In short: Witchouse II: Blood Coven (2000)

After four dead bodies have been found on the grounds of an old creepy house that’s making place for a one of those new-fangled shopping malls, a forensic anthropologist professor (I assume) played by J.R. Bookwalter alum Ariauna Albright and her students are called in to find out whatever they can about the remains. The town where all of this is happening is situated right in Romania, Massachusetts (or is it the other way round?) and apparently well-known for its witch-hunting past, so it will come as a surprise to anyone not having read the film’s title that the Prof and her students are soon bedevilled by supernatural nonsense and possession. Perhaps Andrew Prine, Witch Hunter will be able to help out?

One of the ironies of director J.R. Bookwalter’s career is his hitting of the professional movie-making circuit via Full Moon pictures (which sounds small-scale, but actually meant ten times the budget he had to work with before) actually resulted in less entertaining films than the ones he made on his own dime. This sequel to the David DeCoteau snoozer is a case in point, suffering from a script (by Douglas Snauffer, who actually worked with Bookwalter on his indie films, though not on the scripts) that never seems to know when to end scenes. There’s a particularly egregious part with interviews of the local populace clearly meant to parodically cash in on the Blair Witch style of POV horror that manages to be unfunny as well as endless that puts the final nail in the coffin of the movie’s pacing.

We also have the major problem of a plot that’s good for half a movie (even of a runtime under eighty minutes) at best that has to be dragged out to Full Moon full length by any means necessary. Often Bookwalter attempts to fill the empty spaces where a movie is supposed to be with quips in the style of most of his indie movies, but the pacing of delivery and timing is off there, too.

From time to time, there are moments that still suggest that Bookwalter is a technically more accomplished filmmaker than your typical Full Moon hack of the company’s phase when all the actually capable filmmakers stopped working there, so some of the final act bad special effects monster fighting becomes genuinely entertaining – and who wouldn’t approve of John Prine, Witch Hunter ? – and some of the performances manage to be entertainingly over the top instead of just being bad, but that’s not really enough to save the film as a whole.

Carnival of Blood (1970)

Brooklyn’s favourite amusement park, Coney Island, is struck by a series of gruesome murders. It appears someone’s suffering from a case of highly violent misogyny and has a bit of a taste for mutilation and organ-stealing. Ambitious young assistant attorney Dan (Martin Barolsky) starts obsessing about the case – and his futile attempts at solving it by going to the carnival – so much, it puts his relationship with his artist girlfriend Laura (Judith Resnik) under quite some pressure. Laura has good contacts to Coney Island, too, for she’s good friends with mild-mannered dart-throwing booth owner Tom (Earle Edgerton). Tom has just hired a new helper, a perpetually angry, mentally handicapped, hunchbacked guy going by the highly unfortunate moniker of “Gimpy” (Burt Young, in his very first movie role, working as “John Harris”). Given his disposition and the usual habits of horror films, “Gimpy” is clearly our main suspect, but is he really going to be the killer?

Nobody watching Carnival of Blood will be terribly surprised to hear that its writer/director/producer Leonard Kirtman was mostly working in the porn biz afterwards, apparently sometimes under the pretty wonderful name of “Leo the Lion”, but most often as Leon Gucci (of the Hoboken Guccis, I assume). The film often has that distinctive vibe typical of porn filmmakers of the time doing horror or other non sex-based genres of being structured around sex scenes that somebody simply forgot to add. So there’s quite a bit of pointless dragging of feet in this one, with rather a lot of scenes certainly ending not in any sort of climax and indeed going nowhere slowly. Worst of those are our regular visits with the local fortune teller (Kaly Mills), foreseeing doom, of course, that just go on and on and on into eternity.

To be fair, there is a narrative reason why the film is showing all of the victims are visiting her, but that doesn’t make the scenes themselves any easier to get through, particularly since Kirtman really isn’t good enough of a director to make this repetitive business at least look interesting.

I do think it is worthwhile getting through Carnival’s copious amount of slow bits, however, for while our host certainly isn’t much of a stylist, he makes up for this lack with a lot of fascinating, basically documentary material that shows early 70s Coney Island in all its seediness and somewhat glorious loudness. Kirtman isn’t so much creating an interesting place for what on a plot level amounts to a US giallo to take place in, he’s rather shooting it like a documentary filmmaker would, leading to a film with a striking sense of place, if one often edited with a sledgehammer.

At least some of the acting is pretty worthwhile too, Young going method on a pretty problematic stock horror movie character type, and finding some genuine human core in it, mostly working opposite Edgerton and his similar if cornier and less intense performance to at least somewhat fascinating effect. Let’s not talk about our supposed leads.

Add to this a bit of preposterous and therefore awesome gore that would have been too subtle for Herschel Gordon Lewis, but was probably rather shocking for at least a part of the audience at the time when this went into the cinemas, and you have a film that’s at least interesting as a – exploitation-typical – mix of the crude, the boring, the fascinating, put inside of a time capsule that basically reeks of the past as indeed another country.

Some Thoughts About Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

Original title: 呪怨

A recent re-watch of what is still one of my favourite films among the J-horror wave of the time reminded me of what a fascinating film Takashi Shimizu’s cinematic version of his DTV movies is. On the surface, this is a much inferior film to that other great classic of its time, Ringu, having to work with much lower production values, as well as an inferior cast, and binding itself to a highly episodic structure.

I believe it is exactly the episodic structure, or rather, how Shimizu creates the structure what keeps this still as such an effective piece of horror filmmaking. Its greatest strength lies in how much the structure of the film mirrors the structure of the curse, a viral infection of supernatural anger that moves outward from a time and place in ways that feel frightening because of their irrationality and by how little the people suffering from the supernatural are actually connected to it. Entering the wrong place, being related to another victim, is enough – the idea of punishing the guilty through the supernatural just never applies here; even warnings to the curious are fairer than that. One can, and I sometimes like to, see a nice parallel to the at best indifferent cosmos of Cosmic Horror here, though arrived at from a direction based in Japanese folklore and Buddhist and Shinto concepts of spirits, and certainly carrying a less nihilist meaning, at least culturally speaking.

The temporally disjointed structure strengthens this feeling of the Grudge as something unfair, cruel and anti-rational, as if the destructive supernatural here worked not just forward in time and outward in space, but also backwards and sideways, destroying causality along with the sense of security.

Music Monday: Under the Sun Edition

WarHunt (2022)

The tail end of World War II. A US plane crashes in the German Schwarzwald thanks to what looks a lot like supernatural intervention to me.

