Sideworld: Damnation Village

 The obscure, but influential sci-fi author Kilgore Trout postulated that ghosts are five-dimensional objects that tend to follow channels through space. The main channel that passes through earth skewers it right through the British islands, and that's the reason why no other country is as haunted as we are.
 The third Sideworld movie for some reason fails to mention that, but it does go into the just as valid theory of place memory. The series was already fairly UK-centric, and this entry doubles down on that.

 These films are extremely low-budget documentaries featuring a bunch of spooky folklore with a shared theme (for this one, haunted UK villages), on-site footage overlain with public-domain art, and a constant narration from director George Popov, who's a pleasant host even when his script (again by Jonathan Russell) gets a bit lurid.

 There's two problems with this one; the first is that it falls into the trap of just enumerating hauntings, and to be honest that's not nearly as interesting as the deep dive (ho ho ho) the previous movie took into spooky sea stories. It's a problem with the format, I guess, but that doesn't make it any less of a problem. The ghost stories assembled here just fail to engage.

 The other, bigger problem is that they take the fictional Derring Woods Massacre - an almost decade-old creepypasta - and present it as fact. That's... I mean, OK, now you're making folk horror, not a proper documentary, and that's fine. But now you've got me doubting everything you say from now on... and also retroactively. Or I guess you saw this online and you were fooled into believing it was true. Neither does your credibility any favours.

 As for the rest... it's fine. The movie divides its time between the standard "UK's most haunted places!", as seen in many ghost-hunter podcasts and TV shows. The first is Pluckley, which includes the bullshit I just mentioned above. Then it moves to Prestbury, which includes a couple of interesting asides into the pseudo-scientific theory of place memory and the Black Abbott haunting. The final segment is all about the town of Eyam, and it's the most interesting one as it's all about the village's historic response to the black plague back in 1665-66: they went into voluntary isolation, which was fairly unheard of at the time. Russell and Popov dig up some interesting material and are pretty respectful - there's nary a mention of any supernatural stuff. By far the highlight of the movie.

 It'd be easier to recommend if it wasn't for that Derring Woods faux-pas. But even without it, it's still a bit of a misfire.

Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat

  At some unspecified time (somewhere around the fifties, maybe), a large cabal of vampires have settled in Purgatory, an old abandoned mining town in the middle of the American desert. Led by the mysterious Count Mardulak (David Carradine), they're using modern technology - UV protection cream, sunglasses, and a synthetic blood replacement - to be able to walk along humans during the day and to avoid having to eat them. Their intentions are pure.
 Change is never easy, though, so of course you have some fucking conservatives led by Jefferson (John Ireland) out to ruin things for everyone, planning a violent coup and trying to get everyone to go back to their old murderous ways.

 That'd be enough for any movie to deal with, but Sundown adds a bunch of regular humans who happen to come to town on the eve of the uprising, each one of which with their own stories and arcs.
 It could work, but then you have to factor in that this is an Anthony Hickox movie - so it ends up being a mess. A fun mess, as usual, but the film is spread so thin and its sense of humour is so goofy that it'd be really hard to argue that it is in any shape or form... you know, good. Another agreeable blast of weirdness from a director whose most professional outing* remains, uh, Hellraiser 3.

That's a pretty un-chiropterous mane of hair.

 The first half of the movie establishes the town of Purgatory, which is a fun conceit: there's a trio of oddball vampire elders out on the town's only approach who give warning if any humans are headed in. Once the town goes into alert everyone goes out during the day to pretend being human - they sit at tables in the diner playing with food they can't eat, man the stores, pretend to be out on daily business.
 It doesn't work out all that well, though - the first visitor, an obnoxious yuppie type, gets his head knocked off when he annoys one of the lookouts (M. Emmett Walsh), leading to a small subplot when a couple of the dead guy's friends witness the murder.
 Then the Harrisons arrive: The father (Jim Metzier) was summoned to town to work out some kinks in the artificial blood plant production line, and he brings along his wife (Morgan Brittany) and two children. His wife used to date a local vampire played with hammy relish by Maxwell Caulfield, a frat/yuppie douchebag caricature who's still got designs on his old flame. A surprising amount of time is spent on these four and their deeply crappy drama.
 Last but not least is Bruce Campbell, who arrives alone and immediately catches the eye of a local beauty (Deborah Foreman) - Ok, it's fucking Bruce Campbell, but here he's playing an extremely dorky, comically ineffectual idiot. He even wears a bowtie! I get that there aren't a lot of eligible vampires around, but come on, lady, you can do better.

 There's quite a bit of clumsy exposition to be delivered, a lot of goofy humor and a fairly... well, friendly tone - even when compared to the Waxworks movies, this is even less of a horror movie. The main big genre that the comedy channels is westerns, instead: the backdrops, a lot of the actors, the score (by Richard Stone), and especially the final act.
 For Jefferson has been raising an army of fledgeling vampires, and has armed them with guns that fire wooden-tipped bullets. So the last half hour or so of the film is an extended action sequence where they roll into town and stage their coup.

 It's not good action - basically just people standing around, shooting at each other. One of the big set pieces takes place in the factory, which might as well be an empty warehouse. Lots of squibs, though, and it's fun enough watching it clumsily incorporate the resolution for its many subplots. It's messy as hell and sometimes borders on incompetent, but it's pretty charming and perfectly entertaining.
 There's some noise made about how all the older vampires that side with Mardulak are more physically powerful (that's why they went through the trouble to get the wooden bullets, to level the playing field). But it's all gun violence, all the time; a late climactic one-on-one confrontation ends up being a gun duel.

 The script (by John Burgess and Hickox) struggles with basic storytelling and fails to deliver jokes, opting instead for very hammy character moments. The biggest laugh in the movie comes when a vampire mob forms to feed on a couple of innocent humans - but two (human) little children pop up before they can pounce, so everyone looks away, starts shuffling their feet and whistling tunelessly. We're talking about twenty people doing that at the same time. It's very, very funny, but it should give you an idea of how corny the humor is. It also wrings some laughs from some endearingly shoddy claymation vampire bats - they keep their human hairdos and beards!
 Meanwhile, the acting is... well, the best you can say about it is that they were obviously having fun. It's all very cartoony; Caulfield is the most cringe-worthy, but it's not like Carradine and Campbell acquit themselves a whole lot better. A lot of the cast chose to return for some of Hickox's latter movies, though, and he famously dated Foreman for a few years- so yeah, everyone obviously had a good time.

 You can't accuse Sundown of lacking ambition or enthusiasm, and there's so much going on that it never outstays its welcome. This would be one of the final releases from Vestron, a studio/distributor that put out some legendary low-budget stuff during the eighties; It was one of the studio logos I was always happy to see pop up before a movie during my teen years.
 It's not a bad note to leave things on.

*: But definitely not his best

Sister Death (Hermana Muerte)

 I wasn't a huge fan of Verónica, but it had enough going for it that I ended up checking out writer/director Paco Plaza's prequel (written along with Jorge Guerricaechevarría). It's... well, it shares many of Verónica's problems, but it ends up being a far more interesting movie.

 Sister Death follows a very minor character from the first movie - the creepy... well, Sister Death, whose role was basically to be a spooky presence in the background and to dispense a tiny bit of exposition.
 Here we get to see her as a young Novitiate. Narcisa (Aria Bedmar) arrives at remote nunnery / school for girls with a bit of baggage; When she was a child, she received holy visions that made her a bit of a local celebrity.
 This fame impresses her new sisters (Maru Validivelso and Luisa Merelas), but young Narcisa is full of doubts; In confession, she admits that she is not sure what it is she saw, and yearns for some sort of confirmation.

 So when strange things start to happen - noises in the middle of the night, a chair falling over on its own accord - the novice latches onto it, thinking it's some sort of sign. The bumps in the dark, she learns from the children, are caused by the ghost of a girl who goes around drawing hangman doodles on the walls (that's this movie's version of the haunted toy trope, I guess). Narcisa befriends one of the kids who seems to be targeted by the haunting (Sara Roch) and investigates. It doesn't end well. She also starts having horrible - and deeply silly - waking nightmares.

