Went the Day Well? (1942)

Presented as a flashback from a post-war time still in the hopeful future in 1942, the film presents the small village of Bramley End,  as sleepy as a town during World War II in the UK could have been.

Sleepy, that is, until a group of Royal Engineers arrive in town for some sort of official business that means they have to be billeted there for a couple of days. However, there’s something not quite right about these particular British soldiers. As a matter of fact, they turn out to be Nazi paratroopers working as the vanguard of a German invasion, tasked to sabotage radar equipment. Once the villagers cop to this, they do their best to come together and fight back against what quickly turns into an occupying force with all the charm and decency Nazi troops are known for (that is to say, none). However, not only seems fate to conspire against the villagers, squashing their first plans to get help in the sort of cruel and capricious manner you only ever encounter in real life or suspense movies, there is also a fifth columnist among them.

Directed by (Alberto) Cavalcanti – probably best known today and around here for directing the best episode in 1945’s fine horror anthology movie Dead of Night - and mostly unseen after his first run until ten years or so ago, this is a war propaganda film warning of the need to watch out for potential German spies, and embodying the fear of German invasion (which in reality was rather on the ebb by the time this was made). Said fear wasn’t really new to the British cultural mind, of course, and there had been a small literary sub-genre concerning German invasion attempts and occupation of the British Isles at leas since World War I (books like “When Wilhelm Came” come to mind). Went the Day Well? is an excellent entry into this sub-genre, and its direct propaganda ambitions are actually improving on parts of the form, because it emphasises the need for the British of all classes (it’s not quite so advanced as to do all races, too) to come together to fight off the Nazis, not something that is a given in a highly classist society and its popular culture.

As quite a few British propaganda films, Went the Day seems to be surprisingly honest about the price of war, emphasising sacrifices and deaths quite a bit more than any eventual glory. But then, by 1942, a simple tale of pretty, glorious war could hardly have convinced a population that had survived the first years of World War II.


Why the film still works as well as it does today (apart from the fact that Nazis are still around, despite all suggestions of humanity’s ability to learn from mistakes) isn’t of course so much its propaganda effect (which is of course historically absolutely fascinating) but because Cavalcanti’s execution of it as a suspense movie is brilliant – and I’m talking early Hitchcock brilliant here, with particularly the scenes around the various failing attempts at getting help just being great, all-around filmmaking coming from a rather sardonic mind set. But even before things get going, Cavalcanti does great work: the film’s gentle and mildly comical introduction of the village and its population is sure-handed and funny without being condescending, and sets up characters and place wonderfully, so much so that the slow, insidious drifting in of treason and violence feels like an actual violation. Once the violence comes around completely, there are some moments of astonishing brutality (particularly keeping in mind how prissy British censors were before and after the war when it came to violence in movies) – the obvious scene is something concerning a pepper shaker, an axe, and a Nazi skull, but that’s not the only moment of this kind in the film. Violence, even when committed for the right reasons, is clearly nothing to be taken lightly here, and the direct and unpleasant way the film portrays it is nothing you’d be hard pressed to find again in British cinema until the second half of the 60s.

Three Films Make A Post: Pull over, park, and pray.

AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004): Having said quite a few nasty words about Predator 2, I’m of course now turning around to praise, if mildly, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alien/Predator crossover movie. But then, this film does feature a simple method to bring Aliens and Predators together that makes enough sense for a SF/action/horror movie, has Lance Henriksen being Lane Henriksen, and seems to be perfectly alright with being a cheap and cheerful monster movie with a couple of iconic monsters. The first part of the film is a bit slow – this is one of those films where the doomed character showing family photos needs to do it three times so it sticks even with the slowest audience member, because him getting chest-bursted is apparently not enough to make us care – but once Anderson gets going, the film turns into a series of fun, not always totally dumb action set pieces of the type the director is often rather good at.

One Crazy Summer (1986): I’m not really into random style comedies, but I do tend to make an exception for the films of Savage Steve Holland (or, you know, two or three of them). Mostly, I believe, because here the randomness isn’t so much based on a lack of discipline but on an imagination too great to be constrained by silly things like discipline or proper movie structures. And hey, if it’s good enough for young John Cusack, who am I to naysay?


The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011): David Fincher’s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a perfect example of the pointlessness of Hollywood adaptations of pretty contemporary movies (well series, if you want to be anal about it) from other countries. It’s not at all the fact that this is a bad movie – the cast, particularly Rooney Mara, is certainly great, and one of Fincher’s underused strengths is his ability to depict investigations in a visually interesting but also meaningful manner – but the film doesn’t really add anything important or of interest at all to what was already there in the original. Why remake a thing (or re-adapt a book) when you don’t actually have anything new or different to say about it? On a commercial level, I get it – audiences can’t abide looking at all those foreigner with their terrible foreigner faces (I am being sarcastic, you easily offended). But what’s someone like Fincher getting out of it, who can choose projects that are actually, you know interesting?

Past Misdeeds: Le Bossu (1959)

aka The Hunchback of Paris

aka The King's Avenger

aka The Yokel (seriously?)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

France in the early 18th Century, during the reign of Louis XIV. Philippe de Nevers (Hubert Noel) and Isabelle de Caylus (Sabine Sesselmann) have secretly married, despite traditional hatred between their families. They have already produced one child, a baby daughter named Aurore. Isabelle has somehow managed to hide the little girl away in the very same building where she lives with her father. Either, Aurore is a peculiarly silent baby girl, or Isabelle's dad is a bit deaf.

De Nevers confides the situation to his uncle, Duc Philippe de Gonzague (Francois Chaumett), hoping Gonzague might sway the king who in turn might sway the Marquis de Caylus towards accepting his and Isabelle's marriage. Unfortunately, de Gonzague is not a man to be trusted, particularly since only Philippe is standing between him and the de Nevers family fortune, so he uses an opportunity opened by the secret of the lovers to have de Nevers and his daughter assassinated. The fiend's men succeed in de Nevers's case but the rather gallant and eminently helpful Henri de Lagardère and his comic relief servant Passepoil (Bourvil) save baby Aurore and flee with her to Spain. On their way (and afterwards) our heroes are not only hunted by whatever scoundrels Gonzague can come up with, but also the King's men, for Gonzague has managed to put de Nevers's death on Lagardère's head.

After some adventures and fifteen years, Aurore (now also played by Sabine Sesselmann) has grown up into a beautiful young woman, leading to the foster father and foster child kind of love story between her and Lagardère most modern audiences run away from screaming, but that I'm willing to accept with a shrug in a sixty year old film based on an even older novel.

Lagardère decides that it's time for Aurore to be able to take her rightful place (and return to her mother so that mum can approve of a marriage for them), and for Gonzague to get his just deserts. For some reasons, Lagardère's plans for putting things to rights include disguising himself as an elderly hunchback and getting a lot of hunchback back rubs from Gonzague. Now, I'm usually not someone to look down upon anyone's kinks, but seriously, Monsieur Lagardère, what the hell?

It's one of the more unfair aspects of genre film history that the great French swashbucklers of the 50s are rarely seen outside the French language space, for the best of them (at least going by the subtitled films I've seen) stand on the same level as Hollywood's best swashbucklers of the era. It can't have helped the films' historical position that some of the genre's best directors in France, like Le Bossu's André Hunebelle, were particularly disliked by the nouvelle vague filmmakers and critics. Not needing to fight the theoretical battles of decades ago - battles which always look rather childish and petulant to me, I have to admit - fortunately means I can enjoy the films of the nouvelle vague directors and those of their sworn enemies.

There is, one has to admit, a certain stiffness surrounding Hunebelle's directorial approach here, a willingness to be lavish and serious in a very old-fashioned way that is anathema to the (in the beginning) much more improvisational nouvelle vague style of filmmaking, as well as to any naturalistic approaches, but it's also a natural approach to the particular kind of escapism the swashbuckler trades in. It's a perspective that treats history as a playground for the kind of story that tends to treat even the greatest hardships the genre's protagonists go through with a certain levity, and that will always end in a happy end.

If you ask me, this kind of escapism is not a bad thing, particularly because escapism by its very nature always carries the knowledge that there's something worth escaping from with it; showing us wish fulfilment fantasies also means understanding what we wish for and why. The wish to see some clear good win over some clear evil may be naive when mapped onto the complexities of real world politics, but it is a part of human imagination whose existence can't be denied.

Anyway, Hunebelle was quite a master at the sort of historical fantasy we know as the swashbuckler, using the fact that he's actually filming in the country his film takes place in (and the existence of an actual budget for his project) to put some impressive locations and mood-setting landscape shots in a genre that is often rather set-bound (though there are of course numerous colourful sets on display here, too), and showing a sure hand for the all-important timing. There's not just never a dull moment on screen but never a moment that doesn't contain something exciting or interesting (one suspects that's pretty much a technique Paul Feval, the author of the much-filmed novel the book is based on, and one of the most important writers to run with the genre after Dumas, would approve of).

Not even Bourvil's comic relief is too painful. I could rather have lived without it, obviously, but then I never wished for him to be slowly, and painfully tortured to death, so we can add his treatment to the film's positives (even though I'm not a fan of the classism that can only use the "low-born" as comic relief).

