Scared Stiff

  I have to admit I get a little excited whenever I find an 80's horror movie that's got decent production but I haven't even heard of. The sad truth, though, is that with more than 30 years as a horror fan if it's not foreign or a tiny budget miracle, there's probably a reason I didn't know about it.

 Scared Stiff is a haunted house yarn with a heavy debt to Poltergeist and House directed by Richard Friedman, whose best known movie is probably Phantom of the Mall: Erik's Revenge. It's... not as nearly good as its inspirations, nor is it as (marginally) fun as Phantom. It tries, though, bless its cheesy, poorly acted heart.

Pitching to the rafters

 The haunting in the house is due to a Voudoun curse that isn't just poorly defined, it's flat out not thought out at all. Apparently the master of the house in the bad old days, George Masterson (David Ramsey, who doesn't have a lot of credits besides this) was a rich, famous musician with anger management issues. For extra credit, he also moonlighted as a slave trader.
 His white man rage only got worse when a bunch of rebellious slaves magic'd him into slowly becoming a monster. Perhaps recognizing that turning a human monster into a literal one with ill-defined supernatural powers isn't the best of ideas, the slaves gave Elizabeth, George's saintly wife an amulet to protect herself and their son.

 Couple hundred years later, a doctor (Andrew Young) buys the house and moves into it with his famous pop star girlfriend  Kate (Mary Page Keller, a veteran TV actress who classes up the movie a little) and her young son. While Kate starts seeing the ghost of George everywhere, her boyfriend becomes more and more of a douche, until... eh, you can probably see where this is going. 

 Meanwhile, the bodies of Evil George's centuries-dead wife and kid are found in a chest in the attic of the manor, and David decides to gaslight Kate and try to convince her that there's nothing wrong.
 Besides all the boring psychological horror, there's quite a bit of overt supernatural stuff going on - the house has an infestation of... psychic pigeons, who at one point engineer a handyman's hanging, a kid's playset becomes animated (because Poltergeist, I guess), and cheap even for their time computer graphics come out of a screen to try and foreshadow stuff. None of these make the least bit of sense, but it's cheesy fun - the problem is that there's way too little of it until the movie goes properly off the rails for a very House finale complete with stumbling across different realities, and the movie finally lets loose with the gooey puppets and elaborate makeup effects.
 It's not great -the designs are a bit meh- but it's definitely something.

No one thought of calling Friedman to direct the Ninja Turtles movie?

 Compared to other low-budget bits of weirdness made outside of the system, this is actually not too bad - it looks professional (if a bit TV movie), it's obviously got a decent budget, and they do try to make it varied and interesting. There's a lot of 'what the hell were they thinking' moments but they aren't really that much worse than on other movies that are remembered much more fondly. And if 80's nostalgia is your thing then you're in luck, as the movie is heavily dated by many, many of its choices.

 Unfortunately, Scared stiff  isn't very memorable in any way other than some pretty terrible acting from all the male principals, including the kid - it's the fun kind of bad, and David Ramsey's silent-movie-style scenery chewing actually counts as a plus. 

 In the end there's a reason these things get buried. They'll get rediscovered and get a bit overrated every now and then by people hungry for the stuff, but as far as forgotten 80's horror movies go this one kind of deserves its obscurity.

Evil Dead Rise

  How cool is it that you can say that while Evil Dead Rise is by far the weakest out of the Evil Dead  movies, it's still a pretty great, mean little horror B-movie in its own right?

 The house that Sam Raimi built - five movies over forty-two years, and a TV show I should really get back to someday - has lately gone back to the basics. Fede Alvarez's underrated 2013 remake was all intensity, harkening back to the first Evil Dead with a heavy dollop of queasy, painful-looking violence; Evil Dead Rise, written and directed by Lee Kronin, hews close to that, but balances it out by making the gore a little more cartoony. Aside from short visual gag (hehe, visual!) that's a direct lift from Evil Dead 2, there are no real jokes here, but by dint of the violence being less realistic, we get something a little closer to Raimi's concept of a 'spookablast' - a fancy name for a horror movie that aims to be fun while keeping the scares.

 After a short cabin-in-the-woods set prologue (which expertly takes the piss out of the Evil Dead trademark zooming evil shots, and ends in a minor massacre with some pretty lackluster gore) the action moves to the big city. More specifically, a derelict building where single mother Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) lives with her children: two teens (Morgan Davies and Gabrielle Echols) and a kid (Nell Fisher). We're introduced to her by way of her estranged sister Beth (Lily Sullivan), who's come to crash with them for a while.
 Things are not going great for Ellie - she's been left by her husband, and the building she's living in is condemned, meaning that she has less than a month to find a new place and move. Also, an earthquake's just revealed an abandoned bank vault, from which one of her kids retrieves the Necronomicon Ex Mortis (they call it by another name, but I didn't catch it.)

 The script is fairly well put together - despite its short running time, it takes the time to try and make you empathise with these people. Maybe it's not wholly successful, but it's clear that they're good folks who love each other and really don't deserve the truckload of nasty shit heading their way.

 Great care is also taken to seed things that will come into play later - The mulcher in the garage, the fact that one of the neighbors has a shotgun and power tools, the garage blinders getting stuck, some scissors falling under a sofa... nothing incredibly clever, but cool nonetheless.

Insert post-Campbell catchphrase here

 Soon Ellie is possessed by the Evil, this time summoned by an incantation handily recorded in some LPs that came along with the book (next movie, maybe people can discover the audiobook version - it'll save time). The movie's best horror conceit is that the it then sets the possessed mum loose to try and cut her family - including a tiny, say Newt-sized child - into ribbons... which is laudably fucked up. We had a little of that on part deux, but it was all secondary characters, and it wasn't really played for horror.
 Things get bloody and pretty cruel. It does hold back a bit- it's got one of those scenes where a sharp implement gets inches away from an eye and then is pulled back, an act of blue-balling for the gore connoisseurs in the audience. Overall, though the mayhem is respectable, if a bit over the top and... yes, cartoony. Performatively disgusting, not actually disgusting, if that makes any sense. So the suffering isn't by any means realistic, and while that detracts a little from its impact, it does make it easier to enjoy the film as a ride. A spookablast with very little overt humor.

 It's not perfect (besides the aforementioned issues with the intro, I didn't really buy the final confrontation, and some of the character work is pretty shaky) but its problems are all pretty minor. All in all, it really works - it's energetic, isn't afraid to go for broke, and it does as best it can by the films that preceded it.

I'm not a fan of the intro, but damn if this isn't a great image (and it makes for a killer title screen)

 There are a ton of callbacks to Evil Deads past, from a certain audio-only cameo to people conspicuously saying "I'll swallow your soul" or "Dead by dawn!" to both a shotgun and a chainsaw seeing some heavy usage.
 There's also a lullaby. No Oldsmobile in sight, though.
 You can tell the crew has some real love for the series (quite a few of them worked on the TV series, presumably brought on by the producers.). Things play just a little too safe, but that's ok; it feels more like someone taking care not to fuck up something they love than overt calculation.
 Hopefully next time around we'll get the batshit insanity these films are best known for.

The Sword and the Sorcerer

  It'd be unfair to blame the success of Conan the Barbarian for the run of early eighties fantasy movies - especially Albert Pyun's The Sword and the Sorcerer, which came out on the same year. There must have been something in the water... or maybe it was D&D's popularity at the time.

 What is interesting is that most of these movies fit more in the Sword and Sorcery genre, as popularized by Robert E. Howard and other pulp authors, than within D&D's Tolkien pastiche. Unlike D&D-style fantasy, S&S tends to downplay the fantastic elements, avoids clear morality, and borrows a lot from horror. Magic is evil, or at least dangerous, and always mysterious.
 This movie follows suit, as the title makes clear, but it's not a great take on the genre. Clearly, it's not in the same league as the first Conan movie. But it's not in the same league as The Beastmaster, either, which also came out in the same year; Sad to say, despite directing some B-movie classics the late director Albert Pyun was mostly a purveyor of mediocrity, and this... well, I do kind of like it, but can't really say it's not mediocre. There's some good stuff but you have to wade through a lot of crap to get to it.
 More along the lines of Hawk the Slayer, then, or The Barbarian Brothers, though it does seems to have a respectable budget for this sort of thing.

