Yes, it's the time of the year again to put one's blog on hold, cut one's tentacles into a beard-like shape and put on a jolly red suit. Regular service will resume on January, 6th.
I wish everyone reading a happy festive season of their choice and inclination, as well as a better new year than, well, the last several ones.
After five years of war in India, French country squire Pierre St. Laurent (Cornel Wilde) returns to his home only to now find it the property of a widowed Dutch countess named Katrina (Jean Wallace). Governor Narbonne, the man responsible (and clearly evil because he is played by Herbert Lom) took Pierre’s home and estates for unpaid back taxes and sold them off, or so he says. He also offers no recourse (and certainly no apologies) to the rather incensed soldier.
Katrina, on the other hand, does. Apparently, another bit of bad business instigated by the Governor not only left her husband dead in a duel with the man, but also put the villain’s grubby hands on a family jewel that means rather a lot to her. Right now, it is hidden in a pretty tacky looking “Indian” statuette in Narbonne’s office. If Pierre would agree to, ahem, reacquire the jewel for Katrina, she’d pay him by giving him back everything that belonged to him. Obviously, the good lady might by leaving out some pertinent facts Pierre will learn in due course while swashbuckling, and sometimes scheming his way back to his proper home and hearth, and of course into Katrina’s heart.
While not a top tier swashbuckler, this Cornel Wilde vehicle directed by Arthur Lubin is often very good fun, featuring very satisfying amounts of fencing and intrigue, though not quite enough romance, for Katrina is basically non-existent for much of the plot between the first act and the finale.
The plot is mostly a somewhat obvious developed series of moves, feints, and reversals of exactly the kind you’d expect from a genre in which the plotting does quite appropriately tend to take on the quality of a fencing match. Yet despite being obvious, it’s also nearly always fun and develops in a good pace.
Rather more surprising is that this is a movie about a swashbuckling hero acquiring foreign loot to put it in the hand of a group that wants to put it back where it belongs (apparently to guarantee peace in India), not at all a move typical for this sort of thing, and certainly rather likeable.
As is much of the film, really. Wilde, despite generally getting a bit stiff in the intrigue and dialogue bits (as usual), was the kind of actor at least putting extra effort into those parts of his performances that didn’t come natural, and always did some convincing swashbuckling, too. Lom is always a delightful villain, in this particular case a guy who always seems completely outraged by the idea that anyone could try to pull any of the sort of dirty tricks he enjoys on him, which is the sort thing that makes a villain fun.
Warning: there will be spoilers!
Margot (Emily Bader) was dropped off at a hospital by her mother when she was a baby. She seems to have grown up in a proper adoptive home, but as a lot of adopted children growing up do, she wants to learn about her birthparents. So she is pretty enthusiastic when her cousin Samuel (Henry Ayres-Brown) contacts her via one of those DNA ancestry websites. Her mother is apparently dead, her father not much of theme for discussion, but there are still quite a few other relatives around. Also, the family turn out to be Amish.
Because this is a POV horror film, Margot decides to make a documentary about her first encounter with her family, so she’s accompanied to the meeting and potential Amish sleepover by her buddy and cameraman Chris (Roland Buck III) and local sound guy Dale (Dan Lippert). As all local sound guys or tech guys in all POV horror movies ever, the latter is our Odious Comic Relief of the day, I’m sorry to say.
Having backup might just turn out to be useful in the non-documentarian aspects of Margot’s stay with the family, because there are clearly dark secrets nobody is telling her about, as well as a possible supernatural presence, or dare I say paranormal activity.
I’ve never been much of a fan of the Paranormal Activity series, and the only film I remember actually enjoying was that Japanese spin-off, so I have no idea if there are any connections between this one directed by William Eubank (who made the wonderful Underwater, which I apparently never got around to writing up) and the lore of the earlier Paranormal Activity movies apart from the usual “It’s demons!” stuff too many US movies about the supernatural are fixated on. Though, since the proper description would be – and here the SPOILERS come in, sweetie(s) – “It’s a demon caged in the bodies of one of their women per generation by a family that only pretends to be Amish for tactical(!?) reasons!”, I can’t really complain about the film’s backstory being too typical.
In fact, the whole Amishsploitation angle with the added cynical wrinkle of them being fake Amish, so Amishsploitation is okay again, is symptomatic of the general stupidity of Christopher Landon’s script, where no angle seems to be too silly to be used when it is convenient. If you expect the Fake-Amish family’s methods to achieve their goals to make sense, or think that there just might be a slightly better way to trap a possessed woman than the one these guys use, you’ll probably go out of this one fuming.
The thing is though, as so often happens with movies quite this stupid, if a viewer is going with the flow, treating this as if it were an Italian bit of craziness from the 80s or 90s, for example, the whole big junk of nonsense can be great fun, with one silly idea following the next with great enthusiasm until everything climaxes in the fake-Amish apocalypse. Just don’t ask questions, like “why would a demon supposedly responsible for lust just get people to commit suicide with a single look?” or “why not post a guard in front of your demon hole (or security cameras, since you have them hidden everywhere else)?”. I found myself having quite a bit of fun with the wintery mood of the whole affair (beautifully shot by Pedro Luque) and admired the silly-coolness of the main set pieces instead of getting annoyed by them. While they make little sense on a logical level, the church out in the winter woods and the caves below it where the demon is trapped are very impressive pieces of set design too, really hitting on a nice and effective note of the desolate and the Gothic.
Eubank gives things a nice visual flow, too, sometimes sneakily breaking the found footage basics of the film for a better shot (particularly in the final act, where things become a bit more chaotic), so there’s a nice degree of forwards momentum you don’t always get in the sub-genre.
Seen that way, there’s little wrong with Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin I would want to be fixed, apart from the Odious Comic Relief, of course.
Takashi (Masanori Mimoto) is a quiet yet rather intense guy working as a cook in the titular small restaurant/bar in Tokyo. He’s a bit of a mystery to young bar owner Rina (Miu), but she clearly sees him as her slightly weird brotherly protector. Which Takashi in a way is, for he once worked as an assassin for a secret group murdering untouchable baddies in ways that don’t embarrass the establishment. Rina’s father (Yoji Tanaka), who officially disappeared three years ago, was something of Takashi’s mentor, yet it is also Takashi who is responsible for his death.
Obviously, the past is not going to stay dead, and soon Rina and Takashi will find themselves enmeshed in a fight between Takashi’s old group and a much more malevolent force that operates in a similar style.
Kensuke Sonomura’s Hydra is a somewhat frustrating film. It’s not because what’s there is bad, but rather because its miniscule 77 minutes runtime (and probably its small budget) is absolutely not enough to flesh out concepts and characters in a way that feels satisfying. I’m usually the first to say a film could use a good shortening, but here, it is absolutely the opposite.
This isn’t quite as bad as it could be because Sonomura (otherwise a stunt specialist) is a rather efficient director who doesn’t waste any time anywhere, though he still does understand the need for calm moments (which also happen to be cheaper). But there’s really only so much anyone can squeeze into any given amount of time, so much of the narrative feels rushed and lacks detail.
On the visual side on the other hand, there’s little to complain about here. Sonomura is particularly good at mood-enhancing shots of Tokyo, but there’s also quite a bit of careful framing in the character moments on display, the sort of basics that make one hope a director will get more opportunities.
Last but certainly not least, the film’s three main action sequences are absolutely great, simple, nearly minimalist in set-up and surroundings but staged and executed with verve and visual intelligence, violent and elegant at the same time.
Which may not turn Hydra into the satisfying narrative it could be, but should certainly make it worth watching.
Original title: Dernier domicile connu
Marceau Leonetti (Lino Ventura) is a violent cop but seems rather more thoughtful in his use of violence than most of his movie colleagues of the type. Probably, going by the rest of the movie, because he’s not using violence out of sadism or laziness – he is, in fact indefatigable at the grinding and plodding parts of police work, and I can’t help but suspect he’s using violence only when he deems it most efficient to get things done.
Somewhat ironically, Marceau finds himself demoted to a country office where stolen pigeons are apparently the most interesting case one can encounter for an act of violence he didn’t commit. That’s what you get when you arrest the son of an influential lawyer for a drunk driving incident, apparently.
Eventually, an old police acquaintance (Alain Mottet) asks him for help in a special investigation about the “pervert epidemic” that’s apparently gripping the nation’s cinemas. Leonetti is paired up with rookie Jeanne Dumas (Marlène Jobert) who has the tiring and undignified job of being his perv lure, and together, they’re rather great at this thing too. Because his old boss – quietly and behind closed doors – still trusts Leonetti very much indeed, this job leads to another, more interesting one: Leonetti and Dumas have only six days to find the only surviving witness to the murder committed by an influential gangster/businessman. Of course, said witness has evaded police and crooks alike for nearly five years now…
In the – mostly very positive – reviews for José Giovanni’s Last Known Address, you’ll predominantly find this praised as a bit of a hidden gem of French style noir. I certainly don’t disagree with these appraisals, though I do tend to think the 70s downer ending is a bit too rote and on the nose - in a very particular French way even with an appropriate literary quote to tie things up for all us cultivated viewers. The film certainly recommends itself with the fine chemistry between Jobert and the always wonderful Ventura who as so often does find true grace in an on paper minimal performance, and the kind of filmmaking by the (as a person more than a little dubious, unlike you really like Nazis and murder) Giovanni that’s spectacularly effective while seeming completely unspectacular.
