Three Films Make A Post: Let them try

They Will Kill You (2026): On one hand, I admire Kirill Sokolov’s movie for how full on in its worship for certain aspects of Quentin Tarantino’s body of work it is, and how quickly it becomes trashy, intense and in your face. On the other hand, as it can go with a film that basically shouts in a viewer’s face for ninety minutes, this approach can become a bit tiresome, and I found myself wishing for a change of tack and tone, at least for a scene or two.

Two things, though: Zazie Beetz needs to team up with Samara Weaving in the inevitable Ready Or Not 3, and Pig Satan needs to become a thing in the wider world.

Kraken (2026): Sure, sure, sure, veteran Norwegian horror director Pål Øie’s eco horror/giant monster movie does nothing really new or special with the tropes of the genre it works with. But for my tastes, it absolutely makes up for that with the focussed, unironic approach it takes to these tropes and its unfussy pacing. Let’s call it clarity of purpose.

While this is certainly no comedy, it does recommend itself further with a nicely dry sense of humour and puts enough effort into character building and relations I rather enjoyed my time with them, as well as the film itself. Plus, what’s not to like about a Kraken and the icky things that live on it?

True Fear (2024): Staying in Scandinavia but moving over to Sweden, this is a YouTuber POV horror movie about a couple of young women (Ava Nikodell and Rebecka Enholm) following the trail of the worst witch hunt in Swedish history and encountering creepy rural people, toxic masculinity and the only thing better than duelling banjos: duelling supernatural forces.

Director Daniel di Grado doesn’t attempt to re-invent the found footage wheel here, but like Kraken, this is a film working with tropes sure-handedly, while again having better than average character work, with a script (by Ida Kjellin) that even adds – very appropriately, given the witch hunt theme – some feminist elements.

POV horror veterans like me can actually look forward to some proper special effects here, as well as shot construction that’s thought through beyond “let’s wave the camera around” and s narrative that doesn’t waste hours on characters making themselves unlikable via endless dicking around.

If that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t – this is a rather enjoyable small film.

Three Films Make A Post: The past has a mind of its own

Documenting the Witch Path (2017): I have a higher tolerance for POV horror bullshit than most people, but I’ve seldom encountered a 65 minute movie that felt quite as long as this Swedish one. There’s amateur filmmaking – which is perfectly okay in my book – and then there is a film that exclusively consists of circular dialogue sequences during which characters tell each other about the phone call they and we just fucking heard, dudes reading lore at the camera, and awkwardly edited nothing. Camera angles are apparently chosen at random, and nothing is happening, at all.

Heck, there’s not even a single actually effective shot once the characters finally kinda-sorta begin following the titular Witch Path.

Kshudhita Pashan aka The Hungry Stones (1960): The first half of this poetically shot Bangla language movie by Tapan Sinha based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore is a kind of ghost story you can encounter in many countries, at least in its larger outline. A young tax inspector is sent to a country town to set various things in order. He is quartered in a large, empty palace the locals won’t stay in at night, and has various encounters with a female ghost. At first, these encounters are dream-like and frightening – shot in beautifully realized shadows, but soon enough, a doomed romance starts between the living and the dead. Before we come to the doomed part, the film turns out to be a tale of reincarnation, and so the backstory between these two lovers is revealed in an extended flashback. Which I found somewhat weaker than the film’s first half, though still shot and staged with great care and a sense of true visual poetry. As a tale of doomed supernatural love and mild spookiness, this a lovely thing, made even more so by its wonderful locations.

Mother aka Maza (2014): This only directorial work by great (and in Japan beloved in his public persona) horror and humour mangaka Kazuo Umezu aka Umezz is a somewhat uneven film in acting and direction but there’s quite a bit to be said for any movie that turns parts of the manga career of its director into a horror tale including dark family secrets and the evil ghost of his own mother. It’s certainly not your typical biopic.

As a director, Umezu isn’t as great as when he’s working in manga. The film’s timing is often a little off in a way that suggests difficulties to adapt to the needs of a different form of storytelling, and while there are some fine, creepy sequences, some of the horror here is surprisingly bland.

But hey, there aren’t too many movies in which an actor portraying the actual filmmaker gets into physical altercations with the ghosts of their mothers, so I can’t say this isn’t interesting.

Three Films Make A Post: Turn the darkness into light

The Secret of Kells (2009): I dare say there’s not exactly a load of animation out there that is highly influenced by the art of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. It doesn’t fit too many narratives, I assume. Yet where would this be more appropriate than in a tale about a mediaeval illuminated manuscript?

Directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey made some interesting choices in other regards, as well, often slipping into the – to the modern eye strange – mindsets of their protagonists, while appearing to make a film that’s philosophically at once pagan, Christian and modern humanist. Which most of the time makes for a narrative full of surprising details, even when it hits a lot of the tired old Hero’s Journey beats. It’s also so damn beautiful I probably wouldn’t even criticize it (much), if it were only the Hero’s Journey stuff.

The Flowers of Evil aka Aku no hana (2019): This adaptation of a much loved manga and anime feels nothing at all like what you’d expect from a Noboru Iguchi film. If that’s a good thing or a bad one depends on one’s tolerance for melodramatic, pseudo-intellectual teenage bullshit with a wee bit of sexual deviance included taking the place of absurdist gore as an expression of all possible human feelings.

Mine isn’t terribly high, so I very quickly lost patience with these particular characters, their small town malaise and their inability to read Baudelaire without drenching their books in dramatic rainfalls; your disgust with misuse of books may vary.

