Three Films Make A Post: He's not just in your mind...he's in your house.

The Vagrant (1992): This is the second and final feature film special effects guy Chris Walas directed, and, despite being a marginal improvement on his “sequel” to Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, if only by virtue on not pissing on a classic, it’s really no surprise to me his directing career didn’t go anywhere. Though, to be fair, Walas, didn’t write the script (that was Richard Jefferies), so it’s not exactly his fault that this supposed horror comedy only ever aims for the most obvious joke and eschews the social satire its set-up (Yuppie versus possibly imaginary vagrant! Intense homeownership!) suggests, instead playing out like a long, long, looooong episode of the “Tales from the Crypt” show. Walas’s direction, while certainly professional enough, doesn’t add anything of note, so it’s the job of Bill Paxton’s enthusiastic (if again puddle-shallow but what is he supposed to do, re-write the script?) performance to keep an audience awake to the end.

The Lightning Incident (1991): This TV movie by Michael Switzer featuring a cult that really needs to acquire and sacrifice our heroine’s (Nancy McKeon) baby for reasons of post-colonial shenanigans, isn’t terribly great either. A couple of times, it hits upon an effective moment or two – usually involving dream visions or very standard conspiracy tropes done alright - but the pacing is draggy and the filmmaking not terribly involving. Even though there’s a lot of material in the basic plot to make an interesting little horror film about colonialism featuring a heroine who is actually closer connected to the people she has to fight off than she knows and/or children paying for past sins of their parents, in practice, the whole she-bang sits awkwardly between classic pulp racism and a more complex treatment of the questions its script begs. The heavy hints of the film having ambitions on being a less exciting Rosemary’s Baby don’t help.


Rumpelstiltskin (1995): Finishing today’s trilogy of not terribly great 90s horror films is this example by Mark Jones, that finds a revived Rumpelstiltskin (Max Grodénchik) also doing some baby stealing, though in this case, to acquire a soul. Fighting against Rumps are the baby’s mother (Kim Johnston Ulrich) and the most horrible man alive (one Tommy Blaze). To nobody’s surprise, this is exactly the kind of movie you’d expect, with a bog-standard (fairy-tale background or not) quipping 90s supernatural horror villain in an okayish monster suit, murdering people with okayish special effects while doing nothing exciting whatsoever. Don’t even ask questions like how Rumps learned all the stuff about 90s pop culture he never stops referencing when he was transformed into a rock for the last thousand years, or how someone making a tearful wish in the presence of his rock is entering into a pact that sells a baby soul to him, or what the hell a Tommy Blaze is – nobody involved in this part of 90s horror ever cared about these kinds of questions, because all they were interested in were the quips (which are all horrible) and the effects (which won’t turn anyone’s head). Making an actual movie was just too much effort in the wild 90s world of Leprechauns, Wishmasters (yes, I know, there’s one good Wishmaster film) and Rumpelstiltskins.

Past Misdeeds: Sci-fighters (1996)

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 the far-flung future of 2009, and what a time it is. What we see of the cities looks like Blade Runner lite, there's a high security prison on the moon (so I assume the economy's booming), and people carry little personal electronics devices quite like smart phones without the phone part around. Oh, and Earth has been hanging under a cloud of dust for nearly three months now, leading to an eternal night the locals call Econight, perhaps because The Eternal Darkness was already taken.

Anyway, back on the moon crazy murderer and rapist Adrian Dunn (Billy Drago) decides to infect himself with a mysterious (yes, of course it's alien) virus that seemingly kills him. Unfortunately, Adrian isn't quite as dead as people think he is, so once his body has been returned to his native Boston in a way one might find rather unhygienic and left lying around in the local spaceport, he rises from the dead quite exactly like Jesus, if Jesus had been an increasingly leaky, muttering and physically and mentally quite appalling Billy Drago; so, depending on your favourite parts of the New Testament, perhaps not quite like Jesus.

The newly reborn Adrian continues to do what he loves best, namely going around killing men and raping women in a city that doesn't seem to care all that much. Well, police detective - with a "black badge" that makes him some kind of institutionally condoned version of Dirty Harry or a comparatively harmless version of Judge Dredd - Cameron Grayson (Roddy Piper) cares once he realizes there's a dead virally active murderer around, particularly because he has very personal reasons to hate Adrian. In his quest to catch and preferably kill Adrian, and postpone what might very well turn out to be a viral doomsday, Grayson teams up with virologist Dr. Kirbie Younger (Jayne Heitmeyer) and her mentor Dr. Washington (Tyrone Benskin). Given the surprising powers of not-dying-from-getting-shot and leaking icky fluids Adrian develops, the shape Adrian's victims are in after a while, and the generally fucked-up state of the world he's living in, Grayson will need all the help he can get.

As far as direct-to-video SF/action/horror films go, Peter Svatek's Sci-fighters (whose title of course has sod all to do with the film it belongs to) is really rather good. Sure, the production design is mostly a much cheaper version of Blade Runner's, the world building isn't exactly deeply thought through, and the plotting is very much as archetypal an example of low budget SF/action with added body horror ickiness as you'll find, but Svatek's execution of the whole affair is much better than it needs to be.

It does - of course - help the film a lot that its four larger characters are played by Piper, Drago, Heitmeyer and Benskin who all had been around the low budget movie block for quite some time when this was made, and who all bring charisma and professionalism to roles that could in other hands have turned out pretty boring instead of somewhat sympathetic and slightly interesting. It's certainly no surprise that Drago knows how to chew scenery, or how to go into melodramatic bodily contortions when an infection with an alien virus calls for it (he does that sort of thing every day), but it's as much of a pleasure to watch here as it ever is; as is Piper's ability to keep his character vaguely sympathetic despite him being a bit of a prick.

Mark Sevi's script is sharing some responsibility for this general lack of suckiness too, for it does use the clichés it's working with sometimes quite well. The shared background between Adrian and Grayson is a smidgen more interesting and complicated than usual in these cases, and because its details beyond the most obvious ones are disclosed slowly over the course of the movie, it stays vaguely interesting throughout. Even the obligatory romance between Grayson and Kirbie is more interesting than these things usually are, with a slightly more grown-up idea of how damaged people like Grayson relate romantically. Why, the film even doesn't put the mandatory sex scene in where it would usually be placed, and ends the romance sub-plot at an open yet not all that hopeful point. In this regard, it's also rather interesting which character it is in the end who kills off Adrian, and who it isn't; let's just say it isn't "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.

Sevi's script does quite a bit more of this kind of thing, keeping inside the lines of low budget genre filmmaking of its day and age yet showing some thought, even some ideas of its own. I found myself particularly impressed by the way the film handles all that raping without giving the deeply unpleasant impression a lot of low budget films of all genres fall into - probably seldom on purpose, to be fair - that rape is kinda hot (and the best way to show breasts in a movie). In Sci-fighters, rape and rapists are clearly vile, an idea that is of course cemented further by Drago's performance and physical changes, as well as by the whole alien, terraforming virus angle that puts extra emphasis on rape as something unnatural and inhuman. This does of course also carry a metaphorical echo of the way many raped women feel afterwards, though I'm not too sure the film is having this resonance on purpose and not just by a more or less “happy” accident.

On the other hand, the film also has the heart to include little moments that suggest Adrian isn't as easily filed away as a monster (that is, something beyond and below humanity) than as a twisted and broken human being; if you ask me, that's a rather more horrifying thought than the completely evil Other could ever be.


Of course, all these slightly more clever bits and pieces which I'm not even sure are in the film on purpose are all just minor parts in a rather generic, competently filmed piece of SF action horror (a sub-genre that should have its own name), and are the kind of thing you realize more once you start thinking about a movie than when you're actually watching it. That's as it should be, for while the kind of film I (and I suspect anyone reading this) spend most of my time with is often rather more clever than people not involved in the joys of low budget genre films assume, a film like Sci-fighters lives and dies on its ability to deliver cheap thrills. Fortunately, it's good at that, too.

In short: The Urban Legend of Sugisawa Village (2014)

aka The Urban Legend on a Village

Original title: Sugisawa Mura Toshi Densetsu

Three young men follow on the traces of a popular Japanese urban legend about a village in Aomori prefecture that disappeared from the maps after a villager murdered the rest of the population in a rather impressive killing spree. If you want more details about the urban legend itself, make your way here.

The guys actually manage to find Sugisawa village, but something the film will only explain much later happens, and only one of them returns home, bloodied and panicked and clearly dragging something supernatural with him. He tries to convince the sister of one of the lost men as well as another woman whose exact connection to the rest (girlfriend? friend?) never becomes quite clear to go to the rescue. Which might just turn out to be a horrible idea.

Directed by Yasutake Torii (if we do believe the IMDb when it comes to rather obscure Japanese productions), The Urban Legend is not exactly the sort of thing many people will go out looking for. Well, one of the female cast members is apparently an idol, so there will be a couple of fans coming in from that direction, but otherwise, the film is clearly cheap, slow, and will not be terribly exciting for most viewers. To get something out of its rather oblique storytelling, it does help to know the urban legend it is working from; a bit – well, actually rather a lot - of patience certainly helps too.

Armed with both of these things, I found myself somewhat enjoying some parts of the film. The obliqueness of the storytelling certainly adds a feeling of mystery (and probably confusion) to the whole affair, and makes what otherwise would probably too straightforward a tale a bit more interesting. The sound design with the incessant fake howling of fake wind in the background is cheap yet effective. From time to time, the director hits on a shot or two that’s actually creepy, and the – most probably budget-conscious – decision to show the reaction shots of actors to most of the supernatural happenings more than what disturbs them for most of the running time is not without its merits either.

