Schalcken the Painter (1979)

Leiden, in the Dutch Republic, during the 17th Century. Budding painter Godfried Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde) is studying under the renowned master Gerrit Dou (Maurice Denham). Schalcken is studious and clearly ambitious, but also in love with Dou’s niece, Rose (Cheryl Kennedy), who lives with the old painter. Rose does look at him favourably, as well. Dou doesn’t realize this, and if he did, he surely wouldn’t approve. There’d be no profit in it.

However, when a very rich, very pushy and rather corpse-like looking gentleman (John Justin) Dou has never heard of before appears one night and basically throws some money at Dou to buy Rose, he’s all too happy to comply.

Once she’s met her new betrothed, in a particularly awkward dinner scene, Rose isn’t too happy with the situation. Her uncle doesn’t care, and when she’s not terribly subtly suggesting to Schalcken he might want to run away with her, he’s noncommittal – his ambition, you see…

So when Rose is married, she appears to disappear from the face of the Earth completely. There’s a small attempt by her uncle and Schalcken to find out what happened to her and her husband some months later, but it’s abortive as well as inconclusive.

Years later, when Schalcken is a successful if not exactly spirited painter himself, Rose very suddenly appears, distressed, in terrible fear, asking for a priest as the only way to protect her.

Based on a story by M.R. James favourite Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Leslie Megahey’s BBC TV film is a strange and fascinating beast that often feels like a cross between a docudrama and a BBC Ghost Story for Christmas. Charles Gray’s narration (as Le Fanu) certainly hits both modes very well, with as much thought given to the potential meaning of a darker strain in Schalcken’s paintings as to the supernatural elements of the story.

Those supernatural elements are realized wonderfully, with the handful of effects used harkening back to stage techniques more than filmic ones – like many Japanese kaidan movies liked to use – and some make-up on John Justin that combines with his nearly motionless performance to suggest a living corpse without the film ever needing to state this outright.

The filmmaking is fantastic in general, with nearly every shot based on a contemporary painting, where camera movement often reveals the day to day details the carefully staged and controlled paintings do not show. Much of the film is lit by candles, which is beautiful as well as suggestive of the darkness that increasingly dominates the character of Schalcken.

On a metaphorical level, this is – perhaps a bit too obviously – the tale of a man who forsakes love and a genuinely human inner life as well as True Art™ for money, commerce and (gasp) mere craftsmanship, with his true artistic talent as well as his guilt only manifesting itself in women’s enigmatic smiles and the deep shadows lingering in some of his paintings.

It is also a film made from a male perspective that appears genuinely angry at the idea of using women only as props (while also using one as a prop) for one’s art, instead of committing to them as persons you might actually need to sacrifice something for. Or, give yourself fully to, if they want it.

And it’s also a cracking, if unconventionally paced and structured, ghost story that mostly works through suggestion – until it doesn’t suggest but shows.

Beast-Man (Wolf) (1987)

aka The ryôjoku

aka Exciting Sexy Story: Beast Man Wolf

Our heroine of the evening is called to some village out in the middle of Japanese nowhere, for her twin sister has been killed. Apparently, the perpetrator was a wolf! Apart from the rapey local doctor, the villagers don’t seem terribly interested in the whole affair, so our heroine dresses up like an 80s action hero, shoulders her gun (!) and goes off into the woods where her sister died.

Where she gets beaten early on by a rainstorm, retreating into a lone cabin. The cabin’s owner is a woman in terrible age make-up, who goes off into a series of flashbacks that explain the local wolf lore: forty years ago, a young woman was raped by villagers. Their ringleader, some rich guy’s son (of course) then ties her to a tree so that she’ll be eaten by wolves. Instead, the girl kills and eats the lone wolf that attacks her. Then, another rapist appears (they really need to check the water supply around here), but gets killed by another wolf. Together, girl and wolf then eat the would-be rapist’s corpse, as you do. Sweet, sweet interspecies romance ensues – also the kind of bestiality that’ll happily get you into the FBI these days – and even produces a son.

Later, said son goes off into the world, seduces the daughter of the original rapist villager, and eventually turns into a gorilla suit with a sort of wolfish head to kill the father and (sigh) rape the daughter.

You wouldn’t believe who the old lady in the hut actually is!

