Three Films Make A Post: Seduction. Submission. Murder. Tonight . . . evil goes over the edge

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005): Despite being a friend of the darker kinds of humour, I often find myself nonplussed with comedies when they become too cynical, or rather, when they seem to dislike their own characters so much they can’t seem to find any shared emotional ground with them. Consequently, I have a complicated relationship with Shane Black’s stuff as a writer as well as a director. Here, at the start of the man’s career in the latter role, I find myself rather taken with what he produces. While the characters are certainly not all around loveable, Black doesn’t only wallow in their misfortunes, and his tendency to fourth wall breaking and ironic distance is very controlled and indeed responsible for many of the film’s funniest scenes. It’s also remarkable how good Black here is at scenes that are at once playing with genre conventions in funny ways and actually highly effective expressions of genre.

Add to that charming performances by Robert Downey Jr., Michelle Monaghan and Val Kilmer, and a lovingly absurd mystery plot kinda-sorta based on a Brett Halliday story, and you’ll find me with very uncomplicated feelings towards this particular Shane Black film.

The Big Sick (2017): Staying with comedies for a bit, Michael Showalter’s film based on a script by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon that’s based on their own early relationship, with Nanjiani playing himself and eternal indie romance heroine Zoe Kazan as Emily should by all rights be a mess of a film, or a terrible tear-jerker. As a matter of fact, it is anything but, and rather ends up being a highly successful quirky romantic comedy where that “quirky” isn’t code for “too twee”, a film about the specific problems of the children of immigrants, a sometimes drama about family, and a film that may on paper sound like a bit of an ego trip but that’s very much about people not called Kumail Nanjiani too, showing every character as complex and complicated trying to manoeuvre through the messes of life, love and so on.

It’s a fantastic film. The script is funny and moving and clever and so well plotted it feels completely natural, the acting (with people like Holly Hunter and Anupam Kher giving support) is great, and Showalter’s direction is all brilliant pacing and timing, so much so you might forget it’s there – which is an art to achieve.


The Guard (2011): And while I’m at it, why not finish up on another comedy, this time around John Michael McDonagh’s very Irish homage to buddy cop movies – or is it his answer to 80s action movies as a whole? Anyway, the film’s a showcase for the copious talents of Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle and others, and feels like a bit of an ode to the virtues that might be hidden under very dubious surfaces, with some excursions into actual tragedy (the scenes between Gleeson’s character Gerry Boyle and his dying mother played by Fionnula Flannagan are absolutely heart-breaking; also funny), realpolitik, and the sad fact that in some places, the abrasive, politically un-correct man of dubious morals in little things might just be the only moral guy in big things around.

Past Misdeeds: Zemlya Sannikova (1973)

aka The Sannikov Land

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

During the later stages of the existence of tsarist Russia. His - most probably revolutionary - politics have brought geographer Ilyin (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) into exile in a town near the polar circle. Ilyin dreams of being the first man to set foot onto Sannikov Land, an area north of the polar ice that is green and fecund instead of icy and barren. Some pretty talk about gold that might be found there with the local evil (as he does of course not actually intend to share the gold with the geographer) capitalist earns Ilyin, who is clearly much less interested in gold than exploration as a goal in itself, the funding for an expedition into the white north.

The expedition isn't exactly large: Ilyin, the local manly man/drunk/singer of horrible pop songs and fan of the Tsar Evgeniy Krestovskiy (Oleg Dal), and the capitalist's beleaguered right-hand man and odious comic relief Ignatiy (Georgi Vitsin) - who also seems to stand in for the oppressed working classes from time to time - make up the whole of the expedition, until revolutionary and doctor Gubin (Yuri Nazarov) sneaks on board the ship carrying the trio northwards. Gubin has escaped from prison, and is initially planning to hijack the ship to sail to America, but since he and Ilyin just happen to be old friends, and Ilyin really is quite convincing in his ardour to reach Sannikov Land, he becomes part of the expedition and the trio turns into a quartet.

Once they have set foot on icy land, the expedition doesn't go too well at first. The corpses of an earlier expedition also looking for Sannikov Land are something of a bad omen, and the Inuit our expedition has hired as guides while the camera wasn't looking turn back halfway, taking the dog sleds of the expedition with them (note to self: if you ever go on a polar expedition, bring your own dogs and sleds).

Just when all seems lost and our heroes start with the infighting and the dying, they reach Sannikov Land. It turns out the place is a valley kept warm by volcanic activity (uh oh), and really as green and pleasant as Ilyin had hoped. It's also populated by a tribe of phenotypically very diverse natives (from Caucasians in slight brown-face to a lot of Asians with blond and red wigs) called the Onkilon. While the Onkilon aren't as threatening as their demeanour initially suggests, their chief does not want anyone in the outside world to learn of the existence of their home. He's not a bad guy, though, for he is perfectly willing to provide the strangers with places among his tribe and (how romantic!) women of their own - as long as they never leave again.

This could be the beginning of a somewhat wonderful friendship (if one doesn't mind the imprisonment and shotgun wedding aspect), but alas, the tribe's shaman (Makhmud Esambayev in a performance somewhere between Iggy Pop and the worst Hollywood Indian you can imagine) has a different opinion. He sees that the strangers are threatening his power over the tribe and decides he needs to get rid of them; and while he's at it, he might get rid of that darn liberal chief for good measure.

Zemlya Sannikova is based on a novel in the Lost World mold by early Russian SF writer and man with a highly interesting life (just look at his Wikipedia page!) Vladimir Obruchev, and - as far as I can tell - is still something of a classic in the former Soviet Union. This is another indication (as if we needed more) that people at their core really are the same all over the world, political and cultural differences notwithstanding, for Zemlya Sannikova is exactly the sometimes cheesy, sometimes silly, sometimes awe-inspiringly beautiful kind of adventure movie people all over the world would love, featuring manly, bearded and morally upright heroes (except for the Tsarist, who just happens to be a bit of a prick), an insane shaman, various daring deeds, beautiful women in horrible clothing, and a basic idea that should make everyone's inner twelve year old gleefully happy. Naturally, there are a few differences in the movie's stereotypes when compared to western movies - the capitalist is evil in a slightly different way than capitalists in western movies are, for example. The film's ideology also is a bit different than one is used to from other adventure movies - the film ends on the heroes planning a rescue expedition for the threatened tribe instead of killing them all and taking their stuff, for Marx's sake! - though I think this internationalist streak is rather refreshing. Still, below these surface differences waits the archetype of the adventure story.

Often, the film is very good at what it does: Zemlya Sannikova's early stages not only convey the romance and pathos the kind of expedition our heroes go on carrries, but also a subtle sense of melancholia that will return in the film's final scenes; there's something desperate and beautiful in the history of human exploration of the world, and the early parts of Zemlya Sannikova really want to make that clear. Of course, that feeling of melancholia (already broken by two really quite horrible pop songs early on) soon enough makes room for one of slight insanity once the focus shifts from the exploration to the natives. For while the film tries its hardest to talk about some serious themes when it comes to the Onkilon, its treatment of everything surrounding the tribe is deeply cheesy and silly as is tradition in all Lost World type films. It's not just the fact that these "natives" are dressed up in ridiculous wigs and costumes no actual human being would ever have worn in any kind of wilderness, nor just that their culture - as far as we see it - does not make the slightest bit of sense (we're in full grown "they are big children, Jean-Jacques" territory here), nor is it the combination of these factors alone. Rather it's that their treatment as being the ultimate naïfs seems even more naive than they themselves are supposed to be, as if the film's only idea of how hunter and collector societies work came from a third grade version of Rousseau and Marx.

The latter gentleman truly comes in once we take a look at the film's main bad guy, the shaman, who is clearly supposed to be an example of the destructive power of religion (opium of the people, etc) - more evil than capitalism! - as a way to control the minds of a people. Of course, I can't say I disagree all that much with the film's views of organized religion, it's just that Zemlya Sannikova is simplifying a complex web of human wishes and desires until it turns into a ridiculous farce. That matter sure isn't helped by Esambayev's - a professional dancer who shows his talent in here in adorably ridiculous ways - hilarious performance. Even if one ignores the ideological aspect, it's pretty difficult to take a villain seriously who spends as much time shimmying, wobbling, shaking, hip-swinging and doing the funky chicken while chewing scenery as Esambayev does. On the other hand, while the man's performance might destroy any semblance of seriousness the film had until he appeared, he sure as hell is perfectly entertaining to watch.

Add to that elements like a soundtrack by Aleksandr Zatsepin that reaches from the (still horrible) pop songs to weird, moody synth noodling to Peter Thomas like psychedelic lounge electronica, or ideas like the marriage rites of the Onkilon (basically, they're playing catch), and you have a film as strange as one could hope for. All the silliness (and the sad, scientifically correct absence of dinosaurs and monstrous animals every lost world is supposed to contain) and the many scenes that are just as cheesy as those in a comparable Hollywood adventure movie would be come together into something highly diverting, if not exactly the film I had expected going in.


Directors Albert S. Mkrtchyan (last seen here directing the excellent Priskosnoveniye) and Leonid Popov manage this strange mixture of the earnest, the bizarre, the dogmatic and the plain fun with aplomb, using - often impressively beautiful - nature shots as the best special effect of them all, and treat every aspect of the film with dignity, never mind if the aspect at hand actually deserves any dignity. It might be a cliché, but there's just never a dull moment on screen in Zemlya Sannikova.

