Gaia

 Gaia is a decent little eco-horror film from South Africa that is notable for a) some truly gorgeous shots of the local jungle and b) featuring monsters that look like escaped The Last Of Us fungus people. The filmmakers protest they'd never even heard of the games until they were in the middle of production, and that they were inspired by the same Cordyceps footage from Planet Earth that inspired that game's designers.

 Which is reasonable, except that they then gave the fungus zombies in the movie the same clicking noises as in the games.

Can't be that big a surprise, the guy was clearly terrible at his job.

 In any case, the cordyceps-like fungus zombies are only a minor part of the movie, which mostly follows the misadventures of two rangers who get lost inside the preserve they're supposed to be patrolling. One of them is a dumbass who's almost immediately (and deservedly) consumed by the aforementioned fungus monsters, but Gabi (Monique Rockman) is injured by a trap and taken in by a father-and-son duo who've gone native and have been living in a rickety shack in the middle of the jungle for more than a decade.

 Gabi doesn't know if she's a prisoner, a prospective victim/sacrifice, or if she's free to go, which is not helped by the father (Cerel Nel) giving off some serious unabomber vibes. The son (Alex Van Dyk), meanwhile, has lived all of his life in the shack and is understandably attracted to Gabi.

 As weeks go by and Gabi heals, she learns a bit more of her hosts, of their relationship with the local monsters (who attack the shack every few nights, Minecraft-style), and of the weird religion the father and son share, one that's devoted to a bizarre local lifeform. Tensions escalate as she decides to go back to civilization, and to take the son with her against the father's wishes, and those of the entity in the jungle.

 It's a decent mix of elements which sadly don't entirely cohere into a satisfying narrative even when some overtly biblical themes are introduced. It's relatively interesting, though, and beautifully filmed - director Jaco Bower and cinematographer Jorrie van der Walt make good use of some gorgeous local scenery. The acting is pretty good, the monsters are great (though they barely figure in the story) and the effects are fine, especially for a low-budget movie like this one. It's never particularly scary or exciting, but there's a little bit of effective body horror, some minor psychodelia and some cool imagery, Just enough to make it worth your time, but maybe not enough to be remembered for too long. 

Nosferatu (2024)

 It's common knowledge now (if it wasn't before) that the original 1922 Nosferatu is Dracula with the serial numbers filed off - just enough changes to try and avoid a lawsuit from the Stoker estate (which ended up happening anyway, and almost wiped the movie from history). Think about it. The first mockbuster; The Asylum is totally Murnau's fault.

 Robert Eggers is a fan, and has been trying to get a remake off the ground ever since he hit it big with The VVitch almost ten years ago (this was going to be his second film, once upon a time). The reverence he holds for the material is easy to see - as carefully constructed spectacle goes, this one is just as impressive as your Dunes or Mad Maxes. It's just that instead of nuclear explosions or a thrilling attack on a vehicle convoy, you get immaculately desolate Carpathian ridges and people talking in a reconstructed dead language. Eggers gonna egg.

 I barely remember either of the previous Nosferatus, as I was pretty much a teen when i watched them (Werner Herzog also had a go at remaking it back in the 70s) - the one I remember the most is Shadow of the Vampire, a pretty clever deconstructionist horror film set during the filming of the original. So I can only compare it against Dracula... and yeah, it really is Dracula with the numbers filed off - the same characters running through a very similar plot with most of the same elements.

 Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a young real estate agent is called to ratify some documents by an eccentric rich foreigner to buy a nearby property. The catch is that the count lives in a remote corner of the Carpathians, forcing our hero to leave his young, mentally fragile newlywed wife Mina Ellen (Lily Rose Depp) alone. Unbeknownst to everyone, the Count is laying a trap for the man, as he's got his sights on stealing his paramour.

 The rest of the film is, beat for beat, pretty similar; as the count exerts some dread long-distance influence over Ellen, causing her to behave erratically, which forces Ellen's exasperated doctor (Ralph Inneson) to consult with his mentor - Von Franz (Willem Dafoe, who played Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire), a crackpot hermeticist and the Van Helsing surrogate in this story.

 The vampire arrives on a ghost ship with a host of plague rats, who start spreading diseases all over town - a neat visualization of the count's influence. Thomas, who survived the Count's trap, also arrives, and starts trying to mount a resistance along with Von Franz and some friends. It all leads to a confrontation that, to put it lightly, veers left from Dracula's.

 

 What Eggers adds as a writer here is a couple of more modern touches to the story to give Ellen a little more relevance and agency, which I think work pretty well.

