Hellbound: Hellraiser II

  Hellraiser hadn't even hit theaters when New World pictures greenlit a sequel. Clive Barker could not fit it in his schedule, so he only remained on as an executive producer... though he provided the basic story and by all accounts was frequently on set and involved in many of the decisions.
 Fortunately most of the rest of the Hellraiser crew stayed on and, against all odds, good replacements were found for Barker: Tony Randel (who'd done some uncredited editing on the first movie) for the directors chair, and more importantly, Peter Atkins on scripting duty. Atkins, a long-time Barker collaborator (along with Doug Bradley) from his time in avant-garde theater, didn't just get Hellraiser at a fundamental level, he was somewhat ahead of his time in the way that he didn't just deliver more Hellraiser - he and Barker delved into it, expanded it, deconstructed it, made it even weirder.

 It's relatively similar to the way Aliens exploded, chest-burster-like, out of Alien, so it's funny both movies share Lt. Gorman in a key secondary role.

 Hellbound kicks off with a time-honoured cost-cutting measure: padding the runtime with a recap of the previous film's final scenes*. Just hours after facing off against S&M demons, a rapey undead uncle and an evil stepmother, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) wakes up to find herself as an inmate in a psychiatric institution under the care of smarmy, ridiculously posh doctor Channard (Kenneth Cranham) and his hunky, earnest aide Kyle (William Hope).

 Kirsty recounts the events of the first movie as if she was reconstructing what happened - I love the dialog for this scene and how it's paced, though some of her guesswork is conveniently too accurate (and it's another excuse to recycle more footage from the first movie).

 Realizing, in another improbably leap of logic, that the mattress Julia died on could be used to bring her step-mother back, she asks the doctors to burn it. But as soon as the interview is over, Dr. Channard calls the police and asks that they send the mattress to his place.

 Kyle overhears that phone conversation and, his suspicions aroused, does what any normal person would in that situation: he breaks into Channard's house later that night to see what the deal is. And lo and behold, Channard's studio is full of occult diagrams and carefully preserved cenobite memorabilia... including three of the hell-raising puzzle-boxes. Oh, and the blood-stained mattress in the middle of the floor.

 Before he can take off, Channard gets home, accompanied by one of the inmates - one of those movie nutjobs who hallucinates bugs are crawling all over him. I'm imagine that's a real thing, but it seems to be it must be really overrepresented in fiction.

 Anyhow, Channard sits the inmate (played by Frank himself, Sean Chapman) on the mattress, gives him a straight razor, and just observes as he cuts himself to ribbons; it's a very effective, pretty horrific scene even before skinless Julia, summoned by the blood, comes out of the mattress and finishes off the poor sod. Then, in her weakened state, she asks Channard for help, and he reluctantly pushes the mattress towards her with his foot.

 Can I just point out how fantastic the villains are in these movies? Channard is such hateable, sociopathic asshole, and the ways he keeps finding ways to do 'disagreeable' things without dirtying his hands is truly great writing. And Julia, of course, gets a chance to go big this time around - the script thoughtfully hands her many variations of Frank's lines from the first movie, and even lets her get a little payback.

 In any case, Kyle finally manages to escape and extracts Kirsty from the asylum. Meanwhile, Channard is busy providing Julia (Clare Higgins) with victims so she can reconstitute herself. There's a confrontation which Kyle doesn't survive [spoilers, don't read the previous line if you haven't seen the movie], and afterwards Channard puts in motion a plan where he uses Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), a previously-introduced autistic girl who's a puzzle-solving prodigy to solve one of his cubes. The whole second half of the movie literally goes to hell, which in the Hellraiser universe is a giant labyrinth full of surreal little nooks, presided over by Leviathan - an unknowable monolithical god that looks like a rhomboidal lighthouse that spews darkness instead of light.

 Oh, and the cenobites pop up for a little bit but they don't get a lot to do; if you'll remember, the movie was already in full production before the first one even came out- So no one had any inkling of how big Pinhead would become. This is Kirsty's and Julia's movie, with a side of Chanard and Tiffany; the demons are barely supporting characters.

 It's got a lot going on, and not everything works. Hellbound definitely lacks the elegance and simplicity of Hellraiser, but it makes up for it in ambition and weirdness. The film never quite follows the course you'd expect- still, despite some silliness and a fuzzy plot, most of its events make sense.

 Because the crew from the first movie is almost all in place, everything that was good there remains good in the sequel. Robin Vidgeon's cinematography really benefits from the enlarged sets, and does well by some wonderful visual ideas - like a completely white apartment, all the better to frame Julia's skinless form. Bob Keen and his team provide some really great work, including a brand new cenobite, and Christopher Young delivers another classic soundtrack - it's not as fresh as the one for the first movie, but it expands on its themes beautifully.

 In case you can't tell by now, I'm a fan. I can see the seams and that many things don't strictly work, but it's still a wildly imaginative and original movie. Hellraiser is one of the movies that in many ways made me me, one I rewatch every few years. Hellbound, I hadn't revisited for a long time - more than a decade and a half, probably - but for a long time it was, along with Aliens and Dream Warriors, what I considered the platonic idea of what a sequel should be. Warts and all, I'm very happy to find it still is.

*: While New World provided a bigger budget for the sequel, the movie started filming just as the dollar's value fell precipitously against the British pound - and as the movie was filmed in London (at the legendary Pinewood Studios, no less), the crew suddenly discovered that their budget had been slashed down by a significant amount; Whole planned sequences had to be scrapped. Due to this and studio interference, it's been described by people who worked on it as 'heavily compromised'. Still kicks ass.

Prospect

  Damon (Jay Duplass) and his daughter Cee (Sophie Thatcher) are 'floaters' - space drifters, basically, trying to make a living in the lawless frontier of the far reaches of civilized space. Damon, a very Duplass goofball played straight (though he does get stoned in one scene), has a lead on a prospect on a distant verdant moon, a toxic planet covered in budget-friendly earth-like forests: the location of a valuable pod of organically-generated gems.

The long-distance starship that ferries them to the moon's vicinity is doing its last run, so they risk being left stranded if they don't rendevouz with it three days later when it slingshots back from a nearby star. So of course things go wrong from the outset: their beat-up lander breaks down on entering the planet's atmosphere.

 That's only the start of their problems. While trekking to their destination they soon run into another couple of scavengers led by one Ezra (Pedro Pascal); The encounter proves disastrous, leaving Cee alone in the moon with a broken-down lander.

 Ezra tracks her down, and Cee enters into an uneasy alliance with him to try and find her father's big score and find a way off-planet.

 It's a slow, methodical movie that occasionally bursts into spurts of ugly, desperate violence - an expansion on a short from 2014, but it does more than enough to earn an extended runtime. The setting is well realized; While it's pretty jarring to see people in spacesuits walking through obviously terrestrial woods, the amount of detail in the world - coupled with some wonderfully functional-looking machinery, spaces and tools (production design: Matt Acosta, costumes by Aidan Vitti) ends up making it feel fairly convincing.

 The script, by the directing team of Zeek Earl and Christopher Caldwell, also provides a lot of cool character detail. Cee listens to space indie pop and fills her notebook with a reimagining of a beloved novel she's lost, and Ezra is a Mal Reynolds-style motormouth who keeps spouting all sorts of stories and bizarre facts in a very compelling, flowery patois (yes, the Firefly influence is very strong in this one). The roster acting is superb from everyone involved.

 It looks great, too. Co-director Zeek Earl acts as the cinematographer and he gives the movie the look of a faded polaroid; It's a weird choice for a sci-fi film, but it's a colorful, cohesive aesthetic that fits the film's down-to-earth, subdued action very well. There's a little bit of blood - including a pretty gruelling field surgery, and the practical effects used on the meaty alien flora(?) that serves as the story's McGuffin are pretty cool.