In short: Las brujas de Zugarramurdi (2013)

aka Witching and Bitching

I do remember a time, once in the long ago, when Álex de la Iglesia’s transgressive horror comedies were actually transgressive. Not that I liked them much, mind you, because they always had the whiff of watching films made by who did not give much of a throught about who the targets of his humour were as long as his films got someone outraged, and convinced someone else to defend him for reasons of art (seldom of, you know, substance to that art, alas). I always thought his films lacked any actual conviction, or anger, or bitterness, or love that would direct where he pointed his humour at.

This time around, it’s especially difficult not to see the lack of an actual edge in this tired sequence of mild misogyny and bored homophobia. I’m sure, parts of outrage culture will still be outraged (that’s what it lives off, after all, be it in the guise of right-wing guardians of public morals and freedom or of identity politically moved guarding the very same thing) but I couldn’t help but find myself bored by the tiredness of it all, yawning through much of the film, and finding my patience tried not by any moral apprehensions but by how little the film actually works at shocking – or entertaining, for that matter – its audience, as if shouting some shitty nonsense about women would even be worthy of notice. Being a prick who only spouts lame clichés, it turns out, isn’t all that transgressive in my book, just vaguely unpleasant, like the proverbial racist uncle one pointedly doesn’t talk to once a year yet who never seems worth the effort to actually get angry.


It doesn’t help the film as a horror comedy that it’s often quite sluggishly paced and needs nearly an hour to actually get going, but then, why should that part of the movie suggest any more intellectual or emotional involvement than anything else in it?

Revenge (2017)

Wealthy Richard (Kevin Janssens) has taken his young mistress Jen (Matilda Lutz in what will turn out to be quite the tour de force physical performance) to his modernist holiday home so deep in a desert they get flown in. The plan is for a bit of bump and grind with the young and somewhat naive woman, and then to have her fly out again before his friends Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) will come in for their yearly hunting get-together.

Alas, the guys come in a bit earlier than planned. These, as it will surprise nobody, are not the type of men a woman wants to be alone with. Leering and what one might just barely get away with calling sexual tension turns into rape when Richard is out to take care of their hunting licenses. When Jen rejects Richard’s offer to pay her off to forget the whole thing, he just pushes her off a mountain. Where rapist Stan and all-around shit Dimitri are still baseline human monsters, Richard turns out to be an honest to gawd sociopath.

It takes some time until these prime examples of upper class manhood realize that Jen has somehow survived the fall and crawled away to some hiding spot. Since these guys clearly live their lives following the question “What would a serial killer do?”, they, well, Richard decides - the others follow with more or less grumbling - to hunt Jen down and murder her again. They’ve got weapons, transport and equipment, after all, and Jen doesn’t even have water. Jen is by far not going to be the easy victim they are expecting, though.

Coralie Fargeat’s rape revenge film with the catchy title is rather special, not just because the director/writer being a woman leads to her approaching some of the well-worn plot beats of the subgenre somewhat – though not as extremely as one might expect - differently from most of the male directed brethren her film shares its genre with; not only because the film doesn’t stop at being somewhat more honestly feminist than is typical of a genre that often dances ambiguously between titillation and condemnation, without being didactic. It’s Fargeat’s ability to take, twist and shape genre standards and make them her own, staging everything from the rape scene, to action sequences to dream sequences and making it look easy.

Fargeat’s clearly perfectly okay with the implausibility of some of what happens in the film. In fact, there’s a line of dark, sardonic humour running through it that seems to luxuriate in the ability of a movie to be more than real. Things never devolve into outright comedy, though, the violence – while as over the top bloody as is the French style – always feels weighty and unpleasant, and the characters – the film even gives its trio of rapist shits a bit of depth and believable character relations which doesn’t make them more likeable but definitely more believable beyond “evil” – may be broadly drawn but are also exactly the type you might imagine would inhabit Revenge’s visual world.


Said visual world is rather spectacular too, Fargeat turning the desert and the house into playgrounds of colours, using directorial choices that hint at pop art and video clips yet which in her hands don’t feel tacky and distracting but fiercely focused. Just that this focus isn’t always exactly where you’d expect it to be – which is a good thing, obviously. There’s an air of the more-than-real/not-quite-real about Fargeat’s staging that turns the film from the decent genre programmer its plot might promise into something riveting, intense and dreamlike. At the same time, the director isn’t slave to her stylishness – the rape, the following violence, and so on, never feel lessened in impact or meaning by the way they are shot, but, as it should be, strengthened.

In short: Boar (2017)

A nice Australian family, with Bill Moseley playing the married-in stepdad from the US, have chosen a pretty bad time to visit giant – probably mutant - brother Bernie (Nathan Jones, apparently once a professional strongman known as “Megaman” to which there is nothing to add) in his outback home. For there’s a – most certainly mutant – giant boar roaming this particular stretch of the big Australian nothing, destroying fences, cars, cattle, and killing and sometimes just kidnapping people for its larder.

Why, the thing even murders good old John Jarratt, despite the man for once not playing a serial killer but a stand-up guy. Well, and it will murder large parts of the rest of the cast, too. Obviously.

Well, Razorback Chris Sun’s Boar clearly ain’t. There are certainly no ambitions visible on screen for this to be artistic or deep. This is very consciously built to be just a really fun monster flick without pretensions but also – thankfully - with little irony concerning its own genre.

Even though I wouldn’t exactly call Boar a comedy, the film has quite a few consciously goofy elements, scenes that are probably in it because they’re good fun instead of there to do much for either the plot or the characters. But then, once you encounter the scene where Nathan Jones rides around the countryside while rapping to that, ahem, classic “Ice Ice Baby”, you just might be like me and stop wanting it any other way. The film does take most of the violence and the boar attacks seriously enough, though, or as seriously as a film including something like the dramatic scene in which Jones has a knife fight with the mangy giant thing can get.

Otherwise, the film has quite a bit of fun with presenting many an outback dweller cliché, but with a twist, so everyone’s entertainingly and somewhat hilariously foul mouthed, bar owners solve the problem of grabby customers by kicking their ass, and so on and so forth. These scenes are generally so entertaining, they don’t ever feel like the filler they actually are, but rather like the film having its fun just letting the characters interact with one another and that this is indeed how rural Australia rolls.


The boar– a mixture of practical effects and CGI I believe – is looking rather impressive too for most of the time, coming over as an actual physical presence in most of its scenes, and certainly as a dire threat to life and limb of the characters. In general, Sun is as competent a hand at the action scenes as he is at the funny character bits, so there’s little at all to stand in the way of what seems to be the Boar’s main goal: being a fun movie about very Australian Australians fighting a big ass boar.

Music Monday: November Edition

Slaughter of the Innocents (1993)

Warning: some spoilers ahead because there are a couple of moments late in the movie I need to mention, for I am only human!

Top FBI agent Stephen Broderick (Scott Glenn) seems to have rather a lot of leeway with the Bureau. At least, it seems to be par for the course for him, when it is not going to be dangerous, to take his crime obsessed boy genius son Jesse (Jesse Cameron-Glickenhaus) with him. Apparently, Broderick appreciates his help analysing cases of serial killing, rape and so on and so forth. It is very possible that Jesse is supposed to be somewhere on the Autism spectrum, but then this is a film where a little kid habitually helps his FBI father solve crimes, so its ideas what is neurotypical and what not may differ rather a lot from most anybody else’s.

With Jesse’s help, Stephen nearly – the local prison warden is alas an ass - manages to save the life of a young mentally ill guy on death row in Utah for a murder and kidnapping he certainly did not commit. The crime fighting duo also finds out that this case is part of a whole series of related crimes committed by a disorganized killer if ever you’ve seen one.

Will Jesse make his way to Utah on his own and get into great danger when his dad decides things are getting too dangerous for him? You betcha.

Even James Glickenhaus amateurs like me know that the director/writer/producer was generally all about movies about cops and vigilantes made and set in grubby Koch era New York. But what’s an exploitation filmmaker to do when suddenly, post Silence of the Lambs, nobody wants to see unwashed men shooting drug dealers while rats skitter through blue lit streets? Not making any films at all is no solution for any working director, so a film about an FBI guy hunting a serial killer it was for Glickenhaus. And while one is at it, why not add a weird kid as assistant, gate to the wonders of modern technology and object to be threatened in the end? Films with kids always go down well, right? And hey, when you can cast your own son, it’s going to be a cheap kid too.

Jesse Cameron-Glickenhaus, as becomes obvious rather quickly, is not one of the great child actors, and his Jesse certainly isn’t a believable kid at all, but then, given that he’s not written as one, it’s unfair to lay the blame on the poor kid. As a matter of fact, if you go into Slaughter of the Innocents expecting anything or anyone in it to be describable with the word “believable”, you’re absolutely out of luck. This is the serial killer thriller at its most absurd, with a finale that sees Jesse finding the killer’s secret cave in the desert, which is a place where our antagonist has built a new ark and dressed it up with rotting human corpses, as well as taxidermied animals, including a giraffe. The giraffe is, obviously, a plot point that leads the kid there. As it will turn out, it is also particularly annoying to the killer that his god still hasn’t gotten around to a new flood despite him having brought a giraffe to his ark. This, mind you, is not played for comedic effect at all (or Glickenhaus’s humour is drier than the desert), but follows a scene of an increasingly traumatized child stumbling through the killer’s Cave o’Corpses that wouldn’t feel out of place in particularly crass slasher.


