Three Films Make A Post: Family over everything.

Shadow Force (2025): Joe Carnahan always has been a bit of a hit or miss filmmaker for me, though when he hits, he does tend to find the bullseye.

This piece of action cinema, though, does feel like the product of someone who can’t even be bothered to look in the direction of the target. Everything here, from the bland direct to DVD actioner look (this is not actually a direct to whatever movie), the lifeless script without character or style, the blandly generic action choreography to a script that can’t even be bothered to be interesting enough to be called clichéd, and finally the deeply dull performances by a cast that could do so much better, lacks so completely in personality and life, it’s difficult to even call this a movie. Hell, even “content” might be too friendly a description for something this lacking in soul.

Invader (2024): Certainly not lacking in personality is this brutal serial killer movie by Mickey Keating. This time around, the stylistically very varied director goes all out on jittery, nervous energy, often shaking, handheld camera that perfectly puts into picture the sense of looming threat and paranoia its main character (Vero Maynez) suffers as a foreigner in the USA. Particularly this USA, at this point in time. And though this is mostly a highly efficient, condensed, and often quite nasty, horror movie about a woman threatened by a killer, it works all too well as a mirror of how its time and place feels.

The Executioner (1974): One can’t help but hope the Japan of 1974 did feel like this Teruo Ishii action movie starring beloved Sonny Chiba as the youngest descendent of the Koga ninja clan, gone down in the world to steal a bunch of drugs from the Japanese franchise of the Mafia with a former policeman and a sex pest. For its combination of bizarre violence and the violently bizarre is pretty delightful.

Sure, Ishii has directed weirder things – he’s mostly doing Man’s Adventure with tongue planted firmly in cheek here – and Chiba has been in weirder and/or better movies, but if I’d start judging their movies, or any movies, on that bar, there’d be a very limited amount of joy to be found in my movie watching world.

As far as the world of silly, violent Toei exploitation movies go, this is doing its job of entertaining me more than just fine.

Offseason (2021)

Following a letter that informs her the grave of her actress mother Ava (Melora Walters) has been desecrated in some way, and that her direct and personal involvement is needed, Marie Aldrich (Jocelin Donahue) and her on-again off-again friend George (Joe Swanberg) make a long cross-country drive to the island where Ava is buried. It’s Ava’s birthplace as well as the one place in the world she never wanted to return to – not even dead. Strangely, her testament said otherwise.

During the summer months, the island is a tourist paradise but now, it’s just in the process of being completely shut down for the off-season. Even the bridge connecting it to the main land is going to be closed in a few hours, so Marie should finish her business as quickly as possible. Alas, that’s easier said than done, for the graveyard keeper who wrote to her is nowhere to be found, and the rest of the island population that’s still there is in turns weird, creepy, and somewhat threatening, or all three together. There’s clearly something wrong with the place beyond the feeling of desolation that comes with near-empty places that should be full of people, and worse: something seems to have lured Marie here for a reason.

The newest film by Mickey Keating seems to be rather divisive. I’m not all that surprised about this, for it’s a calm movie that only seems interested in its narrative as a framework to hang a series of moods and evocative set pieces on. So this is a film much more dominated by long shots of Donahue walking through foggy empty small town streets, or along a desolate beach right out of a BBC Ghost Story for Christmas or Messiah of Evil than it is by its minimalist horror plot. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing at all to the handful of more straightforward sequences, nor that there’s no emotional resonance to Marie’s flashbacks to her mother’s deathbed confessions she took for delirium; rather, all of this feels part of Offseason’s evocation of mood through place.

This sort of thing is pretty much catnip to me, and even more so in a film that evokes (which really seems to be the central verb here in more than one way) films like the ones I’ve already mentioned as well as the mood of Fulci’s mid-period without the gore, the framing techniques of John Carpenter, and those parts of US local filmmaking from the 70s that found places like this film’s beach and small town for their stories to play out in. Offseason is part of a very specific lineage of films and books of the fantastic where islands and beaches are liminal places where the fantastic and the horrific enters human lives; Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth”, Messiah of Evil or Carpenter’s The Fog are just a part of this type of horror.

