In short: Paranormal Surveillance Camera 2 (2012)

Narratively and aesthetically, this second entry into the long-running Paranormal Surveillance Camera POV horror series from Japan is quite a step up from the first one. There is of course still an element of that first movie’s supernatural “Where’s Waldo” game involved – I haven’t encountered a film from Japan in this cheap and cheerful style that doesn’t want us to watch something supposedly creepy again in replay – but new director Satoshi Ishii drags this thing as close to an actual narrative as I expect to get from films like it.

So now, the surveillance camera footage is only the first step in short investigations that always threaten to get heated enough for a twist or an actual plot development but typically peter out with the paranormal investigators shrugging their shoulders and going “I dunno”. In about half of the tales, the film manages an interesting feat, however, in that it seems to tell us fragments of very traditional urban legends we can try to, are even supposed to, puzzle out on our own. It’s a curious sideways approach to narrative, where one or two pieces of a puzzle are supposed to suggest the other ninety or so, or at least creep an audience out with whatever they think might be going on.

It’s very much a parallel idea to never showing the monster. The tale we come up with ourselves will, after all, be more frightening than the one the film could actually afford to tell. Which is at least the theory Ishii seems to be operating from.

In the film’s more involved tales – where, for example, a film of the final breaths of an old man leads to one sad and one creepy revelation – this actually works, at least for me; in its lesser ones, there’s at least the charm of its earnestly dramatic presentation of the most minor “paranormal” events.

In short: Dark Stories (2020)

This five tale anthology movie is actually a compilation of episodes from a French horror anthology TV show.

In the framing narrative, a woman (Kristanna Loken) staves off death by a particularly crappy looking killer doll by telling the film’s tales until the inevitable “twist” happens. To give the film its due, it’s not “they were dead all along”.

The stories, particularly the first three, tend to have an unfortunate tendency to that kind of “humour” I can’t think about without the quotation marks; they’re also mostly lacking in originality or a decent effects budget.

The first three tales, directed by Guillaume Lubrano, are all, except for the “jokes”, pretty bland and inoffensive stuff, professionally but personality-free in their direction, and perfectly watchable. In the first, monsters the film calls “ghouls” for some reason, draw people into paintings, and supposed hilarity ensues. In the second, a jogger encounters ghosts in a public park and is murdered by a serial killer (spoiler, I guess), the ghosts of earlier victims trying to warn her in the least useful way. Tale number three is some godawful business about a guy who wakes up undead and saves his girlfriend while literally falling to pieces.

Tale number four and five, both directed by François Descraques, are both quite a bit more interesting. One features the travails of a woman who either suffers from sleep paralysis or is haunted by a djinn. This one actually features some effective – if not original - scenes of dream-based horror, flows well to its downer ending and needless shock after, and features some more than decent characterisation to boot.

The final tale, in which the series splurged for Dominique Pinon, is even better. It features Pinon as a farmer who believes that aliens have told him he is the messiah, and the world is going to end soon. He may not be crazy. This one’s actually pretty great, funny (not “funny”) in a dark way as well as demonstrating a degree of imagination in how it uses the messianic elements of UFO lore. It also looks quite a bit better than Lubrano’s tales, and is certainly directed with much more spirit and style.

Which makes this a very mixed anthology. Two great tales, one terrible one, and two blandly boring ones make…a movie that’s made for fast forwarding to the good parts.

In short: Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)

Mike (Josh Hutcherson), a fashionably traumatized guy taking care of his neurodivergent sister (Piper Rubio), gets a job as a night-watchman at something called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a half-ruined establishment that still harbours some working weird animatronic more-than-human sized animals. Alas, those somewhat creepy looking things are possessed by the souls of dead children and can get rather murderous.

I’m neither a fan of the FNAF games nor am I part of their – and most probably this film’s – intended audience. This is clearly made with entry level horror viewers or fans of the game franchise in mind, but I do believe the former deserve a more interesting and coherent movie. The film’s script is a total mess, with subplots and characters that often don’t feel as if they were written with kids as an audience in mind but actually written by one – the whole business about Mike’s aunt’s attempts at getting hold of Abby is particularly embarrassing – whereas Mike’s trauma scenes seem to belong into a completely different movie.

Some of the horror scenes are effective enough for what they are – director Emma Tammi can do better as we know – and the animatronic animals look pretty great in motion, but there’s no flow, no character and no personality to either the filmmaking or the film itself, leaving this not just as a product, but as a deeply mediocre product with little of interest to it. Kids deserve a better entry drug.

Music Monday: Every Week Edition

While Google is trying to make the free version of YouTube impossibly annoying to watch I recommend using FreeTube or comparable software and apps to access videos like this.

The Ninth Gate (1999)

Rich and ruthless collector of books about the Devil Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) hires sleazy and also pretty ruthless bookhound Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) for a somewhat delicate job: to verify the authenticity of Balkan’s copy of the snappily titled The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. The only other copies still known to be in existence are in the hands of two other collectors, and Balkan is sure that only one of the three copies is actually not a fake – he’s just not sure if his own is the right one.

So Corso is to get access to the other books, find out which of them is the right one, and, if Balkan doesn’t happen to have lucked into the the original, acquire the true Nine Gates by means fair or foul.

Corso is game for a lot of misdeeds, and likes the heap of money Balkan is promising him, so he begins to travel Europe looking for the other copies. On his way, he will get into rather more trouble than he probably expected, stumble upon a number of dead bodies, cultists and dangers to life and limb, and make increasingly immoral decisions, while smoking in the presence of rare books wherever he goes. A Girl (Emmanuelle Seigner) Corso believes to be working for Balkan seems to work as his guardian, ahem, angel, though she has somewhat different plans for him than he initially believes.

