Dragon Lord

 Dragon Lord is another movie Jackie Chan made for Golden Harvest in the early eighties. It was originally going to be a sequel to 1980's The Young Master, with Chan reprising the main character from that. That plan was scrapped, but the character is still called Dragon, and the movie is somewhat similar in form and content, if not as focused.

I love this shot - note the looming shadow of the villain.

 Set in in late nineteenth century China, Dragon (Jackie Chan) and Chin (Mars) are two aristocratic dipshits who basically behave as if they were nine years old, getting up to all sorts of mischief; Usually in pursuit of girls. Despite having some phenomenal action sequences, this is more a comedy than a martial arts movie... which is not great, as the humor is as usual extremely broad and corny. Your mileage may vary, of course.

 In between trying to one-up Chin to impress a local woman and staging elaborate academic cheating methods to impress his father, Dragon manages to interfere with a smuggling operation by a rogue army battalion (I think) led by... I guess the only name we're given for him is The Big Boss. He's played by Hwang In-Shik, who was also in The Young Master, again inhabiting a supremely badass villain - moreso here, as he displays honor and forbearance throughout; He only appears in a few scenes, but he handily steals the film from under the ostensible protagonists.

 The extremely basic plot is colored in with all sorts of digressions, most of them comedic. There are two extended action setpieces that are basically sport matches - one a sort of four-team rugby match at a bun festival where the ball needs to be retrieved from a teetering mountain of bamboo poles and buns (which, of course, topples spectacularly as the contestants climb over each other to get to the top). The other one is a Jianzi match, a game that's similar to football except the ball is replaced with a shuttlecock and it cannot touch the ground. Extreme, team-based Hacky Sack.
 Both scenes are impressive, and it's said that the Jianzi match took almost three thousand takes to capture. It's easy to believe, as some of the moves they pull are almost superhuman.
 Unfortunately, they're very poorly integrated into the story, such as it is, which I guess is par for the course in this film; It's an oddly disjointed, poorly paced beast. It really feels like there were a few scenes the crew wanted to do, and the rest are just filler.

 The other action scenes fare better, and at least advance the plot forward. There's a very fun bit of physical comedy when Dragon climbs up on the roof where the criminals are holed up, and they try to stab him with their lances through the ceiling. The other one, the final battle against the Big Boss, is an excellent brawl that prefigures Chan's later, more complex work - it takes place in a two-story barn and includes a lot of prop use, balancing (and being thrown through) wooden bannisters, and some very dangerous-looking stunts. Great stuff.

 To be perfectly honest, I didn't really like this movie all that much, mostly due to the infantile characters, humour and plotting. There are scenes that make the whole endeavour worthwhile, but you need to get through some pretty turgid comedy to get to them.
 Oh well; It's not like there aren't about a dozen bona-fide Jackie Chan classics you can choose instead.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

It's recently come to my attention that Uwe Boll directed a sequel to his Dungeon Siege movie, this time starring Dolph Lundgreen. Morbid curiosity compels me to check it out, but it puts me in a dilemma: I don't remember the first thing about the original movie, which I know I've seen. Now, I could forget about it and just watch the damn thing, since I somehow doubt there'll be any clever callbacks or that it will build upon the worldbuilding set out in the first movie. But I'm curious - I do remember quite a few things about Boll's other movies, mostly to do with the fact that I didn't think they were any good. So why have I completely blanked out on Dungeon Siege, a movie based on a series of games I have quite a bit of affection for?

 A mystery! So here we go again, into the Uweverse, documented for the first time. Spoiler alert: Turns out it's just a really mediocre, unmemorable movie.

 It's been a long, long time since Uwe Boll's last bid for public visibility - So much so that some people might not even be aware of him. So here goes: Boll is a crazy German who built himself a niche making video game adaptations. Pretty fucking bad videogame adaptations: House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, even an atrocious FarCry adaptation made before Ubisoft, and the game series, became huge.
 He's also famous because he's very outspoken and more than a little toxic - calling people retards, launching a huge publicity stunt calling out his biggest internet detractors to boxing matches, and a bunch more nonsense. If you're to believe internet sleuths, his movies were a front for a The Producers-style German tax evasion scheme - I don't think that was ever proven though.

 In a world where there's a whole company devoted to making movies specifically designed to rip off the clueless ("Hey, I heard you liked Atlantic Rim, so I got you a copy!"), I think maybe the hatred for him was a bit outsized; Gaming as a culture is nothing if not petty and vindictive, after all. His stuff is bad, sure, but it's not like it's got any pretensions. You can't really say he ruined FarCry's story, or even Dungeon Siege's (have in mind I like those games!). Postal had some solid jokes, and was respectable in its tastelessness.

 So. The obvious main draw for In the Name of the King is the cast, which is stacked with affordable recognizable names. But for me the biggest and best surprise is that the action choreographer is Ching Siu Tung - an actual Hong Kong legend, director of motherfucking Duel to the Death, plus The Swordman-ses and the A Chinese Ghost Story-ses. I hope he got a huge paycheck, because the editing and shooting of the action scenes undoes most of his good work. It still shows through... sometimes. A little.

This scene deserves a much better movie around it, dammit.

 You might notice that I've been talking about what's around the movie instead of getting into in as I usually do... and that's because it's just not very interesting. But let's give it a go:
 The kingdom of Ehb is being attacked by the Krug, who will henceforth be known as Lumpy Turd Orcs (LTO's), because that's exactly what they look like - Shit-covered orcs, walking around in a sort of silly waddle which I think is a combination of them not being very mobile under the bulky armor and an attempt to make them more animalistic. They end up looking like Power Rangers mooks.
 The LTOs are being led by a sexy evil wizard with a New Jersey accent (Ray Liotta) who's seduced the good wizard's daughter (Leelee Sobieski) and is literally mooching the magic off her. Sobieski's performance here is... something else; Let's just say that she gives the role the exact the amount of effort it deserves.

 Meanwhile Jason Statham runs a farm, because he's Farmer, you see. He's got an idyllic life with a lovely wife (Claire Forlani) and a son, and is best buds with Ron Perlman. So of course that means the LTOs strike, kill the kid, abduct the wife, and set Farmer off on a collision course with the evil wizard controlling them (incidentally, the effects when he controls them look almost exactly like a low-rent version of when anyone puts on the true ring in the Lord of the Ring movies).
 There was an earlier version of the script that had to be scrapped and rewritten (by Doug Taylor) because it was too similar to Lord of the Rings; the final version still extensively... ahem, 'homages' those movies, visually, aurally and plot-wise.

 Anyhow. At the same time Farmer goes off on a rampage, the King (Burt Reynolds, who like Sobieski can't be arsed to act), the good wizard (who's all-in because of he is John Rhys-Davies and John Rhys-Davies never half-arses anything) are trying to figure out who's behind the invasion They're passively opposed by the king's nephew, a petulant, perpetually drunk nee'r-do-well played y Mathew Lillard, who at least seems to be having fun trying on an English accent. He's in cahoots with the evil wizard, of course.

 There's quite a few fights, with some interesting twists. The action is quite a bit more martial artsy than other fantasy movies, owing to the pedigree behind it. Statham actually does all right by it, with a lot of kicks and tumbling about, though the shooting style lets it down by featuring a lot of cuts and constant camera movement. I've seen some behind-the-scenes style shots of some of these scenes and they actually look much better than the end product; In them you can see the actual film camera whizzing by, on rails.

 There's some silly stuff as well which seems like it would be right at home in a Chinese movie, so I do wonder how much influence Ching Siu Tung had on them. There's honest-to-god ninjas that join a general melee at one point, that's fun (I think they're meant to be elves). There's a surprising amount of heightened tree climbing and brachiation, including Kristanna Locken in a leather push-up bra and friends swinging down from the treetops in magical vines. Also, the LTOs build a giant slingshot to launch themselves into battle. The final fight against sexy evil wizard Liotta has some cool moves and poses, possibly the place where you can most see the action coordinator's influence.

The effects are mostly poor, the designs tend to ape Lord of the Rings... poorly, and the dialog is terrible - so many scenes consist of people talking nonsense at each other, stuff that sounds vaguely ominous or cool-sounding but doesn't actually mean anything. And the music, when it's not trying to mimic Howard Shore, often poorly fits the scenes it's scoring. This is especially galling as the games had some truly excellent, very memorable music; I wonder if they needed to pay extra to get it?
 Stay through the credits for not one but two Blind Guardian songs, plus one by Hammerfall. None of them written for the movie, and neither of the Guardian songs are as good as the one they wrote for an actual videogame.

