The 3rd Eye (2017)

Original title: Mata Batin

When her parents die in an accident, Alia (Jessica Mila) has to return from her new home in Thailand to her native Indonesia to take care of her teenage sister Abel (Bianca Hello). For financial reasons, they have to move back into their childhood home in the country, a place Abel fears with quite some intensity; or rather, she fears something dwelling in the house. As it turns out with good reason, for Abel is cursed with the ability to see the spirits of the dead and other supernatural manifestations, and as it usually goes, the dead see her right back. Alia has been kept in the belief that her sister simply has some psychological troubles, but as Abel explains to her, their mother had not been taking her to a psychiatrist as the family told Alia, but to the psychic Bu Windu (Citra Prima) to help her cope with her abilities.

Even on meeting Bu Windu, Alia still doesn’t quite believe what her sister is telling her, so she asks the woman to force open her own third eye, so she can see the things her sister says are there with her own eyes. This being a horror movie, ghosts and such are all too real, and soon, the two sisters, Bu Windu, and Alia’s frightfully nice boyfriend Davin (Denny Sumargo) will have to fight against the things haunting their home.

I love Netflix more than just a little bit for the surprising number of Indonesian genre films it has distributed over the last couple of years, making it pleasantly easy to actually watch some of the better movies coming from the country right now while also avoiding the “tight tops and horrible humour” subgenre that seems rather prevalent (though I might of course be totally wrong about that, seeing that international distribution for Indonesian films is – Netflix notwithstanding - spotty to say the least).

Rocky Soraya’s The 3rd Eye is no new masterpiece of horror cinema, but its mixture of typical “I see dead people” plot beats, Indonesian style creatures, a smidgen of possession horror with a very spirited performance by the actress involved, and a third act that goes into a surprising direction for this particular horror subgenre (though you can diagnose a Poltergeist influence, if you wish), is always at least entertaining, and often downright fun in a spook show kind of way.

As a director, Soraya (who also co-wrote the script and produced) lets a small budget look slick, generally tending to relatively conservative directorial choices while keeping the pace just right. He also clearly understands that the make-up effects and the creature design are one of the film’s strengths, and plays this aspect up as much as possible without things becoming (too) tacky. Add to this the surprising turn towards a bit of gore and violence in the third act as well as the pretty incredible climax of the film, and you have yourself something clearly made by someone who knows his horror.

Speaking of the climax, as a fan of theoretically visionary scenes made on a budget, I got quite the kick out of the way Soraya creates a hell dimension out of a handful of tunnels, some weeds, deftly applied red light, and a handful of actors in pretty great makeup, keeping the afterlife surreal, and surprisingly convincing. It helps that this part of the film – as well as the excellent scenes coming directly before – mostly keep away from CGI and go for more practical effects, for the digital effects throughout the film are much weaker than the practical ones.


So even though The 3rd Eye isn’t a deep movie that’s telling us much about the human condition, it’s quite a bit of fun if you’re in the market for a bit of horror not meant to evoke existential despair. Plus, there’s a cameo by a Ghost with Hole.

In short: Escape in the Fog (1945)

The final stretch of World War II. Having been honourably discharged from her duties as a nurse after suffering from what we’d today call PTSD, Eileen Carr (Nina Foch) spends time recuperating at an inn near San Francisco. She has a nightmare taking place on a fog-shrouded bridge where three men get out of a taxi, two of them attacking the last one. Things become rather curious when the (most impressive) scream she then lets off in her sleep brings other inhabitants of the inn to her room, among them Barry Malcolm (William Wright) who looks exactly like the man getting attacked. She hasn’t seen Barry before, mind you. Though now that they have encountered each other, they fall in love very quickly – it being wartime and a 62 minute film.

Alas, the whirlwind romance has to take a bit of a backseat, for Barry’s a spy and propaganda expert, and he’s being ordered to bring some very important papers to Hong Kong. Which would be dangerous enough, but his boss’s OPSEC is terrible, so there are a trio of German agents after the documents Barry carries, and whose actions quickly lead to the scene Eileen has dreamed about. Fortunately, Eileen’s a rather quick-witted new girlfriend to have for a spy.

Usually, the films like this one the great Budd Boetticher (then still working under the moniker of Oscar Boetticher, Jr.) made very early in his career for Columbia aren’t treated as major parts of his filmography, and the director himself apparently never was terribly proud of them either. However, as far as little (late) war time programmers with a hint of noir and a whiff of the fantastic go, Escape in the Fog isn’t half bad.

Even this early in his career, Boetticher was a sure hand with pacing, so unlike with other films made for the b slot in a matinee, Escape’s 62 minutes zip along with great economy and already demonstrate the director’s interest for veracity in genre movies. So the handful of scenes that root the film in war time reality, namely some historically interesting business about how taxis work in a war time economy (plus the taxi’s driven by a young Shelley Winters), or the matter of fact way the protagonists discuss their PTSD early on, really already make this feel like a Boetticher film and also do quite a bit to sell the more preposterous parts of the script.

Even though it is slight, the characterisation is actually rather well done, too, bringing enough detail to the characters to keep up audience interest in their travails; that Foch is also particularly charming and a bit gutsy in this one certainly doesn’t hurt the film either.


All in all, Escape in the Fog is still a surprisingly fast and fun little movie more than seventy years after it was made, certainly an achievement for a something made quickly for a short cinematic run without any thought for posterity or longevity.

Music Monday: Tricks Edition

Close (2019)

Warning: Vague spoilers about the film’s ending ahead!

Sam Carlson (Noomi Rapace) is a bodyguard who apparently typically works in war zones. She grudgingly (though I suspect she does everything grudgingly) takes the job of protecting poor little rich girl Zoe (Sophie Nélisse) for a week of London nightlife and then transport her to a safe house belonging to Zoe’s mother Rima (Indira Varma) in the desert near Morocco. Zoe’s father has just died, and she has – very much to the surprise and anger of her mother – inherited a considerable amount of shares in her mother’s and father’s company, so she would make a lucrative target for kidnappers.

After their arrival at the house, in Sam’s last night on the job, they are attacked by a well-armed group of men who know suspiciously much about the place’s security system. Sam saves Zoe, and they both end in the hands of the police. Alas, these cops are clearly on someone’s payroll, and Zoe kills one of them while Sam is putting two others down rather less lethally. So, now the two are going on the run together. And yes, of course, the shared experience will see Sam not only killing quite a few people but also working through her relationship with her own daughter and her trouble with opening up to people, and Zoe will learn valuable lessons, too. Yawn.

Yes, yes, I know, the writers of Hollywood thrillers and action movies are bound by some kind of eternal law to always include this sort of “emotional grounding” in their scripts, but it’s such a been-there, done-that sort of thing I’d actually be all too happy to encounter a film whose heroine is saving the rich teenager because she’s a decent human being instead because of some vague psychological connection to a daughter. And since neither Sam nor the audience ever actually gets to meet her daughter, this so-called emotional core is particularly weak; who cares about a characters relationship to some off-screen name? It’s all very perfunctory and exactly how you’d expect it, and also absolutely unnecessary.

The film’s case when it comes to its supposed emotional core isn’t exactly helped by Zoe being a particularly boring example of the poor rich girl type, with little personality showing, and therefore little weight to Sam’s and her growing connection. Which wouldn’t be much of a problem if the film weren’t hell-bent on foregrounding this stuff, putting the time in but not the actual writing work necessary to keep the relationship interesting.


