Three Films Make A Post: "Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad."

Warning: this is a “short rants about genuinely crap movies” edition

Touch Me (2025): First in today’s trilogy of the terrible is Addison Heimann’s insufferable tentacle sex horror comedy about a woman’s (Olivia Taylor Dudley who does her best, which is more than I’d suggest about anyone else involved here) relationship with an alien with an addictive tentacle touch, and her obnoxious gay best friend. Apart from having really pretty colours, this is just terrible: the characters are obnoxious one-note clichés; the film believes stating having themes of co-dependency and abusive relationships equals actually saying anything about them; and it is painfully unfunny, particularly thanks to dialogue that manages to be unnatural, dumb and – I didn’t expect to use that word in public – cringeworthy to the highest degree.

How to Make a Killing (2026): Supposedly “inspired” by the great Kind Hearts and Coronets, this is actually a proper remake, which is to say, a movie that does everything worse than the original even though it keeps pretty closely to it. Which comes as a particular disappointment from director John Patton Ford, whose Emily the Criminal was sharp, focussed, and very much not a bad clone of anything.

It is pretty funny that a film made seventy years or so later than the original’s critique and comical analysis of class matters is actually less insightful on them – but then, Americans still have trouble talking about class even while their country is on the verge of turning back into a feudal state (not that we Germans are great about that, mind you). As a comedy, this suffers from a slouching, disjointed pace and the fact that Glen Powell – who frankly can’t act his way out of a wet paper bag on the best of days - is not simply no Dennis Price but attempts to get through the whole film with two expressions: a punchable smirk that is supposed to be charming, and some confused rodent mugging I can’t even begin to parse. Also, as in Touch Me, very little of this actually funny, or has anything to say.

“Wuthering Heights” (2026): Look, I’m okay with the fact, that Emerald Fennell didn’t want to actually adapt the novel – after all, none of the earlier film versions ever bothered with it – but turning this into a glossy, empty, and emotionally dead adaptation of her favourite romance novel covers is not a decision to endear her film to me. Nor does the lack of any depth to anything or anyone in here help, where everything that’s actually difficult, or painful, or truly unpleasant about the kind of love this is supposedly about gets sanded down until it is a mere kink, add much for me apart from inducing a feeling of actual loathing for the film. Which isn’t a feeling I often get, so well done there?

Sure, the production design looks kinda spectacular, but the showy way Fennell shoots it gives off the whiff of a bad music video directed by someone who really has no idea how to say something with their pretty visuals. Hell, even creating an actual mood seems beyond the director. It’s just there, in a garish, soulless and ironically boring way, like an ad for something I’m certainly not going to be.

I also have to agree with parts of the internet that Margot Robbie – who is not an actress I find particularly compelling at the best of times - is too old for her role here. That’s not her fault, however: every adult actress would be, seeing how Fennell writes Cathy as a thirteen year old throughout.

Three Films Make A Post: There's something in the snow…

Emily the Criminal (2022): This fine crime movie about what living in a capitalist hell hole can do to a person’s moral self (which makes it something of a neo noir, now that I think about it) by John Patton Ford (who also scripts the film) was a bit ignored when it came out last year, unfairly so, I must say. It’s not an outwardly spectacular film, but one that follows the downwards drift of its protagonist (Aubrey Plaza in a fantastic performance) with an observant and careful eye, finding tension as naturally in the set of Plaza’s shoulder as in the slowly evolving plot, and doing so brilliantly.

Project Wolf Hunting aka 늑대사냥 | neuk-dae-sa-nyang (2022): Kim Hong-seon’s South Korean action horror movie on the other hand only ever wants to do things that are outwardly spectacular. Mostly, this combination of “Die Hard without a proper protagonist on a prison transport ship”, a zombie super soldier, various conspiracist plot twists and so on, manages to do this quite entertainingly. I’m convinced the production sucked up all the movie blood in Korea, bloody and gloopy as things get. Kim shows himself as quite adept at finding new ways to deliver carnage for the full two hour runtime, so he deserves all the blood he can buy.

Apart from the typical outrageous and pretty nonsensical plot twists you’d expect (which are fortunately delivered with verve and proper earnestness), there are also a couple of very South Korean moments when the film shifts and twists a little against genre rules, killing off the “wrong” characters at the “wrong” times to keep the audience on their toes.

Winterskin (2018): How much one will appreciate this predominantly cabin-bound movie by Charlie Steeds, working with his usual coterie of actors, may very much depend on one’s tolerance for fake American accents, done badly. For this tale of a young man looking for his father in the wilderness and getting stranded in a cabin with an old woman of dubious mental health is a cornucopia of dubious American accents whose horribleness it is difficult to ignore. If a viewer can make their peace with them – I did, though perhaps with some cursing and gnashing of teeth particularly during more dramatic sequences involved – they may very well appreciate how much good Steeds does in other regards: how tight and interesting his framing of the central log cabin sequences; how much a film taking place in a fake American snow wilderness uses ideas of the macabre that belong very much in the US tradition of someone like Bierce; how cleverly the film escalates its threats and gore to the over the top yet still on budget climax.