As a hero, Marais has slightly less charm and slightly more gravitas than the Stewart Granger/Errol Flynn type of swashbuckling hero, but he does have the all-important charisma, and looks good in his action scenes (even those parts not done by a stunt double), which is really all you'd ever want from the hero of a swashbuckler. It's also really funny to see people with a low tolerance for this sort of thing squirm when Sabine Sesselmann makes lovey eyes at him but that might just be an effect of my particular sense of humour, and my utter lack of a moralizing backbone when it comes to love in the movies.


So please repeat after me: "If you don't come to Largardère, Lagardère will come to you!"

In short: Escape Room (2019)

Take a couple of strictly one-note characters whose so-called character arcs will be clear to anyone who has seen any movie at all after their introductory scenes (using actor and character names seems to be overkill by suggesting there’s anything going on there at all). Drop them into a boring and unimaginative series of escape rooms that end in strictly family-friendly deaths, like an even worse version of Saw had a boring baby with the mutant love child of Final Destination and The Game, excising every bit of possible excitement and depth that might still exist with the axe of the lazy hack writer. Direct the whole affair with little flair and only the most basic of craftsmanship. Subtract any knowledge of the real world, the laws of physics (even those that would arguably make the set pieces here more exciting). For some godawful reason add two and a half endings more than this needs, including what feels like a cringeworthy bid for a sequel. Voila, you have Escape Room, the final proof that you really don’t need any craftsmanship or effort to make a movie for Sony. Which is also rather confusing, seeing as director Adam Robitel’s other feature length movie was the rather wonderful The Taking of Deborah Logan, a film that’s the opposite of this one in basically everything.

The worst thing about the whole affair is that there’s no reason for the film to be quite this bad: I’d be perfectly willing and able to suspend my disbelief when it comes to the one-note characters and its complete dependence on artificial dumb set pieces. However, the film would need to meet me halfway by, say, demonstrating some sense for constructing set pieces that are interesting or exciting, or by having them resonate with character backgrounds in ways that actually make sense (which would also help elevate the characters to a second note), or by at least pretending to attempt to entertain me.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot (2018)

Elderly World War II veteran Calvin Barr (Sam Elliott) lives a sad, lonely life with his dog, clearly having taken some sort of wrong turn earlier in his life he now can’t correct anymore. In flashbacks (where Calvin is portrayed by Aidan Turner who looks nothing whatsoever like young Sam Elliott, but what the hey) we learn that he was some sort of secret mythic American hero, indeed killing Hitler and most probably getting up to other things of the sort too. But at least to his mind, his deeds never actually changed anything for the better and cost him the love of his life (Caitlin FitzGerald). His isolation even makes it difficult to connect to his younger brother Ed (Larry Miller) - although there is clearly love between the two men.

Now, he is visited by two gentlemen of the Canadian and US governments. They need his help in hunting down and killing the Bigfoot, who is carrying a virus so deadly, it is threatening the world. A virus Calvin just happens to be immune against.

While Robert D. Krzykowski’s film does indeed have an awesome title, I’m not too sure it does itself much of a service with it, for the title – as well as some of the marketing material - surely suggests the film to be either a campy comedy or a two-fisted pulp tale, not exactly roping in the ideal audience for what turns out to be a film about the travails of age and loneliness. It’s not that the title is lying to the audience, mind you, this is indeed a film about the man who killed Hitler and the Bigfoot (and also not one of these “it only happened in his mind” numbers I loathe with a passion); there are even some jokes in it, too. It’s just that his killing of Hitler and the Bigfoot are not really what’s important to the film; in fact, them not being important for Calvin’s life, and being detrimental to his happiness is part of the point of the film. Or rather, part of its point is to show that these heroic achievements aren’t really what would keep one from ending up sad, alone and full of regret. To Calvin, they don’t even feel like achievements anymore, if they ever truly did.

And that’s where the film rightly puts its emphasis, slowly revealing how exactly it happened Calvin didn’t marry the love of his life, how little moments that at the time seemed to just postpone important things to some later date were actually last chances, and how Calvin’s mixed inabilities to make the important steps in his life, to really face the consequences of not making them, and to then be unable to connect to the actual world around him, left him at the bad place we find him now in the last part of his life.

Elliott’s great at this, to no one’s surprise I would hope, not just simply archetypically embodying a type of American maleness for the film to criticize as well as to admire, and absolutely being a guy you’d believe to have killed Hitler and tussle with the Bigfoot, but putting a lot of nuance into the less larger than life parts of Calvin, portraying his loneliness, his orneriness and his difficulty to connect without any melodramatic outbursts but with small gestures, glances and shifts of posture, as something natural and organic to the character.


Despite the elegiac tone of the film, it’s not a hopeless affair either, Calvin eventually taking small steps to show his connection to the world around him. They are only small steps, but then that’s how life goes.

In short: The Final Wish (2018)

Following the death of his father, luckless lawyer without career options and money Aaron (Michael Welch) returns to his home town to continue the fights he and his mother (Lin Shaye) never grew out of, pine after his former girlfriend Lisa (Melissa Bolona) – who is now together with his old nemesis, town sheriff, asshole and potential abuser Derek (Kaiwi Lyman). Well, actually, he’s just coming for the funeral, but that’s not really how things play out.

For strange things clearly connected to a sealed urn belonging to Aaron’s antiques dealer father start happening. Whenever Aaron makes a wish (and Aaron uses the phrase “I wish” with the absurd regularity of a character in a script with a certain lack of imagination) it becomes true; not in totally benign ways, mind you: when he wishes himself to be prettier, for example, he gets hit by a car and the resulting plastic surgery does indeed improve his looks. Or that’s what the film and everyone around him says, for in one of this thing’s better ideas, there’s barely any visible difference at all there.

Irregularly, the wishes do cost the lives of people as a price, but the film never sets this part of the wishing rules up terribly well, and really only seems to include them because a horror film needs to have corpses in it, or something. Obviously, Aaron has acquired a jinn, and just as obviously, things are not going to stay nice and profitable for him for long. Though, making things easier on a guy whose middle name apparently is “I wish”, this jinn doesn’t grant the traditional three wishes but seven.

Timothy Woodward Jr.’s The Final Wish is one of those examples of contemporary horror I wish I liked better than I actually do. It certainly looks pretty good (particularly for its budget bracket), and the director does add some neat little touches to some of the spookier scenes. I also enjoy how much the film starts out as your typical US indie movie about a luckless guy returning to his hometown; that is, for as long as it actually seems to put the proper effort into building the characters and their situation. Soon enough, we drop down into cliché horror movie character land where people turn into idiots whenever the script demands it, and where the character relations the film first sketched out well enough are never filled in properly, because it prefers spending its running time on co-writer Jeffrey Reddick chasing his one big success, Final Destination, with a couple of kill scenes that pointlessly and without any thematic reason play out like a cheaper and more subdued version of that franchise, bargain basement Lynchisms like a random clown appearance, Tony Todd popping in for a scene of pointless exposition, and other stuff that gets the film nowhere. And let’s not even mention the embarrassing look of the jinn once we get to see it.


There’s a good movie hiding under all the dross, one that talks about lives not going as well as those living them wished (see what I did there?) via an evil jinn that actually uses the yearning that comes with not living up to any of one’s dreams for evil, but the film we actually get is a deeply mediocre bit of cliché horror wasting talent and time on things I’ve seen done better a thousand times.

Music Monday: Saint's Edition

Razzia sur la Chnouf (1955)

After several years away from his native country that ended on a stint in the USA that seems to have left him with a reputation as an effective and brutal rationalizer of gangland activity, French gangster Henri Ferré (Jean Gabin), known as “Le Nantais” because French movie gangster nicknames are desperately pedestrian, has been called home to clean up the heroin running operation of one Paul Lisky (Marcel Dalio). Apparently, Lisky bumped off Henri’s predecessor because he got “too soft”, which sums up Lisky’s leadership style quite nicely. So, after having been set up with a nightclub to run as a front, Henri is supposed to tighten up Lisky’s operation, and send Lisky’s favourite killers (Lino Ventura and Albert Rémy) for anyone who doesn’t perform or wants out of the business.

Curiously enough, bloodthirsty, Henri seems to be a rather nice guy, preferring to warn off people from doing suicidal shit, being nice to junkies, and really running things with a much softer touch than his boss believes he does. He’s actually pretty nice for a brutal gangster, is what I’m saying. So it’s not a complete surprise that he quickly romances the youngest woman in his club. Plus, he’s Jean Gabin and therefore has the animal magnetism of a Tom Atkins towards younger women. Of course, there’s still quite a bit of trouble coming Henri’s way.

Henri Decoin’s Razzia sur la Chnouf is a rather interesting example of mid-50s French gangster films. It mostly lacks the highly melodramatic streak of quite a few of its peers I’ve seen, instead going about its tale of crime very much like Jean Gabin goes about acting: unfussy, focussed, with an emphasis on the telling detail instead of the telling mugging. It gives the impression of a film that knows what it is doing and why, and so isn’t going to need to get shrill about it.

Of course, it is also a film that shows a meticulous interest in portraying a mid-50s French drug milieu whose authenticity at least this viewer in 2019 can’t help but doubt, giving the film a peculiarly fairy-tale like air that fits strangely with its clear interest in the sort of detail work you’ll usually find in a police procedural. These elements of the film for the most part don’t feel dated, exactly, but rather as if they were never true in the first place, even though the film’s whole impetus insists they were. Which mostly works fine if you’re willing to just go with it, and enjoy the film’s inventiveness more than its naturalism despite all gestures it makes towards the latter. There is a painfully racist scene in a black marijuana establishment, though, that also seems to suggest that grass is worse than the heroin Henri helps sell, which really seems to be a sign of the times this was made in, and suggests a dubious knowledge of actual drugs from the filmmakers.

