As every year around this time

the business of getting ever more eldritch makes it necessary to put the blog on hold for a week or so.

Normal service will resume on Tuesday, October 8th. From then on it'll be all horror movies all of the time for the rest of the month on here, for obvious reasons.

Three Films Make A Post: The most corrupt cop you've ever seen on screen.

211 (2018): To be honest, going into a contemporary movie with Nicolas Cage I do tend to hope it provides the great, strange actor with opportunity to do great, strange acting, so when I encounter him in a more bread and butter action thriller like York Alec Shackleton’s 211, I do find myself a little disappointed. However, if you are able to get over that little problem, you may find this to be very decent film. Shackleton’s direction is a bit too network TV like to really thrill me, but the film’s story is clearly told, and clear effort is  put into characterizing everyone involved, certainly putting this above the level of a lot of low budget shoot ‘em ups.

It’s not really the film’s fault I’d rather watch something crazier than this perfectly decent little number.

Coyote Lake (2019): Sara Seligman’s film about a mother-daughter duo (Adriana Barraza and Camila Mendes) who run a bed-and-breakfast practically on the US/Mexican border which they use to murder, rob and drown men working for the cartels, isn’t exactly a crazy film either. But here, the insistence on telling a tale that would usually make for a pretty extreme exploitation movie by avoiding practically all exploitative elements one way or the other, and instead focussing on a pretty horrible mother-daughter relationship, is actually what makes it interesting as well as pretty admirable. Seligman has a good grip on the elements of the material she has chosen to focus on, the actors are doing very good work (which is particularly important in a film that’s not at all focussing on the violence inherent in the material), so things come together nicely, creating an unassumingly effective film about family, freedom and weaponized capitalism.


Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): The second Spider-Man film taking place in the MCU with Tom Holland – and again directed by Jon Watts – is a strange little (huge) film. It is strange in the best way, daring a weird teen comedy vibe, destroying beautiful European cities as seen through US tourist eyes and using well-loved  elements of the Spider-Man myth and the MCU to goof off. Frankly, all of this shouldn’t work at all, and while this is indeed a surprisingly messy film whose structure doesn’t bode well for the MCU-less future of our friendly neighbourhood wallcrawler, it is also a whole lot of fun, suggesting a bit more of a freewheeling approach than typical in this kind of blockbuster realm.

Past Misdeeds: Phoenix the Warrior (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.

aka She Wolves of the Wasteland

The world has been quite destroyed by germ warfare that killed all men and only left a small number of women alive, which is the sort of thing that really does make a further propagation of the human race rather improbable.

Somehow, though, thanks to the machinations of an ancient evil youth-sucking woman only known as the Revered Mother (Sheila Howard) or the Reverend Mother, depending on what happens when your ears encounter mumbling, the post-apocalyptic world is populated with quite a few shapely young women. Alas, the germ warfare seems also to have destroyed most of the world’s clothing reserves as well as the knowledge of the ancient art of sewing and mending, so the poor women have to make do with the few shoulder pads, strategically placed strips of cloth, rags that never seem to be quite big enough and bikinis left. On a more positive note, there are large amounts of make-up, hairspray, dune buggies, automatic weapons and ammunition available, so there’s nothing standing in the way of a good post-apocalyptic lifestyle, even under the iron claw of the Revered Mother.

Mother and her main henchwoman Cobalt (a Persis Khambatta so fully clothed, we can assume she’s the one hogging all the clothing reserves in this brave new world) for their parts have to cope with a small bump in the plans of breeding male babies (not to be able to repopulate the world easier, mind you, but so Mother can suck out their life force). Keela (Peggy McIntaggart), a woman carrying the first male embryo in ages, has fled from Mother’s arms on account of the woman’s evilness, and catching her is more difficult than expected since she quickly meets and befriends wasteland warrior woman Phoenix (Kathleen Kinmont). And Phoenix is basically a more personable female version of Conan, just with less…no, wait, actually more clothing on than Conan (in the movies) prefers.

Ah, Action International Pictures, the gift that keeps on giving. Robert Hayes’s post-apocalyptic romp wasn’t made in Alabama, nor by the company’s core team, though, so I assume it was produced independently of the company and locally, and bought up after the fact or something in that manner.

Be that as it may, Phoenix the Warrior is quite good fun - if you like your silly post-apocalyptic cheese fests as much as I do, at least. Despite including many an inappropriately dressed woman, and featuring a bit of nude, ecstatic waterfall frolicking (which is what waterfalls are for anyway, surely), the film’s not at all as exploitative as you’d expect, at least if you can cope with its dress code. The rest of it plays out just like any cheap, trashy post-apocalyptic piece of wonderful nonsense, with lots of awkward hand-to-hand fighting, dune buggy buggying, and some minor explosions, treating its heroines just as a male-cast adventure movie of its type would, so the awkward hand-to-hand-fights never become cat fights, the female baddies are just as evil as male ones, and Phoenix is just the usual competent badass without the film suggesting that men would be better suited to her role.

In quite an uncommon turn of events for post-apocalyptic films with this kind of gender imbalance, Phoenix doesn’t even fall for the full-grown man (James Emery) – brilliantly named Guy - the script basically pulls out of its arse, and Guy certainly isn’t her superior in anything except perhaps early onset hair loss and porn moustache growth. That’s rather refreshing and pleasant from a film whose claim to existence and main selling point at the time was probably “bikini women with guns!”.

Consequently, the film is rather good fun for most of its running time, with nary a moment where nothing enjoyable or of interest is going on: there are the awkward fights I already mentioned, acting that’s just as awkward more often than not, a pointless five year jump forward in time (that doesn’t see anyone aging in any way or form, of course), the traditional arena fighting bit, a handful of very bad yet still funny jokes, and many a shot of deserts and junk yards. It’s all very impoverished from a budgetary perspective, of course, but I find something joyful in a film that just pretends a handful of shacks in the desert is the central base of an evil science witch planning on world domination by boy-soul sucking. Particularly when it’s a film as clearly not ashamed of what it is and what it does as Phoenix the Warrior.

From time to time, the film even stumbles into the realm of most refined cult movie delight, like in the basically throw-away moment that shows Mother keeping her boy child prisoner in what looks decidedly like a parrot cage to me, or the utterly lame yet inspired way our heroines beat her in the end. I’d also be remiss in my duties if I didn’t mention the scene concerning a group of robed mutant cultists who are convinced that just the right amount of human sacrifices made while chanting the names of old TV shows will get those heavenly television broadcasts starting again. Their sacrificial poles have TV antennas dangling on top.

Even better, if you can imagine that, is the performance of Persis Khambatta (looking a bit like Rekha in her 90s action movie phase here), full of deranged eye-goggling, melodramatic shouting, and absolutely peculiar line readings, as if she wanted to show the rest of the cast how to really act IN ALL CAPS.


This, ladies and gentlemen, is how it’s done.

In short: Swerve (2011)

Somewhere in the Australian Outback. Travelling on his way to a job interview, Colin (David Lyons) witnesses a car accident that leaves the man responsible dead, leaving behind a suitcase full of money. The other car harbours a woman we will soon enough learn is the local femme fatale called Jina (Emma Booth) who just might have been trying to get out of town. When the boringly honest Colin delivers the money to the local cop Frank (Jason Clarke), he quickly learns that Jina isn’t only the local femme fatale but also Frank’s wife. If you’re now imagining the rest of the plot, I’m pretty sure you’ve got it right, if you keep in mind that Colin keeps being really boringly honest und unwilling to fall to any direct femme fatale attacks.

Consequently, Craig Lahiff’s Swerve is a bit of a disappointing attempt at making an Australian neo noir movie. Technically, it has quite a bit going for it in postcard pretty landscape shots, a generally high level of competence and a perfectly decent cast. The problem is the nearly absurd by the numbers noir quality of a script that includes exactly the twists and turns you’d expect at exactly the time you’d expect them, and characters that are archetypal clichés without even the tiniest flourish, making the sad sack, the violent husband and the femme fatale who might be a battered woman taking her revenge or not the blandest possible versions of their respective roles. In general, what Swerve lacks is any idea of its own, any attempt at changing its characters for the more interesting, and any chance for an audience that has seen neo noirs that aren’t painfully mediocre to actually become involved in the plot or the characters, for there’s no attempt to build any actual emotional stakes here.


It’s still a competent movie in that it is clearly professionally made, but so’s every film with an actual budget; thankfully many of them have more to offer than this one.

Satanic Panic (2019)

Painfully nice Sam Craft (Hayley Griffith) doesn’t have a lucky first day in her new job as pizza delivery girl. For one, she’s stuck with the rich part of town for her first tour, so, obviously, tips are more of a fictional concept there. Secondly, she stumbles into the motivational speech/Satanic ritual of the devil worshipper coven of Danica Ross (Rebecca Romijn), and soon finds herself the centre of attention when Danica quickly pegs her as a virgin. Hint: never answer “that’s a very personal question” when a movie Satanist asks you about your virginal status.

