Mother of Flies (2025)

College student Mickey (Zelda Adams) fights a recurring battle with cancer. This time around, neither chemo nor radiation therapy are helping, and she has reached the point of desperate measures. So Mickey, accompanied by her father Jake (John Adams), goes to the proverbial witch in the woods for help. Solveig (Toby Poser), as she is called, promises her rituals can cure Mickey during the course of three nights and days at her home.

Mickey desperately wants to believe, and Jake can’t get himself to, despite wanting his daughter very much to survive. Both don’t realize the kind of prize Solveig might ask, or what Solveig truly is.

By now, the Adams family – as usual this was co-directed by Zelda Adams, John Adams and Toby Poser – have developed such a strong, personal style in their low budget indie filmmaking, they are to me on the level of individuality people like Rollin or Franco achieved, if in ways free of fetishism and very much their own. Their films are certainly more easily relatable to the more mainstream viewer, but they are also lacking compromise for easier digestibility and show a personal aesthetic sense of the kind that comes from love (for movies as well as for one’s co-conspirators), working with instead of against financial constraints, and by now very well developed technical chops most filmmakers working on this private a level simply can’t achieve.

Mother of Flies is dominated by a sense of poetry that merges with the film’s recalibration of witch tropes and the impact cancer had on the family in real life to become something very special – life-affirming in its love for the macabre and deeply affecting in its genuine emotionality. Authenticity does get a bad rep sometimes, but I find myself drawn to this kind of truthfulness.

Being genuine seems a central concern to the Family’s filmmaking. These are not films trading in irony or distance of any kind, which might be a problem for some viewers.

But then, how could it be otherwise in films where every tiny detail you see on screen is created by the same handful of people?

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to a world of hurt.

Predator: Badlands (2025): Objectively, this film about a young, outcast Predator ending up with an RPG party, is a terrible mistake following returning director Dan Trachtenberg’s clever Prey. It’s silly, self-indulgently so, weirdly shaped and goes out of its way to rob the Predators of their last remaining mystique. However – and this is going to be a bit of refrain in this post – it is also a whole load of fun, following the rule of cool with such wild abandon critiquing it for a lack of substance would make me one of those people who eat puppies. Also also, Elle Fanning is much better as a funny, wisecracking sidekick than anyone could have ever expected.

Honey Don’t! (2025): The general tenor towards Ethan Coen’s solo films – or in actuality, his films made in co-operation with Tricia Cooke who happens to also be his wife – is harsh to a degree that nearly made me miss this lesbian noirish private eye comedy until it’s not thing, as it did with the film he made before. Sure, this is not a resounding, eternal masterpiece, nor a deep comment on the shape of the world (though the shape of the world is very much visible in it), but then, it’s pretty clear that’s simply not the kind of film Coen & Cooke set out to make. Instead, this is a film all about the filmmakers having fun with plot elements, ideas and tropes they like, namely Lesbians, hard-boiled private eyes, small evils that believe themselves to be big evils, noir, serial killers, and all kinds of weirdness. The result isn’t focussed, sometimes goes off on tangents that don’t quite pay off, but most of the time, is as fun as the filmmakers appear to be having with it. Plus, Margaret Qualley manages to go through all of the film’s tonal shifts in a way that makes it look easy.

Drive-Away Dolls (2024): Having had this amount of fun with Honey Don’t! did obviously lead me directly to also watching Coen & Cooke’s earlier film, also starring Margaret Qualley (among many other delightful thespians, of course), containing even more lesbians, even more off-beat humour, and rather less darkness. Being a road movie comedy, this does get even shaggier than Honey Don’t!, sinks its brow quite a few inches, and contains some ill-advised moments that point directly to The Big Lebowski, but keeps a sense of fun and a heart that can’t quite be cynical all of the time, which is the kind of heart I can identify with the most these days.

Honestly, if Cooke & Coen make films like these two for the – hopefully very, very long – rest of their lives, I’ll be there to watch them.

Three Films Make A Post: Is that a werewolf in your stomach?

Diva in the Netherworld aka 歌姫魔界をゆく(1980): An idol pop duo – one of whose members happens to be an ex-wrestler as well as a vampire – and their manager – who in turn happens to be a werewolf – strand in the mansion of a cannibal (she might be an oni) and her stop motion pet dragon. Given that description, its miniscule budget and its pleasantly short runtime of 63 minutes, Takafumi Nagamine’s weird little movie should be a very fun time of the old “oh, those crazy Japanese” kind. In actuality, most of the film is terribly, so much so even its pieces of loveable insanity – like the moment in the last act when the wrestling vampire lady does a proper henshin into a silver-faced bat heroine – don’t hit very well.

Also, to whoever wrote the plot synopsis that’s all over the internet – please learn the difference between idols and opera singers.

