As regularly as Christmas (or a different festival of your choice) comes around

I'm going to take a bit of a break from the blog for a couple of weeks. I wish all of my readers - imaginary, real, or both - a fine, debaucherous or quiet time, and will be back to my usual shenanigans on January, 6th.

In short: Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022)

Tori Tooms (Riley Dandy) really just wants to drink away small town Christmas Eve, perhaps with some added sexual debauchery with her long time buddie Robbie Reynolds (Sam Delich), at least that’s what everybody they meet believes when witnessing their shouty mating dance of musical allusions and bad sexual innuendo.

Alas, the robot Santa (Abraham Benrubi) from the toy shop of Tori’s best friends malfunctions and begins a killing spree through everyone our somewhat abrasive heroine holds dear (as well as anyone else it encounters). This is the sort of thing that’ll happen when a company’s robot Santas are built on military technology, apparently.

Given the colour schemes of most of his films, it was only ever a question of time until Joe Begos was going to make a film set on Christmas. The resulting movie is pretty much what I expected it to be: very, very red even when no blood is on screen, full of characters unable to communicate in any other way but drunk shouting, editing that tends to the abrasive, often bordering on the physically aggressive. There’s pretty rude, yet damn funny, humour, characters that shouldn’t be likeable but feel both likeable and authentic, and a finely developed sense of general low budget carnage that’s as much reason for Begos’s aesthetic as it is a result of it.

That Begos’s general approach and the punky/grungy air of the film can annoy the hell out of anyone not in the mood for being shouted at for eighty minutes, or ever, is obvious; when you are, there’s really very little like the man’s movies.

Vikrant Rona (2022)

aka VR

Several decades ago (the film officially speaks of “almost half a century”, and I’m not sure if this is supposed to mean the late 70s or the early 80s). A small Indian village somewhere in the middle of a tropical forest is hit by a series of possibly supernatural occurrences and serial killings that suggest a nasty occult ritual is going on. One of the victims is the village’s chief of police. The place is also basically overrun by smugglers, so there is the potential of all of this being a nastier version of the old Dr Syn gambit.

In a curious twist of fate and very suddenly, extremely macho cop Vikrant Rona (Sudeep) appears in the village. He quickly starts taking care of business, swaggering and threatening when he isn’t actually investigating. He’s clearly stirring something up, too, for there is a series of attempts on his life. Though, to be fair, these may very well be caused by all the testosterone the guy is oozing causing allergies.

Freshly returned to the village, young Sanju (Nirup Bhandari) becomes also involved in the investigation, in between bouts of wooing the delightful Panna (Neetha Ashok). These two start on their own parallel investigation that will eventually lead them to a rather horrifying suspicion.

I believe Anup Bhandari’s Vikrant Rona is the first Kannada language movie I’ve seen or written about here. Sensibility-wise, the film is close enough to what I’ve known of contemporary Hindi or Telugu cinema, so it wasn’t much of a problem for me to appreciate its brand of stylized, sometimes wonderfully moody, sometimes loveably silly, slickness. Tonally, I’d actually compare it with Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee movies from Hong Kong, only that Vikrant Rona mixes its twisty mystery with a smidgen of horror not with wuxia but with a bit of melodrama and action in the patented Indian manner.

The action is of the wonderfully overblown and entertainingly overdirected style that’s typically for most of what I’ve seen coming from India right now, in its own way as disinterested in proper fighting techniques as a modern wuxia or a superhero movie, going for maximum loudness, heft, and visual impact. Which can go terribly wrong in the hands of some directors (repeat “Michael Bay” ten times in front of a mirror and he will appear, but only for a tenth of a second, because then the first edit happens) but is just a whole lot of fun here. Particularly enjoyable are an early fight scene on a smuggler boat during a storm that also moonlights as a bit of a musical number, meant to establish Vikrant Rona’s bona fides as an asskicker, and the grand finale that starts as one of the more insane (that’s a compliment) dance numbers I’ve seen and turns into a riot of stunts, peculiar fighting techniques and colours. But whenever else VR punches someone, it is still the beginning of a very good time for the audience.

Speaking of musical numbers, while I’m not the biggest fan of the heavy use of autotune as a vocal effect on generally already very high voices some of the music has going on, as a friend of 70s Hindi cinema, I was rather happy with the pretty traditional way most of them were integrated into the plot, usually to express intensified emotions via choreography that’s just as fun in its own way as the action sequences are.

Speaking of “fun”, given the nature of the killings in the film and certain elements of the plot I’m not going to spoil, I found myself surprised by the general sense of it during the proceedings. It’s not that the film doesn’t have a sense of or respect for its own Indian Gothic (for lack of a better term) elements and the emotional heft of some of the story it is telling, it’s just that these elements so regularly are subsumed under VR’s absurdly overblown machismo (so overblown I couldn’t even get annoyed at it) and the joyful way the film throws out its many, many twists and turns (some of which are pretty damn obvious, some come as really cool surprises I wouldn’t have believed this particular film to get up to), this film of terrible secrets of the past, family suicide and child murder never feels all that emotionally threatening. And because the Vikrant Rona really is that fun, this isn’t an actual weakness but just the basic facts of its nature.

In short: Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out (1989)

Surprisingly, Silent Night, Deadly Night 2’s killer Ricky (now played by Bill Moseley) survived the fatal shooting at the end of a film that mostly consisted of flashbacks and retcons (and about which I just have nothing to say). He’s now comatose, has his brain encased in a plexiglass dome with a puddle of sloshing fluid inside, and is subject to various experiments conducted by Dr Newbury (Richard Beymer), the guy who reconstructed his brain.

For reasons, Newbury is trying to establish a psychic connection between Ricky and blind Laura (Samantha Scully). This turns out to be a very bad idea – who’d have thunk? – when either a rambunctious Santa Claus or the psychic connection awakens Ricky from his slumber and sends him on a killing spree towards Laura, her brother Chris (Eric DaRe) and his girlfriend Jerri (Laura Harring).

SNDN3: BWO, for reasons that I believe would blow everyone’s minds so badly, it is better not disclose them, directed by the great Monte Hellman, really suffers from a lack of Christmas mood. It’s all well and good having your killer wear a cake topper on his head, but when your film is part of a series that was until now all about the supposed shock value of dressing up your killer as Santa, it does miss the mark just a wee bit. If someone would at least have drawn a reindeer on the thing…

But I digress. On paper, this is actually a rather interesting movie. Hellman – who scrapped the original script for the film and wrote his own – clearly wants to make a slasher with a bit more character depth than is typical of the genre, adding more and deeper character interactions, showing actual interest in this aspect of the film. In this, he is thwarted by two things: first and foremost, the cast is completely unable to provide the nuance you’d need for this to work. Particularly Scully is dreadful, unable to even give the mildest movie interpretation of blindness, not to speak of convincingly suggesting emotional depth beyond a pouty rudeness that is probably supposed to be part of her reaction to trauma, but only comes over as unpleasantness in the performance.

Secondly, all those scenes of actors trying desperately to emote cut down on the slasher business at hand badly, and turn Ricky into the blandest killing machine alive.

That Hellman isn’t exactly the greatest suspense director on the planet is not of great help there, either, and so most of the killings and theoretical murder set pieces feel bland and uninvolving. As does the rest of the film, really.

Music Monday: As Always (Goodbye Mimi)

The Barge People (2018)

Sisters Kat (Kate Davies-Speak) and Sophie (Natalie Martins) are going on a barging holiday on the British canals with their respective boyfriends, the eminently likeable Mark (Mark McKirdy) and the eminently punchable banker Ben (Matt Swales). There are some tensions between the men, what with Ben being a total twat, but things do seem to go well enough. That is, until Ben manages to provoke the – admittedly easily provokable – ire of some people actually living on the canals (among them British low budget horror regular Makenna Guyler).

The English barge-dwelling version of the more common US backwoods murder hick isn’t going to be the quartet’s main problem for long, for there is also a school of human-eating fish-person mutants to cope with.

Director (and often editor, producer and writer) Charlie Steeds has been making a pretty astonishing number of movies in the last half decade or so, wildly varying in tone and horror subgenre. Those I’ve seen by now are all very low budget but a far cry above quite a bit of your typical amateur or semi-professional genre movies. That’s mostly thanks to a mixture of actual filmmaking chops on the side of Steeds and his cohorts behind and before the camera and an impression of drive and energy that suggests these films to be made by people who’d make movies independently of how much money they can scratch together. There’s also an air of this being made by an actual troupe, with actors and off-camera talent recurring again and again in various films in different mixtures, the sort of thing otherwise only Mike Flanagan seem to still get away with on a higher budget level. This approach can – and does certainly do in the case of Steeds’s Dark Temple Motion Pictures – lead to films that feel just that decisive bit more personal, like actual labours of love.

The Barge People with its wild mix of elements of a good handful of exploitation and horror sub-genres certainly feels like such a labour of love, with a director who clearly hasn’t just seen a lot of genre movies but also learned why they use the tricks they use and how to apply these to his own work productively; a script – this time around not by Steeds but by Christopher Lombard – that uses and mixes genre tropes with verve and intelligence, and an acting ensemble that can actually act.

That last point is of course not always a given on this budget level, and also helps The Barge People to avoid my greatest bugbear with contemporary lowest budget/DIY horror – dialogue scenes that are slow like molasses, and start too early to then go on and on and on until they arrive nowhere, too late. Here, acting and dialogue are tight, get to the point the film wants to make with them, and then end when they should. Pacing is one of Steeds’s strengths in any case, so The Barge People not only zips along nicely for most of the time but also knows when it is actually useful for it to slow down. So there’s an actual rhythm to the film that’s not easy to reach on the cheap, when reshoots and unlimited time to get a scene just right are most certainly not on the table.

