Is it that time of the year again already?

 Like every year, the stars are turning wrong and I have to go into hibernation for a bit. Our regular schedule will recommence on January, 6th.

Happy Holidays, or whatever tickles your fancy, dear imaginary readers!

In short: Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020)

Julien Temple’s documentary about the late, great Shane MacGowan uses a kind of collage method to not speak about the man and his work but let him speak for himself. So the film uses archival footage and often appropriately bizarre animation to illustrate the life and times of MacGowan as he tells them through various interviews from different stages of his life, some of which conducted by and with friends with an physically barely there man. The only outside perspective given is from some interviews with members of his family, editorializing doesn’t really happen. Given MacGowan’s tendency to extreme drunken debauchery, I wouldn’t exactly believe anything he’s saying, which doesn’t mean the film isn’t a true portrayal of his life and mind – it’s simply not one I’d believe as a portrayal of all the facts of his life and mind. But the facts aren’t really the point when you’re trying the portrait the core of a human being.

Given the nature of the man and his music, the film is a mix of nostalgia, aggression and sudden outbursts of poetry. It’s also clearly not on board with romanticizing hard living as a necessity for art – there’s an unflinching aspect to its look at MacGowan’s increasing physical and mental decline that leaves no room for that. Pleasantly, this unflinching view is paired with a complete lack of hypocritical moral superiority – talent wasting away and life fading is not treated with judgment here, but sadness for what’s gone and love for what’s still there. Which does turn this into a bit of a heartbreaker for those of us to whom MacGowan’s music means a lot, but that’s only right and proper.

In short: Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls (2023)

Bedraggled and just plain weird burger flipper Marcus (Andrew Bowser) is trying to reinvent himself as occultist Onyx the Fortuitous, following the teachings of YouTube occultist, rock star, and Satanic fitness video guru Bartok the Great (Jeffrey Combs). Onyx, let’s use his chosen moniker, is not very bright.

So he is exceedingly happy when he is one of the five Chosen invited to help Bartok with a ritual that will gain everyone involved immortality. Obviously, Bartok’s plans are mite more sinister than he’s letting on, and Chosen might actually be short for Chosen Sacrifices.

Andrew Bowser’s Onyx etc is a bit of an acquired taste, to say the least. Or really, if one is in the wrong headspace for it and particularly its high maintenance protagonist who never shuts up making noises with his very unpleasant voice, this could be a bit of a chore. Particularly during the film’s first half, Onyx the character is just a bit much, and his “funny” loser shtick never really loses those quotation marks. But then, I’m not a great candidate for appreciating this kind of awkwardness-based comedy at the best of times, and Onyx is really, really awkward. The situation isn’t helped by the sluggishness of the beginning of a film that takes ages to get to its early and most obvious beats.

On the other hand, even the film’s early stages are well shot, and well edited, and, even if you don’t like the tone it is going for, clearly well acted – it featuring Barbara Crampton, Olivia Taylor Dudley and Combs certainly doesn’t hurt, either.

Once the preliminaries were finally through, Onyx actually won me over, though. Suddenly, ideas became silly but clever instead of completely obvious, character relations were rather more interesting than they at first looked, and the film demonstrated a likeable, big heart, while still having fun with movie Satanist clichés. Even the jokes in the later stages hit better – there’s nothing that isn’t funny about a seduction scene in form of a fake Meatloaf video with not-Thundercats.

In short: It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)

On paper, doing a modern gimmick horror version of Capra’s insufferable, inevitable It’s a Wonderful Life sounds like a grand idea, for its vague politics and Capra’s peculiar world view really could use a bit of an update; plus blood and guts go well with anything.

In the hands of director Tyler MacIntyre and writer Michael Kennedy, this doesn’t turn out to be a worthwhile effort. The film never seems to be sure what kind of story it actually wants to tell, and for the handful of clever, fun or funny moments it squeezes in while not really telling much of one, there are dozens that simply fall flat. Unlike the film this is taking its basic idea from, the dystopic hellscape the town turns into when the slasher isn’t dispatched by our heroine is just too flat – dope smokers are now into crack instead! – and the curious attempt to change the role of our heroine when compared to the non-slasher version of the material neither makes much sense for the plot, nor does it result in anything much worthwhile thematically.

The attempts at doing the “society’s outsiders are awesome; lesbians are great” thing are certainly likeable, but never really come to life more than stating the obvious generally does.

Knife isn’t much clearer in its treatment of its supernatural elements, particularly when Justin Long’s evil mayor also turns out to have some random hypnotic powers or something, for some reason the film isn’t going into and the characters don’t seem to believe worth even thinking about. I can’t help but think rather a lot of things were lost between various versions of the script, and the film this ended up as is some curious undead abomination made from scraps.

Music Monday: Every Year Edition

Concerning the Ad Wars: https://freetubeapp.io/

Marlowe (2023)

1939. Bay City/Los Angeles. Morally upright private eye Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is feeling his age quite a bit, but he’s still working a job that involves getting shot at, conked on the head, used by the police and clients to do their dirty work, and so on.

This week – one must not assume but knows this sort of thing happens to Marlowe regularly – ravishing Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) hires Marlowe to find her lover Nico Peterson (François Arnaud) who has apparently disappeared without even a goodbye, which simply isn’t a thing that happens to the lady, or so she explains. Marlowe soon enough finds out that Nico is supposed to be dead, his head smashed by a car at the back of a club; eventually his client discloses that she knows about this, but has seen Nico after his supposed death, looking rather chipper for a zombie.

That is of course not the final omission or outright lie Marlowe is going to hear from his client. Cavendish does at least tend to soften her lies and obfuscations by quite a bit of spirited flirting. Other members of the lying persuasion Marlowe encounters in the following days do tend to prefer violence to sweettalk. And, this being Los Angeles in the late 30s, there are a lot of shady people trying to lie to a private eye who is soon up to his eyebrows in liars, killers, pimps and drug pushers – among other charming people. Every single one of them is played by someone like Jessica Lange, Danny Huston or Patrick Muldoon.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is based on John Banville, not Raymond Chandler, but the film is very much clued into Chandler’s idea of what the private detective of the hard-boiled model is supposed to be and do, so expect this version of Marlowe to be a knight in somewhat aged armour, manoeuvring the corrupt world of Hollywood and surroundings while doing his utmost not to be corrupt himself and leave a positive footprint, for someone at least.

Jordan as a director is at his most playful here. His approach to the film’s stylized but often incredibly fun dialogue is to emphasize the artificiality of what characters say and how they speak, which fits nicely into a film that does a rather nice job at pretending Spain is Los Angeles. While this certainly isn’t anything to make the friends of naturalism happy, I do find an ironic joy in a film all about characters to whom pretence and lying has become second nature – again, this is set in Hollywood – pretending to take place where it certainly isn’t with a wink and a smile.

It’s the nature of this particular beast that Jordan pays homage to classic noir and hard-boiled material rather a lot, with many a shot that stands in direct dialogue – let’s say, instead of borrowed - with comparable shots in the classics, but also by drenching this material not in black and white, but rather the colours of 90s neo noir. This does put further emphasis on the artificiality of the whole affair, but it’s a kind of artificiality I found engaging throughout – joyful even.

In short: Ballerina (2022)

Original title: 발레리나

Our protagonist Ok-joo (Jeon Jong-seo) has a background in the security business Ballerina never really explains but that provides her with all kind of badass abilities. Apart from her close friendship with ballerina/cake shop seller Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), she seems to be virtually friendless, a loner by inclination. One might suspect a traumatic past, what with this being an action movie made in the 21st Century, but the film is never showing us one.

Ok-joo does acquire some acute trauma in any case when she finds Min-hee dead of suicide. Min-hee left a note in which she asks Ok-joo to avenge her, complete with a mildly cryptic hint about what the hell she means with that. Soon, Ok-joo is on the trail of mass rapist, killer, and all-around shitheel Choi (Kim Ji-hoon), who raped and enslaved Min-hee, causing her suicide.

Under normal circumstances, killing Choi would be about an evening's work for Ok-joo, but it turns out he’s just part of a large drug, forced prostitution and murder racket, which makes things rather more difficult for her.

Lee Chung-hyun’s Ballerina is a nice little action movie, with some post-John Wick style gun fu, moments of absurd humour that seem to pop in from a different world than the rest of the film, and the attitude to genre tropes we know and love from South Korean genre cinema: tropes are excellent things, fun and really rather useful, but when the mood strikes, they are also optional.

There’s no large restructuring of the elements of the revenge flick here. Lee’s clearly trying to make an effective example of the form right in the mainstream of the cinematic language of our time for such a thing, just one that from time to time likes to turn things a couple degrees away from the completely straight and narrow, which keeps affairs more lively.

Colour schemes, camera work and editing scream POP! so much I’m pretty sure this is going to be a movie we’ll be able to read as a platonic ideal of how action filmmaking in the 2020s looked when we’re ten, fifteen years in the future. It’s certainly a fun example of its form and style, and though it doesn’t exactly have more substance than is strictly necessary for it to function, it still is a fine time.

Short Film Friday: The Archivists

The Archivists from Timelapse Pictures on Vimeo.

In short: The Killer (2023)

A professional killer (Michael Fassbender) botches an assassination attempt. After his middle-man sends people to his home that brutalize his partner, the Killer works his way up to his actual employer.

There’s really very little plot or direct characterization to David Fincher’s The Killer. Fassbender’s character is highly self-contained – or empty – except for a monologue that very pointedly does not really analyse or comment on what’s going on, even though it at first appear to do so. Rather, the repetitious monologue in his head is just another method the Killer uses not to have to connect with the world, to “stay in the moment” in the most nihilist way imaginable, just as he uses his own private The Smiths soundtrack for the same thing.

