Pestilence and other fun stuff

Pestilence reigns in the house in R'lyeh. Hopefully, breathing and normal service will resume next weekend.

Presence (2024)

A rich – sorry, upper middleclass to the Americans in the room – family moves into a new house they’ve acquired somewhat cheaply, which has never been a good sign in any movie.

While everyone’s playing out a family melodrama – Mom (Lucy Liu) is overprotective and clearly prefers her dumb-ass asshole son (Eddy Maday) to her daughter (Callina Liang) who is struggling with the death of her best friend, Dad (Chris Sullivan) can’t cope with this shit – some curious things begin to happen, as if the house were haunted by some unseen presence. Which indeed it is, for the whole film is shot from subjective perspective of this invisible thing.

Eventually, things climax in a ridiculously contrived finale.

I’m not the greatest admirer of Steven Soderbergh at the best of times, but Presence is at least a helpful reminder of how difficult formal experiments are: of course you can shoot your movie completely from the perspective of an invisible presence that haunts the characters’ new home, as Soderbergh does here with expected technical accomplishment.

But once you do, if you want to make a movie instead of a formal experiment to be studied in film schools and admired by a certain kind of critic, you also have to answer the question why you’ve made this formal decision. That, Soderbergh doesn’t do at all – the film never suggests why this perspective is the best choice to tell this specific story, or that taking a look at these specific characters and their lives is more than an afterthought to solving difficult technical and logistical problems, with a bit of extremely sloppy and unimaginative “escalation” tacked onto its ending.

As a matter of fact, there isn’t very much to the story at all. David Koepp’s script feels like an attempt to make some Bergmanesque family melodrama, but lacks the psychological insight as well as the emotional draw to pull this off. In the end, it never even asks what should be a central question to the set-up: why should the audience care about these neurotic people and their rich-people problems at all? They are neither interesting nor show any depth of personality, so what is their point or that of the movie they are in, apart from showing off Soderbergh’s technical abilities. Which is a rather boring and soulless reason to make a film, to my eyes.

Three Films Make A Post: Romance is dead.

Culloden (1964): Once upon on a time at the BBC, someone like Peter Watkins actually got commissioned/allowed to make a film about the Battle of Culloden in the form of a fake verité documentary with a gigantic angry, anti-colonialist, anti-classist streak that was really not par for the course for its place and time. Or any place or time, truly.

From time to time, there’s a certain awkwardness to the proceedings, mostly in those scenes when Watkins can’t or won’t hide the artificiality of the fighting, or when the amateur actors so beloved of certain arthouse filmmakers can’t quite manage to hit the right notes (because they’re not actors). The film’s loathing for those that send others to their deaths without even a twitch of their consciences make this, alas, painfully timeless a film.

Ghosts of East Anglia (2008): This documentary about the ghosts and ghouls of East Anglia by Andrew Gray is mostly an excuse to present various bits of archive footage taken from TV presentations of many decades past. Thus, this is a fascinating treasure trove of “true” supernatural stuff. If you’re as interested in ghost stories of this type and the way they exist in the cultural mainstream as I am, all of this – tales of black shuck, haunted manors and haunted council flats - is highly fascinating and fun; if you’re not, it’s archive footage with a bit of a dramatic presentation around it.

Heart Eyes (2025): A couple hating killer murders only on Valentine’s Day. Not yet a couple Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding) will have to get through their romantic comedy under duress, the occasional spurt of blood, and rather a lot of dead bodies. Meet cutes don’t usually work this way.

You really can’t blame Josh Ruben’s romantic horror comedy for not going all out with both of its genres. The film’s total commitment to its shtick is absolutely admirable, even more so since Ruben’s direction often very cleverly shifts between the stylistic coding of romantic comedy and horror.

As many a high concept movie, this is a bit slight, but then, most holiday based slashers as well as most romantic comedies are, and we don’t necessarily love them less for it.

Heretic (2024)

Young Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) visit the home of one Mr Reed (Hugh Grant), who has shown interest in being converted.

