Here Comes Hell

 Here's an intriguing idea: What if we do a modern, Evil Dead-riffing horror film, but dress it up so that it's indistinguishable from an old B&W one?

 I'd love to see it done well. Think about something like I Walked With a Zombie that suddenly burst out with Tom Savini gore effects, for example. Exploiting what we traditionally think of as classy for shock purposes. That could really work!
 As you may have guessed from my hedging, that goal's a little too ambitious for director/co-writer Jack McHenry to pull off. So instead we get a goofy little oddity where you can tell everyone making it had a blast, but it comes off as... well, watching a bunch of enthusiastic friends putting on a show.

 Good on them; This is clearly a labour of love, and a lot of effort went into it. But that still doesn't make it enjoyable.

 Let's start  with what I liked: The movie begins with a 'classy' presenter who tries to scare us away. Going for either a theatrical Agatha Christie vibe, or maybe William Castle; Eh, either's fun. And Ben Pearson's music is very well done, though it hops in styles and time periods a bit too much. A jazzy number pops up for the credits, with this production company logo:

 

That got a laugh.

  As far as the story goes, a bunch of rich young friends (plus a plus one) get together in a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside. There's a suave athlete (Timothy Renouf), his middle-class girlfriend (Jessica Webber) a gruff, sad and very Texan oil tycoon (Tom Bailey), a beautiful, sophisticated mean girl (Margaret Clunie) and the host for the evening, an ineffectual dilettante scion (Charlie Robb) misspending the last of his late parents' fortunes.

 And here's where the plot finally kicks in. For, you see, the dilettante's latest craze is the supernatural, and he's hired a medium (Maureen Bennett) to contact the ghost of the mysterious occultist that owned the manor, and was rumoured to have opened a gateway to the land of the dead.

 It's a decent setup for some comedy horror, but it takes up half of the movie's lean, under-eighty-minutes runtime. And it's filled with clumsy exposition and weak character work. The actors, while very game, are... well, none of them are good enough to breathe real life into their roles. I appreciate it's trying to replicate a specific, talky 40's horror melodrama style, but it's neither well-written nor well-acted enough for all the waffling to be enjoyable.

 Once things get rolling, they momentarily get off to a great start when the film's best practical effect bursts (or is burst, I guess) into the scene. But then it starts treading water, throwing in random ideas, and leaning a little too hard on Evil Dead 2 without finding a good balance between its comedy and its horror.

The 4:3 aspect ratio and old-timey filters are ok for the budget level - they don't make the obvious mistake to go overboard with the grain and negative damage effects... In fact, I'd go as far as to say they go underboard with them, as it never really looks like anything except digital footage in black-and-whiteface.
 The effects are a mix of practical and digital effects, and they're all over the place - you can tell where they spent some of the budget, and where they ran out of money and used a crappy toy for a non-sequitur instead. I really enjoyed one of the deadites, which is clearly the crew's pride and joy as it gets a lot of deserved screentime. As for the rest... eh.

 Everyone involved definitely puts in the work, and it was made for something like twenty thousand pounds; All of which is really admirable! It also must be said that doing something that looks bad on purpose for comedic purposes is not something a lot of people can pull off successfully- not at feature-length, at least.
 I hope it works as a calling card and gets these folks better opportunities. But to be brutally honest, to me it felt like watching a bunch of people playing live-action role-playing, or some sort of semi-improvised dinner theater. They're clearly having fun, but there's just not nearly enough there for the rest of us.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

 (Notice the THE at the front; this is THE Mario Bros movie. There's clearly never been another.)

 This one is clearly not for me. I'm not a Nintendo Fan, and I'm not ten, and those are the only surfaces that I could conceivably hold on to in a product that has had any possible edges so sanded down that all that's left is a very shiny, featureless series of surfaces. Other than Nintendo's very evocative and cute character/monster designs from the games, I found it more than a little soulless.

Best thing in the movie by a country mile, and one of the very few jokes that works.

 Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are a pair of Brooklyn Plumbers who get transported into a magical world when they enter a green pipe. This world is in the process of getting conquered by a big turtle dragon thing (Jack Black), and there's a plucky princess (Anya Taylor-Joy) who's trying to protect her kingdom of ineffective fungus people by entering into an alliance with the driving-enthusiast ape people of a few kingdoms over.

 It's a generic, arbitrary nothingburger of a plot; The Donkey Kong army, for example, a major plot point throughout the second act, is casually cast aside, rendered meaningless. The shoddy scripting is all the more infuriating because formula insists it needs to have 'relatable human emotions (tm)'. So you have to sit through the most generic possible kiddie-movie-subplot about Mario proving himself and some other piss-poor twaddle that's boring for the kids, and boring *and* insultingly dumb for older kids. Who could possibly give even the most negligible of fucks about that sort of thing? At least the script allows for a lot of action at a manic clip, which is the film's sole justification aside from being a reference-dispensing machine for game console fans.

 In that respect, it's... fine. More than fine in the Nintendo-referencing department: it throws all manner of franchise properties, easter eggs and blink-and-you'll-miss-'em cameos pulled from Nintendo's five decades of video game history. But I'm immune to that- I like some of the games, but I grew up playing Gianna Sisters, not this film's source material. I didn't have any Ninty console until SNES emulation came along.
 So I'm left with the adventure side of things to appreciate, and it's a little underwhelming; every now and then there's a fun action beat, or a nice-looking shot (I'm partial to the bit where the ocean is lit from below from the shards of a broken rainbow.) But taken as a whole it's loud, garish, and it doesn't have a single thing of interest to say, no real artistic reason to exist for non-Nintendo-heads.
 Oh well, at least it moves quickly enough that it doesn't quite get to be boring.

 The directors, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, are behind Teen Titans Go! - a series (and a couple movies) that can be very funny, inventive, and most of all, subversive; So it's a shame to see them so completely neutered here, unable to throw a single Dennis Hopper reference or anything that could be viewed as anything other than a complete orgasmic bliss at the prospect to be playing in Nintendo's toybox. Their energy sometimes shows through, but none of their humour or wit.
 I don't think this being an Illumination joint - purveyors of some of the safest, least interesting big animated movies out there - helped at all. Nor does it help to have the mandate to be a good babysitter movie for very, very young kids (notice the presence of so many 'cheerleader' characters, telling kids how fun and exciting what they're seeing is at several points in the movie.)

  It's an impressively expensive- and occasionally nice-looking movie; This is not to say it's interesting aesthetically, but it is elaborate and well made. The soundtrack is not really memorable, with frequent very obvious needle drops taken from an over-used roster of songs even seven-year-olds will be familiar with, along with tons of variations from the games' tunes.  

 I didn't hate the film - things keep switching up often enough to maintain some interest, and the production values are so huge that it'd be impossible for it not to luck into an interesting-looking bit on occasion. But slotted into what's been a pretty amazing couple of decades for kid's entertainment? It rings really, really hollow.

Spoilers! How about that ending? Bowser's castle squashes half of Brooklyn without a warning. I asked my son to estimate how many people were killed in their sleep in that scene, and his answer was "twenty k?".
 I wonder if all the people who complain about the third act in Superman Returns were outraged by it. I suspect their answer would be the same one for when you criticize this movie's vacuity: "It's a kid's movie, innit?"

 I leave you with the words of Mario Creator Shigeru Miyamoto, as quoted in wikipedia while explaining why this movie came to be:

 "our content business would be able to develop even further if we were able to combine our long-beloved software with that of video assets, and utilize them together for extended periods"

12-Hour Shift

 Mandy (Lucky McKee regular Angela Bettis) works as a nurse at one of those minimal-security movie hospitals where the staff can just grind meds and snort them in side rooms, people just wander wherever they want as long as they're wearing  scrubs, and any sort of post-mortem investigation is non-existent. The perfect place to run an organ-smuggling operation, then.

 It's a simple setup: With full complicity from the head nurse (Nikea Gamby-Turner), Mandy either waits for someone to die or Kevorkians terminally ill patients (her favorite method seems to be to use bleach - and if you wonder how that never raised any red flags, remember: movie hospital). She then pops by the mortuary to retrieve the organs once the coroner is done with the bodies. Finally Regina (Chloe Farnworth), a cousin by marriage, picks the grisly package up and delivers it to the mob in her pink barbie sportscar.

