They Live

 Few directors can boast a run of movies as good the one John Carpenter had in the decade between Halloween and They Live. And as a capper to a streak that includes films as disparate as Halloween, Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, Starman and The Thing... well, you can do a lot worse than They Live, a science fiction satire that's about as funny as it is pointed.

 It's as carefully crafted as any Carpenter film, which is really saying something; While memorable for the chaos that always ends up overtaking everything else sooner or later, what always gets me in most of his movies is the amount of groundwork they start laying down for said chaos as soon as the credits start rolling.

 They Live is a prime example of that. The title card melds into some graffiti as John Nada (wrestler 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper) enters the scene at a seemingly derelict trainyard. He's accompanied by some awfully cheesy blues-rock (courtesy of the director and Alan Howarth) and opening credits in a font that screams TV movie, but I'll always associate with Carpenter.

 John's lugging a huge backpack as he wanders the Los Angeles financial district, looking up at the skyscrapers, and then across more urban areas until he finds a building site and goes in looking for work. He's a drifter, then, explaining the big backpack. At the end of the day co-worker Frank (Keith David), recognizing a kindred soul, invites him back to the shantytown Frank is staying at.

 A blind street preacher warns ominously of invisible overlords, TV channels are hijacked by a mysterious pirate station warning that They are among us, people stare slack-jawed at purposefully shallow interviews and commercials - you can sort of see the shape the movie is eventually going to take.

 But it takes its time getting there, there's some groundwork to be laid first. John first notices something's amiss with a church across the street from the shantytown, where the guy who runs the soup kitchen (Carpenter regular Peter Jason) has some clandestine-seeming meetings and leads what looks like some sort of smuggling operation, so he begins investigating. Meanwhile there's a bit of... well, not subtle, but cool character work between Frank, who has a very cynical approach to things and doesn't want to rock the boat, and John, who has a sort of cautious faith in the system and trusts that they will get their due if they put in the work. A believer in the American Dream. I like that they keep race completely out of it, even as it informs their respective points of view.

 When the church is raided by the police and the authorities raze the shanty town, kicking off the second act, John sifts through the wreckage and finds that what the church group was smuggling... sunglasses. But when he puts them on (Spoilers for a thirty-five year old movie!) he can suddenly see that all the signage in the city, every written word, becomes instructions to keep us tame and under control. Conform! Consume! Obey!

 He also discovers that he can see the They that the preacher and the pirate TV station were talking about; the hidden skeletal alien overlords that are enslaving humanity using greed and corruption.

 They Live is famous for a bunch of pretty great one-liners (90s videogames would not be the same without it) but my favorite quote of the film is when Nada realizes how deeply fucked we are as a race: "It figures it would be something like this!" He says, laughing. What else are you going to do?
 Well, what he does, I guess - grab a shotgun and shoot a bunch of aliens, terrorize a lot of bystanders, and behave like a goddamn terrorist. But, you know, one we know is right and is in a movie. Please don't do that.

 In his rampage he kidnaps a beautiful rich woman (Meg Foster, made up to look otherworldly) who... well, she doesn't take well to his attempts to show her the truth.

 But in that respect she's got nothing on John's buddy Frank. In what's perhaps the film's biggest claim to fame, Frank and John get into a knockdown fight that lasts for more than five minutes because Frank refuses to put on the fucking glasses. It's a hilarious, overblown fight, an absolutely brilliant scene, not the least because of the tension between what we know and what Frank thinks he knows. Mixed in with a point about how far people are willing to go not to have their worldview challenged. It's an all-timer.

 So... yeah, it's a deeply political film. Just as the director was ending one hell of cinematic run, the US had spent the better part of that under Ronald Reagan's administration, and you can tell Carpenter had some things to say about that. He wasn't subtle, and he did not hold back his views on the encroaching neoliberal worldview that would unfortunately come to be the new normal.
 It's an angry, angry film that nonetheless handles its message with wit and a wicked sense of humour, one that's just as relevant today as on the day it was filmed, thanks to the neolibs pretty much conning everyone into thinking their way was the best option. Mostly by tempting people in power to join them so they could make themselves richer, basically, and making the rest of us poor suckers believe we could get their scraps. I wish we could blame it on evil aliens.

 They live is not *quite* perfect: genre obligations and the scope of the threat being dealt with mean that quite a few contrivances are going to be needed to wrap things in about ninety minutes. It's also a very low-budget movie, but the brilliant decision to make the scenes where we see the world as the characters do through the glasses in black and white manage to make a virtue out of its B-movie-ness, linking it back to the B-movies of three decades prior.

 The action, bar that one fight scene, is your standard 80's gunplay; Not very exciting, but there's a lot of squibs. And while we're on that: I guess that the heroes happily gunning down what look like civilians can get a bit uncomfortable, but fuck that; it's well justified in the movie. That's on a bunch of fuckwads in the last few decades deciding to go out and end other people, and on the much bigger bunch of fuckwads that fight to allow them to get as many weapons as they please.

 All pretty minor nitpicks as far as I'm concerned. This, ladies and gentlemen, theys and uses, is a fucking masterpiece.

Sisu

  Sisu is a bloody, exhilarating wartime tall tale/bit of Finnish swagger that pits a bunch of very naughty Nazis against an old prospector who represents the titular 'sisu' - a Finnish word that is said to be untranslatable but basically seems to mean 'grit'.

 Set near the end of World War 2, the Nazis are rampaging across Lapland, destroying and killing everything they come across. But before we get to them we first spend a day or so in the life of one Aatami Korpi (Helander movie regular Jorma Tommila), our near silent badass protagonist, as he carefully digs up a huge seam of gold.
 For a raucous, bloody, nazi-killing genre exercise, Sisu shows a lot of restraint. The movie is divided into chapters, and it quietly bides its time until shit hits the fan. The Nazi platoon is introduced in chapter two, with no time is wasted in establishing they're more despicable than usual: their short convoy includes a truck full of captive Finnish women, their purpose made immediately obvious. There's also a Panzer, another truck full of soldiers, and a bike with a sidecar. Maybe a couple dozen Nazis in all.

 Aatami soon crosses paths with them, in a tense scene where they shake him down. Their dastardly leader Bruno (Aksel Hennie) ultimately decides to let him go, knowing that another group of Nazis bringing up the rear will kill him off soon enough.
 And he does meet the other group of Nazis, and they do try to kill him. But Aatami proves he's not only hard to kill, but also that he's a fucking knife wizard and an expert in all sorts of violence; He easily dispatches his assailants in gruesome fashion and runs off into the wilderness.

