In short: Raccoon Valley (2018)

A military plane carrying some nasty infectant crashes right into the water reservoir of an American small town named Raccoon Valley. Our protagonist is a deaf and socially isolated woman (Terri Czapleski, who is pretty damn fantastic) who doesn’t notice the ensuing evacuation measures and soon finds herself quarantined in town with a handful of the infected. But then, even if she weren’t deaf, this is a rather quiet apocalypse for the place, the infected not turning into rage zombies but white-faced, black-eyed ghouls who loom menacingly in the background more than anything else. Once she has realized the gravity of the situation, our heroine will do her best to find her way to safety.

Apparently made for $175 – and a lot of goodwill, favours, and free work I’d imagine – this little gem was written, directed, produced, scored, edited, sound designed and visually magicked by one Turner Clay. It’s an excellent example of how great indie genre filmmaking in the digital age can be if the people involved are talented and focused. And focused is the watch word here. This is a film that seems to know exactly what story it wants to tell and then tells it in the most economical manner possible, leaving out all distractions and diversions that detract from many an example of indie horror in this budget range. Consequently, the film ends up on a lean 65 minute running time – which is exactly as long as it needs to be.


There is so much to love here: from a visual style that often makes highly effective and intelligent use of limited lighting as well as of autumn colours (always an easy way to get bonus points from me, I admit), over Clay’s sound design which blends our heroine’s memories of sounds with the noises surrounding her she can’t hear and a dark ambient soundtrack, the sense of isolation and melancholy yet also persistence in the face of danger surrounding our heroine, to the effective looming of the infected, everything in the film comes together incredibly well. Not incredibly well for $175, mind you, but so well as to make Raccoon Valley exactly the film it wants to be.

Music Monday: Pretty City Edition

The Graveyard Story (1991)

Warning: I’m going to spoil most of the film’s plot twists, but believe me, it is better that way!

Rich, retired psychiatrist Dr McGregor (John Ireland) has developed a very special relationship to a dead little girl that starts out with him visiting her grave for vague reasons and her reciprocating with – harmless and friendly – visits of her own after a while. Clearly, something is keeping the kid tied to our world, so McGregor hires policeman turned private eye Ron Hunt (Adrian Paul, but not that Adrian Paul) – a man whose newspaper ad promises he will “consider anything” – to find out what. Ron’s just too happy to do the old man the favour for two hundred bucks a day.

During his investigation, Ron stumbles upon various curious things, like a disturbingly horny journalist (Christine Cattell), or the fact that there’s no information about the little girl’s death in the newspaper archives of said horny journalist. He will find other traces, though, and stumble through a pretty darn dumb mystery plot.

Oh boy, Bozidar D. Benedikt’s The Graveyard Story is not at all a good film. In fact, it is so bad a film I can finally cart out my old chestnut about a film feeling as if it was made by people from a dimension about one step removed from ours again. Parts of the film’s general wonkiness are easily explained by the vagaries of shooting something on a low budget, like the bland direction, the often painfully awkward staging of dialogue scenes (and it’s nearly all dialogue scenes in this one), or the way certain scenes are completely superfluous.

The stiff dialogue, often reminiscent of the English dubs of Italian movies from the 70s and 80s, is clearly rooted in the director/writer not being an English native speaker. Why none of the actors except for Ireland were apparently helping out with that is a different question, but then, calling most of the on-screen talent “actor” is a bit much. Take Adrian Paul, carrying himself with all the vigour and verve of a walking corpse, usually showing no expression whatsoever and going through his lines giving the impression he’s got no idea what he’s talking about (and he certainly is a native speaker). And he’s basically in all of the film’s scenes.

The acting level as a whole is rather dreadful. Most of the cast is, alas, not terribly good in a rather boring way – there’s little of the true weirdness nor the histrionics of the entertaining and enthusiastic bad actor on display – only Cattell and the guy playing Angry Mafia Dude (you’ll recognize him if you inflict this thing upon yourself) are any kind of fun to watch. Ireland is an experienced professional and acts the part, but of course he doesn’t have too many scenes.


But let’s not carry on making fun of acting and dialogue, there’s a whole plot to gawk at, too. Going by the film’s start, one would have expected this to be a ghost story at least on some level, but as a matter of fact, this is a mystery without any supernatural elements; unless you take the increasing stupidity of the plot to be supernatural. It’s not just the little things that make the film quite as dumb as it is, like the question why McGregor makes up the whole ghost story to tell to the detective when he actually wants Hunt to look for his long-lost daughter, or who’d hire Hunt for anything but getting bored to death. To wit, the film’s biggest plot twist is based on the following line of thought: that a woman whose daughter has been kidnapped would, when the kidnappers send her – rather thoughtfully – a child sized coffin (please don’t ask where the kidnappers got it, or I’ll have to make something appropriately dumb up) with a piece of coat sticking out, not look inside of the coffin to find out if her child is actually inside, and if she is alive or dead. Now imagine that, furthermore, the mother and her female boss (basically the kid’s fairy godmother), would decide not to go to the police or any kind of authority at any point in time and would just bury the coffin with the help of a friendly priest (who is also not looking into the coffin, of course). If that makes any kind of sense to you, you’re the writer of this film.

Three Films Make A Post: Nothing can stop the Killer with a Blood Lust for Ladies - Naked and Dead.

Chang Chen Ghost Stories aka Be Possessed By Ghosts (2015): Xu Zheng-Chao’s mainland Chinese horror is quite the mess. Wildly pivoting from the rotest possible ghost shtick through psychological horror through thriller motives and back again without a care for coherence and believability, the film not only never finds its tone, it also features a plot that makes no sense at all in the possible worst way. The character’s are as bland and one-dimensional as is all too common in mainland China genre films, keeping the interest in anything that may or may not happen to them low, while Xu’s direction overstrains anything he tries to do, be it the simplest shock or the (patently absurd) psychological elements of the film.

Midnight Man (1995): This Lorenzo Lamas vehicle directed by John Weidner is a pretty decent piece of US martial arts action. It’s either not quite silly enough or too silly to make it high onto my list of beloved entries into the genre canon, but it flows pretty well, and the action is at least decent, while the plot is a choice series of clichés done entertaining enough.
Plus, how can you dislike a film that pretends Lamas is Cambodian (as are a slew of Chinese-American and Japanese-American actors), and features an evil member of an ancient warrior cult walk around in a hilarious kit with razor-sharp hems that look suspiciously like aluminium?

Lights Out (2016): And then there’s this curious film: a James Wan produced contemporary mainstream horror film that actually features a supernatural threat that has thematic coherence and abilities and works as a metaphor for mental illness (which you can, depending on your tastes, read as pretty offensive or as pretty insightful), uses not only jump scares, lacks an idiotic plot twist right at the end, and features expectedly great (Maria Bello) to good (Teresa Palmer and non-annoying kid actor Gabriel Bateman) acting.


It’s pleasantly small scale, quite atmospheric, and has a pleasant air of simplicity, Eric Heisserer’s screenplay and David F. Sandberg’s direction concentrating on a handful of characters and a single supernatural threat (that also isn’t a demon). A fun time is had by all, unless one is hit by the less kind interpretation of the film’s ideas about mental illness, which will leave one rather cranky.

Past Misdeeds: Santo Vs. Las Lobas (1976)

aka Santo vs the She-Wolfs

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Santo's (El Santo!) sweet life of wrestling fools in the ring and getting kissed by the White Wolf Queen of the lycanthropes  (something that will not be important later on) is rudely interrupted by a sleazy private eye who tells our hero some random stuff about lycanthropy and hands him an envelope containing place and time for a meeting with a certain Cesar Harker (Rodolfo de Anda), werewolf hunter. Santo, after having fought every supernatural creature you'd care to name, and some others too, is still the great sceptic at heart, poo-pooing the whole lycanthropy idea and shrugging that strange visit off. One imagines Santo gets visits like that so often he has learned to be choosy whom to believe.

His opinion changes when our sceptical hero is repeatedly attacked by a pack of dogs with the awesome abilities to a) make the great El Santo very very afraid, and b) to disappear into thin air. Clearly, something supernatural is going on here, so the luchador decides that meeting up with Cesar will be just the thing to do.

At their very leisurely meeting (it's still the 70s) Cesar explains to Santo that the Harkers have a long tradition of werewolf hunting, helped by their freakish immunity to the curse of lycanthropy; quite unlike Santo, who will - thanks to his "dog" bites - have to do something against the lycanthropy problem or turn into a lycanthrope himself before the next Great Red Moon (whatever that is) rises. Fortunately, there's an old prophecy foretelling either the end of the world through a lycanthropocalypse or the end to the hairy menace by the hand of a legend or symbol of silver. That latter symbol, Cesar is pretty sure, would be Santo.

Practically, Cesar knows the lycanthropes are based quite close to the small village (still with its own doctor and chief of police) he and his family are living in, so he invites Santo to his home. After dispatching one of the incredibly ineffective lycanthrope assassins who seem to hound Cesar's every step (a random flashback shows he can't even play a relaxing round of golf without being attacked), Santo agrees. But being the responsible chap that he is, the luchador is first going to fulfil his contractual obligations and have a wrestling match; he'll be with Cesar a bit later. After all, possibly turning into a wolf person in the near future is no reason for the idol of the masses to not show up to a fight. My protestant work ethic is ecstatic.

