Three Films Make A Post: Hear how it all began.

A Quiet Place: Day One (2024): I wasn’t terribly fond of the first Quiet Place movie and consequently never bothered with the second one (unlike with the films of M. Night Shyamalam, that I can’t seem to give up on, despite their general suckiness).

But people with interesting taste recommended this prequel, so off I went, and found myself really rather taken with Michael Sarnoski’s film. Clearly, the writer/director only finds the monsters of the franchise of limited interest, and instead focusses on the human impact of their apocalypse. The film is full of scenes of genuinely touching humanity (at its worst and at its best) centred around a fantastic performance by Lupita Nyong’o and a basically immortal cat. This doesn’t mean Sarnoski doesn’t apply himself fully to the monster set pieces – in fact, the way he uses a quiet/loud dynamic in many of the suspense scenes is often brilliant and inventive, making the best out of pretty run of the mill monster designs (the xenomorph still has a lot to answer for) via the wonders of proper sound design.

Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957): While they are of course ultra-cheap AIP monsters, Paul Blaisdell’s creatures in this Edward L. Cahn teens versus space invaders film do have a certain something, even if that something is just the kind of lovely grotesqueness that gets my private sense of wonder working overtime.

For once, a director of one of these things actually makes proper use of Blaisdell’s work, only showing bits and pieces of the designs, hiding the rest behind shadows, tree branches and in between frames, so that they sometimes – there’s a great attack sequence on some innocent livestock – even feel actually threatening.

On the negative side, there’s a lot of painfully knowing camp to get through, which is exactly the sort of thing that’ll make it pretty difficult for me to get through a seventy minute movie. Hipper daddy-os may have a different mileage there.

Succubus (2024): One of these days, a director making a film called “Succubus” will actually know what a succubus is traditionally supposed to be. Until then, Serik Beyseu’s Russian movie (not to be confused with another film of the same title coming out this year)about a bunch of horribly horny and rather stupid people on a cultish couple’s retreat will have to do.

At least, the film attempts to deliver on the expected thrills of direct to whatever movies, so there’s some lame sex, the kind of “twisty” plot you can come up with while scribbling on the back of a propaganda flyer, and, surprisingly enough, a couple of half decent horror set pieces.

These are never enough to make the film actually interesting or effective, but in the realm of direct to streaming low budget horror, a couple of decent scenes and a pretty cool looking monster reveal are better than what you can typically expect, so I’ll take this as a win.

Go for Broke (1985)

Original title: V Madonna: daisenso

Every year, a rural Japanese high school is attacked by a delinquent biker gang, who’ll take the student council’s discretionary budget, or else.

Not even having enough money to buy proper baseballs anymore, parts of the student body really have had it with this state of affairs, so the decision is made to hire some bodyguards against the bikers’ next arrival. One of the female students knows a justice-loving female biker named Saeka (Yukari Asami), and Saeka, once convinced of the nobility of her cause, has her own ideas on how to get together a band of young women of violence. Enter an angry wrestler, a stuntwoman, a sukeban, a lover of explosives – you know the drill.

These “Seven Madonnas” (don’t ask me, my name’s not Kurosawa) are not only going to protect the school, but will also need to teach the students some of their violent ways.

It has been a while since I’ve written up this sort of awesome, trend-hopping, cheap 80s pop cinema from Japan around here; it has also been a while since I’ve had quite as much fun with this kind of film as I had with Genji Nakamura’s Go for Broke.

In part, this film’s particular joy comes from the usual virtue of Japanese genre cinemas from the 50s into the 80s, this cinema’s ability to apply high technical and aesthetical standards to even the silliest bit of material. Thus, this teenage Seven Samurai variation with mild exploitation elements is treated with the same earnestness and craftsmanship as would be one’s most heartfelt commentary on the state of the world. Here, this manifests particularly in a  sense of forward momentum that feels as controlled as it is exciting – there’s nothing ramshackle about Go for Broke’s excited energy, no flaw in its presentation of a world where all the tropes of grown-up genre films are simply part of the teenage experience (see also the not at all Japanese Brick, or make a great double feature out of the two movies).

The action set pieces are cheap but staged for maximum effect – there’s a short bit of handheld camera work in the scene when Saeka comes to Maki’s rescue that feels like a perfect encapsulation of Nakamura’s use of whatever technique comes to hand to keep scenes exciting and avoid any visual repetition, even when he’s working with only a couple of locations.

In tone, style, and the complete absence of grown-up and particularly male authority figures – let’s ignore the final minute please and thank you – this often feels as if it were taking place on the same planet as Walter Hill’s 70s and 80s work. One fuelled by more synthesizers in its rock music, admittedly.

To my particular delight, the film also features one of the funnier examples of transatlantic misunderstandings I’ve encountered. Somewhere – in the space between the English language and the Japanese islands – something must have gone ever so slightly wrong, so there is many a scene where characters declaim dramatically “Go for break!” instead of “Go for broke!”; even better, the film’s them song also is called “Go for break!”.

Three Films Make A Post: No safe space.

V/H/S/Beyond (2024): The much-vaunted pivot to SF horror changes nothing whatsoever about the principles of bro horror still followed by the VHS series. In fact, where S-VHS showed some ambition, this is mostly dire, over tuned nonsense by directors that have done much better work under different circumstances.

There’s no substance, no characters and no ideas in most of the segments, all of which play out like all VHS movie segments ever, without anything beyond an occasional cool monster design or bit of gore, or a rip-off of Tusk. The big exception is the final segment, Kate Siegel’s “Stowaway”. This one has cool effects ideas, but also an actual emotional core, a heart, and a sense of bitter irony that makes the gore crap that came before look even more creatively bankrupt.

Caught (2017): Jamie Patterson’s conjuration of the High Strange is a much more evocative piece of work than most of the VHS attempts at using it for horror. The film is tense, it is tight, and its British variation on the Men in Black trope uses the elements of this kind of encounter in a much more interesting and intelligent way than you’d at first expect. There’s gore here, as well, but there’s also the feeling of the main characters encountering something that isn’t totally comprehensible, as well as the realization that the something can’t comprehend them totally either.

The film also dares to go as weird and as emotionally brutal as it can afford, ending its version of a home invasion in a deservedly harsh manner.

Godforsaken (2020): For its first forty minutes or so, Ali Akbar Akbar Kamal’s POV horror film about what happens after a young woman in a Canadian small town comes back from the dead changed, transcends its amateurish acting by the effective way it handles the dread of a cosmic (or is it religious) revelation that shatters and changes people in ways which become increasingly creepy. There’s a wonderful sense of the small town community it is corrupting as well.

Unfortunately, the final act turns into disappointingly generic zombie business; the amateurish acting becomes an incessant cacophony of amateurish screeching.

The thing is, the earlier two thirds are so strong – the resurrection alone is worth your time – I’d still recommend anyone interested in existentialist or cosmicist horror to take a look at Godforsaken.

The Spine of Night (2021)

Having ascended a mythical mountain, the – always very naked – swamp witch Tzod (Lucy Lawless) converses with an armoured figure (Richard E. Grant), the guardian of the last bloom of a blue flower growing there. Tzord tells of the rather disturbing developments in the human world below during the last centuries, leading to flashbacks that start with her own kidnapping and eventual death and will lead into the rise of a near-godlike conqueror.

For its first fifteen minutes or so, Phil Gelatt’s and Morgan Galen King’s The Spine of Night appears to a be nothing more than a highly competent homage to the poster children of rotoscope animation, Fire & Ice and Heavy Metal. I’ve never been a true connoisseur of that animation style, though I do like these two core texts more than just a little. Frazetta and Sword and Sorcery, or the French school of comics art not beholden to the ligne claire are things irresistible, independent of the form they are presented in, after all.

So, I’d probably have been quite happy with it, if Spine had only been the violent and nudity-positive bit of animated sword and sorcery its beginning promises. It doesn’t take long, however, until it becomes clear these filmmakers have deeper and more complex interests than making a film in the style of things they clearly love and admire. Instead of the more typical heroic/anti-heroic tale that seems to be set up, the film soon broadens its scope to become a much more epic tale, spanning centuries, with characters that would be the heroes and villains of most other movies of this kind coming into and out of the plot as parts of the grand tapestry the film is weaving. Most of them have pasts and futures the film only hints at, suggesting a world full of interesting, mysterious and large lives in ways I find deeply satisfying. Worldbuilding by suggestion, by leaving out explanations to get the imagination of an audience going has gotten rather out of style these days, but when treated as carefully and thoughtfully is it is here, it does fire up at least this viewer’s imagination as little else does.

The Spine does take this approach not only to characters but the world it takes place in as well – the gorgeous and fantastic character and background design is highly suggestive, and manages to make rule of cool elements feel like more than just that – true parts of its world that don’t need to be explained.

On a plot level, this takes elements of sword and sorcery and the cosmicism/cosmic horror that has been an important part of this style of fantasy since its beginning and turns it towards the mythic. In a film that also features a creation myth in which classic rotoscope takes on the shadowy qualities of shadow puppet animation, this is rather obviously a conscious decision, a – successful – attempt at taking the outlook of the pulpier arm of the classic weird tale and emphasising its philosophical contents without having to lose the blood and the guts (there’s a lot of that on screen here as well), or the beauty and terror of existing in a cosmos that cares not one whit about you.

Philosophically, this is a film about the question of how to live with this idea of an at best uncaring cosmos, a place where human strife and achievement is essentially pointless, and where even gods are of no actual import in the greater scheme of things - of how to look into the void and not become it. Thinking about this does involve exploding a god-like wizard after he has been fought by armoured skeletons, so there’s a wonderful mix of completely unexpected thoughtfulness with the stuff the film sells itself on – no cheating the audience off what it came to see (or hear – the dialogue is perfect for what the film tries to do, as well) around here.

None of what I’ve just written, alas, quite captures how The Spine of Night actually made me feel watching it, the elation I got from watching a movie that’s sword and sorcery as imagined by Frank Frazetta covers, a fantasy tale that is as mythic as it gory, as much a part of the landscape of horror as it is of fantasy, and a wonderful bit of cosmicism with generously added trippyness. But that’s how it goes, sometimes.

