The search for great hindi horror movies continues. Starting with Tumbbad may have set expectations too high.
Whatever
Thursday, April 03, 2025
Pari
The search for great hindi horror movies continues. Starting with Tumbbad may have set expectations too high.
Monday, March 31, 2025
Hellbender
Teenager Izzy (Zelda Adams) lives in the middle of nowhere with her mother (Toby Poser). They forage, do home-schooling, and like to glam up for band night, where they play doomy, riff-heavy rock songs they compose themselves.
The girl is completely isolated; any neighbours live "the next mountain over", and whenever her mom goes to town she leaves her behind under the pretext that she has a rare immunological disease. They're happy together; It seems like a good life. When alone, Izzy takes long walks through the woods, swims, and draws whatever bit of gorgeous Catskills scenery catches her fancy. As for mom, she sometimes performs messy, blood-heavy rituals when her daughter's not around, receives ominous visions from an ominous-looking book, or makes the random hitchhiker (John Adams) explode in a shower of ash with a single gesture.
But if teenagers are good at anything, it's at screwing things up for the adults. Damn teens. On one of her walks Izzy randomly meets another teen (Lulu Adams) lounging by a pool in the house the next mountain over, and they strike a tentative friendship. This leads her to discover that when she strays from her strict vegan diet, she gets strange powers. For she is a Hellbender (not to be confused with the Augustine order of hellbound saints), a witch-like, not-quite human being, and she gains power from whatever she eats. And that knowledge sets her on a collision course with her mother.
Hellbender is an engagingly weird coming-of-age story / family drama / horror hybrid shot during the height of the COVID lockdown by the Adams family (Toby Poser and John Adams are married, Lulu and Zelda are their children; They take turns directing, shooting, and scoring the film, which they wrote together as well. The whole credits sequence is basically their names, listed over and over again -even the house in the movie is their family home. A truly home-grown film.
It's surprising just how polished it all is. The music is great, with some really good original songs; The acting's excellent, the story well written, fun and unique... and it looks beautiful, too, with the crisp digital cinematography and handsome compositions.
The effects, unfortunately, bring it down a few notches, but I'm not about going to dock the movie points for being ambitious; Sure, some of the sequences are a little funnier than they should be, but broadly speaking they work, and they successfully deliver their payload of cool ideas. Some of the visual language is also slightly clumsy, with lots of reaction shots, but that's only really an issue in a couple of scenes.
Those niggles aside, this is a pretty great film from a very talented film-making collective.
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Flow (Straume)
Friday, March 28, 2025
Fatal Deviation
But there's so much enthusiasm put into the production that it's really hard to harbour it any ill will.
It's full of padding, but most of it is so bizarre it's entertaining; Where other movies would have endless scenes of people walking around and pointless conversations (and to be clear, there is a bit of that here), the filler in Fatal Deviation tends toward the inspired. Why settle for a boring-ass mundane shit when you can have a man carefully setting up and then taking a bath in an outdoor bathtub with an open fire under it? Or Irish catholic Gandalf (Johnny Murray) training Jimmy by waving sticks at the camera? Or a musical montage where our hero remembers having tender sex with his girl, intercut with random, mundane interactions with the mobsters, intercut with our protagonist nodding thoughtfully? Or a picnic where our lovebirds lie among a scattering of random oranges all over the picnic blanket?
Thursday, March 27, 2025
The Deaths of Ian Stone
Other than that mishap, his life seems pretty good, which makes it fairly off-putting as he whinges to his beautiful girlfriend (Christina Cole) on the ride home about how bad he has it. But I guess he was on to something; After he drops her off a mysterious, a vaguely grim-reaper-like shape lures him off his car and kills him at a railroad crossing.
The main problem is that almost every elements here is borrowed. The film acts like a snapshot of the things the creators were into at the moment: Dark City, Jacob's Ladder, Butterfly Effect, The Frighteners, image comics like Witchblade and The Darkness, and so many other things; Somehow it's not surprising when several characters turn up wrapped in body-hugging vinyl suits, looking like refugees from a porn-level parody of The Matrix.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Gateway
I rather like it, but it's a bastard hard film to recommend.
Sunday, March 23, 2025
She Came From The Woods
As soon as they're alone, the counselors gather for some really, really mild debauchery, which includes the camp's resident wiseass, Peter (Spencer List) enacting a blood ritual to summon local boogeyman Agatha, a local witch supposedly executed years ago at the site for (I shit you not) botched homeopathical treatments or some such. I guess that counts as comedy, maybe? That these twenty-somethings are thinly drawn, deeply unlikeable, and act as if they were fucking twelve is... well, I refer you back to the first paragraph.
One can hope.