Tales From the Lodge

 Five friends and a plus one get together in a remote lakeside cabin to spread the ashes of a friend who died there a year prior. They tell each other spooky stories to while away the hours, but soon they discover they might be in a spooky story of their own.

 Yes, it's another anthology film, but the structure is fairly different from most other portmanteau films, with the framing story (written and directed by Abigail Blackmore) being given much more importance than the tales told within. The other cool detail is that each of the tales is directed by whichever character is telling the tale. They're also narrated by them, so you get interruptions and a running commentary by the rest of the gang.

 As far as the main story goes, it's fairly routine and marred by an extremely ridiculous final twist that rings both completely implausible and is slightly wrong-headed. The poor plotting is more than made up, though, by an extremely appealing, colourful cast of very charismatic character actors (all TV veterans) sharing a very believable, lived-in chemistry. It's easy to believe these forty-somethings have known each other since uni, and it's a pleasure to watch them bounce against each other, even if they can be somewhat vicious - especially against poor Miki.

 Lady's man Paul (Dustin Demri-Burns) arrives to the lodge with a new conquest, Miki (Kelly Wenham), in tow. Once everyone's assembled in the living room, as a spur of the moment thing he tells a really funny (and surprisingly creepy) tale about a confrontation with a slasher. Later, after spreading their friend's ashes in the lake (in a scene that audaciously swipes a joke from The Big Lebowski), the sharp-tongued Martha (Laura Fraser) honours the occasion with the best story in the movie, a hilarious yarn about a bad marriage, demonic possession, and lots and lots of sex.

I guess if you're going to steal, you steal from the best.

 After one too many jabs from Martha and an indiscretion from Paul, Miki angrily leaves the cabin. Russell (Johnny Vegas), the group's clown, tries to lighten the mood with a silly zombie aside, a cheeky and very short slip of a tale that uses up most of the film's makeup FX budget, as well as some cheesy motion comics-style art.

 Not a minute after the tale is done, Miki comes back from the woods in near hysterics after being attacked by a maniac while trying to make her way back home. The group discover their cars have been pushed into the lake in the meanwhile and that the phone landline has been cut (there's no cell phone reception, of course.)

 While trying to come up with a plan to fend off any attacks from the mysterious slasher, Joe (Mackenzie Crook), who has a terminal condition and is waiting for a heart transplant, tells Paul of an anxiety dream he's been having, making the last segment of the movie a surreal vignette. Then we're back to the final stretch of the main movie, where whole situation with the killer comes to a head.

 The cast is rounded out by Sophie Thompson in the main group (who is hilarious as the motherly Emma but doesn't get a story to tell) and a few others within the segments. I'd like to give a shout out to Tom Stourton as Zeke, the horniest, most intense ghost walk guide you could imagine.

 It's the acting and the script that really elevate the film; The dialog is bloody excellent, the tales themselves reflect the character of whoever is telling them, and it's full of low-key but hilarious jokes and running gags. You'll want subtitles on for this one if you're not a native speaker, as the British accents are thick and the naturalistic dialog is sometimes hard to follow. I also probably should warn that there's a twist at one point that can be construed as transphobic - I don't think it's knowingly hateful, but it did make me raise my eyebrows. Other than that, this is a very, very likeable horror comedy.

M3gan 2.0

 M3gan was a lean, very 90's throwback PG-13 techno thriller. Director Gerard Johnstone and scriptwriter Akela Cooper set out to sequelize it almost immediately, and their new story (Johnstone has sole scriptwriter credit) leant bigger, louder, dumber at every turn. The result is a two-hour monstrosity that leans closer to one of the latter Mission: Impossible franchise installment than to M3gan, an action-comedy that unfortunately indulges in all the worst trends of modern blockbuster scriptwriting.

 The plot rather cleverly threads two separate loose ends from the first movie - an unnecessary industrial espionage subplot, and the implication that M3gan (still embodied by Amie Donald and a boatload of special FX) had uploaded itself to the cloud. The industrial espionage has resulted in Amelia (Ivana Sakhno), a M3gan clone out in the wild, doing black ops for the US government. She goes rogue almost immediately in the prologue (handily setting up the film's action aspirations), then starts making her way back to the US, murdering everyone involved with M3gan's creation on the way.

 Cue the re-introduction of M3gan's creator Gemma (Alison Williams) and her niece/surrogate daughter Cady (Violet McGraw), who enjoy a somewhat closer relationship, still fraught due to Gemma's tendency to put work over her personal life.

 After a seriously ridiculous act of government overreach that sets the tone of just how stupid things will get later on, M3gan reaches out to Gemma and they form a sort of alliance to defend Cady against the new android that's hunting them all. Later on, they discover that of course the whole world hangs on the balance.

 The script for this thing is seriously overcomplicated, contrived, and dumb as all hell. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except that it's the sort of plot that sucks the air out of everything else, making characters into puppets and driving them to make all sorts of stupid choices to line up all the pieces. And to comply with the modern blockbuster feel it also includes several mandated, very fake-feeling emotional beats to try and give it an approximation of a soul.

 Luckily it doesn't take itself very seriously. The comedy is not all that great, but the script retains a sharp ear for M3gan's ironic detachment (and Jenna Davis still hits it out of the park with her delivery). The original film's campiness also makes a comeback, predictably amped up - expect an expanded dance sequence, fabulous new outfits, and another song. On the plus side, there are a surprising amount of Steven Segal references in the finale, up to and including a very familiar-looking arm-break.

 Oh, and Jemaine Clement pops up as an amoral tech bro, and his performance is a joy to behold. I love it when you can see an actor clearly having a blast.

 There are quite a few action scenes, most of them with decent-to-great choreography. Unfortunately the action filmmaking is not nearly up to the task of capturing it properly, with piss-poor editing and blocking - there are several points where some of the moves seem to be edited out of sequence, or are at least poorly set up enough to be a bit disconcerting. There are some cool superpowered manoeuvres in the mix as well, although nothing that compares with excellent first fight in Upgrade. To top it all off, a fairly strict enforcement of the PG-13 rating (which, for example, forces a beheading to be played out off-screen*) robs the action of much of its potential impact.

 It's a huge shame; Early on a reconstructed M3gan trains against a kung-fu training dummy, setting up some expectations that the film will take its cues from Hong Kong movies. I wish Johnston had paid more attention to how they're shot.

 As a whole, M3gan 2.0 is just OK. I admire the shift in genre and the ambition behind it, but the overwritten, soul-less, messy story plus the way the action is shot killed it for me. That it's overtly campy and tongue-in-cheek raises it a notch above your Mission Impossibles, Jurassic Worlds or Fasters and Furiosers, but at two hours it becomes really hard to swallow.

