Late Night With the Devil

 The late night TV wars have been going on for longer than I thought; In the late 70s Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian, a young radio personality from... I want to say Milwaukee? took up arms to run against Johnny Carson with a new show called Night Owls. As you might expect, he was destined to fail - even a very special episode with a very candid interview with his terminally ill wife (Georgina Haig) failed to put him at the top. Two weeks later she was dead and the show went on hiatus... only to return a month later, but it would never recover its previous level of success.

 The show went on, going through increasingly desperate stunts for a while until on Halloween night on 1977, Dalton invited a few experts on the supernatural and a very possessed little girl, with disastrous results. Or so Michael Ironside (!) informs us in a voiceover, before he presents us with the original tapes, and some additional footage, of that fateful final show.

 What follows is a loving sendup of '70s TV culture wrapped around a ridiculous but clever and effective demonic horror yarn. The show has four guests lined for the night: psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), insufferable smug asshole and paranormal fraud exposer Carmichael Haig (Ian bliss), and the main act - June (Laura Gordon), a paranormal investigator, and her tween ward Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), who was rescued from a satanic cult and suffers from sporadic possessions.

 Things do not go smoothly. Christou has to... ahem, leave early, Haig is way more belligerent than expected, and June has some serious misgivings (a little too late for that) about exposing sheltered Lilly - not to mention her passenger - to the wider world. There's a cheeky sense of humour (and a whole lot of parody) to the film's portrayal of the  TV broadcast, which is a great example of found footage being used effectively; We get both the original show as transmitted, and a bunch of supplemental material as people panic during the commercial breaks. If nothing else, it lets Delroy deliver a very foreboding summary of what's going to happen... followed by a chirpy "...but first a message from our sponsors."

The production design (Otello Storfo) and music (Roscoe James Irwin and Glenn Richards) are spot-on, the wardrobe (Steph Hook) is believable and fun, but writer/directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes biggest scoop is Dastmalchian on the central role; he comes off as very believable as a somewhat sleazy talk show host whose eyes widen when he recognizes good TV is happening, no matter the cost, and also as a more decent than you'd expect human being; There's a version of this script somewhere that's a lot more cynical and way less interesting, so credit the Cairnes brothers for not going in that direction when writing the character. Leaving some humanity in the satire makes it more effective.

 The occult elements of the script are well handled, too - no deep cuts, but it's all very cleverly put together, and when things properly go to hell, the payoff is outstanding both in the gruesome and the cool visual ideas department.
 Appropriately for the time period, I guess, hypnosis is treated more like a superpower than anything that's ever within sighting distance of plausibility; It does provide for one of the scripts funnier flourishes, though, so that's OK. I was more concerned when the exorcism rites got trotted out, but I shouldn't have worried: this is not a movie that's going to waste your time with a puke and rebuke (thank you My Best Friend's Exorcism). It's got its sights set much higher (or lower, depending on how you look at it) than that.

Kwaidan

 A three-hour collection of ancient Japanese ghost stories? Hell yes.

 Kwaidan collects four folkloric stories that were popularized in the west by author Lafcadio Hearn in a few books published at the turn of the twentieth century... as reclaimed by Yôko Mizuki and directed by Masaki Kobayashi (of Harakiri fame). There's something very pleasing about the continuous cycle of adaptations there. Keeping the old stories alive.

Do not fall asleep first in a party with monks, those guys are -thorough-.

 The first story - The Black Hair - is the most influential, particularly in Japanese horror: A poor samurai (Rentarō Mikuni) leaves his wife (Michiyo Aratama) to marry into a rich clan in far-away Kyoto. He comes to regret his deeply shitty decision and after a few years abandons his new life to go back. He finds his old estate in disrepair, but his wife - looking exactly as she did when he left her - welcomes him with open arms. That is, until he wakes up the next day and gets chased around by tangles of black hair. Hey, don't look at me like that - it works. Mostly. OK, it did make me laugh a couple of times.

 The Woman of the Snow, meanwhile, is more of a fable, and this is where the film really hit its stride for me. Two woodcutters get stranded in a snowstorm and take shelter in an abandoned shack. There, they're attacked by a Yokai (basically, a ghoul/spirit/ghost/etc.) taking the form of a beautiful woman (Keiko Kishi); she freezes the older woodcutter to death, but takes pity on the younger one (Tatsuya Nakadai) and lets him live - on the condition that he never tells anyone what happened that night.
 As the years go by, the young woodcutter meets another beautiful woman... also played by Keiko Kishi! Oh crap, you can probably see where this is going. They have three children, and share a happy life until Minokichi puts his foot in it in the same way people always do in this type of stories.

 Hoichi the Earless is the longest and most elaborate of the film's chapters. It even has its own prologue: a reenactment the battle of Dan-no-ura, a huge sea battle where two opposing samurai fleets faced off against each other, leading to the near-destruction of the Taira clan and the death of the infant emperor.
 A shrine is erected near the site of the battle to pacify the spirits of the many warriors died that day. Many years later Hoichi (Katsuo Nakamura), a young blind musician who's being looked after by the monks there, is summoned by a samurai to play for his lord at his house over several nights. The monks recognize that he is being drained of life by ghosts, and come up with a plan to save him - but commit an oversight, with horrific consequences.

 Finally, In a Cup of Tea is a more playful, slightly meta story where a writer tells the story of a samurai who drinks another man's soul in a cup of tea, leading to a fight with his ghost and his ghost retainers and a fun twist ending.

 This is a gorgeous, gorgeous film, with some staggeringly beautiful, complex sets accompanied by almost psychedelic matte paintings of the sky - sometimes there's eyes painted on them. It's got a very theatrical feel and many of the special effects are just lighting changes. Aggressively artificial, but very effective.
 The film does tend to ramble on - even split into four stories, the pacing is a little glacial. I didn't mind it too much except on Hoichi the Earless, where a lot of the narration comes from Hoichi himself, singing the exposition on his biwa; That got old pretty quickly.
 Other than the singing, though, Hoichi's segment is the clear standout; It's not just a great story (all of these are), but it's also the most transportive of the film's segments and the one that hits the hardest.

 The writing is stately and tries to convey the (beautiful) stories as respectfully as possible, which makes for a somewhat sedate film. It might not be particularly scary, but there's a reason these stories have survived a millennium or more. 

Spaceman

 What a weird little film Spaceman is. A slow-paced, meditative drama in science fiction drag with the heart of a crowd pleaser, full of weird imagery and concepts used to paper over hoary script contrivances.

 Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler) is a cosmonaut six months into a year-long Czech one-man mission to explore a giant purple cloud that appeared near Jupiter. He's doing all right; I mean, he looks depressed, but one gets the sense that that's how he looks all of the time. As the film starts he's having trouble sleeping because of a noisy toilet malfunction, and getting a bit concerned as his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) hasn't called him in a couple of days.

 Unbeknownst to him, his very pregnant wife has just left him - with some time alone to reflect on their relationship, she's (justifiably) decided that their one-sided relationship is not working; so she sends him a message and moves away to a resort for single mothers somewhere in the countryside.

 Her message is intercepted by Mission Control, though, where Jakub's liaison (Kunal Nayyar) and his CO (Isabella Rossellini) hold it back, worried of the psychological impact it'll have on him.

 So Jakub proceeds with the mission, getting a little more concerned over Mission Control's evasive answers about his wife. And then he runs into an alien: A cuddly giant telepathic spider, with great big adorable eyes and the voice of Paul Dano, who entreats him not to fear it, that it's a friend.

 The spider had been studying humanity and became fascinated by Jakub; their relationship develops over the movie, as the spider pokes into Jakub's mind and unspools his relationship with Lenka in a series of achronological flashbacks.

This looks like a still from the best soap opera ever: "I swear, Glormax, it's not what it looks like"

  The feel of the film brings to mind the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem - it's got a sort of post-eastern bloc sensibility where everything is utilitarian, but with absurdist touches like Jakub being forced to recite the slogan for the insecticide company that sponsors the ship's sterilization mechanism before he can activate it. The ship is a beautifully designed space (production design: Jan Houllevigue), very lived in and full of hacks like laptops strapped onto the walls and retro-futurist elements like big chunky handsets.
 What's distinctly not like Lem's work is that the alien - which Jakub dubs Hanus - can not only be communicated with, it basically thinks and feels like a human; Other than its arachnid shape, it'd be near indistinguishable from one, in fact; One of the most annoying bad science fiction tropes out there. It was shit when Andy Weir used it in Project: Hail Mary (a book that might have some trouble getting adapted now that this exists!), it's even worse here stripped of all plausibility and where the alien's only function is to help Jakub work out his relationship troubles.

