Waxworks (1924)

Original title: Das Wachsfigurenkabinett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hellish Spiders (1968)

Original title: Arañas infernales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost Soul (1977)

aka The Forbidden Room

Original title: Anima persa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Films Know What You Did Last Summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original title: Strannaya istoriya doktora Dzhekila I mistera Khayda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trompe l’oiel (1975)

aka The Broken Mirror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cute Devil (1982)

Original title: Kawaii akuma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silverado (1985)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swing Girls (2004)

aka Suwingu gâruzu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imperial Tomb Raiders (1973)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Sonja (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honeydripper (2007)

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

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

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

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

Striking Rescue (2024)

Bai An (Tony Jaa), a man with a rather expert talent for inflicting physical punishment on dozens of goons at once, is going on a bit of a personal crusade through the underworld of a South East Asian (or the censors would never allow some of the elements of the plot if it took place in China) country. Turns out murdering his pregnant wife during the course of some corporate/criminal business wasn’t the villains’ greatest idea.

Because movies – supposedly - need a bit more of a plot, Bai An rescues the teenage daughter of the corporate overlord he takes to be the man behind the murder, and finds himself drawn into protecting her while still murdering his way through the underworld and what turns out to be a conspiracy.

This Chinese direct to streaming action movie by Siyu Cheng is positioned as something of a return to form of its leading man, troubled Thai action star Tony Jaa, and if you’re an old-fashioned lover of watching Jaa smash his elbow (and other parts of his anatomy) into bad guys’ heads like me, you’ll be quite happy with the fact that Jaa is indeed still a fantastic screen fighter up to all kinds of inspired physical shenanigans. One whose elbows you want to keep far away from your head.

The plot, such as it is, is decent enough to hold the action scenes together, though the film could have lost its final scene that’s built on a misguided believe we care one way or the other for a certain character, or feel the need to see them punished, as well as the Chinese morality police mandated text about how Jaa’s character is going to be punished for his violent acts off-camera, because order and virtue and blah blah blah.

Even the subplot about the teenager, the sort of thing that can get pretty annoying right quick, meant to humanize proceedings and our violent protagonist, works well enough, also thanks to a perfectly decent performance by Chen Duo-Yi (I believe) as said teenager.

The action itself is brutal and varied – as we like it around here. Cheng knows what he has in the screen fighters, martial artists and stuntpeople assembled here, and appears to see it as his job to make them look as good as possible doing their things. Which, obviously, should be a given when you direct an action movie centred on a beloved martial arts star, but I’ve seen too many directors obfuscating instead of enhancing what’s happening in action scenes to take this sort of approach for granted.

So, yes, Striking Rescue is indeed the comeback we were promised, possibly the one we deserved.

Three Films Make A Post: Elvis Has Left the Building

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015): It wouldn’t have been difficult to tell this specific tale as an utter freakshow. It is, after all, the of story a horse breeder with musical ambition and a voice naturally a lot like that of Elvis Presley who got roped into the role of “Orion” – a masked singer heavily insinuated to be Elvis returned shortly after his death, somewhat bigger, buffer, and younger, and built to make Sun Records (the Nashville version, so no bad thoughts about Sam Phillips necessary) a whole lot of money, at least for a time.

Director Jeanie Finlay doesn’t at all, but instead creates a sympathetic portrayal of a guy who had a dream he finds fulfilled in a way that’s making him painfully unhappy, and the curious cultural impact of Elvis on the more peculiar parts of American culture. It’s a lovely thing, and that most pleasant of surprises – a documentary about a curiosity that turns out to be a film about people.

Bored Hatamoto: Island of No Return (1960): In this outing of the jidai geki pulp detective series, the Bored Hatamoto (as always embodied quite wonderfully by Utaemon Ichikawa) makes his way to the shadowed streets and the foreigners’ quarter of Nagasaki, where he finds a lot of moody filmmaking by Yasushi Sasaki, who makes much of the sets, those exotic foreigners (like the same two red-headed Western guys wandering through the background of many a scene, or the Japanese guys in blackface wearing turbans), yet another plan to dispose of the shogun (this time via the drug trade), musical numbers, running sword battles and my very favourite trope in this sort of movie – the Japanese actors very badly pretending to be dastardly (sigh) Chinese who turn out to indeed be meant to be Japanese villains pretending to be Japanese.

This is particularly rollicking good fun, with everyone involved in top form. There’s really something to be said for industrialized studio filmmaking, at least when it comes to Toei films from this era (and the next two).

