Short Film Friday: The Horror on Tape

In short: Influencer (2022)

Professional influencer Madison (Emily Tennant) finds herself alone on a backpacking – or whatever the rich people’s version of that sort of thing is called – trip in Thailand. Initially, the trip was planned as an outing with her boyfriend, the impossibly self-centred Ryan (Rory J. Saper), but he noped out of the trip at the last minute, for vague reasons that clearly bother Madison quite a bit. Now alone in a foreign country, Madison has trouble keeping up her façade as well as is part of her job description.

Consequently, she’s very happy when she meets a non-creepy friendly face in CW (Cassandra Naud), whom she meets in a way that’ll only feel forced later. The two young women become very friendly rather quickly indeed. CW uses her copious local knowledge, highly developed social skills, and rather less strict philosophy of life in ways bound to impress Madison. This sort of instant closeness between the two makes it perfectly reasonable for a woman to accompany her new friend to some uninhabited island. Surely, CW has nothing sinister in mind.

Which would make for a rather boring movie, and thankfully, Kurtis David Harder’s influencer thriller is anything but. Apart from being rather clever about the influencer business, the film leaves the satire or the snarling towards influencers to other movies of the sub-genre and focusses more on deeper thematic concerns about the nature of intimacy fake and real, exemplified through CW’s relationship to everyone she meets but also the way Madison’s friends and acquaintances relate to her to her face and behind her back, in ways that are rather more subtly disturbing than “influencer=bad” would be. In fact, the film seems very much concerned with the fakeness at the core of all human relations any of its characters have, so much so that it becomes increasingly difficult not to side with the objectively monstrous CW because she’s so utterly brilliant at faking it. That feeling is even further strengthened by how good Naud’s performance is, magnetic in exactly the way her character is supposed to be, with suggestions of a depth you’d rather not want to explore.

Influencer presents these concerns – naturally, logically and thematically appropriately – under a highly glossy and slick surface that’s so effective, even the nastier moments of violence have something of a sexy sheen, which makes them more effectively disturbing, and turns this into something particularly difficult to achieve: a thriller that is as glossy as it is intelligent.

Out of Mind: The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft (1998)

An uncle he never really knew about bequeaths a mysterious package to young artist Randolph Carter (Art Kitching). Inside that package is a curious book written in a language Carter does neither know nor understand. Nonetheless, in a move that discloses a horrifying lack of genre knowledge, he reads aloud from it.

Afterwards, Carter falls into a series of waking dreams and nightmares that seem connected to the works of the late, great H.P. Lovecraft (Christopher Heyerdahl, making a great Lovecraft for what the film sets out to do), who has been regaling the audience with excerpts from letters and essays even before we met our protagonist. Carter will become somewhat obsessed with Lovecraft’s body of work and uncover some strange connections between it and his uncle. What he finds out will probably not save him from inevitable doom, but at least he gets to go on a walk with Lovecraft in his dreams, which is rather a lot more than most of us get.

Out of Mind is one of the more peculiar documents of Yogsothery I’ve encountered on the screen. This is a French Canadian TV production, directed by Raymond St-Jean, and includes a surprising amount of sometimes disparate material: there are the scenes of Lovecraft talking stiffly – in a wonderfully proper and awkward 30s to camera style – at the audience that seem to come from a more whimsical kind of documentary, dream versions of some of HPL’s tales, or variations thereof, until you realize that Carter’s tale itself is actually a variation on “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” where much of the Providence focus and the historical tales within the tale have been replaced by what the production could actually afford.

The film isn’t always successful with this approach – the bit that is meant to remind us of “Herbert West, Reanimator” for example, must by the rules of TV be pretty tepid and indeed is – and there can be a certain randomness to the way Lovecraft’s material pops up or not. When it works, though, Out of Mind is genuinely successful at evoking not the details of Lovecraft’s plots or mythology (which was never precise when Lovecraft used it anyway, because that’s not what it’s for), but the feeling of reading his work at the right moment, under the right circumstances. There’s an undercurrent of a dream-like and feverish intensity you lose a bit once you’ve gone through the body of work in so many different forms and so many times as I have by now, and I’m genuinely thankful to the film at hand for reminding me of it. Particularly since St-Jean clearly knows his Lovecraft well enough to have drawn out some of the writer’s main themes. Particularly the mix of love for the past and inheritance and the abject fear of what one might learn about it and oneself when one looks a little too closely, that to me always felt much more important to Lovecraft’s work than the racism ever was (though of course not always separated from it).

One might criticize here that the film focusses on the most flowery elements of early and mid-period Lovecraft, yet this feels like the proper choice to me for something that has to work on a TV budget, with TV opportunities for locations, and a TV effects budget. I genuinely don’t believe you could do justice to Lovecraft’s more clinical moments under these circumstances, and I’m glad St-Jean did what he could actually pull off.

In short: The Last Wolf: Karl Edward Wagner (2020)

If there’s a documentary about a literary figure whose mere existence makes me a bit giddy, it is this love letter to the often grievously undervalued or ignored sword and sorcery, horror and weird fiction writer and editor Karl Edward Wagner as directed by Brandon D. Lunsford and Brian M. McKnight.

Formally, this is related to your typical talking head documentary in so far as interviews are the backbone of the film – but this is not a case of the filmmakers cutting together soundbites, and rather one of them editing parts of the extensive amount of interviews they made with Wagner’s family, friends and peers so they paint a chronological and thematical picture of Wagner. Some of these interviewees have died themselves in the meantime, so now their interviews here preserve a part of oral literary history that might otherwise have been lost to us completely. Apart from making a great case for Wagner – the availability of whose work is still spotty beyond his sword and sorcery anti-hero Kane, though the great Valancourt Books have at least republished his wonderful collection “In a Lonely Place” since the film was made – this is also a bit of portray of a small-ish circle of horror writers who were probably too idiosyncratic to dominate the field in the 70s and 80s, but whose stories certainly should have, and sometimes have, left a mark.

