In short: Das Ungeheuer von London-City (1964)

aka The Monster of London City

While certain authorities are beginning to shake their censorious fists, a new hit play about the murders of Jack the Ripper starring Richard Sand (Hansjörg Felmy) as the killer is pleasing 60s London’s public. However, a killer who is supposedly following the modus operandi of Jack the Ripper (and will eventually start sending out mocking letters signed thusly) is beginning to kill his way through the London prostitute population, certainly heating up those calls for censorship.

Is it possible that Sand himself has lost his sense of reality and is committing the murders? He’s acting suspiciously enough, but then, everybody else in the movie is too. I’m sure awfully boring policeman Inspector Dorne (Hans Nielsen) and idiot private eye Teddy Flynn (Peer Schmidt), or perhaps forensic scientist Dr Morely Greely (Dietmar Schönherr) will crack the case eventually.

This non-Edgar Wallace Krimi produced by Artur Brauner that lists Bryan Edgar Wallace as script doctor in its credits (seriously) is as close to the Italian giallo as our homegrown sibling managed to get. Austrian director Edwin Zbonek’s filmography otherwise suggests little of the sense of long, suspenseful stalking sequences and expressionist shadow play he very ably demonstrates here, so I’m not at all sure where the visual artfulness and the very stylish and moody camera work on display throughout Das Ungeheuer are coming from, but I certainly do appreciate it.

As I do the killer's very classic giallo and Krimi killer get-up, the complicated plotting where no upper class character can get away without offering up at least one dark secret to the narrative gods, and the film’s wonderful willingness to dissolve its London of the German imagination into empty stage streets and stark shadows. In its best moments, this is nearly good enough to deserve a descriptor like “phantasmagorical”; in its worst, it’s all a bit talky and melodramatic, though usually still shot rather well.

Music Monday: Fulton Edition

Nine Queens (2000)

Original title: Nueve reinas

Warning: there will be vague structural spoilers!

When a very basic con goes wrong for him, rookie conman Juan (Gastón Paul) finds himself rescued by the much more experienced crook Marcos (Ricardo Darín). It’s something of a fortunate encounter for both of them. Marcos’s last partner has disappeared on him, and since he’s used to working with a partner, meeting Juan looks like a bit of a godsend to him, or at least that’s what he says. Juan for his part has learned all of the basic cons from his father when he was a child, and is now trying to steal together enough money to help his old man out of a difficult situation; so having someone showing him the ropes should come in very useful indeed. Juan also has a conscience, though, and doesn’t really feel inclined to robbing little old ladies and clerks, as he’s just learning about himself.

Marcos till manages to talk Juan into partnering up with him for at least a day – perhaps he’ll find things more to his taste than he just now believes. As luck will have it, the two stumble upon the chance for a rather bigger deal, an opportunity to sell a fake sheet of stamps to a collector just about to be thrown out of the country. Of course, things and plans become rather complicated from here on out; and Marcos might not be the best guy to partner up with, what with his habit of screwing over his colleagues as well as his own family.

The is the first of only two feature films Argentinean director Fabián Bielinsky made in his short lifetime, and it’s about as brilliant a movie about cons and conmen as you can imagine. There is, apparently, a US remake of the film under the highly original title of Criminal, but I simply can’t find anything about the original that needed to be changed or improved.

As a con movie, this is about as perfectly structured and told a film as I can imagine – every single scene bears the full weight of what is happening on the surface, of what the audience might suspect is actually happening, and of the true story. Bielinsky (who also wrote the script) is playing fair with the audience throughout, certainly not showing certain things that happened before the action starts for us, but delivering all the pieces needed to read the film; he’s just also wonderful at doing this in a perfectly ambiguous way that really makes the viewer want to figure out where this is going, telling and showing how untrustworthy everyone and everything in its world is, and then having its fun with the paranoid mindset this engenders in an audience.

In an uncommon move for much of the subgenre (well, there are some Mamet films with a comparable feel, I suppose), Nine Queens presents its perfectly timed twists and turns without getting showy on its audience. The film’s presentation lacks the smug grand gestures of, say, a Soderbergh Ocean’s Whatever joint, instead aiming for wryness and the knowing nod. Even the final reveal is comparatively underplayed. The film’s kind of stage magic is more akin to a close up card trick than letting the Statue of Liberty disappear behind dry ice fog and special effects. That doesn’t mean the film’s afraid of getting clever on its audience – it’s just not interested in doing so via cheap tricks. Bielinsky – through camera work, editing, and so on – lends the film a great sense of flow, leading viewer and characters through plot and counterplot with elegance and energy, while always finding the most important glance and gesture to anchor each and every scene.

Fascinatingly for a film in which people are incessantly lying about themselves and to each other, Nine Queens isn’t just about moving its plot through twists but also works as an incisive view into its characters, clearly working from the basis that the lies somebody tells may be just as revealing about what they are about as the truth, and so it explores the personalities of its leads through their lies and their truths (with the audience not necessarily in the know about which is which). Because the film is as genuinely well written as it is, this works wonderfully throughout. It’s not only the writing, Pauls and Darín (who is quite the big name in Argentinean movies) are carrying a lot of the film’s weight there too, using a naturalistic acting approach in a genre that tends to the stylized (often for good reasons), managing to help create truthful feeling characters in a field of lies.

Speaking of lies, it is perfectly possible to read the film as a meditation about lies and personal ethics, the difference between personal ethics and morals, and the way people (even those that aren’t in the con business) can start to believe their own lies, even when they are told by others.

Or you could just watch Nine Queens as one of the best films about conmen ever made.

Three Films Make A Post: He's in all of us.

Jungle Cruise (2021): Leave it to the wonderful/wondrous Jaume Collet-Serra to turn the adaptation of a Disney ride with The Rock and Emily Blunt into: a very weird sequel to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre; also a film with various heartfelt and honest feeling scenes about the difficulty and joy of being different; a semi-reworking of moments from African Queen; a weird rip-off of elements of the Pirates of the Carribean movies (rides collide) ; a generic blockbuster that repeatedly breaks all the blockbuster rules only to reaffirm them in the very same scene, and then break them again; one damn thing after another; also, a film that would really rather like to be the Fraser/Weisz Mummy. Then imagine how he managed to actually get Disney to pay for the whole thing.

Is the result a good film? I still have no idea. It is, at the very least, one worth watching, gawking at, and pondering as a perhaps productive but certainly not boring aberration.

Two Trains Runnin’ (2016): Very different, and much easier to wrap one’s head around, is this documentary by Sam Pollard that concerns the parallel quests of two groups of white college boys from the North going to Mississippi to find country blues legends Skip James and Son House, respectively, as well as their quest’s curious intersection with the phase of the Civil Rights movements happening in Mississippi at the very same time. There’s much love and thought for the two great (and complicated) old men and their haunting music the kids eventually found, a thoughtful but not judgmental approach to the racial politics of the musical affairs, and a quiet anger about the larger political world (in which Mississippi – or really, the deep South as a whole functioned as if they were not part of the rest of the country at all). It’s told (as narrated by Common) in a mix of talking heads, period photos and film, charming animation, and an excellent choice of musicians covering appropriate songs, doing the complicated business at its core as much justice as any eighty minute movie reasonably can.

