In short: Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made (2018)

After a bit of fake documentary footage that enumerates the burned-down cinemas and dead festival programmers the mysterious Romanian film “Antrum” may or may not have caused, we get to the meat of the matter, namely, the actual cursed movie.

Here, a young woman named Oralee (Nicole Tompkins) takes her little brother Nathan (Rowan Smyth) into a forest camping, supposedly to enact a ritual that will eventually lay to rest the spirit of Nathan’s dead dog, whom Nathan believes to be in hell. In truth, Oralee is trying to help Nathan through his first close encounter with death via occult rituals she has made up herself.

However, the siblings encounter increasingly strange things and seem to drift into a realm where Oralee’s made-up rituals seem to be true and working, conjuring up powers the siblings will hardly be able to control or even understand. Also, a stop motion squirrel.

For once, the fake documentary bits about the cursed/bad/etc movie David Amito’s and Michael Laicini’s Antrum starts with and finishes on are not terribly interesting to me. Mostly, because I don’t believe the core narrative actually needs any of this high concept stuff to work at all.

The film’s core is a really wonderful recreation of the tone and general air of weird 70s cinema, the sort of movies that play out like extended trips into a filmmaker’s subconscious, movies full of shots that probably have some deep symbolic meaning to their makers but which seem puzzling to an outside viewer, where budget and vision are caught in a knife fight that makes an animatronic and/or stop motion squirrel look like a probable special effect.

Antrum’s approach to this kind of filmmaking never feels “ironic”, or in the need to assert that it’s so bad it’s good while winking at the audience. Rather, it truly gets into the spirit of these things by being earnest, careful, and weird in all the right ways, hitting the dream-like aspect these films take on at their best and keeping to it throughout.

Which of course also means that this isn’t a movie for everyone but rather people like me who love the more outsider-style 70s arm of horror with a passion. For people like us, this is basically paradise/hell, hypnotic and more than a little beautiful.

The Harbinger (2022)

(This is about Andy Mitton’s The Harbinger, not the movie by Will Klipstine of the same title, from the same year).

It’s the height of the pandemic lockdown in the US. Monique (Gabby Beans) leaves the home where she is sheltering with her brother and father when her old friend Mavis (Emily Davis) asks for her help with some unspecified problems. They haven’t seen each other for years, but Mavis once saved Monique’s life during a hard run-in with mental illness, so even the pandemic is not going to get in the way of the woman repaying the favour.

Mavis’s problem is rather disturbing. As she tells it, she is plagued by nightmares, or more than nightmares but dream states which don’t end like normal dreams do, and can take days out of her life.

In these nightmares, Mavis regularly encounters a being dressed  like a plague doctor; she has started to believe it is this entity that attacks her through her dreams, with the end goal of completely erasing her from existence. She doesn’t believe she can take it any longer, so Monique’s support is supposed to be a life line for Mavis. Her supposed saviour is sceptical when it comes to the objective truth of what Mavis thinks is happening to her, but she has lived with her own mental illness long enough herself not to disbelief the truth of the experience. Unfortunately, her attempts of helping Mavis seem to infect her with the same entity her friend is fighting.

Andy Mitton is one of the more interesting directors working in the indie space right now. He is particularly good when it comes to portraying those states where dream and reality seem to drift into one another and the ground of reality turns into quicksand. So a dream horror film like this does certainly play to his strengths. There’s a strong sense of proper dream logic to the nightmares Monique will begin to suffer through (we never get into Mavis’s mind this way). The dreams are suffused with a sense of dread that feels very personal and individual to Monique, distorted echoes of a past Mitton never exposits at us, because is is always clear enough how to understand the reality through the nightmare – without things becoming bland.

How personal these dreams feel is rather typical of Mitton’s films (perhaps with YellowBrickRoad as an exception), where the supernatural is always very effectively connected to a protagonist’s inner life, in often subtly revealing ways. Consequently, the film at hand takes great care drawing Monique and her lockdown-reduced social world in meaningful ways.

The Harbinger doesn’t just want to tell a tale of personal horror taking place in a world of real global horror but also attempts to reproduce some of the psychological effects of the pandemic, all those little feelings of wrongness and the low-level dread many of us suffered under at its height. The titular monster isn’t a metaphor for the pandemic itself, exactly (because allegory is the lowest form of art), but embodies elements of how many of us felt about it.

It is also a very fine horror creation, a being that doesn’t just kill you unpleasantly like your run of the mill dream demon does, but rips people-shaped holes in the world, in memory and reality, holes whose existence you can only realize through the feeling of absence and loss caused by them. In The Harbinger, taking away lives is secondary to the titular entity taking away all the small kindnesses and gestures of human connection that now never have existed either, making the world a worse place little by little, absence by absence. Something which the film portrays chillingly despite its small scope.

In short: The Otherworld (2013)

Original title: L’autre monde

As regulars among my imaginary readers will probably know, I tend towards a pretty mechanistic and materialistic view of the universe, so I’m about as far from being a “believer” as you can get. I do try to treat people looking at the word with different eyes than I do respectfully and loathe the aggressive fanaticism of people like Dawkins-style New Atheists, who are just as irrationally convinced of their world view as the most extreme religious fanatic or UFO believer, and pretty damn rude about it, too. One needs to keep in mind that it may be oneself and not the others who are wrong about everything. Plus, even when one doesn’t believe in something, it is usually enlightening, fascinating or sometimes just entertaining to learn what others think about it.

However, I generally do find my patience tested by a lot of paranormal/esoteric/etc documentaries who often argue their cases in ways that make it very hard for me to give them the benefit of the doubt or my eyes and ears.

So I went into Richard Stanley’s documentary about every esoterically minded person’s favourite part of France, Occitania around Rennes-le-Château, Montségur and the other core places of the Cathar faith, his own spiritual encounter there and the various wild and woolly theories and stories about what’s going on around there with a bit of care. Once people start talking about spiritual vibrations and telluric energies, as they do rather a lot in here, my eyebrows can’t help but rise. However, the longer the film went on, the more interested I found myself, and realized that Stanley isn’t in the business of convincing anyone of his beliefs (or even making terribly clear what those beliefs actually are) but trying to portray a place that clearly has something beyond its history drawing the stranger – or more original – parts of humanity there.

While he clearly has his own ideas about the place, Stanley doesn’t attempt to turn a whole lot of sometimes very different experiences into a coherent tale, nor – thankfully – into a conspiracy theory, but is satisfied with letting his subjects and himself share their tales. He enhances those tales through some cheap yet effective psychedelic – and often just loveably playful (watch out for the running gag about cats!) – effects, nature shots that can’t help but impress at least some of the place’s draw on a viewer, and the kind of intelligent editing hand you usually don’t get in documentaries about esoterica.

