Extraction

 I’ve been avoiding Extraction for a while, mainly based on a terrible trailer and it being a Netflix original. Seeing some of the action from the sequel got me curious, though, so… here we are! TLDR: It’s a pretty fun, sometimes great action movie brought down by some truly dire writing.

 Things kick off with in media res, with Caine McExtraction (Chris Hemsworth) stuck in the middle of a shootout in a bridge. It’s… not a great scene, to be honest – gritty, but not much happens and the action isn’t very engaging – and then it cuts to “2 days earlier”. A bit pointless, but ok, sure. Not feeling confident about the script.

 Our protagonist, who’s actually called Tyler Rake (say it out loud! It’s one of those comic-book names that’s just fun to enunciate) is your standard sad-sack, traumatized soldier with a side of a death wish (we know this because he pulls a suicidal stunt on a whim. In case you didn’t get the very obvious message, one scene later his handler (the great Goldshifteh Farahani, who gets next to nothing to do here) just states it out loud. Because that’s the level of scriptwriting we’re dealing with here; Living down to that trailer already.

 Tyler’s a mercenary, and his mission, should he choose to accept it, is to rescue Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), an imprisoned Indian kingpin’s son from a rival kingpin in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The problem? The kidnapper pretty much runs the city, including a heavy militarized police force. Also – the imprisoned kingpin has all his assets frozen, so he can’t pay the mercenary outfit the extraction fee; He instead sends his first in command, Saju (a very cool Randeep Hooda) to kill the mercs and snatch the kid.

 The movie peaks early on with some truly great action – the rescue has some cool hand to hand combat, both armed and unarmed, and some awesome stunts; the filming is a little choppy but crystal clear and immediate, and there are a lot of cool moves and painful-looking falls. But the surprising thing is that it keeps expanding in scope as Tyler and Ovi make their way through the vicinity trying to escape from goons and cops and Saju – there’s a ton of gunplay, knife fights (in a street where cars just won’t break), a very fun car chase… the works. And it’s long! About twenty-five minutes, with some asides, and a lot of it strung together into a (pretty well done) faux-one take.
 At the end it leaves our protagonists stuck in hostile territory, with no means of extraction.

 From there on we get mediocre drama – some boring, predictable business with a fellow merc (David Harbour), a fun fight against a bunch of kids, trite bonding stuff. It all ends with another appropriately long fight on a bridge which I unfortunately didn’t think was nearly as good as some of the earlier stuff, despite the expanded scope. Some dodgy explosion CGI and the only available enemies being faceless mooks (and a tertiary character promoted to sniper) might have something to do with that.
 Still fun enough, though.

 The main problem here is a script that seems to understand the surface elements that make for a good action movie, but completely fails in developing them to… well, basically to any degree; it’s all skin deep, set dressing. Basic to a fault, never developing its threadbare themes into anything even remotely interesting; Just borrowing shit from better movies to give it the desired texture without any interest in saying something or enhancing the action.
 There’s a place for that sort of thing – as Polite Society accurately pointed out, tropes are tropes for a reason; But the uninspired way everything is recycled here, while still dotting its I’s and crossing its Ts to show that the writers have attended some screenwriting classes, is kind of off-putting.
 Given all this shit, it didn’t surprise me to find out it’s written by the Russo brothers (along with the author of the source comic, Ande Parks, but I wouldn’t hold it against him). This is very much of a piece with everything of their output as writers I’ve seen; These folks just completely suck at storytelling.

 (Let me state for the record that I somehow completely missed the script was theirs until the end credits! I thought they just produced.)

 The actors do wonders with the shitty lines they’re given. Hemsworth is basically a charisma golem, and he could play this soulful beefcake in a coma and still make it compelling. Rudhraksh Jaiswal is asked to do a lot more as the kidnappee and succeeds admirably, even when asked to provide some appropriately water-based trite wisdom. Randeep Hooda makes the biggest impression, though, delivering a very cool, relatable badass antagonist.
 Sam Hargrave, a veteran stuntman and stunt/fight coordinator, does pretty well directing his first full length film – and that's putting it mildly; Can’t think of that many established directors who could have pulled off that mid-movie action scene as well as he did.

 For all my railing against the script – and I could go on, from the pointless, hacky gesture at the end to the bad guy following the action on binoculars from miles away as if it was a football match (which to be honest is the more fun type of dumb I like in this sort of thing!) …in the end it’s mostly harmless and provides the requisite excuses for a bunch of people to get shot up good. Don't need to forgive something that's this easily forgotten. Thankfully everything else comes through; Can’t wait to see what Hargrave does to top it in the sequel.

V/H/S/99

 V/H/S is a series of found footage horror anthologies whose central gimmick is that they were, yes, all found recorded on obsolete technology - a single VHS tape per movie; some of the . The series, overseen by Brad Miska, has attracted some big names over the years: Gareth Evans, Timo Tajhanto, Ti West, Adam Wingard, Benson & Moorhead, Nacho Vigalondo, Steve Kostanski and a bunch of others. They're all pretty uneven, as any anthology is bound to be, but they also hit that sweet spot where there's almost always enough good stuff to make it worth it - and segments are varied and short enough to make even the worst misses not register that much. I have a huge soft spot for the series.

 This fifth installment is, as it tile indicates, set in 1999. There's no framing story this time around - as the tape starts we're treated to a some kid's (pretty funny) stop-motion animation, before we're hurled into the first story - Shredders, directed by Maggie Levin.

 

 It's your standard tale of a bunch of punk kids who manage to be punk enough to piss off an undead punk band in a spooky derelict club. The characters are a loud bunch of assholes and it's a beyond predictable tale of comeuppance, so it becomes a bit of an exercise in patiently waiting until the zombies pop up and kill everyone; The undead do redeem the segment somewhat by being entertainingly Fulci-esque.

 Next is Johannes Roberts' The Suicide Bid, a tale of a fraternity hazing gone horrifyingly wrong- one that manages to be genuinely disturbing without shedding a single drop of blood. It also gets an amazing amount of mileage from a non-articulated rubber mask. The ending is a little too EC comics, but this one's a keeper.

 Ozzy's Dungeon, from Flying Lotus (Hip Hop artist Steven Ellison, whose Kuso I've had on my watchlist for ages) is a far more bizarre exercise. It starts out as a pretty funny satire of those shitty, gross-out 90's kid's contest shows where kids had to slide into a pool of slime or whatever, until a horrifying injury makes it switch rails to... well, basically torture porn. It's not very engaging, the pacing is all shot to hell, and all the '90s references get a bit strained, but it's well made and saved by a gloriously weird (and Weird, as in the genre) ending.

 Tyler MacIntyre provides The Gawkers, another chance to spend some interminable minutes with a bunch of assholes until they get their just deserts. Yay. Said deserts are provided by a pretty fun mythical menace, but as in the first skit, this is horror storytelling at its most basic and uninteresting.