 Yes, that's basically all the alien does. That, and providing some new-agey bullshit about the purple cloud. "You never asked me about myself", Hanus says accusingly to Jakub, late into the movie; It makes thematic sense, because that's the gist of Jakub's issues with Lenka as well. But... come on, you luck into a friendly first contact scenario and you're happy to just use him as your counselor? Not even the least curiosity about a fucking alien culture? How was this guy ever astronaut material?

 I'd love to see the debriefing for all this. Sorry guys, we just chatted about my feelings.

 In any case, the movie's not any better, and it's more than happy just using the alien to teach one sad sack human that he's been mistreating his lady. File away the counseling space spider in the roster of lazy-ass romantic script devices, right next to the magical negroes and manic pixie dream-girls.

 It's an oddly unimaginative way to arrange an intriguing set of elements. The whole thing is played dispiritingly straight, and the initially promising setup becomes more mundane as it goes along instead of more awe-inspiring as it clearly aspires to.

 Once you get over the fact that this is more of a magical realist romantic fable with an astronaut in it than anything with any sort of intellectual rigor, it's all right. The relationship drama at its core is solid and affecting, if unoriginal, and the spider *is* pretty cute. Sandler is solid, even though his performance is much more one-note than his other serious roles (seriously, if you haven't seen Punch-Drunk Love, seek it out immediately), and the rest of the cast are all pretty good even if they don't get a lot to do.

 Once you get over its patent flaws, the script by Colby Day is all right, providing the actors with some good lines and cinematographer Jakob Ihre and director Johan Renck (of Chernobyl fame) with a few cool hooks to hang some intriguing imagery on. Plus one lovely allusion to Rusalka.

 The effects are a mixed bag, but look good for a mid-budget Netflix release, I guess. 

 Spaceman is strange and earnest enough to avoid the derogative #content comment so many of these streaming exclusives richly deserve, but it's also not that good. It's a cute movie - just be aware that as science fiction, it fucking reeks.

Loop Track

 For whatever reason, New Zealand can't seem to do straight horror. All the entries in the genre I've seen from them, from the gentle silliness of What We Do In The Shadows to the gleeful maximalist splatter of Deathgasm, have a mile-wide seam of humour of varying degrees of darkness running through them. It's almost as if Peter Jackson staked out a sort of national horror identity with Bad Taste.

 Loop Track doesn't quite buck the trend, but it's definitely the most deadpan of the lot. Thomas Sainsbury, who was so great in Wellington Paranormal, writes, directs and stars as Ian, a nebbish, pudgy middle-aged dude who embarks on a four-day circular hiking trip in the kiwi wilderness; The titular loop track.

 It's quickly apparent something is amiss as Ian goes to unreasonable lengths to avoid the other hikers on the track, almost seeming to go into a panic attack at the prospect of having to be around other people. As it transpires, the guy is just painfully shy and trying to get away from everything... which makes it all the funnier when Nicky (Hayden J. Weal), an overtly cheerful, extroverted outdoorsman, catches Ian and decides to take him under his wing.

 Soon poor solitude-seeking Ian is forced to travel with Nicky and a friendly couple (Kate Simmonds and Tawanda Manyimo) in a keenly observed spontaneous social circle, capturing very well how it feels to be socially trapped by people with good intentions.

 Ian doesn't seem to be a bad sort, but he's poor company: awkward, taciturn, introverted, somewhat depressing to be around - and deeply aware of all of this. As he treks the New Zealand backwoods, add one more item to the list: he starts thinking he sees a large shape following him, one that none of the other hikers can see. The ensuing paranoia leads to some difficulties with the rest of his newfound company.

 This is a film that fully earns the title of slow-burn; Its pacing is methodical, the humor wry and character-based, and it's not always clear if there ever is going to be a payoff. Not that it matters, because the characters are well-drawn and many of the situations are excruciatingly funny. You really start feeling for Ian, even when you might start to suspect he's a serial killer.

 To say it ends with a third act that shifts the genre to full-on survival horror feels a little bit like a betrayal, because until that point it's just as likely that the story might end with everyone arriving uneventfully at the trailhead. But no, it goes gloriously over the top in a swerve that I suspect will get many reasonable people angry at the film. Yes, it's stupid, but also of a piece with the film's wicked sense of humour, and it allows for a measure of manic no-budget mayhem that includes at least one very cool, pretty gory kill.

 Whether you think this last act jumps the shark or not, it's hard to deny it's a very well made film. Weal is hilarious as the overweening Nicky and Simmonds and Tawanda's easygoing chemistry is very believable, especially when it starts to get strained by Ian's shenanigans. Sainsbury handles his various jobs with confidence; The film's direction is deliberate and very effective, the script does a great job of ratcheting up the tension while keeping the characters fun, and the part he wrote for himself as Ian is unsparing and beautifully played - a sympathetic, relatable protagonist that can nonetheless can be a little too much even when... especially when he's opening up. 

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

 Pity anyone trying to revive a beloved franchise. Not the execs who greenlight them, fuck 'em all - I mean the poor saps who have to develop them. Ghostbusters is a good case study: get burnt for trying something new, spend the rest of eternity doing these lukewarm, nothingburger rehashes.

 I've seldom seen a film so horrified of angering the fans as Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a film that was so focused on making up for the perceived transgressions of the previous film in the franchise it could have come with a complementary fellatio from a Sony intern. It's a cynical, manipulative, hollow mess that has nothing but cheap nostalgia and reverence on offer - not just for the first Ghostbusters movie, as it also transparently channels Stranger Things to evoke inchoate warm feelings for '80s comfort movies. It's so reverent it barely has any jokes (its one humorous scene a jarring Gremlins rip-off) and basically chooses to re-enact the original movie instead of having its own third act. To quote an infinitely better movie: a memory, trapped in amber. The sub-title really fits the film; It's a lifeless thing, an echo eternally bouncing around in old, dusty halls it didn't build.

 To say Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is better, then, is not really a compliment - it just means that at least there are glimmers of... something... there.

 After the events of Afterlife, the Spengler Clan (Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace) have been funded by original Ghostbuster Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) and relocated to the old firehouse headquarters in New York, because this movie is nothing if not willing to try and milk all the fucking nostalgia it can out of its props and sets. Know your perceived audience, I guess.

 And because the Ghostbusters are supposed to be scrappy underdogs (and because the Sony mandate is to reuse all the old stuff), their vehicles and equipment keep falling apart even though they're bankrolled by a millionaire. Nostalgia also dictates that the original crew be in the story, too, with a bigger role this time around, of course.

 Also making a reappearance: William Atherton as Peck, who's been promoted to Mayor after wrecking the city back in the '80s. He's, well, very understandably miffed at the new Ghostbusters recklessly endangering lives in a high-speed pursuit across the New York Streets. As opposed to his first appearance, he's the sympathetic figure here, not the protagonists, because the script hasn't done any groundwork and just assumes you're going to root for the team. Nope! These nitwits are clearly a threat to themselves and others, much more so than the original crew.

 There's a lot of waffling around, a lot of pointless side-stories, but when the plot finally kicks in it has to do with an imprisoned old god trying to break loose, and with a couple familial mini-dramas (stepdad needs to be more assertive, the daughter needs to... I dunno, grow up or something? It's not worth wasting digital ink on). Everything feels like filler, a platform for cameos from series actors and props (Hey, it's Bill Murray! and Dan Aykroyd! And Slimer! And Annie Potts, who gets to wear a proton pack this time! Who the fuck was asking for that?) Pandering shit.

 Oh, and they also bring back a couple of the kids from the prior movie, because of course they'd follow these people they barely know halfway across the continent. And that includes that insufferable little shit with the stupid name, too; Oh joy.

