Highwaymen (2004)

Already car-hating Molly Poole (Rhona Mitra) barely escapes with her life from the attack of a serial killer we’ll later learn to be called Fargo (Colm Feore) – one of her friends is less happy. Fargo uses his souped-up car as murder weapon of choice, and really as a replacement body, for he is wheelchair-bound, which makes the while serial killing thing rather difficult. Given the car angle, nobody actually believes Molly’s story, and the police treat the situation as a bad case of a hit and run.

Well, nearly nobody believes her – a traffic investigator (Frankie Faison) has his doubts about the normalcy of the situation, and a mysterious man (Jim Caviezel before he lost his mind to QAnon) in his own souped-up car shadows her. Rennie, as we’ll mostly come to know him, lost his wife to the killer who attacked Molly and has been hunting him for years now, sharing the ways of the road and an occasional CB taunt/come-on with him.

Rennie is convinced Fargo is going to attack Molly again, and he’s not above using her as bait to finally get his man.

What a difference a decade and a half make. When I first (and last) saw Robert Harmon’s Highwaymen, I treated it as a less than successful attempt by Harmon to return to the glory days of his masterful The Hitcher, with the film at hand a slickly made yet basically empty attempt at catching lightning in a bottle a second time.

As is so often the case, I’m looking more than a little askance at my past self’s willingness to wave away a film that’s nearly as good as The Hitcher itself, a film which does indeed use elements of that past achievement as well as some taken from the mass of serial killer films that had accrued between the two movies. Where the old one is about a boy becoming a man/monster (interrogating the borderline between these two in a violent male-dominated society), this one takes place at a point where the protagonist’s innocence is already lost, and there’s only a difference in degree between him and his prey anymore.

So, this is a movie about men who have turned feral, roaming empty highways in cars that have become parts of their bodies – in the killer’s case even actual replacements for much of their bodies – performing a ritualised hunt Rennie uses to keep himself from ever having to actually process the death of his wife like a normal person would have to. In this context, it is no surprise he is only able to finish the hunt once he’s pressed into relating to Molly – and to a degree to investigator Macklin – as a person instead of a tool or an obstacle that doesn’t truly belong into Car World.

All of this is baked into a masterfully made thriller/action movie, a film of dark streets reflecting neon, the empty spaces between the places people actually inhabit, and seemingly endless nights. In fact, one of the best little tricks Harmon uses is the elegant shift from night to day for the film’s final stretch.

Basically, past me was an idiot. But that’s not news around here anymore.

Three Films Make A Post: Can you keep a secret?

The Housemaid (2025): On paper, I absolutely appreciate Paul Feig’s attempt to update the old erotic thriller formula for the 90s, but in practice, I found the resulting movie mostly dull. It is much, much too long for what it is – there’s at least half an hour of redundant repetition in here – and its self-conscious trashiness neither reaches the joys provided by simple, actual trashiness nor does it do much that’s really surprising in any way in its twists on the formula.

I also wish Feig had found a shared tone for his actors: Amanda Seyfried is all turned up to campy eleven, Sydney Sweeney aims for slightly zoned out naturalism, and Brandon Sklenar stays on “sleepy” even when he’s supposed to become anything but.

Blood Beast of Monster Mountain (1975): This is its very own, one-of-a-kind type of nonsense: one Donn Davison (“world traveller, lecturer and psychic investigator”) tries to bend a ten years old unfunny bigfoot comedy into a Legend of Boggy Creek shaped form. He can’t, so the audience is threatened by everything that’s horrible about bad low budget comedy – the film’s “funny” protagonist is called “Bestoink Dooley” as a marker of the ensuing horrors – with the added frisson of watching multi-un-talented Davison “interview witnesses”.

If you’re suffering from the same kind of movie sickness as I do, this probably does sound at least somewhat fun, but in actuality, you’re better off gazing into the abyss than at this one.

We Bury the Dead (2024): On the other hand, I was very positively surprised by Zak Hilditch’s treatment of a localized zombie apocalypse as an excuse to explore grief and guilt. Daisy Ridley is actually a fine actress for this sort of thing, and while this is not going to make anyone happy who is looking for a gory zombie apocalypse film, this is a very pleasant example of a a movie about a personal apocalypse.

If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952)

Original title: Si muero antes de despertar

School kid Lucio (Néstor Zavarce) is a bit of a trouble maker – at least that’s what his parents and his teachers tell him so often, it can’t help but become true. In truth and to modern eyes, the boy seems perfectly fine and does his darndest to live up to the pressures of a restrictive society – Argentina in the early 50s clearly wasn’t fun and games for a child – and a father (Floren Delbene) who can’t divorce the pressures of his job from his home life. Not that Lucio realizes much of this, of course, unlike the film’s viewers.

When a girl from his class Lucio is sometimes friendly with is murdered, Lucio is the only one who knows about her connection to a stranger giving gifts to little girls in exchange for a vow of secrecy. Then, gift giving and later a disappearance happen to an actual friend of Lucio, who by now has realized there’s a connection between the mysterious giver of gifts and young girls getting murdered. Alas, Lucio has sworn to his friend not to tell anyone about her “friend”, and exactly those pressures that are supposed to make him a “good boy” are now keeping his mouth shut. Not that anyone believes him when he eventually can’t help himself and does talk. Since the grown-up world is of little use, Lucio will have to save his friend all by himself.

