Mandy

 This. This is the perfect doom metal movie. No notes, other than it's essential.

 Ok, some other notes: Mandy is a drug-soaked tribute to the sleaziest of the old swords-and-sorcery movies. Set in a version of the 80s that also accommodates cenobite biker gangs and a cult of murderous hippies with access to magical relics, it tells the tale of one Red (Nicolas Cage, a lumberjack whose idyllic life with his girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is terminally disrupted by the aforementioned cult when its leader/messiah Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) takes an interest on the woman.

 What follows is a bloody, brutal struggle as Red enacts his revenge and carves his way up to the cult leader. Crossbows, axes and chainsaws all get their time to shine. It's a deeply psychedelic movie with an immaculately developed ambiance, thanks to director and co-writer Panos Cosmatos' eye, lush, grainy digital photography from Benjamin Loeb, and a doom-laden soundtrack from the late, great Jóhann Jóhannsson.

 There are better action movies out there, but I can't think of any that manage to leverage every single  one of their elements to communicate a specific feel as well as this one; The Limey, maybe? In any case, I can't recommend it enough.

Rumours

 There's a tiny subgenre of action that pits world leaders (well, ok, usually the US president) against terrorists or some other threat. It's never been very popular, but for whatever reason there's been a spike in their production lately (I won't get into the politics of it, but it is pretty concerning, particularly in the current climate). One of them even takes place at the G20 summit.

 I'd say Rumours is a direct response to that one movie, but it came out before it. It pits the members of the G7 as they face an unexpected siege by the wanking dead (no, that's not a typo and no, I won't expand on it). As you might  expect from a movie written and directed by Guy Maddin and frequent collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, it attacks its material at a rather... oblique angle.

 The premise an obvious joke, if a pretty good one: The leaders of the free world convene to tackle on some (unspecified) world crisis only to be faced with a more immediate and dangerous one... and they dissolve into an ineffectual muddle of infighting, grandstanding, and incompetence.

 They're all so self-absorbed and so far removed from any problem that they can't deal with one that directly threatens their survival, and I have to admit that I laughed several times even when the punchlines were only slightly different variations on a theme. I also laughed when the French President starts to look for hidden meaning within the events of the night, which feels like Maddin and co. gently poking fun at themselves and trolling their audience.

 The cast is very, very game and a lot of  fun to watch; The Chancellor of Germany (Cate Blanchett) awkwardly tries to hold things together. The president of Canada (Roy Dupuis) is basically a stroppy teen; The POTUS (Charles Dance with his native English accent) is an artifact stuck firmly in the glories of the past. The Japanese PM (Takehiro Hira) is pretty much a non-entity who goes along with anyone else's plan, and the French president (Denis Ménochet) is a pretentious windbag. The UK PM (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is stuck as the voice of reason along with the German Chancellor. And the Italian president (Rolando Ravello) is a sweet idiot who's just happy to be included, and provides some of the biggest laughs in the movie.

 Oh, and Alicia Vikander (adorable) puts in a short appearance as the leader of the European commission.

 While technically this is a zombie movie, this is first and foremost a bizarre surreal movie that is just barely interested in being a comedy, much less a horror film. It does find a couple of moments to play with genre aesthetics (a garishly-lit 80's style scene in the woods, and a beautiful mist-bound scene at a ferry dock drenched in sodium light), but other than some ambiance the scarce horror elements are strictly there for  laughs or as a surrealist sting.
 The satire, meanwhile, is a mixed bag; Some of its barbs are clear and cogent, like the president of France making pompous, grandiloquent statements while being carried in a wheelbarrow by the leaders of other countries. Others are way too obvious, like the US president falling asleep and being generally senile... I do wonder if this movie would have been a lot more interesting had the movie been released a year or two later. The general thrust of the script - Germany timorously trying to herd a bunch of unruly idiots in order to perform a clearly ineffectual exercise, everyone being completely unable to prioritize or competently take charge of the situation - remains funny throughout . And there is, of course, a whole lot of What. The. Fuck.

