The Soul Eater (Le mangeur d'âmes)

 Elizabeth (Virgine Ledoyen) is a mannered, gives-no-fucks police inspector investigating a bizarre double-homicide in the French Alps; Franck (Paul Hamy) is an intense, driven young Captain who's on the trail of some missing children (he's introduced screaming while jogging himself ragged, which is blatant film language to let us know he's troubled.)

 Together, they fight crime. Kind of.

 The Soul Eater is a sort of collage of detective media from the last couple of decades, a film built almost entirely from common places, plot holes and contrivances tied together by a mystery that only gets shittier as the movie unspools its unlikely tangle of elements. It also throws in a possible supernatural threat and a few Nordic Noir-style disturbing plot elements to try and spice things up, which only makes its half-assed-ness feel tackier.

 It's never able to shake off the feeling that you've watched it before, but for a while it works; Both protagonists are fun to watch and, the investigation at first seems interesting. Directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury know their way around a production of this sort and provide some good atmosphere.

 The two investigators' cases (the child abductions and the double murder) are linked, of course, and they soon learn of a local folkloric figure - the titular Soul Eater - who gets a shitty rhyme to say how he comes out of the woods to eat people and leave behind evil doppelgangers or something.
 There's also a mysterious motorcycle rider, a plane crash in the woods that keeps being brought up, and more police incompetence than you can shake one of those weird little wooden soul eater totems that keep popping up at crime scenes at. And yes, more people soon start showing up dead all over the sleepy town.

 The French, of course, are adept at taking Hollywood crime movie conventions and making them their own - or at least making a banger out of them. The clearest influence here is 2000's banger The Purple Rivers (the directors have admitted as much). But there's not enough of anything here to sustain interest; the style is mostly subdued, there's very little action, and the police procedural/mystery elements hinge on people missing the obvious and other contrivances; The script, by Annelyse Batrel and Ludovic Lefebvre, adapting a novel by Alexis Laipsker, is a complete mess.

 Bustillo and Maury have ever been reliable providers of genre thrills, but while their gorehound sensibilities do give this one a welcome spike of nastiness (the only time the film comes alive is a nasty, bloody late-movie portrayal of the first crime), there's not much they can do here other than keeping things atmospheric. There are a couple of perfunctory foot chases, a couple shootings and a pretty neat car/bike stunt, but other than that everything here relies on the mystery itself -and its resolution- to hold things together... a task at which it fails, miserably.

Blue Ruin

 Dwight (Macon Blair) is a very hirsute beach bum* who lives in his car (the titular blue ruin). An evidently damaged soul, one good day he's brought in by a sympathetic cop to the station to learn that someone called Wade Cleland is being let out of prison on parole.

 The particulars of the situation are gently revealed throughout the next twenty minutes or so - I'll leave them unspoiled, as letting us work things out is one of the many pleasures the movie offers, but the news of the parole electrify Dwight and send him on a revenge quest as he contemplates premeditated murder... with a couple of twists. One: he's just a schlub who's extremely ill-suited to violence. And two: The revenge is successfully consummated within the first twenty minutes, thanks in no small part to dumb luck.

 So we haven't even finished the first act and the deed is done. The rest of the film then becomes a light dramedy as Dwight, his trauma cleanly resolved, attempts to shake off more than a decade of being a hermit to reintegrate as a productive member of society.

 Or maybe not. Maybe it's one of those consequences of revenge/cycles of violence-type stories as the rest of the Cleland clan goes after Dwight and his innocent sister (Amy Hargreaves) gets dragged into the whole sorry mess. You'll need to watch it to find out.

 Grim, understated, and shot clean through with a nasty vein of gallows humour, Blue Ruin is a masterclass in sustained tone and thoughtful scripting. That shouldn't be a surprise if you've watched anything by writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, but this is only his second movie; it's impressive to see just how fully-formed he burst out into the scene.

 Saulnier worked as a cinematographer on other indie films while figuring out this project, and he shoots this with an incredible eye for atmosphere - it is a gorgeous-looking film. A lot of attention is also spent on its violence, which provides messy, graphic and suitably horrifying capstones to the script's carefully built up tension.
 The acting is phenomenal; Blair makes for a very compelling, very soulful weirdo. His ability to emote his pain (both spiritual and very very physical) gets a serious workout here. Everyone around him does a great job, especially Amy Hargreaves, but it's essentially a one-man show.

 It's one of those films where everything is... just so. Saulnier and his crew put it together with some Kickstarter money, personal savings and a lot of hustling after their first microbudget movie, Murder Party (which is definitely worth a watch) failed to get them any further opportunities. They figured they'd give it one more try, which luckily worked out for everyone.

*: Beach Bum, incidentally, was at one point the movie's working title.

Fried Barry

 Barry (Gary Green) is a waste of skin - a strung out old junkie who only lives for his next heroin fix and mistreats everyone around him, including a wife (Chanelle de Jager) and a young son. So when said skin is taken over by mysterious aliens who want to hijack a local to experience life in Cape Town, it's no big loss. It's sort of like Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, but in this one the alien gets injected into Barry's body through his uretra. Complete with an explicit shot of (a prosthetic) lil' Barry.

 Alien Barry walks around Cape town for the next few days encountering the seedy side of town's Troma-like misfits and miscreants. He quickly discovers drugs and dance clubs - a combination that gets him laid almost immediately. It's good that he has some moves, because... well, because he looks like this:

Minus the blood, of course. Though I wouldn't be surprised if that was also a turn-on for the ladies in this film.

 It's a shaggy dog story, one where the metaphorical dog spends most of its time metaphorically licking its anus for our benefit. It's not nearly as skeevy or exploitative as it could have been if, say, Lloyd Kaufman and friends had told the story, but it's nevertheless sleazy and willingly confrontational; Most of the humour consists in Barry being confronted with some bizarre situation (usually involving sex or drugs) and then... barely reacting. It's pretty funny, if you click with the film's rhythms and sensibilities. Later things escalate to a couple more involved, sillier and stranger encounters, but the film never really goes completely nuts; it's more subdued than you'd think. And it's got a not insignificant thread of humanity running through it, which keeps it from collapsing into a nihilistic mess.

 Writer/director Ryan Kruger expanded his own short (called... Alien Dick) to feature length, and while it has all the problems that tends to bring with hit he's successful in keeping things varied enough that the film remains mostly enjoyable to the end - it could have done with some tightening, but the film's rambling nature is an integral part of its... well, let's call it charm.

 Most of the acting is fine if you consider most are probably non actors, and there's a heavily improvisational vibe to the whole endeavour. Gary Green is a good foil for everyone around him going full ham - At least going by IMDB, the guy seems to be mostly a stuntman, so good job Ryan Kruger for getting him an actual role. The other person who stands out is Chanelle de Jager, who acts as if she was in a Cassavetes family melodrama - which of course makes the jokes funnier, and imbues her eventual arc with an odd sweetness. A few other characters make an impression - a motormouth friend (Sean Cameron Michael) and a surprisingly convincing psycho (Jonathan Pienaar) in particular.

 It sounds great, with the band Haezer providing a pulsing techno soundtrack that goes well with the action (the mix is a bit off at times, though) and it looks pretty good for a near 0-budget production, too; Kruger and cinematographer Gareth Place scoring some fairly cool-looking shots. There's next to no special effects, barely any bloodshed, and the couple of action scenes are serviceable but pay more attention to, say, a guy shitting on the floor than to the shootout around him.

 And that is, I think, the film in a nutshell in a nutshell. Someone running around some hallways taking potshots with an automatic rifle, but the most important thing in the frame is some random dude taking a dump on the linoleum. The same director and some of the cast got to remake 80's oddity Street Trash last year, and they all seem like a perfect fit for the material; Can't wait to check it out.

