Third World Cop (1999)

After committing what we in the biz call “murder” on an already disarmed suspect, a Jamaican cop going by the not exactly trustworthy sounding nickname of Capone (Paul Campbell) – though to be fair he’s really more acting as if he was called “Django” or “Dirty Harry” – is transferred back to a place where his “shoot first, shoot second, then shoot again” approach to policing will be more appreciated. Back to his home city of Kingston it is.

Before Capone has even had the possibility to visit his old haunts properly and reintroduce himself to old friends from the time when he was running with low level gangs like everybody else he knew, he stumbles unto parts of a large gun smuggling operation. It’s not really clear what local gang boss One Hand (Carl Bradshaw) needs quite as many guns for as he is smuggling in but it obviously can’t be anything good.

Most troubling for Capone will be that his closest friend from way back when – we’re basically talking brothers here –, a guy with the unfortunate moniker of Ratty (Mark Danvers), is not just working for One Hand but may be as deeply involved in the gun smuggling operations as possible.

As you may or may not know, Jamaica doesn’t have much of a film industry of its own, so every film that’s made there, independent of style and genre, will have to struggle through a lack of infrastructure, experienced crews and money. In this context, it makes sense that Chris Browne’s crime action movie Third World Cop was shot on digital at a time when that still wasn’t usual. Cheap digital photography at the end of the last century did tend to look rather ugly, unfortunately, so there’s really not much good to say about the film’s basic look. It is, however, staged and blocked well, and certainly enhanced through editing that makes the best of what’s there.

The action sequences are usually not terribly well realized either. There are many shots of people either crouching behind something and shooting or standing and shooting, with comparatively little actual movement that would make these scenes dynamic. The editing picks up quite a bit of the slack here, but still, if that were all the film had to offer, I’d probably say something patronizing about it making the best out of what it has to work with, and leave the movie be.

However, once the film has introduced its hero and his pretty cartoonish cohorts (like his comedy colleague who only ever hides and calls for reinforcements) and enemies, it actually starts doing interesting things with them. I suspect a certain inspiration by Hong Kong cinema, but in any case, Third World Cop turns into a – pleasantly melodramatic – tale of male friendship complicated and betrayed that simply works on an emotional level and even has something to say about poverty. Capone and Ratty’s relationship actually starts to feel true, and certainly emotionally engaging. Browne builds them up as believable friends who parted ways some time ago, and still feel close but only half still know each other. They are also mirror images. One can’t help but think that Capone is quite as desperate as he is to save Ratty because he realized the only difference between Ratty and himself is that he managed to get away from Kingston and street life and found an opportunity to change (a little, he’s still a cowboy cop), while Ratty stayed behind and never found any other way to deal with the poverty and violence dominating his surroundings. If Capone hadn’t left Kingston, he might very well be the one working for One Hand.

Where the digital set up the film has to work with doesn’t work out terribly great for the action scenes, its documentarian, unadorned eye does wonders when it comes to portray Kingston – not the parts of town where you’d meet any tourists, mind you, but those where actual people live harsh lives. Most, if not all of the exterior shots look as if they were made guerrilla style (or Browne is absurdly brilliant at making them look that way), so there’s a very direct sense of place to the film that gives its tale of gangsters and cops a feeling of veracity a comparable Hollywood production wouldn’t be able to reach. I wouldn’t exactly call it authenticity - there are still filmmakers making very conscious artistic and commercial decisions here, after all – but it certainly tries to come close to the actual spirit of its place.


For the music fans among us, it’s also rather nice to have a film featuring various Jamaican musicians (for example Ninja Man and Elephant Man) in smaller roles and with a soundtrack that’s produced by Sly & Robbie.

Three Films Make A Post: THE END IS COMING AND IT WILL BE PAINFUL

Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate (1971): Four elderly ladies (Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy, Mildred Natwick, Sylvia Sidney) create a completely fictional young woman for a “computer dating club” to pass the time between drinks. Alas, their imaginary girl attracts a budding serial killer (Vince Edwards). This Ted Post-directed TV movie’s considerable entertainment value is mostly gained through the merry interplay between its four elderly Hollywood Stars, who clearly enjoy not having to play the standard roles women their age have to put up with, and who do know a thing or three about comic timing. The mystery plot itself isn’t particularly interesting, but Post does get quite a bit of tension out of the contrast between his female stars’ companionable fun and the killer’s well-written, downright creepy, whispered off-screen monologue.

The Haunting of Sorority Row aka Deadly Pledge (2007): Keeping with the TV movies, this Canadian Lifetime film by Bert Kish, is on a quite lower level. A sorority pledge (Leighton Meester) has to cope with an evil spirit that haunts her and her prospective sisters because of a hazing ritual gone very badly wrong. Unfortunately, most of the cast is pretty bad – the best performances here could be politely described as “unremarkable” – the script has about one and a half decent ideas during the whole running time, and director Kish shows no flair at all for staging spooky scenes. However, I probably have to praise this one for being willing to go for a much sillier and in your face finale than TV horror movies of its type usually do. It’s too bad that silly and in your face don’t make this a decent movie either.


Swiss Army Man (2016): We leave the world of TV far, far behind with Dan Kwan’s and Daniel Scheinert’s extremely weird comedy about a man (Paul Dano) stranded on a deserted island teaming up with a supremely useful and increasingly communicative corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) to get back to civilization. The first fifteen minutes or so are pretty insufferable, so consciously tasteless I found it difficult to persevere with the film. I did, however, and made my way through a tale that went from insufferable to moving to philosophical to silly to stupid to creepy at a moment’s notice, leaving one with the feeling that this thing is truly one of a kind. What at first looks like a too self-conscious bizarro comedy turns into a film exploring the vagaries of the male human heart through bizarre comedy and other things, while keeping in mind there just might be something very wrong with said male human heart, yet still never losing its compassion.

Past Misdeeds: Desyat negrityat (1987)

aka Ten Little Indians

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.

Warning: this Soviet adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel uses the initial title and version of the nursery rhyme that's so important for its plot, so if you're afraid of that authentic period racism, this is not the adaptation for you. I'll spare you the deeply problematic terminology in the review, though.

Eight strangers - among them a retired judge (Vladimir Zeldin), a secretary and governess (Tatyana Drubich), a former policeman (Aleksei Zharkov) and a soldier/mercenary (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) - arrive at an isolated island mansion (on what I shall call N-word Island). They all have been invited, each guest for a different reason, by a certain U.N. Owen, a person quite unknown to everyone. On the island, the group is awaited by a freshly hired couple of servants (Aleksei Zolotnitsky and Irina Tershchenko), who have neither seen nor heard their new employer. Supposedly, Owen has been held up on the mainland and will join the party the next day.

Owen and his various promises to the various guests turn out to be lies once dinner time arrives. A gramophone recording explains the sins of all ten guests; everyone is responsible for the death of at least one other human being, and everyone, the recording explains, is going to pay for their sins. Which is exactly what happens: one after the other, the guests are killed in ways echoing an old British nursery rhyme that just happens to be posted in everyone's room. Soon, the guests realize they really are the only people on the island, so the killer must be one of them. But who is it, and will they find out before everyone's dead or broken by the situation?

I am, in general, not much of an admirer of the works of Agatha Christie. In part, it's a problem I often have with the cozy subgenre - I just can't bring myself to care if it was the butler or the young relative who killed Lord Arsebutton for his money, and really, why should I? Christie's case is further weakened by her love for perfectly annoying detectives (why isn't anyone murdering Poirot and Miss Marple, for Cthulhu's sake?), her classism, and the intensely improbable construction of many of her mysteries.

I do make an exception for novels like Ten Little N./Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None, though, because there is little that is actually "cozy" about them - but who'd call a literary sub-genre the "bleaky"? Ten (let's make it easy on ourselves with the title) is a novel whose basic set-up has fascinated many a movie director, too, but some of them have balked from giving the film its proper, grim ending. Certainly not Soviet director Stanislav Govorukhin, whose Desyat negrityat not just keeps all the uncomfortable elements of Christie's original novel including its ending, but focuses on them to create the psychologically dark period piece the novel deserves to be.

In Govorukhin's hands, the sometimes somewhat dry book turns into a claustrophobic nightmare that at times feels like a horror film. The director often uses consciously cramped framing - even in shots taking place outside the house - to emphasize how the situation the murderer constructed for his victims throws them back onto themselves, their guilt - even though not all of them feel guilty, and this isn't a movie where a feeling of guilt saves anyone from anything anyhow - and the pasts deeds whose consequences they can't escape anymore, if they ever could or did. There's an incredible sense of tension running through the movie that belies the surface talkiness of its script (though Govorukhin knows quite well when to let his characters stop talking, which becomes clear in the last stages of the film), the seeming simplicity of Govorukhin's direction, and the film's length of 129 minutes. On paper, this might still sound like your typical cozy mystery plot, but in practice, this is a film interested in, and awfully good at, exploring the existential darkness inside of and around its characters. And, if we want to give the film a political dimension instead of one sitting between philosophy and psychology, can it be an accident that every character in the film - the killer of killers being no exception - has at one point not just killed, but killed by misusing a position of authority and trust?

