Strange Love of the Vampires (1975)

Original title: El extraño amor de los vampiros

aka Night of the Walking Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Azrael (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch (1985)

aka Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf

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

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

Needless to say, things turn weird in Transylvania.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Page of Madness (1926)

Original title: 狂った一頁, Kurutta Ichipeiji

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

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

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

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

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

The Man and the Monster (1959)

Original title: El hombre y el monstruo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Night God Screamed (1971)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baby Assassins (2021)

Original title: Beibî warukyûre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Kill With Intrigue (1977)

Original title: 劍花煙雨江南

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DogMan (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cutter’s Way (1981)

aka Cutter and Bone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Longlegs (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Third Man (1949)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Primevals (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Delinquents (2023)

Original title: Los delincuentes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paranormal Surveillance Camera 3-7 (2013-2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haunting Soul from the Dark Building (1989)

aka Haunting Ghost from a Dark Building

aka Haunting Soul in an Old Building

The soundman (Chen Xiguang) of a mainland Chinese movie project lives in a run-down apartment building that features dubious neighbours, a sleazy and mildly threatening caretaker, and a cellar nobody has entered in years. It also has the most wonderful room sound in its staircase, so our soundguy does invite the film’s lead actress (Pan Jie) to walk up some stairs for him there when he’s not satisfied with the sound on set.

She’s got a creepy feeling in the place, though, and begins to have visions of the rape and murder of a teenager that must have taken place in that cellar during the Cultural Revolution (when nobody cared much about one murder more, the film suggests, somehow getting that past the censors). At the same time, the soundman is suddenly able to record bits and pieces of the future on his equipment. Thus drawn into the apartment’s mystery, the two team up to find out how killed the teenager.

All of this apparently excites the kid’s ghost quite a bit, and it begins haunting and killing people.

Haunting Soul is that rare example of an actual horror movie from mainland China. Stylistically and thematically, it is firmly anchored in the tradition of Asian ghost horror as I know it quite well from other countries in the area. Some of its ideas run parallel to those that would later make up the core of the J-horror explosion but never quite lead to as interesting and horrifying places as these later films would reach. But then, not being on the level of Kiyoshi Kurosawa or Hideo Nakata when he was at his best, is not such a terrible failure.

Yet, while they are clearly knowledgeable about the traditions of films about hauntings, and do like to borrow from those traditions, directors Mu Deyuan and Ming Liang seem at times somewhat insecure in their approach to horror cinema, perhaps on account of a certain lack of practical filmmaking experience with the genre in their national cinema. There’s a certain clumsiness and awkwardness in some of the horror scenes that isn’t helped by highly misguided ideas of how a flying doll head can be made creepy (note to directors: probably not make it look quite as much like it were on some very bad drugs), and sudden outbreaks of bizarre nonsense like the synth version of “Also sprach Zarathustra” that underlies a supposedly dramatic scene. Elements that, of course, make the whole affair pleasantly psychotronic even though they weaken its effect as a proper horror film.

On the other hand, Haunting Soul has moments of actual dream-like dread – everything having to do with the characters’ visions is particularly nicely done - and has quite a bit of fun with using the movie making background as part of its horror. It’s meta, but only as much as the film can actually carry without becoming completely silly.

The apartment location is wonderful as well, looking as Gothic as a modern building can look with its improbably large cellar, light that always threatens to turn the colours of horror and as many hand-placed artificial cobwebs as one can dream of. I also suspect some of this would look like a proper time capsule to the right Chinese audience; it does at least have that feeling from over here in Germany.

This being a mainland Chinese horror movie, there is, of course, the dreaded “natural explanation” for everything we’ve seen to appease the censors, but the directors clearly don’t care about convincing us they actually mean it. Seldom have I seen less effort and screen time sacrificed to this particularly kind of nonsense; so much so that the whole “it was all a tale mental patients told each other” bit feels more of a satire on rational explanation endings than a proper one.

