Tell Me Something (1999)

Detective Cho (Han Suk-kyu), right now under investigation for taking dirty money to pay for the medical bills of his now deceased mother, is still tasked with solving a serial killer case in rainy, dark Seoul. After a couple of dead men, Cho finds out that the victims all have something in common – they once dated artist (and daughter of a very famous artist herself) Chae Soo-yeon (Shin Eun-ha).

While Soo-yeon is not a suspect, she is very much of interest to the investigation, though she doesn’t really appear to want to break out of her shell of being a quiet, mysterious beauty. Perhaps she’ll change her mind when Cho finds himself rather drawn to her; or when the killer’s gaze seems to fall more directly on her than on her former lovers?

Often glacially paced, Yun-hyeon Jang’s serial killer thriller takes all of the elements of the late-90s state of the genre and gives them a good shake in a very typical South Korean approach to genre filmmaking to reconfigure it in shapes still quite recognizable yet also slightly estranged from their common form.

Which, given that part of the film’s thematic heft rests on creating a mood of alienation that’s just as big as its mood of menace, is a rather good way to get its audience on track, or at least in the right mood.

And mood really is where the film’s strengths rest – this is all grungy locations, rain, moody dark lightning, noir gone just about digital, interspersed with some moments of brutality, some of action, and carried by Cho’s halting attempts to move through the labyrinth of a case that appears constructed to foil and fool him personally. Why, if you didn’t know it better, you might think the universe wanted to tell him something about himself, the doubtful nature of mysteries or even the depths of his own heart.

In other – okay, American, hands, this would probably have turned into an erotic thriller with copious fucking between cop and witness, but even though there’s a growing attraction between Cho and Soo-yeon, the film really rather prefers to titillate us through the same sense of distance that attracts Cho, as the men before him, to Soo-yeon. It’s certainly still in the ballpark of femme fatale tropes, but reconfigured for a more distanced world.

Somewhat fitting to its insistence on distance and alienation, watching Tell Me Something is never quite the experience thinking about the film afterwards is – there’s a quality to it that makes it difficult to enjoy it in the moment as you’d do with most other good genre films. Instead, the idea of it, as well as the more abstract elements of its aesthetic start to nestle or linger in one’s mind, turning the experience of watching this much more intense in hindsight than during the actual time spent with it.

The Other Side of the Mirror (1973)

Original title: Al otro lado del espejo

The dominating father (Howard Vernon) of jazz-singing rich girl Ana (Emma Cohen) is really unhappy about her planned marriage to a perfectly okay young man. So unhappy, he disturbs Ana’s happy pre-marriage phase via a pretty dramatic suicide that leaves Ana rather turned off from getting married to her beau at all.

Instead she really jumps into the night life of jazz improvisation and alcohol, finding quite a bit of male company to pass the time as well. However, the men she gets involved with have the unhappy tendency to die, struck down with a particularly rare kind of dagger.

Curiously enough, whenever that happens, Ana has dreams – or are they visions? – of a mirror from her father’s house that reflects him, hanging dead, and what may or may not be her double (or is it her Jungian Shadow?), wielding a (particularly rare kind of) dagger more often than not.

I have probably made this particular joke before, but Jesús “Jess” Franco is my favourite Jesus as well as my favourite Franco. I am, still, and by now quite on my way to forever, the kind of viewer who really vibes with Franco’s output more often than not.

This one’s a film as much about Emma Cohen’s eyes, the transcendent joys of improvisation and the kind of woozy quality of sunlight Franco loved so much, as it is about its psychological thriller plot which may or may not carry a supernatural element but certainly wants to play with Jung as well as with Medea (the latter, the film is very explicit about). So if you’re looking for tightness or a structure that isn’t light and improvisational, you’re really going in for a bad time. Though in that case, you’re probably better off not engaging with Uncle Jess at all.

I’d argue that Franco is often at his worst when he attempts to care about providing more conventional genre thrills instead of shooting something he finds exciting or interesting at the moment (which may very well be slowly zooming towards a vagina, or getting really interested in a sax player soloing) and eventually editing it together into a movie-like shape. No worries about that here – Mirror is a thing of mood and moods, carried by Franco’s interests and his little perversions, Cohen, and whatever a given viewer brings to it.

Which is all I ask of the man’s films.

Mockbuster (2025)

Unsuccessful Australian filmmaker Anthony Frith decides the best way to rescue his dream of becoming a proper director is to send an E-Mail to crap movie house The Asylum and ask for a directing gig.

The crapmongers agree, and thus the film follows Frith’s attempts at actually making said movie.

This comedic documentary by Anthony Frith is terribly light-weight and uncritical towards basically anything. There’s little care taken with establishing any sense of truthfulness here: for example, how does Frith’s making of a documentary about making a movie for The Asylum play into his actually being hired to make a movie for The Asylum is a pretty obvious question to bring up, one would think. But then, Frith’s planning of the documentary isn’t any part of the movie at all, so we’re probably meant to pretend everything happens by magic? Poetic truth only works when you’ve got more than wide eyes to back the concept up, and Frith is definitely not Werner Herzog.

This disinterest in ask any interesting questions Which fits the pose of faux naivety the filmmaker and star does put on for the whole of the running time, a tone that would even make James Stewart in his most “Aw, shucks” face tell the guy to tone it done. This pose of course also make it easy to play the deeply cynical approach to low budget filmmaking The Asylum’s producers espouse for laughs and not question it too tightly. I can’t say I find a couple of guys who apparently can’t even comprehend to attempt to use their small means to make films that are actually not total horseshit only funny to a very minor degree.