All of which is all nice and good or even great. However, what I find utterly spellbinding about the film is its middle part, consisting of scene after scene after scene of plodding police investigation, where one clue leads to another clue leads to hope leads into nothing again and again and again. There’s nothing elegant, no terribly clever deductions at play here, instead, the film portrays investigative work, realistically, as a game of patience and endurance, of hitting the sidewalk and asking questions and getting unsatisfying answers, asking more questions and still getting nowhere, and looking through files for hours until total exhaustion sets in. For obvious reason, even the more realistic crime fiction seldom goes quite as far with this approach as the film at hand does by being okay with showing its protagonists doing boring, slow things for nearly an hour.
Yet somehow, this approach works incredibly well for Last Known Address, in part certainly because Ventura and Jobert clearly can make going through the phone book look somewhat interesting, but also because films simply don’t do this, turning what could be boring radically new and therefore interesting, at least to me.
Ida Red (2021): If ever you needed proof that making relatively simple genre movies is actually much more difficult than some filmmakers seem to believe, John Swab’s crime family drama should be it. Clearly thinking itself part of the great American tradition of these films, in truth is only a revue of its greatest clichés, wasting a really wonderful cast (Josh Hartnett, Frank Grillo, William Forsythe, Deborah Ann Woll, and so on) on material that never feels fully thought through beyond copying the surface of better films. This is particularly problematic in a film that clearly wants the audience to feel for a murderous shithead like Hartnett’s character, but never delivers anymore reason for it than him loving his mum and criminal overlady (who is even more horrible than he is, because Freud), and that is, at least treated in this superficial way, simply not enough.
Kajillionaire (2020): I like director/writer/renaissance artist Miranda July’s earlier films quite a bit, despite their nearness to the dreaded mumblecore, particularly for their ability to make the weird feel strangely logical and human. Here, working in a somewhat higher budget bracket, July’s still holding up the flag of genuine weirdness, occasionally hitting on an image or a scene that’s breath-taking and quietly daring in its individuality.
But she’s also clearly aiming for deep, emotional resonance here, something I didn’t feel at all, because in this version of July’s world, everything’s either inhumanly weird or an obvious metaphor, and neither of these things is what makes me feel actual emotions.
A House on the Bayou (2021): For the first half hour of its runtime or so, I was all in for Alex McAuley’s Blumhouse-produced streaming movie, on account of its very specific mood of southern weirdness, and despite its plot focus on rich peoples’ marital problems and the eternal search for veal cutlets.
Alas, after that strong start, the film turns into a godawful mess of random plot twists, inane ideas, and decent ideas realized inanely. There’s simply no way for the film to bring all of its disparate ideas together into anything like a whole – or really, anything like an actual movie. Instead, it just throws nonsense at the audience without even pretending there’s much hope it might stick. Because that’s not annoying enough, the thing feels really rather enamoured with a particularly mediaeval idea of morals as well, as if all the dumb talk about the horror genre’s innate reactionary core were actually true.
Somewhere on its way from South America into the USA and further north, the cocaine of a big drug cartel gets “enhanced” with something rather deadly. We learn very early on that the problem zone lies in the US, with a character the film only, in a pretty annoying effort to pretend to talk about archetypes but which really feels more like it is being too lazy to come up with character names, calls The Man (Laurence Fishburne). The Man is a keen customer of his own product, and plans to find just the right mixture to let him continue to steal cocaine from his very dangerous bosses; he’s an idiot, obviously.
Some of the victims of the guy’s new and improved cocaine turn out to be the sister and brother-in-law of a DEA agent, or, sigh, The Agent in Charge (Leslie Bibb). Said agent gets rather angry about this, and is only too happy to use tools like torture and murder to get at the people responsible.
Of course, the cartel isn’t happy about customers dropping dead quite this early in their careers as addicts, either, so they send a middle manager we will only know as The Cook (Nicolas Cage) to follow the supply chain northwards right from its start.
Jason Cabell’s Running with the Devil got quite a critical drubbing by the few professional reviewers who bothered with it, and it’s really not much of a surprise. Its whole “Sicario as an exploitation movie” shtick must be rather infuriating to quite a few critics. As someone who thinks the Villeneuve movie is – like most of his output – massively overrated, I don’t feel the outrage myself. Instead, I can’t help but think the film at hand has just as little of substance to say about the complexities and horrors of the drug business and the idiot attempts to curtail it with the heaviest hand possible as its more upmarket cousin.
My main problem with Running isn’t even that it is lacking in insight, it is how badly it uses its on paper ambitious and interesting drug picaresque structure. On one hand, it doesn’t trust into having a truly episodic structure enough to just skip a traditional main narrative altogether; on the other hand, its main narrative itself is much too fragmented to work straightforwardly. There are also decisions I find simply bewildering. For example, why tell the audience so early in the movie that Fishburne is the man responsible for the whole plot, and make Cage’s travels so even more pointless on the narrative level?
Additionally, there are painfully awkward tonal shifts, so we go from the film’s handful of scenes of actually tight and interesting crime business to what I can only assume is meant to be comedy, though it certainly isn’t funny. It’s a bit of a shame, too, for more of those tighter scenes could have been combined into a pretty great crime movie.
But at least Running is the one movie you’ll encounter in your life where Fishburne chews the scenery and Cage stays cool throughout.
Original title: Ladrones de tumbas
Centuries ago. The inquisition (heroes for once, if only in a movie!) just barely manage to thwart the plan of one of their own executioners (Agustín Bernal) to beget the Anti-Christ via the icky ways of ritual and virgin rape. On the torture rack, just after he has cursed everyone involved and prophesied his eventual return, he is dispatched via his own axe in his chest.
Today, well, the late 80s. A group of teenage grave robbers – one of whom apparently finds their targets through a psychic gold finding sense – really appear to hit it big this time around. They find their way into a secret crypt below a grave, where a lot of very old corpses wear a lot of jewellery. Alas, dire warnings by Psychic Gal notwithstanding, they get too greedy and open the coffin of the executioner, and remove the axe from his chest. Obviously, this wakes the angry dead guy up but good, and soon the local lethality rate by decapitation, face pressed through lattice, and axeings rises to Halloween Kills levels. Campers are particularly under threat.
Eventually, the dead guy will certainly also try to revive his old rapey plans, if the local cop Captain López (Fernanda Almada) doesn’t find a way to fight him off. Since the cop’s daughter (Edna Bolkan) will turn out to be the killer’s preferred virgin, he is at least highly motivated.
I have to admit, I didn’t really expect terribly much going into Rubén Galindo Jr’s mix of supernatural slasher and religious horror. Most of the little I’ve seen of Mexican horror of the 80s does tend to the cheap, boring and not terribly interesting to look at. The two last problems really do not apply to the film at hand, though, for once his film gets into its groove, it provides so much gloopy fun and so many bizarre ideas and films them so pretty damn attractively, you could probably make two normal movies out of them.
The beginning of the film is a mite slow, but once the executioner is walking around again, heads and extremities start to fly left and right, Almada’s cop beats up teenagers and wastes ammunition like a good action hero, and stranger things dawn on the horizon.
All of this is most probably inspired by Italian 80s horror. At the very least, Galindo seems to like the same mix of blueish light, indoor fog and specific camera angles as his European colleagues. That’s not a complaint, and perfectly keeping in the tradition of Mexican horror, which also was rather good at taking European or North American influences and given them a very individual turn.
The mood of the film is strange and a bit dream-like early on, partially thanks to the camerawork but also because the way the characters go about their business doesn’t exactly make sense (unless most grave robbers are teens with their own psychic), the way the locations are supposed to be connected never quite comes together as anything you’d call a believable picture – even if you ignore the executioner’s Satan-given ability to teleport. This sort of thing will of course be a bit of a weakness if you like things logical and plausible, but here, it seems rather consciously used as a way to create a mood of the outré.
And things do get rather out there in the final half hour, when the slasher we’ve been watching suddenly adds things like a murderous hand coming out of a guy’s belly, a hand which then suddenly comes – plaster colour and all out of a wall to strangle another character. Then, a priest is attacked by a flying dagger he can’t pray away, and Captain López really gets into dynamite in the action movie plus horror plus what the hell climax. All of this is realized via pretty wonderful practical effects, shot attractively, and staged – apart from a couple of bizarrely wayward reaction shots in the finale – very effectively.
Ladrones de tumbas is a wonderful example of all that is good and right about fun 80s horror, and, because Mexican horror unfairly never made it terribly big outside of Spanish language audiences, probably a new old example of the form for many a potential viewer.
1861, just before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration. New York police sergeant John Kennedy (Dick Powell) has discovered a plot to assassinate Lincoln during a pre-inauguration speech in Baltimore. Nobody wants to believe his report on the matter, so he takes it upon himself to get on the night train to Baltimore to try and get the information into the hands of people who’ll take it seriously.
On the train, it becomes clear very quickly that Kennedy isn’t wrong. At least, somebody likes his ideas so little, they attempt to murder him. For the rest of the night Kennedy tries desperately to survive murder attempts, manoeuvre through very dramatic versions of more quotidian problems like the lack of a train ticket, and finds himself hindered and helped by various characters on the train, like Colonel Caleb Jeffers (Adolphe Menjou), a very dutiful train conductor (Will Geer), and an enslaved girl named Rachel (Ruby Dee, who steals every scene she is in). Someone certainly is part of the conspirators against Lincoln. Kennedy’s life isn’t made any easier by the fact that he ended his last meeting with his boss by throwing his badge into the man’s face, making the small bit of authority he usually has rather shaky, and impossible to prove.