 The movie begins with an excursion to an evil misty island, where the main villain of the piece king Titus Cromwell (Richard Lynch) awakens the secondary villain, an ancient snake sorcerer called Xusia (Richard Moll). His sarcophagus is a thing of beauty, a great bit of prop design with stone faces carved all over, which of course animate when the sorcerer is revived. Very cool.

 What's not cool, though, is Xusia; When one of the kings lackeys questions what the sorcerer brings to the table, instead of killing the lackey, he kills the witch that revived him! Asshole. Also, whenever he does magic his fingernails turn bright pink, like light sabers, in an effect that never stops being funny.

Seriously, though, that's one damn cool resting place.

 In any case: King Titus is going after the kingdom of Ehdan, one of those prosperous, good kingdoms ruled by peaceful goodie-two-shoes. With Xusia's help he wipes out half their army, but then backstabs the sorcerer, who escapes by jumping off a cliff. Then he proceeds to kill the royal family, but one of the heirs - Prince Talon escapes him, bearing a really goofy-looking three bladed sword (the blades are in parallel, which you'd think would be a problem when trying to use it to slash at anything). Luckily it seems they realized the thing is so stupid-looking, so they don't ever really show it used in a fight, but they do show it shooting off the two blades on the side.

 So King Titus managed to lose a dangerous, evil sorcerer, and the last descendant of the royal house he's usurping. The guy really needs to get better at tying loose ends.

 We jump to eleven years later, and Talon's grown up to be a Conan-like figure (the narration makes a point to name a lot of Conan's titles, even) played by Lee Horsley, a smug little shit with a perma-lopsided grin and immaculate feathered hair. He comes back to Edhan with his mercenary company to 'repay a debt', and things develop from there.
 Unfortunately, this is where the movie kind of dies on its ass, as we delve into the politics of Ehdan - freedom fighters staging a coup, a beautiful princess figure (Kathleen Beller) who's basically pressured to pay Talon with her body so he goes to rescue her brother, a conspiracy to kill off the kings from neighboring kingdoms, Xusia pulling strings from the shadows... ugh, honestly, I can't be arsed.

 The acting is porn-level bad, the characters are broad and stereotypical, there's no wit to be found in the script as it goes through the paces, and the action is mediocre, only redeemed because every now and then it gets pretty bloody. And it's all smothered by an orchestral score that buries everything under swashbuckling themes. The tone is kept pretty light (aided by that fucking soundtrack) but the script just can't support it, dumb and charmless as it is, and neither can the unlikable, barely delineated characters.

 There are good bits strewn throughout, enough to keep the whole thing from being a complete waste of time. The acting is bad enough to be funny sometimes. And despite the cinematography being pretty workmanlike, Pyun does have a pretty good eye for striking shots, so we get some of that. Also: lots of boobs and a few gory deaths.

Axe to the faaaaaayce!

 Re: boobs - women don't tend to get a lot of respect in this genre, and this is no exception. They get very little to do other than look pretty, and the female protagonist's big thing is to use her feminine wiles and then knee people in the balls. Ineffectively. Even animals get in on the action - there's a bit where a snake attacks a lady late in the film, and it has to get in between her thighs like it's on a Whitesnake album cover or something. So if that sort of thing bothers you, this is not the movie for you. Also, if you're looking for a good movie.

 It made a shitload of money compared to its budget, and is well-remembered enough that it got a sequel (as promised in the end credits) almost thirty years later, with Kevin Sorbo. I guess I'll need to watch that someday, but forgive me if I put it off for a while.

The Blind Detective

 Johnnie To is best known to me (and I'd wager, most non-Chinese cinema enthusiasts) for his gangster movies, but the guy has been filming since 1978, and in his ridiculously prolific career he's tried his hand at a ton of genres (including at least a couple of martial arts classics I plan on revisiting soon.)

 This includes comedies, and more specifically, romantic comedies. Now, I didn't know The Blind Detective was a romantic comedy going in, as it's a genre I really dislike, but here we are. I didn't like it, but I didn't turn it off mid-way like I tend to do with a lot of Chinese comedies, never mind romantic comedies. So... success?

 Johnston, the protagonist and titular Blind Detective is an unlikeable, shallow douchebag. Good job he's played by Andy Lau, whose effortless charisma goes a long way in making him sufferable at least some of the time. He used to be a policeman until his blindness got him kicked out of the force, and he's been using his deductive powers to solve cases before the police and get paid some reward money... which is apparently a thing in this movie.

 He's built up as some sort of Sherlock Holmes, but once we see him in action that falls apart quickly; His procedure is to take as much information as possible, try to imagine how things went on, and then... well, he basically pulls a random theory out of his arse based on his magical intuition.

 Seriously, the stuff he comes up with is so full of shit. It's tempting to say the movie is in on how ridiculous everything is, because it does let him get things wrong every now and then, but it's not presented like a flaw in his reasoning, more like a necessary step in working things out. Part of his process. It's a miracle he ever manages to even find a case, let alone solve one.

 His deductive powers so impress Goldie (Sammie Cheng), a rookie police woman who also happens to be  rich and beautiful (now there's an implausible character for you!) that she agrees to pay him one million dollars to track down a girl she slighted ten years ago and subsequently disappeared. Yes, that's the main plot in this movie.

 Or maybe not - as in, this is not the type of movie that is particularly preoccupied with plot. After taking (half) of the money, plus room and board, Johnston starts using her dime to work on other cases, and has the nerve to be offended when she calls him out on it. He automatically assumes she's ugly and constantly patronizes her and treats her like shit, part of it disguised as some sort of training to get her to be as great a detective as him.

 Now, this could be funny, except... it's not a comedy, it's a romantic comedy, and Johnston's actions are all supposed to be at least somewhat charming. We're supposed to root for these two to get together, and find Johnston relatable, even when he's actively torturing his prospective partner because, reasons. Stupid, stupid reasons.

 Goldie, meanwhile, is absolutely smitten with the douchebag, so she basically acts like a doormat for the whole movie - it's her fate to go through the slapstick humiliations that (bad) Chinese cinema seems to find endlessly hilarious.

 There's an uncomfortable edge to their relationship that could have been sharpened into a decent comedy, but the script is so misbegotten that I don't think it even realizes that. It's just going through the formula, you know? The two lovers don't know they're in love until the third act. It's just that in this one, one of them just assumed the other one is fugly and doesn't want his friends to be ashamed of him.

 So we're left with a bloated, unfunny mess of a movie with a beyond fucking terrible script, buoyed by good filmmaking and the ridiculous amounts of charisma of its stars (Guo Tao rounds out the cast as Johnston's frenemy, now a police commissioner). It takes two hours to tell its nothing story.
 There are glimmers of a better movie buried deep in this turgid pile of crap. Andy Lau and Sammie Cheng crack up every now and then during their line deliveries, which hints at the fact that the cast was having way more fun than the viewers; A little annoying, but also endearing. Watching Lau's outsized confidence and silly mannerisms, like the way he plays with his folding cane, is always amusing, even when the script saddles him with unlikeable lines and idiotic attitudes.
 There's also a case-solving scene set in a morgue that is kind of fun, mostly because two assistants stay in the background and add a running commentary. It's also got the lone laugh-out-loud moment in the movie. There's a couple of stunts and a tiny bit of a fight, too, all well made, but they are such a tiny part of the movie as to be negligible.

 These things add up a little, to the point where it makes the film bearable. But I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

The movie's not nationalistic at all, but daaaaamn, check out that production logo...

Wyrmwood: Apocalypse

  Wyrmwood: Apocalypse is the eight-years in the making continuation of the Wyrmwood saga. That's the one where they use zombie breath to fuel cars, in case you've forgotten.

