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.