Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain

 I've watched this movie four or five times over the years, and it still surprises me just how full of crazy it is. It jumps from a relatively normal battle to an amazing fight with vase vampires in ten minutes flat. A guy played by Sammo Hung holds people and things at bay with his eyebrows, a window ends up being a pool of water, two people flirt by the medium of throwing giant sculptures at each other, and gravity isn't just optional, as with most Wuxia: people here literally bounce around the scenery like a pinball. 

I love this whole scene so much.

 Welcome to the Xianxia genre, which differs from Wuxia mainly in that it's about immortal characters with godlike powers. So you get warriors that shoot off the light reflected from their swords, a priestess that can freeze people solid by wrapping them up in her scarf, and all sorts of fun stuff. Chinese mythological superheroes.
 Director (and all-round-legend) Tsui Hark, along with writers Shui Chung-yuet and Sze-to Cheuk-hon adapted a 1932 novel by taking all the action and very little connective tissue, and then spliced it with Star Wars (Hark even poached a couple of FX artists from that movie to work on this). The result is a frenetic film that often seems like it's being dictated by a kid with an overactive imagination.

Di (Yuen Biao) is an unwilling deserter who, after some misadventures, falls off a battlefield into a magic realm where he joins a motley group of superpowered warriors (Adam Cheng, Moon Lee, Damian Yau and Mang Hoi) in a quest to stop the Blood Demon from materializing or something like that. Simple premise, and a standard quest structure then; But the obstacles and complications in the way are so ridiculous, poorly telegraphed and explained, or arbitrary that the whole thing gets hopelessly tangled right out of the gate.
 To be honest, it doesn't really matter; There's so much cool stuff, so many fights and stunts and bizarre sights - realised with an incredible amount of care and craft, and brought to the screen with some truly incredible early eighties special effects work (right alongside incredibly cheesy FX where you can almost hear the cellophane paper crinkle).

 The plot might be a mess, and the humor... well, it's exactly the type of broad and kind of unfunny business you'd expect, I have a lot of time for the film's messaging, though - There's a lot of sly underlining the senselessness of war, and several instances of strict rules and codes of conduct causing a lot of damage. Corny, to be sure - especially when brought to the fore - but, like the rest of the movie, kind and earnest. 

 Like other movies in this and related genres, there's a pretty high cultural barrier to enjoying it- Chinese sensibilities take some getting used to. But even if you're inclined to like martial arts and wuxia movies, the fantasy elements of this one, along side some chintzy visuals and its breakneck pacing can be a tall order. It can be very rewarding, but you have to let it work its daft spell on you.

Satanic Hispanics

 A horror anthology tied together by very little more than an ethnicity, Satanic Hispanics brings together five Latin-American directors to tell some scary stories. The results vary wildly, but that, as we keep finding out again and again, comes with the territory.

 The first chapter - The Traveller, directed by Mike Mendez - introduces the framing device: the police raid a derelict house in El Paso to find dozens of dead bodies in what looks like a cartel killing. The lone survivor, known as The Traveler (Efren Ramirez) is taken into custody, where he's questioned by two detectives (Greg Grunberg and Sonya Eddy). As the movie progresses The Traveler admits that he's immortal, and being hunted down by death itself. And, in response to a question or something that jogs his memory, he tells the different stories that comprise the film.
 It really doesn't get much to do until the last chapter, and its dialog is severely overwritten - but Ramirez is pretty good, and it gets one really good visual gag in at the beginning.

 This fading year's horror MVP Demián Rugna helms the second segment, También lo Vi (I saw it too), and it's easily the best story in the film. No contest. It's about a Rubik's-cube-obsessed shut-in (Demián Salomón) who's unwittingly devised a way to open a door to the land of the dead, with foreseeably catastrophic results. Visually and conceptually it feels like it could fit in Rugna's Aterrados (itself a bit of an anthology film), but this one's got a lighter tone and more of an impish sense of fun. Plus one hell of an effective jump scare and some excellent effects and cinematography. Shame they couldn't think of a good ending for it.

 Eduardo Sánchez is up next, and he basically does a cute, goofy and kind of lame sitcom skit about a vampire (Hemky Madera) whose night is ruined when he discovers he got daylight savings time wrong. There's some hijinks with the police, passersby, and his long-suffering vampire girlfriend (Patricia Velasquez) as he tries to make it home before dawn - some good gags, but the humor is, in general, just way too broad, and doesn't compare at all well to (possible) inspirations What We Do In The Shadows or Woody Allen's 'Count Dracula'. It lands with a solid punchline, at least.

Then it's Gigi Saul Guerrero's turn, an interminable bit about a would-be CIA informant (Ari Gallegos) who pissed off a shape-shifting tribe's shaman (Gabriela Ruíz) and suffers the consequences. It's a weird shrug of a story that doesn't go anywhere. Maybe I just didn't get it; Have to say, though, that I found the Shaman's long-ass monologue to be gratingly pretentious bullshit.
 I took it to be a cautionary tale about pissing off ancient shapeshifting shamans. Turns out it's a bad idea: you'll end up making them tear off their cheeks.

 The last story is Alejandro Brugués's The Hammer of Zanzibar, another overtly comedic entry about a smartass (Jonah Ray!) who confronts a deadly curse that's set a deadly demon against him. It's buoyed by a likeable cast, some inventiveness and a lot of energy, but unfortunately the humor is... well, not as corny as in Sanchez's entry, but just as broad, and really, really juvenile. Not just in content but in form, as it kind of feels like a short some talented but slightly obnoxious film school kids would put together in their spare time. At least they clearly had a good time making it.

 Things finish up nicely as the wraparound ends with a confrontation between Death and The Traveler as the gaunt deity - a very cool practical effects creation - strides into the police precinct like some sort of supernatural terminator.

 Despite the unevenness and a terminal lack of cohesiveness, the film would be worth a watch just for Rugna's entry alone- but even if the rest don't add up to much, they're mostly entertaining.

The Outwaters

 Four young friends (Angela Basolis, Michelle May, Scott Schamell and Robbie Banfitch) go out on a camping trip to the Mojave desert to film some shots for a music video. Some weird stuff happens, get chased by something and they all end up dead; The footage is later retrieved and, presented as police evidence, ordered chronologically for our enjoyment.
 That premise may sound familiar, but The Outwaters has no pretentions of being popular entertainment. It's a highly ambitious, experimental, and extremely uncompromising film. This cuts both ways.

 The first fifty minutes of the movie are a sampling of the group's day to day life as shot by Robbie, the owner of the camera. It's a likeable bunch of people, and the footage is mostly organic - there's time gaps between the scenes, so they feel relatively authentic as home videos. In the lead up to the desert trip there's some goofing around, some partying, a couple heart to hearts- these people aren't bad company, but not a lot happens either, and as a result the movie drags badly.

 But on the first night in the Mojave proper  what sounds like a freak thunderstorm breaks out around them, and Robbie ends up catching some weird lights - which he thinks is ball lightning- on tape. The next day there's some low-key weirdness, and once night falls the storm returns and all hell breaks loose; it doesn't let up until the film ends.
 Unfortunately, all hell in this case means someone running in the dark, the camera swinging wildly, with a spotlight torch that can only illuminate a fist-sized chunk of scenery at a time. Our hero runs for a while, then stops, films something, then starts running again. Rinse and repeat. So many times.

This, but with shakycam.

 This is not a problem of plausibility, of Robbie lugging his camera to shoot everything he sees while he runs for his life and tries to work out what the hell is going on; I mean, it totally is, but that barely registers. The main problem here is that it's painful to watch - not because the horror or intensity or whatever, but because it's tedious and it looks like ass. For a while there's not even that much to see - Robbie will run for a minute in panic mode, stop to focus on some glistening puddle of gore, and then it's back to the races.

 Luckily things get a little more interesting from there - he starts seeing his blood-splattered friends, or flashes of light and a blood-red sea, or even a few monsters. If the pacing wasn't all shot to hell it might even be interesting. The film goes a couple of places I wouldn't have expected it to, and ends with some fairly extreme gore-shedding. But it's too little, too late.

 I love what this movie is trying to do, and I think it's got the right approach - cosmic horror works best when it's left unexplained. Its commitment to being as nightmarish as possible is also laudable.
 However, much like Skinamarink the result is nigh unwatchable - interesting on paper, but... well, boring in practice. It's the sort of thing that could only come from a highly personal point of view, undiluted by producer's notes or studio meddling: Robbie Banfitch stars, directs, edits, does the cinematography, special effects, sound design and even some of the songs. I'm interested in seeing where he takes that vision from here, but I'd be lying if I said I'm not worried he'll double down on everything that doesn't work here.