In truth, he’s anything but a possible convert, and quickly, the young women find themselves drawn into a perverse game about faith, disbelief, one built on a very specific kind of hubris.

On paper, a contemporary, sort of topical horror movie concerning faith and the horrors of being trapped in Richard Dawkins’s cellar does not sound like a good time, but rather a source for incessant attacks of the kind of progressive smugness that never feel terribly progressive to this socialist, and won’t convince anyone to become a less shitty person. Or, even worse, like nearly two hours of preachin’ time, something that’s to be avoided quite independent of what is being preached.

So colour me most pleasantly surprised by a film that’s nuanced without hedging its bets, dares to be complex yet still have a philosophical as well as a political point of view, and is utterly unafraid to get weird to the point of the most delightful (macabre)absurdity.

Where lesser filmmakers would let things get talky, or preachy, or insufferably smug, directing duo Scott and Bryan Woods couch their film of ideas in the language of the thriller, the very typical cat-and-mouse game between a killer and his prospective victims, so well, it can be enjoyed as a nearly perfect example of its form even if you’ve no interest in the film’s exploration of belief and disbelief whatsoever.

The horror thriller elements are not just window dressing to let a lesson go down easier, yet every set piece is also part of the film’s argument with Reed, the Sisters, and its viewers, exploring metaphorical spaces to better be able to speak about its ideas. That exactly this also leads to openings for clever twists and reversions of audience expectations the film never misses to make good use of isn’t exactly an accident, but a sign of rather brilliant filmmaking.

Being the kind of viewer I am, I’m absolutely delighted by how weird and preposterous the plot is, going to wonderfully deranged places any even semi-realist horror movie would avoid like the plague out of fear of becoming ridiculous, doubling down on stranger elements because they are simply the right elements for this particular movie.

All of this is centred by some absolutely fantastic, visually imaginative, shot by shot filmmaking and three great central performances: Hugh Grant has grown into a delightful performer once he had to stop getting by on charm and is here playing a man creepy, cruel, deranged and terribly convinced of his own rightness in a very precise and specific manner, Thatcher’s captivating as she’s in every role she’s in (and how nice that it’s a really great movie this time around), and East reveals what appears at first to be a somewhat thin performance to be anything but during a final act that rises or falls with her ability to reveal hidden complexities of her character.

Not at all bad for a movie I expected to turn off after twenty minutes or so.

The God of Ramen (2013)

Aging Kazuo Yamagishi is the owner and chef of the tiny ramen shop Taishoken. He’s also the vaunted titular God of Ramen, who provides giant portions of the dish so loved, people are standing in line for actual hours to get a seat in a shop only able to serve sixteen guests at a time.

This documentary’s director Takashi Innami follows him verité style over the course of several years, at first clearly fascinated by the phenomenon of this apparently ramen of mythical quality and the huge lines it provokes. But things become somewhat revelatory the more time director, film and audience spend with Yamagishi, surrounded by apprentices he teaches with graciousness and kindness, yet who can’t actually lay a hand on the noodle. There’s as much sadness as there is beauty to Yamagishi’s fixation on ramen as the be all and end all of his life, and something terrible about his willingness to ignore his dangerously bad health just so he can make another bowl of noodle soup.

It becomes clear that much of this has to do with the death of Yamagishi’s wife fifteen years ago, that left behind a grief the chef has avoided working through by focussing on his art.

There’s nothing cruel or lowering about the way the documentary treats Yamagishi. Instead, a sense of compassion and kindness runs through here, a willingness to meet Yamagishi on the level he wants to be met. Which mirrors the many small moments of kindness and compassion Yamagishi shows towards others throughout the film, clearly parts of his character he didn’t bury under grief and cooking. Being truthful about a person yet still respecting their dignity is not an easy ask of a documentary (or of a human being), but Innami is and does in a delicate manner that’s neither cowardly nor manipulative towards his subject.