Nightmare aka Nattmara (1965): Apparently, not only Jimmy Sangster over in the UK found himself thinking about what to do with the Hitchcock model of what we’d now call the domestic thriller. Arne Mattsson over in Sweden certainly thought along the same lines as Sangster with this tale of gaslighting. The resulting film is at times beautiful and moody, painfully obvious, crude and elegant, with a curious idea of how to time plot revelations running into moments of deep intensity.

Thus, the whole thing feels rather disjointed, though it is never without something interesting happening on screen.

Three Films Make A Post: This summer, justice leaves its mark.

The Mask of Zorro (1998): Comparable to the French Musketeer movies of recent years, Martin Campbell’s version of Zorro drapes the old swashbuckler/pulp saw into the form of a then-contemporary kind of blockbuster. Campbell does so with aplomb: everything is big and pretty (or ugly in a big and pretty way), the jokes are silly, the characters broad and fun, everyone is impossibly hot, and the action has a slick sheen. The film sets out to entertain and puts every single cent of its not inconsiderable budget in service of that single goal.

Campbell is very good at this sort of thing, so there’s never a feeling of this being a mechanical exercise in audience wishfulfilment, but rather one of being sucked into the genuine enjoyment of living through a thrilling tale.

Carousel aka Karusell (2023): This Swedish slasher by Simon Sandquist, on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a budget; worse still, it also lacks in spirit and cleverness, and so goes through its version of the usual slasher shenanigans with the kind of boring professionalism that’s the enemy of all fun, at least to my mind.

Personal pet peeve in this sort of project: a film wasting way too much time and energy on a background story so simple and straightforward, filmmakers with more of an understanding of their genre and craft would have left well enough alone after one expository flashback. Also, plot twists are not actually a necessary part of each and every damn screenplay.

MadS (2024): Not flashbacks, and only the barest minimum of exposition, is to be found in David Moreau’s one-shot outbreak movie. The film propels an audience and its shifting protagonists through a night of violence that always teeters on the edge of the surreal with such vigour and energy, perfectly fair complaints about a lack of substance are also perfectly beside the point.

This is all about momentum and creating a very specific mood of ever-increasing insanity, like the most perfectly choregraphed St. Vitus’s Dance you’d never expect to actually encounter on screen.

In short: Mask of Murder (1988)

Original title: Invastigator

Warning: spoilers ahead, but can you really spoil something this tediously obvious?

A small town in Canada (Sweden). A serial killer with a pillow mask goes around murdering women. On a nightly raid, copper McLaine (Rod Taylor) and his partner Ray (Sam Cook) shoot down a very good suspect whom the audience can indeed identify as the killer, or really, in McLaine’s case, shoot the man when he’s already down. During the course of the firefight, their boss, Chief Superintendent Rich (Christopher Lee) is badly wounded, because Christopher Lee isn’t cheap.

Strangely enough, the murders resume shortly thereafter. Is it a copycat killer? Or has McLaine found out that Ray and his wife (Valerie Perrine) are having an affair and plans a long and boring revenge there’s no possible way for him to get away with?

I’ve liked quite a few films Swedish filmmaker Arne Mattsson made in the 50s and 60s, but this, my first excursion into the handful of entries that make up his filmography during the 80s, is a dire attempt at a return to filmmaking after half a decade’s absence. It aims at mixing elements of the giallo (which makes sense, seeing how Mattsson made films you can see as related to the Italian style decades earlier), the police procedural, and the thriller (non-thrilling division). Alas, the script is flaccid, limping from one badly written scene to the next, with no sense of drama or tension. The supposed surprises feel phoned in, and even a half-awake viewer will see them coming from miles away while the film seems to prefer twiddling its thumbs to causing any excitement in its audience.

The acting, even from the old pros in the cast, is terrible throughout. Most of the cast seem to be sleepwalking – Taylor is particularly bad – and the film is full of painfully dull line readings. Even worse, it is also full of flubbed lines that never should have made it into a finished movie but are left for the audience to gawk at.

But then, Mattsson’s direction feels amateurish more often than not, as well. It is full of bad framing and terrible visual choices, with nothing on screen that would suggest a director with decades of experience in serious popular filmmaking.

In short: Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

At the beginning of the 70s, Sixto Rodriguez made two good to great folk rock albums, only to disappear from the public stage (well, there was a late 70s/early 80s comeback in Australia, but the film at hand doesn’t mention it and probably genuinely doesn’t know about that part of the story). Unbeknownst to anyone in the US – certainly the artist – Rodriguez’ output became something of a key cultural artefact for the white anti-Apartheid counterculture in South Africa, with some of his songs being veritable black market hits.

Following the end of Apartheid – which also brought with it official versions of the records Rodriguez apparently saw as little money off as from the bootlegs because the record industry sucks – and a lot of pretty unbelievable rumours about Rodriguez’ death – “best” of them the one about him committing suicide on stage in front of an audience unappreciative of his music – some of the man’s South African fans start to dig into the case of their lost idol. Eventually, they not just find out where he lived – Detroit, which comes as little surprise given the Motown connection of his records – but also that he’s actually still alive (or was, as Rodriguez unfortunately died just this August). Which leads to a triumphant tour in South Africa.

There’s something special about Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man that doesn’t lie in its effectively used but still pretty standard music documentary format. Probably, this special quality has a lot to do with how it resonates with the Romantic in many a music lover, the way it portrays how music taken out of its original context can take on different, important, (personal) world-changing qualities in a different part of the world. There’s something at once hopeful and strange about this, art resonating in different ways as planned that are still sympathetic to its source.