The actors, especially Drubich and Kaydanovskiy, are fantastic, selling the moments of naturalistic break-downs as well as those of heated melodrama. They - and the script, of course - also manage to turn what could have been only a series of vile people who get exactly what they deserve from somebody no less vile who gets a friendly nod for it (let's call that the "Dexter hypocrisy syndrome") into complex characters who have at one point in their lives given in to weaknesses that - this seems to be a particularly important point for the film - are universally human. These aren't all "bad" people, or "good" ones, or "misunderstood" ones, but just people deserving of compassion even though they have done horrible, or callous, or weak, things. Which, on the other hand, doesn't mean Govorukhin is willing to pretend his characters are the sort of people acting well under outside pressure.

The film's only weakness in my eyes lies in the construction of its plot, or rather, how artificially constructed it is. There's a central plot point - and we can thank Christie for that - that just beggars believe when you stop and think about it for a second (and, to digress for a parenthesis, it is ironically a plot point contemporary movies like the mildly diverting Saw series seem to have fallen in love with wholesale), needing everyone still alive at a particular moment to be outrageously dense or credulous, and the killer to be extremely lucky and talented in the ways of the pulp yogi. However, Govorukhin's direction is so strong I couldn't help but look with raised eyebrows at the solution of the film's mystery, yet still be decidedly enthusiastic about the film as a whole.


The mystery isn't the point of the film anyhow. Desyat Negrityat is all about showing what made its characters what they are, and what they become.

In short: The Whitlow House (2018)

aka The Haunting of the Whitlow House

Steph (Baranger Clark or Baranger Dean, depending if you go by the film’s credits or everything else you can find about it online) and Jason (Freddie Jarrett) apparently have been involved in running extreme haunted houses for some time now. Particularly Jason is set on stopping to work as hired hands in the business and really wants to build something all of their own. So it’s an excellent coincidence when the Whitlow House comes up on the market just when they are looking for a new place to live. The house has a genuine history of all kinds of horrible shit happening in it following a witch burning a couple of centuries earlier, so marketing it as a haunted house should practically work by itself. All this, and they can live in it too! And hey, it’ll only cost them all of their combined money, so whatever could go wrong?

Steph, clearly the sensible one of the pair, does take a bit of convincing, but eventually, they go through with the plan, buy the place and move in. Alas, the house is indeed haunted, and soon, Steph is plagued by strange dreams and blackouts, and encounters a handful of paranormal phenomena. She very quickly wants out, but Jason – in the tradition of horror film males all over the world – is still set on keeping with the plan, even if his girlfriend is slowly going insane.

Brendan Rudnicki’s and Joel Donovan’s Whitlow House is a nice little surprise of an indie movie. It’s – as you’ve realized by now – not a terribly original film, yet it is a nicely focussed affair that seems rather conscious of the pitfalls of working on really low budgets. Well, its old spooky house doesn’t look terribly old and spooky, but I’ll just put that down to the budget.

Technically, this is a clean and effective effort – if you can ignore a sound mix that isn’t always ideal – with more than decent acting particularly by Dean, a script that doesn’t overstay its welcome or try to stretch the material it is working with for longer than is possible, even if that means the resulting film is only a lean 64 minutes long. I certainly prefer this approach to the kind of indie horror that doesn’t seem to believe in edits or ending scenes before doomsday.


Even though the scares will not exactly be new to experienced (or even semi-experienced) horror viewers, they are well realized and do fit nicely together. They really do seem to belong in the same thematic and stylistic realm, making the film feel cut from one piece. The directors also avoid going to the jump scare well again and again, instead putting the emphasis on the increasingly strained relations between its central couple.

Blood Fest (2018)

Nerdy Dax (Robbie Kay) is a giant horror fan. It’s something his mother shared with him when he was little, and after she was murdered by your common and garden masked maniac right in front of him, his fandom only got bigger.

Dax is planning to visit Blood Fest with his female best friend – and of course secret love because movies just can’t do without it – Sam (Seychelle Gabriel) and his other best friend Krill (Jacob Batalon). Blood Fest is a new outdoors festival celebrating all things horror in mostly copyright friendly ways. Unfortunately, Dax’s father (Tate Donovan), a TV psychologist, is set against all things horror after the murder of his wife, making the genre responsible for turning one of his own patients into a killer of psychologist wives. Didn’t see that movie, myself. But even when Dear Dad destroys Dax’s ticket to Blood Fest, our young hero manages to find a way in in form of his kinda-sorta friend Ashley (Barbara Dunkelman), who is trying to make it in the movies by having a relationship (cough) with some asshole horror director, so she can provide.

Perhaps Dax’s Dad wasn’t completely wrong with his hatred and fear of horror though, for it turns out, Blood Fest is all too real. The carnival huckster type guy (director Owen Egerton) running the show has decided that modern horror has become too watered down and needs an injection of reality. Which means public murders of a captive audience of horror fans by his various mad science experiments and a super slasher dressing rather a lot like the one who killed Dax’s father. Of course, Dax, being the horror fan, knows all of the genre rules and is therefore predestined to become the film’s hero. No idea why all the other experts on these rules you’d encounter on this sort of festival aren’t doing their part.

However, if you ignore this little problem with the film’s set-up, and the fact ninety percent of its characters and their relations are pure cliché, there’s still some – depending on one’s taste and patience even more - fun to be had with Owen Egerton’s horror comedy. We’ve all gone through a lot of horror comedies fixated on “THE RULES” in the decades after classic bad influence Scream, so don’t expect every joke to be new to many in the film’s expected audience of horror fans. There is still some good stuff in here among the obvious jokes about the things you’d expect a film like this to joke about, however.

Well, you also need to ignore how the way too self-indulgent villain performance by the director (who is no Clint Eastwood) sometimes threatens to take over the film for no good reason whenever we pop over to his lair again so he can make lame jokes and explain how exactly he created his zombies, etc, as if anyone in the audience cared.

But to the elements that actually make the whole thing worth watching without having you cry about the loss of valuable time you could have spent cleaning out your closet: the cast as a whole give fun performances, making the best out of the flat characters they are dealing with and generally providing them with more life than they strictly deserve, not exactly turning them into people but into the kind of joke and monster death dispensers I don’t mind sharing some of my lifetime with. The cast also makes quite a few of the script’s jokes and ideas work through powers of comical timing that can transcend some of the writing. And, to be fair, some of Egerton’s jokes are indeed funny, as are some of his high concept ideas – I’m certainly rather fond of his non-Jason character with the gardening gimmick, and the play with well-loved elements of Friday the 13th Part II.

On the plotting side, Blood Fest is a homage-laden series of action and horror set pieces, and while I’m not terribly impressed by Egerton as a writer or as an actor, I certainly can’t fault him as a director of this type of set piece. There’s beautiful artificial light in all the right colours, more than enough fun blood and gore (also in all the right colours), there’s a feel for the sets as physical locations. Even though I wasn’t exactly gasping in excitement, the loud stuff is certainly the film’s strong suite.


There is one bit of writing in the film I liked quite a bit, too. It’s that Egerton actually realizes making a horror film that poo-poos people who hate horror but then puts them in the right when horror fandom does indeed lead to mass murder and madness makes little sense at all, so he does something about it. What he does (I’m not going to spoil it here for those who haven’t already realized) isn’t overwhelmingly clever, nor was it terribly surprising to me, but it certainly suggests more thought than some of the by the numbers elements of the film otherwise suggest.

In short: Summer of 84 (2018)

When he sees a the picture of a disappeared kid on a milk carton, and remembers having seen him one night in the home of his neighbour, the police officer Wayne Mackey (Rich Sommer), conspiracy and weird shit obsessed teenager Davey (Graham Verchere) becomes convinced Mackey is a serial killer.

Davey ropes in his trio of best friends to spy on Mackey, and really, what happens then is – until the final five minutes – exactly the film you picture now in your head, for Summer of 84’s director trio François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell seem to have set out to make the most generic film in the sub-genre of post-Stranger Things 80s retro fantastika humanly achievable. There is not a single character, not a plot beat apart from the ending, no scene, nothing whatsoever in this movie that isn’t desperately trying to demonstrate this is indeed a film made in the spirit of 1984. Unlike in Stranger Things there is nothing here beyond cloying nostalgia and formal mimicry, no breath of air, not even a little distance to the mores of the film’s time, and certainly no commentary on them (unlike in films actually made in 1984). Worse, it’s the imitation of a film so generically 1984, nobody in 1984 would have shot it fearing its audience would get bored.


Frankly, I don’t see what the point of the film is at all. Wallowing in nostalgia for the depiction of not perfectly happy childhoods as seen in other movies instead of trying to actually speak about these childhoods, not their portrayal? Making a thriller where every single plot beat is so expected the film might as well not exist beyond its basic idea? And why then end the film on a note that’s absolutely one from a film made in 2018 but that doesn’t really comment on what came before thematically? Perhaps the final couple of scenes are meant to deconstruct the nostalgia Summer of 84 has been peddling for ninety-five percent of its running time, but to do this effectively, it’s really too little, too late, feeling more like a generic grimdark gesture than anything of substance.

Music Monday: Thang Edition

Hardwired (2009)

Welcome to a cyberpunky, corporate-owned future, where even the Pyramids have an ad banner stuck on them. Former special forces badass Luke Gibson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) has relaxed quite nicely into civilian life. His wife and he are clearly happy, and a child’s going to pop any day now. Alas, their car is hit by a truck, killing his wife and child. Because his insurance very suddenly expires, things wouldn’t look terribly great for Luke’s survival either, but a couple of corporate goons working for tech company high-up Virgil (Val “Doesn’t give a shit” Kilmer) convince his surgeon to save our hero by hardwiring an illegal experimental chip into his brain, as per the film’s title.

