Tremors 2: Aftershocks

  Tremors remains one of my favourite creature features ever - just about everything in that film is pitch perfect, starting with a wildly inventive script that's chock-full of clever ideas, amazing FX, great and extremely funny characters, not to mention the ways it keeps both its threats (tentacle-mouthed burrowing slugs that hunt by sound and vibration) and the ways they're dealt with fresh right  up to the very end.

 There's been something like six sequels since, and now there's possibly one more on the way - a legacy sequel with some of the surviving cast and control finally reverted to the original creators. I remain cautiously optimistic, despite the easy cynicism legacy sequels deserve at this late date (and the fact that the original team was also involved in the dreadful Tremors 3) - and the reason to keep faith is that the series' first direct-to-video sequel is honestly kind of amazing.

 After the events of Tremors, its protagonists made a bit of money and finally managed to leave their hard-scrabble life behind. Due to budget cuts the production wasn't able to hire Kevin Bacon, so his character Val (and love interest Reba McEntire) was summarily written out. Instead, the film rests on the shoulders of the great Fred Ward, returning as Earl. His graboid-hunting exploits have made him a minor celebrity, but he's blown his cash-in attempt on it in a failed ostrich farm.

 Cue the arrival of a mexican oil field executive, who explains he has a bit of a graboid infestation and offers $50,000 for each dead pest. Earl is reticent, but the money is too good, and soon he joins old friend and gun-nut Burt (Michael Gross), a geologist (Helen Shaver), a fresh-faced taxi driver and graboid hunting enthusiast (Christopher Gartin) and a small team at the site to hunt down the old tentacle slugs.

  The killing is easy at first, as the crew have graboid extermination almost down to a science. But this is a sequel, and the law of escalation pretty much dictates that there needs to be a different form of threat. In this case, it's the brood of the graboids - they birth clutches of some sort of rapidly-multiplying kangaroo-like creatures. There's a clear debt to Jurassic Park's raptors, but as with the original Tremors, the fun part is watching a very likeable cast use inventively the cards they're given... and sometimes make a bad situation worse. The script isn't quite as full of clever moments as the one for the first movie, but it does feature plenty, including some ridiculously funny jokes that also function to drive the plot (such as the way the crew discover just how much shit a full-metal slug can penetrate).

 The new creatures look great, with some amazing puppetry involved (they are CGI whenever they need to move a lot, and the FX work there - handled by Phil Tippet's studio - looks pretty good nearly twenty years later). Director S. S. Wilson (who co-wrote most of the early installments along with fellow series stalwart Brent Maddock, before Universal took the series away from them) isn't quite as good directing action as Ron Underwood was in the first film, but he handles himself well, has a real eye for filming great-looking earthy explosions, and the verdant scenery of the Mexico oil fields (actually shot in California) gives this one a distinct, attractive look. He also includes a lot of neat little visual details, such as the way a powerful gun's muzzle blast is actually strong enough to break a nearby window that's not on the path of fire.

 Tremors 2 is the rare, miraculous example of a direct-to-video movie that's a worthy follow-up to a true classic. It doesn't manage the neat trick of, say, Undisputed 2 of actually being better than the first movie, but... come on, it's Tremors we're talking about here. Let's not get greedy.

Vulcanizadora

 Two middle-aged friends to out into the woods. Derek (Joel Potrykus) is nerdy, juvenile, and seems to see the trip as an excuse to act like a twelve-year old. Marty (Joshua Burge), an arsonist who is about to be imprisoned, seems to be on some kind of mission, and barely tolerates Derek's antics.

 Vulcanizadora seems content to observe these man-children on their camping trip, charting their progress through the woods with a light touch and heavy slacker comedy vibes. But even before it pivots upon a grim turn and starts tracking its fallout in the film's back half, there are hints as to what's to come shot through Derek's childish up-beat chatter as he discusses his family life and how deeply let down he feels by life as an adult.

 The observational and character-based humour is pretty mild - there are a few laughs here and there, but  most of the comedy is of the cringe variety early on, evolving into some gallows humour and deeply ironic developments later on... In that sense, this is pretty much the anti-Naked Gun.
 It's the drama that ends up being surprisingly effective; Produced on a shoestring budget, writer/director/coprotagonist Joel Potrykus keeps the tone extremely down-to-earth even as the stakes are pretty world-ending for his characters. Great film.

