Talk to Me

 Talk to Me is a clever, funny, imaginative and above all creepy as fuck horror movie from Australian youtuber siblings Danny and Michael Philippou. Well done, you guys; Next time I yell at the kids to get off my lawn, consider yourselves exempt.

 The film revolves around a porcelain hand that a couple of dodgy teens (Zoey Terakes and Chris Alonsio) lug around in a backpack and pull out at parties; When you light a candle, hold the hand, and say "Talk to me", you see dead people. Then you invite them in so they can possess you for a bit.

 So people do this, egged on by other partygoers, and everything gets filmed and everyone has a laugh. It feels genuine - yeah, of course people would use a tool to contact the dead that way. The Ouija board has historically been as much a party favour as a tool to strip money from the credulous.

 This hand thing always works; People infallibly see ghosts, they get a huge buzz from getting possessed, and there are no side effects as long as you keep the ghosts in only for ninety seconds. And it's all fine, because who's going to be stupid enough to break that simple rule?

 Now would be as good a time as any to introduce Mia (Sophie Wilde), a troubled teen who's still not over the death of her mother two years ago. She's gotten a bit better, thanks in part to her BFF Jade (Alexandra Jensen) - but on this night, the anniversary of her mother's death, she's feeling down and wants to go see what's the deal with all the people shaking hands with the dead on her social media. And of course she tries it, and of course she exceeds the time limit. Not by a lot, but enough for the spooks to cling to her, it seems.

 Soon enough there's another party and the hand gets brought out. All's fun and games until Jade's little brother Riley (Joe Bird) wants a turn with the hand. It's an uncomfortable scene even before things inevitably go south, as it drives a wedge between Jade and Mia. And yeah, then it goes south. Things get real in an extremely gruesome way - the makeup department for the film lists more than a dozen people, and whatever they got, they deserve a raise.

 The spookshow doesn't end there, of course, but a lot of the rest of the movie has to do with the psychological fallout for Mia, who wasn't in the best place to begin with. It's an unpredictable movie, and  it's genuinely thrilling to see where the script goes (credit goes to Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, based on an idea from Daley Pearson, the guy who played Thor's roommate in those silly shorts they did in between the Marvel movies.)

 There are a lot of themes and motifs to decode here - some silly, like Mia's repeatedly bringing up that she's held hands with Jade's boyfriend; har-de-har. Some are mysterious, like Mia's recurring nightmare where she can't see herself in a mirror (notice that many of the ghosts that haunt her only appear on reflections). And some overt, like how people drive others away without meaning to, leaving others to deal with their grief alone. This focus on grief and trauma might put some people off, especially as the movie is distributed by A24, which some people associate with 'elevated' horror. But the parallels are used powerfully here, driving the plot and inextricably tied to some properly scary supernatural shit. Great stuff.

 One thing that it does share with other A24 horror movies is that it's not a 'fun' horror movie. I mean, it is fun (and really, really funny - Miranda Otto, as Jade's mom, gets some great lines in.) But It's not meant to be a ride in the same way a James Wan movie is; this is meant to fuck you up, it's meant to be uncomfortable.

 It's a great movie - extremely well acted, well-observed, properly scary and pretty damn original. Work's already begun on a prequel and a sequel; We'll see how those turn out (if they do come out at all), but franchises have been built on much, much less.

Insidious

  Twenty-eight years later... we finally got to see the ghost-world. Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist is a near goddamn masterpiece, but it has a fatal flaw (at least to pre-teen me, and I stand by this assessment): when Steve gets sent to the land of the dead to rescue Carol Anne, we never get to see anything.

 A late-movie twist in Insidious corrects that [retroactive spoilers!]. That it was done on a tiny budget ($1.5 million!) just makes me love it all the more.

 It starts out as a deceptively conventional haunted house movie. Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) Lambert have just moved house along with their brood - pre-teens Dalton (Ty Simpkins) and Foster (Andrew Astor), plus a baby girl. They have barely settled into the house when Dalton... just doesn't wake up; he's gone into a coma state that no doctor can explain.

 Months pass without his condition changing, and in the meanwhile, ghostly activity has gone haywire. The house had strange little quirks - stuff would get misplaced, thrown out of the shelves, supernatural pranks like that. But now random spooks are appearing all over the place, triggering the alarms at night... it gets to the point where the family has to pack up and move to another huge house.
 How they can afford that, with only one working adult (a secondary school teacher, at that!) is probably the most unrealistic event portrayed in the movie.

 Anyhow. The haunting resumes almost immediately at the Lamberts' new home, leading them to contact a team of parapsychologists led by a psychic (Lin Shaye) to try and figure out what's going on. And... that they do: the third act of this movie kind of goes off the rails, in a good way. The explanation is kind of goofy but internally consistent, original and fun. More importantly, the stage is set for some really imaginative low-budget madness of the underworld-spelunking kind.

 It's not (unlike Poltergeist) perfect. The low budget means that ghosts are basically presented as regular people in spooky makeup, which does drain their mystique a little, and there's even a sloppy brawl with one of them. The main bad guy kept reminding me of the villain from Episode One (Darth Insidious?)
 But the atmosphere is expertly judged and the filmmaking is so precise and energetic (DPs: David Brewer and John Leonetti) that these are minor complaints; the film is as well-crafted during its slow burn as it is when at full manic mode, building a land of the dead out of a collection of dimly lit rooms.
 There's excellent use of negative space throughout, a lot of neat tension-building devices, some pretty effective, well-paced jump scares and more than a few cool camera angles. A particularly showy one shows a scene through the whirring blades of a ceiling fan- no wonder director James Wan would later homage Russell Mulcahy in Malignant.

 Both Wan and writer Leigh Whannell made their name with Saw, a movie I still think fucking sucks; They have since redeemed themselves several times over, together and separately. The Conjuring might be their most popular film, but this one remains the scariest thanks to an edge that movie lacks (despite this being PG13, and The Conjuring having an R-rating). It's a silly, sometimes ridiculous horror movie, sure- but it packs a punch nonetheless.

32 Malasana Street (Malasaña 32)

 The Olmedo family moves to Madrid from the impoverished countryside, tying what little money they have into an unforgiving mortgage for a fully-furnished apartment.
 Among the furnishings, but not in the brochure: the ghost of the previous resident.

 While the parents (Beatriz Segura and Iván Marcos) go off to their jobs, teenaged sons Amparo and Pepe (Begoña Vargas and Sergio Castellanos) are left to look for jobs and care for an infirm grandfather (José Luis de Madariaga) and tiny five-year-old Rafita (Iván Renedo).

 Of course the ghost takes an interest in little Rafita. She abducts him early on, setting off a chain of events that will eventually pit the whole family against the supernatural. 
 Beyond a couple of really questionable choices and a pervading gerontophobia, the film doesn't really do a lot to distinguish itself. There are some interesting themes about Spanish societal intolerance and conservatism - there's a reason this is set in 1976, with the non-literal specter of Franco still haunting the proceeds; The script does try to weave both its ghost and the family's predicament into them, but to be honest those attempts, or any other story considerations, are drowned out by the film's seeming primary mission to deliver a near-constant barrage of jump scares and horror clichés.
 In other words, it's more interested in behaving like a trashy, mid-tier Blumhouse production.

 

 The jump scares come frequently and cheap, punctuating pretty much every scene and starting right at the prologue. There's fake-outs, ghostly irruptions, orchestral stings, even an angry cat at one point; seriously, no cliché goes unused. They completely crowd out the cooler, quieter conceits (I liked a part where Amparo sees the ghost using a tinted window) and some clever setups.

 This sort of thing can work, but not without a lot more care and craft. As presented here it feels forced and lacks the wit or originality of its more obvious inspirations.
 Instead we get a haunted etch-a-sketch and a mind-bogglingly terrible scene where the ghost addresses Rafita via a TV puppet show with a silly panto voice. No idea if that's some sort of Spanish cultural trauma (in the same way 70's Eastern European animation shorts were for me) but holy shit it seems like a miscalculation. That's where the movie completely lost me.

 As for questionable choices: there's a twist to the ghost story that, given the themes, I think is well-intentioned, but still feels a bit tropey and off. More problematic is the film's use of a paraplegic woman as a possible magical solution to the family's problem. To add insult to injury, it's explained that her mental issues mean that ghosts can easily take over because there's not a lot going on there. Fuck your inner life, lady!