Joe

 Joe is a rambling, nasty but beautiful southern gothic with a never-better Nicholas Cage in the titular role - a grizzled, no-bullshit ex-con who manages a team of tree poisoners somewhere out in rural Texas. He's a bit of an ogre, but fair to the people who earn his trust - a circle that, shortly into the movie, extends to teenager Gary (Ty Sheridan), a kid who joins the crew and makes a good impression.

 Gary's been dealt a bad hand; His father Wade (Gary Poulter) is an alcoholic whose main income is brutally stealing Gary's earnings, and whose shenanigans got his family run out from their old town. The kid deals with it as best he can, but is trapped in a horrible home situation with his sister and his mom. Working on Joe's crew makes things a little better - not the least because he develops a sincere friendship with Joe.

 For his part, Joe tries to distance himself from Gary's home life, correctly sensing that if he steps in things will take a very nasty turn. It's not just that he's on a very thin line with the police, who hate him for a run-in which landed him a few years in jail; the guy has some very real anger issues. But a feud with a local thug (Ronnie Gene Blevins) escalates things until he can no longer stand by the sidelines.

 For all its bleakness - and it gets incredibly bleak - director David Gordon Green leavens it with plenty of his signature lyricism and oddball humour. His camera rests for long stretches on his cast of non-professional actors, leading to long, authentic-sounding conversations and character moments. The plot is almost in the background for a lot of the movie, surfacing every now and then to strengthen the film's themes and tighten the screws; These moments - which include a ruthlessly violent, evil incident that startingly recontextualizes the menace of one of the film's villains - are expertly paced by scriptwriter Gary Hawkins amidst the film's almost two-hour runtime.

 It's a beautiful-looking neo-noir, too, with cinematographer Tim Orr (who worked with Green on all of his movies up to this one) managing some gorgeous lighting on both daytime and nighttime scenes. The acting is strong from both professionals and non-actors, with Cage in particular giving what's probably his career best turn. Sheridan is very good as well, but the biggest impression besides Cage is made by Poulter, who looks like a frail-looking old man but manages to tread the line between pathetic and pure fucking evil in a way that almost made me queasy several times. An all-time villain played by a local homeless man, who sadly died while the movie was in post.

 Other than the shitty Amazon AI subtitles (which were sorely needed to make some headway into the southern drawl) I can't really thing of anything that doesn't work here. There's some animal cruelty, for those of you for whom that's a deal breaker, and some truly vile mundane evil, but it's all woven into the film's strengths. Maybe one development right near the end didn't make a whole lot of sense to me? Or a fairly contrived coincidence to set up the escalation of the plot? Or the fact that it seems... unlikely that Joe would have survived his frequent run-ins with the law, let alone managed to stay out of prison.
 No matter. For my money, this is one of David Gordon Green's very best films, possibly the best alongside George Washington. I don't say this lightly, as I consider most of his early stuff unimpeachable. Hugely recommended.

The Void

 A father (Daniel Fathers) and a son (Mik Byskov) ruthlessly shoot and burn a woman on the doorstep of her cabin. Another of the cabin's occupants (Evan Stern) escapes, wounded; "Won't get Far," says the father, before driving off in pursuit. Meanwhile a white-robed figure observes from the treeline, a black triangle -the same one we saw on the front door of the cabin- stenciled on the front of his closed veil.

 The survivor makes it to a nearby road before collapsing, where he's picked up by sheriff Carter (Aaron Poole) and taken to a local hospital. This being a horror (and low-budget) movie, the hospital is being renovated after a fire and currently only hosts a tiny skeleton crew and a couple of patients. Oh, and the head nurse is Carter's estranged wife (Kathleen Munroe), to add some (very) mild drama to the proceeds.

 Things go to shit very quickly: not ten minutes go by when one of the nurses goes into a trance and stabs a patient to death with a pair of medical scissors, and then attacks Carter, who shoots her dead. A state trooper appears to take custody of the wounded man Carter brought in (his disappointment in Carter's shoddy resolution of the nurse attack is pretty funny)... but then the both of them run into the resurrected remains of the nurse, who's turned into a shambling mountain of hungry flesh - an extremely cool monster, done entirely in practical effects.

 I think we can all agree all this qualifies as a pretty busy night, but things are just getting started. Carter and co. haven't even dealt with the gooey monstrosity formerly known as nurse Beverly when the father and the son from the opening rush into the hospital waving a rifle around, looking for the one who got away. At the same time a horde of stab-happy hooded cultists start forming a cordon around the hospital, knifing anyone who tries to leave the facilities.

 From there the film turns into a series of expeditions into increasingly dark and derelict corridors, as people find different excuses to go into the hospital's bowels and are chased by some freaky monsters. An explanation of sorts for the night's madness is put forward, but while there are some cool concepts at play, the plot depends on all of the events being tied together with a lazy patchwork of coincidences and contrivances.

 I've now watched 2016's The Void three times, and I've still got the nagging feeling that another watch is going to do the trick, that next time I'm going to fully click with it for sure. I like it well enough, but I should probably accept It'll never live up to the movie I want it to be. There is a *lot* to like here, but I can't deny that it feels like it's missing something vital.

 
 It's a movie that's clearly attempting to recapture the magic of John Carpenter's incredible run of 80s horror movies - you don't even need to squint to see the overt attempts to invoke the ghost of The Thing and Assault on Precinct 13, with a healthy showing of The Fog, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness. Clive Barker's Hellraiser is heavily summoned for the third act, as well.

 It makes sense that this comes from the writing/directing team of Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie, both of whom are alumni of the Astron-6 film collective - at the time this movie came out they were best known for grindhouse pastiches Father's Day, Manborg and The Editor (Konstanski would go on to do the wonderful Psycho Goreman and Frankie Freako).

 It's not like any of those films just stole stuff and hoped for the best, but whereas those movies took every chance to wink at their audience, The Void is dead serious - and the script does not manage to hold it together. The characters are a little weak, the second act drags a little, and the ending feels a little rushed. It's clear that a lot of thought and effort went into trying to make this more than the sum of its borrowed parts, but as it turns out, it wasn't enough.

 None of that takes away from all the coolness in the film. It oozes ambiance and menace, manages some striking visuals, and of course it sports some truly wonderful monsters. The Creature effects were crowdsourced, and no one could ever accuse Kostanski and his crew of taking the money and making a runner; every cent is on-screen, and it looks a whole lot better than many studio movies.
 There's a cool sense of mystery I really respect to the story, too. This keeps the characters opaque, which prevents investment in any of their interpersonal drama, but it also makes this one of the very rare movies that actually feels like it understand what makes cosmic horror work. I may not like many of the plot specifics, but they still manage to paint an intriguing mystery that feels successfully otherworldly, all the way to a pretty cool final shot.

 Obviously, I need to watch it at least one more time. Ask me again how I like it in four years or so,

  

Black Mountain Side

 Oh, goddammit. This could have been something special.

 Black Mountain Side is an indie Canadian horror film about a group of archeologists stuck between a dig site way out in the frozen north and a small compound consisting of several bungalows tied together with a generator-powered electrical grid. They've just uncovered an ancient temple under the permafrost, one where the native populations didn't have any settlements. As the film begins the expedition lead, Jensen (Shane Twerdun), welcomes an expert (Michael Dixon) to validate their findings.

 It's in this introduction that the movie is at its absolute best; It's full of procedural detail of the running of a remote camp like this, gorgeous footage of the surrounding frigid valley, and lots of authentic-sounding archeological shop talk.

Poor Fleetwood Addison-Szostakiwskyj :(

 But this is a horror movie, and soon strange enough things start happening. The escalation is well handled: The local help disappears, an animal is found sacrificed at the site, people start behaving erratically - that sort of thing. And then it's discovered that the unearthing of the temple has freed up some sort of pathogen that's infected the crew, one that affects them psychologically as well as biologically. That revelation in turn pits everyone against each other as paranoia sets in. Sound familiar? Well, just in case one obvious influence isn't enough, there's some bonus talk about the foreign cells becoming... cephalopod-like.