Crimson Bat, the Blind Swordswoman (1969): Apparently, every studio in Japan wanted a slice of the blind swordsperson cake after the success of the Zatoichi films. Shochiku gave us this comparatively short-lived – four entries are next to nothing for a Japanese movie series – entry in the canon, following the adventures of blind swordswoman Oichi (Yoko Matsuyama), in this first film directed by veteran director Sadatsugu Matsuda.

The film’s pacing suffers a bit from too much flashback backstory, but whenever the pretty delightful Yoko Matsuyama stops crying (about her run-away mum, having been blinded by lightning, and years later a murdered gramps) and goes to business with her red sword cane, Matsuda does direct like a young man instead of one right at the end of his career, with some pretty fancy choreography, excellent bad guys (among them eternal villain Bin Amatsu as a gent named “Devil” Denzo), and frame compositions to die (be killed by blind swordswoman?) for.

Missing Child Videotape (2024)

Original title: ミッシング・チャイルド・ビデオテープ

Keita (Rairu Sugita) is somewhat obsessed with helping find kids who get lost in woods and mountains - and he’s rather good at it, as well. He doesn’t appear to let anyone get very close to him. His roommate Tsusaka (Amon Hirai), a part time teacher with the ability to see ghosts (being Japanese, the film is very matter of fact about this), is probably his closest friend, and even he doesn’t really know what drives Keita. He does know that Keita’s little brother disappeared somehow when they were both still children, but his friend has never really gone into any details.

This changes when one of the parcels of parental detritus Keita’s mother has begun to send him following the death of his father contains a videotape young Keita himself shot on the day of the disappearance. There’s something off about the thing apart from its inexplicable content, and slowly but surely, a supernatural dread begins to engulf the two friends, as if something other than human – and certainly not just a little kid’s ghost – were calling for them.

Eventually, they, as well as a journalist (Kokoro Morita) who has become interested in the case for reasons more complicated as they first appear, decide to travel to Keita’s childhood country home. There, things become increasingly disturbing.

In many aspects, Ryota Kondo’s Missing Child Videotape – despite the title not a POV horror film – harkens back to the height of J-horror. Its mythology – as vaguely explained as it is - is certainly steeped as much in Japanese supernatural folklore as it is in contemporary internet interpretations of the same. Unlike its obvious predecessors, it isn’t really interested in updating the technological elements of the haunting much further than the late analogue, early digital era they were situated in. This doesn’t appear so much as an attempt at being retro than a focus on a certain timelessness. These supernatural things don’t belong to any specific time and place, are indeed dissolving our concepts of time and place, so the film isn’t interested in being about technology that hasn’t settled into becoming a thing of a vague past (even for us who experienced it live) either.

Formally, this takes a lot from the approach of Kiyoshi Kurosawa in his J-horror phase, more so than from Takashi Shimizu (who produced the film), or Hideo Nakata. There’s a slowness and calmness to the film that feels very Kurosawa, shots that linger, as well as a build up of dread that does only very seldom end in anything traditionally shocking (though when it does, it hits). This is all about creating a mood of dread, of quiet but intense isolation, and the equally quiet pressure to open one’s old wounds again and again.

The film’s very deliberate pacing and its unspectacular treatment of what would be its main set pieces will probably not work for some viewers – this is never leaving the border between slow and deliberate and just slow – and its unwillingness to explain itself in detail goes against much of the current taste. You can practically feel the irate YouTubers babbling about “plot holes” when they mean “crap we have to figure out for ourselves or might even have to accept as ambiguous, like much in actual life”.

Me, I felt utterly at home in Missing Child Videotape’s idea of dread, its pacing and its ambiguities. I am, indeed, a bit floored by it.

Out Come the Wolves (2024)

Sophie (Missy Peregrym) and her fiancée Nolan (Damon Runyan) have come to Sophie’s old cabin home in the sticks so Nolan can have an actual hunting experience he feels he needs for an article he’s writing. Sophie isn’t into hunting anymore and has even turned vegan, so she has asked her childhood friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky) to take Nolan out hunting for a day while she stays at the cabin. Kyle comes complete with a never resolved and pretty damn unhealthy longing for Sophie and an alcohol problem you can practically smell through the screen.

Tensions mount between the three even the evening before the hunt, and it is this very human shittiness that’ll make the situation much worse when the hunters encounter a pack of very hungry wolves in the woods and things devolve from there in exactly the ways you’d fear them to.

