Landlocked (2021)

Following the death of his father (Jeffrey Owens), Paul (Paul Owens) returns to the old family home. His father had sent him a video message recorded on actual videotape in which he explained that Paul and his brother Mason (Mason Owens) had exactly a year after his death to take from there what they wanted or needed – afterwards, the building would be pulled down, as already arranged by him.

In the house, Paul finds a strange video camera that apparently has the ability to show and record videos of the past when you look through its viewfinder. Between bouts of grieving, reconnecting with Mason, and soaking up the house’s negative atmosphere, Paul re-experiences parts of his own past with his father, as well as some of the moments he has been absent for. However, the longer he uses the device, the more other things seem to drift into the backgrounds and unexplored spaces of the past, things that seem if not actively inimical to Paul, at least unwise and horrifying to engage with.

This piece of American liminal art house horror (really the sort of thing the French made the fantastique label for) by Paul Owens (and family) about grief and an increasingly weirdened past was partially constructed from actual family videos of the Owens family. It is quite the experience: slow, somewhat meandering in its middle part even with a short running time of 75 minutes, it is also drenched in an atmosphere of genuine strangeness, like very abstract weird fiction turned movie. The film starts from a point of naturalistically exploring grief yet becomes increasingly strange and even horrifying without ever leaving the realm of believable human emotion. In his treatment of the material, and despite the slow pace, Owens shows a great amount of control while also being highly imaginative inside of the borders he has set himself.

At first an effective exploration of grief as absence, the turn towards supernatural horror suggests a slight influence of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, once the things Paul (the director/writer also being the lead actor here) sees and increasingly experiences become strange and threatening and not just heart-breaking, and might begin noticing him noticing them.

There’s an authentically haunting quality to the film, a sense of reality that makes the eventual turn towards the more traditionally supernatural – though not traditionally scary movie-like – particularly effective in a way M.R. James might have approved of, though never done quite this way, as well.

Pestilence Break

Normal service will hopefully resume around next Sunday.

Loop Track (2023)

Socially extremely awkward Ian (Tom Sainsbury) is going on a walk through the forests of New Zealand to get away from all those pesky people, and perhaps some concrete aspect of his life he believes he has screwed up particularly badly.

Instead of peace and quiet, he soon finds himself socially pressured into walking together with three randos he meets and that won’t leave a guy completely unable to actually tell them he wants to be alone go on his way alone. Increasingly, Ian believes there’s something bad going on in this beautiful forest. Someone or something seems to be following them, though his attempts at convincing the others of it only make them look increasingly askew at the guy who didn’t want to be involved with them from the start.

Tom Sainsbury’s Loop Track attempts to fuse the comedy of social anxiety and people being people, the expectedly pretty landscape of New Zealand (filmed low-key) with a bit of the monster movie tradition. While certainly a well-made film, it never comes quite together for me – there’s such a heavy emphasis on the social anxiety there’s actually very little room for the monster movie parts here, and – even as a sufferer of some of Ian’s symptoms – I never found myself quite connecting to him, and certainly not the other characters and their single defining character traits.

For a film that appears to be this interested in the characters’ psychology, I found everyone rather lacking in complexity, with every character’s first scene already defining everything about them.

The stalking is played too low-key, and despite a fantastic monster reveal, I’m really not sure why this needed the horror elements at all – it’s not as if it puts them into dialogue with Ian’s internal life.

Having said that, I didn’t exactly mind the film – I just don’t think it does anything much with its potential.

Three Conjuring Spin-offs Make A Post

The Nun (2018): I’ve never been much of a fan of the The Conjuring movies. Their combination of James Wan as usually wasting his considerable talents on bland scripts and these movies’ idolization of two genuinely horrible people simply rub me the wrong. Plus, I often have problems with straightforward Christian horror – I don’t even connect to The Exorcist beyond seeing its obvious technical achievements.