In fact, if there’s a feeling the documentary seems to have towards its subject, it is the wish for him to be happier in a way that fits him, to make choices he can be happy of, and to be kind to himself. Which it generally does without getting kitschy or high-handed, even though the film’s only true flaw, a terrible score, would really rather like it to.

Fortunately, a very Japanese mixture of respect and kindness prevails throughout The God of Ramen, so much so I found myself deeply moved by a film that’s supposedly about a ramen making sensation.

Killer’s Mission (1969)

Original title: Shokin kasegi

The Dutch have sent a warship towards Shogunate Japan to incite a little civil war with a hold full of modern weapons. After first getting thrown out of the Shogun’s sphere, they start poking at a clan best suited for their plans. Not that everyone there’s completely into waltzing their country into an uprising and a civil war meant to soften its up for colonialist forces, but that’s what assassins are for.

The shogun’s usual spies are only of limited use in this situation, so the shogunate sends in spy-for-hire Shikoro Ichibei (Tomisaburo Wakayama) to somehow resolve the situation. Ichibei is a physician, a ladies’ men, a great shot, a master swordsman, a total badass and the owner of a very big penis (as certified by the film’s comic relief ronin), but even he will have certain troubles with this mission.

Of course, there are various other characters of varying trustworthiness and loyalties involved, like the just as badass female Iga ninja Kagero (Yumiko Nogawa), said comic relief ronin, and so on.

By 1969, Toei’s producers weren’t too keen on making jidai geki anymore, not even of the more marketable chambara style, but provided with the proper selling points, they could still be convinced of the viability of such projects – Tomisaburo Wakayama’s particular love for the genre must certainly have helped, in combination with his popularity.

In the case of Killer’s Mission – the first part of the so-called Bounty Hunter Trilogy, which doesn’t feature its hero doing any bounty hunting at all – that selling point was to cross chambara-style sword fighting action with elements of the Italian western as well as spy shenanigans following the James Bond mode. If you think like an exploitation movie producer, that sort of thing makes total sense; if you watch Shigehiro Ozawa’s Killer’s Mission it does doubly so.

Ozawa was already a veteran filmmaker at this point, but one very willing to go with the stylistic tricks of the time and coming up with zoom and slo-motion variants of his own to add to them. This would soon turn him into one of Toei’s best hands at modern, pop, exploitation cinema independent of genre, and the merry way Killer’s Mission goes from comedy to action to high drama to treason and honour really shows why. There are, of course, given genre, country and time, moments of lovely insanity here, but the more straightforward action of sword and gun, Wakayama’s beloved jumps and so on are just as great.

While the action is getting increasingly crazy and a Morricone trumpet blows through the score, the spy plot works rather well, too, with many a betrayal but also acts of honour you’d never see James Bond and co get up to. In fact, despite its closeness to several particularly cynical genres, this isn’t a very cynical movie at all. Rather it still believes in the possibility of honour even in dishonourable situations. Consequently, Ichibei may bluster and bluff like a hardened cynic – which Wakayama does of course excel at – but he also shows moments of compassion and genuine kindness the actor sells equally well.

Other attractions in this highly attractive movie are Kagero, who can match Ichibei at basically everything and does so with vigour;  and a scene where Ichibei for reasons best known to himself pretends to be a blind masseur. The latter is of course a broad parody of everyone’s favourite sword-swinging blind masseur Zatoichi, who just happened to be played by Wakayama’s younger brother Shintaro Katsu. And of course there are buckets – fountains - of artificial blood, but then, it’s a chambara, and a pretty damn fun one at that, so that nearly goes without saying.

Scorched Earth (2024)

Original title: Verbrannte Erde

More than ten years after he had to flee the city following some business that went very badly indeed in In the Shadows, the first film of what is supposed to become a trilogy one day, armed robbery specialist Trojan (Mišel Matičević) returns to Berlin.