 What follows is a pretty cool exercise in psychological horror with some fantastical elements that sadly fails to gel because it feels like the script never really seems to settle on what it wants to be about. There's that poorly-defined mysterious illness (nothing comes out of all that cephalopod talk), whispering in the dark, self-mutilation and a mysterious animalistic figure; But to be brutally honest, the film's attempts at cosmic horror are laughable - a gravelly voice speaking to each character in turn, trying to get them to kill each other? That's fine. But as soon as it tries to claim to be all-powerful or to be more than a delusion... well, it's clearly bullshitting. We just saw you communicate through some wall-mounted furniture, buddy. You're not fooling anyone.

 The thing is that even as the script (by director Nick Szostakiwskyj) flails and fails to find a coherent approach, the characters remain believable and the deaths are as chilling as anything I've seen lately (most of the violence is quick and almost underplayed, and all the more effective for it). At its simplest, it's an extremely effective (if derivative) movie about an isolated group of people going nuts, which leaves me in the odd situation of kind of wishing they'd ditched the more outré Carpenter and Lovecraft influences. Not something I'd expect to be saying very often.

 It's such a disappointment. The whole thing is beautifully shot, the acting is well pitched between heightened and mundane, there makeup effects are pretty cool, and the choice to not have any music whatsoever pays off some big dividends. It ends with a killer punchline, too, its humour black as the endless gulf between the stars. But there's a hollowness at the film's center that an excellent setup and a modest amount of very well-executed creepiness and carnage can't really make up for.

 I really wanted to like this so much more than I was able to.

Kill

  Amrit (Lakshya) and Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) are two star-crossed lovers travelling on a long-distance train to New Delhi. Tulika's father (Harsh Chhaya), a powerful businessman, has set an arranged marriage for her, and doesn't even know of Amrit's existence. In fact, Tulika is in the train returning from her engagement to some rando, and Amrit is there to propose to her himself.

 Things get complicated when a horde of bandits (dacoits, Wikipedia informs me) spring a plan to rob everyone on the train. It's supposed to be a simple smash-and-grab, but when they discover that Tulika's father is a passenger, they switch over to kidnapping mode. Amrit and an old friend (Abhishek Chauhan) object strongly.

 Now's probably the time to mention that both Amrit and his buddy are highly trained army commandoes.  When the bandits attack Tulika's family, Amrit kills off one of the attackers and absconds to a different carriage with a few of the passengers. And so begins a running battle between Viresh (sometimes accompanied by others, but mostly alone) against forty-odd thieves in the cramped confines of the train carriages. At first it looks like it's going to be a standard action movie - like, say, the similarly train-bound sequel to Under Siege - but forty minutes in something happens, the title card slams on the screen with an eerie sense of purpose, and the film suddenly gets a lot more interesting.

 Kill is a strange movie. It's easy to roll your eyes at the melodramatic set-up, but hard not to be impressed by the balls of its second-act derailment into a different subgenre of action film. One that's a hell of a lot bleaker.

 As Amrit carves a bloody swathe across the mass of criminals occupying the train in the latter part of the movie, it quickly becomes clear that they're basically a clan, a few extended families united in banditry. And director Nikhil Bagesh Bhat, who co-wrote the script with Ayesha Syed, never passes up the chance to show the emotional distress of these people as they find their family members butchered by our protagonist. The film's most harrowing scene, in fact, is from their point of view as they cross a carriage where Amrit strung up half a dozen of his victims as a form of psychological warfare - including a guy whose head he caved in with a fire extinguisher; The association with Irreversible is probably unintended but hard to unsee.

 It seems to be attempting to say something, but the message seemed to me to be hopelessly muddled. This is one of those films where our hero often behaves more like a horror movie villain, and where the violence successfully crosses over the line into disturbing more than a few times. To what end? Beats me. The villains, especially Amrit's nemesis Fani (Raghav Juyal), all stay villains until the very end, and it's not like there's a decent character arc for Amrit or any of the other passengers. It still seems to come down as in favour of violence against evildoers, even if said violence is sometimes icky, and the plot doesn't really hold many surprises once it's revealed its hand.

 The moves are mostly MMA-inspired and grittily realistic even as the amount of punishment a body can endure without shutting down is gleefully exaggerated. Some of the blood splatter is CGI, but most of the blood seems to be done with practical makeup effects; It's a good balance, and looks pretty great. The one exception is yet another misguided attempt to do CGI flames, but the kill is still pretty spectacular so I'll let it slide.

 As for the violence. it's well blocked and choreographed, exciting and yes, extremely bloody - while the editing is a bit choppier than I'd prefer*, what's happening is always clear and the film makes good use of the cramped carriage interiors to force one- or two-on-one fights. There's even a fight on a restroom where porcelain is cracked by a cranium; this is a movie that clearly understand the genre it's working within.

 There's an unavoidable monotony to the film's series of encounters within what's essentially a very narrow passageway. While the creative kills, varied fights, and unrelenting intensity do ease it a little bit, it gets a little wearying after a while, especially when the script doesn't find a way to add another dimension to the plot or its characters, or a way to expand on its themes.

 I don't tend to get on with Bollywood films, but asides from a really intrusive (instrumental) score, nothing really bothered me here. It's a lean, focused effort - the film's director has been pretty open about designing it with western audiences in mind. Sure, some of the dialog is pretty clunky, but it's not like action in general has a great track record in that department.

 It might not manage to articulate its message, but it's still a lot of fun, and the added discomfort does add a certain edge to it. Lakshya and Juyal are both charismatic and make for compelling antagonists. And yeah, the action, even if it's not hugely varied, is still pretty great.

*: None of the principals being martial artists might be a factor in the decision to go with that style.

Werewolves

 If nothing else, give credit to Werewolves for trying: director Steven C. Miller apes a very specific type of action B-movie with a modicum of success - he's perfectly capable of making a film that looks at least professional (as he demonstrated on his Silent Night reimagining). Unfortunately, that, a fully committed Frank Grillo performance, and a bonkers premise is just about everything this turkey has going for it.

This sort of idiocy deserves a much more fun movie around it.

 As for that bonkers premise: One year ago, a massive "supermoon" event caused millions of people across the globe to turn into werewolves for one night and cause a global bloodbath. The world's somewhat recovered, but now a new supermoon looms close. How will survivors prepare for the second coming of the wolfpocalypse?

 Well, by doing a whole lot of stupid things, it looks like. But first we have to wade through a whole lot of poorly written melodrama where a Wesley, a former marine played by Grillo, helps prepare the house of his widowed sister-in-law (Ifenesh Hadera) and her cutesy little girl (Kamdynn Gary) for the wolves' night out.

 Why can't he stay there and protect them? Well, because besides being former a globally recognized military hero and a DIY genius who can turn a house into a fortress in a single afternoon, Wesley is also the lead molecular biologist in the government's attempt to find something that can counteract the lycanthropy-inducing supermoon.

 That... hell, that is some truly Buckaroo Banzai-level madness right there. But with none of that movie's charm, panache or sense of fun, it's just a one more misstep in a film that's already made too many to get to this point - and we're less than fifteen minutes in. Oh hell.

 Anyhow - the government's last-ditch effort*, is testing a "moonscreen", a nanite-infused lunar block that can hopefully stop the moon from turning anyone, which sounds like a poor venue of investigation to me since a tarp can achieve the same result... but I'm already giving this movie more thought than anyone involved did.
 In any case, the moonscreen works... temporarily. Thanks to a spectacularly poorly planned and implemented plan to secure the test subjects -and the abject, hilarious failure of the sole failback precaution- the werewolves soon massacre nearly everyone in the facility, leaving Wesley and a fellow survivor scientist (Katrina Law) to trek across the werewolf-infested city to get to his surrogate family.