The Naked Gun (2025)

 Police Squad! is back, now featuring Frank Dreblin's son - conveniently named Frank Dreblin Jr. (Liam Neeson). Along with a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson), he gets tied into a ridiculous conspiracy against a tech bro played by Danny Huston. But the plot doesn't really matter - is it funny?

 Thankfully, it is. I guess I'd put it well below the original, and a little above the Naked Gun 2: The Smell of Fear; As directed by Akiva Schaffer (of Lonely Island fame) from a script by him plus Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, this new Naked Gun is a successful merging of his sensibilities (as in, for example, Popstar) and the original film's Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker maximalist approach.

 It does a pretty admirable job in matching the original's density of silly jokes, but for the most part it stages one joke and moves on to the next instead of packing in multiple gags in a single shot. Serial instead of parallel piss-takes. This has advantages and disadvantages, and gives the film a fairly distinct feel... but I did notice it didn't really achieve the vintage ZAZ effect of overwhelming you under the onslaught of jokes of varying quality - when a joke falls flat here, it flounders. And partly as a result of that, and of some weak sections, the film as a whole doesn't feel quite as memorable, as larger-than-life, as its forebears.

 Still: there are a lot of jokes, a lot of them very funny, and some of them featuring the sort of inventive boldness the ZAZ movies were known for. We get other people's inner dialogs butting into our hero's narration, ridiculous running gags that get increasingly ridiculous as they recur, an inspired montage-that-gets-out-of-control, and a really over-the-top final chase that manages to include a wonderful owl puppet. All that plus the expected quips, dad jokes, exaggerated bumbling, and visual double entenderes you might expect out of a modern comedy firmly situated on the sillier side of things. And it stays well away from the empty references - everything has a punchline. Good stuff.

 A few of the jokes acknowledge some of the concerns people might have about making a light-hearted movie about cops, but Dreblin's trespasses are all pretty minimal; It's as if the movie knows it needs to address it, but is desperate to return to a more goofy, harmless tone. I'm ok with that, even if it feels like a missed opportunity. Guess the 'keep the politics (I happen to disagree with) away from art' crowd will be happy.
 The same goes double with regards to the film's choice of villain - why make him a rich tech 'prophet' who owns a brand of electric cars and then completely decouple him from the obvious target? Both the reality of what the real-life enshittification gurus are pulling, and the all the depressingly lame evil shit Musk specifically has done? Is ripping off Kingsman really the best they could do?
 I feel like I'm over-analyzing a movie where the main character convincingly disguises himself as a tiny schoolgirl, but why call attention to how toothless your satire is? Just avoid real-life parallels in the first place, job's done.

 Neeson is an inspired bit of casting, and he and the rest of the cast attack their roles with the requisite seriousness, making their antics all the more funny. On the technical front, Schaffer has all the skills needed for good comedy: great blocking and crack timing; Other than that, between The Monkey and Weapons, horror comedies have regular comedies soundly beat on presentation. It's nowhere even near a contest.

Bring Her Back

 Two teen Siblings (Billy Barratt and Sora Wong) are assigned a foster home when their dad dies, only to find their new foster mom (Sally Hawkins) and creepy stepbrother (Jonah Wren Phillips) may not have their best interests at heart.

 Bring Her Back is a cruel, intense, and unsparing horror film. It represents a huge leap forward for writer/directors Danny and Michael Philippou, too, with much better-rounded characters and pitch-perfect execution of some rather nasty set-pieces and brilliantly sustained tension.

 The script is very well put together, too; The drama is compelling, and it avoids exposition while still handing us enough information that it's easy enough to put things together in a satisfying fashion. There are a ton of clever touches, up to and including the way it sets up Hawkins's character as a former counsellor - this both sets up her skill at manipulating the kids, as well as a possible source for a VHS tape that acts as a sort of catalyst for everything that's going on.

 Definitely in the running for the best horror movie I've seen this year; I seriously doubt any performances will top Hawkins and Barratt's, at the very least.