Most people, me most certainly included, go into animal attack movies for the animal attacks, and expect the human business to be relegated to filler and other things you really want a movie to get over with to get to the meat of proceedings.

That’s not at all the case with Adam MacDonald’s Out Come the Wolves – here, it’s the naturalistic portrayal of a very human situation that might have ended in violence even without the wolves that drags you in and hold you. The actor trio clearly understand this, and so really get their teeth into their roles and the performances, treating the human business as a serious drama that’s just as important as all the wolf fighting later on. This creates an impressive amount of tension before the hunt starts, and leaves a viewer with the proper amount of dread, the more cosmicist sibling of suspense. It is not at all about the question that things will go wrong, it’s only how they will go wrong. If you want, you can even read the wolves more as a hungry metaphor bringing to life all the repressed feelings of the characters, nature, particularly the red in tooth and claw kind of the hunt, bringing out the worst in people.

MacDonald presents the action part of the film with an admirable relentlessness, a direct brutality that makes a wonderful contrast to the cold beauty of his nature photography. There’s a sense of desperation to the final act most films of this kind can’t hope to grasp – but then, most films of this kind don’t put this much effort into creating actual characters to confront nature (the outside one as well as their own).

Three Films Make A Post: Fear The Darkness

The Black Water Vampire (2014): This piece of POV horror directed and written by Evan Tramel is a bit of a strange one. At times, it is a clever bit of myth-building, and culminates in a surprisingly exciting climax with actual special effects. At other times, it mindlessly reproduces beats from The Blair Witch Project regardless if they actually fit into its plot and concept or not.

It’s a genuinely confusing mix of the inept, the effectively creepy and the clever, and one’s liking for it will most probably be based on how little that first bit turns one off.

Nightmare (2000): This South-Korean movie directed by Ahn Byeong-ki (who would soon go on to the much superior Phone) attempts to ride two of the horror waves of its time at once. There’s certainly a world where you could mix the Asian ghost movie revival following Hideo Nakata’s Ringu with the American teen slasher revival, and have a successful little movie.

Unfortunately, this drab concoction isn’t from that world and has little to offer beyond its dark, moody photography and an ensemble whose prettiness gives any US teen slasher cast a run for its money. The pacing is too slow and the supernatural elements and the I Saw What You Did Last Summer business don’t really do much for each other. Worse, the film’s narrative structure with flashbacks inside of flashbacks is way too much for the very basic plot to carry, and the only thing it does is hold back that our supposed protagonists are even more horrible people than they at first appear to be for an hour or so.

I was rooting for the ghost, and not just because she is played by Ha Ji-Won.

Coma (2022): In some scenes, Bertrand Bonello’s mix of essay film, science fiction and COVID induced coming of age fantasy is nearly brilliant, attempting to feel its way into the mind of an eighteen year old girl (Louise Labèque), suffering from a particularly bad case of teenage desperation at a world that’s clearly made to make us all desperate and what I’d describe as a parasocial infection. In others, it is that kind of nearly insufferable type of French art house movie which hides its intellectual simplicity by expressing its simple ideas in as complicated and obtuse a manner as possible.

And let’s not even start on the film’s start and finish, when Bonello explains exactly what his film is supposed to mean - which may lead the more cynical among us to the suggestion he may have tried to make a movie whose themes viewers can understand by watching it and thinking about it.

Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor (2023)

Margot (Bridget Rose Perrotta) and her girlfriend Rebecca (Destiny Leilani Brown) spend much of their free time visiting the – mostly supposedly haunted – sites of mysterious and unsolved murder cases for Margot’s YouTube channel. Rebecca’s only there for Margot, who tends to get a bit obsessive about “her cases”, whereas Rebecca takes care of the more real business of things like actually earning money when Margot isn’t dragging her around the creepiest parts of America.

For their newest case, Margot has also invited her brother Chase (James Liddell) to join in on the fun – perhaps not the best idea if one keeps in mind he’s just had some kind of mental breakdown.

Particularly since Margot has rented the Carmichael Manor for their newest excursion, the scene of unexplained murder/disappearances, and supposedly so haunted, nobody actually wants to stay there for longer than a night. As it turns out, the place and what happened there is connected to the Abaddon Hotel as known from the other Hell House LLC movies, and comes complete with a set of creepy clown costumes on mannikins that look rather a lot like those creeping around some viewers’ brains since the earlier films in the series. Margot and company will indeed figure out what happened at the Manor, and find it – or something very much like it - happening to themselves to.

