V/H/S

 Well, here it is - the little indie horror found-footage anthology film that could, with six sequels and counting. And... the thing is that as much as I like the series, I didn't really care much for this when it came out; A little too hit and miss. It was with the second one that I sat up and started paying attention.

 The brainchild of the folks over at Bloody Disgusting, the series came out the door with a truly impressive roster of horror luminaries: Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, between You're Next and The Guest. David Brukner in between two other excellent anthology entries (one for The Signal, the other for Southbound). Ti West between Innkeepers and Sacrament. Glenn McQuaid, whose other work I haven't seen. Joe Swanberg in what I think is his only horror directorial detour (the guy was insanely prolific during that period). And last but not least, the Radio Silence team (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez and Chad Villella) - this was their first properly distributed gig, and it's one of the good ones.

 The framing story, from Wingard and Barrett, stars a delightful bunch of delinquent assholes (two of which are Wingard and Barrett) who engage in such exuberant youthful shenanigans as vandalism and sexual assault, film everything and then sell the footage. Tired of just producing #content, they accept a gig to steal a special V/H/S tape from an old man in his run-down home. When they get there the homeowner is dead, and there are plenty of tapes with creepy stories on them strewn around the house; While watching them to figure out which one it is they were meant to take, they're hunted by something, and we get shown the shorts. It's a win-win, at least for us.

 David Bruckner starts things off properly with Amateur Night, the tale of three asshole kids (Mike Donlan. Joe Sykes and Drew Sawyer) who go out to pick up some chicks, try to get into their pants, and film everything with a pair of spy glasses. Unfortunately for them, one of the girls they pick up (Hannah Fierman) turns out to be weirdo and, more importantly, a succubus. It's a basic structure the V/H/S series would reuse several times over, but this is by far its best execution thanks to Fierman's fierce performance, unrestrained sleaziness, great gore and some great, intense filmmaking from Bruckner. It's really good, but you might feel like you need a bath afterwards.

 Ti West classes up things with his segment, second honeymoon, where a couple (Joe Swanberg and Sophia Takal) go out on a road trip down route 66. They do inconsequential, touristy stuff during the day, and at night someone enters their room and films them with their camera. The night segments are really creepy, and the couple have a really well-developed, lived-in relationship, but it takes too long to get to a fairly underwhelming payoff.

 Glenn McQuaid takes us back to a bunch of idiot young adults (Norma C. Quinones,Drew Moerlein, Jeannine Yoder, and Jason Yachanin) who go to visit a remote lake in the middle of the woods with a girl they just met. They have a picnic, some nice extramarital sex, and leave happy and contented to lead long, fruitful lives.
 Nah, they all get killed - it's standard slasher stuff with the usual cast of dillweed characters, but the short uses video glitches and weirdness in a really interesting way. The plot doesn't really go anywhere, but the visual gimmick at least keeps it fresh.

 We're next left in the hands of Joe Swanberg, who provides the strangest segment of the film. It's presented as a series of video chats as two childhood sweethearts (Helen Rogers and Daniel Kaufman) keep their long-distance relationship alive while at different universities*. Sweet as it is, we still get some gratuitous boobage, because of course we do. The young exhibitionist confesses that she thinks her department is haunted, and soon manages to capture some proof on video... which leads to a nasty bout of self-harm, a couple of good things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scares, and a truly batshit series of revelations. It's pretty evil, and a whole lot of fun.

 The last segment is by Radio Silence, and it's another good one. Here we follow another bunch of kids (the Radio Silence crew), but, amazingly, they're just good-natured dopes, not assholes. It also gets the best, most original justification of why everything gets filmed out of any found footage film I've ever seen: the main character's whole costume is one of those stuffed-toy nannycams!
 The kids are out looking for a Halloween party but get lost and end up in a real, honest-to-god haunted house. The early bits use that old Scooby-Doo trope of the kids thinking it's all make-believe and making fun of the paranormal stuff, but it's well executed, and when shit hits the fan it's appropriately hectic. There's some really dodgy, low budget CGI, and the whole thing looks about as tacky as the Blumhouse producer credit animation, but the concepts are good fun and the goofy tone sells it well.

 And there you have it. The only thing left is the standard song at the end which remixes some of the footage from the movie, including, ugh, the sexual assault. There's a line through which provocation curdles into bad taste, and this really crossed that for me.

 Overall I think I liked the movie better this time around, but I'd still rank it relatively low - at two hours, it feels a little too drawn out, and some of the shorts really overstay their welcome. That's especially true when you have to endure some pretty loathsome kids. I was surprised at just how sleazy it is, too: Several full frontals, including a bunch of floppy bananas as well as the expected amount of melons (which is many; many, many pairs of breasts) and unsurprisingly high levels of horniness.
 A lot of it is unpleasant by design; Male toxicity is a bit of a running theme (even in the "happily" married couple, the guy tries to pressure his wife into something she doesn't want to do), but I can't really say it's taken anywhere more interesting than the standard Tales from the Crypt morality play. Except maybe for the Swanberg short, which is just nuts.

 It's definitely worthwhile, though, with at ton of caveats - as usual the high points are pretty high. Wonder if I'll like V/H/S:Viral more this time around, too.

*: I originally mistyped this as universitities at first; Proof that this sick filth truly has a degrading effect on impressionable, innocent minds like mine.

Exhuma (Pamyo)

 When they discover a rich man's infant son is cursed and haunted by the spirit of one of his ancestors, two shamen (Kim Go-eun and Lee Do-hyun) enlist the help of two geomancers (the great Choi min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin) to try to exhume said ancestor and pacify him. Things... do not go smoothly; Thanks to one doomed idiot and to a further secret buried under the ancestor's grave, things go pretty much the opposite of smoothly.

 Exhuma is an excellent, handsomely produced horror movie (and the top-grossing movie of 2024 in its native South Korea).

 It's composed of two very different halves; In the first, quieter part, the four paranormal experts carefully grapple with the menace posed by the interred body, and try to unravel why it's become a nasty occult minefield. The second part gets surprisingly over the top as several spirits (several of them based on Japanese Yokai) come out to play, and a couple of them go ballistic on the rich man, his family, some locals, and a whole lot of pigs.

 Just about everything in the film works beautifully. The acting is excellent, and writer/director Jang  Jae-hyun keeps an impeccable atmosphere and a beautiful autumnal palette (cinematography: Lee Mo-gae). It's not hugely bloody (most of the gore in the film belongs to farm animals), but there are some pretty cool, very tasteful special effects later on. No matter how strange things get the film, while never dour, maintains a carefully controlled, serious tone throughout.

 The mystery is slightly perplexing, coming at it from a western perspective, but it's relatively easy to parse - and I love that at its core it is indeed a geomantic puzzle. Plus, it keeps things fresh: I'd love it if more western curse/possession movies had floating fireballs, a small tribute to Kwaidan, coffins wrapped in prayers and barbed wire, and tiny human-headed snakes.

Jeruzalem

 Jerusalem, but with zombies and a very shitty eschatological (scatological?) bent.

 Two deeply uninteresting but hot twenty-somethings (Rachel Klein and Sarah Pullman) head out to Israel for a short holiday. One of them has a Hololens-style mixed-reality camera glasses she got as a present, so that's the conceit for the found footage angle of the movie; It's kind of a fun idea, with facial recognition and maps popping into the frame every now and then, but the execution is all low-hanging fruit (cat videos start intruding at one point) and it doesn't really end up adding much to the movie.

