Three Films Make A Post: This is not a love story.

Mother Mary (2026): Sometimes, I really like the films of David Lowery; this one, I really don’t. It’s the kind of film where everything’s a metaphor, but never a metaphor for anything that’s actually complex (or, frankly, interesting) enough to warrant being talked about exclusively metaphorically. The kind of film where every single line of dialogue – mostly uttered by Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel in exalted stage psychodrama mode – is spoken portentously, full of pregnant (with metaphor, obviously!) pauses.

The kind of film that makes many gesture about being deep, but misses depth in its incessant efforts of performing depth. Much like the kind of pop star Hathaway portrays, come to think of it…

Twisted (2026): Darren Lynn Bousman, for his part, apparently never left the early 2000, and still directs exactly like he did 20 years ago. So expect the shitty colour scheme of his Saw movies, the would-be Tony Scott editing tics of his Saw movies, the random attacks of blur of his Saw movies, the score made by someone apparently tone deaf of his Saw movies. One might notice a tendency there.

Because our director really, really like to keep to his old standards, this also has the dumb-pretending-to-be-clever plotting of the Saw movies, and the tendency to waste a perfectly fine cast (in this particular case especially Djimon Hounsou and Lauren LaVera).

Santo vs. the Strangler aka Santo vs el estrangulador (1965): Tonight, even El Santo let me down, or rather, René Cardona did by couching some perfectly fine Santo vs the Phantom of the Variety Theatre business in so many musical numbers, re-titling this into Santo vs the Musical Number seems not just fair but simply more honest.

The sad thing about this is: whenever this lucha movie actually concerns the adventures of the Idol of the Masses, it’s genuinely good fun. Alas, the next musical number is as inevitable as metaphor overload in a David Lowery movie.

Three Films Make A Post: True Love Takes Sacrifice

The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw (2020): This piece of folk horror by Thomas Robert Lee clearly wants to play in the same ballpark as films like The Witch, Hereditary, or Midsommar. Mostly, however, it makes it obvious how difficult achievements successful films in this style are. In its characters and obscured back story, the film confuses the vague with the ambiguous; in its plot and pacing, it lacks precision, turning into a mere series of scenes instead of a movie. In theory, the film’s strong-ish grip on a visual mood of grey dread is probably meant to hold things together, but because it only ever seems to ape the outward forms of its style rather than the complicated insides, it never gets beyond being a series of moody scenes. Because the characterisation is so vague, there’s no heft to the moments of outward horror, and the titular curse is never any more than random witchcraft tropes stitched together.

Death of Me (2020): But I still think Lee’s movie is more successful than this thing directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, a film that tries to be tourist horror, twisty thriller, and pseudo Thai folk horror at the same time. A stronger script might perhaps have managed to hold the film’s disparate impulses together, but there’s little thematic connection to the various horrors Maggie Q’s Christine goes through; which is particularly bad in a film that’s supposed to be about a secret ritual. The plot twists never feel earned or part of any thematic whole; it’s supposed to be weird because it’s random, one supposes. That the film also makes no attempt to do anything about the xenophobic vibe movies about innocent westerners traveling somewhere only to be sacrificed by the evil locals can’t help but have does it no favours either. Really, I’m perfectly willing to ignore this sort of subtext in films made before the 1990s, or in classic pulp fiction, but in something made in 2020, there’s just no excuse anymore.

Archons (2018): This tale of a one hit wonder rock group going on a psychotropic drug fuelled journey through the wilds of Canada only to encounter the metaphorical as well as the literal things living inside them is clearly the cheapest of these three movies. It’s also the best, mostly because director Nick Szostakiwskyj seems to have a focussed idea of what his film is actually about, does turn this idea into an actual plot with actual characters, adds weird visions, a bit of body horror and some not terribly great monster suits, and then takes care actually putting these things together into a movie that’s more than a series of disconnected scenes. It’s not as moody as Lee’s film, but makes much better use of the mood it evokes; it beats the Bousman already by not being a random series of twists and racist tropes.

Abattoir (2016)

Real estate reporter Julia’s (Jessica Lowndes) sister and her sister’s family are murdered by a random violent killer. The house where the deaths took place is sold off too quickly going by Julia’s expertise, suggesting to her that something nefarious might be going on beyond the slaughter of her relatives. A look inside the building shows that the whole interior of the room where the family was murdered has been removed.

Further investigations reveal some very curious facts: it looks like a man named Jebediah Crone (Dayton Callie) has been buying up houses in which people suffered a violent death for decades, removing the rooms where the deaths happened and selling the rest of the houses off again, as if he were trying to build the most haunted house of all times out of the pieces he collects. Julia’s shocked and confused, of course. A combination of the obligatory sinister hints from mysterious sources and her own research suggests that Crone brings the house parts to a town with the decidedly lame name of New English (not located in New England, one assumes) to do something with the ghosts he collects with them.

As it happens, New English is also the town where Julia and her sister were born and lived before their mother gave them up for adoption elsewhere. One might think some sort of horrible doom once postponed is waiting for our heroine – and her cop sort-of boyfriend Grady (Joe Anderson) who’ll tag along – in that quaint little town.

Given that he’s directed  Saw number 2 through 4, I am not exactly the president of the fan club of Abattoir’s director Darren Lynn Bousman. Those non-Saw films in his filmography I have seen generally start out promising enough, demonstrating an admirable willingness to begin their plots strange and get ever stranger from there. Alas, they also tend to fall apart somewhere around the hour mark.

Which is exactly what happens with Abattoir too – the film’s basic idea is rather wonderful, and for quite some time it expresses some really silly concepts with a straight face, repeatedly doubling down on being strange in everything, using stilted and absurd dialogue – there’s not a single sentence Grady says that isn’t a gruffly-toned cliché of the highest order for example – in a way that feels like a purposeful attempt at confusing the viewer with artificiality rather then incompetence, and presenting most of the story in the slightly off tones of a peculiar dream. That last impression grows even stronger thanks to weird (in all the good ways) lighting choices, tight yet sometimes unconventional editing, and Bousman’s somewhat Italian 70s/80s horror idea of style. In other words, the first hour or so of the film is the sort of thing that friends of believable and logical narratives in their horror movies will loathe with all of their might but that makes me rather happy with all its consciously non-naturalistic dreaminess.

Alas, the last half hour or so of Abattoir treats its horrors as a pretty boring carnival ride, with a big bad that lacks all charisma and menace (even more so when he gets a pretty stupid horror movie villain bass voice post-processed on), too much exposition that still manages not to explain anything and an ending that aims for an emotional impact the film hasn’t properly prepared and its director can’t deliver. In fact, the last half hour is so bad I’m not  sure the first hour isn’t as interesting as it is by chance.