Mandy

 This. This is the perfect doom metal movie. No notes, other than it's essential.

 Ok, some other notes: Mandy is a drug-soaked tribute to the sleaziest of the old swords-and-sorcery movies. Set in a version of the 80s that also accommodates cenobite biker gangs and a cult of murderous hippies with access to magical relics, it tells the tale of one Red (Nicolas Cage, a lumberjack whose idyllic life with his girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is terminally disrupted by the aforementioned cult when its leader/messiah Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) takes an interest on the woman.

 What follows is a bloody, brutal struggle as Red enacts his revenge and carves his way up to the cult leader. Crossbows, axes and chainsaws all get their time to shine. It's a deeply psychedelic movie with an immaculately developed ambiance, thanks to director and co-writer Panos Cosmatos' eye, lush, grainy digital photography from Benjamin Loeb, and a doom-laden soundtrack from the late, great Jóhann Jóhannsson.

 There are better action movies out there, but I can't think of any that manage to leverage every single  one of their elements to communicate a specific feel as well as this one; The Limey, maybe? In any case, I can't recommend it enough.

Rumours

 There's a tiny subgenre of action that pits world leaders (well, ok, usually the US president) against terrorists or some other threat. It's never been very popular, but for whatever reason there's been a spike in their production lately (I won't get into the politics of it, but it is pretty concerning, particularly in the current climate). One of them even takes place at the G20 summit.

 I'd say Rumours is a direct response to that one movie, but it came out before it. It pits the members of the G7 as they face an unexpected siege by the wanking dead (no, that's not a typo and no, I won't expand on it). As you might  expect from a movie written and directed by Guy Maddin and frequent collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, it attacks its material at a rather... oblique angle.

 The premise an obvious joke, if a pretty good one: The leaders of the free world convene to tackle on some (unspecified) world crisis only to be faced with a more immediate and dangerous one... and they dissolve into an ineffectual muddle of infighting, grandstanding, and incompetence.

 They're all so self-absorbed and so far removed from any problem that they can't deal with one that directly threatens their survival, and I have to admit that I laughed several times even when the punchlines were only slightly different variations on a theme. I also laughed when the French President starts to look for hidden meaning within the events of the night, which feels like Maddin and co. gently poking fun at themselves and trolling their audience.

 The cast is very, very game and a lot of  fun to watch; The Chancellor of Germany (Cate Blanchett) awkwardly tries to hold things together. The president of Canada (Roy Dupuis) is basically a stroppy teen; The POTUS (Charles Dance with his native English accent) is an artifact stuck firmly in the glories of the past. The Japanese PM (Takehiro Hira) is pretty much a non-entity who goes along with anyone else's plan, and the French president (Denis Ménochet) is a pretentious windbag. The UK PM (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is stuck as the voice of reason along with the German Chancellor. And the Italian president (Rolando Ravello) is a sweet idiot who's just happy to be included, and provides some of the biggest laughs in the movie.

 Oh, and Alicia Vikander (adorable) puts in a short appearance as the leader of the European commission.

 While technically this is a zombie movie, this is first and foremost a bizarre surreal movie that is just barely interested in being a comedy, much less a horror film. It does find a couple of moments to play with genre aesthetics (a garishly-lit 80's style scene in the woods, and a beautiful mist-bound scene at a ferry dock drenched in sodium light), but other than some ambiance the scarce horror elements are strictly there for  laughs or as a surrealist sting.
 The satire, meanwhile, is a mixed bag; Some of its barbs are clear and cogent, like the president of France making pompous, grandiloquent statements while being carried in a wheelbarrow by the leaders of other countries. Others are way too obvious, like the US president falling asleep and being generally senile... I do wonder if this movie would have been a lot more interesting had the movie been released a year or two later. The general thrust of the script - Germany timorously trying to herd a bunch of unruly idiots in order to perform a clearly ineffectual exercise, everyone being completely unable to prioritize or competently take charge of the situation - remains funny throughout . And there is, of course, a whole lot of What. The. Fuck.

 If you're tickled by the premise, well then, you'll remain tickled by the premise, but as with all of the movies from these filmmakers, it's somewhat hostile to the viewer. Guy Maddin is a level removed from someone like Quentin Dupieux, who can produce surrealism that still functions within the genre it inhabits.
 I personally don't regret watching this, but the experience of getting through it was often exasperating; It feels like it could have worked much better at half its length. But... I can't discount a film with situations as funny as a man trying to thread the line on how much pedophilic flirting is appropriate, or lines as gloriously unhinged as when someone proclaims that a giant brain is female, because "it's not as big as a male giant brain".

War of the Wizards

 War of the Wizards, renamed as The Phoenix when released in the outside of Asia a few years later to cash in on Clash of the Titans' success, is a budget 1978 Taiwanese fantasy epic that's hobbled by a deeply unlikable little shit of a main character and some really turgid plotting. Stick with it, though, for a bunch of extremely charming old-school practical and visual effects, and a scene that might be the single funniest bit of intentional comedy I've run across in any of these films.

 Two things happen when hapless fisherman Tai (Hsiu-Shen-Liang) finds a magical bowl that allows him to create anything he wishes. The first is that he uses it to become rich (and in so doing, an absolute asshole). The second is that a large number of threats, supernatural and not, come after him to get the relic.

 One of these threats - an interstellar (yes, literally) wizard called Flower Fox (Betty Pei Ti) eventually steals both the bowl and Tai's two brides (long story), prompting a more traditional, heroic second half where our complete waste of a protagonist skills up and overcomes a few obstacles to get what he thinks he deserves. It really is a movie of two halves, so let's have a look at them separately.

 The first half of the movie is, by far, the worst; There is absolutely no reason to root for Tai, who's venal, shallow, a complete idiot, and deeply unfunny - but for far too long the script insists on presenting him as a hero, and we get a lot of his inane antics here. He does eventually get a very mild comeuppance (the film is not that dumb, I guess), but it's absolutely a case of too little, too late. In the meanwhile we're forced to watch him behaving like an entitled little nouveau riche dick and have to suffer through his daft, uncomfortable attempts to woo not one but two beautiful ladies (Terry Hu and Chow Chi-Ming). They are, of course, in cahoots with the main villain to rob the relic, but they do develop feelings for our idiot of a protagonist. Sigh.

 As bad as this first act is, it does contain an unimpeachable bit of comedy: A long scene where Tai is accosted by a number of colourful, powerful assassins at a restaurant. I'm not about to spoil what's easily the best scene in the movie, but do know that it's perfectly executed and, on a conceptual level, ridiculously ahead of its time - a cheeky, slightly post-modern piss take of a scene that only gets funnier as it goes along. Gags in these films rarely get this elaborate.

 Tai remains insufferable for the film's more enjoyable back half, and the fact that he keeps failing upwards and getting more and more powerful with seemingly very little effort no sacrifice won't endear him to anyone. Bonus shitty points: he's very focused on recovering his magic bowl, but rarely devotes a thought to his two hijacked paramours.

 So it's not like the plot gets any better, but at least there's a lot of cool stuff going on. The idiot in charge learns to absorb sunlight and shoot lasers with his sword, and gets the freaking Phoenix as a mount (a very endearing, janky puppet that looks like a peacock but has the rough shape of a turkey). Meanwhile, Flower Fox flies, can breathe fire, summons a giant stone creature and has a huge henchman at her beck and call (Richard Kiel - Jaws off the Bond movies) and causes tidal waves, letting co-director Sadamasa Arikawa show off his chops with miniature cities and boats.

