Hellbender

 Teenager Izzy (Zelda Adams) lives in the middle of nowhere with her mother (Toby Poser). They forage, do home-schooling, and like to glam up for band night, where they play doomy, riff-heavy rock songs they compose themselves.

 The girl is completely isolated; any neighbours live "the next mountain over", and whenever her mom goes to town she leaves her behind under the pretext that she has a rare immunological disease. They're happy together; It seems like a good life. When alone, Izzy takes long walks through the woods, swims, and draws whatever bit of gorgeous Catskills scenery catches her fancy. As for mom, she sometimes performs messy, blood-heavy rituals when her daughter's not around, receives ominous visions from an ominous-looking book, or makes the random hitchhiker (John Adams) explode in a shower of ash with a single gesture.

 But if teenagers are good at anything, it's at screwing things up for the adults. Damn teens. On one of her walks Izzy randomly meets another teen (Lulu Adams) lounging by a pool in the house the next mountain over, and they strike a tentative friendship. This leads her to discover that when she strays from her strict vegan diet, she gets strange powers. For she is a Hellbender (not to be confused with the Augustine order of hellbound saints), a witch-like, not-quite human being, and she gains power from whatever she eats. And that knowledge sets her on a collision course with her mother.

 Hellbender is an engagingly weird coming-of-age story / family drama / horror hybrid shot during the height of the COVID lockdown by the Adams family (Toby Poser and John Adams are married, Lulu and Zelda are their children; They take turns directing, shooting, and scoring the film, which they wrote together as well. The whole credits sequence is basically their names, listed over and over again -even the house in the movie is their family home. A truly home-grown film.

 It's surprising just how polished it all is. The music is great, with some really good original songs; The acting's excellent, the story well written, fun and unique... and it looks beautiful, too, with the crisp digital cinematography and handsome compositions.
 The effects, unfortunately, bring it down a few notches, but I'm not about going to dock the movie points for being ambitious; Sure, some of the sequences are a little funnier than they should be, but broadly speaking they work, and they successfully deliver their payload of cool ideas. Some of the visual language is also slightly clumsy, with lots of reaction shots, but that's only really an issue in a couple of scenes.

 Those niggles aside, this is a pretty great film from a very talented film-making collective.

Flow (Straume)

 A capybara, a cat, a dog, a bird and a lemur get into a boat...

 It sounds like the start of a kid's joke, or maybe a setup for one of those 'cross the river' puzzles where the fox eats the chicken or the chicken the grain.

 No animals eat each other* in Flow, a strange, lush animated piece from Lithuania. The opposite holds true: As far as meaning can be parsed from this enigmatic movie, it's all about bonds, empathy and cooperation.

 Cat lives alone amongst the remains of a long-gone human - a forest bungalow, wooden carvings of cats of all sizes. It's a good life, it seems, so it's upsetting when the waters come, ever-rising, and consume everything the cat has ever known. The sea will claim everything, a wise man once said (and then wrote a video game about it).

 Before drowning, Cat makes it to a lonely boat drifting in the water crewed by a lone, easy-going capybara. As the little sailboat is taken by wind and current through a bunch of different flooded environments they are joined by a standoffish crane, a friendly golden retriever, and a highly-strung lemur. The film follows the boat and its motley crew as they have some very gentle adventures, bounce against each other in different ways; We witness through their eyes beautiful environments  - a half-drowned city, submerged woods, pillars that seemingly stretch all the way to the stars - and events ranging from the mundane to the majestic and strange.

 Not a single line of dialog is spoken. The animals are only slightly anthropomorphized, but beyond the fact that they all seem to know how to operate a rudder and some pretty advanced non-verbal communication, the film does a good job of letting them be natural. The cat in particular is a joy to watch - the animation for his face in particular is extremely well-observed. Its body language is a little less impressive; Good most of the time, but some of it fell a little stiff and uncanny-valley-esque.

 The art style is sumptuous; All the critters are simple and cel-shaded, but very expressive, while the places they float by are beautifully rendered; Director Gints Zilbalodis and his crew frame everything via a restless, ever moving virtual camera. It did feel a little video-gamey a few times, especially because there's one specific game (called Submerged) which has very similar scenes of strange whales cavorting in the ruins of a submerged city; I'd be very surprised if they weren't an influence here.

 The story is simple - schematic, even; There are a couple of strange, unexplained surprises, but they feel more like random weirdness than a coherent mystery to decode. The plot is not really important here; It really is all about the flow.

**: Well, except fish; Flow does not extend its sympathy to the poor fish, only its mammal and avian life.

Fatal Deviation

 After watching both the Aussies and the Germans do their country proud with their martial arts skills, I started looking out for other martial arts films from unexpected countries. This is how I came to hear of Fatal Deviation, Ireland's first full-length martial arts picture. It was also dubbed one of the worst movies ever made by a bunch of humourless twits who obviously don't watch enough movies.

 It starts martial artist James Bennett as... Jimmy Bennett, a martial artist who returns home to his hometown, refurbishes his father's house, meets Nicola (Nicola O'Sullivan), a nice girl who works at the local supermarket, gets in a feud with the mob boss Mike (Michael Regan - are you noticing a pattern here?) that killed his father (whose son is dating Nicola, of course), and enters a secret, violent kumite-like tournament run by Christian monks which the mobsters are desperate to win as it will somehow determine the fate of the whole town. You know, just a day in the life in rural Ireland.

#Gandalfismysifu

 It's barely coherent, no one involved had any idea how to make an action movie, and it was made for next to no money. It's objectively bad. Also... kind of a lot of fun.

 Like many of these films, the whole thing is essentially the star's audition tape to get better parts in action movies; Bennett gathered a group of his mates and just shot scenes wherever people would let him (as you can imagine, this doesn't do wonders for the film's continuity). The main financier for the film (Regan) put money down with the condition he was given a juicy part. It should be a disaster. It... is a disaster, to be honest. The acting is terrible*, the filmmaking is all ugly 90's home video, with frequent A/V glitches and badly exposed scenes. The music... oh god, the music is particularly atrocious mix of horrid 'inspirational' pop and Casiotone incidental music.

 But there's so much enthusiasm put into the production that it's really hard to harbour it any ill will.
 It's full of padding, but most of it is so bizarre it's entertaining; Where other movies would have endless scenes of people walking around and pointless conversations (and to be clear, there is a bit of that here), the filler in Fatal Deviation tends toward the inspired. Why settle for a boring-ass mundane shit when you can have a man carefully setting up and then taking a bath in an outdoor bathtub with an open fire under it? Or Irish catholic Gandalf (Johnny Murray) training Jimmy by waving sticks at the camera? Or a musical montage where our hero remembers having tender sex with his girl, intercut with random, mundane interactions with the mobsters, intercut with our protagonist nodding thoughtfully? Or a picnic where our lovebirds lie among a scattering of random oranges all over the picnic blanket?

 The action is not great - Bennett and a few of the other combatants have some moves, but the choreographies are simple and making the fights look good is beyond the abilities of anyone involved; One of the weakest parts of the movie, the tournament, is actually the most action-packed. There are a couple of shootouts as well (including one where Bennett stands on his motorbike that reminded me of Top Secret!) that might as well have been filmed as a fingergun battles. Having said all that: there's a fairly cool car crash, and the modest stunts on display are still pretty impressive for a bunch of friends and acquaintances working out how to put a movie together as they go along. They do the Jackie-Chan-style bloopers reel at the end, and it gives you a pretty good idea how much harder doing this is than it looks - especially when there's no one around who knows how to handle stunts; A very simple four-foot fall seems to have been pretty painful for the actor involved.