This (and I’ve left plot elements out) is rather a lot of stuff to pack into a pinku runtime of barely sixty minutes, but veteran director Shuji Kataoka – who’ll end up with a filmography with more than 150 entries - has no trouble with that. The merry insanity of Beast Man Wolf zips along so happily, there’s never a boring minute. Not even in the butt and nipple-focussed sex scenes, for Kataoka, in good old pinku style, appears to relish the opportunity to shoot them in curious/artful/absurd ways that only accept repetition in the guys’ sex moves – so expect peculiar camera angles or a whole sex scene shot through what looks like a particularly ugly white, flowered drape. The, ahem, money shot here is of course the faked bestiality scene where normal blurring as well as a cut-out shaped like a yellow full moon do god’s censorship work, and which is absolutely made by the facial expression of the dog playing the wolf – he looks pretty happy with his life, and therefore has a much more likeable sex face than, say, Noboru Ando.

Add to this the absurd gorilla costume, the merry, straight-faced absurdity of everything, the handful of genuinely funny jokes, and Kataoka’s eye for cheap stylish flourishes of the Japanese gothic, and this is much more pure entertainment than you’d expect from this kind of pinku horror.

Shrunken Heads (1994)

Backlot New York in the 50/90s! Three kids (actor names redacted to protect the presumably innocent) are geeking out over DC comics – featuring specific superhero names and all –, spending time with their favourite newsagent, Mr. Sumatra (Julius Harris), who is also a former agent of Haiti’s repressive regime, and getting into trouble with the local gang of greasers. Because greasers are still a thing in New York, right?

Things escalate particularly badly when the kids believe they are in an afterschool special and stand up to the greaser bullies. It probably helps that one of our heroes has the hots for bully girlfriend Sally (Rebecca Herbst), too.

Alas, it turns out, these teenage delinquents come from a very different kind of movie than the kids believe they are in, and are actually part of organized crime, in this case lead by Big Moe (a cross-dressing Meg Foster, because at this point, why the hell not?), who has a bigger quiff and an even bigger ego than their underlings. Thus, standing up to Big Moe like a hero gets our three kids killed.

Fortunately(?) Mr. Sumatra is a proper Tonton Macoute, and therefore knows his voodoo. So, obviously, he cuts off the dead kids’ heads, shrinks them and brings them back to life as flying machines of vengeance with their own special powers – one can cast lighting, one has big teeth, the third carries a switchblade(!?).

Time for vengeance, fighting random crime and a valuable lesson about flying under your beloved’s shirt.

If it weren’t R-rated and somewhat inappropriate, I’d call this Full Moon production the kind of entry level horror they just don’t make anymore today. Though, really, this is probably just the particular weirdness director Richard Elfman (indeed the former Oingo-Boingo guy, brother to Danny, who does some of the scoring) prefers.

And who can blame a guy for wanting to make a film that apparently takes place in the 1950s and the 1990s at once, believes a running gag about how a character we are supposed to be somewhat positively inclined towards is a former Tonton Macoute and still glorifies the lifestyle is a good idea, and features a short sequence that parodies the then-current crop of superhero and proto-superhero movies by replacing the hero with three murderous flying kid heads?

As is obvious, Shrunken Heads goes for a certain tone of self-conscious camp and weirdness I often find rather difficult to vibe with in films. I’m of the “if you can’t bother to take your film seriously, why should I bother with it at all?” persuasion, so this sort of thing tends to annoy me more often than not. In this case, however, I found myself at least a little charmed.

Perhaps because the film does aim for a very personal seeming aesthetic, where the goofy and the macabre mix as well as the visual and pop cultural hallmarks of two very different decades, instead of a more generic kind of self-ironic nothingburger; or simply, because the juxtaposition between the childish and the very much not meant for children elements here come together to form something I think most children would actually enjoy rather a lot.

And since I’m incurably childish myself when it comes to horror, I’m pretty much Elfman’s core audience.

She-Wolf (1965)

Original title: La loba

A rural part of past Mexico is cursed by what one might believe are strange, deadly, animal attacks on people of all shapes and sized. In truth the killings are committed by a female werewolf, all jumping rage and frizzy hair. Curiously enough, the werewolf arises from a grave to go on her killing sprees, to return there after ger business is finished.

As it turns out, the grave comes with a practical tunnel that leads to the bedroom of one of the beautiful daughters of scientist Professor Fernandez (José Elías Moreno), kept under the watchful eye of the Professor’s creepily staring but buff servant Crumba (Crox Alvarado). The Professor is of the mad scientist persuasion, as it turns out – he is researching cryogenics, which will somehow be useful in curing lycanthropy, apparently. Just don’t ask me how.

Given that he’s letting his daughter out to murder her way through the peasantry in the meantime, we can assume his own experiments aren’t too kosher either, in any case.