After Danica’s daughter Judi (Ruby Modine) has let her mother badly down by getting herself deflowered, the cult is in dire need of a virgin for this night’s big ritual, for they plan to conjure up Baphomet, give him a fine virgin womb that also moonlights as a sacrifice and use his demon child to rule the world even more than they already do. So, bad luck for Sam. However, it turns out she’s much tougher than her sugary sweet demeanour suggests, and just plain lucky when luck’s the thing to have. So she not only escapes the cult’s clutches early on, she also manages to accidentally save Judi from a fate worse than death - plus death – and soon has her own witchcraft expert. She’ll need all the help she can get.

Chelsea Stardust’s Satanic Panic, as written by Grady Hendrix, is a surprisingly fun little horror comedy, going the 80s horror comedy throwback route a bit, but not actually set in the period. It’s another Fangoria production, yet unlike old Fangoria productions, the films coming out under the banner of the revived and allergic against digital magazine are actually worthwhile. Or at the very least, are always trying to be proper fun movies beyond being special effects delivery systems.

Of course, the film’s effects are still pretty important to it (it is a film in the spirit of 80s horror after all), and it does have quite a bit of fun coming up with icky  but cheaply doable on a budget stuff for its evil Satanic witches to do, so while this isn’t spectacularly gory, what’s there is very much in the proper spirit of rubber and a mildly grotesque imagination.

The film’s not always looking too great, with a couple of sequences – the climactic Satanic orgy comes to mind – that overstep the line between merry cheapness and mildly embarrassing tackiness, but it is usually saved by a script that puts a lot of imagination in its series of little set-pieces fun and funny, pacing that leaves a lot of breathing room but never so much you get the impression the film is dragging its feet, and a cast that is willing and able to go with the silly, the funny, and the slightly unpleasant yet also perfectly able to go a bit deeper when necessary. Plus, there are not many horror films that feature an impressive fight against linen (making at least this M.R. James fan very happy), Satanist infighting (turns out evil rich people have trouble building a collective front even when Baphomet would really need one), and demonic infighting (as above, so below, as the film in one of its cheekier moments remarks) as well as adorable bunnies.


I was also pleasantly surprised by the film’s willingness to not go for the typical horror movie bullshit ending (not to be confused with a proper downer ending) but give its likeable heroine an actual happy end.

In short: Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

There are some curious weaknesses to Michael Dougherty’s second Godzilla film that keep it rather behind Legendary’s until now best kaijuverse movie, the grand Kong: Skull Island. Most obviously it repeats the mistake of the first Legendary Godzilla movie and concentrates on the least interesting of its human characters, in this case portrayed by Kyle Chandler giving his sad sack character a particularly whiny note (which sure doesn’t help), while he’s surrounded by a bunch of much more interesting actors involved in much more interesting business (Ken Watanabe! Zhang Ziyi! Bradley Whitford! Vera Farmiga! Millie Bobby Brown! Aisha Hinds!), who all do get their moments to shine but are still not allowed to be a proper ensemble for reasons only known to Dougherty. In other regards, the film is actually much better than the first Godzilla at integrating that pesky human element into the plot.

Now, I could go the way of various mainstream film critics and complain about the mild silliness of that human business, but for an old kaiju hand, the mix of earnest eco monologues, mild action, and big fat McGuffins seems perfectly appropriate to the film, and provides quite a bit of entertainment to the friend of explosions, dimly lit corridors and terribly incompetent security forces too. Plus, while I’m no fan of Chandler’s character or Chandler’s acting here, I do appreciate how the film suggests that both he and his ex-wife have lost their respective marbles in very different ways after the kaiju-induced death of their son, turning both the protagonist and the antagonist of the film into characters who have turned to destructive views and ways of life after contact with something they can barely comprehend. It will need a member of the next generation to teach them better. Which, if you’re not a mainstream movie critic, you just might be able to identify as a couple of the film’s themes.


And, you know, then there’s the actual reason for anyone sane to go into a movie called “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”, and that’s enjoying the monster action as well gawking at the way King Gidorah, Rodan and Mothra have been Americanised. And wouldn’t you know it, the monster action is indeed properly great, usually emphasising the sheer size and mass of the creatures, the way they dwarf the human characters not just physically but conceptually. That last element is of course weakened by a modern Hollywood movie’s need to have its human protagonists actually do something that matters, and go through a character arc but that sort of thing is rather inevitable. On the positive side, the film does again and again provide a feeling of sheer awe and wonder at the kaijus that made all of its failings null and void to me while watching, and still looks pretty damn good weeks later.

Music Monday: Monetary Edition

Gleaming the Cube (1989)

Orange County kid Brian Kelly (Christian Slater) is a skateboarding mad professional outsider with a nice line in semi-nihilist philosophy. Part of the reason for his mad-on, apart from the always deplorable state of the world and teenage hormones, is clearly his not completely untrue impression that his parents (Ed Lauter and Micole Mercurio) do rather prefer his adopted brother Vinh (Art Chudabala) to him. Vinh being a kind of near-genius golden boy (which the film does suggest is his way of coping with the whole “being a Vietnamese kid adopted into a very white family” thing) does certainly make him easier to like. The relationship between the two brothers isn’t really all that acrimonious, mind you.

When Vinh is found dead in an apparent suicide in a motel room Brian doesn’t believe his brother truly killed himself right from the start, and when he starts poking around in Vinh’s stuff, he begins to find hints pointing to the truth. A truth the audience knows right from the start: Vinh found evidence for Colonel Trac (Le Tuan), a big shot in the local Vietnamese community he did some part time bookkeeping work for and whose daughter Tina (Min Luong) he dated, being involved in plans of smuggling weapons provided by one Mr Lawndale (Richard Herd) into Vietnam to arm a supposed anti-Communist uprising, and the conspirators accidentally killed him for it. Brian’s not exactly subtle investigation will bring himself into danger right quick, but it turns out that skateboarding and a near-sociopathic ruthlessness can be very useful survival traits in this sort of situation.

I am pretty sure Graeme Clifford’s Gleaming the Cube is the only entry into the sub-genre of the 80s skateboarding neo noir conspiracy thriller, but given how surprising, interesting and gripping most of the film turns out to be, I rather wish there was more of the sub-genre.

Clifford works as your typically slick late-80s director here, though one making skateboarding look rather more interesting and exciting than I usually think of it. Even though it’s not the kind of direction style that terribly excites me, it is effective at pulling in the threads of all the very different genre bits and pieces the film uses and turning them – until the climax, at least – into an organic whole. Plus, Clifford does know how to stage very classic suspense set-ups very well, so scenes like Brian’s witnessing of the second murder while he’s hiding in the backseat of a car that could have turned out rather ridiculous in the wrong hands work as well as they should.

The star’s the script by Michael Tolkin, though. Tolkin manages to juggle all sorts of very different and a bit ridiculous ideas, include a bunch of skateboarding, said suspense scenes, suburban teen drama turning noirish, and turn them into an actual story about actual people with actual stakes. One truly impressive thing about the script is how it avoids being as cartoonish as a description of the film may sound, at least until the climax, instead sure-handedly creating characters coming from believable social circumstances like the Brian/Vinh relationship. Equally impressive is that the film clearly realizes how Brian’s outsider-dom is self-constructed by a young guy for whom it is safe to do that because he’s from polite suburbia, with all the get out of jail free cards this place provides him with. Thanks to an eye for social details like this, and an actual ability to find depth in the characters, the plot doesn’t so much feel like a highly constructed thriller but like the natural consequences of these people’s lives.

At the same time, Gleaming’s tendency to shift between genre codes keeps it surprising instead of feeling like algebra made of people. There’s a true moment of shock when Brian starts doing a preppy make-over to get Tina to trust him, so he can better spy on her father, and acts more ruthless the longer this goes on, apparently using her without realizing – or perhaps simply not caring - how much he does. Though, at this point, the film actually pulls its punches and Tina is perfectly alright with being betrayed into hurting her father, which for my tastes is the script’s greatest misstep.

The film even expands this approach of always being deeper as well as more interesting than it needs to be to its villains. This trio of idiots who think they are much cleverer than they actually are comes right out of a Coen Brothers film, and consequently, most of the film’s somewhat escalating violence comes from their incompetence and their unwillingness to stop and think instead of turning to increasingly stupid plans, which of course plays very nicely with Brian’s own willingness to escalate.