 It'd be beyond wrong-headed not to grade this in a curve- and even if you don't, worst film ever my arse. At the very least Bennett and co. clearly understand and love the type of film they want to make, and they bring their own spin to it. You know that trope of the action guy stopping a violent robbery at a drugstore? Here the hero kicks the asses of two unconvincing random stoned chuckleheads making a nuisance of themselves at a Londis.

 OK, it's not a good spin, exactly, but it's unique and hugely entertaining.

 This is the rarely achieved so-bad-it's-good, as opposed to plain mediocre or cynical, and it's full of memorable, hilarious moments. If the batshit insane epilogue doesn't fill you with joy, I just don't know what to tell you.

 *: On a completely unrelated note, I should also mention that this is the film debut Mikey Graham (as Mike Graham, of course) of "Rock Band" Boyzone. I have no idea why I was reminded of this fact just now.

The Deaths of Ian Stone

 It's been a while since I've seen a movie that's so clearly a child of the '00s as British horror-adjacent opus The Deaths of Ian Stone. The desaturated pallete, aggressive editing and camerawork, the chintzy electronic music, the visual references... The first couple of minutes, which include an artfully distressed title card, reminded me so much of the infamous "You Wouldn't Steal A Car" piracy advert it got a disbelieving belly laugh out of me.

 Ian Stone (Mike Vogel) is a twenty-something hockey player who's grumpy because he gets puckus interruptus out of scoring a winning goal(?) on a technicality from an evil referee. Seriously, the referee is canonically evil. It's that sort of movie.
 Other than that mishap, his life seems pretty good, which makes it fairly off-putting as he whinges to his beautiful girlfriend (Christina Cole) on the ride home about how bad he has it. But I guess he was on to something; After he drops her off a mysterious, a vaguely grim-reaper-like shape lures him off his car and kills him at a railroad crossing.

 This is not the end for Ian, as he wakes from a nap on an office desk. He now works at an office where his girlfriend is just a co-worker, and lives in a huge, multi-story central London loft with another woman, Medea (Jaime Murray). But his previous life still haunts him, and weird shit keeps happening. It comes to a head when a random creep (Michael Feast) accosts him, claiming to know what's going on... and is dragged into the shadows before he can actually explain anything by the same dark-shrouded beings that killed Hokey Ian. Soon Ian is dead again and a new, different life starts, a few more wrinkles are added to the plot, then he dies again, and so on.

 This is not a good film by most reasonable metrics, but the way writer Brendan Hood and director Dario Piana carefully unspool their fantasy is kind of endearing: it's like an over-enthusiastic teen explaining everything about their meticulously planned-out World of Darkness RPG campaign.
 The main problem is that almost every elements here is borrowed. The film acts like a snapshot of the things the creators were into at the moment: Dark City, Jacob's Ladder, Butterfly Effect, The Frighteners, image comics like Witchblade and The Darkness, and so many other things; Somehow it's not surprising when several characters turn up wrapped in body-hugging vinyl suits, looking like refugees from a porn-level parody of The Matrix.

 It's the image comics influence that looms the most, especially as the film barrels on towards a series of alternatingly cheesy and cornball (but always juvenile) revelations that posit events as a sort of "dark" superhero origin story. Ambitious, for sure, but the budget struggles to contain the... let's call them heady concepts the script has dreamed up. There's one really good scene where Ian's worlds smash into each other, but when the script finally calls for some action it's a series of perfunctory, deeply underwhelming stabbings.

 Stan Winston has a prominent producer's credit and the film proudly touts its animatronics and makeup effects were built in his studios, but I'm sad to say the monsters don't look all that great, and are further undone by bone-headed decisions like making them periodically shake their head wildly in fast forward. That's an effect that worked precisely once, in Jacob's Ladder, and never again. The gore fares a little bit better - there are a lot of goopy, very bloody injuries, but they're all deeply unimaginative - stabs and slashes and the like.

 It's never scary, but that isn't really a problem as the film is going more after a Matrix-style mindfuck tone than actual horror. What does cause problems is a series of silly choices like letting a couple of villains keep their hockey jerseys throughout much of the movie, making it look like the protagonist is running away from high-school bullies.

 Acting is yet another weak point. It's... fine, for the most part. But Vogel, with his baby-faced good looks lacks the charisma to anchor the film, and Murray is soon outmatched when pitted against a script that saddles her with increasingly pretentious monologues. The great Michael Feast does what he can but even he is defeated by the cheese he's asked to dispense and the film's solemn, self-serious tone.

 I admire the ambition on display, but it's ultimately misplaced on a deeply derivative, juvenile edifice of hackwork. Both mildly likeable and fairly cringe-worthy, it's only an hour and a half and the pacing is fairly relentless... so at least it goes down quick.

Gateway

 Mike (Tim Creed) is part of a petty gang of criminals - pot dealers who squat in abandoned houses to grow their produce. He's haunted by the memory of a mysterious woman (Fiona Hardy) as the film accompanies him during a day out running deals, talking to an enforcer and various people higher up in the underworld pecking order, and getting a lead on a house they may be able to use to grow their next batch of weed.

 And the house seems well suited for their ends. Except that while they're scoping it out, they discover a locked room - and when that door is opened, bad things happen.

 Gateway is full of lurid details; Even while it's mostly about low-level criminals going around their day-to-day business, setting up their next job, it manages to cram in a torture victim and a few colourful characters. Later there are  various deaths, a very bizarre (and un-sexy) sex scene, plus a number of mysteries to unravel.

 But all of it is handled in the most unsensational way possible. The film is, I think, first and foremost an exercise in rigidly controlled tone. Stark characters, their stoic expressions frequently breaking into open grief, are framed against starker skies. There's no music, just silence - or else a carefully deployed atonal drone or sedate electronic cacophony; the sound design is excellent. The dialog, whether it's dealing with the realities of drug dealing or venting interpersonal grudges, is sparse, clipped, elliptical, as are the editing schemes for many of the scenes. The camera work is elegant, alternating between static shots and purposeful, precise movement where needed. The supernatural mystery at the heart of the movie makes little sense and has no interest in explaining itself, an enigma wrapped in an unassuming surrealist shroud.

 This is a willfully impenetrable film, a slow-burn that remains obstinately sedate and oblique even when things pick up and the bodies start piling up at an admirable pace in the back half. Writer/director Niall Owens and cinematographer Ger Murphy carefully build atmosphere until it's almost asphyxiating; It's a low-budget marvel that's low on horror and high on dread.
 I rather like it, but it's a bastard hard film to recommend.

She Came From The Woods

 One of the perks of doing a genre film is that there are a whole lot of conditions and signifiers that can effectively shield a movie from a lot of the criticism you can hurl its way. Is it a horror comedy? Then it doesn't need to be scary. Is it a slasher movie, especially one that harkens to the 80s? Then you can have insufferable characters, as much sleaze as you want, and the plot doesn't really matter as long as the stalking and kills are good. Is it low budget? Well, then I guess I'll overlook all the cut corners.

 None of these things are going to endear the movie to anyone outside its intended target audience, but as long as you have a good take on the few things that matter, some personality or, well, something to latch onto, people are going to forgive a lot.

 By choice and circumstance, Erik Bloomquist invokes all the examples I used above for his 80's throwback She Came From The Woods. What's more, he and sibling/script co-writer set the film in a summer camp and center it around the counselors on the very last day of camp, once the kids are all gone. That's... a very specific set of associations.

