Enter the Dragon (1973)

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

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

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

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

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

The Forbidden City (2025)

Original title: La città proibita

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Bad Movies Make A Post: Mommy knows best.

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

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

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

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

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

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

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

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

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

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

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

A Couple of Weeks Off

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

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

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

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

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

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

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

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

Express Train (1967)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kanto Street Peddlers: Clan Violent Loyalty (1970)

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

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

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

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

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

Nachtschatten (1972)

Businessman Jan (John van Dreelen) stumbles upon a lonely house belonging to a village in the Lüneburger Heide (heath/moorland in Germany’s Lower Saxony). He feels drawn to the woman living there, Elena Berg (Elke Haltaufderheide), for she’s mysterious, seems in turn vaguely seductive and vaguely defensive, and speaks mostly in vague sentences while using the long, empty stares with lack of eye contact beloved of German filmmaking. A habit Jan shares, incidentally.

Elena wants to sell her house, apparently, and Jan might be interested in buying it, but once it comes to inquiries about concrete details like a price, vagueness sets in again. Jan is also interested in getting into Elena’s pants in the dubious ways beloved of 70s toxic masculinity. She keeps rebuffing him, but she also appears to want him to stay with her for as long as possible and makes many an oblique remark about her brother (wherever he is), death, and love.

Niklaus Schilling’s Nachtschatten – which translates so nicely to “Nightshade” it even keeps its ambiguity - is one among the very manageable number of German sort of arthouse horror movies. Neither the Autorenfilm (West Germany’s version of arthouse) nor the country’s movies made for an actual audience were very keen on delving into Germany’s deep well of the fantastical, so there’s no coherent tradition of this kind of filmmaking here post World War II, and thus the few films of the kind that were somehow made all feel somewhat disconnected from each other.

By virtue of the leaden pacing and disconnected acting style dominating the Autorenfilm, and in something of an ironic twist, Nachtschatten feels related to the kind of film Jess Franco or Jean Rollin were making, though without these directors’ sense of personal obsessions, and only a very mild kind of eroticism instead of full-on obsessive kink. It does manage to feel languid rather than stodgy for most of its running time, though, and from time to time, its slowness and unwillingness to say anything directly if it can instead have a character stare into empty air for a bit takes on a quality of poetic, dreamy unreality I’m unsure Schilling was actually going for.

Visually, this is a curious mix of the Gothically coded – the Heide is about as gothic as my part of Germany gets – and drab 70s interiors shot as if the director were willing them into becoming something more fantastical, dream sequences and characters that go through their daily life as if they were dreams – until it becomes some stiff German art business for a couple of scenes again.

It’s certainly an interesting effort, at least halfway towards becoming something special.

Three Films Make A Post: "Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad."

Warning: this is a “short rants about genuinely crap movies” edition

Touch Me (2025): First in today’s trilogy of the terrible is Addison Heimann’s insufferable tentacle sex horror comedy about a woman’s (Olivia Taylor Dudley who does her best, which is more than I’d suggest about anyone else involved here) relationship with an alien with an addictive tentacle touch, and her obnoxious gay best friend. Apart from having really pretty colours, this is just terrible: the characters are obnoxious one-note clichés; the film believes stating having themes of co-dependency and abusive relationships equals actually saying anything about them; and it is painfully unfunny, particularly thanks to dialogue that manages to be unnatural, dumb and – I didn’t expect to use that word in public – cringeworthy to the highest degree.

How to Make a Killing (2026): Supposedly “inspired” by the great Kind Hearts and Coronets, this is actually a proper remake, which is to say, a movie that does everything worse than the original even though it keeps pretty closely to it. Which comes as a particular disappointment from director John Patton Ford, whose Emily the Criminal was sharp, focussed, and very much not a bad clone of anything.

It is pretty funny that a film made seventy years or so later than the original’s critique and comical analysis of class matters is actually less insightful on them – but then, Americans still have trouble talking about class even while their country is on the verge of turning back into a feudal state (not that we Germans are great about that, mind you). As a comedy, this suffers from a slouching, disjointed pace and the fact that Glen Powell – who frankly can’t act his way out of a wet paper bag on the best of days - is not simply no Dennis Price but attempts to get through the whole film with two expressions: a punchable smirk that is supposed to be charming, and some confused rodent mugging I can’t even begin to parse. Also, as in Touch Me, very little of this actually funny, or has anything to say.

“Wuthering Heights” (2026): Look, I’m okay with the fact, that Emerald Fennell didn’t want to actually adapt the novel – after all, none of the earlier film versions ever bothered with it – but turning this into a glossy, empty, and emotionally dead adaptation of her favourite romance novel covers is not a decision to endear her film to me. Nor does the lack of any depth to anything or anyone in here help, where everything that’s actually difficult, or painful, or truly unpleasant about the kind of love this is supposedly about gets sanded down until it is a mere kink, add much for me apart from inducing a feeling of actual loathing for the film. Which isn’t a feeling I often get, so well done there?

Sure, the production design looks kinda spectacular, but the showy way Fennell shoots it gives off the whiff of a bad music video directed by someone who really has no idea how to say something with their pretty visuals. Hell, even creating an actual mood seems beyond the director. It’s just there, in a garish, soulless and ironically boring way, like an ad for something I’m certainly not going to be.

I also have to agree with parts of the internet that Margot Robbie – who is not an actress I find particularly compelling at the best of times - is too old for her role here. That’s not her fault, however: every adult actress would be, seeing how Fennell writes Cathy as a thirteen year old throughout.

Yokohama BJ Blues (1981)

Apparently, you can’t make a living by being a singer of mediocre Japanese blues rock alone in early 80s Yokohama, so singer BJ (Yusaku Matsuda), also works as a private detective. Well, maybe it’s the other way round.

Be that as it may, a long-time friend of BJ’s, and also married to BJ’s former flame Tamiko (Mari Henmi), is making his own living as a corrupt cop, taking payments from a criminal organization known as “The Family”. He wants out, though, and is just about to tell all to the non-corrupt parts of the police. Alas, while he’s explaining all this to BJ during a semi-clandestine meeting, he is shot with a high calibre bullet.

For reasons quite divorced from facts and evidence, the dead cop’s partner hold BJ responsible for the killing – he just can’t prove it (mostly because it’s not true, one supposes) – so it behoves our protagonist to find out who really killed his friend not only for reasons of revenge but also of self-preservation.

