Three Films Make A Post: What happened to flight 298?

Black Box (2026): Or, as we should probably call it Body Snatcher Tentacles On A Plane, for this is indeed an unironic attempt at adding more tentacles (and UFO conspiracy nonsense) to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and setting it on a plane. Kudos for creative mixing towards director Steven Quale, at least.

Unfortunately, a commercial airline flight isn’t actually that great a place for the kind of paranoia various versions of the Body Snatchers are interested in: your seat neighbour being taken over loudly does not have as much resonance as your loved ones being taken over quietly.

It’s not a bad movie, actually, and some sharper character work might even have turned it into a good one, but the film can’t quite escape the sense that most of the thinking involved in its production went into its initial set-up, and much less into what to then do with it.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026): Whereas this movie following the generally entertaining streaming adventures of its titular characters simple puzzles me, because its flaws are really rather atypical of the way blockbuster franchise movies are designed. Namely, these films do tend to follow a pretty strict scriptwriting rulebook where stakes are set up in the first act, escalated in the second and resolved in the third, where characters have rather precisely timed arcs, and the series of CGI set-pieces does of course escalate in size and drama as well.

None of this happens in Jon Favreau’s movie: there isn’t an actual plot, there sure as shit aren’t any dramatic or personal stakes, and the characters not only don’t go through any kind of arc, but demonstrate less, well, character then they do in the streaming show.

I do understand setting up the usual trappings of a blockbuster and failing, but not even trying nor even attempting to come up with something to replace them does leave me rather confused by the whole production.

The Bells of Astercote (1980): This BBC kid’s movie about two terribly well-spoken children stumbling upon a local legend that suddenly becomes entwined with the present when a golden chalice(!) hidden in the woods supposed to protect a nearby village from a return of the Plague is stolen belongs to a very different time. Then, proper children’s television was allowed to be mildly creepy, and resonant with folk imaginings. Different times, indeed, and while this isn’t one of the truly great examples of the form, it is worth an hour of one’s time, if only to become astonished by the way tropes of kid’s adventure, 70s style, collide here repeatedly with folklore and horror.

It’s like the Famous Five, but with less racism, and magic is real.

R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead (2025)

Following the in today’s grief-struck horror mood obligatory death of the father of the family, Cassie (Kendra Anderson) and her sons, seventeen-year old Finn (Seth Isaac Johnson) and thirteen-year old Sam (Bean Reid) move to a small farming community in what I can’t help but call the sticks.

Sam is particularly unhappy, not just because he’s a kid in puberty who has lost his father and is moving town, but also because he feels more than just a little excluded from the closer, easier, relationship between Cassie and Finn. As kids do, he acts out. Unfortunately, he decides to steal the annual “Prized Pumpkin” (actually an ugly thing nobody would want to eat, or even look at) of the farmer the locals somehow see as responsible for the town’s agricultural luck turning to the better some years ago. Finn, who is a perfectly good brother, decides to help Sam avoid some nastiness with the farmer by bringing the pumpkin back for him the night of the deed.

Alas, Finn has a rather nasty supernatural encounter on the farm and doesn’t return home. Worse still, none of the grown-ups, not even Cassie, can remember Finn ever existed at all, and can’t even perceive any proof of his existence. As the Sheriff’s daughter Becka (Adeline Lo), who had already befriended Sam and warned him against having anything to do with the farm, explains, this sort of thing happens somewhat regularly in town – kids disappear, people who hit the age of eighteen or are above it forget them, crops grow. She’s willing to help Sam in his attempt to get his brother back, whatever has happened to him. Also involved will be the local hermit Rusty (Matty Finochio), a nasty protective scarecrow thing with very bad breath, and one of those grimoires of the facebook type.

Tubi Originals tend to be less than great movies, often lacking in verve and cleverness as much as in budget. Jem Garrard’s Pumpkinhead – based on the favourite kids and teen horror writer of a lot of North Americans of a certain age – is only a bit lacking in the last one, but never lets this lack of funds stop it from doing basically everything right for the kind of kids horror film old-ass people like me can enjoy as well.