 As soon as they're alone, the counselors gather for some really, really mild debauchery, which includes the camp's resident wiseass, Peter (Spencer List) enacting a blood ritual to summon local boogeyman Agatha, a local witch supposedly executed years ago at the site for (I shit you not) botched homeopathical treatments or some such. I guess that counts as comedy, maybe? That these twenty-somethings are thinly drawn, deeply unlikeable, and act as if they were fucking twelve is... well, I refer you back to the first paragraph.

 Soon Agatha rises up and turns a few people at camp into murderers, most memorably turning the kids into a mob of marauding moppets. And that is pretty much the only flash of inspiration to be found in this movie. Other than that it's a complete bust, and that pointedly includes the few things it had to do right to get by: the humour, the kills, the suspense.

 It's almost as if it's not even trying. The problem with cutting genre stuff so much slack is that it opens the door for this sort of... I don't want to say low-effort, because getting even a tiny movie like this made takes a lot of people and a huge amount of work - but it allows certain movies to squeak by with nothing to provide except a certain sense of familiarity.

 I don't anyone involved here said "hey, the Friday the 13ths were shit*, let's just crank some nostalgia bait out". But aside from a technical level of competence that immediately puts it above... oh, I don't know, Camp Hell or something, it's all so sloppily put together, so bereft of anything of interest that it might just as well be.

 So let's start with the good: The production design and basic cinematography are fine. A couple of actors are ok. There's a nice burning man stunt, a couple decent makeup effects, and the fact that the menace is more supernatural than a dude with an axe shows some early potential. The movie never made me laugh,  but a handful of tongue-in-cheek moments I found (very low-key) amusing: a douchebag's cavalier attitude towards burning to death and subsequent final act of sleaziness, a pizza delivery dude interrupting the scheduled killings and chases, that sort of thing.

 For the bad, I'd just point you at everything else. The film's tone is all skewed; There are a couple of bad jokes at the beginning, mostly involving young kids being inappropriate, and a few later on - but the movie takes itself inexplicably seriously for long stretches, making the botched attempts at levity fail even harder. So the comedy's dead on arrival, and the scares are laughable.

 Even worse, the kills are fucking staid, other than the psycho kid mob. There's some variety to all the the murdering... as long as it's boring and mundane: axe chops, stabbings, rock to the head, shotgun blast to the head - all done with next to no elan. There's a lot of blood but very little gore; One well-made head crushing aside you can ignore the rest. Even the requisite exploding head is done with very crummy-looking CGI.

 The acting is terrible, with a couple of exceptions who are undone by their terrible characters. And the script... oh man, where to even begin. It pisses away the potential of the villain with a wall-to-wall series of contrivances, pointless escapades, and lazy, lazy errors and handwaving. A few examples: The resident douchebag outright murders another counselor in front of a colleague, and it's never brought up again; A group of murderous campers are imprisoned at one point, with one exception- but when the time comes for that escapee to kill someone, the murderer ends up being one of the other kids, one whom we know is locked away. A key bit of data regarding Agatha is revealed... by a character just deciding to go over boxes of old files, with no discernible motive to do so. 

 The mythology is fucking inane - the menace is inconsistent and, in the end, pretty, uh, unmenacing. A (conceptually nice) bit of fireside exposition is not just boring, it includes an admission of wrongdoing that is both unnecessary and unintentionally hilarious; The biggest laugh of the movie comes at its own expense. 

 

 Seriously, just don't bother with this one unless you feel a compulsion to watch every horror summer camp movie ever made (and if so, my sympathies). We need to stop giving shit like this a pass (it's currently standing at an inexplicable 73% over at Rotten Tomatoes) just because it looks like horror comfort food; Maybe then people will wait until they have something to offer before offering it.
 One can hope.

*: I shouldn't have to say this, but: the Friday the 13ths are categorically not shit and are, for the most part, a lot better than people give them credit for.

Anora

 Anora's a really fun sort-of-crime sort-of-comedy from Sean Baker, who's really been firing on all cylinders in the last few years. Ani (Mickey Madison), the title character, does some tremendous work as a young stripper who sometimes supplements her income with escort work for clients she likes.

 Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) is one such client: a 21-year old heir to a Russian fortune who's evidently a little dipshit, but also charming in his own moronic way, and, more importantly, profligate with his money and completely taken with Anora.

 A few nights together turn into a two-week 'girlfriend experience' where Ivan and Ani and some Russian friends burn through reams of money in a decadent, drug-fueled hedonistic spree that ends, predictably, in Las Vegas. While there Ivan laments that his parents want him to go back to Russia to work, and that he could stay if he got married to a local... which leads to the both of them getting married at a Vegas chapel.

 Colour no one surprised when it doesn't last long; Ivan's family, horrified by the rumours they're hearing, get the idiot's local minder Toros (Karren Karagulian) and a couple of thugs (Yura Borisov and Vache Tovmasyan) to grab the couple and force them to annul their marriage.

 Ivan flees into the night as soon as they arrive, leaving Ani to deal with the consequences. The film then turns into a sort of "one crazy night" narrative as the three thugs and an effectively kidnapped Ani desperately search for Ivan in a bid to get the marriage cancelled before his parents arrive stateside.

 It's a strange film, one that works despite a bit of a tonal mishmash thanks to a very strong central performances, good cinematography (by Drew Daniels) and Baker's usual eye for mundane detail and off-beat characters and situations. I wasn't all that taken with the first third, to say the least - what with its focus on the dumb, shallow, wealthy and ridiculously attractive. It's almost like going through the Instagram of someone I'd rather not even know the existence of, and features some hilariously repellent music and the sort of decadence that made me kind of wish there'd be a horror movie-style comeuppance later on. But the film's second-act pivot is effective in that the fulcrum - a genuinely upsetting (yet somehow still funny) home invasion - is deftly handled, and in that the Elmore-Leonard-style petty-criminal bungling in the ensuing search for Ivan is often hilarious.

  Anora's faith in Ivan is pretty hard to swallow, The guy is so evidently immature, such an obvious douchebag, that his flakiness is never in doubt, and it makes Anora look like an idiot for placing her trust in him. I can easily see how that, plus the first part of the movie, plus Anora being a bit of a brat who doesn't get a lot of characterization beyond her brashness and profession, could break the movie for some.

 But in defense of Baker's script: despite the romantic sweep of the cinematography during their marriage, it never really turns into a love story. Anora obviously feels at least some affection for the kid, but there's a lot of room for calculation, too. Also, she's only 23, so I guess she's young enough to be allowed to be an idiot (different characters' ages are pointedly brought up at different times).

 There's another component, which is Baker's usual class consciousness coming to the fore. An integral part of Anora's shock and indignation at the whole situation is... well, the universal shock and indignation we're all feeling these days at just how much rich people can get away with. Even the most sympathetic of the thugs, the one who consistently shows a conscience, thinks nothing of wrecking an innocent (working-class) man's shop at the behest of his masters.
 You'd think a sex worker of all people would be used to the world being unfair - a lesson most people learn in their teens, if not earlier. It's not subtle or sophisticated, but that doesn't make the outrage any less valid.

 Has it been overhyped? Well, yeah, maybe. All the attention it's been getting might make the movie ripe for a backlash, but it's still a good one. Not Baker's best, not by a long shot, but definitely his most fun. And in any case, I'm not one to turn my nose up at a sex-positive, digressive, Elmore Leonard-esque confection that's not afraid to mix in a tiny bit of grit with its screwball comedy.