Asylum

  Asylum - or, to give it its full name, Asylum: Twisted Horror and Fantasy Tales, is a fairly dismal indie anthology film that features nine - count 'em, nine tales of very varying quality, plus a framing device in which a clown (Raymond E. Lee) delivers some painfully unfunny, grade-schooler level misanthropic (and misogynist, but that fits the character) invective at us that might or might not be related to the stories he's presenting.
 The shorts were sourced from all over the world by two Argentine producers (Nicolás Onnetti and Michael Kraetzer, and their attempts to tie everything together with their wraparound segments are a large part of why I'm overall negative on the film.

 There are two bright spots - One is Damien LeVeck's The Cleansing Hour, which presents a fake exorcist (Sam Jaeger) who runs into the real deal during a stream. If that sounds familiar, it's because Leveck managed to expand it into a (much better) feature a few years later.

 The other one is an extremely silly and gory surrealistic comedy by Caye Casas, who would almost a decade later later make The Coffee Table. It's the tale of a terminally ill henpecked man (Josep Maria Riera) who gets better just before the funeral, to the chagrin of his wife and his mother (Itziar Castro and Carme Sansa). It's camp as hell, and pretty fun.

 Other than that, a cheeky Mexican short takes the piss out of Trump's "let's build a wall on the border and make the Mexicans pay for it!" still unfulfilled campaign promise, complete with tiny crotch-mounted missile launcher half a decade before South Park made news making fun of the orange pussy-grabber's micropenis. It's a rauchy four-minute live-action (and CGI) cartoon that goes by mamón - that is, cocksucker. Guess who that's aimed at? It's a sentiment I'm sure a lot more people share these days.
 Besides that gleefully juvenile aside, there's not one, but two pretty cute zombie tales - one claymation, one live action. All these are decent enough.

 But then... there's the rest. The wraparound gets even unfunnier the longer it drags on, and seems to take great pride in going absolutely nowhere interesting. As for the other shorts... there's an incredibly basic slasher tale where all the effort is come up is spent making designing a 'cool' slasher, and next to no thought is given the incredibly basic story they put him in (that the killer looks like a slipknot robot... doesn't help things). There's a ripoff of the trippy fourth dimension flight part of 2001, and the butt-ugly 'epic' thematic conclusion to the wraparound where a bunch of clowns run amok in a fairground killing young people.

 There's some good stuff to be found here, but with the Cleansing Hour living on as its own thing, the bad sadly balances it out completely. I wouldn't really recommend this bloated mess to anyone except horror anthology completists.

The Thunder Kick (Yi wang da shu)

 Sometime in the early nineteenth century, A fisherman (Li Chin-Kun) gets into a fight with a bunch of ne'er do wells trying to charge for passage over a bridge. But as his disapproving mother tells him, violence has a way to escalate, and soon some revenge-hungry toll entrepreneurs turn up at his house with... oh shit! It's Bolo Yeung in a cool hat/open vest ensemble.
 The fisherman fights alongside a stranger who turned up to chat up his mom, and Bolo and the other goons are handily beat. Because they fought together, the stranger proclaims the fisherman his brother (battle brothers!) and ends up gifting the fisherman and his mom a fancy house. Way to undercut mom's pacifist message, stranger. Not that mom's complaining.

 I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, for the stranger to reveal some ulterior motives... and when he returns to his home city, he kind of does - but it's nothing nefarious. It turns out that he was apparently involved in a feud with a cartel led by three brothers, and that maybe he was scouting for bodyguards or something similar. Whatever it was he planned to do, we'll never know, because the nefarious triad gang up on him and kick the guts out of him (not literally, sadly) shortly after he gets back.

 But his plan does end up working, if posthumously: The fisherman soon heads to the city to visit his battle brother, learns of his demise, vows revenge... and then spends a pretty boring half hour or so watching his targets run their criminal empires. Eventually, he and some allies come up with a pretty clever plan - a Red Harvest-style scheme to set the brothers against each other so their organizations can be picked off one by one.

 And then, in the final thirty minutes or so, the fisherman does just that, going after each one of the three crime lords single-handedly in some pretty cool, drawn out fights.

 I was a bit worried for a while there because the first few fights in the film - including the Bolo one - are pretty weak; No one embarrasses themselves, but they're extremely unmemorable.
 Luckily the brawls towards the end are much much better and include some excellent bits of colour like people jumping into the fight from the floor above or getting thrown clear across some sliding doors. They have a strong sense of physicality, too, which is not always the case for these older kung-fu movies. The final confrontation, an excellent, prolonged one-on-one duel, is the only time weapons are drawn (a staff and a pair of tonfas). To my taste at least, it cinches the deal, and easily makes this movie worth a watch.