Stigmatized Properties: Possession (2025): Where his old J-horror cohort Takashi Shimizu – to take an obvious example – has kept a core of a personal style, Hideo Nakata from about the 2010s on has turned into something of a faceless journey man director who is making technically proficient films that typically lack any kind of personality. This highly episodic horror comedy about a rookie actor trying to enhance his profile by sleeping in haunted properties is a case in point – it’s not a terrible movie, but there’s such a lack of invention and interest in the material in Nakata’s approach, I dislike it more than I’d do a simple failure. Failures, after all, imply someone is trying.

The Incredible Robert Baldick: Never Come Night (1972): I didn’t know the BBC did the whole “testing the waters for a TV show via TV movies” thing like her US siblings, but this is indeed such a film that never made it to series. Written by Terry Nation – as you know, Jim, a rather important writer in the early years of Doctor Who – this was apparently thought of as a potential Doctor Who replacement, which fortunately didn’t happen.

Unfortunately, this does feel like the start of something rather special. As a standalone filmlet, this is a lovely piece of telefantasy, operating very much in the idea realm of 70s Who and Nigel Kneale, full of fun ideas for its central character and his world that would have been nice to see explored in a series. Apart from a fun and fast supernatural – or is it? – plot, there are some excellent bits and pieces here about class – the madeira scene is brilliant –, the value of knowledge, and the nature of belief.

An Ode to Yakuza (1970)

aka Yakuza Masterpiece

aka The Big Pay-Off

Original title: Yakuza zesshô

Mid-level yakuza Minoru (Shintaro Katsu) hasn’t ever met a problem he didn’t solve with violence. Even though this does lead to a degree of respect among his thuggish brothers, he is not a man equipped for much of a visible emotional range between rage and the kind of nastiness you’d expect this kind of man to show towards, say, women like his girlfriend Kanae (Kiwako Taichi).

The only exception here is Minoru’s eighteen years old half-sister Akane (Naoko Otani), whom he has taken care of since she was a little girl. To Akane, he’s about as sweet and kind as he can be, or at least he believes he is. To the outside observer he’s controlling and overbearing, trying to run his sister’s life even though she’s very well equipped to have more than just a little say in her own life story. In truth, Akane can’t help but notice an undertone of more than just brotherly affection from him, something, to be fair to the guy, Minoru can’t even quite admit to himself. Obviously, he is driving away every man interested in Akane is merely because he is being protective, right?

When the film starts, Akane has just about had enough of the whole thing, and decides the best way to get Minoru off her case is to seduce one of her teachers, so Minoru will have to stop seeing her as a pure, little girl.

Which isn’t even the emotional breaking point of Yasuzo Masumura’s pretty incredible melodrama, but a good enough point to understand where the director is going with his film.

Seen from a certain perspective, the tiny yakuza sub-plot and the film’s title(s) can seem stitched on to an intense, somewhat sleazy melodrama, but really, is there a better example for a kind of traditional patriarchal brutishness that treats excluding (at best), using, and mistreating women as a matter of principle than the yakuza?

And isn’t is exactly this sort of social machinery that drives the – most often at least quietly feminist – genre of the melodrama? So this isn’t so much a case of Masumura cheating with labels as him looking at the yakuza world from an angle even critical traditional yakuza movies tend to avoid.

This is, social aspects aside, of course also a film about people who drive each other to desperation out of ideas about love and identity that can’t come together, love – and Minoru and Akane do indeed love one another in their ways – that can only express itself destructively, and acts of escape that only make everyone’s situation that much worse.

All of this is driven by Masumura’s subtly heated direction that seems to trap his characters in the abyss of their own feelings, but also by two fantastic central performances. Katsu – one of the all-time greats in Japanese genre cinema not just because of the Zatoichi films – manages to make Minoru brutal, ugly, and genuinely disgusting, but also as sad and lost as any man you’d care to imagine, controlled by pressures internal and external he genuinely can neither grasp nor understand; whereas the very young Otani shows Akane’s intelligence and courage, her awakening understanding of love and her own sexuality as well as the way her brother’s brokenness has already begun to cause cracks in herself as a complex web of emotions she desperately needs to escape.

So, Yakuza Masterpiece is the proper title for this, even though the deeply ironic An Ode to Yakuza is probably the better one.

Night Falls (1952)

Original title: La noche avanza

Jai-alai (google that one, kids) player Marcos (Pedro Armendáriz) is quite the piece of work. Convinced by his past and present successes to be the same kind of Nietzschean superman as his later Brazilian brother in spirit Coffin Joe, he lords his superiority about everyone he encounters in life, pushing men in the shittiest macho ways he can come up with (and he has the imagination to go with it), and seducing women left and right, to then mistreat them to his heart’s content.

He’s getting away with it, too, or rather, he has been getting away with it until he impregnates good bourgeois daughter Sara (Anita Blanch) and drops her in the most underhanded way possible. Turns out he isn’t quite as great as he thinks he is, and even his impressive talent for weaselling out of trouble will not keep him away from what’s coming for him forever.

