Three Films Make A Post: Where there is no more death we shall meet again.

Laurin (1989): This is that rare example of an interesting, moody German horror movie. Of course, director Robert Sigl shot in Hungary with predominantly Hungarian actors and crew, so few Germans were actually involved in the production.

This is an example of Gothically inflected, psychological horror concerning the business of a girl starting to grow up, a serial killer, and possibly ghosts, slow-moving yet emotionally and metaphorically intense. Sigl is rather good at imbuing small gestures with a depth of complicated meanings, which traditionally tends to be the sort of thing I like. This being a serious German movie, certain weaknesses show whenever there’s a need for traditional suspense (which isn’t something we do in Germany), but the mood of childhood nightmare is so thick, I won’t blame Sigl for not understanding how to stage a chase scene effectively.

Black Cab (2024): On the plot level, Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab isn’t a terribly original mix of urban legends and contemporary horror tropes, but as a mood piece, it has considerable strengths.

There’s a dreamlike unreality to the various night drives under duress here that make the involvement  of the outright supernatural utterly plausible via the mood provided. Another strong element is a pleasantly deranged performance by Nick Frost as a very sinister taxi driver that greatly strengthens the impact of some well-chosen moments of the kind of dread women suffer from terrible men on a daily basis.

If this sort of thing works for you, you might be as willing to forgive the film the weaknesses of its plotting as much as I did.

Suzhou River (2000): Finishing today’s trilogy of vibes (see how hip I am, fellow kids?), Lou Ye’s play on (and with) elements of noir and Vertigo is all ambiguous doublings of characters, moments and movement, hand-held camera that signals subjectivity instead of authenticity, mermaids and the curious beauty of an industrially wasted river.

Lou’s play with the meta-level of his narrative mostly manages to avoid getting annoying (there’s typically little worse than a filmmaker getting precious about this sort of thing to me) by the amount of ambiguity it shows: this isn’t meta to show how many movies the director has seen, nor to make a precise point, but because it is a movie about ghosts and phantoms, on the screen and off, and the ghost of old movies are ghosts as real as any other.

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far concerns Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ ill-fated attempt of winning the World War II early via an ill-conceived operation in the Netherlands. Ill-fated because – at least in the film’s telling – valuable intel was ignored, important equipment was unusable and anyone at all managed to survive the waves of background incompetence because the men on the ground where particularly tenacious – and probably so used to the War’s combination of idiocy and horror by now, they had learned to cope with it.

Attenborough clearly wasn’t a fan of General Montgomery, and thus the man becomes an off-screen incarnation of bad planning and wilful ignorance – however much one reads this as historically accurate, it certainly isn’t an invalid opinion. In general, Attenborough has little time for those upper echelons whose boots never touch a war zone and let others do the dying, and focusses on characters – all played by an astonishing amount of acting talent – who live or – more often - die by those decisions. The film also spends some time on the impact Operation Market Garden had on the civilian population of the Netherlands, and eventually ends on a handful of survivors in a haunting shot that shows little enthusiasm for any war, even a just one.

Tonally, this is a very strange film: about a third of it feels and sounds like a stodgy but extremely high budget British war movie with a terrible score and performances of a style that belong in this sort of thing (old chap), even when it’s, for example, the usually not at all stodgy Michael Caine hired for it; another third is a series of very 70s New Hollywood style vignettes featuring guys like Gould, Caan, Redford and Hackman (with a bad Polish accent) doing their very different thing in the kind of scenes you’d expect them to be in. The final third mostly concerns the particularly unpleasant adventures of one Lt. Col. Frost having to go through a kind of synthesis of Old Britain and New Hollywood, with a measured and careful performance by Anthony Hopkins, full of moments that are just as bitter and human as those in the American part of the film yet still feel very British in perspective and manner.

Curiously enough, this disparate mix works for the A Bridge Too Far, at least to a degree. Perhaps because it mirrors the very different approaches to warfare brought by the different Allied fighting forces, or perhaps because it simply speaks to my sense of perversity.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Or really, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, for even though Coppola at the time insisted on pretending this to be a close adaptation of the Stoker’s novel, this runs as roughshod over the original as is the norm for movie Draculas. This isn’t a bad thing, I believe – I, for one, don’t need a one to one adaptation of a Victorian novel, as much as I like that particular example of its form. This one is about as close to the original as Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce. Where Hooper chose to retell Dracula as a Quatermass movie, Coppola’s Dracula is the Dario Argento version of Dracula that Argento’s actual Dracula isn’t.

The main project of Coppola’s version appears to be a bit of projection: of the director’s own middle-aged horniness on the novel, overplaying the sexual subtext of a novel that does indeed have rather a lot of sexual subtext so intensely, one repeatedly wants to recommend cold showers to the filmmaker as much as to his characters. Some study of the dictionary entries for “sledgehammer” and “subtlety” might have been of use, as well. All of this has something of the air of watching a high budget Jess Franco movie without the crotch shot obsession but it with even more sexy (and “sexy”) writhing.

That’s not a bad thing in my book, mind you, but rather is an inherent part of what has turned this initially often maligned film into a bit of a classic: sex – eroticism tends to be subtler – is absolutely and always at the core of Dracula’s aesthetics, created out of thin air and celluloid, through the operatically overblown and utterly beautiful production design, the incredible number of bad accents by hot actors who should have known better (as well as Keanu Reeves), and Coppola’s insane/awesome decision to only use effects and filmmaking tricks reproducible on set and in camera (actual theatrical magic).

Thus, Coppola manages to create a mood of highly artificial, overheated and oversexed beauty that never lets up for a single shot – the film’s aesthetics are its actual point, its mood irreproducible and uncreatable by any other means. This may very well be the best possible example of the cinema of style as substance not made by an Italian.

Three Films Make A Post: This murder is set on repeat.