Particularly when you keep in mind what some backyard filmmakers achieve without access to actual professional crews, and on budgets that make these guys look like Marvel. Or look at Roger Corman, who also said he never lost a buck on the movies he produced, while being responsible for a whole lot of classics and for kickstarting the careers of many a talented filmmaker.

Pitch Black (2000)

In some kind of interstellar space-faring science fiction future we’ll learn rather more about than we ever may have wanted in the sequels.

After being disastrously hit by a meteor shower, a transport ship crashes on an uninhabitable desert planet with three suns. Some of the passengers have survived, but of the crew, there’s only Fry (Radha Mitchell) left, the young docking pilot who would have blown the passenger part with the cryo containers off the ship to save herself, though nobody knows that juicy little detail.

There are some remnants of an old mining colony on the planet, but there’s little there to secure anyone’s survival, so the small group of survivors will have to band together quickly.

Worse still, one of the passengers was a prisoner – the dangerous, amoral prick and killer Riddick (Vin Diesel). And as it goes with these kind of people in the movies, he didn’t just survive the crash but also used the opportunity to escape and is now haunting the little group (among them characters played by Cole Hauser, Keith David and Claudia Black) from the side-lines.

Riddick still isn’t the worst bit of news the film has to offer its characters: there are also monsters on the planet, monsters who only come out at night and in the dark, or, say, during the solar eclipse that’s going to hit the planet very soon.

Over the years, David Twohy’s Pitch Black has grown on me, and by now, I’m not even sure anymore what flaws exactly put me off it as completely as they once did. As it stands now, this is the epitome of clever low budget science fiction filmmaking with horror elements, the kind of genre fare whose ambitions show themselves through craftsmanship rather than huge gestures. It’s a Howard Hawks kind of film, concerning a group of disparate yet basically competent people having to come together against a shared threat.

The characters are of various stock types, but brought to life by a script that gives everyone either an interesting or uncommon little character moment or an interesting opinion in one of the more life-philosophical interactions to make them more than stock. One can never overvalue a cast of actors who know and appreciate these kinds of opportunities. This also has the neat little side effect that character growth actually feels earned and not just Twohy following scriptwriting rules.

In its pacing, this is absolutely on point; in its style, it uses some of the visual markers of early 2000 filmmaking for good: the monochrome colour schemes beloved of the time make sense given the planet this takes place on, and even add to the strangeness and otherworldliness of what was in reality the Australian desert.

The digital effects haven’t aged all that gracefully, but I can’t say I really cared about that on more than an abstract level – this is filmmaking that makes the best of what it has, and thus deserves some patience with unavoidable weaknesses.

Pitch Black certainly offers more than enough to make up for the little problems it has.

Case of Umon: One-Eyed Wolf (1959)

Five men are found hanging from a particularly creepily picturesque tree. While an older comic relief colleague – who comes with his own comic relief sidekick – are convinced this was some kind of group suicide of unidentified merchants, young magistrate Umon (Ryutaro Otomo) begs to differ. These men clearly were experienced swordsmen and therefore samurai – and they were murdered.

Together with his comic relief sidekick (Shunji Sakai, as if you didn’t know), and the various friends he has in low places, Umon follows the case to (a surprise if you’ve never seen a jidaigeki detective movie before) a conspiracy to not just kill but blow up the shogun himself.

Even though it suffers from a surplus of comic relief characters – at the point where comic relief characters have their own comic relief characters, things have gone too far – this first film in the Umon series is a particularly fine entry into the realm of somewhat pulpy (to enable swordfights and grand villainous plans) jidaigeki detective tales. I have developed a great fondness for the genre, particularly the various series Toei produced before things became bloodier and rather more cynical in the jidaigeki realm, and nobody’d try to protect the ruling dictator anymore.

Director Tadashi Sawashima must have been in a particularly creative mood when this was made, for this is atypically dynamically filmed for a late 50s jidaigeki of this type. We start with the wonderfully creepy and atmospheric discovery of the five corpses – some shots here do rather look like the kind of painting I’d put on my walls if I had any room for them –, find the director experiment with nearly expressionist framing and rather exciting camera movement during the big fight scenes, and also see him experiment with some excellently melodramatic suspense, like Hitchcock on speed, when Umon has to fight the climactic fight while also making sure the shogun can make his temple visit not just unexploded but on time. It ain’t easy working for the Man.

One-Eyed Wolf is also rather exciting, lovely to look at and genuinely suspenseful if you’re able to roll with the importance of the shogun not being late, and keeping unexploded.

Evil Dead Burn (2026)

Alice’s (Souheila Yacoub) marriage to abusive Will (George Pullar) ends rather abruptly when he dies in a drunk driving accident. Well, actually, it’s more a drunk driving deadite accident, for his family owns an object that is apparently very unhealthy for the things, and they’re drawn to destroy it.

Following the death, and Will’s incineration, Alice is supposed to spend some time with her husband’s family somewhere out in the sticks. This would have been a rather unpleasant experience in any case, given the amount of dysfunction in the family and their barely checked aggressions towards Alice, but once the first of these mostly horrible people get possessed, our protagonist finds herself in a maelstrom of cruelty and bloody violence even worse than the relationship that got her there.

