The Last Voyage of the Demeter

 There's so little nautical horror out there, that's it's kind of a shame to write off this handsome, well-crafted movie as "eh, it's pretty solid, I guess."

 The Last Voyage of the Demeter is famous for being based on a single chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula - the one where the novel takes a break from its epistolary format and instead transcribes the contents of the captain's log for the doomed vessel Dracula hired to make his overseas voyage to English shores.
 Appropriately enough, the film is better known here in the UK for completely disappearing after its US release, only to wash up without fanfare on the barren coasts of Amazon prime a year later. Vampires are no match against the true horror that is international licensing rights.

 Corey Hawkins stars as Clemens, a doctor who signs on to the crew of the Demeter to seek passage back to the UK after a bad job interview. Once on the ship he finds a woman (Aisling Franciosi) entombed on one of the many wooden containers in the hold, rescues her, and nurses her back to health. Unbeknownst to him and the rest of the crew, the woman was to be the good count's meal... and so everyone becomes fair game instead.

 It's a very serious movie - dour, even, which fits director André Øvredal's sensibilities to a tee. Technically, it's impeccable; The ship is beautifully realised, and a prelude set at a Romanian port shows off some pretty high-end production values - horror or otherwise. Tom Stern's cinematography, meanwhile, beautifully captures the allure of the nautical setting during the daytime, and drips with atmosphere once the monster starts prowling above and below deck.

 Said monster is, some slightly dodgy CGI aside, pretty good: Good old Vlad at his most bestial, basically looking like a leather gargoyle. His methods are very enjoyably brutal (I'd recommend a visit to doesthedogdie.com if you have any such triggers), and Øvredal gives him a few really effective horror moments and some neat moves.

 Sadly there's just not enough there... and as shiny as all the surfaces are, they don't manage to cover a lack of anything of substance underneath. Writers Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz (and some others along the way) provide a plot that is both basic and generic, with a heavy helping of really dumb decisions. You'd think that in the more than three decades the script spent being rewritten in development hell, someone would have thought of some justification as to why the crew, once they figure out what's going on, don't use the daylight to their advantage... but no such luck. There's the odd good line (The captain gets a killer line when discussing steam boats), but other than that the film completely relies on its budget, technical aspects, the setting, and some excellent acting (Besides Hawkins, the mellifluous Liam Cunningham and a brooding David Dastmalchian make a big impression as the captain and his very slavic second in command) to do all the heavy lifting.

 And maybe that would have worked on a shorter, punchier movie. But at nearly two hours, the good just barely outweighs the bad.

Close Range

 A generic name for a fairly generic movie. For those who keep an eye on modern, low-budget action, it stars Scott Adkins and is directed by Isaac Florentine. For those who don't know them, it's got a poster with a giant gruff guy with a gun towering over some hoodlums. There's a big sniper scope painted behind him, a smaller explosion sending a car flying (which never happens in the movie) and a helicopter in the background (which never makes an appearance).

 That's fine, it's aspirational; It feels like a movie that would have included explosions and helicopters, if it had the money to put them in. Truth-ish in advertising. Unless you expected Adkins to actually be giant-sized, swatting helicopters out of the sky and kaiju-ing his way through a bunch of gunmen; I can't really help you if that's what you got out of that poster, but I agree that would have been more interesting.

 The big (not literally) gruff guy in the poster is Colt McReady (Adkins), an ex-soldier badass who left the forces after disobeying dishonourable orders, but not before assaulting his (dishonourable, presumably) superior officer. Since then he's been doing some sort of (honourable, presumably) criminal stuff. An opening crawl explicitly compares him to ronin, which makes sense given his military background, but less sense when you realize the movie is very much going for a Western feel.

 We first meet McReady as he kills a few dozen people in a Mexican building while rescuing a woman (Madison Lawlor). It's an excellent running battle, well-filmed and featuring a fun, if slightly subdued (for Adkins's standards) choreography. 

 We later find out the woman is McReady's niece, who was taken by a cartel because her deadbeat father tried to screw them over in a drug deal. When they're back they, plus her mom (Caitlin Keats) try to run away before the inevitable cartel reprisal, but they're held by a corrupt local sheriff (Nick Chinlund).
 So the cartel boss (Tony Perez) and a dozen or so interchangeable henchmen arrive and lay siege to the house, trying to kill McReady and retrieve one of those convenient USB drives with critical drug business information.
 There are some flourishes, but... that's basically it. Close Range is a very meat-and-potatoes low-budget action movie: uncomplicated, unpretentious, kind of dumb, well-executed. The moment-to-moment action is excellent - gritty but with some acrobatic flourishes, and it's got a few ideas and memorable images, such as pitting Adkins's martial arts against a speeding SUV or a very painful-looking stab to the taint. Lots of people shooting through walls, too, a little-loved action trope I tend to enjoy.
 Speaking of which: The film features some wonderful, wholly practical squib and explosive work to give its frequent shootouts more heft; After what feels like a steady diet of middling CGI substitutions on that department lately, I can't overstate what a pleasure it is to get a full meal like this.

A pantry fight results in a rain of cheerios. As it should.

 As good as the action is, it doesn't flow very well; There's no drama to it, and most of the final third of the movie feels like people shooting the shit out of a house without hitting anyone for ages. It looks great, but the film feels oddly drawn out. That's exacerbated by some pretty egregious filler and some pretty weird choices: There are a few scenes early with the cartel where we get a hilarious amount of reaction shots of various thugs reacting to their boss chewing out and then murdering an employee, for example, and soon afterwards we're introduced to each one of these goons in turn, complete with a freeze frame and a helpful name tag. That'd be cool if they were interesting characters, or if they had even a tiny bit of colour, but that's not the case.
 Out of the great occidental action VOD director triad, Florentine remains a distant third favorite (after John Hyams and Jesse V. Johnson); He's got great technical chops, but I don't think I've found any of his movies convincing in the drama department after Undisputed 2. He needs a Michael Jai White-level presence to offset his corniness.

 The script (by Shane Dax Taylor and Chad Law) doesn't really come up with much to give the film any personality, either, and the dialog is often atrocious. Adkins is fine - this is hardly a challenge for him, as he mostly has to act angry all the time (his American accent sounds convincing to my ears, but we already knew that). The acting quality from everyone else varies a lot, unfortunately, but I guess that's not a huge strike against this sort of thing.

 Solid, in other words. A bit disappointing that it fails to gather any steam, but worth it for the different kinds of kind of low-key mayhem everyone gets up to.  

Feast II: Sloppy Seconds

 Holy shit, what a way to piss away the little goodwill you got from your first movie.

 Feast II: Sloppy Seconds loses absolutely everything that made the first film watchable and proceeds to waste our time with a beyond pointless story that quickly goes nowhere, uninteresting characters, and edgelord provocations that are so poorly executed that you can't help but to make fun of the people behind it rather than be shocked.
It's a film that's so tasteless in their tastelessness, so ugly in its ugliness that I'm left struggling to figure out why I should spend any effort writing a few paragraphs about it - and lamenting the time I wasted watching it. 

 The movie picks up shortly after the events of the first one. A gang of lesbian bikers arrive at a small town after it's been attacked by a bunch of rape monsters, there to hunt a guy from the first movie. When the creatures attack, a small bunch of survivors* must band together, bicker endlessly amongst each other, and maybe survive the night. Or not.