Time Cut (2024): You can’t convince me this thing wasn’t written by ChatGPT following a prompt like “write a script to a nostalgic time travel slasher”. That’s the only explanation to characters quite this generically lifeless, dialogue quite this empty and bland, and a plot this shamelessly cobbled together from other, generally better or at least more interesting films.

This is the sort of thing that gives Netflix originals a bad name, but there’s really nothing in the Netflix approach that explicitly forbids a filmmaker to make a good movie or at least one that shows an occasional sign of life – many manage, after all.

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (2024): I am a bit disappointed that this Christmas thriller/murder mystery pretending to be a Christmas slasher is by far my least favourite of the films directed by indefatigable British low budget indie horror director Charlie Steeds.

On the other hand, given the man’s output (this is film number three or four this year, depending on who is counting), they can’t all be winners. This one suffers from a somewhat limp script (by lead and frequent Steeds collaborator David Lenik) that clearly wants to be sharp and snarky and clever, but can’t quite hit the right notes – certainly not in the dialogue, which isn’t helped by a cast that often simply isn’t quite up to it.

Appointment with Death (1988): On the other hand, I still enjoyed this lesser Steeds quite a bit more than this limp Peter Ustinov Poirot directed by Michael Winner for Cannon films.

You’d think Winner would have sleazed up the material a bit – something I rather like to see done to the works of Christie (but then, I’ve never been a fan) – but instead, this is a mix of about forty percent tourist footage of Israel and sixty percent draggy, unrhythmic dialogue, snoozed through by an on paper fantastic cast. Even Peter Ustinov – a man typically not letting go of any scenery coming his way – seems bored and disengaged, and if you manage to make Ustinov look bored, you’re doing something very wrong indeed.

Gandahar (1987)

Paradisiacal Gandahar – apparently a state of mind nearly as much as it is a city state – is threatened by a mysterious, evil force that turns the people of the outlying parts of the place to stone via inexplicable rays. The sort-of-government of Gandahar send their best man for this sort of thing, the not completely enthusiastic Syl (voiced by Pierre-Marie Escourrou) to find out what is going on.

Syl soon stumbles into love with the beautiful and typically naked Airelle (Catherine Chevallier), and finds out about some of the darker secrets of his beloved home in form of definitely not beautiful but glorious mutants exiled from it. Rather quickly he understands the threat to be an army of robots and the giant brain – the product of a too successful Gandaharian experiment - that controls them. These are the less strange bits of our hero’s adventures, however.

This third and final of French filmmaker René Laloux’s gloriously weird pieces of full-length science fiction animation is an appropriately mind-blowing tale of weird science, weird time travel, weird romance, and the kind of (weird) visual imagination the French seem culturally predisposed to lavish on their science fiction be it in graphic novels, animation or film. French cinema in this mode is in the business of turning dreams, symbols and most probably drug visions into moving pictures of the most peculiar kind, and Laloux and his various collaborators do this in ways profoundly beautiful and strange - in all of his films.

In this, Gandahar is absolutely of a piece with the director’s other works here. As it is in a philosophical slant that seems fascinated with the concept of communities, or rather, focussed on imagining how collectivism and individualism can be reconciled without fascism rearing its ugly head. Gandahar certainly is anti-fascist, among other, much less clear things, as much as it is dream-like, strange, and peculiarly individual. There’s a mix of sharp intelligence and naivety to Laloux’s writing, and really, his world view, that counteracts the elements in it that could be too hippiesque for some tastes.

The film’s visual design is strange, and often utterly astonishing in its matter of fact treatment of strangeness and otherness that asks its audience to accept all the strange bits and pieces it comes up with before trying, and probably more than just occasionally failing, to understand them.

Of course, Gandahar’s visuals do have to put most of their weight on the design, for the actual animation of these designs in it is pretty terrible. The North Korean studio it was farmed out to did a terrible job with it, animating so lazily and inefficiently, you’ll imagine amateurs at work instead of the professional animators these people actually were.

The thing is, Laloux’s vision is so strong, this hardly matters for the film as a whole, or rather, it’s a mild annoyance in comparison to the rest of Gandahar’s strange, dreamlike beauty. To some viewers, it might even enhance it.

Same Old One, same old

Like every year, the Festival calls, the year is nearing its close, and I'm off not posting on here.

I wish every single one of my imaginary readers pleasant holidays - if you're into that sort of thing - and a better new year.

Normal service will resume on January 5th.

Until then, you may or may not want to see me over on my Bluesky account (where I'm not doing all that much right now beyond judicious reposts, but who knows, things might change).

See ya in 2025.

Three Films Make A Post: It's High Noon at the end of the Universe.

Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983): To get out of the way what every write-up of this one, however short, must contain: there’s nary a metalstorm in Charles Band’s film, nor is Jared-Syn destroyed.

Most probably, there’s just no time in-between the attempts to squeeze tropes of the western, post-apocalyptic exploitation and the kind of magic you encounter in space operas into some kind of script-shape; there’s also surprisingly little time for actual fun visible on screen, and even Tim Thomerson and Richard Moll seem to sleepwalk through the affair. For a “one damn thing after another” kind of film, this feels curiously bland and uneventful – if ever “meh” was an objective, palpable quality, Metalstorm achieved it.

The Sea Wolves (1980): Speaking of bland, Andrew V. McLaglen’s war as a boy’s own adventure for old men movie does share that quality on a much higher budget level. Despite the presence of Gregory Peck, David Niven and Trevor Howard – all past their prime but usually still perfectly able to carry a dumb adventure movie – there’s a foot-dragging and disinterested quality to direction, script and acting that makes the whole “war as adventure” angle particularly problematic: after all, shouldn’t a movie doing that sort of thing not at least do it in a way that’s actually entertaining and exciting to watch?

Roger Moore adding his usual old man every woman wants to screw shtick to proceedings does nothing to improve things either.