 Daniel L.K. Caldwell provides a gorgeous, very memorable soundtrack. Seriously, it's very, very good.

  Not sure what's up with harsh, cruel sci-fi with young women as protagonists -this would pair well with Vesper- but it does give me hope that we could get an adaptation of Alastair Reynold's Revenger one of these days. I wouldn't want to hype this one too much, as it's a bit on the slight side, but I liked it.

Portals

 Those silly scientists are at it again, running their particle accelerators and trying to create a black holes...

 Luckily for everyone, they don't succeed at creating a (presumably tiny) singularity. Those things are a pain, dropping down into planets and starting to eat them from within as they see-saw around their core like a nightmarish, all-consuming 3D spirograph. No, Portals is content to just be a horror movie. So instead of a black hole we get worldwide blackouts and evil 2001-style monoliths popping up all over the place.

 The monoliths -portals- are at least somewhat sentient and seem to have an agenda. They can communicate telepathically with whomever they choose, control others, and they can take those they're interested in when they touch their vinyl-like black surface. The invader's motivations are kept mysterious, but are generic enough that their antics never really roused my interest.

 Portals tells three stories set around the time the portals make their appearance. It starts with Adam (Neil Hopkins), who wants to take his family out of the city, away from the blackouts and this mysterious threat the news keep talking about.

 First impressions are good - it got me excited, at least, because the writing is pretty good; The story isn't anything special and it gets worse as it goes on, but the characters are believable and very likeable (Hopkins does a pretty good job, and Ruby O'Donnell, his on-screen daughter, is adorable). This segment (which recurs throughout the movie, later moving to a spooky hospital) is directed by Liam O'Donnell, writer of all the skylines and director of the much better sequel (I haven't seen the latest one yet).

 When Adam and his family run into a portal in the middle of the highway the movie shifts into the second story, one set in a 911 call center facility. Again, it's initially interesting, and it's a great way to give a sense of the world (or at least, the corner of the world closest to the call center) going to hell, with the lines overloaded with people calling in about weird occurrences. It devolves to hokum pretty quickly once it introduces your typical conspiracy theorist with that laziest of lazy signifiers: a notebook full of creepy portal-related drawings. When a portal appears in the middle of the office, he grabs a gun and starts forcing his co-workers into it, but the situation fails to go anywhere interesting. Directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale.

 After a short catchup with Adam the action moves to Jakarta, where sisters Sarah (Salvita Decorte) and Jill (Natasha Gott) get stuck in a multi-story car park with a monolith. This one's almost a zombie movie- the monolith takes over multiple nearby people and forces them to chase after Sarah and her sister. Very well-made on what's clearly a shoestring budget, it's got some impressive and very high-energy stunts (mostly to do with a slow-moving vehicle) and some very, very creepy business involving a pram. I shouldn't have been surprised when I found out it was directed by Timo Tjahjanto; I can't say it redeems the movie or anything, but it's a lot of fun.

 The last real segment finishes off Adam's story - it gets a few nice images, an extremely shit Scanners-style headsplosion (CGI, sadly), and some effective nastiness, but especially compared to its strong opening, it's a bit of a disappointment.

 Then there's a cool bit of credits, and a surprise fourth mini-story featuring a couple of scientists (Georgina Blackledge and Dare Emmanuel) who gave some exposition as talking heads early in the movie. I love this sort of formal experimentation, but unfortunately the short is completely disposable, a hollow non-story with a poorly rendered gory finale.

 So... this one's a bust, sorry. It got made by some of the same brains behind Doors, which came out two years later, including the Boulderlight production company, Brad Mishka, and creator Chris White. They'd get it much better on their second attempt, which for me merits a qualified recommendation- this one's not really worth a watch despite Tjahjanto's best efforts.

No One Will Save You

 M. Night Shyamalan famously tried to milk suspense out of an alien invasion from your conspiracy-standard grey aliens. Successfully, even - the problem with Signs wasn't the threat, it was the extremely writerly conceits Shyamalan ballasted his script with. Because a doomsday scenario isn't enough to keep viewers engaged, I guess.

 Two decades later we get another movie that attempts the exact same thing... and fails for pretty much the exact same reasons.

 Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives alone in a big old house in the outskirts of a small town. She seems happy, except for her mom being dead and some unspecified trauma. Perky, enthusiastic, and... well, a little too quirky, to be honest, but that's mainly down to the film's gimmick: there are barely any spoken lines at all, so to compensate Dever is directed to emote like there's no tomorrow. The few times anyone does talk, it's way down in the mix, almost unintelligible.

 Brynn's exaggerated, cartoonily upbeat demeanor only lasts until her first interaction with a neighbour (and, it's implied not too subtly, potential crush), who returns a friendly wave with a similarly over-emoted, withering look of disgust. Brynn deflates in a way that all but demands a sad trombone playing in the background.

 As it quickly becomes apparent, Brynn is a social outcast - everyone in town hates her and makes no bones about it, despite her being friendly to a fault. This is, of course, is all part of her mystery trauma, clues as to its nature carefully parcelled out throughout the movie. It also explains the silence that smothers the whole movie; It's a cute, if glaringly obvious, conceit.

 The alien invasion happens on that same night. Brynn wakes up to some noise downstairs and finds a very noisy little grey man stumbling around. It's a pretty cool variation on a home invasion scene, especially when the alien reveals telekinetic powers. It does raise the same question Signs did - to wit, how the hell did these (space) clowns ever get to interstellar travel?*

 Brynn, plucky heroine that she is, survives the attack, and the next morning opts to get the hell out of Dodge - which reveals the next stage of the alien invasion in probably the movie's most effective scene. From there it's a series of confrontations with the greys, putting the poor woman through the wringer.

 Technically it's very well shot, with writer/director Brian Duffield providing a few tense, well paced sequences and some cleverly blocked shots. The beautiful cinematography comes courtesy of (hello again!) Aaron Morton. The effects are excusably shoddy for a low-budget picture like this, with some nice, weird imagery and fun variations on standard alien iconography offsetting some pretty dodgy physicality in the scuffles with the monsters and terrible-looking effects for things wriggling under the skin (to be fair, that's a type of effect that's defeated much better-funded movies). The practical effects fare better, with some clever use of lighting to depict future technology.

 Dever's the best thing in the movie, and is wonderful as Brynn- She makes a hugely artificial character work through sheer effort and talent.

 Everything's in place for a nasty, effective little thriller... but ultimately it's all let down by the writing; The script is fucking terrible.

 I'm not going to treat it as a science fiction movie, because it's only wearing that skin to tell a... I guess a fable about self-forgiveness and the crushing weight of guilt and public censure intertwined with a straightforward run-away-from-invading-aliens yarn.

 As far as the plot goes the aliens are nicely inscrutable, even if their actions made me laugh a few times (they have a fondness for spelling out alien letters with their bodies like lanky, creepy cheerleaders). That's... well, not all good, but all good fun, and I like bold choices like that even if they don't work. What bothers me is that they are fucking incompetent, their technology inconsistent from one scene to the next, and their threat level varies arbitrarily from situation to situation depending on whatever is convenient for the script.

 Even worse is Brynn's story and the way it integrates with that plot - It's handled so cack-handedly it's hard to take seriously. And when the secret is out... don't get me wrong, it's a horrible thing to happen to anyone, but it's also deeply underwhelming. It completely fails to upend your understanding of the character in any way, and it renders her situation even more simplistic, the society that's shunned her for a decade that much more a caricature.
 The whole film is yoked to an idea that doesn't really work and has very little weight. Had her crime been less mundane, harder to forgive - something actually shocking, like, I dunno, a school shooting - maybe it'd be on to something. As it is, there's no substance, no impact.