 On the one hand, I love that Ellen is something... other, more akin to the legendary vampire than to the rest of humankind. She originally wakes the fiend, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) by praying to him in a state of complete solitude (and, it's heavily implied, sexual frustration), therefore setting the events of the film in motion. The film also pays more attention to her mental health and posits them as part of her otherness - which her Victorian-like peers of course treat as hysteria.

 These changes do recontextualize the original film's famously downer of an ending... a little. But what's unclear is how they add a cogent message to the movie, or add any depth to a character whose faith still was decided by a cast of men, or whose way to save the day... is pretty unconventional*. It's messy.

 Of course the other thing Egger brings to the table are his considerable chops as a stylist and a gift for bringing to life time-distant cultures. And in that respect, this film is an unmitigated success - I'd go as far as saying that it's just as crazily stylized as Coppola's wonderful take on Dracula, but instead of going for high operatic camp, Eggers goes the other direction, giving us a muted, gothic take on the material whose precise camerawork and intricate production design I can only describe as Wes Anderson on a minor key**.

 The film is shot on 35mm and looks absolutely stunning at almost all times, never more than throughout a stretch of Thomas's Transylvanian jaunt where the colours drain out until it becomes a black and white film for a while, with a scene that pays homage to another classic B&W film, The Phantom Carriage at its heart. The cinematographer is Egger's regular collaborator Jarin Blaschke, and he really earns his pay here - it's a thematically and literally shadow-drenched film often only lit with natural lighting from meager candles. There's a recurring complaint that modern horror is too murky (I tend to not agree), but few use shadows as well as this one does, and everything is clearly discernible except when it isn't supposed to be. It looks luscious.

 The acting is mostly great. Depp is incredible as Ellen in a very demanding role, Inneson is as baritone as ever, Dafoe plays his likeable cook with predictable flair, and Skarsgård has a lot of fun devouring the scenery with an outrageously ridiculous accent, which I guess is the prerogative of those playing vampire nobles. Oh, and Simon McBurney as the Renfield equivalent is a huge amount of fun, too.

 I'm much less enthused by the young gentlemen of the piece - Hoult is... all right, though I must admit I've never found him particularly interesting; I'm convinced his high cheekbones, and the way they throw shadows on the rest of his face, were at least a factor in his casting. His friend (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), I found completely unconvincing.

 Is it worth it? Well, for me, absolutely, but aside from the technical side I found this to be Egger's least rewarding film. I'm sad to report I thought it dragged a little at times. People are actually saying pretty nice things about it, though, which surprised me but I'm glad to hear. It's not arthouse ('elevated') horror, it's a proper gothic vampire tale. But it's also stilted as all hell, most of its elements are pretty shopworn, and despite an incredible sense of menace (and a really cool vampire) I wouldn't really rate it very highly as a horror film.

 Fans of Twilight disappointed with the amount of vampire weenage on display in that series should note that Orlok's withered, diseased penis is on full display here. Maybe that's why people like it so much.

 I don't want to sound too negative here. Lesser Eggers turns out to still be essential, and those technical aspects count for a whole lot; This one demands to be seen in the biggest screen possible. After that crossroads-set carriage scene, I would love it unconditionally even if it was half as good.

*: My proposed interpretation is much more boring: forget the psychosexual angle, and consider Orlok as a manifestation of her untreated mental illness.

**: This is meant as unqualified praise, by the way.

The Deadtectives

 Ghost hunters are an easy target. Especially the ones with shows on TV and streaming; They're often pretty far within self-satire territory anyways.

 The Deadtectives doesn't really find an interesting take on the fairly well-populated 'fake paranormal investigators run into the real thing' subgenre, but that's fine - it's perfectly content leaning heavily towards the comedy side of the Horror/Comedy divide, and with not bringing in anything new to the table.

 The show within the movie is a long-running series on one of the 'documentary' channels (Whale Wars is mentioned in passing) where a crew of vacuous idiots go around faking supernatural events so they can 'clean' them.

 The host, Sam (Chris Geere), expertly portrays the breathless fake excitement of every other youtube host ever, only to flip to a very Joel McHale-like aggressively cynical mode as soon as the cameras are not on him. Their producer Kate (Tina Ivlev), who is also engaged to Sam, yearns for the days where they debunked myths and not milked them for money. Rounding out the team are Sam's brother Lloyd (David Newman), a tech wiz and actual paranormal expert/believer, and Javier (José María de Tavira), who's even more cynical than Sam.

