The Soul Eater (Le mangeur d'âmes)

 Elizabeth (Virgine Ledoyen) is a mannered, gives-no-fucks police inspector investigating a bizarre double-homicide in the French Alps; Franck (Paul Hamy) is an intense, driven young Captain who's on the trail of some missing children (he's introduced screaming while jogging himself ragged, which is blatant film language to let us know he's troubled.)

 Together, they fight crime. Kind of.

 The Soul Eater is a sort of collage of detective media from the last couple of decades, a film built almost entirely from common places, plot holes and contrivances tied together by a mystery that only gets shittier as the movie unspools its unlikely tangle of elements. It also throws in a possible supernatural threat and a few Nordic Noir-style disturbing plot elements to try and spice things up, which only makes its half-assed-ness feel tackier.

 It's never able to shake off the feeling that you've watched it before, but for a while it works; Both protagonists are fun to watch and, the investigation at first seems interesting. Directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury know their way around a production of this sort and provide some good atmosphere.

 The two investigators' cases (the child abductions and the double murder) are linked, of course, and they soon learn of a local folkloric figure - the titular Soul Eater - who gets a shitty rhyme to say how he comes out of the woods to eat people and leave behind evil doppelgangers or something.
 There's also a mysterious motorcycle rider, a plane crash in the woods that keeps being brought up, and more police incompetence than you can shake one of those weird little wooden soul eater totems that keep popping up at crime scenes at. And yes, more people soon start showing up dead all over the sleepy town.

 The French, of course, are adept at taking Hollywood crime movie conventions and making them their own - or at least making a banger out of them. The clearest influence here is 2000's banger The Purple Rivers (the directors have admitted as much). But there's not enough of anything here to sustain interest; the style is mostly subdued, there's very little action, and the police procedural/mystery elements hinge on people missing the obvious and other contrivances; The script, by Annelyse Batrel and Ludovic Lefebvre, adapting a novel by Alexis Laipsker, is a complete mess.

 Bustillo and Maury have ever been reliable providers of genre thrills, but while their gorehound sensibilities do give this one a welcome spike of nastiness (the only time the film comes alive is a nasty, bloody late-movie portrayal of the first crime), there's not much they can do here other than keeping things atmospheric. There are a couple of perfunctory foot chases, a couple shootings and a pretty neat car/bike stunt, but other than that everything here relies on the mystery itself -and its resolution- to hold things together... a task at which it fails, miserably.

Blue Ruin

 Dwight (Macon Blair) is a very hirsute beach bum* who lives in his car (the titular blue ruin). An evidently damaged soul, one good day he's brought in by a sympathetic cop to the station to learn that someone called Wade Cleland is being let out of prison on parole.

 The particulars of the situation are gently revealed throughout the next twenty minutes or so - I'll leave them unspoiled, as letting us work things out is one of the many pleasures the movie offers, but the news of the parole electrify Dwight and send him on a revenge quest as he contemplates premeditated murder... with a couple of twists. One: he's just a schlub who's extremely ill-suited to violence. And two: The revenge is successfully consummated within the first twenty minutes, thanks in no small part to dumb luck.

 So we haven't even finished the first act and the deed is done. The rest of the film then becomes a light dramedy as Dwight, his trauma cleanly resolved, attempts to shake off more than a decade of being a hermit to reintegrate as a productive member of society.

 Or maybe not. Maybe it's one of those consequences of revenge/cycles of violence-type stories as the rest of the Cleland clan goes after Dwight and his innocent sister (Amy Hargreaves) gets dragged into the whole sorry mess. You'll need to watch it to find out.

 Grim, understated, and shot clean through with a nasty vein of gallows humour, Blue Ruin is a masterclass in sustained tone and thoughtful scripting. That shouldn't be a surprise if you've watched anything by writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, but this is only his second movie; it's impressive to see just how fully-formed he burst out into the scene.

 Saulnier worked as a cinematographer on other indie films while figuring out this project, and he shoots this with an incredible eye for atmosphere - it is a gorgeous-looking film. A lot of attention is also spent on its violence, which provides messy, graphic and suitably horrifying capstones to the script's carefully built up tension.
 The acting is phenomenal; Blair makes for a very compelling, very soulful weirdo. His ability to emote his pain (both spiritual and very very physical) gets a serious workout here. Everyone around him does a great job, especially Amy Hargreaves, but it's essentially a one-man show.