The situation will be quite changed once Santo arrives in Cesar's home village, though. The werewolf hunter and the White Queen have killed each other off, leaving behind some very angry lycanthropes in need of a new queen, Cesar's twin brother Eric (Rodolfo de Anda without glasses), and various women and children who will soon enough be in peril. I'm sure there's nothing untoward in the crate that arrives from Transylvania the same night Santo does, like, for example, the King of Lycanthropes Licar.

The whole affair could become too much even for a hero like Santo, but Eric, a bare-chested, waxed, vest-wearer named Gitano (Carlos Suárez looking like a man who has a lot of fun here), and various armed villagers (when they're not trying to kill Santo for no reason I managed to discern) are there to pinch in.

One of the real joys of lucha cinema is the adaptability of the genre. As long as he stays a hero, a lucha movie doesn't need to interpret its central character as a standard masked crimefighter alone, unlike - for example - US superhero films do, leaving the door wide open for genre hopping of a kind that makes lucha movies surprisingly adaptable.

As is so often the case in the genre, the movies of the great El Santo are a prime example of this. Santo starred in Universal-inspired classic horror films, 60s spy movies, adventure films, unfunny comedies, pulp-y crime films, rancheros and inexplicably weird stuff. Basically, Santo dipped his toes in every genre except romantic comedies (unless you're a fan of the Santo/Blue theory) and melodrama (though there are of course lucha melodramas without Santo), turning every other genre into sub-genres of the great equalizer that is lucha cinema.

By the time Santo shot Santo vs. Los Lobas, the lucha genre had lost much of its popularity, leaving the tenacious wrestler pretty much in the cinematic dregs, seeing him work for producers churning out very silly, often surprisingly boring movies, on budgets that could probably not always buy shoe-strings for everyone involved. So it comes as a bit of a surprise - even more of it when you add Santo's generally family-oriented image - that Las Lobas is a lucha entry into the genre of somewhat bleak, very dream-like 70s horror that does actually set out to be a real movie instead of random reels of Santo, musical numbers, and travelogue footage. Las Lobas also turns out to be one of the weirdest entries in Santo's filmography not produced by Vergara.

What's probably even more surprising is how well this attempt works, with directors Rubén Galindo (last seen here letting Santo fight against garbage bags) and Jaime Jiménez Pons creating an often nightmarish, always illogical, mood out of cramped looking shots taking turns with strange, yet strangely compelling compositions, a gritty looking aesthetic that's always rubbing against the weirdness of the plot and ideas, effectively dim lighting, and editing whose rawness emphasises the strangeness of it all by roughing up the film's flow. I'm not sure Galindo and Pons were planning to make their film quite as strange as it feels, and that its technical peculiarities weren't just based on a mix of budgetary troubles and ineptness on their side, but it's the results that count, and the results are, as my American brethren like to say, awesome.

Among the things about Las Lobas that may be clever or may be just accidents is the film's tendency to portray Santo as a bit more human and fallible than he often is: he's fleeing from his early dog attackers in a very undignified way (what is it with Galindo and letting Santo high-tail it?), actually needs the help of others, and even loses fights without being tricked into losing them. One might think this time around our hero's actually in danger, which is - of course - a pretty clever thing to find in a horror movie.


But really, it's the mood of the film that makes it as special as it is. It's one of those films where the strangeness of the visuals - lycanthropes who look like bearded ladies in fur bikinis carrying torches standing in a circle around their queen, the White Queen laughing a threatening laugh from the roof of a building, a party with circle dancing turning into a minor lycanthrope massacre - and the peculiarities of the script - a main character dying only to be replaced by a twin who is exactly like he was, the character who is built up as the Big Bad dying quite early leaving plot threads and an ancient prophecy dangling, the rules of lycanthropy changing with every second scene, connections between characters never really getting explained - really come together to form something like a fever dream through which the audience drifts; it's just that this fever dream has a masked wrestler in it, too. And, as a wise man once said, everything's better with a masked wrestler.

In short: Ready Player One (2018)

In the bad future of the 2040s, the world is a greyish brown craphole, so large parts of society escape into the virtual world of Oasis, a random assortment of pop culture and videogame tropes nobody actually playing MMOs today would believe to be successful or not sued into oblivion for copyright infringement. Oasis was apparently mostly built by a cliché tech nerd named Halliday (Mark Rylance) and his only, later bought out, friend Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg, doing to an American accent what he has already done to a Scottish one). For his death a couple of years before the plot sets in, Halliday has hidden away a Big Secret as well as the ownership of Oasis as an Easter egg inside of the virtual world. Until now, nobody has been able to find the secret, despite hordes of fans as well as an Evil Corporation™ trying very hard.

The film follows the meandering adventures of Halliday superfan Wade aka Parzival (Tye Sheridan), his best online bud H (Lena Waithe) and the mysterious Artemis (Olivia Cooke, who actually gets to do more stuff than you’d expect from a female character for this sort of film with this particular guy in the director’s chair) when they actually start to unravel Halliday’s increasingly stupid riddles while fighting off EvilCorps's Saturday morning cartoon goons.

I don’t think the critical mauling of this Steven Spielberg flick based on the insufferable novel by Ernest Cline is completely undeserved, seeing as its first hour or so mostly consists of mediocre animated characters wandering through an ugly and random animated world mostly based on 80s and 90s pop culture – speaking of actual design seems uncalled for – with characterization and dialogue on the level of a YA novel for particularly dense teens (which is still preferable to the smug winking of Cline’s book). Worst of all, it has a joyless feel you don’t usually encounter in a non-serious Spielberg movie.

However, then, after an hour or an hour and half of boredom, something strange happens: the pop cultural references start to cohere, visual gags sometimes become funny, and Spielberg finally falls back on his talents as popcorn cinema storyteller extraordinaire, suddenly hitting well-worn plot beats with heft and energy, making the up to that point absolutely lifeless film feel vibrant and lively. The plot is still pretty stupid, mind you, but now it is presented with a sense of excitement and fun Ready Player One had before been missing completely. The ending is complete pap, of course, but then, how are you sensibly going to end a film whose final philosophy is “reality is real” (insert sound of your favourite dead philosopher rotating in their grave), that wants to criticize consumer culture, but not so much as to anger any of the myriad of product placers involved in it, and that thinks virtual reality is awesome, but you need to take two days a week off to snog Olivia Cooke?


But hey, there are at least 45 entertaining minutes in here, which is quite a bit more than I’d say about the novel it is based on.

Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975)

aka Soul Vengeance

Warning: I will repeatedly use words like “penis” in this one.

Charles (Marlo Monte) is a small-time drug pusher working the black community in Los Angeles. He is, inevitably, arrested. Less inevitable is that one of the cops arresting him, Harry (Ben Bigelow), has a particular hatred of black men like Charles because his wife cheats on him with (gasp!) a black man. Harry is in fact such a crazy bundle of racism and neuroses he’s trying to castrate Charles, which, for reasons the film never bothers to explain, doesn’t quite succeed. The crazy cop’s partner, Jim (Stan Kamber) is theoretically less racist and more fair-minded, but when push comes to shove, he enables and covers for his partner despite knowing better. One might argue this makes him even worse than our would-be castrator, for he actually make a decision to be as bad as he is, whereas his partner clearly has no control over his own actions whatsoever. So there’s no word about any attempted castration in Charles’s trial, and a ranting DA and a judge who spends his free time with black prostitutes land him in prison for three years.

Charles’s time must have been pretty nightmarish, the film turning black and white, the camera following a corridor of cells to a solitary box in which he is kept, cutting to still photographs of Charles in distress. When he comes out, our protagonist wants to go clean, but that’s not easy, ex-cons not exactly being high on the list of the employable. HIs girlfriend has left him for his former partner who now treats him like a doormat. There are good things waiting for him too, though. He and the prostitute Carmen (Reatha Grey) fall in love, Charles getting rid of her pimp easily enough.

But still, the guy who tried to castrate Charles is still around, as are the male figures of supposed authority who covered up for him, so Charles goes around, sexually hypnotizes his enemies’ women so they help him against their respective husbands, and proceeds to kill the men with his prehensile, telescopic schlong.

Yeah, well, I didn’t see that one coming either. It’s no wonder one wouldn’t, either, for Jamaa Fanaka’s Welcome Home does little to prepare its audience for what it gets up to in its final twenty-five minutes or so. Sure, Charles’s jail time is pictured as a literal nightmare, but nightmare doesn’t exactly spell “hero grows super penis”. The little exposition scene “explaining” this comes totally after the fact, and doesn’t actually explain anything. Fanaka’s staging of the film’s sudden turn into weirdo exploitation, his disinterest in structuring it in any conventional narrative manner, does fit the rest of the film, however, for while the synopsis above might make the whole affair seem pretty straightforward, this is not a film structured following any of the rules of a typical narrative. There’s a lot of narrative connective tissue left out, Fanaka clearly preferring to follow his own associative logic in getting from scene to scene.