 It completely fails as a fantasy movie mostly because despite an abundance of pretty nice-looking locales and sets, there's next to no sense of it being a coherent world, just a jumble of elements and places, many of them pretty derivative. Few of the actors even try to put on an accent, any accent, and I seriously doubt anyone thought about trying to coordinate them in any way.

 As a game adaptation... meh. It does follow the events of the first Dungeon Siege game, somewhat: the LTO attacks, a broken bridge, the evil and good wizards, etc. I'm not even going to pretend to care that they did the story wrong or whatever, since the first two games were extremely poorly written, all po-faced fantasy filler. I mean, the kingdom is called Ehb! That's how much effort the original game writers put into it. The third Dungeon Siege game was handed out to another company and actually had an excellent story, but that came out years after the movie got made.

Dude, where's your armor?

 The main crime it commits against the games (and common sense) is kind of hilarious, conceptually: The protagonist keeps his farmer's simple shirt and breeches for the whole movie, even when he goes to war. Because he's Farmer, dontcha know, a simple guy, guv.
 The Dungeon Siege games are an offshoot of Diablo, and all about collecting and equipping incrementally better loot; So if the adaptation was serious about doing the game justice, it'd have Statham wearing incrementally more elaborate costumes, until by the end he'd have spikes all over, a dozen-meter-long cloak and police lights on his shoulders.
 It's also pretty funny (and so, so stupid) that the guy doesn't get out of the same peasant's outfit throughout the whole movie, even when he finds out that he's the crown prince (spoiler!). Success don't change him none. It's thematic!

 To be honest, I wouldn't say this is a trainwreck or anything; If I had to compare it to something, I'd say it's most similar to shitty TV fantasy shows like that horrible Earthsea adaptation the Sci Fi channel did back in the oughts - and this is easily better than that. It's just kind of bad, and mostly boring. Weirdly inert and so, so bloated - asking us to give two shits about side characters that we couldn't even muster a half-hearted fart for. Though that's probably my fault for getting the 30-minutes-longer director's cut.

 Maybe I'll get around to the sequel someday, which at least is only ninety minutes... but this has kind of killed my enthusiasm for it.

Dune: Part One

  There's a scene close to the beginning of Denis Villeneuve's interpretation of Dune that's probably made the hearts of sci-fi nerds of a certain age and over skip a beat.

All it's missing is a Jim Burns signature along the bottom.

 This comes after a glimpse of a strikingly armored sci fi guard, and accompanies a an equally lyrical description of the planet Arrakis and its struggles. I am, Villeneuve is saying, one of you guys. He probably is: even if you don't take his results at face value, he'd been talking about this as a passion project from a long time back, and you just know he had to fight to get people to finance it.

 This adaptation is a staggering achievement - a faithful reconstruction of a novel that was long considered impossible to bring to the screen (I'm actually OK with David Lynch's attempt, but it just reinforced that image). James Herbert's 1965 novel is dense with ideas, a soft science fiction epic that focuses on society, politics and religion with remarkable originality and complexity. It's weirdly paced, truly bizarre (admittedly, it gets weirder on the sequels), and features loads of info-dumps and internal dialog.
 Given all of this, it's no wonder that Lynch failed - what surprises me is how close he got to succeeding, behind-the-scenes drama and all. And now comes Villeneuve, and makes a movie that not only towers over Lynch's effort, it's also much more faithful to the source material.
 It's crazy that this isn't even Villeneuve's best sci-fi film.

 The story concerns the machinations of an empire eight millennia into the future, when humanity has spread into the stars, carrying its cultures and religions to all sorts of different worlds. The planet Dune, properly called Arrakis, is vital to the empire as it is the sole source of Spice, a sort of space dope that starship pilots can use to properly chart courses among the stars. At the beginning of the story, the emperor changes the noble family in charge of exploiting the planet - from the dastardly Harkonnens to the noble house Atreides.
 (And anyone who knows a little Greek mythology will groan at that name; They might as well fly to dune on a ship called Icarus, and call their first colony Roanoke).

 There's other players in the drama: There's the Fremen, native (well, you know what I mean) to Arrakis and in a state of almost constant insurrection, and the Bene Geserit, an all-female illuminati-style order with mystical powers. The film first centers on the attempts of House Atreides to peacefully consolidate their position in the planet, and then on what happens when some pretty non-peaceful Harkonnens come knocking... and the fallout from their invasion. There's a 'chosen' one narrative where the heir to House Atreides is at the center of an ancient prophecy, but just like in the book it's clear that the prophecy has been carefully seeded to manipulate events from the shadows.

 It's a busy, busy film, one that expects you to learn all sorts of funky terminology, keep track of multiple threads, and take a bunch of weird concepts in stride. The way Villeneuve manages it is by splitting the novel into two halves, of which this is the first one. It was a risky maneuver - what would have happened if the first movie didn't find an audience? - But one that thankfully paid off. The extra breathing room allows Villeneuve and his co-writers (Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts) to lavish the planet and far future societies with attention, and a whole lot of talented people spent untold amounts of money bringing Herbert's word to the screen as organically as possible.

Seriously, that introduction...

 The effects and artistic vision are amazing, and the production design - wardrobe, vehicles, buildings - is top-notch, intricately detailed and with an impressive sense of scale. Action-wise it's good; The surprisingly prevalent hand-to-hand fights are just OK (and they sure make a whole lot of noise about those shields for them to matter very little in the end), but I haven't seen any other movie where lasers seem so fucking dangerous as they do here, and there are a lot of extremely cool-looking explosions. Everything looks, as you'd expect from this particular director, absolutely incredible.

 The acting is all shades of great, with strong central performances from Oscar Isaac, Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson, and excellent turns by names like Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Javier Bardem, and Jason Momoa.

 As good as it is, the film does stumble in a few areas. I'm not a fan of the sound mix - Hans Zimmer's (excellent but bombastic) score overpowers everything else, leaving some of the action weirdly low-impact. The script also struggles finding a cutoff point; The movie has a clear ending, but it plows through it and continues for yet another hour, leaving the events of this last third feeling inconsequential, despite being well-integrated into the story. The film's climactic confrontation, for example, is based on someone's unwillingness to kill - which might well be very relatable, but as a concern it comes out of nowhere, so the stakes aren't too compelling. Especially with everything that went on before.

 And a little too much is made of the mystical visions, which don't really pay off meaningfully.

 Yet. I suspect that these last two issues will become a moot point once the movie is completed with Part Deux. After all, as someone cheekily says as the last line in the movie: this is only the beginning.

 I'm just hoping they succeed... just to see how the hell they adapt Dune Messiah, which is a properly freaky (and pretty boring) book. 

Ghosts of War

 OK, let me pull up a chair for this one, it's a lively one.

 Five airborne troopers are tasked to guard a French chateau at the very tail end of world war 2. The group consists of a bunch of walking war movie clichés: The intellectual (Skylar Astin), the all-American brash idiot (Alan Ritchson), the idealistic leader (Brenton Thwaites) and another one (Theo Rossi). The most interesting one is Kyle Gallner as a sort of sadistic space cadet; He's a lot of fun.

 The war movie aspects are mostly well done for a B-movie like this - a pulpy encounter with a nazi jeep on the way to the chateau is a good one, and later there's a defense of the house where the gang gets some unexpected assistance from... gh-gh-gh-ghosts.

 Ghosts of War is firmly on the tacky, gleefully cheesy side of horror. Think the shittier Blumhouse stuff - or even the production logo they put before their movies: Lots of jump scares, with the spirits basically lining up to pose all spooky-like for the camera.
 Here's an example: One of the soldiers is sweeping the manor grounds with his sniper scope, looking for nazis. He passes by a few statues on plinths quickly, except that last one was a creepy zombie statue? When he turns the scope back to double-check, the plinth is empty - And then the creepy zombie statue puts his zombie face right in front of the scope to growl at the soldier. Tell me that doesn't sound like something out of Scooby-Doo or Looney Tunes.

What's up, doc?