Crassness really is a large part of Slaughter of the Innocents special charms. There’s also the discovery of the bloody corpse of a little girl early on, as well as a grim and overheated portrayal of an execution, and other moments in the same style. Glickenhaus is not quite wallowing in this sort of thing enough to make the hardened exploitation viewer queasy, but clearly has no shame at all in doing things in an unpleasant way even when it isn’t strictly necessary. This crassness, the willingness to go there is paired with the nearly comical absurdity of the whole plot – the killer makes no sense, his background makes no sense, the clue trail includes a stolen giraffe – as well as with an effective sense of the grotesque. The killer’s home, for example, isn’t just crass, but it also looks absolutely like the product of a perverted religious imagination that is to equal parts based on kitsch and violence, so while it is absurd, it also provides the right kind of frisson.

Three Films Make A Post: BIG MEETS BIGGER

The Maus (2017): Using genre cinema and elements of the fantastical strictly for parable and allegory is usually the best way for a genre film to get friendly nods from critics who prefer their movies Serious and Meaningful. As Yayo Herrero’s film demonstrates, there is an easy trap to fall in with this approach, asking an audience to somehow connect with a film whose characters aren’t people – aren’t even supposed to be people – but stand-ins for groups of thousands or more individuals and/or mouthpieces for ideas.

Consequently, here, the two Serbian characters are human monsters, the Bosnian woman traumatized into violently striking back, and her German boyfriend just not able to understand because nobody murdered his family. A series of clichés which I believe amply demonstrates how shallowly this film that’s supposed to be about ideas approaches its historical target, turning a complex and horrifying part of recent history into something that’s pat and easily understandable, not reduced to its basics but simplified until the whole noble gesture of this being a Meaningful movie about Serious things seems rather dubious. Why, I can’t help but think if the film had been about specific people instead, it might have been able to actually say more about the world they inhabit and the forces that shaped them.

Habit (2017): Staying in the realm of not terribly convincing genre filmmaking, how about this poverty porn/horror movie by Simeon Halligan? If you went and told me a film concerning a cannibal sex cult running nightclubs and bordellos could be quite as bland and bloodless as this one, I wouldn’t have believed it. Alas, bland and bloodless it is, selling its argument that life as a modern city poor, the inevitable emptiness only lightened by drunken debauchery (don’t tell filmmakers not all of us lower class people are self-destructive alcoholics), can easily push one into enjoying the supposed feeling of life that comes with being a cannibal (the film tells yet doesn’t show that feeling, obviously), with all the energy and depth of an empty battery.

There’s absolutely an exciting, insightful film to be made out of the basic set-up and its basic interests, but that film would have some life to it, and would probably have a point its actually trying to get across beyond: being poor is really bad for your mental health. Who’d have thunk?

Thoroughbreds (2017): Fortunately, I can end this post on a satisfying note, namely with this nasty black comedy about the friendship between two teenage female upperclass sociopaths (Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy in performances that are in turn disturbing, sad, and funny). The film recommends itself not only through the performances of its wonderful leads, but also through its sardonic portrayal of the young women’s upperclass world, the kind of privilege that seems bound to create sociopaths while only willing to notice them when they are acting out a little. It’s the old ditty about the terrors lurking beneath the surface of a supposedly normal world given a large twist of class consciousness, and presented with dry wit.


Director Cory Finley’s clinical style of direction will not be to everyone’s taste but to my eyes, it seems the perfect approach to telling the tale of two people who only ever perform emotions.

Past Misdeeds: P.O.V. - A Cursed Film (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


During the shoot of the low rent idol show of Mirai Shida (playing herself) with special guest Haruna Kawaguchi (playing herself too), something disturbing happens. The show's gimmick of the week is to have the two teenagers watch ghost videos, but the videos that appear on screen aren't the ones the director and the girls’ manager have vetted beforehand.

In fact, these videos contain much better footage than this sort of video usually does, and they all seem to be shot at Haruna's former junior high school, which must be the most haunted school in Japan. Oh, and the videos continue playing when the DVD they are on isn't actually in its laptop anymore. Haruna, who spent some time at her junior high hunting but never finding exactly the ghostly apparitions she now sees on screen, is convinced she is cursed, an idea that does not become weaker once the crew films the reflection of a female ghost in one of the studio windows.

Clearly, this situation affords a fine possibility for the show to hire the world's most matter of fact psychic (who, we will learn, is psychic, not a mind reader) to help Haruna and finally get some really exciting footage. Alas, the psychic is sure that Haruna's little ghost problem can only be solved inside of the junior high. Of course, once the film crew is inside the place, they'll get to see more of the ghosts than they probably asked for.

It looks like the found footage/POV horror sub-genre is suddenly somewhat hot again in Japan. This does not come as much of a surprise seeing as how ideally the genre is suited to low budgets, with footage that is generally supposed to look cheap, no need for complicated camera set-ups or sets, scripts that tend to the simple, and hordes of idols willing to act in everything being churned out by the Japanese entertainment machine. Somewhat surprisingly going by the standard of the POV genre in the USA and Europe, a lot of the newer Japanese POV films I have seen are actually decent or even better, with Koji Shiraishi's Occult and this one being particular stand-outs that manage to fulfil all genre expectations yet also give the clichés they are working with small, effective twists.

POV and Occult invite some comparisons in other aspects than their respective quality, too. Both films are directed by men who have done good, sometimes great, work in the second row of Japanese horror directors. POV's Norio Tsuruta does not have anything quite as brilliant as Shiraishi's Noroi or A Slit-Mouthed Woman in his filmography, but his films clearly show him to be someone who understands the horror genre and is intelligent enough to know that the point of making genre movies isn't just giving people what they want from them but also surprising the audience with slight twists on and tweaks to a given formula.

POV is a perfect example of the latter. In its basic set-up, the film seems as generic as possible, with the usual non-characters going about their horror movie days, and the expected ghosts (though a lot more of them than you usually see in a film like this) doing the expected ghostly things. And what 's more generic than a middle part that mostly consists of people shaking their cameras, screaming, and running through a dark building? The film's plot, however, is decidedly more clever than it at first appears, using the comfortably familiar spook show elements in service of something more sinister and more creepy, leading into a semi-apocalyptic post-ending titles climax that is surprising and highly effective in its nature.

POV is also one of the few films of its sub-sub-genre that seems interested in using the discomfort the basics of Japanese idol culture can produce in a viewer who isn't a total idiot, presenting the low rent entertainment biz in a subtly bad light, possibly even suggesting this sort of entertainment and its unspoken greed would be the perfect in-road for actual evil (or, ironically, that certain ghosts would see idol culture as a nice way to finally become famous). POV does not explore this aspect all that deeply (which is not coming as much of a surprise from a film that by necessity is itself a part of perhaps dubious, always looked down upon, circles of pop culture), but that does also mean it's not getting preachy - and therefore annoyingly hypocritical - about it. It's just an element that's there to add more cultural resonance to the film.

Of course, all of POV's interesting subtext would be quite wasted if it did not also succeed at the bread and butter parts of a horror movie, the shocks, the moments of discomfort, and the all-purpose creepiness. Many of the film's fright scenes are based on sometimes imaginative variations of pretty traditional Japanese ghosts and traditional POV horror shocks. About half of them tend to the more carnivalesque jump scare mode, as well as grating on audience nerves by having the characters screech and shake their cameras, but there are also some exceedingly creepy scenes based on clever sound design, shadows, and my eternal favourite (that also turns a ghost story into something Weirder for me), scenes of time and space losing their usual consistence to threaten the characters. That last element is especially finely realized in the film's first major climax, a scene I find too delightful/disturbing/effectively tense to spoil by describing it. Let's just say it involves a disappearance, a camera, and a ghost moving towards the characters making rather disturbing noises (as Japanese ghosts are wont to, of course), and that it actually got to me.

Tsuruta - who also wrote the script - shows itself as a director very capable of using the more subtle parts of horror craft even in a context like POV horror that often doesn't seem all that interested in them, with a real gift for pacing the suspense scenes beyond the usual running and screaming.


Thanks to him, POV is a surprisingly excellent piece of filmmaking.

In short: Against the Night (2017)

aka Amityville Prison (I have no idea)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the ending, so you don’t have to suffer through the movie!

One among a number of completely interchangeable young horror movie people – even their names seem to be chosen to be as generic as possible – who earns his money shooting fake ghost hunting stuff convinces his friends to go and visit an abandoned prison with him. After way too much time of all eight of these nonentities babbling over one another, they split up into smaller groups and get slaughtered, mostly off-camera. Stupid plot twists ensue. Your seasoned viewer of crap movies sighs in annoyance, then the most stupid plot twist of them all happens, and he does at least respect the film for really not having a single brain cell, yet also no shame.