 It's a handsome movie, with some beautiful photography (DP: Daniel Sosa), good acting, and some great staging. The problem is that there's not a lot there beyond a cavalcade of clichés and those iffy twists. I can't really say that director Albert Pintó makes the wrong call by filling it to the brim with cheap shots; Might as well try to scare the few teens that haven't seen this sort of thing a dozen times over, right?

Blood Vessel

 A bunch of people stuck in a life raft are picked up by a nazi ghost ship... and then they're killed one by one. Not by a deranged/possessed George Kennedy; It's been way too long since I saw 1980's Death Ship, so I can't really say if there are any homages here, but barring that the only thing these two movies share is the premise.

 The castaways here are the survivors from the torpedoing of a hospital ship by a U-boat. It's a diverse bunch, but time and genre limits constrain them to caricatures - you can pretty much describe all of them with a couple of adjectives: You've got New Yorker Asshole (Mark Diaco), Tough Black Guy (Christopher Kirby), Australian Cowboy (Nathan Phillips), Compassionate Nurse (Alyssa Sutherland), Snooty Brit (John Lloyd Fillingham), and Stoic Russian (Alex Cooke).

 After a short credit sequence (which includes a very nice take of the life raft shot from underneath during a thunderstorm), the survivors run into and manage to board a nazi corvette. It's an out of the pan into the fire kind of choice, since their rations had run out, but lucky for them there doesn't seem to be a living soul on the ship.

 Or maybe not so lucky. As they search the ship they find some grisly, butchered bodies, a creepy young girl with an antique doll who constantly asks about her family in Rumanian, and... vampire hunter paraphernalia. Oh, and a pretty cool-looking carved sarcophagus, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the plot. 

Aww, they're funpires!

 It takes a while for the Vampires to run amok. That's not a huge problem, as I thought the first part was pretty effective - there's not a lot of mystery as to what's actually going on, but the way the discoveries are dispensed, and the way the cast bounces off each other is pretty entertaining; while the characters never get any development and some of the acting is a bit iffy, they do butt heads and share some fun badass moments. And failing that, they get killed at an acceptable rate even before someone opens the chained coffin.

 Once that happens and the vampires (sorry - Strigoi) come out the pace picks up with regards to character deaths, but it remains weirdly inert. Mostly because apparently Strigoi don't like moving much; a lot of the movie is them looking creepily at the camera, making hand gestures to control the people they've bitten and reacting to stuff from a distance, which... to be honest, looks pretty goofy. They do attack a couple of times, but the (excellent) practical makeup effects must prevent them from moving much because it's all quick edits that show very little actual action.

 Despite that there's enough mayhem to keep things fun. Nothing special, but still a good time. It's creepy, especially at the beginning, but it's never scary - the vibe is closer to a grim action/survival movie than actual horror. It also has precious few jokes and never descends into winking despite the brilliant pun title; That's something I can respect.

 The effects are solid, low-budget work, with some excellent designs; the cramped ship interiors make for great sets, and I loved the various creepy carvings the Nazis had looted from Rumania. The vampires are a bit more animalistic than usual, and the main Striga looks a bit like the monster in The Night Flyer. As mentioned they look kind of goofy, but in a fun way, especially when their eyes light up.
 I also really liked the cool mold-like effect on the walls near the various corpses, to show the corruption in their blood. And there's also an absolutely brilliant maquette explosion. This movie packs quite a bit of nice eye-candy; Director Justin Dix is an F/X guy, and it really shows.

 So we end up with a solid B-movie, which is nothing to sneeze at. I'd prefer the monsters to be a bit more dynamic and the action a bit better, but what we get here is still worthwhile.

The Heroic Trio

 The Heroic Trio is a Hong Kong superhero movie from 1993 that I remembered pretty fondly, mostly for being pretty batshit crazy. And yeah, that's still pretty much the main takeaway. 

 Here's a small list of what you can expect out of it:
 - A house viewing devolves into someone jumping out a second floor window, using the tendrils of ivy outside both as a Tarzan-style brachiation aid and as a lasso to catch a thief.
 - An invisible assailant steals two babies from police custody, and a female superhero comes to stop it; There's running across electric wires, a falling baby (a running theme throughout the movie; not all of them survive), and all sorts of crazy stunts.
 - The invisible assailant, who turns out to be Michelle Yeoh, reaches an evil underground lair and is gratuitously attacked by a crazed kung fu guardian.
 - We meet this guy:

 - When a child falls from a (different) tall building, someone jumps after her, falls faster and rescues both the kid and her cute kitten.
 - Some criminals hole up in a chemical plant with hostages; All the police can do is look on helplessly while they gun down a helpless woman. Then a mercenary shows up, puts some dynamite in an open empty barrel, sits on it as if it were a horse, and uses the explosion to vault into the second floor and take out all the criminals with her trusty shotgun. It's just as silly/amazing as it sounds.
 - A crazy man goes into a maternity ward to, in his words, "kill all the babies". He's foiled.

 All of this happens within the first half hour! And I didn't even mention all the cheesy melodrama, corny comedy scene setting with the police and other random shit.

 The plot involves some sort of undead eunuch trying to set up an Emperor for China by kidnapping a bunch of babies. He's coercing Invisible Woman (Michelle Yeoh) to do his evil bidding, and is opposed by straight-laced superhero Wonder Woman (Anita Mui) and fun-loving mercenary Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung). As the title of the movie implies, the Invisible Woman may have a change of heart at some point.
 It's a Hong Kong take on American four-color comic stories, and it does a pretty good job of merging both types of madness. The results are never boring, but unfortunately the childish plotting, whiplash-inducing tone swings, wall-to-wall posturing, extremely broad humor, mawkish melodrama, and forced camp kind of bring it down a few notches.

 It just doesn't ever breathe. Everything is always dialed up to eleven; the constant barrage of heightened drama gets tiring, and the lack of anything substantive to latch onto -and the sense that the writer (Sandy Shaw) is just making it up as she goes along- makes it almost impossible to care about any of the events or characters. Even when it's a cute, doomed baby.

 Mui and Yeoh unfortunately don't get to do a lot with their characters - Mui is the earnest, glamorous, properly heroic one, and Yeoh gets the lion's share of all the angsty melodrama. They both look amazing, though. Cheung steals the movie as the sassy one - bad news is that she gets most of the shitty comedy bits, but she's also the only one that seems like she's having any fun and gets the coolest outfit and stunts.
 The film is directed by Johnnie To, but this is a very, very different To than the one who'll eventually direct Election or The Mission; here he just piles on the scenes without any concern for pacing or coherence. It looks pretty good, though, if you can get over the overtly campy tone. There's ample warning as the movie opens with a reference to the sixties batman series.

 And there's a lot of cool stuff. There's a bit where a motorcycle is driven off a wall and hurled, spinning horizontally, at a bad guy wielding a weapon straight out of Master of the Flying Guillotine. The villain's final form is an organic take on The Terminator's skeletal robot, one that opens its ribcage, traps Michelle Yeoh in it, and then puppeteers her to fight her teammates.
 The action is good, but except for a couple of fights it's the slightly less-exciting style of Hong Kong fights: pirouettes and twirly acrobatics rather than intricate combat, with a focus on things looking cool and fast, not so much on detail. Lots and lots of wire-assisted stunts, a lot of which look pretty silly but are a lot of fun.

 It's batshit crazy in a way that works for it just as much as it works against it; I still like it, but it's a hard movie to recommend. Hopefully these semi-coherent ramblings may give you an idea as to whether it's your sort of thing.

Grandmother's House

 Holy crap, we have struck... something. This is the sort of thing that makes trawling the further reaches of the streaming lists worthwhile.

 Grandmother's House is an obscure indie horror movie that's kind of breathtaking in its singular shittiness, a perfect storm of ineptitude, enthusiasm and wrong-headedness; The mythical so bad that it's... well, still pretty fucking bad, but in interesting and very funny ways. 
 If you're in the right frame of mind, it's an absolute blast; Friends and alcohol absolutely recommended.

 Siblings Lynn (Kim Valentine) and David (Eric Foster) have just lost their father. As orphans (their mother having died a few years prior) they're sent to, well, Grandmother's House, to be cared for by their maternal grandparents (Len Lesser and Ida Lee); They'd lived there as kids, but after mom died dad took them to the city.
 The first night at the house David sees Grannie and pop-pops dragging a woman's body into the basement. David is discovered as gramps is going to butcher the woman, so he gets killed too.
 But no! It was all a nightmare. Or was it? The young woman from the dream (prolific Z-movie actress Brinke Stevens) exists and seems to be making her own way to Grandmother's House; She's first seen almost causing a bus crash by jaywalking, then she's picked up by a green van.