In an uncommon turn, this scientist comes with not one, but two beautiful daughters, each of whom could the the wolfwoman. One is beautiful and wilful Clarisa (Kitty de Hoyos), the other is angelic Alicia (Adriana Roel), so it may not be a surprise to learn which one of the two has full moon hobbies.

To complicate the plot a little, the narrative also involves Clarisa’s secret lover, Dr Bernstein (Joaquín Cordero), a man very interested in lycanthropy, as it happens, as well as a wolf hunter (Noé Murayama) and his werewolf-certified dog. Also, rather more lycanthropic romance than I expected of a film of this era, so if that sort of thing floats your boat, you’re welcome.

But then, I also didn’t expect Rafael Baledón’s film to start with surprisingly explicit wolfwoman rampage that shows rather more of our titular character ripping out hearts than I would have expected going by other Mexican films of the era. In fact, the attack scenes here are on the savage side, with a ruthless choice of victims, and some fast editing and camera work that’s neither typical of Mexican pop cinema of this era nor of Baledón, who is usually at his best when it comes to the creation of backlot gothic mood and a certain dramatic dreaminess. Curiously enough, there’s much less expressionism and moody shadow play on display here than I would have expected going in, and instead much more muscular, straightforward and sometimes overlit pulpiness that seems to prefigure our favourite Spanish wolf person Paul Naschy’s body of work.

This directorial approach does fit the general tone of a script that contains two mad scientists, two werewolves, two sisters, two melodramatic romances, a police investigation, a cool werewolf hunter and his dog, as well as a mute child to be threatened, and that still finds time to squeeze several werewolf attacks and even a somewhat poignant ending into a runtime of less than eighty minutes.

Not surprisingly, the whole thing does feel a little messy and more than a little rough around the edges, but there’s a wild energy and conviction to everything that should make the film impossible to dislike for any pumpkin-minded viewer.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

On a far future post-apocalyptic Earth that was once ruled by a class of vampire “nobles”, who are now in decline. Here, tech levels fluctuate wildly between cyborgs and laser guns and torches and pitchforks, so it’s a post-apocalyptic western gothic kind of place.

Peasants still huddle in their houses at night, for while they don’t rule whatever societies are left, there are still some vampires roaming the nights, doing as they please when they have a mind to.

These dangerous monstrosities are hunted by wandering bounty hunters like our protagonist D (voiced by Hideyuki Tanaka). D is a half-vampire with a somewhat standoffish manner, a talking face in one of his hands, at odds with his vampiric heritage but not great at living like a human being either. He’s also frighteningly good at what he does.

Which will stand him in good stead when he is hired to rescue Charlotte Elbourne (Emi Shinohara) from the vampire who kidnapped her. The somewhat dubiously named Meier Link (Koichi Yamadera) is said to be that rare vampire lord who does not use his fangs, though a village full of vampire ghouls left behind on his flight with Charlotte suggests something a little different about his sense of morality.

Compounding’s D’s problems are a rival group of vampire hunters – who come with their very own battle wagon and various wacky powers – and the barbaroi mutants Meier Link has hired to guard him. There’s also the little problem that Charlotte has actually left with the vampire of her own free will to live her private little vampire romance, everyone else be damned (sometimes literally so).

And even that’s not the final problem thrown at our hero and the other vampire hunters: for their prey’s escape route leads right into the castle of Carmilla Bathory (Bibari Maeda), a particularly dangerous vampire, who also protects the last rocket to the vampiredom’s now empty space station.

Fifteen years after the first anime based on a very popular (though not exactly critically acclaimed) series of novels, Madhouse produced this second anime adventure of everyone’s favourite (sorry, Blade) dhampir. This time around, directorial and scriptwriting duties fell on the wonderful Yoshiaki Kawajiri, a man well-versed in stylized over the top action, blood fountains and gore soups, sleaze and the beautifully grotesque, potentially all in one shot.

Which does make him the perfect candidate for a romp through a post-apocalyptic horror and SF world that also more than just nods at the Italian Western and Universal’s gothic backlot Europe.

Aesthetically, the Bloodlust is a little wonder that brings its disparate elements together with a sense of the grandiose that, in good gothic manner, simply ignores the inherent absurdity of the task of uniting only the cool bits of basically all genres. It’s beautiful to look at, full of things you still couldn’t realize in any other form than animation, and brought to life/undeath with an often breath-taking sense of detail.