Speaking of escalation, there is the little thing of the film’s climax, when this very well written, constructed and clever film does indeed turn into the cartoon its basic set-up promised from the start, so expect an absurdly chipper, and absolutely insane, final fifteen minutes, with a ridiculous – and very fun – highway chase involving Slater catching a skateboard ride on a sport scar, a game of chicken with a Pizza Hut truck, and no grounding whatsoever in reality, apart from the reality of a very weird action film. It’s not really the ending I’d have chosen for Gleaming the Cube (in my movie, everybody dies), but it’s certainly one nobody watching will soon forget.

Three Films Make A Post: Adventure lives forever.

Torque (2004): In 2004, the fast cars and macho men sub-genre was already big enough in mainstream cinema, the hipster impulse to do them ironically could not be supressed. To wit, Torque, as directed by Joseph Kahn, a film that spends the whole of its running time pointing out how stupid and lame it is, which indeed it is very much. As all films of this ilk, it never attempts to do anything but point out its own failures, never bothering to, just for example, not be stupid. That, I can’t help but assume, would take effort, whereas empty irony clearly does not. The end result is a film that will neither entertain an audience coming for a fast cars and macho men movie – because an un-ironic film of that genre would at the very least attempt to not be aggressively shite – nor one perhaps expecting an actual parody of the genre, which, again, would take effort this film just isn’t in the mood to make.

Van Helsing (2004): After realizing the error of my ways regarding Stephen Sommers’s Mummy movies, I had high hopes of recognizing Van Helsing as another film I had unfairly maligned. Well, I shouldn’t have worried my pretty little head, because Van Helsing is even worse than Torque above, foregoing the empty irony for some of the worst jokes in film history. As if the jokes weren’t painful enough, Sommers also manages to get a completely lifeless performance out of Hugh Jackman, pairing him up with the typically wooden Kate Beckinsale until a negative number of romantic sparks fly. Somehow, Sommers also lost the ability to stage fun and exciting action sequences, of pacing a movie, and of being rather clever while pretending to be really dumb. Because that’s clearly not bad enough, we also get Richard Roxburgh as the what I believe to be worst Dracula in movie history (porn Draculas not excepted)  giving a performance that’s so bad, the mind boggles what anyone involved was thinking (if anyone was indeed thinking and not just snorting coke).


Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991): But let’s end this post on a movie that isn’t obnoxiously bad, Craig Baldwin’s collage pseudo-documentary that tells the horrible history of US “intervention” in various Latin American countries. The film avoids the preachiness as well as the dry didacticism that could come with this kid of topic by pretending to be a right-wing conspiracist screed telling the tale of the heroic US fight against evil aliens and their co-conspirators, hilariously imitating the tone of the looniest parts of conspiracy theorist thinking, obviously mostly setting it into picture via footage taken from older SF and horror movies, saying what it actually has to say by inversion. Which manages to make the film funny and inventive as well as informative; given my predilections, the particular footage the film uses adds to the enjoyment, of course.

Past Misdeeds: The Terror Live (2013)

aka 90 Minutes of Terror

Original title: 더 테러 라이브 (deu tae-ro ra-i-beu)

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.

Formerly highly popular news anchor Yoon Yeong-hwa (Ha Jeong-woo) has been demoted to an early morning radio programme, and he is quite bitter about it. So it looks like a fine chance for getting his old job back to him when a caller to his show threatens to blow up a bomb he has deposited on a bridge, and really does bring a bomb to explosion when Yoon berates him off the air. Yoon doesn’t take long to finagle this exclusive (what do you mean, call in the police?) into the promise of a return to his old job by his former boss Cha Dae-eun (Lee Kyeong-yeong).

It’s just a question of getting the terrorist to talk. Turns out he is more than willing to do that, for he wants the South Korean president to apologize for the death of three construction workers on the very same bridge he just damaged. He says the deaths could have been avoided if the country actually gave a shit about its working class. Oh, and he has more bombs tucked away somewhere he’ll detonate if he doesn’t get his way, like, for example, the one hidden in Yoon’s earpiece.

Not surprisingly, Yoon finds himself losing control of the situation he was planning to exploit for his own gain, and soon, politicians, his media colleagues and the police are all trying to use the situation for their own gain, or at least to avoid embarrassment. And if avoiding embarrassment means letting a few people getting blown up by a bomb, then so be it, at least if the situation can be turned around so somebody else is going to carry the responsibility in the public eye. Why, the people in power let a guy blowing up bridges and an egocentric former news anchor look like oases of morality.

Which, obviously, is the point that makes Kim Byeong-woo’s thriller The Terror Live as interesting as it is exciting. I can hardly remember seeing a big mainstream production like this being this openly angry about the state of the world in general, and the country it was made in in particular. It’s an anger that can only ever portray any form of authority – be it the media, the police, or even the head of state - as a quietly monstrous entity whose only interests lie in not shaking up the status quo and getting fat from it.

Of course, this anger is expressed through the methods of a very tight, slick and highly paranoid thriller, and might therefore not be taken seriously by everyone, but then, if director Kim had only wanted to make a nice little thriller without meaning or wanting any of its political implications, he’d probably have made a jingoistic film about evil foreign terrorists hunted and killed by heroic South Korean special forces people; it wouldn’t be the first one. One would suspect that sort of thing would have been an easier sell compared to a movie that makes paranoid US movies from the 70s look calm and hopeful.

Be that as it may, the film’s angry politics – which I can’t find myself disagreeing with, not only when it comes to South Korea - are packaged in quite an incredible thriller. The film mostly takes place inside of Yoon’s radio studio, with what would be the big destruction set pieces in most other movies only shown in form of news footage or tiny camera feeds Yoon is looking at. In the hands of a lesser director, this approach might have been a bit disappointing and cheap, as if the audience had been invited to a wedding but then only got to watch an episode of a reality TV show about weddings, yet in Kim’s hands, it helps the film focusing on the important bits of its story, people.

Ha Jeong-woo’s surprisingly nuanced portrayal of a man who thinks he can buy his way back into the world’s good graces by sheer bastardry but then has to learn that there are always bigger bastards, and who rediscovers the existence of his conscience only to also learn that his conscience won’t save him in a world where possessing this sort of thing is only a hindrance is particularly remarkable here, and is certainly just as important for selling a highly unsympathetic man like Yoon as the film’s protagonist as is a script (also written by Kim) that really goes out of its way to give Ha nuances to work with.

An additional joy is the sheer drive of the film, the way in which it sells a plot that on paper sounds just a bit too constructed through focus and energy. There’s just no room for thinking “you know, our terrorist is absurdly good at what he does, isn’t he?” while the movie does everything in its power of convincing you that this isn’t a point worth dwelling upon while you’re watching. Consequently, I’d find it dishonest to complain about something like this afterwards.


Which leads me to quite a luxurious problem to have when writing up a movie: there really isn’t anything to complain about when talking about The Terror Live. It’s a film that knows what it wants in each second of its running time, and seems to have no trouble at all realizing it. It also suggests the slump I thought South Korean genre cinema to be in doesn’t actually exist.

In short: The Mummy (1999)

Growing into one’s middle age is a curious and sometimes disturbing process. Case in point: one day, you wake up and find that you have actually grown to like Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy rather a lot – a film you’ve held up as a great example of really dumb and incompetent blockbuster filmmaking for nearly two decades. Worse still, I’d even call the film pretty damn good instead of just “entertaining”. Clearly, either wisdom or a slow decay of mental faculties comes with age. At least I still have Michael Bay to look down upon.

But seriously, if you go in expecting to see all kinds of silly nonsense, and stop taking yourself so damn seriously (I may or may not be speaking to myself) Sommers’s Mummy is the epitome of an effective and charming, efficiently and really rather cleverly written big loud entertainment. Sommers, while certainly not a visual artist, makes the best out of all the glories late 90s CGI can buy, and puts his characters through one exciting and pretty damn awesome action sequence after the next.

However, director and film never forget that you do need some human grounding to your awesome spectacle, so they treat the romance between hero Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and heroine-librarian Evie Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) not just to get a checkmark on the list of mandatory plot elements, but as if they actually meant it. It may not be a deep, believable portray of actual human romantic interaction, but the film is full of the sort of snappy, glowing banter between lovers old Hollywood loved, resulting in a leading couple you actually root for during the film’s breathless series of set pieces. Which is only right and proper, giving how old Hollywood the film’s obvious other influences also are.

Adding to the film’s huge charm is how many things of import it actually lets characters do who aren’t the male lead, so Evie actually does quite a bit more than your typical blockbuster heroine (that Weisz is charming as all get-out while actually doing shit is certainly not to the film’s detriment either), Evie’s comic relief brother John Hannah never becomes obnoxious and useless as is tradition, and the traditional brown sidekick (Oded Fehr) might even be the actual hero of the piece.


Honestly, I have no idea what was wrong with me not liking this one.