 The script (by Jason Reitman and director Gil Kenan) is, like most Sony scripts, half-baked. Seriously, how can a distributor be behind so many movies with such shitty writing? Is it a quality control thing, production practices, do they have a running bet in how much of a crappy product people are willing to take?
 In this case it's full of continuity errors, overstuffed with characters and exposition, and riddled with plain old continuity errors and bad plotting. It's more of a comedy than Afterlife, at least, but when the film's humor is indistinguishable from the purposefully bad dad jokes Paul Rudd keeps spouting, you're in trouble. It also sets up stuff that has no payoff or is flat-out contradicted: yet again, it repeats the same mistake Afterlife did of rehashing the final act of Ghostbusters and letting all the ghosts get loose... and then barely dwells on the aftermath to focus on a very underwhelming team-against-subpar villain thing.
 It's as if they didn't watch their own shit. It tries to replicate the triumphant ending of the original, too, but this time no-one's there to see it, which was the whole point of having the Stay Puft confrontation out in the open- The whole city was watching! For all its supposed reverence for its source material, this is a movie that doesn't have the first clue how or why it worked in the first place.
 Another thing that annoyed me: They make a big deal out of them tearing down the sliding pole at the fireman station (yes, this is a movie that fetishizes a brass cylinder)... and then it's mysteriously back in position again in time for a dumb joke. A small thing, but emblematic.

 On the positive side, director Gil Kenan has a much better grasp on spectacle than his predecessor. Most of it is your standard mediocre, expensive but fake-looking CGI stuff, but the crew manage to capture some cool scenes and at times lovely imagery. At the top of that list is Emily Alyn Lind as Melody, the ghost of an achingly cool teen with ethereal flames enveloping her, just walking in the nighttime New York streets; She's by far the best thing in the movie, though even she must bend to dumb, dumb, dumb plot necessities. Of the other new characters, most are just exposition faucets (poor Patton Oswalt... and the less said of James Acaster, the better). The only one who registers is Kumail Nanjiani, doing his usual schtick - but I like his usual schtick, so it's a positive.

 I mentioned earlier that saying Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is better than Afterlife isn't really a compliment- as it should be clear by now, it's more of an insult towards Afterlife. These are movies that exist only because these properties need to be impaled on a sharp stick and paraded around, shaken in the hopes some money will fall out, in hopes of appeasing a toxic fandom that will brook no deviation from the original formula.

 I'm beginning to think franchises are a lost cause.

Pumpkinhead

  Of all the horror movies I loved as a kid, Pumpkinhead might be the one I most misunderstood. To be fair, a lot of that is by design: It was the first movie directed by special effects master Stan Winston, and its monster featured heavily in the runup to its release in specialist magazines like Fangoria*. Even the premise is a bit of a misdirection; A creature feature/slasher where a bunch of teens get picked off one in a cabin in the woods...

 But the script (by Mark Patrick Carducci and Gary Gerani, with story help from Winston and Richard Weinman) has a little more on its mind than just that. I remembered it for its ambiance and the incredible creature effects; Upon this rewatch I was surprised to find it's a relatively sophisticated fable on the cost of revenge.

 The prologue is set in 1957, when a family lock their doors and refuse the calls for help from a neighbour as he's attacked (and killed) by a monster. Their son does get to see the killing through a window.
 That kid grows up to be Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen, giving it his 110% as always), a shop owner in the same stretch of nowhere he grew up in. He's a widower raising a tiny kid of his own - no prizes for guessing that the kid's not going to last long, but the setup is sweet enough to ensure that when the inevitable happens it'll be enough of a low blow.

 The agents of chaos arrive soon after Harley and his son set up shop for the day - a bunch of boisterous young adults off to the wilderness to take their dirt bikes out for a spin (or, as it was the 80s, do some motocross).
 Ed goes off on an errand, leaving the little one to mind the store (it's a pretty WTF moment - the kid is about five!); Harley Jr. almost immediately runs off from his post, chasing after his dog, and gets run over by one of the dirt bikes.

 And here's where the script starts distinguishing itself from most other slashers: the young ones try to do right by the circumstances. Well, most of them (Jeff East, Kerry Remsen, Cynthia Bain, Joel Hoffman and the always lovely Kim Ross); There's the one fuck-up, Joel (John D'Aquino), the one who actually squished the kid, who's a grade-A asshole from the beginning.
 The others tolerate Joel because he's good at motocross - when one of the others comments on him being a jerk, pre-accident, another one pipes in to say 'yeah, but he's a talented jerk.' Well, let's see how that's going to work out for you, champ. We keep choosing to ignore warning signs and enable assholes into positions where they can cause damage...

 To Joel's 'credit', Harley Jr.'s death is truly accidental - it's not like Joel did anything wrong whatsoever. But his reaction afterwards is indefensible: he takes his girl and flees the scene while his friends debate how to contact the authorities, and later cuts off the phone line at the cabin when they try to call the police. Turns out he's already on probation for a recent, similar accident! Panicked, he basically threatens everyone else into submission while he tries to work out what to do.

 Meanwhile, Ed returns to find his dying son in the care of one of the tourists, who explains what happened. Ed wordlessly takes his son back to the house, where he soon expires. Soon afterwards he goes off in search of a witch that lives in the mountains hoping she can bring the kid back to life.
 The witch, who lives in a wonderfully constructed set and is called Haggis (sigh), says she can do no such thing. But... she can offer a means to revenge in the same monster Ed saw when he was growing up, though there's a terrible cost.

 And this is how Pumpkinhead is finally loosed upon the frightened kids over at their cabin. The monster is a wonderful creation, a really expressive mixture of suit (worn by another effects legend, Tom Woodruff Jr.) and puppetry that's very recognizably made by the same mind that gave us the queen alien in Aliens (and there's more than a little of the original alien's design recognizable in the beast's spindly arms and legs). 
 This is, ironically, the most disappointing part of the movie to my eyes these days. The monster, however cool it is, is fairly static, and the film's budget (and possibly Winston's limitations as a director) cause a disconnect between it and the mayhem it causes; the kills are fairly rote, with a lot of grabbing from off-screen and dragging victims around, making the slasher portion of the film slightly underwhelming and killing off any chance it had to actually be scary.

 More interestingly, as each teen is killed, Ed feels the murder through some sort of psychic link, and soon realizes he's made a terrible mistake. This being Lance Henriksen, he immediately goes out to make it right with a shotgun.
 All this all leads to a pretty satisfying climax, concept-wise if not in the sort of '80s practical-effects-laden fireworks you'd expect given its pedigree (which is a huge shame, because a Chekhov's fire thrower makes a return from an early appearance). So it's maybe not the best ending possible, but it provides a good conclusion to everything that's gone before and provides a very clever twist of a final scene.

 For all the hype around the monster, the movie's main weapon is Henriksen, who provides a lot of heft to the film's drama. The script is a bit bare-bones and unsubtle, but its ideas are sound and the way it mixes its elements is fairly unconventional; It doesn't really provide a lot of personality to its characters, but it's remarkably compassionate towards them even as it lines them up for slaughter. People very, very rarely deserve what's coming to them in slasher movies, but it's rare to see that acknowledged and baked into the script.
 The cinematography (Bojan Bazelli) is mostly excellent; Far too much of the film takes place on dark, blue-tinted wood, but these scenes contrast nicely with the orange-hued interiors. The are a ton of beautiful and expansive sets, as well - this is a ridiculously atmospheric movie:

 As big as it is among horror nerds, it seems to be strictly second- or third-tier even amongst '80s horror b-movies. I'm not even talking about it being eclipsed by Hellraiser, but whenever horror films of the time are discussed, Phantasm or Basket Case are likely to be mentioned a lot earlier and more often than this... which is sad, but feels about right. As interesting as it is it kind of flubs the genre elements, leaving behind something that's more akin to a fairy tale or dark fantasy than the slasher shape it draws out for itself.
 Still, it's a very, very good film that deserves to be remembered.

*: Not that that aspect was visible when I was growing up in Argentina, but by the time I got around to the movie a couple years later I'd seen all the back issues.

May the Devil Take You (Sebelum Iblis Menjemput)

  Timo Tjahjanto's May the Devil Take you is a silly family melodrama that turns into an even sillier horror/possession movie that is, like most of the 'Mo brothers output, heavily influenced by Sam Raimi in general and Evil Dead in particular. This one goes beyond their usual energetic homage and adds in whole elements from Raimi's masterpieces like the camera following around a disembodied energy that can possess people, a cabin in the jungle and ghouls that can only be described as deadites.

 Lesmana Wijaya (Ray Sahetapy) is an overnight rags to riches story. His secret? A pact with the Devil Iblis, of course. But something went sour and now Lesmana's lost all his money and his health; he's now in a vegetative state, his flesh erupting in bloody pustules and his organs failing. He recovers conscience just long enough to puke black blood all over the face of his son's girlfriend.

