Yet Another Break!?

I'll take a week or so off from the blog. Normal service will resume on Saturday, August 5th. It's a tentacle thing, you wouldn't understand. 

In short: Cabin Girl (2023)

Following a van accident she mostly doesn’t seem to be able to remember, Van Vlogger – this is indeed a thing in the real world – Ava (Rose Lane Sanfilippo) rebrands herself as a cabin vlogger. She buys an old cabin in the woods close to the place where she had her accident, to rest and recuperate from a head injury, but also because she simply feels drawn to the place.

Plus, the local mechanic Kellen (Austin Scott) is kind, sensitive, hot, and really into her.

Of course, this being a horror movie, Ava is soon plagued by visions of a dead young woman who likes to whisper about guilt. Turns out her cabin once belonged to a young woman who apparently committed suicide. Ava becomes obsessed with the spirit, and is quickly convinced the suicide was actually murder, and someone in town wants to keep things quiet.

While our heroine’s interest in the case turns increasingly unhealthy, an unseen stranger with an axe begins stalking her.

I really wouldn’t try to oversell Jon D. Wagner’s Tubi movie Cabin Girl. Streaming or not, this is a TV movie to its bones with the too pat and obvious writing and the Lifestyle movie type ideas about “craziness” that can entail. I can’t imagine many viewers who won’t see the final plot twist coming a mile away, despite some rather awkward attempts at distracting the audience from the obvious, and much of what happens on screen is realized competently more than anything else.

However, this isn’t a case of the dreaded “boring competence”. If you’re willing to buy into Cabin Girl’s basic and simple conceit, and can cope with its unideal depictions of mental illness (for me, it helps when said depictions are as crude as here), you actually can have quite a bit of fun with it. At the very least, it flows very nicely indeed. There’s apparently something to be said for a decent story competently told, or at least, in this case there is.

Sanfilippo certainly makes for the most likeable influencer I can remember having seen in a movie, and once it’s crazy time, she throws herself into that as well. More, I’m not going to ask of a nice, unassuming little movie like this one.

In short: Little Bone Lodge (2023)

Mama (Joely Richardson) lives with Pa (Roger Ajogbe) and daughter Maisy (Sadie Soverall) in a farmhouse somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Scotland. Mama is clearly the dominant member of the family – Pa is ill, doesn’t talk, barely moves, and spends most of the film slumped in a wheelchair, while Maisy seems to have been so well protected from the dangers of the world, her naivety borders on mental illness.

A birthday dinner for Pa is rudely interrupted during a dark and very stormy night (sorry) by a pair of brothers, Jack (Neil Linpow, who also wrote the script) and Matty (Harry Cadby). Jack is wounded, supposedly in an accident, but thanks to Matty being a terrible liar, and not terribly clever in other ways as well, it is pretty clear early on that there’s something rather more wrong going on with the brothers than a simple case of accident. But then, it is pretty clear to the audience that something’s not quite right about the resident family, as well. Their respective wrongnesses will clash, and the usual dark secrets will be revealed.

None of those secrets should come as much of a surprise to anyone even mildly versed in the ways of thriller and horror movies. One can only have so many different kinds of messed up family businesses in a movie, and Matthias Hoene’s film does make life rather more difficult for itself here by trying to keep its messed up things somewhat classy and subtle, further limiting the possibility for surprises of the nasty kind.

This doesn’t mean Little Bone Lodge is squeamish or unwilling to go to somewhat unpleasant places like the really disturbed and unironic British Lifetime thriller of our imagination – it’s just not interested in wallowing there, even when it goes for the grimmest ending possible. Which is at once the right and proper decision and a bit disappointing, for the specific psychological messes the film has decided to use for its characters could work very well in a movie more invested in the nasty surface.

The film is still a rather fine example of its form, using elements of the home invasion thriller for good, building quite a bit of tension and excitement out of its nicely worn tropes. Well, I didn’t exactly ask for yet another version of the toxically evil mother figure, but Joely Richardson makes her particular variation on the theme so steelily impressive and seductively convincing in her mad logic, I’m not exactly going to complain here, either. The ensemble in general is very good at filling the characters with so much life, even the script’s more implausible moments feel completely convincing.

In short: Where Are You, João Gilberto (2018)

Documentary filmmaker Georges Gachot follows the traces of German writer Marc Fischer’s book “Hobalala” in an attempt to finish what Fischer started: find and hopefully meet the great Brazilian musician João Gilberto. For the last decades of his life, Gilberto spent an eccentric and reclusive life, apparently living in hotel rooms and avoiding personal contact with anyone as much as possible, for unknown reasons.

On the trail of Fischer on the trail of Gilberto, Gachot meets various other key figures of Brazilian music history, encounters saudade as well as more European coded versions of sadness, loneliness and nostalgia, and ends up in front of a closed hotel room door listening to Gilberto singing behind it.

Obviously, this is quite different from your typical music documentary, particularly since Gachot often seems to go out of his way to avoid naming, dating or categorizing – if you want to learn about Brazilian music history, you’re wrong here. Instead, this is a film all about the feelings Gilberto’s music evokes in Gachot, Fischer and others, the feelings Fischer evoked writing about the absence of Gilberto as an actual person to be communicated with, as well as the sad beauty of music, not of its historical context.

This approach stands the film in good stead, as does Gachot’s ability to relate to everyone he interviews on a personal and specific level that feels grounded in a genuine appreciation for people with their foibles and eccentricities, as much as a love for Gilberto’s work and Fischer’s book.

That Gachot is also clearly one of those “poetic truth” documentarians makes me a little sceptical about the factual truthfulness of the hotel room door ending, but it’s so perfect an emotional capstone (even more so when you keep in mind that Gilberto himself would die in 2019, never making the big stage comeback and the albums produced by sensitive young fans he so richly deserved), factual truthfulness isn’t the point.

