Evil Dead Trap (1988)

Original title: Shiryo no wana

Struggling late night TV presenter Nami (Miyuki Ono), whose original selling point of producing her show with an all-female crew seems to be losing its lustre for her audience, receives an interesting tape from a member of said audience.

It looks rather a lot like an actual snuff tape of a woman being brutally murdered. Like any sensible person, Nami calls the police. No, wait, she decides to pack her crew – and one male add-on – into a car and follow some decidedly obvious clues to the location where the murder was committed. So obvious are the clues, one might even think there’s a trap waiting for her.

The location where the tape was shot turns out to be an abandoned military base pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Also, someone’s or something’s private murder labyrinth, so Nami and her crew soon find themselves fighting for their lives.

Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap is a pretty astonishing film, still. It is a project that marries varied influences in ways that seem to then have influenced just as varied future horror films. This never is the Evil Dead spin-off you’d expect – apart from some extra chaotic Evil Force point of view shots that will be explained in the end – but rather mixes the grimiest and most “real” feeling traditions of horror – think the idea of Texas Chainsaw Massacre married to the grain of Basket Case - with the most stylized ones. The camera work and lighting appear heavily influenced by Bava and Argento.

This leads to a film whose nightmare-scape qualities are born as much from the things cinema pretends are most real – those grainy shots and the killer’s love for video – as from those that look most consciously artificial and constructed. This, and some narrative elements I feel no need to spoil, makes Evil Dead Trap a predecessor to the Saw style of conscious ugliness, as well as POV horror but also seems to have left heavy traces in everything stylized that followed it.

At the same time, this never just succeeds as a film that marries traditions as some kind of transitional piece before things become more interesting in the future, but as a very energetic, often decidedly crazy, sometimes deeply unpleasant and always exciting example of how to turn influences into one’s own style, brilliantly.

Litan (1982)

Nora (Marie-José Nat) awakens from a nightmare that may very well be a vision of the future in which her boyfriend, two-fisted – and very appropriately named - geologist Jock (director/co-writer/auteur Jean-Pierre Mocky), appears to die – among other, less straightforward things. This sends her racing for Jock through the streets of the curious little town of Litan, where they are temporarily living so he can do some rather explosive geological work.

Today is a particularly strange day in the already strange little town, for it is the festival of Litan’s Day, when its occupants roam the – often fog-shrouded – streets in masks, a (masked) brass band plays wherever and whenever, and everyone acts extra weird. I’d call it the Lesser Festival of Masks.

Apart from the already rather strange festival, there’s something stranger still coming, and soon, peculiar behaviour will turn obsessive or violent, the dead seemingly taking possession of the bodies of most of the living in town.

Sometimes, Jean-Pierre Mocky’s piece of fantastic (in the French sense of the “Fantastique”, so heighten your brows with me) cinema Litan can become a little too self-consciously weird for being surrealist’s sake for my tastes, channelling the misguided arthouse energy that brought us things like Fellini’s beloved parades.

Fortunately, that’s only happening in a couple of scenes, and for much of its running time, this is a wonderful exercise in dream moods and dream logic, taking place in a location where reality just doesn’t seem frayed at the edges but already half dissolved at the beginning of the film. Which would explain Nora’s actually prophetic dream rather well, if you want to apply some kind of story logic to a film that thrives as much on that of dream and metaphor as this one does.

Mocky creates the peculiar world of the film in often striking images that turn a very real location – most of the film was shot in an actual small town in the Auvergne that must be strikingly beautiful in its way – into a disorienting labyrinth where metaphors and symbols crash into elements of pulpy genre cinema in a way I have only ever encountered in French cinema. There is certainly a kinship to Jean Rollin here, while parts of the film play out as an outsider’s pick of elements of horror cinema from Romero’s Crazies – whose knitting lady would have felt right at home in Litan – to folk horror like The Wickerman, and the mad science and masks of Eyes without a Face. It’s just all filtered through a very individual, singular eye, as it should be.

Because this is a French movie, it is also rather discursive, so Mocky is certainly never hiding his ambition of speaking about capital letter concepts in capital letters. Love and Death, are the director’s main interests here, specifically, as well as the rather more complicated than we typically assume borders between Life and Death. The results of this discourse are rather ambiguous, but then, that is rather the point of film like Litan (possibly of life).

The Phantom Killer (1981)

Original title: 粉骷髏

Siu Fong (Wai Pak) is a bit of a local hero in a Chinese town ever since he fought off the bandits once lording it over the place. Because he’s also as pretty as he is boring, every single one of the town’s single ladies is swooning after him. Siu, however, has only eyes for the equally boring Sin Sin (Lee Yuen-Wa).

While Siu Fong’s gallivanting around the country probably doing something heroic, boringly, a series of murders of young women strikes our town. Curiously enough, all the victims were particular fans of Siu Fong; even more curiously, once he is back in town, the victims seem to be killed shortly after having cornered him to flirt with him.

At first, the chief of the local guard, Captain Chiu (Eddy Ko Hung), suspects Siu Fong. But various plot developments soon dissuade him from that theory. Why, perhaps the killer might be a woman trying to get rid of her rivals for that perfect man’s attentions, perhaps even a crazed Sin Sin?

I do have a place in my heart for films that mix wuxia and tales of detection, even more so when they, as Stanley Fung Sui-Fan’s The Phantom Killer does, add pleasant flourishes of the macabre to proceedings. The titular killer dresses up like a skeletal monk to commit their crimes – and their true nature is even more beautifully improbable – and there’s a whole line of inquiry about a corpse deposited in a statue, a worker in clay who sleeps in a coffin, and other elements of that nature.

Unfortunately, the macabre elements, as well as the mystery plot, suffer from the same syndrome as the film’s protagonist – they sound a lot more interesting than they turn out to be in practice.

Siu Fong’s just too bland to be interesting, and while he’s certainly physically attractive, Wai Pak projects all the personality of a freshly whitened wall. This even continues on into his kung fu style, that’s also technically flawless yet also – in a bizarre turn of events for one of the Venoms (Brother Snake) – lacking in any personality.

The macabre elements aren’t quite as struck with mediocrity as the protagonist – you can only make a skeletal monk piloted by a SPOILER so uninteresting – but director Fung certainly doesn’t use them as well as they deserve. Again, there’s nothing actively bad about the direction – it just lacks personality to a nearly improbable degree.

All of this does not mean The Phantom Killer is unwatchable, it’s just wasting some great ideas on boring competence.

The Girl in a Swing (1988)

Alan Dresland (Rupert Frazer), a dealer in antique ceramics, leads a somewhat boring, placid life. Stuck up in a very British kind of way, he doesn’t really seem to have much of an actual life beyond working upper class “responsibilities”. That changes when he travels to Denmark on business, and finds himself in need of some clerical help fluent in Danish, English and German.

A business friend lends Alan one of his secretaries. Karin Foster (Meg Tilly, with an accent so painful, it actually adds to the inherent weirdness of the character she’s playing) is very beautiful, somewhat reticent, impulsive and exactly the kind of woman Alan is bound to fall in love with, what with her tendency to quote German Romantic poetry and swoon at classical music in a most spellbinding manner while looking like, well, Meg Tilly.

For reasons only known to herself, Karin genuinely reciprocates Alan’s feelings, and after a two week courtship, he proposes marriage, despite the fact that Karin is clearly keeping secrets, telling him nothing of her past. She insists on getting married in England, so she need not produce her friends nor family. She also does not want to get married in a church.

Still, the couple’s early married life is full of fine, if a bit weird, companionship and sex that reaches from good to transcendental, and Karin charms friends and family as much as she did Alan.

From time to time, the shadow of Karin’s undisclosed past rears its ugly head – there’s a recurring motif of drownings, as well as the metaphorical shade of a child.

That latter part will become increasingly intense until it turns into a proper haunting.

There’s a languid quality to Gordon Hessler’s darkly fantastic The Girl in a Swing that isn’t exactly conducive to a solidly paced narrative. But then, I don’t think a solidly paced narrative is something this adaptation of a novel by Richard Adams actually aims for. Rather, much of the film is about creating a specific, allusive as well as elusive, mood, influenced by the (early, despite the Heine quotations) German Romantics, the Greek myths, and a very Greek idea of tragedy. In fact, there’s a properly pagan heart hidden in rather a lot of scenes here that Hessler puts in dialogue with his film’s more Christian elements (again, very much in a way the German Romantics would have understood).

All of this does sound rather fantastic, and is certainly a mood and idea space fantasy/fantastic cinema doesn’t explore all too often, or at all. However, in practice, Hessler isn’t quite good enough of a director – or scriptwriter – to turn a concept into a movie in a consistently effective manner. The languid eroticism can feel pompous and overloaded with symbols in a way I find deeply bourgeois (or really, the German version of bourgeois, bürgerlich), aiming for a depth and complexity of feeling it doesn’t quite manage to reach. As beautiful as all the beautiful shots of Meg Tilly’s (beautiful) face are – and as much effort as she clearly puts into embodying a character that’s purposefully difficult to grasp – that isn’t quite enough to realize the greater ideas about sexuality and repression, guilt and forgiveness, and so on Hessler is aiming for.