 The two girls meet an anthropology student (Yon Tumarkin) on the flight to Israel who's kind of interested in how dead people are coming back to life as 'dark angels' all over in Jerusalem, something that the three major religions (Judaists, Muslims, Christians) are covering up for some reason - I dunno, I think incontrovertible proof of some sort of afterlife would be a pretty good boost for their credibility. We know that this is true, by the way, because the film begins with a short where a bunch of religious figures try to exorcise one of these resuscitated demons; It's pretty funny that the priests have a gun in their box of exorcism essentials.

 Nothing really happens for about fifty minutes; We just follow a bunch of insufferable characters around Jerusalem while they do inane party girl shit and some light tourism. At least the city is interesting, I guess. When shit finally hits the fan the night of Yom Kippur, the demons come out and our protagonists go on the run from rarely seen zombies and a zombie kaiju that's stomping on stuff off-screen as the army tries to contain the situation. The film is extremely indebted to Cloverfield, but deeply, irredeemably stupid and uninspired.

 It's one of those movies where absolutely nothing makes sense - one of the tourists has a nervous breakdown and is immediately sent to a mental asylum (which is later explored, and has immediately become one of those spooky derelict horror movie/game asylums over the course of a single  evening's events). Our protagonist consistently makes terrible - just fucking terrible - decisions, which no one else in her group contests successfully despite them being clearly stupid. And there's no coherence to the action even in the short term; A cave might be full of zombie demons one moment, only for them to disappear while some stupid shit goes on, and then they're all back chasing our merry band of idiots.

 I can't really think of anything good to say about this one, other than that it has an interesting backdrop. The effects are mostly ugly, cheap-ish CGI, the direction is artless (although at least you can blame that on the format). The acting is atrocious (the anthropologist in particular is painful to watch) and the script is pure half-arsed bullshit.
 I almost didn't watch this one thanks to its dumb title - should have gone with my gut.

Sea Fever

 From A Dark Song to Oddity, the Irish have neatly bookended the last decade with some of my favorite low-budget horror films. 2019's Sea Fever... doesn't rank anywhere as high, and to be brutally honest I doubt I'll remember much of it in a couple of months. But it's a solid, well-crafted bit of modern nautical horror.

 Siobhan (Hermione Corfield) is a socially awkward marine biology student who books a slot on a fishing trawler to work on her PhD. The ship (the Niamh Cinn Óir, named after a little-known member of the mythical Tuatha De Danaan clan) is fairly small, and its crew of six immediately balks at taking on a red-haired passenger, as it's a sure sign of bad luck. Siobhan balks in turn at their superstition... but guess what? They're all in a horror movie. Superstition turns out to be correct, much like that excellent 'curse' gag in Master and Commander.

 In this case, bad luck means that when the boat ventures into an 'exclusion zone' chasing after a large shoal of fish, it's captured by something that starts causing several spots in the wooden hull to rot away, awash in a weird blue slime. When Siobhan gets in her diving gear and goes out to see what's causing it, she finds a beautiful giant creature that looks like an upside down bioluminescent jellyfish, with its tentacles latched onto the hull.

 The crew manage to get free of the creature's clutches, but soon they find that it's left a virus-like contagion in the ship. And then people start dying.

 It's... all right. I didn't feel the script, which starts out very promising, goes anywhere particularly interesting - the middle section, especially, feels very aimless and unstructured. The characters are relatively well drawn, but once they find that they're trapped in the ship they unravel in ways overtly familiar from a hundred movies like this. The same is true of the situations the crew must work their way through- It's all oddly perfunctory, a little too familiar, and the science is pretty iffy. The bones of a good science thriller are there, but the flesh is all second-hand and not assembled very well, and it lacks the spark that would bring it to life.

 Speaking of flesh: there's quite a decent amount of gore, thanks to the messy way the infection makes an egress out of its human hosts. Nothing too extravagant, but it's solid and it results in a hanful of decent horror moments. The atmosphere is well developed, too; I'm not a fan of Neasa Hardiman's script, but her direction is fairly impressive, especially given the budget she's working with.
 At this point I could stretch my already tortured Frankenstein's monster metaphor and say something like the skin of the creature is well stitched together and the makeup gives it at least a semblance of life. But, dear reader, know that I respect your time too much for such shenanigans. I would never dream of wasting your time making you go through even a single paragraph of such pointless drivel, not even were I to deliver it in pointlessly convoluted, flowery prose.

 Where were we? Oh, yeah - the actors are all decent - the cast is rounded out by Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott as the captain and her second-in-command, plus Olwen Fouéré, Jack Hickey, Ardalan Esmaili and Elie Bouakaze. They're a decent bunch to spend ninety minutes with, even if the script doesn't have a lot of time for them.

 For good or for ill, this one doesn't leave much of an impression.

Ballerina

  Any doubts about whether Ballerina will be a worthy addition to the John Wick universe are quickly dispelled by its prologue. Not by an early action scene where a bunch of assassins attack a cabin; It's a decent sequence, but not up to the series' ridiculously high standards. No, we know it's a proper John Wick movie because when we first meet the Ballerina (Victoria Comte) she's a just-orphaned, tiny little girl clutching a blood-splattered music box. Meat-headed symbolism, right from the get-go! All it's missing is someone solemnly intoning a world-weary "CONSEQUENCES"... but don't worry, that comes later.

 The little ballerina is taken in by the concierge for the New York Continental hotel for civilized assassins (Ian McShane). He then takes her to the academy for young ballet dancers who are also badass tattooed assassins, and hands her over to the mistress there (Anjelica Huston). If you haven't seen any John Wick movies this will likely make no sense to you, and yes - it's exactly as silly as it sounds.

 There the Ballerina grows up to be Ana De Armas and learns the dual arts of ballet dancing and beating the shit out of people real good. There's some stuff about the dancers being trained to protect people, complete with a silly Slavic mythological connection* - but once the Ballerina graduates she's then shown killing loads of people for money, so I call bullshit on that.

 Anyhow, during the course of her work she runs into one of the assassins that killed her father (they have one of those convenient tatoos/scars that identifies them in a pretty visible place). This sends the Ballerina on an unsanctioned mission against an assassin cult led by a philosophizing asshole (Gabriel Byrne). Things get... pretty nuts, in the best way possible; The script takes the Wickiverse's conceit that every other person is an assassin, and it takes it to its absolute illogical conclusion. The film's last forty minutes or are made up of an escalating series of confrontations - the early stages reminded me of Gymkata**, and it builds up to a staggeringly awesome flamethrower duel that must last something like ten minutes. It is fucking glorious.

Seriously - if they don't get an oscar for this, fuck the oscars.

 The script, by Jay Hatten, was an independent piece written shortly after John Wick 2, and was retrofitted for the series once Lionsgate bought it. It also got Hatten a gig co-writing the latter Wick films, and he used the opportunity to introduce the threads that would lead to Ballerina in Part Parabellum.

 The connection to the assassinating world hurts the movie a little in that by becoming part of a franchise, it loses its potential identity. There are frequent visual callbacks, which include some action gimmicks (a few overhead shots of the action, a fight in a cavernous discotheque) and a lot of the elements of the John Wick world (some of which, at this point, Hatten had helped establish): Pneumatic tubes, the tattooed old lady operators, hidden shops catering to an assassin clientele. I did like that when they show the concierge for another branch of the Continental, it's Anne Parrillaud; Cute action movie homage there.
 The good thing is that within its guard rails it also manages to tweak expectations a little - the script is way more playful than it seems. I loved that one of the bigger massacres in the movie isn't shown at all, we just see someone navigating the aftermath... the action only comes crashing in (literally) just when the camera starts panning out. Beautiful concept, perfectly executed. There's also another fun subversion of a now-standard John Wick gearing up scene, and I cannot overstate how crazy the setting for the whole third act is.