Unwelcome

 So you're making a movie about killer fairies. You can make a serious movie that's ashamed of being about killer fairies and explain them away with something 'serious' like, say, cordyceps, or downplay the fantastic elements. You could just embrace the silliness and bring the ridiculous to the fore. Or you could fucking own the fact that you're making a movie about killer fairies and take it seriously enough to allow it to work as a horror movie.

 Unwelcome walks that last, most difficult path, and that alone makes it worthy of respect. And then it has the stones to be a damn good killer fairies movie, too.

 Before getting to the emerald isle, there's a short prelude set in a housing estate somewhere in London. Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) has just found out she's pregnant, to her husband Jamie's (Douglas Booth) delight. It's an almost sickeningly sweet scene, like an advert for a joint bank account- right up to the point where some hoods that Jamie managed to piss off while getting Prosecco at the corner shop stage a very upsetting, violent home invasion.

 Cut to a few months later. The couple's inherited a property in the Irish countryside which comes with a few strings attached. One, it's a fixer-upper; two, the sweet old lady that welcomes Jamie and (a very pregnant) Maya to the house gets her to promise that she'll leave a bit of bloody, raw meat every night to the wee people that live in the woods out back. The red caps of Hellboy fame (Iron Shoes) actually belong to Scottish folklore, but there's a fair bit of overlap. These are pretty close to the Irish Far Darrig tales, if a bit more violent.

 Problems arise when the Whelan clan enters the picture, a bunch of ne'er do wells contracted to fix up the house. The builders from hell, led by an asshole who insists he be called 'daddy' (The great Colm Meaney), two thuggish siblings (Chris Walley and Jamie-Lee O'Donnell), and a slow-witted, physically imposing man (Kristian Nairn, kinda looking like an evil Jack Black).

 The patriarch holds his own in check, barely, but as soon as he's not there things go south pretty quickly with a slow, Straw Dogs style escalation. And then the murdergnomes arrive in full, their appetite for babies ('babbies!') well established.

 There's a lot of movie in here. The themes Mark Stay's clever, tightly-woven script works with may not be subtle or handled in the most original or particularly insightful way, but it's still a clever examination of violence and its consequences as viewed through genre trappings. Hell, just the fact that there's consistent themes at all should be celebrated. And while there's a rich, coal-black seam of humour running throughout the whole thing, it's repressed enough that it comes through as more of a perverse sense of fun that informs the film's pretty effective suspense and horror.

 Well, at least until the fairies arrive, looking like something out of a Brian Froud illustration. They're funny, expressive, and cool-looking practical effects that owe more than a little bit to Gremlins. But even when they arrive in all their giggly, stabby glory, the movie remains absolutely deadpan.

 

 Cinematographer Hamish Doyne-Ditmas makes great and frequent use of drone photography, and a lot of tinkering to make many of the scenes look slightly otherworldly. Elsewhere there's a great orchestral score from Christian Henson, a bunch of cool-looking sets, and some pretty gnarly gore. This is a pretty lavishly produced movie, at least for current genre standards.

 Your tolerance for it will depend on whether you can accept the tricky tonal tightrope-walking director Jon Wright is attempting and the amount of fantasy he allows into the picture. I thought he nailed it, but that's definitely going to be a point of contention. There are definitely some issues with pacing, some iffy dialog, and instances of the film showing its had a little too much.
 But these are all minor issues. Unwelcome's a fun, polished, nasty little slab of weirdness that punches well above its wee height.

The Breach

 When an adrift canoe carrying a horribly disfigured body ruins a family picnic, it falls to the sheriff of the nearby tiny town of Lone Crow (Allan Hawco) to try and figure out what happened.

 And it's a tricky one, because the body has been emptied, shredded from the inside-out ('Where did the bones go?' The sheriff asks the spectacularly douchey coroner played by Wesley French.) Luckily, the ID turns up nearby - the body belonged to one Cole Parsons (Adam Kenneth Wilson), 'THE ELECTROMAGNETIC TSAR OF OZARK UNIVERSITY' , the Oklahoma Times proclaims. I shit you not. He'd rented out a cabin in the woods nearby some time ago, after his daughter disappeared mysteriously.

 So the sheriff contacts Meg (Emily Alatalo), the last person to see TETOOU, who is, awkwardly, also the sheriff's estranged girlfriend. She doesn't have a lot of info, but agrees to take him, and the douchebag coroner, up the river to TETOOU's cabin.

 Hold on a minute - Involving Meg kind of makes sense, she knows the way. But why the hell does the coroner need to go to the site? Especially when it's established they can't stand each other? Well, as it turns out, he was Meg's previous boyfriend. So yeah, he's literally only there to provide some conflict.

I appreciate you, wall-dude.

 TETOOU's cabin is the expected semi-derelict deathtrap, full of scientific doodads and doors that mysteriously close on their own and stains that shift while people aren't looking. A couple of unexpected guests arrive, um, unexpectedly, and it turns out that, shock!, TETOOU was experimenting with things wot mens wern't ment to fiddle, and soon there are people wearing their insides on the outside invading our protagonists' personal bubbles.

 It starts out pretty engaging - the mystery seems cool, and I like the procedural vibe it carries for a while. Hawco is pretty good, and he's got more chemistry with his aide than with his girlfriend. But as the weirdness ramps up, it completely fails to develop properly, becoming more of a collection of horror moments than a coherent existential menace. As presented, the film is closer to a pretty rote body snatchers yarn than the cosmic horrors that it promises. scriptwriter Ian Weir, working from a book by Nick Cutter (An Audible Original! the credits specify) fails to develop the premise into anything interesting, and the same goes for the belabored relationships between the characters.

 Guns n' Roses guitarist Slash has a prominent credit as an executive producer and helped compose the excellent opening theme, which I guess is what's going to bring a lot of people to the movie. It's not clear if he's involved in the rest of the soundtrack, as the film actually attributes most of the songs to James Zirco Fisher. The cheesy guitar noodling when the film gets a little sentimental is a bit much, but other than that it's a pretty decent, if a little uneven horror score that does all right by the scenes it accompanies.

 Director Rodrigo Gudiño makes good use of a low budget; The film is distributed by Raven Banner, and from my experience they tend to value good-looking films. All the actors are at least professional, with Hawco the clear standout - the rest don't really get all that much to do.

 Effects-wise all the gore is strictly post-mortem, but it's pretty good, the monsters are cool and there's some agreeable weirdness like a wall dude who unfortunately appears just the once and completely fails to influence the movie in any way; Just some creepy imagery, carry on. On that vein, someone later puts on random cultist robes, because by Cthulhu this is cosmic horror so we got to have at least one cultist here. Even if it doesn't make the slightest lick of sense.

 If I were feeling mean, I'd say that other than the decent acting and production, it's more Garth Marenghi than H.P. Lovecraft. It's not that dire, obviously, but... well, it's still pretty bad.

The Boy And The Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka - How do you live?)

 Hayao Miyazaki's failure to retire fortunately continues. With this movie he's now reached twelve features, all of them at least good, half of them masterpieces. This one, I'm still digesting- the story didn't quite bowl me over as Spirited Away, Nausicaa, Mononoke or Porco Rosso did when I first watched them, but time will tell if I warm up to it. Technically, though, it's staggering; Visually and aurally this thing is motherfucking luscious.

Miyazaki 1, Hitchcock 0

 This is made crystal clear in a prelude in Tokyo in 1943, where twelve-year old Mahito (Soma Santoki) loses his mother to an allied bombing; the animation is impossibly fluid, beautiful and impressionistic as the haze from the fires mixes with the boy's turmoil.

 A year later his father has remarried - to his late wife's sister - and they move to her palatial estate out in the countryside. Mahito is understandably perturbed about that, and he spends most of the first act a sullen mess, trying to avoid his family and getting into trouble at school.

 But he can't get away from an old heron who haunts the local lake; It keeps hounding him, showing him a derelict tower in a field nearby, and later it starts taunting him verbally (with Masaki Suda's voice), telling him he can take him to his lost mother.
 Mahito being one prickly customer, he crafts a bow and arrow to kill the Heron; But when his stepmother disappears into the woods he's forced to follow the bird into the tower, and into another world, even though he knows it's a trap.