 But then comes the highlight of... well, not just the highlight of this movie, but one of the better shorts in the whole series. Vanessa & Joseph Winter - the couple behind the extremely entertaining Deadstream - close out with To Hell and Back, the story of a couple of documentarians (Archelaus Crisanto and Joseph Winter) trying to make a movie about a witch coven who are about to summon a demon on the cusp of the millennium. Things go horribly, horribly wrong for them in deeply hilarious and imaginative ways; More happens in this segment than on a lot of mainstream movies, and with a tiny fraction of the budget, too. It's firmly on the comedy side of things, but I don't think that will disappoint anyone as it's intense, eventful, and funny as hell.
 Melanie Stone returns as a friendly (or is she?) undead witch, confirming her standout character in Deadstream wasn't a fluke, and there are so many little gags and bizarre touches - seriously, it is a fucking blast.

 So, on the whole? Well, I can't say it doesn't drag here or there, especially given its running theme of toxic people and how they get other people who really should know better to do stupid things; We're forced to spend a little too much time with some seriously annoying shits.

 But as usual the good outweighs the bad - and then some, given how good that last story is.

Asteroid City

  Deep in the middle of nowhere, in the US desert, a tiny town's formed around a five thousand year old meteorite crater. Home to a diner, a garage, a small scientific community and not much else, Asteroid City is formally introduced in a stunning scene where writer/director Wes Anderson takes in the whole of this 50's podunk town with his trademark sharp, angular pans. It shortly becomes minor hub of activity when it hosts a convention for young stargazers to present their atomic age sci-fi inventions under the auspices of Uncle Sam.

 The teens (Jake Ryan, Grace Edwards, Sophia Lillis, Aristou Mehan and Ethan Lee) get along almost immediately, finally finding a nerd-friendly space where they all feel accepted. Their proud parents bring their own problems with them, most notably recent widower/war correspondent Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and ennui-afflicted actress Midge (Scarlett Johansson), who connect almost immediately, sharing their fears and frustrations across their opposing cabin windows.
 Tom Hanks plays Augie's father-in-law, who arrives a little later; Tilda Swinton's a local scientist, and Steve Carrell an enterprising local. There's also a travelling country band stuck waiting for the train, and a school trip there to see some sort of celestial alignment event, led by Rupert Friend and Maya Hawke respectively.

 As ceremonies go on the proceeds are interrupted by an alien presence, which necessitates government intervention and a quarantine of the small town. As the gifted kids try to work out what it all meant, the adults grapple with their own problems and doubts.

 And if all that wasn't busy enough for you, there's also an elaborate framing device where an Ed-Murrow-style TV presenter (Bryan Cranston) treats us to the story of how Asteroid City - the fictional TV show the movie we're watching is based on - came together, all the way from its origins as a play: so add to the cast the screenwriter (Ed Norton), the director (Adrian Brody) and of course the actors playing the characters in the main story appear again playing their actors, not the characters.
 It's convoluted and very meta, but only deceptively extraneous: these background scenes inform the main story, as the actors start questioning their character's motives and internal life, culminating in a scene where the actor for Augie takes a time out to catch some air and has an important tete-a-tete with an actress from a neighboring production.

 Wes Anderson's movies have always been arch, self-aware and purposefully artificial, but never as post-modern as this, never as meta; at points it flirts with surrealism. This is not peak Anderson (except for style): the humor often falls flat, it takes some left turns that I found a bit cringeworthy, and the talented/bloated cast runs a bit together as they all deliver their lines in the same, familiar deadpan rapid-fire; it gets old quickly. The film is flabby, overindulgent and its style tends to overwhelm quieter moments. Everything is stylized to within an inch of its life.
 You know, #WesAnderson problems.

 But it also has too many powerful moments, affecting lines, and intriguing ideas to ignore. And some really funny bits that no other director could pull off. I didn't find it to be as good as most of Anderson's other movies, but it does have a core of honesty, a reflection of where his head is at  these days (in a cloud of existential angst, it looks like). And it left me thinking about it for a long time, which is something I always respect.

 I suspect if you like Anderson's stuff, you'll at least tolerate it- even if it's just for the visual flourishes, sight gags, or the killer's row of acting talent (did I mention Stephen Park, Margot Robbie, Jeffrey Wright, Bob Balaban and Willem Dafoe are in this as well? Only Bill Murray is missing, as he had to bow out due to COVID.)
 If you don't like Anderson, though, you're probably better off watching anything else.

Heavy Trip (Hevi Reissu)

 If you've ever wondered what a crowd-pleasing indie extreme metal movie would look like, well, wonder no more: It would look like any other crowd-pleasing indie comedy, but with better music.

 Heavy Trip is a goofy, likeable trifle from that least extreme (metal) of Scandinavian countries, Finland*. It eschews church burnings or crypto-nazi beliefs and focuses instead in the more common sort of metalhead, the one you might actually meet - a bunch of quiet outsider types.

 

 First seen together playing a Gothenburg-style version of an old Finnish standard, the boys in (what will be known as) IMPALED REKTUM have been rehearsing together in the basement of a reindeer butcher house (metal!) for twelve years without ever showing their music to anyone else; put it down to lead singer Turo's (Johannes Holopainen) crippling shyness - the dude looks like a Viking raider, but can't raise the courage to stand up to anyone or for anything.

 Filling out the band are the down-to-earth guitarist Lotvonen (Samuli Jaskio), affable, enthusiastic drummer Jinkky (Antti Tuomas Heikkinen, in the film's more overt Spinal Tap homage) and Pasi (Max Ovaska), a more traditional metal nerd with eidetic memory.

 Through a series of contrivances the band becomes the talk of their backwater town when they seemingly score a gig in a Norwegian metal festival. They go from being the butt of cartoonish bullying - this is the sort of movie that stacks the deck by making almost everyone in town behave like an absolute asshole towards our protagonists - to local heroes, before the other shoe inevitably drops.
 The third act of the movie turns into a road trip as the band, after a few complications that resulted in an added abducted mental patient (Chike Ohanwe), tries to make their way to the festival.

 The film is at its most likeable when it's at its quietest; it begins with Turo getting bullied, for example, berating himself for not being able to come up with even a basic comeback. Poor Lotvonen gets a little shafted in the characterization department, but there's a genuine sweetness to how the movie portrays these knuckleheads and their various hang-ups: Jinkky's beef with a speed camera, for one of the film's funniest conceits, or Pasi coming out in his corpse-paint persona, or Turo's crush on a local florist - it's all handled sensitively, and the actors do a great job with the material.

 As the plot ramps up on the last third there's a little less space for this sort of character work and the movie suffers, but it remains unassuming and pleasant even as the action around the band gets suitably epic. This is where the film indulges its Hollywoodian crowd-pleasing instincts a little too much - expect neat resolutions and easy outs;  The humor gets pretty absurd, too ("Listen! I love Satan as much as any woman in their forties...") and the events get a bit self-consciously METAL - but this is where all the work the movie did to establish the characters pays off. It feels earned.

 Pacing is a bigger problem, as is a very hit-and-miss, kitchen-sink sense of humor that gets a little too goofy and slapstick-y for its own good at times; but it does get quite a few great jokes in, so I guess that's ok. 