Music Monday: Sinners/Saints Edition

Venus (2022)

Warning: there will be last act spoilers!

Lucía (Ester Expósito), a dancer in a techno club run by organized crime, absconds with a large bag full of little blue pills that belong to her employers. On her way out with her loot, she manages to get through an altercation with the chief bouncer alive. She is however injured enough she flees to her estranged sister Rocío (Ángela Cremonte) instead wherever she was initially planning to run to.

Rocío lives with her daughter Alba (Inés Fernández) in a run-down, nearly empty apartment building, the Venus Complex. I imagine it’s situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of the buildings from Evil Dead Rise and Satan’s Slaves 2.

When Lucía arrives, Rocío is just in the process of fleeing the building in terror, panicked by poltergeist style occurrences and, as we’ll soon enough learn, Alba’s tales of a woman (?) living in the empty apartment above them. The Servant, as Alba calls her, supposedly enters their apartment through nightmares, leaving creepy and curious gifts (a jar full of children’s tears, a nasty little knife, and so on) for Alba. Which would make me want to run as well. But estranged as the sisters may be, a bleeding Lucía is enough to convince Rocío to stay another night.

The morning after some bitter sisterly rows that do not keep Lucía up to date about the potentially supernatural nastiness going on, Rocío is suddenly gone. Lucía may not have been the best sister or aunt, but she’s certainly not going to leave her little niece without any grown-up supervision, which traps her in the Venus building.

Worse still, Lucía’s former employers have managed to narrow down her whereabouts to a couple of blocks; soon enough, her boss’s boss’s specialist for difficult problems, one Calvo (Francisco Boira), will narrow that down even further with the help of a hairball spitting clairvoyant.

While the gangsters are closing in, and other complications from that side ensue, Lucía has to cope with the increasing weirdness of what happens in the apartment: horrifying nightmares and strange visions, a folder of research about the Venus Complex left by her sister that suggests a history of cult activity, child sacrifices and cannibalism, and so on. The place is a horror show – and that’s before Lucía or the audience understand anything of what’s actually going on. At the same time, a mysterious, inexplicable astronomical body moves between the Earth and the Sun, promising a rather unplanned for by science eclipse right in time for the film’s climax.

Even though the plot of Jaume Balagueró’s Venus is more of a mix of very traditional bits of occult horror, just as traditional noirish crime movie tropes, and old-fashioned moments of pulpy weirdness, and is thus somewhat lacking in the originality stakes, I find myself enjoying the film and its approach to horror quite a bit. Given my predilections when it comes to horror, I am probably the ideal audience for this film, its general vibe of tropey goodness bloodied up a bit by a couple gallons of blood, made prettier by its director’s hand for slick yet moody visuals. I am especially enamoured of its complete disregard for logic and proper narrative sense for the climax. Plus, the tropes the film so lovingly reproduces are exactly the ones I can’t get enough of in horror, its story of a weird cult trying to conjure up something terrible for no good reason while colliding with a group of realistically shitty gangsters and a young woman who becomes increasingly, absurdly heroic once push comes to shove, pushing all of my narrative buttons while doing nothing that would annoy me.

Why, I’m even okay with the bizarre ending that goes high pulp in ways I actually haven’t seen before quite like this, but lacks in cohesion with the rest of the film. But then, once you accept the story’s basic conceits about the weirdness the cultists (who are a delightful mix of SM cosplayers, elderly guys who seem to have tentacles coming out of their anuses, and cultivated crazy elderly ladies) are concocting and how they do it, logic and cohesion stop being the point at all. As a matter of fact, even if you’re not as enamoured with the film’s whole vibe as I am, you might need to admit its last scene twist may be badly prepared by anything that came before, but does quite a wonderful thing by standing the classic horror movie bullshit ending on its head, providing a bizarre happy end that works well enough as an idea and a mood to be acceptable for the high pulp world the final act most certainly takes place in.

In short: When Eight Bells Toll (1971)

British attempts at creating a new franchise in the spirit of James Bond have historically never fared too well. A nice example for this tradition is this attempt at bringing in French director Etienne Périer and turn to the ever popular Alistair MacLean for scripting duties to make a young Anthony Hopkins playing a permanently disgruntled treasury agent into “The New James Bond”.

Apparently, nobody involved in the production bothered to understand why the Bond movies were the smashes they were, so that series’ sense for POP and the popping eye candy is replaced by the more realistic and workaday charms of your typical Alistair MacLean hero and his world. Hopkins’s Calvert is still supremely competent, mind you, but like all MacLean heroes, he’s rather too down to Earth and focussed on solving the problems at hand to ever feel charismatic or cool like even the Roger Moore version of Bond does.

There is quite a bit of geographical hopping around here too, but where the Bond films show what tourists like to see – and typically set an outrageous action set piece there – When Eight Bells Toll prefers various, dramatically grey, coast lines, and lots of ships and boats (and helicopters, to be fair). There’s nothing wrong with that at all of course, but if you’re trying to beat the contemporary Bond movies at their own game, you might at least look as if you’re trying.

There are at least some direct if tepid attempts at copying the sexy/sleazy bits of the Bonds, but the film – after all written by the rather notoriously couth MacLean - feels faintly embarrassed by that instead of convinced, which obviously also turns it unconvincing.

All of this doesn’t mean there’s no fun to be had here. If you go into the film not asking for the Bond it doesn’t know how to deliver but for a more on-brand action/adventure Alistair MacLean style affair, there’s a lot to like here, particularly if you enjoy your action and adventure taking place on coastlines and boats (there is, thankfully, not too much interest in diving here), and featuring ultra-competent, slightly boring protagonists.

