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.

Fragile (Frágiles)

  Fragile is a 2005 Spanish/English English-language coproduction from Jaume Balaguerró, who directs and wrote the script with Jordi Galceran.

 It stars Single Female Lawyer herself Calista Flockheart as Amy, an American nurse who's just transferred to a hospital in the Isle of Wight to cover for another nurse who left in mysterious circumstances. The hospital is in the process of being closed down, all the patients transferred to another local facility, but the move's been put on hold due to a train crash. Someone needs to take care of the last remaining patients - half a dozen children - until that's resolved.

She's pretty big in Omicron Persei 8.

 The skeleton crew left behind to look after the kids also includes two doctors (Gemma Jones and Richard Roxburgh) and the day shift nurse (Elena Anaya). Other than the move it seems like a regular hospital... until you find out that the second floor was shut down back in the fifties and left to moulder ever since, fully furnished. You know, the sort of perfectly normal thing that could totally happen outside of a horror movie.

 Amy immediately fixates on one of the patients - Maggie (Yasmin Murphy), a huge-eyed moppet with an imaginary friend called Charlotte. Given the genre, and that we saw in a prologue an invisible force breaking a kid's femur in two places, you know what that means. It's not long before Amy sees enough weirdness to be convinced that there is indeed a force of evil haunting the hospital, one that's fixated on the children in general and Maggie in particular. Cue a particularly annoying instance of trying to convince her coworkers that she's not crazy...

 This is not a good or particularly interesting ghost story; It looks professional enough, and there is a fairly cool twist regarding the identity of the spook at the center of the tale, but it's undone by some piss-poor dialog, uninteresting characters and some unwittingly funny horror moments. I admire how over the top it gets, but unfortunately not the execution of said mayhem, which involves some poor staging and a lot of ropey '00s CGI. The bloodletting fares better; There's not a lot of it, but a scene with a broken canula needle effectively rattled me, as it's something I've imagined happening to me before.
 Oh, and for those keeping tally, there's quite a few creepy/possessed toys, the most prominent of which is a set of haunted letter blocks.

 I have a lot of time for Jaume Balagueró; He may not be nearly as good a stylist as his REC co-director Paco Plaza, but he did do Mientras Duermes (Sleep Tight), a delightfully fucking evil movie if there ever was one. He handles himself well here, but the material just isn't there - it's disposable entertainment, an easily forgettable slab of ghostly cheese despite some good ambiance, a cool menace and some mild cleverness.

Noroi: The Curse (Noroi)

  Pitched somewhere between Lake Mungo and Blair Witch Project (though it ends up edging closer to the latter - makes sense, as the former only came out three years later) Noroi is a Japanese faux documentary presented as the last video (VHS, of course) put out by an underground paranormal investigator/journalist.

 The film within the film starts with our fearless journalist Kobayashi (Jin Muraki) investigating some weird, baby-like ghostly sounds manifesting in a family home. When he goes next door, where the sounds seem to be coming from, the neighbour chases him away. Investigating further, Kobayashi finds that the sounds from a recording do indeed sound like human babies - plural, and a bunch of dead pigeons near outside the neighbour's house.
 Smash cut to black, with some text informing us the neighbour soon disappeared and the family that reported the sounds died in a car crash.

 And so it goes: the film keeps accruing incidents like this, and ends up centering around three psychic individuals - a variety show actress (Marika Matsumoto, playing a fictionalized version of herself) who senses something paranormal while visiting a shrine; Kana (Rio Kanno), a young telepath girl who's soon abducted; And a barely coherent clairvoyant nutjob (Satoru Jitsunashi) who wraps himself in tinfoil and keeps screaming about psychic worms.

 Sensing a connection, Kobayashi starts following up leads- Kana's disappearance, pigeons, Marika's unraveling psyche, a recurring word, mysterious deaths plaguing people tangentially involved in the case, and that pesky neighbour back from the first case, who keeps popping up in unexpected places. Sure enough, a pattern begins to appear, one centered around a flooded town and the rituals they performed to contain a malignant entity.