Look Back (2024): But let’s end on a positive note. This sixty minute anime by Oshiyama Kiyotaka (who not only directs but is also responsible for production, character design and co-scripting) is an utterly lovely thing – a heartbreaker that earns its central moment of sadness, as well as a film about a complicated female friendship (or let’s be honest here, Lesbian love not named such to not scandalize certain people) that doesn’t attempt to come-up with a clear-cut answer to anything, and a film that doesn’t use its moment of magic to heal all things broken.

The Beast Must Die (1974)

Self-made millionaire and all-around prick Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) fancies himself the ultimate hunter. Ultimate hunters need the ultimate prey, and Tom has decided the most dangerous game isn’t humans like other rich movie pricks believe. Nope, it’s werewolves.

Consequently, he has invited a handful of people of dubious character – as well as sometimes potentially suggestive hairiness – onto his isolated island home – there’s a pianist and potential full moon based serial killer (Charles Gray), a potential murderess (Ciaran Madden) who is also friend of Tom’s girlfriend Caroline (Marlene Clark), and a hairy one-time cannibal (Tom Chadbon). Also invited is werewolf expert and enthusiast Dr Lundgren (Peter Cushing), typically dressed nattily in black with red applications, come to spout some very peculiar werewolf lore and be Peter Cushing with a dubious Swedish accent.

Tom, being a modern kind of rich asshole, has wired most of the island and the mansion (apart from the bathrooms, which will become a problem) with cameras and microphones, secretly controlled by his very own Man in a Chair (Anton Diffring).

Now Tom only needs to keep his guests on the island and wait for the full moon. However, it does turn out that this werewolf would really rather play And Then There Were None instead of The Most Dangerous Game, and Tom may or may not be a great hunter, but he certainly isn’t even a minor detective.

Because sometimes the gods provide us wonderful gifts, Paul Annett’s The Beast Must Die isn’t just a werewolf murder mystery, but a werewolf murder mystery with a gimmick right out of the William Castle playbook. You see, before the climax, the film stops for a “Werewolf Break”™, during which we, the audience, are meant to come up with the identity of the werewolf – with headshots of the surviving suspects for the very weak of memory. Of course, this isn’t actually much of a fair play kind of mystery, so the whole thing is only ever a gimmick.

Ignoring the gimmick (though who’d want to do such a thing?), The Beast is good, straightforward 70s style fun, with a bunch of highly unsympathetic characters – the nominal hero of the piece being the worst of them even though he isn’t a murderous werewolf - getting on each others’ nerves or murdered, respectively, broken up with Tom’s incompetent attempts at bagging himself the werewolf.

That werewolf is a bit if a problem, alas, because for some reason, the production doesn’t involve werewolf make-up, as was tradition in the werewolf game at that point, but rather goes for putting a shaggy full-body hairpiece on an actual dog – with exactly the disappointing results one expects from that approach. Annett’s direction doesn’t suggest he realizes that this kind of werewolf is best kept out of frame and in the dark and provides us with many a good look at it.

But then, the direction doesn’t exactly suggest much thought having been put into anything – it’s a very straightforward point and shoot affair that does include some of the fashions of its time not because of any interest in style but because everybody was doing them.

Yet still, this neutral directorial effort can’t drag the fun out of the thing, at least not too badly: too irresistible is the idea of the werewolf murder mystery, too wonderfully of its time and place are its ideas, and too great is the lure of the Werewolf Break™. We all should have one.

A Time For Dying (1969)

Young and not terribly bright Cass Bunning (Richard Lapp) has set out from the family farm to become a gunslinger - a bounty hunter, to be more precise. Making his way across the country, he encounters a psycho gun kid with the unfortunate name of Billy Pimple (Robert Random), saves young Nellie (Anne Randall) from being enslaved in the sex trade, is pressed into marriage with Nellie by Judge Roy Bean (Victor Jory), has a short encounter with Jesse James (Audie Murphy), and learns a bit about the shortness of life, among other things.

In many ways, A Time for Dying is an objectively bad movie; some of these ways are also what make it a fascinating, potentially great movie.

In any case, this is the final narrative film directed by the great Budd Boetticher, as well as the final on-screen appearance by Audie Murphy. As rumour says, the project was an attempt at alleviating some of Murphy’s mob gambling debts, but legal trouble kept it off most screens until the early 80s, when this kind of film must have baffled any audience encountering it, Boetticher was breeding horses, and Murphy dead for a decade.

Which does seem curiously fitting for a film so cheap, there are genuinely moments on screen when the sets don’t survive encounters with horses because they are so shoddy. It is shot in garish colours by the great Lucien Ballard, and often replaces action with a lot of gabbing and supposedly funny business in the way that usually suggests a lack of budget to put even more basic things on screen.

Where most of Boetticher’s other films – and most certainly his Westerns – where pared down to their essentials, tight and tense even when they objectively weren’t actually always more action packed than this one is, A Time for Dying’s eighty minutes feel much longer. There’s a meandering one damn thing after another quality to the narrative, and an appearance of randomness to much that we witness.

But then, the meandering makes all kinds of sense when you think about it: Cass is no Randolph Scott character, but a kid who hasn’t got an actual plan, nor even the brains to know that he hasn’t one, and so he drifts through the film, encountering an Old West that’s like a bitter funhouse mirror of even the ones encountered in the revisionist westerns. All the jokes that don’t land, the hokey, over the top acting, are a thin veneer painted over a place where might always makes right, where the only law we will encounter is an insane alcoholic (perhaps making this, ironically, the most realistic portrayal of Roy Bean), and where brutality rules all.

The broad acting (Lapp is objectively terrible, possibly perfect), the shoddiness of the sets, the unfunny humour and the brutally bright colours all help drag this version of the West in the direction of the grotesque, until everything culminates in a downer ending Sergio Corbucci must have been jealous of.

The only moment of actual humanity and considered acting on screen is the short, one-scene appearance of Murphy, a haunting moment that seems to be the centre of gravity of the whole affair, as ramshackle as the rest of it appears/is, as if the film were struggling to say something really important, but can never grasp it tightly enough to articulate it.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of A Time for Dying as a whole, but it’s certainly not a boring film for a director to go out on, and something I’ll probably have to revisit from time to time, if only to find out if this is horrible or brilliant or both at the same time.

