Imaginary

 Imaginary is the latest lump of steaming mediocrity excreted from producer Jason Blum's cloaca. A misbegotten, hilariously unscary screen saver for teens not to pay attention to while they try to fondle each other's naughty bits.

 Jessica (DeWanda Wise) has recently married Max (Tom Payne), a sweet, hunky brit who came with two children from a previous marriage: Taylor (Taegen Burns), an insufferable, stroppy teen who hates Jessica's guts for daring try to replace their mum, and Alice (Pyper Braun), a cute little moppet of seven or so.

 When they move to Jess's family home, Alice finds an old teddy bear whom she adopts as an imaginary friend. Soon she's acting out, talking to herself Gollum-style, and dropping ominous hints. Soon the plot thickens to include a nosy neighbour (Betty Buckley) who probably knows more than she lets on, a secret from Jess's childhood, and a more concrete supernatural menace; It all leads to various family breakthroughs, a lot of talking down to the audience, and laughable, doomed attempts at scares.

 All the expected light horror elements are here, slightly rearranged. And by light, I mean nearly weightless; Director Jeff Wadlow seems terrified of actually including any actual horror whatsoever, and what's there seems specifically geared at avoiding giving very young viewers a rough night, let alone nightmares. I do wonder if it's not meant to be aimed at children - if that's the case, it's got some stiff competition from The Imaginary, on the account that it explores some similar themes and that it's actually, you know, good. Put it next to Coraline, and this film would go running straight home to cry to its mom.

Children peeking through the banister is a bit of a visual cliché, isn't it?

 The script is written by Wadlow plus Greg Erb and Jason Oremland - the last two seem to have a background in kids' entertainment, which would seem to support calling this a 'my first horror movie' attempt. And to be honest, I can see myself enjoying this when I was ten. But to belabour an obvious point: it's fucking easy to cater to kids, but it's a whole other thing to make something that works for both them and adults at the same time. This film doesn't even come close to that.

 Here's a spoiler for one of the most inane mid-movie twists I've seen in a long time: The bear Pyper keeps lugging around? It doesn't exist! It's imaginary! It's just such a fucking non-starter of a plot point... I mean, it literally changes nothing at fucking all, but the film still does a Sixth-Sense-style victory lap showing all the times in previous scenes where the bear wasn't actually there. Dumb, dumb, dumb. And that's far from the only time the script wastes a lot of time overexplaining whatever's just happened.

 Elsewhere, no one behaves like a relatable, believable human being. The acting ranges from OK to terrible, but I'd hesitate blaming any of the actors when they have to work with this material, and with a director I suspect is not very good with actors.

 Speaking of: Wadlow is otherwise competent as a director, but he fails to inject any sort of imagination or energy anywhere; Imaginary's visual ideas are extremely trite and uninteresting. Just about the one positive thing I can say about the plot - that it goes a little further than you'd expect - is completely ruined by the botched visualization of its biggest idea, an imaginary realm consisting wholly of borrowed, watered-down references: A little Monster's Inc, a little Hellbound, a lot of Tim Burton and M. C. Escher. I know I'm making it sound interesting, but trust me - it really isn't.

 It's all too mediocre to even recommend as a bad film. I did get a couple of chuckles at how it works overtime to try and make things creepy without a clear idea of how to do so; There are several shots of figures lurking in the background, which would work better if they were building up to something or if the film managed to build any sense of menace whatsoever. There's a single scene where it looks like things might get serious, but Imaginary chickens out and it's defused almost immediately. And don't get me started on all the scenes where the shock is... that a teddy bear moved slightly. At least they change him to squint at one point, that did make me laugh.

 My favorite's blunder's got to be an early shot that ominously zooms in on... a wall. It's not even a particularly scary wall, it's got a flower sticker and everything. But the way the horror-coded music swells, you'd think a gutted corpse is going to drop into frame or something.

 That does kind of make sense later, but it's a while before we get that critical bit of context; As it is, it's yet another bodged, half-assed attempt to use visual language to... I guess what bothers me is that it keeps  saying it's scary, without any work done to actually make it scary. Screw this noise.

Glorious

  Where you wondering what to watch the next time your in-laws are in town? How about Glorious, the heartwarming tale of a man whose whole life is upended when he is trapped in a bathroom with an eldritch being who communicates with him through a gloryhole? He lives, he learns, and maybe, if he plays his cards right, he'll get a blowjob from an elder god. That's one way to lose your mind and end up in an asylum, I guess.

 Wes (Ryan Kwanten) has just gone through a messy split with his girlfriend Brenda (Sylvia Grace Crim) and is living off his car, like a less hairy version of Macon Blair in Blue Ruin. After a bender outside a rest stop, he stumbles into the toilets to kneel before the porcelain throne; There he strikes an awkward conversation with the congenial gentleman (he assumes) locked in the next stall over. The cubicles are connected by the aforementioned gloryhole, adorned with a pretty off-putting picture of a lady with some extra bits. Not to kink-shame all you tentacle enthusiasts out there; You know who you are.

 Ahem. The gentleman is played by none other than the great J. K. Simmons, and while unfailingly polite and friendly, he does have some hangups about Wes getting a look into his stall... or leaving the bathroom, for the matter; And as it turns out, he can enforce both preferences with magical powers. He quickly reveals that he's some sort of trans-dimensional all-powerful being named Gathanatoa, and he needs to avert some sort of cataclysm with Wes's help.

 It's a Weird (as in Weird Fiction) as well as a weird (as in willfully fucking weird) chamber piece, and gets a lot of mileage out of its batshit premise as well as from a few extremely funny jokes. Despite an extremely low budget and a script tailored for a shot during COVID isolation, there's some effective gore, some appropriately weird imagery, and a fair amount of imagination on display.

 The problem is that, for such a character-driven piece, the protagonist is pretty damn weak. Most of the specifics of the character's situation, at least for the first stretch, are pretty generic, and while director Rebekah McKendry tries to add some style to the proceeds, her attempts also come off as slightly generic. What's worse, the script doesn't give Wes many convincing lines - much of his muttering seems both writerly and generic at the same time - and I am absolutely not a fan of Kwanten's acting here.

 I really wanted to like the movie more than I did. There's not a lot of cosmic horror out there that's... well, as out there as this, and the jokes that land are pretty damn funny. As with most of these things it leans more towards comedy, but Wes's situation does get fairly horrific once what's really required of him is finally revealed. Simmons is, of course, a treat, and there's a good spread of weird visuals that are effective even as they drive home how little money the production had to work with.

 But even as the Lovecraftian madness is fully unleashed, there are as many misses as there are hits. I would recommend it overall, but it's a very flawed movie.

 Rebekah McKendry also wrote and directed All The Creatures Were Stirring, a movie I'm happy to report I remember now better for its bright spots than its sour notes. The screenplay here is by Joshua Hull and David Ian McKendry (who also co-wrote and co-directed All The Creatures...) based on a short story by Todd Rigney.

 Gathonatoa comes from a tale by Hazel Heald, revised by H.P. Lovecraft. The film alludes extremely obliquely to the short story, and is perfectly happy to wander off in a direction which the original authors never intended - par for the course with Mythos adaptations, really. I vaguely remembered the monster, but only as a bit player in the Call of C'thulu roleplaying game; Had to look him up to remember what he was all about.
 No offense, Gat - you're all right.

Hot Shots!

 Top Secret! was the last movie both written and directed by all three members of the comedy specialist trio consisting of Jim Abrahams and brothers Jerry and David Zucker (ZAZ from here on). All three would write for the first Naked Gun film together, and then pretty much go their separate ways.

 Jerry Zucker would go on to have the most successful, varied post-ZAZ career: He'd find mainstream success with Ghost, and then try his hand at both drama (First Knight) and slightly less wacky comedy (the lackluster Rat Race remake). He'd also help his brother out with scripting duties on the dreadful third Scary Movie sequel, but the less said about that the better.

