The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Young, hot Wilbur Whateley (young, hot Dean Stockwell – not necessarily something you get to write every day) comes to the Arkham University Library to borrow the Necronomicon. He’s got Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee), one of the student assistants of the place, charmed/hypnotized right quick, but head librarian Dr. Armitage (Ed Begley) is particularly protective of that tome. Supposedly, it provides a way to ensure the return of the Old Ones, a superior race that ruled Earth long before mankind, and though Armitage doesn’t exactly believe in these things, he does think the book could be rather dangerous.

While Wilbur isn’t getting the book, he does manage to convince Nancy to drive him to his home in Dunwich, where he can better drug, hypnotize and talk her into becoming a sacrifice to the Old Ones. Or just the new mother of the inhuman race.

Lovecraft’s tales have always been seen as particularly difficult to adapt, but I’ve always thought that especially The Dunwich Horror, with its often decidedly pulpy tenor, would be one of the easier stories to adapt.

AIP must have thought the same, and most of the changes made by the script – by Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum and Ronald Silkosky – to Daniel Haller’s adaptation do make rather a lot of sense: sexing things up a little and putting proceedings firmly into the late 60s/early 70s are logical and sound decisions, at least.

However, the film then proceeds to shoot itself in the foot repeatedly. The acting is generally pretty bad, with Ed Begley (senior, that is) lacking the gravitas and conviction to make a proper counterpoint to Stockwell’s Whateley. Dee lacks any ability to project anything at all (or if she does, chooses not to show any of it), which, given that the script already has very little for her to do, turns Nancy into a complete absence where a person needed to be. Whereas Stockwell so overplays the camp of his role as written, he’s never believable as any kind of horror film villain.

Haller was a brilliant production designer and art director who was able to work wonders on a budget, but his directorial efforts all feel pedestrian, slow and lack any visual imagination, all things this film would have desperately needed to convince an audience to take any of this seriously. Instead of style, from time to time Vaseline or gauze is applied to a camera, and hippies dance, or the screen goes purple for some monster vision. Which simply isn’t enough.

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to the new west.

Americana (2023): Tony Tost’s crime comedy was savaged by a lot of people, but as far as films that desperately want to be Coen Brothers films go, this has more than a few moments that actually, genuinely work and even suggest Tost may very well be able to make a film that’s made by himself instead of the sum of his influences.

As it stands, this is a movie with many good scenes that never quite cohere to a really good movie, with a game cast – who knew Halsey could act? – having to cope with one-note characters, and a plot that really doesn’t need the Tarantino-style told out of order thing.

But, at the very least, it has a very good taste in songs.

Phantom Thread (2017): I’ve been successfully avoiding Paul Thomas Anderson’s dressmaker drama for quite a few years, but, as it turns out, I really shouldn’t have been afraid of this actually being the movie about British peoples’ inability to connect with their feelings it sort of sells itself at. Instead, this is a BDSM romance where people don’t actually fuck but make dresses or poison mushroom omelettes instead, a movie about power and love and the kind of lust that’s more complicated than one would expect, expressed via some of the most elegant filmmaking imaginable. It is also, in a peculiar way, yet another Anderson film that is very much like an exploitation movie in many aspects, until it isn’t.

The Naked Gun (2025): From the sublime to the ridiculous, but keeping with movies I didn’t actually expect to like, Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun requel is the return to silly, random nonsense comedy I didn’t know I needed in my life, with a barrage of jokes that run the gamut from the tasteless, to the mildly political, to the impressively stupid, park for a time to have some fatty food, and then throw even more bullshit at the audience.

At least two thirds of the thousand jokes and sight gags are actually funny, so there’s no way to find fault with what this provides, unlike you’re too afraid of house favourite Liam Neeson’s still gigantic hands.

Inferno (2005)

History (it may be archaeology or anthropology, the subtitles aren’t all that great) student Saeki (Ema Fujisawa) has strange dreams about a young boy that she believes must be connected to an incident in a part of her childhood she has no actual memory of. When she was six or seven years old, she visited family in a small town mostly populated by descendants of some of those families who pretended to convert to Buddhism during the late 16th century’s persecution of Christian missionaries and converted populations in Japan but secretly kept to a form of Christianity.

During the visit, Saeki mysteriously disappeared together with a little boy named Shinichi. Saeki just as mysteriously reappeared again, without any memory of what happened, but Shinichi had never been found, dead or alive.

On her return – the family members have died years ago – Saeki soon encounters disgraced – for some apparently crazy theories the subtitles can’t cope with – archaeologist Hieda (Hiroshi Abe), who is very interested in the area and its traditions. They quickly learn that there’s a hidden hamlet somewhere deep in the mountains whose population has never converted to mainstream Catholicism as the other hidden Christians did once it was possible, and who have some rather peculiar ideas you won’t even find in most collections of apocrypha, particularly about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In their version of the myth, Adam shared his position of being the first man with a certain Jusher, and there were two trees with forbidden fruit: the good old Tree of Knowledge from which Adam – here seduced to it by Jusher instead of Eve – ate, and the Tree of Life, whose fruit gave Jusher and his descendants eternal life but also eternal suffering as well as a decided lack of knowledge.

The people in the curious hamlet, it is said, are descendants of Jusher, and have the mental state of little children.

What this has to do with Saeki’s disappearance years ago, or the fact that children of a certain age in the area are apparently spirited away only to appear sometimes many decades later at the same age they disappeared at, isn’t exactly clear, but there are certainly very curious things happening in rural Japan.

Actually, even having watched Takashi Komatsu’s Inferno – apparently based on a manga by Daijiro Morohishi – I’m still not clear about the whys and wherefores of this aspect of the plot, and how it fits into the heretical Christianity of its concepts.

Until the final act, I actually expected the film to explicitly explain fairy lore to be the basis of Christian ideas about hell and its inhabitants in a more Machenesque way, but it eventually shifts its interest fully onto an alternative form of redemption. Perhaps ill-advisedly, for the material really could have used more room to breathe than the ninety minutes of movie it got, not to speak of a special effects budget that could have better coped with the visionary elements of the climax. Though the very minimalist approach Komatsu takes in the end is actually rather memorable and successful in putting a big idea into a form affordable to the production.

While I’m on the film’s problems – this has all the visual calm of classic J-horror, but doesn’t quite manage to find the visual interest someone like Hideo Nakata would have added to long, long scenes of characters talking ever more complicated exposition at each other. Despite its runtime, this is a very talky movie, but then, much of what happens in the last act needs the film’s concepts and ideas explained in detail to work at all. And it’s really the ideas that shine here: being the kind of guy I am, I’m of course all for the elements of Inferno that treat fairy folklore like a good piece of weird fiction; yet I’m also very fond of the film’s treatment of Christianity as a mythological canon you can play around with. Cultural appropriation can be kind of awesome.

Which is more than enough for me to heartily recommend Inferno. It’s a deeply flawed film, but it is also so very, very interesting and resonates with so many of my interests.

Chain Reactions (2024)

This documentary by Alexandre O. Philippe treats Tobe Hooper’s seminal – and burned not only into my mind – Texas Chainsaw Massacre through the lens of five different admirers, presented in consecutive interviews during which Philippe provides comparison and enhancement of ideas via visual commentary. It is actually pretty revelatory to see the very yellowed print of TCM notable film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas saw of it in its first Australian presentation in comparison to today’s much cleaner versions. This is then used as an excellent jumping off point into a fantastic discourse on the colour yellow in Australian horror (visually proven by the proper number of very yellow looking outback horror snippets). It is just as fascinating to hear Takshi Miike talk about the film’s personal impact on his work as a director, which is notedly different from what film school jargon spouting Karyn Kusama, coming from a very different time and place, finds in the very same scenes Miike talks about.

In fact, it is one of the most interesting aspects of Philippe’s documentary that the film often repeats scenes from Hooper’s film when a different person speaks about them, demonstrating very nicely indeed that everyone can see a very different film while watching the same one.