Up to this point, I appear not to have written a single word about this meeting of the toxic asshole titans Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp. These men, very much like Corso, are of great talents and dubious personal ethics, which may bother any given viewer a little or very much indeed. Me, I prefer to take the good people like them put into the world while damning them for the bad, but if your mileage varies, I’m not going to blame you.

I like The Ninth Gate rather a lot. In part, I love the chutzpa of turning Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s literary entertainment “The Club Dumas” into the Dennis Wheatley potboiler version of itself, replacing the book’s somewhat mild-mannered mood with a wilder and edgier playfulness.

Yet playfulness this still is. Polanski seems to have a hell of a time going through bits and pieces of Satanic conspiracy thriller tropes, crossing them with elements of hard-boiled detective fiction and watching what pretty sparks fly when you just mash them together like a child with a somewhat destructive idea of fun. This approach lends the film a mood of sardonic humour even before Depp encounters the line of European and American character actors – Jack Taylor and James Russo in one movie! - playing twisted eccentrics who make up most of the cast. This is the noise of a director having fun with his material.

The direct horror elements, and quite a bit of the rest of the movie, do carry a very late-90s kind of cheesiness that actually mixes rather well with the overblown Gothicism of Polanski’s set pieces, especially when set to Wojciech Kilar’s even more overblown – and utterly wonderful – score. There’s an air of deep un-seriousness about the whole affair, yet it is not exactly irony that seems to be the driving force here. Rather, it’s as if the sardonicism of the plot is actually the film’s main philosophy, so that a certain kind of winking sneer is the only appropriate tone for this tale about a pretty horrible little man who either loses the rest of his soul or wins the exact kind of enlightenment that’s appropriate for him.

Three Films Make A Post: When the dead start to walk you'd better start running…

The Dead Pit (1989): Half hokey supernatural slasher, half pocket zombie apocalypse movie, Brett “The Lawnmower Man” Leonard’s feature debut never adds up too much. Between attempts at the nightmare logic of a Fulci and the cheesy one-liners of A Nightmare on Elm Street style slashers at their worst, the film never finds any personality of its own.

The acting is dire, the effects undistinguished, and for every single effective shot, there are three whole scenes that look and feel amateurish. It is a film easy to point and laugh at, if you’re of a mind to, but I never found myself interested enough in The Dead Pit to find much actual joy in doing this.

The Cloned Tyrone (2023): If you can make it through the much too broad first twenty minutes or so, you might find that Juel Taylor’s conspiracy thriller weird pulp comedy has rather more to offer than a handful of obvious jokes – hell, there’s even a good reason why these jokes start off as obvious as they do. The movie manages to apply methods and a comedically heightened version of the style of 70s conspiracy thrillers to the feeling of being black and poor in America, and that role’s truly horrifying and individuality-eating aspects. While it’s at it, it then turns this into the kind of existentialist horror that can make one’s laughter get stuck in one’s throat.

Taylor’s direction is intelligent as well as just clever as a meta-game, increasingly putting emotional weight on characters and situations you wouldn’t have expected to be meant to carry them. That John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris make one hell of a core cast doesn’t need mentioning; nor Kiefer Sutherland’s effectiveness as a villain.

The Three Musketeers – Part I: D’Artagnan aka Les trois mousquetaires: D’Artagnan (2023): When in doubt, go back to the classics, as does this umpteenth adaptation of Dumas. This is an update clearly meant for the blockbuster franchise era, so the second half of the film follows in December, there’s a scene in the end credits, and the score is as generically 2023 as you can imagine.

Director Martin Bourboulon is fortunately very good at what he does, mixing modern and original sensibilities effortlessly, keeping close to the same points film adaptations of the Musketeers prefer, while modernising and sexing up the margins. It’s a fun, energetic kind of blockbuster, with a great cast – Eva Green as the Milady, Vicky Krieps as Queen Anne, Vincent Cassel as Athos, and so on – a sense of play as well as one of drama.

Will this be the start of the Musketeeromatic Universe? Will someone eventually adapt “Twenty Years Later/After”? We can only hope/fear.

Short Film Friday: Sushi Noh

Sushi Noh from AFTRS on Vimeo.

In short: Mask of Murder (1988)

Original title: Invastigator

Warning: spoilers ahead, but can you really spoil something this tediously obvious?

A small town in Canada (Sweden). A serial killer with a pillow mask goes around murdering women. On a nightly raid, copper McLaine (Rod Taylor) and his partner Ray (Sam Cook) shoot down a very good suspect whom the audience can indeed identify as the killer, or really, in McLaine’s case, shoot the man when he’s already down. During the course of the firefight, their boss, Chief Superintendent Rich (Christopher Lee) is badly wounded, because Christopher Lee isn’t cheap.

Strangely enough, the murders resume shortly thereafter. Is it a copycat killer? Or has McLaine found out that Ray and his wife (Valerie Perrine) are having an affair and plans a long and boring revenge there’s no possible way for him to get away with?

I’ve liked quite a few films Swedish filmmaker Arne Mattsson made in the 50s and 60s, but this, my first excursion into the handful of entries that make up his filmography during the 80s, is a dire attempt at a return to filmmaking after half a decade’s absence. It aims at mixing elements of the giallo (which makes sense, seeing how Mattsson made films you can see as related to the Italian style decades earlier), the police procedural, and the thriller (non-thrilling division). Alas, the script is flaccid, limping from one badly written scene to the next, with no sense of drama or tension. The supposed surprises feel phoned in, and even a half-awake viewer will see them coming from miles away while the film seems to prefer twiddling its thumbs to causing any excitement in its audience.

The acting, even from the old pros in the cast, is terrible throughout. Most of the cast seem to be sleepwalking – Taylor is particularly bad – and the film is full of painfully dull line readings. Even worse, it is also full of flubbed lines that never should have made it into a finished movie but are left for the audience to gawk at.