 His compatriots would both fitfully try to keep ZAZ formula alive. David Zucker with diminishing returns - starting with the very funny but more traditional BASEketball, then going through increasingly worse Scary Movie sequels, all the way to the mind-numbingly unfunny Republican propaganda piece An American Carol. It was Jim Abrahams who'd come closest to recapturing the old magic with his Hot Shots! films. He was the only one who remembered to end the title with an exclamation mark.

 Hot Shots is a fairly spot-on, affectionate parody of Top Gun; Only five years after the fact, which sounds like a lot but is much closer to the source than Top Secret! is to Casablanca and the Elvis movies it sends up.

 In true ZAZ fashion, the film switches frequently to more then-current targets: The Fabulous Baker Boys, Dances With Wolves, 9 1/2 Weeks... and a whole lot of cultural potshots that haven't aged all that well.

 Charlie Sheen stands in for Tom Cruise as Topper Harley, a maverick loner with daddy issues who's nonetheless clearly the best pilot who ever lived. "He's so complex!" two co-pilots breathlessly exclaim, awe-struck, after he rebuffs them when they get too friendly. Hot Shots might pull most of its punches when making fun of Top Gun, but it clearly understands it very well.

 Topper falls for Ramada (a very game, ridiculously beautiful Valeria Golino), the air base shrink who, in a very funny gag, stamps Topper's papers with a "paternal conflict syndrome" after a very short interview with him. Ramada is romantically involved with the movie's version of Iceberg (Cary Elwes), who's also turned into a sort of Baxter figure once Topper enters the picture.
 Will Topper overcome his trauma to lead his mission to success despite some evil corporate types trying to sabotage it? The plot, as scripted by Abrahams and frequent collaborator Pat Proft, is only slightly less ridiculous than Top Gun's, but a lot funnier.

 It's a weird little film. I haven't seen these as many times as I have the classic ZAZ movies, but my memories of it were mostly corroborated: I remembered it as being pretty uneven, and lo and behold, it is. There's a ton of truly great jokes and sight gags - mostly clustered in short runs in the segments where the film zeroes in on a parodic target. The beginning is a great example: A pretty faithful rendition of the Top Gun theme, dovetailing into butt-rock as the activity on an aircraft carrier gets sillier and sillier. The scene is tinted orange in a good approximation of Tony Scott's most enduring visual contribution to cinema, but here two people carrying bombs over their shoulders smash the warheads together, baggage trains weave between the fighters, and someone cooks a sausage on a jet exhaust. Most of the gags aren't all that funny on paper, but the execution counts for a lot, and so does the fact that they come at a relentless clip. The film manages this feat several times, and it remains extremely funny every single time.

 I'm less enthused about the film's more traditional comedy; a lot of the humour there is pretty weak, and a lot of it just fails completely. Some gags are lessened by ADR work, with some silly comment being overdubbed over the action, as if they weren't sure the joke would land otherwise. Very corny.
 There's no getting over all of that, but the fact is that, as in most classic ZAZ films, there's such a density of gags of all sorts that a string of groaners will still give way to a genuine laugh sooner rather than later.

 Those laugh-free stretches do feel longer than on other, similar movies, though - including the sequel to this one. In exchange Hot Shots! feels more traditional, more coherent, but I'd happily take a more disjointed feel if that's the price for more absurdist jokes and ridiculous asides.

 The acting is exactly as awful as the material demands. Everyone is good, but Sheen in particular made me laugh just with some of his facial expressions, especially in the 'sexy' parts. Lloyd Bridges gets saddled with some of the most painfully unfunny conceits, which is a shame, but he still manages some classic scenes - including a genuinely hilarious version of that most trod on of spoofs, the Patton speech ("I've personally flown 194 missions and I was shot down in every one. Come to think of it, I've never landed a plane in my life!")

 The Hot Shots! films would be the last hurrah for ZAZ-style comedy. There'd be some others from other directors, some of them decent, even - but I've never really revisited any of them, which I think says a lot.

 That's until Spy Hard gave us the ZAZ replacement we deserve but definitely didn't need or ask for: Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who would use it as a springboard to a decades-long cinematic crime spree with their (x) Movie series; Each and every one of them a perfect demonstration of just how badly you can fuck up the ZAZ formula.

Spiritwalker (Yucheitalja)

 Kang I-an (Yoon Kye-sang) wakes up in a car crash, his memory gone; Whenever he looks in any reflective surface (and there are a lot of them at hand in this movie), he sees another man's face. It's unclear how, but it seems he knows he's not in his own body, something that's driven violently home when a few hours later reality shifts around him and he finds himself in the body of a completely different man.

 Every twelve hours, like clockwork. he's dropped in the shoes of a someone from within a group of what ends up being a bunch of really shady people. Making things more complicated, the people he inhabited are still walking around, the twelve hours he spent in their body completely forgotten.

 Kang I-an (Ian? Ian!) enlists the help of a (pretty unfunny) homeless comedy sidekick to try and figure out what's happening, and finds that everyone he's been possessing is part of some ill-defined conspiracy. What's more, they're somehow related to the fate of a certain badass lady (Lim Ji-yeon) he feels compelled to seek out and protect.

 Ian Spiritwalker's situation is immediately engaging, but it loses a lot of steam very quickly: unwieldy dialog, a confusing throughline, and a rotating cast of poorly defined characters to act as the protagonist often threaten to do the movie in. The prosaic, boring conspiracy at the heart of the movie and a hilariously terrible explanation for Ian's superpower don't exactly redeem things either.

 It's that slickness, along with a relatively fleet pace and some pretty good action, that ultimately make the movie a success. Director Yoon Jae-geun can't quite hammer his script into a good narrative, but it's expertly seasoned with car chases, close-quarter scraps and firefights (which end up becoming a close-quarter firefight for the obligatory John Wick-influenced finale). There's not nearly as many action sequences as I would have liked, but they're all a lot of fun and full of neat stunts which the sometimes over-busy camerawork captures well. I also appreciated how analog a lot of it is (not always a given with modern Korean cinema), especially an excellent car chase and some very chunky explosive work to mark bullet impacts.

 It's a little too slick for its own good - a fun time, but not particularly memorable. The acting is fine, and I imagine everyone involved relished the challenge of differentiating their normal personas from those times they're being puppeteered by Ian. You can definitely tell who was good with the martial arts and who wasn't based on the editing style used for their fight scenes (which are a little too reliant on quick cuts even at their best).

 The only distinct character besides the mystery woman and comedy indigent is (I think) Yoo Seung-mok, playing a coked-out corrupt cop who's channeling the same over-the-top villainy as Gary Oldman in The Professional. Elsewhere, a betrayal from a supposedly major character treated by the movie as a momentous event barely even registers, which is oddly emblematic of the film's problems.

The Imaginary

 Rudger (Louie Rudge-Buchanan/Kokoro Terada) is the constant friend and companion to Amanda (Evie Kiszel/Rio Suzuki). Amanda is ten(ish) and Rudger is just three months, three weeks and three days old; That's not a problem, though, since he's just a figment of her imagination.

 The imaginary is a charming, and there's no way around it, very Studio Ghibli-esque account of a few busy days in their lives. When at home, they go on all sorts of adventures in Amanda's overactive imagination; While she's at school, Rudge whiles away the time until she gets back. He lacks all mass but is otherwise material, so he could, in theory, be crushed by a falling sheet of paper. It's tough being imaginary.

 Rudge learns just how hostile soon enough, when he learns that all humans are fated to forget their imaginary friends, and dissolve helplessly in the night. Pretty heavy stuff for a kid's film. Not that he gets a lot of time to worry about it, because soon enough Mr. Bunting (Issey Ogata/Jeremy Swift), a grotesque old man lugging around a My First J-Horror ghost, comes sniffing (literally!) around their mother's bookstore. Mr Bunting, in a wonderful, very Tim Powers-style twist, is an eater of imaginary friends, and apparently Rudge is some sort of delicacy in his estimation.

 Rudge is separated from Amanda and cast out into the very British world outside her house, a dangerous gauntlet where just walking through a crowded pavement is an ordeal (no mass, remember?). There's a few adventures, near escapes, all leading up to a tearful reunion and a final confrontation with their nemesis.