Which is actually a bit more than I expected from the film going in, but I did enter with particularly low expectations, so make of this what you wish.

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

Ireland in the 50s. Her father sends unhappy little Fiona (Jeni Courtney) to live with her grandparents in a small fishing village on the coast close-by to Roan Inish, a tiny island the family lived on in better times, before the death of Fiona’s mother, before “the Evacuation” (the film never explains the why and wherefore of that), and before the somewhat bizarre death of Fiona’s little brother Jamie on the day of said Evacuation.

Fiona is fascinated by the tales her family and others tell her of her family’s past on Roan Inish, of their supposed familial connection to selkies, and the death of her brother. Fiona herself encounters things that very much fit into a supernatural reading of the world, suggesting the idea that her little brother didn’t die, but was taken because the family left the island. During the course of the film, she will realize that the family’s return to Roan Inish might be all it needs to get her brother back, restoring a way of life clearly bound to make everyone happier to boot.

The great John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish does tell this story rather less dramatically than all of this may sound – this is a family-friendly picture and not folk horror, so the selkies’ activity, even when they do something pretty terrible like kidnap a baby, is treated more as a natural part of the world the characters live in than a source of horror. That’s not a criticism, mind you, for part of what makes Secret of Roan Inish as charming and as interesting as it is, is exactly how willing it is to take on the worldview of its child protagonist, looking at the world – and here, a selkie is just as much part of the natural world as is a fish - with wonder rather than terror. Fiona, we are told, is not a child to frighten easily, after all.

Typical for Sayles, quite a bit of the film’s running time is taken up by flashbacks to (or should that be called enactments of?) the various stories about her family and their past Fiona is told. In a Sayles film, identity, and understanding of the past and what we call home and community, is often constructed out of the bits and pieces of stories, people becoming what they are not just through experience but through the way others in their community share their own experiences with them. Of course, Sayles is too intelligent a writer to not understand the vagaries of reconstructing Truth out of Memory but he also realizes that there’s a difference between historical and personal truth, and the truths Fiona discovers are all personal even if they are based on tales of her family history.

Because the film is slow, and quiet, and consciously unspectacular – none of which is meant in any way as a criticism of the film, for this is indeed the way this particular story needs to be told – the director has time and space enough to let the places Fiona inhabits breathe, suggesting a slower tempo, a greater closeness to natural rhythms of life. This, as well as how the film frames the family’s return to their traditional way of life as something equivocally good, could easily turn into a bit of back to nature kitsch (the only kitsch in this one is part of the sometimes really kitsch-Irish score) but Sayles never frames the story that way. This is not a film preaching universal closeness to nature and the past (and selkies) but one about the closeness to nature and the past of this specific group of people, in this specific place and time (this being a Sayles film, specificity when it comes to social and economic structures and pressures is a given anyway, even though this isn’t a film that’s about these things). It’s a rather refreshing approach when looked at in 2019.


Not only the film’s writing is sharp and involving in a quiet unassuming way, though. The film’s visual side (with cinematography by Haskell Wexler) has a calm and unfussy sense of beauty, never going for a postcard view of the Irish coast but seeming to accept the beauty and magic quite matter of factly together with those bits and pieces of the world that aren’t beautiful and magical. The same approach is used when it comes to the depiction of the fantastic aspects of the movie – magic here is just another part of nature, seen and treated with the same eye, yet still evoking a sense of awe and wonder.

In short: Lethal Weapon (1987)

Having watched quite a few films written by Shane Black in the last couple of months, I very much saved the best for last, and have now come up with my own private theory (not to be confused with my own private Idaho) about him: Black is a much better writer when he has clear constraints to work in. At the early stage of his career when he wrote this, he just couldn’t quite indulge himself as he can do now most of the time - I assume one reason Iron Man 3 is as great as it is because there are constraints in working with Marvel getting in the way of most of Black’s flaws while helping his virtues as a writer - so he couldn’t indulge in endless variations of having characters mumble “life is pain” but instead had to show us this philosophy (as far as it goes) through the actual plot of the film. There’s also no room for his four-letter word based humour to become obnoxious – there are about half the fucks and bad jokes as in a contemporary Black film in Lethal Weapon, but here all those fucks are perfectly placed and not everyone seems to suffer from Tourette’s, and the jokes are expertly timed at moments when levity is actually useful to the film. Also very atypical for the writer today: the third act is as well constructed and as tight as the rest of the film.

Sure, the action scenes are somewhat more constrained in their dimensions then they would quickly become deeper into Black’s career, but they are tightly constructed and effective, and there’s nothing as lazy needed to set them up as to have a little girl crawl into a truck loaded with explosives. Things are still larger than life, mind you, they are just larger than life in a more effective manner. And the action on screen is great,  showing off stunt work as good as you’ll see it in a US film of any era.

But the human parts of the film work just as well, with leads that are just slightly larger than life (it’s a big screen they are on after all) but have human problems; and when their life is pain, it’s much more believable, and actually a bit touching, which always comes as a surprise in an action film. But then, Black’s script really does seem to know most of the time that the macho culture particularly Riggs breathes is not a healthy place to live.

Acting-wise, this is mostly Danny Glover’s show, who projects a plethora of nuances and feelings through posture and slight changes of the timbre of his voice; Mel Gibson clearly has no idea how to play a guy with Riggs’s problems (as if the first Mad Max didn’t exist) but does his best, even though he tends to default to bug eyes and is usually drawn in useable directions by a Glover who clearly is the Carl Weathers to Gibson’s Schwarzenegger, to stay in 80s action cinema that pairs an excellent black actor with a not that excellent white dude.


This thing is a classic of US action cinema for a reason.

Music Monday: Fowl Edition

Nightmare Cinema (2018)

Warning: if you’re very sensitive about these things, there are spoilers ahead!

One after the other, people find themselves drawn into a cinema where a mysterious projectionist (Mickey Rourke) shows films starring themselves. Cue episodic horror shorts by different directors, until things end on a decidedly unimpressive wrap-up. But then, Rourke is as boring a horror host as you can get for this sort of thing, so any part of the film involving more of him was bound to not be terribly interesting.

We start off with “The Thing in the Woods” by Juan of the Dead director Alejandro Brugués, in which we meet a woman named Samantha (Sarah Elizabeth Walters) who is apparently in the final stages of a slasher movie, having to fight off a slasher named The Welder in semi-comical manner. But is there more going on, and are we indeed witnessing a film from a different horror movie sub-genre than our heroine thinks she’s in? This one’s a fun little beginning to the film, using an audience’s genre-savvy to clever effect, including a fun plot twist as well as oodles of pretty cool gore. Brugués directs with verve and a clear knowledge of the particular sandbox he is playing in, coming up with a segment that feels fun and over the top in all the best ways. Plus, even in the age of the post-post-(post-?)slasher movie, he does come upon about some rather great slasher jokes.

Next up is Joe Dante’s “Mirare”, based on a Richard Christian Matheson short. It concerns the misadventures of Anna (Zarah Mahler) whose doting rich fiancée pays for a bit of plastic surgery to get rid of a somewhat unsightly bit of scar tissue on one of her cheeks. The grandfatherly plastic surgeon on call convinces her that a couple other “improvements” would be nice too. Of course, there are very different ideas of beauty floating around. Just look at Mickey Rourke! Sorry?

This one’s a pretty slight story whose style and twist (if you even want to call it that) could have landed it a room in a 90s horror cable TV anthology. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a fun little thing, though, and Dante, while certainly not at his best, still has a hand for pacing, the grotesque, and sarcastic if superficial commentary on contemporary social mores.

This is followed by Ryuhei Kitamura’s “Mashit”, and if you’re now asking yourself if it will contain some of the director’s trademark slow motion sword fighting, I can answer this with a resounding yes. How does that fit into a tale about possession at a Catholic orphanage? Well, how else would you stage a sword and knife fight between a priest, a nun and a bunch of possessed children? So yeah, this segment is about as tasteful as [insert grotesque contemporary politician of your choice here], but Kitamura plays the whole thing as such a loving homage to Italian gore horror (even the music is right), I as a lover of that sub-genre myself can’t help but be charmed. Plus, before that anti-money-maker of a scene, the director also includes some moody and creepy moments like the scene where the girl children rise from their beds synchronously, so you can’t really say Kitamura is only going for shock value here. Just once he does, he really does, which I found pretty damn admirable.

The following This Way to Egress by David Slade takes a turn from the awesomely tasteless and weird into the true Weird (and into black and white footage), telling the tale of Helen (Elizabeth Reaser), who – together with her two children – has come to the office of one Dr. Salvadore (Adam Godley) with a rather peculiar problem. She, as well as the audience, sees the people in her surroundings, as well as these surroundings themselves, transforming in disturbing ways that suggest decay and wrongness. Slade does wonders in creating the atmosphere of strangeness needed here, the disturbing feeling of things around you (and Helen) changing just when you aren’t looking, of having drifted into a place where you don’t belong anymore. He is ably supported by Reaser here, who puts a naturalistic face on the reaction to the unnatural, which makes it all the more unnatural.

