WarHunt (2022)

The tail end of World War II. A US plane crashes in the German Schwarzwald thanks to what looks a lot like supernatural intervention to me.

Sergeant Brewster (Robert Knepper) and his squad of tired veterans are tasked to wander into the forest, find the plane wreck and rescue possible survivors. For mysterious reasons, one Major Johnson (Mickey Rourke), probably of the BPRD, orders Brewster to take one of his own men, Walsh (Jackson Rathbone) with him as some kind of vaguely defined specialist for something or other.

Brewster is not amused, but it’s the military, so he doesn’t have much of a choice. Walsh will turn out to be a definite asset, what with him being the only one who actually knows what’s going on in the forest. Which is rather useful once the squad is slowly whittled down in numbers, driven crazy or changed by a coven of witches with a bit of a raven fetish.

As regular readers (hi, Mom!) will know, I have a bit of a weakness for pulpy movies about soldiers versus the supernatural, so Mauro Borrelli’s shot in Latvia WarHunt does push some of my favourite buttons.

As it turns out not just because it knows its genre and the tropes and beats it really needs to hit to function in it pretty well, but because it is simply a genuinely entertaining bit of low budget horror that tends to use its minor budget with quite a bit of creativity, perhaps even enthusiasm. At the very least, Borelli (who also co-wrote with Reggie Keyohara III and Scott Svatos) has some good ideas for using bits and pieces of witch folklore in a creative manner, so that the mix of a bit of body horror, some psychological stuff and the action elements that belong to this particular sub-genre go down pretty satisfyingly and feels consistent.

Borrelli’s always at least a competent director here, regularly hitting on a clever piece of framing or presentation, properly spooky lighting or a neat bit of production design to make some scenes rather more than they would be in less invested hands. I’m particularly fond of a genuinely creepy sequence concerning some roasted pig; the set for the climactic fight below a windmill (which is a pretty perfect place for a witches’ lair going by folklore about millers in Europe) is surprisingly wonderful, too.

The films also adds some Hellboy-esque lore to up the stakes the protagonists are fighting for that make decent sense for its kind of pulp universe, and keeps the film away from the problem of having some random soldiers just randomly stumbling on the witches.

Really, the only thing to criticize realistically – this is a low budget pulp horror/action film, so it not being an A24 joint is not actually a point against the film – about WarHunt is the artistically pointless inclusion of Mickey Rourke, whose scenes mostly seem to be in the film to make the most of the couple of shooting days he was available for them, and have little use beyond slowing things down. Though, to be fair, Borrelli does keep the “star”-induced drag I’ve come to detect and loathe through oh so many direct to whatever action movies to a minimum by keeping the Rourke show scenes relatively short and adding them in places where they do not get too annoying. And Knepper, Rathbone and the rest of the film’s actual cast are not only actually in the movie we are watching, but do give perfectly good performances for the kind of film this is.

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A Prayer for the Dying (1987): This one’s not exactly one of Mike Hodges’s great achievements as a director. It tonally wavers between his rather different masterpieces already out at the time, Get Carter and Flash Gordon. So some of the film’s gangster/IRA business is more than just bordering on the camp (take nearly every single scene with Alan Bates’s gangster boss/mortician and much of the overdone Catholic imagery), while other parts of the film have the grey nihilism you’d probably expect from Hodges doing this specific plot. The film’s major problem is that these two sides of the film don’t actually seem to belong together at all, as if the director had used a coin toss before shooting any given scene to come up with its tone. It’s still an interesting film, and never a boring one, mind you, it’s just not terribly good. Though Mickey Rourke’s Irish accent is never less than hilarious.

The Closet aka 클로젯 (keul-lo-jet) (2018 or 2020, depending on the source): Kim Kwang-bin’s South Korean horror film about the disappearance of a daughter thanks to a creature that uses closet doors as dimension doors and the father (Ha Jung-woo) who is trying to rescue her with the help of a somewhat untrustworthy exorcist (Kim Nam-gil) is certainly not going to go down in my books as one of the great horror films from the country. It starts strong, connecting the shared trauma of father and daughter caused by the death of the mother in an accident nicely with the supernatural elements, but once the kid’s gone, things turn into a certainly fast and furious but also not terribly creepy or scary series of jump scares and okay horror set pieces, keeping everything that’s going on too much on the surface and too focussed on cheap and easy shocks. As a carnival ride, it’s still a fair piece of work.

The Big Swindle aka 범죄의 재구성 (2003): Also from South Korea but made a decade earlier, Choi Dong-hoon’s heist movie mixes broad and subtle comedy and silly and clever ideas to excellent effect, using the complicated flashback structure beloved by South Korean cinema at the time to make its series of heists, betrayals, revenges, secrets and lies rather more complicated than it actually is. Complicated, not confusing, though, for Choi has a clear eye for character motivation (even when these motives are hidden or confused), and while the characters’ various plans only make sense in a movie world, they absolutely make sense for these characters to have.


The film presents this with great verve, a love for visual gags, and a game cast consisting of people like Park Shin-yang, Baek Yoon-sik and Yum Jung-ah.