Errementari

 I tend to be down on Netflix original movies, but that's a stance heavily coloured by their would-be blockbuster attempts - the shit they put out with Snyder or the Russo brothers, for example. But in their eternal hunger for ever more content, they've also done the world a favour giving money to, say, German or Spanish martial artists to fund their action epics, not to mention giving funding to people like Jeremy Saulnier and Pablo Larrain, or snatching interesting projects like Nimona from oblivion.

 This is a really roundabout way to say I really appreciate it when they use the some chump change (from the money they got by breaking movie business with their unsustainable practices) to help get stuff like Errementari made.

 The title sounds like the beginning of a racist joke, but it just means Blacksmith in Basque; It refers to a scattering of ancient European folk tales (according to some ethnographers, one of the oldest known) about a blacksmith who makes a deal with hell and ends up getting the better of old scratch.

 The blacksmith in question is Patxi (Kandido Uranga); A man so evil, so cruel, the animated prelude informs us, that the devil himself would learn to fear him. He spends a good part of the first act off-screen, an ogre-like hermit cooped up in his old smithy.

 The film instead follows some of the regulars of the local inn as they try and help a visiting government official (Ramón Agirre) in locating some gold the smith was said to have stolen during the first Carlist war - and also Usue (Uma Bracaglia), a little bullied girl who may have some relationship to the old man.

 The inn crowd runs afoul of Patxi soon enough, setting the residents of the small town in a collision course with him. Usue, meanwhile, steals away into the smithy, and ends up freeing the demon the Smith had imprisoned in an iron cage. Oops!

 The script (by director Paul Urkijo Alijo and Asier Guerricaechebarría) is all over the place, especially in the early going, but the shambolic structure helps give the film a strangely offbeat, authentic feel, and when things go to hell (figuratively at first, then literally) it's hard to predict where the story is going. But the focus remains on the characters and their destination is, thank goodness, hugely satisfying - I have a lot of time for a movie that manages to juggle sweetness and badassery.

 It never even attempts being scary, but that's ok - this is horror only by default, and it's better to think of it as dark fantasy or even a fairy tale. It certainly looks like one. Colours are tightly controlled - it looks a little fake in one or two shots, but most of the time it's beautiful; The movie owns its artificiality. Paul Urkijo Alijo and cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreu also use non-standard framing to make things feel a little mythical; For example, I love a scene that tracks Usue as sneaks into a room, but she's in the background, out of focus - the camera stays on the smith's sleeping face throughout. It feels like a scene out of Jack and the Beanstalk. And as you'd expect out of a dark fairy tale, the film also takes some visual cues from Guillermo Del Toro.

 But things never get quite as dark as its closest touchstone, Pan's Labyrinth. There's quite a bit of humour threaded throughout: some of it home-baked (got to love those ubiquitous bear traps), some of it courtesy of a faithful display of the visual wit of medieval demonology (expect faces in inappropriate places). The themes are heavy, but not too much so, and while it's rooted in medieval Christianism there are more than a few welcome modern touches, such as the Sandman-like detail that human souls go to hell because they want to be punished.

The effects are excellent for the modest budget - a mixture of really great makeup with digital touch-ups for that signature Bosch/Bruegel look. The acting is mostly strong - there are a couple of iffy child actors, and it took me a while to warm up to Bracaglia's Usue, but I was fully on-board with her soon enough. What kept throwing me off, as a native Spanish speaker, is that the Basque language falls into a sort of uncanny valley where it really sounds like Spanish but I couldn't make out a single word. Pretty disconcerting, but obviously neither a major problem nor something I can blame on anyone but myself.

 Despite a slow start, this was a lovely treat - imaginative, unique, and affecting - an idiosyncratic take on a folk tale, tweaked for modern sensibilities but fairly faithful to the mostly medieval mindset that spawned it. Well... except for a certain sympathy for the devils, but that's a given in these degenerate, godless times.

Dampyr

 First impressions for Italian dark fantasy vampire extravaganza Dampyr couldn't be any less promising. No, I don't just mean the Sony Pictures logo at the beginning (though this movie does end up confirming that they have the worst quality control department when it comes to scripts).

 The whole prelude, which involves three old witches who are also hot young women helping another woman give birth while issuing a magical restraining order to the vampire father, is chock-full of ugly CGI and cheesy shots. It all feels like a deeply shit comic book movie... and sure enough, it turns out it's an adaptation of a long-running Italian comic and an attempt to jump start yet another cinematic universe.

 The baby grows up to be Harlan (Wade Briggs), a sullen-looking pretty boy who wanders Yugoslavia during the height of the Balkan war using his half-human, half-vampire birth to milk credulous villagers of their belongings by running fake exorcisms with the aid of his agent/hype man Yuri (Sebastian Croft, terrible).

 That lineage, which also gives him a reputation as a vampire killer, bites him in the ass when a group of soldiers decide he's the only one who can help when they take over an abandoned village and are attacked by the undead.

 Harlan soon discovers, to his astonishment, that his blood is acid to vampires. Also, that most vampires look like punks from a bad '80s videogame for some reason. So he joins up with one of the soldiers (Stuart Martin) and a cute vampire love interest (Frida Gustavsson) to take the fight to the "Master of the Night" Gorka (David Morrisey in Severus Snape drag).

 This is categorically not a good movie - the script (by Mauro Boselli, Giovanni Masi, Alberto Ostini and Mauro Uzzeo) is dumb as all hell, its mythology and plot deeply uninteresting. Acting's often atrocious, and the action is severely lacking. But the war-torn setting - which soon moves from the abandoned town to a shell-shocked city - is interesting, and director Riccardo Chemello and cinematographer Vittorio Omodei Zorini pepper the runtime with some dramatically lit, very atmospheric shots.

Hey, is that a reference to Low's Double Negative there in the foreground?

 The effects are mostly decent for a relatively low-budget movie like this - it's all very fake-looking, but I liked the various ways vampires crumble into dust; They fare a lot worse when trying to do more overt fantastical stuff, but there's not a too much of that. The makeup effects and (light) gore are pretty well made, too. Needle drops consist of era-appropriate An Emotional Fish (remember them?) and Lou Reed's Take a Walk on the Wild Side, both diegetic; Lorenzo Tomio's soundtrack is not memorable, but accompanies the action well.

 Befitting its vampire subjects, this is a movie that mostly cares about looking cool, and after adjusting expectations downwards after the introduction I was mostly fine with that. Just don't expect me to give the tiniest fraction of a fuck about any of the dumbass characters or the laughably portentous setup for a sequel.

The Devil Conspiracy

 I'd ignored The Devil's Conspiracy for a while, thinking of its overtly weird, batshit premise as a sort of gimmick - something like, say, Sharknado, a bit of imaginative flair to draw the jaded modern b-movie punters. Then I noticed Shudder got it for their lineup, and that made me wonder if the movie might actually be worthwhile; Their curators usually have an eye for stuff that, even when I don't like it, I find at least interesting.

 Well... whatever they saw in it, I completely missed it. I have no idea if this inane, amorphous blob of bullshit is cynical or sincere (I tend to think the former), but earnest or not it's a terrible fucking movie with precious little to recommend it. Yes, it's so bad that it made me laugh a few times. Yes, describing why it's bad is going to make it sound kind of awesome. Such is the way of these things.

Here we see the devil fetus climbing out of the ultrasound monitor like Sadako.
 Ugh, I'm not doing a good job of not selling this, am I?