 While there's a lot of Kung Fu wizardry, the fights remain resolutely mediocre. This is not a martial arts film by any stretch of the word - the choreographies are closer to... oh, say a Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movie.

 The Kung Fu wizardry is pretty good though. It's all very low budget, of course, and I'm sure the soulless fucks at the internet would have a field day complaining about how shitty it all looks. And... yeah, some of it, especially the optical effects, do look pretty bad. But if you can allow yourself to enjoy this sort of thing at all (and you should, don't be like those other losers!) there's definitely a lot to like; Cheap it may be, but there's a lot of effort behind this, and the special effect techniques cover the full gamut except maybe stop-motion.

 I don't want to oversell it - this is definitely not a good movie, and the dipshit protagonist makes it an even tougher sale. But there's enough good stuff here to make it a pretty enjoyable watch.

Tremors 3: Return to Perfection

 The Tremors movies were always low-budget, but this second sequel was the first one to go straight to video (Aftershocks was intended to be DtV as well, but positive reactions on test screenings convinced Universal to give it a theatrical run.

 And... well, this is where the magic fails. Maybe you can blame the script by newcomer John Whelpley, but the story is by the original Tremors team (S. S. Wilson, Brent Maddock plus Nancy Roberts, who helped with Tremors 2). Maddock also directs.

 Gun nut Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) is left to headline after the departures of Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward, and he is as likeable as ever, even if he's much better as a supporting character than a protagonist. And to be completely honest, I didn't hate the deuteragonists either: Shawn Christian as a grifter who takes out tourists on safaris to see "graboids" (or a shitty facsimile thereof), and a business-headed shop owner played by Susan Chuang.

 But the story, which has a new batch of graboids/shriekers terrify the community of Perfection again, feels very tired and by-the-numbers. So does the introduction of yet a new stage of graboid development - it turns out shriekers, if left alone, turn into a sleeker version of a shrieker that can fly by... lighting its farts on fire, basically. These ass-blasters (official name!) look terrible and their method of locomotion never makes sense (they don't look like they could glide for a second); The whole thing reeks of desperation on the part of the creative team.

They got Dark Horse to do a decent cover... shame no one thought about running a spell checker.

 Squint, and you can see some traces of the trademark Tremors wit - but you have to squint a lot, and none of it is really memorable. Add to that crappier production values (although technically on a higher budget; at one point we're treated to a rack of comics called "Shreikers") and more reliance on bargain-bin CGI even for the standard first-stage graboids... yeah, this was a major disappointment.

 This is as far as I got originally with this series. It hasn't gotten any better with a rewatch and, to be honest I'm not exactly making me want to persevere with the series; Especially as the relationship between the Tremors team and Universal, which never seems to have been good (Aftershocks' production was apparently nightmarish, which makes it even more amazing that it turned out so well) got markedly worse after this.

Hell Baby

 Fucking godawful. A ton of comedy talent (Keegan Michael Key! Kumail  Nanjiani! Rob Corddry! Plus a ton of members of comedy groups The State, Stella, and others) are completely wasted on a stoner-friendly horror spoof that relentlessly goes for easy jokes and lame improv comedy.

 Writer/directing team of Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, who also make an appearance as two chain-smoking, hard-living exorcist priests, have come up with some jokes that do work on paper, such as Key's character, a ridiculous Cajun caricature with no sense of personal space or privacy, or some extended absurdist sequences where the film stops to stare at people sampling local Louisiana cuisine for uncomfortably long stretches of time. But the results are never more than mildly amusing, and they carry on for so long they almost inevitably overstay their welcome. And those are the better parts of the movie. Avoid, unless you actually enjoy this sort of Your Highness-style low-effort shit.

Things Will Be Different

 Siblings Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy) abscond to a safehouse after stealing some money. It's a particularly safe safehouse, too: By performing a ritual with the abandoned farmhouse's clocks, the fugitives can jump out of time into a sort of isolated time loop and wait out two weeks without any fear of anyone finding them.

 The catch (of course there's a catch) is that they're not supposed to be there. As Joseph and Sidney end their stay outside of time, they discover that the loop is run by a shady outfit which are unwilling to let them out. They give our protagonists an ultimatum: either get rid of another intruder who's been meddling with their timeloop, or get erased from existence. So the siblings are stuck, unable to return to their lives until they deal with a menace that may not exist.

 It's an original, compelling setup with well-written, likeable characters and some good tension. The biggest and most distinctive thing the movie has going for it, though, is its inscrutability - it's spelled out explicitly that some things will not be explained to the characters (and by extension, the audience). The plot does end up making sense, but only just about, and it leaves a lot up in the air. In that I don't think it's wholly successful, despite some clever ideas and a solid, emotional ending. Much better handled is the weirdness and sense of mystery behind the Vise, as the organization running the time loop calls itself.

 Writer/director Michael Felker has been filmmaker duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's editor for more than a decade now (starting on their V/H/S segment; They produced the film through their Rustic films imprint, and Benson makes an appearance as one of the operators of the time loop.) Felker's chilly, quiet style complements the material well, and the soundtrack by Jimmy Lavalle (of the great post-rock band Tristeza - highly recommend their album En Nuestro Desafío) and Michael A. Muller is excellent.

Tremors 2: Aftershocks

  Tremors remains one of my favourite creature features ever - just about everything in that film is pitch perfect, starting with a wildly inventive script that's chock-full of clever ideas, amazing FX, great and extremely funny characters, not to mention the ways it keeps both its threats (tentacle-mouthed burrowing slugs that hunt by sound and vibration) and the ways they're dealt with fresh right  up to the very end.

 There's been something like six sequels since, and now there's possibly one more on the way - a legacy sequel with some of the surviving cast and control finally reverted to the original creators. I remain cautiously optimistic, despite the easy cynicism legacy sequels deserve at this late date (and the fact that the original team was also involved in the dreadful Tremors 3) - and the reason to keep faith is that the series' first direct-to-video sequel is honestly kind of amazing.

 After the events of Tremors, its protagonists made a bit of money and finally managed to leave their hard-scrabble life behind. Due to budget cuts the production wasn't able to hire Kevin Bacon, so his character Val (and love interest Reba McEntire) was summarily written out. Instead, the film rests on the shoulders of the great Fred Ward, returning as Earl. His graboid-hunting exploits have made him a minor celebrity, but he's blown his cash-in attempt on it in a failed ostrich farm.

 Cue the arrival of a mexican oil field executive, who explains he has a bit of a graboid infestation and offers $50,000 for each dead pest. Earl is reticent, but the money is too good, and soon he joins old friend and gun-nut Burt (Michael Gross), a geologist (Helen Shaver), a fresh-faced taxi driver and graboid hunting enthusiast (Christopher Gartin) and a small team at the site to hunt down the old tentacle slugs.

  The killing is easy at first, as the crew have graboid extermination almost down to a science. But this is a sequel, and the law of escalation pretty much dictates that there needs to be a different form of threat. In this case, it's the brood of the graboids - they birth clutches of some sort of rapidly-multiplying kangaroo-like creatures. There's a clear debt to Jurassic Park's raptors, but as with the original Tremors, the fun part is watching a very likeable cast use inventively the cards they're given... and sometimes make a bad situation worse. The script isn't quite as full of clever moments as the one for the first movie, but it does feature plenty, including some ridiculously funny jokes that also function to drive the plot (such as the way the crew discover just how much shit a full-metal slug can penetrate).