 Siblings Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Brooke (Bianca Bradey) are still running around, trying to survive - Bianca, who was injected with some weird fluorescent zombie juice in the first one by a mad scientist, is basically a zombie herself now, though a more reasonable one.
 Not reasonable enough to avoid biting the neck of one of another pair of siblings Barry and she are running with now, though. Understandably, the sisters, Grace (Tasia Zalar) and Maxi (Shantae Barnes-Cowan) take offence/are horrified at this and decide to split post-haste.

 At this point the action starts following a mercenary named Rhys (Luke McKenzie), the twin brother of a soldier Barry had to deal with (fatally) in the first movie. His introduction is really great, as he goes around his small compound and follows his morning routine; the guy's got the post-apocalypse all figured out.
 Rhys's job is to fetch people and bring them to a tiny underground facility that's run by, oh shit, is that supposed to be the mad scientist from the first movie? How did he survive?
 Well, maybe he isn't, since he's played by a different actor (Nicholas Boshier.) In any case, Rhys thinks he's rounding up people so they can work on a cure, and it's assumed he doesn't suspect they're doing the sort of shit we know they do down there. So he's a good guy working for bad people, though he should really fucking know better.

 Things kick into gear when Rhys ambushes Grace and Maxi and manages to take Grace to the lab. Maxi, in turn, manages to catch Rhys unawares later, and forces him to help him rescue her sister. In due course Rhys's eyes are opened to the sort of shit the government-type shady bastards are up to, and they get together with Barry and Brooke for a couple of climactic confrontations.

 The plot is more than a little loopy, but it's fun and propulsive, and the amount of conflicts between the characters keeps things unpredictable. The Roche-Turner brothers have gotten better at the modest sort of spectacle they enjoy delivering, increasing the scope a little without losing any of the energy or the sense of fun. The action here is varied, including car chases, a giant mutant zombie fight, big explosions, an air cannon, a gatling gun, and of course, lots of zombies, though they take a back seat as most of the fights are against soldier-types.

 More of the same, and in this case that's not a bad thing at all. As long as they keep making them, and keep this level of crazy, early Raimi/Miller-style vibes, I'll keep watching them.

The Mission (1999)

 The Mission is a Hong Kong Triad thriller from Johnnie To - an uneven director who's nonetheless provided more than his share of essential movies across the years and within multiple genres. This one's near the top of those.

  When a Triad boss (Eddie Ko) narrowly escapes an assassination in a bar, his brother (Simon Yam) puts together a crack team of enforcers; their mission, should they accept it, is to protect him from any further assassination attempts, and if possible to work out who's ordered the hit.
 In one of the movies brilliant touches, we've already seen the members of the team before they're properly introduced - shown as the camera roved the streets in introductory scenes, each one in his place of business ('his' being the key word here- this is very much the type of lad's film where women are only ever an inconvenience.)

 There's Curtis (Anthony Wong), cool as a cucumber, the experienced leader.
 James (Suet Lam), the weapons expert, whose defining trait is, unfortunately, being fat(-ter than the others) and eating all the time. He's still given the opportunity to be very cool and professional, though- not at all a comic relief character.
 Roy (Francis Ng), the hot-headed one.
 Mike (Roy Cheung), the pretty one, an ex-pimp. Suave and eager to move up in the world.
 And Shin (Jackie Lui,) the necessary rookie in the team, puppy-like. Roy's protégé.

 The film's considerable pleasures mostly stem from watching this team of likeable badasses come together and deal with situations both professional (there are multiple action sequences, a couple of which are stellar) and interpersonal. The script cleverly arranges for us to get to know the characters at the same time as they get to know each other, and lets us watch as they build ties of respect and affection for each other.

 The action is, as you'd expect from Johnnie To, impeccable. It's all gun violence, but it diverges from, say, John Woo by focusing more on suspense than on action beats. Here we also get to see the protagonists function as a team, all of them highly professional and coordinated - a shootout at a mall should be listed up there with the best HK action scenes, and it clearly shows off To's sensibilities.
 A couple of the gunfights consist a bit too much of people just emptying clips at each other, but there are plenty of cool moments and maneuvers so that it never gets boring. Great stuff, and especially impressive given the amount of money they're working with.

 Because it's very low budget, there aren't a lot of fireworks, and everything is kept mostly low-key. The director makes it work in the film's favour - this is a crime film that makes time for an absolutely joyful scene consisting of an extended take of a bunch of hitmen kicking around a crumpled ball of paper in an office while they wait for their boss to finish his business.
 And the filmmaking is immaculate and extremely atmospheric; Johnnie To had already been making films for almost two decades when he made this, and his talent and experience shine through the rough patches.

 The soundtrack is cheesy as all hell, but it's so insistent it's almost ingratiating. By the end of the movie it kind of grew on me; A weak point, but certainly memorable.

 The main problem with the movie is that, like so many of its brethren, it's criminally hard to get a hold of a decent copy here in the UK. It's on youtube in its entirety, but it's not a great transfer of the DVD; I'd been holding off  watching it for years, waiting for a proper disc release until I finally caved in. It's not ideal, but I'm so glad I did.

Before We Vanish (Sanpo suru shinryakusha)

 Kiyoshi Kurosawa's done a lot of experimenting with genre films, but no matter what toolset he's using, you're always going to end up with a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film. Sometimes you get a superb little gem like Pulse or Cure, which work beautifully within their chosen genre and excel at conveying complex ideas. And sometimes you end up with Something like Before We Vanish. Which... doesn't do either of those things particularly well.

 It's a two-hour and change yarn about intangible alien invaders who take over human hosts in order to learn about humanity in preparation for a hostile invasion. They learn by 'taking' 'conceptions' - as in, someone's conception of ownership, or family.
 Whatever they take, is gone from that person's mind - the concept itself becomes alien to them. It's a fun idea that sadly isn't really explored very well; most of the 'takings' that we see have pretty simplistic consequences.

 Three aliens land on earth. Two of them, including a schoolgirl (Yuri Tsunematsu) who is responsible for all the carnage in the film, enrol a cynical journalist (Hiroki Hasegawa) to be their guide, as they collect conceptions and build a communicator that will allow them to call down the invasion.
 The other alien takes over a cheating husband (Ryuhei Matsuda) still living with his estranged wife (Masami Nagasawa). From there most of the action is about them trying to get together, with the husband character taking the most interest in humanity, and specifically trying to understand the relationship with his wife. Things get a little more complicated, but not much, especially when the government gets involved and actively (but very ineffectually) starts tracking down and trying to eliminate the aliens.

 Despite having a few full-on action sequences (well made, for a non-action movie, with some fun ideas) the film itself is a slow-moving drama/comedy that scores some laughs but has one fatal flaw - few of the characters actually behaves like a human being.

 That's at least somewhat intentional -part of the joke- but it doesn't help the viewing experience. There's a slightly muddled message in there about what humanity has become.
 But for the drama to work, the script really needs to be a lot better. The motivations of some of the characters -specifically the journalist- are completely inscrutable, and a lot of their responses to events feel off. The governmental response to the alien threat is absolutely ridiculous. Neither the dramatic elements nor the genre plotting work very well; It's very scattershot, which is something I've noticed on other lesser films by the same director.

 It's enjoyable overall -the technical aspects are all top notch, except maybe a too-intrusive soundtrack- but way too long for such slim pickings. What Kurosawa is trying to communicate feels a bit muddled and doesn't feel particularly deep, especially with a very predictable, but very sappy twist at the end.

 Kairo, his apocalypse by ghosts film, is one of my favorite horror movies (and definitely the best J-horror film ever made). It's a shame his alien apocalypse feels so half-assed.

Mayhem

 So this is one I've had in the backlog for ages - it looked good, but a bit too slick, too glib. It also seemed too similar to The Belko Experiment. I shouldn't have worried; I mean, it *is* way too slick and too glib, but that's ok, it's also a lot of fun. And it's not that similar to The Belko Experiment.

