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.

Three Films Make A Post: It's Light… It's Bright… It's 100 Proof!

Ghost Train (2025): YouTuber Da-kyeong (Joo Hyun-young) revives her ailing horror channel with stories about Korea’s most haunted subway station as told to her by one of the men working there. At first, these stories seem like disconnected tales, but eventually, they entwine with Da-kyeong’s own life in ways she probably didn’t hope for.

For an anthology movie, the single tales in director Tak Seo-woong’s film can feel a little slight at first, particularly since they do tend to go for the standard tropes and shocks of Korean horror, with more than a smidgen of the Japanese 2chan style. However, each episode here does feature at least one strong, creepy image, and the way everything eventually comes together is pretty satisfying as well, so things are far from being as bland as the film’s beginning – or its title - would suggest.

Hue and Cry (1947): Directed by Charles Crichton, this film about a bunch of older boys in post-War London spoiling the plans of a master criminal did put British Ealing studios on the road to the sort of comedy we now know as the Ealing style of comedy, following the more traditionally comedian-centred efforts they made before. There’s a sharp eye for darkness and human foibles here, yet also a subversive sense of the little guy (in this case young men and boys somehow manoeuvring the direct post-war world), mostly ignored by the powers that be, sticking up for themselves as a community.

In this case, the kids are up against robbers who use not-Sexton Blake Brit pulps for children to message one another, as well as various forms of grown-up cowardice and hypocrisy. More importantly, the film is paced like race car, still genuinely funny in many regards, and makes great use of the rubble of the post-war years.

Whisky Galore! (1949): Speaking of Ealing comedies, in this one, directed by by Alexander Mackendrick, a Scottish island population, dried out of the Water of Life, attempts to steal many cases of whisky from a stranded government ship transporting it. Along the way, the film pulls at stiff upper lips, puritanical religion, and even solves two different romances with a sense of humour that goes from silly to subversive to the outright bizarre. There’s a bit concerning the power of a good bagpipes blow-out you really have to see to believe.

Only, there are very few Scotspeople involved here, so expect many a risible fake accent – I’m convinced Joan Greenwood doesn’t know the difference between Scotland and Wales, though her Welsh accent is really dreamy – and ideas about Scottish national identity that might not stand the sniff test. On the other hand, this is still a movie about a Scottish island getting one over the Brits in the name of alcoholism, so…

The Discarnates (1988)

Original title: Ijin-tachi to no natsu

TV movie writer Hidemi Harada (Morio Kazama) has been having rather a hard time of it at the beginning of the movie. He might be very successful at his job, but he has just gotten divorced, his relationship to his teenage son is basically non-existent, and he has reached the point in life where one takes a good long look in the mirror and can’t lie to oneself anymore about one’s flaws of character or conduct. He’s also thinking a lot about the past, especially the loss of his parents when he was just twelve years of age.

Harada has moved into a nearly empty apartment building, where only one other apartment appears to be rented out. The inhabitant of that apartment, a woman we’ll later learn is called Kei (Yuko Natori), would really rather get to know Harada very closely, but her first, weird, nightly attempt at throwing herself at him is harshly rebuffed by him.

A summer night or so later, Harada ends up in Asakusa, the quarter of town where he spent his early childhood when his parents were still alive. Here, he meets his father (Tsurutaro Kataoka), looking the same age he was when he died, and acting as if their meeting were a completely normal occurrence. Invited home to what looks a lot like their old place, Harada is also reintroduced to his mother (Kumiko Akiyoshi), also looking very lively and very young.

Because spending time with these two brings back an amount of happiness he can barely remember ever having felt, Harada returns to spend time with the couple again and again. At the same time, he also starts on a romance with Kei, who has some curious hang-ups about showing him her breasts, which he respects in a way you’d not at all expect from Japanese man in the 80s.

It would be a happy time all around, if not for the fact that Harada’s typically good health starts to fail rapidly. Why, looking in a mirror, he looks rather like one would imagine one of the walking dead.