 I'm not saying I'm against it- this sort of thing can be enjoyable, and it's well made enough to be entertaining. Just... don't expect it to actually be good.
 So spooky stuff starts happening almost immediately as the soldiers are haunted by the family that previously occupied the manor, all of whom, Brainy GI quickly determines, were killed in some sort of nazi ritual (obligatory reference to the nazi higher-ups being a bunch of occult nutjobs).

 Things come to a head when the nazis mount an attack to retake the chateau, and, as mentioned earlier, the ghosts step in to get a piece of fascist-killing action. In the aftermath the sense that things are truly off mounts, and not just because of the haunting - Incident at Owl Bridge gets brought up preemptively, characters behave erratically, someone screams "THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM!" repeatedly.
 It turns out things are indeed not what they seem, leading to a late-movie twist that's incredibly dumb, poorly handled, and batshit fucking insane.

 Writer/director Eric Bress, bless him, seems truly proud of his Shyamalan-esque turn, and commits to it with a passion. There's a very, very poorly written and poorly staged scene showing the why the of the ghosts, Billy Zane (who also has a producer credit) pops up to drop a ream or two of exposition, and the script then proceeds to gleefully point out all the ways that it had foreshadowed the twist throughout the movie. It's all so bad it's inspired, and I couldn't stop laughing.

 It could have worked... maybe, but the heightened spookablast, B-movie tone was never going to carry it.  I guess it's one of those things where they had to try it but it didn't gel. The end result is a pretty bad (but entertainingly so) haunted house yarn going off the deep end in a howlingly funny fashion; I loved it for all the wrong reasons.

 Obligatory apparition of a haunted toy: A piece of string, I guess: it's a game of cat's cradle. Honestly, it's the best part of the movie - part of a tale that's revisited and it keeps getting creepier every time it's told, the one horror element that is truly effective in the movie. It even gets an appropriately over-the-top origin story in the film's ridiculous twist.

Into the Abyss (Me encontrarás en lo profundo del abismo)

 Into the Abyss, or to use its original, more evocative title: You Will Find Me in the Depths of the Abyss, is an interesting no-budget Argentine science fiction/horror hybrid set in a post-alien invasion Buenos Aires where a few survivors scrabble around abandoned buildings under an eternal storm.

 Its best bit of world building comes near the beginning when we catch up with our protagonist, Bannon (Martín Rispau), locked in a car under the driving rain. He finds an almost-empty plastic water bottle, shakes it wistfully, and drinks the dregs desperately; We'll find out what's wrong with the rainwater soon enough, but it was beautifully set up by this small gesture. Bannon looks through some pictures of his wife and son on his phone, listens to her voicemails, and finally (we assume) hunger and thirst compel him to abandon the vehicle and go into a nearby building.

 The place is derelict and picked clean by looters, but he soon finds a dead body with a gun and a walkie talkie. Trying out a frequency he finds written on a wall, he manages to make contact with Demian (Germán Baudino), who keeps him company as a disembodied voice. Later Bannon has to escape from a humanoid alien and has a face-off with another survivor.
 There's a very heavy survival horror videogame vibe to all these elements - director Matías Xavier Rispau is a self-described gamer, and is currently working on a videogame set in the movie's universe. As a movie it works, just about: the pacing is glacial, and while there's enough atmosphere to enough to get by on that alone, it feels a little too familiar to anyone with passing familiarity with modern computer games.
 The script (by Rispau and Boris C.Q.) peppers Bannon's journey with incidents, some unexplained weirdness and a little action, but seems to get tired of the abandoned city more than halfway through and changes locale and feel to recontextualize everything we know about the protagonist. I can't say I didn't welcome the change - the survival horror first half was severely overstaying its welcome - and I like where it ends up leading, but it leaves the film feeling fractured, two separate pieces that don't really mesh well together.

 Flawed and a little boring, but interesting - and given that it was made for something like a grand and a half in US dollars, its shortcomings are easy to overlook. The visuals (cinematography by the director and Juan Facundo Lopez) often manage to look lovely, in a very bleak way, although the digital video doesn't play nice with the often very dark environments. The acting's fine - Martín Rispau makes for a believable slightly unhinged survivor, and Baudino is excellent as Demian.

 But it's the score by Martin Fuu that knocks it out of the park, often elevating the film with a wonderful synthwave score I am currently streaming in the background - it takes a while to get going, but once it does it's good enough to listen on its own. His soundtracks for Legiones and When Evil Lurks were excellent, but this one is something else.

Four Lions

 Chris Morris is probably best known to the world as Denholm Reynholm, the high-intensity CEO in The IT Crowd's first season, before he was killed off and replaced by national treasure (treasurr-eh!) Matt Berry. But at least in the UK, Morris came to (semi-)popularity as the main driving force behind a show called Brass Eye, a fake news show full of (then) current-events satire and absurdist humor. Do seek it out, it's great.

 The show had a habit of lampooning moral outrage and media-fuelled panic. However, it ended in 2001... so it never got to do a show about terrorism.
 Morris corrected that nearly a decade later by writing and directing Four Lions, a film about incompetent would-be Jihadists based out of  Sheffield dead set on blowing up... something, they can't agree what. It's an absolutely pitch-black comedy; Despite leavening it with a ton of absurdism and very silly humor, almost fifteen years on there are few blacker.

Tiny Nandor!

 The four lions are: Omar (Riz Ahmed), the idealist straight man of the group, whose loving family supports his suicide bomber aspirations - he talks about it with his wife (Preeya Kalidas) as if he were discussing the possibility of  a promotion at work. Waj (Kayvan Novak) describes himself as thick as fudge, and yes, he absolutely is. A total sweetheart, though. Barry (Nigel Lindsay), an all-British muslim who's the most volatile (pun not intended) and gung-ho of the group. Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), a quiet, shy idiot who's convinced he can train crows to become flying bombs. And finally Hassan (Arsher Ali), a young convert who joins the cell during the movie - he's the young eager padawan.
 Yes, I know that's five - one of the lions suffers from premature detonation before the grand finale.

 Their journey includes a trip to contact Al-Qaeda in Pakistan (where the immortal words 'floppy camel sphincter' are uttered in rage), a whole lot of planning and bomb manufacture, a shitload of bickering, and the eventual climactic terrorist attack.

 There's a pervasive sense of doom to the whole arc, which ends up turning Waj, a deeply cartoony creation, into an almost tragic figure. Not bad for a character who keeps comparing the afterlife to rubber dinghy rapids; The poor, sweet idiot.

 It cleaves to the Brass Eye ethos in that everyone is a moron - the authorities, when they do respond, manage to fuck things up almost as spectacularly as our heroes.

 The film remains as bracing, timely and unique as when it came out. In a world that's on its twenty-sixth South Park season, I'm always disappointed to find out how little-remembered this movie is; I'd hesitate to even say it's reached cult status.

 If nothing else, it's a trove of great quotes, funny jokes and running gags, brilliant turns of phrase, and ridiculous, hilarious conceits, all served with a still sharp edge and some affection for its characters. That should ensure it a better legacy than most of the Judd Apatow-influenced shit that was rampant at the time.

Pootie Tang

 Spinoffs from sketch shows tend to be weird - and holy crap is this one a particularly weird confirmation of that rule. Mostly in a good way.

 The character Pootie Tang (Lance Crowther) originally appeared as a guest interviewee on the Chris Rock Show, a musician whose every other word is some silly-sounding made-up slang, but who's perfectly understood by everyone around him. The film is that amped up to eleven, plus a pretty funny origin story, a super-hero arc, and a buttload of ridiculous characters.

 Pootie is one of those Blaxploitation figures who's impossibly cool and competent: A successful musician, consummate ladies man and crime fighter, but also a clean-cut Mister-T-style hero to kids everywhere. Trouble starts when he does a PSA commercial telling kids to be healthy; It's so popular it earns the wrath of Dick Lecter (Robert Vaughn), head of Corporate America - which markets to kids such products as cereals, fast-food burgers, crack, switchblades and rat poison... sales of which go down by as much as 20% immediately after the PSA airs.
 Dick sends his main squeeze Ireenie (Jennifer Coolidge) to seduce Pootie into selling his persona to Corporate America and to steal his belt, the source of his powers. She succeeds, and Pootie falls from grace until he gets his mojo back.

