Demon of the Island (1983)

Original title: Le démon dans l'île

Dr Gabrielle Martin (Anny Duperey) moves to a somewhat isolated island to become the new general practitioner there. The islanders haven’t told her, but her predecessor, Dr Marshall (Jean-Claude Brialy), is still there, dwelling in the 80s idea of a high-tech mansion, and giving off a decided mad scientist vibe. Consequently, and for other reasons that will only become clear to Gabrielle much later, nobody wants to have anything to do with the guy.

At least, Gabrielle won’t have to fear a case of duelling doctors this way. She’s going to have larger problems anyway, for the island is hit by a series of curious and improbable accidents all apparently caused by objects of daily life – from razor blades to household appliances – acting out aggressively with little rhyme, reason, or respect for the actual laws of physics as we know them from the real world.

The truth behind these occurrences will be quite surprising, for our heroine as much as for the audience.

Which is the sort of surprise that’s predominantly caused by a film that builds up its mystery in so pleasantly nonsensical yet also derivative a manner, I was surprised to encounter it in something made in France during the 80s instead of Italy in the 70s.

In the case of Francis Leroi’s Demon of the Island, that’s a compliment, and certainly not an impediment to enjoyment. For what’s not to enjoy about a film that has such a good time finding improbable ways in which household appliances can mutilate people, then realizes them through decidedly not realistic but very fun effects, and finally makes them part of a story that touches on as many clichés as it can grab. I particularly enjoyed the misguided attempts at making Gabrielle’s trauma of child loss part of her motivation.

All of this is filmed by Leroi in the slick and appealing style I associate with softcore filmmakers like him doing horror for a change (or a buck). He’s not great at building suspense, but he’s certainly applying himself to it anyway, often mistiming things in ways I found charming rather than annoying.

Leroi also gets fun performances from Duperey and Brialy, the former increasingly losing her considerable cool, while the latter rants, raves and looks sinister with the best of them.

Even better, Demon of the Island finishes on a moment of genuine greatness, Marshall’s final fate being as strange as anything I’ve seen on screen.

Somewhere in the Night (1946)

After throwing himself on a grenade, a soldier (John Hodiak) in World War II suffers from amnesia. He’s probably called George Taylor, or so the facts suggest. He’s not too keen on finding out more about himself, and even hides his condition from the Army, because he has found a letter among his belongings that suggests he might not be the nicest of guys.

Yet when the opportunity arises to be released to his apparently native Los Angeles, he still grasps it. Once there, the shell-shocked George even learns he might have had an actual friend by the name of Larry Cravat. Looking for something, anything to hold onto, George decides to find Larry. What follows is a series of encounters with the night people of LA, various attacks on his life, and even more questions concerning his own former habits and personality. Bar chanteuse Christy Smith (Nancy Guild) appears quite smitten by George, so things aren’t all bad, confusing and traumatic, even though our protagonist’s face has the sweaty Hollywood glow of stress on his face most of the time.

In many regards, Somewhere in the Night is a bit of a best of collection of the tropes later decades decided would make up the character of the noir as a genre. As many a noir, it isn’t an orderly constructed mystery, it hardly even is a laissez faire one, but rather a film that puts its audience very much into the same position as its protagonist has stepped into: utter confusion about his self and the world surrounding him, chasing shadows while encountering characters – all played by brilliant character actors – whose importance to his own questions or his life he can neither grasp nor understand for much of the film’s running time.

This sense of dislocation and confusion isn’t a weakness of writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film, however, but its point. If ever there was a film about existentialist angst and a world that has broken down so much, a person even has to doubt their own identity and character, this one is it. As a portrayal of this, Somewhere in the Night is flawless.

Even George’s encounters with people who will turn out to have very little to do with his problems have a point in this regard, as Somewhere in the Night shows most of these characters to be just as much in the dark about the world, the plot and their roles in it as he is. Even the film’s main villain knows only parts of what is actually going on, and about these, he isn’t exactly right. Confusion and doubt are just the natural state of the film’s world.

All of this gives Somewhere the quality of an anxiety driven dream even before Mankiewicz and DP Norbert Brodine drench much of it in shadows not so much of night but of our ideal of night.

The dialogue wavers between sharp, clever and sarcastic quips and bouts of depression and existentialist doubt – all of which is about as naturalistic as a Shakespeare monologue, and therefore perfectly fitting to the artificial depths of the noir.

Somehow – perhaps because Hodiak looks and feels like a guy who really deserves a break, and Guild projects a genuine kind of  goodness that makes one root for the guy she goes out of her way to protect – I’m not even annoyed about Somewhere in the Night’s happy end, usually  a small irritant in noirs for me. Nightmares do turn into more pleasant dreams from time to time, after all.

You Shouldn’t Have Let Me In (2024)

Kelsey (Diana Gardner) and professional Gay Best Friend Blake (Nathaniel Ansbach) travel to Italy for the surprisingly intimate bachelorette party of Kelsey’s former best friend Rochelle (Isabella Egizi). There’s some bad blood Kelsey has never actually talked through with Rochelle concerning the fact that Rochelle’s husband to be is also Kelsey’s ex; what seems to have caused a larger rift in the friendship, however, is Rochelle’s career as an influencer. This turns all of her private interactions public, and makes actual friendship as Kelsey understands it impossible.

Right now, that rift is certainly not bridged by Rochelle’s bridesmaid Jenny (Anastasiya Bogach), who acts like the director and producer of the five person – one of whom mysteriously never arrives - bachelorette outing as if it were an important event to be micromanaged to death.

On the plus side, Jenny did manage what looks like the greatest Air B’n’B coup ever: an actual centuries-old Italian villa.

As it turns out, this place usually belongs to a man named Victor (Fabián Castro). And Victor for is part is soon the be revealed as a vampire who sees Kelsey’s as the reincarnation of a former lover and wants to make her his bride, by any means necessary – so mostly sex, hypnotism, bloodsucking, and more hypnotism.

I enjoyed Dave Parker’s Tubi low budget original quite a bit more than I expected going in. In fact, encountering it felt a bit like stumbling onto one of the lesser Charles Band productions before he got all puppet-y on us: a film that embraces being cheap and cheesy without using this as an excuse for not putting any effort in.

So what if many of the American characters have suspiciously continental accents, if this means we can shoot on location in Italy? Sure, sexy vampires have been done to death, but what if we mix the well-worn tropes of 90s erotic (or “erotic”, if you prefer) vampire movies with some contemporary concerns? That’s the kind of thoughts I suspect to have gone through the filmmakers’ minds, and that’s the sort of thing I’m looking for in my low budget movies rather than total originality or the kind of production values you realistically shouldn’t expect anyway.

You Shouldn’t makes appreciating it rather easy as well – not only does it look pretty great for what it is – the 90s indoor fog and some clever, also 90s-style lighting tricks work wonders for nightclub scenes as well as for a bachelorette party turned hopeful orgy turned hallucinatory mini-hellscape – it’s also very well paced.

The script by Michael Lucid and Mary O’Neil is much cleverer than it strictly needs to be, and eventually turns many a trope of the sexy vampire movie on its head to use the space of wonderfully cheesy horror to think through toxic relationships and the vagaries of female friendship in a world full of toxic men and general assholes in a way that’s at once efficient and aggressively non-stupid. Again, that’s how many a great low budget movie has done it in the past, and clearly, it is a tradition these filmmakers understand and appreciate.

Among the other surprising joys of the script is character work that starts from the expected tropes but eventually turns them into characters that don’t always act like their initial nature suggests, but feel rather more complex and, dare I say it, human, thereby. The cast certainly seem to appreciate that as well, and transitions from bitchy one-note to person very effectively.

Plus, how many horror movies feature a gay occult shop owner and vampire hunter?

Jonathan Creek, Series One (1997)

Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) uses his considerable powers of logic and imagination to invent tricks and illusions for the sleazy stage magician Adam Klaus (Anthony Head, in a hilariously slimy one episode performance). Sometimes, that’s bad news for potentially levitating elephants. Over the course of the first series’ five episodes, Jonathan finds himself roped into solving various locked room mysteries and impossible crimes by Maddy Magellan (Caroline Quentin), an investigative reporter specializing in using means foul or fair to uncover miscarriages of justice. The two also develop the will they/won’t they dynamic apparently beloved of all TV and romance writers.