The film’s other big script problem is how often it cuts back to the villains of the piece, destroying every bit of tension director Vicky Jewison’s often deft handling of the action business has managed to build up despite the general weakness of her and Rupert Whitaker’s script. For most of the film’s running time, I was rather puzzled why we spend so much time with Indira Varma’s character. After all, the parts of her scenes actually useful for the rest of the plot could have been handled in one cell phone conversation. In the end, it turns out the film ruins its pacing and drags its audience through badly written business meetings to prepare a last act plot revelation regarding the true identity of the villain. Too bad that change only makes even the tiny bit of sense it does make because these draggy scenes were indeed meant to be cleverly ambiguous instead of tedious and vague – if only they actually were. Also, replacing the evil mother trope with the one about evil Chinese corporations isn’t exactly exciting.

Three Films Make A Post: Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect

Piercing (2018): Visually heavily influenced by the classic giallo (even the one sheet has the appropriate colour), Nicolas Pesce’s film, is placed somewhere between horror, general weirdness, and a very dark comedy about the ways people navigate their darkest desires. The whole thing is classed up by having Mia Wasikowska and Christopher Abbott going through all the stylized and ambiguous motions they are supposed to go through with the proper amount of suggested darkness and mystery. As an exercise in tone and style, the film is highly successful, evoking the mental states of its characters through sound and vision; I’m just not sure it really succeeds at doing as much with this as it could, not really seeming to go anywhere.

Ella Enchanted (2004): With a script that involves the talented hands of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith (who can make teen comedies do really clever and charming stuff and make it look it easy) I was expecting a bit more from this mock fairy-tale version of Cinderella about a young woman (Anne Hathaway) cursed/gifted with the inability to refuse an order, living in a fairy-tale land that does it damndest to evoke The Princess Bride (they even hired Cary Elwes) but is much too beholden to randomness and genericness to get there. But then, there are three other writers listed too, so it’s anyone’s guess how much of what made its way on screen is their fault. Tommy O’Haver’s direction is competent but also corporately bland in a way that is not a good fit for any comedy, and most of the film just barely gets by on Hathaway’s charm. The feminist subtext isn’t terribly involved, and too many of the film’s clever ideas aren’t actually.

Holy Smoke (1999): This comedy/psychodrama directed by Jane Campion, in which Harvey Keitel plays a charming asshole deprogrammer hired to brainwash Kate Winslet’s character back from her love for an Indian guru is usually treated as one of the director’s weaker films, and it is relatively easy to see why, even though a weaker Campion film is still better than anything various male big name critical darlings deliver on their best days (cough, Woody Allen, cough).

But there is a reason why comedy and Campion-style psychodrama are not usually genres that are combined - they don’t really come together well at all, and the film has quite a few moments when the comedic parts and the deep, tour-de-force character exploration (wonderfully portrayed by Winslet and Keitel) seem to belong to completely different worlds, or into completely different movies. This problem is certainly exacerbated by how awkward quite a bit of the film’s humour is.


And still, even though it is sometimes a struggle to get through the funny bits, Campion’s willingness to let ambiguities and complicated contradictions in and between characters stand and explore these spaces between them while keeping the social and all that comes with it in mind is so admirable, her ability to let certain things stand unresolved because they are not truly resolvable is so great that I’m rather okay to have to fight with the film a bit.

Past Misdeeds: The Devil Commands (1941)

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.

Kind-hearted and scatter-brained scientist Dr Julian Blair (Boris Karloff) is in the early stages of a revolutionary invention, a sort of super EEG device he sees as only the first step on the road to mind-reading. Things change for the good doctor when his beloved wife Helen (Shirley Warde) is killed in an automobile accident.

The doctor does not take her death well at all. When he tries to distract himself by puttering about in his laboratory, he accidentally activates his device and is astonished when he realizes that it records Helen's mind-waves (which are just as unique as fingerprints, if you didn't know). Clearly, this means her ghost is hanging around, and if Blair puts his mind to the goal, he should be able to develop a way to speak to the dead! Alas, neither his colleagues nor his daughter Anne (Amanda Duff) believe he is onto anything other than a grief-induced mental breakdown, and even the few men who accept the possibility of communication with the dead give Blair the old "things Man is not meant to know" speech. And these people call themselves scientists!?

The only one who actually believes Blair is lab handyman (I think) Karl (Cy Schindell). Karl, you see, is in communication with the dead himself during weekly séances held by professional medium Blanche Walters (Anne Revere). Blair is rather sceptical regarding the whole medium biz, and when he accompanies Karl on that evening's séance, he soon enough discovers all of Madame Walters's dirty tricks. There's just one thing - an electrical discharge during the séance that isn't part of Walters's act at all convinces Blair that Walters's brain actually is the perfect receptacle for talking to the dead.

The promise of money and possible fame and power in the future is more than enough for Walters to agree to Blair's proposition of a partnership in weird science experiments. Alas - and we're still in the night after Helen's burial here - when Blair attempts to use Karl as an amplifier in the experiment, the poor man gets Lobo-nized.

Walters convinces the doctor that the only way to keep on experimenting and some day contact Helen now is for him and her to pack up Karl and their things and set up science shop somewhere else. Which is exactly what they do.

Two years later, we find Blair, Karl and Walters living in an old dark house in a small town in New England. The local population has learned to fear and hate them for reasons of It's In The Script, so his investigation of a minor series of grave robberies leads the nosy Sheriff (Kenneth MacDonald) to Blair and company, where he will inadvertently start a series of mishaps that will end in catastrophe.

Edward Dmytryk's entry (based on the novel "The Edge of Running Water" by William Sloane I clearly need to read) in Columbia's small series of movies where Boris Karloff plays some kind of mad scientist was a rather frustrating viewing experience for me. The film has so many interesting elements, and so many good ideas which are rather ahead of their time that I found myself nearly infuriated with the little Dmytryk and script writers Robert Hardy Andrews and Milton Gunzburg did with these elements, and with the manifold ways in which they sabotaged their movie. A film that has not a thing to do with the devil, by the way, neither in a literal nor a metaphorical meaning.

However, let's start with the film's good bits (though I can't talk about them without also mentioning the ways Dmytryk and co work against them). First and foremost, there's Karloff's wonderful performance as one of the truly sympathetic mad (or in his case really rather "mildly disturbed") scientists. Like some other of the classic horror actors usually playing madmen and monsters, Karloff - never one of the low effort Christopher Lee school of horror acting in any case - always seemed to relish the possibility to play a nice guy for fifteen minutes or so, and consequently, Blair starts out particularly likeable; his development towards slight insanity seems understandable, and never leaves him less sympathetic. In this regard, it helps that the deaths Blair is partly responsible for are all obvious accidents, even though Blair himself sees things rather differently; his grave robbery is clearly not a nice thing, though.

Of course, the narrative treats Blair as if he were your usual murdering mad scientist, confronting him with the same hokey plot developments every mad scientist has to live through, and in the end punishing him oh so fatefully, even though he hasn't done anything that'd lead to more than a minor jail sentence; it's as if the writers had forgotten to actually put the transgressions Blair is being punished for into the script. It is possible that the script thinks it's punishing Blair for his transgressions against Gawd, but then it would really have been helpful if it had made this clear.

