It’s What’s Inside (2024)

A group of “friends” who hate each other with a passion and would hate-fuck each other at any given opportunity, because they are all hot young things and all dumb as rocks, come together to the pre-wedding party of two among them. The couple doesn’t even seem to like each other much, either.

For reasons, they have also invited Forbes (David Thompson), who never belonged to the peer group – not pretty enough and too nerdy, obviously – but is now a tech mogul and was involved in that middling big secret of the past nobody wants to talk about in oh so meaningful ways that’s always part of the plot in these movies.

In his role as tech biz whiz, Forbes has brought with him not just a grudge (on account of that dark secret) but also the newest gadget he sells as a party game: a device that lets a group of people transfer their minds into another’s body. Obviously, these nincompoops will reveal all their petty, boring desires and less than riveting secrets when body-swapping.

The zoomer identity crisis movie must be one of the least interesting horror sub-genres right now, like the just as bland home invasion movie was a decade or so ago. This version – as written and directed by Greg Jardin - is about the usual for the genre: underdrawn characters of about the depth of the classic jock/slut/nerd slasher triangle, but with more valley girl-isms, a judgmental streak a mile deep that seems to belong to someone who never even heard of the concept of punishments fitting the crime, and a directorial style that uses all the best toys of the day but can’t seem to do very much with them.

The set-up would be great for an exploration of various screwed-up psychologies, but there are no characters here, only a bland set of tropes about as convincing as these idiots are as a friend group. So there are only gestures at depth and interesting ideas here, but no actual depth in content or execution. Do films about superficial people’s lack of depth all have to be so damn superficial themselves? Or am I just getting old?

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Twilight aka Szürkület (1990): I found György Fehér’s adaptation of a much-adapted Dürrenmatt novel to be a rather frustrating experience. There are moments here, many moments even, where its Hungarian slow cinema style, the long shots of foggy, murky landscape accompanied by an ominous score create an incredible mood of dread, a feeling of wrongness highly appropriate to its plot about child murder and a retired policeman obsessing over the case.

But whenever characters start to speak, that very sinister spell was broken and I felt thrown into what I could only read as a parody of the same Hungarian slow cinema style, dialogue scenes that go on and on and on (and on and on) because characters pause for endless seconds after every second or third word in a sentence, as if the actors had painful trouble remembering every single word in every damn line they say. Call me a barbarian, but that ain’t art.

Seedpeople (1992): Probably not art either is this Full Moon Production film directed by the typically entertaining Peter Manoogian. Instead, it’s a seed-based version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, but with more gloopy rubber monsters. It’s rather good fun in its very undemanding low budget movie manner, and while the acting is nothing to write home about, and the script doesn’t really add much (and subtracts a lot of subtext) from its, ahem, inspiration, you can’t argue with gloopy rubber monsters, or at least I’m not going to.

Mostly because they use mind control, and/or turn you into a plant person.

Get Away (2024): Speaking of things that are undemanding but good fun, this horror comedy by Stefan Haars about a British family coming to a remote Swedish (shot in Finland) island to witness a curious play and stumble into a plot of folk horror and perversity isn’t terribly deep either. You’ll either notice its big plot twist early on, or get distracted by those wacky, creepy Swedes (portrayed by Finns), and you’ll enjoy the very, very bloody climax, or you won’t.

If this sounds as if I’m going for the classic “you’ll like this sort of thing if you like this sort of thing” move here, indeed I am, because there’s little else to say about the movie apart from that. Well, it’s always great to see Nick Frost.

Night is Short, Walk On Girl (2017)

Original title: Yoru wa Mijikashi Arukeyo Otome 夜は短し歩けよ乙女

The Girl with Black Hair (Kana Hanazawa) walks through a very long Kyoto night that somehow encompasses all seasons of the year in turn. She’s walking in an attempt to follow her fate, which to her seems to mean to have as many interesting experiences as the night can throw her way. As it turns out, there are going to be a lot of them.

