Music Monday: New Year Edition

Deathtrap (1982)

Successful playwright of stage mysteries Sidney Bruhl (Michael Caine) has his difficulties coping with the giant flop of his newest play. Sure, his rich wife Myra (Dyan Cannon) – I assume a former actress going by her enormously dramatic personality - would be perfectly okay to take care of both of their needs, and she’s clearly not the kind of woman who’d care about this as saying anything about him. Alas, that’s not something Sidney’s ego seems to be prepared to deal with.

He’s so obsessed with regaining success, he begins having rather murderous thoughts when a former workshop student of his, Cliff Anderson (Christopher Reeve) sends him a copy of a new play he hoped Sidney might help him sell. Which shouldn’t be a problem at all, for Sidney finds the play not just to be eminently marketable but also basically perfect. So perfect, murdering Anderson and stealing his work if the opportunity arises becomes more than the joke Myra believes it to be to him.

And that’s where I shall hold the plot synopsis part of this write-up, before any of twists in this utterly brilliant Sidney Lumet adaptation of Ira Levin’s only successful play start happening. Actually good twists that work with established characters, details and motivations are much too rare to waste, after all, and the film at hand does have rather more than one of them.

That Lumet is a great director hardly needs mentioning, but it is probably worth saying that this one lacks the didactic manner he sometimes could fall into, replacing it with a large amount of wit. Particularly seen as the adaptation of a stage play, Deathtrap is a very energetic film. Lumet often seems to put his camera into the scenes as another actor instead of going the respectful and a bit dull route of many of a screen adaptation of a stage where you might as well watch the stage play itself and not a movie. There’s never a feeling of the director doing too much, visually, though, or of getting in the way of the script or the actors. He’s there to enhance, deepen and assist, and he’s doing an incredible job at it.

Of course, the script (adapted by Jay Presson Allen) is rather on the brilliant side. It doesn’t just present a twisty, and often very funny, murder mystery, but also pokes and prods at the form it is working in on a meta level. Never in an obnoxious, too-clever way, mind you, but always deepening what’s going and making it more interesting and more emotionally and intellectually complex, as little  getting in the way of pace or characters as Lumet’s direction is.

The acting is up to the same standards, all three members of the main cast shifting the tones of their performances in ways that feel natural and logical, without showing off with it. That Michael Caine is brilliant in any film he’s in not only to pay his rent is obviously no surprise, but Christopher Reeve is also so good it’s basically revelatory to me, putting a guy I’ve never had all that much time for as an actor (though he was a perfect Superman, of course) really on the map for me. Dyan Cannon was apparently a victim of a critical drubbing when this came out, but really, she’s playing an incredible high-strung woman just as extremely as she needs to be played. Cannon’s also not leaving it at “high-strong”, but also shows the nuances of emotion and thought under that obvious surface layer; that the woman she’s playing isn’t subtle about her emotions and thoughts does not mean her emotions and thoughts have no subtlety, and Cannon’s performance is a masterclass in how to show this, at least to my eyes. The only performance here that’s really rather one-note and over the top is Irene Worth as our detective of the evening, psychic Helga ten Dorp, but that’s the perfect choice for this character in the context of this particular movie as well.

Masterclass really is the word that comes to mind for the whole of a film where script, direction and acting come together to reach astonishing heights as easily as Deathtrap seems to do.

Three Films Make A Post: A Ghost Story

The Long Night aka The Coven (2022): This bit of would-be occult horror set in the South as directed by Rich Ragsdale is the second example of the cargo cult version of slow horror/A24 horror I’ve encountered this year, which probably means that this genre has finally arrived at its proper place high on the horror food chain. It also means we have to fight our way through films like this, that use some of the visual markers of the style but show none of the intelligence needed to use it for anything good. In fact, the script is so dire, I’d rather watch a Full Moon Production movie about stupid dolls murdering people between bad jokes; at least those films have a realistic view of their own nature.

This one, on the other hand, puts a lot of badly edited and staged scenes (look at the amateur hour that is Jeff Fahey’s death scene and weep) and deeply stupid scenes on screen that could have made for a fun little exploitation potboiler in better hands, but instead makes awkward gestures at depth and deep aesthetic involvement, without understanding of how to actually achieve these things.

Martyrs Lane (2021): While not completely to my taste, Ruth Platt’s film does clearly know why it wants to use the aesthetic markers of slow and ghostly folk horror – to take a child’s eye view on depression and grief and their expression through childish ritual that is often quite effective and complex. Kiera Thompson’s performance is certainly frighteningly accomplished coming from a child (who should by all rights not understand many of the nuances she’s asked to portray here), and Platt is a director quite capable of putting a mixture of the magical view of the world of childhood, and the nightmares that come with that as well as with certain realities, into very moving scenes.

Still, the film  doesn’t quite work for me as much as I’d like it to; I can see its artfulness, and I can certainly appreciate it on an abstract level. Yet there’s something I can’t quite put into words (which is rather apropos for this one) that left me untouched emotionally watching it even though it’s obvious this’ll bring the house down for people who are more on its wavelength.

Hellzapoppin’ (1941): But lets finish on a film that takes not being serious very seriously indeed, namely this adaptation of a Broadway revue featuring the comedians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson directed by H.C. Potter. This thing’s so meta in so many aspects slapstick jokes actually become as subversive as the French fans of Jerry Lewis and Deano always said they were. The Fourth Wall is broken and then smashed into tiny little pieces; sight gags, which the people involved clearly understand as a visual form of the pun, become epically silly, deformed, reformed and then made fun of themselves. There are special effects based jokes you’d not have thought Hollywood at this stage to be able to even conceive of, much less realize this brilliantly.

All of this is presented with old-school Hollywood style and panache, like putting a fur coat around the shoulders of an improbable mutation with a trillion arms – some of whom are having a fist fight with each other. It’s a pretty damn wonderful movie, glossy and incredibly weird at the same time.

Short Film Friday: The Haunted Dolls' House

In short: Webcast (2018)

Warning: a couple of second act spoilers follow!

Having been transplanted from the City to a rural community by her mother so they can better take care of her stroke-damaged grandfather (for whose state she clearly feels some guilt), teen Chloe (Samantha Redford) has started up a web cast channel. Probably to fight off boredom more than anything else.

She’s not without ambition, though, and decides to make a documentary about the disappearance of her aunt from exactly the house she is now living in thirty years or so ago. She has a useful helper in form of her friend and flame Ed (Joseph Tremain) who has come to stay with the family for a time.

While out and about, Chloe becomes convinced there’s something very fishy going on with their direct neighbours, something she feels may be vaguely connected to her aunt’s disappearance as well. As a matter of fact, the neighbours are practicing some form of witchcraft, and they do not appreciate teenagers sticking their noses into their affairs at all.