 From there on it's a series of fantastic adventures as Mahito searches for his mother and his near-mythical great uncle, the creator of the tower and keeper of the worlds within. He meets the residents of the new land, making allies with the heron and a couple of women who may or may not correspond to people in the real world, and enemies of mobs of sentient pelicans and parakeets.

 It's a lot of fun, but a little episodic, the connections a bit threadbare. There's a powerful story serving as a backbone to the film, one recognizably lined with Miyazaki's thoughtfulness, warmth and kindness (along with some autobiographical touches). Takes a while to emerge, though, and even when the narrative thrust is more or less clear, some events still feel a bit random, the convergence of its themes and threads a slightly unwieldy mess* (though always an entertaining one).

 And you can't argue with the presentation. I've never seen a traditionally animated movie so tactile - everything moves beautifully, making it a joy just to watch two people board a rickshaw, or the simple act of a boy putting on some pants (hello, FBI!).
 The lush backdrops are absolutely gorgeous, inviting and imaginative, and the character designs are something else; Just watching the parakeets go about their business had me laughing. The inestimable Joe Hisaishi provides a beyond lovely soundtrack, at first piano-driven and then incorporating more orchestral touches.

 From an aesthetic point of view, this is the most beautiful animated movie I've seen in... well, possibly ever. It really is that good- reportedly the most expensive movie made in Japan, and that's easy to believe.

 There's just so much to like here, even without taking into account how startingly vivid everything looks. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is another classic. Let's hope he gets to do another one.

*: Just like my writing, except for the 'slightly'. Heyoooo!

Verónica

 Back in 1991, a girl suffered some hallucinations after running a séance with some friends at school. She died soon after, and there were reports that the house was haunted afterwards and whatnot. It's a popular occult pseudo-urban legend in Spain, and supposedly the first instance of paranormal phenomena documented on a police report, at least in that country.
 Director Paco plaza, who co-wrote (along with Fernando Navarro) Verónica, a movie based on that incident, basically takes the premise and a couple details and twists everything up into a pretty standard horror yarn. But you know, it gets a 'Based on true events' disclaimer. That's important for marketing.

 The titular Verónica (Sandra Escacena) is a teen living in a large apartment with her younger siblings (Bruna González, Claudia Placer and Iván Chavero), whom she looks after while her widower mother (Ana Torrent) is out all day working to make ends meet. The movie has an excellent sense of place and immediacy, which helps immensely as the supernatural elements creep into the well-established domesticity. The spooky stuff comes into play when Verónica tries to use an Ouija board to contact her late father along with some friends at school while everyone else is out catching a glimpse of a total eclipse*.

 The spirit summoning ritual goes wrong, of course, and Verónica starts seeing an apparition around the house that starts threatening her and her family.

 It's a possession story, but one that's mercifully secular, despite there being several nuns involved ('You keep god out of this, he's got nothing to do with it' one of them says). There's no exorcism, other than an attempt to run another séance, and a few effective, creepy scenes as the ghoul pops up here and there. There's a large overlap between possessions and hauntings in horror (cue all the 'The Haunting of *' movies), and this feels more like the latter, which I prefer.

 Unfortunately, there's also few surprises and a whole lot of cheese. It's a shame; The film does a great job of making the characters sympathetic, but the more formulaic nature of the scares rob them of impact. For those of you keeping track of haunted toys in these movies, there's a haunted Simon here. It's used to great effect, flashing red and blue lights that mirror the police arrival in the scenes that bookend the film.

 While the film isn't particularly scary (many of the scenes are more likely to cause an eye roll rather than a gasp) it's still pretty fun. It doesn't have a lot of time for humor, but there are some pretty funny bits (like when Verónica gives a toddler an occult encyclopedia and tells him to copy the symbols on the walls; the kid ends up switching pages and drawing Solomonic demon seals).
 It's also well-paced and very, very stylish (cinematographer: Pablo Rosso); I knew I was on board when, on one of the first scenes, the camera sticks to an opening car door and shows an interlocutor within the rearview mirror. Brilliant. The ghost is creepy enough and, as mentioned, scores some good scenes, a few cool supernatural stunts, to go along with its less successful showings.

 Above all, the film works hard to ground the story, making Verónica's internal, domestic and social life compelling; It's a shame the supernatural threat is a bit too uninteresting to collect on the stakes.

 *: I checked, and there were no total eclipses visible from Madrid in the 90s. For shame, Veronica, I thought you were based on a true story!

Beyond The Black Rainbow

 Beyond The Black Rainbow is a hypnotic, languid, glacially paced mood piece/acid trip that's nominally a science fiction story, but seems more interested in evoking a very specific drug-hazed '70s and early '80s texture, or the memory of watching Solaris or 2001 as a kid without really understanding them.

 Elena (Eva Allan) is a captive in an underground research lab belonging to one Arboria Institute, a cultish group that is devoted to some poorly defined 'better living through technobabble'. There the girl is tormented by Dr. Nyles (Michael J. Rogers), who subjects her to frequent interrogations that include some barely concealed barbs to try and get a rise from her.

 Elena only stares at the floor and barely reacts; Is she consciously ignoring him? Is she tripping balls? Who knows. But there's a bit more going on beneath the surface, as she communicates telepathically with the man (and asks to see her father), and the Doctor uses some sort of giant prism to counter her latent powers.

 As the movie develops, tiny scraps of information are slowly - very slowly - revealed that give you some tools to extract a vague sense out of things; We meet the institute's founder (Scott Hylands), see a (gorgeous, chemical FX-realised) flashback where Dr. Nyles is sent to another dimension (or something), and get a feel for Elena's life in the Institute before she manages to escape, the good doctor always a couple of steps to the side, manipulating things. Oh, and there are a couple of random mutants thrown in for effect, as well as a couple of pimply metal nerds to up the body count.

 It's a very narrow-slice pastiche of styles and elements shot in gorgeous, grainy 35mm with special attention to the production design, a beautiful synth-y score, and lush colour schemes (Bob Bottieri and Jeremy Schmidt off psych-rock band Black Mountain and Norm Li, respectively). Whether you like it or not will depend on how much tolerance you have for this sort of thing, your patience, if you don't mind movies that shoot for style over substance, and if you click with its particular aesthetic.

 Personally, I'm much more of a fan of Writer/director Panos Cosmatos's Mandy, which managed to have a lot more going on while still keeping this careful attention to aesthetics and devotion to old-school weirdness. I had some trouble sticking to this one, and nodded off a couple of times - it's absolutely a late-night movie, but not one to approach if you're even marginally tired. On the plus side, you won't miss anything vital.

 It is beautiful, though, and compelling at times; I could easily see myself falling under its spell upon a rewatch in different circumstances. But the few scraps of story can't really sustain it, not even before the almost hilariously underwhelming final confrontation runs its course.

Red Christmas

 Here we go: The worst movie I've written up yet. A nasty, dumb, ugly slasher I hoped would be good because I'm usually a fan of antipodean horror. You're in the shitlist for this one, Australia.

 Writer/director Craig Anderson comes up with one excellent 'finger up the ass' premise for a slasher movie: The slasher is the protagonist's (Dee Wallace!) survivor-of-an-abortion son, come twenty years later one Christmas day to confront her. Why don't you love me, mummy?

 To make things extra-fun, on the day of her abortion the clinic was bombed (is that even a thing in Australia?) and the one responsible for taking the still-living fetus home and raising him was the terrorist himself.

 Oh, and the killer ex-fetus is named Cletus. He's got Down Syndrome. Har di har.

...Damn, this shot makes the movie seem way more fun than it is.

 In case things weren't already set up for maximum discomfort, the family he's slashing at is a sort of rainbow of hot button demographics: There's a priest, his uptight, humorless, very religious wife, a man with down syndrome, two liberal dope-smoking dipshits, and a fucking insufferable smartass who's also extremely pregnant. Oh, and an adopted girl that's set up to fool you into thinking she'll be a final girl, I think, but she barely registers.

 Some effort is spent making at least some of the characters... if not likeable, at least a little fleshed out. But they're up to all sorts of stupid shit even before the killings start, and as soon as the (mercifully short) first act is done and the first family member is split in two with a single axe stroke, their idiocy ramps up exponentially.

 Once he starts his rampage, the killer appears and disappears arbitrarily, his competence as a slasher varying wildly as the script dictates. The less said of his victims' attempts at survival, the better; most of the scurrying around feels like a waste of time until someone gets killed; no clever plans, no decent action, nothing of interest.
 Mom gets to be the straight character, the one that's reasonable and the target for all the emotional abuse the movie throws. Wallace does an excellent job of making her seem like a rounded human being, but the script is so manipulative and, well, fucking dumb that somewhere around the middle I just started rooting for even her to die so the movie could be over and done with.