 It's messy, unevenly paced, and features some iffy design work (which I imagine comes straight from the original book's illustrations). It also often feels like it piles on the whimsy a little too thick (this is one of those movies where people's emotions are visible from the next town over). Luckily it makes up for all of that with some luscious traditional animation, gorgeous and often surprisingly weird visuals, and a story that's got deep reserves of both darkness and relatively sophisticated emotional heft.

 Things do get a little too dark, actually, for what it feels like its target audience, which it compensates with a sort of forced cheer which is sometimes distracting. This sort of botched balancing act extends to the emotional moments, which are undercut by the sheer quantity of plot that the film needs to get through.

 Still, the emotional beats are strong, and the plot does take the story to some memorable places. The finale in particular feels like a children's version of a horror movie - It pales in comparison with something like Coraline, but this feels like it skews younger; And Mr. Bunting is such a wonderful, loathsomely fun villain.

 Director Yoshiyuki Momose, writer Yoshiaki Nishimura both come from studio Ghibli, along with many of the employees from production house Ponoc's staff. They've crafted a compellingly weird, unwieldy beast of the film that's not without its problems, but is ultimately unique and very rewarding.

The Pale Blue Eye

 Not one, but two movies were released in 2022 featuring a young Edgar Allan Poe solving occult-tinged crimes during his failed stint at West Point. It's such a bizarre, specific premise; I guess Shanghai Noon did it with Arthur Conan Doyle, so there's some sort of precedent, but the equivalent would be to do a serious movie and send him against... I don't know, The King in Yellow instead.

 Fuck, I would so watch that! And maybe after that someone can make a movie about Brett Easton Ellis killing random people while researching American Psycho. Someone please get on that please, thanks.

 Unlike Raven's Hollow, which was a proper (if scatterbrained) indie horror film, Scott Cooper's The Pale Blue Eye is a relatively prestigious affair, a more down-to-earth investigation of a series of occult-tinged murders shaking the West Point military academy in the early nineteenth century. It's... kind of terrible.

 Poe arrives relatively late to the film; The actual protagonist is one Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), a retired, world-weary constable living in a small cottage near the academy grounds. Get it? It's a deep cut, but as clunky as any of these references ever are.

 Landor is introduced with some really tiresome exposition - something the movie indulges in quite a bit - from the two old fuddy-duddy academy officers who hire him as an investigator; Simon McBurney and Tim Spall play these (real life historic) figures extremely broadly - McBurney in particular seems constantly poised to bluster a "well I never!". It's not a good fit with the film's dead-serious tone, but these sort of bone-headed, simplistic choices abound.

 Mr. Landor's task is to find out more about the strange circumstances surrounding the death of one of their cadets: found hanged from a tree, a presumed suicide, his heart removed from the corpse at the morgue by unknown parties. As the investigation proceeds another cadet - Mr. Poe (Harry Melling) - insinuates himself into the investigation and quickly makes himself indispensable. Of course, new murders pop up as Landor and Poe stir things up, complications ensue, etcetera. The resolution to the mystery is kind of bonkers, and not really in a good way: The people who you thought were guilty all along end up being guilty, but their motives and the specifics of the crimes... it's a fairly shitty mystery.

 And the movie meanders - oh sweet baby Dagda does it ever meander, including a ridiculous twist that gives the film yet another excuse to indulge in further reams of exposition. Just when you thought the worst was behind you. The film is two hours ten minutes, and every second is deeply felt.

 The acting is both a strong and a weak point. There are a bunch of bizarre choices that seem to come from a much stranger movie, one with a sense of humour. Gillian Andersen comes to mind, as well as Simon McBurney and, to be honest, much of Meling's performance. I've liked Melling in other movies, but found the tonal clash variably annoying here. The heavy makeup he's saddled with is partly to blame - it does make him look strikingly like Poe, but mainly I just found it distracting.

 There are a few other actors I thought were pretty bad - mostly within the ranks of the cadets. On the other hand, there's a killer's row of talent like Bale, Toby Jones, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Robert Duvall to make up for the rest. 

 It does look fairly good. Nothing to write home about, but cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi provides an evocative, chilly palette for exteriors, all colour drained except the blue of the cadets' uniforms, and sumptuously candlelit interiors. And I also liked Cooper's direction - there's a few scenes that are technically memorable: a tracking shot here, a matching cut there...

 His script, though, could have done with a lot more work. It's based on a well-regarded novel by Louis Bayard which I'd never heard of before. I have no idea how many of the movie's problems are inherited from the source material; Its complete lack of streamlining, for one, cannot be blamed on the book.

Last Sentinel

 What a weird, disappointing mess this movie is. A well written, well acted post-apocalyptic psychological drama with enough talent both behind and in front of the cameras to make its glacial plot engaging... but one that steadily gets worse as it goes along, all the way to a piss-poor finale. A fucking waste.

 It's quickly clear that the science part of this science fiction movie is pure hokum, since bullshit is baked  right into its premise: at some point in the near-ish future (the movie takes place somewhen in the 2060s) human activity manages to screw up the earth so badly that there are massive increases in sea levels. So far, so good.

 But the film's projections are far worse than even the most pessimistic scientist's predictions; Going by an animated map during the film's title sequence, the seas in the world of Last Sentinel devour everything except two land masses - Greenland (which sort of makes sense) and the Malay peninsula (which doesn't).

 There is so much wrong with this, I don't even know where to start. And we're not even past the credits yet.

 But... that's ok - can't really expect better sci fi out of a low budget direct-to-video film than we do out of a big hollywood production, right? And to be perfectly clear, what follows is a reasonably compelling suspense film that hops between several different subgenres. For a while.

 The two remaining lands are still at war, you see, despite having nearly half the planet separating them. And here's another high concept for you to savour: because of... reasons (something something killer storms) ships can only navigate between the two continents along a sort of narrow corridor. Just... roll with it, ok?

 Right in the middle of that corridor there sits an oil-derrick-like defensive platform that one of the sides has armed with a powerful nuke; Should the other side ever try to invade, the bomb is powerful enough to cause a tidal wave that will wash both countries away. Remember: roll with it.

 The station is manned by a skeleton crew of four people. You've got a flakey, ornery Irish engineer (Martin McCann), an earnest, bull-headed cook (Lucien Laviscount), a quietly competent comms engineer (Kate Bosworth) and their commanding officer, a career military man (the ubiquitous Thomas Kretschmann). By the time the movie starts they've already served out their full tour of two years  on the Sentinel- and an unexpected few extra months added to that, with no news of their belayed relief. They only have a small time window to communicate with command back home, but the messages are always 'no news'.

 As you can imagine, tempers are frayed. The four characters are well drawn and the actors playing them do a fine job, even if the situations that put them at loggerheads don't always make a lot of sense. Into this fragile equilibrium drifts an empty boat, Mary Celeste-like, which triggers all sorts of questions. From there the film pivots a couple of times; First into a mutiny tale, then to a cold-war style paranoid thriller.

 Director Tanel Toom does a good job of depicting life on the rickety platform and the harshness of the sea surrounding them.

 The platform itself is a great setting. although it'll probably be recognizable for most UK residents; The exteriors were shot at one of the Maunsell Sea Forts built during WW2 to guard the Thames estuary.

 It's the script that's the problem here. The moment to moment writing is mostly fine, and it often hits upon some great ideas - like a couple of the characters trying to decipher what a tea ball is, or another character reciting an Ikea-like company's mission statement as he gets ready to drown the world. I mean, there's some really good stuff in here. Unfortunately, the dodgy details and non-existent worldbuilding quickly add up to a point where things collapse under their own weight. It's the type of film that falls apart under any sort of scrutiny, and it's never even close to good enough to keep you from poking holes in some of its highly suspect plot developments as they happen.

 The less said of the ending - which requires both us, the viewers, and one of the characters to forgive and forget a bunch of cold-blooded murders - the better.

 It's a shame the story didn't just focus on the nuts and bolts of its well-observed setting, or the character conflicts that erupt on board; Trimmed down a bit (this movie seriously did not need to be nearly two hours long), it could have been a very decent potboiler.