Paul McGhie’s Webcast is an undeservedly neglected entry into the humongous canon of POV horror. It is also, pleasantly, a POV horror movie that doesn’t seem to want to hit the exact same plot beats and plot points of your typical “young people in the woods”-style affairs. There are some scenes taking place in the woods, mind you, and at least one of those is wonderfully creepy, but this is not a wood runner movie, but stands more in the tradition of the investigative arm of folk and occult horror (one could probably argue long and hard about the proper subgenre for this one, or just not) that’s all about a couple of people trying to solve a mystery and getting rather different answers than they wanted.

While clearly realized cheaply, there are quite a few cleverly staged and/or shot moments, and even some bits of great sound design (an aspect many of the cheaper POV horror films tend to ignore beyond the noises of somebody stepping on vegetation). Even more atypical, Webcast puts some energy and time into its characterisation, making Chloe’s obsession with her project even when most people would run believable enough to work. McGhie also repeatedly shows a daft hand at the creepy or weird detail that makes a good movie witch cult of the nasty persuasion work, with some effort clearly having been put into the iconography and style of the cultists, which not just turns the antagonists into a more believable, but also a stranger and nastier threat.

All of which turned Webcast into a very pleasant surprise for me.

Pray for the Wildcats (1974)

Rich macho asshole and deeply unpleasant sleazebag Sam Farragut (Andy Griffith) is one of the richest, most lucrative and most important clients of an ad agency. He knows it too, and because he is that sort of man, he uses his position to belittle, manipulate and denigrate the poor guys who are in charge of his account. So the plan for a campaign using Baja California in Mexico as the backdrop for his campaign turns into him blackmailing his “favourite” ad executives into going on a dirt bike trip through the desert with him, or else. So off Warren Summerfield (William Shatner), his old colleague and work buddy Paul (Robert Reed) and young turk fancying himself an artist Terry Maxon (Marjoe Gortner) have to go with him, as if they didn’t have their own problems. Namely, Warren is in some sort of quantum state of being secretly half-fired, with Paul pegged as his replacement, while Warren is sleeping with Paul’s wife Nancy (Angie Dickinson) who clearly wants the also married Warren as a replacement for Paul in her life. Warren is also suicidal, and believes the trip might just be the way for him to kill himself and make it look like an accident, leaving a fat insurance policy for his family as some sort of ultimate, idiotic “I’m sorry I failed at being THE MAN SOCIETY TELLS ME I’M SUPPOSED TO BE!”. Terry for his part as problems admitting to himself that the work he is doing stands against all of his supposed values, and that he’s turning into a Yes Man for the worst kind of person possible, even though pretending Farragut isn’t the worst humanity has to offer is pretty much akin to talking oneself into a state of actual delusion.

Things don’t get better for anyone in Baja, not just because Farragut just loves to push everybody’s buttons, but because he’ll also turn out to be a murderer just waiting for an opportunity and a pretext.

I don’t generally fall into this jargon (it’s not really mine, philosophically), so when even I want to call Robert Michael Lewis’s TV movie about a trio of ad men, all broken in their own, distinct ways, and their horrible rich guy client a film about the destructive force of various 70s versions of toxic masculinity, it probably really is that. The script by Jack Turley isn’t exactly subtle about this either, doubling down on everything that’s dysfunctional about these men and how dangerous and oppressive this kind of dysfunctionality is for those around them; unlike a film made today would be, it’s not without compassion for these men (except for Farragut), though, so it will not only show them as the destructive forces they are, but also grief how they got there. It doesn’t show a terrible amount of hope for them ever getting better, alas.

Even the way the film side-lines the female characters after the first act for the main narrative thrust but never wants to quite lose sight of them seems to be a pointed, conscious choice, suggesting much about the divide between men and women the culture they live in will build, even when there’s love and an actual human connection between them.

Because that’s not quite enough for a little TV movie, apparently, Pray also adds an equally unsubtle yet effective criticism of a style of capitalism that seems to be build to create exactly this kind of behaviour in men, turning artists into yes-men, and middle-aged men bitter and self-destructive because they can’t quite keep up with the monsters.

Not surprisingly with this cast and the film’s themes, there’s quite a bit of scenery chewing going around, though it’s really Griffith (with the understandable relish of a guy who mostly played the aw-shucks Southerner in his career) and Reed who take the greatest bites, while Shatner, quite unexpectedly, turns in a comparatively nuanced (for his acting style, obviously) performance that makes quite a bit out of all the little hurts, betrayals and self-betrayals this character’s life has become, somehow making Warren more sympathetic than you’d believe.

With all of this going on, it’s not much of a surprise that the film’s actual thriller plot takes a bit of a backseat and is really just there to give characters the final push into the direction fate and the script need them to go; but then, that’s not so much a criticism than it is an observation.

In short: Live a Little, Steal a Lot (1975)

aka Murph the Surf

Allan Kuhn (Robert Conrad) uses his official “career” as strapping, bare-chested beach boy to hide his true profession as not always fully dressed jewel thief in Miami. For reasons the film never really makes clear, he becomes best buds with the ultra 70s macho adrenaline junkie and original beach bum Jack Murphy (Don Stroud), also going by the moniker of Murph the Surf. Very quickly, Allan lets Jack in on his actual profession and teams up with him, again for reasons that pretty much hang in the wind, given that Jack’s the last person anyone would want in any job that could use even an ounce of calm professionalism.

They also fall in with flight attendant Ginny (Donna Mills), who falls for Jack rather heavily. Jack enters into the sort of relationship with her you’d expect from a guy clearly incapable of loving anyone but himself, while Allan does a bit of highly atypical pining for her. After several adventures and misadventures, and increasing strains on all of their relationships, the two buddies steal the ridiculously badly secured J.P. Morgan jewel collection from the New York Museum of Natural History. Things don’t go terribly well after that.

Based on a real crime and using real names (but certainly not taking place in 1964 like the actual crime did), Marvin J. Chomsky’s crime movie never seems to be clear what exactly it wants to focus on: the shittiness of 70s machismo and the way it destroys women? The destructive friendship between two men? That crime is fun? That crime isn’t fun at all? Consequently, there’s a little bit of every of these elements in the movie, but you’d be hard pressed to use any single one of these and say the film’s about it.

Being quite this all over the place might have worked with a different director, but Marvin J. Chomsky only has his TV director chops to use, and so there are few scenes going beyond a bit of bland craftsmanship, and certainly not the kind of creative spark that could make any kind of a whole out of this mess.