 The new creatures look great, with some amazing puppetry involved (they are CGI whenever they need to move a lot, and the FX work there - handled by Phil Tippet's studio - looks pretty good nearly twenty years later). Director S. S. Wilson (who co-wrote most of the early installments along with fellow series stalwart Brent Maddock, before Universal took the series away from them) isn't quite as good directing action as Ron Underwood was in the first film, but he handles himself well, has a real eye for filming great-looking earthy explosions, and the verdant scenery of the Mexico oil fields (actually shot in California) gives this one a distinct, attractive look. He also includes a lot of neat little visual details, such as the way a powerful gun's muzzle blast is actually strong enough to break a nearby window that's not on the path of fire.

 Tremors 2 is the rare, miraculous example of a direct-to-video movie that's a worthy follow-up to a true classic. It doesn't manage the neat trick of, say, Undisputed 2 of actually being better than the first movie, but... come on, it's Tremors we're talking about here. Let's not get greedy.

Vulcanizadora

 Two middle-aged friends to out into the woods. Derek (Joel Potrykus) is nerdy, juvenile, and seems to see the trip as an excuse to act like a twelve-year old. Marty (Joshua Burge), an arsonist who is about to be imprisoned, seems to be on some kind of mission, and barely tolerates Derek's antics.

 Vulcanizadora at first seems content to observe these man-children on their camping trip, charting their progress through the woods with a light touch and heavy slacker comedy vibes. But even before it pivots upon a grim turn and starts tracking its fallout in the film's back half, there are hints as to what's to come shot through Derek's childish up-beat chatter as he discusses his family life and how deeply let down he feels by life as an adult.

 The observational and character-based humour is pretty mild - there are a few laughs here and there, but  most of the comedy is of the cringe variety early on, evolving into some gallows humour and deeply ironic developments later on; It might technically qualify as a comedy, but this is pretty much the anti-Naked Gun.
 It's the drama that ends up being surprisingly effective; Produced on a shoestring budget, writer/director/coprotagonist Joel Potrykus keeps the tone extremely down-to-earth even as the stakes are pretty world-ending for his characters. Great film.

The Naked Gun (2025)

 Police Squad! is back, now featuring Frank Dreblin's son - conveniently named Frank Dreblin Jr. (Liam Neeson). Along with a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson), he gets tied into a ridiculous conspiracy against a tech bro played by Danny Huston. But the plot doesn't really matter - is it funny?

 Thankfully, it is. I guess I'd put it well below the original, and a little above the Naked Gun 2: The Smell of Fear; As directed by Akiva Schaffer (of Lonely Island fame) from a script by him plus Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, this new Naked Gun is a successful merging of his sensibilities (as in, for example, Popstar) and the original film's Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker maximalist approach.

 It does a pretty admirable job in matching the original's density of silly jokes, but for the most part it stages one joke and moves on to the next instead of packing in multiple gags in a single shot. Serial instead of parallel piss-takes. This has advantages and disadvantages, and gives the film a fairly distinct feel... but I did notice it didn't really achieve the vintage ZAZ effect of overwhelming you under the onslaught of jokes of varying quality - when a joke falls flat here, it flounders. And partly as a result of that, and of some weak sections, the film as a whole doesn't feel quite as memorable, as larger-than-life, as its forebears.

 Still: there are a lot of jokes, a lot of them very funny, and some of them featuring the sort of inventive boldness the ZAZ movies were known for. We get other people's inner dialogs butting into our hero's narration, ridiculous running gags that get increasingly ridiculous as they recur, an inspired montage-that-gets-out-of-control, and a really over-the-top final chase that manages to include a wonderful owl puppet. All that plus the expected quips, dad jokes, exaggerated bumbling, and visual double entenderes you might expect out of a modern comedy firmly situated on the sillier side of things. And it stays well away from the empty references - everything has a punchline. Good stuff.

 A few of the jokes acknowledge some of the concerns people might have about making a light-hearted movie about cops, but Dreblin's trespasses are all pretty minimal; It's as if the movie knows it needs to address it, but is desperate to return to a more goofy, harmless tone. I'm ok with that, even if it feels like a missed opportunity. Guess the 'keep the politics (I happen to disagree with) away from art' crowd will be happy.
 The same goes double with regards to the film's choice of villain - why make him a rich tech 'prophet' who owns a brand of electric cars and then completely decouple him from the obvious target? Both the reality of what the real-life enshittification gurus are pulling, and the all the depressingly lame evil shit Musk specifically has done? Is ripping off Kingsman really the best they could do?
 I feel like I'm over-analyzing a movie where the main character convincingly disguises himself as a tiny schoolgirl, but why call attention to how toothless your satire is? Just avoid real-life parallels in the first place, job's done.

 Neeson is an inspired bit of casting, and he and the rest of the cast attack their roles with the requisite seriousness, making their antics all the more funny. On the technical front, Schaffer has all the skills needed for good comedy: great blocking and crack timing; Other than that, between The Monkey and Weapons, horror comedies have regular comedies soundly beat on presentation. It's nowhere even near a contest.

Bring Her Back

 Two teen Siblings (Billy Barratt and Sora Wong) are assigned a foster home when their dad dies, only to find their new foster mom (Sally Hawkins) and creepy stepbrother (Jonah Wren Phillips) may not have their best interests at heart.

 Bring Her Back is a cruel, intense, and unsparing horror film. It represents a huge leap forward for writer/directors Danny and Michael Philippou, too, with much better-rounded characters and pitch-perfect execution of some rather nasty set-pieces and brilliantly sustained tension.

 The script is very well put together, too; The drama is compelling, and it avoids exposition while still handing us enough information that it's easy enough to put things together in a satisfying fashion. There are a ton of clever touches, up to and including the way it sets up Hawkins's character as a former counsellor - this both sets up her skill at manipulating the kids, as well as a possible source for a VHS tape that acts as a sort of catalyst for everything that's going on.

 Definitely in the running for the best horror movie I've seen this year; I seriously doubt any performances will top Hawkins and Barratt's, at the very least.

Asylum

  Asylum - or, to give it its full name, Asylum: Twisted Horror and Fantasy Tales, is a fairly dismal indie anthology film that features nine - count 'em, nine tales of very varying quality, plus a framing device in which a clown (Raymond E. Lee) delivers some painfully unfunny, grade-schooler level misanthropic (and misogynist, but that fits the character) invective at us that might or might not be related to the stories he's presenting.
 The shorts were sourced from all over the world by two Argentine producers (Nicolás Onnetti and Michael Kraetzer, and their attempts to tie everything together with their wraparound segments are a large part of why I'm overall negative on the film.

 There are two bright spots - One is Damien LeVeck's The Cleansing Hour, which presents a fake exorcist (Sam Jaeger) who runs into the real deal during a stream. If that sounds familiar, it's because Leveck managed to expand it into a (much better) feature a few years later.

 The other one is an extremely silly and gory surrealistic comedy by Caye Casas, who would almost a decade later later make The Coffee Table. It's the tale of a terminally ill henpecked man (Josep Maria Riera) who gets better just before the funeral, to the chagrin of his wife and his mother (Itziar Castro and Carme Sansa). It's camp as hell, and pretty fun.