I tend to be somewhat sceptical about movies whose main goal appears to be showing horrible people being horrible, and then detailing their eventual karmic (or otherwise) punishment, mostly because spending time with assholes isn’t typically my idea of a good time, and I only have a limited degree of sadism inside me to really enjoy watching cruel but just punishments.

However, Roberto Gavaldón’s highly melodramatic noir is a clear exception to that rule. Armendáriz is delightfully hissable a villain, so smug, so full of the kind of shitty pseudo-philosophy you’ll find in today’s manosphere, it does indeed become a joy to witness his eventual fall. Gavaldón never attempts to make the man likeable or give him even the tiniest redeeming quality (unless you believe “is good at sports” to be one, but the director clearly doesn’t). Marcos is simply the living embodiment of what’s worst in all of us, or at least us men, using and abusing his position, the perks his gender provides him with, and other people’s inability to believe anybody could be a scumbag of quite his dimensions.

Even once Marcos gets in trouble, the suspense here isn’t built on seeing him finding increasingly desperate methods to get away, but in the hopes for witnessing his eventual punishment. Though, the film even doesn’t leave him in peace even once he’s dead: the final scene shows a placard with Marcos’s name blown into the dirt on a streetcorner, a dog urinating on it (!), and a garbage collector carrying the whole mess off.

Gavaldón shoots all this in the all the black and white colours of the true noir, where heightened intensity is the norm, and suspense scenes happen to everyone.

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Young, hot Wilbur Whateley (young, hot Dean Stockwell – not necessarily something you get to write every day) comes to the Arkham University Library to borrow the Necronomicon. He’s got Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee), one of the student assistants of the place, charmed/hypnotized right quick, but head librarian Dr. Armitage (Ed Begley) is particularly protective of that tome. Supposedly, it provides a way to ensure the return of the Old Ones, a superior race that ruled Earth long before mankind, and though Armitage doesn’t exactly believe in these things, he does think the book could be rather dangerous.

While Wilbur isn’t getting the book, he does manage to convince Nancy to drive him to his home in Dunwich, where he can better drug, hypnotize and talk her into becoming a sacrifice to the Old Ones. Or just the new mother of the inhuman race.

Lovecraft’s tales have always been seen as particularly difficult to adapt, but I’ve always thought that especially The Dunwich Horror, with its often decidedly pulpy tenor, would be one of the easier stories to adapt.

AIP must have thought the same, and most of the changes made by the script – by Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum and Ronald Silkosky – to Daniel Haller’s adaptation do make rather a lot of sense: sexing things up a little and putting proceedings firmly into the late 60s/early 70s are logical and sound decisions, at least.

However, the film then proceeds to shoot itself in the foot repeatedly. The acting is generally pretty bad, with Ed Begley (senior, that is) lacking the gravitas and conviction to make a proper counterpoint to Stockwell’s Whateley. Dee lacks any ability to project anything at all (or if she does, chooses not to show any of it), which, given that the script already has very little for her to do, turns Nancy into a complete absence where a person needed to be. Whereas Stockwell so overplays the camp of his role as written, he’s never believable as any kind of horror film villain.

Haller was a brilliant production designer and art director who was able to work wonders on a budget, but his directorial efforts all feel pedestrian, slow and lack any visual imagination, all things this film would have desperately needed to convince an audience to take any of this seriously. Instead of style, from time to time Vaseline or gauze is applied to a camera, and hippies dance, or the screen goes purple for some monster vision. Which simply isn’t enough.

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to the new west.

Americana (2023): Tony Tost’s crime comedy was savaged by a lot of people, but as far as films that desperately want to be Coen Brothers films go, this has more than a few moments that actually, genuinely work and even suggest Tost may very well be able to make a film that’s made by himself instead of the sum of his influences.

As it stands, this is a movie with many good scenes that never quite cohere to a really good movie, with a game cast – who knew Halsey could act? – having to cope with one-note characters, and a plot that really doesn’t need the Tarantino-style told out of order thing.

But, at the very least, it has a very good taste in songs.

Phantom Thread (2017): I’ve been successfully avoiding Paul Thomas Anderson’s dressmaker drama for quite a few years, but, as it turns out, I really shouldn’t have been afraid of this actually being the movie about British peoples’ inability to connect with their feelings it sort of sells itself at. Instead, this is a BDSM romance where people don’t actually fuck but make dresses or poison mushroom omelettes instead, a movie about power and love and the kind of lust that’s more complicated than one would expect, expressed via some of the most elegant filmmaking imaginable. It is also, in a peculiar way, yet another Anderson film that is very much like an exploitation movie in many aspects, until it isn’t.

The Naked Gun (2025): From the sublime to the ridiculous, but keeping with movies I didn’t actually expect to like, Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun requel is the return to silly, random nonsense comedy I didn’t know I needed in my life, with a barrage of jokes that run the gamut from the tasteless, to the mildly political, to the impressively stupid, park for a time to have some fatty food, and then throw even more bullshit at the audience.

