Three Films Make A Post: Mystery runs in the family

Enola Holmes (2020): I’m really far from the core audience for this one, so take this with a grain of salt, but I do believe that a teen audience could be better served than with this Platonic Ideal of boring competence as directed by Harry Bradbeer. It’s a film as bland as they come, full of bland attempts at being charming, bland emotions, bland characters who’d be happy if they’d be allowed to add half a dimension to the two they have, a bland plot told tediously. Even the feminism is bland with a vaguely unpleasant vibe of – fortunately - blanded down Libertarianism, curiously enough, as is the pointless Fourth Wall breaking, which these days seems to be the lazy scriptwriter’s way out to simply tell the audience stuff their script should put into action.

Poor Millie Bobby Brown seems to be the only one alive in front of the camera in this tragically Watson-less Holmesian universe; Henry Cavill is Holmes interpreted as a clothes rack.

Follow Me aka No Escape (2020): Keeping with the blandness theme, Will Wernick’s film about a Vlogger (again) trying to survive a Russian (yep, it’s the mysterious and evil East again) escape room experience that may just be a little too real, is exactly what you expect following this description. If you don’t see the so-called final plot twist coming from miles away, you’re probably a happier person than I. The rest of the movie consists of bland characters stumbling through one of those boring and bland warehouse sets, solving death traps and puzzles untouched by creativity and excitement, going through exactly the plot motions you’d expect in exactly the obvious way.

It’s suspense filmmaking that’s gotten so formulaic, you better call it unexciting filmmaking.

Red Spirit Lake (1993): Pretty much the absolute opposite to the blandness of the other two films in this entry is this camcorder shot wonder by Cinema of Transgression associated filmmaker Charles Pinion. It’s sleazy and bloody to an amount Herschell Gordon Lewis would have loved, but Lewis’s commercial instincts are replaced by the kind of (very special) arthouse sensibility that likes to pretend to be amateurish to be as subversive as possible, using a lexicon of horror movie tropes as aggressively as it can, editing, shooting and acting roughly on purpose, only to go from some homemade gore effect to moments straight out of abstract experimental cinema, being weird as hell throughout.

After two films so desperate to be for everyone they become too bland to be for anyone, this sort of thing feels even more alive.