As far as I understand, The Tall Target is one of the first films of Anthony Mann not made for the B-slot in an evening at the movies, so he could work with a budget of about a million dollars here, which must have opened up some possibilities.
The resulting film is a pretty fantastic example of what we’d today call a thriller in the Hitchcockian vein, where a mostly normal guy stumbles into a situation that’s really rather out of his depth, but fights on regardless. Sure, Kennedy may be cop, but he has no authority beyond his word, and even has to try to beg, steal, or borrow a gun. And while he has some experience with violence, the traits that help him survive are tenaciousness and sheer luck. So, the film would make a pretty great double bill with the (later) North by Northwest.
Mann here is particularly great at creating a sense of place, the feeling of spending a rather dangerous time in the very enclosed space of the train, as emphasised through the pretty spectacular looking work of DP Paul Vogel. Because most of the film takes place by night, even the handful of scenes taking place outside share the feeling of claustrophobia, of darkness hanging over and enclosing Kennedy, a darkness that will not always turn out to his detriment in moments of danger.
There’s no fat at all to the script by George Worthington Yates and Art Cohn – every scene, every character interaction, every shot carries import and meaning, helps the plot along, defines the characters Kennedy meets along the way, and creates just the right amount of historical context. As a result, The Tall Target is a tight, enormously suspenseful film, yet one that never feels too breathless.
Warning: spoilers ahoy, for some things, you just have to write down!
Jean Kingsley (Brenda Joyce) comes to the small town of Domingo, a place of cattle ranches (which the script calls farms for some reason) and very little else, to work as a companion and occasional secretary for blind Zenobia Dollard (Gale Sondergaard). Zenobia is a charming and kindly woman, knitting many a sweater for the kids in town, and keeping on the dumb and for 40s people apparently very frightening looking Mario (good old Rondo Hatton) as her servant. Why, she’s so nice, she even insists on Jean drinking a nice, warm glass of milk before going to bed each night.
Curiously, ever since she has arrived Jean has begun sleeping very heavily. She is also plagued by nightmares and has problems getting out of bed. It is probably the good country air as Zenobia says. Or is Zenobia slowly draining Jean’s blood to feed it to a giant plant she brought with her from South America and which she uses to poison the local cattle, so the ranchers (which the film calls farmers for some reason) will leave and she can get their lands which once belonged to her family back on the cheap? You decide.
It is rather difficult to not find at least a small place in my heart for a film whose villainess has tried this hard to come up with a needlessly convoluted and ridiculous plan, and thankfully, that’s not the only point on which Arthur Lubin’s Universal production The Spider Woman Strikes Back delivers.
There’s also the sheer chutzpa of a title that tries to sell itself as a sort of sequel to the Rathbone Sherlock Holmes Spider Woman while having nothing whatsoever to do with the Universal Holmes cycle apart from Gale Sondergaard here taking on the role of a different villainess.
On a more practically and less conceptually fun level, this is simply a very entertaining little programmer, surprisingly efficiently plotted by Eric Taylor, and directed with as many flourishes of mood – for example the very nice noirish lighting of Zenobia’s mansion by night – by Arthur Lubin as time and budget permitted. On the plot level, this isn’t at all far from your typical Poverty Row movie, but there’s a pleasant degree of focus and craftsmanship on display here Monogram or PRC directors only seldom rose to, so we get a delightfully silly plot presented with the amount of energy it actually deserves.
Another pleasant surprise is how much Joyce’s Jean is actually doing on her own her. Sure, the painfully boring male lead (Hal Wentley), missing from the plot bit of this post because he’s just that uninteresting, does get to save Jean in the end, but for most of the movie, she’s figuring stuff out herself, making decent plans, and giving off the air of a young woman perfectly able to take care of herself even under difficult circumstances. It’s always particularly nice to see a female character in a 40s movie who is as perfectly capable as she is, yet no femme fatale.
Sondergaard makes a fine villain too, which should come as no surprise since Universal was trying to sell the film on her past Holmes character. She may not be going to the heights of scenery chewing you’d hope for given her bizarre plan, but she’s wonderfully able to present Zenobia’s ability to change from decidedly nice, cultured, poetry-loving woman to cold-blooded killer of secretaries and fondler (there is indeed a somewhat erotic quality in her relationship to her plant) of dangerous plants. And, of course, it’s also nice to see Rondo Hatton, even though I, not coming from the 40s and all, always think he looks like a nice, quiet guy you’d want to have a beer and a chat with, instead of a reason to screech and faint.
What more could anyone want from a cheap Universal programmer from 1946?
Black Friday (2021): This horror comedy by Casey Tebo about an alien parasite type of zombie outbreak in a giant toyshop recommends itself with a lot of nice gooey effects (and a truly adorably bad looking kaiju), fun and snarky performances by Devon Sawa, Ivana Baquero, Bruce Campbell, and the rest of the cast. The script is more competent and effective than great, but its practical realization is fast and fun enough to make this a properly entertaining ninety minutes in the tradition of your favourite pieces of fun horror from the 80s or 90s.
Which does make for a nice change from all the ghost movies about demons as well as all those earnest and slow horror movies about grief.
The Shadow Side aka La Parte Oscura (2020): Speaking of demons and an entertaining time (though it’s not even an hour here), this quarantine zoom conference POV horror movie from Argentina as directed by Max Coronel features the former as well as the latter.
The film is just as long as it needs and should be. It quickly and highly efficiently establishes characters and situation and then goes through a series of escalating and equally efficient horror set pieces, generally staged and shot as nicely as its production circumstances allow. Clara Kovacic makes a fine main characters/victim of your usual evil occult powers, and the rest of the cast is doing exactly what (and as much of it) as they need to.
Mad God (2021): Unlike these other two films, film Tippett’s insanely creative and capital-W weird feature-length stop motion animation isn’t efficient or simple yet effective genre work. Instead, this is a deeply strange trip into aesthetic netherworlds that feel intensely personal, lacking in explanation, plot, and character to make room for incredible, and sometimes deeply disturbing, visual worldbuilding.
I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like it, and certainly not in a shape that actually manages to keep up aesthetic thrills and intensity for nearly ninety minutes like this does.
Medical doctors in 1920s London are killed in various peculiar and grotesque ways. It does take some time until the inauspiciously named Detective Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) figures things out, but the only thing these doctors have in common apart from their titles is that they all took part in an operation which left their patient, one Victoria Regina Phibes (various very fetching photos of Caroline Munro), very dead indeed. It is the dead lady’s husband, the supposedly dead renaissance genius Dr Anton Phibes (Vincent Price) – assisted by the beautiful, talented and fashionable (that’s important) Vulnavia (Virginia North) - who is committing the murders, inspired by the biblical plagues no less. In between bouts of vigorous organ playing and monologues to his dead wife, of course. Will the police catch him before he manages to teach the last of the medicos, Dr Vesalius (Joseph Cotton) a valuable lesson from his bible studies?
I’m actually rather surprised I’ve never written even a tiny piece like this about this particular high water mark in the career of the great Vincent Price, as directed by Robert Fuest in his own career best moment. It’s high pop art in look and feel (some would say high camp), a film so stylish and stylized, so clearly understanding how the funnily grotesque and the macabre are related, it is still a feast for horror kids of all ages and tempers. It’s not a film for anyone of my kind of taste to simply enjoy but one to feel completely at home in, a comfy chair/favourite blanket combo of absurd murder methods, bright, popping colours, and production design that is at once strange, bizarre and makes absolute sense in context. Of course Dr Phibes would have his own tin robot band, and of course he’d have an organ that not just glows in the most intense red but also moonlights as a practical elevator perfect for dramatic entries and exits.
Price is absolutely brilliant here (as he so often was), projecting a grotesque operatic grandness even though the script by James Whiton and William Goldstein – in one of those perverse decisions that can turn out to be pure genius – lets Price use his wonderful voice only occasionally, in a scratchy form, when he’s plugged into his self-made voice box. But no matter for our hero, he can use body language just as well and nuanced in its bigness as his voice, gifting the film (and the audience) a performance that’s just as bizarre and perfectly right as the rest of this pretty perfect movie.
Around the early 19th Century, in the Swiss Alps. Three herdsmen, never named by anything but their job description, and therefore called Senn (something like the foreman in the alpine dairyman business, played by Peter Simionischek), Hirt (herdsman, Giovanni Früh) and Bub (boy, Andy Voss), are going about their cow-minding business, regularly moving their herd from one alpine hut to the next. It’s not all happy cow times, though. Senn is rather too much on the self-righteous side, so when he is fighting what he clearly interprets as his and others sinful urges he does it with a bit too much enthusiasm. Still, the version of Christianity of his time and place Senn follows is paired with quite a few little superstitious rites that can’t quite hide their pagan roots. Hirt, on the other hand, has never met any impulse he’s trying to repress. So he’s perpetually horny, dabbling in the darker kind of ritual magic, and not averse to attempting to rape the boy. The Bub, when not being accosted by the Hirt, is about as innocent as they come. Well, apart from his obsession with getting his hand licked by one particular cow.
After about forty minutes or so of watching these men, Senn and Hirt get raucously drunk on the medicinal stuff and start building a Sennentuntschi, the image of a woman made out of wood, clothes and hay while blaspheming merrily. Of course, the thing comes to life (as a perpetually naked Pamela Prati), and begins hounding the trio in various lethal ways that can’t be stopped by the grown-up men trying to brutalize her to death or ban her with folk magic.