 Aside from the knowing quality of the setup, the slasher's name, a couple lines and some asshattery in the first act, this is not really a comedy; It's a supposedly brutal horror romp that kills off characters we're expected to come to care about. Well, that's a bust, as their general unlikability, coupled with the amount of stupid decisions they make plus the laughably manipulative script mean that all the drawn-out suspense  scenes fall completely flat.
 Worst of all, the movie also unforgivably skimps on the gore department, leaving most kills to be implied or shown in very quick bursts. There's a couple of good deaths - a ridiculous blender-related incident, and a bear-trap-related injury, both of which somehow shed way more blood than someone being cut in half -  and some of the others have a good concept behind them. But they're so ineptly staged they don't even begin to compensate for the rest of this shit. Not all movies can have a good FX/makeup department, and that's fine. But... well, maybe don't do a gruesome-kill-heavy horror movie, then. You're going to make a film this tasteless, we want to see more than a couple jets of blood.

The actors are actually all right; it's the material that fails here. The film looks like ass, which is a problem with many of these low-budget deals, but unlike any good indie horror, there's no craft, sense of fun, no good ideas, or... anything, really, to uplift the whole thing. It sometimes works up a little bit of energy, but for most of its duration it's kind of a dreary slog.

 It's an artless, charmless, unfun bit of shit hoping that the empty provocation and bad taste at its core will dupe someone into thinking there's more to it. No such luck- it's bad even for shitty holiday (and abortion) exploitation horror standards. Keep well away.

Rare Exports

  Way back in the noughties, while this sort of thing still wasn't that common, a couple of weird little Christmas-themed shorts made the rounds on the internet. They detailed the operation of a company that operates in the Scandinavian wilds hunting the most dangerous game: wild Father Christmases. They then process them, train them, and send them all over the world to... work as mall Santas.
 The shorts were extremely well made, weird and funny. They caught on well enough that creator Jamie Helander successfully pitched to make a movie out of them.

 Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale works as a bit of an origin story for the company in the shorts. It's also very well made, weird and very funny in its own deadpan way.

You better watch out.

 It starts with a British company running a dig on a Finnish mountain. As their chief scientist (Per Christian Ellefsen) explains, it's not really a mountain - it's a giant burial mound that the Sami built over centuries to contain... something big.

 Two local kids are spying on the brits. One of them, Pietari (Onni Tommila), is obsessed with an ancient, horned, Krampus-like Nordic version of Santa - a giant being that tortured and ate naughty kids (the books he bases his research on are full of delightful woodcuts of Santa doing just that). He figures that's what the foreigners are digging for; And he's right, of course.

 Soon , the local reindeer hunters (which include Pietari's father, Rauno, played by the actor's real father Jorma Tommila) find a local herd of reindeer dead, butchered in the snow. Blaming the foreigners, and enraged at the loss of their livelihood, they go up the mountain but find the dig site empty, just a huge gaping wound in the ground and things left as if people have been taken in the middle of the night.

 In an unrelated development, they capture a silent old feral man who, when given a chance, bites the ear off one of the hunters. The scenes where the wary hunters (plus Pietari) uneasily watch over this weirdo are easily the best in the movie. As the hunters hatch a hare-brained plan to ransom their ward, they discover that all the local children are missing, and that there might be a bigger threat closing on their tiny settlement.

 Rare exports is a truly bizarre movie. It commits admirably to being a serious horror film, burying its jokey premise under completely deadpan seriousness and some really great atmosphere. It's also pretty grim - there's plenty of butchered reindeer, and the missing ear gets pretty graphic. But it's also very much a kid's movie as Pietari takes over as a protagonist in the third act and the horror-compatible beats like knowing what's going on even though no one believes him shift towards a more blatant PG adventure - things like coming up with the plan that saves the day and a triumphant airborne ride. A heroic sacrifice, even!

 The weird tonal clash works against the movie; Almost all kills happen off-screen, for example, and the main threat looming in the background... never really materializes. Along with the tonal shift at the end, this leaves the narrative oddly truncated and unsatisfying.
 On the balance against that is, well, just what an odd duck of a story this ends up being, and the film's beautifully wrought surfaces: The music (by Juri and Miska Seppa) is epic, the cinematography (Mika Orasmaa) gorgeous, and writer/director Jamie Helander keeps the pacing flowing expertly and grounds the ridiculousness with lived-in relationships and plenty of details that give plausibility to the action.

 It's a wickedly odd joke of a film, unsatisfying but still well worth a watch. I've done so a couple times over the years and I still can't fully embrace it, but I get the feeling that if I'd seen this when I was thirteen I'd be a lifelong fan.

All The Creatures Were Stirring

 A five-short (plus wraparound) Christmas horror anthology - what could possibly go wrong?
 That's a rhetorical question, by the way. You don't have to answer that, All the Creatures Were Stirring has got you covered.

 The wraparound story is about a couple who go see the titular play in some sort of community theater, a terrible-looking performance-art-like piece where three bored-looking actors put on ridiculous looking pantomime of some common activity - each one transitions into one of the film's five segments. There's some fun in just how shitty the shows get, and how poorly the couple are treated by the theater staff, but other than that there's very little going on here.

 The first segment - "The Stockings were Hung" is one of those stories where some sort of evil mastermind traps a bunch of people in a room and tries to get them to kill each other. In this case it's a group of office drones at a company Christmas do. It's fun, for a little bit, until the character writing gets so ludicrous it completely breaks any possible immersion - one of those cases where you wonder if the writers ever saw how human beings actually interact, a copy of a copy of a copy of lazy horror tropes with no verisimilitude or grasp of psychology. It's bad, really bad.

 "Dash All Away" has a man (Matt Long) lock himself out of his car in a deserted parking lot - deserted except for a van with two slightly cultish-looking girls (Catherine Parker and Mekeda Deklet) whom he needs to engage to call his family and roadside assistance. It's the only short in the movie that manages to build some suspense, as the situation is very relatable and effectively creepy. It also has, when it arrives, a cool monster and a nicely bizarre explanation as to what's going on.

 After that high, we're due a couple of turds in the stocking. Specifically, a particularly shitty take on A Christmas Carol where the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future decide scrooge over an unfunny, angry loner (Jonathan Kite) in deeply underwhelming ways. It's a witless, poorly paced and absolutely uninteresting slog that takes way too long to do its thing and shuffle off the screen.
 It's followed by what's almost a throwaway joke, a story where a man runs down a reindeer in a country road to then be followed home by a mysterious assailant that lights everything around it red. It's a hilarious premise, but the next-to-zero production budget means that nothing is shown, completely buggering any chance it had to be a cool (and very funny) creature feature.
 What's interesting with this one is that directors Rebekah and David Ian McKendry go full on with the giallo and '70s Italian horror imagery, from the leather gloves that the man dons to manhandle the downed reindeer to some trippy, very cheap-looking photography-based visuals, to some of the editing and even a goblin-esque (on a budget) score. The short ends up being fucking dire, but it's got some interesting visual callbacks in a movie that otherwise looks pretty drab.

 Well, mostly drab. The last segment, In a Twinkle, is another highlight: Steve (Morgan Peter Brown) tells his girlfriend Gabby (Constance Wu) to not visit him for Christmas, as he prepares to chain himself to bed as a full moon shines outside his window. And then, just as he's about to lock himself in, Gabby, as well as three other friends, arrive for a surprise party.
 What seems like a straightforward lycanthropic (were-reindeer? an elapusthropic?) premise fortunately takes a left turn into Twilight Zone territory, complete with an aspect ratio change, (very flat) black and white photography,  some overtly familiar musical stings, and sci-fi elements. Despite one major dangling thread, it ends up being a very cute, heartfelt Christmas story and it'd be a really great note to leave things on.

 But... no dice. We've still got the wraparound story to wrap up - or deflate, to put it more accurately, with a barely-there resolution. Only then are we finally done; It's some sort of achievement to make an eighty minute movie split into six stories that drag this much.

 So what we have here is an almost aggressively unfunny horror comedy, one that offers at best some chuckles at the concepts on offer, but none at any of the actual jokes. The best segments take their ridiculous premises seriously, and are inventive and cool enough to work on their own terms and merit a recommendation- just skip to Dash All Away and In A Twinkle, you won't be missing out on anything by bailing on the rest.