This 70 minute Cornell Woolrich adaptation by Carlos Hugo Christensen – at this point still working in his native Argentina before fleeing from the Peron regime into exile in Brasil – was initially meant as the third tale in Christensen’s omnibus movie Never Open That Door but was retooled as a stand-alone movie to keep the other film to a saleable length. This doesn’t feel bloated up for a feature release however. Rather it is a concisely told tale with little fat on its bones – and everything that’s superfluous to the plot speaks very eloquently about growing up as being in a state of perpetual pressure from demands by a grown-up world that never seems to be there when it is actually needed, and so strengthens the film’s theme as well as its plot engine.

This is an entry into the small sub-sub genre of childhood noirs, a group of films – with Night of the Hunter as the most obvious example (unless you don’t count that film as a noir, but we can’t help that, can’t we?) – that typically mix the crueller realities of childhood with the air of dark fairy tales, something that’s bound to resonate well with the dark shadows and intensity of everyone’s favourite non-genre. Christensen commands the space between the visually darkly poetic and the heightened realism of the film’s ideas about childhood alienation (or the child’s world as something separated from the reality of the grown-ups supposedly taking care of them) very well indeed, creating the melodramatic intensity so typically of Woolrich until things culminate in a pretty incredible wilderness (of the fully artificial and therefore particularly wonderful kind) climax, including prayers, traumatized children and a father trying to purge his own failings by violence.

It’s all very impressive, and in mood and style stands shoulder to shoulder with the US noir cycle.

The Cursed Palace (1962)

Original title: El-Qasr el-Maloon

Young Lawyer Hasan (Salah Zulfikar) comes to the mansion of Fahmi Bey (Mahmoud El Meligy) to help the rich yet virtuous man sign over most of his wealth to his daughter Yusriyyah (Mariam Fakhr Eddine). The film never explains why this can’t be handled via a will, so I assume the contemporary Egyptian audience would have known why and just take this as a given. Hasan and Yusriyyah very quickly fall in deep, pulpy looking book-trading, love with one another. The business aspect goes well enough, or so it seems, despite Fahmi Bey’s sister being pretty disgruntled losing out on her future inheritance.

But then, one dark and stormy night – Egypt’s very windy in this movie – Yusriyyah finds the dead body of her father, only to encounter a very alive version of the same shortly after. Not surprisingly, this freaks her out rather badly. Her state of mind is not at all improved by the various hauntings she then experiences – skeletal hands at her window, the face of her father where it can’t be, that sort of thing. About half a day later, Yusriyyah is in no mental state to sign any documents that might make her very rich indeed, and her rambling about her father who is dead while she is standing right next to a very living one sitting in his wheelchair is not helping her case at all. Fortunately, Hasan starts investigating, while creepy things continue to happen in the mansion.

I suspect even in 1962, an audience wouldn’t have fallen for anything of what is going on in Hasan Redha’s The Cursed Palace as actually supernatural. We are very much in old dark house territory here, the sort of Old Hollywood set-up Egyptian popular cinema as far as I understand it was very comfortable with. Apart from this type of creaky yet always fun thriller, there’s also a clear influence of the kind of thriller that would follow in its stops, and it wouldn’t be difficult to put The Cursed Palace next to, for example, the kind of post-Psycho thriller Jimmy Sangster wrote for Hammer when they weren’t doing gothic horror.

Stylistically, however, this is a horror movie through and through, praying at the altar of Universal, full of creaking windows, dramatic coach rides, improbably large expressionist shadows, Dutch angles and a camera that seems forever located low, shooting upwards, turning reticent servants into figures of menace. Right at the end, there’s also a sequence that feels as if it were taken directly from a giallo, when the black-gloved villain of the piece, in nearly subjective camera, goes for his final, plot-deciding, murder attempt.

Like most of the handful of Egyptian movies of the era I’ve seen, The Cursed Palace is a stylishly shot, well-acted – in the highly melodramatic manner befitting its material – and well-paced film that’s a joy to watch, uniting some specifics of its place and time with internationally popular ideas about genre filmmaking, and thus a very nice entry into its niche of horror.

Three Films From 2025 I Didn’t Care For Still Make A Post

Ballerina (2025): I’m of two minds about the John Wick movies – no, really, I think half of them are pretty brilliant, the other half very much not – and alas, spin-off Ballerina, as directed by Len Wiseman belongs to the very much not  part of this equation. Featuring pointless cameos, not a single interesting (or just fun) idea and an interminable number of action sequences that are technically very accomplished but also bland and empty as these things get (one might suggest the term “soulless”), this is a joyless example of franchise “content” nobody involved seems to actually wanted to create. Why we are then supposed to want to watch it is anyone’s guess.

Drop (2025): In the case of Drop, the problem may be as much me as the film. It is not exactly director Christopher Landon’s fault that I find US dating culture as presented in movies not just difficult to relate to but aggressively boring. Nor is it his fault that I find twisty thrillers generally a bit of a hard sell.

What is Landon’s fault is that most of the twists here are painfully generic, the surprises perfectly unsurprising, and much of what is presented too absurd to work in the way it is presented. Stylistically, this often feels like a show reel for its director instead of a movie, something you can get away with when you are Brian DePalma; Landon, as much as I enjoyed some of his earlier movies, is not.