 So far... not great. But then the third act kicks off with a total eclipse (in another one of the very mild references to Verónica) and the story switches tracks completely. The finale has some severe problems - the solution to the mystery the movie had been teasing is outright shown, not solved, the explanation fails to make sense of many of the weird happenings, and it all feels very disconnected from what came before. But... well, it does take Narcisa's character in an interesting direction, and it's a cool little series of events where time folds in on itself satisfyingly.

 From a script standpoint it kind of sucks, but still, it's better than anything that came before; I'm not going to complain too much.

 On the whole it's all right, and very well made; The cinematographer this time around is Daniel Fernández Abelló, and the 1:33 compositions are often beautiful. It's a luminous movie, with lots of play between stark sunlight and shadows and the convent, what with all the religious iconography, often makes for a very striking backdrop. It's very atmospheric and creepy.
 At least until it gets to the scares: while somewhat imaginative, they're... well, pretty damn ridiculous. For example: the falling chair is good foreshadowing, but it's not particularly scary. That doesn't stop the music and the visual language from trying to sell it as the most horrible thing ever. Same goes for the hangman doodles and a teleporting scissor - the less said about the constricting dress (the film's most on-the-nose bit of imagery), the better.

 The more overtly fantastic visions/nightmares are inventive, but cheesy as all hell and very, very stupid. Until the finale; Even then, it's not like the movie coheres and justifies itself, it's more like we suddenly find ourselves in a better, more interesting film.

 Verónica was a possession movie that did without religion and an exorcism. Its prequel moves further away from that subgenre - this is firmly a ghost story - but it's also got a healthy iconoclastic streak despite its sanctified trappings. I'm still not sold on the whole Verónica cinematic universe, but for now I remain cautiously interested.

The Lake Michigan Monster

   The Lake Michigan Monster is a choppy, charming home-made comedy about... well, the hunt for the titular monster. It covers for its limitations (a $7000 budget, cast of non-actors, etc.) with a very brisk script that keeps both gags and non-sequiturs coming at a regular clip and a style that mimics early black and white movies.

 Captain Seafield (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who also directs, co-writes and co-produces) is a relentlessly upbeat oddball who has sworn revenge on the beast that killed his father. To that end he gathers a team - a weapons expert (Erik West), a seaman (Daniel Long) and a sonar specialist (Beulah Peters as the excellently named Nedge Pepsi). They go through several poorly thought-out plans until a series of bizarre tragedies tear the team apart and force Seafield to continue the hunt on his own. Or rather, with unconventional help.

 The plot really is just an excuse to deliver a near-constant stream of absurdist jokes and bizarre twists. Along breakneck editing by Mike Cheslik (who also co-writes, did effects and co-produces) and a filming style that's aggressively artificial and entirely too happy to throw in visual curveballs, things don't ever get a chance to stagnate. Which is good, because while there's a ton of jokes and visual gags, only a few are solid - this is more of a mildly amusing movie than a funny one. It's very likeable, though.

 Style-and-substance-wise, it's heavily indebted to the films of Guy Maddin in both style and substance - though it's nowhere near as stylish, funny or weird as them. Still, it's slightly funnier and far more playful with form than Here Comes Hell (which came out the year after this); And taken on its own terms, it's an enthusiastic, enjoyably goofball movie.

God Told Me To

 A sniper climbs up a water tower high up in the New York skyline and starts shooting people with uncanny precision. Fourteen dead, despite the fact that he's using a "mail order rifle" with an uncalibrated scope. When Lieutenant Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) goes to try and talk him down, the shooter seems friendly enough - and when the lieutenant asks him why he's doing it, the amiable psycho replies "God told me to" and jumps off the building.

 More shootings follow, always started by normal people, always claiming they were divinely inspired. This peaks in an absolutely chilling scene - worth the price of admission alone - where a man cheerily describes how he murdered his family in an interview with the lieutenant. It's not a scary movie, but that scene is as horrific as anything I've seen in a while.
 As for the plot, our protagonist finds out that there's some sort of hippy hanging around the periphery of all these events, and chasing that lead takes him to some... pretty unexpected places. Writer/director/all-round-legend Larry Cohen was great at coming up with catchy, crazy premises, but I don't think I'm being unfair when I say he wasn't as good at developing the plots around them. His style, of which this movie is an excellent example, was to follow an insane premise to whichever batshit crazy destination it leads him to, which might not necessarily be the most cinematic or narratively satisfying route.

 It's firmly a genre movie - which genre it finally ends up settling on is actually a spoiler - but the film pays a lot of attention to its dramatic elements, especially where it concerns lt. Nicholas's relationships with his lover (Deborah Raffin)and his estranged wife (Sandy Dennis) and his beliefs.

 While less satirical than a lot of Cohen's output, it's still pretty playful; I mean, when one of the big-in-the-seventies books that inspired the script gets an oblique namecheck, well, you can't but help admire the director's balls.

 And just you wait until you see the film's sole latex special effects creation; I'd love to see the face of the prop sculptor when he got that commission.

 More interesting than good, which is still a good place to be because Cohen's engaging style carries the movie successfully - even when working with a pretty low budget (this is a New World Pictures release, after all). The filmmaking and scripting alternate between very accomplished and endearingly clunky, which is about par for the course with Cohen. I do think a lot of the shots look really good, and it's maybe a little more stylized than the rest of the movies I've seen of his; There's quite a few very atmospheric shots.

 So... yeah, this is a weird one, but firmly in the 'good weird' side of things; An extremely personal film that I can't see anyone else making in even a remotely similar way, willing to go exceedingly nuts when it needs to but tempered with a host of very human moments and a very likeable protagonist. 

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One

 For months on end before the release of the latest Mission Impossible, we were bombarded with featurettes on how Tom Cruise really had driven a motorcycle off a cliff in the alps. And good on him; The scene, in the final movie is a brilliant stunt, and knowing that there's very little trickery involved makes it that much more impressive. We've also found out since that that scene existed because Cruise really wanted to do it; the script in these movies is pretty malleable, so writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (along with co-writer Erik Jendresen) put things together so that it would happen.

 That makes so much sense to me. I've liked bits and pieces off a few of these latter Mission Impossibles - a stunt here, an action beat there - but if I have to be honest, I've found less and less to like about them as they've chugged along. To the point where I think the last few, including Dead Reckoning, are insufferable; Bloated, ponderous, poorly written messes, despite having a bunch of actors I really like playing likeable characters and some great action.

 And it's all down to these fucking pseudo-improvised scripts. They don't exist because someone wants to tell a story. They don't even exist because the franchise needs to continue, so people have sat down to figure out a story. They exist because Tom Cruise wants to drive a motorbike off a cliff; Everything else? Eh, we'll come up with something.

 The threat this time around is a rogue AI that's pretty much already infected all IT systems in the world. There's a neat sci fi conceit around how nothing electronic can be trusted - I'd be much more impressed if that hadn't been thoroughly explored elsewhere (it's a foundational event in the Cyberpunk RPG's history, for example- the societies there can't even be sure of how much of their own history has been rewritten!). All the nations are after two McGuffins that something something maybe control the AI or something, and one of the McGuffins just happens to be in the hands of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a member of the Mission Impossible team. 

 The US sends Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the rest of the MI team to recover it, which is a deeply stupid move given how many times he's gone rogue on them (they even joke about that - maybe instead of lampshading it they could, you know, not trust him in the fist place?). And they're all surprised when, oh no, he goes rogue again in the most flamboyant, ridiculous way posible. Because, this fucking script.
 That's just the premise and the first half hour or so of the movie. Then there's how the plot develops, which is basically a series of arbitrary "and then that just happens". Contrivances, coincidences, bullshit, clichés (let's have the hero choose which one of his friends he has to save!). It's all dumb, all the time - and even worse, boring. It's especially egregious when the AI opponent is supposed to be playing 4D chess against the protagonists.

 I wasn't invested in a single thing that happened in the whole movie; It's all arbitrary, nothing is thought through.

 You get the usual world-hopping collection of set pieces - the Abu Dhabi airport, Rome, Venice, the Orient Express. A ridiculously attractive thief (Haley Atwell) gets embroiled and there's lots of chases, stunts, etc - but not nearly enough to make up for all the fucking ponderous conversations where everyone just keeps posturing and hyping up how critical shit is and Fuck. This. Script. I hoped against hope that the positive reviews and the seemingly lighter tone meant that hey, maybe this one would be different... but no. Even the action scenes are stretched until wear out their welcome; Why the hell did anyone feel this movie needed to be more than two hours and a half long?