 But instead, it sacrifices its workmanlike genre charms to deliver a cack-handed parable on the folly of mutually assured destruction.

Summoning Sylvia

 Four gay friends gather for a weekend stay at a haunted house. Larry (Travis Coles) is getting married, so his friends Nico (Frankie Grande, Ariana's brother), Reggie (Troy Iwata) and Kevin (Noah J. Ricketts) have decided to throw him a bachelor party with all sorts of fun events: a 'wine and design' evening, a burlesque revue, and... a seance.

 All four characters are well drawn and funny in their own right; Larry himself is meek and self-conscious, Nico is the drama queen, Reggie is the punctilious, responsible one and Kevin... Kevin is a dumb kid who's recovering from a failed online relationship which I won't go into because it's too good a joke to spoil. The four have good rapport with each other, an easy, lived-in chemistry that makes it easy to root for them.

 As the first night wears on two there are two events that threaten to derail the celebrations. The first is the seance, which Nico officiates with a homebrew book of spells (he's an expert because he's watched Wicked umpteen times); The house belonged to Sylvia (Veanne Cox), a woman who murdered her son, so they're basically Summoning Sylvia to get her to explain herself. It doesn't seem to work... at first.

 The second, and initially more problematic, event is that due to a series of misunderstandings and Larry's inability to say no to people, there's a surprise fifth guest to the party: his very straight brother-in-law-to be Harrison (Nicholas Logan), who immediately proceeds to piss everyone - but particularly Nico - off with some poorly chosen comments.

 Larry's stuck between trying to please Harrison and appease his friends, which isn't easy with the personalities involved. And then, on top of the various misunderstandings, blunders and personality clashes, come mysterious noises and electric failures; Suddenly everyone is running around like headless chickens.

 It'd be a stretch to call Summoning Sylvia a horror movie. Or even a horror comedy. It's an extremely campy farce that doesn't have a single mean bone in its body.

 That doesn't mean that the genre elements are completely neglected, though. The film constantly finds clever (and budget-friendly) ways to seamlessly transition from the bachelor party to the past, so it can shed light on what actually happened between Sylvia (who acts like she's trying to out-cenobite Doug Bradley) and her son. Writer/director duo Wesley Taylor and Alex Wyse have an impressive command of pacing, and along with editor Sara Corrigan they give the movie a relentless momentum that's particularly impressive in how unforced it feels. It's a great film debut full of delightful little touches - far more than you usually get on much bigger, better budgeted comedies.

 There aren't that many jokes, but the ones that are there range from broad but solid to great; The rest of the film is buoyed by a likeable, game cast and an unfailingly good-natured tone. Maybe a few little moments of darkness here and there, a little tragedy - trace amounts, really, but they help round out a film that otherwise would be nearly weightless. What threat there is is played for laughs, an excuse for the cast to comically overreact rather than an attempt to edge the movie into horror territory.

 As far as complaints go, they're all pretty minor. At least one of the minor characters is genuinely terribly acted, and there's a scene at the very end that goes overboard in a way that undoes some of the genuinely sweet character work that precedes it. But you know what? That a feel-good movie has an over-the-top feel-good ending will probably not register as a problem for most right-thinking people; As for myself, it still bothers me, but I can accept it. The movie earned it.

Surrounded

 Surrounded is a movie of striking contrasts, of starkly backlit figures against beautiful backdrops. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the film's stunning opening sequence, a gorgeous tracking shot following Mo Washington (Letitia Wright) from church to saloon; She starts her walk on the pre-dawn gloom, and ends it bathed in sunlight streaking through the dust kicked up by the activity of a tiny frontier settlement gearing up for the day. Teal to orange - an object lesson in complementary colours, immaculately realised.

I took so many screen captures during this one...

 The scene pointedly features natives being brutally manhandled and pushed into cages. The film is set in 1870, just five years after the civil war, and Mo is a black woman passing for a man to avoid attention - so you can imagine what goes through her head. She's there to get a stagecoach to Colorado, where a stretch of land awaits her.

 But if westerns have taught us anything, it's that travelling coach is a terrible idea. A botched robbery leaves the travellers stranded in a picturesque stretch of dusty wilderness sans coach. Most of the group leave to go get help, leaving Mo behind to keep watch over a chained captive - Tommy Walsh (Jamie Bell; Billy Elliot, all grown up!), a notorious outlaw with a sizeable bounty on his head.

 Toby is a brash, motormouthed fella who alternates between pushing Mo's buttons and trying to escape. An uneasy rapport develops between them as they wait to see who gets to them first - the stagecoach survivors with help, or Walsh's partners in crime.

 There are some complications, of course - the film's best moment involves the great, late Michael K. Williams in a late, mostly stand-alone development - but the meat of the movie is the duel of wills between Mo and her prisoner. The dialogue gets very theatrical at times, with long, blunt, somewhat stilted conversations and monologues in between the shootouts.

 That's where the script, by Justin Thomas and Andrew Pagana, stumbles the most. Some conversations are fine, if a bit stage-bound, but many feel a bit off, a bit forced, and every so often, more than a little preachy. None of this is helped by a lack of clarity as to what the movie is getting at with the central relationship. That is, if it's got anything to say beyond 'people react to things differently' - maybe not, maybe it's just a plot device; If so, it could do with losing a lot of the posturing.

 Both principals do a good job. Wright shows a lot of pain and vulnerability lurking just under her steely gunslinger veneer - one moment in particular, in which she's at her wits' end and admits as much, hits hard. On the whole, though her character seems slightly underwritten. Bell does not have that problem; The advantage of playing an extrovert who sometimes seems incapable of shutting up, I guess.

 Still, Surrounded works well as a genre piece - the action is well staged and exciting, Mo's situation makes for a few good tense moments, and visually, it is sumptuous (cinematographer: Max Goldman). There are more iconic shots of cowboys posing silhouetted in shadows against some beautiful stretch of land than you can shake a six shooter at - and... sure enough, director Anthony Mandler has mostly worked in music videos. The old Russel Mulcahy precedent holds true. All this cool western iconography gets a little cheesy, but honestly it looks good enough that it's easily forgivable.

Longlegs

 Ten families butchered over two decades, each a clear case of the one of the parents snapping and killing the rest. But here's the thing: in each one of the murder scenes there's a letter written in code, signed as LONGLEGS.

 FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a cripplingly shy and socially awkward FBI agent, is assigned to the case. Her gregarious superior (Blair Underwood), hopes her unnatural intuition can help shed some light when Longlegs strikes again.

 His hopes prove founded: with a little help from an unexpected Longlegs letter and a hilariously '70s guide to satanism, Agent Harker cracks the code and finds a new element to the murders that only muddles things further... unless you're willing (as Harker is) to indulge in supernatural explanations.

 Longlegs is the latest film from writer/director Osgood Perkins, one of the most fiercely idiosyncratic  genre directors working in horror today - and for better and for worse, this movie is an excellent showcase for his talents. It's a deeply grim, unsettling film, a creepy exercise in growing ambient dread that's expertly ratcheted up until it threatens to drown everything. The direction is precise and the shots often starkly beautiful, with a cohesive palette that alternates between deep earthy colours and chilly bone-white tableaus. Just from a visual and aural standpoint, the film is a marvel.

 But the script tries to juggle a little too much, and some of the elements are a little suspect. Chief amongst them Longlegs himself, Nicholas Cage in a fright wig and grotesque pancake makeup - Cage's talents are numerous, but there's a little miscalculation to how much weirdness he's allowed to indulge in here, his histrionics effectively creepy but too ridiculous for the film's otherwise tightly controlled tone. I think I get what Perkins and Cage were going for (a screeching injection of white noise into the film's more subdued static drone),  but it didn't really work for me.

 I did like the fact that the killer's into T. Rex and Lou Reed. Giving heavy metal a little time off to relax. And Cage does seem to be having a blast.