 The next day the kids are taken to a pool. David sees the mysterious woman from his dream, but more importantly, Lynn reconnects with a rakish young gentleman: Kenny (Michael Robinson).
 The dude deserves his own paragraph; his seduction techniques rely on eye fucking Lynn, then when she acts mildly embarrassed, diving underwater and ogling her even more from every angle. The camera, of course, leers right along; this was pretty uncomfortable as I thought the character was meant to be fifteen or so, but let's give the script the benefit of doubt and say she's supposed to be nineteen, same age as the actress playing her.
 In any case, she calls him out for being a pervert, so he lunges and forces his tongue down her throat. And... she seems into it.
 (Later on, a friend asks Lynn what rating she'd give Kenny - she says "an eight... but that's only because I've never given anyone more than an eight." Given her tastes, maybe it'd take a Harvey Weinstein to break that record.)

 Anyhow. As the family make their way back to the farm, they pass by a bunch of policemen fishing an old man's corpse out of a nearby pond - an abandoned green van nearby. This would make for an effective thriller, if the movie knew how to milk tension better.
 Soon after a neighboring family pops over for a barbeque. David and another kid go off to play with fireworks (and cause a pretty great-looking explosion). When they get back, David sees grandma and grandpa dragging... a young woman's body - the one from his dream, even.
 The old timers suspect he's seen them, so there's a bit of a cat-and-mouse chase as David sneaks around gramps, who makes a show of maybe not having the best of intentions. That's even before he grabs his gun.

 And now I'm going to spoil the shit out of a mid-movie twist, so skip to after the picture if you're not into that sort of thing: As it turns out, it looks like it's the woman, the supposed victim, who's a complete psychopath, and the grandparents were trying to protect the kids from her. And don't worry, there's a few more left turns ahead.

 There's more chases as David and Lynn try to outwit their pursuer, leading to the film's best-looking scene as the kids run through an orange grove pursued by an antique truck. It's dumb as all hell, and never convincing, but it does look good.
 And it all ends with yet another twist that's so out of the left field and... I don't want to say bold, it's more like holy shit this completely ignores any good storytelling sense and completely derails the movie; It made me burst out laughing, so I'm all for it.

 It's madness. Poorly paced madness with a lot of filler and more plot holes than plot, but it's still got enough crazy shit and energy to be fun in a way many -most- of these movies are not.

 Acting-wise, the kids actually do relatively well - they over-emote, but hey, child actors. As for everyone else... holy shit are they bad.
 Kenny can't even walk convincingly, his every action so mannered I honestly wondered if his character is supposed to have some sort of mental problem. The grandparent's acting is broad and hammy as hell, like something out of a pantomime. As for the mysterious woman, the faces she pulls are something to behold, for sure; I've seen Stevens elsewhere, and while she's never struck me as a good actress, well, she could only improve after this.
 Even minor characters are memorably bad - the family friends that pop over? The patriarch is introduced waving a huge barbeque sausage, screaming "What does this remind you of?" It's like the characters all came out from the "I'd buy that for a dollar!" show in Robocop.

 Director Peter Rader makes some weird choices, but the filmmaking is actually all right. There's some good scenes here, a couple that even manage a measure of suspense. Niko Mastorakis produces, and his trashy sensibilities show through a little bit, I think.
 The music is all cheesy synths and clean guitars (regular Mastorakis collaborator David Zimmer wisely chose to stay the hell away.) I have no idea if it was done to save on costs or if there was some sort of problem, but all the lines of dialog are dubbed in, and it gives this Z- grade movie an even lower-rent feel.

 Despite the film being rated R (justifiably so), most of the movie plays like a shitty thriller aimed squarely at kids. It hews to David's point of view pretty closely, and a lot of the tropes are of a piece with other kid's movies of the time. It even maintains bloodshed to a minimum - this would easily pass as PG-13 if it wasn't for the adult situations and that crazy-ass ending. Everything feels miscalculated, and the film's... unique storytelling style makes it fairly unpredictable. Part of its natty charm.

 It's got all sorts of cool little things interspersed within the crap; The bit where David goes off with his dipshit friend feels pretty naturalistic and well observed, it captures 80's fashion in that unsanitized, unglamorous way only z-movies seem to manage, and some of the production design is pretty good, too - I liked the house's backyard, full of monolith-like rusted engine parts. And that title sequence!

That moon rises as the credits go on. Classy!

 Most of all, it shares that drive to entertain, that gleeful B-movie energy that Mastorakis's films have. I can't say it succeeds on its own terms, but it absolutely succeeds on mine.

The Boogeyman

 Serious representations of grief have been a trend in horror movies for a while now, to the point where it's kind of become a joke. The Boogeyman is a very, very dumb film, but it does one clever thing: Its titular monster is attracted to grief-stricken victims. That way it can have its cake and eat it; It is (or at least tries to be) a serious meditation on bereavement, and it's also a creature feature with an actual, pretty cool monster that's emphatically not a metaphor.

 This is made pretty clear in a pretty ruthless prelude where the monster sneaks into a very young kid's room and kills her. The scene is pretty stylish: floating dots resolve into points of light shed by one of those rotating night light things and the camera roams the room, making what's happening clear while keeping the monster obscured. The whole thing oozes atmosphere and the monster gets a cool conceptual touch as it mimics the voice of the girl's father. Poorly, as if it didn't understand the words it's uttering. A good way to kick off a movie.

 Once that and the title credits are out of the way we're introduced to the Harpers: Sadie (Sophie Thatcher, the troubled teen) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair, the youngest one) and Will (Chris Messina, the dad). They've recently lost their mother/wife and are clearly struggling with the loss; their exchanges are so poorly written and blunt that it's kind of funny. That's unfortunately a running theme in the movie.

 Will runs his psychological practice off a room in the house, and one eventful day a guy called Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) pops up without a booking and starts talking about how a monster started stalking his kids after the youngest died of natural causes, and how the monster ended up killing them and he should have believed them and now everyone thinks he killed them and his life is ruined  and etc. etc. Will, understandably concerned, stalls for time and tries to get the police in, but while he makes the call Lester goes and hangs himself in a closet.

 From there Sawyer, the youngest, starts getting harassed by the monster, who's been transmitted from the Billings to the Harper family through their grief (how very J-Horror of it). Sadie at first doesn't believe her, but soon enough she has a couple of run-ins of her own with The Boogeyman, and starts doing some investigation of the Billings family, tries to come up with plans to kill it, and so on.

 The script, by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman, is, and there's no other way to put this, extremely fucking dumb. The dialog is laughable, there are a ton of plot holes and little stupid details, and its message manages to be both muddled and trite. But - but! it's filled with pretty imaginative sequences that allow director Rob Savage to deliver some pretty great monster stalks and attacks. Some of these are enabled by the script's stupidity, like a bit where the monster comes into a candle-filled room, blowing them out as it goes. Seriously, candles... but they look good, so there they are.

 And it is a good looking, well-made movie in all respects save for the writing. The actors are pretty great, giving good readings of mostly terrible lines, and somehow maintaining a sombre tone even as it's undercut by, oh, I don't know, the psychologist father avoiding talking about trauma by doing the conversational equivalent of running away blocking his ears and singing at the top of his voice. God, it's stupid.

 And no, you can't blame this on the Stephen King short story this is based on. It's been a very, very long time since I read it, but it's just a slip of a tale- basically, Will's session with Lester, less than five percent of the runtime of the movie. The rest is all on the good folk wot writed this.

 Anyhow. The monster effects are good - CGI, but it suits with the spindly, weird-looking bugger. Its appearance is kept vague for a good chunk of the movie, and while it doesn't really change over the film, there's a good trick where we get to find out what its weird-looking teeth actually are late in the movie.

 It does try to do CGI fire in a couple of scenes, which... well, that's usually a mistake; It looks terrible.
 
 It's a very teen-friendly, rabidly PG-13 movie, so blood is kept to a minimum. A couple of the scenes feel a little too tame as a result, but honestly I found it mostly well-judged; This movie doesn't really need gore.

 The cinematography (DP: Eli Born, who did last year's Hellraiser) is excellent, with great use of darkness, sinuous camera movements and ambiance by the bucketful.

 Oh, and points for including a surprising amount of footage from the excellent (and beautiful-looking) game The Pathless in the background on one scene.