 As it usually goes in these type of movies, the plot is only an afterthought threaded in between ridiculous, story-free bits like a gloriously silly action scene where Pootie interrupts some criminals from tricking a dumb kid (the dumbest, the narration tells us) into trying their drugs. One of the villains in that scene - Dirty Dee (Reg E. Cathey) - is so literally dirty he trails a dust cloud like Pigpen from Peanuts, and Pootie bats away his bullets with the end of his pony tail. The movie constantly cuts away to have other characters comment on the action, particularly Pootie's friend Trucky (J.B. Smoove) and would-be-girlfriend Biggie Shorty (Wanda Sykes), who's often shown dancing with her headphones on like the cheesiest, most cringe-worthy MTV interstitial ever.
 Speaking of MTV, a lot of the filmmaking takes its cues from then-current shoddy rap video filming tricks and MTV 'coolness', including very cheap-looking speed ramping and clipping. Zack Snyder has frequently gone on record to state that his style, as solidified on 300, was heavily influenced by Pootie Tang*.

 Chris Rock produces and plays multiple roles, and of course there's a ton of cameos from MTV and HBO people who were big at the time or would be soon afterward (Dave Atell, Missy Elliot, a teeny-tiny Kristen Bell, Jon Glaser and a lot more).

 I should probably mention this is written and directed by Louis C.K. (then a writer on the Chris Rock show), who's had a pretty public fall from grace since, and includes a bunch of instances of blackface - I wouldn't think that'd be a problem, since it's used here on corporate stooges (including David Cross) to impersonate Pootie, but I'm not that clued up on this sort of thing.

 Even at eighty minutes it threatens to overstay its welcome - there's a lot of padding and stuff that just doesn't work. But a likeable tone, a surreal anything-goes sensibility and a buttload of goofy jokes carry it through; No one would ever confuse it with a good (or a non-deeply stupid) movie, but it's bright, chipper, and silly fun.

*: I've shown this sentence to world-class Snyder historians who have said it's amazing. They can't believe it's as accurate as it is.

Woman in the Chair

 Faced with incontrovertible proof of the afterworld, it figures that an influencer would choose to make it a roadside attraction.

 I'm being more than a bit glib here; Maurice (Hagen Vanholland) is not really an influencer, more one of those youtube paranormal investigators. And he doesn't immediately go out to exploit the ghost he finds sitting, immobile, in a creepy abandoned and inaccessible house in Japan. 
 The way things work out, Pearl (Shoko Plambeck), a fan of his youtube videos, hooks him up with her fiancé Devon (Evan de Sousa) - a kind of sleazy rich Frenchman who's hosting investment pitches at a party attended by some presumably rich people. Mostly fellow expats.

 

 Maurice, realizing how big his discovery is, has sat on the video instead of putting it up on his channel, and agrees to pitch it in the meeting to try to secure funds for a proper paranormal investigation. The pitch does not go well, but later in the reception, a couple approaches him asking him if they could see the ghost; You can almost see the dollar signs appear in Devon's eyes.

 Soon they organize an expedition out to the house - which lies in an island in the middle of a lagoon formed by a semi-recent typhoon - and find that yes, the ghost is still just sitting there, in her run-down room.
 So they hire a couple of expat handimen (A.J. Hamilton and Kai Issey) to put a transparent acrylic wall so they can bring tourists over to see the ghost. One of the handymen gets attacked by the ghost when left alone with her, the other one ends up muscling in on the operation as a security guard.

 Business goes all right at the beginning, even though a rich asshole (Charles Glover) forces his way into the ghost's room to get a closer look - instead, he goes into a short trance, and then forgets whatever it is that happened.

  The movie posits Devon as the bad guy, constantly making the worst decisions and pushing for them, but neither Maurice nor Pearl are off the hook as they don't protest nearly as much as they should. Devon is also put on the wrong end of a sort of a love triangle (chaste on all vertices) that develops between himself, Maurice and Pearl; Again, it tries to paint Devon as, if not the villain, as clearly in the wrong in the relationship, but it seems to me that it's Pearl at fault, as she's effectively stringing him on for his money. To be fair, it's slightly more nuanced than that, and there's exactly zero chemistry between Devon and Pearl. But it still rings off - it's natural for the guy to want to fool around a little with his fiancé, and it's not even like he's too pushy or anything, but here it's treated as a huge betrayal - ends up making the film's tone seem pretty prudish.

 Not to defend Devon, who seems like a douche, but let's not clear the others of any blame.

 Anyhow. It's all pretty entertaining! The premise is great and well developed, barring some bum notes and obvious points that even a dipshit like Devon should realize (like the fact that they're building a place of business at a house they don't own, something a local policeman has to point out later; did any of them even think of it?), and it's fun to see how these dumbasses dig a hole for themselves.

 Until a reporter gets wind of the phenomenon and goes in to try and make contact with the ghost, and the script loses it completely just in time for the third act. Actually, it at first it only mildly loses it - sure, the reporter doing something insanely stupid while none of the others realize it because their (non-)sexual tension has reached a breaking point; it's the first time the movie lets the ghost go wild with her telekinetic powers, and she gets in some pretty respectable zero-budget mayhem.

 It's after the fallout from that settles, when everyone gets taken to the local police station, that things really go to hell. Some characters return to the house, joined by other characters from earlier in the movie for poorly explained reasons. All sorts of crazy revelations come tumbling out, all of them completely unforeshadowed, and.. well, pretty fucking dumb. A whole room in the house with an important element is introduced at the last minute, Pearl sees a picture and immediately comes up with some pretty out-there explanations, all sorts of (awkward, low-budget) confrontations take place, and the movie ends up going out with an unconvincing whimper.
 I mean... it's not not fun, and there are some cool images in the mix- a highlight, spoiled in the trailer, has a walking man keel over only for his invisible ghost to leave footprints in the mud where his path would have continued. But it's a shame to see a pretty sharp script (by director Derek Hammer) devolve into this sort of complete bullshit.

 A shame. But two thirds of a good movie, especially a good, well-shot, mostly well-written and paced movie produced on what seems like the low end of a regional production budget - that's nothing to sniff at. I liked it, despite the completely botched final act.

Black '47

  Irish soldier Martin Feeney (James Frecheville) returns to his native Connemara from a long foreign stint with the British military to find his land in shambles. It's 1847, the great hunger has been ravaging the land for two years, and the English landowners have been using the widespread poverty as an excuse to evict famers from their holdings, causing deaths from exposure to skyrocket as the malnourished, bankrupt peasants are turned loose on the countryside.

 His mother and brother dead (she died of starvation, refusing to take the Anglican church's charity as it came on condition of conversion; His brother was hanged after stabbing a constable when their house was taken), Feeney aims to take his brother's remaining family and join the hordes of Irish folk fleeing to America.

 Unfortunately, he never gets the chance: One bright winter morning the local constabulary arrive with an order to tear the roof from his brother's house and evict everyone inside. Martin is held down when he tries to intervene, and can only watch as someone is shot while resisting and the women are turned out into the frozen wilds barefoot.

 When he returns from the constabulary the next day he finds his sister in law and her daughter frozen to death in the now roofless house.

 Pretty good basis for a revenge movie, right? Black '47 is a well-researched, very angry revenge fantasy that's not just about the particulars of its story, but the whole sad chapter in Irish and British history. An angry pointed finger at what some historians consider a deliberate attempt at genocide, courtesy of some long-dead people who still have statues up in parks and streets around London. Fun!

 And yeah, it almost is fun, because as it turns out Feeney has a particular set of skills, which he demonstrated amply the day he was taken to the constabulary in a pretty cool action scene. Killing, I mean. He's good at killing, which he does frequently during the movie, and with a grim sense of poetic justice.

 But that bit in the constabulary is the only properly exciting action sequence in the movie, because I guess the movie is sadly not insane enough to go all Django Unchained with the great famine. Oh well, at least it knows to go out with another big action setpiece.
 Instead of being all about angry Irish Rambo against the dastardly English, Black '47 focuses on a small army task force that gets sent to stop Feeney by any means. It's led by a young, pompous little shit (Freddie Fox), with constable Hannah (Hugo Weaving) as their tracker and a young private (Barry Keoghan) to tend to their horses. Hannah is very much the Col. Trautman figure, an old army buddy of Feeney's who provides running commentary on how the British picked the wrong man to push.