His investigation appears to mostly consist of a slow, drifting movement through Yokohama’s night and dawn life, where he encounters members of The Family, yakuza, a gay biker gang, a barely legal rent boy runaway he’ll have a gay frolicking montage with. Some of those less interesting in frolicking do rather want to murder BJ, as well.

I’ve mostly seen chambara and jidai-geki from Yokohama BJ Blues’ director Eiichi Kudo before, most of them rather energetically directed and fast-moving (at least as I remember them). This film is not like them at all. Rather, it is dominated by a sense of late night languidness, or really, the more specific late night languidness of people who have spent years drifting through nights and dawns.

The film projects a sense of a melancholia that has hardened to the glass jar feeling of clinical depression, so that every movement its characters make seems aimless, joyless, and generally slow and effusive. Human relationships for the most part appear vague, unfocussed, dominated by loss and betrayal, but loss and betrayal whose emotional impact BJ holds at arms’ length. He’s just too tired and melancholic to even feel them, it appears.

It’s really only some of the musical performances and the scene where BJ – presented as clearly bisexual in the most wonderfully normalized manner possible – frolics with the male prostitute that break through the fog. Lifted fog can’t keep in the slow noir world of the film, of course.

This leads to a movie that’s so slow and loose, most of its dramatic gestures and its complicated plot seem mired in some kind of brain fog – there’s really little conventional tension here, and even what would be an action climax in other films is here very consciously turned abstract and distant by Kudo. For make no mistake, this isn’t an aging filmmaker having lost his touch, but one using the opportunity the ruins of the Japanese studio system of the time offer to stretch in interesting and different directions and speak in ways he couldn’t quite before.

Seen as a thriller or a straightforward crime movie, this is of course no success at all. As a film that’s ultra-focussed on turning the sense of ennui and alienation its protagonist, or the whole of Japanese society as it is portrayed here, suffers from, it is a rousing success, full of incandescently beautiful shots of the ugly parts of a slowly decaying Yokohama and a central performance by Matsuda that lets his natural cool curdle into a detachment beyond hopelessness.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

Victorian England. Consulting detective Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and his friend and partner Doctor Watson (Nigel Bruce) are asked to help ensure the safety of Sir Henry Baskerville (Richard Greene), who has come to England to take possession of his inheritance in the Great Grimpen Mire of Dartmoor. Rumours of a supernatural hound haunting his lineage abound, and many secrets are kept on the moors.

This first in its series of Sherlock Holmes movie produced by Fox , in this case directed by Sidney Lanfield, was a major hit in its time. Apart from the natural and perennial popularity of Holmes, this is certainly thanks to the casting of Basil Rathbone in the role, who has the accent, the profile, the energy and the acting chops to pull off an interesting Great Detective; he also has great chemistry with his Watson, real-life friend Nigel Bruce.

I’ve never liked the Bruce Watson much – he’s too stupid to be believable as a doctor, a military veteran that survived anything more dangerous than stepping over a puddle or as a friend to Holmes. In fact, in his worst moments – most of them to come in later films of the duo – this too stupid Watson tends to damage his Holmes, because this version of Holmes apparently needs to travel with the dumbest person alive to feel properly clever and is the kind of guy who drags around the learning disabled to berate them for being “bunglers”.

My tastes in Watsons aside, while The Hound is the most popular, and certainly the best, of the Holmes novels, it is a curious case to start a series with a particularly weak Watson with. For here, Watson is really meant to take the lead role in the investigation for at least half of the narrative, something Bruce’s character never believably manages in between comedy routines and empty bluster. He isn’t helped at all by being surrounded by the sort of extremely unmemorable actors Old Hollywood loved as their young romantic leads. Only Lionel Atwill provides some memorable moments.

The script pretty much makes a hash out of Doyle’s novel, changes everything that might be morally complex even more so than the Production Code would have necessitated, and just barely manages to get in some of the book’s set pieces. Those certainly are made very pretty by the use of some nice looking sets. Sidney Lanfield’s direction is generally unremarkable, and at its most effective whenever he just lets Rathbone or Atwill do their respective thing, which, unfortunately, isn’t all too often.

Three Films Make A Post: Do not overlook any anomalies.

Exit 8 (2025): A man (Kazunari Ninomiya) finds himself trapped on an ever-repeating subway station floor. He learns he has to identify anomalies in his surroundings to find his way out, and learns some valuable lessons along the way.

I’m just a few years too old to have ever gotten into the habit of watching other people play video games on the Internet, and never found enjoyable watching people doing something fun instead of doing it myself. Thus, Genki Kawamura’s videogame adaptation’s approach of being pretty much exactly that doesn’t work too well for me, especially with the highly repetitive set-up it uses.

Eventually, the film does some mildly more ambitious things than have a guy wander around the same corridor, forever, and it is certainly well shot for what it is, but the constraints it put itself under just don’t do much to this viewer. Additionally, the ham-fisted way it attempts to speak of alienation in the modern world is one of those cases where I agree with the thesis, but find the artistic execution lacking.

The Accountant (2016): If I were in a snarky mood, I’d congratulate director Gavin O’Connor for finding a way around Ben Affleck’s problems with being expressive by having him play a man whose form of autism sees him finding expressing feelings difficult, but really, that would be selling an action movie short that’s clever, inventive, fun, and uses its main character’s neuroatypicality and how it makes him relate to the world and the world to him in more nuanced and interesting ways than movies, and certainly genre movies, usually do. It is also still often joyful action movie nonsense, but the kind of nonsense carried by an actual heart and a brain for other things.

The Accountant 2 (2025): Whereas this belated sequel written and directed by the same people suggests that nobody involved in the first part actually had any clue about what made it work.

Here, we’re back with autism as a superpower and nothing but, and you can most certainly cut the clever, inventive and fun from the first movie’s description as well. For some reason, this is now also a comedy, just one of those comedies nobody bothered to actually make funny, or write any jokes for. That it’s also unpleasant, aggressively stupid and without any charm does not exactly help it in any way.

Murder on the Last Train (1955)

Original title: 終電車の死美人

A young women is found murdered on the last train to Mitaka, Tokyo. Tokyo’s Showa era murder squad springs into action.