So, if your dream movie is one that features all the problems of bad POV horror films, despite only half consisting of night vision shakycam etc, Brian Cavallaro’s Against the Night is probably an absolute dream come true. This thing features characterisation so thin it’s basically see-through, no personality to anyone on screen, a plot that starts about half an hour into the film, shots so dark you can’t see much even once there may actually be something happening on screen potentially worth seeing, and a story so generic and empty one might as well call it a parking lot instead of a story.

All of which, particularly with characters who barely manage to at least be horror film clichés, makes it rather difficult to care even once something does indeed start to happen. Sure, there’s a bit of violence, there’s some bickering, probably meant as dramatic tension and paranoia as imagined by someone who has no clue what these words mean, but there’s nobody and nothing on screen, neither person nor idea, that could actually give you a reason to care about any of it. Also, darkness, night vision and screaming does not automatically lead to atmosphere.


On the plus side, the final twist reveals that the killer is not as assumed some guy in a gasmask but an alien with face tentacles that maybe look a little like a gasmask when a film is lit quite as darkly as this one. Against the Night even plays fair and does present the alien explanation earlier, letting one character theorize aliens are haunting the prison and killing idiots with generic names because it is shaped like a crop circle.  This, ladies and gents, is the art of screenwriting.

Shakedown (1988)

aka Blue Jean Cop

New York. Just one week before he’s going to leave his legal aid career behind and start a job in the Wall Street law firm of his rich girl fiancée's rich daddy, once idealistic - now pretty cynical but not completely hopeless - Roland Dalton (Peter Weller) gets quite the case dropped in his lap. Low level drug dealer Michael Jones (Richard Brooks) has apparently shot an undercover cop during an arrest attempt, but Michael says the guy tried to shoot him and steal his money and drugs without ever identifying himself as a police officer instead of a common robber. After all, if a cop would have wanted to shake Michael down, he would have let him take whatever he wanted and let his own bosses sort things out with the dirty cops. Roland believes Michael.

A friendly chat with his cop buddy Richie Marks (Sam Elliott), suggests a course of investigation to Roland that will lead to a bit of hornet’s nest of a group of corrupt cops – whose corruption is of course ignored by the rest of the force for the usual corps spirit bullshit reasons – trying to get a bit more involved in the business of a local crack kingpin (Antonio Fargas).

To add more complications, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case is the love of Roland’s life (Patricia Charbonneau) – not to be confused with his fiancée.

I am not as a great an expert on the body of work of James Glickenhaus as some other writers roaming the movie blog and podcast world are, so I just accept their received wisdom that this on paper somewhat bizarre combination of 80s action movie and courtroom drama is indeed Glickenhaus’s magnum opus. At the very least, it’s pretty damn great, avoiding he drabness of most films about people shouting “OBJECTION!” – Ace Attorney excepted – by replacing the boring bits with stuff like scenes of Sam Elliott chasing some skinny idiot through what I assume is Coney Island, and ending up on a roller coaster, or with a pretty fantastic trike versus car chase with Weller riding handgun, and a finale where Elliott solves the age old grudge match between action hero and small plane once and for all.

These scenes are generally not filmed in the overly slick way one might perhaps expect but embedded in the Glickenhaus typical (so much do even I know about his films) eye for the grimiest bits of late 80s New York, grounding the adrenaline-driven absurdity of 80s action cinema in what feels like a totally real place. Indeed, one of the film’s great strengths is how leisurely and non-dramatic its plotting is, not because the writer/director doesn’t know how to make things tight (you can’t shoot action like this if you don’t know) but because Glickenhaus seems just as interested in portraying the world his characters inhabit – for better or worse – as in the action. So even something like the whole sub-plot in which Roland and his ex are falling back in love with each other and his struggle to tell his fiancée the truth about how he feels and really, who he truly is, do not feel like filler but rather are successful attempts at creating a world that may or may not be a heightened version of how the film and its director sees New York.

This gives a film that’s beholden to a gritty version of 80s pedal to the metal action, speechifying courtroom drama (wonderfully done by Weller, by the way), and some dubious plot ideas – Roland really breaks into a lot of places and likes to get into violent situations for the honest lawyer he’s supposed to be – an uncommon sense of earnestness, very much emphasizing the value of providing its characters with humanity and the world they live in with substance in genres where that sort of thing isn’t always par for the course. This also results in some very typical cliché situations and constellations actually feeling fitting and human, even though they are not actually all that different from the dozens of other times when they just annoyed me.


The cast obviously gets this, too, so there’s a complete lack of winking and being all ironic about being evil from large parts of the ensemble. Instead everyone plays things straight and puts actual effort into their roles. Weller is simply great, whereas Sam Elliott – complete with the facial hair we his fans demand of him – convinces through his typical Sam-Elliott-ness and much soulful and/or disgusted staring. But really, everyone here is completely on point.

In short: Minutes Past Midnight (2016)

Minutes Past Midnight isn’t quite your typical horror anthology but structured rather more like a literary anthology which, curated by Justin McConnell, brings together various short films that weren’t necessarily meant to be parts of a full length movie. I rather like this format, for it certainly helps bring short films to viewers that wouldn’t seek them out as standalones or have no way of seeing them because a surprising amount of shorts isn’t actually online and can mostly be experienced by people who either live near one of the places where a genre film festival takes place or can afford to travel to one.

Unlike with most anthology films I write up, I’m not going to go into every single one of the segments. Let’s just say that most of them are solid to great – except for Ryan Lightbourn’s “Roid Rage” which is pretty much everything I don’t like in a movie condensed into one short – but put out a couple of words for the highlights.

The most obvious highlight is of course Kevin McTurk’s puppet animation “The Mill At Calder’s End”, a wonderful concoction of Gothic mood concerning a family curse in the Victorian age, featuring the voices of the great Barbara Steele and Jason Flemyng (and one puppet that looks rather a lot like Peter Cushing), and making not a single misstep in design, tone, or mood. It’s simply a perfect piece of short cinema.

Also very fine, if not quite as exalted as “The Mill” is Christian Rivers’s “Feeder”, the tale of a struggling musician moving into a rundown house in a rundown part of suburbia where he encounters an entity that trades sacrifice – indicating its wishes through scratched drawings on a wooden floor – for inspiration. As it goes in these matters, the sacrifices required tend to grow and grow. I really like the folkloristic echoes of the trading of sacrifice for inspiration, turning this into a bit of a piece of suburban, Australian folk horror (at least as I would define the word). It’s realized with a solid understanding of how much it needs to show of the sacrifices and their psychological consequences to to be effective. It also ends on a neat little twist that may not come as a complete surprise but fits the tone of the whole piece wonderfully.


Last but not least, I’m going to praise “Ghost Train”, a tale of childhood guilt turning deadly by Lee Cronin, featuring a fantastically creepy looking animatronic ghost train (the kind you find at a carnival, not he sort that makes choo choo), some harsh revenge from the grave by one of the creepier undead children I’ve seen in my long career of watching this stuff. It’s told in a mood that reminded me quite a bit of the stories of Australian writer Terry Dowling, who also often circles comparable thematic concerns and motifs.

Music Monday: Deportee Edition

Dead Night (2017)

One spring break, the Pollack family make their way into one of those all too typical cabins in the snowy woods, taking their daughter Jessica’s (Sophie Dalah) best friend Becky (Elise Luthman), too. It’s not just your standard vacation, though, but rather mom Casey’s (Brea Grant) last attempt at saving her husband James (AJ Bowen) from a brain tumour. The cabin, you see, is supposedly built on magical healing stones right from the realm of woo woo. However, something magical is going to happen when James finds an unconscious woman in the woods who is going by the improbable moniker of Leslie Bison (Barbara Crampton). Alas, it’s the kind of magic that leads to zombie families and axe massacres.

Speaking of axe massacre, while the increasingly demented plot unfolds, the film from time to time cuts into what a mysterious person or thing watches on a tower of TVs stacked up in the middle of the woods: an episode of a sensationalist true crime TV show about Casey’s axe-murder of her whole family. Well, and a TV spot for Leslie Bison’s run for Ohio governor.

That true crime TV show is one of the best parts of Brad Baruh’s pretty bizarre and terribly fun little horror film. It hits exactly the right tone with its over-earnest, sleazy presenter, the kitschy and melodramatic recreations, and the generally sanctimonious tone that comes with the business of making a quick buck out of terrible shit that has happened to people, without a care for boring things like truth, doubt, and responsibility. This part of the film is going to be even more entertaining than it already is once Dead Night comes around to telling the audience who watches it, when, and why, coming up with an answer that makes no logical sense (it’s not supposed to, mind you), the movie staring at its audience as if daring it to call it a damn liar. It’s pretty fantastic.

Also rather wonderful are Dead Night’s practical gore effects, a series of nicely done and excellently grotesque disfigurements that doesn’t really stop once the film has gotten going. As a frequent horror viewer, I did of course know where all of this was going in broad strokes very early on, but the film has a tendency to play with and audiences expectations at least a bit, coming up with improbable ideas and illogical little twists that certainly aren’t common.

That’s not the sort of thing everyone will enjoy, so if you need the plan of a movie’s villains to make much sense, even if it is only a ritualistic one, or things in a film to happen somewhat akin to the way things happen in the real world, you won’t find much joy here. In fact, Dead Night goes out of its way to present the violent supernatural as we know and love it from horror movies of the late 80s and the 90s as something that is at its core not logical and will therefore not act in manners that completely make sense. Or at least, that’s how its treatment seems to.