Because the desolate and the creepy often are, this is a rather astonishingly beautiful film (even more so given a small budget), framed and shot with a calm and elegance that I’ve not seen in Keating’s earlier film. These earlier films – as this one is as well - were all wonderful examples of how to make different aesthetic approaches a director’s own, but they were also usually intense to the border of hysteria, whereas Offseason seeks and finds a calmer way towards its own form of dread, one I find personally rather more enticing.

Donahue is pretty fantastic, too, not just because she’s suggesting a 70s indie horror heroine through look and style, but also because she’s so genuinely good at being present in the weirdness and desolation of Offseason’s world, moving through it and witnessing it with the appropriate confusion and horror but also with a certain poise that seems to suggest a kinship between her and these places. Which does make sense on a plot level, as well.

The only thing about the film that doesn’t quite resonate with me as strongly is that it explains slightly too much of what we’ve witnessed in the final couple of scenes, making the weird ever so slightly more mundane in the process. But that’s not a major problem, because it’s not a major kind of explanation, and so Offseason really leaves me a bit giddy about how good a film it is; at least for someone with my very specific tastes.

In short: Carnage Park (2016)

A very bad day at the small town bank trying to get life-saving money out of an ass turns even worse for farmer’s daughter Vivian (Ashley Bell) when she is taken hostage by Tarantino wash-out gangster “Scorpion” Joe Clay (James Landry Hébert). Joe Clay’s day then gets even worse – though much shorter - than hers when his partner dies from wounds incurred during their little bank heist and he ends up driving them right into the territory of a Vietnam vet serial killer (Pat Healy) with a rifle and a nasty streak.

Of course, it’s Vivian who will have to survive a series of chases and fights against the madman, through the desert, the kind of ramshackle huts all movie killers love, as well as some really unhealthy looking mines. Fortunately, she will turn out to be rather tougher than she looks.

All of the movies of director Mickey Keating seem to be made with a pretty specific model of a different genre and period style in mind. In Carnage Park’s case, we are quite obviously in the land of 70s exploitation horror cinema. Keating, despite production design quite in the proper grimy style, and using a digital colour scheme meant to evoke the yellowing prints many of us have watched movies of the era in, is not a mere imitator either here or in any of his films, always using elements, details in the characterization, and so on that ground his films very much in the decade they are made in instead of going for exclusive retro cool.

Keating’s editing style is certainly of our time, his use of cross-cutting to short flashbacks pretty much the opposite of period approaches to storytelling, his editing making the film’s pacing much faster than typical of the 70s. To my eyes, rather than being retro, the film seems to create a sort of dream-version of 70s horror that mixes some of the best of that decade’s style with some of the best of today’s.


Carnage Park is certainly one of the director’s less abstract movies, really going all-out in telling a traditionally exciting tale, using some of the somewhat psychedelic visual tricks for exploring his female protagonist’s inner life that seem central to his other films, but ending up with a rather more straightforward suspense piece than one might expect going in. That’s not a criticism, mind you, for while I do like my abstract arthouse horror, a rather well-done exercise in suspense by a director usually tending to abstract arthouse horror is a nice thing, too. Particularly since Keating turns out to be rather good at this sort of thing too, adding a more direct sense of tension his other movies tend to lack. Why, he even makes a climax that’s mostly taking place in the dark work as much more than a statement of intent.