Sébastien Vanicek’s entry into the Evil Dead universe has been rather divisive apparently. To a degree, I am sympathetic if a viewer doesn’t want to inflict a film on themselves that’s quite as effective at causing stress, and quite as brutally getting into inter-familial trauma and cruelty as this one does. On the other hand, isn’t a nasty, cruel streak a protagonist somehow has to get through pretty much what the Evil Dead films (apart from Army of the Dead, a film too stupid for it) have always been? These are films whose protagonists have always been pushed into hacking nasty versions of the people they love into little pieces, so I don’t think it’s fair, or even makes sense to me, to complain when a film is simply particularly good at stressing you out, like this one is.

So, obviously, I come down on the side that finds Evil Dead Burn to be a fantastic film, nasty on the level of its pretty extreme violence as well as in the many ways it reproduces the particular emotional resonance of realistic abuse, but very much so in a manner I found as cathartic as I found it exhausting. Add to this an incredible control about how to pace this sort of affair – this one feels like a train running amuck, but somehow still stops at every station on its timetable – and a gloriously messed-up imagination about what to do to human bodies and human minds, and you have quite the piece of horror filmmaking, with a heroine who rings absolutely true as an abuse survivor to me.

Thae Rae: The Exorcist (2025)

Ming (Thaneth Warakulnukroh), a long since defrocked former Catholic exorcist living in a small Thai village is possessed by something very nasty. His past is rather murky. He left the priesthood after a possession case could only be solved by the death of a child, and began – at least going by the villagers who have very little love for the man – to dabble in black magic. He also has the habit of marrying often – and becoming a widower just as often.

Now, things have really escalated, though, and the old man is running around threatening people and munching on raw buffalo guts.

Not completely surprising, his only daughter Malee (Nichaphat Chatchaipholrat) is estranged and living in the city, as far away from her old man as she can get. Some dubious messages supposedly coming from her aunt lure her back, though, right when her dad’s possession problem really hits the fan. Soon, Malee is under the threat of possession – and worse - herself.

Fortunately, at the same time, the Catholic Church sends in young hot shot exorcist priest Paolo (Jirayu Tangsrisuk) to take care of business. The case is so complicated, he will have to team up with streaming-enabled shaman Sopha (Mean Phiravich Attachitsataporn) and dive deep into the secrets of a very murky past to resolve the situation.

I very much enjoy the return of SARS Wars director Taweewat Wantha to the filmmaking world, particularly now that I’ve realized this is indeed the same guy. His two Death Whisperer films certainly are very fun examples of contemporary horror, with the second’s ghost punching tendency exactly the sort of thing to make my little heart all a-flutter, and this ecumenical exorcism film is just as entertaining.

And we are in the world of fun horror here, where even the dark backstory and various bits of trauma business are presented with a certain lightness of touch that keeps the film away from delving into true emotional depths. In other contexts, this wouldn’t necessarily be such a great thing, but Wantha’s film is so deeply involved in the business of racing through a fun mystery punctuated with fine horror set pieces, depth simply isn’t what the film is going for.

Those horror set pieces, based on Thai and Western exorcism tropes and some really dubious religious lore are graciously sprinkled throughout the film, realized with an experienced hand and often a dry sense of humour – without this ever becoming a comedy.

Despite a two hour running time, there’s a breathlessness to the proceedings I really appreciate.

I also appreciate how little bickering there is between our exorcising leads: once they’ve both realized their opposite number is on the level, they simply proceed to work together for the greater good, the fine details of doctrine taking a back seat to saving people. This is not a film about whose religion is right, but one about cooperation and respect, in a low key but obvious way.

Plus, the possibility to freely mix elements of different possession traditions (or the movie tropes thereof) opens up quite a few creative possibilities, Thae Rae then proceeds to make excellent use of.

Ikenie Man (2019) & Harawata Man (2019)

These two short – fifty-two and forty-six minutes respectively – horror comedies by Yu Nakamoto belong together, despite the second film being far superior to the first one. Even though I’m not going to go too deeply into the plots, some spoilers are inevitable here, especially for the second film.

A university film club goes into a pretty creepy forest to film a simple slasher. The final girl doesn’t actually like horror films, the director is a total horror nerd, and soon squabbling ensues that causes her to wander off while the rest of the crew stumble upon a camping site populated by the kind of social mixture of young people you only find in horror movies and videogame casts.

Because they are lacking a lead actress, the filmmaking idiots decide to film a nightly attack on the camp site; problems ensue, though not exactly those you’d have expected.

Ikenie Man. the first of these two films is not just a comedy, it is that most horrifying of things, a full on horror parody. Which, unfortunately, means much of its first half consists of the same jokes every single one of these films make, just less sharply written (and in my case also hindered by somewhat bad subtitles), and not always well timed.

The finale, in which the director channels all of his horror knowledge in an actually hilarious and very gory way to get everyone out of the situation is rather better, though, as a scene during which  a guy uses guts as a nunchaku is bound to be. Otherwise, Ikenie Man is about what you’d expect from a microbudget Japanese horror parody.

Harawata Man is of quite a different calibre, however. We follow members of the same film club, minus the first film’s director plus some memorable new members as they meet, greet and eventually go on shooting yet another horror film.

