Three Films Make A Post: The Cycle Begins.

Proud Mary (2018): Graced with PR material and a title sequence that suggest some sort of cool, contemporary and conscious throwback to blaxploitation cinema times, what Babak Nafaji’s film actually goes to deliver is general tepidness. This little number meanders between uninvolving gangster melodrama and badly staged action movie, leaving its fine leading lady Taraji P. Henson to pick up pieces. Now, Henson’s certainly good, but a single actress can’t save a melodramatic movie that doesn’t seem to know how to actually wallow in emotion, nor an action film that wastes a relatively high budget on stuff most direct to DVD action films would find too unambitious.

The Heretics (2017): Speaking of films that waste a perfectly serviceable set-up and pretty cultist masks on a so script so mediocre I would have preferred it to be just bad and uninspired direction, this Canadian movie by Chad Archibald concerning a young woman (Nina Kiri) getting re-kidnapped five years after her first encounter with a satanist suicide cult, rather comes to mind. It’s not difficult to imagine how this could actually have been a pretty great movie, even when keeping the plot twists of this all too real version, if only it had a script that had a better handle on characterisation, trauma and drama. There are handful of not terrible horror scenes in here – mostly thanks to the excellent production design I believe – but as a whole this is a vague and meandering affair that never seems to be able to settle on a tone.


Quarries (2016): So it is left to Nils Taylor’s film about a ragtag group of women (Nicole Marie Johnson, Carrie Finklea, and others) on a supposedly empowering wilderness survival hike encountering your usual group of male backwoods cannibals/serial killers. Neither the women nor the human monsters are particularly original characters, but at least the protagonists are well acted and written with enough life to make one not completely disinterested in their survival. Otherwise, this is a deeply competent movie with no surprises for genre veterans or even novices. However, that it so clearly cares for these women more than a lot of its genre brethren do makes it certainly worth ninety minutes of one’s time.