Cobweb

 Peter's life sucks. Eight-year-olds don't have it easy in horror movies, but Peter (Woody Norman) already starts Cobweb going through hell at school and at home; I mean, this is a kid who, when asked to draw something for Halloween in class, draws himself in the dark, screaming for help. It's kind of a horror movie trope, sure, but here it's grimly funny in an Edward Gorey sort of way.

 Things... will not improve.

 His parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr) act like a normal mom & dad, at least some of the time, but it's immediately obvious something's wrong with them; both are inhabitants of a sort of behavioral uncanny valley, like aliens who've studied but don't quite get how to impersonate human beings. Passive aggressive, with an undercurrent of menace or madness running beneath their every single appearance. To add to Peter's troubles, he begins hearing a knocking on his bedroom walls at night.

 The kid is naturally horrified by the nocturnal noises, but his parents' reactions to his cries - beleaguered, almost as if they couldn't believe the shit their son puts them through - might be worse. So when the knocks are followed by a voice asking to be Peter's friend, he's alienated enough to accept.

 Peter starts digging into the voice's claims that his parents are not to be trusted, a message he's only too ready to believe. Meanwhile, a friendly substitute teacher (Cleopatra Coleman) gets concerned about Peter's welfare (mainly after seeing his very literal cry for help drawing), and does a little digging of her own.

 It all can only end in tears. And blood. Mostly blood.

 Cobweb is a deeply, knowingly ridiculous movie. The script by Chris Thomas Devlin never edges into comedy, but makes it so that everything is heightened and off-kilter; a tone that's perfectly calibrated to fit the increasingly over-the top nastiness Peter is forced to endure. It walks the macabre line well, at least until it pulls out the stops in the third act.

 Director Samuel Bodin does well by his first feature, with quietly strong, tightly controlled visuals that still manage to fit in some neat ideas of how to transition from scene to scene and a focus on looming shadows. Cinematographer Philip Lozano has the thankless task of working with a desaturated palette and scenes that are almost always extremely dark, but he does a good job; it's a good-looking film.
 And when the gore arrives, it's pretty decent. Nothing too gnarly, but it's nice and exaggerated and surprisingly Raimi-esque. There is a monster, and while kind of derivative it's still a cool creation with some neat details. Shame about the CGI face.

 The film's greatest coup is its casting. Norman and Coleman do a great job as Peter and Miss Devine, but the parents are especially well chosen: Kaplan is a bundle of frayed nerves and anxieties, and Starr's familiar borderline sociopath performance gets a lot of uncomfortable laughs simply by, say, the way he casually brings a hammer to a friendly conversation.

 So yeah, this is another good one. Happy Halloween folks!

Leprechaun Returns

 Leprechaun Returns is a much better film than a syfy original seventh sequel to a not-that-good B-movie has any right to be. Because the continuity had gotten a bit... Wait, these movies never had a continuity - they even have conflicting origin stories, an episode set in the hood and another one in space (beaten to the punch by Pinhead, but way before Jason). So, this is more of your traditional 'legacy' sequel in that it follows the events from the first movie and ignores the rest, but it doesn't invalidate any existing sequels. Brian Trenchard-Smith/Leprechaun fans rejoice.

 The story picks up twenty-five years after the end of the first film, where the evil leprechaun sealed in a well. As it turns out, that same house has been turned into student housing for a nearby university, and is being refurbished by a sorority to become completely self-sufficient.
 Lila (Taylor Spreitler), the daughter of one of the people who put the leprechaun down, has just joined the sorority after her mother passed away. A bit contrived, but... OK.

 Her sorority sisters are Katie (Pepi Sonuga), a little ditzy and well-meaning; Rose (Sai Bennett), a nerdy goody-two-shoes, and Meredith (Emilie Reid), a drunken mess. And the first thing they do when Lila arrives... is to connect a pump to the well. Uh oh.
 After friendly man-child Ozzie (Mark Holton, returning from the first movie) gets a faceful of leprechauntaminated water, the little guy (played by Linden Porco) bursts out of him and into the scene, hat and all. Poor Ozzie; At least he's got to be in one of the cutest/funniest scenes in the movie before that

 From there he starts stalking the girls (and a couple of guests), and you get all the standard slasher-adjacent stuff that are these movies' bread and butter, plus some really obnoxious, forced humor. The Leprechaun's thing, you see, is to be an insufferable little shit, always coming up with really bad rhymes and even worse puns. Sometimes it's funny in a roundabout way, but mostly it isn't. Good thing his sadistic streak is still alive - there are some excellent, very gory kills here.

 I'm probably making it sound worse than it is. I mean, I don't think anyone's supposed to find anything the leprechaun says funny, he's just a little twerp. But the script (by Suzanne Keilly) sometimes feels a bit strained as it tries to inject humor into everything - a few scenes with Marvel-style deflating humor (you know: "Let's do this!" People start walking purposefully towards the camera, record scratch: "Umm... I have no idea how to do this"), and it really stretched my tolerance for corny puns.
 Other than that it's a lot of fun. The plot is simple. Ridiculous and fairly simple, sure, but this is a movie about a killer leprechaun, so the ridiculous is a given. Enough of the humor works, it's got some clever conceits, and the characters are very thinly sketched but still fun enough to watch as they try (mostly unsuccessfully) not to get killed in ludicrous ways. Not perfect by any means - for all my complaints so far, it saves some of its worst ideas for the end - but it's well worth it if you're in the market for this sort of thing.

 A big part of why it works so well is that the effects are a consistent delight - lots of puppets, goo, makeup effects, and one hell of a great-looking explosion. A few CGI missteps doesn't really undo all the great stuff around it.
 No surprise, then, that the director is Steven Kostanski (of The Void and Psycho Goreman fame). I'd rather see him follow his own batshit crazy muse and come up with original shit, but he and his crew obviously had a lot of fun whipping up some eye-popping (literally, in one instance) practical effects to depict the crazy shit Keilly dreamed up.

 I'd go as far as saying that this is probably the best Leprechaun movie. Sorry, Warwick Davies.

Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham

 In case you're not aware, there's an imprint of DC that lets them put out non-canon, what-if stories with established characters: It's called elseworlds, and the formula is to grab a superhero and change something about them, or to place them in a strange setting for an alternate take. So you get... I dunno, what if Batman were a vampire? Or if Superman had landed in Russia, and had become a communist superhero?

 They're usually short, contained stories. Because the setting or the circumstances are changed pretty heavily, there's a nerdy appeal to them in seeing what they did not just with the superhero, but with their supporting cast: If Bruce Wayne is a Viking, what will they do with Selina Kyle or the Condiment Man?

 The Doom that Came to Gotham is the animated adaptation of an Elseworld title published more than twenty years ago, written by Mike Mignola (the creator of Hellboy) along with Richard Pace and illustrated by Troy Nixey and Dennis Janke. As you might expect from the title, the question it asks is: What if Batman, but Lovecraft?

 Or, like most pop-culture takes on Lovecraft, a light, much pulpier version of his signature cosmic horror. You've got to leave some room to fit in all the punch-outs and chases, after all.

 And in this case, I am very happy to report that these action scenes include a fistfight with Mountains of Madness-style mutant penguins. Faithful yet ridiculous, making the tone of the thing crystal clear.

Chillin'

 Bruce Wayne is heading an expedition to the artic to find a previous expedition led by one Oswald Cobblepot; he finds their boat abandoned, Cobblepot gone feral (the sight of him wandering  the artic wastes butt-naked is a wonderfully grotesque image), and a half-frozen man in an eldritch, cyclopean cave, whom he rescues. But not before the stranger frees That Which Should Not Be and is infected with some sort of parasite.

 The expedition returns to Gotham, where it quickly becomes clear that all this artic weirdness was just a prelude to something bigger. There's a cult trying to summon an elder god or two, an ancient conspiracy that may lead to the end of the world. As Batman investigates, he realizes science and rationalism may not be enough to see things through.

 The story's a decent, very comic-book yarn where half the fun is seeing who pops up next, and in what guise. This gets in the way of the narrative, but I guess that's the nature of the beast.
 As silly as it gets, the plot is a fun, pulpy trawl though Lovecraft-flavored nonsense; And it does have some pretty good horror imagery every now and then. Poor Mr. Dent.

 Dialog-wise there's a lot of appropriately purple prose and some great lines. My favorite comes after Jim Gordon accuses Green Arrow of helping contraband bootleg moonshine. Green Arrow's response: "Tell you what, though. If I do happen upon a case, I'll let you watch me polish it off. At least then you and your boys can see what getting to the bottom of a case actually looks like."