Dead Man’s Shoes (2004): Shane Meadows’s film about a soldier coming back to his home town to kill the men responsible for the death of his learning-disabled brother is stylistically much closer to mumblecore than I can usually stomach. But in its case, this approach doesn’t feel like an attempt to signal authenticity by pretending to be inartistic but provides grounding in life to a story that has elements that feel like a comment on the slasher, on all sorts of vengeance movies and the concept of vengeance itself, and as cruel folklore come to life but is not, and doesn’t want to be an exercise in genre deconstruction.

It’s much more a film about the poisonous way the past can shape the present, of pain and destruction becoming nearly living things, or ghosts, but also one that suggests another way out, at least for some.

Short Film Friday: There Are Monsters

Visit beautiful Nova Scotia?

In short: Follow Me to Hell (2019)

Original title: Ikut Aku ke Neraka

Warning: I’m going to get a bit spoilerish here

Lita (Clara Bernadeth) and her husband Rama (Rendy Kjaernett) are expecting their first child in a quietly happy way. But following the move to a new home, strange supernatural things begin to occur, clearly centred around (and very much against) Lita. At first, Rama doesn’t believe there’s something more going on than Lita suffering from the perfectly normal stress of the last trimester of pregnancy. Though he is coping with it in a somewhat less patronizing way than many horror movie hubbies, he’s still a fat load of no help to his wife, who has to cope with a jump scare prone dead lady all on her lonesome. Until the entity visits Rama in his car, that is – after that, things escalate quickly towards not actually that helpful spiritualists and dark backstories.

Azhar Kinoi Lubis’s Follow Me to Hell is one of the lesser entries into the contemporary Indonesian horror boom, lacking the blood, the brilliance and the very dark imagination of the best of its peers. Middling as it is, this is still a perfectly decent little movie, with at least a handful of excellent creep-out moments sandwiched in between the more generic and bland ones. I am particularly fond of a really cool sequence where Lita’s mirror image starts to act rather disturbingly (including some mugging towards the camera) in an effectively creepy manner. Even better, this will turn out to be a meaningful hint towards the haunting’s back story rather than just random spookery, suggesting some thought having been put into why the supernatural villain acts how she does in the spooky scenes.

There’s also the (late) abortion of a ghost child to get somewhat disturbed by and some delightfully complicated mythology to wrap one’s head around.

It’s too bad that the film can’t ever quite seem to hold the effect of its best moments, tending to a certain professional blandness when it really needs more mood building and/or more characterization.

Deadly Inheritance (1968)

Original title: Omicidio per vocazione

Somewhere in rural France. The patriarch of a rich family whose members are still somehow involved in the daily running of a train station including signal duty (shades of Charles Dickens for me there, if the filmmakers wanted it or not, and they probably didn’t) dies in what is probably an accident. There’s quite a nice inheritance to be had, but Father has put a rather interesting stipulation into his will: nobody is getting at anything but the interest on the money until mentally unstable Janot (Ernesto Colli) will come of age and turn twenty-one in three years time and can be shoved off into the best mental health care. The fact that the guy playing him is twenty-eight and looks like forty nor the availability of mental health care for people under twenty-one notwithstanding. This isn’t terribly good news for parts of the family: there are bills to be paid, lovers in need of money to pay off their future ex-wives, and so on.

So it comes not completely as a surprise when other family members - of course including Janot who has another unfortunate train accident leaving him quite in pieces – start dying in accidents and things supposedly like it. Because local boss cop Etienne (Virgilio Gazzolo) isn’t deemed enough, the big city sends Inspector Greville (Tom Drake) to take care of business. Eventually, Greville brilliantly deduces that there’s something suspicious about all of these murders and proceeds accordingly.

Vittorio Sindoni’s Deadly Inheritance is a strange example of late 60s giallo filmmaking. For at least the first half of the film, you see some of the standard tropes of the genre, but they are for the most part used like in a standard and pretty boring mystery. There are dirty secrets, but these are neither treated as a doorway to sleaze nor to get snarky about the ways of the decadent rich, but feel more like necessary plot points the film needs to work through. The cast features some well-liked Italian genre actresses – at least heroine Femi Benussi and Valeria Ciangottini should fall under this umbrella – but they aren’t used to much effect, and Tom Drake’s Greville is about as boring as any protagonist of a movie can be imagined to be. Stylistically, everything feels very dry and lacking in punch.

But the longer the film goes on, the more elements of interest begin to emerge: suddenly, there’s a tightly and aesthetically pleasing chase sequence with a bunch of people after the Inspector’s favourite suspect, running through a very geometrically framed countryside; the murders don’t become exactly more bloody, but certainly more elaborately staged and filmed. Sindoni also begins doing clever things. Take for example the film’s best murder scene: the victim is alone locked into her home, with the police outside to protect her. Things start with a – pretty great as composed by one Stefano Torossi – giallo typical female voice singing an appropriately haunting melody on the score. Our heroine hears something, opens a door, finds a record player playing said haunting melody, which she thankfully lets play on to properly accompany the following set piece of stalking and killing. This is staged in such a matter of fact manner by Sindoni, it doesn’t feel too clever by half but delightful, funny and just the right bit macabre.

Once Deadly Inheritance has reached its final half hour, there’s very little that makes this recognizable as the same film of the plodding and naff to look at first act. Every scenes now has something to draw the viewer in, so much so, the film gets away with a last act double twist that’s as improbable as it is awesome. It also suggests that some of the boringness of the first part of the film was actually there on purpose, meant to manipulate its audience into a couple of very specific expectations concerning the roles of detectives, suspects, and victims in any kind of mystery. It’s quite a thing to do in highly commercial genre cinema, expecting a degree of patience from its audience I’m certainly not always willing to spend on a movie. It’s till a pretty great trick that provides Deadly Inheritance with a fantastic ending.

In short: An Unquiet Grave (2020)

Jamie (Jacob A. Ware) can’t cope with the death of his wife Julia in a car accident. Somehow, he learns of a ritual that can bring her back to life, for a price. He needs the help of Julia’s twin sister Ava (Christine Nyland), who reluctantly agrees to his crazy request. So, on the anniversary of Julia’s death, the two go into the woods where she died to commit their ritual. Things don’t go quite like anyone expected or wanted, not just because of the price for the ritual Jamie never quite got around explaining to Ava but also because some broken things can’t be mended.