 Just about nothing in this movie works. The script offers a collection of poorly strung-together clichés, the action is embarrassingly bad, and everyone acts like a complete idiot. I can sympathise to certain extent - the film is trying to do a lot with very obvious budget limitations; I realize that they would cause nightmare-level complications when something doesn't work as expected. But none of the building blocks the movie is handling work, and no one involved seems to have a clear idea of how to put them together.
 This becomes clear as early as the first few scenes of the movie, where an info-dump brings us up to date with the global werewolf crisis, then suddenly switches to some trite, maudlin family melodrama, then smash-cuts  to the title credits. It gets worse.

 The monsters are cartoony - I kind of like the goofy things, especially when they go through the trouble of leaving some of their normal day clothes to give them personality. They're stiff as hell, look a bit tacky and can't handle any big movements (just one reason why the action sucks so bad), but this is precisely the sort of problem the movie could have gotten over if there was anything else around them to like. There are a few good gore shots, at least.
 As mentioned, Miller makes things look decent; Pretty slick, save for a cheesy over-reliance on light flares. The acting is... I mean, a script this bad makes even Grillo, the ever-reliable action workhorse, look terrible. Others fare a lot worse.

 As much as it pains me to say it, this is a near-complete waste of time. It comes close to being so bad it's good a few times, what with its abundance of non-sequiturs and laughably stupid ideas like the lupine expert deciding getting up close to a werewolf and screaming in its face (dominance, you see!) is a good way to buy time. Or its quaint adherence to the belief that intensity somehow supplants drama and bypasses the need for things to make sense.

 But there's an odd dourness to everything, an epic misjudgement of how much we're going to be invested in its completely artificial characters and their fates; It feels like we're meant to take it seriously. That, coupled with an uninspired run of botched direct lifts from a myriad obvious sources (the main one of which also featured Grillo prominently) prevent even a glimmer of joy. 
 I didn't hate it, at least. There's not enough here to work myself up over.

*: For a project so important, they sure were nice to give its top scientist / first responder action hero  leave to spend the whole day off instead of doing whatever it is he was meant to do.

Sixty Minutes (60 Minuten)

 Octavio (Emilio Sakraya) has done fucked up again. He's gone and booked a big MMA fight on the same day of his estranged daughter's birthday... and made things worse by promising that he'll be there with an amazing cake and gift.

 He reckons he can grab both on his way to the party at his ex-wife's once the fight is done, but he's cutting it close. And you know how it goes: First he has to have an awesome mini-training montage with his cool MMA friends, then get to the fight venue, then have several stops to meet and greet some shady friends of the co-owner of his gym (always a bad sign, when obvious thug types act all nice and mention how much they've got riding on your fight). Before you know it, the kid's party is almost done and his ex-wife, fed up with all his deadbeat dad bullshit, threatens with taking sole custody of their daughter unless Octavio makes good on his promises and gets to the party before it ends.

 The ultimatum arrives just as he's about to enter the ring, and it gives him exactly sixty minutes to buy the cake, retrieve the kitty from the animal shelter, and get to his ex-wife's house... which happens to be on the other side of Berlin. So he chooses the honorable option, of course: to drop everything and run a mad dash across town to try and get to his little girl.

 And there's an added (obvious) twist: Octavio's fight was, unbeknownst to him, rigged, and there was a lot of illegal gambling going in the background from some very shady types. So it's a Run, Lola Run situation of traversing a city against the clock while being chased by all sorts of unsavory characters (and a few asshole cops)... except that in this instance Lola knows martial arts. This is the sort of writing they should give Nobel prizes out for; It is fucking great. 

 As and added treat, the chase starts fifteen or twenty minutes into an hour and a half movie, so it has the beauty of being nearly real-time, something the movie graciously refuses to emphasize except for the odd on-screen rendition of Octavio's clock running a timer, or a map of the city showing our pilgrim's progress.

 I normally hate shitty, manipulative "this is your third strike and you need to do X by Y or we're out of your life or whatever" premises (see: Dayshift); It works here because the protagonist is likeable, but credibly flawed. The film provides an actual context for Octavio's history of poor parenting, so his ex's frustration comes off as more genuine than just some rote stakes-setting, and it makes his grand gesture feels like more than just a gesture.

 The script by Director Oliver Kienle and Philip Koch juggles its elements very well - a lot of action, of course, but it's leavened by a sense of humour that keeps cropping up unexpectedly; The jokes are low-key and character-based, but some of them are still pretty funny. Most characters are given just a little more depth than you'd expect in a film like this and while minimalistic, there's enough to the central drama to give some welcome heft and weight to the story.

 The action is varied and teeters between tensie chases and satisfying fights where Octavio is sometimes joined by a buddy or two - the most noteworthy being Cosima (Marie Mouroum), a statuesque hellion in a tracksuit whose single-minded pursuit of a pay rise throughout the movie is both relatable and pretty amusing.
 Kienle gives his fights and chases room to breathe - there's a little frame skipping but it's not too bad, the handheld cameras track the well-blocked action with ease, and even add some flourishes when they follow through with some of the moves to give them a little more oomph. The choreography is a little too grounded, less crazy than I'd prefer, but there are still plenty of cool moves to enjoy. Sakraya's not an actual MMA fighter but he does have some background in martial arts, and he acquits himself nicely (as do the rest of the cast and stuntmen) both in and out of the fights.

 Ignore the red N of death, this is a really good one. Well done Germany.

65

 65 million years ago, as an odd opening crawl explains, aliens who looked and behaved exactly like us were already buzzing around our galaxy. We meet one of them, Mills (Adam Driver), having a beach day with his wife and daughter. He's taking on a long contract to ferry other people across the stars because it offers triple his normal salary - and he needs the money to get treatment for his daughter.

 This advanced star-faring race hasn't evolved beyond our shitty version of capitalism, in other words. They don't have even have proper healthcare. It's a staggering failure of imagination; I'm used to sci-fi movies wiping their ass with the science part, but this movie all but boldly announces that the people who wrote this did not give a quantum of a fuck about either its science or its fiction in the first five minutes.

 That is, sadly, borne out by the rest of the movie, a deeply, mind-numbingly mediocre mid-budget survival thriller that pits Mills against dinosaurs when his ship crash-lands on Earth at the end of the Jurassic... a few days before a rain of asteroids comes to cause a mass extinction event.

 The only other survivor in the crash is a nine-year-old girl (Ariana Greenblatt) who Mills finds at the start of his journey. Together they must travel fifteen kilometers of primeval forests (which look just like regular forests) while doing some mild bonding and dodging somewhat regular dinosaur attacks and other perils.

 The action and suspense are lackluster, the emotional beats are all dead on arrival, and the dinosaur designs are boring. The main antagonists look more like Komodo dragons than any dinosaur I know of, but at least they move in an interesting, sinuous way - all the other species portrayed here kind of suck, and forego all the wild stuff paleontologists have been theorizing about for the last fifty years in favour of the familiar. Driver and Greenblatt do what they can, but honestly, their characters are so lifeless, their arcs so flat, they might as well have been wooden dummies.

Directors Bryan Woods and Scott beck sometimes do seem to try to find a cinematic angle for things, but their action chops are nonexistent and, except for a fairly cool introduction to a T-Rex, they don't manage a single memorable scene or sequence. At least their visuals are fit for purpose, which is a lot more than what you can say for their script

 Holy shit, this script. How did this ever get picked up? There's not a single element that works. The characters are terrible, the worldbuilding is painfully bad, it has nothing but contempt for plausibility or scientific rigour. There are no clever ideas or twists to be found anywhere, nor any emotion elicited by the film's frequently maudlin character moments.

 It just doesn't work at a deeply fundamental level. Right down to the premise: "Space human from before earth humans falls to earth with a ship full other humans in stasis." You can imagine that the film would set up them to somehow be our predecessors, right? (An idea that was already old when Douglas Adams took the piss out of it in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but don't you mind).
 Well, nope, that's explicitly not the case. The whole premise of the movie doesn't just stretch suspension of disbelief beyond breaking point, it has no reason to be there in the first place. Pointless set dressing for a lackluster action yarn. And don't get me started on the logistics of space travel in this movie.