The film follows the case’s investigation, the police slowly uncovering the victim’s identity, checking out witness statements and turning over every stone to uncover a rather messy situation.

Tsuneo Kobayashi’s film is usually treated as Japan’s first proper police procedural, and the film Toei’s successful and pretty long running Police Precinct series of films would model itself after, with an attempt to portray police procedure as it would be used in its time and place realistically. Of course, these are not films portraying or interested in the politics or ethics of policing, and they also don’t spend much time on the dozen or so coppers’ personalities. Today, you’d probably be tempted to call it copaganda, but given the temporal gap between the then and the now, you might also see this as a portrayal of how proper police work should be done by the standards of Showa era Japan.

Keeping this approach from becoming too abstract or clinical are three elements. First, there’s a script by Shin Morita that’s trying to be realistic towards the shoe leather aspects of policing but also knows what to cut – we aren’t shown the pointless witness interviews but only those that actually deliver some new facts or insights, and we are given to understand how much drudgery an investigation entails but don’t have to take part in it. When necessary, the film isn’t afraid to become dramatic either, so particularly once we move towards the climax, there are moments of tension here – this is still supposed to entertain an audience, after all.

Secondly, Kobayashi’s direction effortlessly moves between framing scenes in a semi-documentary style and expressionist flourishes that can turn even a simple witness interview dramatic and interesting to look at. While this idealized version of the police doesn’t do police brutality, the direction often suggests the threat of violence. Interviews with potential criminals are always shot with the cops crowding their victim and shot in angles that see them tower over it in a very Universal horror monster kind of manner.

Thirdly, while there’s no depth to the police roles, the ensemble – after the manner of Japanese studio cinema – do provide anchors of humanity that suggest people and not automatons, which is more than enough to make the material come to life.

And, if you’re like me, it’s genuinely interesting to witness an attempt at a realistic portrayal of Post-War Tokyo of the times made for a local audience. Murder presents a wealth of cultural details history books usually don’t provide, particularly because it focusses on the parts of society history books have historically ignored. It’s not a documentary, of course, but it’s of highest interest nonetheless.

Color of the Night (1994)

Somehow, the erotic thriller wave of the early 90s even enabled the creation this particular movie, in which psychoanalyst(!) Bruce Willis flees to Los Angeles after a patient traumatized him into red/green colour-blindness by throwing herself through – the film says out of, but she’s going right through the closed thing – his office window, only to get dragged into a series of murders surrounding the hilariously dysfunctional therapy group of his soon to be dead frenemy Scott Bakula (heightening the improbable psychoanalyst stakes quite a bit). Also, he starts an affair with a very young lady (Jane March) he’d recognize from somewhere if he and everyone else in the movie didn’t apparently also suffer from face blindness. Hilarity and a complicated and pretty damn bizarre plot ensue, while director Richard Rush – whose epically long director’s cut is the way to go with this one – overdirects the hell out of the barely comprehensible screenplay by Billy Ray and Matthew Chapman, which treats as a revelation things the film has already shown to the audience ninety minutes earlier.

There’s really no connection to anything amounting to actual psychoanalysis, group therapy or human psychology here, and thus enables a cast filled with beloved character actors - Lance Henriksen! Brad Dourif! Lesley Ann Warren! Eriq La Salle! Rubén Blades! and so on! – to absolutely let loose with every single bit of actorly business they choose to use, because Rush is clearly a “yes, and” and a “yes, yes, yes” kind of guy when presented with any idea anyone could come up with. Plus, if we cast Willis often enough as a psychologist, analyst, etc, people will just have to believe it, right?

At the time, critics mostly focussed on the nonsense – without recognizing its function as beautiful nonsense, of course - and on Willis’s shlong (which makes something of a surprise appearance), but really, this is such a generous and serious attempt at making sweet, sweet love to the aesthetics of the giallo by way of Brian DePalma it seems nearly beside the point that it isn’t actually all that good of a movie.

Three Films Make A Post: Getting in is hard, getting out is hell.

Do Not Enter (2026): A group of YouTube Urban Explorers get in over their heads when they enter an old abandoned hotel where they’ll not only have to cope with a violent group of rivals led by an ex-colleague but also a mysterious murdering monster (Javier Botet doing his usual shtick).

Surprisingly enough, director Marc Klasfeld doesn’t stage this as a piece of POV horror – there’s only very little footage of the sort in here – but shoots it like a “proper movie”. Which seems like a curious decision, given the set-up, but then, this is not a film demonstrating too many sensible behind the camera decisions. All changes to the clockwork-tight David Morell novel this is based on are either superficial modernizations the movie then does nothing of use with, or feel made to slow things down and make them less interesting. The sets are pretty nice, and if you’re into heart-based gore, there’s something for your specific kink in here, but otherwise, this is such a generic piece of cinema, one might just as well not bother with it.

Kanto Street Peddlers aka Kantô Tekiya ikka (1969): At their height, even the more mediocre and generic outings of Japanese studios like this contemporary ninkyo eiga about battling street peddlers produced by Toei and directed by Norifumi Suzuki, were impossibly entertaining.

This does waver sometimes awkwardly between earnest, leftist, ninkyo and the kind of goofy nonsense comedy Suzuki loved so much to drag into every single one of his films, but also contains a bunch of Toei house actors – Bunta Sugwara is our hero, Minoru Oki is actually playing a good guy; Bin Amatsu at least is still evil – I can’t help but love to watch even in lesser material, and looks and feels so much of its time and place it is fascinating even when it isn’t exactly good and a bit slow. Plus, this ends on a fantastic climax that hits all the ninkyo clichés – our hero strutting manly through the rain to the final slaughter while he sings terribly on the soundtrack – which it presents with much verve, imagination – the POV shot start to the battle alone is worth the whole movie – and all the blood one could wish for.

Bored Hatamoto – The Mansion of Intrigue aka Riddle of the Snake Princess’ Mansion (1957): This is still the earliest (between the 22nd and the 25th, depending on source) in the long-running series of jidai-geki pulp detective films starring Utaemon Ichikawa as the titular hero with the moon-shaped scar you can find with English subtitles.