 The problem: Regina is a complete idiot and forgets the organs on her way out after a pickup. Aggravating this: Regina is a fucking psycho, so when she goes back to the hospital and doesn't find the package, she decides she can just kill someone else and take their kidneys.
 You'd think that'd be enough for a 'one crazy night at the hospital' story, but you'd be wrong. A dangerous convict is brought in (David Arquette, sporting a co-producer credit) and escapes thanks to Mandy's meddling; Her brother is wheeled in, OD'd. A couple of police officers get involved once bodies are discovered (Only a couple, because the movie is set in '99, and most of the police force is doing preparations for Y2K). And to top it off, the mob sends a hitman to collect on the kidney Regina didn't deliver. Hers, if none other is available.

 Writer/director Brea Grant (who's done her share of acting in indie horror movies), works off a shoestring budget and keeps things lively and fun... if not always smooth; By the end, after multiple crescendos, things do get a little too forced. Regina's appetite for murder is a too cartoony from the get-go, and some of the stuff with the mob enforcer is a little too much. But the tone is great, with some pretty funny stuff emerging effortlessly from character work and bizarre situations rather than jokes. 

 Besides the direction, the film has two great strengths: Angela Bettis, whose insouciant behaviour is really fun to watch (a less imaginative, or more marketing-driven title for this could be Bad Nurse), and has the chops to infuse her character with some humanity by the end. It's rare to see her get a role this juicy, and she does wonders with it.

 The other vital asset is composer Matt Glass (who also shares a producer credit). The soundtrack he's come up with is outstanding: a lovely, propulsive as hell mixture of drums, strings and opera singing that weaves between different styles depending on the scene, lending a huge amount of energy and not a little personality to the film.

 It's a bloody movie, but not a particularly gory one; The body count is fairly low and the carnage is explicit but not over the top... and that's OK. It gets by on pulpy energy and general craziness just fine.

Hunter Hunter

 The Mersault family - Joe (Devon Sawa), Anne (Camille Sullivan) and their tween daughter Renee (Summer Howell) - live off the grid somewhere out in the Canadian wilderness. Anne has her doubts and seems less keen on the hunting side of things, but the life suits the patriarch just fine, and young Renee seems to have taken to it enthusiastically.
 It's getting harder to (self-)sustain, though; Early on Anne makes a trip to a nearby town to sell the furs and get some necessary provisions, and is told at the store she'll need to 'need to work out what she needs the most'. Prices for her skins are set by a buyer's market, and people aren't buying. So they're left literally living hand-to-mouth, as their only available food is what they can grow or hunt.

 Things get even harder when they realize a lone wolf they have a history with is back and poaching from their traps. Anne in particular is terrified of it, so Joe decides to go out and hunt it down. I'm guessing the fact that its pelt will fetch a tidy sum is also a factor.
 The movie plays its hand early when, while tracking the wolf, Joe runs into a bunch of corpses in the woods arranged in a grisly tableau that's clearly beyond the capabilities of even the meanest of animals. The guy's been established to be extremely people-shy, so when he later decides to hide his discovery from his family and go out to try and find whoever did this by his lonesome... well, it's weird, but it kind of fits the character - protecting his own, his way. (A later scene explains that they may be living in federal lands illegally; It doesn't justify his behaviour, but it does make sense out of things.)

 From there we stick mostly with Anne and Renee back in the cabin who, after a pretty intense lupine encounter, are understandably terrified of the wolf stalking them. There are some not entirely unpredictable developments, and it all ends with a couple bursts of extreme violence and some very respectable grand-guignol gore-work.

 There's additional narrative threads, mostly around a couple of park rangers, but overall it's a simple, stripped-down yarn, well told. The storytelling is very confident, in the sense that it never feels the need to explain everything or go back and fill any blanks, it takes its time getting to the fireworks factory, and it keeps an expert control on its tone and tension-building. It's also well shot (Cinematographer: Greg Nicod), full of beautiful Manitoban landscapes, and gets very gruesome when it needs to. The acting is great and so is the Kevin Cronin soundtrack.

 The script, in its simplicity, does manage a few powerful moments, including a Bambi scene that echoes the squirrel-gutting one in Winter's Bone ("Do we eat the guts?", "Not yet").

 In fact, between the premise, the feel of the movie and some of its situations, it's tempting to be glib and describe Hunter Hunter as "Debra Granik by way of EC Comics". But that would be unfair, as writer/director Shawn Linden has been developing this for more than a decade; Also, Leave No Trace is one of my favorite movies from since whenever it came out, so it'd be really dumb to complain about someone choosing to use it as the basis for what ends up being a pretty damn cool horror-adjacent movie.

The Suicide Club (Jisatsu Sākuru)

  I've only seen two* movies from the ridiculously prolific Sion Sono, but his stuff seems to be designed to make people throw up their hands/roll their eyes and exclaim 'Japan!!!'. He's a good director, though, and works hard to give his movies their fucked up reputation.

 So I didn't know what to expect from the Suicide Club, but it begins by having fifty-four schoolgirls cheerfully join hands at a train station and throw themselves in the path of a speeding train. Despite some terrible CGI, it's one hell of a first scene.
 Two nurses soon join the suicide craze that's sweeping the capital, and the police is powerless to do anything. I mean, a lot of the time they're trying to discern if it's even a crime; There doesn't seem to be any connection, at first - the girls in that first scene, for example, came from eighteen different schools. But then a website pops up that keeps track of all the suicides before they're even reported, and the police start finding long rolls of stitched together skin cuts belonging to the dead. And we, the viewers, are aware that a shitty teenybopper band called Dessart probably have something to do with it as well.

 Yeah, there was never any chance this was ever going to arrive at a coherent explanation, but it's fun for a while to watch detective Kuroda (Ryō Ishibashi) make one gruesome discovery after another, or a bunch of teens playfully psyching each other before jumping off a school terrace. And the movie doesn't skimp on the gore; there's nasty chopping board scene which gets taken to an almost comical extreme, and use of a hand plane that's probably not been approved by any carpenter union.

 The film also seems to have a cogent point about the eternal disconnect between kids and their parents, but beyond that it's anyone's guess what all that open-ended weirdness at the end means. My guess is that there is no real message here and Sono is just trolling us; At least it's some inventive, ridiculous trolling.
 More worrying is the gratuitous sexual assault (Japaaaan!!!) and that we're forced to sit through several all-singing, all-dancing videos from a motherfucking J-pop band. Uncool.
 Guess that comes with the package; Despite all that, and that it sure as hell doesn't stick the landing, it gets by for a long while on batshit energy and daring. I don't often care for these extremely manga/anime-damaged movies, but I'll keep giving Sono a pass as long as he keeps them this entertaining.

*: I almost didn't count the excellent Cold Fish, which I didn't remember was by him, and I'm definitely not counting the terrible Prisoners of Ghostland.

 Also, while reading up on Sono after watching this I found out he's been credibly accused of sexual assault and pressuring actresses for sexual favours in exchange for roles. So... yeah, take that into account.

Noroi: The Curse (Noroi)

  Pitched somewhere between Lake Mungo and Blair Witch Project (though it ends up edging closer to the latter - makes sense, as the former only came out three years later) Noroi is a Japanese faux documentary presented as the last video (VHS, of course) put out by an underground paranormal investigator/journalist.

 The film within the film starts with our fearless journalist Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) investigating some weird, baby-like ghostly sounds manifesting in a family home. When he goes next door, where the sounds seem to be coming from, the neighbour chases him away. Investigating further, Kobayashi finds that the sounds from a recording do indeed sound like human babies - plural, and a bunch of dead pigeons near outside the neighbour's house.
 Smash cut to black, with some text informing us the neighbour soon disappeared and the family that reported the sounds died in a car crash.

 And so it goes: the film keeps accruing incidents like this, and ends up centering around three psychic individuals - a variety show actress (Marika Matsumoto, playing a fictionalized version of herself) who senses something paranormal while visiting a shrine; Kana (Rio Kanno), a young telepath girl who's soon abducted; And a barely coherent clairvoyant nutjob (Satoru Jitsunashi) who wraps himself in tinfoil and keeps screaming about psychic worms.

 Sensing a connection, Kobayashi starts following up leads- Kana's disappearance, pigeons, Marika's unraveling psyche, a recurring word, mysterious deaths plaguing people tangentially involved in the case, and that pesky neighbour back from the first case, who keeps popping up in unexpected places. Sure enough, a pattern begins to appear, one centered around a flooded town and the rituals they performed to contain a malignant entity.