 Why do the aliens find her situation so fascinating? I have no idea; I suspect it's just the script writing itself into a corner yet again. But at least it leads to a deeply contrived, but also really fun ending that finally shows a little of the wit that the rest of the movie sorely lacks.

* Also, how would they be able to take over any town in America? Brynn manages to take a couple down with her tiny frame, blind luck, and improvised weapons - what happens when they try to invade an average home in the ol' US of A, which I'm led to believe holds multiple John-Wick-style weapon lockers?

Doors / Portal

  Millions of sentient structures appear all over the planet. They're big stone-slate things, each one different, covered in constantly rippling living metal (think iron filings on a big magnet). Anyone who touches them disappears, and only sometimes come back... changed. Scientists somewhat unimaginatively call the structures doors (I assume because Portals is the title of a similar 2019 movie).

 The doors communicate with some, and millions of people just walk up to the doors of their own volition and go away elsewehere.

 The pretty cool conceit behind this movie is that the premise is communicated in the interstices, via text infodumps, background chatter and a 'wake up, sheeple!' style podcaster (David Hemphill). The meat of the movie is split in between four shorts, each one set at a specific point during this bizarre invasion, with a focus on the small picture that obscures as much as it illuminates, keeping things mysterious.

 The first segment, 'Lockdown', follows a bunch of high-schoolers stuck in detention right when the invasion begins. It's got a nice paranoid feel as the kids hear sirens and helicopters zoom by outside, their phones all going off at once from within a locked cupboard, and their professor abandons them. Pretty shitty of him, to be honest. But unfortunately it quickly loses steam and kind of flounders when the kids run face to face with one of the newly arrived doors.

 Then it's time for 'Knockers', which is the dumb name given to the people who go into doors to try to document everything within for science. This is dangerous, we learn, because most of these explorers succumb to some form of psychosis if they stay inside for longer than ten minutes or so.
It begins with some rather beautiful nature footage, as one of the knockers (Lina Esco) muses on her overbearing life partner (Josh Peck)... who's also a knocker. Very Terrence Mallik. But the main influence here is quickly revealed to be Alex Garland's Annihilation as they venture into the other side of a door that's bisected a beautiful woodland house. This is the clear standout story in the movie; The alternate house the party of knockers ventures into is eery, weird, and pretty cool, and while the relationship drama ends predictably, it's narratively satisfying in a way that the rest of the film doesn't really ever manage again.

 In 'Lamaj' we catch up with the deadbeat teacher who abandoned the kids in 'Lockdown' (Kyp Malone). He's gone full survivalist out in the woods and has managed to communicate with one of the Doors using some homebrew equipment. The Door is surprisingly friendly and communicative - it's all fairly interesting until he invites a fellow scientist and her plus one, and then some extremely clunky relationship drama ensues again.

 Finally it's Midnight Mike's turn, the guy who runs the podcast we've been listening to throughout the movie. He gets an interview with an expert on parallel realities (Darius Levanté), who acts like a spaced-out cult leader and provides some more information on what may be going on. Again, it's  kind of interesting - anything that reminds me of Childhood's End will make me perk up and pay attention - but dramatically it's completely inert, and that's a terrible way to wrap up the film.

 This is a tough movie to gauge. I really enjoyed its general vibe - and despite a very low budget, it always looks great, with 'Knockers' being again a highlight. I also dug the experimental nature of the filmmaking, which mixes in text, drone shots, and abstract images with its narrative with abandon. The scripts (all written by different people) vary wildly in quality, but none of them are particularly great, with some incredibly clunky exposition (the way characters just blurt out their motivations in Lamaj is near unforgivable). As science fiction none of it has any rigour, nor does it explore any of its ideas satisfactorily, but I do appreciate how much leeway it leaves by design for you to fill in between the lines.

 Brad Miska of V/H/S fame is one of the producers, and it's created by Chris White, but the driving force here seems to be Saman Kesh (who also directed 'Knockers'), with Jeff Desom and Dugan O'Neal taking care of 'Lockdown' and 'Lamaj' respectively.

 Much as I like a lot of it, overall it's a bit of an unsatisfying mess. An engaging unsatisfying mess.

Abigail

  Six thugs kidnap a young ballerina (Alisha Weir) and take her to a Resident-Evil-style mansion at the behest of one Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) with a promised reward of a few million each. Once the deed is done, they need to hole up there and babysit the kid for twenty-four hours until the ransom is paid.

 Simple. Except that, as the movie's trailers and marketing make abundantly clear, the kid is a vampire.

 Imagine how good a twist that'd be if it hadn't been spoiled months before the movie came out! It's easy to understand why they've done this - it'd be a hard sell otherwise. But it's harder to swallow that the movie acts as if it was a big twist for half an hour or so. And while the vampire isn't turning the screws, we're expected to give a shit about half a dozen of poorly written caricatures traipsing through sub-standard tough-guy (and gal) posturing and some of the lamest attempts at humor I've seen in a while.

 The crew are: Joey (Melissa Barrera), the soulful one who balks at inflicting violence on a little girl; Frank (Dan Stevens), a domineering asshole; Peter (Kevin Durand), a dimwit muscle-head and piss-poor comic relief; Rickles (William Catlett), a nice-guy sniper cypher; Sammy (Kathryn Newton), a perky hacker; And finally Dean (Angus Cloud), a mushmouth sleazebag. The actors are clearly having a lot of fun chewing the scenery, and sometimes they make it work - but the lines provided to them fall way short of the achingly clever, witty banter the script clearly thinks it's delivering.

 Things pick up considerably once the vampire finally bares its fangs and starts chasing these idiots around, acting for all purposes like a blood-splattered, murderous version of Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory. The script (by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick) remains pretty fucking dumb, but the mayhem is well choreographed and the gore is pleasingly over-the-top. It's pretty watchable until it gets to the home stretch and it starts piling up twists like the world's stupidest pancake stack, especially during a final confrontation against a new menace that pissed away any goodwill the film had accrued up to that point.

 Directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin (who did segments for V/H/S and Southbound, and then cashed in their success with their excellent feature debut Ready Or Not to do a couple of Scream sequels) bring the movie to life whenever the undead menace is prowling (it's never scary, which is par for the course in horror comedies, but the action is well staged) but don't really do enough to elevate the shitty script in its slower moments. Oh well - at least they (and DP Aaron Morton, who's been pretty busy between this and First Omen) make some of the scenes look pretty good, almost monochrome. Some are sepia, but one of the exterior shots is all subdued pinks, which I thought was cool and unusual outside of a Miami scene.

 They also give (an abbreviated version of) Blood and Tears an airing in an appropriately bizarre dance number - I know she's rich, but It's still pretty impressive how Abigail got a hold of a shellac edition of Danzig II for her gramophone.

 It's hard to criticise a movie that's clearly going for 'dumb fun' for being overtly stupid, even when that equation leans 90% dumb and 10% fun. But there's a point where cheap contrivances, plot holes and hoary dialog start reeking of half-arsedness, and this movie crosses that threshold very early on; I only have myself to blame for the mild annoyance, because it was patently clear from the trailer that the writing would be terrible. 

The First Omen

  Like probably a lot of people my age, easy access on TV meant I watched The Omen early and often. I don't think it was particularly formative (embarrassingly, the killer cat in Uninvited featured a lot more in my nightmares than anything lil' Damien and his satanic rottweilers ever got up to), but its emphasis and slow build up to its bizarre deaths and general bleakness must have fucked me up somehow, even if I have next to zero nostalgia for it.

 And now, thanks to god knows what satanic shenanigans, we finally get a prequel answering a bunch of questions no one asked themselves in the intervening forty-eight years. Maybe they'll try to remake the original again in a couple of years in time for its fiftieth anniversary.

