Three Films Make A Posthouse

The Eternal Daughter (2022): I generally tend to avoid the style of arthouse movies concerning the horrible suffering of posh people from some Freudian bullshit or other or moaning about the oh so terrible emptiness of their lives Joanna Hogg deals in, but when a film is supposed to conjure up the shadow of the 70s Ghost Stories for Christmas, I can’t really resist. And yes, there are some inspired moody shots of the kind Lawrence Gordon Clark dealt in to be found here, and those are certainly artfully done. But there’s also the fact this thing purporting to be a ghost story about grief often seems more like one about a rich person suffering from a bad experience with the hotel staff, which, personally, mostly makes me grief the lack of a guillotine in the hotel’s backroom.

At least Tilda Swinton must have been happy, for she gets to play one of those double roles she clearly relishes.

Summer of Demon (1981): While I’m complaining about ghost stories that don’t build an emotional connection to me as audience, Yukio Ninagawa’s version of Yotsuya Kaidan manages the unthinkable, namely, to make me feel nothing about the tale of Oiwa’s ghost. Coming from a successful career as a director of plays – apparently particularly Shakespeare – Ninagawa overcompensates for his inexperience in screen direction with a lot of distracting, busy camerawork that typically adds nothing to a scene and a lack of focus on the core of the story he’s telling. Kenichi Hagiwara makes a flat Iemon, and Keiko Takahashi’s Oiwa isn’t interesting alive or as a ghost here.

It doesn’t help Ninagawa’s case that I have seen Tai Kato’s much superior version just some months ago, and so have ample comparison points to the detriment of this one.

Posthouse (2025): Thus, the best of this entry’s bunch of movies is Nikolas Red’s tale of an (actually real) lost Pinoy silent horror movie, bad family business, and the danger of obsessing about art. You do need to have some patience with this one, though: the acting is never quite sharp enough for the complex emotions the script suggests, the visual side has a rather cheap, digital look, and the fake silent movie pieces are creepy but never convince as what they are supposed to be.

Still, there’s something genuine, serious and interesting about this one that makes it well worthy of some attention and some thought.

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.