In short: Cabin by the Lake (2000)

Screenwriter Stanley Caldwell (Judd Nelson) is taking his research very seriously indeed. To wit, tasked with writing about a serial killer who drowns women and creates a – pretty tacky looking – underwater garden out of their corpses, he has started kidnapping young women in LA, holding them imprisoned in the lake side hut he lives in, and indeed eventually drowns and tackily gardens them.

Things have been going well for Stanley until now, for Boone (Michael Weatherly), the only policeman in the area who is ever doing anything at all, is a pretty idiot, and people seem to think Judd Nelson’s eye bugging and grimacing is totally normal. The situation changes when Stanley’s newest victim, Kimberley Parsons (Daniella Evangelista), turns out to be rather tough to drown. She survives his attempt at killing her without him noticing (and despite suffering from hydrophobia), and makes her way to the local police. But how can an idiot like Boone catch a serial killer? Calling in actual cops would be right out, so he and Kimberley enlist a local troupe of special effects people to create a fake Kimberley corpse with a camera eye to catch the killer in the act of gardening.

And that’s obviously where Davis Stephens’s script for Po-Chih Leong’s USA Network TV movie loses it completely, stumbling from one stupid idea to the next, shifting tone without rhyme or reason and ending on a deeply unsatisfying climax that even feels the need to have Kimberley re-caught by Stanley to come up with anything dramatic at all.


It’s a bit of a shame, too, for there’s material for either a dark satire about classic Hollywood personality types and their closeness to serial killers in the movie, or for a tight horror thriller about a woman who grows into her own fighting off a serial killer. The film’s problem is that it seems unable to decide which one of these movies it wants to be, and clearly doesn’t find a tone to connect these rather different impulses. So it presents wild mood swings between broad black comedy, TV thriller, and something that’s probably meant to be darkly poetic horror, as if the viewer were zapping around between very different channels.

A Short Break in Transmissions

I'm taking a little time out from blogging. Normal service will resume on April, 14th. Take care until then, dear imaginary readers!

Three Films Make A Post: It'll never let you go

1917 (2019): As a technical feat, and an example of visually extremely beautiful filmmaking this war movie taking place in World War I, shot in two long shots, is an incredible achievement, deserving all the copycats of its tech that’ll surely follow. It’s a film I found myself appreciating on the level of craft a great deal. However, I believe it is exactly this focus – I’m tempted to say fixation - on the technical that makes the film lose emotional impact for me, the humanity it is trying to speak of buried under layers of prettiness and technical chops until it can hardly move. No character in the film has an actual personality, but then, director Sam Mendes’s structural decisions make personalities pretty unimportant, what with no interaction between characters ever having any impact later on in the movie; a swelling score alone is not enough to make me care. Philosophically, we do learn that war is indeed hell, but the why and the how seem to interest Mendes as little as treating his characters as anything beyond ciphers with suffering facial expressions.

Shelter Island (2003): Despite a couple of pleasantly weird details – the film’s protagonist played by Ally Sheedy is a pro golfer turned motivational speaker for example – Geoffrey Schaaf’s thriller about the plot a million late night TV thrillers followed in the decade before, is about as bland as they come. Not clever enough to do anything interesting with the slight variations in its set-up, not sleazy enough to tickle the exploitation bone, and as obvious as “twisty” thrillers come, this one’s about as interesting as watching a middle-aged guy fall asleep watching it. It’s pretty short, though.

The Man with the Magic Box aka Czlowiek z magicznym pudelkiem (2017): But let’s end this on a high note, with this weird (in all the best ways) Polish movie by Bodo Kox concerning a dystopian society that feels like a culturally Polish variation of the kind of society Terry Gilliam would be into making a movie about, psychic time travel, and love across class divides. It’s full of brilliant little ideas realized with the kind of verve that’s usually the result of a fecund imagination coming to life, driven by a weirdness that has its own internal logic, and shows a view of life that’s like an Eastern European shrug that can hardly disguise an honest romanticism.


It’s also really beautiful to look at, Kox turning found locations into organic parts of a strange near future (and the strange land known as the past), while leads Olga Boladz and Piotr Polak breathe human life into characters other films would treat as abstract ideas.

Past Misdeeds: Magistrate Toyama: Falcon Magistrate (1957)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Original title: はやぶさ奉行

Edo period Japan. Kagemoto Toyama (Chiezo Kataoka), known to his friends as Kinshiro, is the son of a well-respected magistrate. Father and son don’t see eye to eye at all because Kinshiro has spent parts of his life mixing it up with the lower classes and clearly not seeing anything wrong with that. In fact, father and son don’t seem to have spoken to each other for a long time, and that won’t change during the course of the film.

Still, when first a carpenter is murdered during a public swimming performance, then a second carpenter is struck down right in front of Kinshiro’s eyes, and finally a female acquaintance of his is murdered because she just might have seen something during the first murder, Kinshiro takes it upon himself to investigate. And wouldn’t you know it, his ability to speak eye to eye with commoners and his willingness to relate to people based on their merit instead of their class turns out to be quite the useful tool in an investigation that – this being the sort of film it is – of course leads him on the trail of a conspiracy to kill the shogun. Just as useful will be Kinshiro’s friendship with wealth-redistributing thief Nezumi Kozo, his sword fighting skills, and his ability to go undercover as a mildly eccentric, prostitute-charming carpenter.

Falcon Magistrate’s hero Kagemoto Toyama is an actual historical figure that must have enticed the popular imagination quite a bit, because the historical magistrate (who was quite liberal for his time and class as far as I understand, but certainly not as awesome as the fictional version) turned into a fictional one popping up in all kinds of popular fiction, kabuki plays, TV shows and a six or eight part (depending on which English language source you believe) series of Toei movies starring the prestigious jidai geki specialist actor and charisma bomb Chiezo Kataoka, of which this is the first one.

Toyama as folklore and pop culture sees him is quite the fascinating expression of the dreams of a highly classist society. He’s a samurai who respects the peasant class and even identifies with its members, who speaks truth to power and has the power and influence himself to serve justice particularly against the villains of his own class, all the while transgressing class borders as if they were the social construct they actually are, a character who is not just willing to team up with a thief like Nezumi but also shows a degree of humorous appreciation for the man’s deeds, even though he’s tutting at them. Nezumi for his part is a parallel case to Kagemoto, also based on a historical figure that grew into something much bigger than the real man probably was. In his own cycle, Nezumi Kozo (which is a nick name that translates into Rat Boy or Young Rat, people who speak Japanese tell me) is generally sticking it to the man, spurning those in power for their sins and giving their money to the poor.

There is of course a bit of paternalistic noblesse oblige in the Toyama character, though the film at hand doesn’t go very far into this part of the character – too authentic are his interactions with the non-ruling class characters, and he’s never making fun of them, as you’d otherwise see when this approach goes wrong.These still are – however you look at it – quite subversive heroes in their folkloric incarnations.

Toyama does keep quite a bit of this aura in this movie version directed by Kinnosuke Fukada (about whose work I know basically nothing, alas), which might come as a bit of a surprise in a genre that at this point in time probably drew at least some of its pull from the power of nostalgia, the wish of a post-war country for a simpler and clearer time. At least, that’s the view of the genre the more rebellious jidai geki and chambara films of the 60s and beyond seem to have been working against. The more films of the era before this new wave I see, the more I’m inclined to say that’s a half truth at best, though, the younger directors in their Sturm und Drang underplaying those qualities of the earlier films they are actually continuing.

Of course, Magistrate Toyama is not all subversion all the time. This is after all film where the not exactly nice and progressive shogun is saved from revolutionaries; though these are revolutionaries of the kind who really don’t want to change anything about the order of things but only about who’s sitting on top. One of the film’s conspirators is also only driven to the deed because he’s convinced the shogun has tasked him with a costly construction project to ruin him; given precedents in actual Tokugawa shogunate history, he’s probably even right. The thing is, Toyama isn’t setting out to investigate a threat against the shogunate, he’s setting out to find the reason why three innocents are murdered, and just tenaciously follows through where this leads him.


On a stylistic level, Falcon Magistrate is a very typical Toei jidai geki/pulpy mystery film, with the high technical level and the extremely solid and dependable cast that suggests. While Fukada isn’t a great stylist, he keeps things moving nicely, finds time for a handful of moodily shot scenes, some minor yet satisfying sword fight set pieces, and does a very fine job with the film’s dramatic climax as well as a pleasantly short, to the point, and effective court room courtyard scene to tie things up. I suspect it’s the sort of genre movie everyone involved in Toei’s production machine could have made in his sleep; it’s also very satisfying and enjoyable, if you care about the tales’ more subversive elements or not. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also the joy of watching Chiezo Kataoka, at this point in time not looking like any sort of leading man you’d have found in a Hollywood film of the same era, but oozing easy charisma and a joy of living that makes him utterly believable as this particular hero.

In short: Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite

Original title: Pikovaya dama. Chyornyy obryad

A group of Russian kids of surprisingly mixed ages play around with a mirror based ritual somewhat akin to good old Bloody Mary, conjuring up an entity known as the Queen of Spades. The Queen of Spades is a shorn-haired spectre with a nasty disposition and the habit of cutting a lock of hair from her victim of the moment as a sort of bad luck foreplay, and consequently, the mortality rate among the kids rises dramatically.