 If nothing else, it's a movie that gets The Omen at a fundamental level, but isn't afraid to have a lot of fun with it too. Witness the prelude to the movie, where two priests -father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, whose voice gave the subwoofers at the cinema a pretty good workout) and father Harris (Charles Dance) meet to discuss some Matters of Grave Import. We know Brennan survives to be in the 1976 movie, but as for the other guy... the film has a lot of fun building up to his death, slathering on tension and compounding it with multiple shots of rickety scaffolding and stained-glass windows being hoisted high up by cranes. And when the inevitable death comes, it's both gruesome and slyly funny.

 But it's not time for Brenan yet - he's just a supporting character. The protagonist is Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American orphan who arrives in Rome to take her vows under the auspices of Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy).

 Margaret is to work at a church-run orphanage under the careful watch of sister Silva (Sonia Braga), and boards with Luz (Maria Caballero), a smoking, sexy novitiate who seems cool and goes out clubbing every night.

 Things settle into your usual horror-movie-nunnery rhythms quickly; Margaret is a hit with the (adorable) Italian girls she's looking after, and quickly develops a special bond with social castaway Carlita (Nicole Sorace) who's constantly locked in her room for bad behaviour.

 At night, Luz takes her out on a night of debauchery, so it's not all bad. And of course, strange incidents begin to mount: A nun hangs herself in a direct reference to the original Omen (and also sets herself on fire and breaks a window while doing it - it's 2024, a straight hanging would be too quaint!), Margaret observes some shady goings on with the senior nuns, there's a horrifying birth scene, that sort of thing.

 So when father Brennan returns from the prologue and warns Margaret that something is horribly wrong, it doesn't take much convincing before she's looking for clues about some sort of horrific satanic conspiracy surrounding her ward Carlita. One thing leads to another- in this case, a series of pretty effective, gruesome scenes with an emphasis on body horror, and a deluge of clumsily dosed exposition.

 Yes, it's predictable, and having to contort to the shape of a prequel to a movie that seriously didn't need one to begin with hurts it a lot. The shape of its narrative is bent out of whack, and while the mystery starts out being compelling, it's easy to see where the pieces will fall, leaving an obvious twist that leads to the foreordained conclusion - and the way the script (by Tim Smith, Director Arkasha Stevenson and Steve Thomas) cheekily subverts it - an oddly underwhelming experience.

 So while The First Omen's story is a bit of a bust, it's full of likeable characters and indelible images. Director Arkasha Stevenson and her cinematographer Aaron Morton craft a lusty, creepy, atmospheric and often gorgeous movie that's highly horror-literate (check out those references to Rosemary's Baby and Possession!). It's not perfect - there are a few too many cheesy jump scares, some dodgy effects, and the big supposedly horrific aftermath to a car accident is handled so ineptly that it had most of the people at the theater I saw this on laughing out loud, which is probably not the intended reaction. But mostly it succeeds, and a couple of standout sequences manage a ridiculous level of intensity.

An eye or a mouth? Guessing the second, based on the prominence of a medieval picture of Satan devouring a fool later. In any case, it looks amazing.

 The themes are strong, if a bit blunt, especially with regards to women's rights over their own bodies; The scenes where they're most made manifest correspond almost one-to-one to the film's best, most harrowing moments. It stumbles when trying to update the original movie's very '70s paranoia for modern audiences (who will probably, and justifiably, tend to mistrust anyone belonging to the catholic church anyways) in a  deeply stupid retroactive change to the series' conspiracy trappings. Yes, making a modern-day omen was always going to be an uphill battle, but I'm not about to cut them some slack for a fight they picked.

 Nell Tiger Free is a highlight - not that you could tell from her subdued performance, but her Possession-like freakout is towering. Ineson is as likeable (and his voice as uncanny) as ever, and Braga and Nighy are the consummate professionals they've ever been, even if they don't really get a chance to show the young ones how it's done. I found Mark Korven's soundtrack occasionally annoying, but it's faithful to Jerry Goldsmith's original score, and its attempts to replicate a theremin with human voices are pretty entertaining.

 More than anything else, Stevenson assured vision marks the addition of another talented, unique voice to the genre - based on this and The Dream Door season for Channel Zero, I can't wait to see what she does next.

The Ritual

Five middle-aged friends meet up in London, trying to work out where to go for a laddish holiday. One of them stumps for a hiking trip in Sweden, and is shot down by his mates, who want to go to Vegas or Amsterdam. While still deciding, two of them - Luke (Rafe Spall) and Rob (Paul Reid) duck into an off-license to buy some booze.

 Still talking about the trip, the two notice a terrified, wounded woman lying in a corner. Luke manages to hide behind the shelves just before two robbers come out from the back. There's a discussion, a scuffle, and then Rob is dead, with Luke petrified not two meters away, still in hiding, unable to act.

 Six months later, the remaining four are in Sweden, honoring their lost friend at a particularly scenic stretch of mountains.

 Luke is consumed by grief and guilt, and feels (correctly, it turns out) judged by the others. Hutch (Robert James-Collier) is the most gregarious, trying to keep the group together and insisting that they're having fun; Phil (Arsher Ali) is mostly quiet, and Dom (Sam Troughton) is the standard-issue asshole of the group. The way others complain about him when he's out of earshot is pretty amusing, and the dynamic felt pretty realistic to me.

 No one except Hutch seems very happy with the hike, and things get complicated quickly when Dom has a fall and twists his leg. Dreading the long trek to the next shelter with Dom complaining every other step, Hutch decides to take a shortcut through a wooded valley. They find a gutted deer strung up on high on the trees (hey, that looks familiar!) and still press on.

 Before you can say 'cabin in the woods'... that's exactly what they run into. A derelict one with a creepy antlered pagan idol in the second floor; but it's raining outside, so the group decides to bunk up inside anyways.

 Bad choice; they all wake up screaming the next day, wrapped up in nightmares. Luke finds himself outside (after a pretty nifty dream where the off-license mixes with the forest- a cool bit of imagery that keeps reoccurring throughout the movie) with a strange wound in his chest, Dom is near catatonic, Hutch's pissed himself, and poor Phil is discovered upstairs, naked, prostrated in front of the idol. Should make for a fun war story back at home; "It was just like that time in Vegas!"

 Except that, you know, this is a horror movie, so they probably won't make it back. Spoilers, probably.

 Luke keeps seeing something out in the forest, a big and nasty something that at some point is going to get tired of just toying with our hapless hikers. After an hour or so of careful setup, the movie finally pulls out its claws and goes nuts, to good effect. It's not entirely successful, but there's a respectable amount of mayhem and weirdness.

 The script by Joe Barton (adapting a novel by Adam Nevill) is functional, with a decent ear for dialog and some interesting imagery. Luke's failure to act during Rob's death seems to be an addition for the movie, which makes sense because while it's seamlessly integrated into the events, it nonetheless feels a little extraneous and doesn't really add much to the proceeds. I'm glad they put it in, though, because Luke hallucinating bits of what Americans would call a drugstore into the middle of the woods, fluorescent lighting and all, makes for some amazing visuals. Barton also keeps any explanations mysterious, besides some vague mythological handwaving, which seems like the right choice.

 The effects are good. We do get a good look at the monster and luckily it's pretty great, though the film's budget doesn't really allow it to do as much as I'd like. We know it can uproot trees, for example, since the hikers witness the aftermath several times - but it never does it while the camera is on it. There's some pretty graphic gore, but not a huge amount. What's there is made all the more disturbing by how matter-of-fact it is; but the film's best and creepiest scenes are all down to set design.

 David Bruckner's proven to be a good director several times over - first with his segments on The Signal and the V/H/S series, then with The Night House and the recent Hellraiser reboot. I have my reservations with the latter two - especially Hellraiser 2022, but they're both interesting, well crafted and engaging; This one's no different. It looks as great as his movies usually do, but with Sweden's natural beauty in its corner (cinematographer: Andrew Shulkind).