 I did find some things to like: mainly new sub-villain Pom Klementieff, who's introduced trying to run down our heroes and looks like she's really having fun doing it; Good for her, at least someone's having a good time.
 I also laughed at a bit where her sociopath boss Gabriel (Esai Morales) screamed "Ethaaaaan!" when foiled. That was a fun action movie moment; I'd have preferred he scream the full name, but I'll take it.

 Some of the action beats are cool even if the scenes around them ramble on and on; McQuarrie knows his way around an action movie, even when he seems to have lost all sense for pacing. A couple of the fights in cramped spaces were nice, and a swordfight on a bridge over a venetian canal was pretty atmospheric. The finale with a derailed train on its own almost threatens to make the movie not be a complete waste of time. Almost.

 It really bothers me because, on paper, I should love this. Reminds me of my father complaining about the stuff I used to watch as a kid; I guess I can rest easy that for now it's only a few franchises I've really soured on: this, the Fast and Furiouses (post 5) and any Marvel movies by the Russos. I'm not that far gone yet.

Pilgrimage

 Somewhere in the southeastern coast of medieval Ireland, a tiny monastery keeps watch over a holy relic - the stone that was used to brain Saint Mathias more than a millennium prior (an event that's depicted in the film's prologue).

 Enter Frére Geraldus (Stanley Weber), a devout Cistercian monk who comes with a papal charter calling for a pilgrimage to bring the relic to the pope - Innocent III hopes the relic will help separate "the faithful from the faithless" for the next crusade, which is a really amusing detail given how the fourth crusade a few years before the events of this movie ended with the sacking of Constantinople and the pope's condemnation of the ensuing massacre.
 I have no idea if this was intended by scriptwriter Jamie Hannigan, but if so: hats off.

 A small problem: the relic seems to be cursed - both given the tales spun around it, and the visual language the film uses to depict it. Still, orders are orders, so a small group of monks is conscripted to take it to Rome. The group includes worldly, wise father figure Ciarán (John Lynch), young, idealistic Diarmuid (Tom Holland), and a mute layman in service to the monastery who's played by Jon Bernthal and thus predestined for badassery.

It's a matter of historic record that the only reason Jerusalem was lost was because they sent Jon Bernthal off.

 The pilgrimage is to take place through contested lands - at the time Ireland was being conquered by the Normans, so Geraldus asks the Baron de Merville (Eric Gordon) to help protect them from Gaelic warbands. The baron agrees, in exchange for absolution from his sins, and sends his son Raymond and a squad of knights to accompany them. It's quickly apparent, though that Raymond is up to no good, and soon the monks are running for their lives through hostile woods and moors and bogs. Good thing they have Jon Bernthal with them! By then it's established he has a crusader past, and it turns out he's pretty handy with a sword. And a shield. And... well, pretty much anything he gets his hands on.

 The action is brutal, gritty and pretty bloody - alas, mostly digital blood. The focus is more on the chases than in the fights, but what fights there are still have fairly complex choreographies; While they're not designed to show everything that's happening clearly, director Brendan Muldowney blocks things well and does a good job of keeping the flow of combat readable and engaging.
 The film is highly entertaining even when the monks aren't fearing for their lives. There's a lot of period detail to every scene, and while I'm sure that it's not all perfect, the fact that it's there is appreciated - I very much doubt that the French the English occupiers speak is period-accurate, for example, but, well, you've still got French-speaking Normans - who are at one point described as "grey foreigners" - invading Ireland for their king.

 Despite a fairly simple plot, it's a fairly complex, thorny movie that does right by the genre and even supports a little reading into as Diarmuid and Geraldus come to opposite interpretations of their travails. Add in some beautifully shot landscapes (cinematography: Tom Comerford), great music (Stephen McKeon), and a wealth of hilariously terrible haircuts, and we're cooking.

Fright Night

 The 80's was a hell of a decade for vampire movies. Lost Boys, Near Dark, The Hunger; A lot of people swear by Salem's Lot, I'll go to bat for Vamp and Lifeforce. Much as I like all of them, none of is as good as Fright Night. 

 Charlie (William Ragsdale) is kind of a dick. That's quickly established in the very first scene of the movie: Charlie alternately gets obnoxiously annoyed with his girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse) when she won't put out during a session of heavy petting, and then, when she relents, he quickly loses interest to go spy on his new neighbours as they take a coffin into their house. Not cool, dude. On both counts.

 Amy rightly storms off, but it turns out that Charlie was right to be intrigued as he soon discovers his neighbour is a vampire. He's found out in turn, though, which sets off a really fun game of cat and mouse as the vampire (Chris Sarandon) goes out of his way to terrorize him and his friends. Their only hope? Local horror host and b-movie star Peter Vincent, vampire killer (Roddy McDowall).

 Charlie is not a very fun protagonist. He's the typical horror movie teenager who gets laughed at when he tries to get help for a very real threat, and a lot of the movie is... well, just that. At least he passes as a teenager, kinda, despite Ragsdale being twenty-something at the time (poor Bearse was closer to her thirties, and she very much doesn't; not even if you squint).
 But while Charlie gets all the tedious running around trying to convince others that vampires are real, the vampire himself and his familiar Billy (Jonathan Stark) run rings around him, taunting him right in front of the people he's trying to convince. It's delightful.
 And when Peter Vincent, vampire killer enters the picture, first in a sort of intervention to convince Charlie vampires aren't real - well, the movie is complete. Vincent is a genius creation, a slightly selfish, completely normal person who discovers that there might be a calling for his on-screen persona in the real world after all, and is understandably terrified by it. There are so many great character moments in this movie - expertly played - that it can afford to play the horror stuff fairly straight and still be hilarious.

 And it's an excellent genre movie even without the comedy. I'm not going to even pretend it's scary, but aside from a couple hiccups it's put together very tightly, with events flowing cleanly and escalating to a very eventful, effects-filled finale that fully utilizes everything Richard Edlund's effects team had learnt doing Ghostbusters the previous year.

 Writer/Director Tom Holland had already secured himself a place in cult royalty by writing Class of 1984 and Psycho 2 (and Cloak & Dagger, another movie I loved as a kid). He'd go on from this to write Child's play and then disappear a little, resurfacing in the '90's with a couple of middling Stephen King adaptations. His direction here is superb and the movie is full of indelible images.

 Vampires, like any monster that successfully incorporates himself into culture at large, are a sort of swiss army knife of anxieties and dark impulses - fear of powerful, privileged twats, the allure of sex, etc. Here Sarandon fully embodies the fear that a more intelligent, handsome, and successful man will take your woman away. He's ridiculously attractive and charismatic, of course, and plays his vampire with an impish sense of fun - even looking at the camera at one point. Between him and Peter Vincent (such a great name, even if it's just a compound reference) they eat the movie whole, fully compensating for the slightly boring lead character and leaving very little for anything else in memory other than a bunch of very cool special effects. It's an extremely fun movie.

Cop Secret (Leynilögga)

 Bússi (Auðunn Blöndal) is a renegade, a lone wolf, a loose cannon. Fortunately, unlike Chuck Steel, he doesn't need to tell us that- we get treated to a scene where he chases a criminal down the streets of Reykjavik by way of introduction, culminating in a scene where he shoots his ineffectual partner (Sverrir Þór Sverrisson) in the arm to get a clear shot at his target.

 Icelandic comedy Cop Secret exists in a heightened action movie world where Bussi's stunts are tolerated as long as he gets results; his misadventures in the introduction just get him a stern talking-to. He's Reykjavik's star cop, well-liked by the masses and popular enough to have sycophantic TV spots with presenters falling over themselves to tell us how cool he is.
 But things aren't going so great lately. He's been unable to dig up any leads on a case where people break into banks but don't steal anything. And there's a new star cop in town: Hörður (Egill Einarsson), a cop from the neighbouring posh area who's just as good as Bússi is, but also more traditionally handsome, rich, and intelligent.

 Because the case involves both precincts (and his former partner doesn't want anything else to do with him) Bússi is partnered with hunky, hunky Hörður to figure out what's going on. Soon they're in a shootout, bonding as they kill a bunch of people, and later they start going at it like bunnies. Record scratch!