 Meanwhile, the main platoon hears the distant gunshots as their compatriots are killed, and double back. Discovering evidence that the prospector is carrying a bag full of gold nuggets among the carnage, they decide to hunt him down for revenge and profit. This sets off a brutal running battle throughout a big, war-torn chunk of Lapland, full of tense setpieces and lots of darkly humorous deaths.

 It's a weird action movie - Mr. Sisu is basically invulnerable; he might get hurt or suffer setbacks, but he'll just get up and carry on. This isn't too different from most action heroes, but here there's no real attempt to make the action even mildly plausible. The guy's got more in common with Paul Bunyan than John Wick; he's a force of nature, a fascist-targeting slasher movie menace, and there's never any doubt as to what the end result is going to be.
 But the action scenes are varied, brutal and thrilling, and there are enough unexpected developments that make the movie ridiculously entertaining even if its destination is clear from the moment knife first meets head.

 So yes, there's a near-contempt for suspension of disbelief throughout, and the mythical levels of badassness help even the most implausible of the stunts that Aatami pulls elicit something between a cheer and a laugh. There's some memorably over the top stuff here.
 All the action itself is somehow less... explicit than on other modern Hong-Kong-influenced action films. What's happening is always clear, but there's more of a focus on storytelling and stunts than on the procedural details of who does what to whom at every turn; The movie feels a little old-school in that respect. This makes a climactic extended hand-to-hand brawl drag a little compared to other modern, more martial-arts influenced movies; but the more frequent shootouts and shorted brawls fare a lot better.
 The way the fights are shot reminded me a little of the overblown stylization of Snyder's work, paying a lot of attention to iconic-looking imagery- applied to better material, of course. The cinematography is beautiful throughout (DP: Kjell Lagerroos, who also did the pretty good wintry war movie Ambush 1941), and writer/director Jalmari Helander provides him plenty of opportunities to show off in. The barren, wide-open spaces of Lapland's beautiful autumnal landscapes do a lot of heavy puling.

 It's a weird, bleak bit of heightened yet minimalist mayhem, gory as hell and full of pitch-black humor, memorable scenes and scenery, gleeful absurdity and badass moves. Mark me down as a fan.

Polite Society

  Lina Khan (Ritu Arya) is going through a rough patch; She's dropped out of art school and is living with her British/Pakistani family while she figures things out. Meanwhile little sister Ria (Priya Kansara) knows exactly what she wants: to be a stuntwoman, a dream she pursues with all the manic determination a teen can muster, despite a complete lack of support from everyone except her sister.

 Complications soon arrive in the form of Salim, a hunky rich dude who sweeps Lena off her feet at a soirée hosted by his mother (Nimra Bucha). Ria is understandably upset at the changes this wreaks on her life and her sister; Who's going to help her do her martial arts youtube videos? She also disapproves of the relationship (she accuses Lena of Jane Austening it, happily marrying herself off to a rich dude,) and balks at her new wardrobe (She's wearing cardigans now!)

 Not the type to give up without a fight (or ten) Ria enlists her schoolmates (Seraphina Beh and Ella Bruccoleri) on a campaign to rescue her sister and/or sabotage her wedding. While her plans start out being comically inappropriate and only get worse, Ria soon starts to suspect there might actually is something sinister in her prospective brother-in-law's seemingly perfect façade, and runs afoul of his sinister mother. Things quickly get out of hand, but saying more would mildly spoil this movie's considerable pleasures.

 Polite Society is a silly, extremely likable comedy that's soaked with loving genre asides. The film mines a lot of laughs by from repurposing classic action beats and horror movie staging - a waxing plays the part of the requisite torture scene, for example, and Ria throwing Salim deranged dirty looks from the shadows like a pissed-off ghost is never not funny.

 It's a universe where everybody knows Kung-Fu and Jiu-Jitsu, and things get exactly as ridiculous as they need to to get a laugh from one moment to the next while still remaining (mostly) coherent. Great stuff.

 The fight scenes are frequent and fun - the fight choreography (by Rob Lock) is (intentionally) derivative with homages all over the place. It's not as good as a specialist action film, but it does a respectable job - and there's a lot of work done to adapt traditional moves to unusual wardrobe choices that result in some really stunning-looking scenes.

 The drama is effective, targeting ethnic and social conventions and traditions, while Ria and Lena's relationship is relatable and genuinely sweet. Don't expect a huge amount of subversion in the story department - early on one of the characters says something like "Tropes are tropes because they work," and the movie stands firmly by that.
 But there's real invention and smarts in writer/director Nida Manzoor's enthusiastic, genre-literate application of a melange of inspirations as they're carefully woven into the story she chose to tell. They feel natural, honest and affectionate even as they turn more mundane situations humorous. Turns out even the hoariest of clichés ("We are not so different, you and I!") can be really funny when delivered by a matronly woman to a wisp of a wild-eyed girl in traditional Asian wedding finery... as a prelude to a martial arts showdown.

 Priya Kansara is really great as Ria: genuinely funny, athletic and very, very expressive. There's a lot of laugh-out-loud-worthy mugging going on here, from her and the rest of the very game cast; It works great with the exaggerated nature of the script.

 Just about the only problem I had with this is that I kind of expected something a bit thornier out of it when it’s very much a crowdpleaser. Tough luck: it's proud to be a crowdpleaser. I was wrong, Polite Society is right, and repeat with me: tropes are tropes because they work. Especially when they're applied with this amount of verve and talent by everyone involved.

Willy's Wonderland

 It's kind of weird that it took people so many years to make a Five Night at Freddy's movie. The videogames, a series of streamer-friendly horror games that lock you after-hours in a gimmicky themed kid's restaurant infested with murderous animatronic mascots, has been a phenomenon for nearly ten years now (god, I feel old). A massive phenomenon a some time ago back, not so much now, but the premise is bound to draw in viewers 'for the lulz' or that have fondness for the material.

 Credit director Kevin Lewis and writer G. O. Parsons for, in time-honored B-movie tradition, rushing in and creating a very recognizable knock-off to fill the perceived void. While you're at it, give them credit for not completely half-assing it, too; this is categorically not a good movie, but it does put in some effort; it could have easily let the premise (and Nic Cage) pull all the weight instead.

 Nicholas Cage stars as a badass silent protagonist who, as the movie begins, is entrapped into spending a night as a janitor cleaning Willy's wonderland, an abandoned restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

 Despite the situation, he immediately sets to work with almost comic professionalism and competence. When when the dusty, zombie-like animatronic characters come to life and try to kill him... he brutally puts them down and continues cleaning.