Short Film Friday: Masked

In short: Leif Jonker’s Darkness: The Vampire Version (1993/2005)

A roaming vampire spends his nights destroying a series of anonymous midwestern US small towns. Some teens band together to fight him, using an astonishing number of firearms as well as cobbled together holy water and other more traditional accoutrements.

Made by Leif Jonker (who obviously was involved in nearly every element of the production) in stops and starts when he was still a teen, and re-edited into the “Vampire Version” (which now features songs by Apostasy whenever the gore starts squirting, following the principles Dario Argento taught us) for the DVD reissue in 2005 or 2006, this is about as grand a no budget gore movie as anyone could wish for.

The blurry, grimy visual quality typical of this sort of thing here helps the film take on a particularly dreamlike quality, where washed out colours and the bleakest Mid-West turn into a deeply American version of the Gothic. Here, nobody notices whole towns getting wiped out by animalistic, throat-ripping vampires, because nobody cares about what happens in these trailer parks and low-income family homes; whole states have become liminal places, apparently.

Thusly, continuity problems and strange filmmaking decisions just seem to emphasise that this takes place in a space situated between dreams and waking. The fountains of gore, the many exploding heads, the cheaply pitch-shifted voices and all the screaming of barely coherent dialogue (but who’d stay coherent when confronted with this version of the vampire myth?) all turn into the texture of this dream.

On the other, more quotidian side, this is an inspired example of a group of young people having a lot of fun, making a movie with what they’ve got, pushing towards what they haven’t, coming up with their own tricks and techniques because film school isn’t around where they come from, and often ending up at genuinely creative solutions to filmmaking problems. Particularly the editing is often brilliant in its un-schooled way, dominated by non-handbook cuts that work incredibly well for what Jonker and his cohorts set out to do. That this also adds to the peculiar, nightmarishly thick mood of the whole affair is probably only a by-product of the method, or mere chance, or just made up by a mind with a tendency to romanticize things when watching, but the effect is all the more beautiful (like bent chrome fenders and fountains of blood are beautiful) for its randomness. Which really is what the joy of the great backyard movies is all about.

The Brainiac (1962)

Original title: El barón del terror

1661. The Baron Vitelius d’Estera (Abel Salazar) is sentenced to death by the Mexican Inquisition, for crimes as varied as witchcraft, necromancy, seduction of married women and virgins and, ahem, dogmatism. Because the Inquisition is one to talk. The Baron’s ability to withstand torture while smiling mockingly doesn’t help his case, either. One Marcos Miranda (Rubén Rojo) comes forward to speak about the Baron’s character as a scientist (that one always goes over well with any inquisition) and a great guy, but all he’ll have to show for it are two hundred lashes and a still sentenced to death baron.

As is tradition, on the night of his burning, the Baron curses the judges who sentenced him, promising them that three hundred years hence, when the comet that just happens to appear in the skies right now returns, he too will come back and revenge himself on their descendants.

Mexico, three hundred years hence. The Baron does indeed return with the comet, though he has changed a bit. Now, he regularly transforms into an inexplicably bizarre and shoddy monster suit with a prehensile tongue to suck the brains of descendants and pretty women alike. The seduction part of his sentencing was apparently bang on, though his technique for seduction consists of staring creepily while an off-camera light blinks at his face. (“I feel scared when you stare at me like that. I want you to keep staring at me” are actual lines in the movie).

Given the baron’s predilections, is it any wonder he develops the monster hots for a female descendant of one of his judges? A woman who just happens to be the girlfriend of one Reynaldo Miranda (also Rubén Rojo, of course). Also involved are two terrible cops, but the less said about them, the better.

On a good day, Chano Urueta was able to make a movie like the brilliant The Witch’s Mirror; in an off-week, he made things like this bizarre gothic-influenced monster movie, a thing which recommends itself not by wonderful gothic atmosphere or a dreamlike mood, but rather its buffoonish bizarrerie, as well as its surprising number of bad hypnotized actor expressions, reaching from a bit sleepy to bug-eyed insane.

That is of course not a bad thing. I don’t think anyone who has any interest in classic low budget horror cinema from Mexico will rue watching this particular concoction. When you can’t gasp at the Baron’s toxically masculine bargain basement Lugosi shtick and every woman’s delight at being stared at creepily by this particular creep, you certainly will giggle and stare in disbelief at the monster costume, seen early, often, and repeatedly, looking like…something someone clearly has come up with for reasons inexplicable and potentially involving demonic possession, with its awkward tongue (that apparently function like a drill, though we neither see nor hear that) and its sweet tooth for brains.

Speaking of sweet tooth, the Baron tends to keep a luxurious looking bowl full of brains in his palatial living quarters at all times, typically in a chest or cupboard in a room he likes to invite the public into, so that every time he gets peckish and picks up his special long spoon to go for a bite without having to transform, he has to go through “suspense” contortions to get at the sweet, sweet brains. That this will be indeed be a plot point helping out our hero Miranda to understand that something's not right with the Baron goes without saying.

In short: Silent Running (1972)

The Future™. All plant life on Earth has been destroyed, or at least all forests have. The planet’s last bits of flora are dragged through space in hydroponic constructs. The mission is manned by hippie biologist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) and three jocks, for some reason. When mission control orders the astronauts to nuke the space greenhouses and return home, Lowell kills his plant-hating non-colleagues, fakes an accident, and plans on spending the rest of his life tending to plants, the fuzzy animals that came with the forest and the ship’s robot drones. Obviously things are not going to go that easily.

There are the bones of a really great, ecologically conscious, science fiction movie hidden somewhere inside this first of only two long-form directing credits of special effects master Douglas Trumbull, but they are buried under so much guff and grating nonsense. The script – credited to Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino and Steven Bochco, which is quite the mix – suffers from being so focussed on being “an ecological fable” – or something equally on the nose – it forgets to ground what it actually wants to say in any kind of recognizable reality. Thus, Silent Running is full of badly thought-through conceits and implausibilities.

