Havoc

 Do you like John Woo? Do you really like John Woo? That Welsh action auteur Gareth Evans really likes John Woo has been clear for a long time - it was made crystal clear during The Raid 2, and in that standout Gangs of London episode where everyone and everything gets the shit shot out of it but real good; Nothing says gritty street-level crime drama like a guy getting perforated two dozen times by high-velocity rounds and still somehow dragging himself up to make a last stand, right? Well, maybe not, but it is pretty Woo.

 Havoc - a film that's had a pretty rough go of it since filming wrapped in 2021 - is only a few doves away from being extremely fucking Woo. People slide on different surfaces discharging weapons. Petty criminals and rookie cops turn out to be born naturals at inflicting all sorts of violence. No one ever runs out of ammo, and people never get shot just once - no one dies until a at least a full machinegun's worth of lead is emptied into their torso... and sometimes not even then. Bullet impacts set off detonations all over the scenery, and great, big, videogamey gouts of blood burst out of spasming bodies, giving the bigger shootouts an oddly festive feel. It's not all that aesthetically equivalent (more on that later), but it definitely felt to me like Evans is paying tribute to the master.

 The plot, meanwhile, is where things veer slightly away from John Woo territory. Evan's script is just as heightened, melodramatic and over-the-top, and it does feature a central redemption story - but it's all quite a bit grittier, a little murkier; There's no glamourizing protagonist Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy), for example. He's a dirty cop and deadbeat father who's introduced buying a shitty, last-minute Christmas present for his estranged daughter while giving his adorable rookie cop partner (Jessie Mei Li) all sorts of shit.

 Walker stumbles into a nasty shootout at a Chinese club that leads him into a tangled, improbable yarn to try and protect the son of a powerful local politician from both Chinese Triads and corrupt cops. Evan's script starts with a bang - an exhilarating truck chase that achieves an incredible sense of speed and risk, and ends with a car getting totalled by a washing machine. The scenes that follow slow down for an hour or so to lay down the plot needed to carry things towards a couple of long, extremely involved action scenes, but violence is never far under the skin; Most of these scenes end with someone getting shot or a stabbed.

 The plot itself is fairly by-the-numbers and requires some pretty dodgy coincidences to move things forward, especially as things move towards the final series of confrontations. All characters except Walker (ably played by Hardy) are thinly sketched types fleshed out by a stacked cast of established charismatic actors (Robert Whittaker, Luis Guzmán, Timothy Olyphant) and some great finds (Yeo Yann Yann, Mei Li, and MMA-turned-stuntwoman Michelle Waterson, who gets both the best fight and the best death in the movie).

 It's all about the action, of course, and while it clearly belongs to a latter, slightly lesser era (one where they let computers handle most of the squibs), Evans and his crew do fine by Woo's legacy and all the other Hong Kong action movies that influenced them, while keeping a more modern, chaotic style.

 There's very little concern for realism - this is the sort of movie where faceless mooks will often pop into the scene and patiently wait to be shot by the protagonists - but that scarcely matters, and neither does a slightly too-artificial look that's concealed under a ton of digital grain and a style that leans more jittery and chaotic than anything Woo did in his heyday.

 What does matter is that even as it looks artificial, it looks good, and that the camera work is tight, flowing and exciting, every now and then indulges in Evans' signature flourish, a tilt to follow a swinging club or a falling body. The fights are full of the sort of creative brutality that makes you laugh out loud in gleeful disbelief... What more can you ask for?
 The sound design is exhausting in the best way possible - not as good as Warfare, maybe, but the many, many different reports from these guns are worthy of the destruction they wreak.

 Violence is gratuitous and all-encompassing in this world; when someone swings a cleaver, you can bet you'll see the results of their efforts, innocents are mercilessly mowed down (another Hong Kong staple) and the only bit of glass that isn't shattered in a fight is there just so you can see a man's face smashed against it from the other side. If that sort of thing is not for you, well... you're out of luck.

 For the rest of us, this is a very well-made action film that delivers everything it sets out to do. It's not as good as The Raid or Merantau, it doesn't have as much cool stuff going on as The Raid 2, and it's not as relentless as that one Gangs of London episode. But even with its limited budget and scope it confirms Gareth Evans as one of our finest working action directors. Now let's hope it doesn't take him five years to get his next picture off the ground.

Irati

 After giving a Basque spin to an ancient European folk tale in Errementari, writer/director Paul Urkijo Alijo turns his attention to the legends of his own country, adorning the margins of the story of the first king of Pamplona with all sorts of mythical flourishes.

 When Charlemagne's armies march towards their domain, the young scion of the local ruling family  turns his back on his Christian faith and makes a deal with Luxa (Elena Uriz), a powerful witch: blood for blood, as demanded by the old ways. He slits his own throat during the battle, and the covenant is fulfilled when giant rocks fall from the sky, squashing the invading franks.
 While the armies fight, his young son Eneko narrowly survives an encounter with a soldier and a lamiak, a river spirit (to the basques, they were apparently men-drowning river spirits more similar to Morgen, Groa'ch, or Rusalkas than the Greek Lamiae). There he meets Irati, the near-feral apprentice to the witch who his father made the deal with.

 With the Franks repelled, the locals are forced to honour the dead lord's deal and bury him in a pagan mound, which the local priests are none too pleased about. In the aftermath young Eneko is sent to get a Christian education elsewhere, and his just-widowed mother is married off to a neighbouring muslim lord to help secure the borders.

 Fifteen years later Eneko (Eneko Sagardoy) returns, saving Irati (Edurne Azkarate) from some sleazy lumberjacks running an illegal logging operation on his land. The eight-century equivalent of an action hero foiling a drug store robbery by chance. When he gets home after that, he's just in time to hear his grandfather's last words. Say what you want of Eneko, the guy seems to have an impeccable sense of timing.

 His grandfather's final request, by the way, is to be buried on hallowed ground by his son. The villagers happily go back on their deal with the witch and exhume the body; During the exhumation, they find that the lord's body has been turned into a goat. Pagans came up with some pretty fun penalties for breaching terms and conditions, it seems.

 Luxa is arrested for rightly calling the Christians out on their bullshit. Later, she tells Eneko that his father's body lies in the lair of the goddess Mari deep underground, along with the treasure from the defeated Frankish army.
 Faster than you can say Hark, a quest!, Eneko sets out to recover his dad's bones, taking along Irati as a guide. They are followed covertly by the henchmen of a duplicitous lordling who's gunning after both the treasure and Eneko's birthright; That conflict will come to a head, of course, but not before they all run into a small selection of Basque mythical beings - all the way up to goddess Mari herself (who sports a gorgeous bit of costume design).

 Irati is a bit of a strange movie - a swords and sorcery saga that's fairly low on adventure, and an epic story that feels slightly less than the sum of its parts. Urkijo Alijo also scripts, adapting a graphic novel (by J. L. Landa and J. Muñoz); But while the script is well constructed, it feels like he couldn't find a good balance between its elements. It's melancholy by design, but that solemnity feels almost at cross purposes with plotting that includes (too few) monster attacks and a dastardly noble rival.

 Visually, though, I have no complaints. The film is gorgeous, with the director, cinematographer Gorka Gómez and the rest of the crew squeezing as much natural beauty out of the forests, caves and mountains they film in as humanly possible. The special effects are low-rent and rely heavily on CGI - but as in Errementari, they complement the film's heightened aesthetics, and there's a ton imagination and a strong sense of visual design on display. That they managed to make this at all with a budget of four million euros is a miracle.