As the kind of viewer I am, I’m particularly happy how much emphasis Chain Reactions puts on exploring TCM through some very individual and personal lenses, finding insight less in academic analysis, as in the way Patton Oswalt, Miike, Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Kusama relate to the film as part of their lives and personal/emotional/intellectual development. There’s multitudes here, and while most viewers will find one or two approaches they won’t vibe with – I find Kusama’s approach that ignores any visceral impact this very visceral film has in favour of jargon-heavy academicisms pretty grating, for example – all of them are treated with equal respect and emphasis, and resonate with one another as well as with the film these five (plus one in form of the director) talk about so eloquently.

Three Ghostly UK TV Movies Make A Post

Traditionally, the British were better with tales of the weird and the supernatural on TV than the most other nations. At least it looks so from over here in Germany, and going by the surprising number of TV plays, TV movies and random anthology episodes you can often only find in blurry VHS rips on YouTube. In these cases, the blurriness does enhance the mood.

Three cases in point (all of which I’ve encountered thanks to the efforts of writer Ray Newman to make all of us watch more obscure British TV on YouTube:

“Haunted”: The Ferryman (1974): This fifty minute shortish TV movie based on Kingsley Amis finds Jeremy Brett as a freshly baked bestselling writer on vacation with his wife (Natasha Parry) at a country inn. The place shows increasingly disturbing parallels to the supernatural thriller he wrote, until he’s basically stepping into the role of his own doomed hero.

This, a Granada production as directed by John Irvin, is a particularly nice discovery: Brett projects a believable mix of arrogance and self-doubt, Parry is excellent as the woman who has to cope with it, and the plot escalates from playfully weird meta to the truly creepy, helped by the kind of calm shooting style so typical of this strand of British filmmaking, where creepy shots are insisted upon until they cause quite a bit of lingering dread.

“Dramarama”: Snap (1987): This twenty-five minute piece directed by Michael Kerrigan concerns a boy who may be on his way to a mild form of juvenile delinquency getting dropped off in some marshland by his father for an ill-defined school photography project (British schooling in the 80s must have been rather peculiar). There, he encounters a supernatural power very interested in his dark side.

I wouldn’t have expected a piece of children’s television to be quite as visually inspired as this is by the proto-Ghost Story for Christmas Whistle and I’ll Come to You, but this borrows a couple of central shots, as well as the mood of a desolate landscape where even human habitations seem to be infused with a degree of wrongness and runs with it to a really pleasantly dark ending. The central child actor isn’t great, but the film quotes well from the right sources and carries its sense of genuine creepiness right through to the end.

“Ghosts”: Three Miles Up (1998): Last but not least, this BBC production directed by Lesley “Ghostwatch” Manning adapts Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “Three Miles Up”, from the phase when she wrote weird fiction influenced by but highly distinctive from the works of her then boyfriend Robert Aickman.

In visual mood, this does with the British canal system what Snap did with marshland, so expect slowly lingering shots of a landscape that feels simply not like a place meant for humans when looked at long enough. I’m not too fond of some of the acting here – TV attempts at psychodrama are generally not my bag – but there’s a sense of strangeness in some of the human interaction here besides the loud attempts at TV Bergman that fits nicely into the strangeness of landscape.

Pale Flower (1964)

Yakuza Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) has just been released from prison after a three year stint for a gang war killing. He quickly gets back into his old life of crime, spiced with a lot of existential ennui. Little in life appears to interest him, and even yakuza fun isn’t actually any fun to him. He’s going through the motions of the life, of course, for what else is there? Muraki is ignoring the clan politics around him as well, which, as not just the later jitsuroku eiga have taught us, is always a problem for a yakuza on the lower rungs of the ladder.

Muraki develops something like an actual interest when he meets Saeko (Mariko Kaga), an at least moderately rich girl slumming it in the low life, obsessed with gambling. Saeko carries herself with the same emotional detachment as Muraki, with the excitement of ever higher gambling stakes about the only thing that seems to bring her to life. Clearly, these two are made for each other, or made to make each others’ lives all the shorter.

Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower is a venerated classic of Japanese new wave cinema, by a director who would often tend to work within genre pushing its boundaries outward from the inside. As far as I understand it – I’ve not seen as much Shinoda as I probably should have – this is Shinoda’s first really artistically out there movie, made for Shochiku but not really inside of its production machine. So there’s freedom for Shinoda not to make a typical ninkyo eiga and also fewer of the studio constraints someone like Seijun Suzuki had to fight against even with a more pop minded studio as Nikkatsu.

The result is an often icily cool movie, driven by a strangely nightmarish score by Toru Takemitsu and a visual style that’s a perfect early 60s interpretation of noir. It takes place in an archetypal Tokyo of night people, populated with characters who have lost all drive for change, and probably all belief in even wanting something like change and thus just drift along, desperately grasping for any sensation that might actually make them feel again, even though this is the clearest road to their own destruction.

The acting here is just as icy and minimal as you’d expect, big expressive gestures buried under the characters’ internal ice. However, even though their characters are frozen inside and out, Ikebe and Kaga project this lack of emotion with great intensity which seems to nearly explode in the gambling scenes. Consequently, these sequences are incredibly sexually loaded, even more so than usual with gambling scenes.

Pale Flower is a perfect film of its kind, dominated by a sense of hopelessness that it’s hard for me not to call exquisite, beautiful in the way of flowers just about to die, something its protagonists would very much approve of.

Plot of Fear (1976)

Original title: E tanta paura

Various, mostly rich and influential, people are killed in gruesome ways. The killer always leaves a page of German old-timey sledgehammer education picture book “Struwwelpeter” at the scene of the crime.

When he isn’t sleeping with his model girlfriend, Inspector Lomenzo (Michele Placido) does some actual, proper, investigative work – and acquires a new model girlfriend in form of Jeanne (Corinne Cléry) during it. From Jeanne, Lomenzo learns that all the victims were involved in the sex and violence parties hunter and dealer in wild animals Hoffmann (John Steiner) held at his estate when he was still alive, and all of them were there the day a prostitute died under highly dubious circumstances.

It’s nearly as if someone were trying to punish the people involved through brutal violence as also happens to be the tradition of old-timey German picture books for kids.

Paolo Cavara’s Plot of Fear is definitely one of the better attempts at mixing elements of the giallo with those of the Italian cop movie, and making pretty successful attempts at subverting both of them while also delivering the genre thrills an audience would expect.

On the giallo side, while this is certainly a stylish and well-shot film, Cavara shows little interest into stylizing the violence as someone like Argento or Martino would (though he does clearly have some heterosexual guy kind of fun with the nudity). Where the often sexually non-binary identities of the killers in your typical giallo can suggest a rather conservative world view (if these aspects are meant that way is a very different question), the killer here comes out of a thematic concern about vigilantism, the misuse of surveillance and the misuse of power that reads very directly left-wing to me.

Police film-wise, Lomenzo is a very different proposition to the two-fisted – depending on your view point fascistically coded (though I would often not read them this way) – action copper as exemplified in someone like the great Maurizio Merli. While he does get into a couple of scraps (the genre demands, and Cavara is clever enough to accede), Lomenzo approaches the case with his head instead of his fists, though he is no Sherlock Holmes, either. He’s a softer, more thoughtful proposition, easily flustered but just as determined and uncorrupted as his more brutal antipodes – he just clearly does believe in due process and proper procedure as the basis of actual justice.

All of which is nice and interesting on paper, but wouldn’t be worth much if Plot of Fear weren’t an engaging genre mix. Fortunately it is, providing the expected genre beats with verve and enough style to keep my sleazier nature happy while pushing two genres into directions they not often go. Hell, Cavara even manages to add humorous interludes that are actually drily funny, which is not a sentence you’ll find me writing about many giallos.