Despite these failings, I can’t help but admire the film (and not only Tilly) for trying for this heightened tone, for the classical and Romantic allusions, even for the callousness with which it treats the reveal of the reasons for Karin’s feelings of guilt, for an attempt at resonance with cultural lines movies in 1988 just weren’t thinking along at all.

Titan A.E. (2000)

For reasons that are never really becoming all that clear or important to the movie, the alien Dredge destroy Earth. The surviving humans become the galaxy’s black people; there will be no actual black people in the movie.

During the flight from Earth, Cale’s (Matt Damon) father left him for some humanity-saving business that apparently didn’t work out too well. Now, fifteen years later, Cale is part of the galactic underclass, doing a crap scavenging job while talking big. He’s a bit of a prick, really, but it turns out a genetically encoded ring his father gave him contains a map leading to the Titan, a spaceship Cale Senior developed that could save the dredges of humanity, somehow, so he is a prick with something useful to offer.

Corso (Bill Pullman), a former associate of his father, drags Cale into the hunt for the Titan; also interested are the Dredge, who haven’t grown any fonder of humanity in the intervening years and want to destroy the Titan and kill Cale. So off into space Cale goes with Corso and his band of misfits. He’s going to fall in love, learn valuable lessons and grow into the hero his father would be proud of.

Because despite this thing having five people listed with story and screenwriting credits – among them genuinely talented ones like Ben Edlund and Joss Whedon – Titan A.E.’s script is about as well-developed as any one-writer first draft screenplay. It’s full of elements that stay completely unexplored, pointless digressions, and a gaping hole where Cale’s actual character development is supposed to be.

There’s certainly a lot going on in the film, but it lacks the energy a good one damn thing after another narrative needs.

The film has a lot of action set pieces, no question, and they are typically decently realized, but they never feel like anything but set pieces inserted into certain places in the plot because that’s where a set piece belongs.

On the animation side, this final direction credit for the great Don Bluth – co-directing with Gary Goldman – is an attempt at marrying digital and hand-drawn animation styles. As is typical of this era, in practice this means that two completely different art styles repeatedly bash into one another, like halves of two different movies colliding, badly. You can often see what the filmmakers were trying to do, but the execution is distractingly awkward. In general, while there are some fine designs on screen, the animation is choppy and a bit disjointed. lacking the flow it needed to make those action set pieces sing.

Daimajin (1966)

Nasty ronin turned respected retainer Samanosuke (Ryutaro Gomi) murders his liege lord Hanabusa (Ryuzo Shimada) to take control of his castle and lands. Thanks to the help of loyal samurai Kogenta (Jun Fujimaki), Hanabusa’s daughter Kozasa and son Tadafumi escape. The trio hide away in the mountains, close to a giant stone statue that is supposed to protect the lands surrounding it from “Majin”, an evil, buried thing the local peasant population fears and tries to keep away with rituals and spells.

Ten years go by. Samanosuke has established himself as a bit of a warlord power player and has enslaved the peasantry as a workforce to improve his castle in preparation for further conquest. Dissent is dealt with harshly even for the tastes of medieval Japan. Of course, Samanosuke has also abolished the folk rituals; and going by his character, probably also singing, dancing, and smiling.

When Tadafumi (Yoshihiko Aoyama), clearly having been taught good guy morals and swordplay by Kogenta, realizes how badly the people suffer under Samanosuke’s rule, he decides to do something about it, even though he has neither men nor allies apart from Kogenta and his non-combatant sister (Miwa Takada).

Samanosuke is still holding some of Lord Hanabusa’s surviving men prisoner – the guy clearly can’t resist an opportunity for prolonged torture – but an attempt to free them goes badly for our heroes.

Fortunately, Kozasa, pure and virginal, is exactly the kind of person whose prayers for help giant stone statues might listen to.

I’ve always liked Kimiyoshi’s Yasuda’s first Daimajin film, but I never realized what the film is actually doing until a recent re-watch. This isn’t really a kaiju movie that attempts to mix up genres with a morally very black and white jidaigeki/chanbara film, but rather a film that aims for a folkloric tone.

In that context, the extreme pure-heartedness of the protagonists and the even more extreme vileness of the antagonist make a lot more sense – these aren’t supposed to be characters but archetypes – as does the very idyllic idea of good and bad noble rule.

Stylistically, Yasuda does a lot to situate his tale in the proper, dark, folkloric place – the use of fog, artificial light and Dutch angles particularly in the mountains, where a hidden God of terrible wrath dwells, is striking (and yet I never really noticed it before, embarrassingly), lending proceedings in turns qualities of the fairy-tale and the Gothic – or properly, the world of the kaidan.

The film’s slow progression from suggestions of the fantastic surrounding the characters to the full-on rampage of Daimajin in the climax is realized perfectly – human evil growing so heavy, the supernatural world’s anger awakens.

These final scenes of carnage are pretty incredible – stylish, surprisingly brutal and realized with special effects that look as good as anything in a contemporary Toho movie. There’s a sense of actual dread surrounding Daimajin’s awakening, and a palpable sense of terror, awe, and inhuman anger oozing off it that’s incredible coming from a well-filmed guy in a suit and some clever editing.

The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)

Couple of five years Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) spend a night in a cosy, remote cabin next to a town full of mildly creepy movie hicks. The home invaders known from the earlier Strangers films start on a campaign of low effort terror – though its an earlier effort at the whole thing, because this is a prequel.

It isn’t usually a productive question to ask “why was this made” when it comes to pop and commercial cinema, because the answer is usually “to make someone money”, but sometimes, you stumble upon product so needlessly dire, you really can’t help yourself.

In the case of the first of three (an additional why for that one) prequels to the The Strangers films, a movie that in no way fulfils any of the functions a prequel is supposed to, I couldn’t help ask it, for there’s really not a single moment on screen that suggests anyone involved in the movie even wanted to make it. This begins with the casting – Petsch and Gutierrez sure are pretty but have not the tiniest bit of onscreen chemistry – continues through production design and locations – if I’ve ever seen a cozy horror movie cabin quite so bland before, I can’t remember it – certainly does not stop at the script – there’s not only the expected lack of ideas and cribbing of the tiredest old clichés in the horror book but also a complete lack of enthusiasm in their execution – and ends with direction by Renny Harlin that’s so lacking in character and personality calling it bland would be an exaggeration to suggest greater excitement than this thing could ever deliver.

And that’s really all the attention this particular movie deserves. Perhaps The Strangers: Chapters 2 & 3 will surprise me by having a point beyond being a movie that sort of exists?

Three Films Make A Post: Got a pencil? Take this down. Tomorrow you die.

Hit Man (2023): To my eyes, Richard Linklater’s perfectly decent comedy has been more than a little overhyped. It’s very Linklater in many ways, starting with the typical “I would like to be Eric Rohmer, alas I’m American” style of its dialogue scenes (do I need to mention that I loathe Rohmer’s dialogue style?), the same view on American culture he has had for the last decades, the slick but a bit empty style, and the grand gesture Linklater traditionally likes to present decent but not exactly terribly exciting ideas with.

This doesn’t mean this is a bad movie – like most everything Linklater ever did, this is an eminently watchable and entertaining piece of work, just not one that connects with me on any level beyond my appreciation for its rather unexciting craftsmanship.

Zu: (The) Warriors from the Magic Mountain aka 新蜀山劍俠 (1983): When it came out, Tsui Hark’s wuxia extravaganza was a core movie in the introduction of at the time state of the art special effects techniques to Hong Kong cinema that gifted us the joys of the wire fu style of wuxia (among other things). Not all of the film’s effects have aged gracefully, but the film throws so many at the audience that you’ll only have to blink and get to the next one; plus, many of the effects are of such insane and lovely conception, their actual quality isn’t too important to me.

Of course, the film’s absolutely unrelenting pace can be a bit of a difficulty if a viewer is in the wrong mood or prone to headaches, something that isn’t helped by its love for throwing barely comprehensible philosophical concepts at the viewer in the same tempo it does everything else.

It’s all a bit like having one’s head bashed in with a bag of the best candy one has ever eaten. In the right mood, that’s not a criticism coming from me.

P.I. Private Investigations (1987): For much of its running time, Nigel Dick’s film is the epitome of the competent-but-not-more thriller in the Hitchcockian style. Dick’s direction is slick, Los Angeles is Los Angeles, and Clayton Rohner’s whiny rich boy protagonist the kind of guy I’m pretty happy to see suffer a bit – it’s that kind of film, and he’s no Cary Grant.

From time to time, however, there’s a hiccup in the conventional slickness, and the film goes off in strange directions for half a scene or so – a chase is interrupted by our protagonist randomly stumbling into a heist, a dream sequence intrudes for no good reason – that keep it away from boring competence syndrome.

Maintenance Phase

I’m going into blog hibernation mode for a week. Expect normal service to return around July, 7th. If you can’t live without my opinions about movies – fat chance – you can always watch me give really high star ratings but write no reviews on Letterboxd.

The First Omen (2024)

Warning: there will be (some) spoilers for this as well as for Immaculate!

1971. Young Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), raised as an orphan by the Catholic church, is sent to Rome to take her vows as a nun in a convent-orphanage. After early moments of genuine female companionship with the other nuns and an invitation to the pre-vow wild life by the place’s other novitiate, the not terribly nun-like Luz (Maria Cabellero), Margaret’s time at the nunnery turns increasingly nightmarish.