It is doubly nice that this is one of the handful of films and stories about rediscovering a lost musician that end happily, even quietly triumphantly, with the artist not just being alive but also happy, not having recorded further music but having had what feels like a full and interesting life, and was still living it when this was shot.

Three Films Make A Post: A gripping puzzle of pursuit and escape

The Lurking Fear (2023): I’m not enough of an optimist to expect something like a Tubi adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s worst – though also fun despite of itself – stories to be much good, even though you could arguably make a nice ninety minute piece of pulp entertainment out of the material. What we actually get in Darren Dalton’s film is a bit of mock-POV horror, followed by long, long, long sequences of characters wandering through underground tunnels, disrupted by bad make-up effects and what the film laughingly calls its plot. Add to that an inability to edit action sequences or parallel plot lines – of different character groupings wandering through those damn tunnels, so don’t get too excited – that borders on the anti-genius (the Anti-Christ’s less fun brother), and not even Robert Davi playing a bad guy wearing a ridiculous hat can do much to save this thing.

Reportage November (2022): In some aspects this fake documentary style piece of POV horror from Sweden by Carl Sundström is a bit more competently made than your usual movie about filmmakers/ghost hunters/random fools walking panicked through the woods, wielding cameras. At least, the script seems to have a basic understanding of dramatic structure, so there’s a pleasant lack of scenes where characters just fart around, and the plot progresses in a reasonable and mostly efficient manner.

Of course, the narrative still only works like the filmmakers want it to because a quartet of supposed professionals acts ridiculously unprofessional, and most of it consists of the usual tropes and clichés of your typical wood wandering POV horror movie (without the green night camera, though), with a bit of a vague conspiracy angle pasted on. It’s still watchable, which is more than I’d say about many of its peers. Plus, at least the forests are Swedish for a change.

The Odessa File (1974): Ronald Neame’s Odessa File recommends itself mainly through its very post-War sensibility, a portrayal of an early 70s Europe that still lies under the shadow of the kind of people responsible for World War II. This makes it unpleasantly topical in a Europe where the Right is on the rise yet again. And like the Nazis here, there’s still the assumption of victimhood, the pretence at culture, and so on, and so forth coming from these people. The films hits the tone of parts of particularly German post-War culture and the things it liked to hide from itself rather well, so much so that its more contrived conspiracy elements as well as its general sense of paranoia feel plausibly grounded.

As a thriller, the film’s pacing tends to be a little slow, but once it gets going, it does develop more than enough drive to satisfy. The acting, with a merry mix of German and British actors playing the Nazis, and Jon Voight pretending to be Gerrman, as well, is strong throughout. Maximilian Schell hits the note of the whiny, self-satisfied mass murderer, particularly well.

Aniara (2018)

Things I didn’t learn in school: in the 70s, Harry Martinson won the Nobel Price for Literature predominantly for “Aniara”, a science fiction verse epic he wrote in the 50s. So this rather late but welcome film adaptation by Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja concerns the travails of the passengers and crew of the spaceship “Aniara” that was meant to transport settlers to Mars but is knocked off course, now pointing to eternity. The story is predominantly told through the eyes of a woman we’ll only ever know as Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson), her job title as the person responsible for a half-alive room that works a bit like a more emotionally striking and individual version of Star Trek’s holodeck. Through her eyes, we witness the increasing weirdness of the now closed society of the Aniara, which slowly turns from a kind of cruise ship into an independent world full of increasingly damaged people. The captain (Arvin Kananian) – Chefone because names are weird – at first lies about the hopelessness for rescue and slowly begins to establish a quiet-ish kind of police state, though one clever enough to do little against the increasing hedonism and weird cultishness of the ship’s population. Part of the movie is the very slow love story between Mimaroben und ship officer Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro), comparing and contrasting their different reactions to the madness of their situation.

In a move that at first seems puzzling but turns out to be rather clever, Aniara is shot in a style pretty typical for contemporary arthouse naturalism. Before things become strange, this mostly emphasises how much the interior of the Aniara looks and feels like that of a mall or a holiday cruise ship, emphasising the quotidian nature of the place and its population, even if all of this is supposed to take place in the future. The further the ship moves away from home, the stranger its people and their ideas and hopes become to us, the less natural the naturalistic filmmaking approach begins to feel to the material; the filmmakers create a conscious gap between what we expect to see shot in this way, and what they are actually portraying, making things weirder by following the visual rule book of things that are the exact opposite of the weird.

Aniara balances commentary on the contemporary world too obvious to get into with the strange psychological and philosophical states its characters enter rather brilliantly. There’s a real push here to portray emotional states akin to grief and loss and depression but not quite like them anymore, turning what could be something of a space bound disaster movie visionary and strange.

Because my tastes are what they are, I can’t help but particularly enjoy whenever hints of cosmic horror pop up. Relatively early in proceedings, Mima – the not-holodock – begins spouting stranger and stranger things in a very Lovecraftian manner, infected by the unbearable grief of the humans connecting with it, until our protagonist has to shut her down violently, which does not do much for her social standing. Then there’s the final scene, which I am not going to spoil, but which is the purest expression of cosmicism (not exactly cosmic horror) I’ve seen in quite some time, or ever.

That Aniara isn’t a film meant or made for everyone, and certainly far from the kind of adventurous science fiction you can at least sell to people (and which I love, don’t get me wrong) is probably quite obvious; one might leave this bored and confused, or get sucked into it as much as I was.