Everything we learn about the man’s actual inner life, or what little there is of it, the film shows us via the breaks in his facades, the physical injuries that begin to roughen up his slickness, and the way his actual deeds often are exactly the opposite of what his inner monologue never stops repeating. That this works as well as it does has a lot to do with focus: like the character at his best/worst (performance/morals), Fincher’s direction here is fastidious, neat and tidy, absolutely focussed on showing the things his main characters is not telling by insinuation, while always keeping up the appearance of this being a simple straightforward thriller.

This contrast between what we’re told we are seeing and what we are actually seeing does lend the film a surprisingly strong thread of humour. It’s a pretty grim sense of humour, of course, but that’s the only fitting kind of humour for this sort of thing – there’s something inherently funny about a guy telling himself quite as many lies as the Killer does, and a film presenting these lies with such a straight face, but murder is still murder. There’s some conceptual humour here as well: the Smiths as the best soundtrack to assassinate people to, the way the Killer’s philosophy mixes crap nihilism (the kind of nihilism only good for excusing one’s own shittiness with the shittiness of the world or universe) with wellness lingo that suggests a future influencer career for the Killer are things that not just work as elements of showing us a character but are also pretty great jokes, when you think about them for a minute.

The Creator (2023)

Some decades in the future. Somehow, humanity has developed genuine AI instead of the predictive language modelling that makes the hearts of our tech bros all a-quiver, and created various types of AI people. Following a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles for which they make AI as a whole responsible, the US have declared war on AI, not just outlawing its use and creation at home but going to war with anyone who isn’t quite this fond of what amounts to genocide. Particularly parts of Asia have become home to various ways of organic and inorganic people coexisting mostly peacefully.

Now, the US is officially winning its “war” thanks to a huge orbital weapons platform called NOMAD that hangs over Southeast Asia like the hammer of doom. In truth, NOMAD is the only thing that’s actually winning anything for anyone here, so desperate measures are called for when the mysterious scientific mastermind behind much of the AIs’ successes has apparently developed some sort of secret weapon against NOMAD.

To get at this weapon, a small strike force invades an Asian country that apparently isn’t Thailand anymore where intelligence believes the weapon is created. Because the US also want to finally get rid of its creator, they drag embittered veteran Joshua (John David Washington, giving a perfect performance) back in for his experiences in the area the attack takes place in. Five years ago, Joshua was undercover with the AI people, married to the scientist’s daughter Maya (Gemma Chan), and clearly teetering on the edge of changing sides for good. A botched attack killed Maya and their unborn child, and left Joshua rather unwilling to take part in much more of this.

Now, the military dangles Maya’s supposed survival in front of Joshua like a carrot. During the incursion into not-Thailand – which consists in large part of the US soldiers slaughtering civilians, AI (which aren’t “real” by their definition) or not – Joshua manages to get at the weapon the military is so wild about. The weapon, it turns out, is an AI that looks like a child. Instead of delivering Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), as Joshua will soon call her, to the Americans, he takes her on the run, in the hope she will lead him to Maya. Obviously, he is now hunted by all sides of the conflict.

For my tastes, Gareth Edwards’s The Creator is a wonder of a big budget science fiction film that squeezes in the mandatory amount of – pretty great – action set pieces but stays thoughtful and focussed on the things it wants to say throughout.

Much of the film’s quality lies in the ability of its director to use the spectacular production design and effects to do much of the world-building heavy lifting. Consequently, all the pretty things we are looking at here are not only meant to look cool – though they certainly do – but also fill out all of the details that turn abstract ideas into a living world.

This fits in nicely with the often hyperrealist direction style Edwards uses, putting less emphasis on a sense of wonder than of the film as showing a lived reality where things that should put the inhabitants of its world to wonder and awe are just parts of an often dirty day to day struggle. Because yes, this is the kind of science fiction that’s not just of its time but very much about its time, using echoes of the Vietnam War and all of those military “police actions” that so seldom seem to achieve what they are supposed to, but leave a lot of innocent people dead, to talk about sometimes surprisingly complex ideas about the nature of violent conflict and imperialism.

We still get a proper Hollywood ending where shit blows up, mind you, just one the film trusts its audience to understand in context; it is also one that doesn’t shy away from showing even such things to have a price. We’re meant to cheer in the end, but we’re also meant to understand what exactly it is we are cheering, and what has been lost for it.

In general, the film trusts its audience rather more than is the fashion right now, not just in us understanding the ending, in understanding the parallels of its world to the here and now, but also in understanding the more subtle elements of its politics and how these are part of the actions of its characters. Thus, even the genocidal military people are allowed to make sense as people, and the film never exactly becomes some triumphant thing about heroic rebels struggling against oppression, but emphasises the price in guilt and violence and loss of even the best of ends.

In short: Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988)

Original title: サイキックビジョン 邪願霊

A small crew is shooting documentary footage about the idol business, specifically the production of the new single of idol Emi, a song with the somewhat curious title of “Love Craft”. There’s something strange about the song, or rather, the music itself, and the production is soon haunted by minor supernatural troubles that seem to be connected to the melody. Nobody seems to really know who wrote the music, or rather, those few who might know seem rather reticent to tell. Our intrepid female lead reporter does eventually finds out the music was written by a woman who committed suicide shortly after she finished the song, which connects in a somewhat disquieting manner to the strange appearance of a ghostly woman in the background of various shots of the documentary.

Supernatural anger will to come to a head on a production run though for the “Love Craft” music video.

Jaganrei, directed by Teruyoshi Ishii, was POV horror of the fake documentary style before that was a defined subgenre, even though of course far from being the first fake documentary. It is astonishingly good at prefiguring much of what came after in its POV horror subgenre. Ishii creates a feeling of real verisimilitude. From the empty business talk of the suits creating Emi and her image, to the girl’s professional sound bites and fake smiles whenever a camera points her way, the film has a wonderful feeling of authenticity that grounds its handful of supernatural events in a very believable world.

These bits of supernatural business already include a bit of the “blink and you’ll miss it, until we repeat it” tactics that would become so important for later Japanese direct-to-DVD (etc) POV horror, and uses that trick effectively, producing tension with simple (and cheap) tactics without feeling simplistic.

It’s a lovely, short forty-nine minutes of period detail and spookiness, and thus highly recommended.

Music Monday: Prince and Joni Edition

The Equalizer 2 (2018)

Warning: spoilers for pretty damn obvious revelations ahead!

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is still going about his very particular kind of vigilante business, now spending time as a Lyft driver to observe humanity, and, this viewer can’t help but think, find either some people in trouble, or people he can sadistically punish for making trouble for others.

Helping out the elderly, breaking the bones of rapists and scaring a kid from the apartment house McCall owns straight doesn’t quite make for the needed action quota – these aren’t the 1970s anymore – so one of McCall’s few genuine friends, CIA analyst Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo) is murdered. The deed at first appears to be a break-in gone wrong, but McCall soon enough figures out there’s actually a mildly complex conspiracy involved.

Some people from McCall’s intelligence wet work past are channelling their violence in much worse ways then our vigilante does, and Susan stumbled onto their trail. If you’re surprised that McCall’s former best bud and partner (Pedro Pascal) is one of them, you’ve never seen an action movie or thriller in your life.

I really didn’t get along with the first Equalizer movie, a movie that seemingly doesn’t realize that its hero is more of sadistic serial killer than your typical movie vigilante (who are typically already sadistic and murderous enough), and finds him being cruel incredibly cool. Someone seems to have explained things to director Antoine Fuqua in the meantime, however, for the second Equalizer goes out of its way to emphasise McCall as someone who uses violence as a means of protection much more than one of punishment. There’s still a degree of sadism to the way he goes about things but not more of it than is to be expected from a contemporary action movie, and the film doesn’t seem quite so in love with this aspect of the character as the first one was.

Atypically for a big budget action film made in the last couple of decades, The Equalizer 2 leaves a lot of space for emotion and character development demonstrated through calm and curiously quotidian – at least for the kind of person McCall is – interactions between our protagonist and the various people he encounters, helps out, or brutalizes. This does the film and its main character a world of good, because it builds actual relationships between him and the world he inhabits, and so puts effort into selling the good he does as much as his badassery/violent temper. From time to time, the film does stray in the direction of the Very Special Episode here, but thanks to Washington and a fine supporting cast, it never quite gets there.

This looser structure and calmer pace also demonstrate a side of director Antoine Fuqua I didn’t expect – an ability to focus on the important parts of human interactions and a degree of patience and restraint his filmmaking usually lacks. I really didn’t think this particular director had much beyond “able to get along with Denzel Washington” to offer, but turns out that, given the right material, he can make a genuinely good movie.

Even once the action starts, Fuqua eschews his typical showiness in favour of mostly controlled set-pieces that don’t need overwrought editing or obfuscating camerawork and instead draw much of their power from an ability to put the audience beside the characters in what feel like actual physical places, which to me is still one of the important elements of an effective action sequence.

Three Films Make A Post: Now You Will Believe…

Night Skies (2007): Like Manchester, The X-Files have so much to answer for. To wit, this alien abduction thing about an RV full of unlikeable twats getting molested by aliens while the Phoenix Lights are doing their little dance. Jason Connery also pops in as an ex-marine trucker, because why not.

The script is sluggish and dumb, the characters unlikeable but not interesting, and director Roy Knyrim directs like someone who started their career with an Insane Clown Posse video. Admittedly, the big – theoretically gory - abduction and probing sequence is pretty funny, but digging through this much crap to reach that tiny nugget of comedy gold would be cruel and unusual.

Satanic Hispanics (2022): This anthology movie by Hispanic horror directors starts strong with a wonderfully strange piece by Demián Rugna, but after that it continues through tales of boring competence and ill-timed attempts at doing comedy that want to be Sam Raimi but only ever reach the effect of a bad third generation carbon copy. It’s a particular shame because most of these directors – apart from Rugna, Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Gigi Saul Guerrero, and Eduardo Sánchez – have made much superior films.