It’s not as if all of the material about Wagner used here were completely new – Stephen Jones’s forewords to those ridiculously priced and limited Centipede Press Editions that always bring out the socialist in me apparently mine comparable sources (I wouldn’t know, because I’m not rich) – but the interviews bring parts of Wagner’s personality to life in a more direct way than a foreword can. The film is doing its best to not only use the interview footage, but also a treasure trove of photos, book covers, as well thematically appropriate bits and bobs to illustrate some readings of Wagner’s prose.

The project doesn’t shy away from the alcoholic crappiness of Wagner’s later years, when the functioning bit of the functioning alcoholic seems to increasingly have gotten lost in Wagner. There’s certainly no attempt at prettying up the end of Wagner’s marriage and what came after, though there’s also no sensationalist wallowing in nastiness; this is clearly aiming to be truthful about Wagner. That The Last Wolf takes a sympathetic and sad eye to these last years instead of a judgmental one is a major strength to my eyes.

Which really should make this a great documentary for anyone interested in Wagner at all, and probably an interesting film to see especially after you’ve read the Valancourt reissue or one of the Kane books.

Music Monday: Violent Jubilee Edition

Brooklyn 45 (2023)

World War II hasn’t been over for long. A group of old friends and war veterans are invited to the Brooklyn home of Lt. Colonel Clive Hockstatter (house favourite and horror hero Larry Fessenden). It’s not the happiest of reunions: one of the men, Archibald Stanton (Jeremy Holm), is on trial for a rather nasty war crime, and there are other tensions in the group as well. Former interrogation specialist/torturer Marla (Anne Ramsay) has brought her husband Bob (Ron E. Rains) with her, and the men really aren’t keen on a guy who married everyone’s sweetheart, particularly when he’s decidedly lacking in the demonstrative manliness they just love to indulge in.

These and other conflicts will come to the fore soon enough, but the reason Hockstatter has asked them to come is rather different. He wants his friends to take part in a séance meant to conjure up the spirit of his dead wife Susan, who killed herself after nobody believed in her wild tales of some German-born greengrocers in the neighbourhood being Nazi spies.

The séance goes rather well– depending on one’s opinion about being trapped in a room by ghosts. Hockstatter puking up a puddle of ectoplasm from which the arm of his dead wife arises is only the first surprise of the evening, and soon the whole affair turns into a long discussion about the morality of war and duty, and horror cinema’s favourite theme, guilt.

Ted Geoghegan is certainly one of the more interesting directors of low budget horror movies working right now. He doesn’t appear to want to make the same movie again, so he follows the Fulci (etc) homage of We Are Still Here and the Western as horror of Mohawk with what amounts to a filmed stage play.

Not surprisingly, the resulting film is very dialogue heavy, much more focussed on its characters talking through some ethical problems they encounter and slowly revealing some dark secrets/their true selves, while also taking a look at the nasty side of the Dream of America, than it is on its supernatural horror. The supernatural side of the film really is only ever an enabler for what Geoghegan is truly interested in here, and – apart from one pretty outrageous gore gag concerning Larry Fessenden’s head – really takes up very little of the film’s interest.

If you’re hoping the supernatural to be thematically relevant instead of plot convenient, this is certainly not going to make you happy. Given my tastes, I found myself somewhat disappointed by that element of the film – I think the film could have done more to use the supernatural as a way to explore its thematic interests and been all the more interesting for it.

Particularly since the dialogue isn’t always strong enough to carry everything the film is attempting to say about America or its characters. While there are certainly moments with the proper weight and cadence here, there are just as many lines that are simply too stagey and stilted to work as coming out of the mouths of these particular characters. The dialogue also tends to be a bit too clear and obvious. There’s a bluntness to it that sometimes suggests a film a bit afraid of its audience not getting what it is trying to say about its characters, their guilt and their country. Which is a particular problem when what it is trying to say has been said dozens of times before, often with more subtlety and complexity, and when it works with a stable of actors who play their asses off, and would certainly do so as well if the material were just a little more nuanced.

All of which sounds rather more damning than what I actually think of Brooklyn 45. I certainly do respect its willingness to be as stagey as it is, as well as its decision to express what it’s going for in a manner that feels rather old-fashioned today. That its approach doesn’t resonate terribly well with me is more a matter of taste than anything else.

Three Films Make A Post: Some mistakes are better left in the dark

Vampire Vs Vampire aka One Eyebrowed Priest aka 一眉道人 (1989): On one hand, it’s nice that Lam Ching-Ying’s long stint playing the same Taoist exorcist character with different names – if he gets one at all – finally bought him the possibility to direct his own adventures for once.

On the other hand, Lam is just another example of an actor whose work in front of the camera didn’t teach him what he needed behind it, and the resulting film is one of the weakest in the expanded Mr Vampire cycle, an endless, tedious, series of jokes that mostly don’t land and slapstick action sequences that lack the joyful and goofy imagination of the better films of this sub-genre. Lam seems to lack the ability to create the kind of flow the film desperately needs – which is particularly difficult to ignore when he was in so many other films of the same style whose flow was perfect.

From Black (2023): I loved the brilliant A Dark Song, concerning a long and desperate magical ritual and its psychological weight on the woman committed to it. Thomas Marchese’s From Black is very much a variation on the older film, only one that seems less grounded in an indie sensibility and extrapolated research about actual, real-life ritual magic and a lot more in what the movies teach us about magic.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad film – as the more mainstream variation on a theme it wants to be, it is actually rather successful, containing as it does a handful of genuinely creepy scenes, an excellent central performance by Anna Camp, and the proper downward movement of many a good horror film. Basically, this exchanges some depth for downbeat fun, and is very successful at what it does.