 What I most admire about Bruckner is that while his movies are... a bit staid, to be brutally honest, he's got an appetite to portray a level of weirdness that feels missing from most horror at the budget levels he's been working with lately. Whether it's the living void at the center of the Night House, Hellraiser's gorgeously batshit final scene, or a few bits and pieces here: the monster, an incredibly creepy (and way too short) scene in an attic- the guy's got one fucked-up imagination and a knack for pouring it successfully onto the screen. He's one of those directors I keep rooting for; One of these days, mark my words, things are going to come together just right and he's going to show us all how it's done.

The Miracle Warriors (Kei moon duen gap)

  A high ranking general and Kung Fu instructor for the royal army (Eddie Ko) secretly marries a Han woman. This being the Quing dynasty, once the... well, I think it's supposed to be the emperor (the subs disagree and call him king) finds out about it, he calls the general to court and orders him to kill his poor wife; The Manchu and Han lines must not cross.

 The general refuses, and when the woman is killed anyway, he goes nuts and starts killing the imperial guard- which I believe is a pretty serious faux pas in court etiquette. When he raises his sword against the emperor, evil warlock bat (Yuen Shun-yi) swoops in from the rafters (as you do) and... gets the general to fight against a cutesy mime in a vase who uses paper swords.

 This movie, by the way, is amazing. Also, fucking nuts.

 The general barely escapes by taking the emperor's son hostage; however, the royal scion accidentally dies during the escape.

 Years later, the general resurfaces in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. He's adopted a kid, Shu-kan (who grows up to be Yuen Yat-cho), and gifts him the emperor son's necklace; No way that's going to come back later in the story, right? In any case, years after the fiasco at the emperor's court, the general drunkenly blows his cover, resulting in a bunch of assassins coming after his (and Shu-kan's) head.

 The first attempt on his life is that old standard, the wire dropped from the ceiling with a drop of poison running along its length. The general discovers it and in the ensuing fight kicks all of the assassin's asses, but he's left blind after his face is burnt.

 Young Shu-kan goes for help, and runs into a previously established pair of sorcerers - an old man (Bryan Leung) and old woman (played by Woo-ping's brother, Yuen Cheung-yan) who live in a house divided and constantly engage in looney-tunes-style martial arts and magical pranks against each other. They take pity on the kid and give him some medicine for his master after he braves a few optical illusions at their place.

 The medicine works, but the cure is short-lived as sorcerer bat appears and kills the general. He plans to forge the boy into an impostor under his control, but Shu-kan escapes and is taken in by the old sorcerous couple.

  Sorcerer Bat (I will never get tired of typing that) is not deterred; he casts himself Mission:Impossible-style masks and manages to kill the old woman with trickery. The old man doesn't fall for it, but to it's clear that bat in not going away any time soon. So he sends Shu-kan to a sort of sorcerer Olympics, where if he wins he will be granted supreme command which he can use to order Bat to fuck off. And you can bet sorcerer Bat's going to try and sabotage that plan.

 There's not a lot of movies out there as full of invention and wild ideas as Miracle Fighters - and with master Yuen Woo-ping at the helm, they work beautifully. On the negative side, it's an early eighties Chinese comedy, with all the corny slapstick and broad humor that entails. There isn't that much offensive stuff, save for an unfortunate gay caricature - even the one fart joke is extremely funny - but there is so much manic mugging...

 It might also be too casually cruel for some kids at a couple of points.

 On the positive side: none of its bad qualities matter. The film is an absolute delight, and even if the more up-front humor fails, there are still a ton of great jokes left; I wish I could share with you one sorcerer's hair-brained attempt to retrieve a key from a bat of boiling oil with his pet fish. "I die before you, my boss!"

 In the world of miracle fighters, all - or the vast majority - of magic is achieved with trickery, even when said trickery is based on cartoon physics. So it's always lovely to see what Woo-ping manages to pull off, and even if it sometimes the budget restrictions show through, it feels thematic somehow, and part of the movie's more than considerable charm. There's a fight with a wooden building block automaton, tons of infractions against the laws of physics, a few fights where dummy body parts are used to great effect, optical illusions, phantasm-style killer spinning tops, a cat's cradle combat... the list goes on, and on and on.
 There's quite a few fights, too, of course - all rapid-fire and precisely choreographed. I adored this one when I was a kid and it's just as much of a joy to watch as an adult.

 It's unfortunate, then, that the film is pretty ugly to look at. The cheapness of the sets and the artlesness of the filmmaking stick out like a sore thumb - again, not a deal breaker, and probably more due to production constraints than to Woo-Ping's direction, who already had much better-looking movies like Drunken Master under his belt. He's directed his share of classics, before and since, but none get quite as crazy as this one does.

The Guest

 Before writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard completely missed the point of The Blair Witch Project and moved on to make a couple of silly american Kaiju movies, they put out a couple of pretty cool horror movies and early contributions to the V/H/S series. Out of all of them my favorite is 2014's The Guest, which sort of straddles the line between their nastier slasher films and the more over-the-top stuff that followed by way of a pastiche of gritty, mid-budget '80s genre stuff.

 As a homage, it's an unqualified success - it really feels like a relic from that time, to the point where it's a bit jarring when someone pulls out a laptop to burn a CD mixtape (which is already a time capsule in its own right; Ugh, I feel old). But the movie's neatest trick is that it wrangles all of its influences to power a really fun, knowingly silly story played (at least until the very final line) with a completely straight face.

 The Petersons - particularly mom (Sheila Kelley) and dad (Leland Orser) - are still mourning their son Caleb, lost in combat somewhere the Middle East.
 Enter David Collins (Dan Stevens), who pops up unannounced on their front door one fine summer day; David was a friend of Caleb's, and he's following up on a promise to check in on his family.

 Mom is immediately won over and invites him to stay over a few days as a houseguest. Dad takes a tiny bit more convincing, but David proves so effortlessly charming that he's soon confiding his office troubles with him over drinks.

 Luke, the troubled son (Brendan Meyer), takes to him quickly - especially after he beats up his high-school bullies in a hilarious, brutal bar brawl. That leaves Anna (Maika Monroe), the adult daughter, who tries to be wary of him for a while... and is soon making him a mixtape.

 And it makes sense; David has the larger-than-life looks and charisma of Dan Stevens. But as soon as no one's around, he switches off and stares off into the distance. It's a brilliant, funny portrayal of sociopathy, and the first time I watched had me wondering if the movie was going to go into The Terminator sci-fi territory. Not quite... but almost.

 The movie is nearly half-done before David kills some people on-screen, and the movie brilliantly keeps his motivations and plan fuzzy. It's a moot point, anyhow, as when the military find out where he is and send a team of mercenaries headed by the great, late Lance Reddick, those plans are scuppered. The movie briefly shifts gears from thriller into action territory, before settling in for a more intimate, blood-soaked finale which, OK, does pay its respects to Cameron.

 It's a brilliant mish-mash, convincing in any of the disguises it dons. The thriller aspects are suitably outrageous (love David's sage counsel to Luke), and the action is meaty and knows to show shell the casings from a light machinegun bouncing in slow motion on the dusty floor; Incidentally, I really miss when low-ish-budget stuff like this could still use explosives to depict bullet hits on a house and not CGI sparks and dust puffs.

 The cinematography (by Robby Baumgartner)is great and unshowy, and the script manages to get a few interesting locations. The acting's really good across the board, with Stevens and Monroe stealing the show.

 The film's secret weapon is the soundtrack - excellent synth-driven original music from Steve Moore, and a bunch of goth and goth-adjacent rock from the 80s, which do as good a job of positioning the movie as the plot devices and unfussy action; it's set in a version of the modern world in which young people really seem to be into Front 242, and Anna can be a fan of Clan of Ximox, Sisters of Mercy and Love and Rockets. A key scene is scored to the opening of Clan of Ximox's A Day, which is as cool a music choice as you can manage.