*: It also leads to a very funny curtailed "fuck" after they use up their one allotment.

V/H/S/2

 Within just nine months after V/H/S was released, the fine folks over at Bloody Disgusting rounded up another bunch of new and returning miscreants to make another sleazy, gory collection of found-footage horror shorts. V/H/S/2 runs about thirty minutes shorter than the first movie, and that tightening really pays off. And while it's still sleazy as hell (we get a pair of boobs and a dong within the first few minutes), but it's noticeably tamer than the first film; I'd only choose "degenerate" as the sixth or seventh adjective to apply to this one.

 The wrap-around this time is about an entertainingly amoral private dick (Lawrence Michael Levine) who, along with his partner (Kelsy Abbott) is hired to find a missing college student. They track him down to a house that looks suspiciously like the one in the first film (and we even see a little footage from some recurring assholes) - there are a load of tapes everywhere, but no corpse this time around.

 I'd forgotten these films implied a shared universe, though it always seemed a bit half-arsed. This segment is written and directed by a returning Simon Barrett, but it's pretty forgettable aside from a goofy-looking bit of gore later on.

 Barrett returns for the first story (Phase I Clinical Trials) as a scriptwriter, paired as usual with director Adam Wingard. It follows one Herman (played by Wingard), the recipient of an experimental electronic eye that connects directly to his brain and records everything he sees (justifying the PoV approach).

 The problem is that the eye is a little more keen than is useful, as a cute woman (Hannah Hughes) who's run into similar usability problems explains later on. It's an excellently creepy little ghost story; Between this and V/H/S/94's Empty Wake, Simon Barrett is responsible for probably the most traditionally scary segments on these anthologies.

 Next are Eduardo Sánchez (mis-spelled as Edúardo in the credits) and Gregg Hale, both alums of the found footage film that kicked it all (Sánchez co-directed, and Hale produced) in a zombie segment that has a pretty fun first-person twist on the zombie genre. It's quick, vicious, technically accomplished, and the premise carries it a fairly long way.

 And then comes what's easily the best segment of the movie, and possibly in the whole series: Garth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto's Safe Heaven. An Indonesian documentary (Fachri Albar, Hannah Al Rashid, Oka Antara and Andrew Suleiman) crew go visit the remote compound of a mysterious and controversial cult leader (Epy Kusnandar)... on the same day that their promised rapture comes.
 The tension is built beautifully as the increasingly discomfitted documentarians keep discovering just how fucked up things are, only for things to get more and more fucked up. There's a ton of gore, a lot of weirdness, and the action is shot with the sort of tense energy that both Tjahjanto and Evans can do so well. I've met some people who hate that it ends with a really goofy joke, but not me. I love this one.

 Unfortunately, I don't have anywhere near the same amount of appreciation for the last story, Jason Eisener's Slumber Party Alien Abduction, where a bunch of obnoxious teens and pre-teens face off against each other in an escalating series of pranks before a bunch of feral aliens come to try and abduct them. It's remarkably energetic, but it doesn't go anywhere interesting, and the characters are hateful except for one very good boy who is cruelly put down. If that's intended as a provocation... well, good job: I fucking hate it with a passion.

 Aside from that bum note, V/H/S/2 is a blast: a high-energy collection of fairly distinct, gory tales - it's a shame that it chooses to go out on its weakest link, souring the experience somewhat. But on the whole it's easily one of my favourite modern horror anthology films.
 It was followed one year later by V/H/S Viral; I don't remember it being very good, but it was so poorly received it sidelined the series for seven years - which seems like an exaggeration. I'll revisit that one soon.

Ugetsu

 It's always surprised me how little so many classic samurai movies romanticize their roaming warriors. I probably shouldn't be, given that most of them were made while world war two was in living memory. Ugetsu was made less than a decade after the war ended, and its depiction of the samurai is possibly the most unremittingly vicious.

 The script, by Matsutarō Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, takes inspiration from an 18th century book of ghost stories (some them influenced by the same traditional stories which would go on to influence Kwaidan a decade later). But it's almost forty minutes before anything even remotely supernatural happens.

 Not that you'd notice, because director Kenji Mizoguchi makes the war-torn 16th century Japanese countryside into an uncanny, limbo-like expanse, and the roaming bands of wild-eyed samurai into chaotic, ravenous demons.
 In the eye of the storm lies a small village, where Genjurô (Masayuki Mori) and Tôbei (Eitarô Ozawa), two potters, see an opportunity to profit by selling their wares to noblemen while supply is at an understandable low. Their greed gets the better of them, and after an initial venture they decide to head to a nearby city with their families. The trip, even the preparations for it, are harrowing, since their village is soon invaded by rampaging soldiers. 

 The journey is tense and masterfully presented, with a jaw-dropping centerpiece: a gorgeously shot lake-crossing that's unnervingly otherworldly.

 At the gates of the city, a concerned Genjurô sends his wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and his infant son back to the village; he soon lets himself be seduced by a local noblewoman (Machiko Kyō, who might be the first instance of a pottery groupie I've ever seen); Tôbei, meanwhile misplaces his wife Ohama (Mitsuko Mito) while assholishly pursuing his dream of getting some armour and becoming a samurai himself.

 So this is the part where the men let their greed ruin their lives, as foretold early on by a a village sage. Tôbei lucks out in battle, and his dishonourable means gain him great favour from a warlord - only to find that his fortunes came at the metaphysical expense of his wife's. As for Genjurô, he finds that his would-be paramour lives in a derelict mansion with her handmaiden and is clearly, let's say, vitally-challenged. That doesn't stop him from... kind of tacitly accepting a marriage proposal.

 There are a couple of elements in his story shared with a couple of Kwaidan's tales, possibly due to the common sources of inspiration; That impression becomes more pronounced once Genjurô finally makes his way back home for one final supernatural twist. Tôbei's story is simpler, and his fate harder to relate with since he's such a buffoonish idiot. Poor Ohama.

 I actually preferred the journey to the destination and the harrowing war survival story to the ghostly escapades, which is rare for me. Maybe that wouldn't be the case if I had seen this before Kwaidan (which came out more than a decade later), but I'd like to think it's more of a testament to how well those early war scenes are handled. It's a lovely, unique movie that despite some missteps (the final monologue is pretty enough, but works against the film's spell) has aged exceptionally well. And the lake scene really is an all-timer.

Marrowbone (El Secreto de Marrowbone)

 Rose (Nicola Harrison) brings her children to rural Maine from the UK escaping their father (Tom Fisher). They get a new house in the boondocks, and carefully start building a new life for themselves as the Marrowbone family.