 Yes, they fuck. That's the premise of the movie - it's a hyper-masculine 80's (well, more 90's) action movie spoof spliced with a gay romantic comedy - a buddy-with-benefits cop movie.
  Together they face the dastardly Rikki (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), who insists on talking in English and making lame animal-based two-liners and whose evil plot will result in thousands of innocent deaths. Because he feels like it, not because it's actually needed.
 Rikki's fun; The movie tries a little too hard to make him funny, but his barely restrained urge to shoot his underlings is kind of amusing. It's his second in command (Vivian Ólafsdóttir) who makes the biggest impression, though - even if she doesn't get to do much, she's got great presence.

 The movie is fine. Just fine. The action is OK, closer to DTV than the movies it's emulating, and the humor... well, it's likeable. There are a few good lines and funny conceits, but you constantly get the sense that either something's getting lost in translation or that it's not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. Most of all it's buoyed by a deadpan tone, a pretty solid knowledge of action clichés, the cast's easy chemistry and a general likeability.

 Some things are spot-on. The movie starts with a pan up from the water to the Reykjavik skyline (just like Robocop!) accompanied by butt-rock guitars and brassy blasts - the music is pretty excellent, if a bit obvious. The script (by Nína Petersen,Hannes Þór Halldórsson and Sverrir Þór Sverrisson) honorably avoids falling into the common trap of confusing references for punchlines. Hell, the one overt reference, in which Bússi says of a plot point: "Just like in Die Hard 3!" is one of film's biggest laughs.
 Unfortunately its jokes aren't that good. Not bad, necessarily, but more amusingly goofy than funny.
 The action is not bad, either. Director* Hannes Þór Halldórsson does admirably with a low budget and, like his writers, he evidently knows the genre well. There's a good mix of (John-Wick-Influenced) shootouts, vehicular action and punchouts (in which our protagonists notably don't do very well); It's not going to win any awards, and isn't memorable in any way, but the fact that it's a spoof elevates it somewhat - it's way better than, say, the action in The Other Guys.

 Faint praise, maybe - it's a very slight movie, an extremely gentle subversion of the formula. But it's cute, doesn't outstay its welcome, gets a few laughs. And despite some of the worst-looking digital explosions in recent memory and a few severe script issues in the finale it manages to leave a positive impression mainly due to its fundamental sweetness. Doubt I'll ever feel the need to revisit, but I found it enjoyable.

*: And ex-footballer - explains the surprising amount of football in this movie.

Buddha's Palm

  How's your tolerance for terrible humor, incomprehensible stories, terrible acting and wildly uneven special effects?

 Yes, we're back to Wuxia - or Xianxia, to be specific - with 1982's Buddha's Palm, a clear forerunner to Zu Warriors and a fellow Star Wars infuencee*. It's based on a long-running Chinese comic series, and has a somewhat lighter tone than Tsui Hark's film. Mostly because it's got a lively narrator who talks to the audience and the characters as if they could hear him; Very old-school comics, or pulp serial.

 Trying to explain the plot would be an exercise in futility, so of course I'm going to take a stab at it.
 An old master retired to a cave to cultivate himself and over the years developed a deadly martial arts style, the titular Buddhist's palm. But people came from far and wide and... I guess they harassed him to death? So his distraught apprentice, Flaming Cloud Devil (Alex Man) went on a rampage and started shit up with all the kung-fu clans in the land. He got beaten down eventually, and disappeared.
 Enter Long Gianfei (Derek Yee), who some years later gets thrown off into a chasm after angering his ex's new boyfriend. He's rescued from the fall by a flying lion/dragon thing (a fantastic creation that's basically a two-man Chinese processional dragon) and taken to Flaming Cloud Devil's (FCD from now on) hideout cave, there to reluctantly become the old man's apprentice. Really reluctant - he turns down offers to be trained enough times that even Joseph Campbell would give up on him. But FCD is heartened by that, because he decides he only wants to teach people who don't want to learn. Turns out spending a long time in a cavern with nothing but a winged lion dragon thing for company is not great for your mental health.

 Then you get the usual crazy adventures: The newly minted apprentice goes to get a mystical pearl to heal his Sifu's blindness, meets and befriends two apprentices (Kara Hui and Candice Yu) of one of FCD's old enemies, and also becomes a student to another crazy kung-fu master (Lieh Lo), one who bellows his name every time he enters the scene and gets a cheesy theme tune. I love that guy.
 As for the plot , it kicks in pretty late in the movie when Gianfei unwittingly uncovers a plot to... well, I'm not sure what the hell that's all about but it involves massacring a whole town and framing him to draw out FCD. Then the final bad guy reveals himself and fights everyone.

 It's busy as hell, none of the characters are interesting, and the reveals are poorly developed. There are attempts at tragedy that are about as poignant as a pie to the face. Some piss-poor bad acting (FCD's love interest takes the cake in that department). But none of that matters because there's always something crazy going on; It's absolutely batshit insane.
 Of course it's full of stunts and wirework, most of them great. There's a couple of terrific fights, but most of the rest involve twirling around or Harry Potter Kung-fu with people shooting different-coloured rays of energy at each other, poorly rendered with charmingly daft visual effects. Fun, but not very exciting.

 There are so many laugh-out-loud moments: A guy called Heavenly Foot (Kien Shih) has a telescopic leg he uses to kick people across a courtyard - he even enlarges his foot to the size of a rhino and stomps on someone (for extra effect, hum the theme from Monty Python's Flying Circus). Alex Man has a tendency to burst out his Thundercats laugh at the slightest provocation. There's a ridiculous fight against a flying 2D mylar buddha. It's pretty wild, and while it's definitely not a comedy, it's not entirely serious either; The actual comedy elements are, as ever in this sort of thing, pretty fucking terrible, but I dig its tone, which is entirely tongue in cheek. More so than usual.
 Speaking of cheeks: one of the people Long has to fight has a huge cyst on his left cheek, which he squeezes during the fight to shoot giant jets of acid. How can you not love that?

 It's also got tons of legitimately awesome stuff. Besides cystboy mentioned above, there's a fight against four... vampires, I think? Anyhow, it's really cool - their masks keeps getting cut to reveal further masks underneath it and when you finally get to see its face it looks like a plate of porridge gone bad. Later there's an extremely well made earthquake that collapses a bunch of buildings and a couple of instances of (very mild, but cool-looking) gore. A lot of the sets and costumes look amazing.

 Director Taylor Wong manages the madness well enough; Like the rest of the movie, it varies a lot in quality - from stately to cheesy, often within the same scene - but I found it slightly less manic than other movies in the same style**. I also have to a lot of respect for how he manages to convey all the crazy action clearly.
 If I have to be honest, I think I prefer this to most other movies in the same style; It might not be as slick or as well-made, but the appealingly silly tone makes it go down easier and it's got very little filler. 

*: If influencer is a word that people use, then I'm going to stand by influencee.

**: Check out Johnnie To's Mad Monk sometime if you want to see how crazy and incomprehensible these things can get; it defeated me, I couldn't finish it. The Miracle Fighters movies are a much more watchable example.

Destroy All Neighbors

 Bill (Jonah Ray Rodrigues) is a pushover - a nerdy thirty-something who's terrified of direct confrontation and spends his days working as a sound engineer for other musicians while he toils away at his own prog-rock album on his time off.

 He's honestly not doing too bad- sure, he's been struggling with his epic masterpiece for years now, but that seems about normal for bedroom musicians, never mind one of the prog persuasion. His apartment is nice, even if the building around it isn't, and his live-in girlfriend (Kiran Deol) seems to love him.

 But people take advantage of and walk over him all the time. And in a horror comedy, that can only mean one thing: self-actualization via creative blood-letting!

  And so it is. To its credit, the script (by Mike Benner, Jared Logan and Charles A. Pieper) takes a few unexpected swerves on its way there. There's no rage virus, no demonic incursion here; Instead it has Bill unwittingly embark on an (accidental) serial manslaughter rampage.

 The first victim is a new obnoxious neighbour played with relish by Alex Winter; He's clearly having a ball chewing scenery as Vlad, an unholy mixture of Eastern European and Scottish stereotypes with some really grotesque makeup and prosthetics... even before he starts strutting around as a tangle of dismembered body parts.