Also rather nice are the copious scenes of gore. Realized practically, the effects are just the right side of not being realistic, so that the gore elements are eminently fun. Admittedly, the fish mutant masks are less than perfect, but these guys are such natty dressers, I can’t say I find myself caring about this as a weakness one lick.

Finally, as someone who has historically gone on about the importance for low budget cinema of any kind to mix the filmmakers’ favourite genre tropes (let’s call it the genre universal) with elements of local specificity, I can’t help but love a film that does variations on backwoods horror on the English canal system. I’m not sure that Robert Aickman or L.T.C. Rolt would have approved of this particular usage, but I’m all too happy about it.

Three Films Make A Post: Vengeance for the right price

The Duel at Silver Creek (1952): This was the first western Don Siegel directed, and in its first act, it does feel somewhat insecure. How much of this is Siegel or just the curiously structured script by Gerald Drayson Adams and Joseph Hoffman that goes through plot and character set-ups with maximum awkwardness isn’t quite clear. Once the film has set into its groove, and every character is actually where they need to be for the real plot to start, things improve markedly. The tale of men’s friendship (between Stephen McNally and Audie Murphy), an evil brother-sister pair (Gerald Mohr and Faith Domergue) pretending to be extremely upstanding or into marshals, and other complications isn’t terribly original by western standards of the time, but Siegel and the cast provide the whole affair with a lot of energy.

Dead for a Dollar (2022): Energy is rather what this new attempt by the great Walter Hill to get back to his old form lacks; the storytelling meanders enough to rob the film of much of its potential drive, and certainly of any actual tension. There’s still quite a bit to like here, though. The cast, particularly Rachel Brosnahan and Christoph Waltz (as well as Willem Dafoe when he’s actually in the movie), do sink their teeth into characters of a type that doesn’t make one wonder why Hill dedicates this one to the late, great western director Budd Boetticher. And while the action isn’t much to write home about (in a Hill movie!), the final shoot-out sees the man regaining some of his old powers in this area.

Mr. Vampire Part 3 aka 靈幻先生 (1987): If you’re looking for much new in the third entry into the deservedly classic Mister Vampire series from Hong Kong, you might be disappointed. If you come for Lam Ching-Ying’s monobrow, and an incredible amount of stunts, slapstick and slapstick stunts and more throw-away visual gags in any given scene than most movies pack into their full runtimes, director Ricky Lau has you covered again, zipping through jokes and fights with abandon and enthusiasm. And hey, we’re fighting a wildwoman style sorceress this time instead of hopping vampires, so there’s that as well.

Short Film Friday: Into the Night

In short: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Little Billy (Danny Wagner) is a magnet for Christmas trauma. First his institutionalized grandpa horrifies him with a traditionally dark interpretation of Santa Claus, then his mother and father are murdered – the mother nearly raped as well – by a robber dressed as Santa Claus. The nun-run orphanage he ends up in afterwards offers the kid no peace either, for the Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin) has no patience with his not exactly surprising Christmas trauma and abuses him quite efficiently.

Ten years later, when he’s 18 (and now played by Robert Brian Wilson), Billy gets a job in a large toy store, because that’s exactly the place where you want a guy who loses it every December to work at. Not surprisingly, once his boss passes the job of the store Santa onto the kid, it takes only one little additional thing to make him crack completely. And wouldn’t you know it, seeing his secret store crush (Toni Nero) pair up with the work asshole is just the push Billy needed. Thus, he goes on a Santa Claus rampage, finding reasons to put quite a few people on the naughty list with whatever axe he’s got to hand.

If Charles E. Sellier Jr.’s Silent Night, Deadly Night demonstrates one thing, it’s that there’s a reason why most slashers don’t spend their first half on the exact way their killers become psychologically damaged: once you’ve spent so much time with a character – even if he’s as badly acted as Billy – and seen so much of the trauma that destroys him as a person, he simply doesn’t work as the kind of monstrous, inhuman killing machine a killer in a slasher needs to be to function. Sure, there’s the possibility of a really good or intelligent filmmaker to do exactly this and make something very interesting and meta out of it, but that certainly doesn’t apply to Sellier or this film (nor to Rob Zombie).

Instead, we get a film whose two halves have little tonal or emotional connection with one another. The first half is theoretically interesting as the beginning of a psychological thriller, but simply too awkwardly written, directed and acted to work as that; and the second is a pretty bland slasher that never makes as much out of the Christmas gimmick as you’d hope for. There are a couple of scenes where at least the contrast between 70s Christmas mood and slasher sleaze gets somewhat fun, and Linnea Quigley getting killed by antlers is a pretty great gag, but otherwise, there’s very little here to get me in the proper, murderous Christmas spirit.

Significant Other (2022)

Warning: while I’m not going to go into details about the film’s big moment in the middle, I’ll talk around it in a way that might be considered a spoiler to some!

Long-time couple Ruth (Maika Monroe) and Harry (Jake Lacy) are going on a backtracking trip somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

It’s all Jake’s idea, really, for he has done a lot of this sort of thing before he met Ruth, and genuinely wants her to appreciate this thing he loves. It’s not a good idea, mind you. For while Ruth clearly is as much in love with Harry as he is with her, she is also a tightly packed bundle of anxieties and depression for whom a camping trip in the wilds even with the person she loves most in the world is sheer terror. Given that none of this is news to Harry, it’s a bit of mystery why he believes this situation will be the ideal moment to ask Ruth to marry him, but there you have it.

As if relationship troubles weren’t bad enough, things turn rather horrible when Ruth makes a discovery inside of a cave.

And that’s really where I like to leave the plot of Dan Berk’s and Robert Olsen’s Significant Other, for the big middle plot development is the sort of thing I think a viewer needs to experience all by themselves. Apart from being clever but not annoyingly so, it certainly escalates the situation for and between the characters in a pretty terrible way. It’s also absolutely of a piece with the portrayal of a fraught but loving relationship we’ve seen before, still letting the film speak about its themes while turning things dramatically horrific in a manner that resonates with all that surrounds it.

It’s at this point of the proceedings where it becomes clear how good the performances of Monroe and Lacy actually are, as well as how cleverly the script and the actors work together to make certain things ambiguous without cheating the audience or betraying the characters. Monroe, having been in quite a few classics or semi-classics of fantastic cinema by now, always seems a bit underrated to me, mostly because her acting style on the surface seems to fall into the “pretty face, big eyes, sloping shoulders” kind of cliché. In actuality, she has a lot of nuance, making little shifts in expression, posture and emotional projection that suggest she is putting quite a bit of thought into her characters and position whoever she is playing as a believable human being in often quite strange circumstances. Lacy for his part manages to play through some major shifts in a very organic feeling manner, until he comes to a point where he can really milk certain developments for maximum creepiness (with a good sense of the emotionally grotesque).

Apart from turning into a very clever piece of science fiction horror, Significant Other is also highly effective and thoughtful as the portrayal of a relationship in which one of the partners suffers from mental illness, specifically depression and social anxieties. For once, writer/directors actually seem to understand how frustratingly like self-sabotage these things can feel for the person suffering from them, how dispiriting and undermining of one’s trust in oneself, to the point where one can love somebody with all one’s heart, but can never convince oneself one is actually good enough for them. And because the film really does understand, it doesn’t make Ruth or Harry the asshole in this situation – even though Harry’s attempt at turning Ruth into an outdoors person seems very misguided – and doesn’t question their love or commitment. All of which makes the horror plot hit all the harder, of course.

In short: When the Screaming Starts (2021)

Norman Graysmith (Jared Rogers) is a low-rent documentary filmmaker with delusional hopes for greatness. He believes he has found the perfect subject for becoming a bigshot when he gets wind of a guy who has clearly just as delusional hopes of becoming a serial killer. Aidan Mendle (Ed Hartland) is not much of a creep, clearly lacking in the negative qualities that make a true killer instead of a sad shlub like you or me, and it’s pretty clear that much of his ambition comes from his dead-eyed girlfriend Claire (Kaitlin Reynell). Attempts at actually killing somebody go sideways, so Aidan, always pushed on by creepy Claire and the ever exploitative Norman, decides to become a serial killer cult leader like Charles Manson instead.

He does manage to recruit a group of creeps and weirdos, but once the group is assembled and actually starts to do some killing, it turns out that Aidan might have found an actual monster among the idiots willing to join a cult lead by him. The kind of monster even Norman’s supreme egotism might not be able to exploit.

When the Screaming Starts’s main thematic pull about the exploitative documentary filmmaker/internet personality/whatever who is actually a greater monster than those monsters he tries to exploit is not exactly news in the realm of the fake documentary (I’m not a fan of the word mockumentary for its suggestion of parody of the form), but Conor Boru’s film, as co-written by Boru and Hartland, is making the point well enough that originality isn’t too much of a concern for me.

Particularly since there’s a lot more going on in the film than that: this is also a film about the absurdity of aspirations one doesn’t have the least bit of talent for – obvious with Aidan but also in Norman’s case –, hilariously unhealthy relationships, and also the ridiculousness and unpleasantness of serial killer fan culture. It does talk about all of these things with humour that reaches from the silly, the awkward and the grotesque to moments of surprising subtlety. The humour can, obviously, get rather dark indeed, but the film knows when not to be funny as well, so the murder set pieces could mostly run in a non-comedic film in the same accomplished way they do here, which makes scenes like the party the killer team get up to after their first mass slaughter all the more funny by contrast.

There’s quite a bit of good character work happening here, too. Even though When the Screaming does of course use comedic caricatures, it knows quite well which characters not to overdraw too much to keep character relations as more than elements of comedy bits, thus providing a much more satisfying emotional connection than it would otherwise.

Music Monday: New Christmas Rituals

Horror Hospital (1973)

aka The Computer Killers

After witnessing a cold open in which a gentleman we’ll quickly enough learn is Dr Christian Storm (Michael Gough) and his little person assistant Frederick (Skip Martin) murder two people with the help of a car carrying practical in-built blades for beheading as well as baskets that can magically catch the flying heads, we meet our main protagonist.