 I have no idea how Sony manages to dump poorly written turds like this on theaters over and over and over again. No other distributor has as bad a track record as they do, so little quality control. It's... some kind of amazing. And shame on Beck & Woods - I am now retroactively much less tolerant of the many flaws of The Quiet Place thanks to this shitshow.

The Mystery of Chess Boxing (Shuang ma lian huan)

 I've talked here before about a channel where I grew up that played tons of 70s and early 80s martial arts movies on Sunday afternoons as if it was something crazy, only to learn just now that it was common practice in other countries as well. Turns out the lure of cheap programming is truly international.

 Anyhow, The Mystery of Chess Boxing was not in that rotation. It's a good one, if a bit derivative; Young me would have loved it.

 The Ghost-Faced Killer (Mark Long, GFK from now on) is back in town. He goes around, as you'd imagine, killing other martial artists, and taking real pride and joy in it, too - not five minutes into the movie he kills a man in front of his family, and regales the bereaved wife and son with a mirthless, awkward kung fu villain laugh. Brutal.

 Arrayed against him is Ah Pao (Lee Yi Min), another similarly orphaned victim* who's looking for vengeance against GFK. He pops up at a kung fu school unbidden, where the students assholishly decide to have some fun with the Ah Pao who, let's face it, really kind of is a bumbling idiot. This sets up a long, long string of unorthodox training montages and 'comedic' hijinks as he stumbles through a series of kung fu masters until an old xiangqi (Chinese chess) master (Jack Long) subliminally teaches him a style that can counter GFK's five elements technique.

 GFK, meanwhile, is intercut into the story in short fight vignettes destroying other masters as he pursues a barely detailed revenge quest of his own, leaving small metal badges (which he's wont to throw like shuriken) as calling cards. Both stories finally intersect when GFK finally tracks down the xiangqi master, resulting in a protracted three-way fight where a xiangqi board is sometimes intercut with the action and the participants call out their strategies as each element beats another, rock-paper-scissors-style. In case you're wondering, that qualifies as awesome.

 There's a surprising amount of fairly lame comedy and slapstick here - basically, any time GFK is not in the frame - until you realize that, unlike whatever's up with chess boxing, that mystery is pretty easy to solve: this movie came out in 1979, a year after Yuen Woo Ping and Jackie Chan's classics Snake in The Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master**.

 Yi Min lacks Chan's charisma, though, and no one in this production had Chan's perfectionism. So his mugging gets very old very quickly, and none of the pratfalls are executed with the precision of a Jackie Chan movie.

 The tonal balance is also out of whack. There's just too much broad comedy, and it sadly subsumes some pretty inventive and cool training sequences. All is forgiven, though, thanks to the frequent and brilliant fights. This is the old-school HK style where blows clearly fail to connect and the fighters wait for each other to take their turn (you can see the performers counting off their moves at points), but the choreographies are complex and the athleticism is undeniable. I was particularly impressed by GFK's standalone fights in the leadup to the finale - a fight against a staff-wielding opponent had me laughing joyfully in a darkened room in the middle of the night like a loon.

 And that alone would make it worthwhile; Luckily, for all its flaws, there's a lot more to like, too.

*: Or is it the same kid, grown up? It's unclear

**: I actually thought this movie was a lot older when I watched it, which had me wondering if Jackie Chan was aping a whole tradition of HK martial arts comedies I didn't know anything about. Shows you what I know; I should have never doubted the master.

They Look Like People

 Ben (MacLeod Andrews) doesn't just suspect that there are monster among us - he's seen through them, even though They Look Like People. They taunt him both while awake and in dreams, and people call him to tell him the end is nigh - in fact, the time where the monsters will attack an unsuspecting, hopelessly infiltrated humanity is extremely fucking nigh. If you'll forgive the reference.

 Before he runs to the hills, though, Ben looks up an old childhood friend, Wyatt (Evan Dumouchel) - the two reconnect and Wyatt, recognizing his estranged buddy seems to be in a tough situation, invites him to crash a few days in his tiny apartment.

 Wyatt has got a lot going on; For one, he's overcompensating for his insecurities by working out and engaging in some performative douchebaggery. Sorry, 'dominating'. He's not shown reading Jordan Peterson, but he's got one of those self-help tapes with ridiculous, overblown motivational compliments. The 'You are a powerful tree but with diamond-hard penises instead of leaves' kind of thing, read by a breathless female narrator*. He's also trying to ask Mara, his young boss (Margaret Ying Drake), out on a date.

 As Mara and Wyatt tentatively develop a relationship, Ben becomes increasingly erratic, seeing monsters everywhere. They Look Like People's gentle, slow-burning psychological horror often takes a back seat to something that feels more like a hangout movie or a quiet indie dramedy. There's more  than a little bit of tension as to whether Ben is going to snap and kill someone thinking they're inhuman, but I was actually more worried about whether his visions are real or not, because the film shores up one of the two possibilities so much I started dreading that it would try to reverse that and spring a final surprise.

 I won't say whether it does or not, but while the script writes itself into a bit of bind by the end, it still manages a strong, satisfying resolution.

 Writer/director/editor/producer/cinematographer/sound and production designer Perry Blackshear has crafted a lovely, heartfelt film that manages to feel authentic while still throwing you off with some unorthodox choices. There are some clunky interactions, but for the most part it's all handled with real warmth, subtlety and grace. The acting is great, especially Dumouchel, who does a great job imbuing a very flawed character with humanity, vulnerability and uniqueness. Both central couples (Ben and Wyatt, Wyatt and Mara) have great chemistry.

 There are a couple special effects - all of them simple and very lo-fi, since the budget here is only a smidgen above the 'a couple of friends and a camera' level, but some scenes manage to be fairly creepy. The rest... not so much. The shooting style is close, intimate handheld shots for most of the film, growing a little more wobbly as Ben's mental state deteriorates; There's not a lot to distinguish it from any number of indie movies, but it's effective.

 Most of all, though, it's the well-developed, very likeable characters that stand out, which is good because this is a deeply character-driven film. By the end I wanted all of these goofballs to avoid their presumable genre-mandated fate; I can think of no end of films where the opposite was true, so this one is definitely doing something right.

*: This actually gets an origin story of sorts in one of the film's clunkier (but still cute) touches.

Presence

 There are slow burns, and then there are movies that barely even get to smolder. Presence is one of these by design - A whole movie built around the point of view of that which haunts a haunted house, letting us borrow its senses as it effortlessly glides through halls and rooms and eavesdrops on the living in long, unbroken takes, until it goes back to slumber and awaken again some time later for another long haunting session.

 These vignettes, which are presented chronologically, do build up to a narrative: The ghost awakens to an empty, immaculate house on the eve of its sale, and witnesses a new family moving in - A work-obsessed mother (Lucy Liu) who is engaging in some, ahem, creative finance at her workplace, a passive father (Chris Sullivan) growing increasingly concerned that things are getting away from him, a complete douchebag of a son (Eddy Maday) and a daughter (Callina Liang) who is distraught after the recent death of her best friend to an overdose and often seems to sense that something is amiss in the house.

 Each thread of the story is advanced inch by inch by the off-hand comments, hushed conversations and private phone calls the presence is privy to; while the script is often clumsy, I tend to find putting information together in this way engaging, and it makes up for the slow pace and the relative lack of incident.
 Things are turned on their head, gently, when the presence makes itself known in no uncertain terms; And then... well, the family carries on, mostly as usual, with the added burden of trying to figure out what to do about the ghost. There is a reason for the haunting, which spirals around the menace posed by a surly, mopey teen who's basically a mess of red flags bundled sloppily into human form (West Mulholland). But that whole lackluster pseudo-thriller element is very poorly written, right up to an abrupt, underwhelming resolution.

 It's easy to see what attracted director Steven Soderbergh to the project - it's got a certain... I don't know, let's call it formal purity, and technical challenges aplenty. Both of which are like catnip to the man who once directed Schizopolis, and he makes it work beautifully. The gliding, roving camerawork really conveys the illusion of being a hidden eavesdropper, to the point where it generates a mild jolt whenever someone somehow acknowledges the presence. A beautiful melancholic soundtrack by Zack Ryan also does wonders for the film's hypnotic feel.