 I've long thought of Len Wiseman as a good action director with bad taste (or luck) for projects, and Ballerina is actually excellent proof of that; Having to work within limits established by a franchise, and having access to one of the best stunt teams in the business lets him rip with near-constant, top-tier action. He flounders a little with the close quarters combat - his editing schemes and blocking are nowhere near as good as Chad Stahelski's (or David Leitch's) and he struggles to capture the action with the clarity the intricate choreography and wince-inducing stunts deserve. He fares a lot better in all the other types of action, of which there's a huge variety. I don't think it reaches the height of the last two Wicks aside from the aforementioned flamethrower cookout (which is an all-timer)... but it comes very close several times.
 Cinematographer Romain Lacourbas also does a good job aping the look of the main series, and manages to expand the palette with some wintry, alpine action later on.

 Ana de Armas looks great, and gets to wear a lot of cool-looking outfits***, but her character is a bit of a blank. And yes, you could say the same of Mr. Wick, but Armas lacks Reeves's presence, world-weariness, and flair for action. She's lithe, and manages some pretty impressive gymnastics, but even when the film insists that she had to learn to 'fight like a girl' (this translates to frequent nut shots, but doesn't really come into play all that much), she's just not badass enough to pull off the character convincingly. I wasn't a fan of The Princess****, but that movie had a better handle in how a small woman might fight off huge grizzled warriors, and Joey King sold her grit much better - Ballerina also puts the protagonist through the wringer, but it feels slightly off.

 So that nagged at me while watching the movie, but we're talking about a series with armour-plated designer suits and people who routinely take on superhuman amounts of punishment. She's definitely fun to watch, and that should be more than good enough for anyone. Please feel free to disregard me.

 Ballerina has a slight but distinct second-hand feel, and the thin connective tissue between all the action won't convince people who aren't in it for the action. On the other hand it's relentlessly paced, loud, and proudly ludicrous, with some truly incredible stunt work, excellent choreographies, and some lovely over-the-top moves. But all this - good and bad - is a moot point, because the movie has a flamethrower fight. And a then water hose versus flame thrower fight (sadly spoiled in the trailer) that looks like a practical-FX version of one of those stupid Harry Potter magic beam fights, but cool. That alone makes this an eleven out of ten.

*: The Kikimora, which these ballerinas call themselves after, are basically house elves. Not as silly as calling the John Wick the Baba Yaga, I guess. John Witch!

**: Just to be clear, this is a good thing.

***: Even a flame-retardant suit looks fashionable.

****: I realize I said exactly the same about Joey King on that one, and I kind of stand by that, but King's acting was nowhere as vulnerable as Armas's here. The main issue in The Princess is still that the protagonist is completely eclipsed by Veronica Ngo.

Bramayugam

 Hey, what about a two-hour and something black and white Indian folk horror epic? I promise it's a good one!

 Bramayugam (which translates as Age of Madness) tells the story of Thevan (Arjun Ashokan), an ex-slave escaping the destruction of his former master's estate in some unspecified conflict. While travelling in the jungle he narrowly escapes the attentions of a Yakshi, a murderous nature spirit, and stumbles upon a dilapidated manor house. There, the cook (Sidharth Bharathan) takes him to the master of the manor - the sorcerer Kodumon Potti (Mammootty); When the old man finds out that Thevan is a folk singer of the panaan, he delightedly takes him in.

 Saved from starvation and the dangers of the wilderness, Thevan soon finds his situation in the mansion is almost as precarious. His host is a fickle lecher who seems to eye him with alternating paternalism, contempt, and hunger. The cook, meanwhile, is almost comically passive aggressive towards both Potti and Thevan. There are also stories of former guests who displeased the master, forbidden chambers, some mysterious entity chained up in the cellar... all that good stuff.

 It's a simple story that could definitely do with some tightening up, but the filmmaking and the characters are strong to support it. Mammootty, in particular, plays a magnificent asshole - it's pretty easy to see why the film gives him one of those rock star entrances where everything pauses as the camera pans from his feet upwards. Ashokan is also very good as the meek Thevan; you can almost hear the gears whirring in his head as the precariousness of his situation sets in.

 Writer/director Rahul Sadasivan and cinematographer mount a handsome production; The black and white isn't quite as visually striking as in Egger's The Lighthouse (another story centered around small number of perpetually sweaty men warily circling each other), but it still succeeds in giving the film a lot of character. There's very little in the way of special effects and next to no bloodshed, but the glimpses that we get of otherworldly stuff are very effective. The film looks gorgeous. It sounds great, as well. 

 The script is easy to follow, but it's hard to say how much I'm missing thanks to the cultural distance, both in the mythical and temporal realms. Power corrupts is a pretty universal message, but I'm left wondering if, for example, Thevan belonging to the Panaan (a historically oppressed people, Wikipedia tells me), carries other points. And it might give the film's ending a bit more meaning, I suspect.

 But the film remains perfectly enjoyable without that dimension. It's not particularly scary, but it's extremely atmospheric, with a great, pervasive sense of menace and many elegant, fairy-tale-like story beats. Recommended.

Broadcast Signal Intrusion

 It is 1999, and James (Harry Shum Jr.) works at the archival section of some Chicago TV station. It's a lonely job: transferring tapes to CDs all evening, the only communication with another human (his supervisor, who works the other shift) handled via sticky notes. All this suits James just fine - he's still a mess after the disappearance of his wife Hanna four years prior.

 Predictably, he doesn't seem to have much of a personal life, either; his only activities seem to be repairing video equipment in his spare time and going to a support group for bereaved partners. So when he discovers the creepy titular Broadcast Signal Intrusion (BSI from now on) while transferring some news programme, he's got nothing better to do than to start poking around to see if he can find something out about it.

 A BSI is just what it sounds like; a pirate signal "highjacking" the daily programming, replacing whatever was on with home-made content. Primitive trolling. This one consists of a woman wearing a blank latex mask moving robotically, while electronic noises blare in the background. It's creepy enough, I guess - I thought it was trying too hard to be weird, but I suppose that makes it look authentic.

 James, who clearly needs a hobby, dives head-first into a series of rabbit holes, led on by (what else?) the internet - or rather, BBSs: in a cute detail, because the footage was originally released in the mid-90s, all the relevant information is still hosted on bulletin boards. 

 Morbid curiosity soon turns personal when he finds out a theory that links the intrusions (of which there are more than one) to missing women... and one of the intrusions took place the day after James's wife disappeared.

 And of course, weird stuff starts happening. James' place gets trashed. Some weird people contact him and some other weirdos follow him around. And all that's on top of the BSI footage itself, which keeps yielding additional information under close scrutiny. Soon James, with the help of a mysterious woman (Kelley Mack), hits the road, trying to track the mysterious TV pirate. It put me very much in mind of a 70s paranoid thriller (with some surreal elements); And sure enough, director Jacob Gentry mentions Alan J. Pakula as an inspiration.

 It's all really well handled, and the mystery and subsequent investigation is very engaging for a while. And therein lies a problem, because the film has an agenda, and it conflicts with the whole investigative aspect. I love the conclusion the film eventually arrives at, but it requires reframing what came before in a way that can be more than a little frustrating; It's a fairly big problem that I can't really go into without some major spoilers. Just be aware that you may need to be patient with some nonesense for a while.

 The director acquits himself nicely; this is a great-looking indie movie* with an excellent paranoid atmosphere courtesy of cinematographer Scott Thiele and an ominous soundtrack from Ben Lovett. I'm not a fan of the acting - Shum is a little too keen to let us know just how much pain his character is bottling up at all times - but he's not too bad otherwise.