So colour me surprised I actually enjoyed two out of three of today’s Conjuring spin-offs. The Nun I’d even call a genuinely great horror movie. But then, there’s very little of the Warrens in here. Instead, director Corin Hardy basically turns out a loving Blumhouse mainstream horror homage to Italian horror – gothic and not – with a smidgen of Hammer gothic mixed in. This sort of thing is catnip to me, particularly when a movie fills the time between quoting Fulci and Bava and the ridiculous and very fun big budget (at least in comparison to its idols) special effects climax (re-)creating such a lovely mood of dread, decay, and the irrational as this one does.

Taissa Farmiga also makes a great horror heroine, filling the film’s more awkward moments – which is to say, everything to do with character bits – with life and personality.

The Nun II (2023): She’s also the only good thing about Michael Chaves’s sequel. Chaves is a curious case to be the guy to have taken over the series from Wan as a director, seeing as he has now repeatedly proven he can’t structure or centre a narrative to save his life, and can never sell his horror set pieces as anything but set pieces. Admittedly, he isn’t helped by a script that doesn’t understand how to tell the story of an investigation, not to speak of telling it engagingly.

Annabelle Comes Home (2019): This third Annabelle movie – and the only one worth mentioning – as directed by Gary Daubermann (who also co-wrote this and the first Nun) does contain rather too much of the Warrens, but at least, this is a film where the possessed doll becomes the ringleader of all the monsters trapped in the Warren’s badly secured creep dungeon (how badly? A fucking teenager gets in) to terrorize the Warrens’ daughter and assorted teens (worth mentioning are Madison Iseman and Katie Sarife). There’s a grumpy wedding dress, Black Shuck (apparently a hellhound), and much delightful running around and screaming through all of the tropes of seriously fun but mostly (monster) kid friendly horror. It’s probably not exactly art, but it is certainly a very good time.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Original title: Baron Prásil

Landing on the moon, an astronaut (Rudolf Jelínek) is greeted by the men who came there before him: the protagonists of Verne’s “De la Terre à la Lune”, Cyrano de Bergerac, and last but not least the great Baron Münchhausen (Milos Kopecký) - as he’s called here in Germany. It’s Baron Prásil in Czechia. Because they don’t need silly science stuff like space suits, the gentlemen assume our astronaut who very much does need one, to be a proper moon man.

Münchhausen decides to take the young man under his wing and show him the wonders and adventures of Earth, which indeed he does. Once there, Münchhausen also insists on getting in a love triangle between the men and Venetian princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová), though none of the young people is actually that into him.

All of this really doesn’t describe the beauty, wonder and utterly unbridled imagination of Karel Zeman’s version of the Münchhausen material – here mostly based on Bürger and particularly Doré’s illustrations to Bürger’s narrative. Technically, this is a mixture of live action and all kinds of animation you could even imagine in 1962, at once naïve, deeply aesthetically constructed, real and unreal thanks to the many ways Zeman mixes special effects techniques and real people. The film is ever shot like a moving paean to the human imagination and filled to the brim with a sense of wonder that should make every viewer a child again for at least an evening.

The characters are of course, not surprisingly given their placement in a series of beautiful and bizarre tall tales, archetypes without normal psychological depths, but from time to time, whenever he finds space between a dozen sight gags and coming up with sights no human being has beheld before on a movie screen, Zeman does hint rather heavily that archetypes are archetypes because they have quite a bit to say about the unchanging parts of the human psyche. Just because young lovers aren’t original or deep does not mean a pure and naïve idea of love isn’t real or important.

But really, if there ever was a movie that exists just to be experienced instead of interpreted or talked to death film school style, it is this one.

Super Happy Forever (2024)

Sano (Hiroki Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) visit a coastal resort motel in the last days of its existence. Sano is clearly beside himself, walking around in something of a fugue, looking for a red ballcap lost there five years ago. Soon enough, we learn he has good reason for his state of mind, for he has lost his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) just a couple of weeks ago. The hotel and the town are where they first met five years ago, and Sano appears to still half be looking for Nagi, or signs of her passing.