This long-running – in the weird, sporadic way of BBC TV shows – mystery series is particularly beloved among mystery and crime fans who prefer the strange mental contortions of the locked room mystery style to grittier or more realistic fare. Even though I’ll probably never stop loving my hardboiled detectives, I’ve grown much fonder of this sort approach to crime over the years, particularly since the purer strains of this approach often show a deep love for the outré, the bizarre and the grotesque that fits very nicely indeed into my tastes. One must just give up on ideas on murder methods being probable and often on the niceties of characterization as well.

The latter isn’t a problem for Jonathan Creek, however. Writer, creator and what the Americans would call show runner David Renwick uses his comedy background to populate the world of bizarre crimes Jonathan Creek takes place in with characters who are usually ever so slightly off. This solves a couple of problems impossible crime can run into rather nicely for the show. The improbability of murder methods and their constructions is easily waved away now: these weird numpties populating the series would never murder anyone in a sensible and direct way, so the building of fake rooms and overcomplicated alibis seem perfectly logical in context. Furthermore, the humour helps the series avoid turning into a sequence of scenes of a guy explaining and theorizing about a crime at the audience. There’s still quite a bit of that, but it is organically integrated into proceedings where the next gag is seldom far away, and where the interplay between Jonathan and Maddy keeps the explain-y scenes light without needing to make them stupid.

Renwick’s jokes hit more often than not, and even when they tend to rather broad satire – particularly of showbiz and popular culture - and the easy gag, they are typically nicely timed and simply work.

Apart from its mysteries and the fun character interplay, the show also puts rather a lot of effort into bits and pieces of weird worldbuilding – Klaus’s stage show and some of the background of fictional 70s rock act Edwin Drood are particular highlights in this first season, though the titular House of Monkeys of the last episode is nothing to sneeze at either. This actually increases the impression the show takes place in a rather fun parallel world that’s exactly like ours (well, the one of 1997), just with a much better quality of murders.

At the same time, the mysteries and their solutions are often as fun and clever as they are improbable; even this early on, the show also seems to find proper delight in playing with certain genre expectations while keeping very strictly to those you can’t play with without breaking the locked room/improbable crime genre.

Three Films Make A Post: If you can't smoke it, drink it, spend it or love it… forget it.

Payday (1973): Sleazy country star Maury Dann (Rip Torn) is on the road, lying, bullying and sliming his way across the USA while growing increasingly deranged.

I’m a big fan of 70s grimdark, but this nearly plotless portrait of a horrible man doing horrible things, horribly, by Daryl Duke actually beats me. It’s not that I can’t appreciate its skewering of the 70s country star, Duke’s version of hyperrealist style, or the great, though somewhat one-note performances, it’s just that I miss some moments of genuine humanity to measure Maury’s horridness against. Or, come to think of it, Maury showing one or two not redeeming but not horrible character traits to put some shading into the black and black of the movie at hand. Hell, the guy can’t even sing.

Tiger Zinda Hai (2017): This Bollywood piece of action-heavy super spy cinema sequel certainly charms with its series of overblown, wonderfully unrealistic action sequences, its treatment of BIG EMOTIONS that makes its predecessor look downright restrained, and its larger than life (in the best way) star performances by Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif.

Director Ali Abbas Zafar (who also co-wrote) also puts a lot of effort into fulfilling the increasingly mandatory quota of Indian jingoism while at the same time doing subtle and not so subtle things that complicate and humanize this jingoism, in ways I’m not at all sure I’m interpreting in the way they are meant to be understood. It’s a fun big damn action blockbuster in any case.

Girl in the Case (1944): A lawyer (Edmund Lowe) who is also an expert on safecracking and lockpicking (it’s a hobby) and his wife (Janis Carter) are sucked into an increasingly complicated case, concerning Nazi spies, a locked trunk, and a particularly stupid police force.

Tonally, William Berke’s B-movie marries mystery and screwball comedy, probably in an attempt to reach the same tone as the later of the Thin Man films. Lowe and Carter are no Powell and Loy – and really should acquire a dog – and Berke no W.S. Van Dyke, but there’s a breezy quality to the film, and a likeability to its basic silliness that makes it pretty difficult to dislike it. If one is at all interested in this era’s mystery comedies, obviously. I’m always happy about movies concerning mismatched couples solving crimes while cracking jokes.

The Phantom of the Convent (1934)

Original title: El fantasma del convento

Friends Alfonso (Enrique del Campo), Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro), and Eduardo’s wife Cristina (Marta Ruel) find themselves lost in the woods at night. A rather creepy man shows them the way to a monastery they have heard curious rumours bordering on fairy tales about. The friends expect the place to be a ruin, but in actuality, it is populated with monks who have taken a vow of silence they occasionally break for exposition. Thus, the ideal place for the trio to stay the night instead of staying lost in the woods.

However, the monastery seems to have a strange influence on the visitors that brings out their repressed desires and the darkest sides of their personalities. Eduardo and Cristina have been quietly lusting after one another for quite some now, but on this night in this place, this desire turns destructive – Cristina turns into a proper femme fatale, while Eduardo just can’t help but stop lying to himself about his feelings and now believes that taking his best friend’s well-being into consideration is rather less important than getting the man out of the way.

When they are not consumed by their private drama, the visitors are spooked by various strange occurrences – monks that seem to disappear where there’s no place for them to disappear to, monks badly hiding their skeletal hands, and a door nailed shut with a cross from behind which horrifying, human cries drift.

The Phantom of the Convent is a very early example of Mexican Gothic horror, featuring motives that would reoccur in movies from the country as a matter of course during the next four decades at least. Here, director Fernando de Fuentes (also responsible for the first Mexican talkie only three years earlier in 1931, or so the Internet tells me) still seems somewhat uneasy with the truly creepy stuff in a couple of scenes, whereas others demonstrate a firm grasp on the proper use of the interplay of light and shadow to create the mood of dream-like strangeness which best occurs in dilapidated surroundings that is so important for this particular style of horror, whatever its country of origin.

There are also rather a lot of hints at one of Mexican popular cinema’s great strengths in the coming decades – the ability to use genre tropes and visual hallmarks of an international tradition and mix them productively with more local interests and ideas. Here, it’s a – to my eyes, nearly a hundred years later, on a different continent – specifically Mexican Catholicism expressing itself through typical Gothic horror monks and the mood of an old-fashioned ghost story. There are also some surprisingly unpleasant looking corpses in the film’s later stages that surprised me to find in a film from 1934, from anywhere, but that are clearly inspired by the same type of mummification process we find in the mummies of Guanajuato.

As it goes with cinema from a very different era, Phantom of the Convent pacing isn’t really to modern tastes – there’s a tendency of scenes to go on a bit too long for my contemporary (non-blockbuster mode) tastes, and the feeling of a film pulling some punches it needn’t have pulled even in 1934, but there’s also a sense of languid, Gothic beauty (a Poe idea of beauty for sure) to The Phantom of the Convent that makes up for these failings in spades.

Love Massacre (1981)

Original title: 愛殺

The film takes place among a group of Hong Kong expat students living in the United States. Joy (Tina Lau Tin-Lan), who appears to suffer from a psychosis, attempts suicide when her boyfriend Louie (Charlie Chin Chiang-Lin) decides to move to New York without her.

Louie – who isn’t a complete tool - and their friend Ivy (Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia) really don’t know how to help Joy anymore, so they ask Joy’s brother Chiu Chung (Chang Kuo-Chu) to fly in from Hong Kong to help hi sister somehow. At first, the plan seems to work out well enough, but once the married Chiu Chung and Ivy start an affair, Joy’s getting even worse than before, and finally goes through with killing herself.

Chiu Chung is understandably hit hard by this and deteriorates much further than anyone could have expected, for he really is mentally just as unwell as his sister was, he’s just better at hiding this in front of strangers. He returns to Hong Kong, but does not become more stable there. In fact, he murders his wife (his former psychiatrist no less!) to then return to the USA and start stalking Ivy and murdering every woman in her closer surroundings he deems “uncooperative”.

