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 Bennet as... Jimmy Bennet, 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 (Michael Regan) 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 an audition tape to get better parts in action movies; Bennet gathered a group of his mates and just shot wherever people would let him. 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 kind of is, to be honest. The acting is atrocious*, 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.
 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 extremely entertaining. Where other movies would have endless scenes of people walking around (and to be clear, there is a little bit of that here), most of the filler in Fatal Deviation is sort of inspired. Why settle for a boring-ass mundane shit where you can have a man taking a bath in an outdoor bathtub? or Irish catholic Gandalf (Johnny Murray) waving sticks at the camera? Or a musical montage where our hero tenderly remembers having sex with his girl, intercut with random, mundane interactions with the mobsters?

 The action is not great - Bennet 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 Bennet stands on his motorbike to shoot 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 basically goofing around. 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; 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- worst film ever my arse. 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 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 appear 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 collide, 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 some 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 becomes an increasingly silly character as the script 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 stretch 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.

Errementari

 I tend to be down on Netflix original movies, but that's a stance heavily coloured by their would-be blockbuster attempts - the shit they put out with Snyder or the Russo brothers, for example. But in their eternal hunger for ever more content, they've also done the world a favour giving money to, say, German or Spanish martial artists to fund their action epics, not to mention giving funding to people like Jeremy Saulnier and Pablo Larrain, or snatching interesting projects like Nimona from oblivion.

 This is a really roundabout way to say I really appreciate it when they use the some chump change (from the money they got by breaking movie business with their unsustainable practices) to help get stuff like Errementari made.

 The title sounds like the beginning of a racist joke, but it just means Blacksmith in Basque; It refers to a scattering of ancient European folk tales (according to some ethnographers, one of the oldest known) about a blacksmith who makes a deal with hell and ends up getting the better of old scratch.

 The blacksmith in question is Patxi (Kandido Uranga); A man so evil, so cruel, the animated prelude informs us, that the devil himself would learn to fear him. He spends a good part of the first act off-screen, an ogre-like hermit cooped up in his old smithy.

 The film instead follows some of the regulars of the local inn as they try and help a visiting government official (Ramón Agirre) in locating some gold the smith was said to have stolen during the first Carlist war - and also Usue (Uma Bracaglia), a little bullied girl who may have some relationship to the old man.

 The inn crowd runs afoul of Patxi soon enough, setting the residents of the small town in a collision course with him. Usue, meanwhile, steals away into the smithy, and ends up freeing the demon the Smith had imprisoned in an iron cage. Oops!

 The script (by director Paul Urkijo Alijo and Asier Guerricaechebarría) is all over the place, especially in the early going, but the shambolic structure helps give the film a strangely offbeat, authentic feel, and when things go to hell (figuratively at first, then literally) it's hard to predict where the story is going. But the focus remains on the characters and their destination is, thank goodness, hugely satisfying - I have a lot of time for a movie that manages to juggle sweetness and badassery.

 It never even attempts being scary, but that's ok - this is horror only by default, and it's better to think of it as dark fantasy or even a fairy tale. It certainly looks like one. Colours are tightly controlled - it looks a little fake in one or two shots, but most of the time it's beautiful; The movie owns its artificiality. Paul Urkijo Alijo and cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreu also use non-standard framing to make things feel a little mythical; For example, I love a scene that tracks Usue as sneaks into a room, but she's in the background, out of focus - the camera stays on the smith's sleeping face throughout. It feels like a scene out of Jack and the Beanstalk. And as you'd expect out of a dark fairy tale, the film also takes some visual cues from Guillermo Del Toro.

 But things never get quite as dark as its closest touchstone, Pan's Labyrinth. There's quite a bit of humour threaded throughout: some of it home-baked (got to love those ubiquitous bear traps), some of it courtesy of a faithful display of the visual wit of medieval demonology (expect faces in inappropriate places). The themes are heavy, but not too much so, and while it's rooted in medieval Christianism there are more than a few welcome modern touches, such as the Sandman-like detail that human souls go to hell because they want to be punished.

The effects are excellent for the modest budget - a mixture of really great makeup with digital touch-ups for that signature Bosch/Bruegel look. The acting is mostly strong - there are a couple of iffy child actors, and it took me a while to warm up to Bracaglia's Usue, but I was fully on-board with her soon enough. What kept throwing me off, as a native Spanish speaker, is that the Basque language falls into a sort of uncanny valley where it really sounds like Spanish but I couldn't make out a single word. Pretty disconcerting, but obviously neither a major problem nor something I can blame on anyone but myself.

 Despite a slow start, this was a lovely treat - imaginative, unique, and affecting - an idiosyncratic take on a folk tale, tweaked for modern sensibilities but fairly faithful to the mostly medieval mindset that spawned it. Well... except for a certain sympathy for the devils, but that's a given in these degenerate, godless times.

Dampyr

 First impressions for Italian dark fantasy vampire extravaganza Dampyr couldn't be any less promising. No, I don't just mean the Sony Pictures logo at the beginning (though this movie does end up confirming that they have the worst quality control department when it comes to scripts).

 The whole prelude, which involves three old witches who are also hot young women helping another woman give birth while issuing a magical restraining order to the vampire father, is chock-full of ugly CGI and cheesy shots. It all feels like a deeply shit comic book movie... and sure enough, it turns out it's an adaptation of a long-running Italian comic and an attempt to jump start yet another cinematic universe.

 The baby grows up to be Harlan (Wade Briggs), a sullen-looking pretty boy who wanders Yugoslavia during the height of the Balkan war using his half-human, half-vampire birth to milk credulous villagers of their belongings by running fake exorcisms with the aid of his agent/hype man Yuri (Sebastian Croft, terrible).

 That lineage, which also gives him a reputation as a vampire killer, bites him in the ass when a group of soldiers decide he's the only one who can help when they take over an abandoned village and are attacked by the undead.

 Harlan soon discovers, to his astonishment, that his blood is acid to vampires. Also, that most vampires look like punks from a bad '80s videogame for some reason. So he joins up with one of the soldiers (Stuart Martin) and a cute vampire love interest (Frida Gustavsson) to take the fight to the "Master of the Night" Gorka (David Morrisey in Severus Snape drag).

 This is categorically not a good movie - the script (by Mauro Boselli, Giovanni Masi, Alberto Ostini and Mauro Uzzeo) is dumb as all hell, its mythology and plot deeply uninteresting. Acting's often atrocious, and the action is severely lacking. But the war-torn setting - which soon moves from the abandoned town to a shell-shocked city - is interesting, and director Riccardo Chemello and cinematographer Vittorio Omodei Zorini pepper the runtime with some dramatically lit, very atmospheric shots.

Hey, is that a reference to Low's Double Negative there in the foreground?

 The effects are mostly decent for a relatively low-budget movie like this - it's all very fake-looking, but I liked the various ways vampires crumble into dust; They fare a lot worse when trying to do more overt fantastical stuff, but there's not a too much of that. The makeup effects and (light) gore are pretty well made, too. Needle drops consist of era-appropriate An Emotional Fish (remember them?) and Lou Reed's Take a Walk on the Wild Side, both diegetic; Lorenzo Tomio's soundtrack is not memorable, but accompanies the action well.

 Befitting its vampire subjects, this is a movie that mostly cares about looking cool, and after adjusting expectations downwards after the introduction I was mostly fine with that. Just don't expect me to give the tiniest fraction of a fuck about any of the dumbass characters or the laughably portentous setup for a sequel.