Eventually, the father of Anna (Alina Babak), the youngest of the kids, becomes involved, slowly starting to believe his daughter’s strange story, and doing his best to protect her and the other survivors.

PG-13-style horror movies are alive and well and apparently being made in Russia too, for director Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy’s Queen of Spades belongs to that part of the horror realm to the core, with all the problems that brings with it. The film’s main problem, and really a problem nearly all movies of this horror bracket suffer under, is a certain harmlessness even a handful of dead teens can’t hide, where nothing is ever allowed to have full emotional impact on audience or characters. There’s a heavy reliance on formula visible, with only very little attempt to do something terribly interesting with said formula and also disappointingly little about the film’s monster that seem culturally specific. The Queen of Spades could be directly transplanted into an American horror movie without any changes or cultural translation necessary, making the film’s central villain a bit more generic than you’d hope for.

However, while Podgaevskiy doesn’t move from the teen horror formula one iota, he does realize that formula more than just a little competently, with a series of perfectly competent and reasonably effective horror scenes – not all of them jump scare based – packaged into a well-paced movie.

It is most certainly a slick looking little film, the director really squeezing his budget – which did probably make Blumhouse look like Marvel - for all it is visually worth.


So Queen of Spades may not be a terribly exciting proposition if you’ve sat through a lot of films of its style, but I can’t honestly pretend it is not a well-made film.

After Midnight (2019)

Abby (Brea Grant), the life and work partner of small town bar owner Hank (Jeremy Gardner, who also co-directs), suddenly disappears from their house, leaving behind a note that’s too vague for a goodbye note but also not exactly promising a quick return. Hank loses himself in memories of better times, when things between the couple were simple because they were young and very acutely in love, so problem fields we’ll learn about later like Abby’s hatred of small town life and Hank’s own troubles with change and making decisions about his life didn’t really come up.

His bout of depression isn’t the only thing haunting Hank right now, though, for ever since Abby went away, he has had nightly visits by some kind of creature that wants to get into his – as is traditional – middle-of-nowhere house and clearly wants to do him harm. Not surprisingly, nobody in town believes any of Hank’s wild tales about the creature, so he has to try to fight it off alone, increasingly losing his grip on his sanity while doing so. How that’s going to turn out if and when Abby should return, and what will all of this do to their relationship?

For the longest time, I wasn’t at all sure about Jeremy Gardner’s and Christian Stella’s horror and romance movie After Midnight, feeling rather sceptical that the leisurely pace would ever let the film arrive at anything amounting to a point, and not too keen on watching yet another guy in a movie having very much self-caused relationship troubles, with a monster that only seemed to be in there to be a somewhat strained metaphor. Slowly, though, I began to appreciate how well, and sometimes funnily, the film drew Hank and his world, how elegantly the directors already implicated all the things that would become Abby’s and Hank’s relationship troubles in Hank’s happy flashbacks, just without Hank and the audience noticing at the time.

Once Abby returns, the film very much proves that all of what came before did indeed have a point, with some wonderful dialogue scenes now talking about the difficulties of love and relationships once the endorphin-driven parts of it are over and the parts start that can be rather a lot like work, Grant and Gardner doing great jobs keeping this believable, lively and real. Here, the film isn’t making the classic mistake of making one of the two the asshole of the relationship, even though it is clearly Hank who has to change if he wants to continue with Abby, instead working on letting the audience understand where each one is coming from; very atypical for a film from the last couple of years, it’s not about judgement and who is in the wrong but about what kind of compromise is viable for these two to stay together.

After that, the film makes utterly lovely use of a standard romance trope in an awkward family dinner scene that had me smiling like a loon, adds the perfect jump scare, and ends in a way that makes it impossible not to realize that the early film’s lengths were indeed in there for a reason, slowly preparing the ground for the rest of the film and trusting in the audience to be patient and have a bit of trust.


In the end, After Midnight, turns out to be the best horror/romance combo since Benson and Moorhead’s Spring (another film that takes a bit of time preparing the viewer). And wouldn’t you know it, those guys produced this film, Benson also taking an acting turn as Abby’s somewhat asshat-ish sheriff brother. That’s the perfect company for what turns out to be a quietly excellent little movie.

In short: Who Killed Santa Claus? (1941)

aka The Killing of Santa Claus

Original title: L'assassinat du Père Noël

I am usually pretty good coping with the idiosyncrasies of older films and their stylistic and tonal peculiarities (being rather peculiar and of my time myself), but Christian-Jaque’s film about a small, Christmas-related crime wave in a quaint French mountain village full of shitty, yet intensely melodramatic people has me beat. How ever much of a classic it may be in its native country, to me, it turns out to be the movie equivalent of Christmas shaped chalk on my mental blackboard.

However, before I start complaining, I do have to lead with the simple fact that the film is utterly beautiful to look at, full of moody, yet clear shots of the snowy village by night, spirited camera moves and many a picturesquely staged scene.

It is more than just a bit of a shame that all this beauty is only ever in service to most bad clichés about classic French movies come to life. Apart from the supposed perpetual horniness of French cinema, nearly every prejudice against the country’s cinema, like most prejudices usually not coming up at all in French films, is there and accounted for. So the film is full of strained, stilted and absurdly melodramatic acting by a horde of camera hogs, too enchanted by the bloviating, full of itself dialogue to show restraint when it is actually asked for. Every single character seems to be permanently teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, only a bad morning away from breaking out into operatic “mad” behaviour on the slightest provocation. Everybody is also a total asshole, though the film itself really doesn’t seem to notice. Children are either insufferable brats or the source of the kind of mawkish sentimentality which makes the Lassie films look subtle. Why anybody should care for anyone here, the film never deigns to explain.

But then, the film itself does feel very much in love with its own intellect and importance, telling its simple and not terribly interesting nor well-constructed tale of crime and village life with grand gestures and in a tone that suggests we are indeed witnessing important insights concerning the human condition. What exactly there is to be so proud about, the film alas never deigns to explain to the lowly viewer.


Some of this is clearly meant as comedy but it’s really rather difficult to find anything of what’s going on here funny in anything else but the inadvertent way. Though, frankly, the only way to make this one funny to me would probably be a final scene that sees the damn village burned to the ground.

Music Monday: Lilac Edition

Past Misdeeds: Der Mann mit dem Glasauge (1969)

aka The Man with the Glass Eye

Scotland Yard’s most boring best (well, at least fifth or sixth best) man Inspector Perkins (Horst Tappert, who was always more lively in these films than in anything else he did, but still ends up rather on the somnambulistic side) has quite the case before him and his insufferable assistant Sgt. Pepper (Stefan Behrens) – yes, that’s the sort of joke you’ll have to suffer through in this one – when first a dubious rich man and then the man’s girlfriend are murdered by hands unknown. This being a Rialto Wallace cycle movie, these two murders won’t be the last, and quickly, Perkins is enmeshed in the dealings and murders of a masked glass-eye wearing knife-throwing avenger, a ring of girl traffickers and heroin traders with a particularly abstruse modus operandi (you see, they only traffick dance troupes, and smuggle their drugs in billiard cues). There is the usual horde of suspects and weird hangers-ons/future murder victims in form of figures like a heroin-addicted Lord named Bruce (Fritz Wepper – future assistant to Tappert in all 281 episodes of the painfully boring mystery show Derrick, by the way - doing his best Kinski, which alas is a mediocre Kinski at best), a dancer with a mysterious past (Karin Hübner), the owner of the most disturbing ventriloquist’s dummy ever to sprout a head nearly as large as its ventriloquist (seriously, that thing is soul sucking), a glass eyed bad guy only known as Boss (the wonderfully named Narziß Sokatscheff whom you won’t confuse with Bruce Springsteen) and so on, and so forth.

Der Mann mit dem Glasauge is veteran Wallace adaptation director Alfred Vohrer’s final film in the cycle, and, not surprisingly by film number fourteen for the series for him, it’s far from his best effort (which would either be the stylish Die Toten Augen von London or the insane Im Banne des Unheimlichen).

Obvious first point of criticism is how overboard Vohrer goes with the odious comic relief here, with way too many scenes of Scotland Yard boss Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck) being “funny”, or even worse “humorously obtuse”, bringing the film to a screeching halt whenever he appears – which is too often. And just don’t get me started on Sgt. Pepper (shudder), the connected long-hair jokes (because a guy with a mild Beatles-esque haircut is a hippy to a 55-year old director, and hippies are icky and oh so funny), or Sir Arthur’s brain-dead secretary. I’ve grown somewhat patient with the humour in the Wallace adaptations over the years, found myself even chuckling at the antics of Siegfried Schürenberg or Eddi Arent from time to time, but the second row of comic relief as embodied by von Meyerinck and co is too painful to endure for long even for me.

And of course, the quagmire of comedy here really hurts the film’s impact as the sort of stiff (we are German, after all) pulp crime movie I want from my Wallace adaptations, because it really takes away from the death traps, the curious contraptions and the grotesque flights of fancy of production design and script. There is still some – alright, quite a lot - of that to be found in Der Mann mit dem Glasauge to be sure, but where Vohrer’s better late-series films manage to integrate the pulp elements, the unfunny humour and his personal sense of the grotesque with each other in a way that doesn’t exactly cause them to make sense (because nothing in Wallace adaptations ever does, much) but that treats them as things that belong together and work with one another to produce the particular Vohrer mood of the strange, here every scene seems to stand (or fall) exclusively by itself.