It’s not one of my particular favourites of the series – three comic relief characters plus a teen sidekick are a bit much for me even though we get a really good seppuku joke late in proceedings – but there’s still a lot to like here. Director Yasushi Sasaki stages some fine battles (we’re still in the bloodless and noiseless stage of screen fighting in Japan here), there are Japanese actors in whiteface pretending to be Dutch, and there’s a wonderful pulpy energy to proceedings, all dominated by Ichikawa’s commanding presence. Plus, as if this were a 70s Bollywood masala, our hero infiltrates the main villain’s lair by taking part in a sweet dance number.

Banned From Broadcast (2003-2008)

Banned from Broadcast is an occasional series of initially six short – about forty-five minutes – documentary-style POV horror movies made for Fuji TV that by now has also spawned three theatrical features and a surprise return episode in 2017. The episodes as well as the films were all directed and written by Toshikazu Nagae, who has worked quite a bit in the realm of direct to video and TV horror with tiny budgets.

When doing Banned from Broadcast, he actually reveals himself as a master of the form on the level of beloved house favourite Koji Shiraishi. But where Shiraishi uses his ability to mimic all kinds of media – as long as they are cheap – to create a crazy, idiosyncratic world of cosmic horror and existential absurdity, with only occasional trips into the horrors of humanity itself, Banned from Broadcast is nearly exclusively – apart from the very first episode – about human horrors rather than supernatural ones.

On the surface, all episodes, be they about a poor, large family with rather more problems than their documentary format likes to admit to, or a village of people with suicidal ideation are meant to be sensational or cloyingly sentimental TV segments that didn’t make it to broadcast for one reason or another, the filmmakers apparently able to emulate the tone and style of such things as they are done in Japan to a T. But there are secrets hidden in the background – sometimes literally – and so the stories the films are apparently telling aren’t what they are actually about. Particularly early in the series, the films expect the audience to figure things out for themselves – there are usually no big exposition dumps or explanations about what really happened. You either figure things out, or you don’t, or you look up enthusiastic interpretations on the Net.

Later in the series, things do end on explanatory montages, and while these certainly make comprehension of the series’ undercurrents easier, these montages still lack full explanations; ambiguity and the series’ trust in an audience’s willingness to play detective stay strong throughout.

Banned from Broadcast, however, does always play fair with its clueing. If you’re looking in the right direction at the right time, you can figure things out early, rather like a video-based shin honkaku detective.

What is going on is usually based on a somewhat cynical view of humanity and especially contemporary Japan, apparently a place filled with cruelty, vengefulness, cults and conspiracies, a nastiness lingering right below the consciously quotidian shooting style. Typically, the fictional filmmakers and one other character are duped in some way – often for revenge – and everybody else is playing up to their expectations to achieve something unpleasant. There’s a pervading sense of paranoia and distrust running through most of the episodes, made even stronger through the authentic feel of the presentation. In these films, everybody lies, and more people than you’d imagine are prepared to do horrible things to someone else, for reasons good or bad.

To my eyes, all of this isn’t just very fine horror but also feels like a conscious update on the golden age mystery formula that’s so big in Japan. Just that where Kosuke Kindaichi can usually at least help establish some form of justice or order, we can only watch, aghast, and think.

Scream 7 (2026)

Because they fired Melissa Barrera for her anti-genocidal stance (clearly mightily controversial a position to have these days) and Jenna Ortega clearly knew a sinking ship actually captained by the damn rats when she was on one, this episode of the never-ending series of films about yet another killer dressing up like the one from the original Scream who will be revealed without any emotional or dramatic impact returns to the misadventures of the now married (to sheriff Joel McHale) Sidney (Neve Campbell). Because even the guys who directed the atrocious Scream 6 (to be fair, also the wonderful Ready or Not) have some standards, Kevin Williams isn’t just allowed to crap out a script that mostly suggests he hasn’t learned anything about writing in a very long career, but is also allowed to attempt to direct this shit show. And because Williams has heard about H20 and Halloween, there are bits and pieces of Jamie Lee Curtis’s stints as trauma mum in here, when Sidney’s daughter Tatum (Isabel May) – yup, named after the garage door victim - is threatened by yet another version of Ghost Face.

Is it a returning from the dead Matthew Lillard, or is the real killer deep faking with AI? And look, nerds! The unkillable Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox and all of the botox) returns. Not that anyone cares, because Williamson, who was once pretty good at this sort of thing, really can’t or won’t provide a script that bothers to make us care about any of the characters, particularly not the generic fodder that makes up Tatum’s peer group. On the plus side, killed characters in this one at least stay dead (for now).

Look, I can cope with a film made by people who are morally bankrupt – this is Hollywood after all, and I have enjoyed art made by even shittier people and companies – but couldn’t they have at least put their feet down and made something good? Hell, with this one, watchable would have been an improvement over Scream 6 already, but somehow, this entry into the franchise manages to be even worse. This leaves out everything that was good about NuScream – mostly the lead actresses, if we’re being totally honest – and doubles down on everything that’s bad, particularly the increasingly brain-fogged scripts, the non-characters, the way a series that once was proud of superficially criticizing slasher tropes now cannot even seem to attempt to escape those it created itself.

This time around, we are also attacked by weaponized nostalgia, none of which hits, because if anyone wants to see Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox in a Scream movie, they can do that in films that are at the very least well-crafted and not made by people who have left their conscience behind for Paramount’s sweet sweet MAGA money.

Three Films Make A Post: Blood, sweat and tutus.

Pretty Lethal (2026): A small troupe of perpetually quarrelling ballerinas – I’d be thankful if someone could explain the minor ballerina genre movie wave of the last twelve months or so to me – get on the bad side of some Hungarian gangsters and ex-ballerina Uma Thurman and thus have to apply their skills rather differently from their usual norm. Though, it turns out, ballet is a martial art.

For easy direct-to-streaming cinema, Vicky Jewson’s little film is a decent enough watch, pleasantly short and clearly sure of the kind of thing it wants to be. I’d rather have preferred it to have taken its own silly set-up a little more seriously instead of going the lazy route of being ironic about it, but of the three “ballerinas doing violence” movies I’ve seen in the last year or so, this is at least the most entertaining. Which doesn’t say too much, but hey, I take what I can get.

Afterburn (2025): A solar flare destroyed the Eastern hemisphere, leaving Europe a mess of minor warlords and grey ruins. Treasure hunter Jake (Dave Bautista) works for the perhaps not quite as terrible would-be king of Britain (Samuel L. Jackson), somewhat unwillingly, and is tasked to liberate the Mona Lisa from the continent. The plot will involve an evil Russian general (Kristofer Hivju) with fascist world (or what’s left of it) domination on his mind, as well as a beautiful freedom fighter (Olga Kurylenko). Also, a plot twist concerning the Mona Lisa nobody will ever have seen coming (ha).