 Unlike most of the nostalgia-fuelled films of the last couple of decades, The Guest feels more like it could sit comfortably among its influences rather than just stare at them from a distance; I've filed it away in my mind next to The Hitcher, in all its (Roy?) batty glory. And that's really high praise, dammit!

Monkey Man

 Calling it John Wick in Mumbai might seem reductive and lazy, but Monkey Man - Dev Patel's action vehicle and directorial debut - openly, consciously courts the comparison. Openly when a gun dealer tries to sell him 'John Wick's gun' (which Patel's character snubs for... a snub-nosed .38), slightly more quietly in its moody shots of inner-city squalor, wardrobe choices, and carefully choreographed violence.

 It's always clear, though, that it comes from a place of love and enthusiasm. Besides Chad Stahelski's opus, there are multiple references to Nicholas Winding Refn, a little the Raid, a little Villainess... maybe a even a teeny tiny bit of Polite Society in a fight where flowing traditional hindi dresses are a visual highlight.

 And it's not just the action; Patel and his DP Sharone Meir fill the film to bursting with memorable images and lovely sequences such as a stolen wallet's journey from hand to hand across the busy streets, a psychedelic interlude with mythological echoes, or commentary as the film cuts away to the more unfortunate (most memorably when a Tuk-Tuk cab tears across the road, disturbing a family sleeping in an alley on a cardboard mattress). And it never really comes across as disjointed - maybe a little overstuffed, but mostly just exuberant, as if Patel is finally getting to let out a thousand bottled-up ideas.

 Patel also writes (along with Paul Angunawela and John Collee) and stars, of course, as Bobby - a young Indian nobody who bides his time fighting in underground tournaments hosted by Sharlto Copley while he patiently positions himself at the (menial) employ of a pimp (Ashwini Kalsekar) who runs a successful club catering to the rich and powerful.

 Bobby's plan is to get close enough to get revenge on Rana (Sikandar Kher), the police captain who murdered his mother and torched his jungle village. Once everything lines up, with the help of a sleazy crook named Alphonse (Pitobash), it leads to the first of the film's action sequences - a series of scenes where a botched assassination attempt leads to an exhilarating running battle across the club, a neighboring low-rent whorehouse and then the city streets. Bobby escapes, just barely, and is taken in by an order of marginalized, transgender monks.

 This leads to a lovely, kick-ass rendition of a standard action movie beat: the protagonist being nursed back to health at a place of healing, confronting his past and getting his mojo back in time for a second attempt. The montages featuring a cool, percussion-led training style (helped along by Zakir Hussain) are very original and worth the price of admission alone. From there it's a straight shot to a final confrontation.

 The structure of the script is pretty elegant; there are only two real action sequences, if you ignore a tournament fight, and everything else is the lead up to them, the second time around with a realigned focus. Another lovely touch - the first set of fights is shot much more chaotically, with close ups edited together in short cuts that sometimes make the action a little bit (but not too) confusing, while the final action scenes are made up of longer takes with the camera capturing the action much more clearly. A really fun concept that lets Patel and his stunt team (fight coordinator: Brahim Chab) indulge in very different styles even before you take into account the varied settings, gimmicks and lighting and colour schemes. It does mean that the first action scene isn't that great, but it fives the film a sense of progression.

 I do have a pretty major problem with the ending, which I found underwhelming for a variety of reasons. Can't really discuss any of them without spoilers - I'll just say that despite a spiritual awakening things ultimately end up about it still being a very selfish (and counterproductive in the bigger scheme of things) revenge story. I'd be fine with that if it weren't completely at odds with the film's openly political stance and the tone of its ending*.

 However. The acting is superb, with Patel giving an enormously magnetic performance and lending a surprising amount of physical power to the fights - the guy can seriously sell a punch! The pacing is excellent, very rhythmical, and along with the dazzling variety to the film's visuals, the colorful characters, and a great soundtrack (by Jed Kurzel) had me completely engaged for the duration. There's a very good boy who gets a creative and funny role in Bobby's revenge, and some great, unexpected gags sprinkled throughout the movie.

 A poor ending will always leave an outsized impression, and I don't want to let it sour me on this  movie. I suspect this will grow on me on rewatches, and it's definitely made me excited for whatever Patel chooses to direct next.

*: OK, Spoilers - seriously, don't read this until you've seen the movie: What do you think will happen after an apparent terrorist kills a beloved, powerful religious figure and a (seemingly upright) police captain who were publicly supporting the political right-wing party that's fully on-board with the systemic horrors the movie is railing against?

 Even the warrior monk's involvement is going to end in tragedy. Never mind that they have such a perfunctory showing that they might as well have sit this all out. Oh well, at least they got a lovely scene.

Civil War

 It's the near future, and the US is at war against itself again. Several states (California, Texas, Miami are mentioned) have seceded and formed a coalition, and are advancing against the remaining forces loyal to the president at Washington D.C. Things are not looking good for the commander in chief (Nick Offerman), whom no one seems to like much and is serving his third term in office.

 The war is ending, and the capitol is due to be invaded at any moment. Two journalists - Reuters correspondent Joel (Wagner Moura) and legendary war photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) decide to go where the action is - but their goal is not just the front lines; They want to cross them and get an interview with the president himself, who's been known to treat the press as enemy combatants.

 They're joined by old hand Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young photographer who idolizes Lee, and off they go on a road trip through war-torn America, running into all sorts of encounters on the way until an action-packed finale at the Capitol. The crew come under fire multiple times, run into some colleagues, find an enclave weirdly untouched by the nation-wide chaos, encounter war-time atrocities, and have time to bond at refugee and army camps.

 It's an anti-war film. That's something Truffaut supposedly said was impossible, and to be honest, this movie yet again proves him right; You can't have visceral gunfights like these or, say, an Apache purring down a city street and pulverizing half a building without it being exiting. But as good as the action is it's also intense, grim as hell, often upsetting, and the human cost is front and center.

 Garland's never really had a budget this big to play with, but his work is as assured as ever, and along with his regular DP Rob Hardy, he's created a film that can be as beautiful as it can be harrowing. The sound design is phenomenal - there are some bizarre, dislocating needle drops every now and then, but I took them to be of a piece with the journalists' partial detachment from the action they're embedded in.

 Meanwhile the script (also by Garland) has engaging characters and a mournful tone that he deflates every now and then with some surrealist situations and wry humour. Really clever stuff, too, like a joke about Canadian currency that's... well, it's not actually a joke if you think about it, but it's still very funny.

 The acting is excellent; Dunst may not have a huge range, but she's great at what she does, McKinley Henderson is loveable as fuck, and Moura and Spaeny are great company as well. Jesse Plemons, of all people, almost steals the movie with a truly chilling turn - I guess officer Gary really lost it after the militia service curtailed his game nights.

Let's be honest, all the warning signs were there.

 It'd be ridiculous to say the film is not political - you can't do a movie about a modern civil war without it being political, much less after the election riots debacle. But wonder of wonders, Garland keeps it as close to apolitical as he possibly can: it's thoroughly non-partisan, avoids mapping any of the sides in its fictional conflict to any ideology, and it stands resolutely fictional in its premise.

 So what is it about? Well, people will read into it what they will, but I think the movie itself makes itself clear when Lee ponders (and I'm paraphrasing here, so apologies in advance) that whenever she sent photographs from a warzone, she felt like she was voicing a warning. "But here we are."

 It's a Brit looking at America from outside and saying: "let's make sure we never get there, OK?

 We worry about you guys sometimes."

Stake Land 2 / The Stakelander

  The thing with happy endings is that they stop being endings as soon as it's time for a sequel. And in the world of Stake Land, happiness has a way of not lasting.