Parallel to that, the Girl’s Senpai (Gen Hoshino) is trying very hard to be noticed by her, though in the most obtuse way possible. He’s attempting to “accidentally” bump into her as often as possible, until she must believe it’s fate, and clearly, they are meant to be. The alternative of simply talking to her is obviously much too bizarre to even contemplate.

The adventures of these two lead through drunken debauchery, debate clubs, the dance of the sophists, a night second hand book market, guerrilla student musical theatre performances and much more, as well as encounters with one of the most wonderful casts of eccentric weirdoes anime has to offer. Both our main characters may very well learn something about the world and themselves, the difference between egotism and love, as well as the problems with walking on without noticing what one leaves behind.

However – and fortunately - one of of the strengths of Masaaki Yuasa’s very non-traditional looking anime is how little this feels like a film about characters learning valuable lessons, but rather like one that treats life as an adventure and as a wonder. You can and will learn things along the way, but the way’s the thing.

This is a film that delights in the strange, surreal and the outré, throwing so many gags and ideas at the audience it should become overwhelming and rather random. Yet, the film never falters under the weight of its overboarding imagination – every random aside, every random idea is actually a part of a well-constructed whole, but one so deep as well as broad, you’ll hardly believe it.

There’s such as sense of joy and discovery running through the whole of Night is Short - a feeling of wonder, the air of the kind of night that indeed feels as if it could and should go on forever. Consequently, I found myself feeling happier and happier the longer this particular wonder went on.

Even better, the film carries such a lovely, compassionate heart below the loving strangeness, the funny asides, and the bizarre ideas, some genuine insight into kinds of loneliness and how it can end, joy is the only proper reaction to it.

Carry-On (2024)

Junior TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) and his partner Nora Parisi (Sofia Carson) have a rather exciting Christmas Eve. It’s not just that working on Christmas sucks, and even more so doing so at LAX, as they both are. Nora has also just told Ethan that she is pregnant, and his reaction is rather more complicated than one would probably hope for from a new father, though, to be fair to the guy, his reaction is based on self-doubt instead of the old deadbeat dad routine.

After some dithering, Ethan does decide to take this as an opportunity to get himself out of the motivational slump he has been in ever since he didn’t make it into cop school. Alas, his new-found go-getting attitude does put him in the crosshairs of a mysterious Traveler (Jason Bateman), who really, really needs Ethan’s help to get an object on an airplane. If not, a bullet just might collide with Nora’s brain.

Ethan’s doing his best to outwit his tormentor without endangering lives, but that turns into a very difficult proposition.

After going through a bit of a Rock-shaped slump, Jaume Collet-Serra is back making the kind of genre movies he’s shown himself to be oh so very good at. As always with the director, the initial set-up and characterization of Carry-On (not to be confused with the Carry On films for my imaginary readers from the British Isles) are taken somewhere out of cliché central. Once the plot gets rolling, however, that sort of thing becomes utterly irrelevant to the enjoyment gleaned from the film’s tightly constructed series of escalations, where every single move Ethan manages to make only appears to make the situation more dramatic and acute. There’s the proper and pleasant breathlessness to proceedings Collet-Serra does so well, and a kinetic energy that belies the fact this is taking place in a comparatively small number of places.

But then, one of the touches that give the film its extra kick is how well it uses the very quotidian locations inside of an airport for maximum excitement. Who knew baggage conveyor systems could be so exciting?

Also exciting – at least to me – is how well Carry-On uses the cliché characters and relations it establishes to further its dramatic impact. While Ethan is certainly the film’s protagonist, Nora and certain other characters are actually doing things as well, which of course makes it easier for a viewer not to see them as some kind of narrative furniture.

So yes, it’s Jaume Collet-Serra making a very Jaume Collet-Serra movie again, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Three Films Make A Post: Even if I kill you, I won't forget.

Werewolves (2024): This werewolf plague movie by Steven C. Miller is absolutely a SyFy original movie script of the style before these films discovered “irony” someone threw a bit of money at. As such, it is pretty dumb, doesn’t think about any of the actual implications – the mind-breaking horror and utter trauma - of its set-up that would make for a more interesting movie, and instead turns into a Frank Grillo and company versus werewolves shoot ‘em up with occasional cool gore effects.