I genuinely admire both Bautista and Kurylenko quite a bit, and always feel a bit sad when they waste their talents on something like this deeply uninspired action movie by J.J. Perry. Their presence, as well as Jackson’s willingness to put some effort into even the lamest nothing of a role, do their job of pulling this from being completely uninteresting into the realm of the vaguely watchable. Though for a guy coming from stunt and action work, Perry’s not terribly adept at directing stunts and action.

Raw File (2025): I found this piece of low budget POV horror about an investigator (Monica Oprisan) and her trusty cameraman (the voice of Alexander Bishop and the camerawork of director Aaron Dobson) having a very bad night in a large apartment complex while looking into a curious suicide to be a pleasant surprise. Once this gets going, the film shows some actual ambition: neat bits and pieces of lore and worldbuilding that cross ideas of the demonic with those of high strangeness are slowly revealed, some actual action is staged, and everything is presented without overstaying its welcome, leaving me pretty happy.

Deform (2020)

Original title: 変容

A group of nine students play at paranormal investigation and enter a derelict building upon which some kind of flying, glowing thing has supposedly descended. Ignorant of genre rules, the kids split up for their search of the building. One after the other, they are infected by a, curious, wormlike creature that spits mini-mes and transform them into creatures rather beyond my abilities of description, and most probably beyond comprehension. There’s also a creepy guy with a very peculiar dress sense running around, whose presence will be explained in a wonderfully cosmicist way that adds a bit of weird plot meat to the body horror meal.

Someone – not me – should really write an essay or ten about how much the sub-genres of body horror and cosmic horror have converged over the years in ways poor old HPL could never have imagined while getting grumpy about early Universal horror. Case in point is this lovely – at least by my very broad definitions of the term – piece of claymation by Shigeru Okada.

Claymation, a style of animation that’s all about physically transforming the sculptures you work with, is obviously an ideal style for body horror – all of these transformations we are allowed to witness are indeed real. Okada’s imagination lets his characters break out and down into some fascinatingly grotesque things – at least one of which suggests one of the Elder Things from “At the Mountains of Madness” to me – which I mostly have not seen quite like this before (which curiously lines up with the Brian Paulin gore movies I’ve also been watching these weeks).

These transformations aren’t just great, but also the absolute stars of the show, so much so, that about two thirds of the film’s slightly more than an hour of runtime consist exclusively of them. One can certainly argue there are a couple transformations too many here for the Deform to be genuinely well-paced, but then, I wouldn’t have known which ones to cut either, were I in the filmmaker’s shoes.

All of this culminates in a wonderful and awesome (in all meanings of the word) sequence that adds an exquisite sense of wonder to the grotesquery, and made me rather happy, as does Deform’s mere existence.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following his rather unwise decisions during the course of the second movie, everyone’s favourite dog-loving assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is on the run, hunted by the rest of the series’ weirdo assassin underworld, and excommunicated from all useful services of their underground world. He’ll have to call in old favours and murder an astonishing amount of mooks and mid-level bosses to perhaps get a chance at survival.

My first time watching Parabellum (which, adorably, will turn out to be a Latin/ammunition-based pun), I really loathed the film (and I’m not going to link to that short piece, because Now-Me is obviously right, until I’m going to change my mind again in the future). Clearly, that's not the case anymore. In fact, I’ve come around to really rather loving it.

I still believe it is not an ideal choice to finish an action film with epic ambitions like this on several fights between Keanu and actors who are simply much better screen fighters than he is - the man certainly has the right spirit, but even in his Matrix days, he has always been a bit stiff and awkward when tasked with unarmed fights, which does tend to look worse when he’s set against more naturally limber opponents like Mark Dacascos or Yayan Ruhian. But then, he does throw himself into the fights with full conviction.

Otherwise, today’s me finds it difficult to argue with Parabellum’s digital neon aesthetics, its commitment to absurd body counts achieved via complicated choreography, or its increasingly pulp baroque world building that’s at once absurd and wonderous.

Even the circular there and back again of the plot that irritated me the first time around makes thematic sense on my second go at the film. It is emblematic of how our dubious hero is trapped in an endless cycle of awesome/pointless violence and rules that only serve the rulers, with the added irony that it is exactly his historical adherence to these rules that lets others in his subculture cut Wick rather a lot of slack.

Three Films Make A Post: A man's got to know his limitations.

Magnum Force (1973): Probably not untouched by the accusations of fascist leanings levelled against Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, this second movie concerning the ridiculously violent police inspector – and let’s be honest here, incompetent investigator - Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), sees the guy fighting a group of vigilante cops who plan what amounts to a fascist coup in San Francisco of all places. At one point in time, ladies and gentlemen, fascists were indeed not ruling most countries in the world anymore. Just imagine.

Anyway, Ted Post’s film never really manages to explain why Harry is set against his vigilante colleagues, though it does attempt to make something of a strength out of it by having Eastwood look somewhat puzzled about it himself. In other regards, this is simply a very solid 70s action movie, with a couple of excellent set pieces, a lead actor who appears to be enjoying himself, and a finale full of dead Nazi cops.

Black Magic (1975): I remember having had not as much time for Ho Meng-Hua’s first Black Magic movie for the Shaw Brothers when I saw it last. On a rewatch, I have rather warmed to the film, especially the brutal way in which Ho lets overheated melodrama, exploitation and the ickiness of South East Asian black magic horror – here at its inception point for Hongkong cinema, as far as I understand – crash into each other, until things can only be solved through one of those absurd and wonderful magic battles one can’t help but love wholeheartedly.

I still prefer the second Black Magic, mind you.

Hardware (1990): These days, films like Richard Stanley’s trippy unauthorized adaptation of a 2000AD strip, with their nature destroyed by human hands, corrupt authorities and corporate rule do feel rather more poignant than most of us would have hoped for even a couple of decades ago, so this in part very silly movie about a rampaging bit of military technology hits harder than ever before in this regard.

If you can get through that, there’ still great delight to be found here: Stanley shoots his science fiction horror not like James Cameron, but as a giallo, with moments that manage to suggest the mythical or the supernatural without outright speaking of them, and a surprisingly daft hand at drawing dysfunctional relationships.

