Three Films Make A Post: He's good at taking friends

Come Play (2020): If you are one of those peculiar people who think The Babadook isn’t great, you might like Jacob Chase’s risible rip-off instead. After all, it does replace careful writing and thoughtful characterisation with jump scares and regurgitated tropes, grinds down the personality of the original in favour of bland slickness and basically sands down everything that’s good about the film it is ripping off into nothing, while not even acknowledging the debt officially. It’s everything that doesn’t work about contemporary mainstream horror squashed into a single film, without anything about this part of the movie universe that’s actually worthwhile and good (and there’s a lot of that to go) making an appearance.

In a way, the film’s total, nearly aggressive, blandness is some kind of achievement, I’m sure, but not one anyone should be proud of.

Boss Level (2020): By all rights, a film by Joe Carnahan about Frank Grillo as a man of violence with the usual problems finding himself caught in a time loop, fighting ridiculous caricatures again and again, should at the very least be a pretty fun watch. It never really was one for me, though. The film’s ironic use of clichés is never actually as smart and funny as it apparently believes it is, and the attempts of making an audience connect with Grillo’s character suffer heavily from him being a vapid idiot and an arsehole (and not the interesting kind) whose rise to heroism is something the film declares instead of actually doing anything to convince the audience of.

The action is perfectly okay, but I wish the filmmakers had taken a good hard look at a lot of low budget action movies with basic plots but heavy emotional stakes, skipped the ironic sneer, and instead learned something from them about how to creatively turn violence into an expression of a dozen different emotions.

Moonshine County Express (1977): Hicksploitation and carsploitation have never been my greatest loves in exploitation cinema, so I’m not sure if my enjoying Gus Trikonis’s example of the form more than most would be a recommendation to anyone who actually likes the sub-genre. It’s certainly always nice to find a female-led (Susan Howard, Claudia Jennings and Maureen McCormick) exploitation film that takes said females’ attempts at taking vengeance on the killers of her dead dad (Morgan Woodward working for William Conrad are the guilty parties) seriously, adding John Saxon as the male helper, but really not making him terribly effectual or useful, and letting the villains and the women drive the plot.

Stylistically, Trikonis moves convincingly from mid-70s style brutal-ish shoot-outs, to corny but mostly inoffensive humour, to a bit of drama, and to the mandatory car chases and back again, letting things get a little weird from time to time as they should be in exploitation cinema, yet finding his way back from there, too.