Of course, not thinking things through, and not properly developing enticing hints is all this particular script ever seems to do. Just look at the mere wasted chances here, and despair. It's particularly irksome when you have a film so perfectly set-up for straddling the line between (at the time of the filming even rather cutting edge) science and séance. And yet, The Devil Commands still manages to not explore this obvious avenue even when someone involved in the production (either art director Lionel Banks or "props" persons Franz, Oscar and Paul Dallons) designs them the best electric séance set-up I've ever seen, the sort of lab that so perfectly invents its own SF gothic style that it makes the lack of imagination surrounding it only more depressing.

But hey, the gentlemen behind the camera were too occupied with ripping off the plotting style of a bad Universal movie complete with lynch mob and adding a horribly acted (by the pretty useless Amanda Duff) voice-over narrative to tell us the obvious in an ominous and annoying manner to realize what they had here.


Ironically, if you are able to ignore the script's failure at being more and Dmytryk's repeated wrong-headed directorial choices, The Devil Commands is really not such a bad mock-Universal movie; if this were produced by Monogram, I'd probably even congratulate it for not being horrible and not being too stupid. Alas, I'm not at all able to do the same with The Devil Commands' in its slightly more elevated context, though I'm sure there will be more patient viewers than me among you.

In short: Shazam! (2019)

I am all for, and actually very happy with, DC trying to save its superhero bacon by lightening up a little and actually putting out films with different tones and approaches beyond Grimdark Batman is Rorschach epics. David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! however, really isn’t how you do that, unless one can’t see a difference between light and completely empty.

It’s not that I would have preferred a grimdark reading of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, but I’d rather have preferred one whose jokes aren’t quite as dumb and unimaginative as those in the film at hand, or one that actually knows how to shift between the silly stuff and the (theoretically) deeper bits effectively because it understands that both are sides of the same coin (say Guardians of the Galaxy style). Come to think of it, I would perhaps have been okay with the film if its jokes just were funny instead of inane and flat.

The more serious stuff is treated in the most perfunctory manner, clearly working from the impression that the kids I assume are supposed to be the film’s main audience are just too dense to understand even the tiniest bit of subtlety or complexity – as if something like Bumblebee that aims for the same core audience but doesn’t pretend kids are brain-dead didn’t exist. And man, are there wasted opportunities in the film concerning the nature of families of birth as well as of families of choice, or how a certain wizard who likes to kidnap kids and then tell them they are not “pure” enough is a bit of a creep and an asshole and actually responsible for everything bad happening in the movie (something that’s just barely acknowledged by the film).

Other disappointments belong to the more nerdy space like the incredibly unimaginative way the film wastes mad scientist Dr. Sivana (given by Mark Strong strictly phoning it in) and lets him become a guy who just punches people with super strength, instead of, say, having him preside over the anti-family to Captain Marvel’s family of choice like even the golden age comics knew to do. This, to me, seems symptomatic to the film’s greatest sin: a complete lack of imagination in how to use the material it has been given, superhero movie tropes as a whole, or just the possibility space modern superhero films open between the flying and the punching. In its whole feel of the filmmakers not actually knowing how this stuff works, Shazam! reminds me of pre Raimi Spider-Man superhero movies in its awkwardness.

Sandberg’s direction really doesn’t help the film’s case at all, presenting some surprisingly wonkily shot superhero action that culminates in a climax so badly edited, staged and conceived it boggles the mind how you can even manage to fail this badly at an action scene with all the technical expertise and money this sort of production has available to it.


But hey, at least it’s better than Venom.

The Black Gate (2017)

When Sarah (Jeanne Dessart) and David (Nicolas Couchet) were children, their parents were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and the kids split up and thrown into different orphanages.

Now that they are grown-ups, their uncle, who is a scientist and an occultist has sent a mysterious occult tome to Sarah. Something suggests to her the book and her uncle may hold the explanation to the death of her parents. David is more than a little sceptical concerning Sarah’s ideas about supernatural shenanigans, but he’s accompanying her to the little village where their uncle lives all the same. He’ll get over his scepticism soon enough, too, for the uncle’s research has opened a gate to a hell dimension, and it will need Sarah and him to perhaps thwart inevitable doom.

Indie – in the sense of probably completely privately financed by non-millionaire enthusiasts instead of the one describing films made by production companies that just happen to not be Hollywood studios with decades of tradition – horror heavily inspired by the works of directors like the great Lucio Fulci like Fabrice Martin’s and Guillaume Beylard’s The Black Gate is a rather difficult proposition. It’s very easy for a film like this to end up feeling more like an amateur rip-off of Italian weird horror and its spiritual brethren than a homage, but the film at hand did convince me quickly it had not just a heart but cinematic instincts in the right place.

Now, it is still a film made on a budget of more of a semi-professional level, so to enjoy it, a viewer does need to meet it halfway from time to time, accepting that not everything here will look as slick as in a big or even mid budget production, that some set-ups and ideas have the whiff of the talented enthusiast, that the dialogue’s rough (and the English subtitles rougher), and that there are moments that are just a bit awkward. In The Black Gate’s case, however, all of these things are honestly not terribly important, at least not if the viewer does, like me, adore the Italian-style horror the filmmakers so clearly do, because they get many of its constituting elements so right, the whole affair doesn’t feel so much like a film made by fans of that part of the genre, but as if this were part of a hidden strand of European horror films still following these old ways today, now working cheaply with all the virtues and problems that come with digital filmmaking, after having found its way to France somehow.

I’m not, in general, a fan of films looking quite as digitally shot as this one sometimes, particularly in its beginning stages, does, but the directors actually turn this to their advantage, using combinations of digital editing tricks, the structure of the material, and what looks like practical as well as post-production effects, to create their own version of the gothic, sometimes mildly psychedelic weirdness of their predecessors. At times, this leads to moments and sequences that do not look “realistic” but unreal in the most delightful manner, properly suggesting a place where the borders between our world and one that works from very different rules have become thin, the laws of physics blurring into other kinds of laws we don’t have a name for. Adding to this effect is how clever and imaginative the production design is – with quite a few elements and creatures on screen that still carry a bit of the air of their inspirations but have become excellent grotesques belonging very specifically to this film. The film also has a great eye for locations – ones in the real world that look impressively gloomy on their own, as well as those that can feel outright otherworldly with a bit of digital magic.

Plotwise, this is of course a bit strange, a bit confusing, and does not always follow the logic of the real world, but it really isn’t supposed to do, nor do I see how the film would gain anything it actually needed by having a more conventionally structured plot when it really aims for a mood and a feeling, and reaches these effectively. The film is a bit faster and tighter than your usual Fulci movie, it has to be said, even including a handful of proper action sequences (most of them of course involving zombies of a kind), most of which are really rather nice if you don’t think too much about why David’s so good with a sword, or why Sarah (who doesn’t even like guns), is a crack shot under pressure.

The acting is certainly more than decent, sometimes showing a couple of weaknesses typical of indie horror, but in a film that’s not really about characters either, these little weaknesses do tend to matter little. And Dessart, who has the most traditional “acting” to do, is genuinely good.


But really, the point of this one is a mood of strangeness and doom, and a palpable love for the less rational side of horror cinema, and in this, The Black Gate turns out to be close to perfect.