Murder at the Lighthouse (2025): This little Lifetime movie at least has an excuse for not being any good – it being a Lifetime movie comes with a decided lack of budget as well as a dearth of talent before the camera – although everybody including the crazy stalker cop ex-boyfriend looks absurdly well groomed.

Director Eric D. Howell clearly liked Misery, so much so he’s eventually getting up to turning this into a decidedly lesser version of the King adaptation (or the King novel). On the plus side, this lacks the painful camp and irony of too many Lifetime thrillers, so at least Howell was trying instead of just throwing his hands up going “it’s all ironic, you see”.

Three Films Make A Post: In 1987, Oakland was hella freaky.

Freaky Tales (2024): I’m not sure where I caught the case of optimism, but I expected an anthology movie with this particular title to contain tales somewhat freakier than the one about the punks who are attacked by Nazis, decide to fight back the next time, and then fight back the next time, or the one about two young women who are invited to a rap battle, take part in the rap battle, and win the rap battle. This is more Tales of the Bleeding Obvious material.

Apparently, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are big fans of classic exploitation movies, but their modern version of them is bland, antiseptic, and just too nice to truly get the spirit. That the blood and gore is all CGI is absolutely telling in this regard. Doing a proper left-wing style exploitation movie seems like a fine goal to me, but this surely isn’t it.

Clown in a Cornfield (2025): As far as modern retro-slasher comedies go, Eli Craig’s Clown is a perfectly decent time – it’s certainly well-made, has a couple of jokes that actually hit, and a fine final girl in Katie Douglas. It’s also less sadistically minded than rather a lot of modern slashers at the moment, and doesn’t feature endless, boring, torture sequences; it falls in the opposite direction a little, so the violence is a bit too weightless and too cartoonish to ever produce much suspense, proving that you really can’t satisfy me in this regard.

But really, it’s the kind of perfectly decent film, most probably made by perfectly decent filmmakers there’s very little to say about.

Eclipse (1977): This film about a very awkward Christmas dinner with the alcoholic wife of a deceased twin and his neurotic brother, close after the accidental (or was it?) death, was only rediscovered thanks to the efforts of its male lead Tom Conti.

It’s an interesting film, building a mood of tension out of occasional flashbacks, awkward and tense social interaction and a pretty fantastic synth score.

In its general tone the film is a sibling to some of the weirder and more abstract regional films from the US (this is a Scottish film), particularly in its insistence on getting by on a mood of tension and dread alone – there are no revelations coming you didn’t expect, and there’s a slightness to these particular sets of neuroses that sometimes gets in the film’s way.

But unlike the other two films in this entry made fifty years later, Eclipse really strains for something unique, and gains a certain power from it even if it doesn’t quite succeed.

Three Films Make A Post: What We Fear We Create

Fight or Flight (2024): I really enjoyed Bullet Train, and apparently, so did James Madigan. In fact, he enjoyed the film so much, he made his own version of it, with the brilliant twist of making everything in it a little – or a lot – worse. So we get an airplane instead of a train, Josh Hartnett instead of Brad Pitt, crappier hallucinations, less absurdly fun characters and inferior action choreography.

The result is one of the more puzzling films I’ve seen this week – I really can’t quite figure out why it exists.

Project MKHEXE (2025): Whereas Gerald Robert Waddell conspiracist POV horror that turns into cosmic horror clearly exists as a labour of love. It’s a film full of genuinely good ideas, well realized. It includes some moments of genuine eeriness, and shows a willingness to end on a downer note that’s deserved instead of cliché.

I particularly enjoyed all the little bits and pieces taken from different styles of POV horror that make up much of the film’s middle part – this solves the problem of the genre’s tendency to have boring middles quite nicely and provides the film with a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the scope of what’s going on in it without breaking the bank.

As to weaknesses – well, the acting’s not always quite up the ambition – particularly when it comes to the grief horror parts of the film – and the film’s ten minutes or so longer than it exactly needs to be. For this kind of indie project, these are hardly problems worth mentioning, however.

Stranger (1991): The early days of Toei’s V-Cinema subdivision really were an anything goes time, apparently, so between classic exploitation, yakuza comedy, insane low budget action, or 70s heist revival, there was also space for this suspense thriller by Shunichi Nagasaki about a loner female taxi driver (Yuko Natori) finding herself stalked by what turns out to be a killer. There are a couple of obvious influences – Spielberg’s Duel for the rather wonderful car action parts and the usual suspense suspects – but Nagasaki’s film is such a great portrayal of loneliness as well as of a woman under threat protecting herself, these influences begin to pale behind the tight, focussed, filmmaking and the general intelligence of the film.

Three Films Make A Post: Never bring a knife salesman to a gunfight.

Invoking Yell (2023): The late 1990s. A trio of women make their way to a supposedly haunted far-off forest site to shoot material for a video for their black metal band. For one of them, bringing the camera, it’s also supposed to be some kind of initiation into the kvlt.

Despite some pacing issues, this Chilean POV horror movie by Patricio Valladares isn’t a bad little example of the form at all. The 90s would-be black metal church burners mood is pretty believable, and once things get going, the filmmakers demonstrate a nice eye for making the traditional running through the woods interesting again.

The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023): A couple of decades ago, I’d have yawned and called this tale of a varied group of people threatening each other with violence in the last diner stop in Yuma County yet another Tarantino-alike. Of course, for better or worse, QT couldn’t make a movie as concise and focussed as Francis Galluppi’s debut feature to save his life, and once you’ve gotten over the shock of this being something of a throwback to 90s filmmaking, you might very well appreciate that, as well as the control about rhythm and shape of the film Galluppi shows.

