The Thunder Kick (Yi wang da shu)

 Sometime in the early nineteenth century, A fisherman (Li Chin-Kun) gets into a fight with a bunch of ne'er do wells trying to charge for passage over a bridge. But as his disapproving mother tells him, violence has a way to escalate, and soon some revenge-hungry toll entrepreneurs turn up at his house with... oh shit! It's Bolo Yeung in a cool hat/open vest ensemble.
 The fisherman fights alongside a stranger who turned up to chat up his mom, and Bolo and the other goons are handily beat. Because they fought together, the stranger proclaims the fisherman his brother (battle brothers!) and ends up gifting the fisherman and his mom a fancy house. Way to undercut mom's pacifist message, stranger.

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

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

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

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

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

V/H/S: Viral

 So... was it bad as I remembered?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warning: Do Not Play (Amjeon)

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

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

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

Warhunt

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

From the Dark

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

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

Shattered (2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hostile

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

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

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

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

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

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

Superman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jurassic World Rebirth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seriously, the HR Giger estate must not be thrilled.

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

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

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

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

The Man From Earth

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

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

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

What's not to love?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**: No one even raises an eyebrow.

Tales From the Lodge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M3gan 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V/H/S/2

 Within just nine months after V/H/S was released, the fine folks over at Bloody Disgusting rounded up another bunch of new and returning miscreants to make another sleazy, gory collection of found-footage horror shorts. V/H/S/2 runs about thirty minutes shorter than the first movie, and that tightening really pays off. And while it's still sleazy as hell (we get a pair of boobs and a dong within the first few minutes), but it's noticeably tamer than the first film; I'd only choose "degenerate" as the sixth or seventh adjective to apply to this one.

 The wrap-around this time is about an entertainingly amoral private dick (Lawrence Michael Levine) who, along with his partner (Kelsy Abbott) is hired to find a missing college student. They track him down to a house that looks suspiciously like the one in the first film (and we even see a little footage from some recurring assholes) - there are a load of tapes everywhere, but no corpse this time around.

 I'd forgotten these films implied a shared universe, though it always seemed a bit half-arsed. This segment is written and directed by a returning Simon Barrett, but it's pretty forgettable aside from a goofy-looking bit of gore later on.

 Barrett returns for the first story (Phase I Clinical Trials) as a scriptwriter, paired as usual with director Adam Wingard. It follows one Herman (played by Wingard), the recipient of an experimental electronic eye that connects directly to his brain and records everything he sees (justifying the PoV approach).

 The problem is that the eye is a little more keen than is useful, as a cute woman (Hannah Hughes) who's run into similar usability problems explains later on. It's an excellently creepy little ghost story; Between this and V/H/S/94's Empty Wake, Simon Barrett is responsible for probably the most traditionally scary segments on these anthologies.

 Next are Eduardo Sánchez (mis-spelled as Edúardo in the credits) and Gregg Hale, both alums of the found footage film that kicked it all (Sánchez co-directed, and Hale produced) in a zombie segment that has a pretty fun first-person twist on the zombie genre. It's quick, vicious, technically accomplished, and the premise carries it a fairly long way.

 And then comes what's easily the best segment of the movie, and possibly in the whole series: Garth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto's Safe Heaven. An Indonesian documentary (Fachri Albar, Hannah Al Rashid, Oka Antara and Andrew Suleiman) crew go visit the remote compound of a mysterious and controversial cult leader (Epy Kusnandar)... on the same day that their promised rapture comes.
 The tension is built beautifully as the increasingly discomfitted documentarians keep discovering just how fucked up things are, only for things to get more and more fucked up. There's a ton of gore, a lot of weirdness, and the action is shot with the sort of tense energy that both Tjahjanto and Evans can do so well. I've met some people who hate that it ends with a really goofy joke, but not me. I love this one.

 Unfortunately, I don't have anywhere near the same amount of appreciation for the last story, Jason Eisener's Slumber Party Alien Abduction, where a bunch of obnoxious teens and pre-teens face off against each other in an escalating series of pranks before a bunch of feral aliens come to try and abduct them. It's remarkably energetic, but it doesn't go anywhere interesting, and the characters are hateful except for one very good boy who is cruelly put down. If that's intended as a provocation... well, good job: I fucking hate it with a passion.

 Aside from that bum note, V/H/S/2 is a blast: a high-energy collection of fairly distinct, gory tales - it's a shame that it chooses to go out on its weakest link, souring the experience somewhat. But on the whole it's easily one of my favourite modern horror anthology films.
 It was followed one year later by V/H/S Viral; I don't remember it being very good, but it was so poorly received it sidelined the series for seven years - which seems like an exaggeration. I'll revisit that one soon.