 A would-be abrasive horror comedy that plays it extremely safe? That dares cast corporate execs (at a law firm!) as evil? Well, yeah, it's not going to win any points with those looking for originality or edgy stuff. But once you get past all that, there's a lot to like here.
 The premise, for one: as a fun narrated intro explains. a mysterious pandemic is raging through the world (have in mind that this came out in 2017.) Called Redeye because it causes ocular hemorrhages, its main effect is to lower inhibitions, enabling "emotional hijacking" - so that's cool, it's basically a petty weak rage virus, or like the Crazies if the Crazies were more Mildly Hysterics.
 So when it strikes it's closer to a drunken mob/orgy than a massacre. BUT: in a landmark case, a dude who killed another dude while infected was exonerated of all charges.

 This is all just the background. Our protagonist Derek (Steven Yeun,) a once idealistic young lawyer who's abandoned his principles to rise in the firm's hierarchy by basically becoming evil, is caught up in a political ploy and unceremoniously dropped to the wolves like an ugly baby.
 But just as he's being escorted outside, SWAT teams arrive escorting medics and health workers and cordon off the building: There's an outbreak of the Redeye virus, and for the next eight hours everyone needs to remain inside.

I like this shot, zooming in on their 'infected' eyes (for some reason, people only get one red eye)

 You can see where this is going, right? Derek, acutely aware that he can literally get away with murder while infected, decides to go up to the penthouse and kill everyone who wronged him. On the way he meets a ridiculously beautiful lawyer (Samara Weaving) whom he'd previously screwed over in a family home foreclosure (in a scene designed to establish just how low he'd sunk kowtowing to the corporate overlords.) He gets her on his side by promising to undo the foreclosure, and off they go, armed with a bunch of maintenance equipment, to paint the cubicles red.

 As an aside, it's easy to imagine what, say, Sam Raimi would have done with this setup, the amount of comeuppance Derek would have piled upon him in his hypocritical quest for revenge. But nope, this movie settles on the much more simplistic tack that he's actually turned a new leaf and is now a good person (who's basically using the virus as an excuse to commit a bunch of killings.)
 It's still a good premise, but with no follow-through. Seriously, don't expect any sort of depth here. It's a dumb movie with a plot that soon settles on "Get to floor five so you can beat the head of HR, to get his keycard that will allow you to get to floor 7, where you can beat up this other person you wanted revenge on and get her keycard, which in turn..."
 Yeah, basically a bad videogame plot. But it moves at a clip, providing enough incident and inventive and colorful carnage... which, honestly, is all it needs to do. It also gets a lot of mileage out of the titular mayhem, like a bunch of office nerds gone feral trying to cash in the bounty on our hero's head, or a lot of incidental background nuttiness.
 My favorite: a dude going around the office, saying "fuck you! fuck you! FUCK YOU! You're cool. Fuck you!" That made me laugh out loud.

 Samara Weaving is a highlight - she's very much a male fantasy designed for the hero to get with at the end. But she has a lot of fun with her character, a lawyer who lists "Motorhead, DRI and early Anthrax" as her favorite bands and decides to go along with the ride, laughing like a complete knucklehead at random acts of brutality.

 The script does have its good moments, but aside from its lack of balls it also gets little too cute with the narration, including a pretty didactic ending complete with a message not to be an asshole. It's a shame the movie doesn't do anything more with its subversive premise, but, well, being entertaining goes a long distance in this sort of thing.

A Ghost Waits

  Shot over a number of years with a rotating film crew, Adam Stovall’s A Ghost Waits is a fun, cute, black and white microbudget horror/romantic comedy mashup.

 Jack (MacLeod Andrews) is a handyman who earns his living by surveying vacant properties before they’re put on the market again. Because his own flat is being fumigated, he ends up having to stay at the latest place he’s surveying, a house where the previous tenants mysteriously left all their stuff behind.

 We know from a cold open that the reason for that is that the house is haunted. And when Jack spends a night there, he becomes a target for the resident ghost.
 At first the supernatural stuff is subtle; opening and closing doors, strange noises, that sort of thing, played mostly for comedy as Jack remains oblivious to it (this movie is only nominally horror; there are no scares.) There’s a cute bit where the ghost provides backup singing when Jack’s fooling around with a guitar.

 Jack’s a likeable character, a slacker type who nonetheless takes pride in his work and tries to be professional about it. This actually factors into the plot in a couple of ways: mainly, that when the haunting begins in earnest, his reluctance to leave his work half-done wins over his fear. So he decides to come back and confront the ghost.

 And here the film splits out in several interesting directions. For one, the ghost, Muriel (Natalie Walker,) is taken aback that someone would try to establish a dialog with her, and she goes back to a sort of underworld office (which looks exactly like a normal office) to ask her own boss for advice; Turns out Muriel is also a kind of blue collar worker, and the film’s nebulous metaphysics provide some really interesting parallels between her and Jack.
 This was my favourite aspect of the movie – once Jack and Muriel get to talking, they establish an easy rapport – Jack’s easy-going and talkative, Muriel is more reserved and old-fashioned, but both start questioning their… maybe not values, but what they’re doing and how they’re going about it. At one point Muriel accuses Jack of being The Enemy, because he’s the one who brings people into the house while she’s in charge of keeping them out… and the movie kind of supports that, with its wonky, low-key metaphysics. It’s great.

 Some complications are introduced when a junior, more gung-ho ghost is sent by Muriel’s supervisor to help her get rid of Jack. This is the second bit where Jack’s professionalism comes into play, because we’re shown that Muriel takes as much pride in her work as jack does.

 The script does an admirable job of setting up interesting tangents like that. It isn’t very good at being naturalistic, with a lot of lines that feel a bit too forcedly twee, and people talking at each other rather than having anything resembling a dialog. The love story, in particular, feels a bit too compressed, even though both actors sell it well and the story supports it well. The film had to be retooled and it shows (the fact that it’s black and white is just as practical as an aesthetic decision – it helped make the original footage mesh with the reshoots.)
 There are no special effects beyond some very simple makeup effects (which must have been hell to do at this budget level,) and the acting is... a little on the stilted side, with some slight over-emoting, but nothing that should take you out of the story. At eighty minutes, none of the film's problems are major enough to get in its own way.

 It’s not going to set anyone’s world on fire, and its quirky indie-style dialog can get to be a little exhausting, but it’s brisk, brings some cool/funny concepts to the table, and a shitload of charm. Not bad.

The Deep House

 Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury enjoyed some infamy as part of the New French Extremity Horror wave of the late 00's with Inside, one of the better and most unsettling films of that short-lived movement. They've been plugging away since, with uneven results, and after some bad experiences working abroad they've elected to stay in France.

 In 2019 they released The Deep House, an excellent slow burn horror film that is low on explanation or common sense, but compensates by having a kick-ass premise, a bunch of great scares, great cinematography, and being creepy as all hell.

 Ben (James Jagger) and Tina (Camille Rowe) are a couple of twenty somethings trying to make a living by going into supposedly haunted buildings and filming their exploits. Ben is extremely British and very, very dickish, while his French fiancé is the more susceptible, easily scared one.

 Early on in the movie, they catch wind of a whole town that was submerged with the construction of a new dam, and decide that it would make a great webcast. So off they go to the south of France, equipped with SCUBA gear and an underwater drone.
 When they arrive, though, they find out that the lake is full of tourists, and that the town was demolished (as, sadly, they usually are in these cases; that's why there are so few subaquatic urban exploration pictures of this sort out there.)

 As (bad) luck would have it, though, a creepy local offers to take them to a branch of the lake that's off the beaten path, where he says they'll find a fully preserved manor house. Our intrepid youtubers take him on as a guide, and after a short dive find that he was telling the truth.

 The second and third acts are completely underwater, and the cinematography is astounding for a relatively low-budget euro-horror movie like this. The film plays very similarly to the same directors' earlier Livide (still their best, by my reckoning), with the young couple exploring the house room by room and finding evidence that things are very fucked up indeed in the house, with an expert buildup of creepiness that's not helped at all by their diminishing oxygen reserves.