I really liked the first Hell House LLC by director/writer Stephen Cognetti a lot, with its mix of genuinely interesting characterisation and creative shocks that made great use of the POV horror format. My interest in the sequels flagged rather heavily – there was so much explaining of the horror’s background myth, I felt myself exposited into disinterest.

That’s not a problem with this fourth Hell House LLC film. Cognetti’s still interested in worldbuilding, but here, he again hits the spot where explanations are hinted at and connections shown instead of explained out loud, leaving the space wide open to create an actual sense of dread.

Which the film does very well indeed. There’s some perfect creepy mood building throughout its first act that creates a delightful feeling of dread which very effectively underpins all of the nice little shocks to come. And Cognetti is truly great at creating little horror set pieces, jump scares and moments of outright creepiness of a type that’s perfect for the POV horror format. There’s nothing of the coyness of not showing anything here that can haunt POV horror/found footage. The direction uses deliberation and intelligence to decide what to show and what to insinuate, combined with an excellent sense of timing to create some memorable moments. The basic creepiness of the clown suits may even detract from how good Cognetti is at this sort of thing.

Which – along with the effective if not deep characterisation – makes Hell House LLC Origins: The Carmichael Manor a wonderful outing in the series.

Case of a Young Lord 1 & 2 (1956)

Original titles: 若さま侍捕物手帖 地獄の皿屋敷 & 若さま侍捕物手帖 べらんめえ活人剣

These two one hour films directed by Kinnosuke Fukada (about whose body of work I otherwise know very little) are really one two-part movie, so I’m treating them as such here.

Edo era Japan. The somewhat excitable city is struck by a curious series of break-ins into the warehouses of a recently deceased pawnbroker during which nothing is stolen. These break-ins are perhaps committed by a mysterious samurai wearing a female oni mask. Because violence appears to be imminent, and indeed soon a murder occurs, the police ask for the help of a young man who’ll only ever be called the Young Lord (Hashizo Okawa) during the course of the series.

He’s apparently a rich loafer from a somewhat important family (one might argue he’s the most important young loafer in the whole of the shogunate), spending his youth on sake, a geisha with a huge crush on him and occasional song, but he’s also a brilliant amateur detective. The Young Lord soon figures out some connections between the break-ins and a plate once bestowed upon the family of a hatamoto by an earlier shogun, the noble marriage market, and other things of interest.

Apart from that mysterious masked samurai, there are others with an interest in the whole affair. Some of them of the kind of murderous disposition (and a bunch of henchmen) that makes it a happy coincidence the Young Lord is also a brilliant swordsman.

For a sick day morning of light entertainment, there’s little that’s better than this sort of jidai geki/chanbara mystery Toei were so adept at at the time. This series – two thirds of which are available with decent English subtitles if one knows where to look – is based on a newspaper series by Masayuki Jo, and adds a lot of pulpy fun to the nicely plotted mystery business, including not just that delights like that samurai in the wonderful mask (whose identity reveal is even more delightful in a “were they even allowed to do that in 1956?” sort of way), running battles with hordes of assassin mooks, and an honest to the godhood of your choice mechanical death-trap.

This joyful pulp goodness is filmed by Fukada with a sense of verve and the usual high technical skill of Japanese studio filmmaking of the era. The night sword fights are particularly well staged, even though this still belongs to the “waving swords around” era of sword fighting choreography, and doesn’t feature the blood or cutting noises that would come to be so stylistically important to all sorts of Japanese genre cinema in the coming decade.

Ozawa makes for a pleasant lead, and shows a particularly effective ability of shifting from lightness to grimness and earnestness, so we the audience have no problem believing that his pretty young man is also very dangerous indeed when ne needs to be.

Three Films Make A Post: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Witches’ Well (2024): A successful horror writer (writer/director/producer/editor/cinematographer Amanda K. Morales) on a research trip to Edinburgh encounters a stalker faking supernatural phenomena, and perhaps something supernatural as well.

This short and to the point piece of POV horror by (nearly) one woman band Morales is a pretty neat piece of work that tells a simple but not too simple story efficiently, doesn’t overstay its welcome with its one hour runtime and even gets a couple of decent stabs at the nature of belief in.

An Unknown Encounter: A True Account of the San Pedro Haunting (1997): This “documentary” about an actual paranormal case as directed by Barry Conrad, one of the men who concocted (or experienced, if you’re the eternal optimist) it, is a glorious mix of bullshit, genuinely creepy nonsense, bad science, bad faith, the kind of “actual footage” that manages never to film anything supernatural occurring because (what a surprise) nobody ever points the camera in the right direction at the right time, and perfectly cheesy “recreations” of everything these guys didn’t manage to capture on film (which is basically everything supernatural that couldn’t be easily faked).