Sukkubus is a curious film, a bit of psychological but staunchly supernatural folk horror made by a German company on a decent budget – so nothing German cinema has any love for – directed by Georg Tressler who mostly worked in sex comedies and the painfully harmless Heimatfilm genre before, and in just as bland TV afterwards. How and why this combination resulted in a German, Swiss-set folk horror movie with long swathes of calm character observation and a bit of sleaze in its second half is anybody’s guess, but I’m pretty happy this thing exists.
It is a rather slow film, but the slowness is caused by its focus on first showing us the psychological brokenness of these lonely men in a world without women, civilisation or even proper distraction. There’s also great care taken with simply showing us the world they populate, and the reality of the work they do, as well as the way they position the supernatural - the protective power of the saints in Senn’s case, something older and more honestly dark in Hirt’s – as part of their daily work and life. Really, the folk magic and folkloric interpretations of Christianity seem to be the best entertainment these guys are going to get; it’s no wonder the boy likes that cow so much.
Having prepared the field this way, the entry of the clearly and obviously supernatural only seems logical, not just on the psychological level where the repressed (in Senn’s case) or the much too un-repressed (Hirt) urges of the men come to life to haunt and kill them in exactly the form they loathe and desire, love and hate at the same time, but also simply following the folkloric logic the men themselves live by to its final consequence.
It’s a rather effective film in that, at least if a viewer has the patience for, or even better, interest in, watching Tressler first build the world that is going to come crashing down on the characters.
aka Demons 3: The Ogre
aka The House of the Ogre
Successful horror writer Cheryl (Virginia Bryant), her husband Tom (Paolo Malco) and their son Bobby (Patrizio) have rented a castle in Italy for some pretty special summer vacation time. Well, I say vacation, but Cheryl is so obsessed with exorcising her emotional demons via her writing, she’s still working rather a lot.
The family’s chosen vacation spot doesn’t seem to have been a great idea, either: once they have moved in, Cheryl begins having terrible nightmares and visions of a childhood encounter with a creature she identifies as an ogre. She becomes convinced these dreams are actual memories, and that the castle’s cellar is the place where she really did encounter something terrible back then. She does seem to have awakened something, for mildly strange things do start happening around her, even outside of her nightmares.
Tom, as is horror movie husbands’ wont in situations like this, is of course of little help, and acts in a way that would be less than helpful if Cheryl indeed had the sort of psychotic break he seems to suspect her to have, and is certainly not useful in case of actual monsters, even those perhaps conjured up by Cheryl’s subconscious.
The Ogre is another one of Lamberto Bava’s movies made for Italian TV. It isn’t one of the more exciting ones, going for a kind of psychological suspense with occasional monsters that neither Bava’s and Dardano Saccetti’s script nor the actors can really sustain.
Bava does seem to enjoy the opportunity to shoot in real locations for once a bit too much, so there are a lot of decidedly uncreepy shots of the very pretty castle, an much use of daylight and natural light that doesn’t play to the director’s strengths at all.
Some of the scenes of Cheryl creeping around the cellar or of the ogre doing his ogre business are fine, but the film seems more interested in the pretty castle and in Cheryl’s and Tom’s not terribly interesting rows to make much of those.
It’s all a bit harmless, and certainly lacks a scene or two of people getting killed via the power of golf.
Five decades before the main plot of the movie, the unsolved murder of a rich man occurred in a bungalow somewhere in India. The wife and son of the victim disappeared, never to be seen again. Despite the place now supposedly being haunted, today (well, in the mid-60s) it is the home of the descendants of the murder victim. The two businessmen – I-never-got-his-name-and-sorry-Internet-sources-he’s-not-called-Ramlal (Moni Chatterjee) and Shyamlal (Nasit Hussain) keep their old-timey-movies style crazy brother Ramlal, called Ramu, (Nana Palsikar) at home, taking care of him as well as can be expected.
The same day on which Unnamed Brother’s daughter Rekha (Tanuja) returns from her studies in London, her father dies in a car crash. While the police are at least suspicious about the circumstances, Ramu says his brother was murdered, and he knows by whom. Alas, he ain’t telling, and even if he’d want to, he’s found hung in his room the next morning after his non-revelation. Shyamlal takes Rekha, who is now the designated heiress of everything, away from the clearly cursed and most probably haunted bungalow to the city.
There, the not exactly tough girl is beleaguered by threatening phone calls, curious voices and what looks a lot like murder attempts. Fortunately, she has met-cute the leader of the local “youth club”, one Mohan (Mehmood), a guy who is really going out of his way to protect the girl he has fallen in love with, even when it means facing murderers, haunted bungalows, or “comically” dressing up like a woman.
Bhoot Bungla – which translates to “haunted house/bungalow” – is the directorial debut of Bollywood comedian Mehmood, and it is one hell of a time. Sure, the film does demonstrate the general disinterest of quite a bit of Hindi cinema of the time towards any concepts of tightness or dramatic unity, but that’s really a feature and not a bug in this sort of affair, so complaining about it is like stating your favourite cookies are really bad at being a salad. Admittedly, not all of the humour has aged well (the whole “man dresses like woman equals comedy gold” strand is really not great at all), but, this being Bollywood, there’s so much of it, for every joke that doesn’t hit, you get a dozen that do.
As a horror comedy, this stands in the same tradition as the classical Hollywood ghost comedy, where no ghost is real, people tend to react to any given haunting with pratfalls, and so on, and so forth, until only a guy in a gorilla costume is missing. It’s just that very few Hollywood movies of the same type ever dared to show quite as wild an abandon when it comes to scenes of people being freaked out by fake hauntings, and there’s not a film – at least to my knowledge – that goes to the insane excesses Mehmood gets up to here. There’s a long sequence late in the movie where Mohan and a buddy try to take on the haunted bungalow that alone would be worth the price of admission by sheer inventiveness and visual imagination, climaxing (and I use the word on purpose) in the most incredible musical number ever to feature men in skeleton suits.
Speaking of visual imagination, one of the reasons why Bhoot Bungla is as much fun as it is is Mehmood’s rather astounding ability to put his wacky ideas into visuals. There’s clever and sharp editing that often tends to be technical impressive as well as funny, and fun and funny visual transitions by the dozen. At least half a dozen of the more suspenseful scenes suddenly start to dwell in the same realm of light, shadow, and crisp black and white photography as proto-giallos and the best of the German krimis, the film taking on a visual language one, well I, would not typically connect with mid-60s Bollywood – at least until the next joke needs and gets quite something different.
The Unknown Terror (1957): This 50s outing by director Charles Marquis Warren tried to sell itself as the sort of horror and SF movie typical of the decade. In reality, the horror of shaving foam-based fungus monsters and a single surprisingly effective shambling foam zombie attack are relegated to the film’s final ten percent or thereabout. Before that, a viewer has to make their way through a full bingo card of colonialist adventure tropes. This sort of thing isn’t always pleasant to begin with (though better films of the genre are often pretty damn entertaining despite modern viewers’ looking askance at their politics), but combined with leaden pacing and a dry and humourless presentation, suffering through it to get to the foam monsters is simply not worth it.
Double Walker (2021): As much of our time as Unknown Terror was of its own, this very low budget indie horror piece directed by Colin West can be pretty magical. At least if you’re in the mood for a slow film that tends to obscure its backstory and timeline to evoke the feeling of slightly distanced confusion its ghost protagonist (pretty wonderfully played by Sylvie Mix, who was also involved in the plotting) has in the audience.
Often, the film creates a peculiar dreamlike mood through simple devices, using ambiguity and a bit of conscious obscurity to add to the effect. Sometimes, it goes a bit far in this direction, in the way debut features often do.
Skyman (2019): With this movie, Blair Witch co-director Daniel Myrick returns to the found footage well once more, this time in form of a fake documentary about Carl Merryweather (Michael Selle) who says he met an alien when he was a little boy, and has been a bit different ever since.
The film works best when the whole aliens and conspiracy angle takes a backseat in favour of somewhat light-handed but often well-observed scenes that portray the not always easy but loving relationship between Carl and his sister Gina (Nicolette Sweeney) and Carl’s only friend Marcus (Faleolo Alailima). This portrayal of loving and trying to protect a loved one with mental illness (which Carl is to the rest of the world), and how difficult difference can be to navigate for the person who is different as well as those around him is the meat of the movie. The film finds a note of compassion and understanding without lacking humour and without falling into mawkishness.
Too bad the horror movie abduction stuff is of as little interest as it is, leaving the whole affair somewhat lopsided, though never without interest.
aka Bloody Friday
Freshly broken out of custody by his buddy Luigi (Gianni Macchia) and some other guy we don’t need to care about, rather violent criminal Heinz (Raimund Harmstorf) is planning the big score. Together with Luigi, Luigi’s girlfriend Heidi (Christine Böhm) and another guy responsible for a distraction, Heinz is going to assault a bank, take some hostages and get more money out of selling those hostages back to the police than they could reasonably get from the bank. In his mind – which isn’t exactly a vast space – his plan is completely fool-proof, but obviously, things aren’t going to go that well.
At first, though, things actually seem to be moving upwards when Heidi’s Bundeswehr deserter brother Christian (Amadeus August) somewhat accidentally joins the gang, but general incompetence, bad luck and reverse Stockholm Syndrome are going to make things turn sour rather sooner than later.