This is a thoughtful movie about grief, the horrible things we’d do to reawaken our pasts, and prices not worth paying. It is a very simple movie, as well, but simple because it, like the folk song that gave it its title, has been pared down until everything superfluous is gone. Directed by Terence Krey (who co-wrote with Nyland), this is certainly going to be one of those “not for everyone movies” I do particularly tend to like, moving slowly but surely, and avoiding everything big. Even the characters’ pain is treated in measured, even tones that lack melodrama; they don’t lack in emotion, though, it’s just emotion quietly whispered, expressed in glances of desperation and grief instead of loud and demonstrative ways.

Given this tone, the film obviously avoids big horror set pieces and jump scares, favouring the horror inside its characters, only providing those obvious shocks the narrative truly needs to function as a narrative instead of a pure mood piece. For me, this is a sign of focus, of filmmakers trusting in what they want to do and say instead of the things that would make their work easier to sell; in this case, without things devolving into self-indulgence. In fact, if there’s a thing An Unquiet Grave seems to indulge in, it’s the showing the truth about its characters.

Music Monday: Science of Light Edition

Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

Sam (Karen Gillan) is working for some sort of criminal organization known as The Firm as a hit woman. As all professional killers do, she has a tragic past. Namely, her mother Scarlet (Lena Headey), who also worked as a killer for The Firm, disappeared fifteen years ago, never to be heard from or seen again.

Sam also has the career typical weakness for children (and perhaps the blind, too, though she doesn’t encounter any blind person during the course of the movie, thus I can’t say for sure), so when her newest victim turns out to have a little daughter (Chloe Coleman), she starts on the mandated way of protection, a way which will also lead to some surprising reunions and point towards methods to reconcile herself with her past.

On the way lie many dead thugs, a family reunion, and three awesome aunts -  librarians, traders in weapons and killers played by Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino and Angela Bassett.

Navot Papushado’s action comedy (with heavier emphasis on the action) Gunpowder Milkshake is one of those post-ironic, trope conscious movies that never quite seems to want to deconstruct the genre it is working in, making friendly nods and a couple of snarky remarks about the genre conventions it uses but also showing no shame nor embarrassment using them. Which is more than fine with me, seeing as this leads to a movie that seldom feels the need to congratulate itself for its cleverness, nor one that confuses small twists and turns in genre conventions with revolutionary acts. Rather, it uses its small changes and twists as more satisfying ways to fulfil genre expectations, finding the sweet spot where self-consciousness does not turn into self-(or genre-)loathing. Gunpowder Milkshake even does direct quotes from a panoply of classic genre movies well, again using little twists into the right directions to make even those things that aren’t exactly its own, very much its own indeed.

So, like this year’s other, even better, big female-centric action movie Black Widow, the film can be relaxed enough to treat the existence of its female action heroes as a matter of course, celebrating their awesomeness by also making it normal. This doesn’t preclude some mainstream feminist elements, but rather strengthens them by anchoring them in a world where a woman doing action hero things is the new normal and doesn’t need explanation or male approval anymore. Which to my eyes isn’t just all kinds of cool but also a pretty inclusive and practical way to move forward.

Of course, it does help the film’s project that Gillan’s has gotten rather great at that action movie star thing and comports herself very well in the action, the comedy and the drama bits of whatever she is given. She is also assisted by co-stars from a couple of generations before who are all actresses active in various genre spaces only an incel won’t love already, which offhandedly turns this into a film that celebrates some great actresses who have been paving the way for women in genre as a normality for decades.

Gunpowder Milkshake is aesthetically a pleasure, too, mixing super-stylized colour schemes and production design to enable less realistic and therefore more cool action, admitting many a silly and cheesy idea, and staging all of it – with this again wonderfully keeping in genre traditions – with increasing verve and style. There’s also a willingness to be weird on display that parallels the worldbuilding of the John Wick films, but in a way that feels less showy and more organic to me. You can insert my usual sarcastic remarks about Keanu here, too – Gillan and co are certainly the superior action actors (less flailing of arms etc).

In other words: it’s fun, not stupid, and looks great, too.

Three Films Make A Post: The time has come to tell the tale.

A Classic Horror Story (2021): This Netflix horror film by Roberto De Feo and Paolo Strippoli starring Matilda Lutz (last seen here in the mind-blowing rape revenge film Revenge) does have quite a bit of fun with the whole meta horror genre shifting business, though never so much it seems more interested in patting itself on the back instead of being an actual horror movie. Consequently, the various set pieces are inventive in their nods to horror of the past but creative enough on their own to also feel organically threatening and creepy. The genre shifting is a fun enough game to play, though I do have to admit I was more than a little disappointed the whole affair decided on one of my least favourite sub-genres as its ending point. But then, it’s me, not the movie.

Ghibah (2021): I have a history of not getting along with Indonesian horror comedy very well (the language barrier certainly doesn’t help), so colour me very surprised about how much enjoyed this somewhat religious (again, not something I love in my horror) horror comedy by Monty Tiwa about an ifrit punishing a group of college kids committing the sins of gossiping and defamation (which is apparently worse than murder) quite a bit. There’s a charming wryness to the film’s comedy that even continues during its most moralizing moments, rather suggesting your mildly disappointed teacher rather than a fire and brimstone preacher (imam?), turning the comedy curiously companionable. At the same time, the horror set pieces are sometimes surprisingly vicious, confronting characters and audience with pretty traumatic images and nearly never playing the horror itself for laughs; which is why the laughs work so well and vice versa.

His Motorbike, Her Island (1986) aka Kare no ootobai, kanojo no shima: On paper, this is your typical mid-80s Kadokawa production made with a young audience and box office results foremost in mind, a romantic coming of age tale between a young and pleasantly awkward Riki Takeuchi (so young even his hair hasn’t quite reached its future epic form) and the motorcycle-loving Kiwako Harada. While it’s script is very much written to market, it’s not stupidly so, knowing quite a bit about the workings of the late teenage heart, fear of commitment and early fear of loss, just presenting it in a light and non-brooding way.

And that’s before director Nobuhiko Obayashi comes in, who, as is his wont, stylizes every single element of the film to hell and back again, intensifying, ironicizing, breaking and putting back together again, often in the same scene. Sometimes, this approach bogs Obayashi’s films down in irony and pop aestheticism, but when it works like here (not to speak of a masterpiece like Hausu), cheese turns into something more fraught, dangerous, exciting and strange, themes, plots and surface aesthetics going on a merry dance with one another that becomes riveting and singular.

In short: Ghost Story (1981)

Every couple of years, I’ve forgotten enough about John Irvin’s all too free adaptation of Peter Straub’s fantastic eponymous novel to try and change my mind about the film.