In short: Hitokowa (2012)

As anyone interested in Japanese horror made in the last twenty years or so will probably know, the country has a particular love for creating urban legends - and yes, there’s consequently also a heap of creepypasta, for early-style creepypasta really is the urban legend’s twin sibling. Cue an old-fartish whinge about too much of creepypasta today having turned into horror writing that’s not good enough for the actual horror market instead of being a thing all of its own here, if you wish.

Anyway, given this love, it’s no surprise that there are quite a few Japanese movie anthologies made for the local home video market either based directly on actual urban legends or aiming for their tone very directly. Much of this stuff unfortunately doesn’t make its way to the West, so watching a little anthology movie like Hitokowa, with its very short tales of horror shot on the cheap that might induce yawns in the Japanese audience it is actually made for, looks comparatively fresh to my eyes that have been less flooded with this stuff.

Apparently (this one’s a bit too minor to trust the IMDB and other sources completely) directed by Kazuto Kodama, the sixty minute film contains a surprising number of tales between five and fifteen minutes in length, generally with plots that really sound and feel a lot like actual urban legends, or are tone-perfect replicas of such (I loathe the term “fakelore”). So you get the tale of the schoolgirl who accidentally texts her romantic SMS to the wrong guy and pays for it (because in the land of urban legends, there’s always a serial killer on the other side of electronic communications), the young woman – most of the protagonists are young women – who googles her name and finds something really rather creepy, and so on and so forth, all presented with just enough worldbuilding and characterization not to be completely bland but absolutely focused on telling the creepy tale and get out.


Visually, the thing looks about as cheap as it probably is, but Kodama is a deft enough director to milk the simple stories and simple camera set-ups he can afford for as much as they are worth, never letting a tale overstay its welcome and certainly presenting each tales’ twist with a certain verve. An additional attraction for my tastes is the film’s location work, setting these short, bleak yet fun tales in the least glamorous places in Japan, poky apartments, and drab streets, which provides a degree of the strange veracity an urban legend needs much better than anything more glitzy would.

Music Monday: Bleached Edition

High Desert Kill (1989)

The friends Jim (Anthony Geary), Brad (Marc Singer) and Paul (Vaughn Armstrong) have been making an annual hunting trip for ages. This year’s outing is a rather sad one, for Paul has died in a horrible accident, and Jim and Brad are taking Paul’s nephew Ray (Micah Grant) with them to scatter Paul’s ashes in the high desert, as per his wishes. It’s pretty clear that Paul was the glue that kept this particular friendship together, for the pretty sensitive medical researcher Jim and the ultra-macho Brad are clearly just one honest talk away from being on the outs forever. The presence of the younger Ray – an actor/model who is the national face of one of those pseudo-rugged outdoorsy companies that are neither rugged nor outdoorsy  - doesn’t help calm things down terribly well, either; his not being his uncle probably has a lot to do with that, as does the generation gap between the man and the one between their personalities.

Once they arrive at the place where they want to make their base camp site, the trio meet grizzled hunter Stan (grizzled Chuck Connors). Stan has bad news for them. Apparently, there’s not a trace of game animals – or really any animal – to find in the area, something the experienced Stan has no explanation for whatsoever. It becomes quickly clear that something is not at all right with the place, even ignoring the lack of animals. It is as if some invisible power were watching the group, playing with their moods and emotions in inexplicable ways, as if something were having its perverse fun, or perhaps were experimenting, with the hunters.

TV veteran Harry Falk’s High Desert Kill is a wonderful example of what could be done within the realm of the made-for-TV movie when the stars were just right, and the right script met the right cast and director in just the right mood. The script by Mike Marvin, Darnell Fry and T.S. Cook is about as Fortean as you could imagine, mixing various elements of High Strangeness with a variation on Fort’s “we are cattle”, and coming up with something that is tense, weird, yet also grounded in a believable depiction of a type of male friendship. This depiction makes it easy to buy into the stranger elements of the film, adding an additional frisson of wrongness to moments like the scenes where Brad comes upon the other three men huddled around a fire cavemen-style, bloodied and gnawing on the raw liver of a bear they had to kill off-screen. In fact, there are a couple of important things happening off-screen, perhaps for budgetary reasons; however it came about, the film only showing us the consequences of certain things also very effectively suggests that there is something wrong with time, space, and memory, the characters seemingly not quite living in a linear, observable reality anymore.

As an old TV hand, Falk’s not the most stylish of directors, but he does make excellent use of the eeriness of the high desert, suggesting the presence of the thing that is haunting the characters through colour filters, sudden absences of sound, and other tricks of that sort. It’s really effective work, particularly in combination with a minimal synth soundtrack by Dana Kaproff that provides additional low budget otherworldliness, and performances that are over the top in just the right way, suggesting the mental pressure and the malignant outside influence on the characters, while also adding a suggestion of complexity to the men.

The ending’s not quite as great as the rest of the movie, explaining things a bit too pat, and resulting in a clever yet not completely convincing finale of dramatic shouting that seems to come right out of an episode of the original Outer Limits (which is not a bad place to come from). The traditional horror movie bullshit ending is very effective, suggesting all kinds of nasty things in the future of the protagonists.


High Desert Kill is a fine movie, using most of the deficits that come with a low budget and a short shooting schedule as ways to add eeriness and weirdness to the whole affair, resulting in one of the best Fortean horror films I know.

In short: Midnight Shadow (1939)

I’m not talking about so-called “Race” [sic] movies, films made in the times of the studio system by and for consumption of African Americans, terribly often, well actually never. In part, that’s because many of these films have been treated particularly badly when it comes to being archived in any form, in part, it’s because most of those I have managed to see just weren’t terribly good at all but writing sarcastic put-downs about these films is way too much like kicking someone who’s down for my tastes. That’s what Michael Bay movies are made for, right? And hey, if these filmmakers had had the money of a Bay movie instead of budgets that let white Poverty Row studios of the time look flush, not to speak of the troubles myriad social barriers against them making art or commerce at all must have caused them, they most probably would have been able to do more with what was given to them. This is not to say that there were no good movies made by and for African Americans at this time – trustworthy sources tell me there were - they are just incredibly difficult to dig up around here, even more so when a viewer’s tastes run to the dubious more than towards the worthy.

George Randol’s Midnight Shadow concerning the (evil) plans of a stage spiritualist and mentalist going by the moniker of Prince Alihabad (Laurence Criner), featuring a bit of seduction and theft, is unfortunately not a good film of its time and place. There’s a cornucopia of weaknesses on screen: the script is plodding despite a running time of under an hour, camera set-ups are static, the acting is stiff at best – some of the actors seem to have been dragged in front of the camera against their wills and seem to just literally be reading their lines – and there’s little sense of drama and excitement at all (the latter of which was of course also a problem that haunted the white Poverty Row Studios). There are some interesting time capsule elements here: despite its myriad flaws, this is after all still a film with an  all-black cast, so every social stratum here from comic relief to the bad guy, over doctors to police is portrayed by African Americans, and as a white guy from Germany born more than three decades after this was shot, I can only imagine how seeing something like this on the big screen must have felt to its intended audience.

Past Misdeeds: Behemoth (2011)

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.

A US small town situated close to a mountain that was an active volcano ages ago is hit by a series of tremors and rather curious earth activities, while deadly CO2 starts leaking all around the mountain. Strangely, at the same time this mysterious activity starts up, various off-screen natural disasters hit places all around the world.

