Dark Match

 I've never really been interested in wrestling at all, even though I spent a couple of formative years in the States during Hulkmania. I've seen movies about these small upstart wrestling companies like the one at the heart of Dark Match before, but I have no idea what they're all about - some kind of travelling show, maybe? I don't know any of the lingo and I'm not really predisposed to buy into its manufactured drama. Would I have enjoyed the movie more if I knew anything about its world, or had any nostalgia for it? Probably not; This is one rickety B-movie.

 The small wrestling company in question is SAW, and they feature a varied roster of heels (villains - hey, I knew this bit of lingo!) and faces (good guys) who fight in dingy warehouses to the delight of even dingier crowds. One good day their manager (Jonathan Cherry) gets hired to give a performance at a remote rural compound full of trashy rock'n'roll loving deviants. After some ominous partying, they are roped into a tournament where the crew are forced to compete against each other in gimmicky, elemental-coded fights... to the death. All for the benefit of a mysterious 'leader' (Chris Jericho) who looks like a bargain-bin Mickey Rourke character and doesn't even pretend not to be some sort of diabolic cult leader.

 Writer/director Lowell Dean seems to be perfectly happy making kind of likeable, haphazard horror filler; This is the type of film that informs you that it's set in the eighties by having a character awkwardly say "hey, it's 1988!". You know, in case it wasn't clear from the brightly coloured jackets, the walkmen, the music, the lurid lighting schemes, or the frequent stretches where the film goes through a degraded VHS-like filter. Plus, it's very poorly shot and completely lacks any sense of style- it just looks cheap; If for some reason you have any problem with Joe Begos's filmography, this one should at least give you some appreciation for his craft.

 Dark Match also takes a little too long to get to the fun parts - the titular dark matches; It barely hangs together as a coherent story and is full of the type of dialog that good actors would struggle with. Not that the acting here is, well, good: The protagonist (Ayisha Issa) has a good, glowering screen presence, and her rival (Sara Canning) also acquits herself well - but everyone else... well, at least they look like they're having fun.
 Everyone except pro wrestler Chris Jericho (who also produces), who seems invested enough to take his ridiculous character completely seriously and tries to give us a convincing, scary villain. It really, really doesn't work.

 Lowell's piss-poor script can't even begin to support a number of unlikely plots that include romances and rivalries within the crew, a very inconsistent conspiracy, and the possibility that the whole tournament is some sort of satanic ritual. Its ninety-odd minutes go by quickly, though, thanks to a relatively quick pace, absolute lack of pretension, and an agreeable amount of decent, completely practical gore effects. Don't ask anything else out of it, roll with its dumbness, and you should be OK.

Offseason

 Marie (Jocelin Donahue) arrives with a friend (Joe Swanberg) at a remote holiday island on the last day of summer. Her mother's grave has been vandalized, a letter informs her, and she needs to go over and survey the damage.

 But the island has the strange custom of sealing itself off after tourist season - they lift the only bridge into town, effectively locking the townies in until winter's over. This leaves Marie with one night to solve the situation with her mother's grave, otherwise she's stuck for the off season.

 And of course there's more to it than that. Marie's ma (played in flashbacks by Melora Walters) didn't want under any circumstances to be buried back in her home town; there's talk of a curse, a deal with a demon. And let's just say that the reception Marie and her friend get in town is... distinctly Innsmouth-ian.

 But while there are some Lovecraftian overtones to the movie, the curse itself is a little more pedestrian (and low-budget-friendly) than a Deep One infestation. The result is the same: Marie is soon left wandering the mist-enshrouded empty tourist town alone with a flashlight, trying to escape the island while being hunted by demonic townies. Any comparisons to Lovecraft or Silent Hill are sadly not going to be very favorable.

 Nothing here is exactly original, but the elements are there for an effective horror-thriller. Unfortunately, despite a strong command of tone, some good cinematography, and a good central performance from Donahue, this one's a bit of a bore.