Having been punched out of his band, obnoxious Jason Jones (Robin Askwith) decides he needs a bit of a break from life. Signing up with a shady travel agency specialized on his particular demographic called “Hairy Holidays” – run by one Mr Pollack (Dennis Price) – our hero (ahem) books a few days in the health clinic of – wouldn’t you know it – Dr Storm, mostly in the hopes of encountering attractive “birds”. As fate will have  it, Jason has a very special meet-cute with Judy Peters (Vanessa Shaw), which includes very early 70s moments of flirting like our hero explaining that he’s not going to rape Judy. Romance is in the air, clearly, when she offers him cheese anyway.

Judy just happens to be on her way to the very same clinic as Jason to meet her Auntie Harris (Ellen Pollock) for the first time. There’s some bad family blood about the aunt’s earlier career as a brothel owner, apparently.

Once the quick couple arrive at the clinic, the place turns out to be rather strange: auntie really rather wouldn’t have Judy there at all for mysterious reasons; the place’s little person factotum seems just a wee bit eccentric; there are bedrooms that look as bloody as slaughterhouses; and Dr Storm is Michael Gough doing his best Bela Lugosi. And that’s before our heroes meet the other guests - all of them very, very quiet, pasty looking, with nasty scars on their heads, and disturbingly happy to carry out Storm’s every order.

Young people, Storm is sure, need a strong hand to guide them, preferably his own, so Jason and Judy are going to have an interesting, perhaps not as healthy as advertised, time there.

Anthony Balch’s Horror Hospital has for a long time been a rather unseen and definitely undervalued little film. Apart from the vagaries of copyright and licensing deals, this may very well have something to do with the film’s very peculiar style that mixes elements of British exploitative horror (think Pete Walker or Norman J. Warren) with weird, on the cheap imagination and a sense of humour that tends to the weird parodic reversal and to black humour so dry, it will not always be clear to everyone watching if they are supposed to laugh at any given detail.

Though, given the film’s general interest in the specific imaginative detail, I’m rather sure the filmmakers have put a surprising degree of thought into nearly everything we see. Clearly, on this set, doing things on the cheap was no excuse for doing things badly or sloppily, so the resulting film is full of those peculiar little moments and details that at once manage to fulfil the quota of weird awesomeness we wish for from the more exploitative side of the movie business but also makes fun of some of these expectations – often at the same time.

If this is going to charm any given viewer and amuse them as much as Horror Hospital does me will most certainly hang on: a) said viewer’s love for 70s British exploitation horror, b) their love for very, very dry humour and c) if they needed the film’s very special limousine in their lives.

Or, come to think of it, if they believe the romantic lead walking into the mandatory shower sex scene wearing the a knight’s helmet is very funny and strange indeed, or just silly and stupid. If you do find this as funny as I do, you’ll also enjoy watching Skip Martin yet again nearly becoming the hero of a film (and yes, we get a meta joke about that) after stealing at least half of the scenes he is in by perfect delivery of dry jokes and asides, and Michael Gough chewing scenery in a very specific way that is supposedly (okay, I believe it) built on Bela Lugosi’s poverty row performances.

It’s that kind of film, and I love it for it.

Three Films Make A Post: Unlocked. Unleashed.

The Lair (2022): Watching the last three movies of Neil Marshall has been as dispiriting and somewhat confusing experience. It is very much like watching a musician trying to hit all his favourite notes, but missing them, sometimes (Hellboy) barely hitting any note at all, or, like in this case, missing enough to mess up melody and rhythm. Marshall’s weirdly insecure direction also has to cope with a script by Marshall and his apparent creative partner Charlotte Kirk (who also acts and produces, like with his last movie) that has never met a cliché it can’t reproduce in an awkward manner. Mostly pretty terrible acting, perfectly embodied in Jamie Bamber’s accent, does not help either.

Unlike with the last two films of Marshall, there are a couple of moments here that suggest he might slowly be working himself up to better things again, but it’s not a process I enjoy watching.

See How They Run (2022): This period meta whodunnit by Tom George has quite the cast: Saoirse Ronan, Ruth Wilson, Adrien Brody, Sam Rockwell, the inevitable Reece Shearsmith, the list goes on. It doesn’t, however have much substance. Its meta genre exploration tends to be a bit too cutesy for my taste, and never does much with the genre quirks it ever so mildly sends up; this is the kind of movie that thinks having a screenwriter complain about flashbacks on screen after we watched some flashbacks is the epitome of wit, instead of a minor joke. Admittedly, there are a couple of scenes that suggest the film wants to have a bit more going on but forgets about it to make room for having Agatha Christie (Shirley Henderson) poison the wrong guy with rat poison, and other shenanigans of this style.

While there’s little depth here, See How They Run is still a pretty fun watch, slickly directed, if the sort of thing I’ll have forgotten all about in about a week’s time.

The Invisible Man Appears aka Tômei ningen arawaru (1949): Shinsei Adachi’s and Shigehiro Fukushima’s Japanese invisible man movie is not the wonderful box of delights a somewhat later invisible man’s encounter with a human fly would be. It’s a bit too much of a melodramatic crime movie for that, and sometimes, the invisible man is more of a gimmick as a necessary part of the plot. However, even in 1949, Japanese studio cinema was made by technically extremely gifted filmmakers, so there’s a lot to like here too, starting with – for its time – fine invisibility effects, and certainly not ending with the expected mix of slick looking (again, in the style of its time) filmmaking. If not at least every second scene of your movie contains a perfectly framed shot, you’re not a Japanese studio director.

Short Film Friday: Posted No Hunting

In short: A Love Song (2022)

Faye (Dale Dickey) spends a very quiet time – apart from a radio that always seems to play the appropriate song and the birds, of course – at a camping ground by the side of a lake and next to some mountains somewhere in Colorado. She occupies her time fishing, stargazing, and birdwatching, thinking about the husband she lost seven years ago. But mostly, she’s waiting, for she hopes to meet up with Lito (Wes Studi), a friend – a former flame, really – who has also lost his partner some time ago. She’s clearly hoping to rekindle the old crush, the old friendship, or just something inside of herself. While Faye is waiting, she makes the acquaintance of a group of cowhands whose little sister speaks for them, a lesbian couple (Michelle Wilson and Benja K. Thomas) on the cusp of agreeing to get married (or not), and, of course, the postman (John Way).

Eventually, Lito arrives.

Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman’s quiet and thoughtful meditation about aging, love and the way we relate to our pasts and the people in it is an utterly lovely film. I am a bit surprised that a filmmaker on his debut is so well able to get into the mindsets of characters very much his seniors, their concerns and ways to look at life (or to avoid looking at life, as may be the case), but there it is.

Dickey, a supporting actor in so many films, projects an incredible sense of genuine vulnerability, the kind of low key human doubts and feelings that are furthest from melodramatic expression, but are nonetheless just as deep and meaningful. She is the perfect fit for this film’s more laconic and low key approach to life and its turning points, showing emotions in quiet ways that more often than not don’t need dialogue or dramatic invention, indeed become truer without them.

The film is also utterly beautiful to look at, connecting natural beauty to a moment of great change in a person in a way that simply feels right. Again, there’s a lack of external melodrama here, so there’s no new age-y aspect in the way Faye relates to nature; it’s more matter-of-fact, and much closer to the truth of her life thereby.

Mirror Mirror 2: Raven Dance (1994)

After a prologue in which a Catholic nun, Sister Aja (Veronica Cartwright), is blinded by the demonic mirror from part one and a crazy lady is eaten by it (or something), we find ourselves an undisclosed number of years later in the same nunnery.

Actually, it’s not a simple nunnery anymore, but an orphanage. An orphanage of a kind, at least, for this is one of those peculiar movie orphanages lacking orphans. Well, apart from dancing-mad Marlee (Tracy Wells) and her (probably) autistic brother (name of the actor withheld to protect bad child actors). For, ahem, reasons, an industrial punk group rehearses a jaunty little number in front of the mirror. In the nunnery/orphanage, while Marlee and brother are watching, oh, yes. The impatient music critic mirror zaps the band to ashes and does something (?) that connects it to Marlee and sibling and leaves Marlee either blind, practically blind, or with reduced vision, depending on the needs of any given scene.

From here on out, things become less strange, though not more comprehensible: Marlee is apparently heiress to a fortune, but her evil step sister Roslyn (Sally Kellerman) teams up with one Dr. Lasky (Roddy McDowell) to drug her insane, the local handyman (William Sanderson) providing practical help to provide her with more effective “hallucinations”. At the same time, Marlee and the mirror fall in love. Our heroine dances a lot, excitedly, terribly. A young Mark Ruffalo appears to earn his “I was in horror movies at the beginning of my career” boy scout badge by getting into a love triangle with the mirror and Marlee. He may be a ghost, or the grown-up child of Nikki from the first movie, or both, or something. He’s doing the rebellious lover thing, badly, and ends up wrestling the mirror demon (I assume) for five second in the incomprehensible climax.

Reading my attempt at a plot synopsis, you’ll probably think “what the hell is going on?”. Watching Jimmy Lifton’s (also composer of the synth noodling score and “writer”) Mirror Mirror 2, the same question came up repeatedly in my head, as well. The only part of the script that makes any narrative sense is the whole, not terribly interesting, “drive the relation” insane business. It doesn’t make much logical sense, of course, but then, the basic situation Marlee is in with the orphan-less orphanage (because that’s where rich heiresses end up, right?) makes little sense either. The supernatural elements are even more incomprehensible. In general, motivations and emotions seem to shift from minute to minute, whereas plans are too stupid to comprehend.

