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.

Flow (Straume)

 A capybara, a cat, a dog, a bird and a lemur get into a boat...

 It sounds like the start of a kid's joke, or maybe a setup for one of those 'cross the river' puzzles where the fox eats the chicken or the chicken the grain.

 No animals eat each other* in Flow, a strange, lush animated piece from Lithuania. The opposite holds true: As far as meaning can be parsed from this enigmatic movie, it's all about bonds, empathy and cooperation.

 Cat lives alone amongst the remains of a long-gone human - a forest bungalow, wooden carvings of cats of all sizes. It's a good life, it seems, so it's upsetting when the waters come, ever-rising, and consume everything the cat has ever known. The sea will claim everything, a wise man once said (and then wrote a video game about it).

 Before drowning, Cat makes it to a lonely boat drifting in the water crewed by a lone, easy-going capybara. As the little sailboat is taken by wind and current through a bunch of different flooded environments they are joined by a standoffish crane, a friendly golden retriever, and a highly-strung lemur. The film follows the boat and its motley crew as they have some very gentle adventures, bounce against each other in different ways; We witness through their eyes beautiful environments  - a half-drowned city, submerged woods, pillars that seemingly stretch all the way to the stars - and events ranging from the mundane to the majestic and strange.

 Not a single line of dialog is spoken. The animals are only slightly anthropomorphized, but beyond the fact that they all seem to know how to operate a rudder and some pretty advanced non-verbal communication, the film does a good job of letting them be natural. The cat in particular is a joy to watch - the animation for his face in particular is extremely well-observed. Its body language is a little less impressive; Good most of the time, but some of it fell a little stiff and uncanny-valley-esque.

 The art style is sumptuous; All the critters are simple and cel-shaded, but very expressive, while the places they float by are beautifully rendered; Director Gints Zilbalodis and his crew frame everything via a restless, ever moving virtual camera. It did feel a little video-gamey a few times, especially because there's one specific game (called Submerged) which has very similar scenes of strange whales cavorting in the ruins of a submerged city; I'd be very surprised if they weren't an influence here.

 The story is simple - schematic, even; There are a couple of strange, unexplained surprises, but they feel more like random weirdness than a coherent mystery to decode. The plot is not really important here; It really is all about the flow.

**: Well, except fish; Flow does not extend its sympathy to the poor fish, only its mammal and avian life.

Fatal Deviation

 After watching both the Aussies and the Germans do their country proud with their martial arts skills, I started looking out for other martial arts films from unexpected countries. This is how I came to hear of Fatal Deviation, Ireland's first full-length martial arts picture. It was also dubbed one of the worst movies ever made by a bunch of humourless twits who obviously don't watch enough movies.

 It starts martial artist James Bennett as... Jimmy Bennett, a martial artist who returns home to his hometown, refurbishes his father's house, meets Nicola (Nicola O'Sullivan), a nice girl who works at the local supermarket, gets in a feud with the mob boss Mike (Michael Regan - are you noticing a pattern here?) that killed his father (whose son is dating Nicola, of course), and enters a secret, violent kumite-like tournament run by Christian monks which the mobsters are desperate to win as it will somehow determine the fate of the whole town. You know, just a day in the life in rural Ireland.

#Gandalfismysifu

 It's barely coherent, no one involved had any idea how to make an action movie, and it was made for next to no money. It's objectively bad. Also... kind of a lot of fun.

 Like many of these films, the whole thing is essentially the star's audition tape to get better parts in action movies; Bennett gathered a group of his mates and just shot scenes wherever people would let him (as you can imagine, this doesn't do wonders for the film's continuity). The main financier for the film (Regan) put money down with the condition he was given a juicy part. It should be a disaster. It... is a disaster, to be honest. The acting is terrible*, the filmmaking is all ugly 90's home video, with frequent A/V glitches and badly exposed scenes. The music... oh god, the music is particularly atrocious mix of horrid 'inspirational' pop and Casiotone incidental music.

 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?

 The action is not great - Bennett and a few of the other combatants have some moves, but the choreographies are simple and making the fights look good is beyond the abilities of anyone involved; One of the weakest parts of the movie, the tournament, is actually the most action-packed. There are a couple of shootouts as well (including one where Bennett stands on his motorbike that reminded me of Top Secret!) that might as well have been filmed as a fingergun battles. Having said all that: there's a fairly cool car crash, and the modest stunts on display are still pretty impressive for a bunch of friends and acquaintances working out how to put a movie together as they go along. They do the Jackie-Chan-style bloopers reel at the end, and it gives you a pretty good idea how much harder doing this is than it looks - especially when there's no one around who knows how to handle stunts; A very simple four-foot fall seems to have been pretty painful for the actor involved.