Sergeant Brewster (Robert Knepper) and his squad of tired veterans are tasked to wander into the forest, find the plane wreck and rescue possible survivors. For mysterious reasons, one Major Johnson (Mickey Rourke), probably of the BPRD, orders Brewster to take one of his own men, Walsh (Jackson Rathbone) with him as some kind of vaguely defined specialist for something or other.

Brewster is not amused, but it’s the military, so he doesn’t have much of a choice. Walsh will turn out to be a definite asset, what with him being the only one who actually knows what’s going on in the forest. Which is rather useful once the squad is slowly whittled down in numbers, driven crazy or changed by a coven of witches with a bit of a raven fetish.

As regular readers (hi, Mom!) will know, I have a bit of a weakness for pulpy movies about soldiers versus the supernatural, so Mauro Borrelli’s shot in Latvia WarHunt does push some of my favourite buttons.

As it turns out not just because it knows its genre and the tropes and beats it really needs to hit to function in it pretty well, but because it is simply a genuinely entertaining bit of low budget horror that tends to use its minor budget with quite a bit of creativity, perhaps even enthusiasm. At the very least, Borelli (who also co-wrote with Reggie Keyohara III and Scott Svatos) has some good ideas for using bits and pieces of witch folklore in a creative manner, so that the mix of a bit of body horror, some psychological stuff and the action elements that belong to this particular sub-genre go down pretty satisfyingly and feels consistent.

Borrelli’s always at least a competent director here, regularly hitting on a clever piece of framing or presentation, properly spooky lighting or a neat bit of production design to make some scenes rather more than they would be in less invested hands. I’m particularly fond of a genuinely creepy sequence concerning some roasted pig; the set for the climactic fight below a windmill (which is a pretty perfect place for a witches’ lair going by folklore about millers in Europe) is surprisingly wonderful, too.

The films also adds some Hellboy-esque lore to up the stakes the protagonists are fighting for that make decent sense for its kind of pulp universe, and keeps the film away from the problem of having some random soldiers just randomly stumbling on the witches.

Really, the only thing to criticize realistically – this is a low budget pulp horror/action film, so it not being an A24 joint is not actually a point against the film – about WarHunt is the artistically pointless inclusion of Mickey Rourke, whose scenes mostly seem to be in the film to make the most of the couple of shooting days he was available for them, and have little use beyond slowing things down. Though, to be fair, Borrelli does keep the “star”-induced drag I’ve come to detect and loathe through oh so many direct to whatever action movies to a minimum by keeping the Rourke show scenes relatively short and adding them in places where they do not get too annoying. And Knepper, Rathbone and the rest of the film’s actual cast are not only actually in the movie we are watching, but do give perfectly good performances for the kind of film this is.

Three Films Make A Post: Revenge is a Dirty Business

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

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

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

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

Short Film Friday: The Monster Upstairs

People like me get extra lazy during lockdown. Others gift us with a series of very fun short film:

In short: Meander (2020)

Original title: Méandre

Warning: some major plot spoilers are pretty much unavoidable in this case!

After getting picked up by car driven by a killer, and going through some sort of altercation with the nasty guy, Lisa (Gaia Weiss) wakes up in a gauntlet of tunnels and small rooms full of traps and unpleasant surprises that only start with the body parts of her predecessors. She’s also got a nifty new outfit, as well as a large bracelet she can’t take off that sets countdowns for her way through the curious place – if she isn’t fast enough, she can look forward to a nice incineration.

At first, the viewer of Mathieu Turi’s Meander will probably assume that this is a bit of Cube meets Saw business in which the crazy person from the beginning is punishing Lisa for some perceived sin in her past (which you will be not surprised to hear is indeed tragic and contains the by now mandatory dead child) using his exceptional talent for homemade traps, electronics and architecture and his fascination for seeing people crawl. However, in a rather positive development, this particular maze of death turns out to have been constructed by aliens, which may not be exactly an original development but certainly helps the writer/director to push our heroine’s trials and travails into more extreme and sometimes strange directions than the serial killer escape room business would have allowed. So there’s time and space between the more typical acid, fire and rotting corpses for gravitational tricks and traps, fake dead daughters and even some fun creature effects as well as some techno-organic variations in the décor.

All of this certainly helps keep things quite a bit more lively than these kinds of film sometimes get, providing opportunities for quite a few fun set pieces. Plus, aliens are inherently more interesting than serial killers (even should they just be there for an anal probe).

All of this happens on a rather slight budget, but Turi uses what he has with verve, pacing things very well indeed, and always adding a new dangerous development before things threaten to become repetitive. I’m particularly taken with the film’s often very clever use of lighting to suggest claustrophobia, to then suddenly open up physical spaces and possibilities with sometimes surprisingly subtle shifts in light and colour.

Add to that Weiss’s fine physical performance (she is pretty much the only actual character on screen throughout), Turi’s sometimes pleasantly weird imagination, and an ending that puts our heroine right into a 70s SF paperback cover, and you’ll hear little to no complaints from me about Meander. And not a joke about meandering was made.

Darker than Amber (1970)

Florida boat-dwelling beach buds Travis McGee (Rod Taylor) and Meyer (Theodore Bikel) are managing to save a mysterious woman (Suzy Kendall), tied to an anchor, who has been dropped down the bridge they were fishing under.

As readers of the novels this is based on know, Travis really doesn’t like that going to the police or the hospital stuff normal people do in reaction in this sort of situation, so he and Meyer take care of the woman - who will eventually disclose her name to be “Vangie” - and her wounds. She’s not going to tell them anything about why someone tried to murder her, and so it’s clear to Travis early on that she was involved in something illegal.

Of course, Travis’s sensitive macho ways and Vangie’s lost girl number fit each other perfectly, romantically seen, and the inevitable happens once they’ve gotten to know each other. Alas, Vangie decides to return to her old haunts to fetch some money (living off Travis’s seemingly endless supply of cash forever isn’t really her thing) and is killed by the charming personality responsible for the whole anchor business, Terry (William Smith with the fakest blond dye job imaginable, which is actually a plot point).

Again, Travis doesn’t do police, so he starts investigating his lover’s death and the nature of the trouble she was involved in on his own, eventually getting even with Terry and his partners with a needlessly complicated – and therefore perfectly awesome - plan.

This is one of only two movie adaptations of the much-loved Travis McGee series by John D. Macdonald. I’ve never been as fond of the books as many readers seem to be, mostly because I find the author’s inability to see that his hero, with his habit of murdering a book’s bad guy and ritually dumping his victim’s corpse in the ocean, is at least bordering on being a serial killer, and because McGee generally comes over as a self-righteous prick, 70s macho version, again without his author seeming to recognize this. Which rather puts a damper on the novels’ effective – if often overwrought – plotting and period mood for me.