So there are – particular in the film’s second half – still moments of joy to find here, but they never connect into an actual movie. Or, if you have no love for the German Wallace adaptations at all, you might even say they connect even less into an actual movie than usual.

But let’s not continue with the sour grapes, and let me instead list – like the Marquis de Sade with his hobbies I can’t talk about the Wallace adaptations without listing stuff, it seems – some of the film’s inspired and puzzling high points. There is, for one, a surprisingly fun billiard room brawl. If you don’t know about billiards, it seems to be a game exclusively played by people wearing suits in a smoky yet somewhat classy establishment that is of course a front for the heroin trade, a situation perfect to devolve into a brawl between two bunches of beefy guys in excellent late 60s suits, Sgt. Pepper (who knows billiard fu, it turns out), and Horst Tappert, who finally gets to use the little stick he’s been carrying around the whole film for no reason beyond it being the sort of visual detail Vohrer loves so dearly.

While I’m being informative, I also need to enlighten my imaginary frequent readers (hi, Mum! Oh wait, she doesn’t speak English…) concerning the nature of heroin. Heroin, you see, is a white powder addicts carry around in little paper sugar bags, and which they exclusively ingest orally, preferably in public places, or just five seconds before they expect their mother to meet them. What’s shooting up?

I am also – for once - quite happy about the identity of our masked avenger in this particular film, because it goes very much against the deeply conservative grain (they are German, you understand) of these films. Even more peculiar, method and motivations of the avenger even make sense; well, sense for the kind of pulp United Kingdom the Wallace films take place in, where becoming a masked avenger is the thing to do when you’ve been horribly wronged and need to put things right.

Other joyful moments and elements are the pretty colourful and deeply late 60s - as seen through the eyes of middle-aged guys from Germany - set and production design with some really popping colours that would strike many a contemporary director of photography dead of colour shock; the excellent murder of the ventriloquist (of course committed by someone wearing the head of his dummy because it is that disturbing) that for one scene very suddenly suggests a proto-slasher of particular weirdness; and various Vohrer-isms in form of the whole glass eye stuff, objects circling, and a playful approach to close-ups.


However, as I said, to get at these very pleasant moments, one has to drudge through the horrors of multiple comic relief characters and not let oneself be put to sleep by the film’s disconnectedness (rather comparable to the amount of parentheses and digressions you find in this write-up here, curiously enough) so this is probably a film not meant for anyone but the krimi veteran who needs to have seen every single film Vohrer made in the genre whatever the quality. So, me.

Three Films Make A Displeased Post: Get Loaded

Children of the Sea (2019): I’ve read decent things about Ayumu Watanabe’s anime adaptation of Daisuke Igarashi’s manga, but I can’t say I ever warmed to the film watching it. The storytelling often feels needlessly vague, with character motivations that might actually make a viewer interested in these personality-less ciphers kept even more so, and a plot that never actually seems to want to get anywhere, spouting half-baked philosophy that really needed much stronger visuals to convince. From time to time, the film’s depiction of lights in the sky and underwater worlds is at least rather pretty, but the animation often has surprising problems with the anime standard of using digital technology to still create a movie that has a hand-drawn feel to it, sometimes looking as if it were made ten years ago when anime filmmakers weren’t sure how to do this.

Guns Akimbo (2019): If you’re in the market for a film that wastes Daniel Radcliffe (who was better when playing a highly practical corpse than here) and Samara Weaving on a combination of flat social media satire, only the most obvious and least funny jokes, and action scenes that lack choreography and imagination, do I have the film for you here! If you’re into films with a loud and obnoxious tone, as if made by people trying to hipster up the Neveldine-Taylor formula (if you can imagine that), all the better! If not, well, then take my advice and avoid this thing like the plague. I certainly wish I had.

All the Bright Places (2019): Speaking of films that waste perfectly good actors, Brett Haley’s Netflix teen drama romance thing with Elle Fanning and Justice Smith is the perfect note to end this entry on. On paper, this might be a perfectly good example of the hopeful teen indie movie, but structurally, this is a catastrophe, a film seemingly so badly in love with the idea of emotionally investing its audience in the hopefulness of its tale it forgets to actually portray the grief and pain of these teens properly before the inspirational music starts tweeting and all the postcard pretty pictures start flashing. Turns out that speaking about living after pain is not terribly convincing when you’re not actually acknowledging the pain itself properly and only treat it as something to kitsch away from as fast as possible.


Not helping is terrible dialogue that may or may not have been written by robots who like to quote Virginia Wolfe, pretending this sort of thing signals a teenager as worthy of an audience’s time, instead of writing characters who are.

In short: Verotika (2019)

Most of us will understand the impulse of someone pretty good in a certain kind of art wanting to work in a different one because they love it just so damn much, so in theory, I applaud Glenn Danzig’s attempt to add “writer/director” to his roles as (sometimes great) musician and editor of “erotic horror” comics that are neither erotic nor horror, though certainly horrible. Alas, then I make the mistake of actually trying to watch the resulting anthology movie-like object (of course based on some of the comics), and the applause quickly turns not so much into the boos and jeers of most people I’ve seen writing about this thing, but an increasingly intense series of yawns.

I could work with the coterie of porn actresses Danzig has hired mangling every single line of Danzig’s already terrible dialogue; after all, even a master thespian could not get anything better out of it than tears of pain from the audience. I could perhaps live with Danzig’s inability to properly ape the stylish kind of wonderfully illogical European horror movie he (as do I) so obviously admires; though it would have been nice if someone had explained to him how to frame scenes so that the cardboard sets they are taking place in don’t look quite as much like cardboard or at least look like cardboard in interesting ways.


Or rather, I could have done this if the film were at least properly weird. It starts out well enough with a woman suffering from love troubles caused by the fact that she has eyes on her breasts instead of nipples, but these first couple of minutes really are as far as genuine strangeness goes, with every single tale devolving into a series of pointless scenes of a bit of nudity and amateur gore that never go anywhere, have never encountered the idea of mood nor that of plot, and go on and on and on forever (you really can’t imagine how long a scene can go on before you’ve gone through the crucible of this film), until each tale stops without ever having found anything even vaguely amounting to a climax. Insert sex joke here - you can start making your own fun right now, you’re going to need it if you decide to inflict this on yourself. If a viewer makes it that far, the endless blood bathing scenes in the “Drukija Contessa of Blood” (the lack of punctuation is from the film, of course) segment will either finally put them to sleep or make them angry enough to never touch anything with the name of “Glenn Danzig” on it again. After this, I’ve started to rethink my loathing for the body of work of Rob Zombie, for in comparison, that guy’s the Martin Scorsese of horror.

VFW (2019)

Theoretically, VFW post commander Fred (Stephen Lang) was planning to spend the night of his birthday at the post, getting drunk with his vet buddies (William Sadler, Fred Williamson, Martin Kove, David Patrick Kelly, George Wendt) – well, and the young guy (Tom Williamson) who just came in returning from one of the USA’s fresher wars. However, when the hour gets a little late, a young woman we will later learn goes by the charming moniker of Lizard (Sierra McCormick) runs in, hunted by the henchpeople and drug slaves of drug lord Boz (Travis Hammer). Lizard, you understand, has stolen Boz’s stash in revenge for his murder of her sister.

The elderly vets don’t cotton to a bunch of armed freaks storming into their post trying to murder an unarmed woman, and a couple of wounded vets and dead baddies later, they find they have stumbled into your classic siege scenario, not just attacked by Boz and his actual gang but also a horde of guys and gals in thrall to the particularly nasty version of speed Boz hawks. The police don’t come to this part of town on patrol, and phones don’t work, so the men and Lizard will have to fend for themselves, at least until morning.

Joe Begos’s newest – made for nuFangoria - is very much a film in love with the magic of low budget and direct to DVD cinema of ye olden times (okay, mostly the 80s and John Carpenter’s 70s), but it’s also a film that mixes its influences inventively – sometimes even wildly - enough so that it doesn’t feel like a retro re-tread and more like a love letter. If you take your love letters with rather a lot of gorily mushed heads.

For gorily mushed heads really seem to be Begos’s thing here, with nary a noggin that isn’t smashed, mushed, caved in or otherwise made rather unattractive during the course of the movie. The action is very focused on highly messy melees with improvised weapons, the experienced troupe of actors and a consciously messy looking editing job selling everything as fun yet gruesome in exactly the kind of way old school horror and action fans will like it, often feeling more like a fever dream of near-post-apocalyptic action movies of years past than the way those films actually were.

Begos is rather good with fever dreams, as should be clear from his filmography by now, though the film at hand’s tendency to drench everything in reds and blacks isn’t as fantastically psychedelic as his work in Bliss. This one’s a looser, less deep film that’s focussed on fun violence and a bit of hero worship towards its cast.

But then, these guys are rather wonderful (obviously), and Begos knows it as well as the film’s probable audience (me included) does, so between the moments of carnage, there’s many a scene of the old dudes shooting the shit, revealing their traumata in ways that seem appropriately reticent and grumpy for men their ages, or just hanging around looking tense. And really, for a film that simply could get away with having Lang swinging an axe at punks and Fred Williams slitting throats and punching heads (always the heads!), there’s a pleasantly surprising amount of space for actual characterisation of these old soldiers as portrayed by old soldiering actors, Begos clearly preferring the looser Howard Hawks model of the siege movie to more modern sensibilities of how tight a movie is allowed to be.