The characters are simply but effectively drawn, the young actors are doing pretty well – Lo could certainly have an actual career in front of her – and the script finds the fine balance between goofy humour, proper horror, and knowing winks to tropes and genre conventions. “You don’t come to the forest hermit for a straight answer” is pretty great, to take the most obvious example for the last one.

The film isn’t afraid to be a bit grotesque when it needs to be – the final pumpkin head form is not something I’d have expected in a contemporary kids’ movie made for the US market, even if it is actually made in Canada like this one, and the scarecrow thing is genuinely creepy, as well as enthusiastically played.

Pumpkinhead is worthwhile in other regards as well. Character motivations and their emotional background make sense (at least for the kind of world this takes place in), and the film clearly knows what it is doing when it is talking about love and friendship by example instead of moral. It’s not terribly deep, but it’s genuine and believable in context. Because it does emotions this well, it also manages to sneak in an ending that actually becomes darker the more you look at it in context of what the characters fear and desire here, not the usual horror movie bullshit ending but a genuine price to be paid.

Visually, this is nothing fancy, but Garrard knows how to create mood and tension, and works around the budgetary constraints of the production really well. There’s nothing here that seems truncated, missing, or undeveloped, which leaves R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead as one of my surprise highlights of this Halloween season.

In short: Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)

Mike (Josh Hutcherson), a fashionably traumatized guy taking care of his neurodivergent sister (Piper Rubio), gets a job as a night-watchman at something called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a half-ruined establishment that still harbours some working weird animatronic more-than-human sized animals. Alas, those somewhat creepy looking things are possessed by the souls of dead children and can get rather murderous.

I’m neither a fan of the FNAF games nor am I part of their – and most probably this film’s – intended audience. This is clearly made with entry level horror viewers or fans of the game franchise in mind, but I do believe the former deserve a more interesting and coherent movie. The film’s script is a total mess, with subplots and characters that often don’t feel as if they were written with kids as an audience in mind but actually written by one – the whole business about Mike’s aunt’s attempts at getting hold of Abby is particularly embarrassing – whereas Mike’s trauma scenes seem to belong into a completely different movie.

Some of the horror scenes are effective enough for what they are – director Emma Tammi can do better as we know – and the animatronic animals look pretty great in motion, but there’s no flow, no character and no personality to either the filmmaking or the film itself, leaving this not just as a product, but as a deeply mediocre product with little of interest to it. Kids deserve a better entry drug.

In short: The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (1968)

Original title: Hebi musume to hakuhatsuma

Young Sayuri (Yachie Matsui) has spent most of her life in an orphanage. Not a Dickensian one, mind you, but a rather pleasant place with grown-ups who actually are positive attachment figures for her.

Nonetheless, Sayuri is both confused and excited when her long lost family finds her and takes her home. It is not an ideal home, to say the least. Mom’s crazy, herpetologist Dad zips off on an expedition the same day Sayuri arrives, only leaving his snake collection, and Sayuri’s secret sister? Is usually hidden away in an attic room and looks a lot like a snake person. She loves to peep at Sayuri through a hole in the ceiling of our heroine’s room and makes her life a living hell. So much so, the kid is also starting to be plagued by surrealist nightmares.

And because all of that isn’t quite a bad enough time for the girl, there’s also a silver-haired witch haunting the borders of the movie, and some murders to look forward to.

This Daiei horror movie is strictly aimed at kids and adapts some tales by the great mangaka Kazuo Umezu, from the phase of his career when he was involved in creating horror shojo manga (that is horror manga aimed at a teen female audience).

Director Noriaki Yuasa – also the guy responsible for most of the Gamera films of the time – often achieves the proper movie version of the manic, hysterical energy of Umezu’s girls’ horror work. As is tradition in this genre, our virtuous heroine is confronted with indignities, injustices and child-sized horrors and mainly comes through them by keeping her chin up and the innate goodness of her heart intact.

The horrors are certainly not something to disturb a contemporary grown-up, yet there’s an inherent weirdness to the whole tale that makes the film a fascinating and fun experience even for us, the elderly. There’s nary a scene going by where Yuasa doesn’t take the crazier way to portray something as long as he can keep to a beautifully crisp black and white aesthetic at the same time. The dream sequences, looking like Dali meeting Umezu, fittingly enough, are particularly great, suggesting that the really rather square Sayuri must have a more interesting side buried under all her straightforward goodness. They also look not quite like anything I’ve seen before, even actual Dali dream sequences.