 Equally problematic is that the film is a little bit disjointed. Each one of the fairly well worn horror and serial killer movie tropes it brings into play are immaculately well crafted, but they end up clashing against each other once it becomes clear how they're supposed to slot in together. The film shines in its first two acts, and while there's a lot to like in the last one, it is more than a little bit clunky and nonsensical.

 Another problem is the film's stylish marketing campaign, a beautifully put together series of mysterious, gorgeously edited trailers which stands in contrast to the terrible, crass job trailers have been doing to promote their respective films for a couple of decades now. It's a petty thing to hold against the movie, not to mention my own damn fault - the slight disappointment of being overhyped - but there you go. For what it's worth, the film was never misrepresented by the trailers, and I suspect they'll prove influential.
 Oh, and please ignore any comparisons to Silence of the Lambs; That type of hyperbole will never do a movie any favours.

 For all my reservations and the time I've spent on them, I really like this movie. It's of a piece with other jagged, retro-tinged mood pieces, artifacts from a 70s experimental horror subgenre that never was. Osgood Perkins and his crew have made something that's pretty special, and I hope its success allows the director to pursue his batshit, uncommercial vision as far as he's willing to take it.

Knockabout (Za jia xiao zi)

 Yipao (Yuen Biao) and his big brother Dai pao (Liang Chia-jen) are a pair of petty crooks introduced working on an elaborate con to defraud a pair of greedy bankers.* While successful, they most of their ill-gotten gains to a bugs-bunny-like beggar that's following them around (Sammo Hung).

 Their misfortune continues after that, ending up with a fateful failed attempt to rob the ruthless kung-fu master Jia Wu Dao (Lau Kar-Wing), who thoroughly outsmarts and humiliates them. And because they're just a fount of great ideas, they hatch a scheme to become his pupils until such a time when they can betray him.

 The plan somehow works, and they annoy their prospective sifu until he takes them on. But a funny thing happens as they train under him; They actually improve their kung fu until they're 'better than normal people' (something the brothers, and the film, take literally, leading to some pretty funny situations), and they develop actual respect for their new master. As for the silver fox himself, he seems to take a liking to his bumbling apprentices.

 This new, (very slightly) more enlightened status quo doesn't last. For Jia Wu Dao is hiding a dark secret, and when it's exposed it forces a confrontation between him and his apprentices, one that leads to tragedy and a brutal murder. Don't worry - in true Hong Kong movie fashion, the film's tone immediately, awkwardly recovers.
 The surviving brother teams up with Hung's chaotic beggar - who ends up being a master of the 'mishmash' style of kung fu, with a particular fondness for Monkey style - to set things right in a spectacular, more than ten-minutes long fight that somehow incorporates the lessons learned from a rope-skipping based stamina training.

 It's a solid, if episodic, plot, expertly constructed by scriptwriters Louis Lau and Huang Chik-chin to allow for as much slapstick, kung fu, and elaborate training methods as possible, all with a side of melodrama to anchor the film a little.

 And I have to say, it is pretty funny. The humour is grounded when compared with, say, Kung Fu Hustle, but other than that it's as broad and exaggerated as any other Asian comedy of the time, packed  to the gills with the standard shameless mugging and heavily telegraphed slapstick. I can see how that would put people off, but if you look past that and the terrible soundtrack there are plenty of great conceits and some truly inspired physical gags.

 (And in case it looks like I'm arguing for some sort of cultural superiority: The Benny Hill Show was on its second decade when this came out, and pantomime shows are still ridiculously popular now here in Britain, even if they're mostly pitched at kids. As for the TV and film comedies of the time in Argentina... this comes off a lot better).

 The late seventies were a good time for director/action director Sammo Hung, who was at the forefront, along with his friend Jackie Chan, of popularizing Hong Kong martial arts comedies over at Golden Harvest, setting the tone for the coming decade. Knockabout was his chance to provide another old friend and fellow student from the China Drama School - the ridiculously gifted Yuen Biao - with a leading role.

 And what an opportunity it ended up being. Knockabout starts out slow, with very mannered, visibly choreographed fights. But as the film goes on, and the protagonist's skills grow, the fighting gets more fluid, and the characters incorporate moves we saw them learning in the film's multiple (very innovative, ridiculously cool) training montages in all sorts of inventive ways.

 I'm no expert, but as in many of the Hung movies I've watched there's a lot of work put into a more subtle storytelling thread that manifests mostly through the choreographies; That is very noticeable here, and it informs and complements the film's more histrionic comedy stylings beautifully.

 I thought the humour was pretty enjoyable, but even if its operatic pitch is too much for you, I'd still recommend you stick with it; If nothing else, the final fight and the training leading up to it have some truly staggering feats of martial arts and athletic prowess.

*: The con itself is pretty cool, but the best touch is that the father-and-son bankers have identical hairy warts, and they stroke the hair coming out of them as if it was a beard.

Frogman

 The United States is awash with cryptids: strange beasts that keep appearing in eyewitness reports, blurry photographs and the pages of Weekly World News, but have so far avoided capture or any other proper proof of their existence. You've got your superstars, of course: Sasquatch, Mothman, the Jersey Devil, the Dignified Kardashian, and the Chupacabra. But dig a little deeper, and there's a host of local celebrities, too: Skunk Ape, Ogopogo, Goatman... and the Loveland Frogman.

 I knew of all of these... except for that last one, the subject of 2023's Frogman, a very enjoyable take on that subgenre of found footage movies, the fake documentary.

 More than 20 years ago, the young Dallas Kyle, a HI8 Camcorder enthusiast, made national news  while on a family holiday when he caught footage of the Ohio-based cryptid peeking at him and his sister from the foliage

 Now a failed, middle-aged director of local obscurities who's reduced to living in his sister's guest room, Dallas (Nathan Tymoshuk) is incensed to find some youtuber dipshit has dug up his old video to mock him. Determined to prove everyone wrong, he enlists the help of his friends Scotty (Benny Barrett) and Amy (Chelsey Grant) to go to Loveland for a weekend to make a documentary about Frogman. And to give the movie a visual identity, he resolves to shoot it entirely in his ancient Sony camcorder.

 The 'crew' arrive in town, interview the locals, get up to some very tame mischief, and find clues that things might be a little weirder than they seem.

 It's enjoyable, thanks to the fun characters and a persistent sense of oddness, but a little familiar (I got some heavy Willow Creek vibes more than once). Thankfully everything leads to a very enjoyable confrontation that includes quite a bit of the titular monster - obscured by blocking, camera shake, visual artifacts and plain old darkness, mind: we're talking about an extremely low budget production here.

 As cheap as it is, the whole sequence is inventive, varied, and while knowingly, extremely ridiculous, it takes itself seriously enough to avoid losing its sense of menace. Director Anthony Cousins crams it with incident and (very lo-fi) stylistic touches, not to mention a dollop of sculpted beasties and make-up effects. It also features someone saying "pollywog" in a context that made me laugh.

 The script (by the director and John Karsko) is very likeable - all three central characters are well rounded and fun to watch -  even if one of them is a stick in the mud. I can't say I ever cared about a romantic subplot, but the rest of their antics did make me chuckle a few times. The town of Loveland itself and the lore around its mascot also provides some appealing weirdness; Did I mention the Frogman has been known to wave a wand around, like a wizard?

 If I have to be honest, now I know that the Frogman-themed shop is a real tourist trap and not a near-miraculous feat of production design, I'm a little less enthused with the movie as a whole. But the scene there is still a lot of fun, and there's a few other cute little bits of local colour, like a surprisingly swole cutout of the Frogman for people to take their pictures with.

 I don't want to oversell this movie; As charming as they manage to make the characters, there's still a some wasted time en route to the fireworks factory. It also, I'm sad to report, looks like absolute garbage - the choice of camera plus naturalistic lighting means that sometimes we can't see people's faces even in daylight shots. God knows why Dallas bothered to hire a cameraman.

 All this aside, it's a clear labour of love from a bunch of talented, enthusiastic people. FROGMAN WILL RETURN, the credits promise. I hope he does.