Not that the script by E. Arthur Kean and apparently the real Allan Kuhn is of any help there. It is, after all setting up all these bits and pieces it then doesn’t really focus on, and makes things even more chaotic through one of the most pointless flashback structures you can imagine.

At least we get a pretty good boat chase out of this mess.

Music Monday: Little Earl Edition

The Ghost Man (1954)

Original title: Yurei otoko

After a blood-drinking artist with very bad teeth and some missing fingers escapes from an asylum, a series of murders of young women strikes Tokyo.

The killer loves to pose his victims artistically/creepily, and has a habit of declaring his future plans via tape messages or public announcement systems like a proper supervillain. He seems to be particularly interested in the women working in a nude model shop that for some reason is also the favourite hang-out of a club focussed in the grotesque and the weird (with no mention of sexy young ladies in their name).

Eventually, great private detective Kosuke Kindaichi (Seizaburo Kawazu) starts taking an interest in the case, which doesn’t bode well for our hobby artist.

If you’re like me and working with the knowledge a handful of – mostly Kon Ichikawa-directed – movies adapting the Kindaichi novels by Seishi Yokomizo from the 70s, you might be surprised to find this adaptation of a Yokomizo work from the mid-50s, as directed by Motoyoshi Oda. As a matter of fact, the Japanese film industry started on the series early, with the first Kindaichi movie having been made in 1947, barely a year after the first novel had been published. Alas, most of these film have neither official releases outside of Japan, nor have heroic fan subtitlers gone to work on the films - except for this one.

Again, if you know only the 70s films and the slow trickle of Yokomizo novels that is being translated into English via Pushkin Vertigo, you’ll probably be as surprised by the style and content of the film at hand as I was. For where the Yokomizo works I know are pretty great, and somewhat self-conscious, whodunnits of the impossible crime persuasion, Ghost Man is a bit of potboiling romp through dark back alleys, featuring a pulp supervillain of a style comparable to those masked maniacs haunting the German Edgar Wallace adaptations at the same time. Sure, the killer’s identity is still in question, and Kindaichi gets to do a bit of traditional detecting, but this is very much more of a pulp affair, even ending with a dramatic rooftop scene. How much of this comes from an actual change in approach by Yokomizo himself, and how much of it is the film taking rather a lot of liberties with the material is anybody’s guess, if “anybody” lives outside of Japan, because there’s no version of the book this adapts available outside of Japan.

Though, given how different this version of Kindaichi is not only from the very eccentric character from the Ichikawa cycle but also the character as described in earlier novels, and turns a socially somewhat strange guy dressed in a shabby yukata into a suave dude wearing some sharp bits of the latest fashion, I wouldn’t be surprised if the original were a very different beast indeed.

I think it is worth setting aside the question of adaptation and taking The Ghost Man for the kind of fast and sometimes pleasantly weird thriller bordering (as is actually rather typical of Yokomizo as I know his work by now) on horror it is, however, for it works rather well as the kind of potboiler it is supposed to be. The film goes from one moodily shot and staged set piece of increasing grotesquery to the next with quite some pace, satisfies with slight but effective action sequences and the typically always at least decent acting of Japanese studio cinema of the era, and really does everything to create exactly the kind of somewhat outré mood the gentlemen’s club in it should find endearing in a work of art. In fact, when it comes to the presentation of most of the titular villain’s victims, things not only get outré but also surprisingly explicit for the time. The film already seems to be halfway to putting the erotic grotesque (ero-guro) of literature and manga on screen like rather a lot of Japanese movies would do come the following decade, the killer’s “artworks” showing this in a aesthetically interesting as well as creepy manner, and Oda making of it as much as he can get away with. Which, as it turns out, is quite a lot.

Three Films Make A Post: They said he couldn’t cut it – they were right!

Cosmic Dawn (2022): There are exactly three things Jefferson Moneo’s very mysterious cult plus aliens movie has going for it: cheap but clever production design, a bright yet strange, sometimes even psychedelic, use of colour, and a perfectly decent central performance by Camille Rowe. Alas, the rest of the film is terrible: the pacing is drawn out and slow for no reason apart from keeping things “mysterious” and “ambiguous” (both of which they aren’t, if you’ve ever read about actual cults or have seen movies about fake ones), the dialogue tends to the inadvertently comical, the rest of the acting is so broad one might think this is supposed to be a comedy (it apparently isn’t?), and all the script’s structure of shifting between different time periods does is draw out things even more. Sometimes, narrative devices that are good for TV or can be used productively by really great screenwriters aren’t what more pedestrian talents should use, apparently.

And since there are at least a handful of movies about UFO cults that are actually good (decent would be enough in this case), I don’t see why anyone should waste their time with this one.

Ghosts of the Ozarks (2021): While it isn’t without its problems either, I’m rather more fond of this Weird, somewhat philosophical, Western-ish film by Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long. Sure, its script does have some unnecessary lengths too, but it also has something to say, saying it via a fantastical narrative because that’s simply a great way to talk about complicated things without getting distracted. That Ghosts does this in ways which are sometimes a bit cheesy, perhaps even silly, will be a problem to some viewers, but does feel so personally and individual to me in this case, it actually becomes one of the film’s strengths.

The direction is a bit awkward sometimes, but mostly in the way films straining against their budgets can get. The acting is generally good to great – with leads Thomas Hobson, Tara Perry (who also co-wrote) and Phil Morris doing fine work. And it’s always nice to see Angela Bettis, and David Arquette being weird.

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021): As if we were trapped in one, we are living in the age of the time loop movie again. Like certain characters in many entries of the genre, I’m perfectly fine with it, at least as long the time loop movies are as good as the current batch. Quality-wise, this teen romance version by Ian Samuels (with a script by Lev Grossman in a very uncynical incarnation) is certainly keeping with modern sub-genre standards, hitting all the mandatory beats of the time loop film and the teen romance, but giving all of them a neat, even mildly subversive twist of their own. Kathryn Newton and Kyle Allen make for very likeable leads indeed, too. Newton should have a nice career in front of her even when she’s not playing characters possessed by Vince Vaughn, it seems.

Apart from making a film that’s charming as all get out, the filmmakers also succeed in giving it one of those “positive emotional messages” without letting it get schmaltzy; instead the emotional beats feel genuine and deserved. Perhaps a bit too optimistic about the non-crappy nature of the universe, but them’s the breaks.