That’s not a bad thing, mind you, for while there are moments when the film feels sloppy and shaggy, there are many more when Fanaka’s approach feels personal and original; at the very least, the strange directorial decisions taken are usually purposeful choices by the director. Often, the film feels as if it were attempting to dissolve the lines between a kind of verité filmmaking very much en vogue with a group of young African American filmmakers in Los Angeles at the time, and a style of the surreal that pictures the same horrors and tragedies more metaphorically and weirdly. I suspect the kind of US black experience the film talks about must sometimes feel surreal to its victims, anyway, so talking about it this way might be only too fitting.


This is, obviously, not a film everyone will enjoy: it is after all, rough and strange, prone to distractions, and not following the narrative shapes it at first seems to suggest. It’s also technically raw, clearly made with talent and (skewed) vision, yet also just as clearly stretching what was possible for the filmmaker at the time. I think this formal and visual rawness adds a lot to the film, providing its slippage into the whacked out in the end with an additional frisson of reality slipping away into what can certainly be read as a revenge fantasy.

In short: Capturing the Friedmans (2003)

One of the reasons – apart from us humans being inherently drawn to the torrid and the unpleasantly spectacular – many of us find the true crime genre so fascinating is its promise of bringing to light the truth about crimes forgotten, unsolved or just ignored.

Then comes along something like Andrew Jarecki’s brilliant, sad and disturbing documentary about a family’s breakdown following the father’s and one of the son’s arrests for an incredible amount of cases of child molestation, and the whole idea of finding the truth, be it criminalistically, journalistically or scientifically becomes doubtful, things turning into a grey muck of doubt.

Despite the father Friedman actually being a self-confessed paedophile, some or all of the cases – that seem cartoonishly crass in their description - may not actually have happened, for what the film reveals about the police investigation suggests more of a witch hunt than any attempt at trying to find the truth, done by people with little clue about how to handle child witnesses or how to keep a community from going into hysteria. At least once memories of supposed victims are only revealed under hypnotic regression therapy, their use as actual depictions of facts goes right out of the window. I’m not saying repressed memories of traumatic experiences can’t exist, mind you, it’s just pretty clear that hypnotic regression is going to reveal more about the therapists prejudices and fears than about the patient’s actual experiences.

Yet the film never makes things quite that simple, “just” portraying what might have been a terrible injustice, but also harbouring all kinds of doubts about this idea too. The longer the film’s examination of the Friedman case continues, the more doubtful it seems there’s a way to trust any memory, not even one’s own, nor does there seem to be any road that leads to an actual truth. There’s only possibilities, suppositions and conflicting statements that can’t all be true even though nobody is lying.


At the same time, this is also a harrowing film about a family – imperfect in various ways like most of them are though not always quite this extreme – breaking down under pressure, of a group of people suffering the pain of distrust in ways I sometimes found too intimate to watch comfortably. Which is just a proper reaction to the film, for an audience shouldn’t feel comfortable with or pleasantly excited by this kind of tale. So it is fitting there’s no real resolution to find here apart from the hope that some of the remaining Friedmans may find ways to live with what they went through.

Music Monday: The Other Foucault Brother

On the Border (1998)

Warning: I do vaguely discuss some of the film’s plot twists!

A couple of years after an involvement in a bank heist gone wrong, Jake Barnes (Casper Van Dien) is working as a bank guard in a tiny town on the US side of the US/Mexican border. He’s not leading a boring life, though, because he spends his free time having an affair with Rosa (Rochelle Swanson), the wife of his very sweaty boss Ed (Daniel Baldwin). To make matters more interesting, the couple is planning on ripping off the bank in a couple of days, for while there’s usually little worth the risk of robbing it inside, this coming Saturday, there will be a whole load of mafia money locked up in there.

There are – of course – complications. For one, Ed’s gotten the idea Rosa is indeed cheating on him and wants Jake to find out who it is. As it will turn out, Jake and Rosa aren’t the only ones who want that sweet sweet mafia money, either. One Barry Montana (Bryan Brown), probably the guy for whom the phrase “toxic masculinity” was termed, is rather interested in the money too. Barry sics his private slave Kristen (Camilla Overbye Roos) on Jake to seduce him and convince him to partner up for the robbery.

Jake does realize that Kristen’s supposed to be a honey pot, yet he still feels drawn to her, as she seems to be to him. She does, after all, have a probably perfectly true horrible story about her being sold to Barry to tell, and seems to only want to get away from the arsehole and out of the life. Because that’s not trouble enough for one film, Jake’s former partner in the old heist that worked out very badly indeed, a completely crazy person called Sykes (Bentley Mitchum), is lurking around the plot’s edges, trying to get an angle. And here I thought robbing a bank was easy.

Going by the IMDB, Bob Misiorowski’s sleazy, pulpy little neo noir is a TV movie, though going by the filming style and the rather large amount of nudity and sex in it, it must have been made for HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime. It’s a proper neo noir (though one with a genre-atypical ending), however, the sexy bits not being the only important parts of the film, unlike in the neo noir’s sleazier little sister, the erotic cable TV thriller. There is, however, indeed a lot more sex and nudity in this one than it would strictly need for its plot. It is pretty much equal opportunity nudity, though, so there’s quite a bit of Van Dien’s qualities in addition to the female nudity on display, too.

I suspect one’s liking for On the Border will have a lot to do with one’s tolerance for films that attempt to include basically all the tropes and clichés of a given genre, for broad acting, as well as for Caspar Van Dien’s sex face, the last being not pretty. This is not what anyone would call an intelligently constructed thriller, rather it is one that just heaps complications and plot threads on its poor protagonist, half of which will acquire stupid yet also highly entertaining twist in the final ten minutes. It’s the “throw as much as possible at the audience, logic be damned” approach, something which doesn’t generally end in films that make much sense. But then I’m a bit of a sucker for simple stories made absurdly complicated, as I am for film that wallow in genre tropes as much as this one does. Sometimes, it’s simply enjoyable to watch a dance you know by heart even though its steps are obfuscated by a whole load of weird hand gestures and mumbling.

Even better, Misiorowski actually gets around to twisting some of the genre tropes of the neo noir, sometimes even in fun ways. So the horrible fake accent you roll your eyes over does indeed turn out to be fake, one of the film’s two femme fatales (why have one when you can have to in a film, right?) isn’t actually one, and the film’s solution does use the general way movies tend to side-line their Mexican characters for a little surprise. Now, before anyone thinks too much of these elements, they are still embedded in a whole lot of sleaze and violence. As I like it.

It would be terribly remiss of me if I ended this without mentioning On the Border’s fine bunch of caricature villains. I can’t imagine living a life where one wouldn’t enjoy a pretty paunchy Daniel Baldwin sweating and being sleazy towards his wife and prostitutes and babbling nonsense about simple being stupid. Or Bryan Brown’s lovely portrayal of a perfect caricature of a vile man (without the Australian accent, I’d put a Trump joke right here). Or how Bentley Mitchum’s minor villain is all twitchiness, verbal tics and drug-fuelled craziness, just one step away from becoming a circus geek.


On the Border is the neo noir interpreted as a sleazy, fun low budget movie, and even though that is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, it sure is mine.

Three Films Make A Post: The miller is coming for you

The Night Watchman (2016): This is not the sort of thing anyone will hear me say often, but I wish Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s US-set Spanish movie had not been a horror film. There’s some fine acting and excellent photography propping up a good poverty porn-style drama that wouldn’t need the horror elements to make it more interesting to an audience. As a metaphor, our particular monster doesn’t really add to what’s going on either, the drama and the horror film never productively coming together, particularly since the horror film – unlike the drama – is rather on the tacky side.

F aka The Expelled (2010): Johannes Roberts’s school-set slasher suffers from various problems: there’s its use of ripped from the tabloid headlines hoodie-wearing teenagers as its villains – this time around with hilarious acrobatics superpowers like low-grade Spider-Man villains Stan Lee would have dubbed the Monkey Menace or something in that style – a trope that’s pure classist resentment; the ass-ugly and pretty boring colour scheme consisting of sickly green and then more sickly green; some by-the-numbers writing; and a score that so desperately tries to emulate Goblin I felt faintly embarrassed.

On the plus side, Roberts does manage to film the slash and stalk sequences and gloopy gore effectively, and the acting is much better than the script deserves, resulting in a film that is pretty watchable if you cut it some slack.


Fender Bender (2016): The best and worst thing I can say about Mark Pavia’s thriller cum teenage slasher is that it’s absolutely inoffensive and perfectly generic, containing not a single scene I haven’t seen done better in better films yet still doing these scenes perfectly alright. The cast is okay, the film’s look is okay, the script uses horror movie logic too often yet still is okay; excitement, surprises and tension, on the other hand, live elsewhere, as do memorable scenes, interesting ideas (well, ideas of any kind), theme, meaning and fun.

Past Misdeeds: Darna! Ang Pagbabalik (1994)

aka Darna: The Return

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

If you want to know more about Mars Ravelo's Wonder Woman inspired yet supremely Filipino superheroine Darna and her different on-screen incarnations, head on over to my fellow agent of M.O.S.S. Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill, who has spent a lot more time watching and thinking about Darna movies than I have.