If you’re like me and go for stuff like this, you just might have a wonderful time, not only with the gory and strange bits but also some shots of wonderful strangeness, be it the TVs in the woods or Crampton’s behaviour in the cabin before the minor killing spree starts, including a fantastic bit of passive aggressive milk drinking. That last part again demonstrates how much of a treasure Crampton as a character actress specialised in all sorts of creepy, disturbed, or disturbing women has become in her return to horror.

Three Films Make A Post: You can change the cards you're dealt.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995): And with the third attempt, the magic disappears completely from the Die Hard movies. Willis’s John McClane is now pretty much like every other action hero thanks to the shunting away of his wife and the non-generic parts of his character. The moments of surprising veracity from the last films are gone, too, and the less said about the film’s attempt to make gestures of tackling racism via its buddy movie plot line with a Samuel L. Jackson who gives the only fun performance in the whole movie the better. The thing additionally suffers from a limp script that doesn’t seem to have much of a clue how to turn a series of action sequences into a movie.

Even worse, returning John McTiernan is at his worst here, directing action scenes that are basically competent but never fun, interesting, or exciting. I understand why everyone involved thought removing the constraints of locality of the first films to be a good idea, but replacing their tight, increasingly outrageous action sequences with Willis and Jackson racing all over New York solving stupid riddles while random stuff breaks isn’t an entertaining replacement. And don’t even get me started on Jeremy Irons’s performance that is exactly the wrong kind of cartoonish.

Another WolfCop (2017): I don’t think I exactly needed a sequel to WolfCop in my life, even if it is by returning director/writer Lowell Dean again. I especially did not need one where half the jokes are slight variations on ones from the first film. However, its (sometimes too) self-conscious charms, its goofy-gory humour and its general Canadian-ness might not quite add up to the outrageous gore and giggle-fest its (awesome) poster and its brilliant tagline (“Sequels are a disease. Meet the cure.”) promise but Another WolfCop is as good-natured and likeable as a meta-humorous pseudo-grindhouse film can get, and that’s worth something in my book.


Mara (2013): Over in Scandinavia it apparently takes three directors to make this – sometimes very pretty to look at – film about young people in a house in the woods – etc, etc. For a time, the whole affair looks and feels like your typical low budget slasher (including quite a bit of gratuitous nudity), perhaps artier shot, then it turns out to be a double-twist thriller that at least tries to play with the audience expectations towards plot twists. While I like the idea, and find the film more than competently shot, I don’t think the plot comes together well enough for the film to be interesting. Even with the twists, it’s just not very interesting, or exciting, or even fun to watch.

Past Misdeeds: Wu Xia (2011)

aka Swordsmen

aka Dragon

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


China, 1917. Liu Jin-Xi (Donnie Yen) lives a peaceful life with his wife Ah Yu (Tang Wei), her son from a first marriage Liu Fang-Zheng (Zheng Wei) and their son Liu Xiao-Tian (Li Jia-Min) in a country town, working in a paper mill. Shadows of a different man Liu Jin-Xi once was begin to emerge when two martial artist villains try to rob the mill.

Liu Xiao-Tian kills the men in what on first look seems like a series of exceedingly lucky accidents, making him the hero of the village. But Xu Bai-Jiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), the detective investigating the villains' death, has his doubts regarding Xiao-Tian. How, after all, should one hapless butcher's son be able to "accidentally" kill two of the meanest martial artists around? Some of the physical evidence Xu Bai-Jiu finds tells a different story, too, and the detective is soon convinced Xiao-Tian must be a masterful martial artist and experienced killer who is just using this identity to hide himself from the law.

Even though Xiao-Tian must be a changed man from whoever he was before, Xu Bai-Jiu can't help himself but go after him, sniffing and asking questions and even accommodating himself at Xiao-Tian's place. Xu Bai-Jiu's own past has him convinced that his natural tendency to compassion is a weakness before the spirit of the law that needs to be purged, so he treats his sense of empathy as an illness that keeps him unable to practice the martial arts; not surprisingly, he also doesn't believe a man can ever truly change, so Xiao-Tian becomes an obsession and a riddle for him to solve.

Xu Bai-Jiu's investigation has other consequences than those he intends, too, for once it has reached a certain point, the people that made Xiao-Tian the man he once was (Jimmy Wang Yu! Kara Hui!) learn where their old friend now is, and they very much want him back, not realizing that some men do in fact change.

Peter Chan Hoh-San's Wu Xia is one those films from Hong Kong that makes me doubt the truth of the old-fartish refrain of "things in Hong Kong cinema are just so bad now" I and many other long-time fans of the city's cinematic output have been singing for about a decade now, for how bad can a regional cinema truly be if it still can produce fantastic movies like this?

In time-honoured fashion, Wu Xia mixes elements of the mystery genre with elements of the wuxia (a real surprise given its title, surely), to form a meditation on the possibility of change in people, the usefulness of suppressing impulses, and even the old question about nature and nurture that may remind some of Cronenberg's A History of Violence, just with the difference that Chan's film - unlike that of the Canadian - is not a comedy. (To digress for a parenthesis, yes, I am that weird guy who really thinks Cronenberg's film is not just a black comedy, but is also meant to be one rather than as the bloody drama most viewers seem to see when watching it; I'll only point at the nature of the sexual role-play between Mortensen and Bello as an obvious hint at that film's true nature.)

Unlike Mortensen's Tom Stall, though, Xiao-Tian isn't only truly alive when he is a monster, and his family life with Ah Yu and the children never has the feeling of somebody going through trained motions without any actual emotions; Xiao-Tian may have only locked away the monstrous parts of himself, but what's left is not an automaton, but an actual human being.

The movie's first two thirds are in large parts about exploring its two male main characters (with Tang Wei getting a handful of scenes that flesh her out as a character more than I would have expected from a film with this set-up and structure - it sure helps how much the actress is able to express with just a few looks) as mirror images of each other: Xiao-Tian as a man who has locked away everything destructive and monstrous about himself to become a human being, and Xu Bai-Jiu who has locked away his most human traits - compassion and empathy - to become a better agent of the Law. The former is a man who will not use his martial arts abilities because they are so closely connected to his worst nature, the latter unable to use his because his best nature cost him his abilities. I can't imagine what the Chinese censor thought about the film's treatment of compassion and the Law, especially since the film treats Xu Bai-Jiu as being in the wrong with his priorities; it's nice to still find Hong Kong films that dare to argue for humanist values being more important than the jackboot. Interestingly, the film also seems to express that it's easier to suppress one's worst impulses than one's best. Of course, both of Wu Xia's main characters will have to accept parts of what they've kept closed up to become fully functional human beings, possibly even heroes.

I was a bit surprised by how well Donnie Yen is able to sell his character's complexities. I do of course love the man and his generally motionless or scowling face, but he always has been a better martial arts actor than an actor, and this is a film that needs him to express himself outside of fight scenes quite a bit. Yen is still using more body language and posture than facial expression (though he has developed a surprisingly pleasant ability to smile over the years), but he is doing that very well, selling the inner changes his character goes through without having to talk about them.


The well handled philosophical discourse alone would be more than enough to recommend Wu Xia, but there is so much more to love here: there are the fantastic fight scenes - of course choreographed by Yen - that dominate the film's final third; Chan's curious yet effective decision to treat Chinese village life of the early 20th century as a peculiar mixture of naturalism and bucolic idyll and still have martial arts be more than a little magical instead of "realistic"; the relatively small but important roles of Jimmy Wang Yu and Kara Hui who feature in the film's two most intense fight scenes; the way the film uses Kaneshiro's traditional Chinese science and medicine as the base for some CSI-inspired scenes and makes that work too without things becoming ridiculous; how Chan's direction handles action, near-mythical dramatic family conflicts, human-level emotions and moments of peace with the same assured sense of rhythm and pacing as well as a deep understanding of their importance. In Wu Xia, it's all good.

In short: Amazing Stories (1994)

Original title: 野店

This Taiwanese anthology horror film directed by Chin Ao-Hsin clearly shares the goals and aesthetics of the milder Hong Kong CATIII movies by adding quite a bit of female nudity to a trio of at heart traditional Chinese horror tales. Stylistically, the film certainly looks the part, too, for it is full of the kind of camera angles, dolly shots, colours and even performance styles typical of Hong Kong cinema of the time. I suspect this was actually shot for the Hong Kong market more than the Taiwanese one, though I certainly can’t prove it.

In any case, the first story concerns the plight of a young woman and her mentally handicapped brother who have been sold off (married?) to a sadistic prick owning and working a small pre-industrial textile mill – which makes for a very moody and claustrophobic backdrop – who likes to rape and torture the girl. After her brother drowns in an accident, our heroine’s beloved male scholar doll she has owned since she was a little child comes alive turning into a man she actually falls in love with, and who will duel the prick repeatedly. Apart from the awesome mill, this first story has it all: torture, an awkward kung fu duel, a loathsome villain, a cringeworthy portrayal of a mentally handicapped man, as well as consensual sex and a genuinely exciting climax (no, the other one) prick versus burnable doll person. And, you know, a male hero called Baby Doll.