The Substance (2024)

Academy Award winning actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) – a character name that does signal this film’s idea of subtlety like the crapping elephant did the quality of Babylon – has aged down in the world. She’s done a TV fitness show for ages now, but exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) really, really wants to replace her with a younger model of public aerobics instructor. Losing that gig is one of the final nails in the coffin of Elisabeth’s societally deprecated self-respect, so she jumps at the chance offered by a mysterious underground drug.

The substance doesn’t make her any younger, but instead creates a younger, supposedly more perfect version of herself by some sort of cell-replication. The old self and the new are supposed to trade active weeks, the inactive one lying in a coma during the other half’s week. The new version needs to feed on some of the old one’s fluids during its waking week.

Calling herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s other self – not a font of creativity – grabs Elisabeth’s old job, becoming an overnight sensation. Self-centred as she is, Sue begins stealing time and overmuch feeding fluid from the original. This isn’t great for Elisabeth’s body, and parts of her start aging and decaying with increasing rapidity. It will take some time until she decides to do something about her new self, though.

I can’t say I love Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance as much as most everyone else seems to do. There’s no discounting Fargeat’s abilities as a visual stylist, and certainly little to critique about Moore’s or Qualley’s performances, but to my eyes, the film has two major drawbacks.

Firstly, for a film that so clearly is about the very clear and specific theme of cultural ageism, it has very little to say about it. That it’s grotesque and wrong should be a given, but that’s where the film stops: there’s no subtlety, no interest in exploring its theme beyond the most obvious elements. Which is a particular problem in a movie that’s nearly two and a half hours long – repetition begins to set in, and the neat little body horror freak-outs are simply not enough to distract from this problem.

Secondly, for a film that’s so focused on two characters, there’s very little substance to Elisabeth or to Sue. This does of course make sense with the latter (and is part of her point), but Elisabeth seems to have led a life without any human connections, any interests, any internal life, really, which does make it difficult to feel any interest in her plight. The film’s entertainment industry setting doesn’t help there: in the end, Elisabeth’s stinking rich and independent even in a world that can’t cope with women aging publically, and her self-pity isn’t terribly interesting in this context.

Three Films Make A Post: What would you ask your older self?

Haunted Ulster Live (2024): For much of its running time, this is  painfully unfunny Ghostwatch but as a comedy business – very much something nobody asked for, but if they did ask for it, probably imagined done much better than this thing is. The non-funny business always gets in the way of the elements of the film that are actually interesting: the emulation of 90s Northern Irish television, some nearly clever bits and pieces of characterization to the TV personalities the film will always drop for the next tedious joke, and some genuinely cool ideas about the how and why of the haunting.

Alas, when that last part came onto the screen in full force, at least this viewer’s patience had worn much too thin for it to have much of an effect.

Things Will Be Different (2024): Michael Felker’s SF (with a smidgen of horror) time-shenanigans movie was produced by Benson and Moorhead, and it very much feels like the kind of project that much beloved (certainly by me) duo of filmmakers will get up to on their own. To my eyes, it also demonstrates how genuinely great Benson & Moorhead are at their high concept SF/horror with genuine humanity on a shoe-string budget art – by not being terribly effective at all, particularly in comparison.

The pacing here is just off, with all revelations about the weirdness around the protagonists coming at least one or two scenes later than they should. Worse still, I found myself not at all interested in the sibling family drama between the main characters, and never found much of a thematic or connection of mood between the weird fiction part and the characters.

My Old Ass (2024): As a very good-looking feel bad feel good movie, Megan Park’s My Old Ass is rather successful. The acting, especially by Maisy Stella and the typically wonderful Aubrey Plaza, is fine as well.

My core problem with the film is this: while it talks a lot of about the acceptance of pain (or at least of the possibility of pain), bitter-sweet coming of age crap as seen in a thousand US indie movies, and so on, it never actually faces the horrible reality of pain, loss and suffering head-on, the moments when this sort of thing isn’t polite, or hopeful, or the thing that’ll teach you some valuable lesson about life, but a profoundly destructive force that leaves only trauma in the ruins of its wake.

Depending on the mood one is when watching this, that’s either a perfectly alright decision for a movie to make – they don’t all have to dig deep – or it is one that can piss a viewer off considerably.

Nightfall (1956)

James Vanning (Aldo Ray) has been on the run for some time now. The police is looking for him as their main suspect in the murder of a friend, while a duo of bank robbers (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) who actually killed the man – and nearly murdered Jim as well – believe he has run off with their ill-gotten gains. For reasons best known to himself, our protagonist doesn’t trust the police enough to tell them the story of what actually happened, though in noir, unspoken war trauma is always a good guess.

There’s also an insurance investigator (James Gregory) on his trail. Things begin to come to a head on a night Jim meet-cutes model Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft), and has an encounter with the robbers, as well as – unbeknownst to him – with the investigator.

For a film that’s generally seen as a noir, Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall does certain things rather differently. Sure, there’s a plot involving mistaken identities, gangsters, and a man on the run, but the femme isn’t fatale, the only on-screen authority figure is actually trustworthy, and our hero’s genuinely innocent – running away with the money like the robbers believe he did never seems to even have crossed his mind.

Instead of the shadows of the titular nightfall, the film’s tensest scenes take place in broadest daylight and comparatively wide open spaces – and it’s not even the desert but rather a lot of snow. All of which makes for a much nicer film than you usual find in the non-genre, the sort of film where love is a real and strengthening thing instead an object of dark obsession and method of manipulation, and where the protagonist is a very decent man whose only flaw is acting a bit stupid. Nihilism, this certainly ain’t.

Curiously enough, giving up on the darkness of the noir worldview doesn’t feel like a cop out for the film at all, but just as natural as the noir’s typical darkness comes to other films of the genre.