 Noroi was made at the tail end of the 'classic' J-horror period, and it has several hallmarks of the sub-genre- most notably the narrative structure, a haunting that spreads like a disease, a creepy kid, and one of my least favorite tropes: an over-reliance on psychics. Other than that it mostly pivots back to a more subdued, traditional Japanese style of horror, though. I guess we'd call it folk-horror these days; I'm very happy to report that warlocks do factor into the proceeds.
 The mystery does end up making sense, most of the new pieces fitting into the story in a satisfying fashion, and the film is effectively creepy despite some misfires. It also nails the feel of an enthusiast documentary, but that comes with its own problems: mainly that there are no real characters in the piece - they're all completely one-dimensional. It makes sense for the format, but at the same time it makes the film a bit of a chore to get through, especially as it drags towards a runtime of almost two hours.

 Again owing to the mockumentary format, it's a pretty ugly-looking movie, all handheld cameras and lossy video - let's call it diegetic cinematography, with a soundtrack added in post. It doesn't do wonders for its watchability, but the realism adds to the film's queasy power. The acting is fine and the (very) limited effects are variable; An early ghostly 'glitch' is laughably cheesy in both conception and execution, but the one good glimpse we get of the big bad is memorably fucked up.

 Director/co-writer Kōji Shiraishi is obviously a big fan of the genre; He'd get to make Sadako Vs. Kayako over a decade later with mixed (being kind here) results, and he does a much better job on this one of capturing its appeal. Noroi isn't a lost J-horror classic or anything like that - I'd recommend Kairo or Dark Water over it in a heartbeat, and a couple others as well. But it is a pretty effective, well-made attempt to fuse the genre strengths with the found-footage craze.

Copshop

 Copshop is the latest in a series of tough, smartass action movies from Joe Carnahan. I tend to enjoy them, and this one wasn't an exception.

 Teddy Muretto (Frank Grillo, looking pretty sleazy in greasy long hair) is being pursued by parties unknown. Out of options and feeling trapped, he sucker-punches a cop at a casino parking-lot brawl to get arrested and put in a cell.
 Turns out he's a fixer-turned-informant for the FBI, and he's got a load of contract killers after his head. And then one of said himen (Gerald Butler) also gets himself arrested on purpose, and gets locked in a cell right in front of him.

 The police station is in the middle of nowhere, but there are still a lot of cops doing overtime that night. And that's a good thing, because the sleepy copshop is going to become a battlefield as another assassin (a very funny Toby Huss) comes after Muretto's head. Well, maybe there being a lot of cops doesn't end up being a good thing, not for the cops; it's a bloodbath. It all ends up with a survivor - Valerie (Alexis Louder), the cop Muretto punched at the parking lot - having to trust either a hitman or his crooked-as-hell target.

 It's a very Joe Carnahan premise, in other words. It plays out in unexpected ways, though, and although the twists aren't terribly clever, they stray far enough from the beaten path that it's pretty thrilling to see how things end up shaking out.
 Unfortunately the script loses it a bit by the end and things get a little too silly, but it's fine, the action is still good, and... well, it's not like the film ever pretended not to be ridiculous.

 Grillo is as likeable as ever, even in a man-bun, Butler's easy charisma is enjoyable, and Alexis Louder (as the one cop able to hold her own in the massacre) does a great job playing foil to the both of them. The dialog is fun, full of silly asides and your typical Carnahan smartarsery and bluster. The action is great, despite some obvious budget issues (I wish they would stop trying to do CGI fire with VoD budgets) and the movie even manages to wring some good suspense out of a few scenes, thanks in part to a pretty unpredictable script. It's not essential, but it's a good time.

The Snake Girl and The Silver-Haired Witch (Hebimusume to Hakuhatsuma)

 Sandwiched between Gamera movies (four before, four after), you can easily imagine The Snake Girl and The Silver-Haired Witch was director Noriaki Yuasa's (unsuccessful) attempt to escape from Kaiju purgatory.

 I've had it recommended to me several times over the years, and now I've seen it... I am ultimately underwhelmed. Which is a shame, because a movie where a villain rips a toad in half and then throws the remains at an adorable moppet's face really does sound fool-proof in paper.

 Came in expecting some craziness and yeah, there is some (see above); But apart from some mild what-the-fuckery, it's a disappointingly pedestrian family-friendly adventure where some plucky, saintly kid untangles a Scooby Doo mystery.

 Young Sayuri (Yachie Matsui) is reunited with her biological parents after one of those mixed-up-babies-at-the-hospital incidents had her put away in an orphanage for ten (or so) years. Oops!

  The problem is that the kid she was mistaken with, Tamari (Mayumi Takahashi), is still living in the house clandestinely, cooped up in the attic. Once that's cleared up Sayuri is delighted to have a sister, but that quickly curdles as Tamari turns out to be a complete bitch set on making her life hell.

 Also, she may be a snake disguised as a human.

 To further complicate matters, there's a crazy, murderous witch running around the house who also seems to have it in for Sayuri.

 At first it looks like things might get good at some point, as the movie threatens to become a sort of Yokai movie, but no such luck - this is one of those films that deploys crappy explanations to deflate any sense of mystery it managed to develop. It doesn't help that the plot really is Saturday-morning-cartoon fodder, full of plot holes and hilarious 50's B-movie scientific 'explanations'.

 The script seems terrified of losing its audience, to the point where Sayuri doesn't just often talk to herself to explain her actions, but also engages in some off-screen narration as well. Other characters mostly serve to spout exposition, and one of them kills what could have been a melancholy ending by telling us exactly how we're supposed to feel about it.

 It's mostly well staged and acted, with handsome but not striking black and white photography. The visual storytelling is pretty good, too, if a bit basic and more than a little corny, which makes it all the more disappointing when the plot turns out to be a bit inane.

 The effects range from laughable to pretty cool (a late-movie maquette is pretty impressive) but unfortunately the craziest scenes are limited to a couple dream sequences, clearly marked by heavy filters and superimposed kaleidoscopic spirals. They feature lots of papier maché puppets, goofy masks, floating objects with clearly visible wires, that sort of thing. You know, fun! Something that the rest of the movie sorely lacks.

Deadtime Stories

 Here's another 80's horror movie I missed the first time around. Unfortunately at this late barrel-scraping stage we're left with dregs which, to be honest, are borderline worthwhile. At first I thought it was a regional production (filmed in and around New York) but looking it up, it apparently got a decent cinema release. Good on them.

 Deadtime Stories is a very, very low-budget horror/comedy anthology where every segment is a story a beleaguered uncle tells his nephew to try to get him to sleep.

 The first segment is the best of the bunch; Two witches are trying to resurrect their sister, but their slave gets a crisis of conscience when he develops feelings for the girl they want to sacrifice. The old abductor getting second thoughts deal. The story is, frankly, kind of terrible, but it's got some amusing bits: there's a part where a hallucinating priest, seeing the witches as comely young women, starts undoing one of their bodices. Cut to the hag proudly showing off her desiccated horrorshow of a prosthetic breast.

Hag boob!

 Not funny enough to make me laugh, but it did place me in the vicinity of a chuckle. The same goes for a tacked-on unhappy ending that the uncle adds when the kid complains his story wasn't scary enough. It's not a funny movie, but it's not unfunny, either.
 This first tale is the one where most of the budget in the movie went, at least judging by the production design. It doesn't quite manage to look good, but it at least makes an effort; that's more than I can say for the rest of the movie.
 Oh, and it's got a really good fleshless-skeleton-to-gory-zombie-thing resurrection scene, I always like those, and this one's a keeper.

 The second story is a retelling of Little Red Riding hood, but because Uncle Mike was trying to watch naked girls on cablevision, Red Riding hood is a buxom cheerleader who's introduced lustily rubbing herself in front of a mirror.
 She gets her grandmother's prescriptions mixed with Billy's, a dodgy junkie-looking fella at the pharmacy (the dude looked pretty normal to me, but he does get a hilarious synth-rockabilly theme). Unfortunately for everyone involved, Billy is a werewolf (there's a respectable low-budget knock-off The Howling transformation involved, though the final product is pretty lame) and he needed the meds to keep himself from turning.
 This one drags a lot more and introduces some Porky's style teen sex comedy elements. There's some good gore, though the editing doesn't allow more than a glimpse, and it shows grandma using a silver cleaning product on her kitchenware. Chekhov's spatula!
 The final, fairy-tale-inspired line is a groaner, but in a good way.

 And on the last story, they just give up with the horror aspects for a retelling of Goldie Locks and the Three Bears that can only be described with the words 'zany' and 'wacky' and 'kind of painful to watch'.