 

*: I am not proud of this; Running horror roleplaying games for a few decades makes you an expert in all sorts of useless knowledge.

Top Secret!

 I first saw Top Secret! when I was twelve years old. That is, of course, the perfect age for this sort of thing to burrow out permanent habitation in your brain (see also: Weird Al Yankovic and MAD magazine). At this point I know it well enough that I don't find it all that funny anymore, even as I appreciate the density of its visual gags and puns and how far it's willing to go to get a laugh. It's become comfort viewing, and that kind of sucks.

 In all of the films written and directed, like this one, by the trio of Jim Abrahams plus brothers Jim and Jerry Zucker, the plot is barely a hook to hang as many jokes as possible. But by spoofing two genres at once - wartime espionage and Elvis Prestley films - the story here is almost schematic, relying more on our familiarity with the tropes in play than on any actual connective tissue to flow from scene to scene.

 And... it doesn't matter. It's always clear (more so than on Airplane! or Naked Gun) that the story takes a distant back seat to any sight gag, non-sequitur, cheesy pun or quick joke that gets within range. The sheer breadth and amount of humour on display is pretty impressive; All of these movies are known for having jokes going on both in the foreground and the background, often at the same time, but I think Top Secret! is probably the one that manages to squeeze in the most -if maybe not the best- gags. I mean, it even manages to sneak a (dumb) joke into its title, what with that exclamation mark.

 The best news is that it's not at all quantity over quality when it comes to its jokes. I mean, sure, there are a lot of groaners in there, but a surprising amount land. There's some real wit on display and a surrealist streak in both incidental gags (where the characters scare off parked bicycles as if they were horses at the hitching rail) and set pieces like the film's most infamous scene (a rendition of The Nutcracker where the dancers twirl around with raging boners).

 Incidentally: the (non-sensical) pun that functions as the raison d'etre for that scene does not translate to Spanish. I spent years thinking it was just another non-sequitur, until I saw it in English.

 

 Even the dumber jokes are often rescued by leaning into their idiocy: You might see the punchline coming after a setup ("Oh, I know a little German!"), but it's still funny when it's delivered with such cheesy verve (a dwarf in lederhosen stands up and starts waving). And there are some true classics in there, like a throwaway gag where our protagonist, crawling through a field, is confronted with a pair of boots; When he looks up, with a raising pedestal shot following his line of sight, he discovers that it's just that - a pair of nazi boots, no nazi wearing them, and he sighs in relief. Amazing.

 Elsewhere you get optical illusions, dumb details that barely count as humour but might still draw an appreciative chuckle (such as a helmet strap that stays on after the soldier takes off the helmet), some fun references, and plain old fashioned slapstick. Seriously, it's quite the spread.

 It's also nice to see a film like this with relatively decent production values. Enough that when a scene calls for an underwater saloon brawl - you know, that old standard - it can deliver in fairly impressive fashion.

  Val Kilmer stars as the Elvis stand-in (his first role) against Lucy Gutteridge, who plays the local resistance member he tries to woo. The film was shot in England (an early Beach Boys spoof, for example, was shot in Cornwall of all places!) and it features a horde of British actors - most notably Peter Cushing in a bit part in one of the film's most elaborate sequences*. Omar Shariff also puts in an extended appearance, and is involved in a really low-brow joke that I remember made my father huff in disapproval. For Shame, Mr. Shariff!

 No one really makes an impression besides Kilmer, who wholly commits to the role and also sings all of the songs in the soundtrack. Everyone else is, like the plot, pretty much just a joke dispensing machine.

 As a grown-up I recognize that both Airplane! and Naked Gun are better, possibly funnier ZAZ movies. But you know what? Fuck that; Top Secret! is still my favorite. Latrine!

*Fun fact: The cast mold taken of Cushing's head for this movie was retrieved thirty-odd years later and used to bring him back as a creepy digital puppet on Rogue One. This would be one of his final (in-person) roles, but not the last - that honour belongs to that weird Biggles movie, which I should really revisit one of these days.

The Beekeeper

 The first interchange in The Beekeeper goes something like this:

EXT. FARM - DAY

THE BEEKEEPER

Thanks for hiring and taking care of me, lovely old lady. You are like a mother figure to me.

ELOISE

That is fine, The Beekeper - you are awesome and a good person. You are also like a son figure to me.

 (I'm removing some extraneous phrasing and exposition, but that really is how it comes off.)

 Once The Beekeper (Jason Statham) retires home after that quaint exchange, Eloise, the lovely old lady (Phylicia Rashad), logs onto her laptop and gets swept up in one of those "your computer has been infected, call this number" scams. The result: all her accounts are immediately emptied, including a charity account to the tune of two million dollars. Once she realizes it, she grabs a gun and shoots herself.

 Let's gloss over the fact that the scammers aren't some grifters out to try and infect random vulnerable targets with ransomware or whatever, but a highly organized bunch of douchebags operating out of a modern, high-tech call center and running a complex operation; That's actually a plot point (a dumb, dumb plot point, like all the other plot points in the movie).

 I don't mind dumb in my action movies. I don't mind crass, either - Up to a point, which this movie surpasses a couple minutes in and never looks back. It's also lazy and manipulative, which I have much less tolerance for. The movie is nothing if not relentlessly populist, dumb, crass, lazy and manipulative. Knowingly so - but while that cuts it some slack, it's no excuse for writing this shitty.

 The floor manager that takes Eloise's call, for example, makes a show out of swindling her out of her life savings, revels in the fact that he's emptying out a charity account, makes nasty asides, and basically twirls his moustache for five full fucking minutes. And then, of course, there's the fact that this lovely old lady's first response to having her bank accounts emptied is blowing her fucking brains out with a gun. There's crass, and then there's this.

 As we know from the trailers, The Beekeeper isn't just a beekeeper, but a Beekeeper, a super agent for  a secret, above-the-law organization that does something or another - John Wick shit, but even less sensical and for the government. Even though he's retired, as soon as his mother figure gets fridged, our Beekeeper quickly finds out where the scammers are based, beats up the guards and blows up the building. Here's a fun fact: He lets everyone go, but leaves four people to burn - presumably the security guards, who are technically the ones who were innocent of the crime he's out to avenge. This fucking script.

 The bombing attracts the attention of a couple of FBI agents (Bobby Naderi and Emmy Raver-Lampman - one of which is Elouise's daughter, because it's that sort of script), and they start following The Beekeeper. While likeable, they are completely and utterly superfluous; A whole lot of time is wasted on them. The main meat of the movie is the war that develops between The Beekeper and the shady corporation controlling the scammers, a conspiracy that quickly spirals out to involve mobsters, mercenaries, government operatives and even a rival Beekeeper (she's batshit crazy and happily starts shooting up innocents; Also, she's completely incompetent. I really have to question the wisdom of a program that gives these asshats this level of power and weaponry.)

 It all is fairly pleasingly over-the-top, and The Beekeper's revenge does go further than I'd have expected. I'd respect it more if Black Dynamite hadn't done something similar before (spoilers?). To be honest, I find the idea of Nixon wielding a nunchaku much more believable than some of the shit this film gets up to.

 The action is pretty decent - short, brutal choreographies which Stratham pulls off with aplomb. It's not up to the standards we've been accustomed to by other recent movies, but it's fun enough. There's no tension - the bad guys are so outclassed there's never any doubt how things are going to end, but that's pretty common in action cinema. No, the problem here is that a script this bad, so full of cringe-worthy dialog and ideas, really needs a whole lot more action to redeem the movie; As it stands, the bullshit:awesome ratio is heavily skewed in the wrong direction.

 There's a dearth of good characters. Beginning with Statham; I normally enjoy his wooden, somewhere between angry and confused-looking charisma, but here he plays a sanctimonious prick who makes the same fucking terrible bee-based puns over and over again, like a piss-poor Batman villain from the '60s show*. And he keeps killing policemen, soldiers and secret service while letting the assholes he should be punishing live! Screw that guy. Jeremy Irons plays the head of the CIA and he's fun and all, but his role is basically to act scared of big bad Statham; The villains don't make much of an impression due to how shallowly over-the-top their performative assholishness is.