Like: how is humanity still a going concern in its old-fashioned nature-destroying capitalist ways when all plant life on Earth has died? What’s the artificial food made of (is it Soylent Green?), or for that matter, how do they still breathe on Earth? How come crack biologist Lowell doesn’t know that plants need sunlight? Why nuke the greenhouses instead of just letting them drift? Why is there only a single biologist on board? Clearly, all these questions can be disregarded and answers replaced by yet another long rant of Lowell about Man’s nature-hating ways and that terrible radio-ready folk ballad that’s torturing our ears whenever Lowell feels particularly sad (so very regularly) and even a perfectly game Bruce Dern can’t express all of the bathos needed.

There’s just so little film here, anyway: the narrative never grips one with interesting questions or suspense, Lowell’s character arc simply doesn’t work, and once the ship is drifting through space, that’s what the narrative does as well. Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the film had something interesting to say philosophically, spiritually, or psychologically beyond: destroying nature is bad. Which is rather too obvious to be worth a full movie, when that’s all you’ve got to say about it.

Music Monday: Last Living Buffalo Edition

Black Sunday (1977)

A Palestinian terror cell have managed to recruit embittered and more than a little crazy blimp pilot Lander (Bruce Dern). Lander has a big plan: blowing up the traditional Goodyear blimp hovering over the stadium during Super Bowl, and killing as many people as possible with some godawful shrapnel contraption he has invented. The very volatile Lander is handled by Dahlia (Marthe Keller), whose job it is to cajole, mother and fuck Lander to keep him from imploding as well as from going on some kind of murderous suicide run before its proper time and place. She’s also going to help him with various preparation and clean-up missions.

A rather very early tape that claims responsibility for some huge and violent yet vaguely described deed in the USA makes its way into the hands of Mossad agent Kabakov (Robert Shaw) who soon travels to the US to get the FBI as embodied by the not terribly competent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) on point and try to find out what exactly is supposed to happen. If they will manage to get to Lander and Marthe on time is anyone’s guess.

To my eyes, John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday is a bit of an underappreciated classic. Slow-moving at first, this turns into the kind of paranoid and increasingly intense thriller Frankenheimer was so good at, until everything climaxes in a of finale of a style you simply couldn’t do anymore today. The amount of access Frankenheimer must have gotten to the Super Bowl is truly astonishing, particularly when one keeps in mind that the plot isn’t exactly the sort of thing any company would see as great advertisement. That Frankenheimer used that access to embed a series of absolutely crazy and improbable stunts in documentarian reality certainly makes the film’s finale very special indeed.

But even before that, Black Sunday often feels convincing in a way Michael Mann would – most probably does – appreciate, showing characters doing the planning and thinking parts of their generally dirty work as well as their plans’ execution in greater detail than a more streamlined film would, thereby creating a feeling of reality that helps build tension as well as, perhaps better than, simple, tight, suspense would.

Politically, the film is rather interesting as well, for in its world, everybody, independent of political stripe, is pretty horrible in one way or the other. To all characters in Black Sunday, the use of violence as part of politics has become so decoupled from any actual goals that violence now is the end as well as the tool of politics. None of the characters here come away looking good: Marthe and Kabakov are brutal sides of the same coin, Corley is incompetent, ineffective and helpless in the face of the violence, and Landers is so broken, even someone as hardboiled as Marthe has moments when she’s visibly afraid of him.

Even so, Frankenheimer also goes out of his way to repeatedly give each and every character some kind of human grounding, scenes when reactions to violence seen and committed are clear on the actors’ faces; thus, while the stunt work is often incredible and brutal, the violence never becomes cool or admirable but carries an undercurrent of terror and horror not many directors working in this realm could or would want to get away with. There’s a bitterness at the state of the world here that replaces any attempts at being patriotic or jingoistic, leaving Black Sunday with a disturbing air that puts it back to back with the great paranoid thrillers of the 70s, even though it gets there via a somewhat different route than the more obvious entries into that cycle.

Three Films Make A Post: No experience necessary.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023): I didn’t think I needed a big budget blockbuster fantasy heist comedy in my life – in general, I prefer my secondary world fantasy with a more serious tone – but John Francis Daley’s and Jonathan Goldstein’s D&D movie is so fun and charming, turns out I do need it. Being a modern blockbuster, it can present all the incredible vistas the probably underpaid parts of the production crew could come up with, and let its merry band of rogues run through it as merrily as this suggests.

Of course, this being a contemporary movie, it’s also about found and assumed family, but it treats that trope so genuinely, it simply works in the proper wish fulfilment manner of such things. Really, the only larger flaw in the film I see is that it sometimes wants a bit too desperately to be a fantasy version of Guardians of the Galaxy, whose greatness it can’t quite reach. But then, that’s not something to be ashamed of.

Kenpei to barabara shibijin aka The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (1957): This film by Kyotaro Namiki about a military policeman whose approach to mystery solving is rather different from that of his peers solving the case of the dismembered body of a woman who was found in the well of a military base is sometimes listed as a horror movie. However, this is really a very traditional procedural crime movie, just one set in the very problematic 1937, which it never really acknowledges one way or the other on a direct political level. If one can ignore that, this is a typically solid product of Japanese studio filmmaking, a decent mystery, well acted and solidly shot.

Surrounded (2023): Whereas this Western about a cross-dressing black woman (Letitia Wright) in the post Civil War US trying to survive the worst day ever is as openly and obviously political as they get. It’s quite the candidate for a film people will look back at in twenty years or so to see where the cultural mind was at this time. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you, and while I find some of the very on the nose, theatrical dialogue sequences about being black a bit much, most of the time, director Anthony Mandler takes care to actually put into action what his characters can’t stop jawing about as well.