This time around, they plan on a guerrilla shot in that other mainstay of no budget movie production, the empty industrial building. As it turns out, there’s another crew – directed by a character played by no less than Shigeo Osako! - already shooting their own movie there. It’s not, as our rather loveable idiot protagonists at first think, a porn shoot, but a snuff film production, so again, bloody violence ensues. You really shouldn’t mess with university film clubs, or underestimate the powers of donning a slasher mask sack (sack mask?), though.

This time around, Nakamoto swerves from parody to a proper horror comedy that still has more than enough genre knowledge but whose humour is predominately character based, with a bit of splatstick to keeps things loose. Which leads to a much funnier film, particularly since, where Ikenie Man’s character work was rather perfunctory, this one deftly draws fun character relations, and presents everyone as a loveable goofball I found impossible not to root for. Also, the jokes simply are better, as well as better timed.

There’s real heart here, so much of it the film can even finish on one of those wistfully melancholic scenes of old friends meeting years later Japanese cinema of any budget level loves so well, and make it work.

Which is quite an improvement between two films that came out in the same year.

Which Is Stronger, Karate Or The Tiger (1976)

Original title: Butoken: Moko gekisatsu!

A domino-masked karateka going by the nom de plum of Iron Dragon (Yasuaki Kurata) is beating up the dreams of karate world domination of evil Kiramoto (Masashi Ishibashi), and in the ring.

As it turns out, our hero has good reason to wear a mask – he is actually one Tetsuji Ryuzaki, and Kiramoto and his equally evil brother once murdered Ryuazki’s father for a chest full of gold.

While getting in the way of Kiramoto’s dream of karate tournament domination isn’t terribly difficult, taking actual, bloody vengeance on the man turns out to be a somewhat different proposition. For the villain makes his home in a castle filled with gimmick-loving martial artists, traps, his very own torture dungeon, as well as the promised tiger, and while our hero is great at karate, he isn’t exactly the most subtle of men, so any mission of infiltration quickly turns into a frontal assault for him.

Apparently, Sonny Chiba couldn’t star in all of Toei’s karate exploitationers, so this one, directed by hand-held camera lover Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (also responsible for Sister Streetfighter and various Delinquent Girl Bosses), instead has to get by with Yasuaki Kurata, at this point of Fight! Dragon fame, later on more recognizable for his work in Hongkong, at least to an audience outside of his native Japan.

Even without Sonny, this is still an archetypal Toei karate exploitation movie, with all the stylistic flourishes and some moments of outright craziness you’d expect, but Kurata’s persona is somewhat different to Chiba’s vile, charismatic badasses. Sure, he’s beating villains to death with his bare hands and does rather unpleasant things to skulls when riled, but he’s more straightforwardly heroic than your typical Chiba character. At least, he’s never seen raping a woman, or selling somebody into sex slavery.

Hell, he’s even putting a young fighter he beat in the ring straight again. To be fair, he does so by beating him up during one of these particularly dramatic – and very blue - rain storms beloved of Japanese martial arts cinema, and doesn’t exactly prolong the guy’s life by getting him involved in his problems, but hey, Chiba’ would probably have ripped the kid’s voice box out and sold his female relatives.

So, befitting the comparative niceness of our protagonist, the Karate or the Tiger as a whole isn’t quite as bloody and sleazy as Chiba’s more extreme outings for Toei – even the torture scenes are more on the aesthetically cool than the unpleasant side, and the only bit of actual sexual violence here is a stolen kiss and one sentence about a rape, which is rather uncommon for a Japanese film of this era and genre; not unpleasantly so, obviously.

The violence is still fun and filmed with style and excitement, it’s simply not quite as extreme as it could be. Yamaguchi really loves hand-held shots and decidedly non-naturalistic lighting in the theatrical tradition that runs through much of Japanese studio exploitation, so there’s always at least something of interest to look at here, some emotion that’s visually heightened in interesting ways, and an sense of energy and excitement throughout.

As to the titular question, it is, indeed, karate.

Passenger (2026)

When Budding van lifer Tyler (Jacob Scipio) and his supportive but clearly long-suffering partner Maddie (Lou Llobell) come upon what looks like an accident by the side of the road, they take with them something worse than bad memories. A supernatural (the film goes with the yawn-inducing “demonic” as a descriptor) entity known as The Passenger (who rides and rides) latches onto them and starts playing increasingly deadly games with its endless, random powers.

I tend to be much happier with the films of André Øvredal than your average horror film fan (ask me about Last Voyage of the Demeter), yet this road movie didn’t do very much for me. In part, because Øvredal’s usually impeccable timing of shocks, jump scares, and suspense seems completely off here, with little of these basic building blocks of horror hitting as well as they should, the evil entity feeling more like a collection of tropes than something as specific as a highway-centric demon (sigh).

Attempts attempts at using good old hobo signs as part of the thing’s mythology lead nowhere interesting. In general, there’s a curious lack of specifity to a monster haunting such a specific liminal space as the US highway system. Most of the jump scares here could be in a movie about a haunted house, a haunted bus, or a haunted beach shanty.

Our main couple isn’t terribly unlikeable, yet here, too, the film never puts much effort into turning them into specific persons beyond “main couple in a horror movie with one character trait each”.

Øvredal does still have technical chops, of course, so this is never descending into the realm of the truly terrible, and instead dwells where the truly generic drive in eternal circles.