 There are some scripts - like the ones that, say Colin Trevorrow squeezes out every few years - that you have to figure are written with crayons on large scraps of coloured cardboard, dick doodles covering the margins. Beekeeper scriptwriter Kurt Wimmer is above that level, if only by a little; He made his name with Equilibrium, after all, a movie with a plot that could generously be described as "Baby's first dystopia (but for really dumb babies)". It had Christian Bale, though, and some interesting/cool Matrix-derived action, so we all gave it a pass.

 I don't want to be too mean to Kurt Wimmer - I did kind of enjoy Law Abiding Citizen, if nothing else. But his script for The Beekeeper is possibly the dumbest fucking thing I've seen in a very long time; If the scripts for the Jurassic Worlds were written with crayons, this one was produced by Mr. Wimmer dipping his balls in tempera and then bending over and rubbing them all over the wall.

 And yet, and yet... I don't hate this movie. Not the same way I hated other deeply dumb and crass movies like the aforementioned Jurassic Worlds, or even the latter Mission Impossibles or Fast and Furiouses. I'm not giving The Beekeeper's shit a pass, mind, but I did make it to the end, and was mildly entertained despite all of the eye rolling.

 Yes, the fact that it does know how stupid it is does play a part, as is its willingness to push things to ridiculous lengths. There's also the fact that there's a sense that everyone is in on the joke, and still decide to play things straight, which is appreciated. Director David Ayer has long been a purveyor of dumb, loud, lad's movies, and his commitment to treating this as if it was Shakespeare goes a long way. There's no excuse for how much time it wastes, but it's still over in a relatively lean 105 minutes.

 I fully stand behind all the verbiage I've written excoriating this movie (for the record: over a thousand one hundred words**), and I could probably think of a lot more to say against it; It really does have one of the worst scripts I've seen in a long time, and richly deserves an MST3K treatment. There's no question in my mind that it's kind of terrible. But... it's the good kind of terrible. As long as I'm never forced to watch it again, I'm kind of OK with it.

*: Even this aspect is half-arsed. They keep re-using the same shitty lines about "protecting the hive", and even squeeze in a lame Bee or not to bee pun. Sadly, Stratham never clenches a knife between his buttcheeks and uses is to stab people - maybe they're saving that for a sequel.

**: That's a little more than 25% of the usual amount of poorly chosen words I need to collect my lame thoughts on the random no-budget horror/action/martial arts movie that inspires me to go in-depth. If you're reading this: You're either a saint, or a masochist. Thank you either way.

Sound of My Voice

 Peter (Christopher Denham), a schoolteacher, and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius), a would-be writer, infiltrate a cult to expose the leader as a fraud and make an indie documentary about it. What could possibly go wrong?

 Less than you'd expect, actually! For a while, at least. It's very much not the same type of cult featured in, say, Martha Marcy May Marlene (both films were shown in Sundance in 2011). This is a more urbane cult, one that gathers only some nights, and the methods used to lead the faithful to their secret base are immediately engaging: vans, blindfolds and restraints, different suburban kitchens and garages, a secret handshake; All leading to the same basement, night after night. There the believers - and our infiltrators - finally get to meet Maggie (Brit Marling), a woman who claims to come from 2054.

 Maggie is softspoken, magnetic, has a flair for the theatrical and even dresses like a cult leader. She says she's preparing her flock for hardships to come, but it doesn't help her credibility that some of the stuff she makes her believers engage in seem distinctly culty: making them let go of their inhibitions, psychological deconstruction, and subjecting them to exhaustion and fasting. Oh, and she kicks out someone who asks Maggie for some future facts to prove she's actually a time traveller; Big red flag right there, if you ask me. An even bigger warning sign: Maggie soon asks one of our protagonists to do something incredibly suspect. By that point, though, they're wrapped up in the cult's mind games.

 Director Zal Batmanglij uses numbered chapter headers and frequent montages to give the story a sense of a relentless flow even when not a lot is happening. His brother Rostam provides the soundtrack, which is as good (if not as catchy) as you'd expect from one of the driving forces behind Vampire Weekend.

 The script, written by the director and Marling, expertly balances between supporting Maggie's claims and portraying the whole thing as a con until fairly late in the game. Personally I don't particularly care for where things end up (it's a bit of a common place in this sort of thing), but it undeniably has a pretty clever way of revealing it. I guess the fact that this was the first part of a proposed trilogy (thank you, IMDB trivia!) kind of gives the game away.
 Still; ending quibbles aside, it's deceptively pacey, dialog-driven cult thriller, carefully constructed around the limitations of its budget and with a strong central performance from Marling. Well worth a watch.

Maxxxine

 It begins, of course, with barn doors opening. Only this time they don't belong to a barn, but to a giant studio soundstage. In struts Maxine Minx, porn starlet, determined to cross over and become the biggest goddamn star in Hollywood. And the film... it just struts right along with her and doesn't ease up until the credits are well past done.

 She's there to audition for the sequel to a controversial horror movie. And, in the course of a beautifully filmed one-shot, she proceeds to (as she brashly puts it to the rest of the hopefuls lining outside the casting call) fucking nail it. Her transformation is astounding, calculated to floor us as much as the directors and producers casting her. It's a bravura sequence that's quickly, pointedly deflated by one of the producers asking to see Maxine's breasts; To which she quickly complies, of course. She's a pro.

 Maxxine is the capper to a slasher-adjacent trilogy writer/director Ti West started with X and Pearl - all shot mostly with the same crew and all starring the ridiculously talented Mia Goth. All you need to know from them, really, is that Maxine was the only survivor - the final girl - from the massacre of a whole porn crew on the remote Texas farm they had chosen as a set.

 You should watch them anyways. Not just because they'll let you appreciate shared themes and motifs (the opening barn doors, for example, how Maxine's casting references the monologue in Pearl, or the differing mottoes that inform their characters' worldviews), but because they are both incredible.

 Both prior movies were slasher movies cross-pollinated with clever, extremely dry humour. While X is knowingly a fairly formulaic horror film, Pearl is a much more complicated beast: a character study wearing the skin of a technicolour melodrama with some gruesome killings sprinkled in and a wicked sense of black humour.

 Maxxxine takes its queues, narrative and stylistic, from trashy '80s culture - Satanic panic, Brian DePalma and Angel. And also Giallo - a whole lot of it, from the lurid colours and the way stabbings are shot to the fetishistical focus on the killer's very expressive thick leather gloves, complete with squeaky leather sounds.

 After the events of X, Maxine's moved to LA and worked diligently to move on up in the world. Aware that her porn star career has a sell by date and that she's rapidly approaching it, she's been doggedly pursuing crossover success. Just when it looks like she's made it, a sleazy creep of a private investigator (Kevin Bacon, beautifully milking the role for all it's worth) turns up and tries to coerce her into meeting his employer for some nefarious end.

 The film is set during the couple of years that the Night Stalker was killing women in the area, too, giving the film a nasty sense of background menace - one that's quickly realized once Maxine's friends and coworkers start popping up dead.

 Calling it horror might be a bit of a stretch, but it's a highly entertaining, grisly thriller with a Fangoria gorehound sensibility: Heads will explode, balls will be (graphically) busted, and body parts will tumble down a stairwell with artistic abandon.
 The mystery itself is ridiculous in not entirely satisfying ways. It works well driving the rising suspense, but when all is revealed, while funny, it's a little too over the top and on-the-nose, like an off-hand joke that somehow became a plot point. And the film as a whole is let down by a weak ending that sets up a righteous third act bloodbath and then messes up the action, both conceptually and stylistically.

 It somewhat threatens to overshadow the rest of the film, which is a shame, because other than that relatively minor stumble, it's a stunningly realized creation. It looks incredible - cinematographer Eliot Rockett and colorist Tom Poole faithfully recreate the grimy, grainy look of celluloid on digital, and West's muscular yet detailed directing style mirrors how driven Maxine herself is. The prologue and title sequences alone are worth the price of admission.

