Pitch Black (2000)

In some kind of interstellar space-faring science fiction future we’ll learn rather more about than we ever may have wanted in the sequels.

After being disastrously hit by a meteor shower, a transport ship crashes on an uninhabitable desert planet with three suns. Some of the passengers have survived, but of the crew, there’s only Fry (Radha Mitchell) left, the young docking pilot who would have blown the passenger part with the cryo containers off the ship to save herself, though nobody knows that juicy little detail.

There are some remnants of an old mining colony on the planet, but there’s little there to secure anyone’s survival, so the small group of survivors will have to band together quickly.

Worse still, one of the passengers was a prisoner – the dangerous, amoral prick and killer Riddick (Vin Diesel). And as it goes with these kind of people in the movies, he didn’t just survive the crash but also used the opportunity to escape and is now haunting the little group (among them characters played by Cole Hauser, Keith David and Claudia Black) from the side-lines.

Riddick still isn’t the worst bit of news the film has to offer its characters: there are also monsters on the planet, monsters who only come out at night and in the dark, or, say, during the solar eclipse that’s going to hit the planet very soon.

Over the years, David Twohy’s Pitch Black has grown on me, and by now, I’m not even sure anymore what flaws exactly put me off it as completely as they once did. As it stands now, this is the epitome of clever low budget science fiction filmmaking with horror elements, the kind of genre fare whose ambitions show themselves through craftsmanship rather than huge gestures. It’s a Howard Hawks kind of film, concerning a group of disparate yet basically competent people having to come together against a shared threat.

The characters are of various stock types, but brought to life by a script that gives everyone either an interesting or uncommon little character moment or an interesting opinion in one of the more life-philosophical interactions to make them more than stock. One can never overvalue a cast of actors who know and appreciate these kinds of opportunities. This also has the neat little side effect that character growth actually feels earned and not just Twohy following scriptwriting rules.

In its pacing, this is absolutely on point; in its style, it uses some of the visual markers of early 2000 filmmaking for good: the monochrome colour schemes beloved of the time make sense given the planet this takes place on, and even add to the strangeness and otherworldliness of what was in reality the Australian desert.

The digital effects haven’t aged all that gracefully, but I can’t say I really cared about that on more than an abstract level – this is filmmaking that makes the best of what it has, and thus deserves some patience with unavoidable weaknesses.

Pitch Black certainly offers more than enough to make up for the little problems it has.

Case of Umon: One-Eyed Wolf (1959)

Five men are found hanging from a particularly creepily picturesque tree. While an older comic relief colleague – who comes with his own comic relief sidekick – are convinced this was some kind of group suicide of unidentified merchants, young magistrate Umon (Ryutaro Otomo) begs to differ. These men clearly were experienced swordsmen and therefore samurai – and they were murdered.

Together with his comic relief sidekick (Shunji Sakai, as if you didn’t know), and the various friends he has in low places, Umon follows the case to (a surprise if you’ve never seen a jidaigeki detective movie before) a conspiracy to not just kill but blow up the shogun himself.

Even though it suffers from a surplus of comic relief characters – at the point where comic relief characters have their own comic relief characters, things have gone too far – this first film in the Umon series is a particularly fine entry into the realm of somewhat pulpy (to enable swordfights and grand villainous plans) jidaigeki detective tales. I have developed a great fondness for the genre, particularly the various series Toei produced before things became bloodier and rather more cynical in the jidaigeki realm, and nobody’d try to protect the ruling dictator anymore.

Director Tadashi Sawashima must have been in a particularly creative mood when this was made, for this is atypically dynamically filmed for a late 50s jidaigeki of this type. We start with the wonderfully creepy and atmospheric discovery of the five corpses – some shots here do rather look like the kind of painting I’d put on my walls if I had any room for them –, find the director experiment with nearly expressionist framing and rather exciting camera movement during the big fight scenes, and also see him experiment with some excellently melodramatic suspense, like Hitchcock on speed, when Umon has to fight the climactic fight while also making sure the shogun can make his temple visit not just unexploded but on time. It ain’t easy working for the Man.