At least two thirds of the thousand jokes and sight gags are actually funny, so there’s no way to find fault with what this provides, unlike you’re too afraid of house favourite Liam Neeson’s still gigantic hands.

Inferno (2005)

History (it may be archaeology or anthropology, the subtitles aren’t all that great) student Saeki (Ema Fujisawa) has strange dreams about a young boy that she believes must be connected to an incident in a part of her childhood she has no actual memory of. When she was six or seven years old, she visited family in a small town mostly populated by descendants of some of those families who pretended to convert to Buddhism during the late 16th century’s persecution of Christian missionaries and converted populations in Japan but secretly kept to a form of Christianity.

During the visit, Saeki mysteriously disappeared together with a little boy named Shinichi. Saeki just as mysteriously reappeared again, without any memory of what happened, but Shinichi had never been found, dead or alive.

On her return – the family members have died years ago – Saeki soon encounters disgraced – for some apparently crazy theories the subtitles can’t cope with – archaeologist Hieda (Hiroshi Abe), who is very interested in the area and its traditions. They quickly learn that there’s a hidden hamlet somewhere deep in the mountains whose population has never converted to mainstream Catholicism as the other hidden Christians did once it was possible, and who have some rather peculiar ideas you won’t even find in most collections of apocrypha, particularly about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In their version of the myth, Adam shared his position of being the first man with a certain Jusher, and there were two trees with forbidden fruit: the good old Tree of Knowledge from which Adam – here seduced to it by Jusher instead of Eve – ate, and the Tree of Life, whose fruit gave Jusher and his descendants eternal life but also eternal suffering as well as a decided lack of knowledge.

The people in the curious hamlet, it is said, are descendants of Jusher, and have the mental state of little children.

What this has to do with Saeki’s disappearance years ago, or the fact that children of a certain age in the area are apparently spirited away only to appear sometimes many decades later at the same age they disappeared at, isn’t exactly clear, but there are certainly very curious things happening in rural Japan.

Actually, even having watched Takashi Komatsu’s Inferno – apparently based on a manga by Daijiro Morohishi – I’m still not clear about the whys and wherefores of this aspect of the plot, and how it fits into the heretical Christianity of its concepts.

Until the final act, I actually expected the film to explicitly explain fairy lore to be the basis of Christian ideas about hell and its inhabitants in a more Machenesque way, but it eventually shifts its interest fully onto an alternative form of redemption. Perhaps ill-advisedly, for the material really could have used more room to breathe than the ninety minutes of movie it got, not to speak of a special effects budget that could have better coped with the visionary elements of the climax. Though the very minimalist approach Komatsu takes in the end is actually rather memorable and successful in putting a big idea into a form affordable to the production.

While I’m on the film’s problems – this has all the visual calm of classic J-horror, but doesn’t quite manage to find the visual interest someone like Hideo Nakata would have added to long, long scenes of characters talking ever more complicated exposition at each other. Despite its runtime, this is a very talky movie, but then, much of what happens in the last act needs the film’s concepts and ideas explained in detail to work at all. And it’s really the ideas that shine here: being the kind of guy I am, I’m of course all for the elements of Inferno that treat fairy folklore like a good piece of weird fiction; yet I’m also very fond of the film’s treatment of Christianity as a mythological canon you can play around with. Cultural appropriation can be kind of awesome.

Which is more than enough for me to heartily recommend Inferno. It’s a deeply flawed film, but it is also so very, very interesting and resonates with so many of my interests.

Chain Reactions (2024)

This documentary by Alexandre O. Philippe treats Tobe Hooper’s seminal – and burned not only into my mind – Texas Chainsaw Massacre through the lens of five different admirers, presented in consecutive interviews during which Philippe provides comparison and enhancement of ideas via visual commentary. It is actually pretty revelatory to see the very yellowed print of TCM notable film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas saw of it in its first Australian presentation in comparison to today’s much cleaner versions. This is then used as an excellent jumping off point into a fantastic discourse on the colour yellow in Australian horror (visually proven by the proper number of very yellow looking outback horror snippets). It is just as fascinating to hear Takshi Miike talk about the film’s personal impact on his work as a director, which is notedly different from what film school jargon spouting Karyn Kusama, coming from a very different time and place, finds in the very same scenes Miike talks about.

In fact, it is one of the most interesting aspects of Philippe’s documentary that the film often repeats scenes from Hooper’s film when a different person speaks about them, demonstrating very nicely indeed that everyone can see a very different film while watching the same one.