While I believe not a single word of it – and abhor the obsession with orbs, the last resort of the desperate paranormal bullshitter – the whole thing is great fun when taken as the fiction it is. Bonus points for being a wonderful time capsule of the unsexy 90s I remember from my teenage years and featuring some excellently overblown narration and presentation by Ferdy Mayne.

The Widow (2020): Clearly heavily inspired by elements of my beloved Blair Witch Project, though only intermittently using POV horror elements, this Russian production by Ivan Minin is a perfectly fine little horror movie that features some impressive Russian forests right out of the most gothic of folk tales, and all the greatest hits of lost in the woods stalked by a witch horror, shot moodily and paced well enough for a fun evening of people dying in various somewhat horrible ways. There are even some moments here that go a bit further – shots of people whose faces shaded by hoods may not exist, haystacks randomly stacked up in the forest for no reason beyond the folkloric (the best reason) – these are the sorts of things I watch random cheap horror for.

Ghost Killer (2024)

Passive and more than a little alienated college student Fumika Matsuoka (Akari Takaishi) goes through life with only the minimum required amount of enthusiasm. She likes to introduce herself with “just another college student”, which might be the purest expression of non-suicidal youthful ennui possible. Her life takes quite a turn when she picks up a bullet casing on her way home.

Suddenly, Fumika finds herself haunted by the ghost of murdered assassin Kudo (Masanori Mimoto), one of those near-mythical super-fighters doing that kind of job in the movies instead of the boring psychopaths of real life. When she invites him in by giving him her hand, Kudo can even possess Fumika and pilot her body. Kudo believes that he might be able to pass on if Fumika lends him her body to kill the people responsible for his death, which might be preferrable to having a middle-aged dead guy hanging around you for the rest of your life.

Fumika, a woman of a generally non-murderous disposition, isn’t into the idea of lending her body for bloody vengeance at first, but after Kudo helps her out with some toxic masculinity problems that turn out to be not completely unrelated to his former business, his vengeance might also save her life.

Kensuke Sonomura is the action and martial arts choreographer of the rather wonderful Baby Assassins movies, but his own directorial efforts until now suffered from scripts too bare-bones even for action movies. Getting Baby Assassins writer/director Yugo Sakamoto to do the scripting honours and teaming up straight action actor Mimoto with half of Baby Assassins’ leads in form of Takaishi finally brings out the best in the guy – turns out Sonomura’s love for intricately choreographed and highly technical martial arts fights also mixes wonderfully with Sakamoto’s sense of humour and humanity when Sonomura’s the man on the director’s chair. There’s a sense of human stakes here Sonomura’s earlier films lacked for me. As in the Baby Assassins films, Takaishi’s style of expressive acting is a wonderful foible for the more limited talents of a great action actor/actress in this regard, while she is by now able to show off some pretty great on-screen action chops as well, though the film does shift to Mimoto’s body for about half of the action.

Pleasantly, and frankly surprisingly, given how Japanese films often go, there are no attempts at sexualising the relationship of the main characters – in fact, the early victims of some righteous ass-whupping are the only creeps of that sort on screen here. In fact, one of the ways the film justifies the increasing violence is by showing us an action-movified version of the kind of crap women all too often have to go through in real life.

While the action is as fast (and I mean fast), furious and regular as one would hope for, and the jokes as well-timed as expected, the emotional beats are just as important to Ghost Killer, so these characters in their somewhat absurd world and situation feel believable  and real enough to care about. And even though Kudo is quite the bad-ass, this isn’t the case of a Steven Seagal bully “hero” – there are physical and emotional stakes here that turn this into more than a pure action display.

The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (1968)

Original title: 一代劍王

Swordsman Tsai Yieng-Chieh (Tien Peng) is obsessed with vengeance. He is hunting down the men who killed his family to acquire a valuable sword when he was still a child.

But his straightforward way to slaughtering a quartet of vile men is getting increasingly complicated and morally grey. Even though he is trying to keep´cool and removed from the world, connection is not to be escaped: he gets help, if he want to or not, by people with agendas of their own. There’s Flying Swallow (Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng) who saves him from a deadly poison for reasons having something to do with not repeating the injustices of previous generations (and probably love, as well), and who will indeed turn out to be the daughter of one of the men Tsai is planning to take vengeance on. Then there’s Black Dragon (Chiang Nan), the greatest swordsman in the martial world (he’s got a little medal that says so), who helps out our protagonist because he just needs to have a duel with him when the whole vengeance business is over and done with.