But then, Mattsson’s direction feels amateurish more often than not, as well. It is full of bad framing and terrible visual choices, with nothing on screen that would suggest a director with decades of experience in serious popular filmmaking.

Blue Beetle (2023)

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) has just returned from college to his very quirky, his oh so very very quirky, family in DC’s version of Florida. A college degree means very little apart from student loan when you’re from a brown and poor family – however quirky it may be – so Jaime has a life of crappy servitude to look forward to, like many of us. A series of accidents leads him on the path to Destiny, though, and he’s soon starting in on the superhero business when an ancient alien symbiote chooses him as its new host, turning him into what we’ll just call the Blue Beetle. He certainly has better symbiote luck as his colleagues over at Marvel.

Evil rich white villain Vicoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) wants control over the symbiote to build an army of OMACs – stupidly without the mohawks so important to that role - so Jaime and his oh so very quirky family have a bit of an uphill battle in front of them. On the plus side, Jaime also gets his mandatory love interest in form of Victoria’s niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), who, not being white and young and hot, gets a rich but not evil exception.

Angel Manuel Soto’s Blue Beetle is a sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating and generally pretty likeable attempt at a superhero movie, never to be followed up by DC of course. I really do appreciate that it tries to add a bit of talk about class to its typically US-centric thinking about race, and how much it lacks mean-spiritedness even when talking about the groups it is okay to be rather essentialist about when one is in the trenches of the US culture wars. Of course, part of its use of class fantasizes about some inherent goodness and solidarity of the poor amongst one another, which is about as kitschy and untruthful a portrayal of the actual experience of being poor as possible. Fun fact: a lot of poor people suck as much as most rich people, they just don’t have the power to express that as destructively.

On the other hand, I’m now complaining that a superhero movie’s politics are lacking in subtlety; newsflash for me: superheroes aren’t subtle, aren’t meant to be subtle, and should be praised for actually putting some effort into politics beyond mere representation, so Blue Beetle certainly deserves that.

Rather more easy for me to appreciate about the film is its total aesthetic focus on garish neon colours, where nothing isn’t made better by glowing. There’s a verve and energy to the visual style that certainly helps provide the action set pieces with a very individual look and some personality.

Part of that personality is somewhat goofy, but then, one of the script’s main problems is that it wants to be funny more often than it actually is, a problem that isn’t helped by a tendency to repeat jokes in slightly revised form sometimes three scenes after another.

Timing is a bit of a problem for the film in general: some dialogue lines seem curiously misplaced, coming a scene or thirty seconds too early or too late for full effect. There’s a sloppiness here that surprises on this budget level. If this sloppiness is caused by the script or by the film’s editing is anyone’s guess. It’s a bit of a shame, too, for despite my gripes, there’s quite bit of fun to be had with Blue Beetle. If it were a bit tighter, it would probably even be a whole lot of that.

In short: Fire in the Sky (1993)

This is a dramatization of one of UFOdom’s favourite incidents, when Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney), a member of a group of loggers in Arizona disappears in the wilderness. His returning colleagues – as led by Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick) and numbering characters played by mainstays like Peter Berg, Craig Sheffer and Henry Thomas – get back into town only to tell the somewhat unbelievable tale of how Travis was sucked into the sky by a UFO. Police person in charge Frank Watters (James Garner) believes he smells a rat, but he’s not thinking hoax, but rather more ambitiously, murder.

What follows for Mike and his buddies is a bit of a nightmare of press hysteria, public outrage, Watters’s weird ratiocinations, lie detector tests and marriage crises. Until a naked and traumatized Travis appears, apparently without any memory of what happened to him.

Robert Lieberman’s film, long missing from home video until a short time ago, has a bit of a reputation among the cognoscenti. That reputation is mostly built on two scenes – Travis’s abduction and his late movie flashback to his experience with some truly frightening and traumatizing versions of the good old greys. Those scenes are indeed as great as their reputation suggests. Lieberman’s tight direction, a perfect use of some of horror’s favourite colours and note perfect production design come together to form two truly nighmarish moments. The slight variation on the typical Grey design alone would be enough to make the experiment scene great, but as Lieberman shoots it, there’s a special quality of suggested horrors about it that’s indelible.

The rest of the film, on the other hand, is a somewhat sober portrait of a handful of working class men under outside pressures they have no control over, mostly shown via, still very well directed and acted, dialogue scenes. It’s not a bad approach to the material in any way, shape or form, but it certainly isn’t the one you’d expect to encounter in a movie with two scenes like those. If this makes Fire in the Sky a better movie or a worse one will depend on any given viewer’s expectations more than on anything else, I believe. Me, I would have loved to see more of Lieberman’s SF horror stylings, but found myself rather hit by the drama.

A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Belgian master detective Hercule Poirot has retired from the detection biz to become a sad, rich guy with ridiculous facial hair and very specific culinary obsessions in Venice. He’s more than a little depressed, yet also very unwilling to step back into his old life. However when Poirot’s old friend, the writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) who based her serial detective on him, drags him out of his new private life to partake in a Halloween séance in the supposedly haunted palazzo of opera singer Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly), he can’t quite resist.

Poirot very quickly reveals that the medium Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh) and her two assistants are frauds, as he expected, but he’s rather more troubled by the murders that, also as expected, happen afterwards. During the course of the night, locked in with a good handful of horrible rich people and the hired help with reasons to hate them, Poirot will have experiences that not only put his own abilities in doubt, but also the rational world view he prides himself on.