 Poor Martin (Connor Paolo) finds this out the hard way; After settling down in New Eden and raising a family, a new menace duly pops up and wipes them all out, leaving him the only survivor. The brotherhood, the first film's nation of religious freaks, have a new messiah in the Mother (Kristina Hughes), a powerful, intelligent vampire that can control her fellow, more feral undead, and she's the one Martin decides to take revenge on.

 He can't do it alone, so heads south again into the Stake Lands (formerly the US) to look for the person who helped him get even the last time his family was massacred: the vampire hunter known as Mister (Nick Damici, who also wrote the script). He doesn't prove to be too hard to find; As someone cheekily observes, Mister is a legend. He is legend - get it?

 The years have been rough on the land, eroding the more hopeful aspects that were such bright spots in the first movie and leaving behind a much meaner, but sadly standard-issue vision of the post-apocalypse in their wake; That's quickly apparent when Martin's first encounters feature such standards as the cannibal trap and a Thunderdome-like arena where captives are made to fight to the death.

 It's in that combat arena where Martin finally finds Mister. They quickly team up, along with a feral woman (Laura Abramsen). They have some scuffles with the brotherhood, team up with some former associates of Mister's (A.C Peterson and Steven Williams), and make a last stand against the forces of the brotherhood and the Mother, whose motivations are a little bit more involved than it first appeared.

 Stake Land 2 is still not an action movie - the fights are a little on the perfunctory side- but it's much more action-focused than the first one, and it's structured as such. After some dodgy scripting it finds its feet and comes up with some decent wrinkles for its story - it's good to spend more time with Martin and Mister, and the new batch of characters are all very likeable.

 It's a good sequel, ably helmed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (I saw they did this when I looked them up after watching their Significant Other - finding out there was a well-regarded sequel to Stake Land was a good consolation prize for watching that movie). It's not on the same level as the first, of course, but it's fun, does right by its characters, and the action is suitably brutal.

 I liked that the Mother behaves more like a traditional vampire while still being a bit feral - she has a fun way to travel by day (showcased in a very cheesy, but fun scene), and even wears a gothic-ish cloak at one point. The way the film chooses to evolve the setting does diminish what made the first movie special, though, even as it tries to recapture the magic with some wistful (and cornier) narration from Martin and loads of magic-hour wilderness footage.

 Oh, and there's a dead baby here as well. Guess it wouldn't be Steak Land without a murdered baby.

 In any case, it's all a moot point because they missed the chance to call it Stake Land 2: Stakelander. I'm not sure I have it in me to forgive them for that.

Shadows

  Alma (Mia Threapleton) and Alex (Lola Peticrew) live with their mother (Saskia Reeves) in a derelict hotel in the middle of the woods. An unspecified cataclysm has come to pass, making daylight dangerous for the girls due to some unspecified presence. Only the mother goes out to hunt, and even then, always at night time.

 They've staked out a pretty good life for themselves; Mother is a bit of a survivalist, so she's a good provider, and the hotel provides enough comfort and space for the two teens to explore and play.

 But all's not well at the Starlight Hotel; The younger one, Alex, chafes under Mother's strict discipline, getting Alma repeatedly into trouble. And Mother, always overprotective, becomes increasingly erratic and threatening as her control over the girls seems to wane.

 Italian/Irish co-production Shadows is a fairly straightforward... let's call it post-apocalyptic psychological thriller; There's something almost old-fashioned about it, a confident, unhurried pace that lets us spend time with the girls as events escalate towards an inevitable confrontation with their Mother. There's a couple of twists - one of them fairly easy to guess, the other one completely unnecessary, both of them unoriginal - but it's a satisfactory ending nonetheless.

 It's a slight movie that slightly overstays its welcome and doesn't really do a lot to imprint itself on memory, but it's very, very accomplished. The script (by Damiano Brué, Fabio Mollo and Vanessa Picciarelli) has a good feel for dialogue, rendering the teens likeable and lending tension to their fraught relationship with Mother. There's not a huge amount of psychological depth to these characters or their relationships, so it's a good thing that the three leads are more than up to the task of breathing life into them, with the siblings in particular sharing a great, lived-in chemistry; They easily carry the film.

 Director Carlo Lavagna carefully maps out their life in the hotel, and along with cinematographer James Mather imbues the exterior, both daytime and nighttime, with a sense of menace. They do experiment a couple of times with shots that try to capture the girls' subjective experience, with mixed results.

 Meanwhile the reedy soundtrack by Michele Braga, featuring lots of '70s-style atonal winds, further reinforces the film's classic feel.

Alien Addiction

  I normally try to avoid stoner comedies. If you've ever been sober around stoned people, you'd probably understand why; They find anything funny. For every Smiley Face or Harold & Kumar movie you get tons of quarter-assed shit like... I dunno- Dude, Where's My Car? or Your Highness, to give a couple high-profile examples; Lots of mugging, a high (ha!) concept, and tired, hacky juvenile humour.

 Case in point: 2018's Alien Addiction, which has the distinction of being the first Kiwi comedy that's completely failed to make me even chuckle a single. Fucking. Time.

...Yeah, this seems about right.

 Riko (Jimi Jackson) is a deadbeat stoner who spends his days getting high with his dimwit friends and getting up to sub-Beavis and Butthead shenanigans in the ass-end of New Zealand. The same ass-end where a couple of aliens have just crash-landed their UFO in; These two dress like bargain-bin cenobites and their puffy faces look a little like... remember the Terry Gilliam cartoon/collage segments in Flying Circus? Kind of like that, but with an ass in their forehead.

 These aliens have come to earth to... suck things up into a sort of high-tech bong and smoke them, as part of a science survey or something. They almost immediately run into a tourist taking a shit in the woods and, mistaking her turd for an offering, they blaze it up... and get high on it.

 In their subsequent hunt for non-metaphorical good shit, they run into Riko while he's masturbating in the shower. He ends up agreeing to act as their supplier, looking for ever more pungent shit. This somehow leads to Jacinta (JoJo Waaka), a very overweight woman whose shit the aliens get addicted to. Oh, and Jacinta has a sex drive, isn't that hilarious? Well, no, but the film disagrees to the point where there are almost as many "jokes" about that as there are about the aliens' quest for feces. Thomas Sainsbury pops up as some sort of Tabloid reporter hunting for the aliens later on, but sadly he's as unfunny as anything else in this film.

 As the plot above should make clear, this is a gleefully crude, offensive, juvenile movie. It's built around toilet humour and fat jokes - you know, the sort of thing people keep insisting 'wouldn't get made today'.  Given this example, that might have more to do with quality control than any type of wokeness.

 There's exactly one ingenious idea in the whole movie: at one point one of the characters tries to lure the aliens with stool samples, in a way that ineptly parallels the way Reese's Pieces were used in E.T. Other than that, it's all deeply lazy crap. It's so devoid of ideas that at several points the script just... gives up and just lets Riko mug or dance directly at the camera, something that never fails to get old almost immediately. Jackson seems like he may be fun to hang around with, but he sure as hell doesn't make material as turgid as this worth watching. The same goes for everyone else in this pretty much worthless film.

 As low-effort as... well, almost everything here is, writer/director Shae Sterling at least ensures that the film is competently shot, with lots of very crisp footage of its lovely New-Zealand setting - That's as much credit I'll give him, as his choice of compositions and comic timing is basic at best.

 This is probably ok to watch with chemical assistance, but then again, so are the Teletubbies.

Stake Land

 The first vampire we see in Stake Land is eating a baby, squeezing the juice out of it like a grapefruit. Fucking hell, Stake Land...

 The vampire in question has just wiped out teenager Martin's (Connor Paolo) whole family, including his baby brother/sister. As he flees the farmhouse, he runs into Mister (Nick Damici) who arms him and takes him back so he can at least get some revenge.

