we finish on an indelible scene of Ando jerking off in a police car while cops look on, displeased. Again, I’ve got nothing.

If you’re of a certain mindset, this will make Chronicle sound like a slam-dunk of the weird and the wonderful – and I haven’t even mentioned the scene of Ando and Ishibashi walking a beach philosophising about being bacteria in the national host body. Indeed, when the movie is on point – particularly during its final twenty minutes or so – it is quite the experience of smut, absurdity and weird energy. But it is also slow, lacking in any dramatic progression or tension, and incredibly repetitive – watching Ando not moving a facial muscle during sex one time is great, watching this ten times causes it to lose a considerable amount of its lustre, so the whole thing is more than just a bit of a slog.

Still, the idea of the film alone is worth some mind space and time, and the moments when Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex is as bizarre as it promises to be make up for all that unsexy sex and scenes of watching characters watch TV, at least to a degree.

Three Films Make A Post: Insert Clever Title Here

Mojin: The Lost Legend aka 鬼吹燈之尋龍訣 (2015): A trio of traditional-official tomb raiders return from dubious retirement in America to China to rob a particularly mysterious tomb. This high on very digital looking effects adventure directed by Wuershan (and based on one part of a long and complicated sounding series of novels) is a whole lot of fun if you like this kind of blockbuster at all.

It’s like a Chinese Indiana Jones with more supernatural action, some surprisingly snarky remarks towards the Cultural Revolution (though it isn’t called by name), and quite a bit of the sense of anything goes that made Hong Kong cinema so enticing but not generally translated to mainland China cinema like this. This really has everything and the kitchen sink in it: romance, zombies, Shu Qi, Shu Qi cursing a lot, complicated mechanical traps, a weird cult, bizarre humour, Shu Qi, and more good and bad ideas than most film trilogies.

Mojin: The Worm Valley aka 雲南蟲谷 (2018): And three years later this happened: none of the actors nor the director of the original return, and with them also leaves the spirit of fun of the first film, as well as parts of the budget. There’s something rote and mechanical about the whole affair – this is pretty much the empty and lifeless spectacle too many people pretend all blockbuster style cinema is, lacking in fun, joy, and the ability to actually deliver the promised rollercoaster ride as a rollercoaster ride.

Deadful Melody aka 六指琴魔 (1994): Welcome to 90s wuxia land. Various martial world weirdoes attempt to steal a magical lute that also happens to be the most powerful weapon this side of your favourite magical sword, while a mysterious, sometimes cross-dressing woman played of course by Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia takes bloody vengeance for the death of her family. Also featured are a not terribly young Yuen Biao as the young hero and Carina Lau Ka-Ling as his love interest and comic relief.

The rest of the film mostly consists of a breathless series of shots of people flying, making shit explode with their Qi, a lot of twirling and a good amount of flying body parts, blue fog, blue light, blue everything, all presented by director Ng Min-Kan with the manic energy of Joel Silver on a real coke binge. This is absolutely awe-inspiring if you enjoy this wuxia revival as much as I do, and aren’t afraid of headaches.