Ugetsu

 It's always surprised me how little so many classic samurai movies romanticize their roaming warriors. I probably shouldn't be, given that most of them were made while world war two was in living memory. Ugetsu was made less than a decade after the war ended, and its depiction of the samurai is possibly the most unremittingly vicious.

 The script, by Matsutarō Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, takes inspiration from an 18th century book of ghost stories (some them influenced by the same traditional stories which would go on to influence Kwaidan a decade later). But it's almost forty minutes before anything even remotely supernatural happens.

 Not that you'd notice, because director Kenji Mizoguchi makes the war-torn 16th century Japanese countryside into an uncanny, limbo-like expanse, and the roaming bands of wild-eyed samurai into chaotic, ravenous demons.
 In the eye of the storm lies a small village, where Genjurô (Masayuki Mori) and Tôbei (Eitarô Ozawa), two potters, see an opportunity to profit by selling their wares to noblemen while supply is at an understandable low. Their greed gets the better of them, and after an initial venture they decide to head to a nearby city with their families. The trip, even the preparations for it, are harrowing, since their village is soon invaded by rampaging soldiers. 

 The journey is tense and masterfully presented, with a jaw-dropping centerpiece: a gorgeously shot lake-crossing that's unnervingly otherworldly.

 At the gates of the city, a concerned Genjurô sends his wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and his infant son back to the village; he soon lets himself be seduced by a local noblewoman (Machiko Kyō, who might be the first instance of a pottery groupie I've ever seen); Tôbei, meanwhile misplaces his wife Ohama (Mitsuko Mito) while assholishly pursuing his dream of getting some armour and becoming a samurai himself.

 So this is the part where the men let their greed ruin their lives, as foretold early on by a a village sage. Tôbei lucks out in battle, and his dishonourable means gain him great favour from a warlord - only to find that his fortunes came at the metaphysical expense of his wife's. As for Genjurô, he finds that his would-be paramour lives in a derelict mansion with her handmaiden and is clearly, let's say, vitally-challenged. That doesn't stop him from... kind of tacitly accepting a marriage proposal.

 There are a couple of elements in his story shared with a couple of Kwaidan's tales, possibly due to the common sources of inspiration; That impression becomes more pronounced once Genjurô finally makes his way back home for one final supernatural twist. Tôbei's story is simpler, and his fate harder to relate with since he's such a buffoonish idiot. Poor Ohama.

 I actually preferred the journey to the destination and the harrowing war survival story to the ghostly escapades, which is rare for me. Maybe that wouldn't be the case if I had seen this before Kwaidan (which came out more than a decade later), but I'd like to think it's more of a testament to how well those early war scenes are handled. It's a lovely, unique movie that despite some missteps (the final monologue is pretty enough, but works against the film's spell) has aged exceptionally well. And the lake scene really is an all-timer.

Marrowbone (El Secreto de Marrowbone)

 Rose (Nicola Harrison) brings her children to rural Maine from the UK escaping their father (Tom Fisher). They get a new house in the boondocks, and carefully start building a new life for themselves as the Marrowbone family.

 But Rose is very sick, and soon dies, making her eldest son Jack (George MacKay) promise to keep her death a secret until his 21st birthday so the family won't be split apart. And shortly after her death a man (presumably dad) comes back. With a hunting rifle.

 Cut to the credits, and then six months later, with the Marrowbones carrying on as their mother requested - Jack goes to town every now and then, maintaining the fiction that her mom is still alive (albeit sick) and courting a local girl (Anya Taylor-Joy) while his siblings (Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth and a very young Matthew Stagg) remain cooped up in the house.

 The kids live in terror of some sort of ghost haunting the house, there's a pesky lawyer (Kyle Soller, who's also a romantic rival) insisting on house visits, and some missing money - but the film is mostly structured around the mystery of just what went on in those missing six months.

 It's a handsomely mounted gothic tale clearly modelled after The Others, written and directed by The Orphanage scribe Sergio G. Sánchez under the auspices of executive producer J.A. Bayona; That's a pretty good lineage! I wish I could be more positive about it.

 For one, the tone - which goes a little too thick on a sort of deeply nostalgic 'gee whiz' innocence - put me off immediately; The film opens with someone browsing a home-made diary with plush covers labeled 'Our Story', and a narration that's prone to make all sorts of melodramatic pronouncements.
 The characters are all just barely defined; Jack is the responsible one, Allie (the local friend) is infinitely understanding and forgiving, and loves Jack very much, and the younger siblings also can be described with a couple of adjectives each. Sollner's lawyer villain is a bit more fun, though the script often contrives to make him more of a menace, to provide a momentum that the film sorely lacks.

