Red Desert (1964)

Original title: Il deserto rosso

Having spent some time in an psychiatric clinic, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the wife of a higher-up at a local plant, now walks through life and the industrial wastelands of rural Italy between fugues and moments of intense activity, confused, alienated and sad. She drifts into something of an affair with businessman Corrado (the most clean-cut I’ve ever seen Richard Harris), who isn’t quite as fine with the world as it is as everyone else around them, and feels drawn as much to Giuliana’s pain and alienation as he is to her body – or he might just be very good at pretending thus.

This might sound as if Michelangelo Antonioni’s arthouse classic Red Desert has something like a traditionally dramatic plot, but there’s very little interest in that sort of thing on display here – as in most of Antonioni’s films I’ve seen. The bits and pieces of plot are really only there to have things for Vitti to react – or not react depending on her mood – to or pull away from in anguish. Vitti performs the kind of inner turmoil that can’t really be expressed in its inescapable, near-spiritual totality, a suffering for and against the world in ways I found touching and sometimes deeply disturbing – this feels much more like real “mental illness” than most movie versions of it do.

Aesthetically, Vitti’s work is couched in the most striking visual depictions of an industrial waste you’ll ever get to see, pictured in ways that always emphasise Giuliana’s alienation, but also never shy away from the beauty and fascination of our destruction of the natural world, while the soundtrack prefers abstract drones to a traditional score. There’s an ambiguity to how the film views Giuliana, and it is never quite clear how much it shares her alienation and anguish at the modern world; most probably because living in a man-made world instead of forever standing outside of it, in pain, also suggests certain beauties to the filmmaker and the audience Giuliana can’t grasp, as much as the rest of the world cannot, will-not come to share her perspective fully.

Inseminoid (1981)

A crew of interplanetary researchers does what appears to be a combination of archaeological and geological research on an alien planet far-off the usual routes. After the explosion of some curious crystals, one of the researchers becomes inexplicably violent and aggressive, causing quite some damage before he can be put down.

Still, mission leader Holly (Jennifer Ashley) decides to continue with the work, just with more care going forward. This turns out to be a very bad idea when another member of the team, Sandy (Judy Geeson), is kidnapped and forcefully impregnated by an alien creature.

Soon, Sandy turns violent as well, murdering her way through the rest of the crew with far larger physical strength than she should have.

Inseminoid is one of my favourites among the science fiction horror movies made to cash in on the success of Alien. British low budget great Norman J. Warren didn’t have the luxury to afford a cool monster suit for the characters to be slaughtered by – he keeps most of the “inseminating” alien out of frame for good reasons – and so puts the weight of committing the acts of violence on the kind of human agency that takes the film’s second half closer to a standard slasher before a science fiction background than a typical Alien-alike. Warren’s secret weapon here is Geeson, who is the exact opposite of the hulking, silent, slasher, and instead chews her way through a wonderfully – and perfectly appropriately – deranged performance that alone would make the movie worth watching. Nicolas Cage has hopefully looked in awe at her achievement here when he was still a young would-be shamanic actor.

Geeson isn’t the film’s only strength, however. Warren, at this time something of an experienced hand at making much out of very little money, is a sure-handed, sometimes clever, director of suspense, as well as of the handful of tasteless money shots he can afford. He’s certainly adept at turning some cheap costumes (check out the motorcycle helmets turned futuristic), a couple of sets, a quarry and a whole load of coloured lights into a convincing enough alien planet. Add some excellent dream sequences and creepy hallucinations for Geeson’s character to go through before she turns, and some late movie monster developments too adorable to spoil, and there’s very little I don’t like about this.

The Bride Wore Black (1968)

Original title: La mariée était en noir

Warning: there will be some spoilers - if you really care in case of a film of this age, loosely based on a novel considerably older

A mysterious woman we eventually learn to be called Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) travels all over France to meet, charm and eventually kill a number of men. As it will turn out, these men are guilty parties in the shooting death of Julie’s husband right on the church steps directly after their wedding vows. These guys, one and all, are also what can only be called sexist pigs.