Pet Sematary (2019)

I was a big admirer of director duo Kevin Kölsch’s and Dennis Widmyer’s Starry Eyes, so I was really rather excited going into their new adaptation of what very well might be Stephen King’s best novel – it’s certainly the King novel that delves deepest into abysses the author tends to shy away from at the last moment in most of his other books. Unfortunately, shying away from abysses is pretty much this film’s modus operandi, the script by Matt Greenberg and Jeff Buhler somehow managing to make a film about desperate grief encountering the worst of King’s malevolent places, and the horrors of not just loss but the lies loss can make you believe, and the terrible things one might do for love feel like an emotionally uninvolving ultra-conventional horror movie.

Visually, Kölsch and Widmyer  do from time to time hit upon a strikingly creepy image – I thought the very artificial and therefore strange in the mostly realist movie surrounding it look of the Bad Place was a particularly good touch – but more often than not, they turn out what any middling craftsman in modern horror can, with horror sequences that are as obvious as they are conventional, and little of the visual mirroring of the protagonists’ inner lives through their surroundings the film desperately needed. Most of the horror business is perfectly okay, but perfectly okay is simply not enough here.

The script seems mostly concerned with streamlining the novel the film’s based on, and I generally understand this approach when adapting King; the man does tend to go off in unnecessary directions rather regularly, and some of this stuff should indeed be edited out. However, Pet Sematary is not one of those King novels, and excising things here would need a much calmer hand than the writers have to offer, for so much what is streamlined away is exactly what makes the novel as devastating and honest about the human heart as it is. The film’s writing, despite serviceable performances by Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz and John Lithgow, really only knows how to go through the surface motions of loss and grief, and the way it treats these emotions, they never seem to be at the core of the horror here but only motions the plot needs to go through to set up the standard horror tropes and shocks. And don’t get me even started on the film’s new improved (ha!) ending which puts all responsibility for things turning out very badly indeed on the shoulders of the Bad Place, and only very little on the humans involved, turning a heart-breaking ending that does not look away from the terrible things it believes about the human condition into just another example of the crappy horror movie “bad” ending that feels dishonest and cowardly in this particular context. One might start believing the filmmakers don’t actually understand that the point of Pet Sematary isn’t OMG! KID ZOMBIES!


It all comes over as just terribly generic and conventional, lacking any spark of true creativity or insight. And yes, I know, I’m always going on about how one should try not to compare adaptations to the things they are adapating too directly and try and look at them as their own thing, but even when I try and ignore that Pet Sematary is based on one of the best horror novels ever written, there’s still little to praise here, for a couple of couple of good images embedded into dreary horror by numbers do not a memorable film make.

In short: U-571 (2000)

World War II. The crew – including Matthew McConaughey in his “young star” phase, Harvey Keitel in his “Harvey Keitel” phase, and Jon Bon Jovi in his perpetual “can’t act” phase -  of the submarine of Lt. Cmdr. Mike Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) is sent on a top secret surprise mission to use a lucky opportunity to grab an Enigma Machine from a German U-Boot.

Things do of course become more complicated than that, and soon the US submarine is destroyed and most of its crew killed, with only a handful of men under the command of XO McConaughey alive on a German U-Boot that has seen better days. More tense complications do of course ensue during the attempt to get the Enigma Machine in allied hands.

This is the other diamond in the otherwise naff crown of director Jonathan Mostow, standing at eye level to his pretty damn great Breakdown. In fact, his two good films are so good, I can’t help but think the director must have been exceedingly unlucky with outside forces on his other projects, for the kind of talent for suspense and tense action his two excellent films demonstrate can’t have been a fluke. Obviously, the script Mostow’s working from is of dubious historical authenticity (if you want to know about the actual way Enigma was cracked, Wikipedia and a bunch of sources mentioning many people from exotic countries like Poland, France, and the UK this film has never heard about apart from a tiny mention once the plot is over beckon), and its characters are cut from very typical genre movie cloth.


However, the script does know how to make its shorthand characters just lively enough for an audience to care about their fate, and provides the damn great cast many a good opportunity to sweat and stare dramatically without the plot ever getting bogged down in melodramatics. Instead, things always feel tight, tense and teetering on the edge of catastrophe, Mostow using all tricks of the thriller-style war movie to do a very classic thing: dragging his audience to the edge of their seats. It does help here that the film, despite its historical inauthenticity, is the kind of war adventure that very well knows that war isn’t actually an adventure, so this isn’t only showing heroic pursuits, but men following these pursuits while in desperate fear for their lives, everybody quickly coming to the edge of their respective breaking points. Which, obviously, enhances the tension Mostow creates through masterful staging and editing of the suspense quite a bit.

Music Monday: True Love Edition

Cleaner (2007)

Former cop Tom Cutler (Samuel L. Harris) has retired into owning his own business, a small cleaning company specializing in crime scene and general biohazard clean-up. He’s taking care of his daughter Rose (Keke Palmer) by himself, for his wife was murdered when he was still a cop. The killer was himself murdered in prison, and Tom and his partner and close friend Eddie Lorenzo (Ed Harris) only escaped jail time of their own for organizing the murder because Tom made a deal with one Vaughn, the godfather of the city’s corrupt cops, though Eddie doesn’t appear to no that part of the deal.

It’s clear that this past is something Tom dearly wants to bury under meticulous cleanliness, avoidance of all his old cop buddies including Eddie and, the good old medicine of pretending the bad shit didn’t really happen. The time for pretending is quickly coming to an end, though, when Tom is called into cleaning up a crime scene that will turn out not to have been an official one afterwards. Worse, Tom hasn’t just cleaned up the remnants of a crime, the victim’s a guy who turned witness against Vaughn. At first, Tom hopes if he continues his well-worn technique of ignoring the situation and hoping it will go away, nothing will happen, but neither this little problem nor his past will quite so easily stay buried.

The 21st Century parts of director Renny Harlin’s career are full of surprises, unless you share the distaste for the man’s body of work most mainstream film critics seem to have quite independent of the actual quality of any given film he turns out. Probably because pretending only tasteful middle brow directors making tasteful middle brow films are worthwhile is still a rather big thing in those circles, a gospel given unto them by the sainted Roger Ebert. If your background is in exploitation and cult cinema like mine, automatically disliking Harlin’s usually interesting, sometimes ridiculous and nearly always (that nearly is obviously important) worthwhile body of work after his time as Hollywood’s second greatest action cinema director seems somewhere between insane and hypocritical.

For its first two acts, Cleaner is very typical of this phase of Harlin’s career by not being typical whatsoever. Instead of the slam bang action he would have made out of this material in the 90s, the film at hand is a stylishly (but not so stylish it becomes distracting), slick, and calm (some may say slow) movie that’s much more focussed on its actors doing proper grown-up acting, with Harlin doing his utmost to step out of their way. Given that this is mainly Jackson’s and Harris’s show – with some very effective help from Luis Guzmán, Palmer, and even Eva Mendes – and these guys could obviously be involving and interesting when shot by an idiot on a phone or Stephen Soderbergh, this is certainly the right approach to the material, also providing the film with a human grit it needs to counteract the visual slickness a little.

This works well for the film, until the third act starts, and the whole film breaks down a little. It’s not just that the revelation of what’s going on is more than a little clichéd, it is also obvious from pretty early on. The way to that “revelation” is rather too messy, also, so messy, in fact, that even Jackson and Harris have a hard time actually selling the whole affair in the end. It’s also deeply unsatisfying in how little the film seems to realize how cynical its ending, where the only crime that’s actually punished is the one committed out of love and where all corrupt cops can merrily ride into the sunset, actually is, and how much it actually undercuts the whole “family first” shtick it is apparently trying to sell.


But then, the first two acts really are rather good.

Three Films Make A Post: The horror is real

Hoax (2019): Welcome to plot twist land, a planet quite like our own, yet where the best way to bring a godsawful bigfoot movie (without any of the charms that make many a godawful bigfoot movie rather lovely) to a climax is to turn it into an even worse piece of hillbilly horror that seems to attempt to rip-off the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre for fifteen minutes or so but only ends up as the Hillbilly Cannibal Massacre Blues. Despite the presence of semi-regular okay genre stalwarts Brian Thompson and Ben Browder and a cameo by Adrienne Barbeau, there’s really nothing to recommend Matt Allen’s stinker, unless you’re really into unfunny humour, awkward plotting, character arcs that go nowhere and crap bigfoot costumes.