 The three bears here are escaped convicts from a lunatic asylum, Goldie Locks is a young psychopath who murders people with telekinetic powers, and... and... it's fucking terrible.

 Credit it for fully committing to the bit, but now we have people shamelessly mugging to the camera (there's a lot of mugging in the other stories, but here it's intentional), cartoony, boioioing-style sound effects, dad jokes, 70's-bad-variety-show-level jokes. Weirdly, while it's not the sleaziest short, it shows quite a bit of skin, which feels at odds with the material. Not that this movie - especially this part of the movie - is at all concerned with tone.

 Melissa Leo, the only actor I recognized in the whole movie, plays mama bear. Apparently the hunky slave in the first short was in Family Ties.

 Director/co-writer Jeffrey Delmar worked as a PA for the first two Friday the 13ths, so I suppose he's entitled to a few horror references in here besides the Howling one. Most notably a first-person prologue that riffs on Halloween, with a side of Jason (you can hear a squeaking bed, which seems to be luring the prowler and ends up being the kid jumping in his bed, not teens enjoying pre-marital sex). I suspect they're there more Airplane!-style-spoofs rather than homages, though. At least they have punchlines.

  

 If you love 80's cheese, you'll... maybe enjoy the AOR soundtrack (provided by the band Taj, written for the movie) which we first hear in the title credits doing a song that namechecks Romero and Hitchcock. I like to think that it's not tongue-in-cheek, it's much funnier that way.
 There are some good practical effects throughout, a lot of terrible acting and cut corners, and the writing is always at least a little off. But at least two thirds of it come by their shittiness honestly -and even the other third makes an effort - so I can say I don't regret watching it. Just about.

Motivational Growth

  Ian (Adrian DiGiovanni) hasn't left his apartment in over a year. A little agoraphobia, a lot depression. We know this because he's in the habit of speaking straight to the camera and expounding on his habits and philosophy at the drop of a hat, in slightly overwritten monologues that are articulate but maybe a little too glib, trying too hard to be clever. A very indie movie style of dialog. In any case, he's not too big on introspection or self-analysis. He's likeable enough, though.

 Unsurprisingly, his place is a sty. Ian himself is a mess of sores and unkempt hair in a dirty wifebeater-underwear combo. The guy's routine consists of a haze of watching TV, with his daily trek to the bathroom to take a dump the sole highlight. It's in one of these pilgrimages that, after his TV implodes, he decides that he's had enough and attempts to kill himself by making a cocktail of bleach and sulphuric acid, trying to gas himself with chlorine.

 He is not successful*; When he wakes up, it's to the dulcet tones of The Mold (Jeffrey Combs!), a sentient pile of mold that talks about itself in the third person and kind of sounds like a deranged beatnik.
 After getting over Ian's initial disbelief, The Mold (never just Mold) browbeats him into getting his shit together, cleaning up his act, and fixing up his department. He also gets him to drill holes all over, which will factor later into the... well, let's be generous and call it a plot.

 What we have here is a sort of surrealist chamber piece -or, to be precise, a two-chamber piece- that's mostly driven by Ian talking with The Mold, and Ian talking with us, the audience. Other characters intrude every now and then, all of them a bag of quirks, most important among them Leah (Danielle Doetsch): the girl next door and love interest whose immediate attraction for Ian, obstinate self-insertion into his life and relentless acceptance is... well, very quirky-indie-movie and kind of a bum note. Without going into spoilers it does kind of fit into the narrative by the end, but still.

 As a whole the film is kind of comedic, but without a whole lot of jokes, and it's definitely going for weird for weirdness's sake. It works, mostly. I was expecting the different characters to be symbolic, or at least to have a function, but if they do, I didn't catch them. They seem to be there just to provide incident and pass the time. Their dialog is, again, a little hit-and-miss, and so is their acting, but nothing too dire. I liked the TV repairman's monologue (Robert Kramer, I think?) , and there's a pretty funny rant about breaking a chimp's arm.

 Jeffrey Combs stands apart - he clearly had a blast voicing The Mold, and the script brings its A-game to all of his lines. The puppet they used for it is also extremely expressive; It's effortlessly funny and inscrutable and menacing in turns... Definitely the best character in the movie, which is as it should be.

 Writer-director-editor Don Thacker's done a lot of videogame shorts (including a few widely liked ones for Devolver Digital), so I guess it shouldn't be surprising that the whole soundtrack is composed of chiptunes, or that there are animated scenes done in the style of an old videogame. This seems odd, since Ian at no point even expresses any interest in gaming.
 There really is no discernible reason for that stylistic choice, but hey, it adds variety to the proceeds and it looks good, which is kind of a guiding principle here. There are aso some cool camera moves, especially at the beginning. It gets a bit flatter later but by then there's enough going on to keep things moving apace.

 The film ultimately attempts to be some sort of mindfuck, but honestly I felt there's too little substance here for it to stick... even now that world events have lent it more resonance than when it was originally made back in the year of our lord 2012. It's entertaining, though, agreeably loopy, and well worth it just for Comb's performance alone.

*SPOILERS: Or... is he? Dun dun DUNNNNNN

Antiviral

 Celebrity culture is a pretty low-hanging fruit for satire. So much so that it's kind of hard to take the piss out of it effectively; how can you, when it's already a piss-take? If you're going to go after such an obvious target, you better have a unique twist.

 Antiviral, a kind-of-Sci-Fi 2012 thriller from Brandon Cronenberg, does a pretty good job of it, and makes it both as cerebral and uncomfortable as you'd expect from a Cronenberg scion. It's set... not exactly five minutes into the future, but a couple of steps to the side of our reality, in a society where celebrity worship is a mite more extreme.

 There's a (pretty funny) running gag about increasingly intrusive celebrity scoops, clandestine (?) restaurants that serve beef grown from celebrity flesh, and, more central to the film's plot, a few biotech enterprises that allow fans to get a little closer to their objects of adoration in some pretty twisted ways.

 Syd (Caleb Landry Jones, spending most of the movie looking like he's just about to keel over) works for one of the bigger and more legitimate of these enterprises, a clinic that specializes in harvesting illnesses from a small stable of celebrities, locking the viruses down so they won't be contagious, and infecting clients with them for a price. Syd's introduced selling Herpes from their biggest celebrity, Hannah Geist (Sara Gadon), to a young man - he injects the kid with the virus on the left side of his mouth, because, as he explains. that's where she would have transmitted the chancre if she had kissed him in person.

 Syd looks pretty unhealthy, and that's because he's moonlighting by smuggling illnesses out of the clinic in his own body. He incubates them and sells them to the black market (he has a stolen virus-encoding machine at home to unlock them). This is why, when he's tapped to pick up a new Illness from Ms. Geist, he injects himself with a sample first, hoping for a big payday.
 Unfortunately for him, Ms. Geist's mysterious illness turns out to be fatal. And to add insult to injury, his being infected turns him into a target for various groups to vie after. It's an effective thriller set up, and it's played surprisingly straight as a compelling, satisfying corporate espionage story, with cool (if not always completely credible) twists and turns.

 

 A very low budget gets in the way a little - some of the sets don't entirely convince, the pacing is a bit uneven, and some of the actors are slightly off- but Cronenberg has his father's knack for clean, clinical shots and upsetting imagery; the sound design is on-point as well.

 If needles scare you, brace yourself; There are lots and lots of lovingly shot injections here, often in close-up. Also, the sort of biological aberrations you'd expect, low-key body horror, people choking on blood... you know, continuing the Cronenberg family business.

 The sci-fi is pretty soft, but some of the weirder conceits are based on real science. The biotech, sure, but also the technology used to encrypt the viruses, based on facial recognition, which is incredibly dense with information for human observers. It's there as more of a cool, unique visual touch, and doesn't entirely make sense as used, but it is real.

 Meanwhile almost everything is held at an arm's length, distant. Syd's a scuzzy sociopath working for a loathsome industry who gets a little sympathy when he's involved in the machinations of bigger fish, then pisses it off in a huge (and grimly hilarious) way. We never know what the celebrities are famous for - it's not important - but the one we do see is the most sympathetic character in the movie, and she's also purely a victim. Little more than a ghost, true to her name. Nothing here is particularly subtle, but... well, what would you expect when dealing with celebrity culture?

 

Post Mortem

  ...Not to be confused with Pablo Larraín's excellent 2012 movie Post Mortem, or that silly thriller with Charlie Sheen.