 Best of all is that the movie celebrates all forms of metal (there's a character named after Dokken, for some reason; They had a song in Boys from County Hell - coincidence?) but focuses on black metal. The guitars and voice for the original songs are provided by members of Mors Subita, and there are jokes about illegible band logos, black metal recording practices (Pasi reverentially describes how one song was recorded with a microphone stuck into a sheep carcass) and extremely niche genre classifications (the band is repeatedly described as "Symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal" with a straight face).

 There's genuine affection for the music and the scene, without a mention of the genre's more, ahem, problematic, elements. It's a relentlessly positive movie (despite featuring grave-robbing, projectile vomiting, and lounge singing) that probably won't blow anyone's mind, but it's an extremely pleasant way to spend an hour and a half.
 And maybe that's not the adjective you'd want out of a black metal comedy but hey, it's still pretty good. A sequel has already been written by the same writing/directing team (Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren; Aleksi Puranen and Jari Olavi Rantala co-wrote); Bring it on, I'm looking forward to spending more time with these folks.

* I'm joking, Impaled Nazarene fans! I'm joking!

The Boys from County Hell

 That Bram Stoker based Dracula on Vlad III, the Impaler, is a relatively modern theory - it arose in the 1950s. The man never really said much about it; Scholars who have studied his notes found that he made up many of the details, and never really knew much about the Wallachian Wanker (as I'm sure he was known in his time [citation needed]).

 There's a newer theory that Stoker actually based his most famous monster on a legend from his own country - Abhartach, 'the dwarf', a cruel tyrant/wizard (the worst type of tyrant) that kept coming back from the grave and, in some tellings, gorged on people's blood.

 The Boys from County Hell, a 2021 Irish horror comedy runs with that. It's set in a fictional town (based on the actual site where Abhartach is said to rest) where Stoker once stayed a night and overheard the story. The locals milk it as much as possible, of course; the local pub is called The Stoker, and the locals have a bit of fun with the meagre few tourists that come for that tidbit of folklore. There's not a lot else to do in that particular corner of the Irish backcountry.

 Jack (Eugene Rowan), our protagonist, is keenly aware of that. He's a slacker in his early twenties with no prospects and no illusions. He mostly hangs out in the pub with his mates - William (Fra Free), Claire (Louisa Harland) and SP (Michael Hough) and whiles away his time as others make plans and move on with their lives.

 Things sour when, while drunkenly crossing a field one night, they're a victim of a random boar attack and William dies against the Abhartach's cairn. As Jack watches horrified, the ground thirstily drinks up his friend's blood.

 But.. that's actually kind of unrelated to the plot. Things kick off a little later when Jack's father (Nigel O'Neill) enlists him and his surviving mates to help him build a road that needs to go right through... you guessed it, the evil dwarf's cairn. No self-respecting evil tyrant wizard is ever going to stand for that; there are some random detours in the way, but things do end up with a suitably epic (well, epic on a budget) vampire attack on the sleepy backwater town.

 There is a lot of this movie that just works; The landscapes are beautiful, the film-making assured, all the actors are great and have plenty of great lines. The monster is excellent and has a truly badass way of draining blood (none of that fang malarkey for The Dwarf!).
 Unfortunately the film is let down by a script that never really coheres its disparate elements into a compelling story. There are false starts, a whole sideplot which feels like it should be integral to the story but ends up feeling like a red herring... it doesn't feel like the movie ever figured out what to do with its plot elements. There's also the fact that the movie acts like it's a comedy but doesn't have that many jokes to back it up; This last one is honestly not much of a problem - I actually prefer this tone, which is a little more, say, American Werewolf in London than Shaun of the Dead - but there's something in the balance that just feels off.

 It's a shame that it's a bit of a mess, but director/co-writer Chris Baugh and his co-conspirators have fashioned a very likeable mess, one that's over and done with in a brisk, enjoyable ninety minutes and does manage to get some pretty funny jokes in. It might be a bit less than the sum of its parts, but there are some very good parts here.
 My favorite: When the Abhartach finally surfaces, instead of his hand coming out of the ground, we see his foot. That might seem like a bit of absurdist humor, but no: to prevent the monster from coming back, the ancient chieftains that fought him had to buried him upside down. Folklore humor!

The Five Venoms

  Cheh Chang built up, over the course of his years directing martial arts movies, a killer roster of Kung-Fu talent - Chiang Shen, Sun Chien, Phillip Kwok, Lo Meng, Wei Pai, Feng Lu and others. They'd eventually coalesce into a stable group which eventually became known as the Venom mob, mostly due to this movie. Wikipedia informs me that they were only active for less than five years, which surprised me - they put out a lot of movies in that short time.

 I loved The Five Venoms (or The Five Deadly Venoms, as it was known back then) as a kid and watched it quite a few times -  there was a TV station that aired a lot of old martial arts movies on Sundays, and this one was in regular rotation. Unfortunately I did not enjoy it as much this time around.

 The premise is great: An old master (Dick Wei/Tu Lung) charges his last apprentice Yang Tieh (Chiang Sheng) with hunting down his previous ones. Each one was taught a deadly animal-based martial arts style (Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Lizard... and, uh, the other one). The old master is dying, so he doesn't have time to train him fully in any of the styles - Yang just gets the basics and gets sent away; because of that, he's told that he'll need to ally with one of the venoms to even stand a chance. There's also some deal with a treasure Yang needs to recover, because these movies seem to be allergic to simplicity.

 Another complication: The Venom clan apprentices go incognito, and the master can't (or won't) help Yang identify them. The apprentices don't even necessarily know each other.

 This simple, videogame boss-rush premise is completely wasted as the script almost immediately tangles itself into knots. Yang, who'd been set up as the protagonist, is unceremoniously ignored for most of the movie to instead focus on the rest of the venom's misadventures; Snake and Centipede think they know where the treasure is, so they kill a whole family to get to it. A constable and his friend, who may or may not be venoms as well (spoiler: they are) investigate, there's a whole lot of betrayals, double-guessing and plotting against each other... but sadly not too many fights. There sure is a lot of torture, though.
 Things get pretty bleak - innocents get tortured to death, and there's some nasty business with hooks going through nasal passages to cause untraceable deaths (with some really vivid bone-crunching sounds!) I clearly misremembered Crippled Avengers being uncharacteristically brutal, since this one's also got plenty of nasty business going on. And because it's all incidental, the nastiness doesn't line up with the plot as it does on Avengers and when the assholes do get theirs it's nowhere near as satisfying.

It's not terrible, necessarily, but both the script and the acting would need to be quite a bit better to make it work. As it is, it's a relief when brawls do break out: The Kung-Fu action is clean, full of amazing physical stunts, great wirework, and fun gimmicks. The whole animal style thing is goofy as hell, though - poor Snake especially made me crack up whenever he showed off his special moves.
 As with most of the Shaw Brothers movies, the action doesn't concern itself much with making the fights look realistic. Awesome moves and athletics are the order of the day, with the choreographies being heavily stylized... if the hits clearly don't connect, eh, it's no big deal.