Though, in one of the more interesting moves François Truffaut’s adaptation of Cornel Woolrich’s novel makes, they are all very different kinds of sexist pigs, each and every one of them drawn in loving (?) detail and portrayed by a wonderful actor. Their avenger comes to these guys playing on each one’s specific weakness and neediness (as you know, there’s hardly anyone needier than a sexist pig). Like an avenging chameleon, she takes on exactly the role that will get her target’s trust, so she can eventually kill him in a very personal, close contact manner – Julie’s not a killer to look away from what she does.

But then, she is also one of those movie avengers who very much understands that what she does is wrong on various levels – certainly for her own existence as an independent being. Moreau’s portrayal of the emptiness inside of Julie – exactly the quality that makes it possible for her to become just the right woman for each murder – is chilling, as well as curiously touching. It does obviously help that her victims are all assholes in a way still all too recognizable in 2024, even without the somewhat accidental killing of her husband.

Formally, this is a very playful film. Truffaut uses the episodic structure of Julie going from murder to murder to create something akin to a series of connected short stories of differing tone held together by the presence of Moreau and a Bernard Hermann score. Hermann is particularly obvious a choice for the score because this is also one of those French films that bow at the altar of Hitchcock but can never quite achieve their idol’s way with suspense and tension. Being French films, after all, everyone in them is too much in love with talking cleverly, and everything’s happening at too leisurely a pace, not things that lend themselves to the creation of true suspense.

So it is often more the idea of suspense than the actual thing running through films like this; of course, a filmmaker like Truffaut is much to intelligent not to know what he’s doing or not doing in this regard, and so the Hitchcockian elements are all part of that  sense of playfulness, of the formal aspects of filmmaking being a formal game. This turns what could (perhaps should) be a weakness of the film into a strength.

It is not as if Truffaut can’t do conventional suspense when he wants to. In fact, The Bride Wore Black ends on a sequence that indeed is a perfect example of relatively straightforward suspense perfectly realized. Curiously, it also prefigures the beloved 2010s blockbuster trope of the villain of a film letting themselves be caught as integral part of their plans.

Looked at as a whole, there’s a fascinating duality to The Bride. Its formal playfulness, the sense of delight you get from it, the sense of beauty of many of the shots on paper do not fit the grimness of the actual tale being told (and embodied by Moreau’s unmoving face whenever she is not playing a role for one of her victims) here. There is a disquieting quality to the gap between form and content at the core of the film. This might very well be a conscious choice; if it is an accident of filmmaking, it is certainly one that provides The Bride Wore Black with a particular staying power for me.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)

Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is pseudonymously living in some backlot German or Austrian city, committing the occasional murder to further his scientific goals.

On the run from the police, Frankenstein more or less stumbles into the perfect set-up for these goals, the small boarding house of Anna Spengler (Veronica Carlson). It’s not just a great place to hide and act creepily – and eventually worse - towards a young woman. As luck would have it, Anna’s fiancée is a young doctor of what goes for psychiatry at the time. Not only that, Karl (Simon Ward) just happens to work at the asylum where the incurably insane Doctor Brandt (George Pravda) is kept. Brandt is a former associate of the Baron, and has developed a formula Frankenstein would do everything to acquire. Given the ethical framework this version of Hammer’s Frankenstein works under, I really mean everything.

It certainly helps in Frankenstein’s plans that Anna and Karl are young, stupid, and eminently blackmailable – and once he has his hooks in them, there’s ever more culpability for ever worse crimes mounting up. So soon, everyone is involved in a sordid tale of violence, rape and brain transplants.

That “rape” part is generally the element of Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed that breaks the film for quite a few viewers. Even with this, the nastiest and most physically and emotionally brutal version of Frankenstein, the baron also turning into even more of a sexual predator than the first Hammer Frankenstein film, Curse of Frankenstein, had already made him a decade earlier, comes as a kind of shock.

To me, that shock is actually an effective one, one that is really meant to pull away the last illusion an audience might have had of the man indeed working for something he truly believes to be a noble scientific goal. This Frankenstein’s only believes that his wants and impulses are more important than anything and anyone else.

Consequently, Must Be Destroyed is the Hammer Frankenstein movie least interested in presenting monsters or mad science as anything more than another way for Frankenstein to destroy everything and everyone he touches to satisfy his own needs.