Ghost Board (2026)

Apparently (the movies wouldn’t lie to us!) detention in Thailand means having to spend a day doing chores for a Buddhist temple out in the sticks for the terrible crime of board gaming during school hours. On their way back, the three male board gaming kids and the girl who had to join them for different reasons (trauma to be explained later on), stumble upon a ruin, wherein they find an ancient boardgame. Boardgames, say the rules, need to be played. Alas, this is a horror movie, so the thing turns out to be a cursed example of its kind.

Now, the kids have to fight off various crappy looking CGI versions of monsters from Thai folklore, as well as the deadite-style possessed sister (Panisara Rikulsurakan) of one of their own, to win the game and survive the night.

I had quite a bit of fun with Chanathip Wongpoltree’s Ghost Board. In fact, given that I’m probably not its core audience, rather more than I expected. Going by the general tone, this is certainly horror meant for kids, but clearly, made with rather different assumptions of what kids are officially allowed to see and enjoy in their exciting monster movies. So this one starts off with a little boy hanged by supernatural forces pissing himself during his death, and features rather more explicit trauma than media made specifically for Western monster kids are generally allowed to show. Though, having been a Western monster kid myself once, and watched and read things very much not made for my age group pretty early on, I think this approach is simply more honest.

Anyway, even with its pieces of past trauma the kids have to conquer besides the monsters to survive, this is simply a very fun monster movie, certainly influenced by Evil Dead and to a degree by Stranger Things, yet filtered through tropes and monsters of Thai folklore. The pacing is speedy without becoming hysterical, the characters and their plights simply drawn but not bland, and there’s a sense of fun running even through the trauma-solving bits.

Sure, the CGI is mostly a bit crap, but when it comes to children (and policemen) being threatened by a headless dude with two swords using the head of one of his victims as a kind of seeing-eye lantern, I care more about the spirit of the thing than about how well it is done on paper. So, I really had a blast with this one.

Daikanyama Wonderland Horror (1986)

Three budding idols in some kind of idol training establishment – aerobics are clearly a particularly important part of this – are offered the chance to level up to actual idol status by the not at all suspicious boss of their school.

Soon, the three are stumbling through dark, dry ice fogged streets and are hunted by a gutmunching hardcore band, Halloween masked versions of Freddy and Jason(!), and a full-grown man who can somehow disguise himself as a baby in a baby cart, and doesn’t who doesn’t need Tomisaburo Wakayama to do some damage. Also appearing is some kind of clown troupe and various wearers of lesser monster rubber masks.

In the end, the idol industry literally eats its children.

If you know director Teruyoshi Ishii predominantly as the director of POV horror V-cinema hidden gem Jaganrei (made a couple of years after this one), you’re going to be in for a surprise, for where the later film is really rather clever and formally inventive, Daikanyama is gloriously dumb and silly. Though, to be fair, both films show a healthy scepticism about what the idol industry does with/to very young women.

For its first third, this is a pure time capsule of 80s Tokyo, obviously shot guerrilla style, that culminates in the epic aerobics sequence other 80s films have only dreamed of. Once the plot gets started, Ishii throws all of his favourite things at you: punk, guts, and rubber masks of famous film monsters, adds rather a lot of gloriously improbable – and therefore awesome - home-made gore, and more dry-ice fog than any 80s music video you care to name.

Since its runs a mere forty-five minutes, there’s no time for this outbreak of youthful enthusiasm to get boring, or really, to ever slow down once we’re through the aerobics bit. I found myself hit by a true cinematic (videographic?) sugar rush – and what else could I ask of a movie?

Pathaan (2023)

In a needlessly flashback-heavy plot, Indian super spy Pathaan (Shar Rukh Khan) has to thwart the fiendish and just as needlessly byzantine plans of super mercenary and ex Indian super spy Jim (John Abraham, presence-wise completely outplayed by everyone else on screen) to loosen a genetically modified small pox virus on, ahem, “Mother India”. Because this is a YRF Spy Universe film, Pathaan also falls for Pakistani super spy Rubai (Deepika Padukone), who may or may not be on his side.

This is much easier to stomach than Siddarth Anand’s earlier entry into the YRF spy universe franchise, the so jingoistic it took all of the joy out of the silly action War. It’s still plenty jingoistic, mind you, but it’s mild for the standards of what comes out of India these days, and keeps to the general tenets of the international action movies. It even manages to do something nearly unheard of these days in Bollywood – its hero is an adopted Muslim, and that’s a good thing, which only Shah Rukh Khan can get away with now. And come to think of it, Rubai is probably Muslim as well, though clearly not a very conservative one, given her fashion style, which leaves us with a contemporary Bollywood movie whose heroes are both Muslims.

Deepika, as it turns out, like quite a lot of her contemporary female peers in Bollywood is also a pretty convincing action heroine and appears to have genuine fun strutting more than just bikinis and opening her tear ducts. That SRK is still a well of off-handed charisma, who makes even machismo look not all that unpleasant should be taken as a given.

For most of the time, Pathaan gives up on all pretences at even a sort-of realism, or even just mild believability, and turns into a full-on live action cartoon, with impossibly beautiful people strutting through insane (that’s a compliment) action set pieces with terrible (but who cares) CGI, making goofy (but likeable) jokes, and demonstrating a cheerful hatred for that boring reality business. Imagine a Tom Cruise Mission Impossible with a sense of humour, and a lead whose ego doesn’t get in the way of letting the other actors on screen shine, too. Which also allows for an incredibly silly and fun Salman Khan cameo as his own YRF hero Tiger, making dad jokes while helping SRK out in an impossible/awesome fight on top of a train.