Which, really, is rather a lot for any documentary to achieve.

Music Monday: Travelogue Edition

Bodyguard Kiba (1973)

aka The Bodyguard

Original title: ボディガード牙

This is based on the Japanese version of the movie; the US cut seems to vary considerably.

Kiba (Sonny Chiba), karate ace and all-around tough guy, returns to his native Japan after a long stint with his martial arts master in the USA. He plans on becoming the public face of his school to rid it of its low class implications, for apparently, the public believes this particular style of karate to be the realm of thugs and no-goodniks. Also, don’t mention bull-punching.

Kiba plans on reaching this goal by getting into the public eye: first, he thwarts a plane hijacking to then declare at the following press conference he’s going into the bodyguard business.

Soon, a mysterious woman named Reiko (Mari Atsumi) drops in at the home of Kiba and his sister (Etsuko Shihomi) in the attic of a Catholic church that is only ever shot in Dutch angles to hire him for five days. Kiba is not too happy his new client isn’t telling him why exactly she needs a bodyguard, but he gets somewhat distracted by various attacks on her life from the Japanese arm of the cosa nostra, as well as by various home-grown thugs. Eventually, he learns that Reiko was the lover of an assassinated Mafia boss and is trying to sell off a load of drugs she took from him.

Ryuichi Takamori’s Bodyguard Kiba is situated just before the great Sonny Chiba finally fell into his star character as the central protagonist of Toei’s soon-to-be very fevered style of martial arts exploitation movie.

At this point, we are nearly there: Kiba’s still a bit too nice when compared to many of Chiba’s later characters – at least he never attempts to rape anyone, and will only mutilate his enemies in about half of the fights – and Takamori approaches the nudity and the more extreme moments of violence with a degree of reticence.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t any crazy karate action business going on. In a pretty fantastic early fight, for example, Kiba uses a door and his heavy-breathing based technique to amputate the arm of one of his assailants to later show it to his understandably nonplussed client. There’s also quite a bit of Chiba-caused eye-mutilation going on, though we never get X-Rays of any exploding hearts, nor do we actually see any eyes popping. There’s still a lot of very fun violence on screen, of course, shot with many of the stylistic elements you’d expect from a Japanese movie of this era, with wild hand camera, dramatic zooms, Dutch angles, and sudden bouts of erotic grotesquery. Just as an example, there is an early scene where Kiba’s sister loses a fight against three mafia killers, only for her brother to find her stripped naked and draped in a crucifixion pose on the shadow of the church cross of the place they live in. It’s of dubious taste, obviously, but it is also pretty  inspired on an aesthetic level.

The film’s noirish plot of dark secrets and the double crosses between Reiko, her former pimp and now partner and the various people they want to sell the drugs to or rob and their plans to counter-rob them is quite a bit of fun as well, setting Kiba up as the kind of guy who stays honourable even in utterly corrupt surroundings, rather a lot like a Chandler-esque private eye with a larger propensity for ripping your arm of.

Bodyguard Kiba’s problems – at least if you can cope with the sexual mores and the violence of 70s exploitation cinema – are generally not so much problems of the film doing anything wrong, but of it being so close to the Platonic Ideal of a 70s Chiba movie that would completely come to pass with The Streetfighter but not hitting that film’s crazed heights. So, if you go into this not hoping for revelation but for a very good time in the inimitable early 70s Toei style, you’ll probably walk out happy.

Three Films Make A Post: “The Best Werewolf Movie In Years”

A Werewolf in England (2020): As much as I adore many of director/writer/low budget genius Charlie Steeds’s works in general, I can’t say this one’s more me. As always, camera work, editing and lighting are pretty great (particularly when you keep the production budget in mind), always influenced by the tradition Steeds is working in, yet also creative in how that influence is used, and the cast is often much better than you’d expect. Locations and sets are fine, as well. It’s just that the whole tone of the movie is pretty much the opposite of what I like: instead of the more straightforward werewolf fare you’d expect, this is a deeply campy comedy, with joke after joke after joke I found nearly painfully unfunny. Which becomes a bit of a problem in a comedy, even in one where I ended up laughing two or three times.

If viewers who actually like camp will have the same problem with this as I have is anybody’s guess, obviously.

The Corpse Eaters (1974): Teenage (at the time) Lawrence Zazelenchuk’s little – the only existing versions run for apparently incomplete 57 minutes – bit of early (non-voodoo) zombie horror may be Canada’s first gore film. It is certainly a bit of a mess in the state you can see it now, a blown-up, sometimes pixelated greenish print. Much of it doesn’t work and makes little sense, but there are moments when the whole thing does take on the quality of a freakish nightmare, especially in the gore scenes where the (mostly library, I assume) soundtrack drops into synth chirps and drones while we witness improbable but – as far as you can see it in this version – excellently gloopy gore, filmed with wildly wavering camera and edited over-excitedly. As an extra bonus, the film warns us before the gore scenes with its own version of the Horror Horn: shots of a balding guy about to puke set to annoying synth noises. If that doesn’t convince you of a film’s quality, clearly nothing will.

Vampires (1979): Vampires were in the air in 1979, though this entry into the BBC’s venerable (and sometimes absolutely wonderful) “Play for Today” series, as written by Dixie Williams and directed by John Goldschmidt may not feature any actual vampires. Most of it follows a trio of kids in a particularly desolate part of Liverpool finding their imaginations fired by a viewing of Dracula – Prince of Darkness. So much so, they decide a pale man walking the local graveyard is a vampire, as well.

All of this works wonderfully as a compassionate, sometimes funny, exploration of a specific time and place and its people. It finds much joy (and a bit of subtextual anger) in the kids’ resilience in interactions with a grown-up world that mostly – apart from a joke shop owner – seems to go out of its way to nip in the bud anything that might make the dullness of the surroundings more interesting, more adventurous. That it ends on an ambiguous note that might turn this into an actual tale of vampirism is nearly beside the point, but still appreciated.

Short Film Friday: Don't Feed the Cat

In short: Troll (2022)

A publicly not exactly lauded attempt to build a tunnel through the Dovrefjell mountain range in Norway awakens a kaiju-sized troll. The thing turns out to be rather unhappy with certain elements of Norway’s secret history and goes on a bit of a rampage that will eventually lead it to Oslo.

The authorities are not especially effective fighting a giant menace that seems immune to modern weapons. Only palaeontologist Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann), who grew up with a father (Gard B. Eidsvold) obsessed with the hidden truth of troll lore, is willing to think outside of the box. She acquires her own mini-coterie of nerds – her father, assistant to the prime minister Andreas Isaksen (Kim Falck), Isaksen’s techie friend Sigrid (Karoline Viktoria Sletteng Garvang, owner of what I imagine to be a very exhausting name even for Norwegian names), and special forces captain Kristoffer Holm (Mads Sjøgård Pettersen) – and just might be her country’s only chance against the troll and the experimental weaponry of the mad minister of defence (Fridtjov Såheim).