The home province of everyone's favourite rural superheroine Darna (Anjanette Abayari) is flooded in a villain-caused (yet not exactly explained by the film) catastrophe. Worse, a large woman clad in green and wearing a turban accosts our heroine in her non-superheroic form as country girl Narda while she's distracted by a snake and clobbers her from behind. The villainess then proceeds to steal the stone Narda needs to swallow to transform into Darna, leaving our heroine for dead and in the rather undignified position of having to be rescued from the rising flood by her Grandma and her little brother Ding (Lester Llansang).

Either the clobbering, the loss of the stone, or the trauma of the natural catastrophe leaves Nards rather addled in the brain, and she spends the following escape of her family to Manila - as well as her first days there - as a happy, mute, loon, though somewhat threatened by various unpleasant males who find her mental state all too inviting and don’t seem to take to the concept of consent. Still, it's like a super hero vacation.

Once arrived in Manila, the family takes shelter in the hovel of Pol (Rustom Padilla), who may or may not be a distant relative, but who in any case once left their country home for the big city.

After various adventures - among them a meeting with local gangster chief Magnum (Bong Alvarez) - a sort of plot develops. It turns out that Darna's arch nemesis, the snake-haired Valentina (Pilita Corrales), is responsible for the loss of Darna's stone. She needs it to keep herself from turning into an - probably ill smelling - heap of goo, it seems.

Apart from that Valentina has bigger plans too. Her - also snake-haired - daughter Valentine aka Dr. Aden (Cherie Gil) has founded a millennial cult playing on the fears of the poor parts of society, promising her followers that Manila will rise into the skies to save them all from the coming destruction of the Philippines by floods, if they just pray hard enough. Valentine's crazy preacher TV programme (she has interpretative background dancers) puts the mind-whammy on Grandma, who soon spends all her time praying and furnishing Pol's hovel with plants. Which is actually an improvement, but hey - evil!

Anyway, while he's out and about sniffing around the cult's lair (why? you got me there), Ding manages to steal Darna's stone back, and soon enough, our heroine is fighting evil-doers again, getting into a romantic triangle with Pol and a cop named Max (Edu Manzano), and saving the Philippines from the snake family's evil plans.

Well, say what you will against the at times plodding pace of this outing of the ever-popular Filipino heroine Darna, but it's still packed full of stuff, some of it interesting, some puzzling, some just plain weird. My plot synopsis has left out various side plots, "comic" distractions and characters - like Ding's female friend Pia (Jemanine Campanilla) - the movie decides to forget halfway through, but really, this is not the kind of film that's interested in a finely crafted dramatic arc. The film's structure is - like in most other films meant for a more rural Filipino audience I've seen - episodic and distractible, and often reminded me of the way 70s Bollywood tried and succeeded to be everything to every viewer. Despite the absence of musical numbers, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik truly squeezes everything and the kitchen sink into its 100 minutes of running time: cute children, low-brow humour, superheroic throw-downs, romance, a bit of horror, some excellent South-East Asian weirdness like freaky snake person transformation effects and an exploding villainess, a bit of social melodrama, and even a bit of religion (not terribly surprising in a Filipino movie, really).

This kind of approach does of course threaten a film's coherence and always risks to annoy a given viewer by spending too much time on the elements she isn't interested in. As a German viewer, I'm certainly not part of the film's core audience, seeing as it is clearly produced with a Filipino audience of the early 90s in mind, playing with and against the anxieties - poverty, religious mania, natural catastrophes - of its time and place. If you look at a film like this as an outsider, you need to bring a bit of patience and a willingness to just accept a slightly different view of the world than you're used to; in this regard, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik is just like a Ramsay Brothers movie or the body of work of Sompote Sands, though certainly more good-natured than the works of the former, and far less painful than those of the latter.

Fortunately, the film - co-directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes - does have more than a few elements that make getting into it quite easy for somebody of my tastes, and, I suspect, the discerning tastes of the typical reader of this column. If there's one thing that speaks a true international language, after all, then it's scenes of a statuesque and likeable beauty in a skimpy yet curiously not sleazy outfit flying around punching evil-doers and monsters. Abayari may not be the greatest of actresses (especially when playing trauma clown Narda), but she's likeable (you seldom see a US superhero grin this much, as if it were an actual joy being a hero, flying and saving people, instead of a pain in the ass), has the right physique for her role and manages to wear a skimpy costume with a degree of dignity that shouldn't be taken for granted.

But even when it isn't clobbering time, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik has more than enough enjoyable, or at least interesting moments. Some of the scenes surrounding the snake women's cult are actually somewhat disturbing in their portrayal of religious mania - those that aren't pretty goofy, that is - and the whole plot line of Grandma turning into one of the cult members is not exactly realistically handled, but quite effective as a play on the fear of losing a lost one to malevolent influences without having the power to do anything about it.

These scenes are pretty dark for what is at its core a family movie, and would be quite unthinkable in a Hollywood family movie (just as the semi-realistic portrayal of poverty and desperation), which is, of course something I do approve of.


And even though Darna! (you gotta love that exclamation mark there) Ang Pagbabalik isn't meant for me, it still made me glad to watch it.

In short: Dead Presidents (1995)

The film follows young, black New Yorker Anthony Curtis (Larenz Tate) from shortly before he volunteers for the Marine Corps in 1969, through his time in a recon unit in the Vietnam War, his return to the USA, the social and financial dead end he finds himself in there, and finally his pretty damn amateurish and bloody attempt at a banking van heist. I’d go into more detail, but frankly, everything you imagine will happen does happen here in the way you expect.

And of course, at least in part, that is part of the point of this film by brothers Albert and Allen Hughes, for our protagonist is supposed to stand in for the experience of the black Vietnam vet as a whole. Unfortunately, this also leads to a film whose protagonist lacks actual specificity, missing the details that would bring him to life. For example, we never learn much about what he’s actually thinking about the world, what he enjoys, what he dislikes apart from the things needed to keep the plot moving, which in turn robs the film of the feeling of having an actual person at its core instead of a representation of ideas about a type of person. The film’s historical specificity suffers in a comparable way. There is certainly the right music playing on the radio (there’s particularly a lot of Curtis Mayfield, which is never a bad choice), the people wear sort of the right clothes, the historical dates fit, but there’s no real life to the presentation of the late 60s/early 70s. The Vietnam sequences suffer from the same problem: they are a series of moments that feel abstracted and constructed to make an equally abstract point instead of lived experience for the protagonist and his peers.


It’s a shame, really, for the cast is fine – apart from the execrable Chris Tucker who hasn’t met a line of dialogue he isn’t going to slaughter – and the Hughes Brothers so clearly have the highest technical abilities and obviously very much care about the political meaning of the story they are telling. It’s just that Dead Presidents never seems to make much effort to make the audience care also.

Corpse Party (2015)

Original title: コープスパーティ

During a nightly cleaning session, a group of classmates (among them Rina Ikoma, Ryosuke Ikeoka and Nozomi Maeda) from the last term of a Japanese high school decide to perform a ritual called “Sachiko Happily Ever After”. Apparently, a couple of decades ago, the high school was a primary school shaken by a series of murders (with a bit of mutilation on the dead bodies) of little girls committed by its janitor. Said Sachiko is the only of the killer’s supposed victims whose body was never found. Rumour holds it she is now the building’s protective spirit.

Well, the charming little folk ritual doesn’t work out as lovely and friendly as hoped, for once it is finished, the ground opens up beneath the feet of the kids and their one lone teacher, and transports them into an in-between realm that looks like a ruined and lost version of the original primary school. It is – of course – a haunted place, and soon the kids have to fight off the undead janitor and his trusty axe and a couple of angry child ghosts. You know how kids get when they can’t find their tongues.

One of the pleasant peculiarities of Japanese pop culture is its willingness to prop surprising things up into becoming multi-media franchises, apparently without a filter that only allows the most corporate cultural artefacts to spawn dozens of children. Case in point is the Corpse Party live action movie here, whose franchise got going with a doujin videogame (a Japanese indie game, basically) made as old-school as it gets by a single guy (hopefully in his bedroom), and now spans half a dozen different games, two live action movies, an anime show and who knows what else. Now, because this sort of thing in Japan isn’t exclusively a big mainstream concern like US superheroes, the resulting products aren’t all glossy high budget projects.

Masafumi Yamada’s neat little horror film was clearly shot on the cheap, with only the most basic locations (helped along by the fact the whole tale takes place in a single haunted school), young and probably cheap actors, and the general air of a low budget affair.

This isn’t a work of cerebral horror, but rather a fun macabre romp that mostly lives from Yamada’s ability to always move the plot along nicely, and the perfect lack of shame the film shows when it comes to the gruesome and the goofily macabre. Characterisations are basic - they are in fact less complex than in the game this is based on – but not quite without substance thanks to the way Yamada handles them. Apart from the ghosts, the kids are of course also victims of their hormones and the way those tend to make messy situations even messier. Even though none of the character development resulting is exactly deep, thematically rich, or original, the film’s minimalist style actually makes it more convincing, keeping things clear and simple instead simple-minded or too twisty. The main actors are pretty okay, too, particularly once the worst actors have been killed off early.