 It's one of those films where everything is... just so. Saulnier and his crew put it together with some Kickstarter money, personal savings and a lot of hustling after their first microbudget movie, Murder Party (which is definitely worth a watch) failed to get them any further opportunities. They figured they'd give it one more try, which luckily worked out for everyone.

*: Beach Bum, incidentally, was at one point the movie's working title.

Fried Barry

 Barry (Gary Green) is a waste of skin - a strung out old junkie who only lives for his next heroin fix and mistreats everyone around him, including a wife (Chanelle de Jager) and a young son. So when said skin is taken over by mysterious aliens who want to hijack a local to experience life in Cape Town, it's no big loss. It's sort of like Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, but in this one the alien gets injected into Barry's body through his uretra. Complete with an explicit shot of (a prosthetic) lil' Barry.

 Alien Barry walks around Cape town for the next few days encountering the seedy side of town's Troma-like misfits and miscreants. He quickly discovers drugs and dance clubs - a combination that gets him laid almost immediately. It's good that he has some moves, because... well, because he looks like this:

Minus the blood, of course. Though I wouldn't be surprised if that was also a turn-on for the ladies in this film.

 It's a shaggy dog story, one where the metaphorical dog spends most of its time metaphorically licking its anus for our benefit. It's not nearly as skeevy or exploitative as it could have been if, say, Lloyd Kaufman and friends had told the story, but it's nevertheless sleazy and willingly confrontational; Most of the humour consists in Barry being confronted with some bizarre situation (usually involving sex or drugs) and then... barely reacting. It's pretty funny, if you click with the film's rhythms and sensibilities. Later things escalate to a couple more involved, sillier and stranger encounters, but the film never really goes completely nuts; it's more subdued than you'd think. And it's got a not insignificant thread of humanity running through it, which keeps it from collapsing into a nihilistic mess.

 Writer/director Ryan Kruger expanded his own short (called... Alien Dick) to feature length, and while it has all the problems that tends to bring with hit he's successful in keeping things varied enough that the film remains mostly enjoyable to the end - it could have done with some tightening, but the film's rambling nature is an integral part of its... well, let's call it charm.

 Most of the acting is fine if you consider most are probably non actors, and there's a heavily improvisational vibe to the whole endeavour. Gary Green is a good foil for everyone around him going full ham - At least going by IMDB, the guy seems to be mostly a stuntman, so good job Ryan Kruger for getting him an actual role. The other person who stands out is Chanelle de Jager, who acts as if she was in a Cassavetes family melodrama - which of course makes the jokes funnier, and imbues her eventual arc with an odd sweetness. A few other characters make an impression - a motormouth friend (Sean Cameron Michael) and a surprisingly convincing psycho (Jonathan Pienaar) in particular.

 It sounds great, with the band Haezer providing a pulsing techno soundtrack that goes well with the action (the mix is a bit off at times, though) and it looks pretty good for a near 0-budget production, too; Kruger and cinematographer Gareth Place scoring some fairly cool-looking shots. There's next to no special effects, barely any bloodshed, and the couple of action scenes are serviceable but pay more attention to, say, a guy shitting on the floor than to the shootout around him.

 And that is, I think, the film in a nutshell in a nutshell. Someone running around some hallways taking potshots with an automatic rifle, but the most important thing in the frame is some random dude taking a dump on the linoleum. The same director and some of the cast got to remake 80's oddity Street Trash last year, and they all seem like a perfect fit for the material; Can't wait to check it out.

Joe

 Joe is a rambling, nasty but beautiful southern gothic with a never-better Nicholas Cage in the titular role - a grizzled, no-bullshit ex-con who manages a team of tree poisoners somewhere out in rural Texas. He's a bit of an ogre, but fair to the people who earn his trust - a circle that, shortly into the movie, extends to teenager Gary (Ty Sheridan), a kid who joins the crew and makes a good impression.

 Gary's been dealt a bad hand; His father Wade (Gary Poulter) is an alcoholic whose main income is brutally stealing Gary's earnings, and whose shenanigans got his family run out from their old town. The kid deals with it as best he can, but is trapped in a horrible home situation with his sister and his mom. Working on Joe's crew makes things a little better - not the least because he develops a sincere friendship with Joe.