Which really sounds like rather good fun if you are like me: usually of the persuasion that mood, worldbuilding and an air of strangeness are the most important thing about many a movie. Alas, large parts of Mirror Mirror 2 are no fun at all, but feel like an endless slog through badly copied Hitchcock, unconnected supernatural shenanigans and terrible dance routines. The beginning is fun enough, and the climax, while still making not a lick of sense, at least has the good sense to be bizarre and goofy enough to distract one from the pains of existence. The in-between - what the layman might turn “most of the film” – however, is excruciatingly dull nonsense, as if our writer/director had confused some doodles he made on a napkin with the finished script and just shot the napkin. It’s so bad, even the on paper very fun cast can’t turn it entertaining; let’s not even dream of “coherent”.

In short: The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022)

aka Die innere Glut

In some ways, Werner Herzog’s documentary about volcanologist documentarians Katia and Maurice Krafft is a bit of a series of our hero director’s greatest hits: there are the artists descending into the abyss to wrestle the devil for some great shots of film; the awe and terror of nature (and what expresses this view of nature more honestly than a volcano?); people walking the tightrope between artistic/scientific (which are clearly much closer related in Herzog’s world view than in many other people’s) truth seeking of the highest order and simple suicidal obsession, or truth and madness; the filmmakers looking for the poetic truth more than the factual one.

This is not a complaint: there’s nothing wrong with having themes and interests - obsessions, actually - and a philosophy of the world. Nor is there anything wrong with sticking to expressing them, and certainly not in the case of a filmmaker quite as intensely interested in finding these things in actually very different people and places. And very particularly not in the case of an artist as interested in his obsessions as he is in the way his subjects see themselves, how they think and feel, and are in the world.

In The Fire Within, Herzog finds all of this not in his own footage, but the footage the Kraffts shot over the years, finding kindred spirits in the archive, editing their material into a film they themselves didn’t end up making; out of what they found, into the kind of tribute only very few of us will get (though, if you ask me, most of us would deserve).

Music Monday: Flood Stage etc Edition

Satan’s Slaves: Communion (2022)

Original title: Pengabdi Setan 2: Communion

1984. Having soured of country life and fallen on financial hard times, the surviving members of the Suwono family are now living in a large, ugly and dreary apartment building. Daughter Rini (Tara Basro) has taken on the role of the family’s replacement mom, putting her own future on the backburner to take care of her brothers Toni (Endy Arfian) and Bondi (Nasar Annuz), who seem to have grown into very typical teenage boys. So Toni is infatuated with an older, hot pants-affine neighbour Tari (Ratu Felisha) and Bondi does love some youthful farting around. Only father Bahri (Bront Palarae) seems to visibly suffer from the trauma of the first film. At least, he’s acting very strangely indeed: he doesn’t tell his kids what and where he is working, locks up his briefcase as if it were full of secrets, and has an in turns shifty and absent manner. He clearly loves his family, though.

Given what happened in the first movie, it’s really no surprise Bahri has grown strange, and living in mid-80s Indonesia, with its dictatorship and the daily disappearances that were part of it can’t have helped. There are also police reports about a sniper shooting tattooed men, adding even more tension.

Said tension increases around the time when a heavy storm hits the apartment building – it’s literally built too close to the water in the middle of nowhere – and locks in the place’s inhabitants. Obviously, quite a few strange and horrible things begin happening in that night (and shortly before), and it is all connected to the pasts of Rini’s family.

If you ask me, Communion’s director Joko Anwar is one of the best directors working in horror today. After the incredible Impetigore und his rethinking of the Indonesian classic Satan’s Slaves, this sequel to the latter shows someone working at the height of his power.

Ironically, given how tight those other two films are, Anwar’s script this time around is the weakest element of the affair. On paper, there are just too many moving parts, too many characters moving around independently, and there are rather a lot of scenes where they act exclusively after the kind of horror movie logic following which it makes total sense to fart around with a body of electrified water, to crawl through holes in walls, or look for the hidden upper floor of a building that’s haunted as hell. The set-up for a sequel isn’t terribly well integrated into the film either; one might also ask if having half of the film consist of various characters walking through the same dark apartment complex really is that great of an idea.

In practice, I found that none of these nominal problems mattered at all, because Anwar is utterly on top of his game in creating an atmosphere of dread, in pacing shocks and set pieces small and large, and in evoking the atmosphere of a very specific time and place with small, well chosen details where lesser directors would go all out and thus overshoot the mark. I’d argue that the time Communion takes place in is incredibly important for it. As much as the film actually seems to underplay it, its underbelly is all about a time in Indonesia’s history when paranoia and a hidden yet daily threat of violence must have done terrible things to the psyches of the people living through it. The barely parsable Satanic (perhaps Jinn) conspiracy running through the film feels like the logical embodiment of such feelings. Consequently, much of the film takes on the quality of a nightmare where neither home, nor family, nor the world itself seem as safe and consistent as they should be, where all social structures and their products are on the verge of complete breakdown, and logic applies to very little in life.

Even though Anwar uses a lot of classic horror tropes, and plots very loosely indeed, he on the other hand also seems to trust in his audience’s ability to put together a surprisingly large number of hints about what is actually going on strewn throughout the film. There’s certainly nobody going to explain anything in long, expository scenes here; we are apparently expected to correlate quite a few hints shown only for a moment or two, and to understand what they mean. There’s a total commitment to showing things and providing enough information to understand them but not explaining them that’s utterly admirable, and works very well indeed for me. This adds a dimension of mystery and thoughtfulness to a film that at first looks like a very tropey series of set pieces, and certainly keeps it in the mind longer.

Of course, those set pieces are absolutely incredible, realized by Anwar with an off-handed sense of stylishness, and created with a sense of the absurd as well as of the creepy, edited to perfection, and utterly engaging. The relatively early elevator sequence is an obvious example for the director’s abilities, but things stay suspenseful, tight and creepy, with actual pay-offs throughout the film, until the peculiar and inspired finale accompanies us out.

Three Films Make A Post: Satan Has Returned For Her!

The Devil’s Daughter (1973): I’m not usually in a mind to enjoy movies for their camp factor, but Jeannot Szwarc’s unofficial, “twenty-five years later” TV move sequel to Rosemary’s Baby has some moments in this regard that make it very, very difficult to stick to my guns there. I blame the combination of delicious scenery chewing by Shelley Winters and – of all people – Abe Vigoda as middle-aged Satanists with the glorious words of “Hail Diana, Princess of Darkness” and the very sensible looking orgy full of old people, as well as the hysterically melodramatic tone in which the tiniest little problems are presented. Also of note is an incredible final shot of Joseph Cotton as the Big Demon Daddy himself.

The Brasher Doubloon (1947): This John Brahm adaptation of a Philip Marlowe story by Chandler is not generally canonized as one of the great ones, but it is a rather delightful hard boiled detective tale, with the mandatory extremely convoluted plot and central mystery, and many a scene of our hero coping with the very peculiar people he encounters. Unlike in many other Chandler adaptations, there’s a certain sardonic humour to the film’s sense of the grotesque; it also features a romance – between Marlowe and a character played by Merle Davis – that permanently wavers between what we’d read as “problematic” today and something quite interesting and original. I could take or leave George Montgomery as Marlowe, but he certainly has his own idea of how the detective works; that it’s not always an idea I share isn’t his fault, and doesn’t negate his performance.

Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022): On one hand, I understand the general praise this Apple TV original wavering between comedy and coming of age drama has acquired. Writer/director/lead actor Cooper Raiff certainly knows what he’s doing in all three of his roles, presenting surprisingly complicated ideas in a very slick and entertaining way while also subverting some of the tropes of the romantic comedy (and his audience’s knowledge of them) in a controlled manner. Plus, Dakota Johnson again proves that she’s rather woefully underpraised by most critics.

On the other hand, I despair at a world where young filmmakers don’t make blistering paeans to Big Romantic Love anymore, but argue for bourgeois domestication as the one and only way to properly grow up; hell, I’m not happy with a world where young filmmakers believe properly growing up is a good thing. These kids really should leave that particular kind of nonsense to their elders.

Short Film Friday: Laura Hasn't Slept

In short: Hellhole (2022)

Original title: Ostatnia wieczerza

Warning: given the twist-heavy plot of the movie, I’ll have to spoil at least a couple of them!

Poland, 1987. A priest named Marek (Piotr Zurawski) joins a Gothically creepy looking monastery clearly far away from the next city to help out in the place’s main business. Officially, the place is a sanatorium for the mentally ill, but in truth, the monks there are specialized in exorcisms, and everyone inside not wearing a cassock is possessed.

Apart from this open secret, the place has quite a few rather more hidden ones, and our protagonist clearly feels very uncomfortable there very soon. Of course, he has some secrets of his own, for in truth, he’s not a priest but a cop and has come to the monastery undercover, looking for a number of women who have disappeared in the area. If you believe a number of anonymous letters, the monks have something to do with these disappearances. Marek’s first discovery is, however, something else: the monks are only faking the exorcisms with the help of drugs and technology. Which certainly isn’t going to be the last surprise he’ll have; things are going to get a bit more personal.

Bartosz M. Kowalski’s Netflix movie Hellhole hasn’t exactly been a hit when it comes to its critical reception. That’s not a complete surprise, really, for after a fast and furious beginning – the exorcism is pretty spectacular – the film quickly settles into a groove of slow mood building, and not much else. Because characterisation is mostly perfunctory, there’s at first not terribly much to hold onto as a viewer apart from the fine monastery set and the thick mood of creepy Christianity. The audience, like the protagonist, is slowly fed a series of curious, inexplicable things to chew on without much explanation; the film asks for quite a bit of patience, perhaps too much for many a viewer.