One of my movie plans this year has been to watch more of the body of work of Nobuhiko Obayashi beyond the glorious Hausu, and by now, it has become clear that thematically rich insanity is only one of the strains of Obayashi’s work. Another one is that of a knowing nostalgia, a nostalgia that is perfectly clear about how memories are constructed and re-shaped into stories we tell ourselves, yet treated in a way that’s also not willing to simply discard these stories, or their impact upon one’s life, as foolishness.

If he wants to, Obayashi can be a deeply controlled director, and so much of The Discarnates consists of dramatically heightened yet precisely observed scenes of human interaction; until very late in the film, where a short yet wonderful freakout is accompanied by some choice Puccini, the supernatural is suggested through colour scheme rather than special effects. Specifically, the colours of the world Harada steps into with his parents are, like the colours of remembered childhood, richer, more intense and warmer – certainly, this is what the idealized happiness of the past must look like (though Obayashi prefers sepia tones for this sort of thing in many of his others films).

Eventually, the film does take on darker shades, when melancholia and guilt become dominant shades and textures, but these, Harada (eventually) and the film accept as an organic part of the world, and the way it shapes people. There’s nothing cruel about Obayashi’s treatment of Harada, here or anywhere – like Harada, he’s conscious of failings but also believes in growth, and a kind of change that is strengthened by being rooted in the past instead of eternally living in it.

So, like much of Obayashi’s work, this is a film about growing up, just this time around the growing beyond we do in adulthood, when we’re lucky.

Return to Silent Hill (2026)

Having received a letter from his dead wife Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), artist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) returns to Silent Hill, the place where they were once happy (or actually weren’t more often than not going by later flashbacks), but that is now consumed by recurring quotes from the videogame this adapts, which appear with little rhyme or reason and are completely divorced from the rich metaphorical quality they had in the game. Also, lots and lots of these flashbacks, establishing things that don’t need to be established, while also showing us things that make the idea of James returning to Silent Hill for any reason utterly preposterous.

Despite the amounts of harsh criticism thrown at Christophe Gans’s return to the Silent Hill franchise (sorry), I went into this one with a degree of optimism. Gans’s first foray into the world of Silent Hill did take some years to be appreciated, after all, and this does attempt to adapt an absolute masterpiece of a game rich in suggestion and ambiguity which also manages to be richly metaphorical in every part of its design.

However and alas, I can’t imagine any reappreciation happening to this abomination, a film that manages to at once overexplain everything and be nearly completely incoherent, that attempts to squeeze in every single bit of iconic imagery of the game – there are way too many shots that attempt to reproduce damn cut scenes – while clearly having not the faintest idea what that imagery actually means. As an adaptation, this seems to have been created by someone without any comprehension of the material they are working with – which is curious since this is made by the same guy who clearly did show such comprehension two decades ago.

But then, this doesn’t feel at all as if it was made by the same Christophe Gans who made Brotherhood of the Wolf or Silent Hill – or hell, even Crying Freeman. There’s none of the visual flair on display here that once was the director’s strength, nor of his ability to present bullshit with such conviction it becomes utterly captivating and even rather convincing. Instead, this version of Gans can’t even handle simple establishing shots properly.

Though, it has to be said, Doppelganger-Gans and his Return to Silent Hill do manage to provoke the kind of reaction in me that doesn’t happen all that often these days when it comes to movies – they make me genuinely angry.

Three Films Make A Post: Dangerously close to human.

Primate (2025): In some of the circles I move in, Johannes Roberts’s rabid chimpanzee movie has caught a decent amount of praise as a throwback to the better animal attack movies of our pre-CGI past.

Alas, I don’t really see it. Sure, there are some nice enough gore gags – though they never go quite as far as you’d hope for, so a face may be ripped off but isn’t in danger of being eaten by a rabid chimpanzee – but a bit of the old blood and guts isn’t enough to distract from the film’s massive pacing problems, the characters’ lack of interest, or the general generic blandness of the script when there’s nothing else to get excited about.