Which I’d be fine with if Miller’s direction were a bit more inspired, or a bit more dynamic, or a bit grittier instead of being workmanlike and okay, and so full of lens flare some scenes genuinely look as if someone had farted light at the screen.

Flow aka Straume (2024): If it were nothing else, this is a brilliant example how much individuality and personality can fit into unashamedly digital animation – these things really don’t all need to look like Pixar. Of course, there’s quite a bit more to Gints Zilbalodis’s tale of a cat and her increasingly large group of animal friends roaming what looks a lot like the more pleasant part of a post-climate apocalypse world. There’s no dialogue here, but a lot of expressive animal noises (watching this at home with a cat would prove interesting, I believe), and animation so emotionally expressive, I certainly wasn’t missing dialogue or voice overs.

There’s a sense of wonder as well as one of melancholia running through the film, and where its plot is at its core simple and very generic, its artistic impression is singular and individual, leaving an immense emotional impact.

Heavier Trip aka Hevimpi reissu (2024): Where the first Heavy Trip was a delightful example of a comedy about misguided but loveable enthusiasts, its sequel by original directors and writers Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren is rather less successful.

Too much of the film consists of re-treads of rock music comedy standards that hit only about half of the time; everything here feels more generic than it did in the first film, less heartfelt and more professionally competent.

Which doesn’t turn this into a terrible film, just one I don’t see myself returning to very often, or at all.

Baby Assassins: Nice Days (2024)

Original title: Baby Walkure: Naisu Deizu

Everybody’s favourite teen assassins Chisato (Akari Takaishi) and Mahiro (Saori Izawa) go on a work trip in Miyazaki for this outing. It looks like a bit of a walk in the park for our favourite murderous friends, so the girls treat the escapade as a holiday with occasional murder for money.

Alas, they are not the only ones trying to assassinate this particular target. Mightily disturbed independent contract killer Fuyumura (Sosuke Ikematsu) is not only onto the same target as the two, he is very concerned with this kill being his body count anniversary. Consequently, he reacts very badly indeed to our heroines’ attempt at stealing “his” kill. The prospective victim, of course, uses the conflict between his would-be assassins as an opportunity to escape.

The assassin’s guild don’t tolerate this sort of thing, so they team Mahiro and Chisato with a very rude local co-worker and her not terribly bright bodybuilding partner to fix the situation, kill Fuyumura and then the target. The problem is that Fuyumura is so dangerous, even four assassins might not be enough to beat him.

In between murder and carnage, there are of course the expected scenes of bickering, female friendship of the kind that basically writes its Lesbian fanfic itself, and absurdity, all presented in the Japanese style.

Apparently, writer/director Yugo Sakamoto had a bit more of a budget to work with for the third Baby Assassins film, so there are more action sequences and a bit less comedy in this entry into the series.

Fortunately, this is a case of a careful escalation of scope of the action and of more conciseness in the comedy rather than an awkward attempt at making things more mainstream or cleaning them up too much. It’s simply more joy on both sides of the Baby Assassins equation.

It does help that the comedy still is often very funny indeed – if you like your humour deadpan and Japanese – and becomes part of the emotional language of friendship between our protagonists in the film, as it sometimes does in real life between friends.

The action for its part is even better choreographed than in the earlier movies. Izawa’s speed is still the film’s not so secret weapon there, but Takaishi has stepped up nicely as an action actress, and there’s a greater ambition and sense of scale in the choreography.

Pleasantly, even the fights Mahiro and Chisato aren’t involved in don’t feel like filler, but rather like generous additions to the whole affair’s variety.

So generosity seems to be the third Baby Assassins' watchword, which I generously accept in the spirit it is offered.

Tarry-Dan Tarry-Dan Scarey Old Spooky Man (1978)

I found this British TV movie via this excellent post.