As is his wont, Kawajiri directs the action with verve and grandiosity as well as clarity, but there’s also space for the slow moments, and for a film whose plot is absolutely based on the rule philosophy of one cool thing after another, there is a lot of time for quiet character moments. Every character here has lived too long and/or seen too much in a world that’s perhaps grown a bit too strange for normal human comprehension. Thus, there’s a sense of tiredness and melancholia, and the senselessness of a life that’s only ever going from one fight to the next, the dreariness of survival running through everyone.

However, curiously enough for a film whose aesthetics are so focussed on the rule of cool and maximalism in everything, it also suggests a potential for actual change, for going on in better ways than the one with the most cool violence, for genuine hope. Of course, it does come to this via moments of operatic melodrama and after a lot of wonderful bloodshed.

Nahual (2025)

After having been attacked by an elderly woman in a house in Chicago that basically screamed “witchcraft”, an encounter the old lady doesn’t survive, social worker Katia (Jenny Sanchez) is understandably traumatized. She takes some time off work and travels to a resort somewhere in rural Mexico.

Shortly after Katia’s arrival there, a series of killings committed by a very fast, very strong, and very strange animal begins. At the same time, Katia begins changing, in behaviour and appetites. It soon becomes clear she has been possessed by a malevolent animal spirit, a nahual, and is indeed the monster killing the locals.

The indigenous people know this sort of thing of old, but that doesn’t mean it is going to be easy to get rid of what has become of Katia.

To my delight, microbudget veteran Ricardo Islas is still making films. He is apparently still from the US, his homebase for two decades or so, but in the case of Nahual, the production was probably shot in Mexico, with a cast of exclusively Spanish language speakers. Which does give the director’s return to the realm of the were-creatures (see Plenilunio for his first, classic, visit there) a strong sense of the local, generally an asset in any production, particularly in the microbudget realm where you have to find your uniqueness because you typically can’t afford to construct it. How much of the local here is an imagined one or how much of it a real one, I’m not in a position to say from Germany, of course.

This is clearly made on the very cheap, with many of the cast members not professional screen actors, but the central roles are well-cast, and nobody is the kind of horrible you shouldn’t cope with in a film made on this kind of budget. Pleasantly for my old ass, this is very centred on middle-aged people who haven’t jumped into the well of chirurgical youth too enthusiastically, which, as the feel of locality does, provides this with a nice base of reality for the supernatural to work on. Plus, in how many horror movies do you find a normal looking, indigenous Mexican woman as the eventual heroine?

His decades of experience as low budget filmmaker have provided Islas with a full toolkit as a filmmaker: his script is much better structured than these things often are, his character work, while not exactly deep, is precise and adds enough interest to everyone involved you are invested in their final fates, and though some of the direction is rough around the edges, there’s a solidity in the visual staging and the editing that simply works. When it is called for – the monster attacks and a great suspense scene in the climax particularly come to mind – Islas’s work becomes focussed and effective.

Obsession: A Taste for Fear (1987)

Original title:  Pathos - Segreta inquietudine

In some bizarre cyberpunk-ish near future as seen from 1987. Diane (Virginia Hey) works as a photographer and videographer doing arty softcore stuff with loads of elements of queerness and a bit of sadomasochism.

Despite/because of her unpleasantly dominating personality and a streak of badly hidden sadism – we in the biz call her state of mind being a self-centred, horny asshole – she is adored by her often mistreated assistant Valerie (Gioia Scola), who oh so very much wants to get into her boss’s panties.

Continuing the unhealthy relationships, Diane is still very close with her ex-husband Georges (Gérard Darmon), a peddler in smut somewhat darker than her own, and with a personality even more egotistical than hers – we in the biz call guys like him a nuclear meltdown waiting to happen.

After Diane helps out by fucking a potential client of Georges to lose that “potential” qualifier, ex-hubby gifts her with muscle model Teagan (Teagan Clive). Diane really rather takes a fancy to Teagan, but after one abortive shoot, the model disappears.

As it turns out, Teagan was murdered by a female killer wearing black gloves who loves to leave behind video disks of her exploits. Shaving-impaired Lt. Arnold (Carlo Mucari) is on the case, but between fighting off Diane’s advances (she finds his resistance to her dubious charms irresistible, of course) and moralizing, he just might need the unasked for help of our protagonist doing the amateur detective bit, as per the giallo handbook.

Conceptually, one-time director Piccio Raffanini’s Obsession is pretty much irresistible to me. A giallo taking place in a sleazy, hi-tech of 1987 near future, where somehow still everyone is from the platonic ideal of the late 80s, and where nobody can stop thinking about sex for more than a scene sounds rather perfect.

