Three Films Make A Post: Honor Was Their Code.

Windtalkers (2002): At the time when it came out, John Woo’s American war epic was often unfavourably compared to The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan. Apart from World War II, I don’t actually see much of a connection to Malick’s film – Woo has never been interested in the sort of introspection and the reflective mood that dominates Malick’s cinema, and certainly not when making a war movie. There’s a bit more kinship to Spielberg on display here, but I don’t see much use in a comparison here either.

This feels very much like an attempt to marry more traditional war movie tropes – often closer to 50s US war cinema than Woo’s peers – to incredibly dynamic but also hyper-realistically brutal action, making very cool looking scenes that still carry an emotional “war is not fun” heft. Add to that Woo’s unparalleled ability to create deeply felt and believable male bonds out of tropes and clichés, and you have a film only this specific director could ever have made.

Deep Water (2026): Clearly, his audience weren’t the only ones bored to tears by Renny Harlin’s Strangers prequel trilogy. The director apparently hasn’t gotten over the whole thing itself, so his return to the spectacle and shark well (the Well of Sharks, hire me!) here often feels surprisingly clunky. The film is populated with characters you won’t give a shit about, to be killed in ways I found myself giving even less of one about, while the plot, such as it is, clanks and clunks away into nothing.

Hungry (2026): When it comes to animal attack movies this month, I found myself much more entertained by this cheap and silly affair directed by James Nunn. This tale of an evil hippo(!) in the Bayou (!!) hunting tourists is a much more surehanded prospect: the characters are clichés but workably written and decently portrayed by the cast, there’s some actual tension in the hippo attack scenes, and where Harlin’s film often feels bloated and unfocussed, this is a film that knows what made pre-Sharknado SyFy movies work – simple craftsmanship applied to a very silly idea presented with a straight face.

Vampires of the Velvet Lounge (2026)

Some kind of vampire hunting organization lead by a Tom Berenger cameo has sent mercenary turned vampire huntress Cora (Dichen Lachman) and intelligence expert Alexis (Rosa Salazar) to stake out an absinthe bar run by Elizabeth Bathory (Mena Suvari) herself. Modern vampires like Elizabeth and her coven – the bitchy one (Sarah Dumont), the eternal tragic teenager acting out one (India Eisley) and hairy dude for the gory work (Mark Boone Junior) – lure in their prey through the powers of internet dating as well as the more usual mind control business.

Cora’s and Alexis’s mission will prove rather difficult, for their prey hasn’t survived several centuries without acquiring quite the bag of tricks.

Velvet Lounge director/writer Adam Sherman isn’t Uncle Jess, and he sure as shit isn’t Jean Rollin, but there’s space in the realm of the female vampire movie made by filmmakers who put all of their weird, potentially embarrassing obsessions on screen for lesser lights fetishizing blood drinking women as well.

So, if you’re in the market for a mix of all modern vampire clichés except for the sparkle, with bits and pieces of noir – Lachman’s off-screen monologues are quite the thing –, low rent action movie, and general sad vampire whining, a bit of modern technology and lots of absinthe and gore, this is the film for you, especially if you like talky vampires.

Unless you expect thematic or narrative coherence, or a tone that doesn’t fluctuate wildly between stupid, whiny, silly, and deathly self-serious. But really, would anyone going into a film with this title expect these things from their obsessive vampire fetish movie?

On the other hand, one also wouldn’t expect a more than decent cast that features Mena Suvari going scenery-chewing mad leading an ensemble of capable and well-known – at least in our circles – thespians who certainly don’t act bored slumming.

I’m generally not a fan of “you’ll like this thing if you like this sort of thing” recommendations, but this a film made 1) for its director and 2) for people who read the above description and purposefully seek out this kind of movie. As a member of group 2, I was certainly entertained, moved to snark, to companionable giggles at mad ideas like “vampires are literal absinthe fairies” and can’t help but respect a film that clearly doesn’t care to aim for any obvious audience beyond its creators.

Ura Horror (2008)

I have been pretty vocal about my love for the works of the contemporary king of POV horror Koji Shiraishi, as well as my general love for the horror anthologies of purportedly real footage that got churned out for the local Japanese home video market for a time. So much so, finding a new fansubbed movie of the sort provides me with a genuine moment of happiness.

Ura Horror, an anthology of shorts that tend to be around the five minutes mark, brings these good things together, with Shiraishi co-directing together with Yohei Fukuda (who also spent some time in the realm of cursed footage and tapes banned from broadcast on his own). Quality and depth of the pieces wavers between what amounts to short jokes and their set-ups, to tales that suggest a larger world of the supernatural lurking right at the upper right corner of a fuzzy video.

For the Shiraishi maniac, some moments here feel like suggestions and sketches of what is to come later: yes, digital worms are indeed in here, and AV actress turned general purpose idol and Noroi stalwart Maria Takagi is featured (and getting cursed) as well in a segment that also features the great Takashi Shimizu playing himself. Shiraishi’s love for the low-rent parts and aspects of Japanese popular culture is already in full effect.

This is, of course, all pretty lightweight in the sense that none of the tales here is an actual story with a traditional beginning, middle, and end, or features an explanation for the weirdness we have just witnessed, and no deep characterisation is going to be forthcoming. One could, of course, argue this to be exactly the point: these are films about the lack of explanation, about weirdness only briefly encountered, caught on camera, and then locked away by the survivors.

Three Films Make A Post: A new breed of mystery.

Videoheaven (2025): We all have our nostalgias; some of us feel the need to make three hour long essay films that attempt to defend them by amateurish attempts at intellectualizing, layered over endless clips of movie scenes taking place in video rental stores.

This is the video store version of Los Angeles Plays Itself, but where that classic of the overlong essay movie has complex ideas – some of whom I very much disagree with – it uses its clips to argue for, this is a strenuous clip show overlaid with an overwritten, pretentious monologue read by Maya Hawke that needs ages to explain the few, superficial ideas director/writer Alex Ross Perry actually has. The whole tone of the project mostly makes me happy video stores are practically dead, because if they made people this insufferable, they weren’t a good thing.

The Sheep Detective (2026): I wouldn’t have been surprised to also hate Kyle Balda’s high budget Amazon original about a bunch of sheep (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston and Patrick Stewart, among others) solving a murder in the most clichéd British murder village (possibly situated in the neighbourhood of Midsomer). However, this turns out to be utterly charming, working with and against golden age mystery tropes, making actually funny jokes and even nailing its emotional beats so well, I found myself tearing up at a movie about animated sheep.

The book this is based on is apparently considerably darker, but I found the film as it stands balancing quite wonderfully on the line between kitsch and goth.

Hi-Five (2025): Dear Internet, I’m still not suffering from that “super hero fatigue” I read so much about – how could I when superhero movies make up perhaps one percent of the movies I watch in a year? – and I’m not sorry about it, either.

So Kang Hyoung-chul’s South Korean superhero comedy about five very ordinary people and a Christian cult leader getting super powers, does have it kind of easy with me. But then, what’s not to like about a well-paced, genuinely fun film filled with just as fun characters, the proper not-Zach-Snyder-approved ideology for a superhero film, and a sense of playfulness and style?