Beyond Re-Animator

 Brian Yuzna doesn't make good movies, and is probably completely uninterested in making good movies. When given enough creative freedom, though, he makes things like Society, or the movie we're discussing now, which has a mid credits sequence where a rat fights a re-animated severed penis.
 That's right. Brian Yuzna doesn't make good movies - he makes awesome movies. At least when the stars are right.

 Beyond is the second sequel to Stuart Gordon's classic Re-Animator, set (and released) thirteen years after the previous movie. Dr. Herbert West, Re-animator (Jeffrey Combs), has spent the intervening time locked up in jail serving a sentence for one of his zombie's crimes.
 We are shown this crime, and it's a good one: the zombie in question spies a cute, scantily dressed woman drinking milk, then breaks into the house and kills her - and then lustily starts chugging from the milk carton. It's a great gag, but also an incredible image because the dude is missing the whole of his lower jaw:

Brian Yuzna and Screaming Mad George in the house, bee-yotches!

 The girl's murder is witnessed by her younger brother Howard Phillips (groan), who grows up to be Dr. Howard Phillips (Jason Barry). He's obsessed with West's work, and joins the infirmary at the jail he's imprisoned to get closer to him.

 Soon the two are working together and are running experiments again with the re-animation serum. There's a few complications this time around:
 a) A sexy journalist (Elsa Pataky), becomes romantically entangled with Dr. Phillips, and interested in Dr. West's work and history.
 b) Prison warden Brando (Simón Andreu), who plays the villain with scenery-chewing relish, hates Dr. West and is almost cartoonily infatuated with the journalist.
 c) West has run some experiments on a fellow inmate's pet rat, which did not go down well, and is getting death threats.

 West also has developed a new technology over the last thirteen years - a transference of electrical nano-wotsits from body to body, which in theory should stop the cadavers going completely psycho after reanimation by virtue of some extremely poorly written technobabble. I demand more scientific rigour out of my reanimation movies!
 As you might expect, the experiments don't turn out that well, and in the chaos that ensues the prisoners break out and cause a riot. The movie was fairly nuts before that, but the real madness starts after this point.

 This is a Yuzna movie, not to mention a Re-Animator sequel, so you should expect a lot of questionable content - sexual violence, boobs and dicks getting bitten off to comedy music, that sort of thing. The pacing is all over the place, and the tone... well, it's firmly a comedy, but way too over the top. Spanish comedy/horror legend Santiago Segura is unfortunately the worst offender in this respect, mugging at the camera with abandon while scarfing down drugs as if they were popcorn and other wackiness. But I can't let the script (by José Manuel Gómez and Miguel Tejada-Flores) off the hook - Warden Brando, for example, might be having a little too much fun squeaking like a rat, but he's playing his role as written.

 This is an English-language Spanish production* which got distributed by the sci-fi channel (and released as a PG cut! Wonder how long that is). The upshot is that most of the actors are Spanish, which lends the movie an even lower-rent quality as they are dubbed or unsuccessfully try to pass for native speakers. The acting is almost uniformly terrible - even Jason Barry, who's Irish - but honestly I think that's down to the material and directorial decisions. Everyone is pitching to the rafters.
 With Combs an a honorable exception, of course: he plays West as he ever has, all acerbic wit and medical detachment. The guy can elevate anything.

 Being a B-movie all the way down to its ugly, deformed soul, the production values are actually all right; The crew had access to a whole jail, which looks suitably imposing, and a ton of extras. The effects are also top notch, with the legendary Screaming Mad George delivering some pretty nuts gore effects which deserve to be put up there with the best this series has to offer.

 It's nowhere near as good as the first movie, but no one expected anything else out of a second sequel. Also- I like Yuzna but he's definitely no Gordon.
 I should re-visit Bride, which I didn't think much of at the time, to see how it's aged. But this, this was a very pleasant surprise - I somehow missed it completely when it came out, and found it to be a blast. A minor Christmas miracle.

*:Just like the excellent Dagon, which was released two years before this one, but by different production companies. I wonder if Gordon was involved in getting his partner in crime this gig.

Mr. Vampire

  Mr. Vampire is a classic Hong-Kong martial arts/comedy mashup with supernatural elements that doesn't lean as much on special effects as other, similar films of its style (though it doesn't do without them entirely).
 Instead it fills its runtime with farcical plotlines, very broad, very slapstick humour and some truly great fights and stunts; The humour... I'd say it's above average for this sort of thing but still pretty cringeworthy, but there's no denying the action.

 Master Gau (Ching-Ying Lam) is a Taoist priest with, as you'd expect, a sideline in ghost hunting. He's introduced putting down an octet of Jiangshi that his dumbass apprentices (Ricki Hui and Siu-Ho Chin) managed to free from their bonds.
 It's a brilliant fight, full of good moves and stunts and a couple of laugh-out-loud gags.

 That first scene barely factors into the plot, though, which involves a down-on-his-luck businessman (Ha Huang) who, tricked by a pissed off feng shui expert, needs to rebury his father. He contacts Master Gau, who quickly realizes that Mr. Yam's father is about to become a vampire, so he takes the corpse into custody.

 The script (by Ricky Lau, Cheuk-hon Szeto, and Barry Wong) quickly spirals in many different directions; both of Gau's dipshit students get into trouble - one is scratched by the vampire and starts turning, and the other one falls under the spell of a beautiful ghost (Moon Lee). Meanwhile, Gau himself gets incarcerated. As usual in these movies, the plot doesn't matter much, though - it's an excuse to stage jokes, chases and fights.

 The jokes, as stated before, didn't really work for me - a few made me laugh, and a few others are cute enough. They're mostly tied to the apprentices and their idiot hijinks, and can be pretty grating. The action though is outstanding. Lam Ching Ying is an excellent stuntman with a lot of presence, and one of the apprentices (Sheng) is not too shabby once he joins in on the fun.

 All the fight scenes are immaculately choreographed and shot, full of inventive and cool moves and stunts; There's one burning man bit in particular where we can see the vampire catch on fire, and then someone goes and throws a jar of oil at him, feeding the flames. Outstanding.

 There's all sorts of neat rituals and rules that the film sometimes takes the time to explain as it goes along. Prayer scrolls are affixed to foreheads, glutinous rice (but not long grain!) keeps the vampires away, and specially treated string is used to bind them. Oh, a couple of live animals (a chicken and a snake) are sacrificed on-screen, so if that's not your sort of thing you might want to avoid this.

 You many also want to avoid the sequels, which I remember as a pretty textbook case of diminishing returns, unless you can't get enough of this; In that case I'd throw in a recommendation for Sammo Hung's terrific Encounters of the Spooky kind.

*: Chinese folklore hopping vampires - a sort of undead that's so stiff with rigor mortis and decay it moves around hopping, arms outstretched, looking for victims to eat

Christmas Evil

 Christmas Evil - also known with its original title, You Better Watch Out- is a relatively popular no-budget holiday slasher from 1980. It came out six months after the first Friday the 13th (which is mentioned in this movie's poster), so it's a pretty early entry in the 80's slasher phenomenon that Halloween started. It's also the first murdering Santa movie that I know of.
 It's... kind of a slog.

 Unlike Friday the 13th, this is a 'classy', more psychological take on the slasher formula, one that keeps a tight focus on the slasher rather than follow the victims. Don't get me wrong, it's exploitative as hell, and none of the characters are even remotely plausible - but it does try.

A truly amazing scene. Shame they couldn't work pitchforks in, somehow.

 Our slasher is one Harry Stadling (Brandon Maggart), who has the misfortune to walk into his father, in full Santa Claus getup, going down on his mother. Well, at least doing some mild groping with his head in the general vicinity of her crotch area, it's a weird, overtly long scene (complete with unsexy sexy music).

 So of course he'll grow up to be a santa-obsessed murderer, that's how these things work.

 As an adult he sleeps in Santa pyjamas, has Christmas decorations and music up by Thanksgiving, and, more worryingly, keeps tabs on all the neighbourhood kids and carefully notes down if they're being nice or naughty in a library of large notebooks (his handwriting is amazing!). There's one kid in particular he sees looking at porn mags, and he treats him like a personal nemesis, calling out his name like a superhero angrily screaming a villain's name: 'Moooooossss!' It's pretty funny.

 Keeping on with the theming, Harry works at a toy factory - it's a desk job, but he misses being in the production line, where he was close to the toys. Being an introvert and more than a bit of a weirdo, he gets disrespected and taken advantage of on a regular basis. And you know what that means.

