Three Films Make A Post: Expose the corruption. Protect the hive.

The Beekeeper (2024): Somehow, for reasons only known to the Hollywood gods who keep good directors out of work, David Ayer still ends up with decent budgets for his movies. This Jason Statham vehicle is John Wick minus the style and the weirdness, with added bee metaphors (so many bee metaphors) and shows our hero boringly killing his way through the usual hordes of incompetent caricatures. There’s never a second where he appears actually threatened, which doesn’t exactly up the excitement ante, and the staging and filming of the action sequences is blandly competent without any sparks of visual or kinetic imagination.

The plot is silly, but never so silly it ever threatens to make the movie fun, and Ayer’s direction lacks style, visual imagination and character to a nearly disturbing degree. Bees and Jason Statham deserve better, as do people who want to actually be entertained by their dumb action movies.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023): On the positive side, The Beekeeper does at least have a vague idea of what its audience might expect of it, it’s just not terribly good at delivering it. This (first and only?) Kaijuverse streaming show as produced for Apple doesn’t, or rather, it appears to believe that what an audience wants from a show named after a secret giant monster hunting organisation are endless scenes of badly written soap operatics, mostly done by C&W style pretty young actors lacking the gravitas and actorly depth that might draw interest out of this nonsense.

Things tend to pick up whenever a monster appears or when the show spends time on flashbacks into the early years of Monarch, but most of its running time is wasted on moves that were old when Dallas made them. Apart from being clueless about what an audience may want from it, the show is also unlucky: take for example, the stunt casting of Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt as the younger version of Kurt’s character. This sounds clever on paper but suffers from the younger Russell’s inability to act his way out of a wet paper bag.

Lord of Misrule (2023): It probably shows my skewed tastes that William Brent Bell’s critically drubbed folk horror movie is the one of these three pieces of media I’d actually recommend to anyone. It’s not that I disagree with the general gist of its critical reception: this is indeed a best of folk horror tropes compilation tape that has little of its own to add to the canon, and isn’t always great at connecting the tropes sensibly.

However, I happen to like these folk horror tropes, and am perfectly okay with the way Bell arranges them here, especially since the production design is derivative as hell, but also looks and feel pretty good. Thus, Bell manages to create at least a handful of decently creepy scenes for Tuppence Middleton to be dramatic in. Which to me makes for a decently good time.

Search for the Gods (1975)

Young Willie Longfellow (Stephen McHattie) - scion of a the Boston Longfellows, I have you know – is travelling the world on a very 70s rich boy kind of search for himself. After a stint in Central America, he has followed the trail of good old liar Carlos Castaneda (repeatedly name-dropped and an obvious inspiration for the film’s brand of the “druggy wisdom of the native people” shtick) to Taos, New Mexico. There, he stumbles into a proper adventure concerning a golden medallion a dying shaman entrusts to him, made from a mysterious unearthly medal a shadowy figure and his main henchman Raymond Stryker (Raymond St. Jacques) want to acquire by all means necessary.

Also involved are ancient aliens, Genara Juantez, the granddaughter of the shaman (Victoria Racimo), the somewhat shady Shan Mullins (a baby-faced Kurt Russell), and an inspiring elderly exposition machine (Ralph Bellamy). There will be a peyote-based test of Willie’s spirit, betrayal, extremely dubious science, and as much adventure as a mid-70s TV film meant as a pilot for a show about Willie’s further adventures finding more medallion pieces that never happened can afford.

The enjoyment one derives from Jud Taylor’s Search for the Gods will most certainly depend on a viewer’s tolerance or love for the kind of pseudo-science and pseudo-religion the decade it was produced in loved so particularly well; this is basically a more honestly fictional episode of In Search Of… with a bit of harmless villainy and violence thrown in.