 There's a b-plot about a young girl and her friends trying to save The Janitor and torch the restaurant. As you might guess, all they do is provide meat for the grinder. Liv (Emily Tosta), the co-protagonist, is basically an exposition engine whose main (and only) traits are being head-strong and heroic; all her friends are immediately forgettable except for Kathy (Caylee Cowan) who is visually introduced as an obvious airhead/mean girl, but immediately proves to be much more interesting. I liked her, though the script gives her next to nothing to do before she decides to bone her boyfriend in the most dangerous place possible with foreseeable results.

 Willy's Wonderland is a horror/action/comedy hybrid, and though it's got some pretty broad jokes the tone is kept relatively grim. That's commendable, but the problem is that it also happens to be fucking terrible at both horror and action. Any attempts at scares are brought low by a complete lack of originality, a cheesy direct-to-video vibe, and an inability to produce any tension. Meanwhile, the shoddy budget and the crew's inexperience also kill off any hopes of the action being decent - shoddy camera work, choppy editing and lack of choreography will, surprise surprise, have that effect. On top of that the cinematography looks like ass, working in a lot of oh-so-trendy desaturated colors and overexposed lighting in what looks like an attempt to reproduce the grimy, thankfully outdated horror aesthetics from the 00s.

 The script and visual storytelling don't help any. The dialog is trite and on-the-nose (the line "He's not trapped in there with them, they're trapped in there with him!" is deployed unironically) and the exposition is laughable. The camera work has a habit of underlining the obvious: when the protagonist notices a message board full of missing people posters, a classic horror beat, you can bet the camera's not going to leave it at that - it has to zoom in with a 'whoosh' on individual posters. The crew obviously knows their action and horror movie tropes, but (and this is a very VoD trait) they seem content with imitating the hackiest ones in the tackiest way possible.

 The horror elements, as mentioned, are piss-poor. It's impossible to care about any of the characters or the plot, so all the deaths feel like a bad Friday the 13th knock-off. And they're all weirdly perfunctory, barely registering... The animatronics get far grislier deaths than any of the humans do.

 The monsters are a mixed bag - some look pretty good, like an actual ostrich robot that The Janitor slaps around for a bit, but others just look like cheap suits (a gorilla, or a fairy with a shoddy papier-maché mask). Most do very poorly whenever they have to interact with any live action components.

 The main exception to the general crappitude of the movie is the music provided by a band called Émoi - a ton of varied, very believable kid's songs for the animatronics to perform, all well crafted and professional-sounding. They also do a decent synthwave song (with lyrics about the movie!) for Nic Cage to let fly his freak flag to at one point. It's an obvious bid to tap into his wilder side and get a meme-worthy moment.

 It's not very successful; Cage is (as always) a pro, and plays a fun angry badass even when he doesn't seem to be very engaged. The script's one strength is in knowing how to use him, if not very effectively, and scores a couple of laughs. But his character doesn't make a lot of sense, especially one major 'wacky' moment that kind of broke the movie for me. Making him completely silent is a bold choice, though it robs him of the chance to goof around with line readings. Oh well.

 There are some good moments. At one point Cage tears off a robot ostrich's head and holds it up high, spine dangling, in an obvious but fun homage. I also loved -loved- a scene where he stares down a cartoon weasel, complete with slow zoom and an ominous soundtrack:

YESSSSSSS

 A truly great scene that perfectly justifies the potential of the movie's mix of genre elements and deeply silly premise. It's a shame the film never manages to get even close to being that good again.

Zombie Lake (Le Lac des Morts Vivants)

 A pretty girl arrives at a lake in the countryside, with music that can only be described as porn-like. She almost immediately confirms that, yeah, this is an Eurosmut film by quickly disrobing and posing naked for the camera as she prances around and sunbathes a little. Soon she's taking down a hilariously amateurish warning sign and goes for a swim while the camera ogles her from every possible angle.

 But wouldn't you know it, there are zombies in this lake. Nazi zombies.

 The fittingly titled Zombie Lake is a 1981 French film by cult legend Jean Rollin. It is an absolute piece of shit, borderline unwatchable; the only reason I managed to make it all the way to the end was that the Arrow player thoughtfully offers a handy time acceleration widget, so those excruciating eighty-six minutes were cut by half. 

 The unnamed skinny dipper is only the first victim of undead fascists; Soon the zombies start shuffling out of the lake like a gang of unruly lads on a night in town, looking for people to nuzzle to death (that's how they seem to kill people; they either rub their faces on others until they die, or quickly bop them from behind.

 The film is a combination of hoary zombie horror tropes (and I use the term horror in the loosest possible sense here), continuity errors, crappy makeup effects, wooden acting, terrible dialog, ridiculous developments and, like on all these sort of movies, time wasting; so much time wasting. There are boobs, of course, and full frontal nudity - but it never edges anywhere near actual porn the way some other stuff (like Jess Franco) does. And sorry girls, the only hunky dude is a nazi and he doesn't even remove his pants for his sex scene. It's exploitative as hell, with lots of scenes of zombies pawing at scantily clad or naked women, but things are kept fairly tame- the attacks only evoke the phantom of sexual assault, and never cross over into actual unpleasantness the way these movies often do; The copious gratuitous nudity, meanwhile, suffers from some inept staging that makes it funnier than sexy.

 The bloodletting and other horror trappings are about as much a letdown as any of the other aspects of the film. You get a few blood dribbles, but almost nothing in the way of gore. That does lead to some fun, at least: the budget is small enough that they couldn't afford squibs, so a pivotal scene where a squad of nazis gets gunned down in an ambush features a lot of people grimacing and pretending to be shot without any visible blood or wounds, and there's an instance of the classic "let me clap my hand to my face so I can burst a blood bag" trick.

 The most memorable aspect is that movie features a sort of romantic subplot where one of the nazi soldiers had fallen in love with one of the local girls before dying; When he comes back as a member of the undead, he reconnects with their daughter, complete with a whimsical theme tune and everything. The movie as a whole is... surprisingly unjudgmental towards the German soldiers, and shows them in a lot better light than the native villagers. None of this is memorable for the right reasons, but at least it's something.

 There's also what looks like a home-made flamethrower used in the 'climax'. That's pretty cool, and, filming those scenes had to be dangerous.
 Other than that the film is a near-complete waste of time, depending on how starved you are for boob-based content. It's a turgid, amateurish mess that feels made by people with no idea of what they're doing making it up as they go along. It's bad enough to be funny in a few parts, and I can imagine in the right frame of mind or with similarly inclined friends it might be a riot; This is, after all, a movie that stops dead in its tracks for a five minute scene where a whole female volleyball team arrives at the lake, take their clothes off, and immediately get dragged off by zombies. But I watched it wanting to get into Jean Rollin's work and found it (for the most part) a fucking chore to get through even on fast forward.