The procedure does indeed save Luke’s life, but he also loses large parts of his memory and starts to see things that suggest the chip is beaming ads right into his brain, a prospect that would most probably convince ad executives in our world to break a few laws, too. Worse, there’s also a kill switch installed that’ll blow up his head when he gets too uppity.

Fortunately, the mandatory semi-heroic group of hackers – tough yet avuncular Hal (Michael Ironside!), his paraplegic hacker son Keyboard (Chad Krowchuk), and the adorably named Punk Red (a pre-Orphan Black Tatiana Maslany) and Punk Blue (Juan Riedinger) – hack into Luke’s brain to for some well-needed ad-blocking and recruit him to their cause by showing him rage-inducing pictures of the family he lost. Turns out a multinational corporation is no match for badass Cuba Gooding Jr. and a couple of hackers with idiotic names.

Fun fact: I just love the direct to home video action movie phase of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career much more than most of what he did in his Oscar-baiting time. As I have mentioned before, the wonderful thing about Gooding in this context is that he doesn’t act like a guy who is slumming at all, but applies his not inconsiderable talents fully to whatever bizarre crap the film at hand asks of him. Consequently, Gooding plays the silly bits, the trite bits, and the parts where he interacts with the horror of the ads beamed into his brain totally serious, with admirable professionalism, really making much of what we see doubly enjoyable. His performance – and those of the cast of fresh young actors and low budget veteran aces like the always great Ironside – stand in extreme contrast to Val Kilmer’s usual pay check grab. One could have put his absurd wig onto a life-sized doll and put his dialogue through a computer and have gotten the same performance for considerable less money. Fortunately, Kilmer isn’t actually doing much, so his lazy diva crap isn’t doing too much damage beyond adding one more embarrassment to a career that could have been great.

Anyway, while the plot is obviously silly, there’s quite a bit more to enjoy here than bashing Kilmer and watching Gooding and co. Director Ernie Barbarash is certainly one of the more talented people working in the direct to your couch action space, here as usual demonstrating a sense of pacing that’s good enough to convince a viewer there’s more action happening in the movie than there actually is. The action sequences that are there are indeed fine, mind you.

What’s most fun about the film – at least to me – is its somewhat early 80s Corman-esque sense of sledgehammer satire. Luke’s brain ads are truly hilarious, as are the branded landmarks in the intro and many another idea of the sort. Plus, who doesn’t like a movie that’s so down on ads?


There’s also something to be said for the somewhat thrown together look of Hardwired’s near future that mixes the mildly science fictional with the grubbily contemporary as of its making, and a handful of dubious aesthetic ideas, and probably ends up on a more realistic look for its future than the completely designed one of a film with a budget would have been. After all, whose outer reality consists exclusively out of objects made during the last two or three years?

Three Films Make A Post: If your skin doesn't crawl, it's on too tight!

He’s Out There (2018): I’m not usually someone beating movies with the morality club, but when a film like Quinn Lasher’s He’s Out There comes around and mostly wants to base its suspense on various “children in danger” tropes, and never uses this as anything but an intensely cheap way to try and get to its audience, it really deserves to be clubbed with it. I’m not even against films exploiting the automatic sympathy most audiences will have for children, but there really needs to be a reason to use this particular element as enthusiastically as this thing does. Otherwise, it’s just a cheap and unpleasant evening without much of a point. Apart from decent lead performances by Yvonne Strahoski and the kid actresses Anna and Abigail Pniowsky, there’s little else to recommend the film – it certainly has one of the uglier colour schemes I’ve seen in quite some time, and a script that’s not just heavy on the child exploitation angle but also on all grown-ups acting exclusively like “it’s in the script” horror movie characters.

Powwow Highway (1989): Jonathan Wacks’s (UK produced!) film about two Cheyenne (A Martinez and Gary Farmer) going on a road trip to get the sister of one of them out of custody is a bit of a mixed bag. Shot and told in a very typical late 80s indie style, it fluctuates between a somewhat abstracted (the director certainly isn’t a Native American) anger about the way the US were still treating people they’d beaten and betrayed again and again, some very generic odd couple friendship stuff, and moments that actually remind more of Burt Reynolds movies than anything else (only the characters’ car is crap). It’s not a terribly coherent and concise film, even as road movies go, losing any prospect of actually thinking any of its potential themes through early on and mostly getting by on Wacks’s generally solid filmmaking and the performances of Martinez and Farmer. The film also doesn’t seem to want to face the fact that nothing its characters do in the end will change anything about them or their lives at all, badly selling empty gestures as something profound.

Welcome the Stranger (2018): Finishing up this trio is this one directed by Justin Kelly. A sister (Abbey Lee) suddenly appears at the house of her brother (Caleb Landry Jones) whom she hasn’t seen for ages. Incestuous tension rises and both siblings are plagued by visions and dreams. Some time, the brother’s girlfriend (Riley Keough) appears, though she might be a figment of his imagination, or the projection of something; or the sister might try to bring him to share her own delusions. Apparently, closeness between siblings isn’t what it’s generally made out to be.


The film is obviously influenced by David Lynch, but there’s also more than just a suggestion of Ingmar Bergman in his least realistic mode. However, unlike with Lynch, the film’s various strangenesses never add up to a feeling of real disquiet, and where Bergman’s use of symbolism and the weird is incisive and sharp yet still ambiguous, Kelly’s film never really dives that deep.

Past Misdeeds: They Came From Beyond Space (1967)

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.


A number of meteors crashes onto a field belonging to a farm in Cornwall. It's the most curious thing though - usually, meteors don't fly in a V-formation. The UK government thinks the phenomenon requires investigation and decides to send a group of scientists lead by an astronomer with a special interest in the discovery of extraterrestrial life, Dr. Curtis Temple (Robert Hutton), to Cornwall.

There is a tiny problem, though: Temple's love for vintage cars (slightly prefiguring the Third Doctor, like some of the film's tone, if you ask me) has resulted in an accident some months ago that left the astronomer with a silver plate in his head, and - at least that's the opinion of his doctor - still too sick to work away from home, even though he'll act as fit as James Bond throughout the movie. We all know about the dangerous wilds of Cornwall, far away from civilization, after all.

So there's nothing to it than to send Temple's colleague and girlfriend, Lee Mason (Jennifer Jayne) to lead the expedition and send all pertinent data up to Temple.

Alas, things at the crash site fastly become problematic. The meteorites contain alien consciousnesses that take over the scientists, break off all contact with the outside world and slowly begin to infiltrate a close-by village too (starting with the local banker, of course, as if that were necessary). Then, the aliens begin to requisition large amounts of building materials and weapons through government channels.

After a time without news, Temple, as well as someone in government, realizes that something's not right at all. An attempt by the aliens to take the astronomer over too failing thanks to that practical silver plate helps Temple's thought processes there. Temple's investigations in the village and around the crash site turn up curious developments: it's not just that the scientists and the dozens of people they have taken on are obviously not themselves anymore, they have built an underground lair all the better to be able to shoot rockets to the moon. Fortunately, Temple is one of those two-fisted scientists from the 50s, and his astonishing abilities (yeah, I know, he must have survived World War II, but how many astronomers really were astonishing commandos and still were when they hit middle-age?) at fistfighting, shooting, and escaping from cells will be very helpful in thwarting the plans of the aliens and their leader - the Master of the Moon (Michael Gough). Not even a strange alien illness that is also part of the aliens' overcomplicated plan can touch Temple; I suspect the illness is afraid to be infected by Hutton's well-known right-wing real life opinions about everything.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you make a 50s alien invasion movie in 1967. This time around, much-kicked – when it comes to non-anthology movies - Hammer rivals Amicus are throwing their shoestring budget at that old stalwart of British cinema, the alien invasion movie with the American no-name actor in the lead role. One suspects Quatermass and the Pit might have had something to do with that decision, though They Came counters the complexity and intelligence of the Quatermass approach to SF with a tale of a properly dumb alien invasion with a badly delivered 60s peace and love twist at the end that wants me to believe that the two-fisted American scientist whose adventures we have witnessed up to the point is willing to shake hands with aliens who wanted to kill him or make him their slave because they say they now think better of it - twice. Let's not even talk about these aliens' idea of secrecy (or the idea of the film's UK government about how a quarantine works; hint: generally, letting people come and go as they please isn't a part of it).

This may sound as if I were rather dissatisfied with They Came, but nothing could be further from the truth. The alien invasion plot may be dumb, it is however dumb in the most delightful manner, easily convincing me that I may not live in a world where this sort of plan would sound logical, but really rather would. Not only are the aliens' plans and the film's hero - who reminds me of a more conservative version of one of these non-professional Eurospy movie protagonists - a delightfully groovy age version of 50s traditions (a total improvement on the model, obviously), the way to thwart them is just as beautifully insane, seeing as it consists of knocking one's possessed girlfriend out, kidnapping her, and using her as a test object while working on a (of course very silly looking) anti-alien-possession helmet, even sillier alien detection goggles and alien re-possession methods with a friendly scientist (Zia Mohyeddin) who just happens to live somewhere in the country close-by, and also owns many silver trophies and as well as utilities to melt metal. In an especially pleasant development that helpful man is a Pakistani Englishman, who is not played as a comical figure, doesn't have to die to prove how evil the bad guys are, and will turn out to be save-the-day-competent. Given his role, and how competent Lee is allowed to be once she's not under alien control anymore, it's pretty obvious this is a film that may love to indulge in silliness for silliness' sake but that also has a clear idea of which parts of his 50s models just don't cut it anymore in 1967.