Patrick Tam Kar-Ming is one of the less sung heroes of Hong Kong’s New Wave cinema. Given the quality of those of his movies I’ve managed to see (I don’t trust my old, negative, review of his The Sword anymore in this context), I suspect this has rather more to do with their bad availability than their quality.

Love Massacre is a case in point. At once a cool, serious but not compassionless, exploration of an extreme of mental illness and eventually a pretty brutal thriller of great formal strength and cold beauty, this is the kind of film that would normally put a filmmaker on the map of the greats. However, the best way to see Love Massacre at the moment is a Laser Disc rip with decidedly not great subtitles (though not as bad as some for Hong Kong films), so there’s only talk about it at all among those movie fans actually looking for this sort of thing and knowing where to find it, instead of the somewhat larger audience of more strictly law-abiding connoisseurs it deserves.

The washed out colours of a Laser Disc aren’t particularly wonderful in a film as strictly and meaningfully colour composed as this one either, but even so, there’s an intense cold power to Tam’s strict use of clearly separated colours, as is to his just as strictly composed use of the frame. In the latter, Love Massacre shows some visual kinship to the best works of Dario Argento, yet where Argento does tend to get emotionally involved in the acts of violence and the more grotesque elements of his films, Tam watches them with a cooler and more distanced eye that does get increasingly disquieting the longer the film goes on, and the more unpleasant the violence gets exactly because it seems so dispassionate.

Still, despite the cold eye, when there isn’t violence on screen, there is also a feeling of thoughtful compassion running through it, or at least a genuine human interest in its characters. Tam does show this for killer and victims and those in-between alike, which makes the whole affair’s distanced visual beauty a particularly interesting and individual decision. An artistically risky one, as well, but one that makes Love Massacre particularly worth watching.

Three Films Make A Post: First There Were Ten…

And Then There Were None (1945): This mystery directed by René Clair is the first of a considerable number of adaptations of Agatha Christie’s best novel (and thankfully uses the US version of the book’s title, for while I’m all for not pretending the past was nicer or better than it was, I’d rather not have to type that one out) wherein ten people isolated on an island are murdered one by one in ways based on nursery rhyme that also mirror some hidden unpunished crimes they committed. Once the plot really gets going and the first characters have been killed, Clair’s direction turns increasingly moody and tense; things take on a feeling of Gothic dread mixed with a rather more modern paranoia.

It would be a perfect version of the material if not for the fact it replaces the grim ending of the novel with a ridiculous happy ending for at least a couple of characters. But then, many of the adaptations that follow will make the same – dubious – decision and this version of it does not ruin the film in any way; it just provokes raised eyebrows.

Righting Wrongs aka Above the Law aka 執法先鋒 (1986): A Hong Kong police Inspector (Cynthia Rothrock) on the trail of a prosecutor turned vigilante murderer (Yuen Biao) uncovers the much worse misdeeds of a colleague. A lot of pretty damn brutal violence ensues.

Despite some painfully obvious stunt double replacements – would it really have killed them to give the guy a Rothrock-style wig? – for some of the most dangerous stunts, the fights in this Corey Yuen Kwai joint are impeccable, highly creative and at times so brutal I felt myself wince on impact of bodies with hard surfaces. In the plot around the action, the film shows a total commitment to let terrible things happen to the kind of people who’d be absolutely taboo in US (or German, if we had action cinema, for that matter) films, providing proceedings a dangerous edge as well as a great basis for its melodramatic elements. Combined, it’s a bit of a classic.

Kill Boksoon aka 길복순 (2023): Boksoon (Jeon Do-yeon) is a hassled single mom as well as a legendary professional killer working for one of these absurd and fun organizations of killers movies about killers adore so much. Eventually, inter-organization political intrigue puts her on the kill list of her employers, which turns out to be a bit awkward for the bunch of killers and killer adjacent fools she’ll have to dispatch.

Byun Sung-Hyun’s action movie is very much on the stylized, comics (manhwa?) affine side of this sort of thing (and most probably influenced by the John Wick films), clearly having a lot of fun creating the underground world Boksoon is eventually going to smash while providing space for ample amounts of cool to brilliant action.

Monolith (2022)

Disgraced after failing to do some crucial background checks during an investigation, a journalist (Lily Sullivan) coming from a wealthy background has turned solo podcaster with one of those “unsolved mysteries” style endeavours.

When she is sent the contact of a woman who once came into contact with a mysterious black brick, the journalist starts on a series of phone interviews that suggest a number of these bricks exist. People who are somehow touched by them, or perhaps are only hear or think about them enough, begin to suffer from hallucinations and strange obsessions, drifting towards violence and madness, or change in disturbing, perhaps unnatural, ways.

Our interviewer, clearly an obsessive personality already, is no exception to these effects. While her podcast becomes a bit of sensation, she appears to become increasingly unhinged by what she learns, sliding towards a confrontation with the lies and omissions at the core of her life as well as whatever force is embodied in the black bricks.

Matt Vesely’s Monolith is a wonderful example of contemporary weird fiction filmmaking. It uses some very of the moment cultural artefacts and concepts – true crime/weirdness podcasting, conspiracy culture and its online and real life consequences – but doesn’t quite tell the story you’d expect it to tell with them.

There’s a strong through line of cultural criticism embodied via in its protagonist running through the film, but apart from some to on the nose metaphorical work in the end, much of Monolith manages to keep the feeling of metaphors and meanings not quite resolving that I believe to be one of the more exciting and defining elements of the Weird. The interesting point in this kind of film to me is never the clear explanation, but the scenes when possible meanings float just before they coalesce. Once they do coalesce here, they do lose some of their special vibe, but thankfully there’s nothing wrong with the story the film is then telling. Apart from it telling a very specific one, but that’s my problem, not the movie’s.

That the landing on actual meaning works out as well as it does for the movie has a lot to do with Lily Sullivan’s performance. Sullivan never loses a quality of basic humanity even once we learn less than great things about her. Of course, it does help that the film never seems too interested in having her go through judgement and punishment as much as it is in a painful transformation towards betterment – at least in my reading of the movie.

Formally, Vesely manages to make a film consisting of a single woman looking at screens and talking on the phone with various people we only ever get to hear in a clearly expansive but also pretty expensive house feel dynamic and exciting, or tense and claustrophobic, depending on the needs of the film.

The use of short, enigmatic scenes that describe the feeling of the things the interviewer hears rather more than precisely show what she is told strengthens the truly Weird (in the sense that needs the capital W) mood of the first two acts wonderfully, and provides Monolith with a very specific rhythm that is great joy to experience.

Out of Darkness (2022)

Following their strong, arrogant prick of a leader Adem (Chuku Modu) a small splinter group of a stone age tribe of early humans have crossed a large body of water to find new, hopefully better lands full of game and cosy caves, or so is the picture apparently gained through visions Adem paints of the place. The group consists of Adem’s pregnant mate Avé (Iola Evans), his brother Geirr (Kit Young), his son Heron (Luna Mwezi), old guy with a whole sackful of chips on his shoulder Odal (Arno Lüning) and stray outsider Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), there to provide whatever is needed.

That new land full of game and green grass of Adem’s imagination, nay, conviction, is rather less pleasant than advertised. Food sources seem to be scarce, as is shelter. One can’t help but notice these particular hunters and gatherers apparently don’t really forage for things very thoroughly. Stones are most definitely left unturned, so the complete absence of game is an even bigger problem here than it would be for more competent groups.

This isn’t going to be the tribe’s only problem for very long, though, for something dangerous is lurking in the shadows, stalking the group and picking them off one by one. Adem’s promised new land might very well eat them all, as promised lands have the habit to.

Andrew Cumming’s Out of Darkness is in many aspects a very typical stone age adventure movie, in so far as it absolutely mirrors the interests and fears of its own time much more than it does attempt an actual portray of stone age life. The difference is that, where, say, the late 60s/early 70s version of the stone age was a world of deeply silly adventure and fur bikinis, this version is mostly there to teach its audience valuable lessons about the evils of patriarchy, the human tendency to fear and hate the different and the unknown (though, given what the unknown does to our protagonists out of its own fear of the unknown, I can’t blame them for their reactions to it as much as the film does), and that a woman’s body belongs to herself.