 But Rose is very sick, and soon dies, making her eldest son Jack (George MacKay) promise to keep her death a secret until his 21st birthday so the family won't be split apart. And shortly after her death a man (presumably dad) comes back. With a hunting rifle.

 Cut to the credits, and then six months later, with the Marrowbones carrying on as their mother requested - Jack goes to town every now and then, maintaining the fiction that her mom is still alive (albeit sick) and courting a local girl (Anya Taylor-Joy) while his siblings (Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth and a very young Matthew Stagg) remain cooped up in the house.

 The kids live in terror of some sort of ghost haunting the house, there's a pesky lawyer (Kyle Soller, who's also a romantic rival) insisting on house visits, and some missing money - but the film is mostly structured around the mystery of just what went on in those missing six months.

 It's a handsomely mounted gothic tale clearly modelled after The Others, written and directed by The Orphanage scribe Sergio G. Sánchez under the auspices of executive producer J.A. Bayona; That's a pretty good lineage! I wish I could be more positive about it.

 For one, the tone - which goes a little too thick on a sort of deeply nostalgic 'gee whiz' innocence - put me off immediately; The film opens with someone browsing a home-made diary with plush covers labeled 'Our Story', and a narration that's prone to make all sorts of melodramatic pronouncements.
 The characters are all just barely defined; Jack is the responsible one, Allie (the local friend) is infinitely understanding and forgiving, and loves Jack very much, and the younger siblings also can be described with a couple of adjectives each. Sollner's lawyer villain is a bit more fun, though the script often contrives to make him more of a menace, to provide a momentum that the film sorely lacks.

 The film gets by for a while thanks to some beautiful cinematography by Xavi Giménez and a drip feed of revelations regarding the situation at La Casa Marrowbone. But these revelations get more convoluted and more melodramatic as the story heads towards its conclusion; There's one admirably brutal secret at the heart of the film, but the way its consequences spread outwards to explain all the weirdness can get bracingly stupid. The script twists itself into knots trying to explain away every detail, and while there's some interest in seeing how the pieces fall into place, the whole ends up being a disappointing mess.

28 Years Later

 Twenty-three years later... director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the zombie movie that pretty much made them (yeah, yeah, I know, The Beach, but who's talked about that one in the last couple of decades?) The thing is, they don't really seem all that interested in following up on 28 Days Later.

 The British isles have been quarantined and left alone in the last twenty-eight years since the rage virus broke out and turned most of the population into feral, fast-moving zombies. Survivors were left to fend for themselves.

 In this brave new world, one population's been doing pretty well for itself: a tiny, self-sufficient community at Holy Island off the coast of Scotland, cut off from the mainland by a causeway that is submerged under the ocean come high tide.

 The film follows one of the villages, Spike (Alfie Williams) - a 12-year old whose father (Aaron Taylor Johnson) is pushing to go for a coming-of-age ritual zombie hunt in the mainland. It goes about as well as you could hope, but upon returning a rift opens between young Spike and his father. Disillusioned, and learning that there may be a doctor further inland, he resolves to slip away from the community and take his ill mother (Jodie Comer), to see the physician.

 28 Years Later is an excellent movie with some fairly idiosyncratic choices which may or may not impact your enjoyment of it... I don't know you, what do you expect me to say? I liked it.

 The first of those choices is a shift in genres: this is not, on the main, really a horror movie; Boyle and Garland use the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop for a coming of age drama instead. That's not a criticism, by the way, just an observation; It's a fine coming of age drama. Just be aware that it's closer to, say, Vesper than 28 Days Later.

 The second point of contention is that the movie feels fairly experimental in its visuals and editing. 28 Days Later came out in the early 2000s, so it had plenty of frame-skipping and shaky cam, and that goes double here: The film's signature visual gimmick is that the action will frequently do a small freeze-frame as an arrow pierces some zombie body part - shots also jump jarringly between different angles, and we still get hyperactive shaky cam and frame-skipping shenanigans. To be fair, Boyle's been tinkering with highly personal ways to shoot action pretty much since he started; This is one of his misses.

 Outside of the zombie hunts, the experimental touches are a little more successful - footage from old war and medieval movies is intercut into the proceeds fairly often to give a feel for the mood at the Holy Island community, and the editing gets a little too frantic when tension ratchets up. The cinematography (by a returning Anthony Dod Mantle) is lovely, and scores a lot of really interesting visuals by juxtaposing the natural beauty of the North with zombie grotesquerie. The music, by hip-hop band Young Fathers, is bloody excellent.

 The last thing to have in mind is the project was approached as a trilogy; The film ends with a bit of a cliffhanger and a very strange tonal shift. It tells a complete story and I like what it seems to be setting up next, but that ending really is a bit jarring.

 Other than that, the film does introduce some slight tweaks to its zombie lore - mainly, it tries to show the ways in which people infected by the rage virus are actually different from zombies. My favourite new element were the alphas, powerful zombies that look like raging Ted Nugents - swinging dicks and all, and give the movie a much needed shot of energy. Also interesting (and diametrically opposed) are the infected equivalent to bottom feeders, the series' creepiest creation yet. There are a decent amount of chases and whatnot, and they're fun even if some of them seem to be viewed through the eyes of someone suffering a seizure.

 There's also some lovely footage of the North being seized back by nature, complete with huge herds of roving deer, and a couple shots of the sycamore gap tree before it was cut down. A friend who knows the area confirmed that the protagonist's itinerary seems plausible, which is neat.

 The acting is excellent, with both Comer and Williams giving two great performances. A third actor pops up later as a major character and gives a characteristically soulful performance.

 I love that they took all these chances with what the studio must consider a franchise, even if not all the risks pay out. You just know there's going to be a somewhat deserved backlash. But now I'm really interested in finding out what they do for its two planned sequels, if they ever come to be.

Howl

  Howl's a rare thing: a modern attempt to make a honest horror B-movie here in the UK. With werewolves, no less!
 OK, so it really is setting itself up for failure, since there's no way it can live up to Dog Soldiers, right? Right. To be fair to it, it doesn't even try; Howl is perfectly happy to wade neck-deep in clichés, stock characters and pull all its plays from the beginner chapters of the siege horror playbook. The thing is that for a while, it works; It sets expectations low, and within that space it manages to be pretty charming. Again, for a while; glaring script issues soon bring it crashing down.

 Joe (Ed Speleers) is a put-upon train guard who the script quickly establishes as having a terminal case of wounded masculinity. I mean, the script comes out and has an alpha idiot (who got the supervisor promotion Joe was also gunning for) accusing him of not being man enough. It apparently took two people (Mark Huckerby and Nick Ostler) to write this shit.