On the technical side, the film is often rather wonderful. Decoin not only shows that great ability to focus on telling details, he mostly gets his actors – apart from Lila Kedrova as a very melodramatic junkie the film treats with exasperation and compassion in about the same amounts - to eschew 50s French BIG acting in favour of Gabin-style thoughtful focus. There are also quite a few moments of simply excellent filmmaking on display, be it in form of many a moody shot of Parisian streets by night or Decoin’s ability to say quite a bit about his characters and the way they relate to one another simply by showing how they move through the spaces the camera creates. There’s a bit of a noir influence there, and much of Decoin’s approach to character and staging suggests a kindred sensibility to Jean-Pierre Melville’s work, just used with less abandon (which is an admittedly strange word for Melville’s style).


The only thing, apart from the racist scene, that’s going to be a bit strange for a viewer in 2019, is the film’s plot twist, that seemed preposterously obvious from very early on to me. That might have something to do with the movie going public in the mid-50s being a bit slow on the uptake (doubtful), or with them not being inundated with the particular trope about police work the film uses, or the film just not actually fooling its contemporary audience at all – who knows? Razzia sur la Chnouf is still a worthwhile watch, particularly if you think that very melodramatic acting was a part of all French genre films of the 50s.

Three Films Make A Post: Survival is its own Journey.

Antarctic (2018): A cynic might say there’s not much new for the survival genre in Joe Penna’s movie about Mads Mikkelsen finding himself stranded in the Arctic and starting a dangerous attempt towards safety to rescue the lone survivor (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) of a helicopter come to save him. But then, this cynic here would say there’s alas very little new in life at all, so I’m not going to criticize a film for making a very good entry inside genre lines. And really, there’s so much to like here, starting with Mads Mikkelsen’s controlled performance that seems utterly believable and has little problem convincing that we are indeed witnessing a desperate man trying to survive without the actor ever needing to lay things on thick. Also wonderful are the nature photography that manages to find the point where a landscape can be beautiful but also utterly indifferent to all human concerns, and a script that is very good at providing Mikkelsen with opportunity to portray the struggle between the desperate need for survival and his better nature.

Police Story (1985): This one’s an eternal classic of Hong Kong action cinema (and therefore even more so of action cinema in general), full of the kind of stunts that aren’t just to be described as “jaw-dropping” but which will make your jaw drop for real, with the typical Jackie Chan mix of low-brow but high physical creativity slapstick and insane action where even less glass remains unbroken than in other Hong Kong films. Was there still sugar glass in Hong Kong after they shot the climax? I doubt it.
If one were a bore, one might complain that the slapstick and the cop on the edge business of the film don’t always flow into one another as organically as they could, but since Jackie’s damn great at both sides of the equation as an actor and as a director, I can’t say I ever cared watching the film. At the very least, both slapstick and action movies are about bodies in motion, so there’s always that most natural of connections.


BOO! (2019): There are some moments of the kind of dramaturgic awkwardness you encounter in films with a budget that’s a bit too low for their ambitions, but there are elements in Luke Jaden’s film about a wavering mixed-race family encountering a supernatural threat that will break them apart even more than anything of what they get up to without it which I found genuinely haunting. There’s something about the way the performances, the notion of how the nightmarish supernatural widens the gaps between the family members and rips open never truly healed wounds, and some just great, memorable moments of horror (even if the special effects are a bit crap) come together that I found more than a little disquieting and sad, and while I’m still not quite sure how and why the film affected me this way, it just might do the same thing to you.

Past Misdeeds: A Viking Saga: The Darkest Day (2013)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

It's 793, and a band of Vikings led by Athelstan (Christopher Godwin) has just raided the abbey of Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England. Athelstan is obsessed with the idea that acquiring the Lindisfarne Gospels will give him the power to make his son the ruler of England, perhaps even of the whole of the British Isles. His plan's a bit like my last Crusader Kings II run-through, really. Unfortunately for him, all his slaughtering of unarmed monks has been for naught, for an elderly monk and what amounts to his adoptive son Hereward (Marc Pickering) have escaped with the mission to carry the Gospels the long way to safety - to Iona off the west coast of Scotland.

The monks are supposed to meet up with a group of armed protectors in a nearby ruin, but the protectors had their own encounter with Vikings that left only one warrior, Aethelwulf (Mark Lewis Jones) alive. A small group of Athelstan's men are following the trio through the woods that make up most of England at the time, not all of them happy with their leader's plan. But after Athelstan's son is killed by Aethelwulf in an encounter that leaves the old monk raped and dead and Hereward well on the way to PTSD, there's no holding him back anymore; he'd probably go to the Holy Land itself to get it back now.

Hereward and Aethelwulf for their part have additional problems to being followed by a small group of brutal maniacs, for Saxon England is pretty much a hell hole, full of bandits, desperate religious maniacs, and so much death and destruction Hereward will have to give up at least parts of his soft-spoken and slightly naive approach to Christianity and life (a poison-induced vision of Christ helps there too). On their way, our protagonists also encounter the Pictish "witch" Eara (Elen Rhys) who demonstrates a rather different approach to paganism than the Vikings have to offer.

Chris Crow's A Viking Saga: The Darkest Day is not at all the film I expected. What I expected was an Asylum-like attempt to cash in on Hammer of the Gods at worst, a fun piece of medieval hack and slash at best. This was before I actually saw Hammer of the Gods and realized not even the part of The Asylum responsible for that horrible Sherlock Holmes film could manage to create something worse than that, nor would anyone in possession even a mild degree of sanity try to rip that thing off.

What I got with The Darkest Day however, is a film exceedingly interested in exploring various directions of the early medieval mind set (of course a thing we can never do more than make informed speculations about), taking great care to take its characters' various ways of filtering the world through their ideas and beliefs very seriously. Doing this, the film avoids looking down on the characters for what they believe in, yet also avoids to agree with these beliefs as objective truth. On paper, you could read the film, particularly Hereward's character development, as a defence of violent Christianity, but I assume it is rather trying not to let the way its medieval characters develop become too influenced by our contemporary views. This attempt to stay - at least to a degree - true to a medieval mind set, is quite effective, I think.

In fact, one of the film's strong suits is how it gives the characters’ various world views (and at that point in human development, religion in one form or the other was the natural seeming basis for seeing the world, for better as well as for worse) space, and takes a look at what happens when they are confronted with the facts of life of a horrifying and violent time. It has to be said that the film's title is a bit of a lie: this is no Viking saga. The Vikings are pretty much the designated bad guys here (something of a pleasant change of pace after one too many Viking metal glorifications of a people who were about as sympathetic as any Christian crusader, though did indeed write some greats sagas), and while the film spends some time with them, it's Hereward and the people he encounters who are the film's protagonists and targets of audience sympathy. Crow does spend time to give the Vikings actual motives, though, and while we're clearly supposed to like them less, he does leave them their humanity.

When it comes to the violence, Crow goes for short, intense bursts of it which emphasise brutality and desperation, with people struggling, biting and scratching for their lives until it ends cruelly and suddenly. As befits the tone of the film, there's no elegance and beauty in killing here but a mixture of desperation, cruelty and necessity. I was quite surprised to find a male-on-male rape scene in the film used to double down on the fact that violence really is not a fun thing; like it goes with all rape scenes, it's not exactly something I was clamouring to watch, but it also very much belongs to the world the film takes place in, and therefore needs to be shown.

The only flaw worth mentioning I can find in The Darkest Day is the usual insistence on using the monochromatic colour schemes so beloved of contemporary filmmakers as a cheap and easy way to build mood. This method can still be effective, but has mostly become a boring short hand that only displays a lack of visual imagination and tends to bring up the question why the hell you'd shoot a film in colour when you then won't actually use colours, or even colour contrasts. In The Darkest Day's particular case, I can't help but think that these monochrome ways are actually weakening the impact the awesomely bleak landscape (somewhere in South Wales, the IMDB says) the film was shot in could otherwise have had.


However, I don't want to end on this somewhat sour note, for if I'm not able to accept the use of short cuts in a low budget movie willing to put this much thought and actual emotional power into so many of its other aspects as The Darkest Day is, where would that leave me as a film fan?

In short: Miami Vice (2006)

The least subtle undercover cops alive, Crockett (Colin Farrell letting his hair and whatever that stuff growing on his face is do the acting this time around) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx, woefully underused despite being the more interesting character with room for a deeper character arc and being simply less stilted in his role) are roped into an investigation concerning a mysterious big time drug operator after one of their former informants gets killed working on the case. In between shoot-outs, shots of Farrell rubbing his neck and head ponderously, and various explosions, Crockett also falls in Instant Big Lust with Isabella (Gong Li), one of the leading heads of the cartel they are investigating.

Like all the mainstream film critics that heaped praise on this film, I’m a big admirer of most of the oeuvre of Michael Mann, but this movie version of Mann’s old stomping grounds, the 80s cop show Miami Vice, leaves me decidedly cold. For the most part, it is because most of Mann’s standard tricks don’t work for me here. He’s perhaps trying his usual thing of adding veracity to a highly improbable script by providing many layers of absolutely realistic feeling details, but all of these details don’t really add up to any reality here, but just add more mannerisms to an already incredibly mannered and over-stylized film, making things not less but more antiseptic.