There, the film shows itself as a brutal, visually beautifully bleak Western that manages to show everything it is telling as well.

Short Film Friday: The Fisherman

In short: Identity (2003)

Ten people (among them characters played by John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Ray Liotta, John Hawkes and Clea DuVall) find themselves stranded in a small Nevada motel during a rainstorm that makes the roads leading in and out impassable. Which would be trouble enough, but there’s also the fact that one of them is a killer who begins murdering their way through the group, leaving behind a numbered motel key with each victim counting down from ten..

There are increasing hints that something more and stranger is going on than a less cosy update of the classic murder mystery formula.

That something turns out to be at once perfectly ridiculous and perfectly awesome, so much so, I don’t really feel the need to spoil James Mangold’s movie to anyone who hasn’t seen it after twenty years. So let’s just say the film has some rather peculiar ideas about how certain mental illnesses and their treatment work, but these are the kind of peculiar ideas that make for a fine, twist-heavy thriller.

Michael Cooney’s script is wonderful, pacing out small reveals and clues in perfect rhythm while playing around with the kind of traditional murder mystery structure that typically becomes just that decisive bit more interesting when a film begins having a bit of fun with its clichés and its normal structure. The final reveal makes it possible that not everything that’s going on needs to make a hundred percent real world sense, which does add further opportunities for structural and formal playfulness.

Mangold’s direction is slick and state of the art of 2003, but unlike other contemporary directors working on this technical level at the time (see the insufferable films of Tony Scott), he is able to use the gloss to create a specific and particular mood – in this case, a glossy yet also miserable and dark all-pervading wetness, the feel of safety always on the brink of breaking down, which feeds excellently into the mood and tone of what’s going on on the surface, as well as below.

Identity is a fine piece of work all around, technically accomplished, clever if a bit silly, tense and fun, with a great cast, and not a single boring moment in it.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)

After the first manned Mars expedition crashes down on the planet, a rescue ship commanded by Colonel Van Heusen (Kim Spalding) is sent to rescue any survivors. There is only one member of the first flight left alive, its commander Colonel Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson). Carruthers tells a somewhat wild tale about his men and himself having been attacked by some sort of creature, but Van – as everyone calls him - is utterly convinced Carruthers somehow managed to murder all nine of his colleagues to stretch his food rations from one year to ten. He’s so convinced of Carruthers’ guilt, Van has already ordered an instant court martial back on Earth for the man.

Not all of the rest of Van’s crew is quite as convinced of Carruthers’ guilt as their boss is, but believing the man or not isn’t going to be much of a question very soon, for the monster that killed the first expedition has managed to sneak on board the ship and is now using the time until they can land on Earth to make a meal out of the new load of Earthlings.

A rather more obvious influence on the tone and structure of Alien than the A.E. Van Vogt story that film supposedly ripped off, this is one of the very best works of multi-genre low budget director for hire Edward L. Cahn. It has a tight, mostly clever script by Jerome Bixby that makes much of the claustrophobic (and cheap) spaceship location this nearly completely takes place in, understands and applies concepts of suspense and escalation, and doesn’t spend too much time on the horrors of 50s SF romance.

Atypical for a 50s low budget movie, there seems to have been quite a bit of care spent on the look of the production, aiming for the sort of work-a-day future that would only really start to dominate science fiction films for a time beginning in the second half of the 70s – I’d even see Star Wars as part of this lived-in look. It is still a cheap 50s SF horror movie in technical look and feel, but one that puts visible thought and effort into making things feel real.

The monster suit – by AIP stalwart Paul Blaisdell – is a good example for this as well: while it certainly never looks real (most probably also never looked real to a contemporary audience), it has more weight and design sense than you’d usually see in this sort of thing, turning it into a much more believable presence and menace. It does help that Cahn makes quite a bit of use of shadows and half shadows when showing it, not exactly hiding its weaknesses but making it at once more plausible and more menacing.

Generally, Cahn works a lot more with expressive light and shadow than you’d expect when you’ve seen some of his AIP movies, generally keeping things visually interesting and atmospheric. Here, he also shows a hand for simple yet striking effects work: the EVA scene for example may be realized in quite an obvious manner, yet it never feels goofy or too old-fashioned to work.

Apart from being tight and effective, there are also some moments here that can at least be read as attempts at further depth. At least, if you squint in just the right way, you might read the film’s treatment of the increasingly unhinged Van as a tacit, practical criticism of the kind of square-jawed know-it-all manliness 50s science fiction loved even more than other genres did, with the less obviously manly Carruthers who is allowed to fear and be troubled by things but then proceeds to make the right decisions presented as the more human as well as more effective alternative. Let’s just keep away from the film’s gender politics, where the main roles of the female crew members appear to be bringing coffee and presenting emotional-sexual support. There’s an astonishing amount of massaging and hand-holding of sick men that’s more than a little perturbing to modern eyes. Nursing practices really have changed rather a lot, apparently.

In short: Vazhiye (2022)

Warning: Structural spoilers are indeed a thing, and they do apply here!

Vlogger Albin (Jeffin Joseph) does suffer from a decided lack of success. This may have something to do with his penchant for videos about exciting things like cutting bottles in two with kerosene. But ghostly stuff always is popular, so he packs up his girlfriend Teena (Aswathi Anil Kumar) to camp in a supposedly haunted patch of forest for a night.

Things work out about as badly as you’d expect for the couple – and some others – though not exactly in the way you’d probably expect.

Which really is the main selling point for Nirmal Baby Varghese’s Malayalam language POV horror film. There’s a decently handled plot twist coming into the film’s final third that does play a little with audience expectations about what POV horror movies about characters camping in haunted woods do and do not do, and yet another twist to that a little later that does add cultists to the mix. Given how samey forest-based POV horror tends to get, I appreciate the filmmaker’s attempt at doing something mildly unexpected.