There appears to be something very wrong with one of the orphans, Carlita (Nicole Sorace), and the older nuns’ treatment of the child seems rather extraordinarily strange and cruel, particularly when you compare it to their usual behaviour towards the children in their care. Margaret herself is increasingly plagued by visions connected to creepy demon fingers touching her, bad sexual experiences and pregnancy; nightmare and reality become increasingly difficult to keep apart.

When the rogue priest Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), contacts Margaret with a highly unlikely tale about what’s really going on at the orphanage, our protagonist isn’t quite ready to believe him yet, but she’s certainly beginning to look at the things that might be hidden in plain sight all around her.

Apart from movies about spiders, this is apparently a year for movies about young women having to fight the not so tender attentions of Catholic Church breeding programs (one would be tempted to defend the Church against horror scriptwriters, but given its history, it has to fend for itself there). Though only one of the latter movies has a scene where a woman smashes the little baby Jesus, second edition, with a rock. The movie at hand is not that movie.

But seriously, even though The First Omen does share quite a bit with its out of wedlock sister film Immaculate – namely the feminism, the Church breeding program and the palpable love for the weirder corners of 70s horror – it does have a feel of its own.

Mostly, that’s because director Arkasha Stevenson’s visual imagination quickly transcends the quotes from the original Omen, numerous stylish Italian horror films, and 70s horror in general, and instead starts using the visual elements taken from there to create a language of horror that feels personal to her as a filmmaker.

Stevenson has an indelible eye for the freaky shot, for short, metaphorically loaded tableaux, a command of mood that drags her protagonist – as well as at least this viewer - ever further in the direction of dread and the weird. The big horror sequences don’t just work as set pieces, but are always also metaphorically loaded for bear, creating the kind of film that does little of its metaphorical work through plot or character work and instead puts all emphasis on mood and style as carriers. Again, very much in the spirit of the era of horror filmmaking it builds much of its aesthetic grounding on.

I wouldn’t say the film’s subtextual interests are terribly original: a young woman trapped in a system that only sees her as a breeder for the men that are going to be really important; a sense of paranoia where nearly every paranoid thought our protagonist has is based on truth, and where even her own identity doesn’t truly belong to her; childbirth as a form of body horror. However, the way it puts these interests into movement, colour, and sound makes them feel like things you’ve never seen or heard about before quit this way. Which is quite the trick in a prequel to a franchise that on paper really didn’t need one.

The Five Venoms (1978)

aka The Five Deadly Venoms

aka 5 Deadly Venoms

The dying master (Dick Wei) of a kung fu clan known as the House of Venoms regrets the rather dark and dubious deeds he and many of his students have committed over the years. His final wish made to his last student, Yang De (Chiang Sheng), is for the young man to find his other surviving students, observe their virtue, and dispatch them if necessary. There are two problems here: even though his master has taught Yang De a smattering of all the techniques of the House – namely the styles of the Gecko, the Toad, the Centipede, the Snake and the Scorpion - the other students have all specialized, and he’ll not be able to stand against them in single combat. Making matters more difficult is the fact that most of the students have never actually met one another, so finding the people whose virtue Yang De is supposed to evaluate could turn out to be rather difficult. One suspects the master of the House of Venoms never had the time to learn of the power of the style of Drawing.

However, there’s another surviving member of the House of Venoms who has retired to a small town in the country. He has stolen and hidden away the clan’s treasure, and the master is convinced the other Venoms are bound to look for him and it. So Yang De really only needs to travel there and keep his eyes open, beat the villains he can’t beat without teaming up with a virtuous venom who may or may not exist, find the treasure himself, and give it to charity. Simple.

As it turns out, the Venoms are indeed all in town looking for the treasure – some committing increasingly horrible deeds of violence and betrayal while others do try to act noble.

Chang Cheh’s The Five Venoms is often overshadowed by the later films featuring its five leads. They were soon to be known as the “Five Venoms”, and consisted, besides Chiang, of Philip Kwok Chun-Fung, Sun Chien, Lu Feng, Lo Meng and Wai Pak. These five were great screen martial artists when working more in the background or alone, as they more often than not before this, but absolute magic when brought together. Later films do indeed provide even more opportunity to showcase their particular artistry.

However, one of the strengths of Five Venoms as a movie is that it is particularly willing to put its martial arts – though there’s still a lot of it, all of it great and often highly imaginative – aside for a bit to mirror Chang’s generally dark, pessimistic and woman-less – one can’t help but suspect a connection there - world view not only in rather dark ideas about the nature of many people but also a mood of the Chinese gothic. The use of torture and cruel, non-martial killing methods used by the evil Venoms does slot into Chang’s taste for a bit of on-screen cruelty, but combined with some choice shadows draped over some well-known Shaw sets and camera work that suggests more than a passing acquaintance with Italian Gothic horror (or similar ideas about how to suggest dread and decay visually), it does sometimes suggest that this particular version of ancient China is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Witchfinder General, if not locally, then spiritually.

Because two genres aren’t enough for Chang and the writer of more movies than many people have seen in their lives, Ni Kuang - who is of course on script duty here - this is also a bit of a classic murder mystery concerning at first an investigation by observation into the moral nature of the Venoms and then one about the identity of the elusive final Venom, Brother Scorpion, a cruel, sociopathic manipulator of the highest order, complete with red herrings.

It’s a combination I find irresistible, particularly when it is held together as well as it is here – philosophically, on a plot level, and aesthetically.

Three Films Make A Post: Give the devil his due.

Under Paris aka Sous la Seine (2024): Apparently, there was a a clearance sale for shark movie clichés in France, and Xavier Gens managed to catch them all. He also brought all of the screenwriters, for he shares various writing credits with six other people here. Given that the whole film plays out like a shark movie as written by ChatGPT (no surprise some film company suits believe replacing writers with AI is a near future prospect), that’s some kind of achievement at least.

As is how unoriginal and culturally unspecific a movie about sharks in goddamn Paris can feel if the filmmakers only not apply themselves properly to their craft. For much of its running time, this isn’t even stupid fun, for the film lacks the energy needed to pull that off, as it does apparently lack the intelligence to realize how silly it is.

This last problem actually turns into a virtue in the final twenty-five minutes or so, when a degree of entertainment manifests – most probably through the magical power of the script’s impressive amount of accrued bullshit becoming sentient.

The Mysterians aka Chikyu Boeigun (1957): It is curious to compare Ishiro Honda’s alien invasion movie with its temporal genre siblings from the USA. Both strands do share a – in Honda rather surprising – today uncomfortable trust in institutions and the military – the latter even more surprising in Honda – but where the Americans most often feel rather po-faced and stuffy, there’s a poppy playfulness surrounding the Japanese film I find irresistible.

This is often a question of design: not only the film’s colours – which do indeed pop – but the colourful and silly-awesome environment suits with capes the Mysterians wear, how the kaiju the aliens use looks a bit like Ro-Man’s cockroach brother, and so on. There’s very little here that doesn’t align itself with a certain idea of directness, brightness and fun.

The Hangman (2024): For at least half of its scenes, Bruce Wemple’s (written by Wemple and lead LeJon Woods) movie is an exemplary piece of low budget cinema, with a sense of mood and forward momentum, and a good idea of the kind of ambitions it can actually pull off, budget-wise. The other half of its scenes tend to meander through ideas, tone, and way too much exposition, and action movie one-liners that have little connection to the emotional core about fathers, sons and trauma, leaving a film that’s generally competent enough to be entertaining but could have used quite a bit of tightening to fulfil its eminently reachable deeper ambitions as well as one would have wished it to.

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Original title: Gojira -1.0

During the last stages of World War II, kamikaze pilot Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) decides not to throw away his life for nothing and lands at a small island base for repairs to his not actually damaged plane.

At night, a large lizard creature that looks much smaller than the Godzilla we know and love attacks the base, killing everyone but Shikishima and the mechanic Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki). Because he freezes up during a moment of danger that may or may not have been decisive, Shikishima adds another dollop of guilt to the bag his not having committed suicide by plane has already filled rather heavily. It certainly doesn’t help that Tachibana puts everything on Shikishima, leaving him with the family photos the other mechanics on the island were carrying with them as a goodbye gift.

After the war, returned to a destroyed Tokyo, with all of his family or friends dead, Shikishima drifts until he meets Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who has taken it upon herself to take care of an orphaned baby named Akiko. When Noriko with the baby simply follows him home, he just as simply lets them stay.

Eventually, Shikishima manages to get a dangerous but comparatively well-paid job on a wooden mine clearing ship that will pay for the found family’s survival. There, he also finds his first actual close human contact apart from Noriko and little Akiko, in form of the ship’s captain Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), former military engineer Noda (Hidetaki Yoshioka) and the very young – so young he wasn’t drafted into the war and gets starry-eyed about something everyone else on board ship wants to forget – Mizushima (Yuki Yamada). He’s not exactly close to anyone, mind you, for his sense of failure and guilt as well as good old PTSD do tend to make him keep everyone around him at an emotional remove. Yet there is a degree of loosening up happening for him.

