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.