I actually love parts of the world building of Roar Uthaug’s Troll, the way it creates a space where the international language of kaiju movie tropes can be read through the lens of the Norwegian local, folklore and cultural specificities.

Unfortunately, once it leaves the conceptual level, Troll’s script (by Espen Aukan) fails on nearly every conceivable level and plays out like a particularly lazily written pre-Sharknado SyFy Original with a bit of a budget but little idea of what to do with it.

Characters aren’t just one-dimensional tropes, something I’d be totally fine in a giant monster movie, but the blandest version of them, spouting ill-timed one-liners and tumbling awkwardly into emotional beats the script doesn’t put even the tiniest amount of work into preparing. The plot doesn’t actually feel like any such thing but a string of beats cribbed from other giant monster movies strung together with little thought about how they actually hang together. The writing lets Jun Fukuda era Toho kaijus look like Shakespeare, or really, like films crafted by actual professionals with a bit of self-regard. There’s nothing wrong with underwriting the humans in a monster movie; there’s a lot wrong with underwriting them so badly they get in the way of a viewer having fun with the monsters.

Andin the way the shoddy plotting of the affair and its non-characters truly get, always adding at least an element of irritation to what should be perfectly fine giant monster action and actually perfectly fun giant monster mythology.

Blind Justice (1994)

Some time after the US Civil War. A nearly completely blind, yet still exceptionally deadly when shooting, gunfighter named Canaan (Armand Assante) roams the borderlands between the US and Mexico, carrying two guns and a baby, looking for a town that might not exist. He promised the baby’s father, whom he killed, to get the little one to her family, apparently, though Canaan and the film will be reticent about going into further detail.

After a meet-cute with a quartet of Mexican bandits – three of whom he shoots while the last one gets to hold the baby – Canaan comes to a small town that is under sieged by the gang of Alacran (Robert Davi). Alacran is after a wagon-load of silver protected by an ever decreasing number of soldiers. Their leader, Sgt Hastings (Adam Baldwin) has repeatedly sent men out to fetch help, but not one of them has come back alive, or seems to have reached the next cavalry outpost. Hasting is too dutiful to give Alacran the gold, or simply not stupid enough to believe the sadistic maniac wouldn’t murder his little troop in any case.

Canaan is still bitter, as well as PTSD-stricken, about what happened to him in the war, so he’s not terribly interested in the soldiers’ plight. He might be willing to do some blockade running for them, for a price, of course. Cigars and milk have to be paid, after all. In truth, the gunman will have trouble with Alacran and his men in any case, for one of the three bandits he shot before coming to town was the man’s younger brother; and while Alacran – a man who mutilates his own men regularly – doesn’t have many softer human traits, brotherly love was one of them.

I can only assume that when he was writing the HBO western Blind Justice Daniel Knauf asked himself why only blind swordsmen, masseurs, boxers and vigilante lawyers have all the fun, but nobody thinks about the poor, blind shootist and then proceeded to solve this problem. As directed by Richard Spence, the resulting movie is a lot of fun.

Clearly going for the spirit of the Italian western in its goofier variations, the film does a very enjoyable job of presenting touches of wonderful weirdness like Canaan’s disgust about having come to a town that has neither smokes, nor milk, nor booze - and yes, when our hero has got a smoke, he’s huffing it in the direction of the poor kid. These elements, Spence presents with a degree of camp, but never so much as to overwhelm the more dramatic or nasty moments of the film with the horrors of irony; here, it feels more like a companionable nod at an audience to suggest that, yes, the film knows it trades in silliness and well-worn clichés, but it also genuinely wants us to simply enjoy them as they are, and actually revel in them a little.

So we get a mix of jokes good and bad, some genuinely fine and creative shoot-outs, explosions, and standard Italian and Revisionist western scenes like our hero’s crucifixion. From the latter, Canaan is at least partially saved by an elderly and somewhat crazy Native American shaman (Jimmy Herman), who is put in stark contrast to the town’s traitorous Catholic priest (Ian McElhinney), which you may or may not want to read as a political statement.

There’s also a romantic subplot between Canaan and the town nurse (Elisabeth Shue), but the less said about this horrifying combination of no chemistry and bad acting choices (what the hell does the usually perfectly competent to awesome Shue think she’s doing!?), the better. It’s not so terrible as to actually damage the film as a whole – it’s just too weird at heart for that – but it sure does little to improve it either.

In general, the acting tends to broad scenery-chewing, strange line readings and the overwrought – particularly, and to nobody’s surprise, Assante and Davi are downright incredible whenever they get going, leaving no mouth in the audience closed. This is not a complaint, of course, for this style of acting is the only fitting approach to the movie’s mix of peculiarity and Italian western made in the USA two decades too late. You don’t go method when the going gets weird, unless you’re not as clever an actor as you think you are, Jared Leto.

As an added bonus for the “before they were stars” column, there’s a one-scene appearance of Jack Black as a Private who gets knocked out by an unarmed blind man. The stuff careers are made of, apparently.

In short: Werewolf Castle (2021)

Some medieval fantasy England. Young and not particularly courageous Thorfinn (Peter Lofsgard) witnesses the slaughter of most of his village – lover and parents included – by a group of werewolves captained by one Wulfstan (Reece Connolly). What’s left of the local authorities believe the wolves will continue to be a problem and attack other villages in the vicinity, so they decide to ask their very much not beloved king Vortigern (David Simcock) for help. There’s just a little problem: between the village and the king’s castle are several days’ worth of a journey through the werewolf-infested forest. So the villagers round up a small group of heroes with wonderful names like Hal Headsplitter (Jay O’Connell) and the geographically confusing Hamelin Wiltshire (Tim Cartwright) to make a quest out of the business. An angry and confused Thorfinn joins the group as their local guide.

It’s going to be a rather difficult time for everyone involved.

I don’t think this fantasy horror piece that seems to reuse some of the werewolf suits from director Charlie Steeds’s Werewolf in England is ever going to be a particular favourite of the man’s merry output for me. It’s – rather atypical for Steeds – a bit slow in parts, taking breathing breaks for characterisation that’s often not terribly interesting even in the realm of tropes and shorthand this film moves in. It is also clearly rather difficult to make a proper quest narrative on what the film can afford, so it plays out as a series of somewhat escalating encounters with the same werewolves during each of which characters and audience learn something more about the threat’s nature and where Thorfinn gets to have a variation on the Hero’s Journey. Given the circumstances, this is probably the best way to tell this particular story.