 Joe is browbeaten into working on the last service to a far-away station. The only bright spot is that his crush (Holly Weston) is also on the train, serving drinks. She's nice to him, but of course the film shows her being flirted with by more effective, manly men. Everyone else on the passenger train is either mean or disrespectful to poor little Joe.

 But soon a chance to man up comes up: While crossing a dark patch of woods, the train rolls over a deer, which causes it to stop.* The conductor (Sean Pertwee, in a fun callback to Dog Soldiers) goes out and disappears, causing a sort of passenger mutiny led by an alpha douchebag in a suit (are you seeing a pattern here?); Everyone tries to trek back towards civilization, against Joe's better judgement - but they're soon attacked by a werewolf, so they go back and hole themselves in the train.

Joe's looking pretty unimpressed with the creature design there.

 And this is where things get kind of interesting, because even as some tensions rise, the crew and passengers actually make an effort to reach out to each other and work together to survive the night. And for a while, it's engaging enough: it's not an original theme by any conceivable metric, but compared to the meat-headed rise-to-the-occasion bullshit the film seemed to be headed towards, it's pretty refreshing. There's a couple of solid jokes, e ven a likeably daft 'rallying the troops' speech delivered over the train's PA system. Dumb, but cute. It works better than you'd expect, especially when it becomes clear that the film is not fucking about with its furry menaces - people are wounded and killed at the drop of a hat with a head still in it, and the gore effects are plentiful and surprisingly graphic.

 So yeah, for a while I actually got my hopes up. But unfortunately the script gets stupider as it gets along, and once again its macho macho themes are pushed to the forefront. That could work in a better-written movie, but here the protagonists heroically establish that no one gets left behind... only to leave behind the (by far) most heroic character in the movie to the wolves (literally) without a single fucking comment. The last thirty minutes are a depressing mess of incompetent narrative choices and dumbass posturing, all in pursuit of delivering an incel-friendly fantasy to its obvious conclusion while taking the dumbest possible route at every turn. Oh, and it has the balls to completely rip off John Murphy's work on 28 days later for its final scene. Fuck this noise.

 Good movies get your complicity in suspending your belief. For a while, I didn't really care how patently ridiculous the idea of a ravenous tribe of werewolves living in a stretch of woods not ninety minutes away from London. Let alone highly infections werewolves that can turn a lovely old woman into a ravening cannibal beast in a matter of hours. So that's a lot of goodwill the film managed to piss away.

 As mentioned earlier, there's a secondary character who basically is the hero of the piece, though the movie hilariously fails to recognize it. And the tiny bit we get of his backstory is a thousand times more poignant and interesting than the shitrag that passes for a protagonist. I do wonder if the other guy was actually supposed to be the protagonist for a while, that'd explain at least some of the script's problems.

 Director Paul Hyett, a veteran makeup and regular F/X artist (the guy has a really impressive CV), has a good grip on low-budget atmospherics - it's pretty funny that he worked on most of Neil Marshall's movies... except Dog Soldiers. The effects crew does an admirable job with CGI-assisted practical makeup effects and wolf suits. The critters sadly, don't look all that great - they belong to the goofy orc / cavepeople tribe of Garou - but at least they have triple-jointed hind legs. That's a very cool, difficult touch, pulled off pretty well... but they still look pretty goofy; The film's final, supposedly badass closeup of a werewolf had me (wait for it) howling with laughter. The perfect capper to a mismanaged, ill-conceived train (please kill me) of events.

* As someone who's often travelled in these exact same trains, I can attest that just about anything can bring them to a halt - from "the wrong kind of rain" to, my favorite, "leaf blow".

V/H/S

 Well, here it is - the little indie horror found-footage anthology film that could, with six sequels and counting. And... the thing is that as much as I like the series, I didn't really care much for this when it came out; A little too hit and miss. It was with the second one that I sat up and started paying attention.

 The brainchild of the folks over at Bloody Disgusting, the series came out the door with a truly impressive roster of horror luminaries: Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, between You're Next and The Guest. David Brukner in between two other excellent anthology entries (one for The Signal, the other for Southbound). Ti West between Innkeepers and Sacrament. Glenn McQuaid, whose other work I haven't seen. Joe Swanberg in what I think is his only horror directorial detour (the guy was insanely prolific during that period). And last but not least, the Radio Silence team (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez and Chad Villella) - this was their first properly distributed gig, and it's one of the good ones.

 The framing story, from Wingard and Barrett, stars a delightful bunch of delinquent assholes (two of which are Wingard and Barrett) who engage in such exuberant youthful shenanigans as vandalism and sexual assault, film everything and then sell the footage. Tired of just producing #content, they accept a gig to steal a special V/H/S tape from an old man in his run-down home. When they get there the homeowner is dead, and there are plenty of tapes with creepy stories on them strewn around the house; While watching them to figure out which one it is they were meant to take, they're hunted by something, and we get shown the shorts. It's a win-win, at least for us.

 David Bruckner starts things off properly with Amateur Night, the tale of three asshole kids (Mike Donlan. Joe Sykes and Drew Sawyer) who go out to pick up some chicks, try to get into their pants, and film everything with a pair of spy glasses. Unfortunately for them, one of the girls they pick up (Hannah Fierman) turns out to be weirdo and, more importantly, a succubus. It's a basic structure the V/H/S series would reuse several times over, but this is by far its best execution thanks to Fierman's fierce performance, unrestrained sleaziness, great gore and some great, intense filmmaking from Bruckner. It's really good, but you might feel like you need a bath afterwards.

 Ti West classes up things with his segment, second honeymoon, where a couple (Joe Swanberg and Sophia Takal) go out on a road trip down route 66. They do inconsequential, touristy stuff during the day, and at night someone enters their room and films them with their camera. The night segments are really creepy, and the couple have a really well-developed, lived-in relationship, but it takes too long to get to a fairly underwhelming payoff.

 Glenn McQuaid takes us back to a bunch of idiot young adults (Norma C. Quinones,Drew Moerlein, Jeannine Yoder, and Jason Yachanin) who go to visit a remote lake in the middle of the woods with a girl they just met. They have a picnic, some nice extramarital sex, and leave happy and contented to lead long, fruitful lives.
 Nah, they all get killed - it's standard slasher stuff with the usual cast of dillweed characters, but the short uses video glitches and weirdness in a really interesting way. The plot doesn't really go anywhere, but the visual gimmick at least keeps it fresh.