Alas, once I start watching, I remember again why I’ll never be able to call this one worth rediscovering, a hidden gem, or anything else positive. The problem really isn’t me here, it is that the film’s just a mess. In part, that’s the fault of a lot of heavy-handed studio intervention that tried to pull the film away from subtlety to more obvious shock effects, as if all that a film needs to be visceral are some often very awkwardly added in shots of a bad looking corpse make-up job. Director John Irvin has quite a bit to answer for, too. The glacial pace in which the film develops through pointless scene and pointless scene of little specific happening is all on him and scriptwriter Lawrence D. Cohen, as are the bizarre tonal shifts between the film’s main timeline and the long, long, way too long flashbacks.

That the film needs to cut back considerable parts of Straub’s novel to fit into anything but a modern mini series runtime (this one could really make a great contemporary streaming series) is obvious. It just seems to wilfully cut out the most important parts of the book, while keeping elements in that do not make sense anymore without what’s been lost. The completely rewritten elements of the film – particular the nature of its big bad - go out of their way to weaken one of the book’s main themes - the destructive force of male fear of women. That the originals many-coloured play with the traditions of the written (or really, told) supernatural tale have gone the way of the dodo is no surprise, but it makes it hard to see the point of the old men telling each other ghost stories at all.

But then, this is a film that makes a big thing out of featuring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and John Houseman in the leads and does sod all with them, focussing on their flashback selves (played by nobody you need to remember), and on Craig Wasson, who, I’m sad to point out, could not act his way out of a wet paper bag, and is actively, wilfully bad here. Alice Krige as our villainess is great, mixing cold anger and strange sensuality perfectly, but again, the film never seems to understand the performance Krige gives (or even what the point of her character is) and simply wastes it on nothing of consequence.

All of this is little improved by Irvin’s failings as a horror director: slow burn horror, shock horror, American Gothic mood, mild (and therefore heavily toned down from the novel) surrealist horror – there’s no mode of the genre you’ll see any ability for here.

Siccîn (2014)

For reasons only known to herself, Öznur (Ebru Kaymakci) has been in rather mad love with her cousin, butcher Kudret (Koray Sahinbas) for a very long time. Even when a black magician (and apparently fortune-teller) foresees that her love will bring her death, she’s unrelenting.

Years later, some time after her lack of love drove her own husband to suicide, apparently, Öznur actually must have managed to sleep with Kudret, for she is now pregnant with his child. Alas, Kudret is now married to Nisa (Pinar Caglar Genctürk), with a blind daughter and a mostly paralysed and bedridden mother-in-law. He’s also, not to put to fine a point on it, a total piece of shit unwilling to take responsibility for anything he does or says: apparently, Öznur “tricked” him into sleeping with her; he’s also at best cold and often enough abusive to his wife, ignores his sick mother in law and sees her as a burden, and is even partially responsible for the sightlessness of his daughter. In any case, he prefers sitting around with his best male buddy to being at home with his family.

When Öznur tells him about her pregnancy, Kudret hits her while berating her to get an abortion, causing a miscarriage, for which he of course does not feel responsible at all.

Disappointingly, this is not a film about the bastard getting his comeuppance. Instead Öznur now goes back to the black magician from before to get him to devise a spell to make Kudret all hers. He’s going for some pig-based djinn conjuring that’s supposed to kill everyone of Kudret’s family but the guy himself. The results are nasty indeed, though not quite as Öznur wanted them to be.

This is the first of a pretty steadily running, and apparently rather popular and commercially successful, series of Turkish horror movies directed by Alper Mestçi. While I am a bit dubious about the film’s moral stance towards who is the greatest asshole in it (it certainly cuts Kudret much more slack than my concept of – admittedly very non-religious - ethical principles would allow), and do certainly find its treatment of Öznur as a character rather problematic, I really can’t argue with the film’s effectiveness as a horror movie. It has an admirable willingness to go into nasty and uncomfortable places, where the most helpless and innocent characters suffer in horrible ways as much as the guilty ones.

Interestingly, while the film’s text always seems to suggest a deeply moralizing streak based on what I assume to be the mainstream values of contemporary Turkish society, in practice, guilty and innocent are suffering alike, here, with punishment for wickedness only arriving once the less wicked characters have suffered and died. Things also do finish in a very sudden way that’s really more 70s downer horror ending than religious horror. As someone unfortunately not terribly knowledgeable about the way religion and worldly life come together to form public morality in Turkey, I’m not quite sure if the film is selling a more nihilist creed under the guise of Islamic horror (try reading something like the The Conjuring films without knowledge of Evangelical Christianity and Warren bullshit to understand what my problems with finding the proper interpretation is), or if this is how this kind of plot is supposed to work out and I’m just misreading it with culturally inappropriate eyes.

What I can say is that Siccîn does contain some highly effective and pleasantly unpleasant set pieces that suggest Mestçi to be a pretty ruthless director of the nastier business in horror. It’s not elegant filmmaking for most of the time, but then, this is clearly a film aiming for your guts and not for whatever organ is responsible for your aesthetic pleasure, really going for it quite unrelentingly once the plot gets going.

In short: The Forever Purge (2021)

This (final time, I believe) around, the Purge movies at least for half of the running time leave their more typical big city surroundings for a rural part of Texas close to El Paso. The film centres on the misadventures of Mexican (illegal) immigrant couple Adela (Ana de la Reguera) and Juan (Tenoch Huerta)  and various people they will have to – sometimes grudgingly – team up with when a heavily armed and well organized insurrection of crazy racists all around the US decides that purging is never going to end (one supposes until all brown people are dead).

Eventually, our heroes – including what’s left of Juan’s former white employers so irony alarm – will have to try and flee to Mexico, before the border closes.

Well, you certainly can’t say that Everardo Valerio Gout’s entry in the never-ending Purge series is quite as lacking in ambition as the – still somewhat entertaining – First Purge movie was. This one at least tries to say something new via the lessons learned of Trumpism and its consequences about what happens when the politics of resentment inevitably slither out of control of the people who once tried to wield them as a weapon. There’s actually some interesting, thoughtful for a pulp politics exploitation movie, subtext about class and race hidden here, the filmmakers clearly making the point that most of the violence in their series happens between people whose socio-economic status should make them allies (in the dictionary sense of the word) rather than enemies.

The problem here is that keeping the usual Purge movie structure centring on a small group of people trying to survive an onslaught of crazy people isn’t a terrible effective way to talk about the film’s bigger concerns. While its focus on characters on the margins of politics and history is perfectly admirable and in keeping with the film’s politics, it also gets in the way of it making the points it attempts to make as clearly as it should. Because we get to see only newsflash snatches of the big picture, we never actually get to see it as anything but a background to the action, instead of it being explored through the action.

Speaking of the action, as an exploitation action movie, The Forever Purge is pretty decent. It lacks the John Carpenter poise of the second Purge film as well as the craziness of the third one, trying to find a middle ground where thematically masked groups of bad guys are still there and accounted for but never get too silly or weird. Which does work as far as it goes, but leaves the action more the bread and butter kind of exciting, never quite selling it as shocking or as bizarre. It’s still perfectly watchable, and certainly trying to not be redundant as a part of its series of films, so I do hold the thumbs of two film critics of your choice up for it.