 If you're tickled by the premise, well then, you'll remain tickled by the premise, but as with all of the movies from these filmmakers, it's somewhat hostile to the viewer. Guy Maddin is a level removed from someone like Quentin Dupieux, who can produce surrealism that still functions within the genre it inhabits.
 I personally don't regret watching this, but the experience of getting through it was often exasperating; It feels like it could have worked much better at half its length. But... I can't discount a film with situations as funny as a man trying to thread the line on how much pedophilic flirting is appropriate, or lines as gloriously unhinged as when someone proclaims that a giant brain is female, because "it's not as big as a male giant brain".

War of the Wizards

 War of the Wizards, renamed as The Phoenix when released in the outside of Asia a few years later to cash in on Clash of the Titans' success, is a budget 1978 Taiwanese fantasy epic that's hobbled by a deeply unlikable little shit of a main character and some really turgid plotting. Stick with it, though, for a bunch of extremely charming old-school practical and visual effects, and a scene that might be the single funniest bit of intentional comedy I've run across in any of these films.

 Two things happen when hapless fisherman Tai (Hsiu-Shen-Liang) finds a magical bowl that allows him to create anything he wishes. The first is that he uses it to become rich (and in so doing, an absolute asshole). The second is that a large number of threats, supernatural and not, come after him to get the relic.

 One of these threats - an interstellar (yes, literally) wizard called Flower Fox (Betty Pei Ti) eventually steals both the bowl and Tai's two brides (long story), prompting a more traditional, heroic second half where our complete waste of a protagonist skills up and overcomes a few obstacles to get what he thinks he deserves. It really is a movie of two halves, so let's have a look at them separately.

 The first half of the movie is, by far, the worst; There is absolutely no reason to root for Tai, who's venal, shallow, a complete idiot, and deeply unfunny - but for far too long the script insists on presenting him as a hero, and we get a lot of his inane antics here. He does eventually get a very mild comeuppance (the film is not that dumb, I guess), but it's absolutely a case of too little, too late. In the meanwhile we're forced to watch him behaving like an entitled little nouveau riche dick and have to suffer through his daft, uncomfortable attempts to woo not one but two beautiful ladies (Terry Hu and Chow Chi-Ming). They are, of course, in cahoots with the main villain to rob the relic, but they do develop feelings for our idiot of a protagonist. Sigh.

 As bad as this first act is, it does contain an unimpeachable bit of comedy: A long scene where Tai is accosted by a number of colourful, powerful assassins at a restaurant. I'm not about to spoil what's easily the best scene in the movie, but do know that it's perfectly executed and, on a conceptual level, ridiculously ahead of its time - a cheeky, slightly post-modern piss take of a scene that only gets funnier as it goes along. Gags in these films rarely get this elaborate.

 Tai remains insufferable for the film's more enjoyable back half, and the fact that he keeps failing upwards and getting more and more powerful with seemingly very little effort no sacrifice won't endear him to anyone. Bonus shitty points: he's very focused on recovering his magic bowl, but rarely devotes a thought to his two hijacked paramours.

 So it's not like the plot gets any better, but at least there's a lot of cool stuff going on. The idiot in charge learns to absorb sunlight and shoot lasers with his sword, and gets the freaking Phoenix as a mount (a very endearing, janky puppet that looks like a peacock but has the rough shape of a turkey). Meanwhile, Flower Fox flies, can breathe fire, summons a giant stone creature and has a huge henchman at her beck and call (Richard Kiel - Jaws off the Bond movies) and causes tidal waves, letting co-director Sadamasa Arikawa show off his chops with miniature cities and boats.

 While there's a lot of Kung Fu wizardry, the fights remain resolutely mediocre. This is not a martial arts film by any stretch of the word - the choreographies are closer to... oh, say a Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movie.

 The Kung Fu wizardry is pretty good though. It's all very low budget, of course, and I'm sure the soulless fucks at the internet would have a field day complaining about how shitty it all looks. And... yeah, some of it, especially the optical effects, do look pretty bad. But if you can allow yourself to enjoy this sort of thing at all (and you should, don't be like those other losers!) there's definitely a lot to like; Cheap it may be, but there's a lot of effort behind this, and the special effect techniques cover the full gamut except maybe stop-motion.

 I don't want to oversell it - this is definitely not a good movie, and the dipshit protagonist makes it an even tougher sale. But there's enough good stuff here to make it a pretty enjoyable watch.

Tremors 3: Return to Perfection

 The Tremors movies were always low-budget, but this second sequel was the first one to go straight to video (Aftershocks was intended to be DtV as well, but positive reactions on test screenings convinced Universal to give it a theatrical run.