 In case you don't know, the premise for this movie is that a bunch of devil worshippers steal the shroud of Turin to get Jesus's DNA so they can build a baby whose frame is strong enough to hold Lucifer, who was chained in hell by the archangel Michael at the dawn of time. That's shown at the prologue, by the way - Lucifer quotes Milton's famous line as he's imprisoned, of course (or I guess he improvises it, and Milton later somehow hears of it) - but that's a good early indicator of the movie's pervasively shoddy writing, since it's not really hell at that point, nor does he have anyone else to reign over.

 The plot built around that doozie of an inciting event is that a hunky Italian priest (Joe Doyle) gets killed trying to prevent the robbery of the shroud. As he lays dying he invokes the archangel Michael to come over and set things aright. As you do. So he gets possessed by dour old mick and basically becomes a superhero.
 Oh, and an American art student (Alice Orr-Ewing) gets kidnapped at the same time; You never know when Satan is going to need a body to incubate his new Jesus body.

 What follows is ostensibly a mixture between a Marvel movie and Dan Brown. It's certainly as brain-dead as Dan Brown (or the worst of MCU, for that case), but the script by one Ed Alan finds a fresh way to dumb things down up by getting completely lost after some pretty basic action shenanigans - and it never really recovers. Instead we get endless scenes of people spouting drivel/exposition at each other or belabouring uninteresting character dynamics, dumb plot developments, and powerless people getting monologued to death by moustache-twirling cartoon villains. (The acting ranges from serviceable to atrocious, but the villains are uniformly awful.)
 Worse yet, when our protagonists inevitably free themselves, the film's modest budget and an aversion to have any decent action whatsoever conspire to prevent absolutely anything interesting from happening. That's often the case with these things - put a crazy, eye-catching premise, and then bore your viewers to death. Also, the dialogue features several extremely clunky lines that made me think that it could have benefitted from a couple of passes from a native English speaker. (Hey, just like this blog!)

 The writing and plotting are bad enough that when you see that the scriptwriter is also the producer, and that these are their only two credits... well, it's hard to avoid drawing conclusions.

 The themes are hammered early and hammered strong. There are a couple of discussions about whether demons and angels are abstract forces or actual entities that's so on the nose I started to fear that the Louvin Brothers would come on the soundtrack like they did at the end of Dark Match. Oh, and because I failed spectacularly to bring it up last time, I have to share their infamous album cover for it:

You're welcome!

 Later, the conflict between faith and science is basically literalized. This is a movie that works really hard to earn the right to be called dumbass.

 As for the good bits... well, director Nathan Frankowski has a certain visual flair, although his style is pretty unoriginal, murky, and he can't shoot action worth shit. There's a little bit of well-realized gore (the film had to get a horror tag somehow), and a couple moments of levity indicate that the people behind it aren't so far up their own arseholes that they can't crack a couple of jokes; I mean, the archangel-possessed priest almost immediately finds a cool leather trench coat to wear, and it's played in at least a slightly self-aware way.

 The best laughs, though, are completely unintended. There's a head-stomping scene that's so ill advised, so poorly acted and framed, that it had me in stitches. The perpetrator later glugs down a bottle of chlorine, which sounds like it'd be President Trump's second favorite COVID cure, and deploys caustic amniotic fluids. The best part? After watching all that madness, a jealous villain mutters, solemnly, "That should have been me." And I can't tell if we're supposed to think it's exposing the inner working of that character's psyche or howl with laughter. Again, I suspect it's the the former, which just makes it funnier..

 Diabolic fetuses will never be not hilarious, and there's a staggeringly fragrant example of that here (see the first capture above). Veteran character actor James Faulkner is non-plussed when he meets archangel Michael in the flesh, and it's pretty funny that he's on a first-name basis with him (though, to be fair, it's impossible to be anything else).

 Oh, and at the end a little kid bullies Satan's soul by letting him out of his nose and then inhaling him back... like a kid letting his spit dangle before sucking it back in. And that, ladies, gentlemen and otherkin, that is the fucking climax of the movie!

 Yeah, yeah, spoilers. Honestly, in this particular case, I couldn't give a shit.

 Seriously, fuck this movie. It has the courage of its batshit convictions, at least, but all that means is that we get a self-serious pile of steaming turds instead of a smart-alecky mound of the same. And once it runs out of steam within the first half, it becomes another bog-standard snoozefest of a mockbuster that is perfectly content just wasting time and doesn't even build up to anything remotely exciting.

 I feel like locking the gate here and setting a flaming sword on top of it to keep people away, but I fear I'm just lighting a beacon for the 'so bad it's good' crowd. It's not, but I understand... and who knows? Maybe you'll get more out of it than I did.

Daddy's Head

 Young Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) never had the best of relationships with his stepmother Laura (Julia Brown) - it was James (Charles Aitken), the head of the family, whom they both loved and held things together; After he passes away in the aftermath of a car accident, Isaac and Laura start pulling further apart. And that's even before a shape-shifting monster wearing Daddy's Head comes a-calling at their remote modernist home and starts trying to... turn Isaac against all other grown ups? It's not really clear.

 It's a punishingly slow film, one that doesn't flesh out its characters nor its scares, leaving nearly every scene feeling a little hollow, a little unsatisfying. Very little happens, which could be excused if there was any heft to the emotions or themes on display, but the characters and their relationships are all basic and fairly schematic. The script, by director Benjamin Barfoot has some good writing and the makings of a compelling enough situation, but fails to bring it to life or take it anywhere interesting - everything feels perfunctory, and it doesn't help that it often casts its protagonists as severely unlikable, empathy-free jerks. The acting, while fine, is fully in sync with the film's overriding dourness.

 The direction at least is on-point, with some beautiful cinematography from Miles Ridgway. The set design - especially a forest stick fort to end all forest stick forts - is excellent, as is the creature, a creepy CGI creation which remains frustratingly elusive all the way to the end. The glimpses we get are extremely effective, but it all builds up to a confrontation that is almost comically underwhelming. 

 File this one under: Handsome, slow-burn elevated horror with very little to say. A little above Antlers,  maybe, but not a lot. Cool monster, though; Wish they'd had the money or wherewithal to do a little more with it. 

Life After Fighting

 Life After Fighting is a passion/vanity project from Aussie martial artist and stuntman - and now writer/director/star Bren Foster. Like most vanity projects, it's a little clumsy, a little indulgent... but unlike the vast majority of them, it's a magnificent showcase for some truly talented performers to strut their stuff. Eventually. But most of the rest of it is pretty enjoyable, too.

 Foster plays the protagonist Alex Faulkner as one of those invulnerable, almost-perfect sweethearts; even his major trauma/flaw would count as a humble brag for anyone else (he didn't loose his undisputed world champion title, you see - he threw that fight because his heart wasn't in it).

 This sort of thing is usually pretty fucking annoying, but Foster is so damn nice and likeable in the role it's all but impossible to hate this square doofus. Alex runs a dojo, loves kids, tries to stay out of trouble, starts a sweet relationship with the mom of one of the kids (Cassie Howarth) when she asks him out... low-key, relatable stuff, shown at a leisurely pace with lots of footage of him training with his students.

 There is some drama: There's a hungry young martial artist making the rounds trying to get Alex to come out of retirement, his new girlfriend's ex (Luke Ford) is one of those creepily possessive dudes who also tries to start some shit with him, and two strangers show up at his class, beat up his students and insult Alex's martial arts (a classic).