All very worthwhile things to speak and think about of course, but also, one can’t help but think, not things actual stone age people would have wasted much of a thought on, unless you want to argue that the inner life of Grok the cave woman is basically the same as that of Inga the modern woman.

However, as there was absolutely nothing wrong with the old fur bikini movies using the far past as their adventure playground, there is also not much wrong about a contemporary movie using the same past to explore its own interests. Well, it could be a bit more subtle about it from time to time – the awkward post-climax voiceover provided so the most stupid audience members understand what the film is talking about really is a bridge too far for me – but often, its putting contemporary troubles into the past does what this approach is clearly meant to do: put the evils of a particular kind of masculinity, and how it feels to be at the receiving end of it into a clearer, more brutal form. This makes it easier to understand its victims by helping us empathize with them more clearly and lets us thrill to the moment when they regain – or gain for the first time – agency.

It does help the film’s case as well that it is rather good at portraying what I assume to be one of the most basic of human fears – being lost in the dark, stalked by something whose nature appears so alien it might very well not be natural, of starving and being very much alone in a seemingly empty world, thrown together with a handful of people who are only interested in the use you can be to them.

Particularly the first two acts are full of scenes that most certainly aren’t believable portrayals of actual stone age life, but feel true to what we imagine it might have felt like in its most dramatic and horrifying moments, the horrors of staring into the darkness, something invisible staring back at you.

Thus, Out of Darkness often feels like the cross of stone age adventure and horror movie I didn’t know I needed before.

Three Films Make A Post: The heist begins at 40,000 ft.

Lift (2024): This Netflix production as directed by F. Gary Gray is rather astonishing. Astonishing in how forgettable it is. If I hadn’t made a couple of notes while watching it, I’d remember not a thing about it a week after having seen it. Going by these notes, this is a heist movie neither charming enough to be light fun, nor serious enough to ever build up any stakes one might care about.

It also contains a terribly written romance between Kevin Hart and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and a somewhat inexplicable performance by Vincent D’Onofrio, who is certainly doing something that may or may not have anything to do with an attempt at being Udo Kier.

Otherwise, there’s nothing here to even waste another sentence on.

Lovely, Dark and Deep (2023): Screenwriter Teresa Sutherland’s feature debut is a very frustrating movie. In its beginning stages, it makes interesting and creepy use of the urban myth of the mass disappearances in US National Parks, with quite a few shots of mildly disturbing background happenings our protagonist doesn’t notice. In these early stages the film builds a wonderful mood of the weird and the outré.

Alas, its back half consists of what amounts to an endless dream sequence in which said protagonist – Georgina Campbell, wasted –works through emotional issues through the most hackneyed and obvious symbolism possible at tedious length, until the film finally ends. The Weird turns into the boringly prosaic.

Life of Belle (2024): I had heard rather nice buzz about Shawn Robinson’s POV horror (in the Paranormal Activity vein) piece. I can’t say the film does very much for me at all. While its approach to a child filming random childish crap while the borders of her world slowly break down in the background is certainly interesting, it’s also a bit tedious. That the film goes quite as heavy on the “mentally ill equals evil” part of the horror equation because it tries to be too subtle about its supernatural bits doesn’t exactly make it more likeable. Though I do have to give it props for not being afraid of eventually leading its audience into tasteful but disturbing scenes of child abuse.

Like with Lovely, Dark and Deep, there is a clear influence of creepypasta on display; like that movie, and a lot of creepypasta itself, Life of Belle has trouble getting beyond showing a handful of creepy images and calling that a movie.

The Safecracker (1958)

Colley Dawson (Ray Milland), designing safes for rich people who use them to lock up treasures for nobody to see, has enough of the small life: fast cars, pretty women and touching said treasures loom large in his mind. So when an antiques dealer (Barry Jones) makes him an offer to put his talents to a safe-cracking use, Colley is easily convinced to start on a rather lucrative side-career.

To have use of his ill-gotten gains right here and now without alerting the police with a sudden influx of money, Colley starts on a double life, playing the daring safe-cracker and playboy under an assumed name on the weekends while keeping up his old life-style – including living with his elderly mum – on weekdays. Eventually, he gets caught when he ignores warning signs and directed warnings. He is sentenced to a ten year prison sentence.

However, in 1941, when World War II isn’t going terribly well for the British, Colley’s talents are in demand for a commando mission. The mission’s goal is to photograph secret documents kept in a safe in mansion in occupied Belgium that would disclose the whole of German spy operations in the UK. Particularly, doing this without the Nazis figuring out it happened would be quite a success for the British. Offered a full pardon on success, Colley agrees to take part in the mission, despite his decided lack of patriotism.

Ray Milland dabbled in directing from time to time, and clearly was a fan of directing himself. He’s still trying to hang on to his old charming, somewhat roguish image here in 1958, but at this stage in his career, “roguish” often turned out somewhat sleazy. Which isn’t a bad fit for Colley at all, though I was never quite sure Milland actually realized that was the impression he gave.

As a director, Milland isn’t terrible; he certainly isn’t great either. He has a tendency to use the least interesting shot in too many scenes, and doesn’t have a great hand for pacing either, leading to a lack of tension and a sluggishness not great in the sort of genres this is dabbling in.

The script doesn’t help there either. Structurally, this is a film of two halves from different genres, both of them not terrible successful. First, we have a heist movie that isn’t terribly interested in actually making the safe-cracking business exciting, focussed on a character who doesn’t change in any way once he’s turned from safe-maker to safe-cracker. Thus, the film is more going through the motions of a crime movie than actually being one. The second half does the same with war movie tropes. Again, there’s little tension; again, Colley isn’t changed by any of his experiences; again there’s an aimless, ambling quality to the way scenes are set-up. Not even the climactic raid appears to be all that tense.

Now, one could argue the decision to not have Colley experience any sort of inner redemptive arc as a somewhat interesting and uncommon decision, but since this leaves us with a character that goes through hardship and error completely without much of interest to an audience happening with him, I’d argue it’s an inherently boring decision as well. In the hands of more accomplished director and much more accomplished writers, one could of course do something with this reversal of expectations about how this sort of film is supposed to play out, but as it stands, this just makes a pretty lifeless film even more uninvolving.

Bucktown (1975)

Big city hard ass Duke (Fred Williamson) comes to the conveniently named Bucktown to bury his estranged brother who owned a nightclub there. For dubious reasons of The Law, Duke must stay in town for at least sixty days to put his brother’s affairs in order.

Given that he’s hassled early on by the corrupt and racist police force, whose main reasons to exist seem to be racketeering and extortion (and who will of course also turn out to be responsible for the death of Duke’s brother, as if that ever was in any doubt), that’s not a great proposition. Because a man needs something to do, and the buck needs to flow, Duke lets himself be convinced by a hustling kid and by Harley (Bernie Hamilton), an alcoholic buddy of his brother, to reopen the nightclub for a bit. This also gets him far into the good books and the bed of his brother’s girlfriend Aretha (Pam Grier).

When Duke very violently disagrees with paying the protection money the police expects of him, things do start to look a bit bleak for his continued survival, so he calls in an old buddy of his from the city, the gangster Roy (Thalmus Rasulala). Once Roy arrives with three generally unpleasant mooks (one of them played by the late, great Carl Weathers) in tow, he and Duke begin to gleefully murder their way through the cops.

Once that’s over, Duke expects Roy and the goons to go back to the city. Instead, Roy decides to stay in town and take over the police business, legal and illegal. Duke’s not too happy with this, because he clearly didn’t plan on replacing one group of violent shits with another one, and apparently thought better of Roy. Which, giving their whole companionable killing spree, seems somewhat peculiar. Eventually, the former friends will come to blows.

Before going into Arthur Marks’s blaxploitation movie Bucktown, it is probably best to temper one’s expectations a little. Specifically, the promise of Fred Williamson and Pam Grier starring in the same movie isn’t fulfilled in quite the way I would have hoped for: Williamson’s as Williamson as he always is, but Grier’s role in the movie is strictly being The Girl, so don’t expect razors hidden in afros, much asskicking or just coolness from her. She is unfortunately in the movie mostly for the melodramatic outbursts of awkward dialogue, which doesn’t at all play to her strengths as an actress or as an on-screen personality.