Alas, what does not come as a surprise is how draggy and tension-free much of the film – even after the first plot twist – feels, with scenes of quotidian nothing that go on endlessly, and little tension or characterisation. Well, there’s some potential tension coming from the feeling of seasickness caused by the shaky hands of our cameraman, and if not terribly well-composed shots of forests and jungles excite you, you may get tense and excited here.

Still, I do appreciate Vazhiye’s attempts at changing up the formula it is working with enough that I’m somewhat interested in the two(!) announced sequels.

Music Monday: Dilated Eyes Edition

The Dangerous (1995)

A Japanese brother and sister duo (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Saemi Nakamura) with some unexplained ninjutsu expertise murder their way through the coke dealing underworld of New Orleans. Because the cops, not even the randomly named Random (Michael Paré), can’t really cope with this sort of thing, the corrupt powers that be manage to draw retired man of violence Davalos (Robert Davi) back in with one of those offers one can’t refuse.

For also unexplained reasons, Davalos isn’t just hot shit when it comes to killing people – as he proves early on in a shoot-out in a graveyard that mainly consists of everyone involved running backwards while shooting – he is also an expert in the made-up version of Japanese culture the film trades in. So teaming him up with Random makes perfect sense, and random doesn’t seem too phased by having to team up with a random (see what I did there?) thug.

On the negative side, Davalos also happens to be an old enemy of New Orleans coke kingpin Tito (Juan Fernández). Tito for his part believes his underlings are being killed by the cops – who always walk around with swords in this parallel universe New Orleans, one assumes – and hires a knife-wielding duo of killers going by Emile (John Savage) and Henri (Jim Youngs) Lautrec. I assume their brother Toulouse is out and about painting somewhere.

Various amateurishly staged action sequences occur.

If all of this sounds like a hot, overcomplicated mess, that is exactly what Rod Hewitt’s and David Winters’s The Dangerous is. A tale of crossed revenges shouldn’t be as complicated as this turns out to be, but Hewitt’s script somehow manages that feat by never explaining the things that need explaining, overexplaining what you never wanted to know, and dipping everything in a fat sauce of badly digested clichés about honour and revenge. Which somehow never leaves time for the film to actually find a way to gracefully go from one scene to the next. More often than not, this feels as if parts of the script where written after scenes had been shot, made to fit any which way.

While this does not lead to a tense, suspenseful action movie, it does provide the film with many opportunities to charm with bizarre moments. So there’s the mandatory one scene Elliott Gould cameo (this time around he’s a junkie slash projectionist and gets his cheeks grabbed by Davi in a truly awkward moment – so at least he’s working for his mortgage, or whatever else Gould needed to pay off at the time); an unhoused informant with a radar sense very useful when he’s stashed in a car trunk; the complete nonsensical “Japanese” “philosophy” generally accompanied by painful attempts of the score to “sound Japanese”; Fernández cackling maniacally and looking rather aroused when he lets the Lautrecs murder one of his underlings as a test; and so on and so forth.

All of this is enjoyable enough when you are of the disposition to find joy in the little things, and I’d even call The Dangerous a minor cheap shot action gem for this, if not for the sad fact that action direction and choreography are absolutely terrible. To add insult to injury, the action is badly edited and amateurishly filmed in a “what’s the worst angle to shoot any given moment from” kind of way, so much so that even old pros at looking interesting in shitty action sequences like most of the cast members are can’t do anything against it. Even worse, the locations – a cinema, that New Orleans graveyard including a jazz funeral, a high rise rooftop and so on – would be perfect for doing something clever and exciting with them. The filmmakers just don’t seem to be able to.

But at least, we will always have the merry ring of absurdities the non-action parts of The Dangerous churn out.

In short: The Wrath of Becky (2023)

A couple of years after the first Becky, our now sixteen years old heroine (again Lulu Wilson) has been passed through various foster homes and is now living on the run. Well, really, working as a teenage small town waitress in some podunk town. Becky has found herself a new mother figure in form of one Elena (Denise Burse).

Because that’s how lazy scripts work – and this one is particularly lazy – three disgruntled costumers deservedly sassed by Becky turn out to be members of a right wing terrorist group, follow Becky home, murder Elena and steal Becky’s dog.

Which turns out to be a fatal mistake for the men as well as the rest of their cell, for Becky isn’t going to let this sort of thing slide and is still rather great at violently killing people.

New directing and writing duo Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote apparently came out of a screening of the first Becky having missed anything that wasn’t a violent cartoon in it, and decided to make their sequel even more cartoonish. So if you expect anything as clever as the first film’s play with horror and thriller tropes, effective suspense, or writing that at least appears to make some effort towards intelligence like I did, you’ll by sorely disappointed.

The first film’s virtues have been replaced with smug self referentiality, lazy character clichés most DTV action movies would be embarrassed by, and violence that is supposed to be cartoonish and over the top but mostly feels bland and uninspired. There’s a flatness and lack of emotion in the script that’s the enemy of all suspense, paired with a lack of imagination. Missing as well is any idea about what made the first Becky movie fun and special.

On a surface level, this is a perfectly watchable movie, but it is the kind of watchability of rote, by-the-numbers filmmaking and a smugness about one’s own cleverness that never appears based on any actual cleverness, most certainly not intelligence.

Short Film Friday: The Dog

In short: Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)

Being abandoned by Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) and the resulting food-shortage has turned Pooh and Piglet into cannibals (or however you’d call them eating Eeyore to get through the winter), and given them a mad hatred of all of humanity.

Consequently, they grow up/mutate to become your typical mute – talking is for the hated humans - slasher killers. After killing Christopher’s wife and capturing him for long-ish bouts of torture, they start on murdering their way through a vacation home full of young women, because of course they do.