The Equalizer 3 (2023): But hey, it’s not as if the third Equalizer were any better – it just cost much more money to make. The third movie returns to the unexamined sadism of the first one, the unwillingness to take a long, good look at its hypocritical and self-pitying protagonist, and Antoine Fuqua’s all too typical inability to make a stylistically coherent movie.

Not making any of this any better are showy but uncreative action sequences without flow, weight or a sense of fun, so there’s very little to recommend. Even Denzel Washington is letting the side down with a performance so vain and filled with ill-advised actor business (just take a good look at his use of a teabag during one dialogue scenes), this only needed more shots of pointless and heroic poses to reach Tom Cruise levels of embarrassment.

In short: Paranormal Surveillance Camera 2 (2012)

Narratively and aesthetically, this second entry into the long-running Paranormal Surveillance Camera POV horror series from Japan is quite a step up from the first one. There is of course still an element of that first movie’s supernatural “Where’s Waldo” game involved – I haven’t encountered a film from Japan in this cheap and cheerful style that doesn’t want us to watch something supposedly creepy again in replay – but new director Satoshi Ishii drags this thing as close to an actual narrative as I expect to get from films like it.

So now, the surveillance camera footage is only the first step in short investigations that always threaten to get heated enough for a twist or an actual plot development but typically peter out with the paranormal investigators shrugging their shoulders and going “I dunno”. In about half of the tales, the film manages an interesting feat, however, in that it seems to tell us fragments of very traditional urban legends we can try to, are even supposed to, puzzle out on our own. It’s a curious sideways approach to narrative, where one or two pieces of a puzzle are supposed to suggest the other ninety or so, or at least creep an audience out with whatever they think might be going on.

It’s very much a parallel idea to never showing the monster. The tale we come up with ourselves will, after all, be more frightening than the one the film could actually afford to tell. Which is at least the theory Ishii seems to be operating from.

In the film’s more involved tales – where, for example, a film of the final breaths of an old man leads to one sad and one creepy revelation – this actually works, at least for me; in its lesser ones, there’s at least the charm of its earnestly dramatic presentation of the most minor “paranormal” events.

In short: Dark Stories (2020)

This five tale anthology movie is actually a compilation of episodes from a French horror anthology TV show.

In the framing narrative, a woman (Kristanna Loken) staves off death by a particularly crappy looking killer doll by telling the film’s tales until the inevitable “twist” happens. To give the film its due, it’s not “they were dead all along”.

The stories, particularly the first three, tend to have an unfortunate tendency to that kind of “humour” I can’t think about without the quotation marks; they’re also mostly lacking in originality or a decent effects budget.

The first three tales, directed by Guillaume Lubrano, are all, except for the “jokes”, pretty bland and inoffensive stuff, professionally but personality-free in their direction, and perfectly watchable. In the first, monsters the film calls “ghouls” for some reason, draw people into paintings, and supposed hilarity ensues. In the second, a jogger encounters ghosts in a public park and is murdered by a serial killer (spoiler, I guess), the ghosts of earlier victims trying to warn her in the least useful way. Tale number three is some godawful business about a guy who wakes up undead and saves his girlfriend while literally falling to pieces.

Tale number four and five, both directed by François Descraques, are both quite a bit more interesting. One features the travails of a woman who either suffers from sleep paralysis or is haunted by a djinn. This one actually features some effective – if not original - scenes of dream-based horror, flows well to its downer ending and needless shock after, and features some more than decent characterisation to boot.

The final tale, in which the series splurged for Dominique Pinon, is even better. It features Pinon as a farmer who believes that aliens have told him he is the messiah, and the world is going to end soon. He may not be crazy. This one’s actually pretty great, funny (not “funny”) in a dark way as well as demonstrating a degree of imagination in how it uses the messianic elements of UFO lore. It also looks quite a bit better than Lubrano’s tales, and is certainly directed with much more spirit and style.

Which makes this a very mixed anthology. Two great tales, one terrible one, and two blandly boring ones make…a movie that’s made for fast forwarding to the good parts.

In short: Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)

Mike (Josh Hutcherson), a fashionably traumatized guy taking care of his neurodivergent sister (Piper Rubio), gets a job as a night-watchman at something called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a half-ruined establishment that still harbours some working weird animatronic more-than-human sized animals. Alas, those somewhat creepy looking things are possessed by the souls of dead children and can get rather murderous.

I’m neither a fan of the FNAF games nor am I part of their – and most probably this film’s – intended audience. This is clearly made with entry level horror viewers or fans of the game franchise in mind, but I do believe the former deserve a more interesting and coherent movie. The film’s script is a total mess, with subplots and characters that often don’t feel as if they were written with kids as an audience in mind but actually written by one – the whole business about Mike’s aunt’s attempts at getting hold of Abby is particularly embarrassing – whereas Mike’s trauma scenes seem to belong into a completely different movie.

Some of the horror scenes are effective enough for what they are – director Emma Tammi can do better as we know – and the animatronic animals look pretty great in motion, but there’s no flow, no character and no personality to either the filmmaking or the film itself, leaving this not just as a product, but as a deeply mediocre product with little of interest to it. Kids deserve a better entry drug.

Music Monday: Every Week Edition

While Google is trying to make the free version of YouTube impossibly annoying to watch I recommend using FreeTube or comparable software and apps to access videos like this.

The Ninth Gate (1999)

Rich and ruthless collector of books about the Devil Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) hires sleazy and also pretty ruthless bookhound Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) for a somewhat delicate job: to verify the authenticity of Balkan’s copy of the snappily titled The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. The only other copies still known to be in existence are in the hands of two other collectors, and Balkan is sure that only one of the three copies is actually not a fake – he’s just not sure if his own is the right one.

So Corso is to get access to the other books, find out which of them is the right one, and, if Balkan doesn’t happen to have lucked into the the original, acquire the true Nine Gates by means fair or foul.

Corso is game for a lot of misdeeds, and likes the heap of money Balkan is promising him, so he begins to travel Europe looking for the other copies. On his way, he will get into rather more trouble than he probably expected, stumble upon a number of dead bodies, cultists and dangers to life and limb, and make increasingly immoral decisions, while smoking in the presence of rare books wherever he goes. A Girl (Emmanuelle Seigner) Corso believes to be working for Balkan seems to work as his guardian, ahem, angel, though she has somewhat different plans for him than he initially believes.

Up to this point, I appear not to have written a single word about this meeting of the toxic asshole titans Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp. These men, very much like Corso, are of great talents and dubious personal ethics, which may bother any given viewer a little or very much indeed. Me, I prefer to take the good people like them put into the world while damning them for the bad, but if your mileage varies, I’m not going to blame you.

I like The Ninth Gate rather a lot. In part, I love the chutzpa of turning Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s literary entertainment “The Club Dumas” into the Dennis Wheatley potboiler version of itself, replacing the book’s somewhat mild-mannered mood with a wilder and edgier playfulness.

Yet playfulness this still is. Polanski seems to have a hell of a time going through bits and pieces of Satanic conspiracy thriller tropes, crossing them with elements of hard-boiled detective fiction and watching what pretty sparks fly when you just mash them together like a child with a somewhat destructive idea of fun. This approach lends the film a mood of sardonic humour even before Depp encounters the line of European and American character actors – Jack Taylor and James Russo in one movie! - playing twisted eccentrics who make up most of the cast. This is the noise of a director having fun with his material.

The direct horror elements, and quite a bit of the rest of the movie, do carry a very late-90s kind of cheesiness that actually mixes rather well with the overblown Gothicism of Polanski’s set pieces, especially when set to Wojciech Kilar’s even more overblown – and utterly wonderful – score. There’s an air of deep un-seriousness about the whole affair, yet it is not exactly irony that seems to be the driving force here. Rather, it’s as if the sardonicism of the plot is actually the film’s main philosophy, so that a certain kind of winking sneer is the only appropriate tone for this tale about a pretty horrible little man who either loses the rest of his soul or wins the exact kind of enlightenment that’s appropriate for him.

Three Films Make A Post: When the dead start to walk you'd better start running…

The Dead Pit (1989): Half hokey supernatural slasher, half pocket zombie apocalypse movie, Brett “The Lawnmower Man” Leonard’s feature debut never adds up too much. Between attempts at the nightmare logic of a Fulci and the cheesy one-liners of A Nightmare on Elm Street style slashers at their worst, the film never finds any personality of its own.

The acting is dire, the effects undistinguished, and for every single effective shot, there are three whole scenes that look and feel amateurish. It is a film easy to point and laugh at, if you’re of a mind to, but I never found myself interested enough in The Dead Pit to find much actual joy in doing this.

The Cloned Tyrone (2023): If you can make it through the much too broad first twenty minutes or so, you might find that Juel Taylor’s conspiracy thriller weird pulp comedy has rather more to offer than a handful of obvious jokes – hell, there’s even a good reason why these jokes start off as obvious as they do. The movie manages to apply methods and a comedically heightened version of the style of 70s conspiracy thrillers to the feeling of being black and poor in America, and that role’s truly horrifying and individuality-eating aspects. While it’s at it, it then turns this into the kind of existentialist horror that can make one’s laughter get stuck in one’s throat.

Taylor’s direction is intelligent as well as just clever as a meta-game, increasingly putting emotional weight on characters and situations you wouldn’t have expected to be meant to carry them. That John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris make one hell of a core cast doesn’t need mentioning; nor Kiefer Sutherland’s effectiveness as a villain.

The Three Musketeers – Part I: D’Artagnan aka Les trois mousquetaires: D’Artagnan (2023): When in doubt, go back to the classics, as does this umpteenth adaptation of Dumas. This is an update clearly meant for the blockbuster franchise era, so the second half of the film follows in December, there’s a scene in the end credits, and the score is as generically 2023 as you can imagine.