Rolf Olsen’s ripped from the headlines style exploitation crime drama is not a terribly typical example of German popular filmmaking of the time – though there are a good handful of films made in this style - at least half seeming to take its inspiration from the crime movies of its Italian production partners. This still being a German film more than an Italian one by its inclinations, it’s not all sleaze, violence – and this is pretty outrageously violent if it wants to be - and exploitative social criticism of the times it was made in. There’s also a dollop of po-faced melodrama and quite a few scenes of that most German movie of things, people debating thrown in the mix. At times the film’s shifts between Serious German Business, ridiculous (and fun) exploitation, and hilariously bad melodrama are so extreme as to give a boy whiplash. Though, in any case, you can’t blame the film for being boring or not trying to entertain its audience any damn way it can.
Still, having said that, I can’t pretend to actually like the film as much as I should like its type of idiosyncratic exploitation. Mostly, I blame Olsen’s direction. From time to time, he manages to create a tight, or a clever, or a somewhat insane set piece, or creates a moment of fine mock realism, but just as often, he stands in the way of its film potentials, dragging out the wrong scenes for too long, putting the emphasis on exactly the wrong moments of a scene. Generally, Olsen’s directing approach feels random more than anything.
aka Door into Silence
Original title: Le porte del silenzio
Real estate business guy Melvin Devereux (John Savage), is trying to get from New Orleans to his home further South. But from the beginning of his travels he is beset by strange encounters and peculiar occurrences: a mysterious woman (Sandi Schultz) is mysterious towards him, promising a later encounter at a certain crossroads, perhaps for sex, perhaps for something very different indeed. Melvin repeatedly encounters a hearse whose driver seems hell-bent on getting him killed. Worse still, the hearse seems to be carrying the dead body of one Melvin Devereux, husband of Sylvia, like our protagonist is. The swampy byways of Louisiana are either blocked for various reasons, or roads seem to lead into dreams and visions, or simply not where they are supposed to, while the sun never sets above them.
These encounters and more do suggest to Melvin that something very strange is going on, and it’s clear that he eventually arrives on the suspicion the audience has been having right from the start – that he’s dead and trapped in some sort of limbo.
Well, I say the audience has the suspicion, but Lucio Fulci’s final movie doesn’t actually try to surprise its viewers with the truth about Melvin’s state. So, instead of wasting time on diffusion and trickery to surprise us with something we’re not going to be surprised about anyway (the true surprise in a film of this sub-genre would be when the protagonist weren’t dead already), Fulci uses the space and time thus afforded to him to create a mood of the strange and a labyrinth out of wide open spaces. While he’s at it, he adds nods to Southern US folklore as well as classic mythology – which quite often seem to be closely related anyway, just differing in their expression of the state of humanity and life – as a backdrop to Melvin’s slow unravelling. It’s also a road movie, obviously, for there’s little we Europeans like to romanticize more than the tale of anyone going on a journey by car through parts of the USA, even when, as it may be the case here, the journey really runs in circles from death to the very same death again.
It will be rather a matter of taste if this works for any given viewer, I believe. There’s a slowness to the proceedings that may prefigure Slow Horror if you’re of a mind to see it that way, but which can also be read as Fulci dragging out a miniscule plot and a somewhat basic idea to feature length come hell or high water. I, not surprising anyone, belong to the former camp, but then, a film of a guy travelling through the US South (well, at least Louisiana) by car and encountering strangeness and eventual doom there is very much the sort of thing I would go for. Really, if Fulci had replaced the Dixieland on the soundtrack with classic country blues, you might have sold me on the idea the film at hand was indeed made for me, personally.
Apart from the film’s pushing of a lot of my personal buttons, I also like Savage’s performance as a not terribly likeable yet also not horrible man finding himself in a situation nothing could ever have prepared him for and understandably losing it piece by piece and bit by bit. Playing a character who is neither a complete prick nor a nice guy isn’t actually that easy or common. In this case, it also shields the whole film from becoming too much of a Twilight Zone episode, the rather cynical Fulci clearly having no truck with the moral(ising) universe perfected by Rod Serling.
His last movie is also yet another example of Fulci as a director who wasn’t actually too bothered with staying in his comfort zone, genre-wise, not going for gore or aggressive, meaningful illogic as in his most-loved films, but ending his filmography restlessly, trying to make a film he hasn’t done before.
aka The Victim (because there just aren’t enough movies going by that title in the world)
After a worrying phone call from her sister Susan (Jess Walton) about Susan’s decision to get a divorce from her husband Ben (George Maharis), Kate (Elizabeth Montgomery) decides to drive out to the spacious country home the soon to be ex-couple live in to be there for her in person. Little does she expect that somebody has murdered Susan and tucked her away in the cellar.
So Kate enters a surprisingly empty house, with no clue to Susan’s whereabouts. Of course, somewhat curious things start to happen: Mrs Hawkes (Eileen Heckart), the rude older housekeeper our heroine will soon discover has been fired by Susan, seems to pop in and out of the place at will, pretending Susan hasn’t been in for the day at all, despite evidence to the contrary. As a storm makes the lines of communications for Kate ever more difficult, she becomes convinced someone is sneaking around the house, cutting the electricity off and on, and may or may not be planning something violent towards her, for reasons she can’t quite understand.
To be fair, they are not terribly interesting reasons, and Herschel Daugherty’s ABC Movie of the Week Out of Contention neither seems terribly interested in the more straightforward mystery aspect of the tale, nor very good at constructing it.
The focus is solely on the ABC thriller standard of a lone, isolated woman in peril. There’s obviously a good reason why this set-up is such a genre and format stand-by, for it’s easily relatable to just about anyone, and, done right can deliver a suspenseful narrative on a budget.
The peculiar thing about this particular example of the form is how little effort the film puts into actually isolating Kate, while still having her act as if she were indeed locked up somewhere with no way out. The phone lines are working for most of the movie, the storm is dangerous but never so bad as to make it impossible to flee, and there are indeed other characters about, even non-suspicious characters. So much of Kate’s troubles could have been simply avoided by her getting into her car and driving away instead of repeatedly returning to a house she clearly believes to be dangerous.
Most of this must have been meant to make the mystery aspect easier to handle, to provide Kate with an easy opportunity to learn about what’s actually going on, but this also robs the film of much of the tension and suspense of other TV thrillers in the same vein. It’s never a terrible film, mind you, but rather a sort of professionally realized hand-waving made celluloid, never exciting enough to get actually interesting, yet not ropey enough to be actively bad.
Original title: Il maestro del terrore
Warning: there’s no way to talk about the good bits of this one without some heavy last act spoilers!
Popular horror movie director Vincent Omen (Tomas Arana), dubbed “The Prince of Terror” by what I can only assume is movie Earth’s version of Fangoria, has an on-set falling out with his regular scriptwriter, Paul Hilary (David Brandon) and gets the man fired rather ruthlessly.
A dinner that very same night in the villa out in the sticks where Vincent lives with his wife Betty (Carole André) and his teenage daughter Susan (Joyce Pitti) is rudely interrupted by prank phone calls and a golf ball on the dinner table. Later, in an ever so tiny escalation, Susan finds her lapdog skinned in her bedroom. So everyone runs to their car and drives off to the next police station. No, wait, of course not. Rather, Susan cries, her parents shrug, and Vincent puts the dead dog into the trash.
Obviously, the dead dog is only the beginning of a night of terror. Vincent has apparently a gift for pissing people off, for Paul the angry writer has teamed up with an actor named Eddie Felsen (Ulisse Minervini) who was injured making one of Vincent’s films and is now your regular movie maniac. Together, they drive the family through various special effects horror set pieces Vincent once excised from Paul’s scripts. In-between, there’s ponderous yet nonsensical musing about the nature of horror, and the old “was it real, or not?” gambit repeated about a dozen times, until Vincent uses his golfing-based superpowers. Also, he might be the devil.
This is one of a series of four movies Lamberto Bava made for Italian television at the end of the 80s. He brought other Italian horror mainstays with him to the project, so here you get a script in the inimitable manner of Dardano Sacchetti (that is, it makes very little sense but seems to make a lot of it in the writer’s mind, and is all the better for it), a score by Simon Boswell, and effects by Sergio Stivaletti. Apparently, Italian TV was surprisingly okay with the gloopy gory bits you’d hope for from Stivaletti, so there’s at least that to look forward to for everyone.
Otherwise, this is certainly not on the level of Lamberto Bava’s best cinematic outings, but it is a fun enough movie once the viewer has decided to enter the proper mind space for its specific type of Italian horror, which means giving up on ideas of logic or proper causality and opening up to the random void, while holding back the parts of one’s personality that might want to watch this thing ironically. It’s not terribly difficult, actually, for Bava does know how to make his TV budget look surprisingly pretty, putting quite a bit of effort into making the the architecture of Omen’s home at once sexy and strange (or at least somewhat confusing).
I could have lived rather well without the whole “what’s true horror?” angle in the dialogue, though there are some peculiar lines in the English dub that will at least make the viewer ponder the nature of the drugs the writer was on (probably just wine, I know, I know). But then, Bava clearly wants to do some ratcheting up of tension like in a proper thriller, so the film needs its slow moments, structurally, and there’s little filmmakers like to talk about more than the philosophy of filmmaking.
The real meat of the movie is of course its insane climax, when Vincent first golfs Eddie’s brains out (seriously), then breaks Paul’s wrist – and apparently spirit – with a billiard variation on golf, and drives off with his family while Paul encounters Vincent’s supernatural powers beyond golfing. See the dead dog’s trash bag move! See Eddie move and puke out a stream of golf balls! Share Paul’s panicked sense of logical disconnect! Be happier than you were before seeing any of this (unlike Paul, who is now most probably dead)! And if that still isn’t enough, try to imagine this thing as a parallel universe sequel to The Omen, taking place in a world where Damien has become such a big Vincent Price fan, he stole his first name and went to Hollywood.