Looking for work from the few contacts he has left after his long absence, Trojan eventually manages to join the team of a properly planned, classic art heist. As is typically the case with a movie heist, stealing something and surviving the aftermath are very different things indeed, so Trojan has to cope with the vagaries of his business, particularly a client who’d rather not pay the thieves for the painting they stole for him.

This year, I’m apparently taking a deeper dive into the easily missable strands of proper genre filmmaking that developed in Germany in the last twenty-five years or so, typically hidden away in TV movies and films made by arthouse filmmakers.

It is somewhat curious that of all the German arthouse filmmaking movements of the last decades, it is the filmmakers of the Berlin School who have proven to be quite the genre filmmakers if they want to – if you’d only watch Arslan or Michael Petzold in their genre mode, you might start to believe we Germans are rather good at making this sort of thing.

In the Shadows. the first Trojan movie from 2010, crossed a clear love for Jean-Pierre Melville gangster movies in their most minimal mode of coolness with a sense of cold observation. That’s still a huge part of this rather belated sequel, but this time around, Arslan’s focussed – and pretty stylish – minimalism allows for a degree of warmth. Or rather, despite sparse/ultra-focussed (take your pick) characterisation, the director allows his characters to break professional coolness in a manner that suggests the humanity below it more clearly than he did in the earlier film.

Their coldness, the film appears to suggest, isn’t quite as natural as it appears, and rather an adaptation to their environment – Berlin. The city of this film is cold, empty, and never feels like a place actual people are meant to inhabit – it’s just streets and buildings empty of personality, often even devoid of the impression of habitability, and the only way one can find to survive in it is to stop being a person.

This does of course also fit nicely to some of the preoccupations of the kind of heist and gangster movie tradition Arslan’s film is part of: there’s not only the coolness and minimalism of Melville, but also the meticulousness of Mann, but without the latter’s slickness. As is often the case with characters like this, at least to me, there’s the shadow of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker hanging over Trojan and the films he appears in. With Parker, Trojan shares a calm ruthlessness that accepts acts of violence he deems necessary without compunction, his professionalism in a business that isn’t a proper business with proper professionals at all, the kind of trustworthiness that means he won’t stab you in the back unless you try and stab him first.

As a comparison, this is as high a compliment as you can pay to the protagonist of this kind of crime film, as well as the movie he’s in.

Tokyo: The Last War (1989)

Original title: Teito taisen

1945, before the H-bombs are dropped on Japan. Despite loud scepticism from the military leadership, spiritual leader of Japan – so says the voice from the off and who am I to disagree – Kanami Koho (Tetsuro Tanba, of course) plans to send out a wave of bad spiritual energy through radio waves to kill the Allied leadership. Instead of doing that, he awakens Yasunori Kato (Kysusaku Shimada), apparently actually the embodiment of Tokyo’s masses of angry dead from the last thousand years.

Kato’s thing is still destroying Tokyo, and he’s still ridiculously powerful. The last surviving member of the Tatsumiya family, Yukiko (Kaho Minami), isn’t really prepared to fight her ancestral enemy, but she at least slips into the role of protecting a little blind orphan girl Kato shows quite some interest in.

There must have been several novels taking place between those that made up the material for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis and the eleventh entry in Hiroshi Aramata’s clearly insanely ambitious Teito monogatari series, so there are no returning characters here apart from Kato, and there’s no time spent on getting us up to date on anything that happened in between the movies.

Having said that, The Last War is actually a much less sprawling thing than its epic predecessor, and where that movie simply had no air to stop and breath, this one appears to thinly stretch out too little plot for nearly two hours.

There’s a ponderous quality to the film that is a bad follow-up to the merry insanity of the first one, and where Last Megalopolis was a wellspring of crazy special effects, much of what happens here is people making constipated faces to suggest they are using their psychic powers, until some mild explosion occurs. This gets a little better in the film’s last third when at least a mild sense of the grotesque settles over proceedings, but for a film whose conceptual design is credited to H.R. Giger, whose effects are by Screaming Mad George, whose – possibly not so – assistant director is Hongkong’s prince of the batshit insane Ngai Choi Lam, and whose action is directed by Philip Kwok, it’s all pretty harmless.