So slowly, Shikishima appears on the way of healing, until Godzilla, now mutated and made even angrier and much larger by US nuclear tests, and basically indestructible by any conventional means, re-emerges and begins to attack Japan. This shortly after the war, the Japanese Defence Force lies in the future, and the US are at a stage in their dance with the Soviet Union where they’re afraid to provoke the latter by any military moves, so the Japanese people find themselves unprotected and underinformed. Eventually, Shikishima, his trauma raw again, will become part of a somewhat crazy civilian plan to destroy Godzilla; though he also has a plan of his own to make up for his “failure” as a kamikaze.

But, and that’s important, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is not at all a film that condones the kind of “heroic” sacrifice its protagonist is attempting, but rather one that argues that there’s something wrong with the glorification of young men throwing their lives away on the battlefield. Like in Honda’s initial Godzilla, the film at hand, while enjoying the spectacle of warships and arms, does argue against the idea of war as a glorious or even just politically sensible thing – here, war is a waste of humanity that leaves behind broken people populating a broken country, and actual heroism is people doing dangerous things out of their own free will not because their potential death will be glorious but because they have to be done.

Minus One explores these thoughts, as well as Shikishima’s specific trauma, with a surprising love for complexity and depth for a film that could get away with being a nostalgic monster mash or just a bit of silly fun without anyone complaining. Instead, this focusses on ideas and on its characters to a degree that is often dangerous in a kaiju movie – we are, after all, here to watch everyone’s favourite lizard smash Tokyo, and not for watching traumatized men (this is a film predominantly about men, which is the movie’s only weakness) in a traumatized country. However, the writing is so strong, the film’s conviction in its portrayal of people, places and time so great, and Yamazaki so effective at staging emotional moments that mostly don’t feel manipulative but just somewhat larger than life to make life clearer, there’s none of the dreaded “waiting for the monster” here.

Godzilla really isn’t the main point of the film, but a catalyst that drags the inner lives of the characters and their country to the surface, exploring what’s wrong and what’s worth saving, and why.

This doesn’t mean that the kaiju scenes aren’t effective. In fact, Godzilla’s rampage through Ginza is one of the most impactful scenes of its kind I’ve seen – and I’ve seen most of them – emphasising the horror and the trauma of the event, the human cost, and the awesome (in the old meaning of the word) impact of Godzilla on Japan not as an abstraction called a country but as a conglomerate of individual people.

Apart from its insistence on actually being about something and its ability to pull this off, there are many little things to admire here: for example the way the soundtrack keeps away from the classic Ifukube themes for nearly the first half of its running time and then uses it score that horrifying Ginza scenes, recontexualizing them as much as those scenes of chirpy pop playing to something particularly unpleasant in a horror movie do; or Yamazaki’s incredible ability to pace narrative and emotional arc of the film while also creating scenes of real suspense and interest.

Despite its two hour running time, its long-ish time scale, and its general vibe of being a slick, big production with all that comes with that sort of thing, this is also a wonderfully lean film. There’s no bloat here, no scene that doesn’t help carry the film’s weight – there’s nothing here that is not in service of Godzilla Minus One’s specific goals as a narrative. It is a rather astonishing film.

The Fall Guy (2024)

Having broken his back during an accident, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), stuntman to the insufferable star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), does recover bodily, but finds himself in lowest of spirits. During his recovery he has driven away his girlfriend, budding director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), and has decided to park cars for a living instead of jumping canyons in them.

However, Ryder’s manager and producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) lures Colt back to stunt work by the simple expediency of telling him Jody asked for him to work on her directorial debut Metal Storm, a SF epic about the power of love, violence and cheesy speeches, that does, alas, seem to lack Jared Syn. What the film also lacks is Tom Ryder, for he has gone missing – possible on a drug bender – which wouldn’t be atypical for the guy. Gail wants Colt to find him before anyone else notices he is gone (most people on set don’t). All the while, Jody is rather nonplussed to find her ex-boyfriend suddenly working on her movie – she certainly didn’t ask for that.

Soon, Colt will need all of his considerable stunt person superpowers to survive his surprisingly dangerous search for Ryder; in between being drugged, getting run over by cars, and so on, there’s also a bit of a possibility to restart the relationship with Jody he so efficiently sabotaged after his accident on a more equal footing.

Saying I went into David Leitch’s The Fall Guy with low expectations would be selling them rather high, even though I loved Leitch’s Bullet Train. The combination of modern high budget action comedy, a needless revival of a mildly beloved old IP (shudder), and Ryan Gosling (whose general unwillingness to express emotions via facial expression or body language simply isn’t my idea of acting except in very specific circumstances) did not promise a good time.

But here’s the thing: Gosling emotes! Well, that’s one of several things, as a matter of fact. Instead of the completely empty pap I expected, this is a lovely cross between two genres that only very seldom meet – the romantic comedy and the action comedy, and one where both genres are equally important to the film.

That Leitch does absurd action very well is no surprise; his expert sense of romantic timing very much is. But then, Drew Pearce’s script goes out of its way not to reproduce the way relationships are usually treated in action movies, nor does he fall into the trap of many a male-centric romcom where the protagonist’s girlfriend-keeping character change feels self-serving and dishonest. Colt Seavers isn’t just working out his bullshit, he’s also genuine about his feelings and going through that whole parallel action comedy plot at the same time; Blunt’s Jody is never just a prize but has some actual agency, as well as dreams and hopes that belong to her. Blunt’s also as fun in the Romcom stuff as she is in the more action oriented bits of the film. In fact, the way romcom and action comedy collide and change one another’s clichés is one of the most surprising elements here – much of the film can be read as meta commentary on the differences and parallels of genres that are typically female and male-coded, and suggests some things they might learn from each other.

The absurd action for its part is as expected: fun, fast, often very clever with the stupid jokes and very much centred on actual stunt work instead of CG, as is only right and proper when it comes to a film about a stuntman. The film’s also genuinely well plotted, with a central mystery that works and an eventual solution to our heroes’ problems that very consciously uses movie magic to come to a proper movie solution.

Because that’s what The Fall Guy is as well: a paean to genre films, the absurd things we are willing to love, the clichés we embrace and those we embrace while laughing about them, the things we want to believe in movies, the special moment when something preposterous and artificial touches one’s heart just as if it were the real thing, only better.

Three Films Make A Post: Your fate is in the cards.

Tarot (2024): Don’t screw around with tarot readings, kids, lest you be dragged into a terrible Final Destination rip-off (as if some of those sequels hadn’t been bad enough) where tarot/astrology crossover prophecies are turned into painfully literal murder set pieces.

The characters are as dull and generic as the actors are pretty, the direction by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg has never met a horror cliché it doesn’t want to regurgitate in the least creative way, and our old buddies mood, tension and suspense have taken the week off.

The tarot monster designs aren’t half bad, admittedly.

Baghead (2023): While it is far from being perfect, Alberto Corredor’s film is quite a bit more effective and interesting than Tarot. It is also a lot more ambitious, trying to handle the old horror one-two of grief and guilt by way of weird occult folklore (including a neat little fake occultist backstory). In a couple of scenes – mostly the early meetings with its very peculiar monster – there’s a genuine, delightful strangeness to the supernatural threat that only suffers from some thematic parallels to the brilliant Talk to Me the film at hand simply can’t beat at its own game.

Later, things become somewhat more generic – with not exactly unexpected hallucinations and fake-outs – but even in its less interesting moments, this is always at least a decent, character-driven horror film with a very neat monster, as well as a very respectable central performance by Freya Allan.

Infested aka Vermines (2023): There are certain parallels to Attack the Block in Sébastien Vanicek’s French apartment building horror film, mostly in its focus on young, working class, brown people surviving by sliding around the borders of legality, but how it focusses is as driven by its time and and country as that of Joe Cornish’s was – so the comparison is more caused by the fact that there are still very few horror films focussing on characters of comparable circumstance in the way these movies.

In any case, Vanicek’s film isn’t a dry exploration of poverty and the quieter tensions of racism but rather one where that exploration is made by way of a fantastic animal attack movie full of brilliant set pieces, bits of body horror and some of the most effective suspense scenes I’ve seen in quite some time. Because the film spends time and care on its characters, there’s a larger weight to the horrible things that happen to some (well, most) of them, which in turn makes the suspense as well as the film’s subtext about people having to cope in a society that doesn’t give a crap about them more potent.

Suffer Little Children (1983)

Based on a true story, apparently! That sounds completely plausible.

To wit:A mute little girl with a “please take care of me” note in her hand appears on the doorstep of a small orphanage in what I assume to be a city in the UK. She seems quiet and pleasant enough, but in truth, she’s possessed by SATAN (caps contractually obligated). After turning two other girls into her servants in a zombie picnic dream, she bides her time with minor bouts of terror and violence.

Mostly, we watch people do very little of interest, while most of the dialogue is completely drowned out by a repetitive score that does pop up some metal riffs whenever the action becomes properly SATANic.

Until, eventually, finally, the boredom culminates in a twenty minute freak-out of kids in an attic bowing before our satanic child queen making jazz hands, scenes of kids with knives (apparently a decades-old British nightmare, though they do miss hoodies) piling onto grown-ups and each other until blood spurts, bizarre yet excellently cheap editing effects and an appearance of the Lord Jesus himself (note to SATAN: don’t crucify pop stars), who points his (holy, one supposes) finger at possessed kids while cheap laser pew-pew noises play. It’s pretty fantastic.