As Ray plays him, Jim is closer to Hitchcock’s traditional thriller protagonist, an everyman getting in over his head. Though most Hitchcock protagonists of this style do not project the sense of genuine vulnerability Ray displays here, wonderfully going against what his physique of bullneck and bulk would suggest. This is a 50s man not afraid to show his fears and genuine emotions to the woman he falls for, and consequently, Marie falling for him this quickly feels much less contrived than is typical for this sort of thing.

This compassionate eye for the softer side of the characters – see also the interactions between the insurance investigator and his wife – is not a thing you typically get in any movie seen as a noir, but for Nightfall, the feeling of watching basically decent, large-as-life people involved in a thriller plot seems central.

This being a Tourneur film, that thriller plot is realized with great care, economy and style, full of genuine tension. Nearly every scene is filled with the kind of detail that’s either telling about the characters or helps create the texture of the film’s world as an actual place.

In a way, all of this is very low key, but it’s also perfectly of a piece, and utterly convincing.

Red Desert (1964)

Original title: Il deserto rosso

Having spent some time in an psychiatric clinic, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the wife of a higher-up at a local plant, now walks through life and the industrial wastelands of rural Italy between fugues and moments of intense activity, confused, alienated and sad. She drifts into something of an affair with businessman Corrado (the most clean-cut I’ve ever seen Richard Harris), who isn’t quite as fine with the world as it is as everyone else around them, and feels drawn as much to Giuliana’s pain and alienation as he is to her body – or he might just be very good at pretending thus.

This might sound as if Michelangelo Antonioni’s arthouse classic Red Desert has something like a traditionally dramatic plot, but there’s very little interest in that sort of thing on display here – as in most of Antonioni’s films I’ve seen. The bits and pieces of plot are really only there to have things for Vitti to react – or not react depending on her mood – to or pull away from in anguish. Vitti performs the kind of inner turmoil that can’t really be expressed in its inescapable, near-spiritual totality, a suffering for and against the world in ways I found touching and sometimes deeply disturbing – this feels much more like real “mental illness” than most movie versions of it do.

Aesthetically, Vitti’s work is couched in the most striking visual depictions of an industrial waste you’ll ever get to see, pictured in ways that always emphasise Giuliana’s alienation, but also never shy away from the beauty and fascination of our destruction of the natural world, while the soundtrack prefers abstract drones to a traditional score. There’s an ambiguity to how the film views Giuliana, and it is never quite clear how much it shares her alienation and anguish at the modern world; most probably because living in a man-made world instead of forever standing outside of it, in pain, also suggests certain beauties to the filmmaker and the audience Giuliana can’t grasp, as much as the rest of the world cannot, will-not come to share her perspective fully.

Inseminoid (1981)

A crew of interplanetary researchers does what appears to be a combination of archaeological and geological research on an alien planet far-off the usual routes. After the explosion of some curious crystals, one of the researchers becomes inexplicably violent and aggressive, causing quite some damage before he can be put down.

Still, mission leader Holly (Jennifer Ashley) decides to continue with the work, just with more care going forward. This turns out to be a very bad idea when another member of the team, Sandy (Judy Geeson), is kidnapped and forcefully impregnated by an alien creature.

Soon, Sandy turns violent as well, murdering her way through the rest of the crew with far larger physical strength than she should have.

Inseminoid is one of my favourites among the science fiction horror movies made to cash in on the success of Alien. British low budget great Norman J. Warren didn’t have the luxury to afford a cool monster suit for the characters to be slaughtered by – he keeps most of the “inseminating” alien out of frame for good reasons – and so puts the weight of committing the acts of violence on the kind of human agency that takes the film’s second half closer to a standard slasher before a science fiction background than a typical Alien-alike. Warren’s secret weapon here is Geeson, who is the exact opposite of the hulking, silent, slasher, and instead chews her way through a wonderfully – and perfectly appropriately – deranged performance that alone would make the movie worth watching. Nicolas Cage has hopefully looked in awe at her achievement here when he was still a young would-be shamanic actor.

Geeson isn’t the film’s only strength, however. Warren, at this time something of an experienced hand at making much out of very little money, is a sure-handed, sometimes clever, director of suspense, as well as of the handful of tasteless money shots he can afford. He’s certainly adept at turning some cheap costumes (check out the motorcycle helmets turned futuristic), a couple of sets, a quarry and a whole load of coloured lights into a convincing enough alien planet. Add some excellent dream sequences and creepy hallucinations for Geeson’s character to go through before she turns, and some late movie monster developments too adorable to spoil, and there’s very little I don’t like about this.

The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Original title: La mariée était en noir

Warning: there will be some spoilers - if you really care in case of a film of this age, loosely based on a novel considerably older

A mysterious woman we eventually learn to be called Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) travels all over France to meet, charm and eventually kill a number of men. As it will turn out, these men are guilty parties in the shooting death of Julie’s husband right on the church steps directly after their wedding vows. These guys, one and all, are also what can only be called sexist pigs.

Though, in one of the more interesting moves François Truffaut’s adaptation of Cornel Woolrich’s novel makes, they are all very different kinds of sexist pigs, each and every one of them drawn in loving (?) detail and portrayed by a wonderful actor. Their avenger comes to these guys playing on each one’s specific weakness and neediness (as you know, there’s hardly anyone needier than a sexist pig). Like an avenging chameleon, she takes on exactly the role that will get her target’s trust, so she can eventually kill him in a very personal, close contact manner – Julie’s not a killer to look away from what she does.

But then, she is also one of those movie avengers who very much understands that what she does is wrong on various levels – certainly for her own existence as an independent being. Moreau’s portrayal of the emptiness inside of Julie – exactly the quality that makes it possible for her to become just the right woman for each murder – is chilling, as well as curiously touching. It does obviously help that her victims are all assholes in a way still all too recognizable in 2024, even without the somewhat accidental killing of her husband.