Kuei Chih-Hung’s Hex Trilogy (1980-1982)

(which is only a trilogy because the Shaw Brothers said so, but those are the rules of exploitation filmmaking.)

Hex (1980): The first Hex falls right into the middle of one of the Shaws’ small early 80s commercial renaissances, when suddenly, their black magic movies were a real commercial, centipede-filled proposition. Hex, though, particularly reminds me of a cross between Les Diaboliques and a Japanese kaidan, with only the last act that includes an incredible, beautiful and very very weird, colour-gel filled exorcism, going full on HK-weird when most movies would be starting to put their feet up for an epilogue.

Here, an abusive husband is drowned by his ill, long-suffering wife (Tanny Tien Ni not doing the femme fatale for once; I actually prefer her in this mode) and her new maid, only to apparently return as a ghost. There follow quite a few twists – even a few twists too many for my usual tastes, but Kuei (who also co-writes) times every reveal so well, I didn’t find myself caring about the implausibility and strained logic of certain “natural” explanations.

Visually, this is a deeply moody film, full of the darkest shadows, highly dramatically expressive weather, and drenched not only in rain showers but in all the colours of Hongkong horror, all of which fit melodrama as well as horror and the thriller form and its plot twists.

Hex vs Witchcraft (1980): So, following the success of Hex, the Shaws apparently felt the need to put a sequel out as quickly as possible. This went to cinemas only three months after the first film. How many centipedes had to die for the black magic needed to manage that magic trick? Apparently none. Instead, the studio got by simply renaming the next film Kuei was working on, a goofy gambler and ghost comedy in which a shiftless, luckless and deeply unlikable gambler (James Yi Lui) is pressed into marrying a female ghost who proceeds to wreak well deserved havoc on his life, and occasionally turns into a skeleton-faced ghost in a black widow’s dress that looks rather like a German Edgar Wallace krimi villain.

Apart from this having sod all to do with the first film – for obvious reasons – HvW also suffers from not being a great comedy. Now, it is true that comedy often doesn’t translate very well over language and cultural borders, so maybe there’s some great, clever wordplay here, or really funny dialogue. Though, given how much emphasis Kuei puts on “funny” noises on the soundtrack to remind the audience some bit of slapstick is supposed to be funny, I rather doubt the existence of hidden depths.

Be that as it may, physical comedy and slapstick do tend to translate well enough, and here, too, the film just falls flat. The timing of those scenes is off more often than not, and there’s also very little imagination on display when it comes to the set-up of the general physical goofiness. It’s all very bland and generic, and not even particularly interesting to look at.

Hex After Hex (1982): The final Hex keeps with the gambling and ghost comedy, but is an all around more accomplished film than its predecessor. Perhaps because our ghost Rosy’s (Nancy Lau Nam-Kai) new husband is portrayed by Lo Meng, whose martial arts training does give him a leg up in the realm of physical comedy (though you wouldn’t confuse him with Jackie Chan), or perhaps because the film generally has better ideas for its slapstick set-ups and includes a couple of the moments of copyright-smattering insanity so beloved of Hongkong cinema of this era – here, Rosy transforms first into a dime store yoda and then into a version of Darth Vader that has clearly studied magical girls anime – or perhaps because Kuei does at least from time to time display a bit of the visual imagination that makes his better movies so exciting.

This still isn’t a masterpiece, mind you, well, perhaps the climax is, but it is a marked improvement on the middle film of the not really trilogy.

Whistle (2025)

New kid at school Chrys (Dafne Keen) finds an ancient Mesoamerican whistle in her school locker. Soon, someone makes the mistake of blowing it, cursing all the teens present, who are now being haunted and killed by their future deaths in various more or less imaginative ways. Hooray for them, I suppose.

Despite a theoretically decent enough cast of young actors and in Corin Hardy a director who knows his way around around a mid-budget horror set piece (his The Nun being one of the few Conjuringverse movies I genuinely appreciate), this tale of teens cursed by a Mayan whistle (the Internet talks about an Aztec death whistle, but the film quite explicitly says Mayan – it’s nonsense in both regards anyhow) is as dire as everyone says it is.

Owen Egerton’s script is a total mess, lacking consistency and even the kind of out-there logic you can easily get away with in supernatural horror, and instead features wonky characterisation and character motivation, as well as a completely messy time line. And not in the classic Italian way of weirdness I delight in, but in the “we don’t actually give a crap, it’s just a horror movie anyhow” kind of way I particularly do not. Nothing here makes sense – hell, even the inscription on the whistle is in our Latin alphabet (and wouldn’t be something you could translate via an Internet translator, come to that), and what’s worse, nothing in the film carries any weight of mood or thematic connection.

What’s left are bits and pieces cobbled together from various teen horrors, and signifiers of It Follows, Final Destination and Smile that not only make the dangerous mistake of reminding me of much better movies but also make it clear that nobody involved in the production actually understood what they were trying to imitate.

But to finish on the only positive note I can come up with about this mess: I did genuinely appreciate how simply normal the film treats the fact its heroic lead romance is a Lesbian one.

Three Films Make A Post: The Pressure is Rising, The Adrenaline is Rushing, The Clock is Ticking

Run Lola Run aka Lola Rennt (1998): As a German born in the second half of the 70s, I really should have been all about Tom Tykwer’s hyperactive little action movie with an alternative timeline twist at the time. In actuality, I’ve watched it for the first time this week, and find myself half impressed by how much mileage Tykwer gets out of all the hallmarks of 90s cinema that usually make films ugly, if not just unwatchable.

Here, as is in some of the films of Dominik Graf, all of the stylistic excesses of a time of filmmaking turn into an actual style that feels like the only correct way to tell this particular story; or really, the style is the story here. Which does lead to my major problem with the film: its main characters may be really good at running, but are also spectacularly shitty people we are somehow supposed to care about because they are in love. Or something?

It’s not a deal breaker – I’ve cheered on even worse people in other movies after all – but also not exactly something to endear a movie to me.

The Last Sacrifice (2024): Speaking of not endearing, there’s this thing, a film that takes a Wikipedia-look level at an actual crime, uses bits and pieces of horror cinema that never really fit the voiceover talking at us to portray it, and suggests an influence of said crime on folk horror it never takes any effort to actually substantiate. It also tries to connect it to the cultural development of the UK without ever showing much of a grasp of that development beyond the most superficial talking points.