Music Monday: If the Shoe Does Not Fit Edition

Jailangkung 2 (2018)

Warning: I’ll have to spoil some elements of the first movie in the synopsis!

One might have thought that following the grand finale of the first Jailangkung, ghosties and ghoulies would leave our protagonist family alone for a while at least. Alas, it’s not to be, for there are more than a few troubles coming up only shortly after the end of the first film. As it happens, Bella (still Amanda Rawles) and Rama (still Jefri Nichol) are the only characters who are not actively troubled by something supernatural or psychological at the beginning of this sequel. Bella’s father Ferdi (Lukman Sardi) is still pining after his dead wife rather badly, and has now added quite a bit of guilt for the pain his attempts at coping with his grief via magic have caused his daughters to his hang-ups; on the outside, he’s trying to pretend everything’s alright now to a truly unhealthy degree.

That’s a rather minor problem by the family’s standards now, though, for Bella’s sister Angel (Hannah Al Rashid) is more and more drawn to the mysterious (and clearly evil) insta-baby she gave birth to in a graveyard in the last movie. It’s not taking long, and she’s full on obsessed with the need to protect it from everyone, particularly her own family, with newfound poltergeist style superpowers. Because that’s not enough supernatural trouble for one family, little sister Tasya (Gabriella Quinlyn) – who was mostly a plot device in the first film – is also still missing her mother, and ghostly voices as well as the family tendency to do stupid shit suggest to her that she might use Jailangkung to talk to her. Which, obviously, is not going to turn out well.

In the end, it’s up to Bella and Rama, and a not at all suspicious new student acquaintance of theirs named Bram (Naufal Samudra Weichert), to solve the increasing amount of supernatural troubles hounding them and their loved ones.

Though we also get a couple of scenes with a medium (Ratna Riantiarno) called in by Ferdi, who’ll end up having a magical special effects duel with a flying mantianak. The Warrens never get up to stuff this awesome. Which, of course, only goes to show that returning directing duo Rizal Mantovani and Jose Poernomo do understand well that a sequel needs to escalate things in an audience pleasing manner, and proceed to do just that here.

The Conjuring movies do come to my mind for a reason here, for, while divided by cultural specifics and budgets, both movie series do tend to eschew exploring interesting thematical or character depth, and really go for a mix of horror set pieces and melodramatics to keep their audiences hooked. Jailangkung 2 works very well for me in that regard, thanks to a series of pretty great set pieces (and a complete lack of boring Evangelical Christian demons) that really do climax on a pretty weird and awesome sequence involving our protagonist family, some black magic touting bad guys, our main monster, said medium/exorcist character, a lot of shouting, camera shaking, and peculiar monster fighting techniques.

On the way there, the directors include some very fun other set pieces. A personal favourite starts with a female shape in the background exactly and very creepily mirroring Bella’s movements in an empty and dark gas station, escalating from unease about a bizarre situation into a chase involving more than one spirit. Later on, we also get the rolling heads of dead Dutch colonialists menacing our characters in a lighthouse, with no Jaka Sembung around to kick them away.

It’s all very good fun in a high end haunted house ride manner. For my tastes even more so than the first movie was, because Jailangkung 2 also escalates the weirdness of the supernatural menaces, and if a film is not aiming for serious character work, weirder is usually better in horror. It certainly is here.

Three Films Make A Post: You're in for a shock.

Blood Red Sky (2021): If you want to play cliché bingo with this German Netflix “Die Hard on an airplane with a vampire lady standing in for Bruce Willis” movie, be advised that doing the drinking version might actually kill you. And this abomination directed by Peter Thorwarth (who also co-“wrote”, if that’s the word to use for cribbing this egregious, with German TV veteran Stefan Holtz) really isn’t worth your life. This is the sort of copyist filmmaking that simply can’t get up even an ounce of creative energy, cribbing left and right in the most soulless and joyless manner, ripping off superior movies without the tiniest bit of fun, charm or intelligence but a whole lot of stupidity. Indeed, it’s a movie so stupid, it believes Dominic Purcell is a good casting choice for Die Hard’s John Rickman character, and that it’s tedious repetition of well-worn tropes should scratch on the two hour runtime mark.

On the positive side, it does teach that watching people in vampire makeup running through an airplane does get boring pretty fast.

Jolt (2021): Over at Amazon, Kate Beckinsale is cast as Jason Statham with breasts in a crime action fantasy about a woman so irascible she develops super powers and needs electric jolts to calm herself down hunting down the killers of her prospective boyfriend. It’s also very clichéd, but has a fun, snarky sense of humour and shows some imagination in the way it puts its clichés together. Some scenes show that director Tanya Wexler doesn’t have much experience staging action scenes, but there are just as many that are good bread and butter action fun. It’s a good time right now if you want to see some skulls cracked and balls kicked by a woman (and when wouldn’t you?). I don’t think I exactly need the sequel a surprise Susan Sarandon apparently wants to sell me, but I’d certainly not be set against it completely.

The Scary House aka Das schaurige Haus (2020): Back again at Netflix, we have this Austrian family friendly bit of horror cinema for the YA crowd directed by Daniel Prochaska. You know the drill: after the death of a parent, the rest of the family moves far away into a house in the sticks and encounters ghostly shenanigans caused by a dark secret of the (near) past. The haunting gets resolved, the kids acquire some friends, and some evildoers are punished while the rest of the cast learns a valuable lesson. The film doesn’t treat its material with more originality than the other two flicks in this entry, but Prochaska is pretty good at creating a sense of place for the Austrian village right on the border to Slovenia this takes place in and does deliver some pleasant kid friendly spooks, as well as a couple of effective suspense sequences.

While plot and structure are well-worn, the film takes care to present them with enough conviction they still have weight, so the result is a nice afternoon’s entertainment that features a surprisingly unpleasant backstory – as befits a haunting but isn’t exactly what you’d expect in a movie for the kids these days.

Short Film Friday: Cat With Hands

Well, most anyone reading this (imaginary or real) will probably know this one, but it's still such a great short, it does bear repeating.

In short: Un silencio de tumba (1972/6)

Movie star Annette Lamark (Glenda Allen) and her entourage go for a weekend trip to a rather pretty island she must have bought quite some time ago. Annette’s sister Valerie (Montserrat Prous) is living there all year round with some rather weird domestics, taking care of Annette’s little son and nurturing quite the hatred for Annette in long, dramatic internal monologues.

Among Annette’s usual group of lickspittles is the detective Juan (Alberto Dalbés), apparently a total hottie, though you might not notice when looking at him.

Soon enough, the kid is napped by someone who demands quite a sum of money. Tempers run even higher and more hysterical now, of course, and things don’t get any calmer once someone sabotages the boat connecting the island to the mainland and starts killing some of these arseholes and fools.

