End of Days (1999)

It’s 1999, and instead of going to a proper party, Satan possesses the body of Gabriel Byrne and goes out to rape a particular young woman named Christine (Robin Tunney) – because thusly, the world is going to end, and Satan would win his game of cosmic whatever against God.

Some rogue (the film takes great pains to show the Pope disagrees) Catholics are trying to get in Satan’s way by simply murdering Christine. This, however, is not actually as easy as it sounds, particularly since mercenary bodyguard Jericho Cane (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an alcoholic with a tragic dead family past, becomes involved, and starts protecting Christine from both sides. How centrist of him. So its’s Schwarzenegger against Satan and his gang and the churchy murder people, hooray.

Alas, poor Arnold. In a film like this bizarre mix of millennial horror and action movie, you really need to be able to utter the portentously idiotic lines Andrew W. Marlowe’s script offers with the proper dramatic weight. Schwarzenegger doesn’t appear to even understand what the hell he is saying most of the time, so all he’s left with are old action movie poses, an air of the overly chiselled slowly going to seed and utter confusion. Which isn’t enough when a movie demands actual acting from one to only be somewhat silly instead of completely ridiculous.

Everyone around Arnold knows what kind of film they are in, so Gabriel Byrne, Robin Tunney and even Kevin Pollak chew the scenery to various appropriate degrees, leaving our supposed star in the dust in a manner I found almost cruel.

House favourite director Peter Hyams doesn’t seem to be able to draw Schwarzenegger’s old limited yet effective charisma out either, and he’s clearly either not willing or not able to get the rest of the cast to make the poor guy look any better. Where’s Carl Weather’s when you need him? Because Hyams is Hyams, the action sequences are effective, efficient and absolutely competent, though they certainly aren’t the least bit inspired.

So as a viewer, all one is left with is the whole affair’s utter ridiculousness, the stupid but very funny dialogue, the confused mythology, Byrne’s absolutely shameless performance, and a lot of explosions.

Which certainly doesn’t make End of Days any kind of hidden gem, but a rather entertaining bit of nonsense despite of itself.

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to the Witching Hour

Aval aka Gruham aka The House Next Door (2017): Apparently shot in three of the big Indian languages in parallel, Milind Rau’s tale of ghosts, possession and eventually vengeful reincarnation is a nice example of how world pop cinema can be able to take genre elements from a popular Hollywood genre (in this case The Conjuring style horror) and at first seem to reproduce that pretty closely, only to eventually add highly specific elements from its own cultural frame that change things up considerably. This sort of thing is always at least great fun to me; in Aval’s specific case, that fun is further increased by the director’s genuine ability at creating a proper mood of the contemporary Indian gothic – with a bit of help of some genuinely beautiful locations and often wonderful set design that also finds the point where western horror and Indian horror meet (with a bit of dubious Chinese horror thrown in the mix, too). Plus, possession is always better when no Christian demons are involved.

The Craft (1996): For some, Andrew Fleming’s tale of four high school teen witches getting up to increasingly dark shenanigans, or of four girls trying to survive growing up weird (as portrayed by ridiculously attractive young actresses, of course), is at least a minor classic and an important step in the development of mainstream feminist horror. For others, it’s a camp fest that’s basically made to be incorporated into some crappy talking head TV show about the 90os. As the first, I find the film to be a sometimes frustrating experience, often getting to a point where it looks like it is going to face some shitty thing young women have to go through but then steps back from it at least a half-step again. In the second thing, I simply have no interest, and frankly think a film as genuinely trying to do something interesting while still keeping its contemporary teenage audience entertained deserves better than to be treated as camp.

As a horror movie, I find The Craft a bit harmless but also pleasantly imaginative and graced with the kind of all-out performance by Fairuza Balk as what amounts to its villainess that seems fearless in its total abandon.

Bring Back the Dead (2015): And finally for today, there’s this Singaporean horror movie about a grieving (yet also abusive when her child was still alive, which the rest of the characters comment with sad-eyed tuts) mother (Jesseca Liu) using her former nanny’s (Liu Ling Ling) contacts to a Buddhist priest of dubious morals to conjure the spirit of her dead child into her house. On a theoretical level, that plot is horror gold made for mining an abyss of grief and denial, but even though director Thean-jeen Lee is perfectly decent at the basics of Asian ghost movies, the film’s too glossy and too disinterested in exploring the depths it suggests very deeply.

It’s a fun little spook show, mind you, just one that wastes an excellent set-up on being only that.

Three Films Make A Post: Nothing's more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose.

American Violence (2017): This thing, directed by Timothy Woodward Jr., is what they called a “stinker” in the olden times when I still had all my hair and teeth. It’s an overly ambitious movie that makes big gestures towards exploring the nature of violence and evil through a thriller lens but actually spends its running time regurgitating all serial killer thriller clichés you may or may not remember, presenting them through hilariously po-faced direction, tone-deaf dialogue of the “how not terribly clever people think intelligent people speak” type, and actors who just aren’t good enough to sell any of it. Seriously, when your best thespian is Denise Richards (adding a psychologist to her nuclear physicist etc roles), you have yourself a problem.

Patema Inverted aka Sakasama no Patema (2013): This anime directed and written by Yasuhiro Yoshiura, on the other hand, is really rather great. It concerns the adventures of (of course) two teenagers on a post-apocalyptic Earth where some people live with an inverted gravitational direction. That’s of course a pretty damn silly idea, but it drives the film to moments of true awe and wonder, and adds ingenious little twists to help a plot that at its core is as generic as they come feel as vibrant and alive as the animation itself.

There’s also a rather potent metaphorical level to a tale of two people coming from very different places with opposite gravitational pulls falling in love that should speak to romantics of all ages and places.

Cherish (2002): Finn Taylor’s comedy/thriller/whatever does remind me a bit of the films of Jonathan Demme when their genre descriptions were equally vague/all-encompassing. It’s not as good as Demme at his best – there’s a bit too much calculated twee-ness in here for that – but there are moments in here when the film truly sings with a mix of honest eccentricity, surprising ideas, and unpredictable tonal shifts that are indeed the actual tone of the film.


The whole high strangeness of the film is centred around a disarmingly charming main performance by Robin Tunney and an able supporting cast (among others Brad Hunt as an improbable love interest, and Ricardo Gil as our heroine’s gay, wheel-chair bound, little person neighbour who isn’t at all the caricature that description may suggest), whose performances organically shift and change with the film.