As the kind of viewer I am, I’m particularly happy how much emphasis Chain Reactions puts on exploring TCM through some very individual and personal lenses, finding insight less in academic analysis, as in the way Patton Oswalt, Miike, Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Kusama relate to the film as part of their lives and personal/emotional/intellectual development. There’s multitudes here, and while most viewers will find one or two approaches they won’t vibe with – I find Kusama’s approach that ignores any visceral impact this very visceral film has in favour of jargon-heavy academicisms pretty grating, for example – all of them are treated with equal respect and emphasis, and resonate with one another as well as with the film these five (plus one in form of the director) talk about so eloquently.

Three Ghostly UK TV Movies Make A Post

Traditionally, the British were better with tales of the weird and the supernatural on TV than the most other nations. At least it looks so from over here in Germany, and going by the surprising number of TV plays, TV movies and random anthology episodes you can often only find in blurry VHS rips on YouTube. In these cases, the blurriness does enhance the mood.

Three cases in point (all of which I’ve encountered thanks to the efforts of writer Ray Newman to make all of us watch more obscure British TV on YouTube:

“Haunted”: The Ferryman (1974): This fifty minute shortish TV movie based on Kingsley Amis finds Jeremy Brett as a freshly baked bestselling writer on vacation with his wife (Natasha Parry) at a country inn. The place shows increasingly disturbing parallels to the supernatural thriller he wrote, until he’s basically stepping into the role of his own doomed hero.

This, a Granada production as directed by John Irvin, is a particularly nice discovery: Brett projects a believable mix of arrogance and self-doubt, Parry is excellent as the woman who has to cope with it, and the plot escalates from playfully weird meta to the truly creepy, helped by the kind of calm shooting style so typical of this strand of British filmmaking, where creepy shots are insisted upon until they cause quite a bit of lingering dread.

“Dramarama”: Snap (1987): This twenty-five minute piece directed by Michael Kerrigan concerns a boy who may be on his way to a mild form of juvenile delinquency getting dropped off in some marshland by his father for an ill-defined school photography project (British schooling in the 80s must have been rather peculiar). There, he encounters a supernatural power very interested in his dark side.

I wouldn’t have expected a piece of children’s television to be quite as visually inspired as this is by the proto-Ghost Story for Christmas Whistle and I’ll Come to You, but this borrows a couple of central shots, as well as the mood of a desolate landscape where even human habitations seem to be infused with a degree of wrongness and runs with it to a really pleasantly dark ending. The central child actor isn’t great, but the film quotes well from the right sources and carries its sense of genuine creepiness right through to the end.

“Ghosts”: Three Miles Up (1998): Last but not least, this BBC production directed by Lesley “Ghostwatch” Manning adapts Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “Three Miles Up”, from the phase when she wrote weird fiction influenced by but highly distinctive from the works of her then boyfriend Robert Aickman.

In visual mood, this does with the British canal system what Snap did with marshland, so expect slowly lingering shots of a landscape that feels simply not like a place meant for humans when looked at long enough. I’m not too fond of some of the acting here – TV attempts at psychodrama are generally not my bag – but there’s a sense of strangeness in some of the human interaction here besides the loud attempts at TV Bergman that fits nicely into the strangeness of landscape.

Pale Flower (1964)

Yakuza Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) has just been released from prison after a three year stint for a gang war killing. He quickly gets back into his old life of crime, spiced with a lot of existential ennui. Little in life appears to interest him, and even yakuza fun isn’t actually any fun to him. He’s going through the motions of the life, of course, for what else is there? Muraki is ignoring the clan politics around him as well, which, as not just the later jitsuroku eiga have taught us, is always a problem for a yakuza on the lower rungs of the ladder.

Muraki develops something like an actual interest when he meets Saeko (Mariko Kaga), an at least moderately rich girl slumming it in the low life, obsessed with gambling. Saeko carries herself with the same emotional detachment as Muraki, with the excitement of ever higher gambling stakes about the only thing that seems to bring her to life. Clearly, these two are made for each other, or made to make each others’ lives all the shorter.

Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower is a venerated classic of Japanese new wave cinema, by a director who would often tend to work within genre pushing its boundaries outward from the inside. As far as I understand it – I’ve not seen as much Shinoda as I probably should have – this is Shinoda’s first really artistically out there movie, made for Shochiku but not really inside of its production machine. So there’s freedom for Shinoda not to make a typical ninkyo eiga and also fewer of the studio constraints someone like Seijun Suzuki had to fight against even with a more pop minded studio as Nikkatsu.

The result is an often icily cool movie, driven by a strangely nightmarish score by Toru Takemitsu and a visual style that’s a perfect early 60s interpretation of noir. It takes place in an archetypal Tokyo of night people, populated with characters who have lost all drive for change, and probably all belief in even wanting something like change and thus just drift along, desperately grasping for any sensation that might actually make them feel again, even though this is the clearest road to their own destruction.

The acting here is just as icy and minimal as you’d expect, big expressive gestures buried under the characters’ internal ice. However, even though their characters are frozen inside and out, Ikebe and Kaga project this lack of emotion with great intensity which seems to nearly explode in the gambling scenes. Consequently, these sequences are incredibly sexually loaded, even more so than usual with gambling scenes.