Southern Journey (Revisited) (2020): This documentary by the wonderful duo of Rob Curry and Tim Plester follows in the footsteps of the Southern journey of Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins in 1959 and 1960, revisiting some of the same places, not so much checking in with any sense of nostalgia, but in an attempt to find change a swell as traces of the past, attempting to understand specific parts of the Southern US experience through the virtues of openness and genuine interest and the way other people live. In this way, it actually feels like an actualisation of what Lomax’s approach never quite managed to achieve: letting subjects speak for and about themselves without bringing too much of the documentarians’ own interpretation in. That there’s quite a bit of great music and a wealth of interesting people involved rather comes with the territory.

Short Film Friday: Signal Dark

In short: Hypnotic (2023)

Police detective Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) stumbles upon a very curious case: a sinister looking gentleman (William Fichtner) somehow convinces random civilians into helping him commit complicated and suicidal robberies. Even more curious: all of this seems somehow connected to the kidnapping of Rourke’s little daughter by another random stranger some time ago.

Before Rourke knows it, he is teaming up with a backstreet hypnotist (Alice Braga) and starts following the trail of a weird conspiracy surrounding an operation of government mind controllers with a deep love for red blazers.

Clearly, Robert Rodriguez didn’t go into this trying to make your bog standard contemporary action thriller but mixes it up with the traditions of the 70s paranoid thriller, as well as some X-Men style not quite superhero psi stuff. In the film’s good moments, this works out rather well. Particularly early on, before the film starts to explain way too much, Rodriguez regularly reaches an un-real and somewhat nightmarish mood of paranoia – the culmination here is certainly the scene in the police station where our hero gets in trouble with his partner, though there is also a really nice bit where Rourke finds himself mind-whammied into a murder attempt.

The more standard big budget action thriller elements never work out quite as well: the action is – atypical for Rodriguez – more competent than great, and the plot never quite has the drive it should have. On the other hand, Hypnotic pulls off its two big twists rather well, including a pretty clever sequence of reveals too fun to spoil here. I can take or leave the final one, however.

I do believe Hypnotic’s main problem is its lead actor. Affleck’s unwillingness or inability to express any human emotion beyond indigestion is of course legend by now, but it’s poison for any emotional effect the film should have on its audience. On paper, Rourke goes through a psychological and physical wringer, and it should be easy to make us sympathize with him and his plight, perhaps admire his gumption. Alas, Affleck doesn’t express any of this, leaving a vacuum where Hypnotic’s emotional heart should be.

That the film stays watchable throughout is a little wonder; though the kind of wonder that makes me particularly wistful for a better casting decision.

House of Cards (1968)

These last few years, American Reno Davis (George Peppard) has made his living as a middling boxer on the European circuit. He’s coming to the end of his rope here, though. So it’s an ironically nice twist of fate when a little boy (Barnaby Shaw) we will soon enough learn to be called Paul de Villemont nearly shoots Davis by accident. Well, perhaps the nearly dying bit’s not that nice, but Paul’s mother likes the cut of Davis’s jib, and certainly his American manliness, and decides he’s just the kind of man who should be her son’s new tutor, and rock of sanity against the family of her late husband.

Turns out the family is the core of an international fascist conspiracy out to create a new world order of particular shittiness; whereas Davis is pretty good at punching Nazis.

John Guillermin’s House of Cards never gets quite as crazy as the spy movies his Italian colleagues made in the wake of James Bond Mania, and its hipness and fashion sense is more on the down to Earth side of the late 60s, so I wouldn’t exactly compare this to a Eurospy movie, though the film certainly is part of the family. Nominally, this is a US production, but directed by a Brit and shot in France and Italy with a cast mostly consisting of Europeans, the vibe isn’t exactly Hollywood.

After a somewhat slow start, the film becomes increasingly fun. Guillermin first makes an enjoyable time out of Peppard acting like the proverbial hammer in search of a nail in any situation where subtlety would be called for, pretending horrible male chauvinist nonsense is charm in so drastic a manner I couldn’t help but see the film making fun of it when nobody’s looking, only to then turn up the paranoia. Why, for twenty minutes or so, this even seems to prefigure the paranoia of 70s conspiracy thrillers, to surprisingly gripping effect. After which, because this certainly isn’t a film made to bore anyone by staying too constant in tone and mood, our hero finds himself captured and encounters a parade of dysfunctional fascists, whose portrayal is about as sardonic as possible. The bad guy actors do milk their scenery chewing opportunities with excellence, so Davis eventually getting the better of them is very satisfying indeed, particularly since Peppard manages to make his somewhat thuggish and pretty misogynistic character likeable beyond the “everybody is better than a Nazi” rule. I’m still not quite sure how he does it, but it certainly works.

The only one looking a bit bored on screen is Orson Welles, who clearly only pops in for a couple of scenes to collect a pay check for alimonies or doomed film projects, but at least he’s trying to convince George Peppard’s little tutee to gun our hero down for real this time, while being all hypnotic and malevolently low-angled.

House of Cards’ production values are higher than you’d get from the more cardboard oriented Italian Eurospy arm, so Guillermin has quite a few opportunities to impress the audience with very pretty shots of France and Italy. Particularly the castle our hero finds himself trapped in for quite a stretch looks rather impressive. But as an old veteran of these things, I’m already delighted when doors at least look as if they were made of wood, and the same shot of a car isn’t repeated ad nauseam throughout a chase, so sane viewers’ mileage may vary.