 It'd be beyond wrong-headed not to grade this in a curve- and even if you don't, worst film ever my arse. At the very least Bennett and co. clearly understand and love the type of film they want to make, and they bring their own spin to it. You know that trope of the action guy stopping a violent robbery at a drugstore? Here the hero kicks the asses of two unconvincing random stoned chuckleheads making a nuisance of themselves at a Londis.

 OK, it's not a good spin, exactly, but it's unique and hugely entertaining.

 This is the rarely achieved so-bad-it's-good, as opposed to plain mediocre or cynical, and it's full of memorable, hilarious moments. If the batshit insane epilogue doesn't fill you with joy, I just don't know what to tell you.

 *: On a completely unrelated note, I should also mention that this is the film debut Mikey Graham (as Mike Graham, of course) of "Rock Band" Boyzone. I have no idea why I was reminded of this fact just now.

The Deaths of Ian Stone

 It's been a while since I've seen a movie that's so clearly a child of the '00s as British horror-adjacent opus The Deaths of Ian Stone. The desaturated pallete, aggressive editing and camerawork, the chintzy electronic music, the visual references... The first couple of minutes, which include an artfully distressed title card, reminded me so much of the infamous "You Wouldn't Steal A Car" piracy advert it got a disbelieving belly laugh out of me.

 Ian Stone (Mike Vogel) is a twenty-something hockey player who's grumpy because he gets puckus interruptus out of scoring a winning goal(?) on a technicality from an evil referee. Seriously, the referee is canonically evil. It's that sort of movie.
 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.

 This is not the end for Ian, as he wakes from a nap on an office desk. He now works at an office where his girlfriend is just a co-worker, and lives in a huge, multi-story central London loft with another woman, Medea (Jaime Murray). But his previous life still haunts him, and weird shit keeps happening. It comes to a head when a random creep (Michael Feast) accosts him, claiming to know what's going on... and is dragged into the shadows before he can actually explain anything by the same dark-shrouded beings that killed Hokey Ian. Soon Ian is dead again and a new, different life starts, a few more wrinkles are added to the plot, then he dies again, and so on.

 This is not a good film by most reasonable metrics, but the way writer Brendan Hood and director Dario Piana carefully unspool their fantasy is kind of endearing: it's like an over-enthusiastic teen explaining everything about their meticulously planned-out World of Darkness RPG campaign.
 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.

 It's the image comics influence that looms the most, especially as the film barrels on towards a series of alternatingly cheesy and cornball (but always juvenile) revelations that posit events as a sort of "dark" superhero origin story. Ambitious, for sure, but the budget struggles to contain the... let's call them heady concepts the script has dreamed up. There's one really good scene where Ian's worlds smash into each other, but when the script finally calls for some action it's a series of perfunctory, deeply underwhelming stabbings.

 Stan Winston has a prominent producer's credit and the film proudly touts its animatronics and makeup effects were built in his studios, but I'm sad to say the monsters don't look all that great, and are further undone by bone-headed decisions like making them periodically shake their head wildly in fast forward. That's an effect that worked precisely once, in Jacob's Ladder, and never again. The gore fares a little bit better - there are a lot of goopy, very bloody injuries, but they're all deeply unimaginative - stabs and slashes and the like.

 It's never scary, but that isn't really a problem as the film is going more after a Matrix-style mindfuck tone than actual horror. What does cause problems is a series of silly choices like letting a couple of villains keep their hockey jerseys throughout much of the movie, making it look like the protagonist is running away from high-school bullies.

 Acting is yet another weak point. It's... fine, for the most part. But Vogel, with his baby-faced good looks lacks the charisma to anchor the film, and Murray is soon outmatched when pitted against a script that saddles her with increasingly pretentious monologues. The great Michael Feast does what he can but even he is defeated by the cheese he's asked to dispense and the film's solemn, self-serious tone.

 I admire the ambition on display, but it's ultimately misplaced on a deeply derivative, juvenile edifice of hackwork. Both mildly likeable and fairly cringe-worthy, it's only an hour and a half and the pacing is fairly relentless... so at least it goes down quick.

Gateway

 Mike (Tim Creed) is part of a petty gang of criminals - pot dealers who squat in abandoned houses to grow their produce. He's haunted by the memory of a mysterious woman (Fiona Hardy) as the film accompanies him during a day out running deals, talking to an enforcer and various people higher up in the underworld pecking order, and getting a lead on a house they may be able to use to grow their next batch of weed.

 And the house seems well suited for their ends. Except that while they're scoping it out, they discover a locked room - and when that door is opened, bad things happen.

