Loop Track (2023)

Socially extremely awkward Ian (Tom Sainsbury) is going on a walk through the forests of New Zealand to get away from all those pesky people, and perhaps some concrete aspect of his life he believes he has screwed up particularly badly.

Instead of peace and quiet, he soon finds himself socially pressured into walking together with three randos he meets and that won’t leave a guy completely unable to actually tell them he wants to be alone go on his way alone. Increasingly, Ian believes there’s something bad going on in this beautiful forest. Someone or something seems to be following them, though his attempts at convincing the others of it only make them look increasingly askew at the guy who didn’t want to be involved with them from the start.

Tom Sainsbury’s Loop Track attempts to fuse the comedy of social anxiety and people being people, the expectedly pretty landscape of New Zealand (filmed low-key) with a bit of the monster movie tradition. While certainly a well-made film, it never comes quite together for me – there’s such a heavy emphasis on the social anxiety there’s actually very little room for the monster movie parts here, and – even as a sufferer of some of Ian’s symptoms – I never found myself quite connecting to him, and certainly not the other characters and their single defining character traits.

For a film that appears to be this interested in the characters’ psychology, I found everyone rather lacking in complexity, with every character’s first scene already defining everything about them.

The stalking is played too low-key, and despite a fantastic monster reveal, I’m really not sure why this needed the horror elements at all – it’s not as if it puts them into dialogue with Ian’s internal life.

Having said that, I didn’t exactly mind the film – I just don’t think it does anything much with its potential.

Three Conjuring Spin-offs Make A Post

The Nun (2018): I’ve never been much of a fan of the The Conjuring movies. Their combination of James Wan as usually wasting his considerable talents on bland scripts and these movies’ idolization of two genuinely horrible people simply rub me the wrong. Plus, I often have problems with straightforward Christian horror – I don’t even connect to The Exorcist beyond seeing its obvious technical achievements.

So colour me surprised I actually enjoyed two out of three of today’s Conjuring spin-offs. The Nun I’d even call a genuinely great horror movie. But then, there’s very little of the Warrens in here. Instead, director Corin Hardy basically turns out a loving Blumhouse mainstream horror homage to Italian horror – gothic and not – with a smidgen of Hammer gothic mixed in. This sort of thing is catnip to me, particularly when a movie fills the time between quoting Fulci and Bava and the ridiculous and very fun big budget (at least in comparison to its idols) special effects climax (re-)creating such a lovely mood of dread, decay, and the irrational as this one does.

Taissa Farmiga also makes a great horror heroine, filling the film’s more awkward moments – which is to say, everything to do with character bits – with life and personality.

The Nun II (2023): She’s also the only good thing about Michael Chaves’s sequel. Chaves is a curious case to be the guy to have taken over the series from Wan as a director, seeing as he has now repeatedly proven he can’t structure or centre a narrative to save his life, and can never sell his horror set pieces as anything but set pieces. Admittedly, he isn’t helped by a script that doesn’t understand how to tell the story of an investigation, not to speak of telling it engagingly.

Annabelle Comes Home (2019): This third Annabelle movie – and the only one worth mentioning – as directed by Gary Daubermann (who also co-wrote this and the first Nun) does contain rather too much of the Warrens, but at least, this is a film where the possessed doll becomes the ringleader of all the monsters trapped in the Warren’s badly secured creep dungeon (how badly? A fucking teenager gets in) to terrorize the Warrens’ daughter and assorted teens (worth mentioning are Madison Iseman and Katie Sarife). There’s a grumpy wedding dress, Black Shuck (apparently a hellhound), and much delightful running around and screaming through all of the tropes of seriously fun but mostly (monster) kid friendly horror. It’s probably not exactly art, but it is certainly a very good time.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Original title: Baron Prásil

Landing on the moon, an astronaut (Rudolf Jelínek) is greeted by the men who came there before him: the protagonists of Verne’s “De la Terre à la Lune”, Cyrano de Bergerac, and last but not least the great Baron Münchhausen (Milos Kopecký) - as he’s called here in Germany. It’s Baron Prásil in Czechia. Because they don’t need silly science stuff like space suits, the gentlemen assume our astronaut who very much does need one, to be a proper moon man.

Münchhausen decides to take the young man under his wing and show him the wonders and adventures of Earth, which indeed he does. Once there, Münchhausen also insists on getting in a love triangle between the men and Venetian princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová), though none of the young people is actually that into him.

All of this really doesn’t describe the beauty, wonder and utterly unbridled imagination of Karel Zeman’s version of the Münchhausen material – here mostly based on Bürger and particularly Doré’s illustrations to Bürger’s narrative. Technically, this is a mixture of live action and all kinds of animation you could even imagine in 1962, at once naïve, deeply aesthetically constructed, real and unreal thanks to the many ways Zeman mixes special effects techniques and real people. The film is ever shot like a moving paean to the human imagination and filled to the brim with a sense of wonder that should make every viewer a child again for at least an evening.

The characters are of course, not surprisingly given their placement in a series of beautiful and bizarre tall tales, archetypes without normal psychological depths, but from time to time, whenever he finds space between a dozen sight gags and coming up with sights no human being has beheld before on a movie screen, Zeman does hint rather heavily that archetypes are archetypes because they have quite a bit to say about the unchanging parts of the human psyche. Just because young lovers aren’t original or deep does not mean a pure and naïve idea of love isn’t real or important.

But really, if there ever was a movie that exists just to be experienced instead of interpreted or talked to death film school style, it is this one.

Super Happy Forever (2024)

Sano (Hiroki Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) visit a coastal resort motel in the last days of its existence. Sano is clearly beside himself, walking around in something of a fugue, looking for a red ballcap lost there five years ago. Soon enough, we learn he has good reason for his state of mind, for he has lost his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) just a couple of weeks ago. The hotel and the town are where they first met five years ago, and Sano appears to still half be looking for Nagi, or signs of her passing.

After forty or so minutes, the film turns back to the past of five years ago. Now, shown from Nagi’s perspective, we see how the couple first met and learn to understand some of the echoes of their encounter left five years later during Sano’s return.

Beginning slowly and not terribly interested in explaining itself at first, Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever turns out to be a film about loss, love, the physical presence of the past in the now, and the small, hidden connections between people and places. It is also a love story told through absences: at first, we can only perceive the shape of Nagi’s absence in the now, Sano’s moments of short memories and the things about their relationship his behaviour hints at. But then, the flashback, while filling in some of these holes also doesn’t fill in any of the actual relationship between Sano and Nagi (which apparently wasn’t all that happy) – we’re only ever witness to its beginning and its aftermath, and none of the joy or pain in between.

There’s nothing sentimental about the film’s approach to this, or of the patness of esoteric bullshit Miyata has fled into, but nor is there any cynicism here. Instead, this is a film of genuine sadness, genuine love and a genuine longing for human presence and connectedness – coming together into a form that feels quite special, in a way that’s self-contained and lacks showiness, and never indulges in the painful overintellectualization arthouse cinema can fall into.

Three Films Make A Post: Dare to play.

Night of the Reaper (2025): For that part of its running time when it is a period-set throwback slasher with a procedural element that reminds more of a giallo than a cop movie, Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper is an exemplary and quite entertaining low budget movie that looks and feels the part it wants to play very well indeed. For its final third, it does turn out to be a very 2020s kind of film, alas, and we end up in the realm of “clever” plot twists that not only strain belief in the context of what the audience has seen before (or not been allowed to see on a pretty obnoxious level) but also replace what should be an exciting climax with fifteen minutes of the movie explaining itself to us.

It’s a shame too, for before that, this is a really fun little movie.

Witchboard (2024): This remake (of a very free kind) of Witchboard by veteran director Chuck Russell isn’t so much a throwback to the more freewheeling world of 80s/90s horror but simply a film made by a director who lived the time and apparently has no interest in changing his way of filmmaking. This is messily plotted and loves to go off on wild tangents, but what it loses in tightness thereby, it wins in the joys of wild abandon. This is a movie that’s probably going to go there, or find something that’s even more there to go to. Add an openness to add some sleaze/sexiness (often completely absent from horror these days, because people apparently don’t fuck anymore) to the gratuitous – and often pretty awesome – violence, and you have quite the concoction of the best clichés, tropes and bad yet awesome ideas a viewer could hope for. Well, if you can ignore the digital blood splatter, which never works.

Blood Ritual aka 血裸祭 (1989): Speaking of wild abandon, this Hongkong horror/action/comedy/kitchen sink CATIII wonder directed by Lee Yuen-Ching wavers so wildly between non-supernatural cult horror, sleazy softcore sex, brutal action choreographed by Tsui Siu-Ming, broad romantic comedy and info dumps about “evil religions” at least this viewer got quite dizzy. Which probably is the right state of mind to appreciate a film that seems to be a perfect expression of the kind of maximalism for a minimal budget HK cinema at this point in time was particularly fantastic at.