Until the film suddenly remembers that all of its main characters have torture and dead parents in their past and goes all gritty for five minutes. Fortunately, it will proceed to get distracted by yet another explosion in few minutes, so all is well in the YRF Spy Universe.

Shinjuku’s Number One Drunk-Killer Tetsu (1977)

Original title: 新宿酔いどれ番地 人斬り鉄

After spending the usual ten years in prison for the brutal slaughter of an enemy gang boss, mad dog yakuza Tetsu (Bunta Sugwara) finds himself repelled by yakuza politics and a Tokyo he doesn’t quite understand anymore. People are now lieutenants he wouldn’t even spit on – and he likes spitting on people nearly as much as bashing their faces in – and there are clearly things going on his boss Eisaku Daimon (Mikio Narita) doesn’t want to tell him about. It doesn’t help Tetsu’s mental state that Harumi (Etsuko Ikuta), the woman who promised to wait for him hasn’t been seen for three years.

Cue various bouts of a drunk Tetsu getting into people’s faces, and lashing out. Not that Eisaku is actually surprised by this; he had clearly already decided to make use of the man’s nasty disposition before he ever stepped foot out of prison. So he sends Tetsu to Fussa, another part of Tokyo under control of a different yakuza clan to disturb the other clan’s business so forcefully, they’ll just have to allow Daimon’s people a foot in the door.

For that, Tetsu teams up with a hated corrupt cop, a former boxer and cell-mate, a former race car driver, a rocker-style delinquent, and his old buddy Fujiwara (Makoto Sato), one-armed and clearly having had enough of Tetsu’s shit, though Tetsu, not being the sensitive type, doesn’t quite manage to notice.

The group do manage to cause a lot of carnage, but once it’s time for the carnage to stop, a guy like Tetsu can become a bit of problem.

For once, a jitsuroku-style yakuza movie actually starts off declaring it is not based on any actual exploits of real brutal thugs. That’s pretty much the only actual surprise you’ll have with Yutaka Kohira’s movie if you have even the faintest knowledge of this genre. The rest of the film is all about checking all of the surface jitsuroku boxes: Tetsu’s little team of thugs is only somewhat better than their enemies in that they actually seem to believe in not murdering their co-workers – until the expected betrayal, of course –, while the heads of every clan are horrible and manipulative, society corrupt, and the camera nervous, often hand-held and always energetic.

There’s little depth or complexity to the plot or the characters here – most of Tetsu’s team members get their redeeming character traits a scene before they are dispatched (and after having committed yet another act of brutal violence), and the old romantic troubles between Tetsu and Harumi (who is in Fussa, because of course she is) are so undercooked, they might as well not be there. The same goes for the friendship between Tetsu and Fujiwara.

Having said that, I also have to say I had rather a great time with the movie. While this isn’t out to bring anything of complexity to its audience, as an explosion of late 70s yakuza violence this is an absolute blast, with some brilliantly edited action, some low-key fantastic car-stunts and a time-capsule quality to the filmmaking I found completely irresistible. While this is as far from reality as John Rambo’s adventures in Afghanistan, there’s something about the specific kind of grain, the shots of the ugly side of Tokyo, and the manic energy of the film that makes this feel more real than the reality of 1977 itself.

Speaking of fun, Bunta turns up his favourite mad dog persona until it crosses the border of the cartoonish, and everybody else plays their one note to the T, as well, apart from Sato, who appears to come in from a much more serious movie, which befits his plot function. Bunta also “sings” the title track, to prove not even he is perfect.

So, while it certainly isn’t any kind of artistic triumph, Shinjuku’s Number One Drunk-Killer Tetsu (also winner of the title of the week award), is an absolute blast of nihilistic energy.

Masters of the Universe (2026)

As a guy who had a somewhat intense He-Man phase in his childhood, I hardly know what to say about this sad attempt at nostalgia baiting by Travis Knight, the director of the only good live action Transformers film – Bumblebee.

Unfortunately, this ain’t no Bumblebee, kids. For a film that has less plot than many a short film, this somehow manages to be nearly two and a half hours (too) long. It’s so slow, we get our first He-Man transformation an hour into the non-proceedings. But then, how else to fit all of the “jokes” in, and that’s why we’re here, right?

And with jokes I mean the sort of winking, no actual jokes included awkward bullshit every movie that didn’t understand why the Guardians of the Galaxy movies worked now uses to undercut every single moment in a nerdcore movie an audience member might actually think is awesome (which really is what this should be all about, even Cannon knew this much about pulp filmmaking), and to destroy every single emotional beat this bloated monstrosity otherwise might have had. Hell, Masters of the Universe doesn’t even manage to utilize a needle drop of Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” properly, because it does of course need to make exactly the “joke” you’ll expect it to make at this point.

For a film that really wants to get my nostalgia money, the tone feels eternally (see what I did there, I’m just as funny as the script) embarrassed by the toy line and cartoons it is based off, always going for the easiest joke (Fisto, anyone?). Consequently, the whole film shows no actual appreciation of what could be fun about all of this.

