In short: Swerve (2011)

Somewhere in the Australian Outback. Travelling on his way to a job interview, Colin (David Lyons) witnesses a car accident that leaves the man responsible dead, leaving behind a suitcase full of money. The other car harbours a woman we will soon enough learn is the local femme fatale called Jina (Emma Booth) who just might have been trying to get out of town. When the boringly honest Colin delivers the money to the local cop Frank (Jason Clarke), he quickly learns that Jina isn’t only the local femme fatale but also Frank’s wife. If you’re now imagining the rest of the plot, I’m pretty sure you’ve got it right, if you keep in mind that Colin keeps being really boringly honest und unwilling to fall to any direct femme fatale attacks.

Consequently, Craig Lahiff’s Swerve is a bit of a disappointing attempt at making an Australian neo noir movie. Technically, it has quite a bit going for it in postcard pretty landscape shots, a generally high level of competence and a perfectly decent cast. The problem is the nearly absurd by the numbers noir quality of a script that includes exactly the twists and turns you’d expect at exactly the time you’d expect them, and characters that are archetypal clichés without even the tiniest flourish, making the sad sack, the violent husband and the femme fatale who might be a battered woman taking her revenge or not the blandest possible versions of their respective roles. In general, what Swerve lacks is any idea of its own, any attempt at changing its characters for the more interesting, and any chance for an audience that has seen neo noirs that aren’t painfully mediocre to actually become involved in the plot or the characters, for there’s no attempt to build any actual emotional stakes here.


It’s still a competent movie in that it is clearly professionally made, but so’s every film with an actual budget; thankfully many of them have more to offer than this one.

Pet Sematary (2019)

I was a big admirer of director duo Kevin Kölsch’s and Dennis Widmyer’s Starry Eyes, so I was really rather excited going into their new adaptation of what very well might be Stephen King’s best novel – it’s certainly the King novel that delves deepest into abysses the author tends to shy away from at the last moment in most of his other books. Unfortunately, shying away from abysses is pretty much this film’s modus operandi, the script by Matt Greenberg and Jeff Buhler somehow managing to make a film about desperate grief encountering the worst of King’s malevolent places, and the horrors of not just loss but the lies loss can make you believe, and the terrible things one might do for love feel like an emotionally uninvolving ultra-conventional horror movie.

Visually, Kölsch and Widmyer  do from time to time hit upon a strikingly creepy image – I thought the very artificial and therefore strange in the mostly realist movie surrounding it look of the Bad Place was a particularly good touch – but more often than not, they turn out what any middling craftsman in modern horror can, with horror sequences that are as obvious as they are conventional, and little of the visual mirroring of the protagonists’ inner lives through their surroundings the film desperately needed. Most of the horror business is perfectly okay, but perfectly okay is simply not enough here.

The script seems mostly concerned with streamlining the novel the film’s based on, and I generally understand this approach when adapting King; the man does tend to go off in unnecessary directions rather regularly, and some of this stuff should indeed be edited out. However, Pet Sematary is not one of those King novels, and excising things here would need a much calmer hand than the writers have to offer, for so much what is streamlined away is exactly what makes the novel as devastating and honest about the human heart as it is. The film’s writing, despite serviceable performances by Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz and John Lithgow, really only knows how to go through the surface motions of loss and grief, and the way it treats these emotions, they never seem to be at the core of the horror here but only motions the plot needs to go through to set up the standard horror tropes and shocks. And don’t get me even started on the film’s new improved (ha!) ending which puts all responsibility for things turning out very badly indeed on the shoulders of the Bad Place, and only very little on the humans involved, turning a heart-breaking ending that does not look away from the terrible things it believes about the human condition into just another example of the crappy horror movie “bad” ending that feels dishonest and cowardly in this particular context. One might start believing the filmmakers don’t actually understand that the point of Pet Sematary isn’t OMG! KID ZOMBIES!


It all comes over as just terribly generic and conventional, lacking any spark of true creativity or insight. And yes, I know, I’m always going on about how one should try not to compare adaptations to the things they are adapating too directly and try and look at them as their own thing, but even when I try and ignore that Pet Sematary is based on one of the best horror novels ever written, there’s still little to praise here, for a couple of couple of good images embedded into dreary horror by numbers do not a memorable film make.

In short: Terminator Genisys (2015)

Given that I’m not an admirer of contemporary Hollywood’s REBOOT EVERYTHING motto (we all know how Uncle Ben died by now, right?), I didn’t go into Alan Taylor’s reboot of the Terminator franchise with too much hope; of course, seeing as this would be a stupid intro if I wasn’t positively surprised by the film, nobody’ll be surprised to hear I was indeed positively surprised by it. Surprise.

Thinking about it, the Terminator movies were actually one case where a reboot made sense, it being a franchise whose entries beyond the first two movies and some of the comics were not very good anyway. Furthermore the last two films have pretty much stuffed the meta-plot with so much nonsense burning down what came before was probably the best option.

The film doesn’t just reboot though, but actually remixes and remodels parts of the first two films in clever and surprising ways that can also keep the good parts of what came before canonical thanks to the vagaries of time travel. The film’s first half in particular is blockbuster action cinema at its most playful, breaking up the big dumb (and rather fun) action scenes with often delightful twists on scenes we knew know from earlier films without letting the film become a mere series of ironic quotations. Taylor keeps the pace up nicely, and while some of the CGI looks a bit shoddy to my eyes, he manages to keep the increasingly silly action (the helicopter chase really is too dumb to believe) fun despite its rampant stupidity. The film’s second half isn’t quite as successful with the self-referentiality and awesome time-travel nonsense but it stays a seriously effective spectacle that knows how to keep small bits of humanity in play in between the explosions. There’s nothing deep here, yet Genisys never has that Michael Bay air of utter loathing for the intelligence of its audience; and it actually knows how to time silly one-liners.

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