Though it certainly is not a spoiler to say that Kenneth Branagh’s third Hercule Poirot film will explain the supernatural away in the end, and will reinstate Poirot’s belief in himself on the way as well. Like Death on the Nile, this film is interested in asking questions about the role of the Great Detective, not so much doubts about his abilities or the use and abuse of a very classically humanist idea of rationality but rather the practical use such abilities and principles should be put to. In Branagh’s view, Poirot’s weakness appears to be the detective’s tendency to drift into that realm of pure rationality where the knowledge gained isn’t tempered by compassion, and where Poirot’s attainment of this knowledge doesn’t actually help anyone. So all three of Branagh’s Poirot films see the man confronted with murders not committed out of reasons of pure evil or greed but as result of human tragedies. The cases thus become not only about the Great Detective’s use of his powers of ratiocination, but about how he learns to use them in the cause of justice more than that of the law.

It’s not a very Agatha Christie approach to the formula, if you ask me. As most writers of traditional crime in the “Golden Age” (ha!) style, she showed little emotional investment in the compassionate approach to human tragedy leading to crime (especially when committed by the lower classes), or really, little interest in the murder mystery as more than a neat puzzle.

Clearly, this is not an approach Branagh is interested in, so Poirot ends this third movie as a man with a degree of moral authority, and a degree of humility that’s based on compassion more than anything else. Like any good superhero, he’s getting back to the business of making the life of others perhaps just a little bit better. To me, that’s a rather more interesting approach than mere puzzle solving, but I’ve been known not to be the greatest fan of Christie and her stylistic sisters and brothers, so others might very well be annoyed by this instead of enthused.

Of course, this also affords Branagh with his acting hat on to actually do something with Poirot beyond the always fun preening. In his context Poirot is allowed to doubt and stumble and actually be involved with the people he has come to judge, an opportunity he certainly doesn’t let pass by. In general, A Haunting in Venice feels very much like a film built to give its whole cast something interesting or fun in their characters to work with, and as is usually the case with films that do, everybody puts effort into mildly theatrical and pretty wonderful performances that bring all these flawed rich arseholes with dark secrets to life.

And because this is a Halloween movie, Branagh the director spends much of the film using every traditional – say from the expressionist era to late 40s Universal with perhaps a little visit to Robert Wise’s The Haunting – visual trick of the spooky trade. The shadows are dark and deep, the light of dubious use for visibility but of the greatest for atmosphere, and there’s hardly a minute going by without a perfectly applied Dutch angle. I’d love to see Branagh try his hand at an actual ghost story in this manner, but I’m perfectly happy with the half of one we get here.

So call me an Branagh Poirot apologist, but I do love this third of the man’s Poirot movies just as much as I did the first two.

Three Films Make A Post: Human blood is only the beginning…

Detour aka Snarveien (2009): A Norwegian couple on a booze run in weird and peculiar Sweden (gasp!) end up stranded in a forest, encountering one strange situation after the next. Violent men in gimp suits, a disturbing backwoods family and a cop of dubious trustworthiness are only parts of a very bad night.

Severin Eskeland’s shortish horror-leaning thriller is pretty silly and improbable in its set-up, and obvious in many of its twists. Yet it is also well-directed and effectively paced, and dominated by a handful of very solidly structured and shot suspense scenes, as well as helped along by quite a few fun performances. That’s more than enough to make for a pleasant time of thrills and a bit of violence.

Vampire Virus (2020): This entry into the ever-growing filmography of the apparently indefatigable Charlie Steeds mixes elements of the Lesbian Vampire film with very 80s horror lighting (and a perfectly fitting synth score by Matt Akers), a bit of a male gay romance, some subtext about vampirism as a metaphor for all kinds of societal outsiders, and a bit of blood and gloop. All the while, it keeps to a handful of locations and sets – as typical for Steeds, all looking better than you’d expect or fear, which also always goes for his filmmaking – and has one eye pointed in the direction of proper low budget cheesiness.

It’s pretty great for what it is, even though you won’t confuse Steeds with Rollin, Larraz or Franco.

Impulse (1984): After a pretty shocking call from her mother during which the good lady first berates her and then shoots herself, Jennifer (Meg Tilly) and her boyfriends Stuart (Tim Matheson) return to her small town home. There’s something not at all right in the place: her family – played by people like John Karlen and Bill Paxton – and the rest of the population act very strangely indeed. It seems as if they have lost some of their impulse control, doing whatever comes to mind, whenever they please.

Director Graham Baker portrays the ensuing chaos with a nice eye for the creepy in the familiar and some suspenseful set pieces. There’s a feeling of creeping dread running especially through those parts of the film during which little happens on a surface level.

The film also looks fantastic in a very specific early 80s way that would be lost to films just a year or two later. The only real minus is the conspiracist coda that adds little to the film at hand.

Short Film Friday: The Beckoning

The Beckoning from Hartmann Films on Vimeo.

In short: Skinwalker Ranch (2018)

Most people interested in Fortean phenomena in one way or the other will have heard of the “Skinwalker Ranch”, a property in Utah located in what appears to be located in a hotbed of all manner of strange activity from Navajo-style skin-walkers to poltergeists over UFOs through cattle mutilation – if it’s High Strangeness, people seem to experience it there. If you’ve never heard of the place, have a Wikipedia page.

The place is also known for various attempts to gather data about the occurring phenomena in a scientific manner. Of course, if you believe the people involved – some of which you’ll encounter in Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell’s documentary – the phenomena seemed to purposefully (and rather conveniently, one can’t help but feel) avoid camera lenses and all attempts to measure and understand them, as is such phenomena’s wont.

The documentary itself is a thing of two halves. Large parts of it consist of often very interesting and atmospheric material from a never finished documentary by George Knapp about the place and the surrounding phenomena. These parts are actually wonderful filmmaking, including some rather suggestive material, and while they don’t exactly convince me of the theories of the parties involved, they do certainly convince me that a lot of people have indeed experienced very strange things in the area.