 The characters are fine, and I do like that the main thrust of the movie is for these two people - one following an ascendant faith, the other following a path that's disappearing as she walks it - to find common ground. But the love story is a little too abrupt to be convincing, and the acting a bit uneven; Azkarate cuts an imposing figure (Irati gets a lot of moments where the camera frames her as a badass), while Sagardoy always looks... kind of bemused to be there. He's not bad, precisely, and I think the intention is for him to be out of his depth most of the time - but he doesn't have a lot of presence, which is a huge drawback in the few scenes where it's his turn to shine. More damningly, he doesn't have a lot of chemistry with Azkarate either.

 With all these caveats, I did like the film. File it under interesting rather than great, but there's room for that too - especially if it goes all out to portray a folklore I knew next to nothing about. Plus, there are as many shots of a gloriously unimpressed goat as you could possibly want.

Fréwaka

 When Shoo (Clare Monnelly) arrives at her mother's home to clean up after her death, her fiancée Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya) is shocked at just how few fractions of a fuck she seems to give. Things aren't improved when Shoo decides to take a care worker gig somewhere out in the boondocks, leaving poor Mila to throw away all her late, unknown mother-in-law's belongings. That's no way to foster a relationship.
 Shoo of course has her reasons, which are explained later in the film. But the bulk of the story concerns her stint taking care of Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), an older woman living alone in an isolated, large house after a stroke.

 Peig, you see, is a difficult customer - she refuses to open the door for Shoo, and greets her with a puddle of piss. (that's piss!, Peig helpfully explains.) Even once Shoo gets access to the house, she has to deal with Peig's hostility and bizarre rituals - from throwing away all her pills and dumping a ton of salt in her porridge, to keeping all the mirrors in the house covered and making Shoo tap an iron horseshoe three times every time she wants to come in from outside.

 But as Shoo ingratiates herself to the older woman, she starts to think there may be more to her weirdness than paranoid delusions. No points for guessing that there is, indeed, a supernatural menace trying to wend its way into the house from without (and within, through the heavily warded cellar door).

 Fréwaka is one of those movies that does what it does well, but not in a way I personally find particularly engaging or memorable. Writer/director Aislinn Clarke and her crew do very well with a shoestring budget - I have to respect a movie whose 'monsters' include guys in suits and Friday-the-13th-part-one-style sack-cloth masks... and succeeds in making them menacing without any violence. The filmmaking is often beautiful, with some pretty striking use of colour, and always atmospheric (cinematographer: Narayan Van Maele); A jarring soundtrack by Die Hexen helps immensely.

 The tone is unremittingly bleak, with some bursts of warmth as the relationship between the protagonists develops - both actresses are excellent.

 The story flows well, has suitably nasty reveals, its plot hinges between pagan and Irish Catholic abuse, and it incorporates a lot of cultural and supernatural specifics, along with some cool ideas (like certain thresholds like marriage, birth and death acting as vectors through which the uncanny can seep in; Shoo qualifies for all three). This is all good stuff.

 Despite  fulfilling several criteria, I don't think this can be accused of being elevated horror - It's certainly arthouse, but there's never a sense that it's only begrudgingly a horror movie. However well crafted and sincere, though, I constantly felt a certain familiarity to the film's tropes and throughline, and a distance I wasn't able to close.

 These are both things I've struggled with on other modern folk horror movies, though... So maybe mine is a a problem with the subgenre? I'd hope not - I love folklore, I love horror, and I love movies that try to make faeries as scary as they were to our distant ancestors. So I'm a bit annoyed I didn't like this movie a lot more than I did.

Sinners

 There are legends, Ryan Coogler's new movie Sinners tells us, of people with the gift of making music so true it conjures spirits from the past and future. This is demonstrated at the film's halfway point when Sammi (Miles Caton) finally plays for a packed audience; As musicians and crowd lose themselves in the song, they're joined by ghostly revellers both long gone and yet to be born, forebears and descendants: A guitar-wielding rock-star, a DJ, a chinese Opera singer, breakdancers. And the music follows suit, morphing the instrumentation running beneath Sammi's blues number fluidly in and out of several different styles

 It's an almost didactic demonstration of the universality and transcendent power of music. It's ridiculous in the best way possible, a huge gamble that pays off in a big way. The scene is the clear heart of the movie; It both neatly divides and bridges the film's period drama-heavy setup from the blood-soaked vampire horror that still lurks in the wings. It is, over everything else, a thing of beauty, and it firmly establishes Sinners as a bona fide musical.

 But the film takes its time to get to that party, and to the monsters that gatecrash it. First we spend an hour following Smoke and Stack, twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan in a characteristically great performance) who return to their small Mississippi town at the tail end of the prohibition from a years-long stint - first in the war, and then working for the Chicago mob.

 They've come back to set up a juke joint (a mix between a casino, lounge and dance hall catering to a black clientele) at a sawmill they bought with ill-gotten gains. And because they fear the gangsters following them, they need get it done quickly; They arrive at morning, buy the place, and aim to have the grand opening that same night.

 The brothers are bad news, but charismatic and profligate with their money, so soon an ensemble cast of colourful characters accretes around them. Sammi is their cousin and first hire: a gifted young bluesman and preacher's son who's blinded by the twin's glamour. Then Anne (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke's estranged wife as a cook, Cornbread (Omar Miller) as a door man, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) and Perline (Jayme Lawson) as musicians, and many others.

 Watching them go about their business, promoting their club and working acquaintances to put together their business is detailed, interesting and entertaining to the point that it's almost disappointing when it finally transitions to horror. The upshot is that all that hard work pays off by making the pain and misery inflicted on these people really hurt.

 The vampires are led by Remmick (Jack O'Connell), an Irish child of the night who, like Sammi, has a musical streak. In fact, it's Sammi's performance that draws him to the juke joint just as things are getting into swing: Anne's narration at the beginning warned us that powerful music like that can draw evil spirits along with the bad; A neat nod to all the legendry linking the blues to the devil.

 And that's the second half of the film: The vampires quickly multiply and lay siege to the sawmill, and a handful of survivors try to make it to morning. The film's vampire lore is surprisingly traditional (but I do love that at first the survivors think that they're haints) - the only wrinkle is that they share a sort of hive mind, another really cool touch which becomes very thematic.
 While the vampires start out all white (and Remmick's first recruits are alluded to belong to the Klan), Coogler's script has a much more interesting tack on the type of menace they pose. Remmick comes as a fellow traveller, another oppressed soul looking for fellowship and true emancipation; An interesting nod to the way history has treated Irish peasantry. And the film backs his sincerity by giving him two musical numbers: a lovely renditions of Wild Mountain Thyme and The Rocky Road to Dublin as a lively jig. His lust for Sammi's blood is as much a need to share his gift with his flock as something more demonic.

 All of this, while still keeping it crystal clear that he's a fucking monster.

 As nasty as things get, this fellow traveller theme runs strong through the film and dovetails nicely along with an amazing, eclectic soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson (which veers from jangly americana to heavy doom-laden riffs) and the beautiful, diverse collection of songs.

 And things do get nasty; People get killed in all sorts of ways and blood flows freely, all done through glorious practical and makeup effects. There's a surprising amount of action, all very well rendered - things are not crystal-clear all of the time, but it's a horror film, so that's fine. A bonus cathartic shootout at the end is a strong argument as to that the dismally poor action and shoddy structure of Black Panther was more down to Disney than any lack on Coogler's part.

 And man, does he get to show off in this movie, both behind the camera and behind the pen, in ways both obvious (an early tracking shot following first a girl, then her mom as they simply cross a street particularly stands out) and more subtle (The way a half-picked cotton field underlines the hard work of the men and women out on the field, and how it would factor in making Smoke's shady offer all the more appealing).

The sets and wardrobe are on-point; Horror is notorious for working on tight budgets, but man if it isn't nice to see the a genre exercise to look as lavish as this. The cinematography (by Autumn Durald Arkapaw) is similarly gorgeous, sporting a desaturated look that makes even blue skies look overcast. There a couple of overtly-murky, dark-set scenes, but nothing serious - that's about the only thing I can complain about the film's aesthetics. 