Like most true crime documentaries, and especially those with a horror bent, it’s shoddy, thoughtless and always more than a little offensive.

fuji_jukai.mov (2016): For quite some time, Katsumi Sakashita’s POV horror movie where footage of a film crew interviewing people of what we usually call Aokigahara forest in the West – and the film mostly calls jukai – is intercut with that supposedly shot by a girl going into the forest to commit suicide, accompanied by two other girls she met on the web who just want to watch, had been more of a rumour than an actual film outside of Japan.

It is a fine, low budget example of its form that sometimes shows its constraints in the performances and some unideal set design. Its emphasis on very human horrors and a central twist reminded me more than a little of the wonderful Banned from Broadcast series (more about them on a later date), but it certainly is on a level of accomplishment where that comparison is a compliment instead of to a film’s detriment.

Cryptic Plasm (2015)

David Gates (Joe Olson) and his camera operator buddy Brian O’Reilly (the film’s auteur Brian Paulin) are filming cryptozoological investigations for a rather shady guy who promises David the moon, though doesn’t actually publish the footage the two shoot.

After an experience in an empty town that has supposedly been influenced by a wormhole – or, as we the audience know, whatever it brought with it - that leaves particularly David shaken, the money guy commands them to shoot an exorcism, despite this not being David’s area of expertise.

During the exorcism, things go very wrong indeed, and soon demonic and cosmic influences are dragging various bodies apart.

I’m generally not the greatest fan of nor expert on underground gore style horror, so I’m somewhat surprised at finding myself delving quite vigorously into the filmography of New England indie gore auteur Brian Paulin. Though this certainly helps, it’s not only that I can’t help but admire the drive of someone who – together with recurring collaborators – has been making movies on home budgets since the early 90s, it’s that Paulin’s films show genuine power and invention.

Sure, the acting often isn’t terribly great, but it’s also earnest and serious in ways that keeps it from being a source of mockery, and has generally grown more sure over the years. And yes, on the visual side of the craft, the filmmaking is often pretty damn rough, yet it is rough in exactly the kind of way films that are all about mental and bodily transformations, rot and the many improbable and therefore awesome ways human flesh might be destroyed, transformed and turned into gloop, goo, and other g-words that surely must exist, should be. Even better, Paulin, in film after film, does come up with new and grotesque shapes to form his physical – no CG here, that’s for sure – material into forms I haven’t seen before. This way, the gore isn’t just an incredibly impressive demonstration of what you can make out of cheap materials but also feels individual and personal to Paulin’s imagination.

Cryptic Plasm, which was initially planned to be a web serial, shows the filmmaker at a point in his career where he’s clearly grown extremely sure of his craft, and so can add elements of POV horror to his arsenal that fit his general visual approach nicely and thicken the general thick, if certainly never pleasant, mood of proceedings further. The film’s pacing will probably be a bit leisurely at the beginning for some tastes, but this very specific vision of cosmic horror as gore freakout can use a bit of room to breathe before it truly gets going. And once it does, there’s no stopping until the entire cast has been turned into a mess of gloop, slime, blood and pus in ways that can make one more than a little queasy, in the best possible way.

Shelter (2026)

Mason, a man with a mysterious violent past because he’s played by Jason Statham, is hiding away alone on a pretty pathetic fallacy-prone Scottish island (actually portrayed by an Irish island, perhaps caused by a bout of whisky-based confusion). His only contact to the outside world are supply runs a man we’ll later learn to be an old friend makes for him. Said old friend also tends to bring his niece, the otherwise orphaned Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) with him on these runs. Not that Mason interacts with them, mind you – he stays in his former lighthouse, looking down, drinking, and being manly and sad.

Then, two catastrophes follow shortly after one another to shake up everyone’s life: First, Mason’s buddy is killed in a storm, and he saves and takes in Jessie, if she wants to or not. While the two are slowly warming to each other, the hermit’s former boss, publicly disgraced MI-5 boss Manafort (an evil Bill Nighy!), gets wind of our hero’s location and uses his old contacts, some manipulation, and his illegal electronic surveillance network to get Mason and the inconvenient as a witness Jessie killed. Clearly, their working relationship didn’t end on great terms.

The thing is, Mason is rather more difficult to kill than Manafort might like, particularly when he’s also needed to protect a child from harm, and does have some old contacts of his own.

Historically, I have never really loved Jason Statham’s body of work, but like an old, comfy, hairless, shoe, he has grown on me during the years. There’s a highly likeable quality to an actor who understands his strengths and his limitations in range and just proceeds to work inside them, at least from my perspective. Of course, the last two Statham vehicles, the insufferably stupid The Beekeeper and the MAGA-hat-wearing A Working Man, were still terrible movies with little entertainment value.

Shelter is more like it. Directed by variable journeyman director Ric Roman Waugh, this is a very standard back to basics “hardass protects young girl” kind of film, with a few accidental (?) jibes against the surveillance state, and a good handful of straightforward and effective action sequences. I found myself particularly enjoying the action here because it isn’t attempting to be crazy, or big, or particularly loud, but looks and feels like the product of a kind of sure craftsmanship that fits an aging Statham better than any attempt to get back to Crank.

And, though the Stat is a limited actor, a mix of experience with this kind of material, actual screen presence and some great chemistry with his young co-star Breathnach, do sell the relationship between these two, even if it is built on clichés. So much so, I found myself caring about the action not just because I like to watch action scenes in my action movies (who’d have thunk) but because I also bought into the film’s emotional stakes. More people directing Statham should try this approach.

As it stands, to me, this is a return to form for Statham. Or perhaps I should say a return to making the kind of movies I like to see Statham in.

Three Films Make A Post: They were divided by war. He united them in song.

The Choral (2025): This is the sort of very competently made, somewhat life-affirming drama that appear to only be made in the UK anymore. Some of its elements do strain historical believability a little – surely, the climactic choral performance is too modern(ist) in this context? – and there are a couple of scenes that don’t have the emotional impact they are supposed to have on me – the compassionate masturbation bit particularly comes to mind.