 No, this Post Mortem is a Hungarian entry in a genre that I really enjoy - horror movies that remain resolutely steadfast to their batshit conceits, and are willing to follow through as far as they must. As a result it comes off as a littlelot goofier than maybe intended, but it's also entertaining as hell.

 It's set in 1918 Hungary, with both the war and the Spanish flu decimating the population. We first meet our protagonist Tomás (Viktor Klem) in the battlefield, where running soldiers are flung around by explosions in a way that's clashes a little with the sober tone of the scene. Tomás eventually gets hit by a shell and dies... for a while. But as he's slipping away he gets a vision of a little girl; He comes back to half buried amidst a pile of corpses, and when we next see him the war is over, we're at some sort of travelling fair, his comrade in arms is using his story to part rubes from their coin, and Tomás is working as a post mortem photographer.
 What that entails is that he's got a small studio to which bereaved families bring the corpses of their loved ones; he does the corpses up, sets them in as natural a pose as possible, and takes one last family picture.
 We all know from Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things that this sort of thing is not a good idea, but since he's not a dirty hippy and is mostly respectful, none of the corpses turn into zombies and bite his face off.

 In case you hadn't heard of it, corpse photography is an actual thing that was big in the Victorian times - It doesn't feature much in movies, as the only modern one I can think of where it's mentioned is The Others. There's an outstandingly creepy seam of old pictures of moms cradling dead babies out there; It went out of fashion as photography became more commonplace, but it makes sense that it would still be popular in rural areas, especially ones hit hard by war and plague.

 While Tomasz is going about his job he meets Anna (Fruzsina Hais), a little girl who's come to the fair  along with a small delegation from a distant village. Once the villagers see his work, they explain that their town was hit hard by the flu, and because the ground is frozen, they haven't been able to bury anyone all winter. So they ask him if he would be willing to travel with them and take photos of them with their diseased.
 Tomasz agrees immediately, not because it looks like it'd look good in his resumé - well, that's probably a reason, too, but mostly he goes because he recognizes the girl from that vision he had when he nearly died.

 Linguistic aside: I liked it when the villagers comment on the pronunciation of his name . Someone later calls him German, but I don't think that's literal? He's probably from the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian equation. Also, I thought  that soft sh sound meant that it should be spelt Tomász? But maybe that's a Polish thing.

 Anyhow. The film gives us a taste of (silly) things to come as soon as Tomász arrives at the village and bemusedly observes a dog playing with something invisible - it leans on nothing and is picked up at one point by invisible hands. It's ridiculous, but an original and cool idea - dead dog owners must still like playing with their pets.
 As Tomás putters about the township, making the corpses presentable and taking his morbid family pictures, the supernatural rapidly makes itself more and more noticeable. At first it's just things that go bump in the night and photo-bombing shadows, but the dead are anything but subtle in this movie. Soon they're carting people off into the darkness and getting very, very hands-on.
 Some of them apparently like pranks. Some of them seem to think they're in some shitty internet video played for a shitty youtuber to shittily fake-scream to. And some of them have murder in mind.

 The spirits' meddling quickly becomes very overt, so Tomás and Anna start digging around to try and find out why the ghosts are sticking around and getting all up in people's business. Things get pretty apocalyptic and, honestly, ridiculous, but again, in a good way: I like over-the-top horror, especially when it's as well made as this. There's even a weird death dimension visit, á la Insidious; I'm never going to say no to that.

 It carries itself for a long time as a more serious movie would, and the somber tone and undeniable creepiness of the photographic business is extremely effective. But even before things get out of hand, you get a ton of cheesy things like corpses snarling at the camera and then quickly putting themselves back into position before anyone notices they moved. And once things get bonkers... well, imagine if something like The VVitch suddenly started pulling Ghostbusters-style shit.

 It's a deceptively dark horror movie that very much wants you to have fun, in other words, and I am absolutely up for that. The budget is decent but not huge, and its money is judiciously spent - some of the stuff they get away with is pretty impressive. The ghosts here like snatching people up and making them float, and some of those scenes are really well made, very physical; it looks a lot better than the floating in most superhero movies. I also loved a bit where the ghosts pose all of the town's dead for a group shot. Spectral goofballs.

 There's a lot of schlock mixed in with genuinely cool ideas, but the puckish enthusiasm on display is infectious enough that the crappier bits (like, say, an unintendedly hilarious scene with a Harry-Potter-style 'scary' animated photograph, or all the mugging corpses) don't really taint the experience.

 Director Péter Bergendy has a good command of tone, and knows how to mount a handsome-looking film with a limited, wintery palette; He also manages pacing well and keeps the movie from ever becoming too dour. The more serious parts work really well as a result, and the central mystery is compelling, at least until it fizzles out into nothing.
 Blame that on a script that, while well written, struggles to say anything coherent in between all the cool phantasmagoria. That's OK, because it fits in a lot of phantasmagoria, but also a bit frustrating because I get the feeling there's a good, if weird ghost story buried under the madness. The actors are all pretty good except for young Anna, who often struggles to sell her character.

 This inspired bit of lunacy was submitted as Hungary's official selection for the 2020 Oscars; Bless their hearts. It ends with a pretty cheesy setup for further adventures, and yeah, you know I'd absolutely be up for more of this.

I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore

 I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore opens with barrage of low key, quotidian assholishness heaped on poor Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) by random people. You know the type: people cutting in line,  not picking up their dog poop, littering - not giving a fuck about others and just being generally shitty. The first of these incidents gets the biggest laugh in the movie: a dying woman dies in the middle of a horrible tirade right in front of Ruth at the hospice she works in as a nurse... later, surrounded by her grieving family, she's asked if there were any last words.
 She doesn't have the heart to tell them the last words were "Keep your gigantic monkey dick out of my good pussy."

 Linskey is aways good, but especially so here playing a quiet, decent person who feels increasingly out of step with the rest of humankind.

 When she gets back home after this particularly shitty day, she finds someone's broken in and stolen her laptop, some silver that belonged to a late, favorite family member, and meds. It's a shitty thing to happen to anyone, and Ruth's reaction to it all - a sort of resigned heartbreak mixed with impotent rage -  is spot on and like so much of the rest of the movie, very relatable.

 When the police get there they basically brush her off and give her a hard time for not locking her front door. Cold.

 After stewing over it for a couple of days, Ruth starts sleuthing around and is able to track down some of her missing stuff; So she enlists the aid of one of her neighbours for backup - Tony (Elijah Wood, in a pseudo-mullet with a rattail and a Saxon T-shirt), an introverted weirdo who seems to be less of a dick than everyone else. And off they go, on an initially successful quest across their little Texan suburb to get Ruth's shit back.

 As their crusade goes on, Ruth gets a little too much into it. Not that it turns into a proper vigilante movie or anything - her plan is simply to confront people and maybe get them to, at most, explain themselves. Get them to be at least a little ashamed. But unfortunately for Ruth and Tony, part by skill and part by dumb luck, they do eventually manage to catch the attention of the people that originally robbed her place - a trio of strung-out petty thieves (led by David Yow!) who'd barely register as mooks in your standard vigilante movie, but drip with menace here.

 Writer/Director Macon Blair became known after playing the lead in Blue Ruin, and this, his first movie, is definitely in tune with that film's sensibilities. Describing it as Blue Ruin but played as a comedy is a bit glib, but fair - at least if we're thinking of comedy more in the ancient Greek sense; There are some good jokes here and a pervasive bleak sense of humour, but it's undercut by a nasty intensity, a queasy sense of danger that seems to promise things will not go well. And.. well, they don't. Should anyone make it through alive, you can be sure they'll have earned getting to the finish  line.

 There is some action, and it is suitably brutal, deflating any glamour or the more vicarious thrills this sort of movie might offer. The film doesn't stay pinned on Ruth's viewpoint, either; other characters get a chance to expand on theirs too, and a lot of these make a lot of sense. The script remains sympathetic to Ruth and Tony to the end, but it never completely romanticizes the action or loses sight of how fucked up, dangerous, and just plain stupid some of the stuff they get up to is.

 Some of the events towards the end get a little far-fetched, but it's easy to forgive a little silliness given how grounded most of the movie feels at that point. It's a good one.

Final Cut (Coupez!)

 The Japanese film One Cut of The Dead remains one of the best comedies made in the last few years. It's funny, heartfelt, impecable on a technical level, and it boasts one of the bests scripts I've seen in ages - a clever, water-tight marvel with a unique, original premise.
 It's not exactly a film that's crying out for a remake, as it came out fully-formed the first time around. But when it was announced Michel Hazanavicius was going to do a French-language remake, I perked up - with the OSS117 films, the guy's proved to be a great comedy director.