 As I grow older I find myself being a lot more forgiving of dumb movies, especially when they've got fun scenes like this one. But The Boogeyman is brought down by a kind of narrative uncanny valley where it looks and sounds like a serious, thoughtful movie, so when you actually pay attention and see how poorly it's written it becomes harder to forgive. That, and a kind of generic, modern horror vibe manage to undo a lot of the goodwill it would have gotten if it wasn't trying and failing so hard at saying something that could be construed as profound.

Hellblazers

 It's an old, old trick in the world of Video on Demand to cast well known actors on small roles to give a film a visibility boost. Hellblazers does it specifically to attract genre nerds: Meg Foster! Tony Todd! Adrienne Barbeau! Bruce Dern! Billy Zane! John Kassir!
 It also does that time-honored mockbuster thing of naming the movie after something famous (in this case a long-running horror comic previously adapted as Constantine and a TV show) in the hopes someone will be fooled/piqued by it.

 That cast, though, coupled with a deceptively decent-ish trailer, suckered me into watching what ends up being the worst kind of bad movie: a low-effort mediocrity.

 After a terrible-looking, long-ass credit sequence (gotta fill up that run-time!) there's a promising prologue with Billy Zane as a cult leader, obviously having a lot of fun (when his underlings hesitate to throw a sacrifice into a pit to hell, he prods them by saying "Steve didn't dig a hole to hell for nothing, put him in there!"; That's unfortunately the last good joke in the movie, by the way.) The cult's efforts manage to raise a (pretty good looking!) demon.

 Unbeknownst to them their ritual is observed by Bruce Dern. A character played by Bruce Dern, not Bruce Dern himself - that would be a far more interesting/funnier movie.

 The movie is set in a tiny burg in rural California in the eighties - I guess it's meant to tie into the era's satanic panic, but that goes pretty much uncommented on. The ostensible protagonist, Joe (Ed Morrone), is a New York cop who's recently for unspecified reasons moved out and become the sheriff of this podunk town. 

 He and his acting-impaired deputies soon get a visit from Bruce Dern, who proceeds to chew the scenery as he recounts the whole damn prologue, at length. Good as he is, his scenes are so obviously there to extend the running time it's not even funny. Joe goes out to investigate Bruce's claims and pretty much vacates the movie until the very end, leaving his deputy Teddy (the awesomely named Crash Buist) in charge; from here the movie gets a bit more episodic as we're introduced to several of the soon-to-be-demonically-besieged town residents.

 As the day goes on there are a couple of supposedly creepy incidents - a couple necking in the middle of nowhere get eaten by the demon in a hilariously inept scene, and a few robed, hooded cultists stand in the background menacingly looking at people like a really bad remake of The Void.

 When night falls the cultists finally attack, and the movie turns into a low-rent, low-energy action movie; Though they act in pairs at most, the cultist numbers are seemingly endless, giving the proceeds the feel of a video game. Until, finally, they're all gone, the sheriff returns and in a hilariously unclimactic confrontation deals with the summoned demon.

 There's no pacing, no tone, and no rhythm to anything; The antagonists have no agenda, no discernible plan other than to be a kind of ineffectual physical menace. The script is fucking awful, full of boring banter and squabbling that's there to only inflate the running time, people reacting to things in extremely stupid ways, senseless 'heroic' self-sacrifices; It seeds a chainsaw only for it to be used in the most underwhelming way possible, has the most hilarious bit of inept policing I've seen in a while... I could go on and on.

 The acting is as variable as you'd expect. The vets anchor the movie and provide some very badly needed quality - Todd, Foster and Barbeau are all great in their clichéd roles; The film repays this by unceremoniously killing them off or, in Barbeau's case, completely forgetting her character in the finale. At least Tony Todd gets a fight scene in.

 Bruce Dern is given too much latitude with an extremely broad character, and Zane is barely there; Both of them seem to belong to a completely different movie. As for the young people... I kind of liked Morrone's deadpan turn as the sheriff, but that's it. It's an uncharismatic bunch, with a big "look, I'm acting!" energy about them; It's not like they could do much with the lines they're given anyways.

 
 The action is, to be positive and mildly heretical about it, about as OK as the brawls and shootings on most of its inspirations - with the huge, huge difference that no self-respecting eighties action B-movie is going to skimp on squibs and blood splatters the way this one does. It's also completely devoid of character or coolness or elaborate set pieces; Literally Bloodless, as well as metaphorically.

 At least writer/director Justin Lee makes it look like a real movie. It's mostly competently shot, which I guess counts for something.

 Hellblazers is a Tubi original, which would have kept me away from it as I've heard (and now confirmed) bad things about them, but here in Britain it's not marketed that way at all.
 Distributors High Fliers films, a UK company that according to themselves "...capitalize on the potential of producing their own low risk commercially viable feature films...", were on my radar thanks to the surprisingly classy and enjoyable The World we Knew and because their products have now flooded my streaming recommendations list. Going to be a lot warier with them from now on.

 Either due to limitations, not giving a shit, a lack of talent or a combination of some or all of the above, Hellblazers completely misses just about everything that makes this sort of movie work.
 #Content for the #Content gods and a payday for some beloved actors, a fucking waste of time for the rest of us.

Strays

 Strays is the sort of film that's kind of immune to criticism - a gleefully dumb, very R-rated comedy about four talking dogs on a quest to bite someone's dick off. Unless they completely fuck up the jokes, you pretty much know if you're going to like it going in, don't you?
 So... they mostly  don't fuck up the jokes. There's some funny stuff, some weirdness, and a lot of cute dogs. And There's a bunch of good gags that weren't on the trailer. There you go, make of that what you will

.

 Will Ferrell plays Reggie, a very cute, terminally optimistic Border Terrier with a dipshit owner (Will Forte) who hates his guts. Reggie is blind to just how badly he's being mistreated until his owner abandons him in the middle of the city.

 There he's taken in by Bug (Jamie Foxx), a no-bullshit Boston Terrier that introduces him to the stray lifestyle and his two friends Maggie (Isla Fisher with her native accent because she's playing an Australian Sheperd) and Hunter (Randall Park), an overtly genial cone-wearing Great Dane.

 Horrified when Reggie tells them about the 'good times' he's had with his owner, the other dogs help Reggie realize that he's in a toxic relationship. Pissed off, he vows to go back home and bite his owner's dick off. The others, partly because they're drunk (from drinking bin juice outside a pub) encourage him and decide to tag along.

 The problem: Reggie's house is out in the boondocks, and all he's got is a few landmarks to go by. But he's nothing if not optimistic, so off they all go. The trip includes a psychedelic freakout, a run-in with police dogs on the hunt for a missing girl, and a bunch of other misadventures. Also: lots of jokes about humping, shitting, pissing, and Hunter's enormous dick; it's as profane as they could make it, which is fine because decent amount of jokes land.
 There's also a lot of simple, observational dog humor. This ranges from them talking about sex positions (there's only one: normal style), staging a fireworks scene as if it was the end of the world, chats about how much they hate mailmen, and some funny business about spinning around before going to sleep. It's been done a thousand times before (particularly that hoary mailman thing - that dates at least from the fifties), but the voice cast is very game, the writing is decent and the dogs are lovely.

 Writer Dan Perrault (with, I'm guessing, an ad-libbing assist from the crew? There are some very Ferrell lines in this, though he didn't get a credit) does allow the script to go off on some bizarre, funny tangents - my favorite has got to be a Labrador Retriever (Josh Gad) who constantly narrates the events of his owner's life in a folksy drawl while gentle music plays in the background. These people know their dog movies. Unfortunately most of the script isn't as inspired as that, but there are a few other good, goofy non-sequiturs in that vein there.

 Not everything works. The film takes real canine footage and digitally adds in the lip sync, which is a problem when the dialog is shot like human dialog - you've got a mostly still dog whose lips are moving in an unnatural way; it doesn't look great. The film seems to recognize this and tries to make its scenes more dynamic (and the dogs, and their trainers, do a great job of it) but not nearly enough. The directing (by Josh Greenbaum) is, as in most comedies these days, unobtrusive and fairly personality-free.

 Not all of the jokes work, but that's to be expected. Also to be expected, but always disappointing, is that there are some rote life lessons that aren't quite subverted - your typical case of modern comedies wanting to have their cake and eat it. But that's ok. The film remains likeable, its heart is in the right place, and just look at all those very good boys and girls!