Galaxy of Terror (1981)

The spaceship Remus, belonging to a planetary culture ruled by someone going by the fortunately not copyrightable moniker of The Master, crashes down on a rather dangerous and mysterious planet.

The Master sends a second ship, the Quest, after it. The Quest is predominantly populated by character actors like Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Robert Englund, Grace Zabriskie, Ray Walston and Sid Haig who are perfectly built to turn the sparse hints the script offers about the characters and the world they inhabit into something that feels plausible and alive. Arriving at the planet, the Quest also crashes, and will need some repairs to fly out again.

At least the Remus is comparatively close by, so it doesn’t take long for our protagonists to stumble upon what’s left of its crew – dead bodies, killed under mysterious and obviously violent circumstances. There are some crew members missing, however, so there still may be survivors, somewhere. Perhaps they have made their way to the gigantic, creepy black pyramid looming on the horizon?

Before anyone from the Quest can start making their way there, as well, the newcomers begin suffering from the same troubles that must have killed the Remus’s crew – tempers begin to flare, moods darken, and whenever somebody is alone, they are killed – or worse – by a different monstrosity with the curious ability to disappear before anyone else can see it.

Bruce D. Clark’s Galaxy of Terror – produced by Corman’s New World Pictures - is typically considered as being on of the Alien rip-offs. Some of that sweet sweet, Corman money has certainly flown into the film because of that, but the Alien influence is mostly visible in the grubbiness of the tech, the very non-Star Trek (or Wars) characters, and the spirit of some of the production design (among others by James Cameron, who’d put that particular experience to good use a couple of years later when he made an actual Alien sequel). Much larger in feel and form loom Bava’s Planet of the Vampires – one of the core texts in science fiction horror on screen – and of course Forbidden Planet.

In fact, much of the film plays out like a less polite, more brutal and sexed/sleazed up version of the latter film, with added elements of a post-hippie interpretation of A.E. Van Vogt-style SF weirdness. Which works out very nicely indeed for the film thanks to its spirited, imaginative space gothic meets working class production design and practical monster effects that mix puppets, a bit of stop motion and whatever else was to hand in ways to make any monster kid happy.

Obviously, going by contemporary tastes, I could rather have done without the rape by giant worm scene (that makes a thing explicit many another horror movie prefers to keep implicit or plain metaphorical for a reason) – particularly since Clark films it very much as a scene we (as in the imagined all-male heterosexual audience) are supposed to be turned on by instead of squicked out. Which isn’t just unpleasant but based on very weird assumptions about male sexuality.

Fortunately, the rest of the monster business is much too good to let that one piece of unpleasantness destroy it, and Galaxy of Terror would be absolutely worthwhile for its effects and production design alone. The latter does also add a fine layer of cosmic dread to proceedings, uniting the promise of science fiction cinema to show us things we’ve never seen before with the (cosmic) horror dictum of showing us things we probably shouldn’t be seeing.

Howard’s Mill (2021)

Warning: I’ll have to spoil a bit of a film that’s really made for going into cold.

We are back in POV horror land. This time around the film purports to be a true crime documentary made by – repeat after me – a couple of student filmmakers. I deeply appreciate the lack of the annoying tech or sound guy trope character among them.

On a couple’s detectorist outing on some farmland near Springfield, Kentucky, Emily Nixon (Shira Lacy) goes missing very suddenly and rather inexplicably. After some time, husband Dwight (Reegus Flenory) comes under some suspicion by the police, but there’s really very little evidence for foul play from his side, however much the cop on the job would like it to be.

Dwight isn’t terribly satisfied with the police work, so he and the filmmakers start digging into the case on their own. For a basically empty patch of land close to a farm, there has been a curiously large amount of sudden disappearances over the years in a very small area, and soon enough, our intrepid investigators go down a rabbit hole of curious circumstances, creepy and deeply suspicious happenings, and tales of people going missing only to return ten years later.

There’s an additional cool bit to that last part I am not going to spoil any further than to add that I admire how cleverly director Shannon Houchins uses a classically weird trope here, combined with a very traditional folkloric concept, without ever actually using the word that concept suggests. It’s all very fortean in a delightfully underplayed way.

Another of Howard’s Mill’s strengths is its strong sense of the local. This was really shot on locations in the actual Springfield – I assume with local talent professional and amateur – so there is a strong sense of place and authenticity (as well as the proper accents) running through proceedings. This sort of thing always enhances the qualities of a horror movie in my eyes. Particularly, of course, when a movie is made in a style that’s all about at least the appearance of authenticity.

There are some lovely, moody landscape shots here, and the there’s a sense of the rural and US Southern that does feel natural, as well as unnatural when a big of gothic dread is needed.

Houchins does make a pretty good go of imitating the form of a cheap true crime documentary, and there’s a neat sense of progression to the protagonists’ investigations, where interesting revelations are spaced out just right. And thanks to the documentary style, there aren’t any of the scenes of nothing of relevance or interest happening that haunt POV horror as a whole.

Given the Fortean elements, that bit I don’t want to spoil, as well as its emphasis on the local, Howard’s Mill is a film pretty much made for my specific tastes, but even if you’re not its absolute core audience, its quietly confident filmmaking and its low-key sense of something inexplicable haunting a perfectly unassuming locale should make for a clear recommendation.

Santo vs. Frankenstein’s Daughter (1972)

Original title: Santo vs. la hija de Frankestein

Dr Freda Frankenstein (Gina Romand), the daughter of the original “It’s alive!” Frankenstein, has gone into the family business as a mad scientist. She has a lot going for her: a swanky – if somewhat cold – looking lair in the countryside, a trusted partner in Dr Yanco (Roberto Cañedo), and a bunch of goons in matching outfits to rob graves, kidnap women and whatever else needs doing around the home. Mad scientific success, however, isn’t guaranteed.

Her attempt to inject one of her minions with gorilla blood to achieve, um, who knows what, has turned him into Truxon, a guy in a gorilla mask (Gerardo Zepeda) she has to keep locked up and can only control with her considerable powers of hypnotism. Repeating the experiments of her father has proven somewhat more successful, and she is just on the cusp of creating her own Monster, whom she’ll dub Ursus (also Gerardo Zepeda, but in a different mask of dubious quality).

Frankenstein has also managed to develop a serum that not only stops aging but has a rejuvenating effect as well. This hasn’t just kept her and Yanco ship-shape, but is also a useful tool to recruit old losers into her goon squad and soften them up as victims for her love for controlling sadism and domination. Unfortunately, the serum is beginning to lose its power for the good doctor, and instead of the three months typically going between injections, she has now weeks at best – and the effects decrease ever quicker.

Our mad scientist has a plan, however. She just needs the blood of a very special person to create a more potent formula. Yes, of course it is the blood of Santo (Santo!), idol of the masses, friend of children, and so on and so forth. Santo’s blood, Frankenstein has found out, contains a much higher concentration of whatever stops aging, keeping him youthful, fit, and an all-around perfect physical specimen.

Just asking Santo for some of his blood wouldn’t probably not be kinky enough, and kidnapping him would prove difficult and inconvenient, so instead, Frankenstein sends her minions to kidnap Norma (Anel), Santo’s girlfriend. This, and a helpful blackmail letter, should bring the luchador right to her doorstep, which indeed it does, accompanied not by Blue Demon or Mil Mascaras, but by Norma’s sister Elsa (Sonia Fuentes). Various games of catch and release, monster mashes against Truxon and Ursus, and other shenanigans ensue. Also appearing: Chekhov's lair self-destruct lever.

At this stage of Santo’s film career, budgets were clearly pretty low, but there’s a willingness to make much out of comparably little and a pop cinema energy to Miguel M. Delgado’s Santo vs. Frankenstein’s Daughter the great man’s cinematic outings would increasingly lose. This is even one of those Santo movies where somebody even seems to have been committed to actual production design, so there’s a sense of visual coherence you don’t always get in lucha cinema. That the very early 70s fashion and colours pop very nicely on the print I watched adds to the pleasure here.

The film is comparatively focussed as well – there’s no odious comic relief, no musical numbers, the two ring fights are short and sweet – and the second one takes place only after the plot has been resolved. In fact, there’s no filler in the movie at all.

Instead, Delgado fills those parts of the movie that don’t concern Santo doing Santo stuff, vigorously, to really draw us into the world of our female mad scientist. There’s much fun to be had with her gleefully sadistic way of controlling her minions – which Romand hams up wonderfully – and many a silly-awesome background detail to enjoy. Why, some of the minions even have character traits, and if you look closely, there are even traces of actual relationships between these pulpy characters mostly here to get beaten up by a masked wrestler.

Because these are the early Seventies, the film is on the bloodier side of the Santo cycle – Ursus near fatal wound on a big cross in the graveyard next to Frankenstein’s lair comes to mind, or the moment when Santo repeatedly strikes an already beaten Truxon with a chain – and the fantasy in Fernando Osés’s script turns toward the macabre. There’s a scene in which a grumpy, rejected-by-Santo Frankenstein hypnotizes – yes, of course a colour wheel is involved – Norma into trying to cut out Santo’s eyes, for example. Of course, this isn’t a Fulci film, so the power of love protects, while the minions meant to watch Santo during this are so squicked out by the whole thing, they have to leave the room.

Yes, the film is making a joke here, and it’s actually funny. Which, come to think of it, happens in a couple of scenes, as if, freed from the yoke of the comic relief character, humour can suddenly work and add more to a lucha movie than annoyance.

In “things we never knew about Santo”: both Norma and Frankenstein agree that an unmasked Santo has the hottest male face ever to grace our planet. Obviously, we have to take their words for it.

Thus, this particular adventure of Santo is recommended even to those among my imaginary readers who don’t go for the idol of the masses as much as Norma, Dr Freda Frankenstein or this writer do. There’s cheap but awesome production design! Two monsters – well guys in bad masks – played by a single actor! Sadomasochist subtext! Mad science! A woman who screams whenever she sees someone with a wrinkled face! What more can one ask of any movie?