One-Eyed Wolf is also rather exciting, lovely to look at and genuinely suspenseful if you’re able to roll with the importance of the shogun not being late, and keeping unexploded.

Three Films Make A Post: A Knifepoint Horror Story

Lockbox (2026): I am of course happy to see that Soren Narnia appears to reap some of the fruits of having made one of the best horror/weird fiction podcasts by now reaping the reward of that sweet, low budget adaptation money from it.

I am definitely much less happy that the first Knifepoint Horror movie coming out of that is this limp thing directed by Daniel Stamm that wastes a fantastic cast (Carla Gugino, Lou Taylor Pucci and Katherine Isabelle are certainly great for the material) on a script by one Justin Yoffe that turns what could be a great psychological horror film, or a great film about trauma, or a really weird exorcism movie into a series of shitty jump scares and been there done that set pieces, until everything crashes even further down in an orgy of exposition and an aggressively stupid climax.

Fight Against Evil 3 (2026): The first two entries into these Chinese copaganda martial arts streaming movies were deadly earnest; this third one finds our hero cop played by Xie Miao as the straight man to a number of weird characters, something the actor turns out to be nearly as convincing at as he is at doing martial arts.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a pleasant amount of excellently choreographed scenes of men grabbing each other very tightly (because the modern martial artist doesn’t really punch or kick anymore) and a plot about children abducted into slavery – director Yang Bingjia simply humanizes the mood around the action movie business with quite a few surprisingly funny jokes.

I can also report that this is a film that uses colours, perhaps excessively so.

The East Palace (2026): For its first half, this South Korean mix of supernatural shenanigans, horrible people at a horrible imperial court being extremely horrible, and a videogamer’s idea of boss fights is really good fun. Alas the streaming series starts dragging its feet considerably in the middle, trying to reach its runtime goal by repeating the same plot beats again and again instead of continuing to escalate, so that the perfectly decent climax feels like something of a relief.

Human Vapor Season 01 (2026)

Tokyo gets into a bit of tizzy when a scientist rises into the air and explodes during a live TV interview with reporter Kyoko Kono (Yu Aoi). The case is more than a little weird, so the police reactivate Kenji Okamoto (Shun Oguri).

Okamoto had been suspended because he was taken to be responsible for leaks about a date-raping yakuza turned CEO reaching a journalist, and the concurrent suicide of said yakuza turned CEO. The journalist was, of course, Kyoko, who was in a relationship with Okamoto at the time, and betrayed him to get the info.

Obviously, there are complicated feelings between these two now, which will not become less complicated when both of them start investigating the murder. Not that Kyoko has much of a choice, for the killer, someone (something?) calling himself the Human Vapor (Uta), wants her – specifically - to interview him about his further plans.

Apparently, he uses practically supernatural powers in a quest for vengeance on a mysterious, influential group in the habit of using the weakest members of society as “human fuel”.

This Japanese/Korean co-production directed by Shinzo Katayama and written by Yeong Sang-ho (of Train to Busan fame) and Ryu Yong-jae does a very convincing job of adapting the Ishiro Honda classic to modern times and the demands of the streaming show form. Though, curiously enough, the filmmakers seem to do this through the lens and style of mangaka Naoki Urasawa, who has nothing whatsoever to do with the show, unless his way of storytelling fitting the streaming show form pretty perfectly.

Yet still, the structural approach, the use of flashbacks, even of classic Japanese rock, the character types used, even the show’s moments of very Japanese and genuinely endearing goofiness (let’s just say “bowling” so as not to spoil things), are so in tune with how the creator of 20th Century Boys and so on operates, one can’t help but wonder how and why this exact approach was chosen. Hell, the show even shares Urasawa’s tendency for cheap plot twist trick tactics based on first showing the audience only half of what actually happened in a scene. Which is okay when used with care, but does get a bit old when it happens in nearly every single episode.