Ghost-Cat of Arima Palace (1953)

Original title: 怪猫有馬御殿

Being a mere greengrocer’s daughter, young and beautiful Otaki has few friends in the inner chambers of the titular Arami Palace. Add to this classism their Lord’s main concubine’s fear of being replaced by a younger model, and Otaki’s life is a sheer nightmare.

The other women hound her to her death with measures of increasing cruelty (since they start with pressing her into giving away her pet cat, you can imagine how bad it gets). Before you can say “bakeneko”, Otaki’s little cat – returned for the occasion like a proper pal - drinks her dying blood. The resulting cat demon goes on a bit of a rampage of vengeance, as is tradition.

At least here in the West, this short – 49 minutes – piece of Daiei bakeneko horror directed by Ryohei Arai is more than a little obscure, as is much of the horror output of Japanese studios of this decade beyond some core texts, so I’m not really able to put the film into the context of other movies from the second row of the genre.

What I can say is that this is a lovely little thing. Otaki’s suffering is properly upsetting, the human villain’s are deeply hissable in their nasty, grabbing ways, and the film goes out of its way to dispose of the Otaki cat after she has gotten her full and proper vengeance (something not all ghost cat movies I’ve seen do).

Once the film starts in on the supernatural shenanigans, they are rather wonderful – there’s a great scene during which the ghost cat uses her powers to puppet her victims into supernatural acrobatics like a poltergeist on steroids, and there’s some impressive and creative business with flying heads of the sort that’s bound to make the right viewer – that’s me – gleefully happy.

There are other, perhaps slightly more high-brow, aspects here as well: apart from the Lord, the film is very female-centric, so much so, we get to see the female part of the inner chambers is guarded by armed women, and we do even see them fighting against our cat hero/villain with what look like naginata to me. Earlier, the film also puts emphasis on being taught to fight as part of the proper kind of education the lower class Otaki lacks. This isn’t something you see in many jidai-geki – at least not that I’ve seen.

I also found the emphasis on class hatred surprisingly clear and direct for a film of its time and place.

All of which adds up to lovely hidden gem of a film, the sort of thing I’d hope some boutique Blu-ray level can pick up, package with two or three other films of its style, and make me very happy indeed.

Three Films Make A Post: He's every parents' worst nightmare.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025): For once, this is an entry in the typically boring PublicDomainsploitation canon I’d actually watch a second time instead of rueing the moment I pressed play. It’s still a movie that turns a public domain children’s story into a mid 2020s slasher, but it does so with a degree of competence, with decent acting, an actual script and direction – responsible here is British low budget regular Scott Chambers – that does understand the rules of straightforward horror films.

Even the characterisation is not without interest this time around, and the film’s interpretation of Peter Pan as a delusional drug user feels less tacky in practice than it sounds. The whole thing is an actually well-made low budget slasher, daring to follow through on some of its ideas.

Hotspring Sharkattack aka Hot Spring Shark Attack (2024): I went into Morihito Inoues sharksploitation film expecting a lot of sleaze and a bit of gore. What I actually got was very little sleaze but an absurdist and ambitious sharksploitation epic that lovingly mocks everything from urban development to amnesiac protagonists. The film’s reason for being is to turn everything shark movie up to eleven, make Sharknado look like a sensible little tale, and throw all kinds of genre elements and clichés on-screen with wild abandon, yet also a curious sense of control. This film knows where it is going: the dream underworld of bad CGI and hand puppet shark bites Joseph Campbell wrote about in his little-read sequel “The Hero’s Journey II: Sharks, so many sharks”.

Cult aka Sekte (2019): But let’s end on a comparative downer note with another amnesiac protagonist finding herself tucked away in an isolated house full of weirdoes who will turn out to be a Satanic cult. Director William Chandra manages a couple of atmospheric scenes here – I was particularly impressed by the one in which protagonist Lia (Asmara Abigail) finds the cult’s corpse depository – but for much of the running time, the film’s in the business of presenting as deeply mysterious a mystery its own damn title already reveals. So yes and alas, this is the kind of movie that climaxes on an endless series of flashback-filled “reveals” that bring every bit of the momentum the film might have developed before to a screeching halt with an astonishing amount of stupid ideas.

Jack-O (1995)

It’s Halloween in one of those typical American small towns we all know from direct to video productions shot in Florida. After a graveyard disturbance, a gentleman with a large light up pumpkin for a head and wielding a scythe is wandering around very slowly indeed and killing everyone he gets his hands on. Apparently, his appearance is part of a curse a warlock (some archival footage of poor John Carradine) cast on the descendants of the Kelly family, whom he held responsible for being burnt at the stake. Mind you, until the final act, Mr Pumpkinhead shows no preference for killing Kellys.

Nonetheless, we do get to spend a lot of time with the family, experience their haunted garage spook show, follow discussions of the joys of Halloween, thrill to their babysitter troubles, and so, and so forth. Eventually, Mr Pumpkinhead does shamble along to threaten the family’s youngest.

If you’re looking for cosy, nostalgic horror for the sad post-Halloween time Steve Latshaw’s low budget masterpiece of tacky American Halloween mood has your back. It’s a film haunted by the ghosts of Halloweens past. Pumpkinheads, a Linnea Quigley shower scene, a tasteful decapitation, horror hosts (in this case an archival Cameron Mitchell), home-made horror houses and horror-loving families are there and accounted for, as are the ghost of John Carradine, a knock-off synth score, fog, bad acting of the lovely kind, and the shambling and dreamy rhythms of childhood memories of movies that’ll turn out not all that frightening once you’ve grown up.

It’s a vibe, as they apparently say, a movie that feels as if the script to a cheap kid’s horror Halloween film had been spiced up with a bit of nudity and blood – the actual stuff of a horror movie childhood dreams. How could I not love Jack-O?

R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead (2025)

Following the in today’s grief-struck horror mood obligatory death of the father of the family, Cassie (Kendra Anderson) and her sons, seventeen-year old Finn (Seth Isaac Johnson) and thirteen-year old Sam (Bean Reid) move to a small farming community in what I can’t help but call the sticks.

Sam is particularly unhappy, not just because he’s a kid in puberty who has lost his father and is moving town, but also because he feels more than just a little excluded from the closer, easier, relationship between Cassie and Finn. As kids do, he acts out. Unfortunately, he decides to steal the annual “Prized Pumpkin” (actually an ugly thing nobody would want to eat, or even look at) of the farmer the locals somehow see as responsible for the town’s agricultural luck turning to the better some years ago. Finn, who is a perfectly good brother, decides to help Sam avoid some nastiness with the farmer by bringing the pumpkin back for him the night of the deed.

Alas, Finn has a rather nasty supernatural encounter on the farm and doesn’t return home. Worse still, none of the grown-ups, not even Cassie, can remember Finn ever existed at all, and can’t even perceive any proof of his existence. As the Sheriff’s daughter Becka (Adeline Lo), who had already befriended Sam and warned him against having anything to do with the farm, explains, this sort of thing happens somewhat regularly in town – kids disappear, people who hit the age of eighteen or are above it forget them, crops grow. She’s willing to help Sam in his attempt to get his brother back, whatever has happened to him. Also involved will be the local hermit Rusty (Matty Finochio), a nasty protective scarecrow thing with very bad breath, and one of those grimoires of the facebook type.

Tubi Originals tend to be less than great movies, often lacking in verve and cleverness as much as in budget. Jem Garrard’s Pumpkinhead – based on the favourite kids and teen horror writer of a lot of North Americans of a certain age – is only a bit lacking in the last one, but never lets this lack of funds stop it from doing basically everything right for the kind of kids horror film old-ass people like me can enjoy as well.

The characters are simply but effectively drawn, the young actors are doing pretty well – Lo could certainly have an actual career in front of her – and the script finds the fine balance between goofy humour, proper horror, and knowing winks to tropes and genre conventions. “You don’t come to the forest hermit for a straight answer” is pretty great, to take the most obvious example for the last one.

The film isn’t afraid to be a bit grotesque when it needs to be – the final pumpkin head form is not something I’d have expected in a contemporary kids’ movie made for the US market, even if it is actually made in Canada like this one, and the scarecrow thing is genuinely creepy, as well as enthusiastically played.

Pumpkinhead is worthwhile in other regards as well. Character motivations and their emotional background make sense (at least for the kind of world this takes place in), and the film clearly knows what it is doing when it is talking about love and friendship by example instead of moral. It’s not terribly deep, but it’s genuine and believable in context. Because it does emotions this well, it also manages to sneak in an ending that actually becomes darker the more you look at it in context of what the characters fear and desire here, not the usual horror movie bullshit ending but a genuine price to be paid.