So if you’re allergic against magical natives, white boys finding themselves through them, absurd ancient alien theories and dynamite-based archaeology, you’ll not find much to like here. Me, I like this sort of things quite a bit, particularly in a case like Search for the Gods where a movie may be a bit silly and a bit cheap, but is actually trying its best with its tropes. So while I rather doubt its depiction of the Taos people is terribly close to their actual cultural beliefs, the film is respectful towards them, certainly not avoiding all magical native business (that would be rather difficult in a film like this, really) but also not landing too far in that particular kind of fantasy. Plus, I just can’t complain about a good peyote-based test of the spirit, authenticity be damned.

It certainly helps that Willie comes over as a genuinely thoughtful and nice guy, not so much a white saviour as a white dude who accidentally asks the right questions at the right time; there’s also nobody to save, really. The film’s treatment of Genara is surprisingly sensible, too, giving her room enough to breathe and be a person, and while not completely avoiding clichés (this is not the sort of film that does that or wants to), providing her with a much more interesting character arc than you’d expect from a native American woman in a mid-70s TV movie. Even the romance between her and Willie is at least half thought through, both characters having mirrored experiences as people who are not at home where their home is supposed to be. The later-born cynic will of course add that Willie’s not being at home as a rich Bostonian is probably a rather easy cross to bear, but you can’t really expect a deep analysis of class structures from a mid-70s TV movie about a possibly alien medallion, nor does this detract much from the film’s general pleasantness. Plus, McHattie turns out to be just as good at playing the soulful nice guy as he is in the rather less nice roles he’s now specialized in, so all this never actually damages the character much.

Racimo as Genara is fine too, keeping a straight face in the sillier moments and nicely avoiding a too melodramatic turn otherwise. The cast’s main weakness is actually Kurt Russell, who surprisingly enough just doesn’t have the charisma yet to play the sort of half-trustworthy rogue he is supposed to be in a convincing manner. Really, he mostly comes over as whiny.

The film’s pacing tends a bit to the meandering side, but Taylor makes much out of the locations (at least in part this was actually shot in Taos), clearly realizing that the desert landscape is one of his greatest assets here. The “people with torches wandering through the desert” set-up for the peyote ceremony is particularly atmospheric, as all scenes of that kind tend to be, but the ceremony itself is pretty fun too, using very simple means and some excellent eye-bugging from McHattie to be trippy and mildly threatening without a budget for special effects.


Apart from the absence of actual aliens on screen, there’s little more you could ask of Search for the Gods, giving its circumstances, so if this sort of thing is like catnip to you, as it is for me, or if you at least think this sounds interesting beyond the cast, you will probably find a nice little TV movie here.

Breakdown (1997)

After their brand new car breaks down on a desert highway, married couple Amy (Kathleen Quinlan) and Jeff Taylor (Kurt Russell) feel lucky when a friendly trucker (J.T. Walsh) pops up only a couple of moments later. Because the car is full with their stuff (they are moving), the plan is for Amy to let the trucker drive her to a relatively close diner where she can organize help while Jeff stays by the car.

Alas, Amy never returns, and the Taylors’ car trouble turns out to be suspiciously easy to solve once Jeff looks at the right place. You know, it looks just like the sort of thing somebody could have done to a car while its owners where away paying for gas. With his freshly self-repaired car, Jeff makes his way to the diner, but nobody there has seen his wife, the trucker, or knows anything about anything, really. After some back and forth with the locals and the unhelpful police, all of which increases his paranoia mightily, Jeff will learn that his wife has been kidnapped by that nice trucker and some of his friends, who have their own brand of highway robbery going on. Fortunately, Jeff is played by Kurt Russell.

If one were of a mind too - and I have indeed read this in a couple of older write-ups of the film - one could certainly be annoyed about the way Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown uses Kathleen Quinlan’s character mostly as a McGuffin in its plot instead of a character with much agency. But then, it’s mostly the bad guys here who actually treat her this way (and one could argue that her dropping a truck on J.T. Walsh at the end demonstrates Amy’s feelings concerning this matter quite well) – Jeff just goes to bat for a person he loves in the only way that seems open to him. Mostow also couldn’t really avoid this kind of accusation without making a completely different film, for showing Amy doing things to free herself, or really showing anything of what happens to her, would open up the limited perspective the audience and Jeff share, and on which much of the film’s initial tension is based on. As a matter of fact, Amy does certain things to stay alive longer; how this affects Jeff, the film rather elegantly demonstrates later on in practice.