 But 'what that means' is a little more nuanced than you'd expect. Basically, he does get fed up, but not necessarily with the abuse. it's mostly the hypocrisy and people's flippant attitude to a holiday he considers magical that enrages him. He doesn't embark in a rampage; Rather, he goes full loon and convinces himself he's the real Santa. So he dons a full Santa Claus costume, loads up on toys, and actually does some real good, and as it happens kids love him. Except Moss, but fuck that kid, he's naughty.
 Harry has less luck with adults. So when a trio of idiots bully him outside a church, he snaps and kills them. As the killer santa news spread out, he gets into more and more trouble - even with his little brother (Jeffrey DeMunn)- and after some chases things build up to a cute, surrealist ending.

 There's an undeniable sense of humor running through the film - it's dead serious on the surface, but also features a 'santa can't get through the chimney' gag and a hilarious scene where the police grab a bunch of people in Santa suits and put them in a line up. The problem is that the script is so inept on some respects, and the humor so deadpan, that it's hard to know whether, say, a random parent pulling a switchblade on Santa, or a mob -complete with torches- running amok hungry for Santa's blood, was intended to be funny or is just part of the movie's weird sensibilities. I'm inclined to give writer/director Lewis Jackson the benefit of the doubt here and say it's both. In any case, it made me laugh, and the ridiculous nature of, say, Harry's children monitoring are part of the film's appeal.

 That's not to say the script is good, though - many of the conversations are laughable, and so are most of the performances. Maggart comes closest to transcending the material, trying to inhabit his character as fully as possible and succeeding at making him at least a little relatable and entertaining to watch. But he also at one point shakes his fist and literally says 'grrrrrr', so... what are you going to do.
 The movie's minuscule budget definitely doesn't do it any favours either, as scenes where not much happens painfully stretch out to pad out the runtime. Some of them are fun in concept, like when Santa gets roped into a Christmas party and dances to entertain the crowd (and does a little speech for the children), but they absolutely overstay their welcome. It's not a great-looking movie, but it does have some great-looking scenes; Argentinian DP Ricardo Aronovich's CV included movies by Costa-Gavras, Resnais and Moreau by the time this was made.

 Meanwhile, the slasher action is kept to a bare minimum. The prosthetics are very cheap and only shown as quick flashes, but there's a pretty effective eye-stabbing and some axe murdering as well, all very bloody. Someone gets killed with a Christmas ornament too, so there's that holiday tradition covered. Don't get excited, though - again, it's a tiny (if important) part of the movie.

 I'd be lying if I said it didn't often bore me to tears, but it was kind of interesting, and pretty funny to boot. I'm happy I watched it.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

 Count me as a fan of the first Aquaman movie, a ridiculous, exuberant, colorful movie that came closer to replicating the feel of 80's world-hopping adventure movies than things which mined that specific vein of nostalgia way more cynically (did Stranger things have a toboggan scene? Suck on that, Stranger Things).

 So now comes the inevitable sequel, under a cloud of both studio and behind-the-scenes drama, and at a time where the pendulum seems to finally be swinging away from the superhero reign over blockbusters. And... it's fine. It's OK. A decent time-waster.

 Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and his wife wife (Amber Heard) have settled into a sort of double life - on land they take care of their baby, while in the sea they rule over the kingdom of Atlantis. And in between he gets into random fights against pirates and polluters and whatnot.
 The movie starts with a fight on a cargo ship that highlights the film's main problem - the action this time around is really, really sloppy. At least the scene has a fun twist , as it turns out that Aquaman is recounting the fight to his baby son and the action alternates between the actual fight and Jason Momoa smashing action figures together. Cute.
 Not so cute: all the jokes about the baby peeing on his face. Come on, folks, you can do better than that hacky standup act crap.

 Meanwhile, Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is hunting down Atlantis tech so he can fix his suit and kill Aquaman/avenge his dad. Instead, he finds the black trident, a relic from a lost Atlantean kingdom. One that's all corrupt and evil and seems like it came out from a really mediocre D&D campaign; It's even called Necris, for fuck's sake. Anyhow, The old Necris king (a really goofy-looking lich-like thing) possesses Manta and gets him to start burning some ancient fuel to fuck up the environment.

 After some incidents Aquaman figures out Manta's up to no good again. To hunt him down, he decides he needs to team up with his brother (Patrick Wilson) - last seen trying to destroy the surface world, now imprisoned in a dusty jail by a bunch of undead critters who ride bony centipedes. Seriously, the D&D vibes in this movie are very noticeable.

Monstrous Compendium 3: Featuring Goofy Lich and its undead posse

 The meat of the movie is then a sort of a buddy movie as the odd couple hunt down leads and finally confronts Manta and the evil possessing him.

 It won't blow anyone away, but it's warm, likeable, pacey, has some cool bits, and doesn't take itself half seriously at any point. It also has a major asset in Jason Momoa, whose presence and charm, along with his character's folksy, irrepressible good nature, shouldn't be understated.

 But... But... Director James Wan can't prevent it from being kind of bland, especially when so many of its scenes compare unfavorably to the first movie. A lot of it can be blamed on a pretty lifeless script (by returning writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick), but the lion's share should go to a pretty huge downgrade on the spectacle department.
 The fights and most of the action, as mentioned above, are not particularly memorable; Hard to read and (mostly - there are some cool moves) poorly staged and choreographed. Jon Valera (a veteran stunt coordinator from 87Eleven veteran who worked on the fights on the first movie) is still on board, so not sure what's happened, but the difference in quality, especially in the larger brawls, is extremely noticeable.

 I'm not going to remark on plot holes or the dumbness of the script, because this is a movie where a seahorse actually makes whinnying horse sounds. Which is, of course, awesome.
 What concerns me more is that while the movie does land a few of its jokes, so many of them are so basic they barely register as attempts at humor; Martin Short turns up to deliver a terrific, Hammill-esque voice performance as a bargain bin Jabba the Hutt, for example, and he's given lame jokes that would make even Lucas cringe. 

 There's lots of dodgy CGI, but it's one of those movies where that isn't that big an issue as the visuals get so fantastic it might as well be wholly animated. What's important is the spectacle, and... well, it does a little better in that department than on the action, with some cool concepts like a city built out of sunken ships, a secret volcano lair, or the titular lost kingdom- but not that much. It gets the job done, barely.

 I suspect the film's getting dunked on by both people who hate/have gotten sick of superhero movies and by superhero movie fans who needed it to be that much better. It's a shame, and more than a little unfair, but to be honest the movie's not actually good or interesting enough to champion.

Infinity Pool

 James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing at a vacation resort in Li Tolqa (filmed in Croatia); James is a failed writer struggling to write a follow-up to his first book, Em comes from money; Their marriage isn't going that great.

 After a startling, low-key violent incident with one of the locals they meet fellow tourists Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert). Gabi comes on strong to James, having read and loved his novel. His ego stoked, James becomes a lot more social (to Em's resentment) and soon both couples are off on an unsanctioned visit to the countryside to sample the local sights.

 It's a mild outing, except for the part when Gabi creeps up on James as he's taking a piss and gives him a handjob- complete with an on-screen (prosthetic) dick and money shot. As you'd expect from any of the Cronenbergs, it's a spectacularly unsexy sex scene and plays almost like body horror. It's a running theme, just like the resort is shot to be pretty much the opposite of paradisiacal. Camberley-esque, is I believe the word for that.
 And then as James is driving the group back, he runs over and kills a local.

 Things develop similarly to The Forgiven: they don't call the police and instead head back to the compound, but are found out anyways. Then the police show up and take them away.
 It's a familiar nightmarish scenario for anyone who's been a tourist: guilt and the intrinsic fear of the foreign, compounded by multiple hints about local resentment and corruption, and the contrast between the resort and the impoverished countryside.

 As it turns out, Li Tolqa has a very creative approach to justice. According to their legal system, manslaughter - even involuntary - is punishable by death, the execution to be carried out by the victim's next-of-kin.
 But because tourism is one of the few ways the country has to make money, there's a way to get out. Li Tolqa happens to have the technology to build fully developed clones of people who share all their memories (shhh, just go along with it). So if a foreigner is willing to part with a lot of money to build one of these clones, he can have this clone be put to death as a surrogate. Oh, and he needs to witness the killing.