Three Films Make A Post: Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night Edition

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025): Scott Cooper’s Springsteen biopic focussed on the making of “Nebraska” (certainly one of my favourite albums of all time) is a deeply frustrating experience. At its best, this is a calm, meticulous and thoughtful portrayal of the creative process, and about trying to go forward when something in one’s past always holds one back.

At its worst – all too often – this just dumps the greatest hits of biopic clichés onto that better movie, the kind of bullshit neither life nor art deserve and that runs against the attempts at truthfulness of the film’s good third. It doesn’t exactly help that the the film’s ideas about psychology tend to the reductive or even the outright stupid, and that Cooper also likes to do things like show Springsteen looking up at a mansion on a hill and then cut to him writing “Mansion on the Hill”, as if the writer/director were either an idiot or assumed his audience to be.

It Was Just An Accident aka Yek tasadof-e sadeh (2025): Whereas this is Jafar Panahi channelling quite a bit of his own suffering under the Iranian regime into a movie that is never going for the simple and the easy and transfiguring what must be a lot of actual pain into a film of astonishing compassion with even those the director would have every right to see as beyond having any right to be treated with it.

Also included are moments of righteous anger turned righteous art, complex characterisation of characters a film like Cooper’s above would have treated as walking, talking tropes, genuinely riveting discussions of the morals of vengeance and mercy, and emotions genuine yet still filtered through the thoughtful complexity of these discussions. There’s also a dry sense of dark humour running particularly through the middle act that’s often actually delightful.

Here We Come A-Wassailing (1977): Coming to something rather different, this short-ish BBC documentary directed by great British folk rock musician Ashley Hutchings (whose Albion Band also scores the film) looks at various local yuletide/midwinter/Christmas traditions in different villages on the British Isles. It’s an often fascinating document of rites that by the time this was shot were curiously disconnected to the actual life of those people still holding to them. What must have been deeply meaningful at one point to the communities involved here looks like a nice lark to get up to while getting very, very drunk – to be lost in the next decades, and then in parts revived again through new generations stumbling onto the traditions and filling them with hopefully new meanings.

In any case, it’s fantastic just to be able to see some of this stuff, to speculate on the meanings these traditions might have had, and to watch people enjoy doing pretty damn strange things that would puzzle anyone living farther away than three villages over.

The Drifting Avenger (1968)

Original title: Kôya no toseinin

A gang of stagecoach robbers stumble into the Old American West cabin of an expat samurai (three minutes of Takashi Shimura are better than no Takashi Shimura), shoot the man and his wife and leave their cowboy son Ken (Ken Takakura), also pretty shot, for dead.

Because this is a western, Ken survives with a righteous lust for vengeance only tempered by the samurai code his father taught him, and rides out in search for the killers. He still doesn’t quite have the killer instinct he’d actually need to conclude the whole avenging business successfully, and lacks some of the technical skill of the proper gunman as well, so it comes in useful he soon encounters the experienced Marvin (Ken Goodlet), who is good with guns, paternal advice and being an old west kind of guy. He also happens to be the father of one of the killers, though that conflict isn’t quite resolved as you’d expect, or made as much of as you’d hope for.

Ken does seem to have a thing for fallen in with relatives of his prospective victims. For he also develops paternal feelings for the son of another one of the killers, and also gets close to the same man’s soon to be widow, who takes her husband’s fate philosophically even before he is dead.

Vengeance, it turns out, is a place full of relatives who are rather more okay with having their family killed than Ken is.

Despite being more than just a little fond of classic Japanese genre cinema, I’ve never been able to see any of the westerns some of the major studios at put out, so my only actual contact with this somewhat surprising genre has been Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django until now – and that’s of course neither a classic era studio movie nor sane nor normal. On the other hand, there’s been so much back and forth influence between chanbara in Japan and the western in the US and Italy, it’s not as if I’m moving through unknown territory here.

Still, this is my first proper Japanese western (if one shot in Australia with an Australian cast apart from its star and a couple of intro characters). The film was directed by Toei contract man Junya Sato, whose direction tends to the technically competent yet workmanlike, at least in most of his films I’ve seen. This certainly applies to Drifting Avenger. There’s nothing here that’s badly staged or ugly to look at, but there’s also a certain lack of flair and visual energy – as a western director, he’s certainly no Leone, Boetticher, Ford, or Corbucci. Which is a particular shame because the Australian landscape would at the very least offer up some spectacular – if not very American looking – vistas beyond what Sato shows here.

The script is more routine than inspired as well, with some attempts at complicating Ken’s quest for vengeance via entanglements between honour and humanity that equally speak to western, chanbara and yakuza film traditions but that never feel as emotionally or intellectually captivating as they could. The film’s structure is a little too episodic for this to work as well as it should, particularly since it repeats plot beats between Marvin and the other killer’s family that would have been better explored through a single set of characters.

The situation isn’t helped by the fact that Takakura and Goodlet are the only professional screen actors in larger roles – the rest of the Australian cast only has this as their single film credits, and the lack of experience and ability gets in the way of proper emotional and thematic exploration, even though everyone is dubbed into Japanese. An all Japanese cast out of Toei’s stable of character actors, stars and pros would have provided much needed personality to everyone. And while Takakura is great as always, he does need other actors to play off of when emoting, instead of the walking talking cardboard he has to cope with here throughout.

Still, The Drifting Avenger is not a terrible movie by any means, just one that’s never more than very basically entertaining.

Hallow Road (2025)

On a dark night, Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and Frank (Matthew Rhys) get a call from their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell), with whom they had a giant row that evening. Apparently, Alice stormed off and stole Frank’s car when the parental units got rather angry at her for certain life decisions that don’t bode terribly well for the future they imagined for her.

Anger notwithstanding, Alice is now calling them for help. She has had an accident, struck a girl with her car on a lonely forest road, and doesn’t know what to do. Because the circumstances look dubious, and will become increasingly so the more information Alice shares, Maddie and Frank are driving to help Alice. Maddie’s experience as a emergency rescuer comes in helpful for talking Alice through first aid steps on the girl she injured, at least.

However while the parents are driving on, developments take a rather dark turn or two.

Speaking of the drive, there’s something strange going on there as well, for Hallow Road, where Alice had her accident, seems curiously difficult to reach, as if there were forces at work that have their own ideas about what to do about Alice for the trouble she has gotten herself into, forces rather less willing to tolerate wrongdoing than parents may be.

Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road is a project that could very well have ended up as merely a gimmick movie of a kind that might have been better realized as an audio play. However, Anvari directs the hell out of a story that consists of two people in a car having a phone call for most of its running time. There’s an admirable sense of focus to Anvari’s work here, as well as clear trust in his main actors to convey desperation, anger, as well as slowly encroaching dread. Which, as actors of a certain calibre are wont to do in cases like this, they repay with the kind of great work that eschews getting too showy while also hitting the proper dramatic notes, suggesting things that don’t need to be told directly.

William Gillies’s script works like clockwork but never feels like one, and handles characterisation as well as it does escalation, while confronting its increasingly fraying characters with a situation where one wrong decision cascades until events become catastrophic. I also loved how the film handles the supernatural, mixing very traditional folkloric tropes in a way that makes them fit perfectly with its psychological thriller base.

To my eyes, Hallow Road is a prime example of how to make creative use of constraints, and how to make a movie out of very basic elements that’s anything but basic.

Three Films Make A Post: The past has a mind of its own

Documenting the Witch Path (2017): I have a higher tolerance for POV horror bullshit than most people, but I’ve seldom encountered a 65 minute movie that felt quite as long as this Swedish one. There’s amateur filmmaking – which is perfectly okay in my book – and then there is a film that exclusively consists of circular dialogue sequences during which characters tell each other about the phone call they and we just fucking heard, dudes reading lore at the camera, and awkwardly edited nothing. Camera angles are apparently chosen at random, and nothing is happening, at all.

Heck, there’s not even a single actually effective shot once the characters finally kinda-sorta begin following the titular Witch Path.