On the movie side of this affair, I’ve also never had much time for Darker then Amber’s director Robert Clouse, whose movies I’d generally describe as bland at best, usually badly paced, dubiously edited and staged with disinterest. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that I have rather a lot of time for Darker than Amber. It’s not that Clouse reveals himself as a great director here, but he is certainly working competently enough inside of the idiom of early 70s crime cinema, never doing anything clever with clichés, but realizing them well enough, I’m perfectly okay with the lack of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Pacing still wasn’t Clouse’s strong point even here at his best, so a viewer has to expect some dragging of feet and some needless reiteration of things you already got the first two times. On the other hand, there are a couple of cracking, grim and brutal action scenes here. Particularly the final fistfight between Travis and Terry comes to mind there, which looks so brutal, Taylor and Smith have told in various interviews they were having an actual fight and weren’t laughed off by anyone. Actors, of course, have no tendency of using a good in for a bit of self-mythologizing whatsoever, so the story must be true.

Taylor is a curious choice for the sensitive thug role of McGee, mostly because he’s not exactly great at selling the first part of the description, but he also embodies a particular kind of machismo that’s part and parcel for the character type perfectly; never in a way that’ll question any of the assumptions of being a 70s macho man, obviously, but as a human time capsule of the type, he’s pretty perfect. Particularly when contrasted with Smith, who simply turns up Taylor’s ten and a half up to eleven, finding the place where “man of his time” turns into “outright violent psychopath” and really getting his teeth in.

Seen from today, a lot of this very un-questioned macho posturing will look uncomfortable to some (and understandably so), but as a pulp fantasy of this particular kind of violent machismo, I find Darker than Amber rather hard to beat.

In short: Primal Rage (1988)

Original title: Rage – Furioa primitiva

An ever so slightly mad scientist (Bo Svenson) experiments on baboons in an attempt to revive dead brain tissue, working in college campus lab. Unfortunately, one of the college newspaper’s young journalists is bitten by one of those baboons while breaking into the lab to find evidence for illegal animal experiments. This being a horror film, the monkey’s bite causes what we’d call your typical rage zombie virus symptoms today, and soon, very bad skin problems and a murderous disposition make their way from our journalist, to his new girlfriend, to the rapist jock assholes who were pretty terrible even before they had an excuse.

Because the scientist is so crazy for experiments on the newly infected he’s not going to call for help, it will eventually fall to the college’s other intrepid reporter Sam (Patrick Lowe) and his new art student girlfriend Lauren (Cheryl Arutt) to save the day during the big campus Halloween party.

Primal Rage, directed by Vittorio Rambaldi, belongs to the group of Italian productions shot in the USA, made with an inexperienced (apart from Svenson) cast with not terribly exciting acting futures, using a mix of Italian and local US talent behind the camera.

As is typical for these films, there’s a certain disconnect between the authentically American cast and locations and the way they act, very much dragging the audience into a fantasy of how the US are (were) that’s even further away from the truth than the fantasies US movies have about their own country. It’s a very specific mood and tone some viewers will find off-putting because its obvious disconnect with reality, while others, like me, will find fascinating for exactly the same reasons.

Rambaldi is the son of the Carlo Rambaldi who was also involved in the special effects here together with Alex Rambaldi, another son of Carlo. Vittorio doesn’t appear to have made it very far in the film business, unfortunately, with four direction credits during the course of twenty years or so. He’s actually rather more capable than many an Italian no-name director, holding his own version of US culture together well enough, keeping the slow bits of the plot (co-written by Umberto Lenzi) moving quickly enough, and giving the violence a nasty edge that fits the simple yet icky design of what the infection does with its victims.

The climax with the rampaging frat boys is particularly effective, not just upping the body count but doing so in pleasantly unpleasant ways, while playing the violence very much as a more dramatic version of the underbelly of US college culture as we know it from movie, TV and courts of law.

Music Monday: Achinkad Edition

Polymorph (1996)

When their boss Dr Clark (Pete Jacelone) calls his two interns Ted (James L. Edwards) and Bill (Joseph A. Daw) to some patch of woods to help with finding a freshly crashed meteorite, Bill decides to turn work into a camping weekend with his girlfriend Alice (Jennifer Huss) and Alice’s friend Donna (Ariauna Albright) as a blind date for the somewhat neurotic Ted. Little do they expect that by the point they arrive, the good doctor will already have found the meteorite, will encounter a coke-addled drug trafficker named Tarper (Sasha Graham), and, together with his security guy, will have been killed by her.

While our protagonists are wondering where their boss is, and decide to just make it a nice night in the woods when they find no trace of him beyond his car, Tarper is in the process of being taken over by a rather rude and murderous alien that came packaged with the meteorite. Also, because he had a troubling phone conversation with Tarper, her drug biz boss Carlos (Tom Hoover) is on its way to the very same patch of woods. Clearly, plot lines will collide and a shitty green proto-CG alien special effect is going to make the rounds.

As the regulars among my imaginary readers will know, I’m something of a fan of the body of work of Polymorph’s writer/director/editor/DP/producer J.R. Bookwalter, particularly those parts that are indie as all get out. Bookwalter usually had better script and a tighter grip on pacing than many of his peers in this area, so his films do tend to feature dramatic arcs that can connect with viewers who like a bit of actual structure and movement in their movie narratives, while still providing quite a bit of the eccentricity and actual weirdness of the semi-professional arm of indie horror.

Polymorph may or may not have begun as a serious “people in the woods fighting against a very cost-effective alien special effect, because we only need green digital noise” movie, but clearly, it is shot and staged very much as a comedy. Something that usually rings many alarm bells with me in productions on this budget level, because comedy is especially difficult to do in a realm where you’re lucky when half of your cast has any actual acting experience or talent, and where scripts don’t have to – sometimes can’t – hold themselves to any professional standards of polish. However, I found myself genuinely charmed by much of what was going on in the film, the silly romantic comedy bits, the sort-of Tarantino in a goofy mood parts, and the number of snarky asides that once may have begun as serious action movie one-liners. There’s quite a bit of winking at the audience here by Bookwalter and his cast, with action movie poses turned absurd (yet, this being a Bookwalter joint, edited rather well nonetheless). That kind of winking is something I tend to despise, but here, it actually adds to Polymorph’s considerable charm for me. Which is to say, many of the jokes are actually funny.

