Three Films Make A Post: An Old Man and his Mule Go West

A Perfect Enemy (2020): Don’t you just hate it when a film clearly thinks it is oh so very very clever, but actually confuses cleverness with being contrived and far-fetched? Case in point (at least for me) is this example of the type by Kike Maíllo, one of those films that thinks they are twisty and formally complex, when in fact they are a bit tedious and increasingly obvious. The plot, such as it is, would – after judicious rewrites to get rid of the faux cleverness - have made for a nice thirty minute episode of something like Inside No. 9, but is stretched out to ninety minutes full of pointless detail and the film shouting “look how clever I am!”.

There’s a nice, scenery chewing lead performance by Athena Strates without whose efforts the whole thing would become completely tedious, but her counterpart Tomasz Kot approaches his role so low key, she might as well not have bothered, while their surroundings scream of technical achievement in the filmmaking arts without any idea how to properly apply it.

Terror and Black Lace aka Terror y encajes negros (1986): Keeping with the tediousness, how about this sleazy Mexican number that starts as a sex comedy and continues in that way for way too long, until it turns into a mock giallo about a serial killing hair fetishist. From time to time, there’s a genuinely creepy scene popping up, and the hetero pervs among us will not complain about all the ways the film comes up with to show off attractive women with little or nothing on. Alas, even the latter gets tedious after a while, while the former’s mostly used to keep the audience awake through all the tedium. If I were a nicer guy, I’d probably suggest that Luis Alcoriza is trying to satirize the Mid-80s Mexican bourgeoisie like a cut-rate Chabrol during the sex comedy parts, but Chabrol was never this relentlessly boring.

An added minus is that every single character here is thoroughly unlikeable, either a serial killer, an abusive husband, or women trading sex for material goods, with no complexity to help a viewer tolerate them.

Abduction (2019): Last but certainly best today is this direct to home entertainment science fiction and action movie by the dependable Ernie Barbarash, starring Scott Adkins and Andy On. Adkins is laying it on a bit too thick this time around for my tastes, but then, the action is surrounded by a lot of weird to totally cracked alien abduction business that’s at least partially expressed through the language of martial arts cinema (so the aliens are really into chi-driven dimensional travel because this is a Chinese production after all), so subtlety clearly isn’t asked for. If you think that sounds a bit dumb but also rather a lot of fun, you have the film pegged perfectly; and if you’re like me, and always wanted your cheap but well-staged action (Barbarash and his leads know what they’re doing in this regard) paired with affordable interdimensional shenanigans (see On run through the same patch of park again and again, trapped in a loop, watch Adkins realize he’s been abducted for decades etc), you’re going to enjoy this just fine.