Kshudhita Pashan aka The Hungry Stones (1960): The first half of this poetically shot Bangla language movie by Tapan Sinha based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore is a kind of ghost story you can encounter in many countries, at least in its larger outline. A young tax inspector is sent to a country town to set various things in order. He is quartered in a large, empty palace the locals won’t stay in at night, and has various encounters with a female ghost. At first, these encounters are dream-like and frightening – shot in beautifully realized shadows, but soon enough, a doomed romance starts between the living and the dead. Before we come to the doomed part, the film turns out to be a tale of reincarnation, and so the backstory between these two lovers is revealed in an extended flashback. Which I found somewhat weaker than the film’s first half, though still shot and staged with great care and a sense of true visual poetry. As a tale of doomed supernatural love and mild spookiness, this a lovely thing, made even more so by its wonderful locations.

Mother aka Maza (2014): This only directorial work by great (and in Japan beloved in his public persona) horror and humour mangaka Kazuo Umezu aka Umezz is a somewhat uneven film in acting and direction but there’s quite a bit to be said for any movie that turns parts of the manga career of its director into a horror tale including dark family secrets and the evil ghost of his own mother. It’s certainly not your typical biopic.

As a director, Umezu isn’t as great as when he’s working in manga. The film’s timing is often a little off in a way that suggests difficulties to adapt to the needs of a different form of storytelling, and while there are some fine, creepy sequences, some of the horror here is surprisingly bland.

But hey, there aren’t too many movies in which an actor portraying the actual filmmaker gets into physical altercations with the ghosts of their mothers, so I can’t say this isn’t interesting.

The Breakthrough (1975)

His superiors in the scientific government bureaucracy send young scientist Saunders (Simon Ward) to a somewhat isolated research facility to check out what lead scientist Maclean (Brewster Nichols)is actually doing with the project’s time and the government’s money. Instead of closing anyone’s purse strings, Saunders quickly finds himself drawn into the project. That’s little wonder, for the researchers appear to be surprisingly close to an answer to the question what truly happens to their consciousness at the moment of a person’s death. Sure, they are using a mentally ill child as a kind of medium and a dying man as their core research subject, but that’s just science, right?

This seventy minute TV movie was part of the BBC’s “Playhouse” strand of teleplays, based on a tale by Daphne Du Maurier. Despite her huge commercial footprint at the time, Du Maurier today looks like a bizarrely underrated writer of often very interesting and thought-rich supernatural tales and weird fiction, as well as her core modernized gothic interests.

It was adapted by Clive Exton (who’d end up as one of the credited scriptwriters for the Brigitte Nielsen Red Sonja movie, of all things, and did write the incredible, for a long time underrated, original Ghost Story for Christmas “Stigma”, in between, among other things) and directed by Graham Evans. There’s a lovely mix of the “serious, scientific” approach to the supernatural so beloved of the 70s (see Nigel Kneale, Legend of Hell House, parapsychological research in the real world, and many other examples), as well as suggestions of the truly unmeasurable in the film’s ideas, and some wonderfully atmospheric landscape shots, as typical of this strand of British TV.

The movie does suffer somewhat from – also typical of British TV of the time – fact that only its exteriors are shot on film, and there’s only a very limited degree of mood to be squeezed out of shot on tape interior sequences. So there’s a lot of talk – most of it interesting –, a bit of mood and only a limited amount of the kind of actual action (in the sense of “things happening”) that would cost money. And much of what happens can be a bit overshadowed by the – also very typical of this time and filmmaking place – tendency of actors to perform emotion exclusively via DRAMATIC SHOUTING. But then, mid-70s TV sound and picture probably needed that approach to reach an audience watching on TVs very different from what we use today.

In any case, there’s quite a bit to recommend The Breakthrough: the already mentioned moody, calm exterior shots, the mixture of science and the supernatural, as well as the film’s willingness to present ideas and ambiguities and – despite the shouting – let the audience sort out what to think about the whole thing for themselves.

Seasonal break, as always

 Things are getting kinda squamous around here, so my incessant nattering about movies will have to cease for a bit.

 Normal service - for good and for ill - will resume on January 4th. If me make it that far, of course.

I wish everyone reading this who isn't a bot - those can fuck right off - some peaceful and quiet days between the years, and if you're keeping to any holiday traditions, happy ones. 

The Black Phone 2 (2025)

Warning: I’ll not spoil the second act, but certainly parts of the ending here

Years after surviving his kidnapping by the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in the first movie, Finn (Mason Thames), now a late teenager, struggles with his clearly untreated trauma, with pot and violence his main methods of control. Recently, his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has been having terrible nightmares featuring the ghosts of dead children at a snowy summer (winter?) camp and other curious details. These nightmares are now beginning to turn into feats of rather impressive sleepwalking, one of which leads Gwen to the Grabber’s old house and the black phone with the direct line to the dead in its cellar. There, she has a phone conversation with her and Finn’s dead mother. Some research and a bit of luck suggest to Gwen where the camp from her dreams is situated and because she’s convinced this is not a thing she can just ignore and hope it’ll go away, she, an unwilling Finn, and her prospective boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) make their way to snowy Montana (I believe), as camp counsellors in training. There, Finn, too, will have phone conversations with the dead again, and all will be haunted by the shadow of the Grabber.

On paper, The Black Phone 2, like the first one directed by Scott Derrickson and scripted by Derrickson and his eternal writing partner (lieutenant of Megaforce) C. Robert Cargill, is yet another exercise in 80s horror nostalgia, remixing elements of the original movie with A Nightmare on Elm Street. Particularly the establishing scenes hit that kind of nostalgia pretty hard, not just with pointedly cheesy bits of dialogue but also aesthetically. However, while the 80s never go away, they turn out only to be one of the movie’s touch stones, and are really an easy way to establish an aesthetic reality things then begin to deviate more and more from.

Once the dreams start in earnest, and even more so once the characters end up in the snow and ice, the film begins to let other eras, film stocks (well, probably digital filters to emulate other filmstocks, but it’s so well done, this really doesn’t matter), and ideas take over. The film then proceeds to create a mood of liminality, of drifting between dream and reality, of borders crossed and uncrossed without the characters realizing in so brilliant a manner, I found myself perfectly okay with its at its core very straightforward narrative and characterisation. But then, straightforward doesn’t mean bad – particularly the characters are likeable and clearly drawn, and some of the differences in how Gwen and Finn relate to their respective traumata feel as if they’ll become rather less straightforward on second or third watch. It’s also nice to watch a really well-made contemporary horror film that allows its characters to triumph about the monster (and work at their trauma) for once. I’m all for 70s horror downer endings, but have grown somewhat annoyed by serious contemporary horror’s insistence that fights are always hopeless, grief insurmountable, and so on and so forth. This is a movie that is convinced sometimes, you can ram evil’s face repeatedly against a frozen surface. A message I approve of.

But really, it’s the mood and the film’s consistently thought-through aesthetics that particularly excite me: Black Phone 2 is a mood held for the length of a whole movie.

Three Films Make A Post: When it rains it pours…BLOOD!

The Corruption of Chris Miller aka La corrupción de Chris Miller (1973): This Spanish giallo directed by Juan Antonio Bardem is about as close to Sergio Martino in his most erotic/sleazy mode as you can imagine, carrying the same sense of actual decadence. Bardem isn’t quite the stylist his Italian peer is, but then, late Franco era Spain isn’t exactly an easy place to do eroticised, violent glamour and glamourous violence in, and given the context, this is beautifully done.

Plus, Jean Seberg and Marisol are fantastic as the film’s core psychosexually messed up duo taking in a drifter who may very well be a serial killer but is most definitely a 70s kind of guy in all other ways.