The actors do well with the different styles of humour the film uses, too, and everyone goes for the bigger and sillier interpretation of whatever they do. Frankly, I’m not convinced anyone but Albright and Hoover would actually be able to play the film straight and do a proper, convincing acting job, but this way, the whole affair gets by on sheer enthusiasm (no mumblecore non-emoting here, that’s for sure) and the wondrous magic of a handful of people making weird faces.

Three Films Make A Post: More frightening than Frankenstein! More dreaded than Dracula!

The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021): If you want to know how not to make historical slow horror, this film written and directed by Edoardo Vitaletti should be a great teaching tool. It steps into all of the traps this sort of film can find its way in, starting with the belief that if you want to portray a period and society that’s all drab and dreary, your film needs to be drab and dreary too, and ending on pacing that’s leaden for no good reason whatsoever.

The film also never manages to bring its all too obvious thesis of “historical oppression of women and homosexuality by men was bad and killed the women struggling against it” to actual human life, never letting its concept become an actual story about actual people. It’s too concerned with hokey would-be authentic dialogue, lots of whispering, drab and dreary candle light like Barry Lyndon gone ridiculous to find anything genuinely human. And if all it has to say can be summarized in one easy sentence, what’s the point?

Trojan Eddie (1996): Whereas this Irish crime movie and very dark comedy by Gillies MacKinnon is all about things genuinely human. So it seeks and finds some kind of living spark even in the most oppressive idiots, and can be sympathetic without becoming bathetic. It is often very funny in the bleakly Irish style and very sad at the same time, never shying away from the brutality and pettiness of even its more sympathetic characters; yet it also never treats these as the only things they are. A cast full of people like Stephen Rea and Richard Harris certainly helps there, too.

In direct – and perfectly unfitting – comparison between this and Vitaletti’s movie, I can absolutely believe this film’s Ireland of the mid 90s as a place and time populated by actual human beings, where Mary’s is one in dire need of being fleshed out and taken beyond simplistic ideas about the past and the way people lived in it.

Shiva Baby (2020): Speaking of black comedies that are utterly sympathetic towards their characters even when they are treating them rather rudely and making them the butt of the joke, Emma Seligman’s tale of a shiva going very unpleasantly indeed for young Danielle (Rachel Sennott), what with all the lies she tells others about her life collapsing around her ears in public, is simply a fantastic film.

It is sharp, observant and often cutting without ever becoming cruel, using specificity of time, place and characters in a way that can’t help but produce insight even in viewers not sharing them. Seligman’s a very precise and visually interesting filmmaker, using camerawork and blocking as tellingly and elegantly as a great martial arts film/musical.

Short Film Friday: Bear Hugs

In short: The Mezzotint (2021)

Warning: there will be mild spoilers about the changes the adaptation makes to the tale!

Between the Wars. Academic Williams (Rory Kinnear and his magical facial hair) is sent a mezzotint engraving on approval. On first look, it seems to be not particularly exciting, but whenever Williams or others take a new look at it, it changes in increasingly disturbing and grotesque ways. At the same time, Williams learns some somewhat surprising facts about his family history.

As usual with Mark Gatiss, this half hour adaptation of a Monty James tale as a Ghost Story for Christmas for the BBC has found as much hate as praise (both pretty much from the circles you’d expect them to come from). I’m completely on the praising side this time around, and see this as Gatiss’s best James adaptation yet. It’s an effort that changes exactly the parts of the story that need changing for better dramatic effect, the original tale being one of James’s less exciting stories in need of a bit more punch on the haunting side as well as emotionally for its climax, which Gatiss provides in an efficient and logical manner. Then there are a few bits and bobs added to pull the story a smidgen away from the purely male academic area where James’s stories – as well as their author – dwelt. For this, Gatiss adds some dialogue about women coming to academia, something that actually must have been talked about rather a lot in 1923 in these circles, and puts a bit of organic diversity in by casting Nikesh Patel as Nisbet and adding an important female character (via a wonderful performance by Frances Barber). It’s all very efficiently, effectively and intelligently done, in a way that roots the tale in its contemporary reality, a technique James himself found very important in ghost stories.

Most important, obviously, is how well Gatiss has become at directing this sort thing. There are so many clever and atmospheric uses of Dutch angles, extreme close-ups and sharp editing on display, one thinks Lawrence Gordon-Clarke should have been proud of how creepy a tale mostly about men staring at a picture dramatically can get when filmed right. Of course, the men and women doing the staring here are fantastic too, suggesting great degrees of personality and emotion in a very short time.

And hey, Gatiss also adds a nice example of the Jamesian Wallop (term courtesy of the great M.R. James podcast A Podcast to the Curious) to the climax that’s not afraid to do a bit of showing when the telling’s through.

Ruqyah: The Exorcism (2017)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Although, given that this is based on “a true story”, there can be no actual spoilers, right?

Anyway. Jakarta, 2012. Popular actress Asha (Celine Evangelista) has been having some strange and frightening experiences with doppelgangers, poltergeist phenomena and the usual demonic (well, djinn) business. Either she is haunted, or she is losing her mind. Eventually, she is confessing her troubles to reporter Mahisa (Evan Sanders), who is clearly so smitten with her he’s perfectly okay to not report a pretty great story and instead help her out. At first, he’s rather sceptical when it comes to the supernatural aspects of Asha’s troubles, but seeing turns out to be believing.

Mahisa’s research quickly suggests that Asha is possessed by various djinn who are responsible for her success and beauty but also need her to pay a proper price for their help. We further learn that quite a few people in showbusiness are helping their careers along with black magic, whereas Asha genuinely has no clue about her evil supernatural helpers, or where they come from. Eventually, it turns out to be something of a tradition in the village where she comes from to ensorcel the young and the pretty without their knowledge so they are supernaturally endowed to make money for their elders. Beats work, I guess.

Mahisa decides he really needs professional help now, but the imam he goes to recommends a homemade exorcism by an unsupervised (except for Allah, one supposes) amateur like our hero. Apparently, the guy doesn’t believe in actually putting any effort into helping people coming to him for help. which even an atheist like me understands to be not the way holy texts and prophets want their priest casts to act.

As you can imagine, things don’t go terribly smoothly with Mahisa’s attempt at exorcizing Asha while also fighting her black magic wielding mum (Mega Carefansa).

Ruqyah is yet another piece of Indonesian horror by the prolific Jose Poernomo (this time around also his own DP as well as co-writer). It’s not the director’s best effort, for unlike most of his films, this one seems have greater ambitions than it can actually afford, so the plot of a two hour movie is squeezed into ninety minutes, and particularly the big climax feels undercooked and underbudgeted, with the film’s worst effects and worst looking set not exactly making for a winning combination there, even with as much effort as Poernomo puts into dramatic handheld camera waving and pretty tight editing.