 It really doesn't matter, all the fights are good fun. It's a shame the rest of the movie kind of drags.

The Outlaws

  "Based on a true story!" Boasts the trailer for The Outlaws, a 2017 Korean film, exclamation sign and everything. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that, like Cocaine Bear, it uses a real incident (an early 2000's police sting which resulted in a bunch of arrests) as a springboard for a pretty nuts police actioner rather than an attempt to shed any light on what actually happened.
 And this is fine! Because as it turns out it's a fun and well-made pretty nuts police actioner.

 Detective Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong-seok) heads up a small serious crime unit embedded in the Chinatown section of Seoul, trying to curb Chinese gang violence from escalating. The guy has a personal, almost friendly relationship with most of the gang bosses, to the point where he stops a turf war from exploding by browbeating two opposing gang leaders into playing nice with each other.
 He patronizes another gang den, one of those bars/karaoke joints which... yeah, pretty sure it'd count as a serious case of corruption. He and his team also do that thing where they beat up suspects while pointing the office cameras away. Ah, police brutality, always hilarious.

 It works, though, because the movie adopts a pretty heightened tone that doesn't fully break with reality, but it's made abundantly clear that it's not one-hundred percent serious either. They do this mostly by deploying Ma Dong-seok's outsized charisma and impeccable comedic timing; The guy is ridiculously likeable, and can do no wrong even when he fucks up. There's quite a lot of understated humor in the movie, and most of it comes down to Dong-Seok's considerable charm. He's just as likely to treat an armed assailant as a child and annoyedly ask for the weapon, rather than getting into a fight... and the funniest part is that it seems like common sense, yep, that would probably work. At least for Don Lee.

 The main plot arrives in the shape of a trio of mainland goons led by one Jang Chen (ex-K-pop singer Yoon Kye-sang, in good badass form). They come to collect on a debt, and instead take over one of the gangs and start to brutally murder their way across the criminal underworld. They're so ruthless that it actually works! But their methods call too much public attention, and cause the police commissioner to take the case away from the Serious Crimes unit.

 Ma Seok-do takes exception to this, and manages to keep the case for ten more days by betting his job on being able to make 25 arrests before that time is through. Again: not how the world works, but it's a snug fit with the somewhat goofy, ultra-tough tone of the film.

 There's some cheesy business with a surrogate son figure (though he might be his real son, if I understood correctly? That would make it a lot cheesier) and some brutal, actually upsetting violence - torture, sexual violence, that sort of thing. As with much of South Korea's cinematic output, the tone can vary wildly from one scene to the next, but overall it's pretty well considered. There's some bloody detail to some of the carnage but nothing too gory.
 The action is pretty great. There's a lot of it, mostly short and brutal, not show-offy at all. It still manages some fun sequences, my favorite ones involving cars. The standout is the one drawn-out fight set in a public restroom, and it's an absolute winner: no porcelain is cracked, but you can't say the same for mirrors, glass partitions, a flowerpot (!) and some pipes. Great stuff.

 It was hugely successful and has already spawned two wildly popular sequels, with a third one on the way for next year. Based on how enjoyable this one is, I'm really looking forward to catching up with the further adventures of Det. Ma Seok-do and the gang.

The Show

 Alan Moore's kept busy after finally quitting comics a few years ago. He's put out a (great) book of short stories, might actually be finishing a long-in-gestation book on magic, and more importantly for our purposes here, he actually wrote and shepherded a full movie to production.

 The Show -a title so generic it's almost as if it's flipping two birds at search engines- is a wonderful trawl through Northampton's more psychedelic side, a noir yarn warped by Moore's acid-tinged surreal sense of humor. A suitably droll, very witty, hyper-literate sense of humor.

 A man (Tom Burke) arrives at Northampton looking for another man (Darrell D'Silva), one who beat his client's daughter and stole a precious heirloom. We'll mostly be following the former - goes by Steve Lipman, though his name changes often, as does his cover story - as he hits the streets and meets various colourful characters, slowly putting together a pulpy, twisty story that will lead to a confrontation with an East London mafioso and a sort of vaudeville act of the damned that seems to impose their reality upon our dreamscapes. Their apparent ringleader? A dead cult comedian called Frank Metterton, played by none other than Alan Moore hisself, made up to look like a crescent moon. Or a waning moon, I guess, depending on which side you look at him from.

 

 The story serves as an excuse for a lot of digressions and to parade a bunch of wonderful characters, but it isn't an afterthought. Unlike a lot of surrealist work the plotting here is loose but coherent, laced with dream-logic but sound enough to work within its chosen genre. And it builds up to near-traditional beats and payoffs, even while structurally it remains a shaggy dog story.
 There is so much to unpack here; As is usual with Moore's work, the whole thing is dense with detail, allusions, gags and homages. One thing I love about surrealist films is that it puts me in a mode where I'm constantly double-guessing myself, trying to work out some bit of incidental symbolism rather than plot mechanics- and in that sense this movie is a treasure trove. With all the references to dreams in the early going, I at first took Lipman's shirt to be a nod to Freddy Krueger, but no- it becomes clear later, with his choice of weapon, that he's actually meant to be the Beano's version of Dennis the Menace, all grown up. Does it mean anything? I'm not sure, maybe not - Moore's gone on record about reading a lot of those comics as a kid, so it might be just a homage. Is it positioning him as an agent of chaos, or further grounding all this weirdness in the working class? Possibly; It still got a huge laugh.

 The characters are so much fun: A pair of pre-pubescent gumshoes who come with their own black and white palette and speak their hard-boiled noir narration out loud (later, they do the two-kids on a trench coat gag.) A natty club doorman constantly contradicts himself and backtracks on everything he says. A brutally direct, standoffish woman gets some seriously funny lines in. There's also a Voodoo priestess drug dealer, a gravitas-laden superhero whose laptop is branded with his insignia... silly, silly stuff. That's not even counting Faith (Siobhan Hewlett), a very likeable near-fatal victim of erotic asphyxiation who becomes integral to the story early on.

 If it all sounds a bit too twee for you... well, it might well be; This is the sort of movie that will provoke a strong visceral rejection in a certain sort of moviegoer. But it's very well made. All the actors are having fun with their roles, the staging shows the limits of its budget but wears them well- and the production design is outstanding, filling the background with marginalia like an advert for 'Amityville and Usher, realtors' or a soap opera called Wittgenstein's terrace where a shouting match devolves into epistemological debate. Moore's frequent collaborator Mitch Jenkins shows a little flair where money allows but mostly remains unobtrusive, reserving his most striking shots to frame the characters in memorable ways.

 In something as wide-ranging as this, it's inevitable that some bits will fall flat. There is the one scene in particular - a nightmarish courtroom incident - which I found almost intolerable, the sort of terrible self-consciously arty and surreal dream sequence that that the rest of the movie skillfully avoids doing.

 Other than that, I really loved the film. Everyone involved is trying to get a TV show based on it off the ground, which hopefully will come to pass someday; There's also a series of shorts, now more than a decade old, which feature the same characters; I'll need to hunt them down now.

 No, it's not for everyone, but I couldn't be happier I found this.