It doesn’t help the film at all that its script (by Mann and co-TV-Miami Vice-veteran Anthony Yerkovich) seems to work from a “Miami Vice plot elements” checklist, where every big beat of the show needs to be included in some way, turning the whole affair clumsy and ponderous where leanness would probably have helped. But then, leanness has never been part of the Mann approach. This is also the kind of film that becomes basically paralyzed by all of the clichés and tropes it needs to somehow stuff into its running time, so Crockett gets to hear the “in too deep” speech about twenty minutes into the case, and he and Isabella basically jump each other the moment they lay eyes on each other. Who cares that it doesn’t make sense for the kinds of people they are supposed to be, or that Farrell and Gong have no on-screen chemistry whatsoever despite the film’s permanent visual insistence that this is The Big Thing. And don’t get me started on how stupid everyone in the film needs to be to let things play out like they do here. Again, these are not problems new to Mann’s work, but usually, he’s telling his tales of moody macho men embedded in what feels like a (not necessarily the) real world in which they and their troubles actually belong. Here, it’s just the posing of emotionally stunted assholes typical of bad high budget action cinema in front of slick backgrounds without substance or emotional resonance relating them to actual human feelings. And when it comes to high budget action, there are simply better choices for a viewer.

Road House (1989)

Dalton (Patrick Swayze), a legendary bouncer with a tragic past that clearly has taught him the art of bouncer Zen, is hired on by Tilghman (Kevin Tighe) to clean up the small town road house he has acquired a short time ago. Right now, it’s the kind of place where drugs are sold pretty much openly, and where things are so rowdy, the house band (The Jeff Healy Band, whose leader is actually as pleasant a natural amateur actor as you can find) has to play in a cage to protect them from an audience that throws glass bottles at blind singer/guitarists. With his legendary reputation (yes, this film takes place in a world where bouncers can become legends), his insistence on being nice first and only hitting when that doesn’t work out, and his air of calm, Dalton actually does make great strides towards cleaning up the place, even finding time in his schedule for a romance with local doctor Doc (Kelly Lynch) he initiates by bringing his medical records and the explanation that “pain don’t hurt”.

Unfortunately, pain hurting or not, he soon comes into conflict with the town’s very own Big Bad, Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara) and his gang. Wesley controls the place with the verve of a Bond villain – and has the appropriate kind of underlings, too. So eventually, Dalton has to get back to the old ways of his tragic past again and do what 80s action heroes do. Though most action heroes don’t have a mentor played by Sam Elliott at his most Sam Elliott-ish they can call in.

When it came out, Rowdy Herrington’s Road House wasn’t terribly well-loved (I certainly remember being nonplussed by it myself when I first saw it when I was sixteen or so) but by now the film has grown quite the cult following. It’s a properly deserved cult following too, for when it comes to 80s action films taking place in the kind of strange parallel world where Brad Wesley runs a town by doing evil deeds like destroying the place of a car-salesman who gets uppity with a monster truck, and where a bouncer can be a lot like a western hero who comes to town trying to find peace only to have to fall back into violent ways, this one’s actually as brilliant as that description sounds.

A lot of the film’s impact certainly has to do with Swayze. The guy’s speciality when appearing in action movies was being the soft tough guy – someone who can be just as violent as your typical macho but usually chooses not to because he’s above proving his manliness by breaking your face, but over the lines he draws you certainly shouldn’t step; yet also one of those action heroes who is believable in the romantic moments because he can actually act like a guy in proper love. Basically, Swayze’s the anti-Seagal, is what I’m saying, believably projecting being a guy who may know one thing or the other about ripping throats out with his bare hands (in what I assume to be a pretty wonderful nod to what Sonny Chiba does as a much less nice hero in The Streetfighter and its sequels) but who also knows that actually doing that is wrong. Swayze is also simply genuinely great at physical acting and screen fighting, and while he may have a comparatively small range as an actor, the things he does well, he does well.

Of course, Swayze’s not the only wonderful actor on screen. Gazzara chews the scenery with insane enthusiasm, gripping the opportunity to be a completely self-centred asshole with a bad case of megalomania and a complete lack of a sense of proportion with both hands (and probably also digging his teeth in), so that a guy with a handful of goons lording it over a small town becomes some kind of supervillain. If you want to read something into the film, you may want to take a look at the difference in the performance of manliness between Wesley and Dalton. The former is all about “alpha male” dominance, abusing (and weaponizing) his girlfriend, kicking his men when they are down, and clearly having never encountered a situation in his life that isn’t a dick measuring contest. Whereas Dalton clearly couldn’t care less about “dominance”, obviously wants his sexual partners to have an orgasm (it’s impossible to read the emphasis in the film’s sex scene any other way), treats everyone he meets as an equal, and only resorts to violence as a last measure against the violent. The film even acknowledges that Dalton’s way is still not good enough when it still ends in a bloodbath.

Apart from that, Road House is just incredibly well constructed, with any given scene taking care of the needs of characters, plot, and theme and usually throwing in some action too, with everything going on making total sense if you are willing to accept the film’s set-up, and flowing wonderfully. Herrington’s a very fine action director, too, certainly never trying to be an 80s Hong Kong action filmmaker, but really doing wonders with the classic American punch-up style of action.


Road House is just a completely wonderful film, as flawless as any you’ll encounter, unless you don’t like fun, or road houses, or Patrick Swayze ripping a guy’s throat out.

In short: McBain (1991)

I don’t believe James Glickenhaus actually knew about irony, not to speak of anything with the post prefix, so he presents this patently goofy transferral of his typical New York vigilante shtick into a Colombia just waiting to be freed from tyranny by some Vietnam vets under the leadership of Christopher Walken(!) as the titular McBain – also including Michael Ironside as their arms dealer frenemie who really needs to feel alive by shooting a lot of people again as well as Steve James for all your action movie needs - and the worst rebel army ever as sort of spearheaded by a Maria Chonchita Alonso who commits to her role with total earnestness. Every cheesy bit of revolutionary kitsch his script comes up with, every dubious speech about the very real horrors of dictatorship and the domination of one Simon Escobar (cough) is done with total conviction, as if the stuff these people spouted had any actual emotional impact.

For a Glickenhaus film, the whole affair is surprisingly awkwardly paced, partly because the film does want to tell an epic tale of Vietnam flashbacks, the death of a friend and the following revolution but only has 107 minutes time for it all instead of the three hours it would probably need to get serious. More curious, even a couple of the action sequences fall flat, perhaps because so little of the film takes place in the grimy New York of the director’s best films. Instead, most of it was shot in the Philippines which do of course stand in for Colombia as well as take on their more typical role as Vietnam for a low budget production.

However, even though the whole thing doesn’t hang together too well, at least Walken, Ironside, James, Alonso and the merry rest of the cast are usually fun to watch, the film’s freewheeling moments of craziness can be pretty great, and from time to time, Glickenhaus comes up with the sort of thing I have by now learned to love him for. Take the scene where our heroes are in dire need of money to buy guns from Ironside, and shoot through a bunch of drug dealers, only to be taught the class politics of the drug war by the lone survivor (Luis Guzmán!), after which they rather steal from a banker (while pretending to be Mossad agents, because why not, right?). That’s not the sort of thing you’ll encounter in many vigilante and mercenary movies, and it is this kind of curveball that makes slogging through the slow bits perfectly worthwhile.


Do I need mention that Glickenhaus’s politics are certainly rather more complicated than those of the filmmakers of your typical flag-waving US action movie?

Music Monday: Monstrous Edition

Bullitt County (2018)

Warning: contains vague spoilers about the ending and the film’s structure!

It’s the late 70s. Four friends – Gordie (Mike C. Nelson), Keaton (director/writer David McCracken), Robin (Jenni Melear) and Wayne (Napoleon Ryan) – come together for a days-long outing they call a bachelor “party” for Gordie after quite some time of drifting apart. These attempts of rekindling old fires always work well, right? One can’t help but think that Keaton’s idea of taking the tiny gang on their old famous Kentucky distillery trip for it just might be a bit misguided, given that Gordie’s a recovering alcoholic. Once we get to know the characters a little more, the whole affair seems even more doomed, for the whole distillery trip’s just bound to remind everyone exactly of the catastrophic event that started them off on their way to drifting apart.

But that’s not all that’s wrong here: Gordie clearly carries a deep, simmering resentment towards himself and his friends around that tends to express itself through violence against the world, as well as a deep – and clearly not reciprocated – crush on Robin; Keaton’s still not a proper grown-up; and Robin’s still trying to be friends with people she obviously has outgrown quite some time ago. So it seems like an even worse idea than the distillery tour when Gordie convinces his friends to go off with him traipsing through the woods for some days, digging for a legendary treasure he just heard about. Things are tense enough for as long as these guys believe to be alone in the woods, but once they encounter company, and a potentially dangerous situation, things devolve quickly.

For my tastes, David McCracken’s Bullitt County is a pretty excellent example of how to make a clever, emotionally complex indie genre movie. It’s a film that at first seems a bit too interested in going for one wild stylistic flourish or the other, but what at first feels like the director showing off a little really turn out to be good, creative and meaningful directorial decisions meant to strengthen the naturalistic portrayal of character relationships and mental states through non naturalistic stylistic choices. Which sounds paradoxical but works wonders in practice.