 Gateway is full of lurid details; Even while it's mostly about low-level criminals going around their day-to-day business, setting up their next job, it manages to cram in a torture victim and a few colourful characters. Later there are  various deaths, a very bizarre (and un-sexy) sex scene, plus a number of mysteries to unravel.

 But all of it is handled in the most unsensational way possible. The film is, I think, first and foremost an exercise in rigidly controlled tone. Stark characters, their stoic expressions frequently breaking into open grief, are framed against starker skies. There's no music, just silence - or else a carefully deployed atonal drone or sedate electronic cacophony; the sound design is excellent. The dialog, whether it's dealing with the realities of drug dealing or venting interpersonal grudges, is sparse, clipped, elliptical, as are the editing schemes for many of the scenes. The camera work is elegant, alternating between static shots and purposeful, precise movement where needed. The supernatural mystery at the heart of the movie makes little sense and has no interest in explaining itself, an enigma wrapped in an unassuming surrealist shroud.

 This is a willfully impenetrable film, a slow-burn that remains obstinately sedate and oblique even when things pick up and the bodies start piling up at an admirable pace in the back half. Writer/director Niall Owens and cinematographer Ger Murphy carefully build atmosphere until it's almost asphyxiating; It's a low-budget marvel that's low on horror and high on dread.
 I rather like it, but it's a bastard hard film to recommend.

She Came From The Woods

 One of the perks of doing a genre film is that there are a whole lot of conditions and signifiers that can effectively shield a movie from a lot of the criticism you can hurl its way. Is it a horror comedy? Then it doesn't need to be scary. Is it a slasher movie, especially one that harkens to the 80s? Then you can have insufferable characters, as much sleaze as you want, and the plot doesn't really matter as long as the stalking and kills are good. Is it low budget? Well, then I guess I'll overlook all the cut corners.

 None of these things are going to endear the movie to anyone outside its intended target audience, but as long as you have a good take on the few things that matter, some personality or, well, something to latch onto, people are going to forgive a lot.

 By choice and circumstance, Erik Bloomquist invokes all the examples I used above for his 80's throwback She Came From The Woods. What's more, he and sibling/script co-writer set the film in a summer camp and center it around the counselors on the very last day of camp, once the kids are all gone. That's... a very specific set of associations.

 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.

 Soon Agatha rises up and turns a few people at camp into murderers, most memorably turning the kids into a mob of marauding moppets. And that is pretty much the only flash of inspiration to be found in this movie. Other than that it's a complete bust, and that pointedly includes the few things it had to do right to get by: the humour, the kills, the suspense.

 It's almost as if it's not even trying. The problem with cutting genre stuff so much slack is that it opens the door for this sort of... I don't want to say low-effort, because getting even a tiny movie like this made takes a lot of people and a huge amount of work - but it allows certain movies to squeak by with nothing to provide except a certain sense of familiarity.

 I don't anyone involved here said "hey, the Friday the 13ths were shit*, let's just crank some nostalgia bait out". But aside from a technical level of competence that immediately puts it above... oh, I don't know, Camp Hell or something, it's all so sloppily put together, so bereft of anything of interest that it might just as well be.

 So let's start with the good: The production design and basic cinematography are fine. A couple of actors are ok. There's a nice burning man stunt, a couple decent makeup effects, and the fact that the menace is more supernatural than a dude with an axe shows some early potential. The movie never made me laugh,  but a handful of tongue-in-cheek moments I found (very low-key) amusing: a douchebag's cavalier attitude towards burning to death and subsequent final act of sleaziness, a pizza delivery dude interrupting the scheduled killings and chases, that sort of thing.

 For the bad, I'd just point you at everything else. The film's tone is all skewed; There are a couple of bad jokes at the beginning, mostly involving young kids being inappropriate, and a few later on - but the movie takes itself inexplicably seriously for long stretches, making the botched attempts at levity fail even harder. So the comedy's dead on arrival, and the scares are laughable.

 Even worse, the kills are fucking staid, other than the psycho kid mob. There's some variety to all the the murdering... as long as it's boring and mundane: axe chops, stabbings, rock to the head, shotgun blast to the head - all done with next to no elan. There's a lot of blood but very little gore; One well-made head crushing aside you can ignore the rest. Even the requisite exploding head is done with very crummy-looking CGI.

 The acting is terrible, with a couple of exceptions who are undone by their terrible characters. And the script... oh man, where to even begin. It pisses away the potential of the villain with a wall-to-wall series of contrivances, pointless escapades, and lazy, lazy errors and handwaving. A few examples: The resident douchebag outright murders another counselor in front of a colleague, and it's never brought up again; A group of murderous campers are imprisoned at one point, with one exception- but when the time comes for that escapee to kill someone, the murderer ends up being one of the other kids, one whom we know is locked away. A key bit of data regarding Agatha is revealed... by a character just deciding to go over boxes of old files, with no discernible motive to do so. 