Pale Flower is a perfect film of its kind, dominated by a sense of hopelessness that it’s hard for me not to call exquisite, beautiful in the way of flowers just about to die, something its protagonists would very much approve of.

Plot of Fear (1976)

Original title: E tanta paura

Various, mostly rich and influential, people are killed in gruesome ways. The killer always leaves a page of German old-timey sledgehammer education picture book “Struwwelpeter” at the scene of the crime.

When he isn’t sleeping with his model girlfriend, Inspector Lomenzo (Michele Placido) does some actual, proper, investigative work – and acquires a new model girlfriend in form of Jeanne (Corinne Cléry) during it. From Jeanne, Lomenzo learns that all the victims were involved in the sex and violence parties hunter and dealer in wild animals Hoffmann (John Steiner) held at his estate when he was still alive, and all of them were there the day a prostitute died under highly dubious circumstances.

It’s nearly as if someone were trying to punish the people involved through brutal violence as also happens to be the tradition of old-timey German picture books for kids.

Paolo Cavara’s Plot of Fear is definitely one of the better attempts at mixing elements of the giallo with those of the Italian cop movie, and making pretty successful attempts at subverting both of them while also delivering the genre thrills an audience would expect.

On the giallo side, while this is certainly a stylish and well-shot film, Cavara shows little interest into stylizing the violence as someone like Argento or Martino would (though he does clearly have some heterosexual guy kind of fun with the nudity). Where the often sexually non-binary identities of the killers in your typical giallo can suggest a rather conservative world view (if these aspects are meant that way is a very different question), the killer here comes out of a thematic concern about vigilantism, the misuse of surveillance and the misuse of power that reads very directly left-wing to me.

Police film-wise, Lomenzo is a very different proposition to the two-fisted – depending on your view point fascistically coded (though I would often not read them this way) – action copper as exemplified in someone like the great Maurizio Merli. While he does get into a couple of scraps (the genre demands, and Cavara is clever enough to accede), Lomenzo approaches the case with his head instead of his fists, though he is no Sherlock Holmes, either. He’s a softer, more thoughtful proposition, easily flustered but just as determined and uncorrupted as his more brutal antipodes – he just clearly does believe in due process and proper procedure as the basis of actual justice.

All of which is nice and interesting on paper, but wouldn’t be worth much if Plot of Fear weren’t an engaging genre mix. Fortunately it is, providing the expected genre beats with verve and enough style to keep my sleazier nature happy while pushing two genres into directions they not often go. Hell, Cavara even manages to add humorous interludes that are actually drily funny, which is not a sentence you’ll find me writing about many giallos.

Three Films Make A Post: Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night Edition

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025): Scott Cooper’s Springsteen biopic focussed on the making of “Nebraska” (certainly one of my favourite albums of all time) is a deeply frustrating experience. At its best, this is a calm, meticulous and thoughtful portrayal of the creative process, and about trying to go forward when something in one’s past always holds one back.

At its worst – all too often – this just dumps the greatest hits of biopic clichés onto that better movie, the kind of bullshit neither life nor art deserve and that runs against the attempts at truthfulness of the film’s good third. It doesn’t exactly help that the the film’s ideas about psychology tend to the reductive or even the outright stupid, and that Cooper also likes to do things like show Springsteen looking up at a mansion on a hill and then cut to him writing “Mansion on the Hill”, as if the writer/director were either an idiot or assumed his audience to be.

It Was Just An Accident aka Yek tasadof-e sadeh (2025): Whereas this is Jafar Panahi channelling quite a bit of his own suffering under the Iranian regime into a movie that is never going for the simple and the easy and transfiguring what must be a lot of actual pain into a film of astonishing compassion with even those the director would have every right to see as beyond having any right to be treated with it.

Also included are moments of righteous anger turned righteous art, complex characterisation of characters a film like Cooper’s above would have treated as walking, talking tropes, genuinely riveting discussions of the morals of vengeance and mercy, and emotions genuine yet still filtered through the thoughtful complexity of these discussions. There’s also a dry sense of dark humour running particularly through the middle act that’s often actually delightful.

Here We Come A-Wassailing (1977): Coming to something rather different, this short-ish BBC documentary directed by great British folk rock musician Ashley Hutchings (whose Albion Band also scores the film) looks at various local yuletide/midwinter/Christmas traditions in different villages on the British Isles. It’s an often fascinating document of rites that by the time this was shot were curiously disconnected to the actual life of those people still holding to them. What must have been deeply meaningful at one point to the communities involved here looks like a nice lark to get up to while getting very, very drunk – to be lost in the next decades, and then in parts revived again through new generations stumbling onto the traditions and filling them with hopefully new meanings.

In any case, it’s fantastic just to be able to see some of this stuff, to speculate on the meanings these traditions might have had, and to watch people enjoy doing pretty damn strange things that would puzzle anyone living farther away than three villages over.