VFW is a lovely effort, clearly made on the cheap, but carried by a mixture of filmmaking chops, wonderful aged character and action actors (and a couple of good young ones), and an abiding love for lethal head trauma.

In short: Braven (2018)

Logging business owner Joe Braven (Jason Momoa) quite accidentally comes up against a group of drug runners with a mostly military background and a tendency to use about thrice as much violence as is appropriate to any given situation who have stashed a lot of drugs in his family’s mountain cabin.

Fortunately, everyone in our hero’s family – except, disappointingly, for the little girl – is really rather great at killing people, so eventually, Joe axes (and shoots and so on) drug runners, his wife (Jill Wagner) shoots them with her trusty sport bow, and Joe’s dad (Stephen Lang) does quite a bit of sniping between his bouts of dementia. Moral of the story: avoid the USA, everyone there is just too murderous to comprehend.

From time to time, you can imagine this made-for-Netflix action film directed by stunt coordinator Lin Oeding to go in one or two interesting directions, either by really doubling down on its family melodrama side (the actors sure would have the chops for that), or turning into a true exploitation movie as the grungy silliness of the plot suggests. Or, you know, simply explain why the Bravens are all quite as ruthless as they are without ever seeming to feel any psychological impact from their counter-rampage, whereas even Rambo has feelings.

Alas, despite a pretty gory final act, what the film mostly turns out to be is curiously bland, never getting into the emotional bits nor into the tasteless bits with the abandon the material suggests, feeling peculiarly toothless for a film this bloody.


Despite his background, Oeding isn’t a terribly remarkable action director, seldom setting the violence or the action up to the best effect, instead giving the action the same sense of bland professionalism of the drama surrounding it. It’s one of those Netflix films that really make me miss a third option between thumbs up and thumbs down: a thumb held perfectly level in a resounding meh.

Music Monday: Tongue Edition

Porco Rosso (1992)

Original title: 紅の豚, Kurenai no Buta

A somewhat different Italy, though still one ruled by the fascists, between the wars. An anthropomorphic pig and genius pilot usually known as Porco Rosso, not a friend of the fascists, lives half in hiding on an Adriatic island, working as a bounty hunter fighting against the local tribes of pretty goofy sky pirates. Porco is a bit of a standoffish guy, but then, he hasn’t always been a pig person but has been turned into one through some sort of curse or spell, and this sort of thing does tend to make guy a bit reticent. Add to that his experience in World War I, and that the handful of friends who survived it have been dying like flies in the last couple of years or went fascist, and you can see where he’s coming from. There’s also a tragic romance between him and a nightclub singer.

Anyway, his pursuits in the sky have angered the various groups of sky pirates so much, they have hired American ace pilot Curtis – a guy of dubious morals dreaming of a film career as a stepping stone to becoming president of the US – to get rid of Porco for good. Curtis does manage to ambush Porco when our hero is on his way to Milan for repairs and nearly destroys his plane completely. Porco does manage to make his way to Milan and the old mechanic friend he knows there eventually. His old friend tasks his seventeen year old granddaughter Fiona with doing the design and leading the improvement work, something the not exactly feminist Porco at first isn’t terribly happy about – until he sees Fiona’s work and slowly begins to appreciate the young woman’s character too. Together, they might even survive a rematch with Curtis.

Usually, Porco Rosso is treated as one of the odd pigs out among Hayao Miyazaki’s Ghibli films, so much so that I haven’t even been bothering with the film at all before he went up on Netflix. That turns out to have been rather a large mistake, though, for while the film at hand might not have quite the emotional drawing power of a Spirited Away, it is very much a film filled with the joy of a director playing with many things he is particular enthuasistic about. In this case, these enthusiasms are centred on planes and the Golden Age of Aviation (though the film is actually set rather late for this particular love), and old Hollywood. There is a surprising amount of Casablanca in here, but also quite a few moments that reminded me of the Marx Brothers and Howard Hawks. Miyazaki definitely shares Hawks’s appreciation for professionals doing professional work, but not so typical of Hawks (though not unheard of in that man’s films either), the best demonstrations of this in the film concern women working – Fiona reconstructing Porco’s plane in scenes that suggest what kind of woman this particular late teen will grow up into, and the female members of her family (the men are all gone somewhere else in hopes of paying work) doing the actual manual labour involved.


There’s a sense of delicate melancholy and a bit of a quietly tragic world view hidden away in the movie too, not the chest-beating variety of youth but a calm, accepting one that comes from a certain experience of life and what it entails. It’s not all melancholy, of course, for there’s also a lot of slapstick concerning the very funny pirates, more little lovely side gags than you can shake a pig sticker at, and an aeroplane and adventure plot that glows with enthusiasm, Miyazaki creating a sibling of the tone of his Lupin III films in those scenes.

Three Films Make A Post: The struggle is real.

Witches in the Woods (2019): I can appreciate that this film directed by Jordan Barker does try to use the metaphorical power of witch lore to explore very contemporary ideas about feminism (really, the #metoo movement in this case), class, and race. Unfortunately, the idea is much better than the execution, for Christopher Borelli’s script is about as good at actually writing the characters involved and their relations as the scripts of 80s slasher movies were. Believing that these specific people are supposed to end up in the same SUV looking for hot snowboarding action and have ever been friends is honestly a bridge too much to cross for my ability to believe any damn nonsense a movie tries to sell me. Making matters worse is of course that an 80s slasher could easily get away with this sort of thing because the characters were not really what those films were about.

This one, on the other hand, is supposed to be about the social and the psychological, so not delivering on these things marks complete failure. Even ignoring this, the film’s horror stylings are bland and conventional, and there’s nothing to see here but some pretty young things who probably deserved to be in a better movie.

Tone-Deaf (2019): Keeping with films I didn’t enjoy at all, here’s Richard Bates Jr.’s movie about an intolerably annoying young woman (Amanda Crew) renting a house in the country for a weekend to get over her life being crap and to have a different place to stare at her phone from encountering an equally insufferable old guy (Robert Patrick) with a tendency to break the fourth wall right into the camera who has found the new hobby of murdering people. I have no idea why I should care, or what the film’s permanent shifts between blood, the flattest jokes outside of a pancake, META!, and whatever the director/writer wanted to shove in next are supposed to achieve, but I’m sure everybody involved thinks this one’s really, really clever, given all the smug mugging into the camera the film and the actors do.


Blackhat (2015): On the other hand, I thought Michael Mann’s generally maligned crime and action movie that presses an actual performance out of Chris Hemsworth instead of a star turn is rather good. After the horrors of Miami Vice, Mann has returned to his old tricks – actors doing ACTING in diners, hoisting enough detail into a film to make the silly perfectly believable – and come up with a film that’s about as realistic a portrayal of international hacking shenanigans as Hackers was, but that creates its world with such drive and force, I even found myself buying into the even more improbable finale in which Hemsworth – genius hacker and action movie badass at the same time – does manly shit wearing phone book armour.

Past Misdeeds: Hawk the Slayer (1980)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Welcome to some vaguely defined medieval fantasy period. Brothers Voltan (Jack Palance) – evil if the name isn’t hint enough – and Hawk (John Terry) – good if his lack of personality isn’t a hint for that – have been feuding for years, ever since Voltan tried to murder Hawk, killed the woman they both loved (Catriona MacColl on flashback duty), and murdered their father (Ferdy Mayne) because dear dad didn’t want to give him the family elf stone that turns a really awkward looking sword into the Mindsword (magical power: something about minds and a bit of telekinesis).

Now, Voltan, his adopted son Drogo (Shane Briant) and their henchpeople involve themselves in kidnapping an abbess for ransom. Though, if that sort of thing should attract Hawk for a bit of fratricide, all the better. Indeed Hawk does become involved. Happily, he’s already in the process of picking up his own team of, ahem, heroes by saving their lives: Ranulf, owner of a repeating crossbow who is also the guy responsible for informing Hawk of Voltan’s misdeeds; Crow (Ray Charleson), the last elf; Baldin (Peter O’Farrell), a not particularly small dwarf; Gort (Bernard Bresslaw), a not particularly large giant; and a blind good witch everyone calls Woman (Patricia Quinn) because name are for men. Together, they fight crime. No, actually, together they assault a band of slavers, murder (which is the word one uses when you kill your enemies when they are already disarmed and helpless, I believe) them and steal their money so the nuns can have some ransom money to hand if our merry band doesn’t manage to conquer Voltan.

Obviously, with our heroes coming up with plans this ethically accomplished, nothing can go wrong.

The British production Hawk the Slayer is a strangely fascinating film. Not because it is any good, mind you. It is, as a matter of fact, actually a pretty terrible movie all around, with shoddy production values, dubious to hilarious acting, and a script that always drifts off into stuff that just doesn’t make sense; why, it even ends throwing open the gates to a sequel that – perhaps thankfully, perhaps sadly if you’re of my somewhat perverse tastes – never came.