Eventually, even one of those horrible killers Tsai has set out to kill right back will turn out to have repented, and be quite helpless now.

I really have underrated director Joseph Kuo. Some of his films may have been shoddy attempts to jump on the newest trends, but at least this early in his career, he was also able to make a proper masterpiece like this wuxia. At first, it appears to be a well-shot but straightforward vengeance tale, with a straightforward hero hunting down straightforward villains for straightforward reasons in a straightforward manner. But with every additional character Kuo introduces, things become less easy and less clear, vengeance turns out to not be just in every case, and the obsession of the martial world with very clear and strict rules of conduct not fit for the more complicated world of the human heart. These rules turn out not be an ethical way to lead one’s life, but a cage one traps oneself and others in.

Visually, Kuo couches this tale in often beautiful and poetic nature shots that position the human drama in a world that mirrors and comments on it, and at times dynamic, at times focussed swordfights. It’s all wonderfully of a piece, where what at first appear to be distractions will turn out to be important parts of the film’s philosophical argument – it’s rather astonishing coming from a typically distractible director like Kuo.

Three Films Make A Post: Torment is just the beginning.

The Butterfly House aka Pernikahan Arwah (2025): A couple’s wedding preparations are disturbed when the groom’s family curse starts making things difficult. For reasons of symmetry, this curse has quite a bit to do with weddings.

I found Paul Agusta’s piece of Indonesian horror to be a pleasant example of the form. It is neither as gruesome as some horror films from the country, nor as soap operatic, instead inhabiting a middle ground of the perfectly decent, with nice enough horror sequences, good enough acting and a decently flowing script.

1978 (2025): I expected a little more of a film set during the Argentinean military dictatorship where some torturers and their victims encounter something perhaps even worse than themselves. Unfortunately, Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s film makes little use of the metaphorical space screaming to be filled here – the torturers could be any random shit heels from any place and time in history and nothing at all would change about what happens to them and how they react to it, and the occult forces unleashed are run-of-mill Satanic business.

It’s not a terrible movie – some of the effects and monster designs are really neat for this budget bracket, and the directors know how to keep things flowing – but there’s nothing of real interest going on here.

The Big 4 (2022): As much as I usually like the films of Timo Tjahjanto, this action comedy about violent idiots killing other violent idiots for reasons of FAMILY is dire. That the humour is unfunny and ill-paced is bad enough, but somehow, the deeply action-affine director also can’t seem come up with any action set pieces of note. The problem isn’t just the humour, or the somewhat slighter amount of blood and gore than usual in Indonesian action. The film shows a lack of imagination and weight – or the proper kind of weightlessness – I find genuinely confusing coming from this particular filmmaker.

Mutant Ghost War Girl (2022)

In the confusing future of 2077. Superpowers acquired through gene editing are apparently now a thing, and international gangs/companies of evildoers use this technique to build themselves fighters they apparently mostly use for blood sports and only the occasional assassination.

An operative known as Ghost (Muqi Miya, apparently a Chinese-internet-famous yoga instructor) is sent to infiltrate the evil Medusa Company/Network to acquire super-secret data of some kind. This she does indeed acquire, but she is also mutated by the bad guys before her colleagues can rescue her. Now, after a rescue mission gone bad, she’s on the run from Medusa Corp through the mean streets of future South Korea.

Zhou Yang (Li Mingxuan), some kind of Korean intelligence agent is helping her out, though not via logical things like calling in any reinforcements. Instead he’s hiding her at his place for a bit, until they team up to acquire more of the mutating juice for…reasons.

Eventually, there’s a climactic fight with the leaders of the bad guys.

If all of this sounds vague and confusing, that’s firstly because Liu Binjie’s Chinese cyberpunk-y science fiction action movie comes with a set of subtitles that completely defies comprehension for at least half of the time, and defies sense even when the words used manage to combine into something you might confuse for a proper sentence. I’m not sure this is to the movie’s detriment, for this may very well be the sort of film made more enjoyable if you don’t understand what’s supposed to go on. At the very least, this incomprehensibility does add to Mutant Ghost War Girl’s mood of deep peculiarity.