 I'd actually have liked this movie a lot more, I think, if it had stayed a slightly digressive indie drama with a few fights thrown in here and there. But if you've seen the trailer, you know that a child trafficking ring derails everything by kidnapping the children of the dojo's receptionist (Annabelle Stephenson). Jerks!
 To its credit, the film tries to do justice to its grim subject matter by treating everything extremely seriously, so the film becomes first a drama and then a thriller before it can go back to being about people beating the living shit out of each other.

 This approach unfortunately comes with more than a few problems.

 The drama is fine, but staid, and it feels a little like a TV movie; The thriller aspects don't fare as well. The law of narrative economy dictates that the plot tie back to one of the prior conflicts, so the identity of the villains ends up being both unsurprising and uncomfortably contrived. And once our protagonists discover what's going on, their choices start getting pretty... well, dumb. Let's just say that this movie would have been a hell of a lot shorter if Alex had remembered he was carrying a mobile phone.
 And yes, I'm perfectly happy ignoring plot holes or handwaving when a script's trying to move things from fight A to fight B, but here everything's taken seriously enough to bloat the running time to beyond two hours, so I think it's fair to put it to task.

 It's still enjoyable, but the film does sag quite a bit in its middle section, and it gets pretty dark; I'm used to tonal whiplash from Asian films, but I was surprised here at how far Life After Fighting was willing to go with normally taboo subjects. The good news is that once all the chips fall in place, the last forty or so minutes of the movie consist of a prolonged fight pitting Alex against a platoon of very hateable evil assholes. It's just as good as you'd hope it could be.
 Alex faces off against a mostly interchangeable rota of thugs; Of the two exceptions, one is a guy he handily defeated previously, and the other (the 'boss') chooses to keep a balaclava on through the whole fight, denying us the pleasure of hateful stares, shocked expressions and moments of begrudging respect. The fights are complex and very well filmed; The edits mostly consist of long takes, the cameras have a habit of moving along with the action, and everyone displays an admirable Hong-Kong-like willingness to be thrown against the furniture, breaking wood panels, windows, and in a particularly painful-looking move, a glass display case. The choreography (also by Foster) does get a little repetitive at times but it's expertly delivered by everyone involved and it mixes a variety of styles to great effect. I'm no expert, but I counted Tae Kwon Do, Muay Thai/Kickboxing, Krav maga and a whole lot of Jiu Jitsu.

 That last epic battle does a lot to redeem the film; It truly does belong in the canon of great western martial arts fights. Most of the film's problems are self-inflicted by tackling a plot that's a little too dark for a film where a knife does an exaggerated swish! sound every time it swings, and a little too complex for the somewhat clumsy script to deliver on successfully. But all this also kind of makes the whole endeavour endearingly ambitious, and the villains all the more hateful.

 Let's hope Mr. Foster has a few more like these in him, or that it gets him some well deserved recognition, and hopefully a starring role.

Strange Darling

 "A Thriller in 6 chapters" Announces a small blurb beneath the film's title. And then the film proper starts with a title card announcing Chapter 3.

 Strange darling is a playful, beautifully constructed serial killer epic obfuscated by a splintered chronology; It front-loads the action, throwing us in media res as "The Demon" (Kyle Gallner) chases "The Lady" (Willa Fitzgerald) first around a forest and then (after another chapter jump) in a cosy house. Earlier chapters are introduced later on to give some context to the cat and mouse games so we can assemble what's actually going on.
 It's not a hugely complex script, but writer/director JT Mollner expertly paces his reveals and pulpy twists throughout so that the film changes shape slightly a couple of times, and it goes far afield enough that a few developments got a chuckle out of me. I don't really want to go into it any more - at the risk of overhyping how clever and twisty this is (it isn't), it's definitely one of those films where it's best to go in knowing as little about it as possible.

 It looks gorgeous, with excellent direction from Mollner and some truly beautiful cinematography from Giovanni Ribisi(!), who also has a producer credit. Seriously, I cannot over-emphasize how good this movie looks: all grain, saturated colours, and a mixture of bright natural and lurid artificial lighting. You can be sure that the script finds ways to take advantage of it, decking, say, the lady in an all-red outfit to run through a vibrant Oregon forest. "Shot entirely on 35mm", a huge blurb proclaims in the title credits - I've seen some people mock that online, but I think the movie earns bragging rights by looking this damn good.

 The acting is also phenomenal, especially from Fitzgerald, who fully inhabits a very complicated character (and makes for a very convincing scream queen) - Gallner's also pretty good. Genre vet Barbara Hershey, character actor Ed Begley Jr., and some others put in some fun appearances as random bystanders, but the film is very much about its protagonists; I'd be very surprised if it doesn't make Fitzgerald into a much bigger star.

 Things get a bit grisly - not in an over the top way, things are more seeping wounds than exploding heads, and the effects are very well made. The music consists of pretty, sparse indie pop which made me think of Cat Power's covers - especially as a cover of Love Hurts has a pretty prominent place in the film. All the songs are by Z Berg, and the movie packs in a surprising amount of them. 

 

  So yeah, I'd highly recommend this one. I'm a bit wary of how highly praised it's been - A lot of the reactions I've seen severely overstate how clever it is, for example, and I'd argue that the film doesn't have that much to say once it lays all its cards on the table; But seeing things play out is still fun, and it maintains a very respectable level of cruelty. It made me think of Pearl a little bit, mostly for its technicolor exuberance, controlled but playful direction, and one shot near the end. This one's not nearly as good... but hey, it's still a pretty big compliment.

Mickey 17

 Mickey (Edward Pattinson) is an expendable. He signed his life away to escape an ugly situation on Earth; In exchange, he gets to go off-planet on a colony ship run by a failed politician with delusions of grandeur (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Toni Collette).

 His function on the ship is, quite literally, to die for science. His conscience is transferred, somehow, between deaths, stored on a 'brick' (the prop for which is, in a good example of the film's loopy humour, an actual brick), and his new bodies are created by a machine that spits them out with the same juddering, back and forth spasms as an inkjet printer. The crew frivolously use him to examine the deadly effects of space radiation, foreign pathogens, experimental drugs; A recyclable human test subject.

 His occupation makes him all but a pariah on the ship, an untouchable for all except for Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer who takes an inexplicable and fierce romantic interest in Mickey and stays with him throughout all his incarnations.

 The main plot of the film kicks in after the colony ship arrives at their destination, an icy planet appropriately named Niflheim. Mickey's current incarnation, 17, is left for dead on an icy crevice, and is rescued by the planet's native life forms (counterintuitively cute insectoids that look like wood lice and move like excited French bulldogs). But in the time it takes him to get back to the ship, they've already printed out 18 - leaving them as multiples, a situation that marks them both for disposal. And from there the film shoots out in multiple (sorry) directions at once.

 At its heart Mickey 17 (the film, not the character) is a farce, a pretty unsubtle satire that runs its titular protagonist through a bunch of ridiculous situations, bouncing off cartoony characters. It's nominally sci-fi, but despite a killer production design and some lip service to depicting how future technologies might impact society at large, its got no real interest in that genre; It's a comedy through and through, and it will happily contradict its internal rules for the sake of an easy joke or an exciting scene. Par for the course with Hollywood sci-fi.

 The satire becomes a bit more pointed in its second half, with the introduction of a racist agenda, odes to failing upwards and self-serving jingoism. It's impossible to avoid assigning targets to the film's barbs, but they are pretty toothless and vague, seemingly by design; Ruffalo and Collette's power couple, for example, take pains to at least appear to be respectful to others, which is at severe odds with their real-world analogue's performative anti-wokeness. Isn't that depressing? Satirical, fictional dystopian politicians are better than what we've got.