 I wasn't that impressed with the script, which has a strong central idea and some interesting subtleties, but buckles under the weight of its crappy villain and his designs and some groan-worthy dialog and character work; Got to love the douchebag son proudly regaling his family with the tale of a very creepy, shitty prank he played on a female student that includes sharing a sexy pic online solicited under false pretences. David Koepp, ladies and gentlemen. The guy was good -both actually good and the good kind of bad- once upon a time, but these last few decades have been rough and he should never be allowed to write anything related to youth culture; I still haven't forgiven him for using a flash mob as a plot device that one time.

 To be fair, the story here is not terrible or anything, it just has a few too many rough patches... and for what it's worth, a revelation at the end does recontextualize a few earlier events and adds a posthumous (heh) theme to the film. 

 The acting is pretty great, especially from Liu and Sullivan, and Liang credibly anchors the film. There are next to no special effects besides the film's impeccable technical execution, and don't expect any scares - horror is a technically correct but very misleading label here. Maybe existential horror for millennials, as they watch the couple here effortlessly buy a house.

 But no- treat it as a naturalistic drama instead, with some genre elements to add colour, and you should be golden. Despite an almost pulpy premise, it's one of those films that will be insufferable unless you actually engage with it, so your patience with deliberately paced arthouse fare will definitely be a factor. Personally I thought it was a bit slight, but very worthwhile.

Sinister

 When Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) uproots his family to move to another town for work, it doesn't go down all that well. Especially since his work is writing about true crime; His wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance) is particularly cautious, but Ellison reassures her with a promise that "we haven't moved a few doors down from a crime scene again". Notice the very specific wording there.

 Yep, the very house they're the proud new owners of is very much a crime scene; the previous residents, the Stevensons (a family of five) were all hanged from a tree out back - all except one of the children, who remains missing. Ellison stakes out an office and sets up one of those conspiracy boards to map out his book. He's barely started preparing when he runs into an unexpected breakthrough: In a box conspicuously placed in the middle of an empty attic, he finds a box with old Super-8 recordings and a projector.

It's horrific because he's watching the video in Apple Quicktime

 Luckily, Ellison's a dab hand with obsolete electronics (I'd have no idea how to even spool the reels), and soon he's watching a collection of five home movies - which begin with some footage of families going about their normal lives, only to then cut to them being restrained and murdered in cold blood in various ways. Starting with the hanging of the Stevensons, an event that took place not ten meters away from the spot Ellison is watching the movie. He's understandably shaken, but nevertheless successfully resists his scruples and decides not to share the films with the police and do his own investigation instead. You can imagine how well that works out for him.

 As he delves into the tapes with the help of a friendly local police officer (Derrickson regular James Ransone, bringing some very welcome humour), a series of events of increasing freakishness start convincing him that there's something... occult going on - that whoever is behind the murders might not be wholly human.

 Sinister's gathered a bit of a reputation since it came out in 2012; It regularly comes up in a pretty high in any list of the scariest movies ever made, and people still talk about a couple of 'legendary' jump scares that, to be honest, I've always found a bit silly. Rewatching it now, all these years later... yeah, I'm still not entirely convinced. Which is a shame, because so much of this movie works beautifully.

 Especially those fucking home movies. They remain supremely... well,  sinister, and are still viscerally effective on a rewatch - so much so the director's used the exact same trick on later projects. Derrickson and his team have always been adept at finding freakish soundtracks to pair these vignettes to, and here they use experimental and drone/noise bands to double down on the intensity of already disturbing imagery. The only one I recognized was Ulver, but holy shit there's some amazing stuff in here. The result - sound, image, subject matter - is creepy as all fuck.

 The acting is also excellent. Hawke is one of those actors I'm always happy to see pop up; He always gives whatever it is he's on, genre or arthouse, his all. Rylance is very good, Ransone is likeable and so is Vincent D'Onofrio in a bit part. The script, which Derrickson co-wrote with regular collaborator C. Robert Cargill, gives them all good characters to inhabit and a cool, twisted supernatural mystery to fall victims to. It stumbles a few times but the information is parceled out nicely, the pacing is fine, and the ending's got a nasty bite to it. As for the direction, Derrickson already had a good grasp on both the mundane and on building a solid horror atmosphere.

 So why don't I like it more than I do? Without going into spoilers... it's the supernatural menace, particularly the entity that's at the root of the goings-on. It's... well, there's no other word for it - it's fucking tacky, and the couple of jump scares it's a part of feel like they come from a much trashier movie (like, say, 75% of distributor Blumhouse's output). There is, to my mind, a tonal clash that the film doesn't resolve between its more grounded, nihilistic horror and the schlockier take on its ghosts and ghouls. I'm all for both of those approaches, but have a clear preference for the former - so this mix doesn't do it for me. Not the way it's executed at least.

 I don't begrudge this movie its success, though, nor its reputation. It's just a good film that rubbed me the wrong way.

Wallace & Grommit: Vengeance Most Fowl

 The Wallace & Grommit shorts and films are some of the funniest, most colourful and creative animated stories out there - absolutely crammed to the gills with of bad puns, quaint English humour and warm-hearted satire. If you've seen any of them, you know what to expect. If you haven't, you're in for a treat: Start out with the original shorts and go up from there. They're all at the very least delightful.

 This one is not Aardman at the top of their game, but even a weak Wallace & Grommit outing is a good egg. Series creator Nick Park returns as a writer/director, with co-director Merlin Crossingham and co-writer Mark Burton. It's the first film without Peter Sallis as the voice of Wallace, but replacement Ben Whitehead does a good enough job that I never noticed. Joining him are Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Reece Shearsmith and Diane Morgan (Cunk herself!) with characters old and new. But the main draws are voiceless: Grommit, the most long-suffering dog in all of England... and Feathers McGraw, masterminding a new heist after being being incarcerated at the end of The Wrong Trousers more than thirty years ago. It feels like cheap bid to invoke nostalgia,  but I can't argue with the results.

 The plot is serviceable, a collection of silly events that serves more as a joke dispensing machine than anything else - the quality of the humour is variable (I wasn't a fan of most of the police scenes) but there are some very good conceits in here (the use of a James Bond-style musical sting is alone worth the price of admission) and as usual there are some fine potshots at quintessentially English cultural touchstones - chief among them a hilarious, climactic long boat chase.

 It should go without saying that it's a technical marvel. Aardman can really make stop-motion sing.

 There's not a lot to dissect here - it's Wallace & Grommit, innit? Seriously, just go watch them all already.

Wolf Man

 After lending a (pretty enjoyable) feminist twist to The Invisible Man, writer/director Leigh Whannell turns his attention to another Universal monster with the modestly-budgeted Wolf Man. And as it starts it looks like he's got a somewhat similar angle for it, too: first with a young boy being subjected to a mildly toxic upbringing, and then showing that same boy all grown up thirty years later turned into a stay-at-home-dad, wearing lipstick (long story) while his wife returns from work with short hair and a suit.

 Not much comes of it, though, which is actually kind of cool: with the exception of factors completely out of his control, Blake (Christopher Abbott) remains a committed dad to his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) and a loving partner to his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) throughout the movie - it's a good reversal of expectations, playing as it does against what the film seemed to be setting up (and this is a fairly minor spoiler). Unfortunately, it does make the script feel a bit messy and unfocused.

 When Blake's father is officially declared dead after being missing for years, Blake convinces his wife, whom he feels is growing distant, to go on a family outing and take a look at his dad's estate out in rural Oregon (replaced by locations in New Zealand on the film). On the way there they have a horrifying accident thanks to a mysterious humanoid figure standing on the middle of the road. The family survives and makes it to the house while being hounded by the mysterious figure, but Blake is wounded by it. Uh oh.