Visually, this is nothing fancy, but Garrard knows how to create mood and tension, and works around the budgetary constraints of the production really well. There’s nothing here that seems truncated, missing, or undeveloped, which leaves R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead as one of my surprise highlights of this Halloween season.

Santet (1988)

A rather isolated village somewhere in Indonesia. Local crime lord and all-around bad guy Bisman (I. Gusti Jagat Karana) poisons his wife because she’s been annoying him with being ill for too long. Because he’s just that kind of a guy, he then proceeds to blame a local cleric for the killing as a work of black magic, burns the man alive (in a stunt that makes one fear for the stuntman involved), and then start in on an attempt to rape the cleric’s wife Katemi (Suzzanna). Katemi does know where rapist shits hurt, and manages to escape unscathed, at least bodily.

Out in the wilderness, she meets actual black magic sorceress Nyi Angker (Joice Erna), a woman whose human head sits on the body of a crocodile for half of the month. Nyi Angker sees in Katemi her chosen disciple, and convinces the woman to learn and use black magic to take vengeance on Bisman and his allies.

While Katemi does things like eat fresh baby placentas and bathe in crocodile-filed waters to prove her willingness to become a black magician, Bisman starts off a black magic scare in the village with the goal to become the local mayor, with his and his allies’ talk of magic also a useful distraction for the murders he commits himself. Things become interesting indeed when Katemi starts closing in with actual black magic.

Santet isn’t my favourite cooperation between great Indonesian horror and exploitation director Sisworo Gautama Putra and Indonesian Queen of Horror Suzzanna. There’s just a bit too much incidental comedy – even devolving into a musical number at one point – in it for me to fully embrace the film, particularly in the middle act when the jokes sometimes threaten to bring the film to a complete standstill. To be fair, the humour is only annoying when Suzzanna doesn’t join in – whenever she does some black magical joking while looking about impishly, I’m perfectly happy with it, perhaps because it is always fun to see this very dramatic and dignified actress cut loose in a different way from time to time.

The romance – between Suzzanna and the old mayor’s very pious son – is a bit undercooked as well, but then, it seems mostly to be in here to provide the opportunity for a fully clothed dream sequence that’s all hands rubbing “erotically” on cloth and to point towards an easy happy end Suzzanna’s characters don’t get too often (so I won’t complain).

Whenever the film focusses on the actual business at hand, we get the expected Indonesian madness, with many a body part exploding and snakes and what looks like eels crawling and/or slithering out of various natural and unnatural bodily orifices, bodies swelling and popping, and some choice human-animal hybridisation that would give the mad scientist around the corner ideas. Sometimes, these scenes have a truly phantasmagorical quality; at other times, they’re just gloriously weird and strange.

As a bonus, we also get a neat magical duel, Indonesian style, to wrap things up, though, alas, dear Suzzanna isn’t involved in it as anything but a bystander.

But hey, we will always have the indelible picture of Nyi Angker’s human/crocodile form rising out of a pool to say hello.

Good Boy (2025)

Warning: spoilers are inevitable to get at the emotional core of this beyond the film’s central gimmick

Titular good dog Indy (Indy) is taken to a cabin in the woods by his owner Todd (Shane Jensen), following some very bad news about Todd’s health. The thing is, this is the cabin where Todd’s grandpa (Larry Fessenden in various home video diaries being extremely Fessenden, as he should be) died with his own dog from an illness that looks a lot like the consumption Todd apparently suffers from.

And something’s very wrong with the cabin, too. Some ghostly, and increasingly present thing is haunting the place, hovering around Todd to hurt and possess and make him disappear.

Indy, who sees if not understands the threat earlier than Todd does, is trying his best to protect the central person in his life, but there’s only so much even the best boy can do against the fact that loss is inevitable.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy is a gimmick film, at least in so much as it is laser-focussed on its central gimmick – telling its tale of a haunting through the eyes of a dog. But then, being a gimmick movie doesn’t mean it has to be a lazy movie, so Leonberg really embraces his gimmick – and his canine star (and I mean star) – trying to do as much with it as possible to twist and shape genre standard scenes and scares until they fit into the dog’s eye view without making the film something as boring as a deconstruction of the genre.

At the film’s best, this makes it a clever, often exceedingly well staged example of how little twists and turns to the comfortable and cosy shapes of tropes and standards can make them feel fresh again; in its lesser moments – few as they are – it at the very least never shies away from its gimmick even if it were easier to do so.

Unlike other gimmick movies, this also happens to have a genuine emotional core, even beyond the obvious “look at this lovely doggo!” (I’m more of a cat person anyway, sorry, Snuff), and manages to draw an emotional yet not too sentimental portrait of love and the things dogs (or people) might be willing to do for it.

Though, in the end, this isn’t a film about holding on as it is one about letting go, with the haunting as a perhaps somewhat too obvious metaphor for illness, and the narrative very much one about how we have to accept loss.

Thankfully, Good Boy handles this well enough so this doesn’t become too much of a teachable moment sort of thing or some ill-advised take your medicine cinema. Here, as well, Leonberg hardly takes a wrong step while keeping to the core ideas of his film.

The Cursed Palace (1962)

Original title: El-Qasr el-Maloon

Young Lawyer Hasan (Salah Zulfikar) comes to the mansion of Fahmi Bey (Mahmoud El Meligy) to help the rich yet virtuous man sign over most of his wealth to his daughter Yusriyyah (Mariam Fakhr Eddine). The film never explains why this can’t be handled via a will, so I assume the contemporary Egyptian audience would have known why and just take this as a given. Hasan and Yusriyyah very quickly fall in deep, pulpy looking book-trading, love with one another. The business aspect goes well enough, or so it seems, despite Fahmi Bey’s sister being pretty disgruntled losing out on her future inheritance.

But then, one dark and stormy night – Egypt’s very windy in this movie – Yusriyyah finds the dead body of her father, only to encounter a very alive version of the same shortly after. Not surprisingly, this freaks her out rather badly. Her state of mind is not at all improved by the various hauntings she then experiences – skeletal hands at her window, the face of her father where it can’t be, that sort of thing. About half a day later, Yusriyyah is in no mental state to sign any documents that might make her very rich indeed, and her rambling about her father who is dead while she is standing right next to a very living one sitting in his wheelchair is not helping her case at all. Fortunately, Hasan starts investigating, while creepy things continue to happen in the mansion.

I suspect even in 1962, an audience wouldn’t have fallen for anything of what is going on in Hasan Redha’s The Cursed Palace as actually supernatural. We are very much in old dark house territory here, the sort of Old Hollywood set-up Egyptian popular cinema as far as I understand it was very comfortable with. Apart from this type of creaky yet always fun thriller, there’s also a clear influence of the kind of thriller that would follow in its stops, and it wouldn’t be difficult to put The Cursed Palace next to, for example, the kind of post-Psycho thriller Jimmy Sangster wrote for Hammer when they weren’t doing gothic horror.

Stylistically, however, this is a horror movie through and through, praying at the altar of Universal, full of creaking windows, dramatic coach rides, improbably large expressionist shadows, Dutch angles and a camera that seems forever located low, shooting upwards, turning reticent servants into figures of menace. Right at the end, there’s also a sequence that feels as if it were taken directly from a giallo, when the black-gloved villain of the piece, in nearly subjective camera, goes for his final, plot-deciding, murder attempt.

Like most of the handful of Egyptian movies of the era I’ve seen, The Cursed Palace is a stylishly shot, well-acted – in the highly melodramatic manner befitting its material – and well-paced film that’s a joy to watch, uniting some specifics of its place and time with internationally popular ideas about genre filmmaking, and thus a very nice entry into its niche of horror.

Hollywood 90028 (1973)

By day, loner cameraman Mark (Christopher Augustine) shoots porn reels – not even proper porn movies – for the low-rent outfit of one Jobal (the impressively named Dick Glass). He’s clearly not happy with this state of affairs and dreams of less morally dubious work. When he’s not dreaming of his traumatic childhood, that is, which has caused some pretty major issues with women.

So by night, mark picks up women in bars, lets them take him home, and strangles them to death. Which doesn’t even seem to make him any happier, adding sad-sack-ism to his deadly misogyny.

Things change when he meets accidental porn actress Michele (Jeanette Dilger). They start on a courtship made less than ideal by the fact the audience knows about Mark’s more typical nightly endeavours, and Michele clearly sometimes catches a vibe from him that suggests more to her than “somewhat difficult guy”. Mark is curiously seriously about their relationship, though. Why, he even stops murdering women, in a somewhat ironic twist on monogamy. Of course, these things can’t last.