 Because as Bill's body count grows, his undead victims start haunting him, An American Werewolf in London-style, but with a remarkably forgiving attitude towards their murderer. The movie ends up ticking a lot of the expected boxes, just maybe not in the expected or in a particularly effective way.

 Director Josh Forbes is mainly a music video guy, and he taps into that to keep the proceeds fairly stylish and pacey. The film's got a pretty good comedic timing. There are lot of visual effects - a lovely credits sequence by Rich Zim, a veteran animator who's worked done stuff for Laika and Adult Swim, and some cool old-school lightning effects in the finale, but the gore and creature effects are all practical. There's a lot of variety, and all of it looks pretty damn good.

 As much gore as there is, the tone is always light and overtly jokey. And some of the jokes are even good! Jon Daly scores a lot of laughs as an online prog-bass guru who tends to mix uncomfortable life stories in between his music lessons, which turn into tips on how to get rid of inconvenient corpses when the plot requires it. So does Ryan Kattner as Caleb Bang Jensen, a megalomaniac pop star who insists on being called by his full name every single time he's referred to. Mild stuff, but, like the movie as a whole, very likeable.

 All the rigamarole doesn't end up amounting to much, though there's a killer Prog-extravaganza finale that makes time for a yodelling interlude (hello, Focus!) and ends up draping Bill in something the Great Gonzo would wear at one of his shows.

 It might seem like a back-handed compliment to call it pleasant, but there's a place for low-stakes hangout movies like this where the most appealing part is watching the characters bounce off each other.

Raging Bull

 Raging Bull - good movie, good movie. DeNiro, Scorsese, Pesci, Schoonmaker, Schrader. It's rightly considered a masterpiece. I mean, it's no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Braindead or Evil Dead 2, but it's good.

 In short, the movie follows Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) as he struggles to make it in the world of middle-weight boxing on his own terms with his brother (Joe Pesci) as his manager. That doesn't work out and he's finally forced to throw a fight to get a shot at the title. This he does, but in such a (hilariously) shoddy way that his career gets derailed for a while. Once he becomes a contender he quickly wins the belt, defends it for a couple of years and loses it to Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes); He quits boxing for personal reasons soon after, and ends up playing host on increasingly seedier clubs.

 But this isn't a sports story, it's an unsparing character study, so all that is the background to Jake's motivations, hang-ups, and his relationships to his brother (Joe Pesci, never better) and his second wife (Cathy Moriarty).
 It's a brutal movie: the fights look more like torture - or self-flagellation - than sport, rendered in beautiful, stark black and white by DP Michael Chapman. Meanwhile the drama aspects are awash in the stew of toxic masculinity the La Mottas breathe day in day out and Jake's inability to not be the sort of bum he keeps denigrating. It's a sad, upsetting, cringe-inducing story that's deceptively simple and pretty hard to watch even as Scorsese and his editor of choice Thelma Schoonmaker keep the pace brisk and deceptively breezy. And the acting is, of course, incredible.

 I really don't feel equipped to talk about this one! I like it, I can appreciate what it's doing and how well it does it - but its brutal, ugly thing is very different from the type of brutal, ugly things that I enjoy. Over the years I've read up on it enough to appreciate a lot of what it's up to (and watching a lot of Schrader-scripted films has also helped get a handle on it). But as a watching experience, I enjoy almost every other movie Scorsese's made more than this one.

Ghost Mansion

  Ghost Mansion - also known as The Night Shift - is a solid low-budget anthology of horror stories from writer/director Jo Ba-reun. It's more creepy than scary, and more interesting than anything else. That's not a great thing for a horror movie to be, but what are you going to do.

 Our protagonist Ji-Woo (Sung Joon) is a webtoon artist looking for ideas after his last work failed to... get enough views, I guess? He visits the Gwang-Lim mansion looking for inspiration, a huge tenement building rumored to be a hive of paranormal activity - the explanation changes from the site previously hosting an orphanage that burnt down with all its children, or a doomsday cult; it varies in a way that suggests either a short expanded to feature length or a short story repurposed for this compilation, but I like the weirdness that introduces.
 Upon arrival he meets the building superintendent (Kim Hong-Fa), an impassive host who regales Ji-Woo with tales of the paranormal pulled from the rooms in the building.

 There's five stories overall - quiet, creepy little oddities that owe a lot to Asian horror comics.
 The first one is about a writer (Lee Chang-Hoon) who starts getting harassed by the kids from the burnt orphanage. The second (and the one I liked best) is about a young pharmacist whose lover kills his wife and son before going into hiding in her flat; spookiness ensues. The next one is about a sleazy real-estate broker who is haunted by plumbing issues and his sex doll - I also liked this one; It's silly, but builds up a great atmosphere.
 Next up is an extremely Junji Ito-esque tale of a boy and his mould, and from there the fifth tale finally explains what's up with the superintendent before wrapping up by sealing the webtoon guy's fate.

 It's all right - well-made and tightly controlled. I definitely expected a bit more craziness out of it and a couple of the segments are a bit staid, but it's chill, creepy and varied even as it never really builds up towards anything memorable.

The Roundup: No Way Out

 Well, it only took two sequels for the Crime City series (seemingly renamed to The Roundup in the west, despite the first one lacking that title) to become a parody of itself. This is a problem when the series didn't take itself that seriously from the beginning.

 This time around the threat is a rogue group of Yakuza who've stolen a batch of a deadly new designer drug dubbed Hyper from Japan, and are prepping to put it out on the streets. They're protected by the police chief in Incheon (Lee Joon-hyuk), a silent partner in their drug trade, but things get complicated when headquarters back in Japan realize what's going on and send a small army of thugs led by katana-wielding Rikki (Munetaka Aoki) to kill everyone involved and take back the mechandise.

 Unluckily for all of them, Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong Seok/Don Lee) of the metropolitan police and his team of hangers-on are on the case and working their way up the crime chain.

 I really liked the previous films mostly due to how they balanced gritty cop drama with Ma Seok-do's outsized  comedic persona. He's basically the only adult in a world of eight-year olds, slapping both thugs and the law around until things fall into place, but they worked like eighties cop movies in that respect.

 The Roundup: No Way Out exaggerates that aspect even more and amps up the comedy and action until there's no sense of threat. Don Lee's basically a superhero at this point: infallible, unbreakable and possessed of superhuman strength; His punches now regularly send people flying through walls and at one point he knocks a thug unconscious with an open-handed slap.

 At the same time the plot he's up against is a bit murky and overstuffed with characters. It woks... kinda, but it's nowhere near as compelling as the previous movies' cases. And the pacing is a bit repetitive, falling back on Don Lee arriving, kicking everyone's ass, then finding the clue that will lead to the next throwdown, or cutting to internecine fights between the criminals.

 The action is all right, as always - the choreographies tend toward the basic but it's clear, often funny, and it's full of good stunts. Don Lee's presence helps a lot, his boxer training, bulk and charisma lending credence to his physical threat, and his weary 'can you believe this shit?' expression is always funny.

 The comedy is a bit more unreliable; A new character (Jeon Seok-ho, I think) scores quite a few laughs as a criminal-turned-informant who gets a little too into helping the police, and the few times the movie dares poke fun at Don Lee are pretty funny as well. Less successful: all the bits where the police gleefully roll their eyes at due process and ethics - there's yet another scene where the police cover up the cameras in their (much nicer, this time around) office so they can engage in some police brutality with a suspect, which has become a running gag in these films.

 Later on there's a scene with the Yakuza brutally beating one of their own for information, and I wasn't sure how I was meant to feel - I mean, it played very similar to the police scene before, only people weren't smiling and the music was menacing. I know it's tiresome to bring this up, it's a fantasy where the police are infallible, yadda yadda, but... screw this shit.

 Things have now become untethered enough from reality that the movie loses the sense of danger that the previous installments managed to still hold on to. Either that, or the formula's grown stale for me. It's still watchable - returning director Lee Sang-yong knows how to make slick entertainment - but if I have to be honest, I'm way less interested in seeing where Don Lee and his crew head on next.

Sideworld: Terrors of the Sea

 Calling it a documentary might be stretching the definition a little; The Sideworld movies collect spooky bits of folklore and historical miscellany (mostly from England) and bundle them into themed packages. In this case, the sea. Director Alexander Popov narrates from Jonathan Russell's script, along with good music (by Matthew Laming) and some beautiful nature footage and images from historical documents (DP: Richard Suckling); No re-enactments. The presentation is slick and unobtrusive.