Three Films Make A Post: Hope Burns Brightest in The Cold

Black Crab aka Svart krabba (2022): Some time in the near future, when Sweden is struck by a civil war between groups the film doesn’t bother to define for us, a group of soldiers is tasked to ice-skate over the ocean behind enemy lines to transport some canisters that’ll win the war for their losing side. The movie directed by Adam Berg is going for the whole universal/archetypal thing, apparently, so giving the audience the space to decide if they actually want these characters to achieve their goal is not in the cards; or any actual, concrete politics. Also not in the cards is anything amounting to characterisation for anyone but Noomi Rapace’s character. She gets a lot of superfluous flashbacks to early civil war life with her daughter that do very little for the movie yet take up quite a lot of time.

The film is a war movie made by people who somehow managed to miss how films in this genre understood how to speak about something universal by focussing on the specific, and decide that vague handwaving is the way to go instead. We do get as many war movie clichés as we never wanted, all of which I’ve seen realized in so many better films.

Windfall (2022): I liked director/co-writer Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love from a couple of years quite a bit as a very clever contemporary and adult movie-length Twilight Zone episode. This thing with Jason Segel, Lily Collins and Jesse Plemons is rather less successful, playing out like an attempt to make a somewhat contemporized version of a Coen Brothers film in the Fargo mode crossed with a TV show bottle episode. Just one that can’t seem to get up the imagination to give any of its three characters any amount of depth – after the first couple of scenes, you really know all you need to know about everyone, and nothing of interest will be revealed about their personalities. Also missing are a sense of timing – the ninety minutes drag as if they were three hours – and really much of a point.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982): Fortunately, this P.D. James adaptation by the usually rather more experimental than he is here Christopher Petit rides in to save this post – or rather its writer – from complete frustration. The seldom seen on screen Pippa Guard plays secretary turned private detective Cordelia Gray with quite a bit of presence, generally finding something interesting to add to any standard detective movie scene. And there are a lot of them in a film as chock-full of detective movie tropes as this one is. Petit and his fine cast use most of these tropes for good, making a pretty meandering film whose sense of meandering isn’t a weakness but very much the point of the whole endeavour, because it provides ample opportunity to think about class, gender and obsession.

Lady in White (1962)

Original title: Vita frun

With his last will, a rich arsehole industrialist (as if they were any other kind) manages to snub rather a lot of people, starting with his nurse and certainly not ending with composer of pompously melodramatic piano tunes Eva (Gio Petré) and colonialist Roger von Schöffer (Jan Malmsjö), the children of his first wife. The only winners in the bequest lottery are his second wife Helen (Anita Björk) and her daughter (Elisabeth Odén, I believe) – whom he had adopted, unlike the children of his first wife. These two get everything, even the mansion that once belonged to Eva’s and Roger’s family. Helen graciously allows Eva to keep living in the mansion, but in the most hurtful manner she could come up with.

A bit later, Eva drowns herself in the nearest swamp. Afterwards, Roger returns from his stint in Brazil, and curious things start happening that surely won’t have anything to do with the typical crime-causing passages all wills in mystery movies contain.

In any case, a mysterious Lady in White – who may or may not be a ghost – portends evil, apparently ghostly hands play Eva’s horrible music on a harpsichord, and there’s fun with a life-sized doll, too.

Eventually, Helen calls in private detective John Hillman (Karl-Arne Holmsten). He’s not bringing his rather more interesting wife, alas. However, comic relief assistant Freddy (Nils Hallberg), now having left the Hillmans trying to get his own detective agency going, has been hanging around since the beginning of the movie to pump his aunts for some starting capital. Which is great for people who like comic relief characters, I suppose.

This is the final Hillman mystery by Arne Mattson, and despite what the title’s closeness to the first one in the series might make one belief, this is not a re-tread of that one, but has a plot all of its own; apart from the inclusion of a potentially ghostly lady, of course, but I’m certainly not going to complain about that sort of thing.

Hillman only arrives at the halfway mark through the film. Before that, Mattsson and his audience spend quite some time with a cast of characters right out of the nastier arm of the manor house mystery that would bear its most beautifully poisoned fruits a couple of years later in its own corner of the giallo. Everybody here has dirty secrets, is unpleasant, a liar, a drug addict, a cheat, a money-grubber or of the bizarre belief that being titled is anything but a reason for shame for the oppression one’s ancestors grew fat on. In other words, it’s a fun time to be had with these pretty stains on humanity that gets even better with everybody’s love for hand-wringing melodrama. Though I’m not terribly sure the film finds its characters quite as reprehensible as I do.

Mattsson’s handling all of the talk needed for the sort of film this is rather excellently, posing everybody in the most effective way for maximum hand-wringing, using reflections and shots made from knee-height to make things visually more interesting (and weirder, too), really going as all-out visually as I’ve by now begun to expect of the man’s often pretty astonishing looking films. Mattsson is particularly great at the spooky bits, so much so I’m rather disappointed he apparently never made a straight-up piece of supernatural horror (though this comes pretty damn close for spoiler-y reasons). Particular highlights in that regard are Eva’s suicide in the swamps by night, the final appearance of the Lady, and a climactic séance that ends with a proper mad scene – all shot in ways that would have fit perfectly in an Italian Gothic (which is the highest possible compliment for this sort of thing), all drenched in shadow.

In short: Lady in Black (1958)

Original title: Damen I svart

Private detective couple Kajsa (Annalisa Ericson) and John Hillman (Karl-Arne Holmsten) are going on a long-awaited holiday in the country, supposedly to get away from crime. Too bad they’re going to visit Kaja’s friend Inger von Schilden (Anita Björk), who is in a bit of trouble, and not just because she has an affair with the assistant of her husband Christian (Sven Lindberg). Soon enough, a series of murders start, perhaps committed by the area’s local ghost, the titular Lady in Black. Clues, however, and a lot of them too, point towards Inger as a rather more corporeal suspect, if a very clumsy one.