Speaking of chases, while this wasn’t made with the set piece loving heart of even the early Bond movies, the action sequences generally flow very well and have a nice sense of physicality to them, even though all Nazi goons do have glass chins. The last point only adds to the fun, of course, for what is more entertaining than seeing a Nazi getting punched by George Peppard in action hero mode?

In short: The Day Time Ended (1979)

Richard Williams (Christopher Mitchum) has built a nice, ultra-modern desert home that looks rather 50s futurist to my eyes, so that he and his family and his grandparents (Jim Davis and Dorothy Malone) can live together. While Richard’s away – expect many a shot of Chris Mitchum driving around and looking confused later on – the rest of the family is hit by a variety of strange occurrences, starting with electrical problems, time slips, the appearance of strange aliens, and finally attacks by various monsters. It’s apparently all on account of a triple supernova 200 lightyears or so away. Eventually, the family will be transported to what may or may not be another planet, until the plot, such as it is, just stops.

And there really isn’t much “plot” The Day Time Ended, as directed by John “Bud” Cardos. Instead this Charles Band (in his Charles Band Productions phase) production is all about the weirdness and the effects work, particularly the weird effects work, so that the film often feels more like a show reel that demonstrates the good and the bad of state of the art (of the day) effects techniques when used on a low budget. Consequently, some of the effects shots look pretty shoddy and awkward, but for every bad back projection, there are half a dozen fun and pleasantly grotesque stop motion monsters, swirly laser stuff and inexplicable nonsense I don’t have the vocabulary to describe but certainly the capacity to enjoy quite a bit.

Also very much speaking to me is the film’s insistence on making not a lick of sense but getting by on just throwing strange visual stuff at its audience, hoping that some of it might stick to our brains enough we can at least pretend the talk about “time space rifts” (and so on) makes an sense whatsoever. If that plan works out, we might even take being transported to a strange new planet with no way home but only a not at all mind-control like feeling that things are gonna be okay in the next alien domed city as well in stride as the protagonists do at the non-sequitur ending of the film. “#lifegoals”, as the youth of today with their Internets and their weird beards would say.

Music Monday: Hope, Arkansas Edition

Confidence (2003)

A dead man (Edward Burns, who really does act with all the expressiveness of a dead man throughout) tells a man with a gun to his head the story of his recent travails.

A successful con turns sour on con artiste Jake Vig (our dead man) and his team (Paul Giamatti, Brian van Holt and Louis Lombardi), when they realize their mark was working for a crazy, polymorphously perverse gangster boss who likes to be called The King (Dustin Hoffman). Even worse, the mark was paying them with the King’s money. After an unfortunate killing of a member of the team, Jake offers the King to work a con for him, to make up for their little differences, on the victim of the King’s choice. The King’s not going to make things easy, so the victim is one Morgan Price (Robert Forster), a man as difficult to get at as possible.

Still, Jake’s ego and those needs that must cook up a plan that might even work. He pretty randomly recruits hot pickpocket Lily (Rachel Weisz), because the film really needs a romance between two actors with zero chemistry (or rather, between a usually brilliant actress trying to get any emotional reaction from what might very well be a well-groomed rock) as well as the inevitable romantic betrayal.

Obviously, there will be twists as well, or did anybody expect the first person narrator of a movie about con artists to be telling the truth, and all of it?

Which does lead us neatly into Confidence’s main problem: a script that simply isn’t as smart as it believes to be, and so copies the surface level elements of other movies about cons, and a lot of the in 2003 inevitable Tarantino-moves without ever thinking about what they are actually good for in general or could be useful for in its own specific case.

But then, Confidence very much lacks in specificity as a whole. In part, this is the fault of very bland character writing where some verbal tics stand in for even the most basic of characterization, so much so that even great actors like Rachel Weisz and Andy Garcia can’t do much more than look sexy or wear weird clothes, respectively, while Dustin Hoffman simply pretends to be in a Tarantino film, alas not one with Tarantino’s hand for getting unexpected performances out of his actors. It does not help here at all that our viewpoint character as embodied by Edward Burns is quite so bland and lacking in personality; other characters tell us incessantly how cool he is, but assumed traits really don’t stick to a surface that boring.

In other ways, Confidence is nearly painfully of its precise point in time. James Foley’s direction is certainly slick, but it is slick in the manner of something shot with a “filmmaking styles of 2003” handbook in one hand. The score is exactly the sort of mutated Hip Hop Beat stuff you’d expect as well, the editing seems obsessed with having scenes ending on a quip or a one-liner (reaction shots are for losers, apparently) as if this were a TV show dragging us into an ad break, and so on and so forth. Everything here simply manages to be at once completely of its time and perfectly generic – one might call that an achievement, if one’s lifetime weren’t finite.

Three Films Make A Post: In a city forever in darkness an ancient horror awakens.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham (2023): For large parts of its running time, this adaptation of the Mike Mignola, Richard Pace and Troy Nixey Elseworlds mini-series as directed by Christopher Berkeley and Sam Liu sticks rather closely to the original. In its first acts, its mostly makes some not terribly creatively handled gestures towards inclusivity it would have been weird not to include in 2023, and allows Oliver Queen a bit more heroism than the original had. For the finale, though, the script by Jase Ricci makes increasingly strange choices that muddle what was a pretty straightforward plot and climax in ways that seem weird, and pointless. I’d understand – if not like – changes to make things slicker or more contemporary, but farting around with a solid structure to replace them with a rickety construct of rotten wood makes little sense to me.