 So we mainly follow these three - soon to be four, with the welcome addition of a local guide played by the always soulful Stephen Rea - as they follow Feeney on his rampage, always two steps behind. It's an engaging tale, though there's quite a bit of on-the-nose exposition as the movie makes time so that the British villains can vent their loathsome practices vis à vis the famine situation. Jim Broadbent's Lord Kilmichael is all in for genocide, for example, happily comparing his work with the wiping out of the Indian nations in the US.
 Most of these stances are certainly well documented, but as asides in a genre movie they're a little too didactic. I'd probably appreciate them more if I didn't know about the points they're making already, though. Not to mention that the two-dimensional villains do make the film's premise, which is basically a slasher movie where an unstoppable murdering machine works his way up systemic injustice, much easier to swallow.

 Its desire to illustrate the ills of the time include a completely unnecessary aside into how the English were still exporting food during the famine. Again, true, and again, a bit preachy. The approach does have some problems, but its heart is int the right place and by making the oppressors into such clear bad guys it tilts the movie further into action territory, so it didn't actually bother that much.

 While it tries hard to remain on the period drama side of things, I'm comfortable calling it an action movie based on the amount of shootouts, chases and that pretty cool fight at the constabulary, and the opposition being such an unrepentant, openly evil (to our eyes) cast of villains*. Or maybe a pseudo-Western.

 The script (by P.J. Dillon, Pierce Ryan and Eugene O'Brien) has some pretty big superficial similarities to First Blood, but they remain skin deep - The Rambo here is not really a character, just a hook on which to hang a gritty revenge yarn festooned with history lessons.

 There's quite a few heavy hitters in the cast, and they all acquit themselves nicely, with (unsurprisingly) Weaving and Rea standing out. Frecheville is fine, but his character is only ever required to be stoic and convincingly badass, which he does handily.

 Director Lance Daly directs the action with some flair, and Declan Quinn's cinematography is beautiful - wintry and as drained of color as the story is drained of nuance, all miserable Irish landscapes with abandoned thatchless cottages. He also likes to shoot darkened interiors with natural light seeping in, some of the scenes resembling a sort of dutch chiaroscuro. Plenty of striking imagery here.

*: someone smarter than me would write a joke here about how the word villain comes from villeins, which are similar to the victims of this movie's villains.

Judge Archer (Jian shi liu bai yuan)

 China, 1917. Martial artists are running around the country wreaking havoc, as they usually do - either as soldiers serving many clashing warlords, or at martial arts schools. And as we know from countless martial arts movies over the years, martial arts schools aren't any better, always challenging, stealing sacred objects, or insulting each other.

 Somewhere in the countryside, a man (Yang Song) traumatized after witnessing an atrocity is given a new lease on life by the local monks - they they allow him to drop his previous life and run out into the word cleansed; The first words he hear will be his new name and identity.
 As it happens, those first words are "Judge Archer!", shouted in a forest after some sort of scuffle. Our protagonist finds a wounded old man, who asks his name. When he responds "Judge Archer", the old man tells him that's his name too, and decides to take him under his wing.

 Judge Archers are, as the opening blurb informed us, the people who keep all the martial arts schools in line. Cut to six years later, and the new Judge is now a powerful martial artist; We get to see him in action for a while - he can perform his job even while blind drunk - until the plot kicks in.

 That plot involves Erdong (Yenny Martin), a femme fatale who convinces Judge to kill an old master (Chenghui Yu) who's thrown in with a powerful warlord. Judge (is it ok if I use his first name?) proves he's not being seduced into doing it by literally fighting off her advances in the bedchamber (an amazing and dryly funny fight where the main weapons end up being a length of string, a pair of knives and a chair), and then agrees to her request anyways.

 Things end up being even more complicated than they seem at first (which is plenty complicated) when a beautiful opera singer (Chengyuan Li) keeps interrupting Judge's attempts on the old man's life until he falls in love with her.

 It's a confusing, frustratingly obtuse story that keeps everybody's motivations cryptic. I'm used to just rolling with Wuxia storylines without fully understanding them, but it's especially frustrating here because you get the feeling that there's a well thought-out story full of interesting themes, sitting tantalizingly half-out of reach. It does make sense, mostly, by the end, but there's plenty of bewildering choices, hindered no doubt by cultural distance.

 On the other hand, the movie looks absolutely sumptuous. Director Xu Haofeng has an incredible eye for visuals and tying scenes together in a very compelling way; He also writes, edits and does all the choreography, which is a really impressive list of credits given how well it's all done. The art direction (by Yong Xie) and cinematography (by Tony Wang) are beautiful, and the wardrobe (by Tingting Liang) looks amazing. The film easily earns a ton of goodwill by virtue of just how good it looks and sounds (the music, by Wei An and Fan Wang, is also fantastic).
 And the acting is good. Judge Archer is a damaged weirdo prone to strange pauses, but he's a convincing, very charismatic damaged weirdo. Kuang is a great villain, believably capable and equally likeable, and both of the women are very good as well, although their roles are the most inscrutable.

 It's a thoughtful film full of quiet moments, punctuated by frequent and very cool, very varied fights. There's a series of close-up duels which have people sitting on benches, right on front of each other with their knees almost touching, relying a lot on elbows and the insides of the forearms. Other fights use the aforementioned piece of string, arrows wielded as wands, and pole fights that turn into spear fights when the combatants sharpen the tips by tapping them on a hard object. A lot of attention is paid to footwork, which is something I adore in these movies.
 All great stuff, much less flamboyant than most wuxia but still a tiny bit heightened and very imaginative.

 Set against the rise of the Chinese republic and the ensuing wane of martial arts ("there won't be another Judge Archer", someone says), the story and its themes are quietly affecting- especially when we learn of the fate of the Judge's sister, the catalyst that set the whole story into motion, and compare them to see how their lives diverged.
 Xu Haofeng is serious about all this stuff: he's a researcher into martial arts and its role in history, a well-known novelist in China, probably most famous here in the west for being one of the writers behind Kar-Wai Wong's The Grandmaster. He's appeared once in this blog already, as the writer of the novel Monk Comes Down the Mountain is based off; given just how good Judge Archer is, he will absolutely appear again.

Fragile (Frágiles)

  Fragile is a 2005 Spanish/English English-language coproduction from Jaume Balaguerró, who directs and wrote the script with Jordi Galceran.

 It stars Single Female Lawyer herself Calista Flockheart as Amy, an American nurse who's just transferred to a hospital in the Isle of Wight to cover for another nurse who left in mysterious circumstances. The hospital is in the process of being closed down, all the patients transferred to another local facility, but the move's been put on hold due to a train crash. And someone needs to take care of the last remaining patients - half a dozen children - until that's resolved.

She's pretty big in Omicron Persei 8.

 The skeleton crew left behind to look after the kids also includes two doctors (Gemma Jones and Richard Roxburgh) and the day shift nurse (Elena Anaya). Other than the move it seems like a regular hospital... until you find out that the second floor was shut down back in the fifties and left to moulder ever since, fully furnished. You know, the sort of perfectly normal thing that could totally happen outside of a horror movie.

 Amy immediately fixates on one of the patients - Maggie (Yasmin Murphy), a huge-eyed moppet who insists she talks to an imaginary friend called Charlotte. Given the genre, and that we saw in a prologue an invisible force breaking a kid's femur in two places, you know what that means. It's not long before Amy sees enough weirdness to convince her that there is indeed a force of evil haunting the hospital, one that's fixated on the children in general and Maggie in particular. Cue a particularly annoying instance of trying to convince her coworkers that she's not crazy...

 This is not a good or particularly interesting ghost story; It looks professional enough, and there is a fairly cool twist regarding the identity of the spook at the center of the tale, but it's undone by some piss-poor dialog, uninteresting characters and some unwittingly funny horror moments. I admire how over the top it gets, but unfortunately not the execution of said mayhem, which involves some poor staging and a lot of ropey '00s CGI. The bloodletting fares better; There's not a lot of it, but a scene with a broken canula needle effectively rattled me, as it's something I've imagined happening to me before.
 Oh, and for those keeping tally, there's quite a few creepy/possessed toys, the most prominent of which are a set of haunted letter blocks.

 I have a lot of time for Jaume Balagueró; He may not be nearly as good a stylist as his REC co-director Paco Plaza, but he did do Mientras Duermes (Sleep Tight), a delightfully fucking evil movie if there ever was one. This, however, is disposable entertainment, an easily forgettable slab of ghostly cheese despite some good ambiance, a cool monster and some mild cleverness.