 We're next left in the hands of Joe Swanberg, who provides the strangest segment of the film. It's presented as a series of video chats as two childhood sweethearts (Helen Rogers and Daniel Kaufman) keep their long-distance relationship alive while at different universities*. Sweet as it is, we still get some gratuitous boobage, because of course we do. The young exhibitionist confesses that she thinks her department is haunted, and soon manages to capture some proof on video... which leads to a nasty bout of self-harm, a couple of good things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scares, and a truly batshit series of revelations. It's pretty evil, and a whole lot of fun.

 The last segment is by Radio Silence, and it's another good one. Here we follow another bunch of kids (the Radio Silence crew), but, amazingly, they're just good-natured dopes, not assholes. It also gets the best, most original justification of why everything gets filmed out of any found footage film I've ever seen: the main character's whole costume is one of those stuffed-toy nannycams!
 The kids are out looking for a Halloween party but get lost and end up in a real, honest-to-god haunted house. The early bits use that old Scooby-Doo trope of the kids thinking it's all make-believe and making fun of the paranormal stuff, but it's well executed, and when shit hits the fan it's appropriately hectic. There's some really dodgy, low budget CGI, and the whole thing looks about as tacky as the Blumhouse producer credit animation, but the concepts are good fun and the goofy tone sells it well.

 And there you have it. The only thing left is the standard song at the end which remixes some of the footage from the movie, including, ugh, the sexual assault. There's a line through which provocation curdles into bad taste, and this really crossed that for me.

 Overall I think I liked the movie better this time around, but I'd still rank it relatively low - at two hours, it feels a little too drawn out, and some of the shorts really overstay their welcome. That's especially true when you have to endure some pretty loathsome kids. I was surprised at just how sleazy it is, too: Several full frontals, including a bunch of floppy bananas as well as the expected amount of melons (which is many; many, many pairs of breasts) and unsurprisingly high levels of horniness.
 A lot of it is unpleasant by design; Male toxicity is a bit of a running theme (even in the "happily" married couple, the guy tries to pressure his wife into something she doesn't want to do), but I can't really say it's taken anywhere more interesting than the standard Tales from the Crypt morality play. Except maybe for the Swanberg short, which is just nuts.

 It's definitely worthwhile, though, with at ton of caveats - as usual the high points are pretty high. Wonder if I'll like V/H/S:Viral more this time around, too.

*: I originally mistyped this as universitities at first; Proof that this sick filth truly has a degrading effect on impressionable, innocent minds like mine.

Exhuma (Pamyo)

 When they discover a rich man's infant son is cursed and haunted by the spirit of one of his ancestors, two shamen (Kim Go-eun and Lee Do-hyun) enlist the help of two geomancers (the great Choi min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin) to try to exhume said ancestor and pacify him. Things... do not go smoothly; Thanks to one doomed idiot and to a further secret buried under the ancestor's grave, things go pretty much the opposite of smoothly.

 Exhuma is an excellent, handsomely produced horror movie (and the top-grossing movie of 2024 in its native South Korea).

 It's composed of two very different halves; In the first, quieter part, the four paranormal experts carefully grapple with the menace posed by the interred body, and try to unravel why it's become a nasty occult minefield. The second part gets surprisingly over the top as several spirits (several of them based on Japanese Yokai) come out to play, and a couple of them go ballistic on the rich man, his family, some locals, and a whole lot of pigs.

 Just about everything in the film works beautifully. The acting is excellent, and writer/director Jang  Jae-hyun keeps an impeccable atmosphere and a beautiful autumnal palette (cinematography: Lee Mo-gae). It's not hugely bloody (most of the gore in the film belongs to farm animals), but there are some pretty cool, very tasteful special effects later on. No matter how strange things get the film, while never dour, maintains a carefully controlled, serious tone throughout.

 The mystery is slightly perplexing, coming at it from a western perspective, but it's relatively easy to parse - and I love that at its core it is indeed a geomantic puzzle. Plus, it keeps things fresh: I'd love it if more western curse/possession movies had floating fireballs, a small tribute to Kwaidan, coffins wrapped in prayers and barbed wire, and tiny human-headed snakes.

Jeruzalem

 Jerusalem, but with zombies and a very shitty eschatological (scatological?) bent.

 Two deeply uninteresting but hot twenty-somethings (Rachel Klein and Sarah Pullman) head out to Israel for a short holiday. One of them has a Hololens-style mixed-reality camera glasses she got as a present, so that's the conceit for the found footage angle of the movie; It's kind of a fun idea, with facial recognition and maps popping into the frame every now and then, but the execution is all low-hanging fruit (cat videos start intruding at one point) and it doesn't really end up adding much to the movie.

 The two girls meet an anthropology student (Yon Tumarkin) on the flight to Israel who's kind of interested in how dead people are coming back to life as 'dark angels' all over in Jerusalem, something that the three major religions (Judaists, Muslims, Christians) are covering up for some reason - I dunno, I think incontrovertible proof of some sort of afterlife would be a pretty good boost for their credibility. We know that this is true, by the way, because the film begins with a short where a bunch of religious figures try to exorcise one of these resuscitated demons; It's pretty funny that the priests have a gun in their box of exorcism essentials.

 Nothing really happens for about fifty minutes; We just follow a bunch of insufferable characters around Jerusalem while they do inane party girl shit and some light tourism. At least the city is interesting, I guess. When shit finally hits the fan the night of Yom Kippur, the demons come out and our protagonists go on the run from rarely seen zombies and a zombie kaiju that's stomping on stuff off-screen as the army tries to contain the situation. The film is extremely indebted to Cloverfield, but deeply, irredeemably stupid and uninspired.

 It's one of those movies where absolutely nothing makes sense - one of the tourists has a nervous breakdown and is immediately sent to a mental asylum (which is later explored, and has immediately become one of those spooky derelict horror movie/game asylums over the course of a single  evening's events). Our protagonist consistently makes terrible - just fucking terrible - decisions, which no one else in her group contests successfully despite them being clearly stupid. And there's no coherence to the action even in the short term; A cave might be full of zombie demons one moment, only for them to disappear while some stupid shit goes on, and then they're all back chasing our merry band of idiots.

 I can't really think of anything good to say about this one, other than that it has an interesting backdrop. The effects are mostly ugly, cheap-ish CGI, the direction is artless (although at least you can blame that on the format). The acting is atrocious (the anthropologist in particular is painful to watch) and the script is pure half-arsed bullshit.
 I almost didn't watch this one thanks to its dumb title - should have gone with my gut.