Director Martin Bourboulon is fortunately very good at what he does, mixing modern and original sensibilities effortlessly, keeping close to the same points film adaptations of the Musketeers prefer, while modernising and sexing up the margins. It’s a fun, energetic kind of blockbuster, with a great cast – Eva Green as the Milady, Vicky Krieps as Queen Anne, Vincent Cassel as Athos, and so on – a sense of play as well as one of drama.

Will this be the start of the Musketeeromatic Universe? Will someone eventually adapt “Twenty Years Later/After”? We can only hope/fear.

Short Film Friday: Sushi Noh

Sushi Noh from AFTRS on Vimeo.

In short: Mask of Murder (1988)

Original title: Invastigator

Warning: spoilers ahead, but can you really spoil something this tediously obvious?

A small town in Canada (Sweden). A serial killer with a pillow mask goes around murdering women. On a nightly raid, copper McLaine (Rod Taylor) and his partner Ray (Sam Cook) shoot down a very good suspect whom the audience can indeed identify as the killer, or really, in McLaine’s case, shoot the man when he’s already down. During the course of the firefight, their boss, Chief Superintendent Rich (Christopher Lee) is badly wounded, because Christopher Lee isn’t cheap.

Strangely enough, the murders resume shortly thereafter. Is it a copycat killer? Or has McLaine found out that Ray and his wife (Valerie Perrine) are having an affair and plans a long and boring revenge there’s no possible way for him to get away with?

I’ve liked quite a few films Swedish filmmaker Arne Mattsson made in the 50s and 60s, but this, my first excursion into the handful of entries that make up his filmography during the 80s, is a dire attempt at a return to filmmaking after half a decade’s absence. It aims at mixing elements of the giallo (which makes sense, seeing how Mattsson made films you can see as related to the Italian style decades earlier), the police procedural, and the thriller (non-thrilling division). Alas, the script is flaccid, limping from one badly written scene to the next, with no sense of drama or tension. The supposed surprises feel phoned in, and even a half-awake viewer will see them coming from miles away while the film seems to prefer twiddling its thumbs to causing any excitement in its audience.

The acting, even from the old pros in the cast, is terrible throughout. Most of the cast seem to be sleepwalking – Taylor is particularly bad – and the film is full of painfully dull line readings. Even worse, it is also full of flubbed lines that never should have made it into a finished movie but are left for the audience to gawk at.

But then, Mattsson’s direction feels amateurish more often than not, as well. It is full of bad framing and terrible visual choices, with nothing on screen that would suggest a director with decades of experience in serious popular filmmaking.

Blue Beetle (2023)

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) has just returned from college to his very quirky, his oh so very very quirky, family in DC’s version of Florida. A college degree means very little apart from student loan when you’re from a brown and poor family – however quirky it may be – so Jaime has a life of crappy servitude to look forward to, like many of us. A series of accidents leads him on the path to Destiny, though, and he’s soon starting in on the superhero business when an ancient alien symbiote chooses him as its new host, turning him into what we’ll just call the Blue Beetle. He certainly has better symbiote luck as his colleagues over at Marvel.

Evil rich white villain Vicoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) wants control over the symbiote to build an army of OMACs – stupidly without the mohawks so important to that role - so Jaime and his oh so very quirky family have a bit of an uphill battle in front of them. On the plus side, Jaime also gets his mandatory love interest in form of Victoria’s niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), who, not being white and young and hot, gets a rich but not evil exception.

Angel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle is a sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating and generally pretty likeable attempt at a superhero movie, never to be followed up by DC of course. I really do appreciate that it tries to add a bit of talk about class to its typically US-centric thinking about race, and how much it lacks mean-spiritedness even when talking about the groups it is okay to be rather essentialist about when one is in the trenches of the US culture wars. Of course, part of its use of class fantasizes about some inherent goodness and solidarity of the poor amongst one another, which is about as kitschy and untruthful a portrayal of the actual experience of being poor as possible. Fun fact: a lot of poor people suck as much as most rich people, they just don’t have the power to express that as destructively.

On the other hand, I’m now complaining that a superhero movie’s politics are lacking in subtlety; newsflash for me: superheroes aren’t subtle, aren’t meant to be subtle, and should be praised for actually putting some effort into politics beyond mere representation, so Blue Beetle certainly deserves that.

Rather more easy for me to appreciate about the film is its total aesthetic focus on garish neon colours, where nothing isn’t made better by glowing. There’s a verve and energy to the visual style that certainly helps provide the action set pieces with a very individual look and some personality.

Part of that personality is somewhat goofy, but then, one of the script’s main problems is that it wants to be funny more often than it actually is, a problem that isn’t helped by a tendency to repeat jokes in slightly revised form sometimes three scenes after another.

Timing is a bit of a problem for the film in general: some dialogue lines seem curiously misplaced, coming a scene or thirty seconds too early or too late for full effect. There’s a sloppiness here that surprises on this budget level. If this sloppiness is caused by the script or by the film’s editing is anyone’s guess. It’s a bit of a shame, too, for despite my gripes, there’s quite bit of fun to be had with Blue Beetle. If it were a bit tighter, it would probably even be a whole lot of that.

In short: Fire in the Sky (1993)

This is a dramatization of one of UFOdom’s favourite incidents, when Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney), a member of a group of loggers in Arizona disappears in the wilderness. His returning colleagues – as led by Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick) and numbering characters played by mainstays like Peter Berg, Craig Sheffer and Henry Thomas – get back into town only to tell the somewhat unbelievable tale of how Travis was sucked into the sky by a UFO. Police person in charge Frank Watters (James Garner) believes he smells a rat, but he’s not thinking hoax, but rather more ambitiously, murder.

What follows for Mike and his buddies is a bit of a nightmare of press hysteria, public outrage, Watters’s weird ratiocinations, lie detector tests and marriage crises. Until a naked and traumatized Travis appears, apparently without any memory of what happened to him.

Robert Lieberman’s film, long missing from home video until a short time ago, has a bit of a reputation among the cognoscenti. That reputation is mostly built on two scenes – Travis’s abduction and his late movie flashback to his experience with some truly frightening and traumatizing versions of the good old greys. Those scenes are indeed as great as their reputation suggests. Lieberman’s tight direction, a perfect use of some of horror’s favourite colours and note perfect production design come together to form two truly nighmarish moments. The slight variation on the typical Grey design alone would be enough to make the experiment scene great, but as Lieberman shoots it, there’s a special quality of suggested horrors about it that’s indelible.

The rest of the film, on the other hand, is a somewhat sober portrait of a handful of working class men under outside pressures they have no control over, mostly shown via, still very well directed and acted, dialogue scenes. It’s not a bad approach to the material in any way, shape or form, but it certainly isn’t the one you’d expect to encounter in a movie with two scenes like those. If this makes Fire in the Sky a better movie or a worse one will depend on any given viewer’s expectations more than on anything else, I believe. Me, I would have loved to see more of Lieberman’s SF horror stylings, but found myself rather hit by the drama.

A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Belgian master detective Hercule Poirot has retired from the detection biz to become a sad, rich guy with ridiculous facial hair and very specific culinary obsessions in Venice. He’s more than a little depressed, yet also very unwilling to step back into his old life. However when Poirot’s old friend, the writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) who based her serial detective on him, drags him out of his new private life to partake in a Halloween séance in the supposedly haunted palazzo of opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), he can’t quite resist.

Poirot very quickly reveals that the medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) and her two assistants are frauds, as he expected, but he’s rather more troubled by the murders that, also as expected, happen afterwards. During the course of the night, locked in with a good handful of horrible rich people and the hired help with reasons to hate them, Poirot will have experiences that not only put his own abilities in doubt, but also the rational world view he prides himself on.

Though it certainly is not a spoiler to say that Kenneth Branagh’s third Hercule Poirot film will explain the supernatural away in the end, and will reinstate Poirot’s belief in himself on the way as well. Like Death on the Nile, this film is interested in asking questions about the role of the Great Detective, not so much doubts about his abilities or the use and abuse of a very classically humanist idea of rationality but rather the practical use such abilities and principles should be put to. In Branagh’s view, Poirot’s weakness appears to be the detective’s tendency to drift into that realm of pure rationality where the knowledge gained isn’t tempered by compassion, and where Poirot’s attainment of this knowledge doesn’t actually help anyone. So all three of Branagh’s Poirot films see the man confronted with murders not committed out of reasons of pure evil or greed but as result of human tragedies. The cases thus become not only about the Great Detective’s use of his powers of ratiocination, but about how he learns to use them in the cause of justice more than that of the law.

It’s not a very Agatha Christie approach to the formula, if you ask me. As most writers of traditional crime in the “Golden Age” (ha!) style, she showed little emotional investment in the compassionate approach to human tragedy leading to crime (especially when committed by the lower classes), or really, little interest in the murder mystery as more than a neat puzzle.

Clearly, this is not an approach Branagh is interested in, so Poirot ends this third movie as a man with a degree of moral authority, and a degree of humility that’s based on compassion more than anything else. Like any good superhero, he’s getting back to the business of making the life of others perhaps just a little bit better. To me, that’s a rather more interesting approach than mere puzzle solving, but I’ve been known not to be the greatest fan of Christie and her stylistic sisters and brothers, so others might very well be annoyed by this instead of enthused.

Of course, this also affords Branagh with his acting hat on to actually do something with Poirot beyond the always fun preening. In his context Poirot is allowed to doubt and stumble and actually be involved with the people he has come to judge, an opportunity he certainly doesn’t let pass by. In general, A Haunting in Venice feels very much like a film built to give its whole cast something interesting or fun in their characters to work with, and as is usually the case with films that do, everybody puts effort into mildly theatrical and pretty wonderful performances that bring all these flawed rich arseholes with dark secrets to life.