A Cornish coastal town. Teen Jonah Grattan (Colin Mayes), working-class scruffy and the kind of dead-end rebellious that’ll guarantee he’ll end up in the same kind of nowhere his social class would nearly guarantee him however he acts, becomes obsessed with the town’s very own creepy tramp Tarry-Dan (Paul Curran).

There’s something truly strange going on with the man: children have been singing a mocking playground ditty about him for generations, as if he’d been a feature of the town’s life from the beginning, and Jonah has dreams about the man and a battle – presented as animated version of a stained-glass window – that somehow concerns himself as well as the strange old man. The teen becomes convinced that the old man is evil, and he is somehow destined to slay him; the truth is rather less nice.

Directed by John Reardon in a very typical late 70s BBC style of moody 16mm outside location shots and drab shot on video interior sets, this was written by Scottish TV playwright (that was an actual thing once upon a time) Peter McDougall, who otherwise appears to mostly have been involved in more socially realist endeavours.

As often happens when this kind of writer turns towards the supernatural, there’s an especially strong sense of the predominantly metaphorical around the non-realist bits – being cursed here turns out to be very much the same thing as being from a no-future working class background just with rather a lot more drama – but McDougall makes up for this sin by his ability to easily, and seemingly off-handedly, portray the drab world of Jonah and his small group of not-really friends, which in turn makes the elements of folk horror (or more properly myth horror, I suppose) more grounded.

It’s a lot like a Cornish version of a Bruce Springsteen song with added folklore, the old tale of a poor, not necessarily nice, young man finding himself trapped in a life he had no hand in choosing.

Which probably wasn’t – even expressed as folk horror – exactly new to anyone in 1978, and certainly isn’t today, but then, cycles repeating themselves is built into this narrative for a reason. In any case, Tarry-Dan tells this tale with tightness, insight and a sense of the local, and is much too good at it to be damned to an existence as a blurry VHS rip on YouTube.

But why not have a look yourself:

Three Films Make A Post: Where there is no more death we shall meet again.

Laurin (1989): This is that rare example of an interesting, moody German horror movie. Of course, director Robert Sigl shot in Hungary with predominantly Hungarian actors and crew, so few Germans were actually involved in the production.

This is an example of Gothically inflected, psychological horror concerning the business of a girl starting to grow up, a serial killer, and possibly ghosts, slow-moving yet emotionally and metaphorically intense. Sigl is rather good at imbuing small gestures with a depth of complicated meanings, which traditionally tends to be the sort of thing I like. This being a serious German movie, certain weaknesses show whenever there’s a need for traditional suspense (which isn’t something we do in Germany), but the mood of childhood nightmare is so thick, I won’t blame Sigl for not understanding how to stage a chase scene effectively.

Black Cab (2024): On the plot level, Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab isn’t a terribly original mix of urban legends and contemporary horror tropes, but as a mood piece, it has considerable strengths.

There’s a dreamlike unreality to the various night drives under duress here that make the involvement  of the outright supernatural utterly plausible via the mood provided. Another strong element is a pleasantly deranged performance by Nick Frost as a very sinister taxi driver that greatly strengthens the impact of some well-chosen moments of the kind of dread women suffer from terrible men on a daily basis.

If this sort of thing works for you, you might be as willing to forgive the film the weaknesses of its plotting as much as I did.

Suzhou River (2000): Finishing today’s trilogy of vibes (see how hip I am, fellow kids?), Lou Ye’s play on (and with) elements of noir and Vertigo is all ambiguous doublings of characters, moments and movement, hand-held camera that signals subjectivity instead of authenticity, mermaids and the curious beauty of an industrially wasted river.

Lou’s play with the meta-level of his narrative mostly manages to avoid getting annoying (there’s typically little worse than a filmmaker getting precious about this sort of thing to me) by the amount of ambiguity it shows: this isn’t meta to show how many movies the director has seen, nor to make a precise point, but because it is a movie about ghosts and phantoms, on the screen and off, and the ghost of old movies are ghosts as real as any other.