Carnival of Sinners aka La main du diable (1943): Vichy era France wasn’t a great place to make films in that weren’t running with the Nazi party line – though quite a few French filmmakers managed – so there was a tendency to retreat into more fantastical material, as this tale of a talentless painter who buys a talisman in form of a hand – sometimes moving – that turns him very talented indeed. Of course, this also means he’s made a pact with the devil – here a small bureaucrat without a bit of Milton in him – and thus his talent doesn’t actually buy him the happiness he craves.

All of which isn’t exactly easy escapist material, and one can’t help but read rather obvious political points into Maurice Tourneur’s film. The film has its lengths – particularly in its middle part – but there’s the poetic power of dark legend in its scenes more often than not, typically intercut with surrealist imagery and a bit of humour.

Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl aka Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken (2009): Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu, this belongs to that school of often pleasantly insane, cheap, gore comedies a small group of Japanese directors tuned out in the early 2000s. These aren’t movies making promises they can’t keep, so the title is definitely program, the humour is broad, and blood – curiously digital and practical – is as copious as a sense of crazy, often very funny and grotesque body-shifting fun (personal favourite: Frankenstein Girl using her legs as a propeller to fly).

This does take some time to get going and tests the audience’s patience early on with what amount to not terribly funny comedy skits about high school subcultures, but the film’s second half is a series of increasingly bizarre and inspired bloody nonsense that’s bound to put a smile on the face of anyone watching a movie with this title on purpose.

If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952)

Original title: Si muero antes de despertar

School kid Lucio (Néstor Zavarce) is a bit of a trouble maker – at least that’s what his parents and his teachers tell him so often, it can’t help but become true. In truth and to modern eyes, the boy seems perfectly fine and does his darndest to live up to the pressures of a restrictive society – Argentina in the early 50s clearly wasn’t fun and games for a child – and a father (Floren Delbene) who can’t divorce the pressures of his job from his home life. Not that Lucio realizes much of this, of course, unlike the film’s viewers.

When a girl from his class Lucio is sometimes friendly with is murdered, Lucio is the only one who knows about her connection to a stranger giving gifts to little girls in exchange for a vow of secrecy. Then, gift giving and later a disappearance happen to an actual friend of Lucio, who by now has realized there’s a connection between the mysterious giver of gifts and young girls getting murdered. Alas, Lucio has sworn to his friend not to tell anyone about her “friend”, and exactly those pressures that are supposed to make him a “good boy” are now keeping his mouth shut. Not that anyone believes him when he eventually can’t help himself and does talk. Since the grown-up world is of little use, Lucio will have to save his friend all by himself.

This 70 minute Cornell Woolrich adaptation by Carlos Hugo Christensen – at this point still working in his native Argentina before fleeing from the Peron regime into exile in Brasil – was initially meant as the third tale in Christensen’s omnibus movie Never Open That Door but was retooled as a stand-alone movie to keep the other film to a saleable length. This doesn’t feel bloated up for a feature release however. Rather it is a concisely told tale with little fat on its bones – and everything that’s superfluous to the plot speaks very eloquently about growing up as being in a state of perpetual pressure from demands by a grown-up world that never seems to be there when it is actually needed, and so strengthens the film’s theme as well as its plot engine.

This is an entry into the small sub-sub genre of childhood noirs, a group of films – with Night of the Hunter as the most obvious example (unless you don’t count that film as a noir, but we can’t help that, can’t we?) – that typically mix the crueller realities of childhood with the air of dark fairy tales, something that’s bound to resonate well with the dark shadows and intensity of everyone’s favourite non-genre. Christensen commands the space between the visually darkly poetic and the heightened realism of the film’s ideas about childhood alienation (or the child’s world as something separated from the reality of the grown-ups supposedly taking care of them) very well indeed, creating the melodramatic intensity so typically of Woolrich until things culminate in a pretty incredible wilderness (of the fully artificial and therefore particularly wonderful kind) climax, including prayers, traumatized children and a father trying to purge his own failings by violence.

It’s all very impressive, and in mood and style stands shoulder to shoulder with the US noir cycle.

Primitive War (2025)

Warning: there will be some spoilers, but since this is all pure pulp nonsense nobody should be too afraid to read on

During the Vietnam War. Colonel Jericho (Jeremy Piven in a performance so bad you have to admire the rest of the cast can keep a straight face around him) sends Baker (Ryan Kwanten) and his “Vulture Squad” of soldiers of dubious renown but high efficiency on a somewhat vaguely defined rescue mission into a particularly deadly valley. The Green Berets our protagonists are supposed to rescue there were meant to do something about a research base hidden deep in the valley, but that’s all need to you and apparently our soldiers don’t.

Turns out the valley is full of dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes that, ahem, “fell through a wormhole in the past”. Said wormhole was created by evil experiments devised by evil Soviet general Borodin (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) – yes, like the composer but then, there’s also a Soviet character named Tolstoy which I believe is what goes for wit in this one – who attempts to do something – presumably evil and most certainly world-threatening – with particle accelerators.

Eventually, after many an adventure with dinosaurs, heroic sacrifice, and teaming up with an Eastern German scientist and dinosaur exposition expert (Tricia Helfer, whose bad German accent attempts actually sound like very bad Russian accent attempts), our heroes will have to take the fight to Borodin’s base.

It is very difficult to argue against a film that fulfils that old childhood dream of every good nerd to see soldiers fight against dinosaurs – as long as one doesn’t expect Luke Sparke’s movie (apparently based on a novel by one Ethan Pettus, but I’ll just take the film’s word for it) to be actually a properly good movie. Fortunately, this one does fall deeply under the “it’s not a good movies, it’s a great movie” umbrella where its myriad of flaws also happen to be insanely entertaining.

Firstly and foremost, this is such a deeply stupid movie it’s actually impressive – starting with the whole dinosaurs dropped, sorry, fallen, through a wormhole (probably landing with a big whomp sound effect) by Soviet mad science during the Vietnam War business, the film’s utter inability to convince anyone this actually takes place in 1968 however much CCR plays on the soundtrack (kudos to whoever managed to get the rights for the songs), and dialogue of such deep, clichéd stupidity it becomes nearly transcendent. Personal favourites here are the scene where Baker radios in his squad’s dinosaur problems to his superiors, and one of the dumbest “big rousing” speeches I’ve ever experienced, which is certainly not helped by Sparke’s decision to loosen the tension with a fart joke. No, really.

The special effects are all over the place – turns out cheap CGI dinosaurs with feathers are even more difficult to realize than dinosaurs without them – but make up for their wavering quality by the quantity and diversity of included dinosaurs. Plus, while it isn’t always good effects work, it is still done with visible love and enthusiasm.

While deeply, unironically stupid, this love and a sense of earnestness are really why this is so fun. Someone here must actually have put thought into details like the noise T-Rex jaws barely missing a victim must make – though the resulting noise is pretty damn silly. Which makes it somewhat bizarre that nobody put the same amount of thought into plot, dialogue, pacing or narrative structure, but hey! Soldiers versus dinosaurs and every damn war movie cliché plus every damn dinosaur movie cliché in a single movie! And even some romance – between two T-Rexes, in fact.

So thanks, Australia, this was deeply stupid, but also incredible.

Three Films Make A Post: Ghoulish Delights

Halloweenville (2011): Gary P. Cohen, of Video Violence fame, and one Paul Kaye, document the intense Halloween shenanigans in Lambertville, New Jersey, which turns into a giant, tacky and lovely piece of Halloween kitsch for a week a year. Embedded in cheesy commentary and the cheapest default editing tricks the directors’ editing suite can provide, are interviews with various local Halloween enthusiasts and many a verité (or awkwardly framed, if you prefer) scene of the place’s insane Halloween festivities. It’s enough to make any ghoul cry tears of joy.

While this is certainly not done artfully, there’s so much genuine enthusiasm here, presented fully in the cheesy version of the spirit of the season, it’s impossible not to love this.