 It's a kind of brilliant premise: the family is cut off and trapped in a strange house by the hungry monster prowling outside, trying to figure a way to escape, while Blake is laid low by a slow transformation into a bloodthirsty beast. I guess it's a classic zombie movie situation, but since it involves having two werewolves going at each other's throats (while at least in theory being a threat to everyone else around them) it feels like a fairly novel take.

 It drags a tiny bit on its middle section, but other than that there's plenty to enjoy: some damn good body horror, good tension, and a few truly excellent scenes where the film seamlessly shifts into Blake's point of view to show us his growing disconnection from reality and his loved ones. One of them, designed to show us his senses becoming more and more acute, made me laugh - it doesn't make a single lick sense, but it's the kind of weird touch I adore. Good sound design.
 Whannell also likes to use the camera a little more adventurously than most other directors do, but only in short bursts - kind of like he did in Upgrade. There are some lovely little flourishes where simple lighting techniques are used to portray a character's isolation or to shift focus from one character to another. Unfortunately the theater I watched this at left some of the lights on while the film rolled, which made an already murky movie a little harder to parse than it should have been.

 The main issue for me, and one that hugely impacted my enjoyment of it, is the werewolves. The makeup and prosthetics are pretty impressive, but... they just don't really look anything like wolves; It's like the monsters are stuck in the initial stages of a werewolf transformation in a movie with better werewolves.

 They look like fucking cavemen. And since the main character is confused and understandably shocked at his transformation, he spends most of the time looking sad. A tragic troglodyte.
 There's also an issue with the inconsistency of the threat the non-dad other werewolf presents - but I guess I can just chalk it down to it being a little incompetent at the whole werewolfing thing. Still call bullshit on the whole greenhouse scene, though.

 Putting aside the creatures' looks and a slightly meandering middle section, the movie's not bad at all. And even with the silly-looking werewolves, things could be a lot worse: Universal's original plan was an entry in their (aborted) MCU-like 'Dark Universe' continuity, with The Rock rumoured to play the protagonist. Also consider that the last movie Blumhouse dumped in a January was Nightswim; A low blow, I know, but still a precedent.

 It's a shame the script doesn't manage to wrangle its on-the-nose themes to say something more interesting (or even cogent), but at least the story is satisfying, the family drama at the film's heart is well-handled, and there's enough cool genre stuff to satisfy me. I kind of liked it, mopey caveman and all.

A Dark Song

 The Abramelin ritual is a taxing, months-long set of occult processes performed with the aim to purify yourself enough to contact and ask a boon of your Daemon - or, in more traditional, theurgic versions of the ritual, your holy guardian angel. It's probably best known for being a ritual Aleister Crowley bailed on; he was reportedly never the same again afterwards.

 That ritual is at the center of A Dark Song - and that, in and of itself, that's pretty pretty impressive! But even better, the whole of the film makes an effort to portray occult practices in a somewhat realistic light*. Realistic being a relative term here, of course**... but I'm heavily predisposed to like a movie that mentions Gnosticism and then calls its main character Sophia.

 Sophia (Catherine Walker) hires a house out in the Welsh countryside to perform the ritual (which can take anywhere from six months to a year and a half, and can't be safely interrupted once started) and the services of Solomon (Steve Oram), a Brit occultist for hire, to guide her through the process. He gets almost one hundred thousand euros, plus the chance to also ask a boon of the daemon at the end of the rite. She says she does it to talk with her dead infant son; The truth is a little more complicated.

 The meat of the movie revolves around a complex set of evolving rituals as Sophia migrates between the different circles scored on the living room in a slow trawl towards purification - all the while taking abuse from her chosen guru, who quickly shows himself as more than a little bit of a dick.

 An occult psychological horror chamber piece, then - how's that for a subgenre?

 Writer/director Liam Gavin, production designer Conor Dennison, set decorator Ciara O'Donovan and cinematographer Cathal Watters carefully mark out the progress of the ritual by making the magic(k)al diagrams on the living room floor ever more intricate. There's a little bit of blood and a few special effects later towards the end, when either the ritual kicks in and either unmoors the house from reality or poor Sophia from her senses, but the film is carefully calibrated to work well within its tiny budget. The film's biggest scare is a wonderfully creepy scene that only involves shadows, a cigarette ember, and great sound design. It's a beautifully crafted movie.

 You'll probably find it a bit slow going if you're not interested in the procedural detail of hermetic magic, but the central relationship is intense, dramatic and well-drawn enough that I think the film would still work - just beware it's got an extremely slow-burn approach. Both actors are excellent, and I found Sophia's arc pretty moving. Outstanding.

 

*: The only other movie I can think of that pays this much attention to the nerdier aspects of the occult is The Alchemist's Cookbook, also from 2016; The stars were obviously right that year.

**: For obvious reasons. Also, I'm sure it's not an entirely accurate portrayal of the workings involved, not with Reiki symbols making an appearance... though that sounds to me like exactly the sort of syncretic practices occultists do all the time. In any case, I don't know enough about it for it to bother me.

Seance

 I have a lot of time for Simon Barrett, a writer who's mostly known for scripting most of the films of his buddy Adam Wingard - as far as I'm concerned, the duo have a lifetime pass for their early work: You're Next, a couple good segments in the first two V/H/S films, and (especially) The Guest.

 Seance is his only full-length movie as a director so far (he wrote it as well). It's not that great, but it's dumb, cheesy fun.

 Camilla (Suki Waterhouse) arrives at the exclusive Edelvine Academy for Girls, a replacement in the middle of the year for another girl who died in mysterious circumstances.

 She soon runs into trouble by picking a fight with the school's mean girl clique, and gets locked into detention with them. As it turns out, the dead girl used to be a part of their group, and her death came soon after they performed a ritual to invoke the Edelvine ghost, a local legend rumored to haunt the school halls. The whole ritual was a prank, but we all know ghosts can't really tell the difference.

 Having learnt no lesson at all, the girls decide to perform a seance to find out what really happened to their friend, and they're all surprised to find the ghost is pretty talkative (they use an improvised planchette to do automatic writing); The spirits, as they are wont to do, warn of bloody murder. And sure enough, one of the girls gets stabbed while walking the school grounds that night.

 You know the drill; while the girls stage their own investigation, someone stalks them and picks them off, one by one, until there's a final confrontation. The story falls mainly within the category of mystery-focused slashers, but it also includes a minor splash of the supernatural with a sprinkling of visions, nightmares and ghost sightings.
 The solution to the masked slasher mystery is one-half extremely obvious, one-half absolutely ridiculous (and out of the blue); There's also one more (unrelated) twist afterwards that's absolutely bullshit - a fun idea that makes little sense on its face and further falls apart if you give it any amount of thought. All this dumbness is offset by the film being knowingly trashy while still treating its preposterous story with all seriousness, which I appreciate.

 The other thing that won me over is that the film gets progressively gorier as it trundles on. The first few deaths are very PG13, but things take a turn about an hour in with a close-up of a throat slashing that's clearly a reference to Italian horror, and from there there's a fair amount of well-realised gore. Things sadly don't ever cross over into full-on action the way The Guest did, but there's a similar feel as one of the characters reveals not-very-well-hidden reserves of badassery.

 The acting is... fine. Everyone's playing very predictable, well-established types, and that includes Waterhouse, who's otherwise gives a very enjoyable performance as a take-no-shit style lone wolf. The filmmaking doesn't particularly call attention to itself, but what little action there is is clear and the film is fairly atmospheric, with some good suspense-building. There are a few scenes shot in the dark which the digital cameras turn into a murky visual soup, but maybe I'm just over-sensitive at the moment after watching Nosferatu.

 All in all, it's fine - vacuous, teen-friendly horror with precious little of the smug tone that turns me off films like Scream and that lot. Maybe it's that close-up of a throat wound, but it really did remind me of the crappy horror films Italy would put out by the dozens in the eighties. Lacking as it does the sort of madness that would put it over the top, I doubt I'll remember any of it in a year or so - still, good fun.