Green Room

 It begins as a road movie: The Ain't Right's are on tour, living hand to mouth as they perform live shows throughout the pacific northwest, crashing on fan's couches, siphoning gas to make it to the next venue.

 Not the best way to do business, as they discover when a show falls through. Finances almost down to zero, they're faced with cancelling the tour, but the dipshit that had them come to town for nothing offers an option - play out in the boonies for a 'boots and braces' crowd - skinheads. What could possibly go wrong?

 Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier and cinematographer Sean Porter film this prologue with a beautiful naturalistic flair and a very firm handle on the day-to-day business of a tiny punk band trying to string some shows together. The band is Tiger (Callum Turner), Sam (Alia Shakwat), Pat (Anton Yelchin) and Reece (Joe Cole) - a really likeable bunch of kids even when they're (very believably) posturing about how legit they are. Their relatability is a great asset in a nasty horror movie like this.

 Once they make it to the venue things... they look all right, actually. Tense, but manageable. And their show goes well - despite the gang hilariously choosing to go with Nazi Punks Fuck Off as their opening number; "It's a cover" the lead mutters as bottles fly around him.

 They get paid and are on their way out when Pat realizes he left his phone behind on the green room - and when he gets there, there's a girl with a knife buried to the hilt in her skull. Fuck.

 So begins a standoff between the Ain't Right's and a rotating cast of heavies initially led by Gabe (Macon Blair). The film's scope narrows to just the green room initially, where the band is locked in with an armed, unfriendly brute and a fellow doomed witness (Imogen Poots), and slowly expands as the owner of the venue arrives and - Oh shit, it's Ben Kingsley Patrick Stewart! Ahem. Anyhow, he arrives to 'negotiate', and the band slowly starts realizing that their odds of survival are close to null even as they keep trying to reason with them.

 Things go even south-er almost immediately as the locals make their intentions clear with one incredibly fucked up instance of ultraviolence, and from there we follow both the punks as they try to find a way out and the skinheads as they make plans to kill them and dispose of the bodies in a way that won't get them in trouble.
 I've watched this a couple times over the years, and it always strikes me how complex the script actually is, and how well it communicates subtleties; besides the ripping horror/survival main plot, enough details are crammed in the margins to explain why that initial girl was murdered, we get a lot of character moments on both sides, funny bits of dialog and some horrifying ones as the venue management discuss the band's ultimate fate. It's a gem.

 And when things get going, they really get going. It's not a hugely gory movie, but the carnage still looms large thanks to some unusually terrifying brutality, which the camera lingers on unflinchingly. Survival of common people against hardened criminals is a common escapist movie trope, but this is no fantasy - good people get chopped up with little warning and extreme prejudice, and any reprieve is gained at horrible cost.

 The acting is great (most of the cast is British for some reason, not that you could tell), the music's excellent and the filmmaking is propulsive and even lyrical at multiple points, leading up to one very moving shot right near the end, followed by a pretty funny, silly gag. Damn near perfect little movie.

Open Grave

  A man (Sharlto Copley) wakes with no memory in a huge mass grave. OK; clichéd, but intriguing. A mysterious woman drops a rope for him and runs away; chasing her the man finds a house, with voices coming from inside.
 Now you'd think the best approach would be to knock, right? Or at least scout things out better, maybe eavesdrop a little? Well, no. Because Open Grave operates at the shrillest possible level at all times, our hero runs in waving a gun. It goes down about as well as you'd expect.

 The people inside include an insufferable tough-guy German (Thomas Krstschmann), the mute, mysterious woman who dropped our hero a rope (Josie Ho), a nerdy American (Joseph Morgan), a poor lady who's constantly trying to look so intense she almost looks cross-eyed (Erin Richards), and a token Brit (Max Wrottesley). A lot of shouting ensues, and it quickly becomes clear that despite the mystery-box setup, this is a movie that constantly feels the need to manufacture drama at any cost, often to the detriment of the plot or any character work.

Not big on gun safety, Sharlto? You're gonna Cheney that poor guy.

 It kind of works anyways, for a while at least. Once things quieten down somewhat, we find out that everyone in the house has lost their memories as well - some of them feel like they know each other, but they don't really know how they're related. It's an interesting setup: how do they proceed from there? Sadly that potential unfortunately goes unfulfilled as the only character who's developed at all is the protagonist.
 Meanwhile the mystery broadens as the amnesiacs explore first the house and then the environs; They find corpses everywhere, get attacked by feral people, and run into more seemingly abandoned buildings. which hold more clues to their predicament. It's interesting until you work out that the answers aren't particularly... well, interesting, and it's all further ruined by the film being seemingly terrified of losing the viewer's attention. It stacks the pointless antagonism, manipulative out-of-context flashbacks, heightened chases and red herrings, all in service of a very artificial tense tone that just isn't deserved by the material.

 The script (by Eddie and Chris Borey) also fails to develop a proper plot beyond the puzzle solving. The story beats that follow once the mystery unravels make for a laughable attempt at generating some pathos, but even if they were better handled they would be doomed by the poor characterization.

 It's an indie film through and through, nominally American but shot entirely in Hungary with a local crew and a pretty international cast. The differently accented actors make sense here, as the location is unspecified; just another part of the mystery. As for their acting... well, Copley manages to wrangle his lines into something compelling, the rest don't. I wouldn't blame the actors, as the film's tone is pretty strident already.
 Director Gonzalo López-Gallego manages some cool imagery, a good sense of grittiness, and a little tension, but the film pisses away its mild early promise with dick measuring contests, pointless finger pointing and shouting matches even before it gets the chance to underwhelm with its revelations. I wouldn't bother with it unless you're a Copley completist. A Copleytist.

Alienoid (Oegye+in 1bu)

 Aliens - or Alienoids, I guess, but I'm not going to use that word because it's fucking stupid - don't just live among us; They're incarcerated within us.

 In Alienoid's barely sensical cosmology, the human mind is the ultimate alien prison. A warden alien stationed on earth takes receipt of hundreds of prisoners from his home planet every so many years and injects them into our minds. He's also tasked with hunting them down should they take control of their host and try to flee (they can manifest outside the host, carrying the floating human body like a helium balloon; it's a pretty cool/silly image). Earth's atmosphere is poisonous to them, so they can't just ditch us completely - they have to wear us like a suit.

 That's just the premise; This is a deeply, deeply convoluted and extremely dumb movie.
 The alien warden (Kim Woo-bin) is also a time traveller, and is accompanied by a wise-cracking floating robot who likes to take on his form - this allows Woo-bin, who plays the warden as a serious, no-nonsense stick in the mud, to also play broad caricatures in goofy suits. The first time he does that the soundtrack goes into full wacky mode. While I'm on that subject - the score for this is intrusive and really, fucking tacky; Replacing it would actually improve the movie measurably.

 I'm not really selling this, am I? Well, it does kind of suck, but there's also plenty of good stuff.

You'll have to take my word for it, but this scene is almost Woo-level cool.

 Alienoid is a movie of two halves. Well, half a movie of two halves - it ends in a cliffhanger, pending completion later this year. In any case - half of the story takes place in the modern age, the other half in the late fourteenth century.

 The modern story is honestly pretty shitty: a very kid-friendly FX-heavy adventure that I honestly struggled to muster any interest for, starring the warden, a ten-year old adopted kid sidekick (Choi Yu-ri), and the comedy robot. It's mostly about the kid figuring out what's going on with her 'dad' (which means we get reams of crappy exposition) just as he has to deal with a ship full of rebel alien mutants destroying large chunks of Seoul. The action has its moments but the CGI is very variable, with an unfortunate propensity to have extremely unconvincing humanoids fighting each other. I've had enough of that shit with Marvel, thank you very much. I did like the design of the main alien invader, though.

 The half set in the past, though, is kind of amazing. It's a ridiculously entertaining wuxia-style series of events that follow bounty hunter/bumbling apprentice dosa (the Korean version of a cultivator, as far as I can tell) Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol) as he tracks down a mystical dagger. Jun-veol makes for a very likeable doofus, and he has a real knack for physical comedy. Miraculously, the script actually follows through and provides him with some honest-to-god funny material!