 For his part, Joe tries to distance himself from Gary's home life, correctly sensing that if he steps in things will take a very nasty turn. It's not just that he's on a very thin line with the police, who hate him for a run-in which landed him a few years in jail; the guy has some very real anger issues. But a feud with a local thug (Ronnie Gene Blevins) escalates things until he can no longer stand by the sidelines.

 For all its bleakness - and it gets incredibly bleak - director David Gordon Green leavens it with plenty of his signature lyricism and oddball humour. His camera rests for long stretches on his cast of non-professional actors, leading to long, authentic-sounding conversations and character moments. The plot is almost in the background for a lot of the movie, surfacing every now and then to strengthen the film's themes and tighten the screws; These moments - which include a ruthlessly violent, evil incident that startingly recontextualizes the menace of one of the film's villains - are expertly paced by scriptwriter Gary Hawkins amidst the film's almost two-hour runtime.

 It's a beautiful-looking neo-noir, too, with cinematographer Tim Orr (who worked with Green on all of his movies up to this one) managing some gorgeous lighting on both daytime and nighttime scenes. The acting is strong from both professionals and non-actors, with Cage in particular giving what's probably his career best turn. Sheridan is very good as well, but the biggest impression besides Cage is made by Poulter, who looks like a frail-looking old man but manages to tread the line between pathetic and pure fucking evil in a way that almost made me queasy several times. An all-time villain played by a local homeless man, who sadly died while the movie was in post.

 Other than the shitty Amazon AI subtitles (which were sorely needed to make some headway into the southern drawl) I can't really thing of anything that doesn't work here. There's some animal cruelty, for those of you for whom that's a deal breaker, and some truly vile mundane evil, but it's all woven into the film's strengths. Maybe one development right near the end didn't make a whole lot of sense to me? Or a fairly contrived coincidence to set up the escalation of the plot? Or the fact that it seems... unlikely that Joe would have survived his frequent run-ins with the law, let alone managed to stay out of prison.
 No matter. For my money, this is one of David Gordon Green's very best films, possibly the best alongside George Washington. I don't say this lightly, as I consider most of his early stuff unimpeachable. Hugely recommended.

The Void

 A father (Daniel Fathers) and a son (Mik Byskov) ruthlessly shoot and burn a woman on the doorstep of her cabin. Another of the cabin's occupants (Evan Stern) escapes, wounded; "Won't get Far," says the father, before driving off in pursuit. Meanwhile a white-robed figure observes from the treeline, a black triangle -the same one we saw on the front door of the cabin- stenciled on the front of his closed veil.

 The survivor makes it to a nearby road before collapsing, where he's picked up by sheriff Carter (Aaron Poole) and taken to a local hospital. This being a horror (and low-budget) movie, the hospital is being renovated after a fire and currently only hosts a tiny skeleton crew and a couple of patients. Oh, and the head nurse is Carter's estranged wife (Kathleen Munroe), to add some (very) mild drama to the proceeds.

 Things go to shit very quickly: not ten minutes go by when one of the nurses goes into a trance and stabs a patient to death with a pair of medical scissors, and then attacks Carter, who shoots her dead. A state trooper appears to take custody of the wounded man Carter brought in (his disappointment in Carter's shoddy resolution of the nurse attack is pretty funny)... but then the both of them run into the resurrected remains of the nurse, who's turned into a shambling mountain of hungry flesh - an extremely cool monster, done entirely in practical effects.

 I think we can all agree all this qualifies as a pretty busy night, but things are just getting started. Carter and co. haven't even dealt with the gooey monstrosity formerly known as nurse Beverly when the father and the son from the opening rush into the hospital waving a rifle around, looking for the one who got away. At the same time a horde of stab-happy hooded cultists start forming a cordon around the hospital, knifing anyone who tries to leave the facilities.

 From there the film turns into a series of expeditions into increasingly dark and derelict corridors, as people find different excuses to go into the hospital's bowels and are chased by some freaky monsters. An explanation of sorts for the night's madness is put forward, but while there are some cool concepts at play, the plot depends on all of the events being tied together with a lazy patchwork of coincidences and contrivances.

 I've now watched 2016's The Void three times, and I've still got the nagging feeling that another watch is going to do the trick, that next time I'm going to fully click with it for sure. I like it well enough, but I should probably accept It'll never live up to the movie I want it to be. There is a *lot* to like here, but I can't deny that it feels like it's missing something vital.