 The film gets by for a while thanks to some beautiful cinematography by Xavi Giménez and a drip feed of revelations regarding the situation at La Casa Marrowbone. But these revelations get more convoluted and more melodramatic as the story heads towards its conclusion; There's one admirably brutal secret at the heart of the film, but the way its consequences spread outwards to explain all the weirdness can get bracingly stupid. The script twists itself into knots trying to explain away every detail, and while there's some interest in seeing how the pieces fall into place, the whole ends up being a disappointing mess.

28 Years Later

 Twenty-three years later... director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the zombie movie that pretty much made them (yeah, yeah, I know, The Beach, but who's talked about that one in the last couple of decades?) The thing is, they don't really seem all that interested in following up on 28 Days Later.

 The British isles have been quarantined and left alone in the last twenty-eight years since the rage virus broke out and turned most of the population into feral, fast-moving zombies. Survivors were left to fend for themselves.

 In this brave new world, one population's been doing pretty well for itself: a tiny, self-sufficient community at Holy Island off the coast of Scotland, cut off from the mainland by a causeway that is submerged under the ocean come high tide.

 The film follows one of the villages, Spike (Alfie Williams) - a 12-year old whose father (Aaron Taylor Johnson) is pushing to go for a coming-of-age ritual zombie hunt in the mainland. It goes about as well as you could hope, but upon returning a rift opens between young Spike and his father. Disillusioned, and learning that there may be a doctor further inland, he resolves to slip away from the community and take his ill mother (Jodie Comer), to see the physician.

 28 Years Later is an excellent movie with some fairly idiosyncratic choices which may or may not impact your enjoyment of it... I don't know you, what do you expect me to say? I liked it.

 The first of those choices is a shift in genres: this is not, on the main, really a horror movie; Boyle and Garland use the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop for a coming of age drama instead. That's not a criticism, by the way, just an observation; It's a fine coming of age drama. Just be aware that it's closer to, say, Vesper than 28 Days Later.

 The second point of contention is that the movie feels fairly experimental in its visuals and editing. 28 Days Later came out in the early 2000s, so it had plenty of frame-skipping and shaky cam, and that goes double here: The film's signature visual gimmick is that the action will frequently do a small freeze-frame as an arrow pierces some zombie body part - shots also jump jarringly between different angles, and we still get hyperactive shaky cam and frame-skipping shenanigans. To be fair, Boyle's been tinkering with highly personal ways to shoot action pretty much since he started; This is one of his misses.

 Outside of the zombie hunts, the experimental touches are a little more successful - footage from old war and medieval movies is intercut into the proceeds fairly often to give a feel for the mood at the Holy Island community, and the editing gets a little too frantic when tension ratchets up. The cinematography (by a returning Anthony Dod Mantle) is lovely, and scores a lot of really interesting visuals by juxtaposing the natural beauty of the North with zombie grotesquerie. The music, by hip-hop band Young Fathers, is bloody excellent.

 The last thing to have in mind is the project was approached as a trilogy; The film ends with a bit of a cliffhanger and a very strange tonal shift. It tells a complete story and I like what it seems to be setting up next, but that ending really is a bit jarring.

 Other than that, the film does introduce some slight tweaks to its zombie lore - mainly, it tries to show the ways in which people infected by the rage virus are actually different from zombies. My favourite new element were the alphas, powerful zombies that look like raging Ted Nugents - swinging dicks and all, and give the movie a much needed shot of energy. Also interesting (and diametrically opposed) are the infected equivalent to bottom feeders, the series' creepiest creation yet. There are a decent amount of chases and whatnot, and they're fun even if some of them seem to be viewed through the eyes of someone suffering a seizure.

 There's also some lovely footage of the North being seized back by nature, complete with huge herds of roving deer, and a couple shots of the sycamore gap tree before it was cut down. A friend who knows the area confirmed that the protagonist's itinerary seems plausible, which is neat.

 The acting is excellent, with both Comer and Williams giving two great performances. A third actor pops up later as a major character and gives a characteristically soulful performance.

 I love that they took all these chances with what the studio must consider a franchise, even if not all the risks pay out. You just know there's going to be a somewhat deserved backlash. But now I'm really interested in finding out what they do for its two planned sequels, if they ever come to be.

Howl

  Howl's a rare thing: a modern attempt to make a honest horror B-movie here in the UK. With werewolves, no less!
 OK, so it really is setting itself up for failure, since there's no way it can live up to Dog Soldiers, right? Right. To be fair to it, it doesn't even try; Howl is perfectly happy to wade neck-deep in clichés, stock characters and pull all its plays from the beginner chapters of the siege horror playbook. The thing is that for a while, it works; It sets expectations low, and within that space it manages to be pretty charming. Again, for a while; glaring script issues soon bring it crashing down.