On the plus side, the plot runs like clockwork, and many elements that seem like pointless asides to get the series to length – curse of streaming - will eventually turn out to be actually meaningful and important not just structurally but also thematically.

Speaking of themes, the show is driven by a genuine sense of righteous fury about the abuses and uses, possibly even existence, of power in ways tiny and huge. Men – and it’s invariably men – with power are all portrayed as grotesques, mostly having left their actual humanity behind when they started to convince themselves people without power are only there to be used at their whim, if they ever cared at all. Even the small fry bad guys are fucking weirdoes.

The cast is obviously pretty great. Aoi and Oguri of course so, the rest of the cast sometimes to my surprise. Everyone sells even the plot’s less plausible parts with conviction, and appears to do their outmost not to be made subservient to the plot twists, and instead make these twists actual parts of their characters and performances.

Evil Dead Burn (2026)

Alice’s (Souheila Yacoub) marriage to abusive Will (George Pullar) ends rather abruptly when he dies in a drunk driving accident. Well, actually, it’s more a drunk driving deadite accident, for his family owns an object that is apparently very unhealthy for the things, and they’re drawn to destroy it.

Following the death, and Will’s incineration, Alice is supposed to spend some time with her husband’s family somewhere out in the sticks. This would have been a rather unpleasant experience in any case, given the amount of dysfunction in the family and their barely checked aggressions towards Alice, but once the first of these mostly horrible people get possessed, our protagonist finds herself in a maelstrom of cruelty and bloody violence even worse than the relationship that got her there.

Sébastien Vanicek’s entry into the Evil Dead universe has been rather divisive apparently. To a degree, I am sympathetic if a viewer doesn’t want to inflict a film on themselves that’s quite as effective at causing stress, and quite as brutally getting into inter-familial trauma and cruelty as this one does. On the other hand, isn’t a nasty, cruel streak a protagonist somehow has to get through pretty much what the Evil Dead films (apart from Army of the Dead, a film too stupid for it) have always been? These are films whose protagonists have always been pushed into hacking nasty versions of the people they love into little pieces, so I don’t think it’s fair, or even makes sense to me, to complain when a film is simply particularly good at stressing you out, like this one is.

So, obviously, I come down on the side that finds Evil Dead Burn to be a fantastic film, nasty on the level of its pretty extreme violence as well as in the many ways it reproduces the particular emotional resonance of realistic abuse, but very much so in a manner I found as cathartic as I found it exhausting. Add to this an incredible control about how to pace this sort of affair – this one feels like a train running amuck, but somehow still stops at every station on its timetable – and a gloriously messed-up imagination about what to do to human bodies and human minds, and you have quite the piece of horror filmmaking, with a heroine who rings absolutely true as an abuse survivor to me.

Three Films Make A Post: Paradise Has An Appetite

The Devil’s Mouth (2026): For a few minutes there, I actually thought Jeff “I Made Kick-Ass 2 And Somehow Still Have A Career” Wadlow’s teens in their twenties versus a shark in a cave movie might be good fun. Hell, I even thought it might do something with the co-dependent “friendship” it sets up between Kathryn Newton’s and Lana Condor’s characters. Obviously, it didn’t.

Instead, the cave most of the film takes place in is so dark, I can’t even complain about the shark being bad CGI – you’d have to be able to see it for that –, the script so lacking in tension, follow-through or ideas all hopes of being entertained soon left me, and Wadlow’s direction is without personality, style, or focus.

The whole thing’s simply a bore.

Brocéliande (2003): For more than half of its running time, the improbably named Doug Headline’s French entry into the then slasher cycle actually feels like an attempt at smuggling in a conspiracist giallo with added nonsense about druids. Despite his name, Headline’s not a great stylist, alas, so it is more exciting an attempt on paper than in practice.

Colour me actually surprised when the whole thing turns into movie about young people running through a cave system fighting a dude in a monster suit for its last third. Not a terribly good one – the action staging leaves a lot to be desired – but hey, at least, I didn’t see this turn coming.