Three Films Make A Post: A hunter never leaves his prey wounded

Wounded (1997): A forest ranger played by Mädchen Amick gets into a pretty typical cat and mouse game with an insane poacher (Adrian Pasdar), after barely surviving a first encounter that left her partner and quite a few other people dead. The only person she trusts is an alcoholic cop (Graham Greene). Directed by Richard Martin in a somewhat slick and impersonal manner, this one really lives from a handful of fine performances. Amick, if you can suspend your disbelief far enough to imagine her as someone who spends most of her time outside, does a very credible job with a character wavering between grief, trauma and anger, Greene is his typical low-key inspired self, and Pasdar does pretty sociopathy and murderous scenery chewing very well indeed.

Structurally, this would probably have needed some extra hook, but still stays a pretty worthwhile hidden gem for the acting ensemble alone.

The Creeping Flesh (1973): This Tigon production is certainly not director Freddie Francis’s best, mostly because the script by Peter Spenceley and Jonathan Rumbold never quite seems to have decided what exactly it wants to do with some very Nigel Kneale-ish ideas, and so does quite a few things, none with much follow-through. But it still has the visual flow and flair typical of Francis even on his bad days, and fun work by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as half-brothers with their own respective brands of mad science. Particularly Lee is spectacularly nasty here once he gets going, contrasting nicely with Cushing’s more sympathetic (yet still horrible) kind of mad scientist.

The film features a complicated and not unproblematic view on mental illness and heredity, particularly when female sexuality comes into the mix, but also quietly suggests that certain male behaviours, even well-meant ones, might be among the root causes of the problem there.

If only the titular Creeping Flesh would make its appearance earlier (or, alternatively, only be a metaphor).

The Summit of the Gods aka Le sommet des dieux (2021): While I’m too much of a coward to ever do any climbing myself, I find mountain climbing and its philosophical and psychological underpinnings endlessly fascinating. Consequently, I find this animated French (though based on a Jiro Taniguchi manga and very Japanese in visual style) film directed by Patrick Imbert about mountain climbing, obsessive men, and the reasons for their obsessions very fascinating indeed.

It uses a flashback structure flawlessly, draws its characters clearly and with surprising complexity, and often looks very beautiful indeed, staging suspense, tragedy and the handful of moments when it wanders off into the slightly surreal all with the same calm capability.

Short Film Friday: Ad Lib

I don't usually do content warnings, but this one's about abuse, so be warned.

In short: Witchouse II: Blood Coven (2000)

After four dead bodies have been found on the grounds of an old creepy house that’s making place for a one of those new-fangled shopping malls, a forensic anthropologist professor (I assume) played by J.R. Bookwalter alum Ariauna Albright and her students are called in to find out whatever they can about the remains. The town where all of this is happening is situated right in Romania, Massachusetts (or is it the other way round?) and apparently well-known for its witch-hunting past, so it will come as a surprise to anyone not having read the film’s title that the Prof and her students are soon bedevilled by supernatural nonsense and possession. Perhaps Andrew Prine, Witch Hunter will be able to help out?

One of the ironies of director J.R. Bookwalter’s career is his hitting of the professional movie-making circuit via Full Moon pictures (which sounds small-scale, but actually meant ten times the budget he had to work with before) actually resulted in less entertaining films than the ones he made on his own dime. This sequel to the David DeCoteau snoozer is a case in point, suffering from a script (by Douglas Snauffer, who actually worked with Bookwalter on his indie films, though not on the scripts) that never seems to know when to end scenes. There’s a particularly egregious part with interviews of the local populace clearly meant to parodically cash in on the Blair Witch style of POV horror that manages to be unfunny as well as endless that puts the final nail in the coffin of the movie’s pacing.

We also have the major problem of a plot that’s good for half a movie (even of a runtime under eighty minutes) at best that has to be dragged out to Full Moon full length by any means necessary. Often Bookwalter attempts to fill the empty spaces where a movie is supposed to be with quips in the style of most of his indie movies, but the pacing of delivery and timing is off there, too.

From time to time, there are moments that still suggest that Bookwalter is a technically more accomplished filmmaker than your typical Full Moon hack of the company’s phase when all the actually capable filmmakers stopped working there, so some of the final act bad special effects monster fighting becomes genuinely entertaining – and who wouldn’t approve of John Prine, Witch Hunter ? – and some of the performances manage to be entertainingly over the top instead of just being bad, but that’s not really enough to save the film as a whole.

Carnival of Blood (1970)

Brooklyn’s favourite amusement park, Coney Island, is struck by a series of gruesome murders. It appears someone’s suffering from a case of highly violent misogyny and has a bit of a taste for mutilation and organ-stealing. Ambitious young assistant attorney Dan (Martin Barolsky) starts obsessing about the case – and his futile attempts at solving it by going to the carnival – so much, it puts his relationship with his artist girlfriend Laura (Judith Resnik) under quite some pressure. Laura has good contacts to Coney Island, too, for she’s good friends with mild-mannered dart-throwing booth owner Tom (Earle Edgerton). Tom has just hired a new helper, a perpetually angry, mentally handicapped, hunchbacked guy going by the highly unfortunate moniker of “Gimpy” (Burt Young, in his very first movie role, working as “John Harris”). Given his disposition and the usual habits of horror films, “Gimpy” is clearly our main suspect, but is he really going to be the killer?

Nobody watching Carnival of Blood will be terribly surprised to hear that its writer/director/producer Leonard Kirtman was mostly working in the porn biz afterwards, apparently sometimes under the pretty wonderful name of “Leo the Lion”, but most often as Leon Gucci (of the Hoboken Guccis, I assume). The film often has that distinctive vibe typical of porn filmmakers of the time doing horror or other non sex-based genres of being structured around sex scenes that somebody simply forgot to add. So there’s quite a bit of pointless dragging of feet in this one, with rather a lot of scenes certainly ending not in any sort of climax and indeed going nowhere slowly. Worst of those are our regular visits with the local fortune teller (Kaly Mills), foreseeing doom, of course, that just go on and on and on into eternity.

To be fair, there is a narrative reason why the film is showing all of the victims are visiting her, but that doesn’t make the scenes themselves any easier to get through, particularly since Kirtman really isn’t good enough of a director to make this repetitive business at least look interesting.

I do think it is worthwhile getting through Carnival’s copious amount of slow bits, however, for while our host certainly isn’t much of a stylist, he makes up for this lack with a lot of fascinating, basically documentary material that shows early 70s Coney Island in all its seediness and somewhat glorious loudness. Kirtman isn’t so much creating an interesting place for what on a plot level amounts to a US giallo to take place in, he’s rather shooting it like a documentary filmmaker would, leading to a film with a striking sense of place, if one often edited with a sledgehammer.

At least some of the acting is pretty worthwhile too, Young going method on a pretty problematic stock horror movie character type, and finding some genuine human core in it, mostly working opposite Edgerton and his similar if cornier and less intense performance to at least somewhat fascinating effect. Let’s not talk about our supposed leads.