Speaking of the Hero’s Journey, the script’s best – and certainly its original – idea is how it actually subverts some of the ways modern screenwriters tend to use this particular holy writ, letting Thorfinn hit all the right beats on the road, make the proper experiences, and then lets him fulfil his destiny in a way that feels closer to the darkness in actual myth and legend than our modern readings of this. Which is not at all bad for a low budget movie about guys with swords fighting werewolves.

While they don’t all hit for me this time around, I do think that at least two of the film’s set pieces – the surviving heroes’ stay in a rather unhealthy village with the proper mood of doom and the climax – are really well done and edited with the kind of controlled verve I’ve come to particularly respect about the Steeds’s films. That our filmmaker is still pretty great at finding atmospheric and photogenic locations (no warehouses for his films, unless a warehouse actually makes sense) might deserve a mention here as well.

So, even though I didn’t quite love this as much as I did The Barge People or A Haunting in England I still had a fun enough time with Werewolf Castle.

Music Monday: Prism Edition

Dracula (1979)

A word of warning: for quite some time, director John Badham insisted on having the home video versions of the film at hand released in a colour-“corrected” version that borders on the monochrome. By now, there are fortunately versions of the film available that give it back the rather gorgeous colours of its initial theatrical run. I suggest anyone interested in viewing (or re-watching) the film to pick up one of those colourful, aesthetically much more pleasing and visually effective, versions. I have no idea what Badham was thinking.

It’s particularly exasperating in a film whose main qualities are visual, namely the incredible art direction and production design, and camera work. These elements of the film create a lush world of fog, picturesque ruins and asylums, and some of the most attractive rot and decay ever to grace a cinema screen. In combination with a somewhat pompous but gloriously, loudly, moody John Williams score, there’s something to be said for just letting those beautiful Gothic pictures wash over one while one is dreaming of dying roses or something equally appropriate.

It’s all the more important to focus on this aspect of the film because its script certainly isn’t great. By now, we’ve all grown used to cinematic adaptations of Stoker’s “Dracula” (and that cursed play) wildly mixing up elements of the original, removing important bits and keeping less interesting others. Often, this sort of thing makes sense when going from one medium to the next, so I’m all on board with the film making one of the female main characters the daughter of Dr Seward (Donald Pleasence), and putting the doctor’s asylum thusly much more front and centre. Why you’d swap the roles of Mina (Jan Francis) and Lucy (Kate Nelligan), on the other hand, I have no idea. But then, this may very well have something to do with the misguided decision to cast Dracula as a “great lover” character and pose Lucy’s attraction to him and all that he stands for as some sort of attempt to escape the stifling Victorianism of her surroundings. Which is all well and good, until you remember that this Dracula is still a mass murderer who turns women into baby-drinking monsters; not exactly a romantic proposition where I come from. And how much a woman liberates herself by just tying herself to a different, objectively much more horrible, guy then her fiancée is a question that comes to mind as well. Unless, of course, you want to argue that Badham is on the side of Victorian paternalistic repression, something that works with what we got on paper, but seems rather not at all like the director.

It doesn’t help that Frank Langella is just not up to the task, neither as a romance character or as a vampire. Sure, his hair is great in a disco era idea of great, and he’s doing his best to smoulder through the overblown, overdirected romantic sequences, but he mostly ends up looking like he is trying hard instead of achieving. When it comes to the character’s cruel side, he’s simply not convincing at all; he kills his victims with all the conviction of a politician.

Still, even with its limp Dracula, whenever the film goes fully into Gothic horror mode, it becomes much more convincing and interesting. The sets and Badham’s direction come to the sort of fake, stylized un-life I love so much about this kind of horror. The actors – particularly Pleasence and Olivier but also Nelligan who is also much better at pretending that Dracula is incredibly hot than Langella deserves – play things up very nicely indeed. From time to time, Dracula even finds a moment of true horror or two – particularly Van Helsing’s encounter with his undead daughter is wonderful, as is the early sequence in which the vampire murders the crew of the Demeter during a particularly dramatic looking storm.

Three Films Make A Post: Party Like It’s 2022

Mandrake (2022): Sometimes, I really don’t know. Objectively, Lynne Davison’s clever mix of traditional British social drama and neo folk horror is a fine, perhaps even great film. The acting, particularly by Deirdre Mullins and Derbhie Crotty, is great and absolutely on point, Davison’s visual language is creepy without only ever going for the obvious effect, and the script clearly knows what it wants to be about as well as how to express it. In practice, I didn’t connect with it at all. Despite my love for clever variations on folk horror and good filmmaking this might as well have been Generic Blumhouse Horror Number 9855, for all I felt and thought. Which says very little about the film, obviously.

Beast (2022): To be fair to myself, for most of the time, I had the same reaction to Baltasar Kormákur’s animal attack movie in which Idris Elba needs to protect his family from lions. But here, it’s the proper reaction. As you might expect, the film milks the whole “a man needs to protect his little girls” so incessantly, you can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop and the movie to deconstruct this notion. To nobody’s surprise, the other shoe never does drop, and it’s just a case of very low effort character writing.

On the plus side, Elba is good even if he has very little to do, the young actresses playing his daughters deserved better as well, and Sharlto Copley does – as usual – a great portrayal of Sharlto Copley playing a likeable ranger. Too bad the film has no ambitions beyond being as generic as possible, wasting the talents of everyone involved on the kind of movie that’s simply there.

Barbarian (2022): Because I didn’t want to go into spoiler heavy territory with this one – let’s just say there’s a really clever, effective and actually meaningful structural thing or three that happen – I can end the post on a positive note.

For Zach Cregger’s Barbarian truly is as good as everyone says – apart from one bit I found somewhat too smugly on the righteous side of our times which would involve heavy spoilers to get into – using parts of today’s social conversation in intelligent ways to surprise. It’s the case where a movie has something to say, knows how to say it, and also how to make a pretty fantastic horror movie out of it. Add some really great performances by Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long, and you have something really rather special.

Short Film Friday: Shadowprowler

As regularly as Christmas (or a different festival of your choice) comes around

I'm going to take a bit of a break from the blog for a couple of weeks. I wish all of my readers - imaginary, real, or both - a fine, debaucherous or quiet time, and will be back to my usual shenanigans on January, 6th.

In short: Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022)

Tori Tooms (Riley Dandy) really just wants to drink away small town Christmas Eve, perhaps with some added sexual debauchery with her long time buddie Robbie Reynolds (Sam Delich), at least that’s what everybody they meet believes when witnessing their shouty mating dance of musical allusions and bad sexual innuendo.