When people - though too few of them do - talk about They Came's special effects, they unfailingly mention their quality to be comparable to contemporary Doctor Who (this was the time of the Second Doctor Patrick Troughton, if you're not quite up on important historical dates). That's an old chestnut when talking about British SF cinema, yet in this case it is indeed true. Consequently, the effects' execution has more than just a whiff of cardboard and spit, but it also shares the other, more important part of the Doctor's legacy, a decidedly British visual imagination that makes up for the unavoidable cheapness and threadbareness. My favourite set piece is the yellow and black striped elevator that sits right inside a typical British country home, exemplifying at once the loving absurdity and the Britishness (for wont of a better word) of the film's production design. It's the mix of the local and the strange that gets me every time.

What the Doctor generally didn't have at the time (though the show did have some good ones) were directors quite like They Came's Freddie Francis. Francis, veteran that he was, was someone seemingly unable to not put real effort even into his cheapest and silliest films, and he works his magic here too, milking every possibility to turn the cheap yet creative sets and the landscape of the locations into a cheap pop art dream that feels saturated with colours even when the surroundings are rather brown more often than not, and that builds visual interest even from the smallest thing.

The movie's pop art feel is even further strengthened by James Stevens's score that belongs to the jazzy swinging kind you often find in Eurospy movies, though it has a peculiar habit to just fall into an unending series of drum rolls when Hutton punches people in the face.


The cheap pop art feel of, well, everything about They Came From Beyond Space suggests a film made to treat the old-fashioned tropes of the 50s alien invasion movie with the sensibilities that produced the Eurospy movie. In a wonderful turn of event, Francis's movie actually succeeds at that mission, for words like "groovy" and "awesome" come to my mind quite naturally when I think about it.

In short: Sleep No More (2018)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the film’s single (good) idea!

After a research project to “cure sleep” with some magical drug ends with the death of one of its subjects via eye mutilation and suicide, the medical – or pharmaceutical, the script neither tells nor has probably thought about it – researcher responsible (Yasmine Aker) convinces her grad students (Brea Grant, Keli Price, Stephen Ellis, and Christine Dwyer) to continue the experiment on a long weekend. After all, once they have reached 200 hours without sleep, they will reach a state of lucidity and will be feted as heroes of humanity everywhere, right? Of course, everyone involved quickly develops horrible hallucination, and starts to see a foggy CGI monster, while also suffering from various other psychological problems you might imagine to occur with drug-induced sleep deprivation.

There is, by the way, no connection to L.T.C. Rolt here, if you were asking yourself that. I rather enjoyed director Phillip Guzman’s previous film, Dead Awake, and I sort of dig the sleep themed horror thing he has going on, but the film at hand is pretty atrocious. It’s not so much Guzman’s direction – though the decision to show a CGI monster this crappy quite this often, as well as how the tonal shifts in the acting present don’t do the film any favours either and are certainly in the purview of the director’s job – but rather a script that gets basically nothing right apart from the cool, old school fantastika idea of dream-eating monsters living in symbiotic relationship with humanity until a couple of idiots decide to “cure sleep”.

The characterisation is broad and empty where depth and detail are needed for the story to have any effect on its viewers, and the tone shifts between awkward comedy and supposedly deadly serious horror at a moment’s notice. The actors seem to have been left without any guidance, so only Aker – who doesn’t have to go through these shifts – and eternal pro Grant actually seem to have any kind of grip on their respective characters. The rest of the cast wobbles and stumbles through the series of disconnected moments that goes for a plot here. The film’s basic problem is the complete absence of actual definition in characters and world, which is rather a heavy lack in a film all about horror based on the psychology and perceptions of its characters.

For some reason, this is also set in the 80s, so these aren’t just unconvincing characters, but also ones dressed up in “period” costumes who look exactly like that – costumed.


That Sleep No More’s idea of how medical research works, what a control group is and what it is there for, and so on, and so forth, has little base in even the most cursory research made by the writers seems to be par for the course for this sort of thing; that most of its deviations from reality – which make Flatliners look scientific – aren’t even useful in building drama, adds insult to injury.

The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963)

Original title: La maldición de la Llorona

Somewhere in the Mexican countryside in the 19th Century, or thereabouts. The area is plagued by a series of horrible murders. Victims are found in terrible states – mutilated and without a drop of blood in their veins. The local police seems to have their suspicions about Selma Jaramillo (Rita Macedo), a widow apparently living completely alone in a huge, intensely creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere, being involved somehow, but thus far, there’s no actual evidence beyond the woman acting rather off-handedly, perhaps even a bit gleeful, about all the murders in her direct neighbourhood. We the audience know these suspicions about her are indeed well-founded, for the film’s first scene sees Selma – though with disturbing shark eyes in her face – her dogs and her scarred henchman Juan (Carlos López Moctezuma) making brutal work of some travellers.

Tonight is going to be special night in Selma’s house of horrors. After fifteen years during which she has kept the girl away, she has invited her niece Amelia (Rosita Arenas) to visit her in the house; she has a bit of a nasty surprise waiting as the young woman’s present for her 25th birthday. Amelia also brings a surprise of her own – she is freshly married to the cigar-chomping Jaime (Abel Salazar).

Amelia and Jaime quickly understand that something is very wrong with Selma and her house. A single servant the woman says she’s cut from the gallows and who certainly looks the part, mysterious cries in the house and an unpleasant vision in a mirror are the sort of things that’ll get guests into an ominous mood. And that’s before Selma reveals the horrible truth about their family to Amelia – they are the descendants of La Llorona (which in this version of the legend was an evil, powerful, bloodsucking witch), fated to become just like her. Amelia, says Selma, is cursed to bring La Llorona herself back to life by removing the pike she had been staked with when a bell that hasn’t tolled in ages will strike midnight. Worse still for the young woman, she too will become an evil, bloodsucking fiend, while Jaime, like apparently all men marrying into her bloodline, is doomed to madness.

While Amelia is more than just a little disturbed by all this, Selma is all too happy with her project. After all, following in her ancestor’s (or mother’s, the film isn’t terribly clear about it) footsteps has brought her considerable power and agelessness already; she expects nothing less than “omnipotence” once La Llorona lives again.

As most Mexican genre directors of his era, Rafael Baledón made a huge number of films in all kinds of genres, and as normal for everyone whose output is quite as humongous as his was – I speak from practical experience here – not every single film he worked on was a masterpiece; some were indeed rather bad. However, his best films – and I have by now seen more than a couple that deserve this description – could be outright brilliant.

La maldición certainly is brilliant, as great a Gothic horror film as anything the Italians or Corman made around this time, breathing the mood of bad dreams and cruel fates. Where most Mexican Gothic horror on screen seems to have come to the genre mostly by way of the Universal school (with more or less hefty pulpy elements added to the mix), this entry shows some clear influences by Bava, Black Sunday specifically. Particularly the beginning scenes, the shot of Selma, shark-eyed, surrounded by her attack dogs, and the whole look of the set dominated by broken trees they take place in suggest the iconic shot of Barbara Steele surrounded by her dogs, and the coach sequence at the beginning of Bava’s masterpiece. There are some plot parallels too, but Baledón’s film takes these elements in directions too much of its own for the film ever to become a rip-off.

Baledón’s direction may not be quite on the level of Bava at his best here, yet the film is still full of the mood of dreams and nightmare imagery, putting its characters into a place perpetually dominated by fog and nature that looks broken, twisted and corrupted, trapping them in a house whose series of secret passages and elegantly placed giant spider webs, its stairs leading who knows where suggest the subconscious mind much more than an actual house people would inhabit. The performances fit these places, particularly Macedo playing her Selma much larger than life. But then, how else would you portray the character of a potentially immortal, bloodsucking witch trying to push her niece into fulfilling the family curse?

Apart from the sometimes expressionist sets and camera work suggestive of the otherworldly and the strange, Baledón also has some simple, and brilliant ideas that make the film stranger in all the best ways. Take for example, the scene where Amelia – well on her way to turning evil herself – has a crisis of conscience, and the night sky above her suddenly fills with (animated) eyes; or the one where Selma exposits some of the family history to a hypnotized Jaime but all we see of the flashbacks (which look like scenes from other Mexican horror films as far as I could make out) is in negative form, turning what could be hokey cost-cutting peculiarly disquieting.


Thematically, this is a film very much about an obsession of Gothic literature and cinema (and sometimes weird fiction following it, too, see Lovecraft): the fear of inheritance as a form of fated doom, be it biological inheritance, spiritual inheritance, or a philosophical one, very close to the idea of free will being a mere illusion. Interestingly enough for a Mexican horror film - whose solutions to this sort of conundrum, this being a very Catholic country, usually involve religion or masked wrestlers – this particular horror here is averted by the very earthly love between a husband and a wife, the climax finding Jaime – not at all like a proper macho but rather like a real man – pulling Amelia back from the abyss by pleading with her and declaring his love. Well, he does get to punch Juan afterwards too, but that’s really more an epilogue to help the audience cope with Jaime’s general lack of fighting skill, as is the traditional – and impressive - breakdown of the house where everything took place.