Three Films Make A Post: There is a cat in the brain

Elysium (2013): One shouldn't be surprised about the critical drubbing Neill Blomkamp's neo-cyberpunk movie received by mainstream critics. It's a film far too angry about the state of the world for the bourgeois set to stomach. Particularly since it's not at all graceful about its rage and would clearly love to punch you (and possibly me, too) in the face - for good reasons.
That feeling of well-grounded yet quite consuming rage the film shares with its protagonist Matt Damon (in one of his good outings) does of course also cause its final act to turn into a full-grown violent wish fulfilment fantasy with a dash of deus ex machina but then, how else could Elysium not end in absolute bitterness? Generally, even in the real world, power doesn't sit down with the people it crushes under its boots to build a better world, so I don't know how else the film could have ended. Unless you'd argue for bitter and pessimistic, in which case you could of course kiss the money Blomkamp needed for all the pretty SF stuff on screen goodbye.

Maneater (2007): Gary Yates's SyFy Channel movie is a perfectly entertaining little film about a tiger making its new home in the woods belonging to your typical US small town, eating hunters, joggers, and other undesirables. Thanks to a very entertaining performance of Gary Busey as one of the nicest and more competent sheriffs in this sort of movie, the inclusion of a tiger-telepathic little boy sub-plot, as well as of a great white British hunter with excellent facial hair (one supposes for the screenwriter British colonial India is still a thing) it's really rather pleasant to watch. Of course, originality, etc. etc.


Ritual (2013): Original isn’t what Mickey Keating’s Ritual is about either but this quite low budget piece about an estranged couple’s troubles with some Texan cultists highly recommends itself with as clever a use of seemingly low res footage as one could wish for, an idea of Americana bordering on David Lynch, and a highly effective approach to showing its doomed protagonists stumbling ever deeper into trouble. It’s a very simple story but Keating tells his tale so well and with such a fine hand for pacing only the most churlish would mind. In fact, the simplicity of the plot and the archetypal form the film’s threats take on only help make its best scenes (and there are many) all the more nightmarish.

In short: Pod (2015)

When his brother Martin (Brian Morvant) leaves his physician brother Ed (Dean Cates) a disturbed sounding and more than just a little disquieting message on his answer phone, Ed grabs their estranged alcoholic sister Lyla (Lauren Ashley Carter) and drives off to the cabin in the middle of nowhere where Martin lives to stage a neat little family intervention.

Martin, you see, has been having psychological problems ever since he left the army, perhaps based on what may or may not have happened to him in one of the last US wars. His last institutionalization was on Ed’s head, though he isn’t quite convinced anymore that was the right idea to help Martin get better. Or rather, he isn’t until Lyla and he arrive at Martin’s cabin. There, Martin doesn’t just threaten them with a rifle for a bit but also starts off on an insane, long, and very loud rant about the experiments the government did on him, the “pods” they created as horrible weapons, how he found one of these pods in the woods – or maybe it found him - and how how he has now locked it away in his cellar. From here on out, things escalate rather quickly, for as insane as Martin sounds, he really has something rather monstrous locked away down there and the government – as represented by yet another Larry Fessenden cameo – truly is somehow involved.

Sure sure sure, yes yes yes, Mickey Keating’s indie horror exercise in conspiracy theories and mad screeching is not the most original of films, and it’s true, it can be a somewhat annoying film thanks to its insistence on ever-increasing loudness and cheap shock effects.

However, watching Pod, I found myself mostly enjoying it, the shameless and unapologetic way it mixes alien conspiracy theories’ greatest hits, its clear disinterest in being tasteful when that means giving up on having fun or diluting the pure power of SCREAMING LOUDLY IN YOUR FACE for at least two thirds of its running time. And while that might sound pretty dumb, this isn’t a dumb film at all – at least, the way it plays with its clichés feels rather clever to me, playful without becoming lamely ironic.

Obviously, this sort of film needs acting dialled up to eleven, and that’s exactly what the small cast provides for your eighty minutes of dysfunctionality. Particularly Morvant gives his all in what might not be the most authentic portrayal of somebody suffering a psychotic break but certainly is an effective – and very loud – one, leaving no head un-pounded and no eardrum still.