The film’s approach to horror is interesting: this is certainly not a Ringu or Ju-On-style film mixing the subtle with some pants-wettingly horrifying set pieces, but a more modest endeavour that really isn’t too involved in horror exploring the human condition but in macabre fun. Unexpectedly, though, this doesn’t mean Corpse Party is only a series of jump scares. Masafumi goes for a broader approach, with some ridiculous yet awesome gore (Japanese teenagers in the movie’s world apparently pop like really mushy grapes) as well as classic creepy child behaviour and proper macabre Japanese horror weirdness. A personal favourite among the last is the moment when one of the male kids creepily starts photographing the mushed up mass hanging on a wall that once was one of his friends (already maggotty after five minutes, of course) and then gets a call from her in which she tells him to stop looking at her insides.


Despite this at its core being a film about a handful of characters in various pairings wandering through an empty school building, encountering various supernatural stuff and freaking out, watching it, I never had the feeling of watching a film wasting my time on non-existent production values. Yamada has always something of interest happening, keeping a degree of suspense going, from time to time surprising an old horror hand like myself with which old trope he’s going to dig up next, and generally turning Corpse Party into a fun macabre time.

In short: Chandler (1971)

Embittered and depressed private detective Chandler (Warren Oates) gets back into the game when an old acquaintance working for some kind of government agency asks him to shadow the moves of one Katherine Creighton (Leslie Caron) for reasons as vague as what Chandler is actually supposed to do.

The viewer knows this is all part of a plan to bring down a highly positioned member of a large criminal organization by another member of said organization. Katherine, you see, was the lover of the former man, but has grown tired of the violence and him (one supposes, the film’s pretty vague about this as well) and has used a vaguely defined opportunity subtly provided by the latter man to flee. The whole conspiracy is built on Katherine’s ex-lover following her to the West Coast where he is supposed to be easier to kill (for reasons the film never makes clear, of course). Chandler is, we are told, meant to be a decoy, but for whom, the film never bothers to make clear.

Be that as it may, Chandler does what everyone expects of him and tries to protect Katherine from the conspirators who are repeatedly trying to kidnap her because…honestly, you got me there. I also have no clue why the bad guys are using Chandler at all.

Which, as the vagueness and illogic of this plot synopsis hopefully already has suggested, brings us right to the core problem of Paul Magwood’s Chandler: it makes no lick of sense whatsoever, and not in the way of, say, a Raymond Chandler novel, as the too clever idea of naming the hero Chandler might suggest, where the plot is only a method to move the protagonist from one interesting encounter to the next, but in that of a film made by people who hire Warren Oates to play an old school private dick moving through the early 70s and are too dense to make good use of that.

The problem isn’t just that the plot makes no sense, the script as a whole is a complete mess. The dialogue consists of one third total non sequiturs, one third of the villains gloating in mock-educated manner (in scenes which are probably supposed to fit into a typical 70s conspiratorial mind set but are in actuality stupid, tedious and slowing the film down for no reason), and one third horrible clichés presented without charm and conviction. There are more ellipses in the dialogue than in a manga from the 90s.


I suppose the film is attempting to make some clever comment on the Chandler style private eye – a product of a different decade – colliding with the 70s and existentially suffering under it. Unfortunately, nobody involved in this production seems to have had any clue how to actually go about this, beyond casting the perfect actor for the main role, so what we actually get are ninety very tedious minutes of pointless movie. It’s not even interesting enough to call it pretentious.

Music Monday: Not Whom Edition

Finally, a break!

I'm taking a little blogging break. Normal service will return on Monday, the 18th of June.

Past Misdeeds: The Pirates of Blood River (1962)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


At the end of the 17th century, a group of Huguenots fled France and settled on the tropical, piranha-infested Isle of Devon somewhere in the tropics. Now, two generations later, what once was supposed to be a colony providing freedom from persecution has become the tyranny of a handful of older men with impressive facial hair under the leadership of Jason Standing (Andrew Keir, as intense as always, even though the script doesn't provide him with much to work with here). The bible-wielding elders sentence people to death or life in their own little penal colony for breaking that obscure set of religious laws known as "the ten commandments" (or something of that sort). The less bearded classes aren't too happy with the political state of affairs, yet they're still too respectful of their elders and their elders' leather-vested henchmen to openly rebel.

Standing's own son Jonathon (Kerwin Mathews, one of the better romantic leads for this sort of film) is especially dissatisfied with life on the island, thinking his father lets himself be manipulated into a cruelty that is quite against his nature by his colleagues. Rather lacking in holiness himself, Jonathon's also in love with a married woman who is mistreated by her husband, and plans on fleeing the place together with her. Alas, before the couple can realize their plans, the elders are catching them in the act of rubbing their cheeks together, provoking the poor woman into running into a river full of piranhas.

Graciously, the elders don't sentence Jonathon to death for his unbiblical behaviour, but rather to spend some time in the colony's penal colony, which, as it turns out, is just as much of a death sentence, just a slower one.

Things at the colony are rough, and Jonathon's background makes him not exactly well-liked by the warden, but eventually, the young man escapes. Only to run right into the arms of the pirate band of Captain LaRoche (Christopher "I'm French, no, really" Lee) which counts among its members some beloved Hammer mainstays like young Oliver Reed and Michael Ripper. For a pirate, the Captain seems civilized enough, and claims to be willing to help Jonathon out with peacefully getting rid of the rule of the elders if the younger man only agrees to let the pirates stay in the Huguenot village for rest and recuperation whenever they need it.

In a turn of events that only surprises Jonathon, the pirates are really in it for the raping and the pillaging. LaRoche is convinced that the founders of the colony have hidden away a treasure of gold somewhere (he might even be right), and he's willing to do absolutely anything to get it. Of course, hoping for gold and actually finding it are two things, especially when some of the Huguenots turn out to be quite competent guerrilla fighters.

John Gilling's The Pirates of Blood River is the least among Hammer Film's handful of seafaring averse pirate movies, slightly hampered by a script that sets up conflicts for its first thirty minutes it will then not bother to resolve later on by anything else but hand-waving.

The whole religious oppression angle is very much side-lined - except for two or three wavering dialogue scenes - once the pirates arrive at the colony, and is only ever resolved by the fact that LaRoche kills off the elders one by one, which sure is a solution, but not one that's thematically satisfying. On the positive side, pirates.

Said pirates are a bit sillier than in the other Hammer pirate movies, too, for some genius (Gilling? Anthony Keys? Jimmy Sangster?) decided it would be a bright idea not just to camp up their appearance, but also to let them all - except for Michael Ripper, whose dialogue instead tests out how often a man can use the pirate-appropriate word "matey" without giggling - speak with painfully fake accents. Reed - in an unfortunately minor role - and Lee - doing his evil glowering shtick with some enthusiasm and thanks to that to very good effect - seem to be trying to outdo each other in the badness of their "French" accents. Though this aspect of the movie clearly has camp value (too bad for me I abhor the concept), it's standing in stark opposition to the film's earnest dramatic tone and makes it quite a bit more difficult to take certain scenes seriously.

This isn't to suggest there's nothing enjoyable at all about the movie if you're not into pointing at especially silly pirates; this is, after all a Hammer production made in the early 60s, a time when the high professional standards of the studio and the people working for it made it quite impossible for them to produce a bad movie. Gilling - who directed two of my favourites among the studio's non-series horror movies with The Reptile and Revolt of the Zombies - may have his problems with the film's pacing in the early scenes, but once the final half hour arrives, he milks a lot of excitement out of the guerrilla warfare between the Huguenots and the pirates trying to get away with their ill gotten gains. At that point, there's little left of the silliness of the film's earlier scenes. High camp is replaced by a certain grimness that makes up for a lot of what came before.


My true disappointment isn't so much with the film's problems at the beginning anyway but rather with the idea how fantastic the film could have been if it had been quite as good as those last scenes right from the start. As it stands, the sympathetic viewer needs a bit of patience and the ability to ignore a problematic set-up to enjoy The Pirates of Blood River, but with that patience, the film is still very much worth seeing.

In short: Lady Bird (2017)

Unlike I, Tonya the other film concerned with class that was nominated for all the large film prices last year, and about which I can only speak through clenched teeth, Greta Gerwig’s coming of age story about a young woman (Saoirse Ronan, as genuinely fantastic as she always is) growing up in Sacramento actually understands things about class. Specifically about how being part of a family of the lowest rung of the middle-class (only a catastrophe away from becoming the working poor) can feel, not just about how large parts of one’s future are determined by the class and place into which one is born but how that knowledge grinds one down, one way or the other. The film’s not exactly about that, though, or rather, the class element is just a piece of a film that talks about how it feels to be a somewhat strange young woman in a place nobody will confuse with the centre of the world, about the complications of the love of family and home, growing up, sexual awakening, and half a dozen other things.

In a highly impressive balancing act, Gerwig manages to let riotously funny scenes follow moments of great sadness, moments of the absurd those of great veracity, as well as the other way round, without that ever feeling like grating shifts in tone but as logical consequences of the characters and the town the film takes place in. The film often feels light as a feather; it comes about these moments of lightness not by ignoring depths and the abyss but by facing them, un-dramatically and dramatically.