Gaia

 Gaia is a decent little eco-horror film from South Africa that is notable for a) some truly gorgeous shots of the local jungle and b) featuring monsters that look like escaped from the sets of The Last Of Us. The filmmakers protest they'd never even heard of the games until they were in the middle of production and that they were inspired by the same Cordyceps footage from Planet Earth that inspired that game's designers; Which is perfectly reasonable, except that they then gave the fungus zombies in their movie the same clicking noises as in the games.

Can't be that big a surprise, the guy was clearly terrible at his job.

 In any case, the cordyceps-like fungus zombies are only a minor part of the story, which mostly follows the misadventures of two rangers who get lost inside the preserve they're supposed to be patrolling. One of them is a dumbass who's almost immediately (and deservedly) consumed by the aforementioned fungus monsters. The other ranger, Gabi (Monique Rockman), gets injured by a trap while looking for a downed drone and is taken in by a father-and-son duo who've gone native and have been living in a rickety shack in the middle of the jungle for more than a decade.

 Gabi doesn't know if she's a prisoner, a prospective victim/sacrifice, or if she's free to go, which is not helped by the father (Cerel Nel) giving off some serious unabomber vibes. The son (Alex Van Dyk), meanwhile, has lived all of his life in the shack and is understandably attracted to Gabi.

 As weeks go by and Gabi heals, she learns a bit more of her hosts, of their relationship with the local monsters (who attack the shack every few nights, Minecraft-style), and of the weird religion the father and son share, one that's devoted to a bizarre local lifeform. Tensions escalate as she decides to go back to civilization... and to take the son with her against the father's wishes, and those of the entity in the jungle.

 It's a decent mix of elements which sadly don't entirely cohere into a satisfying narrative even when some overtly biblical themes are introduced. It's relatively interesting, though, and beautifully filmed - director Jaco Bower and cinematographer Jorrie van der Walt make really good use of some gorgeous local scenery. The acting is pretty good, the monsters are great (though, again, they barely figure in the story) and the effects are fine, especially for a low-budget movie like this one. It's never particularly scary or exciting, but there's a little bit of effective body horror, some minor psychodelia and some cool imagery, Just enough to make it worth your time, but maybe not enough to allow those mycelium to dig in too deep.

Nosferatu (2024)

 It's common knowledge now (if it wasn't before) that the original 1922 Nosferatu is Dracula with the serial numbers filed off - just enough changes to try and avoid a lawsuit from the Stoker estate (which ended up happening anyway, and nearly wiped the movie from history). Think about it. The first mockbuster; The Asylum is totally Murnau's fault.

 Robert Eggers is a fan, and has been trying to get a remake off the ground ever since he hit it big with The VVitch almost ten years ago (this was going to be his second film, once upon a time). The reverence he holds for the material is easy to see - as carefully constructed spectacle goes, this one is just as impressive as your Dunes or Mad Maxes. It's just that instead of nuclear explosions or a thrilling attack on a vehicle convoy, you get immaculately desolate Carpathian ridges and people talking in a reconstructed dead language. Eggers gonna egg.

 I barely remember either of the previous Nosferatus, as I was pretty much a teen when i watched them (Werner Herzog also had a go at remaking it back in the 70s) - the one I remember the most is Shadow of the Vampire, a pretty clever deconstructionist horror film set during the filming of the original. So I can only compare it against Dracula... and yeah, it really is Dracula with the numbers filed off - the same characters running through a very similar plot with many of the same elements.

 Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a young real estate agent is called to ratify some documents by an eccentric rich foreigner to buy a nearby property. The catch is that the count lives in a remote corner of the Carpathians, forcing our hero to leave his young, mentally fragile newlywed wife Mina Ellen (Lily Rose Depp) alone. Unbeknownst to everyone, the Count is laying a trap for the man, as he's got his sights on stealing his paramour.

 The rest of the film is, beat for beat, pretty similar; as the count exerts some dread long-distance influence over Ellen, causing her to behave erratically, which forces Ellen's exasperated doctor (Ralph Inneson) to consult with his mentor - Von Franz (Willem Dafoe, who played Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire), a crackpot hermeticist and the Van Helsing surrogate in this story.

 The vampire arrives on a ghost ship with a host of plague rats, who start spreading diseases all over town - a neat visualization of the count's influence. Thomas, who survived the Count's trap, also arrives, and starts trying to mount a resistance along with Von Franz and some friends. It all leads to a confrontation that, to put it lightly, veers left from Dracula's.

 

 What Eggers adds as a writer here is a couple of more modern touches to the story to give Ellen a little more relevance and agency, which I think work pretty well.

 On the one hand, I love that Ellen is something... other, more akin to the legendary vampire than to the rest of humankind. She originally wakes the fiend, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) by praying to him in a state of complete solitude (and, it's heavily implied, sexual frustration), therefore setting the events of the film in motion. The film also pays more attention to her mental health and posits them as part of her otherness - which her Victorian-like peers of course treat as hysteria.

 These changes do recontextualize the original film's famously downer of an ending... a little. But what's unclear is how they add a cogent message to the movie, or add any depth to a character whose faith still was decided by a cast of men, or whose way to save the day... is pretty unconventional*. It's messy.

 Of course the other thing Egger brings to the table are his considerable chops as a stylist and a gift for bringing to life time-distant cultures. And in that respect, this film is an unmitigated success - I'd go as far as saying that it's just as crazily stylized as Coppola's wonderful take on Dracula, but instead of going for high operatic camp, Eggers goes the other direction, giving us a muted, gothic take on the material whose precise camerawork and intricate production design I can only describe as Wes Anderson on a minor key**.

 The film is shot on 35mm and looks absolutely stunning at almost all times, never more than throughout a stretch of Thomas's Transylvanian jaunt where the colours drain out until it becomes a black and white film for a while, with a scene that pays homage to another classic B&W film, The Phantom Carriage at its heart. The cinematographer is Egger's regular collaborator Jarin Blaschke, and he really earns his pay here - it's a thematically and literally shadow-drenched film often only lit with natural lighting from meager candles. There's a recurring complaint that modern horror is too murky (I tend to not agree), but few use shadows as well as this one does, and everything is clearly discernible except when it isn't supposed to be. It looks luscious.

 The acting is mostly great. Depp is incredible as Ellen in a very demanding role, Inneson is as baritone as ever, Dafoe plays his likeable cook with predictable flair, and Skarsgård has a lot of fun devouring the scenery with an outrageously ridiculous accent, which I guess is the prerogative of those playing vampire nobles. Oh, and Simon McBurney as the Renfield equivalent is a huge amount of fun, too.

 I'm much less enthused by the young gentlemen of the piece - Hoult is... all right, though I must admit I've never found him particularly interesting; I'm convinced his high cheekbones, and the way they throw shadows on the rest of his face, were at least a factor in his casting. His friend (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), I found completely unconvincing.

 Is it worth it? Well, for me, absolutely, but aside from the technical side I found this to be Egger's least rewarding film. I'm sad to report I thought it dragged a little at times. People are actually saying pretty nice things about it, though, which surprised me but I'm glad to hear. It's not arthouse ('elevated') horror, it's a proper gothic vampire tale. But it's also stilted as all hell, most of its elements are pretty shopworn, and despite an incredible sense of menace (and a really cool vampire) I wouldn't really rate it very highly as a horror film.

 Fans of Twilight disappointed with the amount of vampire weenage on display in that series should note that Orlok's withered, diseased penis is on full display here. Maybe that's why people like it so much.

 I don't want to sound too negative here. Lesser Eggers turns out to still be essential, and those technical aspects count for a whole lot; This one demands to be seen in the biggest screen possible. After that crossroads-set carriage scene, I would love it unconditionally even if it was half as good.

*: My proposed interpretation is much more boring: forget the psychosexual angle, and consider Orlok as a manifestation of her untreated mental illness.

**: This is meant as unqualified praise, by the way.