 Likewise, the whole second half of the movie devolves into a bloated morass of plotlines and contrivances. Writer/Director Bong Joon-ho throws together a bunch of his usual preoccupations (class warfare, lack of empathy, exploitation) but he's hobbled by an uncharacteristic optimism which robs the movie of a lot of its intended bite; Thematically, it's integral to the story -it doesn't feel at all the result from exec notes or test audience polls- but the sloppy execution makes it feel off. His script has a lot of solid ideas and jokes, but the plotting is somewhat unsatisfying, and his seeming contempt for his characters' internal lives makes some late-game triumphs feel hollow.

 There's more than enough good stuff to make the film entirely worthwhile, though. Joon ho's directing is, as usual, incredible (there's a dinner scene here that should handily make him a contender come awards season), the cinematography by Darius Khondji is characteristically beautiful, and the special effects are excellent.
  I love that the script ensures every single character in the movie except Mickey 17 (but including 18) becomes a cartoonish asshole at least some of the time. That doesn't do wonders for their likeability or coherence, but it does get a few laughs and I see it as thematic: Even a different version of Mickey gets to be an unempathetic, but redeemable jackass. Ruffalo's comedic take on a showboat politician is as broad as a barn - a less restrained cousin to his rake in Poor Things - but it is very funny, as is Steve Yeun as a self-serving "friend" or the callous gaggle of scientists that very excitedly observe and take notes on Mickey's agony.
 Pattinson's turn is very enjoyably buffoonish: he is a well-meaning idiot as the protagonist, and a volatile psycho idiot in his next incarnation. But his meekness as 17 is endearing, and the fact that (partly due to circumstance) he never turns into a raging asshole like everyone else does makes him a successful anchor for the film.

 If I had to be honest, I'd recommend every other Bong Joon-ho film I've seen over this one; Too many of its jokes don't really work, and it feels too undisciplined, too self-indulgent, and ultimately, a little forgettable . But it still made me laugh quite a bit, it frequently looks incredible, and there's nothing else quite like it.

Blind War (Mang zhan)

 For all its many, many faults, you can't blame Blind War for not being entertaining. And it's never more entertaining than during its first ten minutes: a courtroom-set symphony of gunfire that includes a priest opening fire on a judge, a clown getting dramatically mowed down by the police, and the pretty defense lawyer stabbing a policeman. There's a gatling gun, a flying... helium? canister, multiple explosions and a small army of policemen and criminals going at it within the building and in the street outside.

 The action is.... well, it's more about quantity than quality; There are some cool moves, but the choreography is not that complex, it's not cut well, and the CGI explosions and blood effects are pretty bad. It is pretty fun, though.

 During that fracas the heroic captain Dong Gu (Andy On) manages to put down the main villain, but it comes with two consequences (or CONSEQUENCES, as the Baba Yaga would say, nodding sagely): First, he's permanently blinded by a close-range flashbang detonation. And second, he earns the mortal enmity of a psychotic woman (Yang Xing) when he kills her lover.

 This movie plays like a deadpan spoof of eighties action movies, starting with the fact that after all his heroics Dong Gu gets blamed of incompetence by his by-the-book boss and run out of the police force. He's understandably miffed, and has trouble adapting to his new sightless civilian life; But with the help of his teen-aged daughter, he learns that his preternatural hearing (signalled by his twitching ears, a visual device I never stopped finding hilarious) is actually a pretty decent substitute for eyesight. This is way more Daredevil than Zatoichi or Blind Fury.

 Since his daughter is all he has to live for, she of course gets abducted during a trip abroad. But, get this: she gets abducted by same crime family that was on trial in that initial shootout. And it's all happenstance! They just run a human trafficking ring and she was available (in the backstage of a prestigious classical music concert - you know, the type of place lowlife thugs would normally haunt). The script (by Laogou Lin) is... well, let's just be charitable and say its sole concern is to facilitate action scenes.

 When Dong Gu goes on a rampage to recover his daughter, the psycho who has it out for him sees him on TV, breaks out of prison, murders a police woman and takes her place to get close to him. "I'll get close to my enemy and use him to get revenge on the old bosses who raped me" is a novel angle for a villain, but based on the evidence here I doubt it'll catch on.

 From there the duo start working their way up the crime ladder to get to the head of the trafficking ring.

 Oh, and there are extremely ill-advised attempts at broad comedy, mostly thanks to a hapless local cop. They are painful to watch, and I say this as someone who's somewhat inured to this sort of sort of thing thanks to a lifetime of watching martial arts films. At one point they have the guy use the body of an innocent murdered woman as a (terrible) punchline, a rotten cherry on top of the shit pile.

 Blind War is an incredibly fucking stupid movie. It's haphazardly put together (I don't normally notice continuity errors, but I saw quite a few here) and poorly conceptualized. Andy On is fine as the protagonist, but his fellow cast members have a huge appetite for scenery; It's hard to fault them for bad acting when excess seems to be their goal, but it still comes off as a little cringe-worthy.

 And speaking of excess, Director Suiqiang Huo works overtime to make every single scene as epic as he can, with the result that the film becomes a extremely unwieldy. He employs speed ramping, slow motion, arc shots... it really does feel like the spoof of a heightened action movie, especially when the cameras are orbiting two people while they have a relatively non-important conversation as if it was an epic revelation. The music follows suit, and is painfully intrusive. Especially during the 'comedy' bits.

 So it's a good thing that the film's got a lot of action; It's not, as mentioned above, great action, but it's frequent, loud and pleasingly excessive. It does not compare well at all to movies from the 87eleven team or (the more direct comparison) the Hong Kong action epics from the 80s and 90s, but taken as its own thing - especially when considering it seems to be a relatively low-budget title - it's... all right. Consider this a very reticent recommendation, but please don't hold me responsible for any brain damage.

The Tunnel

 In 2007 the Australian government decided to tap into huge reservoirs of water that had filtered through to the abandoned tunnels beneath Sydney. The move gained some notoriety thanks to worries about a transient population of homeless people living underground, but it all came to nothing - the project was suddenly swept under the rug, quietly cancelled.

 That's the fictional basis for The Tunnel, an Australian found footage film that follows a film crew that tries to find out what the story was behind the sudden, mysterious death of the controversial water-recycling project. After being stonewalled by the government, journalist Natasha Warner leads a small news crew (illegally, and under false pretenses) into the darkness beneath the city. Where, of course, they are stalked and picked off one by one by... something.

 The film is framed as a documentary looking into what happened in this expedition, alternating between talking head interviews, the footage they shot both before and during their doomed underground jaunt, and incidental footage from surrounding security cameras. There's a surprising amount of buildup covering the office politics at the newsroom, and it informs the inevitable character conflict when things go wrong later; The film's premise also gives a credible justification for everything being on film (although, as usual, that gets a little contrived late in the game) and it allows the movie to look a little better than it would were it just people waving cameras around. You get footage of the film discussing how to get interstitials and pickup shots, and you also get to see those shots as well, which is rather clever.

 The characters are simple but well-developed. The technical crew (Steve Miller and Luke Arnold) are a pair of knuckleheads who have a very credible dynamic, and their producer (Andy Rodoreda) is pretty good as the one trying to hold things together.
 It's interesting that while the film makes it perfectly clear that Warner's carelessness is 100% responsible for the crew's dire straits (and a couple of deaths), she still comes off as sympathetic thanks to a near-constant stream of casual chauvinist comments from the people that are supposed to be supporting her.