Gwen (2018): Quite a different kind of not good (in comparison to Hoax, it’s of course still a masterpiece, because it is an actual movie) is this beautiful looking film directed by William McGregor about the travails (and travails, and more travails) of the female members of a farmer family living near a Welsh mining town. It’s the sort of film that’s heaping doom and gloom, more doom and gloom and even more doom and gloom on its characters with such abandon, and so little thought as to make any of the doom and gloom stick dramatically, the Red Wedding feels subtly underplayed. It clearly does aim for a The Witch type of modern folk horror vibe but is too squeamish to actually fully to commit the supernatural route, and has little of the American movie’s sense of pacing and threat, nor much actual sense of folklore. In this one, everything’s dark and painful and patriarchal evil, but also weirdly vague (which is not the same thing as being ambiguous), and the misfortunes come down so thick on our protagonists, I started asking myself if all of this was meant as a parody of historically minded poverty porn. Alas, it isn’t.


The Quiet Earth (1985): This film from New Zealand directed by Geoff Murphy about a scientist (Bruno Lawrence) who wakes up one morning, perhaps being the last person on Earth, on the other hand, is a minor classic. Particularly the first third in which Lawrence’s character slowly explores the now empty world and goes a bit insane, is utterly brilliant, as is the brilliantly ambiguous last scene, all shot with a genuine sense of mood and place. The rest of the film, once a couple of other characters come in, isn’t quite as great, mostly because the love triangle is really rather conventional and pretty underwritten, and because the film does tend to hammer the things it wants to say about the contemporary anxieties of the mid-80s home a bit too hard. However, whenever The Quiet Earth seems to lose its way a bit, there’s one striking image or another putting it back on its feet again.

Past Misdeeds: Byzantium (2012)

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

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

Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (based on a script by Moira Buffini that doesn’t feel stagy at all despite apparently being based on a stage play by the author) is the kind of film that really needs quite a different writer than I am to be properly appreciated. A shot-by-shot analysis combined with a deep thematic exploration seems rather appropriate, but that’s neither a thing I do, nor a thing I’m particularly good at, nor a thing I am even usually interested in.

What I can do, though, is to swoon a bit about what I think is the best film I’ve seen to have come out in 2013. I might throw around words like masterly, even. Now, before anyone thinks I have been struck by a case of director fandom, I’m not even a total admirer of the body of work of Neil Jordan, because for every properly brilliant movie he makes (like the Angela Carter adaptation The Company of Wolves, obviously), there’s a piece of self-important dross that just isn’t as clever as it thinks it is in his filmography. And don’t even get me started on the waste of properly sexy history that is The Borgias or his other vampire movie, the execrable Interview with the Vampire. This fluctuation between the horrible and the sublime makes the director much more difficult to adore than someone who makes mediocre and brilliant films in equal measure. On the plus side, one gets the feeling that Jordan’s failures have never been caused by a lack of ambition or an inability to change.

Be that as it may, with Byzantium, Jordan takes not a single false step throughout nearly two hours of film – and this is a film that really needs the time it takes – with moment of subtly breathtaking filmmaking followed by moment of subtly breathtaking filmmaking followed by moments of not at all subtle yet still breathtaking filmmaking. This is a film that not just oozes style in a very deliberate way, knows which shots to frame like a painting and which ones not to, builds a non-realist mood of contemporary grime with as sure a hand as it does provide some beautifully gothic excess; it is also a film that does nothing of this without a good reason. In fact, there’s a calm purpose to every shot and every camera movement, all of it not just made to impress with its beauty but always bearing the weight of character, theme, and mood without ever making it look like a weight.

At the very same time, Byzantium never uses its visual style to overwhelm its actors, always giving them as much space as they need. And, given how great Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton and their supporting cast are, one can’t help but imagine them paying the film’s care back in style. While some of the basic character set-up might seem a little obvious, even clichéd, on paper, the actors as well as the script provide subtlety and life quite on the level with what Jordan is doing around them, with so many suggestions of complexity I soon forgot that not every idea here is new to vampire media of any kind. It is, after all, not just the ideas which matter but also how you bring them together and execute them.

Thematically, Byzantium is as rich as its visuals and its acting are. This is, of course, in part a story about growing up given an ironic twist by the nature of its main characters, as well as a story about the need to change even when you are supposedly changeless. Yet there are also undercurrents of moral failures perpetuating themselves cyclically, of the impossibility to keep one’s hands clean when one wants to survive as a monster or as a human being until one doesn’t even want to keep one’s hands clean anymore, as well as an exploration of the lies people tell themselves about their natures to be able to live with themselves. There is, obviously, also a feminist and even a class-conscious aspect to a story that shows the vampires as a boy’s club that really doesn’t want any of those icky girls in them, particularly not ones from the lower classes. Which somewhat comes with the territory of a group whose members have been born centuries ago and clearly want and need to control their environment as far as possible. In this context, the film’s women can’t help but represent change and a different way of life – everything the male vampires fear – to them, quite independent of who these women actually are, and how much of the way they have to lead their lives is a survivor’s reaction to the pressures coming from the men around them. One of the really masterful aspects of the film is that it contains all this and more and never feels overloaded or as if it were trying too hard.

Another aspect of Byzantium I particularly admire is its willingness and ability to change from its semi-realist mode into Gothic fullness and back again without selling any of it short. In fact, the film achieves some of its greatest impact by the collision of the two modes, and by never quite keeping them apart for long, as if both ways at looking at the world were in the end just sides of the same coin.


Quite surprisingly in a film this unashamed of its Gothic melodrama, it also has a sense of humour about it all, a sense of humour which – again - never diminishes the rest of what’s going on, particularly since it has a wonderful grip on the closeness between humour and horror, and a cast willing and able to sell this, too.

In short: Nekrotronic (2018)

Given how much I liked Wyrmwood, the previous feature of sibling filmmakers director/writer Kiah Roache-Turner and writer Tristan Roache-Turner, I’m rather disappointed how little I got on with this horror action comedy about demon hunters for some reason called necromancers and demons under the soul-eating tutelage of Monica Bellucci fighting it out in Australia and on the Internet. There’s Ben O’Toole as the lamest Chosen One imaginable, a fighting sister duo (Caroline Ford and Tess Haubrich), a comic relief ghost of colour (Epine Bob Savea) and a plot that’s as busy as its is uninvolving, with characters that can’t even be bothered to have single defining character traits.

The neon colours (this is another movie that has fallen into a septic tank of The 80s) are certainly pretty, and the special effects, apart from the sub super sentai monster costume in the grand finale are the gloopy sort of fun, but the writing’s genuinely terrible: when the dialogue isn’t clunky exposition, it’s utterly brain-dead humour (the last line in the movie is “suck on this”, and that’s about as funny as this thing gets, alas). The film’s world – despite all of that exposition - never comes to any kind of life but exists as a series of stupid, sometimes mildly cool, ideas the film tries to hang a series of action scenes on. Alas, those action scenes are for the most part – the film does have a moment or two – as bland as they are loud. That air of blandness really is the film’s greatest surprise, given all the mugging and the shouting it does, but there’s never anything actually worth all the noise. Particularly bad are the attempts at aiming for serious emotional beats among all the terrible jokes, with little visible effort spent on actually preparing these emotional shifts, leaving the tear-jerking moments as artefacts from a very different film.


Honestly, I can’t imagine what went wrong here.

The Night Comes for Us (2018)

Indonesian Ito (Joe Taslim) has been working for the Chinese Triads as an international enforcer for three years now. But when he and his men are tasked with massacring a whole village, something in him changes, and he can’t bring himself to kill the last survivor, the little girl Reina (Asha Kenyeri Bermudez). Instead, he kills his own men and flees with Reina to his native Jakarta, where he was a gang leader before he and his protégé Arian (Iko Uwais) had to hire themselves out to the triads to protect the rest of the gang.

There’s not much left of Ito’s old life. Most of his former friends and partners are dead or in jail. His former girlfriend Shinta (Salvita Decorte), his old friend and partner Fatih (Abimana Aryasatya), his frenemie Bobby (Zack Lee) and Fatih’s nephew Wisnu (Dimas Anggara) are really what’s left of his past relations. Ito’s not happy with getting them involved in his troubles, but he believes he needs all the help he can get to come up with enough money and resources to bring him and Reina out of the triads’ reach. For of course, the triads don’t take to Ito’s betrayal kindly, and have sent a veritable horde out to kill him and the little girl. Among them is Arian who doesn’t seem to be completely on board with the project.

Things are further complicated by the fact that the triads are using their search for Ito as an excuse to move in on Jakarta, eventually offering the local crown to Arian if he is willing to betray his old friends. Also involved is a nameless government killer (Julie Estelle), who actually may be on Ito’s side.

I’m pretty sure that once the production of Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us was over and done with, there was no stage blood left in Jakarta, for the film is an unrelenting series of incredibly bloody action sequences. There’s a bit of obviously Heroic Bloodshed inspired personal business between men involved too, but the emphasis here is really on inspired on-screen violence that attempts to be as gritty and icky as the film can get away with – which is apparently a lot when you can get a deal with Netflix for distribution outside of Indonesia.