The film as a whole feels as if were trying to replace Jissoji’s extremely personal, strange yet maximalist sense of aesthetics, but doesn’t appear to know with what, until all that’s left is the sort of bland professionalism that doesn’t make for a bad movie, but a woefully uninteresting one.

Director Takashige Ichise never directed a feature film before or after Tokyo: The Last One, and concentrated on a successful career as a producer – first as Toho’s man for international co-productions, then as one of the architects of the J-horror boom – and really, this too often feels like the film a producer would make rather than that of a director.

Three Films Make A Post: The Greatest High Adventure Ever Filmed!

Festival of the Living Dead (2024): After having started out strong, the Soska Sister Jen and Sylvia don’t seem to be able to get a movie together that’s even vaguely in the ballpark of American Mary. It’s all sequels, ill-advised remakes and cheap guff, typically decently enough made but well beyond the filmmakers’ talent levels.

This Tubi Original flirts a little with being an actual sequel to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but mostly, it’s a movie of braindead idiots sleepwalking through zombie movie tropes. Energy levels are low, and there’s little on screen here to tell me why I should watch this above the other dozen crappy zombie movies coming out every month.

Companion (2025): If there’s one thing holding too many “progressive” horror movies back right now – and I say that as a socialist much closer to their political ideals than MAGAs, incels and other real life horrors – its the smug self-satisfaction about the rightness of their world view that reminds me of myself in my twenties, with its complete inability to realize that it’s all to easy to win arguments when all you ever do is argue against straw men. Worse, this brand of smugness tends to lend films a particular self-satisfied air with any little twist, any half-bright idea in their scripts, and an inability to look at one’s own work and see its flaws.

This goes very much for Companion, a film of middling twists it very clearly believes to be incredibly deep and intelligent, and a slick surface of ultra-competent filmmaking that has very little of any depth or interest going on below its polished surface.

The only thing this really has going for it is the rightfully admired Sophie Thatcher. Who also happens to be in Heretic, a great example of how to do progressive horror without intellectual shortcuts.

The Guns of Navarone (1961): Speaking of intellectual shortcuts, during the course of the German election, I really needed to watch a movie where a lot of Nazis are killed. J. Lee Thompson’s war/spy movie classic fit the bill nicely. It also has a starry cast playing your typical Alistair McLean bunch of competents, rather a lot of great action scenes – during which indeed a heart-warming amount of Nazis die – and a couple of absolutely icy war is hell moments.

Gregory Peck is particularly great in this one, mixing the reticence of a man who has already seen and done too much in this war with the coldness of a man willing to do even worse if necessary.

Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988)

Original title: Teito monogatari

Yasunori Kato (Kyusaku Shimada), a horrifyingly powerful, deathless onmyoji who looks as if he stepped right out of a Suehiro Maruo manga, has a burning desire to destroy Tokyo.

Beginning in 1912 and continuing through the next decade, he makes various attempts at awakening the vengeful warlord Tairo no Masakado, whose head is buried somewhere below Tokyo to protect it, but who’d destroy everything around him once awoken. Kato’s main enemies are the good – or at least not batshit insane – onmyojis of the Tatsumiya line. As Masakado’s descendants they are, ironically, also the ideal mediums to wake up the grumpy old sleeper if controlled by Kato.

In a myriad of side and parallel plots we witness the plans of cigar-chomping millionaire Shibusawa (Shintaro Katsu) to drag Tokyo into the modern age via the dubious magic of urban development, listen to scientists and mystics espouse wild theories and just as wild exposition and witness a city changing at lightning pace.

It’s all rather confusing, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that this is an adaptation of several volumes of Hiroshi Aramata’s influential “Teito monogatari” series of fantasy/horror/weird fiction. A body of work which has alas not been translated into a language I speak or even dabble in. Basically, this often feels like several seasons of a modern streaming show pressed into a two hour runtime, with frequent leaps in time and space, and subplots and characters that disappear before you can blink.