Add to this a bit of preposterous and therefore awesome gore that would have been too subtle for Herschel Gordon Lewis, but was probably rather shocking for at least a part of the audience at the time when this went into the cinemas, and you have a film that’s at least interesting as a – exploitation-typical – mix of the crude, the boring, the fascinating, put inside of a time capsule that basically reeks of the past as indeed another country.

Some Thoughts About Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

Original title: 呪怨

A recent re-watch of what is still one of my favourite films among the J-horror wave of the time reminded me of what a fascinating film Takashi Shimizu’s cinematic version of his DTV movies is. On the surface, this is a much inferior film to that other great classic of its time, Ringu, having to work with much lower production values, as well as an inferior cast, and binding itself to a highly episodic structure.

I believe it is exactly the episodic structure, or rather, how Shimizu creates the structure what keeps this still as such an effective piece of horror filmmaking. Its greatest strength lies in how much the structure of the film mirrors the structure of the curse, a viral infection of supernatural anger that moves outward from a time and place in ways that feel frightening because of their irrationality and by how little the people suffering from the supernatural are actually connected to it. Entering the wrong place, being related to another victim, is enough – the idea of punishing the guilty through the supernatural just never applies here; even warnings to the curious are fairer than that. One can, and I sometimes like to, see a nice parallel to the at best indifferent cosmos of Cosmic Horror here, though arrived at from a direction based in Japanese folklore and Buddhist and Shinto concepts of spirits, and certainly carrying a less nihilist meaning, at least culturally speaking.

The temporally disjointed structure strengthens this feeling of the Grudge as something unfair, cruel and anti-rational, as if the destructive supernatural here worked not just forward in time and outward in space, but also backwards and sideways, destroying causality along with the sense of security.

Music Monday: Under the Sun Edition

WarHunt (2022)

The tail end of World War II. A US plane crashes in the German Schwarzwald thanks to what looks a lot like supernatural intervention to me.

Sergeant Brewster (Robert Knepper) and his squad of tired veterans are tasked to wander into the forest, find the plane wreck and rescue possible survivors. For mysterious reasons, one Major Johnson (Mickey Rourke), probably of the BPRD, orders Brewster to take one of his own men, Walsh (Jackson Rathbone) with him as some kind of vaguely defined specialist for something or other.

Brewster is not amused, but it’s the military, so he doesn’t have much of a choice. Walsh will turn out to be a definite asset, what with him being the only one who actually knows what’s going on in the forest. Which is rather useful once the squad is slowly whittled down in numbers, driven crazy or changed by a coven of witches with a bit of a raven fetish.

As regular readers (hi, Mom!) will know, I have a bit of a weakness for pulpy movies about soldiers versus the supernatural, so Mauro Borrelli’s shot in Latvia WarHunt does push some of my favourite buttons.

As it turns out not just because it knows its genre and the tropes and beats it really needs to hit to function in it pretty well, but because it is simply a genuinely entertaining bit of low budget horror that tends to use its minor budget with quite a bit of creativity, perhaps even enthusiasm. At the very least, Borelli (who also co-wrote with Reggie Keyohara III and Scott Svatos) has some good ideas for using bits and pieces of witch folklore in a creative manner, so that the mix of a bit of body horror, some psychological stuff and the action elements that belong to this particular sub-genre go down pretty satisfyingly and feels consistent.

Borrelli’s always at least a competent director here, regularly hitting on a clever piece of framing or presentation, properly spooky lighting or a neat bit of production design to make some scenes rather more than they would be in less invested hands. I’m particularly fond of a genuinely creepy sequence concerning some roasted pig; the set for the climactic fight below a windmill (which is a pretty perfect place for a witches’ lair going by folklore about millers in Europe) is surprisingly wonderful, too.

The films also adds some Hellboy-esque lore to up the stakes the protagonists are fighting for that make decent sense for its kind of pulp universe, and keeps the film away from the problem of having some random soldiers just randomly stumbling on the witches.

Really, the only thing to criticize realistically – this is a low budget pulp horror/action film, so it not being an A24 joint is not actually a point against the film – about WarHunt is the artistically pointless inclusion of Mickey Rourke, whose scenes mostly seem to be in the film to make the most of the couple of shooting days he was available for them, and have little use beyond slowing things down. Though, to be fair, Borrelli does keep the “star”-induced drag I’ve come to detect and loathe through oh so many direct to whatever action movies to a minimum by keeping the Rourke show scenes relatively short and adding them in places where they do not get too annoying. And Knepper, Rathbone and the rest of the film’s actual cast are not only actually in the movie we are watching, but do give perfectly good performances for the kind of film this is.

Three Films Make A Post: Revenge is a Dirty Business

The Killer is Still Among Us (1986): Criminology PhD student (Mariangela D’Abbraccio) becomes convinced that the serial killer haunting her city now is the same one she has started to write her thesis on, who did his horrible work a decade or so ago. Because the rules of the giallo say so, she starts investigating herself and quickly gets in over her head.

Camillo Teti’s giallo is a pretty uneven effort. About half of it is either stylish, or genuinely clever, interestingly unpleasant or very tense; the other half still looks rather fine, but is the movie version of someone dragging their feet very slowly. It does certainly get up to a very clever (or infuriating, if you’re of that temperament when confronted with the highly eccentric) ending with a healthy dose of meta.

Clean (2020): Paul Solet’s (and Adrian Brody’s, seeing as he co-writes, produces, acts and writes the generic score) movie about a man of violence trying to mend his ways but getting dragged back into his old ways to protect some innocents has exactly one half-way original thought: treating our protagonist’s former violent ways as an addiction like his heroin one. Too bad that thought is also pretty damn stupid, psychologically dubious, and just not getting the movie anywhere more interesting. Otherwise, this is an okay entry into its sub-genre, with one or two pretty effective moments of violence, decent performances, and technically competent filmmaking.

The Eclipse (2009): I’m still not quite sure what to make of this Irish film directed and written by Conor McPherson. At times, it seems to prefigure the most arthouse affine arm of A24-style slow horror, but it also has some of the loudest jump scare ghosts ever annoying you with a VERY LOUD NOISE, and a script that never seems to want to decide on a tone. So the spookiness as metaphor stuff, scenes about grief and loneliness and scenes of a man slowly coming back to life via awkward romance are paired up with the sort of romantic farce you’d expect a local amateur theatre to come up with. All of it is staged in a stately and artful manner (if that fits any given scene or not), acted very well by Ciarán Hinds, Iben Hjejle and Aidan Quinn even in those moments when the material doesn’t deserve their efforts, and never really comes together for me.