Of course, the Hillmans investigate, alas assisted by their stuttering odious comic relief assistant Freddy (Nis Hallberg), who has followed them to the country.

This is the first of a commercially quite successful series of films about the detective couple directed by Arne Mattsson.Tonally and formally these are close relations to the Italian proto giallos and the German Edgar Wallace krimis that started up at about the same time. Clearly, something good was in the air in Europe at the time.

As far as I’ve read, Swedish critics never did warm to Mattsson, putting him down for his commercial instincts (a problem well known to German genre directors of the time as well), and, absurdly, even mocked his propensity to, you know, move his camera. Which indeed, he does here, too, stylishly and intelligently, emphasising and deepening character relations with it, something he does with some eccentric but effective framing choices in many a scene as well. Mattsson also puts quite some effort into expressionist/noir plays with shadow and light, which pays off particularly well in the scenes involving the Lady.

The script, as is often the case with films like this, isn’t quite as great as Mattsson’s visual realization. The humour really hasn’t aged terribly well (if it ever was funny at all), the sexy bits are not terribly sexy if you’re not from the 50s, and the melodrama and connected characterisation is sometimes a bit stiff. However, the mystery at the film’s core works rather well in the film’s decidedly non-naturalistic world, and the Hillmans make a fun detective couple. It is particularly nice to see in a film from this era how much Kajsa is actually doing on her own account, and how matter of factly the film treats her as her husband’s equal, something this film does much better than any of the Wallace movies from my native Germany ever managed (or even tried).

Lady in Black is really a wonderful film as a whole, aiming to be a crowd pleaser but doing so stylishly.

Three Films Make A Post: You can change the cards you're dealt.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995): And with the third attempt, the magic disappears completely from the Die Hard movies. Willis’s John McClane is now pretty much like every other action hero thanks to the shunting away of his wife and the non-generic parts of his character. The moments of surprising veracity from the last films are gone, too, and the less said about the film’s attempt to make gestures of tackling racism via its buddy movie plot line with a Samuel L. Jackson who gives the only fun performance in the whole movie the better. The thing additionally suffers from a limp script that doesn’t seem to have much of a clue how to turn a series of action sequences into a movie.

Even worse, returning John McTiernan is at his worst here, directing action scenes that are basically competent but never fun, interesting, or exciting. I understand why everyone involved thought removing the constraints of locality of the first films to be a good idea, but replacing their tight, increasingly outrageous action sequences with Willis and Jackson racing all over New York solving stupid riddles while random stuff breaks isn’t an entertaining replacement. And don’t even get me started on Jeremy Irons’s performance that is exactly the wrong kind of cartoonish.

Another WolfCop (2017): I don’t think I exactly needed a sequel to WolfCop in my life, even if it is by returning director/writer Lowell Dean again. I especially did not need one where half the jokes are slight variations on ones from the first film. However, its (sometimes too) self-conscious charms, its goofy-gory humour and its general Canadian-ness might not quite add up to the outrageous gore and giggle-fest its (awesome) poster and its brilliant tagline (“Sequels are a disease. Meet the cure.”) promise but Another WolfCop is as good-natured and likeable as a meta-humorous pseudo-grindhouse film can get, and that’s worth something in my book.


Mara (2013): Over in Scandinavia it apparently takes three directors to make this – sometimes very pretty to look at – film about young people in a house in the woods – etc, etc. For a time, the whole affair looks and feels like your typical low budget slasher (including quite a bit of gratuitous nudity), perhaps artier shot, then it turns out to be a double-twist thriller that at least tries to play with the audience expectations towards plot twists. While I like the idea, and find the film more than competently shot, I don’t think the plot comes together well enough for the film to be interesting. Even with the twists, it’s just not very interesting, or exciting, or even fun to watch.

Three Films Make A Post: Greed has a price.

Werewolf (1995): Tony Zarindast’s originally titled werewolf movie is the sort of thing only a mother (or perhaps a director) will love. The acting’s awkward, the script makes no damn sense at all (the archaeologist bad guys apparently infect people with werewolfery so they can show them off caged, despite having a perfectly fine werewolf skeleton to present and slavery being rather frowned upon in modern times), and the direction…Well, the direction clearly aims for being stylish, but always, absolutely always hits the wrong spot, ending up in turns awkward, bizarre, or just plain inexplicable. I hope you like long, loving tracking shots through a museum while animal noises play in the background, or just as long, loving shots of that darn werewolf skeleton. Additional attractions are Jorge Rivero’s toupee, Richard Lynch, and werewolf make-up in various states of crappiness.

Happy Death Day (2017): Oh, look, it’s a time loop movie! Never seen one of these before. Vile college student Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) is killed again and again by a mysterious masked killer, only to repeat the same day again and again, until she identifies her killer. The problem: she’s such a horrible person there’s nobody she knows who doesn’t have a motive. Speaking of unlikeable main characters, this one makes Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day look like a totally nice guy; and whereas that particular classic actually puts the effort in to show us its main asshole changing into a better person, Christopher Landon’s film doesn’t bother to put any effort into character development. Tree just suddenly isn’t a horrible human being anymore; the mild attempts to explain her character flaws through trauma simple don’t work.

Otherwise, this is a mildly diverting movie that suffers from being neither terribly thrilling, nor funny, nor clever yet also never gets too painful.