 
 It's a movie that's clearly attempting to recapture the magic of John Carpenter's incredible run of 80s horror movies - you don't even need to squint to see the overt attempts to invoke the ghost of The Thing and Assault on Precinct 13, with a healthy showing of The Fog, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness. Clive Barker's Hellraiser is heavily summoned for the third act, as well.

 It makes sense that this comes from the writing/directing team of Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie, both of whom are alumni of the Astron-6 film collective - at the time this movie came out they were best known for grindhouse pastiches Father's Day, Manborg and The Editor (Konstanski would go on to do the wonderful Psycho Goreman and Frankie Freako).

 It's not like any of those films just stole stuff and hoped for the best, but whereas those movies took every chance to wink at their audience, The Void is dead serious - and the script does not manage to hold it together. The characters are a little weak, the second act drags a little, and the ending feels a little rushed. It's clear that a lot of thought and effort went into trying to make this more than the sum of its borrowed parts, but as it turns out, it wasn't enough.

 None of that takes away from all the coolness in the film. It oozes ambiance and menace, manages some striking visuals, and of course it sports some truly wonderful monsters. The Creature effects were crowdsourced, and no one could ever accuse Kostanski and his crew of taking the money and making a runner; every cent is on-screen, and it looks a whole lot better than many studio movies.
 There's a cool sense of mystery I really respect to the story, too. This keeps the characters opaque, which prevents investment in any of their interpersonal drama, but it also makes this one of the very rare movies that actually feels like it understand what makes cosmic horror work. I may not like many of the plot specifics, but they still manage to paint an intriguing mystery that feels successfully otherworldly, all the way to a pretty cool final shot.

 Obviously, I need to watch it at least one more time. Ask me again how I like it in four years or so,

  

Black Mountain Side

 Oh, goddammit. This could have been something special.

 Black Mountain Side is an indie Canadian horror film about a group of archeologists stuck between a dig site way out in the frozen north and a small compound consisting of several bungalows tied together with a generator-powered electrical grid. They've just uncovered an ancient temple under the permafrost, one where the native populations didn't have any settlements. As the film begins the expedition lead, Jensen (Shane Twerdun), welcomes an expert (Michael Dixon) to validate their findings.

 It's in this introduction that the movie is at its absolute best; It's full of procedural detail of the running of a remote camp like this, gorgeous footage of the surrounding frigid valley, and lots of authentic-sounding archeological shop talk.

Poor Fleetwood Addison-Szostakiwskyj :(

 But this is a horror movie, and soon strange enough things start happening. The escalation is well handled: The local help disappears, an animal is found sacrificed at the site, people start behaving erratically - that sort of thing. And then it's discovered that the unearthing of the temple has freed up some sort of pathogen that's infected the crew, one that affects them psychologically as well as biologically. That revelation in turn pits everyone against each other as paranoia sets in. Sound familiar? Well, just in case one obvious influence isn't enough, there's some bonus talk about the foreign cells becoming... cephalopod-like.

 What follows is a pretty cool exercise in psychological horror with some fantastical elements that sadly fails to gel because it feels like the script never really seems to settle on what it wants to be about. There's that poorly-defined mysterious illness (nothing comes out of all that cephalopod talk), whispering in the dark, self-mutilation and a mysterious animalistic figure; But to be brutally honest, the film's attempts at cosmic horror are laughable - a gravelly voice speaking to each character in turn, trying to get them to kill each other? That's fine. But as soon as it tries to claim to be all-powerful or to be more than a delusion... well, it's clearly bullshitting. We just saw you communicate through some wall-mounted furniture, buddy. You're not fooling anyone.

 The thing is that even as the script (by director Nick Szostakiwskyj) flails and fails to find a coherent approach, the characters remain believable and the deaths are as chilling as anything I've seen lately (most of the violence is quick and almost underplayed, and all the more effective for it). At its simplest, it's an extremely effective (if derivative) movie about an isolated group of people going nuts, which leaves me in the odd situation of kind of wishing they'd ditched the more outré Carpenter and Lovecraft influences. Not something I'd expect to be saying very often.

 It's such a disappointment. The whole thing is beautifully shot, the acting is well pitched between heightened and mundane, there makeup effects are pretty cool, and the choice to not have any music whatsoever pays off some big dividends. It ends with a killer punchline, too, its humour black as the endless gulf between the stars. But there's a hollowness at the film's center that an excellent setup and a modest amount of very well-executed creepiness and carnage can't really make up for.