Honestly, I didn’t think Gerwig had a film I’d find quite this moving (my heart and brain in many directions) in her, for quite a bit of her other work as a writer I’ve seen (Frances Ha and its circling of comparable themes being an obvious exception) tends to keep a wall of irony between her and her characters, distancing the audience from too much emotional involvement with them as well. In Lady Bird, the writer/director still uses irony and distance, but now it’s the distance of someone taking a step or two back to be able to watch more closely and understand more precisely.

Twilight (1998)

After having accidentally been shot in the leg by Mel (Reese Witherspoon), the wayward daughter of his clients, former Hollywood stars Jack (Gene Hackman) and Catherine Ames (Susan Sarandon), ex-cop turned private eye Harry Ross (Paul Newman) ended up moving into the couple’s mansion, living above their garage as an all-round hanger-on. Among the things that keep him there are a rather big crush on Catherine, who is playing up to it like the Hollywood pro she is, the loneliness of a man whose only child died years earlier and who doesn’t seem to have much in the way of actual friends, and a sense of being needed, even if it’s only in his mind. It certainly isn’t money keeping him there – Jack isn’t paying Harry anything.

Things begin to take a more interesting (in the probably made-up Chinese curse kind of way) turn for Harry when Jack asks him to deliver a package that looks rather a lot like the kind of blackmail money envelope you always see in detective movies to a woman. Soon, Harry’s wading through rather a lot of dead bodes, encounters shady people, reacquaints himself with old police partners (Stockard Channing and James Garner, mostly), and stumbles circles around a dark secret someone is very obviously willing to kill for.

Robert Benton’s film about elderly private eye Harry Ross taking on one last case, is a bit of a quiet joy, strolling through quite a few standard detective tropes, myths about Hollywood (this is a very LA-centric movie), and so on, while having thoughts about class, aging, guilt and responsibility. The film never presents its consciousness of older detective movies with ironic air quotation marks, but does use the structure of the genre to talk about the things that interest Benson, carefully shifting and twisting an element here or there without attempting to make any grand gestures of deconstructions. Which fits my tastes rather nicely, for I don’t believe this genre actually needs to be deconstructed or ironicized any further than it already has been in the past.

Benton is not a viscerally exciting director – even those scenes where bad stuff happens to people seem calm and subdued – and the film’s tempo is of a slowness appropriate to the age of its stars. Instead, he’s trusting in his wonderful cast of veterans, character actors and extremely competent young blood to understand and carry the ideas of his film, which they do clearly, calmly and to great emotional effect. Paul Newman has of course never been a terribly great actor, most of his better moments were based on presence and face, but he can rise to the occasion in the right movie under the right director, and Benson’s sensibilities seem to be just the right fit. Newman certainly has a couple of highly regarded detective roles on his CV, too, fitting into Benton’s work with genre history here very well.


I am sure this isn’t a film for everyone – I’ve seen critics complaining about the film being too slow (it certainly isn’t fast, but I don’t see why it would have to be), the plot being preposterously constructed (as if that weren’t exactly the kind of plotting you’d expect of a hard-boiled detective movie), and so on and so forth – but if you’re like me, Twilight might be just the right paean to the private detective as moral arbiter (or knight in shining armour, Mr Chandler, if you insist), Dark Los Angeles, and shadows of the past that certainly do not become lighter the older you get.

In short: Die Hard 2 (1990)

Clearly, the only way to top an instant classic like the first Die Hard is to make a film that is basically the same but just a little different than the original, and definitely louder and bigger. However, Renny Harlin’s sequel still features a relatively constrained place for John McClane (who else but Bruce Willis again?) to get increasingly beat up in.

If you squint a little, you can see hints about the wrong direction the series will head towards in the future, but even though this one softens the class politics of the first film quite a bit – not so much discerning between working class and bosses anymore but more aiming for people willing to do their actual jobs versus those there only to play politics – and doesn’t really feature any of the random moments of veracity I loved particularly in the first one, there’s still quite a bit of humanity in here to ground the action. After all, how many other big loud US action movies are there whose hero breaks down crying after not managing to save an airplane full of people? Or how many of them realize that, if you want to make a guy’s wife (a returning Bonnie Bedelia with slightly less frightening hair than in the first film) a part of the film’s emotional and very real stake, you really need to show her coping with her own duress, too, which also turns her from a price to be won into a person an audience wants to see saved?

While it is completely outrageous and far-fetched, the sequel’s plot is still also well-constructed in its unfolding, playing fair with its plot twists, and not so much aiming to provide an excuse for the action sequences but making them an organic part of a flow. Things need to move in an action movie, is what I’m saying (alas too late for the writers of the next Die Hard film to hear), and it’s even better when they move in interesting and fun directions even when nothing explodes.


Speaking of explosions, I believe Harlin was at the time the second best director of big US action movies (after Die Hard’s John McTiernan, obviously), and it shows here. There’s an appropriate heft to many of the action sequences but also a sense of good fun that turns the potentially annoying smart-ass moments of the film into something enjoyable, like a corny joke told by a good friend.

Music Monday: Alabama Edition

Pyewacket (2017)

Leah (Nicole Muñoz) is a sad as well as classically angsty teenager. She is plagued by a bit more than your usual teenage malaise, though. After the death of her father, her mother (Laurie Holden) has fallen into a deep depression, and is teetering on the edge of alcoholism. In her state, she has certainly no emotional capacity left to help her daughter through her grief; instead, it’s anger and resentment from both sides, Leah spending much of her spare time escaping into her fascination with the occult.

Mom’s trying to drag herself up again, but her best plan for that – or really her decision, it’s not as if she’d involve her daughter in the planning – is to sell the house they lived in with the father and move to some lone house in the woods a two hours drive away from their old home. This does of course also mean that Leah will have to change schools soon, potentially losing the bit of stability and help her small group of friends – all outsiders like her – provide her with. Inevitably, the move does happen – the mother’s best offer being to move the change of schools six months or so further into the future.

When the mother and Leah have another argument, and mom says the sort of thing to her that’s so hurtful it usually marks either the complete destruction of a mother-child relationship or the parental unit realizing what she’s doing and turning things around, Leah storms into the woods and performs a ritual supposed to conjure up a spirit known as Pyewacket, tasking it to kill her mother.

In a classic case of cosmic irony, Leah’s mother does indeed begin to turn herself around and act like the grown-up in the relationship in the following days, so Leah tries to just forget about her ritual and learning to trust her mother again. Unfortunately, she did indeed open the door to Pyewacket and soon a series of increasingly disturbing manifestations haunts the house. If Leah doesn’t find a way to un-summon what she has called up, her mother might indeed die.

There have been a couple of excellent horror movies about teenage girls, their mothers, their dead fathers and trouble brought about by occult rituals in the last year or so. Adam MacDonald’s Pyewacket is certainly one of them. This particular example of the potential new sub-genre recommends itself at first through the calm and truthful feeling manner MacDonald introduces the audience into Leah’s world. This isn’t a film in the style of 50s teenage rebellion movies that’s raising eyebrows and wagging fingers at Leah and her problems, but a film that does its utmost to portray her pain and her emotional troubles seriously, with compassion and understanding. And while the film is painfully honest and believable about the arguments between Leah and her mother, it isn’t judging the mother either as simply as you at first might believe. As a portrayal of grief causing dysfunction between exactly the people who should help one another through it, the film is excellent, with the big argument that’s the turning point of the plot and the relationship between mother and daughter particularly truthful.

While MacDonald is taking great care with this aspect of the movie, Pyewacket is also very much an actual horror film that climaxes in a series of very well-weighed and pretty damn horrific in your face scenes that gain particular force by following a series of scenes which gain their disquieting power by the things they are not showing. The whole sequence with the visit of Leah’s friend is a particularly effective example here, the audience never seeing or learning what exactly leads to her completely breaking down. After that, the explicitness of the actual climax feels even more shocking than should befit its content.


Pyewacket is very much in tune with the classic weird, using thematically highly appropriate elements like the Doppelgänger motive in elegant and deeply disquieting ways, clearly making the dark sides of Leah and her mother even more visible than the more naturalistic scenes already did, but also adding an inhuman dimension to them that makes them more than mere metaphor.

Three Films Make A Post: Stephen King took you to the edge with The Shining and Pet Sematary. This time......he pushes you over

Matchstick Men (2003): A film about con men seems to be a really weird proposition for Ridley Scott, for this particular genre thrives on the proper sense of timing and pacing, both not elements of storytelling many of Scott’s film suggest much understanding of. Consequently, the – terribly obvious if you’ve seen a couple of films from the genre – con part of the movie sputters and stops awkwardly, not exactly helped along by how bland the whole con is. Of course, this is the sort of film that thinks itself rather above the concerns of a proper genre film because IT HAS SOMETHING TO SAY! Alas, what it actually does say is neither terribly interesting nor insightful, so this bit does fall pretty flat too.

I’m also not terribly happy with the film trying to get most of its humour out of making fun of the mentally ill, as excited as Nicolas Cage seems to be to play this sort of thing. Doesn’t help much here that the jokes often just aren’t terribly funny.