 Because you know what? The film doesn't care about storytelling, plot or characters, so neither should you. The script (again by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan) only has a few gags in mind, and it incorporates them into its story in the shoddiest way possible. So at one point one of the film's cast of asshats decides he needs to do a creature autopsy. He's not a doctor, there's nothing he could conceivably get out of it - but the brain trust behind this turdfest wanted to have a long, long scene of a corpse posthumously jizzing on its female cast... so monster autopsy it is.
 Want to have a (predictable) gag where a baby dies? Never mind that the first movie had a decently shocking child death. Here, instead of properly weaving the baby into the story, they have him suddenly wake up and start crying a full day into the creature invasion. And then the joke itself is drawn out into an overlong, mind-bogglingly ugly-looking sequence. Audacity alone will not carry your jokes, folks.

 The amount of bad decisions from everyone involved is staggering. Gone is the propulsive, simple survival story of the first movie, along with its production values and excellent practical effects; They're replaced with a series of disconnected, arbitrary incidents and extremely shoddy-looking CGI. John Gulager's direction, meanwhile, hasn't improved in the slightest, so the result predictably looks cheap, ugly and uninteresting.

 There's exactly one joke in the whole movie where the delivery isn't botched to hell**. Other than that, this is just plain cynical, uninspired, deeply unfunny shit.
 There's a Feast III out there, but after this one you'd need to pay me to watch it.

 

*: The cast includes two Mexican little people luchadores, because... comedy, I guess.

**: If you must know, the bit where they're trying to work out how much of the grandmother they need to get rid of. I never said it was a great joke, but at least they don't ruin it.

Ninja Terminator

 Godfrey Ho's name is synonymous with legendary terrible movies. The guy was so prolific, and his output so truly awful that his name is one of the few I remember from my martial-arts watching era as a kid; I didn't recognize Chang Cheh by name then, nor Ching Siu-Tung - but whenever uncle Godfrey's name popped up at the beginning of a movie, there would be a collective groan.

 The insanely prolific writer/director/producer started his career at the Shaw Brothers, but he soon branched out and formed a company with the like-minded Joseph Lai called IFD. There their MO would be to get the rights for some other Asian movie, cut it into pieces and shoot some supplementary footage with a stable of slumming western actors*; They'd then splice everything and re-dub it into a poorly stitched Frankenstein of old and new material which they call some random combination of buzzwords in a bid to win over the western markets. And hey, it worked; I rented several of their movies back in the 90s.

 Ninja Terminator follows this process to the letter. The 1984 South Korean film The Uninvited Guest Of The Star Ferry would provide the source material, and Ho would then append additional footage of grown men skulking around in pijamas. The result is an astoundingly bizarre fever dream, a perfect storm of incompetence and chutzpah. If the concept of 'so bad it's... still bad, but also funny as hell' appeals to you at all, this is essential viewing.

 Just how bad is it? Well, to be perfectly honest the Korean half of the equation is not bad at all. Cheesy as all hell, and probably pretty dumb even before Ho finger-painted his own plot all over it with his feces, but it looks like it was originally a decently fun action flick. It stars Jaguar Wong (Jack Lang), a cocky, assholish cop who goes up against a crime syndicate led by a heroin dealer in a beyond ridiculous He-Man wig (Hwang Jang-lee).

 The plot has been completely rewritten and re-cut to incorporate Ho's ninja shenanigans, but the fights are both frequent and very good, with fairly complex choreographies that succeed in giving Jaguar a recognizable personality. They don't quite stack up with what the folks over at Hong Kong were doing in that same time frame, but it's a honorable effort, and Lang has a great screen presence even if his character is an unlikeable dick.

 So half of the movie is a perfectly enjoyable police actioner. And then there's Ho's contribution: an incompetent, obviously tacked-on ninja yarn that frequently had me in stitches.

 The 'story' concerns an evil ninja empire that has finally reunited the three parts of a statuette that grants invulnerability. Concerned that it will be used for evil, three of the ninjas (Richard Harrison, Jonathan Watts and a third one that I think is never shown) defect and steal parts of the statue.

 The evil ninja master sends a red ninja (the ubiquitous Phillip Ko) to try and retrieve the statue pieces. He kills off the anonymous third ninja, and in response one of the good ninjas - named, I shit you not, Ninja Master Harry - calls Jaguar Wong from the other movie to get him to protect his dead comrade's sister.

 To give him a bit more gravitas, all of Ninja Master Harry's calls are placed from a Garfield phone. This... fucking... movie.

 So there's your link; In the Ninja Terminator version, Jaguar Wong is not a cop trying to stop a heroin smuggling syndicate while trying to protect an old flame, he's doing the bidding of a secretive cabal of ninjas who spend their free time bowing down to a chintzy cheap prop like an otaku venerating a bust of his favorite anime waifu.

 All the Ninja hijinks are categorized by wall-to-wall incompetence, terrible acting, stilted action, gratuitous cartwheeling, incoherent plotting and all sorts of ludicrous, hilarious touches. Here's a short, non-comprehensive list to give you a taste of the sort of batshit craziness you can expect:

- Ninja Master Harry's wife gets attacked by crabs while trying to cook them, and his husband protects her by throwing a kunai at one of them. Cue a shot of a poor crab walking around with a blade stuck in its back. For added drama, this scene has multiple dramatic zooms.

- Ninja Master Harry demonstrates his prowess with a katana by slicing a watermelon. It's such a thrilling sequence that another ninja master repeats it later (he eats the watermelon slice with a knife and fork; Sadly, he does it out of costume).

- The Evil Ninja Empire delivers ultimatums by VHS tapes borne by... a tiny, dime-store wind up robot toy. The robot (like the Garfield phone) has a surprising amount of screen time.

- Here's a short image sequence of a ninja master receiving an ultimatum from the bad guys. Imagine it set to the most overblown music possible, complete with sci-fi bleep bloop sounds:

 And there is so much more. Right up to a hilarious final shot, Ninja Terminator is a gold mine for this sort of shit. I have no idea if anyone involved possessed any self-awareness whatsoever; Is the Garfield phone Ninja Master Harry uses to communicate with the other movie a self-consciously ridiculous touch, or did they think that it would go down well with American audiences? I have no idea, and I don't care. Death of the author and all that - the only thing that matters is that it is hilarious. Good on them if they were laughing while making it, but given how shoddy this whole endeavour is it's hard to give anyone involved any credit.

 The links between the two movies-within-the-movie are tenuous, but sometimes pretty involved; I have to give Ho credit for that one scene where Ninja Master Harry and his wife watch part of Jaguar's story on a (robot-delivered!) VHS tape. The way Ho's script ties itself into knots to link both stories together just adds to the overwhelming schadenfreude.

 It's so bad it's glorious, and if you're in any way inclined to enjoy this sort of shit it is a fucking delight. The whole thing is available on youtube and, to be honest, given the way Ho exploited his stars and source material, pirating this is probably the best way to watch it. Gather a group of friends, maybe some alcohol and/or chemical assistance, and your night is sorted.

 

 *: This might sound familiar from several American re-releases of Godzilla movies; Corman's AIP indulged in this sort of thing too.

Lake Artifact

 A group of young adult friends (Thomas Brazzle, Catharine Daddario, Anna Shields and Chris Cimperman) plus a mysterious, affable hitchhiker (Dylan Gunn) they meet on the road head out to a remote lake cabin to enjoy a few nights of very mild partying. But the site they've chosen is a paranormal hotspot, as foreshadowed by several locals interviewed on-camera by a mysterious man.

