Babu – Damned Revenge (1996)

A woman (Helen Wiese?) has some questions about the death of her son. These questions are answered by good old Coffin Joe (of course José Mojica Marins), who may or may not be in the same room as she is while they are having their little chat. A young man we must assume to be said son, in what we must assume to be flashbacks, is drawn into the orbit of a house that may be infested with Satanists, or the memory of Satanic rituals, or the ghosts of Satanists past or all of the above.

In any case, our protagonist begins suffering from increasingly bizarre, generally either school or Satanist themed, dreams and visions that hint at some kind of awful revelation to be about to happen to him in the unpleasant old house.

Ah, sometimes films like this one still hit the spot for me, beyond the realm of ideas like “good” or “bad” movies. Thus Cesar A.’s piece of Brazilian ultra cheap SOV horror – mostly shot in what looks like a school building and someone’s living room and cellar – shambles straight into the realm of ambient horror where many of the markers of objective badness can be exactly what makes a film worth watching. Or perhaps films like this can tune a viewer onto a somnambulist frequency where the rules of filmmaking as we (mostly) know them simply do not apply.

So, the woozy quality of the video made even woozier by the (fansubbed by angels or demons, you decide!) VHS source turns from technical problem to texture as important to the film’s thick mood of sludgy strangeness as the dream-like state its protagonist often finds himself in, the vagueness of its plot details, and the dubious manner in which cause and effect work here. Yes, again, I have to argue a film whose artistical merits most sane people will doubt to be very much constructed like a dream – peculiar, more than a little nebulous, and very much on the non side of sensical.

Adding to this quality are the curious soundtrack – half needle dropped classical music, half random synth noises and shouting – and that at least two thirds of the dialogue scenes here are shot suggesting these actors very often do not share the same physical space at the same time when talking at each other with the tell-tale pauses – even in proudly post-dubbed dialogue! – of people waiting for the director to shout “action!” while the camera is already rolling.

Also worth mentioning are practical special effects that suggest someone involved in the production owned several hand puppets, and the awesomeness of filmmakers who managed to convince Marins to give them a couple of hours of his time.

Midnight Diner (2014) & Midnight Diner 2 (2016)

A man known to his customers only as Master (Kaoru Kobayashi) runs a small diner in Tokyo that’s open between Midnight and 7AM, catering to a crowd of regular night people and the occasional guest star. Apart from a tiny menu, Master offers whatever meal a guest asks for, if he can provide it. Apart from a pretty great cook, Master is also a kind, quiet and thoughtful problem solver and a mighty good listener who clearly can’t help himself when it comes to helping people, sometimes assisted by his small community of regulars. So the films see Master help out people like young, homeless Michiru (Mikako Tabe), who at first eats and runs but then becomes his assistant for a time, mends a broken heart or two, and helps take care of an elderly woman brought to Tokyo through a telephone scam.

Based on a manga that also spawned a popular streaming show, the two Midnight Diner movies belong to the kind of quiet, compassionate and unhurried feel good affairs certain Japanese directors have an astonishing ability to create. Joji Matsuoka’s Midnight Diner films are excellent examples of this form, with their calm, quiet and undemonstrative compassion, their belief in the power of community – as well as in the basic goodwill of communities – and carried by an idea that helping people also means meeting and understanding them on their own terms and at their own pace.

Where this sort of thing could easily drift off in the direction of kitschy teachable moments and schmaltz – some of the plotlines here could certainly play out rather melodramatically and trite – the Midnight Diners are simply too calm and collected for going there; they also feel absolutely genuine in their ideas of how compassion and human dignity interconnect. Also, these films never shy away from acknowledging that life can simply be hard, that the ones you love might not love you back, people die, and catastrophe’s hit – they go about the question of how to go on quietly and calmly afterwards.

Plus, they are really, really Japanese about food, and whose stomach would disagree?

On a filmmaking level, there are no spectacular flourishes here – Matsuoka creates a place, populates it, and then only lends small pieces of emphasis to the work of a fine cast of working actors – for whom Kobayashi provides an impressively calm and kind centre – and script.

Structurally, you can feel the manga source in both films – their structures are episodic but always satisfyingly connected through the material’s clear world view, and their philosophy of unfussy kindness.

Three Films Make A Post: The end continues.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025): This belated sequel to the great Spinal Tap is not an ideal note for director Rob Reiner to go out on – but then, who is so lucky to finish on a masterpiece?