With a cast featuring the kind of indie darlings I like – particularly Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue as well as some beloved horror people like Barbara Crampton and Alex Essoe in very minor roles – and filmmaking this controlled, this actually turned out be a very pleasant surprise.

Bells in the Moonlight aka Klokker I måneskinn (1964): Kåre Bergstrøm’s anthology movie about a group of mostly men telling each other three tales of the supernatural that are then debunked by a fat Freudian unfortunately isn’t as great as the director’s Lake of the Dead. It is very well shot and expertly staged, and there are quite a few eerie little moments here, but the tales themselves are harmless and gutless, have a tendency to moralize – the adultery-destroying elf doll is particularly painful – and go on much longer than their thin plots allow.

My general dislike for tales of the supernatural that never actually commit to the supernatural and make a big thing out of their not committing to either the supernatural or the rational certainly doesn’t help matters here, but even without it, this is mostly one for the completist who needs to have seen every horror anthology. A group that, alas, includes me.

Heretic (2024)

Young Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) visit the home of one Mr Reed (Hugh Grant), who has shown interest in being converted.

In truth, he’s anything but a possible convert, and quickly, the young women find themselves drawn into a perverse game about faith, disbelief, one built on a very specific kind of hubris.

On paper, a contemporary, sort of topical horror movie concerning faith and the horrors of being trapped in Richard Dawkins’s cellar does not sound like a good time, but rather a source for incessant attacks of the kind of progressive smugness that never feel terribly progressive to this socialist, and won’t convince anyone to become a less shitty person. Or, even worse, like nearly two hours of preachin’ time, something that’s to be avoided quite independent of what is being preached.

So colour me most pleasantly surprised by a film that’s nuanced without hedging its bets, dares to be complex yet still have a philosophical as well as a political point of view, and is utterly unafraid to get weird to the point of the most delightful (macabre)absurdity.

Where lesser filmmakers would let things get talky, or preachy, or insufferably smug, directing duo Scott and Bryan Woods couch their film of ideas in the language of the thriller, the very typical cat-and-mouse game between a killer and his prospective victims, so well, it can be enjoyed as a nearly perfect example of its form even if you’ve no interest in the film’s exploration of belief and disbelief whatsoever.

The horror thriller elements are not just window dressing to let a lesson go down easier, yet every set piece is also part of the film’s argument with Reed, the Sisters, and its viewers, exploring metaphorical spaces to better be able to speak about its ideas. That exactly this also leads to openings for clever twists and reversions of audience expectations the film never misses to make good use of isn’t exactly an accident, but a sign of rather brilliant filmmaking.

Being the kind of viewer I am, I’m absolutely delighted by how weird and preposterous the plot is, going to wonderfully deranged places any even semi-realist horror movie would avoid like the plague out of fear of becoming ridiculous, doubling down on stranger elements because they are simply the right elements for this particular movie.

All of this is centred by some absolutely fantastic, visually imaginative, shot by shot filmmaking and three great central performances: Hugh Grant has grown into a delightful performer once he had to stop getting by on charm and is here playing a man creepy, cruel, deranged and terribly convinced of his own rightness in a very precise and specific manner, Thatcher’s captivating as she’s in every role she’s in (and how nice that it’s a really great movie this time around), and East reveals what appears at first to be a somewhat thin performance to be anything but during a final act that rises or falls with her ability to reveal hidden complexities of her character.

Not at all bad for a movie I expected to turn off after twenty minutes or so.

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.

Carry-On (2024)

Junior TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) and his partner Nora Parisi (Sofia Carson) have a rather exciting Christmas Eve. It’s not just that working on Christmas sucks, and even more so doing so at LAX, as they both are. Nora has also just told Ethan that she is pregnant, and his reaction is rather more complicated than one would probably hope for from a new father, though, to be fair to the guy, his reaction is based on self-doubt instead of the old deadbeat dad routine.

After some dithering, Ethan does decide to take this as an opportunity to get himself out of the motivational slump he has been in ever since he didn’t make it into cop school. Alas, his new-found go-getting attitude does put him in the crosshairs of a mysterious Traveler (Jason Bateman), who really, really needs Ethan’s help to get an object on an airplane. If not, a bullet just might collide with Nora’s brain.

Ethan’s doing his best to outwit his tormentor without endangering lives, but that turns into a very difficult proposition.

After going through a bit of a Rock-shaped slump, Jaume Collet-Serra is back making the kind of genre movies he’s shown himself to be oh so very good at. As always with the director, the initial set-up and characterization of Carry-On (not to be confused with the Carry On films for my imaginary readers from the British Isles) are taken somewhere out of cliché central. Once the plot gets rolling, however, that sort of thing becomes utterly irrelevant to the enjoyment gleaned from the film’s tightly constructed series of escalations, where every single move Ethan manages to make only appears to make the situation more dramatic and acute. There’s the proper and pleasant breathlessness to proceedings Collet-Serra does so well, and a kinetic energy that belies the fact this is taking place in a comparatively small number of places.

But then, one of the touches that give the film its extra kick is how well it uses the very quotidian locations inside of an airport for maximum excitement. Who knew baggage conveyor systems could be so exciting?

