Three Films Make A Post: It's a cold, cruel world - but Jackson can hack it!

Fresh (2022): I’m not as excited about Mimi Cave’s variation on common horror tropes as quite a few other viewers seem to be, mostly because adding a bit of gloss to keep a more mainstream audience watching something usually done sordid doesn’t seem to be much of an achievement to me, and does not for a terribly interesting movie make to these eyes. I also found the film’s feminism very superficial and pretty bland, not really adding further insight to anyone’s view of the world nor doing much I haven’t seen before to the tropes of its sub-genre. It’s certainly well-filmed and well-acted (with Daisy Edgar-Jones giving a likeable turn, and Sebastian Stan giving the oversize crazy performance every filmography needs) on a technical level, but it’s also twenty to thirty minutes too long. Particularly the never-ending (and not in a good way) climax is a problem here.

Unmasked Part 25 (1988): Anders Palm’s very low budget slasher comedy romance from several decades earlier is rather more creative with the tropes of its sub-genre, providing many a moment of handmade gore as an additional attraction, thinking through and against the basics of the slashers genre, skewering bodies as well as poetry-quoting self-serious sad sack men, and actually building a world for his slasher (Gregory Cox) to inhabit. The jokes here are trying to hit on every level, from making fun of genre tropes – be they horror or romantic comedy – to peculiar sex jokes to plain deadpan weirdness, and as is par for the course for the shotgun approach, not all of them hit. But there are so many of them, you’re already laughing or shaking your head at the next one.

Bride of the Nile aka Arouss el Nil (1963): Practically everything I’ve seen of classic Egyptian movies like this romantic fantasy comedy by Fatin Abdulwahhab fits very much in style and taste to classic Hollywood formulas, and it’s very easy to imagine a US version of this tale of a grave-disturbing engineer (Abdel Moneim Ibrahim) first being haunted by and then falling in love with the spirit of the last bride of the Nile (Lobna Abdel Aziz) without many changes to the script or the filmmaking. We don’t actually need a US version, happily, for the film at hand is really all you could want from the kind of whimsical, fantastical romance this material promises, with many a superimposed image of Lobna Abdel Aziz waving her hands so that some telekinesis can happen, the expected assortment of musical numbers and pretty great costumes, and a general sense of fancy that never seems to get tired or old.