And because this is a Halloween movie, Branagh the director spends much of the film using every traditional – say from the expressionist era to late 40s Universal with perhaps a little visit to Robert Wise’s The Haunting – visual trick of the spooky trade. The shadows are dark and deep, the light of dubious use for visibility but of the greatest for atmosphere, and there’s hardly a minute going by without a perfectly applied Dutch angle. I’d love to see Branagh try his hand at an actual ghost story in this manner, but I’m perfectly happy with the half of one we get here.

So call me an Branagh Poirot apologist, but I do love this third of the man’s Poirot movies just as much as I did the first two.

Three Films Make A Post: Human blood is only the beginning…

Detour aka Snarveien (2009): A Norwegian couple on a booze run in weird and peculiar Sweden (gasp!) end up stranded in a forest, encountering one strange situation after the next. Violent men in gimp suits, a disturbing backwoods family and a cop of dubious trustworthiness are only parts of a very bad night.

Severin Eskeland’s shortish horror-leaning thriller is pretty silly and improbable in its set-up, and obvious in many of its twists. Yet it is also well-directed and effectively paced, and dominated by a handful of very solidly structured and shot suspense scenes, as well as helped along by quite a few fun performances. That’s more than enough to make for a pleasant time of thrills and a bit of violence.

Vampire Virus (2020): This entry into the ever-growing filmography of the apparently indefatigable Charlie Steeds mixes elements of the Lesbian Vampire film with very 80s horror lighting (and a perfectly fitting synth score by Matt Akers), a bit of a male gay romance, some subtext about vampirism as a metaphor for all kinds of societal outsiders, and a bit of blood and gloop. All the while, it keeps to a handful of locations and sets – as typical for Steeds, all looking better than you’d expect or fear, which also always goes for his filmmaking – and has one eye pointed in the direction of proper low budget cheesiness.

It’s pretty great for what it is, even though you won’t confuse Steeds with Rollin, Larraz or Franco.

Impulse (1984): After a pretty shocking call from her mother during which the good lady first berates her and then shoots herself, Jennifer (Meg Tilly) and her boyfriends Stuart (Tim Matheson) return to her small town home. There’s something not at all right in the place: her family – played by people like John Karlen and Bill Paxton – and the rest of the population act very strangely indeed. It seems as if they have lost some of their impulse control, doing whatever comes to mind, whenever they please.

Director Graham Baker portrays the ensuing chaos with a nice eye for the creepy in the familiar and some suspenseful set pieces. There’s a feeling of creeping dread running especially through those parts of the film during which little happens on a surface level.

The film also looks fantastic in a very specific early 80s way that would be lost to films just a year or two later. The only real minus is the conspiracist coda that adds little to the film at hand.

Short Film Friday: The Beckoning

The Beckoning from Hartmann Films on Vimeo.

In short: Skinwalker Ranch (2018)

Most people interested in Fortean phenomena in one way or the other will have heard of the “Skinwalker Ranch”, a property in Utah located in what appears to be located in a hotbed of all manner of strange activity from Navajo-style skin-walkers to poltergeists over UFOs through cattle mutilation – if it’s High Strangeness, people seem to experience it there. If you’ve never heard of the place, have a Wikipedia page.

The place is also known for various attempts to gather data about the occurring phenomena in a scientific manner. Of course, if you believe the people involved – some of which you’ll encounter in Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell’s documentary – the phenomena seemed to purposefully (and rather conveniently, one can’t help but feel) avoid camera lenses and all attempts to measure and understand them, as is such phenomena’s wont.

The documentary itself is a thing of two halves. Large parts of it consist of often very interesting and atmospheric material from a never finished documentary by George Knapp about the place and the surrounding phenomena. These parts are actually wonderful filmmaking, including some rather suggestive material, and while they don’t exactly convince me of the theories of the parties involved, they do certainly convince me that a lot of people have indeed experienced very strange things in the area.

Unfortunately, Knapp’s material, that seems more in the spirit of the better Fortean documentaries of the 70s, is intercut with amateurishly shot footage of the Utah desert in “suggestive” camera angles with Corbell rambling on and on about nothing through a cheap microphone, a couple of interviews that go nowhere at great length, some conspiracy bullshit, and a sit-in on the ranch with its new owner who wants to hide his identity while pontificating about having “a large empire of business interests”, and showing off his watch. Well, and a random cameo by crap pop star Robbie Williams, who, we learn, believes. If you’d cut these scenes out, the whole affair would be 90 minutes of modern folkloric bliss, as it stands, you gotta work for the good stuff here.

In short: The Hands of Orlac (1960)

Original title: Les mains d'Orlac

Self-important but brilliant pianist Stephen Orlac (Mel Ferrer) is on his way to his fiancée Louise Cochrane (Lucile Saint-Simon) when his plane crashes. His hands are destroyed in the crash. Louise convinces genius surgeon Professor Volchett (Donald Wolfit) to save Stephen’s hands. The experimental operation that may or may not be a complete transplant succeeds.

In the following weeks, Stephen turns from his old pomposity to a whiny kind of anguish that quickly turns into paranoia. He believes that something’s not right with his hands. He can’t play piano as well as before anymore, a week after his hands were completely destroyed, so clearly, his hands aren’t his own anymore! Just as clearly, his new hands are those of a strangler who was executed at about the same time of his operation! Why, he suddenly feels the need to strangle the gardener! When his hands get the wrong kind of naughty with Louise, Stephen storms off and rents a room somewhere in shadytown. There, he falls in with magician’s assistant/prostitute Li-Lang (Dany Carrel) and her always nattily dressed magician/pimp Nero (Christopher Lee).

Nero has plans for Orlac, obviously, and for reasons only known to itself, the film is rather more interested in this part of the narrative than the whole strangler’s hands business.

Well, actually, I’m not completely surprised about that, for Carrel and Lee are certainly the two actors in Edmond T. Gréville’s remake of two much superior films – Orlac’s Hände and Mad Love – who seem awake and willing to apply themselves to their roles. Particularly Lee, not an actor given to put much effort into things he deems beneath him but perfectly willing to take a pay check nonetheless, seems to be enjoying himself for a change, and so steals every scene he is in. Perhaps it’s the fantastic fashion sense of the character that kept him on board?

Of course, stealing scenes from Ferrer here is a lot like taking candy away from a baby, for his performance as Orlac is whiny, melodramatic and ineffectual as a portrait of a pianist losing his hands as well as that of a man slowly losing his grip on reality. He somehow manages to never elicit any sympathy for a character that should elicit hardly anything but.

To be fair, the script with its insistence on not making explicit important details and ignoring character motivations whenever possible, is not terribly helpful to him or anyone.

Add to this Gréville’s bland direction, the often sluggish pace and the film’s curious emphasis on its least interesting elements, and you’ll mostly wish to have watched the earlier versions of the material. I certainly did.

On the plus side, there are only few films whose happy end is based on the news that a man executed as a serial killer was innocent.

In short: She Came From the Woods (2022)

1987. It’s the last day of summer camp in picturesque Camp Briarbrook for the year. While the kids are carted away in a bus that won’t make it far (spoiler?), the counsellors have the usual nightly get-together of teen melodrama, horniness (this being a movie from the 2020s and not the 1980s, little comes of that), spooky stories about the local urban (woodsy?) legend, and, um, a blood-letting meant to conjure said legend up.

That little ritual works out rather well, and soon the counsellors are beset by possession, an invisible, dangerous force, those kids that didn’t make it far, and whatever else the film wants to “homage”.

And with “homage”, I mean rip off without much of a creative direction beyond fandom, for yes, She Came from the Woods is yet another throwback 80s affair whose only independent ideas seem to be to add some diversity to the cast without actually doing anything with that diversity, sprinkle in lots of gratingly unfunny humour, and just copy stuff from better movies.

Among the film’s other problems is a cast of characters that’s much too big to provide space for anyone to become interesting. Because this is the self-conscious kind of throwback, there’s no possibility for the film just accepting or wallowing in the characters’ inherent tropiness either; yet it’s not substantial enough to do anything better.

The script suffers from a much too complicated backstory that gets exposition dumped at the dramaturgically worst possible moment, and is neither clever nor weird enough to need to be that complicated. The plot really only consists of set-up and characters stumbling around stupidly, broken up by occasional murder, so there’s very little here that seems worth of anyone’s time.

Music Monday: Feelgood Edition

The Black Castle (1952)

Sometime in the 18th (17th?) Century. Sir Ronald Burton (Richard Greene), just returned from the business of imperialism in Africa, learns that two of his closest friends have disappeared in the Black Forest.

The place they were last seen is suspiciously close to the estate of one Count Karl von Bruno (Stephen McNally). Von Bruno is an enemy of Burton and his friends from their colonial adventures, and would have good reason to want to take vengeance on them; he certainly has the lack of scruples to make any such vengeance very cruel indeed. He has, however, never laid eyes on Burton, so Burton decides to pull political strings to go undercover as a hunting guest at the Count’s castle, in the hopes of finding out what happened to his friends, and to hopefully save them from a dire fate.

He gets into rather more trouble than he initially expected, but is helped by his rather egalitarian ways with the lower classes as well as his quick fencing arm. Burton will need all the help he can get, for his motivations are quickly shifting from those of the investigator and possible revenger to a man very much in love with von Bruno’s wife, Elga (Paula Corday). Elga reciprocates very much, for she was married off to her hated husband for political reasons – one can’t help but assume blackmail to have been involved given how much of a villain the guy is. Other complications involve a mute strongman who hates all Englishmen (Lon Chaney Jr.), the mysterious and somewhat sinister Dr Meissen (Boris Karloff), as well as a (non-metaphorical) pit full of crocodiles.