But enough about that, for most of my very mild annoyance about the kidnapped woman trope stopped early on thanks to the sheer conviction of Mostow’s film. There’s such an elegant flow, and such a believable tension coming with the escalation of Jeff’s troubles and emotional state – from confusion, to anger, to total paranoia, to increasing violence – that more abstract considerations just stopped for me after half an hour or so. Breakdown is full of clever little moments and gestures to show how much out of his depth Jeff is. The early film portrays him as your typical upper middle-class guy who has trouble effectively communicating with anyone from the working class beyond economical transactions, sending out exactly the wrong signals to everyone he meets and seemingly unable to read those around him. In fact, the film hints it is this behaviour that has gotten the Taylors in trouble at first. It will, however, turn out it isn’t a backwoods horror family threatening them but just a couple of guys with a disturbingly casual relationship to violence who see the Taylors as easy prey because of quite different signals sent by both of them.


Which then leads to a tense, expertly timed, and tightly staged series of escalating chase and action sequences that should really bring anyone watching right onto the proverbial edges of their seats. Breakdown is as good a mid-budget action thriller as you’ll probably encounter, tight and clever, changing pace and shape with verve and always at just the right moment, further improved by a fine cast in a very good mood.

In short: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

If you’re looking for a counter-argument to the idea that the big commercial movie universes suppress all individual directorial expression, the Guardians movies are your most obvious starting point, seeing as their tone and style fit exactly into the oeuvre of James Gunn. Witness the way crude and blunt humour sometimes hide the rather more clever jokes the film makes; or just watch how cynical little asides so often glide into moments of actual human emotion that are just as important for the film as the big set pieces and explosions are. And these are pretty damn important to the film, it’s just that Gunn clearly sees no qualitative difference between the loud and the quiet, the goofy and the clever. Blockbuster cinema here means a film that sets out to fulfil all kinds of different expectations, not to be all things to all people, but because being a bit messy and complicated and rich is what this sort of filmmaking should be about.

One might argue that the film’s thematic concerns about families of choice, of blood and of chance are not the most original ones but I suspect very much most members of the film’s audience will have found themselves involved in one or more of these kinds of families, and can certainly connect to some of what’s going on under the loud, beautiful and bonkers surface; which is more than I can say about these “universal”, important films beloved by mid-brow criticism that are inevitably about the sex life of rich people or academics. Plus, Gunn really doubles down when he uses well-worn tropes – one just has to look at the shape, form and dimension the standard “killing of the father” takes on in this film. It’s big in the best way.


But what really does make this such a wonderful film is how much care Gunn takes with the small things. It’s not just the nearly absurd number of throwaway gags going on in the background (and certainly not stopping with the end credits), it’s how tiny dialogue moments from the first Guardians are given greater meaning (and ambiguity) through just as tiny throw-away lines here, how there’s always a little more going on in every scene than the most direct reading of it suggests.

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

The old West. A pair of drifters and murderers (David Arquette and good old Sid Haig) accidentally desecrate the burial ground belonging to a group of cannibalistic troglodytes. Sid Haig gets himself murdered right quick, but Arquette’s character manages to escape to a nearby town where he raises the interest of local Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) enough to get himself shot in the leg.

Hunt calls in Samantha O’Dwyer (Lili Simmons), the unofficial yet highly competent actual town doctor without a degree - not to be confused with the alcoholic official town doctor we never get to see. The sheriff leaves her to tend to the prisoner under the care of his deputy, and calls it a night. The next morning, he finds a stable boy dead, and Lili, the deputy, the drifter and a bunch of horses gone. The murderers and abductors were of course the troglodytes the drifter accidentally led into town; at first, the Sheriff suggests it must have been an Indian attack, but as a quickly called in Native American diagnoses in a scene that feels a lot like the film holding up a placard with “See, we’re not racist against Native Americans” written on it, these weren’t actual Indians but members of a tribe of a degenerate and cannibalistic monster people dwelling in caves, though they might look like Indians to the unenlightened white people. See, it’s totally okay the film’s not going to give these guys even a single human trait, because the Indian said it’s alright.