However, it is also a film absolutely ahead of its time. This is, after all, a low rent sword and sorcery movie made before any of the films that produced the sword and sorcery wave for the cinemas were completed, seemingly picking up its main influences from Star Wars. At least, Voltan’s helmet and demeanour forcefully suggest a whinier Darth Vader, while the cowled sorcerer or whatever he is supposed to be pulling his strings for reasons the film leaves open for that sequel that never came has a decided Emperor vibe. One might also interpret Hawk’s Mindsword as the low tech version of a light sabre, but then, a magic sword is a magic sword is a magic sword and not necessarily invented by George Lucas.

The film’s other main influence is obviously – at least to my eyes and ears – the Spaghetti Western, with half of the score built out of cues which carry more than just a passing resemblance to certain Ennio Morricone works, and many an early fight scene consisting of stare downs followed by short and rapid action. The latter could of course also be less inspiration by the Italian films as Terry Marcel filming around something he’s not very good at, namely the actual action in action sequences. This idea gets further traction when you keep in mind that Hawk’s two larger set piece battles both take place in conditions of visibility so bad, the audience can only guess at most of what’s actually going on in them, peering through the very artificial fog of the first one, and through what looks a lot like the insides of a slaughtered feather bed in the second one (all thanks to practical witch magic that seems to be based on the idea of movie heroes coping much better with not actually seeing their enemies than villains do, which doesn’t actually work out so hot in what I’m not going to call a nod to realism).

There’s something deeply perverse about directorial decisions like that one. But then a certain perversity fits the film, for there’s a lot about Hawk that’s awkward and dubious in a way that parallels the Italian sword and sorcery films of half a decade later to a degree I can’t help but imagine someone involved in the production was a Doctor Who companion socialized in the 1990s somehow stranded in 1980’s British low rent movie central. Seriously, the parallels are frightening, and there’s little on screen you wouldn’t later see in various Italian films.

Sure, there’s a total lack of nudity (appropriate to the mythical, meaning it being a myth, sexlessness of British culture) but otherwise we have everything I love and hate about Italian sword and sorcery on display here: the ethical flexibility of the heroes (which might obviously also be taken from the Spaghetti Western or even actual sword and sorcery stories); line delivery that suggests a cast of non-native speakers or a really weird bunch of post-dubbing actors giving the characters voice; acting that fluctuates between so dead pan it’s more dead than alive (hello, Hawk and monosyllabic, staring elf dude) and hysterically over-excited (hello, Jack Palance’s visible hunger for the chewing of scenery and possibly other actors, and double hello “Woman”’s loud melodramatic stage whispering of every damn line she speaks); production design that makes little sense culturally and looks in turns shoddy and hypnotically weird; oh so very special effects like the emulation of Crow’s supernaturally fast arrow shooting skills via showing the same shot again and again in quick cuts while adding hilarious sound effects; and last but not least, a script that makes little sense and meanders from one damn thing to another with random abandon. Yup, Hawk truly has it all.


Of course, since time travel doesn’t actually exist apart from the boring linear movement most of us – I’m not sure about certain script writers and filmmakers - suffer under, Hawk being a full-fledged Italian sword and sorcery movie made in the UK before the genre actually existed, might also suggest the big Italian sword and sorcery wave didn’t just try to rip off Conan and Excalibur but was actually heavily influenced by Terry Marcel’s Hawk the Slayer. I’m not sure I’m not preferring the time travel theory, though.

In short: Camp Cold Brook (2018)

Among the most dangerous professions known to humanity – at least going by the movies I watch – is that of the TV show ghost hunter.

Case in point are the four bits of ghost fodder we encounter here, named Jack (Chad Michael Murray), Angela (Danielle Harris), Kevin (Michael Eric Reid) and Emma (Candice De Visser). Their show is floundering rather badly and won’t see a new season, but production lead Jack hopes that their last ghost adventure will be grand enough to ensure continued employment.

Emma’s found a rather interesting place to look for a haunting, a former summer camp that’s been empty ever since twenty or so kids died there, drugged into killing one another in ritual fashion. From a certain perspective, the team’s in luck, for the place is indeed haunted; from the more practical perspective of survival, things aren’t looking up, alas, for said haunting is highly malevolent and more than just a little murderous.

When you are working in certain horror sub-genres, delivering a solid and not particularly exciting but aggressively un-crap movie can push you right into the upper quality third of that genre. Such is the case with movies about ghost hunters becoming the ghost hunted and Andy Palmer’s Camp Cold Brook. Consequently, the film’s virtues aren’t  great new achievements in horror but a production team that seems to have done the due diligence of looking at what the greatest problems of other movies in their sub-genre are, and then simply worked to avoid them.

This may not sound like a spectacular achievement, but it’s quite the thing to find a ghost hunter movie whose characters are something akin to human beings with actual human motivations instead of total pricks who deserve everything they get. Sure, Jack, for example, doesn’t believe anymore in ever finding a haunting and is playing things up for the camera, but he comes over as a guy exhausted by a lack of success and having doubts of having a future career that would help feed his family rather than the megalomaniac arse the team leader usually is in these films. Why, one might even go as far as not to want him killed by ghosts. The characters aren’t terribly deep, yet at least they are characters.

Neither the film’s backstory nor the hauntings themselves are nail biters, though the backstory isn’t quite as played out as usual, and Palmer does know how to stage a bread and butter haunting competently enough, with perhaps even one or two scenes I’d describe as somewhat creepy; the filmmaking’s cheap yet solid.


There’s not much else to the film, but what there is turns out to be perfectly sufficient for an okay time.

Hercules vs. Moloch (1963)

Original title: Ercole contro Moloch

aka The Conquest of Mycene

Once, in semi-mythical ancient Greece. The second version of he city of Mycenae – the first one burned down because of some godly business between the Earth Goddess (never named anything else in the English dub of the film at hand) and the town’s other patron god, the evil Moloch – is striking fear into the hearts of the other city states of Greece. Ruled by the evil queen Demetra (Rosalba Neri with very fetching white streaks in her hair), Mycenae seems militarily unbeatable, pressing the rest of the Greek world for the delivery of hostages. Hostages, mind you, that tend to disappear completely never to be seen again, for Mycenae MKII houses the earthly incarnation of Moloch. It has taken form in Demetra’s son, and living gods need sacrifices, as you know. This particular living god dwells in a cave below the city with “his favourite slave girls”, is fond of Bava colours, torture, and disfiguring beautiful people who aren’t his slave girls. Moloch isn’t exactly well-loved by all of Mycenae's populace, however, and most of the commoners would really rather return to the worship of the less cruel and hands-on Earth Goddess. They’d also rather see young Medea (Alessandra Panaro), daughter of the old king who wanted a life without Moloch for his people and Demetra’s step daughter, sit on the throne, but since the military, the nobility and the priests are all under Demetra’s (and Moloch’s) thumb, there’s little hope for a successful revolution at the moment.

The last Greek town standing against Mycenae is Tyros. Alas, its king has taken rather too long with a policy of outward appeasement and secret attempts at building an alliance against Mycenae. Eventually, after Tyros’s best potential ally falls, there seems little hope of anything but to also deliver hostages to their enemies. Things aren’t quite as hopeless as they seem, though, for Tyros’s crown prince Glaucus (Gordon Scott) has a plan. It’s not a terribly good plan, mind you, for it mostly consists of him becoming an incognito hostage going by the name of Hercules (so we can get the proper, cash-grabbing name into the film’s title) and trying to see if he can’t find allies in Mycenae while attempting to gain the trust of Demetra.

Fortunately, the Earth Goddess is with the good guys.

I thought I had basically seen all the peplums worth seeing (and quite a few not), but along comes Giorgio Ferroni’s Hercules vs. Moloch to prove me wrong. Not that I’m complaining.

Anyhow, this one’s a pretty great little movie, even though its not-actually-Hercules main character doesn’t do random hearty manly belly laughs and generally leaves pillars in peace to do their thing. Well, at least one has to admire the chutzpa used to get Hercules into the movie’s title.

The film stands at what could be a somewhat awkward point between the more fantastically minded branch of the peplum concerning itself much with mythological beast (that is to say, guys in monster suits and sometimes dubious, sometimes wonderful bigger monsters), gods, and half-gods, and the more mundane business of palace politics and revolutions, spending certainly more time on the latter, less fun part of these films to boot. However, Ferroni actually integrates these elements well, finding reasons for the palace intrigues in the supernatural stuff, solving some of the problems arising during the course of the plot through a very cool moment of literal deus ex machina perfectly appropriate to ancient Greece, all the while making the film’s world convincing as one in which the Gods are actually real. Even though Moloch junior probably isn’t much of a god.

The film turns out to be genuinely good at both sides of the equation, with fights and battle scenes of a quality not always found in peplums. Ferroni must have had a rather high budget for the genre, too, for the battle scenes and fights actually feature a decent amount of combatants and horses (some of which may or may not come from library footage, but if so, it’s excellently integrated) involved in what looks like actual fight choreography. There’s a good amount of sets and locations, too, and while they aren’t exactly lavish, they also never feel cramped and too much like cardboard, the filmmakers demonstrating a good eye for filming around the holes in the illusion.

And even though the Moloch parts of the film are not quite as plenty as I would have liked, the guy is a perfectly creepy Gothic horror type villain, wearing an excellent creepy mask, cackling while he’s disfiguring women and ranting about wanting to destroy all beauty, and living in a most excellent multi-coloured cave full of women pressing themselves against walls looking intense.

