The search for great hindi horror movies continues. Starting with Tumbbad may have set expectations too high.
Thursday, April 03, 2025
Pari
The search for great hindi horror movies continues. Starting with Tumbbad may have set expectations too high.
Monday, March 31, 2025
Hellbender
Teenager Izzy (Zelda Adams) lives in the middle of nowhere with her mother (Toby Poser). They forage, do home-schooling, and like to glam up for band night, where they play doomy, riff-heavy rock songs they compose themselves.
The girl is completely isolated; any neighbours live "the next mountain over", and whenever her mom goes to town she leaves her behind under the pretext that she has a rare immunological disease. They're happy together; It seems like a good life. When alone, Izzy takes long walks through the woods, swims, and draws whatever bit of gorgeous Catskills scenery catches her fancy. As for mom, she sometimes performs messy, blood-heavy rituals when her daughter's not around, receives ominous visions from an ominous-looking book, or makes the random hitchhiker (John Adams) explode in a shower of ash with a single gesture.
But if teenagers are good at anything, it's at screwing things up for the adults. Damn teens. On one of her walks Izzy randomly meets another teen (Lulu Adams) lounging by a pool in the house the next mountain over, and they strike a tentative friendship. This leads her to discover that when she strays from her strict vegan diet, she gets strange powers. For she is a Hellbender (not to be confused with the Augustine order of hellbound saints), a witch-like, not-quite human being, and she gains power from whatever she eats. And that knowledge sets her on a collision course with her mother.
Hellbender is an engagingly weird coming-of-age story / family drama / horror hybrid shot during the height of the COVID lockdown by the Adams family (Toby Poser and John Adams are married, Lulu and Zelda are their children; They take turns directing, shooting, and scoring the film, which they wrote together as well. The whole credits sequence is basically their names, listed over and over again -even the house in the movie is their family home. A truly home-grown film.
It's surprising just how polished it all is. The music is great, with some really good original songs; The acting's excellent, the story well written, fun and unique... and it looks beautiful, too, with the crisp digital cinematography and handsome compositions.
The effects, unfortunately, bring it down a few notches, but I'm not about going to dock the movie points for being ambitious; Sure, some of the sequences are a little funnier than they should be, but broadly speaking they work, and they successfully deliver their payload of cool ideas. Some of the visual language is also slightly clumsy, with lots of reaction shots, but that's only really an issue in a couple of scenes.
Those niggles aside, this is a pretty great film from a very talented film-making collective.
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Flow (Straume)
Friday, March 28, 2025
Fatal Deviation
But there's so much enthusiasm put into the production that it's really hard to harbour it any ill will.
It's full of padding, but most of it is so bizarre it's entertaining; Where other movies would have endless scenes of people walking around and pointless conversations (and to be clear, there is a bit of that here), the filler in Fatal Deviation tends toward the inspired. Why settle for a boring-ass mundane shit when you can have a man carefully setting up and then taking a bath in an outdoor bathtub with an open fire under it? Or Irish catholic Gandalf (Johnny Murray) training Jimmy by waving sticks at the camera? Or a musical montage where our hero remembers having tender sex with his girl, intercut with random, mundane interactions with the mobsters, intercut with our protagonist nodding thoughtfully? Or a picnic where our lovebirds lie among a scattering of random oranges all over the picnic blanket?
Thursday, March 27, 2025
The Deaths of Ian Stone
Other than that mishap, his life seems pretty good, which makes it fairly off-putting as he whinges to his beautiful girlfriend (Christina Cole) on the ride home about how bad he has it. But I guess he was on to something; After he drops her off a mysterious, a vaguely grim-reaper-like shape lures him off his car and kills him at a railroad crossing.
The main problem is that almost every elements here is borrowed. The film acts like a snapshot of the things the creators were into at the moment: Dark City, Jacob's Ladder, Butterfly Effect, The Frighteners, image comics like Witchblade and The Darkness, and so many other things; Somehow it's not surprising when several characters turn up wrapped in body-hugging vinyl suits, looking like refugees from a porn-level parody of The Matrix.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Gateway
I rather like it, but it's a bastard hard film to recommend.