 The script, by Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall is respectably willing to remain obtuse to the end, and its use of obsolete technology is pretty endearing - any movie that mentions phreaking ("with a ph-") is all right by me. There's some stilted dialog, and at least one instance the old technology fetish gets a little too on-the-nose (a video nerd exalts how much better Betamax was than VHS), but it's all pretty enjoyable if you're an old nerd, and it shouldn't be too off-putting for the rest of humanity.

 So it's another hard one to recommend. If you're willing to meet it in its own terms, though, and give it the benefit of doubt until it has its say, I think it's very much worth your time. I liked it a lot.

*: It even includes a pretty solidly shot fight -  of the sad/pathetic kind, though.

La Chimera

 La Chimera is a deeply lovely Italian comedy/drama hybrid that's suffused with strangeness, mythic undertones and some interesting themes. Not bad for a movie that takes more than an hour to lay its cards on the table.

 Arthur (Josh O'Connor) is a British expat somewhere in Italy, sometime in the '80s. He cuts a dashing, standoffish figure in his cream suit. It's enough to make the local girls swarm to him, although his surly disposition quickly scares them off.
 The man is a fallen archeologist, just out of prison for tomb robbery. We follow him for a while as he visits his old home (a run-down shack in the shadow of a huge medieval wall), goes to visit the mother (Isabella Rossellini) of an old flame, and is accosted by his old partners in crime - a jolly gaggle of misfits who call themselves the Tombaroli - until he accepts to join them again.

 The thing is that Arthur is critical to their operation, which sees them roam the countryside looking for Etruscan burial sites to despoil: The archeologist is an eerily effective dowser who can sense nearby tombs. Conflict finally arrives surprisingly late in the movie, as his nose for treasure leads him to a spectacular find. Its fate - along with a tentative romance with a local woman (Carol Duarte) the film has been patiently building - sends the archeologist into an existential crisis.

 It's a slow, slow character study that happens to be charming as hell and pretty funny in that boisterous, slice-of-life Italian way while mostly steering clear of melodrama in a way that requires more than a little patience. But writer/director Alice Rohrwacher adds a lot more to it: a red thread (almost literally!) runs through the movie, serving as both an incarnation of the protagonist's restlessness and a nod towards Theseus and Ariadne, and the story also references the Orpheus myth. Hell, there's even a couple of musicians that follow the Tombaroli and sing a couple of songs that comment on the action like a Greek chorus. All that on top of many slightly surrealist (or magic realist, I guess) touches.

My favorite movie poster in ages. I mean, look at this thing - it's glorious!

 Arthur clings to memories of a happier time, as does Rosellini's character. Italia, Arthur's new love interest, unknowingly articulates the Tombaroli's justification for stealing historic artifacts (it they belong to everyone, they belong to no one?) and later turns it on its head. It's not a hugely deep movie, and there are some misfires such as a scene where a powerful woman compares the Tombaroli with tiny cogs in a huge machine... and then proceeds to frame Arthur between huge, gyrating engines. But on the main it's all pulled off with grace and wit; There's quite a bit going on here.

 The filmmaking is beautiful - lots of film grain and bright primary colours - and Rohrwacher and DP Hélène Louvart sneak in some clever camera moves and some fun touches like slightly undercranking a  ridiculous police chase. The acting is also incredible - O'Connor is incredible, as is Duarte, and most of the side characters are given memorable performances.

 As with so many of these movies that scratch deeply personal itches (eww!), I find it really hard to gauge how well it would play for others. As always, I can only try to articulate why I feel it might be worth your time. If any of the above sounds appealing, you can probably do a lot worse.

Redline

  Here's the plot for Redline: Sweet JP (Takuya Kimura) really wants to win the Redline, an interstellar racing championship, all the while nursing a crush for rival racer Sonoshee (Yū Aoi). He blows his chance to qualify, but gets lucky when two other racers pull out for the championship and he gets voted into the final lineup.

 Unfortunately, the reason people are pulling out is because the race is going to take place on Roboworld - the home planet of race of fun-hating fascist cyborgs (is there any other kind?), a whole race of Galactus wannabes that would like nothing more than to crush anyone who lays rubber on their homeland.

 And... that's pretty much it. There's a corrupt agent and an interlude in a demilitarized nearby moon where the racers mingle and prepare their rides ahead of the race, but the plot on this movie is minimal. The focus is fully on the insane detail spilling from every frame. Not just on the action, which is frequent and beautifully animated, but even minor scenes such as the one where JP tries to buy cigarettes is a visual treat where we get to see the weird nervature on alien currency, a weird, funky rabid merchant, and some gorgeous Mignola-esque corridors in the background.

 The art style on this thing is gorgeous - both scratchy and detailed - and the visual imagination is staggering. The story barely hangs together, but that doesn't matter because this movie is first and foremost about looking cool, and that's something that Redline does exceptionally well.

 Everything gets thrown in the blender. You've got a rockabilly protagonist and his zeppelin-breasted object of desire (who is shown topless while she complains about the angles the news choose to show her from...). There's a magic-using race of hot space elves whose racing candidates also function as a J-pop group. Two intergalactic bounty hunter's visual inspiration clicked for me halfway through the movie, making me laugh very loudly. The last third of the movie is a protracted battle scene that includes the expected racing shenanigans, but also mechs, Robotech-style flying battles, and a giant baby-shaped energy monster. It's a pummeling mix of annoying techno, eye-watering visuals and a serviceable (but surprisingly sweet) storyline. Exhausting, but glorious.

 This is the closest I've seen any studio come to the lush animation of Ghibli and classic Disney, and it's all in service of bringing comics - many different styles of comics - to life in a form that I'd vaguely describe as the love child of Speed Racer and Wacky Races. I don't really read a lot of comics or manga, so I could only identify a few the many, many references here (Kirby fort the Roboworld crowd, some Tesuka and a huge spider-limbed nod to master Miyazaki) - I expect proper comic and anime fans will have a field day with this.
 But even without that dimension, it just looks gorgeous, and the designs are phenomenal and often hilarious. I mean, look at this guy:

  Redline is pure joy, from start to finish. A lush love letter to everything its creators (director Takeshi Koike, with some heavy input from producer Katsuhito Ishii and others from Studio Madhouse) hold dear. It reportedly took them seven years to bring it to fruition, so the least you can do is spend a hundred minutes taking it in. Trust me, it's worth it.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter

 There's so little nautical horror out there, that's it's kind of a shame to write off this handsome, well-crafted movie as "eh, it's pretty solid, I guess."

 The Last Voyage of the Demeter is famous for being based on a single chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula - the one where the novel takes a break from its epistolary format and instead transcribes the contents of the captain's log for the doomed vessel Dracula hired to make his overseas voyage to English shores.
 Appropriately enough, the film is better known here in the UK for completely disappearing after its US release, only to wash up without fanfare on the barren coasts of Amazon prime a year later. Vampires are no match against the true horror that is international licensing rights.

 Corey Hawkins stars as Clemens, a doctor who signs on to the crew of the Demeter to seek passage back to the UK after a bad job interview. Once on the ship he finds a woman (Aisling Franciosi) entombed on one of the many wooden containers in the hold, rescues her, and nurses her back to health. Unbeknownst to him and the rest of the crew, the woman was to be the good count's meal... and so everyone becomes fair game instead.

 It's a very serious movie - dour, even, which fits director André Øvredal's sensibilities to a tee. Technically, it's impeccable; The ship is beautifully realised, and a prelude set at a Romanian port shows off some pretty high-end production values - horror or otherwise. Tom Stern's cinematography, meanwhile, beautifully captures the allure of the nautical setting during the daytime, and drips with atmosphere once the monster starts prowling above and below deck.