Alas, Nightmare Cinema does end on “Dead”, the long, tedious and unfocussed tale of Riley (Faly Rakotohavana), who is clinically dead for some minutes after being shot by the same random crazy guy who just killed his parents. Afterwards, Riley does of course see dead people, among them his mum who wants him to die for under explained reasons. But in what I can only assume must have seemed like a good idea for a plot to director/writer Mick Garris, said random crazy guy is still alive and kicking and trying to kill Riley, so there’s also a bit of badly staged suspense added to the whole “I see dead people” shtick. Frankly, like most of what Garris directs, it’s a mess - badly paced, full of details that never come together, showing little visual style and feeling like one of the really bad episodes of one of those 90s cable TV horror shows Dante’s episode reminded me of in a more positive way. Which is no wonder since that really is where Garris comes from. I don’t want to be too down on the man, though, for while I still think he’s a mediocre director at his best, I do absolutely admire his ability to get projects like this (or “Masters of Horror”) off the ground, as well as his quality as an interviewer of genre heroes.


Apart from its final segment and the wrap-around (also directed by Garris, by the way), I had quite a bit of fun with Nightmare Cinema. I’d just recommend to stop the film before the Garris segment, which should leave the prospective viewer fully satisfied with the anthology film.

Three Films Make A Post: They’re watching…They’re waiting…They’re back!!

Visitors of the Night (1995): 1995 was of course peak alien abduction time in (at least US) popular culture, and once the X-Files (still beloved around these parts) opened the flood gates, TV movies like this alien abduction tale directed by TV veteran Jorge Montesi quickly followed. Despite featuring Canada’s finest Stephen McHattie in a smaller role, the film at hand sure is no X-File, but a tepid family melodrama about some nice bourgeois lady and her nice bourgeois kid troubles. Sure, there’s a bit of generational abduction business, and some suited government people are in the game as well, but the way this plays out, the film really rather would avoid the SF/horror trappings completely and go through a lot of family whining and hand-wringing about not understanding one’s teenage daughter. That you might actually use the fantastical elements to strengthen the family melodrama and vice versa seems to be beyond the film’s grasp or imagination, but then, the family melodrama itself isn’t exactly sharply written, either, so what does one expect?

Wretch (2018): How much anyone will get out of this very indie little horror movie by Brian Cunningham about the consequences an encounter with a supernatural entity during a druggy night in the woods has for three friends, will certainly have something to do with one’s willingness to just let a film unfold slowly and in its own way and pace. At first, the whole thing did feel a bit too muddily structured and ambiguous to me, but the film actually goes somewhere specific, and the at first obtuse looking way it gets there is a planned and proper approach, at least if you’re willing to follow the film where it leads. Which, as it turns out, is to one of my favourite supernatural entities, so that’s a bonus, too.

But the movie’s rather strong in other regards too: the acting, particularly by Megan Massie, is better than usual in this sort of thing, and the film does some great work starting out with rather typical character and relationship types but then complicating them repeatedly. Because this aspect of the film is so strong, it also recommends itself as a portrayal of destructive human relationships that is – unlike in the quite a bit more “professional” Visitors – indeed strengthened and made clearer by its supernatural element.


Roadkill (1989): Much less perfunctory and much more entertaining than Visitors and rather more playful than Wretch is this Canadian indie movie, that is so late 80s/early 90s Canadian indie, it involves the talents of Bruce McDonald, Don McKellar and Valerie Buhagiar while of course sporting a soundtrack by Nash the Slash and various Canadian luminaries. It’s the sort of black and white road movie that tonally and stylistically fits with the type of thing Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki were doing at the time, including these directors’ use of the local and the specific, so it’s clearly part of a very particular international style of indie filmmaking, but also rooted in places and people the directors find in Canada and punk rock adjacent art. Of course, while it is taking efforts to demonstrate it is coming from a particular time and place, this isn’t mumblecore (this particular kind of filmic horror lurking in the future of none of these filmmakers), so there’s also a fabulist and imaginative streak to the film, and a personal sense of weirdness and peculiarity visible in basically every moment of its road movie tale.

Past Misdeeds: Night Wars (1988)

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.

Vietnam veterans Trent (Brian O'Connor) and Jim (Cameron Smith) never really left the war behind them. Particularly not the memory of the time when their platoon was betrayed by the eeeevil McGregor (Steve Horton wildly chewing scenery), and they had to leave their friend Jhonny (Chet Hood) - yes, that's how the film spells the name - behind when fleeing from his torture-loving hands.

More than a decade later, Trent and Jim start suffering from nightmares about the McGregor/Jhonny situation even worse than the ones they already had. Quite peculiar nightmares these are too, for wounds inflicted in them stay right with you when you're awake. And as our heroes will learn once they're convinced they are not just suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, this works the other way round too, so they are able to take items, weapons for example, with them from the waking world into their nightmares.

In utterly appropriate dream logic, Trent and Jim decide the obvious solution to their shared nightmare problems is to go kill Dream-McGregor and free Dream-Jhonny. Alas, before they can go and do that, they have to cope with a well-meaning veterans hospital doctor (Dan Haggerty) who understandably thinks they've gone crazy, and learn that Dream-McGregor has borrowed a few moves from Freddy Krueger.

To my perhaps ever so slightly twisted mind, the movies David A. Prior directed for his Action International Pictures (I'm not going to call it A.I.P. for obvious reasons) are a delight in their curious mixture of local filmmaking gone direct-to-video awkwardness, self-deprecating humour and often deft as well as daft high concepts. It's as if classic (or, depending on your taste "classic") Men's Adventure paperbacks from the 70s had gone to the US South, developed a degree of self-consciousness and decided to make strange genre mash-ups that just aren't satisfied with being one kind of movie at one time.

The sources for Night Wars' particular genre mash-up are pretty obvious: firstly, it's the dreary 'Namsploitation sub-genre concerned with bringing the boys back home, secondly, it's good old A Nightmare on Elm Street, which turns out to be a combination as ridiculously un-obvious as it is entertaining. Instead of your usual jingoistic affair, "bringing the boys back home" takes on a slightly different meaning when said boys - or really just one boy - are probably only still alive in the protagonists' dreams, and the usual story of winning the war after the fact turns into one of people trying to live through their guilt and trauma. Of course, this being a David A. Prior movie, living through one's guilt and trauma is done by shooting and blowing up nameless Asian henchmen in one's dreams, but hey, baby steps. Actually, this pinko communist is for once rather happy that these nameless Asian people are commanded by an evil, ranting American (even though the whole traitor "because the Vietcong pays better" angle makes little sense with its suggestion the Vietcong had much money to spare for anything); it at least spares us some really unpleasant stereotyping. In fact, most Action International films I've seen by now don't have their heart set on being racist at all, which is rather uncommon for the action and war genres in their US versions, and is of course quite welcome.

When Night Wars isn't showing us Asian American extras throwing themselves backwards in absurd death throes, or bamboo huts exploding (we can for once blame hand grenades), it gets around to a handful of creepy scenes too. Particularly the death of Trent's wife (played by Jill Foors) is rather effective, set up to be at once surreal and horrifying on a very basic human level, and does fine work with the way it turns something normal and pleasant into something horrible. That scene, and a handful of others, are as effectively dream-like as Prior can manage on his budget and with the overly bright lighting the film can't seem to escape even in dream sequences.

Of course, this being an Action International Pictures film, the neat ideas and effective moments are not enhanced by slick filmmaking. In fact, this late in his career, Prior's direction wasn't usually as raw and awkward as it is here, with slow and counter-productively staged action sequences, often little of visual interest shot even less interestingly, and acting so shoddy Dan Haggerty is the best actor on screen. Still, like with most Prior films, there's something deeply likeable about his approach. Watching even the shoddiest of his films, I never get the feeling a given movie's problems are attributable to laziness, nor to a lack of interest in the film by its makers but are side-effects of seat-of-your-pants regional filmmaking that can't always be avoided. Plus, while Night Wars can look unintentionally funny - a boy can take only so much of Dan Haggerty staring dramatically at a dozen alarm clocks, after all - it is never boring or lacking in interesting, if potentially misguided, ideas.

I'm quite sure that the film's unwillingness to explain why or how McGregor is some sort of dream demon will drive more than one viewer to conniptions because this very basic part of the film's set-up doesn't make much sense without any explanations, unless you want to read everything what's going on here as a metaphor for the protagonists' PTSD, which I find impossible to believe in an Action International film. Anyway, I for my part think this lack of clarity and explanation just enhances the film's mood of weirdness, as does the fact that Vietnam looks a lot like California, or as do puzzling moments like the scene where we realize that our heroes are shooting their guns in the real world too when they do so in their dreams; I'd like to have their very patient neighbours.


But then, I'd also like to own Blu-ray special editions of my favourite Action International Pictures films, so my needs and interests just might be somewhat special.

In short: My Talks With Dean Spanley (2008)

Before I encountered this film from New Zealand directed by Toa Fraser, I didn’t even know there were any movie adaptations of the works of Lord Dunsany. It’s not the Pegana movie I secretly dream of, but it’s certainly a fine – and strange – little film. It’s taking place in a lovingly – and knowingly – reconstructed Edwardian Age. Fisk Junior (Jeremy Northam) a man of what was probably called great melancholy in his time, is haunted by the unspoken grief about a brother who died in the Boer War and the difficult relationship to his father, the elderly Fisk Senior (Peter O’Toole), whom he meets once a week, but with whom he doesn’t ever discuss anything of actual import to their emotional lives.