In practice, you need a bit of patience with the film. The giallo elements really only come to the fore in its second half – even the inciting murder isn’t shown in any relevant detail – and before that, you are at the mercy of garish/stylish lighting consisting of all the colours of the neon, copious amounts of nudity draped in some of the weirder attempts at arty sexiness I’ve encountered (the question “who’d masturbate to that!?” did go through my mind repeatedly but then I remembered humanity), and a bunch of deeply unlikeable hot people being horny at each other.

If that’s terrible or awesome really depends on one’s mood and personal predilections, I suppose. I certainly enjoyed the pretty colours, the nearly as pretty people, the analogue future tech weirdness on copious display – so many CRT TVs in the future, generally coming in stacks – but did not necessarily enjoy spending time with the characters until the giallo plot at least got into second gear.

Faster than that, the film doesn’t ever run, but as an occasional lover of slow cinema and slow horror, I did find myself more often captivated than not, if only in appreciation of the film’s distinct style of absolute 1988.

There’s a lot to be said for aesthetic conviction, and that, Raffanini clearly had in spades.

Amazing World of Ghosts (1979)

Here is a genuine picture of a ghost [cue static shot of a blurry black and white photograph that might show a cat, or a goat, or your mum, for all that’s visible]. What are its plans? Is it staring out at us, longingly, trying to send us a message from the void?

Look at the moon! Our majestic, silent companion! Did you know the number of UFO sightings increases on nights of the full moon? What do these visitors from outer space want from us? Do they fear like we do, love like we do? Or is this the beginning of an invasion? Why is it that the number of reports of ghosts increases whenever there are more UFO sightings?

Here is a picture of Nessie.

And so on, and so forth. If this sort of thing droned in an endless dramatic monologue performed by actor Sidney Paul’s (disembodied, obviously) voice over a backdrop of blurry photos, archival footage, mondo style nonsense and shots of outer space floats your boat, this late 70s documentary devoid of arguments, facts, or logical progression of thoughts or themes may very well become your new favourite movie. Sometimes, Paul’s monologue is even connected to the pretty pictures; sometimes, 70s racist assumptions meets bizarro nonsense; sometimes, it all turns to ambient noise devoid of meaning despite the use of actual words, put into order one assumes would make them sentences, before one gets distracted by Nessie.

Also included is what I can only be assume to be a pretty impressive assemblage of library music ascribed to one Jim Cookman that wavers between some lounge, quite a bit of lite acid rock and pleasant amounts of woozy synth drones that turns the whole affair even more bizarrely cosy, at least if you’ve got my aesthetic preferences.

It’s actually pretty amazing, as if a High Strangeness doc had turned into some kind of off-beat poetry project as written by people who never, ever should have been allowed to write poetry. Amazing, this most certainly is.

Three Films Make A Post: Touch of Leather

The Nightman (2023): For its first hour or so, this Belgian movie shot in Ireland with an Irish cast directed by Mélanie Delloye does some fine work adapting elements of the non-supernatural gothic to modern sensibilities, carried by some wonderful locations – the rural mansion at the foot of a castle ruin is pretty much perfect for this sort of affair – and a fine lead performance by Zara Devlin.

Once the plot has stabilized, the supernatural has been put aside, and it is clear what’s going on, things become less interesting.

The mood of dread and growing paranoia is replaced with Crazy Guy tropes and thriller by numbers plotting that’s executed well enough, but simply not all that interesting, particularly after what came before.

Hauntology (2024): Parker Brennon’s movie has nothing to do with hauntology, but is instead a very fun, decidedly queer microbudget indie horror anthology movie that tells some straightforward spook stories and a giallo homage from a queer perspective.

It’s that pleasant kind of horror that does tend to like its main characters a bit too much to have horrible or unfair things actually kill or really hurt them – that sort of thing belongs to backstories and the giallo segment here – but instead provides a fun, spooky time with ghosts, curses and (good) witches. If you’re not going in demanding a bad time for every character on screen, this is actually a very good time for a viewer, shot well enough (or rather, much better than the budget would have you expect, though not as idiosyncratically stylish as I always hope for), and with generally decent performances. Among the acting talent is the Love Witch herself, Samantha Robinson, as well as an unretired Nancy Loomis (now Nancy Kyes), so we are in very good hands.