 Nothing else in the script comes close to that level of repartee, but that alone makes it above average.

 Delivery varies wildly: I liked what David Giuntoli did with Batman, and Jeffrey Coombs pops up to deliver an unhinged voice performance. Didn't really find anyone else memorable, for good or ill.

 The art style tries to ape what I imagine is the style of the comic (which I haven't read), and looks like a cross between the old Bruce Timm Batman cartoons and lesser Mignola. DC are putting out a lot of these animated films, but I haven't seen any of them so I can't really compare - the style looks a little cheap to me, a bit flat. But there's a lot of variety in the action and the backgrounds, it never feels half-assed.

 It's...  ok. Horror for kids, well-made enough to be perfectly watchable but not really worth seeking out unless you really like this sort of thing. Or if you want to see Batman deliver a beatdown on mutant (non-albino) penguins, which I admit is a strong selling point.

 Having fun with Lovecraft rather than actually engaging with his ideas properly, and that's fine, I 'd never expect this genre, of all things, to ever do that, to pit superheroes against something so powerful and alien it wouldn't even recognize them as a threat, let alone be defeated in any meaningful way. Wouldn't that be something, though?

The Wrath of Becky

 Things have kind of worked out for Becky (Lulu Wilson) since we last saw her. We catch up with her two years after the events of the first movie, as she's trying to sucker a couple of prospective foster parents into taking her in. It's a funny scene that's immediately at odds with the tone of the previous movie, but that's ok, it's making clear the sequel goes for a different, more overtly comedic tone.
 Once she's got social services out of her back, she escapes (or something - just roll with it) with her dog Diego, gets a job and rents a house from a simpatico older woman (Denise Burse) who doesn't ask too many questions and appreciates (and returns in kind) Becky's brand of wry smart-assery.

 But this is a sequel to Becky called The Wrath of Becky... so this idyllic life can't last. And it doesn't: Becky being Becky, she insults a bunch of extremist assholes heading up to make a ruckus at a progressive candidate's rally, probably planning to do more than just holding up signs and chanting.

 Anyhow, the three assholes - the suave true believer (Michael Sirrow), the asshat (Aaron Dalla Villa) and the reluctant one (Matt Angel) - follow Becky home, kill the poor landlady, knock Becky unconscious, and take the dog.

 And here's where the movie started losing me: I mean, Becky saw all of their faces, and we know at least two of them are perfectly willing to kill. The only reason they don't kill her is... well, because it'd be a damn short movie if they did. That's just lousy, lazy writing.

 The three alt-right amigos carry on and meet Darryl, the leader of their terrorist cell - who's played by Seann William Scott, in a similar bit of stunt casting to the first movie. Meanwhile, Becky comes to and decides she wants to kill them all and get Diego back; And because they had mentioned Darryl by name, she's able to track them down (thank goodness he's in the same town, otherwise... well, very short movie, again) at terror HQ, a nice lakefront cabin.

 What happens from there is pretty much the same as on the previous movie, with Becky running a guerrilla warfare campaign against the assholes wot took her dog. Except nowhere nearly as good. To be honest, I didn't think it was good at all.

 One of the things I liked about the first one is that it took its silly premise seriously enough for it to be a decent, tense action film with a very real sense of menace. Here writer/directors Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote seem to think that because it's clearly a comedy, they don't need to sweat the details and ground the action... which is a huge mistake, especially because there's not enough humour, imagination or craziness to pick up the slack.

 All the deaths this time around are pretty boring. Except for one pseudo-elaborate deathtrap (the old tie the grenade pin to the doorknob trick) that kind of strained my suspension of disbelief, the kills are completely unimaginative; There's some gore, but again with the exception of the abovementioned deathtrap, it's all pretty uninspired.

 And since we're here: fuck the idea of a grenade only blowing up the top of someone's skull; that guy would have been wearing his torso as a very red, very wet hula skirt. Would have made a much cooler image, too.

 On the plus side, it's pretty eventful and there's a couple of twists - it's never boring, even though neither the events nor the twists are very interesting. I appreciate the balls of the... well, let's call it the post-ending, which goes so far into goofball territory that I can't disapprove of it. And there are some good lines in there, a couple funny situations; the script is not a total waste.
 The acting is great. Lulu Wilson's material may not be as good this time around, but she does an ace job anyways. And Seann William Scott makes for a convincing, threatening prick, even if he never gets to do anything much.

 Overall, though, this was a huge disappointment.

The Woods

  Lucky McKee's follow up to May is an interesting one. It's a supernatural horror period piece set in the 60s, heavily indebted to Suspiria. Light on plotting, heavy on atmosphere and characterization.

 After burning a tree in her backyard, Heather (Agnes Bruckner) gets sent away by her parents to a girl's boarding school in the middle of some ancient woods. After applying a written test, the headmistress (Patricia Clarkson, giving off some amazingly on-point "we're not angry, we're disappointed" vibes)  decides that Heather is eligible for a scholarship and accepts her into the school. It's worth noting that Heather cuts her finger on the test papers, effectively signing them in blood.

 Things don't go well at first. Heather is accosted by a cadre of mean girls (led by Rachel Nichols), gets into trouble with the staff, has some horrifying nightmares about a girl that went missing from the dorm, and an attempt to escape into The Woods leads to all sorts of creepy hallucinations. A real shit-show, in other words.

 But things do settle down a little bit after she makes a friend (Lauren Birkell). It's funny how good company can change things for the better: She's still hearing voices, and things at school get more worrying by the minute, but having Marcie at her side anchors Heather, lets her calm down and even enjoy herself a little.

 This being a horror film, it doesn't last. As the weirdness piles up, the voices from The Woods ring clearer, students go missing, and the vegetation starts to spread into the institution, it becomes apparent that Heather is being groomed for... something. Cue ominous laughter.
 The mystery at the heart of the story, one that seemingly involves an ancient coven of witches, isn't very complicated and is revealed organically as the script unspools. Heather is a good character, but, unusually (and, to be honest, probably realistically,) she focuses more on her relationships and immediate concerns than on the creepy designs coalescing around her. With regards to the actual plot, she's a strangely passive player, being handed most of the exposition instead of going through the normal investigation beats that you get in horror movies. The same goes for most of the plot points: Other people tend to drive the action, not the protagonist. In a movie that's very much about the perils of conformity, and with Heather kicking ass in so many other respects, it rings a bum note.

 The finale is appropriately spectacular, although it heavily features some pretty cheesy looking 2004 CGI. And because the rest of the film had so effectively established the threat as almost insurmountable, I didn't really find the climactic confrontation convincing. It's a great setpiece that felt a little off.

 So, it's got issues, some of them definitely not minor, but the rest of the film is so good it more than makes up for it. The script (by David Ross) explains just enough to leave things nice and mysterious. More importantly, it gives us enough time to get to know everyone before things get too hectic. And it's worth doing so: This is a good batch of characters, a few of which get a moment to reveal some vulnerability or hidden depths. The dialog is excellent, and complemented by some great acting and production design (By Dan Leigh), it really shines.

 Lucky McKee has shown several times over he's a great director, and this is, well, more proof of that. Expect flowing camera work and many neat dissolves, scene transitions and montages. Not to mention the usual empathy he shows his characters. There's a lot of subtle detail, like the way the school seems to change over the course of the story, or how colours dull as Heather conforms to strictures. Cinematographer John Leonetti does some great work here.

 It's an interesting, engaging film. Maybe the genre elements don't come together as best they could -  this is not a particularly scary film, despite having the bones of one, plus a helping of axe murder. It's a decent mystery, though, well worth watching to see its cast navigate the hazards placed in their way; Good company and all that.

Hiruko the Goblin (Yôkai hantâ: Hiruko)

 Somewhere in Japan, some mad (or ignorant) fools have built a school on top of an ancient tomb where the ancient god Hiruko lies. Much sillines follows.

 After his archeologist dad and his crush disappear investigating something at the school over summer vacation, teenager Masao (Masaki Kudou) enlists the help of some mates to go look for them. I'd list them, but it'd be pointless as they almost immediately behead themselves with a variety of implements (and a strong gush of arterial blood). While running around in terror, he encounters his uncle-in-law Hieda (Kenji Sawada), who explains that Masao's father contacted him to help with the investigation.