Short Film Friday: The Monster Upstairs

People like me get extra lazy during lockdown. Others gift us with a series of very fun short film:

In short: Meander (2020)

Original title: Méandre

Warning: some major plot spoilers are pretty much unavoidable in this case!

After getting picked up by car driven by a killer, and going through some sort of altercation with the nasty guy, Lisa (Gaia Weiss) wakes up in a gauntlet of tunnels and small rooms full of traps and unpleasant surprises that only start with the body parts of her predecessors. She’s also got a nifty new outfit, as well as a large bracelet she can’t take off that sets countdowns for her way through the curious place – if she isn’t fast enough, she can look forward to a nice incineration.

At first, the viewer of Mathieu Turi’s Meander will probably assume that this is a bit of Cube meets Saw business in which the crazy person from the beginning is punishing Lisa for some perceived sin in her past (which you will be not surprised to hear is indeed tragic and contains the by now mandatory dead child) using his exceptional talent for homemade traps, electronics and architecture and his fascination for seeing people crawl. However, in a rather positive development, this particular maze of death turns out to have been constructed by aliens, which may not be exactly an original development but certainly helps the writer/director to push our heroine’s trials and travails into more extreme and sometimes strange directions than the serial killer escape room business would have allowed. So there’s time and space between the more typical acid, fire and rotting corpses for gravitational tricks and traps, fake dead daughters and even some fun creature effects as well as some techno-organic variations in the décor.

All of this certainly helps keep things quite a bit more lively than these kinds of film sometimes get, providing opportunities for quite a few fun set pieces. Plus, aliens are inherently more interesting than serial killers (even should they just be there for an anal probe).

All of this happens on a rather slight budget, but Turi uses what he has with verve, pacing things very well indeed, and always adding a new dangerous development before things threaten to become repetitive. I’m particularly taken with the film’s often very clever use of lighting to suggest claustrophobia, to then suddenly open up physical spaces and possibilities with sometimes surprisingly subtle shifts in light and colour.

Add to that Weiss’s fine physical performance (she is pretty much the only actual character on screen throughout), Turi’s sometimes pleasantly weird imagination, and an ending that puts our heroine right into a 70s SF paperback cover, and you’ll hear little to no complaints from me about Meander. And not a joke about meandering was made.

Darker than Amber (1970)

Florida boat-dwelling beach buds Travis McGee (Rod Taylor) and Meyer (Theodore Bikel) are managing to save a mysterious woman (Suzy Kendall), tied to an anchor, who has been dropped down the bridge they were fishing under.

As readers of the novels this is based on know, Travis really doesn’t like that going to the police or the hospital stuff normal people do in reaction in this sort of situation, so he and Meyer take care of the woman - who will eventually disclose her name to be “Vangie” - and her wounds. She’s not going to tell them anything about why someone tried to murder her, and so it’s clear to Travis early on that she was involved in something illegal.

Of course, Travis’s sensitive macho ways and Vangie’s lost girl number fit each other perfectly, romantically seen, and the inevitable happens once they’ve gotten to know each other. Alas, Vangie decides to return to her old haunts to fetch some money (living off Travis’s seemingly endless supply of cash forever isn’t really her thing) and is killed by the charming personality responsible for the whole anchor business, Terry (William Smith with the fakest blond dye job imaginable, which is actually a plot point).

Again, Travis doesn’t do police, so he starts investigating his lover’s death and the nature of the trouble she was involved in on his own, eventually getting even with Terry and his partners with a needlessly complicated – and therefore perfectly awesome - plan.

This is one of only two movie adaptations of the much-loved Travis McGee series by John D. Macdonald. I’ve never been as fond of the books as many readers seem to be, mostly because I find the author’s inability to see that his hero, with his habit of murdering a book’s bad guy and ritually dumping his victim’s corpse in the ocean, is at least bordering on being a serial killer, and because McGee generally comes over as a self-righteous prick, 70s macho version, again without his author seeming to recognize this. Which rather puts a damper on the novels’ effective – if often overwrought – plotting and period mood for me.

On the movie side of this affair, I’ve also never had much time for Darker then Amber’s director Robert Clouse, whose movies I’d generally describe as bland at best, usually badly paced, dubiously edited and staged with disinterest. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that I have rather a lot of time for Darker than Amber. It’s not that Clouse reveals himself as a great director here, but he is certainly working competently enough inside of the idiom of early 70s crime cinema, never doing anything clever with clichés, but realizing them well enough, I’m perfectly okay with the lack of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Pacing still wasn’t Clouse’s strong point even here at his best, so a viewer has to expect some dragging of feet and some needless reiteration of things you already got the first two times. On the other hand, there are a couple of cracking, grim and brutal action scenes here. Particularly the final fistfight between Travis and Terry comes to mind there, which looks so brutal, Taylor and Smith have told in various interviews they were having an actual fight and weren’t laughed off by anyone. Actors, of course, have no tendency of using a good in for a bit of self-mythologizing whatsoever, so the story must be true.

Taylor is a curious choice for the sensitive thug role of McGee, mostly because he’s not exactly great at selling the first part of the description, but he also embodies a particular kind of machismo that’s part and parcel for the character type perfectly; never in a way that’ll question any of the assumptions of being a 70s macho man, obviously, but as a human time capsule of the type, he’s pretty perfect. Particularly when contrasted with Smith, who simply turns up Taylor’s ten and a half up to eleven, finding the place where “man of his time” turns into “outright violent psychopath” and really getting his teeth in.

Seen from today, a lot of this very un-questioned macho posturing will look uncomfortable to some (and understandably so), but as a pulp fantasy of this particular kind of violent machismo, I find Darker than Amber rather hard to beat.

In short: Primal Rage (1988)

Original title: Rage – Furioa primitiva

An ever so slightly mad scientist (Bo Svenson) experiments on baboons in an attempt to revive dead brain tissue, working in college campus lab. Unfortunately, one of the college newspaper’s young journalists is bitten by one of those baboons while breaking into the lab to find evidence for illegal animal experiments. This being a horror film, the monkey’s bite causes what we’d call your typical rage zombie virus symptoms today, and soon, very bad skin problems and a murderous disposition make their way from our journalist, to his new girlfriend, to the rapist jock assholes who were pretty terrible even before they had an excuse.

Because the scientist is so crazy for experiments on the newly infected he’s not going to call for help, it will eventually fall to the college’s other intrepid reporter Sam (Patrick Lowe) and his new art student girlfriend Lauren (Cheryl Arutt) to save the day during the big campus Halloween party.