Her Private Hell (2026): Following his success with Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn has put increasingly more effort into driving away any viewer who might come at his body of work from the direction of conventional thriller or horror expectations. In this sense, the highly divisive Her Private Hell is a rousing success. If anyone hasn’t noticed that Refn makes movies predominantly for himself, this one really should do as a teachable moment.

Given my predilections, and despite how little I enjoyed The Neon Demon (a film I should probably rewatch sooner rather than later, in hopes of better appreciation), I think Her Private Hell is rather brilliant as a film that’s all about wallowing in its directors’ obsessions, his kinks, and his favourite visual ideas. Imagine Cattet and Forzani with the kind of budget and clout to be able to hire an up and coming actress like Sophie Thatcher, and afford even more tacky/lovely tricks from an idealized version of the giallo and exploitation playbook, with even more pretentious dialogue and you’re pretty much there. This is the sort of thing I rather avoid to analyse on a plot and thematic level – though one could probably deduce all of Refn’s favourite sexual obsessions if one were of a mind to – but love to inhabit as an aesthetic place of muted neon, languor and the most Pino Donaggio score every to be Pino Donaggioed.

Tell Me Something (1999)

Detective Cho (Han Suk-kyu), right now under investigation for taking dirty money to pay for the medical bills of his now deceased mother, is still tasked with solving a serial killer case in rainy, dark Seoul. After a couple of dead men, Cho finds out that the victims all have something in common – they once dated artist (and daughter of a very famous artist herself) Chae Soo-yeon (Shin Eun-ha).

While Soo-yeon is not a suspect, she is very much of interest to the investigation, though she doesn’t really appear to want to break out of her shell of being a quiet, mysterious beauty. Perhaps she’ll change her mind when Cho finds himself rather drawn to her; or when the killer’s gaze seems to fall more directly on her than on her former lovers?

Often glacially paced, Yun-hyeon Jang’s serial killer thriller takes all of the elements of the late-90s state of the genre and gives them a good shake in a very typical South Korean approach to genre filmmaking to reconfigure it in shapes still quite recognizable yet also slightly estranged from their common form.

Which, given that part of the film’s thematic heft rests on creating a mood of alienation that’s just as big as its mood of menace, is a rather good way to get its audience on track, or at least in the right mood.

And mood really is where the film’s strengths rest – this is all grungy locations, rain, moody dark lightning, noir gone just about digital, interspersed with some moments of brutality, some of action, and carried by Cho’s halting attempts to move through the labyrinth of a case that appears constructed to foil and fool him personally. Why, if you didn’t know it better, you might think the universe wanted to tell him something about himself, the doubtful nature of mysteries or even the depths of his own heart.

In other – okay, American, hands, this would probably have turned into an erotic thriller with copious fucking between cop and witness, but even though there’s a growing attraction between Cho and Soo-yeon, the film really rather prefers to titillate us through the same sense of distance that attracts Cho, as the men before him, to Soo-yeon. It’s certainly still in the ballpark of femme fatale tropes, but reconfigured for a more distanced world.

Somewhat fitting to its insistence on distance and alienation, watching Tell Me Something is never quite the experience thinking about the film afterwards is – there’s a quality to it that makes it difficult to enjoy it in the moment as you’d do with most other good genre films. Instead, the idea of it, as well as the more abstract elements of its aesthetic start to nestle or linger in one’s mind, turning the experience of watching this much more intense in hindsight than during the actual time spent with it.

The Other Side of the Mirror (1973)

Original title: Al otro lado del espejo

The dominating father (Howard Vernon) of jazz-singing rich girl Ana (Emma Cohen) is really unhappy about her planned marriage to a perfectly okay young man. So unhappy, he disturbs Ana’s happy pre-marriage phase via a pretty dramatic suicide that leaves Ana rather turned off from getting married to her beau at all.

Instead she really jumps into the night life of jazz improvisation and alcohol, finding quite a bit of male company to pass the time as well. However, the men she gets involved with have the unhappy tendency to die, struck down with a particularly rare kind of dagger.

Curiously enough, whenever that happens, Ana has dreams – or are they visions? – of a mirror from her father’s house that reflects him, hanging dead, and what may or may not be her double (or is it her Jungian Shadow?), wielding a (particularly rare kind of) dagger more often than not.

I have probably made this particular joke before, but Jesús “Jess” Franco is my favourite Jesus as well as my favourite Franco. I am, still, and by now quite on my way to forever, the kind of viewer who really vibes with Franco’s output more often than not.