 The strange phenomena pile up without much in the way of rhyme nor reason - I mean, sure, the roads loop and time seems to transcur unevenly for our protagonists, but what's the deal with the mysterious printer that spits out pictures no one seems to remember taking?
  There's a very muddled, barely sensical explanation involving some poorly-sketched multiversal conflux, but Coherence, this ain't - things barely make any sense and they don't amount to much dramatically, either. Even when people are trying to kill each other all over the place. 

 Writer/director Bruce Wemple keeps things rolling with constant developments, and the film looks pretty good for its non-existent production values. But events don't assemble into any sort of compelling picture, and the characters - through no fault of the actors playing them - and the situations they find themselves embroiled in fail to generate the sort of empathy needed for us to get invested in their fates. And so Lake Artifact fails at both of the genres it straddles.

 I try to cut these low-budget efforts a lot of slack, but aside from a fun twist late in the game, there's barely anything going for this one aside from the competence with which it's made.

Feast

 A lad's movie if there ever was one, Feast pits a bunch of yahoo caricatures stuck in a gritty southern bar under siege by toothsome, man-eating, sex pest monsters that kind of look like flayed versions of Marvel's Venom. It's proudly loud and crass, wildly exploitative, and it's directed like shit; And by some miracle, it's actually kind of enjoyable.

 This is the sort of film where you don't just get a freeze frame introduction for each character, they also get a short bio with some obnoxious, winking joke. Everyone gets an "Life Expectancy" entry, for example, but asides from a fun moment early on, most of the jokes are terrible.

 The style is purposefully abrasive, which is a shame because a couple of shots at the beginning are reasonably stylish and set me up to expect more from the film. As for the tone... this is one of those movies that shamelessly chases a would-be smartass, hyper-exaggerated version of early Tarantino and applies it with a self-congratulatory, frat-boy mentality. More Boondock Saints than Pulp Fiction, in other words. I have nothing against this sort of thing, but it's got to have more going for it than just attitude.

 Shock takes the lion's share of the film's comedy - those life expectancy blurbs, for example, are mostly there to be subverted as their owners go on to meet a messy, sometimes inappropriate deaths. There's a lot of sexual exploitation (which is more than a little bit iffy, seeing as this comes from the house of Weinstein*) but I have to admit an incident of face-fucking is so over-the-top and cruel it had the intended effect of provoking a disbelieving laugh.
 The gore and practical monster effects are excellent, but this is where I ran into my biggest problem with the film: You really don't get to see much of them. Whenever there's even a tiny bit of action, director John Gulager makes it his mission to make it as incomprehensible as possible. Shaky cam was all the rage in the '00s, but it goes into overdrive here, making most of the most promising scenes here devolve into a maddening, headache-inducing mess. This has its place in proper horror (Splinter, which came out a few years later is a good example) - but it has no place in action, or in a movie like this that's intended to showcase its splatter.

 Dumb as it is, the script (by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan) does slow down a little bit and gets some clever jabs in. The film is peopled by shallow stereotypes (it seems clear neither Melton nor Dunstan have ever set foot in the sort of dive they're portraying), but some decent acting by the likes of Henry Rollins, Clu Gulager (the director's father) gives them at least an illusion of depth.

This, sadly, is about as clever as the script ever gets.

 I dunno. It's often shitty and kind of obnoxious; It's absolutely the sort of movie that can't wait to let you know how in it is on its own jokes. And I can't overstate how deeply fucking annoying it is to see cool effects and ideas mangled so badly by the camera work.
 In its favour, it doesn't waste a lot of time. The pacing is zippy, the monsters are cool, and there's more than enough silly mayhem to comfortably the fill the short runtime. And then there's the rare moment where it style comes together rather than hindering the action, such as when a head is popped like a zit, and the film's Saving-Private-Ryan shutter speed tomfoolery captures each goopy glob of gore perfectly.

 *: It really adds some unwelcome context to a scene where one of the female employees has to bend over for her boss. I'm sure Harvey found it hilarious.

Cloud (Kuraudo)

 Kiyoshi Kurosawa spent decades in the trenches directing whatever came his way; Before Cure, he made movies that went from something called Kandagawa Pervert Wars (Veteran of the Pervert Wars was, of course, Pink Oyster Cult's breakout record) to high-budget Japanese Poltergeist riff Sweet Home (I have seen that one, and highly recommend it). Then he made Cure, and from that point onward he took no more notes from anyone; He still does genre work - hell, he made my absolute favourite J-horror film - but he tends to twist genre conventions into sometimes unrecognizable shapes, driven by his weirdo sensibilities and offbeat sense of humour.

 All of this to say: don't expect a traditional genre movie out of Cloud. Elaborating on that is tricky, because it doesn't actually become a genre movie until after the halfway mark - and the genre it eventually settles into might not be what you're expecting.

 But until then Cloud follows the misadventures of Yoshii (Masaki Suda) as he tries to make a living by abusing the core capitalist verbs: buying and selling. After receiving a good sum for some health equipment (by ripping off the people who actually made them) he decides to quit his factory job and get a house in the suburbs where he can move in with his girlfriend (Kotone Furukawa), set up a storage area for his wares, and become a full-time online reseller. He takes on an employee - Sano (Daiken Okudaira), a local, slow-witted youth - and begins stepping up his operations. But his world starts coming apart when his business runs into trouble... and when he starts noticing shady people following him everywhere.

 Everything is handled in a realistic, deliberate manner for the first hour or so, even though this reality feels slightly off-kilter. But as Kurosawa's script starts turning the screws and the nature of the conspiracy against Yoshii becomes clear, things take a sharp turn towards the surreal; The film shifts into a paranoid thriller for a while until Sano pops back into the picture.

 And this is where I'd recommend you stop reading and go watch the movie if you'd rather be surprised. It's an excellent, beautifully filmed, surreal-tinged movie, and you're probably better off watching it unspoiled. 

 So here's the thing: once Sano comes back into the picture, he continues assisting Yoshii with a different set of skills. Which mostly involve guns. As it turns out, this is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's version of an action movie. And it's good action, too! Gritty and low-key, but dynamic and well executed. Don't expect complex choreographies or tons of violence - the feel is closer to a war movie than John Wick.

 The devolution into gun battles is completely ridiculous, and by design; Sure, Yoshii is clearly a douchebag - he's shown driving everyone around him away, and you could even say that he represents a lot of what's wrong with the world today. But his adversaries are hilariously unhinged, and the fact that they coordinate via internet forums should not be lost on anyone. The people here are driven by dream logic rather than rational or even genre logic.
 As with most surrealism, a rich, wicked vein of humour runs beneath the script, masked by an utterly deadpan delivery. Kurosawa's clinical, controlled direction, the sound design, and fine, committed performances from the actors (especially Suda - his facade of control while he descends into panic forms the backbone to the story) all run counter to these characters' bizarre interactions.

 It all comes together into something that's truly special, but also fairly impenetrable. David Lynch is a good reference, bearing in mind that Kuroswa's take on surrealism is fairly distinct from his. But as long as you're willing to meet the movie half-way, I'm happy to recommend it.