Primal Rage, directed by Vittorio Rambaldi, belongs to the group of Italian productions shot in the USA, made with an inexperienced (apart from Svenson) cast with not terribly exciting acting futures, using a mix of Italian and local US talent behind the camera.

As is typical for these films, there’s a certain disconnect between the authentically American cast and locations and the way they act, very much dragging the audience into a fantasy of how the US are (were) that’s even further away from the truth than the fantasies US movies have about their own country. It’s a very specific mood and tone some viewers will find off-putting because its obvious disconnect with reality, while others, like me, will find fascinating for exactly the same reasons.

Rambaldi is the son of the Carlo Rambaldi who was also involved in the special effects here together with Alex Rambaldi, another son of Carlo. Vittorio doesn’t appear to have made it very far in the film business, unfortunately, with four direction credits during the course of twenty years or so. He’s actually rather more capable than many an Italian no-name director, holding his own version of US culture together well enough, keeping the slow bits of the plot (co-written by Umberto Lenzi) moving quickly enough, and giving the violence a nasty edge that fits the simple yet icky design of what the infection does with its victims.

The climax with the rampaging frat boys is particularly effective, not just upping the body count but doing so in pleasantly unpleasant ways, while playing the violence very much as a more dramatic version of the underbelly of US college culture as we know it from movie, TV and courts of law.

Music Monday: Achinkad Edition

Polymorph (1996)

When their boss Dr Clark (Pete Jacelone) calls his two interns Ted (James L. Edwards) and Bill (Joseph A. Daw) to some patch of woods to help with finding a freshly crashed meteorite, Bill decides to turn work into a camping weekend with his girlfriend Alice (Jennifer Huss) and Alice’s friend Donna (Ariauna Albright) as a blind date for the somewhat neurotic Ted. Little do they expect that by the point they arrive, the good doctor will already have found the meteorite, will encounter a coke-addled drug trafficker named Tarper (Sasha Graham), and, together with his security guy, will have been killed by her.

While our protagonists are wondering where their boss is, and decide to just make it a nice night in the woods when they find no trace of him beyond his car, Tarper is in the process of being taken over by a rather rude and murderous alien that came packaged with the meteorite. Also, because he had a troubling phone conversation with Tarper, her drug biz boss Carlos (Tom Hoover) is on its way to the very same patch of woods. Clearly, plot lines will collide and a shitty green proto-CG alien special effect is going to make the rounds.

As the regulars among my imaginary readers will know, I’m something of a fan of the body of work of Polymorph’s writer/director/editor/DP/producer J.R. Bookwalter, particularly those parts that are indie as all get out. Bookwalter usually had better script and a tighter grip on pacing than many of his peers in this area, so his films do tend to feature dramatic arcs that can connect with viewers who like a bit of actual structure and movement in their movie narratives, while still providing quite a bit of the eccentricity and actual weirdness of the semi-professional arm of indie horror.

Polymorph may or may not have begun as a serious “people in the woods fighting against a very cost-effective alien special effect, because we only need green digital noise” movie, but clearly, it is shot and staged very much as a comedy. Something that usually rings many alarm bells with me in productions on this budget level, because comedy is especially difficult to do in a realm where you’re lucky when half of your cast has any actual acting experience or talent, and where scripts don’t have to – sometimes can’t – hold themselves to any professional standards of polish. However, I found myself genuinely charmed by much of what was going on in the film, the silly romantic comedy bits, the sort-of Tarantino in a goofy mood parts, and the number of snarky asides that once may have begun as serious action movie one-liners. There’s quite a bit of winking at the audience here by Bookwalter and his cast, with action movie poses turned absurd (yet, this being a Bookwalter joint, edited rather well nonetheless). That kind of winking is something I tend to despise, but here, it actually adds to Polymorph’s considerable charm for me. Which is to say, many of the jokes are actually funny.

The actors do well with the different styles of humour the film uses, too, and everyone goes for the bigger and sillier interpretation of whatever they do. Frankly, I’m not convinced anyone but Albright and Hoover would actually be able to play the film straight and do a proper, convincing acting job, but this way, the whole affair gets by on sheer enthusiasm (no mumblecore non-emoting here, that’s for sure) and the wondrous magic of a handful of people making weird faces.

Three Films Make A Post: More frightening than Frankenstein! More dreaded than Dracula!

The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021): If you want to know how not to make historical slow horror, this film written and directed by Edoardo Vitaletti should be a great teaching tool. It steps into all of the traps this sort of film can find its way in, starting with the belief that if you want to portray a period and society that’s all drab and dreary, your film needs to be drab and dreary too, and ending on pacing that’s leaden for no good reason whatsoever.

The film also never manages to bring its all too obvious thesis of “historical oppression of women and homosexuality by men was bad and killed the women struggling against it” to actual human life, never letting its concept become an actual story about actual people. It’s too concerned with hokey would-be authentic dialogue, lots of whispering, drab and dreary candle light like Barry Lyndon gone ridiculous to find anything genuinely human. And if all it has to say can be summarized in one easy sentence, what’s the point?

Trojan Eddie (1996): Whereas this Irish crime movie and very dark comedy by Gillies MacKinnon is all about things genuinely human. So it seeks and finds some kind of living spark even in the most oppressive idiots, and can be sympathetic without becoming bathetic. It is often very funny in the bleakly Irish style and very sad at the same time, never shying away from the brutality and pettiness of even its more sympathetic characters; yet it also never treats these as the only things they are. A cast full of people like Stephen Rea and Richard Harris certainly helps there, too.

In direct – and perfectly unfitting – comparison between this and Vitaletti’s movie, I can absolutely believe this film’s Ireland of the mid 90s as a place and time populated by actual human beings, where Mary’s is one in dire need of being fleshed out and taken beyond simplistic ideas about the past and the way people lived in it.

Shiva Baby (2020): Speaking of black comedies that are utterly sympathetic towards their characters even when they are treating them rather rudely and making them the butt of the joke, Emma Seligman’s tale of a shiva going very unpleasantly indeed for young Danielle (Rachel Sennott), what with all the lies she tells others about her life collapsing around her ears in public, is simply a fantastic film.

It is sharp, observant and often cutting without ever becoming cruel, using specificity of time, place and characters in a way that can’t help but produce insight even in viewers not sharing them. Seligman’s a very precise and visually interesting filmmaker, using camerawork and blocking as tellingly and elegantly as a great martial arts film/musical.

Short Film Friday: Bear Hugs

In short: The Mezzotint (2021)

Warning: there will be mild spoilers about the changes the adaptation makes to the tale!

Between the Wars. Academic Williams (Rory Kinnear and his magical facial hair) is sent a mezzotint engraving on approval. On first look, it seems to be not particularly exciting, but whenever Williams or others take a new look at it, it changes in increasingly disturbing and grotesque ways. At the same time, Williams learns some somewhat surprising facts about his family history.