King Kong vs Godzilla (1962)

Original title: Kingu Kongu tai Gojira キングコング対ゴジラ

While a reawakened Godzilla makes his way back to attack Japan, some ad men are sent on an expedition to a mysterious island. After some misadventures with the local natives, the guys manage to capture their god – King Kong. The ad-men’s boss decides it would be great ad copy if the pharmaceutical company they work for would officially sponsor Kong, and they’d get him to beat up Godzilla. Monster fighting ensues.

Some would argue that here, finally, Showa era Toho kaiju cinema has arrived at the overtly childlike and silly yet also often thematically rich tone it would keep to until the era’s end in the 70s.

I don’t exactly disagree, but would also suggest that Toho – as well as director Ishiro Honda – already had arrived at that tone much more successfully with the preceding, Godzilla-less Mothra. Where Mothra does a comparable thing a lot more effectively, here, the satire of capitalism, its expression through a modern media circus and consumerism turns at times gratingly unfunny and drags down the pacing of too much of the first two acts.

Because Honda was one of the great directors of his time, there are still moments of great joy in the first fifty minutes or so: the Japanese people in brown face pretending to be South Sea islanders dancing to a sleeping Kong is pretty incredible (also thanks to Ifukube’s wonderful theme) if “problematic”, and there’s even a bit of fun smashing going on when the film bothers to get away from ad-men and expositing scientists.

The final act, on the other hand, is flawless in its mixture of the silly, the outrageous (there’s for example an incredible bit of dialogue about an electrified Swiss postman only a giant ape wouldn’t love), and the utterly bizarre, wonderful and impactful fights the title promised.

It’s no wonder the US cut – for a long time the only version of the film you could see outside of Japan – decided to cut quite a bit of the material in the first acts. Unfortunately, the news reel style nonsense they replaced it with was even more grating and boring, while sanding away any attempt at depth.

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner in one of my favourite performances of hers) has the middle-aged blues. Her marriage to her high school sweetheart Charlie (Nicolas Cage) is practically over, and she doesn’t seem to quite have had the life she hoped for when she was young. There must have been some happy years with Charlie in-between, though, and they produced a daughter (Helen Hunt) who clearly has turned out fine and loves both of her parents.

Still, her daughter’s emotional support notwithstanding, Peggy Sue’s feeling bad, and she’s even worse because she has to go to her 25th high school reunion right when she’s having the worst time of her life. When she faints while being crowned reunion queen, she suddenly awakes in 1960, her graduation year, in the body of her younger self (though the film keeps us seeing her as Turner).

Peggy Sue has no idea what’s happening to her, but with twenty-five years of experience and a knowledge of her accumulated mistakes, she decides she’s going to correct what must have gone wrong with her life. Though she just might add some new mistakes of the “live a little” type on the way.

Looking at Francis Ford Coppola’s career beyond the obvious classics, one can regularly encounter semi-hidden gems like Peggy Sue Got Married. On the surface, this is a pretty typical time-shift comedy probably made possible by the success of Back to the Future. Consequently, it goes through quite a few jokes of the kind you’d expect from the set-up – see Peggy Sue’s parents freak out over her sudden grown-up behaviour, see Peggy Sue predict the technological future – and has some space for what you’d probably call boomer nostalgia for pop culture.

There’s nothing wrong with these aspects of the film to my eyes – the jokes are good and the nostalgia actually feeds into the narrative effectively and thoughtfully. If the film were only that, there’s still be a lot to like about it. However, Coppola fills a lot of the proceedings with a genuine sense of melancholia and quiet sadness. This is core to the film’s emotional honesty: whenever it talks about who Peggy Sue was as a teenager and who she grows up into, it avoids seeing the teen perspective as wrong and the more cynical adult one right or the other way around. Instead, the film emphasises again and again, it’s a matter of perspective born in the moment, and life’s not an abstract.

