Three Films Make A Post: This Dogg's got a bone to pick.

Amusement (2008): This sort of slasher by John Simpson is rather irritating. It looks really fantastic, it is slickly directed, and Katheryn Winnick is a fine final girl, but the script (by Jake Wade Wall, apparently otherwise one of the go to guys for pointless remakes) is one of those efforts that tries to be a clever twisty thriller but ignores even the mildest bit of plausibility. Its central killer and abductor (Keir O’Donnell) – apparently going by “The Laugh” – prefers plans ripped from creepypasta which aren’t just absurd and only work when everyone involved is an idiot but could only work in a universe with an interventionist god who has taken quite a shine to the killer, so based on mere chance are they; characters don’t just act like idiots but like idiots following a script dumber than them; there’s a backstory between the killer and his victims that is so underdeveloped your random late 80s slasher has more depth. And so on, and so forth, the people involved clearly believing that there’s no need to put any effort into anything about a horror film or thriller beyond a slick look.

Shojo Tsubaki aka The Camellia Girl (2016): Torico’s adaptation of the Suehiro Maruo manga with Risa Nakamura in the title role is a pretty incredible mix of candy colours, proper kitsch, twisted kitsch, cruelty, feminism, perversion, anti-feminism, star cult critique, pathos and just plain weird shit, and ends with the sort of meta blast that just might make you interpret what you’ve just seen completely differently from what you thought three minutes earlier, or it might confuse you completely; probably – and rightfully so – both. It is pretty mind-blowing, in any case.

Visually, Torico delivers a particularly fine example of classic Weird Japan that uses artificiality in a way like Hausu did in the olden times (and looks great and aesthetically stringent); in sensibility, its use of kitsch and irony without loathing or posturing feels close to Anna Biller’s grand The Love Witch – just with a very Japanese sensibility.


American Friends (1991): Last but not least, this romance (with some comedic elements) about an Oxford don (played by Michael Palin who also co-wrote the script based on the travel diaries of his great-grandfather) who finds love – or really life – through a young American woman (Trini Alvarado) – who very much finds in him what she needs too – doesn’t look or sound like terribly much. Tristram Powell’s direction is a bit conservative at times – though it is neither cheap nor stupid – but the stars here are the acting - with Palin, Alvarado and Connie Booth as Alvarado’s adoptive mother/aunt putting turning out moving performances without histrionics – and a script that understands the past and its people and their respective flaws and mostly treats them with mild irony, a degree of sadness and much love; it looks upon our common humanity and treats these people gently, with the understanding that everyone looks like a fool (or worse) seen from the future (that eternal know-it-all).