Unfortunately, Knapp’s material, that seems more in the spirit of the better Fortean documentaries of the 70s, is intercut with amateurishly shot footage of the Utah desert in “suggestive” camera angles with Corbell rambling on and on about nothing through a cheap microphone, a couple of interviews that go nowhere at great length, some conspiracy bullshit, and a sit-in on the ranch with its new owner who wants to hide his identity while pontificating about having “a large empire of business interests”, and showing off his watch. Well, and a random cameo by crap pop star Robbie Williams, who, we learn, believes. If you’d cut these scenes out, the whole affair would be 90 minutes of modern folkloric bliss, as it stands, you gotta work for the good stuff here.

In short: The Hands of Orlac (1960)

Original title: Les mains d'Orlac

Self-important but brilliant pianist Stephen Orlac (Mel Ferrer) is on his way to his fiancée Louise Cochrane (Lucile Saint-Simon) when his plane crashes. His hands are destroyed in the crash. Louise convinces genius surgeon Professor Volchett (Donald Wolfit) to save Stephen’s hands. The experimental operation that may or may not be a complete transplant succeeds.

In the following weeks, Stephen turns from his old pomposity to a whiny kind of anguish that quickly turns into paranoia. He believes that something’s not right with his hands. He can’t play piano as well as before anymore, a week after his hands were completely destroyed, so clearly, his hands aren’t his own anymore! Just as clearly, his new hands are those of a strangler who was executed at about the same time of his operation! Why, he suddenly feels the need to strangle the gardener! When his hands get the wrong kind of naughty with Louise, Stephen storms off and rents a room somewhere in shadytown. There, he falls in with magician’s assistant/prostitute Li-Lang (Dany Carrel) and her always nattily dressed magician/pimp Nero (Christopher Lee).

Nero has plans for Orlac, obviously, and for reasons only known to itself, the film is rather more interested in this part of the narrative than the whole strangler’s hands business.

Well, actually, I’m not completely surprised about that, for Carrel and Lee are certainly the two actors in Edmond T. Gréville’s remake of two much superior films – Orlac’s Hände and Mad Love – who seem awake and willing to apply themselves to their roles. Particularly Lee, not an actor given to put much effort into things he deems beneath him but perfectly willing to take a pay check nonetheless, seems to be enjoying himself for a change, and so steals every scene he is in. Perhaps it’s the fantastic fashion sense of the character that kept him on board?

Of course, stealing scenes from Ferrer here is a lot like taking candy away from a baby, for his performance as Orlac is whiny, melodramatic and ineffectual as a portrait of a pianist losing his hands as well as that of a man slowly losing his grip on reality. He somehow manages to never elicit any sympathy for a character that should elicit hardly anything but.

To be fair, the script with its insistence on not making explicit important details and ignoring character motivations whenever possible, is not terribly helpful to him or anyone.

Add to this Gréville’s bland direction, the often sluggish pace and the film’s curious emphasis on its least interesting elements, and you’ll mostly wish to have watched the earlier versions of the material. I certainly did.

On the plus side, there are only few films whose happy end is based on the news that a man executed as a serial killer was innocent.

In short: She Came From the Woods (2022)

1987. It’s the last day of summer camp in picturesque Camp Briarbrook for the year. While the kids are carted away in a bus that won’t make it far (spoiler?), the counsellors have the usual nightly get-together of teen melodrama, horniness (this being a movie from the 2020s and not the 1980s, little comes of that), spooky stories about the local urban (woodsy?) legend, and, um, a blood-letting meant to conjure said legend up.

That little ritual works out rather well, and soon the counsellors are beset by possession, an invisible, dangerous force, those kids that didn’t make it far, and whatever else the film wants to “homage”.

And with “homage”, I mean rip off without much of a creative direction beyond fandom, for yes, She Came from the Woods is yet another throwback 80s affair whose only independent ideas seem to be to add some diversity to the cast without actually doing anything with that diversity, sprinkle in lots of gratingly unfunny humour, and just copy stuff from better movies.

Among the film’s other problems is a cast of characters that’s much too big to provide space for anyone to become interesting. Because this is the self-conscious kind of throwback, there’s no possibility for the film just accepting or wallowing in the characters’ inherent tropiness either; yet it’s not substantial enough to do anything better.

The script suffers from a much too complicated backstory that gets exposition dumped at the dramaturgically worst possible moment, and is neither clever nor weird enough to need to be that complicated. The plot really only consists of set-up and characters stumbling around stupidly, broken up by occasional murder, so there’s very little here that seems worth of anyone’s time.

Music Monday: Feelgood Edition

The Black Castle (1952)

Sometime in the 18th (17th?) Century. Sir Ronald Burton (Richard Greene), just returned from the business of imperialism in Africa, learns that two of his closest friends have disappeared in the Black Forest.

The place they were last seen is suspiciously close to the estate of one Count Karl von Bruno (Stephen McNally). Von Bruno is an enemy of Burton and his friends from their colonial adventures, and would have good reason to want to take vengeance on them; he certainly has the lack of scruples to make any such vengeance very cruel indeed. He has, however, never laid eyes on Burton, so Burton decides to pull political strings to go undercover as a hunting guest at the Count’s castle, in the hopes of finding out what happened to his friends, and to hopefully save them from a dire fate.

He gets into rather more trouble than he initially expected, but is helped by his rather egalitarian ways with the lower classes as well as his quick fencing arm. Burton will need all the help he can get, for his motivations are quickly shifting from those of the investigator and possible revenger to a man very much in love with von Bruno’s wife, Elga (Paula Corday). Elga reciprocates very much, for she was married off to her hated husband for political reasons – one can’t help but assume blackmail to have been involved given how much of a villain the guy is. Other complications involve a mute strongman who hates all Englishmen (Lon Chaney Jr.), the mysterious and somewhat sinister Dr Meissen (Boris Karloff), as well as a (non-metaphorical) pit full of crocodiles.