Having put the film’s great disappointment out of the way, there is rather a lot to like about the rest of the movie: its portrayal of the police force of Bucktown as just another gang goes even further than the racist and corrupt police forces in most other blaxploitation movies that at least seem to involve law enforcement work from time to time do; but then going another step further and positing that gangsters and pimps aren’t a great replacement for that role either puts the whole thing dangerously close to being a blaxploitation film that actually critiques the kind of violent but awesome (in the movies) types of black men that are the bread and butter of these films as well.

Of course, this being an exploitation movie, it also takes great delight at showing us the badassery of Duke and Roy quipping while brutally murdering some – admittedly very nasty – people, and certainly is never going to make a – for it obviously hypocritical – final stand against answering brutal violence with even more brutal violence.

It does, however, use the somewhat less awkward opportunity to portray the kind of close, male friendship that would later become one of the core interests of Hong Kong’s heroic bloodshed movie beyond the (heroic) bloodshed. These scenes of Duke and Roy first being buddies in violence and then growing increasingly disenchanted with one another – Roy’s disgust with Duke’s apparent growing of a tiny little bit of conscience is played particularly well by Rasulala – are the strongest of the film’s dramatic scenes. Rasulala and Williamson play off one another wonderfully whatever their relation, suggesting a lot of the men’s personal history without never needing to explain them.

That their final throw down is the climax of their relationship as well as the film’s best action scene – not that there’s anything wrong with the earlier action – seems rather fitting in this context.

The Valachi Papers (1972)

This Dino de Laurentiis production directed by Terence Young just about managed to beat The Godfather to the cinemas, but didn’t make much of a splash there; nor is it as well-remembered as even the least of Coppola’s gangster movie trilogy would eventually become.

Which certainly has a lot to do with how little this rates in any aspect compared to the Coppola film. Instead of turning the true crime plot about real life Mafia goon turned federal witness Joe Valachi (Charles Bronson) into an exploration of a man’s relationship to the criminal world he betrays, or even just an actual exploration of anything but the surface of that world, this just races through plot points probably taken from the book this is based on, hitting on anthropological bits of Mafia rituals, murders and Valachi’s love life (Jill Ireland inevitably makes her appearance there) in turn, but never stopping to connect any of this to become something you might want to call an actual narrative.

Watching this, it’s not difficult to imagine Martin Scorsese suffering through it as well, only to think he can certainly do this better by using actual themes and characters and even – gosh! – connecting those, while keeping to the life-long scope of the film, coming up with Goodfellas in the process, a film that’s directly comparable in its scope and basic set-up, but does everything right The Valachi Papers can’t even seem to imagine doing.

Despite the gritty visual quality native to movies made at this point in time, there’s a blandness to the film that’s more than just a little infuriating, a feeling as if nobody involved could actually be bothered to add any personality or depth to the proceedings. The sloppiness of the period parts – where no attempt seems to have been made to hide out of period background details to a degree even I noticed it – adds further to this air of a film that’s just not bothering. Which, as always, leaves the question why a viewer should.

Music Monday: Hawkmoon (not Dorian) Edition

Metamorphosis (2022)

Original title: Yi bian bao long

After catching a very weird giant snake that escaped from a dubious gene research facility, biologist (weird wildlife expert?) and all-around honourable man of action Liang (Gao Shuang) hires on with the research outfit responsible for the monstrosity. His ex-girlfriend, scientist Shi Wen (Sun Ruiqi) is working there as well, and there’s still clearly still a lot going on between them. It’s a bad time for romance, though, for escaping giant snakes aren’t the place’s only problem: the T-Rex the researchers have cobbled together out of the genetical material of other animals breaks out of its cage as well, and now starts hunting the research staff. Liang and Shi Wen do their best to keep everyone alive, but herding these bickering scientists is rather a lot like herding the proverbial cats.

To make matters worse, the perhaps cow-sized T-Rex mutates whenever it encounters deadly force, and eventually evolves to acquire interesting traits like a prehensile tongue and super-chameleon-like stealth powers. All very much to the delight of the mad scientist who actually owns the facility.

Apparently, while I wasn’t looking Chinese streaming services have started to fill the niche for cheap and cheerful CGI monster movies left deserted when the SyFy Channel jumped the Sharknado, and I’m all for it. Chen Liangyan’s Metamorphosis follows all the of the important rules of this particular genre, showing off its dubious but certainly not charmless creatures early and often, while only wasting time on the human characters to create a modicum of plot forward momentum.

Mostly, the people are in here to get eaten, look pretty, bicker to make us happy for them getting eaten, and be heroic, and the cast fulfil these functions as well as can be hoped for. Showing good sense for the kind of movie this is, Chen puts little emphasis on the interpersonal dramatics, and instead hits the monster action as quickly as possible, while doing his best to keep away from too much repetition through the wonderful goofiness of the monster’s mutations. Thanks to an economical runtime of just seventy minutes, this plan works out fine for the movie and at least this viewer.

I have a lot of time for cheap monster movies, and certainly ones that understand the basic needs they are made to fulfil quite as well as Metamorphosis does – the tropes and clichés are the point of these films, not something to be shamefacedly avoided, so wallowing in them is indeed a good thing.

Plus, there’s very little I can say against a film that follows Chekhov’s edict while replacing a boring gun over a fireplace with a colourful giant CGI snake.

Circle of Danger (1951)

Some years after the end of World War II. Having made enough money in the underwater salvaging business to afford it, Clay Douglas (Ray Milland) travels to the UK to figure out the truth of the mysterious circumstances that resulted in the death of his brother during the war. All Clay really knows is that his brother died on a joint commando raid with British forces, but he has a curious feeling that there’s more to the death than “just” the vagaries of war.

Now Clay has the funds to travel around Great Britain from Wales to Scotland to meet up with the survivors of the raid who also happened to survive the war. His doubts grow with the reticence the men show to speak of what happened to his brother; this certainly makes his investigation rather difficult.

Because a man needs a hobby, Clay has an early meet-cute with americanophile Elspeth Graham (Patricia Roc) who is as obviously smitten with him as he is with her. Turns out investigating a mystery and romancing a woman at the same time is something of a juggling act Clay isn’t terribly well cut out for.

Going by the bare plot description I did expect Circle of Danger to be a – perhaps Hitchockian, perhaps early 50s paranoid – thriller somewhat in the vein of perpetual house favourite Ministry of Fear (a film that of course also features Milland). In actuality, this is a very leisurely mystery that spends as much if not more time on Elspeth’s and Clay’s romance as it does on a very minorly realized mystery. Quite a bit of the film looks and feels a bit like a tourist board ad as well, with Milland strolling through very different parts of the UK in the studio and some beautifully shot locations director Jacques Tourneur shows from their prettiest sides.

I don’t know the – usually great – Tourneur as a director of fare this light, but once I accepted that nothing about this affair is going to be tight, exciting, or tense, and clearly isn’t meant to be any of those things, I did start to enjoy myself with it.

After all, Milland is still in his charming leading man phase, and as always a joy to behold going through these particular motions, the romance is improbable enough to work, and Tourneur shoots even the least exciting criminal investigation with great style. As an added bonus, the suddenly very tight five minutes during the climax feature an incredible use of wide empty spaces for a suspense scene.

Three Films Make A Post: A new depth of fear

Gods of the Deep (2023): British low budget one man movie making army Charlie Steeds returns to the Lovecraftian well, including a pretty fantastic God of the Deep/homemade Cthulhu effect.

Otherwise, this is at first dominated by the joys of cheap underwater sci fi sets that sometimes reminded me pleasantly of Juan Piquer Simón’s own cardboard underwater horror/sf affair The Rift, to then turn into a mix of cheap weird psychedelia with terrible action movie dialogue and some dollops from Aliens.

It’s all very 80s Italian in its approach to, ahem, creative borrowing, which, depending on one’s taste, is either a damning indictment of the film, or, if you’re me, a gateway to the kind of fun they don’t usually make this way anymore.