Liu clearly loves western science fiction and superhero media so the film is as stuffed with quotes, borrowings and stolen parts from these films as much as Zhou Yang’s place is stuffed with fan tat (he even proudly displays a bust of Iron Man, Marvel’s trademark lawyers be damned). Liu does tend to like very peculiar parts of his western idols – you will encounter a character who is Jared Leto’s Xtreme Joker, and a scene borrowed nearly directly from the atrocious Ghost in the Shell abomination with Scarlett Johanssen, but again, this of course only adds to the film’s personality.

While all of this is pleasantly weird, MGWG also shows off some more than decent filmmaking chops: the production design is weird in a coherent and always fun to look at manner – mixing Western ideas of Cyberpunk Asia with actual Asian aesthetics – and the action scenes are fast, imaginative and silly in the best rule of cool manner.

Hell, even Muqi is a pretty good CGI action star for a yoga instructor.

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

College student Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is plagued by recurring nightmares of a big, bloody and very digital catastrophe in a sky-view style restaurant. It’s getting so bad, her once famous academic prowess is suffering. Because these dreams star a young version of her grandmother, she decides to return home to dig for family secrets.

There she encounters an older generation that doesn’t want to talk about family secrets like the fact that Grandma is living in a weird cabin in the middle of nowhere thereby trying to stave off the death of her whole family line (or is plain crazy), and a younger one wont to not very interesting whining. Everyone’s also prone to the kind of melodrama without which the amateurish script would screech to a halt. One can’t blame death for trying to wipe them out in the series-standard gory accidents. One can blame him for taking his dear time with it.

Sometimes, you should really cut your losses – unless somebody with an actual sense of imagination gets their hands on the Final Destination franchise again, there are only ever drearily “funny” death pinball entries in the franchise’s future.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, the former of which already tried my patience with crap like Dead Rising: Watchtower and Leprechaun: Origins a decade ago, or one of the five people listed with scriptwriting and story duties try to turn the whole death business into a family affair, during which death doesn’t only try to wipe out the unplanned survivors of catastrophes but also their spawn, I mean, descendants. And yes, of course the film is not going to really hold to these new rules, because that would take actual effort by the filmmakers. Obviously, the only effort anyone’s taken here with anything are the death scenes. Ironically, these try a bit too hard to be clever and twisty in the way only the most stupid things do, so there’s only a small degree of joy to be found here. The film’s painfully digital look – not something I tend to complain about – robs most of the killing of any physical weight anyway, and the film’s insistence on digital blood really doesn’t help here at all.

The character work is dull and mechanical, with everyone being either bland or annoying, probably to fit better with the CGI.

The only moment of actual humanity here is the final appearance of Tony Todd in a scene not even Lipovsky and Stein can rob of it. Still, I would have wished the man could have gone out with a film worthy of him.

Three Films From 2025 I Didn’t Care For Still Make A Post

Ballerina (2025): I’m of two minds about the John Wick movies – no, really, I think half of them are pretty brilliant, the other half very much not – and alas, spin-off Ballerina, as directed by Len Wiseman belongs to the very much not  part of this equation. Featuring pointless cameos, not a single interesting (or just fun) idea and an interminable number of action sequences that are technically very accomplished but also bland and empty as these things get (one might suggest the term “soulless”), this is a joyless example of franchise “content” nobody involved seems to actually wanted to create. Why we are then supposed to want to watch it is anyone’s guess.

Drop (2025): In the case of Drop, the problem may be as much me as the film. It is not exactly director Christopher Landon’s fault that I find US dating culture as presented in movies not just difficult to relate to but aggressively boring. Nor is it his fault that I find twisty thrillers generally a bit of a hard sell.

What is Landon’s fault is that most of the twists here are painfully generic, the surprises perfectly unsurprising, and much of what is presented too absurd to work in the way it is presented. Stylistically, this often feels like a show reel for its director instead of a movie, something you can get away with when you are Brian DePalma; Landon, as much as I enjoyed some of his earlier movies, is not.

Murder at the Lighthouse (2025): This little Lifetime movie at least has an excuse for not being any good – it being a Lifetime movie comes with a decided lack of budget as well as a dearth of talent before the camera – although everybody including the crazy stalker cop ex-boyfriend looks absurdly well groomed.

Director Eric D. Howell clearly liked Misery, so much so he’s eventually getting up to turning this into a decidedly lesser version of the King adaptation (or the King novel). On the plus side, this lacks the painful camp and irony of too many Lifetime thrillers, so at least Howell was trying instead of just throwing his hands up going “it’s all ironic, you see”.