Retired professor William Walsh (William B. Davis) has found an explanation for the strange phenomena through his extensive study of myth, or rather myths. William thinks what's happening has to do with the true base of various myths shared by cultures all around the world, myths in which a gigantic creature acts out the wrath of the Earth whenever humanity too actively disturbs the natural order; now, says William, the creature is waking up again.

Of course, William is mentally ill (probably schizophrenic, though the film doesn't dare use the word in what I assume is an example of inexplicable US puritanism), and going off his meds, so neither his son Thomas (Ed Walsh), a lumberjack boss, nor his twenty year old daughter who acts like a teenager Grace (Cindy Busby) believe a single word he says. Too bad he's right.

The seismic activities are so peculiar that Thomas's former flame Emily Allington (Pascale Hutton), now a seismologist, returns to her hometown to find an explanation of her own, and convince her Sheriff uncle (Garry Chalk) of the danger of the situation, if need be.

The danger is, of course, even larger than she could have expected. Also as a matter of course, Emily, Thomas, Grace, and a mysterious government agent of the Department of Weird Shit (Ty Olsson) will end up on the mountain exactly when the tentacles really hit the fan, and William's theories are proven quite beyond doubt.

The Internet disagrees with me here, but I truly think W.D. Hogan's Behemoth is a particularly fine example of SyFy Channel movie making. Certainly, it's a film pushing a lot of my buttons with the way it mixes a basic SF horror idea right out of Weird Tales or Astounding in its more horrific moments with the highly localized global disaster movie style SyFy is so very fond of. It's a great mixture, particularly because Hogan (and/or Rachelle S. Howie's script) really does know how to sell the age-old clichés most of the film is built from as natural instead of annoying.

Plus, there's a monster as big as a mountain with tentacles that is first partially revealed in a sequence where its very large eye peers angrily out of a hole in the mountain at our non-teenage teenage co-protagonist and her boyfriend, which is as perfect and resonant an image as one could hope for to find anywhere. Once we get to see the monster completely, it also turns out to be one of the rather more creatively designed SyFy CGI creatures, again fully fitting into the traditions of certain old pulp magazines. The only disappointment when it comes to the monster is the rather lame way our heroes end up getting rid of it, even though this comes with the territory when you as a filmmaker aren't allowed to let it eat the world and surely couldn't afford the pyrotechnics anyhow.

Behemoth, despite being a film deftly made from clichés and well-worn tropes, also has some moments when it's making small steps into directions you don't expect. I was particularly surprised by the film's treatment of William's mental illness (even though it doesn't dare name it - people could infect themselves with it, or something). There's a believability and truthfulness about the way his environment reacts to William's illness and what they believe to be just another expression of it in what must have been a long line of expressions. William's family shows a mixture of sadness, exasperation and plain tiredness that isn't just unexpectedly real for a SyFy monster movie but for movies in general. Even better, the film also allows its mentally ill character the same degree of dignity (one thing many mental illnesses don't exactly leave you much of, while your environment generally does its damndest to take away the rest) it gives its other characters, and even provides him with an opportunity for small-scale heroism without feeling the need to kill him off for reasons of “redemption”.

William B. Davis uses the opportunity to for once not play a bad guy, and provides William (the name-giving fairy was out, sorry) with just the right mixture of obsessiveness, fragility, and a warmth suggesting a complete human being.

In general, Behemoth is pretty good at breaking up its ultra-competent and highly entertaining giant monster/disaster tale with small moments of truth in the character department (not in the moments when everyone just has to act like an idiot for genre conventions, obviously). Apart from everything to do with William, there's - just for example - the telling fact that the Sheriff doesn't take what Emily tells him about a possible catastrophe seriously, despite her being an actual expert, because she's just his niece, and surely she can't know more about anything than he does, which seems to mirror the experience most younger women of my acquaintance have with their own families.


For me, these kinds of elements and small details often are what make or break a SyFy creature feature; it is of course important (and pretty much unavoidable) to work with and within clichés and tropes when making a low budget genre film for TV, but it's these small things that differentiate a competent movie from one truly worth watching. Behemoth, for its part, clearly belongs to the latter group.

In short: Man Bites Dog (1992)

Original title: C'est arrivé près de chez vous

At least when it came out, this very dark francophone Belgian comedy by Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde (who also are the main cast) was a bit of a cult hit. It’s no surprise, for the film’s structure as a fake documentary by three guys following around a sociopathic killer when he’s doing his dirty business is rather useful as a device to grimly send up the growing reality show business as well as the petit bourgeoisie, and its flippant depiction of violence and a couple of horrible characters is basically catnip to us cult movie fans.

It’s the anti-bourgeois aspect the film puts the greatest emphasis on (actual reality TV as we know it today wasn’t quite a thing yet, lucky time), Poelvoorde playing the killer Ben as the sort of self-centred, pseudo-educated, racist, sexist and endlessly talking embodiment of the reason why the bourgeoisie does have a bit of a bad rep in certain circles. But then, the film seems to suggest, there’s really only a tiny step between talking this way and being a cold-hearted monster, so the on-screen filmmakers don’t slowly slide into the roles of willing accomplices but are there basically from minute one.


Which is of course one of the film’s biggest problems. It has basically said everything it wanted to say in its first thirty minutes, has demonstrated what it wanted to demonstrate and then treads water for an hour or so by going through increasingly unpleasant, yet not increasingly disturbing, scenes of Ben doing horrible things, followed by a bit of Ben ranting at someone, followed by another murder, and so on, and so forth. For my taste, it all gets a bit tedious and samey, and while I do admire the filmmakers for being consistent, I do believe the film goes nowhere terribly interesting very slowly once it has very deftly set up its basic premise.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)

After a British author who wrote a book about the Candyman is murdered by evisceration with a hook in New Orleans (in this version, the place where the Candyman legend has its source), Ethan Tarrant (William O’Leary), who had a violent altercation with the man about his responsibility for the death of Ethan’s father, confesses to the deed, even though the audience already knows quite well the actual killer was the indeed Candyman (Tony Todd) himself.

Ethan’s sister, the school teacher Annie (Kelly Rowan), doesn’t believe her brother he is a killer, whatever he says, and thinks he’s just trying to punish himself for the guilt he feels for their father’s death. Plus, there has been a whole series of murders in New Orleans committed in the same manner, and it would be preposterous to think Ethan is responsible for all of them. Annie can’t help but look into the matter everyone else treats as an open and shut thing or just ignores over the Mardi Gras season, leading her to a hidden truth about her family history but also inviting the Candyman into her life and that of her loved ones.

As is the critical consensus about the Bill Condon directed sequel to Bernard Rose’s classic Candyman, I don’t think the first film was in need of a sequel at all, having said what it wanted to say about the still on-going consequences of slavery in the USA, the creation of myths, and a guy with a nasty hook, quite eloquently.