The second story concerns a guy living in some kind of no man’s land digging out the remains of people so their relatives can take them with them when moving away (everybody moves away). He encounters one of yon seductive supernatural women who like to suck out men’s life-force during sex (an idea that, as far as I know, has been a traditional concept in various Chinese culture groups for literal ages). This specific woman even has a reason for this, for in an earlier life, he promised to commit suicide together with her, but changed his mind at the last moment, leaving her unable to ever be reincarnated as a human again. However, when the gravedigger (reverse gravedigger?) was a child, he saved the life of a female badger(?) spirit, who enters into a mild yet pretty fun wire fu duel with the sex sucker. Again, this packs a lot into a short running time, and while Chin’s direction is a bit generic, the genre in question is 90s wire fu with sexy bits of dubious taste, so it’s certainly an enjoyable little tale.


The third and longest story did leave me a bit puzzled, I have to admit. Its set-up is basically The Postman Always Rings Twice situated in civil war China, with some added bits about impotence, but the tale ends in a way I find less than satisfying, leaving exactly the wrong characters alive for the wrong reasons and presenting a plot twist plan that’s so improbable, it could be from a US horror film made in 2018. The tale also asks its audience to buy a not terribly gracefully aged, sixty-year old Tin Ching as the studliest man alive. However, in between, there are quite a few sweaty, claustrophobic moments to witness, so the third episode may be the film’s weakest, but isn’t a total wash.

Arumi (2018)

Warning: I kinda sorta need to spoil the ending here!

In the age old tradition of teenagers and people in their twenties, as well as people in their twenties pretending to be teenagers in horror cinema everywhere, this Indonesian production sees Rasti (Ardina Rasti) and a small gaggle of friends make their way to a villa in the middle of the jungle owned by the young woman’s family for some very mild partying. How mild? Beer, we will learn, is really, really bad.

Personally, I find the idea of Rasti choosing this particular place for partying somewhat dubious, for the villa is the place where her father murdered the rest of her family and then himself when she was just as small kid. But then, I’m not a horror film character.

Be it as it may, on their way to the villa, the characters encounter a little girl hunted by your typical group of enraged villagers threatening her with farm implements. On Rasti’s insistence – the rest of the group seems surprisingly okay with the idea to leave a little kid to the tender mercies of a group of what they can only assume to be violent maniacs – they rescue the little girl and bring her with them to the villa. Lily, as she seems to be called, looks a bit scratched and beaten up and seems to have lost at least a part of her memory. Rasti and she bond rather quickly, but as increasingly strange and destructive occurrences demonstrate, the girl’s not exactly alone. A certain Arumi seems to have adopted her, protecting her from threats true and perceived and showing a rather cruel and murderous streak. Need I mention that Arumi isn’t exactly human?

It has been quite some time since I’ve seen a contemporary Indonesian horror film I have enjoyed. Most of the handful of genre films that make their way to these shores from Indonesia include a heavy dose of humour that just doesn’t work for me at all, be it for my lack of cultural understanding, the inability of middling subtitles to express many subtleties of humour, or just the way the humour always seems built to undermine the horror. I have no idea how representative this is for the genre output of the country as a whole, of course. I can, however, happily report that Nayato Fio Nuala’s Arumi doesn’t contain a single scene of slapstick contortions, and instead takes its characters and their situation seriously, always at least striving for an atmosphere of horror and mystery.

This atmosphere doesn’t always quite come together – at times, the clearly very low budget results in very flat cinematography, and the not terribly great acting (as far as I can tell in a language I don’t speak) isn’t always good for preserving the finer points of the script. However, there’s also a lot of good in the film. Even though the various sequences of supernatural threat are only original to a point – turns out Indonesian forest spirits act rather similarly to demons and poltergeists in US films – Nuala does hit the right tone in them more often than not, milking the basic creepiness of Arumi’s modus operandi quite effectively, even though he sometimes uses technically relatively crude methods to get there.


The script is straightforward but not so straightforward as not to make some changes to standard formulas. So, despite being set up like a typical spam in a cabin film, Arumi doesn’t actually operate like one, and isn’t killing off the characters one after the other. Instead, it sets up a story and climax that thrives on the parallels between what happened to Rasti and her family fifteen years ago, and what is happening in the house now. The supernatural entity at work does what ghosts and ghoulies all over the world love so much, setting up the present so that it repeats a dreadful past, and probably neither for the first nor the last time. There’s an interesting, folk tale like twist to the ending, too, when Rasti’s compassion and kindness save her life, yet still leave her in a bad enough situation to call the ending grim.

In short: The Jokesters (2015)

A bunch of total pricks has a pretty successful YouTube channel where they “prank” people, where “prank” is defined as cruel bullying that’s excused with a good old “just joking”.

One among their number, Ethan (Dante Spencer), seems to want to leave the fold of four guys who’ve brought out the shitty little boy in one another since Junior High, just now marrying a guh, a guh, a girl named Gabrielle (Jen Yeager) and secretly planning to move to Colorado (which I assume is as far away as possible without leaving the country).

The three remaining friends, particularly the clearly deranged Nick (Nathan Reid), plan to end their show with a bang, by ruining the wedding night of their supposed best friend. For reasons said wedding night takes place in a cabin in the snowy woods that belongs to one of the guys’ fathers, so things are well set up to spy on the couple via hidden cameras, don skull masks and have fun with axes. Would you believe that things don’t turn out terribly well?

There’s the core of pretty interesting little horror film hidden away in AJ Wedding’s The Jokesters. That imaginary film would use thriller elements and tropes of the POV horror sub-genre to examine destructive male friendships, why it might be not a good idea to stay together with every idiot one has outgrown, and how basically sane people can push one another into the extreme corners of being assholes.

Unfortunately, this film is buried under masses of filler and drudgery. The first forty minutes in particular are bordering on torture, seeing as we the audience spend them with four complete assholes that incessantly act the part, and then again, and again, and again. Fun fact: I got it after the first ten minutes, and could have lived without the film’s repetition of this basic fact about its characters. This directly leads into the film’s next problem, characterisation that doesn’t actually give any of the people in whose fates we as an audience are supposed to be interested in any character traits beyond being obnoxious and horrible. Well, Nick is apparently “not Mexican”, and the other dudes like their racist and sexist jokes, but that’s it when it comes to characterisation. Basically, these assholes are assholes.


Things don’t improve much once the plot sets in, for the supposed twists and turns never feel anything but random – not least thanks to that lack of depth in the characterisation – and what I believe is supposed to be dramatic escalation never grabs at all.

Music Monday: Asking for a Friend Edition

The Rizen (2017)

1955, in what we will later learn is an underground research facility below Kent. A woman (Laura Swift), let’s call her Frances for that’s what her documents say, awakens while being dragged through a dark – probably dank – tunnel by a humanoid creature with a bandaged head. I hope you like this tunnel, for you’ll look at it for large parts of the rest of the film. Anyway, Frances manages to bash the creature’s head in, and begins to make her way through the underground facility. Unfortunately, she’s suffering from a bout of amnesia, so she has no idea where she is, why she’s there, or what she is supposed to do. Gradual flashbacks (aka the only parts of the film not taking place in the grey and black tunnels) reveal that she has been prepared – programmed more like it – to do something very important indeed. But what? Who knows? On the positive side, she is rather good at killing the bandaged creatures, and soon saves a fellow amnesiac wearing the uniform of a movie scientist (Christopher Tajah) to team up with. Eventually, they realize the researchers have ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe through which something very nasty is trying to enter.

Not completely to my surprise, given how many of my favourite plot and background element The Rizen hits, I found myself enjoying Matt Mitchell’s piece of cosmic pulp horror quite a bit. It’s a film where I have to give fair warning, though. This was clearly shot for very little money, so there’s quite a bit wrong with the film on a technical level: there’s the general tediousness of watching characters spending much of their time in blackness with greyish walls that suggest little money for production design, acting that’s often pretty terrible (with Swift the obvious exception by being alright for many of her scenes and actually good in the rest), and a running time that’s about twenty minutes too long and could have been much improved by cutting out the ineffective humour and the ill-placed “romance”.

There’s also the strange phenomenon of how much better the flashback sequences look – they even have actual set design! -  and how much more professional the actors in them are as well – even Swift who is in both seems just much more in control in these scenes.

The thing is, despite the flaws, there’s a fine creative core to the film, with some well realized ideas about weaponized occult research, some mysteries that work well because the film isn’t answering them, and some really fun monsters, all involved in a plot that really knows how to do the pulpy side of cosmic horror justice. Despite its low budget, The Rizen effectively builds up the background to its horrors in the flashbacks, and ends on a genuinely exciting climax. On the monster side I am particularly fond of the bandaged head design we get for most of the time. It’s much creepier than cheap masks or CGI and uses the power of a viewer’s imagination to good effect, while also getting an excellently weird explanation later on. The action scenes, even though a bit repetitive, are much better realized than is normal in this sort of thing, too. They feel weighty and desperate, while still keeping the silliness that makes this pulpy rather than classicist cosmic horror. I suspect Swift’s background as stunt performer helped quite a bit in this regard.