Fangs (1981)

Original title: Anyab

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a young couple, planning to get married (after they’ll find an appropriately cheap apartment), find themselves stranded in the countryside during a rain storm. Thanks to a helpful yet somewhat sinister hunchback, they make their way to a creepy – yet awesome – mansion. There’s a very peculiar party going on inside, and the host tries to sweep the female part of the couple right off her feet.

Only in this case, the party is a masquerade of vampires who like to wear Halloween masks, and the host isn’t a sweet transvestite but Dracula (Ahmed Adawiyya).

Mohammed Shebl’s pretty mind-blowing horror musical comedy Fangs is the sort of thing we would have described as “psychotronic” in ye olden times. Produced on a low (low low low) budget but gifted with the nearly manic enthusiasm of a true believer in the power of popular cinema, this takes elements of Western pop culture and puts them through the blender of a very personal set of interests and obsessions in a cultural remix. The influences, quotes and re-works start with the obvious Rocky Horror (minus the LGBTQ material, though I suspect because this would have been a bridge too far for an Egyptian movie, not because Shebl didn’t want to), move over to Dracula (there’s an incredibly awesome-awkward restaging of the Count crawling up a wall you need to see to believe and love), and certainly do not end at using cheaper versions of the Biff! Bang! Pow! thought bubbles of the Batman TV show.

Shebl must have had quite the encyclopaedic knowledge of and nerdy interest in very different forms of – mostly US and British - pop culture, for his quotes and interests reach from the most obvious to the obscure. I can’t quite speak to the way these elements interact with the specifically Egyptian and probably pretty political parts of the movie, but forty years later and many kilometres away, there’s no mistaking -  this is a film made with total love for the material it borrows from.

Shebl also carries in his heart a sweet and probably abiding love for the fourth wall break: the plot, such as it is, is regularly interrupted by a gentleman in his private library who at first focusses on exposition and melodramatic pronouncements like a very serious horror host but eventually gets into a discussion with Dracula on the reality of vampires. Which in turn leads to the narrative coming to a screeching halt in favour of a number of absurdist skits that suggest a rather clear connection between vampires and capitalism.

In the main plot, Dracula will get into trouble for his autocratic leadership style as well, so even this non-80s-Egyptian viewer smells a degree of satire there.

However, between the fourth wall breaking, the quotes and everything, this is also a gorgeous, often utterly bizarre horror musical that makes up for a certain lack of budget through the virtues of imagination and natural weirdness. The film’s actual music should be on various hipster turn tables with its mix of disco, “Egyptian”-sounding percussion, synths and vocal lines that remind me more than a little of 70s Bollywood. Shebl needle-drops a variety of certainly copyrighted music as well, and there are as many clever gags based in the use of borrowed music as there are visual ones.

From time to time, Fangs even puts some emphasis on the “horror” bit of its multi-genre descriptors, and suddenly there’s genuinely icky vampire gore between the songs and the general strangeness. Clearly, Shebl liked a lot of things, and aimed to put them all on screen in the same movie – one never knows if it isn’t one’s first and only, after all.

Horrors of Malformed Men (1969)

Original title: Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû

Japan, 1925. Being thrown into a mental institution for no good reason is not terribly great, but when a bald co-patient attempts to strangle Hirosuke Hitomi (Teruo Yoshido) and does not survive Hirosuke’s self-defence, the young man uses this as an opportunity to flee. He follows a female voice singing a folk song that reminds him of something in his past he can’t quite grasp.

The singer of the song is a young woman (Teruko Yumi). Turns out this is a tune common to a specific island off the Japanese coast where she grew up before she became a circus performer in the big city. There’s clearly more to say, but before she can tell our protagonist more, she is killed by a thrown knife, which of course leads to various witnesses running after Hirosuke as the murderer.

Having escaped that problem, Hirosuke decides to travel to the island the girl told him about, to perhaps learn more about himself – it’s never quite clear if he has some form of amnesia, or is just easily mystified. On the train to the island, Hirosuke, sees the photo of the head of the main family dwelling there, one Genzaburo Komoda. Strangely enough, Genzaburo looks exactly like Hirosuke; even stranger, he’s dead, so any theories Hirosuke might actually be Genzaburo go right out of the window.

So Hirosuke does the logical thing: once on the island, he steals the dead Genzaburo’s shroud to stage a pretty bizarre resurrection. The Komoda family buys this peculiar production, and soon Hirosuke finds himself not only coping with the results of his own ruse, but also the various mysteries and strangenesses of the Komoda household, as well as the sexual advances of Genzaburo’s wife and of his lover. What follows is a bit of sex, more perversion and a murder or two.

Eventually, our protagonist will end up on yet another island, where Genzaburo’s father (Tatsumi Hijikata) is attempting to create his very own tribe of surgically malformed and psychologically tortured men meant to mirror and triple down on his own physical and mental problems. Very much making Doctor Moreau look perfectly reasonable in comparison.

Using Edogawa Rampo’s “The Strange Tale of Panorama Island” as plot scaffolding, Teruo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men adds bits and pieces of other stories by Rampo to the proceedings, clearly aiming to adapt the spirit of the man’s body of work even when fudging plot details. Given the sense of the unreal and the perverse in what I’ve read of Rampo’s stories, emphasising the feel of his work seems a reasonable approach. This might very well be the only thing in the film I’d describe as “reasonable”, for what Ishii makes of this is an increasingly, heatedly deranged series of set pieces that play out like the fever dreams of a perverted pulp writer. On paper, this is by far not the most extreme thing I’ve seen in Japanese cinema – there’s more sex, more violence, more sexualised violence elsewhere – but its mood is so fantastically and specifically erotically grotesque, the film feels dangerous, exciting, strange, and brutal as anything you’d encounter.

Ishii, a veteran of Japanese genre cinema whose films became ever more strange and idiosyncratic, is at his best here, marrying the technical chops typical of studio directors of the time and place with a gleeful sense of transgression as well as a visible understanding of the beauty of the grotesque you won’t find in many horror films. There’s a restless sense of creativity to Ishii’s methods in realizing this beauty – the decision to have the malformed people as well as Genzaburo’s father be played by butoh performers, for example, pays off in a brand of poetic strangeness found right at the other side of ugliness that’s perfect for Rampo and gifts the viewer with quite a few sights never seen before or after.

Strange Love of the Vampires (1975)

Original title: El extraño amor de los vampiros

aka Night of the Walking Dead

A small European village apparently a good way off from any proper town in the 19th Century (or thereabouts) has been the playground for occasional vampire attacks for decades. By now, it has become customary to stake every corpse left behind by those vampires, despite the protestations of the city-bred town doctor. What the villagers don’t realize is that these vampires are clever enough to remove those stakes and keep up their numbers. But then, these villagers will turn out to be spectacularly bad at organizing anti-vampire measures, even when they know exactly what to do and to whom.

Young Catherine (Emma Cohen), daughter of the village’s head bourgeois, has never been a ray of sunshine. Understandable, given the place where she lives, and the fact that she’s diagnosed with one of those romantic illnesses that will kill her young and decoratively. Her proto-goth disposition grows yet more maudlin after the vampire death of her sister Miriam (Amparo Climent), followed by the betrayal of her lover Jean (Baringo Jordan). Jean prefers other female companionship, for he is apparently afraid of her because he “only sees death in her eyes”. So Catherine is just the right candidate to fall for the (genuine) romantic advances of oh so tragic head vampire Rudolph of Winberg (Carlos Balesteros), despite his penchant for mass murder and self-serving philosophising about Good and Evil.

Their romance comes just in time for the yearly big vampire party.

León Klimovsky certainly was one of the work horses of Spanish horror of the 70s; at times – most often when paired with Paul Naschy, who’s not in this one – he managed to turn the flaws films of this place and time seemed to acquire as their birth right into genuinely engaging movies. Well, engaging for people like me, that is, the mileage of civilians and viewers unaccustomed to the rhythms and illogic of this kind of European horror will vary considerably.

If you are one of us, Strange Love turns out to be one of Klimovsky’s best films: it is languid, has very specific and peculiar ideas about the erotic (as well as love, life and death), and carries off that dream-like, occasionally nightmarish, feeling I love so well with aplomb.

It also is nearly plotless, features characters that pop in and out of the film as if they slipped the dreamer’s/director’s mind until they become useful props again, and makes vague gestures at actually being about something. What that is, I’m not sure. Mostly, because the various directions the film pushes in seem to have too little to do with each other to make any kind of logical sense. Sometimes, the vampires feel like walking metaphors for social outcasts, in the next scenes, they are simply murderous monsters; Winberg’s philosophical approach has no conceivable through line; and the film’s attempts at painting him in a tragic light suffer from the fact that his only pleasant acts are in service of looking good for the (much younger) woman he wants to bang. Something the filmmakers clearly don’t realize does just make him look even worse.

Instead of that boring theme and logic stuff, Klimovsky delivers the obligatory amount of sleaze – early on, the film regularly threatens to become a sex farce – as well as quite a few moody, archetypal scenes of horror. Catherine coming face to face with her dead sister through a closed window, saved by a cross her mad mother has scratched into the glass; the vampires rising in a very bright night (cough) out of graves that ooze fog; vampires dragging away screaming victims as snacks for the vampire party – all of these are moments that simply get the feel of gothic horror in its 70s European guise so right, their lack of coherence is absolutely beside the point.

In its final act, Strange Love perpetually hovers at the point where the dream-like becomes downright surreal. Particularly the vampire party is a thing to behold: cheap costumes, coloured balloons (!) and other New Year’s accoutrements, as well as the emotional cruelty of an EC comic culminate in a sequence where Winberg shows Catherine bizarre visions of what his minions are feeling right now, or are dreaming off, which is apparently the sort of thing that makes a girl get rid of her cross right quick.

It is fantastic in a way you simply couldn’t get away with in a time where people even complain about the lack of exposition in something as clear and linear as Hellboy: The Crooked Man, and pretty damn beautiful to boot.