 Soon they're being chased around by the decapitated head of Tsukishima, Masao's crush (Megumi Ueno), which skitters at high speed on six spiderish legs, and dodging the school groundskeeper (Hideo Murota), who may or may not be hunting them down as well.
 There's a lot of flailing around, some pretty unfunny slapstick, and infodumps that try to explain what's going on without the story ever cohering into something interesting.

 Yeah, in case it wasn't clear, I didn't really enjoy Hiruko the Goblin much. The action is pretty one-note and the plot is both simple and overcomplicated enough that it never felt worth engaging with.
 It's a shame, because I love mythology-drenched stories like this one. But it's got a lot of problems- some common to the genre, such as the bone-headed decisions the protagonists make at every turn (starting with not going to the police immediately when they find the first dead body). The other problems are more specific to this sort of anime-damaged film: Bad acting and poor and tropey characterization. Cheesy music. A slightly formulaic feel. Broad comedy, camp, and kistch.
 Most damning is the lack of variety in the weirdness on offer, and a turgid plot which fails to do much with its yokai-adjacent story. The menace for most of the movie is Tsukishima's spider-legged head, and while the monster puppet is well made (cheesy, but the right kind of cheesy), it gets old quickly.

 The film itself looks slick enough; Director Shin'ya Tsukamoto is most famous for The Tetsuo: The Iron Man films, but this is a would-be mainstream film so he unfortunately curbs his penchant for madness and experimentation. The downside being that it's just not an interesting-looking movie, except for a few bits where he gets to apply some energy, borrowing Evil Dead 2's flyover camera to chase his protagonists (here, because it's a skittering spider-demon, it sticks low to the floor, sometimes jumping onto walls and ceilings; nice).

 Most of the humor consists of exaggerated mugging at the camera, but a couple of the jokes land; I liked one where Haeda realizes that a yokai-detector-type machine was off the whole time because he forgot to plug a cable in, and another one where... um, wait, no, that's it.
 There is some blood, and a couple of juicy decapitated bodies, but just that. They do feel a bit jarring because the rest of the movie almost feels aimed at children. The effects are endearingly clunky, and some shots look bad enough to be fun. I guess that counts for something?

Waxwork II - Lost in Time

  I must have watched Waxwork a dozen times as a kid/teen, and upon a recent rewatch I discovered I remembered a lot more from it than I thought I did. This sequel... not so much; I don't remember disliking it. But I did not remember a single scene except for a couple of bits at the climax.

 Waxwork II picks up straight after the events of the first; the waxwork is going down in flames, and our heroes Mark (Zach Galligan) and Sarah (Monika Schnarre, replacing Deborah Foreman) catch a cab to take them away.
 Sarah arrives home to her stepfather, and... well, we get some proof that writer/director Anthony Hickox unfortunately hasn't gotten any better at writing dialog or directing actors in the four years since the first one. There's some pretty embarrassing drama between Sarah and her stepdad, interrupted when an animated severed hand kills the stepfather in a homage to evil dead 2 (Waxworks 2 is even more overt in referencing other movies than the first one). The music remains wacky even as the poor guy's face gets hammered to mulch which... you know what? Fair enough; It's really hard to make animated body parts not be ridiculous.

Acting!

 Sarah is accused of the murder, and her defense of 'a dismembered hand did it' is somehow not successful, especially since she ground the proof in the trash compactor. So Mark starts looking for a way to prove her innocence.
 This involves finding a compass that lets him find 'time doors', invisible portals that will take them to other vignette-dimensions across time and space in the same way the Waxwork exhibits did in the first film. So he convinces Sarah to blindly jump into the first one they find, and away they go.

 And so begin Mark and Sarah's further comedic adventures in slightly off-brand familiar stories. The first Frankenstein pastiche isn't a great start, but it quickly gets better with the next ones - a pretty well done (for its budget) sci-fi knock off, and then an excellent black and white piss take on The Haunting that recycles the best joke from the first movie (the guy giving exposition while suffering extreme, graphical torture) to great effect, not the least because the victim is played by Bruce Campbell.

 So far, so good, but then the movie stumbles badly and drops everyone into a pretty damn lame fantasy story that is kind of indistinguishable from any number of the turgid Conan wannabes that came out in droves during the eighties Think Beastmaster, but not as fun. And that's the longest story by far, taking up almost half of the movie.

 The action climax, thank goodness, is excellent (that's where, incidentally, all the bits I remembered were from). Mark faces off against the big bad from the fantasy segment (Alexander Godunov) in a really fun sequence where they have a swashbuckle-y duel across multiple dimensions, going through knock-offs of Dawn of the Dead, Godzilla, Nosferatu (blink and you'll miss a Drew Barrymore cameo) and others. The choreography and swordplay is just passable, but otherwise the execution is excellent and features the best jokes in the movie.

 It's a weird film. Like Waxworks the first (and all of the Hickox movies I've seen except Hell on Earth), it's got an almost childish enthusiasm and a sort of gleeful 'let's see how much I can get away with' attitude. This sequel is a bit more polished than the first one, and I have to say some of the segments are impressively shot. Hickox mimics Robert Wise with a real eye for what makes the Haunting memorable; Notice that the acting, especially Galligan's, gets better as soon as there's a clear direction to follow. The Nosferatu segment, despite an unconvincing vampire, is also a joy to watch, technically well made and with some good comedic timing. The guy could really direct, at least some of the time.

 But that charm-free hour of pseudo-medieval guff really ruined this one for me. I forgot to mention the soundtrack for that bit repeatedly references Enigma's Sadeness Part 1; if that doesn't date the movie...
 Even without that, the whole thing also feels much more muted than the first movie. There's some good gore, but not nearly enough. The comedy is just a little broader, lacking the abrasiveness or plain weirdness of its prequel. There are no interesting, weird, experimental camera placements. And while this one is still pretty horny (there's at least one instance of ex-president Trump's favorite courting method), it fails to top someone being whipped until orgasm - even when the same character is right there. Sarah is downright boring, a major downgrade from her previous incarnation (script-wise, no fault of the actress), and there's no one like the first film's China to perv things up either.

 ...And so on. It's still a likeable movie, but it's a hard one to root for. Having read a couple of interviews with Hickox and his crew, though, I'm happy to say that they apparently had a blast making these, and that the guy absolutely prioritized having fun and doing stuff that he wanted to do even if it didn't fit the material. Can't fault him for that, even if the end result this time around isn't as much fun as they had on the other side of the screen.

The Last Wave

  Hasn't the weather been strange... could it be a warning? Asks the oddly worded poster for The Last Wave, Peter Weir's 1977 follow-up to Picnic at Hanging Rock.
 Like his previous film, it's another languid, atmospheric take on a mystery that's never really resolved. Or rather, it is, kind of, but it's a vague resolution that just raises more questions. It's complicated.

 Things kick off in a tiny school somewhere in the Australian outback on a cloudless, sweltering summer day. Suddenly thunder rings out, then driving rain; the children get herded back into the classroom shortly before huge hailstones start coming down, breaking windows, hurting one of the kids and scaring them all half to death. A great scene.

 A short time later, rainstorms are hammering Sidney, but at least these ones have the grace to come from cloudy skies. There we meet our protagonist, David (Richard Chamberlain), a corporate tax lawyer.
 Because he's offered some advice to humanitarian organizations in the past, he's asked to help mount a legal defense for a group of aboriginals who stand accused of killing another man. Feeling unqualified, but intrigued, David takes the case.

 As the days go on, David is assaulted by vivid dreams - including a creepy one where a whole street is drowned, and one where he sees one of the aboriginals in his house; a neat trick, since he hasn't met them face-to-face yet. When he later recognizes him from his dream, he starts getting convinced that something supernatural is going on. He tries to get explanations from the aborigine in his dream (David Gulpilil) and their shaman (Nandjiwarra Amagula), and gets... well, something about being a 'Mulkurul', a made-up term that the Wikipedia entry for the movie tells me has to do with 'a race of spirits who came from the rising sun bearing sacred objects with them'.
 The weird stuff is intriguing, but not a lot gets explained - just a few tantalizing connections, like David being from South America, and then discovering what look like Mayan drawings and artifacts in the sewers beneath the city. 

 It's an appropriately dream-like movie, glacially paced and drenched through (ha!) with water imagery. Almost every scene features running water in some capacity, and it turns out to be an eerily effective motif. The film oozes atmosphere thanks to some great cinematography (courtesy of Russell Boyd) and a cool electronic-and-didgeridoo-powered soundtrack (from Groove Myers).