The Dead Center

  A body-bagged John Doe suddenly comes back to life on a hospital basement, where it was stored awaiting autopsy. The newly minted revenant (Jeremy Childs) shuffles upstairs and collapses on an empty bed. 

 When discovered, he’s taken to the psychiatric ward, where he ends up in the care of one Daniel Forrester (Shane Carruth): our protagonist. Dr. Forrester is a bit of a mess – he’s introduced waking up in a couch in his office, and is enough of a sadsack loner that the only out-of-work social interaction we see him engage in is him half-drunkenly calling up his sympathetic, preternaturally patient boss (Poorna Jagannathan) at ungodly hours in the morning to discuss a work-related incident.

 He's also deeply empathetic, which serves him well when dealing with the John Doe. He manages to draw him out of a catatonic state and starts successfully treating the man (notably in an excellently staged hypnosis scene). When the patient finally opens up, he starts speaking of a darkness at his core, some sort of evil entity gathering strength to perform unspeakable acts (killing people; he just means killing people, nothing fancy.)
 Dr. Forrester at first discounts these as schizophrenic delusions, but when people start dropping dead in the hospital, their corpses looking like slightly less freaky versions of Samara’s victims in The Ring, he starts getting a little nervous. OK, a lot nervous.

 All of this is intercut with the point of view of the police medical examiner who was originally slated to do the autopsy on the body (Bill Freehely). Understandably miffed (a case of corpsus interruptus!), he starts investigating, following a trail of clues to the cosmic horror that lurks at the centre of the movie.

 Don’t expect much out of said cosmic horror – The film does wonders with its minuscule budget as far as atmosphere and tension goes, but its supernatural menace - the titular Dead Center - ends up being disappointingly prosaic. The final act is nightmarish and effective, but not nearly as weird and/or apocalyptic as it could have... no, as it should have been after all that set-up.

 The film has a very pleasing procedural feel to it, a low-level grittiness that feels well-observed, and a good sense of place. Much of the first part of the film deals with navigating bureaucracy in an underfunded hospital, and the mental patients on display here seem a little more realistic (to this non-expert) than your standard Hollywood crazy person. There is one cooky older lady that does some whimsical shit like dancing in an empty hallway, but that gets a pass because it’s there for effect. The gumshoe aspect is also pretty well done, if a bit more generic.

 The character work is solid, and Carruth and Jagannathan in particular do a great job with theirs. Even if they are, respectively, a little one-note and a little underutilized.

 Writer/director Billy Senese does well on both of his duties, with economical writing and clinical, precise direction; it’s a slow-paced movie by design, but it never really drags. It’s not incredibly gory, though there are a few gruesome bits, compounded by the fact that the script does not have any problem at all with killing off any of its characters at the drop of a hat. Some of the decisions – like death by scaryface montage –don’t really work out, but otherwise it manages a great sense of dread throughout.

 In the end the threat lets the movie down a little, and that’s a shame. But it’s still well worth it if you’re in the market for a pretty effective, slick, low-key/low budget indie horror film.

A Touch of Zen

 How about... a three-hour Chinese epic?

 Well, Taiwanese, to be accurate. Originally released in two parts in 1970 and 1971, A Touch of Zen was made by Shaw Brothers legend King Hu after he moved out of mainland China, but it still tells a very Chinese Wuxia story set in the Ming dynasty.

 Gu Sheng-tsai (Shih Chun) is an amiable fourteenth-century slacker who elected not to take the administrative exams to become a scholar for the government; instead, he makes a living as a scribe and painter off a stall in the market in his small town.
 But once he notices his latest out-of-town client is up to some sneaky business, he's set on a trail that ends up with him discovering that his new neighbour, the fetching Yang Hui-zhen (Hsu Feng) is being hunted by the government. Her father was a magistrate who tried to expose an eunuch's corruption and got a death sentence for his whole family instead. And now the corrupt governmental forces are closing in on her.

 The pacing is, as you'd expect from a three-hour movie... sedate. But even though there's very little action in this first hour, the plot is interesting and Gu makes for a fun protagonist. He's the lone non-fighting character in the movie - Yang turns out to be a phenomenal, monk-trained warrior, and her co-conspirators are all defecting generals and soldiers.

 Gu falls in love with Yang, and vows to help her with his, um, knowledge of war literature; Of course his strategies end up carrying the day. The second hour of the movie is a huge amount of fun, as Yang, Gu and the sympathetic local magister run a series of ambushes and stratagems to fight the overwhelming army that's coming to get her.

 This is where the movie gets properly epic. The first act was restricted to just a few locations - the town market, Gu's house, the derelict manor where Yang is crashing. But as lady Yang reveals her backstory we're treated to some stunningly beautiful landscapes, and we also get a gorgeous-looking and extremely cool fight at a bamboo forest; A classic, and extremely influential, scene.
 The climactic confrontation and culmination of Gu's planning is, unfortunately, at night, and in town, but it's a fun scene in its own right. The problem is that... well, there's still another hour before the movie finishes after that.

 And this is where the movie kind of lost me. The last third keeps some ties to the main story, with the pivot being a great scene where Gu goes from celebrating his successful ruse to realizing the cost it had in human life, as a group of monks come to burry the dead. But the events thereon feel a bit like leftovers from the main plot, a denouement that doesn't add a huge amount to the movie and focuses mostly on new characters - the Buddhist abbot Hui-yuan (Roy Chiao) who barely figured in the first two thirds of the story, and a new antagonist.
 Hui-yuan is a cool character - a badass, pacifist/fighting monk whose sense of justice won't let him look away from the court's excesses (although he seems to have no problem when his charges ruthlessly cut down fleeing soldiers). But his role and involvement feel vestigial to the main story and add a spiritual component that... well, it doesn't come out of nowhere, but to me feels extraneous, unsatisfying after all that had come before; the story already feels finished before he even sets foot in it. And it all leads to a mystical finale which I honestly could have done without.

 As with all of these old martial arts movies, I'm kind of grading it on a curve (I feel a bit silly saying this of what's widely considered a classic; but there's a lot here, especially the action and a lot of acting choices, that feel decidedly old-fashioned). But I genuinely enjoyed it even as it dragged a bit in its last third; It's a very entertaining movie that's undeniably influential (Ang Lee is obviously a fan) and has some stand-out, beautiful action and fun characters. Well worth a watch.

Brooklyn 45

 A few months after the end of World War 2, a group of friends gather in the house of one Col. Clive Hockstatter (the inestimable Larry Fessenden) to try and cheer him up; his wife committed suicide recently, and the man has understandably been down in the dumps since.

 The invitees are: Marla (Anne Ramsay), an interrogator whom we learn had a reputation for using torture against enemy prisoners; Archie (Jeremy Holm), who served as Hockstatter's trigger man and is being investigated for war crimes. And Major DiFranco (Ezra Buzzington), a no-nonsense career military man and the only one who shows up in full uniform.
 They all know each other from the war, and DiFranco and Hockstatter are childhood friends. Their camaraderie and love for each other is convincing, and all the characters are well drawn. This is a very well acted movie, and while the dialog is sometimes a little on-the-nose, it's very well written.
 Standing apart from the main group is Bob (Ron E. Rains), Marla's husband and plus one, who didn't serve and is constantly belittled by the soldiers.