However, all of the seemingly random elements actually do belong together, and the final act turns into a series of increasingly bizarre and wonderfully macabre twists that may be preposterous, yet also compelling, fun and more than just a bit bonkers. I found myself having a huge amount of fun with these revelations, as well as the film’s increasingly sardonic sense of humour – there’s a bit connected with a somewhat disappointing ceremony that’s absolutely perfect. Then the final five minutes happened, and I found myself absolutely in love with the visual language used as well as Kowalski’s willingness to just go there.

Which certainly doesn’t make Hellhole a perfect movie, but if you bring a bit of patience with you, it may very well reward you with blowing your mind just a little bit in the end.

Mirror Mirror (1990)

Very LA goth teenager Megan (Rainbow Harvest, a name that brings up so many questions) and her mom move to a small town in nowhere, Iowa. Megan, being from the big city, shy, and a bit weird, does not hit it off with most of her new classmates. Only prospective class president Nikki (Kristin Dattilo), a friend of strays and weirdos, or so her vacuous boyfriend suggests, befriends her. Because Megan is not one to make her own life easier, she develops quite the crush on the nice-jock boyfriend of the school’s resident bitch queen (Charlie Spradling, only credited as “Charlie” for some reason), which does not make her social life any easier.

Because teen hormones and soap operatics are best taken with a bit of violence, an antique mirror left over from the earlier owner of the house Megan and her mom (Karen Black, alas not doing much) moved into turns out to be possessed by demonic forces. At first, it seems to react to Megan’s subconscious – and quite understandable – rage by magically murdering whosoever tortures or annoys the kid. Soon, however, Megan seems to control the destructive forces herself, while taking a nasty twist to her personality. Eventually, she’s outright possessed by the mirror and its powers. Only Nikki realizes something strange is going on, and tries her best to find out what exactly is up with Megan and her mirror, and get her friend back. There is, of course, a somewhat tragic story of sister love and murder connected to the mirror, and Megan and Nikki seem bound to repeat a variation on it.

Marina Sargenti’s only feature film – she did a bit of TV work later on, but only a couple of TV movies and a handful of episodes of various TV shows – is a perfectly decent entry into that horror subgenre concerning teenage misfits gaining some sort of supernatural power to take vengeance on the world that has treated them so badly. Its main problem is a certain lack of originality, so much of the character work feels a bit routine. So, Mirror Mirror goes through its well-worn motions, tropes and plot beats in an effective but not exactly riveting manner.

Of course, these tropes are well-worn because they are so relatable to many of the misfits at heart who have always made up large parts of the hardcore of horror movie fans (typically the people who stay with the genre no matter if it is in one of its cyclical upswings or downswings), and there’s nothing wrong with their presentation here. It’s good enough for what the film is doing, as faint as that praise may sound.

Also good enough for a decent time are the murders committed by the – mostly - invisible demon force; again, there’s nothing here that’s terribly original, but Sargenti’s direction is capable enough. As everything else about the movie, the horror set pieces are perfectly decent.

Really, Mirror Mirror’s main flaw is just that it’s so decent, competently made and keeping to the safest parts of horror country there’s very little about it you’ll remember as being actually exciting or weird. There is one scene of Megan dry-humping the mirror (who can hug back) that’s misguided and weird enough to please and so will in one way or the other reappear in the film’s three(!) sequels, but otherwise, this is very much the most average horror movie imaginable.

In short: The Grapes of Death (1978)

Original title: Les raisins de la mort

Élisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) is on her way by – a nearly empty - train to reunite with her fiancée, who is working in a vineyard in the country. When she’s nearly there, she is attacked by a somewhat unhealthily and a bit rotten looking gentleman, who kills her best friend.

Élisabeth manages to escape the train and makes her way through a French countryside that has turned into a bit of a madhouse. People are infected with some sort of illness that turns them homicidally mad while their bodies slowly appear to decay. Well, that goes for the men at least, women seem to rot slower and go crazy in more interesting ways, because this is a Jean Rollin movie. Later, Élisabeth will learn that it’s all on account of a pesticide her own fiancée used on his grapes, but before she gets there, she will have various, often somewhat surreal and nightmarish, encounters with the mad, the sick and their victims.

Quite a few people seem to see The Grapes of Death as one of the films the great Jean Rollin made exclusively to get money for his more personal projects, but to my eyes, this is certainly no Zombie Lake nor like one of Rollin’s porn movies but the work of a director genuinely attempting to infuse the budding zombie apocalypse genre with his own sensibilities. For me, at least, Rollin does so quite successfully as well. In a couple of scenes, he’s grazing the more direct socio-political concerns you’d find in a Romero movie – and at least the bit with the infected wine is a satirical masterstroke – but mostly, he’s interested in what Rollin’s films are always interested in: Gothically romantic shots of landscape and buildings in decay he here finds in empty fields and a half-destroyed village and in some incredibly shots of the vineyard, where it always seems to be early November; violence that is broken and framed through a sense of the surreal; actresses with particularly expressive eyes, though you can’t always be sure what they express; an idea of madness that’s taken half from the literature of the macabre and half from what feels like a very personal place to me; and of course doomed (or undead) love.

In Grapes, Rollin fits all of this into a slowly – Élisabeth is on foot, after all – evolving picaresque of the macabre, a couple of moments of light gore, and at least one sequence (the burning village and a truly crazy Brigitte Lahaie performance) that feels like an authentic, if peculiar, nightmare, shooting everything with the eye of a painter of dream landscapes.

Music Monday: What He Said Edition

Shadowhunter (1993)

Los Angeles police detective John Cain (Scott Glenn) is suffering heavily under the circumstances of his divorce. He’s clearly depressed, and so hollow inside he is barely able to function in his job. His boss, not unsympathetic to Cain’s psychological plight, believes that getting a change of air would be just the right thing, so he sends Cain off to fetch a murder suspect arrested on a Navajo reservation. The reservation police under Frank Totsoni (Robert Beltran) suspects the man, one Nakai Twobear (Benjamin Bratt), to be guilty of some murders in their jurisdiction as well, but they don’t have the amount of evidence the LA cops have for their murders. They don’t seem completely unhappy to let Cain drive off with the man, anyway, for as we will soon enough learn, they believe Twobear to be a coyote man or skin walker.

There may very well be something to that idea, for Cain gets into a very curious accident while transporting the suspect through the desert, the sort of thing that suggests magic. Unless one doesn’t believe in such a thing like our protagonist, of course. But then, he has a point in so far as his own psychological state could very well cause a man to drive off a road. In any case, Twobear uses the accident to escape, taking with him Cain’s gun and badge, and some of the last bits of the man’s self-respect.

Cain hasn’t quite given up on himself, though, and decides to take an active part in arresting Twobear again, even if it means travelling through the desert with Totsoni, tracking expert Ray Whitesinger (Angela Alvarado) and a small posse. Obviously, Cain will have to confront his own failures and his psychological breaking points, and may very well need to rethink what he believes about magic and how the world functions.

The 90s were a point in time when a good handful of – predominantly white – not Native American filmmakers started making more serious attempts at films that take place on somewhat realistic depictions of reservations, usually featuring an honest interest in – typically Navajo – parts of their cultures and beliefs. For some of today’s tastes, this will of course smack of “cultural appropriation” but watching a film like Shadowhunter, I can’t help but find the attempts at portraying parts of Native American cultures genuine and honest. How correct director J.S. Cardone everything gets is most probably (I’m not an expert on Navajo culture, either) up to discussion, but then, the way for example Catholic exorcisms are portrayed in horror movies made by not always Catholic filmmakers isn’t exactly authentic, either. When in doubt, a filmmaker will change things to work better in a film; thrillers don’t have to follow the rules of the documentary.

Anyway, the film at hand is usually called an action film, but if one goes into it looking for many punch-ups and shoot-outs, or Scott Glenn ripping off his shirt to scream while shooting a machine gun, one will be sorely disappointed, for Cardone uses the old evergreen plot about a man and his companions chasing after a potentially supernatural threat to explore Cain’s brittle interior life, and how he comes to a kind of faith and a reawakening belief in himself and perhaps in others, while Twobear very literally attempts to fill the emptiness inside Cain with his own evil. So expect a lot of loosely paced scenes of people trekking and riding through the desert, dream sequences and explorative dialogue before any action happens. The climactic confrontation is pretty great, mind you, because Cardone is certainly an old pro at suspense and budget action, but it is also the outward culmination of Cain’s inner struggles. All of this works very well indeed thanks to Cardone’s intelligent and calm script and some fine performances by Glenn and Alvarado, and Bratt managing to project Evil and menace throughout (perhaps even when he’s not on screen, which does take some doing).

Shadowhunter is also a fine example of how to keep the supernatural in a film ambiguous without getting ridiculous about it. There’s nothing here that couldn’t be explained through Cain’s mental state and the fear of a man quite as destructive as Twobear is. Yet reading everything that happens through a supernatural lens makes complete sense as well, which to me seems a surprisingly good portrayal of how different frameworks of looking at the factual world can draw very different conclusions from the same facts.

Three Films Make A Post: How to fail in the music business and succeed as a legend.

Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah (2011): I’m not completely sold on the jumping about Kevin Triplett’s Duct Tape Messiah does in the chronology of legendary – and legendarily unlucky – Texas songwriter Blaze Foley’s life; it doesn’t really add anything, and seems to obfuscate things rather than make them clearer. On the other hand, the film is such a labour of love about a figure at once intensely influential and obscure, full of interviews with friends, lovers, family and peers, as well as some incredibly valuable archive material of the man itself, I can’t find it in me to pick formal nits for too long. Particularly not in a film that’s also not pretending the bad, self-destructive elements of its subject’s character didn’t exist; it just knows this changes nothing about the love (or the great songs).