The actors mostly show themselves equally unenthusiastic (in a way the now much belittled Marvel would never let anyone get away with in one of their films not directed by Waititi), apart from Idris Elba and Alison Brie, who make actual acting choices and have actual screen presence. Jared Leto’s Skeletor is even worse than his Exxxtreme Joker was (at least you could understand all of what he said there), and Nicholas Galitzine and Camila Mendes are less expressive than the action figures they portray.

Man, do I suddenly feel old and grumpy.

April Fish (1986)

Original title: Shigatsu no sakana

Director Shohei Nemoto (Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Yukihiro Takahashi) made a critically acclaimed, yet commercially unsuccessful film a decade or so ago, and has been floundering ever since, while declaring he’s an artiste to anyone who doesn’t want to hear it. Shohei did manage to marry the leading lady of his film, now slightly aging star Fujiko Kinugasa (Miyoko Akaza), however, and she’s been paying the bills whereas Shohei stays at home and indulges in his hobbies of cooking fine French cuisine and nibbling cheese.

Shohei did shoot a – never used, of course – commercial on a South Sea Island a couple of years ago and got friendly with one of the local chiefs, a second generation Japanese named Panapora Handa (Tetsuro Tanba). They got so friendly, the Chief lent Shohei his wife for a night, as is apparently local custom in this very special South Seas community. Now, Shohei didn’t actually do anything untoward even when provided the opportunity because he actually loves his wife very much indeed, but when Handa comes to Japan for a bit, our hero is very much afraid the Chief is going to want to have Shohei reciprocate with the wife sharing.

Even though he isn’t the type to cheat on his wife, Shohei also isn’t the kind of guy able to say no to that sort of idea, or admit any part of this bizarre business to Fujiko. Fortunately, a screenwriter friend of his has a brilliant idea: why not hire a young actress (Kyo Kanoko) who is very much into free love to pretend to be his wife for an evening? Surely, nothing at all can go wrong, there.

Nobuhiko Obayashi, rightly beloved for Hausu in cult movie circles, was a director of many more facets than I understood before I started to dive deeper into his filmography. What connects all of his films are immense technical abilities as a director, as well as the knowledge when and how to apply these abilities for any given project. Which may mean going hog-wild for two hours, or never moving one’s camera for three.

Visually, April Fish is a pretty calm film for Obayashi, but adding too many flourishes to this wild, often slapstick-heavy homage to screwball comedies and especially Billy Wilder would have made the film utterly insufferable. As it stands, Obayashi puts a heavy emphasis on catching the physicality of his actors, be it Takahashi’s nervy, neurotic qualities, or Kyo Kanoko’s silliness and sexuality.

This isn’t a movie that’s afraid of a pratfall or a thrown condiment, yet there’s also an emotional core here that speaks about a marriage in crisis, where everything that’s actually important between a couple is left unspoken, and where all necessary fights have been avoided for years. It just does so through the language of screwball comedy, an epic cooking scene, and Tetsuro Tanba chewing the scenery in new ways even for this experienced chewer.

One might look askance at some of the racial politics here – the sexual ones are actually much less regressive than the plot description would make one fear – but the film’s basic silliness really works as a shield here I see no point in even trying to push aside.

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

This is the Mad Max film I’ve returned to the least, so seldom indeed it must have last seen it in the late 90s. At that point in time, following the classic joyful childhood viewings when silly things like taste simply don’t get in one’s way, I really couldn’t roll with much of this at all. Miller’s decision to shift things to a PG-13 degree of violence and nastiness, Max’s evolution into a minor redeemer figure, and Tina Turner were all things that got me pretty worked up.

Rewatching it with less need to prove my good taste to myself – that train has not only gone but dive-bombed into a canyon with all passengers lost – I was first surprised by the heavy sense memory I was hit with during the first act, in an intensity I don’t get all that often. Apparently, the parts of the film until shortly after the Thunderdome sequence have been burned into my brain like Claremont X-Men comics, the original Star Wars trilogy, and Inframan. That went away once Peter Pan’s weird children appeared, but even as a child, I wasn’t too much into child protagonists, so that tracks quite well.

What I truly realized about the film this time around is how incredible Miller’s design sense is, how lived-in and strange Max’s world has become, and in turn, how Miller made his world stranger with every movie, the world breaking apart into further weirdness and strange delusions the longer it goes on after the apocalypse.

I don’t hate the children anymore as I once did, either. Or at least, I absolutely appreciate how Miller uses the Lost Boys to present an alternative to the capitalist hell of Bartertown, hope born from innocence and a lack of knowledge of the most destructive alternatives, but hope nonetheless. Emotionally, Max’s turn into a saviour figure still doesn’t quite work for me, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t want to watch the adventures of a guy who just lets a bunch of children run to their doom.

So this still is my least favourite Mad Max film, but now one I’ll occasionally rewatch and enjoy. Also, Tina Turner is a fantastic villain, what were you thinking, young Me!?

Vampires of the Velvet Lounge (2026)

Some kind of vampire hunting organization lead by a Tom Berenger cameo has sent mercenary turned vampire huntress Cora (Dichen Lachman) and intelligence expert Alexis (Rosa Salazar) to stake out an absinthe bar run by Elizabeth Bathory (Mena Suvari) herself. Modern vampires like Elizabeth and her coven – the bitchy one (Sarah Dumont), the eternal tragic teenager acting out one (India Eisley) and hairy dude for the gory work (Mark Boone Junior) – lure in their prey through the powers of internet dating as well as the more usual mind control business.