 Other than that, a cheeky Mexican short takes the piss out of Trump's "let's build a wall on the border and make the Mexicans pay for it!" still unfulfilled campaign promise, complete with tiny crotch-mounted missile launcher half a decade before South Park made news making fun of the orange pussy-grabber's micropenis. It's a rauchy four-minute live-action (and CGI) cartoon that goes by mamón - that is, cocksucker. Guess who that's aimed at? It's a sentiment I'm sure a lot more people share these days.
 Besides that gleefully juvenile aside, there's not one, but two pretty cute zombie tales - one claymation, one live action. All these are decent enough.

 But then... there's the rest. The wraparound gets even unfunnier the longer it drags on, and seems to take great pride in going absolutely nowhere interesting. As for the other shorts... there's an incredibly basic slasher tale where all the effort is come up is spent making designing a 'cool' slasher, and next to no thought is given the incredibly basic story they put him in (that the killer looks like a slipknot robot... doesn't help things). There's a ripoff of the trippy fourth dimension flight part of 2001, and the butt-ugly 'epic' thematic conclusion to the wraparound where a bunch of clowns run amok in a fairground killing young people.

 There's some good stuff to be found here, but with the Cleansing Hour living on as its own thing, the bad sadly balances it out completely. I wouldn't really recommend this bloated mess to anyone except horror anthology completists.

The Thunder Kick (Yi wang da shu)

 Sometime in the early nineteenth century, A fisherman (Li Chin-Kun) gets into a fight with a bunch of ne'er do wells trying to charge for passage over a bridge. But as his disapproving mother tells him, violence has a way to escalate, and soon some revenge-hungry toll entrepreneurs turn up at his house with... oh shit! It's Bolo Yeung in a cool hat/open vest ensemble.
 The fisherman fights alongside a stranger who turned up to chat up his mom, and Bolo and the other goons are handily beat. Because they fought together, the stranger proclaims the fisherman his brother (battle brothers!) and ends up gifting the fisherman and his mom a fancy house. Way to undercut mom's pacifist message, stranger. Not that mom's complaining.

 I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, for the stranger to reveal some ulterior motives... and when he returns to his home city, he kind of does - but it's nothing nefarious. It turns out that he was apparently involved in a feud with a cartel led by three brothers, and that maybe he was scouting for bodyguards or something similar. Whatever it was he planned to do, we'll never know, because the nefarious triad gang up on him and kick the guts out of him (not literally, sadly) shortly after he gets back.

 But his plan does end up working, if posthumously: The fisherman soon heads to the city to visit his battle brother, learns of his demise, vows revenge... and then spends a pretty boring half hour or so watching his targets run their criminal empires. Eventually, he and some allies come up with a pretty clever plan - a Red Harvest-style scheme to set the brothers against each other so their organizations can be picked off one by one.

 And then, in the final thirty minutes or so, the fisherman does just that, going after each one of the three crime lords single-handedly in some pretty cool, drawn out fights.

 I was a bit worried for a while there because the first few fights in the film - including the Bolo one - are pretty weak; No one embarrasses themselves, but they're extremely unmemorable.
 Luckily the brawls towards the end are much much better and include some excellent bits of colour like people jumping into the fight from the floor above or getting thrown clear across some sliding doors. They have a strong sense of physicality, too, which is not always the case for these older kung-fu movies. The final confrontation, an excellent, prolonged one-on-one duel, is the only time weapons are drawn (a staff and a pair of tonfas). To my taste at least, it cinches the deal, and easily makes this movie worth a watch.

 Shame about the story - the bones of a good yarn are there, but director Wing-Cho-Yip fails to find an engaging way to tell it. It's also seriously hampered by a too-perfect protagonist who never is even remotely threatened by any of the fights he throws himself into, and doesn't have the sort of charisma to make his invulnerable character fun to watch. Hell, I only watched this a few days ago, and I'm struggling to remember the first thing about him. Except that he can swing a pair of tonfas really, really well.

V/H/S: Viral

 So... was it bad as I remembered?

 Well, yes, it's pretty fucking bad. And I don't seem to be alone in thinking that; This third V/H/S anthology derailed the series from its yearly schedule, kicking the next film seven years into the future.

 The framing story (by Marcel Sarmiento) is beefier than usual - I suspect that if you add all its parts together, they'd add up to as much as any other of the segments. Unfortunately, the story does not. Add up to anything, I mean. It's a non-starter about a dude who gets obsessed with a slow car chase which has something to do with his girl disappearing and with people going nuts all over the place. It's bad.

 Once it cedes its spot to the first proper short things get immeasurably better - Dante The Great (by Gregg Bishop) is a mockumentary about the rise and fall of the titular illusionist (Justin Welborn), a loser who somehow gets a hold of a magical cape which has some unfortunate demonic tendencies. Things get out of hand, resulting in a sort-of live-action re-enactment of Pixar's short Presto but with an R rating. Silly, well-made, well-paced and featuring the rare V/H/S protagonist (Emmy Argo) you actually want to root for... if anyone's looking for a segment in any of these movies that needs to be rescued and transplanted to a better anthology, this one would be a really good candidate.

 Dante's a hard act to follow. Nacho Vigalondo tries his best with Spanish-language parallel dimension tale Parallel Monsters, which has some clever conceits and a good WTF reveal, but none of it did much for me.

 At least it's nowhere near as bad as Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Bonestorm, though. It's the usual tale of some insufferable skater dickwads who cross the border to Mexico to do some ollies or whatever and then have to face off with a bunch of zombie-like Dia de los Muertos entities. Taken as a near-experimental exercise in how far found footage can be stretched, it's kind of interesting... but it's also near painful to watch, and there's absolutely no narrative reason to sit through it.
 That these guys made both this and Spring in the same year still boggles my mind.

 All of this would have been rounded out by Todd Lincoln's Gorgeous Vortex, but it was cut out of the anthology because the director forgot to make it as a found footage film. And maybe because it's sucks, but given the rest of the material, I somehow doubt that. I have no idea what the hell this one's supposed to be about; Self-consciously arty, slow as molasses, and as obtuse as humanly possible... The protagonist (Jayden Robison) is truly gorgeous, though, and spends the most of her time running around in various skimpy outfits - so I guess there is at least that.
 The last short is available on the bluray after the credits, or up in various streaming sites if for some reason you don't want to spend any money on this. And to be clear, you shouldn't spend any money on V/H/S/Viral, I don't care how good Dante The Great is.

Warning: Do Not Play (Amjeon)

  This one didn't really do a lot for me. It's a pretty standard movie about an obsessed filmmaker (Seo Yea-ji) who's trying to track down an indie horror movie that's rumoured to a) get people who watch it in some sort of trouble and b) to be shot by a gh-gh-gh-ghost!

  This dumps her into an investigative spiral which will, of course, have some pretty dire consequences for her and other people caught up in the quest. It begins rather well (if a bit uninspired), but not a lot of time goes by before she's doing a few questionable and/or deeply stupid things to track down the film. Since she doesn't really have a strong motivation to do those things (beyond "I'm under pressure to do my own horror movie", which really doesn't cut it) or a proper justification for her obsession, it's hard to sympathise with her when the inevitable spooks come a-knocking.