After forty or so minutes, the film turns back to the past of five years ago. Now, shown from Nagi’s perspective, we see how the couple first met and learn to understand some of the echoes of their encounter left five years later during Sano’s return.

Beginning slowly and not terribly interested in explaining itself at first, Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever turns out to be a film about loss, love, the physical presence of the past in the now, and the small, hidden connections between people and places. It is also a love story told through absences: at first, we can only perceive the shape of Nagi’s absence in the now, Sano’s moments of short memories and the things about their relationship his behaviour hints at. But then, the flashback, while filling in some of these holes also doesn’t fill in any of the actual relationship between Sano and Nagi (which apparently wasn’t all that happy) – we’re only ever witness to its beginning and its aftermath, and none of the joy or pain in between.

There’s nothing sentimental about the film’s approach to this, or of the patness of esoteric bullshit Miyata has fled into, but nor is there any cynicism here. Instead, this is a film of genuine sadness, genuine love and a genuine longing for human presence and connectedness – coming together into a form that feels quite special, in a way that’s self-contained and lacks showiness, and never indulges in the painful overintellectualization arthouse cinema can fall into.

Three Films Make A Post: Dare to play.

Night of the Reaper (2025): For that part of its running time when it is a period-set throwback slasher with a procedural element that reminds more of a giallo than a cop movie, Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper is an exemplary and quite entertaining low budget movie that looks and feels the part it wants to play very well indeed. For its final third, it does turn out to be a very 2020s kind of film, alas, and we end up in the realm of “clever” plot twists that not only strain belief in the context of what the audience has seen before (or not been allowed to see on a pretty obnoxious level) but also replace what should be an exciting climax with fifteen minutes of the movie explaining itself to us.

It’s a shame too, for before that, this is a really fun little movie.

Witchboard (2024): This remake (of a very free kind) of Witchboard by veteran director Chuck Russell isn’t so much a throwback to the more freewheeling world of 80s/90s horror but simply a film made by a director who lived the time and apparently has no interest in changing his way of filmmaking. This is messily plotted and loves to go off on wild tangents, but what it loses in tightness thereby, it wins in the joys of wild abandon. This is a movie that’s probably going to go there, or find something that’s even more there to go to. Add an openness to add some sleaze/sexiness (often completely absent from horror these days, because people apparently don’t fuck anymore) to the gratuitous – and often pretty awesome – violence, and you have quite the concoction of the best clichés, tropes and bad yet awesome ideas a viewer could hope for. Well, if you can ignore the digital blood splatter, which never works.

Blood Ritual aka 血裸祭 (1989): Speaking of wild abandon, this Hongkong horror/action/comedy/kitchen sink CATIII wonder directed by Lee Yuen-Ching wavers so wildly between non-supernatural cult horror, sleazy softcore sex, brutal action choreographed by Tsui Siu-Ming, broad romantic comedy and info dumps about “evil religions” at least this viewer got quite dizzy. Which probably is the right state of mind to appreciate a film that seems to be a perfect expression of the kind of maximalism for a minimal budget HK cinema at this point in time was particularly fantastic at.

Ghost-Cat of Arima Palace (1953)

Original title: 怪猫有馬御殿

Being a mere greengrocer’s daughter, young and beautiful Otaki has few friends in the inner chambers of the titular Arami Palace. Add to this classism their Lord’s main concubine’s fear of being replaced by a younger model, and Otaki’s life is a sheer nightmare.

The other women hound her to her death with measures of increasing cruelty (since they start with pressing her into giving away her pet cat, you can imagine how bad it gets). Before you can say “bakeneko”, Otaki’s little cat – returned for the occasion like a proper pal - drinks her dying blood. The resulting cat demon goes on a bit of a rampage of vengeance, as is tradition.

At least here in the West, this short – 49 minutes – piece of Daiei bakeneko horror directed by Ryohei Arai is more than a little obscure, as is much of the horror output of Japanese studios of this decade beyond some core texts, so I’m not really able to put the film into the context of other movies from the second row of the genre.