Otherwise, director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett evoke a time and a place and use this evocation to tell us something about people in times of social upheaval without it ever feeling didactic. Rather, this is done with grace, compassion, a sense of humour, and populated by actual characters brought to life by a brilliant cast – Ralph Fiennes really has quite a couple of years right now.

H Is for Hawk (2025): Staying in the UK, Philippa Lowthorpe’s adaption of an autobiographical book about a female academic (Claire Foy) who is avoiding coping with her grief about the death of her father (Brendan Gleeson) by hyperfocusing on training a goshawk contains one of the most believable portrayals of a real depressive episode I’ve seen in cinema – at least the kind of depression I have experience with (your symptoms may vary). Foy’s performance here is quite brilliant, nuanced and very human indeed.

Even though the film gets a bit too third act dramatic for real life in (surprise) its third act, this turns out not to be a film about a woman “getting over” mental illness by getting close to a bird as you’d probably expect, but something much messier, more complicated and more real that feels much closer to actual mental illness and the ways we cope with it than the easier version would have been. Which doesn’t mean this isn’t also full of perfect footage of a goshawk doing goshawk things, for just because the bird won’t save your life doesn’t mean it is of no import to it.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025): Belgian filmmakers Hélène Cattet’s and Bruno Forzani’s project of reflecting and intensifying the beautiful surfaces of European genre cinema of mostly the 60s and 70s – though in this one, there’s also quite a bit of Louis Feuillade added to the mix – until they turn even more abstract and weird than they already are continues. As with any good reflective surface, these films can be used as a mirror of whatever thematic interest or interpretative approach you prefer – I’m particularly fond of reading this one as a critique of the gender politics of European super spy films that still really likes looking at swankily dressed or nude, hot people; or as a meditation on the aesthetical losses of aging.

Though, honestly, I mostly prefer to fall into these films as dreams of exceeding, perhaps excessive, beauty.

Species (1995)

Some years before the start of the movie, SETI actually did get an answer from an alien source. Following some goodwill plans for a clean, inexhaustible energy source (still waiting on that one here), the aliens sent genetic information to be implanted in human egg cells to grow, well, who knows?

The government decided creating a human alien hybrid was worth a crack, so scientists under the leadership of one Fitch (Ben Kingsley) created a girl from the alien DNA plans – because women are more docile, donchaknow. Sil (as a young girl played by Michelle Williams), as they call her, grows up at a rapid tempo and appears to be exceptionally strong and agile. She does seem pleasant enough for someone growing up in a cage, however. Yet when she also develops the disturbing habit of growing H.R. Giger-style mutations under her skin, the decision is made to kill her and end the perhaps ill-advised experiment. Because who could have expected alien DNA to be alien! Obviously, the girl makes a dramatic escape.

On the run, while committing the occasional murder, Sil turns into a rather attractive young woman (Natasha Henstridge), who, as is tradition in certain cultures, goes to Los Angeles to procreate and thereby create who knows how many more aliens.

The government throws together a team consisting of Fitch, assassin style fixer Press (Michael Madsen), molecular biologist Laura (Marg Helgenberger), computer guy Arden (Alfred Molina) and empath Dan (Forest Whitaker) to catch and kill Sil before it is too late for humanity.

Leave it to the 90s to cross the genes of the erotic thriller with gigeresque alien ickiness on a mainstream budget, give it to not always inspired yet highly competent journeyman Roger Donaldson to direct, and make a commercial success out of it.

On the plot level, this is of course pulpy nonsense, but it’s the kind of pulpy nonsense that moves from one hormonal high and one great set piece to the next, has – apart from the badly aged CGI – absolutely great effects and sells every awesome bit of nonsense that comes to its mind with complete seriousness.

Of course, you can read the whole thing as a misogynist tractate about male fear of being seduced into fatherhood but occasionally murderous women (or something of that manner). You can also, if you want to, put a very different reading on the whole thing, and read it as the story of a young woman crushed by forces she has no control over whatsoever – one of them her own biology, the other parents whose only answer to her awakening sexuality and/or difference is to hunt and kill her when she steps out of line.

In any case, on this re-watch, years after I last saw the film, I’ve also realized how good Henstridge’s performance is, quite apart from her willingness to undress. The way she shifts from Sil’s childish naivety into ruthless predator mode, the little notes of regret and desperation – it’s probably more than the film’s script asked of her. Otherwise, the impressive cast doesn’t care they are in a pretty silly kind of science fiction/horror/action exploitation flick, and though there’s little substance to the characters, everyone offers presence, the small actorly notes that bring these kinds of roles to life and a sense of taking their craft seriously.

The older I get – and, perhaps ironically, the less important a generous heaping of nudity becomes to me – the more I’ve learned to appreciate Species. Make of that what you will.

Dracula: A Love Tale (2025)

In a more honest world, this would be titled “Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula By Yet Another Guy Who Didn’t Read The Damn Book”.

Given how much this attempts to rip off Coppola’s version of Dracula in places, this should be a nice way for the old vintner to recoup some of those Megalopolis losses. But then, I wouldn’t want to be connected to Besson’s movie-shaped object either, even for a lot of money, so Besson is probably save. When I say Besson rips off Coppola, I actually mean to say he tries to remake Coppola’s Dracula, but apparently can’t recreate anything of that movie’s idiosyncratic vision of never contained horniness, mood of gothic excess, or visual and stylistic pull.

Everything taken from other sources here is like a bad xerox copy, a shadow that only reminds us of other films that made the same thing but with artistic intent and vision, or at least a hold on simple craftsmanship.

The things Besson adds are goofy, inane and just plain stupid – I’ve been arguing that Besson simply either isn’t very bright or believes his audiences aren’t for years – to a degree that should actually make the film enjoyable as the product of someone’s rampaging Id (somewhat like Argento’s version of Dracula, which I genuinely enjoy and thus prefer to this one). After all, this is a film that replaces the standard sexy vampire brides with crappy CGI gargoyles, has a time-skipping montage during which Dracula invents a rape, sorry, seduction perfume that causes women to find Dracula irresistible and to break out in musical numbers you have to see to believe, and features a tower of horny nuns, so it should at least be more than a little entertaining. Unfortunately, apart from the few moments of insanity, this is simply dull, leadenly paced – there’s no reason for this to be more than two hours long, seventy minutes feel about right – and for most of its running time simply lacks what saved some of Besson’s other, just as deeply stupid, films from being boring: visual imagination.