Three Films Make A Post: Tell Me Why You Don’t Like Sundays

Phenomena aka Fenómenas (2023): This Netflix production by Carlos Therón isn’t the remake of the Argento movie one might fear, but rather a film that seems to imagine the Conjuring series, but with bickering middle-aged women (one of them the inevitable Belén Rueda) replacing the sexed up version of two right-wing con artists. Which is such an obvious improvement, one wonders why nobody did something like it earlier.

Therón does a good job of mixing the expected stylistic interests of modern mainstream horror with a very Spanish sense of humour without things ever exactly turning into a horror comedy. The spooky business isn’t original but fun and done competently enough to make this a very pleasant surprise.

The Seventh Grave aka La settima tomba (1965): This often amateurish Gothic horror meets Old Dark House piece directed by one-time filmmaker Garibaldi Serra Caracciolo is certainly not what you’d call a good movie, or a hidden gem, but recommends itself to the likes of me through moments when exactly the film’s flaws – terrible continuity, dubious lighting, stiff yet overheated acting, and a complete lack of aesthetic taste – turn it interesting. It’s a very traditional psychotronic film in that way, blowing one’s mind a little by seeming devoid of any actual understanding of how to make a “proper” movie.

Terror in the Streets aka Akuma ga yondeiru (1970): The first third of this horror-tinged mystery by Michio Yamamoto portrays the increasing social and economical isolation of its heroine (Wakako Sakai) as if by some shadowy evil force that seems to prefigure 2020’s Invisible Man with wonderful paranoid and melodramatic intensity in a way that might even suggest some kind of feminist thought being involved. Any idea of that disappears in the middle of the movie, when things become increasingly silly and surreal, with an utterly bizarre nightclub marriage without consent scene as a particular high point.

Yamamoto unfortunately can’t keep the tension or the sheer hypnotic bizarreness of what came before up in the third act. But then, who wouldn’t crash and burn when tasked to tie up what came before in a standard mystery knot?