The Drifting Avenger (1968)

Original title: Kôya no toseinin

A gang of stagecoach robbers stumble into the Old American West cabin of an expat samurai (three minutes of Takashi Shimura are better than no Takashi Shimura), shoot the man and his wife and leave their cowboy son Ken (Ken Takakura), also pretty shot, for dead.

Because this is a western, Ken survives with a righteous lust for vengeance only tempered by the samurai code his father taught him, and rides out in search for the killers. He still doesn’t quite have the killer instinct he’d actually need to conclude the whole avenging business successfully, and lacks some of the technical skill of the proper gunman as well, so it comes in useful he soon encounters the experienced Marvin (Ken Goodlet), who is good with guns, paternal advice and being an old west kind of guy. He also happens to be the father of one of the killers, though that conflict isn’t quite resolved as you’d expect, or made as much of as you’d hope for.

Ken does seem to have a thing for fallen in with relatives of his prospective victims. For he also develops paternal feelings for the son of another one of the killers, and also gets close to the same man’s soon to be widow, who takes her husband’s fate philosophically even before he is dead.

Vengeance, it turns out, is a place full of relatives who are rather more okay with having their family killed than Ken is.

Despite being more than just a little fond of classic Japanese genre cinema, I’ve never been able to see any of the westerns some of the major studios at put out, so my only actual contact with this somewhat surprising genre has been Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django until now – and that’s of course neither a classic era studio movie nor sane nor normal. On the other hand, there’s been so much back and forth influence between chanbara in Japan and the western in the US and Italy, it’s not as if I’m moving through unknown territory here.

Still, this is my first proper Japanese western (if one shot in Australia with an Australian cast apart from its star and a couple of intro characters). The film was directed by Toei contract man Junya Sato, whose direction tends to the technically competent yet workmanlike, at least in most of his films I’ve seen. This certainly applies to Drifting Avenger. There’s nothing here that’s badly staged or ugly to look at, but there’s also a certain lack of flair and visual energy – as a western director, he’s certainly no Leone, Boetticher, Ford, or Corbucci. Which is a particular shame because the Australian landscape would at the very least offer up some spectacular – if not very American looking – vistas beyond what Sato shows here.

The script is more routine than inspired as well, with some attempts at complicating Ken’s quest for vengeance via entanglements between honour and humanity that equally speak to western, chanbara and yakuza film traditions but that never feel as emotionally or intellectually captivating as they could. The film’s structure is a little too episodic for this to work as well as it should, particularly since it repeats plot beats between Marvin and the other killer’s family that would have been better explored through a single set of characters.

The situation isn’t helped by the fact that Takakura and Goodlet are the only professional screen actors in larger roles – the rest of the Australian cast only has this as their single film credits, and the lack of experience and ability gets in the way of proper emotional and thematic exploration, even though everyone is dubbed into Japanese. An all Japanese cast out of Toei’s stable of character actors, stars and pros would have provided much needed personality to everyone. And while Takakura is great as always, he does need other actors to play off of when emoting, instead of the walking talking cardboard he has to cope with here throughout.

Still, The Drifting Avenger is not a terrible movie by any means, just one that’s never more than very basically entertaining.

Hallow Road (2025)

On a dark night, Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and Frank (Matthew Rhys) get a call from their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell), with whom they had a giant row that evening. Apparently, Alice stormed off and stole Frank’s car when the parental units got rather angry at her for certain life decisions that don’t bode terribly well for the future they imagined for her.

Anger notwithstanding, Alice is now calling them for help. She has had an accident, struck a girl with her car on a lonely forest road, and doesn’t know what to do. Because the circumstances look dubious, and will become increasingly so the more information Alice shares, Maddie and Frank are driving to help Alice. Maddie’s experience as a emergency rescuer comes in helpful for talking Alice through first aid steps on the girl she injured, at least.

However while the parents are driving on, developments take a rather dark turn or two.

Speaking of the drive, there’s something strange going on there as well, for Hallow Road, where Alice had her accident, seems curiously difficult to reach, as if there were forces at work that have their own ideas about what to do about Alice for the trouble she has gotten herself into, forces rather less willing to tolerate wrongdoing than parents may be.

Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road is a project that could very well have ended up as merely a gimmick movie of a kind that might have been better realized as an audio play. However, Anvari directs the hell out of a story that consists of two people in a car having a phone call for most of its running time. There’s an admirable sense of focus to Anvari’s work here, as well as clear trust in his main actors to convey desperation, anger, as well as slowly encroaching dread. Which, as actors of a certain calibre are wont to do in cases like this, they repay with the kind of great work that eschews getting too showy while also hitting the proper dramatic notes, suggesting things that don’t need to be told directly.