I generally prefer the weirder side of great director Jess Franco, and often tend to find his more conventional movies a bit boring. This very Agatha Christie (though based on a novel by Spanish writer Enrique Jarnes) mystery is actually one of the better among the more mainstream Franco movies, building quite a bit of tension out of the melodramatic clichés, certainly helped by a fantastic bit of overacting by Prous (bizarrely cast as the ugly duckling of the sisters) who really works all of those close-ups of her eyes Franco goes for to maximum melodramatic effect. This is also one of Franco’s genuinely pretty efforts, with many picture postcard shot of the island that makes an effective contrast to the nastiness going on between the characters.

The island setting – and the film’s general lack of porniness – do hamper some of Franco’s stylistic fixations. There’s little room for nightclub sequences (though Jess manages to squeeze a bar and some soft, melancholic guitar playing in), and certainly none for zooming through any woman’s nether regions. If that’s a disappointment or a feature, a viewer probably needs to decide for themselves.

In short: The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil (2019)

Original title: 악인전

After a fender bender ends up with the driver of the car that had been bumped into being knifed to death rather enthusiastically by the other party, cop Jeong Tae-seok (Kim Mu-yeol) actually takes time out from uselessly harassing gangster boss Jang Dong-soo (Ma Dong-seok) and develops the theory that the killer is a serial killer whose modus operandi makes it difficult to identify him as such- Apparently, there are really a lot of knife murders in Korean traffic. His boss, with whom he is basically at war because of his private feud against Dong-soo (who happens to be said boss’s other employer, too, so we can’t quite hold this against Tae-seok) does not buy it, particularly not in the typically rude and assholish way Tae-seok is trying to sell it. Obviously, he’s going to keep working the case anyway.

As luck will have it, Jang Dong-soo is the killer’s next prospective victim; he’s just too good at fighting and taking damage to get killed. At first, the gangster interprets the attack as part of an emerging gang war with an old buddy of his, but eventually, he and Tae-seok will team up to get the killer, all the while trying to use and trick each other for their own separate ends.

Lee Won-tae’s thriller mostly lives on style and the abilities of his actors to sell the convoluted plot as theatre of big manly emotions. At the same time, the film is not shying away from portraying its non-serial killing leads as deeply unpleasant and horrible people, in the good tradition of South Korean cinema to never portray a police officer or a gangster completely positively. Though, for once, our main cop is somewhat competent, at least when he gets off his ass to do something a bit more advanced than punching people. We do get enough of the punching, too, obviously – and of course also of Ma Dong-seok using his physicality rather impressively.

The film isn’t too bad at mixing the clichés and tropes of the cop and gangster love/hate fest and that of the serial killer thriller quite productively, making some of it curiously surprising via the remixing of tropes despite lacking all surface originality.

So there’s a lot of very stylishly staged genre fun to have here, with big performances, big drama and big violence. Well, until the final twenty minutes or so arrive, when the film’s going for a really overcooked final plot twist, all the while shouting how awesome capital punishment for the mentally ill is. Which is not a great look for The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil to go out on, if you ask me.

In short: Jailangkung (2017)

When their father Ferdi (Lukman Sardi) falls into a mysterious, medically inexplicable coma, sisters Bella (Amanda Rawles) and Angel (Hannah Al Rashid) learn some rather disquieting facts about what he has been up to during the last years. Apparently, their father has regularly retreated into a secret house in Eastern Java when they thought he was jetting around the country doing charity work. There, he attempted to contact the spirit of his dead wife, their mother, with the help of something called Jailangkung, a divination ritual that uses an abstracted sort of puppet (and about which you can find some more information here, keeping in mind that the film uses a pretty different variant of what’s described in the article). Eventually, he did indeed manage to have a chat or two with the dead woman, but he also accidentally invited something terrible into his life that is the reason for his illness now.

With the help of Bella’s friend Rama (Jefri Nichol), who studies the supernatural from a religious-mystical angle, the sisters attempt to help Ferdi where medicine won’t. At first, though, these attempts only cause further problems in the form of more supernatural ingressions.

To my mind, Jailangkung’s co-director Rizal Mantovani (here working with Jose Poernomo as a co-director) was on of the best directors in the last big Indonesian horror boom. This later movie is not on the level of something like the original Kuntilanak trilogy, but it’s a fine, fun piece of Indonesian horror nonetheless. The film’s major missteps mostly concern its treatment of the familial relations of its characters with its tendency towards the saccharine, which does undermine some of the film’s darker strings of thought somewhat.

This is, after all, a film whose inciting incident is caused by a man who is at once incredibly grief-stricken and completely unable to communicate the depth of his grief to his daughters, rather turning to weird folk magic than revealing what’s actually going on with him emotionally. This would probably hit harder and be more thematically resonant when it would actually show in what we see of the family relationships instead of incessant niceness and willingness to sacrifice.

On the other hand, Mantovani and Poernomo do have quite a bit of fun with the supernatural business at hand, going through all kinds of spooky shenanigans, from a ghost riding on Dad’s back to a very sudden and rather disquieting supernatural pregnancy, including a ghost ambulance and delivery in a graveyard. The hauntings are often shot with a nice sense for the appropriately spooky mood and a total willingness to get weird. Thanks to the set-up, this huge diversity in supernatural occurrences even makes sense beyond the needs of not boring an audience. It’s always nice when filmmakers put at least a little thought into these things, and that goes doubly so when thought leads to making a film more entertaining (in the appropriately creepy manner).

Music Monday: Footwear Edition

A Howling in the Woods (1971)

Having had enough of what must have been the endless bullshit of her fashion photographer husband Eddie (Larry Hagman), young and beautiful (as the film will never stop saying, so I’ll just do as I’m told here) Liza Crocker (Barbara Eden) returns to the home of her father in the very rural small town she hasn’t visited for half a decade, to lick her wounds, planning to stay there long enough to establish residence and be able to put in for a divorce.

But Liza’s father isn’t there at all. Apparently, he has already embarked on his yearly archaeological – or is is anthropological - expedition into parts remote where no telephone can reach. At least her stepmother Rose (Vera Miles) provides our heroine a warm welcome, as does the Rose’s son Justin (John Rubinstein) whom Liza meets for the first time. One might even suggest that Justin’s a little too warm, though Liza seems charmed.

These two are pretty much the only ones greeting out heroine with open arms, however. The rest of the town’s population treats her with disregard to outright rudeness Liza can’t explain to herself, as if she were some kind of pariah everyone she once knew was just all too happy to see go. Or is it jealousy for her big city success?

There is, indeed the kind of dark secret hanging over the town you’d expect to encounter in a modern Nordic noir rather than an innocent little NBC TV movie like this. It all has to do with the drowning murder of a little girl some months ago, and with what the town’s people, once properly riled, proceeded to do afterwards.