My Learned Friend (1943): The last comedy Will Hay made for Ealing Studios before his death, directed by Hay and Basil Dearden, does put the comical duo of Hay and posh straight man Claude Hulbert against a serial killer (Mervyn Johns), prefiguring the dark humour to be found in later Ealing outings like Kind Hearts and Coronets. There’s not as much subversion as you’d hope for if you’re coming to the film from later Ealing comedies, and it does drag a little even with a short runtime of 74 minutes, but there are a couple of moments of genuine inspiration here, and whenever inspiration fails, always the basics of good filmmaking to fall back on.

Oily Maniac (1976): I’d love to enjoy Shaw Brothers exploitation maestro Ho Meng-Hua’s tale of a lowly, handicapped lawyer (Danny Lee Sau-Yin in one of his better performances) turning into the titular Oily Maniac to murder various assholes like an oily, murderous Hulk more than I actually do. But this one seems so fixated on rape, and loves to stop the little plot it has for side-tracks that are simply not terribly interesting, I really only love the scenes where Lee empties oil over his head to transform, and the monster suit does its monster suit business. The rest of the film is either too unpleasant or just a little bit dull – a curious yet deadly combination.

The Vampires of Coyoacán (1974)

Original title: Los vampiros de Coyoacán

Warning: there will be some third act spoilers!

A horrifying elderly luchador known as El Espectro (Nathanael León aka Franquestain) kills his opponents in the ring, despite moving as slow as an old man, um, zombie. Apparently, making a habit of this sort of thing is okay per Mexican law as of 1974 as long as it happens in the ring.

While the elderly threat is hanging in the background, lucha heroes Mil Máscaras (Mil Máscaras) and, alas, Superzan (Superzan) are called in by one Dr Thomas (Carlos López Moctezuma) to help him out with a little family problem: his daughter Nora (Sasha Montenegro) is suffering from a strange illness. How strange? The good doctor is utterly convinced she is being targeted by a vampire, who regularly visits her to slowly suck her dry. Mil and Superzan are easier convinced of the supernatural threat than the more sceptical El Santo or Blue Demon would have been, so they are soon staking out creepy mansions, watching a group of little people vampires carrying a coffin through the darkness and wrestling said little people vampires (because this is an Agrasánchez production), as well as hipster vampires. They are ably assisted by paranormal investigator Dr Wells (Germán Robles, cast as a vampire hunter instead of a vampire, probably to confuse us).

And what of El Espectro? He is obviously part of the vampire problem.

If you are into the joyfully cartoonish side of lucha cinema – or like me, into all of its sides, except the one featuring mostly filler or comedians whose shticks don’t translate – Arturo Martínez’ Vampires of Coyoacán is a rather wonderful experience. That is, unless you’re wrestles into submission by its beginning, which features a fifteen minutes lucha sequence with no importance to the film’s plot at all, shortly followed by another one, that at least kicks off the El Espectro subplot. Though it has to be said that the cut-able lucha sequence is dynamically choreographed enough not to put one to sleep, which isn’t always that way in Agrasánchez films.

Following that, it’s all acid rock driven joy: rubber bats, cheap but cheerful Mexican 70s gothic production design lit in all the colours of horror as instituted into law by Maestro Bava in Italy, shot by Martínez with surprising enthusiasm, borrowings from Dracula as well as from Doctor Mabuse, the usual luchadores versus vampires battles, little people that are indeed vampires this time around, luchadores versus younger more gothy/hipsterish vampires (who are even somewhat creepy) business. Whatever you can ask of this sort of thing, the film offers it in spades, all driven by a huge amount of pulpy energy that isn’t always a given at this developmental stage of the lucha genre.

It does of course help that Mil and his funky wardrobe are among the liveliest presences in lucha cinema – that man can dress as well as move – so much so even the dreaded Superzan doesn’t manage to annoy me.

