Three Films Make A Post: What We Fear We Create

Fight or Flight (2024): I really enjoyed Bullet Train, and apparently, so did James Madigan. In fact, he enjoyed the film so much, he made his own version of it, with the brilliant twist of making everything in it a little – or a lot – worse. So we get an airplane instead of a train, Josh Hartnett instead of Brad Pitt, crappier hallucinations, less absurdly fun characters and inferior action choreography.

The result is one of the more puzzling films I’ve seen this week – I really can’t quite figure out why it exists.

Project MKHEXE (2025): Whereas Gerald Robert Waddell conspiracist POV horror that turns into cosmic horror clearly exists as a labour of love. It’s a film full of genuinely good ideas, well realized. It includes some moments of genuine eeriness, and shows a willingness to end on a downer note that’s deserved instead of cliché.

I particularly enjoyed all the little bits and pieces taken from different styles of POV horror that make up much of the film’s middle part – this solves the problem of the genre’s tendency to have boring middles quite nicely and provides the film with a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the scope of what’s going on in it without breaking the bank.

As to weaknesses – well, the acting’s not always quite up the ambition – particularly when it comes to the grief horror parts of the film – and the film’s ten minutes or so longer than it exactly needs to be. For this kind of indie project, these are hardly problems worth mentioning, however.

Stranger (1991): The early days of Toei’s V-Cinema subdivision really were an anything goes time, apparently, so between classic exploitation, yakuza comedy, insane low budget action, or 70s heist revival, there was also space for this suspense thriller by Shunichi Nagasaki about a loner female taxi driver (Yuko Natori) finding herself stalked by what turns out to be a killer. There are a couple of obvious influences – Spielberg’s Duel for the rather wonderful car action parts and the usual suspense suspects – but Nagasaki’s film is such a great portrayal of loneliness as well as of a woman under threat protecting herself, these influences begin to pale behind the tight, focussed, filmmaking and the general intelligence of the film.

Three Films Make A Post: A new M. Night Shyamalan experience.

Trap (2024): Not surprising anyone who has ever heard anything I said about his films, I did have a very typical M. Night Shyamalan experience with this one, in so much as I found myself in turns annoyed, exasperated and bored by his usual approach of setting up something that could go somewhere interesting but only ever follows through to the lamest possible direction.

To the usual Shyamalan problems (I don’t feel the need to list them yet again), this one adds a dollop of nepotism when our director/writer/producer casts his daughter Saleka as a basically angelic popstar, the facts she’s not great at the whole popstar bit as well as an aggressively terrible actress notwithstanding. Josh Hartnett for his part apparently believes he’s in a comedy, and so mugs and grimaces his way through his cartoon serial killer shtick without any fear of embarrassment.

Well, at least he seems to enjoy his time with the film.

#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead (2024): I found the first thirty minutes of Marcus Dunstan’s slasher comedy/sledgehammer satire on influencers hard going – it’s not easy spending time with characters this broadly drawn to be ridiculously horrible, nor did the first kills really catch my interest. However, once the cast is whittled down a bit and things get into a groove, Dunstan lets some of his instincts for suspense come to the fore, as well as some additional character traits in the gaggle of idiots to be destroyed.

Plus, some of the cheap nastiness actually becomes somewhat funny.

Luminous Woman aka Hikaru Onna (1987): As a lover of the weird and the woolly, I’ve often been rather disappointed with my regular inability to get much out of this sort of thing when approached from an arthouse angle. Case in point is this Shinji Somai joint full of nonsense like hairy holy innocents from Hokkaido, or underground wrestling matches that come with their own opera singers that should be just the kind of things that delight me. Yet I never found myself able to connect with any of it.

That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate Somai’s artful direction, the inventiveness of his framing of scenes, his – famous - long shots, or the way he folds time and space when he feels the need to in a way only cinema can do. In practice, however, I don’t connect to any of this, neither intellectually nor emotionally nor aesthetically, more’s the pity.

Three Films Make A Post: Crime runs in the family

Ida Red (2021): If ever you needed proof that making relatively simple genre movies is actually much more difficult than some filmmakers seem to believe, John Swab’s crime family drama should be it. Clearly thinking itself part of the great American tradition of these films, in truth is only a revue of its greatest clichés, wasting a really wonderful cast (Josh Hartnett, Frank Grillo, William Forsythe, Deborah Ann Woll, and so on) on material that never feels fully thought through beyond copying the surface of better films. This is particularly problematic in a film that clearly wants the audience to feel for a murderous shithead like Hartnett’s character, but never delivers anymore reason for it than him loving his mum and criminal overlady (who is even more horrible than he is, because Freud), and that is, at least treated in this superficial way, simply not enough.

Kajillionaire (2020): I like director/writer/renaissance artist Miranda July’s earlier films quite a bit, despite their nearness to the dreaded mumblecore, particularly for their ability to make the weird feel strangely logical and human. Here, working in a somewhat higher budget bracket, July’s still holding up the flag of genuine weirdness, occasionally hitting on an image or a scene that’s breath-taking and quietly daring in its individuality.

But she’s also clearly aiming for deep, emotional resonance here, something I didn’t feel at all, because in this version of July’s world, everything’s either inhumanly weird or an obvious metaphor, and neither of these things is what makes me feel actual emotions.

A House on the Bayou (2021): For the first half hour of its runtime or so, I was all in for Alex McAuley’s Blumhouse-produced streaming movie, on account of its very specific mood of southern weirdness, and despite its plot focus on rich peoples’ marital problems and the eternal search for veal cutlets.

Alas, after that strong start, the film turns into a godawful mess of random plot twists, inane ideas, and decent ideas realized inanely. There’s simply no way for the film to bring all of its disparate ideas together into anything like a whole – or really, anything like an actual movie. Instead, it just throws nonsense at the audience without even pretending there’s much hope it might stick. Because that’s not annoying enough, the thing feels really rather enamoured with a particularly mediaeval idea of morals as well, as if all the dumb talk about the horror genre’s innate reactionary core were actually true.