Christina Hornisher’s Hollywood 90028, unfortunately her only feature film, has long been underseen and undervalued but thanks to some champions in the film world it is now available in a restoration that look better than it will ever have looked when it hit the grindhouse circuit, and is now presented in environments sympathetic to a film that treats pretty typical early 70s grindhouse-style exploitation material with a low budget arthouse style and rather a lot of feminist subtext.

If you’re of the film school interpretative shape of mind, you’ll find much to think about here concerning the male gaze, the camera as a method of male domination, the problems with the porn industry; if you’re somewhat more bread and butter you might be astonished by Hornisher’s willingness to still treat her male serial killer as a complex human being without ever forgetting/or letting us forget, that he’s also a horrible one.

Obviously, this never tries to be a straightforward serial killer thriller, but there’s a heft and believable violence to the murders that keeps this a horror movie; just one where the violence is equalled by an ability to portray softness as well as paint a picture of a very specific part of Hollywood at a very specific point in time.

Visually, Hornisher often shows her background in experimental film, breaking up moments that feel verité through edits and dissolves that are anything but, very consciously tunnelling under the reality she has at first established so well. There is a slightly disorienting quality to this approach, as if time and place were slightly out of joint, or as if we were subtly pushed into sharing some of the wrongness that lurks in Mark.

Then, there’s that incredible final shot that belongs high up in the pantheon of final shots in (sort of) horror cinema finishing up a film that has been quite a revelation to me in an area of film history I thought I’d pretty thoroughly exhausted by now.

Count Dracula (1971)

Original title: Hrabé Drakula

The Victorian era. Jonathan Harker (Jan Schánilec) is sent to Transylvania to finish some real estate dealings with one Count Dracula (Ilja Racek), who is acquiring a new, gloomy, home in England. Well, and if you don’t know what happens next, you might want to make your way to Project Gutenberg.

This Czechoslovakian TV movie is more than just an interesting artefact for being the only Dracula adaptation I’ve ever heard of directed by a woman, Anna Procházková. It is also a genuinely fine film that makes much out of what clearly were very limited means. Stylistically, this fluctuates between some moody and appropriately bleak locations – the castle corridor and snowy Transylvania are the greatest example here, and the director milks them for mood and impact for all they are worth – and not terribly detailed interior sets. The latter are often used during cramped closed-ups – probably to help people on the kind of TV most Czechoslovakian viewers must have had at the time to see any damn thing at all – that are still highly effective and curiously moody. It often comes as a bit of a shock when the camera gets further away from the action, and this, too, Procházková uses very well, emphasising the moments of danger and strangeness.

Squeezing Stoker’s novel into a running time of seventy-five minutes would have been impossible, so there are heavy cuts to the material – Quincy Morris goes gets the shaft as he always does, but so do Renfield and the last voyage of the Demeter – and what’s kept in of the material is often heavily compressed for time. Though, unlike many an adaptation, Procházková and co-writer Oldrich Zelezný have a great idea of which core set pieces of the novel they want to keep and why they want to keep them. It’s genuinely impressive work that manages to do the novel’s mood in its best chapters justice throughout.

Empusa (2010)

When out and about with his best buddy, fisherman Victor (Antonio Mayans), former actor turned beach bum, tarot reader, writer on the occult and lover of all kinds of substances, Abel Olaya (Paul Naschy, sometimes dubbed by another actor, because he didn’t figure out the trick of speaking from beyond the grave, to everyone’s disappointment), finds a severed female underarm (including the hand) on the beach. Despite vigorous protests from Victor, Abel doesn’t call the police but takes the arm with him to research the mysterious tattoo on the arm, storing it in his fridge for the duration, right above his salami.

Turns out, empusas – in the film’s interpretation hot, very old, more durable female vampires – are slowly invading the quaint coastal town, turning the old men populating it into normal vampires through the powerful lure of hot goth girl sex, and plan to do something or other. Eventually. One supposes. They are also nibbling on Abel a little, but since he’s extra special – Naschy does after all script and direct – they have more interesting plans to acquire his “wisdom”. He, on the other hand, believes he’s destined to kill all empusas.

Though this isn’t the last film that came out starring Spanish horror king Paul Naschy, it is the last film he directed and wrote before his death in 2009. By this time, he had made something of a minor comeback, starring regularly in direct to video films that weren’t as fun as those he made during his heyday, but typically provided a couple of scenes of Naschy doing Naschy things like turning into a werewolf or a vampire and charming all the decades younger ladies with his increasing decrepitness, or wisdom, or whatever.

While nobody would ever call Empusa a good film, or even a consistently entertaining one, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as anybody’s first Naschy film, there’s a good-natured, ambling quality to the cheap looking thing that at the very least makes it a rather likeable film for the Naschy enthusiast, which I certainly am. In part, Naschy simple goes through many of the greatest hits of his interests – apart from lycanthropy – by now having grown out of the bitterness that made some of his 80s films pretty hard to watch. Spending one’s final years making silly horror movies with some friends and a surprising number of pretty young women willing to pretend one is the hottest thing on legs, do silly dances, or just drop their clothes in front of the camera does seem like the proper way for Naschy to go out on.

This feels companionable rather than exploitative, in large part because Naschy makes many jokes about the absurdity of the whole affair in the tone of somebody who knows very well who he actually is, but has fun embodying a fantasy version of 70s manliness, continued into old age, and there’s very little meanness in any of the jokes and asides here that could spoil this impression.

Rather than an attempt at some kind of no budget late period masterpiece that would only break everyone’s hearts (just look at Jess Franco’s final years), Empusa is the product of a guy who is just having a bit of fun at the end of his life, and who could blame him?

Death Carries A Cane (1973)

Amateur photographer Kitty (Susan Scott) witnesses the brutal murder of a naked woman by a someone dressed all in black – of course wearing the mandated black leather gloves - through a telescope. This isn’t going to be the last murder committed by this particular killer, who takes care of witnesses as much as of his core victims.

Curiously, the murders seem somehow connected to Kitty’s social circle, and soon, the investigating Comissario (Jorge Martín) seems so interested in Kitty’s boyfriend, the not the least bit suspicious and shifty Alberto (Robert Hoffmann), Alberto feels motivated to do some amateur sleuthing to save his own skin.

If ever you wanted to see a “typical”, made completely out of tropes, middle of the road, giallo, Maurizio Pradeaux’s Death Carries A Cane has your back. It is fair to say the film has no ideas of its own, but it has studied its giallo contemporaries and forebears well enough, it is able to apply the ideas it has borrowed from them consistently and coherently (as far as any giallo ever aspires to coherence). Thus this base-line giallo is also a very satisfying watch that gets what the genre is all about and what an audience likes about it.

The film’s only nearly original element is that it can’t quite decide who its central amateur detective is going to be – first it’s Kitty, then Alberto, then it’s back to Kitty again – which does hamper its narrative focus from time to time yet also keeps the audience on their toes.

On the level of style, this isn’t up to par with Argento, Bava or Martino, but Pradeaux does make great use of the contrast between run-down looking exteriors and the fully fashioned up interiors all giallo characters are bound by law to inhabit. The killings are also rather well done, often very effectively using dark blues and deep shadows before we get to the artificial red of cut throats. The climactic stalking – with a Kitty who has by now descended into hysteria – is particularly fine and again makes great use of locations and all the colours of the dark.

There’s little of substance here, of course, but some October nights, you just want to see a tale of pretty people of dubious moral fibre, a killer with a great fashion sense, and brutal murders. Well, make that most nights.

Waxworks (1924)

Original title: Das Wachsfigurenkabinett

A poet (William Dieterle when he was still called Wilhelm) looking for a paying job wanders into a waxworks that appears to be part of travelling circus. He is quickly hired to write tales about the three waxen main exhibits (I suppose for dramatic readings to paying customers=. He also finds himself inspired to romance - perhaps because the pretty daughter of the cabinet’s owner apparently has no concept of personal space and hovers nearly on his shoulder while he’s writing.

The tales he writes – all with Dieterle and the actress playing the daughter also taking on the romantic leads in them – make up the meat of the movie.

First, we learn how the calif Harun al Raschid (Emil Jannings) lost his arm in a macabre-grotesque bit of the kind of orientalism the 20s and 30s particularly loved, the “exotic” location providing the possibility to suggest a degree of cruelty and corruption in those in power you’d probably not have when setting your tale in Weimar or Berlin or the contemporary USA. This is segment is a bit long in the middle, but also features a surprisingly dynamic action sequence with Dieterle making his way over the very expressionist roofs of fantasy-Baghdad and ends on a gag macabre enough, my jaw dropped a little.

Next up in the cruel foreigner parade is Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt), being crazy, evil and sadistic until he finally succumbs to madness in a climactic – expressionist – freakout. Also featuring are a poisoner and his giant hourglass and as much sadism as you were allowed to suggest in a movie in 1924 (decidedly more than in a movie made twenty years later).