 The cast is good, the cinematography (by Young-soo Yoon) is good, and Director Kim Jin-won clearly has chops - his film has some good ambiance and a couple of decently creepy moments - but as a whole neither the story (also by Jin-won) nor the horror coalesce into something substantial or even particularly interesting. Oh well.

Warhunt

  I usually find horror movies set in World War 2 fun, but this one's mostly a miss. When a plane goes down somewhere in occupied Europe (if they mentioned where, I missed it), a squad of GIs is sent to look for its critical cargo.

 Mickey Rourke plays one Major Johnson who forces his own soldier (Jackson Rathbone) as an additional member. The Major rocks a shiny eyepatch and a cane, which seems like a bit much, but everything about Rourke in this movie is a lot much, to be honest.

 Despite some incredibly cheesy title credits, bad acting and some very stilted dialogue that goes overboard in trying to sound badass, there film shows some promise early on; the photography is fine, with some striking shots, and an early shootout is fun, mostly because of the use of physical squibs detonating everywhere.

 But the rest of the action is deeply mediocre and the plot goes nowhere quickly. The soldiers almost immediately discover that it's impossible to find their way in the forest, and soon after start getting whittled down both by physical attacks and pretty basic mind tricks from some unnatural force. Meanwhile, the action keeps cutting to a command centre somewhere where Rourke and some completely unnecessary characters provide some deeply irrelevant exposition. There are some good bits, but the disjointed narrative and poor plotting make getting to them feel like a bit of a chore.
 It all does leads to an action-packed climax; Unfortunately, it's so poorly shot that it finishes undoing what little goodwill director Mauro Borrelli had managed to accrue up to that point.

 The whole thing - laughable CGI, Rourke's involvement*, poorly put together script, the multiple production companies involved - make the whole thing feel deeply like a direct to video project, but Lionsgate somehow saw it fit to distribute it. The whole thing is not without some charm, but unless you're truly desperate for some WW2-set horror you're probably best off avoiding this one.

 

*: To be fair, Rourke is not half-assing it. Sure, he does sit out most of the movie in a separate set, but he ends up doing a fair bit more than most 'prestige' name actors do when they're slumming like this. Let's say three quarters-assing it.

From the Dark

 This one's an Irish movie about a vampire who's freed from being pickled in peat by a guy with a shovel (I think this might be the first time I see peat mining depicted in a movie.)

 A squabbling young couple (Niamh Algar and Stephen Cromwell) has their car break down within the creature's haunts, and must survive the vampire's attacks by using light, which keeps the children of the night away. Writer/Director Conor McMahon and co-writer Demian Fox have some problems with plausibility and consistency (the vampire seems perfectly able to smash  out headlights, but is unable to blow out a candle) but overall it's a neat, focused little vampire siege movie. Low budget to a fault and a little one-note, but it's well-crafted and has tons of shots of the vampire moving around unseen in the background, if that type of thing works for you.

Shattered (2025)

 Somewhat unsurprisingly, a ton of people have chosen to name their movies Shattered over the years. This one's a no-frills collection of horror-adjacent shorts from young British filmmakers.

 And when I say no-frills, I really mean it; the shorts (some of which made the festival rounds, and at least one of which were funded via Kickstarter) are presented with their own credits, production company logos, and a montage of mismatched credits at the end. No framing story, but that's probably for the best. Also, I don't think anyone here is known for anything else as of yet. Although I did do a double take when the name of Chris Barnes popped up as a writer, this one doesn't seem to be the... 'vocalist' of Cannibal Corpse. Nothing here is edge-lordy enough to sound like him.

 The first minute of the movie is its best - it acts as a sort of standalone prologue to John Ferrer's 1-Star Review, and shows several people getting killed in ways that ironically reflect the scathing reviews they left of one eating establishment. It's clever, funny, and well-made.
 Those qualities extend, somewhat diluted, to the rest of the short, which sees the murderous chef face off against one of his critics. It's a fun, extremely slight restaurant-set slasher tale; And, to be brutally honest, the best this anthology has to offer - That's it, you can safely stop the movie here. 

 What, still here? Well, don't say I didn't warn you. Burn, from Judson Vaughan, comes next, and it's nowhere near as fun: It's the overlong, somewhat muddled and honestly not very interesting story of the surviving family members of an impressively-eyelashed serial killer, plus the most inept police investigation ever. A huge amount of polish makes it go down easy, but it's stilted, takes itself overtly seriously, and there's just not enough there to sustain its fifteen minutes.

 The Verge seems to be a bid from a production company to produce their own content, funded through Kickstarter in a campaign that just barely squeaked by its £10k goal. It's 2086, the world is a climate-ravaged hellhole, and to get off-world three woman must compete against each other to get to the top of a building. This involves fighting, running around, and a contrived heart-to-heart... but mostly it's fighting. You know, instead of genetic tests or what-have you.
 The problem is that it's really fucking hard to make fights look convincing on film, and fight coordinator (and director, if the Kickstarter page is to be believed) Mark Strange is not, as of yet, up to the task. Have you ever had a bunch of bored friends decide to stage a mock fight? Well, that's what this looks like.
 I give it an A for effort, but it would be much easier to root for if the script wasn't an absolutely insufferable puddle of wank. It has the gall to make its own premise incredibly stupid, and then make the ending 'twist' a rebellion against that incredibly stupid premise. It's also wrapped in the sort of self-serious tone that mars so many student films and makes them feel rank with pretension... so, seriously, fuck this noise.
 There is a laughably, endearingly naff shot of flooded London that made me laugh, at least.

 Arla Piacentini's Hold Me Til The End is particularly painful, because it almost works. Em is stuck in a time-loop with her lover Jess; Every whorl of the loop has Em trying, unsuccessfully, to keep Jess from killing herself. It's a horrific premise, somewhat undone thanks to... well, just how ridiculous it is, and a spotty execution that can be wholly excused by the low budget; This short feels significantly less polished than all of the other entries, something that actually works on its favour: it feels a little rawer than all the rest, a sole spot of colour.
 It overstays its welcome, the (heart-felt) ending feels a way too didactic, and there's a disastrous, hilariously botched attempt to recreate the head-shaking blurred movement effect from Jacob's Ladder, if you remember that. But flawed as it is (and it is very flawed), this one mostly achieves what it's going for - I kind of like it.

 The last short is William Brooke's Re-Birth, an insufferable exercise in slow-burn Lynchian dream-like atmospherics that has little to offer beyond its production values and formal chops. It looks really great, and I hope it works as a calling card for everyone involved. Other than that, it's an absolute slog with next to no payoff.

 So, all in all, this is a really underwhelming collection - the best segments are OK, and the bad are really, really dire. Acting is mostly mediocre throughout, which is understandable and forgivable, and the FX work can best be described as cheap and cheerful; Most of them are gore effects, and none of them are memorable.
 What most surprised me is how great most of the movies look and sound: these are some very slick no-budget short films, with the music on Burn, for example, being legitimately great. But that comes hand-in-hand with a certain soullessness, and that's not a good tradeoff.

Hostile

 A post-apocalyptic zombie movie, intecut with a cute romance story which is a) surprisingly integral to the film, and b) intended for women, which is still pretty rare in this type of film. Yes, I am deliberately not counting Twilight or other YA movies as 'serious horror'. Bite me.