 The excellent documentary Orchestrator of Storms about the director and his movies barely mentions Zombie Lake, calling it one of his lowest points - And he was clearly embarrassed, as Rollin used a pseudonym for the credits. Wish I'd seen that before watching this.

 The film had been abandoned by fellow Eurosmut purveyor Jess Franco, and Rollin agreed to film it because money was tight. So it turns out I was extremely unlucky in choosing an entry point to his filmography; I'll probably give him another chance someday. But seriously, learn from my example and do not bother with this one..

Dick Johnson is Dead

 With the spectre of Alzheimer's looming over her dad, documentarian Kirsten Johnson -who'd already lost her mother to the same disease some years earlier- decided to celebrate the man by making a movie about him while he's still mostly present.

 But that would be too straightforward, so the documentary instead hangs on a gimmick. To confront his mortality, several scenes are staged where Dick Johnson dies in various ways: an air conditioner falls on him, he drops dead in the street, etc. There's also a fake funeral, and some weird, purposefully kitschy scenes in a music-hall like heaven where Mr. Johnson (who is still a believer) holds court while dancers wearing oversized photographic masks of himself and his wife as youths sway merrily in the background. I can only guess at what he was thinking.

 It's a weird and not entirely successful conceit, but Mr. Johnson goes along with his daughter's ideas with a seemingly unending reserve of patience and good will. At one point, covered in fake blood on a cold New York street, he compares the act of filming one of his demises unfavorably to the experience of surviving an actual heart attack. Not that you could tell that he's miserable; He's one of those people who remains pleasant even on the most trying circumstances.

 You can see why the director thought the fake deaths angle would be a good idea, but honestly, I'm not a fan. Best case scenario it was well intentioned and it didn't work out, worst case it feels mercenary: forced quirkiness, something that they came up to get the movie greenlit.
 The artifice of those staged scenes certainly doesn't seem to do much for Mr. Johnson; He seems to go along with it just to please his daughter, whom he dotes over. I hope it helped her, at least.

Chocolate fudge cake as a running theme; I approve.

 As the movie starts Mr. Johnson is closing down his psychological practice and selling off the beautiful house he lived in with his wife to move in with his daughter in her tiny NY apartment. He has to give up his car, and driving. It's devastating.

 Like any movie about Alzheimer's that attempts to portray it truthfully, I can only describe the experience of watching it as a constant kick to the emotional balls/ovaries. Despite eliding the most horrifying stages of the disease it still manages to be brutal, a sort of psychological act of terrorism; All this made even more hurtful by the fact that Dick Johnson is clearly a wonderful, delightful human being - a ridiculously sweet man whose love for his daughter is as clear as her love for him.

 The movie is full of powerful little moments: it tries to linger on the more positive ones, though most of them end up being bittersweet. Some of them even are a result of the gimmicks; a friend's eulogy/bugle salute in the fake funeral is hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.
 The funeral is fake, and the mourners know Dick is not dead and probably will not die in the immediate future. But it's still a farewell. So maybe I'm wrong and the gimmick is worth it; I'm just angry at it because it made the guy miserable for one afternoon.

 Dick Johnson is Dead is a beautiful, heartfelt documentary, full of warmth and humanity. I am very glad I watched it, and would rather never watch it again.

The Pope's Exorcist

 Russel Crowe is... The Pope's Exorcist. He unfortunately doesn't (spoiler alert!) exorcise the pope (Franco Nero!) at any point though, it's more that he's all buddy-buddy with the Pope and has his Holiness run some background investigation for him at one point, like the stereotypical nerdy sidekick that does all the homework for the hero. That's pretty badass, too, though they don't have the pope hacking anything which seems like a missed opportunity.

 Crowe plays a character loosely based on real-life figure Aman Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican's chief exorcist from 1986 to his death a few years ago. From the little I've read, it's.... a very loose likeness. The film's plot is even more liberal in its relationship with (purported) fact.

The exorcist vs. Saruman

 Crowe's interpretation of Gabriele is actually one of the main draws of the movie; He uses his considerable charisma to portray an avuncular, self deprecating fella who suffers no fools (as shown by an undercooked subplot about ecclesiastical power games) but also possesses an interminable supply of compassion. It's a good character, always fun to watch bounce off situations and other people.

 Demons are real, Catholicism and the church are (overall, at least) forces for good, and treating scripture or superstition as anything but literal, manifest truth is a mortal risk to both body and soul; Satan is real, y'all! You may or may not agree with any of this, but it's required buy-in to enjoy this sort of thing, so there you go. And to be fair to the movie (and to real-life father Amorth) they do allow that actual supernatural possessions are vanishingly rare, mostly they all have rational, usually psychological explanations.

 Father Amorth is sent to Spain to look into the case of one Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), a young kid taken over a powerful demon while his American expat family was trying to refurbish an abandoned abbey of which the Pope himself warns "has given us trouble before." It turns out that the site hides a (literal!) torture basement with ancient buried secrets, secrets that could shake the very foundations of Christendom, yadda yadda.

 With the stakes duly set Father Amorth and a local priest (Daniel Zovatto, playing the requisite rookie) carry on with their exorcisms and investigations. Cue all the subgenre-appropriate trappings: telekinetic manhandling, regurgitation of unlikely (but oh so symbolic) objects, demonic mind games, etc. If you, like me, find a little kid saying inappropriate things with a cookie monster voice more funny than scary... well, prepare to not be scared. It's all slightly more over the top than your usual possession movie but sadly not nearly enough to make it really stand out.

 What we end up with is yet another religious possession movie where the possessed says something hurtful and the good guys pray at it harder. Rinse and repeat; it's really, really hard to make this sort of thing interesting at this point, and despite its best attempts The Pope's Exorcist doesn't really succeed at it. A tragic backstory for Father Amorth frankly makes it seem even more by the numbers.
 The demon's motives are a bit more convoluted than usual, but like the political games back in Rome the conspiracy side of things feels like a bit of a letdown. Darker, and much more recent secrets have been aired about the Catholic church, but the movie only alludes to them - one gets the feeling that the script doesn't really want to cast too much shade on the Good Guys.

 Julius Avery is a good craftsman, and the film looks pretty great (cinematographer: Khalid Mohtaseb). Maybe a bit too reliant on those two most famous of complementary colours, teal and orange, but hey, it works. The pacing is strong, the sets are very nice, and the actors are all game. It's not a great movie - I'm not sure you could make a good traditional possession movie without some heavy retooling, something which this movie is completely uninterested in doing - but it is entertaining for what it is.