Otherwise, Doom certainly is one of the better DC animated features; it even shows some moments of visual creativity instead of the more factory like approach DC’S animation arm seems to prefer these days.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre (2023): Whereas this misbegotten attempt at some sort of comedic Mission Impossible thing by Guy Ritchie is at times astonishingly bad: jokes never hit – and are generally underwritten - action set pieces are bland and lifeless, scenes that shouldn’t be in the film at all go on forever. Even at his worst – and I’d say that’s at least half of his output – Ritchie usually knows how to pace quick, usually at least semi-witty dialogue and seems to be a director who appreciates the qualities of a good cast, but you won’t even find any of that here. This is just a lifeless, glossy yet cheap-looking waste of a great cast.

Acidman (2022): For my taste, Alex Lehmann’s film never quite rises to the set-up of “woman’s (Dianna Agron) attempts to reconnect with her long-time estranged father (Thomas Haden Church) and fix her own hang-ups in the process is repeatedly interrupted by his obsession with UFOs and his Alzheimer’s”. The film’s neither sad nor weird enough to really pull the set-up off quite as effectively as one would wish it to, and much of it turns out to be a pretty middle of the road “woman meets dad” indie that doesn’t seem to dare to become as strange or emotional as it could and should. It’s a nice enough movie, mind you – it only wastes its potential to be more than that.

Short Film Friday: Inverse

In short: Sisu (2022)

1944. The Nazis are leaving Lapland, but not without following through with scorched earth policy. As if the landscape weren’t already pretty bleak. Gold digger Aatami (Jorma Tommilla), escaping a violent past and the loss that came with it, has actually struck gold and is now transporting his find to the next town. Meeting Nazi troops ends in rather a lot of violence, for it turns out that our protagonist is a crazed veteran of the Winter War, dubbed Koshchei by his Russian enemies then, which does not bode well for Nazis out to take his gold and his life.

As far as low(ish) budget action movies with a bone-dry sense of humour and a love for the old ultra violence go, Jalmari Helander’s Sisu is rather great. There’s a wonderful sense of flow as well as of escalation to the film, a forward momentum that never quite becomes breathlessness – our hero’s a quick, methodical killer, after all, though also a messy one.

As in most great action movies, Sisu demonstrates an absolute willingness to leave the laws of physics (those old bores) behind for the joys of iconic and sometimes grotesque action, and very specifically understands the joy of Platonic pulpiness – having half a dozen female Nazi captives armed with machine guns mowing down a truckload of Nazis, a grizzled guy hitching a ride on the outside of a plane with a pick-axe, that sort of thing. At the same time, the film never presents these moments with a sense of ironic detachment – the audience is supposed to get sucked into this and feel it, instead of admire it from the outside, and at least for me, this approach to the material worked splendidly. But then, I prefer the absurdly awesome and the awesomely absurd presented to me with a straight face instead of a wink.

On a less visceral note, the film is very successful at portraying its version of Lapland as something that looks a lot like the movies have told me a post-apocalyptic wasteland looks, providing the proper mood for the grim and over the top violence going on in it; it certainly beats the warehouses you so often get in the cheaper action movies. The score and some scenes, as well as the film’s generally grim outlook do suggest the Italian West as a neighbouring realm as well; one would not be surprised meeting Franco Nero dragging a coffin with a special surprise inside around here. There’s certainly a lot of squinting going on, and our protagonist does have the proper air of mythic brutality, as well as one can only assume to be Wolverine's healing factor.

In short: Mars (1997)

In the near future of Elon Musk’s wet dreams, Mars has been colonized and is controlled by a single Company whose miners are tasked with acquiring a new, totally, completely, nay, absolutely healthy fossil fuel for Earth.

When a member of the Company’s private police force is killed under dubious circumstances, the delightfully named Caution Templer (Olivier Gruner), also one of the Company’s so-called “Keepers”, as well as brother of the victim arrives to kick some heads in.

Because there’s no subtlety on Mars, the bad guys responsible for the death of Caution’s brother try to kill our protagonist as soon as he arrives on the planet, making it pretty easy even for him to stumble upon the conspiracy in which the Company is of course and obviously involved. On the way, Caution acquires the help of local grumpy physician Doc Halliday (Shari Belafonte) and a local street rat named, adorably, Buckskin Greenberg (Gabriel Dell Jr.).

As you can see, character names in Jon Hess’s science fiction action piece Mars are a pretty painful affair, unless one is a big fan of awkward attempts at “subtly” hinting at the Western genre, as I am, as it turns out. Its very own special naming conventions are pretty much Mars’s only independent ideas, for otherwise, this is a cheap knock-off of Peter Hyams’s Outland, without the brains, the quiet cleverness of the writing, the Connery, or Hyams’s brilliant direction, mixed with just as badly copied bits of Total Recall. Turns out you can’t really make Outland on a DTV budget, or at least, Hess can’t.

So expect a Mars colony that looks suspiciously as if it were build from bits and pieces of the usual warehouses and industrial buildings where all action movies of this type are shot, some choice bad CGI, the usual nightclubs that look nothing like nightclubs apart from the naked women with awkward boob jobs, and a script that just screams for some proper scenery chewing none of the villain actors is really bothered to provide, even though the writing does offer them the opportunity.

All of this, apart from the lame villains, is to be expected. Why the film doesn’t seem to be able to stage a proper fight, despite having a perfectly competent screen fighter as its load, and does the kind of choppy editing nonsense you typically encounter whenever nobody in front of the camera can be trusted to execute any fighting move properly, is anybody’s guess however. It’s not as if you’d hire Gruner for his acting chops, so why not make use of the skills the guy – within limits – can actually offer?

In short: Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva (2023)

Following the disappearance and probable death of hiking blogger Gary Hinge in the first film, student Minerva Sound (Solveig Helene) dies under mysterious circumstances in a trailer in the Nevada High desert, which may be connected to the disappearance of yet another woman (Brooke Bradshaw), and a bag full of creepy, ambiguous videotapes Minerva found in the trailer.