Alas, the robot Santa (Abraham Benrubi) from the toy shop of Tori’s best friends malfunctions and begins a killing spree through everyone our somewhat abrasive heroine holds dear (as well as anyone else it encounters). This is the sort of thing that’ll happen when a company’s robot Santas are built on military technology, apparently.

Given the colour schemes of most of his films, it was only ever a question of time until Joe Begos was going to make a film set on Christmas. The resulting movie is pretty much what I expected it to be: very, very red even when no blood is on screen, full of characters unable to communicate in any other way but drunk shouting, editing that tends to the abrasive, often bordering on the physically aggressive. There’s pretty rude, yet damn funny, humour, characters that shouldn’t be likeable but feel both likeable and authentic, and a finely developed sense of general low budget carnage that’s as much reason for Begos’s aesthetic as it is a result of it.

That Begos’s general approach and the punky/grungy air of the film can annoy the hell out of anyone not in the mood for being shouted at for eighty minutes, or ever, is obvious; when you are, there’s really very little like the man’s movies.

Vikrant Rona (2022)

aka VR

Several decades ago (the film officially speaks of “almost half a century”, and I’m not sure if this is supposed to mean the late 70s or the early 80s). A small Indian village somewhere in the middle of a tropical forest is hit by a series of possibly supernatural occurrences and serial killings that suggest a nasty occult ritual is going on. One of the victims is the village’s chief of police. The place is also basically overrun by smugglers, so there is the potential of all of this being a nastier version of the old Dr Syn gambit.

In a curious twist of fate and very suddenly, extremely macho cop Vikrant Rona (Sudeep) appears in the village. He quickly starts taking care of business, swaggering and threatening when he isn’t actually investigating. He’s clearly stirring something up, too, for there is a series of attempts on his life. Though, to be fair, these may very well be caused by all the testosterone the guy is oozing causing allergies.

Freshly returned to the village, young Sanju (Nirup Bhandari) becomes also involved in the investigation, in between bouts of wooing the delightful Panna (Neetha Ashok). These two start on their own parallel investigation that will eventually lead them to a rather horrifying suspicion.

I believe Anup Bhandari’s Vikrant Rona is the first Kannada language movie I’ve seen or written about here. Sensibility-wise, the film is close enough to what I’ve known of contemporary Hindi or Telugu cinema, so it wasn’t much of a problem for me to appreciate its brand of stylized, sometimes wonderfully moody, sometimes loveably silly, slickness. Tonally, I’d actually compare it with Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee movies from Hong Kong, only that Vikrant Rona mixes its twisty mystery with a smidgen of horror not with wuxia but with a bit of melodrama and action in the patented Indian manner.

The action is of the wonderfully overblown and entertainingly overdirected style that’s typically for most of what I’ve seen coming from India right now, in its own way as disinterested in proper fighting techniques as a modern wuxia or a superhero movie, going for maximum loudness, heft, and visual impact. Which can go terribly wrong in the hands of some directors (repeat “Michael Bay” ten times in front of a mirror and he will appear, but only for a tenth of a second, because then the first edit happens) but is just a whole lot of fun here. Particularly enjoyable are an early fight scene on a smuggler boat during a storm that also moonlights as a bit of a musical number, meant to establish Vikrant Rona’s bona fides as an asskicker, and the grand finale that starts as one of the more insane (that’s a compliment) dance numbers I’ve seen and turns into a riot of stunts, peculiar fighting techniques and colours. But whenever else VR punches someone, it is still the beginning of a very good time for the audience.

Speaking of musical numbers, while I’m not the biggest fan of the heavy use of autotune as a vocal effect on generally already very high voices some of the music has going on, as a friend of 70s Hindi cinema, I was rather happy with the pretty traditional way most of them were integrated into the plot, usually to express intensified emotions via choreography that’s just as fun in its own way as the action sequences are.

Speaking of “fun”, given the nature of the killings in the film and certain elements of the plot I’m not going to spoil, I found myself surprised by the general sense of it during the proceedings. It’s not that the film doesn’t have a sense of or respect for its own Indian Gothic (for lack of a better term) elements and the emotional heft of some of the story it is telling, it’s just that these elements so regularly are subsumed under VR’s absurdly overblown machismo (so overblown I couldn’t even get annoyed at it) and the joyful way the film throws out its many, many twists and turns (some of which are pretty damn obvious, some come as really cool surprises I wouldn’t have believed this particular film to get up to), this film of terrible secrets of the past, family suicide and child murder never feels all that emotionally threatening. And because the Vikrant Rona really is that fun, this isn’t an actual weakness but just the basic facts of its nature.

In short: Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out (1989)

Surprisingly, Silent Night, Deadly Night 2’s killer Ricky (now played by Bill Moseley) survived the fatal shooting at the end of a film that mostly consisted of flashbacks and retcons (and about which I just have nothing to say). He’s now comatose, has his brain encased in a plexiglass dome with a puddle of sloshing fluid inside, and is subject to various experiments conducted by Dr Newbury (Richard Beymer), the guy who reconstructed his brain.

For reasons, Newbury is trying to establish a psychic connection between Ricky and blind Laura (Samantha Scully). This turns out to be a very bad idea – who’d have thunk? – when either a rambunctious Santa Claus or the psychic connection awakens Ricky from his slumber and sends him on a killing spree towards Laura, her brother Chris (Eric DaRe) and his girlfriend Jerri (Laura Harring).

SNDN3: BWO, for reasons that I believe would blow everyone’s minds so badly, it is better not disclose them, directed by the great Monte Hellman, really suffers from a lack of Christmas mood. It’s all well and good having your killer wear a cake topper on his head, but when your film is part of a series that was until now all about the supposed shock value of dressing up your killer as Santa, it does miss the mark just a wee bit. If someone would at least have drawn a reindeer on the thing…

But I digress. On paper, this is actually a rather interesting movie. Hellman – who scrapped the original script for the film and wrote his own – clearly wants to make a slasher with a bit more character depth than is typical of the genre, adding more and deeper character interactions, showing actual interest in this aspect of the film. In this, he is thwarted by two things: first and foremost, the cast is completely unable to provide the nuance you’d need for this to work. Particularly Scully is dreadful, unable to even give the mildest movie interpretation of blindness, not to speak of convincingly suggesting emotional depth beyond a pouty rudeness that is probably supposed to be part of her reaction to trauma, but only comes over as unpleasantness in the performance.

Secondly, all those scenes of actors trying desperately to emote cut down on the slasher business at hand badly, and turn Ricky into the blandest killing machine alive.

That Hellman isn’t exactly the greatest suspense director on the planet is not of great help there, either, and so most of the killings and theoretical murder set pieces feel bland and uninvolving. As does the rest of the film, really.