Finally, the film ends on the shortest tale, in which the Poet gets tired and dreams and reality begin to mix so much, he believes Spring-Heeled Jack (Werner Krauss) – whom the film appears to confuse with Jack the Ripper – is murdering the Daughter. This segment of the film is appropriately dream-like – in part thanks to some spectacular directorial tricks, the general air of unreality expressionist German cinema always carries, but probably also because the only remaining cuts of Das Wachsfigurenkabinett are missing about twenty minutes. Given how short the Spring-Heeled Jack segment is, it is probable these missing bits and pieces would belong to it and turn it into a more conventional story.

As it stands, the fragmentary nature of this last segment does make it even more nightmarish, like the actual product of a mind that has spent perhaps a little too much time on the morbid nature of the tales that came before it.

While Das Wachsfigurenkabinett isn’t quite the movie about wax figures coming to life some older write-ups of it promise, it is absolutely a film standing with both feet in the tradition of the macabre. This feels very much like an attempt to get as close to the tone of contes cruels and grand guignol as possible, using the visual elements of German expressionism to embody the characters’ cruelty and obsessive natures through pretty incredible sets.

Co-directors Leo Birinsky and Paul Leni use quite an impressive amount of dynamic editing techniques, creating suspense before the concept even had a technical term on the silver screen.

It’s a highly impressive movie, at least for those viewers who can stomach the problematic nature of its portrayal of non-Western cultures – though I’d argue the film’s whole feel is so unreal and clearly belonging to the world of nightmares, suggesting there’s any attempt here at saying much about actual historical figures or countries seems an ill fit to the film at hand.

Hellish Spiders (1968)

Original title: Arañas infernales

The planet Arachnea appears to be suffering from something of a food shortage, particular when it comes to the proper feeding of its Supreme Ruler, a queen who just happens to be a giant spider with the voice of an old woman. Fortunately, the Arachneans’ intrepid explorers have found a nice space pantry - a planet its supposedly sentient population likes to call Earth.

Turns out the inhabitants of that insignificant little planet have exactly the kind of food the Arachneans need: human brains. By now, Earth, or rather, its cultural centre, Mexico, has been secretly invaded by the aliens, walking around in human form and making a list of the most nutritious human, to be kidnapped and eaten shortly, without even checking twice.

Fortunately for brains in Mexico and the rest of the world, wrestler and all-around champion of justice and not-eating-brains Blue Demon (Blue Demon) begins thwarting the spider aliens’ plans. He’s such a superior example of humanity, the spider queen even forbids her people to kill him with their death ray – he’s just too good to waste. Thus, the usual tricks of lucha villainy – paralysation rays, the kidnapping of sidekicks, smuggling the Arachnean champion Arak (of course Fernando Osés) into the lucha ring to fight Blue – have to suffice.

This, directed by the sometimes inspired, sometimes not, Federico Curiel, is the pure stuff, a great example of the joys of lucha cinema, and proof that Blue Demon is just as glorious as El Santo.

This doesn’t just have everything you may want from a lucha movie, but also very little of those things you’d rather avoid: there’s no comic relief character! Only mildly boring ring fights! And musical numbers are kept over there where El Santo sleeps!

Which leaves much space in the film for the good stuff: Blue giving a scientific explanation for the phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion (“when there’s a neutrino imbalance, the thing or individual involved is ignited and it’s all over”) to his completely befuddled sidekick; Blue thwarting many an attack or kidnapping attack by wrestlers, I mean aliens, in pretty dynamic fight scenes; Blue casually solving cases for the police (as he regularly does, of course) in between wrestling matches; flying saucer effects that care not about your stupid tasty-brained human believability; curiously abstract alien base interiors that sometimes suggest you’re watching a really peculiar art film and not lucha pulp SF horror cinema; lots of brain eating; and a dude whose hand turns into a spider he then attempts to shove into Blue Demon’s face (which would be an illegal move in any wrestling match, if the referee hadn’t fled screaming).

If that’s not enough to make any friend of the adventures of heroic luchadores happy, let it also be said that Curiel may not have had much of a budget but a really good week when shooting this, so the film is actually well-paced, makes as much sense as this sort of thing needs to, and turns some sets – like that strange, strange spider alien base – into abstract-expressionist dreamscapes. It’s a genuinely impressive effort.

Also impressive, and pretty uncommon for the genre, is how much of the dialogue hits my personal sweet spot for the kind of pulp dialogue that nearly becomes a sort of unschooled poetry – there’s quite a bit of talk about humanity’s insignificance in the cosmos, and a lot of high-toned speechifying among the Arachneans who may not want to explain their plans to us humans, but surely have a great love for gloriously pompous announcements among each other. And who’d ever forget Blue Demon’s science lectures?

Lost Soul (1977)

aka The Forbidden Room

Original title: Anima persa

Tino (Danilo Mattei), a provincial late teen without much of a clue what to do with his life, comes to Venice to try his hand at studying art. He’s taken in by his uncle, the engineer Fabio (Vittorio Gassman) and aunt Sofia (Catherine Deneuve) to live with them in their decaying palazzo. Half of the place isn’t in a fit state to dwell in anymore, and Sofia and Fabio are very adamant about Tino not going into the attic. That’s pretty much the only thing husband and wife are agreeing on, though: Fabio is a dominating, verbally abusive hypocrite who very casually belittles Sofia, and she is fearful and neurotic about things Tino can grasp even less than the audience does.

Tino quickly – so quickly I’d hardly call it a spoiler – finds out there’s somebody else living in the house. His uncle’s brother is locked up in the attic room, incurably mad, raving, with Fabio his only human contact. Well, and the prostitute that visits once a month, apparently doing her thing with the madman while Fabio watches.

Given how quickly we learn about the man in the attic, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise there are more secrets in the palazzo, some concerning the dead daughter of the couple and the effect her death had on the marriage. Eventually, Tino will find out about all of them.

Dino Risi’s Lost Soul is not your typical Italian Gothic horror, but rather a somewhat arthouse-minded classy drama that thoughtfully takes influences of European Romanticism and Gothic horror to explore ideas of bourgeois hypocrisy and the loss of innocence through a revelation of family sins. Until its final revelations suggest that coming at things from this sideways direction of Gothic horror will still very much leave you making a horror movie. In fact one whose final revelations suggest a depth of perversity and sad corruption, Risi made the right choice not including Christopher Lee and his whip collection.

It helps Risi’s case for the sideways Gothic that Venice – particularly shot as clearly and moodily as DP Tonino Delli Colli does here – seems the perfect place to tell a tale of modern, sadly Gothic decay. It is, after all, a city grand but clearly on its slow way towards nowhere, full of stories terrible and wonderful (there’s an indelible, short sequence where Fabio explains some of the stories surrounding some palazzos they pass on their way to Tino’s school), enticing, but probably smelling of death below its perfume.

As a narrative, there’s very little actually happening here on the surface, but what’s lacking in action is made up by thoughtful and complex dialogue sequences full of allusions, suggestions, and the sharp needles of truth, filtered through fantastic performances by Deneuve (who is so good, you nearly buy her utterly counterfactual bits about the horrors of her aging which in reality are not at all visible on her face) and Gassman. There are layers of meaning – personal, philosophical, political – in the dialogue, but it feels not at all as if it were straining to carry them all. Risi’s touch appears so light, it can only result from a great feat of control.

Obviously, this is not a traditional Italian Gothic, but a film that uses choice elements of the form so well, it still is one of the hidden gems of the genre.

Three Films Know What You Did Last Summer

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997): Unlike its contemporary Kevin Williamson-scripted Scream, this adaptation of a Lois Duncan YA novel really didn’t want to be all clever and funny in its combination of slasher and giallo tropes. Instead, this is all about sexy people shot sexily, chases that take their time to stop being bloodless, and slick youth market filmmaking in a late 90s style.

Being the kind of guy that I am, really prefer this approach to the Scream way of doing things. This one’s all about big, loud, fun. In this, it is much closer to the spirit of the classic slasher, or rather, the perfect studio update to the formula. Sure, half the cast can’t act their way out of a wet paper bag (to be fair, most of them got better over the years), the plot makes very little sense, and the killer has even greater superpowers than Jason Voorhees, but there’s such a lack of pretension here, I’m bound to have fun with this one even when I’m not falling into 90s nostalgia (which I won’t anyhow).