The Hallow

 This is a well-made but very goofy Irish horror movie from 2015 that I'd had in my radar for a while because, well, killer faeries. It doesn't quite deliver on that - or rather, it does, but it gives a 'scientific' explanation to rationalize faeries that somehow involves Cordyceps.

 The Hitchens family - Adam (Joseph Mawle), Clare (Bojana Novakovic), their baby Finn (Wren Hardy) and their dog Iggy (Toddy) have moved to the backwoods of Ireland for work: Adam's been contracted by a logging company to... do something that's never really explained, but it seems to involve scientific prep work to help a logging company cut down some ancient woods.

 The locals don't take kindly to his presence, but it's not because he's working for corporations that are exploiting the forests for foreigners - the closest neighbour, Colm (Michael McElhatton), is leaning on them pretty heavily to go away because the woods belong to the hallow - mythical woodland beasties like Banshees or Leprechauns. It's an effective use of outsiders vs. locals social tension, but it never really goes anywhere, especially because it's pretty clear that the residents are never going to be the true menace. Just a bit of empty bluster, and a red herring.
 We're aware that there are monsters in the background, but Adam remains resolutely unconvinced there's anything odd going on, even when black rot chokes out the engine of his car.

 Luckily it's not too long - maybe halfway through - before the faeries hallow come out into the open and lay siege to the Hitchens family home. It's too silly to be scary, and the characters make so many bad decisions that it's hard to root for them; But on the plus side, it's very, very atmospheric, the monsters are good (think zombie Groots), there a couple of pretty out-there visuals and director Corin Hardy keeps things lively.
 It's not a good movie, but it's got plenty of things going for it. 

 The effects are all pretty good - it's not a very gory movie, but there's at least one wince-inducing bit of nastiness and some really neat imagery. The cinematography (by Martijn van Broekjuizen) is outstanding, providing a lot of cool-looking variations on people doing stuff in the dark. All the actors do well by the parts they're given.
 The issue here is the script (by director Corin Hardy and Felipe Marino). The cordyceps angle was not very original even when it came out (The Last of Us had come out two years prior), and to be honest, the way it's used is just as silly as if they had gone with goblins or scary undead faeries. It also tips its hand early by showing some images on a book that predict how things will go later, fails to make the characters compelling and makes them behave like complete idiots several times...
 None of these are necessarily fatal mistakes, but there are enough problems that that they took me out of the movie. It's a shame because the script does do a few things right and hits upon a few cool images and ideas. Oh well.

Elemental

 Elemental is a cute Pixar love story that (once again) functions as commentary on the immigrant experience. In this case, it's got Aristotelian elements as stand-ins for ethnicities/cultures. So you've got people made of fire, people made of water, etc.

 The water, air (they look like clouds, which is cheating!) and earth people live together in seeming harmony in a huge, utopic metropolis called Element City. The fire people are much rarer; Their culture is a mix between a bunch of eastern cultures - there's a lot of the Chinese and Indian, a little Polynesian, a little Arabic maybe; That it's rooted in fantasy makes it lose specificity, but I guess more people in the foreign markets will identify with it. It's a shame they didn't dare come up with something a bit more alien or more original; I don't think what's here is cynical, but I don't think it works all that well, either.

 In any case, a couple from fire land come to town and, after running into some systemic discrimination (some well-intentioned, some not) they set up shop (literally; they build a shop) on a derelict part of town and become the seed (or kindling) of a thriving fire community.

 Ember (Leah Lewis), our protagonist, is set to inherit the store from her hard-working dad (Ronnie del Carmen). The only thing holding her back is her temper, which is literally explosive whenever she gets too stressed out. This gets her in trouble when a complicated chain of events leads to the basement of the store getting flooded, and with her getting mixed up with Wally (Mamoudou Athie), an... overtly emotional water-dude inspector from City Hall.

 Together they try to find out why there's water being routed to the fire neighbourhood. They learn about each other, they fall in love, they have a fight, etc. etc.

 It's a cute movie, and it can be very very funny when it wants to. It also does get a bit more sophisticated in the exploration of its themes than you'd expect: it touches on the obvious stuff, sure, but one of the main drives of the plot is the second-generation immigrant's guilt- the debt they feel to their parents for having sacrificed so much so they could have a better life. It's well handled, even if the answers it finds are pat. It's a kid's movie, after all.
 And there's a scene where Ember and her dad are denied entry somewhere that I thought was pretty devastating.

 Technically, it's a marvel: The city is as well realized as any Pixar metropolis, and there's more than a few beautiful scenes peppered throughout the film. All the actors (the most famous, at least to me, would be Catherine O'Hara in a minor role) do a great job, the character designs are cute and very distinctive, and there's a lot of imagination and humor on display everywhere.

 Overall, I did find it a bit underwhelming though. Maybe we're close to taking Pixar for granted, maybe I've been spoiled by all the years they put out classics pretty much back-to-back. But the script this time felt off. It's mostly fine moment-to-moment, but there were a few too-tidy resolutions, and the way it deploys a couple of deus ex machinas really put me out.

 I also had many, many problems with the 'rules' of the world. People make fun of Cars for having a world that doesn't make sense, but I don't really have a problem with it (despite disliking the films); the world is silly, but consistent. Thinking about why they have steering wheels and passenger doors is fun, but it's also kind of a dumb thing to criticize; it's part of the buy-in.

 Not so here. The rules don't make sense, which... in a world that includes sentient farts, I can roll with. But they're also very inconsistent. Why can ember handle some flammable substances but then can't seem to be able to avoid burning others? Why does Wade melt (evaporate?) sometimes but seems fine on other similar situations? The movie seems to be making everything up as it goes along without real consistency, which is a problem when these issues become plot points in the narrative. And that makes the drama feel arbitrary and at least on one instance, manipulative.

 Nothing fatal to my enjoyment of the movie. I'd consider this 'minor' Pixar... which, as usual, is still a good time.

Europa Report

 At some point in the near future, a company sends out six people on a manned mission to one of Jupiter's moons to look for life under its thick icy crust. Six months, less than a third of the way to their destination, there's a huge solar storm, and comms are lost completely.
 Some time later, the Europa corporation puts together and releases the Europa Report, a documentary about the fate of the expedition. And that's what we're watching.

 This is a film that strongly commits to its bit, and it nails the tone, music, visuals, and the format (talking heads, split screens, aspect ratio changes) down to the smallest detail. Coupled with a hard sci-fi edge and a mostly unsentimental approach to its story, it all makes for pretty compelling viewing; unfortunately it relies on a puzzle box structure to cover up that not a lot happens during the movie. There are a lot of incidents, but the plot itself is a bit too simple and ultimately a little unsatisfying.

 Being cobbled together from camera footage from all around the ship and inside the crew's helmets, it fully qualifies as found footage movie. One of the least contrived ones I've seen; All the cameras make sense in-universe, not a single asshat waving a camcorder to be seen.
 The editing jumbles up the timeline to give a little more drama to the proceeds, which is OK because the story itself is pretty straightforward and consciously unmelodramatic - don't expect anyone to, I dunno, start worshipping the sun and killing off crewmates. Everything is kept low-key and people remain reasonable to the end. Literally.

 Yes, it's clear from the beginning that things do not go well; the script (by Philip Gelatt) pulls some tricks to make it hard to gauge exactly how not well, but it's clear that at least a few people won't make it back. First with the permanent loss of communications, then an accidental death that leaves the team understandably shook and demoralized (the details are left until late in the movie) and finally with a series of technical issues once they finally reach their destination and everyone takes a lander down to the frigid moon's surface.

 Once there they run into some anomalies which lead to the film's more out-there element. It's well handled and kept pretty mysterious.

 The crew consists of the captain (Daniel Wu), the pilot (Anamaria Marinca), a techie (Michael Nyqvist) and a few science people (Christian Camargo, Karolina Wydra and Sharlto Copley; remember when he was in every other movie?). They're not particularly detailed, but they're all likeable people played by pros. And the script and the actors work together to give them a lot of implied history with just a few details - a phrase in Russian, a knowing stare...
 As mentioned throughout, all the technical aspects are excellent; the cinematography (by Enrique Chediak) and environmental designs are excellent, and it's expertly directed by Ecuadorian Sebastián Cordero. It's a shame the movie never coalesces and feels a little hollow, a bit less than the sum of its parts. But most of those parts are so good, dammit.