Sunday, March 23, 2025
She Came From The Woods
As soon as they're alone, the counselors gather for some really, really mild debauchery, which includes the camp's resident wiseass, Peter (Spencer List) enacting a blood ritual to summon local boogeyman Agatha, a local witch supposedly executed years ago at the site for (I shit you not) botched homeopathical treatments or some such. I guess that counts as comedy, maybe? That these twenty-somethings are thinly drawn, deeply unlikeable, and act as if they were fucking twelve is... well, I refer you back to the first paragraph.
One can hope.
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Anora
Colour no one surprised when it doesn't last long; Ivan's family, horrified by the rumours they're hearing, get the idiot's local minder Toros (Karren Karagulian) and a couple of thugs (Yura Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan) to grab the couple and force them to annul their marriage.
You'd think a sex worker of all people would be used to the world being unfair - a lesson most people learn in their teens, if not earlier. It's not subtle or sophisticated, but that doesn't make the outrage any less valid.
Friday, March 21, 2025
Errementari
The title sounds like the beginning of a racist joke, but it just means Blacksmith in Basque; It refers to a scattering of ancient European folk tales (according to some ethnographers, one of the oldest known) about a blacksmith who makes a deal with hell and ends up getting the better of old scratch.
But things never get quite as dark as its closest touchstone, Pan's Labyrinth. There's quite a bit of humour threaded throughout: some of it home-baked (got to love those ubiquitous bear traps), some of it courtesy of a faithful display of the visual wit of medieval demonology (expect faces in inappropriate places). The themes are heavy, but not too much so, and while it's rooted in medieval Christianism there are more than a few welcome modern touches, such as the Sandman-like detail that human souls go to hell because they want to be punished.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Dampyr
Hey, is that a reference to Low's Double Negative there in the foreground? |
The effects are mostly decent for a relatively low-budget movie like this - it's all very fake-looking, but I liked the various ways vampires crumble into dust; They fare a lot worse when trying to do more overt fantastical stuff, but there's not a too much of that. The makeup effects and (light) gore are pretty well made, too. Needle drops consist of era-appropriate An Emotional Fish (remember them?) and Lou Reed's Take a Walk on the Wild Side, both diegetic; Lorenzo Tomio's soundtrack is not memorable, but accompanies the action well.
Monday, March 17, 2025
The Devil Conspiracy
Here we see the devil fetus climbing out of the ultrasound monitor like Sadako. Ugh, I'm not doing a good job of not selling this, am I? |
In case you don't know, the premise for this movie is that a bunch of devil worshippers steal the shroud of Turin to get Jesus's DNA so they can build a baby whose frame is strong enough to hold Lucifer, who was chained in hell by the archangel Michael at the dawn of time. That's shown at the prologue, by the way - Lucifer quotes Milton's famous line as he's imprisoned, of course (or I guess he improvises it, and Milton later somehow hears of it) - but that's a good early indicator of the movie's pervasively shoddy writing, since it's not really hell at that point, nor does he have anyone else to reign over.
Oh, and an American art student (Alice Orr-Ewing) gets kidnapped at the same time; You never know when Satan is going to need a body to incubate his new Jesus body.
Worse yet, when our protagonists inevitably free themselves, the film's modest budget and an aversion to have any decent action whatsoever conspire to prevent absolutely anything interesting from happening. That's often the case with these things - put a crazy, eye-catching premise, and then bore your viewers to death. Also, the dialogue features several extremely clunky lines that made me think that it could have benefitted from a couple of passes from a native English speaker. (Hey, just like this blog!)
You're welcome! |
Later, the conflict between faith and science is basically literalized. This is a movie that works really hard to earn the right to be called dumbass.
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Daddy's Head
Young Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) never had the best of relationships with his stepmother Laura (Julia Brown) - it was James (Charles Aitken), the head of the family, whom they both loved and held things together; After he passes away in the aftermath of a car accident, Isaac and Laura start pulling further apart. And that's even before a shape-shifting monster wearing Daddy's Head comes a-calling at their remote modernist home and starts trying to... turn Isaac against all other grown ups? It's not really clear.
It's a punishingly slow film, one that doesn't flesh out its characters nor its scares, leaving nearly every scene feeling a little hollow, a little unsatisfying. Very little happens, which could be excused if there was any heft to the emotions or themes on display, but the characters and their relationships are all basic and fairly schematic. The script, by director Benjamin Barfoot has some good writing and the makings of a compelling enough situation, but fails to bring it to life or take it anywhere interesting - everything feels perfunctory, and it doesn't help that it often casts its protagonists as severely unlikable, empathy-free jerks. The acting, while fine, is fully in sync with the film's overriding dourness.