I suspect full comprehension of the film would need a better understanding of various aspects of Japanese philosophy and religion than I have as well as actually having read the books.

It’s all very Lynch’s Dune in this regard, and even though this approach certainly isn’t the most obvious approach to filmmaking, one might even call it somewhat perverse, I can sympathize with a film just not wanting to compromise with its audience in any way whatsoever. Either you’re getting on board, or this thing is simply going to roll over you.

At the time this was made, it was apparently one of the highest budgeted Japanese movies ever produced, and you can indeed see every yen spent on it on screen. While the plot – and the clearly huge amounts of philosophical and social subtext – can fly over a Western viewer’s head, one can’t argue with the intense visual power of the film, full of memorable shots that do more for the emotional understanding of the film’s content than another hour of detailed plot or characterisation, its intense aesthetic mixture of historical authenticity and late 80s neon, nor the way its star-studded cast (including favourites like Katsu and Shimada, the incredible Mieko Harada, Jo Shishido and dozens of other Toho stalwarts) fills the underwritten characters with life by the sheer power of their presence. Well, returning to the subtext, even I understand that this is very much a film about the pace of the changes to Tokyo and Japan in the first three decades of the century, and the toll this took on the national psyche, the difficulty of reconciling the traditional and the new without falling into insanity and sick dreams of empire.

That this is portrayed, among other things, via duelling magicians, wonderful stop motion creatures, and a steam-driven (I believe) robot just makes the whole thing even more wonderful, obviously.

Responsible for this astonishing, overwhelming film is Akio Jissoji, well known around here as a director at home in pink cinema, arthouse about matters sexual and spiritual and tokusatsu TV – if I had actually seen more of his stuff, he’d be a patron saint around these parts, that much is clear.

Even having seen perhaps half a dozen of his films (and a few tokusatsu episodes), it’s clear that Jissoji managed to get his personal handwriting and a focus on certain core interests into whichever kind of project he worked on – Last Megalopolis certainly isn’t some disinterested work for hire bit, but something created with full artistic focus and passion.

That I have the feeling I’ve barely understood half of it, and even less of the intricacies of its plot, doesn’t make Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis less of an achievement.

Harms (2013)

Professional criminal Harms (Heiner Lauterbach) gets out of jail after the usual fourteen, fifteen year span movies use in these cases. He’s getting bored rather quickly with sitting around and having sex with prostitute Jasmin (Valentina Sauca) who appears inexplicably fond of him.

So he’s taking an opportunity to get back into the game, when a not at all dubious character (Friedrich von Thun), invites him into handling a big armed robbery for him.

Harms grabs some members of his old crew, some hacker dude his shady partner finds, and goes to work. The planning phase is made difficult by a variety of problems, most of which need to be resolved by violence, and the actual robbery does feature some sudden and inevitable betrayal.

Which isn’t a spoiler, because prime among the weaknesses of Nikolai Müllerschön’s Harms is a script that feels the need to include every gangster and heist movie cliché ever seen in a movie while putting very little effort into properly connecting them. It’s not as if I expect originality from this sort of affair, but some care, focus, and judicious excision of superfluous side business would have done wonders here.

That might also have cut down the cast of characters to a number Müllerschön could actually handle – as it stands, there are a lot of characters in the movie who aren’t terribly important, and quite a few actors who seem unprepared for the kind of naturalistic tough guy acting the film clearly asks for. In typical German overcompensation, the dialogue often tries rather too hard for tough guy strong language in ways that feel ridiculous instead of believable – it’s not just that nobody would be talking this way, it’s that nobody involved manages to convince they indeed are.

Lauterbach is pretty good, though, apparently enjoying the opportunity to break many of the rules of German screen acting and work more via physical presence than overenunciation.

From time to time, the film manages to get up to a good scene or two, but its lack of focus prevents Harms from capitalizing on this enough to become a good movie. Or really, to become more than a series of scenes.