 It's a major contrivance, but... well, that's what the movie's about. More importantly, it's a deeply but subtly horrific conceit at an existential level. Not for James, though; he's weirdly entranced by seeing his copy be brutally stabbed to death, while Em is horrified; another wedge between them. When they get back to the resort - effectively getting away with murder, James is inducted to a group of expats who've been indulging in the possibilities that Li Tolqa's cloning technology allow for years. And from there the movie spirals out in all sort of debauched, inventive, and bizarre tangents.

 Infinity Pool is unnerving, grimly hilarious, enthralling and wince-inducing in equal measure. It's a weird, weird movie that's hard to get a handle on, which gives it a queasy power. This is strengthened by writer/director Brandon Cronenberg's careful, clinical direction, Karim Hussain's beautiful, washed-out cinematography, and a cool, pulsing, cacophonic score by Tim Hecker. Even the weird typography for the title card and credits.
 Skarsgård gives his character's bizarre arc a lot of heft - getting over self loathing through self-murdering, only to later have his ego crushed in a way that gave me sympathy for a very closed-off, unsympathetic character; the guy specializes in recklessly brave, vanity-less performances, and this is a memorable one. But he's outshone by Mia Goth often in full-on crazy mode, playing a wonderful role that evolves through the movie, always emerging in a weirder shape than before. Funny, terrifying and terrifyingly sexy in equal measure - between this and Pearl, she should win all the actor awards this year. All of them.

 I think I love it? I'm not sure, I'm still digesting it - there's a lot to unpack in this movie, tons of interesting stuff going on beneath the tourists run amok surface reading. Ask me again later.
 But yeah, I'm pretty sure I love it.

The Toxic Avenger

 So: we're over three hundred posts and have never covered a Troma Team production. In honour of its upcoming remake, let's have a look at The Toxic Avenger, the one that put them on the map.

 Just so we get it out of the way: Troma films are infamous for pushing whatever boundaries they can as far as they think they can get away with. There's ethnic insults, gratuitous nudity, over-the-top gore (often coming out of animals and children), all done in a style I can only describe as gleeful, tasteless exploitation. You'd think we'd be inured to this sort of thing after things like South Park have gone mainstream, but at their best Troma still manages to shock. And this is definitely one of their best.

 The action takes place in Tromaville ("the toxic waste dumping capital of the world!", played by New Jersey on the film) - a place so corrupt the mayor and the police captain take a cut from all crime proceeds.
 The film at first follows four juvenile delinquent health freaks as they lord over a gym: absolute psycho Bozo (Gary Schneider), his equally psychotic girlfriend Wanda (Jennifer Babtist), and horndog  accomplices Julie (Cindy Manion) and Slug (Robert Prichard). Their favorite pastime when not working out: running over people with Wanda's car, going by a Death Race 2000-style points system that prioritizes ethnicities, children and the elderly. In the movie's most infamous scene, a kid gets his head graphically squashed as the girls coo appreciatively and take pictures of the bloody mess. Later, Julie diddles herself while looking at the photographs. Classy!

 So when this lot stages an elaborate prank to mortify Melvin, the gym's goofy janitor (Mark Torgl), by their standards it really is a harmless lark. Until he ends up waist deep in radioactive waste, and everyone around - not just the psycho quartet - takes turns laughing at him even as his flesh turns into hamburger meat and spontaneously combusts. Rough.

 It's not all downsides, though. Melvin is mutated by the toxic sludge into a six-foot tall monstrosity (Mitch Cohen) with superhuman strength and a mellifluous, comically articulate voice. It also imbues him with a sort of radar for evil and a compulsion to brutally beat up bad guys and leave a mop on their face. Other than that, he remains a sweetheart - I'd  argue even more of a sweetheart, since he seemed a bit of a perv in his previous incarnation.

 Toxie sort of blunders into a dumb/cute love story with a blind woman , fights his way through the criminal hierarchy and wins the hearts of the Tromaville residents. Just like a Marvel movie, except for all the sexual assault, dog killing, and mauling people with their own dismembered arms.

 His first fight involves several Three Stooges moves, but taken to their most extreme consequences: eyes are poked out, and when heads are knocked together, you can bet skulls will crack. That's basically this movie's sensibility in a nutshell.

 The tone of is over-the-top in all senses, which helps the brutality not register that much, the very goofy humor land at least some of the time, and its corny, daft sweetness seem more charming than it probably should be. Joe Ritter's script is very simple, relying on wall-to-wall slapstick taken to all sorts of bloody extremes. Meanwhile, Troma co-founders Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman direct with enthusiasm but little flair, with a focus on filling the frame with boobs, gore and dumb visual gags, and an over-reliance on cheesy reaction shots.
 The acting is... well, there is no acting in this movie: every one mugs and waggles their eyebrows maniacally, looking for all intents and purposes like they're having a grand old time chewing as much scenery as possible. It's sometimes kind of painful to watch, but also kind of cute, and it pays off in a big way with Bozo's theatrical rage, which is never not hilarious.

Bozo, in a weirdly matching shot to Toxie's.

 The action is extremely bloody and relatively well staged, all things considered. All the bad guys know Karate or some kung fu, which they deploy in pointless flourishes to some basic choreography. It's fun to watch, if a bit stiff and repetitive. The makeup effects excel - not just the gore, but the monster himself is a great, expressive design (by Jennifer Aspinall, Ralph Cordero and Tom Lauten).

 It does experiment a little, and stretches its legs in interesting ways. There's a very eighties car chase with good stunts, crashes and explosions, for example. But the most interesting scene for me this time around was when Toxie decides to go after Wanda: He chases her through the gym into some derelict tunnels, and for a while there the movie turns into a decent horror movie that plays with the hunter/hunted roles, based on what you know about the characters. I'd forgotten all about it. It's a cool scene that doesn't really work in context (as part of a half-assed subplot about Melvin becoming evil), but it's still noteworthy.

 Elsewhere a pimp tries to get an unwilling tween to turn tricks (twelve years-old for twelve dollars!), a dog gets shot in graphic detail, and hairy fat people are shown getting massages for a cheap laugh. It's undoubtedly trash, by design, a cheesy, juvenile movie destined to be discovered and treasured by fourteen-year-olds of all ages until the end of time.

Meg 2: The Trench

 The Meg was a movie with very, very few redeeming qualities: It wasted a fun premise on hoary clichés, unexciting and generic action, and way too much waffling with its corny, boring as fuck characters. It seemed to expect us to care about a bunch of shitty melodrama, while failing to deliver even close to the amount of madness needed to make it palatable.

 Director Ben Wheatley (in full anonymous studio director mode) course corrects admirably for the sequel. This movie has a lot of problems, but embracing its ridiculous sense of excess is not one of them. It populates its almost two hours with silly developments, punchy deaths, and not just shark attacks but some sort of crocodile dinosaur monsters and a giant octopus. Quantity over quality, absolutely, but in owning that it's a dumb monster movie and committing to it with enthusiasm, it makes its plot holes, continuity errors, laughably shallow characters and dodgy CGI entirely forgivable.

 After the events of the first movie, Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) has turned into some sort of a 'green James Bond', as his friends describe him while debating just how awesome he is. That only factors into the first scene and never really matters again, which is par for the course for this movie's script (by Jon & Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris - the same team who did the first one). It's fine; it gives Statham a decent fight scene, at least.

 The movie gets going properly after some table setting, when Jonas and suave scientist Jiuming (the great Wu Jing, who criminally doesn't get a single fight of his own) mount an expedition to the trench where The Meg originally came from: a hidden, mysterious ecosystem blocked off by a thermocline (a barrier of cold water). They take along a few characters to act as redshirts (these movies are firm believers in plot armor), and get a stowaway in Meiying (Sophia Cai), Jonas's teen stepdaughter.

 Once in the trench, the crew find an illicit mining operation and sabotage gets them stranded in the ocean floor From there it's a series of action scenes pretty much all the way to the finish line - fighting against various underwater beasties, then a host of evil mercenaries protecting the mining operation, and then all hell breaks loose as the thermocline is breached and a bunch of Megs, along with what may as well be a fucking Kraken make it to the surface (decompression doesn't seem to exist in this universe). 

 And you know what? It works. The action is varied, extravagant and fun: you get survival challenges, a nasty death when a helm breaches deep underwater, a die-hard-in-an-oilrig section, and an assortment of monsters going wild in some sort of beach resort which more than makes up for the piddly similar section in the first movie. This one has shots from within the shark as it snaps people up! Sure, there's barely any blood, but it's the sort of silly carnage that wouldn't necessarily benefit from it.
 The effects are... well, they're very artificial-looking, modelled after Chinese blockbusters where they don't really care about things looking even marginally realistic. Unless you're unusually sensitive to that, the action is cool enough that it's never more than a minor distraction.