Thus, this is certainly the least fun of the Hammer Frankensteins, not the kind of horror of gothic castles – in fact, I’d argue Fisher very consciously films this as the least gothic Hammer movie he can make it – but one where the pseudo-Victorian world of Hammer shambles towards the brutality of the 70s in horror right at the cusp of that decade.

I can’t help but admire the film for what it tries, and mostly succeeds at, to do, but I can also very much understand why people don’t want to see Peter Cushing of all people going the sexual predator route.

Three Films Make A Post: This summer, justice leaves its mark.

The Mask of Zorro (1998): Comparable to the French Musketeer movies of recent years, Martin Campbell’s version of Zorro drapes the old swashbuckler/pulp saw into the form of a then-contemporary kind of blockbuster. Campbell does so with aplomb: everything is big and pretty (or ugly in a big and pretty way), the jokes are silly, the characters broad and fun, everyone is impossibly hot, and the action has a slick sheen. The film sets out to entertain and puts every single cent of its not inconsiderable budget in service of that single goal.

Campbell is very good at this sort of thing, so there’s never a feeling of this being a mechanical exercise in audience wishfulfilment, but rather one of being sucked into the genuine enjoyment of living through a thrilling tale.

Carousel aka Karusell (2023): This Swedish slasher by Simon Sandquist, on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a budget; worse still, it also lacks in spirit and cleverness, and so goes through its version of the usual slasher shenanigans with the kind of boring professionalism that’s the enemy of all fun, at least to my mind.

Personal pet peeve in this sort of project: a film wasting way too much time and energy on a background story so simple and straightforward, filmmakers with more of an understanding of their genre and craft would have left well enough alone after one expository flashback. Also, plot twists are not actually a necessary part of each and every damn screenplay.

MadS (2024): Not flashbacks, and only the barest minimum of exposition, is to be found in David Moreau’s one-shot outbreak movie. The film propels an audience and its shifting protagonists through a night of violence that always teeters on the edge of the surreal with such vigour and energy, perfectly fair complaints about a lack of substance are also perfectly beside the point.

This is all about momentum and creating a very specific mood of ever-increasing insanity, like the most perfectly choregraphed St. Vitus’s Dance you’d never expect to actually encounter on screen.

Dagger Eyes (1983)

Original title: Mystère

High class call girl Mystère (Carole Bouquet) keeps up the style and posture of a high fashion model at all times, projecting an aura of impossibly perfect beauty presented with total emotional detachment. Her mantra appears to be that nothing ever surprises her. Indeed, Mystère’s perfect surface hardly shows the tiniest cracks even when a mysterious figure starts stalking her with ambitions on murder.

The killer is not a random maniac, as you’d expect, however. Rather, a long-fingered colleague has more or less accidentally hidden a lighter in Mystère’s stylish handbag she has stolen from a client. In the lighter is a microfilm, and on that microfilm are photos that show the assassin (John Steiner) who shot a politician during a motorcade. The brutally disposed people behind the assassination are in the espionage business, and certainly not to be trifled with.

However, neither is in Mystère, even less so once she teams up with the deeply misogynistic, very subtly named, Inspector Colt (Phil Coccioletti).

The giallo genre hit a rather big snag during the 80s. In part, this was only natural in the somewhat fad and fashion based world of Italian genre movies where yesterday’s hit genre is today’s box-office death knell. Italian filmmaking as a whole started suffering from fewer opportunities and ever lower budgets, with rather a lot of talent making their way to the aesthetically less pleasing but more secure feeding troughs of TV production.

However, I believe the giallo had another problem in trying to update its style to that of the new decade. Visually, the genre had always been deeply informed by pop culture and fashion, but there aren’t that many directors involved in the genre who appeared interested in updating this element of their films as much as it was needed to keep giallos contemporary.

Carlo Vanzina, mostly specialized in directing comedies, demonstrates no problems in that regard here (nor in his later giallo Nothing Underneath) – if there is any film that breathes the idea of the giallo as a version of the thriller and horror genres informed by violence and sex but also by fashion, it is Mystère. Its titular heroine – really embodied by Bouquet more than strictly acted – is presented as the impossible ideal of its time: an always perfectly made-up, cool kind of femininity. Bouquet always looks as if she’s just stepped out of a magazine cover, even when surrounded by people who look perfectly normal, always in control, Hitchock’s everyman protagonist inverted into something new and deeply contemporary - as it will turn out morally as well as stylishly, as befits the decade.