The Snowman (2017): Speaking of painful, I don’t hate Tomas Alfredson’s attempt at a serial killer thriller quite as much as most other people seem to do, but that doesn’t mean I’m confusing it with a good or even a mediocre film. There is, after all, nary a scene that doesn’t feature at least one completely inexplicable directing choice or an actor going completely off the rails, with many a scene additionally enlivened by not having any function whatsoever for plot, characters or theme. The violent as well as the more absurd flourishes of the plot really demand to be filmed either in the way of a giallo or of a modern potboiler; Alfredson instead directs them as if they were parts of a thoughtful Nordic style crime movie, at once inadvertently pointing out the stupidity of much what is going on and wasting its potential to entertain. Things are not improved by portentous pacing and a theoretically brilliant cast whose members seem as lost in the pointlessness of the whole affair as I was.


Well, now that I’ve thought about it, I actually do hate this just as much as everyone else does.

Three Films Make A Post: The emotions are real, everything else is questionable.

Wither aka Vittra (2012): Do you like Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead? So do Swedish directors Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund, so they made this near-remake. Alright, there are a few differences: the possessed aren’t as chatty as those in Raimi’s classic and sometimes act more like zombies, nobody is raped by a tree, all colour has been desaturated out of the picture, and there’s no Bruce Campbell to be found. Otherwise the film keeps rather to close to its big inspiration without ever reaching its energy level nor its air of unbridled creativity, which is what happens when one plays in other peoples’ sandbox instead of building one’s own.

The gore is nice to look at though, and the film certainly isn’t boring.

Black Rock (2012): Katie Aselton’s film, on the other hand, sets out to play the good old game of role and trope reversal with the survival horror genre. The film isn’t interested in being ironic, though, so it’s still very much a highly focused survivalist thriller, but one with added feminist subtext that doesn’t overwhelm the text, and a deft hand at slightly undercutting expectations in favour of better characterisation. The acting by Aselton herself, Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth is fine too, so there’s little here that doesn’t work rather wonderfully. Which is not a daily occurrence in a sub-genre whose tales about thin veneers of civilization breaking down again and again and again can become a bit tiresome.

Star Trek Beyond (2016): Reboot Star Trek the third, this time directed by Justin Lin (who actually manages to shoe-in a motorcycle sequence into the plot) is a very pleasant loud SF adventure movie, containing many a moment of great and loveable silliness, much loud and rather exciting adventuring, various explosions, generally rather stiff acting – basically all the charms I hope for in a contemporary blockbuster. It’s not up to Marvel standards in sudden bouts of humanity or half-hidden cleverness, but it’s far beyond (sorry) Michael Bay style blockbusting by virtue of having an actual flow, a story that makes some kind of sense, and by being actually fun instead of just being loud and obnoxious.

In short: Sounds of Silence (1989)

Peter Mitchell (Peter Nelson) inherits a house in Sweden from an aunt he never heard about before. Instead of just selling the place off from back home in LA, he packs in his girlfriend writer and grown-up of the relationship Sarah (Kristen Jensen) and her deaf-mute son Dennis (Dennis Castillo) for a nice little holiday on his new Swedish property.

The “house” turns out to be rather large mansion situated near the sort of village where horrible secrets of the past are buried, and guests from afar are treated with communal silence in the village pub. At least Dennis finds a friend rather quickly. Admittedly, little Bill (Jonas Ivarsson) is dressed in rags, blue in the face, the son of the dead aunt and a ghost but BFFs are BFFs, right? As it goes with the more personable type of ghost Bill certainly belongs to, the dead boy needs help with disclosing above-mentioned secrets which have something to do with the death of all the children of Bill’s orphanage decades ago, or rather, the people actually responsible for that. That, and bloody ghostly revenge, of course.

Peter Borg’s Swedish/American co-production (with a heavy emphasis on the Swedish part) is a nice little bit of ghostly horror. It is neither subtle nor original, but it tells its generic story earnestly and convincingly enough for it to become enjoyable, and manages to finish on a strong and atmospheric finale. In between, there’s lots of dry ice, some serious “Man is the greatest monster of them all” business, a perfectly crap synthesizer soundtrack, and many a scene which greatly resembles other books and movies without Sounds of Silence ever becoming a complete rip-off of other films.

Rather, it plays out as a traditionalist film out to tell a traditional ghost story with pleasant directness; as it sometimes happens with this kind of film, it stumbles on a moody shot, a creepy scene or an interesting variation of the usual rather often, and ends up a pleasant way to while away an evening in the lonesome October.

Before I Go to Sleep (2014)

Christine (Nicole Kidman) wakes up every morning remembering nothing that has happened to her since her late 20s. The man she wakes up next to, her husband Ben (Colin Firth), explains - with the help of a useful photo wall in the movies more often used by serial killers - to her that some years ago, she had a bad accident that left her with a very particular kind of amnesia, erasing her memory with every night’s sleep.

However, things aren’t quite as simple as they seem to be. Secretly, Christine has been seeing neurologist Dr. Nasch (Mark Strong) for a few weeks now. Nasch has encouraged her to keep a video diary on a camera she keeps hidden, and reminds her of it with a phone call every morning. The therapy seems to be working too, but the bits and pieces Christine remembers lead to doubts concerning Ben.

Turns out Christine’s “accident” was actually a vicious attack on her. This will turn out not to be the only part of her past Ben edits out when he’s doing his daily info dump with her, but is this an attempt to protect her and survive a very difficult situation for himself, or is something sinister going on? And while we’re at it, what about Nasch? Isn’t he acting ethically rather questionable what with him making googly eyes at Christine and treating her in secret?