As usual with Mark Gatiss, this half hour adaptation of a Monty James tale as a Ghost Story for Christmas for the BBC has found as much hate as praise (both pretty much from the circles you’d expect them to come from). I’m completely on the praising side this time around, and see this as Gatiss’s best James adaptation yet. It’s an effort that changes exactly the parts of the story that need changing for better dramatic effect, the original tale being one of James’s less exciting stories in need of a bit more punch on the haunting side as well as emotionally for its climax, which Gatiss provides in an efficient and logical manner. Then there are a few bits and bobs added to pull the story a smidgen away from the purely male academic area where James’s stories – as well as their author – dwelt. For this, Gatiss adds some dialogue about women coming to academia, something that actually must have been talked about rather a lot in 1923 in these circles, and puts a bit of organic diversity in by casting Nikesh Patel as Nisbet and adding an important female character (via a wonderful performance by Frances Barber). It’s all very efficiently, effectively and intelligently done, in a way that roots the tale in its contemporary reality, a technique James himself found very important in ghost stories.

Most important, obviously, is how well Gatiss has become at directing this sort thing. There are so many clever and atmospheric uses of Dutch angles, extreme close-ups and sharp editing on display, one thinks Lawrence Gordon-Clarke should have been proud of how creepy a tale mostly about men staring at a picture dramatically can get when filmed right. Of course, the men and women doing the staring here are fantastic too, suggesting great degrees of personality and emotion in a very short time.

And hey, Gatiss also adds a nice example of the Jamesian Wallop (term courtesy of the great M.R. James podcast A Podcast to the Curious) to the climax that’s not afraid to do a bit of showing when the telling’s through.

Ruqyah: The Exorcism (2017)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Although, given that this is based on “a true story”, there can be no actual spoilers, right?

Anyway. Jakarta, 2012. Popular actress Asha (Celine Evangelista) has been having some strange and frightening experiences with doppelgangers, poltergeist phenomena and the usual demonic (well, djinn) business. Either she is haunted, or she is losing her mind. Eventually, she is confessing her troubles to reporter Mahisa (Evan Sanders), who is clearly so smitten with her he’s perfectly okay to not report a pretty great story and instead help her out. At first, he’s rather sceptical when it comes to the supernatural aspects of Asha’s troubles, but seeing turns out to be believing.

Mahisa’s research quickly suggests that Asha is possessed by various djinn who are responsible for her success and beauty but also need her to pay a proper price for their help. We further learn that quite a few people in showbusiness are helping their careers along with black magic, whereas Asha genuinely has no clue about her evil supernatural helpers, or where they come from. Eventually, it turns out to be something of a tradition in the village where she comes from to ensorcel the young and the pretty without their knowledge so they are supernaturally endowed to make money for their elders. Beats work, I guess.

Mahisa decides he really needs professional help now, but the imam he goes to recommends a homemade exorcism by an unsupervised (except for Allah, one supposes) amateur like our hero. Apparently, the guy doesn’t believe in actually putting any effort into helping people coming to him for help. which even an atheist like me understands to be not the way holy texts and prophets want their priest casts to act.

As you can imagine, things don’t go terribly smoothly with Mahisa’s attempt at exorcizing Asha while also fighting her black magic wielding mum (Mega Carefansa).

Ruqyah is yet another piece of Indonesian horror by the prolific Jose Poernomo (this time around also his own DP as well as co-writer). It’s not the director’s best effort, for unlike most of his films, this one seems have greater ambitions than it can actually afford, so the plot of a two hour movie is squeezed into ninety minutes, and particularly the big climax feels undercooked and underbudgeted, with the film’s worst effects and worst looking set not exactly making for a winning combination there, even with as much effort as Poernomo puts into dramatic handheld camera waving and pretty tight editing.

This doesn’t mean the whole of Ruqyah is a wash: there are some fun and clever (if less than original) sequences throughout, with some especially fine examples of the doppelganger motive Indonesian horror cinema uses so often, and the nearly mandatory scene of someone’s mirror image acting independently of themselves. The latter comes with the – thematically clever with this particular type of possession – variation of the mirror image looking more afraid than the original person.

Interestingly, Poernomo sets most of the big set pieces and moments of horror in brightly lit, modern apartments, clearly suggesting that contemporary evil is to be found with the rich, the powerful, and the very modern indeed. Which does have a whiff of preachiness and conservatism, too, of course, as is nearly inevitable in religious horror like this. Fortunately, Poernomo doesn’t overplay this aspect of the tale as much as he could. Plus, it’s not as if the religious authorities are terribly efficient before the mandatory final exorcism; and even that one is undermined by the good old horror movie bullshit ending.

In short: The Trip (2021)

Original title: I onde dager

The married couple of unsuccessful actress Lisa (Noomi Rapace) and soap opera director Lars (Aksel Hennie) head into a cabin by the fjords owned by Lars’s father for a quiet and peaceful weekend. Nominally, this is, for in truth, both are planning to murder the other there. Fortunately, for friends of true love finding a way and such, before anyone can murder anyone else, the perhaps not quite so happy couple are visited by a trio of very violent criminals (as played by Atle Antonsen, Christian Rubeck and André Eriksen), whose various attempts at rape and murder might be just the thing so save a marriage.

I’m pretty sure there will be quite a few people who can’t stomach Tommy Wirkola’s very specific mix of 70s exploitation style home invasion horror (the only good kind of home invasion horror) and darkest comedy; it takes a very specific kind of constitution to allow a film that can get quite as nasty as this one to also be funny. Despite my love for the more unpleasant side of traditional exploitation, I often tend have problems when it is mixed with humour myself, mostly because humour often seems to cheapen the harsher elements of a film or because some things just aren’t funny.

For my tastes, Wirkola (who does of course historically have a bit of talent for his sort of thing, see Red Snow) manages the difficult task of deciding what to keep simply unpleasant, which unpleasantness can be made funny, and which simply not to touch very well indeed, knowing what kind of brutality can actually make for a good, cynical joke, and which one would be tacky to use that way.

It does of course help there, too, that Wirkola is as experienced with comical timing as well as the sort of timing needed in an ultra-violent thriller as he is. An experience that also clearly makes it easier for the guy to find the points in his tale of marriage-saving blood and guts where he can quietly push the absurdity of things so far, he’s also at least partially satirizing exactly the kind of film he is making.

Add to that a cast of actors who seem fully in on the joke and just as capable to shift codes as Wirkola is, and the resulting film is a whole lot of decidedly non-stupid fun.