 Unfortunately, the remake is a disappointment - a very likeable disappointment, but completely unnecessary when the original Japanese film does pretty much everything better. Oh well.
 I am going to spoil the shit out of things, because the trailer for the remake pretty much gives the game away - if you've seen neither, I STRONGLY recommend you go watch the Japanese original before reading any further. Trust me, it's worth it. And if you have already seen it, well... there's not much to spoil anyhow, as the remake is pretty faithful.

 OK, you've been warned. So here are the commonalities: both films start with a 30-minute zombie movie about a film crew that encounters real zombies while shooting a zombie movie - and it's shot entirely in one cut. Meta! But wait, it gets more involved.
 The second act jumps back in time and explains the backstory of the short - it's a production to promote a new video platform, and it's being aired live as it's shot as a publicity stunt; They purposefully hire a competent hack to do the movie, a couple of famous young faces for the protagonists, and a bunch of others to shoot it in a remote deserted facility.
 After some last-minute complications, including the director having to insert himself and his wife into the movie to fill in for missing actors, the third act details the actual production of the film, showing everything that was happening in the background, explaining away a bunch of irregularities like the camera getting dropped, why people start talking about random stuff at points, etc.

 Clever, huh? There's also a running thread where the director, partly inspired by his daughter (who's also on-set), starts caring about the material and evolves from a hack to a... well, not an artist, but to someone who at least gives a shit about his work. It's corny, but it works beautifully and is integrated very well with the story.

 Both movies are very, very similar in content. Coupez! adds one major character, a musician (Jean-Pascal Zadi) doing the music on the fly - he gets a couple of good lines, and a very funny running gag where we realize the soundtrack in the background is actually him doodling on the keyboards.
 It exists in the same world where the original Japanese short from One Cut of the Dead has already aired, and this is a remake for the French launch of the same platform (Yoshiko Takehara, who played a producer in the original, reprises her role.)

 This is heady on a meta level, but it also makes you start thinking that if the problems with the production are almost identical to the ones in the original movie... oh, what the hell? It doesn't even begin to make sense. But it's a cute joke and it leads to some fun added complication like when the French director (Romain Duris) is forced to keep the original Japanese names after pissing off the producer. There are some other changes, but nothing major, and many of the beats are almost identical.

 There are a couple major problems here. One is that the comedy this time around is a little broader (which is saying a lot, since the original was a Japanese comedy). Even worse: the short at the beginning just doesn't fucking work in the remake.
 I mean, it's still a technical achievement, but as a short horror film, it sucks. The original was a cheesy but tight zombie story that's in and of itself a fun, funny genre exercise - the 'issues' that will later be expanded upon are a little weird, or offer some what the fuck moments, but they don't break the movie because the rest of the short is very propulsive and (as we later learn) the crew fixed things successfully as they went along. You could watch it on its own and it would still be great.
 In the remake... well, later, when we see the behind the scenes, it cuts to people watching and complaining about it, lampshading the obvious issue: it's garbage. And the film never recovers from that because- what does the director have to be proud of at the end? Another mediocrity?

 The broadness of the comedy is mostly a problem with the second third - the original was also cartoony, but mostly remained believable - the new one is happy to vamp and exaggerate things, which is a shame. Once we're caught up and they're doing the film again in the final stretch, the slapstick becomes more organic, and the film's energy and likeable characters finally sync up with the more 'wacky' elements.

 It's very, very flawed, completely overshadowed by the original, and the few jabs at being a remake and other additions don't really justify its existence.
 …Unless you know French and really hate subtitles, I guess.
 It's a shame because technically it's very accomplished, and the actors all do a good job; Hazanavicius regular Berenice Bejo is great as usual, and Simone Hazanavicius plays the director's daughter - another delightfully meta touch. (And yes, I'm aware I'm overusing the word meta, but that's completely warranted when talking about these films.)

 An amiable lark, maybe best watched as a curiosity after you've had your fill of the original.

Red Sun (Soleil rouge)

 Toshiro Mifune, Charles Bronson,  Alain Delon and Ursula Andress.

 That's it, what else do  you need? Go watch it already.

 OK, fine: Red Sun is a French-Italian coproduction from 1971 shot, like so many Spaghetti Westerns, in Almeria, Spain. It was directed by Terence Young, a brit whose output was as varied as it was diverse; He's best known for a couple of early Bond classics (Russia With Love and Dr No), but his work also includes The Jigsaw Man, Safari and Triple Cross. While the premise - Samurais and cowboys! sounds a bit cynical (as well as awesome), Young was clearly interested in the subject; He had previously written an original script for the '60s OSS117 films that moved the action to Tokyo.

 So let's talk about those samurai, then. They're guarding an ambassador from Japan, who's travelling from San Francisco to Washington to present a ceremonial blade to the president.
 Unfortunately for them, the train is robbed by a notorious outlaw gang led by Link (Bronson). His second in command, Gauche (Delon) snatches the ceremonial katana and kills one of the samurai... and shortly afterwards betrays Link and leaves him for dead, taking all the loot.

 The ambassador revives link, and tasks him to help the surviving samurai, Kuroda (Mifune), with bringing back the weapon before a week is done, or do as honor demands (hara-kiri). He then gives Kuroda a rope with seven knots to remind him of his promise. This, of course, becomes an extremely badass visual reminder as every morning the samurai unties one more knot.

 While he tries to escape a few times, Link's goals actually align with Kuroda's; he wants to hunt down Gauche to discover where he took the money from the train robbery. The problem is that the samurai is honor-bound to kill Gauche on sight.
 It's a buddy comedy, then, as the two men develop rapport and respect for each other - with the added bonus that since Kuroda of course is the straight, ultra-serious half of the duo, Link must then pick up the slack and be the talky, funny one. And Bronson hits it out of the park, playing his outlaw with a genteel, easy charm, and some pretty damn funny lines.

 On their way they pick up Gauche's main squeeze Cristina (Andress), your traditional feisty, amoral western whore, to use as a bargaining chip. They also piss off a band of marauding Comanches on their way, setting the table for one of those forced alliances at the end as Gauche joins the heroes to hold off an indian attack.

 It's a little more violent and sleazy than you'd expect, given its pedigree; the action is pretty bloody- mostly bloodstains, but there's a couple of squirting wounds as well, and Andress shows a fair amount of skin. Standard disclaimers for all spaghetti westerns apply, though the threat of sexual violence never crosses over into actual unpleasantness. Link does behave in a pretty ungentlemanly way; it's easy to see why Cristina prefers Gauche over him.

 The action is great - I don't think Young had done any westerns, but he'd directed his share of war movies and worked with a killer lineup of actors, so he knows how to frame his trio of badasses for maximum impact. There are a lot of cool stunts, explosions, and a pretty impressive fight in a burning field- but my favorite stunt has to be an early one where Link tries to escape by tumbling down a scree-covered mountainside, and Kuroda just runs down the same slope, nimbly keeping pace. Or maybe an explosion where someone ducks under a detonating train carriage; Seemed pretty dangerous.

  The actors are still the main draw, and they're all obviously great. I've already talked enough about the two leads, but Andress is great in a thankless role - scheming and mischievous - and Delon has a lot of fun playing a seriously dickish asshole. I knew I loved him in this when he pretends to kindly help someone up to a moving train, only to shoot him off it, and then looks pleased as punch with himself. Using his charisma for evil.

 So yes, this one is very much worth it. I'm not sure why it's not better known.

Blood & Gold

 It's starting to get crowded here in the final days of World War: The Sequel. Joining Sisu and (the most crowd-pleasing part of) the latest Indiana Jones, we've now got a new contender from Germany: Blood & Gold, a stylized, violent pulp yarn about greed and murder in a small town in the middle of soon-to-stop-being-Nazi Germany.

 Heinrich (Robert Masser), a young disillusioned soldier with a face so chiselled it looks like a natural rock formation, is rescued from being hanged for desertion by Elsa (Marie Hacke), a young local farmer with no sympathies for the Nazi party. Between Sisu and this, the fascists might want to look into alternative execution arrangements.

 Meanwhile, the Nazis that failed to follow through  with Heinrich's hanging arrive at the nearby village, looking for a cache of gold bars left behind by the only Jew family in town. They're not just Nazi soldiers - they're SS, Himmler's own Nazier-than-thou zealots, and you know they're especially dastardly because they're led by a sociopath in a phantom of the opera-style leather mask (Alexander Scheer).