Like its predecessor, Dutch Marich’s Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva is presented as a documentary about some mysterious occurrences. It is, however, a much superior film to my eyes (the Internet mostly disagrees there). For one, the ratio between talking heads segments and found footage action is much more sensible here, so the fake documentary bits provide framing and exposition but don’t take over the whole of the film, leaving space for the film to experiment with diverse modes of POV horror in its found footage segments, from handy footage, to old serial killer camcorder fun, to the good old “people panicking in the dark while holding an infrared camera”.

This does give the whole affair a lot more energy than the first film had and provides an opportunity to build up to more complex questions the planned next sequel may or may not answer. At the very least, there’s a sense of focus and direction here I didn’t get from the first movie, and enough basic storytelling skill to make this interesting and watchable throughout.

Some of the found footage segments are genuinely creepy – I’m particularly fond of the camcorder stuff and its suggestion of a greater weirdness, but there’s also some clever and effective use of found audio in the parts of the film about Minerva’s death, as well as in another moment later on, and a general sense of a pleasantly macabre imagination at work that often makes nice use of the feeling of isolation the locations provide. The final found footage bit goes on a bit too long for my taste for too little payoff, but the rest of the film is absolutely good enough to make up for a minor pacing problem like that.

Music Monday: Swing Pushing Edition

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Sisters Beth (Lily Sullivan) and Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) haven’t always seen eye to eye, historically, but when Beth has a problem, as she has at the beginning of the movie, she still comes back to Ellie – and Ellie’s kids Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), Danny (Morgan Davies) and Kassie (Nell Fisher). Right now, Ellie’s family has problems of their own, though: the father of the kids has left them, and the high rise they live in is going to be demolished in a month, with no new place to live on the horizon.

So the family reunion isn’t without its troubles. Troubles which will be rudely interrupted when an earthquake open ups a hidden bunker under the building and Danny grabs the grimoire stashed there in the hopes of selling it off to get everyone out of trouble. Soon deadites and fountains of blood will redecorate the building’s interior.

The new Evil Dead film is not at all the kind of film I’d have expected out of Lee Cronin. Where the director’s short films and his The Hole in the Ground are rather slow, cerebral and thoughtful, Evil Dead Rise is fast, bloody, and often wonderfully fucked up perfectly in keeping with the tradition of the franchise. Cronin turns out to be really good at this sort of thing, as well, timing shocks, freak-outs and nasty suspense masterfully, while keeping the characters interesting enough for him to be able to slow down strategically whenever necessary or useful to the film’s mood.

There are, of course, a lot of nods to the other films of the franchise here (there’s a particularly wonderful/creepy variant of the old “DEAD BY DAWN!”, turned into an actual chant here), but Cronin – who also scripted – also adds some flourishes of his own that manage to keep completely in the style of the series but also feel new and individual enough to move it forwards, in a much more organic way than the new Hellraiser tried and failed to do it. The final creature – to spoil that one would be a crime – is a great example for this. It’s certainly in the mind space Sam Raimi works in when doing horror, but it’s also something I really haven’t seen before, or indeed imagined to see in the fifth movie in a franchise that also already spawned a TV show.

For a movie that’s aiming for the mainstream, this can get surprisingly nasty – not just in the blood showers but also in its willingness to kill characters who would be taboo in most mass market fare, in its general sense of gruesomeness and in its sheer macabre visual imagination.

Between the crazy effects, the blood, and the horrific action, Cronin has also managed to include elements that resonate on a different level. Apart from being a movie about possession, blood and unpleasant transformations, this is also very much a film playing on a very basic human fear. To my eyes, it is not the “evil mother” thing certain people get so cranky about (because all mothers in real life are awesome I assume against better knowledge?) but rather the fear of your loved ones turning against you or changing beyond recognition, turning into monsters literal and metaphorical. There’s a certain perverse glee in the way Evil Dead Rise plays with this fear, first setting up family relations that are close but not too idyllic, and then destroying them in ways none of the characters deserve.

If you start thinking about it, Evil Dead Rise is really very dark indeed – it just puts this darkness into such a sweet mix of macabre and perversely fun carnage, not everyone watching will even notice that darkness.

Three Films Make A Post: LONDON IS ABOUT TO GET A TASTE OF TEXAS

Gate aka 게이트 (2017): Shin Jai-ho’s comedic heist movie suffers from the general lowbrow-ness of its humour, a certain tackiness in the presentation of its melodramatic moments, and never gets to the point you find in so many South Korean genre movies when they just straight out break iron-clad genre rules to go and do their own thing.

It’s still watchable enough: Shin certainly is a slick director, and the cast do their best to fill out their thin characters enough to at least make them halfway fun to watch.

Freeze (2022): Clearly, Charlie Steeds never stops making movies for a second. This time around Steeds and his usual ensemble go for a tale of Arctic horror with clear traditional Lovecraftian signifiers like murderous, weird fish people, and books that should not be read. Between the wonderful hand-made gore, this one puts particular emphasis on Steeds’s brand of home-made surrealism, turning parts of the proceedings so dream-like, the film’s weaknesses – some of the sets really only suggest what they are supposed to be instead of portraying it, and the acting is often decidedly un-naturalistic – only emphasize the peculiar mood of the whole affair. Half gory low budget fish people action and half surrealistic cheap nightmare is a pretty irresistible combination, if you ask me.

One Ranger (2023): Jesse V. Johnson is certainly one of the better directors working in low budget action today, so there’s always at the very least a solid standard to the basic filmmaking in his movies, as well as action sequences that tend to look much costlier than they are.