Malignant (2021): Surprise, I don’t like the newest James Wan movie, like nearly every other film he made. Unlike with somebody like Rob Zombie, I’m always disappointed when a Wan movie yet again doesn’t click for me, for Wan is so clearly a ridiculously talented director.
Alas, he’s also one apparently not the least bit interested in applying his powers to material worth a damn. This non-Conjuringverse movie clearly wants to be a Dario Argento giallo circa Opera, seeing how many elements the film cribs and how much it quotes from that era and style. But where the good (and often the mediocre) giallos manage to use their style as substance, the film at hand is just a series of barely coherent, very pretty, and completely pointless scenes that barely manage to make a movie at all. In a particularly catastrophic development for what he film is going for, there really doesn’t even seem to be one unified style to it, there’s no plot or theme to speak of anyway (though there is, of course, an expectedly stupid late movie “revelation”), so all we’re left with is a film whose scenes only connect via their colour scheme.
My Son (2021): In an act that tragicomically completely misunderstands the strengths and weaknesses of improv, this remake by Christian Carion of his own film sees poor James McAvoy stumble through a complicated plot without being provided with a script or dialogue, whereas every other actor is. The result of course consists of many a scene of McAvoy – who also doesn’t seem to have been provided with prompts to tell him what any given scene is supposed to be about – floundering or going off in directions the rest of the film doesn’t want to follow, because everybody else isn’t there to improvise with him, but to unsubtly push him into the directions the script says he must go. Which is the absolute opposite of what improvisation is supposed to be about.
Much of this is shot very prettily, but this prettiness works not at all with the lack of direction this filmmaking approach can’t help but produce. The pacing is dreadful, obviously, and while McAvoy is certainly doing his best, the whole affair is custom built to make him fail.
Crescendo (1970): Because this is apparently not a day to talk about films I enjoyed, how about what I take to be the by far worst thriller Jimmy Sangster wrote for Hammer? The script has openings for all the little clever bits, the subversive push and the great use of well-worn tropes as the other movies in the cycle did, but in practice, everything about it feels the wrong kind of tacky, terribly conservative in its conception of psychosexual hang-ups, and simply just not that interesting.
How much of that is Alan Gibson’s rather bland and ineffective direction, how much Sangster having an off month is anybody’s guess.
Little Baskara (Zidane Khalid) is having a very hard time. His father has died, and his mother is coping badly, treating the kid with little empathy or understanding. Things feel so bad to him, Baskara decides to run away on the day of a school outing, for some reason pinning his goodbye note to an intensely creepy looking doll he has made himself.
Because it is apparently that sort of week for the boy, a bullying incident on the outing apparently opens his sixth sense, and now he’s seeing ghosts all around him. Eventually, he makes his way to the home of his father’s twin Anton (Surya Saputra), his wife Ami (Wulan Guritno) and their weird twin girls, all of whom he hasn’t seen for years. He is welcomed very warmly indeed, but something’s clearly not right about the situation: there are no questions why he is here, or anything about his mother. The family simply takes the boy in, no questions asked, smiling very broad smiles while going through their peculiarly repetitive days. Obviously, Baskara’s ghost encounters don’t stop, either.
Repeat horror offender Jose Poernomo’s Silam isn’t one of the director’s better ones; it also isn’t exactly a highlight of Indonesia’s contemporary horror boom. The film’s structure is just too ramshackle for it to work well, its plot twist feels telegraphed (unless you are Baskara’s age), and a potentially potent emotional core is buried under quite a few clichés used inelegantly.
There are also very painfully obvious attempts at borrowing from Blumhouse style horror, with a finale scene that so clearly prays at the altar of Annabelle (but admittedly with a creepier looking doll), it becomes faintly embarrassing. The film’s borrowings from Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense work rather better, partially because Poernomo here actually does some rejiggering of tropes and give what he takes a bit of a turn of his own. Because so many Indonesian horror films use elements of that film, it has basically become a founding film of the less gory side of Indonesian horror.
There are, as is typical of Poernomo, a few rather potent horror set pieces buried under the commonplace material. The repeated family dinner may be overacted but is wonderfully weird and creepy, and who doesn’t like a ghost who apparently infects its surroundings with slow motion? Plus, it’s nice to see the twins from The Shining getting regular work.
That’s not really enough to recommend Silam as a whole, but if a viewer is in a bit of a gold digging mood and can find a way to watch the film, there is indeed something of interest to find here.
Original title: El pantano de las ánimas
Warning: major spoilers for a film that’s going to be older than most people reading this ahead!
The Mexican equivalent of the Old West. Don Mendoza, one of the local Big Men, has died of what is apparently cholera. Thanks to practical good sense, the local graveyard is quite a bit of swamp travel away from town; less great is that the area is supposed to be haunted by the souls of the wicked dead. There’s certainly curious stuff happening: Mendoza’s body disappears between his wife and his suddenly returning stepson wanting a lookaloo at the corpse; and when grandson galops off to fetch his cowboy detective buddy Gastón (Gastón Santos) to explain that particular weirdness, he is ambushed and dies in his friend’s arms. And once Gastón makes his way to his new case, various people are attacked or killed by a gill man style swamp monster.
It is clear early on that there’s a very human kind of conspiracy involved too. Please don’t tell me the supernatural is only faked to scare away superstitious villagers and riding detectives?
As indeed, alas, turns out to be the case in Rafael Baledón’s ranchero horror mystery Swamp of the Lost Souls. The Scooby Doo before there was Scooby Doo-ness of the whole affair is made a bit more disappointing by the fact that Baledón certainly wasn’t a filmmaker opposed to the supernatural as well as by the fact that there are quite a few Mexican movies that mix ranchero (the Mexican parallel genre to the US western) with enthusiastically portrayed supernatural shenanigans.
On the plus side, this does explain the shoddiness of the gill man costume rather nicely. The film’s not a complete loss for us more horror minded viewers anyway, for particularly the film’s first half has a couple of choice scenes of Mexican gothic. The burial sequence is done very well indeed (and by daylight to boot!), really getting an audience into a properly swampy mood, as are the first two or so swamp monster attacks. I’m also rather fond of the high-strung gothic melodrama surrounding the deceased’s wife Doña María (Sara Cabrera) and her rather handy in a pulp adventure lady’s maid Carmela (Lupe Carriles). The good lady does after all try to hide her blindness with the help of a lot of handwringing and contrived plans while still doing a good bit of snooping, all things Carmela is very helpful in doing while throwing a lot of dramatically meaningful glances her boss lady can’t even see.
The ranchero business is very much in the classic white hat against black hat style, with a pretty man dressed up ridiculously making a not terribly interesting hero (as is the tradition with this style of western) but still going through the mandatory bar fights, shoot-outs and chases with enough verve to make them interesting. The mystery elements for their part are enhanced by their minor pulp supervillain vibe, with bad guys that not only concoct plans including a fake gill man but also communicate via hidden portable telegraphs and really like to tie you up and explain their plans to you. There’s also a scene in which the – otherwise perfectly boring – romantic female lead’s horse does a Lassie to fetch Gastón like any good anipal would.
All of which makes it rather difficult for me to dislike Swamp of the Lost Souls, however much I despise Scooby Doo endings, and however creaky some of the film is. Baledón’s way of adding all of his disparate genres and ideas up is just too damn fun to complain about.
Original title: 귀문 gwi-mun
In 1990, a janitor at a country community centre goes on a killing spree with a shovel, murdering quite a few visitors and colleagues. Afterwards, the building is haunted by strange acts of violence, and is quickly condemned, Yet even then, it seems to draw people to their doom, keeping their spirits trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead. Particularly the last night of the Lunar Year is a dangerous time, for then, the moon of the afterlife rises above the building, opening the titular lightless door that seems to transcend space and time.
More than half a decade after the killings, an experienced shaman attempts to cleanse the building and free the trapped spirits, but is overwhelmed and killed herself instead. Some years later, in 2002, her son Do-jin (Kim Kang-woo), armed with years of research, the basic abilities that come with his lineage, and a spirit-exorcising dagger, enters the building on the last night of the Lunar Year to finish what his mother started.
He encounters, ghosts, ghoulies, as well as spatial and temporal shifts that let him cross ways with a group of film students exploring the place in 1995. He’ll also learn what actually causes the rather spectacular hauntings.
I had a lot of fun with Shim Duck-geun’s Guimoon. At its core, it’s yet another film that nearly exclusively consists of groups of people trampling through creepy modern ruins encountering supernatural stuff, and proceeds to present a series of not terribly original creep-outs set pieces in the manner of your basic haunted house ride. However, while there’s a certain lack of originality in the scares, and very little characterisation and character development on display beyond character set-ups necessary for the plot, the film isn’t lacking in variety. Shim seems to be very adept at all basic horror techniques, pacing moments of suspense and jump scares with quite a bit more mood building than movies about people walking through haunted ruins usually get up to.
The film also does quite a bit of effective work with the timey-whimey stuff. It uses the temporal shifts and crossings of times and space not just to fill in backstory in a visually more exciting manner than having Do-jin go through files would provide, but clearly also aims to engender a feeling of confusion in its viewers, very effectively turning your basic industrial ruin into a stranger and more interesting place than it would otherwise be.
All of which suggests filmmakers that have watched about as many of these kinds of horror movies as I have, have managed to identify their major problems, and decided not to copy others’ mistakes. Consequently, Guimoon turns into a fun, spooky time.