 *: While I'm here, I should also point out that there was a plot hole near the end that brought the movie down a peg or two for me - namely that [SPOILERS!] they fixed the comms by cannibalizing life support on the lander? In ten minutes? Why didn't they do that earlier? Less of a problem, but still funny, is that the person who first bites it is the one who talks all the time about his family. Might as well have called him Dead Meat.

Samurai Fiction (SF: Episode One)

  Samurai Fiction is a cool Japanese oddity that straddles the lines between being a homage, a piss take, and a deconstruction of classic samurai films. It works mostly because it plays its plot relatively straight and only adds goofy shit afterwards, and excels because it's got a great sense of fun and one seriously cool, badass villain.

 Well, "villain" is probably more apt - Kazamatsuri (Tomoyasu Hotei) is more of an antihero, a ronin who impresses a local clan leader when he helps a serf couple get revenge on some bandits. For this and his fighting skills, he's granted custodianship over the clan treasure, a sword given to the family by the Shogun.
 Kazamatsuri is admiring the sword in his quarters when an overzealous/jealous clan officer bursts in and accuses him of trying to steal the sword and attacks. Kazamatsuri, who's not the type to suffer fools lightly, kills him and elopes with the treasure.

 Inukai (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), the clan leader's son takes it upon himself to retrieve the sword and kill the thief. But when he catches up to Kazamatsuri, he's easily beaten and one of his friends is cut down. He survives thanks to an intercession from Hanbei (Morio Kazama), a local healer who pacifies the ronin and takes the wounded noble back home with his daughter (Mari Natsuki).
 Kazamatsuri then heads over to a nearby town and shacks up with the owner of the local gambling den. Meanwhile, Hanbei and his daughter try to disuade a healing Inukai from going after the ronin again. There's some added complications with a bunch of clan ninjas and the relationship between the ronin and the criminals that run the town, but other than that the plot is relatively... maybe not straightforward, but simple.

 It is a little unconventional, though, in the sense that Inukai - whom the movie treats as its protagonist with a straight face, even giving him narrator duties - is kind of ridiculous, a conceited noble dipshit who needs to be reined back and appeased before he gets himself killed. It falls to Hanbei, who's  a pacifist, to try and resolve the Kazamatsuri situation and try to recover the heirloom.

 It's a very playful film. Shot almost completely in black and white with flashes of colour, it features a great soundtrack from Hotei which starts out with the traditional Taiko drums, but soon switches to different styles of old-school rock.
 There are also a lot of comedy elements. Some of them pretty funny, a lot of them very, very broad, but most of it is character-based and all the silly stuff never threatens to derail the plot. I really enjoyed the film's tone, which is good-natured and likeable to a fault.

 Director Hiroyuki Nakatano started out as a music video director, so he manages to squeeze a fair bit of style in. The frequent fights are well choreographed with an eye towards them looking good rather than realistic and are a lot of fun. As for the acting... well, it's of the more... exaggerated school of Japanese acting. Thankfully the two main characters of the movie are fine; Hanbei is very relatable as a man put in a complicated situation, trying to find a peaceful resolution, and Kazamatsuri... well, Hotei (whom I thought kind of looks like Adam Driver) is an actual rock star, and he brings all of his charisma to bear on the role. The film in turn recognizes this and gives him a lot of screentime and great lines.

 So yeah, I liked this one a lot. I'm not that familiar with Samurai movies (just the classics) so I'm sure there's tons of references I missed. Still found it very enjoyable; thanks Eff for the recommendation.

Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell (Jigoku no Chimidoro Muscle Builder)

  'Lovely' may be a strange way to describe a movie where faces are shot in half, bodies chopped to pieces, and a head is squashed like a grapefruit - but Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell is such a pure, enthusiastic bit of Evil Dead fan-art that it's hard not to fall for its daft charms.  Writer/Director/Protagonist/Cameraman/Special Effects Artist/Probably-Caterer Shinichi Fukazawa sunk more than fifteen years of his life to get the movie made; It's a wonder it got finished at all, and I'm very glad it did- the end result is entertaining as all hell. Sometimes inept, always at least a little cheesy and silly, but I can't be down on something as inventive as this, or as eager to please.

 The first part is not very promising, especially a prologue where a woman tries to kill her boyfriend for sleeping around and gets murdered instead. The guy uses a shovel and an axe to hide her body under the floorboards of his tiny flat; In a nice touch, both tools will make a return appearance. Other than that the whole prologue is kind of laughable, and not really in a good way.

 Cut to thirty years later. Shinji (Shinichi Fukazawa), the titular body builder (the bloody muscles and hell part comes later) is contacted by Mika (Asako Nosaka), an old flame who writes articles about hauntings and such. She's after a picture of a creepy house owned by Shinji's late father; soon after she contacts him for access to the place, and asks him to give her and her psychic friend (Masaaki Kai) a tour.

 Once they arrive the psychic gets clocked (literally!) and rendered unconscious. You'd think all the hair lotion he's got on would cushion his head from the blow, but no. Soon after - twenty minutes in, almost a third of the movie's barely-over-an-hour runtime, things finally pick up as he finds a knife and gets possessed by the crazy lover from the introduction. Then it's on; It's all mayhem from here on out.

 Mika and Shinji get trapped in the house with the murderous possessed psychic. They fight back - successfully! - with knives and the established axe and shovel. An early eye-popping stabbing had me laughing out loud, and there's a bit with Shinji chopping up a body off-frame, severed limbs flying up into the shot whenever he takes a swing.

 It's a deeply, deeply silly film, with some honest-to-god funny gags and a lot of self-conscious nods to Sam Raimi. It's also relentless in its invention, with severed limbs reattaching themselves into crazy configurations and flesh melting and taking improbable forms via the arcane arts of claymation. Buckets of blood are spilled, an amulet animates itself and digs into someone's lacrimal duct, and the protagonist has the epiphany that his muscles are the secret weapon and hulks out. Hell yeah I'm in.

 Shot completely in super-8 with amateur actors, a non-existent budget and (save for a couple scenes) a complete disregard for cinematography, it's... not a great looking movie. Especially when the transfer on Shudder seems to add digital noise (this may actually be a result of all the digital corrections the director had to pay for to even out tons of reshoots that looked wildly different). There's also animated stills with some crude animation overlaid which I'm guessing were needed to tie the film together in editing when footage wasn't available; it looks jarring, but it also gives the film a jolt of Gilliam-esque weirdness. All the effects are home-made and it shows... and honestly that's part of the allure here.

 It's an excellent example of the let's put on a show spirit, and a grand example of someone making the exact movie he'd like to see; I've seen enough sub-indie regional productions and amateur films to know this sort of thing seldom works out as well as this, so- well done!

Point Blank (À Bout Portant)

 I love me a prelude that doesn't fuck around, and French action/thriller Point Blank's got a damn good one where a wounded man (Roschdy Zem) getts chased by two goons. It's ridiculously loud and energetic; doors get kicked, people slam into walls, and the whole thing ends with a surprise bit of violence that made me laugh out loud with joy.

 Once that madness is done, we get to spend a little time with the movie's actual protagonist - Samuel (Gilles Lellouche), an everyman spending some quality time at home with his very, very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya). He works as a nurse's aide over at a local hospital, and one of the patients most recently put into his care is - oh shit, the guy that was being chased in the introduction! On his next shift he notices one of the goons who were after patient x is back at it, trying to asphyxiate his quarry disguised as a doctor. Samuel chases him away.

 When Sam gets back home he starts humbly bragging about his good deed... and then gets knocked out as his wife is kidnapped.

 When he comes to, he gets a phone call: the bad guys have his wife, and will kill her unless he gets patient x out of the hospital. And instead of calling the police, that's what he does: first he has to outwit the police protection guarding the patient, then he shoots the patient full of adrenaline and manages to extract him successfully. But when Hugo (the patient) tries to go his own way once set free, Samuel pulls the gun he stole from the police guard and forces him to take him to his wife.

 From there, besides having to keep an eye on Hugo, Samuel needs to avoid the police, the goons from the beginning... and a third faction of led by a shady policeman (Gérard Lanvin, very effective) whom the movie does a very poor job disguising might be involved somehow.

 None of the characters have a lot of depth -the script is too lean to spend time developing anyone- but the mains are very likeable, and I really enjoyed how Samuel remains opposed to violence even as his ethics seem pretty malleable. Hugo is cool as hell, too, and the way his character's role in the movie keeps morphing as the backstory comes to light is really well done.
 The pacing is relentless; there's a lot of excellent stunts and action (including a few brilliant and very tense foot chases; Director Fred Cavayé really outdoes himself there), the plot twists and revelations come quick and steady, and there's not an ounce of flab in sight. Things do end up making sense... mostly. Many of the developments stretch credulity, but that's ok: It's all exactly the right kind of ridiculous.