She strides through a plot that enlivens giallo standards by combining them with the conspiracy thriller – also reimagined into something more fashionable and more amoral – through often rather wonderful suspense sequences, shots of great, artificial beauty, and those sudden outbreaks of illogic and goofiness which were always part of this arm of the genre. Indeed, if you ask me, its the inherent strangeness and the disinterest in presenting the world of the film as working like the real world does that always bring the giallo into the folds of horror, or at the very least the cinema of the fantastic, as a sibling of the film noir that’s even more stylized and even less interested in real-world logic.

From this perspective, even the pretty damn silly epilogue of Mystère makes sense as part of the aesthetic package of the film; that it also doesn’t even seem to understand, and certainly not share, the moral outrage of the conspiracy thrillers it also borrows from makes sense: this is a complete product of the 80s.

Three Films Make A Post: He always takes one

The Collector (2009): When I initially watched Michael Dunstan’s film, I judged it to be deeply indebted to Saw and the piss-coloured aesthetics of that school of filmmaking. Today, I rather see it as a variation on Home Alone where Kevin has grown up, is breaking into peoples’ houses and turns them into trapped murder holes, which makes me a lot happier.

It’s still more a decent film than a great one, mind you, lacking in something that makes it truly special, or that’s as insane as its killer’s chosen method. That would come in the sequel, fortunately.

Sana aka Everybody’s Song (2023): Takashi Shimizu, decades away from his J-horror heights, does still regularly churn out horror movies of highly variable quality. Sana has some delightful moments of dread and terror and a complicated twisty backstory to its haunting that actual earns those twists; it also goes on a little too long, and spends a bit too much time on also being an ad – there’s even a song with lyrics subbed on screen, so you can karaoke to it, as well – for the boy (well, men) band Generations. These guys aren’t bad actors for male idols, and the film isn’t pulling its punches too badly in their treatment in the plot. Still, I can’t help but think that a film concerning a fictional pop group could have gone into rather more interesting places with them as characters.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024): The newest entry into Legendary’s kaijuverse is about as silly as giant monster movies from the USA will get, which is to say, pretty damn silly indeed, and if you’re looking for even the shallowest puddle of depth, you’ll be rather disappointed in it. If you’re willing to accept that this thing is just going to revel in a large number of giant monster fights - all realized in the fakest most colourful digital art Hollywood money can buy -, grin at you, make up bizarre lore and waste Rebecca Hall on a role even a muppet could play, you may very well have a very good time after all.

For one thing is clear: Adam Wingard is doing his damndest to entertain his audience here, to never bore, to ignore the human drama nobody cares about (that’s what that Apple TV show about bigamy is for), and to just turn out a fun piece of popcorn cinema, the sort of thing that’s pure sensation, nothing else.

I’m perfectly fine with that approach to filmmaking and thus felt myself perfectly entertained by the film; I rather enjoy the contrast between this and what Toho does with Godzilla on his home turf, as well.

They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore (1985)

Texan gardeners Billy Buck (John Smihula) and Jacob (Adam Berke) have moved to Long Island. Alas, they aren’t only the best lawn carers rich Long Island yuppies in their quintillion dollar houses could ask for, but also enjoy slaughtering people with the same thoroughness they apply to the green stuff. Which is to say, after they have clubbed or macheted their victims to death, our Texan friends then proceed to rip their victims’ flesh off with their bare hands until only bones remain. As you do in Texas, apparently. Though, come to think of it, Billy Buck’s and Jacob’s headwear actually reminds me more of what Austrian or Bavarian mountain farmers wear in German Heimatfilmen.

As the more long-suffering among my imaginary readers know, I am not the biggest fan of pure gore movies not coming from Italy, but there’s an undeniable charm to the shot on Super-8 (just like young JJ Abrams!) gore movies made by Long Island’s finest, Nathan Schiff. They Don’t Cut the Grass Anymore is no exception.

For a film that’s all about showing people – or rather various pieces of meat – being ripped apart in loving, close-up detail, Grass has such a joyful and good-natured air of something made as a lark, out of the sheer fun of doing it, and not as an attempt to be a career, it is difficult not to be charmed by it.

