Three Films Make A Post: Seven Suicides - and they roared back as The Living Dead.

Psychomania aka The Death Wheelers (1973): For the longest time, I didn’t get along with this particular bit of British bikersploitation/folk horror by Don Sharp at all. It’s not a complete surprise, for the film does have some undeniable drawbacks: the pacing is – rather atypical for Sharp – leaden, until it suddenly isn’t because it’s time for a stunt sequence; the bikers seem awfully well-groomed and polite even when they are undead and working for Satan; and the script never seems to agree with itself on the proper tone for the affair. On the other hand, and that’s what rather worked for me this time around: the stunt sequences are really great in mixing Sharp’s excellent instincts for action with a very British looking mundanity, and the folk horror tale has moments of proper weirdness that very consciously resemble folk tales about deals with the devil, until everything culminates in a set piece that absolutely should be part of a modern (as of ‘73) version of an actual folk tale.

Antlers (2021): I’m honestly more than a bit confused about what to make of this film by Scott Cooper. It’s at once an attempt to use a version of the wendigo myth to talk about circles of abuse and poverty, and a monster movie (with an awesome looking creature) so traditional, it could have been on the SyFy Channel before they go lost in the bad jokes. Which might have worked out fine indeed, if the script had ever found a way to actually connect its disparate impulses to build a proper whole.

Instead, the narrative drags the characters back and forth between two very different kinds of movie, without ever even seeming to make an attempt to convince its audience why they belong together.

The Negotiation aka 협상 | hyeob-sang (2018): That sort of thing could never happen to this ultra-slick South Korean thriller by Lee Jong-seok about a very intense hostage negotiation that turns into a series of twists and revelations. It’s all very professionally done, acted well (particularly Son Ye-jin as our hostage negotiating heroine does a wonderful star turn), and really rather exciting.

It is also somewhat predictable for anyone who knows this style of movie – it’s just made so well I didn’t actually find myself caring it is in a terribly negative way – and mostly surprises by not going for the sort of deep formal or thematic turn many highly commercial films from Korea love to take despite this sort of thing supposedly not how highly commercial films are done.