The Spider Labyrinth (Il nido del ragno)

 When an academic working for the Intextus project - some sort of global historic research endeavour - stops reporting in, the people at headquarters send Alan (Roland Wybenga), an American professor, to Budapest to figure out what's wrong.
 Plenty is wrong, as it turns out; Alan's contact is dead soon after their first meeting, people he's met turn out not to exist at all, and everyone in his hotel keeps shooting him knowing looks.

 With the help of the sexy assistant to the late academic (Paola Rinaldi), Alan starts working out what the hell is going on, while someone goes around murdering people who try to help him. The explanation for the mystery is a little underwhelming, but it makes good use of Lovecraftian tropes, and is capped by a truly batshit finale that does a lot to elevate the film. 

 Not that what goes on before is bad; The Spider Labyrinth is heavy on atmosphere, paranoia, and some light surrealistic horror touches. It's just a little slow, and it sometimes looks a little too mundane despite cinematographer Nino Celeste bathing the more Giallo-esque scenes in garish colours and even pulling out some dutch angles. Director Gianfranco Giagni, meawhile, had mostly worked on TV before making this film, and it unfortunately shows. 

 The film is also hurt by a very, very boring main character whose main traits are his immaculately coiffed hair and an inability to emote anything beyond looking slightly miffed even when he's knee-deep in corpses; The Femme Fatale is fatale enough, but she sadly doesn't add much beyond looks either. Most of the colour comes from secondary characters like a creepy, cat-loving hotel owner (Stéphane Audran) or the typical doomed, crazy-seeming bystander (William Berger) who actually knows what's going on and tries to warn the protagonist that he's fucked.

 I liked it a fair bit; It's a fun, flawed, old-fashioned film and a good tale of Lovecraft-style elder god cults. Best approached without high expectations.

Final Destination Bloodlines

 Stefi (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is having a rough time at uni; She's been unable to sleep for weeks thanks to a recurring dream in which she sees a young woman (Bec Bassinger) die (eventually) in a massive, deadly, very funny tragedy at a high-end restaurant on the top of a Space-Needle-type tower. The whole nightmare forms a prologue of sorts to the movie, and of course acts as the catalyst for everything that happens afterwards. It's an elaborate, impressive introduction.

 About to fail her courses, and remembering her estranged grandmother's name was also Iris, Stefi decides to head back home to look for answers. She soon finds them... and then death itself starts picking off her family members, one by one, in all sort of gruesome 'accidents'.

 If you've seen any of the previous five (!) Final Destinations, you know that death actually never appears - it just sets off chains of unlikely events that result in someone snuffing it in a highly sadistic, and usually grimly funny manner. It seems no one is ever able to describe these movies without mentioning Rube Goldberg devices, and I guess I'm no different.
 You also know the rough shape the movie is going to take; People start dying in a series of freak "accidents". They band together, figure out a way to maybe try to avoid it from happening to them. There are a lot of fake-outs, and at the end they might succeed or they might not, it's usually impossible to care one way or another.
 And that's not important, because these movies are, more than any slasher movie, all about the kills - and since the killer is basically fate*, the scriptwriters (Guy Busik, Lori Evans Taylor and Jon Watts) don't really need to worry about finding different ways for some dude to tear people apart. They can come up with all sorts of wild shit - for example: have someone sit on the drain on a large pool and get their guts pulled out through their anus**.

 Part: Bloodlines adds a very slight but fun wrinkle to the formula - I'm not going to spoil the only unpredictable aspect of the movie, but it's right there in the title. Aside from that... it sure is another Final Destination movie, huh? Although one that's directed with a fair bit of enthusiasm by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein. It's a little bit clever (the film plays upon our genre literacy by lightly subverting horror clichés before inevitably indulging them), and seriously, mind-numbingly stupid; The dramatic foreshadowing is so heavily piled it gave my extraocular muscles one hell of a workout, and the characters make so many stupid decisions you're basically left cheering for their demise.

 But I guess that comes with the territory; Let's not forget that the first movie in the series has a twist ending where someone dies because they don't understand basic pendular motion***.

 Other than that, it's fine. Good fun as long as you can get into the spirit it's offered in (as in: enjoy it as a comedy), and one of the better installments in the series, I think (have in mind I'm not a huge fan.) No experience is needed with the rest of the previous movies - in fact, the lack of familiarity would probably work in your favour, and while there are quite a few callbacks and references, they're all firmly in easter egg territory.
 This one tries to make the characters more relatable by having them all be part of a family, but it's impossible to care for these characters and their relationships when everything in the movie seems to have quotation marks around it: Here comes a "funny" part. Oh, here's some "family drama". None of it really registers.

 The kills, on the other hand, do. The suspense is basic and a bit overdone, but the comedic timing is spot-on and so is the gruesome, brutal gallows humour. I'm not a fan of the gore - I know, I know, whining about CGI, but it can be done well (Smile 2 being a recent example). The carnage here, while copious and graphic, has the usual CGI problem of feeling weightless, and of making the flesh too malleable. When a glass shard pierces a foot, it has all the physicality of a red-hot butter knife going through... something a red-hot butter knife would go through really easily - I don't know, I can't think of any good example right now.
 Still, that garbage truck death was rough - good job on that one, movie.

 There's also a problem with the film's structure that I'm not sure any movie in this series can ever really overcome - there's a general shapelessness to the story, a lack of escalation. It's just gory set pieces, a couple revelations, more gory set pieces; The climactic scene at the end doesn't really feel any more important than the other struggles that went before.
 I mean... it's fine, storytelling has never been a strong point for these series - as long as they space them out properly, there's a place for this. Say, one every five years and not five in a single decade. But it'd be nice if they added something to the formula, it's getting pretty stale.

 The acting is fine - there's not a lot anyone could have done with these characters, but Santa Juana does a good job of being an engaging, variably intelligent protagonist. Richard Harmon's also fun as a very punchable douchebag (one who's got Air Supply in his sad playlist, no less!)
 But the only cast member who really makes an impression is the late Tony Todd, delivering the film's sole grace note with his signature wry gravitas.

 So is it worth it? Well, yeah, I think so - it's pretty entertaining, reasonably well made and it made me laugh a bunch of times. It knows exactly what it is, it's just a shame that part of that "what it is" is being really fucking dumb.

*: I like this version of death - they're an accountant, a bookkeeper, just balancing the numbers. And they're a dick about it because... who likes added work?

**: This actually happens in one of the movies; The guts come flying off a pipe at you in a very cheesy use of 3D. Which is, of course, the best possible use of 3D.
 And... holy fucking shit, this really happened? I always thought it was an urban legend! It's even got a name: transanal evisceration. Man, Cannibal Corpse could make a two-disc concept album out of that.

***: In case you don't remember: a guy ducks a huge swinging, burning sign, stands up to gloat about how he cheated death, gets squished when the sign swings back. That's how they chose to end it. It's only a mediocre joke, and a good example of how these movies' idiocy can sometimes get to be a bit much.

Companion

 Companion is a very clever, extremely solid sci-fi thriller. It's best, but not necessary to go in blind - One major, scene-setting twist is spoiled in its trailers, but that's basically the premise, and there are plenty of fun twists afterwards. So if you don't know anything about the movie, then ignore the rest of this write-up and go watch it, but don't sweat it if you find out what it's about. It's still very enjoyable. I will have to give it away in a little bit, it'd be a very short write-up if I didn't - so be warned.

 Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) are a seemingly loving young couple who go spend a weekend at a lake house with some of Josh's friends: the surly Kat (Megan Suri), who seems to have something against Iris right from the beginning; Sergey (Rupert Friend), a rich Russian asshole type and owner of the cabin and all the land around it; Plus Pat (Lukas Gage) and Eli (Harvey Guillén), another sweet-as-molasses couple.

 Iris seems a bit off from the get-go, as her inner life revolves around her beau to an unhealthy degree and has some odd mannerisms. The explanation arrives quickly (and this is the spoiler): she's a sexbot, an android shell with an AI that's unaware that she's artificial.
 This comes to the fore when she kills someone in the house in self-defense, and is explained by Josh in terms that increasingly paint him as a douchebag (he basically gives her a hilariously insensitive pep talk as he explains to her he'll need to switch her off and wipe her, because she's obviously defective).

 Things go to shit, of course; If futurama has thought us anything about robosexuality, it's that the path to robot hell is paved with human flesh.

 As mentioned, that's only the premise of the movie. From there Iris has to become independent if she's to survive, and all sorts of cool ideas and fun plot complications follow. Writer/Director Drew Hancock's script gets pretty creative, even to the point of having some fun with its structure - Barbarian's Zach Creggers was originally slated to direct, and it's easy to see what drew (ha!) him to the project.

 Hancock's comedy background (he was the creator of Cautionary Tales of Swords!) serves him well - Companion goes about its business seriously, but there's an infectious sense of humour lurking behind many of its lines and developments.

 It does get a little too didactic on the finer points of toxic masculinity - a little more subtlety would do the film a world of good - but that's a minor misstep, easily papered over by Jack Quaid's boyish charm.

 As good as Quaid is, this is Thatcher's movie - hers is a complicated role, an anxiety-ridden, lovelorn waif who discovers that she can literally empower herself. All that, plus she looks a little too perfect to be flesh and blood. Guillen's also memorable, though he's getting a bit too close to getting typecast as a human teddy bear.
 It's a beautiful film to look at, with cinematographer Eli Born drenching everything in the warm, pastel hues of a romantic comedy. The script is doing the usual Hollywood thing of using sci fi concepts as a springboard for its story; It's smarter than it needs to be, which makes it easy to forgive the film for showing a near future that's remarkably similar to our present despite true AI (not the bullshit engines making the rounds) and lifelike robots cheap enough to be mid-tier consumer products. The few FX we do get to see (which include a fun Terminator reference) are fine. It's not a very gory movie, but the one nasty bit is ill-served with unconvincing CGI.

 I don't want to oversell it, but this one's pretty good.

Freaky Tales

 You had to be there, man.

 The very specific there in discussion is Oakland, California, and the when is 1987, on the night where basketball player Sleepy Floyd set some sort of basketball record. That game really happened; Everything else is a fable about rallying together, saying enough is enough, making amends... and getting even. Always aided by a mysterious green energy that threads four interconnected stories.

 The first tale is a straightforward public service announcement that it is always ok to punch (and slash, and stab, etc) nazis as a bunch of punks decide to band together to protect themselves against the marauding gang of skinheads that has taken to bullying them. The second one is about two young women (Normani and Dominique Thorne) who go on a rap battle against Too $hort (DeMario Symba Driver), overcoming insecurities and the prevalent misogyny in both their lives and in the music they enjoy.

 A mob enforcer (Pedro Pascal) tries to make sense of his life after a family tragedy in the more contemplative third entry, while Sleepy Floyd himself (played by Jay Ellis) steps in to wrap things up with a blood-soaked revenge story that has extremely satisfying nods to both martial arts movies and Scanners.

 The narrative and thematic threads that bind the stories could have been developed better, but the way a couple of the developments are brought back (including a certain someone's habit of stalking people) made me laugh appreciatively. The structure clearly owes a lot to Quentin Tarantino.

 Freaky Tales is a willfully ridiculous confection played mostly straight - a simple, crowd-pleasing exercise in nostalgia, wish fulfilment and myth-making that's just strange and playful enough to give it a tiny bit of heft. If I have to be honest, I was unsure about it for a while - but it slowly, steadily won me over.
 That is, I suspect, mostly down to the writing/directing team of Anna Bowden and Ryan Fleck. They fill their version of that night with specificity, making what could just have been empty nostalgia feel personal and lived-in, and give their characters enough depth to make it worth getting invested in them. In any other hands, it all might have felt cynical, but Boden and Fleck imbue the whole project in a sort of well-natured, joyful yearning that I eventually found irresistible. How could I be down on a movie where a crowd of kids celebrate a bloody success with a Black Flag concert?

 The acting is excellent across the board (Ben Mendelsohn puts in an appropriately despicable appearance as the main antagonist), the grainy cinematography (by Jac Fitzgerald) is often gorgeous, and the action, when things get serious, is surprisingly good (the film has two major action scenes - the first one is definitely not serious, the second one is... well, it isn't serious either, but it is a joy to watch).

 What a strange movie. I don't think it's anywhere near as good as any of Boden and Fleck's previous films*, but it's a cool little oddity with a power all its own. It might be pure calories, but sometimes that's exactly what you need.

 

 *: I'm not going to count their Marvel entry.

Master of the Flying Guillotine (Du bi quan wang da po xue di zi)

 Old master Fung Sheng Wu Chi (Kang Chin) practices kung fu alone in a barren, volcanic mountain. When a messenger pigeon arrives, bearing the news that his two apprentices have been killed by a one-armed boxer, he literally bursts out through the ceiling of his hovel in rage. He then pulls out his signature weapon, the titular Flying Guillotine (a basket with a bladed rim, set at the end of a long chain) and beheads a few dummies arrayed outside... and an innocent rooster, clearly for real (chicken have a really low life expectancy in Hong Kong cinema). Every time he throws the guillotine it sounds like a revolver shot in a western.

 Then, satisfied he's made an impression and ready to go out to avenge his followers, Wu Chi puts a bow on it by torching his former residence with a firebomb. All of this accompanied by the amazing, extremely modern strains of Neu!'s Super 16*.
 And this, folks, is how you start a movie. 

 We then catch up with the actual protagonist of the film: Wu Chi's target, Yu Tien Lung (Jimmy Wang Yu, who also writes and directs). He's a circumspect, calm master who's lying low after being targeted by the Qing dynasty** by running a martial arts school where he teaches that with proper breath control you can walk on walls and even ceilings. Not the most discrete of occupations, but it seems to work out for him.

 When the dojo receive an invitation to participate in a nearby international martial arts tournament, Tien Lung worries that it's a trap from the government. (It actually isn't, but you can bet that Wu Chi, who's shown to be gleefully killing one-armed men, is going to gatecrash it.)
 Tien Lung's students convince him that the tournament would make for a great field trip despite his reservations, so off they all go to take in a few fights.

 The second act of the film is mostly the tournament itself. It's a good one, with (fairly racist depictions of) multi-national fighters coming together to show off different styles; You get a brash, kick-focused Thai fighter who does a silly little song and dance number before every fight and a shinobi-hat wearing, tonfa-wielding Japanese dude who goes by the name "wins-with-no-knives-Yamata" (Lung Fei) who gets one of my favorite jokes in all of martial arts filmdom.
 There's a hindi yogi who can stretch out his arms (the effect is very silly-looking, but it also kind of amazing; A great combination of goofy practical effects and clever chorography), and a Chinese fighter who uses his long, tressed pony tail as a whip and a noose.
 It's a good sampling of varied styles, with many different weapons putting in an appearance. The influence of this part on videogames has been acknowledged, with the last two fighters being clear inspirations for both Street Fighter 2 and... um, Yie-ar kung fu 2.