The Creeping Garden

 How about... a ninety minute documentary about slime moulds?
 Why not? They're fascinating beings, situated somewhere adjacent to fungi, but different enough to make scientists a little uncomfortable around them. Until relatively recently they were classified as half fungus, half animal.

 The directors (Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp) chose to style it after retro sci-fi films, and tapped Jim o'Rourke from Sonic Youth to provide an unobtrusive electronic score; The whole thing is very well put together. And thanks to tons of time-lapse footage of growing, hypnotically pulsing slime moulds, it's got no lack of eye candy.

 It's all spliced together from interviews with people who study slime moulds in one capacity or another. An amateur who likes to wander around the woods looking for them waxes philosophical, various scientists geek out on their obscure subject of study, and a historian provides some excellent digressions on Victorian entertainment before a lively presentation on a British documentarian who was doing time-lapse photography on moulds back in the early twentieth century.

 Most of the interviewees are candid, engaging and interesting. The movie does lose its way a little when it focuses on artists using the movement of slime moulds; a live-action 'game' where people get tied together and asked to act following the rules the smaller organisms follow is kind of amusing, as are the experiments of people making them run simulate road networks and whatnot. But others - people building robots that take their input queues from slime mould colonies, or a pianist that likes to jam to background music generated by the mycetozoa have a distinct whiff of bullshit.
 The movie itself has no editorial voice and is content to follow up on anything to do with its subject, and does not judge at all; I'd really have liked more detail on, for example, how these people get any sort of dynamic response from something that moves a couple centimeters an hour.

 Another problem with the documentary is that it would have been nice to have a primer on these weird organisms - we get a lot of punctual information about them, but the broad strokes (such as that they have very distinct phases of development) are left for viewers to look up on Wikipedia afterwards.

 But the talking head approach really pays off when, for example, a specialised scientist admits that the subjects of his chosen field of study don't seem to have much of an ecological role ("They could pretty much disappear completely, and very little would change..." or when an archivist at a repository for fungus samples is kind of thrilled when someone comes looking for the slime mould section ("We never come back here").

 It's an interesting, entertaining look at a pretty obscure subject. Shame about the lack of depth.

Studio 666

  You may recognize the Foo Fighters as that band that put out that one really good song... Jesus, twenty-five years ago? The one with a video full of Evil Dead 2 references. I hear they've been active since then, not that we would know anything about that, haha, right? It's a band your father listens to, not a hip, with-it cat like me, daddy-O. Ahem. They've put out a few good songs throughout the years, half a great double album, that sort of thing. Or, umm, so they tell me.
 The band's known to like dad jokes - fooling around with dumb fake press releases and silly pranks, doing jokey videos with the Tenacious D folks and shit. At least that's what people who like this band tell me, I wouldn't know. And now they've gone and made a movie.
 Studio 666 is... well, can't really call it anything else than a vanity project, based as it is on a short story by frontman Dave Grohl that really did not need nor deserve a full motion picture treatment. There's no reason to justify its existence besides mixing those two passions of theirs: horror movies and dad jokes.

 Trying to do something special for their tenth album, the Foo Fighters retire to a big house in the hills of Los Angeles to record it. Unbeknownst to them, back in the nineties the house was used by the frontman of Dream Widow ('the next Jane's Addiction!') to summon a demonic entity via a doomy metal song and a book that looks suspiciously like Evil Dead's take on the Necronomicon. Oh, and he murdered the rest of his bandmates. Part of that is shown in a surprisingly legit pre-credits scene where Jenna Ortega tries to escape the house amid the bloody wreckage of her bandmates, only to get her head caved in with a hammer for her troubles. This movie does not fuck around with the gore, it's all (as you'd expect from the director of Hatchet 3) top-tier and extremely over the top.
 Adding to the legitimacy: a pretty cheap but cool-looking credits sequence with very John Carpenter-like keyboards that... oh, wait, yeah, it is John Carpenter! He also gets a small cameo.

 Enter the Foo Fighters, two decades and something later. Dave Grohl, Pat Smear, Nate Mendel, Taylor Hawkins, Rami Jaffee and Chris Shiflett, all playing some variation of themselves. All of them also self-aware to various degrees and, except for Grohl and Jaffee, looking mildly embarrassed to be there.
 The acoustics of the place are enough to convince them to stay to record their opus, but Grohl is stuck with writer's block. Stuck, that is, until he visits a creepy murderbasement and listens to an old recording; he ends up obsessed with it, and spends much of the rest of the movie trying to recreate it, becoming more and more a dick towards his bandmates. You can imagine where it goes from there.

 The tone is goofy and amiable, despite some pretty gnarly gore - it might disgust, but after its first five (very cool) minutes I can't imagine how any of it would scare anyone who's ever seen a horror movie. That's understandable, and it's an issue shared with pretty much every other horror comedy ever made. The problem is that the comedy side of things doesn't ever really materialize, either. Not that the movie is laugh-free - some of the band interactions are cute, and there's some low-key pleasure in watching Grohl behave like a prick and Shiflett get all sniffy about it, Pat Smear's complete inability to act, or Jaffee's complete and utter lack of basic modesty. But low-key is all there is because when the film does remember to deploy an actual joke or deliver a punchline, it's almost invariably pretty lame. A dad joke.

 And it absolutely doesn't help that, besides Grohl, everyone else kind of seems to be there against their will, unsure of how to fill all those minutes until they meet their inevitable demise. No one acts, everyone mugs to the camera; it must sting that the biggest laugh of the movie is stolen by a surprise cameo from a fellow non-actor musician.
 Grohl, bless him, brings a ton of energy. The others do what they can, with maybe the biggest surprise being Rami Jaffee, who does a pretty good job of portraying a very cartoony, broad new age goofball/horndog. To be clear, we're grading on a curve here, but he did make an impression. The few real actors in the film all play pretty minor characters, and even they can't do much with their given lines.
 This is disastrous in a one hour and forty-six minutes movie. Maybe if there were funnier situations, a bigger body count, a less generic plot that couldn't be summarized in two sentences... Anything.
 Grohl and co. are grappling with a few things here, mostly about how far out a frontman can get ahead of the rest of the band, and for a vanity project there's not a lot of self-aggrandizement involved; But they're not necessarily saying anything interesting, either, or saying it in an interesting way. At least you can tell that everyone involved was having fun, which... yeah, it does help, a little.