Azrael (2024)

Many years after the Rapture – or so one of the film’s very occasional expository titles explains – a woman - let’s call her Azrael - (Samara Weaving) and a man named Kenan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) flee through a forest, apparently hunted by members of a cult or some cult-like community. The two must have belonged to these people once, for they both have mutilated vocal cords that make them unable to speak, like all of the cult members. Given this fact, only few concrete explanations for anything will be forthcoming.

The cultists manage to catch the two and separate them. We follow Azrael. Bringing her to a clearing and strapping her to a chair, the cultists proceed with a ritual. Chanting without vocal cords, it turns out, sounds like a really violent kind of breathing exercise. Apparently, they mean to sacrifice the woman to the creatures roaming the woods. These things look like undead burn victims, follow the smell of blood and have a nasty habit of ripping their victims to pieces. Azrael manages to escape, but her hunters are not willing to give up; whereas she attempts to rescue Kenan.

I have to admit, going into E.L. Katz’s Azrael I was somewhat nervous about the whole post-Rapture business – I am seldom in the mood for religious proselytizing, and even less so in the holiest of months in my private religion. Fortunately, this is not that sort of Christian horror, but rather the kind that uses elements of Christian mythology strictly as a basis for a proper spook show.

For at least half of the film’s runtime, it’s not terribly clear why this has to take place in a religious kind of post-apocalypse at all, but the further things go along, the clearer it becomes that this is to a degree a spiritual sibling to films like Immaculate and The First Omen. Apparently, something is in the air when it comes to the horrors of birth and pregnancy in connection with religion. Thanks to the near complete lack of dialogue, the audience has to put quite a bit of work into figuring the film out – there is a degree of unsolvable ambiguity here, particularly when it comes to the motivations of the cultists, but that’s part of Azrael’s charm.

In spirit, this is very much the classic kind of low budget movie you could imagine Roger Corman producing in the 80s, making a lot out of working under difficult circumstances, finding a way to make a bigger movie than the money should actually allow (in this case, by shooting in Estonia), and putting more intelligence and energy into the film than it would strictly need. No cheap irony or “aw shucks, we’re not talented enough to be good, so let’s suck ironically”, here; instead actual filmmaking.

Katz has a lovely eye for the sort of shot that stays with a viewer – at least this one. The first appearance of the monsters, the trip in the lit-up car through the dark woods, the whispering coming out of a hole in a wall to instruct the believers – all of this is wonderfully conceived and realized.

There’s an admirable relentlessness to the film. Once it starts, there’s a feeling of constant forward momentum, of constant threat, which is particularly effective when paired with the audience’s attempt at figuring the film’s world Azrael is first driven through and then driving against out without giving us much space to reflect on much of anything. Simon Barrett’s script has some lovely touches, particularly when it comes to pulling a viewer’s expectations sideways. Moments other films would use to let their heroine take a breath and get some exposition quickly dissolve into chaos and violence again, about half of the time set pieces resolve unexpectedly (which makes the times when they do so expectedly much more interesting as well).

Last but not least, Azrael is another showcase for the incredible physical acting of Samara Weaving, the sort of performance you’d nominate for the Academy Award for Best Physical Acting, if said Academy had the good sense to have this sort of thing.

As it stands, an imaginary award will have to do.

Three Films Make A Post: He's not a serial killer. He's much worse.

Troublesome Night 8 aka 陰陽路八之棺材仔 (2001): This eighth entry into the venerable series of Hong Kong horror comedy anthologies surprises by not being an anthology movie. Instead, director Edmond Yuen Chi-Keung chooses to draw out a single story that might have made a strong segment for an anthology into a full length movie that starts slow, continues slower and suddenly becomes downright entertaining in its last half hour (the bit you’d actually find in the anthology movie). It’s not terrible, but it’s also not exactly an exciting piece of cinema, not helped by Yuen’s bland and characterless direction.

Dust Devil (1992): Every few years, I try again to watch Richard Stanley’s much loved horror magnum opus, a film I always should have been all over, given my tastes in horror. Every few years, I don’t get on with it. Or rather, I didn’t, for suddenly, this year, the film opened up to me, and suddenly its complicated mix of private and not so private mythology, its surrealist commentary on colonialism and its human consequences, and its intense visual style came together in a singular way; eccentricities I found annoying the last four or three times suddenly make total sense.

That abuse and the kinds of violence certain men inflict upon women have been more on my mind lately than I’d like to might have played into my finally connecting with this one, as well, for this is also a film about an abused woman stumbling into a man (well, sort of) even more toxic than the last until she will eventually become so hollowed out, his personality will be able to just slip into her.

Succubus (2024): Succubus is no Dust Devil, but I do appreciate how much R.J. Daniel Hanna’s film wants to be like one of the films of the classic exploitation era: sleazy (or as sleazy as you can get in 2024), a bit absurd, but also absolutely interested in talking about some of the issues of the day in the sort of crudely metaphorical manner that makes my heart go out to any movie using it. It also features Ron Perlman playing one Dr. Orion Zephyr, adding a little joy to anyone’s day.

I also appreciate the film’s willingness to just go there and attempt the budget size version of the visionary artistry it can never afford the proper effects work for.

The script, on the other hand, could have used a little more time, perhaps a clean up of the pretty draggy middle of the film, as well as more focus on the core of what it clearly wants to communicate about relationships in the age of swiping wherever.

Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch (1985)

aka Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf

Coming to the funeral of his sister Karen, Dee Wallace Stone’s journalist character from the first movie, Texan sheriff Ben (Reb Brown) soon finds himself in curious company. Occult investigator Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee) attempts to convince Ben that his sister had arranged her own on-camera murder to prevent turning into a werewolf for good. Karen’s former colleague Jenny (Annie McEnroe, doing an awkward Jamie Lee Curtis impression) is willing to buy into Stefan’s ideas quickly enough, but Ben needs a bit of convincing.

Fortunately, werewolf attacks are a good argument against scepticism, so soon, everybody’s on board with Stefan’s tales about the mighty werewolf queen Stirba (Sybil Danning) and her plan to turn more werewolves into wolfier werewolves, or something. Anyway, she needs to be stopped right quick. Stefan invites his new allies to accompany him to the small town in Transylvania that’s closest to Stirba’s secret lair in a big ass castle nobody appears to know how to find – not even Stefan’s local allies who must have lived in its neighbourhood for decades.

Needless to say, things turn weird in Transylvania.

Where Joe Dante’s first The Howling is still one of the best werewolf films ever made, Philippe Mora’s sequel is bad in so bizarre and wilful ways, it is also pretty damn fantastic without being good or best in any way, shape or form.

Aesthetically, this attempts to mix 1985 post-punk style, bits and pieces of gothic horror and a backlot Europe that manages to feel like an off-beat dream despite the backlot for once having been in actual Europe - Czechoslovakia to be precise. In practice, this means unholy yet weirdly compelling clashes between the kind of leather outfits favoured in movie BDSM and apocalypses and the cobwebby castles which are Christopher Lee’s natural habitat. A guy wearing an absurd medieval closed helmet and little else guarding said castle with an automatic weapon is the sort of thing you can expect here in every single scene. The film is nearly Italian in this regard.

Villagers that are having a folk horror village fete (probably to give Lee Wickerman flashbacks), a little person zombie attack that echoes Don’t Look Now, and a truly off-putting werewolf orgy to the jolly sounds of the film’s new wave theme song are only part of the film’s attractions. For the sleazebags among us, there’s also an incredibly ridiculous werewolf threesome between Danning, Marsha A Hunt’s character and whoever plays the guy trying to imitate wolf sex noises with them that’ll haunt your dreams (and not in a pleasant way), suggestions that Lee is the ten thousand year old brother of the equally ancient Stirba and the two once had a bit of an incestuous thing going on between them, and general horniness whenever nobody gets killed.

Our heroes are absolute idiots without any concept of strategy or any sense of self-preservation, jollily walking into traps like the giant idiots they are. Fortunately, Stirba’s not much better at her job either. I’m not sure what Stefan did with his life before becoming an occult investigator, or what his qualifications for the role are, apart from his knowledge about the movie’s curious werewolf subspecies that can only be killed by titanium instead of silver. But then, I’m not sure why our werewolf matriarch mostly spends her time having sex, shooting lasers and casting spells instead of doing anything werewolf-y, nor why there’s quite as much staking of werewolves going on here. Yes, titanium stakes, of course. Those are even more phallic, probably.

I am unsure if Mora is in on any of this being as funny, absurd and weird as it plays out, but then, that’s a not an uncommon reaction to Mora’s films for me. On the one hand, if he’s in on the joke, he keeps the straightest directorial face possible, on the other hand, how could anyone not be? The only point in the movie where I’m sure someone involved in the production is consciously taking the piss is in the ending credits, when Danning’s “iconic” moment of ripping her top off is repeated seventeen (of course people, including me, have counted it) times, intercut with outtakes from the movie one can only read as reaction shots to Danning’s breasts. Christopher Lee seems to approve of them.

The rest of the movie, I have no idea. What I do know is that Howling II is the perfect portrayal of the dream life of some male 80s teenager who also happens to be a fan of pulp writing.

A Page of Madness (1926)

Original title: 狂った一頁, Kurutta Ichipeiji

The Internet – well, and people who have read the script as well – tells me that A Page of Madness is about about a man (Masuo Inoe) taking on a janitorial position at an asylum to free his wife (Yoshie Nakagawa), who is imprisoned there.

One can understand about as much about Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness. But seeing how the film lacks intertitles, a third of its original runtime, as well as the narration that most probably accompanied it in Japan on its release, this is where any kind of unambiguous understanding ends when watching it, at least for me.

Instead, the viewer is drawn into a series of scenes that are influenced by the angles and shadows of German expressionism, and often wildly experimental. There are quick and violent edits, fades and superimpositions you wouldn’t expect in any movie made in the mid-20s, a bit like Eisenstein turning his montage technique inwards (or into the cosmic), or like Maya Deren in an aggressive mood. Some of this, I’d most probably be better able to understand on an intellectual level if I had a better grasp of traditional Japanese theatre forms, but feeling instead of thinking one’s way through a film like this might be the better approach in any case.