Travelling for a Living (1966): For the British folk revival and folk rock, the subjects of this short documentary, The Watersons, as well as the work they did afterwards, were an incredibly important and influential group. Here, in Derrick Knight’s grainy verité footage, you can witness the group as working musicians, at the cusp of reaching something new via the traditional, following a very personal idea of freedom and individual expression. If you’ve listened to music by or influenced by the Watersons and their peers for a few decades like I have, you’ll probably be shocked/delighted by how young and hopeful they were here, how very much of their time in the very best way; how much these people feel like their voices, coming from more years away than I’ve been alive.

Tenebrae (1982): These are just a couple of thoughts after a recent re-watch of this Argento giallo. I don’t need to reiterate my love for the man’s visual powers as a director, or how much he manages to turn an absolutely improbable plot believable in so far as it seems to fit the visual world he creates so perfectly. Rather, what was going through my head this time around is how much Argento must have been bothered by the accusations of misogyny and idolation of violence thrown at him regularly, seeing as they are mirrored rather exactly in what his writer protagonist Peter Neal here has to hear. Like Neal, Argento’s not terribly good at defending himself here; but then, given that Neal is also an insane murderer, he’s probably not supposed to, and may very well be meant as a way for Argento to poke fun at himself (or at least his public image) as well as his detractors.

Short Film Friday: Pinki

In short: Terrifier 2 (2022)

I thought Damien Leone’s first Terrifier was a surprisingly great microbudget slasher that mixed pretty damn extreme gore with a clear love for the traditional slasher, some clever twists on traditional slasher tropes, and a great slasher in Art the Clown. Terrifier 2 is made with clearly slightly more money but still has the same indie ethos, and an intense love for the tradition.

This return of Art is full of fantastically created, grotesque and adorably vile gore gags, nods to the tradition of the slasher and twists to its formulas. It also has a surprisingly complex mythology and a clear interest in building the character of its final girl (Lauren LaVera) and her family to be more than just slasher fodder. From scene to scene, there are exemplary moments of blocking and framing intelligently on a budget; the film often looks strikingly good, with gore set pieces that are filmed with as much love and enthusiasm as has been put into the creation of the grimly funny gags themselves. All of this feels very much like an absolute labour of love, and I’m genuinely happy the film has become a bit of a success for Leone and his cohorts.

Yet Terrifier 2 also demonstrates some of the problems that come with a film done very much DIY and as a labour of love, where nobody is there to say “no” to the filmmakers, so they can indulge in whatever they want for how long they want. The film is full of darlings that needed to be killed (or in this context perhaps not killed?) and were instead turned into scenes that go on and on and on because the filmmakers were too much in love with them to cut them down to the actual meat of the matter. An early example is the first dream sequence, which goes on twice, thrice the time it needs to, and includes a whole bunch of details that are of no use to the movie at hand whatsoever, the sort of cool little ideas one should leave on the cutting room floor because they are weighing one’s film wrongly. All of this leads to an exhausting run time of 138 minutes for a movie that really should be a lean 108 or so, and makes many ideas that are inspired and awesome on paper just a bit tiresome.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

Snow Hollow, a small mountain community in Utah, is struck by a series of incredibly violent killings. With the ripped apart state of the victims, it isn’t even clear at first if these are animal attacks or products of a really rather mad killer. Given these facts, the wolf-like descriptions coming from witnesses, and the mix of animal ferocity and cleverness in the murders, one might even think the killer is some kind of werewolf.

The local police is ill prepared for this sort of case, and help isn’t even coming once they ask for it. Nominally, the little police department is commanded by Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster), but the man is ailing in body, mind, and spirit, so the actual work falls on the shoulders of Hadley’s son, John Marshall (Jim Cummings). John, a man barely keeping dry via a twelve step program, fighting against violent urges, a feeling of rage against himself and the world, and all manner of self-destructive behaviour while also attempting to keep the peace with his ex-wife (Rachel Day) and rebuild the cracked relationship with his daughter Jenna (Chloe East), is not actually in any state to withstand the mounting pressures of the investigation. As the number of bodies rises and very few clues that would make any logical sense turn up, he breaks down increasingly. Things aren’t helped by the fact that apart from John, there’s really only one member of the police force qualified for more than writing parking tickets, Julia Robson (Rikki Lindhome). Actually, Julia is rather more qualified and mentally better prepared for the case than John himself, only, she isn’t related to the Sheriff, and woman.

The first time I tried watching Jim Cummings’s The Wolf of Snow Hollow I bounced of it quickly and forcefully. Today, I’d call it one of the best movies of the last ten years or so (at least), so clearly, I can be a bit of a fool sometimes. Of course, the film’s very dry sense of humour, its slow and careful characterisation and its very particular ideas of what can and can not be called a horror movie are the sort of thing not everyone will tune into even on repeated tries, which is neither a failure of the movie nor one of any given viewer.

If and when one starts to get the movie’s – or really Cummings’s given that he directed, wrote and plays the lead – perspective, one begins encountering a film whose horrors are found in more than just its handful of gory corpses and its tale of a werewolf (or is it a serial killer?) murder series taking place in a small town. Rather, the film’s heart lies in its treatment of John’s struggles, a downward spiral he, like many of us with psychological troubles, can see and experience but feels helpless to break free from even though there is help for him to be had, and which eventually leads in a very traditionally male way to a place of violence that can end up set against himself or against others. The film finds moments of humour in John’s increasing self-destructiveness, but it’s never making fun of the psychological struggles and failures themselves. These, it treats with surprising compassion, never excusing some of the shittiness John gets up to, but treating it with a degree of delicacy and sadness you wouldn’t exactly expect in a werewolf movie. Of course there are clear parallels between John and his behaviour and the wolf, both partaking in the same male coded propensity for violence, just not ending up in the same place, exactly. Since the film treats this aspect subtly, it makes a rather more interesting, or really, more personal argument about men and violence than you usually get in this sort of thing. It also suggests a way to betterment for at least one of its violent men.

Also sad and very subtle is the portrayal of the relationship between John and his father. There’s a well-observed understanding of difficult family relations and the pain that’s part of love under these circumstances on display that’s rare and unexpected in any medium. That one half of the father/son duo is portrayed by Robert Forster shortly before his death adds even more poignancy.

Cummings is just as adept at the larger scale of portraying a community under pressure as he is at the micro-scale of family relationships and personal breakdowns. Snow Hollow quickly feels like a real place with real, if slightly grotesque, people, a place that follows recognizable rules of social connections, that feels lived in and believable. It also feels like a physical space, snow and darkness and blood taking on extra weight by it.

That The Wolf of Snow Hollow’s moments of suspense and gore are also rather excellent feels nearly beside the point in this context.

In short: Deadstream (2022)

Warning: there are spoilers forthcoming!

Deeply unlikable Internet “influencer” and insufferable man-child Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter) whose shtick it is to livestream himself fighting his fears while whining a lot aims for a comeback after some past unpleasantness we’ll only learn details about much later. Clearly, the way back into the adulation of the public he believes he deserves is by streaming a night in a haunted house. While whining and fake-shuddering his way through the house, he acquires an unwanted sidekick in the form of a fan called Chrissy who suddenly pops up (Melanie Stone) in a way that’ll only convince an influencer nothing untoward is going on (that’s not a spoiler, surely), lets himself be goaded into an ill-advised ritual, and eventually proceeds to enrage the already rather nasty local main ghost into quite a bit of Evil Dead 2 like horror comedy business, though with a lower body count.

I didn’t enjoy Vanessa and Joseph Winter’s horror comedy quite as much as the rest of the Internet apparently did. Largely, that’s on account of my growing dislike for the “all influencers are horrible and fake” set-up I’ve seen too many horror movies use in the last half decade or so. It’s a bit too pat and too self-congratulatory a set-up, usually lacking nuance, and doesn’t get better by the number of films that simply repeat it. This also leads to films whose first half consists of deeply punchable asshats with one character trait doing little of interest, a problem we encounter here as well.

The first half of Deadstream is admittedly somewhat better paced than these things often are, but it still forces us to spend a lot of time with a single idiot doing little of interest. Shawn isn’t exactly a grower, either, or charming in his idiocy like Evil Dead’s Ash, so even once the film gets going in his second half, I can’t say I was ever on his side instead of the ghosts’.

To be fair, the tour de force parts of the film are typically fun enough to shift the focus from how little I enjoy spending time with its main character, and the pacing of the slightly weird horror comedy set pieces becomes downright great. Stone’s gleefully over the top full body performance is also quite the thing, providing the force Shawn fights with an appropriately extreme personality. There’s also some mirroring between her and Shawn’s motivation going on, but this mostly gets drowned out by the loveable gooey nonsense.

Still, I found Deadstream’s first half or so weak enough to drag the whole film down considerably.

Music Monday: Love Hope Trust Edition

Demon Witch Child (1975)

aka The Possessed

Original title: La endemoniada

Mr. Barnes (Ángel del Pozo) rules his Spanish town with a bit of an iron hand, it seems. When a baby disappears, he suggests (ahem) a group of wandering “gypsies” (I use this term because “Romani” seems to be a completely inappropriate description for what we see in the film) is at fault. As will turn out soon enough, he’s absolutely right, because these aren’t your typical travelling folk, but actually a wandering Satanic cult led by an old woman with a very distinctive face who calls herself Mother Gautère (Tota Alba). The bumbling and ineffective chief of police (Fernando Sancho) and his henchpeople manage to arrest the old gal, surprisingly enough, but during interrogation, she jumps out of a window, committing suicide before she can be injected with pentothal.

Of course, Mother Gautère’s second in command (Kali Hansa) swears vengeance, especially on Mr Barnes and his family. Rather quickly, Barnes’s daughter Susan (Marián Salgado) is possessed by the spirit of Mother Gautère herself, sacrificing babies, imitating voices and strangling men many times her weight. Only the local young priest, Father Juan (Julián Mateos) can help, but he is regularly distracted by some melodrama between him and the woman he left to turn to the priesthood, and her disappointed life as a prostitute.