Its obvious marketing selling point has clearly brought this bit of Poohsploitation to the eyes of people who typical wouldn’t be found dead watching low budget slashers like this one. Of course, given the nature of this kind of film, that’s a lot of people who now call this the worst movie ever made, and so on and so forth.

I do envy these new acolytes of crappy movies their innocence, for Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Blood and Honey really isn’t all that bad, certainly not the kind of bad that is very interesting. For what it is, the film even looks decent enough, though little things like acting, continuity and a non-monotonous script have not managed to make it into the final cut. Though again, not in an interesting way, but in the way generic low budget slashers without much imagination always have been and will be, going through the motions without ever coming to any individuality as films.

Which is a bit of a shame, for there’s certainly a fun and clever little slasher to be made out of the tale of Pooh and Piglet out for revenge; that fun and clever little slasher would obviously not focus on a house full of random women to murder, but put its emphasis on the former anipals versus Christopher Robin and friends, playing with the nature of the reality of children’s books while also putting interesting gore on screen. And while I won’t blame the film at hand for being bland and boring, I certainly can blame it for only attempting to actually making good use of its selling point for its first ten minutes.

Capricorn One (1977)

Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), Peter Willis (Sam Waterston) and John Walker (O.J. Simpson) are the crew of the first manned mission to Mars. Or rather, they are supposed to be, for just before launch, a couple of gentlemen in suits drag them out of their capsule and transport them to some hidden base out in the desert.

There, the Mars project’s architect, Dr Kelloway (Hal Holbrook), explains to the men that some last minute checks on the capsule have uncovered some catastrophic material flaws that would have turned disastrous for them as well as the mission. Because there’s supposedly no true political backing for something like manned space flights anymore, Kelloway and some other powers that be have decided not to disclose the problems to anyone, but to instead fake the Mars landing. Obviously, he needs the help of the astronauts to produce this hoax.

They, on the other hand, think Kelloway and whoever is backing him have gone crazy. The scientist, however, is very quick with threatening the lives of the men’s families, so they grudgingly accede to his demands. Particularly Brubaker is only waiting on a moment or a way to somehow turn the tables, but for now, there’s a Mars landing to fake.

During the months the astronauts are involved in this, muck-raking - but not terribly successful at it - reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) stumbles upon hints that suggest something strange is going on with the Mars project, though he can’t really figure out what kind of strangeness at all. Fortunately, the conspirators are so heavy-handed in their approach to any perceived threat, they attempt to murder him early on. Caulfield being the kind of guy he is, he is bound to see that as prove that something particularly shady is going on and will get at the truth somehow.

Peter Hyams’s Capricorn One is certainly one of the more peculiar examples of the 70s conspiracy thriller, with a plot that moves the generally at least somewhat down to Earth sub-genre not just towards the really rather implausible but the outright absurd. Attempting to understand the logistics and plans of the Mars fakers is an obvious way to traditional Lovecraftian madness, and while there’s certainly the genre-typical criticism of Power, Secrecy and their misuse, and a couple of perfect moments of paranoia, in many ways this more of a romp than any other film of its sub-genre.

I’m not complaining about that, mind you, for Hyams’s flights of fancy – sometimes even whimsy – here are generally gloriously entertaining and tend to lead to one of the director’s patented go-for-broke action sequences. Capricorn One may not be great as a deep criticism of the military-industrial complex, but absolutely makes up for it with sequences like the climactic biplane versus helicopters chase through desert and canyons. Because that scene clearly wasn’t crazy enough, the filmmakers decided to put Brolin (well, his stuntman) on the biplane’s wing while it flies loops and destroys modern helicopters. And because that’s yet still not crazy enough, the plane is piloted by a scenery chewing Telly Savalas who just pops into the film for the final act.

Particularly in Gould’s plotline, Hyams appears to have a lot of fun with just letting his actors patter through probably at least in part improvised dialogue that finds the midpoint between old Hollywood homage and sheer bizarreness and dances a merry little jig on it. Gould is, even by his standards, particularly gleeful in these sequences, so they turn into the sort of joyful little cinematic gems you can’t believe actually made it into the final cut of a film so well-made, and are all the more wonderful for it. Just watch the “I don’t like you” scene between Gould and his editor – or the bizarre flirting scenes between Gould and Karen Black – and become happy for at least the next hundred years.

That all of this actually somewhat works as a straightforward thriller as well is thanks to Hyams’s gift for the great action scene, as well as how cleverly he leaves all the weird stuff to Gould and co, whereas Brolin, Waterston and Simpson are left to play everything straight, the two plotlines only converging at the late point when a viewer has either bought into the whole thing, or, sad creature, already left the film in a huff.

In short: The Lost Platoon (1990)

War reporter Hollander (William Knight) has nominally come to Nicaragua (which looks surprisingly like Alabama) to cover the civil war. In truth, an earlier encounter with a quartet of soldiers has brought him to the belief that these men are vampires, eternally fighting in America’s wars, and he believes they are part of the US forces in Nicaragua. He’s right, too. And as it turns out, these boys aren’t the only vampires around, for a couple of Russian vampires are attempting to turn the Nicaraguan population against the red, white and blue by faking American atrocities (as if those needed to be faked).

I’ve generally gone on record as an admirer of director David A. Prior – even in his shoddy early phase – and much of the output of Action International. So if I say that The Lost Platoon is a bit of a disappointment, you’ll probably understand that this will mean “utterly unwatchable” for less tolerant eyes and squishier brains.