 As soon as a random one-armed fighter enters the arena, though, it's over: Wu Chi sweeps in from the wings, quickly beheads the poor guy, and then starts terrorizing everyone else. This leads to a running fight against the one-armed boxer, with several of the surviving tournament fighters going after him as well to curry favour with the government, I guess. Assholes.
 An out-numbered Tien Lung must then figure out how to navigate this gauntlet of enemies, and find a way to deal with Wu Chi's deadly weapon. Cue a number of duels, along with a few over-complicated ruses to even out the odds.

 The film is heightened and knowingly silly, but - as long as you can buy into its world - not in a way that works against its simple, dramatic confrontation. Jimmy Wang yu's filmmaking is unfussy but assured, and he throws in some flourishes by colour-coding a few of the fights. Meanwhile the legendary Shaw Brothers action choreographer Liu Chia-Liang (AKA Lau Kar-leung) keeps the fights propulsive, brutal, and full of neat little gimmicks. They tend to be short confrontations lacking the technical complexity of other films, but to my undiscerning eyes they seem to be a little more believable than the typical fights of this era of martial arts cinema; They look less choreographed and more realistic, for the lack of a better word. Which is ironic given the movie's many fantastic elements and silly conceits.

 Blood flows fairly freely. This is not a movie for grand arterial sprays, even when justified by a beheading, but the violence is frequent and there is a small amount of gore, the most memorable of which is a puddle of... let's call it nut slurry after someone gets repeatedly kicked in the testicles.
 I should also highlight the music, which follows the long, proud tradition in Asian cinema of just lifting music from other sources. Instead of stealing the theme from another movie, though, someone in the Guillotine crew was clearly a fan of krautrock - songs by Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream pop up on the soundtrack along with that Neu! track, and give the film a very unique energy. Frankie Chan's original music is decent, but it understandably doesn't make as big an impression.

 Master of the Flying Guillotine is considered a classic of the genre - and deservedly so, I think. The highest compliment I can pay it is that I clearly remembered huge chunks of it, despite last seeing it as a pre-teen... way too ago. It made an impression then, and I'm happy to report that it holds up beautifully even after all these years. 

*: The regular version of Super appears over the title credits, and it makes for a very punk-rock opening. Super 16, meanwhile, accompanies Wu Chi throughout the rest of the movie - it's his own version of the imperial march.

**: This film is a sequel to The One-Armed Boxer - there's no need to watch that to understand anything here, but I'd still recommend it as it's also really good.

Madelines

 Madeline (Brea Grant) and her husband Owen (Parry Shen) are developing a working time machine in their tiny, home-based lab. They're done with testing with fruit, but after a series of catastrophic experiments with rodents (they explode), Madeline has had enough; She solves all the problems with the device during a drunken science rampage and successfully makes a round trip to the future.

 She reappears in the lawn outside the lab, none the worse for wear. The problem: she left a loop in the code that replicated her 3600 times - and for x reason, they start coming back in a trickle: different versions of her start materializing on her back yard, one per day, day after day.

 The pair immediately decide that, because of... a very, very bone-headed interpretation of the Novikov principle, they need to kill every single Madeline as they appear. Hilarity fails to ensue.

 If you're anything like me, this pared down synopsis should be ringing all sorts of alarm bells. And yes, the science fiction in Madelines is beyond awful.
 The simple time-travel plot is bare-bones, poorly explained, and full of holes. But that's par for the course on movies about time travel; My main issue here is that script, by Brea Grant and director Jason Richard Miller seems to hold science in the most absolute contempt.

 I mean, even before they work out time travel, the duo have a machine that dematerializes objects - but they remain working for some pissant local investor (Richard Riehle). I guess that it's at least at some very under-developed level a satire of tech start-ups, but fucking hell, this is such a monumental failure of imagination. Later they have clearly stumbled onto a way to replicate matter, but absolutely nothing is made of it. It's maddening. The less said about the technological aspects, the better - the script treats these two bozos closer to wizards than scientists or engineers.

 OK, I'm being unfair, because Madelines's main goal is black comedy, not science fiction... but please, if you're going to wear another genre as drag, I'm going to ask that you demonstrate that you understand it at least at a basic level. And if you're trying to sound clever - which Madelines is clearly, desperately trying to do - it helps not to make your premise hinge on so much idiocy.

 But it's all a moot point anyhow, because the comedy also fails; The characters are awful and unlikeable, their chemistry is non-existent, the dialog goes for a stylized, clever banter that it only rarely reaches, and everyone's actions are consistently idiotic. No one acts like people in this film, no one talks like people either, and the events they're enmeshed in are just as contrived and pointlessly overcomplicated as the way they go about things

 Not all of it is a failure, mind - There are some good lines here and there (Back to the Future and Timecop are mentioned within a single sentence), and some of the ways they try to deal with the situation are amusing even as they completely defeat any possible suspension of disbelief. There are also a couple of nice props (never a given at this budget level) and the film wastes no time in getting to the meat of its story; There are plenty of pacing issues, but dawdling on the way to the main conflict is not one of them.
 Oh, and the soundtrack (by Matt Akers) is very good.

 This is what's officially called a micro-budget movie, and... well, it looks ok for what it is. The filmmaking is very amateurish and the (cheap CGI) effects are dismal. Brea Grant (who wrote and directed the excellent 12 Hour Shift) is pretty good and does what she can with a character I didn't care for at all from pretty early on - everyone else... well, they also do what they can, but achieve less.

 I don't really hold any of this against the film - it's clearly the sort of stuff that needs to be graded on a curve; The script, though, that's a much, much taller hurdle.

*: A very wooly concept that mainly just states that time travel cannot change the future; Events will sort themselves out so that there are no distortions. It's a pretty common concept in most time travel stories that don't split out into different timelines.

Encounters of the Spooky Kind (Gui da gui)

 This one's probably best known as the film that made hopping vampires (jiangshi) popular.

 Bold Cheung (Sammo Hung), a rickshaw bearer, is known in his village for his fighting prowess; So when a local rich man (Huang Ha) starts an affair with his wife (Leung Suet-mei), they decide that it would be prudent to take him out with magic. They enlist the aid of a sorcerer (Jonny Chan) from the Mao-shan sect to commit the foul deed; The sorcerer's apprentice (Chung Fat) takes exception to this misuse of magic, and sets out to protect the hapless Cheung from the dark spells arrayed against him.

 It's a simple plot, but the film is all over the place; many of the spooky encounters don't even have anything to do with the evil magician, they're just isolated spooky encounters Cheung happens to wander into. And... that's fine, martial arts films aren't known for their coherence. They are known for broad humour and slapstick, and this one's no different: Sammo Hung - who directs, and co-writes along with Huang Ying - puts his own brand of tomfoolery up front and center. Cheung's episodic adventures aren't particularly funny, but there area few laughs here and there (I liked the bickering of the urned corpses at the beginning, for example).

  There's a nice, folkloric feel to many of the encounters; Cheung fights a mirror ghost and cuts off her hand, has to follow specific rules to survive a night at a mortuary, and uses black magic (as well as kung fu) to battle a jiangshi. Later, it's revealed that in a wizard duel, he who has the tallest altar wins - which leads to some truly amazing stunt work.