 His family converges on his old house in the middle of the jungle to see if they can find something to sell. They arrive at the same time as Alfie (Chelsea Islan), Lesmana's estranged daughter from his first marriage, which leads to some tension as there's no love lost between them for reasons that will be explained during the movie. We take her side anyways, as the second wife (Karina Suwandhi) is coded as a complete harpy - I don't speak Indonesian, but just the way she pronounces Alfie's name is so over the top it'd make a daytime soap's villain grit their teeth with envy.

 The family drama is short-lived, though: Soon someone tears some seals off and breaks open the door to the basement and the mother is immediately possessed, turning into an unholy, scenery-chewing abomination that starts terrifying both her kids and Alfie. It looks like the patriarch tried to renege on his deal, and the ghost of the priestess that brokered the agreement has come back to collect all their souls.

 It's a fun, goofy movie, full of well made but pretty cheesy scares - at first figures in the background popping up to deliver Blumhouse-esque jump scares, progressing to more physical threats as the deadite attacks Alfie and her step-siblings (Pevita Pearce, Samo Rafael and Hadijah Shahab). I think my main problem is that the possessed are just as likely to mug goofily at the camera as they are to bite a chunk off someone's arm; At one point the possessed mom even starts wagging her tongue at us like fucking Gene Simmons. Definitely not the sort of Demon you want to emulate if you're trying to be scary.

 The script (also by the director) doesn't really break any new ground and is pretty contrived, but its worst crime is that it gets pretty repetitive; At almost two hours, the film drags quite a bit. Still, there's a lot of mayhem packed into the latter half, delivered with Tjahjanto's usual verve and visual invention and a mean undercurrent of black humor.
 It's not a hugely gory movie, but injuries abound and they all look painful. The makeup is superb, if a bit (unwittingly) funny in a couple of places, and the sound design is - like so much of the rest of the movie - so over the top it's almost charming. 

Bad City

  Kaiko City is... Bad City.
 It's the sort of place where Gojo, a top-level Yakuza (played by Lily Franky) can shrug off a bunch of charges (with the help of the prosecutor!) and then immediately announce a candidacy for mayor. His plan? To use an urban renewal project as cover to build a few casinos. He needs the Korean mafia at his side to do that, so there's a bloody coup brewing as his second in command (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi) tries to take over with the help of a silent knife-wielding psycho (Tak Sakaguchi, well utilized).

 There's so much corruption no one can do anything against this madman. So one of the few clean prosecution officers in the city goes and does what you do in those situations: put together a crack, off-the-record task force, duh. These policemen and -woman (Hideto Katsuya, Masanori Mimoto and Akane Sakanoue) all come from the serious crimes unit, and their old boss is taken out of jail to lead them (Hitoshi Ozawa).
 The plot is pretty straightforward, but you wouldn't know that from watching the movie for a while; The storytelling is muddled, throwing a lot of names and complications into the mix without a lot of explanation. The film's a throwback to Japanese '80s VoD police thrillers, but since I haven't seen a lot of those what this reminded me most of is the more recent The Roundup films.

The glamour shot.

 Luckily all the crime means that there are a lot of fights as our secret task force tangles with Gojo and his cronies -  and this is where the movie absolutely shines. Early on there's a great fight against a baseball team's worth of Korean mafiosos which Ozawa beats down with a megaphone (the movie isn't devoid of humour, and this fight includes some great prop comedy), and the finale is a rolling brawl where a handful of people face off against a mall's worth of thugs. The action is varied but mostly consists of large punch-ups, sometimes with bats and knives, and while it's mostly realistic (or, to be more precise, 'realistic',) there's some cool silliness like Takaguchi being just too damn awesome to let himself be hit by bullets.
 It's a very low-budget production, but that's not as noticeable as it could be. There's some extremely dodgy-looking digital blood in one of its rare gunfights, but other than that it's pretty smart about not letting its reach exceed its grasp.

 Writer/Director Kensuke Sonomura is only a couple of movies into his directorial career, but he's been an action coordinator and a stuntman for decades. His experience shows: the choreography here is tight and everyone gets a chance to show off some pretty cool moves.
 He does stumble when trying to keep his story threads straight and/or compelling, and when trying to add in some drama (cutting a plucky reporter minor plot would honestly enhance the movie somewhat). Worst of all, at one point you find out one of the good guys had some information right from the beginning that made pretty much the whole plot irrelevant (this is known as The Force Awakens school of scriptwriting). But the characters are likeable, the violence frequent, and Hitoshi Ozawa's gruff charisma help hold things together when people aren't creatively mauling each other on-screen. It's an enjoyable bit of silliness.

DreadOut

 After the Mo brothers went their own ways, Timo Tjahjanto probably got the lion's share of attention - putting out one of the best action movies of the '00s will do that. But his former partner in crime Kimo Stamboel's didn't do too badly - he directed his own, pretty great action movie, and then did a movie adaptation of everyone's favorite Indonesian videogame/fatal frame... 'homage'. 

 Yes, DreadOut got a movie. There's even a couple of scenes that replicate the game's first person mode. It's a game I've only played a couple of hours of, and a long time ago, so I can't really comment on how faithful it is, but I will say that Stamboel is absolutely one of the best possible directors they could have gotten; When it's good, it sings. Unfortunately he also writes, and, well, he's not so good at that side of things.

 The first scene is excellent - a couple of really great, evocative establishing shots, and then it's right into the mayhem as some sort of cult are coercing a woman to perform a ritual on their behalf. By threatening her little girl, in her own apartment. It's a really tense scene even before it becomes clear that the tied-up bundle in the coffee table, within a ritual circle, contains some sort of demon. The cult succeeds in pulling a ceremonial knife out of the demon's mouth, but the police arrives and stops whatever it was that they were planning to do to celebrate.

 Some years later Linda (Caitlin Halderman), the little girl who was present at the ritual, is in high school, and grown into a teenaged version of your stereotypical final girl: she's serious and holds a job to take care of her father while all the other idiots party around her. And said idiots are fucking despicable influencer wannabes that whine about how few followers they have; Even the supposed 'nice guy' of the group joins in on bullying some younger students. Good thing we're in a horror movie, right?
 The teens (Jefri Nichol, Marsha Aruan, Ciccio Manassero, Susan Sameh and Irsyadillah) have a plan to go into a nearby 'haunted' apartment block to do a livestream- and we know that it's actually haunted, because it's the same building from the prologue, abandoned since that incident. The catch? The groundskeeper won't let them in. Luckily Linda knows him, so they convince her to skip her shift and go with them.

 Nothing much happens in the building until the kids, drawn by the police tape, wander into the same apartment where the cult did their thing all that time ago. There they discover a ritual circle and some weird red leather pages with Sanskrit (love that a high schooler can recognize Sanskrit! Or is that a thing in Indonesia?); One of the pages seems blank, but when her phone flashes on it Linda sees some sort of writing no one else can see.
 And... she reads it aloud. That's it, I'm done, she can fucking die along with all the others as far as I'm concerned. I'm officially rooting for the deadites. The ritual words (the same ones her mother was forced to read once upon a time) convert the ritual circle into a whirling pool of black water, and all the kids are drawn in.

 Linda and one of the others end up in a jungle somewhere, but as the film is desaturated and blue-tinted, it's clear that it's a horror jungle. She soon gets attacked by zombie-like monsters, but her phone flash burns them like some sort of weapon. And from there starts a running battle with a powerful spirit who can possess the kids and throw them around telekinetically, who's still sore after the cult stole her favorite knife. Meanwhile, the others kids back in the real world and do a lot of nothing in the most annoying way possible.

 The main thing to have in mind about this movie is that, despite first appearances and Stamboel's track record, it's aimed straight at teenagers. So any hopes of the shitty teens getting sliced and impaled like satay quickly evaporates. The other thing is that the script is incredibly stupid. Sometimes to humorous effect, like all the ridiculous leaps in logic people make (which of course are always absolutely correct), or the groundskeeper taking a quick look at the swirling black portal and nonchalantly blaming it on a leaky pipe (making him my favorite character in the movie by a country mile).
 Most of the time, though, it's just bad. Painfully bad, even. Which is a shame, because there are a lot of good ideas and cool shots; Stamboel's direction is assured, energetic, and sometimes inspired (a shot of a striking axe, filmed along the path it travels, is very Raimi-esque). There are also some amazing sets,  with a couple of striking tableaux which I'm guessing come straight from the games, well captured  by cinematographer Patrick Tashadian. 