 It turns out the reason that Hockstatter summoned them is that in the months since his wife has died, he's been reading up on parapsychology (metaphysics, as he puts it), and wants his friends' help to try and stage a séance to try to reach his wife.
 The others reluctantly agree - and of course things go very, very wrong. But the movie has more things in mind than ghosts amuck; the fantastic components are correct and accounted for, but once they play out a new character is introduced (Kristina Klebe), and the movie turns the screws as the characters divide along ideological lines and confront each other regarding her fate.

 There's not a lot subtlety on display here, to the point where the themes are clearly articulated by the cast at multiple points. That doesn't make it any less powerful, though: the degree to which these people can't escape a war that's been over and done with for months, the ease with which they fall back on attitudes that were acceptable in war time (or not, in Archie's case), and whether that makes them bad people or not... It's engaging, compelling, and well thought out.

 Ted Geoghegan's direction is crisp and precise, with a lot of attention paid to blocking (the camera tends to move around a bit, but you always know where everyone is). The writing could stand to be a little tighter, but a little flab is understandable on a script this dialog-heavy and character-driven. All the actors are excellent, with Fessenden in particular showing some heartbreaking vulnerability. The genre elements are intrinsic to the story but take a back seat to the character work, and while there are some great, horrific moments most of the tension lies in waiting to see who snaps first. It's not psychological horror, it's a psychodrama with a seam of gonzo horror.
 It's a bit of a face about from the writer/director's first movie (the excellent We Are Still Here,) which also had a psychological component but errs heavily towards horror-movie mayhem. As it happens, he does the opposite just as well.

Avengement

 A prisoner (Scott Adkins) is taken from jail, under heavy police custody, to the hospital where his mother lies dying. They arrive too late.
 As the title card takes up the whole screen, we hear the sounds of a scuffle and muffled groans... and cut to Adkins leaving an elevator full of fallen policemen and quietly escaping the hospital. To get his Avengement, you'd presume.

 And you'd presume right. An unspecified amount of time later he breaks into a pub full of gangster types, pulls out a shotgun, and holds everyone hostage. As he makes his demands and spars (verbally and physically) with assorted hoodlums, the movie flashes back to fill in the blanks of Cain's (groan) backstory and motivations.

 Avengement is the third and latest collaboration between Adkins, director Jesse V. Johnson, and writer Stu Smalls. This is a lot grittier than Accident Man and quite a bit more dour than The Debt Collectors. Its story is both simple and razor-focused on Cain's quest for revenge, its time-jumping organically incorporated into the dialog: segues followed as Cain recounts and remembers the chain of events that ended up with him going after his brother's blood.

 Everything gets explained away; Obviously, important things like who the hell this Cain character is anyhow, what he's up to, and why... but even minor details get filled in, ranging from where he got the shotgun to (in a pretty funny touch) an origin story for each one of his scars.

 And of course those asides include a ton of fights. Brawls, more like, don't expect any wall-running or acrobatics; While very well choreographed and shot, they're kept simple and (mostly) realistic. There's an appropriate focus on brutality and on the bloody aftermath of the attacks, a lot of wince-inducement to go with all the excitement.
 The low-and-dirty tone extends to the locations (which show London at its dingiest even in the obligatory nightclub action scene), the plot points (which include some really loathsome petty organized crime activities), and the acting, which has everyone at peak nasty bloke. I'm not an expert on British accents, but everyone seems to be having a lot of fun putting on their cockney.
 I had some trouble buying Adkins as a dangerous badass, but that's mostly on me for watching too many of his podcasts and interviews (the guy is as pleasant and good-natured as they come.) He's got a lot of makeup (scars) on him here, and does pretty well by the material despite my minor misgivings.

 It's not without its grace notes. Cain's relationship with his mum (Jane Thorne) is touching, and there's a redemptive arc which feels a bit forced but kind of welcome after being submerged under all this scum for more than an hour. There are also a few pretty funny lines here and there and a minor role for Louis Mandylor.
 I sometimes felt like it was trying a little too hard, but all in all it's a great little bit of genre meanness: lean, punchy, and badass. Cain describes himself at one point as a hardened, rusty nail, a great line that also fits the movie.

Possum

  Mathew Holness - Garth Marenghi himself, has written and directed a horror movie. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I've had Possum on my watch list for ages, and didn't know it was a Holness movie. What a mess, lessons learnt, etcetera etcetera.

 All of this is moot point anyway, because beyond its belonging to the horror genre, Possum is about as far removed from Marenghi's (doubtless haunted) wheelhouse as (in)humanly possible. It's an extremely British, glacially paced, bleak-as-all-hells throwback to arty psychological horror movies from the seventies. A fun time at the movies, in other words.

 Before the studio logos are over, reedy synths creep in - an instrument that I associate with sepia-toned Lassie re-runs and depression incarnate. We then get a glimpse of our protagonist Phillip (Sean Harris) while a Babadook-style creepy nursery rhyme runs in the background... and then this:

Just in case the soundtrack wasn't retro enough for you.

 The credits run over still images while various chemical and digital effects slowly distort them and the soundtrack devolves to a more standard but extremely effective discordant horror cacophony. It all effectively sets the tone for the whole movie, and that tone is creepy as fuck. I'm a sucker for a well-made, well deployed credit sequence.

 Phillip is returning to his childhood home in Norfolk after some unspecified event (another character  later calls it a scandal,) carrying only a huge leather duffel bag. The guy is clearly lugging some unresolved trauma around, which may or may not be symbolised by the bag and/or its contents; His gait is defeated, and he constantly looks like he was about to break out crying. Or as if he's the victim of a terminal case of constipation, take your pick. It's a fierce, convincing, one-note performance that aligns perfectly with the film's unremittingly bleak tone.

 As Phillip wanders around town and tries to get rid of the contents of the duffel bag (and other mysterious errands), little fragments of information emerge and allow us to build a picture of what's going on. An old family picture, a notebook with the nursery rhyme from the beginning, news of a missing boy (and the fact that it's happened before...)
 Early on Phillip learns that his estranged stepfather (Alun Armstrong, repulsively excellent) is still living in the derelict house, which at least explains why there's light and water. Their short, fraught conversations provide a little exposition - never enough to actually explain things, but giving us a bit more to go on.

 It's no spoiler to say that it's going to be About Something, with capital letters, so if you have something against that sort of thing then you best steer clear. But at the same time it never feels like elevated horror; the atmosphere of dread is slathered on so thickly it'd be silly to insist this isn't a true horror movie; It offers gallons of nightmare fuel without resorting to jump scares.
 It never matters if you know that the puppet (a great, creepy creation) poor Phillip's been carrying around is probably not really coming to life to torment its owner.