As it stands, it’s not totally unfair to call the film a bit unnecessary, at least in as much as it doesn’t do anything surprising with its very aged fictional rockstars that didn’t already happen in the first one, but there more concise, and more energetically. This doesn’t mean there aren’t any good jokes in here – in fact, there are still more funny ones than bad ones – or that the film isn’t at least worth one rainy Sunday afternoon watch. There’s just nothing it does that suggests anyone involved actually needed to make it.

Imborrable (2022): Even at seventy minutes, this Spanish fake documentary about the attempt at creating a horror short film that goes astray is a drag. The actual narrative core could have been presented in twenty minutes at most, but director Jorge Rivera drowns it out in a series of talking heads that never seems to stop, and proceeds to go on and on forever in tangents that often have very little to do with anything and make the hour of farting around that make up the beginning of many a found footage-style POV horror film look downright concise.

Forbidden Fruits (2026): If ever there was a film that’s clearly not made for me, it’s Meredith Alloway’s meandering, social media irony-drenched bit of feminist hang out movie with a horror appendix. I found the characters obnoxious, the way the film treats its themes somewhere between impenetrable and pointless, and really didn’t want to spend any time with these people or in their world.

However, even I have to give the filmmaker credit for her unwavering aesthetic through line. There’s an insistent visual style to Forbidden Fruits you can’t help but respect, even if it bores you to tears as a film.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973)

Young surgeon and Frankenstein fanboy Simon Helder (Shane Briant) is arrested after playing with too many corpses that didn’t belong to him, and convicted of sorcery. Which – the olden tymes’ justice system being somewhat confusing – leads to him being placed in an Asylum.

As his luck will have it, it’s the same Asylum where his idol, Baron Doctor Victor Frankenstein (still and always Peter Cushing), was incarcerated. Supposedly, the great, mad scientist died there, but, as Simon quickly learns, he’s very much alive. In his own, illimitable style, Frankenstein has blackmailed his way into the position of the resident physician, the alias of Dr. Victor (a genius with aliases, he is not), freedom, and some useful ways to continue his experiments in the creation of life.

The good Baron is quite happy Simon recognizes him practically at once. After all, the young man is well suited to take over some of his responsibilities in the Asylum and leave Frankenstein more time to pursue his more private interests.

Soon enough, Simon, together with mute and beautiful patient Sarah (Madeline Smith), becomes involved in these experiments as well. Slowly, the young man begins to realize that the cliché is right and one should truly never meet one’s heroes. Frankenstein is rather more unscrupulous than Simon imagined him to be, stepping over ethical lines the young man himself clearly holds sacrosanct, how ever dubious the experiments he’s interested in.

This is the final gasp of Hammer’s Frankenstein series, again directed by Hammer’s more traditional gothic stylist Terence Fisher, and at times, it really does feel a bit like the kind of lumbering, reanimated corpse the good Baron likes to create, slowly shambling through a plot without many surprises while having to cope with a budget that clearly isn’t what it once was anymore – and Hammer never was a big budget kind of place in any case.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to like here: from time to time, Fisher can still create a pleasantly gothic mood, and hit a striking image or three. Particularly the third act has quite a few of those, enhanced by the somewhat stronger gore late period Hammer experimented with from time to time. Frankenstein’s final fate, for example, does sit particularly well on the border where the Gothic and the gruesome meet.

Cushing is of course very strong here, particularly in the way he reveals quite how mad and immoral his initially avuncular Frankenstein actually is – this is still the monstrous man he started the series as, just older, even more ruthless and better at hiding what he is, until he slowly lets his mask drop. The movie’s problem here is that the audience knows very well what the Baron’s true nature is, so there’s little dramatic tension to the slow reveal Simon experiences, which is the main reason the first half or so of the film feels quite as slow as it does.

Then there’s the terrible monster, looking as if somebody had taken the lower half of a bad gorilla suit, put it on a highly overweight actor, and dabbed a third generation copy of an unused version of Christopher Lee’s monster’s head from the first Hammer Frankenstein on top. Somehow, this thing manages to make David Prowse look physically unthreatening, which just isn’t right, however you look at it.

The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)

The film follows the live story of Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) a Christian cult leader who founded the Shakers, a group of people so annoying, they got thrown out of England and made their way to the New World to start their on line of colonialism and hypocrisy.

Well, I’m usually the first one to blather about morals not really being a necessity for good art, but this hagiographical musical about a cult leader still managed to rub me the wrong way. Sure, parts of the teachings of the cult do fit into certain parts of modern, US-leftist thinking rather nicely, but then, isn’t that the way with all cults, and actually the way they do get to the lost and the lonely that are their main prey before revealing the rot at their core?