From time to time, the film even makes clear that it is indeed a product of the more downbeat 70s, so you also get elements of a decidedly unhappy ending, where a young vampire woman first murders here father and then, realizing what she’s done, sets herself on fire and dies screaming. Which is quite the thing in a silly movie about luchadores fighting vampires.

Legend of the Shadowy Ninja: The Ninja Dragon (1990)

Original title: Kûsô-kagaku ninkyô-den: Gokudô ninja Dosuryû

For centuries, the bloodline of the Nindo yakuza clan has been protected by three magical ninjas whenever real trouble reared its head . After the ninja appear to high school age Nindo daughter Shinobu (Etsuko Araoda) in a dream and gift her a magical protective amulet that she takes with her into waking life, the girl quickly learns why ninja protection can be needed.

Two improbably strong and hardy people are murdering yakuza left and right – the film never bothers to tell us if the victims are part of the Nindo-gumi – as part of some vague yakuza domination to country domination to world domination plan of the also freakishly strong Go Ranjuji (good old Rikiya Yasuoka). Shinobu, though, Ranjuji doesn’t want to see murdered. He wants to marry the high school kid so she can produce “thousands and thousands of eggs” for him, as you do. This really is a job for magical ninja.

This OVA/V-Cinema movie is anime and manga royalty Go Nagai’s only foray into directing live action, and what it lacks in having anything like an actual narrative, it does make up for in cool, cheap, and pretty damn awesome practical effects. Ever wanted to see Rikiya Yasuoka rip a guy’s face off and then lick what’s below? Ever wanted to see Rikiya turn into a thing out of Screaming Mad George’s dreams? Go Nagai has all your Rikiya needs covered.

Visually, there’s a budget conscious mix of cramped frames and sudden bursts of Steadicam, and at least an attempt to provide visual interest in every single scene, even when it’s just letting the camera slowly move from one off-kilter angle to another. There’s a certain amateurish energy to Nagai’s direction here that works well for a film that doesn’t really want to tell anything amounting to a story, and while I wouldn’t recommend this to civilians, if you have any interest in Nagai, or practical effects-based direct to video movies from Japan, or films that include a random scene in the climax where Cutie Suzuki wrestles, unconvincingly, or just films where ninjas fight aliens, you’ll probably have a reasonably good time here. I certainly had, but that’s only to be expected.

Three Films Make A Post: Can you keep a secret?

The Housemaid (2025): On paper, I absolutely appreciate Paul Feig’s attempt to update the old erotic thriller formula for the 90s, but in practice, I found the resulting movie mostly dull. It is much, much too long for what it is – there’s at least half an hour of redundant repetition in here – and its self-conscious trashiness neither reaches the joys provided by simple, actual trashiness nor does it do much that’s really surprising in any way in its twists on the formula.

I also wish Feig had found a shared tone for his actors: Amanda Seyfried is all turned up to campy eleven, Sydney Sweeney aims for slightly zoned out naturalism, and Brandon Sklenar stays on “sleepy” even when he’s supposed to become anything but.

Blood Beast of Monster Mountain (1975): This is its very own, one-of-a-kind type of nonsense: one Donn Davison (“world traveller, lecturer and psychic investigator”) tries to bend a ten years old unfunny bigfoot comedy into a Legend of Boggy Creek shaped form. He can’t, so the audience is threatened by everything that’s horrible about bad low budget comedy – the film’s “funny” protagonist is called “Bestoink Dooley” as a marker of the ensuing horrors – with the added frisson of watching multi-un-talented Davison “interview witnesses”.

If you’re suffering from the same kind of movie sickness as I do, this probably does sound at least somewhat fun, but in actuality, you’re better off gazing into the abyss than at this one.

We Bury the Dead (2024): On the other hand, I was very positively surprised by Zak Hilditch’s treatment of a localized zombie apocalypse as an excuse to explore grief and guilt. Daisy Ridley is actually a fine actress for this sort of thing, and while this is not going to make anyone happy who is looking for a gory zombie apocalypse film, this is a very pleasant example of a a movie about a personal apocalypse.