 Juliet (Brittany Ashworth) is a rough, no nonsense driver out scavenging for supplies for some survivor settlement out in an arid, zombie-infested wasteland. She has a spectacular crash, and has to fend off both living and unliving menaces while dealing with a serious injury (an exposed fracture, of course) and trying to get a rescue organized.
 While she does this, different prompts cause her to have flashbacks to her life in New York before the zombie outbreak as she met and fell in love with rich French dreamboat Jack (Grégory Fitoussi)

 The love story is very well made, and a little too romantic for my taste. Jack is, in his own way, just as implausible as your regular Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Steady Wealthy Dedicated Dreamboat?) - someone who's utterly smitten by and devoted to Juliet right from the beginning, sensitive, assertive (sometimes to an uncomfortable degree, but always to his paramour's benefit), rich (but conflicted about his priviledge), ludicrously handsome.
 None of those criticisms are valid as that's exactly what it wants to be; I'm just not wired to like this sort of thing - I'm more of a Before Midnight than a Before Sunrise person, and found it all a bit too cloyingly sweet and, well, idyllic despite featuring at least a little darkness. My preferences aside, this is at its heart the rare romantic horror film and it should be celebrated for that. Everything is obviously leading up to a grand romantic tragedy in both of its timelines, and honestly, the lead-up is fine.

 The problem is just where it's all leading to; There's a climactic, wildly implausible development that will severely test anyone's faith in the script, and it also paints much of the preceding action on the post-apocalyptic sections of the movie as a bit of an idiot plot, if I'm going to be a dick about it. In its defense it's the whole point of the film, but... it's rather a lot to take in.

 Still. There's a lot to like here. Both halves of the movie are well-made, with distinct filming styles, and structurally it's sound (even if the prompts for switching to the flashbacks are a little flimsy). Writer/director Mathieu Turi has a good eye for low-budget action (there's a very amusing early scene where the film shows - or rather, doesn't  - a fight against a zombie from outside of a camper van) and manages some really striking shots (the post-apocalyptic segment is mostly set around the upturned wreck of Juliet's car, and it manages to  look eerily beautiful; Turi and cinematographer Vincent Vieillard-Baron manage to do a lot with mood lighting). There's some gnarly, brutal gore (including a very well-made skull crushing) and the makeup effects for the creatures are pretty good.

 Ashworth is good in the main role, and her character is fairly well-rounded. I just wish Jack was a little less of a generic fantasy fulfilment hunk, but... well, I'm not the intended audience here. The twist is a bigger hurdle, even if it is baked into the story. Warts and all, though, it's a likeable film, a very solid bit of survival horror, and it tries to do something unusual; That counts for a lot around these parts.

Superman

 I can't say I'm very surprised, but damn if I wasn't open to the possibility of this being good: Writer/Director James Gunn is, after all, responsible for some of the best superhero media of the last decade. The pressures of heading up the DCU, developing multiple IPs, and stretching out far, far beyond his comfort zone with that dadliest of wholesome superheroes have broken him, though, resulting in what's by far his worst movie up to now. Which, OK, isn't that bad from a guy who's only made good to great stuff, but the opening of a 'new phase' (and that should be a phrase that should fill any right-thinking person with dread) for the DC universe looks remarkably like the lower end of mid-tier Marvel (or any of their latter offerings).

 It is, simply put, a mess, a movie that overcomplicates things massively with politics and multiple threats, and then circles back and tries to cut everything into little chunks so that the youngest kids in the audience will, maybe, be able to follow the action. They should have chosen a tack and stuck to it, but instead we're left with muddled Saturday morning realpolitik. It is motherfucking dumb and worst of all, kind of boring even before it gets offensively manipulative. Dammit James, we shouldn't make it so easy for the assholes on the right to make fun of us!

 The action is forgettable, the only scene with any visual interest is played in the background as a (pretty good) joke, the CGI is omnipresent (completely ruining superpooch, who should be a bright spot in the film) and the guy they got to play Superman is a bore. As mediocre as Snyder's Superman was, at least it had some interesting action ideas, and Cavill was legitimally enjoyable in the role. This is probably better on the whole, but that's a really low bar to clear.
 Oh well, at least there's another Peacemaker season to look forward to.

--------Programming note--------

  So. For the last three years or so I've been trying to log everything I watch. I haven't managed to do it for everything I see, but it I've managed a pretty consistent ninety-something percent ratio.

 Over the last couple of years, along with the rise of what people these days call AI (or, to use a much more appropriate name, bullshit engines) the hits on this blog have gone into ridiculous numbers - tens of thousands per month, while the 'real' hits (as reported on google analytics) remain the same as they ever were: double digits per month... if that.

 So I'm winding down the blog; I'm not that keen on giving free labour to people who think turning the world into even more of a dystopic hellhole is a great idea, to train a toy that's been mostly a tool of global enshitification. In the unlikely case you are an actual human being who comes here to read stuff... well, sorry.

 This site has (mostly) ever been a tool to force myself to write, and I can do that elsewhere. It's been fun spreading my shit takes around, but it's also kept me from working on other projects. I have nothing but admiration for people who can knock out incredibly articulate, considered thought pieces off-the-cuff; But as far as I'm concerned, even the crappiest blog post takes me on average from an hour to ninety minutes to put together. I could watch another movie in the time it takes me to compose two of these.
 I do like having a log of everything I watch, mostly so I can go back and say "oh yeah, I did watch hellblazers at some point, it was shit". So I may log much shorter capsule reviews from now on. And I reserve the right to post longer rants if I really feel the need to vent. But on the main, dear hypothetical reader, things are going to become even less interesting around these parts.

Jurassic World Rebirth

 The Jurassic World movies are built around a seriously toxic, mind-numbingly idiotic plot point: That dinosaurs are just not cool enough, and that people will get bored of them quickly. The original Jurassic Park was built around the awe that these creatures inspire; They're the entire appeal of the franchise, for fuck's sake.

 This whole concept seems to come from one Colin Trevorrow, who's finally left the Jurassic World building to go fail upward somewhere else. He leaves behind three of the stupidest mainstream films of the last decade.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is helmed by the infinitely more capable Gareth Edwards, working from a script from David Koepp -  a man who's produced his share of shit, but also some cool stuff. Their tack, which is to hew closer to Jurassic Park than to any of the sequels, is solid.

 Unfortunately, they've chosen to carry forward the stupid, stupid baggage from the Jurassic World films. So as the film starts, we're informed that dinosaurs are dying all over the place, and people just don't give  a shit.
 Well, most people. Obviously evil biotech companies are after dinosaurs' magic blood, which they know they can use to eliminate heart disease. And since there are no more parks, they need to go get this magic dinosaur blood (it needs to be from the biggest dinosaurs, because they have the biggest hearts, you see!) from closed off areas near the equator where dinosaurs still roam free.

 You know what, after re-reading the paragraph above, I'm not sure Koepp is that much of an improvement over Trevorrow. Sadly, it doesn't get a whole lot better.

 An obviously evil suit (Rupert Friend) working for one of those obviously evil big pharma companies hires a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and a dinosaur expert (Jonathan Bailey) to go get the magic dinosaur blood with him and a group of other PMC types. On the way they rescue a family who decided to go sailing in dinosaur-infested waters, so when things inevitably go wrong and everyone gets stranded in yet another dinosaur island, the film splits its time between the PMCs going after their quarries and the family trying to make it to safety.