 The shitty script, along with the film pulling nearly all of its punches (See? Teens really do ruin everything!) means that I can't conscionably recommend this. Or... Maybe? If it's easily available to you, or if you have more tolerance for this sort of thing. All the good stuff doesn't quite make up for the inane story, but it's close.

We're All Going to the World's Fair

 A film about creepy internet rabbit holes that's almost indistinguishable from... well, creepy internet rabbit holes, but without a good rabbit hole to delve into; Just a really good performance from Anna Cobb as Casey, a lonely, haunted-looking teenager who decides to take "The World's Fair Challenge", a viral challenge that's also a kind of ill-defined online role-playing game somehow?

 The idea is that you take the challenge, which involves a sort of ritual pledge, and then chronicle the ways in which it changes you - we get to see a few other challengers, and their stuff is... well, the sort of really shitty stuff people swipe through on tiktok with glazed eyes. The way it affects Casey's is a little more interesting, though.

 The movie mostly consists of Casey's uploaded videos, and it's up to us to piece together what's going on with her - a task made difficult because she's a fairly inscrutable kid, and also because the videos are 45% inane 'creepy' youtuber shit, 45% nothing at all going on.

 I fucking loathed the experience of watching a lot of this film, and despite the narrative crumbs left here and there in the middle of all that tedium, I had a really hard time making it through.

 Overall I liked the two main story threads: Casey's psychological descent into... whatever is going on, and the efforts of a random online guy (Michael J. Rogers) who contacts her and tries to help her through the changes. I liked the uncertainty about what the hell is happening, and that the movie does convey a certain psychological depth for Casey (the guy... not so much). I liked where the film finally ends up.

 But you could probably tell the same story in ten minutes - maybe stretch it out to twenty. At an excruciating eighty-six minutes... nope. And I understand why all the filler is there, and why other people might not see it as filler; Personally, I have very low tolerance for that shit, and that I made it all the way through is a testament to writer/director's Jane Schoenbrun's talent and Cobb's performance as Casey (and the fact that I cut the movie a lot of slack for being a zero-budget experiment). I'm glad I did, but let's never do that again.

 It's a nigh insubstantial mood piece, the sort of thing that might be fascinating if you can get onboard. Between this and Skinamarink, I'm starting to suspect maybe I'm just too old.

The Enclose (Harim)

 There are plenty of micro-budget horror movies out there. Many are easily accessible in the far reaches of the genre lists on streaming services, and I understand in the States they all fester within something called Tubi. I tend to avoid them, as there are a lot of deeply shitty films in this space and many seem to only be made to cynically gather whatever meagre earnings are to be made from adventurous /undiscriminating viewers... but sometimes curiosity wins out.

 2009 Iranian horror film The Enclose (originally known as Zone, apparently) seems to have come to reside in that space. It is, whatever other flaws it may have, not cynical - there's clearly a lot of effort put behind it, and that's usually enough for me to at least get through to the credits.

 The credits roll over a 1966-set prologue shot in cheesy modern-day digital approximation of black and white old-timey stock where a bunch of archaeologists discover a tablet, and a little kid, shortly before being attacked by Alan Moore. I think.
 Cut to 2009, where detective Mohebi (Hamid Farroukhnezhad?*) lies alone in a double bed, sadly fondling his wedding ring and casting longing glances to the empty space at his side. The next shot he's sitting at a sofa, looking at family pictures.

 This, by the way, points at the film's single biggest flaw; Writer/director Reza Khatibi has clearly internalized a lot of western film language, and unfortunately that includes a lot of shitty visual storytelling clichés like the ones above. There's a lot of this - and crappy wall-to-wall horror clichés - throughout the film; I got the sense that given that it's a slow, investigative tale, the script (by the director and Mehdi Hosseni-Nejad) deploys these things to keep viewer interest, but it would definitely have been much better off with a subtler approach.

 Major Mohebi is rousted from his mourning by a new case where two British tourists were found near a forest in the middle of nowhere in northern Iran - one of them dead, with no obvious wounds, the other one alive but catatonic, and missing a leg.

 The case is the backbone for the movie, and it's an engaging mystery that soon involves a mysterious village, a haunted forest, and the detective's personal history. The investigation itself is well-handled, although it's often derailed by narrative convenience; An early questioning of a key witness, for example,  misses an obvious detail that's only properly investigated much later, when plot development can better accommodate it. And all throughout, in the margins, there are cheap horror-movie tactics galore, liberally sprinkled all over, most of them not effective at all.
 The final explanation makes it clear that the script was indeed throwing out bullshit like crazy and leaves several key questions hanging, but even then (and despite it hinging on an ill-defined 'everything is connected' conceit) it's still got a fairly cool idea at its centre.

 The director and cinematographer Mohammed Ahmadi are constantly looking to inject some energy into the movie. This is both a good and a bad thing. On the plus side, there are a lot of unconventional angles, top-down tracking shots, and interesting takes in general; a lot of elbow grease is applied, and that's a rare and much appreciated thing here in the far reaches of low-budget productions.

 On the other side, as previously mentioned the film constantly includes poorly integrated, cheesy genre trappings, as if to remind you that it is indeed a horror movie. Some of them are well crafted, but even the good ones end up being distracting. And some of them are unwittingly funny - like the constant 'scary sound effects' (as per the subtitles!), some teleporting village people, scene-bombing Alan Moore, or the multiple instances where the characters within a scene seem to react to a musical sting in the soundtrack; that made me chuckle.

 Is the movie worth it? Well, yes and no. I don't regret watching it. As horror it's a bust, but I've definitely seen worse, and there's plenty to like: Hamid Farroukhnezhad(?) gives a fine, soulful performance; The specificities of Iranian culture give the proceeds a little more interest that a western movie would have had, even though aside from a couple of bits its mystic elements don't seem that tied to either local culture or to Muslim religion.

 The most important thing is that even though the mystery doesn't fully cohere by the end, I still found it engaging, if a bit boring on the moment-to-moment. With a bit more restraint, and maybe a little more development, it might have actually been good.

*: There's very little information about this movie online and the credits are in Persian, so I may have him wrong.

Bottoms

 Bottoms is one of those teen comedies where a lie gets away and takes a life of its own and then it's revealed as a lie and the people who told it need to deal with the fallout and blah blah blah - you know the deal, that old shitty chestnut.
 It's a hoary, hackneyed plot structure, but the specifics of it can elevate it;  These formula movies are only as good as the jokes they deploy. So credit Emma Seligman (who also directs) and Rachel Sennot (who also stars) for a very silly script that's got just enough off-beat, funny jokes to make the plot engaging, and is often willing to take them just a little bit further than expected.

 PJ (Rachel Sennot) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are two life-long lesbian friends and social outcasts who decide that this... whatever year it is of high school is the one where they'll propose to their way-out-of-their-league crushes (Havana Rose liu and Kaia Gerber; both cheerleaders, of course). PJ and Josie's dynamic is a little similar to the one shared by the protagonists in Booksmart - with PJ the amoral motormouth who drags nerdier, saner Josie (also a bit of a motormouth) into her schemes - but this is a far, far sillier movie, one that's more interested in absurdist humor and skewing teen movie tropes.
 So after an incident where the girls (barely) hurt the school's star football player (a very funny Nicholas Galitzine), they become even less popular... until PJ hits on the idea of founding a self-defense club for women. She does it as a way to maybe wrestle with hot girls, but the club takes on a life of its own and inspires the other girls who join it. Also taking on a life of its own: a lie the girls encourage to get respect about having been to Juvie and being forced into fights to the death while there. See the first paragraph for the general arc of that plot.

 It's a feminist movie, of course, but gently so - and it gets some good jokes at its expense, especially about just how clueless everyone is about feminism; When PJ fakes being a feminist while talking up the club, Josie tells her off, by pointing out her favorite show is Entourage. Later a black girl, upon learning the that the club was founded by the girls to get some cooch, is pissed off because "It's the second wave all over again."

 When it works it's got a great energy going for it; Sennot and Edebiri are extremely funny together, there are lots of great ideas and characters peppered throughout, and things do get unexpectedly violent to great comedic effect. But the formulaic plot drags it down - the last thing I care about in a movie like this is whether the girl gets the girl, and I absolutely don't want to see a sad musical montage. I felt like there was a little too much attention wasted on the particulars of its inane plot, but then again at least it gets a lot of mileage when it decides to subvert it.
 I got the sense that there's about forty-five minutes' worth of jokes, stretched out to ninety. Luckily there are some very good jokes in there.