 Said monster is, some slightly dodgy CGI aside, pretty good: Good old Vlad at his most bestial, basically looking like a leather gargoyle. His methods are very enjoyably brutal (I'd recommend a visit to doesthedogdie.com if you have any such triggers), and Øvredal gives him a few really effective horror moments and some neat moves.

 Sadly there's just not enough there... and as shiny as all the surfaces are, they don't manage to cover a lack of anything of substance underneath. Writers Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz (and some others along the way) provide a plot that is both basic and generic, with a heavy helping of really dumb decisions. You'd think that in the more than three decades the script spent being rewritten in development hell, someone would have thought of some justification as to why the crew, once they figure out what's going on, don't use the daylight to their advantage... but no such luck. There's the odd good line (The captain gets a killer line when discussing steam boats), but other than that the film completely relies on its budget, technical aspects, the setting, and some excellent acting (Besides Hawkins, the mellifluous Liam Cunningham and a brooding David Dastmalchian make a big impression as the captain and his very slavic second in command) to do all the heavy lifting.

 And maybe that would have worked on a shorter, punchier movie. But at nearly two hours, the good just barely outweighs the bad.

Close Range

 A generic name for a fairly generic movie. For those who keep an eye on modern, low-budget action, it stars Scott Adkins and is directed by Isaac Florentine. For those who don't know them, it's got a poster with a giant gruff guy with a gun towering over some hoodlums. There's a big sniper scope painted behind him, a smaller explosion sending a car flying (which never happens in the movie) and a helicopter in the background (which never makes an appearance).

 That's fine, it's aspirational; It feels like a movie that would have included explosions and helicopters, if it had the money to put them in. Truth-ish in advertising. Unless you expected Adkins to actually be giant-sized, swatting helicopters out of the sky and kaiju-ing his way through a bunch of gunmen; I can't really help you if that's what you got out of that poster, but I agree that would have been more interesting.

 The big (not literally) gruff guy in the poster is Colt McReady (Adkins), an ex-soldier badass who left the forces after disobeying dishonourable orders, but not before assaulting his (dishonourable, presumably) superior officer. Since then he's been doing some sort of (honourable, presumably) criminal stuff. An opening crawl explicitly compares him to ronin, which makes sense given his military background, but less sense when you realize the movie is very much going for a Western feel.

 We first meet McReady as he kills a few dozen people in a Mexican building while rescuing a woman (Madison Lawlor). It's an excellent running battle, well-filmed and featuring a fun, if slightly subdued (for Adkins's standards) choreography. 

 We later find out the woman is McReady's niece, who was taken by a cartel because her deadbeat father tried to screw them over in a drug deal. When they're back they, plus her mom (Caitlin Keats) try to run away before the inevitable cartel reprisal, but they're held by a corrupt local sheriff (Nick Chinlund).
 So the cartel boss (Tony Perez) and a dozen or so interchangeable henchmen arrive and lay siege to the house, trying to kill McReady and retrieve one of those convenient USB drives with critical drug business information.
 There are some flourishes, but... that's basically it. Close Range is a very meat-and-potatoes low-budget action movie: uncomplicated, unpretentious, kind of dumb, well-executed. The moment-to-moment action is excellent - gritty but with some acrobatic flourishes, and it's got a few ideas and memorable images, such as pitting Adkins's martial arts against a speeding SUV or a very painful-looking stab to the taint. Lots of people shooting through walls, too, a little-loved action trope I tend to enjoy.
 Speaking of which: The film features some wonderful, wholly practical squib and explosive work to give its frequent shootouts more heft; After what feels like a steady diet of middling CGI substitutions on that department lately, I can't overstate what a pleasure it is to get a full meal like this.

A pantry fight results in a rain of cheerios. As it should.

 As good as the action is, it doesn't flow very well; There's no drama to it, and most of the final third of the movie feels like people shooting the shit out of a house without hitting anyone for ages. It looks great, but the film feels oddly drawn out. That's exacerbated by some pretty egregious filler and some pretty weird choices: There are a few scenes early with the cartel where we get a hilarious amount of reaction shots of various thugs reacting to their boss chewing out and then murdering an employee, for example, and soon afterwards we're introduced to each one of these goons in turn, complete with a freeze frame and a helpful name tag. That'd be cool if they were interesting characters, or if they had even a tiny bit of colour, but that's not the case.
 Out of the great occidental action VOD director triad, Florentine remains a distant third favorite (after John Hyams and Jesse V. Johnson); He's got great technical chops, but I don't think I've found any of his movies convincing in the drama department after Undisputed 2. He needs a Michael Jai White-level presence to offset his corniness.

 The script (by Shane Dax Taylor and Chad Law) doesn't really come up with much to give the film any personality, either, and the dialog is often atrocious. Adkins is fine - this is hardly a challenge for him, as he mostly has to act angry all the time (his American accent sounds convincing to my ears, but we already knew that). The acting quality from everyone else varies a lot, unfortunately, but I guess that's not a huge strike against this sort of thing.

 Solid, in other words. A bit disappointing that it fails to gather any steam, but worth it for the different kinds of kind of low-key mayhem everyone gets up to.  

Feast II: Sloppy Seconds

 Holy shit, what a way to piss away the little goodwill you got from your first movie.

 Feast II: Sloppy Seconds loses absolutely everything that made the first film watchable and proceeds to waste our time with a beyond pointless story that quickly goes nowhere, uninteresting characters, and edgelord provocations that are so poorly executed that you can't help but to make fun of the people behind it rather than be shocked.
It's a film that's so tasteless in their tastelessness, so ugly in its ugliness that I'm left struggling to figure out why I should spend any effort writing a few paragraphs about it - and lamenting the time I wasted watching it. 

 The movie picks up shortly after the events of the first one. A gang of lesbian bikers arrive at a small town after it's been attacked by a bunch of rape monsters, there to hunt a guy from the first movie. When the creatures attack, a small bunch of survivors* must band together, bicker endlessly amongst each other, and maybe survive the night. Or not.

 Because you know what? The film doesn't care about storytelling, plot or characters, so neither should you. The script (again by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan) only has a few gags in mind, and it incorporates them into its story in the shoddiest way possible. So at one point one of the film's cast of asshats decides he needs to do a creature autopsy. He's not a doctor, there's nothing he could conceivably get out of it - but the brain trust behind this turdfest wanted to have a long, long scene of a corpse posthumously jizzing on its female cast... so monster autopsy it is.
 Want to have a (predictable) gag where a baby dies? Never mind that the first movie had a decently shocking child death. Here, instead of properly weaving the baby into the story, they have him suddenly wake up and start crying a full day into the creature invasion. And then the joke itself is drawn out into an overlong, mind-bogglingly ugly-looking sequence. Audacity alone will not carry your jokes, folks.

 The amount of bad decisions from everyone involved is staggering. Gone is the propulsive, simple survival story of the first movie, along with its production values and excellent practical effects; They're replaced with a series of disconnected, arbitrary incidents and extremely shoddy-looking CGI. John Gulager's direction, meanwhile, hasn't improved in the slightest, so the result predictably looks cheap, ugly and uninteresting.

 There's exactly one joke in the whole movie where the delivery isn't botched to hell**. Other than that, this is just plain cynical, uninspired, deeply unfunny shit.
 There's a Feast III out there, but after this one you'd need to pay me to watch it.

 

*: The cast includes two Mexican little people luchadores, because... comedy, I guess.

**: If you must know, the bit where they're trying to work out how much of the grandmother they need to get rid of. I never said it was a great joke, but at least they don't ruin it.

