Three Films Make A Post: Party Like It’s 2022

Mandrake (2022): Sometimes, I really don’t know. Objectively, Lynne Davison’s clever mix of traditional British social drama and neo folk horror is a fine, perhaps even great film. The acting, particularly by Deirdre Mullins and Derbhie Crotty, is great and absolutely on point, Davison’s visual language is creepy without only ever going for the obvious effect, and the script clearly knows what it wants to be about as well as how to express it. In practice, I didn’t connect with it at all. Despite my love for clever variations on folk horror and good filmmaking this might as well have been Generic Blumhouse Horror Number 9855, for all I felt and thought. Which says very little about the film, obviously.

Beast (2022): To be fair to myself, for most of the time, I had the same reaction to Baltasar Kormákur’s animal attack movie in which Idris Elba needs to protect his family from lions. But here, it’s the proper reaction. As you might expect, the film milks the whole “a man needs to protect his little girls” so incessantly, you can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop and the movie to deconstruct this notion. To nobody’s surprise, the other shoe never does drop, and it’s just a case of very low effort character writing.

On the plus side, Elba is good even if he has very little to do, the young actresses playing his daughters deserved better as well, and Sharlto Copley does – as usual – a great portrayal of Sharlto Copley playing a likeable ranger. Too bad the film has no ambitions beyond being as generic as possible, wasting the talents of everyone involved on the kind of movie that’s simply there.

Barbarian (2022): Because I didn’t want to go into spoiler heavy territory with this one – let’s just say there’s a really clever, effective and actually meaningful structural thing or three that happen – I can end the post on a positive note.

For Zach Cregger’s Barbarian truly is as good as everyone says – apart from one bit I found somewhat too smugly on the righteous side of our times which would involve heavy spoilers to get into – using parts of today’s social conversation in intelligent ways to surprise. It’s the case where a movie has something to say, knows how to say it, and also how to make a pretty fantastic horror movie out of it. Add some really great performances by Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long, and you have something really rather special.

Three Films Make A Post: Secluded getaway. Killer views.

The Rental (2020): Despite Sheila Vand, Alison Brie, Dan Stevens and Jeremy Allen White being no core cast to sneeze at, Dave Franco’s film about two couples going on a weekend vacation and crashing against most of them being pretty shitty people as well as someone really, really not liking them doesn’t do a lot for me. In part, it’s the too slow pacing of Franco’s and Joe Swanberg’s script, spending too much time on characters that simply aren’t terribly interesting, until it finally gets up to very rote thriller tropes realized competently but without verve.

The whole thriller/horror part certainly isn’t helped by the film never getting around to telling the audience why we’re supposed to care for these characters under threat anyway, so their fates aren’t exactly keeping one’s eyes open.

The Wave (2019): Gille Klabin’s semi-trippy film about a corporate lawyer on his way to become a total piece of human crap played by Justin Long learning a valuable – and rather final – lesson about the universe (apparently, it wants balance, maaaan) after not saying no to drugs, is surprisingly bland for a film containing a giant drug trip, time jumps and the stuff of “lost in the city” movies. The film’s surrealism simply doesn’t hit, the drug visions and shifts having a blandly banal air to them rather akin to the banality of its protagonist’s style of evil, really not breathing an air of the actual surreal as much as one of the try-hard surreal.

Not helping is the banality (yep, that word again) of the film’s philosophy, the sort of thing a film would need considerably more charm to sell than this one shows.

The Cleaning Lady (2018): Ending on another film that leaves me nonplussed, Jon Knautz’s horror movie about a woman with a “love addiction” problem making the classic movie mistake of befriending a member of the lower classes (it’s feeling rather Victorian around here) and landing in the hands of a violent psychopath doesn’t just annoy me with its implied politics. It makes the much bigger mistake of not being good enough as a thriller and a horror movie to not let me overlook its politics. Sure, it adds some mildly crass violence to at least give its villainess more of a background but not really even attempts to sell  her as an actual human being instead of a caricature of suffering turned evil.


When it comes to the shock and the suspense, the film’s just okay, with a couple of scenes that don’t quite work or simply lack the imagination for any of this to have much of an impact.

Jeepers Creepers (2001)

Siblings Trish (Gina Philips) and Darry (Justin Long) are road-tripping through Florida. After a nasty encounter with a peculiar looking truck, they accidentally witness the shadowy driver (Jonathan Breck) dropping what might very well be a packaged human body into a large pipe beside an abandoned church, driving off again afterwards. Especially Darry is pretty sure the bundle was indeed a human being; he manages to convince Trish to have a look inside.

So down the pipe Darry drops. Below, there’s a serial killer arts and crafts cave, with numerous prepared dead bodies plastered to the ceiling and wells. And the bundle? Well, it does indeed contain a young guy who dies in Darry’s arms. Surprisingly enough, the siblings manage to get away scot free, and – unlike quite a few horror movie characters – the first thing they think about is informing the police. Unfortunately, this unprecedented example of sense won’t save them from a very bad night, for the driver isn’t just your run-of-the-mill serial killer, but a supernatural threat deeply unimpressed by quotidian problems like armed police officers. Worse still, the thing has gotten a nose full of the siblings’ smell, and it very much likes what it smells on one of them.

Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers is a long-time personal favourite of mine I’ve somehow (like a lot of long-time personal favourites, actually) never gotten around to writing up. At the time when this came out, the more mainstream parts of horror were still very much doing the whole pseudo-ironic teen slasher thing we can – and do – blame Wes Craven’s Scream for, with lots of films that were very intent on demonstrating their ironic superiority over their own material instead of putting work into improving the things they were feeling so damn superior about. These weren’t happy horror movie fan times for me, I have to admit.

So Jeepers Creepers, a film bathed in love for traditional horror things from the 50s to the 70s that didn’t feel the need to get all ironic about everything and instead delivered a clever, fun, and creepy monster movie while still showing quite a bit of knowledge of the genre it was working in, just not so much of it that it couldn’t move anymore, felt like a breath of fresh (well, appropriately mouldy) air to me. In fact, it still does, particularly since a lot of what Salva does with it is based on a fine eye for detail that has let the film age well. Or rather, standing somewhat outside of what was typical for the genre of its period, Jeepers Creepers has something of a timeless quality to it.

There is, still, quite a bit of genre love on display, it’s just not primarily used as a basis for jokes but seems to spurn the film on to do things a bit better than would be typical, acknowledging things on eye level. So this is a film where the heroine has enough genre knowledge to know that the killer is going to get up again once hit by a car and proceeds to drive over him again and again, but it is one which plays the scene straight instead of just pointing out the trope to the audience yet still using it unchanged.

Apart from this, Salva does many things just right: the sibling squabbles between Trish and Darry actually read as believable instead as annoying and manage to tell us more about the closeness between the two than long, melodramatic “I love you, brother/sister” exchanges would; the monster is creepy, creative and a bit silly, while staying original and unobvious; Florida here feels very Southern Gothic, the kind of place where a random clairvoyant and bodypart-stealing monsters make sense; and the set and production design is beautiful, atmospheric, and feels just right, the film embracing the dream-like and slightly off whole-heartedly.

Which turns Jeepers Creepers into a small classic in my book.