 Their show is hot garbage - to the point that their agent, sick of the spineless crap Sam whips up, gets them a hotshot new producer (Martha Higareda), a flakey FX wizard (Mark Riley), and sends them south of the border to 'the most haunted casa in all of Mexico' for an extravagant season finale that stands a chance of getting the show renewed with the network.
 And so it is that the Deadtectives run up against their first brush with actual spirits: the ghosts of a father and the family he butchered. The casa is well and truly haunted, and the pater familias is perfectly willing and capable to keep on killing from beyond the grave.

 There's a little scooby-doo-style farce where the Deadtectives run into some random ghostly apparition and they blame it on the special effects guy, but that's mercifully cut short by a couple actual murders and undeniable supernatural goings-on. What follows is an agreeable, often funny timewaster that's given a tiny (very tiny) bit of gravitas by the ghostly victims, who add a touch of creepiness to the proceeds.
 The effects are good for a lower-end independent production like this, and the gore is mild but harsher than the PG13-like tone would lead you to believe. Director Tony West (who co-wrote, along with David Clayton Rogers, Mark Riley and Chris Rice) opts to film it as a traditional comedy, not as found footage, and his style, along with Andre Lascaris's cinematography, are crisp and slick.

 The script is also slick, if a bit over-familiar. The tone gets a little too loud at times, which I'm not a fan of (there's a lot of screaming, especially early on) but a respectable amount of jokes land successfully. The humour can get very broad, but all in all it's a pretty good-natured film that mostly knows how far to push most of its characters' dickishness without becoming grating. I tend to prefer horror comedies that feel a little bit less like a sitcom, but this one's all right.

A Quiet Place: Day One

 I'm not that huge a fan of the Quiet Place movies. I liked the first one well enough - it's a well executed gimmick horror film - but I still struggle to buy into the premise: animalistic aliens that hunt by sound alone arrive on Earth in numbers high enough to bring our civilization to heel. I mean, you can defeat them by throwing a noisemaker and calmly walking in the other direction, right?

 A Quiet Place: Day One is a prequel that hinges around events we've already seen in the best scene of the second movie in the franchise - the alien D-Day, the moment when the large humanoid mantis-things arrive in meteorites and start wreaking havoc amongst an unsuspecting populace. It moves the action to New York, and away from the family central to the the first two movies to a new cast.

 

 Sam (Lupita Nyong'o) is spending her last days as a terminal cancer patient in a hospice in New York with her cat Frodo (Schnitzel and Nico). She reluctantly agrees to go on a field trip to go see a show downtown, mostly because it'll allow here the chance to nip out and grab a slice of pizza. Sam is pretty big on pizza, for dramatic reasons that will become clear later.

 The show gets interrupted due to an unknown disturbance, and as the group starts boarding the bus, the meteorites hit the ground and the aliens emerge and start attacking everyone.

 Sam has a few close calls, bands in with other survivors as people quickly figure out that noise equals death, and then decides to strike out on her own on a suicidal quest for pizza. She then runs into a shellshocked British expat (Joseph Quinn) who insists on sticking with her, and as they travel together a tentative friendship develops between the two. 

 It's a simple, affecting story that focuses on the mundane elements and its relatable characters despite the constant alien threat. It helps a lot that the drama is a clear upgrade over the first two movies; I can certainly empathise more with an embittered, dying woman's rage against the dying of the light than with a couple whose act of defiance is to have a baby despite the fact it's probably going to doom their whole family. The minimalistic script does a lot of the heavy pulling, as does the always excellent Nyong'o, particularly expressive and intense here.

 Unfortunately, the aliens are much less convincing this time around; Their hearing and hunting skills, even when they do that cool move where they open up their head like a pinecone, vary depending on the script's needs... but as a rule they end up feeling incompetent to the point that whenever someone dies it feels like it's their own damn fault. A downgrade from the more effective hunters from the previous movies (which, to be fair, also had this problem, just to a lesser degree).

 The cat is also... well, it totally fails to behave like a real cat for some of its major scenes (including one particularly ridiculous bit where it would have sunk its claws up to its elbows in its poor bearer).

  On the plus side, the wrecked city scenery (hard not to think of 9/11) looks incredible, thanks to some beautiful visuals from writer/director Michael Sarnoski and cinematographer Pat Scola (who had previously worked together on the wonderful, and tonally similar Pig). They handle the requisite tense 'skulking around the aliens' scenes well, but I was more taken by their impressionistic focus on the details of the devastated city - a shoe poking out of the rubble, an abandoned basketball court, or the shuffle of a refugee crowd, all filmed in a style that felt to me indebted to Lubezki's work with Malik. Not bad for the second sequel of a horror franchise!

 Back on the genre side of things, the effects sell the mass of the aliens exceptionally well - in one particularly effective scene, the danger doesn't come from being hunted, but from being crushed by a fast-moving stampede.