William Gillies’s script works like clockwork but never feels like one, and handles characterisation as well as it does escalation, while confronting its increasingly fraying characters with a situation where one wrong decision cascades until events become catastrophic. I also loved how the film handles the supernatural, mixing very traditional folkloric tropes in a way that makes them fit perfectly with its psychological thriller base.

To my eyes, Hallow Road is a prime example of how to make creative use of constraints, and how to make a movie out of very basic elements that’s anything but basic.

Three Films Make A Post: The past has a mind of its own

Documenting the Witch Path (2017): I have a higher tolerance for POV horror bullshit than most people, but I’ve seldom encountered a 65 minute movie that felt quite as long as this Swedish one. There’s amateur filmmaking – which is perfectly okay in my book – and then there is a film that exclusively consists of circular dialogue sequences during which characters tell each other about the phone call they and we just fucking heard, dudes reading lore at the camera, and awkwardly edited nothing. Camera angles are apparently chosen at random, and nothing is happening, at all.

Heck, there’s not even a single actually effective shot once the characters finally kinda-sorta begin following the titular Witch Path.

Kshudhita Pashan aka The Hungry Stones (1960): The first half of this poetically shot Bangla language movie by Tapan Sinha based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore is a kind of ghost story you can encounter in many countries, at least in its larger outline. A young tax inspector is sent to a country town to set various things in order. He is quartered in a large, empty palace the locals won’t stay in at night, and has various encounters with a female ghost. At first, these encounters are dream-like and frightening – shot in beautifully realized shadows, but soon enough, a doomed romance starts between the living and the dead. Before we come to the doomed part, the film turns out to be a tale of reincarnation, and so the backstory between these two lovers is revealed in an extended flashback. Which I found somewhat weaker than the film’s first half, though still shot and staged with great care and a sense of true visual poetry. As a tale of doomed supernatural love and mild spookiness, this a lovely thing, made even more so by its wonderful locations.

Mother aka Maza (2014): This only directorial work by great (and in Japan beloved in his public persona) horror and humour mangaka Kazuo Umezu aka Umezz is a somewhat uneven film in acting and direction but there’s quite a bit to be said for any movie that turns parts of the manga career of its director into a horror tale including dark family secrets and the evil ghost of his own mother. It’s certainly not your typical biopic.

As a director, Umezu isn’t as great as when he’s working in manga. The film’s timing is often a little off in a way that suggests difficulties to adapt to the needs of a different form of storytelling, and while there are some fine, creepy sequences, some of the horror here is surprisingly bland.

But hey, there aren’t too many movies in which an actor portraying the actual filmmaker gets into physical altercations with the ghosts of their mothers, so I can’t say this isn’t interesting.

The Breakthrough (1975)

His superiors in the scientific government bureaucracy send young scientist Saunders (Simon Ward) to a somewhat isolated research facility to check out what lead scientist Maclean (Brewster Nichols)is actually doing with the project’s time and the government’s money. Instead of closing anyone’s purse strings, Saunders quickly finds himself drawn into the project. That’s little wonder, for the researchers appear to be surprisingly close to an answer to the question what truly happens to their consciousness at the moment of a person’s death. Sure, they are using a mentally ill child as a kind of medium and a dying man as their core research subject, but that’s just science, right?

This seventy minute TV movie was part of the BBC’s “Playhouse” strand of teleplays, based on a tale by Daphne Du Maurier. Despite her huge commercial footprint at the time, Du Maurier today looks like a bizarrely underrated writer of often very interesting and thought-rich supernatural tales and weird fiction, as well as her core modernized gothic interests.

It was adapted by Clive Exton (who’d end up as one of the credited scriptwriters for the Brigitte Nielsen Red Sonja movie, of all things, and did write the incredible, for a long time underrated, original Ghost Story for Christmas “Stigma”, in between, among other things) and directed by Graham Evans. There’s a lovely mix of the “serious, scientific” approach to the supernatural so beloved of the 70s (see Nigel Kneale, Legend of Hell House, parapsychological research in the real world, and many other examples), as well as suggestions of the truly unmeasurable in the film’s ideas, and some wonderfully atmospheric landscape shots, as typical of this strand of British TV.

The movie does suffer somewhat from – also typical of British TV of the time – fact that only its exteriors are shot on film, and there’s only a very limited degree of mood to be squeezed out of shot on tape interior sequences. So there’s a lot of talk – most of it interesting –, a bit of mood and only a limited amount of the kind of actual action (in the sense of “things happening”) that would cost money. And much of what happens can be a bit overshadowed by the – also very typical of this time and filmmaking place – tendency of actors to perform emotion exclusively via DRAMATIC SHOUTING. But then, mid-70s TV sound and picture probably needed that approach to reach an audience watching on TVs very different from what we use today.

In any case, there’s quite a bit to recommend The Breakthrough: the already mentioned moody, calm exterior shots, the mixture of science and the supernatural, as well as the film’s willingness to present ideas and ambiguities and – despite the shouting – let the audience sort out what to think about the whole thing for themselves.