 There's a lot of running around in dark tunnels, of course, and lots of murky scenes shot with night vision cameras. Director Carlo Ledesma doesn't find a way to make all the scrambled footage cinematic, but a good ambiance, some grisly findings, a very clever "oh shit, we're being watched" moment and a couple of well-placed jump scares keep the tensions running high.
 All the darkness also keeps whatever lurks in The Tunnel nice and mysterious. It's a gamble made necessary by the film's very low budget, but it works beautifully here; The few glimpses we get of it are extremely effective. The director and Writers/producers/editors Julian Harvey and Enzo Tedeschi do a good job of leaning into their limitations.

 The Tunnel seems almost forgotten these days - seemingly eclipsed by As Above So Below, which came a couple of years later and is inferior to this one in most ways that count. It's a very solid entry into the found footage horror pile.

Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer fait tousser)

 I'm pretty fond of French nutjob Quentin Dupieux. His movies may be somewhat half-baked, indifferently shot, and often frustrating - the guy has next to zero interest in conventional narrative - but they're always funny, batshit crazy, and at the very least interesting.

 Smoking Causes Coughing is, as far as I know, his first superhero movie. And by that, I mean it's a Super Sentai (Power Rangers, basically) spoof that soon loses interest in its setup and digresses into a series of short stories first told by the cast, then characters who stumble into the frame, and then... well, best not to spoil one of the film's biggest laughs.

 Benzène (Gilles Lellouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercure (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Ammoniaque (Oulaya Amamra) are the Tobacco Force, a group of superpowered avengers that assemble into a deadly, toxic force. They are introduced fighting a beautifully crafted Power Ranger-esque walking turtle in a scene that has got it all: Flying kicks, ineffective shuriken, the line "Let's give him a cacer!", and a joyful shower of viscera that somehow reaches a distant family watching the fight through binoculars.

The actors actually stumble back before the barrage of oncoming entrails. It's glorious.

 During the fight, Mercure has some problems focusing his powers, as apparently he's not sincere enough. And sure enough, after the fight their splinter-like boss (Alain Chabat voicing and operating a hilariously dingy puppet) tells the team that they must go into a retreat to learn to work together again.

 There's an intergalactic threat they need to prepare for, and all sorts of interpersonal conflict and insecurities they obviously need to work through, but that'd be boring. So when Benzène tells a scary campfire story (a ridiculous, but mostly deadpan Deerskin-like slasher tale), different characters come out of the woodwork to tell their own bizarre horror-adjacent stories.

 Dupieux films everything with his usual flat style and a washed-out '70s palette. It's not a bad-looking movie, but part of the fun is how ramshackle and workmanlike it looks. The soundtrack is all dusty, cheesy French pop, and the gore effects are basically people hurling buckets of offall at the characters from off-screen. There is a pretty nifty disembodied mouth effect I imagine was done with CGI, but other than that it's not really the sort of movie that distinguishes itself visually. The cast, which consists mostly of French and Belgian TV and comedy vets (plus Adèle Exarchopoulos) is game, but this is the sort of material with which even the best acting would feel stilted... and you wouldn't be able to tell if that was the intention or not.

 On the plus side, it's a great showcase for the writer/director's inventiveness, it boasts a genuinely surprising, unpredictable structure, and the gags range from genuinely solid jokes to absolute headscratchers that are somehow still funny. If you have any tolerance for truly surrealist humour and some patience, this is a great point of entry to Dupieux's bizarre filmography.

The Gorge

 There's a rift somewhere in the northern hemisphere, a huge gorge where monsters dwell. Two opposing towers overlook it, manned by two people who overlook an automated defense system (mines and turrets) to prevent the imprisoned things from leaking out.

 Two snipers from both sides of the old iron curtain - Levi (Miles Teller) from the west and Drasa (Anya Taylor Joy) from the East - are hired to guard The Gorge for a year. It's all hush-hush; They have no idea where they are, they are only briefed by their predecessors (who don't know much more than they do), and the gorge itself is guarded by magical cloakers that somehow prevent spy satellites and google maps from seeing it. And if that sort of hand-waving bothers you, I'd recommend avoiding this movie like the plague because it is the sort of film that categorically does not sweat the details.

 As the loneliness and boredom of their respective posts sets in, Drasa and Levi start making eyes at each other across the rift. Levi is a stick in the mud, especially compared to Drasa, who on her birthday starts blasting The Ramones' Blitzkrieg Pop; As they start communicating through the medium of binoculars and writing pads, the residents downstairs come to complain about the music - so the couple flirts both by writing messages to each other and by covering each other's backs with their sniping skills as human/plant zombie hybrids come swarming out of The Gorge.

 This first part of the movie is all about Levi and Drasa's growing attraction and, despite some clunky dialog, it's probably the best part of the movie. As the months go by the long-distance starts to wear on the two; When Drasa is at a low point, Levi jury-rigs a rocket to function as a long-distance grappling hook and the couple have their first proper date and night together.

 But this is nominally an action/horror film, so the script (by Zach Dean) soon finds a way to strand the lovers within the gorge. There it becomes an action/survival yarn as Levi and Drasa search for a way out and bring all its deeply stupid mysteries to light - all while being pursued by a bunch of CGI monsters.
 It's a little bit Annihilation and a whole lot of the Resident Evil videogames, right down to the requisite ancient 8mm tape with a scientist explaining exactly what's going on and equipment that remains strangely functional after more than half a century of complete neglect. Hey, at least it functions as a pretty funny callback to the director's use of low-fi analog footage in his other films.

 The action is decent but not very exciting; Director Scott Derrickson is more of a horror guy, and he and cinematographer Dan Laustsen (Guillermo Del Toro and Chad Stahelski's go-to DP) make the different environments of The Gorge look creepily alien, mostly thanks to some interesting, Fury-Road-like exaggerated colour grading and mutated plants and animal remains.
 As for the shootouts, brawls and chases, there are a couple of interesting set pieces but the choreographies aren't all that great. Most of the monsters are essentially fast zombies (I was really annoyed by that, because they find the skeletons of much more interesting beasts) and the extensive use of CGI never achieves a good sense of physicality.

 For better of for worse, The Gorge has a very modern Blockbuster mindset - think the latter Fast and Furiouses, or the Jurassic Worlds: The action is middling and it's proudly, very loudly dumb; I mean, this one's nowhere near as meat-headed as either of those, but the script does devolve into a similar morass of poorly though-out world-building and unlikely developments. It goes beyond the plot and setting - there are a ton of obvious mistakes that should have really been caught during production, like the fact that both Drasa and Levi are using assault rifles with regular sights to snipe across huge distances; Anyone who's logged at least a little time on any military shooter would call shenanigans. Maybe I'm overestimating the amount of people who'd notice that, but given the movie's videogame feel I suspect it's not insubstantial. And the film is full of this sort of thing.

Fortunately, the romance is solid, and it ultimately proves more central to the movie than the action beats. I remain sceptic about Miles Teller, who I find deeply uncharismatic and plays a bit of a sadsack here (his first message to Drasa is 'we're not allowed to fraternise' or something like that). Anya Taylor-Joy, however, more than makes up for him; She's no Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but it's the same sort of dynamic where she puts in all the personality and sense of fun.

 Their relationship makes the movie - it's nowhere close to, say, Before The Sunset, but it's easy to root for these two. It gives the film some stakes, and us a reason to overlook the rote action and all the idiocy.