Apparently, the smaller British arm of SOV horror, here exemplified in the efforts of Alan Briggs, Meg Shanks and their kid and teen acting school pupils, felt a need to demonstrate to their American colleagues in horror how to properly do that very shot on video horror thing of two interminable acts of nothing followed by one incredibly bonkers and entertaining climax. Consequently, apart from the zombie picnic and an unfortunate death or two, Suffer’s first two acts are a pain to get through, with dull people shot dully in dull locations talking for hours through dialogue you mostly can’t even hear (what you do manage to hear suggests you’re better off that way anyhow). It’s truly excruciating, even though the viewer does get to gawk at some top early 80s UK fashion.

Of course, all that dullness does turn the eventual freak-out of cheap, hilarious violence and utter mind-blowing strangeness not just highly entertaining but also somewhat shocking. Not because some of these kids are rather painfully good screamers – they are - but because at this point in proceedings, nobody could have expected these particular filmmakers to get their acts together enough to create scenes this loud, peculiar, bloody and fun.

Which only goes to show that all those Hollywood movie who taught us to never give up hope did know what they were talking about. I’ll never doubt again (lest Jesus shoot me with his finger guns).

In short: Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

Original title: Gojira no gyakushû

While scouting for tuna for their employers, two airplane pilots stumble upon a second Godzilla, fighting another giant monster, a supposed ankylosaurus SCIENCE dubs Anguirus. When the kaiju aren’t fighting, they are threatening Osaka. Fortunately, the JDF and the tuna scouts are there to save the day, eventually. Turns out Godzilla doesn’t take well to being buried under an avalanche.

Ah, if Doctor Serizawa had only known.

This second Godzilla movie, a clear quick shot trying to cash in on the success of the first one, is often said to prefigure much of the rest of the Showa era cycle of Toho’s Godzilla films.

I can’t really say I agree with that particular assessment, for while this does completely ignore the metaphorical level of the first movie and introduces the kaiju against kaiju fight, there’s nothing of the feel of the best – or even the mediocre - of the later productions in Toho’s first cycle. No joy, certainly, no quick cleverness, no silly and fun ideas, no bits and pieces of subtext peeking out at those looking for them.

Instead, this feels like a film made by people who really didn’t care for the material they were working on – Motoyoshi Oda’s direction is professional but also utterly lifeless, and he has learned nothing from Honda’s staging of the original movie. Of course, behind the scenes, there’s only about half of the talent that made the first film what it was, and particularly the lack of Honda and Akira Ifukube is felt deeply. Speaking of the latter, there’s a curious lack of music in many of the scenes – the footage taken from the first film early on for example plays completely silent – that turns the dullness even more dull. When the score by Masaru Sato does come in, it never lives up to what Ifukube did.

Raid not living up to the first film is made even more obvious by its repeated mistake of pointing out its superior successor. That silent footage of Godzilla rampaging early on is so much better than what Oda does, and dragging Takashi Shimura out again for one scene of dignified exposition only makes more obvious how much lesser the characters in here are.

Philosophically, the first film might as well not have existed for this second one; for what’s come before, but also for the often very silly yet also very excellent films that came after, Godzilla Raids Again might as well not have, either.

Not of This Earth (1957)

A rather peculiar fellow going by the - totally not the pseudonym of an alien invader - name of Paul Johnson (Paul Birch) ambles through Southern California. He has a very particular form of blood disease that calls for rather intense blood transfusions, but also the ability to hypnotically convince his doctor to be rather helpful about his medical troubles and his preferred solution to them.

Mr Johnson moves into a nice suburban house, hires himself a former ne'er-do-well as a caretaker and a private nurse (Beverley Garland). Occasionally, he communicates with his alien superiors about experiments meant to save his radioactively irradiated race, and ambles along to kidnap people for some rather radical experimentation which leaves them rather dead.

As a director, I particularly love Roger Corman for his Poe cycle made some years later, but even when he made short and very cheap variations on alien invasion and monster movie models, his films typically had something to recommend them.

In the case of Not of This Earth that something is the very specific type of contemporary Southern California hipness used to fill in the holes in budget and script, like Dick Miller’s short turn as a salesman taking a bad end not unfitting to his profession, the absurd teen patois used in another scene, the general late 50s grooviness of what’s going on, and the immensely quotable dialogue (“If I do not receive blood within four chronoctons of time, I will have no need of emotion”), that feels like the sort of thing Ed Wood was trying to achieve but lacked the sense of humour to reach.

Because of the general scrappiness of the production, this has an often very improvisational feel through scenes that just seem to have popped into the crew’s mind and then directly to camera. Only a couple of years later, this would culminate in little masterpieces of skewed wit like Bucket Full of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors, but even in its embryonic form, Corman the pseudo-beat is a fine thing to remember the man for, among many other achievements.

Big Time Gambling Boss (1968)

Original title: Bakuchiuchi: Sôchô Tobaku

Tokyo 1934. The boss of the city’s clan specialized in the gambling business suffers from a stroke while he’s refusing a plan to help unite the yakuza groups into some kind of national front that will bring drugs and prostitution to “the continent” (read “China”).

The succession to the now bed-ridden and mute man’s position is fraught. The best candidate would be the deeply honourable Nakai (Koji Tsuruta), but he’s refusing the role because he came to Tokyo as a refugee from an Osaka clan following trouble with the law there. Apparently taking on the leading role in his adopted clan would be against the Code of the yakuza. Anyway, going by Nakai’s interpretation of things, the designated successor to the position of boss should be Matsuda (Tomisaburo Wakayama), Nakai’s sworn brother.

As a matter of Code and honour, Nakai may even be right about that. Yet right now, Matsuda is imprisoned for his role in an attack on a rival gang that left that gang not much of a problem anymore, but also saw some of Matsuda’s own young men dead. In general, while nearly as traditionally honourable as Nakai, Matsuda is a bit of an emotional powder keg, leading from the front with quite a bit of violence. So he is somebody the clan as a whole doesn’t really want in its highest leadership position.

Prodded by shifty advisor Senba (Nobuo Kaneko with the most astonishing bit of Hitler facial hair), the clan decides to make the boss’s son-in-law, the somewhat lower-ranking and sweaty Ishido (Hiroshi Nawa) the successor, clearly not the strong choice.

Ishido’s ascension ceremony is to take place during a big gambling do for the highest-ranking yakuza in the country.

At this point, Matsuda has been released from prison and is less than happy with the situation. To his sense of personal betrayal comes the fact that not the obviously ultra-competent Nakai is to be the group’s boss, but the weak Ishido. And Matsuda is not the kind of man who can play the diplomatic game, even if it means burning all bridges.

Soon, the plot becomes a complicated machine of obligations, honour, friendship, and betrayal, full of relationships that are much more complicated than they at first appear to be, and violence that is less than cathartic.

When it is spoken about at all in the West, Kosaku Yamashita’s Big Time Gambling Boss – actually the fourth film of a series, though one that usually has not continuity of plot or characters between films – has the reputation of being one of the greatest yakuza films of the ninkyo eiga style. I can’t disagree with this assessment at all – this is pretty much a perfect film, one that stretches the possibilities of the ninkyo style to its absolute limits. That its writer Kazuo Kasahara would go on to script Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity series seems just the logical consequence of where this one goes.

Certainly, Gambling Boss shares the later films’ tendency to turn an in theory very simple plot about yakuza intrigue into a web of duties, obligations and interpretations of a code of honour where one’s human feelings only further complicate things. Nearly every single character here has to come to grips with their own conflicts between the supposed honour of their societal rules and their actual humanity – Nakai’s and Matsuda’s internal and personal conflicts are the film’s main thrust, but the younger yakuza that take on the role of Nakai’s replacement sons, and the two men’s wives all go through the same struggles.

Nakai’s wife Tsuyako (Hiroko Sakuramachi), to take an example, at first seems to only fulfil the genre role of the dutiful wife, but one second act conflict suddenly reveals her inner life and the struggles she goes through while keeping up appearances, providing the film not only with a sudden jolt of “wait, that’s not how ninkyo eiga work!” but also emphasising one of the film’s thematic undercurrents: the utter destructiveness of a way of life that knows no compromise and lets problems grow and fester until they are only resolved in the most violent and destructive ways. Every character in the movie goes through this, or something comparable, and all of them end up destroyed or dead – and the film clearly isn’t applauding this as the only honourable way to exist but treats it as the tragedy it is.

There is indeed a great deal of compassion for its characters in the film, not the sentimental kind yakuza movies (and their fans, me not excluded) generally prefer, but one that feels more humane, sadder and more subtle.

In large part, this effect of greater emotional nuance is enabled by Yamashita’s restrained and intensely focussed direction. This is a film without any distractions in staging, tight framing that is meant to keep the viewer as close to the characters as possible, and not a second of material on screen that isn’t important to the characters or the plot. This means none of the actors can afford to overact or fall back on the simpler tricks in their toolkits – every moment of drama is earned through their complicated portrayals of complicated feelings and relationships. Even Wakayama, not an actor who appeared to like to be subtle (and whom I usually love for it), follows suit, and gives one of the most nuanced and human performances I’ve ever seen from him. Consequently, the film develops an uncommon emotional pull, a feeling of witnessing a genuine tragedy evolve, instead of a series of ritualized scenes that end in an explosion of violence.