Ninja Terminator

 Godfrey Ho's name is synonymous with legendary terrible movies. The guy was so prolific, and his output so truly awful that his name is one of the few I remember from my martial-arts watching era as a kid; I didn't recognize Chang Cheh by name then, nor Ching Siu-Tung - but whenever uncle Godfrey's name popped up at the beginning of a movie, there would be a collective groan.

 The insanely prolific writer/director/producer started his career at the Shaw Brothers, but he soon branched out and formed a company with the like-minded Joseph Lai called IFD. There their MO would be to get the rights for some other Asian movie, cut it into pieces and shoot some supplementary footage with a stable of slumming western actors*; They'd then splice everything and re-dub it into a poorly stitched Frankenstein of old and new material which they call some random combination of buzzwords in a bid to win over the western markets. And hey, it worked; I rented several of their movies back in the 90s.

 Ninja Terminator follows this process to the letter. The 1984 South Korean film The Uninvited Guest Of The Star Ferry would provide the source material, and Ho would then append additional footage of grown men skulking around in pijamas. The result is an astoundingly bizarre fever dream, a perfect storm of incompetence and chutzpah. If the concept of 'so bad it's... still bad, but also funny as hell' appeals to you at all, this is essential viewing.

 Just how bad is it? Well, to be perfectly honest the Korean half of the equation is not bad at all. Cheesy as all hell, and probably pretty dumb even before Ho finger-painted his own plot all over it with his feces, but it looks like it was originally a decently fun action flick. It stars Jaguar Wong (Jack Lang), a cocky, assholish cop who goes up against a crime syndicate led by a heroin dealer in a beyond ridiculous He-Man wig (Hwang Jang-lee).

 The plot has been completely rewritten and re-cut to incorporate Ho's ninja shenanigans, but the fights are both frequent and very good, with fairly complex choreographies that succeed in giving Jaguar a recognizable personality. They don't quite stack up with what the folks over at Hong Kong were doing in that same time frame, but it's a honorable effort, and Lang has a great screen presence even if his character is an unlikeable dick.

 So half of the movie is a perfectly enjoyable police actioner. And then there's Ho's contribution: an incompetent, obviously tacked-on ninja yarn that frequently had me in stitches.

 The 'story' concerns an evil ninja empire that has finally reunited the three parts of a statuette that grants invulnerability. Concerned that it will be used for evil, three of the ninjas (Richard Harrison, Jonathan Watts and a third one that I think is never shown) defect and steal parts of the statue.

 The evil ninja master sends a red ninja (the ubiquitous Phillip Ko) to try and retrieve the statue pieces. He kills off the anonymous third ninja, and in response one of the good ninjas - named, I shit you not, Ninja Master Harry - calls Jaguar Wong from the other movie to get him to protect his dead comrade's sister.

 To give him a bit more gravitas, all of Ninja Master Harry's calls are placed from a Garfield phone. This... fucking... movie.

 So there's your link; In the Ninja Terminator version, Jaguar Wong is not a cop trying to stop a heroin smuggling syndicate while trying to protect an old flame, he's doing the bidding of a secretive cabal of ninjas who spend their free time bowing down to a chintzy cheap prop like an otaku venerating a bust of his favorite anime waifu.

 All the Ninja hijinks are categorized by wall-to-wall incompetence, terrible acting, stilted action, gratuitous cartwheeling, incoherent plotting and all sorts of ludicrous, hilarious touches. Here's a short, non-comprehensive list to give you a taste of the sort of batshit craziness you can expect:

- Ninja Master Harry's wife gets attacked by crabs while trying to cook them, and his husband protects her by throwing a kunai at one of them. Cue a shot of a poor crab walking around with a blade stuck in its back. For added drama, this scene has multiple dramatic zooms.

- Ninja Master Harry demonstrates his prowess with a katana by slicing a watermelon. It's such a thrilling sequence that another ninja master repeats it later (he eats the watermelon slice with a knife and fork; Sadly, he does it out of costume).

- The Evil Ninja Empire delivers ultimatums by VHS tapes borne by... a tiny, dime-store wind up robot toy. The robot (like the Garfield phone) has a surprising amount of screen time.

- Here's a short image sequence of a ninja master receiving an ultimatum from the bad guys. Imagine it set to the most overblown music possible, complete with sci-fi bleep bloop sounds:

 And there is so much more. Right up to a hilarious final shot, Ninja Terminator is a gold mine for this sort of shit. I have no idea if anyone involved possessed any self-awareness whatsoever; Is the Garfield phone Ninja Master Harry uses to communicate with the other movie a self-consciously ridiculous touch, or did they think that it would go down well with American audiences? I have no idea, and I don't care. Death of the author and all that - the only thing that matters is that it is hilarious. Good on them if they were laughing while making it, but given how shoddy this whole endeavour is it's hard to give anyone involved any credit.

 The links between the two movies-within-the-movie are tenuous, but sometimes pretty involved; I have to give Ho credit for that one scene where Ninja Master Harry and his wife watch part of Jaguar's story on a (robot-delivered!) VHS tape. The way Ho's script ties itself into knots to link both stories together just adds to the overwhelming schadenfreude.

 It's so bad it's glorious, and if you're in any way inclined to enjoy this sort of shit it is a fucking delight. The whole thing is available on youtube and, to be honest, given the way Ho exploited his stars and source material, pirating this is probably the best way to watch it. Gather a group of friends, maybe some alcohol and/or chemical assistance, and your night is sorted.

 

 *: This might sound familiar from several American re-releases of Godzilla movies; Corman's AIP indulged in this sort of thing too.

Lake Artifact

 A group of young adult friends (Thomas Brazzle, Catharine Daddario, Anna Shields and Chris Cimperman) plus a mysterious, affable hitchhiker (Dylan Gunn) they meet on the road head out to a remote lake cabin to enjoy a few nights of very mild partying. But the site they've chosen is a paranormal hotspot, as foreshadowed by several locals interviewed on-camera by a mysterious man.

 The strange phenomena pile up without much in the way of rhyme nor reason - I mean, sure, the roads loop and time seems to transcur unevenly for our protagonists, but what's the deal with the mysterious printer that spits out pictures no one seems to remember taking?
  There's a very muddled, barely sensical explanation involving some poorly-sketched multiversal conflux, but Coherence, this ain't - things barely make any sense and they don't amount to much dramatically, either. Even when people are trying to kill each other all over the place. 

 Writer/director Bruce Wemple keeps things rolling with constant developments, and the film looks pretty good for its non-existent production values. But events don't assemble into any sort of compelling picture, and the characters - through no fault of the actors playing them - and the situations they find themselves embroiled in fail to generate the sort of empathy needed for us to get invested in their fates. And so Lake Artifact fails at both of the genres it straddles.

 I try to cut these low-budget efforts a lot of slack, but aside from a fun twist late in the game, there's barely anything going for this one aside from the competence with which it's made.

Feast

 A lad's movie if there ever was one, Feast pits a bunch of yahoo caricatures stuck in a gritty southern bar under siege by toothsome, man-eating, sex pest monsters that kind of look like flayed versions of Marvel's Venom. It's proudly loud and crass, wildly exploitative, and it's directed like shit; And by some miracle, it's actually kind of enjoyable.

 This is the sort of film where you don't just get a freeze frame introduction for each character, they also get a short bio with some obnoxious, winking joke. Everyone gets an "Life Expectancy" entry, for example, but asides from a fun moment early on, most of the jokes are terrible.

 The style is purposefully abrasive, which is a shame because a couple of shots at the beginning are reasonably stylish and set me up to expect more from the film. As for the tone... this is one of those movies that shamelessly chases a would-be smartass, hyper-exaggerated version of early Tarantino and applies it with a self-congratulatory, frat-boy mentality. More Boondock Saints than Pulp Fiction, in other words. I have nothing against this sort of thing, but it's got to have more going for it than just attitude.