McCracken’s never using his stylistic adventurousness to obfuscate what his actors – and himself as an actor – are doing. Instead, he’s emphasizing a couple of wonderful, nuanced performances by the cast, digging into the complexities of undead friendships, secret loathing and self-loathing, guilt, and what happens when the things we never speak about are being spoken about, much deeper than the film’s beginning made me expect.

I’m not, however, terribly convinced by the decision to set the film in the late 70s. Sure, the fashion works, and there are few enough locations to make these feel semi-authentic, too, but neither the way the characters talk to each other, nor how they relate, nor the way the film sees and portrays them, really seems native to any other era than the late 2010s. At first, that’s the sort of thing to raise my eyebrows, but the longer the film went on, the less I cared about this feeling, for the character work was much too strong when taken on its own terms for the film’s time period to matter in the end. Even philosophically, the film is not terribly close to 70s thriller nihilism. This is, after all, a film where the final character is rewarded for a morally (and ethically) correct decision, instead of dying like everyone else, which is pretty much the opposite of everything the cinema of the 70s taught me about life. It’s not a fake or cheesy moral, mind you, but something that works organically as part of the film.

Speaking of organically, the film even manages to contain a couple of plot twists that not annoy me to bits. Both of them are the kind of twists that are not just actual parts of the film but part of the meaning of the film, so we are not talking of deus ex machina or horror movie bullshit endings here. Why, even realizing what these twists will be before they come as I did doesn’t work against the film at all.


As a thriller, Bullitt County is a bit eccentrically paced, but this never feels like McCracken not knowing what to do with the genre, rather like the only way the film’s kind of emphasis on characters will work inside of the structures of this genre. Classically styled and effective suspense scenes are still coming during the course of the movie, an audience only needs to be willing to engage with the things that lead up to them properly. And meeting a film on its own terms is always the thing to do; even more so when it’s as good on them as Bullitt County turns out to be.

Three Films Make A Post: Same Day, New Killer

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997): Even though nobody would ever call the first Jurassic Park intelligent, how we got from there to this thing, also directed by Spielberg and written by David Koepp, I have no idea. Surely, Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and Vince Vaughn versus dinosaurs should be kind of a sure thing, but the script has everyone acting even more stupid than in the first film, with little happening here making any sense even by the rules of the universe Jurassic Park was set in, and no visible attempts by the director to jump over the giant holes where a script was supposed to be through his usual magic touch with suspense and thrilling fun. It’s a film made by highly capable professionals in front and behind the camera who all act like they suddenly have no clue about making movies anymore.

To add insult to injury (that is, wasted time), the film also never seems to actually want to end, finally petering out after the worst King Kong rip-off imaginable has gone on and on where every other film this shitty would at least have had the decency to end after ninety minutes.

The Sting (1973): Fortunately, to the rescue of my mood comes the classic George Roy Hill period caper movie that manages to make the depression era look sexy without pretending it isn’t the depression era. This, despite by far not being the first comedic heist film at all, is of course the caper movie most later entries into the sub-genre want to be. Who, after all, would not be captured by the magic of a clever, twisty script that is light and light in touch but never one to pretend depths don’t exist (there is in fact a lot of sadness in this comedy, and quite a few moments that acknowledge bitter truths about the US and life in general, it has just decided not to fall into them), direction that somehow manages to make things that should by all rights be grimy and gritty look slick, cool and elegant without shaving off all the hard edges, the power of Robert Redford and Paul Newman at the height of their stardom, and a supporting cast that’s to die for?


Sky High (2005): If nothing else, this superhero teen comedy directed by Mike Mitchell (who otherwise has a perfectly horrible filmography) is a perfect example of how a film can be utterly generic, and follow the genre structures of teen comedy and pre-Nolan Batman (really, more pre-Raimi Spider-Man, even if the chronology would suggest otherwise) superhero movies slavishly, yet still be charming as heck. Mostly that’s thanks to the lovely cast featuring people like Kurt Russell, Bruce Campbell, Lynda Carter and Kelly Preston as well as young Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Danielle Panabaker selling the clichés with charm and conviction, as well as to a script that may only ever aim at the low hanging fruits of humour and humanity but hits those every single time. It’s not terribly deep (it’s a 2005 Disney teen comedy, after all), but so likeable I’m perfectly okay with that. Plus, who wouldn’t like a film featuring Ron Wilson, Bus Driver?

Past Misdeeds: Manchas de sangre en un coche nuevo (1975)

aka Blood Stains In A New Car

On the surface, Ricardo (José Luis López Vázquez) seems to have a rather cushy life in late Franco Spain: he's the owner of successful art restoration business, his wife Eva (Lucia Bosé) is stinking rich, and he keeps his young and pretty employee Maria (May Heatherly) as a really rather emotionally loving mistress on the side.

However, the cracks in Ricardo's ordered life of quotidian hypocrisy deepen when his wife buys him a new luxury car (oh, the glories of Volvo, master of cardom) as a wedding anniversary gift. On his first drive home with his new toy, Ricardo passes the scene of a car accident by the side of an otherwise empty road. A man and his little son are trapped in the flipped car and beg Ricardo for help, but out of fear of getting involved - and what of his brand new car!? - he drives on again, only to see the car explode in his rear view mirror, as cars do.

Afterwards, things really go downhill for Ricardo. He begins to see blood stains nobody else can see on the backseat of his car, something that disturbs his already very guilty conscience even more. Ricardo is becoming unable to drive his car himself. It seems driving is now something the women in his life must do for him (holy metaphor, Batman!). He also begins - not for the first time it seems - to doubt the basics of his life. Is having a convenient, rich existence with a woman who won't sleep with him (and who reacts to his tale about leaving people behind to die with pure cynicism), clearly doesn't love him, and never wants kids, and a job that makes him rich yet also hides a minor criminal enterprise (Ricardo's in the art forging business too, we learn late in the movie), truly all he wanted from life? Then there's the fact that Eva has been sent yellow roses these last few days and seems even less inclined to loving companionship of any kind than usual, awakening an unexpected amount of jealousy in Ricardo, given the actual relationship between his wife and him, and which I'd explain more through hurt machismo than anything else.

Despite Maria's reaction to the whole situation being quite more humane towards Ricardo - the dead people are ironically not important to anyone but Ricardo himself - than Eva's, and a hopeless attempt to cure him of car related anxiety through good old car related intercourse, it's clear that Ricardo is going to crack soon.

Antonio Mercero's Manchas de Sangre is a minor, yet very interesting psychological thriller that suffers a bit from how on the nose its metaphorical and symbolical language is. As it often goes for me with this sort of thing, it's all a bit much, and I'd like to take the director to the side to tell him: "Yes, Senor Mercero, we get it already. All symbols of masculinity can't salve Ricardo's deservedly guilty conscience for what looks decidedly like a metaphor for the guilt of looking away the upper bourgeoisie in Franco's Spain carried. But did you really have to hammer his emasculation home by giving his wife a lesbian affair? And while we're at it, why does it sometimes look as if Ricardo's feeling of emasculation seems more important to you and not just to Ricardo than his being a murderer by inaction?". But then I have a rather low tolerance for this sort of thing, so your mileage may vary.

Mercero does make some rather interesting decisions, though, namely turning Ricardo - quite perfectly embodied by Vázquez, who is the kind of guy you never see playing the lead in a genre movie - into a surprisingly sympathetic figure despite of all the perfectly horrible things he does, even if you're like me and do not care about anyone's lack or possession of any degree of masculinity, and generally don't have very much empathy for people who care about this sort of thing. Still, the respectful and deeply human way Mercero and Vázquez portray Ricardo makes empathising really rather natural.

Ricardo is a man whose central problem in life seems to be that he has always played by the rather perverse rules the society he lives in has established, yet has never quite been able to stomach these rules, nor to believe in them as the way the world should be. He is consequently plagued by a guilty conscience, but at the same time, and despite all his emphasis on overt masculinity, never courageous enough to stop and lead a life he needn't be secretly ashamed of. It is the central irony of the film's plot that he's either too cynical, or not cynical enough, not moral enough, or too moral, to live in this movie's Spain, a place where only cynical monsters like his wife can be happy. Of course, I could have lived quite well without the film treating Eva's lesbian sex life as a sign of her complete lack of morals; her "just take a valium" reaction to Ricardo's guilty conscience is rather more poignant and less bigoted, and would have been more than enough to make the point. Which leads us back to the point that Mercero likes to lay things on a little too thickly.


Formally, Mercero clothes these themes and ideas in a well-done, if not overtly spectacular psychological thriller (the only kind of thriller that doesn't need an actual bad guy in its plot because people are able to destroy themselves well enough without more direct intervention) with a more subtle hand for the visual than the writing side of things, that perhaps suffers a bit from showing little interest in being exciting on its surface because it is much more interested in other things.

In short: Lily C.A.T. (1987)

In the future of the 23rd century, various corporations are sending out spaceships to survey planets far from Earth for what I can only assume to be mining rights. Since there’s no faster than light space travel in this relatively gritty, blue collar future, crew and surveyors are put into some sort of water-based cryo sleep, only returning to Earth several decades in Earth time later. The ship the film takes place on, the Saldes, has made this sort of trip a couple of times now, its crew being a motley assemblage of people who have grown close via what amounts to the experience of travel in time as much as in space. The surveyors they take on board, including a guy with a flat top bringing a gun and the daughter of the mining company’s president bringing her cat Lily, are new to this sort of thing, though, and don’t know each other for the most part. So trust isn’t exactly something that’s going round, which turns out to be particularly problematic when they come out of cryo sleep and things start going particularly badly.