Living Death (2009)

aka Possessed

Original title: 불신지옥

One exhausted evening, college student Hee-jin (Nam Sang-mi) gets a call from her mother (Kim Bo-yun) reporting her sister So-jin (Shim Eun-kyung) has disappeared. Hee-jin returns home at once. To her shock, she finds her mother hasn’t called the police about the disappearance yet; dear mother, in the grip of full-on religious mania for what we will later learn quite some time now, really rather wants to pray the kid back.

Of course, once Hee-jin calls the police, she isn’t exactly impressed by the detective she’s speaking with, Tae-hwan (Ryu Seung-ryong). He’s basically shrugging things off by explaining the 14 year-old’s disappearance with her “simply” having run away. Therefore, there’s supposed to be no reason for concern or for the policeman doing his job. However, Tae-hwan will change his tune once a series of strange and disturbing events begin to develop, like a number of suicides in rather quick succession, all taking place in the apartment house Hee-jin’s mother and sister live in. The first woman who kills herself apologizes to So-jin for something in her suicide note, though neither mother nor daughter seem to know what her connection to Hee-jin was apart from having babysat her sometimes. Tae-hwan’s and Hee-jin’s – sometimes independent, sometimes not – investigations turn up increasingly disturbing connections between these people and So-jin.

What these connections in Lee Yong-joo-I’s Living Death exactly are, I’m not going to disclose; I am only going to say that this is one of those horror films where most people getting supernaturally killed off pretty much get what they asked for. Yet, it isn’t the sort of straightforward supernatural tale of vengeance one might expect, for Lee structures the story and its telling very much like a traditional mystery interspersing the investigative sequences with highly effective and often properly disturbing scenes of horror of ever increasing intensity. So this is less a tale of supernatural revenge than that of a young woman and a cop with problems trying to figure out the truth through proper investigations, with interviews and research revealing ever more of the truth of what has been going on around So-jin.

Or really, half revealing that truth, for as many a South Korean horror film, Living Death keeps certain things ambiguous, ending on a note that can be easily read in a couple of very different ways. Which is only right and proper for a film whose characters have very different interpretations on the same set of occurrences and facts, depending on their personal connection to things as well as their religious and spiritual outlook.


Thematically, the film is concerned with the love of family and the sometimes disturbing forms it can take, the horrors of religious world views, the willingness of people to egotistically use others, guilt, and the way fact is always filtered through any given person’s view of the world. It’s pretty heady stuff, at least on paper. In Lee’s hands, however, all these ideas and perspectives come together to form a highly coherent, intelligent film that asks questions and expects its audience to come up with their own answers. It’s also a film that happens to be a fascinating tale of mystery as well as a character based piece of horror that finds its most terrible moments not in the supernatural (though it is certainly no slouch in that regard) but in the human reaction to it.

Music Monday: Vampira Edition

Hack-O-Lantern (1988)

aka Halloween Night

Apart from giving away lots of pumpkins for Halloween, dear old Grandpa (Hy Pyke) is not-so-secretly the big boss of a Satanic cult working in one of those typical US small towns that are always full of satanists, monsters, and the murderously deranged. Grandpa has his favourite grandkid Tommy (Bryson Gerard) pegged as somebody very special for the future service of His Satanic Majesty. Indeed, he’s so special Grandpa does take it upon himself to murder Tommy’s dad, probably to make himself the best bet for a father figure.

Years later – Tommy is now played by Gregory Scott Cummins – Tommy’s indoctrination has gone apace, even though his mother – Grandpa’s very own daughter! – tries to keep her son as well as his siblings Vera (Carla Baron) and Roger (Jeff Brown) as far away from the old man as possible. Which, given that Tommy’s the product of a bit of incest between Gramps and his daughter whom he hypnotized into it on her wedding day, must take quite some doing.

This Halloween, Tommy’s initiation phase is finally going to be over, if, that is, he manages to keep “pure” for it. Satan must secretly be a no sex before marriage to him guy, I assume. Fortunately for Tommy, somebody in an inspired robes and devil mask outfit murders his girlfriend before she can suck out his spiritual energy, or something. This being a slasher film, robes and mask murders will continue throughout the movie. Who is the killer? Crazy Grandpa? Tommy taking time out from body building and fantasizing a whole video clip of a inspired crap hair metal band featuring him on guitar? Somebody else?

Whereas I diagnosed future softcore specialist Jag Mundhra’s previous horror film Open House, as some kind of softcore sex film, just without the sex (and therefore as pointless as anything), Hack-O-Lantern (which is clearly the better because the much more ridiculous title for this epic) is indeed an authentic late 80s direct to video slasher. That’s to say it is nonsensical, ridiculous, from time to time tasteless, mind-boggling, and frequently (inadvertently) very, very funny.

The plot, such as it is, the killer, their motive, the Satanic cult – take whatever you want in this movie, and it’s going to make no sense whatsoever to you, yet do so in a highly absurd and entertaining manner. I am particularly fond of the film’s randomness: there’s nothing that’ll make a film more awesome for less effort than a random video clip for some bad band disguised as a dream sequence including some “sexy” dancing, and really nothing that could have less of a point.

Then there’s Mundhra’s inspired hand for the silly detail. Who wouldn’t love Grandpa’s pumpkin delivering ways, or the fact that everybody seems to know where his cult does its thing, apart from anyone in any position to care about it? And just see how lovely these Satanic rituals are, with the red robed evil doers slowly stepping in a circle around a pentagram while Grandpa babbles nonsense!

Speaking of Grandpa, a huge part of the responsibility for the high entertainment value of Hack-O-Lantern sits on the shoulders of Hy Pyke, his Southern drawl, his various versions of the devil horns and the evil eye sign that emphasise about every third sentence he says, as well as the insane enthusiasm of his scenery chewing that visibly leaves many of the other actors unable to react in any way, shape or form. So most of his appearances consist of him mugging and declaiming outrageously while his so-called co-actors just stare helplessly, unable to come up with any way to relate to whatever the hell it is he is doing; and they surely can’t expect Mundhra to step in and instruct them, he’s busy enough keeping everyone in frame.


It’s quite the thing to witness, and while Hack-O-Lantern is certainly not a Halloween classic, it is very, very, good at being not so classic.

Three Films Make A Post: Secrets kept hidden for 100 years are now revealed.

Incidente aka Incident (2010): On paper, this piece of POV horror by Argentinian director Mariano Cattaneo sounds pretty awful: a couple of documentarians (whose camera wielding half apparently can’t frame a shot decently to save his life) examining the occult connections of a spree killing of years past and some occultist academics awaken a rather possessive evil; lots of running around of people in various states of possession through a dilapidated industrial building ensues. In practice, and despite the much too shaky camera work, Cattaneo somehow turns this thin bit of plot into an entertaining 80 minutes of film, by what I can only imagine to be sheer willpower. The make-up effects are rather impressive for the film’s budget league, but what really makes this work as decently as it does is a proper sense of mood and pacing, I just wish it had been put to use on a more interesting story, though I do give the film some extra bonus points for its use of actual occult concepts in its backstory.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018): While I enjoyed the first film in what is now apparently a franchise more than this sequel, Stephen Cognetti’s attempt at broadening his haunted house tale towards a more concrete mythology of its own still ends up being a perfectly entertaining little movie featuring some actually thoughtful retconning of elements of the first film, and quite a few scenes that are effectively creepy. Like Cattaneo, Cognetti also understands the importance of mood and pacing for this sort of low budget affair, so there’s none of the feet dragging that can mar indie horror, and a clear sense of purpose to everything we see and hear.

Heilstätten (2018): And here’s yet another POV horror film, this time around from my native Germany, directed by Michael David Pate. Bottom feeding Youtube “personalities” break into a former hospital complex with a very bad past (this is Germany after all). The expected mixture of romantic travails and supernatural and/or slasheriffic violence ensues, as does a double plot twist that doesn’t work terribly well but certainly isn’t boring.


And really, while there’s nothing terribly exciting about Heilstätten apart from it being yet another horror movie from Germany that isn’t just amateur gore hour (though it features some pretty well done bits of the icky stuff as well) or an arthouse flick, it works well throughout, keeps its pace up, takes care to make its characters less loathsome than you’d expect, and seems generally made by people who care about entertaining their audience. I certainly felt moved accordingly for most of the film’s 90 minutes.

Past Misdeeds: The Pact (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.


The death of her abusive mother brings Nichole (Agnes Bruckner) back to the family home she and her sister Annie (Caity Lotz) thought to have left behind for good. Annie's even less happy with going back than Nichole, and only some fine sisterly pressure convinces her to return at all, and much later than Nichole does.

When Annie arrives "home", Nichole has disappeared into thin air after - as the audience knows - some rather disquieting things happening to her. Annie assumes Nichole, with her history of drug use and disappearing acts, has just fallen back into old habits, leaving her sister alone to deal with a house and a funeral she only thought of going to for her sister's sake, and her cousin Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) to take care of her little daughter Eva (Dakota Bright).