Doctor of Doom (1963)

Original title: Las luchadoras contra el médico asesino

Mexico City is in a panic: young women are kidnapped, only to be found dead days later with curious head injuries.

As we the audience learn early on, a masked and mysterious mad scientist and his helpers are responsible for the dastardly deeds. They’re not actually out to kill these women, but “only” need them as subjects for their brain transplant experiments. Alas, or so the mad scientist explains, normal human bodies are just too weak to withstand the awesome power of this kind of science, therefore the dead women. But unwilling sacrifices need to be made, right?

There only survivor (Gerardo Zepeda) of earlier experiments is slowly devolving into an ape-man, but is at least useful when it comes to fighting off the police. Not that those guys are of much use, mind you.

Somewhat fortunately, the villains’ latest victim is the sister of luchadora Gloria Venus (Lorena Velázquez), who, together with her new partner, US import Golden Rubi (Elizabeth Campbell), will involve herself in the investigation with rather more success than the cops.

For an early 60s lucha monster movie, René Cardona’s Doctor of Doom is rather surprisingly explicitly feminist in form and function, treating the female wrestlers as the same kind of hero you’d expect of their male colleagues, just having to present more glamorously while going about their business of fighting mad science and mad science’s products.

Though, again to my surprise, Cardona also portrays the kind of nonsense women have to go through El Santo never had to put up with, like having to romance mostly incompetent cops that talk as if they were solving the case while the luchadoras do all the work. There are some delightful reversions of lucha tropes here as well, like when romantic lead cop number one gifts one of those genre-typical radio watches to Gloria so she can call him when she needs help, only to be the one needing to use it to call her and Rubi to get him and his comic relief colleague out of a death trap. Also delightful is how sarcastically Campbell flirts with said comic relief colleague (while towering over him) – where the script might mean this as serious flirtation, the actress clearly doesn’t.

Apart from this inspiring and, again, delightful, feminist content, Doctor is the full load of everything awesome about lucha cinema, made at a time when the budgets where comparatively high, and really moody black and white photography was possible. Expect every joy of pop and pulp cinema you can imagine, treated with verve, a smile, and more than one good mad scientist rant, and delight as Velázquez and Campbell project a sense of fun not all of their masked brothers got, while also having much bigger hair.

Three Films Make A Posthouse

The Eternal Daughter (2022): I generally tend to avoid the style of arthouse movies concerning the horrible suffering of posh people from some Freudian bullshit or other or moaning about the oh so terrible emptiness of their lives Joanna Hogg deals in, but when a film is supposed to conjure up the shadow of the 70s Ghost Stories for Christmas, I can’t really resist. And yes, there are some inspired moody shots of the kind Lawrence Gordon Clark dealt in to be found here, and those are certainly artfully done. But there’s also the fact this thing purporting to be a ghost story about grief often seems more like one about a rich person suffering from a bad experience with the hotel staff, which, personally, mostly makes me grief the lack of a guillotine in the hotel’s backroom.

At least Tilda Swinton must have been happy, for she gets to play one of those double roles she clearly relishes.

Summer of Demon (1981): While I’m complaining about ghost stories that don’t build an emotional connection to me as audience, Yukio Ninagawa’s version of Yotsuya Kaidan manages the unthinkable, namely, to make me feel nothing about the tale of Oiwa’s ghost. Coming from a successful career as a director of plays – apparently particularly Shakespeare – Ninagawa overcompensates for his inexperience in screen direction with a lot of distracting, busy camerawork that typically adds nothing to a scene and a lack of focus on the core of the story he’s telling. Kenichi Hagiwara makes a flat Iemon, and Keiko Takahashi’s Oiwa isn’t interesting alive or as a ghost here.

It doesn’t help Ninagawa’s case that I have seen Tai Kato’s much superior version just some months ago, and so have ample comparison points to the detriment of this one.