Thrilling Bloody Sword (1981)

aka The Thrilling Sword

aka Heaven Sword

Original title: 神劍動山河

When his wife dies giving birth to a red, oval, pulsating flesh egg, the ruling king of wherever this takes place (Chin Han) decides to get rid of the thing by doing the old Moses bit. The egg (cocoon?) finds its way to The Seven Dwarfs of the Happy Forest (seriously) who quickly learn there’s a healthy human baby girl inside of the fleshy exterior. They decide to raise her as their daughter.

Seventeen years later, our heroine (I believe the delightfully named Fanny Fang Fang-Fang) has grown up to be beautiful, morally pure, and so on. She becomes involved in her birth father’s business again by fate: meeting a heroic prince (Liu Shang-Chien) of the king’s realm and falling in love with him are one. Her feelings are reciprocated, and things could be set for a very quick happy end, if not for the fact that the king has invited two heroic exorcists to his court who are actually a couple of evil, devil worshipping magicians. These two are trying to usurp his throne by all means necessary, after having won the king’s trust by beating monsters they have conjured up themselves and by attacking his counsellors in front of him. Turning heroic princes into embarrassed looking bears, mind-controlling lost daughters and other acts of bizarre fiendishness are all in the program. Fortunately there’s help for the lovers: apart from the dwarfs, who are actually transformed generals, there’s a tiny, magic-wielding fairy willing to go out of her way to help, as well as a ridiculous looking sword that shoots laser beams (paired with an equally ridiculous looking armour), and other whacky nonsense.

Apparently, this Taiwanese fantasy wuxia variant of Snow White (or a Taiwanese version of the same folk tale model) directed by Chang Hsin-Yi is meant as a kids movie. This certainly tracks with other kids movies from the country I’ve encountered, seeing as it is both inexplicable and weird, and seems to be made for the kind of kids you probably wouldn’t want to encounter in the dark. Or really by day – they might shoot laser beams at you.

The whole thing is a WTF movie of the highest degree: it makes its folk tale sources as weird as possible (as if folk tales weren’t already strange enough), adding inexplicable flourishes, scenes of the kind of goofy nonsense some grown-ups believe kids find funny, bits and pieces of other popular fantasy movies – apart from Hong Kong, Chinese sources and Disney, I bet somebody here has seen their share of Harryhausen films and peplum – and random stuff whose reason to be in the movie – or anywhere else - is dubious and inexplicable (in the sense of “please, don’t explain”).

There are so many questions here, from the obvious, “what’s with the horrifying looking chicken bird/whatever muppet pet the dwarfs keep?” to more exalted ones like “why do the devil icons with the lightbulb eyes our baddies converse with have additional mouths in their crotches?”, or “where does a bear costume so bad, it looks actually embarrassed by itself even come from?”.

The movie is certainly not going to answer them, and I’m a little afraid to speculate. It is easier, and certainly more entertaining, to just let the film wash over one’s psyche like radiation. Very possibly, joy will sprout from your brain, like a flower in a Clark Ashton Smith story, when you realize the magic mirror from the folk tale has been replaced by a devil statue talking through its crotch mouth, or encounter the frog person sirens and their buddy the mini-Rodan while our prince is on his quest, or simply try to keep up with bizarre leaps of logic and genre.

Added bonus joys are an awesome needle-dropped score, special effects that clearly care not a whit about how ridiculous they look, and so become impressive in their ridiculousness, a plot that can’t help but do everything, even a simple hero’s quest, as weirdly as possible, and direction that really goes out of its way to make everything look as weird as it should be.

In short: H.P. Lovecraft & The Frozen Kingdom (2016)

I’m not the kind of orthodox Lovecraft fan who clamps his tentacles in horror at the mere idea of an all ages animated film concerning the man (or as in this case the boy) and his yog-sothery, so in principle, I have no problem whatsoever with the basic conception of Sean Patrick O’Reilly’s animated feature. Unfortunately, I do have quite a few with the film’s actual execution.