This focus on the barest basics (bones?) of the matter of horror doesn’t mean Schiff isn’t a strangely effective filmmaker – he may only have a small bag of tricks in his slaughterhouse, but those he has, he applies with cleverness and a sense of fun. From time to time, things become downright experimental. So one shouldn’t be surprised when the flesh-ripping is accompanied by looped dialogue of the victims before they were quite as dead.

That this lark somehow got out of hand and turned into a movie people half a world and nearly four decades away still watch certainly says something about the human spirit, the glories of horror cinema, or the joys of watching yuppies getting slaughtered.

The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966)

Original title: Miss Muerte

When somewhat mad neurologist Doctor Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) explains his somewhat bizarre theories at a conference, he is laughed and scorned out of the room. Since he explains he has found the parts of the brain that control “good” and “evil”, as well as a way to stimulate or shut them down, so evil will be forever ended, some scepticism shouldn’t come as a surprise here. Still, the good Doctor promptly dies, cause of death: criticism (no, I don’t know how that works, either).

A couple of months later, Zimmer’s daughter and assistant Irma (Mabel Karr) fakes her death in a car accident – hitchhikers are so useful when you need a stand-in corpse – and proceeds with her plans to take revenge on the three scientists she specifically holds responsible for her father’s death. She already has a former killer (Guy Mairesse) suborned by her father’s SCIENCE and his mind controlled nurse as useful helpers, but she decides these men have to die in a more interesting manner.

Being a Jess Franco character, Irma finds herself inspired (and clearly a bit turned on) by the dance choreography of nightclub dancer Nadia (Estella Blain). It’s no wonder, for Nadia’s bit as “Miss Muerte” is all about seduction and murder by freakishly long fingernails, things that resonate with all of us, particularly when we’re planning vengeance. So Irma kidnaps Nadia, puts the mind-control whammy of her father’s SCIENCE on her, somehow poisons her nails, and sends her out to seduce and kill the scientists one by one.

The police, under leadership of a character played by director Jess Franco himself, seem rather confused by the whole thing, but Nadia’s boyfriend (Fernando Montes) – who also happens to be Irma’s short-term flirt and a neurologist himself – seems rather more capable, and certainly more motivated when it comes to uncovering the weird menace plot.

In 1966, Jess Franco was still a somewhat conventional filmmaker, putting some effort into making pulpy horror science fiction thrillers like this one with an audience in mind instead of ascending/descending completely into his world of personal obsessions and perversions. Which in turn means Franco could actually acquire decent budgets to work with. There’s a degree of slickness in Miss Muerte’s black and white photography Franco’s body of work would soon enough lose in favour of the languid, sometimes boring, idiosyncratic phantasmagoria his style would soon enough turn into.

Here, Franco seems to be at an absolute sweet spot between the old and the new. The – somewhat – higher budget inspires him to more concise storytelling, and his love for interesting/weird camera angles is here paired with some wonderful play with shadow and light that often creates as thick of an atmosphere of Franco-ness as his later, more difficult, work.

Many of Franco’s obsessions are there and accounted for: some of his favourite kinks, the nightclub scenes – though there’s no stripping and zooming on crotches here, in fact, very little zooming at all –, his very specific ideas about seduction, dominance and sado-masochism, and many a plot element we’ll encounter again and again in his films. Just here, these kinks seem still to be in service of the pulp horror plot instead of the other way around. From time to time, the film descends into delicious weirdness – the moment where Nadia seduces Howard Vernon’s neurologist character is incredible – but this weirdness still seems controlled.

In fact, Miss Muerte suggests a Franco might have been very effective in subsuming his personal weirdness, at least a little, to make more conventionally accessible yet still highly worthwhile genre movies. Being who I am, I am glad he let his freak flag fly rather sooner than later, but this does not make Miss Muerte any less of an interesting, fun bit of pulp horror.

Trenque Lauquen (2022)

Apparently, it helps for a piece of arthouse slow cinema to come from Argentina if it wants my buy-in. Who knew?

Anyhow, if you can make time and mind space for 250 minutes or so of various characters (particularly those played by Laura Paredes and Ezequiel Pierri) in various timelines very slowly being drawn into various kinds of (non-violent) obsession with various mysteries and secrets – including love letters hidden in old books, the disappearance of a woman, an uncategorized specimen of flower, and a monster/child/who knows you’ll never get to see – you might just become as riveted as I found myself.