Cora’s and Alexis’s mission will prove rather difficult, for their prey hasn’t survived several centuries without acquiring quite the bag of tricks.

Velvet Lounge director/writer Adam Sherman isn’t Uncle Jess, and he sure as shit isn’t Jean Rollin, but there’s space in the realm of the female vampire movie made by filmmakers who put all of their weird, potentially embarrassing obsessions on screen for lesser lights fetishizing blood drinking women as well.

So, if you’re in the market for a mix of all modern vampire clichés except for the sparkle, with bits and pieces of noir – Lachman’s off-screen monologues are quite the thing –, low rent action movie, and general sad vampire whining, a bit of modern technology and lots of absinthe and gore, this is the film for you, especially if you like talky vampires.

Unless you expect thematic or narrative coherence, or a tone that doesn’t fluctuate wildly between stupid, whiny, silly, and deathly self-serious. But really, would anyone going into a film with this title expect these things from their obsessive vampire fetish movie?

On the other hand, one also wouldn’t expect a more than decent cast that features Mena Suvari going scenery-chewing mad leading an ensemble of capable and well-known – at least in our circles – thespians who certainly don’t act bored slumming.

I’m generally not a fan of “you’ll like this thing if you like this sort of thing” recommendations, but this a film made 1) for its director and 2) for people who read the above description and purposefully seek out this kind of movie. As a member of group 2, I was certainly entertained, moved to snark, to companionable giggles at mad ideas like “vampires are literal absinthe fairies” and can’t help but respect a film that clearly doesn’t care to aim for any obvious audience beyond its creators.

Ura Horror (2008)

I have been pretty vocal about my love for the works of the contemporary king of POV horror Koji Shiraishi, as well as my general love for the horror anthologies of purportedly real footage that got churned out for the local Japanese home video market for a time. So much so, finding a new fansubbed movie of the sort provides me with a genuine moment of happiness.

Ura Horror, an anthology of shorts that tend to be around the five minutes mark, brings these good things together, with Shiraishi co-directing together with Yohei Fukuda (who also spent some time in the realm of cursed footage and tapes banned from broadcast on his own). Quality and depth of the pieces wavers between what amounts to short jokes and their set-ups, to tales that suggest a larger world of the supernatural lurking right at the upper right corner of a fuzzy video.

For the Shiraishi maniac, some moments here feel like suggestions and sketches of what is to come later: yes, digital worms are indeed in here, and AV actress turned general purpose idol and Noroi stalwart Maria Takagi is featured (and getting cursed) as well in a segment that also features the great Takashi Shimizu playing himself. Shiraishi’s love for the low-rent parts and aspects of Japanese popular culture is already in full effect.

This is, of course, all pretty lightweight in the sense that none of the tales here is an actual story with a traditional beginning, middle, and end, or features an explanation for the weirdness we have just witnessed, and no deep characterisation is going to be forthcoming. One could, of course, argue this to be exactly the point: these are films about the lack of explanation, about weirdness only briefly encountered, caught on camera, and then locked away by the survivors.

The Summit of Mount Fuji (1970)

Original title: Fuji sanchô

After some years of failed attempts at convincing the government, the Japan Meteorological Agency manages to secure a mandate to install a weather radar device on the summit of Mount Fuji. This is predominantly going to be used to forecast dangerous typhoons much earlier than possible up to this point.

It’s not an easy project though: the weather affords only about forty working days per year, with a very slim two year window to finish it at all provided by the budget. There’s also the little problem of hard physical labour having to take place in very thin air, as well as the logistical and practical nightmare of masses of production materials having to be hauled by horse and higher up on foot.

And that’s before the kinds of troubles arise a project of this kind can’t avoid: backroom squabbling, worse weather than expected, and so on.

When you see the “Nikkatsu” logo on a film, you generally expect something more pop or more nude than a somewhat dry two hour movie about an ambitious construction project, but, with the assistance of the JMA and Mitsubishi Motors (the company who built the actual weather radar on Mount Fuji), this is indeed what we get here.

Surprisingly enough, I found myself often riveted by Tetsutaro Murano’s film. There’s something to be said about a film concerning a bunch of serious, professional people – all of them men, because that’s the times unfortunately – doing serious, professional work under difficult circumstances to build something of actual use to their society. Especially when watched in a time when the thing to admire in the real world are incompetent fools trying to destroy as much of our societies in many of the countries of the West in as short a time as possible to get rich on the backs of everybody else.

Murano tells the story calmly, often emphatically without drama. Thus, he can focus on the small triumphs when yet another difficult hurdle is surmounted by hard work and professionalism, and doesn’t exactly need too become too heavy-handed.

This isn’t much of a character movie. There are a lot of fine Japanese actors here – like eternal favourite Shintaro Katsu as the leader of the horse porter cooperation which will turn into the bulldozer porter cooperation – who provide screen presence to not let the film drift off into the inhuman. Yet this isn’t a film about personal problems but one about the solving of impersonal problems through competence, stubbornness and a bit of luck.

Visually, there are some exciting shots of Mount Fuji – particularly the daring helicopter transport of the radome is impressive –, of heavy machinery crawling up a mountain while a group of pilgrims goes down the mountain, and rather a lot of bad weather, made with enough heft to convince anyone they are indeed witnessing the building of a radar station on a mountain summit.

Which, it turns out, was exactly the kind of thing I needed to see today.