Obviously, one does not go into a film where Alabama stands in for Nicaragua expecting High Art – or even Low Art which is typically the best. One does, however, typically go into this sort of thing expecting to be somewhat entertained, and that’s where my problems with this Prior opus start, for this outing lacks the whacked out charm most of the man’s films have to carry them through. That the plot’s structure is so messy even calling it “structure” is overstating things is a given, but usually, most of the disjointed scenes in a Prior film have something charming, fun, or fascinating to them. Here, there’s just an oscillation between bad but not interesting acting, non-action, and a story that starts nowhere and stays there.

From time to time, there are still sparks of Prior’s bizarre genius: the early line of “Thought I had the world by the balls, 'til I looked down and I saw that the balls in my hand were my own” is an obvious example, but I’m also very fond of the inexplicable moment when the female of the evil vampires reacts to being staked by turning in a circle until she explodes. A couple more scenes like that, and I’d probably sing the praises of the whole affair, but as it stands, The Lost Platoon should be low on the list of even the Prior completist, however enticing it may sound on paper.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

Killer’s killer John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still attempting to somehow defeat the killer cult hierarchy known as the High Table, after begging for his life didn’t really work out for him in the third movie. Because he’s murdering goons and higher-ups like nobody’s business, the new Marquis (Bill Skarsgård) is trying to get rid of him with particular enthusiasm (and while speaking with a dubious accent that’s apparently meant to be French). This guy’s even less subtle than his predecessors, so destroying Winston’s (Ian McShane) hotel because he didn’t betray John well enough in the last film, and murdering Charon (Lance Reddick, who will be missed in real life around here) is only the beginning of what will turn out to be sending yet more hordes of goons after John.

Goons, as well as John’s old friend, the blind assassin Caine (Donnie Yen), in what is probably supposed to be an attempt at psychological warfare. John for his part might just stumble upon a plan of his own. Don’t worry, it involves the only thing he’s really good at.

I was really nonplussed with the pointless circle jerk plot of the third John Wick, and didn’t particularly enjoy most of the action in it either, so I didn’t go into Chad Stahelski’s sequel expecting much of anything from it. My low expectations were considerably exceeded, and this very long, probably final for now, part of the franchise turned out to be very good fun for me. Even its rather excessive length doesn’t really keep this one down: while it might be cut by fifteen, twenty minutes, for most of the time, the epic length of any given action set piece in here is rather the aesthetic point.

For this is a movie that’s burning to make you see every single moment of choreography, every movement stuntmen make, every improvement the effects crew makes to their imperfect humanity, so it’s showing you all of it, not caring one whit if the audience becomes as exhausted as our protagonist. Camerawork and editing often feel genuinely influenced by arthouse cinema of the Slow Cinema style, Stahelski finding a nice angle and then slowly panning through the action, or rising towards the ceiling – in this case probably not to say something philosophical about the nature of humanity but to show off as much as possible in what I’m tempted to call Slow Maximalism. In many of the set pieces, the feeling of physical forward momentum comes exclusively from what stunt people and actors and post-production achieve. The camera’s just there to watch. That this works out for the film as well as it does is a compliment to everyone involved in these departments, and that Stahelski makes it work demonstrates an astonishing absence of directorial ego (which in this context may have something to do with his roots in stunt work).

At this point, the series has also become adept at filming around  Keanu’s specific weaknesses as a screen fighter, and often make him look as good as the earlier films in the series said he is.

Otherwise, this has some of the most fun archetypes of the series. The great Donnie Yen’s joyfully played morally complicated blind assassin is the obvious stand-out here, but Rina Sawayama makes a much better action heroine than you’d expect from a pop star, and Shamier Anderson’s backpacking tourist-styled tracker with a dog is also simply fun to watch interacting with the rest of the cast.

Add to this the film’s moments of genuine weirdness – like Scott Adkins in a fat suit as a German gangster who gets it in pretty bizarre nightclub fight – and it’s pretty difficult to resist the charms of John Wick, Chapter 4.

Three Films Make A Post: Winning was just the beginning.

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021): If the first Escape Room didn’t feel random and contrived enough to you, Adam Robitel’s sequel has you covered. The characters are even thinner than in the first movie – and what good is a diverse cast when none of the diverse characters is even the least bit interesting? – the plot is non-existent, and the film’s attempt at a big reveal in the final act is so stupid, it’s laughable.

The escape rooms themselves manage to be at once implausible, random and just ever so faintly stupid, showing as much imagination as the rest of the film, which is to say, none. That its idea of excitement mostly seems to consist of random editing tics and screeching actresses is only par for the course for this one.

Ek Tha Tiger aka Once There Was a Tiger (2012): Despite not being much of a fan of its lead couple Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif as far as I know their bodies of work, I had quite a bit of fun with this Bollywood spy romance by Kabir Khan. The film puts heavy emphasis on the romance, so much so, the handful of action sequences and the rest of the spy business sometimes feel as if they’ve slipped in from another movie. Since the action is still good fun, and the romance actually works pretty well, that’s not really a problem, though – one does not venture into an early 2010s Bollywood hit expecting the same ideas about tonal consistency you’d find in Hollywood at the same time, and blaming a film for not following rules it doesn’t actually set out to follow seems pointless, and a bit boring, like complaining about the lack of veggies in your ice cream.

Plus, there’s something deeply likeable about a Hindi movie that uses the enmity between India and Pakistan without ever becoming jingoistic (because love beats politics, here, obviously), and whose romance actually affords its female lead some agency.

Street View aka Reikai no tobira Street View (2011): A curious figure in street view seems connected to the disappearance of our protagonist’s sister. A lot of only mildly changed beats from old Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hideo Nakata movies follow. Alas, director Soichiro Koga doesn’t really manage to turn his cobbled together bits of great movies into a decent one of its own.

From time to time, there’s a scene or a moment here that manages to create something of a frisson, a suggestion of something truly ghastly lurking on the other side of one’s monitor, but more often than not, this looks and feels like a cheap rip-off of much better things, without the thought that could have turned it into something special, or even just interesting.