I know very little about the career of A Howling in the Woods’ director Daniel Petrie beyond his humungous filmography (much of it in TV and family movies), but this thriller is certainly not an achievement to sneeze at, whatever I think about the rest of the guy’s work whenever I may encounter it. Petrie has a firm grip on his film’s not uncomplicated plot, timing his reveals well and turning the town this takes place in into the sort of community that’d only need one good werewolf or vampire to turn into a complete American rural gothic nightmarescape. Though, as it turns out, humans do pretty well in the monster business too.

The film creates an effective sense of Liza’s increasing paranoia, very efficiently suggesting how much her new experience in her old home diverges from what she remembers, using the inexplicability of this change to ratchet up the tension. If you’re not Liza, the film is also suggesting that there always has been something darker under the surfaces she knew, the kind of violence and darkness that needs another act of violence as a catalyst to come to the surface, but which only ever seems to be just waiting for that kind of excuse.

There’s some great acting on display, too, Eden (while about ten years older than her character is probably meant to be) making a likeable and often rather tough heroine, Hagman – who of course pops in during the course of the movie to convince his wife of taking him back via the power of being obnoxious - making pretty clear the difference between meaning well and knowing how to express it, and Rubinstein showing himself as really rather good at being a creep.

It’s a satisfying little movie that uses a complicated and not completely probable plot as an excellent excuse for a thriller that’s also interested in the dark heart of communal life.

Three Films Make A Post: Killing for Two

Blood Born (2021): While this is a thing that has gotten better outside of the big blockbuster business (where the problem is probably caused by an audience that expects quantity for the not inconsiderable sums cinemas and Disney+ VIP ask for a ticket), there are still quite a few films that feel the need to blow forty-five minutes of material up to ninety elsewhere, too. An example is this sometimes somewhat satirical horror movie by Reed Shusterman about the horrors of childbirth and childlessness as exemplified via a childless couple turning to a weird sorcerer company for a last chance at breeding. There are a couple of fun, even poignant ideas in here, but everything feels too drawn out, the film repeating ideas much too often, losing the kick it could and should have because it needs to fill out one of those ninety minute cinema slots that don’t actually exist for films of this type anymore.

Kandisha (2020): I never got as much out of French directing and writing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s much-loved first film Inside but absolutely loved their second one, the supernatural giallo fairy tale Livide. Their newest effort, Kandisha, doesn’t quite work for me, alas. I really like their portrayal of their three urban poor (and therefore two-thirds brown and black) teenage protagonists and the world they inhabit, their avoidance of poverty porn without denying the pain of poverty, and the quick and sure creation of the world their characters people. The supernatural element, on the other hand, despite being based on actual folklore, is curiously bland. The titular entity’s activities are as generic as possible, never connecting with the characters on anything but the level of physical threat. Disconnected as it is from the rest of the film, it might as well be a leprechaun.

Prevenge (2016): Returning to the horrors of pregnancy, writer/director/star Alice Lowe’s movie about a woman driven to murder the people she holds responsible for the death of her husband by the voice of her unborn child, does a rather more effective job at pregnancy horror than Blood Born. In part, that’s “simply” because of Lowe’s sharp, macabre and very funny writing (and her perfectly fitting lead performance). Yet it is also because her film expresses so many of the negative things about pregnancy, children and guilt we as a society dislike very much to talk about in such a brutally efficient yet compassionate manner. At the same time, the film finds quite a bit of unexpected genre resonance beyond macabre comedy and vengeance movie, effortlessly suggesting fairy lore and folklore and their dark undergrowth of the human spirit without ever making grand gestures towards these things.

Frightful Friday: Kisaragi Station

This is a very neat - if typo-infested - animated adaptation of one of the classics of Japanese creepypasta.  Japanese creepypasta is a fascinating parallel world when you're mostly experienced with the US/UK version of the genre, with elements you'll recognize very well indeed, and others you'd never encounter in Western variations of the form.

In short: Zombie A-Hole (2012)

Frank Fulci (Josh Eal), zombie and other supernatural nasty hunter with a cowboy fixation is on the hunt for the titular Zombie A-Hole. Said undead (Brandon Salkil) is demonically possessed, nearly unkillable, and a very dapper dresser. He’s also going around the backroads of the USA, murdering female twins, and then some more female twins, and then even more female twins. This hunt is a bit personal for Frank, because of course it is.

Also looking for Frank’s enemy are a mysterious one-eyed, one-handed woman with some home-made utility hands (Jessica Cook) and the zombie’s twin brother Castor (also Brandon Salkil) – and yes, before he was the Zombie A-hole, our antagonist was indeed called Pollux. Eventually, team-ups and flashbacks to tragic backstories will occur.

I don’t love – or even like – all of the many films Dustin Mills has made in the last decade or so, but Zombie A-Hole is certainly a film with its very own room in my heart. This is the really indie sort of indie horror, held together by spit, creativity and whatever money and talent a filmmaker can scrounge up; it’s also the sort of indie horror I’m only writing about very irregularly, because many of these films are simply not very good when you’re neither the filmmakers nor their relations (groups that tend to have quite the overlap), but also made with so much love that talking about them only to rip them to pieces seems mean-spirited and pointless to me.

This one, however, actually is really rather good, in the way a short, sharp, smutty punk rock song is good, or a rusty but polished fender is, feeling as if it were built out of old pulpy horror comics, a love for the weird side of gore, and Southern Americana. Technically, this is obviously in parts pretty rough, and looks cheap, but Mills usually wrangles these problems into becoming part of an aesthetic, especially thanks to his often very sharp editing, and effects that dare to just go there. There’s a lot of visual imagination and highly creative staging of scenes here, also, often used in ways a professional/mainstream filmmaker would never do things because they are just not slick enough or simply too weird (that’s a compliment). The result is perhaps not always clean, but more often than not surprising and atmospheric, and practically always perfect for the film’s attitude and its peculiar sense of humour.

Personally, despite the many good gore gags in the movie, I would have wished for fewer twin killing scenes – the ungodly number of them really isn’t terribly good for the film’s pacing. But otherwise, this one turned out to be absolutely worth my while as a film with a genuine spark.

Cry for the Strangers (1982)

Psychiatrist Brad Russell (Patrick Duffy) and his wife Elaine (Cindy Pickett) are moving away from the city to a supposedly quiet little coastal town. As luck will have it, it’s the same place where the family of one of Brad’s child patients has moved to. Little Robbie (Shawn Carson) apparently suffered from an incurable case of ADHD (or something, it’s probably better not to think about it). Yet somehow, something about the place seems to have cured him and turned him “normal” (ugh).

Well, as normal as sneaking out each and every stormy night and watching some “Indian” (I’d use the more correct term “Native American” here, if these weren’t very much bad movie “Indians”) ghosts doing their sacrificial dance gets. Despite the local Sheriff (Brian Keith) mostly pretending everything’s great, there’s something else wrong with the place too. There is a history of strangers dying or getting killed on stormy nights, and it’s pretty clear the death toll is a bit too heavy to be explained by happenstance.