However, if there has to be a sequel, Condon’s film is certainly at least not the kind of embarrassing nonsense that would turn its titular character into a standard issue quipping supernatural slasher. There are some conceptual weaknesses to the film, however. First and foremost, it does tend to waver a bit between the deadly sequel sickness of trying to make the same film with the same plot beats again and the much more interesting attempt to re-locate and deepen the film’s mythology and metaphorical resonance. I was also not terribly happy about the importance a certain mirror will have for the resolution of the plot, or rather, I understand why you’d want a physical object in the film that makes it possible to not repeat the first film’s ending – and at least the mirror has a connection to Candyman’s slightly revised origin – but the way the first film and this one has turned Candyman into a living myth makes it pretty difficult to buy that any physical object, even one intimately involved into turning the victim of violence into the supernatural perpetrator of it, could be dangerous to what amounts to a killing idea. The film’s final weakness is an early insistence on including a huge number of false scare style jump scares, adding the insult of nothing actually happening to the injury of the jump scare. After the first half hour or so, that element of the film just stops completely, though, leaving at least this viewer a bit confused about why and how it was there at all to begin with.

But let’s get to the good stuff, for while this certainly isn’t as good as the original, Farewell to the Flesh does quite a few things very well indeed. There is, for example, the great use Condon gets out of the film’s relocation from Chicago to a New Orleans in the thrall of carnival season. It’s not just that (pre-Katrina, obviously) New Orleans as it is used here is an excellent, moody and picturesque place that, in this season, seems to sit right on the threshold between heaven and hell, it is also that the city’s history lends itself particularly well to what the film says of the US history of slavery and racism, and the sin of trying to be mute about it. Though it has to be said that the Philip Glass score doesn’t sound much like New Orleans. Ignoring his entries into the Twilight series (which I haven’t seen and probably never will), Condon as a director seems particularly interested in liminal spaces and their connection to identity or its construction, so this aspect of the film is quite clearly right up his alley. The film also understands class as another dividing factor of people’s lives much more so than many horror films do, but also realizes that people aren’t only the sum of their tribal identity of their class and their race, so we also get a character like Annie from a certainly privileged (in the old meaning of stinking rich) background who is a more than just decent human being.

Once the film hits its stride, the more directly horrific elements of the plot become rather effective too, with a handful of nightmarish sequences that make use of quite a lot of old-fashioned tricks having come down from the Hitchcock school of suspense, as well as some cool set-ups for somewhat graphic sequences that don’t stop at being cool but actually carry thematic and even emotional resonance. Condon does a great job at fitting all of this into the proper mood of dread and doom too, with a dark and rainy New Orleans (or in part dark and rainy New Orleans as portrayed by an LA soundstage, I assume) full of desperate revellers mirroring what’s going on around Annie (or perhaps the other way round).


All of that’s not bad at all for a sequel nobody asked for.

In short: DreadOut (2019)

A bunch of teens really feel the need to improve their social media standing. Their plan of attack involves going to an empty, supposedly haunted apartment building somewhere in what I assume to be Jakarta to film themselves there encountering fake ghosts. They do need the help of sensible, lower class classmate Linda (Caitlin Halderman) who knows the security guard to get in, though, so she’s co-opted by the guy she clearly has a crush on, too, and we have our mandatory heroine who might be somewhat closer connected to the building than she knows herself.

Of course, the teens encounter rather more serious supernatural activity in the building than they would have wished for.

The Indonesian DreadOut, directed by Kimo Stamboel (once one half of the Mo Brothers), is based on the videogame of the same title. I haven’t played that one myself, so I can’t talk to how close the film is to the game, but I believe the repeated use of cellphone flashes as a weapon against the film’s monsters is taken right from the game – and isn’t terribly convincing on screen, I have to say.

On the other hand, even though the film as a whole keeps inside the lines of horror as a carnival ride, Stamboel is a perfectly talented barker, so most of the horror sequences are well-timed and much improved in their effectiveness by some pretty cool monster design. Pocong and other creatures of Indonesian folklore pop up, and those are of course creepy as hell when done right. Going by the director’s past, I would have expected a bit more blood and gore and a higher body count, but I don’t exactly need more dead teenagers in it to enjoy a film (though your mileage may vary, of course).


The film also puts some effort into creating the proper creepy mood, with set design that gets a lot of decrepit atmosphere out of a miniscule budget. And while the script isn’t exactly deep, it does make good use of the couple of locations it has to work with, and does know how to make the most out of the film’s weirder ideas, like the impossible circular, bottomless pool of water on the sixth floor of an apartment building that is a gate to somewhere else. What more could I ask of a videogame movie?

Music Monday: Drowsy Edition

The Stars Are Wrong!

So normal service around here will return on July, 16th (when the stars will presumably be right again).

Music Monday: No Relief Edition

Summerfield (1977)

Warning: I’m going to spoil an important element of the plot that will probably suggest most of the rest of the movie to some readers!

Teacher Simon Robinson (Nick Tate) comes to a small Australian outback town to replace a predecessor who has seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth. Simon’s a bit put out by this, or rather by the complete disinterest everyone in town shows towards the disappearance. Even the local policeman is more interested in proper and correct car licenses than a guy gone missing. The town’s a bit weird for Simon’s taste anyway, with a populace that mostly carries various kinds of leers and sneers on their faces, and whose members lack even the tiniest smidgen of politeness. Well, the female half  (Geraldine Turner) of the couple running his guest house (apparently the Australian term for boarding house) wants to seduce him, and he being a 70s Australian film leading man isn’t going to say no, but otherwise, it’s an unfriendly and slightly creepy place. Why, even the kids he’s going to teach are greeting him with a fake hanging!

Given the general mood and the boredom that must come with the spirit of this place, Simon begins to poke around the disappearance himself, quickly if not verbally coming to the conclusion that some sort of foul play must have been involved. At least in his mind, he does connect the disappearance to Summerfield, an island separated from the rest of the area by water, a small driveway and quite a high gate, where Sally Abbott (Michelle Jarman), one of his students, lives with her mother Jenny (Elizabeth Alexander) and her uncle David (John Waters). Because he does have a bit of a problem with his libido, he also develops more than just a tiny crush on Jenny, which will not make the situation better in the long run.

Ken Hannam’s Summerfield belongs to the not inconsiderable number of Australian films that build their own little cinematic canon of the Australian gothic. Quite a few of these films have an outsider coming (or sometimes returning) to a small town in the outback where he or she encounters various strange and unfriendly locals, the threat of violence expressed through more sweaty faces than in a Spaghetti Western, and some kind of terrible secret of the past one or more members of the want to keep buried, and which shapes the places present and future.

In Summerfield’s case, the secret is incest, which, going by the way various family portraits are shot, may have been going on for generations as some sort of family tradition, but which at least in this contemporary case is perfectly consensual (cue a discussion of how consensual sibling incest can ever be in your own mind, if that floats your boat, imaginary reader). In something of a clever twist, it’s not so much the hidden secrets bubbling to the surface and the past taking control of the present that leads to the film’s very 70s ending, but Simon not being willing (or able) to leave well enough alone; and as the nasty little twist at the end suggests, he has set in motion the death of three people for no good reason at all. But then, nothing Simon does during the film suggests he is very good at thinking through the consequences of the things he does, or trying to get into the heads of the country people he so clearly dislikes. On the other hand, you only ever know if something should actually be truly left alone or not once you’ve figured out what it is about.


Hannam’s direction style is a bit dry sometimes, perhaps not too surprising from someone working in TV more than in the movies, but there are also quite a few scenes that really drive home the particularly Australian gothic mood of the film. The film features quite a few dramatic shots of flat empty land that don’t suggest a freedom of wide open spaces but the threat of being surrounded by nothing (or nothing but people who just might be a bit crazy thanks to their surroundings), close-ups of the sweaty faces of character actors who look as if they are about to lose it every minute (but never really do), and other things that suggest a Hammer movie but by day and with too much space. Summerfield as a place is particularly great, like the idea of the traditional gothic manor turned Australian and (70s) contemporary, its dwellers isolating themselves from a part of the country that’s already too isolated for comfort, breeding behaviours rather frowned upon in less isolated spaces.