While on what goes for a spiritual quest when you are an Edwardian gentleman (that is, listening to the mindnumbingly boring lecture of a swami about reincarnation), Fisk Minor encounters the dean Spanley (Sam Neill). The dean has the somewhat peculiar habit of entering a kind of fugue state whenever he drinks Tokay, vividly remembering his past life as a dog; in roundabout ways, Fisk Minor’s fascination with this aspect of the man, and his obsession with getting the poor cleric drunk on Tokay to hear more about his life as a dog, will bring father and son Fisk together.

And really, if that description does sound intriguing rather than plain stupid to you, you’ll probably, like me, enjoy the film’s peculiar sense of irony, as well as its reconstruction of an Edwardian state of mind, and share in the special and unexpected joy of watching Sam Neill – in the most Edwardian language possible thanks to Alan Sharp’s tonally perfect script – reminisce about his time as a dog.


It’s really a lovely film, perhaps a bit too mushy and nice to its characters in the ending stretch - or I’m perhaps simply not quite as optimistic when it comes to radical change in people as the film is. It is full of lovely (that’s really the perfect word to describe this), sometimes wickedly funny, detail fitting to its time, and featuring a bunch of actors (Bryan Browne and Judy Parfitt are in there, too) doing justice to what really is a pretty damn peculiar project. That the film isn’t ever turning its plot wild and wacky is another of its virtues – this is one of those endeavours that take a preposterous thing, realize that one of the great things in the movies is to turn a preposterous thing into something tangible and real, and use it with dignity and love.

Between Worlds (2018)

Long haul truck driver Joe (Nicolas Cage) is at the end of his rope. Following the death of his wife and kid, he has lost whatever grip he had on life – it clearly wasn’t terribly tight to begin with - and turned into a (probably unwashed) alcoholic who’s bound to even lose his truck soon enough. And, as Joe will explain, a man without a truck isn’t a man. No, seriously.

Anyway, while at a rest stop, Joe saves a woman we will soon enough learn is called Julie (Franka Potente) from being choked to death. His rescue attempt was a bit misguided, though, for Julie wanted to be choked. You see, she can contact the spirit world, but only when she is suffocating. So says the script, and who are we to roll our eyes? And right now, Julie needs all the suffocation she can get, for her daughter Billie (Penelope Mitchell) has fallen into a coma following an accident. As you do in this sort of situation, Joe helps Julie by at first driving her to the hospital, and later getting on with some helpful hospital stairway choking. Lo and behold! It helps, and Julie seems to have gotten her daughters spirit back into her body.

She also gets Joe into her pants right quick, and things could be fine – as much as any relationship with a character played by Cage can be fine – with Julie having a new horrible relationship obviously doomed to crash and burn and her daughter being alright again. But as it turns out, Julie didn’t get the spirit of her daughter back into her body, but somehow opened up the body to the ghost that had been hanging around Joe, his dead wife Mary (sometimes played by Lydia Hearst). Of course, Billie manages to convince Joe soon enough she is indeed his wife, and he does what any rational guy played by Cage would do, and starts an affair (including very special sex techniques like reading poetry aloud during sex) with the spirit of his dead wife inhabiting the body of his new girlfriend’s daughter. As you can imagine, nothing can go wrong there.

You may or may not believe it, but that is indeed the plot of writer-director Maria Pulera’s Between Worlds, following a script that somehow must have convinced someone wearing a suit to provide enough of a budget to hire Cage, Potente and Mitchell and have enough money left to shoot a film that looks perfectly professional, if haunted by a tendency to stage everything in the most trashy way possible. The sex scenes alone, with Cage huffing and puffing, and mugging and reading poetry, and the director thinking it a great idea to intercut various sex adventures into one single scene of epic weirdness are a thing to behold; Dutch angles crop up; suspense is based on the big question of Joe being able to get his pants back on quickly enough.

And if all of this sounds to you like a Lifetime movie gone mad(der than typical), that’s what the film suggests to me too, just with a bit more (and perfectly unappetizing, because who the hell wants to see Cage do this?) sleaze, and a script that throws out bizarre and goofy ideas by the dozen. Whereas the modern Lifestyle movie defaults to camp as its tone, though, I never quite understood what tone the film at hand is actually going for. Am I supposed to take any of this seriously? Is the director? The actors apparently don’t know either, with Potente (who doesn’t work great with Cage here) looking as if she’s just barely holding off giggling fits, Cage doing that thing where he’s making perfectly sensible acting decisions for the bizarre material he is given about half of the time, but going all-out Cage-crazy for the other half, and only Mitchell seeming to be able to decide on a tone and keep to it. Is that what the filmmakers wanted? Who knows?


What I do know is that, even though the film obviously is a bizarre mess of curious ideas, dubious execution and Nicolas Cage cageing out, it is also highly entertaining. I might not have cared about the supposed psychological damage of any of the freaks on screen, and never found myself pondering the conundrum of a guy wavering between hot sexy times with the spirit of his wife in the hot young body of the daughter of his girlfriend and said girlfriend, but I sure as hell was always looking forward to the next bit of strangeness Between Worlds came up with. For like its male lead, the film may have a tendency to dubious decisions (some may call them “bad”) but those decisions are always interesting, surprising and genuinely entertaining. Also, in terribly bad taste, but who cares?

In short: All Light Will End (2018)

Warning: spoilers, but that’s for your own good!

Writer Savannah (Ashley Pereira), fresh off her first, bestselling novel, decides to return to her former home for her brother’s graduation. There’s more baggage to that return than typical. Her mother committed suicide by hanging in the house she’s now returning to (and in fact, her estranged father and local sheriff doesn’t live there anymore), and she has terrible nightmares about her childhood. Well, I say nightmares, but actually, Savannah suffers from various vaguely defined psychological problems, among them the tendency to have a rather difficult time making out the difference between dreams and reality. At least she’s not going alone, for her boyfriend, her best friend and her best friend’s boyfriend are coming with. That, however, might not be as great as it sounds once things become a bit violent around the place.

While this is going on, the film regularly cuts to Savannah’s father and his two bumbling deputies who find various body parts around town while acting close to Wes Craven Keystone Kops.

At first, Chris Blake’s All Light Will End looks like a slickly filmed, straightforward little horror movie that’ll soon enough get around to drag out the old “the creature from the protagonist’s nightmare is real!” card. However, the film’s a bit more ambitious, for it turns out this is supposed to be an example of the twisty psychological thriller. Unfortunately, it’s a rather bad example, and once it finds its supposed stride as a thriller, the initially competent if not terribly exciting film turns to be way out of its league.

For a film that spends a – too long – scene at a therapy session and supposedly wants to base what’s happening on consciously induced psychological damage, the film seems to have little idea about actual human psychology (and in fact, some viewers might find its treatment of mental illness rather offensive), or how to plot this sort of thing without resorting to cheap gimmicks like that pretty pointless nonsense it does with the story’s timeline, wasting too many scenes on preparing an uninteresting twist. Time and place isn’t the film’s strong suit in any way, because for most of its plot to work (as far as it does work), it needs to be terribly vague about lots of things, mostly concerning time and space.


And look, I get how filmmakers may approach this sort of story thinking more about what would be cool to do on screen rather than what is plausible, but when you go that road, you really need to drag your audience over the wall of ridiculous nonsense you’ve built up with the power of sheer visual style and force. Alas, while the film is certainly slick to look at, it is no giallo or Brian De Palma flick, and never manages to convince the viewer (nor the actors, going by their vague and unconvincing efforts) of anything happening on screen.

Music Monday: (Not) Waving Edition

Prospect (2018)

In a ramshackle, lived-in kind of future. Damon (Jay Duplass) and his teenage daughter Cee (Sophie Thatcher) work as nomadic miners and prospectors. Apparently, the thing to exploit workers in the future is the return of an old trick: renting them their equipment – in this case a drop capsule that can make it from orbit to a planet or moon and back again and which turns out to be in a deplorable state – and controlling their way of travelling – said ship where they have basically rented a docking bay – clearly only leaving the miners just enough to live on and stay just desperate enough to be willing to take terrible risks. And even though the film isn’t explicitly saying it, you can bet the prospectors are paid only a fracture of what the things they are risking their lives for are worth.

Damon, popped up on pills and desperation, is hoping for the one score that’d make them rich. There’s really no time for proper preparation or planning on how to get to the particularly rich claim he has made a deal for – the toxic and heavily pollinated (nope, I don’t mean polluted) moon they have been working for a while is more or less mined out (goodbye, alien ecosystem), so the ship that’s carrying them and other people of their kind is just going to make one final orbit around the star system before it leaves, never to return. And clearly, it’s not going to wait if some freelancer or other doesn’t make it back on time.

Cee’s not happy at all with her father’s plan for one last drop in the time their carrier ship will take for that orbit, but then, there’s little love lost between the two anyway, thanks to the way of life Damon has landed them in, and his pretty obvious lack of care for his daughter and her basic safety. Her being a teenager hardly comes into the equation here, so certainly isn’t helping matters.

Not surprisingly, their capsule barely makes the landing and might not fly again. Even less surprisingly, Damon’s desperation and stupidity get the two into even deeper trouble, particularly once they meet those most terrible of creatures – other people (in particular a character played by Pedro Pascal). In the end, Cee will have to find some way to survive the troubles her father made for her, as well as the natural and human dangers of the moon.