 And... well, this is where the magic fails. Maybe you can blame the script by newcomer John Whelpley, but the story is by the original Tremors team (S. S. Wilson, Brent Maddock plus Nancy Roberts, who helped with Tremors 2). Maddock also directs.

 Gun nut Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) is left to headline after the departures of Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, and he is as likeable as ever, even if he's much better as a supporting character than a protagonist. And to be completely honest, I didn't hate the deuteragonists either: Shawn Christian as a grifter who takes out tourists on safaris to see "graboids" (or a shitty facsimile thereof), and a business-headed shop owner played by Susan Chuang.

 But the story, which has a new batch of graboids/shriekers terrify the community of Perfection again, feels very tired and by-the-numbers. So does the introduction of yet a new stage of graboid development - it turns out shriekers, if left alone, turn into a sleeker version of a shrieker that can fly by... lighting its farts on fire, basically. These ass-blasters (official name!) look terrible and their method of locomotion never makes sense (they don't look like they could glide for a second); The whole thing reeks of desperation on the part of the creative team.

They got Dark Horse to do a decent cover... shame no one thought about running a spell checker.

 Squint, and you can see some traces of the trademark Tremors wit - but you have to squint a lot, and none of it is really memorable. Add to that crappier production values (although technically on a higher budget; at one point we're treated to a rack of comics called "Shreikers") and more reliance on bargain-bin CGI even for the standard first-stage graboids... yeah, this was a major disappointment.

 This is as far as I got originally with this series. It hasn't gotten any better with a rewatch and, to be honest I'm not exactly making me want to persevere with the series; Especially as the relationship between the Tremors team and Universal, which never seems to have been good (Aftershocks' production was apparently nightmarish, which makes it even more amazing that it turned out so well) got markedly worse after this.

Hell Baby

 Fucking godawful. A ton of comedy talent (Keegan Michael Key! Kumail  Nanjiani! Rob Corddry! Plus a ton of members of comedy groups The State, Stella, and others) are completely wasted on a stoner-friendly horror spoof that relentlessly goes for easy jokes and lame improv comedy.

 Writer/directing team of Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, who also make an appearance as two chain-smoking, hard-living exorcist priests, have come up with some jokes that do work on paper, such as Key's character, a ridiculous Cajun caricature with no sense of personal space or privacy, or some extended absurdist sequences where the film stops to stare at people sampling local Louisiana cuisine for uncomfortably long stretches of time. But the results are never more than mildly amusing, and they carry on for so long they almost inevitably overstay their welcome. And those are the better parts of the movie. Avoid, unless you actually enjoy this sort of Your Highness-style low-effort shit.

Things Will Be Different

 Siblings Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy) abscond to a safehouse after stealing some money. It's a particularly safe safehouse, too: By performing a ritual with the abandoned farmhouse's clocks, the fugitives can jump out of time into a sort of isolated time loop and wait out two weeks without any fear of anyone finding them.

 The catch (of course there's a catch) is that they're not supposed to be there. As Joseph and Sidney end their stay outside of time, they discover that the loop is run by a shady outfit which are unwilling to let them out. They give our protagonists an ultimatum: either get rid of another intruder who's been meddling with their timeloop, or get erased from existence. So the siblings are stuck, unable to return to their lives until they deal with a menace that may not exist.

 It's an original, compelling setup with well-written, likeable characters and some good tension. The biggest and most distinctive thing the movie has going for it, though, is its inscrutability - it's spelled out explicitly that some things will not be explained to the characters (and by extension, the audience). The plot does end up making sense, but only just about, and it leaves a lot up in the air. In that I don't think it's wholly successful, despite some clever ideas and a solid, emotional ending. Much better handled is the weirdness and sense of mystery behind the Vise, as the organization running the time loop calls itself.

 Writer/director Michael Felker has been filmmaker duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's editor for more than a decade now (starting on their V/H/S segment; They produced the film through their Rustic films imprint, and Benson makes an appearance as one of the operators of the time loop.) Felker's chilly, quiet style complements the material well, and the soundtrack by Jimmy Lavalle (of the great post-rock band Tristeza - highly recommend their album En Nuestro Desafío) and Michael A. Muller is excellent.

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 at first 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; It might technically qualify as a comedy, but 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.