But when Annie meets Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) and her niece at her mother's funeral, she isn't quite as convinced of Nichole's disappearance having a comparatively harmless explanation anymore. Liz argues Nichole would never have left her daughter alone this way; after all she has turned her life around for her.
Because Annie is more than a bit freaked out about staying at her mother's place alone for another night, she invites Liz and Eva to stay the night with her. After dark, everyone is woken by strange noises, and now it is Liz's turn to disappear while Annie has an encounter with an invisible force that can only be explained by supernatural agency. She barely manages to get out of the house with Eva before whatever happened to Nichole and Liz can happen to her too.

When Annie goes to the police with her story, the part about poltergeist phenomena does not exactly improve her chances for being taken seriously about anything else she says. Only Bill Creek (Casper Van Dien), a cop who knew Nichole - and one suspects also knows something about the family history - is willing to actually listen to her. Creek isn't willing to believe in any of that spooky stuff, but at least, he's still taking Annie seriously enough to help her in the few ways actually in his power. However, if Annie wants to find out where her sister and her cousin went, and what is haunting her mother's house, she will have to do most of the investigating alone, with a messed-up sensitive named Stevie (Haley Hudson) she knows from her high school pointing the way. Annie might just find some terrible family secret hidden nearly in plain sight.

Say what you will about (or against) the last decade in horror movies, but it has - probably via the successes of Japanese cinema in this regard - brought about a minor renaissance in movies about hauntings and ghosts, some of which, like Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact, can stand their ground next to any movie in that particular sub-genre you'd care to mention.

The Pact is a brilliant example of a movie closely concentrated on creating a mood of dread and fear very close to the kind of fears I remember too well from my own childhood. The movie manages to create a feeling of tension even though it isn't a permanent barrage of Completely Shocking Things™. There are some truly shocking and some truly creepy things happening throughout the movie, but there's never the feeling any of them are in the movie because it needs to include a shock every ten minutes. Rather, everything here happens for a reason closely related to the film's plot and the film's mood, two elements as organically entwined as possible.

McCarthy's direction is very stylish (the Internet tells me of Argento but also Val Lewton productions as an influence, and I believe her in this case), yet he never gets too flashy. McCarthy instead opts to put his stylistic abilities exclusively into the service of creating the film's particular brand of tension. For most of the time, the camera glides through the cramped and claustrophobic spaces of Annie's mother's house, looking over Annie's shoulder, lingering on blackness and the place's quotidian and bleak interior until they become threatening in their near normality.

I also love how willing McCarthy (also responsible for the script) is to not outright state a lot of what is going on with his characters and their lives but to subtly show it through details of the interiors they move through and Caity Lotz's body language (insert gushing praise about Lotz's performance here). It's not that the film is vague about anything, The Pact is just not the kind of film feeling the need to spell everything out an attentive audience will understand in other ways.

It's all part of the film's overall spirit of tightness and concentration, virtues it doesn't even leave behind when its plot later on takes a turn towards a somewhat different type of horror film than it initially seemed to be, fortunately without doing the boring "look at this surprising twist!" routine. What could have been flabby and digressive in less capable hands feels organic and logical here.

Finally, it's also worth mentioning - seeing as this is a horror movie - how creepy the film is throughout, how successful The Pact is at combining Annie's struggle with her past (her own childhood fears), the idea that however horrible one's past was, there might always have been something more horrible lurking unseen just a (literally and metaphorically) thin wall apart, and the more general images of childhood fears it conjures up in pictures that seem archetypally effective - and willing to be strange if it suits the film - to me.


That, dear reader, means I was freaked out more than once during the course of The Pact, which is the sort of compliment I can't give many horror films.

The Barn (2016)

It’s Halloween in small town USA, 1989. Best friends Sam (Mitchell Musolino) and Josh (Will Stout) are just about to graduate high school. But before they let go of supposedly childish things like Sam’s absolute obsession with the best of all holidays – he’s even got his own interpretation of the Rules of Halloween – they are going to have a real proper Halloween with their other friends by riding out of town for the big concert of their favourite band, Death Inferno. Perhaps Josh can push Sam into finally romancing long time crush Michelle (Lexi Dripps), too?

Alas, the kids will never actually arrive at their concert a couple towns over, for on their way, they accidentally end up in front of the barn all local Halloween legends talk about. Apparently, if you knock on the barn door three times and shout “Trick or Treat!”, you’ll awaken a trio of murderous monsters that’s a bit like the Halloween version of the village people – a miner, a scarecrow, and a guy with a pumpkin head with flaming eyes. Because they are kids in a horror movie, and because Josh clearly thinks it’ll get Sam over some of his personal hang-ups, our group of protagonists does exactly that, and will end up paying rather dearly in the ensuing triple slasher rampage. However, it’ll turn out that Sam’s and Josh’s experience in gardening will be extremely useful in a monster fight.

Justin M. Seaman’s The Barn is a piece of throwback horror from beginning to end, so if the idea of a film quite this consciously using the style of late 80s US low budget horror, even going so far as to use filters to make the thing look more like the films it adores, sends you into some kind of anti-retro panic, this is not the film for you. I’m generally a bit on the fence about retroism taken quite this far, but I quickly found myself charmed and entertained by the film, and once the scene that can only be called “The Halloween Hoedown Massacre” came around, there was no thought about complaining about the film being retro anymore, for it is delightfully so.

What I particularly enjoyed about the whole affair is how much The Barn embraces the silly and goofy sides of the films it so clearly has been inspired by, showing as little shame as its role models when it comes to seek reasons to show off wonderfully gloopy gore effects, and as much moody red and blue lighting as anyone could ever have wished for. This is the sort of film that late in the game decides that three supernatural killers alone just aren’t quite enough, so it adds a Satanic cult to the fold. And because Seaman and cohorts apparently know what’s fun about Satanic cults in the sort of film they are making, it indeed ends up as a nice addition to the rest of the wonderfully weird crap going on here.

All of this would be enough to result in a perfectly good time for me, but The Barn also works rather well in its more down to earth moments, particularly in its first third. While the film certainly works with clichés when it comes to its characters, particularly Sam and Josh’s friendship still rings true to what I know of a certain type of close friendship between boys in a small town, and actually feels quite a bit better developed than comparable relationships would have been in many late 80s horror films. Michelle’s and Sam’s relationship, while also a movie cliché, works on a comparative level, too. These more naturalistic elements do of course wonders when it comes to selling all the crazy and outrageous bits of the film, and really hold together what otherwise could have been a fun series of gory episodes more than an actual movie, while still leaving the filmmakers enough space to just make up crazy entertaining shit.


Of course, there are a couple of weaknesses: the acting is not always as strong as it could be (a problem The Barn obviously shares with it spiritual predecessors), and the second act could probably have been tightened a bit. However, when it comes to fun throw back horror like this, these aren’t exactly insurmountable obstacles to enjoyment, and indeed, if you want to see a very specifically old-fashioned fun horror movie instead of the bleak and slow stuff I so often champion in contemporary horror, The Barn should hit the spot very nicely indeed.

Trench 11 (2017)

It’s the ending stretch of World War I. A British desk jockey trying to get his piece of glory before it’s too late manages to convince his superiors to send him and a small group of soldiers to investigate a hidden underground complex the Germans just fled. He suspects it to be the secret lab of German mad scientist Reiner (Robert Stadlober), also known as “The Prophet”.

He’s all too right about that, and soon the mixed group of Brits, Americans and PTSD-struck Canadian tunnel expert Berton (Rossif Sutherland) has to survive the products of Reiner’s experiments, which look and sound like rather icky worm-induced rage zombies. To make a bad situation worse, the German high command has sent the surprisingly sane Hauptmann (whom the IMDB lists as a “Kapitän”, which would be a sea captain) Müller (Shaun Benson) with a team of men as well as Reiner himself back to the laboratory to purge the place. Still worse for everyone’s potential survival is the little fact that Reiner really is a bit of a prophet in that he’s very much foreseeing the spirit of Hitler and would really rather let the world be destroyed by his worm zombies, Germany potentially rising from the flames “purged of all weakness”, and so on and so forth.

German zombie-style infected in a bunker, you say? I believe I’ve seen a couple of films in this particular sub-genre of the Nazi zombie film before. In theory, the setting of Leo Scherman’s Trench 11 during World War I could differentiate it a bit from other films it does rather remind one of, but in practice, it doesn’t make much of a difference if a German zombie soldier in a low budget film is a Nazi or not, particularly since zombie creator Reiner is very much written to embody the spirit of Nazism, while Benson’s Müller is that well-worn trope of the basically decent German soldier (who just happens to guard a KZ, but didn’t notice anything untoward, no sir, but I digress into directions this film really isn’t responsible for). So, the big difference between this and other bunker zombie films really only is the choice of uniforms. Originality, you gotta seek elsewhere.

However, Scherman’s film has more than enough going on in it to recommend itself for a day when one is in the mood for the unsurprising. For one, the script is pretty tight, with simply yet effectively drawn characters acting in ways that make sense for them while still hitting all the mandated plot beats of the sub-genre they are moving in. The cast is doing a good job with them, too, Sutherland and Benson making an effective duo of heroes, and Stadlober putting in a very fun bit of Nazi scientist scenery chewing containing just the right mix of foaming at the mouth and companionably crazy calm right before he does something really nasty.