 Elsewhere, I can grumble about missing out on quite a bit of dialog thanks to the thick accents, but that's obviously on me. A more serious complaint would be that the film is somewhat messy, sports some cheesy symbolism, and it's more than a little bloated and self-indulgent - but I don't begrudge it for any of that, not even it goes through more endings than Lord of the Rings. Even when it's corny, that sentimentality is hard-earned.

 To be honest, the biggest problem I have with the whole thing is a trailer that gives entirely too much away, including the identity of several characters who become vampires. As ever: fuck marketing.

 Sinners is a bold mix of elements confidently tied together into a coherent whole by top-notch filmmaking and storytelling. The rare movie where almost everything just works and feels natural; And that is a fine thing to be able to say about, of all things, a sensual vampire period drama musical.

Banshee Chapter

 Inspired by an investigation of the old CIA MKUltra experiments, two young men disappear while one of them tries DMT-19, the drug used in the trials. Because they did it for science, some footage remains of the event; It shows the kids getting more and more spooked until the downstair radio starts emitting calliope music and then tunes into a numbers station. Then something mysterious happens and the video turns into a jumble of botched camera angles, white noise, and this lovely image:

 Anne (Katia Winter), a journalist who used to be best friends in university with the missing kid decides to investigate the disappearance some unspecified time later. Connecting the dots eventually leads her to a weirdo out in the desert (very clearly modelled on Hunter Thompson, and played by Ted Levine) who helps her hook up with some DMT-19 and provides some sorely needed energy to the proceeds. From Beyond gets explicitly name-checked as the duo are hounded by strange presences who are drawn, along with a transmission from the mysterious numbers station, to people who consume the drug.

 Banshee Chapter skirts the line between found footage and more a traditionally shot horror movie. Most of the exposition is handled as in-universe footage, but Anna's exploits are filmed with non-diegetic cameras, albeit in a handheld style that's consistent with the rest of the movie. It's a little messier than that, though - some of Anna's exploits are shown through in-universe cameras, as well.
 I wonder if the intention was to shoot it all as found footage, but they couldn't work out how to do it. As things stand, director Blair Erikson makes it work - it's a fairly good-looking indie horror movie.

 He's unfortunately not that successful with his script (based on an idea by Daniel J. Healy). The mystery is compelling, and there are a couple of very well-crafted set pieces that slowly ratchet tension until they're capped by an inevitable (but effective) jump-scare. But the resolution feels a bit rushed, and the events and the intriguing blend of elements leading up to it never really come together into a coherent, satisfying narrative. The movie is slightly less than the sum of its parts.

 Still, those are some pretty good parts. The jump scares are a little formulaic but the film works hard to make sure they're earned, and they're very well executed when they come. The (modest) effects are fine, Erikson has a pretty good handle on atmosphere, and the acting is enjoyable: Anna's got some good chemistry with Levine, and their rapport heightens what could otherwise have been a pretty dry movie.

 It's not perfect, but it's interesting, and better yet, kind of scary. Success on any of those two fronts is usually enough for me to enjoy something, so I'm not going to look askance at something that succeeds at both. I found out about this one while reading up on Miskatonic U; Happy to say something good came out from that debacle.

Splinter

 Polly (Jill Wagner) and Seth (Paulo Constanzo) are a couple celebrating their first anniversary by going out camping. Their plans are derailed when another couple, Dennis (Shea Whigham) and Lacey (Rachel Kerbs), criminals on the lam, hijack their car at gunpoint.

 The hijacking is derailed in turn when a strange creature attacks the group during a rest stop visit. The being, which manifests as a patch of magnetic ferrofluid that's wont to produce spikes (or splinters, if you like), takes over human hosts and puppeteers them into attacking others, zombie-like.

 This sets the stage for a neat little siege movie as the survivors hole themselves into the gas station shop, try to figure out what they're facing, and find a way to escape without being assimilated.

 There's a lot to like in here. The acting is good, and the characters show some nuance and evolve in interesting ways throughout the night. They also mostly react intelligently to the situations they're put through, and end up being a fairly likeable bunch. 

 The monster, meanwhile, is pretty damn cool. It owes an obvious debt to The Thing - an early scene, where half a hand starts crawling on its own, is only missing a "you've got to be fucking kidding!" comment. But it does enough to distinguish itself - this is not a highly sophisticated monster that can fully mimic humans, just a basic predator that reconfigures flesh and awkwardly strains bone and ligament attempting to spread itself into other unwilling hosts.

 An early scene makes it clear that the infected are fully conscious, even if not in control of their bodies, but this sadly goes unexplored for the rest of the film as the monster only picks up corpses from there on. Its various incarnations are put together with practical effects which seemingly include some pretty cool uses of ferrofluid. The FX are really good for the film's budget bracket, but they're somewhat undone by some Neveldine/Taylor levels of shaky camera work and jerky editing.

 I watched this back when it came out and was completely soured on the film by that: a couple of the creature's attacks are ruined as the camera spasms uncontrollably. This is very obviously a conscious decision to obfuscate the low budget, and to keep the monster out of the frame as much as possible while it performs actions that the FX can't portray.

 Yes, director Toby Wilkins doesn't really find a way to make it look good, but I was absolutely being too harsh on it: it's only a couple of scenes, and justified by external (low budget) and internal (the action is meant to be disorienting) reasons. It also, wittingly or unwittingly, keeps the creature mysterious. In my defense, this came out during a spell where shaky cam was a pox upon action cinema, so I was seriously turned off by it.

 This is an excellent creature feature. It features some top-notch body horror, excellent, likeable, believable characters (a rarity in the genre) and a fun script (by the director, Kai Barry and Ian Shorr) that finds time for a horrifying amateur amputation in between all the monster hijinks and some questionable but fun science-based survival gambits. Sure, it's got a couple of cases of shaky cam and nu-metal, but what are you gonna do... It was the noughties, man.

The Resonator: Miskatonic U - The Feature

 I grew up with Charles Band movies; It's safe to say that the various films put out under his various studios (Trancers, Ghoulies, Parasite Puppet Masters, Subspecies, The Dungeon Master and many, many others) have informed my taste to this day. And there's no denying that, whatever the reason*, the level of quality of their output has dived off a cliff for at least a couple of decades; Speaking as someone who has a lot of affection for their older material, I haven't been able to finish a single film from Full Moon pictures for a very long time now.

 It's within this context that Full Moon Features has chosen to create a modern-day mashup of two of my favourite movies from their golden period: From Beyond and Re-Animator. This was released as a web series, apparently, and later collected into two feature films - this one, which collects the first two episodes, and a latter three-hour monstrosity that edits the whole series into a single movie.

 It begins with a dedication to the late, great Stuart Gordon, effectively setting the tone, before embarking on a near-recreation of the prologue for From Beyond**: Crawford Tillinghast, with the help of an assistant, activates The Resonator, a device meant to pierce the veil between this and other dimensions. The machine works, and the room is filled with weird floating beasties. The assistant ends up dead, and a disturbed Tillinghast shuts down the machine.

 The problem is that it's a deeply shit recreation. The digital cinematography is extremely flat, it's got the dynamism of a week-old flap of roadkill, and the effects are entirely composed of shitty CGI - right down to a butt-ugly shot of a decapitated body spurting blood, which you'd think would be probably easier to rig with practical effects.

 From there we jump to a few scenes that establish the actual take these movies have on From Beyond and ReAnimator... which is to cross them with something similar to a high-school CW show. OK, technically, the cast are students at an university (Miskatonic University, of course) and not high-school, but there are bells between periods, students wear uniforms, and everyone behaves like high-school types. Tillinghast has a cute girlfriend (Christina Braa) and a group of hot young friends, which are introduced in by far the cleverest scene in the whole film when a bunch of young ladies are discussing paranormal phenomena as if they were talking about boys.