 The acting is excellent; Not just from Goth and Bacon, but from a whole ensemble of memorable characters: Elizabeth Debicki as a hardass director, Giancarlo Esposito as an agent who's absolutely not above getting his hands dirty, and Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale liven things up considerably as a pair of homicide detectives.

 Beyond that there's a whole lot of filmic references that, honestly, don't seem to come to much; Is there any point in making a rapist look like Buster Keaton, other than to lump him in with the other celebrity impersonators on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? The same goes for a chase down the Universal backlot that ends in the Bates Motel, which looms big in the film as a whole but never seems to really stand in for anything but Maxine's aspirations (it's pretty funny when the director makes sure to mention Psycho II was shot there a couple years earlier, though).

 Still: Maxxine may hit a few minor bum notes, come off as a little hollow, but it's still a gorgeous-looking film that's a huge amount of fun. It doesn't stand at the same level as the other two movies in the trilogy, but even if it ultimately misses the mark it's still an ambitious, well-crafted movie bursting with memorable scenes and the subversive sense of humour that lines all of these films.

The Debt Collector

 OK. it's really bothering me now. I've watched this movie three times, and I still can't work it out; Who is The Debt Collector?

 Is it French (Scott Adkins)? Could be - he's our point of view character, a very British martial arts instructor and independent gym proprietor whom we meet as he greets a bunch of predatory douchebag rivals who are trying to run him out of his dojo. He deals with them in the best possible way: by offering to take them all on before he'll consider their offer. "Like in a martial arts movie" "Yeah, that's right, mate, like a fucking martial arts movie."

 He handily kicks their collective asses, but that doesn't solve the fact that the gym is struggling financially. To try and make ends meet, he convinces an friend and student (Michael Paré!) to give him a job as a debt collector. His friend doubts he's a good fit for it, and for good reason: French clearly lacks the moral flexibility the gig requires. But after some wheedling, and meeting the collections boss, he steps into the titular role. Or does he?

 Because therein lies the problem: On his first day, he's partnered up with another debt collector - Sue, an old, bleary-eyed and hungover veteran played by the great Louis Mandylor. At no point do they say "there can only be one!" and fight each other, nor does one recognize the other as the one and true Debt Collector. No crown or sash is ceremonially donned. It's maddening.

 The film follows them both as they do the rounds that first weekend. Sue's way of showing the new guy the ropes consists of dropping him into the deep end and hanging back to enjoy the fireworks; French, for his part, does relatively well - he's been established as a soldier as well as a mixed martial artist, so beating up a bunch of thugs is something he turns out to be surprisingly good at.

 Not that he enjoys it. This is a buddy comedy, after all, so the characters need to be at odds for a while before they warm up to each other. And the way it works here is that Sue basically takes the piss, always hanging back and letting French take on all punches; Meanwhile, French complains. He does come off as a little whiny, but what makes it funny is that all his moaning is justified.

 They're both great characters, and the actors have good chemistry together. Veteran VoD director Jesse V. Johnson is predictably good with the action, but more importantly for this movie his script (co-written with Stu Smalls, whom he'd worked with before on the excellent Accident Man) is funny, full of great lines and colour (and off-colour) detail. It's charming as hell, with a tone that remains breezy even as it gets into murkier waters.

 Because as everyone keeps warning French, debt collection's not for those with a conscience. And, to be fair, despite showing some scruples, he does get up to some pretty heinous shit over the course of the movie. While the film remains episodic, there aren't any major issues. But a plot eventually emerges (driven by a gangster played by Tony Todd) that will lead to places where he - and maybe even callous, burnt-out Sue - are not willing to go. Predictable, but satisfying.

 There are quite a few fights, and Mandylor gets to show off his boxing skills. But it's mostly Adkins's show, and he gets a real workout; The brawling is a little grittier than, say, Accident Man - it's way more grounded, and it feels like a few of the victories are very close -  but it still finds the time for someone to get thrown clear through a wall and quite a few comic beats. A climactic shootout, meanwhile, doesn't have much in the way of choreography or excitement, but it has an excellent use of squibs. Very juicy ones.

 One thing that cracked me up: there's this one guy who, when hit, makes a basketball-like sound on every impact. Cracks me up every time. Someone give the foley artist responsible a raise, please.

 Cinematographer Jonathan Hall captures the shittier corners of LA in all their dusty, sunny, neo-noirish glory, and the actors really elevate already good material; Adkins has never been better in the dramatic department, and Mandylor is a revelation: soulful, funny and with just the right mix of badass and vulnerability. In a just world, his part here would have made him huge. Johnson is a great director whose movies tend to look much better than their budget should allow, and this is no exception. There are even a few avant-garde like flourishes; They're slightly jarring, but after a few watches I now find the epilogue of sorts they lead to sweet and affecting. This is a really great fucking movie.

 French and Sue will return, improbably, in a very inessential sequel that nonetheless retains much of the charm. It doesn't answer who The Debt Collector is in this one. It's also nowhere near as good, but who'd refuse to spend more time in these guys' company?

Baby Assassins

 Baby assassins is about two assassins that act like big babies, not assassins that go about assassinating babies - If that's what you're after, you'd be better off hiring The Killer instead. You monster.

 The two titular assassins are Mahiro (Saori Izawa) and Chisato (Akari Takaishi) - two girls just out of high school under the employ of one of those shady assassin agencies we keep hearing about. To keep their cover after graduation, the agency suggests they both get an apartment together, and get a part-time job as a cover (as their handler explains, the agency is more scared of tax men than law enforcement). Very low-key hijinx ensue.

 The movie is bookended by two excellent fights, but spends most of its time indulging in low energy slice-of-life comedy that honestly feels too slight to even qualify as a sitcom - it's more like filler updates on a web comic.

 There's a plot of sorts where the girls inadvertently start a fight with the Yakuza, but it's an afterthought; just the bare bones to give a little structure to the proceeds and provide a big brawl at the end. More is made of the assassin's attempts to get a job, or the very polite, very mannered squabbles resulting from their convivence. For, you see, Chisato is bubbly, outgoing, and quirky (in a very specifically Japanese way that I find pretty fucking annoying), and Mahiro is an antisocial wallflower who can't be arsed with anything that doesn't involve killing (and she even moans about that). Both are complete sociopaths too, which makes their matter-of-fact handling of their assassin duties a pretty funny running gag. Especially when the actress playing Mahiro also happens to be an accomplished stuntwoman, and she can move; The movie really comes to life whenever she gets the chance to flex her muscles.

 Baby Assassins is a pretty anime-damaged film - both girls are pretty trope-filled characters, as is the type of stuff they get up to. Still, there's a lot to like here - they have a lot of chemistry together, as proven by the dialog where they start making fun of the type of unsolicited wisdom a certain type of man might spout. The film frames their job as distinctly un-glamorous and not very well paid, which is a relatively novel take, and there are some pretty solid jokes sprinkled here and there.

 Unfortunately the film spins its wheels for far too long and delves into Japanese cultural aspects that set my teeth on edge (namely, an extended plot point that involves a stint in an extremely childish maid café.) It frequently splits the line between cute and cutesy, amusing and annoying... and the proportions are not always flattering to director Yugo Sakamoto's very loose script.

 Ultimately, though, I think it's successful, just about. The fights, though definitely not the focus of the movie, are a big part of that: they're quick, brutal, and feel hard-won. Izawa is a terrific, scrappy performer who athletically weaves in and out of holds - her fight against the heavy (Masanori Mimoto) easily makes the movie worth a watch; The action director is Kensuke Sonomura, who directed Bad City, so that tracks. There's a lot of blood, all of it digital and distractingly bad, but the rolling around is so good it's easily forgiven.

 More importantly, despite all the stuff that grated and the cultural differences, both actresses are pretty good and their characters ultimately come off as at least somewhat charming (one much, much more than the other; Sorry, Chisato).

 I mean, it's a movie where both assassins ride a single bike on their way to the climactic battle - and once there, they fret about whether it's ok to leave it out in the street. Weebs will lap this stuff up, but there's just about enough here for the rest of us too.