 Pacing is a huge hurdle: Marie spends ages wandering around in the mist, looking out for threats that mostly fail to materialize. There are some asides that delve a little into Marie and her mother's backstory a little, and they do help break the monotony of the action, but there's only so much careful prowling in empty, darkened tourist traps I can take. Characterization is thin, and most of the dialog devolves into people screaming at each other unconvincingly. Which is a shame because I tend to like most of these actors: Swanberg's character is insufferable, Richard Brake does little more than scream his motivations over and over, and the inestimable Larry Fessenden barely gets a cameo.
 And there are some pretty lousy ideas, as well; The western-inspired pub scene is laughably bad, as is the technical instruction video for a complicated piece of machinery (I'm going to chalk that down to an attempt at humour).

 There's some good mixed in with the bad: I liked a flashback to a session with some lawyers where Marie tries to get her mother's will changed, and the reveal of the evil pulling the strings is pretty memorable. Marie looks great in a fetching tan overcoat. And as mentioned, it's a pretty atmospheric film overall, with some strikingly good looking scenes. But everything else feels threadbare, and not just because of the obviously low funds. Writer/director Mickey Keating simply fails to take the movie anywhere interesting. 

Grave Encounters

 The 'paranormal investigators run into the real thing' subgenre of found-footage horror is actually older than Paranormal Activity or even The Blair Witch Project; It started with Ghostwatch, a legendary 1992 BBC program that fooled many of its viewers into thinking it was the real thing thanks to its pitch-perfect, deadpan execution. It's a bit of a legend here in the UK even among those who didn't watch it when it originally aired.

 As for its more modern, cynical form - one that takes into account shitty ghost-hunting reality TV shows and youtubers, the ur-text is probably the very enjoyable Canadian shocker Grave Encounters from 2011. I've been thinking about it off and on for a while now - since watching Gonjeam: Haunted Asylum and The Deadtectives, at least. And yeah... its influence is undeniable.

 The film kicks off with an introduction from the producer of a reality TV show called, of course, Grave Encounters, who explains that the show was cancelled after its whole crew went missing during the filming of the sixth episode. Which is a pretty solid reason for cancellation, if you think about it; No amount of online petitions are going to help there. Anyhow, the footage they shot during the filming of that episode - set in a spooky abandoned mental hospital - was retrieved after their disappearance, edited from hundreds of hours into ninety minutes for our viewing pleasure.

 The crew consists of:
 Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), the host, your typical charismatic faker.
 Sasha (Asheligh Gryzko), a goth-y occult specialist, the true believer (though she's still pretty cynical).
 T.C. Gibson (Merwyn Mondesir), the main cameraman and all-round 'fuck this noise' type.
 Matt White (Juan Riedinger), Tech wizard, laid-back.
 And last but not least Houston Gray (Mackenzie Gray), a fake medium and amiable charlatan.

 They're all douchebags who are not above slipping some money to a gardener to make up a ghost story about the building they're going to be covering on the show (the film can be pretty funny when it wants to, as in that aside). They're not influencers, so they come off more as entertaining grifters/hacks than as complete wastes of flesh. The film proceeds pretty much as you'd expect: a long introduction where we learn about the characters and the building they're going to be spending the night on, the surveillance setup, the 'supernatural hotspots' which may or may not figure prominently later, etc.

 When weird shit starts happening, it's also the usual gradual ramp-up from gentle weirdness: for a while it's all mysterious noises, equipment failures, and things moving on their own. The film finally hits its stride when the panicked crew try to leave the building, which leads to a House of Leaves-style twist and the strongest moment in the film (complete with a very funny callback to an early laugh*); From there things get a lot more hectic, with some pretty cool horror moments as the hospital's ghosts torment our crew. Cheap CGI does mar the proceeds... as does a whole lot of wandering around dark hallways with swinging flashlights and/or night vision cameras.

 It's this ratio of thrills to a very specific type of tedium that makes this horror subgenre somewhat hard to recommend; I think that, thanks to some pretty cool horror scenes, Grave Encounters lands comfortably on the green, but I'd be lying if all the hysterics and wobbly-lit running down darkened passages didn't wear on my nerves.
 The cast do a decent job; Even if their characters remain little more than sketches, they're likeable enough that it keeps this from having the audience rooting for the ghouls. Writer/Directors The Vicious Brothers have some neat ideas for their scares, but the format they're working on mercilessly thrusts function over form. Or rather: the more artless its form, the more effective it is - there's some really good horror imagery, but its impact is conceptual, not visual, if that makes any sense.

*: Death Awaits indeed.