The Summit of Mount Fuji (1970)

Original title: Fuji sanchô

After some years of failed attempts at convincing the government, the Japan Meteorological Agency manages to secure a mandate to install a weather radar device on the summit of Mount Fuji. This is predominantly going to be used to forecast dangerous typhoons much earlier than possible up to this point.

It’s not an easy project though: the weather affords only about forty working days per year, with a very slim two year window to finish it at all provided by the budget. There’s also the little problem of hard physical labour having to take place in very thin air, as well as the logistical and practical nightmare of masses of production materials having to be hauled by horse and higher up on foot.

And that’s before the kinds of troubles arise a project of this kind can’t avoid: backroom squabbling, worse weather than expected, and so on.

When you see the “Nikkatsu” logo on a film, you generally expect something more pop or more nude than a somewhat dry two hour movie about an ambitious construction project, but, with the assistance of the JMA and Mitsubishi Motors (the company who built the actual weather radar on Mount Fuji), this is indeed what we get here.

Surprisingly enough, I found myself often riveted by Tetsutaro Murano’s film. There’s something to be said about a film concerning a bunch of serious, professional people – all of them men, because that’s the times unfortunately – doing serious, professional work under difficult circumstances to build something of actual use to their society. Especially when watched in a time when the thing to admire in the real world are incompetent fools trying to destroy as much of our societies in many of the countries of the West in as short a time as possible to get rich on the backs of everybody else.

Murano tells the story calmly, often emphatically without drama. Thus, he can focus on the small triumphs when yet another difficult hurdle is surmounted by hard work and professionalism, and doesn’t exactly need too become too heavy-handed.

This isn’t much of a character movie. There are a lot of fine Japanese actors here – like eternal favourite Shintaro Katsu as the leader of the horse porter cooperation which will turn into the bulldozer porter cooperation – who provide screen presence to not let the film drift off into the inhuman. Yet this isn’t a film about personal problems but one about the solving of impersonal problems through competence, stubbornness and a bit of luck.

Visually, there are some exciting shots of Mount Fuji – particularly the daring helicopter transport of the radome is impressive –, of heavy machinery crawling up a mountain while a group of pilgrims goes down the mountain, and rather a lot of bad weather, made with enough heft to convince anyone they are indeed witnessing the building of a radar station on a mountain summit.

Which, it turns out, was exactly the kind of thing I needed to see today.

The Stately Ghosts of England (1965)

Ah, the Sixties, when NBC News somehow deigned to hire – apparently already paranormally inclined – Frank “future The Entity guy” De Felitta to adapt a non-fiction – of a kind - book by Diana Norman about some haunted manors in England.

Because as guy from the Bronx doesn’t exactly scream “stately manor house”, the ensuing documentary is actually carried by Margaret “Miss Marple” Rutherford, her apparently mute husband Stringer Davis, and “clairvoyant” (not space cadet!) Tom Corbett.

So Rutherford and her hangers-on in turn visit three stately manors, all of which clearly can only be filmed in Dutch angles, let some posh twat tell the local ghost story in the tone of often told, well-rehearsed stories, and then begin wandering about the place while an impressive orchestral score swoons. Corbett inevitably sees ghosts (and corrects the number of ghosts from the stories upwards), Rutherford overacts every of the very many reaction shots asked of her while quoting Shakespeare or Byron. All the while Stringer Davis looks on, confused why he’s even there.

In other words, it’s pretty fantastic entertainment for the lover of ghost stories or of the less YouTube sort of posh English ghost hunting – Dame Rutherford certainly won’t measure any magnetic fields or shout at any given spirit person – and the paranormal as cosy entertainment.

For me, as someone who grew up on our German Edgar Wallace adaptations as a focal point of what England is supposed to look and feel like – that is, not at all like the real place – the film provides the additional kick of doing something comparable through the eyes of American De Felitta, with the added frisson of De Felitta actually having some proper British upper class people to act out his fantasies about their country for him.

Three Films Make A Post: MIGHTY MAX!

The Solar Thread (1963): The mere existence of this short film is something of a Fortean encounter. Commissioned to make a PR film for a large producer of artificial textiles, Kazuo Kuroki turned out this portrayal of capitalism as an abstract nightmare of empty factories filled with machines voided of human input, bathed in an atonal score by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Possibly one of the great dystopian yet beautiful movies I’ve seen. Somehow, a large company’s PR arm signed off on this, and a gentleperson on the internet fansubbed it and put it on the Internet Archive.

Speed Demon (2026): I seem to be one of the few people alive who actually enjoyed this “nun exorcist Katie Cassidy on a train” movie, but Jon Keeyes’s film is so joyfully cheesy without winking at its audience, and carries itself with such a sense of fun, I’m not going to complain about the bizarre characterisations, the improbable dialogue, and the, ahem, variable acting. All these so-called flaws really only add to my enjoyment, as does a final sequel set-up in which an undercover Pope first tells our heroine that he doesn’t like her methods but approves of her results and then leads in to promise us the exorcism of the President of the United States (who really could need one) in the sequel. How could I resist?

Bored Hatamoto: The Daimonji Conspiracy (1959): Unlike the other films in the long-running jidaigeki mystery series I’ve seen, this entry, directed by Yasushi Sasaki, does involve a somewhat more down to earth plot about a corrupt official’s attempt to rope an honourable but ill-used clan into a rebellion against the Shogun. There’s an emphasis on palace intrigue, plots and counterplots, and comparatively few of the pulpier elements of other Bored Hatamoto films. Though Utaemon Ichikawa does get an opportunity to make one of this patented grand surprise entrances in the finale, and still gets to stare down and kill a lot of mooks.

I have to admit, the film’s general quality notwithstanding,m I found myself missing the magical curses and, ninjas and vampire bats of other entries into the series a little.

Highwaymen (2004)

Already car-hating Molly Poole (Rhona Mitra) barely escapes with her life from the attack of a serial killer we’ll later learn to be called Fargo (Colm Feore) – one of her friends is less happy. Fargo uses his souped-up car as murder weapon of choice, and really as a replacement body, for he is wheelchair-bound, which makes the while serial killing thing rather difficult. Given the car angle, nobody actually believes Molly’s story, and the police treat the situation as a bad case of a hit and run.

Well, nearly nobody believes her – a traffic investigator (Frankie Faison) has his doubts about the normalcy of the situation, and a mysterious man (Jim Caviezel before he lost his mind to QAnon) in his own souped-up car shadows her. Rennie, as we’ll mostly come to know him, lost his wife to the killer who attacked Molly and has been hunting him for years now, sharing the ways of the road and an occasional CB taunt/come-on with him.

Rennie is convinced Fargo is going to attack Molly again, and he’s not above using her as bait to finally get his man.

What a difference a decade and a half make. When I first (and last) saw Robert Harmon’s Highwaymen, I treated it as a less than successful attempt by Harmon to return to the glory days of his masterful The Hitcher, with the film at hand a slickly made yet basically empty attempt at catching lightning in a bottle a second time.