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998): Danny Cannon’s sequel is ridiculous in all the right ways, even slicker, potentially sexier and most certainly quite a bit bloodier, and features the sort of plot that falls to pieces when one applies even the slightest bit of logic to it. It also, following a sad cue from the first film in the series, appears to be the start of the neo slasher’s inability to kill off main characters for fear of hindering franchise potential. Also features Jack Black as a rasta ganja dude OCR, which is a thing I’d rather not have had to witness or even just contemplate.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025): Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s legacy sequel is often much more of a comedy than the first two films, and spends just as much time on the supposedly charming girlfriends pair of Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders as it does on murder and mayhem. Whenever the film gets around to being a slasher legacy sequel of fun chases and awesome violence, it is great fun, and focussing on character relations could actually induce a viewer to care about what happens to them – a trick the first movies never managed with me. Of course, for this, you also need to forget the reason why the killer is after these assholes. But then, I’m rather sure the script does exactly that about halfway through.

Some fans of the originals apparently aren’t too fond of the way the film treats Jennifer Love Hewitt’s and Freddie Prinze Jr.’s characters (both of whom have really improved as actors in the ensuing decades, as I promised above), but for that, you probably need to have given a shit about them in the first place.

Otherwise, this is a fine example of mainstream legacy horror and all of its strengths and weaknesses.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1986)

Original title: Strannaya istoriya doktora Dzhekila I mistera Khayda

Lawyer Utterson (Anatoliy Adoskin) is worried about his friend and client Dr Henry Jekyll (Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy), a successful and rather virtuous (by Victorian standards of the term) physician. Jekyll has changed his will in a curious way – now, his entire fortune is supposed to go to one Mr. Edward Hyde (Aleksandr Feklistov), a complete unknown without any discernible connections to Jekyll. Curiouser still, Jekyll emphasises that Hyde shall inherit even if Jekyll just disappears for more than three months.

Utterson smells blackmail and dark plans, even more so since he learns that this Hyde is a person of vile tastes, a violent personality, and is perhaps involved in rather serious crimes. Jekyll becomes increasingly withdrawn from society, while Hyde appears to become more active with some dark business, until Utterson finally learns…

Well, what most everyone watching a movie concern this particular strange case will already know – Hyde and Jekyll are the good (more or less) and the evil (totally) side of the same man, divided (in a way) through an elixir Jekyll created in an attempt of completely repressing his worst impulses gone perfectly badly.

But then, it is one of the most interesting aspects of Aleksandr Orlov’s Soviet version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s genre-defining short novel that it mostly attempts to follow the book’s structure more closely than other adaptations – Utterson and theoretically the audience even finally learn the truth reading papers left by Jekyll, as in the novel proper. Though Orlov is still a filmmaker, so said papers lead to a series of flashbacks instead of the Utterson Reading Hour.

Given that Western adaptations of the material nearly always ignore the structure of Stevenson’s book completely, Orlov’s approach feels curiously fresh. Sure, Hyde’s identity won’t be a surprise to the viewer (unlike the original readers of the book, I assume), but there’s great joy in the slow reveal of details and the less straightforward presentation of the narrative that leaves little gaps for the audience to fill.

Visually, this is a fine film, a bit stodgily staged in some sequences but full of life and creativity in the more directly horrific scenes. Whenever Hyde appears – often capering and contorting himself like a character from an expressionist silent movie – the camera becomes particularly mobile, the angles as Dutch as Amsterdam, as if the world were visually coming askew with the presence of a force quite contrary to the slow and measured pace regular Victorian society likes to present. Which visually explains parts of the draw Hyde has for Jekyll – he’s a dancer of a kind in a place where even abominable acts are carried out with a stiff neck.

Increasing the silent movie influence, Orlov uses colours in ways that suggest tinting more than contemporary colour choices, with tones of sepia and blue often denoting the emotional impact of these scenes.

Quite contrary to the Victorian setting, the film’s score by Eduard Artemyev (who also scored various Tarkovsky films, among many other things) is synth based and sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear in an Italian movie of the time, particularly during Hyde’s scenes. This adds an additional layer of mood and peculiarity to proceedings, something this version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde already has in spades.

Trompe l’oiel (1975)

aka The Broken Mirror

There are strange thing happening in the life of Anne Lawrence (Marie-France Bonin), who usually spends her working day restoring paintings in the Belgian mansion where she lives with her husband Matthew (Max von Sydow). She’s four months pregnant now, but she suffers from more than just wobbly hormones. Some time ago – the film loves to be vague, so I couldn’t tell you if this means a week or four months – Anne just disappeared for a day or so, returning without a memory of what happened to her, or what she did during that time. When she reappeared, she was clinging to a painting picturing a woman being devoured – well, at least pecked at – by a bird of prey in front of a body of water. Now, Anne doesn’t even want to look at the picture.

Anne has fallen into a grey depression, leaving Matthew struggling to connect to what she feels or wants, spending her time working or walking very slowly and randomly through the streets of their town. She feels as if somebody is watching her – a man is indeed standing in the window of the mansion opposite all day – and has feelings and impulses she doesn’t understand, as well as difficulty discerning between reality and dream, things and metaphors.

There appears to be something less obscure going on as well, for someone is sending her – of course vague – anonymous threat letters, and there’s an indelible sequence where Anne is being threateningly followed by a slow driving car.

Eventually there will be an explanation for the more actual elements of this, though the symbols and metaphors of Anne’s inner state, you’ll have to make sense of yourself.

Though, to my eye, the final sequences do suggest a childhood trauma connecting to Anne’s father, his hunting habits, sexuality, and death that should make Freudians very happy, if one feels the need to interpret the mass of symbols and metaphors Claude d’Anna’s waking dream movie offers.

I’m just not that kind of viewer, so while I’m perfectly able to do that sort of thing to a film, I’m really more interested in the way d’Anna creates the world of colour, shape and mood, with sudden blares of orchestral music Anne inhabits, that is only broken by scenes of arthouse style psychodrama between her and von Sydow – can’t hire Max for this kind of European arthouse/weirdness project and not let him stretch these specific actorly legs – and some painfully realistic feeling scenes between Anne and her mother (Micheline Presle) whose love presents very much like hatred.

There’s a languid, sometimes a bit stilted quality to proceedings, the haziness of dreams and altered states of mind, a wandering quality very appropriate to a film whose protagonist spends her free time wandering as well. In the film’s later stages, this languidness makes way for proper surrealism and quite the final shot, with little of any day-to-day reality to hold onto.

Presented differently than in the language of weird arthouse (the kind of arthouse movie that’s weird fiction minus the pulpiness), you could have made a giallo out of some of the material, adding a handful of murders and some sex, but d’Anna clearly cannot approach his material in a manner as comparatively straightforward, so instead throws Anne into loops of obscuring gestures.

This does obviously make The Broken Mirror a film whose attraction is much based on a viewer’s mood and patience – seen in the wrong state of mind, this will be like watching paint dry – but when this kind of film hits, it can take a viewer to a special place more straightforward fare will not be able to reach (and is not aiming for), a place that’s beautiful, a little disquieting, and somewhat confusing.

Cute Devil (1982)

Original title: Kawaii akuma

When her boyfriend is killed in an accident after she wishes him to die in the aftermath of a very bad row, music student Ryoko (Kumiko Akiyoshi) has a proper nervous breakdown. She’s institutionalized with the delusion of having caused the accident through the power of her feelings. While she’s being treated, Ryoko’s sister dies on her wedding day. In a curious parallel development the accidental death happens after little Alice (Tina Kawamura), sister of Ryoko’s brother-in-law for a day Koji (Hiroyuki Watanabe), wished Ryoko’s sister to die so Alice can inherit her bridal veil.

When Ryoko is well enough to leave the hospital, Koji, a genuinely nice guy if also a genuine idiot, as the course of the movie will show, invites her to stay with his sister Keiko (Miyoko Akaza) and Alice for some light work as something like Alice’s governess.

Ryoko quickly learns that something is very wrong with Alice – people around the girl turn up dead with increasing regularity, and while they all officially die of accidents and natural causes, just like Ryoko’s sister, Ryoko begins to believe Alice to be very unwell, and a kid serial killer.

So, on paper, Cute Devil is a very typical bad seed movie, with some interesting psychological parallels between the evil kid and the woman who begins to understand her true nature – with the difference that Ryoko isn’t actually a killer and is stricken by all the remorse for something she didn’t cause Alice is completely unable to feel for the things she actually does – and some clever borrowing from gaslighting thrillers.

In execution, this is utterly and completely a Nobuhiko Obayashi movie in which the master of kitsch, art and grotesquery overload does his thing with greatest enthusiasm and intensity. Given that this is also a TV movie, I have a hard time understanding how he managed not just to afford to make a film as beautifully and strangely composed as this one is, but also how he managed to get TV suits to let him do it. In its aesthetics, this is nearly as extreme as his masterpiece Hausu if not quite as deeply loaded on its metaphorical level. Sure, instead of Japanese soft rock, we have an incessant soundtrack of classical music (one suspects this is playing in music student Ryoko’s cracking mind throughout), but the striking effect remains, and the film’s visual language – between languidness and sharp edits and the kind of beauty often found shared by the tasteless and the macabre – is just as extreme as it is in Obayashi’s best movies made for the big screen.