Sea Fever

 From A Dark Song to Oddity, the Irish have neatly bookended the last decade with some of my favorite low-budget horror films. 2019's Sea Fever... doesn't rank anywhere as high, and to be brutally honest I doubt I'll remember much of it in a couple of months. But it's a solid, well-crafted bit of modern nautical horror.

 Siobhan (Hermione Corfield) is a socially awkward marine biology student who books a slot on a fishing trawler to work on her PhD. The ship (the Niamh Cinn Óir, named after a little-known member of the mythical Tuatha De Danaan clan) is fairly small, and its crew of six immediately balks at taking on a red-haired passenger, as it's a sure sign of bad luck. Siobhan balks in turn at their superstition... but guess what? They're all in a horror movie. Superstition turns out to be correct, much like that excellent 'curse' gag in Master and Commander.

 In this case, bad luck means that when the boat ventures into an 'exclusion zone' chasing after a large shoal of fish, it's captured by something that starts causing several spots in the wooden hull to rot away, awash in a weird blue slime. When Siobhan gets in her diving gear and goes out to see what's causing it, she finds a beautiful giant creature that looks like an upside down bioluminescent jellyfish, with its tentacles latched onto the hull.

 The crew manage to get free of the creature's clutches, but soon they find that it's left a virus-like contagion in the ship. And then people start dying.

 It's... all right. I didn't feel the script, which starts out very promising, goes anywhere particularly interesting - the middle section, especially, feels very aimless and unstructured. The characters are relatively well drawn, but once they find that they're trapped in the ship they unravel in ways overtly familiar from a hundred movies like this. The same is true of the situations the crew must work their way through- It's all oddly perfunctory, a little too familiar, and the science is pretty iffy. The bones of a good science thriller are there, but the flesh is all second-hand and not assembled very well, and it lacks the spark that would bring it to life.

 Speaking of flesh: there's quite a decent amount of gore, thanks to the messy way the infection makes an egress out of its human hosts. Nothing too extravagant, but it's solid and it results in a hanful of decent horror moments. The atmosphere is well developed, too; I'm not a fan of Neasa Hardiman's script, but her direction is fairly impressive, especially given the budget she's working with.
 At this point I could stretch my already tortured Frankenstein's monster metaphor and say something like the skin of the creature is well stitched together and the makeup gives it at least a semblance of life. But, dear reader, know that I respect your time too much for such shenanigans. I would never dream of wasting your time making you go through even a single paragraph of such pointless drivel, not even were I to deliver it in pointlessly convoluted, flowery prose.

 Where were we? Oh, yeah - the actors are all decent - the cast is rounded out by Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott as the captain and her second-in-command, plus Olwen Fouéré, Jack Hickey, Ardalan Esmaili and Elie Bouakaze. They're a decent bunch to spend ninety minutes with, even if the script doesn't have a lot of time for them.

 For good or for ill, this one doesn't leave much of an impression.

Ballerina

  Any doubts about whether Ballerina will be a worthy addition to the John Wick universe are quickly dispelled by its prologue. Not by an early action scene where a bunch of assassins attack a cabin; It's a decent sequence, but not up to the series' ridiculously high standards. No, we know it's a proper John Wick movie because when we first meet the Ballerina (Victoria Comte) she's a just-orphaned, tiny little girl clutching a blood-splattered music box. Meat-headed symbolism, right from the get-go! All it's missing is someone solemnly intoning a world-weary "CONSEQUENCES"... but don't worry, that comes later.

 The little ballerina is taken in by the concierge for the New York Continental hotel for civilized assassins (Ian McShane). He then takes her to the academy for young ballet dancers who are also badass tattooed assassins, and hands her over to the mistress there (Anjelica Huston). If you haven't seen any John Wick movies this will likely make no sense to you, and yes - it's exactly as silly as it sounds.

 There the Ballerina grows up to be Ana De Armas and learns the dual arts of ballet dancing and beating the shit out of people real good. There's some stuff about the dancers being trained to protect people, complete with a silly Slavic mythological connection* - but once the Ballerina graduates she's then shown killing loads of people for money, so I call bullshit on that.

 Anyhow, during the course of her work she runs into one of the assassins that killed her father (they have one of those convenient tatoos/scars that identifies them in a pretty visible place). This sends the Ballerina on an unsanctioned mission against an assassin cult led by a philosophizing asshole (Gabriel Byrne). Things get... pretty nuts, in the best way possible; The script takes the Wickiverse's conceit that every other person is an assassin, and it takes it to its absolute illogical conclusion. The film's last forty minutes or are made up of an escalating series of confrontations - the early stages reminded me of Gymkata**, and it builds up to a staggeringly awesome flamethrower duel that must last something like ten minutes. It is fucking glorious.

Seriously - if they don't get an oscar for this, fuck the oscars.

 The script, by Jay Hatten, was an independent piece written shortly after John Wick 2, and was retrofitted for the series once Lionsgate bought it. It also got Hatten a gig co-writing the latter Wick films, and he used the opportunity to introduce the threads that would lead to Ballerina in Part Parabellum.

 The connection to the assassinating world hurts the movie a little in that by becoming part of a franchise, it loses its potential identity. There are frequent visual callbacks, which include some action gimmicks (a few overhead shots of the action, a fight in a cavernous discotheque) and a lot of the elements of the John Wick world (some of which, at this point, Hatten had helped establish): Pneumatic tubes, the tattooed old lady operators, hidden shops catering to an assassin clientele. I did like that when they show the concierge for another branch of the Continental, it's Anne Parrillaud; Cute action movie homage there.
 The good thing is that within its guard rails it also manages to tweak expectations a little - the script is way more playful than it seems. I loved that one of the bigger massacres in the movie isn't shown at all, we just see someone navigating the aftermath... the action only comes crashing in (literally) just when the camera starts panning out. Beautiful concept, perfectly executed. There's also another fun subversion of a now-standard John Wick gearing up scene, and I cannot overstate how crazy the setting for the whole third act is.

 I've long thought of Len Wiseman as a good action director with bad taste (or luck) for projects, and Ballerina is actually excellent proof of that; Having to work within limits established by a franchise, and having access to one of the best stunt teams in the business lets him rip with near-constant, top-tier action. He flounders a little with the close quarters combat - his editing schemes and blocking are nowhere near as good as Chad Stahelski's (or David Leitch's) and he struggles to capture the action with the clarity the intricate choreography and wince-inducing stunts deserve. He fares a lot better in all the other types of action, of which there's a huge variety. I don't think it reaches the height of the last two Wicks aside from the aforementioned flamethrower cookout (which is an all-timer)... but it comes very close several times.
 Cinematographer Romain Lacourbas also does a good job aping the look of the main series, and manages to expand the palette with some wintry, alpine action later on.