At this point in his career, Gordon Scott had become a very capable leading man too, striking the correct righteous poses for the properly righteous dialogue he gets as the most righteous manly man around, going through the usual stylized romance (with Medea, as if I need to tell anyone who has seen even one of these films) with the proper stylized conviction. He’s also a pretty convincing fencer and screen fighter here, making up for the rather low-powered Hercules he is playing by doing the business of people who aren’t half gods with a nice degree of intensity. Rosalba Neri for her part makes a pretty great evil queen, doing the sexy evil glowering, the increased unhingement, and all the other expected bits of business with fun enthusiasm.


All in all, it’s a pretty wonderful achievement, Ferroni and company turning what could have been a complete dud in the wrong hands into a very fun peplum.

In short: Bloody Chainsaw Girl (2016)

Original title: Chimamire Sukeban Chainsaw (血まみれスケバンチェーンソー)

Giko (Rio Uchida) is just your typical delinquent style middle school girl waiting for a girl boss movie to happen. Well, I say typical, but she does tend to bring the chainsaw that’s the symbol of her family’s business with her to school, which I’ve never seen Meiko Kaji do. However, said chainsaw turns out to be a rather useful survival tool, because Giko has somehow – she honestly has no idea how - pissed off the school’s very own teen mad scientist, one Nero Aoi (Mari Yamachi).

Nero, on a bit of a rampage after being bullied for turning a classmate’s cat into a cyborg zombie kitteh, turns many of their school mates – well, everyone who doesn’t simply flee, really – into one type of cyborg zombie mutant or another, many of which seem to develop a bit of a cultish appreciation for their mistress Nero, and are all too happy to try to murder Giko for whatever Nero thinks she has done to her. Ah, teenagers.

The time when practically every single film of the Japanese bizarro splatter world made it to Western shores are, alas, long over, so whenever a film like Hiroki Yamaguchi’s (of Hellevetor fame) Bloody Chainsaw Girl still does make it here, I do feel a faint tingle of excitement, even though I by now know well that only a few films in this particular genre keep the promises their absurd titles and lurid covers make.

Bloody Chainsaw Girl, to my delight, actually does its job rather well. It’s obviously a pretty low budget affair, but Yamaguchi’s direction keeps things snappy enough you’ll only notice if you really want to. The special effects are cheap but the right kind of cheap, enhancing the charm of the affair by emphasising the absurdity of everything that’s going on onscreen, from the cheerleader with the traditional Japanese thing of shooting rockets from places where rockets should most certainly not be shot from (the film adds an actually pretty funny moment concerning the reloading of this particular device), to the enhanced members of the ninja club (of course this school has a ninja club. Keep up, please!).

It’s all very charming if you’re like me and willing to be charmed by the merry absurdity of proceedings like this. I was also pretty happy that the motivation for the film’s villainess’s hatred for our heroine and the reason for all this carnage does have the pettiness of actual teenage grudges, lacking as much in reason as the less believable parts of the film.

Rio Uchida does the whole snarky teenage delinquent bit rather well (apart from very obviously not being a teenager), making for a surprisingly likeable heroine, whose shrugging, sarcastic, acceptance of every new absurd turn of events did rather endear her to me. Whereas Mari Yamachi’s a decent glowerer and a pretty decent ranter, and what else do you need from the villain of a piece like this?


All of this does obviously add up to a lot of good, clean fun, if you share my loose definition of “clean”, at least.

Music Monday: (Not) Canadian Edition

Strangers in the Night (1944)

Sergeant Johnny Meadows (William Terry) is sent home from the war with a back injury. He’s making his way to the home of Rosemary Blake (Linda Stirling), a woman he fell in love with by letter and through a shared love of “A Shropshire Lad” (you certainly can’t say much against her taste), hoping to finally meet and talk to the woman he plans on marrying.

On the train, Johnny has what would be a meet-cute under different circumstances with Dr Leslie Ross (Virginia Grey). Leslie just happens to be the – scandalously! - female physician who has just taken over the practice in the small town where Rosemary and her family live, so they’ll probably have time to further pretend not to be attracted to one another later on.

When Johnny arrives at the Blake mansion, he is greeted by Rose’s mother Hilda (Helene Thimig) and her live-in friend Ivy Miller (Edith Barrett). Hilda is very happy to meet Johnny, but Rose is apparently away for a couple of days for very vague reasons. Johnny’s very welcome to stay until she returns, though. Which he does, only to become increasingly convinced that something’s not quite right about this whole business. Isn’t Hilda’s behaviour peculiar, even creepy? And why is Ivy so nervous? On the positive side, Leslie is drawn into the affair too and turns out to be a decent amateur detective, and a good woman to have at one’s back.

Which, honestly, is one of the more remarkable elements of the film, symptomatic for the way director Anthony Mann – here very much at the beginning of his career shooting a short programmer for Republic – treats his female lead as a complete character, still fully competent in her job and in life even when she’s falling in love, which is usually the point in movies of this time when a woman turns all damsel-y. Even better, the film portrays the crap a female physician like Leslie has to go through sympathetically, with a couple of scenes of her and her nurse (Frances Morris) rolling their eyes companionably at the world feeling particularly true to life.

As a suspense movie with Gothic elements, Strangers in the Night isn’t completely successful, though. In this case, the brisk 59 minute running time simply isn’t quite enough for everything the film is trying to do, leaving Mann little room to fill out the ghost story without the supernatural, the grown-up reading of a conventional movie romance (which of course makes it pretty unconventional), and the proto Evil Biddy film this turns out to be. Even this early in his career, Mann is a highly efficient storyteller, but even he can’t quite make a viewer ignore that the main characters could really use at least a couple of scenes to flesh out their characters, and that the film simply doesn’t have the space to go further into its more interesting ideas, or to explore its clear interest in portraying nonjudgmentally how World War II has shifted the relationships between women and men in the USA of its time as deeply as the theme deserves.


Still, the film has quite a few effective moments of creepy mood and effective suspense, Mann, aptly supported by DP Reggie Lanning who does quite a bit of John Alton-like work with depth of field and chiaroscuro, turning what would be a cheap little programmer in lesser hands into something that is at the very least always interesting to watch and think about, rather beautiful to look at, and entertaining even more than seventy years later, even though one might wish it to be a bit deeper.

Three Films Make A Post: A Reign Of HORROR... a man-made monster on the loose!

Black Friday (1940): Arthur Lubin’s gangster brain transplant movie with Boris Karloff as a rather mad scientist and Stanley Ridges as a mild mannered English literature professor who gets parts of a gangster’s brains grafted on to save his life (and Karloff’s ego) with the expected results seems a bit like an attempt by Universal to poach on Warner’s territory. The mix of gangster film and mad science yarn doesn’t exactly play to Universal's strengths as a studio, though, curiously enough, it’s not the gangster movie parts that don’t work but the mad science. Lubin shows a decent eye for the former and very little flair for the latter. Karloff’s as good as always and Ridges works his double role rather well. Bela Lugosi pops in for a couple of scenes too but doesn’t really have much to do here. Otherwise, this is exactly the movie you’ll expect it to be, for better or for worse.

The Song Keepers (2017): I was a little disappointed by Naina Sen’s documentary about the history of Aboriginal Women’s Choirs singing German Lutheran hymns translated (and wonderfully and wondrously changed) into their respective languages and one contemporary choir’s travel to Germany to perform these hymns there. It’s the kind of film you really want to like - it’s about people who more than deserve their moments, fascinating (and pretty beautiful) music, and the messiness of colonial history, after all. But its execution is rough, with way too many scenes of everyone complimenting everyone else on their awesomeness, scenes that seem to belong into a private holiday video more than into a documentary, intercut with interviews that reach from the bland, to the informative, to the sort of thing that’ll make every sane person cry, all mixed with little focus or artistry in a manner that often borders on the random. It’s a shame, really, because these women and their stories are much more interesting and important than the film’s presentation makes them out to be.


I Know Where I’m Going (1945): One of the strengths of The Archers – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – was to make films that combined a sense of place and landscape – here the coast of Scotland – and a naturalistic feel set apart from the stagey predilections of much of British cinema of their time with a sense of mood and metaphor that was (and still is) anything but naturalistic. This is the sort of artistry that never feels contrived and artificial even if it by all rights should, so a film like this which puts its critique on a very specific type of materialism into the form of a romance of slow self-discovery with heavy folkloric undertones seems perfectly logical and natural, and not at all contrived. It’s also a film about the very British interpretation of the connection between people and landscapes, a love of rural communities that never becomes that sickly kind of love that tends to end in pogroms, about superstition and folk belief, and the dangers of straight lines.

Past Misdeeds: Alien Warrior (1986)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

aka KING OF THE STREETS

Okay, so, here’s a plot, such as it is: in an alien dimension peopled by men with excellent – and better – facial hair live a martial artist-philosopher-messiah-future-cult-leader guy we will come to know and (certainly not) love as Buddy (Brett Clark) and his Dad (Norman Budd). Well, actually, we never get to see anyone apart from Buddy and Dad there, but since Buddy’s supposed to become king, I can only assume he has some people to crush under the boot heels of monarchist oppression. Before Buddy (his Dad actually called him Ragnar until he realized Buddy wouldn’t make a decent Viking, or I might be making this up thanks to the intoxicating powers of Alien Warrior) can take his rightful place, he has to go somewhere to smite (alas, smiting isn’t really part of the film’s dialogue, though it’s ace – as in transcendentally stupid - otherwise) some Great Evil. And what better place for that sort of thing than the rough streets of Los Angeles circa 1985?