Also exciting – at least to me – is how well Carry-On uses the cliché characters and relations it establishes to further its dramatic impact. While Ethan is certainly the film’s protagonist, Nora and certain other characters are actually doing things as well, which of course makes it easier for a viewer not to see them as some kind of narrative furniture.

So yes, it’s Jaume Collet-Serra making a very Jaume Collet-Serra movie again, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Nightfall (1956)

James Vanning (Aldo Ray) has been on the run for some time now. The police is looking for him as their main suspect in the murder of a friend, while a duo of bank robbers (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) who actually killed the man – and nearly murdered Jim as well – believe he has run off with their ill-gotten gains. For reasons best known to himself, our protagonist doesn’t trust the police enough to tell them the story of what actually happened, though in noir, unspoken war trauma is always a good guess.

There’s also an insurance investigator (James Gregory) on his trail. Things begin to come to a head on a night Jim meet-cutes model Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft), and has an encounter with the robbers, as well as – unbeknownst to him – with the investigator.

For a film that’s generally seen as a noir, Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall does certain things rather differently. Sure, there’s a plot involving mistaken identities, gangsters, and a man on the run, but the femme isn’t fatale, the only on-screen authority figure is actually trustworthy, and our hero’s genuinely innocent – running away with the money like the robbers believe he did never seems to even have crossed his mind.

Instead of the shadows of the titular nightfall, the film’s tensest scenes take place in broadest daylight and comparatively wide open spaces – and it’s not even the desert but rather a lot of snow. All of which makes for a much nicer film than you usual find in the non-genre, the sort of film where love is a real and strengthening thing instead an object of dark obsession and method of manipulation, and where the protagonist is a very decent man whose only flaw is acting a bit stupid. Nihilism, this certainly ain’t.

Curiously enough, giving up on the darkness of the noir worldview doesn’t feel like a cop out for the film at all, but just as natural as the noir’s typical darkness comes to other films of the genre.

As Ray plays him, Jim is closer to Hitchcock’s traditional thriller protagonist, an everyman getting in over his head. Though most Hitchcock protagonists of this style do not project the sense of genuine vulnerability Ray displays here, wonderfully going against what his physique of bullneck and bulk would suggest. This is a 50s man not afraid to show his fears and genuine emotions to the woman he falls for, and consequently, Marie falling for him this quickly feels much less contrived than is typical for this sort of thing.

This compassionate eye for the softer side of the characters – see also the interactions between the insurance investigator and his wife – is not a thing you typically get in any movie seen as a noir, but for Nightfall, the feeling of watching basically decent, large-as-life people involved in a thriller plot seems central.

This being a Tourneur film, that thriller plot is realized with great care, economy and style, full of genuine tension. Nearly every scene is filled with the kind of detail that’s either telling about the characters or helps create the texture of the film’s world as an actual place.

In a way, all of this is very low key, but it’s also perfectly of a piece, and utterly convincing.

Dagger Eyes (1983)

Original title: Mystère

High class call girl Mystère (Carole Bouquet) keeps up the style and posture of a high fashion model at all times, projecting an aura of impossibly perfect beauty presented with total emotional detachment. Her mantra appears to be that nothing ever surprises her. Indeed, Mystère’s perfect surface hardly shows the tiniest cracks even when a mysterious figure starts stalking her with ambitions on murder.

The killer is not a random maniac, as you’d expect, however. Rather, a long-fingered colleague has more or less accidentally hidden a lighter in Mystère’s stylish handbag she has stolen from a client. In the lighter is a microfilm, and on that microfilm are photos that show the assassin (John Steiner) who shot a politician during a motorcade. The brutally disposed people behind the assassination are in the espionage business, and certainly not to be trifled with.

However, neither is in Mystère, even less so once she teams up with the deeply misogynistic, very subtly named, Inspector Colt (Phil Coccioletti).

The giallo genre hit a rather big snag during the 80s. In part, this was only natural in the somewhat fad and fashion based world of Italian genre movies where yesterday’s hit genre is today’s box-office death knell. Italian filmmaking as a whole started suffering from fewer opportunities and ever lower budgets, with rather a lot of talent making their way to the aesthetically less pleasing but more secure feeding troughs of TV production.

However, I believe the giallo had another problem in trying to update its style to that of the new decade. Visually, the genre had always been deeply informed by pop culture and fashion, but there aren’t that many directors involved in the genre who appeared interested in updating this element of their films as much as it was needed to keep giallos contemporary.

Carlo Vanzina, mostly specialized in directing comedies, demonstrates no problems in that regard here (nor in his later giallo Nothing Underneath) – if there is any film that breathes the idea of the giallo as a version of the thriller and horror genres informed by violence and sex but also by fashion, it is Mystère. Its titular heroine – really embodied by Bouquet more than strictly acted – is presented as the impossible ideal of its time: an always perfectly made-up, cool kind of femininity. Bouquet always looks as if she’s just stepped out of a magazine cover, even when surrounded by people who look perfectly normal, always in control, Hitchock’s everyman protagonist inverted into something new and deeply contemporary - as it will turn out morally as well as stylishly, as befits the decade.