Posthouse (2025): Thus, the best of this entry’s bunch of movies is Nikolas Red’s tale of an (actually real) lost Pinoy silent horror movie, bad family business, and the danger of obsessing about art. You do need to have some patience with this one, though: the acting is never quite sharp enough for the complex emotions the script suggests, the visual side has a rather cheap, digital look, and the fake silent movie pieces are creepy but never convince as what they are supposed to be.

Still, there’s something genuine, serious and interesting about this one that makes it well worthy of some attention and some thought.

Mother of Flies (2025)

College student Mickey (Zelda Adams) fights a recurring battle with cancer. This time around, neither chemo nor radiation therapy are helping, and she has reached the point of desperate measures. So Mickey, accompanied by her father Jake (John Adams), goes to the proverbial witch in the woods for help. Solveig (Toby Poser), as she is called, promises her rituals can cure Mickey during the course of three nights and days at her home.

Mickey desperately wants to believe, and Jake can’t get himself to, despite wanting his daughter very much to survive. Both don’t realize the kind of prize Solveig might ask, or what Solveig truly is.

By now, the Adams family – as usual this was co-directed by Zelda Adams, John Adams and Toby Poser – have developed such a strong, personal style in their low budget indie filmmaking, they are to me on the level of individuality people like Rollin or Franco achieved, if in ways free of fetishism and very much their own. Their films are certainly more easily relatable to the more mainstream viewer, but they are also lacking compromise for easier digestibility and show a personal aesthetic sense of the kind that comes from love (for movies as well as for one’s co-conspirators), working with instead of against financial constraints, and by now very well developed technical chops most filmmakers working on this private a level simply can’t achieve.

Mother of Flies is dominated by a sense of poetry that merges with the film’s recalibration of witch tropes and the impact cancer had on the family in real life to become something very special – life-affirming in its love for the macabre and deeply affecting in its genuine emotionality. Authenticity does get a bad rep sometimes, but I find myself drawn to this kind of truthfulness.

Being genuine seems a central concern to the Family’s filmmaking. These are not films trading in irony or distance of any kind, which might be a problem for some viewers.

But then, how could it be otherwise in films where every tiny detail you see on screen is created by the same handful of people?

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to a world of hurt.

Predator: Badlands (2025): Objectively, this film about a young, outcast Predator ending up with an RPG party, is a terrible mistake following returning director Dan Trachtenberg’s clever Prey. It’s silly, self-indulgently so, weirdly shaped and goes out of its way to rob the Predators of their last remaining mystique. However – and this is going to be a bit of refrain in this post – it is also a whole load of fun, following the rule of cool with such wild abandon critiquing it for a lack of substance would make me one of those people who eat puppies. Also also, Elle Fanning is much better as a funny, wisecracking sidekick than anyone could have ever expected.

Honey Don’t! (2025): The general tenor towards Ethan Coen’s solo films – or in actuality, his films made in co-operation with Tricia Cooke who happens to also be his wife – is harsh to a degree that nearly made me miss this lesbian noirish private eye comedy until it’s not thing, as it did with the film he made before. Sure, this is not a resounding, eternal masterpiece, nor a deep comment on the shape of the world (though the shape of the world is very much visible in it), but then, it’s pretty clear that’s simply not the kind of film Coen & Cooke set out to make. Instead, this is a film all about the filmmakers having fun with plot elements, ideas and tropes they like, namely Lesbians, hard-boiled private eyes, small evils that believe themselves to be big evils, noir, serial killers, and all kinds of weirdness. The result isn’t focussed, sometimes goes off on tangents that don’t quite pay off, but most of the time, is as fun as the filmmakers appear to be having with it. Plus, Margaret Qualley manages to go through all of the film’s tonal shifts in a way that makes it look easy.