 Unfortunately, that is most of what it's running on - Atmosphere. Also: Fortean phenomena, a vague apocalyptic sense of menace, a few woolly mysteries, and some nice visuals. The narrative is too much on the thin side, and to be honest I found it a bit of a chore to get through.
 Weir has stated that he wanted to explore what happens when a modern pragmatic person gets a premonition, and David's journey from rationalist to believer is engaging (aided by a very likeable performance from Chamberlain and Olivia Hamnett, who plays his wife). Though I did laugh when he starts talking about sorcery as a murder weapon at a courtroom, silly wig and all.
 Meanwhile the native actors do a good job of playing a closed-knit group trying to gauge this intruder's attempts to poke at a body of knowledge no one ever shows any interest in.

 I don't know; This is the kind of movie that I suspect I would have liked if I had watched it on a day when I'm more in tune with its wavelength - it's certainly well-made and weird enough to merit a revisit someday.

The Flash

  I don't really care that much for superhero stories. I've hated pretty much every comic-book event/crossover/franchise-flex film made thus far, except maybe Far From Home. The less said of the director's previous movie, It 2, the better.
 By all rights I should hate The Flash. And yet, and yet... I don't. Color me surprised, but it's a pretty fun movie.

 Maybe it's those contrarian reflexes kicking in; I don't really pay much attention to film twitter or any of the other online outrage echo chambers, but I get the sense that this film got a bit of hate from fans and critics; and it was a notorious box-office flop.
 However, I lean towards it just being a likeable film. And I never could take superheroes seriously, so the film's major stoner comedy vibes resonated with me a lot better than most of these things do.

 In any case. The Flash is heavily embedded within Zack Snyder's take on DC continuity; It picks up after the events of Justice League, and hinges on plot points from the 2013 Superman movie.
 You don't need to have seen any of those films - My son hadn't, and he liked the movie just fine - but you might at least want to read up a little.
 And yeah, having to include these sort of caveats are part of why I hate this shit. At least it's easier to stomach when it's just a couple of movies and not a bunch of them plus a streaming-service-exclusive series.

 Barry Allen (Ezra Miller, who's been the target of some pretty troubling allegations) is The Flash, and plays him as a sort of motormouth smart-ass; Think Peter Parker. He's tapped at the beginning of the movie by Alfred (Jeremy Irons), Batman's butler, to help Batman (Ben Affleck) with an operation that's gone awry; a hospital is falling apart, and people need to be saved. You know, standard Super Friends stuff.
 And that's where the film's overtly goofy sensibilities kick into overdrive (where they remain for most of the runtime). Allen strikes a cool pose, ready to set out, the music swells, the titles card starts to form... and then a bunch of kids interrupt him. Music goes off, the title slinks off, defeated.
 I mean, it's not like it hasn't been done before, but it's a bigger commitment to the humor side of things than the smart-alecky banter that usually takes the place of jokes and punchlines in most of these films. When things get going and the film's first action sequence breaks out, it's an over-the top, extremely ridiculous scene where half a dozen babies, a nurse and a cute dog get thrown out of a high-rise; the whole thing owes more to Looney Tunes than any sort of comic book escapade.

 On his way back (and after a pretty funny encounter with Batman and Wonder Woman) Barry discovers that he can run fast enough to go back in time. So he gets the notion to use his new-found power to save his murdered-when-he-was-a-child-mom. What could possibly go wrong?

 Soon Barry is stuck on a different timeline completely. Because of the similarities to Far From Home and stuff like that, this movie seems to have been lumped in with the glut of multiverse movies Marvel seems to favour lately, but it's actually more of a straightforward time travel yarn (complete with multiple references to Back to the Future), with the twist that when Barry change something, he doesn't just create a branching timeline; He jumps to a completely new one.

 ...One that already has its own version of Barry Allen, one who grew up with a full family and is a complete, over-the-top goofy idiot. So for most of the movie you get the two versions of the protagonist quibbling and riffing off each other. I thought Miller was really good at this: he's pretty funny in both roles, makes them fairly distinct, and even manages to give some personality and a smidge of pathos to the overtly cartoony stoner persona.
 That's not the only difference from his reality. It turns out that there are no superheroes in this version of events, except for Batman... who's played by Michael Keaton, and brings with him the vehicles, suits, and Danny Elfman theme from his movies. Keaton is great as usual, but I wouldn't take this as a huge selling point - he's only a guest here in Barry's story, a passenger. The rest of the film in no way, shape or form takes any cues from Tim Burton's Batman duology, leaving the character as a really odd fit in all the overtly modern action movie sequences.
 And finally, it all takes place during the events of 2013's Superman, with General Zod laying a siege to Earth. Except that... no Superman. So the Barrys and Batman need to step up.

 The movie is, and there's no other way to put it, extremely messy, mostly owing to a sort of late-stage superhero movie shapelessness that seems to come with the genre (and many other blockbusters) these days. The film is as well paced as it could possibly be given all its disparate mandates, but a lot of the plot points are glossed over and there are more than a few, shall we say, stupid moments. The script (by Christina Hodson, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein) also writes itself into several corners by the third act, resulting in a very bleak, strange message for a blockbuster movie - I actually appreciated that! But, like on No Way Home, it comes with a whole lot of problems as it glibly elides delving into many of its practicalities and consequences. Not to mention that it clashes badly with the tone of the movie. It's solution? Just... don't think about that, here's a bunch of goofy jokes. Look! His tooth fell off, hahaha.

 It does, however, have a very powerful emotional payoff, and a decent amount of clever twists. The fact that it constantly finds ways to puncture any gravitas it develops may irk the people who turned on Thor 4, but I'm all for this sort of thing in superhero films.
 The action has some decent beats and ideas, but it's of the entirely artificial variety where almost everything is very obviously an effect against a green screen. There's some cool imagery and a couple of badass moments (loved Zod simply going through a helicopter to get at his enemy), and the spectacle is above average once you get used to how it looks, but nothing to write home about.

 Director Andy Muschietti is a huge proponent of quantity over quality in his CGI, so there is a lot of iffy-looking animation here. The visuals for the Chronobowl, the way the Flash visualizes time-travelling, are the worst offenders by far... But to be honest, it's so stylized that it's got to be a conscious decision. A shitty aesthetic choice, but an aesthetic choice nonetheless.
 I'm less of a fan of the rubbery, synthetic look of most of the action, starting with the cheesy way the movie visualizes the flash's warp speed running, and encompassing all of the fights - but you know what? It fits well with the movie's live-action cartoon tone. It didn't bother me that much, and after a while I got used to  the  artificiality of it.

 So... yeah. I honestly enjoyed it, warts and all; It's an overtly silly movie, but that's fine: it's a silly genre.

Housebound

 Kylie Bucknell (Morgana O'Reilly) is... Housebound.

 As in: she's sentenced to house arrest for eight months due to a string of petty crimes. Because the judge feels she needs stability, he decides that the sentence is due to be carried out in her mother's house.

 Things don't go well at first; though her mother Miriam (the inestimable Rima Te Wiata, funny as always) welcomes her home, Kylie remains in a passive aggressive funk, choosing to vegetate in a couch watching TV and being generally unpleasant. Her stepfather (Ross Harper) is a shy, retiring man who chooses to stay out of the way.

Notice the cheese grater gauntlet; I love this movie.

 The twist here -the first of many- is that the house turns out to be haunted. Kylie at first rolls her eyes at her mother's stories, but she comes around quickly when a hand grabs her ankle at the basement... and then the craziness starts.
 Not in a Poltergeist sense, mind you; That's the least of the film's insanity.
 When Miriam and Kylie mention their suspicions to Amos (Glen-Paul Waru), the technician in charge of looking after Kylie's ankle monitor, he turns out to be an amateur paranormal investigator; Soon he's setting up the requisite cameras and sensors these type of movies take so much joy in. Some investigation also turns up that there was a murder in the house, and a likely culprit in a next-door neighbour. And then more revelations come, one after another, to overturn everything that was established before.

 Housebound keeps throwing plot developments and pulling the rug out from beneath the viewer with manic abandon, its carefully calibrated, deadpan sense of humor complementing the crazy twists extremely well. It's a horror comedy, but one without any winking whatsoever, relying instead on the ridiculous situations and excellent, very funny characters. Clever and knowingly stupid in equal measure.
 Kylie, for example, is ridiculously competent and badass, at least until the film forces her into a more traditional victim role. But it's a joy to watch a horror heroine who's just as likely to punch the ghost in the face as she is to scream. And Miriam is a delight, a daffy busybody who always has some daft or inane comment at hand but still gets a couple of relatable scenes of exasperation at her daughter's asshattery.
 It is a fucking blast.