London Overground (2016): John Rogers’s documentary finds that most London of writers, Iain Sinclair, retracing the steps he took for his book of the same title, with the involvement of some of the usual suspects. Like a lot of later Sinclair, this is a mix of insightful observations on London and the changes in her, an old man ranting at clouds while walking, and a portrait of a man finding poetry in the sort of thing most people would just walk on by and ignore.

Thus are some of the typical problems of Sinclair’s work on display. Predominantly, the inability to separate the critique of the capitalist horrors inflicted on a place from one’s own nostalgia for the ideal version of the place that only ever existed in one’s mind – or in this case the books one wrote, which can lead to the impression that Sinclair is against any change whatsoever (which I don’t believe he actually is).

However, there’s much to think about and look at here that would be lost without Sinclair or this film.

Top Line (1988): A writer (Franco Nero) procrastinating and sleeping around in Colombia is put on the trail of a great conspiracy that hides the trail of alien influences on earth. Various forces – like a sadistic Nazi played by George Kennedy of all people – try to hinder or murder him. Among those forces is a wonderfully blatant – and pretty good looking, effects wise – Terminator rip-off, for we are back in the arms of the actual Italian rip-off machine in all its confused oddness. Here, James Cameron meets the UFO conspiracy and traces of the 80s jungle adventure movie, Nero goes shirtless a lot, and little happens that makes much sense.

On the plus side, little happens that makes much sense that isn’t also pretty awesome or entertaining. From time to time, director Nello Rossati even manages an actually suspenseful scene – the preposterous but great sequence of Kennedy hunting Nero through a cactus field comes to mind. If not that, he at least comes up with something memorably goofy. Why wasn’t the Arnie Terminator smashed by an angry bull?

King Boxer (1972)

aka Five Fingers of Death

Original title: 天下第一拳

When kung fu master Sung (Ku Wen-Chung) finds that his best disciple Chao Chih-Hao (Lo Lieh) has nothing of worth to learn from him anymore, he sends the young man off to the school of Master Suen (Fang Mian), whom he deems superior to himself as a martial artist. The point isn’t just to better Chao’s abilities, but to turn him into the future winner of the Regional Kung Fu Tournament, an event so important, the school of the winner basically rules the (regional) martial world. Should the title fall into the hands of a school not as morally upright as those of Sung and Suen, a reign of terror over the non-fighting populace may very well commence.

Turns out that isn’t just two old kung fu masters being melodramatic, for the insidiously evil – and hilariously hypocritical – Master Meng (Tien Feng) is indeed planning on having his son, the also pretty vile Tien-Hsiung (Tung Lin), become the new champion to then indeed start on that reign of terror business. To that end, Meng invites every morally dubious fighter he can get his claws into to his school, and is certainly not averse to murdering Suen’s disciples when the opportunity arises.

Once Chao becomes established at Suen’s school, tensions mount further, for the young man, once completely trained even in the secret Iron Palm Technique, is certainly going to beat Meng Tien-Hsiung’s murderous behind handily. So Meng decides to get really serious with his intrigues, even going so far as to invite a trio of Japanese – gasp! – killers to his school, letting them kill, mutilate and be dishonourable to their hearts content, while Tien-Hsiung grins from the side-lines.

Cheng Chang-Ho’s (a Korean director more properly named Jeong Chang-Hwa who worked for the Shaw Brothers for decades) King Boxer was one of the breakthrough movies for kung fu cinema in the West, or at least on the US grindhouse circuit.

Working from a plot that was old when kung fu cinema was still in its infancy, it’s at first difficult to make out why exactly this of all films of the genre hit particularly hard. Cheng’s direction seems very state of the genre in 1972: the zooms come when you expect them to, the editing style is perfectly of its time and place, and everything looks and feels much like every other of the bloodier martial arts films made in Hong Kong of the era.

However, once the film gets really going, its attraction becomes very much clear – Cheng has an impeccable sense of timing, hitting the sentences of action and the punctuation of melodramatic revelations with absolute perfection (and very ably assisted by Wu Da-Jiang’s score). The escalation to increasingly bloody violence is just as perfect, until we hit on the kind of mutilation that really must have sold to the grindhouses; the choreography is of course impeccable. There’s such a perfect sense of timing, so much of the very specific kind of artistry experienced filmmaking hands can put into a genre movie that just wants to be a genre movie, and damn deconstruction, irony and cleverness on display in it, King Boxer takes on an archetypal quality. That the people involved were in reality probably just trying to churn out another Shaw production matters little when you look at the finished product of their labours.

This archetypal quality can also be seen in the character work. Of course the characters and their psychology aren’t deep, but they aren’t deep in exactly the right way, embodying their one or two character traits in exactly the right way (even if it’s being pretty but boring like main love interest Wang Ping) to feel like moving parts in an old tale that have been polished to be singularly perfect expressions of these traits.

Or, if you think I’m really laying it on a bit thick here: this is also a film full of joyfully intense bouts of kung fu, some great eye mutilation, a fantastically tense fight in the dark that’s just one of four connected climactic fights, and that wonderfully unsubtle score Quentin Tarantino borrowed a piece of for Kill Bill.

Here for Blood (2022)

Because she needs at least half an evening off juggling part-time jobs and learning for her college exams, student Phoebe (Joelle Farrow) convinces her boyfriend, underpaid and dumb but buff and tenacious pro-wrestler Tom O’Bannon (Shawn Roberts), to fill in for at least half a shift of babysitting while she spends some time actually focussing on learning.

Little Grace (Maya Misaljevic), the kid in question, is good as long she gets her dose of digital entertainment, so things shouldn’t go too far off the rails.

Alas, a group of masked weirdos invades the home of Grace’s parents, and attack Tom during an attempt to abduct the kid.

Given Tom’s joyful enthusiasm for physical violence, their plan - if you want to call it that - doesn’t go terribly well for the bad guys. Unfortunately, these aren’t just your garden variety home invaders but members of a cult worshipping some nasty entities from the Outside, so Tom is soon beset not just by armed assholes for him to beat up but also needs to cope with undead, possessed and very hard to kill guys for him to chop up. Things become rather high stakes for him personally as well, once Phoebe and two of her friends arrive to take over the other half of the babysitting gig; though Phoebe turns out to be a decent hand with a meat cleaver.

After a somewhat rough first fifteen minutes or so, where the jokes don’t hit and the filmmaking feels rather lacklustre in a particularly indie horror kind of way, Daniel Turres’s gory horror comedy hits its stride the moment the violence starts. Suddenly, drab camerawork turns exciting, indifferent editing effective, and the series of quips and one-liners may stay stupid but also becomes actually funny.

Turres is very, very good at milking his practical effects budget for all it is worth, and even though there’s clearly no possibility to do much beyond doing great make-up jobs on men of varying beefiness, the film does so with a surprising amount of hilariously nasty imagination. Enough of it, proceedings never descend into the realms of cheap gore comedy where the same gag is repeated far too often; instead Here for Blood demonstrates an impeccable sense of timing and pacing, where no incident is kept with for too long, and no scene hangs on for too long because somebody in the production was a afraid of ending a sentence instead of keeping it going (he wrote in a run-on sentence).

Unlike how one might probably imagine a Canadian movie to be, this is a decidedly, nay proudly, low-brow affair that puts a considerable amount of cleverness into being likeably dumb without ever becoming the nasty kind of low-brow that wants to bring back fascism. This is as fun as a movie full of decapitation, mutilation, squirting blood and a wrestler body-slamming a guy’s head to mush can be; it enjoys being that sort of thing, and will probably look at you funny if you complain about it being what it is. It’s too polite a film to feed naysayers to an ever hungry very old head, though. Probably.

Three Films Make A Post: Expose the corruption. Protect the hive.

The Beekeeper (2024): Somehow, for reasons only known to the Hollywood gods who keep good directors out of work, David Ayer still ends up with decent budgets for his movies. This Jason Statham vehicle is John Wick minus the style and the weirdness, with added bee metaphors (so many bee metaphors) and shows our hero boringly killing his way through the usual hordes of incompetent caricatures. There’s never a second where he appears actually threatened, which doesn’t exactly up the excitement ante, and the staging and filming of the action sequences is blandly competent without any sparks of visual or kinetic imagination.