The slowness, here, turns out to be patience, a willingness to let things develop in their own shape and tempo. Which doesn’t at all mean that director Laura Citarella eschews increasing the tempo when it fits her, probably mysterious, plans. As well, there is a willingness to keep some of the film’s mysteries unsolved, or rather, to admit the ambiguity of leaving space for an audience’s interpretations.

On the way to that not solving of mysteries, the film moves through phases and stages – practically lineated in chapters in a gesture that seems rather more inviting than slow cinema often is – where the focus shifts from different protagonists, to different obsessions, and different kinds of beauty, finding much in small actorly gestures, nature, and the town of Trenque Lauquen and its surroundings, testing and exploring different kinds of connections between people.

There is also a strain of weirdness running through the film I found particularly enticing, perhaps more Magical Realism than the versions of the fantastic I’m most fond of. Some reviewers have found a comparison to Lynch here, but Trenque Lauquen lacks an interest in, or perhaps does not believe in, the deep and uncomfortable darkness that always rears its head with Lynch. Rather, this film’s weirdness feels kinder and more compassionate, with little risk for the characters to fall foul of an uncaring universe or moving into the wrong metaphysical hut for some decades. It’s not such a cosy world, though, for there are still human passions, foibles and dramas.

Not being Lynchian, mind you, is not a weakness. Citarella’s much too interesting a director and writer to need to take on other people’s world views, and has one rather singularly her own.

Three Films Make A Post: Hear how it all began.

A Quiet Place: Day One (2024): I wasn’t terribly fond of the first Quiet Place movie and consequently never bothered with the second one (unlike with the films of M. Night Shyamalam, that I can’t seem to give up on, despite their general suckiness).

But people with interesting taste recommended this prequel, so off I went, and found myself really rather taken with Michael Sarnoski’s film. Clearly, the writer/director only finds the monsters of the franchise of limited interest, and instead focusses on the human impact of their apocalypse. The film is full of scenes of genuinely touching humanity (at its worst and at its best) centred around a fantastic performance by Lupita Nyong’o and a basically immortal cat. This doesn’t mean Sarnoski doesn’t apply himself fully to the monster set pieces – in fact, the way he uses a quiet/loud dynamic in many of the suspense scenes is often brilliant and inventive, making the best out of pretty run of the mill monster designs (the xenomorph still has a lot to answer for) via the wonders of proper sound design.

Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957): While they are of course ultra-cheap AIP monsters, Paul Blaisdell’s creatures in this Edward L. Cahn teens versus space invaders film do have a certain something, even if that something is just the kind of lovely grotesqueness that gets my private sense of wonder working overtime.

For once, a director of one of these things actually makes proper use of Blaisdell’s work, only showing bits and pieces of the designs, hiding the rest behind shadows, tree branches and in between frames, so that they sometimes – there’s a great attack sequence on some innocent livestock – even feel actually threatening.

On the negative side, there’s a lot of painfully knowing camp to get through, which is exactly the sort of thing that’ll make it pretty difficult for me to get through a seventy minute movie. Hipper daddy-os may have a different mileage there.

Succubus (2024): One of these days, a director making a film called “Succubus” will actually know what a succubus is traditionally supposed to be. Until then, Serik Beyseu’s Russian movie (not to be confused with another film of the same title coming out this year)about a bunch of horribly horny and rather stupid people on a cultish couple’s retreat will have to do.

At least, the film attempts to deliver on the expected thrills of direct to whatever movies, so there’s some lame sex, the kind of “twisty” plot you can come up with while scribbling on the back of a propaganda flyer, and, surprisingly enough, a couple of half decent horror set pieces.

These are never enough to make the film actually interesting or effective, but in the realm of direct to streaming low budget horror, a couple of decent scenes and a pretty cool looking monster reveal are better than what you can typically expect, so I’ll take this as a win.

Go for Broke (1985)

Original title: V Madonna: daisenso

Every year, a rural Japanese high school is attacked by a delinquent biker gang, who’ll take the student council’s discretionary budget, or else.