A couple of days – at best months – after the first Asih movie, our indefatigable kuntilanak (as always, Shareefa Daanish) returns, murders the protagonists of said movie, leaving the old lady (Marini) behind to spend the rest of her life in a mental institution, and kidnaps the couple’s baby Amelia. So much for surviving a horror movie.
About six years later (so about 1991), a little girl (Anantya Rezky) is hit by a car on a jungle road and brought to hospital by the driver. Apparently, the kid lives alone in the jungle, without family or home. Hospital doctor Sylvia (Marsha Timothy) decides the little girl she soon will dub Ana needs adopting rather badly. It is clear that Ana, as well as the situation in which she was found, reminds Sylvia painfully of her own daughter and the way she died some years ago, a tragedy neither she nor her cartoonist husband Razan (Ario Bayu) have emotionally recovered from. Razan is pretty sceptical about the adoption idea, but is letting himself be convinced.
As the couple quickly realizes, Ana isn’t in the best of mental health, and isn’t exactly socially adapted to life outside of the jungle. This is of course not going to be the major problem our protagonists have to cope with, for Ana is of course little Amelia after some years as Asih’s “daughter”. Thus, the very jealous and rather dead would be mother starts on her usual diet of terror.
Which, of course is the main problem Rizal Mantovani’s Asih 2 has. This is now the third movie in the Danurverse in which Asih is the main villain, and her bag of tricks really hasn’t changed much from the early days of the franchise, so our characters are spooked and creeped out by things the film’s audience will have experienced often enough for a degree of tedium to set in. There are still decent scare scenes in here, thanks to Mantovani’s considerable talent at going through the motions with a degree of style, but hardly one of them is going to surprise or shock anyone. They do deserve an appreciative nod for competent filmmaking by the director, though.
Another obvious flaw is the amount of time the film needs to show its protagonists catching up to all the things about Asih the audience has learned during the course of her other appearances. There’s little excitement in seeing them figuring out the kuntilanak’s not exactly complex backstory, and there’s really little reason for an audience to go through it yet another time, particularly since the film adds little that changes anything of much relevance. Asih’s creepiness – and really the creepiness of most supernatural threats in the movies – is not at all enhanced by us knowing every part of her in fact sad and tragic backstory in excruciating detail, and there’s certainly no need for the film to go through the material yet again when it has no plans to use it in any interesting or new ways.
Thanks to this, Asih 2 also manages to bury its more interesting elements, namely the emotional parallel Sylvia draws between Ana/Amelia and her dead daughter, the well-drawn fog of grief that has descended on hers and Razan’s relationship and what their new little girl does to that. There’s a really interesting horror film about two grief-stricken women – one living, one dead – fighting each other for an adoptive daughter buried in here, but it is buried under the dross accrued through the very real horrors of bad franchising.
Halloween Kills (2021): Just no.
Don’t Let Her In (2021): By the standards of a contemporary Full Moon production, this Ted Nicolaou sexy demon subtenant sixty minute movie is practically a masterpiece. By more exacting standards, it does at least parse as an actual movie with a plot, half-way professional acting, sensible camera setups and production design somebody apparently thought about for more than ten seconds. Watching it, I found myself vaguely entertained, which is much more than I can say for most of what Charles Band’s cohorts have crapped out in the last decade or so. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a trend.
The Deep House (2021): I found this to be a movie much closer to my tastes than Alexandre Bustillo’s and Julien Maury’s other effort of this year, Kandisha. At the very least, monster and story here intrinsically belong to one another. It’s a rather minimalist film when it comes to plot and character development, though, and mostly relies on its underwater photography and its creepy setting, never really going beyond what you’d expect a film about a haunted house underwater to do. One could easily argue this one could have been done more fruitfully as a sixty minute film, cutting out a couple of sequences of our protagonists slowly swimming through the creepy house; one would not be wrong.
On the other hand, the film oozes an atmosphere of decay and a bit of dread, and has at least a handful of unforgettable shots, particularly in its final third, so if you’re going in more for the film’s mood and the way its visuals create said mood, you might very well leave completely satisfied, like me.
aka Satan War
Apparently, this is based on a “true story”, or something, and does the docudrama voice over dance at the beginning, the end, and during the bizarre short “documentary” bit supposedly about voodoo tacked on after the end.
Bill (Jimmy Drankovitch), a lazy smoker and (one supposes evangelical) Christian without a personality and his wife Louise (Sally Schermerhorn), having to do all the work and punishing the world for it by having a really annoying voice, move into their new home, hoping for a fine time of rather conservative living.
Alas, curious things begin happening: there are noises coming from nowhere, a chair has the tendency to bump very very softly into Louise while the film treats it as a rabid chair attack, mysterious goo ruins floors and kitchen appliances, and an invisible force turns not the couple’s frowns but their cross on the living room wall upside down.
Turns out it’s not ghosts it’s demons (ugh). Also, Writer/director Bart La Rue has apparently read Frank De Felitta’s novel “The Entity” (and most certainly something by the inevitable Warrens), and did like the idea of rape by invisible force, alas.
Which produces a couple of rather too harmless for what they are supposed to be paranormal rape scenes; on the other hand, it’s pretty difficult to get incensed about demon rape quite this affectlessly done. On hand number three, there’s a particularly awkward discussion with rape jokes about the demon’s first attempt between our loving couple that’ll raise hackles and eyebrows, and might have even annoyed me if not for the again complete lack of affect in acting or presentation here.
And really, this complete lack of human expressivity in basically everything people in it say or think or do is the make or break feature of this curious cheapie. Either, a viewer is going to be bored out of their wits, or utterly hypnotized by the static camera, the absence of normal emoting even in scenes where Louise is crying her eyes out, and scene upon scene upon scene in which a threateningly warbling three note synthesizer score accompanies Louise (and very seldom Bill) doing housework while the 70s décor tries to burn your eyes out, quietly. In this context, the very mild (yes, even the rape feels paradoxically mild) supernatural manifestations become downright shocking, turning the intensity from minus five up to at least two. It’s all very exciting in its lack of excitement, if you are in the mood for that kind of entertainment.
I was, so thank you, Satan.
French Detective-Inspector Brunel (Lino Ventura) has been lent to the London police from his native France for quite some time now. His stint in the UK does slowly near its end. To make things difficult, fate does put a rather strange and dangerous case in his way: John Morlar (Richard Burton), a misanthropic writer of very angry novels has been nearly beaten to death in his own apartment, and is now in a coma. The doctor responsible for his treatment (Gordon Jackson) thinks it is only a question of time until he dies, and if not for some very curious spikes in brain activity, he’d probably not even warrant the battery of equipment that lets him breathe right now.
Brunel’s investigation paints a curious picture of the victim: bitter, cynical, perpetually angry, and obsessed with catastrophes and large accidents, the man had few friends (if any), his psychiatrist Dr. Zonfeld (Lee Remick) probably being the closest person in his life still alive. Yet she seems rather cagy about something concerning her patient. Still, Brunel’s slow and systematic efforts begin to suggest that Morlar suffered from a curious delusion, the conviction that he had some sort of psychic power that killed anyone who made him angry. Given how many of the people who did that actually died in strange accidents, there might even be something to the man’s idea.
Late in life, Morlar even seems to have developed some control over his powers, which, combined with his clear conviction of his own superiority over basically everyone surrounding him, and his seething hatred for the powers that be, would have made for a good motive for killing the man. Particularly since Morlar started to make plans for the future…
Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch seems to be a bit of a marmite film, with people apparently hating the film with quite some passion, or treating it like one of the great undervalued British horror films in the Nigel Kneale vein. I belong to the latter group, surprising nobody.
But then, it’s not difficult to understand why someone might not enjoy a slow-moving investigative movie that mostly consists of Lino Ventura talking to people until we flash back into a past that shows us some of the horrors the world inflicted on Morlar, and then the horrors he inflicted on it in turn. The film’s portrayal of its comatose antagonist here is fascinating, because it seems like an honest attempt to understand the mindset of the man, find compassion for him, yet also clearly portray his later reactions to the general crappiness of the world as just as horrifying as the world itself. It’s very much a film about a guy turned monstrous by his surroundings, but he’s now a monster nonetheless. Even more interesting, as played by Burton, he’s never likeable, because he is much too convinced of his own importance and superiority over everything human. It’s not a pleasant or convenient route to take for the film - making him an innocent betrayed or a simple fanatic would make this much easier to digest - but it certainly adds an additional quality of disquiet. We all have felt like Morlar, after all, and with his power, might we have turned out like he did? It’s not even as if he weren’t right about at least fifty percent of the things he is so angry about.
Politically, you might read this as a film about the violence that can be evoked by politics birthed of anger, of how the horrors of the world can bend and twist people so much they become just as cruel as what surrounds them. This, needless to say, can go either way, politically, and without psychic powers, you can easily imagine Morlar ending up as a Nazi or an RAF terrorist.
Apart from subtextual complexities, I also simply find The Medusa Touch often highly effective as a piece of SF horror. There’s a quality of brooding and slowly increasing dread to the affair, created with the help of subtly disquieting and disorienting editing, and Michael J. Lewis’s fantastic score, a mood that is only increased by the fact that we are led through the tale by a man so clearly down to Earth as Ventura’s Brunel. He feels so real, witnessing him step into the world of the uncanny feels wrong in all the right ways for the film.
Burton, never one of my favourite actors, is pretty much perfect for the role: projecting an inflated ego was never difficult for the guy, but here, he adds an undertow of genuine hurt hidden under all the anger and bitterness and self-obsession. As it turns out, Burton also has one of the most convincing death stares I’ve ever seen in an actor.