Music Monday: As Always (Goodbye Mimi)

The Barge People (2018)

Sisters Kat (Kate Davies-Speak) and Sophie (Natalie Martins) are going on a barging holiday on the British canals with their respective boyfriends, the eminently likeable Mark (Mark McKirdy) and the eminently punchable banker Ben (Matt Swales). There are some tensions between the men, what with Ben being a total twat, but things do seem to go well enough. That is, until Ben manages to provoke the – admittedly easily provokable – ire of some people actually living on the canals (among them British low budget horror regular Makenna Guyler).

The English barge-dwelling version of the more common US backwoods murder hick isn’t going to be the quartet’s main problem for long, for there is also a school of human-eating fish-person mutants to cope with.

Director (and often editor, producer and writer) Charlie Steeds has been making a pretty astonishing number of movies in the last half decade or so, wildly varying in tone and horror subgenre. Those I’ve seen by now are all very low budget but a far cry above quite a bit of your typical amateur or semi-professional genre movies. That’s mostly thanks to a mixture of actual filmmaking chops on the side of Steeds and his cohorts behind and before the camera and an impression of drive and energy that suggests these films to be made by people who’d make movies independently of how much money they can scratch together. There’s also an air of this being made by an actual troupe, with actors and off-camera talent recurring again and again in various films in different mixtures, the sort of thing otherwise only Mike Flanagan seem to still get away with on a higher budget level. This approach can – and does certainly do in the case of Steeds’s Dark Temple Motion Pictures – lead to films that feel just that decisive bit more personal, like actual labours of love.

The Barge People with its wild mix of elements of a good handful of exploitation and horror sub-genres certainly feels like such a labour of love, with a director who clearly hasn’t just seen a lot of genre movies but also learned why they use the tricks they use and how to apply these to his own work productively; a script – this time around not by Steeds but by Christopher Lombard – that uses and mixes genre tropes with verve and intelligence, and an acting ensemble that can actually act.

That last point is of course not always a given on this budget level, and also helps The Barge People to avoid my greatest bugbear with contemporary lowest budget/DIY horror – dialogue scenes that are slow like molasses, and start too early to then go on and on and on until they arrive nowhere, too late. Here, acting and dialogue are tight, get to the point the film wants to make with them, and then end when they should. Pacing is one of Steeds’s strengths in any case, so The Barge People not only zips along nicely for most of the time but also knows when it is actually useful for it to slow down. So there’s an actual rhythm to the film that’s not easy to reach on the cheap, when reshoots and unlimited time to get a scene just right are most certainly not on the table.

Also rather nice are the copious scenes of gore. Realized practically, the effects are just the right side of not being realistic, so that the gore elements are eminently fun. Admittedly, the fish mutant masks are less than perfect, but these guys are such natty dressers, I can’t say I find myself caring about this as a weakness one lick.

Finally, as someone who has historically gone on about the importance for low budget cinema of any kind to mix the filmmakers’ favourite genre tropes (let’s call it the genre universal) with elements of local specificity, I can’t help but love a film that does variations on backwoods horror on the English canal system. I’m not sure that Robert Aickman or L.T.C. Rolt would have approved of this particular usage, but I’m all too happy about it.

Three Films Make A Post: Vengeance for the right price

The Duel at Silver Creek (1952): This was the first western Don Siegel directed, and in its first act, it does feel somewhat insecure. How much of this is Siegel or just the curiously structured script by Gerald Drayson Adams and Joseph Hoffman that goes through plot and character set-ups with maximum awkwardness isn’t quite clear. Once the film has set into its groove, and every character is actually where they need to be for the real plot to start, things improve markedly. The tale of men’s friendship (between Stephen McNally and Audie Murphy), an evil brother-sister pair (Gerald Mohr and Faith Domergue) pretending to be extremely upstanding or into marshals, and other complications isn’t terribly original by western standards of the time, but Siegel and the cast provide the whole affair with a lot of energy.

Dead for a Dollar (2022): Energy is rather what this new attempt by the great Walter Hill to get back to his old form lacks; the storytelling meanders enough to rob the film of much of its potential drive, and certainly of any actual tension. There’s still quite a bit to like here, though. The cast, particularly Rachel Brosnahan and Christoph Waltz (as well as Willem Dafoe when he’s actually in the movie), do sink their teeth into characters of a type that doesn’t make one wonder why Hill dedicates this one to the late, great western director Budd Boetticher. And while the action isn’t much to write home about (in a Hill movie!), the final shoot-out sees the man regaining some of his old powers in this area.

Mr. Vampire Part 3 aka 靈幻先生 (1987): If you’re looking for much new in the third entry into the deservedly classic Mister Vampire series from Hong Kong, you might be disappointed. If you come for Lam Ching-Ying’s monobrow, and an incredible amount of stunts, slapstick and slapstick stunts and more throw-away visual gags in any given scene than most movies pack into their full runtimes, director Ricky Lau has you covered again, zipping through jokes and fights with abandon and enthusiasm. And hey, we’re fighting a wildwoman style sorceress this time instead of hopping vampires, so there’s that as well.

Short Film Friday: Into the Night

In short: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Little Billy (Danny Wagner) is a magnet for Christmas trauma. First his institutionalized grandpa horrifies him with a traditionally dark interpretation of Santa Claus, then his mother and father are murdered – the mother nearly raped as well – by a robber dressed as Santa Claus. The nun-run orphanage he ends up in afterwards offers the kid no peace either, for the Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin) has no patience with his not exactly surprising Christmas trauma and abuses him quite efficiently.

Ten years later, when he’s 18 (and now played by Robert Brian Wilson), Billy gets a job in a large toy store, because that’s exactly the place where you want a guy who loses it every December to work at. Not surprisingly, once his boss passes the job of the store Santa onto the kid, it takes only one little additional thing to make him crack completely. And wouldn’t you know it, seeing his secret store crush (Toni Nero) pair up with the work asshole is just the push Billy needed. Thus, he goes on a Santa Claus rampage, finding reasons to put quite a few people on the naughty list with whatever axe he’s got to hand.

If Charles E. Sellier Jr.’s Silent Night, Deadly Night demonstrates one thing, it’s that there’s a reason why most slashers don’t spend their first half on the exact way their killers become psychologically damaged: once you’ve spent so much time with a character – even if he’s as badly acted as Billy – and seen so much of the trauma that destroys him as a person, he simply doesn’t work as the kind of monstrous, inhuman killing machine a killer in a slasher needs to be to function. Sure, there’s the possibility of a really good or intelligent filmmaker to do exactly this and make something very interesting and meta out of it, but that certainly doesn’t apply to Sellier or this film (nor to Rob Zombie).

