Three Films Make A Post: You were right to be afraid of the dark.

Daemonium: Soldier of the Underworld (2015): This Argentinean SF/action/horror film directed by Pablo Parés and apparently written by half a dozen people consequently features a nearly unintelligible and wildly overambitious plot that includes everything you might think of - from battle androids to rebellious arch angels –, characters whose design looks cheap yet awesome in all the right ways but who mostly lack any visible reason to do the things they do, and a running time of nearly two hours where eighty minutes would have sufficed.

Yet this is also clearly a labour of love that looks and feels like the adaptation of an especially bonkers European science fiction comic. It throws visual clichés and inventiveness at its audience with great vigour and enthusiasm, features some wonderfully chosen and framed locations (Argentina apparently looks like a weird far future post-apocalyptic wasteland), and has action scenes that are bloody, clever and much better staged than you’d expect. So, despite its flaws, I find this one impossible to dislike. This was clearly made by my people.

The Frontier (2015): Oren Shai’s deeply 70s cinema and noir inspired and 70s set crime movie is a bit of a mixed bag. Jocelin Donahue’s main performance is excellent, and Kelly Lynch and Jim Beaver lend equally good support, but the rest of the acting is very hit or miss, which is no surprise seeing as the film demands from its actors to approach 70s-style naturalism with a conscious distance. This also follows from a script which at times can feel stilted and too interested in demonstrating its knowledge of gestures taken from other movies than in making its own. The result is a film that often feels artificial for no good reason beyond demonstrating the filmmakers’ ability to make it so. Which, ironically enough, is the polar opposite to the kind of 70s cinema it can’t stop telling us it is inspired by; while the noir way of stylisation (the film’s other hallmark) never was interested in stylisation as an end in itself.

Legend of the Phantom Rider (2002): In theory, Alex Erkiletian’s western/horror mix about two ancient spirits – one good, one evil, of course – doomed to be reincarnated again and again to murder one another this time around having their little spat in the Old West, sounds like a sure enough bit of entertainment. At least if you like your westerns and your horror films and like them even better when they get together (that is, if you are me).

Unfortunately, practice finds this direct-to-video film to be rather tedious, giving us scene after scene after scene supposed to prove to the audience how evil the bad guy is but which mostly demonstrate that watching a bald guy who can’t act for shit (Robert McRay) being a bit off a sadist gets boring pretty damn quick. I have no idea how his henchmen cope with the boredom.

Harper’s Island (2009)

In this thirteen part limited run TV series, a bunch of out-of-towners with a history with the place descend on small Harper’s Island for the wedding of rich girl Trish Wellington (Katie Cassidy) and poor boy Henry Dunn (Christopher Gorham), because everyone involved had such a beautiful time there once. The fun mostly happened before a brutal series of murders committed by one John Wakefield on the island seven years ago, mind you.

The memories of these murders make the return for former local and our designated heroine Abby Mills (Elaine Cassidy) particularly difficult, since one of the victims Wakefield hung from what I must assume was his favourite tree was her mother. Still, Abby might just find the opportunity to hook up with her old love Jimmy (C.J. Thomason) and rebuild the relationship with her Dad Charlie (Jim Beaver) who is also the local sheriff and the guy who shot Wakefield and let him drop off a cliff. Well, she’ll do that, and try to survive the ensuing madness when people start to disappear (or, as we the audience know, get violently killed by a mysterious assailant and fan of death traps).

The CBS (but looking, feeling and featuring a cast that makes it look like a CW project) series Harper’s Island – with the sometimes excellent Jeffrey Bell as show runner - is the ungodly mixture of soap opera, “Ten Little Whatever” style whodunit and slasher you didn’t know you needed in your life. It’s not the ironic kind of slasher most TV attempts at the slasher form are either: while there’s a perfectly appropriate macabre sense of humour running through the show that’s best exemplified by episode titles like “Whap” or my personal favourite “Thrack, Splat, Sizzle” which do indeed onomatopoetically hint at (some of the) murders occurring in the episode, the show is playing things without the safety of ironic distance, so the slasher parts are indeed slasher parts and not parts about the slasher genre or the series’ assumed superiority over it.

Harper’s Island is also clever enough to realize that you can’t blow up the slasher format to a TV show without adding extra genre ingredients to it, so we get the Agatha Christie style whodunit – though one unable to construct red herrings that’ll confuse anyone but its literally terminally stupid characters – and the soap operatics. The last bit turns out to be a bit of a challenge in the first five episodes or so, at least for me, who really does not care about the plotline explaining how Rich Girl’s Dad (Richard Burgi) doesn’t want her to marry her fiancée and has taken his dear time to do anything about it, as well as other subplots I vaguely remember from Dallas. Particularly since the cast isn’t exactly full of interesting and likeable characters, for rather a lot of them are your standard soap opera types, and the melodramatic parts of the writing mostly work well only in the episodes Bell writes. On the plus side, if there’s a character you’re annoyed by, there’s more than just a good chance you’ll see him or her find a gruesome end, for even if the show is only marginally gory, the body count is insanely high and the death methods are created with a loving sense for detail and – probably evil – fun. And, hey, at least the victims aren’t slasher stereotypes.

Once the show gets going, and despite its heavy reliance on standard clichés, it becomes rather a lot of fun, showing the appropriate ruthlessness towards most of its characters, and really pulls off so many twists and fun little set pieces I can’t imagine anyone who likes even one of the genres involved won’t have fun with it.