Which also means that Charlie – played with a mix of mania and insight by Cage that’s pretty damn irresistible - does turn out not to be a mistake to be avoided but a guy who genuinely cares about Peggy Sue deeply – in the sort of young person’s way we tend to forget we could feel when we get older – and whose own growing into imperfect middle age is not a thing to be changed by clever tricks but a process that can’t be avoided, though perhaps understood and thereby gotten through as much as Peggy Sue’s own middle-aged sadness can. The film presents no easy answer there but a quiet hope.

In general, there’s a quiet kindness to the way the film treats its characters, which in many ways is mirrored by the small kindnesses middle-aged Peggy Sue as young Peggy Sue spends on most of the people around her this time around, be they useful to her plans of building a better future, or not. One of the philosophical main tenets of Peggy Sue Got Married appears to be “don’t be an asshole”, and why would anyone want to disagree with that?

Break-ing News

I'll dry my tentacles in the summer heat for a bit. Normal service on the blog will resume on August, 21st.

Three Films Make A Post: Will you win, Godzilla? Will you win, Kong? The battle of the century!

Copycat (1995): There are two reasons why Jon Amiel’s serial killer thriller is anything more than a slick adaptation of an overconstructed script. And since these reasons are called Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, and both are in their fullest screen presence modes, this silly concoction about a serial killer who is basically a serial killer cover band turns into a tour de force commanded by two actresses who drag every bit of possible substance out of very little. This sort of thing can absolutely elevate mediocrity into a greatly entertaining movie, as the film thoroughly proves.

Malasaña 32 (2020): Some of the set pieces in Alberto Pintó’s movie about a Spanish family in the 70s moving from the country into what turns out to be a haunted apartment are very well done and effective. However, this is the type of horror movie that can only ever treat and see its supernatural threat as a reason for set pieces and plot twists, and never manages to cohere the political troubles of the time it suggests, the family’s experience moving from the country to the city in hopes of a better life, and the backstory of the supernatural threat into any kind of thematically coherent argument.

The horror pieces themselves tend to the grab-bag approach where thematic coherence or coherence of mood never appear to be of interest to the filmmakers, either. All the easier to borrow heavily from all kinds of sources, be it Poltergeist – a much superior film – or creepypasta.

Embrace of the Serpent aka El abrazo de la serpiente (2023): There’s a certain kinship between Ciro Guerra’s film and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Cobra Verde and Fitzcarraldo in the way naturalism and sudden outbreaks of the surreal intertwine, as well as in its location.

However, this is a film made by someone from a very different time and place, so there are as many differences in approaches and world view as there are similarities – Guerra certainly isn’t a Herzog cover band. The film’s treatment of colonialism, Western scientific and Amazonian traditional culture comes from a very different direction, but Guerra generally doesn’t simplify and keeps certain differences unresolved, philosophical questions answered from two opposing directions at once.

As a film this is an act of deep worldbuilding, making ways of looking at and being in the world understandable by slowly drawing a viewer into them, full immersion in a style only a handful of directors use these days (Robert Eggers comes to mind).

Three Films Make A Post: No man left behind.

Life After Fighting (2024): Lead actor/martial artist/director/producer Bren Foster’s directorial debut climaxes in forty minutes or so of incredibly impressive martial arts madness of the naturalistic, bone-crunching style, presented in a direct and visceral way. To get there, you have to work your way through eighty minutes or so of much too slow build-up, pointless side-plots, and scenes that – in classic indie tradition - never seem to want to end when they really should have ended minutes ago.

I do appreciate Foster’s willingness to go slow and actually ground his character emotionally – this certainly beats the “egomaniac martial arts asshole” you always fear in this kind of project – but there’s providing the ground for things, and then there’s scenes crawling by at a snail’s pace for no good reason.

The Heroin Busters aka La via della droga (1977): This Enzo G. Castellari joint with Fabio Testi (playing a character named Fabio in case he forgets) and David Hemmings as cops (well, Hemmings is playing an Interpol agent) on a rampage starts out pretty slow as well, but it doesn’t take more than half of its running time to gather its speed. Once it dies get going, there’s no holding its series of probably highly dangerous to stunt people action sequences back for even a second. There’s a manic, dangerous energy to Castellari’s action at its best, and here, he holds that level for the whole last act of the film, while doing much less feet-dragging than Foster’s movie before.