Formally, this is a very playful film. Truffaut uses the episodic structure of Julie going from murder to murder to create something akin to a series of connected short stories of differing tone held together by the presence of Moreau and a Bernard Hermann score. Hermann is particularly obvious a choice for the score because this is also one of those French films that bow at the altar of Hitchcock but can never quite achieve their idol’s way with suspense and tension. Being French films, after all, everyone in them is too much in love with talking cleverly, and everything’s happening at too leisurely a pace, not things that lend themselves to the creation of true suspense.

So it is often more the idea of suspense than the actual thing running through films like this; of course, a filmmaker like Truffaut is much to intelligent not to know what he’s doing or not doing in this regard, and so the Hitchcockian elements are all part of that  sense of playfulness, of the formal aspects of filmmaking being a formal game. This turns what could (perhaps should) be a weakness of the film into a strength.

It is not as if Truffaut can’t do conventional suspense when he wants to. In fact, The Bride Wore Black ends on a sequence that indeed is a perfect example of relatively straightforward suspense perfectly realized. Curiously, it also prefigures the beloved 2010s blockbuster trope of the villain of a film letting themselves be caught as integral part of their plans.

Looked at as a whole, there’s a fascinating duality to The Bride. Its formal playfulness, the sense of delight you get from it, the sense of beauty of many of the shots on paper do not fit the grimness of the actual tale being told (and embodied by Moreau’s unmoving face whenever she is not playing a role for one of her victims) here. There is a disquieting quality to the gap between form and content at the core of the film. This might very well be a conscious choice; if it is an accident of filmmaking, it is certainly one that provides The Bride Wore Black with a particular staying power for me.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)

Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is pseudonymously living in some backlot German or Austrian city, committing the occasional murder to further his scientific goals.

On the run from the police, Frankenstein more or less stumbles into the perfect set-up for these goals, the small boarding house of Anna Spengler (Veronica Carlson). It’s not just a great place to hide and act creepily – and eventually worse - towards a young woman. As luck would have it, Anna’s fiancée is a young doctor of what goes for psychiatry at the time. Not only that, Karl (Simon Ward) just happens to work at the asylum where the incurably insane Doctor Brandt (George Pravda) is kept. Brandt is a former associate of the Baron, and has developed a formula Frankenstein would do everything to acquire. Given the ethical framework this version of Hammer’s Frankenstein works under, I really mean everything.

It certainly helps in Frankenstein’s plans that Anna and Karl are young, stupid, and eminently blackmailable – and once he has his hooks in them, there’s ever more culpability for ever worse crimes mounting up. So soon, everyone is involved in a sordid tale of violence, rape and brain transplants.

That “rape” part is generally the element of Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed that breaks the film for quite a few viewers. Even with this, the nastiest and most physically and emotionally brutal version of Frankenstein, the baron also turning into even more of a sexual predator than the first Hammer Frankenstein film, Curse of Frankenstein, had already made him a decade earlier, comes as a kind of shock.

To me, that shock is actually an effective one, one that is really meant to pull away the last illusion an audience might have had of the man indeed working for something he truly believes to be a noble scientific goal. This Frankenstein’s only believes that his wants and impulses are more important than anything and anyone else.

Consequently, Must Be Destroyed is the Hammer Frankenstein movie least interested in presenting monsters or mad science as anything more than another way for Frankenstein to destroy everything and everyone he touches to satisfy his own needs.

Thus, this is certainly the least fun of the Hammer Frankensteins, not the kind of horror of gothic castles – in fact, I’d argue Fisher very consciously films this as the least gothic Hammer movie he can make it – but one where the pseudo-Victorian world of Hammer shambles towards the brutality of the 70s in horror right at the cusp of that decade.

I can’t help but admire the film for what it tries, and mostly succeeds at, to do, but I can also very much understand why people don’t want to see Peter Cushing of all people going the sexual predator route.

Three Films Make A Post: This summer, justice leaves its mark.

The Mask of Zorro (1998): Comparable to the French Musketeer movies of recent years, Martin Campbell’s version of Zorro drapes the old swashbuckler/pulp saw into the form of a then-contemporary kind of blockbuster. Campbell does so with aplomb: everything is big and pretty (or ugly in a big and pretty way), the jokes are silly, the characters broad and fun, everyone is impossibly hot, and the action has a slick sheen. The film sets out to entertain and puts every single cent of its not inconsiderable budget in service of that single goal.

Campbell is very good at this sort of thing, so there’s never a feeling of this being a mechanical exercise in audience wishfulfilment, but rather one of being sucked into the genuine enjoyment of living through a thrilling tale.

Carousel aka Karusell (2023): This Swedish slasher by Simon Sandquist, on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a budget; worse still, it also lacks in spirit and cleverness, and so goes through its version of the usual slasher shenanigans with the kind of boring professionalism that’s the enemy of all fun, at least to my mind.

Personal pet peeve in this sort of project: a film wasting way too much time and energy on a background story so simple and straightforward, filmmakers with more of an understanding of their genre and craft would have left well enough alone after one expository flashback. Also, plot twists are not actually a necessary part of each and every damn screenplay.

MadS (2024): Not flashbacks, and only the barest minimum of exposition, is to be found in David Moreau’s one-shot outbreak movie. The film propels an audience and its shifting protagonists through a night of violence that always teeters on the edge of the surreal with such vigour and energy, perfectly fair complaints about a lack of substance are also perfectly beside the point.

This is all about momentum and creating a very specific mood of ever-increasing insanity, like the most perfectly choregraphed St. Vitus’s Dance you’d never expect to actually encounter on screen.

Dagger Eyes (1983)

Original title: Mystère

High class call girl Mystère (Carole Bouquet) keeps up the style and posture of a high fashion model at all times, projecting an aura of impossibly perfect beauty presented with total emotional detachment. Her mantra appears to be that nothing ever surprises her. Indeed, Mystère’s perfect surface hardly shows the tiniest cracks even when a mysterious figure starts stalking her with ambitions on murder.