All that and a climax that includes Not-Westminster Cathedral falling down like London Bridge makes for a pretty irresistible movie in my book.
As regular readers know, I have a high tolerance for modern blockbuster movies and their specific foibles. Still, I have no problem judging this one to be one of the more pointless pieces of overbudgeted crap I’ve encountered in my time.
Apparently, Hasbro is hankering after its own Hasbro Cinematic Universe (stop laughing!), and decided to start it with…an origins spin-off about a popular G.I. Joe character. Directed by Robert Schwentke, director of completely personality-free and nearly painfully mediocre highish budget mush like R.I.P.D. and RED. And indeed, Schwentke here continues to show a complete lack of personality or style as a director, not exactly doing much wrong on a technical level, but never doing anything right or just interesting either. He’s also really great at getting disinterested performances out of perfectly decent actors, like everyone in this one’s cast.
Clearly, you don’t want to start out your Hasbroverse with anything that’s entertaining or even vaguely ambitious.
The film does remind me of the terrible first Wolverine movie in Fox’s X-Men universe a lot more than of anything Marvel has put out, in that its script consists exclusively of clichés anybody in the market for this kind of film will have seen used better in a hundred other films, dragged out interminably. Worse, it really wants to have all of the clichés, and so trundles off in twelve different directions, one after the other. There, the film finds nothing of interest but certainly uses every opportunity to slow things down to a crawl, and turn about seventy minutes of usable stuff into a two hour movie that never seems to end.
It also suffers from an inexplicable need to explain any old nonsense about Snake Eyes, though, admittedly, there’s nothing in here quite as pointless as the origin of Wolverine’s leather jacket. On the other hand, Wolverine’s leather jacket never decided that a stone that spits a bit of fire is a horrible super weapon, unlike this one.
On the plus side, the Hasbroverse can only get more interesting after Snake Eyes, if it survives a first outing quite this lacking in personality and reason to exist.
Original title: Dr. Satán
By day, the delightfully named Dr Plutarco Arozamena (Joaquin Cordero) is a successful physician (though we never see him meet any actual patients). By night, he is Dr Satan, a criminal mastermind, mad scientist and black magician. Dr Satan has cooked up a way to kill people, steal their souls and let their bodies return as his mindless undead slaves – though only with the help of the non-doctorate original Satan, whom he conjures up for a minute (never longer, for Satan appears to be quite the busy man) of chatting quite regularly. For reasons only known to himself, the good doctor uses his awesome powers to help distribute forged dollars throughout Mexico.
It’s that part of his business rather then the black magic and turning men into mindless zombies arm that gets the mad medical man in trouble, for Interpol Inspector Mateos (José Gálvez) and his partner (the film calls her assistant, but doesn’t treat her that way) Nora (Alma Delia Fuentes) are hot on the trail of the money forging business and will eventually end up suspecting him. Which of course leads to a series of weird plans, zombie attacks, kidnappings, and so on. Our villainous semi-protagonist will also learn a valuable lesson about why it is a bad idea to keep on as secretary the daughter of a guy one has turned into a zombie.
Miguel Morayta’s Dr. Satan is exactly the kind of pulp adventure with a good dollop of horror elements the doctor (not Satan) orders for this time of the year, or, really, any other time. The print I’ve seen looks so swampy and fuzzy, the whole affair feels rather more like it was made in the 30s or 40s than the 60s, but given the serial-like energy of the movie, this sad state of affairs does for once work to a film’s advantage, putting it into a very fitting aesthetic frame. Particularly since Morayta doesn’t seem to want to go into the direction pop art-style supervillain centric films from Italy at about the same the time did, but really does breathe the not terribly realistic, but wonderfully excitable air of the weirder end of the serials instead.
In the film’s scenes most concerned with Dr Satan’s black magic and mad science plans, there’s also quite a bit of the more atmospheric moods of Poverty Row style horror and mystery on display, with a hint of expressionism as filtered through Universal and Mexican horror cinema of the decades before, of course. So, when he isn’t in his man of society guise, Dr Satan is nearly always presented with his very own spotlight shining creepily on his face as if Cordero were Bela Lugosi, while much of his surroundings are drenched in shadow and fog, suggesting – quite effectively - an air of otherworldliness. The appearances of Satan himself are really rather effective too, a winged figure shrouded in smoke and darkness that’s shot just far enough you don’t see the strings of the wings, and instead can buy into the suggestion of the otherworldly.
On the more mundane side of the equation, I found myself appreciating how much the female characters (yes, there are indeed several) in the film actually get to do. Particularly Nora is treated seriously as an investigator and woman of professional competence. Even when she and her temporary partner in crime busting Elsa (Judith Ruiz Azcarraga) are (as is traditional) kidnapped for the finale, they are at least also enabling their own rescue. Hell, to anyone’s surprise, the film might even get through the Bechdel test unscathed.
It’s all very fun indeed, sometimes spooky fun, sometimes fun in its pulpy weirdness and energy, sometimes fun in its ability to surprise the jaded viewer with little unexpected treats.
Candyman (2021): For its first two thirds, I was all in with Nia DaCosta’s sequel to Bernard Rose’s masterpiece. There’s strong acting, interesting conceptual decisions when it comes to the nature of Candyman as a myth, exposition done via awesome shadow puppet animation, and some heavily moody and macabre filmmaking that turns rote killings (quite appropriately) into art. Sure, from time to time, the film does tend to wear its politics on its sleeves a bit too much if you’ve ever heard of the concept of subtlety or complexity, but not in a way that isn’t also rather appropriate to the material, like it or not.
Alas, the third act is a total mess where having characters being responsible for their own doom, or even just making actual decisions is sacrificed on the altar of the plot twist, and where the film we were watching until then becomes overwhelmed by the pointless need to tie it in tighter with the original Candyman, which does rob the film we are actually watching of much of the power it had until then.
There’s Someone Inside Your House (2021): Warning, I’m going to spoil the identity of the killer here. So, to my taste, this rework of teen slasher tropes for the woke era and Netflix as directed by Patrick Brice does woke horror (this is a genre now, surely) rather more effectively than Candyman does, particularly since it doesn’t go off the rails during its third act quite as much but escalates dramatically and emotionally, using the way it has fleshed out its character tropes in the first two acts to connect characters and audience. Which, obviously, makes its climax emotionally and dramatically much more satisfying than one in which the main characters get to do sod all. On the way, there are some fine and clever ideas on how to fuse classic teen horror tropes with modern sensibilities, and some nicely staged suspense. The only element that did tend to irritate me is the identity of the killer, who is of course the psychologically messed up white rich kid who hates his (totally hateable) father, or rather, that the film seems to argue that growing up rich somehow robs one of one’s humanity so much, one isn’t allowed to have emotional damage, which does mar a film that otherwise is all about compassion and understanding for damage and guilt by being total bullshit.
Black as Night (2021): Keeping with woke teen horror, this Amazon and Blumhouse teens versus vampires in New Orleans film (starring Asjha Cooper who is one of the secondary leads of There’s Someone) as directed by Maritte Lee Go is a fun enough time. The sense of place is quite strong, its political ideas are slightly more complicated than those of There’s will turn out in the end, and some of the vampire lore and set pieces are pretty neatly conceived too.
It is, however, a bit of a flabby movie even with a length of less than ninety minutes. So expect awkward things like the film suddenly adding some good vampires to the mix shortly before the climax only to do very little of consequence with them.
When forest ranger Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson) arrives in Beaverfield, a tiny community at the edge of nowhere he is going to (sort of) police for the foreseeable future, he gets rather more excitement on his first day and night than one typically hopes for when starting on a new job. Apart from everyone – well, everyone but extremely lovely and adorable postal worker Cecily (Milana Vayntrub) – being your typical kind of comedy movie crazy, the village is also divided on the issue of a new gas pipeline that’s supposed to run through town soon enough, making for something of a less than peaceful environment. Things really escalate when a storm knocks out all connections – including the road – to the outside world. Someone (or something?) knocks out the town’s generators, too, and soon, a bit of a killing spree starts. The perpetrator seems to be a werewolf (SCIENCE says so), so the killer really could be anyone among the population, which doesn’t help the sense of distrust and paranoia between these people at all. You wouldn’t exactly need a werewolf for murder among these people. Finn – who is nice, communicative, into cooperation and extensive quoting of Mister Rogers to a fault – and Cecily are pretty much the only ones in town able to keep their heads.
At first, I didn’t quite get the raves Josh Ruben’s videogame based movie Werewolves Within received from all corners. Mostly because the film starts out very slowly indeed, putting what seems to be way too much time into characters that are mostly one-note comedy stock. And really, most of them never acquire that much coveted second dimension, but Ruben isn’t actually introducing the characters as much as he is seeding the murder mystery clues of the piece and introducing the audience to the physical set-up of Beaverfield, both elements that will turn out to be much more important than most of the characters involved are as characters.
It is exactly their slow and subtle introduction that makes these things work ones the film gets going, turning this into a very cleverly constructed mystery and, once the final act starts, a really great series of murder and chase set pieces. While the characters do mostly stay one note (well, apart from spoiler and spoiler, of course), our protagonists are very likeable (great credit to Richardson for turning a character who could be just too nice to be likeable into a guy so likeable you just gotta like seeing him being excessively nice) indeed, and the mystery and mood develop quite a bit of pull, an effect the film would not have managed to achieve with a faster start.
Plus, the werewolf is pretty great, the murders become rather fun indeed, and most of the jokes in the second half hit with great precision.
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