Apparently, while everyone else was sleeping, someone has brought on board space debris infected with a spaceship eating bacterium also deadly to humans. And there’s a some kind of monster running around too. Oh, and at least two of the passengers aren’t who they are supposed to be, either.

It’s obvious that Hisayuki Toriumi’s SF horror anime takes quite a few cues from that premier entry of its sub-genre, Alien, while also grabbing bits of The Thing and at least one cleverly adapted iconic shot out of Westworld, too. However, unlike a lot of derivative movies from the sub-genre, Lily C.A.T. has a script whose writer – also Toriumi – has thought about what makes the original work and proceeds accordingly, actually putting craftsmanship and effort into its worldbuilding, even finding space to think about what the cryo sleep based space travel must mean for the people and society using it, and generally seeming as interested in how the group of people encountering this particular murderous alien interacts as in the alien itself. Which doesn’t mean it skimps on the horror part of the SF horror – there are a couple of very effective creepy scenes, the monster design is pretty awesome, as is that of the film’s – conceptually pleasantly strange – unfriendly android.


Because this has only 70 minutes to go through its plot, and because Toriumi was a seasoned veteran of anime, the film’s handling of characters and plot is highly economical. Characters and ideas are built with deft, broad but not too broad, strokes, and the plot develops like a fine-tuned clockwork without things ever feeling too condensed. The script is pretty much a master class on how to handle this kind of material, how to be derivative without being boring, and how to pace a short-ish film well. Which is rather a lot for a relatively obscure little anime from 1987.

Isabelle (2018)

Larissa (Amanda Crew) and Matt Kane (Adam Brody) have just moved into their new suburban home, which they bought to have more room for their new-born that’s going to pop any day now. Alas, when the supposedly creepy daughter (Zoë Belkin) of their strange neighbour looks at Larissa would-be creepily from an upstairs window, something happens, and Larissa has a miscarriage.

Not surprisingly completely bereft, and brought back into a completely empty home where she is left utterly alone, Larissa first begins to hallucinate the crying of a baby in what was supposed to be the nursery, and sometimes even hallucinates a teddy bear into a merry little baby. She quickly becomes convinced that the creepy daughter, who turns out to be paraplegic and mute after her long dead father abused her and, as a helpful online newspaper article exposits, “dedicated her to Satan”, is sending her very bad vibes. And wouldn’t you know it, she just might be right!

I’m not usually one to get out the morality club when talking about genre movies, but when a film like Robert Heydon’s Isabelle uses things like a stillbirth and the following mental illness of the mother as the basic for its tale of possession, I do expect it to either put actual effort into what it does or leave things well enough alone, or put it into the hands of better filmmakers, respectively. Unfortunately, these filmmakers didn’t, instead leaving us with this odious mess that exploits some terrible shit that happens to actual people often enough without even being terribly good exploitation.

The script is a complete mess, with characters that change their opinions and basic traits randomly from scene to scene, a plot that takes ages to get to a point the audience has seen coming half an hour ago, and a structure that simply doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the passage of time. Now, (improbable) defenders of this mess might argue that some of these weaknesses might be explained by the film’s ending that suggests these things haven’t been completely real, but I know a crap horror movie kicker ending that has nothing to do with the film that came before it when I see one; I have, after all, by now witnessed hundreds of them.

The worst example of the script’s failings is probably the character of Matt, played by Brody with all the bafflement any sane person would feel when encountering his scripted behaviour. Matt’s the kind of guy who, when he finds his wife acting strangely shortly after the stillbirth, grabs the next priest he can find, mumbles something about possession and asks the guy to visit his wife and him, only to then, when the priest arrives the next day, argue there’s no such thing as possession, and his wife only suffers from grief, without anything having changed in the scenes in between. Even better is the moment later in the film when the very same guy who brought up possession in the first place also explains he doesn’t believe in “this woo-woo stuff”. Do I have to add that the film also sees fit to have him go into the mandatory speech about how he can’t cope with his wife’s behaviour any longer even before their damn kid is even buried!? But then, he’s also the kind of guy who leaves his wife completely alone the day she comes out of the hospital after a stillbirth without him or the film giving much of a reason for that apart from him just having started a new job. The film clearly can’t see there’s anything strange about that at all; it’s as if this was written by aliens.

And let’s not even get me started on the film’s general treatment of Larissa’s mental unravelling, how badly it is timed and structured, and how little sense it makes on a psychological level. But then, what do filmmaking aliens know about us strange hu-mans?


Because that’s clearly not bad enough, Isabelle also fails at the most basic element of even the dumbest horror flick: being at least a wee bit scary or disturbing. Heydon just can’t seem to be able to time anything right when it comes to scaring his audience. Even the most primitive jump scare doesn’t sit, more complex set-ups fall plainly into the realm of the ridiculous, the possessed ghost girl make-up of Isabelle is just silly with an added heap total ridiculousness whenever her red flashlight eyes start digitally glowing. It’s pretty astonishing how a film that should be full of psychologically disturbing stuff can’t even get simple fun house scares right, but that’s Isabelle for you. To be fair, neither Heydon nor writer Donald Martin have much, if any, experience with horror, but that’s not really much of an excuse after I’ve had to sit through this one.

In short: Death Blog (2014)

Hitomi (Kana Nakada) is probably the shiest girl in the world, or at least at her high school - though, to be fair, said high school only seems to have five or six students on most days. She’s apparently living alone with her younger sister – at least we never get to see the parents and they are never mentioned. She has started to live vicariously via an anonymous blog portraying what the film probably thinks is her inner turmoil. However, blogging’s a dangerous business as we all know, and there has been a series of baseball bat bashing murders by someone following blog entries.

Once Hitomi – very much to her own surprise – gets together with the hot guy (says the film) from her school she has been dreaming about, various baseball battings seem to be based on her blog entries, too. Or is it just the curse of the…death blog?

Naturally, giving the year most people are living in, there have been quite a few social media based horror movies by now; just as naturally, most of them have been rather bad. Well, let’s be honest here, not just rather bad but utterly so. Death Blog, as directed by Masaki Jindo, fits right into this halcyon group by being a movie in which nothing whatsoever works. Jindo’s direction is aimless and meandering, managing to make an eighty minute movie feel like an overlong three hour epic by an improbable incompetence at pacing. Then there’s the script’s decision to not show us quite a few things that could give the plot at least a bit of impact. There’s, for example, the buddy of Hitomi’s boyfriend who gets baseball-batted shortly after they are introduced. Alas, we never get to see the scene where our heroine actually meets the guy, so the whole thing is just another random baseball batting incident involving a total stronger to a viewer. The film’s full of aggressively anti-dramatic decisions like this, as if it were made by people who really don’t understand that d-word at all.


Even worse, if you can imagine that, is the acting. I’ve seen enough Japanese movies from the last decade or so to understand that contemporary Japanese taste in acting styles is rather different from the contemporary Western one (the Japanese prefer their actors to actually emote, for example), so I’m not down on the actors because their work follows rules different from those of a contemporary Hollywood movie. It’s just that nobody on screen can emote even the least bit convincingly, following rules of emotional behaviour even our Martian cousins would probably find dubious (unfortunately, I lost the phone number of Martian Manhunter to check), and seemingly intuitively finding the worst possible thing to do in any given scene. Nakada is particularly dreadful, which is a bit of a problem seeing that the camera’s on her ninety-nine percent of the time. She’s clearly not understanding the difference between shyness and whatever the hell she thinks she’s doing, getting into a lot of heavy breathing, eye-rolling and theatrical shaking whenever she’s asked to portray emotion. You’d think the director could have guided her a little, but then you look at the rest of the film and realize he probably didn’t know any better either.

Music Monday: Windswept Edition

The Oath (2016)

Original title: Eiðurinn

Finnur (Baltasar Kormákur) is a successful surgeon with what appears to be a happy and satisfied family life. However, ever since his daughter Anna (Hera Hilmar) has gotten together with her new boyfriend Óttar (Gísli Örn Garðarsson), things have grown ever tenser. Óttar, you see, is involved in the drug trade, and the easy supply and closeness to that trade has gotten Anna hooked on drugs rather seriously, with a future as a proper junkie basically guaranteed if nothing happens quickly. Finnur is convinced that if he could only get Óttar out of Anna’s life, he could help her turn things around. But Óttar is not listening to reason anymore than Anna is, he’s not taking bribes, and when Finnur’s increasingly desperate attempts to somehow get rid of the younger man lead to the loss of a considerable amount of drugs, Óttar is starting to become violent and threatening himself. So what’s a surgeon to do? Kidnap the boyfriend, drug him and chain him to a radiator in a house out in the boons, apparently, putting the boy on ice until Finnur can decide if he can actually bring himself to commit murder.