 Things don't make an awful lot of sense, some of it by design (the movie subscribes to the idea that horror works best when it's unexplainable) and some of it due to weird decisions like recurring references to Tina's ophidiophobia. But it's an excellent update to the haunted house genre, with the killer twist that its victims are all divers.

Wolf Guy (Urufu Gai)

  Wolf Guy (full title- Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope) is a fun 1975 Japanese B-movie from Toei that piles on the sleaze and the exploitation, and stars none other than The Street Fighter himself, Sonny Chiba. Unlike on those movies, Chiba plays a suave, very moral character here - part of the joke being that he, an actual animal person, is more civilized than the degenerates who live in the city.

 Yes, Chiba plays a werewolf, the last of his kind, as his town/family home was wiped out when he was a child by an armed mob. It's not your typical werewolf, though; he doesn't transform or even get a little hairier, like the one other werewolf we'll see later; it's just that under the full moon, he becomes super strong and immune to bullets (just like real wolves, I think - just checked Wikipedia and it doesn't say anywhere wolves are vulnerable to bullets.)
 He also has beautiful women basically immediately rip their clothes off and throw themselves at his feet or fall in love with him, but I think that's a Sonny Chiba thing, not a Wolf Guy thing. The dude exudes charisma.

 Things kick off with a guy running across downtown Tokyo, screaming something about a curse, a girl called Miki, and that there's a tiger out to get him. Wolf Guy happens to be nearby and tries to help him, but the dude is cut open by invisible claws in a pretty cool, grisly scene. It might even have been scary, except that the funky soundtrack kicks in just then, all squealing guitars and electric piano.
 Wolf Guy is the only person to see him die, which comes complete (I'm guessing because of his wolf guy senses) with a very cheesy tiger hallucination:

 The police take Wolf in, and are obviously familiar with him because they give him shit about always making a mess of things. At first I thought Chiba was a private eye, but later he says he's a journalist.
 In any case the autopsy report comes in and Wolf is exonerated because, I kid you not, the cause of death is determined to be demons. Ladies and gentlemen, this movie is officially awesome.

 Wolf starts poking into the case, and finds out that he victim was the member of a rock group called The Mobs, and that other members have died a similar way. During the investigation he finds that they gang raped a singer called Miki (Etsuko Nami), gave her syphilis and basically ruined her life; she's now a total heroin junkie. That's... yeah, that's a pretty good reason to unleash a deadly curse, I guess. There's a conspiracy behind it that goes all the way to an important Conservative party politician  so Wolf has multiple confrontations with yakuza thugs as he starts working things out.

 So yeah, it's pretty sleazy and goes to some dark places. Also: boobs, squibs and a lot of fights, shot in pretty shaky handheld, but still legible and fun. Because Wolf is a very sincere, stand-up guy, it kind of dilutes the ugliness of the movie; as soon as he finds Miki, for example, he resolves to stand by her no matter what. Very empathetic, though the way he goes about it is kind of laughable.

 The movie lays the groundwork for a very satisfying revenge/bringing powerful people to justice kind of thing, but it's completely derailed when the government steps in. They've been observing Wolf and Miki, you see, and want to harness their powers for their use. They Brainwash Miki and use her to eliminate political targets, while Wolf is tortured (in a scene where they splice in real surgical footage; not cool).
 He bides his time, knowing that when the moon is full he'll get his chance - a Firestarter situation, done half a decade before King published the book.

 There's a really fun setup for a random maze of death and a superpowered opponent for Wolf Guy, but the resolution to both is perfunctory and anticlimactic. That's because instead of ending things there, the film launches into a third act that follows yet another tangent.
 I mean, what happens next makes sense for the character, but it comes out of nowhere and kills the momentum the movie had been gathering for the second fucking time.

 Some loose ends do get tied up in the end, rather clumsily, but by then what I thought would be a classic ended up as more of a fun disappointment. Oh well. Two thirds of it are great, and it's got Chiba at the height of his powers; that's always fun to watch.

Nightmare at Noon

 Nightmare at Noon is a low budget, very very eighties action/horror movie- more action than horror, about a town infected with the rage virus.

 As far as eighties B-movies go, this is strictly mid-to-low tier, but it isn't a complete waste of time either. It's very much of its time, and not something that needs to be rediscovered or anything: It's cheesy, clumsy, lacking in any depth, and nothing that happens quite makes sense, but it does offer some amount of coolness. I'd never heard of it, despite it being very much the sort of thing I'd seek out for most of my life; I think younger me would have liked it a lot.

 Things kick off with that most nefarious of the alphabet organizations -the EPA- messing around near a town's water supply with their futuristic computers and tech and machineguns (!). That they're up to no good is made clear when a charming local yokel drives up and tries to engage them in friendly conversation and gets shot right in the beard. And everywhere else.
 Then the head EPA guy, an albino played by (non-albino in whitehair) Brion James, shoots some green gunk into the water, and officially kicks off the experiment on his computer.

 We then cut to Ken (Wings Hauser) and Cheri Griffiths (Kimberly Beck), a married couple of 80's stock characters on a holiday cross-US camper van roadtrip where of course they seem to spend all their time quarreling and being a smartass to each other. They pick up a hitchhiker called Reilly (Bo Hopkins) who's too suave by half, and head to town for breakfast.

 At the diner a seemingly sweet redneck suddenly turns murderous - he stabs a waitress with a knife, and then starts attacking everyone. This is a great scene because Ken, the urbane lawyer, tries to stop him and gets his ass handed to him. Then Reilly, who had been hanging back, playing it cool, goes up to the berserk yokel, gets a couple of good hits in... and then gets his own ass kicked! Good subversion of expectations, movie. Don't expect much of  that sort of thing, it's pretty much a one-time show of cleverness, but it's much appreciated.

 Reilly ends up shooting the... fuck, let's call him a zombie, because that's pretty much what he is* - in any case, he shoots him in the knee, which explodes in green blood. Whatever the EPA put in the water, it acts pretty fast. In typical b-movie fashion, no one seems to think that merits freaking out over.

 The sheriff (George Kennedy!) joins the action, along with his police officer daughter Julia (Kim Ross) just in time to explain that regular people are going insane all over town. Ken and Cheri decide to bail out, but their motorhome is stopped dead when the evil EPA operatives activate an EMP-like plot device that stops all cars heading outside of town; So they have to go back and join the non-infected survivors to try to formulate a plan... to... well, it's not clear what they're trying to achieve. at least not until they work out what's happening and get an actual goal they can work towards later on.

 There's some fun scenes as chaos breaks loose, but not as much as you'd hope for, I imagine due to budget constraints, but also because there's a lot of extraneous drama with these very basic characters that the script seems to think we give a single shit about. Stuff happens and there's a lot of wheel-spinning, but don't expect much in the way of interesting developments, sense of fun... or even basic common sense.

 On the other hand, in the best tradition of 80's low budget nonsense, it does pack in a lot of cool stuff.
 There are a ton of stunts, many of them minor, plenty pretty impressive - and quantity does matter in this sort of thing. There are also a lot of explosions, long loving shots of people using flamethrowers, and a whole lot of shooting. The action is... pretty standard for non-asian 80's action; people take turns shooting at each other, and every now and then someone on the other side gets hit; Nothing too exciting. The car stunts fare a lot better: this is the sort of movie where the tiniest fender bender can set off a huge fireball.

 The final act takes place in the desert, complete with horse chases and the incredible beauty of the Arches national park; it turns into a western for a while as the EPA spooks head for the mesas.

 There is also a completely extraneous but legitimately cool helicopter chase intercut with the finale, and that's the one thing this movie knocks out of the park. I especially love that missed missiles still manage to hit a vehicle randomly parked out in the middle of the desert... not once, but twice! Awesome.