This doesn’t mean the whole of Ruqyah is a wash: there are some fun and clever (if less than original) sequences throughout, with some especially fine examples of the doppelganger motive Indonesian horror cinema uses so often, and the nearly mandatory scene of someone’s mirror image acting independently of themselves. The latter comes with the – thematically clever with this particular type of possession – variation of the mirror image looking more afraid than the original person.

Interestingly, Poernomo sets most of the big set pieces and moments of horror in brightly lit, modern apartments, clearly suggesting that contemporary evil is to be found with the rich, the powerful, and the very modern indeed. Which does have a whiff of preachiness and conservatism, too, of course, as is nearly inevitable in religious horror like this. Fortunately, Poernomo doesn’t overplay this aspect of the tale as much as he could. Plus, it’s not as if the religious authorities are terribly efficient before the mandatory final exorcism; and even that one is undermined by the good old horror movie bullshit ending.

In short: The Trip (2021)

Original title: I onde dager

The married couple of unsuccessful actress Lisa (Noomi Rapace) and soap opera director Lars (Aksel Hennie) head into a cabin by the fjords owned by Lars’s father for a quiet and peaceful weekend. Nominally, this is, for in truth, both are planning to murder the other there. Fortunately, for friends of true love finding a way and such, before anyone can murder anyone else, the perhaps not quite so happy couple are visited by a trio of very violent criminals (as played by Atle Antonsen, Christian Rubeck and André Eriksen), whose various attempts at rape and murder might be just the thing so save a marriage.

I’m pretty sure there will be quite a few people who can’t stomach Tommy Wirkola’s very specific mix of 70s exploitation style home invasion horror (the only good kind of home invasion horror) and darkest comedy; it takes a very specific kind of constitution to allow a film that can get quite as nasty as this one to also be funny. Despite my love for the more unpleasant side of traditional exploitation, I often tend have problems when it is mixed with humour myself, mostly because humour often seems to cheapen the harsher elements of a film or because some things just aren’t funny.

For my tastes, Wirkola (who does of course historically have a bit of talent for his sort of thing, see Red Snow) manages the difficult task of deciding what to keep simply unpleasant, which unpleasantness can be made funny, and which simply not to touch very well indeed, knowing what kind of brutality can actually make for a good, cynical joke, and which one would be tacky to use that way.

It does of course help there, too, that Wirkola is as experienced with comical timing as well as the sort of timing needed in an ultra-violent thriller as he is. An experience that also clearly makes it easier for the guy to find the points in his tale of marriage-saving blood and guts where he can quietly push the absurdity of things so far, he’s also at least partially satirizing exactly the kind of film he is making.

Add to that a cast of actors who seem fully in on the joke and just as capable to shift codes as Wirkola is, and the resulting film is a whole lot of decidedly non-stupid fun.

Music Monday: Kissing Rules Edition

Sneakers (1992)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Bishop (Robert Redford), a computer and security expert still nominally on the run from the government for non-sins committed in the 60s, leads a group of freelance weirdos doing the early 90s offline – and a little online – white hat hacking, with a clear Robin Hood streak. The rest of the team are former CIA man Crease (Sidney Poitier), the grown-up of the gang, blind man with excellent ears Whistler (David Strathairn), Forteana and conspiracy nut Mother (Dan Aykroyd, really going out of his comfort zone there), and young guy Carl (River Phoenix). When she and Bishop were still an item, ultra-straight Liz (Mary McDonnell) was also part of the group, but she’s still on good enough terms to help out when asked nicely.

Asking nicely isn’t the strength of the NSA, apparently. Instead, the agency is pressing our heroes into their service to steal a mysterious black box via the magic of not so veiled threats and money. At least our protagonists do have a challenging, and therefore interesting, job in acquiring it.

Unfortunately, once the heist is over, things get dangerous: the box itself is capable of cracking any kind of code and encryption used in the US; worse still, the NSA people aren’t actually working for the NSA but are private service bad guys in the service of one Cosmo (Ben Kingsley). And Cosmo just happens to be part of Bishop’s major past trauma. In any case, an object like the magical box belongs neither in his hand nor in that of the government, so a second heist will have to occur.

And make no mistake, Phil Alden Robinson’s Sneakers is, its outer appearance made out of badly understood and dramatized 90s hi-tech notwithstanding, in many regards a very traditional heist movie, belonging right next to films about sympathetic con-men sticking it to the Man in various forms in the less greed-minded side-arm of the genre.

As is typical, and perfectly fine, for the genre, Sneakers mostly throws plausibility out of the window for its version of the Rule of Cool, safe in the assumption an audience will let implausibilities slide in this context, if you just present them with enough charm. It’s absolutely the right choice, too, and if one hasn’t taken one’s monthly dose of ridiculous but fun plans nearly thwarted by silly problems, and perhaps hasn’t re-watched this in quite some time, Sneakers is a fine way to get one’s hit of these specific genre tropes.

Particularly because its cast is quite as fine as it is, with Redford, Poitier, Strathairn and the rest all providing some great middle-aged star power with performances that not just manage to create perfectly likeable two-note characters but also do the heavy work when it comes to balance the film’s considerable number of – often genuinely funny – jokes, quips and mildly silly situations with the more serious elements of the plot. It does help that most of these guys and the lady are all well versed in the serious as well as the funny stuff, and can shift from one acting stance to the other at a moment’s notice while keeping their characters whole. Well, I’m not terribly happy with Kingsley’s performance, I have to admit, because he falls into his rather typical trap of being all tics, bad accent and far-fetched body language when everyone around him is relaxed and giving the impression of the naturalistic even when portraying an implausible character type. One cannot blame the man for not putting any effort in, though.

On the direction side, things are a bit conservative, certainly never flashy and not exactly inspired. Which seems rather typical of a director whose handful of other films also never suggest much of a directorial personality beyond the ability to hold things together professionally and trust in his actors. While that’s not an approach to direction that’ll ever win many deserved prizes or just critical praise (yes, I know, he directed the curiously beloved by many Field of Dreams, but that thing’s terrible as well as terribly overrated), it works out very well indeed for Sneakers, whose actors are clearly happy to shoulder the main load of the film, and do so with a pleasant lack of vanity.