Nathan Juran’s mix of swashbuckling adventure and gothic non-supernatural horror tropes The Black Castle is rather a lot of fun even eighty years later. The script by Jerry Sackheim builds a highly enjoyable castle of tropes that provides opportunity for physical derring-do as well as for gothic melodrama (there’s even some Romeo and Juliet style coma draught business) while Juran – not always the most exciting director – puts a lot of effort into finding the point where the lighter style of the historical adventure movie and gothic horror in the Universal manner meet visually. His use of light and shadow certainly often creates a pleasantly creepy mood that’s very effectively intercut with the handful of scenes where Burton demonstrates his physical abilities. Some very fine sets add to the effect.

The cast is in fine fettle, as well. Greene makes for a believable, rather human, hero, while McNally, Michael Pate as his main henchman and Chaney Jr. milk the possibilities of the gothic swashbuckler villain for all it is worth.

Another of the film’s strengths is its willingness to give its character a second dimension, so von Bruno’s hatred of Burton isn’t completely without reason, and some characters who would usually just do what their evil boss says are allowed to have agency and moral complexity of their own. I was particularly taken with Karloff’s first sinister but increasingly troubled Dr Meissen. Karloff was always able to do sympathetic villains particularly well, and does wonders when he is allowed to play an actual human being like here.

So The Black Castle ends up being a rather wonderful mix of two related but seldom mixed genres that turn out to be as close to my heart in blended form as they are separated.

In short: Natty Knocks (2023)

A trio of kids and their babysitter (Charlotte Fountain-Jardim), become targets of a small town serial killer (Bill Moseley). His murders are connected to the local urban legend of one Natty knocking nine times, as well as the horrible death of a B-movie actress.

If there’s one thing about the contemporary movie landscape that can get me to whining like one of those silly “superhero movies are the doom of all human culture!” people, it’s that there’s little room for the competent journeyman director anymore, apart from mid-level TV and streaming show work with little creative influence whatsoever. So actually getting a proper new feature film by someone like Dwight “Halloween IV” H. Little is a bit of a treat.

At least on paper it is, for the actual film often feels as if it were held together by sheer willpower more than skill. Little clearly cashes in quite a few cheques from old contacts, thus the decently sized and pleasantly energetic appearances by Danielle Harris and Robert Englund.

At times, Natty Knocks has a pleasantly old-school Stephen King style US horror vibe, using 80s references without actually taking place in the 80s, because this sort of thing comes natural to filmmakers who’ve lived through them; at other times, the script seems to go out of its way to tell a very straightforward, semi-supernatural slasher tale in as overcomplicated a manner as possible. Too many characters need to be kept involved, so there’s too much running back and forth between what’s basically the same scenes from different perspectives for the film ever to feel suspenseful or tight.

From time to time, Little hits on a nice moment of suspense or two, and his straightforwardly, intensely competent style of direction never lets the pace get so slack the film actually becomes boring. Still, there’s a lack of focus here that stands in the way of this ever becoming anything more than decently watchable. Admittedly, this has one of the more fun horror movie bullshit endings I’ve seen; also admittedly, if Natty Knocks had actually been the film to fit this ending, this would have been rather more interesting.

Short Film Friday: The Colour out of Space

The Colour Out of Space from Patrick Mueller on Vimeo.

In short: The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

Original title: Hebi musume to hakuhatsuma

Young Sayuri (Yachie Matsui) has spent most of her life in an orphanage. Not a Dickensian one, mind you, but a rather pleasant place with grown-ups who actually are positive attachment figures for her.

Nonetheless, Sayuri is both confused and excited when her long lost family finds her and takes her home. It is not an ideal home, to say the least. Mom’s crazy, herpetologist Dad zips off on an expedition the same day Sayuri arrives, only leaving his snake collection, and Sayuri’s secret sister? Is usually hidden away in an attic room and looks a lot like a snake person. She loves to peep at Sayuri through a hole in the ceiling of our heroine’s room and makes her life a living hell. So much so, the kid is also starting to be plagued by surrealist nightmares.

And because all of that isn’t quite a bad enough time for the girl, there’s also a silver-haired witch haunting the borders of the movie, and some murders to look forward to.

This Daiei horror movie is strictly aimed at kids and adapts some tales by the great mangaka Kazuo Umezu, from the phase of his career when he was involved in creating horror shojo manga (that is horror manga aimed at a teen female audience).

Director Noriaki Yuasa – also the guy responsible for most of the Gamera films of the time – often achieves the proper movie version of the manic, hysterical energy of Umezu’s girls’ horror work. As is tradition in this genre, our virtuous heroine is confronted with indignities, injustices and child-sized horrors and mainly comes through them by keeping her chin up and the innate goodness of her heart intact.

The horrors are certainly not something to disturb a contemporary grown-up, yet there’s an inherent weirdness to the whole tale that makes the film a fascinating and fun experience even for us, the elderly. There’s nary a scene going by where Yuasa doesn’t take the crazier way to portray something as long as he can keep to a beautifully crisp black and white aesthetic at the same time. The dream sequences, looking like Dali meeting Umezu, fittingly enough, are particularly great, suggesting that the really rather square Sayuri must have a more interesting side buried under all her straightforward goodness. They also look not quite like anything I’ve seen before, even actual Dali dream sequences.

In short: Project Eerie (2023)

Two bored teenagers livestream breaking into a deserted government installation. They find a bundle of secret documents as well as a compilation disc of found footage shorts. The stream of the shorts makes up the largest part of the film. The tales involve a strange incident at a camping ground, some low budget apocalyptica, and some hidden camera fun in a haunted Amish house.

We’re deep in “POV horror as a filmmaking style invented for creative indie filmmakers without money but a – probably long-suffering - family willing to provide houses and backlots as locations” territory. Apparently this is already the fourth movie in this spirit director/writer/producer (/etc) Ricky Umberger has made, and there’s certainly quite a bit to like here.

While the stories aren’t exactly substantial, they are fun little horror stories in a straightforward campfire tale/creepypasta style that never overstay their welcome, escalate cleanly and nicely and feel energetic throughout. Particularly that last bit is certainly thanks to Umberger’s editing style, which never breaks the found footage/POV horror rules but does tend to avoid the tedious bits of set-up and maintenance indie found footage can often lose itself as well as this viewer’s interest in.

Every tale here does have at least one truly creepy (not necessarily eerie, but who’s counting) moment, and at least one clever idea, which is more than enough to carry the somewhat basic narratives to satisfying conclusions.

In short: Macabre (1980)

Original title: Macabro

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Bad luck apparently comes in twos to Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers). After her lover is decapitated in a car accident and her little son is drowned by his sister Lucy (Veronica Zinny) in the bathtub – though everyone believes that to be an accident as well – Jane spends some time in a mental institution.

When she is released, she moves into a room in the mansion of blind Robert Duval (Stanko Molnar). Robert is attracted to his new tenant, though, surprisingly enough, only in a mildly creepy way. Jane seems to come on to him regularly as well, but generally in ways that suggest she doesn’t understand the concept of “blindness”. However, whenever intimacy seems to threaten, Lucy is visited by a mysterious man who invokes the loudest sex noises imaginable from her. Of course, we the audience have also witnessed her masturbating with the same wattage, so we will not be quite as surprised as Robert when we eventually learn the mysterious lover is actually the head of her dead lover she keeps in her icebox.

Things come to a head (tee-hee) because Lucy can’t stop torturing her mother.

Lamberto Bava’s first effort as a feature director after years of experience as an assistant director for his father, the great Mario Bava, and the great Dario Argento, is a bit of a mixed bag. It is certainly an at times stylish giallo, but not stylish enough to cover up how little is actually happening in much of its first acts. Everything and everyone seems to at least be established twice, so that things move at the slowest possible pace at any given moment.

The final act is a different thing: here, Bava junior very suddenly loses all inhibition. Not only is the narrative suddenly moving like a freight train crashing down a cliff, the film now leaves sense and good taste so far behind, they are somewhere in another dimension. It’s impressive, so much so I can’t even fault the first two acts too much anymore. Their slowness still isn’t necessary, mind you, but the contrast between them and the final act feels like one of those Insidious ghosts suddenly jumping out and screaming in your face turned into a movie.

To skew my critical faculties even more in Macabre’s favour, it ends on a final shot so ludicrous and awesome its existence could be justified by it alone.

Music Monday: Henry, Love Edition

The Ghost (1963)

Original title: Lo spettro

Somewhere in the Scottish countryside in 1910. Dr John Hichcock (Elio Jotta) suffers from a nearly complete paralysis of a kind respectable medicine has no way of curing. Hichcock himself has come up with experimental treatments using curare and other poisonous substances. Given his state, he can’t really experiment on himself, though. It has taken the good doctor quite some to time to find another physician willing to commit to these experiments, but when the film starts, Dr Charles Livingstone (Peter Baldwin) has been living in the mansion, testing Hichcock’s treatments for some time now. Until now without any success, unfortunately.

What Hichcock doesn’t know is that his wife Margaret (Barbara Steele) and Livingstone have started an affair. Margaret is working on convincing Livingstone to murder her husband. The younger doctor is after all excellently positioned to make it look like a death from natural causes, and Margaret would very much like to get rid of her old, mean-spirited husband but keep his money. Livingstone eventually agrees – the Power of Barbara Steele compels thee – but murdering a man and ending up happily ever after are different things.

For one, Hichcock hasn’t actually left all of his money to Margaret, and the couple need to do rather a lot of grubbing, perhaps adding a bit of grave robbery to their list of crimes, to get around that little problem by stealing the loot before anyone knows how much of it is there. Then there’s a less easily soluble bit of trouble – the couple appear to be haunted by Hichcock’s ghost, who shows himself in increasingly intense ways that put rather a lot of strain on the murderers’ relationship.