For most of the film’s wild and improbable (in the best way) technical experiments are put in service of visually reproducing altered states of mind, putting into moving pictures how it must feel to see reality like the “mad” do. The only way to really achieve that is by giving up much of already established filmic naturalistic language and aiming for something harsher, wilder and stranger.

Because mental illnesses are how they are, the film’s handful of moments of beauty are rare, short, and quickly dissolve into panic, anger and dread. A sense of doom lingers, shadows threaten and the only reasonable way to live may be to wear the mask of madness. So it is little wonder this is often seen as some kind of proto arthouse horror film. After all, A Page of Madness’ images linger and disturb, even nearly a hundred years after it was made.

The Man and the Monster (1959)

Original title: El hombre y el monstruo

Famous pianist Samuel Magno (Enrique Rambal) has retreated from the limelight for mysterious reasons, hiding away in a hacienda on the outskirts of a small Mexican village. He’s ready for some sort of comeback, though. He has arranged the big public reveal of his protégé Laura (Martha Roth), whom he believes to be the Greatest Pianist in the World (piano fans around the world are keeping records and score tables of piano duels, I assume).

Because of this coming attraction, surprisingly two-fisted music critic Ricardo Souto (Abel Salazar) comes to town for an unarranged interview. Magno, living alone with his severe and rather creepy, cat-carrying, mother (Ofelia Guilmáin) and Laura, is very reticent about any attempts of Ricardo’s to speak with him, but Laura is rather smitten by Ricardo (he is played by the writer/producer, after all).

Ricardo for his part stumbles upon Magno’s secret. It concerns the corpse of the former Greatest Pianist in the World (also Martha Roth) locked into a side-chamber, a pact with the devil, and the fact that Magno turns into a furry-faced fiend whenever he plays the piano (because the devil has a weird sense of humour).

As regular readers know, I just love Mexican horror cinema of this era. The Man and the Monster, directed by the often genuinely brilliant Rafael Baledón, is no exception to that rule.

As usual, I find myself particularly delighted by the film’s mixture of genres and tones. At its core, this is of course a contemporized gothic horror version of the Faustian pact (with shades of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, if you want to see it that way, and I certainly enjoy doing that, if only to annoy the squares), but it is also a vigorously played melodrama, as well as the kind of monster movie that includes a wild fist fight between a music journalist and a furry fiend the journalist actually wins.

As is so often the case in his movies, Baledón is a master of drenching rooms into long and deep shadows, of having his characters throw meaningful, heavy glances at the slightest provocation – though provocations here are generally not slight – and of treating the silliest, slightest moments of the script with a heaviness of emotion and expression that to me often seems at the core of what makes Gothic cinema so impressive and expressive.

Baledón is particularly honest about where the visual style of his gothic horror is actually coming from – the nods to Universal cinema and the shadows of a – typically not gothic as we non-academics understand the term – Val Lewton production are there and accounted for (lovely as ever), but there’s also that brilliant, minimalist scene in which Magno flashes back to his pact, emoting in front of a set that’s all classical movie expressionism and could be taken directly from Caligari.

On a subtextual level, this is a film curiously fitting to our times in some regards, seeing as it concerns a man of influence and power first taking control of the life of a young woman to then be able to destroy it for his own convenience. Of course, she is also saved by her two-fisted music critic instead of doing any of her saving  herself, which would not play well in a contemporary movie, but this is still a film made in 1959. And a rather wonderful one at that.

The Night God Screamed (1971)

Mild-mannered and pleasant Willis Pierce (Alex Nicol) is a curious preacher to get a homicidal mad-on for, but when he very mildly berates the leader of the dope-smoking (gasp!) Jesus freak hippie cult that’s robbing him of the little money he is able to collect for his work, he thereby enrages the leader of the pack so much, the poor man is crucified on the big cross he just bought. The preacher’s wife Fanny (Jeanne Crain), who wasn’t into Willis buying a cross already, sees insult added to injury by finding his corpse. Her statement is also going to be responsible to send the cult leader to the electric chair, rather to the anger of his gang.

A year later, Fanny is working for the judge who presided in the cult leader’s trial. He asks her to babysit his quartet of teenage children for a weekend, because those young ones clearly can’t be trusted without a responsible adult around.

Unfortunately, it is this night when some cult members decide to take vengeance on Fanny, and soon a tense siege situation evolves. And believe me, Rio Bravo did not include teenagers among the besieged for a reason.

Going by its plot, its title, and the year it was made, one would expect Lee Madden’s The Night God Screamed to be a rather nasty bit of exploitation cinema. Alas (or fortunately, if you’re as mild-mannered as Willis was) that is not the case. This is a bit of cheap but mostly classy cinema, so much so even its hippie bashing – an easy bit of work in 1971 – does lack the nastiness in tone you would expect (hope for?).

As it stands, the level of violence and exploitation on display throughout the film would have been on the mild side for an ABC Movie of the Week. However, like with many of those films, Night is a perfectly decent little movie, shot with a degree of technical acumen, effectively structured, and pretty satisfying when one doesn’t go into it expecting a movie about a night during which god screamed.

As any actual TV thriller of the style would, this, too, does feature an aging Old Hollywood star in the lead role, and as in an actual TV movie, Jeanne Crain gives the kind of effective performance that carries a film like this through the vagaries of mediocre teen actors.

The siege sequence are competently tense and effective, though somewhat lessened after the fact by a pretty stupid and not exactly surprising plot twist, so there’s really very little to complain about here. Beyond the fact this isn’t the film about a preacher crucifying cult and/or screaming godhoods I was hoping for, but October is still young.

Baby Assassins (2021)

Original title: Beibî warukyûre

Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) are two highly trained assassins working as partners for one of those assassin organizations the movies love so well. They also just graduated high school. Their organization makes it a point to give their assassins a surface cover of normality, so the two girls are ordered to move in together. Each of them is to take on some kind of shitty side job as a cover as well.

These leads to two problems. Firstly, even though Mahiro and Chisato work very well together, they are less than perfect roommates. Chisato is girly, personable and traditionally pretty where Mahiro wears her natural weirdness on an outside of astonishing social awkwardness; which makes for a bit of a strained living situation. Secondly, MacJobs are horrible, and finding and keeping one is going to be a problem for these two, particularly for Mahiro.

Because looking for part time jobs does not for a proper action comedy make – unless Mahiro fantasizes elaborately about killing her interviewers, as is her understandable wont – there’s also a bit of trouble with a group of yakuza. Particularly the daughter of a mid-level boss is going to turn into a bit of a nemesis for Chisato. On the plus side, these are the sort of troubles lasting friendships are built on.

I wouldn’t have believed it, but Yugo Sakamoto’s mix of Japanese slacker comedy and assassin buddy action comedy is an utterly fantastic piece of work that makes its genre mix work by the simple but difficult to achieve virtue of being good at all the genres it is made of.

The slacker comedy is relatable to anyone who ever had to suffer through job interviews, bad working conditions and insane work, and is certainly made even funnier by the loving depiction of the weird and deeply localized version of crap work the film chooses to inflict on its characters. In particular, there’s a longer sequence of scenes about a maid café that’s funny by virtue of being only lightly exaggerated. Here, the film also demonstrates some of its quieter virtues by putting some actual humanity into the most grotesque situations, which makes it curiously lacking in cynicism for a film about two ruthless professional killers. Of course, the maid café is also the point where the girls’ real jobs and their unloved fake jobs will collide, because Sakamoto’s script is often genuinely clever in working with these kinds of contrasts – for the jokes and for the serious moments.

As an action film, this has that most curious of things – heavily MMA influenced action I find actually fun to look at; it certainly helps that Izawa – who is thirty, so not at all just out of high school – is an experienced stunt performer and screen fighter and sells complex and very technical moves with verve and a kind of manic energy that’s impossible not to admire the hell out of. The climactic fight – that also gives Takaishi plenty of opportunity to shine - is particularly great in this regard. It is also, as is much of the film, inventive and creative in its loving play with clichés and tropes.

Lastly, as a buddy movie, this very simply thrives on the fun chemistry between the two lead actresses, as well as the simple fact that Baby Assassins’ jokes tend to be genuinely funny.

To Kill With Intrigue (1977)

Original title: 劍花煙雨江南

The Martial World. A group known as the Bee Faces (because they really love to put human-faced bees on tattoos and poison darts, as one does) attacks the birthday of Martial World big muck Lei Chi Fung (Ma Chi), in revenge for an attempt at wiping out the Bee Faces fifteen years ago Lei Chi Fung instigated.

Lei’s son Hsiao Lei (Jackie Chan) learns of the attack plans early on, and does his best to drive birthday guests and peers alike away by acting like an ass, instead of, oh, telling them the truth. He does the same with Chin Chin (Yu Ling-Lung), the servant girl carrying his child. He has secretly asked his friend Chen Chun (Shin Il-Ryong), the Vagabond of the Martial World, to take care of her if he doesn’t make it, so we can’t blame him for lacking foresight as well as emotional maturity.

In something of an ironic twist, Hsiao Lei is going to be the only survivor of the massacre of his family, for the leader of the Bee Faces – whom we later learn to be called Ting Chan Yen (Hsu Feng) – spares his life. She also tells him that his father may not always have been the pillar of virtue he knew him as, a deep scar on her face he gave her during the death of her parents, the leaders of the Bee Faces, when she was just five years old speaking to that.

Her reasons for sparing Hsiao Lei despite her far superior kung fu are complicated. In part, she appears to see how much her own act of killing his parents mirror the acts she kills them for; in part she’s rather smitten with him; and in the part she’s actually saying out loud, she’s going to watch him suffer under the sad fate of his family.

During the following weeks, she’s certainly going to stalk Hsiao Lei, in turns declaiming dramatically, repeatedly saving his skin, or just watching him longingly, creepily.