Drive-Away Dolls (2024): Having had this amount of fun with Honey Don’t! did obviously lead me directly to also watching Coen & Cooke’s earlier film, also starring Margaret Qualley (among many other delightful thespians, of course), containing even more lesbians, even more off-beat humour, and rather less darkness. Being a road movie comedy, this does get even shaggier than Honey Don’t!, sinks its brow quite a few inches, and contains some ill-advised moments that point directly to The Big Lebowski, but keeps a sense of fun and a heart that can’t quite be cynical all of the time, which is the kind of heart I can identify with the most these days.

Honestly, if Cooke & Coen make films like these two for the – hopefully very, very long – rest of their lives, I’ll be there to watch them.

Three Films Make A Post: Is that a werewolf in your stomach?

Diva in the Netherworld aka 歌姫魔界をゆく(1980): An idol pop duo – one of whose members happens to be an ex-wrestler as well as a vampire – and their manager – who in turn happens to be a werewolf – strand in the mansion of a cannibal (she might be an oni) and her stop motion pet dragon. Given that description, its miniscule budget and its pleasantly short runtime of 63 minutes, Takafumi Nagamine’s weird little movie should be a very fun time of the old “oh, those crazy Japanese” kind. In actuality, most of the film is terribly, so much so even its pieces of loveable insanity – like the moment in the last act when the wrestling vampire lady does a proper henshin into a silver-faced bat heroine – don’t hit very well.

Also, to whoever wrote the plot synopsis that’s all over the internet – please learn the difference between idols and opera singers.

Stigmatized Properties: Possession (2025): Where his old J-horror cohort Takashi Shimizu – to take an obvious example – has kept a core of a personal style, Hideo Nakata from about the 2010s on has turned into something of a faceless journey man director who is making technically proficient films that typically lack any kind of personality. This highly episodic horror comedy about a rookie actor trying to enhance his profile by sleeping in haunted properties is a case in point – it’s not a terrible movie, but there’s such a lack of invention and interest in the material in Nakata’s approach, I dislike it more than I’d do a simple failure. Failures, after all, imply someone is trying.

The Incredible Robert Baldick: Never Come Night (1972): I didn’t know the BBC did the whole “testing the waters for a TV show via TV movies” thing like her US siblings, but this is indeed such a film that never made it to series. Written by Terry Nation – as you know, Jim, a rather important writer in the early years of Doctor Who – this was apparently thought of as a potential Doctor Who replacement, which fortunately didn’t happen.

Unfortunately, this does feel like the start of something rather special. As a standalone filmlet, this is a lovely piece of telefantasy, operating very much in the idea realm of 70s Who and Nigel Kneale, full of fun ideas for its central character and his world that would have been nice to see explored in a series. Apart from a fun and fast supernatural – or is it? – plot, there are some excellent bits and pieces here about class – the madeira scene is brilliant –, the value of knowledge, and the nature of belief.

An Ode to Yakuza (1970)

aka Yakuza Masterpiece

aka The Big Pay-Off

Original title: Yakuza zesshô

Mid-level yakuza Minoru (Shintaro Katsu) hasn’t ever met a problem he didn’t solve with violence. Even though this does lead to a degree of respect among his thuggish brothers, he is not a man equipped for much of a visible emotional range between rage and the kind of nastiness you’d expect this kind of man to show towards, say, women like his girlfriend Kanae (Kiwako Taichi).

The only exception here is Minoru’s eighteen years old half-sister Akane (Naoko Otani), whom he has taken care of since she was a little girl. To Akane, he’s about as sweet and kind as he can be, or at least he believes he is. To the outside observer he’s controlling and overbearing, trying to run his sister’s life even though she’s very well equipped to have more than just a little say in her own life story. In truth, Akane can’t help but notice an undertone of more than just brotherly affection from him, something, to be fair to the guy, Minoru can’t even quite admit to himself. Obviously, he is driving away every man interested in Akane is merely because he is being protective, right?

When the film starts, Akane has just about had enough of the whole thing, and decides the best way to get Minoru off her case is to seduce one of her teachers, so Minoru will have to stop seeing her as a pure, little girl.