 Gerard Johnstone writes, edits and directs. His script is maybe too twisty - you get the feeling that he writes himself into a couple of corners later in the movie, but the tongue-in-cheek tone is well established enough by then for the implausibility not to matter that much. More than anything else it's got a real energy going for it, an unpredictability that keeps you constantly guessing, and just enough grounding to make the payoffs satisfying as well as hugely entertaining.
 There's a remarkable sweetness to the movie as well, grounding Kylie's journey towards not being as much of a dick much better than movies that don't have to juggle a crazy plot like this one, and reserving a surprising amount of empathy even minor characters.

 Aside from the positive buzz, this movie was one of the main reasons I was excited for M3gan last year. It's a shame Johnstone didn't manage to helm any other movies until then, and now he's stuck sequelizing his breakout hit. I'm still looking forward to that, but it'd be good to see him try to walk the line between Sam Raimi and early Peter Jackson again.

Killers of the Flower Moon

  While the Trail of Tears was still within  living memory, the Osage nation settled in a forsaken patch of land in Oklahoma. Half a century later, oil was discovered beneath their territory, turning every full-blooded Osage into a rich person overnight, thanks to a deal they struck with the government.

 It's a ridiculously rich, interesting setting: The natives are a sort of nouveau-riche caste, but a government system that declares the Osage 'incompetent' means that they cannot spend their money freely. So white people rush to take advantage of the whole system. White business owners take advantage of the tribe with "Osage prices", and others try to woo natives to gain what's essentially a controlling share of their wealth as they take a guardianship role. There's also the expected resentment as a group of people are forced to wait on another group of people they view -with the tacit support of their government- as their genetic and spiritual inferiors.

 Into this stew wanders Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), discharged from his position as a cook in the great war due to medical reasons. He's the nephew of a local prominent white businessman William "King" Hale (Robert DeNiro), an avuncular sort with deep ties with many native families.
 Ernest soon starts work as a taxi driver, where meets and falls in love with Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). With some urging from his uncle, maybe, but their relationship is genuine.

 The problem is that Hale is a complete and total sociopath who now has the opportunity to consolidate a whole bunch of oil-rich Osage lands under his ownership, via Ernest and Molly's marriage. This will necessitate the deaths of a few people, some of whom Hale professes to view as his own family; How unfortunate.

 There is very little mystery to Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. For a while there is some doubt as to whether Ernest will help or oppose his uncle, as DiCaprio plays him as a likeable, dumb, spineless lug who really loves his wife. It's resolved quickly.
 The movie is instead more similar to something like Goodfellas or Wolf of Wall Street, a view of the events from the ground level as they develop, anchored intellectually (a loose use of the term; he's a moron) by Ernest and emotionally by Mollie.

 The difference, of course, is that in the other cited movies you had a roster of despicable characters mostly turning on each other. It was easy to disconnect their actions from the real impact they had, so you can have fun watching everything play out. Not so here, where the horrifying nature of the enterprise (not to mention its basis in fact) is front and center, and each death hits poor Molly and the Osage community like a boulder. The film is almost three hours and a half long, and much of it feels like an emotional pummelling.

 It's Scorsese, so it's still an enjoyable emotional pummeling. There's a black-as-coal sense of gallows humor running through some of the scenes, especially when Elmore-Leonard-esque petty criminals are called upon to implement Hale's plans. You could probably cut out forty minutes to an hour out of the film without it having a huge impact, but there's so much going on it never felt like a chore to sit through even when the shaggy-dog nature of the story is going off on some tangents; Most of these also feel like they still inform the action. This is one of the rare instances where the inflated running time feels earned.

 And the surfaces of this thing are gorgeous. The film miraculously got a huge budget to work with, and it shows on every scene; Scorsese's direction remains as muscular as ever, finding ways to punctuate the film with startling scenes of surrealism or shocking violence. The editing and cinematography, by regular collaborators Thelma Schoonmaker and Rodrigo Prieto respectively, are top-notch, as always, and the wardrobe is stunning. Costume designer Jacqueline West comes up with lots of ways to replicate the Osage's mixing of flapper-era fashion with their traditional styles in a very striking way.

 The cast is also unanimously great. DiCaprio delivers a great, ego-less performance (I can't imagine Brad Pitt in the same part), as does DeNiro, but it's Gladstone who anchors the film. It's a thankless victim role, but the way she registers the blows, manipulated and refusing to believe she's being manipulated, is a huge part of why the film hit as hard as it does.

 The script (by Eric Roth and Scorsese) apparently veers off the source David Gann book a little, which was a more straightforward mystery narrative told from the point of view from the FBI agents who pop up late in the tale; The focus on Ernest and Mollie's relationship reportedly came from Scorsese's conversations with Margie Burkhart's (Ernest and Mollie's real-life granddaughter), as she reminded him that they truly loved each other.

 Events build up to a somewhat satisfying third act - there is some justice, at least (this is not a given in this sort of story). But it's the coda that packs a punch: a beautifully crafted "and then this is what happened" capstone that ends in a beyond lovely, heartfelt eulogy that left me reeling, while still recognizing that this is white people packaging other people's tragedies for white people's consumption. 

Hellgate

  The 80s horror barrel-scraping experiment continues with... 1989's Hellgate. Spoiler alert: it's a terrible movie. Just fucking terrible. About as bad as it gets without stooping down to the crappiest reaches of regional productions. Full disclosure: It's so bad, after ten minutes I started abusing the Arrow player's speed up feature, which shaved the running time by 50%. It still sucked.
 As a bonus, I've just found out it was made by Americans in South Africa during the Apartheid. And voilà! What little sympathy it might have got (making movies is hard, they sure went for it, it's got some cool stuff, this might be a fun watch with friends and/or while drunk, etc.) has evaporated.

Piano Perv got a laugh, at least.

 We start in a house in the woods on a dark and stormy night, as a dipshit tells horror stories to two girls. I have no idea if it's the insipid direction (William A. Levey), the witless script (Michael S. O'Rourke, writer/director of the much better Moonstalker), the charisma-free actors, or a perfect storm of all three, but holy hell, the characters in this movie are particularly painful to watch. Wooden, witless and... white? Dammit, I was this close to a WWW dad joke. What a woeful waste.
 The dipshit (Evan Klisser, I think; I'm not watching this again to find his name) is trying to tell horror stories, just spouting the hoariest crap you could imagine, so one of the girls (Petrea Curran or Joanne Ward) tells her own story. In this one (which she swears is 'true') an angelic girl (Abigail Wolcott) gets kidnapped by a gang of grubby, nasty bikers who take her to her nearby home town of Hellgate to have their filthy biker way with her in the middle of town. But they get interrupted by the girl's father (Carel Trichardt) and the girl dies in the fight. You know, your standard tragic story, only really fucking stupid.

 But it gets worse, because that's only half the story. Hellgate becomes a ghost town, but Father stays behind - he's got a poster of his daughter in his studio, a big picture of her looking sultrily at the camera, looking exactly like a Guess jeans ad or something. Just a normal memento dad would have of his dear daughter. And of course he sees footage of his daughter clumsily superimposed on it, because this is a shit movie made by people with no taste.
 And no sense. To wit: in the same scene her father comes into possession of a magical crystal that shoots reviving rays, which also turns things into horrible monsters. This is one of the rare bits of the movie where cool stuff happens - first a goldfish turns mutant and bursts its bowl, then blows up. The second experiment is a stuffed sea turtle, which is revived and attacks dad, and then blows up.
 You know where this is heading: Daughter's gonna get revived. Because no taste, no sense.

 The resurrected daughter, surprisingly enough, doesn't explode. She instead turns into some sort of succubus who inexplicably falls for the protagonist of the movie (Ron Palillo), a friend of the three idiots in the cabin from the beginning and all-round fuckwit who gets lost on his way there. Random shit happens, then they all head to Hellgate, where the dead come to life and attack them and things get even more random. Magicians cut off their fingers, a pretty cool zombie puppet gropes one of the girls,  a head in a fridge starts belting out hoary dad-jokes. Nothing makes sense, but not in a good, dream-logic way; It's more of a "these people couldn't be arsed to make things fit together" way.