Instead, we get a film whose two halves have little tonal or emotional connection with one another. The first half is theoretically interesting as the beginning of a psychological thriller, but simply too awkwardly written, directed and acted to work as that; and the second is a pretty bland slasher that never makes as much out of the Christmas gimmick as you’d hope for. There are a couple of scenes where at least the contrast between 70s Christmas mood and slasher sleaze gets somewhat fun, and Linnea Quigley getting killed by antlers is a pretty great gag, but otherwise, there’s very little here to get me in the proper, murderous Christmas spirit.

Significant Other (2022)

Warning: while I’m not going to go into details about the film’s big moment in the middle, I’ll talk around it in a way that might be considered a spoiler to some!

Long-time couple Ruth (Maika Monroe) and Harry (Jake Lacy) are going on a backtracking trip somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

It’s all Jake’s idea, really, for he has done a lot of this sort of thing before he met Ruth, and genuinely wants her to appreciate this thing he loves. It’s not a good idea, mind you. For while Ruth clearly is as much in love with Harry as he is with her, she is also a tightly packed bundle of anxieties and depression for whom a camping trip in the wilds even with the person she loves most in the world is sheer terror. Given that none of this is news to Harry, it’s a bit of mystery why he believes this situation will be the ideal moment to ask Ruth to marry him, but there you have it.

As if relationship troubles weren’t bad enough, things turn rather horrible when Ruth makes a discovery inside of a cave.

And that’s really where I like to leave the plot of Dan Berk’s and Robert Olsen’s Significant Other, for the big middle plot development is the sort of thing I think a viewer needs to experience all by themselves. Apart from being clever but not annoyingly so, it certainly escalates the situation for and between the characters in a pretty terrible way. It’s also absolutely of a piece with the portrayal of a fraught but loving relationship we’ve seen before, still letting the film speak about its themes while turning things dramatically horrific in a manner that resonates with all that surrounds it.

It’s at this point of the proceedings where it becomes clear how good the performances of Monroe and Lacy actually are, as well as how cleverly the script and the actors work together to make certain things ambiguous without cheating the audience or betraying the characters. Monroe, having been in quite a few classics or semi-classics of fantastic cinema by now, always seems a bit underrated to me, mostly because her acting style on the surface seems to fall into the “pretty face, big eyes, sloping shoulders” kind of cliché. In actuality, she has a lot of nuance, making little shifts in expression, posture and emotional projection that suggest she is putting quite a bit of thought into her characters and position whoever she is playing as a believable human being in often quite strange circumstances. Lacy for his part manages to play through some major shifts in a very organic feeling manner, until he comes to a point where he can really milk certain developments for maximum creepiness (with a good sense of the emotionally grotesque).

Apart from turning into a very clever piece of science fiction horror, Significant Other is also highly effective and thoughtful as the portrayal of a relationship in which one of the partners suffers from mental illness, specifically depression and social anxieties. For once, writer/directors actually seem to understand how frustratingly like self-sabotage these things can feel for the person suffering from them, how dispiriting and undermining of one’s trust in oneself, to the point where one can love somebody with all one’s heart, but can never convince oneself one is actually good enough for them. And because the film really does understand, it doesn’t make Ruth or Harry the asshole in this situation – even though Harry’s attempt at turning Ruth into an outdoors person seems very misguided – and doesn’t question their love or commitment. All of which makes the horror plot hit all the harder, of course.

In short: When the Screaming Starts (2021)

Norman Graysmith (Jared Rogers) is a low-rent documentary filmmaker with delusional hopes for greatness. He believes he has found the perfect subject for becoming a bigshot when he gets wind of a guy who has clearly just as delusional hopes of becoming a serial killer. Aidan Mendle (Ed Hartland) is not much of a creep, clearly lacking in the negative qualities that make a true killer instead of a sad shlub like you or me, and it’s pretty clear that much of his ambition comes from his dead-eyed girlfriend Claire (Kaitlin Reynell). Attempts at actually killing somebody go sideways, so Aidan, always pushed on by creepy Claire and the ever exploitative Norman, decides to become a serial killer cult leader like Charles Manson instead.

He does manage to recruit a group of creeps and weirdos, but once the group is assembled and actually starts to do some killing, it turns out that Aidan might have found an actual monster among the idiots willing to join a cult lead by him. The kind of monster even Norman’s supreme egotism might not be able to exploit.

When the Screaming Starts’s main thematic pull about the exploitative documentary filmmaker/internet personality/whatever who is actually a greater monster than those monsters he tries to exploit is not exactly news in the realm of the fake documentary (I’m not a fan of the word mockumentary for its suggestion of parody of the form), but Conor Boru’s film, as co-written by Boru and Hartland, is making the point well enough that originality isn’t too much of a concern for me.

Particularly since there’s a lot more going on in the film than that: this is also a film about the absurdity of aspirations one doesn’t have the least bit of talent for – obvious with Aidan but also in Norman’s case –, hilariously unhealthy relationships, and also the ridiculousness and unpleasantness of serial killer fan culture. It does talk about all of these things with humour that reaches from the silly, the awkward and the grotesque to moments of surprising subtlety. The humour can, obviously, get rather dark indeed, but the film knows when not to be funny as well, so the murder set pieces could mostly run in a non-comedic film in the same accomplished way they do here, which makes scenes like the party the killer team get up to after their first mass slaughter all the more funny by contrast.

There’s quite a bit of good character work happening here, too. Even though When the Screaming does of course use comedic caricatures, it knows quite well which characters not to overdraw too much to keep character relations as more than elements of comedy bits, thus providing a much more satisfying emotional connection than it would otherwise.

Music Monday: New Christmas Rituals

Horror Hospital (1973)

aka The Computer Killers

After witnessing a cold open in which a gentleman we’ll quickly enough learn is Dr Christian Storm (Michael Gough) and his little person assistant Frederick (Skip Martin) murder two people with the help of a car carrying practical in-built blades for beheading as well as baskets that can magically catch the flying heads, we meet our main protagonist.

Having been punched out of his band, obnoxious Jason Jones (Robin Askwith) decides he needs a bit of a break from life. Signing up with a shady travel agency specialized on his particular demographic called “Hairy Holidays” – run by one Mr Pollack (Dennis Price) – our hero (ahem) books a few days in the health clinic of – wouldn’t you know it – Dr Storm, mostly in the hopes of encountering attractive “birds”. As fate will have  it, Jason has a very special meet-cute with Judy Peters (Vanessa Shaw), which includes very early 70s moments of flirting like our hero explaining that he’s not going to rape Judy. Romance is in the air, clearly, when she offers him cheese anyway.