Once he’s beamed to LA, Buddy does show himself less shite than we thought and soon saves women from rape – specifically, angelic Lora (Pamela Saunders, I think), a woman not only imbued with the power of making the most absurd facial expressions unimaginable but also the will to bring the beauty of reading to the inner city with what we might call a community centre if it weren’t a warehouse with a random assortment of bookshelves in it. Because Buddy is a bit of a messiah (or cult leader), Lora’s reading warehouse becomes quite the success thanks to our hero’s awesome power of getting in the head of would-be rapists, finding out that their wicked ways started when their mum called them stupid once, and curing them in a way certainly not at all inspired by a certain cult founded by a SF writer who once wrote about how a good way of getting rich would be to found a religion.

Soon, graffiti artists in the place are writing awesome new slogans like “BE TEMPERATE” on walls, Buddy and a helpful homeless alcoholic build a sports car out of scrap metal, and protection money rackets are stopped by slow motion shouting. Somewhere on the way, Buddy makes an enemy, though, in form of frequently pretty much naked pimp and drug dealer Mr. One (Reggie De Morton), owner of an even better car than Buddy’s.

Oh, and he’s – not much of a surprise given his choice of career – totally evil, perhaps even the Great Evil Buddy has come to conquer? Unfortunately, Mr. One is also prepared, and has – in a series of sleazy sexual interludes – gotten a lot of dirt on all three members of LA’s police force, who are now working for him, because who wouldn’t murder so the photos of one’s dalliance with a girl with large breasts won’t fall into the wrong hands?

So, Buddy’s got his job cut out for him, or he would have, if he’d actually be any good at the conquering Great Evil bit or at being a Messiah.

On first encounter with Ed Hunt’s brilliantly bizarre Alien Warrior, the sane viewer will ask herself what exactly she has gotten herself into: perhaps an afterschool special that wants to show us how awesome cult leaders are? The film’s politics and philosophy at least support that theory, what with the rampant naivety the film shows towards the thoughts, actions, and reasons for the actions of human beings, the absurd psycho-babble Buddy sprouts at every opportune moment, bonkers moments like the one where Buddy rubs the hands of a comatose little girl against his beard to successfully revive her, and the whole thing where our expressionless lead with the emotionless voice brainwashes idiots into being good by turning them against their mums (who were right, because these guys truly are idiots). On the other hand, there’s the film’s other half, consisting of about four scenes of attempted rape, some choice gratuitous violence, more nudity than you can throw your facial locks at, and many a scene of Reggie De Morton being a bit vile and/or underdressed.

And did I mention the bad martial arts fights, the slow-motion to end all slow motions (because, where slow-motion in other films slows down actual movement, slow-motion here is mostly used to slow down shots of people not actually moving much) or the moments that concentrate on Mr. One like a very cheap, very late, and very bad blaxploitation movie? It’s a puzzling, and perhaps a little frightening, mix of incongruous elements that gives a film that is already chockfull of utterly bizarre nonsense a kick in the direction of the true classic.
Of course, Alien Warrior does carry all the other virtues of true bizarro filmmaking too. There’s the acting, with De Morton strutting around as if he owns the place (even when he’s wearing only his undies and a submachine gun, and yes, that happens too), Saunders (I hope it’s her, or I’m making fun of the wrong woman and apologize) doing things with her face human faces aren’t meant to do, and Clark giving a frighteningly effective impression of a walking-talking manikin.

Hunt’s direction is static and absurdly in love with his very special concept of slow motion. Scenes are framed in strange and awkward ways and the film’s storytelling is disjointed, jumping from one idea (I’m using the term loosely, of course) to the next without much of a logical connection. In other words, it’s brilliant, and it’s not difficult to imagine this to be a film Buddy himself has made. Which would actually explain the ending too, where Buddy, after having fucked up so completely large parts of the guys whose lives he supposedly improved are now dead, and his nemesis having been shot by one of the few survivors (who’ll spend the rest of his life in jail, probably), and leaving Lora behind with the dubious excuse that time and space are an illusion so they’ll therefore be together forever, returns home, and is congratulated by his father on his awesome skills of conquering Great Evil. Well, at least it sort of fits with Buddy’s philosophy of making peoples’ lives better by having them close their eyes and imagine everything they wish for is coming true and everything’s perfect.


Come to think of it, that philosophy is also the only way I can come up with to explain the existence of Alien Warrior, so I can’t even say the film isn’t practicing what it preaches.

In short: Extreme Job (2019)

Original title: 극한직업

Following what is apparently only the most recent in a series of operational mishaps with sees a bus instead of a cop making the arrest of a perp , the merry narcotics division team of long-suffering veteran police captain Go (Ryu Seung-ryong) seem bound for whatever the opposite of glory is for a South Korean cop. It’s not that these guys and gal are particularly mean-spirited or terribly incompetent, much worse, they are a little incompetent and very luckless.

A much younger colleague and arch enemy (obviously coming with a boy band looking team) offers Go what amounts to a final chance to not end up finishing his last years on the job behind a desk (a fate to terrible to contemplate for the man). A well-known felon and probably mid-tier associate of a very big meth dealer has just come out of prison and is now hanging around a place with a bunch of thugs doing nothing. Surely, there’s something going on there that can provide an in into some sort of big criminal operation.

But planning a long-form observation of guys doing not much of anything is a rather difficult thing for these particular cops, so they eventually end up buying the fried chicken restaurant across the (potential) bad guys’ place and do some undercover fry cooking. Turns out these cops are rather better at their pretend job than their actual one, and suddenly the undercover work turns into actual lucrative work. Why, even Go’s wife is now showering when he gets home!

Will our heroes follow the lure of business or keep their cop values intact? Will they accidentally become part of a money laundering business (because clearly, someone here has seen “Breaking Bad”)?

I’ve heard Lee Byeong-heon’s Extreme Job described as an action comedy, but honestly, the film’s  action stays right at the start and the finish of the movie. The largest part of it is concerned with heaping the horrors of sudden unwanted and very unfamiliar success on the broadly drawn but generally fun characters and watching them squirm, while also suggesting that these guys and gals are even unlucky in their successes.

There are a couple of hints at darker elements – Go’s half-beaten personality seems to be the consequence of PTSD following being knifed for example – but the film isn’t interesting in exploring any of this through humour but really prefers to hang around with its characters and tease them a little. So the comedy isn’t particularly deep and incisive, but Extreme Job gets by very well indeed on Lee’s ability to keep the pace up and come up with some new silly business for the characters to scrape against as well as quite a few good jokes about the parallels and differences between the police and the food business with each new scene.


Unlike most comedies involving cops, the whole affair further recommends itself by its general lack of mean-spiritedness, clearly liking its characters too much to be too cruel to them.

Gemini Man (2019)

Over the years, government-owned killer Henry Brogan (Will Smith) has slowly developed (or regained) that most inopportune thing for his job: a conscience. He now simply wants to retire and try being human again. Alas, someone among the people he has been working for all this time (spoiler: it’s Clay Verris as played by house favourite Clive Owen) is trying to kill him. Well, not just him, but basically everyone he has been in contact with for the last couple of weeks or so, including Danny Zakarweski (played by another house favourite, Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the agent sent by another part of Henry’s former organization to simply keep an eye on him and make sure he behaves in his retirement.

After the first hit on Henry fails – and of course causes him and Danny to team up for the rest of the movie – things become rather stranger than our protagonist had expected, for Verris is now sending his best man, well, really rather “kid”, after Henry. Junior (digitally rejuvenated Will Smith), as Verris calls him, turns out to be a clone of Henry, supposedly programmed to be a better killer and soldier.

I don’t hate Ang Lee’s Gemini Man as much as many others seem to do, but that’s probably more because I like the cast a lot, appreciate certain elements of the film, and find the direction it seems to want to take its slab of  big mainstream action cinema somewhat interesting as well as rather sympathetic.

So let’s start out with the good (that I like Winstead and Owen a lot wherever they appear and certainly mind today’s Smith much less than many other actors in his price class needs no repeating, I believe). While the set-up and some of the marketing certainly suggest this to be a film all about having Smith fight digitally youthful Smith to the death, Lee really rather wants to treat this as a drama than a shoot ‘em up, in reality having made a film about a guy who has learned some rather disturbing things about himself and eventually sets out to save a younger man from making these mistakes at all. Which is not just surprisingly un-cynical, but also a kind of direction I’d like more action movies to go in. Another nice element of the film is its treatment of Danny, keeping her away from becoming a love interest (it always feels like a breath of fresh air when men and women are allowed to be friends in cinema), and going out of its way to actually let her do things in the movie. Which would of course work better in a film whose plot doesn’t need to focus as hard as this one on its male main character, but in big budget movies, you take what you can get. And even though it’s not terribly well realized, I also appreciate how the film goes all in with its happy end, really only missing a twist to somehow resurrect Benedict Wong’s character, again lacking the cynicism that’s de rigueur in anything but superhero cinema on the biggest screens right now.