 The fights, as you'd expect from someone of Hung's caliber, are all excellent, but the film has surprisingly few of them; instead, we get more traditional horror moments, like a (pretty creepy) hopping vampire searching for a hidden victim. The horror never takes, though, as even when the movie gets nasty - such as a surprisingly gory bit when two hungry spirits bite chunks out of Cheung's legs - every other beat is played for laughs. As usual the humour was a bit too broad for me, and had precious little of the wit of, say, Knockabout - but Sammo is as likeable as ever, and that carries the film a long way.

 The effects are also a mixed bag, but usually they're not trying to portray anything too complex. There's a magic battle at one point where practical effects are used to shoot out a long gout of flame instead of the more typical animated lightning - that's pretty cool. There's also an excellent scene where a house falls apart around Cheung. Mostly it's just simple makeup effects of varying quality, and at one point a canvas bag with a crude face drawn on it. Chinese Ghost Story, this ain't.

 I watched this one years and years ago, and didn't think too much of it then. I enjoyed it a bit more this time around, but I can't say I've revised my opinion of it much, unfortunately. Animal lovers beware: a rooster gets killed on-screen, which is par for the course in these sort of films (I hope the caterers used the chicken), and a black dog is killed outside the frame (I hope they got the sound effect for its death humanely...).
 For all the film's fucking around, it made me laugh the hardest with its typically abrupt end, which involves a brutal bit of domestic violence. Wrong-headed as hell, sure, but holy shit does it ever provide a memorable what-the-fuck! moment.

Hawk and Rev: Vampire Hunters

 I should by all rights hate a movie where everyone is constantly mugging for the cameras, or where most of the jokes barely qualify as humour. It shouldn't work. Hell, I'd say it doesn't work for most of its runtime. But Hawk and Rev: Vampire Slayers is so relentlessly good-natured and likeable that it's almost impossible to be down on this goofy, weightless little indie film.

 Writer/director Ryan Barton-Grimley stars as Philip 'Hawk' Hawkins, a stunted man-child whose life was derailed after killing another soldier at boot camp with a 2x4 because 'he was a vampire'. Unfortunately, the flashback doesn't really show how he managed to do it.

 Hawk now camps out on a tent at his parent's yard after they threw him out of the house, splitting his time between a dead-end security job and doing tai chi at the beach with his best bud Rev (Ari Schneider), a hippie in all but name.

 The plot, such as it is, kicks off when Hawk sees a bunch of goth dudes sneaking into one of the warehouses he's supposed to watch over. After surveiling them for a while with Rev's help, they decide to go on the offensive, and enlist the help of a guy Hawk met at prison (Richard Gayler) as a vampire-hunting mentor. They're later joined by the clerk at a the santeria they buy holy water from (Jana Savage), who also starts dating Hawk.

 There is a twist, of sorts, but the film mostly consists of Hawk and Rev or some combination of the cast fooling around, seemingly trying to make each other laugh. It's absolutely shameless - I wasn't kidding before when I said everyone keeps mugging all the fucking time, or that the humour barely works; There are multiple slow-motion montages where our heroes strut for the cameras to the music, and someone usually stumbles - you know, basic, lowest common denominator comedy.
 But Barton-Grimley and his crew add a bit of unexpected panache to every other scene; I'm not going to say it looks good, because it's amateurish as hell, but it's clear they're experimenting with different techniques, going for a certain Edgar-Wright-like energy... and sometimes, it's close enough. The soundtrack is fairly good, too - a surprising amount of folk-adjacent rock alongside the expected original 80's mid-tempo butt rock ballad about how Hawk and Rev save the day/fighting vampires and chasing them away. I mean, honestly, when that song comes on with a hilariously abrupt edit over a spot-on '80s throwback title card... I laughed, hard. That aspect of the film at least is genuinely well-made.

 This is basically outsider cinema, with a budget at the level of a regional production - the film's profile was raised a little thanks to COVID wiping the cinematic slate when it came out, but it's got the DiY ethos of a bunch of friends entertaining themselves. The few special effects there are, in particular the CGI bloodshed, look absolutely terrible - but then again, they're pretty epic for this movie.
There are long stretches where the film is almost painfully to watch - Rev's antics, in particular, will break many viewers; He's got the same type of really grating energy that Michael Moriarty displays on Q: The winged serpent - but less actorly and way more 'wacky'. But soon afterwards someone will pipe up with a completely bizarre line or a joke that's so off-beat, it just works; By the end I was mostly on the film's side, and a series of pretty funny vignettes that run alongside the end credits cemented that. I can't in good conscience recommend this movie to anyone, but God help me, I actually found it enjoyable.

The Devil's Business

 Two hitmen eventually run into some trouble when their target seems to have struck a deal with the Devil. Eventually; First, they wait around. A lot.

 It's not quite as bad as it sounds, as the killers aren't terrible company. Mr. Pinner (Billy Clarke) is the old pro, constantly exasperated by his feckless, deeply unprofessional rookie helper Scully (Jack Gordon). It's an overused character dynamic, the acting isn't that great (Clarke's exasperation has a slight case of deer-caught-in-the-headlights overacting), and the dialog provided by director Sean Hogan's script is pretty stilted. But... I still found it all entertaining enough, mostly thanks to a faint undercurrent of wry humour that runsjust beneath the surface.

 Scully whines incessantly, Mr. Pinner tells a rambling ghost story, and in between their chats the duo provide a little background on their mission and discover a couple of occult-looking tableaux around the house. One of them involves a dead baby, which understandably leaves them both rattled.
Then their target (Jonathan Hansler) arrives, and things really go to hell.

 It's a slightly amateurish, deeply OK slow burn of a film. The script is cleverly built around its budget limitations, a short runtime prevents it from overstaying its welcome, and it benefits from a decent soundtrack and a couple of post-rock tracks from Justin Greaves of the band Crippled Black Phoenix. It also, bless, does try to go over the top at the end with a supernatural attack, although the results are closer to ridiculous than upsetting.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, not when similar, much better films like Kill List and The World We Knew already exist, but it's not a complete disappointment either.

Until Dawn

 The bigger distributors/production companies don't normally have a distinct "personality" like smaller boutique enterprises do (think A24, Blumhouse, Annapurna), but Sony pictures and most of its component studios have carved out a reputation for themselves over the last couple of decades as "those fucks that seriously need a quality assurance department".

 On a completely unrelated note... here's Until Dawn, a proud Sony Pictures production. Some mild story spoilers ahead.

 Five hot young people go on a trek to the boonies, retracing the steps of the sister of one of their number  who went missing some time prior. On the way they run into a gas attendant who tells them of a nearby valley where people disappear. This would be your typical foreshadowing, except that the attendant is played by Peter Stormare in full-on weirdo mode (and having a lot of fun channeling Nicholas Cage, it seems.) So you know he's going to pop up later, Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style.

 When the gang arrives at the visitor center for the valley (a quaint, colonial-style house), it's abandoned - but even weirder, they find that the house sits at the eye of the storm in a well-delineated circle where the torrential rain outside the area abruptly stops. The group's resident douchebag says that it's a well-known weird weather phenomena: "A waterwall, they wrote that song about it." That's a simultaneously underwritten and overwritten bad joke, and a good showcase for the film' bone-headed, mildly amusing sense of humour.