 Ana de Armas looks great, and gets to wear a lot of cool-looking outfits***, but her character is a bit of a blank. And yes, you could say the same of Mr. Wick, but Armas lacks Reeves's presence, world-weariness, and flair for action. She's lithe, and manages some pretty impressive gymnastics, but even when the film insists that she had to learn to 'fight like a girl' (this translates to frequent nut shots, but doesn't really come into play all that much), she's just not badass enough to pull off the character convincingly. I wasn't a fan of The Princess****, but that movie had a better handle in how a small woman might fight off huge grizzled warriors, and Joey King sold her grit much better - Ballerina also puts the protagonist through the wringer, but it feels slightly off.

 So that nagged at me while watching the movie, but we're talking about a series with armour-plated designer suits and people who routinely take on superhuman amounts of punishment. She's definitely fun to watch, and that should be more than good enough for anyone. Please feel free to disregard me.

 Ballerina has a slight but distinct second-hand feel, and the thin connective tissue between all the action won't convince people who aren't in it for the action. On the other hand it's relentlessly paced, loud, and proudly ludicrous, with some truly incredible stunt work, excellent choreographies, and some lovely over-the-top moves. But all this - good and bad - is a moot point, because the movie has a flamethrower fight. And a then water hose versus flame thrower fight (sadly spoiled in the trailer) that looks like a practical-FX version of one of those stupid Harry Potter magic beam fights, but cool. That alone makes this an eleven out of ten.

*: The Kikimora, which these ballerinas call themselves after, are basically house elves. Not as silly as calling the John Wick the Baba Yaga, I guess. John Witch!

**: Just to be clear, this is a good thing.

***: Even a flame-retardant suit looks fashionable.

****: I realize I said exactly the same about Joey King on that one, and I kind of stand by that, but King's acting was nowhere as vulnerable as Armas's here. The main issue in The Princess is still that the protagonist is completely eclipsed by Veronica Ngo.

Bramayugam

 Hey, what about a two-hour and something black and white Indian folk horror epic? I promise it's a good one!

 Bramayugam (which translates as Age of Madness) tells the story of Thevan (Arjun Ashokan), an ex-slave escaping the destruction of his former master's estate in some unspecified conflict. While travelling in the jungle he narrowly escapes the attentions of a Yakshi, a murderous nature spirit, and stumbles upon a dilapidated manor house. There, the cook (Sidharth Bharathan) takes him to the master of the manor - the sorcerer Kodumon Potti (Mammootty); When the old man finds out that Thevan is a folk singer of the panaan, he delightedly takes him in.

 Saved from starvation and the dangers of the wilderness, Thevan soon finds his situation in the mansion is almost as precarious. His host is a fickle lecher who seems to eye him with alternating paternalism, contempt, and hunger. The cook, meanwhile, is almost comically passive aggressive towards both Potti and Thevan. There are also stories of former guests who displeased the master, forbidden chambers, some mysterious entity chained up in the cellar... all that good stuff.

 It's a simple story that could definitely do with some tightening up, but the filmmaking and the characters are strong to support it. Mammootty, in particular, plays a magnificent asshole - it's pretty easy to see why the film gives him one of those rock star entrances where everything pauses as the camera pans from his feet upwards. Ashokan is also very good as the meek Thevan; you can almost hear the gears whirring in his head as the precariousness of his situation sets in.

 Writer/director Rahul Sadasivan and cinematographer mount a handsome production; The black and white isn't quite as visually striking as in Egger's The Lighthouse (another story centered around small number of perpetually sweaty men warily circling each other), but it still succeeds in giving the film a lot of character. There's very little in the way of special effects and next to no bloodshed, but the glimpses that we get of otherworldly stuff are very effective. The film looks gorgeous. It sounds great, as well. 

 The script is easy to follow, but it's hard to say how much I'm missing thanks to the cultural distance, both in the mythical and temporal realms. Power corrupts is a pretty universal message, but I'm left wondering if, for example, Thevan belonging to the Panaan (a historically oppressed people, Wikipedia tells me), carries other points. And it might give the film's ending a bit more meaning, I suspect.

 But the film remains perfectly enjoyable without that dimension. It's not particularly scary, but it's extremely atmospheric, with a great, pervasive sense of menace and many elegant, fairy-tale-like story beats. Recommended.

Broadcast Signal Intrusion

 It is 1999, and James (Harry Shum Jr.) works at the archival section of some Chicago TV station. It's a lonely job: transferring tapes to CDs all evening, the only communication with another human (his supervisor, who works the other shift) handled via sticky notes. All this suits James just fine - he's still a mess after the disappearance of his wife Hanna four years prior.

 Predictably, he doesn't seem to have much of a personal life, either; his only activities seem to be repairing video equipment in his spare time and going to a support group for bereaved partners. So when he discovers the creepy titular Broadcast Signal Intrusion (BSI from now on) while transferring some news programme, he's got nothing better to do than to start poking around to see if he can find something out about it.

 A BSI is just what it sounds like; a pirate signal "highjacking" the daily programming, replacing whatever was on with home-made content. Primitive trolling. This one consists of a woman wearing a blank latex mask moving robotically, while electronic noises blare in the background. It's creepy enough, I guess - I thought it was trying too hard to be weird, but I suppose that makes it look authentic.

 James, who clearly needs a hobby, dives head-first into a series of rabbit holes, led on by (what else?) the internet - or rather, BBSs: in a cute detail, because the footage was originally released in the mid-90s, all the relevant information is still hosted on bulletin boards. 

 Morbid curiosity soon turns personal when he finds out a theory that links the intrusions (of which there are more than one) to missing women... and one of the intrusions took place the day after James's wife disappeared.

 And of course, weird stuff starts happening. James' place gets trashed. Some weird people contact him and some other weirdos follow him around. And all that's on top of the BSI footage itself, which keeps yielding additional information under close scrutiny. Soon James, with the help of a mysterious woman (Kelley Mack), hits the road, trying to track the mysterious TV pirate. It put me very much in mind of a 70s paranoid thriller (with some surreal elements); And sure enough, director Jacob Gentry mentions Alan J. Pakula as an inspiration.

 It's all really well handled, and the mystery and subsequent investigation is very engaging for a while. And therein lies a problem, because the film has an agenda, and it conflicts with the whole investigative aspect. I love the conclusion the film eventually arrives at, but it requires reframing what came before in a way that can be more than a little frustrating; It's a fairly big problem that I can't really go into without some major spoilers. Just be aware that you may need to be patient with some nonesense for a while.