As is so often the case, I’m looking more than a little askance at my past self’s willingness to wave away a film that’s nearly as good as The Hitcher itself, a film which does indeed use elements of that past achievement as well as some taken from the mass of serial killer films that had accrued between the two movies. Where the old one is about a boy becoming a man/monster (interrogating the borderline between these two in a violent male-dominated society), this one takes place at a point where the protagonist’s innocence is already lost, and there’s only a difference in degree between him and his prey anymore.

So, this is a movie about men who have turned feral, roaming empty highways in cars that have become parts of their bodies – in the killer’s case even actual replacements for much of their bodies – performing a ritualised hunt Rennie uses to keep himself from ever having to actually process the death of his wife like a normal person would have to. In this context, it is no surprise he is only able to finish the hunt once he’s pressed into relating to Molly – and to a degree to investigator Macklin – as a person instead of a tool or an obstacle that doesn’t truly belong into Car World.

All of this is baked into a masterfully made thriller/action movie, a film of dark streets reflecting neon, the empty spaces between the places people actually inhabit, and seemingly endless nights. In fact, one of the best little tricks Harmon uses is the elegant shift from night to day for the film’s final stretch.

Basically, past me was an idiot. But that’s not news around here anymore.

The Convenience Store (2026)

A couple of cops are trying to piece together the strange occurrences that took place one night at a rural convenience store. There’s rather a lot of strangeness, as well as a dead, eyeless manager in the basement to consider.

The case’s main witness is student Tazuru (Kotona Minami). She had been working the night shift of the store that night, as she does six nights a week to earn money for college and to take care of her mother. During the interviews, she, and eventually other characters, reveals some of the peculiar and horrific things that happened at the store during the last few nights.

Because what the girl has to tell is very strange indeed, seeing as it concerns ghosts, apparitions and a doom-saying homeless man, it is lucky she can offer some memory cards with videos to prove at least some of her supernatural experiences. Surely, watching those videos can’t connect anyone watching them to a curse, right?

Director Jiro Nagae has been doing cheap Japanese horror for the home viewing market for quite a few years, and he does by now clearly have a good grip on how to make a very basic horror film. Thus, I mostly found this videogame adaptation a pleasant enough time, featuring as it does some somewhat effective scares and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The film carries its affection for the superior classics of the J-horror boom on its sleeves: the investigative structure is mostly an excuse to tell the story out of order like a Ju-on story, there’s a little boy ghost also more than a little reminiscent of those classics, and the eventual cursed object is so Ringu, I’m a bit surprised nobody got sued.

Of course, being quite so derivative, there are few surprises here – if you have seen any Japanese horror made post 1995 at all, you’ll know what the big final reveal is going to be very early on, and if you’re bored by J-horror style ghosts, this isn’t going to be the movie to show you how wrong you are (even though you are).

As an unapologetic part of its tradition, The Convenience Store is a pleasant enough experience.

Three Films Make A Post: This is not an expedition. It's an execution.

Iron Lung (2026): While the YouTube to movie director pipeline has already introduced some excellent new blood to the cadre of horror genre filmmakers, it also has enabled the return of the vanity project, this time with an in-built audience your past vanity filmmaker could only have dreamed of.

On one hand, I applaud YouTuber Mark Fischbach falling in love with a horror videogame and deciding to use his influencer clout to finance and create his own movie adaptation of it instead of becoming a serial killer or MAGA techbro. My problems start when he then takes on the role of director, writer, executive producer and co-editor of the project, while not being very good at any of these roles. He then proceeds to turn out a film that moves slow like molasses – this is about an hour longer than the material warrants – lacks the visual flair needed for something that mostly consists of shots of Fischbach or some sexy, sexy dials and screens, and which focusses on one single actor who simply isn’t good enough to carry a two hour movie on his shoulders. Much of which could have been avoided in a project where someone would have been in a position to say “no” to the auteur’s bad ideas, or could have convinced him to hire an actual actor for the lead role, a screenwriter for the script, and so on, and so forth.

Personally, I’d also have loved some professional sound editing, but then I’m too old for this shit anyway.

Paura il diavolo and Blue Fear (1993): On the other hand, these first SOV short-ish features by British DIY filmmaker Darren Ward, mostly made with friends and family, show much more of a coherent vision than Fischbach’s endless meandering shots of his own face, even though these, too, are amateur productions completely in thrall to their influences.

In Paura’s case, these influences are mostly from the gory side of Italian horror – Lamberto Bava’s Demons and Fulci are clearly involved – and Evil Dead, so this is predominantly a showcase for some fantastic homemade effects, but also already shows a filmmaker with an eye for the creation of mood through colour and shadow, a flair for concise and expressive editing (hi, Mr Fischbach), all clearly visible even with the limitations of the Shot on Video style and the damn fuzzy VHS source the Blu-Ray was sourced from.

In a sense, Blue Fear is a bit a of a regression for Ward, mostly because here, he’s in full-on giallo mode. Which is more than fine in the highly effective and ridiculously stylish (this is SOV!) slash and stalking and dream sequences that actually suggest a young director sharpening his visual tools. However, a giallo also needs a plot and therefore needs acting, and here, Ward doesn’t seem as secure in his abilities to get the desire results yet, leading to some awkwardly edited and slow dialogue sequences, certainly not helped by the lack of actual actors on the project. Family and friends can only take you so far in this regard, unless you’re called Bridges or Carradine.

The Adventures of Kosuke Kindaichi (1979)

Original title: Kindaichi Kosuke no boken

In the world of the film, famous detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Ikko Furuya) is also a famous mystery novel character, and a famous film character. For his newest case, he teams up with Inspector Todoroki (Kunie Tanaka). Todoroki is mostly interested in a series of art thefts committed by a gang of roller-skating young people who like mime and/or David Bowie make-up, whereas Kindaichi is waiting for a murder to happen, for there are always murders in his cases, as well as tainted blood, generational guilt, and complicated murder methods, because that sort of thing is at the core of the Japanese experience as he sees it.

Which is about as sensible as I can make the great Nobuhiko Obayashi’s mystery comedy’s plot sound. There is a properly Kindaichi-like murder mystery happening here, mind you, but it is nearly drowned out by Obayashi at his most exhaustingly unleashed: there’s not a single shot here without any sight gags going on in the background, hardly a line said that doesn’t hint at broader pop culture, Japanese golden age style mysteries, movies, books, music, or ads that have nothing to do with the supposed plot. Some of it is completely inexplicable from my distance of time, geography and language to its point of creation, some I could parse thanks to the amount of Japanese movies, books and manga I’ve consumed during the course of my life, some should be clear to everyone. In any case, it can all become a bit overwhelming, particularly combined with the breakneck speed with which Obayashi goes from scene to scene here.

Of course, this being an Obayashi movie, it also looks absolutely beautiful, and shifts from visual style to visual style with an off-handed surety that must have intimidate any lesser director; also of course, this does not make The Adventures any less overwhelming.