This time around, Johnson seems to have been able to work on a slightly better budget than usual, but the resulting film isn’t one of his best. I appreciate the film’s peculiar sense of humour, its attempts at giving its villain an actual character arc, and I’m certainly happy to see a “The Expanse” reunion with Thomas Jane (pretending very hard to be Texan) and Dominique Tipper in the leads, as well as short appearances by John Malkovich and Patrick Bergin.

However, the structure of the film as a whole just seems off, rather as if this wasn’t shot following a proper script but a first draft of one – and while people who have no clue will tell you action movie scripts only need action scenes, flow is incredibly important for the genre. And flow is what One Ranger lacks.

Short Film Friday: Disguise

In short: Horror in the High Desert (2021)

Warning: there will be spoilers, because the film is so slight, there’d be nothing to talk about otherwise

High Desert hiker - and as it will turn out vlogger - Gary Hinge (Eric Mencis) disappears on one of his excursions. The film purports to be a documentary about the event, so eighty percent or so of it consist of duelling talking heads interviews with Gary’s handful of friends and family, and a very slow beat for beat walkthrough of a rather uneventful investigations.

Eventually, it will turn out that Gary’s disappearance has something to do with a creepy cabin deep in the High Desert, and the backwoods mutant person (or is it?) living there. Since the final piece of film we get to see has been found in a camera held in Gary’s cut off hand, things have apparently ended badly for him.

Until we get to all that excitement and the somewhat effective found footage bit surrounding it, Dutch Marich’s lockdown-produced movie is a bit of a slog, unfortunately. I do like the fake documentary format for POV horror, because it makes exposition flow more naturally and can help filmmakers cut out unnecessary lengths, but in this case, too much of what the talking heads blabber about is of no actual pertinence to anything that’s going on. It also often doesn’t feel terribly well thought through in terms of logic or dramatic impact. There is, for example, no good reason to make it a surprise to most of the characters that Gary was blogging about his wilderness exploits apart from dragging the minor mystery of what’s going on out. There’s also too little of Gary’s actual footage in comparison to the talking heads, and very little even tiny creepiness happens for the first fifty minutes of the film or so. Some of this can probably explained by the way this had to be produced as a low budget movie during the pandemic, but understanding this doesn’t make the movie more entertaining to watch.

It’s a bit of a shame as well, for the last fifteen minutes or so of Horror in the High Desert are perfectly decent POV horror.

In short: Siccin 2 (2015)

aka Sijjin 2

Hicran’s (Seyda Terzioglu) happy family life with her husband Adnan (Bulut Akkale) and their little son turns into pure horror when the child is squashed by a cupboard that could not and should not have fallen.

Because grief isn’t bad enough, Adnan turns into an abusive monster who very loudly puts the fault for the kid’s death squarely on Hicran’s shoulders. Then there are the visions of nasty and angry looking women, the nightmares – waking and sleeping – and various occurrences you could only explain with some supernatural force wanting our heroine ill.

A visit to a hodja (think a mix of priest, theological scholar and exorcist for the practical purposes of the film) suggests that Hircan is cursed by a particularly terrible curse only a female relative can lay on the victim, so she begins looking into her own family history. The things she’ll eventually learn are pretty horrible, even by horror movie family secret standards.

This second in Alper Mestçi’s only thematically connected series of Turkish witchcraft/possession horror movies often runs sideways to the sensibilities of comparable movies from the US or the UK, mixing the culturally conservative and the exploitative in ways I’m by now starting to see as very specific to Turkish cinema of the 2010s. There’s always more than a whiff of paternalism and misogyny around, but this is countered by how ineffective and often absent the film’s paternalistic protector figure tends to be. The hodja just loves to give advice but never does anything practical on camera, and is absolutely useless as help against the supernatural. In this context it is also interesting to observe how much of this plays like a classic melodrama, a traditionally female-centric genre, just a melodrama where the usual reasons for turned to eleven dramatics – and boy do the film and Terzioglu love those - have been replaced by curses, witches, and so on. Which does situate Siccin 2 nicely in that very traditional exploitation cinema position where a film perpetuates but also potentially subverts conservative cultural ideas at the same time.

On the more generically horror side of the equation, Mestçi loves to edit in quick, short, shocking moments of creepy, distorted looking faces and practical gore effects in ways that not always make it clear if this is happening inside of the characters’ minds, in the reality of the film, or only for the audience. This, particularly when combined with its high tension melodrama, and the film’s general eye for creepy shots of bleak countryside and city streets, gives Siccin 2 a rather nightmarish mood, or perhaps the feeling of reality getting out of whack through the influence of the malignant forces the curse has conjured up.

In short: Renfield (2023)

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), has been Dracula’s (Nicolas Cage) slave for many decades now as the submissive part in a pretty messed-up co-dependent abusive relationship. Well, at least he gets superpowers from eating insects, now, so I wouldn’t say Dracula never did anything for him.

Our protagonist is struggling badly with the horrors of Dracula, however, the guilt that comes with his complicity in many an outrageously bloody deed. By now, he’s at least an observing participant in a self help group for people with the less supernatural version of his relationship troubles, and feeds his peers’ abusers to his vampiric masters. In a couple of decades, Renfield might even have started on getting away from Dracula, but the vagaries of an increasingly idiotic plot drag him there rather earlier.

What’s good about Chris McKay’s Renfield is easily summed up in the words “Nicolas Cage”. His performance as this movie’s Dracula is incredible, channelling an amped up, combined version of earlier portrayals (most obviously those by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee) into the vampire as an embodiment not of some romantic bullshit, or animal magnetism, but of masculinity at its worst. There’s a sense not of actual intelligence about this version of Dracula, but some kind of violent cleverness, something so human it feels deeply inhuman even before we get to the evil vampire powers and the teeth.