Christopher Cadwell’s and Zeek Earl’s Prospect is one hell of a low budget indie SF movie, presenting the kind of working class – really working poor – future the more space operatic or the more out there films in the genre could not deliver for most of the genre’s history. And while I love an exciting space adventure with galaxy saving and so on, I’m always happy to encounter films that realize that it’s perfectly okay to tell a story about events that just threaten and change the private worlds of a handful of characters instead of the whole of existence.

That sort of thing is even better when it is as well realized as Prospect is, with worldbuilding that doesn’t need reams of exposition because the writers (also Cadwell and Earl) are willing and able to imply and suggest things about the world their film takes place in, letting the audience fill in the blanks about how things work. Obviously, this kind of approach lives and dies on the filmmakers providing not only the right amount of detail but also simply the right details to show. Prospect is pretty damn flawless in this regard, building a world out of a handful of lines of dialogue, a couple of special effects, and an awesome hand at using and creating just the right props to make the whole thing feel like it’s taking place in a world with its own history without needing to tell the audience this history or how the world works.

In part, the film does this by using elements of the US gold rush – and the audience’s knowledge about it – also giving the film a bit of a Western vibe in the process. It’s convincingly done, with the old school capitalist materialistic nastiness of the gold rush and its exploitation of the hopes and the lives of the poor for the gain of the few feeling like a probable and realistic way the exploitation of resources in outer space might go, if things down here don’t radically change. The Western vibe, for its part, is never overplayed, mostly working to place the film on the kind of frontier civilization hasn’t quite reached, all the better, cheaper, and nastier to exploit the resources at hand. None of which the film ever explicitly states, but suggests through characterization and detail.

The production design that also assumes a large part of the responsibility for the film’s quality is spot-on, making the objects the characters use at once logical and practical looking and clearly in their world so cheaply produced and often used they barely hold together. There’s a reason the only man-made thing in the whole film that looks as if it were made with an idea of beauty are the headphones Cee uses to shut out the world and listen to music, well, actually several reasons, because the film does tend to use its moving parts for more than one thing at the same time. The scenes on the moon are obviously shot in a forest on Earth, but with a bit of digital magic for the skies, a bit of pollen, and an eye for finding places in nature that look unearthly, the directors turn it into a convincing place somewhere else. Sure, it’s not the place of CGI dreams, but the more palpable feel of actual locations does add a layer of veracity instead of destroying an illusion.

Veracity is one of the film’s great virtues anyhow. This is one of those films where technology and the way people use it seem to make an innate sense, and even if the viewer doesn’t initially understand every step of what the characters do when they are mining, the film also gives the full impression that there is a reason for each of these steps the filmmakers have actually thought about. That sounds like a little thing, but does actually do wonders to convince a viewer of the reality of what is going on before them.

The character work is just as strong, again working from bases an audience will probably recognize but always going in the right directions from there without feeling the need to fill in all the blanks about the characters. We never quite do learn how much of a bastard Pedro Pascal’s Ezra is or isn’t (the film does something pleasantly ambiguous with his potential redemption arc), for example, or what Cee will feel about the fate of her father once she has gotten back to safety. We learn other things, though, like how Cee survives in her own head in a world that doesn’t give a damn about people like her.

Thatcher’s performance is strong throughout, really as good as anything you’d expect from an actress her age and with limited experience, not wallowing in the standards of teenage grumpiness even when her character is indeed a teenager and unhappy. She’s never putting it on too thick, every decision and emphasis seems just right. The rest of the cast is on the same level (and therefor much better than you’d expect from a film quite this indie), but then, this is a film that does manage to get people like Sheila Vand, Andre Royo and Jay Duplass for small but not unimportant parts, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.


If I do sound rather excited and positive about the film, that’s because Prospect is such a damn exciting and artistically successful movie, not the kind that will have many people dazzled – and more’s the pity – but one that quietly and calmly simply does everything right it sets out to do.

Three Films Make A Post: What's left when the light goes out?

The Vanishing aka Keepers (2018): On paper, Kristoffer Nyholm’s film is a great little thriller inspired by the Flannan Isles Mystery, shot beautifully, acted intensely and effectively by Gerard Butler, Peter Mullan and Connor Swindells, providing a wonderful sense of place and a not implausible tale. However, for my tastes, there’s something missing here that never makes the terribly things that happen genuinely involving, an abstract look at the characters that talks about loss and guilt but doesn’t truly get into the minds of the characters but only ever observes from the outside. And that’s not really how you portray pain.

Serenity (2019): Curiously enough, even though it is a very different kind of film, Steven Knight’s film about fisherman Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) and his troubles with a big tuna he is obsessed with, a minor noir plot, and some weird shit that’s certainly going to turn out to be meaningful, also never managed to actually connect with me emotionally, even though it clearly wanted to quite, quite, desperately. As long as the film’s a noir, everything’s peachy and fun enough, even though the film’s cast (also including people like Anne Hathaway, Diane Lane, Djimon Hounsou and Jason Clarke) seems to be a bit overqualified for the ciphers they are playing, and an influx of the mildly weird has never annoyed me. Alas, once the film puts its cards on the table, it may explain why everyone’s a cipher, but it also does nothing whatsoever to actually make a viewer care, what with the people whose fates the film’s actually about hardly even appearing in it. I’m also not sure I buy the film’s weird moral discussion that somehow floats around the question if catching a tuna fish named Justice is better than killing a total piece of human shit.


Hellmouth (2014): Speaking of weirdness, John Geddes’s film (written by Tony Burgess) concerning the strange misadventures of a graveyard keeper played by the great Stephen McHattie in a heavily metaphorical world whose visuals suggest the horror fan version of the influences of Guy Maddin, is certainly weird, too. However, unlike Serenity, this film’s metaphorical language seems fully thought through, and its protagonist’s reality may be as dubious as that of McConaughey’s character but it also comes together instead of falling apart when you think about its meaning. Fortunately, this isn’t just an allegory, but also a film that clearly revels in German Expressionism and its followers, as well as in providing McHattie with many an opportunity to demonstrate a wonderful ability of making the film’s strangeness real and personal.

Past Misdeeds: I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

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.

Teen Aubrey Fleming (Lindsay Lohan) is living a charmed life - she's bright, wealthy, has a supportive family, and could have all the jock boyfriends she could handle; all reasons for her not to be perfectly happy are hidden quite well or perfectly obvious after this description. Then one day she disappears, probably the third victim of a serial killer.

Unlike your usual victim of a serial killer, however, Aubrey reappears quite alive, if without her right hand and parts of her right leg. Her abductor's earlier victims suggest he is into torture through amputation before he kills his victims, so this isn't completely surprising, if horrible. The police assumes Aubrey must somehow have escaped from her tormentor and just made it close enough to a road to be noticed.

But the returned Aubrey says she isn't Aubrey at all but an exotic dancer called Dakota Moss; she also claims not to be able to describe anything about her tormentor, and to barely remember anything at all, if with a reluctance that suggests she might not be telling the whole truth. Everyone is convinced Aubrey has developed some choice delusions to protect herself from her traumatic experience - the FBI in childishly annoyed ways that surely would help no traumatized victim open up, Aubrey's family with a mixture of horror and a willingness to get through this thing too, somehow, whatever "this thing" actually is.

However, Aubrey/Dakota hasn't even told anyone the truly strange parts of her story, something so unbelievable it looks she and her shiny new high class prosthetics (medicine is surprisingly fast on the film's planet) will have to catch the serial killer themselves.

I suspect the general hatred for Chris Sivertson's I Know Who Killed Me is based on the general hatred for lead actress Lindsay Lohan, something I neither share nor care for, since nothing I know of Lohan's public life suggests anything more than the not atypical story of somebody growing up in public and becoming troubled and somewhat self-destructive, which certainly aren't things deserving of hatred in my world. That "compassion" thing I heard about once might be a more appropriate reaction, but of course, if there's one thing left and right, the “woke” and bigots have in common right now, it's their pleasure in judgement and talking down to people instead of making even the tiniest attempt at empathy or developing tolerance for any imperfections in others.

Be that as it may, and leaving Lohan's (who gives a perfectly decent performance here, and if that's the sort of performance deserving a Razzie, the people responsible for that award should probably watch actually bad performances from time to time) public image aside, I Know Who Killed Me looks to me like the sort of film everyone who'd be interested in a (relatively) contemporary US variation on the giallo should take a look at when she's through the films of Brian De Palma, whose shadow seems to hang over the film in more than one scene.

I Know Who Killed Me is not at all interested in "realism", or in being the kind of thriller whose plot would be even vaguely probable in real life, or even just sound probable as fiction. Rather, Sivertson's film attempts to create a dream world, a filmic place where visual metaphors (some so very, very blunt as to make Eisenstein blush, some surprisingly subtle) are more important than plot logic. For my tastes, Sivertson is very good at this sort of thing, using surprisingly complex and meaningful colour schemes, gliding camera work, and the sudden influx of the fantastic and the bizarre into the semi-reality of the film, all in the service of creating a fictional place and a mood that enables him to talk about how difficult it is to be a young woman right now, quite independently of class, or talent, or just blind luck. One might suggest that this theme rather fits the film's lead actress, but hey, what do I know?