The Raven (1963): This adaptation of Poe’s poem as a comedy has never been a particular favourite of mine among the films of Corman’s Poe cycle. On this recent rewatch, I actually fell in love with the film. Price, Lorre and Karloff mugging it up in this tale of duelling wizards, Hazel Court doing a femme fatale bit, and young Jack Nicholson looking confused in front of Daniel Haller’s gorgeous gothic sets, filmed by Corman with the élan they deserve – what’s not to love?

Particularly when I’ve actually grown old enough to find the general silliness rather diverting, find myself actually laughing at jokes I’ve shrugged at a decade ago, and enjoy how much Corman and company make fun of a style they themselves put a lot of effort into creating.

Plus, the climactic sorcerous duel is one of the prime moments of pure, silly, imagination in cinema.

The House of Usher (1989): Speaking of Poe adaptations that don’t exactly keep to the text, Alan Birkinshaw’s bit of late 80s cheese is pretty fun if you accept it as what it is and what it isn’t – there’s certainly joy to be had in Donald Pleasence running around with a drill hand pretending not to be mad, Oliver Reed being dastardly while chewing scenery, some tasteful mutilation and decapitation, a rat eating a guy’s penis, and come curiously fine set design that goes for some sort of modernist gothic. All of this doesn’t make terribly much sense, but certainly looks pretty great.

Landlocked (2021)

Following the death of his father (Jeffrey Owens), Paul (Paul Owens) returns to the old family home. His father had sent him a video message recorded on actual videotape in which he explained that Paul and his brother Mason (Mason Owens) had exactly a year after his death to take from there what they wanted or needed – afterwards, the building would be pulled down, as already arranged by him.

In the house, Paul finds a strange video camera that apparently has the ability to show and record videos of the past when you look through its viewfinder. Between bouts of grieving, reconnecting with Mason, and soaking up the house’s negative atmosphere, Paul re-experiences parts of his own past with his father, as well as some of the moments he has been absent for. However, the longer he uses the device, the more other things seem to drift into the backgrounds and unexplored spaces of the past, things that seem if not actively inimical to Paul, at least unwise and horrifying to engage with.

This piece of American liminal art house horror (really the sort of thing the French made the fantastique label for) by Paul Owens (and family) about grief and an increasingly weirdened past was partially constructed from actual family videos of the Owens family. It is quite the experience: slow, somewhat meandering in its middle part even with a short running time of 75 minutes, it is also drenched in an atmosphere of genuine strangeness, like very abstract weird fiction turned movie. The film starts from a point of naturalistically exploring grief yet becomes increasingly strange and even horrifying without ever leaving the realm of believable human emotion. In his treatment of the material, and despite the slow pace, Owens shows a great amount of control while also being highly imaginative inside of the borders he has set himself.

At first an effective exploration of grief as absence, the turn towards supernatural horror suggests a slight influence of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, once the things Paul (the director/writer also being the lead actor here) sees and increasingly experiences become strange and threatening and not just heart-breaking, and might begin noticing him noticing them.

There’s an authentically haunting quality to the film, a sense of reality that makes the eventual turn towards the more traditionally supernatural – though not traditionally scary movie-like – particularly effective in a way M.R. James might have approved of, though never done quite this way, as well.

Pestilence Break

Normal service will hopefully resume around next Sunday.

Loop Track (2023)

Socially extremely awkward Ian (Tom Sainsbury) is going on a walk through the forests of New Zealand to get away from all those pesky people, and perhaps some concrete aspect of his life he believes he has screwed up particularly badly.

Instead of peace and quiet, he soon finds himself socially pressured into walking together with three randos he meets and that won’t leave a guy completely unable to actually tell them he wants to be alone go on his way alone. Increasingly, Ian believes there’s something bad going on in this beautiful forest. Someone or something seems to be following them, though his attempts at convincing the others of it only make them look increasingly askew at the guy who didn’t want to be involved with them from the start.

Tom Sainsbury’s Loop Track attempts to fuse the comedy of social anxiety and people being people, the expectedly pretty landscape of New Zealand (filmed low-key) with a bit of the monster movie tradition. While certainly a well-made film, it never comes quite together for me – there’s such a heavy emphasis on the social anxiety there’s actually very little room for the monster movie parts here, and – even as a sufferer of some of Ian’s symptoms – I never found myself quite connecting to him, and certainly not the other characters and their single defining character traits.

For a film that appears to be this interested in the characters’ psychology, I found everyone rather lacking in complexity, with every character’s first scene already defining everything about them.

The stalking is played too low-key, and despite a fantastic monster reveal, I’m really not sure why this needed the horror elements at all – it’s not as if it puts them into dialogue with Ian’s internal life.

Having said that, I didn’t exactly mind the film – I just don’t think it does anything much with its potential.

Three Conjuring Spin-offs Make A Post

The Nun (2018): I’ve never been much of a fan of the The Conjuring movies. Their combination of James Wan as usually wasting his considerable talents on bland scripts and these movies’ idolization of two genuinely horrible people simply rub me the wrong. Plus, I often have problems with straightforward Christian horror – I don’t even connect to The Exorcist beyond seeing its obvious technical achievements.

So colour me surprised I actually enjoyed two out of three of today’s Conjuring spin-offs. The Nun I’d even call a genuinely great horror movie. But then, there’s very little of the Warrens in here. Instead, director Corin Hardy basically turns out a loving Blumhouse mainstream horror homage to Italian horror – gothic and not – with a smidgen of Hammer gothic mixed in. This sort of thing is catnip to me, particularly when a movie fills the time between quoting Fulci and Bava and the ridiculous and very fun big budget (at least in comparison to its idols) special effects climax (re-)creating such a lovely mood of dread, decay, and the irrational as this one does.

Taissa Farmiga also makes a great horror heroine, filling the film’s more awkward moments – which is to say, everything to do with character bits – with life and personality.

The Nun II (2023): She’s also the only good thing about Michael Chaves’s sequel. Chaves is a curious case to be the guy to have taken over the series from Wan as a director, seeing as he has now repeatedly proven he can’t structure or centre a narrative to save his life, and can never sell his horror set pieces as anything but set pieces. Admittedly, he isn’t helped by a script that doesn’t understand how to tell the story of an investigation, not to speak of telling it engagingly.

Annabelle Comes Home (2019): This third Annabelle movie – and the only one worth mentioning – as directed by Gary Daubermann (who also co-wrote this and the first Nun) does contain rather too much of the Warrens, but at least, this is a film where the possessed doll becomes the ringleader of all the monsters trapped in the Warren’s badly secured creep dungeon (how badly? A fucking teenager gets in) to terrorize the Warrens’ daughter and assorted teens (worth mentioning are Madison Iseman and Katie Sarife). There’s a grumpy wedding dress, Black Shuck (apparently a hellhound), and much delightful running around and screaming through all of the tropes of seriously fun but mostly (monster) kid friendly horror. It’s probably not exactly art, but it is certainly a very good time.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Original title: Baron Prásil

Landing on the moon, an astronaut (Rudolf Jelínek) is greeted by the men who came there before him: the protagonists of Verne’s “De la Terre à la Lune”, Cyrano de Bergerac, and last but not least the great Baron Münchhausen (Milos Kopecký) - as he’s called here in Germany. It’s Baron Prásil in Czechia. Because they don’t need silly science stuff like space suits, the gentlemen assume our astronaut who very much does need one, to be a proper moon man.

Münchhausen decides to take the young man under his wing and show him the wonders and adventures of Earth, which indeed he does. Once there, Münchhausen also insists on getting in a love triangle between the men and Venetian princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová), though none of the young people is actually that into him.

All of this really doesn’t describe the beauty, wonder and utterly unbridled imagination of Karel Zeman’s version of the Münchhausen material – here mostly based on Bürger and particularly Doré’s illustrations to Bürger’s narrative. Technically, this is a mixture of live action and all kinds of animation you could even imagine in 1962, at once naïve, deeply aesthetically constructed, real and unreal thanks to the many ways Zeman mixes special effects techniques and real people. The film is ever shot like a moving paean to the human imagination and filled to the brim with a sense of wonder that should make every viewer a child again for at least an evening.