Even here, at the climax, the movie refuses the sure-fire way to please the audience of its genre. Instead of showing is the mandatory showdown between Nakai and a large group of enemies, the film cuts away from it. It makes sense too, for the violence that’s actually important for Nakai came before and will come after that fight, and that violence is brutal, and short, and looks the exact opposite of fun.

Three Films Make A Post: Beneath the city streets lie government secrets. File #7 is missing… Pray they don't find it.

The Most Terrible Time in My Life (1993) aka Waga jinsei saiaku no toki: This first movie in Kaizo Hayashi’s Maiku Hama trilogy is a very film school film nerd type of project. It is full of allusions to and plays with tropes and approaches from other movies – mostly from noir, the hard-boiled school and the nouvelle vague.

As it often happens with this approach, the film appears stuffed full of things, or really, overstuffed, leaving little room for a personality that isn’t made exclusively made from other movies. As it also often happens, many of the scenes here are fantastic when looked at on their own, they just don’t add up to much of a whole.

Where You’re Meant to Be (2016): Paul Fegan’s documentary concerns the attempt of Arab Strap’s voice Aidan Moffat of doing a small town tour with his versions of traditional Scottish ballad and folk material. An early encounter with very traditional Scottish ballad singer Sheila Stewart – her rules of folk singing are so purist, most other folk singers wouldn’t cut it – sees her criticizing the project rather vigorously. Her criticism clearly hurts and rankles Moffat in ways he never quite expresses on camera. An off-camera monologue ruminates about Moffat’s doubts, while the film follows him through backrooms, rehearsals and meetings with various somewhat ballad connected people.

This is more an interesting documentary than a successful one, mostly because it seems to be quite able to find out what it actually is about. It attempts to use the Stewart/Moffat divide as a narrative frame, but there’s really not enough substance to it to carry the whole film. Other encounters feel rather random and not always terribly interesting, something that isn’t helped by Moffat’s tendency to throw himself into the pose of a smirking ironicist, which in my experience only is a way to get people to talk when they’re drunk and don’t notice their interlocutor thinks he’s above them. In any case, it’s not a pose I find terribly interesting to watch.

Hidden City (1987): A young woman (Cassie Stuart) drags an at first unwilling statistician (Charles Dance) into the search for a classified film that leads into the lower echelons of espionage, bad commercial art, and all the interesting things barely buried under London’s surface, secrets the people meant to keep them secret have mostly forgotten themselves.

In mood and style Stephen Poliakoff’s movie fluctuates between comedy, a light and very British 80s version of the 70s US conspiracy thriller, and a psychogeographical essay turned movie. This is very much a film about a boring life getting in touch with the weird undercurrents that have always run just a tiny bit below the surface and starting to get in tune with them, shifting his view of the world; the thriller elements are really only there to hang this shift in personal perspective on.

Some Thoughts About Godzilla (1954)

In truth, there isn’t all that much one can still add to everything that has been written about the movie that started it all, Ishiro Honda’s incredible original Gojira, a film that has been something of a given for me all of my life, at first in the curious German cut (that is based on the US cut, but mutilated further), then in the much superior Japanese original.

My umpteenth rewatch, however, did bring up a handful of observations: first, how much of a horror movie this initial Godzilla movie is at its beginning, with much of the monster action taking place in gloomily lit nights scenes, and a structure that slowly reveals the giant lizard that’s going to threaten Japan. Much of the film’s visual language must of course have resonated quite heavily with a populace that has lived through the war years and their particularly brutal end, and at first, these shots as well seem to be in the service of simply making the horror more horrific.

But the more emotional gravitas the film gains – and this film is all about gravitas, and sadness, and things and people destroyed in the end even when the world is saved – the less Honda uses his shots of destruction that way, and instead utilizes them to argue his emotional, humane and political points. In the end, Honda’s always the humanist, the pacifist who enjoys shots of destructive technology with the best of them but is also genuinely saddened at their use, and only the guy trying to creep us out on the way to get there.

Speaking of the political, it’s interesting to watch a couple of scenes here after Shin Godzilla and after Godzilla Minus One, how important Godzilla’s moments of the squabbling, ineffectual, officials will become to these films in the century after it was made.

In general, one of Honda’s particular strengths here isn’t just that he creates surprisingly complex characters particularly in Drs Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) and Yamane (Takashi Shimura), but that he understands how to create side characters who feel memorable and alive enough to stand up to the giant lizard with the atomic breath – which most kaiju and giant monster movies simply don’t manage.

It is also fascinating to keep in mind how much this one is a movie all about the filmmakers figuring out how to do what they are trying to achieve while doing it, and how little this looks like a movie made by people who weren’t quite sure how to do it until they did it. In fact, Godzilla feels like a fully thought through and composed masterpiece from shot one to its finish, where one has to look very hard for the traces of the scrappiness of some of the production.

The Cat and the Canary (1978)

The 1920s. A murder of prospective heirs descend on a somewhat creepy, and definitely creaky, old mansion, to hear the reading of the will of one Cyrus West (Wilfried Hyde-White). In a peculiar turn of events, the old man does the reading himself, via a filmed message that doesn’t just contain the will but also some rather rude remarks about his family, bastards all (or most of them, anyway), he says.

Not surprisingly, the will is about as peculiar as its presentation, seeing as it shows a curious fixation on the mental stability of the heir. Should the chosen heir to judged mentally unstable, the next heir is going to inherit; should that one botch their SAN test as well, it’s the next in line, and so on.

So one isn’t quite sure if one should congratulate West’s chosen victim, ahem, heir, Allison Crosby (Wendy Hiller) for winning the heir lottery, or simply suggest to her to run as quickly as she can.

Alas, running is out of the question in any case, for on the night of the reading of the will, the family is going to be stranded in the old dark house anyway, and soon, curious things begin happening. There’s the curious case of the suddenly appearing local psychiatrist (Edward Fox) on the armed hunt for a supposedly homicidal maniac who believes himself to be a cat; the curious case of the disappearing lawyer; and the many curious cases of the disfigured creep only Allison ever sees. Why, it’s enough to drive a woman mad.

I have no idea why the greatest of the arthouse porn directors Radley Metzger added another entry to the list of adaptations of this most archetypal of all old dark house stage plays; I have even less of an idea how he managed to acquire a cast that also features Honor Blackman, Michael Callan, and Olivia Hussey (among others) for what is clearly a pretty low budget affair.

What I can say is that he managed to turn out a very interesting (in the good meaning of that descriptor) version of the tale. A peculiar one, as well, for The Cat’s most obvious feature is its tendency to fluctuate between two very different tones – about half of the film is very much in keeping with the old-fashioned creakiness of its material (and of the house its plot takes place in), an old-fashionedly staged mystery comedy that might have been done exactly this way in the 30s or 40s. Its other half, on the other hand, seems to be unable to help itself from dragging the material to the borders of sleaze and exploitation cinema very typical of the late 70s; it never quite gets outrageous, but there are suggestions of what you’d have lamely termed “alternative lifestyles” when this was made and hints of outright perversion the old creaky stage play would never have dared even consider.

This latter element never becomes quite as explicit as in a giallo – which Metzger must have been influenced by – yet you never have the impression the film is squeamish. Rather, it feels to me as if part of Metzger’s approach here is meant as a comment on the fluidity of social mores over time, without wanting to quite make fun of the more stuck-up morals of the past (and, alas, sometimes the future) too much, lest the future will do the same to him.

Much of what makes the film as entertaining as it is – apart from some excellently timed jokes like West’s incredible video message and effective old-fashioned, creaky suspense – is in the tension between the very old-fashioned material and the idea of modernity used at the time when this film was made, a feeling of a movie that manages to look at the past and its own time with a degree of ironic distance, but also of sympathy.

So, apparently, I do have an idea of why Metzger might have chosen exactly this material.

The Fist of the Condor (2023)

Original title: El Puño del Cóndor

A mysterious, shaven-headed, nearly mythical fighter (Marko Zaror) is setting out from his monk-like retreat to take some kind of vengeance. It takes quite some time, and a series of flashbacks, half-flashbacks and voice overs to reveal that he is searching for his twin brother (obviously also Marko Zaror), who took everything that meant anything to him some years ago.

Among the things taken was the manual to the powerful fighting technique the Inca used against the conquistadors, the Fist of the Condor. While our warrior hero sets out on his quest, his evil brother begins taking his own steps back into the world, or rather, he sends his brutal and really rather unpleasant disciple Kalari (Eyal Meyer) out on some nasty business that’s meant to make our protagonist suffer some more before Kalari is supposed to kill him.

It’s been quite a few years since last I saw one of the usually pretty fantastic low budget martial arts movies from Chile starring Marko Zaror – who does quite a bit of work in Hollywood on the stunt and choreography side these days, but still seems to make an independent martial arts or action movie in Chile every few years.