In general, I’m not terribly fond of thrillers with amnesia plots. It always seems to be a rather too convenient starting point from which to build a plot from, keeping protagonists and audience guessing without a film having to work for it.

However, if an amnesia film uses its easy starting point as well as Rowan Joffe’s Before I Go to Sleep does, I’m totally okay with it. The trick for such a film to make me happy is to create a narrative where the protagonist’s amnesia is more than just a plot tool, so Christine’s memory loss does have quite a few other functions than just enabling the thriller plot – though it does that too. As much as this is a well done “woman in peril – but from whom?” thriller, it is also a film attempting to think thoroughly about the way memory shapes a woman’s identity, and how memory and identity intersect with love and trust.

In putting the thoughtful bits and the thriller plot together, Joffe turns out to be a rather fine director and writer (he wrote the script based on a novel by S.J. Watson I unfortunately haven’t read) for this sort of thing, playing fair with the audience by keeping them clued in about what is going on as much as Christine is without going through awkward contortions to keep things mysterious. Sure, the way the plot relevant bits of memory return to Christine is a bit artificial (surely, she might remember drinking milkshakes or something else irrelevant to matters at hand from time to time instead of exactly those things that’ll make the film most interesting) but what the film does with these memories fits nicely into its thoughts on matters of trust, truth and love. And the suspenseful moments here are indeed exciting without looking as if the film were working too hard for them – which of course means it is working particularly hard for them.

Add to this expectedly fine performances of not particularly simple roles by Kidman and Firth, and you have an exemplary thriller.

In short: War Dog (1986/7)

aka Wardogs

Charles Stewart's (Timothy Earle) brother Rick (Bill Redvers) went missing when both brothers were fighting in the Vietnam War. Charles never could believe his brother actually died then, and he's even less convinced when the Army suddenly sends a letter to his mother telling the family Rick is dead.

Charles scepticism is very correct, too, for Rick has been pressed into the super soldier program of the brothers' old superior Spacek (Bengt Fridh), where he has been turned into a drugged, mind-controlled killer. And one prophetic of modern US military tactics one to boot: in a little real world training exercise, Rick and his super soldier friends not only kill their target, but also a bunch of innocent bystanders (look forward to the bloody death of some kids, blood spatter friends). I'm only surprised the soldiers didn't wait for ambulances to kill the medics too.

It is this horrible mess that brings Charles on the track of the whole program via a camera man who filmed it, a journalist who got the tape, and Spacek's tendency to let his men run around killing people left and right.

Charles's goal is clear: find the location where the soldiers are kept, free his brother, kill Spacek, and don't bother to get Rick psychiatric help and then be surprised when the abused man slits the throat of the rather too friendly neighbour.

I would be more than a little surprised if Roland Emmerich (or one or more of his scriptwriters) had not seen this Swedish ultra low budget production before making their Universal Soldier, though, say what you will about Emmerich, the resulting Hollywood movie is admittedly quite a bit more competently made and not just a rip-off of War Dog.

Of course, Emmerich and co did have the advantage of things like a professional crew and a minor Hollywood budget where War Dog (which I like to imagine as the prequel to War Horse or the third part of the War Bus series, or both) is held together by spit, shoestrings and pure enthusiasm.

Given that fact (and the plot synopsis above), it will come as no surprise to anyone to hear that War Dog is a cheese fest of the first degree full of all the things that make low budget action movies like this - depending on one's tastes - either brilliant entertainment or totally unwatchable. If you're in the market for horrible yet frequently funny dialogue, the slightly chubby guy from next door as an action hero, explosions (alas, no grass or bamboo huts), slow motion, and slow motion explosions, improbable gun sounds, the Swedish countryside standing in for the mid-western USA, a random/awesome/generic synthesizer soundtrack, and all the government conspiracy crap you could ever want, all not really connected by sloppy yet surprisingly creative direction, then you're in for a treat. If not, I don't think you should be reading about a film called War Dog, and even less watch one.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: swedish movies,in short,action,björn carlström,daniel hübenbecher,timothy earle

In short: Blood Runs Cold (2011)

Winona (Hanna Oldenburg), a popular artist (musician, I suppose, but the film's not making that part too clear) is in dire need of a bit of rest and relaxation, so her manager rents her a house in the deep dark wintery woods somewhere around the town where she grew up in.

When out and about in what just might be the only bar in town, she meets her ex-boyfriend Rick (Patrick Saxe) whom she had left to have a career closer to civilization. In an attempt to rekindle old feelings, Winona invites Rick, his perfectly annoying friend Carl (Andreas Rylander) and Carl's girlfriend Liz (Elin Hugoson) to her house.

Alas, poor Winona had stumbled into the wrong home right from the start and is accidentally squatting in the abode of the local cannibalistic undead serial killer. While Winona is sleeping, the axe-wielding and very hungry killer gets rid of her guests for good. The following day will find Winona going toe to toe with her very grumpy host.

Generally, it's never a good sign when a movie's marketing material tries to turn its budget into a selling point. It comes over either as an attempt to excuse a film's flaws or as way too self-congratulatory. I don't think director Sonny Laguna's Swedish $5000 movie (or so the marketing tells me) Blood Runs Cold is good fit for either of the two, for it has mostly the same flaws and troubles any other contemporary ultra-generic slasher movie has.

Problem number one is, of course, the film's desaturated look, keeping with the adage that having actual colour in a movie instead of kinda-sorta colour is something that is to be avoided at all costs. After all, there's no great tradition of horror directors working on a budget using intense colours to good effect at all, right?