Not even having enough money to buy proper baseballs anymore, parts of the student body really have had it with this state of affairs, so the decision is made to hire some bodyguards against the bikers’ next arrival. One of the female students knows a justice-loving female biker named Saeka (Yukari Asami), and Saeka, once convinced of the nobility of her cause, has her own ideas on how to get together a band of young women of violence. Enter an angry wrestler, a stuntwoman, a sukeban, a lover of explosives – you know the drill.

These “Seven Madonnas” (don’t ask me, my name’s not Kurosawa) are not only going to protect the school, but will also need to teach the students some of their violent ways.

It has been a while since I’ve written up this sort of awesome, trend-hopping, cheap 80s pop cinema from Japan around here; it has also been a while since I’ve had quite as much fun with this kind of film as I had with Genji Nakamura’s Go for Broke.

In part, this film’s particular joy comes from the usual virtue of Japanese genre cinemas from the 50s into the 80s, this cinema’s ability to apply high technical and aesthetical standards to even the silliest bit of material. Thus, this teenage Seven Samurai variation with mild exploitation elements is treated with the same earnestness and craftsmanship as would be one’s most heartfelt commentary on the state of the world. Here, this manifests particularly in a  sense of forward momentum that feels as controlled as it is exciting – there’s nothing ramshackle about Go for Broke’s excited energy, no flaw in its presentation of a world where all the tropes of grown-up genre films are simply part of the teenage experience (see also the not at all Japanese Brick, or make a great double feature out of the two movies).

The action set pieces are cheap but staged for maximum effect – there’s a short bit of handheld camera work in the scene when Saeka comes to Maki’s rescue that feels like a perfect encapsulation of Nakamura’s use of whatever technique comes to hand to keep scenes exciting and avoid any visual repetition, even when he’s working with only a couple of locations.

In tone, style, and the complete absence of grown-up and particularly male authority figures – let’s ignore the final minute please and thank you – this often feels as if it were taking place on the same planet as Walter Hill’s 70s and 80s work. One fuelled by more synthesizers in its rock music, admittedly.

To my particular delight, the film also features one of the funnier examples of transatlantic misunderstandings I’ve encountered. Somewhere – in the space between the English language and the Japanese islands – something must have gone ever so slightly wrong, so there is many a scene where characters declaim dramatically “Go for break!” instead of “Go for broke!”; even better, the film’s them song also is called “Go for break!”.

Three Films Make A Post: No safe space.

V/H/S/Beyond (2024): The much-vaunted pivot to SF horror changes nothing whatsoever about the principles of bro horror still followed by the VHS series. In fact, where S-VHS showed some ambition, this is mostly dire, over tuned nonsense by directors that have done much better work under different circumstances.

There’s no substance, no characters and no ideas in most of the segments, all of which play out like all VHS movie segments ever, without anything beyond an occasional cool monster design or bit of gore, or a rip-off of Tusk. The big exception is the final segment, Kate Siegel’s “Stowaway”. This one has cool effects ideas, but also an actual emotional core, a heart, and a sense of bitter irony that makes the gore crap that came before look even more creatively bankrupt.

Caught (2017): Jamie Patterson’s conjuration of the High Strange is a much more evocative piece of work than most of the VHS attempts at using it for horror. The film is tense, it is tight, and its British variation on the Men in Black trope uses the elements of this kind of encounter in a much more interesting and intelligent way than you’d at first expect. There’s gore here, as well, but there’s also the feeling of the main characters encountering something that isn’t totally comprehensible, as well as the realization that the something can’t comprehend them totally either.

The film also dares to go as weird and as emotionally brutal as it can afford, ending its version of a home invasion in a deservedly harsh manner.

Godforsaken (2020): For its first forty minutes or so, Ali Akbar Akbar Kamal’s POV horror film about what happens after a young woman in a Canadian small town comes back from the dead changed, transcends its amateurish acting by the effective way it handles the dread of a cosmic (or is it religious) revelation that shatters and changes people in ways which become increasingly creepy. There’s a wonderful sense of the small town community it is corrupting as well.

Unfortunately, the final act turns into disappointingly generic zombie business; the amateurish acting becomes an incessant cacophony of amateurish screeching.

The thing is, the earlier two thirds are so strong – the resurrection alone is worth your time – I’d still recommend anyone interested in existentialist or cosmicist horror to take a look at Godforsaken.