 And... it's mostly fine. It's dumb - really dumb - and noticeably making an effort at being very kid-friendly (complete with a cute baby dinosaur following the family around and basically acting like a puppy). It's also overstuffed, making its relatively lean (for the current status quo) runtime feel much longer than it actually is.
 But action is mostly good. There's extremely little sense of risk - this is the kind of movie that blatantly only kills evil characters or the ones it doesn't spend any time developing. It also cheats all the time by making pursuing monsters either disappear or suddenly fall back in the interstices between one shot and another; The worst offender in that respect is a scene where the family out-paddles a chasing dinosaur (a scene that's directly taken from Crichton's book for the original Jurassic Park).

 OK, I'm not really selling it, am I? It's got good momentum, the effects are pretty good (although nothing groundbreaking), and there's good variety. There's also good dinosaur variety: We get Quetzalcoatlus, Mosasaurs, Titanosaurs, and a few others. The mutated dinosaurs fare less better, but at least the sausage-headed big bad is a botched mutation, so it looks like something out of H.R. Giger's sketchbooks than an actual dinosaur.

Seriously, the HR Giger estate must not be thrilled.

 The main issue here is that the movie is in too many ways really fucking basic. An early scene where Zora (Johansson's character bonds with another one played by Mahershala Ali is representative - they trade sad, sad news and make sad sad faces at each other, while all the time Alexandre Desplat's extremely intrusive, manipulative score indicates to us that we should be sad too. The filmmaking relies far too much on glib lines, reaction shots and hearty laughs (tm) whenever someone does something that's supposed to be funny - the rhythms almost make things feel like they're edited like a trailer a lot of the time. This might be a side-product of being aimed at children, and I fucking abhor it.

 David Koepp's script is another major problem. The plotting is... fine, but all the characters are fairly nondescript, the humour is terrible, and every interaction is clumsily handled or botched. Oh, and he insists on writing young people, that's always funny to watch. In this one he's created a lazy zoomer who offers weed to a pre-tween! Isn't that hilarious? The less said of his attempts at a 'stick it to the man' messaging, the better, but at least he includes an American family of latinxs as the coprotagonists - that's actually appreciated in the current political environment.

 Going by his work, at this point I'm convinced that the indelible characters from the first Jurassic Park are all Crichton and Spielberg.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is a blatant bid to recapture the magic of that fist movie - there are a ridiculous number of references, callbacks, and scenes that mirror events from it. It's a pale imitation, though, and it's weighed down by too many iffy elements. A respectable attempt, and much, much better than the last few tries, but it still misses the mark.

The Man From Earth

 I've mellowed out a lot in my opinions about movies over the past couple of decades; Even if it doesn't sound like it, these days I'm way more likely to shrug off a film's problems and look for the fun or something interesting, if the film allows for it.

 The Man From Earth is an interesting one, though, because it managed to consistently annoy me while having its heart firmly in the right place and doing things I appreciate. For starters, it's pointedly a "thinking person's sci fi" movie - no action, no spectacle, basically just one long conversation between some erudite, supposedly companionable people.

 The premise is that as a university professor (David Lee Smith) is getting ready to skip town, a group of colleagues (Tony Todd, John Billingsley, Ellen Crawford, Annika Peterson, and William Katt - the Last American Hero himself, playing a history professor with a leather jacket and a soul patch!) come to give him an impromptu going away party. As the evening unspools, the protagonist lets slip that he's functionally immortal, and has been walking the earth since before the last Ice Age; The rest of the day is spent with the bemused guests alternating between asking good-natured questions and trying to figure out if it's an elaborate prank. Later, a psychologist (Richard Riehle) is called in to join in the fun.

What's not to love?

 Well, the script, for one - credited to one Jerome Bixby, a "legendary Sci Fi author" (of short stories, none of which I've read) who's probably more famous for scripting the great It! The Terror From Beyond Space, plus a handful of Star Trek episodes and It's a Good Life from The Twilight Zone.
 Bixby made his name in the fifties and sixties, and it really, really shows; The film's central conversation does cover some good points - mainly about how hard it is for an individual to form an accurate image of a larger picture, and it's moderately enjoyable, but mostly it feels stilted, a little outdated and... annoyingly quaint, is maybe the best way I can describe it.

 The weight these people assign to the protagonist's word is outsized. They are shocked! They are amazed! They react to his declarations as an affront to good sense and property, while obviously being deeply affected! I'm exaggerating, of course, but not that much. Characterization, which is indispensable in what's essentially a chamber piece, is extremely scattershot, and everyone serves as fairly transparent mouth pieces for whatever idea the author is pursuing. An author, I should add, firmly rooted in the golden age of sci fi- an era notorious for giving very little importance to people's inner lives*.

 Given all that, it's hard to fault the actors for failing to breathe lives into their roles. Smith is actually pretty good as the protagonist, whom he plays with a quiet, self-effacing charm. The great, late Tony Todd steals the show as a characteristically (for Todd) soulful professor. Everyone else... oof. Katt is kind of enjoyable as a douchebaggy professor who drags a student date (Alexis Thorpe) to the party** - only kind of enjoyable, though, mostly he's just there as an unreasonable foil and little else. The rest of the cast consists of TV actors, and they fail to provide any of the naturalism or charisma that the film sorely needs. Oh, and poor Peterson's sole function is to be in love with the protagonist and completely, utterly support him no matter what. I have no idea if she's any good because she's completely wasted -both as an actress and as a character. At least she looks really nice.

 So all that's left is the ideas the film discusses... and aside from some meditations on subjectivity, they're pretty basic and on-the-nose; Dorm-room philosophy. There's a silly, kind of fun theological bombshell dropped at one point (directly stolen from a book by Michael Moorcock), but it only throws dirt on Christianity - Buddhism, as usual, gets off scott-free.

 The form of the debate is pretty poor, as well. The professors make for poor inquisitors: it seems to me that proving the guy is telling the truth would be as easy as "write this paragraph that I'm going to dictate in every language you know", but they insist in throwing slowballs and being in (sometimes reluctant, but usually vocal) awe of him instead.

 Director Richard Schenkman actually has a pretty fun, trashy resumé (he's directed entries in both the Angel and I Spit in Your Grave series!) but this is, by form and necessity, an extremely subdued film. There's some attempt to give the film some variation - a couple of walks outside the cabin, lots of shuffling around, some movers taking stuff away, giving the film's one set some variety - but this is a very low budget production... as will become immediately clear by the extremely TV Movie title credits.

 I think, given how much I like the idea of the film, and its built-in cosiness, I might have still given it a pass even with all the ways it falls short. But in a desperate attempt to end the film with an exclamation sign, there's an event so idiotic, so contrived, that it completely ruined any goodwill that had been accrued up to that point, and made all of the failings that much more glaring.

 The film ends with a trailer for a sequel that looks so awful it made me morbidly curious; But a friend confirms that yes, it is exactly as awful as it looks, and completely devoid of any interest. Thanks Matt, your sacrifice was not in vain.

 *: All of which makes me think this clearly needed to have been written by a new wave author; Imagine what Roger Zelazny (who wrote his share about immortals) or Rob Silverberg could have done with it.

**: No one even raises an eyebrow.

Love Hurts

 A valentine's day action vehicle for Ke Huy Quan that's sadly too half-arsed to work well, despite some decent ideas and action provided by the 87North crew.

 Quan plays a real estate agent who's forced to to come out of retirement as a hitman when an old flame (Ariana DeBose) comes out of hiding to cause problems with a local kingpin. Bloody mayhem ensues, and some pretty unconvincing romance.