 The script is terrible, but at least this time around it understands that it's only there to carry the characters from one peril to the next. It could stand to be a lot funnier (the characters communicate in glib sentences that often clunk lifelessly to the ground and... just lie there, flopping around in a sort of slow humour death), but at no point are we asked to care for some tired, trite melodrama.
 There are continuity errors aplenty, and while it's hard to accuse a movie with a plot as dumb as this of having plot holes, there's definitely a surfeit of dumb. As with the bad effects or the lack of anything deeper to say than 'the only thing cooler than a shark is a shark the size of five sharks', it's part of the movie's DNA; If you can look past it, there's a lot here to like.

Godzilla Minus One (Gojira -1.0)

  I'm not a huge Godzilla fan - I've always had affection for the guy, as he and his friends played in the background a lot when I was a kid. That affection's not enough to feel the need to revisit the films as an adult: I don't really have a lot of patience for '50s-style creature features - Kaiju movies have suits and destroyed miniatures going for them (and that does go a long way) but charm and nostalgia aren't that strong a pull.
 I've seen a few of the newer ones, both Japanese and American, but to be honest they kind of run together in my mind. Color me surprised, then, when there would be two stunningly good Godzilla movies in a row. Not just good Kaiju movies, but excellent films in pretty much any way that counts.

 Godzilla Minus One is a prequel to the original Godzilla, though it's best not to take continuity seriously in these things. As World War: the Sequel draws to a close Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot chickens out from his ordained duty to kill himself for the emperor, and goes back to land in a base at Odo island (the same island where the first part of the first Godzilla takes place). The ground crew boss, Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) sympathises, as the war is almost over anyhow and he sees that sacrifice would be pointless.
 That night, however, a T-rex-sized Godzilla comes ashore and attacks the base. Tachibana asks Shikishima to use the guns on his plane to bring down the beast, but Shikishima once again panics and flees, leaving everyone to die. Only he and Tachibana survive; Awkward!

 From  there things move to Tokyo. With the war over, The city is a bombed-out, post-apocalyptic hellscape. Everyone Shikishima knew has died except for a neighbour who blames him saying that if he'd done his job properly her children might still be alive. Ouch. Shikishima befriends and forms a family of sorts with another survivor - Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and a young child she rescued. Wracked with survivor's guilt, he gets a dangerous job cleaning up mines from the Pacific. And wouldn't you know it, there he runs into Godzilla again, who's now grown to the size of a tall building, has been snacking on warships, and is eyeing up Tokyo as his own personal stomping ground; Kaiju's gonna kaiju. The boat chase that ensues is a stunning bit of action filmmaking.

 From there the movie settles into the usual rhythms of these movies, as the plucky humans ineffectively try to stop the monster until they come up with a clever plan that might just work. What's different this time around is that the very grounded, post-war melodrama between Shikishima, Tachibana and Minami is just as compelling as any of the monster mash. The drama is extremely old fashioned - in fact, it'd fit right into movies made shortly after the movie takes place - but it's well written, well acted, and packs enough of an emotional punch to earn it a pass for its contrivances, common places and manipulative blows.

 The drama dovetails nicely into the action, which is thrilling, well filmed, and visceral in a way that no other Toho Kaiju film I've seen has ever been. Writer/Director/FX artist Takashi Yamazaki makes his incarnation of old Gojira vicious; even the act of it deploying its back-plates feels like an act of violence, its regeneration powers seem painful and chaotic, and whenever it blasts its heat ray you can see it burning away its own skin. The monster lays to waste several ships and pretty much the whole of Ginza, kills a bunch of people as graphically as a PG-13 film will allow, and is an all-round public nuisance.
 It's particularly impressive because this incarnation of the monster does away with a lot of the modernizations to the face, which is expressive, with very clear lines that feel heavily influenced by traditional Japanese art as much as anything. Gojira also does that thing where he seems to be swimming like a duck, seemingly standing waist-deep in water that's much deeper than that. The movie tactically doesn't show the furious paddling that must be going on underneath, but I got a chuckle out of it.

 And of course it's all going to symbolize something; It's impossible to not assign meaning to a character that was created as an attempt to work out a nation's post-nuclear collective trauma. I won't go into any specifics here, as parsing out the messaging is part of the fun, but the human story at the center of the movie fleshes out the movie's unexpectedly rich thematic heft.

 The movie runs over two hours, but there's so much happening and it's so well-paced it's never noticeable.
 Personally, I prefer Shin Godzilla, as wry satires are more my speed than earnest tearjerkers... but I have to concede this one is the superior movie and an absolute joy.

Oppenheimer

  Oppenheimer is a prestige biopic from Christopher Nolan about the 'father of the atom bomb'. It tracks Robert Oppenheimer's life (played by Cillian Murphy) from his youth at European universities to his fall from grace at the hands of politicians, going through his political experimentation, romantic misadventures, the creation of the A-bomb, and any other number of things besides in a tightly packed, breakneck three hours. It's kind of a mess.

 A lavish mess. Nolan directs with his usual verve, eye for experimentation and lush visuals, and keeps digital effects to a minimum. Nolan regular DP Hoyte Van Hoytemna is in place too, so you know it's going to look great, complete with very crisp black and white segments for one of the storylines.
 The acting is phenomenal, with a ridiculously stacked cast that besides Murphy includes Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon, Macon Blair in a pretty significant role (he does great!), Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett... I mean, any movie that has Niels Bohr as a character is going to be worth watching, and it's pleasure to see him played by Kenneth Branagh. My main disappointment in that department was that Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid) barely gets a couple of lines and is mostly just a weirdo in the background playing the bongos. They also have to don some dodgy-looking old-people makeup later on, but that's a minor complaint.

 The movie's got a few more significant issues that (I feel) work against it. One is that Nolan, in adapting the source novel, took the maximalist approach and tries to put everything in there. While I really respect that, maybe a (very) Hollywood film is not the best medium for a non-fiction novel. The film does try to tie its disparate elements thematically by adding some small flourishes in its depiction of Oppenheimer's internal life and, say, private conversations with Einstein (Tom Conti) and other luminaries, but it still comes across as a jumble of disparate events and throughlines.

 None of these is worse than the film's focus on Lewis Strauss (Downey Jr.), whose beef with Oppenheimer caused his downfall (spoilers!). Here he's given his own villain arc, complete with evil monologues, pinning the beef on extremely petty concerns, a voice of conscience in a fictional character played by Alden Ehrenreich, and a crowd-pleasing comeuppance complete with a mention of JFK. It is, as the Irish would say, cat altogether. Cat melodion, even.

 And that takes up a whole fucking hour. The film has other moments of pure Hollywood bullshit, such as giving the 'I am become death...' line its own cheesy origin story, but if I'm to be honest that involves Florence Pugh in the buff... so I'll allow that. There's also a bit where they compare mathematics to reading/feeling music, and the (gorgeous!) score by Ludwig Göransson goes into a symphonic overdrive as beautiful landscapes pass by, intercut with shots of Oppenheimer looking awestruck and jolts of abstract sub-atomic visualizations. It's a great scene, expertly directed, but... let's just say I don't really rate Nolan much as a scriptwriter these days.

 The editing of the film also exhausted me. It's kind of a thing of beauty (editor: Jennifer Lame), every shot consisting of no more than three seconds or so- it gives the movie an incredible sense of momentum, but after a while it becomes a bit punishing, especially as this is a film built out of conversations and quiet moments artificially jacked up (the soundtrack is particularly guilty of this) to build a sense of excitement.
 Nolan's usual timeline switching is more successful. There's a lot of effort and technical skill behind keeping a script that features so many characters and events presented in a non-linear way so relatively easy to parse. It still feels like it's there to make the movie sexier, to keep viewers engaged by making them work to figure things out, but that aspect felt to me well-made. 

 I sometimes I think I'd prefer Nolan would make smaller, less blockbustery films; That way we'd have an Inception without shitty, unnecessary action, and maybe he wouldn't feel the need to fill this one with all this nonsense. But that'd mean we wouldn't get Dunkirk, either, so what are you going to do. He's just not the best fit for a sprawling biopic, at least not one without a crystal-clear throughline.
 As it stands, Oppenheimer is two thirds of a good, not great, movie, and it's got some huge marks against it. But the amount of craft behind it cannot be denied, either.