Judy just happens to be on her way to the very same clinic as Jason to meet her Auntie Harris (Ellen Pollock) for the first time. There’s some bad family blood about the aunt’s earlier career as a brothel owner, apparently.

Once the quick couple arrive at the clinic, the place turns out to be rather strange: auntie really rather wouldn’t have Judy there at all for mysterious reasons; the place’s little person factotum seems just a wee bit eccentric; there are bedrooms that look as bloody as slaughterhouses; and Dr Storm is Michael Gough doing his best Bela Lugosi. And that’s before our heroes meet the other guests - all of them very, very quiet, pasty looking, with nasty scars on their heads, and disturbingly happy to carry out Storm’s every order.

Young people, Storm is sure, need a strong hand to guide them, preferably his own, so Jason and Judy are going to have an interesting, perhaps not as healthy as advertised, time there.

Anthony Balch’s Horror Hospital has for a long time been a rather unseen and definitely undervalued little film. Apart from the vagaries of copyright and licensing deals, this may very well have something to do with the film’s very peculiar style that mixes elements of British exploitative horror (think Pete Walker or Norman J. Warren) with weird, on the cheap imagination and a sense of humour that tends to the weird parodic reversal and to black humour so dry, it will not always be clear to everyone watching if they are supposed to laugh at any given detail.

Though, given the film’s general interest in the specific imaginative detail, I’m rather sure the filmmakers have put a surprising degree of thought into nearly everything we see. Clearly, on this set, doing things on the cheap was no excuse for doing things badly or sloppily, so the resulting film is full of those peculiar little moments and details that at once manage to fulfil the quota of weird awesomeness we wish for from the more exploitative side of the movie business but also makes fun of some of these expectations – often at the same time.

If this is going to charm any given viewer and amuse them as much as Horror Hospital does me will most certainly hang on: a) said viewer’s love for 70s British exploitation horror, b) their love for very, very dry humour and c) if they needed the film’s very special limousine in their lives.

Or, come to think of it, if they believe the romantic lead walking into the mandatory shower sex scene wearing the a knight’s helmet is very funny and strange indeed, or just silly and stupid. If you do find this as funny as I do, you’ll also enjoy watching Skip Martin yet again nearly becoming the hero of a film (and yes, we get a meta joke about that) after stealing at least half of the scenes he is in by perfect delivery of dry jokes and asides, and Michael Gough chewing scenery in a very specific way that is supposedly (okay, I believe it) built on Bela Lugosi’s poverty row performances.

It’s that kind of film, and I love it for it.

Three Films Make A Post: Unlocked. Unleashed.

The Lair (2022): Watching the last three movies of Neil Marshall has been as dispiriting and somewhat confusing experience. It is very much like watching a musician trying to hit all his favourite notes, but missing them, sometimes (Hellboy) barely hitting any note at all, or, like in this case, missing enough to mess up melody and rhythm. Marshall’s weirdly insecure direction also has to cope with a script by Marshall and his apparent creative partner Charlotte Kirk (who also acts and produces, like with his last movie) that has never met a cliché it can’t reproduce in an awkward manner. Mostly pretty terrible acting, perfectly embodied in Jamie Bamber’s accent, does not help either.

Unlike with the last two films of Marshall, there are a couple of moments here that suggest he might slowly be working himself up to better things again, but it’s not a process I enjoy watching.

See How They Run (2022): This period meta whodunnit by Tom George has quite the cast: Saoirse Ronan, Ruth Wilson, Adrien Brody, Sam Rockwell, the inevitable Reece Shearsmith, the list goes on. It doesn’t, however have much substance. Its meta genre exploration tends to be a bit too cutesy for my taste, and never does much with the genre quirks it ever so mildly sends up; this is the kind of movie that thinks having a screenwriter complain about flashbacks on screen after we watched some flashbacks is the epitome of wit, instead of a minor joke. Admittedly, there are a couple of scenes that suggest the film wants to have a bit more going on but forgets about it to make room for having Agatha Christie (Shirley Henderson) poison the wrong guy with rat poison, and other shenanigans of this style.

While there’s little depth here, See How They Run is still a pretty fun watch, slickly directed, if the sort of thing I’ll have forgotten all about in about a week’s time.

The Invisible Man Appears aka Tômei ningen arawaru (1949): Shinsei Adachi’s and Shigehiro Fukushima’s Japanese invisible man movie is not the wonderful box of delights a somewhat later invisible man’s encounter with a human fly would be. It’s a bit too much of a melodramatic crime movie for that, and sometimes, the invisible man is more of a gimmick as a necessary part of the plot. However, even in 1949, Japanese studio cinema was made by technically extremely gifted filmmakers, so there’s a lot to like here too, starting with – for its time – fine invisibility effects, and certainly not ending with the expected mix of slick looking (again, in the style of its time) filmmaking. If not at least every second scene of your movie contains a perfectly framed shot, you’re not a Japanese studio director.

Short Film Friday: Posted No Hunting

In short: A Love Song (2022)

Faye (Dale Dickey) spends a very quiet time – apart from a radio that always seems to play the appropriate song and the birds, of course – at a camping ground by the side of a lake and next to some mountains somewhere in Colorado. She occupies her time fishing, stargazing, and birdwatching, thinking about the husband she lost seven years ago. But mostly, she’s waiting, for she hopes to meet up with Lito (Wes Studi), a friend – a former flame, really – who has also lost his partner some time ago. She’s clearly hoping to rekindle the old crush, the old friendship, or just something inside of herself. While Faye is waiting, she makes the acquaintance of a group of cowhands whose little sister speaks for them, a lesbian couple (Michelle Wilson and Benja K. Thomas) on the cusp of agreeing to get married (or not), and, of course, the postman (John Way).

Eventually, Lito arrives.

Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman’s quiet and thoughtful meditation about aging, love and the way we relate to our pasts and the people in it is an utterly lovely film. I am a bit surprised that a filmmaker on his debut is so well able to get into the mindsets of characters very much his seniors, their concerns and ways to look at life (or to avoid looking at life, as may be the case), but there it is.

Dickey, a supporting actor in so many films, projects an incredible sense of genuine vulnerability, the kind of low key human doubts and feelings that are furthest from melodramatic expression, but are nonetheless just as deep and meaningful. She is the perfect fit for this film’s more laconic and low key approach to life and its turning points, showing emotions in quiet ways that more often than not don’t need dialogue or dramatic invention, indeed become truer without them.

The film is also utterly beautiful to look at, connecting natural beauty to a moment of great change in a person in a way that simply feels right. Again, there’s a lack of external melodrama here, so there’s no new age-y aspect in the way Faye relates to nature; it’s more matter-of-fact, and much closer to the truth of her life thereby.