The killer is not a random maniac, as you’d expect, however. Rather, a long-fingered colleague has more or less accidentally hidden a lighter in Mystère’s stylish handbag she has stolen from a client. In the lighter is a microfilm, and on that microfilm are photos that show the assassin (John Steiner) who shot a politician during a motorcade. The brutally disposed people behind the assassination are in the espionage business, and certainly not to be trifled with.

However, neither is in Mystère, even less so once she teams up with the deeply misogynistic, very subtly named, Inspector Colt (Phil Coccioletti).

The giallo genre hit a rather big snag during the 80s. In part, this was only natural in the somewhat fad and fashion based world of Italian genre movies where yesterday’s hit genre is today’s box-office death knell. Italian filmmaking as a whole started suffering from fewer opportunities and ever lower budgets, with rather a lot of talent making their way to the aesthetically less pleasing but more secure feeding troughs of TV production.

However, I believe the giallo had another problem in trying to update its style to that of the new decade. Visually, the genre had always been deeply informed by pop culture and fashion, but there aren’t that many directors involved in the genre who appeared interested in updating this element of their films as much as it was needed to keep giallos contemporary.

Carlo Vanzina, mostly specialized in directing comedies, demonstrates no problems in that regard here (nor in his later giallo Nothing Underneath) – if there is any film that breathes the idea of the giallo as a version of the thriller and horror genres informed by violence and sex but also by fashion, it is Mystère. Its titular heroine – really embodied by Bouquet more than strictly acted – is presented as the impossible ideal of its time: an always perfectly made-up, cool kind of femininity. Bouquet always looks as if she’s just stepped out of a magazine cover, even when surrounded by people who look perfectly normal, always in control, Hitchock’s everyman protagonist inverted into something new and deeply contemporary - as it will turn out morally as well as stylishly, as befits the decade.

She strides through a plot that enlivens giallo standards by combining them with the conspiracy thriller – also reimagined into something more fashionable and more amoral – through often rather wonderful suspense sequences, shots of great, artificial beauty, and those sudden outbreaks of illogic and goofiness which were always part of this arm of the genre. Indeed, if you ask me, its the inherent strangeness and the disinterest in presenting the world of the film as working like the real world does that always bring the giallo into the folds of horror, or at the very least the cinema of the fantastic, as a sibling of the film noir that’s even more stylized and even less interested in real-world logic.

From this perspective, even the pretty damn silly epilogue of Mystère makes sense as part of the aesthetic package of the film; that it also doesn’t even seem to understand, and certainly not share, the moral outrage of the conspiracy thrillers it also borrows from makes sense: this is a complete product of the 80s.

Three Films Make A Post: He always takes one

The Collector (2009): When I initially watched Michael Dunstan’s film, I judged it to be deeply indebted to Saw and the piss-coloured aesthetics of that school of filmmaking. Today, I rather see it as a variation on Home Alone where Kevin has grown up, is breaking into peoples’ houses and turns them into trapped murder holes, which makes me a lot happier.

It’s still more a decent film than a great one, mind you, lacking in something that makes it truly special, or that’s as insane as its killer’s chosen method. That would come in the sequel, fortunately.

Sana aka Everybody’s Song (2023): Takashi Shimizu, decades away from his J-horror heights, does still regularly churn out horror movies of highly variable quality. Sana has some delightful moments of dread and terror and a complicated twisty backstory to its haunting that actual earns those twists; it also goes on a little too long, and spends a bit too much time on also being an ad – there’s even a song with lyrics subbed on screen, so you can karaoke to it, as well – for the boy (well, men) band Generations. These guys aren’t bad actors for male idols, and the film isn’t pulling its punches too badly in their treatment in the plot. Still, I can’t help but think that a film concerning a fictional pop group could have gone into rather more interesting places with them as characters.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024): The newest entry into Legendary’s kaijuverse is about as silly as giant monster movies from the USA will get, which is to say, pretty damn silly indeed, and if you’re looking for even the shallowest puddle of depth, you’ll be rather disappointed in it. If you’re willing to accept that this thing is just going to revel in a large number of giant monster fights - all realized in the fakest most colourful digital art Hollywood money can buy -, grin at you, make up bizarre lore and waste Rebecca Hall on a role even a muppet could play, you may very well have a very good time after all.

For one thing is clear: Adam Wingard is doing his damndest to entertain his audience here, to never bore, to ignore the human drama nobody cares about (that’s what that Apple TV show about bigamy is for), and to just turn out a fun piece of popcorn cinema, the sort of thing that’s pure sensation, nothing else.

I’m perfectly fine with that approach to filmmaking and thus felt myself perfectly entertained by the film; I rather enjoy the contrast between this and what Toho does with Godzilla on his home turf, as well.

They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore (1985)

Texan gardeners Billy Buck (John Smihula) and Jacob (Adam Berke) have moved to Long Island. Alas, they aren’t only the best lawn carers rich Long Island yuppies in their quintillion dollar houses could ask for, but also enjoy slaughtering people with the same thoroughness they apply to the green stuff. Which is to say, after they have clubbed or macheted their victims to death, our Texan friends then proceed to rip their victims’ flesh off with their bare hands until only bones remain. As you do in Texas, apparently. Though, come to think of it, Billy Buck’s and Jacob’s headwear actually reminds me more of what Austrian or Bavarian mountain farmers wear in German Heimatfilmen.

As the more long-suffering among my imaginary readers know, I am not the biggest fan of pure gore movies not coming from Italy, but there’s an undeniable charm to the shot on Super-8 (just like young JJ Abrams!) gore movies made by Long Island’s finest, Nathan Schiff. They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore is no exception.

For a film that’s all about showing people – or rather various pieces of meat – being ripped apart in loving, close-up detail, Grass has such a joyful and good-natured air of something made as a lark, out of the sheer fun of doing it, and not as an attempt to be a career, it is difficult not to be charmed by it.