Lizard brain comfort food

 The sound mix deserves special mention, because it adds a hell of a lot to the cheese factor in the movie; everything gets its own distinct sound effect. A cursor blinking on a screen? Beep! Beep! A futuristic crossbow thing being reloaded? Schwing! And so on. It's pretty funny; I hope the foley artist got a good paycheck out of it.

 The music, composed by Hans Zimmer (!) with his mentor Stanley Myers is of the unmemorable crappy synth variety, intrusive and obvious, and nowhere near as catchy as their awesome earlier work on The Wind. It does reference a couple of classic western soundtracks on the finale, which is cute.

 So... yeah. If I had seen this as a teen that helicopter chase, along with the abundance of squibs, the horror-ish tone and Kim Ross - I'm pretty sure I'd remember the movie fondly. These days I'm much a little pickier, but I can definitely still see the appeal.

*: The zombies in this film are pretty high-functioning, and [spoilers] can apparently be healed, so purists may disagree.

Incident in a Ghostland

 Pascal Laugier does not make movies that are easy to recommend. His latest, Incident in a Ghostland, is no exception. It's... problematic, both for its subject matter and some ridiculous script decisions.

 The Keller family are moving to a house their aunt's left them on their will, somewhere in rural Manitoba. On the way, one of the daughters reads a news article about a series of killings where the adults are killed and the daughters are spared, to be tortured for weeks. Later, they're accosted by a weird-ass ice cream truck that follows them on the road for a while.
 Yeah, it's a little on the nose. It gets worse.

 Mom (Mylène Farmer) and daughters Beth (Emilia Jones - the nerdy one, wants to be a horror writer) and Vera (Taylor Hickson - the older one with the teen attitude) arrive at the house and find that their aunt had the type of taste in decoration only found in horror movies: all creepy tchotchkes and deformed dolls no right-thinking child would ever want to get close to.
 As they're unboxing stuff and setting up for the night, the ice cream truck arrives and in come the home invaders and... sigh. The villains are a seriously mentally handicapped mountain of a man, and an evil transvestite. I mean, come on.

 In any case, the invasion is brutal and easily the morbid highlight of the film. Tense, unsettling, shocking and everything this sort of thing should be in a movie in this genre. And yes, the threat of sexual violence is obvious, though it's implied rather than shown in any way. Still. It's pretty fucking intense and worth avoiding if this is not your sort of thing.
 Just as the dust settles mom, who had been left for dead, comes to the rescue and after a really nasty fight manages to somehow overpower the attackers.

 Cut to a decade and something later. Beth (now played by Crystal Reed) has become a famous horror writer, just like she always wanted. Her latest book, Incident in a Ghostland, is a best seller, she's got an adoring husband and a cute kid (who likes to dress up as young Mike Myers did for Halloween,) and is pretty much living in her best timeline.

 At least until her sister calls her in a state of panic. You see, her mom and sister stayed on the site of the home invasion (great call, mom), and poor Vera's been reliving that night over and over ever since. Worried, Beth tries to call mom, but can't get through. So she decides it's time for a family visit.

 When she gets there, everything turns out to be fine - or as fine as it could be, at least. Mom is fine. Vera is completely insane, hurting herself and causing a lot of emotional distress to her poor mom, but what can you do. The problem is, as the nights go on, weird things keep happening, and things don't add up.
 There's an obvious twist somewhere around here, one that's very easy to see coming. It almost ruined the movie for me because I did see it coming and thought that that was going to be what the movie was about... but no, the reveal comes fairly quickly (although not quickly enough.) The second half of the film is much more interesting.

 To go into more detail would be spoiling things. But it's pretty dark, and while it's not scary in the traditional sense it does offer tons of atmosphere, a lot of tension, and standard horror beats (expect a lot of jump scares). I'd rate it a lot higher if they didn't commit a critical fumble at the very end, leaving things a little more unsatisfying than they could have been.
 Also, maybe don't reference Lovecraft if the movie's not going to have any sort of cosmic horror.

 Technically it's superb, as you'd expect from Laugier - brilliantly shot and edited, with some outstanding (if eye-rolling-ly silly) sets. He also wrote the script, so some of the dialog is a little wooden. The music is fine, your standard horror tinkly piano, and the acting is great, with the actresses really selling their characters' distress.

 Incident in a Ghostland is a very thorny movie with some really daft choices, a couple really good ones, and a willingness to be deeply unpleasant and disreputable. It also has genuine warmth for its characters and as much as it wallows in misery, it has a positive message. It's just that you have to wallow through a lot of misery to get to it.

The Great Yokai War (Yôkai daisensô)

 Japanese folklore is rife with all sorts of spirits, ghosts and monsters. They range from objects that gain sentience after one hundred years of existence, to Llorona-like ghosts looking for their children, to weirder stuff like giant heads floating in the sky and nature spirits of all sorts.

  They're collectively known as Yokai, and pop up everywhere from comics to movies to videogames and more; they've been codified and illustrated for centuries, most famously and recently by Shigeru Mizuki, who produced a huge number of popular Yokai comics since the 1960's and is responsible for how many people visualize them these days.

 The Great Yokai War is Takashi Miike's loose remake of a 60's movie known as Spook Warfare. Shigeru Mizuki was a consultant, and even has a small role in the film, so it makes sense that the movie does its best to recreate Mizuki's designs.

 It follows the adventures of a little boy (Ryunosuke Kamiki) who is bitten by a radioactive ritual parade float, which marks him out as the destined Ki-Rin rider, a warrior for peace and stuff. The kid, Tadeshi, has other problems - his parents are recently divorced and he was sent out to a small town in the country. His mother is never around, so he needs to look after his senile grandfather.

 But the wheels of destiny are spinning, and somewhere in Japan the ghost of an ancient warlord is mustering hordes of dissatisfied spirits in an industrial hellscape that doubles as his base and is also a giant flying monster(!) He's rounded up all the innocent yokai he could find, to throw them into a furnace and turn them into an evil robotic army.

 So... yeah, Tadeshi needs to fight the evil ghost. This involves a group of Yokai seeking him out, a magic sword, adventures and misadventures... it's a kid's film through and through, and to be honest, not a terribly engaging one. The effects weren't great for 2005, much less now, and while the Yokai are all charming and mostly creative costuming, the main opponents here -the machine-yokai hybrids- really aren't that much to look at, as well as being composed of the aforementioned bad CGI. 

 I am really not the target audience for this, despite loving Yokai lore. Miike's a great director, and manages some memorable imagery here, but the film is just pitched too low. To be honest I liked it the most while the Yokai haven't really made their presence known, as once they're in the picture they crowd out any subtlety or a hope for decent pacing; the early scenes of Tadeshi's daily life strike a lovely, wistful tone, and an early scene where he goes look for the sword on his own works really well, with some lovely natural scenery.

 After that... there's things to like, for sure. The main villain (played by Etsushi Toyokawa) cuts a striking figure, but the biggest impression is made by his #2, Agi (Chiaki Kuriyama,) a henchwoman with the obvious hots for her boss, rocking a white beehive hairdo and tight dresses. She fights with strings she swings around like whips, and is basically a lot of fun to watch.

 The Yokai themselves are cool to look at, but not so interesting to listen to. There are a lot of them, though, especially when they form a ridiculously large mob near the end - a seriously impressive bit of spectacle.

 So it's not really something I would recommend, except for babysitting purposes. There are a few touches that are pretty inappropriate for children -a severed arm, gushing blood, or multiple shots of kids lustily groping a Yokai's milky thighs- but nothing your typical kid can't handle these days. I've seen worse in other Japanese kid's movies, so I wouldn't really blame them on Miike.

First Love (Hatsukoi)

 Takashi Miike's done just about every genre in his ridiculously prolific career, and quite a few of them have been Yakuza movies.
 First Love, from 2019, is one of his more restrained efforts - and by that, I mean restrained by his standards; It's still pretty nuts. It almost passes for a normal Yakuza movie most of the time, and a damn good one at that. A funny, twisty delight with some pretty damn memorable characters and scenes. So many cool little details and unexpected touches; Very highly recommended.

