Three Films Make A Post: The World Has Come To An End The World Calls Upon The Hunter

Badland Hunters aka 황야 (2024): Hei Myeong-haeng’s post-apocalyptic action movie is good fun, with Ma Dong-seok (or Don Lee, if you prefer) and Ahn Jiy-hye making pretty great action heroes – the latter really throws herself into her action scenes while looking totally focussed – a hissable villain of the highest degree, and often very effective action choreography. It also has quite a few elements that remind me of the abandon of good, classical post-apocalyptic exploitation cinema, which isn’t as good for it as that may sound. This way, it becomes rather more obvious how much the film pulls its punches, how nice it feels at its core when it could use a bit of nastiness there to go with the theoretically nasty things it features.

Tora-san, His Tender Love aka Otoko wa tsurai yo: Fûten no Tora (1970): There’s a certain, well, a big, actually, be-there done that quality to much of the Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man film series as far as I know them, even this early in the cycle. However, this isn’t really to the detriment of the films when watched responsibly (Tora-san is only to be binged in the most dire of circumstances), but provides the films a comfortable shoe kind of quality. You know the characters, the kind of jokes the film’s going to make, Tora’s faults and foibles, and so on and so forth, but there’s something comforting and kind to the knowledge that fits its main character’s fits of – often badly applied – kindness beyond the fool’s bluster curiously well.

Last Night at Terrace Lanes (2024): Speaking of cinematic comfort food, sometimes you just want to be comforted by the tale of an estranged father and daughter bonding again through the fight against math-based cultists who are attacking the bowling alley they once bonded in, slaughtering all and sundry there.

Because this is 2024, there’s also a bit of Lesbian teen romance in here.

Jamie Nash’s film is never original or deep, but it does the classic low budget movie thing of telling a simple story taking place in a confined space effectively rather well. There’s really nothing at all wrong with that.