Alas, these well-meant and good ideas and moments never come quite together, Lee seeming curiously unable to put all this into the proper kind of spectacle, instead filming locations, acrobatic action scenes and theoretically insane chases that should suck an audience in to then deliver the other things the film has to say to them with a bland distance I certainly never would have thought Lee even capable of. The film’s look tends to the curiously bland, too, as if all the visual focus had been on making digitally young Will Smith look like an actual human being (which the film achieves excellently), and nothing whatsoever into making the world he moves through feel exciting and dangerous.

In short: I Was a Teenage Zombie (1987)

Somewhere in Brooklyn. After having been sold bad weed by a muscleman with the less than trust-inspiring name of Mussolini (Steve McCoy), a gaggle of high school kids really rather want their money back. Alas, when they go about their customer relations business in a somewhat violent manner, Mussolini accidentally gets killed, or so they believe. It’s the usual business where the victim of an accident who is believed dead wakes up just before their killers want to throw them into a body of water or bury them and really gets killed in the ensuing struggle, of course. Though Mussolini doesn’t stay dead then, either, for the kids have dumped him in a radioactive body of water that turns him into a vengeful undead. Since he’s talking and fully conscious, I wouldn’t call him a zombie but rather an undead super asshole.

Anyway, he starts killing his way through the kids and some random victims until the survivors dump one of their dead in the radioactive waters too. Before he gets to fight Mussolini, the poor teen will learn that zombiefication is not terribly great for one’s romantic life.

John Elias Michalakis’s I Was a Teenage Zombie is another ultra low budget 80s horror comedy that is in turns anarchic, goofy, annoying and charming, driven by what feels a lot like the same spirit that gave us punk rock, similarly replacing slickness with nervous energy and the willingness to just make art even if one’s abilities or lack of experience would usually keep one away from being allowed to make it. It’s a filmmaking ethos I’m unable to dislike, even if I’m not always excited about the resulting films.

Like most movies made in this spirit, IWaTZ is all over the place in tone and style, sometimes feeling like a low rent version of Porky’s and the like, sometimes becoming the kind of movie that believes a zombie rape scene is ever a good idea, sometimes making fun of all kinds of teen movie tropes of its time, sometimes going for that awesome home-made gore. More often than not, the undisciplined tone and the rawness of the filmmaking do work wonders for the film, turning its theoretical flaws into charming virtues, suggesting that the you’re watching the result of a bunch of young gals and guys having a hell of a time and wanting you to share in it, too.


Somehow, the film also managed to acquire a pretty nice soundtrack featuring music from the likes of the Violent Femmes, Los Lobos and Alex Chilton, which perfectly fits the tone of proceedings. What’s not to like?

Music Monday: Expectations Edition

Phoenix (2014)

Germany, in the earliest days after World War II. Former singer Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss) has just barely survived the Holocaust, ending up with a disfiguring headshot wound. Saved by her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) and brought to a hospital in Berlin, Nelly undergoes reconstructive surgery that looks rather successful for the era but leaves her with a face only resembling her old self, furthering the alienation caused by the trauma inflicted by the KZ and the particular horror of surviving what so many – among them quite a lot of people she knew and loved – did not. The only thing that really seems to keep Nelly functional is an increasing obsession with finding her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), even if it is by roaming the at this point desperately dangerous streets of Berlin at night.

Lene, just as stricken by the experience of the Holocaust as Nelly is, but trying to channel her pain into anger at the betrayal (or the many betrayals) the Germans committed on the Jews, as well as into attempts of convincing Nelly to go to Israel with her, is less than happy with Nelly’s attempts at finding Johnny. Lene is convinced that Johnny betrayed Nelly to the Nazis, and that Nelly is losing herself in the past when the only way to go on after what she has been through is to find a future as far away from that past as possible.

Eventually, Nelly does indeed find Johnny, but Johnny doesn’t recognize her anymore. In an ironically cruel twist of fate, he only sees her as a stranger with a huge resemblance to his wife, a resemblance he decides to make use of to get his hands on Nelly’s money, presenting a living “fake” Nelly being the only way to do that for a guy everyone believes to have sold his wife out to the Nazis. Nelly decides to agree to his plan, dazed by trauma, love and perhaps an awakening wish to understand what Johnny actually did (or did not) do to her.

As the regulars among my imaginary readers know, I’m generally rather down on the way genre cinema that isn’t insipid comedy has been treated in Germany, historically. Unlike in other countries, most filmmakers from the artsy side of town don’t seem to have any interest of working with genre tropes and forms either, probably fearing the dirt of popular culture getting on their opera gloves (nothing against the opera – opera gloves on the other hand…).

As always, there are exceptions to that rule, and one of them, perhaps the most interesting and certainly one of the most important ones, is Christian Petzold, a man who has never made exactly what I’d call a straight genre movie even in his TV work inside of genre series, but has been using elements of genre, combined with a precise visual language put into service of portraying very complex people and situations, and the usual foot in the German Autorenkino, to make some of most interesting German language films in the last decades, often using the considerable acting talents of Nina Hoss.

Petzold seems particularly interested in putting his fingers on very specific German wounds, the important historical or personal moments Germans try their utmost to avoid of actually engaging with outside of school and outside the sort of historical documentaries that are putting as many walls as possible between a viewer and the actual experience of those having suffered through this history. So it was really only a question of time until he engaged the Holocaust, or really, the experiences of Jews having survived the Holocaust encountering a Germany that does its damndest to pretend nothing worth talking about happened, a pretence at normality that more than just borders on the unreal in a Berlin still in ruins.

To do this, Phoenix uses elements of the noir and the melodrama, both genres built for exploring alienation, the unwanted and the shadows between memory and reality. While the film’s surface seems as calm and slow as is typical of “respectable” contemporary German filmmaking, there’s a simmering intensity to the film, the impression that the three main characters are barely holding it together and might just break down completely at any given moment, Hoss’s Nelly having been robbed in the KZ of all belief in herself, barely able to look even Lene directly in the face, shaking and stiffening when going through Johnny’s reconstruction of the wife he believes dead through her; Johnny projecting a desperate kind of hunger between what’s left of what must have been a considerable amount of charm and joie de vivre; and Lene trying to bury all her sorrow and pain under caring for Nelly, taking care of practical things and dreaming about vengeance and security. That this film’s climax isn’t a scene of wild accusation and tears but one of Nelly singing “Speak Low” to Johnny’s piano playing, and revealing everything that has been unsaid by her up to that point, is just par for the course for the film’s tone.


This isn’t all Phoenix does, though. Petzold is also exploring the question of revenge and forgiveness in this specific historical moment and specifically which of the two might be more conducive to actually living a life afterwards for the victims of atrocity; and the murkiness of truth and identity. There’s also a lot more going on in the relationship between Nelly and Lene here, but then, Petzold really does manage to put quite a bit more resonance and complexity into any given scene than seems probable without overloading things with meaning. In fact, if there’s one thing I admire most about Phoenix, it is the clarity and preciseness with which it speaks about all those things that are not clear and precise to talk about.

Three Films Make A Post: Two bad people are about to meet two worse people.

Some Kind of Hate (2015): Whereas I thought that director Adam Egypt Mortimer’s follow-up film Daniel Isn’t Real (perhaps later more about that one on a later date) was a brilliant horror film about mental illness and the idea of “normality”, this, Mortimer’s first feature really doesn’t work at all. This one’s about the trauma of bullying and an undead girl taking vengeance on bullies and taking things rather too far. Apart from obvious structural problems like terrible pacing and way too much repetition, what this one suffers under most is a certain heart on its sleeve quality that suggests filmmakers a bit too close to the theme they want to talk about and therefor unable to step away from it enough to turn it into functioning art. A couple of the kills are pretty cleverly staged and imagined, at least, but it’s clear throughout that the film has much greater ambitions than being a slash fest it simply can’t fulfil.

Meek’s Cutoff (2010): Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist (post-revisionist?) Western on the other hand seems to be able to fulfil all of its ambitions easily, but then the comparison between a debut horror movie by a young guy just starting out and an experienced director like Reichardt at the top of her game is completely unfair of me, probably to both films. Anyway, Reichardt’s ambitions here are many: at once to show a naturalistic, detail-focussed tale of settlers on the Oregon trail but also to sip from the mythic well that has been built over the bones of such settlers; talking about America today by talking about its past; facing the complexities of societal misogyny and racism head-on. She’s doing all that in a film shot with some of the starker values of post 2000s US indie cinema – the very digital camerawork, the realistic sound (though leave it to Reichardt to make it a highly constructed realistic sound clearly designed), the paucity of a classical dramatic plot, the slow pacing. Which shouldn’t work terribly well at all, but in practice, the whole film has a nearly magical quality of slowly growing intensity and will eventually feel at once naturalistic and utterly not of this world.

The Ladykillers (1955): And now for something completely different, a classic British black comedy about criminals and old ladies by Alexander Mackendrick (made for Ealing Studios who had a bit of form for this sort of thing) that’s about as subversive about society, to be precise about how a classist society reads social cues and roles and the way this twists even the people who think themselves clever enough to use this for their own profit, as can be.


It’s classically stylish British comedy cinema of this type, with actors like Alec Guiness, Katie Johnson, Cecil Parker, a young Peter Sellers, or Herbert Lom treating their roles with an arch humour that never can quite disguise the actual humanity behind characters that aren’t treated terribly compassionately by the film they are in.