She strides through a plot that enlivens giallo standards by combining them with the conspiracy thriller – also reimagined into something more fashionable and more amoral – through often rather wonderful suspense sequences, shots of great, artificial beauty, and those sudden outbreaks of illogic and goofiness which were always part of this arm of the genre. Indeed, if you ask me, its the inherent strangeness and the disinterest in presenting the world of the film as working like the real world does that always bring the giallo into the folds of horror, or at the very least the cinema of the fantastic, as a sibling of the film noir that’s even more stylized and even less interested in real-world logic.

From this perspective, even the pretty damn silly epilogue of Mystère makes sense as part of the aesthetic package of the film; that it also doesn’t even seem to understand, and certainly not share, the moral outrage of the conspiracy thrillers it also borrows from makes sense: this is a complete product of the 80s.

The Night God Screamed (1971)

Mild-mannered and pleasant Willis Pierce (Alex Nicol) is a curious preacher to get a homicidal mad-on for, but when he very mildly berates the leader of the dope-smoking (gasp!) Jesus freak hippie cult that’s robbing him of the little money he is able to collect for his work, he thereby enrages the leader of the pack so much, the poor man is crucified on the big cross he just bought. The preacher’s wife Fanny (Jeanne Crain), who wasn’t into Willis buying a cross already, sees insult added to injury by finding his corpse. Her statement is also going to be responsible to send the cult leader to the electric chair, rather to the anger of his gang.

A year later, Fanny is working for the judge who presided in the cult leader’s trial. He asks her to babysit his quartet of teenage children for a weekend, because those young ones clearly can’t be trusted without a responsible adult around.

Unfortunately, it is this night when some cult members decide to take vengeance on Fanny, and soon a tense siege situation evolves. And believe me, Rio Bravo did not include teenagers among the besieged for a reason.

Going by its plot, its title, and the year it was made, one would expect Lee Madden’s The Night God Screamed to be a rather nasty bit of exploitation cinema. Alas (or fortunately, if you’re as mild-mannered as Willis was) that is not the case. This is a bit of cheap but mostly classy cinema, so much so even its hippie bashing – an easy bit of work in 1971 – does lack the nastiness in tone you would expect (hope for?).

As it stands, the level of violence and exploitation on display throughout the film would have been on the mild side for an ABC Movie of the Week. However, like with many of those films, Night is a perfectly decent little movie, shot with a degree of technical acumen, effectively structured, and pretty satisfying when one doesn’t go into it expecting a movie about a night during which god screamed.

As any actual TV thriller of the style would, this, too, does feature an aging Old Hollywood star in the lead role, and as in an actual TV movie, Jeanne Crain gives the kind of effective performance that carries a film like this through the vagaries of mediocre teen actors.

The siege sequence are competently tense and effective, though somewhat lessened after the fact by a pretty stupid and not exactly surprising plot twist, so there’s really very little to complain about here. Beyond the fact this isn’t the film about a preacher crucifying cult and/or screaming godhoods I was hoping for, but October is still young.

Three Films Make A Post: Revenge has never been sweeter.

You’ll Never Find Me (2023): There’s a lot to admire in Indianna Bell’s and Josiah Allen’s thriller about a stormy night in an Australian trailer park home, a nightly visitor, and a lot – and I mean a lot – of meaningful stares and portentous dialogue: the sound design is fantastic, the performances are focussed, and it has some genuinely interesting things to say about the violence some men love to inflict of women. However, for me, there’s not enough material here for anything longer than a forty minute short film, so at full length, things feel rather repetitive and drawn out, and everything seems to be restated thrice until the film can lumber to its excellently realized if obvious conclusion.

Thelma (2024): I am genuinely disappointed I didn’t enjoy Josh Margolin’s comedic variation on action movie themes and old age as much as everybody else appears to. It’s not that this is a bad movie, but it is (again!) also a very obvious one: its insights about old age, while played wonderfully by June Squibb and Richard Roundtree, are not exactly incisive – and do tend to the treacly – and the play with action movie tropes stays just as surface level. The humour, as well, never is all that involving.

Taken on the surface level the film actually operates on, it is a fun time and genuinely well done, just don’t go in expecting something that has ambitions beyond making you feel good about your own future of slow decay and dissolution, and everybody you know and love dying (which the film actually tries to make a joke of, because old age loneliness is funny, apparently).

Bad City (2022): Whereas Kensuke Sonomura’s violent cop movie holds more than the homage to classic Japanese V-cinema I was promised. In fact, for being that other movie, it’s not quite violent and crazy enough, and much too interested in character work.

Don’t get me wrong – the action is plenty violent (though, alas, rather MMA-based), pleasantly chaotic and balancing right on the edge of cartoonish fun and brutality appropriate for the material. But this is a film deeply interested in also giving characters proper motivations and relationships it then uses to drive the plot that in its turn is the engine that drives the action sequences. During this, it uses clichés and tropes, and discards them or revels in them as it finds most fitting. It thus actually manages to achieve – between funny-bad jokes and a bit of carnage – a series of emotional beats that actually work. Hell, I found myself caring for the characters as characters, and how often can you say that about an action movie?

Three Films Make A Post: A new M. Night Shyamalan experience.

Trap (2024): Not surprising anyone who has ever heard anything I said about his films, I did have a very typical M. Night Shyamalan experience with this one, in so much as I found myself in turns annoyed, exasperated and bored by his usual approach of setting up something that could go somewhere interesting but only ever follows through to the lamest possible direction.