All of this reads like a commentary on the kind of art a Kosuke Kindaichi film must be to me, something referential to a torrent of other media in its own series, as well as the torrent of popular media surrounding it, as well as the torrent of different popular media that surrounded the other versions of the same character, a hall of mirrors that goes on and on until it becomes difficult to find the substance of whatever the adventures of Kosuke Kindaichi actually mean. Or once meant, or will mean, and so on and so forth, until one is overwhelmed enough by the whole thing one has to make Kindaichi himself the killer to return to any kind of sense at all.

Another Break

The European heatwave makes my tentacles dry out, so normal service will resume with a fresh new post on the first Sunday in July.

Three Films Make A Post: When Billions Get Stolen, Meet the Pros Who Steal It Back

In the Grey (2026): Once can’t blame Guy Ritchie’s newest caper/thriller/action attempt for a lack of honesty in its title. This does indeed embody all of the blandness mainstream entertainment cinema can be capable of, and manages to be a film that’s too technically proficiently made to be downright bad, but feels much worse than an actually bad movie would do because it even lacks the spark of energy of a failure.

It wastes two usually capable leads (and Henry Cavill) on nothing roles with no character traits to speak of, goes through its heist plot with a perfunctory shrug of its shoulders, and contains not an ounce of genuine fun – or thought, but that’s not expected from Ritchie anyway. It just exists, without even at attempt at creating tension, or suspense, or silly little things like even the most simple character arc.

Chuck Chuck Baby (2023): It’s an unfair comparison (for the Ritchie film), but next up is a film that’s all soul, fun, sadness and genuine cinematic invention. Janis Pugh’s film pairs the dourness of the British kitchen sink drama with the heightened emotion and joy of the musical, to turn out a paean to love – of all types - between women that’s honest about all the crap of working class life yet also dares to see joy and hope, and the cracks where indeed light comes in, without devolving into kitsch or empty optimism.

The Girl Who Sees aka Mieruko-chan (2025): Yoshihiro Nakamura has made some very individual and personality-filled movies, like the utterly brilliant Fish Story, in his time, but he’s also perfectly capable of making a film like this manga adaptation about a schoolgirl (Nanoko Hara) who sees ghosts, and quickly learns it’s best to ignore them. Until, of course, circumstances conspire against this plan. The film hits all the marks it is supposed to hit, without showing much of the personality or imagination Nakamura is capable of as a filmmaker.

But then, unlike me, most of the audience going into this will come for the manga, and not for Nakamura, so getting out of the way of the material does make perfect sense from this perspective. And from that angle, this is a perfectly pleasant and light bit of fantasy/horror comedy, with the mandatory charming lead. It’s just a movie any competent director could have directed in exactly the same way as Nakamura does here.

Babu – Damned Revenge (1996)

A woman (Helen Wiese?) has some questions about the death of her son. These questions are answered by good old Coffin Joe (of course José Mojica Marins), who may or may not be in the same room as she is while they are having their little chat. A young man we must assume to be said son, in what we must assume to be flashbacks, is drawn into the orbit of a house that may be infested with Satanists, or the memory of Satanic rituals, or the ghosts of Satanists past or all of the above.

In any case, our protagonist begins suffering from increasingly bizarre, generally either school or Satanist themed, dreams and visions that hint at some kind of awful revelation to be about to happen to him in the unpleasant old house.

Ah, sometimes films like this one still hit the spot for me, beyond the realm of ideas like “good” or “bad” movies. Thus Cesar A.’s piece of Brazilian ultra cheap SOV horror – mostly shot in what looks like a school building and someone’s living room and cellar – shambles straight into the realm of ambient horror where many of the markers of objective badness can be exactly what makes a film worth watching. Or perhaps films like this can tune a viewer onto a somnambulist frequency where the rules of filmmaking as we (mostly) know them simply do not apply.

So, the woozy quality of the video made even woozier by the (fansubbed by angels or demons, you decide!) VHS source turns from technical problem to texture as important to the film’s thick mood of sludgy strangeness as the dream-like state its protagonist often finds himself in, the vagueness of its plot details, and the dubious manner in which cause and effect work here. Yes, again, I have to argue a film whose artistical merits most sane people will doubt to be very much constructed like a dream – peculiar, more than a little nebulous, and very much on the non side of sensical.

Adding to this quality are the curious soundtrack – half needle dropped classical music, half random synth noises and shouting – and that at least two thirds of the dialogue scenes here are shot suggesting these actors very often do not share the same physical space at the same time when talking at each other with the tell-tale pauses – even in proudly post-dubbed dialogue! – of people waiting for the director to shout “action!” while the camera is already rolling.

Also worth mentioning are practical special effects that suggest someone involved in the production owned several hand puppets, and the awesomeness of filmmakers who managed to convince Marins to give them a couple of hours of his time.

Midnight Diner (2014) & Midnight Diner 2 (2016)

A man known to his customers only as Master (Kaoru Kobayashi) runs a small diner in Tokyo that’s open between Midnight and 7AM, catering to a crowd of regular night people and the occasional guest star. Apart from a tiny menu, Master offers whatever meal a guest asks for, if he can provide it. Apart from a pretty great cook, Master is also a kind, quiet and thoughtful problem solver and a mighty good listener who clearly can’t help himself when it comes to helping people, sometimes assisted by his small community of regulars. So the films see Master help out people like young, homeless Michiru (Mikako Tabe), who at first eats and runs but then becomes his assistant for a time, mends a broken heart or two, and helps take care of an elderly woman brought to Tokyo through a telephone scam.

Based on a manga that also spawned a popular streaming show, the two Midnight Diner movies belong to the kind of quiet, compassionate and unhurried feel good affairs certain Japanese directors have an astonishing ability to create. Joji Matsuoka’s Midnight Diner films are excellent examples of this form, with their calm, quiet and undemonstrative compassion, their belief in the power of community – as well as in the basic goodwill of communities – and carried by an idea that helping people also means meeting and understanding them on their own terms and at their own pace.

Where this sort of thing could easily drift off in the direction of kitschy teachable moments and schmaltz – some of the plotlines here could certainly play out rather melodramatically and trite – the Midnight Diners are simply too calm and collected for going there; they also feel absolutely genuine in their ideas of how compassion and human dignity interconnect. Also, these films never shy away from acknowledging that life can simply be hard, that the ones you love might not love you back, people die, and catastrophe’s hit – they go about the question of how to go on quietly and calmly afterwards.

Plus, they are really, really Japanese about food, and whose stomach would disagree?

On a filmmaking level, there are no spectacular flourishes here – Matsuoka creates a place, populates it, and then only lends small pieces of emphasis to the work of a fine cast of working actors – for whom Kobayashi provides an impressively calm and kind centre – and script.

Structurally, you can feel the manga source in both films – their structures are episodic but always satisfyingly connected through the material’s clear world view, and their philosophy of unfussy kindness.

Three Films Make A Post: The end continues.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025): This belated sequel to the great Spinal Tap is not an ideal note for director Rob Reiner to go out on – but then, who is so lucky to finish on a masterpiece?