If I Know Who Killed Me only consisted of these elements, it would be a rather easy film to digest and love, but Sivertson adds even more to the mix: there are moments when the dream mood becomes a fairy tale mood (see also the classic fairy tale trope about lost siblings), moments of Lifetime Channel type melodrama awkwardly rubbing against the rest of the film, rather too coy sleaziness (the stripping and the sex feel more than just a little absurd thanks to that), and a sense of dry humour that pops up in the most unexpected places. It's a bit of an overload of contradictory impulses, and certainly doesn't help make the film an easily digestible whole. It does, on the other hand, create something of a feeling of more going on behind the film's curtains than one at first suspects, suggesting a complexity of ambition behind the film I'm still not sure is actually there. What it definitely leaves a viewer with is room for copious divergent interpretations of hidden meanings, which is always a fun game to play with a film inviting one to it.


Of course, this tonal inconsistency drawing me to I Know Who Killed Me like Socks to catnip is exactly what will drive a lot of people away from the film. Any given viewer will find more than one moment in it either impressively imaginative or strained to the point of inadvertent comedy; I don't believe anyone watching will be left neutral. As should be obvious, I found myself impressed more often than not, and appreciated the film's more dubious moments because to me, these moments look like the result of a film actually taking risks, and often strange risks to boot, instead of going the easy route of just being a very standard thriller.

In short: Critters Attack (2019)

I don’t know about you, but I dearly hope there’s nobody not wearing a suit who actually asked for another Critters sequel. Though, frankly, calling this thing an actual movie in the sense the other Critters movies were might be taking charity too far. At least with a bad backyard indie movie, you’ll witness something people have put actual love and (most probably misguided) effort in; this one doesn’t look that much better than a backyard indie would, but totally lacks any suggestion of the filmmakers giving a crap about making a movie, let’s not even speak of an entertaining one. It might as well have been made by robots.

The film-like entity is directed by Bobby Miller with such an impressive lack of verve and style, I do recommend a good bit of coffee for anyone willing to make it through this thing. The whole affair follows some poor young actors - whom I’m not going to hold responsible for the film they are in - pointlessly running around with a good, female Critter in tow (who is of course looking like it’s wearing make-up, because it is a girl, ugh) while supposed jokes happen.


From time to time, someone gets killed in a “funny” way that isn’t funny or interesting to look at; poor old Dee Wallace is apparently now an elderly bounty hunter and pops up in the sort of badly integrated cameo you may know from action movies featuring Dolph Lundgren or JCVD (alas without a scene where she tortures someone while shooting a video for her cooking channel, because that would be actually funny and/or weird). The script by Scott Lobdell (who is about as competent a scriptwriter as he is a comics writer, it seems – that’s not a compliment) is badly paced, full of jokes that don’t hit and characters nobody gives a toss about, going through the motions of a plot nobody making this gave one about either. And even though the Critters franchise always had more than a little of the soul of the cheap cash-in, its films generally seem to have been made with a mind to actually entertain an audience, so it really deserved better than it got with this one.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

I went in expecting nothing whatsoever from the Robert Rodriguez directed, James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis written manga adaptation, and went out pretty happy with a very satisfying bit of big budget cyberpunk action cinema. Now, the usual critics will offer the usual complaint that the film uses well-worn tropes in a plot very much written to the still most popular structural model in modern blockbuster pop cinema. These gals and guys are only half wrong, for the film is indeed filled with genre tropes and does indeed follow a certain Blockbuster plotting 101 philosophy. However, you can use well-worn clichés with a sense of joy (and perhaps even a bit of intelligence); the standard blockbuster plot style exists in so many movies because it actually works very well inside the genres these films usually belong to. And really, all jokes about plot structure timed to the second in today’s mainstream cinema aside, there’s always wriggle room to do something interesting or weird in seemingly rigid structures.

What I am obviously leading up to is this: sure, Alita is full of variations on stuff you’ve heard and seen explode on a screen many times before, but it does more often than not use these elements with such joy and abandon that originality simply doesn’t come into play when you’re actually willing to watch the film instead of trying to watch it antagonistically (which is not the same as watching critically, whatever parts of the internet and the critical classes may believe); and while the film’s structure is indeed well-worn by now, the script really flows and works very well inside this structure. Rodriguez also manages to create a world weird enough to be appropriate to the manga it adapts, where a cameo by Jeff Fahey and his cyborg dogs (potential band name ahoy!) isn’t just a fun aside but also makes sense as a part of the film’s highly strange world. The trick here is that Rodriguez never seems to have accepted the idea that there’s a strict dividing line between the goofy and the cool, and so can pick and mix from both sides of this arbitrary divide, put the fun stuff on screen and let the audience decide to either enjoy themselves or find all of this very silly indeed. Me, I’m with the enjoyment.

This doesn’t mean the film is absolutely brain dead and only there to put its – actually pretty damn awesome – production design in your face. There’s some obvious (and obviously underplayed, no surprise given that this is mass market entertainment made for a giant company) business about class divisions and what the incessant want to need to make it big to escape them does to people. The film also manages to hit its emotional beats about the travails of a young heroine to define herself and her own destiny, as clichéd as they are, with great conviction, providing the film with a degree of mainstream feminist heft in the process. Plus, on a more technical level, the script does ably deliver exposition and world building, even a handful of flashbacks, in a way that feels organic instead of tedious, something I particularly appreciate after I’ve suffered through the new Hellboy movie.

Also pretty fun is how easily the film convinces us of the tiny Alita with the weird CGI face as an ass-kicking heroine who becomes more fun to watch the longer the film goes on. That’s not just because this sort of thing is just naturally fun (which proper nerd sides with the big bruiser against a tiny slip of a girl, after all?), but also because Rosa Salazar’s performance, despite that weird decision to CGI away most of her actual face for no good reason, is pretty fantastic for this sort of thing, making Alita feel absurdly grounded and human. In fact, one of the more interesting aspects of the film’s handling of Alita is how little it is interested in this cyborg’s basic humanity – listen to Salazar give even the bad lines of dialogue, and her humanity really isn’t in question at all. The acting’s pretty wonderful for this sort of thing on the whole, with Waltz making a wonderful likeable father figure and looking perfectly dignified when using an absurd manga style weapon, and Jennifer Connelly selling a somewhat underwritten surprise face turn by sheer power of personality. Why, the film’s so good with its actors, I didn’t even mind Ed Skrein, though perhaps because he is the butt of many a violent joke.


Last but not least, Alita amply demonstrates that having a great action director like Robert Rodriguez is still important in the digital filmmaking age. You’d think – and I’ve certainly done this from time to time – that today’s blockbuster with all the technological expertise and money thrown at them basically couldn’t miss having at least solid action sequences, but then just look at the sad excuses for action featured in Venom or Shazam (to mention the worst offenders I’ve seen in the last year or so) and compare the staging, imagining and execution of their action scenes to the fast, imaginative and fun things Rodriguez does with the same sort of technology and budget. Apparently, having a visual imagination and an innate sense of pacing still is pretty useful when it comes to action scenes in the post-analogue era.

In short: Occult Angel (2018)

Film student Andy Roberts accompanies and films his landlord and sometimes boss Jack Angel, an occultist with mediumistic abilities, on some house calls in their home town of Bath. Occult activity in the city has been increasing in the last couple of days, and there is indeed something very nasty afoot, connected to the symbol of a horned snake and buried beneath the layers of history modern Bath is built upon.

This one’s a very indie outing directed by Roberts, shot in a POV style - with some inserts that are meant as build-up to the final act - as the only proper way to tell this particular story without a couple of millions as a budget. Even though there are certainly obvious flaws to the film -  like camera work that’s a bit too jittery, acting that  often feels more like good amateur work than strictly professional acting, some weird pacing hiccups - that’ll probably make it unwatchable for some, I found myself rather taken with the whole affair. In part because the script does a more than decent attempt at constructing an occult mystery surrounding Bath’s past and present, in part because most of Roberts’s directorial and stylistic choices demonstrate a good sense of how to build a dark and creepy mood on the very cheap.

Mostly, though, I’m a sucker for films that use the local as well as Occult Angel does, mixing the true and a fictional history of Bath to construct a horror tale whose use of a layered past is highly specific to its place, resonating with the very British horror subgenre of folk horror (and my beloved cosmic horror) by suggesting the very real and malignant influence of a buried past on a present that has pointedly attempted to forget as much about it as possible, leaving it to the outsiders and the weirdoes to care.


Which is and does quite a bit more than your usual contemporary POV film about some crap haunting that turns out to be caused by crap demons who like to follow (crap) screeching people through the woods, so is it any wonder I really rather liked Occult Angel?

Music Monday: Well, Shit Edition

Bury Me Dead (1947)

Barbara Carlin (June Lockhart) is a bit like Tom Sawyer (or various superheroes), seeing as we first meet her when she’s attending her own funeral, incognito under a nice black veil that’ll fool everybody she knows and loves (or hates), of course. Apparently, a stable with her inside burned down under somewhat suspicious circumstances. It’s just that she wasn’t actually at the family mansion at the time, so the burned-up female body must belong to somebody else.

Instead of visiting the police once she learns what has occurred, Barbara decides to take the matter of cracking this case on her own, trying to surprise a confession out of her friends and relatives by just turning up at everyone’s place after her funeral. Given what we later get to see of the way the local police operates, her plan’s probably the safer bet to come to the truth of the matter. So we get to meet the family when Barbara first makes herself known to the always dependable family lawyer Mike (Hugh Beaumont), then her sort of (it’s complicated, so we get our first flashback) sister Rusty (Cathy O’Donnell), her shiftless and shifty estranged husband Rod (Mark Daniels), her basically brain-dead (but hot if you’re into idiots, apparently) boxer lover George (Greg McClure) who once was Rusty’s boxer lover before Barbara got between them – for Rusty’s own good, of course. Flashbacks and a lot of wisecracking ensue, until the murderer tries to do Barbara in again.