Tonally, the action is focused on that most tricky kind of choreography: creating fights that look and feel brutal and realistic, sloppy and inelegant like real fights do (probably), with a side note of desperation. Tijahjanto’s direction is tight, with a preference for action taking place in enclosed spaces that add a dimension of claustrophobia to the physical threat and the general violent insanity going around. The film also does what the more hyperviolently gritty side of action and martial arts cinema seldom does (because the hyperviolence makes this sort of thing rather difficult), defining characters through their fighting styles more than by the things they say: so Ito’s a brutal street fighter who just takes hits in the face and is willing to use just about anything to kill you, the government operator is controlled and efficient even when losing a finger or two, Bobby’s an insane berserker, and Arian’s at once elegant, and treacherous, and so on.


Inside of its basic tenet of being as brutal as possible, the film’s action is surprisingly diverse, with a whole load of fighting styles, action styles, and set piece ideas that never really repeat themselves beyond the good guys (good by default, because the bad guys are definitely even worse) being outnumbered, so the film’s action never becomes monotonous despite being quite so unrelenting. The whole blood and guts style of the affair - Tjahjanto’s experience in gory horror is always visible – puts this in great contrast to the much more antiseptic mass violence in something like the John Wick films that go for the videogame approach to bloody violence that may like a bit of gore, but prefers to ignore how messy, unpredictable and downright unpleasant all this bloody murder and human bodies are. Which isn’t to say that The Night Comes for Us is pretending to be more or deeper than it actually is, it’s just curiously human for a film this brutal.

In short: Daughter of the Wolf (2019)

Just after Clair Hamilton (Gina Carano) has returned home from military service to bury her father and take care of her estranged teenage son Charlie (Anton Gillis-Adelman), Charlie is kidnapped. The kidnappers do ask for a ransom consisting of basically all the money Clair has, but they still plan on selling Charlie off to someone even if they get the money. Their leader, only known as Father (Richard Dreyfuss, of all people now also in a low budget direct to home video career phase) we will learn during the course of the movie, has some rather personal reasons for the whole affair, as well as a pretty perverse sense of morality.

Fortunately for Charlie, Clair is well up for hunting a bunch of criminals through the snowy mountains, even teaming up with one among their number (Brendan Fehr) who has a bit of a conscience as well as the kind of tragic backstory that lends itself to a bout of redemptive action. There’s also a wolf pack hanging around the borders of the narrative, threatening, attacking, and sometimes helping, sometimes feeling like real animals, sometimes as if the film would turn them into creatures of myth any scene now.


David Hackl’s Daughter of the Wolf is a somewhat successful entry into the survivalist thriller sweepstakes, often making good use of the snowy woods of British Columbia and the action movie heroine talents of Gina Carano (who could kick your ass in real life, so is rather plausible kicking fictional ass). Carano’s a decent actress by now when she doesn’t shoot someone, too, so there’s never the feeling the whole film’s point is only about the violence. Of course, while it does have a somewhat thoughtful manner, and does put more than a little effort into building up the screwed up family values of Father, as well as giving most characters who would be only canon fodder in other films a bit of a personality and background, the characters are still very much stock types going through stock situations. And even though Hackl does a good job with action as well as dialogue scenes (not something to be taken for granted in the low budget action and thriller bracket), he doesn’t exactly make the material sing or feel real. It’s a workmanlike job, I suppose, elevated by Carano, Dreyfuss and the landscape to be never less than entertaining.

Music Monday: Absence Edition

Stree (2018)

Warning: I am going to spoil a bit of the film’s backstory!

The town of Chanderi in Bhopal is cursed. Once a year, during a local(?) festival, a female spirit the town’s inhabitants only refer to as “Stree” – The Woman – roams the streets at night attacking and abducting young men who are out and about on their own, leaving behind nothing but their clothes. At least there’s an easy way to keep one’s home safe from ghostly visits. One simply has to write “O Woman, come tomorrow” on the wall of one’s house, and the apparently very polite ghost isn’t going to bother one. So it should be easy enough keeping the town’s young men safe for four nights a year, but as it goes, the ghost does find rather a lot of victims.

It certainly doesn’t help that there are notorious sceptics like young tailor savant Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) around. Vicky doesn’t believe in the ghost at all. Though, to be fair to the guy, he is rather more involved with romancing a mysterious, apparently nameless woman (Shraddha Kapoor), who does ask increasingly curious things of him. So curious, in fact, that his two bosom buddies Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) and Jaana (Abhishek Banerjee) begin to suspect their friend’s beloved might be The Woman herself.

Horror comedies are a problematic proposition on the best of days, and I often have problems with the humour in Hindi movies (that’s not necessarily the humour’s fault, mind you, but rather mine), so I was very pleasantly surprised by Amar Kaushik’s Stree. As a horror comedy, Stree avoids all of the main mistakes bad entries into the genre tend to make, so the film does not use its supernatural menace for any slapstick business, having a bit of fun with the folklore surrounding her but always keeping her as an actual menace when she appears. Thanks to that, there are actual stakes for the protagonists.

I also found myself rather liking the particular version of the romantic fool the film presents, the film never overdoing it with the romantic part of the character nor the foolishness. Vicky’s a sweet idiot, and it’s certainly no surprise that he’d fall for our mysterious nameless woman. Pleasantly enough, once we get to know her a little, the good lady does turn out not to be just mysterious (the kind of mystery a sequel will probably solve) but also mildly bad-ass, and not the least bit of a damsel.

And, you know, a lot of the jokes here may not be terribly deep, but they are funny, usually character and situation based (subtitles don’t really do wordplay), and are well-timed. Which parallels the spooky bits of the film, none of whom will actually frighten anyone (I very much hope) but that do feel pleasantly spooky. The film’s worst part are the small handful of musical numbers, curiously enough for a Bollywood movie, which lack in charm and visual imagination despite Kaushik demonstrating he’s quite capable of showing both quite a bit otherwise.

All this alone would make for a pleasant horror comedy, but there’s also a mildly subversive subtext involved that adds some spice to the proceedings. The ghost, you see, belongs to a prostitute (about as low on the Indian class ladder as you can get) who is rightfully angry for an historical evil committed against her and her one true love, so our heroes do in the end not destroy her, but take away her power to do evil, while acknowledging the evil committed towards her. They make amends for the sins of the past, and turn the thing that haunted their town into its supernatural protector in the end. And wouldn’t you know it, the prophesied chosen one to bring this sort of thing about must – among other things – be the son of a prostitute himself, which is not at all the sort of thing you’d expect in a Hindi mainstream movie like this (and would be hard pressed to find in any mainstream western movies, when it comes to that). But then, Stree also tends to be rather playful when it comes to gender roles, not doing any deep deconstructions but clearly approaching the whole “man” and “woman” thing and their roles in a genre movie with a degree of freedom, so it has form with this sort of thing.


All of which adds a further very likeable dimension to a film I found pretty likeable already, turning Stree into a more than pleasant horror comedy.

Three Films Make A Post: Evil Gets Rebooted

Aurora (2018): Yam Laranas’s horror film about coastal inn keeper Leana (Anne Curtis) having to cope with a terrible ship catastrophe on a reef just outside her inn, and getting drawn into a desperate attempt tot salvage the corpses the coast guard pretends aren’t there, is an interesting film in the way it mixes elements of a very serious drama about poverty and how the ship catastrophe ripples out into causing all kinds of personal catastrophes for Leana (and others) with very matter of fact, and somewhat generic South East Asian ghost movie tropes. The film’s at its best when it focuses on the former elements, given Curtis – an actress with a pretty broad range – many an opportunity to shine. The most effective horror moments are really those that concern themselves with either the physicality of death or simply the mass of the dead on Leana’s doorstep; the more typically generic parts of the film are perfectly competent, but not more.

Through Black Spruce (2018): Speaking of genre films about poverty that are at their best whenever they are not focussing on the standard genre tropes, Don McKellar’s film concerns Cree woman Annie Bird (Tanaya Beatty in a performance that’s as complicated as the character she’s playing under a veneer of straightforwardness that’s clearly armour) travelling to Toronto on the trace of her missing twin sister, and the travails of her uncle Will (Brandon Oakes) coping with nasty people at home. It’s a slow, somewhat ponderous film, much more interested in drawing a portray of its First Nation characters by watching them closely in undramatic moments, interactions that breathe the frustration of being poor, brown, pushed to the side, and accepted as a symbol and a thing rather than a person, than in hitting the standard plot beats in the standard moments. Consequently, while there’s nothing wrong with the film’s more typically thrilling scenes, they do seem to distract from its actual strengths sometimes.


10 to Midnight (1983): For my taste, this is one of the lesser movies featuring Charles Bronson that J. Lee Thompson churned out. But then, my tolerance for scenes of policemen whining about the horror of having to respect the law they are supposedly protecting and the usual nonsense about the insanity defence as an easy out is pretty damn low. To be fair, the film does put some effort into giving Bronson an actual human motivation for faking evidence for once. What the film’s motivation for its desperately slow middle part is, I can’t really figure out, though.