The characters are of course, not surprisingly given their placement in a series of beautiful and bizarre tall tales, archetypes without normal psychological depths, but from time to time, whenever he finds space between a dozen sight gags and coming up with sights no human being has beheld before on a movie screen, Zeman does hint rather heavily that archetypes are archetypes because they have quite a bit to say about the unchanging parts of the human psyche. Just because young lovers aren’t original or deep does not mean a pure and naïve idea of love isn’t real or important.

But really, if there ever was a movie that exists just to be experienced instead of interpreted or talked to death film school style, it is this one.

Super Happy Forever (2024)

Sano (Hiroki Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) visit a coastal resort motel in the last days of its existence. Sano is clearly beside himself, walking around in something of a fugue, looking for a red ballcap lost there five years ago. Soon enough, we learn he has good reason for his state of mind, for he has lost his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) just a couple of weeks ago. The hotel and the town are where they first met five years ago, and Sano appears to still half be looking for Nagi, or signs of her passing.

After forty or so minutes, the film turns back to the past of five years ago. Now, shown from Nagi’s perspective, we see how the couple first met and learn to understand some of the echoes of their encounter left five years later during Sano’s return.

Beginning slowly and not terribly interested in explaining itself at first, Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever turns out to be a film about loss, love, the physical presence of the past in the now, and the small, hidden connections between people and places. It is also a love story told through absences: at first, we can only perceive the shape of Nagi’s absence in the now, Sano’s moments of short memories and the things about their relationship his behaviour hints at. But then, the flashback, while filling in some of these holes also doesn’t fill in any of the actual relationship between Sano and Nagi (which apparently wasn’t all that happy) – we’re only ever witness to its beginning and its aftermath, and none of the joy or pain in between.

There’s nothing sentimental about the film’s approach to this, or of the patness of esoteric bullshit Miyata has fled into, but nor is there any cynicism here. Instead, this is a film of genuine sadness, genuine love and a genuine longing for human presence and connectedness – coming together into a form that feels quite special, in a way that’s self-contained and lacks showiness, and never indulges in the painful overintellectualization arthouse cinema can fall into.

Three Films Make A Post: Dare to play.

Night of the Reaper (2025): For that part of its running time when it is a period-set throwback slasher with a procedural element that reminds more of a giallo than a cop movie, Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper is an exemplary and quite entertaining low budget movie that looks and feels the part it wants to play very well indeed. For its final third, it does turn out to be a very 2020s kind of film, alas, and we end up in the realm of “clever” plot twists that not only strain belief in the context of what the audience has seen before (or not been allowed to see on a pretty obnoxious level) but also replace what should be an exciting climax with fifteen minutes of the movie explaining itself to us.

It’s a shame too, for before that, this is a really fun little movie.

Witchboard (2024): This remake (of a very free kind) of Witchboard by veteran director Chuck Russell isn’t so much a throwback to the more freewheeling world of 80s/90s horror but simply a film made by a director who lived the time and apparently has no interest in changing his way of filmmaking. This is messily plotted and loves to go off on wild tangents, but what it loses in tightness thereby, it wins in the joys of wild abandon. This is a movie that’s probably going to go there, or find something that’s even more there to go to. Add an openness to add some sleaze/sexiness (often completely absent from horror these days, because people apparently don’t fuck anymore) to the gratuitous – and often pretty awesome – violence, and you have quite the concoction of the best clichés, tropes and bad yet awesome ideas a viewer could hope for. Well, if you can ignore the digital blood splatter, which never works.

Blood Ritual aka 血裸祭 (1989): Speaking of wild abandon, this Hongkong horror/action/comedy/kitchen sink CATIII wonder directed by Lee Yuen-Ching wavers so wildly between non-supernatural cult horror, sleazy softcore sex, brutal action choreographed by Tsui Siu-Ming, broad romantic comedy and info dumps about “evil religions” at least this viewer got quite dizzy. Which probably is the right state of mind to appreciate a film that seems to be a perfect expression of the kind of maximalism for a minimal budget HK cinema at this point in time was particularly fantastic at.

Ghost-Cat of Arima Palace (1953)

Original title: 怪猫有馬御殿

Being a mere greengrocer’s daughter, young and beautiful Otaki has few friends in the inner chambers of the titular Arami Palace. Add to this classism their Lord’s main concubine’s fear of being replaced by a younger model, and Otaki’s life is a sheer nightmare.

The other women hound her to her death with measures of increasing cruelty (since they start with pressing her into giving away her pet cat, you can imagine how bad it gets). Before you can say “bakeneko”, Otaki’s little cat – returned for the occasion like a proper pal - drinks her dying blood. The resulting cat demon goes on a bit of a rampage of vengeance, as is tradition.

At least here in the West, this short – 49 minutes – piece of Daiei bakeneko horror directed by Ryohei Arai is more than a little obscure, as is much of the horror output of Japanese studios of this decade beyond some core texts, so I’m not really able to put the film into the context of other movies from the second row of the genre.

What I can say is that this is a lovely little thing. Otaki’s suffering is properly upsetting, the human villain’s are deeply hissable in their nasty, grabbing ways, and the film goes out of its way to dispose of the Otaki cat after she has gotten her full and proper vengeance (something not all ghost cat movies I’ve seen do).

Once the film starts in on the supernatural shenanigans, they are rather wonderful – there’s a great scene during which the ghost cat uses her powers to puppet her victims into supernatural acrobatics like a poltergeist on steroids, and there’s some impressive and creative business with flying heads of the sort that’s bound to make the right viewer – that’s me – gleefully happy.

There are other, perhaps slightly more high-brow, aspects here as well: apart from the Lord, the film is very female-centric, so much so, we get to see the female part of the inner chambers is guarded by armed women, and we do even see them fighting against our cat hero/villain with what look like naginata to me. Earlier, the film also puts emphasis on being taught to fight as part of the proper kind of education the lower class Otaki lacks. This isn’t something you see in many jidai-geki – at least not that I’ve seen.

I also found the emphasis on class hatred surprisingly clear and direct for a film of its time and place.

All of which adds up to lovely hidden gem of a film, the sort of thing I’d hope some boutique Blu-ray level can pick up, package with two or three other films of its style, and make me very happy indeed.

Three Films Make A Post: He's every parents' worst nightmare.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025): For once, this is an entry in the typically boring PublicDomainsploitation canon I’d actually watch a second time instead of rueing the moment I pressed play. It’s still a movie that turns a public domain children’s story into a mid 2020s slasher, but it does so with a degree of competence, with decent acting, an actual script and direction – responsible here is British low budget regular Scott Chambers – that does understand the rules of straightforward horror films.

Even the characterisation is not without interest this time around, and the film’s interpretation of Peter Pan as a delusional drug user feels less tacky in practice than it sounds. The whole thing is an actually well-made low budget slasher, daring to follow through on some of its ideas.

Hotspring Sharkattack aka Hot Spring Shark Attack (2024): I went into Morihito Inoues sharksploitation film expecting a lot of sleaze and a bit of gore. What I actually got was very little sleaze but an absurdist and ambitious sharksploitation epic that lovingly mocks everything from urban development to amnesiac protagonists. The film’s reason for being is to turn everything shark movie up to eleven, make Sharknado look like a sensible little tale, and throw all kinds of genre elements and clichés on-screen with wild abandon, yet also a curious sense of control. This film knows where it is going: the dream underworld of bad CGI and hand puppet shark bites Joseph Campbell wrote about in his little-read sequel “The Hero’s Journey II: Sharks, so many sharks”.