 The sound design is also excellent, though that's probably a given with this series.

 I love this sort of thing: a (no pun intended) quieter, more experimental offshoot of an established genre franchise. Even better when it's put out by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes imprint. There's been a third a core quiet place movie in the works for a while now, but I'd much prefer more side-trips like this one.

The Cellar

 I really enjoyed The Pilgrimage, a historical VOD action movie where Jon Bernthal gets medieval while protecting a few monks and a relic of (perceived) mass destruction. So of course I'm going to watch a movie from the same writer/director (Brendan Muldowney) about, going by the trailer, a haunted house with demonic equations, alchemy and a passage to some sort of Sheol.

 The good news is that Muldowney remains pretty good behind the cameras, and cinematographer Tom Comerford returns as well: it's a nicely atmospheric movie, with some beautiful panoramic shots of the Irish countryside and some well-constructed (if generic) genre moments.

 The bad news is that it's kind of a mess, and not the fun kind of mess.

 Keira Woods (Elisha Cuthbert) has just moved to a huge new house with her husband (Eoin Macken) and her two children - a nasty, deeply unlikeable teen (Abby Fitz), and a weirdo tween (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady). The elder Woods-es run an ad agency using influencers or something, and if there's a combination of words that would make me lose sympathy with anyone... well, that'd be high up in the list. Especially when they talk about the specifics of the campaign. That shit is more horrific than anything in the movie.

 Anyhow! Ellie, the teen, is basically in complete, unlikable stroppy little turd mode from the first moment we see her; So when the cellar of the house devours her and she goes missing, I half-expected the family to shrug, cut their losses and carry on as usual.

 But no - Keira goes on the warpath instead, and when the police can't turn up any clues and assume instead her daughter ran away, she starts investigating on her own. She finds that the stairs her daughter went missing on has numbered steps and a formula inscribed at the bottom, and Judaic characters inscribed on random places around the house.

 There's also the words Solve Coagula, which, along with a picture of someone posing with his two fingers facing up (but not the other two facing down, which kind of defeats the occult purpose) are a very clear reference to a famous alchemical image - it might be a slight spoiler as to the nature of the menace hiding somewhere in the house.

 Everything points to the occult, as Keira confirms when she consults with a math professor (Aaron Monaghan) and discovers the previous owner of the house was an alchemist as well as a mathematician. Incidentally, the math teacher she talks to used to be a normal lunkhead until he hit his head a couple years prior and kablam! instant math prodigy. I... yeah, I have no idea what they were thinking. It's played completely straight. That whole character introduction is bewildering.

 All of the answers, when they come, are deeply half-arsed and underwhelming; The film plays with some interesting ideas but fails to do any of them justice. It's not entirely witless - I do like the concept of someone walking down some stairs further than there are steps, for example. Which, incidentally, was the basis for the original short that got expanded into this movie.
 Oh, and I've been remiss on reporting possessed toys in haunted house movies lately (there was a slinky in Shock, I think, as well as a swing used as the means to a curse). It doesn't begin to make up for my lapse, but here we get that old staple of a ball falling down a set of stairs, and a haunted abacus. That one might be new.

 The acting is a little iffy, but I can't really fault the actors for failing to breathe life into these characters. As mentioned earlier, at least the technical side of things is well handled; It's a good-looking low-budget film. Things also do at least get a little nuts towards the end. I don't want to raise anyone's expectations - It's a clear case of too little, too late. The puzzle-solving aspect should have been the film's strongest draw, but unfortunately the script is in no way able to deliver answers worthy of the questions asked or the subjects raised.

Older Gods

 Chris (Rory Wilson) drops out of his life over at the US to travel to Wales without telling anyone and rent a cottage out in the countryside. An old friend, Billy (Ieuan Combs) recently committed some unspeakable act and killed himself - but before doing so, he sent Chris a large bundle of documents and a video asking him to go over his research.

 What's in the folder? Documents, a seeming murder weapon, and pictures detailing, Chris soon discovers, the activities of a shadowy cult that murders anyone who learns anything about them... and their families. Well gee, Billy, thanks for that, you sure are a good friend. Very considerate. My soon to be butchered wife says hi.

 The movie openly bills itself as a bit of Lovecraftian fiction, and it does feature the aforementioned cult of titular Older God worshippers. There's a flash of tentacles and everything. But the film doesn't really engage with cosmic horror as a genre beyond these superficial signifiers. More than anything else, it feels like a premise in search of a story.

 It's a solid, if silly premise: Billy's research started looking into people suffering what he ominously termed 'primal fear', which the rest of us will probably recognize as garden variety existential dread - grappling with the fact that existence is unimaginably large, and we're all insignificant in the scheme of things.