The Book of Sijjin and Illiyyin (2025): This version of Cinderella but with black magic, Indonesian style, on the other hand, pretty much goes where you expect it to go. That’s not a complaint, mind you, for Hadrah Daeng Ratu – one of the few female Indonesian directors whose films I’ve encountered – has a lot of fun with insects digital and real, healthy spatters of blood, icky corpse manipulation based magic, religion versus black magic duels, and everything else one could hope for.

Despite an ending where religion kinda-sorts wins, this has a wonderfully nasty streak. Probably not recommended to people who thought Evil Dead Burns just wasn’t a very nice movie (unlike all those other Evil Dead movies about people having to brutally murder their possessed beloved ones)?

Thae Rae: The Exorcist (2025)

Ming (Thaneth Warakulnukroh), a long since defrocked former Catholic exorcist living in a small Thai village is possessed by something very nasty. His past is rather murky. He left the priesthood after a possession case could only be solved by the death of a child, and began – at least going by the villagers who have very little love for the man – to dabble in black magic. He also has the habit of marrying often – and becoming a widower just as often.

Now, things have really escalated, though, and the old man is running around threatening people and munching on raw buffalo guts.

Not completely surprising, his only daughter Malee (Nichaphat Chatchaipholrat) is estranged and living in the city, as far away from her old man as she can get. Some dubious messages supposedly coming from her aunt lure her back, though, right when her dad’s possession problem really hits the fan. Soon, Malee is under the threat of possession – and worse - herself.

Fortunately, at the same time, the Catholic Church sends in young hot shot exorcist priest Paolo (Jirayu Tangsrisuk) to take care of business. The case is so complicated, he will have to team up with streaming-enabled shaman Sopha (Mean Phiravich Attachitsataporn) and dive deep into the secrets of a very murky past to resolve the situation.

I very much enjoy the return of SARS Wars director Taweewat Wantha to the filmmaking world, particularly now that I’ve realized this is indeed the same guy. His two Death Whisperer films certainly are very fun examples of contemporary horror, with the second’s ghost punching tendency exactly the sort of thing to make my little heart all a-flutter, and this ecumenical exorcism film is just as entertaining.

And we are in the world of fun horror here, where even the dark backstory and various bits of trauma business are presented with a certain lightness of touch that keeps the film away from delving into true emotional depths. In other contexts, this wouldn’t necessarily be such a great thing, but Wantha’s film is so deeply involved in the business of racing through a fun mystery punctuated with fine horror set pieces, depth simply isn’t what the film is going for.

Those horror set pieces, based on Thai and Western exorcism tropes and some really dubious religious lore are graciously sprinkled throughout the film, realized with an experienced hand and often a dry sense of humour – without this ever becoming a comedy.

Despite a two hour running time, there’s a breathlessness to the proceedings I really appreciate.

I also appreciate how little bickering there is between our exorcising leads: once they’ve both realized their opposite number is on the level, they simply proceed to work together for the greater good, the fine details of doctrine taking a back seat to saving people. This is not a film about whose religion is right, but one about cooperation and respect, in a low key but obvious way.

Plus, the possibility to freely mix elements of different possession traditions (or the movie tropes thereof) opens up quite a few creative possibilities, Thae Rae then proceeds to make excellent use of.

Ikenie Man (2019) & Harawata Man (2019)

These two short – fifty-two and forty-six minutes respectively – horror comedies by Yu Nakamoto belong together, despite the second film being far superior to the first one. Even though I’m not going to go too deeply into the plots, some spoilers are inevitable here, especially for the second film.

A university film club goes into a pretty creepy forest to film a simple slasher. The final girl doesn’t actually like horror films, the director is a total horror nerd, and soon squabbling ensues that causes her to wander off while the rest of the crew stumble upon a camping site populated by the kind of social mixture of young people you only find in horror movies and videogame casts.

Because they are lacking a lead actress, the filmmaking idiots decide to film a nightly attack on the camp site; problems ensue, though not exactly those you’d have expected.