 The humor is extremely broad, as usual, but it does work, and the action is very good - not as good as classic wuxia, and it focuses on magic rather than on martial arts, but it's exciting and very well staged. The scenery and magical mayhem are top-notch - imaginative and full of cool and funny ideas. A lot of Mureuk's wizardry, for example, comes from his painted fan - he pulls out weapons and magic from it, including two cats who shape-shift into sidekicks and accompany him for most of the movie. I love this sort of thing.

 The plot gets a lot less exposition-heavy than the modern-day storyline, too, at least until the closing moments, so of course it's gonna overcomplicate things with weird asides and ridiculous secondary characters, some of them delightful (plus: a little-seen but often-referred to character goes by Dog Turd).

 Even when the main plotline comes to the fore it's more fun, as it allows a love interest / time traveller (Kim Tae-ri, getting a lion's share of cool moments) to pull out a gun in the middle of a brawl in an ancient Korean estate. 

 That's not to say that the main story gets interesting, but at least it doesn't spend all of its time tangling itself into unsatisfying knots. It's an excellent take on modern wuxia, and it more than makes up for the soul-less modern half.
 It's a shame that writer/director Choi Dong-hoon is so enamored of his crappy narrative, as he can tell a hell of a ripping story when he's not preoccupied with conveying the inane particulars of the alien's masterplan.

 The good news is that it seems like the sequel will be led by the more likeable characters; Given how good they, and the mayhem that surrounded them, were here, that's definitely something to look forward to.

She Dies Tomorrow

 Existential horror is not that big a genre - there's horror that gets existential, of course (my go-to would be Kairo; It Follows would be a more recent, popular option), but few genre movies (and probably few non-genre movies, too) are as purely, unapologetically existential as She Dies Tomorrow.

 A jittery anxiety attack of a movie, it drops us off with Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) who's in what at first seems like a deep, deep depression. We watch her as she boozes, sadly browses the internet, rubs herself against the floor and random plants as if she'd just done ecstasy for the first time, and has a sad, awkward conversation with a friend over the phone.

 It's... honestly, it drags. A lot. Be prepared for a lot of moping about. Things pick up a little when the friend she called earlier, Jane (Jane Adams) pops by, and Amy explains to her that she will die tomorrow. No reason, no cause, just the certainty that it will inevitably happen. Her friend, understandably exasperated, leaves her to her funk... but on her drive home realizes that she too will die tomorrow. And on it goes, as Amy spreads thjs conviction at a party to a bunch of other people. Everyone ends up convinced that they will die tomorrow, and the film spends some time with them and tracks how they decide to spend their last twenty-four hours on this earth, and how they spread the misery around.

 It's a deeply bizarre and very leisurely film. There's no central thesis, just people dealing with this sudden certainty; Genre elements are limited to the premise and some imagery to convey people coming to this understanding. There's some very, very understated humor - some of it drily funny, but it's so gentle it barely registers. Very, very little happens.

 I ended up liking it - it's very original and well made (the sound design especially), and I liked how it conveyed irrational thinking. A good mood piece with some sharp writing; Writer/Director Amy Seimetz completed the film before the pandemic hit in full, which makes it remarkable how much the film captures the surreal feel of those couple years.

 Some parts were a bit of a chore to get through, and it left a remarkably small footprint on my mind - I only watched it yesterday and I'm already unclear on some of its details - but yeah, I enjoyed, slight tedium and all.

Legions (Legiones)

 Antonio Poyjú is a shaman, a warlock - though he prefers to be called a mediator between worlds. His is a sacred bloodline, powerful against demons.
 Not that the law gives a shit; Turns out killing a possessed person still counts as manslaughter.

 Played as an old man by Germán de Silva, he whiles away his days at the nuthouse, with the other inmates hanging on his every word as he tells stories of his demon wrangling glory days in the jungles of northern Argentina.

 When he was younger (and played by Fernando Alcaraz) he lived in a hut with his family in the subtropical rainforests of Misiones. Life was good until a demon killed his wife and stole his daughter's faith; Unable to keep young Elena interested in the life of a witch doctor, he takes her to Buenos Aires, where his sometimes violent interventions with evil spirits soon ge him into trouble with the law - and his matter-of-factness about the spirit world gets him institutionalized.

  Things seem placid enough; Antonio is the pragmatic sort, so he just bides his time and entertains his fellow inmates, who are so enraptured by his stories that they decide to mount a stage play about them. But the demons haven't forgotten about his sacred bloodline; with a lunar eclipse looming, another witch comes to warn him that an old enemy from across the veil will try to sacrifice his daughter.

 So Antonio needs to break free from the madhouse, make peace with his daughter (Lorena Vega), and kill the demon.

 Writer/Director Fabián Forte provides an entertaining yarn with a pretty strange, off-kilter tone - it's comedy-first, but there are very few jokes, relying instead on deadpan quirk, mildly ridiculous situations and comedic understatement. That sort of thing can grate, and I'm sure it will for some, but a cast of very game, often very funny actors (kudos to the inmates - Mauro Altschuler, Marta Haller and Victor Malagrino for keeping things lively) and pair of strong central performances from de Silva and Vega help keep things from ever getting insufferable.

 It also helps that there's a strong, believable emotional centre to Antonio and Elena's relationship, and that it's integral to the film's plot. 

The filmmaking is pretty good, giving each locale its own distinct personality (Cinematographer: Mariano Suarez), and Pablo Fuu's off-kilter soundtrack is excellent. If those names sound familiar, Forte was an assistant director for Terrified/Aterrados, and there's a lot of overlap between his crew and regulars from Demián Rugna's movies.

 The horror aspects are OK; It's not a particularly scary movie, despite some good atmosphere, but that's not what it's shooting for anyhow. The mayhem never tops the first scene where young Antonio has to exorcise a very limber possession victim (the film uses physical contortionists to great effect), but there's a montage where he whips up some shamanistic tools, a couple of freaky rituals that use Santeria/Umbanda's reliance on cigar smoking to good effect, and a finale where a couple of demons break free to wreak some carnage and stretch the (very limited) budget a little.

 The film ends up collapsing under the weight of genre expectations - it's a rare film that makes me think it might be better off without a jaw ripped off and a reference to Poltergeist 2's demonic tequila worm - but, well... it still has a jaw ripped off and a reference to Poltergeist 2's demonic tequila worm. That counts for something, right?

Security

  Security is an American B-movie shot in Bulgaria by a French-Canadian director with a Spanish protagonist and a British villain. It doesn't really distinguish itself on the action front from many other DTV movies, but it's a fun take on the Die Hard formula - or maybe Assault on Precinct 13, since the criminals don't control the mall for much of the movie - with likeable protagonists and just enough personality to make it enjoyable.

 Eduardo Deacon (Antonio Banderas) has hit a rough spot after returning from the Middle East - his introduction at a job centre, where some unspoken issues with his psychiatric evaluation make him hard to employ, is excellent: It gives him good action bonafides (he made captain and did three consequent tours), establishes the stakes (he's nearly broke, has an estranged wife and daughter) and his personality traits (humble and willing to do whatever it takes to pull through)... plus, it's just a good, empathetic scene all around. The movie puts its best foot forward, and I honestly don't know how well it'd work if it had botched this part or if it had chosen a more standard action scene to kick things off. Well done, movie.
 In any case: after some back and forth and some begging, Deacon manages to land a minimum-wage job as a night watchman in a mall in a some nearby-ish shitty neighbourhood.

 His luck, meagre as it is, doesn't hold. That same night, the USA Marshalls Service (yeah, I know, their spelling, not mine!) is transferring a state witness on a convoy when they get hit by a team of criminals that operate with military precision and are somehow able to jam both police scanners and cell signals. All the feds are killed, but the witness - Jamie (Katherine de la Rocha), a little girl - is able to escape into the woods.

 As that's going on Deacon is getting inducted at the new job by Vance (Liam McIntyre, a pompadoured and be-sidemuttoned jackass who's all but coded to be annoying. As it turns out the mall is located between two meth-stricken urban wastelands, so the overnight security team is three people plus Ruby (Gabriella Wright), whose deal isn't really clear but she seems to crash in the security room to sleep off her hangovers often enough that they're all used to it.

 Jamie reaches the mall and runs into Deacon just as he's completing his first rounds of the night - and conveniently passes out in his arms. As the team discuss what they're going to do with her, someone else pops up outside and... oh shit, it's Ben Kingsley! He first tries to trick them into giving the girl to him, then he tries to bribe them into it, and finally he threatens to kill every single one of them when they refuse his terms.