As it stands, it’s not totally unfair to call the film a bit unnecessary, at least in as much as it doesn’t do anything surprising with its very aged fictional rockstars that didn’t already happen in the first one, but there more concise, and more energetically. This doesn’t mean there aren’t any good jokes in here – in fact, there are still more funny ones than bad ones – or that the film isn’t at least worth one rainy Sunday afternoon watch. There’s just nothing it does that suggests anyone involved actually needed to make it.

Imborrable (2022): Even at seventy minutes, this Spanish fake documentary about the attempt at creating a horror short film that goes astray is a drag. The actual narrative core could have been presented in twenty minutes at most, but director Jorge Rivera drowns it out in a series of talking heads that never seems to stop, and proceeds to go on and on forever in tangents that often have very little to do with anything and make the hour of farting around that make up the beginning of many a found footage-style POV horror film look downright concise.

Forbidden Fruits (2026): If ever there was a film that’s clearly not made for me, it’s Meredith Alloway’s meandering, social media irony-drenched bit of feminist hang out movie with a horror appendix. I found the characters obnoxious, the way the film treats its themes somewhere between impenetrable and pointless, and really didn’t want to spend any time with these people or in their world.

However, even I have to give the filmmaker credit for her unwavering aesthetic through line. There’s an insistent visual style to Forbidden Fruits you can’t help but respect, even if it bores you to tears as a film.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973)

Young surgeon and Frankenstein fanboy Simon Helder (Shane Briant) is arrested after playing with too many corpses that didn’t belong to him, and convicted of sorcery. Which – the olden tymes’ justice system being somewhat confusing – leads to him being placed in an Asylum.

As his luck will have it, it’s the same Asylum where his idol, Baron Doctor Victor Frankenstein (still and always Peter Cushing), was incarcerated. Supposedly, the great, mad scientist died there, but, as Simon quickly learns, he’s very much alive. In his own, illimitable style, Frankenstein has blackmailed his way into the position of the resident physician, the alias of Dr. Victor (a genius with aliases, he is not), freedom, and some useful ways to continue his experiments in the creation of life.

The good Baron is quite happy Simon recognizes him practically at once. After all, the young man is well suited to take over some of his responsibilities in the Asylum and leave Frankenstein more time to pursue his more private interests.

Soon enough, Simon, together with mute and beautiful patient Sarah (Madeline Smith), becomes involved in these experiments as well. Slowly, the young man begins to realize that the cliché is right and one should truly never meet one’s heroes. Frankenstein is rather more unscrupulous than Simon imagined him to be, stepping over ethical lines the young man himself clearly holds sacrosanct, how ever dubious the experiments he’s interested in.

This is the final gasp of Hammer’s Frankenstein series, again directed by Hammer’s more traditional gothic stylist Terence Fisher, and at times, it really does feel a bit like the kind of lumbering, reanimated corpse the good Baron likes to create, slowly shambling through a plot without many surprises while having to cope with a budget that clearly isn’t what it once was anymore – and Hammer never was a big budget kind of place in any case.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to like here: from time to time, Fisher can still create a pleasantly gothic mood, and hit a striking image or three. Particularly the third act has quite a few of those, enhanced by the somewhat stronger gore late period Hammer experimented with from time to time. Frankenstein’s final fate, for example, does sit particularly well on the border where the Gothic and the gruesome meet.

Cushing is of course very strong here, particularly in the way he reveals quite how mad and immoral his initially avuncular Frankenstein actually is – this is still the monstrous man he started the series as, just older, even more ruthless and better at hiding what he is, until he slowly lets his mask drop. The movie’s problem here is that the audience knows very well what the Baron’s true nature is, so there’s little dramatic tension to the slow reveal Simon experiences, which is the main reason the first half or so of the film feels quite as slow as it does.

Then there’s the terrible monster, looking as if somebody had taken the lower half of a bad gorilla suit, put it on a highly overweight actor, and dabbed a third generation copy of an unused version of Christopher Lee’s monster’s head from the first Hammer Frankenstein on top. Somehow, this thing manages to make David Prowse look physically unthreatening, which just isn’t right, however you look at it.

The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)

The film follows the live story of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) a Christian cult leader who founded the Shakers, a group of people so annoying, they got thrown out of England and made their way to the New World to start their on line of colonialism and hypocrisy.

Well, I’m usually the first one to blather about morals not really being a necessity for good art, but this hagiographical musical about a cult leader still managed to rub me the wrong way. Sure, parts of the teachings of the cult do fit into certain parts of modern, US-leftist thinking rather nicely, but then, isn’t that the way with all cults, and actually the way they do get to the lost and the lonely that are their main prey before revealing the rot at their core?

The film decides mostly to ignore or not mention everything about the Shakers that doesn’t fit as nicely into modern morals, so it can focus on Seyfried’s extremely charismatic and intense performance that is only marred by a terrible attempt at a Mancunian accent (but then, most of the rest of the cast suffers from that problem as well), and gawk sadly but very politely at the elements of her biography that were actual suffering.

Most interesting here are, of course, the song and dance numbers the film turns the Shakers’ ceremonies into, built out of bits of actual hymns, avantgarde influences of the kind that won’t hurt or even mildly displease anyone and Hans Zimmerisms. The musical aspect is very well done, but like the rest of the movie, it polishes away violence, suffering and general unpleasantness, changing the intensity of actual physical ecstatic worship into something polite and digestible to an audience.

Which really is the film’s main problem: while everything here is technically brilliant – I’ll certainly watch the next movie Mona Fastvold directs with high expectations – it (apart from Seyfried’s performance) never appears fully committed to actually be about anything but vague attempts at equating a cult with an oppressed minority and presenting its enemies as agents of paternalistic misogynist repression that only work by turning an ugly past into an artfully realized theme park.

Three Films Make A Post: Let them try

They Will Kill You (2026): On one hand, I admire Kirill Sokolov’s movie for how full on in its worship for certain aspects of Quentin Tarantino’s body of work it is, and how quickly it becomes trashy, intense and in your face. On the other hand, as it can go with a film that basically shouts in a viewer’s face for ninety minutes, this approach can become a bit tiresome, and I found myself wishing for a change of tack and tone, at least for a scene or two.

Two things, though: Zazie Beetz needs to team up with Samara Weaving in the inevitable Ready Or Not 3, and Pig Satan needs to become a thing in the wider world.

Kraken (2026): Sure, sure, sure, veteran Norwegian horror director Pål Øie’s eco horror/giant monster movie does nothing really new or special with the tropes of the genre it works with. But for my tastes, it absolutely makes up for that with the focussed, unironic approach it takes to these tropes and its unfussy pacing. Let’s call it clarity of purpose.

While this is certainly no comedy, it does recommend itself further with a nicely dry sense of humour and puts enough effort into character building and relations I rather enjoyed my time with them, as well as the film itself. Plus, what’s not to like about a Kraken and the icky things that live on it?

True Fear (2024): Staying in Scandinavia but moving over to Sweden, this is a YouTuber POV horror movie about a couple of young women (Ava Nikodell and Rebecka Enholm) following the trail of the worst witch hunt in Swedish history and encountering creepy rural people, toxic masculinity and the only thing better than duelling banjos: duelling supernatural forces.