 But the people Billy studied didn't deal with it by going to therapy or reading some Sartre. No, most of them killed themselves, and those who didn't... went on to discover an entity that promised them an end to reality and transcendence into some other state that'd be meaningful. Just as long as they behave like deranged lunatics killing whoever gets too close to them; The standard cultist package deal. And while studying them, him Billy and his team became their next targets.

 While Chris comes to grips with Billy's discoveries, he must also deal with the god and his followers - first psychically, then physically as they start popping up right outside his shack. It's an exceedingly slow burn that only ever builds up to a little flickering and a wisp of smoke; The ending, while kind of sweet and hinting towards a sort of message, seems like another stumble in a script that never really found a consistent direction for its horror or a decent throughline for its story.

 Given that it's a pandemic project put together by a about a dozen people with a total budget of half a million pounds, it's easy to forgive the film's faults. It looks pretty slick, with writer/director David A. Roberts and cinematographer Shaun Bishop effectively grounding the film's drama with some crisp imagery, and a very decent soundtrack by Gerald Buckfield.
 The acting calls a little too much attention to itself ('hey, look at me, I'm acting!'), but everyone puts in a decent effort. Technically, it's a well-made film.

 But while I respect the effort that went into it and the talent needed to end up with a professional-looking product like this, I'm finding it really hard to find a reason to recommend it. There's just not a lot there.

Monstrum (Mulgoe)

  At some point during the embattled Joseon dynasty in early 16th-century Korea, someone wrote an off-hand comment in the official record of reports of a monster near the capital. And you know what that means: a thoroughly silly horror movie BASED ON HISTORICAL EVENTS, baby!

 And so it went that the faction that brought King Jungjong (Park Hee-soon) to power is now conspiring to take him down. So when his ministers bring him news of a monster spreading plague and eating peasants on the borders of his kingdom, the king rejects their plans to deal with it - afraid they're plotting to overthrow him - and calls on an old ally instead to lead the investigation: an old general that resigned in disgust at the court's amoral maneuvering.

 The general, Yum Kium (Kim Myung-min), is living the peasant life in the impoverished countryside, along with another general who followed him into exile (Kim In-kwon) and an adopted daughter (Lee Hye-ri). They quickly accept the king's request and start investigating the alleged monster's depredations which, strangely, come in two separate flavours: People brutally torn apart, and people being half-mauled to death, infected with a strange plague.

 What follows is, depending on how you approach it, either an extremely ridiculous horror movie or a fairly ridiculous action/adventure yarn as our trio, accompanied by a court officer (Choi Woo-shik) face off against court intrigue and/or a monster that may or may not exist.

 Before we engage in spoilers, I'll just say that the movie is a fair amount of fun - despite a couple of scenes set at the sites of grisly mass murders, it ends up being a silly, humorous adventure that gets a bit too preposterous for its own good. There are a lot of tonal shifts but while a ton of innocent people get slaughtered, hey, don't worry, our protagonists mostly make it through and there's time for a few fart jokes. In that sense it's definitely closer to the Detective Dee movies than, say, Brotherhood of the Wolf. 

 In any case, SPOILERS: Yes, there is a dastardly court scheme of the extremely moustache-twirling (or wispy beard stroking, in this case) kind to overthrow the king, and yes, there is a monster who's doing its own thing in parallel, and events conspire so that they both strike at once. The monster boasts an excellent design - it looks a little bit like a giant foo dog afflicted by a nasty plague, one that's at once distinctive, menacing and a little cute. It's unfortunate that the surprising (given the budget) amount of time it's on-screen, coupled with an all-CGI execution, end up wearing out its welcome.

 The action itself is just ok. Director Jong-ho Huh shoots his fights with quick edits that rob the choreography of any impact, and the most involved battle is shot with a sort of pulsing zoom effect that looks kind of cool but makes the action pretty illegible. The run-ins with the monster fare a little better, but for good or ill (mostly ill) it's the sort of CGI-heavy spectacle we've seen many times by now, and nowhere near as good as on The Host.
 The script (by the director along with Heo Dam) gets more and more overstuffed as it goes along, culminating with a series of finales of increasing absurdity. But it does keep things moving apace, and the comedy, while not all that funny, keeps things light even when people are dying all over the place.

 I realize I'm maybe coming off here as a bit more negative than intended. It's a decent, fairly original creature feature that does a good job of mixing in some action and intrigue elements before going a bit brain-dead. I enjoyed it, but it's definitely one of those where you need to adjust your expectations as it goes on.