Three Films Make A Post: The Business Of Killing Just Got Personal

After Blue aka After Blue (Paradis sale) (2021): At times, Bertrand Mandico’s pretty bizarre women-only weird science fiction epic is one of those films that just too desperately want to be a future cult item, putting so much effort into being out there it becomes more than a little exhausting and off-putting, suggesting a pose of eccentricity more than genuine one.

At other times, this is the weird, candy-coloured, gender-fluid and ever so lovingly messed-up freeform science fiction epic of my dreams. It is certainly of beautiful artificiality throughout, and not a film that should ever bore anyone.

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992): Why you'd dig up the old franchise eight years after the first movie only to then come up with this abomination is beyond me. As it stands CotC II: TFS could as well have been called "Generic 90s horror movie". The film takes all the cool and interesting elements of the first movie and throws them away to then become something encapsulating all that was bad about 90s horror. So you have the bad yet boring acting, creepy kids who aren't creepy at all, a teenage love story that makes you want to bleach your brain, boring protagonists, a boring series of supernatural deaths which are neither as funny nor as clever as they seem to think they are, and a plot delivered with so little panache you can't help but start thinking about plot holes and continuity errors between this and the first film. On the positive side, that way lies at least madness instead of the boredom David Price's film offers without it.

The Devil’s Mask (1946): I didn’t find this second movie after the I Love A Mystery radio show quite as entertaining as the first one, which I wrote up ages ago. Sure, Henry Levin’s direction is pacy, often moody, and surprisingly elegant, but the film’s mystery isn’t as crazy and convoluted as that in the first film, leading to the always tiresome situation where the audience has long figured out what’s going on and why, yet the supposedly crack detectives still stumble around in the dark, following the wrong suspect. It’s also a bit problematic that the film’s favourite wrong suspect is one based on classist resentment that probably was easier to buy for a 1946 audience, and that our heroes’ reaction to him makes them look like authoritarian asshats instead of intrepid adventurers.

Still, thanks to Levin’s efforts, there’s more than a modicum of fun to be had here; it’s just a bit of a disappointment after the very pleasant weirdness of the first film.