 It's fun enough, though rarely funny, and it can look surprisingly good. But while the fights are well staged they're not particularly great  - this is a shame, because director Jonathan Eusebio has decades of stuntwork and has been a second unit director in films with some outstanding action.

 Most of the problems can probably be laid down at the feet of its script, but it's possible production constraints also played a part in the film's almost ramshackle feel. The protagonists are excellent taken individually, but there's not a lot of chemistry between them, which is pretty big flaw for a film that, to its credit, takes its romantic side very seriously.

 

Tales From the Lodge

 Five friends and a plus one get together in a remote lakeside cabin to spread the ashes of a friend who died there a year prior. They tell each other spooky stories to while away the hours, but soon they discover they might be in a spooky story of their own.

 Yes, it's another anthology film, but the structure is fairly different from most other portmanteau films, with the framing story (written and directed by Abigail Blackmore) being given much more importance than the tales told within. The other cool detail is that each of the tales is directed by whichever character is telling the tale. They're also narrated by them, so you get interruptions and a running commentary by the rest of the gang.

 As far as the main story goes, it's fairly routine and marred by an extremely ridiculous final twist that rings both completely implausible and is slightly wrong-headed. The poor plotting is more than made up, though, by an extremely appealing, colourful cast of very charismatic character actors (all TV veterans) sharing a very believable, lived-in chemistry. It's easy to believe these forty-somethings have known each other since uni, and it's a pleasure to watch them bounce against each other, even if they can be somewhat vicious - especially against poor Miki.

 Lady's man Paul (Dustin Demri-Burns) arrives to the lodge with a new conquest, Miki (Kelly Wenham), in tow. Once everyone's assembled in the living room, as a spur of the moment thing he tells a really funny (and surprisingly creepy) tale about a confrontation with a slasher. Later, after spreading their friend's ashes in the lake (in a scene that audaciously swipes a joke from The Big Lebowski), the sharp-tongued Martha (Laura Fraser) honours the occasion with the best story in the movie, a hilarious yarn about a bad marriage, demonic possession, and lots and lots of sex.

I guess if you're going to steal, you steal from the best.

 After one too many jabs from Martha and an indiscretion from Paul, Miki angrily leaves the cabin. Russell (Johnny Vegas), the group's clown, tries to lighten the mood with a silly zombie aside, a cheeky and very short slip of a tale that uses up most of the film's makeup FX budget, as well as some cheesy motion comics-style art.

 Not a minute after the tale is done, Miki comes back from the woods in near hysterics after being attacked by a maniac while trying to make her way back home. The group discover their cars have been pushed into the lake in the meanwhile and that the phone landline has been cut (there's no cell phone reception, of course.)

 While trying to come up with a plan to fend off any attacks from the mysterious slasher, Joe (Mackenzie Crook), who has a terminal condition and is waiting for a heart transplant, tells Paul of an anxiety dream he's been having, making the last segment of the movie a surreal vignette. Then we're back to the final stretch of the main movie, where whole situation with the killer comes to a head.

 The cast is rounded out by Sophie Thompson in the main group (who is hilarious as the motherly Emma but doesn't get a story to tell) and a few others within the segments. I'd like to give a shout out to Tom Stourton as Zeke, the horniest, most intense ghost walk guide you could imagine.

 It's the acting and the script that really elevate the film; The dialog is bloody excellent, the tales themselves reflect the character of whoever is telling them, and it's full of low-key but hilarious jokes and running gags. You'll want subtitles on for this one if you're not a native speaker, as the British accents are thick and the naturalistic dialog is sometimes hard to follow. I also probably should warn that there's a twist at one point that can be construed as transphobic - I don't think it's knowingly hateful, but it did make me raise my eyebrows. Other than that, this is a very, very likeable horror comedy.

M3gan 2.0

 M3gan was a lean, very 90's throwback PG-13 techno thriller. Director Gerard Johnstone and scriptwriter Akela Cooper set out to sequelize it almost immediately, and their new story (Johnstone has sole scriptwriter credit) leant bigger, louder, dumber at every turn. The result is a two-hour monstrosity that leans closer to one of the latter Mission: Impossible franchise installment than to M3gan, an action-comedy that unfortunately indulges in all the worst trends of modern blockbuster scriptwriting.

 The plot rather cleverly threads two separate loose ends from the first movie - an unnecessary industrial espionage subplot, and the implication that M3gan (still embodied by Amie Donald and a boatload of special FX) had uploaded itself to the cloud. The industrial espionage has resulted in Amelia (Ivana Sakhno), a M3gan clone out in the wild, doing black ops for the US government. She goes rogue almost immediately in the prologue (handily setting up the film's action aspirations), then starts making her way back to the US, murdering everyone involved with M3gan's creation on the way.

 Cue the re-introduction of M3gan's creator Gemma (Alison Williams) and her niece/surrogate daughter Cady (Violet McGraw), who enjoy a somewhat closer relationship, still fraught due to Gemma's tendency to put work over her personal life.

 After a seriously ridiculous act of government overreach that sets the tone of just how stupid things will get later on, M3gan reaches out to Gemma and they form a sort of alliance to defend Cady against the new android that's hunting them all. Later on, they discover that of course the whole world hangs on the balance.

 The script for this thing is seriously overcomplicated, contrived, and dumb as all hell. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except that it's the sort of plot that sucks the air out of everything else, making characters into puppets and driving them to make all sorts of stupid choices to line up all the pieces. And to comply with the modern blockbuster feel it also includes several mandated, very fake-feeling emotional beats to try and give it an approximation of a soul.

 Luckily it doesn't take itself very seriously. The comedy is not all that great, but the script retains a sharp ear for M3gan's ironic detachment (and Jenna Davis still hits it out of the park with her delivery). The original film's campiness also makes a comeback, predictably amped up - expect an expanded dance sequence, fabulous new outfits, and another song. On the plus side, there are a surprising amount of Steven Segal references in the finale, up to and including a very familiar-looking arm-break.

 Oh, and Jemaine Clement pops up as an amoral tech bro, and his performance is a joy to behold. I love it when you can see an actor clearly having a blast.

 There are quite a few action scenes, most of them with decent-to-great choreography. Unfortunately the action filmmaking is not nearly up to the task of capturing it properly, with piss-poor editing and blocking - there are several points where some of the moves seem to be edited out of sequence, or are at least poorly set up enough to be a bit disconcerting. There are some cool superpowered manoeuvres in the mix as well, although nothing that compares with excellent first fight in Upgrade. To top it all off, a fairly strict enforcement of the PG-13 rating (which, for example, forces a beheading to be played out off-screen*) robs the action of much of its potential impact.

 It's a huge shame; Early on a reconstructed M3gan trains against a kung-fu training dummy, setting up some expectations that the film will take its cues from Hong Kong movies. I wish Johnston had paid more attention to how they're shot.

 As a whole, M3gan 2.0 is just OK. I admire the shift in genre and the ambition behind it, but the overwritten, soul-less, messy story plus the way the action is shot killed it for me. That it's overtly campy and tongue-in-cheek raises it a notch above your Mission Impossibles, Jurassic Worlds or Fasters and Furiosers, but at two hours it becomes really hard to swallow.

*: It also leads to a very funny curtailed "fuck" after they use up their one allotment.