As a native German speaker, I was rather impressed – that “Kapitän” excepted – by the general idiomatic correctness of the German here (though I’m not completely convinced it’s actually idiomatic for the time this is taking place in too). The German dialogue consists of sentences actual Germans would say, not something you’ll get in many movies, not even German ones. The delivery of the German parts of the dialogue (Stadlober obviously excepted), in somewhat ironic contrast, is much less convincing, not only suggesting actors who are rather more Canadian than your typical German language speaker but who also learned their dialogue phonetically.

While neither sets nor direction are exactly exciting, there’s solid, dependable craftsmanship visible throughout the film, as well as a decent sense of place. It’s never a deep movie, exactly, but it’s also not goofy or playful, treating its plot straight and working well enough with it.

The worm zombies and other effects are rather successful and certainly unappetizing creations, the creatures basically bloated to bursting with their parasites, which provides a handful of neat frissons of body horror.


As a whole, this might not be a remarkable or deep film, but it is solid and dependable entertainment that’ll not leave you feeling more stupid going out than you did when you came in.

Cheerleader Camp (1988)

A group of cheerleaders (as played by Betsy Russell, Lucinda Dickey, Lorie Griffin, Teri Weigel and Rebecca Ferratti) and their two male companions (Leif Garrett and Travis McKenna) take part in a prestigious cheerleading camp – I leave it to everyone’s imagination if such a thing existed in the real world of the real 80s – to improve their act for some sort of upcoming competition and to take part in the camp’s very own competition as well. However, something’s very wrong at the camp, and it’s not just some of the girls’ horrifying competitive streak when it comes to, well, everything, from cheerleading to boys, nor their just as horrifying lack of empathy and solidarity.

Things start very early on with the supposed suicide (which is of course in truth murder) of one of the girls, the sort of thing that should stop the summer fun completely, if not for the fact that camp owner and eternal cheerleader Miss Tipton (Vickie Benson) fulfils the local Sheriff’s (Jeff Prettyman) cheerleader kink. More girls disappear, or rather, as the audience knows, are murdered in horrible ways. Curiously enough, all of the murdered have some reason to be in the bad books of Dickey’s character who increasingly starts to fray at the edges during the course of the film.

I didn’t expect the slasher comedy Cheerleader Camp to actually be anything but a dispenser for tits and gore, particularly since it was directed by future softcore director John Quinn. So I am particularly happy to note the film is indeed a bit more, actually much more, interesting than that. Sure, there’s the mandatory amount of female nudity – though fans of the male form will get something to look at too – and a series of increasingly cool, icky and physically absurd killings. But they are realized in a competent and effective manner,and even the nudity mostly fulfils a sensible function in the film’s actual plot; a plot that does indeed exist. And while I thought it rather obvious who is actually responsible for the killings, Cheerleader Camp is taking its murder mystery angle mostly seriously, timing red herrings and reveals well. Why, the film even bothers to provide its cheerleading protagonists with somewhat complex inner lives, caring for them rather more than most slashers do with their respective victims, which obviously makes watching it rather more involving than just gawking at the murders would be. The actresses – and Leif Garrett – seem to appreciate that effort too, and consequently do a bit more work than just shoving pretty faces and breasts and George ‘Buck’ Flower into the audience’s faces.

I also found myself laughing about at least half of the film’s jokes, which is as good as any camp based teen comedy – horror or not - can hope to get out of me.


Adding an additional frisson of pleasant surprise to the film’s other considerable charms is the amount of subversive elements in the script by David Lee Fine and R.L. O’Keefe. At times, Cheerleader Camp really digs into portraying the immense pressure to be pretty, and good, and perfect, and available, yet still virginal, these young women are put under, as well as the way they internalize these pressures to then put them on their peers in turn. Why, even the killer is really only doing a somewhat more extreme version of what a young woman’s supposed to. As long as she comes out on top and looks good doing it, it’s alright, right?

Music Monday: Double Halloween Edition

The Enfield Haunting (2015)

1977. When the Hodgsons, a family living in a council home in Enfield, is terrorized by all kinds of poltergeist phenomena, Society for Psychical Research member Maurice Grosse (Timothy Spall) is called in to investigate. He quickly realizes that much of the activity seems to be centred around the youngest daughter, Janet (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), who, we will later learn, happens to share the first name of his own dead daughter.

After the publicity blitz about the affair starts, the SPR sends the delightfully named Guy Playfair (Matthew Macfadyen) in to help Maurice. Well, they actually send him to debunk what is going on, for Maurice’s public belief in the things he experiences in the Hodgsom home seems like rather bad publicity to the organization. It doesn’t take terribly long, though, until Playfair also realizes the phenomena are very real indeed. In fact Maurice’s and his duty may very well be not to debunk what is happening but to help the family experiencing it.

All the time, the phenomena are getting worse, going from the usual moving objects and smashed up furniture to what very much seems like possession of Janet, and even to physical harm.

I’m really not sure if calling a story told in three forty-five minute episodes a mini-series instead of a movie hacked in three parts as the British Sky did with The Enfield Haunting as directed by Kristoffer Nyholm and written by Joshua St Johnston is a terribly sensible idea, but then, I’m not working in TV, so what do I know?

As even someone only very superficially interested in the history of psychical phenomena will realize, the series is based on what may very well be the UK’s most famous poltergeist case, specifically, it calls itself an adaptation of a book about it by the real Guy Playfair. How much the book or this film have to do with any actual reality, only the people involved will ever truly know, but then I’m not writing up a documentary but a pretty neat little horror series, so this question is probably neither here nor there.

There is a very typical mistake quite a few – particularly TV – adaptations of true (or “true”, depending on one’s philosophy and mood) tales of the paranormal tend to make. All too many of them, while going hog-wild with the characterisation of their protagonists and taking all kinds of shortcuts, eschew being satisfying narratives by seemingly going out of their way to not have thematic through lines and certainly no satisfying endings. It’s understandable, of course, for non-fictional tales of the supernatural are not really supposed to have a theme – life sure as hell does not – and usually just peter out somehow, somewhere.

When it comes to this decision of either making a “realistic” story or a satisfying tale of the supernatural, The Enfield Haunting goes straight for the latter, providing not only a dramatic, emotional ending but also building its story rather nicely on Maurice’s emotional involvement with the Hodgson family who clearly could use a non-horrible male in their lives. As they occur, the supernatural events invite him to treat them as a mirror for some of his own ghosts, suggesting a connection between the two girls named Janet that may or may not only exist because he cares for them both. It’s an important, and rather well written, part of the story that also involves the marital troubles between Maurice and his wife Betty (Juliet Stevenson) caused by the death of their daughter. It would be very easy to use this element of the narrative only to jerk out a few tears from the audience – and the series certainly doesn’t shy away from a bit of tear-jerking – but it is also part of the series’ complex idea of human motivation and connection. The inner lives of people, the series understands, are not single-lane streets, so it accepts complexity and ambiguity in them. So where you’d expect it to have Maurice and Playfair go through the usual believer/sceptic rigmarole, it actually portrays both men as believers and sceptics, depending on the situation, something that practically never happens in this sort of story, and which made me really rather happy.

It also uses this approach in its treatment of the supernatural as something that can be threatening and horrifying, and certainly very cruel, but also quiet and kind. Accepting ambiguities seems to be the modus operandi here, and I’m certainly all for it.

Mind you, there’s no ambiguity to the existence of the actual supernatural in the series’ world, but then, there are really only a handful of cases where keeping the supernatural absolutely ambiguous in a tale of horror is anything but frustrating and even a bit cowardly, and I’m pretty sure it would be pointless for The Enfield Haunting. At the very least, the film’s acceptance of the supernatural as a given does provide us with some very good set-pieces. Some of the scenes of Janet – and others – speaking with the voices of the dead are really rather chilling, and the sequence with the medium in the second part manages to start out as a bit of a joke yet becomes increasingly uncomfortable and tense, even more so because it starts as anything but. Series director Nyholm generally manages to keep even the more typical bits of poltergeist business interesting, often concentrating on giving them a physical impact that makes them feel real. These scenes are not, as such, original if your know your horror, but they are so well staged and scripted originality doesn’t come into it.


Nyholm and the script are very ably assisted by a fine cast. I was particularly enamoured with Timothy Spall’s performance that at first seems to be all facial hair and a very late 70s embodiment of growing old badly but that reveals a complex and humane soul. And when have you last seen a movie or TV show this interested in a guy who looks like Spall here that uses him as its actual hero? Eleanor Worthington-Cox is also particularly good, selling all elements of the role - the intelligent teenager, the literally haunted kid, the various characters that will speak through her, and the near brokenness of the final part – without ever laying it on too thick.

Three Films Make A Post: Great things come in bears.

Mon Mon Mon Monsters aka 報告老師！怪怪怪怪物！(2017): I like grimdark, “Man is the greatest monster of them all”, everything is horrible, everyone is horrible, and so and so forth movies as much as the next guy, but boy, does Taiwanese director/writer Giddens Ko go overboard with that stuff here. The problem when you fill your film with characters with not a single character trait that isn’t horrible, doing horrible things to horrible monsters while being horrible, until things end horribly, is that there really rather seems to be no point at all to proceedings, for when everything and everyone is horrible all of the time, there’s really not much of a conclusion to reach anymore. It’s also rather monotonous and becomes a bit boring quickly. Hell, even serial killers, unlike everyone on screen here, aren’t monsters 24/7. I’ve seen this praised as incisive criticism on the state of The Youth, but this interpretation suggests that every kid is a sociopath or a psychopath, which just isn’t true.