The film’s final act is a thing to be seen and certainly not to be described, full of ideas I have a hard time anyone but this director pulling off in quite this way, and of a crazed intensity of emotion and imagination everybody should experience.

Of course, one needs to be in the mood for Obayashi in this exalted mode, and I couldn’t quite blame anyone who’d protest against Cute Devil for being too much for comfort or sanity – which is typically my reaction to the films of Ken Russell, whose aesthetics actually suggest Obayashi’s nastier British brother, now that I think about it – but if one allows this film into one’s head, it’s probably not going to leave it ever again.

Silverado (1985)

The Old West, mythical version. Four men (Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner) meet, like each other’s compatible principles, ride together and eventually arrive with plans for various futures in the town of Silverado.

Alas, Silverado’s a place where dreams have gone sour, the sheriff's a former outlaw (Brian Dennehy) who is now the boot on the feet of the rich, and friendships and principles are put to the test.

I can’t say I really disagree with anyone calling Lawrence Kasdan’s not really revisionist western epic Silverado a bit – or a lot - self-indulgent. It does feel as if Kasdan wanted to cram all of the genre – apart from the “Evil Indian” tropes – into a single movie, having written it a maximalist love letter he’d then turn into a film.

However, I think there’s a joyfulness to the indulgence here, a genuine and very direct love for the genre, its look and feel and sound that’s utterly charming and that needs the scope of the kind of movie that’s close to the fifty minute mark when it actually arrives in the titular town. There’s space for characters and their relationships to breathe here, and while one could argue Budd Boetticher or Howard Hawks could create comparable depth of relations in much less time, I certainly wouldn’t have complained spending more time with any Boetticher or Hawks character, the virtue of concision be damned.

Kasdan’s approach definitely leads to a film that can feel like a world more than it does like a narrative, but it’s a world full of fantastic actors being fantastic, a series of fun western set pieces, and quite a few moments where Kasdan adds a telling detail or two to a character – even the villains - to turn them from stock to person.

There are also joyful little twists to the formulas of the genre – a black man (Glover is fantastic and feels so very young) as an actual lead among four and not a sidekick or Linda Hunt straight-up doing the Angie Dickinson part. It does help that the cast is absolutely brilliant, Lynn Whitfield, Jeff Goldblum (as a totally, absolutely, completely trustworthy gambler named “Slick”), Jeff Fahey and on and on, and everyone here has something that suggests a past and a future instead of just a narrative function.

The only bit where things do get a bit indulgent for my tastes is in the double climax – there’s really no need for two big shoot-outs directly after each other, though both of them are great. Which might be the reason why both of them are in the movie.

Swing Girls (2004)

aka Suwingu gâruzu

After accidentally poisoning their school’s brass band through the power of raw fish, heat and tardiness, a group of girls decide it’s best to roll with the punches and use this opportunity to get out of their summer school maths class by replacing the original band members.

The problem: apart from the still standing cymbal player of the original band Takuo (Yuta Hiraoka) who is actually a pretty decent piano player, most of the girls do not play an instrument or are actually motivated to learn music – at least at first. There aren’t enough members for a proper brass band anyway, but a swing big band seems somewhat doable to Takuo.

Despite keeping up appearances for teenage disengagement, some of the girls really do take to the whole band thing, and even when the return of the real brass players should put a stop to their band ambitions, a hard core around Tomoko (Juri Ueno, doing some of the choicest cute camera hogging known to humanity) and Takuo decide to continue turning into a band that might even manage to keep time.

Swing Girls’ director Shinobu Yaguchi is something of a specialist in the very specifically Japanese kind of feelgood movie where a group of people of dubious talent and motivation come to learn to work together to achieve something quite special.

At its worst, this sort of thing can feel disingenuous and downright unpleasant and unkind towards the many, many people who fail at things and never manage to play an awesome version of “Take the A-Train” without any fault of their own.

At its best – and Swing Girls certainly is this sub-genre at its best – these films can feel like a shot in the arm of a condensed mix of hope, actual good cheer and appreciation of people in all their difference. As Yaguchi does it here, avoiding the pitfalls of kitsch and bad faith storytelling looks easy – a quality of genuine humanity runs through scenes of broad and not so broad comedy, plain silliness and quiet contemplation, touching coming of age tropes without wagging a finger and teaching us all a valuable lesson.

The film does occasionally allow us to laugh at its characters, but it does so in a way that suggests we do so recognizing our own foibles in them; the film’s kindness is of a type that even allows us to be kind to our own failings.

Yaguchi’s main trick for avoiding the horrors of making this feel either treacly or unpleasant lies in this ability to look at his characters with kindness yet also show their failures and strengths and the connections and fissures in their relationships with great precision. There’s a lot of slapstick here, and a lot of very movie-like good cheer, but also a clear appreciation of emotional truths. It’s quite the thing, really, additionally delivered with perfect comedic timing.

Three Films Make A Post: Let Don Lee’s Fist Come Unto Thee

Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025): This horror action film about a trio of exorcists for hire – the shamanistic medium with demon powers (Seohyun), the shlub (Lee Da-Wit), and the dude who will punch the demon right out of you (Ma Dong-seok aka Don Lee) – take on a particularly difficult case during which all of the exorcism movie clichés will appear, barely comprehensible lore will be spouted, and Ma Dong-seok will punch everything – demons, minions, a portal to hell, the furniture. As directed by first-timer Lim Dae-hee, this is fast, low-brow fun that pretty much knows the kind of pulp joys it wants to deliver and goes about this business with enough verve to distract from how little substance this actually has.

Plus, you can learn about the six stages of exorcism.

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards! aka Kutabare akutô-domo: Tantei jimusho 23 (1963): It’s pretty impossible to live up to this title, and Seijun Suzuki clearly doesn’t want to. Though while this has a couple of very fun action sequences, it mostly demonstrates everything the Nikkatsu higher ups didn’t like about Suzuki: his unwillingness to just tell a simple, straightforward story, his bizarre sense of humour, his intense distractibility. All of this does get in the way of building even the least amount of tension, but leaves Suzuki and his audience much space to enjoy all kinds of colourful – also literally, because give Suzuki a colour film and he’ll colour the crap out of it and your eyes – bits and pieces of comedy, strange sexual hang-ups, and Jo Shishido saying “yes” to everything Suzuki throws at him.

This never reaches the genuine unity of bizarre artistry of something like Tokyo Drifter or Branded to Kill but is still pretty damn fun, unless you go in expecting a straightforward crime film. But why would you?

The Shaolin Plot aka 四大門派 (1977): This Golden Harvest production directed by Wong Fung marks a rather important point in the career of Sammo Hung – here, he has clearly reached early mastership in the art of martial arts choreography, has a fun, prominent villain part (featuring some fascinating hairstyle decisions), and has assembled much of the team that’ll accompany him in the following years, when he’d go on to make his own films.

Stylistically, this very much wants to be a Shaw Brothers shaolin movie, just with very different ideas about choreography – much more physically brutal and directly acrobatic – and a script – also by Wong Fung – that lacks the easy competence of the sort of thing Ni Kuang would have written. While the martial arts are utterly fantastic, there is, particularly in the middle part, an unfocused and dragging quality to everything else, with scenes that never seem to want to end for no good reason, and surprisingly little personality – even short-hand one – to most of the characters.

This is what keeps the film from being a real classic of its style in my eyes, though the fights alone make it pretty unmissable for anyone interested in the transitionary phases of Hongkong cinema between the reigns of Shaw and Golden Harvest.

Imperial Tomb Raiders (1973)

The late 19th Century. The bandit gang – small army, really – of Chin Da-Kui (Tso Yen-Yung), the owner of the biggest damn fur hat you’ve ever seen, is hanging around a village, making it impossible for Liu (Yuan Shen), the official in the next big town, to collect taxes (the subtitles speak of “collecting rent”, but I’m doubtful). Liu has hired famed bandit killer Luo Qi (Wang Yong) to get rid of the problem, but the gentleman appears to have not survived a fight with the bandit leaders.

Even worse, the bandits have bigger plans. Turns out the Liu family’s old Nanny Wang (Chang Ping-Yu) was once an Imperial maid, buried alive together with some of her colleagues to accompany the Emperor’s favourite concubine into death in the lavish, secret tomb hidden in the mountainous country where the village is situated. Apart from dead maids and a dead concubine, the tomb also holds an incredibly valuable pearl – and Nanny, who managed to escape from the tomb, is the only living soul who knows where exactly this tomb is hidden. Somehow, the bandits have gotten wind of her knowledge, and are willing to do rather a lot to get at the old woman carrying it.