 And while I do have complaints (because of course I do!), I still liked it a lot - it's a pretty unique movie, one that lovingly lampoons Heathers and is sincere about finding a shared space, even if it's within a club that was originally founded to try and get some action.

Calvaire

 From the mid-nineties on there was a pretty weak decade of horror films*, and there's always bound to be a reaction to something like that. In Hollywood it took the form of 'torture porn' - A shitty, useless label if there ever was one - and the genre getting generally grittier and meaner for a while.
 The French, though... they took it to a whole other level: Enter the horror wing of the so-called 'New Extremity' films.

 In short order we'd get movies like High Tension, Martyrs, Ils and Livide. They weren't that shocking if you had already watched a bunch of Takashi Miike's stuff; hell, many of them weren't even that bloody. But they all shared a nastiness and an intensity that farted in the general direction of anything the Americans were doing at the time.

 The first thing that surprised me when re-watching Calvaire, one of the earliest horror movies to be lumped in with the new extremity label, is... that it's fucking funny. In fact, you could almost -almost- describe the film as a supremely fucked-up discomfort comedy as much as fucked-up horror. Director Fabrice du Welz weaponizes awkwardness very effectively. He also makes some pretty strange decisions throughout - sometimes they work, some times they don't, but they all add to the film's batshit insane power.

 Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) is a lounge singer introduced at a concert in a retirement home. The chintziness of his gig is played up, but never overtly comedic - even when he spreads a cape with his name on it, or when he sings old standards to a recorded instrumentation that sounds like one of those cheesy pre-programmed accompaniments on  your basic Casiotone, or when he singles out one of the old women in the audience to serenade.
 He regrets this last act when the same woman later gets into his room and tries to make a pass at him. She's devastated when he rebuffs her, an exquisitely awkward scene that both painfully sad and deeply, darkly hilarious. It's followed up soon by a second punchline that... well, I don't tend to like cringe comedy, but it had me laughing for a long time.

 Marc manages to escape the nursing home unmolested and starts on the long drive ahead of him to get to  his next gig a Christmas gala, but his van breaks down in the middle of nowhere. In a stormy night. As they are wont to do.
 With the help of a strange, but semi-helpful local, he makes it to a local inn managed by Bartel (Jackie Berroyer, who kind of looks like an even sadder, dumpier Paul Giamatti). The following morning Marc and Bartel get to chatting - the innkeeper is having trouble getting a mechanic in for Marc's van, so he invites him over to stay at the inn for the next day until it's fixed.

 A few red flags are raised at that exchange - Bartel warns Marc of the local village, but most of the red flags are raised by Bartel himself, who keeps acting overtly familiar towards Marc. As soon as Marc goes out on a walk, Bartel goes full creep, breaks into the performer's van and starts fetishistically going over his personal stuff. Uh-oh.
 Meanwhile, Marc runs into some of the locals... entertaining themselves. I don't normally bother with trigger/content warnings, but be warned there's quite a lot of (not explicit) sexual violence in this movie - and not all of it is against humans. Turns out Bartel's warning was on the money.

 That night there's an exquisitely awkward dinner scene where Bartel forces Marc to sing for him. The next day - forty minutes into the movie - shit finally hits the fan.
 I shouldn't spoil what comes after - you can guess some of it, but most should rightly come as a surprise; After its first sedate half, the film finally starts turning the screws properly and shit gets appropriately insane.

 It's not a hugely gory film, but it is very violent, and prone to bizarre digressions and some pretty... bold choices - a deeply disturbed (and pretty funny) barroom dance works. Showing Marc's frame of mind via a spinning camera spliced with close ups of his wild, bugged-out eyes... not so much.

 The filmmaking is straightforward and deceptively simple - there's a pretty neat shot going into an out of a van that's all the more remarkable for being completely unshowy. Later on there's some very good-looking cinematography (Benoit Debie, a regular Gaspar Noé collaborator) as the film ventures out into the wild. But then you'll get a scene that looks as if nobody had any idea what they were doing, or like something straight out of the Tim and Eric Awesome Show.
 The same goes for the acting, which gets so far out of normalcy that it's hard to gauge what works and what doesn't sometimes. It's pretty fearless work, though, and I have a lot of respect for it even when I'm not sure what the hell it's supposed to be. And Berroyer is often unqualifiedly great.

 The script (by the director and Romain Protat) skirts along the edges of saying something meaningful about refusing to accept reality at all costs, or performative seduction (that scene at the beginning isn't just funny, it's thematic!). It depends on how much credit you're willing to give it, I guess. The fact remains that as effective as the genre swap makes it, it's only powerful because it's unusual - swap it right back, it loses its surprise and goes straight into rote exploitation messaging (don't act sexy or you're asking for it) - so I'm a bit mixed on how I feel about it.

 Hell, I'm overanalysing it. The new extremity wasn't a real movement in that most of the directors lumped into it weren't actually making their movies to form a part of it. But all of them were definitely going for fucked-up, and Calvaire more than most; Graded on how well it hit that target, I'm giving it top marks.

 This, Frontier(s) and High Tension have gotten new transfers pretty recently, and this one at least looks pretty great. The movie itself has aged a lot better than I expected it to, so expect more actual, non-Belgian-French new extremity revisits in the new future. But not Martyrs, because fuck that - once is more than enough.

* Unless you like the Scream movies and their legacy - in which case, for a while there you had much more fun watching horror than I did.

Poor Things

  It's so strange for Yorgos Lanthimos, the director of films as thorny as Dogtooth or Killing of a Sacred Deer to become a household name (or close to it; Try and get the average English speaker to pronounce his surname). But now he's got a bunch of Oscars for a feminist, kinky, deeply bizarre riff on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein*.

 Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, a grown-ass woman who acts like a toddler and lives with a disfigured father figure she calls God - full name Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, putting on a Scottish accent) and who seems to be raising her as a child. The specifics of her situation are revealed early-ish, but are best unspoiled - like most of the rest of the movie. Let's just say she's a Modern... um, Persephone - yeah, let's go with that. A dead woman resurrected with no memory of her past life, learning life over again with the scientist responsible for the miracle carefully monitoring her new upbringing as if it was still part of the experiment. It's surely not affection he feels, just rational scientific interest.
 As part of that experiment, God calls in Max McCandless (Rami Youssef), one of his students, to help tabulate Bella's progress. Which is rapid; she's soon asking uncomfortable questions about going outside,  (God disapproves, as it would take the experiment out of a controlled environment), disagreeing with her wardens, and, more importantly... trying to jam an apple up her vagina (and wondering out loud where she could find a cucumber). She discovers masturbation by chance and it's a transformative experience, in a scene as hilarious as the weirdly similar one in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator.

 Yes, Poor Things is an unabashedly sexual movie.

 Afraid to lose control over his test subject, God asks McCandless to marry Bella - to which he agrees, as he's grown fond of her. But before any nuptials can be drawn up, the lawyer God hires to write up the marriage contract (a never-funnier Mark Ruffalo) absconds with the bride to be.
 From there the film becomes a bit of a travelogue as Bella enjoys a lot of sex and is exposed to new ideas across three cities and a cruise ship. Her development is the throughline, as the adventures themselves can feel a little episodic - the shaggier they get, the longer the movie feels, although I didn't really think it ever overstayed its welcome; I was more concerned about how things would end, as the director's philosophy can be quite bleak, but it looks like the source material - an early twentieth century novel by Scot Alasdair Gray as adapted (loosely, from what I can gather) by Tony McNamara - seems to have won out.

 The messages of the movie aren't particularly deep - not just the feminist ones about the degrees of control and strictures a woman (and especially a woman in those times) needs to navigate, but the more universal truths about coming out on the other side of  growing up and learning about the world with your convictions intact. But they're delivered with wit, an impish sense of fun, and some astonishing background colour.
 The world of Poor Things is a steampunk wonderland of bright, high-contrast colours and deeply textured... everything. Lanthimos has always had his toes dipped in surrealism, and here that's very evident in just how textured everything is - a London flat, for example, will have walls covered in delicate china and photographs, the floor upholstered as if it was a giant cushion; Lush and plush! The set-contained 'exteriors', meanwhile, are intricate and deliberately artificial - a feverish, swooningly gothic depiction of a romanticized Europe. The production (Shona Heath and James Price) and wardrobe designs (Holly Waddington) are both lavish and immaculately realized; it's a gorgeous, extremely imaginative film, captured with playful experimentalism by Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan.

