Three Films Make A Post: You'll never see them coming.

Deadsight (2018): I have to admit that I by now belong to the sad group of people who could live without another zombie/infected movie for about the next billion years. Having said that, I found Jesse Thomas Cook’s viral zombie style indie horror film surprisingly decent. At the very least, It is focussed and the the main cast do their jobs well. Why, Cook even manages to wring some genuine emotion out of some zombie movie standards by virtue of effective and efficient direction.

There are also some tiny yet not unimportant changes to your typical zombie movie rules, where infected are still conscious to a degree, which makes this particular version of the zombie plague rather more tragic, and turns at least some of the infected into people suffering horribly instead of merely dangers for the protagonists (Liv Collins, who also co-wrote, and Adam Seybold) to get through.

A Whisker Away aka Nakitai Watashi wa Neko wo Kaburu (泣きたい私は猫をかぶる) (2020): This Toho anime by Mari Okada about a middle school aged teen, her awkwardly (or creepily if you're really sensitive) expressed crush on a classmate and the troubles that come with turning oneself into a cat is a prime example of how much of an influence Studio Ghibli films still are on parts of anime filmmaking, seeing as this one quite desperately wants to be a Ghibli film, hitting as many buttons, tropes, and favourite Miyazaki concepts as it can get its paws on.

That’s only a bad thing on the originality front, though, for while this certainly can’t compare to Ghibli at its best (which is one of the troubles a film will get into when it prays so clearly at other films’ altars), it’s still a genuinely charming film that speaks about the pains of growing up with real affection and insight, doing the Japanese version of Magical Realism with charm and style. The final act could have used some trimming for my tastes, but otherwise, this is as good as pseudo-Ghibli is going to get.

Hoffmaniada (2018): More than a decade in the making, this Russian puppet stop motion animation directed by Stanislav Sokolov uses the great German Romantic writer (and not quite so great composer) E.T.A. Hoffmann’s life and elements of his work to talk about the borders between imaginary lives and real ones, the difficulty of more traditionally artistic temperaments to live in the world instead of their heads (also to recognize the difference between a woman and a freakish automaton), and the cruelty of said world to them. Which is about as Romantic as they come.


Quite appropriate for something with and about Hoffmann, the film contains a healthy dose of the grotesque, and while the animation isn’t always exactly slick (though never amateurish), that more handmade quality actually adds to its charms, turning Hoffmann’s world stranger than Hollywood slickness would, something that’s very appropriate to the film and its themes.

In short: The Hoard (2018)

This Canadian horror comedy directed by Jesse Thomas Cook and Matt Wiele and co-written (has also acts) by the same Tony Burgess who wrote the novel the great and wonderful Pontypool was based on, concerns the misadventures of the cast of the reality TV show “Haunted Hoarders”. The show’s shtick of course mixes the terrors of hoarding reality TV crap with the idiocy of paranormal reality TV nonsense. The members of the crew lose the grip on their respective limited sanities, and encounter their doom in form of three hoarder houses and one hidden, undead uncle.

As a parody of bullshit reality TV, the film has its best moments when it uses the inherent absurdity of the format for jokes good and bad; it’s generally aiming pretty low, so if you hope for any kind of insight beyond “reality TV is inherently absurd and made by people of dubious mental and moral state”, you are a bit out of luck here. As a whole, the film seems more at home making jokes about bodily fluids and is – a bit ironically - aiming at the cheap seats as much as the TV formats it is making fun of. Yes, I am complaining that a reality show parody has little substance, but then, the film’s 98 minute run time does stretch the premise really a bit too thin for its own good, and the material’s not that funny. In part, this has to do with the film not really thinking too much about its premise, so it is never quite clear how a show would actually mix the anti-hoarding stuff and the paranormal investigation bits, leaving lots of opportunities for more complex jokes, and ways to go off into more involving directions, by the wayside.

On a formal level, I had my problems with the strange way the film treats the camera and sound people, who sometimes seem to be actual physical presences, and sometimes, particularly during the climax, are definitely not. Sure, not pretending the camera’s there is part and parcel for reality TV, but once the killing starts, the camera and sound guys surely should find gory ends, too?


Don’t get me wrong, while I’m not completely happy with The Hoard, I did have some fun with it – it’s certainly technically competent indie horror, the cast is just as competent (and Burgess as the show’s fake psych doctor turns out to be a natural comedian), and it’s perfectly watchable.