El bar (2017): Which is also something that troubled me about Álex de la Iglesia’s comedic thriller about a group of people stranded in a bar with a deadly virus, all Man being the greatest monster of them all tropes imaginable locked with them inside, and a really stupid government conspiracy outside. The mix between comedy and thriller never quite worked out for me not just because the jokes aren’t funny (there’s only so many times you can laugh about a hipster beard), but because the characters are comedy characters – too broadly drawn to make the thriller and psychological side of the film convincing, a decent cast notwithstanding.
As an old pro, de la Iglesia does know how to stage this sort of thing competently and somewhat excitingly, but to my eyes, this is the plot of a forty minute short film stretched out to feature length by adding random clichés about how horrible people under pressure are.


Sisters of the Plague (2015): Jorge Torres-Torres’s New Orleans set mumblecore arthouse horror film (seriously) about ghosts, possession, and relationship troubles certainly isn’t generic, on the other hand. Given the mumblecore aspirations, its slowness (though unlike with Matchstick Men this seems at least the consequence of an actual directorial decision) and the film’s general air of conscious spurning of many filmic conventions, this one’s going to be hard going for many a viewer. I got something out of it – Josephine Decker, Isolde Chae-Lawrence and Thomas Francis Murphy certainly play their behinds off, and while I found the heavily metaphorical use of the supernatural and quite a few of its moments of purposeful sloppiness (it’s the mumblecore influence, I’m sure) not much to my taste, there’s a sense of place and an air of the Weird about parts of the film that I found at least fascinating, sometimes even riveting.

Past Misdeeds: Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor (1963)

aka The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Former colonial bureaucrat Lucius Clark (Rudolf Fernau) has found a pretty sweet set-up for himself. He's soon to be knighted for his crimes against humanity/deeds for the British Empire, and spends his life sponging off the money belonging to his niece Claridge Dorsett (the inevitable Karin Dor) which he is uses to rent most of the castle of a certain Lord Blackmoor (Walter Giller). Oh, and he also has an oven full of stolen raw diamonds he's slowly selling off to the - of course - shady bar owner Tavish (Hans Nielsen). Because Clark's lazy, he has hired on ex-con diamond cutter Anthony (Dieter Eppler as Klaus Kinski) as pretend butler, so that everything needed for the illegal diamond trade is happening in house, or rather in castle.

Alas, all good things have to come to an end, and so Clark soon enough finds himself confronted with various problems, most of them connected to his dark past (so it's all his own fault). First and foremost, a masked man who knows quite a lot about Clark's past wants him to hand over the diamonds, and kills whoever gets in his way. That guy, let's call him "The Strangler", strangles his victims and then cuts an "M" into their foreheads before he decapitates them for extra fun and games. Then there's the fact that Tavish, the shady lawyer Tromby (Richard Häussler) and barmaid Judy (Ingmar Zeisberg) - in varying configurations - would very much like to acquire some of Clark's diamonds without having to pay for them. Oh, and did I mention Claridge's colleague Mike (Hans Reiser) and Lord Blackwood are also acting quite suspiciously? Or that Anthony's raving mad, wants to make sweet sweet love to the diamonds, and would prefer to make Clark rich by killing Claridge instead of seeing his boss sell his precioussss?

Fortunately for the blandly innocent Claridge, Scotland Yard sends its most wooden inspector, Jeff Mitchell (Harry "I'm so emotionless, I'm two pieces of wood" Riebauer) to romance her painfully somehow solve the strangler cases.

Der Würger is yet another of those non-Edgar Wallace krimis that are doing their best to emulate the successful formula of the Rialto movies; that's certainly easier to do when you have, like krimi veteran director Harald Reinl does here, a Bryan Edgar Wallace novel to adapt. Edgar Wallace's son did, after all, make a career out of emulating his father and selling his surname to the highest bidder (that frequently being German producer impresario Artur "Atze" Brauner, who is as close to one of the eccentric producer impresarios of the US and the UK as we Germans ever got), so the shoe fits perfectly well.

Of course, with the sort of movies I generally champion, keeping as close to a successful formula as possible is not necessarily a bad thing as long as one knows what to do with it. Reinl (and scriptwriters Ladislas Fodor and Gustav Kampendonk, both men of excellent names, interesting filmographies, and a talent for writing absurdly confusing scripts) is as good at producing excellent, low budgeted entertainment out of a formula as one can be. Whenever I praise one of Reinl's krimis, I mention his highly mobile camera, his talent for serial-like action sequences and the noir-like mood of the slower scenes (often also thanks to cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke), and these three elements are again what turn Der Würger into a pretty great time.

Sure, the action isn't quite as good and frequent as in some of Reinl's higher budgeted Rialto productions, but what is there of it is as exciting as action in German movies of this period (or, frankly, any period, for German director almost always just suck at this sort of thing) gets, showing off some nicely creative touches.

The art direction also isn't quite up to the Rialto standards; fake Britain is not as playfully fake as it sometimes gets, nor does the film show quite the absurd imagination of its big predecessors. There's your standard castle, there's fog, there's a boring bar, and for most of the film's running time, that's perfectly enough to put me in the not-Britain of the krimis.

The film's other big flaw is clearly the acting. While German movies of this period always tend to the stiff and slightly melodramatic, most of the performances here are just the decided bit stiffer than usual (that might vary with the dubbed versions, of course); the performances aren't horrible, they're just not as good as the could be. There are two exceptions to that in the cast: Riebauer who plays exactly the same character Heinz Drache or Joachim Fuchsberger usually played lacks so heavily in charisma I have a hard time understanding why anybody would want to cast him as anything, not to speak of as the male lead, while Dietler Eppler may not be a Klaus Kinski, but sure as hell does his utmost to channel the great actor's spirit by ranting, raving and making bug eyes at Karin Dor, something I do heartily approve of.

I also do approve of the production's peculiar choice of soundtrack. The krimis always had a tendency to involve some of the better German film composers like Martin Böttcher and the godly Peter Thomas, but Der Würger goes one step further by (like a few other films did) employing the pioneer of electronic music Oskar Sala, co-inventor of the Trautonium and all-around eccentric musical genius. His weird, abstract electronic score probably isn't what one would expect to hear in a piece of pulpy entertainment like this (some of Sala's musical decisions seem somewhat perverse) but it's often exactly what the film needs to feel more unique than it actually is. Sala's music even turns what may be the most boring bar in the krimi genre into a place of weirdness and (slight) wonder.


Now, even though I've been pretty critical about nearly every part of the movie, I do like Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor quite a bit, even ignoring Sala's and Eppler's contributions. The film may not be quite up to the standards of the best of the Rialto Wallace krimis, but those films are as good as this genre gets; Der Würger may not be quite as excellent, yet it's still an all-around fun film despite all of its flaws.

In short: Black Eye (1974)

Ex-cop of course turned private eye - as well as beater of drug dealers and protector of prostitutes - Shep Stone (Fred Williamson) stumbles into quite the case. When looking in on prostitute Vera (Nancy FIsher), he only finds her corpse, as well as her murderer. The guy is armed with a knife but also swinging a cane with a special silver handle. We the audience already know that cane belonged to a silent movie star, and Vera stole it from the top of his coffin. After a pretty intense fight, the killer escapes with his cane and most of his bones intact. Shep’s not the kind of guy to let this sort of thing slip, so he convinces his ex-partner in the police to hire him to work the case, instead of the people actually responsible for investigating murders.

Because our hero’s a bit of a multitasker, he also agrees to a second case a couple of hours later. He is to find runaway daughter Amy (Susan Arnold) for a guy named Dole (Richard Anderson). Working the cases – if indeed these are separate cases – will lead Shep through all sorts of very 1974 situations, as seen through the eyes of nearly 60 years old director Jack Arnold.

The late 60s and the 70s didn’t exactly treat low budget movie pro Arnold too well, or perhaps he just never really managed to adapt his sensibilities to the new era of filmmaking. In any case, the non-TV work of late period Arnold always feels to me a bit like the work of a man who is trying his best to follow the contemporary exploitation angles but doesn’t quite have the vocabulary needed to do it convincingly. In Black Eye’s case, all attempts to depict the early 70s life and mores of younger people seem to come from a position of raised eyebrows, the director nearly audibly tutting at homosexuals, lesbians, late hippies, religious zealots, and letting his lead tut right with him. It’s often rather awkward, and could indeed be pretty unpleasant at times if not for the joy it is to watch Fred Williamson at work. Williamson spends much of his time using his nearly proverbial (at least if you’re moving in my circles) laidback swagger to stroll from slightly off kilter scene to slightly off scene as a character you might imagine to be played by James Garner in case of Wiliamson’s unavailability, flirting, pretending to be shocked by stuff my grandmother wouldn’t have been shocked by at the time – and how I love him for so clearly only pretending – and from time to time hitting deserving people in the face.


Every couple of scenes – when the film isn’t suddenly turning into a Sunday afterschool special or spends its time on a slow motion romance montage you gotta see to believe and which incorporates a nearly naked Williamson and later a tandem  – Arnold gets up to more timeless things. The handful of action scenes are mostly spirited and fun, and demonstrate that Arnold still had his old directing chops and just didn’t really warm to his material. Still, if you’re interested in the bodies of work of Arnold and/or Williamson, or want to see a 70s private eye film with a black lead that isn’t really a blaxploitation film, this one has enough good moments to be worth your while.

The Wailing (2016)

Warning: there are most certainly spoilers ahead!