 Kudos to whoever designed all the spliced animals running around at the London flat, a lovely bit of absurdism to help set the tone for the movie.

 The music is as weird as everything else, partly atonal and featuring a lot of unconventional arrangements and instruments (it pulls out the bagpipes in an important scene, possibly as a sop for fans of the Glasgow-set novel, now transferred to London).

 And the acting... the acting is phenomenal. All major parts are memorable, but Bella nearly steals the show with an incredibly physical performance that starts out all jerky and develops as her character does; It's mesmerizing to watch, a role that's showy in a way that's integral to the character and the plot. Ruffalo also does some incredible comedic work - just the way he waits a bit to say 'Ow!' scored a huge laugh. 

 I really don't want to use the d-ful word, but damn if this isn't the definition of a delight. A bright, big-hearted fable that's fiercely intelligent, often laugh-out-loud funny and always gorgeous. Due to the way it was talked about I was expecting it to be an 'important' movie, but it's much fleeter than that - and all the better.

* Boring Oscar talk time: I mean, maybe the academy is trying to make up for giving all of the big awards to the most tepid (and undeserving) candidate, but still, this is a proper weird choice to honour, even if it was a good call for the categories it won. It almost... makes the Oscars feel a little cool, which was maybe the intention. Fucking vampires.

Castle Falls

 A good script (by Andrew Knauer) with a killer premise, starring two of the most likeable (and one of the most supremely competent) action actors around - in a fair world Castle Falls would at least have the sort of budget Gerald Butler vehicles get. But we live in a manifestly unfair world, so we're lucky to get a plucky, very low-budget video-on-demand release instead.

 The derelict Castle Heights Hospital is not just an eyesore in Birmingham, Alabama's skyline - it's also a reminder of the city's segregated past. Or that's what the mayor keeps telling the media, at least; the building is condemned and set to be demolished in three days, with a (modest) media circus set up to celebrate its passing.

 The old hospital is also the hiding place for three duffle bags with a million dollars each, hidden there by Lando, a drug dealer (Eric Gray) who stole the money from a rival dealer (Robert Berlin). Both of them have since been incarcerated.

 The film takes its time to get to the money, though; First it carefully establishes the two protagonists. Mike Wade (Scott Adkins) is a washed-up MMA fighter who came over from the 'original' Birmingham at a friend's request when he opened up a gym. It didn't work out. Any hope for contender status shattered, broke and homeless, he takes a menial job with the cleanup crew at the condemned hospital.

 Meanwhile, Richard Ericson (Dolph Lundgreen, who also directs) is a little better off - he's at least got a house and a stable job as a prison guard. But his daughter (Ida Lundgreen) has blood cancer; With the American health system being what it is, he needs to scrounge up four hundred thousand dollars because they deem the treatment she needs to be 'experimental'.

 As a director, Lundgreen takes a leisurely, fly-on-the-wall approach for this first half of the movie, letting the dramatic material breathe. This is obviously good for budgetary reasons, and their stories are a little bland for the runtime that's devoted to them - but it just about works because the characters are great and the script provides some specificity to their (very relatable) situations. Wade's MMA background also gives us a decent early fight (with Evan Dane Taylor), but... yeah, the first forty minutes or so here are all table-setting.

 Not just character introductions. The plot is set in motion by Lando, the guy who originally hid the money in the hospital. When he hears the hospital is about to be demolished, he reaches out to the only guard he trusts - Ericson, of course - and tells him about the money in exchange for protection from the guy he stole the money from.

 That guy's not idle, either: alerted by some corrupt cops of Lando's deal, he reaches out to his brother  outside the slammer (Scott Hunter) to assemble a team of gunmen, follow Ericson and get the money back. And of course, on the eve of the building coming down, Wade discovers the duffel bags while pulling apart some furniture. He hides it back and decides to come back to get it after his shift is done.

 So there you go: the stage is set. I'm not going to lie and say it doesn't drag at points (a piss-poor dream sequence is the worst offender in the padding out department), but it's a really cool premise, mostly well laid out. Almost half-way into the movie's ninety-minute runtime (and with a couple hours left within the movie until the building blows up) Wade and Ericson go into the building separately to retrieve the moolah, the latter followed by half a dozen armed thugs. From there it becomes a running battle - first between Wade and Ericson, then both of them against the rest of the world when they inevitably team up.

 There are quite a few fist fights, a couple shootouts (gunfights are risky due to the building being full of explosives) and a few tense chases as the principals try to sneak around the armed thugs. The action is good, not great - the choreographies are very grounded and a little slow, with Adkins doing the lion's share of the work. The developing dynamic between the two protagonists is great to watch, though, and the mooks hunting them get a little colour and some fun lines as well.

 Most of the movie's flaws are down to it being your quintessential DTV (or is it DTS now?) film; The sort where you can barely talk about production design, just a ready-made locations to shoot in (the Lundgren construction company posters were cute, but that's as far as it gets). Similarly, all the setup with the Mayor and the media watching the demolition from the sidelines doesn't really serve any purpose except to set up a (very funny) gag when someone falls out a window and no one notices; If there's any subtext to these cash-strapped people risking their lives for money while politicians and the media watch on from the other side of the street, the subtleties were lost on me.

 The script and the action also have a few hiccups: expect people to use an infinite ammo cheat, for example. The pacing is slightly off until the film hits its stride in the third act, and there's also a couple of crowd-pleasing epilogues I didn't care much for. Relatively minor issues, but noticeable.

 Lundgren's style is unobtrusive, after a couple of non-chronological flourishes near the beginning, and action-wise he makes sure we can see everything properly and doesn't do a lot beyond that. The film is divided into character chapters until it isn't, and a cheesy chronometer runs with the countdown until the explosion every now and then. All blood is digital as expected; I was hoping they'd run the shoot on a building that was scheduled to be demolished in reality, so they could use that on the film, but no such luck; A crappy CGI demolition it is.

 Still, it's a good old-fashioned, no-frills action movie. I'd prefer it to have a little more weirdness, a little more oomph, but it's still an extremely solid and likeable scrappy little b-movie.

24 Hours to Live

 24 Hours to live doesn't make a great first impression. Warning bells were set off by a Chinese production logo at the start - I love Chinese cinema (and I've got the write-ups to prove it!*) but their western co-productions seem, in my experience, to play it safe and skew to the sort of extremely dumb and crass would-be-blockbuster crap I tend to get very annoyed at. Think The Meg, with Meg 2 as the exception that proves the rule.
 The other early warning sign is a prologue where an Interpol convoy transporting an American whistleblower (Tyrone Keogh) who's about to present a declaration against a powerful PMC. They get attacked at a checkpoint between South Africa and Namibia, and the agent in charge, Lin, (Qing Xu) and the prisoner barely make it out alive.
 It's a fine action sequence, with lots of shooting and a couple of really good stunts. But... it's choppy - very choppy, to the point where you can barely see one of its best stunts (a guy climbs onto a car and then gets thrown off when it crashes). Not a good precedent on a movie that bills itself as Ethan Hawke's John Wick.

 Then the movie proper begins, and most of my reservations melted away. We're introduced to Hawke's character (going by the excellent action movie moniker Travis Conrad) as he's bantering drunkenly with his father in law (holy shit, it's Rutger Hauer!) on a beach. After some (pretty funny) back and forth, they work up the will to do what they're there for: to spread the ashes of Travis's wife and son, who've died a year prior. Unfortunately Hauer barely appears after that; I'd watch the hell out of these two talking shit for ninety minutes.

 But the plot must go on, and the movie goes about this business efficiently. Travis senses trouble when two thugs enter the strip club he's buying coke at, and preemptively ambushes them in a pretty funny scene where he locks them in a bathroom and incapacitates them with cleaning products out of a janitor's closet (I'm guessing he mixes bleach with ammonia - I did that once by mistake, and yeah, I totally buy that it could be weaponized).
 He runs into his handler (Paul Anderson) at the bar when he returns from the incident with the thugs; turns out they were just there to set up the meeting, I guess? As established by the way he dealt with those two, Travis is an assassin - the best in the business, of course - and his new job (pay: 1M/day, courtesy of the ever-present PMC) is to hunt down the whistleblower from the prologue and end him.