Going by the title and the classically noir beginning (as shot by the great John Alton, no less), you’d expect the film (a PRC productions, purveyors of the finest noir on Poverty Row) to continue as some Woolrich-style weird mystery, but once Barbara unmasks herself to Mike and starts to go through all the suspects she knows (basically everyone she ever met), the whole thing plays out more as a comedy, with our heroine wisecracking and tough-talking through the mystery, and the generally sarcastic tone of the dialogue making mincemeat of all of the film’s melodramatic pretensions. And this isn’t a case of the film being unintentionally funny – the dialogue as well as the characterisation border on open satire of the non-genre of the noir, populated as the film is by people like “neurotic” sister Rusty who does all of the Freudian psychobabble you’ll find in noir but hilarious, or George who isn’t just a tool but an actual comedic idiot. All of this does of course weaken the dramatic impact of the film’s various melodramatic conniptions; but then, I don’t believe for one moment the film as directed by the sometimes great Bernard Vorhaus wants its audience to find them anything but sardonically funny.

It’s a pretty great comedy too, with Lockhart (who has all the best lines) cracking wise and taking names for most of the film, making Rod’s lack of open infatuation with her the most improbable part of the film. Of course, the film has a final scene where Barbara is supposed to be willing to put the household into Rod’s hands and he babbles something about from now on “taking good care of her”, but everything we’ve seen before does make this sound like the film going “yes, yes, yes, propriety must be restored, the censors and such” at the audience instead of meaning anything of what it just said. The viewers have, after all, met Barbara and her husband.

Before this supposed happy end, the film’s final act does step away from the comedy a bit (but not so far as not to have fun having its way way the police and especially their star criminologist), and does get up to some actually thrilling noir business, with some tightly directed suspense (that’s still based on the police being so comically stupid, even Rod turns out to be a better detective than any of them are) whose impact is greatly enhanced by Alton’s standard tricks working well with Vorhaus’s sense of timing.


It’s a great little film, really, even though it’s not the one its title suggests.

Three Films Make A Post: Saving the World is Alien to Them

Rim of the World (2019): I’m generally on board with Netflix’s approach of producing or just buying up a lot of stuff to throw at its audience in the hopes of some of it sticking. Alas, other things are pretty sticky, too, which brings us directly to this abomination directed (ha!) by McG(odawful) and written by the guy who certainly wasn’t responsible for the good bits in Thor or the very many good ones in X-Men: First Class. This movie-like object tries to milk the Spielberg/Abrams/Stranger Things axis, but only proves how good and clever the things it rips off are by getting nothing whatsoever right, neither the characters who manage to be one-dimensional clichés the script clearly isn’t even clever enough to understand, nor the horrible attempts at “humour” that fall so flat, a pancake is voluptuous in comparison, nor the alien design that looks like something out of a really shitty SyFy Original, nor the plotting that can’t get a straightforward journey to save the world right. Also horrible are McG’s generic and bland direction, the generic and bland score, as are the special effects. The whole thing plays like something made by people who think they have the whole being Spielberg/JJ Abrams thing down pat but are indeed to those guys as Bizarro is to Superman.

Arcadia (2017): Fortunately completely unrelated to Rim is this attempt by director and writer Paul Wright to portray the repeated construction and reconstruction of the philosophical and sometimes physical relationship between the British and the idea of the land they live on (more than the reality). Wright does this collage-style, repurposing footage taken from everything from exploitation movies, to documentaries, to public safety films, building an impressionistic view of Wright’s interpretation of the Question of England.

Given this technique, what Wright wants to say about his theme isn’t always quite clear, and sometimes, things do seem to come down to one of that “closeness to nature = good / keeping the green shit away = bad” business I tend to be rather sceptical about.


Topsy-Turvy (1999): For reasons only known to my subconscious, I have for years turned Ken Loach and this film’s director Mike Leigh into a horrifying fictional poverty porn creating monster, where as a matter of fact, Leigh really isn’t into that sort of thing at all, as this period comedy about Gilbert and Sullivan’s creation of “The Mikado” proves rather handily. At first, a certain meandering quality and the film’s considerable length do threaten a bit of a hard time, but the longer the film goes on, the clearer it becomes that the film’s often episodic seeming structure does indeed lead to a rather interesting place where the film not only becomes a portray of the British operetta masters, and their fraught relationship, but also of their working methods, musical theatre, the sexual and social politics of their time, and the creation of art as a collaborative process; also, a film that suggests that “The Mikado” is really pretty great. All the while, the film (and its great cast) portray the very diverse cast of characters with depth as well as broadness, managing to mix human and social insight with quite a bit of the funny stuff.

Past Misdeeds: The Black Hole (2006)

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.

That most dangerous of all scientific endeavours, Quantum acceleration experiments, as taken on in a certainly highly scientific establishment in St. Louis goes rather wrong, opening a black hole in the fabric of space-time, as these things tend to. The black hole quite impolitely starts eating up the surrounding matter, growing in curious stops and starts in the progress, and threatening to eat up the whole planet rather sooner than later.

Because only one of the three initial scientists of the project, Dr (I assume) Shannon Muir (Kristy Swanson) has survived the film's first five minutes, the military under the surprisingly competent and sane General Stryker (David Selby) calls in former project member Eric Bryce (Judd Nelson), who brings with him the aftershocks of a bad divorce, moon eyes between him and Shannon, ridiculous mad scientist hair, and a chip on his shoulder because he was right all along. As if closing up a black hole weren't problem enough for two more or less sexy scientists, an energy creature has slipped out of the black hole, eating electricity (and people) and feeding the black hole in the process. Shannon and Eric are doing their best to resolve the situation before the increasingly humongous black hole eats all of the landmarks of St. Louis, and eventually find out the creature's - and therefore the black hole's - central weakness, which at least is neither salt nor the power of love this time around.

It's just too bad that their government would really rather resolve the problem in more traditionally American ways, by dropping an H-bomb on their problem and the remaining citizens of St. Louis, despite our heroic experts telling them this would only make matters worse. Consequently our heroes have not just one but two races against time to win. Fortunately, the film provides a bombing mad general to Stryker's sane one, so the latter is free to actually be helpful.

People who are wrong will tell you that Tibor Takács's The Black Hole (produced by Nu Image for our friends at the - then - SciFi Channel) is a stupid piece of nonsense when in truth it's a film that provides a whole lot of fun based on a silly yet clever idea of the kind it's not difficult to imagine to find in an episode of the classic Outer Limits.

As everyone who isn't wrong knows, Takács in his incarnation as direct-to-DVD and direct-to-TV director is pretty excellent at squeezing fun films out of sometimes (okay, most of the time) doubtful scripts and tiny budgets, and his The Black Hole is absolutely no exception. The film is perfectly paced, hitting the disaster movie and semi-monster movie beats at just the right moments, never stopping for too long along the way to let the audience think too much about the (im)probabilities of what's going on.

Sure, if you're the kind of person who can't help but bemoan curious scientific ideas, the bizarre lack of scientific staff in US government during a scientific catastrophe [this was evidently written some time ago], and call them "plot holes", you won't have any fun with this, and even Takács won't be able to distract you from actively avoiding fun, but then, why are you watching a film about a black hole opening up in Missouri in the first place?

For the rest of us, the film at the very least shows a degree of coherence. That is to say, if you accept The Black Hole's sometimes (okay, always) bizarre assumptions about the nature of reality, it proceeds logically enough from them to create a diverting SF pulp movie plot that provides Takács with ample opportunity to show soldiers vaporized, and parts of St. Louis eaten by a black hole. Which, surely, is all we can ever ask of a film called The Black Hole. To make up for a tight budget, Takács shows most of the major destruction through the eyes of shaky TV footage happening on screens with dubious resolutions, a cost-conscious decision that works beautifully - thanks to good timing much better than in other SyFy movies trying the same trick.

Added to the film's entertaining pulp trappings are some rather sarcastic nods in the direction of political crisis management - particularly in a scene of the US president and his aides writing a bathetic speech about the nuclear destruction of St. Louis before the fact intercut with our scientist heroes' attempts to actually do something to save the the city and the world. It's also difficult to miss the fact that the least effectual (and most destructive) ideas to solve all problems come courtesy of "Homeland Security", which can hardly be a coincidence in a US film made after hurricane Katrina.

In the less real world, SyFy experts will be astonished that the catastrophe is only normalizing the relationship between Eric and his ex-wife and daughter, instead of bringing the grown-ups back together as is annoying tradition and stupid rule in these films, nor does Shannon sacrifice herself to protect Eric's family or something of that sort. Why, you might even think the film argues moving on after a divorce is a good thing! I am quite conscious that all I’m getting a clichéd romance instead of the cliché divorce regression here, but then, this isn't something too typical for a SyFy movie. Perhaps Takács made The Black Hole too early in the cycle for the Rule of Un-Divorce to have already been in effect?


Given these achievements and minor surprises of and in The Black Hole, I'll end this with the traditional phrase that could end half of my SyFy Channel Original write-ups: what's not to like!?

In short: Dead Men Tell (1941)

Looking for his Number Two son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung), who has cavorted off looking for adventure, Chinese-Hawaiian master detective Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler), stumbles into the kind of murder mystery that’s right up his alley: an elderly rich woman is apparently frightened to death by the ghost pirate who is said to visit all members of her family on their death beds, and the four parts of the map leading to a pirate treasure need to be assembled. Also involved are – of course – a parrot, a mental patient (and yes, prepare for stuff that can be called “problematic” there too), an escaped murderer and Jimmy Chan’s tendency to fall into the ocean.