Noboru Ando’s Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex (1976)

Following an attack on a business man he ordered, gang leader – historically he wasn’t a “proper” yakuza - Noboru Ando (Noboru Ando) has to go on the run. A process that consists of a lot of drinking, watching TV, and spending time at all of his many girlfriends’ places. Most of these women love Ando very much indeed, so he has to cope not just with proving his potency again and again, but also fending off various attempts from the various ladies to follow him on the lam.

As you may or may not know, before he became an actor, Noboru Ando was an actual criminal, clearly a darling of the Japanese yellow press, and just as clearly pretty damn awesome at building his own public mythology, like a John Ford western character gone mad. This isn’t even the first movie to dramatize the misadventure that earned Ando the prison sentence which in turn earned him his acting career, but it certainly is the first and only one based on the decision to turn the whole affair into a mix of standard yakuza tropes, some broad satire, and pinku style sex.

Directed by softcore auteur Noboru Tanaka, this puts a heavy emphasis on typically highly unerotic – and often very funny - sex scenes during which Ando does his very best not to move a single facial muscle. Does he enjoy the act as much as his writhing, moaning, love-sick partners do? He certainly ain’t telling. Also appearing are a “sexy”, hot dog based dance (not committed by Ando, because not even yakuzasploitation like this would be that cruel), tuberculosis jokes (I got nothing), and a climactic fight during which a very young looking Renji Ishibashi holds off the police while Ando attempts to finish a bit of spontaneous sex with a random partner. Which he doesn’t manage, so we finish on an indelible scene of Ando jerking off in a police car while cops look on, displeased. Again, I’ve got nothing.

If you’re of a certain mindset, this will make Chronicle sound like a slam-dunk of the weird and the wonderful – and I haven’t even mentioned the scene of Ando and Ishibashi walking a beach philosophising about being bacteria in the national host body. Indeed, when the movie is on point – particularly during its final twenty minutes or so – it is quite the experience of smut, absurdity and weird energy. But it is also slow, lacking in any dramatic progression or tension, and incredibly repetitive – watching Ando not moving a facial muscle during sex one time is great, watching this ten times causes it to lose a considerable amount of its lustre, so the whole thing is more than just a bit of a slog.

Still, the idea of the film alone is worth some mind space and time, and the moments when Chronicle of Fugitive Days and Sex is as bizarre as it promises to be make up for all that unsexy sex and scenes of watching characters watch TV, at least to a degree.

Three Films Make A Post: Insert Clever Title Here

Mojin: The Lost Legend aka 鬼吹燈之尋龍訣 (2015): A trio of traditional-official tomb raiders return from dubious retirement in America to China to rob a particularly mysterious tomb. This high on very digital looking effects adventure directed by Wuershan (and based on one part of a long and complicated sounding series of novels) is a whole lot of fun if you like this kind of blockbuster at all.

It’s like a Chinese Indiana Jones with more supernatural action, some surprisingly snarky remarks towards the Cultural Revolution (though it isn’t called by name), and quite a bit of the sense of anything goes that made Hong Kong cinema so enticing but not generally translated to mainland China cinema like this. This really has everything and the kitchen sink in it: romance, zombies, Shu Qi, Shu Qi cursing a lot, complicated mechanical traps, a weird cult, bizarre humour, Shu Qi, and more good and bad ideas than most film trilogies.

Mojin: The Worm Valley aka 雲南蟲谷 (2018): And three years later this happened: none of the actors nor the director of the original return, and with them also leaves the spirit of fun of the first film, as well as parts of the budget. There’s something rote and mechanical about the whole affair – this is pretty much the empty and lifeless spectacle too many people pretend all blockbuster style cinema is, lacking in fun, joy, and the ability to actually deliver the promised rollercoaster ride as a rollercoaster ride.

Deadful Melody aka 六指琴魔 (1994): Welcome to 90s wuxia land. Various martial world weirdoes attempt to steal a magical lute that also happens to be the most powerful weapon this side of your favourite magical sword, while a mysterious, sometimes cross-dressing woman played of course by Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia takes bloody vengeance for the death of her family. Also featured are a not terribly young Yuen Biao as the young hero and Carina Lau Ka-Ling as his love interest and comic relief.

The rest of the film mostly consists of a breathless series of shots of people flying, making shit explode with their Qi, a lot of twirling and a good amount of flying body parts, blue fog, blue light, blue everything, all presented by director Ng Min-Kan with the manic energy of Joel Silver on a real coke binge. This is absolutely awe-inspiring if you enjoy this wuxia revival as much as I do, and aren’t afraid of headaches.