Past Misdeeds: The Ghoul (1975)

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.

Warning: this can't help but contain some structural spoilers and more knowledge about the fate of one or two characters than some readers may wish to have.

It's the more or less roaring twenties somewhere in England. Members of a party of (movie)-young upperclass people decide that a little car race would be a fun distraction, or rather, Daphne (Veronica Carlson), the most courageous of the bunch does and gets her friends Geoffrey (Ian McCulloch), Billy (Stewart Bevan), and Billy's sister Angela (Alexandra Bastedo) to indulge her. Soon, two adorable cars are racing through the increasingly foggy countryside, though Daphne and Billy (Daphne's driving, of course) are soon lost way out in front of their friends, because Angela has Geoffrey park for a bit so she can vomit. Yes, she's going to be that kind of heroine.

Daphne and Billy end up somewhere in the deepest, darkest part of the countryside, without fuel. Because she's that kind of girl, Daphne doesn't wait out Billy's aimless tromp in search of the 20's middle of nowhere British version of a gas station. First, she stumbles into the arms of a creepy guy named Tom (a young John Hurt, effectively aiming for the kind of creepiness Klaus Kinski specialized in when doing horror, krimi, etc) who'd really rather keep her in his creepy guy hut, but after a well-applied knee to the groin, she comes upon the manor of the former priest Dr. Lawrence (Peter Cushing). At first, Lawrence, who lives alone with his Indian housekeeper Ayah (Gwen "Secretly Hindu" Watford) and a gardener who will later turn out to be Tom, seems eminently helpful and friendly, insisting on Daphne staying at least until the dangerous fog has lifted like a sweet, if sad, old gentleman.

The longer Daphne stays, the clearer it becomes to her that something is not right at all in the mansion - and she doesn't even know that Tom will murder Billy rather sooner than later. Lawrence tells her a rather disturbing story about himself, his son, and his late wife becoming part of a depraved (says he) cult in India, which doesn't seem to have ended so well for anyone involved. Ayah acts secretive and threatening, and really, it seems as if Lawrence doesn't want his young guest to leave at all. It's all enough to even make a rather worldly and tough young woman like Daphne uncomfortable. But will she be uncomfortable enough to safe her from the horrible (or was it horribly obvious?) secret hidden in the attic?

For my tastes, Tyburn Production's The Ghoul is a rather underrated film. At least, I think it is much better than general opinion made me suspect it to be. My love for the Hammer movies Tyburn's owner Kevin Francis (son of Freddie, who directed The Ghoul) clearly adored may influence my opinion there a bit, of course, and it surely doesn't hurt the film that it was directed by an old Hammer hand in an atmospheric style quite close to the cheaper side of Hammer's films, written by an old and rather important Hammer player in Anthony Hinds, and features the great (not just) Hammer star Peter Cushing. However, even seen without nostalgic glasses - and I have seen too many bad films connected to the people involved to have any illusions concerning their perfection - I think the film has quite a bit going for it, certainly enough to make it well worth the effort tracking it down and the time watching it (repeatedly, if you're me).

One of the film's main attractions is clearly the fine acting ensemble. As already mentioned, John Hurt does an excellent Klaus Kinski impression while also later using the opportunity the script gives him to lift the mask of the creepy crazy guy for a scene or two and give some hints about why he is the creepy crazy person he is. I hardly think it's an accident it's connected to the Great War in a film where nearly everything the characters say or do seems influenced (perhaps caused) by it or by the British colonial past, as in the case of Cushing's Lawrence.

Cushing's performance for its part feels nearly painfully emotional to me. Cushing quite obviously puts some of the very real pain about the loss of his own wife into the role of Lawrence, which at times makes for a rather uncomfortable watch in the context of what is a lurid (in an at least partly old-fashioned way) horror movie in a tradition that doesn't usually involve feelings this raw. Apart from this aspect, Cushing provides Lawrence with a perfect mixture of dignity, raw nerviness and sadness that alone would make The Ghoul well worth watching.

Veronica Carlson's Daphne is a rather surprising female character for a film that models itself on the Hammer tradition in that she is an actual character with the same complexity and agency as the male characters possess, or really, more of it than at least her peers Billy and Geoffrey show. Not that any of it saves her, of course, but where this could usually quite easily be interpreted as Daphne being punished for her transgression of not knowing a woman's supposed place, The Ghoul turns out to be rather more of a mid-70s movie than you'd expect, for Geoffrey, who would be the nominal romantic lead in an actual Hammer movie (and still boring as hell) ends up just as badly as Daphne does - after the film gives him twenty minutes or so to give off ex-military upperclass officer bluster that very pointedly turns out to be no help at all in the end.

Angela, the film's mandatory survivor, may be as far away from a final girl as is imaginable. Consequently she doesn't find any hidden inner strength to help her survive in the end but is just lucky that a drama that begun a long time ago just picks a good moment to finally end. The film makes it quite clear this isn't godly intervention caused by Angela's virtue but sheer luck on her part, putting The Ghoul firmly into the field of 70s horror, where following society's rules won't save you.

The Ghoul is rather clever that way, for while it has obvious aspirations at being a Hammer-style horror film it actually works more as a collision of classic British Hammer-style horror with a more contemporary approach to terror, the sort of thing I wish Hammer had attempted themselves as consequently as it is done here. There are even several lines where Cushing states that these "modern times" (nominally the 20s) are rather confusing for him. One can't help but think Francis and Hinds felt the same but decided (for once) to build this confusion into the heart of their film.

And while the plot itself, with its not unproblematic mixture of post-colonial guilt and pulpy ideas about India, and its rather slow pace, might be The Ghoul's big weakness, Hinds does another interesting thing with the plotting, namely using his old Hammer-colleague Jimmy Sangster's favourite plotting trick taken from Psycho where a film's seeming protagonist turns out to not live through its first half. Which would, now that I think about it, then make Geoffrey the private detective, but I might be reading too much into it here.


In any case, The Ghoul is a film very much worth anyone's time, full of interesting ideas, moody moments, and the kind of luridness that must have looked rather old-fashioned in 1975 but can be much easier appreciated for what it is now, when the more contemporary luridness of 1975 looks just as old-fashioned, colliding with an ideological approach very much of its time.

In short: Terrifier (2016)

Tara (Jenna Kanell) and her friend Dawn (Catherine Corcoran) are having a rather bad Halloween night when they encounter a creepy clown who is apparently called Art (David Howard Thornton). For Art is one of those crazy killer clowns (not from outer space) urban legends warn so much about, and he’s got his eye on Tara.

Perhaps Tara’s sister Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) will come to the rescue?

Plot-wise, Damien Leone’s Terrifier is about as simple as things come. “Killer clown stalks and slashes a handful of characters mostly through one dilapidated building” is a simple set-up even for a slasher (most of which at least feature some backstory), and the film really isn’t interested in doing more than broad-stroke characterization. That does of course also mean it doesn’t fall into the trap of featuring forty minutes of supposed characterization that doesn’t elevate anyone above the slut/jock/etc level, a problem you’ll find in quite a few classic slashers, and provides the film with the opportunity to focus on the more watchable basics of the slasher film.

The film does do a couple of uncommon things with its very standard 80s slasher set-up: Terrifier doesn’t have a proper final girl but shifts protagonists so that really anyone’s a possible survivor or victim, cleverly undermining the one thing that’s absolutely certain in slashers apart from the gore. There are a couple of other surprising shifts from the way slashers usually operate too, but I don’t really want to spoil those for the first time viewer, and will just say that I chuckled when those scenes came up; anyone with even the slightest bit of slasher experience will know which bits I mean.

The gore’s of the gloopy, not terribly realistic sort that’s much more fun to watch than the “realistic” style, providing some neat moments of pleasant ickiness. Leone actually turns out to be too good a director to fixate on the gore, anyway, and while the film certainly is bloody enough to annoy or disturb certain people, there are quite a few accomplished suspense sequences too, as well as a couple of scenes that clearly enjoy going for the grotesque, as befits a film whose killer clown wears a natty little hat.

Speaking of clowns, Thornton is a nicely expressive creepy killer clown actor, filling the simple yet effective make-up and costume he inhabits with an air of menace as well as a sense of unpredictability.


So, if you only want to watch one killer clown movie this week, make it this one.