Hsiao Lei for his part is hell-bent on returning to Chin Chin. However, it turns out his good friend Chen Chun might not be as trustworthy a man as he believes him to be. The characters will also get involved in the troubles of the Dragon Escort group of Dragon Five (George Wang Chueh), the nicest guy in the martial world. You can imagine what he’ll eventually get for that.

Much of what has been written about this Jackie Chan wuxia made shortly before Chan would start developing his distinctive screen persona (well, actually two personas, if you ask me) is focussing on blaming Lo Wei’s film for not being “A Jackie Chan Movie”. It certainly isn’t, but once you’ve got over the shock that Jackie was working as a martial artist/actor here and not as the movie star he’d turn into, you should be able to appreciate the film for what it is.

Particularly since “what it is”, is a fantastic late 70s wuxia, full of characters whose internal life is fully externalized through larger than life melodrama, martial artists that are all so utterly committed to their fighting bits that dressing in colour-coded group togs or using floating coffins for one’s entrance just is a normal Tuesday for them. Everybody has a fantastic sense of fashion and style as well, starting with Ting Chan Yen’s generally mono-coloured gowns and certainly not ending with even random assassins walking around with the most striking red hats, all the better to get a dramatically shot entrance.

The martial arts choreography is wonderful as well, combining some great “realistic” skills with moments of fantastic imagination. Ting Chan Yen going at a group of villains with knives is a thing to behold, as is a moment concerning an assassin, a tree, a sharp object and a Jackie kick you have to see to believe. Things are appropriately brutal when they need to be – the main villain’s death is particularly gruesome in that regard.

All of this takes place in front of impressive backdrops. Lo makes incredible use of South Korean locations that are a real selling point for the cinema of a small place like Hong Kong, where the regular viewer often feels acquainted with every nook and cranny a wuxia could be shot in. Lo uses the opportunity to get properly wide-screen staging fights in the most spectacular surroundings he can find, and really making every shot count there.

On a narrative level, this is very much a wuxia where the easy distinctions between good and evil tend to be unclear and shifting, and even good deeds like what Ting will eventually do for Hsiao Lei will be done in the cruellest possible way. In this world, the woman who killed one’s parents can be much more trustworthy than one’s best friend. Of course, the film knows that the death of Hsiao Lei’s parents is the end of Ting’s very own revenge flick, and shows us what happens after the revenge, or rather, the confusion when one survives the only act one has lived for.

Hsu Feng’s portrayal of Ting is highly effective, hitting the high melodramatic notes the film’s tone needs but also showing the nuances of her deeply complicated feelings. There’s an intensity to her performance Chan at this stage can never quite reach, and while he certainly isn’t bad here, he simply can’t match the complexity of anger, longing, and sadness his co-star exudes, and often comes over as just as bit sulky in comparison.

So, instead of reading this as an unsuccessful Jackie Chan vehicle, I rather see To Kill with Intrigue as an excellent Hsu Feng film, and one of Lo Wei’s visually most arresting films.

Three Films Make A Post: Revenge has never been sweeter.

You’ll Never Find Me (2023): There’s a lot to admire in Indianna Bell’s and Josiah Allen’s thriller about a stormy night in an Australian trailer park home, a nightly visitor, and a lot – and I mean a lot – of meaningful stares and portentous dialogue: the sound design is fantastic, the performances are focussed, and it has some genuinely interesting things to say about the violence some men love to inflict of women. However, for me, there’s not enough material here for anything longer than a forty minute short film, so at full length, things feel rather repetitive and drawn out, and everything seems to be restated thrice until the film can lumber to its excellently realized if obvious conclusion.

Thelma (2024): I am genuinely disappointed I didn’t enjoy Josh Margolin’s comedic variation on action movie themes and old age as much as everybody else appears to. It’s not that this is a bad movie, but it is (again!) also a very obvious one: its insights about old age, while played wonderfully by June Squibb and Richard Roundtree, are not exactly incisive – and do tend to the treacly – and the play with action movie tropes stays just as surface level. The humour, as well, never is all that involving.

Taken on the surface level the film actually operates on, it is a fun time and genuinely well done, just don’t go in expecting something that has ambitions beyond making you feel good about your own future of slow decay and dissolution, and everybody you know and love dying (which the film actually tries to make a joke of, because old age loneliness is funny, apparently).

Bad City (2022): Whereas Kensuke Sonomura’s violent cop movie holds more than the homage to classic Japanese V-cinema I was promised. In fact, for being that other movie, it’s not quite violent and crazy enough, and much too interested in character work.

Don’t get me wrong – the action is plenty violent (though, alas, rather MMA-based), pleasantly chaotic and balancing right on the edge of cartoonish fun and brutality appropriate for the material. But this is a film deeply interested in also giving characters proper motivations and relationships it then uses to drive the plot that in its turn is the engine that drives the action sequences. During this, it uses clichés and tropes, and discards them or revels in them as it finds most fitting. It thus actually manages to achieve – between funny-bad jokes and a bit of carnage – a series of emotional beats that actually work. Hell, I found myself caring for the characters as characters, and how often can you say that about an action movie?

DogMan (2023)

Douglas, more typically known as (the) Dogman (Caleb Landry Jones), is arrested by the police while he’s driving a truck full of dogs, wearing a dress drenched in blood. He’s also paraplegic (as it turns out, in a variation readymade for melodrama). In interviews with a police psychiatrist (Jojo T. Gibbs), he starts recounting his peculiar life story, and how it eventually led him to where the film begins.

Caged together with the dogs of his abusive father, he developed and early affinity with the animals that apparently resulted in an ability to speak to dogs so they understand every word he says. Further misadventures eventually find Douglas moving into a proper lair with his gang of dog pound dogs. From there he makes money for dog food by working as a dog-based fixer/vigilante in the Equalizer manner (more Woodward than Washington), and a drag performer in a club. He also has his dog buddies steal jewellery from the houses of the rich. Eventually, the dangers of these combined professions and his general loneliness take their toll. Christ symbolism will be involved.

Most of the films Luc Besson has made in the last decade or so have been terrible - stupid in all the wrong ways and typically lacking in any conviction. Conviction is something DogMan has in spades.

This is a film that carries its inherent weirdness with seriousness and dignity. There’s not a single shot here that suggests Besson thinks the amount of outsider signifiers he’s saddled his protagonist with is a bit silly, no irony, no attempt at distancing himself from the weird and the improbable. Rather, this is a film that looks you straight in the eye and challenges you to take it seriously on exactly the level it has decided on; thus, there’s no weird for weird’s sake freakishness involved here at all, but a sense of a director speaking about things that are actually important to him in a way that’s completely him, utterly unembarrassed.

It succeeds wonderfully, for suddenly, Besson isn’t the hack director going through the motions anymore we’ve known for a while, but again one who uses heightened intensities, realities and stakes as his form of expression, and uses the genre combination of what is situated somewhere between a weird vigilante movie, a curious drama, and an out-there superhero origin story to speak of the feeling of being an outsider, of loneliness, and of the breaks caused by abuse that never heal in a way that feels utterly genuine.

In Jones, Besson has found a congenital partner. There’s a lack of irony and distance in his performance that utterly destroys any possibility to read this as a film about a freak we’re meant to gawk at; in his perfectly unreal and unrealistic surroundings, Jones reaches for simple and clear, yet dramatically heightened, humanity and doesn’t make more of a show out of it than the film he’s in needs. Which is rather a lot, obviously.

That DogMan also contains a couple of dog-based heist sequences which easily beat The Doberman Gang is another point in its favour.

Three Films Make A Post: A new M. Night Shyamalan experience.

Trap (2024): Not surprising anyone who has ever heard anything I said about his films, I did have a very typical M. Night Shyamalan experience with this one, in so much as I found myself in turns annoyed, exasperated and bored by his usual approach of setting up something that could go somewhere interesting but only ever follows through to the lamest possible direction.

To the usual Shyamalan problems (I don’t feel the need to list them yet again), this one adds a dollop of nepotism when our director/writer/producer casts his daughter Saleka as a basically angelic popstar, the facts she’s not great at the whole popstar bit as well as an aggressively terrible actress notwithstanding. Josh Hartnett for his part apparently believes he’s in a comedy, and so mugs and grimaces his way through his cartoon serial killer shtick without any fear of embarrassment.

Well, at least he seems to enjoy his time with the film.

#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead (2024): I found the first thirty minutes of Marcus Dunstan’s slasher comedy/sledgehammer satire on influencers hard going – it’s not easy spending time with characters this broadly drawn to be ridiculously horrible, nor did the first kills really catch my interest. However, once the cast is whittled down a bit and things get into a groove, Dunstan lets some of his instincts for suspense come to the fore, as well as some additional character traits in the gaggle of idiots to be destroyed.

Plus, some of the cheap nastiness actually becomes somewhat funny.

Luminous Woman aka Hikaru Onna (1987): As a lover of the weird and the woolly, I’ve often been rather disappointed with my regular inability to get much out of this sort of thing when approached from an arthouse angle. Case in point is this Shinji Somai joint full of nonsense like hairy holy innocents from Hokkaido, or underground wrestling matches that come with their own opera singers that should be just the kind of things that delight me. Yet I never found myself able to connect with any of it.

That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate Somai’s artful direction, the inventiveness of his framing of scenes, his – famous - long shots, or the way he folds time and space when he feels the need to in a way only cinema can do. In practice, however, I don’t connect to any of this, neither intellectually nor emotionally nor aesthetically, more’s the pity.

Cutter’s Way (1981)

aka Cutter and Bone

The post-Vietnam, post-Watergate USA. We follow a trio of characters who seem too weary and exhausted by the last decade to have anything like hopes or aspirations anymore. A couple of years later, Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) would probably aspire to the horrors of yuppiedom (if ever there ever has been a better sign of desperation, I don’t know about it), but as it stands, he’s working at a Santa Barbara yacht club and making a little money on the side via some low-rent gigolo-ing, in his own, generally passive, way. Bone’s most active desire appears to be his pining for Mo Cutter (Lisa Eichhorn). Mo also happens to be the wife of Bone’s closest friend, Alex Cutter (John Heard). Alex came home from Vietnam damaged in mind and body, having traded in an eye, a leg and an arm for a hankering for self-destruction, some casual cruelty, and a big case of alcoholism.