She Never Died

  It's tough, being a cannibal immortal. That was already the case for Jack (Henry Rollins) in 2015's He Never Died, and it's still true in 2019 for Lacey (Olunike Adeliyi).
 The Experience has warped them in pretty different ways, though; Both are what you'd call antisocial, but while Jack lived as a recluse and ethically drank blood smuggled out of hospitals, Lacey has gone almost feral, is homeless, and freely murders/eats people as long as they're assholes.

 Not so much a sequel as a superficially similar story set in the same world but with another set of characters, you don't really have to know anything about the first movie to enjoy the sequel - but I'd still recommend watching both, because they're both really good.

 The plot's not that complex, but it's got a lot going on. A police detective (Peter McNeill) is monitoring the site of a suspected human trafficking ring group when Lacey just breaks in and kills a guy (who, to be honest, has it coming, playing Russian roulette against a dog for a live stream). During the altercation Lacey gets shot in the head, which doesn't even phase her, and she cuts off various chunks of the guy after gruesomely putting him down.
 The detective follows her to a nearby café, and in a very funny exchange, finds her to be surprisingly straightforward in her answers: Yes, she did cut off the guy's fingers, she was planning to snack on them; they're easy to carry, and have a lot of marrow.
 He takes it in stride, and ends up giving her a dossier on another douchebag, one he wants dead; in exchange, he offers Lacey his old apartment, complete with a fridge for her to store the severed body parts so she can nibble on them at leisure.

 The whole deal with the detective does end up making sense later, but for a while there the whole thing really sounds off. Good job MacNeill for making that work as well as it does.

 Meanwhile, the siblings who run the trafficking ring / snuff studio (Michelle Nolden and Noah Dalton Danby) become obsessed with obtaining Lacey. You'd think she'd be a goldmine for snuff filmmakers, right? She's basically a renewable resource; But no, they intend to sell her off to the highest bidder, since she's become a bit of a star on the ol' dark-webs. Seems like a waste.

 The movie is filled with fun/cool characters, but these two villains are by far the funniest; two young go-getters who deadpan great, ridiculous lines at a clip, like alternating between fussing over each other's health and then talking about torture and murder in the most frivolous way possible.

 There are some complications - Lacey gets saddled with a young adult (Kiana Madeira) who takes an interest in her situation and follows her around - but overall you can probably guess where things are headed. It's well put together, and the script (written by Jason Krawczyk) excels in adding weirdo details and humorous but completely deadpan asides. It's not quite as much of a comedy as He Never Died, but it's still a pretty damn funny movie.

 It's got a lot of fun gore, a couple of good fights and stunts (for a horror movie) and it pulls off a couple of fun gags just with editing. Director Audrey Cummings does a great job of keeping things engaging. She's helped by the cast - I wasn't a fan of the surrogate daughter character, who gets a surprising amount of screen time, but other than that they all make for good company. Otunike Adellyl does a particularly great job with the titular She - Lacey is a great creation, alternately savage, vulnerable, brutally honest and tortured, so it can't have been easy to pull it all off half as well as she did, and make her this fucking cool in the process.

 As on the first movie, things get a little biblical, and by the end the stage is set for an apocalyptic end to the trilogy. I hope they get to make it.

Lighthouse

  While reading up on 1944's Dead of night, I discovered there's at least two other movies with the title. One is Bob Clark's excellent Deathdream, the other one is a 1999 British indie horror movie better known as Lighthouse which various people seem to defend online. The trailers looked terrible and it didn't get good reviews, but it's got to have something interesting for it to become borderline culty, right?

 Well... no. It's a derivative, clumsy, and pretty dumb piece of crap. But then again, it does get memorably bad at points. Maybe that's what people like about it.

 The black and white prologue introduces us to Dr. Kirsty McCloud (Rachel Shelley), overacting her heart out with all the solemnity of a B-movie actor playing a Very Serious Role, while the camera dramatically zooms into her face with a whoosh and cuts to her typing, news clipping, and footage of bloody crime scenes. She's muttering some vague platitudes about evil as she writes a report about a dangerous serial killer entitled A MIND OF EVIL. LEO ROOK? Which, I have to say, made me laugh - Guess I'm easily amused.

 So that's the level of scriptwriting we're working with here. The filmmaking is kind of ambitious, including a dissolve from desk lamp to a lantern and a tracking shot as a police team examine one of Leo Rooks?'s (mind of) evil lair, but sadly it's full of visual clichés and tacky shots. Not poorly made, exactly, but it's also pretty far from actually good. TV movie level craftsmanship, though it at least shows some ambition.

 So we know we're in trouble before the credits even come on. The story concerns a police transport boat running a few criminals over to wherever. The cargo includes, of course, the mind of evil himself, Leo Rook? (Christopher Adamson), who soon breaks free and steals a boat. He reaches the nearby Gehenna Island (appropriately named; it's about as hospitable as LV-426), kills off all the lighthouse keepers, and breaks the lighthouse light just in time so that the boat he escaped from crashes into the coastline.
 If you're thinking "wait a minute, how could the timing for that possibly work out?", well... that's not the last time the script fucks up. Not even close.

 The shipwreck survivors, which include Dr. McCloud, a few cops, and a few criminals, band together and start getting hunted by Leo Rook?. It's not a bad slasher movie setup! But unfortunately, this is not a good slasher movie.
 Its main crime is badly mishandling the amount of suspense buildup any given scene needs, resulting in way scenes of the killer shambling, zombie-like, towards a victim that last for way too long, or letting people argue for a hilarious amount of time, so they don't hear someone banging at the door to be let in before he's murdered. Any accumulated tension quickly turns into unwitting comedy.
 There's a worthwhile scene in a bathroom which sets up a few moving pieces and then knocks them down, domino-like. It's really really dumb, but at least there's a sense that it's meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek. The same goes for the finale, which goes above and beyond in the amount of death dealt to Leo Rook? - a parody of 80's action movie villain deaths.
 I shouldn't forget to mention a "creepy" dream sequence that had me in stitches. It's... well, it's fucking terrible, and as nineties as it possibly could be.

 But there's not nearly enough good/bad stuff like that to sustain an hour and a half. It's... basically, it's about on-level with the average direct-to-video release of the time, which means it's kind of fucking dire, even as its general technical competence and some flourishes make me want to rate it a bit higher. Then I remember all the dumb shit you need to wade through, all the mediocrity, how generic it feels, and any goodwill drains away.

 The acting is pretty bad, though given the material, I wouldn't blame any of the actors. It's got an early role for James Purefoy playing a generic heroic hunky inmate, and I especially liked Paul Brooke as a melancholy old drunkard. His easy camaraderie with Dr. McCloud was much better than the chemistry between the two principals.
 The visual effects are... well, they're OK for the budget level and time it was made, but they still look pretty bad. The all-practical gore fares a little bit better, but it's mostly arterial spurts, and there's only so much you can do with those. Given the film's originality quotient, you bet some blood's going to get splashed on a bare lightbulb at one point, bathing a room in red light.

 The photography is ok - it manages some atmosphere at times, though the illumination for the scenes is highly variable from shot to shot. I'm much less enthused by cinematography, which is full of Dutch angles and lousy-looking slow motion; It feels like everyone involved was very enthusiastic, but unfortunately, it hews to then-current trends and the execution remains pretty bad. Entertainingly bad, sometimes, but still bad. 

 Director Simon Hunter would later go on to direct Mutant Chronicles, a green screen/CGI fest that nonetheless managed to be a lot more fun than this. It was similarly derivative, but if I'm not misremembering, it wedded war movie clichés to an obscure, Warhammer 40k-ish RPG sci-fi setting and it let Ron Perlman and Tom Jane run amok.
 It's an easy recommendation over this one; Lighthouse is a movie that honestly deserves its relative obscurity.

Spirits of the Air - Gremlins of the Clouds

   1988's Spirits of the Air - Gremlins of the Clouds (what a title!) puts its best foot forward. As its credits roll, they're intercut with footage of a man clad in black advancing through the desert, walking by some pretty stunning bits of near-surrealist wreckage: Oversized crooked utility poles, a car graveyard where the cars are the headstones, a ridiculously complex set of wooden rigging. When he arrives at a dusty farm, he scares a woman who was playing along to the beautiful title song on what looks like a mixture between a shamizen and a kokyu; he promptly collapses of exhaustion as the woman panics and goes to get her brother.
 It's one hell of an opening, as beautiful as anything I've seen in a while.