Baltasar Kormákur is a strange director, with a filmography that seems harshly separated into crap big budget action comedies with Mark Wahlberg, impressive Human against Nature epics, and small, weird, off-beat black comedies with a deep noirish streak. The Oath is closest to that last strain in the director’s oeuvre, though it’s not really a comedy anymore but a psychological thriller whose few moments of comedy are so dark, one can’t help but look at oneself askance for laughing. For the most part, this is a thriller in the same vein as many a French genre entry from the 80s or 90s, less concerned with the actual mechanics of viscerally exciting an audience than with painting a detailed portrait of bourgeois people confronted with some kind of situation bringing them to emotional or intellectual extremes (which you can read as certainly running parallel to the director’s Human against Nature films, if you care to). In The Oath’s case, that extreme is more of a moral nature, the titular oath being the Hippocratic one and its insistence on doing no harm working counter to what the protagonist genuinely believes is necessary to protect the person he loves most in life.

To make Finnur’s dilemma work on more than a mere intellectual level, Kormákur portrays his relationship to Anna and his wife Solveig (Margrét Bjarnadóttir) not as you’d expect with the kind of treacly sweetness you get whenever dear Liam Neeson needs to save his little girl (bless him) but in a somewhat distanced and clinical manner that never feels as if it wants to press the audience into sharing his protagonists feelings but rather attempts to detail and explain them, so we can understand where Finnur is coming from even though we do not feel as he does. Pulling this off – and Kormákur does indeed pull it off – means the film has to be a master class on the telling detail, showing the inner lives of a family through a series of controlled and meaningful gestures rather than exposition.


Kormákur’s own performance in the lead role does add considerable dimension here, a degree of cold detachment actually convincing me more of the reality of Finnur’s character and situation than even the greatest scenery chewing could have. Finnur’s an interesting character, clearly priding himself on the detachment of the surgeon, trying to keep the kind of rational control over his surroundings that most of us learn early on is only achievable under the luckiest of circumstances, and only for a very short time. The film also realizes how basically self-centred Finnur’s approach to the situation is, even when we overlook how morally wrong his acts are. This thing is supposed to be all about the happiness and the future of his daughter, but in the end, he makes it all about himself, his inner struggle, his willingness to overthrow his beliefs. He doesn’t even realize the saddest thing about the relationship between Anna and Óttar (something the film understands very well): that these two are genuinely in love with each other; it’s just that it’s a love that most probably will kill Anna and ironically does kill Óttar in the end.

Three Films Make A Post: In the darkest hour, there is a light that shines on every human being...but ONE!

Rottentail (2018): As if anyone needed another example that going for the Instant Cult Movie thing is a very bad idea, here comes director Brian Skiba’s idiotic tale (apparently based on a graphic novel, for which I’ll just take the movie’s word) of a scientist (Corin Nemec at a career low) who turns into a human-rabbit monster thing after an unfortunate incident involving a genetically modified killer rabbit and an experimental fertility treatment. From then on out, it’s shrill acting, unfunny on purpose “funny” lines (because actual jokes are too hard, I can’t help but assume), hideous special effects, direction exclusively consisting of annoying tics, and winking at the camera non-stop, with nothing that suggests the point from where actual cult movies start: the wish to make an actual movie.

Darkman (1990): The film that looks now a bit like Sam Raimi’s weird dry-run for making his Spider-Man movies on the other hand, is an actual cult film, made by people who obviously care about the art of filmmaking even in the film’s strangest moments – perhaps even most then – with grace, style, cleverness and an actual sense of humour. Typical of Raimi at the time, the film’s a rollercoaster with at least one fun/clever/wonderful/crazy idea jumping onto the screen every thirty seconds, but also with enough of a heart and a brain to keep the tale about what amounts to the Phantom of the Opera as a superhero film just barely under control. Watching it for the twentieth time or so, I still had the feeling of seeing a film that just might go completely off the rails any second now, but never does, instead leaving me happily grinning for much of its running time, when not gasping at Liam Neeson’s huge hands (well, or his wondrous ability to play his role just as straight as it can be played) or Larry Drake’s gorgeous mugging.


Thelma (2017): Completely different in style and tone, but also rather wonderful, is Joachim Trier’s meticulous film about the kind of teenage lesbian awakening that includes psychokinetic powers that start with Carrie but end in the freedom of positive and hard-earned wish fulfilment. It’s filmed with a sense of poetry, of terror and at some points of an awe that raises this far above many a film that uses the supernatural as metaphor, and played by Eili Harboe with immense emotional weight and subtlety. All of this puts it far beyond the modernized re-tread of Carrie it at first threatens to be; it also should convince every feeling viewer that its happy end is perfectly deserved and proper for what came before it. Depending on one’s interpretation of what happened before, one might not even want to treat the happy end as one, but the film’s perfectly fine with not only portraying the suffering and crisis of becoming herself of a young woman but also daring to say that things might actually get better for her.

Past Misdeeds: L'amante del vampiro (1960)

aka The Vampire and the Ballerina

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Someone in a coat walks around the Italian countryside, sucking the blood of young women, turning them into his slaves through what rather looks like quality orgasms before the continued blood loss kills them. The country folk are convinced they are being terrorized by a vampire, but what they have of local authorities (including a doctor who can't tell bite wounds from scratch marks, and does not think an epidemic of anaemia among young women is anything worth investigating further) isn't interested in all that superstition, or is, like the police, curiously non-existent in the world of the film.

As luck will have it, a group of what the film calls ballet dancers after a definition that probably declares every dance taking place in a night club also to be ballet have come to a villa in the countryside to train a new choreography and to provide Luca (Isarco Ravaioli), the nephew of the slightly creepy owner of the villa, an opportunity to romance his very-soon-to-be fiancée, the dancer Francesca (Tina Gloriani). This set-up suggests quite a feast for a hungry heterosexual male bloodsucker.

For a time, it's all undisturbed dancing, lover's talk and listening to uncle's vampire tales for the girls, though. That is, until  Francesca, her now fiancée Luca, and her best friend Luisa (Hélène Rémy) are surprised by a storm while out walking and have to seek shelter in a supposedly empty castle. There, they meet two curious people: countess Alda (María Luisa Rolando) and her servant Herman (Walter Brandi), both dressed in fashion a few hundred years out of style, and moving as stiffly as, well, living corpses.

While at the castle, somebody takes a good bite out of Luisa's neck in a walk-in wardrobe, turning her into a rather enthusiastic Renfield, and Luca finds himself all too happy to be invited to return to Alda later the same night. My, you'd think there's something wrong with these people and their home…

I, like many a cult film fan, know and love L'amante's director Renato Polselli mostly for his perfectly insane, and wonderfully bizarre weird-out Gothic Black Magic Rites/The Reincarnation of Isabel, one among the weirdest films in a genre rich in weirdness. Compared to that piece of glorious incoherence, the film at hand is a rather logical and clear piece of filmmaking, even though every character - vampire or human - here does act completely and rather inexplicably foolish in at least one scene, and even the emotions of people not touched by the supernatural are turned to eleven all the time.

However, L*amante's narrative makes some basic sense, and I'm even willing to call some of the character motivations the script gives comprehensible, at least for some of the running time. Of course, this being an early Italian Gothic horror movie, I don't really care all that much how much sense the script makes or rather doesn't make, and am rather more interested in the film's mood of irreality.

Polselli shows himself quite adept in the creation of this mood of thick irreality, with many a beautifully composed shot of shadowy castles and graveyards, shadows on the walls, and whatever other traditional way of showing the audience that it has stepped into a place where the membrane between this world and another is particularly thin one might ask for in this regard. We are again in the realm of a very dream-like idea of what filmmaking means here, where pacing is sometimes erratic (some may say slow), people don't act like people generally do in real life, and where logic exists but only seems skewed to push the characters into the arms of the supernatural.

Apart from this, L'amante surprised me with how heavily and openly sexualized vampirism in it already is for a movie of its time, and how much further even than Hammer's Horror of Dracula it goes this early in the vampire movie game, with so much writhing, breast-rubbing, and obvious orgasming from the female part of the cast that speaking of a "subtext" here would be utterly preposterous. In Polselli's film, vampirism is all about sexual dominance, a fact that is  even further emphasised (and pushed in the direction of the slightly perverse) by the ugliness of the (not exactly convincing) vampire make-up. It's not difficult to see this as a film about unhealthy sexual power structures, particularly once we find the main vampire staking his former victims so that they can't disturb his "mastership"(!), and learn he keeps his vampire lover locked up in their castle, only letting her feed indirectly by drinking his blood after he has gouged himself, which, in turn, is the cause of his ugliness. Consequently, it's hardly a surprise she attempts to use Luca to get rid of him and probably to find a more pliable partner, even though later developments in the film suggest the distribution of power between the two vampires might be a little more complicated, as it often goes in sexualized master/slave relationships.

Polselli's treatment of these elements is as on the nose as imaginable for a film made in 1960, and really makes the film's two supposedly titillating dance scenes look as if they were part of a different, much less interesting and daring movie made in a time when even the often sexually quite more progressive and open European cinema had to use attractive women in skimpy outfits dancing horribly as the best it could do for titillation. On the other hand, the return to the second half of the 50s (in Europe, not the Code-dominated USA, obviously) in between actively messed up sexuality does further increase the film's unreal mood.


Not that L'amante del vampiro really needed that, for it is already a wonderful example of Italian Gothic horror being weird without it.