To my eyes, The Ghost is among director Riccardo Freda’s best films. For much of its running time, its combination of Gothic and thriller tropes produces more than just a pleasant frisson, though it certainly does that as well. The film clearly takes place in the same imagination space like Poe’s “The Black Cat” or “The Cask of Amontillado”, but Freda never quotes directly from this particularly Gothic forbear. Instead he is aiming for a shared mood of psychological derangement as expressed through the art of deep shadows and tellingly symbolic colour contrasts. Even in the mediocre print I’ve seen shots like that of Steele in full Victorian widow garb, clutching a bunch of red flowers to her chest while kneeling in front of Hichcock’s tomb are pretty spectacular to look at, suggesting all those darkly romantic ideas about beauty, death and guilt that are part and parcel of the poe-etic.

Steele is as wonderful as ever. Her inherent mix of attraction, weirdness and intensity always made her a spectacular presence in Gothic horror surroundings, so much so that looking at her actual characters as written tends to be beside the point.

The only element of The Ghost I’m not terribly happy with is its unsurprising revelation of the haunting being no such thing. Though, to be fair, the supposedly mundane explanation includes astral projection. This isn’t a deal-breaker, especially since it also sets up a very macabre ending for everyone involved, but a natural explanation feels like a bit of a cop out after a film has gone so out of its way to create an atmosphere of the gothic macabre.

In short: Gappa the Triphibian Monster (1967)

Original title: Daikyojû Gappa

Sent by some rich fool to acquire undiscovered new species from an not as unexplored by Japanese people as they think South Pacific island to populate a resort fake pacific island called Playmate Island, a group of explorers meet a tribe of Japanese people in brownface. When they’re not doing risible “native dances” that make those parallel dances in Toho movies look downright sensitive, these guys and gals pray to something they call “Gappa”.

The expedition members discover an egg from which a rather ugly new (to them) species hatches, some sort of flying, amphibian dinosaur thing. Let’s call it Gappa. Obviously, our “heroes” grab the thing to take it with them to Japan.

Just as obviously, where there’s a giant monster egg, there are also giant monster parents, and these ass-ugly dinobirds follow the expedition to Japan to go on a rampage.

Nikkatsu’s only kaiju movie – after three or four earlier aborted attempts – is generally seen as an inferior rip-off of Gorgo crossed with a bit of Godzilla vs King Kong, and inferior it certainly is. Director Hiroshi Noguchi has little experience with this kind of material, and directs the human drama bits with often surprising leadenness, given how pop Nikkatsu’s movies in other genres typically were. Consequently, things are pretty dull when it comes to the scenes featuring people, at least whenever they aren’t hilariously “problematic”.

It doesn’t help the film’s case there that most of its characters have all the ethical depth of a black hole, but its attempts at talking about that little problem for their part have all the depth of that cardboard cut out over there.

The effects, supervised by former Toho man Akira Watanabe, are a curious case. The kaiju carnage is generally at least competent, usually even genuinely good, particularly in the miniature work. However, the design of the monster suits is abysmally ugly, and the suits themselves look terrible awkward in action and even worse in those scenes where the parent Gappas are supposed to express emotions.

In short: Tales of Halloween (2015)

This anthology movie takes place during a single night in a US small town with a particularly high death rate on October 31st. The ten segments were directed by eleven more or less well-known horror directors – like Adam Gierasch, Axelle Carolyn, Lucky McKee and Neil Marshall – and feature a horde of horror people of varying prominence in cameos, regular acting bits, and funny make-up.

The film feels first and foremost like a fannish project, so the tone tends to the low-brow, there’s deeply silly – that’s not a complaint – gore aplenty, and the comedic bits won’t scare anyone away with subtlety. This certainly isn’t a Trick’R’Treat with its single director and a unity of tone, style, and theme, but feels more like a bunch of professionals and semi-professionals from a specific scene letting their hair down and having some fun.

For my taste, the film leads off with two of its worst segments – Dave Parker’s “Sweet Tooth” just isn’t very interesting, and Darren Lynn Bousman’s “The Night Billy Raised Hell” is just aggressively unfunny for what’s supposed to be a comedy. Afterwards, Tales of Halloween finds its feet, though. The later segments actually hit the comedic mark they aim at, or have a lot of fun with throwing together classic horror clichés and tropes and twisting them sardonically. There’s even room for slightly more atmospheric (Axelle Carolyn’s “Grim Grinning Ghost” with house favourite Alex Essoe) or substantial yet still fun (Lucky McKee’s “Ding Dong”) fare, leading to some diversity in approach and tone that does the film good. It is also very hard to argue with Neil Marshall’s tale of a man-eating carved pumpkin and the tough female cop hunting it.

So, if a viewer makes it through the first couple of tales, there’s a good chance they’ll have quite a bit of fun with the film, at least on the kind of October night when one is struck for the mood of a film by horror people having fun made for horror people to have fun with.

Dark Harvest (2023)

In an American small town that seems to be situated in a 50s that’s slightly off-kilter, Halloween is home to a rather different ritual than trick-or-treating. Each and every Halloween, the male late teens of the town go on a nightly “Run” to kill Sawtooth Jack, a somewhat pumpkin-headed creature, before it reaches the local church. If Jack stays unslain, an unnatural storm and nine years of bad harvest will follow. Typically, the town wins out, though not without a death toll.

The boy who takes the killing stroke is rewarded with a very American car and generally leaves town never to be seen again, while his family is rewarded with financial prosperity.

The film follows the Halloween night of Richie Shepard (Casey Likes), and a girl named Kelly Haines (Emyri Crutchfield), whose family may very well be the only people of colour in the whole place. As the brother of a former winner, Richie isn’t actually allowed to take part in the yearly night of violence, but his brother’s leaving and the town itself have put quite a chip on his shoulder, and he will go out of his way to take part any way he can, whatever his parents (Jeremy Davies and Elizabeth Reaser) may say. Kelly for her part is also excluded from proceedings, what with her being – gasp! – a girl, and a black one to boot. But like Richie, she isn’t taking this sort thing lying down, though the film often seems to forget she exists during the first acts.

During the course of a night in which their peers are as much of a threat as the monster they are hunting, the two will learn their town’s darkest secrets.

Norman Partridge’s novella “Dark Harvest” is an at least minor horror classic, an atmospheric book full of the joys of Halloween as well as an angry argument against elements of the American Dream that seem so ingrained in culture, people aren’t even going to think about them.

David Slade’s adaptation isn’t as wonderful as its source. It’s not a bad movie at all, there’s just quite a bit of it that feels slightly off: the performances are stilted and somewhat artificial in a way that reminds me of how 90s horror often went about things, but never quite stilted and artificial enough to become productively strange. The effects are fine, but also look and feel so digital they are much too cold for the story the film is trying to tell. Slade’s tendency to use jittery camera work whenever possible often feels like the wrong choice for scenes that could have used clarity and mood instead of movement; from time to time, I couldn’t help but think someone in the production liked the Purge movies a bit too much, and Patridge’s novel not enough.

The film does carry the novel’s thematic concerns. The sins of the father, the horrible price an older generation is willing to let their children pay for “prosperity” and “security” are there and accounted for, and there are scenes that suggest a nightmarish Bruce Springsteen song about a town that does everything to not let its victims/children leave. Dark Harvest is just not terribly good at exploring these themes through its action.

It’s not at all terrible, mind you, for a bit of lightly fall-themed horror, but rather a disappointingly mediocre adaptation whose changes to its source never make it any better as a movie or as an adaptation.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)

Original title: À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma

Zé do Caixão (José Mojica Marins) – better known as Coffin Joe in English-speaking countries – is an undertaker in a Brazilian country town. He’s also an inveterate bully half of the town is afraid of, sadistically violent, a misogynist of the highest order, an atheist and unbeliever in all things supernatural in a deeply religious and superstitious community, a man with his very own sartorial ideas, as well as someone given to long rants somewhere between Nietzsche, LaVey and John Wayne Gacy.

If he weren’t so murderously dangerous and brutal in his retribution of every slight he himself deliberately provokes, he’d probably already have been driven out of town or lynched. Right now, at least when he’s not violating someone somewhere, Zé is obsessed with the question of continuing his bloodline – given his philosophy, it’s the only way a man has towards immortality, or so he monologues. Since his live-in lover has not been able to get pregnant for years, Zé really is in need of a new breeding option – obviously, in his mind, the possibility he might not be able to have children because something’s biologically wrong with him doesn’t even come up. He already has another candidate for the position in mind, the virtuous Terezinha (Magda Mei). There’s a problem there, or rather three problems: firstly, Zé doesn’t truck with his old girlfriends running around potentially getting pregnant by other men (his logic, not mine), so he really needs to get rid of the old model woman rather more permanently. Secondly Terezinha is the fiancée of his friend – the film never explains how Zé managed to acquire one – the totally normal Antônio (Nivaldo Lima); thirdly, Terezinha really isn’t into Zé at all. Who could imagine why?

Of course, problems one and two can easily be solved with murder, while number three just needs a total disinterest in consent, so they aren’t all that difficult to solve for our protagonist.

The deeply uncooperative Terezinha decides to commit suicide after Zé rapes her, though, and from then on out, the unbelieving Zé is haunted by ghosts and portents that might very well end in supernatural vengeance.

Being a very poor country, Brazilian’s film industry in the early 60s was a small and struggling thing; being an at the best of times very conservative one, it lacked in horror movies completely. That is, until José Mojica Marins, who at this point had already made a small handful of films in other genres, came upon the brilliant idea on how to get horror through censorship, while also keeping it extremely critical of large parts of the country’s culture: just put all of your criticism, and all of your ideas into the mouth of the most outrageously exalted villain you can come up with.