I could fill this thing with screenshots; it's a gorgeous movie.

 The hiker is Smith (Norman Boyd), a drifter running away from... let's call them bad guys - for unspecified reasons. It doesn't matter. The woman, Betty (Melissa Davis), is a religious nutjob who dons a new elaborate outfit, makeup and hairpiece for almost every scene, and her brother Felix (Michael Lake) is wheelchair-bound and flight-obsessed. Yep, it's going to be a weird one.

 Especially when you realize that the movie is, more than anything else, a willfully quirky psychodrama. Felix takes Smith in and nurses him back to health, much to his sister's chagrin (she's convinced he's the devil). Once the newcomer comes back to, Felix talks him into helping build his flying machines, luring him with the prospect of getting over the mountains that bar the way north. And so the household settles into a routine - Felix and Smith try to get their creations off the ground, while Betty seethes in the background, with the unspoken threat that her insanity might escalate beyond childish hissy fits and bizarre passive-aggressiveness into actual violence.

 It's a very, very weird movie, but if (and this is a very big if) you can get over its languid pacing and the sometimes very broad acting, there's a lot to like here.
 Not the least the production design. This was Alex Proyas's first movie, and the amount of detail and invention on the sets is really impressive. Every scene has been fussed over and has at least a couple of cool touches; "MTV video directors" was a charge levied at a lot of people a few decades ago who tried to inject some style into their movies (Proyas's fellow Aussie director Russell Mulcahy was a perennial target), and... well, yeah, this is a very 80's-MTV-video looking movie. It definitely tends to put style before substance.
 Most people have gotten over using that particular zinger to put down movies a long time ago, especially when the style is as good as it is here. The ridiculously elaborate sets and costumes combine with some great cinematography (DP: David Knaus), saturated colours and a couple instances of Proyas's penchant for unorthodox camera placement to great effect.

 The near lack of a plot is probably the biggest problem here. The script (written by Proyas) is not bad - the dialog is sometimes clunky but it mostly works, and the siblings at the heart of the story do eventually get a little depth; Enough to allow for some effective bits of pathos towards the end (some of it ably aided by the production design (Sean Callinan) - Felix's room is a good example) which I at least found pretty affecting.
 But, as far as actual plot... nothing much happens.

 I'd be lying if I said it didn't drag at points, but the film had me firmly under its spell for the duration after those amazing first few minutes. Australia is a pretty dependable source of genre oddities, and few of them are as odd, cool looking, or beguiling as this.

Dead of Night

 I'm only passingly familiar with the Ealing studios movies, and like most people I identify them with their comedies- so I was surprised to learn that Dead of Night, which predates Kind Hearts and Coronets by almost five years, was also put out by them.
 It's a movie that has a certain reputation with horror geeks, and I'm glad I finally got to it - it hasn't aged perfectly, but it's a fun, clever, well-written anthology film with the rare wraparound sequence that kicks as much ass as its individual stories.

 A few caveats: It's from 1945, so you have to adjust for the storytelling conventions of the time, and overlook some truly... expressive acting, especially (but not always) from the younger actors. There are also two versions going around - the 102 minute UK theatrical release, and a 77 minute US cut that, based on a quick comparison seems to cut out two of the stories completely.

 Fun fact: the film's plot structure caused Fred Hoyle to postulate the steady state model of the universe. How many horror flicks can brag about directly inspiring an important cosmological theory?

 The main story follows one Walter (Mervyn Johns) as he arrives at a rural home and is introduced to the group of people there. As introductions are made, Walter seems miles away, and soon explains that he's had recurring dreams of arriving at the house and meeting these people; he's able to provide details about some of his hosts, which he's never met before, and also predict a few events before they happen. His memories from the dream are very vague, but he does know that it turns into a nightmare by the end.

 His hosts are piqued, and in a fun turn of events, kind of delighted by this bizarre tale- they start testing his claims and throw out theories as to what's happening. The stodgy psychiatrist of the group (Frederick Valk) tries to explain it with science, to expose it as a delusion; The rest of them take turns sharing supernatural things that have happened to them.

 This is, as you might guess, where the anthology aspect of the movie kicks in, with each story its own little short. A racecar driver shares how a premonition saved his life, a teenager tells a spooky little ghost story, a woman brings up that one time a cursed mirror  almost drove her groom-to-be insane.

 The owner of the place then tries to lighten the mood with the tale of two golfers and a rivalry that would extend beyond death - a comedic tale that's notable for having Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne almost-but-not-quite reprising their very similar roles from The Lady Vanishes, and for being based off an H. G. Welles short story; other than that it's cute and mildly funny, but kind of boring, and it's understandable that the US version would cut this one. 

 And when the evidence that something is amiss piles up enough that even the psychologist can't deny something is definitely up, he commits a flagrant breach of patient confidentiality and shares his weirdest case - an excellent and really fun yarn about a haunted puppeteer.

 Once all the tales are told, the finale has the wrap-around story reach its final nightmarish destination in a great climax that does some really clever things with structure (let's just say the wrap-around moniker is wholly deserved here). This movie really does stick the landing.

 The writing is really on-point, with well-rounded characters and interesting relationships between them. Their dialog is a little stilted, and there's a bit too much psychobabble, but other than that it's full of wit, understated humor, and some choice lines. It's aged pretty well. Plot-wise It's interesting that the film justifies how perfunctory some of its segments are by framing them as anecdotes, which is a great solution to a problem a lot of these movies have (especially ones that try to tell more than three stories). And as mentioned before, the structure for the film as a whole is inventive and very clever.

 The film looks great, with a lot of variety in the sets and some lovely photography, especially when it goes full gothic for Sally's ghost story. I also probably shouldn't leave the creepiness of that fucking puppet uncommented on; Makes sense it seeded nightmares for generations! There are barely any special effects whatsoever - most of them are on the golfer's story, which makes sense as most of the other stories are pretty grounded.

 The score, by George Auric is a little intrusive at times but pretty effective, especially when recurring themes emerge and comment on the action.

 I often feel I get to movies like these too late, that there's too much cultural distance for me to appreciate them properly, but I enjoyed this one.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

  I tend to avoid writing about comedies because they're intrinsically hard to write about in a meaningful way (not that my usual writing is meaningful, but I do try). Also, the stuff I find funny does not tend to align with most people's opinion, something that seems to have gotten worse over the last couple of decades because I'm a sad old bastard.
 Case in point: Judd Apatow, whose bloated, unfunny, overtly self-indulgent films make me want to drink myself into a stupor. Which is a feat, because I never drink (...wine).

 Counterpoint: Walk Hard. But also Adam McKay's older movies, released during the post-Apatow drought of good Hollywood comedies. They're not great movies, exactly -except maybe Step Brothers- but they're goofy fun and often manage to cram in some inspired craziness.
 Talladega Nights is probably the weakest one of these, but I still have a vague soft spot for it.

 It recounts the story of one Ricky Bobby, beginning with a bit of mythologizing (he was delivered at the back of a muscle car, because his father was going too fast and overshot the hospital).

 He grows up to be Will Ferrell, who becomes, along with his inseparable best friend/second fiddle Cal (Dewey Cox himself John C. Reilly), the top NASCAR driver. Success, as it usually does in this kind of story, turns him into a mild asshole.
 And of course his dominance is soon upended. This time by a very, very French F1 driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen, in top form), who easily bests him and challenges his 'winner' alpha male identity (in more ways than one; Jean is very openly gay). Humble pie is eaten, mojo is regained, something redemption, yadda yadda yadda.

 It's often funny. Very, very funny in its specifics; The biggest laugh is probably when you find out he called one of his twin sons Walker and the other one Texas Ranger ("if we wanted wussies, we would have named them Dr. Quinn and Medicine Woman!"). I mean... just that makes me kind of love the movie right there. There's also some excellent absurdism, like Cal just not understanding that stealing your buddy's wife and home is Not Cool, or Jean's choice of reading material while driving.

 But... it's two hours long, and the heavily improvisational quality impacts the script (credited to Ferrell and McKay). There are a lot of great jokes, but they're spread out in between a lot of overtly indulgent filler, meaning that It really, really drags in places. Funny as it is, it really could do with going a little faster.