From time to time, there are flashes of the man Cutter must have been, and it is these pieces of him Mo seems still to cling to, loving a man who most probably doesn’t deserve it anymore, and slowly destroying herself in the process. To make matters more complicated, she reciprocates Bone’s feelings for her, at least in part, which closes the circle of these three like a trap.

Instead of continuing to slowly tumble along towards nothing, an outward force is going to push these characters to their extremes and their doom. Bone witnesses how a killer dumps the body of a young woman in a dumpster; the shadow he sees may or may not belong to local rich man J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott). Given who he is, in the USA in 1981 (or in 2024), this might not even matter.

Once Cutter hears of this, he gets it into his head to take some for of vengeance on Cord as a stand-in for everything he’s bitter about (and perhaps the murdered woman), or blackmail him for money, or both, and he pulls his friends with him, unwilling or not.

Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is what one might call an inconspicuous masterpiece, a film so carefully constructed, one might miss just how great it is exactly for its kind of greatness.

There’s a logic and congruity to the way the plot develops out of the deep flaws of the characters one might miss in its brutal perfection; a precise ugly beauty in Jordan Cronenweth’s photography one might confuse with naturalism; a painful honesty about flawed people in a desperate time – times are always desperate - in Jeffrey Alan FIskin’s script one might not want to face. But the closer you look at Cutter’s Way, the more you see all of these things, how it uses them to embody the quiet desperation of its time and place. It’s no wonder a country would embrace the immoral, anti-human horrors of Reaganism after years of this – at least that way it could pretend to be alive again.

Other elements of the film have grown in importance over the years: the film’s treatment of the unassailability of Power (with a capital letter for sure), of relationships between men and women poisoned by the wounds inflicted in the name of said Power as well as the lies some men have been taught to tell themselves about women (and about themselves), and a sense of anger so strong, acts coming from it will only lead to futile acts of violence bound not to change very much at all.

There’s a deep, painful sense of humanity in here as well, a willingness to show the three protagonists as flawed and broken and often downright shitty (embodied in absolutely perfect performances – especially Eichhorn is a bit of a revelation of complicated nuance) yet still insist on compassion and understanding for them. Well, J.J. Cord never gets that, but then, it is rather the point of Cutter’s Way he’s standing above us mere humans, like the crappy, capitalist godhood we deserve.

Longlegs (2024)

After demonstrating what may or may not be some ESP abilities, young FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is drafted into the hunt for a peculiar serial killer. The killer, let’s call him Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), doesn’t actually appear to lay hands on his victims, but somehow gets them to kill each other, following his own ritualistic specifics.

There may or may not be black magic or Satanism involved; in any case, Lee is going to find herself drawn into proceedings rather more personally than a member of any police force would hope to.

If anyone expected me to be part of the backlash against Oz Perkins’s newest film, a rather wonderful example of weird and highly individual genre cinema also making a surprising amount of money and pleasing many a critic, they probably don’t know me. This thing was made with someone with my tastes as its ideal audience, and I’m certainly not going to pretend otherwise.

While this was certainly very consciously schooled on the aesthetics of Silence of the Lamb and what follows (though Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s wonderful Cure is probably more important here), Longlegs makes clear very early on that it isn’t trying to be even a dramatized “realistic” police procedural or serial killer thriller. It is rather a film that uses elements and tropes of these genres to lure an audience into something stranger and a little more subversive, a world and a headspace built on the kind of nightmare logic that nearly appears to make sense but tends to shift and get blurry around its edges in the moments when you’re not exactly thinking or looking.

Which, really, is pretty much what I expect of Perkins by now. Particularly the way in which the film’s metaphors are well-built to suggest certain interpretations (here about alienation and family), and the plot could nearly neatly resolve but then doesn’t quite is very much in keeping with the director’s modus operandi in his earlier films. This isn’t Perkins being unable to make a movie that is soluble like a crossword puzzle, but him aggressively rejecting the kind of naively rationalist world view that can still believe in such a thing as an expression of reality. Instead of neat resolutions and explanations, this is a film about slowly building dread, the horrors of facing one’s nightmares and still not ending them, and those very bad moments in the middle of the night when you can’t quite discern if there’s a difference between nightmare and waking life.

Needless to say, there are certain, sometimes innocuous, shots in here that I still can’t shake days after having seen the film.

That Longlegs manages to hold up this mood for the whole of its runtime is a little, dark, wonder; that it does so while also offering a perfect, naturalistic performance by Monroe at its core is particularly clever; and that rather a lot of viewers can’t or won’t go where Perkins leads with this one, I won’t blame them for.

I, on the other hand, cannot imagine watching another film this year that’s quite so much me and for me.

Three Films Make A Post: "This is the story of the world's secret that only she and I know."

Weathering with You aka Tenki no ko (2019): This is certainly one of Makoto Shinkai’s lesser films. There’s always a fine line between being emotional and being emotionally manipulative when you like to go for heightened emotional stakes like Shinkai’s anime tend to do, and here, he’s sometimes stepping over that line into obvious attempts at pushing audience buttons. Particularly the last act is simply too melodramatic, so much so its emotional loudness hinders the emotional impact it could possess if it were only holding back a little.

That doesn’t mean this is a bad film. There are certainly quite a few moments of great beauty here, as well as some insight into the teenage psyche – it’s just that the film as a whole doesn’t come together as well as those Shinkai movies that surround it, a great director sometimes being his own worst enemy.

Hell Hole (2024): Whereas this shot in Serbia body horror monster comedy by the Adams Family (minus Zelda Adams) is a downright disappointment. Gone is nearly all of the personality of the family’s other films, the idiosyncratic yet/and awesome decisions to use the weirder approach whenever possible. Instead, we get what once would have been a middling SyFy Original, full of obvious jokes, lots of feet-dragging disguised as dialogue sequences, and very little else beyond the basic competence filmmakers in the lowest budget end acquire over time when they don’t give up.

I wouldn’t be complaining if this were actually a good traditional body horror monster movie with a bit of bite to it. Alas, it feels as if the filmmakers were just ticking boxes on a list of monster movie tropes.

Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters (2019): At times, Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet’s documentary about the great special effects artist Phil Tippett (whose creations certainly made my childhood as much more interesting as Ray Harryhausen’s did for Tippett) also feels a bit like the directors are ticking boxes on how to structure a biography-driven documentary. But then, you get to the next bit of interview with Tippett or one of his peers, and you are struck by the sheer single-minded love these people have for Tippett and the art of hand-made special effects, and can’t help but mirror that feeling right back at them.

The film never manages to acquire an actual thesis about Tippett or his world. Thus, it never turns into the kind of documentary you’d recommend even to people who aren’t terribly interested in their subjects. There is, however, quite a bit to say for the film’s willingness to let Tippett and his peers simply speak about their lives and times, and work.

The Third Man (1949)

Pulp western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) comes to a post-war Vienna that’s all Dutch angles, high shadows and people of dubious trustworthiness. His childhood friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has lured him there with a vague job offer, and where Harry calls, Holly goes, vagueness or not. Alas, when Holly actually arrives, his friend is not in a fit state for providing a job, for he is about to be buried. Apparently, Harry Lime died in an automobile accident, not the kind of death you’d expect for a larger than life personage like him.

Apart from Holly, Harry Lime leaves behind an actress lover with a secret (Alida Valli) and British and Russian military policemen so happy about his death, they’re not going to actually investigate it. As Holly soon learns, his friend was apparently involved in large scale black market operations.

Holly really can’t believe that of his roguish but not evil childhood buddy and sets out to find a bit more about the Harry Lime situation than the police is ready to tell him. While Holly is doing that, he stumbles upon the fact that a mysterious third man appears to have been part of the accident that killed Harry. His friend’s death might very well have been murder. Together with Harry’s lover Anna Schmidt, Holly goes further and further done a proper rabbit hole of an investigation, while of course falling for the lady.

Carol Reed’s The Third Man is an indelible classic, situated somewhere where noir and Hitchcockian thriller meet. I’d argue that its portrayal of individuals trapped in the aftermath of a political conflagration, in the hand of secretive powers they can’t fully comprehend, is an important milestone on the road to the kind of pessimism the 70s conspiracy thriller would deal in. This version of Vienna is the incubation point of many things that would go wrong and grow worse in the coming two decades, as well as the way the movies would look at them.

Stylistically, I find The Third Man particularly fascinating as an example on how to use real locations (among some choice sets) and make them look unreal and threatening, how to see and shoot them as places where the shadows outside do indeed mirror the shadows inside the hearts of the characters. The abundance of Dutch angles portray an off-kilter world, the huge, often more than simply thick, shadows are bringing to the surface the undercurrents of reality in ways only a movie can.

As a German, I’m always surprised by the film’s use of actual Austrian actors for the minor roles, who, unlike what you encounter in most Hollywood films, speak actual idiomatic German, and whose dialogue feels utterly probable for the time and place. This adds a further layer of reality only accessibly to an audience who understands what these actors are saying.

There’s a very specific quality to The Third Man that suggests a film where everything comes together just right: the obvious visual artistry, the interest in getting details right, the interplay between heightened style and naturalism, the acting (Welles leaving a deep impression of a very complex character in only a couple of scenes, Cotton and Valli probably giving the performances of their lives without looking as if they are trying), the curious decisions that turn out to be just right (that zither score is such a strange idea, when you think about it). At the same time, it is one of those highly constructed films that never feels as if it were trying all that hard – it just is.

The Primevals (2023)

After Sherpa kill a rampaging yeti in Tibet, a tiny, not quite official expedition, lead by Dr Claire Collier (Juliet Mills), goes on the look-out for more of them. Apart from Collier, the group consists of retired big game hunter – as well as owner of one of the best names imaginable – Rondo Montana (Leon Russom), long-time yeti-believer and male lead Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), anthropology student Kathy (Walker Brandt) and yeti hater (and local guide) Siku (Tai Thai).

