The Black Water Vampire (2014): This piece of POV horror directed and written by Evan Tramel is a bit of a strange one. At times, it is a clever bit of myth-building, and culminates in a surprisingly exciting climax with actual special effects. At other times, it mindlessly reproduces beats from The Blair Witch Project regardless if they actually fit into its plot and concept or not.
It’s a genuinely confusing mix of the inept, the effectively creepy and the clever, and one’s liking for it will most probably be based on how little that first bit turns one off.
Nightmare (2000): This South-Korean movie directed by Ahn Byeong-ki (who would soon go on to the much superior Phone) attempts to ride two of the horror waves of its time at once. There’s certainly a world where you could mix the Asian ghost movie revival following Hideo Nakata’s Ringu with the American teen slasher revival, and have a successful little movie.
Unfortunately, this drab concoction isn’t from that world and has little to offer beyond its dark, moody photography and an ensemble whose prettiness gives any US teen slasher cast a run for its money. The pacing is too slow and the supernatural elements and the I Saw What You Did Last Summer business don’t really do much for each other. Worse, the film’s narrative structure with flashbacks inside of flashbacks is way too much for the very basic plot to carry, and the only thing it does is hold back that our supposed protagonists are even more horrible people than they at first appear to be for an hour or so.
I was rooting for the ghost, and not just because she is played by Ha Ji-Won.
Coma (2022): In some scenes, Bertrand Bonello’s mix of essay film, science fiction and COVID induced coming of age fantasy is nearly brilliant, attempting to feel its way into the mind of an eighteen year old girl (Louise Labèque), suffering from a particularly bad case of teenage desperation at a world that’s clearly made to make us all desperate and what I’d describe as a parasocial infection. In others, it is that kind of nearly insufferable type of French art house movie which hides its intellectual simplicity by expressing its simple ideas in as complicated and obtuse a manner as possible.
And let’s not even start on the film’s start and finish, when Bonello explains exactly what his film is supposed to mean - which may lead the more cynical among us to the suggestion he may have tried to make a movie whose themes viewers can understand by watching it and thinking about it.
Posts