Three Films Make A Post: You are the experiment

Kain Kafam Hitam (2019): Somehow, it took two directors in form of Yudhistira Bayuadji and Maxime Bouttier to make the most generic, blandest example of the contemporary Indonesian horror wave I have yet seen. As a long-time genre movie fan, I’m perfectly okay with movies that aren’t works of genius and which consist nearly completely of well-worn tropes, but this one really has not a single moment that’s genuinely creepy, instead dragging its audience from one non-set piece, filmed indifferently, to the next. Apparently, the true horror is getting painfully bored by a film not even making the pretence of putting any effort in.

Arctic Void (2022): In comparison, this “stranded on Stavanger after some Fortean stuff happened” film by Darren Mann is a masterpiece. At least, it does start out pretty strong, with an inciting incident that’s cleverly staged and genuinely intriguing.

After the first act, alas, it becomes clear all too quickly that the film doesn’t really have any material for a second or a third one and will mostly drag its feet while nothing happens. At first, the very beautiful shots of an empty arctic township are somewhat interesting, but that attraction does stop eventually too, for one can only watch three mediocre actors doing very little for some time before one expects a theme, a plot, or just a mood to arrive.

The French Dispatch (2021): If you’re Wes Anderson (and the comparison is obviously very unfair to Arctic Void), you can get by with a very personal aesthetic, as this movie of connected shorts set in a France built out of weird ideas dreamt up after a marathon viewing session of pre-80s French cinema demonstrates. The film’s omnibus structure enables Anderson to completely give up on any pretence of interest in a standard narrative. Instead, a bunch of great actors go through a series of Anderson obsessions, tics and concepts, movie and literature quotes as filtered through the director’s by now well-known predilections, until the viewer is either hypnotized by the power of watching the contents of someone’s subconscious turned movie, or annoyed. I’m one of the viewers still very much with Anderson; visiting his mind space as a world put on screen still feels rather singular.

Short Film Friday: The Hidebehind

In short: The Crimson Key (1947)

Mrs Swann (Barnadene Hayes) hires half-boiled private eye Larry Morgan (Kent Taylor) to shadow her husband, who has apparently been acting strangely. Alas, while Larry is sleeping, somebody murders Dr Swann; his wife, rather optimistic concerning Larry’s capabilities after that one if you ask me, decides to keep the detective on the payroll to find out who did in the hubby and why.

So, Larry starts on his investigation and talks to peculiar people, tells his dreams (that is, the plot of the movie) to a Freudian analyst of dubious ethics, chats with an alcoholic society lady (Doris Dowling) more or less locked up by her husband (Dennis Hoey), gets roughed up, and stumbles upon more than just one additional corpse.

This little Fox programmer directed by Eugene Forde is a bit of a favourite of Quentin Tarantino (who also adds the helpful hint that it’s on YouTube), and it’s really not too difficult to see why. Sure, Forde’s direction is more of the straightforward, shoot fast, don’t shoot dumb, try to keep things in focus manner than anything that’ll ever get big stylistic praises, but it’s also very effective in not standing in the way of a very fun script by Irving Elman and a cast that seems to find a lot of enjoyment embodying their slightly stranger versions of standard hardboiled detective character types.

Because talk is cheapest when you’re on a budget – and boy, this surely is on a budget – there’s quite a lot of dialogue and very little action, but the filmmakers clearly put a lot of effort into making every scene with the various characters Larry encounters in his investigation memorable. So most of the dialogue here is fun on some level or another, and every character has some foibles or mannerisms for their actor to milk. Which everyone does absolutely joyfully, leading to a film that mostly uses the set-up of a shoe-leather destroying investigation to realize a series of wonderful little encounters full of witty repartee and more than a little weirdness. Plus, how many other movies are there containing a scene in which a detective presents the plot of the movie he’s in as a dream to a psychoanalyst? It’s delightful.

Alison’s Birthday (1981)

Warning: there will be (some) spoilers, especially for the film’s structure and ending!

When she was sixteen, young Alison (Joanne Samuel) had a rather too exciting home-made Ouija board experience. During it, something purporting to be the spirit of her father (her parents both died in a car accident) possessed one of her friends to warn her not to return home to her uncle and aunt for her nineteenth birthday. After which something else manifested and telekinetically killed her friend.

Now Alison is nearing that nineteenth birthday, and she’s not really planning to go home for the day. What a surprise. She’s a bit busy with her life as a record saleswoman and her radio DJ boyfriend Peter (Lou Brown) anyway. Our heroine does change her mind when her aunt Jennifer (Bunney Brooke) suggests that her uncle Dean (John Bluthal) doesn’t have long to live. She does bring Peter with her, even though he isn’t going to sleep at her family’s place.

Not surprisingly, very strange things start to happen that just might suggest that the deadly warning from beyond of a couple of years ago was right on the money, and that the nice aunt and uncle couple may very well have some terrible plans for their niece. In the end, it’s going to be up to Peter to save Alison, which may or may not turn out to be great for the people involved.

Ian Coughlan’s folk/occult horror movie Alison’s Birthday had been quite difficult to see for decades, so my expectations for it were probably a bit higher than was good for my appreciation. There was a degree of disappointment when I finally got to see the film, for it is not, as one may have hoped for, a long lost masterpiece of its sub-genre(s), but a sometimes awkward mix of two very different kinds of horror film that doesn’t quite come together as perfectly as too high expectations would want it to.

However, looked at realistically, this is a fine little bit of horror with a handful of truly great scenes, and otherwise mostly solid ones, which (those are the rules) makes it a rather good film, just not the return of one’s favourite godhood on celluloid.

The film’s structure is peculiar: for its first half, we follow the misadventures of Alison, her exploration of the hidden secrets of her old home (major finds being a mini-Stonehenge in the supposedly snake-infested backyard, where “backyard” is interpreted in a very Australian way, and a genuine crone in the attic), her growing distrust of what functionally were her parents for much of her childhood, her trying to escape the cloying pressures of people being creepily nice and loving – all of which ends with her being drugged and hypnotized and losing her protagonist role.

At which point the film turns into a Dennis Wheatley-ish (if you can imagine Wheatley without his ultra-competent asshole heroes and weird rants about communism and Satan) occult conspiracy tale in which Peter uses his surprisingly good investigative skills to find out what’s going on, and then tries his much less impressive two-fisted hero bit on the cultists he has discovered, while he’s thwarted by their basic competence at being evil at every turn.

Turns out, the would-be macho guy may steal the female protagonist’s occult gaslighting tale right out of her hands, but that doesn’t mean he will not screw up her rescue rather badly, so that she has to bear the brunt of a film’s shock ending.