As I’ve mentioned before, if you ever want to enjoy one of the numerous Charlie Chan movies of the 30s and 40s, you really need to be able to just overlook – or not mind – that its Chinese American hero is played by a very Caucasian guy in crappy yellowface, who also dons a dubious accent, while, curiously enough, all other Asian characters are played by people who are indeed Asian American. The second half of the Charlie Chan cycle is not exactly helped by Sidney Toler having taken over the role from Warner Oland, for while Oland was also about as Chinese as Boris Karloff, his caricature of a Chinese accent and his performance always had the undercurrent of his Charlie Chan playing up his otherness to use his adversaries’ prejudices against themselves. Toler, on the other hand, tended to a stiffness that suggests all the wrong ideas about “inscrutability” (shudder), and only seldom sells an audience on the self-irony the scripts give the character.

On the other hand, while he’s played by a white guy, Charlie Chan’s still that most curious of things on screen for his time: a Chinese character who is undoubtedly the hero of the piece, as well as the character with the superior intellect as well as morality. And while the writers of this film and those of most others in the series don’t seem to have had much of a clue of Chinese or Chinese American culture, these films never go the route of mock mysticism you’d find in many a comparable character in the pulps (who did indeed include some non-white heroes among the more white and square-jawed type).


The film at hand, as directed by Harry Lachman is for my tastes one of the better ones of the Toler Chan films, which are generally inferior to the ones starring Oland, presenting its silly but fun story in a zippy manner. Sure, the various suspects could be delineated more clearly from each other (or simply have better actors portraying them), and the mystery is mildly complicated more than actually mysterious, but as a bit of good-natured fun from the past, there’s little to complain here. Visually, Lachman has his moments too, turning on a bit of the old expressionist influence for a couple of shots (always a sure winner) and generally staging the dialogue-heavy scenes he has to work with clearly and without things becoming too stagey.

In short: Darkroom (1989)

When ad executive Janet (Jill Pierce) returns to her family home out in the boons, her mega mullet wearing photographer boyfriend in tow, the worst she expects is having some tense discussions with her gramps as well as said boyfriend about her unwillingness to marry (gasp!). She certainly didn’t count on a slasher with a photography obsession making the local rounds, but soon, she and everyone she loves have to fight for their lives.

By 1989 when this was made, the slasher cycle in its indie incarnation was pretty much in its last gasps, and most films in the genre still coming out were all kinds of unwatchable and dreary. So I can at least compliment director Terrence O’Hara’s and producer Nico Mastorakis’s Darkroom for actually trying to be a decent movie with professional camera work, lighting and sound.

The script clearly tries to get away from many of the teen slasher tropes and return to the suspense well that once spawned the slasher, or perhaps to the giallo, but unfortunately, all the attempts at adding red herrings and something of a murder mystery element to the film fall rather flat because they are so amateurishly written, obvious in their construction, and simply not terribly interesting. And because the film also attempts to keep the sleaze and the gore to a minor level, it doesn’t have too much to help a viewer over these failings.


Sure, O’Hara (who would go on to a prolific TV career that would climax in the true horror of having directed 70 episodes of NCIS and its spin-off) is a capable enough hand at pacing, and he’s a competent director in so far as he has mastered the basics of filmmaking, which automatically puts this in the higher quality bracket of late era slashers, but that doesn’t mean Darkroom is terribly exciting, or atmospheric, or even just fun. It’s a perfectly watchable little film, but not being actively bad isn’t necessarily enough to recommend a movie to anyone but slasher die-hards who just have to see every single entry in the genre or people like me who’ll simply watch anything.

Hellboy (2019)

Given the amount of rumours about this being a troubled production where producers, director and actors were all pulling the film into completely different directions (and you know it’s gonna be bad when actors start to believe they can drag a film away from its director), it’s not exactly a surprise that the reboot of the adaptation of Mike Mignola’s great comic universe turns out to be a bad movie. What is a surprise is how bad it is, or rather, how it manages to be bad in basically every single aspect, some of whom the sort of conceptual stuff that can’t be blamed on the actual production but must have been decided early in pre-production.

Why “reboot” the Hellboy movies when you then go on to adapt a storyline taking place late in the comic’s run that really needs about two or three movies worth of preparation to work and simply to make sense on more than the most basic level? But then, nobody involved actually does seem to have had more than the most basic understanding of the comic they were adapting, what it is about, and how it speaks about the things it is about. Hint: it’s not shit that can be set to crap rock riffs. And while Andrew Crosby’s (or whoever actually “wrote” this stuff without having their name in the dirt/credits) script runs roughshod over the storyline it is supposedly adapating, it still manages to introduce characters a movie audience won’t know about as entities Hellboy knows well, adding practically absurd amounts of expository dialogue that explains very little of help as well as a handful of badly placed flashbacks. I really don’t want to know what anyone who hasn’t read the comics makes of Baba Yaga, for example.

Speaking of flashbacks, particularly ill-advised is the one concerning Hellboy’s appearance on Earth because it is very much reshooting the start of Del Toro’s Hellboy as if to really show off everything that’s wrong with Neil Marshall’s version here - namely, the acting, the laughable writing, and production design that neither hits the unified aesthetics of the Del Toro version, nor that of the comics, nor one of its very one. For one of the worst things about this film full of bad things is how little the whole production cares about looking and feeling good or coherent, or building up a mood (any mood would do!). It’s random crap monster designs thrown against random, badly framed backdrops, edited without any feeling for style or finesse, action scenes that seem perfunctory to a degree that seems ridiculous in a Marshall film, and a desperate attempt at hawking a godawful “Songs from the Motion Picture” mp3 packet by drowning everything in perfectly shitty guitar riffs. You’d think this was some sort of parody, but really, it’s a movie made by people who can’t understand the difference between the Weird and the inanely goofy, and who sure as hell have neither much knowledge of nor respect for the comics they are adapting.


I could probably berate the actors too (shouldn’t Milla Jovovich after decades of acting by now know that part of that whole acting thing is moving one’s face to express human emotions, and should Ian McShane not spend more on-screen time on the telephone, seeing as he’s phoning in his performance anyway?), but really, this thing has already wasted enough of everyone’s time.

Music Monday: Vanishing Edition

The Night Sitter (2018)

A woman we’ll only ever get to know under her nom de plum of “Amber” (Elyse DuFour) arrives at the house of Ted Hooper (Joe Walz), would-be paranormal investigator waiting on his shot for his own shitty TV show, one evening around Christmas to babysit Ted’s son Kevin (Jack Champion), as well as the insufferable Ronnie (Bailey Campbell), the son of Ted’s girlfriend. In truth, Amber isn’t really called Amber, and she isn’t a babysitter by trade but actually planning on robbing the house, particularly the locked room filled with Ted’s occult treasures, with the help of her friend Rod (Jermaine Rivers). Because the film needs a bit more fodder for a handful of cool gore effects later on, Rod also brings his girlfriend Lindsey (Amber Neukum), Amber’s would-be boyfriend appears, and a neighbour interested in the occult shows up.

At that point, Amber – let’s keep the name – has already bonded with the shy Kevin who has been having curious dreams of three witches that may very well be connected to one of his father’s artefacts, so when Ronnie gets into Ted’s treasure chamber and wakes up the Three Mothers (not the ones you hope, probably), she is actually going out of her way to protect him. And the film doesn’t even bring up anything about her having a son or brother somewhere! Soon, the whole of the cast is magically locked in with the witches, and Amber will have to prove her mettle as a witch killer.

Nobody is going to accuse The Night Sitter’s directors/writers Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco of having created something original, but as a throwback to the times of Evil Dead, Demons, and Night of the Demons this is often a highly entertaining movie. Like those films, this is clearly a very low budget affair but the filmmakers have gone out of their way to put said low budget to fine visual use, hitting on an aesthetic of Dean Cundey-style (and really, Cundey-coloured) camerawork, practical gore effects, simple yet effective monster and possessed design, as well as a cool synth soundtrack in the right spirit, and going with it for the whole of the movie. This isn’t cargo cult filmmaking that only apes the surface level of the films of the past either, but there are clear signs that everyone involved doesn’t just no the what but also the why of their approach. You also have to admire the film’s absolute commitment to the classical colours of horror (well, and Christmas) – green, red and blue.

I don’t want to oversell The Night Sitter – the first half or so of the film is a bit slower than it exactly needs to be, making something of a meandering impression (and I believe the filmmakers are to clever by far to re-create that element of past horror on purpose), and the humour is a bit hit or miss, too. But the film’s aesthetics are pleasantly strong and coherent even then, and once things get going, there are quite a few very fun scenes of mild carnage and supernatural shenanigans that left at least me very satisfied with the whole affair. For once, I also enjoyed that last act twist that uses the audience’s willingness to just go with certain things in this sort of film for a mild yet clever surprise.

On the acting side, I found a couple of performances a bit too broad, but the child actors are much better than you’d fear on this budget level, and DuFour makes a great heroine, finding the right spot between being manipulative and likeable without ever needing to go through a big moment of redemption.


The whole thing’s a truly fun affair and makes a nice contrast to the concentration of much of contemporary horror on being not-fun. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these approaches, mind you, it’s just nice to have a choice from time to time.