 The director acquits himself nicely; this is a great-looking indie movie* with an excellent paranoid atmosphere courtesy of cinematographer Scott Thiele and an ominous soundtrack from Ben Lovett. I'm not a fan of the acting - Shum is a little too keen to let us know just how much pain his character is bottling up at all times - but he's not too bad otherwise.

 The script, by Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall is respectably willing to remain obtuse to the end, and its use of obsolete technology is pretty endearing - any movie that mentions phreaking ("with a ph-") is all right by me. There's some stilted dialog, and at least one instance the old technology fetish gets a little too on-the-nose (a video nerd exalts how much better Betamax was than VHS), but it's all pretty enjoyable if you're an old nerd, and it shouldn't be too off-putting for the rest of humanity.

 So it's another hard one to recommend. If you're willing to meet it in its own terms, though, and give it the benefit of doubt until it has its say, I think it's very much worth your time. I liked it a lot.

*: It even includes a pretty solidly shot fight -  of the sad/pathetic kind, though.

La Chimera

 La Chimera is a deeply lovely Italian comedy/drama hybrid that's suffused with strangeness, mythic undertones and some interesting themes. Not bad for a movie that takes more than an hour to lay its cards on the table.

 Arthur (Josh O'Connor) is a British expat somewhere in Italy, sometime in the '80s. He cuts a dashing, standoffish figure in his cream suit. It's enough to make the local girls swarm to him, although his surly disposition quickly scares them off.
 The man is a fallen archeologist, just out of prison for tomb robbery. We follow him for a while as he visits his old home (a run-down shack in the shadow of a huge medieval wall), goes to visit the mother (Isabella Rossellini) of an old flame, and is accosted by his old partners in crime - a jolly gaggle of misfits who call themselves the Tombaroli - until he accepts to join them again.

 The thing is that Arthur is critical to their operation, which sees them roam the countryside looking for Etruscan burial sites to despoil: The archeologist is an eerily effective dowser who can sense nearby tombs. Conflict finally arrives surprisingly late in the movie, as his nose for treasure leads him to a spectacular find. Its fate - along with a tentative romance with a local woman (Carol Duarte) the film has been patiently building - sends the archeologist into an existential crisis.

 It's a slow, slow character study that happens to be charming as hell and pretty funny in that boisterous, slice-of-life Italian way while mostly steering clear of melodrama in a way that requires more than a little patience. But writer/director Alice Rohrwacher adds a lot more to it: a red thread (almost literally!) runs through the movie, serving as both an incarnation of the protagonist's restlessness and a nod towards Theseus and Ariadne, and the story also references the Orpheus myth. Hell, there's even a couple of musicians that follow the Tombaroli and sing a couple of songs that comment on the action like a Greek chorus. All that on top of many slightly surrealist (or magic realist, I guess) touches.

My favorite movie poster in ages. I mean, look at this thing - it's glorious!

 Arthur clings to memories of a happier time, as does Rosellini's character. Italia, Arthur's new love interest, unknowingly articulates the Tombaroli's justification for stealing historic artifacts (it they belong to everyone, they belong to no one?) and later turns it on its head. It's not a hugely deep movie, and there are some misfires such as a scene where a powerful woman compares the Tombaroli with tiny cogs in a huge machine... and then proceeds to frame Arthur between huge, gyrating engines. But on the main it's all pulled off with grace and wit; There's quite a bit going on here.

 The filmmaking is beautiful - lots of film grain and bright primary colours - and Rohrwacher and DP Hélène Louvart sneak in some clever camera moves and some fun touches like slightly undercranking a  ridiculous police chase. The acting is also incredible - O'Connor is incredible, as is Duarte, and most of the side characters are given memorable performances.

 As with so many of these movies that scratch deeply personal itches (eww!), I find it really hard to gauge how well it would play for others. As always, I can only try to articulate why I feel it might be worth your time. If any of the above sounds appealing, you can probably do a lot worse.

Redline

  Here's the plot for Redline: Sweet JP (Takuya Kimura) really wants to win the Redline, an interstellar racing championship, all the while nursing a crush for rival racer Sonoshee (Yū Aoi). He blows his chance to qualify, but gets lucky when two other racers pull out for the championship and he gets voted into the final lineup.

 Unfortunately, the reason people are pulling out is because the race is going to take place on Roboworld - the home planet of race of fun-hating fascist cyborgs (is there any other kind?), a whole race of Galactus wannabes that would like nothing more than to crush anyone who lays rubber on their homeland.

 And... that's pretty much it. There's a corrupt agent and an interlude in a demilitarized nearby moon where the racers mingle and prepare their rides ahead of the race, but the plot on this movie is minimal. The focus is fully on the insane detail spilling from every frame. Not just on the action, which is frequent and beautifully animated, but even minor scenes such as the one where JP tries to buy cigarettes is a visual treat where we get to see the weird nervature on alien currency, a weird, funky rabid merchant, and some gorgeous Mignola-esque corridors in the background.

 The art style on this thing is gorgeous - both scratchy and detailed - and the visual imagination is staggering. The story barely hangs together, but that doesn't matter because this movie is first and foremost about looking cool, and that's something that Redline does exceptionally well.

 Everything gets thrown in the blender. You've got a rockabilly protagonist and his zeppelin-breasted object of desire (who is shown topless while she complains about the angles the news choose to show her from...). There's a magic-using race of hot space elves whose racing candidates also function as a J-pop group. Two intergalactic bounty hunter's visual inspiration clicked for me halfway through the movie, making me laugh very loudly. The last third of the movie is a protracted battle scene that includes the expected racing shenanigans, but also mechs, Robotech-style flying battles, and a giant baby-shaped energy monster. It's a pummeling mix of annoying techno, eye-watering visuals and a serviceable (but surprisingly sweet) storyline. Exhausting, but glorious.

 This is the closest I've seen any studio come to the lush animation of Ghibli and classic Disney, and it's all in service of bringing comics - many different styles of comics - to life in a form that I'd vaguely describe as the love child of Speed Racer and Wacky Races. I don't really read a lot of comics or manga, so I could only identify a few the many, many references here (Kirby fort the Roboworld crowd, some Tesuka and a huge spider-limbed nod to master Miyazaki) - I expect proper comic and anime fans will have a field day with this.
 But even without that dimension, it just looks gorgeous, and the designs are phenomenal and often hilarious. I mean, look at this guy:

  Redline is pure joy, from start to finish. A lush love letter to everything its creators (director Takeshi Koike, with some heavy input from producer Katsuhito Ishii and others from Studio Madhouse) hold dear. It reportedly took them seven years to bring it to fruition, so the least you can do is spend a hundred minutes taking it in. Trust me, it's worth it.