While The Rizen obviously resonates with those parts of me that thrive on Lovecraft and what something like “Delta Green” made of some of his ideas and creations, there are some thematic concerns on display here that belong to it alone, thoughts about free will, heroic sacrifice and heroism that fit very well into the rest of the film’s ideas. It seems rather telling – as well as awesome – that the most important heroes here are a woman and a black man.

Three Films Make A Post: The Cycle Begins.

Proud Mary (2018): Graced with PR material and a title sequence that suggest some sort of cool, contemporary and conscious throwback to blaxploitation cinema times, what Babak Nafaji’s film actually goes to deliver is general tepidness. This little number meanders between uninvolving gangster melodrama and badly staged action movie, leaving its fine leading lady Taraji P. Henson to pick up pieces. Now, Henson’s certainly good, but a single actress can’t save a melodramatic movie that doesn’t seem to know how to actually wallow in emotion, nor an action film that wastes a relatively high budget on stuff most direct to DVD action films would find too unambitious.

The Heretics (2017): Speaking of films that waste a perfectly serviceable set-up and pretty cultist masks on a so script so mediocre I would have preferred it to be just bad and uninspired direction, this Canadian movie by Chad Archibald concerning a young woman (Nina Kiri) getting re-kidnapped five years after her first encounter with a satanist suicide cult, rather comes to mind. It’s not difficult to imagine how this could actually have been a pretty great movie, even when keeping the plot twists of this all too real version, if only it had a script that had a better handle on characterisation, trauma and drama. There are handful of not terrible horror scenes in here – mostly thanks to the excellent production design I believe – but as a whole this is a vague and meandering affair that never seems to be able to settle on a tone.


Quarries (2016): So it is left to Nils Taylor’s film about a ragtag group of women (Nicole Marie Johnson, Carrie Finklea, and others) on a supposedly empowering wilderness survival hike encountering your usual group of male backwoods cannibals/serial killers. Neither the women nor the human monsters are particularly original characters, but at least the protagonists are well acted and written with enough life to make one not completely disinterested in their survival. Otherwise, this is a deeply competent movie with no surprises for genre veterans or even novices. However, that it so clearly cares for these women more than a lot of its genre brethren do makes it certainly worth ninety minutes of one’s time.

Past Misdeeds: Der Schwarze Abt (1963)

aka The Black Abbot

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


The new owner of the hunting cabin (whose inside looks more like that of a bungalow to me, but what do I know about hunting cabins) on the estate of Lord Chelford (Dieter Borsche) is knifed in the back by a man dressed up as the legendary Black Abbot. Said Abbot is supposed to protect a mythical gold treasure hidden in the ruins of an abbey on Chelford's estate.

Scotland Yard sends Detective Puddler (Charles Regnier) and his comic relief assistant Horatio (Eddi Arent, of course) to deal with the problem by living in Chelford's estate for a time, which seems eminently reasonable once you've gotten to know Chelford's surroundings.

The Lord himself is clearly on the verge of some sort of breakdown, obsessing over finding the legendary treasure and charming his fiancée Leslie Gine (Grit Boettcher) with talk about "owning her". Leslie, you see, is the sister of Chelford's lawyer Arthur (Harry Wüstenhagen), who - as we will learn - is in the habit of selling his sister, a woman so pliable it's difficult to imagine a better argument for radical feminism, off to the highest bidder to help with his betting debts. Early in the movie, the bookmakers Arthur is indebted to will all turn out to be one single person, Arthur's office manager Fabian Gilder (Werner Peters). That villain will then proceed to blackmail the lawyer into selling his precious sister to him instead of Chelford. Gilder also would very much like to get his hands on the gold treasure and has planted a crook going by the delightful and totally believable nom de plum of Thomas Fortuna (Klaus "KINSKI!" Kinski) as a Butler with Chelford. Gilder too cooperates with Chelford's former secretary Mary Wenner (Eva Ingeborg Schulz). Wenner promises to lead Gilder to the treasure if he only somehow manages to stop the engagement between Chelford and Leslie so that she can have the Lord - and especially his title - for herself.

Having a headache already? Then you won't be pleased to hear of the existence of Dick Alford (Joachim Fuchsberger), Chelford's cousin and financial administrator. Dick is doing his best to protect Chelford from any suspicion the police may have against him, but his loyalties are torn between Chelford and the fact that he is also romantically interested in Leslie - and his interest, Leslie actually reciprocates. But Dick has other secrets too, secrets that may not be quite as innocent; or are they?

Clearly, this volatile mix of interests and shady people can only lead to violence, madness, and KINSKI! skulking through abbey ruins.

Der Schwarze Abt is another one of the half dozen krimis (all adaptations of either Edgar - like this one - or Bryan Edgar Wallace) director Franz Josef Gottlieb made in 1963 and 1964, all of which suggest a talent that doesn't show in anything the man directed before or after. If you told me these six films were made by Gottlieb's secret twin, or a mysterious masked director using his name for equally mysterious reasons, I'd believe you at once. It's a more satisfying, and obviously less boring, explanation than "he had a talent for this sort of film he never used before or after".

In the film at hand, Gottlieb's visual imagination doesn't get quite as bizarre as in the later Das Phantom von Soho, but that's mostly because he seems to have made the surprising choice of mirroring the slow increase of the plot's derangement and complexity (or is it mere complicatedness?) in his visuals. So the film starts off slowly, with a lot of scenes of nasty people being nasty to each other that are shot flatly, staged simply, and are lit too brightly for my tastes in black and white films. But the more the plot increases in bizarrery and density, the stranger Gottlieb's approach to the framing and staging of scenes becomes; the brightness is becoming less and less bright, the fog more artificial and the ruins ever more gothic and picturesque. A dialogue scene that would have been filmed in a very standard manner in the film's early parts is now shot from behind the swinging pendulum of a clock, and Richard Angst's camera becomes increasingly mobile. Despite their general visual superiority over other German post-war films (seeing as most German post-war films were absolutely allergic to anything that smelled of visual interest or elegance), this sort of ambitious set-up is uncommon even for the Wallace films, rather pointing towards the giallo, so I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear it were explicitly Gottlieb's films rather than those of his genre colleagues Reinl or Vohrer which influenced that genre visually.


Der Schwarze Abt is very proto-gialloesque in other aspects too, with its concentration on nasty people being nasty to each other, a plot that's even more complicated than usual for the krimi, and its relegating of the titular masked evil-doer to more of a normal murderer than the masked pulp super-villain of many of the other Wallace krimis. Often, the less pulpy Wallace adaptations are the less interesting to me too, but that's only because many of the lesser films of the cycle seem to relegate the villains to the side lines only because they seem ashamed of those villains' lurid pulpiness, exactly the part I find most enjoyable about them. Der Schwarze Abt just knows other places where it can also find that pulp feeling, namely in headache-inducing plot convolutions and some very well done melodramatics, and so decides to provide all the luridness and excitement its audience could ever wish for through them.

In short: Romina (2018)

Warning: I can’t avoid heavy spoilers for this one, though I doubt anyone will care!

You know the drill: a carful of young ones with more or less unpleasant personal habits drive to the country for a camping weekend. Their camping space is  not at all ominously called Crystal Lake, probably dubbed thusly in case you were confused which sub-genre you were in. Romina (Francisca Lozano), the best friend of one of the gang and not at all the friend of the rest isn’t taking part in the trip, though. Or at least that’s what everyone thinks, for in fact, Romina is camping just a skip away from the rest of these fools.

A couple of the guys notice her eventually, and decide that a rape is in order. The very next morning, Romina starts to murder everyone involved in the camping trip.

Diego Cohen’s Romina left me a bit confused, somewhat annoyed, and very much dissatisfied. At first, I had the impression of Cohen trying to go somewhere slightly different with his rape revenge slasher combo. Early scenes like the one where all characters talk over each other on the ride to the camping lot suggested an attempt at – rather nerve-wrecking – naturalism to the proceedings of the slasher genre. A bit further in, I assumed the decision to not show the rape and show only the aftermath of the following murders was meant to signal some kind of comment on the way an audience relates to violence in slashers, but a couple of scenes later, some of the violence got pretty explicit.

It’s certainly not filmed like a standard slasher, lacking the rhythm of stalking and slashing. Unfortunately, Cohen doesn’t actually find anything to replace it with, sucking all the tension of the genre out of the film without ever convincing me there’s a reason to do so. I’m rather confused about the rape revenge motivation of the plot, too, or rather, why the film goes that way but doesn’t bother to provide Romina with even a hint of characterisation, leaving this killer in a slasher movie who has an actual humanly relatable reason for her murders with less human character traits than Jason Voorhees.

Then there’s the plot twist that suggests somebody involved really rather liked All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (I don’t blame him), but wanted to leave out all the pesky motivations and put a male character in the dominating role of the murderous couple. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t improve my opinion of the film, nor does if work in any way, shape or form.


The whole of Romina feels like it was based on the first draft of a script, lacking any actual focus and consistency. It’s a bit of a shame, too, for the film certainly looks well enough and has a damn good synth score. It just seems all rather pointless.

Red Sparrow (2018)

Bolshoi ballerina Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is hurt in an on stage accident that will later turn out not to have been an accident at all. In any case, she will not be able to dance again on her old level, leaving her and her sick mother without much of an income or even a place to stay, for even their apartment belongs to the ballet company. Fortunately or unfortunately, Dominika’s uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts) is deeply involved in the world of espionage and is perfectly willing to provide his niece with a way in, especially after he has provided her with information concerning the truth about her accident and is probably quite satisfied with the talent for violence she then demonstrates.