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far concerns Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ ill-fated attempt of winning the World War II early via an ill-conceived operation in the Netherlands. Ill-fated because – at least in the film’s telling – valuable intel was ignored, important equipment was unusable and anyone at all managed to survive the waves of background incompetence because the men on the ground where particularly tenacious – and probably so used to the War’s combination of idiocy and horror by now, they had learned to cope with it.

Attenborough clearly wasn’t a fan of General Montgomery, and thus the man becomes an off-screen incarnation of bad planning and wilful ignorance – however much one reads this as historically accurate, it certainly isn’t an invalid opinion. In general, Attenborough has little time for those upper echelons whose boots never touch a war zone and let others do the dying, and focusses on characters – all played by an astonishing amount of acting talent – who live or – more often - die by those decisions. The film also spends some time on the impact Operation Market Garden had on the civilian population of the Netherlands, and eventually ends on a handful of survivors in a haunting shot that shows little enthusiasm for any war, even a just one.

Tonally, this is a very strange film: about a third of it feels and sounds like a stodgy but extremely high budget British war movie with a terrible score and performances of a style that belong in this sort of thing (old chap), even when it’s, for example, the usually not at all stodgy Michael Caine hired for it; another third is a series of very 70s New Hollywood style vignettes featuring guys like Gould, Caan, Redford and Hackman (with a bad Polish accent) doing their very different thing in the kind of scenes you’d expect them to be in. The final third mostly concerns the particularly unpleasant adventures of one Lt. Col. Frost having to go through a kind of synthesis of Old Britain and New Hollywood, with a measured and careful performance by Anthony Hopkins, full of moments that are just as bitter and human as those in the American part of the film yet still feel very British in perspective and manner.

Curiously enough, this disparate mix works for the A Bridge Too Far, at least to a degree. Perhaps because it mirrors the very different approaches to warfare brought by the different Allied fighting forces, or perhaps because it simply speaks to my sense of perversity.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Or really, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, for even though Coppola at the time insisted on pretending this to be a close adaptation of the Stoker’s novel, this runs as roughshod over the original as is the norm for movie Draculas. This isn’t a bad thing, I believe – I, for one, don’t need a one to one adaptation of a Victorian novel, as much as I like that particular example of its form. This one is about as close to the original as Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce. Where Hooper chose to retell Dracula as a Quatermass movie, Coppola’s Dracula is the Dario Argento version of Dracula that Argento’s actual Dracula isn’t.

The main project of Coppola’s version appears to be a bit of projection: of the director’s own middle-aged horniness on the novel, overplaying the sexual subtext of a novel that does indeed have rather a lot of sexual subtext so intensely, one repeatedly wants to recommend cold showers to the filmmaker as much as to his characters. Some study of the dictionary entries for “sledgehammer” and “subtlety” might have been of use, as well. All of this has something of the air of watching a high budget Jess Franco movie without the crotch shot obsession but it with even more sexy (and “sexy”) writhing.

That’s not a bad thing in my book, mind you, but rather is an inherent part of what has turned this initially often maligned film into a bit of a classic: sex – eroticism tends to be subtler – is absolutely and always at the core of Dracula’s aesthetics, created out of thin air and celluloid, through the operatically overblown and utterly beautiful production design, the incredible number of bad accents by hot actors who should have known better (as well as Keanu Reeves), and Coppola’s insane/awesome decision to only use effects and filmmaking tricks reproducible on set and in camera (actual theatrical magic).

Thus, Coppola manages to create a mood of highly artificial, overheated and oversexed beauty that never lets up for a single shot – the film’s aesthetics are its actual point, its mood irreproducible and uncreatable by any other means. This may very well be the best possible example of the cinema of style as substance not made by an Italian.

Three Films Make A Post: This murder is set on repeat.

Time Cut (2024): You can’t convince me this thing wasn’t written by ChatGPT following a prompt like “write a script to a nostalgic time travel slasher”. That’s the only explanation to characters quite this generically lifeless, dialogue quite this empty and bland, and a plot this shamelessly cobbled together from other, generally better or at least more interesting films.