 An example: a girl wanders into a weird burlesque show where there's a... supposedly scary can-can dance, which the girl is entranced by. And then someone comes from behind and strangles her with a rope. 
 I mean, I thought one of the can-can girls was going to kick her head off, or squeeze it to mulch between her thighs. Something apropos. But no, that'd require effort to come up with. So we get murderdad and a lousy fucking rope.

 It's lazy, miscalculated shit all the way down, happening to characters that no one could possibly care about and executed with minimum flair or personality.

 There are some good stunts, a couple of cool practical effects, and some decent explosions; you know, the kind of stuff even talentless hacks like the folks involved in this movie could seem to pull off regularly back in the eighties. There are some random bits of weirdness that at least work on paper, like when the succubus roams naked, unnoticed through a ballroom with couples dancing. It's ostensibly a horror-comedy, and that description works in the sense that the comedy works just as well as the horror; However, there are a few involuntary so-bad-it's-almost good moments.
 For the vast majority of its runtime, however, it's just a waste of time.

Crimes of the Future (1970)

 Before David Cronenberg became known for such mainstream, crowd-pleasing entertainment as The Brood, Shivers and Rabid, he wrote, directed, shot and edited a handful of arthouse films. 1970's Crimes of the future - an hour-long movie that only shares a couple of elements with the 2022 film of the same name - is one of them.

 Yes, it's about as fucking weird as you'd expect an experimental Cronenberg film to be.

 Shot almost entirely within hallways, foyers and courtyards belonging to huge brutalist structures (what youngsters these days would call liminal spaces) around the Toronto area, with no dialog whatsoever and a stop-start soundtrack consisting of glitchy, atonal synth sounds, gurgling water, moaning people or, distressingly often, complete silence, and featuring an opaque script, the movie is about as hard to follow as this sentence.

 The 'plot' is dispensed by the protagonist Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik) in short snippets of narration that at first sound random, but slowly do cohere into a (very slight) narrative. I knew going in that the story takes place in a world where a plague's wiped out all women, and if that information is in the movie, I missed it. We follow Mr. Tripod as he holds a few different jobs, all of them weirdly sexual (a phrase that I guess fits most of the director's work): Running a skin clinic, traficking women's clothing, doing foot massages - until he falls in with a few conspirators attempting to... well, let's just say that the titular Crimes of The Future, as imagined five decades ago, remain pretty shocking. 

 It's interesting, troubling, and... despite some excitement towards the end... kind of boring. Every scene takes way longer than it should, and there's no getting around that you're watching a film with no dialog about a people doing pseudo-random things in public spaces. Even at an hour, it drags.

 I did end up liking it though; There's enough cool stuff here, like a guy who collects random cancer mutations harvested from his body (Cronenberg would pick that idea up again fifty-two years later; Fifty-two years!). A deadpan scene consisting of a couple grown men lustily rubbing huge metal orbs. Way to sublimate your sex urge, guys. Some amazing early seventies fashion. Plus, those few final scenes... holy shit.

 It's got a good atmosphere going on; The soundtrack isn't entirely successful, but combined with the weirdness of the events depicted and Cronenberg's clinical filmmaking (already fully developed back then) it's an effectively unnerving picture.

 The film prefigures many of the filmmaker's interests - hell, it prefigures his son's interests, with a throwaway idea that will inform all of Antiviral. It's a worthwhile, rewarding slog.

Prevenge

 The title is misleading. If you're expecting a time traveller taking control of himself as a fetus to manipulate his mom into killing the mothers of people who would eventually wrong him, that is [SPOILER] not what's happening here at all.
 No, the plot for Prevenge completely avoids that, to its detriment, by being about something else entirely. They could have milked that pun title so much more! What a disgrace.

 Ruth (Alice Lowe) is a very very pregnant murderer, first shown as she slits the throat of a sleazy-ish pet shop owner (Dan Renton Skinner). Others (including Tom Davis and Kate Dickie) will soon follow as she works her way through a list of targets. The law barely even puts in an appearance; I have no idea what the Cardiff police department ever did to Alice Lowe, but here they're portrayed as the most inept bunch imaginable. Unless more of the movie is going on inside Ruth's head than it seems. Anyhow; the why of the murders becomes clear as the film goes on, but other than that the film keeps its cards relatively close to its chest.

 It's a weird, thorny bit of gallows comedy; Clever and more than a little bit unhinged.

 The cast is uniformly good; The cinematography (by Ryan Eddleston) and an excellent soundtrack (by Pablo Clements and James Griffith) conspire to give the movie a dream-like sheen; While in general it shoots for a more realistic, washed-out, fuzzy atmosphere with a muted palette, the movie knows to throw in some really good-looking compositions and bright primary colors.

 The script is an ornery bastard. It paints Ruth as a sort of chameleon, adopting all sorts of disguises to approach her victims, and has her then spoil the effect by trying to get into their heads - almost as if she was working herself up to killing them... or to find a reason not to go through. Her ambivalence towards  the carnage becomes clearer as the film goes, and includes her having verbal spats with her unborn daughter (the little one shows no compunction whatsoever). Meanwhile, her midwife insists that the baby now controls her life. It's all very funny, a little uncomfortable, and oddly relatable... somehow.

 What's more surprising are some startling flashes of empathy, and some really affecting, low-key scenes. Lowe wrote Prevenge while she was pregnant, and then hurried through both starring and directing it before the baby came to term. I guess this unusual (pardon me) gestation shows through in a raw sense of honesty lurking beneath the film's arch, extremely wry facade. Definitely not what you'd expect out of a rampaging pregnant woman movie where a man vomits inside his wig.
 In case it's not clear- all this is a pretty roundabout way of saying I kind of loved it. 

Cujo

 It's always been a bit weird to me how people complain about Stephen King movie adaptations. There's been a few turkeys among them, sure - and the man himself is responsible for Maximum Overdrive. But their overall quality is still pretty damn high: The Shining, obviously, but also Christine, The Dead Zone, The Mangler (I'm willing to fight over this!), Carrie, The Mist, Stand By Me and a few more. That's one hell of a bunch of movies right there; Let's see John Grisham or Nicholas Sparks beat that.

 Cujo is not a movie that comes up often when King's movies are discussed, but I've always thought it's one of the good ones. It's the rare Stephen King adaptation that tries to show as much love as the author does for his characters, and that pays off beautifully once the domino chain of events results in a lady and her young child getting isolated and trapped in their car, under siege by a murderous Saint Bernard.

 The film takes its time to get there. First you need to know who that's gonna happen to, and why. Or how, at least. The setup takes up almost two thirds of the movie, and the script (by Don Carlos Dunaway and Barbara Turner) takes special care in showing how all the pieces are set so that they'll fall just so.
 Cujo himself gets infected with rabies in the first scene, a bonkers sequence that follows a dog chasing a rabbit down a field into a very nice-looking burrow full of rabid bats; A whole complex, beautiful set built just for that. Lewis Teague, along with cinematographer Jan de Bont, go above and beyond in making a lot of scenes look incredible and very distinct - even ones like this one, which arguably only fulfills a minor role in the story. It's a surprisingly great-looking film.

 Then there's the Trentons, of which the Mrs. (Dee Wallace) and the Jr. (Danny Pintauro) are scheduled to be terrorized by the giant rabid canine. They have their own issues; Donna's been having an affair with family friend Steve (Christopher Stone), and her husband Daniel (Daniel Hugh Kelly) is starting to suspect. Their marriage isn't in a great place, as you'd expect, but little Tad - about whom both are crazy - keeps them together.
 If it sounds a bit soap-opera-ish... well, it kid of is, but it's well-handled, taking a page from King's naturalistic dialog, and ably aided by some beautifully understated work from the actors (particularly Dee Wallace). Pintauro is also incredible, giving a ridiculously good and very realistic child performance.

 The important thing is that it all feeds into the story. The fight, along with a crisis at Daniel's advertising firm, conspires to keep them separated, and the particulars of their situation leave Donna driving a barely functioning Ford Pinto up to a mechanic just outside town. The mechanic (Ed Lauter) and his family situation is yet another story thread that the film duly picks up on - an important one, because said family own one soon-to-be man-eating (times three) St. Bernard.

 There's a bleak inevitability to how things play out, along with some sharp gallows humour. In the book there's an inchoate evil spirit who's implied to be setting up the situation, but the movie ignores all that (though it left in Tad's night terrors and fear of monsters), and it's probably all the better for it.
 What the film does lose is the characters' inner dialogue, especially for Cujo, whose point-of-view chapters were heartbreaking in the book. The movie does an admirable job conveying some of it, but it's not the same. It's also a bit jarring to cut away from Donna and Tad's struggle for survival to drop in on Daniel eating lobster with a colleague. It all ties into the story, and generates some suspense, , but it still feels a little too drawn out for its own good.
 I'm also not a fan of Charles Bernstein's score. Reeds make me drowsy.