I’ve repeatedly gone on record with my general dislike for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Its fears and theological arguments don’t work for this hard-headed atheist, and it is because it is as serious and well-made a film actually about its themes as it is that it also doesn’t work as a horror movie for me.

Fortunately, there’s a whole load of cheap, trashy and deeply unserious films inspired by/ripping off elements of Friedkin’s film I am able to enjoy. Amando “Blind Dead” de Ossorio’s Spanish example of the form, Demon Witch Child, certainly is cheep and trashy, as well as pulpy, sometimes hilariously mean-spirited, and a lot of fun for my by these virtues. I could have done without the business about the Father Juan’s prostitute troubles (alternatively, this element of the film could have simply been better written, but let’s not be unrealistic here), and the whole “travelling folk as baby murdering Satan worshippers” angle is rather distasteful, but otherwise, what’s not to like?

To whit: apart from the more usual possession business with floating, head rotating and spitting, possessed Susan is a bit more proactive than many of her peers. She regularly takes on the face of Mother Gautère and goes out strangling people, who are properly freaked out by the surprisingly creepy “old face on child’s body” make-up. She also likes to have her little jokes. So an implied after-murder castration (whose beginning even suggests a bit of necrophilia de Ossorio apparently decided to leave to Italian filmmakers), and gifting the nicely packaged, ahem, package to the victim’s fiancée is all in her program, as are voice imitation to confuse all kinds of matters and other general nastiness.

All of which is filmed in a manner rather typical of many de Ossorio films I’ve seen, where about half of the scenes look incredibly shoddily blocked and staged and edited with a hatchet, whereas the other half is full of Dutch angles, threatening camera movements and every other trick to make a scene creepy you can use when you don’t have much of a budget. Thankfully, the film’s general air of unhealthy imagination and its lurid energy are more than enough to help one through the rough patches, and enjoy the weird and inspired scenes of witch-faced children and Dracula-style wallcrawling.

Three Films Make A Post: The mission that changes everything begins.

No Time to Die (2021): This very long final entry in Daniel Craig’s stint as James Bond – by far my favourite Bond version – as directed by the often great Cary Joji Fukunaga is a pretty dignified note for the series to end on, continuing, varying and actually finishing the themes that have run through the whole of the Craig Bond cycle while also delivering highly entertaining crazy SpyFy nonsense, a large handful of great, usually imaginative and fun action set pieces and even quite a bit of character work that actually, well, works on the heightened level this sort of blockbuster needs to get up to.

The film really has only two problems in my eyes. First, there is Rami Malek’s inexplicable decision to play his villain as a mediocre Klaus Kinski imitation; but then, Malek is one of these actors whose ego bark to my eyes often promises more than his acting bite can deliver. Secondly, the way the script telegraphs the film’s ending beforehand is glaringly obvious even for the world of the blockbuster where things for understandable reason do tend to be telegraphed with the dumbest parts of the audience in mind.

Castle Freak (1995): Despite featuring house favourites Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, this is by far my least favourite Stuart Gordon film. Sure, the castle location is a pretty fantastic looking setting, and some of the suggested and portrayed nasty gruesomeness is somewhat diverting, but otherwise, this simply lacks the energy, the spirit, and the depth of the director’s other films.

In the Devil’s Garden aka Assault (1971): From time to time, this Sidney Hayers thriller seems to suggest a malign influence from some kind of outside force on its somewhat sordid tale of rape and serial murder. It mostly creates this mood by shots of the – always female – victims staring at the woods, the sky and overland electric lines in desperation. The rest of the film never turns these suggestions into part of the narrative and plays out as a plodding police procedural with some stiffly realized social criticism and skirts the edges of exploitation cinema via theme and very mild sleaze, but not with its storytelling. It’s not a terrible film – Hayers was nothing if not a pro – but one of those films that always seems to shy away from its most interesting impulses.

Short Film Friday: Behind

In short: The Ghostmaker (2012)

aka Box of Shadows

Warning: some spoilers ahead!

On his house clearing job, Kyle (Aaron Dean Eisenberg) stumbles upon a curious device. At first glance, the thing looks like a coffin with a whole load of clockwork added to it, as well as coming with a nice, creepy Christopher Young melody. In actuality, it’s a device developed by a 15th Century occultist/inventor that separates a person’s spirit from its body for a while. The spirit is able to roam free, walk through walls and invisibly spy on whatever it wants. Using the device may also awaken the interest of forces one might not want to be noticed by.

Of course, even without that particular problem, Kyle and the friends he’s using the coffin with are not ideal material for even this tiny amount of power. Kyle’s quite far on his way to becoming a proper meth head, which puts a lot of strain on his relationship to his girlfriend Julie (Liz Fenning), and even minor superpowers are not a great idea in a case like his. Kyle’s wheelchair bound friend and roommate Sutton (J. Walter Holland) is an even worse candidate, seeing as he uses the opportunity to now finally be able to better stalk Julie. Obviously, things will escalate.

Mauro Borrelli’s The Ghostmaker is an interesting variation on elements of Flatliners, with a much more interesting background to the occult experiments and a quite a bit more screwed up cast of characters. It does suffer visibly under its tight budget, though, with effects that work better as ideas than as what you actually see on screen, and the usual pitfall of many lower budget films made in the last decades of scenes generally going on much longer than they need to or should.

For a character-based piece of horror, the writing’s a bit too broad as well: I absolutely appreciate where the film wants to go, but it is not really making the right moves for me to be able to follow.

Savageland (2015)

Someone – or is it somethings? – wipes out nearly the entire population of the small town of Sangre de Cristo, on the US-side of the Arizona-Mexico border area. The local police force arrests the only survivor when he is trying to cross the border towards Mexico, covered in blood, bites and barely able to speak coherently.

Because Francisco Salazar (Noe Montes) is Mexican, “illegal”, and in no mental or financial state to present any kind of defence against the racist good old boy Sheriff (George Lionel Savage) and the procedures of law that back him, he is declared a serial killer and rather quickly sentenced to be murdered by the state. Rather a lot of disturbing and curious facts about the case notwithstanding. There are questions like, how exactly could a single man have killed a whole small town of 57 people in only a few hours, only using some tools and his teeth apparently? Why do the teeth marks on the victims not fit his own? And why do the photographs Salazar himself took throughout the night tell a very different, much more disturbing tale about what happened?

Phil Guidry’s, Simon Herbert’s and David Whelan’s Savageland presents its case in the fake documentary sub-style of POV horror. Apart from being a highly effective horror film, this is obviously also a film that has quite a few angry things to say about the racist elements of Arizona border culture, grandstanding sheriffs, the inhuman way immigrants without papers are treated, and the injustices that result from all these things when they are combined with a system of justice that’s all about money and race, and very little about truth or justice. That the film can do this in a graceful manner that lets even the shitty people have some humanity without weakening its own argument is one of its major virtues; that it can be quite this angry and engaged and still be a fun and effective piece of horror filmmaking is another one.

I believe both of these virtues have a lot to do with the directors’ understanding of the importance of nuance and detail, as well as their ability to make a nuanced and detailed film on what can’t have been much of a budget. So there’s a feeling of weight and reality to the proceedings even though the core of what truly must have happened that night in this reality is the stuff of supernatural zombie/vampire horde nightmares about the repressed biting America in the throat.

The film is also highly effective in its fictional imitation of the forms of the better socially engaged true crime documentaries, again adding a feeling of reality and authenticity that makes the generic horror feel as plausible in context as the political one.

What’s particularly great about the more traditional horror movie elements of Savageland’s horror is with how little material it works: there are no film snippets from security cameras or anything of that matter (apart from one ambiguous phone call) portraying the night of horror, but only Salazar’s panicked still photos, a map of the town, and a border patrol officer (Carlos Olivares) walking us through the scenes of the crimes long after most of their traces have gone. So the viewers’ brains are doing most of the work here. We are filling in the spaces between these – very creepy – photos and the places they were supposedly shot in with our imaginations and our knowledge of genre tropes. For me, this approach worked incredibly well, particularly in dialogue with the real world horrors Savageland so clearly cares a lot about, producing the feeling of walking a battlefield with the film, not so much after the fact, but between one battle and the next.

If you’re a fan of American comics, you’ll also enjoy one of the handful of acting appearances by the late, great comics writer and editor Len Wein, which was as unexpected as it was awesome for me.

In short: Margaux (2022)

A group of college students in their final year try to recapture the closeness of their freshmen time with a weekend together. There’s designated final girl and coding whiz Hannah (Madison Pettis), her eternal crush, nerd turned jock Drew (Jedediah Goodacre), stoner Clay (Richard Harmon, still playing a college kid), and lovers of mildly kinky sex, Kayla (Phoebe Miu) and Devon (Jordan Buhat). To make matters a bit awkward, Drew’s influencer girlfriend Lexi (Vanessa Morgan) has invited herself at the last minute, so we can get influencer jokes and a love triangle in one economic wash.

Because (alas?) these aren’t the 70s anymore, the friends aren’t spending their weekend of getting brutally murdered in a cabin in the woods, but in an incredibly advanced smart home in the woods. Unfortunately, its AI Margaux (the voice of Susan Bennett) doesn’t just torture its clients with awkward uses of cool kids language but is also heavily into serial murder.

If you’re going into Steven C. Miller’s Margaux looking for anything original, deep or intelligent, you’ll probably be sorely disappointed. If, on the other hand, you’re in for a bit of (very) dumb fun, you might have a good enough time. At least, I do have to admire how traditionalist the film is, starting with characters that are just barely modernized updates of slasher victim archetypes, through murder methods which are merrily ignoring logic and physics and ending with horrible one-liners from Margaux even the people writing late-period Freddy Krueger would have been a bit embarrassed by. The only elements here that are truly of our time are the increased number of people of colour in the cast and all of the (bad, typical) jokes about internet influencers and home automation. Which actually might be enough to get this one status as a fascinating time capsule thirty years on. Alexa, set a reminder for 2052!