Which isn’t even the emotional breaking point of Yasuzo Masumura’s pretty incredible melodrama, but a good enough point to understand where the director is going with his film.

Seen from a certain perspective, the tiny yakuza sub-plot and the film’s title(s) can seem stitched on to an intense, somewhat sleazy melodrama, but really, is there a better example for a kind of traditional patriarchal brutishness that treats excluding (at best), using, and mistreating women as a matter of principle than the yakuza?

And isn’t is exactly this sort of social machinery that drives the – most often at least quietly feminist – genre of the melodrama? So this isn’t so much a case of Masumura cheating with labels as him looking at the yakuza world from an angle even critical traditional yakuza movies tend to avoid.

This is, social aspects aside, of course also a film about people who drive each other to desperation out of ideas about love and identity that can’t come together, love – and Minoru and Akane do indeed love one another in their ways – that can only express itself destructively, and acts of escape that only make everyone’s situation that much worse.

All of this is driven by Masumura’s subtly heated direction that seems to trap his characters in the abyss of their own feelings, but also by two fantastic central performances. Katsu – one of the all-time greats in Japanese genre cinema not just because of the Zatoichi films – manages to make Minoru brutal, ugly, and genuinely disgusting, but also as sad and lost as any man you’d care to imagine, controlled by pressures internal and external he genuinely can neither grasp nor understand; whereas the very young Otani shows Akane’s intelligence and courage, her awakening understanding of love and her own sexuality as well as the way her brother’s brokenness has already begun to cause cracks in herself as a complex web of emotions she desperately needs to escape.

So, Yakuza Masterpiece is the proper title for this, even though the deeply ironic An Ode to Yakuza is probably the better one.

Night Falls (1952)

Original title: La noche avanza

Jai-alai (google that one, kids) player Marcos (Pedro Armendáriz) is quite the piece of work. Convinced by his past and present successes to be the same kind of Nietzschean superman as his later Brazilian brother in spirit Coffin Joe, he lords his superiority about everyone he encounters in life, pushing men in the shittiest macho ways he can come up with (and he has the imagination to go with it), and seducing women left and right, to then mistreat them to his heart’s content.

He’s getting away with it, too, or rather, he has been getting away with it until he impregnates good bourgeois daughter Sara (Anita Blanch) and drops her in the most underhanded way possible. Turns out he isn’t quite as great as he thinks he is, and even his impressive talent for weaselling out of trouble will not keep him away from what’s coming for him forever.

I tend to be somewhat sceptical about movies whose main goal appears to be showing horrible people being horrible, and then detailing their eventual karmic (or otherwise) punishment, mostly because spending time with assholes isn’t typically my idea of a good time, and I only have a limited degree of sadism inside me to really enjoy watching cruel but just punishments.

However, Roberto Gavaldón’s highly melodramatic noir is a clear exception to that rule. Armendáriz is delightfully hissable a villain, so smug, so full of the kind of shitty pseudo-philosophy you’ll find in today’s manosphere, it does indeed become a joy to witness his eventual fall. Gavaldón never attempts to make the man likeable or give him even the tiniest redeeming quality (unless you believe “is good at sports” to be one, but the director clearly doesn’t). Marcos is simply the living embodiment of what’s worst in all of us, or at least us men, using and abusing his position, the perks his gender provides him with, and other people’s inability to believe anybody could be a scumbag of quite his dimensions.

Even once Marcos gets in trouble, the suspense here isn’t built on seeing him finding increasingly desperate methods to get away, but in the hopes for witnessing his eventual punishment. Though, the film even doesn’t leave him in peace even once he’s dead: the final scene shows a placard with Marcos’s name blown into the dirt on a streetcorner, a dog urinating on it (!), and a garbage collector carrying the whole mess off.

Gavaldón shoots all this in the all the black and white colours of the true noir, where heightened intensity is the norm, and suspense scenes happen to everyone.

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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