 Lewis Teague had directed one of the best 80's creature features in Alligator, so it's no surprise that he excels at the actual monster/dog attacks. There are a couple shots were Cujo is a little unconvincing (including one instance of it wagging its tail as it prepares to rip someone's throat out), but on the main it's fine, and where it counts - where the dog is mauling people or trying to dismantle the car to get at poor Donna and Tad - it's all very effective.

 All the more effective because of all the groundwork the film painstakingly laid out in the previous hour. They're fleshed out, flawed, likeable characters stuck in a horrible but also fully fleshed out situation.
 This Stephen King guy might be on to something.

The Conference (Konferensen)

 The Conference is a new slasher movie from Sweden with a side of (very slight) satire. It's a fun one.

 A bunch of government functionaries get together at a holiday resort for a team-building exercise to celebrate the completion of their latest project: final approval for a shopping center that will (in theory) bring much needed tourism and business to their neck of the woods.
 Not all of them are sold on the achievement, mind; a new hire (Bahar Pars) questions the legality of the proceeds, another (Cecilia Nilsson) the environmental impact of the enterprise, and Lina (Katia Winter, the closest the movie comes to a point-of-view character) comes back from stress-related sick leave to find that the documents on file aren't the ones she remembers signing.
 Opposite them, a trio of corporate-minded morons: bosswoman Ingela (Maria Sid), idiotically trying to put a positive spin to everything, a vapid yes-man (Christoffer Nordenrot) and a sociopath corporate climber (Adam Lundgren) who portrays his character with such bug-eyed intensity he sort of looks like a human ventriloquist dummy.

 The satire angle is kind of fun, but so over the top it lacks any sort of bite. Good thing, then, that it's not the film's main attraction; That'd be a shady figure circling around the resort, killing people quietly at first, and then laying siege to the terrified survivors. Along the way he puts on the oversized mask of the future shopping center's mascot, for full ironic marks.

 It's nothing you haven't seen before (even the work retreat setting/workplace satire is recycled), but it's done well and with gusto. It's reasonably tense, the kills are good, and there's a good mix of characters so that you can enjoy some of the murders and wince at others.

 Things get pretty gory - not nearly as much as in other recent examples of the genre, but there are some fairly gruesome, graphic deaths. Editor Robert Krantz has some fun cutting between the carnage and the corpos having "fun" (someone gets brained with a pan, cut to someone banging a gong), and the cinematography (by Simon Rudholm) is crisp, wintry, and always clear.
 Director Patrik Eklund obviously knows his slashers and does well by them, managing to get some pretty cool scenes (a slow-motion decapitation comes to mind). As for his script (Co-written with Thomas Moldestad), its... well, it's all right. The whodunnit aspect is so perfunctory it might well not exist - even as it's presented as some sort of puzzle - and most of the other plot developments are pretty predictable. But those aren't fatal flaws for this sort of movie; on the plus side, it seeds some tools early on that will later be used in ways that would upset health and safety officers, and takes enough liberties with slasher conventions to earn itself at least some goodwill.

Smile

 Smile begins with a shot that artfully zooms out from a dead woman's face, through a bedroom riddled with pills (subtle, it ain't), to a terrified little girl standing at the doorway.

 She grows up to be Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), an idealistic doctor working at the psych ward of a big hospital. Her latest patient is a PhD student who's experiencing some severe paranoid delusions: ever since one of her teachers bludgeoned himself to death in front of her with a hammer, she insists, a presence has been haunting her. Rose tries to calm her, but her patient ends up slitting her throat with a vase shard, all the while smiling like a lunatic.
 As staff rush in to handle the situation, the camera zooms in to Rose's face, into one of her eyes, and there, in the blackness of the pupil, we get to the film's title card, pulsing nastily. It's in her head!
 That's one hell of a way to start a movie.

 Rose is understandably rattled by the incident. Soon, she starts seeing the suicide girl in random places, smiling at her... and then nastier things start happening. With the help of an ex-flame who happens to be a cop with conveniently shaky ethics, she finds out that this cycle - people killing themselves in front of a witness, who then go on to kill themselves in front of someone else - has been going on for a while.
 It's a cool premise, but also pretty derivative (beginning with its J-Horror premise by way of It Follows, and then running through a glut of modern horror clichés). That's ok, though; It wears its borrowed elements with flair. I was more bothered by the way the script (by director Parker Finn) oversells its message as the film goes on.

 It's not 'elevated horror' fatigue - I don't see any reason to question the movie's legitimacy just because it's explicitly about trauma. And I tend to like elevated horror anyhow. The whole psychological angle here is intrinsically tied to the supernatural menace, and it makes sense.
 What put me off is the way that it goes overboard trying to convey the film's simple thesis, which necessitates making most of the secondary characters unempathetic, unlikeable shits, and contriving situations that make Rose look like a complete nutter. That whole situation is... well, yeah, it's the point of the movie, but it just doesn't appeal to me narratively. I also felt it spoils what starts as a very good performance by Bacon by making her go a bit strident. But more than anything some of the themes feel too on-the-nose, too belabored.

  Other than that, Smile's got a lot going for it: one hell of a recurring, thematically appropriate motif (forced smiles, of the sort that pretend everything is all right), good kills, a pretty cool monster, some great gore, effective jump scares, and a pervasive sense of dread. It's nasty, unsparing, and you can tell everyone involved put a lot of thought and care on it. Technically, aside of a couple of iffy effects, it's extremely well shot and crafted. It doesn't have a huge amount of personality, but there are a lot of carefully planned shots and camera moves, and the use of negative space -at some points echoing earlier events- is excellent.
 It's another movie that makes me kind of feel bad for not liking it more; It may get lost in a glut of similar movies, which perhaps is deserved, but it'd be a shame; this is a seriously impressive debut film.

Waxwork

  Anthony Hickox wasn't a great filmmaker. Hell, if I have to be honest I'd have to say I think he probably wasn't a good filmmaker - but at his best he made ridiculously entertaining films; He will be missed.
 Waxwork is not his best-known movie (that'd be Hellraiser 3, unfortunately). But it's an interesting, unique slice of eighties madness; Not a good film, exactly, but certainly fun and memorable.

 It kicks off with some muscular, beefy jazz over the title credits, with exterior shots of a big manor in a dark, stormy night. That's quite the juxtaposition. Inside, two men are fighting; The style is energetic, enthusiastic, and... charmingly inept. The action is stilted and the camera focuses on the man's screaming face to slightly humorous effect as it's pushed into a flaming hearth. But you also get some good shots of a double with his head and shoulders aflame, and, more impressively, later diving head-first into the open fire. I have no idea how they did that. There's some great editing showing the assailant robbing the place as the corpse burns. Meanwhile, the music unfortunately settles down into a more generic, mildly intrusive late-eighties soundtrack.

 The whole movie is a lot like this - a lot of energy and an irrepressible will to put on one hell of a show, missteps be damned.

 Our hero, Mark (Zach Galligan), a rich kid with a mansion, butler, and everything, is introduced having breakfast with his mom. Here's another good example of the sort of directorial choices Hickox tends to take: the table has big, busy flower arrangements along its center, so they keep having to lean over to talk to each other. It's strange, and it doesn't look great, but it's original and kind of funny. Later in the scene Mark starts screaming at his mom that he wants caffeine, goddamn it, which his mom won't provide because he's still a growing boy. It's bizarre. I think maybe it's supposed to show he's got anger issues. Maybe. But it just comes off as off-kilter and makes him look a bit toxic. I am actually all for it; The weirdness and miscalculation make otherwise boring scenes interesting.

 In the next scene Sarah (Deborah Forman) and China (Michelle Johnson) walk across suburbia talking about boys, and they are surprised to find a wax museum has opened in their neighbourhood. Then the owner (David Warner) appears out of nowhere and invites them and some friends for a special exhibition at midnight.
 I mean, just about everything in that situation should be setting off all sorts of alarms - Take your pick: David Warner, the fact that he's dressed like fucking Willy Wonka, a wax museum (which everyone refers to as Waxwork)... But because this is a very horny movie and one of the girls likes the look of David Warner, they decide to accept the invitation.