What I can say is that this is a lovely little thing. Otaki’s suffering is properly upsetting, the human villain’s are deeply hissable in their nasty, grabbing ways, and the film goes out of its way to dispose of the Otaki cat after she has gotten her full and proper vengeance (something not all ghost cat movies I’ve seen do).

Once the film starts in on the supernatural shenanigans, they are rather wonderful – there’s a great scene during which the ghost cat uses her powers to puppet her victims into supernatural acrobatics like a poltergeist on steroids, and there’s some impressive and creative business with flying heads of the sort that’s bound to make the right viewer – that’s me – gleefully happy.

There are other, perhaps slightly more high-brow, aspects here as well: apart from the Lord, the film is very female-centric, so much so, we get to see the female part of the inner chambers is guarded by armed women, and we do even see them fighting against our cat hero/villain with what look like naginata to me. Earlier, the film also puts emphasis on being taught to fight as part of the proper kind of education the lower class Otaki lacks. This isn’t something you see in many jidai-geki – at least not that I’ve seen.

I also found the emphasis on class hatred surprisingly clear and direct for a film of its time and place.

All of which adds up to lovely hidden gem of a film, the sort of thing I’d hope some boutique Blu-ray level can pick up, package with two or three other films of its style, and make me very happy indeed.

Three Films Make A Post: He's every parents' worst nightmare.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025): For once, this is an entry in the typically boring PublicDomainsploitation canon I’d actually watch a second time instead of rueing the moment I pressed play. It’s still a movie that turns a public domain children’s story into a mid 2020s slasher, but it does so with a degree of competence, with decent acting, an actual script and direction – responsible here is British low budget regular Scott Chambers – that does understand the rules of straightforward horror films.

Even the characterisation is not without interest this time around, and the film’s interpretation of Peter Pan as a delusional drug user feels less tacky in practice than it sounds. The whole thing is an actually well-made low budget slasher, daring to follow through on some of its ideas.

Hotspring Sharkattack aka Hot Spring Shark Attack (2024): I went into Morihito Inoues sharksploitation film expecting a lot of sleaze and a bit of gore. What I actually got was very little sleaze but an absurdist and ambitious sharksploitation epic that lovingly mocks everything from urban development to amnesiac protagonists. The film’s reason for being is to turn everything shark movie up to eleven, make Sharknado look like a sensible little tale, and throw all kinds of genre elements and clichés on-screen with wild abandon, yet also a curious sense of control. This film knows where it is going: the dream underworld of bad CGI and hand puppet shark bites Joseph Campbell wrote about in his little-read sequel “The Hero’s Journey II: Sharks, so many sharks”.

Cult aka Sekte (2019): But let’s end on a comparative downer note with another amnesiac protagonist finding herself tucked away in an isolated house full of weirdoes who will turn out to be a Satanic cult. Director William Chandra manages a couple of atmospheric scenes here – I was particularly impressed by the one in which protagonist Lia (Asmara Abigail) finds the cult’s corpse depository – but for much of the running time, the film’s in the business of presenting as deeply mysterious a mystery its own damn title already reveals. So yes and alas, this is the kind of movie that climaxes on an endless series of flashback-filled “reveals” that bring every bit of the momentum the film might have developed before to a screeching halt with an astonishing amount of stupid ideas.

Jack-O (1995)

It’s Halloween in one of those typical American small towns we all know from direct to video productions shot in Florida. After a graveyard disturbance, a gentleman with a large light up pumpkin for a head and wielding a scythe is wandering around very slowly indeed and killing everyone he gets his hands on. Apparently, his appearance is part of a curse a warlock (some archival footage of poor John Carradine) cast on the descendants of the Kelly family, whom he held responsible for being burnt at the stake. Mind you, until the final act, Mr Pumpkinhead shows no preference for killing Kellys.

Nonetheless, we do get to spend a lot of time with the family, experience their haunted garage spook show, follow discussions of the joys of Halloween, thrill to their babysitter troubles, and so, and so forth. Eventually, Mr Pumpkinhead does shamble along to threaten the family’s youngest.