Ikenie Man. the first of these two films is not just a comedy, it is that most horrifying of things, a full on horror parody. Which, unfortunately, means much of its first half consists of the same jokes every single one of these films make, just less sharply written (and in my case also hindered by somewhat bad subtitles), and not always well timed.

The finale, in which the director channels all of his horror knowledge in an actually hilarious and very gory way to get everyone out of the situation is rather better, though, as a scene during which  a guy uses guts as a nunchaku is bound to be. Otherwise, Ikenie Man is about what you’d expect from a microbudget Japanese horror parody.

Harawata Man is of quite a different calibre, however. We follow members of the same film club, minus the first film’s director plus some memorable new members as they meet, greet and eventually go on shooting yet another horror film.

This time around, they plan on a guerrilla shot in that other mainstay of no budget movie production, the empty industrial building. As it turns out, there’s another crew – directed by a character played by no less than Shigeo Osako! - already shooting their own movie there. It’s not, as our rather loveable idiot protagonists at first think, a porn shoot, but a snuff film production, so again, bloody violence ensues. You really shouldn’t mess with university film clubs, or underestimate the powers of donning a slasher mask sack (sack mask?), though.

This time around, Nakamoto swerves from parody to a proper horror comedy that still has more than enough genre knowledge but whose humour is predominately character based, with a bit of splatstick to keeps things loose. Which leads to a much funnier film, particularly since, where Ikenie Man’s character work was rather perfunctory, this one deftly draws fun character relations, and presents everyone as a loveable goofball I found impossible not to root for. Also, the jokes simply are better, as well as better timed.

There’s real heart here, so much of it the film can even finish on one of those wistfully melancholic scenes of old friends meeting years later Japanese cinema of any budget level loves so well, and make it work.

Which is quite an improvement between two films that came out in the same year.

Three Films Make A Post: What happened to flight 298?

Black Box (2026): Or, as we should probably call it Body Snatcher Tentacles On A Plane, for this is indeed an unironic attempt at adding more tentacles (and UFO conspiracy nonsense) to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and setting it on a plane. Kudos for creative mixing towards director Steven Quale, at least.

Unfortunately, a commercial airline flight isn’t actually that great a place for the kind of paranoia various versions of the Body Snatchers are interested in: your seat neighbour being taken over loudly does not have as much resonance as your loved ones being taken over quietly.

It’s not a bad movie, actually, and some sharper character work might even have turned it into a good one, but the film can’t quite escape the sense that most of the thinking involved in its production went into its initial set-up, and much less into what to then do with it.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026): Whereas this movie following the generally entertaining streaming adventures of its titular characters simple puzzles me, because its flaws are really rather atypical of the way blockbuster franchise movies are designed. Namely, these films do tend to follow a pretty strict scriptwriting rulebook where stakes are set up in the first act, escalated in the second and resolved in the third, where characters have rather precisely timed arcs, and the series of CGI set-pieces does of course escalate in size and drama as well.

None of this happens in Jon Favreau’s movie: there isn’t an actual plot, there sure as shit aren’t any dramatic or personal stakes, and the characters not only don’t go through any kind of arc, but demonstrate less, well, character then they do in the streaming show.

I do understand setting up the usual trappings of a blockbuster and failing, but not even trying nor even attempting to come up with something to replace them does leave me rather confused by the whole production.

The Bells of Astercote (1980): This BBC kid’s movie about two terribly well-spoken children stumbling upon a local legend that suddenly becomes entwined with the present when a golden chalice(!) hidden in the woods supposed to protect a nearby village from a return of the Plague is stolen belongs to a very different time. Then, proper children’s television was allowed to be mildly creepy, and resonant with folk imaginings. Different times, indeed, and while this isn’t one of the truly great examples of the form, it is worth an hour of one’s time, if only to become astonished by the way tropes of kid’s adventure, 70s style, collide here repeatedly with folklore and horror.

It’s like the Famous Five, but with less racism, and magic is real.