And it’s a really good shock ending, too, Coughlan hitting a nasty, disturbing and pretty cruel note with true creepy vigour, providing the movie with the true 70s (functionally, 1981 is still the 70s for horror) downer ending poor Alison doesn’t deserve, and which does make up for a scene or two too many of Peter flailing at the hero bit.

It’s certainly an interesting way to tell this particular story, though I do find the Alison-led half of the film more engaging. In part, because Samuel is simply a much better actress than Brown, in part because her slowly figuring out what’s going on with the people supposedly closest to her and trying to escape them without breaking the social contract is just thematically and emotionally much more resonant and engaging, dramatizing the horror of growing up very well indeed. Whereas the tale of an incompetent dude trying to save his girlfriend just doesn’t quite have the same interest.

There is still enough of interest going on in Peter’s half of the film to never make Alison’s Birthday boring, mind you, with some delightful moments of bizarre cult activity and a dollop of sequences of people doing research (which always delight me to no end) keeping things at the very least engaging throughout.

In short: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020)

Original title: ドロステのはてで僕ら

Café owner Kato (Kazunari Tosa) learns that the two minute time delay between a monitor in his home above his café and a monitor inside of the place makes it possible to see two minutes into the future. Things become complicated once some of his regulars/friends get wind of the thing; some of them are rather creative with their use of the set-up and manage to enhance it. Also involved are the adorable neighbour Kato is harbouring a crush on (Aki Asakura), and…but that would be needlessly telling.

Clearly, the wonderful One Cut of the Dead has put the idea into the heads of some of the more creative Japanese indie filmmakers that editing is for suckers and precisely choreographed one take movies are the thing to do now. Even better for the quality of the resulting films is that this sort of approach weeds out the boring, the lazy and the sane filmmakers, leaving guys like first-time feature director Junta Yamaguchi to the business of making their own lives very difficult, and their audiences happy.

As Yamaguchi approaches the format he has chosen, he and writer Makoto Ueda clearly use its difficulties and problems as creative fuel, turning what could be a gimmick into an intrinsic and important part of the narrative, and then proceed to go from clever bit to clever bit, from one great joke to the next, using formal restrictions to turn a film with a minimum of locations and characters into something exciting and alive that feels genuinely new.

At the same time, and that’s really the more important connection the film shares with One Cut, this is also a deeply likeable movie with quite a big heart, the sort of thing that’ll make you leave the streaming service of your choice with a big smile on your face not just because the film is clever and exciting, but because it has a heart as big as a Marvel blockbuster to boot.

Music Monday: Passenger Edition

The Glass Cage (1955)

aka The Glass Tomb

Pel Pelham (John Ireland) is a carnival barker as well as a family man. He genuinely loves his job. Well, mostly, it appears, he loves the feeling of divorcing sucker from money in as flamboyant a fashion as he can come up with. Right now, he’s planning on introducing London to the special talents of starvation artist/starving man Henri Sapolio (Eric Pohlmann) and his attempt to break his own record by going seventy days without food while on public display in the titular glass cage.

Pel still needs a bit of capital for this, though, so it’s a lucky break when old showbiz pal turned successful business man Tony Lewis (Sidney James) asks Pel for a favour worth 250 pound. Tony, you see, is about to be married to a nice young upper class lady, but an old lady friend is blackmailing him for money. Pel might just be the right guy to talk said lady friend out of it. As it turns out, the business is money easily earned, for the blackmailer is Rena Maroni (Tonia Bern), an old friend of Pel’s. Even better, she has changed her mind about the blackmail anyway and won’t do anything that could embarrass Tony. She was clearly talked into the attempt by someone, but doesn’t tell Pel who.

We learn soon enough that the blackmail instigator is the carny biz world’s favourite agent, Harry Stanton (Geoffrey Keen), and Harry’s so unhappy about Rena’s change of heart, he murders her while Pel and his carny pals are having a party just a flight of steps down. This is just the start of an affair that’ll cost a good handful of people their lives. Fortunately, once under pressure, Pel turns out to be quite a good hobby detective, particularly paired with one Inspector Lindley (Liam Redmond), a man who clearly has a heart for the less upper-crust inhabitants of the world.

This sixty minute cheapie directed by Montgomery Tully is one of the quota quickies Hammer produced with Robert Lippert, and it is certainly one of the better examples of its kind. Tully’s filmmaking is straightforward and effective, with some moments of very clever staging and a couple of scenes that reach for the intensity of US noirs, though the film never attempts the expressionist visuals of those films.

In tone, however, The Glass Cage is certainly close to what one would call a noir, not quite as cynical as its American brethren could get, perhaps simply because its extra short running time doesn’t leave quite enough space to really dig into the messed-up minds of its villains, nor into the complicated personality of its protagonist Pel. What’s there of these depths is, however, well-realized, and works well with the film’s stranger plot details. And they do get strange, particular in a finale that’s slightly more bizarre and macabre than one would expect, and so far-fetched, Cornel Woolrich would have been proud to be associated with the film, if only he had been involved.

Despite the film’s briefness, it at least manages to draw its characters well enough to suggest actual personality and depth to them. In part, that’s thanks to the script’s effective use of shorthand characters tropes, in part because of a cast that fits into these tropes so nicely, they provide them with actual life (and liveliness) and make them memorable. I was particularly impressed by Ireland’s ability to draw Pel as a guy who is at once shifty and trustworthy; a man working a semi-crooked business and loving it without being crooked where it matters.

The film clearly has a lot of fun with showing as much of the carnival business as its budget provided, at the outset using it as a companionable counterpoint to the darker business of the main plot until both eventually intersect more directly. One can’t help but notice that it’s the – by 50s standards – morally dubious carnival people who do most of the killer catching work here, and that the film’s protagonist is even a bit of a conman who wouldn’t go unpunished in more typical 50s fare, and nod approvingly.

Three Films Make A Post: Witness the Beginning of Evil.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021): I was actually mildly excited about the Resident Evil world being put in different hands after about a hundred films by Mila Jovovich’s husband, but the resulting movie director/writer Johannes Roberts cooks up really isn’t a step up for the franchise at all. It’s a mess of a film that seems more interested in squeezing in as many videogame characters and nods towards various Resident Evil games as possible than constructing a working narrative, with way too many characters who have no reason to be on screen at all taking up run time as well as some of the viewer’s lifetime, the film cutting back and forth between these non-entities in a way that destroys the rhythm a big loud horror action movie like this desperately needs to work.

Instead of getting the adrenaline pumping, the film drags, then drags some more, and then drags again; the action sequences are staged without weight and feel random and inconsequential, and there’s simply no sense of tension to anything on screen.