The film decides mostly to ignore or not mention everything about the Shakers that doesn’t fit as nicely into modern morals, so it can focus on Seyfried’s extremely charismatic and intense performance that is only marred by a terrible attempt at a Mancunian accent (but then, most of the rest of the cast suffers from that problem as well), and gawk sadly but very politely at the elements of her biography that were actual suffering.

Most interesting here are, of course, the song and dance numbers the film turns the Shakers’ ceremonies into, built out of bits of actual hymns, avantgarde influences of the kind that won’t hurt or even mildly displease anyone and Hans Zimmerisms. The musical aspect is very well done, but like the rest of the movie, it polishes away violence, suffering and general unpleasantness, changing the intensity of actual physical ecstatic worship into something polite and digestible to an audience.

Which really is the film’s main problem: while everything here is technically brilliant – I’ll certainly watch the next movie Mona Fastvold directs with high expectations – it (apart from Seyfried’s performance) never appears fully committed to actually be about anything but vague attempts at equating a cult with an oppressed minority and presenting its enemies as agents of paternalistic misogynist repression that only work by turning an ugly past into an artfully realized theme park.

Three Films Make A Post: Let them try

They Will Kill You (2026): On one hand, I admire Kirill Sokolov’s movie for how full on in its worship for certain aspects of Quentin Tarantino’s body of work it is, and how quickly it becomes trashy, intense and in your face. On the other hand, as it can go with a film that basically shouts in a viewer’s face for ninety minutes, this approach can become a bit tiresome, and I found myself wishing for a change of tack and tone, at least for a scene or two.

Two things, though: Zazie Beetz needs to team up with Samara Weaving in the inevitable Ready Or Not 3, and Pig Satan needs to become a thing in the wider world.

Kraken (2026): Sure, sure, sure, veteran Norwegian horror director Pål Øie’s eco horror/giant monster movie does nothing really new or special with the tropes of the genre it works with. But for my tastes, it absolutely makes up for that with the focussed, unironic approach it takes to these tropes and its unfussy pacing. Let’s call it clarity of purpose.

While this is certainly no comedy, it does recommend itself further with a nicely dry sense of humour and puts enough effort into character building and relations I rather enjoyed my time with them, as well as the film itself. Plus, what’s not to like about a Kraken and the icky things that live on it?

True Fear (2024): Staying in Scandinavia but moving over to Sweden, this is a YouTuber POV horror movie about a couple of young women (Ava Nikodell and Rebecka Enholm) following the trail of the worst witch hunt in Swedish history and encountering creepy rural people, toxic masculinity and the only thing better than duelling banjos: duelling supernatural forces.

Director Daniel di Grado doesn’t attempt to re-invent the found footage wheel here, but like Kraken, this is a film working with tropes sure-handedly, while again having better than average character work, with a script (by Ida Kjellin) that even adds – very appropriately, given the witch hunt theme – some feminist elements.

POV horror veterans like me can actually look forward to some proper special effects here, as well as shot construction that’s thought through beyond “let’s wave the camera around” and s narrative that doesn’t waste hours on characters making themselves unlikable via endless dicking around.

If that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t – this is a rather enjoyable small film.

In the Dark (2000)

Librarian Jane (Kim Garrett) lives the bored small town lifestyle, the sort of thing that can predispose a woman to start on a series of bad decisions for the simple hell of it. So when she begins to find a series of notes from someone calling themselves the “Master of Games” she doesn’t really hesitate to follow the instructions on them. After all, doing so always leads to an envelope full of money.

Of course, what starts off as a series of simple tests of courage escalates with the increasing amount of money in those envelopes, moving towards minor criminality, through major criminality and right into a maximal fucked-upness of a kind that more than just suggests the possibility of a very dark endgame for Jane.

This pretty incredible piece of shot on video horror by Clifton Holmes, adapting a novel by smut horror royalty Richard Laymon has never been officially released but has been making the rounds for quite some time in form of burned DVD-Rs, and a YouTube stream. I do hope the lovely people of Bleeding Skull or of Vinegar Syndrome will catch this one sooner or later.

As it stands, the air of mild secrecy and grime does fit this particular film rather well – one would expect the Master of Games to spread their unpleasant gospel this way.

This is one of those uncommon SOV films that appear to know exactly what they want aesthetically – the often excellent camera work adds to the air of obscure and forbidden reality, and the editing is of a kin that regularly breaks the rules of the game to make an actual thematic point. Unlike with many SOV movies, shots here are thoroughly composed and expressive beyond the air of grime, the black and white of the footage emphasising the shadows in this indeed shadowy tale, providing a nightmarish shape to the film’s crazier moments that don’t quite seem to fit into reality as we know it without ever actually going the supernatural route.