Nathan Juran’s mix of swashbuckling adventure and gothic non-supernatural horror tropes The Black Castle is rather a lot of fun even eighty years later. The script by Jerry Sackheim builds a highly enjoyable castle of tropes that provides opportunity for physical derring-do as well as for gothic melodrama (there’s even some Romeo and Juliet style coma draught business) while Juran – not always the most exciting director – puts a lot of effort into finding the point where the lighter style of the historical adventure movie and gothic horror in the Universal manner meet visually. His use of light and shadow certainly often creates a pleasantly creepy mood that’s very effectively intercut with the handful of scenes where Burton demonstrates his physical abilities. Some very fine sets add to the effect.

The cast is in fine fettle, as well. Greene makes for a believable, rather human, hero, while McNally, Michael Pate as his main henchman and Chaney Jr. milk the possibilities of the gothic swashbuckler villain for all it is worth.

Another of the film’s strengths is its willingness to give its character a second dimension, so von Bruno’s hatred of Burton isn’t completely without reason, and some characters who would usually just do what their evil boss says are allowed to have agency and moral complexity of their own. I was particularly taken with Karloff’s first sinister but increasingly troubled Dr Meissen. Karloff was always able to do sympathetic villains particularly well, and does wonders when he is allowed to play an actual human being like here.

So The Black Castle ends up being a rather wonderful mix of two related but seldom mixed genres that turn out to be as close to my heart in blended form as they are separated.

In short: Natty Knocks (2023)

A trio of kids and their babysitter (Charlotte Fountain-Jardim), become targets of a small town serial killer (Bill Moseley). His murders are connected to the local urban legend of one Natty knocking nine times, as well as the horrible death of a B-movie actress.

If there’s one thing about the contemporary movie landscape that can get me to whining like one of those silly “superhero movies are the doom of all human culture!” people, it’s that there’s little room for the competent journeyman director anymore, apart from mid-level TV and streaming show work with little creative influence whatsoever. So actually getting a proper new feature film by someone like Dwight “Halloween IV” H. Little is a bit of a treat.

At least on paper it is, for the actual film often feels as if it were held together by sheer willpower more than skill. Little clearly cashes in quite a few cheques from old contacts, thus the decently sized and pleasantly energetic appearances by Danielle Harris and Robert Englund.

At times, Natty Knocks has a pleasantly old-school Stephen King style US horror vibe, using 80s references without actually taking place in the 80s, because this sort of thing comes natural to filmmakers who’ve lived through them; at other times, the script seems to go out of its way to tell a very straightforward, semi-supernatural slasher tale in as overcomplicated a manner as possible. Too many characters need to be kept involved, so there’s too much running back and forth between what’s basically the same scenes from different perspectives for the film ever to feel suspenseful or tight.

From time to time, Little hits on a nice moment of suspense or two, and his straightforwardly, intensely competent style of direction never lets the pace get so slack the film actually becomes boring. Still, there’s a lack of focus here that stands in the way of this ever becoming anything more than decently watchable. Admittedly, this has one of the more fun horror movie bullshit endings I’ve seen; also admittedly, if Natty Knocks had actually been the film to fit this ending, this would have been rather more interesting.

Short Film Friday: The Colour out of Space

The Colour Out of Space from Patrick Mueller on Vimeo.

In short: The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

Original title: Hebi musume to hakuhatsuma

Young Sayuri (Yachie Matsui) has spent most of her life in an orphanage. Not a Dickensian one, mind you, but a rather pleasant place with grown-ups who actually are positive attachment figures for her.

Nonetheless, Sayuri is both confused and excited when her long lost family finds her and takes her home. It is not an ideal home, to say the least. Mom’s crazy, herpetologist Dad zips off on an expedition the same day Sayuri arrives, only leaving his snake collection, and Sayuri’s secret sister? Is usually hidden away in an attic room and looks a lot like a snake person. She loves to peep at Sayuri through a hole in the ceiling of our heroine’s room and makes her life a living hell. So much so, the kid is also starting to be plagued by surrealist nightmares.

And because all of that isn’t quite a bad enough time for the girl, there’s also a silver-haired witch haunting the borders of the movie, and some murders to look forward to.

This Daiei horror movie is strictly aimed at kids and adapts some tales by the great mangaka Kazuo Umezu, from the phase of his career when he was involved in creating horror shojo manga (that is horror manga aimed at a teen female audience).

Director Noriaki Yuasa – also the guy responsible for most of the Gamera films of the time – often achieves the proper movie version of the manic, hysterical energy of Umezu’s girls’ horror work. As is tradition in this genre, our virtuous heroine is confronted with indignities, injustices and child-sized horrors and mainly comes through them by keeping her chin up and the innate goodness of her heart intact.

The horrors are certainly not something to disturb a contemporary grown-up, yet there’s an inherent weirdness to the whole tale that makes the film a fascinating and fun experience even for us, the elderly. There’s nary a scene going by where Yuasa doesn’t take the crazier way to portray something as long as he can keep to a beautifully crisp black and white aesthetic at the same time. The dream sequences, looking like Dali meeting Umezu, fittingly enough, are particularly great, suggesting that the really rather square Sayuri must have a more interesting side buried under all her straightforward goodness. They also look not quite like anything I’ve seen before, even actual Dali dream sequences.

In short: Project Eerie (2023)

Two bored teenagers livestream breaking into a deserted government installation. They find a bundle of secret documents as well as a compilation disc of found footage shorts. The stream of the shorts makes up the largest part of the film. The tales involve a strange incident at a camping ground, some low budget apocalyptica, and some hidden camera fun in a haunted Amish house.

We’re deep in “POV horror as a filmmaking style invented for creative indie filmmakers without money but a – probably long-suffering - family willing to provide houses and backlots as locations” territory. Apparently this is already the fourth movie in this spirit director/writer/producer (/etc) Ricky Umberger has made, and there’s certainly quite a bit to like here.