 There's also a couple of dastardly professors led by Mr. Wallace (Michael Paré). The man's got designs on Tillinghast's machine, and later confesses to have killed his father for... reasons.

 The 'plot' of the movie, such as it is, involves the students fooling around with the Resonator, some relationship troubles between Tillinghast and his girlfriend, and Mr. Wallace showing up at one point trying to take control of the device. There are some boobs and some sub-skinemax 'sexy' scenes, including one with a fairly funny-looking octopus lady. There's no forward momentum, nothing interesting happens, not a single good character moment, nothing; Seriously, one of the main things that gets resolved in the movie is that Crawford learns to act less standoffish with his girl.

 The only decent scene is a fun (grading on a curve here) little action sequence where our intrepid protagonist runs around stabbing a couple of very shoddy practical effects. Other than that, the film's problems are compounded by the fact that it looks like shit and it's peppered with establishing shots which often don't really gel with the action. If it were a fan project up on the web from writer/director William Butler (which, from the little information I can find might well be how this got started) I could forgive the amateurish filmmaking, effects and writing; But not when they're this devoid of charm - and not when it's backed by the same people who distributed From Beyond back in the eighties.

 The acting is about the only thing that's sometimes not terrible (for a low-budget horror movie - again, grading on a curve). Dr. Herbert West is introduced at the end, promising some more incompetently made, mildly sexy/mildly bloody adventures, but fuck that. Even at little more than an hour, this was a complete waste of time.

*: It's easy to blame digital video and CGI, but I'm sure the realities of producing low, low budget cinema in the post-home video age have gotten a lot harsher. They're still cranking out movies, so clearly they're doing something right.

**: You know, the only part in that movie that had anything in common with Lovecraft's story.

Summit of the Gods (Le sommet des dieux)

  Makoto Fukamachi (Damien Boisseau) is a Japanese photojournalist drinking away his frustration as the team whose Everest ascent he was documenting turned back before they could reach the top. When a shifty characer approaches him to offer him a camera belonging to one George Mallory, who had attempted to conquer the mountain back in 1924, Fukamachi turns him away. But his interest is piqued, and he follows the man out.

 Before he can approach him again the camera is taken by another man, who in turn slinks away into the shadows. The surprised Fukamachi recognizes him: Habu Joji (Éric Herson-Macarel), a once up-and-coming fellow Japanese climber who disappeared years ago without a trace.

 Back in Japan Fukumachi starts investigating Habu, rebuilding the man's life through archival data and interviews with old acquaintances. His work eventually pays off, leading back to Nepal and an unexpected attempt to help Habu complete some important unfinished business.

 Summit of the Gods is a quiet, contemplative French animated character study based on a Manga of the same name by Jirô Taniguchi (which is in turn an based on a novel by Baku Yumemakura). Director Patrick Imbert and his crew have carefully shepherded the adaptation to the screen; The art is beautiful, with crisp, clear lines, sharp colours and gorgeous backdrops (expect lots of tiny figures framed against giant rock formations). The traditional, 2D animation is detailed but oddly muted, always aiming for realism and not expressivity. Everything is rounded off by a gorgeous soundtrack courtesy of Amine Bouhafa.

 The film's script (by the director, Magali Pouzol and Jean-Charles Ostorero) is built around two well-written characters (both fictional, although Mallory did exist). Their story is relatively simple but beautifully told thanks to an elegant structure that patiently paints a picture of Habu from Fukamachi's investigations. The two timelines interweave and fold together seamlessly to coalesce into an examination of why people like Habu gamble their life over and over again for the sake of a new, highly-specific record. No conclusions are reached, of course - but whenever Habu conquers some difficult challenge (the specifics of which are painstakingly drawn and animated) or reaches a summit, you can almost see the appeal.

Warfare

 Zero context, just enough narrative that even I could maybe squeeze it into a single paragraph, and no real characters to latch onto. 

 Warfare is a realistic, fly-on-the-wall, worst-day-in-the-life depiction of a squad of navy SEALs stuck in a fortress-like house deep in enemy territory in Iraq. They're there to provide sniper support to a nearby operation.

 Aside from a prologue showing the unit enjoying some R&R, and a nighttime raid to establish their outpost (a civilian house whose civilian inhabitants need to be pacified), most the film takes place mostly in real time; The first part involves a lot of tedium as the crew goes through the daily business of coordinating the operation, and a rising suspense as they realize the local jihadis are closing down on them. Then a grenade is thrown their way and just like that they are in a siege situation, with what seems like numberless, seldom-seen enemy combatants shooting at them from surrounding buildings.

 A disastrous attempt to evacuate leaves the crew reeling and in need of extraction; The second half of the movie is scored by screams as well as shots in what's probably the most raw, upsetting depiction of pain I've encountered in a semi-mainstream movie.

 This movie is damn near perfect for what it is. What it is, though, is hard to recommend: a dead serious, respectful, meticulous, reconstruction of a real-life combat scenario that does its best to put you in a brutal, modern siege situation. It was put together by co-director Ray Mendoza from the memories of both soldiers and civilians who were directly involved in the real operation (Mendoza himself was the comms officer, and is played by Bear himself D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai). Alex Garland co-directs.

 The cast of mostly young British (Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter) actors acquits themselves well, although none of the roles are what you'd call an actorly showcase. The cinematography expertly supports the film's troop-level point of view, supplementing it with the occasional army drone shots.

 This is, I feel I need to underline, not a traditional depiction of, um, warfare. Prodigious amounts of munitions are burned through, but if someone is hit you can barely see it. Combat is portrayed more like brutal waves that wash over everyone involved, with the cameras trained constantly on the soldiers to reinforce how they have to make critical decisions based on fragmentary information and limited positional awareness. The feel is much, much closer to the horror genre than action, heightened by an exquisite sound design that hammers you with every possible permutation of gun report, bullet impact, or casing hitting the floor. There's no music, either; Warfare is scored by the rhythm of gunfire, the chatter of comms, and the near constant screams of the wounded. It's a unique, exhaustingly harrowing approach.

 The scope of the film neatly stops before politics ever come into it, but bringing the knowledge in that the war was waged under false pretenses is inescapable - and even the script, which studiously stays away from making any judgement, still shows its hand in the treatment of local friendlies and civilians. It supports the troops, not the war, you might say.

Reign of Assassins (Jianyu Jianghu)

 The Dark Stone gang, a powerful group of assassins, is after the remains of an the ancient Buddhist monk Bodhi in the belief that the corpse would give its bearer fancy martial arts powers. The bastards kill the possessor of the corpse and his son in cold blood, but one of the assassins - the beautiful Xi Yu (Kelly Lin) - out-assholes them all and flees with the top half of the corpse.

 While on the lam, she meets a roving monk called Wisdom. It's unclear whether the relationship is romantic (Wisdom does eventually confess to have a crush), but they spend three months training before Xi Yu kills him during a lesson when she loses her cool. Distraught, she takes his dying advice and decides to honour him by never killing anyone else.

 And so she travels to a doctor who operates (heh) out of a houseboat, and asks him to give her a new face so she can start a new life. I should note plastic surgery in Jianghu - the martial arts world - involves poison, flesh-eating insects working from the inside out, and gold thread; Just one more reason why we love wuxia.

 And thus Xi Yu transforms into Zeng Jing (Michelle Yeoh) and starts a new civilian life as a cloth merchant; She soon meets Ah-sheng (Jung Woo-sung), a humble courier, and they marry.
 Their placid life is briefly interrupted when they are both caught in a bank robbery; When it turns ugly she single-handedly foils the kung-fu-powered robbers and is outed as a badass, Ah-sheng's reaction? 'I don't care if you were a brigand, now you're my wife.' Loving and slightly demeaning, but I think that's just the translation - it's supposed to be romantic.