Alas, this performance and the very sound and interesting basic idea are completely wasted in a movie that really rather would like to be some godawful noisy action comedy with random bouts of gore. Everything that could be thoughtful and clever is buried under reams of bad and obvious jokes and mediocre action sequences that are not improved a wit by being obnoxiously loud.

It’s just a waste, as is Awkwafina’s walking, talking plot device of a character or the usually dependable Nicholas Hoult who just looks bored and confused most of the time.

Music Monday: Love=Gravity Edition

Thrilling Bloody Sword (1981)

aka The Thrilling Sword

aka Heaven Sword

Original title: 神劍動山河

When his wife dies giving birth to a red, oval, pulsating flesh egg, the ruling king of wherever this takes place (Chin Han) decides to get rid of the thing by doing the old Moses bit. The egg (cocoon?) finds its way to The Seven Dwarfs of the Happy Forest (seriously) who quickly learn there’s a healthy human baby girl inside of the fleshy exterior. They decide to raise her as their daughter.

Seventeen years later, our heroine (I believe the delightfully named Fanny Fang Fang-Fang) has grown up to be beautiful, morally pure, and so on. She becomes involved in her birth father’s business again by fate: meeting a heroic prince (Liu Shang-Chien) of the king’s realm and falling in love with him are one. Her feelings are reciprocated, and things could be set for a very quick happy end, if not for the fact that the king has invited two heroic exorcists to his court who are actually a couple of evil, devil worshipping magicians. These two are trying to usurp his throne by all means necessary, after having won the king’s trust by beating monsters they have conjured up themselves and by attacking his counsellors in front of him. Turning heroic princes into embarrassed looking bears, mind-controlling lost daughters and other acts of bizarre fiendishness are all in the program. Fortunately there’s help for the lovers: apart from the dwarfs, who are actually transformed generals, there’s a tiny, magic-wielding fairy willing to go out of her way to help, as well as a ridiculous looking sword that shoots laser beams (paired with an equally ridiculous looking armour), and other whacky nonsense.

Apparently, this Taiwanese fantasy wuxia variant of Snow White (or a Taiwanese version of the same folk tale model) directed by Chang Hsin-Yi is meant as a kids movie. This certainly tracks with other kids movies from the country I’ve encountered, seeing as it is both inexplicable and weird, and seems to be made for the kind of kids you probably wouldn’t want to encounter in the dark. Or really by day – they might shoot laser beams at you.

The whole thing is a WTF movie of the highest degree: it makes its folk tale sources as weird as possible (as if folk tales weren’t already strange enough), adding inexplicable flourishes, scenes of the kind of goofy nonsense some grown-ups believe kids find funny, bits and pieces of other popular fantasy movies – apart from Hong Kong, Chinese sources and Disney, I bet somebody here has seen their share of Harryhausen films and peplum – and random stuff whose reason to be in the movie – or anywhere else - is dubious and inexplicable (in the sense of “please, don’t explain”).

There are so many questions here, from the obvious, “what’s with the horrifying looking chicken bird/whatever muppet pet the dwarfs keep?” to more exalted ones like “why do the devil icons with the lightbulb eyes our baddies converse with have additional mouths in their crotches?”, or “where does a bear costume so bad, it looks actually embarrassed by itself even come from?”.

The movie is certainly not going to answer them, and I’m a little afraid to speculate. It is easier, and certainly more entertaining, to just let the film wash over one’s psyche like radiation. Very possibly, joy will sprout from your brain, like a flower in a Clark Ashton Smith story, when you realize the magic mirror from the folk tale has been replaced by a devil statue talking through its crotch mouth, or encounter the frog person sirens and their buddy the mini-Rodan while our prince is on his quest, or simply try to keep up with bizarre leaps of logic and genre.

Added bonus joys are an awesome needle-dropped score, special effects that clearly care not a whit about how ridiculous they look, and so become impressive in their ridiculousness, a plot that can’t help but do everything, even a simple hero’s quest, as weirdly as possible, and direction that really goes out of its way to make everything look as weird as it should be.

Three Films Make A Post: Long live adventure… and adventurers!

The Tank (2023): I’m not really sure why this movie from New Zealand directed by Scott Walker is trying to pretend it’s American, even though there’s no reason at all for this to be taking place anywhere specific. But then, I’m equally unsure why this has to be a period piece, either. Or, come to think of it, why the film has to drag its feet for nearly an hour until anything of interest happens in it – the character work certainly isn’t so deep it needs the time.

What the film has going from it – apart from a perfectly capable cast – is a really great monster design; the monster just comes in much too late.

Sideworld: Haunted Forests of England (2022): If I were a cynical man, I’d look down on George Popov’s documentary for being quite as cost-consciously produced as it obviously was: the film’s tales of dark folklore, myths and rural legend are told from the off, accompanied by creepy low angle shots of British forests and art from the public domain, and everything is accompanied by dark ambient – and that’s really all there is to it, formally.

However, the script by Jonathan Russell puts the well-worn and not not so well-worn tales the film tells into efficient little packages, and Popov applies his background in indie folk horror filmmaking of the more directly fictional variety nicely to the material, shaping the minimalist set-up into something effective and interesting.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975): John Huston’s adaptation of the Kipling tale is a well-loved classic, and that’s no wonder at all: not only is this one hell of a traditional colonialist adventure movie full of invention, charm, and one great damn thing after another; it is also a film that has a lot to say about what’s wrong about colonialist adventures and the mind-set they are born from, as well as the kind of men they tend to champion. Still, it never feels schizophrenic in its approach, but manages to be a film about the joys and the horrors of the same ideas at the same time.

That it also contains wonderfully larger-than-life performances by Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer only adds to the film’s specific magic.

Short Film Friday: Stones