 Vampires openly own the night -  an I Am Legend situation, except that here they're completely feral. It's a nice change from the standard zombie apocalypse; They're mostly an individualistic threat, but much, much deadlier. Mister's become a wandering vampire hunter, which makes him a sort of rock star amongst the enclaves of survivors that dot the countryside. He takes Martin under his wing and gives him some training as they make their way northwards towards New Eden, a supposedly vampire-free zone.

 Unfortunately, to get there they need to go through lands controlled by a coalition of religious nuts who believe vampires are a part of God's plan. These guys are fucking despicable; They're introduced trying to rape a woman, and we're told they like ramming trucks full of vampires into other peoples' settlements. We get to see a particularly horrifying variation of that first-hand when they crash a party later. Assholes.

 Mister and Martin pick up some other travellers as they tread the line between undead and fundamentalist: A nun (Kelly McGillis), a pregnant girl (Danielle Harris), an ex-navy SEAL (Sean Nelson).

 Like so many post-apocalyptic stories, this is a road trip. Unlike many other such stories, things haven't completely gone to shit; there's a few human settlements not populated by assholes, and despite things being very, very bleak, manages to show glimmers of humanity and hope here and there, and a whole lot of natural beauty (DP Ryan Samul does a great job capturing it).

 The film's surfaces are so well realised that the relatively low budget doesn't register much - besides the great cinematography and set design the soundtrack, by Jeff Grace, is gorgeous.

 It's grim and ruthlessly cruel, but also surprisingly lyrical; The film felt fairly unique in a crowded field when it first came out in 2010, and it still holds some power now, even after years of The Walking Dead and multiple incarnations of The Last of Us (a game I'm sure was more than a little bit influenced by this). A lot of it is down to the complex, likeable characters and the actors who portray them - D'amici in particular is superb: badass, cynical and pragmatic, but not far gone enough to fail to recognize he may have shed too much of his humanity.

The nature of the vampires and their invasion is kept mysterious, but we get a good sense of the scope of things - mostly thanks to the SEAL's war stories; Likewise, Mister's hunting tips let us know there's various types of vampires out there, some of whom are harder to kill than others.

 There's some slightly corny narration courtesy of Martin, but otherwise the script (by director Jim Mickle and protagonist Nick Damici) maintains a light touch, letting the characters drive the action with a minimum of exposition. There's a tiny bit of action, but the film's actually better in its quiet moments; It's got a good bunch of people to share the road with.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

 Somewhere in Hollow Earth...

 There's a certain point where you just can't get annoyed at a movie for being stupid; It is what it is, and if you're watching it, you can only get mad at yourself.

 I've long lost hope for any of these Universal Monsterverse films to rise above idiocy, let alone over basic Saturday morning cartoon plotting. And in that sense, the new Godzilla x Kong (god, I feel stupid just typing that) doesn't disappoint: it's an absolute mess of dumb ideas clumsily hammered into a basic narrative that you can just about call a plot, if you squint. I can't imagine anyone ever calling it a good plot, though.

 No matter; it manages to do the bare minimum, which is to cram a lot of giant monsters bashing each others heads in, along with a healthy side of collateral damage. As a bonus, the amount of time devoted to the worthless human characters has been reduced; That's a distant next best option, next to writing interesting characters with compelling plotlines- but since that's clearly not going to happen, I'll take it.

 OK, let's get it over with. After the events of Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla was left in the surface, and Kong deep within the earth's crust in the verdant, megafauna-infested hollow earth - any other arrangement would lead to them coming to blows again.

 Kong's getting settled into his new life when a series of earthquakes reveal a hole that leads to a new stretch of land where he runs into other giant apes - including a mini-kong, whom we'll call Suko after his name in the credits. The trailer makes it seem groanworthy (all wide eyes and cute cooing sounds) but trust me, the way their meeting ends up going contains the film's only inspired (and very funny) idea. In any case, after a rough introduction, Kong conscripts Suko to guide him to Kong country, which ends up being a massive monkey Mordor ruled over by the ruthless Skar King, a spindly giant ape / petty tyrant asshole who keeps his tribe under his heel by using a crystal to mind-control a cute icy Pokemon-looking dragon thing. Bonus points for making Skar red, so whenever I saw him from the back, he kind of reminded me of an aggressive Elmo.

 They fight, of course, and Kong gets his ass kicked; He barely makes it out alive, with Suko's help.

 Meanwhile, on the surface, Godzilla senses a new threat, so he starts fighting other Kaijus to level up, much like a pimply teen would grind on a JRPG to get an ultimate weapon. And... honestly, that's it, that's Godzilla's plot for most of the movie. Hard to believe it only took three people (Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater) to write this!

 Finally, the least interesting part - the humans. This time around it's about a little girl (Kaylee Hottle) - the last survivor from Skull Island's Iwi natives - who picks up some sort of telepathic distress signal from hollow earth. Her adoptive mother (Rebecca Hall) mounts an expedition to try and track it down, along with an insufferable conspiracy theorist podcaster (Brian Tyree Henry) and a flamboyant Australian (Dan Stevens). After some misadventures they find the source of the distress call - the OG Iwi tribe, who live in a magical crystal kingdom and have a (sigh) prophecy about Mothra, one in which the little girl is the only hope. Mothra's only task? To convince Kong and Godzilla to work together to beat Skar, who honestly just never seems like the world-ending menace he's painted out to be. But there you go.

 So... yeah, the plot is absolute toss. Par for the course in the series. The saving grace is that the film is less than two hours long, and though the shitty story ensures the pacing is shot to hell, it's stuffed full of action: Godzilla fighting a bunch of other Kaijus and then falling asleep curled up like a kitten in the roman coliseum. Godzilla vs Kong vs the pyramids. Godzilla x Kong x Mothra against Skar and a bunch of his underlings. Kong vs a variety of megafauna.

 The spectacle side of things is fine. Only a few of the fights take place in the real world, so not that many cities get levelled. On the other hand, the visuals for hollow earth that aren't set in magic crystal city - where another landmass spreads overhead instead of the sky - are nonsensical but spectacular. With so much of the film focusing on Kong and the other completely digital creations, it ends up looking aggressively artificial - something that's exacerbated by a use of bright, saturated colors. It didn't wow me at any point, but it's not a bad aesthetic.

 Unfortunately, there's something to the way director Adam Wingard chooses his shots that seriously rubs me the wrong way. I would need to watch it again to put my finger on it, but there's an over-emphasis on reaction shots and on posturing that made me wince more than a few times.

 Similarly, even though the humans get less screen time, the film still feels the need to include them needlessly. It’s most egregious here when everyone in the human cast gets a cut away and a chance to offer running commentary on the fight when Godzilla and Kong arrive at Hollow Earth, every single one of their contributions inane and superfluous. It's not just pointless and condescendingly didactic, it hurts the flow of the action.

 It's silly to talk about acting in a movie like this where everyone is pitching their character to the rafters; Hall does a good job - she's one of those actresses that will always elevate whatever she does, and the only one who comes out of this with any dignity. Hottle is fine in a very wish-fulfilment-y, kiddie film role. I normally like Stevens, but his character reeks of desperation. He lends his Kaiju vet a lot of his likeability, but the character feels like one of those '90s cartoon characters that strained to be cool and hip. A Poochie.

 That leaves the most annoying role to poor Brian Tyree Henry, who's absolutely dire. Through no fault of his own - I can't imagine any actor breathing life to a creation so artificial... call him a Ronald Emmerich character.

 In fact, this is a pretty Ronald Emmerich movie, just slightly less dumb, slightly less histrionic. Thanks to a surplus of the old monster mash, it remains just on the right side of stupid, and as unessential as it gets.