To the usual Shyamalan problems (I don’t feel the need to list them yet again), this one adds a dollop of nepotism when our director/writer/producer casts his daughter Saleka as a basically angelic popstar, the facts she’s not great at the whole popstar bit as well as an aggressively terrible actress notwithstanding. Josh Hartnett for his part apparently believes he’s in a comedy, and so mugs and grimaces his way through his cartoon serial killer shtick without any fear of embarrassment.

Well, at least he seems to enjoy his time with the film.

#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead (2024): I found the first thirty minutes of Marcus Dunstan’s slasher comedy/sledgehammer satire on influencers hard going – it’s not easy spending time with characters this broadly drawn to be ridiculously horrible, nor did the first kills really catch my interest. However, once the cast is whittled down a bit and things get into a groove, Dunstan lets some of his instincts for suspense come to the fore, as well as some additional character traits in the gaggle of idiots to be destroyed.

Plus, some of the cheap nastiness actually becomes somewhat funny.

Luminous Woman aka Hikaru Onna (1987): As a lover of the weird and the woolly, I’ve often been rather disappointed with my regular inability to get much out of this sort of thing when approached from an arthouse angle. Case in point is this Shinji Somai joint full of nonsense like hairy holy innocents from Hokkaido, or underground wrestling matches that come with their own opera singers that should be just the kind of things that delight me. Yet I never found myself able to connect with any of it.

That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate Somai’s artful direction, the inventiveness of his framing of scenes, his – famous - long shots, or the way he folds time and space when he feels the need to in a way only cinema can do. In practice, however, I don’t connect to any of this, neither intellectually nor emotionally nor aesthetically, more’s the pity.

The Third Man (1949)

Pulp western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) comes to a post-war Vienna that’s all Dutch angles, high shadows and people of dubious trustworthiness. His childhood friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has lured him there with a vague job offer, and where Harry calls, Holly goes, vagueness or not. Alas, when Holly actually arrives, his friend is not in a fit state for providing a job, for he is about to be buried. Apparently, Harry Lime died in an automobile accident, not the kind of death you’d expect for a larger than life personage like him.

Apart from Holly, Harry Lime leaves behind an actress lover with a secret (Alida Valli) and British and Russian military policemen so happy about his death, they’re not going to actually investigate it. As Holly soon learns, his friend was apparently involved in large scale black market operations.

Holly really can’t believe that of his roguish but not evil childhood buddy and sets out to find a bit more about the Harry Lime situation than the police is ready to tell him. While Holly is doing that, he stumbles upon the fact that a mysterious third man appears to have been part of the accident that killed Harry. His friend’s death might very well have been murder. Together with Harry’s lover Anna Schmidt, Holly goes further and further done a proper rabbit hole of an investigation, while of course falling for the lady.

Carol Reed’s The Third Man is an indelible classic, situated somewhere where noir and Hitchcockian thriller meet. I’d argue that its portrayal of individuals trapped in the aftermath of a political conflagration, in the hand of secretive powers they can’t fully comprehend, is an important milestone on the road to the kind of pessimism the 70s conspiracy thriller would deal in. This version of Vienna is the incubation point of many things that would go wrong and grow worse in the coming two decades, as well as the way the movies would look at them.

Stylistically, I find The Third Man particularly fascinating as an example on how to use real locations (among some choice sets) and make them look unreal and threatening, how to see and shoot them as places where the shadows outside do indeed mirror the shadows inside the hearts of the characters. The abundance of Dutch angles portray an off-kilter world, the huge, often more than simply thick, shadows are bringing to the surface the undercurrents of reality in ways only a movie can.

As a German, I’m always surprised by the film’s use of actual Austrian actors for the minor roles, who, unlike what you encounter in most Hollywood films, speak actual idiomatic German, and whose dialogue feels utterly probable for the time and place. This adds a further layer of reality only accessibly to an audience who understands what these actors are saying.

There’s a very specific quality to The Third Man that suggests a film where everything comes together just right: the obvious visual artistry, the interest in getting details right, the interplay between heightened style and naturalism, the acting (Welles leaving a deep impression of a very complex character in only a couple of scenes, Cotton and Valli probably giving the performances of their lives without looking as if they are trying), the curious decisions that turn out to be just right (that zither score is such a strange idea, when you think about it). At the same time, it is one of those highly constructed films that never feels as if it were trying all that hard – it just is.

Three Films Make A Post: Will you win, Godzilla? Will you win, Kong? The battle of the century!

Copycat (1995): There are two reasons why Jon Amiel’s serial killer thriller is anything more than a slick adaptation of an overconstructed script. And since these reasons are called Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, and both are in their fullest screen presence modes, this silly concoction about a serial killer who is basically a serial killer cover band turns into a tour de force commanded by two actresses who drag every bit of possible substance out of very little. This sort of thing can absolutely elevate mediocrity into a greatly entertaining movie, as the film thoroughly proves.

Malasaña 32 (2020): Some of the set pieces in Alberto Pintó’s movie about a Spanish family in the 70s moving from the country into what turns out to be a haunted apartment are very well done and effective. However, this is the type of horror movie that can only ever treat and see its supernatural threat as a reason for set pieces and plot twists, and never manages to cohere the political troubles of the time it suggests, the family’s experience moving from the country to the city in hopes of a better life, and the backstory of the supernatural threat into any kind of thematically coherent argument.

The horror pieces themselves tend to the grab-bag approach where thematic coherence or coherence of mood never appear to be of interest to the filmmakers, either. All the easier to borrow heavily from all kinds of sources, be it Poltergeist – a much superior film – or creepypasta.