Cutthroat Island (1995)

Lady pirate (it says so on her wanted poster) Morgan Adams (Geena Davis) is having a bit of a hard yet adventurous time. Her (gentleman?) pirate captain father is murdered by his own brother, notoriously sadistic (so definitely non-gentleman) pirate Dawg Brown (Frank Langella, not Christopher Lloyd), and dies in her arms. Dear Dad has left Morgan something rather interesting, though, one of three parts of a treasure map leading to untold riches tattooed right onto his head. The two other parts are in the hands of daddy’s brothers, so Morgan will have to fight Dawg rather sooner than later, if she wants to acquire the treasure as well as her vengeance, that is.

Other problems coming up are her decided lack of reading and specifically Latin – solved by stealing the obligatory charming rogue (Matthew Modine) out of slavery – as well as a rather mutinous crew, a corrupt governor and his troops, betrayal, and all the special dangers of your typical treasure island.

Married couple Renny Harlin and Geena Davis were not terribly lucky when it came to get their own production firm up and running, losing quite a bit of money in the endeavour of DeLaurentiis style hubris at hand. Despite the critical drubbings it received beside the commercial one, I actually rather like Cutthroat Island, at least looked at from today’s perspective. It’s a bit of a curious film, trying to tell a swashbuckler style tale not with the flash and elegance of the swashbuckler but in the language Harlin as a director spoke best, that of 90s excessive mainstream action movies, a genre nobody ever confused as being elegant; and all the flash it has, it gets out of explosions and the sort of loudness one can find obnoxious.

So historically minded mainstream film critics were bound to dislike the movie automatically, for the class is and was as a rule unable to resist the opportunity to write about how a film doesn’t live up to the one they had in their heads beforehand instead of meeting it on its own territory.

And sure, as a swashbuckler, the film isn’t terribly good, what with its general lack of swashbuckling – even the fencing and the swinging on candelabras has the heft and the bombast of  90s action movies and never suggests anything Errol Flynn might have been involved with – the only intermittently witty writing, and Harlin’s love for explosions.

However, watching it as a mid 90’s Harlin movie (what’s more US mainstream action than that?), I found myself enjoying the film quite a bit. Like Harlin, I rather like explosions, particularly ones shot as enthusiastically as the ones in this film, and I have a lot of time for the way Cutthroat Island takes the elements of the classic swashbuckler and turns them into a loud and a bit crass 90s action movie spectacle, or really, a series of spectacles, because the film would really rather like its audience not to catch a breath and think about anything of the beautiful nonsense going on.

Also like Harlin (I very much hope), I have a very soft spot for Geena Davis’s short phase as an action heroine. She might not be the physically most convincing female badass but makes up for that with throwing herself (and her stunt double) into the action scenes, the one-liners (horrible highlight is certainly “Bad dawg!”), and the swagger. And oh, does she swagger. Plus, in the mid-90s, mainstream cinema had even fewer female action heroines than there are today, so simply watching her beat up men, and do the Die Hard thing of getting ever bloodier and bloodied yet still coming out on top in her fights in the end, would be pretty enjoyable in itself, even if the film’s very diverse series of action sequences were less fun. Modine as the male romantic lead does stuff, too, but this is really Davis’s show, and he’s the support. And isn’t that just lovely, too?


Of course, it would have been nice if the film had found a bit more time to flesh out its characters beyond one character trait (though Langella does his one character trait as fantastic as Davis hers, so there’s that), or get up to a more convincing romance, but then, these aren’t really things big loud US action movies were made for, so I’m fine with the situation.

In short: Man on Fire (2004)

Creasy (Denzel Washington), an alcoholic ex-CIA killer with the mandatory traumatic past (therefore the alcohol) is hired to protect Lupita (Dakota Fanning), the child of US company exec Samuel (Marc Anthony) and his wife Lisa (Radha Mitchell). Despite there having been a rash of kidnappings of the children of executives of US companies in Mexico like Samuel, he really hires Creasy because he comes cheaply, and because Creasy’s old murder buddy Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken) pushes the guy recommending people to Samuel a bit in Creasy’s direction.

After a bit of the expected “PTSD suffering guy can’t let anyone into his heart anymore” shenanigans, Creasy falls in replacement father love with Lupita (who, as played by Fanning, really is a particularly nice kid), so when she is kidnapped and apparently killed, he does of course go on a murderous rampage, killing his way up the long, long totem pole to the people responsible for her death.

At first, Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, written by Brian Helgeland, is a surprisingly effective retelling of the ole tale of a shut-off man of violence reminded of his humanity by a child, and then falling back into his old ways again to protect/save her. After some minutes of the kind of noisy visual bullshit typical of late period Scott, even the director seems to calm down a little about the whole thing, giving his excellent performers enough space to breathe life into the very clichéd set-up and even – gasp – using his love for all kinds of annoying technical tricks to enhance instead of destroy what the actors are trying to do. Why, for once in a Tony Scott movie, I even felt emotions coming on.

Alas, once the film gets going with Creasy murdering his way through the supporting cast, all of this stops. Scott loses himself, Washington’s performance and my attention through the use of all the phony visual nonsense he so dearly loved in this part of his career. So there’s an incessant barrage of whoosh-cutting, pointless superimposition of Washington’s face over Washington’s face (honestly, I have no idea why), a camera that randomly jitters and jerks, jumpy editing, micro-zooms, stutter and all imaginable kinds of pointless visual graft, all, I assume in service of keeping the audience awake through way too many scenes of Creasy torturing and murdering characters in various ways. As my imaginary readers know, I’m not exactly bothered by tasteless violence, but rather by the directorial assumption that this sort of thing used as much as in this film will somehow shock a viewer.


In fact, having a murder machine murder their way through personality-less goons can only keep one’s interest up when it is either very well staged (which is impossible with all actual action buried under all of Scott’s tacky direction ticks), carries some interesting resonance, or actually does something else needed for the film. In Man on Fire’s case, all the killing ever does is make the film way too long, until what should be a tight little 90 minute thriller becomes tedious two and a half hours of nothing but Scott editing into your face, which isn’t just an unpleasant time, but also time of your life you won’t ever get back.

Music Monday: Fading Edition

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following the events of the last John Wick, our hero, sensitive mass murderer John Wick (Keanu Reeves, upon whose greatness as a person I am now apparently bound by law to sing an ode, even though he’s still not much of an actor, which seems to be rather more relevant to me when talking about him, you know, acting) is on the run, hunted by the same goofy cabal/cult running the international underworld he murdered oh so many people for. If the end of the second John Wick suggested to you that John has a plan to somehow fight back against The High Table, during the course of the film you’ll learn that he really hasn’t one apart from seeking the overlord of his now-enemies to…beg him to take him back in. Whoa.

On the plus side, on his way to there (and back again), dear John is meeting up with various old and new acquaintances (among them Halle Berry doing quite a bit of dog-based gun fu) and killing a whole lot of people in front of very sexy looking backgrounds.

So yeah, if you expected the actual story of Chad Stahelski’s third John Wick movie to go anywhere, you might very well be disappointed on finding the whole plot of this third film could very well have been squeezed into the first half hour of the fourth John Wick film, for all the way it moves the not-so epic story forward. It sure doesn’t help the plot that John is quite so much of a one-trick pony, never actually learning anything, never really changing, and so when he actually tries something different, he seems to make his new choices at random. People (and I am sometimes one of them) make fun of automatic Hollywood character arcs often enough, but for John Wick as a character, that would be an actual improvement.

However, while not much of actual import happens (John killing hordes of people is by now such a given pretending it might mean anything is preposterous), the film goes further in its direct predecessor’s attempts at building a cartoonishly-goofy yet also irresistibly baroque world made out of conspiracy theory, comic book ideas about organized crime that make the Kingpin’s organization seem plausible in comparison, and often eye-popping aesthetics. I do sometimes wish the film would use this world for more than creating mere backgrounds for its fights as if it were a level-bound videogame, but them’s the breaks.

Speaking of fights, the action sequences are of course the actual reason for the movie to exist, and for the most part, they do not disappoint, the series by now having progressed to a stage where animal-loving John inducing a horse to back-kick his enemies to death seems perfectly logical for the world it takes place in. It’s obviously silly as hell – I’m expecting he’s going to throw adorable killer puppies at his enemies in the next film – but presented with so much verve – often style, too – that it’s pretty difficult to not be on board with this sort of thing. Also damn great are Halle Berry’s dog kennel fighting style, and all kinds of absurd flourishes in nearly every action scene. The least impressive of them is probably the grand finale that sees John fight against a scenery-chewing Mark Dacascos, which depends a bit too much on an audience not noticing how awkward and stiff Reeves looks when compared to his sparring partner. But hey, at least John has been shot, beaten and cut so much at this stage, his slowing down and doing martial arts like Keanu Reeves does make some sense.


So, while John Wick 3: Electric Boogaloo is not quite as great fun as the second film, it’s also not the annoying waste of time the first one was, and still a very entertaining bit of movie videogame violence. Perhaps the fourth John Wick film will even get around to having a plot?