Problem number two is the cast's pretty variable acting that isn't completely horrible all the time, but fluctuates between basically alright and pretty horrible without ever reaching the exalted heights of being horrible or alright in a compelling way. I don't think it helps the quality of the performances that the Swedish actors are all speaking English. While it's clear that everyone actually understands what he or she says, and their accents are a lot better than my own, the English dialogue does make the acting look more artificial. It also adds unnecessary distance to the film as a whole; it's more difficult to lose yourself in a movie - a state a film with a plot this thin and full of the usual slasher movie holes needs a viewer to get into - when the all-Swedish cast for some reason decides to speak English with each other all the time.

The rest of the film is slasher movie by numbers. Although there are two or three tense moments, and nothing about the film is technically bad, the film lacks a personality of its own. I have seen everything that's going on here a million times before, so a film really needs to do something original or strange to keep me interested. Blood Runs Cold unfortunately doesn't.

So yes, Blood Runs Cold proves you can make a middling slasher movie for $5000 that is just as middling and basically okay as a movie that cost twenty times as much. I just don't think this is an achievement I should be praising.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: swedish movies,horror,slasher,in short,sonny laguna,hanna oldenburg

In short: Terror In The Midnight Sun (1959)

Original title: Rymdinvasion i Lappland

The Swedish cut and the US cut of this Swedish/US co-production are completely different. Since the US-version has been touched by the appendages of Jerry Warren, I opted for the Swedish one that is (and I do believe the Internet in this case) supposed to be superior in every way.

A meteorite has crashed down on the ices of (the Swedish) Lapland, but there's something rather strange about it. The object seems to have landed rather than crashed, really, getting the Swedish Royal Academy of Science all a-tizzy. They send American scientist Dr. Frederick Wilson (Robert Burton) and Swedish geologist and professional lady killer Erik Engström (Sten Gester) up there on a little expedition.

Turns out that Wilson's niece, Olympic figure skater Diane (figure skater Barbara Wilson), is also in the skiing resort that will be the base camp for the whole investigation. She's also very much interested in becoming part of the expedition and of Erik's harem. That's a happy coincidence, because we'll need a woman to run away and scream soon enough, because a big, hairy monster in need of American women to threaten has stepped out of the meteor. I see squashed Lap tents and minor avalanches in the future.

I have certainly seen worse examples of the 50s monster movie genre than Terror in the Midnight Sun, but I've enjoyed many of these quite a bit more than the film at hand. Yes, we are in the realm of boring competence again (though some of the film's editing might stretch the definition of "competence" to a problematic degree), where no goal is achieved beyond ticking off checkmarks on a list of features every other film of a given time and genre includes too. If you've seen any of this film's brethren - and everyone should have, there are birds as big as battleships to find - you know all there is to know about its characters, their relations, their icky romances and about the film's ideas about women.

What features Terror has beyond that are mostly not of the kind gladly mentioned, because they consist of an overabundance of filler, especially during its first two thirds. So there are ten minutes of a documentary about radar (I wish I were kidding), a figure skating scene, a musical number, horrible "flirting" and lots and lots of skiing - none of it needed for or relevant to the film's actual plot, such as it is. The furry monster's somewhat cute, at least, and one can't blame director Virgil W. Vogel for having tried to make it look more impressively large than it actually is through forced perspective and low-angled camera shots; for my tastes, he does at least beat Bert I. Gordon here.

The film's other positive is the Swedish landscape, that at times (when it is not misused for more skiing) promises a much bleaker and more interesting film than Vogel is able to deliver.

Now, an okay monster and a lot of snow are probably not enough for most people to wade through the rest of Terror in the Midnight Sun, but I do appreciate that everyone (except writer Arthur C. Pierce) were honestly trying to make a decent monster movie.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: swedish movies,american movies,sf,horror,giant monsters,in short,virgil w. vogel

Three Films Make A Post: In Da Hood

Murderlust (1985): A seemingly mild-mannered Sunday school teacher and watchman kills prostitutes and dumps them in the Mojave desert in his free time. He has a splendid time with it, until his state of mind begins to influence his job performance.

This is one of the unending mass of US serial killer movies, here done in a local independent style, but without anything to distinguish it from all those other serial killer films, unless you always wanted to see one which is too timid to show the viewer anything untoward or interesting. No actual exploration of psychic or physical abysses here, but at least there's slow and affectless acting to help you find some sleep. Oh, and a neat Sunday school sequence, of course.

 

Bloody Beach (2000): A bunch of young and characterless young people who know each other from a chatroom go on a beach vacation together. But there is dark chatroom drama in their past. Could that have anything to do with the guy who sloooooowly slashes and stalks them in a not very interesting manner?

South Korean director In Soo Kim proves that he can make a boring, completely generic slasher movie in which nothing exciting or suspenseful happens as well as anyone else. I have of course seen much worse slashers, but those weren't as boring as Bloody Beach. Congratulations, director of generic slasher movie #2457.

 

Det Okända (2000): A quintet of Swedish grad students (biology? geology? who knows?) make a field trip into the deep dark woods. All is well except for the incessant bickering until a specimen that looks like a badly made roast sneaks into a woman's belly to start its own little invasion of the body snatchers. Aesthetically, this is one of the children of Blair Witch Project, just without an in-plot reason for the shaky cam and a lot less sense for creepy mood. It's not bad, especially in the last half hour or so when the body snatching really begins, but the script is problematic (why exactly aren't these people just leaving?) and the photography never as good as the woods the film takes place in deserve.

 

Technorati-Tags: in short,american movies,south korean movies,horror,swedish movies