 The stories are mostly regional tales from the British coasts and cover a nice range of nautical subjects, each one given a whole chapter: ghost ships, sea monsters, sailor ghost stories and underwater people. The incidents discussed are pretty interesting, and provide some sources were possible, but the focus is in keeping them fleet of foot and entertaining.

 They also get fairly obscure; the Ghost Ships segment, for example, touches briefly upon the Flying Dutchman and Mary Celeste by way of introduction, but spends most of its time on a particularly haunted sandbar just off England's southeastern coast.

 Popov makes for an great host, and while the script sometimes gets a mite too purple for my taste (the rhetorical questions at the end of each chapter made me chuckle) its contents don't push for supernatural explanations or call for credulity- not too hard, at least. Sometimes it sounds like Popov is workshopping horror story ideas based on whatever he's expounding on, and there's plenty sops to scepticism.

 It's an unpretentious and nerdy exercise which just happens to be a excellent way to spend seventy minutes.

Braindead (Dead Alive)

 I have no idea how much damage watching Peter Jackson's Bad Taste did to my brain when I watched it as an impressionable child; It was the best thing ever for a long time, overshadowing even this when it came out a bunch of years later. I've watched both a lot of times over the years and while I'll always love Bad Taste, now it's Braindead that consistently blows me away. Every single time.

 It mixes the then-burgeoning splatterpunk movement with slapstick - Splatstick, if you will, which is actually a thing, according to the internet. It's juvenile, over-the-top, full of actors going full ham and the broadest of broad and gross-out humour. It is glorious.

 The film's silly sense of humour is on full display right out of the gate, with a (on the uncut version) patriotic homage to the queen as an expedition of the New Zealand zoological society goes to Skull Island to pick up a rare rat-monkey, a species that's later explained to be the result of a horde of plague-rats raping the local monkey population. It's a busy chase scene that finds time for a cricket gag and ends with a hilarious amputation joke. Zingaya indeed.

 From there the action moves to Wellington for some light farce between Lionel (Timothy Balme), his domineering mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody), and Paquita (Diana Peñalver), a local shopkeeper. Paquita falls madly in love with Lionel because (in one of the film's weakest conceits) she's basically predestined to. Lionel is definitely interested, but Vera immediately dislikes the girl and forbids the affair (she hilariously describes Paquita as experienced; Moody is so good in her role).

 You can't stop young love, but Vera is nothing if not persistent. While they're on a date in the zoo she follows them and gets bitten by the rat-monkey. Dear old mother mines this for maximum drama, and uses it as an excuse to pull Lionel and Paquita apart - after crushing the rat-monkey's skull with her high heels in a scene that strives to be as disgustingly goopy as possible. Bonus: the scene also includes a cameo from sci-fi legend Forrest J Ackerman.

 As foreshadowed by the prologue, the rat-monkey carries a deadly illness that quickly starts turning Vera into an undead monstrosity; And as she turns, the film's ghoulish sense of humour starts ramping up to overdrive.

 Lionel keeps her from running amok by keeping her zonked out with animal tranquilizers, but errors are made and undead abominations proliferate. His containment efforts finally fail spectacularly at a party held in his house, which results in an awe-inspiring final battle against a horde of the undead.

 This is an incredibly well-crafted, imaginative movie. Not just the gore and creature effects, which are a staggering feat of low-budget wizardry, but the script (by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Stephen Sinclair) is incredibly elaborate, introducing a lot of elements that then keep weaving in and out of the action.

 Jackson's direction would get sharper with time, but many of the gonzo camera moves he would later use in his later, much more polished movies -particularly dramatic pans and zooms- can be traced back here. It's slightly amateurish, especially when compared to his simpatico American colleague Raimi, but it's incredibly energetic and propulsive. And the visual storytelling is top-notch, always keeping the many plates it's spinning on-screen, ready to be deployed for maximum impact.

 Much as I love the Lord of the Rings movies, I mourn early Jackson and wish he would have found a way to temper his more mainstream instincts with these deeply goofy, overtly bloody offerings. Put me against the wall, and I'd choose this over the whole of that much more famous trilogy.

Onibaba

 "The Hole/ Deep and dark/ Its darkness has lasted since ancient times"

 Say the stately kanji superimposed over an open pit in the middle of a wind-stirred field of tall grass. Then the title comes on to cymbals and a discordant note, followed by a vigorous, jazzy theme.

 I've been meaning to watch Onibaba's for ages, as I like these old Japanese folk-drenched stories; but that's not quite what writer/director Kaneto Shindō had in mind; The film's a deeply fucked up but unjudgmental psychodrama about civilians caught up in other people's wars.

 It centres on two women - one middle-aged, with wild hair (Nobuko Otowa), and the other her young stepdaughter (Jitsuko Yoshimura). They're introduced ruthlessly murdering two fleeing soldiers -got to love that stark shot of blood splashing on the susuki grass- then stripping them and throwing the naked bodies into the pit. Later, they take the soldiers' arms and armour down to a local broker who'll sell the items back to the one warring army or the other; he pays them with a couple bags of millet, which the women take back to their hut. There's a nest of crows on their roof. How's that for symbolism?

 Kiyomi Kuroda's gorgeous black and white photography manages a lot of very striking images, with a lot of focus on the women's very expressive eyes.

 I guess it's a living. Barely. Hey, I'm not going to judge- I've seen enough samurai movies to know the effects of their wars on the peasantry. The film, luckily, underlines this; While the action never leaves this one field, the news from abroad are dire - Kyoto has fallen, and armies rove the land, killing and raping and taking, as armies do. The way it's described is near apocalyptic: "As if the earth had turned upside down." 

 Complications arrive when their neighbour Hachi (Kei Satō), who had been conscripted along with the young woman's husband, returns from the front lines a deserter. He brings bad news: the husband was killed by a mob when they tried to rob a farm. Later, he gleefully describes how he killed an enemy soldier while he was taking a shit in the bushes. This movie is bleak.

 In any case, Hachi soon starts sultrily coming on to the young woman. And despite him... well, being a complete dipshit who vents his sexual frustrations by screaming and running around in the fields like a lunatic, I guess he's the only man available so they quickly start boning. For a while I got worried the movie was going to go down a different path there.

Hachi piles on the charm.

 The older woman doesn't take it well - not because her stepdaughter is sleeping with a ne'er do well who lived while her son died, though she absolutely plays that card - but because she's worried that the girl will leave her for Hachi, and she needs the help to continue their line of work. And because she's also horny as fuck, and when she offers herself Hachi coldly turns her down; Brutal.

 And that's the main conflict here. A very (very) slight, but pretty cool supernatural element is introduced later, and steers the film towards its very cool, folk-horror-ish final destination.

 It's a simple, primal story set in a sort of amoral limbo bounded by the whispering, constantly shifting susuki grass. It's aged beautifully; I can see why so many consider it a classic.

Night Swim

 For all the Insidiouses and Get Outs and whatnot, Blumhouse are proud purveyors of schlock - it's right there in the tacky ghost tunnel of a vanity logo they put in front of all their movies. They might do some good every now and then, but their meat and potatoes are basic, gimmicky horror movies that pack in a bunch of jump scares and not much else. Grist for teens and unpicky horror fans.

 That's Night Swim in a nutshell: a tired budget horror offering that's bad enough to be funny a couple of times, but mostly it's just aggressively mediocre. Writer/Director Bryce McGuire expands on his 2014 3-minute short with an admirably weird evil-wishing-well-type narrative thread, but he struggles with plotting and characters, and with the Blumhouse mandate to keep the jump scares coming.

  We first meet the people-eating pool in a cold open set in the 90s where it kills a little girl. This establishes a few of its tricks; it can beckon you with stuff (in this case, a motorboat toy), make you think you see people while you're underwater, and materialize ghouls to keep you underwater.
  Fast forward a few decades, and the Wallers move into the same house. The father, Ray (Wyatt Russell), is a former pro baseball player who had to quit due to a degenerative illness; His depression casts a pall over his family (Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle and Gavin Warren), everything they do (there's a very funny scene where they wistfully watch happy suburban families as they drive by), and even the movie's color palette.

