Three Films Make A Post: Witness the Beginning of Evil.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021): I was actually mildly excited about the Resident Evil world being put in different hands after about a hundred films by Mila Jovovich’s husband, but the resulting movie director/writer Johannes Roberts cooks up really isn’t a step up for the franchise at all. It’s a mess of a film that seems more interested in squeezing in as many videogame characters and nods towards various Resident Evil games as possible than constructing a working narrative, with way too many characters who have no reason to be on screen at all taking up run time as well as some of the viewer’s lifetime, the film cutting back and forth between these non-entities in a way that destroys the rhythm a big loud horror action movie like this desperately needs to work.

Instead of getting the adrenaline pumping, the film drags, then drags some more, and then drags again; the action sequences are staged without weight and feel random and inconsequential, and there’s simply no sense of tension to anything on screen.

The Beast aka The Wasteland aka El páramo (2021): This Spanish Netflix horror film by David Casademunt sets its sights rather a bit higher than Roberts’s film does, trying to talk about monsters and mental illness and frontier life and difficult families, all through the tale of a family that has fled 18th century wars into the wasteland (geographically and emotionally) of the film’s best title. I say trying, because like Raccoon City, it often lacks the focus it needs to succeed at its difficult task, though there are a handful of scenes in here that do produce the cold chill and the emotional complexity it so clearly aims for. The film’s main problem really isn’t only a lack of focus. There’s also Casademunt’s unsubtle direction, a tendency to overplay emotional beats and add a lot of slow motion and showy camera work in the tackiest manner imaginable exactly at those points when the film should trust its actors, namely Imma Cuesta and young Asier Flores, who both do what they can with what the film provides.

Devicansky Svirka aka Song of the Virgins aka The Maiden’s Tune (1973): By far the most artistically successful movie in today’s post is this fifty-five minute teleplay made in Yugoslavia when that country still existed. Directed by Djordje Kadijevic who also made the brilliant Leptirica/The She-Butterfly, this is a pretty incredible mix of early 70s arthouse sensibilities and the Gothic, a tale of psychosexual weirdness that is much better experienced than described which ends its very highbrow (and I mean that in a good way) tale with one of the greatest High Gothic scenes I’ve ever seen, the sort of thing that would have driven Poe-cycle phase Corman or even Bava mad with envy if they’d seen it, marrying sex and death and music in the most perfect way.