This is the sort of thing that gives Netflix originals a bad name, but there’s really nothing in the Netflix approach that explicitly forbids a filmmaker to make a good movie or at least one that shows an occasional sign of life – many manage, after all.

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (2024): I am a bit disappointed that this Christmas thriller/murder mystery pretending to be a Christmas slasher is by far my least favourite of the films directed by indefatigable British low budget indie horror director Charlie Steeds.

On the other hand, given the man’s output (this is film number three or four this year, depending on who is counting), they can’t all be winners. This one suffers from a somewhat limp script (by lead and frequent Steeds collaborator David Lenik) that clearly wants to be sharp and snarky and clever, but can’t quite hit the right notes – certainly not in the dialogue, which isn’t helped by a cast that often simply isn’t quite up to it.

Appointment with Death (1988): On the other hand, I still enjoyed this lesser Steeds quite a bit more than this limp Peter Ustinov Poirot directed by Michael Winner for Cannon films.

You’d think Winner would have sleazed up the material a bit – something I rather like to see done to the works of Christie (but then, I’ve never been a fan) – but instead, this is a mix of about forty percent tourist footage of Israel and sixty percent draggy, unrhythmic dialogue, snoozed through by an on paper fantastic cast. Even Peter Ustinov – a man typically not letting go of any scenery coming his way – seems bored and disengaged, and if you manage to make Ustinov look bored, you’re doing something very wrong indeed.

Gandahar (1987)

Paradisiacal Gandahar – apparently a state of mind nearly as much as it is a city state – is threatened by a mysterious, evil force that turns the people of the outlying parts of the place to stone via inexplicable rays. The sort-of-government of Gandahar send their best man for this sort of thing, the not completely enthusiastic Syl (voiced by Pierre-Marie Escourrou) to find out what is going on.

Syl soon stumbles into love with the beautiful and typically naked Airelle (Catherine Chevallier), and finds out about some of the darker secrets of his beloved home in form of definitely not beautiful but glorious mutants exiled from it. Rather quickly he understands the threat to be an army of robots and the giant brain – the product of a too successful Gandaharian experiment - that controls them. These are the less strange bits of our hero’s adventures, however.

This third and final of French filmmaker René Laloux’s gloriously weird pieces of full-length science fiction animation is an appropriately mind-blowing tale of weird science, weird time travel, weird romance, and the kind of (weird) visual imagination the French seem culturally predisposed to lavish on their science fiction be it in graphic novels, animation or film. French cinema in this mode is in the business of turning dreams, symbols and most probably drug visions into moving pictures of the most peculiar kind, and Laloux and his various collaborators do this in ways profoundly beautiful and strange - in all of his films.

In this, Gandahar is absolutely of a piece with the director’s other works here. As it is in a philosophical slant that seems fascinated with the concept of communities, or rather, focussed on imagining how collectivism and individualism can be reconciled without fascism rearing its ugly head. Gandahar certainly is anti-fascist, among other, much less clear things, as much as it is dream-like, strange, and peculiarly individual. There’s a mix of sharp intelligence and naivety to Laloux’s writing, and really, his world view, that counteracts the elements in it that could be too hippiesque for some tastes.

The film’s visual design is strange, and often utterly astonishing in its matter of fact treatment of strangeness and otherness that asks its audience to accept all the strange bits and pieces it comes up with before trying, and probably more than just occasionally failing, to understand them.

Of course, Gandahar’s visuals do have to put most of their weight on the design, for the actual animation of these designs in it is pretty terrible. The North Korean studio it was farmed out to did a terrible job with it, animating so lazily and inefficiently, you’ll imagine amateurs at work instead of the professional animators these people actually were.

The thing is, Laloux’s vision is so strong, this hardly matters for the film as a whole, or rather, it’s a mild annoyance in comparison to the rest of Gandahar’s strange, dreamlike beauty. To some viewers, it might even enhance it.