Embrace of the Serpent aka El abrazo de la serpiente (2023): There’s a certain kinship between Ciro Guerra’s film and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Cobra Verde and Fitzcarraldo in the way naturalism and sudden outbreaks of the surreal intertwine, as well as in its location.

However, this is a film made by someone from a very different time and place, so there are as many differences in approaches and world view as there are similarities – Guerra certainly isn’t a Herzog cover band. The film’s treatment of colonialism, Western scientific and Amazonian traditional culture comes from a very different direction, but Guerra generally doesn’t simplify and keeps certain differences unresolved, philosophical questions answered from two opposing directions at once.

As a film this is an act of deep worldbuilding, making ways of looking at and being in the world understandable by slowly drawing a viewer into them, full immersion in a style only a handful of directors use these days (Robert Eggers comes to mind).

Three Films Make A Post: Sometimes, No Tagline’s Forthcoming

Death Occurred Last Night aka La morte risale a ieri sera (1970): The mentally disabled daughter of a single parent father (Raf Vallone), disappears without much of a trace. An increasingly invested cop (Frank Wolff) takes on the case to find some rather nasty business concerning a prostitution racket and personal betrayal.

Even though it is often strikingly shot and edited with as mix of inventiveness and intelligence, and features fine performances by the always great Vallone and Wolff, I never quite managed to connect with this police procedural (whoever pretends this to be a giallo as the genre is typically understood is simply lying). Perhaps the reason is Duccio Tessari’s unwillingness to ever show as much of the sordidness this tale is built upon as would be actually necessary? The overwhelming sense of watching a film that really wants to make it clear that it is socially conscious and rather important?

Never Give Up aka Yasei no shomei (1978): Junya Sato’s often somewhat too slow and vague narrative style – the film is nearly two and a half hours long! – never quite manages to disguise quite how strange of a genre mixture this Ken Takakura vehicle is: it’s a melodrama about a man of violence trying to do penance for past sins, a 70s conspiracy thriller about a female journalist stumbling upon a small town conspiracy that is at the same time apparently nation-wide, a movie about a psychic kid, an action movie that prefigures some beats of the final act of First Blood. There’s just a lot going on here, and for at least the film’s first third, it is not exactly easy to parse how all these disparate elements connect.

However, once they do – or if you enjoy figuring out vague narratives – Never Give Up becomes more than just a little compelling. Needless to say, the acting is pretty wonderful, and there’s a very 70s fearlessness on display when it comes to the death of central characters and downer endings.

Mars Express (2023): I don’t understand the high praise this French piece of science fiction animation is getting all around the net. To these eyes, Jérémie Périn’s film is about as generic as science fiction action gets, and neither its animation nor its design is much to write home about – unless you’re deeply into things looking as if they were done with strict professional competence. The narrative is as been there, done that as it gets, and the worldbuilding nothing that hasn’t been done in science fiction again and again to better effect.

It doesn’t improve my appreciation that the film shunts its only compelling ideas into its final fifteen minutes.

Three Films Make A Post: Got a pencil? Take this down. Tomorrow you die.

Hit Man (2023): To my eyes, Richard Linklater’s perfectly decent comedy has been more than a little overhyped. It’s very Linklater in many ways, starting with the typical “I would like to be Eric Rohmer, alas I’m American” style of its dialogue scenes (do I need to mention that I loathe Rohmer’s dialogue style?), the same view on American culture he has had for the last decades, the slick but a bit empty style, and the grand gesture Linklater traditionally likes to present decent but not exactly terribly exciting ideas with.

This doesn’t mean this is a bad movie – like most everything Linklater ever did, this is an eminently watchable and entertaining piece of work, just not one that connects with me on any level beyond my appreciation for its rather unexciting craftsmanship.

Zu: (The) Warriors from the Magic Mountain aka 新蜀山劍俠 (1983): When it came out, Tsui Hark’s wuxia extravaganza was a core movie in the introduction of at the time state of the art special effects techniques to Hong Kong cinema that gifted us the joys of the wire fu style of wuxia (among other things). Not all of the film’s effects have aged gracefully, but the film throws so many at the audience that you’ll only have to blink and get to the next one; plus, many of the effects are of such insane and lovely conception, their actual quality isn’t too important to me.

Of course, the film’s absolutely unrelenting pace can be a bit of a difficulty if a viewer is in the wrong mood or prone to headaches, something that isn’t helped by its love for throwing barely comprehensible philosophical concepts at the viewer in the same tempo it does everything else.

It’s all a bit like having one’s head bashed in with a bag of the best candy one has ever eaten. In the right mood, that’s not a criticism coming from me.

P.I. Private Investigations (1987): For much of its running time, Nigel Dick’s film is the epitome of the competent-but-not-more thriller in the Hitchcockian style. Dick’s direction is slick, Los Angeles is Los Angeles, and Clayton Rohner’s whiny rich boy protagonist the kind of guy I’m pretty happy to see suffer a bit – it’s that kind of film, and he’s no Cary Grant.

From time to time, however, there’s a hiccup in the conventional slickness, and the film goes off in strange directions for half a scene or so – a chase is interrupted by our protagonist randomly stumbling into a heist, a dream sequence intrudes for no good reason – that keep it away from boring competence syndrome.