 There's some more (weird, stilted) drama later at school as Mark gets possessive of China. Meanwhile, her way to say "it's not you, it's me" is to get in bed with a jock and then bring up how good their sex was as much as possible. I'd like to say it's sex- positive, since the film seems to have some sympathy for her, but her sluttiness later gets her killed. I don't think it's sex-negative, either; I just think that whoever wrote the script doesn't really - Oh, wait, it's by Anthony Hickox, too. That explains a lot.
 In any case, most of the dialog is supposed to be smart-ass and quippy but it ends up sounding kind of abrasive, making most of the characters hard to root for.

 Mark, Sarah, China, and three more friends end up attending the not-at-all suspicious private waxworks function, where they're greeted by two butlers - one very very small, the other obscenely tall, and are left to wander the exhibition floor. It's your typical wax museum, with creepy exhibits whose subjects are supposed to be made of wax but are conspicuously not, and include such celebrities as weirdo putting a gasoline hose in a flapper's mouth. That old standard.
 And here's where things get interesting; As they gawk, two of the kids walk into the exhibits, right into a sort a scene that's presided over by classical monsters - one with a werewolf, one with vampires. Things don't work out well for the kids, though China puts up one hell of a fight until her horniness gets the better of her. The scenes themselves are silly little shorts that get pretty damn bloody and entertaining: someone gets torn in half lengthwise, there's an extended scene with a guy with his leg eaten to the bone as a centerpiece, a cross makes a vampire's head explode like a melon, and another undead gets impaled by champagne bottles - of course the corks pop afterwards. Lots of fun, very gory mayhem.
 There are other movie references like these; Whole scenes with the wax dimension vignettes, and shorter visual gags later. Rosemary's Baby features as a full-on demon tot.

 You'd expect that to be the whole movie - each kid gets their own death scene until the last survivor or two get the upper hand. But you're forgetting that this is an Anthony Hickox film, so there's still a lot of craziness ahead. There's an bizarre plot about some stolen relics that seems to come straight out of some ambitious teen's D&D campaign, a lot more weirdness, some comical (and 'comical') relationship drama (poor Mark has terrible luck with women; I wouldn't blame the women), weird psychosexual shit... it's wild. And the whole finale turns into a giant brawl where everything is just thrown together as if in a blender.

 It's clearly meant to be a comedy first - one that's actually funny at points, thought not often enough - and a lot of the weirdness is definitely intentional. That does wonders to pave over some of the more iffy elements. But the movie's strongest asset is that it's desperate to put as much cool stuff on the screen as possible; It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, if there's one more monster or gimmick that can be added, you can be sure it'll be thrown in.
 The effects are great (team led by the legendary Bob Keen) and there are tons and tons of them; The sets are varied and often pretty cool. The cinematography (DP: Gerry Lively) is decent, and the film switches styles casually depending on the scene. There are some attempts to shoot some of the scenes from non-traditional angles, such as one seen from behind a ceiling fan, or from the top of an impossibly tall hallway. It doesn't always work, but the visual variety adds to the film's goofy appeal.

 So what if some of the actors don't seem to have any idea about what they're supposed to be doing, or if the werewolf looks silly, or if the plot doesn't make sense? There'll soon be some bit of madness- a memorably bad line, a cool monster, some random gore, or a bizarre twist. Waxworks often feels like it's being made up as it goes along by people who're not sure about how to do things... but are willing to do them with panache if not taste.
 It's a mess, but an interesting, entertaining, and entirely loveable mess.

The Bird People in China (Chūgoku no Chōjin)

 Takashi Miike's career spans two decades and a half at this point, often putting out two or more movies a year - not counting made-for-TV work. 1999 was a good year for him: Audition and Dead or Alive put him on the international map* and made his name synonymous with over-the-top gory excess.

 But for some bizarre reason the first Miike movie I watched - maybe a year or two later - was 1998's The Bird People in China, off a pirated and fan-subbed videotape a friend lent me. It's a movie I still have a lot of fondness for: a quiet, contemplative, and often very funny comedy/drama, one that left a pleasant, very green mark on my mind. I'm happy to report that yes, it holds up well, and that it's just as green as I remembered. It's a great movie.

The titular Bird People in China, one of them with a loud Yakuza shirt on.

 Wada (Masahiro Motoki), a hapless salaryman, is sent to the furthest Chinese hinterlands, high up in the mountains, to see if he can stake a claim on an alleged jade deposit. Ujiie, a gruff, violent yakuza (Renji Ishibashi) soon insinuates himself into the expedition to make sure Wada's company can pay the mob the money that they owe. They arrive at the village after a long series of vicissitudes, including their guide (Mako) losing his memory due to a bonk on the head.

 If you think that's too cartoony a development, don't worry- he later bonks his head again and recovers completely. Science!

 So the salaryman and the Yakuza - both emblematic of modern Japanese society- find themselves trapped in a pre-industrial society where no one speaks their language. They soon find things with which to occupy their time, though: Ujiie falls in love with the pastoral lifestyle, and Wada finds a less philosophical love interest in Si-Chang (Li Li Wang), a blue-eyed villager who goes around singing an old Scottish standard. 

 The villagers also claim they can fly; kids running around with oversized cloth wings make for a great recurring image.

 The film's mysteries are minor but interesting, and it's full of cool, fun, and funny details - from an early ride in a vehicle that falls apart as they go to a ferry pulled by turtles (at one point the gang is delayed because the turtles need to be painstakingly be rounded up from the river).

 It's not perfect - the film is pretty slow and has a major shift of gears towards the middle as it settles down, and there are a few jarring fades to black which made me think it was made for TV with commercial breaks (this doesn't seem to be borne out, as it debuted in film festivals and had a theatrical run).

 The script, by Masa Nakamura (based on a novel by Makoto Shiina) introduces the sort of themes you'd expect: Exploitation, cultural preservation,  tradition... only to muddle the discourse slightly: The young people in the village, for example, can't wait for the company to take over the mines: "We'll finally have electricity!"
 Miike's direction matches the material. It starts out hectic and slowly settles down, but still finds a chance to insert a bloody, nightmarish shootout in the second half.

 The tone is great - mostly solemn, full of subtle, thoughtful scenes, but also prone to outbursts of humor. The jokes can seem a little blunt to our sensibilities, like on most Asian films, but there are a few laugh-out-loud ones, and they never work against the story - rather, the playful sense of humor is integral to it. And all of this takes place against the breathtaking, forest-covered mountains of inner china. The movie's beautiful cinematography (by Hideo Yamamoto) paints most of the latter scenes in deep, verdant greens, and it looks gorgeous and expansive. It must have been hell to shoot for everyone involved, but it's completely worth it; the backdrops are absolutely stunning.

* Miike also directed the excellent Ley Lines on 1999, a good counterbalance to the Dead or Alive Yakuza Madness

Knocking (Knackningar)

 Molly (Cecilia Milocco) is having a rough time of it. After some time institutionalized for an unspecified reason (which one assumes has something to do with the loss of her partner in a mysterious beachside incident) she's let free to go to a small apartment to continue her life.

 The problem is that she doesn't have much of a life to go back to, which, well, doesn't do wonders for her mental state. Neither does a once-in-a-decade heatwave.
 So when she starts hearing knocking sounds (and later cries) coming from one of the apartments on the floor above her and convinces herself that a woman is being tortured, well... you can imagine how well her efforts at investigating that go.

 Knocking is a bleak, slow-burn Swedish psychological thriller that's filmed like a horror movie, a claustrophobic chamber piece that works more as a character study than as any sort of genre exercise because there's just not much to the story besides its deeply empathetic presentation of Molly's character. Everything is filtered through her point of view as she sinks into depression, seems to suffer from delusions, and is treated with varying degrees of wary hostility by others.

 The technical aspects are impeccable: Frida Kempff's direction is assured, with an eye for interesting shots, and the cinematography (by Hannes Krantz) is beautiful. Above all, the film revolves around an incredibly vulnerable performance from Cecilia Milocco, who manages to instill her character with a huge amount of humanity despite the limited range of emotions displayed during the movie. It's got to have been a thankless task, and she does an incredible job.

 There are some stunning images spread throughout the film, but while watching the character is riveting, following the story around her isn't; It's a standard thriller, with no real surprises and a shrug of a 'twist' at the end. It doesn't really do anything wrong, and I liked how it tends to leave things unexplained, but... well, there's just not a lot going on here.
 It's the sort of film I feel I should have liked more than I did, but there's just too little for me to latch onto.