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Avenger of the Seven Seas aka Il giustiziere dei mari (1962): Domenico Paolella's adventure movie contains just about everything one could possibly hope for in an Italian film of its type and era: Richard Harrison! Pirates! The most evil British commanding officer in a film not made in the USA! Italians in brown-face playing cannibals! A giant man-eating plant! Exciting ship battles! Exciting land battles! Torture! Romance! People calling each other traitor for the most perfunctory of reasons so that DRAMATIC EMOTIONS can result!

And while Paolella does not present any of these elements with more than the strictly necessary verve, the resulting film is still very good fun, particularly because it clearly doesn't care that not all of its elements would traditionally belong together in one film.

13 (2010): Director Géla Babluani remakes his own 13 Tzameti with Hollywood talent, so Mickey Rourke is doing is usual shtick, Jason Statham wears a hat and his aggressively grumpy, a painfully fragile looking Ben Gazzara and his fake German accent chew scenery, and 50 Cent can't act for shit. I haven't seen the original, so I can't be as offended by the remake as everyone else seems to be. Instead, I think this is a fine film that uses its organized group Russian Roulette idea as quite obvious critique of capitalism. The film does suffer a bit from a tendency to meander where it would have been more effective for it to be concentrated, particularly because the characters of Rourke, 50 Cent and Gazzara all feel grafted on because the actors were available, and do not really seem to be organic parts of the film.

Maneater aka Evasion (1973): In Vince Edwards's TV thriller made in what must be one of the golden years of TV movies, Ben Gazzara and friends get in trouble with crazy Richard Basehart who defies their city-slicking ways (and gets his kicks from seeing people getting killed; and from ranting, obviously). That would be bad enough for them, but the good man also comes with an equally crazy henchman and two man-eating pet tigers. Soon a very special hunting trip through the wilderness ensues.

What also ensues is a fine little survival thriller (possibly co-written by Jimmy Sangster, though only the IMDB, not the film use his name) full of clever little flourishes. Actor Edwards turns out to be a rather good director, keeping things tight (sometimes consciously claustrophobically so) and letting his actors do the rest. The film's only problem is one I assume nobody involved is responsible for: the version of the film floating around is of a somewhat battered VHS recording (with bonus digital artefacts), and tends to be very very dark, which becomes something of a problem in the film's final third that takes place exclusively in the dark. It speaks quite well of Maneater and its director that it is still thrilling to watch even when you can't see what's going on in it.

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Iron Man 2 (2010): No wonder mainstream critics looked less favourably on Jon Favreau's second Iron Man movie than they did on the first one. Instead of going in the direction of the serious and the dark (and we all know only the serious and the dark can be good, unless your making comedies about neurotic New Yorkers not featuring any explosions), Favreau goes on an all-out binge of the silly and the slightly to heavily ridiculous while trying to tell about half a dozen stories at once without including much of an actual plot holding them together. Not surprisingly, this leads to a highly distractible film that is lacking in coherence and dramatic power and prefers spending its time on play and having (often dumb) fun with whatever it can get its hands on.

Fortunately, I do like the silly and the ridiculous parts of superhero fiction as much as I do the more serious interpretations of the concept, and approve of a director spending ridiculous amounts of big company media money on playing around, so I had just about as much fun with the film as Favreau, Downey and the gang seem to have had.

Machete (2010): I know, as someone mostly specializing in cult movies, I am required by law to look down on the efforts of people like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino mining everyone's favourite cult movies for fun, art and profit, and to mumble some stuff about "stealing" from "my genre" that has nothing whatsoever to do with my understanding of the way cultural products feed on other cultural products or - more specifically - the way classic exploitation movies themselves have been built from other people's ideas and the lust for money (which of course doesn't say anything about their qualities as art or entertainment).

Fortunately, I don't care about that law, and have enjoyed nearly anything Rodriguez (or Tarantino) has ever made. Machete is no exception to that rule. As in Favreau's movie, there's a lot of wallowing in silliness on screen here too, but also a whole bunch of silly/cool pretend violence, a bit of sledgehammer political satire, Steven Seagal actually moving and speaking his own lines (though he does both with the expected problems), mainstream Hollywood actresses not daring to undress, and Danny Trejo doing what Danny Trejo does best. It's all in good fun; most of the time, Machete is a lot of fun.

Spirited Killer 3 (or whatever it is actually called, though this might actually be the spiritual sequel to what usually goes under the name of Spirited Killer 2; 199x): Two groups of people (one Japanese, the other Chinese) are tromping through a well-known patch of Thai jungle in search of a black crane's egg. Alas, an evil shaman played by Panna Rittikrai (who else?), has called dibs on the egg and sets his undead servants (including two ninjas who just love to shout "Nin-nin-nin-nin-ja!") on them. Only when the Japanese, the Chinese and the Thai people of a nearby village unite and team-up with a girl with demonic blood (don't ask) can they hinder the bad guy from using the egg for world domination.

Unfortunately, what sounds like a perfectly awesome piece of weird fu cinema gets dragged down into that very particular brand of Thai slapstick humour that makes me want to bash my own head in when I have to witness it. Not even the ninja or a gut-munching old woman are enough to alleviate the pain of dozens of sped-up chase scenes and pratfalling. Of course, not everyone is as allergic to this sort of thing as I am, so you (yes, YOU!) might well like it.

 

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