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.