Director Daniel di Grado doesn’t attempt to re-invent the found footage wheel here, but like Kraken, this is a film working with tropes sure-handedly, while again having better than average character work, with a script (by Ida Kjellin) that even adds – very appropriately, given the witch hunt theme – some feminist elements.

POV horror veterans like me can actually look forward to some proper special effects here, as well as shot construction that’s thought through beyond “let’s wave the camera around” and s narrative that doesn’t waste hours on characters making themselves unlikable via endless dicking around.

If that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t – this is a rather enjoyable small film.

In the Dark (2000)

Librarian Jane (Kim Garrett) lives the bored small town lifestyle, the sort of thing that can predispose a woman to start on a series of bad decisions for the simple hell of it. So when she begins to find a series of notes from someone calling themselves the “Master of Games” she doesn’t really hesitate to follow the instructions on them. After all, doing so always leads to an envelope full of money.

Of course, what starts off as a series of simple tests of courage escalates with the increasing amount of money in those envelopes, moving towards minor criminality, through major criminality and right into a maximal fucked-upness of a kind that more than just suggests the possibility of a very dark endgame for Jane.

This pretty incredible piece of shot on video horror by Clifton Holmes, adapting a novel by smut horror royalty Richard Laymon has never been officially released but has been making the rounds for quite some time in form of burned DVD-Rs, and a YouTube stream. I do hope the lovely people of Bleeding Skull or of Vinegar Syndrome will catch this one sooner or later.

As it stands, the air of mild secrecy and grime does fit this particular film rather well – one would expect the Master of Games to spread their unpleasant gospel this way.

This is one of those uncommon SOV films that appear to know exactly what they want aesthetically – the often excellent camera work adds to the air of obscure and forbidden reality, and the editing is of a kin that regularly breaks the rules of the game to make an actual thematic point. Unlike with many SOV movies, shots here are thoroughly composed and expressive beyond the air of grime, the black and white of the footage emphasising the shadows in this indeed shadowy tale, providing a nightmarish shape to the film’s crazier moments that don’t quite seem to fit into reality as we know it without ever actually going the supernatural route.

There’s also great focus and pacing here, with no wasted shot, certainly no superfluous scenes. We are accompanying Jane on her descend into an abyss that won’t stop at merely looking back at her, and the way down isn’t filled with scenes of people dragging their feet.

In the Dark works particularly well as an exploration of a specific kind of dissociative small town ennui, where what appears as the way out of the capitalist trap – or at least as relief from its eternal fucking boredom – drags one down into something that’s very much of the same kind, though perhaps eventually a little more honest, if even less pleasant.

While the acting here isn’t always great – this is still an SOV movie, if a brilliant one – Kim Garrett is absolutely fantastic, showing Jane’s alienation, her quiet desperation and all the emotions she never quite can’t suppress, and since she’s the absolute centre of the film, she’s also another part of the motor that makes In the Dark work as astonishingly well as it does.

There Are Monsters (2013)

The by now proverbial student filmmakers are road tripping through a not particularly sexy looking part of Canada for what looks like a pretty boring series of interviews, shakily shot.

In the background, there are signs of strange troubles brewing: the TV news report about curious happenings at CERN and a new infectious disease that appears to attack the middle ear and leave the infected either aggressive, creepy. or totally passive.

Things start going badly in the background closer to our protagonists, as well: they witness people just standing and staring with their faces to walls for hours, while the grins of others grow disturbingly wide, and more and more people appear to become convinced some of their loved ones have been…replaced by things that look like exact copies of them but are not at all human.

Despite the student filmmakers and the shakycam Jay Dahl’s There Are Monsters isn’t a POV horror film, it is just shot and edited like one, with shaky verité cam that often goes right into the actors’ faces and a jittery quality to its images. At first, this lends the film a veneer of the amateurish but the longer it went on, the more impressed I became by how clever and well thought out many of Dahl’s directorial decisions actually are. The camera shakes and jitters for a reason and carried by an eye that gives it meaning; Dahl’s framing of shots is often fantastic, and again, leading to shots that are highly composed while giving the impression of being not composed at all. This, as it does with really good straight-up POV horror, lends the film a particular feeling of reality that crashes nicely into how unreal its world starts to become..

For Dahl very cleverly scratches on the borders – and increasingly the centres – of this reality with a Weirder version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and traces of rage zombies, as if the edges of reality were really rubbing away and monsters coming through. Particularly in the last act, the film is full of singular, bizarre imagery I found genuinely unsettling.

If one were of a complaining mind, one could bemoan that the acting is more on the local theatre level as that of fully professional screen acting, but the actors always rise to the occasion when they really need to hit a beat for the film to function, so I’m not terribly bothered by the occasional stilted line reading.

This is really a fantastic movie, for formal reason mostly championed by found footage enthusiasts, yet one I believe everyone who is interested in indie horror should take a look at.

Three Films Make A Post: The wager between heaven and hell is on Earth

Constantine (2005): I absolutely loathed this when I first saw it, but now, I have more complicated feelings about this piece of horror-leaning urban fantasy: as an adaptation of the original Vertigo Hellblazer comics, this is an absolute catastrophe, the sort of adaptation that changes tone, style, location, world building, philosophy, ethics of the thing it adapts to the worse… Hell, even the original colour of the protagonist’s coat isn’t good enough for it, and Los Angeles sure as shit is not London.

If you treat this as completely its own thing, a movie about some other, much less interesting, Constantine having special effects heavy supernatural adventures in that most boring city, Francis Lawrence’s film is actually a lot of fun. Depending on my mood, I can take or leave this approach when watching-

Apex (2026): This grieving Charlize Theron versus psycho Taron Egerton in the wilderness movie by Baltasar Kormákur does very little for me. Despite a game Theron, this is painfully generic, has a dull middle, and overuses CG for everything computer animation is not good at – trees, waves, you name it.

Egerton’s movie psycho performance is also terribly annoying, full-on in the always playing for the camera even when the character is supposed to be alone kind of way too many serial killer performances devolve into. It robs the character of all of its potential threat in favour of clowning.

Hellfire (2026): Stephen Lang continues to throw his hat into the elderly action hero ring, and is a fine, calm presence there. In fact, some people might call the first half or so of low budget action maestro Isaac Florentine’s Hellfire a little too calm. Me, I enjoyed listening to the score playing variations on “Wayfaring Stranger” while various character actors (and an ill-looking Harvey Keitel) create actual relationships and a sense of place, and menace slowly builds up.

And once that menace explodes, Florentine gets to stage some rather nice action pieces. Particularly some limited vehicular action and an intense close quarters fight between Lang and Johnny Yong Bosch delight.

Enter the Dragon (1973)

The British secret services convince Shaolin martial arts master Lee (Bruce Lee) to attend a martial arts tournament taking place on the fortress island of international drug lord and all around evildoer Han (Shih Kien). Since Han has disgraced the shaolin martial arts he once studied, and also murdered Lee’s sister (Angela Mao in a short but sweet flashback), there’s quite a bit of motivation provided for our hero to destroy Han’s operation.