 As it turns out, the pool has healing properties, and Ray's illness goes into remission. Happy days. Except for the rest of the family, who start getting pool-related scares. Little Eliot gets the lion's share of the scares, with tossed coins leading  him into the deep end and an encounter with the ghost of the little girl in the gutter (a scene that would be a creepy highlight if they didn't ruin it with yet another fucking jump scare); Izzy gets a silly Marco/Polo horror scene which leads into a run-in with a ridiculous-looking (I think they were going for grotesque) blobby ghost who reminded me of Slimer. As for mom... mom just thinks she sees someone standing outside the pool and then it turns out there was no one there. You got off easy, mom.

 The pool possesses Ray and turns him mildly evil, causing him to almost drown a kid at a pool party. Meanwhile mom handles the standard haunting/occult investigation duties to discover that yep, the pool's got quite a body count, and her husband's healing demands a sacrifice in turn. No explanation about why the pool needs to scare the bejeezus out of everyone in the process - seems counterproductive. It's probably just a dick by nature and can't help itself.

 Everything about the movie seemed mishandled to me. The drama is corny and the characters pretty flat; The horror elements, meanwhile, are all gimmicky and miscalculated- old ladies with creepy smiles are scary, right? Let's add some black goo and make her extra scary!
 It's all cynical, and tacky - but not enough for the movie to actually be fun. Any attempts to build an atmosphere are ruined both by that and by massive pacing issues; It's a problem the movie seems to recognize... but its solution is to fix it with jump scares. Deeply shitty jump scares.

 At one point there's an establishing shot of a sign pointing to a pool party, festooned with balloons. As the shot ends, suddenly one of the balloons pops loudly. Horror! I like to think that came from a production note from Jason Blum: 'needs moar jump scares'

 It's not all bad. I liked the way reality is bent underwater a couple of times, and there's a scene with a coin I really enjoyed. And it's a good-looking film, aside from the ghouls. None of that brings the film even to the just OK status; Just more lazy, dumb, cynical Blumhouse filler.

 By the way, I hope you appreciate my restraint in avoiding any pool-related jokes; I even deleted a (not intended as a pun) instance of 'shallow'. Treading water, off the deep end, floaters, chlorine and so many other shitty puns and metaphors were floating right there on the surface, beckoning like the stupid motorboat in the prologue.

Soul (Roh)

 I don't think I've ever seen a Malay film before, despite them having what looks like a burgeoning horror industry. Based on Roh, I should probably correct that.

 Mak (Farah Ahmad) lives in a bamboo house out in the jungle with her two kids Along (Mhia Farhana) and Angah (Harith Haziq). Soon they find another kid in the jungle and take her in: a cute little girl (Putri Qaseh) covered in grime and blood, wielding a knife.

 They clean her up and feed her, and wake next morning to find her eating their chickens, raw. Then she tells them they will all be dead when the moon is full, and slits her own neck. Now, I don't really know about Malaysian customs, but that seems rather extreme; just leave a one-star review, lady.

 More creepy weirdness ensues - there's a lot of amazing (and amazingly creepy) imagery in this movie, from the prologue where the little blood-soaked girl wanders among burning buildings, to a deer hanging from a tree, to some other scenes later that it'd be best not to spoil. There's not that much of a plot, just the family enduring a gauntlet of supernatural horrors, which seem to somehow be related to an old lady (June Lojong) and a grieving hunter (Namron) who wander by every now and then.

 The events are heavily tinged by local folklore and Muslim beliefs - things end up making a certain amount of (mythical) sense, but I imagine I'm missing a lot of detail; the feel of it reminded me at times of Indonesian black magic movies, which I guess makes sense.

 It's beautifully directed (by Emir Ezwan) and shot (by Saifuddin Mussa), with lots of static and slow tracking shots, a gorgeous earthy palette and excellent use of darkness. The soundtrack (by Reinchez Ng), mostly droning synths, do a lot to prop up the film's atmosphere. It's a simple, slow-burn movie punctuated by some startling, nasty shocks and a whole lot of weird folklore-based shit. Of course I loved it.

Next of Kin

 Linda (Jacki Kerin) returns home after however many years upon her mother's death - home being, in this case, an old manor house in the middle of nowhere that's been converted into a retirement community. Feeling a bit adrift, as the business seems to be run efficiently by the capable Connie (Gerda Nicolson), Linda spends a lot of the first two acts basically just haunting the building, hanging out with an old flame (John Jarratt), and poking around her mother's stuff.

 Soon after her arrival one of the clients is found drowned in a bathtub (in an excellently creepy scene - he's found when someone tries to get in the tub and steps on the corpse's face!). This awakens some mildly Shining-esque memories in Linda where she walks around as a child, holding a red ball.
 Poking around some more on her mom's old documents, she finds some irregularities on the ledgers, and some weird events that had happened twenty years ago. There's also the fact that she hears someone roving the old house at night, opening windows and leaving faucets open. She even catches the odd glimpse of a figure looking at her. It all eventually leads to bloodshed. Eventually.

 Next of Kin's a pretty solid 1982 thriller from down under. It takes a long time to get going, but the characters are likeable and the film's got an off-beat sense of humor I really enjoyed: When a terrified Linda goes to get her beau's help, for example, she finds him asleep at the saddest pep rally I've ever seen. No jokes, just odd characters and situations.
 Director Tony Williams also knows when to add some discordant touches - the first corpse in this movie is really shocking - and his roving camerawork carries a lot of the film. The photography is also beautiful, very colorful; DoP Gary Hansen tragically died in a helicopter crash on the same year this came out.
 The bloody finale has a little bright-red giallo-esque gore and a couple of great action beats, but it ends almost as abruptly as it arrived. As for the mystery itself, I guess its solution makes sense, but it's pretty silly. It's also marred by an unintentionally funny slow motion sequence which also slows down Linda's screams, to hilarious effect.

 It's probably not the sort of film that will blow anyone away, but on the other hand it's an almost gothic, extremely good-looking movie that uses its location - both the retirement home itself and the fact that it's so remote - very effectively. 

Dorm (Dek Hor)

 Dorm is a pretty cool Thai kid-friendly coming-of-age drama with some supernatural horror added to spice things up.

 After a disappointing school year, Ton (Charlie Taurat) is sent over to a boarding school in the country side and placed in the hands of the cold, uncaring Ms. Pranee (Chintara Sukapatana). It's about as rough an adjustment as you'd expect, especially when the new school features communal dorms and showers that would not be out of place in a prison. The institutional, cold palette the movie uses is all the school scenes doesn't help.

 

 Ton 'befriends' a band of kids who alternately bully and accept him (a pretty accurate depiction of social dynamics at that age, I feel), and that night they gather to tell ghost stories. It's a really great scene - the ghosts they take turns talking about either walk by or are shown in short vignettes that include looking between your own legs (an old Thai superstition) to see the ghost of a hanged woman; Fun!

 In any case, there's one ghost they specifically warn Ton about, of a kid their age that drowned in a pool. They tell him never to go to the bathroom at night if the dogs are baying. And sure enough, that night he has to go to take a piss, there's a chorus of dogs howling outside, and he runs into a gh-gh-gh-ghost! He runs back to his cot, bladder undrained, which results in a wet bed the next morning; Not great for his social life.

 With everyone against him after that bed-wetting incident, there's just one other kid with whom Ton gets along - Vichien (Sirachuch Chienthaworn) - but Ton's bad luck holds. During a night screening of a Thai knock-off of Mr. Vampire (very charming, and made especially for this movie) Ton discovers that no one else can see Vichien; He's the ghost everyone's talking about.

 But Vichien doesn't seem particularly scary - more sad than menacing - and Ton's outcast status hangs heavy over him; Soon the two kids are hanging out again, and Ton manages to work out some of the metaphysics underpinning the haunting. That gets him looking into the mystery of his friend's death... and wondering if he can do something to put him at rest.

 It's a sweet, well-observed, funny movie that sheds the horror part pretty quickly, but integrates the supernatural into its yarn, including some pretty striking imagery. It's a bit derivative of The Devil's Backbone, but between that, all the Mr. Vampire references - be on the lookout for an appearance from one of that film's distinctive caskets - and the fact that it takes things in a pretty different direction, I'm just going to chalk it down to some pretty good taste from the writers (Vanridee Pongsittisak,Songyos Sugmakanan,Chonlada Tiaosuwan) and the director (Songyos Sugmakanan).