 The effects are a very mixed bag. The practical effects used for the gore, as mentioned, are a dark delight, not just in the execution but in concept as well; this is very clearly where the film shines. The CG effects used for all the other spooky stuff, though... let's just say they're less proper horror movie, more Insane Clown Posse Miracles video. But not as endearing.
 There's some flashes of interesting filmmaking, such as a hanging staged for maximum damage, or when Grohl first tests the acoustics of their new studio (cheesy, but cool). But on the whole it's just not a well made movie, especially when the band is involved; The very basic staging and blocking, along with the also very basic plotting and dad jokes, make the adventures of the Foo Fighters kind of feel like a 70's Scooby Doo cartoon. With graphic gore.

Oh hey, is this the bit everyone kept talking about in Whiplash?

 Bizarrely, the soundtrack is completely lacking in Foo Fighters songs, at least until the end credits. Maybe as a way to position this as more of a 'real' movie. The snippets of the doomy song we get are pretty good, though not nearly as good as the film makes it out to be. We do get some Gojira, a little Slayer... and, uh... some Jackyl.

 It's mildly -very mildly- likeable. There's some novelty value in seeing the Foo Fighters act portray themselves. And it's very, very bloody. That counts for something in these parts.
 Other than that, though, I'd have to go with pretty fucking terrible.

Under the Shadow (Zeer-e sāye)

 This movie is quite the thing. A horror movie set in Tehran during the height of the Iran-Iraq war, leaving space for hostile spirits and ballistic missile-based scares alike, put together by an Iranian emigree director in the UK, shot in Jordan, starring Farsi-speaking talent from all over the world.

 It starts with a gut-punch: Shideh (Narges Rashidi,) a young woman all but begging to be let back into university so she can continue her career, is denied the right due to her past as a political activist by the administration and dressed down for even daring to ask for it. When she makes it back home, her husband (Bobby Naderi) says "Maybe it's for the best..." and gets angry when Shideh is upset as a result and gives her an emotionally brutal talking to. Oof.

 Shideh resumes her home life, which mostly consists of taking care of her young child Dorsa (Avin Manshadi) and exercising to Jane Fonda workout videos. When Dorsa's favorite doll disappears, the child blames it on evil spirits -djinn, but not the cuddly ones that look like Idris Elba- as per the stories a creepy playmate has been feeding her. Shideh remains sceptical for a while, but at some point shit will, as they say, get real.
 It's a true slow-burn horror movie, but the tension is there from the beginning because society itself is basically hostile to someone like Shideh... or anyone who owns a Betamax, really. She can't even be open about her scepticism: when she confides to a neighbour and laughs off the idea of evil spirits, her neighbour sternly reminds her that djinn are mentioned in the Quran. It shares a lot of DNA with The Babadook -Shideh's deteriorating frame of mind affects her relationship with her daughter in a familiar way- but most of the stress is external this time.

Shideh, under the shadow.

 By the film's midpoint an inert missile strikes the building, scaring the residents (one of them to literal death). The image of the missile just hanging there is striking, and a fairly obvious tip of the hat to Guillermo del Toro; From there Shideh's neighbours start fleeing for the countryside, and the ghostly attacks against her daughter get more frequent and overt.
 Varied and imaginative horrors do eventually come, culminating in a final gauntlet of low-budget but cool-looking supernatural goings on (I was reminded of Poltergeist while watching it, and was amused to read later in an interview with the director that it was a definite influence!)

 For such a small production, it's beautifully shot and staged, with a couple of great performances at its heart and a brilliant control of tone. And the script is clever: the symbolism may be a little on the nose, but well chosen and relevant to the story (besides the missile, the titular shadow is the one cast by the tape X's put to prevent glass shattering from nearby explosions, and there's also the matter of the form chosen by the spirit.)
 It's just a good story. A bit too slow sometimes, and some of its elements may be a little overtly familiar (which, turns out, is a bit unfair: The Babadook came out during its production) but the cultural specificity, and its integration with the film's psychological tightening of the screws, gives it a lot of power.

Confess, Fletch!

 Confess, Fletch is a new adaptation of one of Greg McDonald's Fletch books, coming in more than thirty years after the second Fletch movie - and that wasn't even based on any of the books, just the character.

 That previous incarnation of Fletch, a freelance, countercultural journalist with a penchant for getting into trouble was famously played by Chevy Chase, who created a great character that ran parallel to the literary Fletch but eroded too many rough edges and made him way too goofy, with elaborate disguises and the sort of silliness you'd expect from a hungry young comedian trying to make a post-SNL name for himself.

 This new movie adapts the second Fletch novel and is also perfectly happy to make any number of changes - the book's police antagonist had to be excised for rights reasons, for example, because he got his own spinoff series. But while he still has his rough edges sanded down a bit, this new Fletch is much closer to the low-key, overconfident, professional meddler depicted in the books. Even if he's no longer kind of a scumbag.
 Now played by John Hamm - who is, if we're going to pick at nits, at least two decades too old to play the part faithfully, and way too charismatic - the goofiness is dialled down, leaving most of the humor in this noir comedy to smartass quips, ill-judged decisions, and character interactions. It's the sort of film that's too slight to leave a deep impression, but it's expertly carried by everyone involved.

 The Fletch here is maybe a little bit better treated by people at large than in the books, and has gained a measure of respect in the art world. Enough that he's hired by a rich family to track down a number of stolen paintings. Complications quickly ensue: As soon as he gets to Boston to follow up on some clues, he finds a dead woman's body in the living room of his rented house.

 Now a prime suspect in a murder investigation, not that he's too worried about that, he goes off to investigate the best way he knows: by going around stirring shit, seeing what comes out. 

 Director Greg Mottola mostly keeps out of the way - any stylistic flourishes are over and done with after the credits, leaving the actors and the mystery to do most of the heavy lifting here. Despite having all of Boston and a chunk of Rome to play around in, this is not a movie with any real visual flair.

 The characters fare a lot better: most go a little too broad at times, but since the only real comedy here is character-based, that's understandable. The funniest, arguably, are the two police officers assigned to Fletch's case (Roy Wood Jr. And Ayden Mayeri), who had to be invented whole-cloth for the movie; but they perfectly portray the antagonistic relationship that Fletch had with any and all authority figures in the books. 

 Because the mystery isn't all that great (it's reasonably involving but doesn't end up making all that much sense) it's all about those characters. Besides the police inspector and his assistant, you get Marcia Gay Harden as a very funny European countess, John Slattery as a newspaper owner who can barely stand Fletch, Lorenza Izzo as the rich heiress/girlfriend, Kyle McLachlan as an art dealer who's into EDM... Most of them get at least a few solid jokes in. Even incidental characters get some colorful personality traits. And while the story isn't very compelling, it's well told and things keep happening at a decent pace.