 The way he does this is by seducing agent Lin - a very clever scene where he uses the information he's got on her to subtly win her over. Also, this is fucking Ethan Hawke with charm turned to 11 we're talking about, so all the footwork and hacking was probably superfluous. But it's still appreciated.
 I'd just like to say that the script for the movie (by Ron Mita, Jim McClain and Zach Dean) is pretty damn on point, especially for a VoD action movie like this; It's got its problems, but when it's good, it's really good. And while we're doing an aside: Qing Xu is great- very charismatic, and we get to see a few sides to her character. Unfortunately she doesn't get that much to do, she's just an accessory to Travis's story. A redemption hook.
 Ahem! In any case, Travis is about to kill Lin as she's in the shower next morning - even has one of those gotcha scenes where he goes through and then we see he was just planning how'd it go - but decides against it and sneaks out instead. Bad idea: Lin (I guess) notices he hacked her phone, tracks him down, and after a short (and very cool) shootout, puts two bullets in his chest.

 So here's the twist in the movie, and this will be a spoiler if you haven't seen its trailers or read its premise (just skip until after the picture): he gets brought back by techs from the PMC that hired him - they've been developing a way to bring soldiers temporarily back from the dead; This is actually what the whistleblower was going to testify about, as they unethically (in my opinion) tested the procedure on dozens upon dozens of poor African civilians first ("some real Mengele shit").
 It's only a temporary reprieve from death - Travis has 24 hours before his brain shuts down, and he's given a handy implant in his wrist with a countdown (the script can be pretty dumb). Side effects include hallucinations, which is useful for storytelling purposes, too.
 In any case, the PMC just brought him back to get the location of the whistleblower; They try to get rid of him immediately afterwards, which, if you've seen any amount of action movies, you'll know is a Big Mistake. Faster than you can say "remorseless killer develops a conscience and seeks redemption", Travis kills all the PMC soldiers on the site and sets out to foil their plans to kill Lin and the whistleblower. 

A good boy almost got flattened during the making of this picture.

 What follows is pretty standard action fare, but well made, grounded by some great character work, and with some superb conceptual flourishes. I loved a bit where Travis enlists the help of some civilians to stop the PMC. It's a really dumb setup: Yeah, let's stop a heavily armed military convoy by waving axes and knives at them - but the kicker is that he gets a resurrection-related seizure just before shit hits the fan, and is forced to watch the carnage in slow motion without being able to do anything. There's a bit where a dog almost gets run over when a Humvee drives through house - I hope he got hazard chow. Anyhow, it's a really great scene.

 The movie does run out of steam towards the end, with a very standard and pretty forced final act, but it's still exciting enough, and it comes by it honestly after all the setup the movie went through. Also, there's a callback to that first conversation between Travis and his father in law at the beginning of the movie that's both affecting and hilarious. Yeah, the script is a mixed bag, but there's some really superb writing in there.

 I was really impressed by director Brian Smrz (not a typo). The guy's only ever directed this and another one from 2008 - Hero Wanted, which I should check out sometime - but he's racked up an impressive resumé as a second unit director and stunt coordinator. Like, seriously impressive, in quantity and popularity if not quality. And he handles himself really well here.
 The action here is not quite up to the standards of the 87North production the movie's marketing invokes, but it's still really good modern action. Shootouts improve a lot after the one in the prologue, with a little more clarity, and the bullets causing an impressive amount of destruction - at one point a sniper uses a gun to shoot multiple people clear across a room. There's also some impressive vehicular action. I'm less enamored of the digital blood and a hilariously bad explosion close to the end, but that's all easily excusable given the budget.

 Other than that it's a well-shot, expansive movie with great cinematography (by Ben Nott) and a little world-hopping flair. It's not quite Ethan Hawke's John Wick - probably something more like Ethan Hawke's The Accountant - but it's still a great action movie with some excellent drama, way better than my glib comparison makes it sound like. And at the heart of it lies an outstanding performance from Hawke, a great actor who's always willing to give it his all for interesting genre stuff. One of the good guys.

* Chist, I sound racist... "Some of my best friends are Chinese movies!"

Dream Demon

 Sometimes a great scene is all you need. British low-budget horror Dream Demon scores one right at the beginning: Diana (Jemma Redgrave) arrives at the altar in a posh-looking wedding, but she's having second thoughts. When she tells her fiancée that she can't proceed, the guy (Mark Greenstreet) gets all stroppy and slaps her. She slaps him back... and his fucking head comes off! A really well made, chunky effect, too, with lots of blood squirting everywhere. Then she runs down the isle, her wedding dress more red than white.

 It's a nightmare, of course. What's interesting is that she doesn't wake up when she kills her husband-to-be, it's after she runs out of church and is accosted by the press. I don't think it really means anything (nothing in this movie does), but it's a fun detail.

 In the waking world the wedding is still some time off, but her anxiety is off the rails. Maybe it's just the wedding, maybe it's something else; Her beau is heavily coded to be a douchebag, and not just because he's a war hero from the Falklands war. Or it could be, as Diana's psychologist not very subtly implies, fear of sex.

 In any case, she's having recurring dreams, none of them pleasant. Things get worse after being accosted by two rude, scenery-chewing paparazzi (played by Timothy Spall and Jimmy Nail, who're obviously having a lot of fun). She's rescued from them by a surprise American, Jenny (Kathleen Wilhoite) and they become quick friends. As it turns out, Jenny had come around to get a look at the house she grew up in, though she doesn't have any memories of it.
 The pair bond over... well, mostly Jenny's personality, because honestly Diana is a posh bore, and start hanging out. Over the next couple of days Diana's dreams get worse, and seem to start affecting real life - first one of the paparazzi disappears, then she dreams a bloody earthquake which leaves a very real crack on her wall.

My screencap utility is bugging out with Shudder, so we'll make do with this shitty shot.

 Jenny, intrigued, agrees to try and help. What follows is a very muddled plot where Diana discovers she can pull people into her nightmares, as she did unwittingly to one of the paparazzi. First she does it with Jenny, to try and make sense of what's happening, but later it goes out of control.

 In true dream-logic fashion, nothing really makes sense, and like somebody telling you all about their dreams, it's pretty boring. And because sleep-deprived Diana keeps drifting in and out of dreamland, you never know when something's real or not.

 Without any rules, you can only go along for the ride. There are a couple of recurring images - a guy running around on fire and an angelic girl, mostly, but any resolution is a bit perfunctory and unsatisfying.  The identity of the little girl, for example, is obvious from the get-go, and its revelation comes in one of the most cack-handed bits of exposition I've seen in a long time.

 Mostly, the film consists of empty, surrealist-tinged suspense building heavily indebted to Nightmare on Elm Street and some botched attempts at horror scenes.

 There are some flashes of coolness- a couple neat tracking shots, some neat atmosphere and cool transitions. I still have no idea how they did an effect where someone's ear pops back into existence, that was really well done. Even the script has some glimmers of interest - It sympathises, for example, with Diana's virginal anxiety over sex, to the point where all men who appear here are very much raging dicks of one variety or another. If this got made today people would complain about it being too woke or something.

 But so much of it is incredibly amateurish; The film will often cut to black, and it's so jarring I'm left wondering if the version streaming on Shudder was butchered to allow for TV commercial breaks at some point. The acting is... holy shit it's bad. Jemma Redgrave has become a bit of a stalwart here in the UK, but this is only her second movie and she's terrible in it. Her fiancée doesn't fare a lot better, all ridiculous intensity, badly overselling the obvious fact that he'll reveal himself to be a heel at some point. At least Wilhoite is fine as Jenny (she'd already proved capable of stealing a movie in Witchboard), but there's not a lot she can do with some of her material.

 Technically, as mentioned, it's very uneven, but at least it develops an atmosphere.  As for the genre elements, let's say director Harley Cokeliss (who co-writes along with Christopher Wicking and Catherine de Pury) is clearly not a horror guy, or else he's trying too hard to mimic the tone of the third Nightmare; There's some great bloodshed, though. His biggest movie was Black Moon Rising, and ended up mostly doing TV work after this.

 Dream Demon is cheesy as all hell, often kind of incompetent, but it's got a lot of warmth. It mostly gets by on that and on the strength of its killer first scene. There's no sugarcoating that it's bad, but it's a very watchable kind of bad.