This focus on the barest basics (bones?) of the matter of horror doesn’t mean Schiff isn’t a strangely effective filmmaker – he may only have a small bag of tricks in his slaughterhouse, but those he has, he applies with cleverness and a sense of fun. From time to time, things become downright experimental. So one shouldn’t be surprised when the flesh-ripping is accompanied by looped dialogue of the victims before they were quite as dead.

That this lark somehow got out of hand and turned into a movie people half a world and nearly four decades away still watch certainly says something about the human spirit, the glories of horror cinema, or the joys of watching yuppies getting slaughtered.

The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966)

Original title: Miss Muerte

When somewhat mad neurologist Doctor Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) explains his somewhat bizarre theories at a conference, he is laughed and scorned out of the room. Since he explains he has found the parts of the brain that control “good” and “evil”, as well as a way to stimulate or shut them down, so evil will be forever ended, some scepticism shouldn’t come as a surprise here. Still, the good Doctor promptly dies, cause of death: criticism (no, I don’t know how that works, either).

A couple of months later, Zimmer’s daughter and assistant Irma (Mabel Karr) fakes her death in a car accident – hitchhikers are so useful when you need a stand-in corpse – and proceeds with her plans to take revenge on the three scientists she specifically holds responsible for her father’s death. She already has a former killer (Guy Mairesse) suborned by her father’s SCIENCE and his mind controlled nurse as useful helpers, but she decides these men have to die in a more interesting manner.

Being a Jess Franco character, Irma finds herself inspired (and clearly a bit turned on) by the dance choreography of nightclub dancer Nadia (Estella Blain). It’s no wonder, for Nadia’s bit as “Miss Muerte” is all about seduction and murder by freakishly long fingernails, things that resonate with all of us, particularly when we’re planning vengeance. So Irma kidnaps Nadia, puts the mind-control whammy of her father’s SCIENCE on her, somehow poisons her nails, and sends her out to seduce and kill the scientists one by one.

The police, under leadership of a character played by director Jess Franco himself, seem rather confused by the whole thing, but Nadia’s boyfriend (Fernando Montes) – who also happens to be Irma’s short-term flirt and a neurologist himself – seems rather more capable, and certainly more motivated when it comes to uncovering the weird menace plot.

In 1966, Jess Franco was still a somewhat conventional filmmaker, putting some effort into making pulpy horror science fiction thrillers like this one with an audience in mind instead of ascending/descending completely into his world of personal obsessions and perversions. Which in turn means Franco could actually acquire decent budgets to work with. There’s a degree of slickness in Miss Muerte’s black and white photography Franco’s body of work would soon enough lose in favour of the languid, sometimes boring, idiosyncratic phantasmagoria his style would soon enough turn into.

Here, Franco seems to be at an absolute sweet spot between the old and the new. The – somewhat – higher budget inspires him to more concise storytelling, and his love for interesting/weird camera angles is here paired with some wonderful play with shadow and light that often creates as thick of an atmosphere of Franco-ness as his later, more difficult, work.

Many of Franco’s obsessions are there and accounted for: some of his favourite kinks, the nightclub scenes – though there’s no stripping and zooming on crotches here, in fact, very little zooming at all –, his very specific ideas about seduction, dominance and sado-masochism, and many a plot element we’ll encounter again and again in his films. Just here, these kinks seem still to be in service of the pulp horror plot instead of the other way around. From time to time, the film descends into delicious weirdness – the moment where Nadia seduces Howard Vernon’s neurologist character is incredible – but this weirdness still seems controlled.

In fact, Miss Muerte suggests a Franco might have been very effective in subsuming his personal weirdness, at least a little, to make more conventionally accessible yet still highly worthwhile genre movies. Being who I am, I am glad he let his freak flag fly rather sooner than later, but this does not make Miss Muerte any less of an interesting, fun bit of pulp horror.

Trenque Lauquen (2022)

Apparently, it helps for a piece of arthouse slow cinema to come from Argentina if it wants my buy-in. Who knew?

Anyhow, if you can make time and mind space for 250 minutes or so of various characters (particularly those played by Laura Paredes and Ezequiel Pierri) in various timelines very slowly being drawn into various kinds of (non-violent) obsession with various mysteries and secrets – including love letters hidden in old books, the disappearance of a woman, an uncategorized specimen of flower, and a monster/child/who knows you’ll never get to see – you might just become as riveted as I found myself.

The slowness, here, turns out to be patience, a willingness to let things develop in their own shape and tempo. Which doesn’t at all mean that director Laura Citarella eschews increasing the tempo when it fits her, probably mysterious, plans. As well, there is a willingness to keep some of the film’s mysteries unsolved, or rather, to admit the ambiguity of leaving space for an audience’s interpretations.

On the way to that not solving of mysteries, the film moves through phases and stages – practically lineated in chapters in a gesture that seems rather more inviting than slow cinema often is – where the focus shifts from different protagonists, to different obsessions, and different kinds of beauty, finding much in small actorly gestures, nature, and the town of Trenque Lauquen and its surroundings, testing and exploring different kinds of connections between people.

There is also a strain of weirdness running through the film I found particularly enticing, perhaps more Magical Realism than the versions of the fantastic I’m most fond of. Some reviewers have found a comparison to Lynch here, but Trenque Lauquen lacks an interest in, or perhaps does not believe in, the deep and uncomfortable darkness that always rears its head with Lynch. Rather, this film’s weirdness feels kinder and more compassionate, with little risk for the characters to fall foul of an uncaring universe or moving into the wrong metaphysical hut for some decades. It’s not such a cosy world, though, for there are still human passions, foibles and dramas.

Not being Lynchian, mind you, is not a weakness. Citarella’s much too interesting a director and writer to need to take on other people’s world views, and has one rather singularly her own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go for Broke (1985)

Original title: V Madonna: daisenso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Films Make A Post: No safe space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spine of Night (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Galaxy of Terror (1981)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Howard’s Mill (2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Santo vs. Frankenstein’s Daughter (1972)

Original title: Santo vs. la hija de Frankestein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fangs (1981)

Original title: Anyab

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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