Land of Bad (2024): Despite the military-based version of the action film being my least favourite type – I dislike some of the sub-genre’s inherent assumptions even less so than those of vigilante films – it is difficult to find fault with the way William Eubank and a game bunch of actors (several Hemsworths, Ricky Whittle and Milo Ventimiglia in an actually good performance, as well Russell Crowe chewing scenery delightfully as the Man in the Chair) present a series of theoretically tired old clichés. In a style I find by now typical of Eubank, he leaves no cent of the budget not visible on screen, so there’s an always entertaining series of gunplay, explosions, unarmed combat and more explosions shown off in the most effective manner possible.

The character bits are clichéd but also just work, so there’s enough emotional backing to the violence. If you squint and look at the film in the right light, you might also see it as a mild critique of the detached ways of modern technological warfare in some scenes, of course in between the film milking modern technological warfare for the funnest possible action.

Nighty Night (1986)

Original title: 真夜中の悪夢

An intro of a girl reading a version of Little Red Riding Hood to some toys (or is she?) is followed by four unconnected tales of horror. A teenage birthday party turns into a massacre of the certainly no longer repressed. A floating girl that looks like an idol leads young men to their deaths and the realization they can’t actually walk on air; or perhaps it’s the other way round. A geeky girl has to fight off an astonishingly freakish looking monster while she’s trapped in the rules of a video game. Yet another girl adores the preppiest boy in school. When he reciprocates, her body image problems turn into body horror.

All of this takes place in the confines of modern as of 1986 Japanese homes and quotidian urban spaces that breathe a lovely air of an authentic time and place for the bizarre and the supernatural to break into. Apparently hardly anyone saw this when it hit the Japanese video market for about five minutes, but Internet archaeologists have not just uncovered a very watchable looking copy but also produced a documentary about the film’s production, with full cooperation of its director Hirohisa Kokusho. Some days, the Internet does provide what it promises.

For reasons only known to the filmmaker, Nighty Night starts off on its weakest foot. While it sets up the shorts’ thematic through line of turning teenage malaise into horror (an old but dependable tradition), it does have a certain film school stiffness bound to turn potential viewers off, even though it does go all out on the nihilism.

The floating idol killer tale is a lovely little trifle, putting one idea into moving pictures and then getting out while the getting is good.

Then follows my personal favourite of the tales, which doesn’t just feature that pretty damn incredible monster I don’t have words to describe but also makes a more than decent grab at Zuni Doll style one woman versus monster suspense with added blue lighting. Even the horror movie bullshit ending is delightful.

The final story returns to taking teenage horrors very seriously indeed again, but the metaphor is more interesting and better realized than the one in the first tale, and there’s at least a bit of a spring in the step of the editing and camera work here, ending Nighty Night on a face Screaming Mad George would probably have enjoyed creating, and a troubled dead teenager.

What’s not to like about that?

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024)

So apparently what happened in the first Blood and Honey wasn’t necessarily what actually happened in the world of its sequel but may have been the sensationalist adaptation of the true travails of Christopher Robin (Scott Chambers). Monstrous grown-up killer versions of Pooh and co. going on a woodsy killing spree were part of the truth, mind you. I’ll take that as an apology for the quality of the first film.

Christopher Robin is understandably traumatized by the ordeal as well as that movie. Worse still, only a few people – including his friend Lexy (Tallulah Evans) – actually believe the whole killer Pooh thing, so Chris is ostracized in his small town as a potential spree killer.

As if that weren’t enough trouble for a sensitive guy, Pooh (Ryan Oliva), Owl (Marcus Massey) and a particularly deranged Tigger (Lewis Santer) feel rather ostracized themselves by humanity, all of whom either don’t want to be killed by them, don’t believe in them, or want to kill them right back, so they start on another killing spree. This time, they’ll even come to Christopher Robin, if Christopher Robin won’t come to them.