 And that's it: Our small team of mall cops (plus Ruby) need to protect Jamie from a couple dozen highly trained mercs. They refreshingly almost immediately rally behind Deacon to lead them, which is just common sense but I was dreading some head-butting, especially when the script foreshadowed that Vance might put up some resistance.
 As it turns out one of them has experience with explosives because... the internet, Ruby knows how to shoot a bow, Vance knows his way around guns, etcetera - all stuff that will come in useful later. A couple other plot points are carefully seeded (Vance has a gun on his truck in the parking outside, there's a trike in the show floor that's apparently really fun to drive..) and I'm happy to say the script (by Tony Mosher and John Sullivan) duly follows up on them.

 The action is not that great - this is firmly in the direct-to-video quality bracket, and Desrochers is no Jessee V. Johnson or John Hyams. On the other hand, it is better than some of the action that did make it to the cinemas at around the same time (like, say, London Has Fallen).
 There's some hand-to-hand combat, a lot of shootouts, a couple explosions, clever use of home-alone style traps and even a little vehicular action. It knows enough to add some colorful villains for our heroes to fight, including MMA vet Cung Le in a pretty fun main henchman role.

 There's a lot of posing, but no follow through - so you'll get a really good scene of, say, Banderas sliding through the floor shooting guns akimbo, but it's all close shots and poorly edited so it's not really fluid. At least the posing itself looks pretty cool.

 The dialog is clunky, but it succeeds in making the characters likeable and has some good moments - I liked the way one of Deacon's co-workers (Chad Lindberg) reacted to killing someone for the first time; yeah, it tracks. Kingsley scores a few cool lines as well towards the end, when he's trying to turn the girl to his side, or maybe just trying to get a reply so he can shoot her. Either way, it's fun.
 But the movie belongs to Banderas, who blesses a very likeable character with a great, soulful performance. There's a bit of formulaic feel-good shit in his relationship with Jamie, but it's ok, Banderas earns it.

Badland Hunters (Hwang-ya)

 The first character we meet in Badland Hunters is a mad scientist played by Lee Hee-joon. He's got a blood-splattered lab coat and everyhing!  The police break into his lab before he can inject a young girl with a vial of green liquid (sadly, it's clear and translucent; tut tut), but just at that moment a huge earthquake strikes Seoul, laying waste to the whole city in a garishly artificial scene of total destruction.

 Three years later, the city is a pile of rubble with post-apocalyptic tribes roaming the parched land. We soon run into Nam-san (Don Lee) and Ji-wan (Lee Jun-young), wasteland hunters: Ji-wan is the goofy, cocky young one, and Nam-San doesn't stray at all from Don Lee's by now familiar beefy, tough-love uncle persona. Not even ten minutes in he's punching someone across a plaza, and later on he punches an intercom so hard he hurts the guy on the other end.

 Our protagonists have a good thing going hunting critters in the wilderness and bartering their meat at a nearby establishment. They have a friend in Su-na (Roh Jeong-eui), a young girl who's Ji-wan's crush and Nam-san's surrogate daughter; She's the catalyst for the action when a group of clean-cut strangers invite her over to their high technology enclave; she and her grandmother accept the offer, with Nam-san's blessing. And if you think that everything is on the level... I guess you haven't seen/read/played many post-apocalyptic stories.

 Su-na is quickly separated from her grandmother under fake pretenses, and ends up in the one intact building in the city, guarded by military types and ruled over by... the mad scientist from the prologue. Now in normal clothes, but don't worry, he'll find his way back into a blood-spattered lab coat eventually.
 Meanwhile Nam-san and Ji-Wan find their way back into the plot when an extremely unlikely and very convenient coincidence has them run into Su-na's grandmother just as she's getting murdered by her escorts. If you squint, you can just about make out scriptwriters Kim Bo-tong and Kwak Jae-min's complete lack of fucks.

 The Badland Hunters kill the soldiers - with some difficulty, as the enclave forces seem to be resistant to getting pieces chopped off and being stabbed all the way through with sharp objects; Soon they're  joined by another soldier (Ahn Ji-hye) who defected from the enclave when she discovered the mad scientist was squirreling away children to run experiments on. That seems like at least a minor breach of ethics. Oh, and he's the one who turned the soldiers into damage-resistant mutants.
 Now a trio, they start making their way to the tower to rescue Su-na, but not before we get an agonizingly boring look at what's going on within the tower.

 The movie painfully goes into a sort of moronic thriller mode for twenty minutes or so as we're shown how the poor people there are manipulated and lied to. It turns out, there's some evil afoot in the place run by grandma-murdering soldiers and a children-murdering mad scientist! Go figure.

 It's not a complete loss, however: at one point one of the mutant soldiers eats a mouse in one gulp, lowering it into his mouth in a way that... may seem familiar to people over a certain age. Later on the same soldier gets part of his face ripped off, revealing scales underneath - holy shit, that's got to be some sort of V homage, right? I have no idea, but it did make me laugh. Lizard people, dear readers.

  After some faffing about with all this our three ass-kickers get to the building in time for some mildly engaging derring-do, ending things with some fun but very poorly shot action.

 Let me just state this as clearly as possible: the script for this movie is an absolute fucking disaster. It's lazy, dumb, full of lazy outs and terrible jokes, and it wastes a huge amount of time with pointless, boring digressions. Yes, it's bad for a knowingly dumb B-movie script. Don Lee makes a couple of his jokes work - the guy's 'can you believe this shit?' schtick remains pretty funny - but the rest is pretty much a waste of time.

 Meanwhile, director Heo Myung-haeng, a stuntman who's worked with Lee in the past, comes up with cool stuff for the hand-to-hand fights but isn't able to shoot them in a way that's clear or engaging; Things are comprehensible, just about, but the shoddy editing, shaky filming and poor blocking let most of the action scenes down badly. At least most of the individual moves are clear, so you can appreciate Ji-hye's acrobatic fighting style.
 There's also a lot of gunplay, which is fine but it gets a little too repetitive and relies way too much on CGI carnage.

 No, it's not a good movie. It does get to be kind of fun, but you need to wade through a lot of shit to some bits which are only slightly better than OK; I wouldn't bother.

Carnifex

 Carnifex is a very traditional low-budget creature feature with a heavy Australian twang. Set shortly after the recent real-life brush fires, it follows two biologists (Harry Greenwood and Sisi Stringer) and a documentarian (Alexandra Park) as they track the devastating effects the fires had on the distribution of local wildlife.

 As our protagonists trek through the brush, we get to see snippets of a mysterious predator eating a couple of animals and a poacher. Except for those asides, the first hour or so of the movie is fairly uneventful. It's got a nice procedural feel as the scientists go around checking cameras and cataloguing fauna, looking for rare local species that might allow them to cordon off a section of the forest from industrial logging.
 They're good company, these three - none of them get a huge amount of detail or character development, but they're likeable enough that it's fun to watch them as they go about doing their job. It also helps that the background scenery is beautiful, and that what they're doing is interesting.

 Things finally get going once the scientists recover footage of a rare wallaby... just as it suddenly gets attacked by a large shadowy mass; Based on that and some claw marks on a nearby tree, one of the biologists wonders if it could be a prehistoric Australian beast- It doesn't sound like a particularly scientific conjecture but it makes sense for the character to posit it because the guy's a bit of a space cadet. And we know he's right because, well, genre conventions. 

 As soon as night falls the thesis is suddenly proven true when the monster drops by to eat a nearby goat, and the movie falls apart a little as it switches gears to survival horror. There's something nifty to the idea of an arboreal hunter who hunts by pouncing from the treetops and then quickly shuffles back into the woods, dragging its prey, but it ends up making for a pretty undynamic threat.
 The monster itself is mercifully shown very little because once we do get a clear view of it, it's a pretty goofy design; And even if it weren't so damn cuddly, the low-budget CGI lacks the means to give it the physicality it would need to be menacing.

 There's a wee bit of gore, some good tension, and a nice resolution that meshes with the film's conservationist ethos - Neither director Sean Lahiff nor writer Shanti Gudgeon do anything majorly wrong, and the film is reasonably well put together. The horror elements all feel very familiar, however, and the monster and mayhem are pretty underwhelming; I ended up finding the film's low-stakes setup more engaging than its action-filled payoff.