The Beast aka The Wasteland aka El páramo (2021): This Spanish Netflix horror film by David Casademunt sets its sights rather a bit higher than Roberts’s film does, trying to talk about monsters and mental illness and frontier life and difficult families, all through the tale of a family that has fled 18th century wars into the wasteland (geographically and emotionally) of the film’s best title. I say trying, because like Raccoon City, it often lacks the focus it needs to succeed at its difficult task, though there are a handful of scenes in here that do produce the cold chill and the emotional complexity it so clearly aims for. The film’s main problem really isn’t only a lack of focus. There’s also Casademunt’s unsubtle direction, a tendency to overplay emotional beats and add a lot of slow motion and showy camera work in the tackiest manner imaginable exactly at those points when the film should trust its actors, namely Imma Cuesta and young Asier Flores, who both do what they can with what the film provides.

Devicansky Svirka aka Song of the Virgins aka The Maiden’s Tune (1973): By far the most artistically successful movie in today’s post is this fifty-five minute teleplay made in Yugoslavia when that country still existed. Directed by Djordje Kadijevic who also made the brilliant Leptirica/The She-Butterfly, this is a pretty incredible mix of early 70s arthouse sensibilities and the Gothic, a tale of psychosexual weirdness that is much better experienced than described which ends its very highbrow (and I mean that in a good way) tale with one of the greatest High Gothic scenes I’ve ever seen, the sort of thing that would have driven Poe-cycle phase Corman or even Bava mad with envy if they’d seen it, marrying sex and death and music in the most perfect way.

Short Film Friday: Ignore It

In short: Don’t Panic (1987)

Late teen Michael (Jon Michael Bischof) has just moved to Mexico City with his mother. Still, his birthday party is quite a large one, though mostly filled with kids he neither really knows nor likes, or virtual strangers like his instant crush Alex (Gabriela Hassel).

One of the local idiots, Tony (Juan Ignacio Aranda), brings an ouija board (as always, for reasons I’ll never understand, pronounced by everyone as “WeeGee”) to the festivities. Using it apparently awakens some kind of evil force, and so Michael soon has a whole load problems of the sort teenagers outside of horror movies usually miss out on: his eyes turn a merry red at times, and he has visions in which some of his class mates and acquaintances are stabbed to death with a dagger. It may or may not be some sort of mental connection to the supernatural killer – the film sure isn’t going to tell. Later on, there’s also a head made out of TV static making regular appearances, warning Michael who the next victim is going to be, and asking him to get them out of town. When he tries, he can add psychiatric attention to his problems.

Despite all the murder and mayhem around him, our hero still finds time and mind space to successfully romance Alex, of course.

Just having watched Rubén Galindo Jr.’s somewhat insane and most certainly insanely entertaining Grave Robbers some weeks ago, I was going into this earlier piece of Mexican 80s horror by the same director with particularly high hopes. Unfortunately, they weren’t really fulfilled, for where the Galindo’s next movie reaches some remarkable heights of individual, late 80s-tinged craziness, Don’t Panic is a rather less exciting mix of 80s horror cheese and variations (he said politely) on scenes from other, more popular horror movies of the decade. There’s rather a lot of the first two Nightmare on Elm Street movies in the film, but really, if you made a successful 80s teen horror movie, you’ll probably find elements cribbed from it, or at least played with in an obvious manner, in here, too.

Though, to be fair, there’s a certain amount of visual flair to the supernatural set pieces here that does stand Galindo Jr. in good stead, even if none of the ideas in the movie are actually his. Alas, the film does take its time getting there, frontloading the terrible teen romance and dire scenes of improbable teen interactions before the going gets good, so a viewer will have to keep awake by critiquing 80s fashion and counting very slowly to one thousand through the film’s first third or so.

But hey, we will always have Grave Robbers.

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968)

Mumbling and muttering academic Professor Parkins (Michael Hordern) checks into a hotel on the Norfolk coast for his vacation, which he mostly seems to have planned – in so far as he does any planning – to spend writing and on surprisingly vigorous coastal walks (unlike in the original story, golfing is out).

On one of said walks, Parkins finds an ancient whistle half-buried in the sand. Taking it home to the hotel, he discovers a Latin inscription on it, carrying the not at all concerning words “Who is this who is coming”. For reasons best known to himself, Parkins blows the whistle and is afterwards plagued by nightmares of some shadowy, deeply disturbing figure on the beach, as well as a feeling of being followed in real life, until things climax in something very disturbing happening in his hotel bedroom.

This short TV movie directed and adapted by Jonathan Miller (and based on one of the greatest ghost stories ever written) is of course the model that would some years later create one of the BBC’s great achievements in horror and supernatural television, the annual Ghost Story for Christmas, often based, as is this one, on the father of the modern ghost story, M.R. James.

For many a viewer, this proto-Ghost Story for Christmas is one of, if not the greatest of them all, and really, it’s not difficult to see why: the calm and slow beginning and the stark and effective black and white photography create a sense of place and a mood of something ineffably dreadful lurking just beyond the borders of the very quotidian; the handful of effects are used so cleverly, they are actually Jamesian in affect and method as well as in an eventual ruthlessness typical of the endings of Monty’s tales that’s not at all sanded down for television; and the sound design does much to add to all this.

For something that was really meant to be shown once and then thrown away (long-suffering friends of vintage British television do of course still have fits of anger about the BBC’s nightmarish decision to just overwrite the tapes of some of their old programs), there’s an astonishing amount of art and thoughtfulness on display. The filmmakers of this – like of a lot of other BBC productions – work on a Hollywood Poverty Row budget with the love, care, and effort of proper artists, and so Miller’s editing rhythm’s and staging decisions provide the film with a nearly hypnotic quality, something ineffable that turns a slow and theoretically straightforward tale into something very special indeed.

Now, I’ve gone on record somewhere that I don’t actually love this particular James adaptation as much as many others do mostly because of the much-praised performance of Michael Hordern, who portrays the somewhat obtuse but basically sensible Parkins of the story as a mumbling, brabbling absent-minded horror of a man barely able to communicate. I can’t say I’ve grown to love the performance over the years. I still believe Hordern is just too much here, but I’ve grown less irritated by it, and therefore less distracted by it also, and now find myself disagreeing with his acting decisions without finding them ruining the filmmaking for me anymore, finally – after a decade or so – leaving me just as much in love with the filmmaking and mood of Whistle and I’ll Come to You as everyone else who cares about these wonders of British television is.