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)?

In short: Makmum (2019)

After being evicted from her home, chance points mortuary beautician and speaker to the dead Rini (Titi Kamal) towards the boarding school where she was raised. She hires on as a summer tutor. Her help is desperately needed, though not in educational matters. During summer vacations, three girls have been left behind at the school because of their bad grades (I’m sure that’s going to help), in the not so tender care of nasty new boarding school boss Rosa (Reni Yuliana). Rosa’s a bit of a sadist at the best of times, but these certainly aren’t. The kids are attacked, possessed and generally terrorized by a ghost that seems fixated on disturbing them during their prayer times, usually starting its business by imitating a prayer follower (the titular “Makmum”, as far as I understand) and proceeds from there.

Of course, Rosa doesn’t believe the possession tales, but she also doesn’t see the problem as one of mental or physical illness, even when Putri (Adilla Fitri), the ghost’s favourite possession body, shows clear signs of physical breakdown. As Rosa sees it, it’s all just a lack of basic discipline. So Rini arrives just in time.

Makmum, directed by Hadrah Daeng Ratu, shows various of the favourite concepts and set pieces of the milder side of contemporary Indonesian horror: there’s the haunted school, the woman with a tragic past (most of which she’ll only remember during the course of the movie) who can see and speak to ghosts, the nasty female authority figure making things worse by her insistence on knowing every damn thing about everything even though she knows very little indeed, the ghost who disturbs prayers (which I as a heathen atheist always find particularly fascinating a trope). Also appearing are the attack on an ill old woman, as well as a lot of generic set pieces you probably see in front of your inner eye right now.

So a well of originality or depth, this film is certainly not, yet there’s a certain sense of conviction in the presentation of the spooky set pieces that makes them always fun to watch. Ratu’s storytelling has a nice, light-handed flow to it that makes the clichés decidedly more convincing, and enough of a sense for mildly creepy mood to make the whole thing perfectly entertaining despite its lack of any personality of its own.

Three Films Make A Post: He was a world-class criminal and a working-class hero.

The General (1998): This gangster movie by the great John Boorman about Irish burglar, robber (etc) and perhaps part-time national anti-hero Martin Cahill (portrayed by Brendan Gleeson with perfect nuance even when the character he portrays would deny possessing any of that) was all the rage with critics when it came out, and really doesn’t seem to be part of any conversation anymore. It’s definitely a John Boorman movie in its willingness to be peculiar: at times, it feels more like a very strange comedy than your typical biopic. It portrays its protagonist with as much sarcasm as it does reverence (though there’s some of that, also), understanding the very specific working class charm of the man as well as the fact that he also was a scumbag. Boorman is never willing to make any total statements about his subject, instead treating Cahill as the sort of complicated and contradictory person we all are, denying the audience the easy way of seeing him as a hero or as a villain, therefor denying the kind of easy judgement that sees everyone as either all-virtuous or all-bad that’s all the rage at this political moment in time.

Confessions of a Police Captain aka Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica (1971): If you go into this Damiano Damiani joint hoping for more typical hard-hitting Italian 70s cop movie fare, you’ll probably be a little disappointed, for as is so often the case with the director, he’s really only interested in providing as much of the exploitative stuff as he needs to let his social criticism go down easier with an audience. That approach is not always to my taste because it does tend to suggest a pretty patronising view on Damiani’s audience, but in this film, the director avoids most of the spirited monologing he loves so well and instead makes his points via the conflict between a bitter police captain (Martin Balsam) and an idealistic young D.A. (Franco Nero, cleverly and effectively cast against type), who want the same things but completely disagree on how to achieve them, arguing against political and societal corruption by showing what it does to individuals and their view of the world.

It’s a very effective film at this, and even better for the fact that this is one of the Damiani films where the director seems to have put as much heart and energy into the more generic crime elements as he has into the political side of the film, letting one enhance the other quite wonderfully.

Jaca Pocong (2018): A nurse (Acha Septriasa) is tasked to travel to a lonely country home to change an IV and make an injection, but quickly finds herself roped into a wake. Of course, there’s spooky stuff happening. And some of said spooky stuff in Hadrah Daeng Ratu’s Indonesian horror film is rather effective; the spookery is also rather generic in its nature, with only the not quite as worn out last act twist providing a hint of half-originality to the proceedings. It’s not a bad film before that, mind you, just one that seems so satisfied with standards shocks and suspense moments, it never gets too exciting.

On the other hand, it is crafted carefully enough that it also never becomes boring, so there’s that.