 While they search for the gold they take over the village inn as a center of operations, and send some soldiers to a nearby farm to look for supplies. Can you guess whose farm they go to raid?

 Elsa manages to hide Heinrich from the plundering soldiers, but all bets are off when things get rapey. Soon Heinrich, Elsa and her brother have to leave behind a farm full of dead Nazis; And then Elsa's brother goes and gets himself captured, they need to go to the village to rescue him.

 The backstory for the gold gets filled in, adding the complication that there's a group of people in town willing to murder for the money; and so the rest of the film ably spins these plates, weaving its characters between them in a series of confrontations and narrow escapes that always end up involving some gnarly violence.
 It's a gleefully pulpy story with a relatively low body count but a few memorable demises; Add a soundtrack composed of oldie German numbers and Morricone-style spaghetti western music, a heavy debt to Quentin Tarantino, and a sense of humor but no overt jokes...

 Good fun, in other words. It's a brisk, well-made, entertaining film punctuated by blood-red gouts of gore and some exploitation... A bit sleazy, but never too much so. The script doesn't always deliver the goods in a satisfying way, but it's pretty lean and it throws a few fun left turns and unexpected details.

 Director Peter Thorwarth does a good job with the action, keeping it varied and brutal, and manages suspense well in the scenes that need it. This is a huge improvement over his previous movie, Blood Red Skies (in case you were wondering). I doubt I'll remember much of this in a year's time but yeah, I enjoyed it.

Kuso

 Well, stop the search. This year's prestigious "The Fuck Did I just Watch?" award goes to...

 Kuso is an unhinged, deeply bizarre surrealist comedy in the vein of Tim Heidecker and Eric Warheim's Awesome Show by way of body horror.
 And if that doesn't tell you anything, well, congratulations: that puts you one peg closer to normalcy. Tim and Eric are a couple of anti-comedians who do purposefully tacky, off-putting shows for Adult Swim that try to recreate the most cringe-inducing, crappiest lows of public access television.

This film's the brain-child of Rapper Flying Lotus (Steve Ellison), who's obviously a fan of Tim and Eric, and whose music has featured in some Adult Swim shows. It's a series of alternating vignettes set in a plague-ridden Los Angeles where reality was disrupted in weird ways by a series of earthquakes.

 (I'm going to go into the film in some detail now. Kuso goes all-out in an attempt to offend and/or disgust, and absolutely revels in bad taste... so, well, be warned. It qualifies as a pretty extreme movie.)

Wait, George Clinton does what now?

  Does the Phrase 'David Cronenberg porn' sound amusing to you? The man himself has gotten close to pornography a few times in his own, clinical way -he certainly never shied away from sexual themes- but this movie gets explicit with it. I won't spoil it, but that's basically the most apt description for the punchline to one of the stories here.

 A more concrete example: There's a subplot where a man gets cured of his crippling fear of boobs (mastophobia?) by drinking the juices from an insect residing in George Clinton's gaping anus.
 Yes. George Clinton. The man's a legend. And yes, we get a perspective shot from within Clinton's bowels, looking out his sphincter; Bless this movie for giving me the chance to write that sentence.

 And here are some more bits, out of context: people jam things in their dickholes. Insects get bitten in half. A bloody, recently aborted fetus gets thrown around like a football. A dead child is used on a throwaway gag. All sorts of bodily fluids get thrown around and smeared on people.
 It's all purposely pretty fake-looking and over the top, so it can still be funny... But even so  some of the stuff still made a little queasy. 

 Stylistically most of the stories are live action on a shoestring budget, but there are a few cheap-looking CGI interludes and some pretty creative Terry Gilliam-esque collages (he gets name-checked via a big-ass book on a shelf early on).

 I won't go into detail on all the 'plots'; In case you're interested, here's a Wikipedia entry that goes pretty in-depth into them (and explains some unnecessary details I completely missed while watching.)
 Some of the skits are followed up on, and three or so narrative threads emerge - don't expect a proper story out of them, but they do build up to something approximating a punchline, and some of them are even funny. All are creative as hell, but there's a fairly low hit ratio for the material - which will probably be lower for most people, and higher for those that prefer to chemically enhance their movie watching (the Adult Swim crowd will be happy).

 The effect the whole thing has is hard to describe. I'm not a fan of the style but it did make me laugh several times; when it's funny, it's really fucking funny, and that makes it infinitely better to me than its most obvious inspirations.
 There were long barren stretches that were a bit of an endurance test, though. It's not just that there's a (sometimes literal) shitload of gross-out... well, some of it is humour, and that it's actively unpleasant in every possible way it can conceive of.

 My issue is that a lot of it is weird for weirdness's sake - but not that interesting. And while the bizarre imagery and concatenation of ideas kept me from fast-forwarding through any of it, this is not something I'd enjoy sitting through again to expose my friends to it the way I routinely do with... I dunno, Boxer's Omen.

 Ellison directs and has a writer credit on all of the segments. Rapper Zack Fox co-wrote the funniest short (the one with George Clinton's ass bug). David Firth, he of Salad Fingers fame, collaborated with Ellison on the weirdest one - guess that won't surprise anyone.

 I should probably say some nice things about the music and sound design. While there are a few random fart and shitting sounds that kind of work against the movie's... ah hell, let's call it spell- the music side of things is very well made. I can't claim to know any Ellison's stuff, but he got Aphex Twin and Akira Yamaoka working on the soundtrack, and I really enjoyed what they all did on that front. My favorite detail comes during a hilarious turn by, um, Lexington Steele -dunno him from anywhere, no sir!- where his lines are underscored by short staccato strings; a bizarre, funny touch I genuinely loved.

 Oh, and since we're listing actors now: Tim Heidecker puts in a short appearance, waving his pasty white bum at the camera as usual. Rapper Busdriver also does a very cool, pretty funny number at the beginning with some great practical effects.

 So yeah, your mileage will very much vary on this one. I suspect you'll know whether you'll like it -whether you can like it, maybe- going in.

Nimona

 After a particularly hellish development, Nimona's finally made its way to Netflix. And the good news is that it's a fun, funny and heartfelt animated film that does justice to its source material (a series of webcomics that were collected into an excellent book in 2015). Now it's a cartoon with a presumably younger-skewing audience, they've had to sand down some of its sharper edges, change and simplify quite a few things, but the heart was left intact.

 Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) is about to be inducted into the Institute for Elite Knights - the first commoner to be knighted into the nobles-only club since its foundation a millennium ago. He's to become a protector of the kingdom - a retro-futuristic sci-fi walled city - along with his lover Ambrosius (Eugene Yang), but things go horribly wrong during the ceremony when his sword shoots and kills the Queen.
 On the run and missing an arm (seems the institute trains its knights to disarm people thoroughly), Ballister (Balls from now on) escapes to a cool ruined tower which he takes over as a lair.

 He doesn't get much peace. Soon after moving in and building himself a replacement robot arm, he gets a visit from a bubbly, possibly psychopathic teenager (Chloë Grace Moretz, very energetic), who introduces herself as Nimona and insists on becoming his evil sidekick.
 As they investigate, it quickly becomes clear that Balls has been framed by the head of the institute itself, and becomes a notorious outlaw as he attempts to clear his name. Mostly due to Nimona enthusiastically causing as much collateral damage as possible.

 Oh, yeah, it also turns out that Nimona is a shapeshifter, happily switching forms between a rhinoceros, cats, whales and a bunch of other animals. This understandably freaks Balls out and puts a strain in their relationship - he can't understand that the Nimona he knows is just a part of what she truly is, and tries to get her to act 'normal', to stay as a girl. The metaphor may elude its target audience, but it's solid, affecting, and well developed, if a bit on-the-nose.

 Plot-wise there will be misunderstandings, minor betrayals (perceived and direct), a pretty graphic (and touching) depiction of an attempted suicide -always a hit with the kids, those attempted suicide scenes- and, yes, a same-sex kiss. There are also a lot of very fun kick-ass action scenes, some really good jokes, and some eye-popping, colourful, very dynamic animation. It's pretty good!

 Not as good or as funny as the comic, which had much more room to breathe and make its revelations more organic. Nimona could afford to be a real psycho there and rack up a body count, and the story could let Balls start out as a villain and reveal his backstory later (it gets a huge amount of mileage in the early going from Nimona questioning comic-book villainy.) There are a lot of other changes made for the movie, but they're the sort of thing you'd expect when cramming a comic that ran for years into a hundred minutes; I may be misremembering, but it felt like shackling Nimona with PG restraints does the story the biggest disservice.