 Very little actually happens; the film is more of a tone poem, and the mystery at its core is not that complex. Its slow burn does build up to a conclusive set of revelations, though - a bit abrupt, but still satisfying.
 Holness has mentioned he was mainly inspired by German silent horror movies (both expressionist and not) and that's pretty illuminating, because he really nailed their uncanny feel.

 It's a beautiful-looking film, in its own depressing, shoestring-budget way; DoP Kit Fraser keeps the locations interesting and heavily textured, and the sound design is also excellent (it was handled by the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, who also did the excellent soundtrack. As with the acting, both aspects dovetail beautifully with the script and direction. Everything lines up, giving Possum a purity that makes it pretty damn powerful.
 Holness's latest venture's been to write an actual book (and doing a book tour) as Garth Merenghi, and pitching/possibly doing another Darkplace which... well, I won't complain. But I hope he'll also take the time to do more proper horror movies; Based on the strength of this one, I'd be pretty keen to see what he comes up with.

Fuck You Immortality

  Its title later sanitized to the more streaming services-friendly "You Can't Kill This!", Fuck You Immortality is a mockumentary that follows a burnt-out hippie couple (Bill Hutchens and Josephine Scandi) as they try to track down Joe (Brutius Selby,) an old acquaintance that, they slowly come to realize, is immortal.

 For such an oddball indie bit of a genre goof, it's got surprisingly high production values: It looks great, it's well paced, includes fun and very gruesome practical gore effects, and has a bunch of good needle drops. It also scored a huge win with its two leads - Tony is a quintessentially British space cadet sweetheart, and Kacey's preternaturally even-handed and wry. They're both a lot of fun to watch and have an easy chemistry together that's extremely charming; it's easy to believe they've remained a loving couple for years and years.

 It's a shame that the film around them never really manages to find itself. The story is fairly engaging at first, as the couple hit the road with a documentary crew following the scant leads as to Joe's eventual fate - one found by chance, and more later after they set up a website and ask others for information. Then (spoilers for a bit that's a major part of the trailer) Joe suddenly turns up... and the movie doesn't really seem to know where to go from there. It manages some mildly amusing scenes, and remains pleasant for the duration until it settles on an tonally discordant ending that... well, way to harsh my mellow, movie.

 Even before those issues come into play it's clear that the movie is mostly just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, with an extremely episodic nature that allows the central couple to meet various colourful characters and get themselves into crazy situations. Hutchens and Scandi do wonders to prop it up even as the film flails manically with forcedly quirky conceits like having Tony deliver exposition while he plays with rubber ducks in a bathtub, or Kacey sing a song as Tony dances in the background.
 Most of the actors besides them don't fare as well. The various nutjobs they run into run the gamut from mildly amusing to annoying scenery chewers; often both at the same time. That also sadly applies to Selby, who strains a bit too hard to sell Joe's intensity. No one is helped by a script that's a mix of R-rated dad jokes, broad stereotypes, non-sequiturs and cheap shocks. A lot of it is interesting in concept but doesn't really work in practice; I was often left thinking that I should have found a given scene a lot funnier than I ended up doing.

 There are also a lot of asides such as a sizzler reel of the Ninjasploitation movies that Joe was up to in the 80s, or a fun segment that showcases Tony and Kacey's various bloody attempts to grant Joe a final death. The filmmakers clearly had a lot of fun with these, and their love for genre fare is pretty endearing.

This one they call "The Predator"

 It had a few things that made me chuckle, and one actual laugh late in the movie with what's probably the best vegan joke since Scott Pilgrim. But despite its punk-rock title, shock humor and purposefully downer ending, this is mostly an inoffensive, pleasant time waster. I feel bad saying this about a movie that includes a maneuver it calls 'the Fulci' that fully lives up to its name... but to be perfectly honest, this is probably best left running in the background.

Crippled Avengers

  Picture this: Three swordsmen enter a Chinese manor home, and heroically face off against dozens of guards to get to the master of the house, accompanied by some epic Chinese martial arts movie music. Once they reach it, they find that their quarry is not home... but his wife and son are. So they decide to chop some of their limbs as a calling card. As you do.

Not sure I agree with that decision, but loving the enthusiasm there!

 And this being a Shaw Brothers movie, you can bet that they not only go through with it, but it's also shown (it doesn't linger in the carnage, thankfully, but it is genuinely upsetting). Guess those guys weren't the heroes.

 Just as they finish chopping the kid's arms off, the master of the house Du TianDao (Chen Kuan-Tai) finally makes an appearance, and quickly and brutally dispatches them with his legendary Black Tiger style. Of course he calls out each specific technique as he uses it; I love this sort of thing!
 Once they're all dead, dad attends to his son and promises him he will build iron arms for him, with which he will become a great martial artist.

 Smash cut to ten, fifteen years later and dad's now explaining how he's finally found the perfect metal arms for his now grown-up son (Lu Feng). That's some comically economic storytelling right there, but hey, it works. Good setup for a heroic protagonist, right?
 Well... no. It turns out dad rounded up all the descendants of the three assholes who killed his wife and maimed his son. He let them live and train in martial arts... only so that his son, now an unstoppable juggernaut with metal fists could brutally demolish them. Dad does an evil laugh and everything! A little later the son seems to think Tiandao is taking things too far and looks a little bit apprehensive, but nah, he'll quickly show he's just as much of an embittered asshole as dear old pa.

 Things get out of hand as TianDao and son terrorize the townspeople and start crippling people for pretty minor infractions; The perennially shirtless town smith (Meng Lo) calls them out on it, and he's forced to drink a poison that takes his voice - and when he's still defiant in writing, he gets deafened for his trouble. A wandering salesman (Philip Kwok) is blinded for complaining how bad things are; and a poor bystander (Sun Chien) gets his legs chopped off just for bumping into the young master!

 The trio of victims (crippled, but not yet avengers) get together in the smith's shop, and the way they communicate and help each other is genuinely cool and well thought out. But there's some cruelty left to be dispensed before the movie finally shifts gears. First, after Wei Datie offers to support his newfound friends with his blacksmith work, Tiandao proves yet again to be a master of the dickish arts when he threatens anyone who would patronize the shop, leaving them with no means of income. Then a wandering martial artist (Sheng Chiang) learns of Tiandao's reign of terror and solemnly vows to put an end to it. He heads straight to the manor but is defeated after a pretty cool fight (sword vs. weighted chain); Tiandao 'cripples' him by crushing his head in a vise and causing irreparable brain damage.
 In yet another subversion of expectations, the most straightforwardly heroic figure in the film becomes the comic relief character, a petulant, childish bugs-bunny style trickster figure. This movie kind of rules.

 Tiandao's other victims take in their now-idiot would-be saviour and, discovering a letter to his master on his person, decide to take him home. Once there the old teacher, understandably shocked at his fellow martial arts master's behaviour, offers to train the three cripples so they can get their revenge.
 It's a very enjoyable training segment. I especially love that the blind man is basically just told "you just need to listen really good" and he immediately starts shooting falling leaves off the sky with a marksman's precision. All of them are moulded over three years into martial arts masters, each with their own style, of course, and with metal prosthetics included where needed. This is also where the scene I best remembered from the movie comes in, a fight with oversized metal rings that features some incredible acrobatics.
 From there we finally get to the third act, where they return to town to finally deliver Tiandao and his clan some sorely deserved comeuppance with a series of back-to-back fights that culminate in a spectacular frontal assault against the manor. It mirrors that first scene, and more importantly, the iron rings make a crowd-pleasing return.