While the stories aren’t exactly substantial, they are fun little horror stories in a straightforward campfire tale/creepypasta style that never overstay their welcome, escalate cleanly and nicely and feel energetic throughout. Particularly that last bit is certainly thanks to Umberger’s editing style, which never breaks the found footage/POV horror rules but does tend to avoid the tedious bits of set-up and maintenance indie found footage can often lose itself as well as this viewer’s interest in.

Every tale here does have at least one truly creepy (not necessarily eerie, but who’s counting) moment, and at least one clever idea, which is more than enough to carry the somewhat basic narratives to satisfying conclusions.

In short: Macabre (1980)

Original title: Macabro

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Bad luck apparently comes in twos to Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers). After her lover is decapitated in a car accident and her little son is drowned by his sister Lucy (Veronica Zinny) in the bathtub – though everyone believes that to be an accident as well – Jane spends some time in a mental institution.

When she is released, she moves into a room in the mansion of blind Robert Duval (Stanko Molnar). Robert is attracted to his new tenant, though, surprisingly enough, only in a mildly creepy way. Jane seems to come on to him regularly as well, but generally in ways that suggest she doesn’t understand the concept of “blindness”. However, whenever intimacy seems to threaten, Lucy is visited by a mysterious man who invokes the loudest sex noises imaginable from her. Of course, we the audience have also witnessed her masturbating with the same wattage, so we will not be quite as surprised as Robert when we eventually learn the mysterious lover is actually the head of her dead lover she keeps in her icebox.

Things come to a head (tee-hee) because Lucy can’t stop torturing her mother.

Lamberto Bava’s first effort as a feature director after years of experience as an assistant director for his father, the great Mario Bava, and the great Dario Argento, is a bit of a mixed bag. It is certainly an at times stylish giallo, but not stylish enough to cover up how little is actually happening in much of its first acts. Everything and everyone seems to at least be established twice, so that things move at the slowest possible pace at any given moment.

The final act is a different thing: here, Bava junior very suddenly loses all inhibition. Not only is the narrative suddenly moving like a freight train crashing down a cliff, the film now leaves sense and good taste so far behind, they are somewhere in another dimension. It’s impressive, so much so I can’t even fault the first two acts too much anymore. Their slowness still isn’t necessary, mind you, but the contrast between them and the final act feels like one of those Insidious ghosts suddenly jumping out and screaming in your face turned into a movie.

To skew my critical faculties even more in Macabre’s favour, it ends on a final shot so ludicrous and awesome its existence could be justified by it alone.

Music Monday: Henry, Love Edition

The Ghost (1963)

Original title: Lo spettro

Somewhere in the Scottish countryside in 1910. Dr John Hichcock (Elio Jotta) suffers from a nearly complete paralysis of a kind respectable medicine has no way of curing. Hichcock himself has come up with experimental treatments using curare and other poisonous substances. Given his state, he can’t really experiment on himself, though. It has taken the good doctor quite some to time to find another physician willing to commit to these experiments, but when the film starts, Dr Charles Livingstone (Peter Baldwin) has been living in the mansion, testing Hichcock’s treatments for some time now. Until now without any success, unfortunately.

What Hichcock doesn’t know is that his wife Margaret (Barbara Steele) and Livingstone have started an affair. Margaret is working on convincing Livingstone to murder her husband. The younger doctor is after all excellently positioned to make it look like a death from natural causes, and Margaret would very much like to get rid of her old, mean-spirited husband but keep his money. Livingstone eventually agrees – the Power of Barbara Steele compels thee – but murdering a man and ending up happily ever after are different things.

For one, Hichcock hasn’t actually left all of his money to Margaret, and the couple need to do rather a lot of grubbing, perhaps adding a bit of grave robbery to their list of crimes, to get around that little problem by stealing the loot before anyone knows how much of it is there. Then there’s a less easily soluble bit of trouble – the couple appear to be haunted by Hichcock’s ghost, who shows himself in increasingly intense ways that put rather a lot of strain on the murderers’ relationship.

To my eyes, The Ghost is among director Riccardo Freda’s best films. For much of its running time, its combination of Gothic and thriller tropes produces more than just a pleasant frisson, though it certainly does that as well. The film clearly takes place in the same imagination space like Poe’s “The Black Cat” or “The Cask of Amontillado”, but Freda never quotes directly from this particularly Gothic forbear. Instead he is aiming for a shared mood of psychological derangement as expressed through the art of deep shadows and tellingly symbolic colour contrasts. Even in the mediocre print I’ve seen shots like that of Steele in full Victorian widow garb, clutching a bunch of red flowers to her chest while kneeling in front of Hichcock’s tomb are pretty spectacular to look at, suggesting all those darkly romantic ideas about beauty, death and guilt that are part and parcel of the poe-etic.

Steele is as wonderful as ever. Her inherent mix of attraction, weirdness and intensity always made her a spectacular presence in Gothic horror surroundings, so much so that looking at her actual characters as written tends to be beside the point.

The only element of The Ghost I’m not terribly happy with is its unsurprising revelation of the haunting being no such thing. Though, to be fair, the supposedly mundane explanation includes astral projection. This isn’t a deal-breaker, especially since it also sets up a very macabre ending for everyone involved, but a natural explanation feels like a bit of a cop out after a film has gone so out of its way to create an atmosphere of the gothic macabre.

In short: Gappa the Triphibian Monster (1967)

Original title: Daikyojû Gappa

Sent by some rich fool to acquire undiscovered new species from an not as unexplored by Japanese people as they think South Pacific island to populate a resort fake pacific island called Playmate Island, a group of explorers meet a tribe of Japanese people in brownface. When they’re not doing risible “native dances” that make those parallel dances in Toho movies look downright sensitive, these guys and gals pray to something they call “Gappa”.