 It's damned to be considered as 'pleasant', and to be honest, it's laid back and languid enough that I can't really say that's an unfair assessment. But dammit, some of the dialog and situations here are so funny and true to the books I really wish we'd get another opportunity to see Hamm and Mottola get another go at the character. 

The Killer (2022) (Deo killeo: Jugeodo doeneun ai)

  The Killer, or as it's better known, The Killer: A Girl who Deserves to Die (a subtitle that's good for disambiguation and absolutely fuck else) is a 2022 South Korean action movie about a ridiculously proficient professional assassin carving a bloody swathe across the criminal underworld - a JohnWick-alike. A Wicky-likey? A Wick-off.

 Bang Ui-gang (Jang Hyuk) is the titular killer, now enjoying his happily ever after with his wife, Hyeon Soo (Chae-Young Lee). And as is usual in these things, tragedy soon strikes: Hyeon is going on a holiday with a friend, and strong-arms Bang (now that's a name for an assassin!) into taking care of her friend's teenaged daughter for three weeks.
 OK, so maybe that's not in line with family or a puppy getting killed.
 In any case the daughter, Seo-Young Lee (Kim Yun Ji) turns out to be a bit of a brat and annoys Bang to the point where he basically bribes her to get her out of his hair. But on a hunch, he decides to track her down instead... which ends up being a good idea, because a bunch of teen ne'er do wells are basically forcing her into a prostitution ring.

 Bang walks into this induction, cool as a cucumber, kicks everyone's butts, and heads out with Seo. But the next day he finds out that all the kids he'd just knocked around are stabbed to death, and he gets a call from the madam/would-be-pimp that they have a knife with his fingerprints, and that they're going to frame him.
 So Bang tracks them down again, getting more and more violent, and things escalate as they're wont to do in this sort of movie - things of course go deeper than it looked like at first, and poor Seo-Young had been 'chosen' by a rich and powerful douchebag who has half the Korean underworld and part of the Russian Mafia in his back pocket. Because you can't have a Wick-off without the Russian Mafia.

Hallway; Simulated one-take; A horde of thugs; Heavy color grading. Modern action movie bingo!

 South Korean cinema has a long and storied history in the action genre -a film like this is of a line that goes back to The Villainess, The Man from Nowhere (which gets a shoutout here!) and, I dunno, A Bittersweet Life- but it's pretty clear here that the filmmakers were mostly looking westward, and towards the 87North filmography in particular. Which is fine! None of this exist in a vacuum, and it's not like Stahelski and co. didn't lift from other places. Director Jae-Hoon Choi and his fight team keep things lively and memorable; Apparently Bang Ui-Gang is known for doing a lot of the fight choreography, so good on him.
 The action is frequent, varied and a lot of fun - violent, gory (all digital blood, but a little less floaty than most) and filled with pretty cool and painful-looking stunts. I'm a bit less of a fan of the editing, which is too jumpy and tends to change position a bit too often, but things are still crystal clear.

 That's a good thing, because while the script is serviceable, it's one of those jobs where the protagonist is perfect and five steps ahead of everyone else and playing 3D chess while everyone around him is playing tiddlywinks. There are no stakes because he's basically infallible; besides, some of the 3D chess moves are pretty wonky; I have no idea what the hell the use of stringing up a major threat with a weird pulley system achieved, for example, and there's a couple of instances like that seem almost random.

 The script is also hit and miss with characters and their development, but it's not too bad. There's a chunk of maudlin backstory that's pretty cringeworthy, but the character relationships are solid, and there's a welcome amount of (intended) weirdness and funny character moments. Look out for a great scene with a gun dealer and youtube tutorials.

 It's not as solid a movie as the previous collaboration between this director and the protagonist, 2020's excellent historical epic The Swordsman, but it's still a great follow-up- it might be derivative, but it's compelling and full of great action. You could ask for a lot more, but you don't really need it, do you?

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

  The drama couldn't be higher for the Guardians in their third solo outing. Writer/director James Gunn is defecting to go run things over at DC, ending a run that includes some of the last memorable Marvel characters - this is in the middle of a disappointing couple of 'phases' for Marvel's corporate strategy.
 Market indicators signal that this immanentize the end, or at least a diminishing of Disney's pop culture dominance, with falling revenues over...

 Ugh.

 I originally planned on writing three or four paragraphs in this vein, and end the post with a sentence saying something along the lines of "oh, and by the way, the movie itself is pretty good!"
 But as much as the MCU is culpable for helping shift discussion from art to the corporate strategies behind it on the mainstream, I don't have it in my heart to take it out on the poor Guardians; they don't deserve it.
 They've been as much victims of all this corporate shit as perpetuators. Whether you like it or not, Gunn has always tried to put as much of himself as possible in these things, and the love for the characters and their world shines through. The guy is earnest; and he did try and make this last one special. It's not perfect- it's a bit messy, overlong, sometimes manipulative, the script spirals out of control in the third act, but... it's honest, it's fun, full of great character moments and story beats, and the music is great.

 I mean, it ends on a Replacements track!

 Pretty much in line with the previous two volumes, then. This one delves into the backstory of Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper), the team's furriest, smartass-iest member (and that's saying something, when most of the dialog consists of characters trying to out-smartass each other at every turn).

 The plot kicks off when the movie's villain, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) sends Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) to retrieve Rocket. Rocket is left gravely wounded, and the rest of the team have to jump through a bunch of hoops and visit a couple of exotic locales to save him. This time around we get a space station built out of bone, flesh and sinew, and a U.S. suburban neighbourhood peopled by creepy-ass furries.
 Meanwhile, Rocket has extended flashbacks of his time as a subject of animal experimentation.

 Story isn't this movie's strength, even with as powerful a driving force as Rocket's backstory - both previous movies have been shaggy dog stories held together by strong themes and character work, and this isn't really an exception. But when the big climactic action scene in the third act is the team just getting from one end of a hallway to another, even when said hallway is filled with low-level enemies... something's gone wrong.
 It's not even the MCUs traditional problem with weak villains; It's that the villain isn't in control of the third act, and most of the characters' actions don't really have anything to do with him. A case of poor scripting, basically, diminished by the fact that the script is clearly unconcerned by such concerns as final confrontations - it's much more interested in the characters' journeys.

 Mild issues aside Volume 3 is, as usual, a very colourful, very fun space opera, full of memorable characters, jokes and explosions, anchored by likeable, flawed characters the cast could play in their sleep by now, and that have enough depth built into to them that pathos can reliably be extracted from any of their different relationships. Hell, they even get Chris Pratt to act. I know, I was mildly surprised, too.