Cult aka Sekte (2019): But let’s end on a comparative downer note with another amnesiac protagonist finding herself tucked away in an isolated house full of weirdoes who will turn out to be a Satanic cult. Director William Chandra manages a couple of atmospheric scenes here – I was particularly impressed by the one in which protagonist Lia (Asmara Abigail) finds the cult’s corpse depository – but for much of the running time, the film’s in the business of presenting as deeply mysterious a mystery its own damn title already reveals. So yes and alas, this is the kind of movie that climaxes on an endless series of flashback-filled “reveals” that bring every bit of the momentum the film might have developed before to a screeching halt with an astonishing amount of stupid ideas.

Jack-O (1995)

It’s Halloween in one of those typical American small towns we all know from direct to video productions shot in Florida. After a graveyard disturbance, a gentleman with a large light up pumpkin for a head and wielding a scythe is wandering around very slowly indeed and killing everyone he gets his hands on. Apparently, his appearance is part of a curse a warlock (some archival footage of poor John Carradine) cast on the descendants of the Kelly family, whom he held responsible for being burnt at the stake. Mind you, until the final act, Mr Pumpkinhead shows no preference for killing Kellys.

Nonetheless, we do get to spend a lot of time with the family, experience their haunted garage spook show, follow discussions of the joys of Halloween, thrill to their babysitter troubles, and so, and so forth. Eventually, Mr Pumpkinhead does shamble along to threaten the family’s youngest.

If you’re looking for cosy, nostalgic horror for the sad post-Halloween time Steve Latshaw’s low budget masterpiece of tacky American Halloween mood has your back. It’s a film haunted by the ghosts of Halloweens past. Pumpkinheads, a Linnea Quigley shower scene, a tasteful decapitation, horror hosts (in this case an archival Cameron Mitchell), home-made horror houses and horror-loving families are there and accounted for, as are the ghost of John Carradine, a knock-off synth score, fog, bad acting of the lovely kind, and the shambling and dreamy rhythms of childhood memories of movies that’ll turn out not all that frightening once you’ve grown up.

It’s a vibe, as they apparently say, a movie that feels as if the script to a cheap kid’s horror Halloween film had been spiced up with a bit of nudity and blood – the actual stuff of a horror movie childhood dreams. How could I not love Jack-O?

R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead (2025)

Following the in today’s grief-struck horror mood obligatory death of the father of the family, Cassie (Kendra Anderson) and her sons, seventeen-year old Finn (Seth Isaac Johnson) and thirteen-year old Sam (Bean Reid) move to a small farming community in what I can’t help but call the sticks.

Sam is particularly unhappy, not just because he’s a kid in puberty who has lost his father and is moving town, but also because he feels more than just a little excluded from the closer, easier, relationship between Cassie and Finn. As kids do, he acts out. Unfortunately, he decides to steal the annual “Prized Pumpkin” (actually an ugly thing nobody would want to eat, or even look at) of the farmer the locals somehow see as responsible for the town’s agricultural luck turning to the better some years ago. Finn, who is a perfectly good brother, decides to help Sam avoid some nastiness with the farmer by bringing the pumpkin back for him the night of the deed.

Alas, Finn has a rather nasty supernatural encounter on the farm and doesn’t return home. Worse still, none of the grown-ups, not even Cassie, can remember Finn ever existed at all, and can’t even perceive any proof of his existence. As the Sheriff’s daughter Becka (Adeline Lo), who had already befriended Sam and warned him against having anything to do with the farm, explains, this sort of thing happens somewhat regularly in town – kids disappear, people who hit the age of eighteen or are above it forget them, crops grow. She’s willing to help Sam in his attempt to get his brother back, whatever has happened to him. Also involved will be the local hermit Rusty (Matty Finochio), a nasty protective scarecrow thing with very bad breath, and one of those grimoires of the facebook type.

Tubi Originals tend to be less than great movies, often lacking in verve and cleverness as much as in budget. Jem Garrard’s Pumpkinhead – based on the favourite kids and teen horror writer of a lot of North Americans of a certain age – is only a bit lacking in the last one, but never lets this lack of funds stop it from doing basically everything right for the kind of kids horror film old-ass people like me can enjoy as well.

The characters are simply but effectively drawn, the young actors are doing pretty well – Lo could certainly have an actual career in front of her – and the script finds the fine balance between goofy humour, proper horror, and knowing winks to tropes and genre conventions. “You don’t come to the forest hermit for a straight answer” is pretty great, to take the most obvious example for the last one.

The film isn’t afraid to be a bit grotesque when it needs to be – the final pumpkin head form is not something I’d have expected in a contemporary kids’ movie made for the US market, even if it is actually made in Canada like this one, and the scarecrow thing is genuinely creepy, as well as enthusiastically played.

Pumpkinhead is worthwhile in other regards as well. Character motivations and their emotional background make sense (at least for the kind of world this takes place in), and the film clearly knows what it is doing when it is talking about love and friendship by example instead of moral. It’s not terribly deep, but it’s genuine and believable in context. Because it does emotions this well, it also manages to sneak in an ending that actually becomes darker the more you look at it in context of what the characters fear and desire here, not the usual horror movie bullshit ending but a genuine price to be paid.

Visually, this is nothing fancy, but Garrard knows how to create mood and tension, and works around the budgetary constraints of the production really well. There’s nothing here that seems truncated, missing, or undeveloped, which leaves R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead as one of my surprise highlights of this Halloween season.

Santet (1988)

A rather isolated village somewhere in Indonesia. Local crime lord and all-around bad guy Bisman (I. Gusti Jagat Karana) poisons his wife because she’s been annoying him with being ill for too long. Because he’s just that kind of a guy, he then proceeds to blame a local cleric for the killing as a work of black magic, burns the man alive (in a stunt that makes one fear for the stuntman involved), and then start in on an attempt to rape the cleric’s wife Katemi (Suzzanna). Katemi does know where rapist shits hurt, and manages to escape unscathed, at least bodily.

Out in the wilderness, she meets actual black magic sorceress Nyi Angker (Joice Erna), a woman whose human head sits on the body of a crocodile for half of the month. Nyi Angker sees in Katemi her chosen disciple, and convinces the woman to learn and use black magic to take vengeance on Bisman and his allies.

While Katemi does things like eat fresh baby placentas and bathe in crocodile-filed waters to prove her willingness to become a black magician, Bisman starts off a black magic scare in the village with the goal to become the local mayor, with his and his allies’ talk of magic also a useful distraction for the murders he commits himself. Things become interesting indeed when Katemi starts closing in with actual black magic.

Santet isn’t my favourite cooperation between great Indonesian horror and exploitation director Sisworo Gautama Putra and Indonesian Queen of Horror Suzzanna. There’s just a bit too much incidental comedy – even devolving into a musical number at one point – in it for me to fully embrace the film, particularly in the middle act when the jokes sometimes threaten to bring the film to a complete standstill. To be fair, the humour is only annoying when Suzzanna doesn’t join in – whenever she does some black magical joking while looking about impishly, I’m perfectly happy with it, perhaps because it is always fun to see this very dramatic and dignified actress cut loose in a different way from time to time.

The romance – between Suzzanna and the old mayor’s very pious son – is a bit undercooked as well, but then, it seems mostly to be in here to provide the opportunity for a fully clothed dream sequence that’s all hands rubbing “erotically” on cloth and to point towards an easy happy end Suzzanna’s characters don’t get too often (so I won’t complain).

Whenever the film focusses on the actual business at hand, we get the expected Indonesian madness, with many a body part exploding and snakes and what looks like eels crawling and/or slithering out of various natural and unnatural bodily orifices, bodies swelling and popping, and some choice human-animal hybridisation that would give the mad scientist around the corner ideas. Sometimes, these scenes have a truly phantasmagorical quality; at other times, they’re just gloriously weird and strange.

As a bonus, we also get a neat magical duel, Indonesian style, to wrap things up, though, alas, dear Suzzanna isn’t involved in it as anything but a bystander.

But hey, we will always have the indelible picture of Nyi Angker’s human/crocodile form rising out of a pool to say hello.