 The mythology is fucking inane - the menace is inconsistent and, in the end, pretty, uh, unmenacing. A (conceptually nice) bit of fireside exposition is not just boring, it includes an admission of wrongdoing that is both unnecessary and unintentionally hilarious; The biggest laugh of the movie comes at its own expense. 

 

 Seriously, just don't bother with this one unless you feel a compulsion to watch every horror summer camp movie ever made (and if so, my sympathies). We need to stop giving shit like this a pass (it's currently standing at an inexplicable 73% over at Rotten Tomatoes) just because it looks like horror comfort food; Maybe then people will wait until they have something to offer before offering it.
 One can hope.

*: I shouldn't have to say this, but: the Friday the 13ths are categorically not shit and are, for the most part, a lot better than people give them credit for.

Anora

 Anora's a really fun sort-of-crime sort-of-comedy from Sean Baker, who's really been firing on all cylinders in the last few years. Ani (Mickey Madison), the title character, does some tremendous work as a young stripper who sometimes supplements her income with escort work for clients she likes.

 Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) is one such client: a 21-year old heir to a Russian fortune who's evidently a little dipshit, but also charming in his own moronic way, and, more importantly, profligate with his money and completely taken with Anora.

 A few nights together turn into a two-week 'girlfriend experience' where Ivan and Ani and some Russian friends burn through reams of money in a decadent, drug-fueled hedonistic spree that ends, predictably, in Las Vegas. While there Ivan laments that his parents want him to go back to Russia to work, and that he could stay if he got married to a local... which leads to the both of them getting married at a Vegas chapel.

 Colour no one surprised when it doesn't last long; Ivan's family, horrified by the rumours they're hearing, get the idiot's local minder Toros (Karren Karagulian) and a couple of thugs (Yura Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan) to grab the couple and force them to annul their marriage.

 Ivan flees into the night as soon as they arrive, leaving Ani to deal with the consequences. The film then turns into a sort of "one crazy night" narrative as the three thugs and an effectively kidnapped Ani desperately search for Ivan in a bid to get the marriage cancelled before his parents arrive stateside.

 It's a strange film, one that works despite a bit of a tonal mishmash thanks to a very strong central performances, good cinematography (by Drew Daniels) and Baker's usual eye for mundane detail and off-beat characters and situations. I wasn't all that taken with the first third, to say the least - what with its focus on the dumb, shallow, wealthy and ridiculously attractive. It's almost like going through the Instagram of someone I'd rather not even know the existence of, and features some hilariously repellent music and the sort of decadence that made me kind of wish there'd be a horror movie-style comeuppance later on. But the film's second-act pivot is effective in that the fulcrum - a genuinely upsetting (yet somehow still funny) home invasion - is deftly handled, and in that the Elmore-Leonard-style petty-criminal bungling in the ensuing search for Ivan is often hilarious.

  Anora's faith in Ivan is pretty hard to swallow, The guy is so evidently immature, such an obvious douchebag, that his flakiness is never in doubt, and it makes Anora look like an idiot for placing her trust in him. I can easily see how that, plus the first part of the movie, plus Anora being a bit of a brat who doesn't get a lot of characterization beyond her brashness and profession, could break the movie for some.

 But in defense of Baker's script: despite the romantic sweep of the cinematography during their marriage, it never really turns into a love story. Anora obviously feels at least some affection for the kid, but there's a lot of room for calculation, too. Also, she's only 23, so I guess she's young enough to be allowed to be an idiot (different characters' ages are pointedly brought up at different times).

 There's another component, which is Baker's usual class consciousness coming to the fore. An integral part of Anora's shock and indignation at the whole situation is... well, the universal shock and indignation we're all feeling these days at just how much rich people can get away with. Even the most sympathetic of the thugs, the one who consistently shows a conscience, thinks nothing of wrecking an innocent (working-class) man's shop at the behest of his masters.
 You'd think a sex worker of all people would be used to the world being unfair - a lesson most people learn in their teens, if not earlier. It's not subtle or sophisticated, but that doesn't make the outrage any less valid.

 Has it been overhyped? Well, yeah, maybe. All the attention it's been getting might make the movie ripe for a backlash, but it's still a good one. Not Baker's best, not by a long shot, but definitely his most fun. And in any case, I'm not one to turn my nose up at a sex-positive, digressive, Elmore Leonard-esque confection that's not afraid to mix in a tiny bit of grit with its screwball comedy.