As an added bonus, this also provided Marins with the opportunity to get as much exploitational value into his film as possible. The violence and the blasphemy and the sex are, after all, the misdeeds of a villain who will be rightfully punished by supernatural forces (though, one can’t help but notice, not the power of Christ), so this is not a way to criticize the way things are and get behinds in seats by being as outrageous as possible, but really a tale told to keep people honest citizens, Mister Censor. Censors being censors, they did apparently buy this argument, and Marins was off to the races, producing a series of increasingly psychedelic and bizarre movies featuring versions of the Zé do Caixão figure, always embodied by Marins himself with the glee of a guy who is getting away with it.

Marins’s portrayal of Zé here truly is a sight to behold. His improbable get-up and style, his long, soul(?)ful rants about often utterly horrible ideas, his mean-spiritedness and his love for often surprisingly gory violence are what holds the film together instead of a more traditional narrative. Marin’s direction and Giorgio Attili’s photography are a little rough around the edges, but they have such a sense for the dramatic, and the macabre money shot technical polish is replaced by the sheer energy of what they are doing. This is the how it looks when a group of people do something new, and exciting, and can even allow themselves jokes like Zé using the crown of thorns of a Jesus statuette to beat a guy up without getting dragged to court for it.

There isn’t only joy in the breaking of taboos on display here, though. The climax in which Zé is dispatched by ghosts looks very much schooled on the way classic kaidan cinema would have realized the same sort of ending – just with a bit more ickiness here – and there are rather a lot of little visual flourishes that suggest a filmmaker who is rather well-informed about what is going on in the rest of the world, incorporating what fits into his aesthetics and discarding the rest.

Music Monday: Serial Killer Edition

The Boxer’s Omen (1983)

Original title: 魔

When his brother Wing (Johnny Wang Lung-Wei) is so badly hurt in a ring fight against a rather evil Thai Boxer (Bolo Yeung) he’ll never be able to walk again, gangster Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei) swears vengeance. Before he can do much about it apart from setting a date with the villain, his daily life of fighting and tough-guying is interrupted by a glowing buddha-like figure who spouts water like a rather improbable water fountain. Said figure wants Hung to come to him, for reasons he’s not going to explain.

As luck will have it, when Hung comes to Thailand for his grudge match against the Thai Boxer, he stumbles upon a temple whose abbot the glowing figure apparently is. Said abbot was close to achieving either nirvana or bodhisattva status when he was cursed during an extensive long range magic duel against a black magician. Now, instead of attaining a glorious state, he’s starting to slowly rot away.

Which is a problem for Hung as well, because in a former life, he was the abbot’s twin; they are still spiritually connected, so the curse will kill Hung as well, eventually. The only way out is for our very reluctant protagonist to become a monk (abstaining from sex is a real problem for this friend of the female breast) and learn some proper Buddhist magic. And even if Hung should manage to beat the magician, there are further complications in front of him.

This bare description of its first forty minutes or so does not in the least do justice to the incredible amount of macabre craziness Kuei Chih-Hung’s The Boxer’s Omen gets up to. Much of the film is taken up by a series of magical duels that take place on black sound stages with mood lights, during which an incredible amount of some of the weirdest stuff ever put to screen takes place. Heads rip themselves from bodies, eyes turn to maggoty holes, little bat skeletons slow-motion hop away, and so on, and so forth until one is overwhelmed by the film’s sheer focus on being weird. Once things have gotten going, which does not take long at all, there’s no stopping Kuei’s – or screenwriter Szw-To On’s – imagination when it comes to body horror, strange uses of body parts, and whatever you might imagine belongs into a film like this.

I’ve seen enough black magic and Buddhist horrific folk magic in movies to actually recognize quite a few of the tropes and magical basics on display here, but The Boxer’s Omen uses their more traditional weird only as a springboard for flights of wild and macabre visual fancy that are peculiar even for the weirdest stage of horror filmmaking in Hongkong. Despite the film mostly consisting of a couple of – pretty great – martial arts fights and drawn-out magical duels, there’s really never a dull moment here. That’s not only thanks to Kuei’s willingness to make every idea he encounters weirder, but also because he has such a great eye for creating a mood of the truly outré throughout, a hand for the exalted camera angle as well as for the most bizarre lighting choice for any given scene. The film seems to set out to stretch the concepts of the folk magic concepts it uses to such extremes, they leave the actual logic underlying them behind and become a form of pure free-floating weirdness. It is an exhausting joy to watch.

Reflecting on the film afterwards is rather more like trying to remember a vivid and utterly bizarre nightmare than thinking about a movie I’ve seen, which either is a huge recommendation or a terrible insult, depending on who is reading this.

Three Films Make A Post: Murder is so 1987.

Apparently it’s “movies I liked a lot more than the critical consensus” week this late October around here, as these three films prove.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023): So yes, I did indeed like Lindsey Anderson Beer’s prequel to the (horrible) Pet Sematary Remake quite a bit. Not as a logical extension of that other movie’s world, nor of that of the novel (one of Stephen King’s very best, if you ask me), but as a very atmospheric horror movie that may not treat its tale about the horrors of familial responsibility with any subtlety, but certainly knows what it is talking about. A palpable sense of dread and doom runs through much of the film, and an acceptance of that dread and doom by the older generation as a fact of life, a feeling that’s occasionally broken by downright nasty violence of the type that really doesn’t care whether characters deserve what happens to them. The third act becomes a bit unfocussed for my tastes, but otherwise, this is the only Pet Sematary movie I genuinely like.

V/H/S/85 (2023): This entry in the traditional bro horror anthology series is not terribly bro at all anymore. In fact, most of the segments, as directed by David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Natasha Kermani, Mike P. Nelson and Gigi Saul Guerrero, seem rather more interested in doing cool things with the POV horror set-up of the series. I thought Derrickson’s “Dreamkill” was a particularly strong entry – as well as a nice sibling piece to The Black Phone – with some particularly clever use of found footage as parts of its plot, but there’s not a single segment here that doesn’t do something clever, or freakish, or interesting with its part of the anthology.

Totally Killer (2023): Back to the Future+Happy Death Day+The Final Girls=Totally Killer, and strangely enough, I’m perfectly okay with the equation of Nahnatchka Khan’s movie. More than okay, actually, for I found this slasher time travel comedy often surprisingly funny (the great comical timing of particularly Kiernan Shipka helps a lot there), the jokes never getting so meta-genre I’d lose patience with them, even though there’s a lot of genre consciousness visible during the slasher bits. The emotional beats hit very well as well, so much so that I’d suggest this bit of horror arithmetic has some actual heart.

Short Film Friday: Corvidae

Silver Bullet (1985)

The peaceful US small town of Tarker’s Mills is suddenly hit by a series of incredibly brutal murders. Curiously enough, the killings always take place on the night of the full moon. The local sheriff (Terry O’Quinn) isn’t terribly successful at finding the killer, and soon enough, the natives are growing restless enough to start on acts that will go on to influence some of the most idiotic bits of the pretty damn idiotic Halloween Kills; also, these acts will get some of them killed in unpleasant ways.

Paraplegic kid Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) figures out that the killer is a werewolf, and will eventually even find out the monster’s true identity, but he’s not exactly in a position to convince anyone to believe his wild tales. Eventually, he finds allies in his sister Jane (Megan Follows), who gives up some fine times of mutual sibling hate for it, and even an actual grown-up in form of his eccentric Uncle Red (Gary Busey). But then, Red is the kind of guy who turns a kid’s electric wheelchair into a motorcycle, so he’s not exactly firing on all cylinders, unlike the wheelchair.

After this, his only feature film, Silver Bullet’s director Daniel Attias would go on to a successful TV career that still continues today. From time to time, there’s a whiff of mediocre TV about this Stephen King adaptation, mostly when it comes to its treatment of the more emotional moments between the Coslaw kids. There’s something too treacly and pretty unconvincing about those scenes, which isn’t helped by a King script that feels stilted and uncomfortable in those moments in ways his books aren’t when treating comparable material.

Tonally, the film is somewhat inconsistent, at least on first thought. There’s the afterschool special feel of the sibling scenes, the love for the mild gore gag of the werewolf attacks, and, for most of the film’s running time, a love for broad and curiously artificial performances and writing that can suggest a live action cartoon. Or, going by King’s influences, pre-Code Horror comics read as a live action cartoon. Fortunately, this broadness is laid in the hands/on the shoulders of a cast of character actors (apart from those already mentioned also Everett McGill, Bill Smitrovich, Lawrence Tierney and a host of not quite as well known names) well capable of making an approach that could be annoying in lesser hands interesting and fun to watch, turning things from the cartoonish towards a dream-like feel that has never been typical of US horror filmmaking beyond the regional level.

In the context of a dream, even prime 80s silliness like the motorcycle wheelchair makes a degree of sense, or rather, fits into the curious world where this takes place, where a town can have a prolific serial killer, yet nobody from the outside, neither press nor law enforcement, shows any interest whatsoever in proceedings, thereby turning the dreaded plot hole into parts of the mood.

Once having accepted this about a movie I’ve never clicked with in earlier attempts at watching, I’ve suddenly grown enormously fond of the whole thing, its genuine willingness to go with dream instead of real world logic in telling its werewolf tale. When he’s not doing teen melodrama, Attias is a pretty effective director – not one visually inventive enough to reproduce the feeling of the Berni(e) Wrightson illustrations for the original book (which were my first conscious encounter with Wrightson’s work when I was a kid), but certainly willing and able to find a creepy, comics-like/dream-like (take your pick, I choose both) way to present any given scene.

Carlo Rambaldi’s effects fit into this perspective on the movie as well; while they are beautiful and lovely in the way of good practical effects, they also do tend to look broader and feel more performative than is typical of the work of his peers. In a film whose point clearly isn’t naturalism, this potential weakness turns into a strength, so much so that I can’t imagine a Rick Baker werewolf fitting into the surroundings of Silver Bullet as perfectly as Rambaldi’s creature does.