In short: I Trapped the Devil (2019)

Surprise family visits on Christmas are seldom a great idea, yet still Karen (Susan Burke) has talked her husband Matt (AJ Bowen) into driving up to Matt’s brother Steve’s (Scott Poythress) house as a bit of a surprised. Karen’s clearly thinking this might be a great opportunity to smooth things over between the brothers who have grown estranged after Steve lost his family in an accident. Matt, you see, clearly isn’t much of a guy to understand a close relative’s psychological troubles when they start to become bothersome to him.

It really turns out to be a surprise, for not only does Steve seem even more depressed than the last time anyone here talked, and is rather adamant they’re not going to stay, but something’s not at all right in the house. There’s a palpable air of dread and doom hanging over the place even Matt has a hard time pretending to be not there. It would indeed probably be better for everyone involved if Karen and Matt would leave but they are snowed in quickly. Eventually, Steve is admitting his secret: he is convinced he has locked the Devil up in his cellar. In Steve’s interpretation, the Devil is the force responsible for everything bad that happens not caused by humans themselves (which is an interesting way to frame evil) and as long as he is keeping him prisoner, the world will become an increasingly less horrible place.

Of course, Matt and Karen do at first believe Steve has lost it completely and has locked up some poor bastard down in the cellar, but the whole atmosphere of the place, as well as the disquieting behaviour of Steve’s victim, do open up the dreadful possibility that there’s something to what he says.

There’s a lot I like about Josh Lobo’s I Trapped the Devil. There’s the heavy atmosphere of dread and doom mostly constructed out of classical Christmas colours (which also happen to be classical horror movie colours, go figure), a gloomy night, blurry visions on a TV screen, and a core acting trio that’s as good at suggesting being surrounded by a feeling of wrongness as they are at portraying the film’s more quotidian family troubles (quotidian, as always, does not mean without weight).


You could argue against the film that it really isn’t taking its basic idea very far at all, but to me, it’s exactly this willingness to focus on these three people and how the thing that may or may not be in the cellar and the mood it carries with it brings the divisions between them into clearest view, that makes I Trapped the Devil as successful as it is. As a matter of fact, I find the personal apocalypse of these three people much more concerning and moving than another tale of the devil or a demon doing apocalyptic shit again. And really, Lobo’s ability to keep the film’s palpable mood of dread up for eighty minutes without ever resorting to jump scares or obvious visual clichés is a thing to behold, turning this into a wonderfully contained and focused film that’s actually rather difficult to forget.

Past Misdeeds: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012)

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.

After the death of his mother Rosalind (Vanessa Redgrave), Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) comes to her house looking for something like closure, or at least to confront parts of the past he shared with his mother. They had been estranged for years, without visits or phone calls, because Rosalind suffered from a kind of mania that drove her to pressing her religion on Leon, playing "games" bordering on child abuse.

Rosalind's house - not the one where Leon grew up in - is a strange place, full of antiques, and statues and statuettes of angels, many of which Leon acquired for Rosalind in his profession in the antiques trade without knowing whom he bought them for. The longer Leon stays the more he is hit by a feeling of something strange, something malevolent even, going on, as if there were some truth to Rosalind's Christian cultish beliefs, and now something were about to punish Leon for his conscious decision against belief. Things seem to move where there shouldn't be movement, Leon is inexorably pressed into confrontation with elements of his mother's beliefs that seem to have taken on life and reality, and something is prowling around the house. Only time will tell if ghosts, wrathful angels, or just Leon's still bruised mind are the cause of the strange happenings.

Rodrigo Gudiño's The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is the kind of film that easily divides opinions, not just because Gudiño is the publisher of Rue Morgue mag (never trust a journo - or blogger - making movies, right?) but because it is a film that combines a lot of elements people usually either love or hate in movies, depending one their temperaments.

It's a slow moving film with comparatively little outward action, utterly dependent on the creation of mood through set design, sound design, camera work, and acting. The Last Will tells its story in a way that not quite answers the question of the reality of what Leon encounters in the house, and consciously keeps parts of the plot's background ambiguous. Seeing that this is also a film circling questions of belief and disbelief via the weird and influences of classic supernatural tales, it's no surprise certain people will find the film boring or pretentious. As with all things mood-based, it's a matter of being compatible with the feeling the film is going for, and if you don't feel it, you just don't feel it, though I'd really wish people would more often differentiate between things that aren't for them, and things that aren't good.

To me, The Last Will is a little wonder of a movie, with a lead actor in Aaron Poole who can carry a film all on his own, never sharing the screen with anyone else. Other actors make their appearances as voices on the phone, in a small bit of video footage, and in form of a long-ish monologue by Vanessa Redgrave that really pulls the film together thematically. But really, the film is centred on Poole, with not a few scenes only showing him exploring the house.

One could argue that the house - on the outside built in a mock-medieval castle style, on the inside a living space reimagined as an angel-obsessed antiques store - really is the film's other main actor beside Poole, as it is the main source of the film's increasingly oppressive mood. The way Gudiño films it, the house is a place probably once meant to fill Rosalind's loneliness through an accumulation of stuff, but now has become something different, a kind of graveyard of emotions and an attempt at keeping a past alive so that it can never truly turn into a new present. In short, it's a place that seems custom-built to create its own ghosts; and Rosalind had turned herself into a ghost even long before she died, it seems. This mood as well as Rosalind's turn of mind might very well have something to do with intellectual influence the Christian sect Rosalind belonged to had on her, but then neither Leon nor the audience ever really learn if they had an active role in the proceedings that caused the house's haunting, or if they just provided more of the emotional trouble Rosalind was looking for.

In fact, the film only ever completely accedes the existence of Rosalind's ghost to be real; we never learn how much of what happens to Leon is caused by her, how much of it is a product of his mental damage, or how much of it has another supernatural source. The film leaves room for various interpretations, if you're interested in them, so you can takes its hints about a cult awakening something supernatural that leeches onto Rosalind's and Leon's private pains at face value, or you can ignore them completely without losing out on much of the film's meaning either way. In the end, the film seems to say, there's really not much of a difference between being haunted by a ghost or being haunted by the past in its non-supernatural form - both things can kill you one way or the other.

The Last Will is also one of the few films questioning the nature of belief and unbelief that doesn't feel the need to come down on either side while damning the other. Rosalind's ghost exists as a creation of her own beliefs, while Leon saves himself by reasserting his disbelief. It's unexpectedly satisfying, and definitely quite a bit less annoying than being petulantly preached at by another movie, quite independent of the direction the preaching comes from.


So, obviously, and not quite unexpectedly given my tastes, I come down on the side of those viewers who find The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh rather spectacular in its quiet, intelligent way. If it were a book, it would probably be published by Ash Tree Press or Tartarus Press, and if that sounds like a recommendation to you, it most definitely is.

In short: Red Island (2018)

Warning: I’m going to spoil what goes for a major plot reveal in this one right in the synopsis!