 Shock takes the lion's share of the film's comedy - those life expectancy blurbs, for example, are mostly there to be subverted as their owners go on to meet a messy, sometimes inappropriate deaths. There's a lot of sexual exploitation (which is more than a little bit iffy, seeing as this comes from the house of Weinstein*) but I have to admit an incident of face-fucking is so over-the-top and cruel it had the intended effect of provoking a disbelieving laugh.
 The gore and practical monster effects are excellent, but this is where I ran into my biggest problem with the film: You really don't get to see much of them. Whenever there's even a tiny bit of action, director John Gulager makes it his mission to make it as incomprehensible as possible. Shaky cam was all the rage in the '00s, but it goes into overdrive here, making most of the most promising scenes here devolve into a maddening, headache-inducing mess. This has its place in proper horror (Splinter, which came out a few years later is a good example) - but it has no place in action, or in a movie like this that's intended to showcase its splatter.

 Dumb as it is, the script (by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan) does slow down a little bit and gets some clever jabs in. The film is peopled by shallow stereotypes (it seems clear neither Melton nor Dunstan have ever set foot in the sort of dive they're portraying), but some decent acting by the likes of Henry Rollins, Clu Gulager (the director's father) gives them at least an illusion of depth.

This, sadly, is about as clever as the script ever gets.

 I dunno. It's often shitty and kind of obnoxious; It's absolutely the sort of movie that can't wait to let you know how in it is on its own jokes. And I can't overstate how deeply fucking annoying it is to see cool effects and ideas mangled so badly by the camera work.
 In its favour, it doesn't waste a lot of time. The pacing is zippy, the monsters are cool, and there's more than enough silly mayhem to comfortably the fill the short runtime. And then there's the rare moment where it style comes together rather than hindering the action, such as when a head is popped like a zit, and the film's Saving-Private-Ryan shutter speed tomfoolery captures each goopy glob of gore perfectly.

 *: It really adds some unwelcome context to a scene where one of the female employees has to bend over for her boss. I'm sure Harvey found it hilarious.

Cloud (Kuraudo)

 Kiyoshi Kurosawa spent decades in the trenches directing whatever came his way; Before Cure, he made movies that went from something called Kandagawa Pervert Wars (Veteran of the Pervert Wars was, of course, Pink Oyster Cult's breakout record) to high-budget Japanese Poltergeist riff Sweet Home (I have seen that one, and highly recommend it). Then he made Cure, and from that point onward he took no more notes from anyone; He still does genre work - hell, he made my absolute favourite J-horror film - but he tends to twist genre conventions into sometimes unrecognizable shapes, driven by his weirdo sensibilities and offbeat sense of humour.

 All of this to say: don't expect a traditional genre movie out of Cloud. Elaborating on that is tricky, because it doesn't actually become a genre movie until after the halfway mark - and the genre it eventually settles into might not be what you're expecting.

 But until then Cloud follows the misadventures of Yoshii (Masaki Suda) as he tries to make a living by abusing the core capitalist verbs: buying and selling. After receiving a good sum for some health equipment (by ripping off the people who actually made them) he decides to quit his factory job and get a house in the suburbs where he can move in with his girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa), set up a storage area for his wares, and become a full-time online reseller. He takes on an employee - Sano (Daiken Okudaira), a local, slow-witted youth - and begins stepping up his operations. But his world starts coming apart when his business runs into trouble... and when he starts noticing shady people following him everywhere.

 Everything is handled in a realistic, deliberate manner for the first hour or so, even though this reality feels slightly off-kilter. But as Kurosawa's script starts turning the screws and the nature of the conspiracy against Yoshii becomes clear, things take a sharp turn towards the surreal; The film shifts into a paranoid thriller for a while until Sano pops back into the picture.

 And this is where I'd recommend you stop reading and go watch the movie if you'd rather be surprised. It's an excellent, beautifully filmed, surreal-tinged movie, and you're probably better off watching it unspoiled. 

 So here's the thing: once Sano comes back into the picture, he continues assisting Yoshii with a different set of skills. Which mostly involve guns. As it turns out, this is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's version of an action movie. And it's good action, too! Gritty and low-key, but dynamic and well executed. Don't expect complex choreographies or tons of violence - the feel is closer to a war movie than John Wick.

 The devolution into gun battles is completely ridiculous, and by design; Sure, Yoshii is clearly a douchebag - he's shown driving everyone around him away, and you could even say that he represents a lot of what's wrong with the world today. But his adversaries are hilariously unhinged, and the fact that they coordinate via internet forums should not be lost on anyone. The people here are driven by dream logic rather than rational or even genre logic.
 As with most surrealism, a rich, wicked vein of humour runs beneath the script, masked by an utterly deadpan delivery. Kurosawa's clinical, controlled direction, the sound design, and fine, committed performances from the actors (especially Suda - his facade of control while he descends into panic forms the backbone to the story) all run counter to these characters' bizarre interactions.

 It all comes together into something that's truly special, but also fairly impenetrable. David Lynch is a good reference, bearing in mind that Kuroswa's take on surrealism is fairly distinct from his. But as long as you're willing to meet the movie half-way, I'm happy to recommend it.

The Spider Labyrinth (Il nido del ragno)

 When an academic working for the Intextus project - some sort of global historic research endeavour - stops reporting in, the people at headquarters send Alan (Roland Wybenga), an American professor, to Budapest to figure out what's wrong.
 Plenty is wrong, as it turns out; Alan's contact is dead soon after their first meeting, people he's met turn out not to exist at all, and everyone in his hotel keeps shooting him knowing looks.

 With the help of the sexy assistant to the late academic (Paola Rinaldi), Alan starts working out what the hell is going on, while someone goes around murdering people who try to help him. The explanation for the mystery is a little underwhelming, but it makes good use of Lovecraftian tropes, and is capped by a truly batshit finale that does a lot to elevate the film. 

 Not that what goes on before is bad; The Spider Labyrinth is heavy on atmosphere, paranoia, and some light surrealistic horror touches. It's just a little slow, and it sometimes looks a little too mundane despite cinematographer Nino Celeste bathing the more Giallo-esque scenes in garish colours and even pulling out some dutch angles. Director Gianfranco Giagni, meawhile, had mostly worked on TV before making this film, and it unfortunately shows. 

 The film is also hurt by a very, very boring main character whose main traits are his immaculately coiffed hair and an inability to emote anything beyond looking slightly miffed even when he's knee-deep in corpses; The Femme Fatale is fatale enough, but she sadly doesn't add much beyond looks either. Most of the colour comes from secondary characters like a creepy, cat-loving hotel owner (Stéphane Audran) or the typical doomed, crazy-seeming bystander (William Berger) who actually knows what's going on and tries to warn the protagonist that he's fucked.

 I liked it a fair bit; It's a fun, flawed, old-fashioned film and a good tale of Lovecraft-style elder god cults. Best approached without high expectations.

Final Destination Bloodlines

 Stefi (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is having a rough time at uni; She's been unable to sleep for weeks thanks to a recurring dream in which she sees a young woman (Bec Bassinger) die (eventually) in a massive, deadly, very funny tragedy at a high-end restaurant on the top of a Space-Needle-type tower. The whole nightmare forms a prologue of sorts to the movie, and of course acts as the catalyst for everything that happens afterwards. It's an elaborate, impressive introduction.

 About to fail her courses, and remembering her estranged grandmother's name was also Iris, Stefi decides to head back home to look for answers. She soon finds them... and then death itself starts picking off her family members, one by one, in all sort of gruesome 'accidents'.