This one’s a film as much about Emma Cohen’s eyes, the transcendent joys of improvisation and the kind of woozy quality of sunlight Franco loved so much, as it is about its psychological thriller plot which may or may not carry a supernatural element but certainly wants to play with Jung as well as with Medea (the latter, the film is very explicit about). So if you’re looking for tightness or a structure that isn’t light and improvisational, you’re really going in for a bad time. Though in that case, you’re probably better off not engaging with Uncle Jess at all.

I’d argue that Franco is often at his worst when he attempts to care about providing more conventional genre thrills instead of shooting something he finds exciting or interesting at the moment (which may very well be slowly zooming towards a vagina, or getting really interested in a sax player soloing) and eventually editing it together into a movie-like shape. No worries about that here – Mirror is a thing of mood and moods, carried by Franco’s interests and his little perversions, Cohen, and whatever a given viewer brings to it.

Which is all I ask of the man’s films.

Three Films Make A Post: When the world breaks the brave are born.

Worldbreaker (2025): I was actually pleasantly surprised by this okay little movie by Brad Anderson, and thus can still carry some hope for the return of the filmmaker who brought us Session 9 and The Machinist to his initial form. This masquerades as a cheap Milla Jovovich starring post-apocalyptic actioner, but at its core is actually a slow, quiet film about a father (Luke Evans) and daughter (Billie Boullet) bonding in a terrible situation, with a line about consciously building hope in future generations when all of it should be lost. I also found myself enjoying the film’s mythological approach to its monsters, as well as Anderson’s willingness to be slow and patient.

Sure, the effects aren’t great, and the ending is somewhat frustrating, yet this is still a much better film than the one its – limited - marketing threatens.

Big Baby (2025): Apparently, featuring one’s spouse in one’s movies is a thing in the family, so Rob Zombie’s brother Spider One (yeah, I dunno about these names) features his wife Krsy (come on) Fox in all of his films. I have more time for One and Fox than for Zombie: Fox could clearly carry a movie on her own, and One at least doesn’t think ass-ugly is an aesthetic.

Big Baby, however, is not a great film. There’s enough material for a thirty minute short film in here, but dragged out to ninety minutes, this reality-bending meta horror tale of a whiny scriptwriter whose new slasher idea gets more than a little out of control never is quite as clever as it appears to want to be, and adds little to the already bloated canon of films about how terribly difficult it is to make movies. Those poor filmmakers!

Humint (2026): South Korean filmmaker Ryoo Seung-wan is a hell of a director of big-ish budget action and thriller cinema. Humint is one of his weaker films until it explodes into a fantastic final thirty minutes of intense, tear-jerking action whose tone, though not style, reminded me of John Woo’s imperial period in the very best way.

The set-up and middle part, though, feel uncommonly slow for Ryoo, and one can’t help but feel that he simply doesn’t feel quite at home with material that’s grounded in the quieter tropes of non-James Bond spy movies and melodrama.

It’s not a bad movie, mind you, and the climax is a good as this kind of cinema gets – as a whole, the film is just not as great as the director’s movies can get.

SPEC ~ First Blood (2010)

Following an incident during which one of his subordinates is heavily wounded either under supernatural circumstances or by him, Japanese SWAT-equivalent Lieutenant Sebumi (Ryo Kase) is transferred to the tiny unit of Tokyo’s police concerned with weird crimes committed by people who have “specs”. Specs are powers apparently explained by their wielders using the ninety per cent of their brains bad pop science said we don’t use.

The very straight Sebumi’s two new colleagues are even stranger than their cases: unit chief Nonomura (Ryu Raita) appears timid and more interested in his affair with a much younger policewoman than in the whole solving crime business. Whereas the heart and brains of the operation, Saya Toma (Erika Toda), is not only clearly on the spectrum, but also a near endless fount of strange tics, aggressive behaviour, body language from another planet and an unhealthy love of gyoza.

She’s also an absolute genius when it comes to solving weird crimes.

Directed – and as far as I understand also independently produced – by Yukihiko Tsutsumi, the ten episode series SPEC is a most curious thing in its mix of Japanese pop culture trope obsessions, the X-Files, and particularly once the main plot get going in a way Chris Claremont would probably approve of, the X-Men, filtered through a lens of absurdist slapstick that can swap to effectively deathly earnest and even genuinely affecting on a moment’s notice. None of this shouldn’t come together, but somehow, the show drags its disparate influences into a complete thing all of its own, a tone that’s utterly distinct.