The expedition members discover an egg from which a rather ugly new (to them) species hatches, some sort of flying, amphibian dinosaur thing. Let’s call it Gappa. Obviously, our “heroes” grab the thing to take it with them to Japan.

Just as obviously, where there’s a giant monster egg, there are also giant monster parents, and these ass-ugly dinobirds follow the expedition to Japan to go on a rampage.

Nikkatsu’s only kaiju movie – after three or four earlier aborted attempts – is generally seen as an inferior rip-off of Gorgo crossed with a bit of Godzilla vs King Kong, and inferior it certainly is. Director Hiroshi Noguchi has little experience with this kind of material, and directs the human drama bits with often surprising leadenness, given how pop Nikkatsu’s movies in other genres typically were. Consequently, things are pretty dull when it comes to the scenes featuring people, at least whenever they aren’t hilariously “problematic”.

It doesn’t help the film’s case there that most of its characters have all the ethical depth of a black hole, but its attempts at talking about that little problem for their part have all the depth of that cardboard cut out over there.

The effects, supervised by former Toho man Akira Watanabe, are a curious case. The kaiju carnage is generally at least competent, usually even genuinely good, particularly in the miniature work. However, the design of the monster suits is abysmally ugly, and the suits themselves look terrible awkward in action and even worse in those scenes where the parent Gappas are supposed to express emotions.

In short: Tales of Halloween (2015)

This anthology movie takes place during a single night in a US small town with a particularly high death rate on October 31st. The ten segments were directed by eleven more or less well-known horror directors – like Adam Gierasch, Axelle Carolyn, Lucky McKee and Neil Marshall – and feature a horde of horror people of varying prominence in cameos, regular acting bits, and funny make-up.

The film feels first and foremost like a fannish project, so the tone tends to the low-brow, there’s deeply silly – that’s not a complaint – gore aplenty, and the comedic bits won’t scare anyone away with subtlety. This certainly isn’t a Trick’R’Treat with its single director and a unity of tone, style, and theme, but feels more like a bunch of professionals and semi-professionals from a specific scene letting their hair down and having some fun.

For my taste, the film leads off with two of its worst segments – Dave Parker’s “Sweet Tooth” just isn’t very interesting, and Darren Lynn Bousman’s “The Night Billy Raised Hell” is just aggressively unfunny for what’s supposed to be a comedy. Afterwards, Tales of Halloween finds its feet, though. The later segments actually hit the comedic mark they aim at, or have a lot of fun with throwing together classic horror clichés and tropes and twisting them sardonically. There’s even room for slightly more atmospheric (Axelle Carolyn’s “Grim Grinning Ghost” with house favourite Alex Essoe) or substantial yet still fun (Lucky McKee’s “Ding Dong”) fare, leading to some diversity in approach and tone that does the film good. It is also very hard to argue with Neil Marshall’s tale of a man-eating carved pumpkin and the tough female cop hunting it.

So, if a viewer makes it through the first couple of tales, there’s a good chance they’ll have quite a bit of fun with the film, at least on the kind of October night when one is struck for the mood of a film by horror people having fun made for horror people to have fun with.

Dark Harvest (2023)

In an American small town that seems to be situated in a 50s that’s slightly off-kilter, Halloween is home to a rather different ritual than trick-or-treating. Each and every Halloween, the male late teens of the town go on a nightly “Run” to kill Sawtooth Jack, a somewhat pumpkin-headed creature, before it reaches the local church. If Jack stays unslain, an unnatural storm and nine years of bad harvest will follow. Typically, the town wins out, though not without a death toll.

The boy who takes the killing stroke is rewarded with a very American car and generally leaves town never to be seen again, while his family is rewarded with financial prosperity.

The film follows the Halloween night of Richie Shepard (Casey Likes), and a girl named Kelly Haines (Emyri Crutchfield), whose family may very well be the only people of colour in the whole place. As the brother of a former winner, Richie isn’t actually allowed to take part in the yearly night of violence, but his brother’s leaving and the town itself have put quite a chip on his shoulder, and he will go out of his way to take part any way he can, whatever his parents (Jeremy Davies and Elizabeth Reaser) may say. Kelly for her part is also excluded from proceedings, what with her being – gasp! – a girl, and a black one to boot. But like Richie, she isn’t taking this sort thing lying down, though the film often seems to forget she exists during the first acts.

During the course of a night in which their peers are as much of a threat as the monster they are hunting, the two will learn their town’s darkest secrets.

Norman Partridge’s novella “Dark Harvest” is an at least minor horror classic, an atmospheric book full of the joys of Halloween as well as an angry argument against elements of the American Dream that seem so ingrained in culture, people aren’t even going to think about them.

David Slade’s adaptation isn’t as wonderful as its source. It’s not a bad movie at all, there’s just quite a bit of it that feels slightly off: the performances are stilted and somewhat artificial in a way that reminds me of how 90s horror often went about things, but never quite stilted and artificial enough to become productively strange. The effects are fine, but also look and feel so digital they are much too cold for the story the film is trying to tell. Slade’s tendency to use jittery camera work whenever possible often feels like the wrong choice for scenes that could have used clarity and mood instead of movement; from time to time, I couldn’t help but think someone in the production liked the Purge movies a bit too much, and Patridge’s novel not enough.

The film does carry the novel’s thematic concerns. The sins of the father, the horrible price an older generation is willing to let their children pay for “prosperity” and “security” are there and accounted for, and there are scenes that suggest a nightmarish Bruce Springsteen song about a town that does everything to not let its victims/children leave. Dark Harvest is just not terribly good at exploring these themes through its action.

It’s not at all terrible, mind you, for a bit of lightly fall-themed horror, but rather a disappointingly mediocre adaptation whose changes to its source never make it any better as a movie or as an adaptation.