Three Films Make A Post: In 1987, Oakland was hella freaky.

Freaky Tales (2024): I’m not sure where I caught the case of optimism, but I expected an anthology movie with this particular title to contain tales somewhat freakier than the one about the punks who are attacked by Nazis, decide to fight back the next time, and then fight back the next time, or the one about two young women who are invited to a rap battle, take part in the rap battle, and win the rap battle. This is more Tales of the Bleeding Obvious material.

Apparently, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are big fans of classic exploitation movies, but their modern version of them is bland, antiseptic, and just too nice to truly get the spirit. That the blood and gore is all CGI is absolutely telling in this regard. Doing a proper left-wing style exploitation movie seems like a fine goal to me, but this surely isn’t it.

Clown in a Cornfield (2025): As far as modern retro-slasher comedies go, Eli Craig’s Clown is a perfectly decent time – it’s certainly well-made, has a couple of jokes that actually hit, and a fine final girl in Katie Douglas. It’s also less sadistically minded than rather a lot of modern slashers at the moment, and doesn’t feature endless, boring, torture sequences; it falls in the opposite direction a little, so the violence is a bit too weightless and too cartoonish to ever produce much suspense, proving that you really can’t satisfy me in this regard.

But really, it’s the kind of perfectly decent film, most probably made by perfectly decent filmmakers there’s very little to say about.

Eclipse (1977): This film about a very awkward Christmas dinner with the alcoholic wife of a deceased twin and his neurotic brother, close after the accidental (or was it?) death, was only rediscovered thanks to the efforts of its male lead Tom Conti.

It’s an interesting film, building a mood of tension out of occasional flashbacks, awkward and tense social interaction and a pretty fantastic synth score.

In its general tone the film is a sibling to some of the weirder and more abstract regional films from the US (this is a Scottish film), particularly in its insistence on getting by on a mood of tension and dread alone – there are no revelations coming you didn’t expect, and there’s a slightness to these particular sets of neuroses that sometimes gets in the film’s way.

But unlike the other two films in this entry made fifty years later, Eclipse really strains for something unique, and gains a certain power from it even if it doesn’t quite succeed.