 It's got some severe pacing issues - the film didn't really need to be almost two hours long, and the middle section suffers as a result. It can also get pretty corny. But the kid actors do a really great job - Taurat, in particular, anchors the film effortlessly, and the script is gratifyingly a little more sophisticated than I expected: a few (a little on-the-nose) motifs develop, there's a couple weird touches (a very funny explanation for why the dogs howl at Vichien stands out), and some unexpected developments add nuance to Ton's anger at his dad. I would have adored this movie had I watched it as a kid; As it stands, I still liked it a lot.

The Witch in the Window

 Simon (Alex Draper) takes his son Finn (Charlie Tacker) from New York out to the middle of nowhere in Vermont, where he's remodelling an old country house. As the days pass the two go through some pretty standard haunted house tropes - some appliances just won't work, there are strange noises, and they find out the house itself has a spotty history. In this case, a (distant) neighbour calls the last occupant a witch and implies she might have killed off her own family.

 The film stays on Simon's relationship with his son (and to a lesser extent his estranged wife, played by Arija Bareikis) for a long time; While there are a few extremely cringeworthy lines, most of the dialog feels at least somewhat realistic and the characters are well fleshed-out. Then the supernatural elements hit like a sledgehammer, the witch makes her presence very known, and the movie careens in an unexpected direction.

 Aside from one excellent scene, it's not a very scary movie - and even in that scene the built-up dread is dispelled with a ghost attack that's more laughable than shocking. That's just not where its heart is at.
 The film works best when it's at its quietest; There's a lot of emphasis on the drama, which is surprisingly effective and dovetails nicely with the non-standard genre elements to earn a pretty poignant (though overextended) ending.

 A quiet indie drama that happens to revolve around a haunting as well as around a father trying to repair the relationship with his family. Some of the dialog is a little iffy, the pacing is slow and some of the events don't seem to make a lot of sense if you think about them, sure. But writer/director/editor/composer/producer Andy Mitton has made a good-looking, compelling movie that holds together very well, its threads weaving a hard to classify but pretty affecting yarn.

Horror in the High Desert

 Real, actual documentaries are so desperate to drum up tension and drama that you can actually use all sort of cheesy, manipulative devices and dirty tricks ("No one could ever imagine the horrible consequences this would bring..."), and it would still feel like something you could watch on the Discovery Channel.

 This is both a blessing and a curse for Horror in the High Desert, a simple but clever horror mockumentary that tracks the disappearance of one Gary Hinge in the Nevada wilderness.
 The talking heads in this case are Gary's sister Beverly (Tonya Williams Ogden), a journalist (Suziey Block) and a couple more, who slowly recount the investigation into Gary's disappearance. It nails the format, which makes the ultimately underwhelming mystery at the movie's center more compelling than it would otherwise be.

 Gary was an outdoorsman who would disappear into the unpopulated Nevada outback for days at a time - until he actually, well, disappeared. The film does a good job of making the people around him likeable, and it piles on a modest amount of weird touches to make the case progressively creepier.
 It also piles on the dirty tricks: narrators spend a lot of time building up a forthcoming revelation will be,  only for the narrative to double back and follow the same thread from another person's point of view. It tells, tells, tells, shows, then tells you about what it's just shown you. And then it switches to another character who tells you again. It kind of works because this is the direction documentaries have evolved in, unfortunately. But when the script hits a few snags later on, it's more than a little aggravating.

 The ending involves a long sequence of found footage, the impact of which will depend on whether you're still invested in the story by that point. It's overlong and, as mentioned, the payoff is a letdown, but it's effectively creepy at least some of the time; And it does a good job justifying why the person behind the camera keeps filming everything.

 It's pretty well crafted; pulling it off so that it passes the smell test of being indistinguishable from an actual documentary can't be that easy, so good job director Dutch Marich and his crew. His script does write itself into a few corners in the process of filling out eighty minutes, but overall it progresses nicely and builds towards its payoff.
 The mockumentary format is friendly to low budgets -much more so than found footage, I'd wager, because here you can just cut to the actors talking over a still or some stock footage- but it's also very rigid, and keeps its material at arm's length. The framework is anathema to a lot of what makes the genre work; There's a reason there are tons of found footage horror films, but so few of them take the next step and go on to become documentaries that use that footage - I can only think of Lake Mungo, and... well, that's not a comparison this movie can take.
 Still, this one holds together and maintains interest all the way to the end. It's alright, I enjoyed it. We'll see how the sequel moves things forward.

Versus

 Versus was pretty well received back when it came out - I remember a lot of acquaintances talking about it, and people kept recommending it to me because I liked 'that Japanese stuff'.

 Unfortunately, Anime doesn't tend to be among the Japanese stuff I like. And man, is this movie ever anime-damaged. A disappointment twenty-odd years in the making.

 You can tell exactly what director Ryûhei Kitamura was into back then by watching this: A lot of Matrix, a lot of Tarantino, a lot of Evil Dead, a little of chanbara (samurai) films. Which, fair enough, that's pretty much what all of us nerds- pardon me, geeks, were into. But Kitamura only lifts the shallowest, most juvenile elements for his pastiche, and besides some fun energy and gore, he doesn't really bring much else.
 How shallow of a pastiche is it? When our hero has to find some clothes, the first thing he comes across is a leather trenchcoat.

There be wankers in them woods.

  There's an opening crawl that's so elaborate and pointless it plays as parody; The plot is some nonsense about an ancient confrontation between an evil Shinto priest (Hideo Sakaki) and a pure hearted samurai (Tak Sakaguchi) - the priest wants to control a portal between life and death, the Samurai wants to protect his lady (Chieko Misaka), whose blood is needed for the priest's evil ritual. Oh, and there's zombies because the portal doesn't let anyone in these woods die properly.

 That's just the prologue. These people, and some other mooks, all reincarnate many centuries later - The Samurai as an escaped convict, almost everyone else as Yakuza, and the girl as... a girl they've kidnapped.

 None of them are aware of what's happening, except the priest, who is a yakuza boss this time around, and is pulling the strings to finally do whatever it is he wants to do.

 But it takes a while for the movie to get to that. First we must endure a long stretch where they posture for ages without doing anything, trying to bring some Tarantino cool to the movie by way of tired old anime tropes. Holy shit is it painful to watch.
 I hate the main character with a passion - he's one of those manga antiheroes that's so cool, so above it all they come across as almost narcoleptic, constantly whining about having to do stuff... an absolute piece of shit character. The girl is a blank, constantly waiting for this shitstain to validate her, and the mooks are a one-dimensional collection of anime stock characters without a single shred of charisma between them. You've got the serious, honorable one, the serious one with glasses and long hair, the psychotic clown who looks like he might pull a face muscle from all his mugging, the incompetent one that's so caught up in his panic attack that he looks almost feral... OK, that last one at least was entertaining to watch. Probably not in the way intended, but as trainwrecks go it's entertaining.

 Then there's another bunch of characters that are introduced out of the blue. Literally, I have no idea what they're doing in this movie, and they barely interact with the... let's call it story. I'd complain, but they're way more fun and interesting than any of the main characters, with the highlight being a psycho pixie (Hoshimi Asai) who turns up and starts punching people. No posturing, no bullshit, only punching. And she gets a really funny death, too.

 It's pretty clear the plot in this doesn't matter in the least - it's just an excuse to string together the scenes Kitamura wanted to do; lots of fights and shootouts, all reasonably fun but done without a real choreography. It's all about looking cool, not doing cool stuff, unfortunately; They did put in the effort - there's even some wirework involved. For your money you also get Zombie killing, some silly jokes (some of them even good!) and lots of very over-the-top gore. Chintzy, very Matrix-inspired techno music, camera work that's all over the place (including a pretty well done Michael Bay homage, of all things) and all the forest scenery you could possibly want.

 I like the movie's energy, at least when it gets going, and I like some of its goofy humour. I wanted to like its "let's go to the woods and film some cool shit" ethos. Hell, I'd even agree that some of it is cool, when it's not trying too hard. Shave off an hour, preferably all the scenes with dialog, and it'd be watchable.