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.