As always directed by Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, this particular outing is probably not the best introduction to Zaror’s body of work for the completely uninitiated. Not because it is a bad or mediocre martial arts film – the fight sequences are all somewhere between great and absolutely inspired, mixing the beefy-brutal with the elegant in a highly convincing manner. Rather, it is the film’s narrative that might give quite a few viewers pause, or rather, a narrative structure that takes a rather straightforward vengeance tale and pulls it into temporal loops and twists that can remind one more of the temporal approaches sometimes found in arthouse cinema than of the way martial arts and action movies like to present themselves. To my eyes, it does so successfully, indeed deepening its narrative instead of obfuscating it. I can imagine myself coming out of this confused and a bit irritated watching it in the wrong mood, however.

Of course, simply going with the flow and enjoying its structural peculiarities as simple trippyness would be another fruitful, at the very least highly enjoyable, way of approaching the film as well.

The other possible stumbling block is how seriously and straight-faced Fist of the Condor takes itself as a philosophical tale of martial arts as a way to nurture body and spirit. There is no sense of irony to it at all, nor any attempt to put even the tiniest bit of distance between long monologues about martial arts philosophy and its audience. While I’m clearly not of the same mindset as the filmmakers, I do appreciate this seriousness of purpose, and even more so the risk one takes when putting oneself out there like they do.

But then, putting themselves out there, making the film these filmmakers want – perhaps need – to make, seems to be rather the point of Fist of the Condor, apart from showing off Zaror’s sculpted body and a series of great fight scenes in often spectacular landscapes (the old adage of nature being the best special effect holds), of course. This is a film that’s rather a lot more ambitious than most low budget action movies, and therefore takes the elements of the genre it is interested in and shapes them into forms it finds more interesting and pleasing, even if they will be confusing to some.

Three Films Make A Post: One Small Ember Can Burn Down Everything.

Monkey Man (2024): You really needn’t tell me that this somewhat overlong tale of revenge is Dev Patel’s directorial debut. It’s impossible to miss in a movie that feels quite this desperate to show how stylish and clever and original it can be visually. Patel often appears so unsure of his own simple narrative he bloats the film up with incessant flashbacks to things the audience has understood the first time around, and visual flourishes that detract instead of add. There’s a sense of desperation to prove that Patel can indeed direct like a real director surrounding the project that permanently gets in the way of the film simply working.

That’s particularly disappointing because Monkey Man is quite good whenever its director/writer/star gets out of his own way and trusts his instincts and those of his crew. There’s a really good action lead performance hidden below all of the guff, and whenever Patel calms down a little, there are also the makings of a really good – and stylish - action movie director visible. Just one who needs an editor – internal and external.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024): Guy Ritchie’s newest film wishes to have that problem. This one feels rather desperate as well. Here, however, the film’s not desperate to have depth it wants to express through style that only obfuscates what’s good about it, but wants so desperately to be FUN, it never relaxes enough to actually have or provide any. Making matters worse, it is so afraid of not being fun for even a single second, it never tries to find grounding anywhere. The film is an incessant bombardment of colour, edits, “clever” dialogue, and so on. None of which amounts to much beyond two hours of movie because there’s no weight to any of it – no tension, no suspense, no stakes, no human connection between what it laughingly calls its characters. It’s a movie so fun, it’s utterly bland.

City Hunter aka Shiti Hanta (2024): In comparison, Yuichi Sato’s adaptation of an 80s manga is a complete work of art, not because it is deep, or clever, or meaningful, but because it not only knows what kind of movie it wants to be – a light action number with a somewhat sleazy sense of humour – it goes about becoming that movie with simple, calm professionalism and a sense of fun that doesn’t have the air of an abused child star grimacing “joyfully” at you for two hours while tapdancing.

There’s no ambition here beyond providing an entertaining, violent hundred minutes of action and dubious humour, but that ambition, the film fulfils without fuzz – and with fine action choreography that’s not hidden behind obfuscating camera work and editing, nor suffering from being without impact.

Heroes of the East (1978)

aka Shaolin Challenges Ninja

aka Shaolin vs. Ninja

aka Drunk Shaolin Challenges Ninja

Original title: 中華丈夫

Hongkong businessman’s son Ho To (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) has come of age. This means he is bound to marry the daughter of a long-time Japanese business partner of his father, in a marriage arranged when the victims were still kids. Ho To’s not best pleased. However, things turn less gloomy for the groom when said daughter, Yumiko (Yuka Mizuno), turns out to be rather on the attractive side. Even better, the young couple do hit it off rather nicely, and things seem set for a great marriage with attractive, bilingual kids.

Alas, both of the newlyweds turn out to be rather fanatical martial artists. Instead of bonding over this shared interest, they focus on cultural differences and short tempers. Ho To thinks Japanese martial arts rather unladylike, while Yumiko clearly finds her husband’s kung fu a bit girlie. Quite a bit of physical fighting between the irascible couple ensues, until Ho To manages to insult Yumiko and the whole of Japanese martial arts, and she flees back to Japan in anger.

Following the advice of his dumbest servant, Ho To then decides to lure his wife back to Hongkong by writing her a challenge letter in which he further insults Japanese martial arts. Thanks to a former admirer of Yumiko, who is also her ninjutsu teacher, that letter lands in the hands of the grandmaster of a school for all kinds of Japanese martial arts, who, keeping with the short tempers of everyone in the movie, does not like what he reads there. Thus instead of a penitent or even more angry wife, a whole horde of masters of various martial arts arrive from Japan on his doorstep, and Ho To will have to beat every single one of them without causing the martial arts version of an international incident. On the plus side, Yumiko returns without wanting to fight.

There is really very little about Lau Kar-Leung’s Heroes of the East that isn’t awesome in one way or the other. Really, the only thing I don’t like about this tale of marriage troubles caused by some of the hardest heads in romance/martial arts is that the set-up leaves no room for the Japanese martial artists to win a bout or two against Ho To. But then, unlike most Hongkong movies, Heroes of the East does not portray the Japanese as bucktoothed villains, instead giving them and their particular martial arts cultures respect, and the fighters personalities – of course mostly expressed via fighting styles. Even better, the Japanese characters are actually portrayed by Japanese martial artist actors, so the Chinese vs Japanese martial arts are a bit more than Hongkong actors imitating Japanese fighting.

Instead, Lau’s fight choreography finds particular joy in the match-ups of the most artistic versions of culturally differently coded fighting styles, putting such an impressive amount of thought and intelligence into making every single fight different and inspired, one will hardly even notice that what starts as a martial arts romantic comedy turns into a series of fight set pieces.

But then, as is only proper and correct for martial arts cinema, there’s actually quite a lot expressed through the fighting. One of the movie’s subtler points is how much Ho To grows by having to level up his kung fu against so many accomplished fighters, acquiring a poise, dignity and politeness that is directly expressed through the changes in his fighting style. With these traits he could of course have avoided the whole marital malaise completely if he’d only already had them when squabbling with his wife.

Even though the film unfortunately spends very little time on her in the later proceedings, it is clear that Yumiko goes through a comparable process of personal growth, less by having to fight it out, but by watching her friends and her husband putting themselves through an ordeal for little more than angry words.

F for Fake (1973)

Hired to take over/make use of the bare bones of a documentary made by François Reichenbach about art forger and general high living faker Elmyr de Hory and his biographer and semi-professional liar Clifford Irving, Orson Welles starts having a bit of fun, turning the material into a meditation on art and reality, the nature of forgery, the flim-flam elements of his own particular talents, and takes an opportunity to show off his late life partner Oja Kodar  – in a very unreconstructed kind of way you really wouldn’t encounter anymore these days, very much for better and for worse.

Also involved are thoughtful moments of Orson – in his role as one of the great and wonderful hams of the screen - hamming it up considerably when the opportunity for a monologue arises (or whenever he simply fancies doing one), some moments of “high art” theatre, and a dirty story about great painter made particularly funny via a combination of “look how hot my girlfriend is!” and Michel Legrand’s score going full softcore soundtrack on us.

All of this is very Orson Welles in many aspects. Welles treats the project as yet another opportunity to show off his – considerable – intelligence and his – hardly in need of an adjective - talents – real and imagined. On paper, this should be a rather unpleasant watch – Orson holding forth to his friends with a glass of wine or three, Orson showing magic tricks, Orson talking up his girlfriend, Orson wearing his favourite hat, and so on, and so forth. In practice, like most of the man’s weirder projects, there’s a genuine charm to film and man. Sure, he’s full of himself, but he also appears to approach his audience as people who are on his own level (up in the stratosphere, at least), whom he invites to think about a couple of things, to have various very diverse kinds of fun with him, to listen to interesting people tell even more interesting lies and truths, and to present us with a last run-through of what Orson Welles was all about.

Only the very disagreeable would disagree with this approach, and only the much too serious would not be caught up in Welles’s charm. I for one don’t want to be any of these things, at least this evening.

Three Films Make A Post: Children can be such monsters.

Abigail (2024): In Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillet’s new directorial outing, yet another hapless gang of criminals (among them characters played by Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kevin Duran and Kathryn Newton) kidnaps a little girl (Alisha Weir) that turns out be rather more dangerous than anyone could have expected.