 The story structure is superb - all the grim business in the first act really pays off once the crippled avengers assemble (sorry, had to put that in somewhere) and kick ass. It's the most satisfying revenge yarn the Shaw Brothers, who put out a revenge story or two over the years, produced. Especially because Tiandao starts out being such a sympathetic figure before he quickly proves to be a capital-A asshole.
 It's enough of a tragedy to have appropriately epic weight, and for the bonds the characters establish to matter. I won't pretend that it can't come off as cheesy to our sensibilities (time and cultural distance rarely help - nor does some truly over-the-top acting) but if you are willing to engage with it, it more than earns the label of 'heroic bloodshed' that's frequently applied to Wuxia films.

As an actor, Lu Feng is one hell of a martial artist.

 Director Cheh Chang does a great job with this one. The guy was a legend; Name any number of classical martial arts movies and his name is bound to come up, and probably more than once. He does wonders here with your typical SB movie budget, and keeps things moving, varied and exciting. This one has a heavy Sergio Leone influence and is full of those classic dramatic zooms to people's faces and exaggerated sound effects that people associate with old martial arts movies (Chang was hugely influential, and reportedly introduced Leone-isms to Hong Kong cinema.)
Also of note is some playing around with fish-eye lenses on panoramic views and the very '70s wardrobe, especially designed to show off people's (very buff) chests; beefcake lovers rejoice. Special mention goes to an oversized disco medallion that gets an in-universe justification!

 It's also worth noticing that in a movie that features a pretty sprawling cast of extras, I think the only woman to be shown is Tiandao's ill-fated wife. 

 The action is top-notch, as you'd expect from Team Venom. It sports at least some Wuxia influence; there is a little wire work and hidden trampolines, but things tend to be pretty grounded - more of a standard martial arts flick, though one with a fairly epic scope. There's no overt magic or mystical elements, but a lot of it is pretty far-fetched, as usual with this sort of thing.
 The 'gimmick' of the movie, the heroes' various disabilities, are well represented even if the movie cheats by basically treating them as fully able once they power up. But there's still some good stuff  when the bad guys try to use their weaknesses against them, and the way they keep communicating with the deaf/mute smith gives the movie a pretty unique feel. The film also goes completely silent when it adopts the smith's point of view early on, which is pretty effective.

 A lot of the fights feel very staged and are more acrobatic/dance-like than modern action tends to be, but that's part of the charm; Gratuitous cartwheels and pirouettes are the order of the day. There's a huge amount of imagination and humor to the permutations in the fighting and the moves pulled - the word exuberant comes to mind. It might not convince anyone who's not already on board with this sort of thing, but for converts it'll be a constant delight.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

 2018's Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse set a high bar for any follow-up to clear. In purely aesthetical terms, its habit of smashing completely different artistic styles into each other with reckless abandon while still achieving a very distinct visual style has become extremely influential  (most notably in The Mitchells vs. The Machines or last year's Puss In Boots movie.)

 How could a sequel top that? Well... rather easily, as it turns out.

 As Spider-Woman/Gwen Stacey (Hailee Stanfeld) does the standard origins narration which the first film employed repeatedly with such great effect, she plays a drum solo. While the threads of her narration weave in and out between past events and the themes of the current movie, the imagery ranges far and wide with a ridiculous amount of invention and energy; it's an animation solo to accompany Stacey's playing, and a virtuoso one. And the good news is that this energy and level of invention never really lets up.

 The movie looks sumptuous. Production values, rhythms, technical execution, originality, everything;

Even as the storytelling starts following our characters - first Stacey, then Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), our actual protagonist, and the narrative gets a little more traditional, the film continues throwing curveballs and asides. It's DENSE: visual gags in the background, all sorts of inventive uses of superpowers, and an incredibly expressive use of the medium to communicate moods in magical surrealist ways where, say, the background can start looking like a Matisse painting while the characters have a heart-to-heart. Even when nothing crazy is going on, you still get very striking compositions and cool framing tricks.

 It looks good, is what I'm saying. Extremely so; The visuals, design and technical accomplishment are worth the price of admission alone, and is bound to reward multiple viewings.

 Gwen's prologue includes a (very funny!) confrontation with a renaissance-style Vulture (Jorma Taccone) who's been pulled in from a different dimension. It turns out that the exploding collider from the climax of the first film left some dimensional instabilities throughout the multiverse. Gwen is joined during the fight by another couple of Spider-people; Their leader Miguel (Oscar Isaac) has put together a sort of inter-dimensional police force, and begrudgingly accepts Gwen into the group.

 We then pick up things with Miles Morales pretty much where the previous movie left us: It's been a year, in which Miles has become the friendly neighborhood spiderman, his secret superhero life keeps getting him in hot water with his family (#Spider-person problems), and he misses his Spider-Friends. He has a confrontation with a rather hapless villain called, uh, Spot (Jason Schwartzman, very recognizable and very funny) whose power is basically throwing portals around, and blames Miles for his villainification - this whole thing may or may not be important later, you never know.

 Things start looking up for Miles for a while when Gwen comes calling. But she's actually there on business- to keep tabs on Spot, whom the interdimensional police consider a threat. Her quarry escapes while she's distracted hanging out with Miles, and when things inevitably escalate, Miles is dragged into all sorts of multiversal adventures.

 It's very much worth noting that it ends on a cliffhanger. It'll be completed with a third movie, hopefully within the next couple of years; This wouldn't be too bad - to be honest, it's got so much going on it feels justified - except that just this installment runs for almost two hours and a third. It doesn't feel interminable like some other recent superhero 'epics' -thanks to the mind-blowing visuals and a very busy script, mostly- but it does feel very flabby in a way the first one never did.

 That's not helped at all by the fact that its story is... it's just ok. It's a very modern superhero plot, by which I mean that in conventional terms it's kind of bad but pretty complex, and engages in all sorts of metatextual mindfuckery (a main plot point revolves around the fact that a certain type of heroic tragedy follows all Spider-people like a bad stink; They're playfully called Canon Points). I suspect the story will mostly resonate with comic nerds who have this shit internalized; It left me, as a nerd of a non-superhero denomination, pretty much cold.
It especially suffers in comparison to its prequel, which had a perfectly self-contained and much better crafted plot.

 Overall it succeeds, on a writing level, because the characters are still great and their emotional beats are fun and (mostly) feel true to them; And the script is full of constant laugh-out-loud gags, lines and situations, and facilitates great action set-pieces. There's a ton of cleverness and wit on display everywhere, and most importantly, it keeps the first movie's fundamental sweetness and good nature.

 As in with Spider-Man: No Way Home, sometimes that's enough. It doesn't completely dispel the sense, though, that it's all smoke and mirrors to distract us from the problems with its navel-gazing narrative.