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.