Eventually, Dominika lands in a school for sexspionage (headmistress: Charlotte Rampling) where she shows talent as well as a rather unwanted spine. Thanks to her uncle, and one General Korchoi (Jeremy Irons), she soon is set upon her first case/victim. There’s a highly placed mole somewhere in the Russian secret services, and Dominika is supposed to seduce the mole’s handler Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) to find out their identity. Dominika for her part might have plans, perhaps even feelings, all of her own.

Francis Lawrence’s spy novel adaptation Red Sparrow is an at times rather impressive watch, yet it it is also full of niggling little problems. The most obvious faux pas right from the start is the filmmaker’s decision to have all the Russian characters – none of whom is actually being played by a Russian actor, pretty much the only nationality where that sort of thing is still allowed without people on the Internet shouting angrily – speak with mild, fake Russian accents, because clearly, all Russians talk in accented English with each other, right? It’s definitely the sort of decision that already starts the film up feeling highly artificial. The movie’s problematic idea of Russia is further increased by its portrayal of the little it shows of the country’s culture as exclusively inhabited by rapists and human monsters. The film’s portrayal of the political side of things seems to have little to do with actual Russian nationalism and the way it works today and much more with a US-style nightmare vision of their old enemy turned new enemy but actually staying completely the same. Which would bother me much less if the US secret services at least were played a little less like a goody-goody bunch who apparently don’t do horrible things on a daily basis. Edgerton’s Nash is such a nice, careful, pleasant and loveable guy it is impossible to buy him as a spy, for whatever country.

And still, I had a lot of fun watching this thing, once I had adjusted my perspective on it towards it being a really high budget exploitation film of the kind nobody makes anymore (and really, that was seldom made at all even in the past). It’s a surprisingly unpleasant film for what at its core is a mainstream spy movie, full of torture, sexual violence, threats of sexual violence, and a lot of random nasty stuff put in just to make the film feel extra gritty. There is, for example, no reason at all to give our heroine’s uncle the incestuous hots for her apart from making him even less pleasant than he already is; it’s like adding kicking dogs as an additional vice to Hitler. The thing is, director Lawrence turns out to be a great big budget exploitation director, so all these scenes of suffering, vice, and men not named Edgerton behaving toxically, only to be punished by our heroine in one way or the other, are unpleasant to watch in just the right way to be entertaining, and not just only in the “did that big Hollywood production honestly just do that?” kind of way. The film has a melodramatic, operatic drive to it, really digging into the core of making movies you enjoy to cringe at. And like with a lot of good exploitation fare, you can perfectly well argue the whole she-bang is actually a feminist film about a tough woman with an untouchable moral core beating all the asshole men in her life with their own vices.

It helps that Lawrence the actress seems – as usual – in absolute control of her abilities, not attempting to portray Dominika as a normal person but the sort of heightened, iconic near-mythological being that exists in this sort of plot. It’s an honestly great job at point-exact overacting through a lot of grim facial expressions, never laying it on too thick, but always exactly as thick as the film needs. Her counterpart Edgerton – usually a fine actor - is surprisingly colourless, but then, what’s a guy to do when a script doesn’t give him any actual personality beside being as morally upright as a knight? The rest of the cast does traditionally fine character actor work (sadly, Irons isn’t there to do more than look thin, pale and sad), so it is difficult not to enjoy the film at least on this level.


But then, I’ve never pretended to dislike exploitation films, so I’m certainly not going to start complaining when I see one made by talented people who have been provided with a lot of money for excellent outfits and only the best locations and sets.

In short: The Hard Word (2002)

aka The Australian Job

Scott Roberts’s film is a highly peculiar, and pretty singular film. At first, the whole thing does give the impression of being an Australian version of one of those pseudo-Tarantino films of this era that seldom went anywhere interesting or worthwhile. However, the longer the whole thing goes, the clearer it becomes that this may be built out of the well-worn bits and pieces of any old film about smart-talking gangsters, a bit of noir, and the bones of heist and jailbreak films, yet it treats these elements in so individual a way they become things that belong to it alone.

The plot, at once episodic, straightforward and complicated concerns the brothers Twentyman. Dale (Guy Pearce) is the clever one with a big L love for his sometimes traitorous wife Carol (Rachel Griffiths), Shane (Joel Edgerton) the pretty and perhaps not terribly clever one with the mother complex. and Mal (Damien Richardson), the scruffy yet sensitive one. Right now, they are sitting in prison, but thanks to a financial arrangement between their lawyer Frank Malone (Robert Taylor), some cops and the warden of their prison, they are regularly snuck out to commit bloodless heists, brilliantly planned by Dale. Theoretically, they should get out any day now, but Frank really rather seems to like how they earn money he then “keeps secure” for them and can’t really do anything about it; he also has an affair with Carol that he takes rather seriously.

Various developments will eventually lead to a pretty bad heist and the brothers going on the run.

Because this is such an individual film, I am pretty sure The Hard Word isn’t a film everyone is going to enjoy. The immense tonal shifts happening not just between scenes but during them often are quite radical and certainly not always lead into directions everybody will be willing or able to follow. The film also packs about as much stuff (and plot) into a normal feature length as two seasons of your favourite Netflix show. It shouldn’t hold together at all, but to my eyes it is carried by both Roberts’s stylish direction that makes these shifts often feel much more consistent than they should, and an acting ensemble (Rachel Griffiths as Pearce’s complicated wife deserves a special mention besides the male main trio here) whose approach shifts right with the film while never giving the viewer the feeling she’s not watching the same people. I’d even argue these seeming shifts in the characters are closer to the way actual people are, and the film does indeed use them to emphasise the elements in its characters’ personalities that do not change with their situations, revealing their cores clearer than a more obvious and direct approach might.


The film’s humour, and its often playful approach to clichés is rather wonderful, too, often seemingly making a beeline towards the most cynical idea possible but then using various techniques to not necessarily soften but complicating this, finding moments of perfect sweetness in a film about sweary, sweaty men committing exciting crimes.

Music Monday: Starstuff Edition

Nightworld (2017)

Former LA cop Brett (Jason London) has great difficulty working through the death of his Bulgarian wife Ana (Diana Lyubenova), spending his time at their Bulgarian country home in a deep depression. A concerned buddy has a plan to get him out and back into the world, to which end the proactive man has procured a security job in Sofia for Brett.

It’s a live-in position in an old villa whose upper levels have been converted into apartments, or so the owners of the place say. Not that Brett’s ever seeing anyone living there. It’s a cushy, if somewhat strange job: Brett’s only duties are locking and unlocking the main door and to descend into the very deep cellar twice a day to check some security monitors that are facing the darkness inside a large locked chamber (the film calls it a hangar, for some reason) that’s situated behind a large door with neat skulls and tentacles on it. Clearly, there’s nothing to worry about here, and at first, Brett actually seems to get better doing very little. He’s got a new environment to explore, he’s got at least something to occupy himself with, and the – very young and very very pretty – barista Zara (Lorina Kamburova) of the corner coffee shop clearly has an eye on him. Therea are certainly worse ways to live.

However, there’s something really strange going on in the villa. There are not just the expected peculiar noises, and that hell gate style door in the cellar, but Brett also begins to have nightmares that begin to turn into daytime visions. And once Brett has seen what looks a lot like footprints through one of his cameras and calls in the owners’ expert for this situation, an older blind man named Jacob (Robert Englund) events spiral downwards rather quickly.

For my tastes, Patricio Valladares’s Nightworld is a pleasant surprise, a horror film that feels very much beholden to the classic Weird Tales style of horror with a smidgen of Lucio Fulci I’m not going to spoil. It is, in other worlds, exactly the sort of film where I’m perfectly willing to overlook certain weaknesses as long as it understands and uses its strengths.

The obvious weakness here is the pacing; while this sort of mood based horror does need and deserve a thoughtful pace, Nightworld does meander a bit in the middle, with perhaps one dream sequence and ten minutes of running time that could productively have been excised. It’s not a deadly flaw, at least in my eyes, mind you, though it is something which will make the film not terribly interesting to watch for some viewers. The film’s not always all that believable, either: would a guy like Brett really take a job like this without at least explicitly asking if he’s guarding anything illegal and without any explanation for its strangeness? The May-October romance between Brett and Zara isn’t terribly easy to buy either.


However, while acknowledging these flaws, I can’t say they really did anything to my enjoyment of the film. Valladares – ably assisted by some cracking spooky locations and Pau Mirabet’s moody and shadowy camera work – creates a wonderful sense of creeping wrongness. And once the film has explained the rather wonderful backstory of the villa through some patented and effective Englund exposition, it also develops a neat and effective resonance with classical myths about the realms of the dead, all the while making good use of its budget (the way the film uses a large, dark empty room to full effect borders on brilliance) and evoking its lead’s pining for a lost love to thematically appropriate effect. In general, Valladares uses iconic horror images very well, with moments like the shots of the faces of the dead trapped in the villa pressed against its windows from the inside just resonating very well with me in their archetypal feel.