The animation side suffers from all the problems you might suspect when confronted with low budget computer animation: movement is often jerky, characters lack personality thanks to their painfully generic design and a minimum of detail, and the lack of background detail here borders on the absurd.A more creative approach to these technical and budgetary limitations could have turned into a style of its own for the film, but the way things end up on screen, the characters and environments just looks tacky and cheap. That’s certainly not a way to get sucked into the film’s world – unless bad digital animation is cosmic horror for kids.

The voice acting is weird. On paper, the film features a perfectly capable cast (with the bigger names of course playing the smallest roles), yet the style of the performances fluctuates wildly, one third of the actors aiming for an 80s Saturday morning cartoon style, another third sounding as if they were reading directly from a script the have just encountered for the very first time, and only the last third turns out something that actually fits the tone of the film they are in. It’s so all over the place one might question if there was any voice direction involved at all.


The concepts for the film’s world aren’t half bad, though you can hold it against The Frozen Kingdom that half of its Lovecraft references are mere namedropping without any actual use for the narrative, whereas much of the other half is used in often terribly un-Lovecraftian ways. The latter isn’t a problem for me, but the more conservative Lovecraft fans among the audience might get somewhat annoyed. And it’s not as if there’s much to distract anyone from any annoyances here, what with the lack of visual power, and a plot that is a very basic quest set-up presented with a lot of convoluted detail to make it look more complex than it actually is - and failing at that. Frankly, it’s a waste of a good idea, or the rough draft of a movie waiting for someone to actually polish it up.

In short: Haunted School (1995)

aka School for Ghosts

Original title: Gakko no kaidan

There's trouble in the elementary school of a Japanese small town. On the last school day before the beginning of summer holidays, a small girl wanders into the theoretically closed-down old school building, and doesn't come back out. Her brother goes looking for her, but soon enough he and a handful of other kids who wandered inside looking for adventure find themselves lost and locked in the school. Being locked turns out to be their smallest problem, though - a ball game accident has shattered one of the clay figures holding the local evil spirits and ghosts at bay, and now quite a few of them want to spend some quality with the kids.

Even when grown-ups in the form of a nerdy teacher and the motorcycle mechanic sister of one of the kids appear the day isn't easily saved.

Hideyuki Hirayama's Haunted School is quite obviously a film for kids, and therefore would not usually fall into my area of expertise or interest. However, Haunted School is a Japanese film for kids full of rubber monsters and a bit of the crazy, which is pretty much what I'm all about, so I felt forced (forced! I tell you!) to watch it in the interest of rubber monster science.

I wasn't disappointed, at least not much. The film starts out a bit slow, with not much more than a flying watermelon with a carved face and a levitating ball to ease the adult viewer through the introduction of the (not very interesting) kids and their (sorry, not very interesting, either) problems, but once everyone has been kidnapped by ghosts and spirits a fine time for the friend of all kind of monsters begins. There are rather large feet to gawk at, the digital yokai brother of Ghostbusters' Slimer makes an appearance, an anatomical model grows rather lively innards and a bad temper, and a bearded janitor first grows excellent spider appendages and then transforms fully into a rubber spider monster. Said innards and the spider transformations are the kind of stuff only a Japanese movie (or perhaps, looking at Doctor Who, a British one) would dare present as kids' entertainment, in the certain knowledge that kids can and will cope with this sort of thing and will probably even love it, because monsters are cool however old you are, and slightly freakish monsters are always the best.

Haunted School also has one or two valuable lessons to teach (one even about death being something natural), but it's fortunately not the sort of film that feels any need for loud preaching. I didn't like films preaching at me when I was a kid, and I certainly don't like them doing it now, so this avoidance sound like a sound artistic decision to me, especially when the preaching time can be spent much more fruitfully by showing some kids running away screaming from a lump of flesh that once looked like a human being.

If there's anything more enjoyable to watch than the archetypal confrontation between human and rubber, then I don't know what, and - frankly - don't want to hear about it. Instead, why not watch Haunted School again?

 

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