Three Films Make A Post: Shocking beyond belief

La revanche des mortes vivantes aka The Revenge of the Living Dead Girls (1987): I do have a high tolerance for backyard-made horror nonsense, but this French attempt at a movie directed by Pierre B. Reinhard (who mostly had a career in porn, though you wouldn’t notice him actually having ten years of experience as a director of anything when this was shot if I didn’t tell you) does stretch my patience thin. Perhaps it’s the fault of its high concept of randomly mashing softcore porn and supposedly gory horror together, shifting genre codes badly and at the worst possible moment. Or it maybe the non-acting, or the usually static camera. Or how un-erotic the softcore sequences, and how bland and boring the horror bits are? Or maybe, it’s a combination of all these factors that turns the film into a joyless slog. In any case, this is so bad it’s bad.

El segundo nombre aka Second Name (2002): I have an equally high tolerance for slow movies, and do enjoy the investigative aspects of horror quite a bit, but Paco Plaza’s adaptation of one of the great Ramsey Campbell’s lesser novels does make a it desperately hard to connect to it. There’s slow movies, and then there’s needlessly static ones like this, seemingly hell-bent on slowing what is already a slow plot to a crawl for no good reason whatsoever. Certainly, there’s little mood-building going on in any of the many overlong scenes, and what’s of import for plot and characters could be much more economically told in about half the time. The characters have little dimension either, and – as if to make up for it – everyone insists on a particularly stiff and ponderous acting style, perhaps to slow things down even more. This does leave a viewer with copious time to find fault with the preposterous conspiracy theory at the film’s core; while there’s little here that carries any of the thematic dimensions of the novel.

Brightburn (2019): Director David Yarovesky’s Brightburn promises to tell an inversion of the origin story of Superman in which he doesn’t don a costume and becomes the best person on the planet, but where the onset of puberty awakens the evil psychopath in him. He does make himself a costume at least. The film keeps its promise admirably, featuring a good cast (Jackson A. Dunn does creepy very well indeed), good effects and a well-paced script, so it is an enjoyable film if you want a bit of evil kid supervillain action.


However, that’s really all there is to it, so if a viewer imagines the film to actually comment on superheroes or Superman in particular, or do anything at all but presenting its high concept with a high level of craftsmanship, they are a bit out of luck, for there’s really no ambition at all towards having any thoughts whatsoever in the film. In fact, most contemporary superhero movies have quite a bit more going on under their hoods than this riff on them.