 If you've seen any of the previous five (!) Final Destinations, you know that death actually never appears - it just sets off chains of unlikely events that result in someone snuffing it in a highly sadistic, and usually grimly funny manner. It seems no one is ever able to describe these movies without mentioning Rube Goldberg devices, and I guess I'm no different.
 You also know the rough shape the movie is going to take; People start dying in a series of freak "accidents". They band together, figure out a way to maybe try to avoid it from happening to them. There are a lot of fake-outs, and at the end they might succeed or they might not, it's usually impossible to care one way or another.
 And that's not important, because these movies are, more than any slasher movie, all about the kills - and since the killer is basically fate*, the scriptwriters (Guy Busik, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts) don't really need to worry about finding different ways for some dude to tear people apart. They can come up with all sorts of wild shit - for example: have someone sit on the drain on a large pool and get their guts pulled out through their anus**.

 Part: Bloodlines adds a very slight but fun wrinkle to the formula - I'm not going to spoil the only unpredictable aspect of the movie, but it's right there in the title. Aside from that... it sure is another Final Destination movie, huh? Although one that's directed with a fair bit of enthusiasm by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein. It's a little bit clever (the film plays upon our genre literacy by lightly subverting horror clichés before inevitably indulging them), and seriously, mind-numbingly stupid; The dramatic foreshadowing is so heavily piled it gave my extraocular muscles one hell of a workout, and the characters make so many stupid decisions you're basically left cheering for their demise.

 But I guess that comes with the territory; Let's not forget that the first movie in the series has a twist ending where someone dies because they don't understand basic pendular motion***.

 Other than that, it's fine. Good fun as long as you can get into the spirit it's offered in (as in: enjoy it as a comedy), and one of the better installments in the series, I think (have in mind I'm not a huge fan.) No experience is needed with the rest of the previous movies - in fact, the lack of familiarity would probably work in your favour, and while there are quite a few callbacks and references, they're all firmly in easter egg territory.
 This one tries to make the characters more relatable by having them all be part of a family, but it's impossible to care for these characters and their relationships when everything in the movie seems to have quotation marks around it: Here comes a "funny" part. Oh, here's some "family drama". None of it really registers.

 The kills, on the other hand, do. The suspense is basic and a bit overdone, but the comedic timing is spot-on and so is the gruesome, brutal gallows humour. I'm not a fan of the gore - I know, I know, whining about CGI, but it can be done well (Smile 2 being a recent example). The carnage here, while copious and graphic, has the usual CGI problem of feeling weightless, and of making the flesh too malleable. When a glass shard pierces a foot, it has all the physicality of a red-hot butter knife going through... something a red-hot butter knife would go through really easily - I don't know, I can't think of any good example right now.
 Still, that garbage truck death was rough - good job on that one, movie.

 There's also a problem with the film's structure that I'm not sure any movie in this series can ever really overcome - there's a general shapelessness to the story, a lack of escalation. It's just gory set pieces, a couple revelations, more gory set pieces; The climactic scene at the end doesn't really feel any more important than the other struggles that went before.
 I mean... it's fine, storytelling has never been a strong point for these series - as long as they space them out properly, there's a place for this. Say, one every five years and not five in a single decade. But it'd be nice if they added something to the formula, it's getting pretty stale.

 The acting is fine - there's not a lot anyone could have done with these characters, but Santa Juana does a good job of being an engaging, variably intelligent protagonist. Richard Harmon's also fun as a very punchable douchebag (one who's got Air Supply in his sad playlist, no less!)
 But the only cast member who really makes an impression is the late Tony Todd, delivering the film's sole grace note with his signature wry gravitas.

 So is it worth it? Well, yeah, I think so - it's pretty entertaining, reasonably well made and it made me laugh a bunch of times. It knows exactly what it is, it's just a shame that part of that "what it is" is being really fucking dumb.

*: I like this version of death - they're an accountant, a bookkeeper, just balancing the numbers. And they're a dick about it because... who likes added work?

**: This actually happens in one of the movies; The guts come flying off a pipe at you in a very cheesy use of 3D. Which is, of course, the best possible use of 3D.
 And... holy fucking shit, this really happened? I always thought it was an urban legend! It's even got a name: transanal evisceration. Man, Cannibal Corpse could make a two-disc concept album out of that.

***: In case you don't remember: a guy ducks a huge swinging, burning sign, stands up to gloat about how he cheated death, gets squished when the sign swings back. That's how they chose to end it. It's only a mediocre joke, and a good example of how these movies' idiocy can sometimes get to be a bit much.

Companion

 Companion is a very clever, extremely solid sci-fi thriller. It's best, but not necessary to go in blind - One major, scene-setting twist is spoiled in its trailers, but that's basically the premise, and there are plenty of fun twists afterwards. So if you don't know anything about the movie, then ignore the rest of this write-up and go watch it, but don't sweat it if you find out what it's about. It's still very enjoyable. I will have to give it away in a little bit, it'd be a very short write-up if I didn't - so be warned.

 Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) are a seemingly loving young couple who go spend a weekend at a lake house with some of Josh's friends: the surly Kat (Megan Suri), who seems to have something against Iris right from the beginning; Sergey (Rupert Friend), a rich Russian asshole type and owner of the cabin and all the land around it; Plus Pat (Lukas Gage) and Eli (Harvey Guillén), another sweet-as-molasses couple.

 Iris seems a bit off from the get-go, as her inner life revolves around her beau to an unhealthy degree and has some odd mannerisms. The explanation arrives quickly (and this is the spoiler): she's a sexbot, an android shell with an AI that's unaware that she's artificial.
 This comes to the fore when she kills someone in the house in self-defense, and is explained by Josh in terms that increasingly paint him as a douchebag (he basically gives her a hilariously insensitive pep talk as he explains to her he'll need to switch her off and wipe her, because she's obviously defective).

 Things go to shit, of course; If futurama has thought us anything about robosexuality, it's that the path to robot hell is paved with human flesh.

 As mentioned, that's only the premise of the movie. From there Iris has to become independent if she's to survive, and all sorts of cool ideas and fun plot complications follow. Writer/Director Drew Hancock's script gets pretty creative, even to the point of having some fun with its structure - Barbarian's Zach Creggers was originally slated to direct, and it's easy to see what drew (ha!) him to the project.

 Hancock's comedy background (he was the creator of Cautionary Tales of Swords!) serves him well - Companion goes about its business seriously, but there's an infectious sense of humour lurking behind many of its lines and developments.

 It does get a little too didactic on the finer points of toxic masculinity - a little more subtlety would do the film a world of good - but that's a minor misstep, easily papered over by Jack Quaid's boyish charm.

 As good as Quaid is, this is Thatcher's movie - hers is a complicated role, an anxiety-ridden, lovelorn waif who discovers that she can literally empower herself. All that, plus she looks a little too perfect to be flesh and blood. Guillen's also memorable, though he's getting a bit too close to getting typecast as a human teddy bear.
 It's a beautiful film to look at, with cinematographer Eli Born drenching everything in the warm, pastel hues of a romantic comedy. The script is doing the usual Hollywood thing of using sci fi concepts as a springboard for its story; It's smarter than it needs to be, which makes it easy to forgive the film for showing a near future that's remarkably similar to our present despite true AI (not the bullshit engines making the rounds) and lifelike robots cheap enough to be mid-tier consumer products. The few FX we do get to see (which include a fun Terminator reference) are fine. It's not a very gory movie, but the one nasty bit is ill-served with unconvincing CGI.

 I don't want to oversell it, but this one's pretty good.