While Liu has no clue what to do about the problem, his rather more proactive, if perhaps not terribly sensible, daughter Qiao-Er (Tso Yen-Yung) and her four maids – all excellent fighters with guns, bows and martial arts – grab Nanny Wang and go off to get rid of the bandits.

It’s good that they are capable fighters, for while Luo Qi turns out to be alive and of great help, there are fights, dirty tricks, betrayal and an instable tomb for them to cope with.

I have always assumed that media about Imperial tomb raiding were a Chinese pop-cultural obsession of this millennium (before the censors started complaining, of course). At least, I hadn’t encountered any Chinese or Hong Kong movies featuring tomb raiding action of this style before Taiwanese director Ting Shan-Hsi’s Shaw Brothers film Imperial Tomb Raiders. So apparently, I have been wrong again.

Though, to be fair, despite its title, the film isn’t as tomb-centric as one might expect – most of its short and sharp runtime is spent on a siege scenario, with Qiao-Er’s group and Luo Qi holed up in a farm, fighting the bandits and their dirty tricks. The tomb only really comes into play in a short flashback to Nanny Wang’s escape (including her surviving by eating snakes), and then for the film’s climax, and there’s little of the supernatural or the bizarre traps that would turn up in later tomb raiding films. The tomb, however, is a very nice set and makes a good backdrop for the climactic fight.

Speaking of fighting, even though the choreography is rougher than usual for a Shaw Brothers production, the mix of guns and martial arts does make for an interesting series of fights, fun by virtue of being atypical for the way the Shaws handled this sort of thing otherwise. But then, this was shot in Taiwan instead of Hongkong, so I suspect Ting (who also wrote script) had a bit more freedom here than directors working directly on the Shaw lot.

This film also features few of the usual Shaw stars and bit players – which is its biggest weakness, for while nobody here is unconvincing, nobody is excessively charismatic or puts much of a stamp on the very basic characters featured, either.

That doesn’t mean Imperial Tomb Raiders isn’t a fun film – it’s always interesting, atypical, and features elements – like the siege scenario, the tomb business – that weren’t typical for martial arts cinema of the time and place.

Red Sonja (2025)

Having directed the surprisingly good Solomon Kane adaptation, MJ Bassett has some form with Robert E. Howard adaptations, though this, of course, is based on what Roy Thomas unleashed when he brought the historical adventure character of Red Sonya of Rogatino into Conan’s Hyborian Age in the comics, where she soon acquired a chainmail bikini, and many, many more adventures than her historical counterpart experienced.

It is also, alas, yet another damn origin story, so if you hoped for watching a movie featuring the character you actually like, you’ll have to make do with Sonja – adequately if not wonderfully embodied by Matilda Lutz - as an occasionally ultra-violent eco terrorist orphan with a horse buddy until the epilogue that promises a sequel we’re never going to get anyway. Our main villain (Robert Sheehan) consequently plays like the fantasy version of a tech bro, at least half of the time. The other, actually more interesting, half of the time, he has a tragic backstory that will turn out to be closely connected to that of Sonja, because contemporary scriptwriters (the credited guilty party here is Tasha Huo, though I suspect diverse hands being involved in about a thousand versions of the script) just can’t help but overexplain and overconnect.

More interesting is the villain’s unhealthy co-dependent relation with his main henchwoman (Wallis Day) who has her own trauma to carry – something the script decides is so important, it starts to get weird about it in the climax. Or really, what one calls a climax, for the film decides to put its worst battle at the end of the movie and to then peter out with endless amounts of dialogue and character business, some of which is at least vaguely interesting, all of which goes on way too long and sits at the wrong damn place for the kind of movie this is. But then, sensible structure really isn’t the script’s strong suit. The narrative timeline is a total mess – just try to understand how long the film thinks Sonja is with the gladiators – and there’s little sense the film understands how dramatic arcs work.

What saves this Red Sonja from being just an inconsistently and technically badly written movie and makes it one that’s actually still entertaining enough is mostly Bassett’s quality as an action director, if you can ignore that unfortunate final battle. In those scenes where they commit, there actually is the kind of thrill and excitement, perhaps even a bit of blood and thunder, I expect from a film about a Robert E. Howard, Rascally Roy character.

Three Films Make A Post: Run for your life before they devour you

Halabala (2025): This Thai production directed by Eakasit Thairaat about an killer cop and a handful of idiots hunting a crazy killer in a haunted forest is a bit of a frustrating mess. It never can decide on a tone, wavering between Thai gore, psychological horror, ill-advised post-Tarantino-isms, and whatever else you can come up with. Whenever it actually hits on something creepy or interesting in a scene, it’s going to undermine it completely in the next; the climax is a particular mess, and a waste of a perfectly good monster suit to boot.

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (1992): This is the first of three unconnected Kamen Rider V-cinema movies. It is also the longest and the least artistically successful one.

It is actually a great idea to double down on the body horror element inherent to Kamen Rider as a whole – crossing people with bugs and all that – but the film doesn’t really commit to the horror for too long, finds itself not clever enough to rip off the relationship bit from The Fly properly, and shoots a third of its action scenes via bug vision, so the audience can’t actually see what’s going on in them. Which is a bit of a shame, for the rest of the action sequences are full of the great joys of direct-to-video action and tokusatsu. Hell, they could even afford a helicopter for the climax.

The film isn’t without its charms – Geena Davis should have had a foetus shooting golden light from her abdomen as well – but it’s also not as fun as the film you’ll see in your mind when you hear “Kamen Rider body horror”.

The Great Chase (1975): To avenge her father, race car driver and karate ace Shinobu (Etsuko Shihomi) has joined up with a secret government organisation. Her investigation, during which she also turns out to be a mistress of disguise (she does old ladies, dapper young men, and even older ladies from Cambodia) and a fashion icon (some of the costuming choices alone would be worth the price of admission), eventually leads her not only to the man who killed her father, but also the guy responsible for it: Bin Amatsu, who likes to rape women while wearing a furry suit (including a head), accompanied by loud classical music. Afterwards, he stuffs the traumatized victim in full plate mail, because why not.

So yes, this is indeed a Norifumi Suzuki movie, full of stuff that is as problematic as it is outrageously fun, as well as half a dozen cool fight showcases for the ever wonderful Shihomi, and a choice Toei funk soundtrack. It’s not his most extreme or outrageous Suzuki joint – Shihomi had certain standards – nor his most offensive but it is certainly still quite a bit of fun.

Honeydripper (2007)

The early 50s in the Deep South, Alabama. The Honeydripper Lounge, the juke joint of pianist Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) has seen better days – the music doesn’t excite, it probably doesn’t help that Tyrone doesn’t allow guitarists into his place, the audience doesn’t leave enough money, and most everybody appears to have lost patience with Tyrone’s attempts to save his place hustling. Not even to speak of his debts, particularly to a landlord who comes calling with a weekend ultimatum. Thus this weekend will be Tyrone’s last chance to save his place – for this he even breaks his “no guitarists” rule and has managed to invite famous New Orleans electric guitarist Guitar Sam. Obviously, things do not run as smoothly as Tyrone hopes.

Despite being set a couple of decades later, and being far less interested in plot or vampires, John Sayles’s Honeydripper would make an interesting double feature with Sinners, seeing as it centres around a dive bar in deep Alabama, music, and all aspects of the surrounding culture. Of course, this being a John Sayles film, it uses its plot as an incitement to begin exploring a community of people – what keeps them together, what keeps them apart, and in this particular case, how do you live when a racist system is always stacking the deck against you to lessen your triumphs and make all of your fuck-ups much worse. So the film spends just as much time on the disillusionment and potential religious conversion of Tyrone’s wife Delilah (LisaGay Hamilton), the dreams of his daughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta) for a very modest idea of a better life, the hopes of young guitarist Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) for a life in music, and so on and so forth as it does on Tyrone’s increasingly desperate and immoral attempts to keep his head above water. There’s a plain matter-of-factness to the film’s portrayal of day-to-day racism, the way the local Sheriff (Stacy Keach) takes his corruption as his simple due as a white man lording it over black people that’s perhaps more painful than if it were showing the extremes and deepest horrors of these injustices (knowing Sayles, he probably wouldn’t think it his place to do so).

The film features a nearly all-black cast of Sayles veterans, character actors, musicians, and young actors on early gigs, and everyone appears deeply engaged with their craft here, even if they are just in the film for a scene or two. Glover does give one of his career best performances, projecting a complex mix of desperation and sadness, but also a genuine hopefulness that feels lived and earned. Nobody else here falls below that sort of level of performance.

Visually, Sayles sometimes strains against his budget, with some shots and camera set-ups that feel more as if they belonged into a contemporary cable TV movie, and an all-around cheapish look to the photography. Fortunately, Sayles’s script, the great performances and, yes, the quality of the music are more than enough to keep Honeydripper engaging and emotionally involving.