Once the kid vampire ballerina is revealed, things turn into the typical chase through a mildly creepy location, with a couple of decent twists and betrayals added to the mix. It’s all decent enough, but also not terribly creative on the scripting level: Barrera’s character, for example, is supposed to be the likeable one because she has a child she loves and hesitates about five seconds when it comes to kidnapping another child, which assumes an audience willing to cut a pretty face rather a lot of slack. Fun fact: Hitler really loved dogs.

I’m also less than enthused about the movie’s absolute fixation on that vampire ballerina thing, something that stops to be as funny or creepy as the filmmakers seem to believe long before she starts on the vampire ballerina kung fu.

Late Night with the Devil (2023): The first half or so of Cameron and Colin Cairnes’s (what’s it with all these directing duos these days anyhow?) is a wonderful little horror film, a lovingly created exaggeration of a late 70s TV talk show that turns increasingly bizarre in its supernatural shenanigans. Unfortunately, that’s not enough for the film, and it begins to turn into an oh so 2024 series of “twists” and unnecessary reveals that I began feeling I was watching a scriptwriting rulebook come to life instead of the film the first acts promise.

It’s still a pretty interesting movie, with some effective performances – David Dastalmachian is particularly great at the talk show host – but I found myself increasingly bored by its screenwriting 101 approach to narrative.

Dune: Part Two (2024): I really didn’t expect Denis Villeneuve’s second Dune movie – adapting the second half of the first book - to go quite this consequently and ruthlessly down the road of deconstructing the idea of the chosen one Frank Herbert mostly left for his second novel. Yet here it is, with Villeneuve doubling down on this element of the books early – perhaps because a third film wasn’t guaranteed or simply to set up more physical conflicts for that film – making this the central point of the film.

This doesn’t mean this second film loses any of the visually visionary power of the first one – in fact, here, too, the director seems to be doubling down, making his future even stranger and awe-inspiring than that of the first.

Dirty Ho (1979)

Original title: 爛頭何

“Dirty” Ho Ching (Wong Yu) is a pretty enthusiastic thief with a certain penchant for self-taught kung fu. He’s just managed a great jewel heist and is in the process of spending some of his ill-gotten gains on some high class courtesans (one of whom is played by house favourite Kara Hui Ying-Hung) in a brothel situated on a river boat when a man in a neighbouring pavilion we’ll soon enough learn is named Wang Chin Chen (played by yet another house favourite, Gordon Liu Chia-Hui), is starting to get in a not terribly subtle bidding contest for the ladies’ interests. The size of jewel chests is compared and Ho’s found wanting, until the latter clearly wants to start a more physical kind of fight. The brothel owner calls the police who arrests Ho. However, Wang secretly shows the police a seal that identifies him as part of the Imperial Court, and orders them to let Ho go as soon as possible, while he himself takes care of the thief’s jewels.

Obviously, once released, Ho wants to get back at Wang, but loses a fight against Crimson, whom Wang declares to be his new bodyguard. Well actually, Ho loses against Wang who puppets Crimson while pretending to hide behind her back, but Ho not being terribly bright he’s not going to notice subtleties like this.

Ho does go on to further attempts at getting back at Wang, but the latter needs little effort to have things go his way. Eventually, Ho finds himself poisoned and blackmailed into the role of Wang’s martial arts student.

Unlike Ho, the audience at this point knows what’s going on: Wang is the eleventh son of the Emperor, spending his time on art, fine wine, women and martial arts training while roaming the country, and shows little interest in becoming the next Emperor. However, one of his brothers believes exactly this will undoubtedly make Wang the Emperor’s candidate of choice, and has set in motion various plans to kill this most unwilling of rivals.

Which leads to a couple of incredible scenes during which Wang is invited to sessions with other friends of the arts who try to murder him while both sides pretend to only be interested in wine or paintings. Ho, as usually not getting it, blithely pokes around the edges of these scenes.

Eventually, Wang is hurt badly enough in one of those fights that he needs to intensify Ho’s training as his body guard.

Dirty Ho is a particularly fun example of director and martial arts director Lau Kar-Leung’s ability to make deeply physical kung fu comedies that still don’t have as much of an affinity to slapstick as the Golden Harvest model (which I have grown to love over the years) shows. Instead, his Shaw Brothers comedies have a certain restraint in their physical comedy that can express uproarious humour through the incredible precision of Lau’s brilliant choreography given life through a fine cast of martial artists and actors, but that feels more like Fred Astaire than Buster Keaton (who I both love, as regular readers will know).

There’s a great sense of invention in the film’s fights, even when Lau uses ideas you will also have seen in earlier films of the genre (and that will be repeated ad nauseam in the future). There’s just such a perfection of comical timing and elegance in something like the the puppetting sequence with Liu and Hui, it can leave this viewer quite breathless. Not only from laughter but also in admiration for the intelligence of choreography, visual staging and performance on display. Liu never repeats a trick in the movie, and so every fight scene is of equal brilliance but also absolutely distinctive from the next.

The wine and arts assassin sequences are particularly fine as well, with the mix of physical violence and verbal politeness making for some poignant bits of humour.

This being a Hongkong comedy, there are also moments of outrageous weirdness – some of which might be seen as problematic for some contemporary tastes – as well as a transition to some more serious – and still incredible – fights in the climax, all of which Lau and his cast and crew handle with the same aplomb, elegance and off-handed visual class.

The Return of the 18 Bronzemen (1976)

Original title: 雍正大破十八銅人

Qing prince Yong Zhen (Carter Wong Chia-Ta) doesn’t like the choice of successor to the throne made by his late father, and so changes Daddy’s last will to become emperor himself. Framing the actual successor for an assassination and grabbing the throne is all in a day’s work.

Most of the rest of the movie flashes back to Yong Zhen’s earlier years, when he, an already accomplished martial artist, takes on the role of a commoner to be taught the legendary martial arts of the shaolin. The harsh training regime isn’t quite enough for the guy, so he also commits some minor acts of villainy trying to acquire further shaolin secrets.

Joseph Kuo’s follow-up to to his rather wonderful 18 Bronzemen is a bit of a mess. The first act and the final ten minutes or so seem to belong to a different film – one that doesn’t even have an actual ending. The film appears to believe because its audience already knows the folklore surrounding the destruction of the shaolin temple, it is not its business to actually tell that story even in so far as it touches on what’s happening in its own main plot, the shaolin temple sequence. Which leaves Return not just without an ending but also without a dramatic climax. There’s a pretty random fight against Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng, out to take vengeance on our nasty protagonist, but since we never actually spend time with her, or see the reason for her need for vengeance, or even get a conclusive ending to that fight, this just strengthens the feeling of Return simply being unfinished – or consisting of scenes of two different films with the same cast that have been smashed together without rhyme or reason, or interest in coherence.

The main shaolin training sequences are fun, at least, with some nice further ideas for shaolin torture, I mean training and testing, regimes that make much of visual interest of the film’s small means, fun choreography, and a very accomplished editing flow. This part of the film really only lacks at least somewhat distinctive characters – none of Yong Zhen’s co-students are fleshed out to any degree, and even he doesn’t have anything like actual character development – to be riveting. However, the martial arts are fun enough and the training methods weird enough, to make for a somewhat entertaining middle film, even though it never acquires an actual narrative or makes anything much out of the opportunity to flesh out the backstory of one of he major off-screen villains of kung fu folklore.

Damsel (2024)

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) is traded in to a far and apparently very prosperous country to marry the local prince in trade for the food and riches that will help her famine-plagued home country survive. Independent and a bit wilful, Elodie isn’t terribly happy about this, her starving subjects only being a thought the script mentions when it remembers them. At least the prince (Nick Robinson) she’s bound to marry seems pleasant enough, while her future stepmother (Robin Wright) is rather on the horrid side, and never acts like you’d act towards a girl you’ll spend a considerable amount of time with in the future.

That’s because this is meant to be a very short marriage, for Elodie is not really meant as a long-term daughter-in-law but as a sacrifice to a dragon. So soon, our heroine finds herself thrown into an abyss by her betrothed and hunted through its murder cave by a sadistic dragon who probably shouldn’t have read all those Thomas Harris novels.

On one hand, I’m all in for a film in which a princess supposed to be sacrificed to a particularly unpleasant kind of political convenience strikes back and wins her independence, and I think parts of the fantasy survivalist middle part of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s movie are rather effective.

On the other hand, I find Damsel’s moral stance when it comes to its dragon main villain either completely unexamined or actively repugnant. Apparently, committing serial killings while gloating sadistically over hunting down young women for centuries, during that course shifting an already shitty culture into an even more shitty form is a-okay and totally excused when said culture – whose living members are generations divorced from the inciting incident – once murdered one’s babies. One wrong apparently makes serial killing innocents perfectly alright, forever. Let’s not even talk about the implied suggestion that, if the victims of the dragon were only really of the bloodline of the royal family of Evilstan, and not just poor nobles married into it to die, murdering them would be any better.

Damsel even plays it as a happy ending when our heroine – after teaming up with the dragon to slaughter the royal family in an act of vengeance that at least hits the actual perpetrators of an evil deed - finishes the dubious tale by taking said serial killing dragoness with her to her homeland, a place that also already suffers from a famine having to feed the fucking monster will probably not help alleviate, even if you’re ignore its murderous and sadistic character.

This makes the ethical stance of most vigilante movies look downright progressive; or at least coherent.