The Witch Files (2018): This – if not officially – POV semi-remake of 90s classic/”classic” (your choice) witchcraft movie The Craft as directed by Kyle Rankin, on the other hand, a film clearly made for a YA audience, is clearly of the opinion that there are indeed problems with The Youth, but most of them are caused by an evil witch, and can be solved with a bit of hocus pocus and teenage girls learning some valuable lessons. Like a lot of contemporary YA cinema, this suffers from a rather lukewarm script; where Mon Mon etc is much too cynical, this one’s just a little too nice to its characters. Otherwise, there’s little here that’s terribly interesting or insightful, the plot developing competently but without any actual surprises.

It’s an okay enough film to while away 90 minutes of your time, mind you, there’s just little substance and only a degree of excitement to be had. The cast is pretty good, though, and I’m looking forward to seeing them in movies that give them a bit more to do.


Don’t Leave Home (2018): I was neither terribly surprised by the plot of this tale of an artist working in diorama form getting invited to the estate of a former Irish priest (Lalor Roddy) and painter who was involved in some possibly supernatural disappearances decades ago. You’ll never guess what the man’s dominating housekeeper (Helena Bereen) and he are actually going to sell. However, director Michael Tully sets up such a fine mood of the strange and the ineffable through landscape shots, creatively staged dream sequences and often ambiguous dialogue, complete originality is not really necessary at all for the film to work. The acting for the three central characters is fine too, and there’s a lot to be said for the intelligent way Tully interweaves his soft horror with elements of the folk tale. I also do appreciate a film that knows how to do something of a happy end that fits well into this particular genre space.

Past Misdeeds: Devil Story (1985)

Original title: Il était une fois le diable - Devil Story

aka Devil's Story

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.

Somewhere in what I think is supposed to be Florida but sure looks like a picturesque part of France to me, a guy (probably Pascal Simon) in a Halloween gnome mask that is supposed to be his face wearing a uniform jacket with SS insignia - so I think we can call him Adolf Gnome - randomly kills various people in rubber-gory ways.

After fifteen minutes of these shenanigans, the film cuts to a married couple driving through what might be the same area. They stop, and the woman (most probably Véronique Renaud) has a nasty encounter with a black cat that might at least in part be hallucinatory. Anyhow, it's enough to drive her into the first of many bouts of hysteric screeching (therefore I dub her "Screechie").

That very same night (I suppose), the couple is still driving around the countryside, having lost their way terribly. Fortunately, they come upon a gothic palace inhabited by two weird yet friendly members of the elderly demographic who invite them to stay the night. For some reason, Elderly Guy wears a camouflage outfit, but this sort of thing doesn't invite comment here. The rather strange hosts ramble on about the terrible things that happen in the area "before, during and after the equinox" (which I translate into "always") and then proceed to tell the young couple a pointless story (historical flashback the film can't afford time!) about five brothers who lured a ship to its doom but somehow drowned during the proceedings, plus some stuff about their descendants supposedly having made a deal with the devil.

Remember Adolf Gnome? He is one of said descendants, living alone with his equally crazy elderly mum. The female half of our husband and wife protagonist team will eventually meet those two, for during the night, she is awakened by a black horse that makes one hell of a racket outside and will proceed to do so in the most annoying fashion throughout the rest of the movie. Obviously, Screechie decides to go out in her nightie and investigate. That decision is the beginning of an epic journey during whose course Screechie makes the acquaintance of Adolf Gnome and Mum (they think she looks like Gnome's newly dead sister, so they decide to bury her alive), a mummy with a bulging crotch that randomly kills people and digs out said dead sister (she's a zombie now, I think) to walk around holding hands with said dead sister, and has random shit happen to her.

Also featured are Adolf Gnome bringing fists to a hoof fight, the usefulness of powder kegs and petrol when confronted with the backside of a mummy, Elderly Guy's epic (he's shown to shoot at it for hours out of what I assume to be his starting gun - that does at least explain the infinite ammo) obsession with the black horse he declares to be "the Devil Beast", the ship from the story, and a random (or rather, even more random) gotcha ending featuring the black cat from the beginning and a very hungry patch of ground.

It looks as if France during the 80s had its own little tribe of people making the really awesome kind of backyards horror films, the sort full of rubbery gore, random nonsense, and a narrative that makes most dreams look coherent. As my attempts at giving you the feel for the absurd randomness of its plot should have made clear, Bernard Launois's Devil Story is a proud and unapologetic part of that group of films, leaving no brain undamaged, and no narrative rule unbroken. It's not as mind-expanding as N.G. Mount's improbably awesome Ogroff, but it sure is a film doing its damndest to overwhelm its audience with pure weirdness.

If you want to be all serious about it, Devil Story's randomness is obviously influenced by European folklore and fairy tales. The black horse and black cat as creatures of the devil are important parts of that tradition, and stories about smugglers luring ships to their doom and paying for it later on are parts of many local folklores too. However, where fairy tales and folklore usually have quite clear thematic connotations and an understandable subtext, the film at hand just grabs some outward signifiers from the folk tales, adds impenetrable rambling, screeching, some rubbery gore, a mummy and a serial killer and calls it a story in a way that suggests the writer (not surprisingly also Bernard Launois) to be either twelve years old or under the influence of mind-expanding substances like wine or strong coffee. The whole project is awe-inspiring in its stubborn insistence on making no sense at all beyond "bad magical things that may have something to do with the devil - or not - happen to people in this area - or not".

On the technical front, Devil Story is a curious beast. It's well photographed in so far as Launois knows how to frame and block scenes and everything he - well DP Guy Maria - shoots looks rather picturesque, but everything else about the film is a (hot) mess. As already mentioned (and obvious), the narrative structure is more or less non-existent, with no really discernible plot, no characters (let's not speak of the acting beyond giving Elderly Guy the day's price for most excited line delivery), and no feeling of progression or dramatic escalation.

This problem is further emphasised by the most curious, a-rhythmic editing decisions where every possible moment of suspense is sabotaged by recurring, random cuts to the devil horse being an obnoxious - and very loud - animal, the Elderly Guy shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting, the horse, the shooting, etc, until the little structure there is just turns to goo, very much like the mummy's lower lip once Screechie has ripped off a few of its bandages. And even if Launois could keep away from Elderly Guy's horse adventures, all action scenes are so awkwardly staged, and so overly long, they become befuddling instead of exciting, with cause and effect obviously divorced from each other, actors and the things they are acting on visibly not at the same place at the same time, and the same little thing going on and on and on for seeming hours, turning moments that could have been semi-exciting highlights like the scene when Screechie is playing tug-of-war with a gravestone against Adolf Gnome's Mum who is trying to bury her alive into improbable slogs through the swamps of time and space.


So, clearly and obviously, Devil Story is a horrible movie. And yet it's also a fascinating and quite riveting artefact of filmmaking that cares so little about - or misunderstands - the way films are supposed to be made, to look and to feel it nearly invents its own filmic language, entering the space so beloved by a certain type of film fan (that is, me) where the objective badness of a movie turns into something quite loveable and beautiful. I know, I do like to go on about films feeling as if they came from another world/dimension, or were made by aliens who once watched a movie and are now trying to make their own, but that is still the best way I've found to describe films like Devil Story in all their glorious, unapologetic oddness.

In short: Fury of the Demon (2016)

Original title: La rage du Démon

This is another entry into the fake documentary arm of the POV horror subgenre. Fabien Delage’s film follows the traces of a curious incident: a couple of years ago, an American movie collector with a rather Poe-affine name showed a mysterious old silent movie called “La rage du Démon” to a select group of movie biz people. Somehow, the screening caused a minor riot, with several of its viewers still suffering from psychological aftereffects today. Rumours and suppositions suggest the very same film has caused comparable troubles at least two times before; other rumours and suppositions say it was directed by the father of at least the fantastic arm of cinema, the great Georges Méliès.

The documentary follows the film’s tracks through interviews with actual – mostly French – film critics, enthusiasts and directors. It turns out it may not have been made by Méliès at all, but by an occultist he shortly associated with, but what the film does, where it is now, and how it affects its viewers the way it does stays unclear.

If there’s an easier way to get me to like your film than by making it a documentary about a film that never actually existed, I don’t know what it is. Fury is a particularly great example of the fake documentary form in any case, always feeling as if it were shot about a real subject. The only thing – apart from the truth – standing between the film and complete authenticity is that not everyone Delage has roped into the project is a terribly great actor. But then, not everyone talking to the camera in real documentaries is a hundred percent convincing either.

Apart from the lovely idea, the film particularly recommends itself by the sure-handed way its history of the mystery film is constructed and talked about. Most of the tales about its subject the film digs out are very well integrated into actual film history – and into how much of the early history of the art is lost to us – so not little of what we hear in the interviews on screen would actually be the sort of thing we’d encounter in a documentary about a real lost film, adding a pleasant degree of plausibility to the fun, outré parts of the story.


It’s also quite a joy to watch how much some of the film people in front of the camera get into the whole thing – the late Jean-Jacques Bernard is particularly wonderful – going off into the somewhat starry eyed art talk that seems so typical of French film critics once they get going. There’s a joy of invention as well as a palpable love of film running through all of what Delage presents, so I can’t at all imagine anyone who loves movies as much as the people who made this not getting a bit of a kick out of Fury of the Demon.