 Joe (Ed Speleers) is a put-upon train guard who the script quickly establishes as having a terminal case of wounded masculinity. I mean, the script comes out and has an alpha idiot (who got the supervisor promotion Joe was also gunning for) accusing him of not being man enough. It apparently took two people (Mark Huckerby and Nick Ostler) to write this shit.

 Joe is browbeaten into working on the last service to a far-away station. The only bright spot is that his crush (Holly Weston) is also on the train, serving drinks. She's nice to him, but of course the film shows her being flirted with by more effective, manly men. Everyone else on the passenger train is either mean or disrespectful to poor little Joe.

 But soon a chance to man up comes up: While crossing a dark patch of woods, the train rolls over a deer, which causes it to stop.* The conductor (Sean Pertwee, in a fun callback to Dog Soldiers) goes out and disappears, causing a sort of passenger mutiny led by an alpha douchebag in a suit (are you seeing a pattern here?); Everyone tries to trek back towards civilization, against Joe's better judgement - but they're soon attacked by a werewolf, so they go back and hole themselves in the train.

Joe's looking pretty unimpressed with the creature design there.

 And this is where things get kind of interesting, because even as some tensions rise, the crew and passengers actually make an effort to reach out to each other and work together to survive the night. And for a while, it's engaging enough: it's not an original theme by any conceivable metric, but compared to the meat-headed rise-to-the-occasion bullshit the film seemed to be headed towards, it's pretty refreshing. There's a couple of solid jokes, e ven a likeably daft 'rallying the troops' speech delivered over the train's PA system. Dumb, but cute. It works better than you'd expect, especially when it becomes clear that the film is not fucking about with its furry menaces - people are wounded and killed at the drop of a hat with a head still in it, and the gore effects are plentiful and surprisingly graphic.

 So yeah, for a while I actually got my hopes up. But unfortunately the script gets stupider as it gets along, and once again its macho macho themes are pushed to the forefront. That could work in a better-written movie, but here the protagonists heroically establish that no one gets left behind... only to leave behind the (by far) most heroic character in the movie to the wolves (literally) without a single fucking comment. The last thirty minutes are a depressing mess of incompetent narrative choices and dumbass posturing, all in pursuit of delivering an incel-friendly fantasy to its obvious conclusion while taking the dumbest possible route at every turn. Oh, and it has the balls to completely rip off John Murphy's work on 28 days later for its final scene. Fuck this noise.

 Good movies get your complicity in suspending your belief. For a while, I didn't really care how patently ridiculous the idea of a ravenous tribe of werewolves living in a stretch of woods not ninety minutes away from London. Let alone highly infections werewolves that can turn a lovely old woman into a ravening cannibal beast in a matter of hours. So that's a lot of goodwill the film managed to piss away.

 As mentioned earlier, there's a secondary character who basically is the hero of the piece, though the movie hilariously fails to recognize it. And the tiny bit we get of his backstory is a thousand times more poignant and interesting than the shitrag that passes for a protagonist. I do wonder if the other guy was actually supposed to be the protagonist for a while, that'd explain at least some of the script's problems.

 Director Paul Hyett, a veteran makeup and regular F/X artist (the guy has a really impressive CV), has a good grip on low-budget atmospherics - it's pretty funny that he worked on most of Neil Marshall's movies... except Dog Soldiers. The effects crew does an admirable job with CGI-assisted practical makeup effects and wolf suits. The critters sadly, don't look all that great - they belong to the goofy orc / cavepeople tribe of Garou - but at least they have triple-jointed hind legs. That's a very cool, difficult touch, pulled off pretty well... but they still look pretty goofy; The film's final, supposedly badass closeup of a werewolf had me (wait for it) howling with laughter. The perfect capper to a mismanaged, ill-conceived train (please kill me) of events.

* As someone who's often travelled in these exact same trains, I can attest that just about anything can bring them to a halt - from "the wrong kind of rain" to, my favorite, "leaf blow".

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. So they get (presumably) killed, 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, some sort of 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.
 Oh, wait, no- 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 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 between two childhood sweethearts (Helen Rogers and Daniel Kaufman) as they 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. Make sure you look up the alternate ending, personally I think it fits the short better.

 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 overall - 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 (that would be: many pairs of melons) and unsurprisingly high levels of horniness.
 A lot of it is unpleasant by design; Male toxicity is a bit of a running theme (even within 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 in the best way possible.

 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.