 The attack at the bank draws the attention of the rest of the Black Stone Gang, who have replaced Xi Yu with Turquoise (the recently late Barbie Hsu). The leader, The Wheel King (Wang Xueqi) performs something I always enjoy: Kung-fu forensics, and uses it to determine that the person who defeated the robbers could be no one but Xi Yu.
 The assassins face off again, and the stray swordswoman is coerced to retrieve both halves of the ancient monk's body for team evil. Assassins gonna reign, or something. Which of course leads to a few surprises, a lot of fights, and melodrama to spare.

 The script, by main director Su Chao-pin, is fairly sloppy; there are many contrivances, unnecessary scenes, and the all-important MacGuffin which drives the action is oddly relegated to the background and eventually forgotten.

 But the thrust of the story is powerful, and as forward momentum accumulates, disparate elements that had been previously established come together in highly satisfying/entertaining ways. For all the script's problems, it can be pretty clever, and its entry-level use of Buddhist philosophy can even be seen as wisdom, if you look at it from the appropriate angle and with enough goodwill.

 The story is also full of odd, cool touches and excellent acting. Many characters, including the villains, get splashes of backstory that give them a lot of colour, and there's a sense of humour about the movie that makes it very likeable. It's a good one.

 There are plenty of interesting martial arts on display; Things like Xi Yu fighting with a thin, flexible blade that bends to strike targets from an unexpected angle (kind of like the way flails were supposed to curve over shields), or a magician (Leon Dai) who uses flaming swords.

 The problem is that the director does not shoot the action cleanly; The edits are short, and the camera often too close to the actors. It's not bad, exactly: The fights are easy enough to read, and they clearly prioritize making the cast look good and showcasing cool moments; In that, the director succeeds. But the scenes don't flow well, and I was often frustrated at the choppy quality of the combat as the edits jumped from one beat to the next, often completely changing angles. This break with Hong Kong tradition is especially galling because they had John Woo in an advisory capacity for enough time that he's billed as a co-director.

 And yet... I can't be disappointed with a movie that begins with a single assassin fighting and killing a whole kung-fu family, starting with their very young son. In self-defense, no less!

 Elsewhere the film looks very good. The cinematography (Wikipedia lists five cinematographers) is good, and the editing style, while it takes some getting used to, gives it a sort of elegant, flowing quality.

 This is one of the rare wuxia movies where the story far outshines the action. The cast is gifted, the wire-work is great, and the choreographies are excellent and have plenty of cool moves... it's a shame that we can't enjoy all of that properly. Other than that and some storytelling glitches, it's an excellent wuxia tale: enthralling, often funny, and surprisingly sweet.

Common Wealth (La Comunidad)

 Julia (Carmen Maura) is a middle-aged woman working a temp job showing properties she'd never be able to afford. Ricardo (Jesús Bonilla), her husband, is trying to hold down a door gig at a disco and has all but given up and become a fount of toxicity and self-pity. Ah, the joys of late stages capitalism - at least a quarter of a century, and no end in sight.

 When she's sent to show a beautiful, fully furnished flat in the middle of Madrid to prospective buyers, Julia decides to invite her hubby there and spend a few stolen nights of high living while it's unoccupied; But her plans to rekindle things with Ricardo is interrupted when a crack in the ceiling spills stagnant water and bugs on them, souring their foreplay and eventually leading to a big fight.

 Julia ends up alone in the flat, and the next day she's there when the fire brigade breaks into the apartment above the one she's staying at. They discover the corpse of an old man, and a mysterious scribble. Later, when she's alone, Julia uses it to find a few bags holding a minor fortune squirrelled away in the derelict apartment; Life-changing money.

 The catch is that the rest of the building's tenants, led by the superintendent (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba) had been patiently waiting for the old man to croak to get that money - and they won't let this new interloper to steal what they see as theirs. When subterfuge fails, their attempts become more violent... and Julia's escape more fraught.

 Breakout hits don't come out much better than Álex de la Iglesia's La Comunidad, in which the prickly Basque director, famous for bleakly funny genre films, fused the pitch-black comedy of his previous effort (Muertos de Risa) with a heavy dose of Hitchcockian suspense to tremendous effect. It's a gorgeous movie, something that becomes immediately apparent with the first shot of the movie as the cameras zoom from street level to the top of a building to follow a cat as it goes inside to eat a little of its former owner (Cinematography: Kiko de la Rica). Later set pieces are exquisitely staged, from a party that freezes whenever Julia is not in the room to a rooftop chase that finds the time to lovingly spoof The Matrix while homaging Vertigo.

 The script, which the director wrote with regular collaborator Jorge Guerricaechevarría, is a precisely calibrated cocktail of farce, suspense, and pure misanthropy with solid jokes that range from gallows humour to near non-sequiturs. All the actors are fully committed and are clearly having a blast, too; None more than Moura, who fully inhabits a complex character at a complicated moment in her life while still managing to be hilarious.

 This is not my favourite de la Iglesia film (my preference for his work roughly follows the order in which the movies were released), but it's easily his most accessible, and one of his most visually sumptuous. Very highly recommended.

Chopping Mall

 A bunch of young adults stay after-hours at the mall most of them work in to booze and have sex at the furniture store (plenty of beds, you see). Unfortunately, the mall has automated its security with three top-range security robots.

 After a nasty thunderstorm fries their circuitry the killbots, like Johnny Five, turn sentient. Instead of dispensing pat life lessons, though, they instead decide to kill everyone they run across - first the technicians overseeing them, then a janitor (Dick Miller!), then our favorite bunch of horny idiots.

 Chopping Mall is an 80s horror B-movie that never really takes itself too seriously; It includes many references to other films (including bringing in Dick Miller, plus Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov to reference their characters in A Bucket of Blood and Eating Raoul), purposefully bad (I think) lines, plenty of carnage and some gratuitous nudity (courtesy, in part, of genre legend Barbara Crampton).

 What makes it interesting is that one of its many influences is The Terminator; The protagonists arm themselves at a guns and ammo store (called Peckinpah's) and try to take the fight back to the killbots. I don't want to oversell it, as the 'action' parts mostly consist of people just standing there, unloading their weapons. But it's not all bad- plenty of appliances and windows get shot to pieces, and some (very mildly) creative ways are found to shut down the machines for good.
 The running battles and showdowns between the "teens" and the robots have always made this one stick out for me - it's a collection of clichés and mediocre writing that nonetheless manages to stumble into a fairly unique take; Add to that some fun lines and one truly phenomenal headsplosion and you've got a very '80s B-movie that, despite some pacing issues, works pretty well. Good cheesy fun.

 Jim Wirnoski, the co-writer and director, got a start with Roger Corman and his wife - I've actually seen a couple of his movies (Deathstalker 2, Transylvania Twist), but this one's easily better than any of those. The guy's put out more than 150 movies since - unfortunately most of them seem to be softcore trash with titles like "The Witches of Breastwick" or "The Bare Wench Project". I have to admit "The Da Vinci Coed" made me laugh, though. Good one.

Death of a Unicorn

 As far as premises go, casting unicorns as the monsters for your creature feature is a decent one. Writer/director Alex Scharfman has no faith in the power of silly creatures wreaking havoc, though, so he clumsily back-fills the film around the cryptid attack with all sorts of unnecessary, clumsy and extremely derivative scaffolding.

 Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) and his somewhat estranged daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) are summoned to the remote retreat of the Leopolds, a family that owns a powerful big pharma / biotech company; The scions wish to meet Elliot before making him the figurehead of the company, as the patriarch (Richard E. Grant), is dying of cancer.