 As the title implies, the film's got two young lovers at its heart. Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a disaffected youth, a boxer who fights only because he's good at it, without joy or passion. His life is turned upside down when he gets diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor. Meanwhile, Yuri (Sakurako Konishi) was basically sold into sex slavery by her father, and she starts the movie with withdrawal-induced hallucinations of her dear old dad coming after her wearing only his underwear.

Hey, I think I played this part in one of the Yakuza games.

 And then there's the crime story. As the local Yakuza slowly lose ground to changing times and Chinese triads, Kaese (Shôta Sometani,) a mid-ranking officer, decides he's had enough and wants out of the family. His plan: Steal a bag of meth from a couple of goons, kill said goons, give the drugs to a crooked cop (Miike regular Nao Omori,) and frame the Triad. Meanwhile, he'll turn himself in for another crime and serve a few years. His hope is that by the time he's out, his family will have been wiped out by the Triad.
 Oh, and it just so happens that the goons that are marked for death are Yuri's pimps.

 Kaese's worked everything out well in advance, so it's especially funny when absolutely everything goes awry as soon as things get going. He manages to kill one of the goons, but ends up infuriating the dead man's girlfriend (Japanese personality Becky), who basically goes berserk and spends the rest of the movie in a hilariously unhinged quest for revenge. The movie's MVP.

 The crooked cop doesn't fare a lot better; He was supposed to pose as a John, take Yuri somewhere quiet and kill her. But Yuri, who's hallucinating as a result of going cold turkey, sees him as his father and asks a random passer-by to help* her.
 The random passer-by turns out to be Leo, still in a daze from learning he's got only a little time left to live. Acting on impulse, he punches the cop out cold, and leads Yuri away.

 And so the two have to run away from both the Yakuza and the Triads, who think Yuri has the drugs, while Kaese and the Cop try to eliminate them to erase their tracks. It's a contrived, but very effective setup, and it's milked for all it's worth.
 It's billed as a romance, but to be honest while the relationship between Leo and Yuri is very sweet, it's not a very romantic movie - Leo is too indrawn for overt romantic gestures, and Yuri too damaged. But they both watch out for each other and behave selflessly, and their blooming friendship/romance is pretty affecting.

 I should probably mention the soundtrack, which is wonderful - a very muscular sort of jazz that goes very well with the rest of the movie.

 Miike's always been a great director, and while this is not the showiest of his movies, he gets a lot of chances to shine. The gore is tame for Miike's standards but still pretty gruesome - one of the first scenes is of a headless corpse stumbling around like a headless chicken, while his head blinks confusedly an alley away. The action is also pretty great.
 Miike can't help but to let some of his usual weirdness and wicked sense of humor seep in, but it's mostly done within the boundaries of the world and story - most impactfully on a very funny, very cute scene that shows that sometimes laughter can really chase away your demons. But you also get someone rubbing meth into an open wound to get John-Wick-ian superpowers... so, you know, Miike stuff.
 He also seems to get bored by the end, and the movie dips a little into symbolism and even an animated interlude (which I suspect was done due to budget issues, not being able to work out a realistic out to the situation, or both.)
 But it's only a little, and it doesn't derail the whole thing. The earth doesn't explode in this one. The man's getting softer in his later years.

*: Taskete (help) is one of the few Japanese words I know, mostly because of Ryoshi Kurosawa's Pulse. When my son started to babble, I tried to teach it to him in hopes he would repeat it randomly.
 I figured if my son started repeating it in the vicinity of someone who had watched Pulse, that person would shit themselves. I have no idea if it worked, but I dearly hope it did.

The Lair

 The Lair is an agreeable mediocrity by genre craftsman Neil Marshall. A low budget sort-of retread of Dog Soldiers, the movie that put him on the map, but nowhere near as good or fun.

 The movie tells the story of a British RAF pilot Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk, who also co-writes and produces,) who gets stranded in a hostile corner of the Afghanistan wilderness after her plane is shot down. Chased by insurgents, she lucks her way into an old Russian bunker. Deep within, she finds Resident-Evil-style secret lab, complete with glowing green vats with very Resident-Evil-style humanoid monsters within them. As the insurgents hunt Sinclair down, their shooting frees the monsters, which start laying bloody waste to everyone.

 Sinclair and a lone insurgent survive and manage to escape. Soon after, they're picked up by an American patrol and taken to a tiny base on a nearby ridge. That night, the monsters come out from their lair and lay siege upon the base. Things get a little predictable from there, though the script provides some decently ridiculous surprises for later... including the true cause for the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

 It's a fun, unpretentious setup for a B-movie, and Marshall brings his usual energy to the proceeds. The problem is that the script shoots for campy but non-jokey over-the-top badassery... which is admirable as a goal, but devoid as the dialog is of any wit, all we get is a load of poorly written, testosterone-filled bluster, delivering tired old clichés with overblown accents. This sort of thing can be great if done well, and The Lair does deliver some good fun eye-rolling moments ('Sorry for the inconvenience,' a British pilot gurgles as he dies,) but a lot more memorable lines were needed for it to work as intended. As it is... it's very visibly trying way too hard.

Yes, it's got a slow motion strut scene.

 Most of the actors are clearly on-board with the silliness, but it's hard to do anything worthwhile with these characters as written. Standouts include Jonathan Howard playing what could best be described as a Frank Grillo role, and a Major (Jamie Bamber) that doesn't just look like a Thunderbirds character, he's almost as wooden as one. By design, it seems.

 As usual for a Marshall film, things get pretty gory: In a fun and characteristically ridiculous scene, someone's face is cleanly ripped off with a single swipe, and someone's jaw is graphically torn out. The monsters themselves don't do as well, as the actors in the bulky suits can't really sell the grace they are supposed to have. And the cheap digital effects are pretty bad, including the worst digital blood I've seen in a non-amateur movie.

 The action is not great, but as it's focused more on suspense and immediacy, and made with evident budget constraints, it's forgivable. As mentioned before, the movie has its tongue firmly lodged on its cheek, but there are no overt jokes, which is the best tone for this sort of thing and went a long way to make me overlook its many faults.
 The end credits give up the pretense, showing old-school short scenes of the characters as they list them, which is cute but also underlines just how much this looks like a cheesy tv movie, despite all the gore. Can't say that I liked it, really, but it's also hard to hate.

Her actual mum, too; that's adorable.

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

 Dungeons and Dragons always been a big part of my life. I was sold the Advanced set when I was eight by a neighbor, and I've been playing it, off and on, ever since. I can't really say the same for the dreadful 80's cartoon, or the terrible movies they made back in the 00s. I had zero expectations for the movie, based on trailers that did a pretty bad job of selling why it was appealing except for the promise of Gelatinous Cubes and other classic D&D beasties on-screen. It just looked like a Marvel movie clone.

 Well, it kind of is a Marvel movie clone, mostly taking after Guardians of the Galaxy. The good news is that... well, the Guardians movies are not a bad thing to crib off. This is, like last year's Top Gun: Maverik, a fine example of a crowd-pleasing blockbuster done exactly right, with so much love and care lavished on everything from the script on up that it's all but impossible to begrudge it anything. It's about as light as an entertainment as it could be, studiously avoiding anything that may possibly cause anyone offense, but that's hard to fault when the result is so effortlessly charming.

 Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who also wrote the script (along with Michael Gilio,) have a deep love for the game, and it shows; The story they crafted may be a bit too good, too clever, too scripted to accurately portray a standard roleplaying scenario, but it showcases the appeal of these sort of stories extremely well. You can tell that they didn't just think about the characters in the story- I'm willing to bet they also have a pretty clear image of the fictional people who are playing those characters. It's also full of the sort of improvisation and weird tangents that make playing the game a joy.