Han for his part mostly uses the tournament as a way for recruitment, but at least two of the other martial artists, blaxploitation movie protagonist Williams (Jim Kelly) and roguish adventurer Roper (John Saxon) will turn out to be just as unhappy with their host’s lifestyle as Lee is, and thus make for natural allies.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that Bruce Lee never meant as much to my appreciation of martial arts cinema as he did to other people. Despite his obvious talent, the movie star image first approach he tended to take – and which fit Hollywood much better than it did Hong Kong – always did rub me the wrong way a little.

Which isn’t to say Enter the Dragon is not a fantastically successful attempt at mixing Hong Kong style martial arts, blaxploitation and spy adventure in the Ian Fleming style. This is one of those movies that seem to absolutely embody the sprit of 70s exploitation cinema (which has always been, and will always be, on of the loves of my life). There’s very little here that isn’t enjoyable – from the fights, to the gimmicks, the so wonderfully of its time production design, to the breathing noises so loud, Sonny Chiba heard them over in Japan and decided to make them even more absurd. The film is carried by a spirit of generosity towards its audience, really going all out to not just belong in half a dozen genres or so, but to provide a viewer with everything they could wish for from every single one of them.

And all that from a director like Robert Clouse who usually doesn’t understand pacing, or style, or how to direct action. Well, looked at objectively, for most of the film, it isn’t actually Clouse doing much of the heavy lifting, but the choreography, the production design and a gang of actors that appear to have a great amount of fun; the director for mostly tries not to get in the way of what he has. Which, given most of Clouse’s other films, I can’t help but wish he’d used as an approach more often.

The Forbidden City (2025)

Original title: La città proibita

A mysterious, kung fu fighting young lady we will eventually learn to be called Mei (Liu Yaxi), is smuggled into Italy to be a victim of the flesh trade. Instead of submitting to anything, Mei kicks the ever-loving crap out of her trafficker-captors. Turns out she hasn’t come to be exploited and still make more money than she could hope for at home – the rural areas of China aren’t all charmed – but is looking for her sister Yun (Ye Haijin). Yun for her part came to Italy to earn enough money to pay for the bureaucratic recognition of Mei’s existence. They were both born during the time of of the One Child Policy, and such papers, even once the rule has ended, apparently aren’t cheap. Yun has disappeared, though.

So, armed with her trusty translator app, great kung fu and quite an attitude, Mei has come looking for her sister. It seems Yun has run away with the father of local cook Marcello (Enrico Borello), but, this being the kind of film it is, there’s worse going on, and eventually, Mei and the non-combatant Marcello team up, fall in love and seek vengeance together.

I didn’t expect much of a contemporary Italian martial arts movie starring a Chinese actress with a barely existing CV, but Gabriele Mainetti’s The Forbidden City isn’t just a good martial arts film for an Italian low budget affair but simply a very good martial arts film of a style that’s simply not done anymore at scale. While Liu Yaxi turns out to be a highly capable screen fighter, a fine action actor, and a great on-screen presence.

The action direction is often genuinely wonderful, featuring many a clever use of props, camera work that enhances action instead of obfuscating it, and the mix of controlled movement and poise I often miss in the more MMA-heavy style of fighting contemporary action movies love so dearly.

While the action is sprinkled graciously throughout, this isn’t the kind of martial arts movie that only wants show off the fights – great as they are. This one’s also telling a character-driven story, set in a part of Rome full of immigrants (generally portrayed sympathetically), and puts a lot of work into creating a sense of place and character relationships. This does take place in a community, and so, betrayals and heartbreak do take on a more personal dramatic character than they otherwise would. Handled in this way, the romance isn’t perfunctory as it could easily be in a comparable film, but actually one of the film’s core virtues: acts of violence here follow human emotions, for good and for ill.

I’m not quite as convinced of the film’s recurring comical beats as of the rest of it, but Forbidden City clearly wants to be the full meal kind of martial arts tale, so it’s no surprise humour is an important part of it as well, as is genre tradition. Funny to me or not, the humour does carry as much of a coherent and individual tone as the rest of the film, and Mainetti does manage to balance it, the drama, the romance, and the violence nicely in a way most Western action movies simply aren’t interested in anymore (or, looking at you, Bren Foster, can’t pull off), if they ever were.

I certainly ended the movie’s epilogue with a happy smile on my face – what more can a man ask for?

Three Bad Movies Make A Post: Mommy knows best.

The Mortuary Assistant (2026): Compared to some of the worst new movies I’ve seen in the past couple of months, I can at least praise Jeremiah Kipp’s videogame adaptation for not attempting to paste over the holes in its budget with AI slop – while this isn’t good, at least it has a degree of self respect.

Unfortunately, that’s about all the film has going for it: the photography is flat and ugly in a particularly boring, digital style, the sets look terrible, the plot neither makes sense nor is it told in anything amounting to an even vaguely interesting manner, and consists of all of the clichés of past mortuary horror movies anyway, and the acting is dreadful throughout. There’s a complete lack of imagination on display here I found genuinely dispiriting.

Dolly (2025): Dolly was shot on film and really, really wants you to know it. And shot on film it is indeed, just not shot particularly well, or doing much to demonstrate how its analogue ways are much better than comparable digital photography would be. What’s texture good for when you don’t actually use it?

Being shot on film is also meant as a signifier of this being a throwback to grindhouse days, but there’s nothing the film does actual grindhouse cinema didn’t do better, or deeper, or broader. Even Dolly’s self-conscious nastiness doesn’t quite work, because it is so self-conscious, more concerned with looking like the real thing than simply being it. So it ends up being like a plastic copy of the sort of film it wants to be.

Anatema (2024): I’m genuinely not sure if this mix of religious horror clichés of all times and places directed by Jimina Sabadú is meant to be a comedy, or us just really bad at being a horror movie. In any case, cribbing from movies that aren’t all that great to begin with (hello, most of the Conjuringverse), but doing it badly does not for a decent movie make, even though this, admittedly, has a couple of ideas borrowed from Italian horror (say, The Church) you could still make a fine movie out of. You’d just have to commit to a tone and style, instead of racing through a bunch of greatest hits while actors mug and this viewer sighs.

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

While Fox either didn’t manage to or didn’t want to secure the rights for further Holmes movies, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce deepened their footprints as the characters during a successful series of radio plays in the roles. So it makes a lot of sense that Universal studios, who eventually managed to make a deal with the Doyle estate, then went to that particular well and hired the men for their own cycle of Holmes movies.

These films weren’t given the full studio budget treatment of Fox’s Holmes films, however, but were strictly meant for the B slot of any given cinematic performance, leading to shorter and cheaper films made by the B-movie arm of Universal’s operation. On the plus side, Universal’s B arm did have better directors than the guys Fox put on their Holmes films.

As another, apparently still quite contentious in certain Holmes purist circles to this day, cost-cutting measure, the Universal films put Holmes into the present day, though a version of the present day that is drenched in shadows and fog more often than not. Because it was 1942, Universal also decided to start the films off as war propaganda. So this first outing finds Holmes thwarting a Lord Haw-Haw style Nazi radio propagandist who commands his spy minions to commit some rather spectacular (for the budget) acts of sabotage. Holmes ropes in the service of a thinly-coded prostitute (Evelyn Ankers) who convinces parts of the Underworld to do their patriotic duty with a really rather effective speech to counter the Nazi scum.