In short: The Hoard (2018)

This Canadian horror comedy directed by Jesse Thomas Cook and Matt Wiele and co-written (has also acts) by the same Tony Burgess who wrote the novel the great and wonderful Pontypool was based on, concerns the misadventures of the cast of the reality TV show “Haunted Hoarders”. The show’s shtick of course mixes the terrors of hoarding reality TV crap with the idiocy of paranormal reality TV nonsense. The members of the crew lose the grip on their respective limited sanities, and encounter their doom in form of three hoarder houses and one hidden, undead uncle.

As a parody of bullshit reality TV, the film has its best moments when it uses the inherent absurdity of the format for jokes good and bad; it’s generally aiming pretty low, so if you hope for any kind of insight beyond “reality TV is inherently absurd and made by people of dubious mental and moral state”, you are a bit out of luck here. As a whole, the film seems more at home making jokes about bodily fluids and is – a bit ironically - aiming at the cheap seats as much as the TV formats it is making fun of. Yes, I am complaining that a reality show parody has little substance, but then, the film’s 98 minute run time does stretch the premise really a bit too thin for its own good, and the material’s not that funny. In part, this has to do with the film not really thinking too much about its premise, so it is never quite clear how a show would actually mix the anti-hoarding stuff and the paranormal investigation bits, leaving lots of opportunities for more complex jokes, and ways to go off into more involving directions, by the wayside.

On a formal level, I had my problems with the strange way the film treats the camera and sound people, who sometimes seem to be actual physical presences, and sometimes, particularly during the climax, are definitely not. Sure, not pretending the camera’s there is part and parcel for reality TV, but once the killing starts, the camera and sound guys surely should find gory ends, too?


Don’t get me wrong, while I’m not completely happy with The Hoard, I did have some fun with it – it’s certainly technically competent indie horror, the cast is just as competent (and Burgess as the show’s fake psych doctor turns out to be a natural comedian), and it’s perfectly watchable.

Die Sieben Raben (1937)

aka The Seven Ravens

Closely following the version of the fairy tale as written down by the Brothers Grimm, this early example – the Internet tells me it is the third of its kind but counting firsts has never been its strength – of a puppet stop motion animated film tells the tale of a girl who learns from her parents that she once had seven brothers. Her brothers were turned into ravens and flew away after her father muttered an unkind wish when they didn’t come back with the water for the (then) baby girl’s emergency baptism they were sent to catch from the nearest well. Apparently, there have been unkind words among their neighbours about the whole affair ever since – turns out, in the realm of fairy tales, this is not the sort of occurrence to produce horror but gossip.

Anyway, once the girl learns about these matters from her mother, she sets out to put thing right and find their brothers, for she has the heightened sense of responsibility that in today’s pop culture would combine perfectly with a spandex costume. Ergo, she wanders off into the woods telling everyone she meets plaintively that she’s looking for her brothers. Eventually, she encounters a fairy (the girl calls her “good” but I dunno). The fairy explains that the raven brothers (brother ravens?) are now living in a mountain of glass but she will turn them back into humans and send them home if the girl swears to not speak for seven years and weave seven shirts for her seven brothers. The girl, clearly going for saintliness here, agrees, and moves into a tree where she befriends animals and spins, spins, spins. Until six years later, the local ruler comes upon her, is instantly smitten with her beauty and poise, and makes her his wife. Note to the modern viewer: she seems pretty okay with it. This, not surprisingly, is only the beginning of more troubles and suffering.

The brothers Ferdinand and Hermann Diehl were pioneers of puppet stop motion animation in Germany – and not just here – working together from 1929 until 1970 (with a couple of things done by a single brother alone afterwards), mostly making their mark through fairy tale adaptations like this one but not shying away from other source materials. If you are a German of a certain age, you’ll probably have vague childhood memories about having seen something they’ve done on TV when you were little.


And the brothers’ work is well worth remembering. Their version of stop motion isn’t quite as slick as what later creators in the style would deliver, a certain stiffness coming from the more traditional puppets they are working with as well as from their decision to give their puppets animated mouths but keep the rest of their faces still and unmoving. To me, however, watching something like Die Sieben Raben is still totally engrossing. In part, it’s because this, like the best of the Diehls’ work I’ve encountered (though not at all like everything they ever did) doesn’t try to play over their source material’s sombre and upsetting elements to console a family audience. In fact, it’s exactly the sombre and sometimes even upsetting tone that’s responsible for most of the surprising emotional the impact of the film, and I assume very much the point of the whole affair. This is not so much a tale of wonder but one of suffering and endurance by a saintly woman, closer in spirit to the female-centric melodrama of a couple of decades later than you’d expect from a stop motion puppet fairy tale. It is also a film that realizes that fairies in folklore are utter pricks with a decided sense of self-righteous cruelty; and as in folklore, it’s best to avoid telling the fairy you’re having business with that.

In short: Hell Girl (2019)

An impressively annoying group of ghost hunters who really double down on the greed by having an Internet show, getting paid for their “services” by the haunted, and being scam artists without the art, are hired on by the owner (Tom Sizemore as always wearing the facial expression appropriate for a guy who is only ever in garbage anymore) of a place that once was a mine, and a bordello, and is an assemblage of cabins now (or something) to exorcise the place (or something). The bordello-mine-cabin-park is haunted indeed – there’s a nasty little girl ghost, an undead MILF (the film’s term), and a lot of strange crap going on.

Even though the supernatural entities have pity on the audience and eventually start killing off the idiots whose lame soap opera nonsense and horrible jokes the viewer has endured for what feels like hours, none of the survivors think about leaving until the final act. But then, this takes place in a world where the lone cop around doesn’t call in assistance when she encounters murders, ghosts and annoying ghost hunters, or at least attempts to get dead bodies to a medical examiner (or vice versa) but rather hangs around and teams up with said ghost hunters, until we finally get to the completely nonsensical final act.

On the positive side, said final act is certainly the film’s highlight because it replaces the standard nonsense of the most boring mediocre horror low budget fare presented before with random bullshit mythology about demons, children birthed as ten year olds from the wombs of dead women, and plot twists that must have sounded good in somebody’s head, breathing the blessedly blighted air of the kind of irrationality you would have encountered in an early 80s Italian horror film. Unfortunately, getting to the final act is a bit of a drag, full of bad acting that’s annoying instead of fun, writing that is the wrong kind of stupid (but at least plenty of that ) to be actually entertaining, direction that undercuts an air of vague professionalism by moments of atrocious staging, and an editing job that also looks professional if boring for most of the time but then inexplicably seems to be missing half scenes, reaction shots and important transitions.


It’s tough going until it finally becomes pretty watchable, is what I’m saying, but at least you can’t blame the film for being too mediocre to be enjoyable. It’s really much too stupid for that.

Music Monday: Heist Edition

The Head Hunter (2018)

A man (Christopher Rygh) lives a lonely life in a hut in the wilderness of a technologically medieval fantasy world. Following sparse flashbacks, he wasn’t always alone but once had a daughter (Cora Kaufman); a woman never comes into play. The daughter was killed by some kind of monster, and the man now earns a pay he derisively throws to the side as the local king’s monster hunter, rather unhygienic ramming a fresh and unprepared monster head onto a spike in what amounts to his living room whenever he’s back from a job. He is really biding his time with this, waiting for the return of the monster that killed his daughter. Eventually, it does indeed return.

Jordan Downey’s The Head Hunter is a pretty great little movie, the sort of film that wants to tell a very specific tale in a very specific way and then goes about telling it just so. In this case this means the camera and the audience are not accompanying the man on his monster hunts at all, only witnessing his preparation, perhaps a bit of the way towards the monster, his usually wounded returns, his healing his wounds with a magic goo, his ritual of putting the monster heads on spikes and his visits to his daughter’s grave where the dead child is the only one witnessing the handful of sentences he ever speaks.

It’s a very sparse approach to this sort of tale that probably will leave more than a few viewers hoping for some hot monster fighting action disappointed, but which really says all it needs to say about him and his life, the way everything he does is only part of waiting for and surviving until the only thing happens that still has meaning for him: the return of the thing that killed his daughter. So the film shaves all of these things unimportant to its protagonist off, too, carefully focusing on what’s important: small gestures, the man’s ever heavier and strained breathing, the little failures and chance mishaps that can add up to disaster rather quickly, the tiny circle grief and the need for vengeance has reduced the man’s life to. We do get to see the fight against the thing that killed his daughter, though, or rather, the excellently staged and paced final stretch of it that really proves the film hasn’t just not shown the monsters before because it couldn’t come up with proper monster costumes.

It’s all grim and lovely at the same time, and works as a rather more personal sword and sorcery/horror movie than typical of the genre, as well as it does as one where everything that happens is a living (if you can call the man’s existence living still), breathing metaphor. Even the ending that might seem a bit too left-field at first works exceedingly well with the central metaphor about the destructive force of grief.

The film also looks fantastic, particularly for something that couldn’t have had much of a budget, with some great, oppressive landscape shots and a staging that always focuses on the small things that will turn out to mean so much, as well as highly expressive lighting and sound design that’s sparse in just the right way to fit the film.


I really love Downey’s approach to the fantasy genre here, taking well-worn (and much-loved by me, don’t get me wrong) elements, making minor adjustments to them that are mostly based on literally changing our perspective on them, and turning them into a film that’s one of a kind, as far as I know. There are so many clever little touches in the film too - from the derisive yet compulsive way Rygh stakes the heads to his wall to Downey’s version of Chekhov's Gun – so that it feels like a true labour of love rather than another film of someone adapting their D&D campaign (not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course).