Brad and Elaine kinda-sorta start looking into things on their own, finding dark secrets on their way to a pretty bizarre truth.

As it is based on a John Saul novel, one should not go into this TV horror movie expecting a terribly sensible backstory or much of a plot, though I have to admit the final reveal as it is presented here is perfectly hysterical in all meanings of that word. That’s of course worth quite a bit in my sad little life.

Plus, while the narrative isn’t more than a series of clichés too well-worn for most mainstream horror writers even in 1982, the film was directed by the sometimes great, sometimes terrible Peter Medak. And in his good months, that man really knew how to create a proper macabre mood. He is, after all the director of one of the best ghost stories ever made for the big screen, The Changeling (a film I’ve apparently, scandalously, never written about). This one obviously isn’t on the level of that masterpiece – turns out Patrick Duffy is no George C. Scott – but it is an often striking and always entertaining effort.

Medak makes excellent use of location shots and the coastal setting, using all kinds of camera and direction tricks to turn the place properly creepy, generally working around the problems of plot logic and coherence by slathering on a thick mood of the American Gothic, enhancing the small town shenanigans and (mildly) dark secrets of the place with rather a lot of bad weather. Thanks to Medak’s experience working on lower budgets, the film usually gets around letting its TV budget seams show to often or too heavily. There is, however a certain shot of storm clouds that’s going to repeat again and again when you are watching this. The first two or three times, it’s actually a nice and moody enough shot, emphasising the importance of the weather to the shenanigans on the beach, but after the tenth or so time, it mostly begs the question why CBS had only footage of one single stormy sky in its archives.

For many, Cry for the Strangers’ other big weakness is going to be the final reveal of what’s really going on (or is it?), and the way it expresses its pretty damn silly idea in the most scenery-chewing way imaginable, ending a film that was up to that point holding its own rather well as a silly yet seriously made movie on a note of rather exalted crapness and camp, something that isn’t helped at all by the wild and absurd performance of a certain veteran actor which looks like an attempt to get hired by John Waters. It’s certainly not going to help with anyone ever taking this one seriously, but it’s also the sort of glorious “what the heck were they thinking” moment that makes a film very memorable indeed. If probably not for the reasons filmmakers want you to remember their work, but then, what the heck were they thinking?

In short: Babysitter Must Die (2020)

aka Josie Jane: Kill the Babysitter

Apparently, the end of the world as we know it is pretty easily achieved. It’ll only take a home invasion in a very special house with something very bad secretly slumbering under it (locked up but not guarded), and a bit of ritual sacrifice of the unknowing family living there, while these sacrifices are wearing some very special masks also conveniently hidden in the same house. So do at least say three rather hapless cultists (Melinda Yaeman, Nic Fitzgerald and Nathan Stevens). Little do they expect that the main problem standing between them and their pined-for Armageddon isn’t their inability to actually find the stupid masks, but the family’s babysitter Josie (Riley Scott). Josie has acquired every single summer camp merit badge imaginable, and is therefore, once roused, an excellent anti-cultist warrior who can only be beaten by a horror movie bullshit ending.

Well, say what you will about this okay home invasion movie by Kohl Glass (who apparently started in the Kickstarter-funded kind of indie movie), but adding cultist and some pulp cosmicist lore to the standard home invasion tropes does make the old lady look a lot livelier again. Not that this is the only film trying to work that kind of magic on the tale of those bad, bad poor people beleaguering the totally innocent rich, but I still appreciate the effort.

The resulting film is certainly no masterpiece or future major cult hit, but as a focussed low budget bread and butter horror comedy, this is not bad at all. Glass certainly knows how to pace these things, entering the actual home invasion meat of the film as quickly as possible, only providing us with enough backstory and the two or three character traits Josie needs to keep a viewer’s interest, and then letting things commence.

The suspense set pieces as well as the humour are decently staged and realized – they only lack some final bits of imagination to make them special instead of solid. This is rather more pedestrian than something like the comparable Becky but still fun enough to watch.

In short: Sundown Edition

Night (1996)

A group of fearless yet not terribly competent vampire hunters go up against an undead 1930s gangster (Richard Cutler), mostly for personal reasons. It doesn’t go terribly well for our heroes, until the lead vampire is killed in the most ignominious way since that thing with Dracula and the bush nobody likes to talk about.

Directed, written, shot, produced by Glenn Andreiev, who is also co-starring as the film’s Renfield, Night is one of the more interesting shot on video movies of its era. It does, of course, have many of the problems we’re used to from this sort of thing, so the acting is of varying degrees of badness, the sound and sound editing are sometimes dubious, and the script is not exactly professional. Furthermore, the editing – and really, all technical aspects of the film – isn’t just rough around the edges but also around the middle, turning the action sequences more into anti-action sequences. The film’s general look is SOV-typical, which is to say, mostly ugly.

However, if you can cope with all that – and if you want to approach 90s SOV horror, you simply need to or might just as well give up on the project altogether – Night has actually quite a few things to recommend it. While the plotting isn’t up to any professional standards, the film does understand that it is best to drop most of the exposition and explanations and drop the audience in medias res into the vampire plot, starting things up at a point in the narrative when things are actually beginning to happen, and never letting up showing something of interest or fun to the audience with every scene. Scenes are generally as long or short as they need to be (though the transitions to the next are botched more often than not), and there’s none of the pointlessly meandering quality you often get in these films. Andreiev, it appears, knows what he wants and even mostly how to get there, and isn’t terribly interested in the in-between, which is a particular virtue in a realm of filmmaking where there’s neither money nor space for that in-between anyway.

The film’s other big strength is its often surprisingly fun imagination, coming up with interesting and weird details that can make parts of the film actually memorable. The vampire as an old school gangster angle for example is pretty wonderful, the old undead now using the power of crack cocaine to control people to do his bidding by day, clearly reliving his glory days. It also provides opportunity for some really terrible “I’m a junkie” acting.

I also can’t help but admire a filmmaker for casting himself as a semi-comical turncoat and Renfield-type character who always misses out on being on time for his evil deeds because he’s perpetually distracted by videos catering to his very particular kinks. Also appearing in the film’s gallery of weird character ideas are a bare-chested bodybuilder vampire (who really needs quite some killing), a random guy (billed as the “Balloonatic” in the credits) who drives around in a car full of balloons to cope with his anxiety (spoiler: balloons are no help against vampires), and a handful of very awkward but also absurdly enthusiastically acted fight scenes.

While all of this has the patented SOV “like crap” look, there’s often surprisingly effective blocking, Andreiev making more use of the (small) possibilities of video than you’d expect, at least here.

Obviously, all of this won’t make Night a good film in most viewers’ books, but to my eyes, it’s fun, sometimes pleasantly imaginative and never boring, really rather exceeding the tiny hopes I usually have for SOV material.