While the propagandist elements here can feel to be laid on rather thick (this certainly isn’t a Powell/Pressburger joint), I find myself rather taken with this aspect of the film. But then, if ever there was a reason for the people of Britain to be proudly patriotic, it was how they held out against Nazi Germany when the Americans here singing their praises were still twiddling their thumbs. And frankly, who else would you have Sherlock Holmes fight in 1942?

The film, directed by John Rawlins, is a nice little piece of pulpy entertainment, making moody use of Universal’s standing sets, and a script that’s just on the right side of overstuffed, with some cheap but cheerful action set-pieces, rousing speeches – Anker in particular really gives her all there – and a well-developed sense of the shadow-drenched mood I tend to hope for in Holmes media whenever it leaves the drawing room. The cast is fine, the villains dastardly, and I even didn’t mind the idiot version of Watson too much this time.

A Couple of Weeks Off

In yet another bid for keeping things nailbitingly exciting around here, I’ll take a couple of weeks off from posting.

What goes for normal service around here will resume on the 24th of May. If you can’t live without my movie opinions – I certainly can’t – you can still witness me give inexcusable star ratings to movies over on Letterboxd.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Following Fox’s first Holmes movie with the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce double act rather quickly, this second movie is already the end of the short Fox cycle featuring these two. The studio apparently had problems wrangling the rights for further movies out of the Doyle estate, and perhaps not as much interest in continuing the series anyway.

Probably making negotiations less important for the studio that this film was neither much loved by the studio bosses nor – apparently – audiences, so fighting Adrian Doyle might not have been worth it to them in any case.

The Adventures doesn’t attempt to adapt any particular Holmes tale, but spins a complicated yarn about a plot of Professor Moriarty (who is much more common in adaptations than in the canon, and here played by the typically fun George Zucco) to thwart and humiliate Holmes and get rich in the process.

Not being a studio boss or a 1939 audience, I prefer this second Fox Holmes to the Hound. The plot is more lively, Alfred L. Werker’s direction is workmanlike but at least effective and from time to time even atmospheric, and Rathbone and Bruce really have gotten a grip on the character they are never really going to lose for as long as they will continue to play these characters (as much as I loathe Watson as an idiot, but you know that already). Unlike in the first movie, there’s also at least one memorable part among the younger actors surrounding our heroes – Ida Lupino (early in her career here) imbues her theoretically typical heiress in distress with as much personality and backbone as she can get away with, which does wonders for much of the plot she is involved in.

This – like most of Hollywood Holmes – is very much Holmes in pulp mode, so expect as much action as ratiocination, and delightful moments like the scene in which Moriarty’s butler has forgotten to water the man’s beloved plants and faces the ensuing threats of death and doom with the most movie butlerish face ever encountered. It is all very good fun. Apart from the actual jokes, of course, but that’s par for the course.

Express Train (1967)

Aoki (Kiyoshi Atsumi) is the proud, veteran conductor of an express sleeper train. At the time, this didn’t mean he’d just be checking tickets, but is actually commanding the small army of personnel on the train and shooting all kinds of trouble.

Aoki does so with a mixture of warmth, sternness, and the everyman awkwardness Atsumi is so good at portraying. He’s too self-serious not to be always at least a little ridiculous but he’s also kind and compassionate to a fault, so it’s impossible not to be kindly disposed towards him even if he’s being silly or mildly embarrassing.

In this first of four Train movies with Atsumi produced by Toei, he has to take care of passengers like a child with a dangerous heart problem, a somewhat rowdy drunk ladies’ party, as well as a pregnant passenger who will of course give birth on board of the train.

He’s also going to fall in love again with a woman (Yoshiko Sakuma) he developed a crush on when she was just a late teenage passenger on another line – this being a Japanese move from the 60s, that’s not to be read as anything creepy in the world of the movie. Now very much grown up, her marriage is on the skids, and Aoki’s own marriage isn’t terribly satisfying. Of course, she’s also completely unreachable as a realistic romantic prospect for Aoki.

And if all of this sounds rather a lot like a train-based predecessor to the long, long, very long-running Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man series Atsumi would star in for Shochiku starting some years later, apparently every single person watching this – including me – agrees. This is the absolute blueprint of the sort of thing Atsumi would go on to play and be on screen in the future. There are of course some differences here – despite being a bit of a fool sometimes, Aoki is actually pretty good at his job, and feels at least more grown up than Tora will do. He also doesn’t have episodes of lashing out at everyone around him.

Masaharu Segawa directs with an appropriate sense of gentleness – the tone is gentle, the humour is gentle, and there’s an air of day-to-day kindness here that does smile at human folly more than damn it, using the train and its conductor as a model of a late 60s Japan that never quite was but that looks like a place I’d rather like to live.

Kanto Street Peddlers: Clan Violent Loyalty (1970)

After having spent only a couple of years behind bars for his role in the climax of the first movie, Bunta Sugawara now roams Japan in this second movie of the street peddling focussed ninkyo eiga series to keep out of Tokyo trouble.

As will surprise nobody who ever watched a ninkyo eiga or two, Bunta soon falls in with group of deeply honourable street peddling yakuza who control an important festival site, but are beleaguered by the intrigues and occasional casual violence of a gang of proper baddy yakuza who want to get at that turf and its riches by any means necessary.

This sequel was again directed by Norifumi Suzuki, who spent a lot of his time in the ninkyo realm before he found his true calling in pinky violence and dubious comedy.

Here we find the director pulling his preferred comedy shenanigans back for much of the film beyond a couple of comical interludes. Instead he concentrates on melodrama and bad yakuza nastiness (even in the less extreme ninkyo eiga variant of the yakuza movie, things could get a bit unpleasant at this point in time, as long as only the villains were doing the really bad stuff). Despite some inelegant shuffling out of and into the movie of characters – some actors probably shot another movie for Toei in parallel, or ten – the film is rather more focussed than its predecessor. This provides Suzuki with opportunity to put more effort into creating more complex character relations and go deeper into the politics of the street peddler world. All this is then used to make the melodrama more intense once the shit hits the fan, until everything culminates in the expected beautiful bloodbath.

That climax isn’t quite as wonderfully done as the one in the first Kanto Street Peddlers, though Suzuki still puts a lot of effort into creating an energetic fight that doesn’t use the standard by the book camera set-ups or blocking of such scenes. In general, Suzuki appears very interested in using all kinds of tricks to make the genre standards Seiko Shimura’s script goes through visually memorable and through this emotionally involving. This works rather well for the movie, and also demonstrates a side of the directors that’s easy to overlook when he’s throwing naked female wrestlers and pratfalls at the camera: he’s genuinely good at the quiet emotional moments, and knows how to provide the Toei stable of thespians with openings to really strut their stuff. As it usually goes when a director does this, they repay him with giving a little extra.