 Despite everything, It's a pretty decent adaptation.
 Especially when you consider it originated with Blue Sky Studios, the makers of Ice Age and other, even lesser animated movies. Thankfully this is more in the vein of their underrated Peanuts adaptation.

 The story for this one is fascinating - the movie was in mid-production when Blue Sky was acquired by Disney, and after several delays, it was shut down by the new management, explicitly due to its content. It seems Rodent House has a strict policies against overt LGBT themes; have that in mind whenever you're tempted to praise them for their wokeness/accuse them of corrupting the youth or whatever.
 To be fair, the movie is a rough fit for Disney's tame, extremely safe sensibilities - beyond any 'contemporary concerns', it's simply too anarchic for them. Even a dull edge can scare away big money.

 In any case, things were very pretty far along at the time of cancellation - according to Wikipedia, quoting co-director Troy Quane: "the film was approximately "70% through layout": they had completed five fully animated sequences, along with character models, story reels, and locations at the time of Blue Sky's shut down."
 Annapurna picked up the rights and handed the project off to DNEG Animation. They managed to find a way to replicate the existing style and finish the movie, which sounds to me like a Herculean task - good job for pulling it off, folks.

 The animation style looks great, if a little cheap sometimes, with simple character designs full of geometric patterns - angular for the knights, rounded and ridiculously fluid for Nimona herself. All the low-detail stylization looks pretty good when inserted into the more detailed 3D environments and lighting. I didn't much care for the design of some of the secondary characters, but all the principals are very expressive and Nimona in particular is a delight.
 The movie fittingly hits its peaks when Nimona is transitioning between forms with abandon, showing her inner life in a riot of color and action, or in one memorable scene, pitch-black depression. This is her show, and she thoroughly owns it.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

 Here we are. Five movies in. A bunch of TV episodes and movies, a couple dozen videogames (one of which is a stone-cold classic). Comics, books, tabletop roleplaying games, the works. I've consumed a lot of them as they've come out over the last... forty-two years.
 I feel fucking OLD.

 Indiana Jones, like seemingly every other thing these days, now belongs to Disney. And if there's one thing Rodent House doesn't do, it's to let its properties lie, even when maybe they should; so it's time to put Harrison Ford in hat and leather one last time before he croaks.
 The other thing our corporate overlords don't tend to do is to take any risks, not any more, so the whole thing kind of feels like re-heated leftovers, with a lot of callbacks, references, and at least one familiar face who has no reason to be there plot-wise. Fan service.

 But damn it, for a while there at least it works beautifully. In a prologue set in the waning days of World War 2, a digitally de-aged Indy (never did get used to hearing his gruff older voice come out of a sometimes convincing younger mouth) and new-to-the-series-longtime-friend Basil (Toby Jones) are sniffing around a castle as it's looted by the Nazis. Their goal? The Lance of Longinus, a fun reference to a long-debunked myth about Hitler (also a plot point in the Wolfenstein games, so it's a pretty shallow cut as far as these things go.)
 An allied bombing stops the looting short, freeing a captured Indy, and soon there's a car and motorcycle chase, ducking nazis within and without a speeding train... you know, derring-do and modern swashbucklery! Fun Indiana Jones-style stuff, more in the vein of the third one than the first. It's about as safe a choice as possible, but I'll take it.
 The Spear of Destiny turns out to be a red herring, to be replaced by the film's real McGuffin of Destiny: Archimedes' Antikythera, the titular Dial. Along with it we get our first real glimpse of the film's villain, Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a nazi scientist who alludes at some sort of ultimate power that can be unlocked with the dial. 

 The epilogue ends rather abruptly - things build up to an explosive climax, and then... it kinds of fizzles out; We jump from things about to blow up good with a weirdly unsatisfying cut to a point in time where the British have the situation under control and the trainwreck is already a fait accompli. Get ready for that sort of thing, this movie has a ton of continuity errors and pacing hiccups.
 In any case, that's the prologue done; and it's mostly downhill from here.

 Cut to nineteen-sixty-nine-Indy being waken up by his neighbours playing Beatles and David Bowie, in a scene that does a pretty good job of painting him as a defeated old man. Time hasn't been kind to him - he's lost his son Mutt (yay!) and divorced Marion (boo!). Students in his classes can barely stay awake or get engaged in his lectures, in a pointed reference to the beatlemania-like zeal of yesteryear. The dude is, the film is telling us, done.

 Luckily his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Basil's daughter, comes to snap him out of it. Turns out her father went a bit crazy over the dial, convinced it had dangerous powers, and now she's come to have a look after her dad entrusted it to Indy. She is, in turn, followed by a bunch of ruthless CIA spooks who are working with none other than Voller, who's pulled a Von Braun and is now working for the States building rockets. But he's done with that; now he's after the dial.

 There are a bunch of twists and turns- Helena, in a fun reversal, bucks the sort of role her character would normally have in an Indiana Jones movie and is more of an agent of chaos, and a lot of fun. She brings with her a tween sidekick (Ethann Isidore) who gets a way-too-cute introduction with a homemade plane dashboard. As the action bounces around ports in the Mediterranean, is he going to get a chance to fly a real plane? Well...

 The movie hops from destination to destination, and setpiece to setpiece, at a good clip. The action is constant... but unfortunately very uneven, and full of continuity errors and lousy sequencing. It also pulls a lot of moves that wouldn't feel out of place in a late Fast & Furious sequel; I'm not necessarily against that, but it felt a bit out of place here. Overall, it's fine - not very exciting and weirdly lifeless at points, but it's got enough silliness and variety to be entertaining.
 The script is harder to excuse. For all of its straining to recapture the magic of the previous films, it's also full of dodgy twists and developments, stupid, inexplicable decisions, and it never compensates by  coming up with anything cool. Plot holes abound and things happen just because... well, the good guys can't lose the bad guy's trail, and viceversa, because then there'd be no more movie.
 There are also a few very weird, dumb choices, like establishing a character can't swim and then having him swimming without any major issues, or a seemingly fatal bullet wound that doesn't really end up informing the action in a major way.
 The movie's had a long and troubled production, which undoubtedly accounts for some of the issues; but also consider David Koepp was involved as a writer. That's been a warning sign for the last couple of decades.

 Once you take all of this into account, any goodwill accrued in those excellent first twenty minutes and the other good things the movie has got going for it has been spent by the time we arrive at a very... weird finale, one that does not compare that well to Jones facing off against alien phenomena. It's the furthest afield any of the mainline movies have gone outside the realm of credibility... and it's kind of for nothing. Like everything else in the movie, the supposedly momentous final stretch is oddly impact-less; it doesn't serve much of a function for our heroes' journey. I mean, I see what they were going for, but it feels extremely forced and artificial; Unearned.
 Not to mention it's a pretty underwhelming way to dispatch the film's villain and resolve the plot. Even if it kinda fits with the series' ethos of letting the bad guys get killed off by whatever it is they're looking for, it was particularly uninspired.
 At least the coda is nice, and the series manages to end sweetly on a couple of grace notes.

 I normally like director James Mangold, but here he seems to have lost control of the CGI monstrosity he's ushered into being. Even when the movie is good -as it is in the prologue, and during a few other bits- it feels a bit too fake, much of the action weightless and artificial. Luckily the actors are very game, starting with Ford not just fully inhabiting his iconic character, but also giving him a lot of depth and soul. Waller-Bridge brings a lot of impish energy to the proceeds, and while Mikkelsen is maybe too obvious a choice as a villain, his usual chilly, calm and collected brand of villainy is still pretty cool. I found it funny that he kind of sounds like the voice of reason, even after donning full Nazi regalia and talking about [SPOILERS] going back in time to kill Hitler to save the Reich. That's a good one.
 And of course you've got the John Williams score doing a lot of heavy lifting in the background. Fully counts as another character. I'm not one for nostalgia, not much... but damn- those themes.

 So. This is definitely not good, but it's not exactly bad either; I think I liked it about the same as the previous sequel (which is: not that much, but I don't seem to hate as much as everyone else). Even at two hours and a half it didn't feel like a chore, I don't regret watching it. Don't need to lock it in a box and forget it in a warehouse somewhere, but it'll probably end up on a high shelf along with that crystal skull and other lesser knick-knacks.
 Faint, qualified praise... but what are you going to do? Sometimes it's best to let sleeping dogs lie.