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, the tone 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 it mostly 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 gets 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 to 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 painful. 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. But 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 retrieve 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. 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, too; 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 in 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 on the lower end of 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 actors 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 the same month as 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 and I think I prefer it, 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 coming back 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 him. 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 scores some good atmosphere, and his script (written along with Abhishek Banerjee) tells a decent, if 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.