 I really wanted to like this so much more than I was able to.

Kill

  Amrit (Lakshya) and Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) are two star-crossed lovers travelling on a long-distance train to New Delhi. Tulika's father (Harsh Chhaya), a powerful businessman, has set an arranged marriage for her, and doesn't even know of Amrit's existence. In fact, Tulika is in the train returning from her engagement to some rando, and Amrit is there to propose to her himself.

 Things get complicated when a horde of bandits (dacoits, Wikipedia informs me) spring a plan to rob everyone on the train. It's supposed to be a simple smash-and-grab, but when they discover that Tulika's father is a passenger, they switch over to kidnapping mode. Amrit and an old friend (Abhishek Chauhan) object strongly.

 Now's probably the time to mention that both Amrit and his buddy are highly trained army commandoes.  When the bandits attack Tulika's family, Amrit kills off one of the attackers and absconds to a different carriage with a few of the passengers. And so begins a running battle between Viresh (sometimes accompanied by others, but mostly alone) against forty-odd thieves in the cramped confines of the train carriages. At first it looks like it's going to be a standard action movie - like, say, the similarly train-bound sequel to Under Siege - but forty minutes in something happens, the title card slams on the screen with an eerie sense of purpose, and the film suddenly gets a lot more interesting.

 Kill is a strange movie. It's easy to roll your eyes at the melodramatic set-up, but hard not to be impressed by the balls of its second-act derailment into a different subgenre of action film. One that's a hell of a lot bleaker.

 As Amrit carves a bloody swathe across the mass of criminals occupying the train in the latter part of the movie, it quickly becomes clear that they're basically a clan, a few extended families united in banditry. And director Nikhil Bagesh Bhat, who co-wrote the script with Ayesha Syed, never passes up the chance to show the emotional distress of these people as they find their family members butchered by our protagonist. The film's most harrowing scene, in fact, is from their point of view as they cross a carriage where Amrit strung up half a dozen of his victims as a form of psychological warfare - including a guy whose head he caved in with a fire extinguisher; The association with Irreversible is probably unintended but hard to unsee.

 It seems to be attempting to say something, but the message seemed to me to be hopelessly muddled. This is one of those films where our hero often behaves more like a horror movie villain, and where the violence successfully crosses over the line into disturbing more than a few times. To what end? Beats me. The villains, especially Amrit's nemesis Fani (Raghav Juyal), all stay villains until the very end, and it's not like there's a decent character arc for Amrit or any of the other passengers. It still seems to come down as in favour of violence against evildoers, even if said violence is sometimes icky, and the plot doesn't really hold many surprises once it's revealed its hand.

 The moves are mostly MMA-inspired and grittily realistic even as the amount of punishment a body can endure without shutting down is gleefully exaggerated. Some of the blood splatter is CGI, but most of the blood seems to be done with practical makeup effects; It's a good balance, and looks pretty great. The one exception is yet another misguided attempt to do CGI flames, but the kill is still pretty spectacular so I'll let it slide.

 As for the violence. it's well blocked and choreographed, exciting and yes, extremely bloody - while the editing is a bit choppier than I'd prefer*, what's happening is always clear and the film makes good use of the cramped carriage interiors to force one- or two-on-one fights. There's even a fight on a restroom where porcelain is cracked by a cranium; this is a movie that clearly understand the genre it's working within.

 There's an unavoidable monotony to the film's series of encounters within what's essentially a very narrow passageway. While the creative kills, varied fights, and unrelenting intensity do ease it a little bit, it gets a little wearying after a while, especially when the script doesn't find a way to add another dimension to the plot or its characters, or a way to expand on its themes.

 I don't tend to get on with Bollywood films, but asides from a really intrusive (instrumental) score, nothing really bothered me here. It's a lean, focused effort - the film's director has been pretty open about designing it with western audiences in mind. Sure, some of the dialog is pretty clunky, but it's not like action in general has a great track record in that department.

 It might not manage to articulate its message, but it's still a lot of fun, and the added discomfort does add a certain edge to it. Lakshya and Juyal are both charismatic and make for compelling antagonists. And yeah, the action, even if it's not hugely varied, is still pretty great.

*: None of the principals being martial artists might be a factor in the decision to go with that style.