This was clearly made on the very cheap, with only a handful of standing sets (all of those cheap but also thoughtfully made) and whatever locations Tsutsumi could scratch together. But then, the Tsutsumi proceeds to direct the hell out of what he’s got in a barrage of fast edits, peculiar angles and improbable camera movement that makes everything feel absurd, intense and exciting, and puts the show into a pretty unique aesthetic place somewhere between expressionism and live action manga.

This plays particularly well with Toda’s performance, which is an absolute thing of beauty. Toda turns a series of tics, slapstick ideas and always full-on physical acting into an actual person, a coherent character who is also perfect fit for Tsutsumi’s exalted style. She is as believable when she’s solving a weird crime, as when she has a dramatic revelation, or as when she has a Three Stooges style punch-up with Sebumi.

The show is inventive, funny and interesting throughout, with a plot that escalates from a series of golden age mystery inspired crimes with one added supernatural element into a grand conspiracy with high emotional stakes for both of our main protagonists.

The show was something of a surprise hit in Japan, kickstarting Toda’s career and was followed by two TV specials as well as a trilogy of actual movies of escalating plot insanity, though not necessarily quality.

Mockbuster (2025)

Unsuccessful Australian filmmaker Anthony Frith decides the best way to rescue his dream of becoming a proper director is to send an E-Mail to crap movie house The Asylum and ask for a directing gig.

The crapmongers agree, and thus the film follows Frith’s attempts at actually making said movie.

This comedic documentary by Anthony Frith is terribly light-weight and uncritical towards basically anything. There’s little care taken with establishing any sense of truthfulness here: for example, how does Frith’s making of a documentary about making a movie for The Asylum play into his actually being hired to make a movie for The Asylum is a pretty obvious question to bring up, one would think. But then, Frith’s planning of the documentary isn’t any part of the movie at all, so we’re probably meant to pretend everything happens by magic? Poetic truth only works when you’ve got more than wide eyes to back the concept up, and Frith is definitely not Werner Herzog.

This disinterest in ask any interesting questions Which fits the pose of faux naivety the filmmaker and star does put on for the whole of the running time, a tone that would even make James Stewart in his most “Aw, shucks” face tell the guy to tone it done. This pose of course also make it easy to play the deeply cynical approach to low budget filmmaking The Asylum’s producers espouse for laughs and not question it too tightly. I can’t say I find a couple of guys who apparently can’t even comprehend to attempt to use their small means to make films that are actually not total horseshit only funny to a very minor degree.

Particularly when you keep in mind what some backyard filmmakers achieve without access to actual professional crews, and on budgets that make these guys look like Marvel. Or look at Roger Corman, who also said he never lost a buck on the movies he produced, while being responsible for a whole lot of classics and for kickstarting the careers of many a talented filmmaker.

Three Films Make A Post: From the Director of Plane

Mutiny (2026): After the promising and even attractive to look at Shelter, this year’s second Jason Statham vehicle devolves to the stage of Stat by numbers: bland action, directed blandly in bland colours in which a bland protagonist sleepwalks through what would be a complicated thriller plot if the script actually did sod all with its set-up.

Mostly, this is Statham and Annabelle Wallis sneaking their way across a ship, with the Stat occasionally killing somebody. The emotional stakes are zero, because nobody bothered to include any, and the action is extremely underwhelming. Well, at least its not an Ayers/Stallone MAGA joint.

Shake, Rattle & Roll: Evil Origins (2025): If an anthology is two and a half hours long, it should have a good reason for it. This entry into the revived Filipino series certainly has not, and would probably be at least mildly improved if each of the three tales of clichéd horror therein would have have needed to focus a bit instead of going on and on and on.

The film’s only clever idea is in the set-up – all three episodes are kinda-sorta connected, so that the future set final segment is the whole she-bang’s grand finale. Unfortunately, in practice the connections between the segments amount for very little, and unlike you’re aggressively in love with unfunny jokes and a bit of middling gore, there’s just nothing here. Certainly nothing that deserves the insane runtime.

Supergirl (2026): Unlike certain parts of the internet, I do not hate Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl. It is not a great adaptation of the specific comics this is based on, but as an outer space superhero film, it’s mostly good fun, including a couple of fine set-pieces and a couple of bland ones – unfortunately the bland ones are clustered in the climax – and two game leads in Milly Alcock and Eve Ridley.

I could have gone without the product placement of an AI-sloppy Lobo as played by a characteristically one-note Jason Momoa, and the film’s doubling down on its sources bloodthirsty in the grand American style, ending. Tom King does at least have the excuse to be a former CIA operative, so a moral backbone isn’t to be expected.

Still, it’s a decently entertaining film.

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.