The plot is silly, but never so silly it ever threatens to make the movie fun, and Ayer’s direction lacks style, visual imagination and character to a nearly disturbing degree. Bees and Jason Statham deserve better, as do people who want to actually be entertained by their dumb action movies.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023): On the positive side, The Beekeeper does at least have a vague idea of what its audience might expect of it, it’s just not terribly good at delivering it. This (first and only?) Kaijuverse streaming show as produced for Apple doesn’t, or rather, it appears to believe that what an audience wants from a show named after a secret giant monster hunting organisation are endless scenes of badly written soap operatics, mostly done by C&W style pretty young actors lacking the gravitas and actorly depth that might draw interest out of this nonsense.

Things tend to pick up whenever a monster appears or when the show spends time on flashbacks into the early years of Monarch, but most of its running time is wasted on moves that were old when Dallas made them. Apart from being clueless about what an audience may want from it, the show is also unlucky: take for example, the stunt casting of Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt as the younger version of Kurt’s character. This sounds clever on paper but suffers from the younger Russell’s inability to act his way out of a wet paper bag.

Lord of Misrule (2023): It probably shows my skewed tastes that William Brent Bell’s critically drubbed folk horror movie is the one of these three pieces of media I’d actually recommend to anyone. It’s not that I disagree with the general gist of its critical reception: this is indeed a best of folk horror tropes compilation tape that has little of its own to add to the canon, and isn’t always great at connecting the tropes sensibly.

However, I happen to like these folk horror tropes, and am perfectly okay with the way Bell arranges them here, especially since the production design is derivative as hell, but also looks and feel pretty good. Thus, Bell manages to create at least a handful of decently creepy scenes for Tuppence Middleton to be dramatic in. Which to me makes for a decently good time.

Music Monday (On A Tuesday): Grandfatherly Edition

Murder at Shijinso (2019)

aka Murder at the House of Death

Original title: 屍人荘の殺人

A university’s would-be great detective (Tomoya Nakamura) and his Watson (Ryunosuke Kamiki) are drawn into an actual murder mystery and more when actual girl detective Hiruko Kenzaki (Minami Hamabe) presses them into accompanying her to a dubious get-together of their University’s “Rock club” that’s taking place in a pretty impressive pension out in the boons close to a local rock festival.

In actuality, the rock club event is used as a feeding trough for older alumni to look for women in pretty damn toxically masculine way.

When a zombie outbreak occurs at the festival, the group – and a few other survivors they picked up at the festival - has to lock themselves inside the pension. Inside isn’t as safe as one would hope, for a mysterious series of seemingly impossible murders occurs that may have more to do with the shittiness of the male rock club people than a zombie apocalypse.

Having enjoyed the pretty incredible locked room/impossible crime but with zombies novel by Masahiro Imamura this is based on (published in English translation as “Death Among the Undead”), I found myself very disappointed with Hisashi Kimura’s adaptation. It’s not only that the adaptation doubles down on the weakest element of the novel – the Light Novel style characterisations right out of otaku central that just scream “I want to be adapted into a manga!” – it also changes a lot of details of its source in ways that are clearly meant to make the material faster paced and less talky. These changes do indeed sharpen the film’s pacing, but they also make the material less rich as a mystery and file off quite a few telling details that enrich the story emotionally and intellectually.

In consequence, the murders are mechanically less complex and mysterious, the background behind the killings and the killer’s character also become less complex and less compelling, and the handful of actual emotional beats don’t hit as well. The the film sacrifices everything that makes the book as fun and interesting as it is for a faster pace that isn’t the be all and end all in a somewhat traditional mystery like this anyway. Seeing these kinds of pointless changes in an adaptation is more than a little frustrating.

How this looks to someone who hasn’t read the novel, I obviously can’t speculate about.

Rififi (1955)

Original title: Du rififi chez les hommes

Tony (Jean Servais) has just gotten out of prison. He is now a bitter and at least half broken man, at least in part because his girlfriend Mado (Marie Sabouret) left him while he was inside and absconded with the loot of the heist he was in for to boot. After abusing Mado – who now has a new horrible boyfriend in form of gangster Pierre Grutter (Marcel Lupovici) – with a belt, Tony decides he’s going to go down in a blaze of glory. So he accepts the invitation of a buddy of his own young friend Jo (Carl Möhner), an Italian named – in a fit of deep originality – Mario (Robert Manuel), to help the younger men with a heist on a jewellery store. Instead of the smash and grab they had initially planned, though, Tony suggests they do something much bigger. Adding Italian safecracker Cesare (director Jules Dassin himself) to the team, they come up with a plan to get into the store’s rather impressive vault.

Thanks to excellent preparation and some cool professionalism during the job (imagine the opposite of Money Heist), the heist goes off without a hitch. The problems start afterwards, when Cesare, an inveterate champion of buying women who are otherwise out of his league, uses a piece of jewellery from the heist for his unhealthy hobby. Soon Grutter and his junkie brother Remi (Robert Hossein) are on our crew’s trail, and these men do not follow the handful of rules of criminal conduct even an abusive prick like Tony believes in.

There’s a reason why Jules Dassin’s Rififi is typically listed among the greatest and most influential heist movies – it’s pretty much a perfect example of the form, made by a filmmaker whose style to my eyes prefigures the hyper-realism of Scorsese and the detail-obsession of somebody like Michael Mann.

Quite a bit of the film takes place on actual grimy Parisian streets, but instead of mere documentary realism, Dassin’s eye for the often artfully artless looking shot, followed by the not at all artless looking next and often very dynamic (by mid 50s standards, not Michael Bay, obviously and fortunately) editing, turn these into an ideal of Grimy Parisian Streets that expresses the idea of the term just as much – one might suggest even better – than their actual reality.

Dassin’s ability to focus on the right details comes to the fore in the legendary, long, wordless heist sequence that produces great tension out of watching men at their (illegal) precision work. There’s a painstaking focus on detail in this sequence, as well as total trust in the audience’s ability to understand what’s going in it based on what it has seen in the preparation stages of the heist; both come together to create twenty minutes of incredible tension.

But even after that, Rififi isn’t through. At this point, you can expect a degree of slackening of tension in most heist movies – on the plot or the visual level – but this is not a film willing to stop and breathe for a moment. Dassin starts building tension again at once, this time, using quite a bit of the character building he has done in the first act to create the sling that’s going to throttle the characters, and goes through a series of suspenseful sequences that are just as tightly focussed and brilliantly conceived as the heist. This being a French movie, the characters’ doom does not feel like a moral judgement on them (in fact, modern sensibilities could argue that Tony’s abusive relationship with Mado could use a bit more of a moral judgement from the film), but as a result of the way the world works for any of us.

Three Films Make A Post: “The Best Film of the Year”

Fallen Leaves aka Kuolleet lehdet (2023): I’m not quite as enthused about this Aki Kaurismäki film as most professional critics seem to be, and would prefer his previous two movies to this romance with difficulties, but then, I always found that Kaurismäki’s directing style, his use of Brechtian/Mamet-type acting, his love for stiffly posing characters in the frame, works better in his more comedic films. Here, where humour is still there and accounted for but really not at the centre of attention, the conscious distancing and stiffness gets a bit in the way for me, overemphasising concepts in favour of characters in what is for all sense and purpose actually a character piece.

This doesn’t mean I don’t see this as a worthwhile or artfully made film. It’s just not one I’m burning to revisit soon.

Return to Seoul aka Retour à Séoul (2022): Staying with arthouse favourites that didn’t quite connect with me, I found Davy Chou’s years-spanning tale of a French woman (Park Ji-min) with Korean birthparents repeatedly returning to Korea often visually stunning, but also rather frustrating in its unwillingness to connect some dots about its main character Freddie for the audience. Where mainstream films tend to overexposit and feel the need to explain every damn thing in them, Chou goes the other way, never expositing or explaining, even when a bit of a hint or two might provide a deeper understanding of Freddie. As it stands, her behaviour often feels random and a bit disconnected from what we know about her, her trauma an abstract thing rather than one to empathize with.