 On their way through a huge private nature reserve, though, the Kintners run over... well, a unicorn. At first worried that he'll get in trouble for killing a mythical animal, he quickly finds that the Leopolds are instead overjoyed when they discover that the mythical healing properties of a unicorn's horn are very, very factual. So they set out to fabricate cures based on every part of the equine corpse's body, trying to exploit it to the utmost - and all the while Ridley (the virtuous maiden) observes from the sidelines in dismay.

 And then (as foreshadowed by a particularly graceless bit of research/exposition on the famous unicorn tapestries) things get violent when a pair of unimpressed unicorn parents arrive at the compound to retrieve the corpse of their offspring. And these are not your forebear's unicorns; These ones have fangs and sharp spurs besides that nasty-looking horn.

Visual cliché ahoy!

 Death of a Unicorn very obviously takes Knives Out as a template and tries to do what it did for murder mysteries to creature features instead. But it does so in an extremely witless, blunt manner that all but kills its feeble attempts at relevance; The Leopolds (Richard E. Grant, Téa Leoni and Will Poulter) are deeply cartoony, one-note 'ugly' rich people whose every utterance is there to reinforce that they are selfish, callous, entitled, and grossly evil. There's no nuance nor any of the wit that made Rian Jonson's set of douchebags such a delightful bunch of villains to root against; This is hollow satire, pandering crap that offers up effigies so that people (rightfully) angry at the one percent can point at them and say 'yeah, these sure are horrible people' just before they get treated to some comeuppance at the end of an alicorn.

 There are also attempts at melodrama and a shit-ass redemption arc as Elliot spinelessly kowtows to the Leopolds throughout the movie, putting his already strained relationship to his principled daughter at even greater risk before having a half-arsed crisis of conscience. It all leads to a deeply unearned, corny ending that all but oozes cheap sentimentality.

 If only all this crap was in the service of good carnage and decent action... but the movie flubs that too. There are some decent unicorn attacks and some effective stalking, but the creature design is unimpressive and the film's budget is unable secure the CGI needed to bring its creatures to life in a convincing manner; The monsters, like the satire and the drama, are thoroughly unconvincing. It might have been redeemed by good visual storytelling, but Scharfman's direction is workmanlike and unexciting.

 At least the acting is good, which is a pretty much a given with this cast. Unfortunately the roles everyone's been given are extremely... well, basic. Quickly, think the first role you might imagine any of these given actors playing. That's basically what you're going to get; Elfman plays a principled, eye-rolling, perceptive teen. Poulter an entitled, callous dipshit. Richard E. Grant is a ruthless megalomaniac given to making grandiloquent statements... Even Rudd, who gets to be spineless and wishy-washy for most of the movie, is playing entirely to his everyman type. Poulter at least gets some funny lines - the jokes themselves aren't great, but they're rendered funny by his motormouth delivery and gusto. Barry's Anthony Carrigan also gets a few laughs as the sole rational being in the compound besides ridley; they're cheap laughs, but I'll take them.

 More than anything else, Death of a Unicorn is disappointingly mediocre, an uninspired mess of safe choices, toothless satire and lame comedy and horror. A catchy premise, as proven by all those shorts extended to feature length or the attempts to make horror out of newly copyright-free Disney characters, does not a good movie make.

Southbound

 Southbound is a loopy horror anthology partly shepherded into being by Brad Miska, the patron saint of modern anthology films (and co-founder of Bloody Disgusting). It's a good one, thanks to cryptic storytelling, a great atmosphere, and an incredible sense of place cobbled together from road-bound, southern-fried landmarks: A dusty, unmarked highway, hell, dingy dives, motels, empty towns and hell and hell and hell again.

 There's a sort of framing story, but beyond that each segment trails some detail that's left dangling off the edge of the ending to be picked up by the start of the next one, like an exquisite corpse. Sometimes it's just a location where both stories intersect, one memorable time it's a whole character that becomes a prop for the next tale. Most feature people traveling down lonely roads, and all of them do indeed go south - or South, if you get my drift - as a radio DJ (Larry Fessenden!) intones platitudes that loosely reflect the situations his listeners are about to go through.
 The other thing all of these stories have in common is that these stories never explain themselves too much, withholding important information and keeping many of their mysteries; It's a risky gamble that pays off richly.

 The Radio silence production team (who have since made the excellent Ready or Not, as well as a couple of latter-day Scream sequels) track the progress of two men (Chad Villella and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) who are trying to run away from an unspeakable act... and a series of creepy reaper-like figures who look like they've stepped off the cover of a Tales from the Crypt.

 Roxanne Benjamin tells the tale of three young ladies who accept the hospitality of a couple who seem like they come from the sixties, and who may not be on the up-and-up.

 David Bruckner writes and directs the clear stand-out episode in the anthology: a man (Mather Zickel) driving alone at night is left trying to save the life of the person he ran over against increasingly ridiculous odds while advised by an emergency responder over the phone who... may not be on the level. It's a slightly surrealistic panic attack of a story that's at once hilarious, bracing, and ridiculously cruel. Worth the price of admission alone.

 Jailbreak is a bit simpler: another man (David Yow) comes into town trying to save his sister, only to discover that there's a bit more to the town and its inhabitants than he expected. Patrick Horvath's the only director here who didn't cut his teeth on the V/H/S series, but his segment has a some fun weirdness and a great feel.

 Finally the Radio Silence team steps up again, this time with a violent home invasion that eventually loops back to the two men from the beginning.

 All the stories are good, creepy, bizarre fun. Bruckner's The Accident is far and away the best of the segments, but they all have something to recommend them, not the least a willingness to go further out into the fantastic than most other similarly low budget productions. The acting is excellent across the board, the effects are cheap but cheerful (and feature some really nasty gore), and the direction is assured across the board. It's also cohesive in a way many of these anthologies (including all V/H/S installments) aren't; I really liked it.

The Man from Nowhere (Ajeossi)

  Korean cinema was on fire in the first decade of this new millennium, with some of its finest directors putting out films that at least dipped their toes into all sorts of genres - and given the regional characteristic disdain for tonal consistency, often all at once. Park Chan Wook's revenge trilogy is probably the best of these, but consider Kim Jee-woon putting out Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life, The Good The Bad the Weird and I Saw the Devil back-to-back. That's a run of almost Carpenterian proportions! Bong Joon Ho announced himself with Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother. And there were many others.
 Imagine following up on any of these.

 Writer/director Lee Jeong-beom did just that to great local box-office success with Ajeossi - a polite word for men older than yourself normally used by children when they don't know who they're speaking with (thank you google!). The film is Known as The Man from Nowhere in other territories, because Mister! doesn't sound half as badass.
 To describe it glibly, it's a film that sits squarely between Man on Fire and Taken. Cha Tae-sik (Won Bin) is a quiet, moody, ridiculously good-looking pawn shop owner who's taken in a stray: So-mi (Kim Sae-ron), the young daughter of a prostitute neighbour. The tiny, big-eyed girl often comes to stay over at Tae-sik's place whenever her mom is either with clients or indulging in substances.

 That drug habit proves to be deadly for So-mi's mom after she steals two bags of heroin from a Chinese-affiliated gang whose activities imply an attempt to win some sort of heinous activity bingo: drug-smuggling, illegal organ harvesting, human trafficking... I didn't notice any prostitution, but that's a blessing given that they enslave and traffic small children. And harvest their organs once they're all used up.
 So it's this group of deeply hateable villains that soon traces the robbery back to So-mi's mother, and kidnap the both of them. Tae-sik becomes involved because his pawn shop was (without his knowledge) used to stash the stolen merchandise. That makes him a target - but, and hear me out here, I know this might come as a shock - he's not so helpless; he is possessed of a very particular set of skills, etc. etc. That showdown leaves one man dead, shot to death by his own partner in cold blood once incapacitated by Tae-sik.