The film follows in flashback and with copious voiceovers a story John (Georgie Daburas) tells a cop after his wife Amy (Alex Essoe) disappeared on an island he took her to help save their marriage. Apparently, a miscarriage had caused a depression in Amy that put quite the strain on the marriage. Well, perhaps the fact that John’s main reaction to his wife’s suffering is to whine incessantly about how she isn’t to him like she was before has something to do with their marital troubles, too, but neither he nor the film really seem to realize that. But then, John’s lying through his teeth about his wish to save their marriage by island travel anyway, and is in fact there to steal some cursed “Indian” plaque for some Russian guy. Why he’s even taking Amy? Don’t ask me.

Of course, that cursed plaque is indeed cursed, and Amy seems to connect in some vague way to its mystical goat person guardian.

Directed and written by someone calling themselves Lux, Red Island has exactly two things going for it: Alex Essoe, one of the undervalued (otherwise she’d not have to be in this film) genre actresses right now, and a forested island setting that does indeed look like the liminal space it is supposed to be. Of course, the film does very little with it human ace card, putting a cap on Essoe’s performance by telling what should really be her character’s tale through the eyes of her – frankly about as interesting as his name and certainly also not very interestingly played – husband. Which would already be bad enough, but we get a double dose of him thanks to the unnecessary framing device, and hardly a scene goes by where poor Daburas doesn’t have to go into a pointless off-screen monologue that mostly tells a viewer nothing they haven’t already seen, or descends into flowery musings that are simply not as deep as they apparently believe to be. The cut-aways to the police interview are a great way to destroy what tension the film manages to build, something that certainly isn’t helped but that whole bit of the plot not going anywhere at all. In fact, the few pieces of information we get through them and another pointless flashback to John and the Russian would have been much better integrated into scenes between Amy and John. That might even have upgraded the pacing from leaden to slow. If ever a film needed unity of place and time, this one does. Also, a ban on off-screen babbling.


It’s a bit of a shame, really, because there is a pretty interesting, a bit Laird Barron-ish tale to be told with this island, and even from Red Island’s basic premises.

Polaroid (2019)

Bird (Kathryn Prescott) doesn’t just have a dubious name, she’s also an outsider, though not a completely friendless one, at her high school, thanks to her reserved personality that may perhaps border on very mild social phobia. She does of course also have the mandatory dead father and the mandatory mother who loves her but isn’t home often enough to show it. Bird’s life doesn’t get any easier when one of her friends gives her, a noted photography nerd, a vintage polaroid camera he has found at a yard sale. Turns out the camera is cursed, and whoever is photographed with it is soon killed off by a malevolent entity (the inevitable Javier Botet and what looks like a bit too much CGI to me). Which becomes particularly problematic after Bird has shot a group photo of her friends and the guy she is rather keen on.

A lot of the things I enjoyed about Lars Klevberg’s Polaroid do sound as if I am damning the film with faint praise, but for a film hailing from the realm of PG-13 mainstream teen horror, this is really a nice enough effort. The film’s main problem is its monster. While it is conceptually fine and fun enough, the actual CGI-and-Botet execution is just not terribly scary, in part because the Botet-monster has by now become something of a generic shorthand for filmmakers with a limited imagination to use in horror, and in part because the execution doesn’t do much very much at all with the really cool idea of a monster that works like a photograph on various levels.

However, the longer the film went on, the less I found myself miffed by the monster, and started to enjoy myself because of all the other things the film gets right. First and foremost, I really like how the script (by Blair Butler) doesn’t let its characters end up as the clean tropes of teen horror and slasher cinema (the jock, the slut, well, perhaps the final girl), but does indeed put a bit of effort into its mostly effective shorthand characterization. In general, the behaviour of the characters makes sense for who and what they are supposed to be and the situation they find themselves in, without the film feeling the need to use horror movie bullshit to get them killed. Turns out, the supernatural threat is dangerous enough without that, though the film doesn’t go out of its way to kill off characters at all, leaving this with a more interesting structure than the usual string of kills. The film prefers more of an investigative angle to its horror, really. And why, even when a character acts like a total ass in the film’s final third, it does make sense for him to do so at that point.

Otherwise, apart from an unnecessary wrinkle in the final act, the film is simply solidly structured, telling its story as a series of discoveries the teen protagonists make instead of a series of plot twists that happen to them. Nothing they find out is exactly ground-breaking and new for the veteran horror viewer, but it works and isn’t aggressively stupid or clever-clever.

Klevberg’s direction is at its best when it comes to character moments, framing a couple of effective (and even two pretty cool) scare sequences, and a few solid ones with teens acting mostly believably. Again, it’s nothing spectacular, but it does get the job done in a solid an convincing way.


See what I meant about damning with faint praise? See also the solid cast (which in teen horror land of course means much better than expected) with just as solid genre veteran appearances by Mitch Pileggi and Grace Zabriskie, the solid effects, the solid score, and so on and so forth. But honestly, I liked Polaroid!

In short: A Vigilante (2018)

A woman we will eventually learn is called Sadie (Olivia Wilde), is helping victims – mostly women of course - of domestic violence to escape the supposed loved ones who abuse them, or, depending on the situation, to drive the abusers off. She’s working with violence, planning, and an anger barely held in check. Sadie’s just holding onto her sanity, apparently, but ironically, her personal brand of vigilantism is what’s holding her together and not what’s tearing her apart.

In flashbacks to support group sessions in a women’s shelter, we eventually learn Sadie’s own story of abuse, something that isn’t quite over yet in the film’s present timeline.

Sarah Daggar-Nickson’s is a master class on how to make what is certainly still a genre film (screw the use of “elevated genre” for what’s actually “really great genre”) about domestic abuse and vigilantism without ever falling into the easy trap of exploiting its theme. In part, this is because of the film’s very careful framing, the way it focuses not on the violence committed on the victims of abuse nor very much on that Sadie inflicts on the abusers in turn, but on the aftermath of both. Like any vigilante film, the film accepts the freeing aspects of what Sadie does - and it’s clear that what she’s doing may be illegal, but it’s also moral and the only thing she can do to stay sane and a person – but it lacks the smug self-satisfaction of most vigilante films, the speechifying, the pretence that this shit is easy. It is also a film much more interested in Sadie helping free these women (and a child) from their horrible situations than in her punishing the perpetrators, and it’s just as interested in a believable portrayal of the psychology of the victims of abuse. That it in the end does finish on an act of vengeance presented in a short series of very classically styled suspense scenes doesn’t actually work against this interest; it is simply the only way for the film to give Sadie some of the peace she desperately deserves, and after having seen what she has been going through, it would be a wrong note to end on to deny her this.

On a more technical level, Daggar-Nickson’s direction impresses through her elegant and meaningful handling of the film’s flashback structure (something that’s too often used as a gimmick), the way she integrates the support group scenes with Sadie’s brand of vigilantism, one part commenting on the other in actually enlightening ways that left this viewer at least understanding more about these characters and the world we live in.


I probably shouldn’t end without mentioning Olivia Wilde’s fantastic performance as Sadie that for large parts of the film works via body language and nuance more than dialogue and huge, dramatic expression. Well, there’s that one big breakdown meant to make clear to the audience how broken she is I found a bit too loud/too much for the rest of the film, but for the most part, we learn all there is to learn about what’s going on with her through glances, posture, the shifting of shoulders and the way her back straightens when she goes out to help someone.

Music Monday: Home Edition