Anyway, the Sheriff, his elderly reserve deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), so racist even the Old West characters around him don’t approve John Brooder (Matthew Fox), and Lili’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), who is suffering from a pretty debilitating leg wound since falling from a roof trying to be manly, are all the posse this town gets together to follow the troglodytes to their lair to save the abducted. Things won’t exactly go to plan.

So, did anyone ever really miss the cannibal movie? 2015 finally brought us the return of films about inhuman brown people eating white people nobody asked for, though at least without the real animal violence, because that really wouldn’t cut it today. I very much hope one day one of them will get around to perhaps do at least as much as Cannibal Holocaust did when examining its own assumptions – or, you know, just replace their cannibals with actual monsters and be done with it.

S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk isn’t that film; it is, in fact, not interested in facing the problem at the core of this particular sub-genre head on at all, therefore we get the scene described above, which really seems like an attempt at creating an easy out to me. On the other hand, the scene also suggests the film isn’t really interested in this sort of discussion of race at all and really rather sees its cannibals as representations of the dark heart of humanity, dehumanizing violence and so on and so forth. That’s of course problematic in contemporary parlance, but I’m generally trying to take on films on their own terms, and so am willing to appreciate the film is actually quite clear about its terms early on, giving me the opportunity to take them or leave them. Given how adept the film is at what it actually wants to do, I took them.

Once and if you do, you might just be surprised by the first one and a half hours of film you actually get, because while the troglodytes are introduced early on, for the longest time the film belongs to the calm and unhurried kind of modern western, with dialogue that at first seems to be a bit too indebted to Quentin Tarantino but then turns out to carry a different kind of emphasis and emotional weight that seems specific to Zahler (at least when you’ve read some of the man’s novels which I can highly recommend), and some spectacularly moody landscape shots that stand in strong contrast to the somewhat bland looking scenes taking place in town. There’s very little – though just enough – plot in these first two thirds of the film. Instead, Zahler puts all his considerable talent into creating a sense of a place and its dislocating brutality yet also into making the characters feel deeply human and complicated, even Fox’s vile racist whom most films would turn into an easy target for their audience’s hatred or give a too easy shot at redemption. There’s an honesty to the characterisation that feels special and personal, rooted in certain genre conventions but given space to breathe and live by dialogue that only seems self-indulgent on first contact, and based on a bunch of excellent acting performances.

This does of course make things emotionally harder to stomach when the film finally gets its cannibal movie on; I at least had grown rather fond of the characters and didn’t really want to see them getting ripped to pieces in horrible ways. So in that regard, the film too is quite the success, with one or two scenes that leave you squirming not just because they are unpleasant to watch but because they actually mean something.


Combine that with how uncomfortable I still am with the whole not-really-native-American cannibals, and you have, well, a film I find effective, moving, and meaningful yet also find myself struggling with loving unreservedly not because it’s a bad movie – it is indeed a very fine one – but because I wish it were different in a single aspect I found difficult to overlook in a film made today (well, or 2015).

Re-watching Escape From New York

John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981) has been one of my favorite movies seen I first saw it on German cable TV about twenty years ago.

There wouldn't be much sense in reviewing it - me using six hundred words to squee "I love it, I love it" looks like a waste of perfectly good blog space to me.

So I'm just going to list some of the details that made me especially happy this time:

• Parts of the music sound like further reduced E.S.G.!
• The relative disinterest the film takes in Snake's little gladiatorial match, which fits its anti-hero's poise perfectly. (And is exactly the thing some of Carpenter's later macho-fests like Vampires are missing)!
• The pure joy of having just about every single role cast with a b-movie hero(ine)!
• An ending that still says "Fuck you!" as beautifully as a perfect punk single!

Darling of the Day: "Snake Plissken!? I heard you were dead!"

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