 Shame about the story - the bones of a good yarn are there, but director Wing-Cho-Yip fails to find an engaging way to tell it. It's also seriously hampered by a too-perfect protagonist who never is even remotely threatened by any of the fights he throws himself into, and doesn't have the sort of charisma to make his invulnerable character fun to watch. Hell, I only watched this a few days ago, and I'm struggling to remember the first thing about him. Except that he can swing a pair of tonfas really, really well.

V/H/S: Viral

 So... was it bad as I remembered?

 Well, yes, it's pretty fucking bad. And I don't seem to be alone in thinking that; This third V/H/S anthology derailed the series from its yearly schedule, kicking the next film seven years into the future.

 The framing story (by Marcel Sarmiento) is beefier than usual - I suspect that if you add all its parts together, they'd add up to as much as any other of the segments. Unfortunately, the story does not. Add up to anything, I mean. It's a non-starter about a dude who gets obsessed with a slow car chase which has something to do with his girl disappearing and with people going nuts all over the place. It's bad.

 Once it cedes its spot to the first proper short things get immeasurably better - Dante The Great (by Gregg Bishop) is a mockumentary about the rise and fall of the titular illusionist (Justin Welborn), a loser who somehow gets a hold of a magical cape which has some unfortunate demonic tendencies. Things get out of hand, resulting in a sort-of live-action re-enactment of Pixar's short Presto but with an R rating. Silly, well-made, well-paced and featuring the rare V/H/S protagonist (Emmy Argo) you actually want to root for... if anyone's looking for a segment in any of these movies that needs to be rescued and transplanted to a better anthology, this one would be a really good candidate.

 Dante's a hard act to follow. Nacho Vigalondo tries his best with Spanish-language parallel dimension tale Parallel Monsters, which has some clever conceits and a good WTF reveal, but none of it did much for me.

 At least it's nowhere near as bad as Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Bonestorm, though. It's the usual tale of some insufferable skater dickwads who cross the border to Mexico to do some ollies or whatever and then have to face off with a bunch of zombie-like Dia de los Muertos entities. Taken as a near-experimental exercise in how far found footage can be stretched, it's kind of interesting... but it's also near painful to watch, and there's absolutely no narrative reason to sit through it.
 That these guys made both this and Spring in the same year still boggles my mind.

 All of this would have been rounded out by Todd Lincoln's Gorgeous Vortex, but it was cut out of the anthology because the director forgot to make it as a found footage film. And maybe because it's sucks, but given the rest of the material, I somehow doubt that. I have no idea what the hell this one's supposed to be about; Self-consciously arty, slow as molasses, and as obtuse as humanly possible... The protagonist (Jayden Robison) is truly gorgeous, though, and spends the most of her time running around in various skimpy outfits - so I guess there is at least that.
 The last short is available on the bluray after the credits, or up in various streaming sites if for some reason you don't want to spend any money on this. And to be clear, you shouldn't spend any money on V/H/S/Viral, I don't care how good Dante The Great is.

Warning: Do Not Play (Amjeon)

  This one didn't really do a lot for me. It's a pretty standard movie about an obsessed filmmaker (Seo Yea-ji) who's trying to track down an indie horror movie that's rumoured to a) get people who watch it in some sort of trouble and b) to be shot by a gh-gh-gh-ghost!

  This dumps her into an investigative spiral which will, of course, have some pretty dire consequences for her and other people caught up in the quest. It begins rather well (if a bit uninspired), but not a lot of time goes by before she's doing a few questionable and/or deeply stupid things to track down the film. Since she doesn't really have a strong motivation to do those things (beyond "I'm under pressure to do my own horror movie", which really doesn't cut it) or a proper justification for her obsession, it's hard to sympathise with her when the inevitable spooks come a-knocking.

 The cast is good, the cinematography (by Young-soo Yoon) is good, and Director Kim Jin-won clearly has chops - his film has some good ambiance and a couple of decently creepy moments - but as a whole neither the story (also by Jin-won) nor the horror coalesce into something substantial or even particularly interesting. Oh well.