Original title: 곡성 (gok-seong)

Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won) is a small-time copper in a village in the countryside in South Korea. He’s a bit lazy, and a bit ridiculous, but probably a generally decent human being, a combination quite a few of us might encounter when looking in the mirror.

His peaceful life, as well as that of everyone else in the village, will take a disturbing turn when a series of murders strikes the town. Always, a family member seems to go crazy and kill everyone they love, themselves ending up like a surviving character in a Lovecraft story. Nobody knows why this is happening. Could it be an illness? The result of a psychotropic mushroom tonic? Or is it, as some of the village men with lynch mob ambitions believe, some kind of curse brought by the Japanese – we all know how well-hated they are in Korea – man (Jun Kunimura) living in a cabin in the woods?

Even the naturally passive Jong-goo will have to take sides and make decisions once his little daughter Hyo-jin (Kim Hwan-hee) shows some of the symptoms the killers tend to start with, and there is really no guarantee whatsoever his decisions will be good ones.

After my third viewing of the film, I’m still not quite sure if I really understand what’s going on in Na Hong-jin’s masterful The Wailing. There are two main interpretations of what’s happening in the film, but there’s also a conscious ambiguity to some of the film’s facts that makes neither of these interpretations a hundred percent convincing, leaving a disquieting gap in a viewer’s understanding. While it certainly has elements that can be described as plot twists, this is not at all a film about plot twists.

This is all too befitting a movie among whose thematic main concerns stands the encounter of day-to-day people with a series of events that always seem to slip out of their grasps, full of hints and explanations that suggest solutions that in turn only open up new questions and disturbing ideas; it doesn’t help here that our protagonist and the people surrounding him – like a lot of us - are not at all comfortable with looking at their own preconceptions and prejudices. In the end, everyone in the film falls back first on violence, then on evoking an authority that can have no power at all over the things going on in the film, a broken Jong-goo ending the film mumbling about his power of fixing everything by being a cop (with the added irony that he never was a respected or good policeman anyway) being the obvious example.

Some of The Wailing’s ambiguities are certainly made greater for a Western viewer like me through a simple lack of cultural knowledge. While I have by now (movies are educational, son) developed a working understanding of certain details of South Korean cultural mores and ghostly lore, the film does contain some elements a Korean audience will pick up on much clearer, with at least two folkloric monsters (three cock crows as a plot element are generally an obvious hint towards folklore) about whom I had to do some exciting internet research before the penny dropped. The thing is, even once you’ve read up on things, the film’s ambiguities are never completely solved, things never quite making sense in a way that felt truly disquieting to me (and curiously close to the pretty Western idea of the Weird). The film seems to argue that there is simply a limit to human understanding of the basic rules of the world he’s living in, and that attempts to bridge these gaps between the human and the other are doomed to end in horrible consequences.

At the same time, there’s also a rather explicit sort of Christian theological explanation to what is going on, though this explanation might only exist because we experience an important scene through the eyes of a Catholic priest-in-training who will tend to read what he experiences through this specific filter. In this reading, The Wailing is a film about characters punished for their sins, Old Testament style. However, their punishment for these sins starts before they have even committed them, and at least some of their sins are indeed caused by their pre-punishment. This too is a pretty disquieting world view that tonally fits the more cosmicist interpretation curiously well. They do at least have the unknowable nature of things and their deep inhumanity (or should that be anti-humanity) in common.

This probably makes The Wailing sound like a very heady film that reaches most of its disquieting power through ideas, a film that’ll bore everyone going into a horror film for more visceral thrills. However, there’s rather a lot of the more explicit stuff in the film too. The movie, at nearly two and a half hours of length, does take a little time to get there, but the build-up is absolutely necessary to give later scenes the heft they need, until the film’s last forty-five minutes or so turn into the stuff of nightmares. Nightmares realized by Na just as well as the film’s humorous, even a little whacky, and certainly strange beginning.


The atmosphere of dread and horror Na builds is incredibly dense, even before the most horrible scenes of the film come to pass. There are a couple of scenes staged so well, and with so much off-handed style, I found myself thinking about them for weeks after watching; I also found myself thinking about the film’s ideas and the disquieting ideas about the nature of our world it suggests. I don’t know many films that touch both on the visceral and the cerebral quite as well as The Wailing does. It’s the sort of film that reminds me of everything I love about horror, weird fiction and philosophy and makes me think about the world it describes – what better compliment could I make a movie?

In short: Molly’s Game (2017)

Failed freestyle ski Olympic skier Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) finds her true profession when she first helps a vile Hollywood producer run a high-stakes poker game just this side of being illegal gambling, and then turns it into her own. Apparently, the FBI has some problems with this sort of thing, particular when organized crime sits at the table.

The directorial debut of – much beloved though not necessarily by me – screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is an interesting example of the dangers of basing your film not just on “a true story” but on an actual memoir about said “true story”. So if that memoir/”true story” has an incredibly obnoxious Frank Capra ending, your film is going to get one too, even if it tonally doesn’t fit what came before at all. Though, to be fair, I can’t imagine many films this particular ending would fit with.

Other problems are that Jessica Chastain’s Molly Bloom is just a bit too perfect, too nice for what she’s actually doing and a bit too likeable for the film ever to sell her tale as anything but a cinematic fairy-tale about a woman who is done wrong despite her being super-awesome. Even when she steals the producer’s game she’s in the right, the way the film tells it. I could have gone without the Freudian bullshit between her and her psychoanalyst Dad (Kevin Costner!), and the film’s dubious general ideas about psychology too.

There’s quite a bit to like here, though. More often than not, Sorkin does a pretty decent visual Scorsese – circa Goodfellas – imitation. The film’s certainly not boring to look at, and keeps moving along at a merry pace, despite a two hour plus running time.

The dialogue is fun and clever - if, in typical Sorkin style, bereft of any concept of different people having different patterns of speech - while the cast doesn’t just include the always excellent Chastain (who by the way off-screen-monologues with the best of ‘em) and Costner in a good mood, but also Idris Elba (getting some quality expressive shouting time in), Michael Cera (finding his inner creep), and a horde of other good people doing good work.


All this adds up to a film that’s neither as good in the mildly horrifying “quality cinema” kind of way it is clearly aiming for, nor actually saying terribly much about the state of America as it seems to think it does, but that is certainly worth spending an evening with, even if it is only to enjoy the actors strutting their stuff and looking at the pretty pictures.

Music Monday: Middle Edition

Baskin (2015)

Warning: spoilers are an inevitable fact of life!

A group of Turkish policemen (Görkem Kasal, Ergun Kuyucu, Muharrem Baryrak, Fatih Dokgöz and Sabahattin Yakut), most of whom are thugs or at least the sort of cop letting their colleagues work out their inner thugs without protest, receive a call that sends them out to a house in very curious rural area. They are confronted with a terrible ritual in a place and time where the borders between our world and one much worse have grown rather thin. But even before they have arrived at the house, the world seems to shift around them, time and place twisting and turning into nightmares that may not offer escape for any of them.

Turkish director Can Evrenol’s Baskin – based on an earlier short film – is quite the film, as close to the recreation of a nightmare (inside of a nightmare inside of a nightmare, and so on) as possible. Even right at the start, when the plot hasn’t arrived at the point where it will actually show anything supernatural or simply horrifying, the director puts quite a bit of effort into creating a feeling of wrongness and weirdness. Some characters show frays at their edges the situation – or simple digestion problems – don’t quite seem to justify. Colour schemes, camera angles, music, and the disquieting way the camera doesn’t show the faces of certain characters seems to suggest doom, dread and create distrust in the reality of anything we see, until the simple act of meat cutting to appropriately sinister music takes on a sinister undertone, a suggestion of one isn’t quite sure what, only that it can be nothing good, healthy, or sane.

The sense of disquiet Evrenol creates is only further increased by strange jumps in time and place that leave the viewer asking if it is the film as one first assumes or the characters jumping around; the way the talk between one of the cops and his foster son seems to concern dreams, omens and the supernatural quite a bit more than fits the tough guy postures of their colleagues. The film keeps this sense of the high Weird even once the policemen have descended into cellar of a lonely house and have become the unwilling participants of a ritual that contains rather more – inventive and excellently unpleasant - gore and torture than films this heavy on an atmosphere of dread (when they’re not made by Fulci and the other typical Italian suspects at least) usually show, keeping the feeling of the ritual as disquieting as it is brutal. Not a little feat once you’ve realized that most of this latter part in actuality only consists of a bunch of people out of a 90s metal video doing metal video stuff to one another in some ruined cellar. The thing is – Baskin never feels that way at all, but really comes very, very close to the feeling of the never-ending living nightmare its content is supposed to be.

Even the slowness of Baskin’s early phases – about the only element of the film I can see anyone reasonably criticizing – fits the idea of a nightmare perfectly, leaving the audience without the crutches of a more conventionally thrilling first half while still building (and building) a feeling of wrongness. And while I can’t say I was terribly surprised by the film’s ending, I don’t think feeling surprised by it is really the point here; rather, the film seems to delight in confirming the audience’s worst fears.


All in all, Baskin is a fantastic achievement that anyone who likes their horror on the atmospheric yet gory side needs to see.