 Gunn also continues to try and come up with cool imagery (along with cinematographer Henry Braham), something they really started doing on Volume 2 of this series, and is carried out here with considerable panache. This is a very colorful, often striking movie; Add to that the hallway-crossing scene mentioned above, which is a successful attempt at doing the sort of cool, exciting, cleanly choreographed action that mostly eludes Disney's output.
 It's surprisingly violent for its PG13 rating, most of it enjoyably goopy alien slashing/blasting, but some of it consists in violence against animals. While that's pretty manipulative, it's also undeniably effective.

 If this all sounds like damning the movie with faint praise and too many qualifiers, know that it's not my intention. The trilogy capper is genuinely likeable and heartfelt and thrilling and very well made. It's a James Gunn movie through and through, full of the specific brand of weirdo sensibility that just has to give Howard the Duck an extended cameo, can go maudlin at the drop of a hat, or that ends on a run of pitch-perfect music jokes ending on a mention of Adrian Belew.
 Like all the other worthwhile Marvel movies, this is purely a Guardians of the Galaxy movie -  there's the unfortunate business with Gamora, which is incorporated into the flow of things gracefully enough even though it feels like a spanner int he works; But other than that, there's no extraneous MCU shit.

 It really is great.

Tumbbad

 And verily it happened that the firstborn of ye Mother of All Gods hath turned out to be a bit of a dick. Yea, Hastar is... iseth? a greedy little shit

 The other gods put up with it until little Hastar sets out to steal all the gold and all the food from her mother. Then they rebel, and put him down after he takes all the gold, but before he gets his mitts on the food. Mom takes pity on him and lets him live, but imprisons him deep in her womb (ouch!) and strikes his name from the cosmic record, so that he will never be worshipped.

 This is the mythology lesson told in the first couple of minutes of Tumbbad, a very cool Hindi folk-horror/dark fantasy/period drama/bit of weirdness. This prelude is presented with cheap-looking CGI -  classy on paper (it's all static idols and spilling coins) but very fake looking in practice, in a way that seems to bug us westerners (or at least me) but is very common in Asian cinema. In any case, I'm happy to report that's the only instance of tacky, overtly artificial CGI in the movie.

 From there we jump to the village of Tumbbad, early in the twentieth century, where a mother (Jyoti Malshe) and her two young children are stuck caring for a sleeping ancient woman chained to a bed, her mouth held shut with railroad spikes. The mother is the mistress of a rich man, the children are his bastards, and the chained up woman is his distant ancestor (great great grandmother, if I remember it right.) As it turns out, the old man lives in an old, cursed manor that used to be a forbidden temple to Hastar. He's spent all his life and fortune trying to get to the forgotten god's rumored treasure.

 Meanwhile, the sleeping old lady knows where the treasure is, but she's also a hideous cannibal demon. The eldest kid keeps pressuring his mother to try and get the treasure herself, to try and get the old woman to tell them where it is, or to go search the manor for it themselves. Things don't get that far; a horrifying accident leaves the kid alone in the shack, at night, with a hungry, now woken demon.

 The family, what's left of them, soon leaves Tumbbad, to look for a better life in the nearby city of Pune.

 Fifteen years later, the eldest son Vinayak (now played by Sohum Shah) returns to the old cottage where the crone was chained, only to find that a tree has grown out of her, with her still-beating heart attached. I love this sort of stuff. In exchange for finally putting her to rest and ending her eternal hunger, Vinayak finally learns where the treasure is and how to get at it, and returns to Pune with a pouch full of gold coins.

 This second chapter is all about Vinayak, his dealings with his wife (Anita Date-Kelkar) and his brother in law (Deepak Damle) - Vinayak needs to return every so often to Tumbbad and comes back with a handful of coins every time, so this naturally raises some questions, and some complications.
 When we finally learn how he gets the coins, it's a brilliant piece of mythic storytelling, a sort of procedural look into some business that feels like a legitimate folk tale, and that makes complete sense within the made-up cosmology set out in the prelude. This whole side of the movie is ridiculously well crafted, and worth the price of admission alone.

 The third act, set once again fifteen years later, catches up with a more successful Vinayak and his now grown son, who pretty much acts exactly as he did himself as a child. They come up with an ambitious plan to take advantage of the thing beneath the manor at Tumbbad... which, nah, can't see any problems with trying to trick an ancient evil god, I'm sure everything will turn out great.

 The mythology was created from scratch for the movie, but it sounds and feels authentic. It's interesting that Hastar is effectively unnamable, which has got to be a Lovecraft reference, right? The plot is is basically cautionary tale about greed (as an initial Gandhi quote should have made clear.) But... it's so much richer than that! Vinayak, to be clear, is a dipshit whose greed causes pain to those close to him, but he's never painted as a real monster, and has his good qualities. What I found really interesting is that he's more of a trickster figure than anything else, complete with things only going bad for him when he lets his lust for riches get the better of him. But it worked out great while he kept it reined in, so the story isn't that one-sided. He could have made it.

 The narrative of the movie as a whole is a little more problematic; It's episodic by design, but that gives the film some pacing issues. The first chapter is possibly the least interesting, but the most effective one as a fucked up mini-horror movie. The other two, while digging a bit more into outré imagery and cooler mythological aspects (more dark fantasy than horror proper) mix in maybe a little too much period drama and too many tangents. It's mostly compelling, but it makes the movie harder to recommend to people who'd prefer a more straightforward yarn. It also makes the film feel a little unwieldy, even despite its short running time. But... well, it's also what makes it special.

 I haven't even mentioned the Del Toro-influenced commenting on Indian history, or the thematic links between the different chapters - it's got some issues, but the script does a lot of heavy lifting.

 I should really mention the brilliant cinematography, which serves up striking imagery at a good clip, both natural and un-. Director Rahi Anil Barve and cinematographer Pankaj Kumar have made a damn beautiful-looking movie.

 The music, by videogame stalwart Jesper Kydd is also really, really good. There's also a recurring Indian song included, which... well, let's just say it's not my style, but it very endearingly comments on the action, like the rap at the end of a Ninja Turtles movie. Or Psycho Goreman.

 I like a lot of Asian cinema, but have bounced off the hardest off Indian stuff. There's a little of the sort of Bollywood stuff I dislike on display here - the song, a ridiculously overblown dramatic moment, but it's pretty negligible, and the movie completely earns those moments anyhow. It's a good one - great even, for mythology nerds.