There’s also great focus and pacing here, with no wasted shot, certainly no superfluous scenes. We are accompanying Jane on her descend into an abyss that won’t stop at merely looking back at her, and the way down isn’t filled with scenes of people dragging their feet.

In the Dark works particularly well as an exploration of a specific kind of dissociative small town ennui, where what appears as the way out of the capitalist trap – or at least as relief from its eternal fucking boredom – drags one down into something that’s very much of the same kind, though perhaps eventually a little more honest, if even less pleasant.

While the acting here isn’t always great – this is still an SOV movie, if a brilliant one – Kim Garrett is absolutely fantastic, showing Jane’s alienation, her quiet desperation and all the emotions she never quite can’t suppress, and since she’s the absolute centre of the film, she’s also another part of the motor that makes In the Dark work as astonishingly well as it does.

There Are Monsters (2013)

The by now proverbial student filmmakers are road tripping through a not particularly sexy looking part of Canada for what looks like a pretty boring series of interviews, shakily shot.

In the background, there are signs of strange troubles brewing: the TV news report about curious happenings at CERN and a new infectious disease that appears to attack the middle ear and leave the infected either aggressive, creepy. or totally passive.

Things start going badly in the background closer to our protagonists, as well: they witness people just standing and staring with their faces to walls for hours, while the grins of others grow disturbingly wide, and more and more people appear to become convinced some of their loved ones have been…replaced by things that look like exact copies of them but are not at all human.

Despite the student filmmakers and the shakycam Jay Dahl’s There Are Monsters isn’t a POV horror film, it is just shot and edited like one, with shaky verité cam that often goes right into the actors’ faces and a jittery quality to its images. At first, this lends the film a veneer of the amateurish but the longer it went on, the more impressed I became by how clever and well thought out many of Dahl’s directorial decisions actually are. The camera shakes and jitters for a reason and carried by an eye that gives it meaning; Dahl’s framing of shots is often fantastic, and again, leading to shots that are highly composed while giving the impression of being not composed at all. This, as it does with really good straight-up POV horror, lends the film a particular feeling of reality that crashes nicely into how unreal its world starts to become..

For Dahl very cleverly scratches on the borders – and increasingly the centres – of this reality with a Weirder version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and traces of rage zombies, as if the edges of reality were really rubbing away and monsters coming through. Particularly in the last act, the film is full of singular, bizarre imagery I found genuinely unsettling.

If one were of a complaining mind, one could bemoan that the acting is more on the local theatre level as that of fully professional screen acting, but the actors always rise to the occasion when they really need to hit a beat for the film to function, so I’m not terribly bothered by the occasional stilted line reading.

This is really a fantastic movie, for formal reason mostly championed by found footage enthusiasts, yet one I believe everyone who is interested in indie horror should take a look at.

Three Films Make A Post: The wager between heaven and hell is on Earth

Constantine (2005): I absolutely loathed this when I first saw it, but now, I have more complicated feelings about this piece of horror-leaning urban fantasy: as an adaptation of the original Vertigo Hellblazer comics, this is an absolute catastrophe, the sort of adaptation that changes tone, style, location, world building, philosophy, ethics of the thing it adapts to the worse… Hell, even the original colour of the protagonist’s coat isn’t good enough for it, and Los Angeles sure as shit is not London.

If you treat this as completely its own thing, a movie about some other, much less interesting, Constantine having special effects heavy supernatural adventures in that most boring city, Francis Lawrence’s film is actually a lot of fun. Depending on my mood, I can take or leave this approach when watching-

Apex (2026): This grieving Charlize Theron versus psycho Taron Egerton in the wilderness movie by Baltasar Kormákur does very little for me. Despite a game Theron, this is painfully generic, has a dull middle, and overuses CG for everything computer animation is not good at – trees, waves, you name it.

Egerton’s movie psycho performance is also terribly annoying, full-on in the always playing for the camera even when the character is supposed to be alone kind of way too many serial killer performances devolve into. It robs the character of all of its potential threat in favour of clowning.

Hellfire (2026): Stephen Lang continues to throw his hat into the elderly action hero ring, and is a fine, calm presence there. In fact, some people might call the first half or so of low budget action maestro Isaac Florentine’s Hellfire a little too calm. Me, I enjoyed listening to the score playing variations on “Wayfaring Stranger” while various character actors (and an ill-looking Harvey Keitel) create actual relationships and a sense of place, and menace slowly builds up.

And once that menace explodes, Florentine gets to stage some rather nice action pieces. Particularly some limited vehicular action and an intense close quarters fight between Lang and Johnny Yong Bosch delight.