The Monkey

 Stephen King's The Monkey is a pretty simple short story. In around forty pages, it tells the story of a father and a son that are cursed with a toy monkey that, the father suspects based on childhood experience, causes deaths whenever it smashes its cymbals together. Then then they get rid of it.

 It's not surprising that it's undergone some changes while being adapted into a motion picture. Writer/director Osgood Perkins, fresh off the unlikely success of Longlegs, has chosen to turn it into a splatterpunk comedy.

 The protagonist has now been split into twins, both played as kids by Christian Convery. One's mousy and meek, the other's a would-be-jock asshole; When they discover the Monkey, which was a gift from their absentee father (played in a fun prologue by Adam Scott, making great use of his endless reserves of mannered aggravation), they quickly discover that whenever someone turns the key on its back, someone gets killed. Gruesome deaths start piling up until they throw the monkey down a well.

 Twenty-five years later Hal (Theo James plays both grown-up twins) gets one last weekend with his estranged son Petey (Colin O'Brien) before his new stepdad (Elijah Wood) formally adopts him*. Their holiday is cut short by a phone call from Bill, who informs his brother Hal that The Monkey has resurfaced. Suddenly people are dying in hilariously macabre ways left and right and center again, and it's up to Hal and Petey to find out who's been turning the key on his childhood toy.

 It's a film that fully embraces the bizarre - it's been advertised as a 'trip', has funky 60s fonts in its title card, and lets Perkins channel all the overt weirdness that suffused Longlegs with menace into... a sort of humour this time around. Not all the jokes work - in fact, a lot of them fall flat - but they are constant, and the good ones are pretty damn good. Imagine it as an outsider version of a Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker film.

 The whole thing takes place in a world where cheerleaders line up outside police cordons to cheer when the coroner takes a body away, and a rookie, overwhelmed, seemingly stoned priest (Nicco Del Rio) is allowed to give eulogies where he unwittingly keeps making jokes at the expense of the deceased. One recurring knucklehead character looks like a missing member of Stephen King's beloved Ramones.

 The deaths, too, are overwrought and extremely messy. The heightened nature of the world extends to its implementation of the laws of physics: an electrocution here might make someone blow up like a gremlin in a microwave. The carnage ranges from simple shotgun blasts to Rube-Goldberg-like devices that end up with a cannon blast to someone's face. All of them are as over the top and gory as possible, though in a cartoony way that robs them of the impact they would otherwise have (there's a reason this was rated 15 here in the UK); This is a horror comedy that definitely isn't trying to scare anyone. Lots of CGI, unfortunately, but it fits well with the garish style of the bloodshed.

 Osgood Perkins has always been fond of careful visual compositions, and here, along with cinematographer Nico Agilar, he manages some truly outstanding visuals. The editing by Greg Ng and Graham Fortin is excellent, too, with a smash cut (involving a turn by Perkins in a minor, gloriously muttonchopped role) scoring one of the biggest laughs in the movie. And the monkey prop is glorious, especially its perverted grin. They reportedly had to replace the cymbals with a drum due to fears of the monkey-with-cymbals being copyrighted by Disney after Toy Story 3 - which is hilarious if true - but that's probably for the better as it allows the Monkey some cinematic flair. What with his drumstick twirling and everything.

 The script is all right; Like the acting, it's so mannered and willfully strange that it's hard to hold it to task for some of the film's excesses. I got a slight sense that Osgood, fully taking on the role of class clown, goes in a little too strong on the strangeness - some of the humour felt a bit forced to me, strained.
 But criticizing the film for that would be a bit mean, given how much of it is successful and how different the whole thing feels from anything else out there. And by the end it even lands on a sincere-sounding message of sorts, even if it is a little fucked-up. This is a great, unique, hugely entertaining slice of macabre nuttiness.

*: How does it compare to other films (Dayshift, 60 Minutes) that use unreasonable family demands to set the stakes? Well, here it isn't as much an ultimatum as a fait accompli, plus it's played solely for laughs.

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 province of Vosges; 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 their 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 appearing at all the crime scenes. 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 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 dumb conceits; 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 cruel, bloody late-movie portrayal of the inciting crime), there's not much they can do here other than keeping things nice and atmospheric. There are a couple of perfunctory foot chases, a couple shootings and a pretty neat car/bike stunt; Aside from than that, everything 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.