 But there are no metafiction shenanigans whatsoever here, unless you go looking for them. The movie tells the story of a band of rogues: charming bard Edgin (Chris Pine), burly barbarian Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), Simon the Sorcerer* (Justice Smith, who between this and the Jurassic Worlds is kind of getting typecast as an ineffectual nerd) and finally Doric the half-demon druid (Sophia Lillis).

 Edgin and Holga start the movie imprisoned in the Forgotten Realm's northern reaches, D&D's most popular setting, and we get treated to some exposition as Edgin recounts how they were captured in a botched heist, betrayed by the person who hired them.

 After a very funny escape they go back to their hometown and find that another previous companion has hit it big in a nearby city, and is now the guardian to Edgin's daughter. This companion, Forge, is played by none other than Hugh Grant, and... is it a spoiler to say he'll betray them and become one of the film's main villains? If so, spoiler warning! He'll betray them and become one of the film's main villains. Seriously, it's pretty obvious, since Grant is basically reprising his character from Paddington 2 (minus the acting fetish). He's in cahoots with the wizard that got Holga and Edgin imprisoned in the first place, and wants to keep Edgin's daughter, as (in a fantastic bit of petty villainy) he's grown a bit fond of her himself.

 So that's where the film's central heist comes in, and before you can say 'you look like a trustworthy fellow!' Edgin fills out the party so he can steal his daughter back. What follows is... not necessarily predictable, as plans go awry and new complications are introduced.

 The story zigs and zags, baking in a lot of comedy into the mix, but what impressed me the most was just how clever and varied the action is (which includes a little, but not much actual combat; another way the movie differs from your standard D&D session.)

 It does have some really corny jokes (part and parcel of the Marvel style it perpetuates), but even when it, for example, makes the obvious joke of huge Holga being really into little people (hobbits, basically), it quickly moves past that obvious bit of silliness to find a softer, more humanistic thing to say about her character. This is way better written and conceptualized than its most obvious inspirations - much as I like James Gunn's creations, their plots are not this intricate or well formed.

 

 The action -both combat and otherwise- is great- fun, funny, and clearly shot. The movie won't win any awards for visual excellence (other than the effects, which are varied, pretty damn good, and with a great eye towards the ridiculous), but it conveys its outlandish and often complex ideas effortlessly and has the time to drop in a lot of cool little flourishes: the movie is fond of overhead shots, for example, making the characters seem like miniatures on a battle map. There's a ton of fan-service, but it's all in service of jokes or the story, so it doesn't stick out. And as a fan of monsters in general, and D&D's monster manuals in particular, I couldn't find it in me to resent it anyhow; So many beasties.

 The characters are all great and fun to hang around. Everyone is game, playing pretty much to type but doing it well, and supporting the tone expertly. It's... it's just an all-round ludicrously entertaining movie, a cotton-candy confection that's a tiny bit insubstantial but sweet as all hell and fills its two hours and something with an amazing amount of fantastic locales, beasts, and story.

 I have no idea what the film's (deserved!) success bodes. A Forgotten Realms cinematic universe? A Dark Sun or Ravenloft series on HBO? Shadowrun or Exalted getting their own movies? There may come a time to bemoan the long tail this movie is sure to have. But for now, let's celebrate its unlikely brilliance.

*: Yes, seriously.

Honor and Glory

  Back in the eighties, Cynthia Rothrock had one hell of a career starter when she scored the lead in bonafide HK martial arts classic Yes, Madam. It really wouldn't be disrespectful to say she never got to top that, but she never really got the career she deserved either. She made several perfectly entertaining movies -China o' Brien, Undefeated, and Martial Law come to mind- but she never got as many or as good opportunities as her b-movie action star contemporaries, which is a shame. Too many of her movies require some caveats along with a recommendation.

 Sadly, with 1993's Honor and Glory the caveats heavily outnumber any other consideration. After being directed by the likes of Corey Yuen and Robert Clouse, Rothrock did a couple movies with Godfrey Ho - a ridiculously prolific director whom I've long associated with cheap crap. One of them is Undefeatable, which is ridiculously entertaining and may be Rothrock's biggest claim to fame, since its insane final fight and terrible one-liners ('Keep an eye out for you, Stingray.' 'Yeah, see ya!') briefly went viral a full yonk of years ago. The other one is, well, this one: your basic, cheap-looking crap with horrendously wooden acting and a script that is more interested in providing filler material than actual fight scenes.

 There is so. Much. Filler. Not a single scene goes by where a new character or a plotline is introduced, many of which are never mentioned afterwards. When the fight scenes do arrive, they're ridiculously perfunctory, and don't really convey properly the obvious fighting skills that Rothrock and some of her co-leads show, spoiling them with bad choreography, bad editing, or both.

 The plot is... something about a missing nuclear trigger, then something a corrupt senator or something called Slade (John Miller, also in Undefeatable) who likes to illustrate his ball-crushing ways by alternately fondling and mock-crushing a couple of steel balls. Rothrock plays Tracey Pride, a CIA agent who goes to DC to see her sister Joyce (Donna Jason), a plucky news reporter/martial artist/Chinese culture enthusiast/all-round exposition delivery device.
 It just so happens Joyce is covering the corruption of Senator Slade, so Joyce, Tracey and a bunch of random characters that accrue around them for no good reason at all are set in a collision course against the villain.

 The first action scene consists of Joyce being called out for a report she did on some big public figure by a random lady, which... quickly escalates into a knife fight with her. All while her crew looks on, as if this was an everyday occurrence. Maybe it is.

 This movie has a fever dream aura that makes it hard to pin down any details. The script spins out of control almost immediately, oozing out in multiple directions and completely losing sight of the plot and main characters; if you were to cut out all the extraneous stuff, you'd probably only have twenty minutes left. It's kind of insane.
 Do I need to say that the extraneous stuff is not particularly engaging, either? It's not without merit- it's an oddly sweet, unjudgmental film where the two main protagonists (this thing has like seven characters that could qualify as co-protagonists) are ass-kicking women. It also sets up Jake Armstrong (Chuck Jeffreys,) a black guy who starts out as the evil senator's bodyguard and switches sides, to be Joyce's love interest; They have a hilariously terrible courting-with-chopsticks scene and everything.
 Only a few people get killed, too, all peripheral characters plus a should-be-peripheral pimp who gets a puzzling amount of screen time (his only function, basically, is to get Jake the bodyguard to quit in disgust.) This is rare in a genre that usually kills or maims innocent/sympathetic characters to establish motivations or as a way to make the villain more despicable.

 But man, does it ever drag. Put me against a wall, and I'd have to admit many HK Martial arts movies I do like have scripts that are as bad as this one. Except for one crucial detail: they know to set up and deliver lots of elaborate fights. Which this one really, really doesn't. When action does arrive it's choppy and lacking in any sort of energy, and fights are over almost before they register. Even the final fight, with multiple groups of people facing each other separately - the only fight in the movie which is allowed to breathe a little - has huge conceptual problems, like pairing off Jake with a completely random mook that hadn't been set up at all beforehand. This, in a movie where Jake's totally irrelevant boxing trainer gets a sizeable speaking part.

 The soundtrack is all easy listening shit, a lot of which doesn't fit the action in the least; and almost all of the acting is terrible, terrible, terrible. John Miller-as-Slade's scenery chewing is entertaining to watch, and I liked Chuck Jeffreys's turn as Jake. But everyone else -and this includes Rothrock, whose strength was never acting but is usually very likeable and has a good screen presence- everyone else is  almost painful to watch. Secondary and tertiary characters (of which there is a metric buttload) seem to have been picked randomly off the street and been given half an hour to prepare their lines; I can imagine someone is sitting just off the shot, forcing them to act at gunpoint.

 All par for the course for a director who has more than a hundred and fifty films listed on IMDB, most of which he's scripted as well (not this one, though; that dubious honour goes to one Herb Borkland). To get to that level, you can't really sweat the small stuff. Or the medium stuff, or some of the important stuff either, I guess.

 Thanks go to Eff and the rest of the Moviesign gang for both making me watch this and making it a bit more tolerable with the running commentary.