In between killing scenes, we regularly pop in with Chris, who slowly discovers the horrible/hilarious truth about the nature and identity of Pooh and his murderous buddies, and their connection to his other childhood traumas.

Where the first Blood and Honey was just a cheap shot piece of crap, returning director/writer Rhys Frake-Waterfield appears to have put a lot more thought and effort into the sequel. This time around, there’s actually a point beyond sales value for the whole Pooh connection, and the film puts some serious effort into creating a grim and gritty murder background for our childhood friends.

That background is pulp as all get out and very silly indeed, but treated to earnestly, I couldn’t help but be charmed by it.

Because this is 2024, this is of course also a film that utilizes grief and trauma as the motivating factors for its main character. Its portrayal isn’t going to win any prizes, but does provide the film with a bit of emotional grounding and backbone, which is really all a slasher needs to work.

Speaking of slashing, the kills here belong to the drawn-out, sadistic Terrifier 2 style of murder that’s en vogue these years. Even though I’m not a big fan of that approach – turns out very long murder scenes of the type just get boring and a bit unpleasant for me – these are realized via fine, practical effects that demonstrate a decently macabre imagination. Plus, this is still a pleasant ninety minutes long and not two and a half hours, so the Terrifier 2 effect of stealing my time for no good reason does not feature here.

Blood and Honey is a very nice step up from the first film – and hey, this isn’t even to be read as damning with faint praise – so much so I’m genuinely excited for what Frake-Waterfield is going to do in the planned mega match-up of public domain characters that appears to be next on his plate.

Wolf (1981)

Original title: Srigala

Ill-mannered Caroko (S. Parya) and his hired hand divers Tommy (an alas very underused Barry Prima) and Johan (Rudy Salam) have come to a lake somewhere in the jungles of Indonesia to dive for treasure.

The operation is all hush-hush – and one supposes not perfectly legal – so Caroko gets particularly cranky when a trio of, ahem, teenagers appear to have some fun by the lake. Good girl Nina (Lydia Kandou) and less good girl Hesty (Siska Widowati) are accompanied by their much-hated friend and odious comic relief Pono (Dorman Borisman) for some reason.

The girls do like a bit of a good flirt, and the two divers are “hunks”, so Caroko’s ever shorter patience is further tested by his employees’ ensuing extracurricular activities.

Someone else is sneaking around the lake – as well as the obligatory dilapidated lake cabins – as well, clearly planning evil and getting up to the occasional speed-boat duel. Things finally come to a head when the divers find a coffin containing a rotting corpse in the lake, and soon, slashing commences.

I do love quite a few of the films of Indonesian exploitation movie maestro Sisworo Gautama Putra, so getting my hands on a sexy newish restoration of what is generally called an Indonesian Friday the 13th rip-off did get me as excited as normal people are by a long lost reel of Citizen Kane.

As it goes with these things, the film turns out to be a minor disappointment, with the Friday rip-off relegated to the final third. Before Gautama Putra can prove he’s a much better director than Sean S. Cunningham – which indeed he was – there’s a lot of other stuff to get through, not much of it terribly well connected.

Rather, much of the film feels like an attempt to loosely stitch together scenes the filmmakers believe will entertain the audience, but filling the parts in between with simple feet-dragging instead of excitement. So the space between a wonderfully over-the-top speed boat duel (the Voorheeses never got up to that) and the obligatory exploitation movie catfight turning into a much more entertaining out of nowhere exploitation movie martial arts catfight is filled with annoying comic relief, some coy sexy times and lots of pointless bickering.

All of this does look pretty great, at least, and once the film turns into a full-on Friday imitations, it also becomes an undoubtedly fun time, so it’s not as if this were a total write-off. Sisworo Gautama Putra just did so much better in other films.