 The crew (Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A'zion, Ji-young Yoo, and Belmont Cameliis) are mostly interchangeable - the movie is busy enough that they get precious little time to establish character. Rubin is Clover, the closest thing to a main character, and her main trait is that she's in mourning. Young Yoo is a psychic, Cameliis plays the group douchebag, and... that's it - I was disappointed A'zion, who's very talented and likeable, didn't really get anything interesting to do beyond being the mildly sassy one.
 In any case, night falls while they poke around the visitor center, an antique hourglass machinery starts a countdown... and everyone gets stalked and killed by a masked slasher. Then the sand runs out, the machinery resets, everyone freaks out until they're all killed again, this time by a more supernatural, possessing force. Then, when they come to life afterwards, everyone explodes from drinking the water. Yes, spontaneous explosions due to water consumption. It's just as stupid as it sounds and worse still, it's brought back at a critical junction for an encore.

 Until Dawn is a time loop movie, in other words, in the spirit of Groundhog Day horror reimagining Happy Death Day. The idea is that to make it out, our heroes need to outlast the hourglass and survive the night... but, as the evil mastermind behind everything helpfully explains, "someone always has to die".

 The script (by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler) quickly ties itself into knots trying to keep the overtly busy plot chugging along while shoddily establishing some themes, a backstory and some mythology. I'd characterize it as "almost charmingly incompetent", but I imagine there's some serious studio meddling behind all these poor decisions.
 The horror is overtly reliant on jump scares and, while there are some interesting concepts thrown in (bodies decaying death after death, the very video-gamey choice characters make to kill each other off to 'reset' the timelines, or lost loops discovered via found footage*), none of them are allotted enough time to develop.
 And that's before you take into account weird-ass decisions like a small scene with a Poltergeist-like clown toy that doesn't go anywhere, or the way the timeline abruptly skips over events that seem way more interesting than what we end up getting. It's very poorly crafted.

 At least there's enough weirdness, enough going on that the film is never boring, at least until plot necessities contort it into a far more predictable series of confrontations in the third act.

 The premise and structure of the story allow for it to encompass multiple horror subgenres, like a far dumber, much less successful Cabin in the Woods. For a while, that keeps things interesting; But unfortunately - and unsurprisingly - the script mostly wastes that potential. All the interesting monsters are kept in the margins, and the (by far) most common threat here is a bog standard fast zombie.
 David F. Sandberg's direction is competent but unmemorable - between him and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre (Alexandre Aja's go-to guy) they manage some creepy atmosphere, but that's about it. A by-the-numbers modern horror look.

 The gore seems to be a mix of practical and CGI - it's not done well enough to give it actual heft and most of the scenes are slightly clipped so that they don't get too over-the-top, but it's not bad. The kills are varied and mostly not very imaginative; The best one's a very cruel, drawn-out death by minor explosions that seems out of place (on paper it's there to deflate the movie's most ridiculous scene), but it's still welcome.

 Make-up effects and monsters fare a little better, but they really are just variations on ghouls/zombies, and the movie commits a cardinal scene by foreshadowing a werewolf and then not delivering; I'm pretty sure it's in the bible (thou shall not blue-ball people with lycanthropes).

The acting is fine - all everyone had to do is basically look pretty and sell their suffering, which they do well enough.

 This all comes from a video game I haven't played (it was until very recently a console exclusive). The game was basically an attempt to make an interactive movie, so it's a little surprising to read there's very little in common with the source material - though I have played other games by the same company, and going from that I seriously doubt a faithful adaptation would have been that much better. 

 Until Dawn: The Motion Picture tries instead to adapt the interactive element - the experimentation, exploration and different deaths that come via the time loop mechanic, which sounds pretty admirable to me... maybe the only thing I actually find worthy of respect here.

*: A plot point, and scene, that echoes similar ones in the reviled Blair Witch sequel, no less. This movie fails to redeem it, though it remains a good idea and one worth stealing.

Ash

 Riya (Eiza González) wakes up in a small high-tech bunker-like structure on another planet. She's amnesic save for a handful of scattered, fragmentary memories, and seems to be suffering from trauma, at least some of it physical.

 A quick search turns out broken equipment and dead bodies - exploring outside leads to the discovery the atmosphere is poisonous. And as she regroups to gather her wits, someone knocks on the airlock.

 That would be Brion (Aaron Paul), another member of her expedition, and a right cagey bastard who's obviously hiding something. What that something is becomes somewhat clear as Riya pieces together environmental clues, sorts out her own memories... and realizes she can't quite trust her perception.

 The script, by Jonni Remmler, is nestled somewhere between The Thing and Alien and a dozen other sci-fi horrors since... as filtered by hundreds of videogames. The narrative is decent, entertaining even, and the mystery is interesting - but it's not the sort of story that survives even the mildest critical approach once the revelations start piling up*. Thankfully those concerns are secondary, because Flying Lotus (rapper Steve Ellison of Kuso fame/infamy) gets to play with the genre toybox and by Cthulhu's betentacled testicles, he's clearly having a blast - and his enthusiasm is beyond contagious.

 That enthusiasm, and his affection for the material, mainly show through in the aesthetics. This is a wildly experimental film that leverages a small budget in all sorts of ingenious, clever ways; Excellent practical effects mix with CGI of very variable quality, and Ellison is not afraid to go for broke with all sorts of toys and techniques: Fish-eye lenses, neck-mounted camera rigs, all sorts of cool (and sometimes gorgeous) transitions between shots. There are miniatures, composite imagery attempting to replicate the look of old sci-fi magazine covers, some beautiful props, glorious gore effects... There's one effect where the cheap nature of the CGI lets the movie down, and it's unfortunate that it renders the main menace of any physicality. But then you get a more abstract shot of it that depicts it as a bizarre, H.R. Giger-esque cross between a metroid alien and an elder god, and all is forgiven.

 Even when the effects are a bit spotty, they all contribute to a very cool and coherent, if somewhat derivative visual style. It's rounded out by a bloody excellent retro synth-driven soundtrack (also by Ellison). You can tell a huge amount of time, care and thought went into the visual and aural departments, and I can't help but to love something that manages to punch so far above its weight. Good job Mr. Lotus, and good job to the cinematographer (Rchard Bluck)

 The production design is really impressive, too; The outfits and exo-suits look really good (is the organic spine attached to their back a reference to Dead Space? If not, the tool Riya uses certainly is), and there are enough future-tech details to give some flavour to the world. In fact, the best character in the film (apologies, humans!) is a Japanese automated medkit that scores some pretty big laughs without puncturing the believability of the setting. Nice trick, that one.

 The videogame connection seemed pretty clear to me - not just due to the amnesiac protagonist and the way the plot is delivered (all that was missing was a blood-scawled Remember Citadel!), but there were a lot of references scattered throughout - from the Mass-Effect-Inspired suits the crew wear (they even have an embroidered 7) to a final critter that's closer to Resident Evil than anything in however many movies Paul W. S. Anderson's has adapted.

 The acting is very decent. Riya makes for a likeable, relatable protagonist, and Aaron Paul is enjoyably sketchy. The rest of the cast appear only in flashbacks; Iko Uwais is enjoyable as the expedition leader, and even gets a small, mostly first-person fight scene that's pretty good for a horror movie. Ellison himself cameos as another scientist who, tongue firmly in cheek, proves a hoary old horror trope true.

 Yeah, I liked this one a lot.

*: The less said of the science, the better.