 The best part: The criminal who shot the downed man, a Vietnamese hitman (played by Thai actor Thanayong Wongtrakul) later observes: "He didn't even flinch at the shots". That's some quality storytelling there.

 These events send Tae-sik on a single-minded quest to rescue the missing woman and what becomes increasingly clear is his surrogate daughter. At first he lets himself be coerced into doing favours for the kidnappers (which sets him in the sights of the police detectives who are dead-set on catching the gang), and later, when it becomes clear there's no dealing with these people, he resorts to good old detective work and sweet, sweet violence.

 The Man from Nowhere may be derivative but it's executed almost perfectly and with enough colour to render it much, much better than both of the American movies it closely resembles. It sprawls out to follow two sets of gangsters and the policemen trying to catch them for a while, and it even goes into Tae-sik's backstory a little - but none of this ever feels unnecessary because these scenes include, say, a cop fly-kicking a guy in a wheelchair with enough force to send him rolling backwards a few meters into a pillar. If that's bloat, it's a kind of bloat I can fully endorse.

 Elsewhere, the tone is remarkably controlled. The action and melodrama are heightened, but it doesn't register that much thanks to an overriding grimness; This is a gritty, mean-spirited action film where the humour is deployed judiciously, and often in editing choices (we often jump from the moment where shit is about to go down directly to its aftermath, only for the film to loop back in later).  More importantly, the action scenes are excellent and varied, combining gunfights and melee with a sprinkling of excellent car crashes. I particularly liked a final brawl where our hero gets particularly brutal to intimidate a small horde of thugs to keep the number of enemies on him manageable.

 I thought Won Bin was excellent as the protagonist - a good combination of John-Wick-awesome with a little more vulnerability than you'd expect out of something like this. I'm biased, though, because when I originally watched this I had already seen Mother. The guy hasn't acted in anything else in the intervening decade and a half, which is a huge shame; Dude had chops, looks and range.
 His character here is a perfect little pretty boy who goes into his action sets dressed in immaculate suits, and at one point gives himself a perfect haircut; It does contrast a little with the grittiness of the rest of the film.

 There are a couple of good villains, too - the Vietnamese hitman shows off some honour and a bit of soul and is well used throughout; There's also a crazy, whiny psycho (Kim Sung-oh) who's very enjoyably over the top - it's all a little cheesy, but they both set up hugely satisfying story beats and scenes.

 The action shoots for (and achieves) immediacy and intensity but it's mostly very clear even when it dips into first-person shots, there are some excellent stunts (including an impressive jump off a tall window done with no body doubles). The director is ably assisted by cinematographer Lee Tae-yoon and a score by Shim Hyun-jung to give his film some excellent ambiance. There are many better Korean movies out there, but few pure action ones.

The Possession

  Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has just moved house after getting a divorce from his wife (Kyra Sedgwick). But it's not the house that's haunted in Ole Bornedal's english-language horror movie The Possession - it's an antique wooden box his tween daughter Emily (Natasha Calis) buys at a garage sale, one that we saw kill an old lady in a very silly-looking prologue. Emily even gets to see the wounded old lady freak out through a window while she's carrying the box away, while Anton Sanko's (otherwise decent) soundtrack imitates John William's Jaws theme. It is... not a good scene.

 The box contains a Dybbuk, a malicious ghost from Jewish mythology, and it starts warping little Em in increasingly nasty ways, as well as killing or maiming minor characters in ridiculous-looking displays of telekinetic power. As the possession advances it drives a wedge between Clyde and his ex until he figures out what the threat is via the magic of google, and enlists the help of a Hassidic exorcist. The film ends as it began: with very few surprises.

 Juliet Snowden and Stiles White's script starts out mostly well-constructed and it seems like it might be on to something interesting for a while - but as the film plods on that promise quickly dies away.
 As likeable as Morgan is  as the deadbeat-ish dad who needs to rise to the occasion (his vibe reminded a little of Craig T. Nelson in Poltergeist), the family drama is beyond clichéd (he misses his daughter's dance recital!)
 Calis also does a phenomenal job as the spooky little possessed kid, but the horror side of things is about as bad as the drama; Both strands end up dovetailing into a disappointing finale that crams in as many hacky Hollywood beats as it possibly can from the two genres.

 The script also starts losing it; At one point, Em stabs dad in the hand with a fork, a scene that's played for effect and then completely forgotten. Later, an inconvenient character gets chased away by the Dybbuk inna box with an unintentionally hilarious bit of poetic justice, and he's, again, never mentioned again.

 The story is (very loosely, of course) based on a 'true story' that has long been proven a hoax. It became semi-famous off the back of an article by Leslie Gornstein about a sales listing for a haunted Jewish wine cabinet box. Gee, I wonder what someone's motivation would be to lie in that situation.
 The script built around that premise doesn't really find any fresh angle at all; The fact that it's a dybbuk does not make the supernatural menace any different from any other haunted house/possession movie, and the exorcism faithfully follows the template set down by... well, The Exorcism, except it's done in traditional Jewish garb.

 At least Bornedal and his old friend and ace cinematographer Dan Lausten develop a good atmosphere - the colours are so subdued the film sometimes looks monochrome. The problem is that, with one honourable exception, when it comes time to bring tension to a head the supposedly horrific moments are pretty dire.

 I watched the heavily cut theatrical version - there's a longer cut out there, but reading up on it I doubt it would fix the film's issues; For example, when an old lady is thrown around in her house, do I really need to see her face banging against a glass in slow motion, shown from the other side? Well... yes, obviously - but it would clash just as badly as the rest of the 'scary' bits do against the dour, dead-serious tone of the movie.
 At least the extensive cuts speak to another huge problem I had with the film, which is that the editing often seemed to cut scenes in odd places, giving the whole movie an oddly unprofessional feel. We can blame that, at least, on studio interference; Everything else, not so much: there's definitely room for movies where a possessing spirit appears in a CAT scan, but you can't expect me to take it seriously as this film seems to do. These are some catastrophic levels of tonal miscalculation here.

Fight or Flight

 When renowned 'blackhat terrorist' The Ghost is detected after pulling off a job in Thailand, a shady organization led by a hardened operator (Katee Sackhoff) mobilizes its only asset in the region to stop them. That asset turns is Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett), a burnt agent who was cut off because he had too much of a conscience; He spends his days getting drunk at a Thai dive bar and avoiding hit men. Despite his misgivings, the chance of getting his old life back is too good to pass up.

 So Reyes boards the same flight to Los Angeles The Ghost is on, with the mandate to bring them back alive at any cost. The bad news is that the news have leaked that the ghost is on the flight - along with a sizeable bounty for their death. And that, basically, is the whole movie; Reyes duking it out against a colourful array of assassins while at first trying to figure out who the ghost is (he only knows that they have a gunshot wound), and then protect them.

 I do wonder if it's intended to be a John-Wick-like world where every other person is a world-class assassin and they all found out about the job while on the flight, or if all these assassins managed to get to Thailand in time to board the flight in the scant hours since news of the Ghost got out. Yes, I know I'm overthinking it, especially since the script (by Brooks McLaren and D. J. Cotrona) is almost showboatingly dumb. Wait until you find out what the McGuffin is; Precious little makes any sense in hindsight.

 This gleefully moronic tone renders all the time the film spends on its conspiracy elements somewhat insulting, but it pays off with character moments and action beats that at least try, and often achieve, low-key inspired lunacy. Sure, a lot is lifted almost wholesale from Bullet Train, and individual elements - like Reyes hallucinating fireworks instead of blood while tripping balls in a climactic big brawl - mirror other movies (in this case, Harley Quinn substituting violence with flower petals in Suicide Squad); But hey, most of the comedy actually works.
 It also includes a lot of oddball details that give the movie some personality and a whole lot of batshit energy. I love, for example, that it finds an excuse to put three Chinese martial artists straight out of a wuxia movie - they're led by JuJu Chan, and she finds time to use a deadly hairpin and everything. The film also managed to get the great Marco Zaror, who doesn't get nearly enough to do but at least manages to deploy some of the effortless charm he showed he had in spades in Mandrill, and breaks the ice with Reyes by showing him off his dance moves.