If you’re looking for cosy, nostalgic horror for the sad post-Halloween time Steve Latshaw’s low budget masterpiece of tacky American Halloween mood has your back. It’s a film haunted by the ghosts of Halloweens past. Pumpkinheads, a Linnea Quigley shower scene, a tasteful decapitation, horror hosts (in this case an archival Cameron Mitchell), home-made horror houses and horror-loving families are there and accounted for, as are the ghost of John Carradine, a knock-off synth score, fog, bad acting of the lovely kind, and the shambling and dreamy rhythms of childhood memories of movies that’ll turn out not all that frightening once you’ve grown up.

It’s a vibe, as they apparently say, a movie that feels as if the script to a cheap kid’s horror Halloween film had been spiced up with a bit of nudity and blood – the actual stuff of a horror movie childhood dreams. How could I not love Jack-O?

R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead (2025)

Following the in today’s grief-struck horror mood obligatory death of the father of the family, Cassie (Kendra Anderson) and her sons, seventeen-year old Finn (Seth Isaac Johnson) and thirteen-year old Sam (Bean Reid) move to a small farming community in what I can’t help but call the sticks.

Sam is particularly unhappy, not just because he’s a kid in puberty who has lost his father and is moving town, but also because he feels more than just a little excluded from the closer, easier, relationship between Cassie and Finn. As kids do, he acts out. Unfortunately, he decides to steal the annual “Prized Pumpkin” (actually an ugly thing nobody would want to eat, or even look at) of the farmer the locals somehow see as responsible for the town’s agricultural luck turning to the better some years ago. Finn, who is a perfectly good brother, decides to help Sam avoid some nastiness with the farmer by bringing the pumpkin back for him the night of the deed.

Alas, Finn has a rather nasty supernatural encounter on the farm and doesn’t return home. Worse still, none of the grown-ups, not even Cassie, can remember Finn ever existed at all, and can’t even perceive any proof of his existence. As the Sheriff’s daughter Becka (Adeline Lo), who had already befriended Sam and warned him against having anything to do with the farm, explains, this sort of thing happens somewhat regularly in town – kids disappear, people who hit the age of eighteen or are above it forget them, crops grow. She’s willing to help Sam in his attempt to get his brother back, whatever has happened to him. Also involved will be the local hermit Rusty (Matty Finochio), a nasty protective scarecrow thing with very bad breath, and one of those grimoires of the facebook type.

Tubi Originals tend to be less than great movies, often lacking in verve and cleverness as much as in budget. Jem Garrard’s Pumpkinhead – based on the favourite kids and teen horror writer of a lot of North Americans of a certain age – is only a bit lacking in the last one, but never lets this lack of funds stop it from doing basically everything right for the kind of kids horror film old-ass people like me can enjoy as well.

The characters are simply but effectively drawn, the young actors are doing pretty well – Lo could certainly have an actual career in front of her – and the script finds the fine balance between goofy humour, proper horror, and knowing winks to tropes and genre conventions. “You don’t come to the forest hermit for a straight answer” is pretty great, to take the most obvious example for the last one.

The film isn’t afraid to be a bit grotesque when it needs to be – the final pumpkin head form is not something I’d have expected in a contemporary kids’ movie made for the US market, even if it is actually made in Canada like this one, and the scarecrow thing is genuinely creepy, as well as enthusiastically played.

Pumpkinhead is worthwhile in other regards as well. Character motivations and their emotional background make sense (at least for the kind of world this takes place in), and the film clearly knows what it is doing when it is talking about love and friendship by example instead of moral. It’s not terribly deep, but it’s genuine and believable in context. Because it does emotions this well, it also manages to sneak in an ending that actually becomes darker the more you look at it in context of what the characters fear and desire here, not the usual horror movie bullshit ending but a genuine price to be paid.

Visually, this is nothing fancy, but Garrard knows how to create mood and tension, and works around the budgetary constraints of the production really well. There’s nothing here that seems truncated, missing, or undeveloped, which leaves R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead as one of my surprise highlights of this Halloween season.