There’s more than a curious yeti rampage or two going on, though, and soon, the expedition lands in the middle of (Edgar Rice)Burroughs country.

Apparently mostly shot in 1994, this labour of love directed by special effects expert David Allen (who died in 1999), was left unfinished on the shelves of Full Moon pictures. Years after a crowd-funding campaign to finish the film, it has finally been released.

And it is very much a film made with someone exactly like me as its ideal audience in mind. There’s an immense sense of love on screen for a lot of the best things in life: Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation, pulp adventure in the spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doug McClure adventures, the 80s adventure movie boom, the Shaver Mystery (or similar fun Fortean matter), and Nigel Kneale read as pulp.

All of these things come to life again on screen here in a way that’s obviously pretty nostalgic, but also realized with the kind of enthusiasm and craft that transcends mere nostalgia to turn this not into a copy of the tradition but a genuine, breathing part of it.

Sure, one could nit-pick that the film’s portrayal of non-Western cultures isn’t great, the acting doesn’t always hit the mark completely – though Mills in the scientist role typically reserved for a man is great, as is Leon Russom talking about the eyes of dying giraffes – and that there’s a little too much monster-less slack between the incredible Sherpa vs yeti start of the movie. However, all of this is counteracted by the sheer joyfulness of the project, its lack of self-conscious irony and all the love and care that has been put into every second on screen. Not bad for a movie that nearly wouldn’t have existed in finished form at all.

The Delinquents (2023)

Original title: Los delincuentes

Aging bank employee Morán (Daniel Elías) steals a very particular amount of money from his bank. It’s more or less exactly double the sum he would earn by working for them to retirement age. His idea is this: hide the money, get arrested, and spend three and a half years in prison instead of twenty as a bank employee. The money he gives to his colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) who only learns of the plan after the money is already stolen, for safe-keeping until Morán gets out. Afterwards, Román will get half of the money and be free from doing a crap job for the rest of his life as well.

If he doesn’t take the money, Morán will name him as an accomplice, so Román doesn’t feel he has much of a choice in the matter, though his conscience doesn’t always let him rest easily.

The rest of the film concerns Morán’s adventures on the run and in prison, Román’s suffering under the bank’s intensely passive aggressive reaction to the theft, and various matters of freedom, love and sudden influxes of quiet beauty.

Slow Cinema is an interesting thing to me: about half of the films from the not-genre I know, I find insufferably pompous exactly because they’re so fixated on not being pompous but merely ponderous. The other half, I tend to be rather in love with, though these films often aren’t obviously different from the ones I can’t stand at all. It is, alas, a matter of mood, vibes, feeling, or however one might want to call it, something that’s even less quantifiable than most things concerning art (popular or un).

For its first third, I wasn’t really sure if I was on board with The Delinquents’ apparent project of turning heist movie tropes quotidian and drawing them out endlessly. Yet slowly (sorry) but surely, the film did work its particular kind of magic by digressing into directions that have little to do with deconstructing or slowing down heist movie tropes, or making them more “realistic” by making them less dramatic.

Instead, director Rodrigo Moreno starts from the idea of the heist movie as a dream of freedom – freedom  from the shackles of the capitalist project, from the emptiness of the daily drudge – and follows that idea to the many places it leads: love, nature, poetry and sudden bursts – perhaps too dramatic a term for a film that ever hardly is that – of an intense visual beauty achieved through patience and care, a deep interest in the small gestures that make up daily lives as much as in the way small changes of light, a poem read through years and years or hair turning grey and thin can be beautiful.

I’m not sure there’s actually that much intellectual substance to the film’s philosophy, or even depth to its characters, but the longer the film goes on, the less these concrete things turn out to be the point here. Rather, it is moods, feelings and hopes this seems to be about in the end, and that moment when a series of shots in a film overwhelms you not because of any technical accomplishment (though there is a lot of technical accomplishment here if you are into that sort of thing) but because the ineffable way it touches you.

The Delinquents is often very funny as well, in a weird and sideways manner that’ll not be for everyone as much as everything else about this won’t be.

Paranormal Surveillance Camera 3-7 (2013-2014)

Given the general thinness of these things, it makes sense to write about the entries in this Japanese POV horror series in bulk. They’re interesting – and typically fun to watch for the hour most of these run – but they’re not exactly deep.

Formally, the series increasingly leaves behind the “Where’s Waldo?” (or should that be “Where’s Sadako”?) one camera angle pieces in favour of a surveillance camera bit followed by a POV horror style investigation by the fake crew of the show, during which they interview witnesses – only seldom with blurred-out faces –, pop in with their occult consultant, the witch/warlock/wizard (depending on the subtitle of any given entry) KATOR – always in all caps – and poke around in dark places. On one hand, this shift into the method every other Japanese POV horror fake documentary series operates by is a bit of a shame, on the other, there’s only so much you can do with a single, nailed-on camera view, so it’s probably for the better.

The series gains another unique selling point, however, in that it turns increasingly comedic from about part 5 on, with a weird off-beat humour you’ll either loather or love. So suddenly, there’s a pretty bizarre sequence where the intrepid crew plays catch with an invisible man but has problems following simple left and right instructions; another one about a man suffering from “spiritual allergies” that make him incredibly easily possessed by ghosts and ghoulies, protecting himself by covering his whole body in nylon stockings; the curious tale of the dude who catches ghosts in garbage bags and collects them just like any other nerd would, while his mum looks on sighing yet indulgingly. Not to speak of part 7’s high point/low point, the tale of a chicken that lays wish-granting eggs and is accidentally hounded to death by our reporters.

It’s not quite as mad and wonderful as what Koji Shiraishi gets up to on any given day, but it’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, if you like your cheapo POV horror with a dollop humour.

One Shot (2021) / One More Shot (2024)

The main selling point of James Nunn’s tale about a Navy Seals squad lead by Jake Harris (house favourite Scott Adkins) having to survive a terrorist siege when they’re about to guard the transport of an inmate of one of those US torture camps for prisoners that officially don’t exist anymore is that is indeed a one shot movie. Logistically, that’s a rather impressive feat even in the age of digital editing, particularly since the film’s action sequences are often surprisingly complicated; I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to get an choreography together for the hand to hand combat.

Despite the pretty unpleasant torture camp setting, and the restrictions of the one shot style, there’s quite a bit of decently effective character work here as well, enough so that every character at least has believable motivations – even some of the villains are allowed to be human beings. Human beings played by some fine character actors and a very game Ashley Greene to boot, so there’s a surprising amount of humanity in between the exciting murder and explosions.

Made three years later or so, One More Shot takes place only a couple of flight hours after the first film. Harris, the only survivor of his team and his prisoner Amin Mansur (Waleed Elgadi) land not exactly in the country they were expecting to end up in, and soon find themselves thrust into a mercenary attack on the airport, as masterminded by one Robert Jackson (Michael Jai White). As it turns out, the supposed Islamist terrorism case is only a set-up for an attempted coup in the USA.

Harris, not exactly the biggest fan of Mansur after the first film, finds himself dragged into protecting the man as well as Mansur’s pregnant wife while also figuring out what exactly is going on.

This second film is a nice escalation of the first one, sharing most of its virtues – character actors doing their stuff admirably (hi, Tom Berenger) under one shot circumstances, and action sequences that look bigger and even more complicated to set up. The car crash bit does frankly look a bit insane to me to actually have been pulled off.

The plot’s turn into the more convoluted does sit better with me as the old evil Muslim thing but it also does make the second movie somewhat less plausible. Fortunately, I’m not really going into a Scott Adkins movie looking for plausibility – everything else you might want from a low budget action movie, these two films deliver.

Three Films Make A Post: Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they can't see you.

Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch (2024): I still find Durch Marich’s Horror in the High Desert movies some of the most likeable projects in American (the Japanese side operates on a whole different level) POV horror low budget cinema. But with film number three, I – not a viewer typically needy for explanations – do find myself growing rather impatient with the film’s unwillingness to even show or say so much you’d need an explanation for it. In film number three, there’s great set-up work in the first act, much flabby nothing in the middle and a climax that has two or three shots but delivers so little it’s difficult to truly think of it as a climax, and not just a stopping point for the inevitable fourth movie, in which again little of import will happen (not happen – you know what I mean).

Beautiful Noise (2014): Eric Green’s music documentary is billed as an “in-depth exploration” of the roots of the genre the film goes out of its way not to call shoegaze, but in truth, it is a painfully  superficial and surface-level exploration of it. Instead of focussing on a handful of bands as a core for style and sound, this tries to squeeze a dozen or more of them into ninety minutes, chasing through soundbites and interview bits and pieces that could be revelatory in the proper context without ever arriving at anything like an argument or a point. There were bands, they were making music, their sound was sort of revolutionary and very influential, and that’s all we truly are allowed to learn through this approach.

Then there’s a terrible reliance on interviews with “famous fans”: Billy Corgan is rambling, on drugs, wearing the worst hat, and has no clue (as expected), Wayne Coyne appears comparatively sober (gasp!) and has little insight to add, and only The Cure’s Robert Smith appears to provide any musical insight.

Mayhem! aka Farang (2023): Despite the excitable English market title, this (mostly) Thailand set French action movie by Xavier Gens with the excellent Nassim Lyes as a man with a past finding his new-found family peace disturbed by old grudges is a rather slow affair for the first hour or so of its runtime. What’s there of action early on seems rather perfunctory, and the too-slow build-up of all the expected clichés of this sort of affair make the first two thirds a bit of a slog to get through, though certainly a professionally shot one.

Once the action comes, it certainly is gritty, bloody, and competently staged, yet I found myself watching it from a certain remove, too much of it having been spent on building up the expected early on, and a just as expected “plot twist” later.

I also have to say that I’m a bit tired of action movies killing off the female lead to motivate their male heroes to violence. At least when it’s done in as mechanical a fashion as it is done here.