Three Films Make A Post: Revenge is a Dirty Business

The Killer is Still Among Us (1986): Criminology PhD student (Mariangela D’Abbraccio) becomes convinced that the serial killer haunting her city now is the same one she has started to write her thesis on, who did his horrible work a decade or so ago. Because the rules of the giallo say so, she starts investigating herself and quickly gets in over her head.

Camillo Teti’s giallo is a pretty uneven effort. About half of it is either stylish, or genuinely clever, interestingly unpleasant or very tense; the other half still looks rather fine, but is the movie version of someone dragging their feet very slowly. It does certainly get up to a very clever (or infuriating, if you’re of that temperament when confronted with the highly eccentric) ending with a healthy dose of meta.

Clean (2020): Paul Solet’s (and Adrian Brody’s, seeing as he co-writes, produces, acts and writes the generic score) movie about a man of violence trying to mend his ways but getting dragged back into his old ways to protect some innocents has exactly one half-way original thought: treating our protagonist’s former violent ways as an addiction like his heroin one. Too bad that thought is also pretty damn stupid, psychologically dubious, and just not getting the movie anywhere more interesting. Otherwise, this is an okay entry into its sub-genre, with one or two pretty effective moments of violence, decent performances, and technically competent filmmaking.

The Eclipse (2009): I’m still not quite sure what to make of this Irish film directed and written by Conor McPherson. At times, it seems to prefigure the most arthouse affine arm of A24-style slow horror, but it also has some of the loudest jump scare ghosts ever annoying you with a VERY LOUD NOISE, and a script that never seems to want to decide on a tone. So the spookiness as metaphor stuff, scenes about grief and loneliness and scenes of a man slowly coming back to life via awkward romance are paired up with the sort of romantic farce you’d expect a local amateur theatre to come up with. All of it is staged in a stately and artful manner (if that fits any given scene or not), acted very well by Ciarán Hinds, Iben Hjejle and Aidan Quinn even in those moments when the material doesn’t deserve their efforts, and never really comes together for me.

Three Films Make A Post: Crawling, Slimy Things Terror-Bent on Destroying the World!

Preservation (2014): To my surprise, I found myself quite taken with this new variation on the old, old theme of people (in form of the excellent Wrenn Schmidt) having to unleash their inner beast to defend themselves against other people hunting them through the woods. At first, the film seems a bit talky and smug, but soon enough director Christopher Denham demonstrates a nice eye for mood, and all-around inventive yet subtle direction, and the film becomes pleasantly ruthless.

Sure, there’s little that’s new here, but Denham executes particularly the scenes taking place after the hunted has become the hunter™ very suspenseful, always ready to surprise with a minor twist on the formula or just a particularly well executed example of it. That’s really more than enough to keep me happy.

John Wick (2014): Take one painfully miscast lead actor, a bunch of great but underused character actors, dialogue so painfully stupid not laughing seems utterly impossible, some cool action scenes, just as many action scenes that are by far not as cool as they obviously think they are and go on and on and on and on, obnoxious loud music playing obnoxiously loud, and you have Chad Stahelski’s application for the job as the new Neveldine/Taylor or perhaps the new mid period Luc Besson. The resulting film is at times inadvertently funny (seeing as it concerns Keanu Reaves’s bloody vengeance on the Russian mobsters who stole his car and killed the little dog his dead wife gifted him from beyond the grave), at times actually exhilarating if stupid, and at other times painfully annoying in its permanent attempts at overstylizing everything and at overselling Keanu’s supposed badassness.

Dark Summer (2015): About half of Paul Solet’s film is a fine, subtle ghost story centring on ideas about love, desire, and the inability to get these things to work in a way that isn’t messy among teenagers, with two excellent lead performances by Keir Gilchrist and Stella Maeve and direction that makes a virtue of the film’s limited means. Alas, the other half – at times running in parallel to the good parts - is working hard to undo that good work with way too much stuff about black magic, eyebrow-raising twists, and the sort of scenes you put in your film when you don’t trust your audience to stay awake if you don’t shout at it “look, I’m a horror movie!” from time to time. Needless to say, it doesn’t work out too well for the film as a whole.

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