And yes, yes, I get it, this does of course mirror Freddie’s lack of deeper connection to the people and the world around her, as caused by her issues, but that doesn’t mean it is a satisfying way to go for a movie; it’s more an abstractly interesting one, and I’m not terribly interested in the abstract in my film watching experience. I can feel disconnected very well on my own, thank you very much.

Mad Fate aka 命案 (2023): On the other hand, I did connect with this complicated film about the horrors of destiny, the weight of grief, and the nastiness of coincidence/the gods, rather a lot more than with the first two in this entry. It’s not as if director Cheang Pou-Soi is out to make anything easy for his audience. His characters – including deeply disturbing performances by Gordon Lam Ka-Tung and Yeung Lok-Man – are certainly not what you’d normally call “relatable”, while the plot is as finicky as you can expect from a film where the destructive force of destiny hangs over the characters like a badly-humoured cat. The whole affair has a somewhat curious disposition as well,where it finds a degree of hope in a manner bound to make you uncomfortable.

Yet there’s a drive to push the audience into the film’s world Return to Seoul only has visually, Fallen Leaves not at all, and a willingness to let the audience into the head of the characters as well as its ideas the other two films of this entry lack, and that really makes this something special.

Music Monday: Train/Gasoline Edition

The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1992)

Original title: インスマスを覆う影 Insumasu o ouu Kage

In a version of Japan where places like Innsmouth, Arkham and Kingsport are a train ride away from Tokyo, newly minted travel-journalist and photographer Hirata (Shiro Sano) develops a curious obsession with visiting the small coastal town of Innsmouth. Innsmouth’s pull on him seems to be connected to vague childhood memories and a vision of a rather fishperson-like looking gentleman.

Once Hirata arrives there, Innsmouth turns out to be a former rich fishing town that has somewhat come down. Most of its buildings appear closed and dilapidated. Apart from a female cab and delivery driver (Kimie Shingyoji) from Arkham whose outfit (nobody here seems to ever change their clothes) screams early 90s, the town’s population is less than friendly. Their food seems to consist of fish that’s not quite dead yet, and there are very peculiar ceremonies held on the beach. Still, Hirata persists in poking around town and making photos – there’s just something about the town he can’t quite grasp that draws him in ever further, yet that also seems to influence him for the worse, bringing on a desperate and violent side we didn’t get to see when he was still in Tokyo.

On the plus side, there’s a sexually aggressive lady in a kimono (Michiko Kawai) strolling around town for Hirata to fool around with.

If you keep in mind its nature as a sixty minute Japanese TV movie from the early 90s and can cope with the cheap look of the cinematography that comes with that, Chiaki Konaka’s is surprisingly clever adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth”. There are, of course, a lot of changes, but most of these make sense for the film’s place, time, and budgetary constraints. Olmstead’s flight from Innsmouth as written in Lovecraft, the film simply couldn’t bring on screen in any decent way, and the long expositional scenes of Zadok Allen would either mean a guy talking at the audience for large swathes of the movie or flashbacks the film again simply couldn’t afford.

Thus, putting a stronger emphasis on Olmstead’s/Hirata’s disturbing familial connections and the horrors of heritage and identity makes a lot of sense, while keeping fully with Lovecraft’s interests. It also opens up avenues for horror and suspense sequences the film can afford, while also providing ample opportunity for building up a somewhat creepy mood. Konaka – who has predominantly worked as a writer for much if his career – turns out to be rather good at doing this with the simple sets much of the film takes place in, bathing them in the classical colours of weirdness – red and green – whenever something mildly creepy happens, and making up for the lack of make-ups effects that would work in dialogue scenes by filming most of the townies in expressionist half-shadow.

There are some pretty neat Deep One masks, mind you, and they are sculpted with what looks a degree of love and care – they are just not the kind of thing you’d put front and centre, or let the audience’s eyes linger on for too long.

Thanks to Konaka’s direction, and his clever interpretation of what this Lovecraft tale is all about (turns out, you can leave the whole icky fear of “miscegenation” out and still keep rather a lot of Innsmouth intact), this version of Innsmouth is much better than you’d expect given its circumstances. There’s a thematic coherence that doesn’t even break down when the plotting becomes a bit loose in the end. For much of its running time, Insumasu is dominated by the feeling of watching a guy stumble through a situation he can’t quite comprehend, reacting to it in ways he can’t quite understand either that does stand an adaptation of this particular novella in very good stead.

It also ends on little bit of flip-book magic that most certainly wasn’t in Lovecraft but is such a clever little moment, I found it impossible not to love the film for it alone.

River (2023)

Original title: Ribâ, nagarenaide yo

A small, traditional Japanese mountain inn situated right next to a river and its surroundings are suddenly trapped in a time loop. While the characters keep a continuous consciousness and remember everything that happened in earlier loops, the world around them and the position and state of their bodies are reset every two minutes. We experience this through the perspective of Mikoto (Riko Fujitani), a young woman working at the inn. The staff do their best to keep the peculiar situation calm as if keeping guests from losing it were just another part of the horrors of working in the service industry to be survived through politeness and gritting one’s teeth.

Obviously, the situation escalates, because juggling eccentric guests and private feelings isn’t easy even outside of a time loop.

Junta Yamaguchi follows up his lovely, charming time travel variation Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, with this lovely and charming time loop variation again focussed on two minutes, again scripted by Makoto Ueda (who also has form in other time travel adjacent media).

In the beginning the film charms through the simple and focussed manner in which it treats its basic plot, the surehanded escalation of events and loss of nerves of its characters. Once the point is reached where it appears proceedings are just one step ahead of turning into outright horror or splatter, Yamaguchi slows it down simply by letting Mikoto turn in a different direction after a loop has reset, stepping into a quieter, more quietly emotional part of the plot, until we get a humorous action-ish finale.

Visually, Yamaguchi makes clever use of repeating camera angles and set-ups. We always start a loop on the same shot of Mikoto standing by the river, and follow her into the inn with the same shot from behind, to only then encounter the newest escalation with changes to the staging and framing of what follows. The film diverges from this very purposefully at certain points to signal larger changes in the emotional quality of what’s happening and the development of the plot. This does feed into – represents, really -  the film’s main thematic argument – the human need for change even in the sort of quiet and calm one might want to stay in forever. Which could sound a bit like something out of an astrology book or the worst kind of pop psychology, but is here, embedded in quirky shenanigans, time travel and time loop tropes, and some sweet quiet moments, perfectly convincing.

Three Films Make A Post: They're all alone in this together.

The Holdovers (2023): It’s not generally a great sign to someone of my tastes when basically every single review about a film describes it as “heart-warming”, but then not too many movies manage to be heart-warming without becoming kitsch, so this isn’t completely my failing. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers the kitsch by an insistence on all that’s crappy in life existing for its characters as well; its uplifting quality lies in saying “all this is true, but still…” and finding the positive in the small yet life-changing things. All the while, the humour runs a perfect line of sarcasm of the kind that’s quotable and will still be funny after you’ve quoted it a hundred times. The performances of the core trio of actors – Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa – are point perfect, and Payne directs like someone putting himself completely in the service of the story he is trying to tell (which is a difficult thing if you’re also going to tell it well).

Lot No. 249 (2023): For 2023’s Ghost Story for Christmas, Mark Gatiss went to the Arthur Conan Doyle well. This is probably one of the Gatiss era’s lesser offerings, but I say that rather regularly about these things and then find myself returning to them with great joy later on, so ask me again about its greatness or lesserness in a couple of years.

What’s definitely fine here is a surprising performance by Kit Harington, a cameo by not-Sherlock Holmes quite a few people not me apparently found annoying, and subtext about gayness, (self-)repression and the arrogance of Empire that has lost all of the sub.

The Childe aka Sad Tropics aka 귀공자 (2022): This South Korean action film by Park Hoon-jung concerns the misadventures of a young man looking for his father who learns that some fathers are better not found. A violent three-way-tugging match about with him as the rope ensues. The film features some fun, sometimes – the climax! - brilliant, action set pieces and a handful of performances so cartoonish, one will either find them very fun or very annoying, and very little else worth talking about. Enjoyable, the film certainly is, and I’m not against cartoons in any way, shape or form.

Music Monday: Born Strangers Edition