The direction at least is on-point, with some beautiful cinematography from Miles Ridgway. The set design - especially a forest stick fort to end all forest stick forts - is excellent, as is the creature, a creepy CGI creation which remains frustratingly elusive all the way to the end. The glimpses we get are extremely effective, but it all builds up to a confrontation that is almost comically underwhelming.
File this one under: Handsome, slow-burn elevated horror with very little to say. A little above Antlers, maybe, but not a lot. Cool monster, though; Wish they'd had the money or wherewithal to do a little more with it.
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Life After Fighting
To its credit, the film tries to do justice to its grim subject matter by treating everything extremely seriously, so the film becomes first a drama and then a thriller before it can go back to being about people beating the living shit out of each other.
And yes, I'm perfectly happy ignoring plot holes or handwaving when a script's trying to move things from fight A to fight B, but here everything's taken seriously enough to bloat the running time to beyond two hours, so I think it's fair to put it to task.
Alex faces off against a mostly interchangeable rota of thugs; Of the two exceptions, one is a guy he handily defeated previously, and the other (the 'boss') chooses to keep a balaclava on through the whole fight, denying us the pleasure of hateful stares, shocked expressions and moments of begrudging respect. The fights are complex and very well filmed; The edits mostly consist of long takes, the cameras have a habit of moving along with the action, and everyone displays an admirable Hong-Kong-like willingness to be thrown against the furniture, breaking wood panels, windows, and in a particularly painful-looking move, a glass display case. The choreography (also by Foster) does get a little repetitive at times but it's expertly delivered by everyone involved and it mixes a variety of styles to great effect. I'm no expert, but I counted Tae Kwon Do, Muay Thai/Kickboxing, Krav maga and a whole lot of Jiu Jitsu.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Strange Darling
It's not a hugely complex script, but writer/director JT Mollner expertly paces his reveals and pulpy twists throughout so that the film changes shape slightly a couple of times, and it goes far afield enough that a few developments got a chuckle out of me. I don't really want to go into it any more - at the risk of overhyping how clever and twisty this is (it isn't), it's definitely one of those films where it's best to go in knowing as little about it as possible.
Saturday, March 08, 2025
Mickey 17
I love that the script ensures every single character in the movie except Mickey 17 (but including 18) becomes a cartoonish asshole at least some of the time. That doesn't do wonders for their likeability or coherence, but it does get a few laughs and I see it as thematic: Even a different version of Mickey gets to be an unempathetic, but redeemable jackass. Ruffalo's comedic take on a showboat politician is as broad as a barn - a less restrained cousin to his rake in Poor Things - but it is very funny, as is Steve Yeun as a self-serving "friend" or the callous gaggle of scientists that very excitedly observe and take notes on Mickey's agony.
Pattinson's turn is very enjoyably buffoonish: he is a well-meaning idiot as the protagonist, and a volatile psycho idiot in his next incarnation. But his meekness as 17 is endearing, and the fact that (partly due to circumstance) he never turns into a raging asshole like everyone else does makes him a successful anchor for the film.
Friday, March 07, 2025
Blind War (Mang zhan)
Thursday, March 06, 2025
The Tunnel
It's interesting that while the film makes it perfectly clear that Warner's carelessness is 100% responsible for the crew's dire straits (and a couple of deaths), she still comes off as sympathetic thanks to a near-constant stream of casual chauvinist comments from the people that are supposed to be supporting her.
All the darkness also keeps whatever lurks in The Tunnel nice and mysterious. It's a gamble made necessary by the film's very low budget, but it works beautifully here; The few glimpses we get of it are extremely effective. The director and Writers/producers/editors Julian Harvey and Enzo Tedeschi do a good job of leaning into their limitations.
Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer fait tousser)
The actors actually stumble back before the barrage of oncoming entrails. It's glorious. |
During the fight, Mercure has some problems focusing his powers, as apparently he's not sincere enough. And sure enough, after the fight their splinter-like boss (Alain Chabat voicing and operating a hilariously dingy puppet) tells the team that they must go into a retreat to learn to work together again.