Miller’s a more than decent director here, usually finding shots that make the cheapish effects (the gore’s good, though) and the low-ish budget look better than they probably deserve. Things keep moving zippily even though Margaux doesn’t really have quite enough victims for its running time and the kind of movie it is. Miller solves this problem with murder attempts and much less complicated – and sometimes pleasantly goofy - variations on traditional suspense tropes that reminded me a bit of a less complicated and clever Final Destination.

Which certainly isn’t the worst thing I could say about a bit of uncomplicated, cheap and cheery fun like Margaux.

Music Monday: Growing Wild Edition

Double Murder (1977)

Original title: Doppio delitto

Police inspector Baldassare (Marcello Mastroianni) has been banished into some particularly boring part of the police archives some years ago, following a monumental screw-up that has become somewhat legendary among his colleagues. He seems to have made his peace with the boring life and spends his free time reading old detective fiction and wandering through his Roman neighbourhood, looking melancholic. Baldassare’s old instincts awaken when he stumbles upon a very curious accidental death by lightning strike that manages – those old metal handrails are dangerous! – to kill two people in the same building, an old palazzo: the prince who owned it, as well as a guy doing some repairs on the building.

Baldassare decides this is a bit too much random chance to be believable and begins poking around the case a little. It turns out the deaths were indeed murders, and they will not be the only ones. Given the number of mildly eccentric suspects, thinning these numbers a little in that way just might be of help to our not always intrepid hero. Among the suspects are a political activist (Agostina Belli) with a side-line in flirting with aging cops, the prince’s wife, a former Hollywood actress (Ursula Andress), their friend, a scriptwriter (Peter Ustinov) writing about the time when the prince was helping to finagle the “Reichskonkordat” between the Nazis and the Vatican, an eccentric bookseller, an artist (Jean-Claude Brialy) of dubious merit, and so on and so forth.

This comedic mystery directed by Steno (apparently a man with little use for a proper name) is a small delight. Unlike a lot of Italian comedies I’ve seen, this doesn’t typically aim for slapstick and broad jokes, though the couple of times it does use them, these land as well. Instead, the film’s humour is character-based, often a thing of wry asides, played with small gestures often more meant to make you smile than to induce belly laughs.

Which does befit Double Murder’s sense of middle-aged melancholia. Most of the characters here have come down in the world in one way or another, and are now stranded in a place that’s also past its prime, making plans for futures they don’t themselves believe will come to fruition, and finding a degree of humour in their own, minor humiliations. While it does seek and find the humour in these situations, the film never looks down on its characters; there’s a sense of compassion intertwined with that of the ridiculous that makes some of this surprisingly touching. But then, that may be my own middle-aged ennui speaking here.

The cast – the international stars as well as the Italian character actors – do very well with this material, but then, I suspect particularly Mastroianni, Andress and Ustinov would have had a certain understanding of their characters’ places in the world taken from their own experiences.

Speaking of their world, Steno manages to create a sense of place as well as one of companionable ridiculousness, so the film takes place in a fully realized quarter of an aging Rome, a place where old bohemians might go to lick their wounds, still beautiful, perhaps because it is losing to time.

That Double Murder is also a decent whodunnit seems to be nearly beside the point, but there’s that, too.

Three Films Make A Post: The scene was the wildest freak-out in Vegas history…and the gig was to grab it all!

The Innocents aka De uskyldige (2021): Eskil Vogt’s horror movie about a group of kids who discover they are developing psychic powers and the pretty horrible things that follow is certainly a future genre classic, exploring uncomfortable ideas about childhood and poverty without becoming dishonest or grimdark or lacking compassion, while also providing some memorable and painfully effective horror set pieces that make most jump scare horror look embarrassing and pointless in comparison.

There’s also fantastic child acting, as well as filmmaking that finds un-kitschy ways to portray the way a child’s sense perceptions might feel when combined with the strangeness of telepathic and telekinetic powers taken seriously.

The Adventures of Arsène Lupin aka Les aventures d’Arsène Lupin (1957): I generally do tend to enjoy French genre movies made in this period, but Jacques Becker’s attempt at everyone’s favourite gentleman thief feels rather too close to the way German filmmakers of the time would have handled the material, which might have something to do with this being a French-German-Italian co-production. So expect only the most obvious kind of humour, a never-ending stint in the world of KuK (treated nostalgically, of course and alas). Not to blame on my native country are Robert Lamoureux’s one-note performance as Lupin, or the script’s difficulties when it comes to at least pretending its plot episodes are actually connected. And it’s not as if the film had any interesting heist set pieces.

The Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968): A criminal mastermind (Gary Lockwood) bites off more than he can chew in a daring (and murderous) armoured truck robbery (not really robbing Las Vegas, despite the film’s title), and soon has to cope not just with the normal police and the owner of the truck (Lee J. Cobb), but also the Mafia, the US treasury department (via Jack Palance), and the fact that his merry band of colleagues is mostly incapable of keeping a clear head or following instructions. At least there’s a particularly attractive Elke Sommer waiting for him, or might that be another problem?

This is another international co-production, with the late-60s cast to match, competently though not exceedingly well directed by Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi. If it were twenty minutes shorter, this would probably be a great example of the twisty, hard-boiled arm of the heist movie. With over two hours of running time, it does tend to drag its feet from time to time, taking its time with various subplots it doesn’t exactly need. On the other hand, there are some really cleverly staged set pieces taking place in the desert, and a great ending where everybody loses.

Short Film Friday: Wandering Soul

In short: Hellraiser (2022)

Sort-of clean addict’s Riley (Odessa A’zion) decision to follow the plan of her criminal non-mastermind boyfriend to steal something that will turn out to be the Lament Configuration (New Edition) leads to madness and death (mostly death, though) for everyone involved, including her half-estranged brother.

I was rather looking forward to David Bruckner’s version of Hellraiser, given how much I enjoyed – well, I say “enjoyed” but you know what I mean – his The Ritual and The Night House. Alas, the actual film leaves me completely cold. While there are some scenes that are memorable as high technical accomplishments on a design and effects level – just take that van sequence as an example – there’s an abstract, passionless and sexless quality to all of it that is completely at odds with the material and its thematic connotations. It’s a film about obsessions, sex, violence and all combinations thereof where nobody ever seems all that obsessed (even passionate) about anything; perversion’s a cenobite that looks a bit like it was made with the action figure foremost in mind. Bruckner’s usual thematic main concern – the combination of grief and guilt – does appear again, but in comparison with his earlier films, its treatment is so superficial it borders on the offensive.

But then, the character going through the grief is not really a character, but a flat cliché version of a young woman down on her luck, as lifeless at her core as the rest of the film. Turning the cenobites into aggressive tempter figures is not such a great idea either, bringing them much too close to the been there done that of the classic devil, taking away from the feeling of mystery and the uncanny. (And yes, I know, some of the Hellraiser comics did this as well, but those were mostly terrible, so don’t seem to be the greatest source to me).

There is simply no reason for this to be two hours long – the characters are certainly not complex enough to need scenes and scenes of build-up with them, and there’s simply not enough plot to fill the spaces between set pieces.

Blood and Bullets (1976)

aka Knell, The Bloody Avenger

Original title: Sangue di sbirro

Dan Caputo (George Eastman), a giant with a short fuse and a violent disposition who goes by the nickname of Knell (as in death knell) returns to New York shortly after the death of his father. Because this is that kind of movie, Dan single-handedly thwarts an air jacking attempt by half a dozen or so armed guys on his way in. Sure, quite a few of the hostages die during the shoot-out, but apparently, he’s still a big damn hero.

Somewhat more plot-relevant attempts at our protagonist’s life begin when he hasn’t even entered the apartment he grew up in and where his father was killed. Of course, random mooks are easily dispatched. To make Dan’s life a little easier, he’s also greeted by an old associate of his, the avuncular (if one’s uncle is a bit of a killer, at least) gang leader Duke (Jack Palance) who comes with some helpful gunplay and his own free corpse disposal service.

From here on out, barely a scene goes by in which Dan isn’t involved in a brutal beatdown – mostly with him as the delivering party – or a shoot-out with people who really don’t want him to find out who killed his father, or why. The film does manage to squeeze in a couple of flashbacks about the fraught relationship between Dan and his dad, a sub-plot about him reconnecting with an old girlfriend (Jenny Tamburi), and even some detective work. Repeat until all of the bad guys are dead and Duke – spoiler – crowns himself the new king of the underworld, because all of this was apparently part of his evil plan, or something.

Around these parts, Blood and Bullets’ director Alfonso Brescia is mostly beloved for his wild and woolly cardboard and blinking lights space operas, films whose cheapness is only exceeded by their inspired weirdness. Being a working Italian genre director, Brescia was involved in other genres as well, which brings us to this Eurocrime movie. Or truthfully, this endless series of cheaply – though not as cheaply as Brescia’s science fiction – realized yet energetic action sequences. Brescia isn’t one of the great Italian crime action directors, but what he lacks in finesse when it comes to editing, blocking and rhythm, he does make up for in energy. The action is absolutely relentless, even in the context of the film’s time and place. I don’t think I’ve seen many action movies where the sheer number of violent encounters was quite as exhausting as here, apart from some Indonesian films made forty years or so later.

What Blood and Bullets lacks, at least in comparison with much of the rest of Brescia’s body of work is a sense of weirdness. Brescia’s stranger sensibilities are completely replaced by a willingness to hit genre tropes and plot beats like clockwork. To me, that’s a bit of a disappointment, because I prefer my Brescia weird and woolly. Yet it also is what makes this work as well as it does as a straightforward Eurocrime film, made with a total commitment to entertaining its audience with the low-brow but always effective charms of copious violence, tough guy posturing, a bit of sex and a nasty disposition.