 The action is OK. Director James Madigan is hampered by a non-martial artist star, which drags down (for example) the big fight with Zaror. The editing skews a little too short, and the cameras are pulled a little too close to the action, but the choreographies are simple enough and the blocking is decent, so it's not too bad. The film goes for a sort of Jackie-Chan style prop comedy using everything an airplane can offer - those pivoting arm rests, seatbelts, the metal drawers the cabin crew stores everything in - they all have their time to shine... modestly. Aside from an inspired use of an overhead baggage partition, there's nothing hugely inventive.

 All the performances are very game, especially Hartnett - his physicality is good, and while he may not have the moves, his deranged, committed performance is central to much of the film's joyful madness. The special effects are iffy - in that sense, the film's low budget shines through early and often. All the CGI blood fits the cartoony nature of the action well, but other than that... well, it looks terrible.

 No matter; The blood splatters may be inconsistent. the action may not be all that thrilling, but it is funny, it's just crazy enough, and it mostly avoids all the bloat that, say, David Leitch tends to attach to his efforts. It probably won't stick around anyone's thoughts for long but, while it lasts, it's a good time.

Pandemic

  We had a few outbreak scares before COVID; Dengue, SARS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika. In films, though, save for a few prestige pictures (your Contagions and whatnot), depictions of pandemics always seems to come down to zombies.

 That's definitely the case with 2016's Pandemic; It barely goes into any detail about its mysterious illness, except that anyone infected eventually goes into a comatose state and then rises up as a blood-thirsty maniac - this is called stage 5. And as usual, no one refers to the infected as Zombies. That Shaun of the Dead joke really is evergreen.

It's a stage-5 infected, not a zombie. Completely different things.

 Humanity lives on, but after a few months after society broke down resources are getting scarce; Both early stages and non-infected survivors are desperate enough to sometimes be undistinguishable from the ravening hordes of stage-5 zombies. Meanwhile, remnants of the government still hold out in small safe zones and send out increasingly desperate military-like teams to gather uninfected test subjects to develop a cure.

 To be honest, the setup is extremely basic. Dustin T. Benson's script blitzes through it to focus on one such expedition led by rookie dr. Lauren Chase (Rachel Nichols). Her team consist of a sympathetic navigator (Missi Pyle), a badass veteran (Mekhi Phifer) and a douchey ex-con wheelman (Alfie Allen). Lauren is almost comically inept, and it soon becomes apparent she's not quite as invested in her nominal mission as the other soldiers (well, except the wheelman) are. The expedition goes to shit soon enough, leaving the remnants of the group stranded in an urban, zombie-infested no-man's land, and Dr. Chase free to pursue her actual goals.

 All scenes are shot from in-world cameras, with an emphasis on the cameras mounted on the helmets of the hazmat suits the team wears during the expedition. There are frequent changes of perspective, but director John Suits does a good job of making it feel more like a first-person video game than the usual found footage film. Not a first-person shooter, though, even if there are enough action scenes that you could make a case for it being a jittery action movie; As a whole, though, it fits much more snugly into the survival horror genre - the game it most reminded me of is semi-forgotten Ubisoft zombie horror game ZombiU (later rechristened to Zombi once it was free of the failed WiiU and ported over to other systems).

 There are a few fights against both survivors and infected, chases, a pretty tense cat and mouse game at a storage unit, and some abandoned building exploration. It's a good mix of situations presented at a steady clip, and the fairly relentless pacing mostly makes up from all the bone-headed decisions needed to place the team in unnecessary jeopardy. Almost everything in the movie feels second-hand; Don't expect much in the way of surprises.

 Going with a first-person view pays off in intensity and immediacy, but has the usual cost in legibility. Taking that into account, the action is fine; there's a standout sequence- a fight against a horde of zombies which has a couple of great moves (up to and including some parkour), but elsewhere it's a bit of a visual mess. The film's most tense sequence, meanwhile (the aforementioned abandoned storage unit scene) is so derivative it fails to have the intended effect. Still, it's serviceable, and the execution is fairly impressive for a movie this far down in the indie spectrum.

 This low budget, coupled with the film's ambitions, sadly means that it often punches a little too far above its weight. There are a lot of CGI blood and fire effects that fare about as well as you'd expect. Maybe a bit worse; Some of the blood and flames seem almost hand-drawn onto the images, like  the lightning effects in Hellraiser's finale, but much less charming. It's a violent film, but it doesn't go over the top with its gore; It's got the requisite zombie movie evisceration, for example, but the camera shies away from the Savini-esque carnage so lovingly lampooned by (again) Shaun of the Dead.

 The acting is decent, with the everyone doing what they can to bring some life into characters that are mostly resistant to such attempts. The music is pretty good, as is the direction - this is a much more stylish film than most of its found footage compatriots.

 What's crazy is that, as far as I can tell, Pandemic came out within weeks of that other first-person-shooter-inspired movie, Hardcore Henry (at least in the States). Comparing the two is like comparing oranges to Aristotle; One's an exhausting exercise in excess, the other's more of a 'real' movie. I think I prefer this one, but it's so wedded to zombie movie tropes I doubt I'll remember much of it after a few weeks. 

Pari

 Arnab (Parambrata Chatterjee) is on his way back home from meeting a prospective wife (Ritabhari Chakraborty) with his family when their car runs over and kills old woman out in the middle of nowhere. When they and the police head out to try and find out her identity, they find her shack nearby, and in one of the rooms they find Pari (Anushka Sharma), a young woman chained to the floor.

 Prahab takes pity on the almost feral Pari, and helps her identify her mother at the morgue and set up a funeral. Later, when a couple of shady assholes at the morgue inform a shady scholar type (Rajat Kapoor) about a strange tattoo on the old woman's arm and start stalking Pari, she flees into Prahab's house. He takes her in; Later, in the immortal words of Scott Tobias, they bone.

 That's a problem, because the lady in the prologue agreed to marry Prahab. So we have a love triangle with a spineless idiot in the middle, and an evil cult-like group of goons lurking in the margins - but the biggest threat is Pari herself, who you will be shocked, Shocked! to learn is not all she appears to be.

 Pari's a respectable attempt at a horror movie - Director Prahit Roy and his crew manage some good atmosphere, and his script (written along with Abhishek Banerjee) tells a decent, if all too slight story.

 Unfortunately it didn't work for me at all; Blame it on a plot that does extremely little to earn a runtime of more than two hours and change, an extremely intrusive soundtrack that highlights the jump scares in the cheesiest way possible, and a protagonist so milquetoast I spent the movie wanting to slap him.

 Or maybe blame it on all the plot holes (the cult was trying to do what?), contrivances, and horror moments that feel derivative and shoehorned in, or a love story that feels creepier than intended for all the wrong reasons (Pari is basically a child in an adult's body). Also, have I mentioned that the main character, whom we're obviously meant to identify with, is a piece of shit?

 The acting is mostly decent, and Sharma is excellent as Pari; Effects are a mixed bag, but that's not really what the movie is about; A low body count (which includes a couple of dogs) doesn't really allow for a lot of gore, and the movie as a whole feels like a 90's adult thriller with a few ghouls on the margins. The ending, aside from a twist that gets a little too... well, 90's adult thriller, has a couple of decent ideas and some nice moments but it also fails, mostly by letting Prahab off way too easy. That fucking guy.

 
 The search for great hindi horror movies continues. Starting with Tumbbad may have set expectations too high.