 Noroi was made at the tail end of the 'classic' J-horror period, and it has several hallmarks of the sub-genre- most notably the narrative structure, a haunting that spreads like a disease, a creepy kid, and one of my least favorite tropes: an over-reliance on psychics. Other than that it mostly pivots back to a more subdued, traditional Japanese style of horror. I guess we'd call it folk-horror these days, and I'm very happy to report that warlocks do factor into the proceeds.
 The mystery does end up making sense, most of the new pieces fitting into the story in a satisfying fashion, and the film is effectively creepy despite some misfires. It also nails the feel of an enthusiast documentary, but that comes with its own problems: mainly that there are no real characters in the piece - they're all completely one-dimensional. It makes sense for the format, but at the same time it makes the film a bit of a chore to get through, especially as it drags towards the two-hour mark.

 Again owing to the mockumentary format, it's a pretty ugly-looking movie, all handheld cameras and lossy video - let's call it diegetic cinematography, with a soundtrack added in post. It doesn't do wonders for its watchability, but the realism adds to the film's queasy power. The acting is fine and the (very) limited effects are variable; An early ghostly 'glitch' is laughably cheesy in both conception and execution, but the one good glimpse we get of the big bad is memorably fucked up.

 Director/co-writer Kōji Shiraishi is obviously a big fan of the genre; He'd get to make Sadako Vs. Kayako over a decade later with mixed (I'm being kind here) results, and he does a much better job on this one of capturing its appeal. Noroi isn't a lost J-Horror classic or anything like that - I'd recommend Kairo or Dark Water over it in a heartbeat. But it is a pretty effective, well-made attempt to fuse that genre's strengths with the found-footage craze.

The Great Yokai War (Yôkai daisensô)

 Japanese folklore is rife with all sorts of spirits, ghosts and monsters. They range from objects that gain sentience after one hundred years of existence, to Llorona-like ghosts looking for their children, to weirder stuff like giant heads floating in the sky and nature spirits of all sorts.

  They're collectively known as Yokai, and pop up everywhere from comics to movies to videogames and more; they've been codified and illustrated for centuries, most famously and recently by Shigeru Mizuki, who produced a huge number of popular Yokai comics since the 1960's and is responsible for how many people visualize them these days.

 The Great Yokai War is Takashi Miike's loose remake of a 60's movie known as Spook Warfare. Shigeru Mizuki was a consultant, and even has a small role in the film, so it makes sense that the movie does its best to recreate Mizuki's designs.

 It follows the adventures of a little boy (Ryunosuke Kamiki) who is bitten by a radioactive ritual parade float, which marks him out as the destined Ki-Rin rider, a warrior for peace and stuff. The kid, Tadeshi, has other problems - his parents are recently divorced and he was sent out to a small town in the country. His mother is never around, so he needs to look after his senile grandfather.

 But the wheels of destiny are spinning, and somewhere in Japan the ghost of an ancient warlord is mustering hordes of dissatisfied spirits in an industrial hellscape that doubles as his base and is also a giant flying monster(!) He's rounded up all the innocent yokai he could find, to throw them into a furnace and turn them into an evil robotic army.

 So... yeah, Tadeshi needs to fight the evil ghost. This involves a group of Yokai seeking him out, a magic sword, adventures and misadventures... it's a kid's film through and through, and to be honest, not a terribly engaging one. The effects weren't great for 2005, much less now, and while the Yokai are all charming and mostly creative costuming, the main opponents here -the machine-yokai hybrids- really aren't that much to look at, as well as being composed of the aforementioned bad CGI. 

 I am really not the target audience for this, despite loving Yokai lore. Miike's a great director, and manages some memorable imagery here, but the film is just pitched too low. To be honest I liked it the most while the Yokai haven't really made their presence known, as once they're in the picture they crowd out any subtlety or a hope for decent pacing; the early scenes of Tadeshi's daily life strike a lovely, wistful tone, and an early scene where he goes look for the sword on his own works really well, with some lovely natural scenery.

 After that... there's things to like, for sure. The main villain (played by Etsushi Toyokawa) cuts a striking figure, but the biggest impression is made by his #2, Agi (Chiaki Kuriyama,) a henchwoman with the obvious hots for her boss, rocking a white beehive hairdo and tight dresses. She fights with strings she swings around like whips, and is basically a lot of fun to watch.

 The Yokai themselves are cool to look at, but not so interesting to listen to. There are a lot of them, though, especially when they form a ridiculously large mob near the end - a seriously impressive bit of spectacle.

 So it's not really something I would recommend, except for babysitting purposes. There are a few touches that are pretty inappropriate for children -a severed arm, gushing blood, or multiple shots of kids lustily groping a Yokai's milky thighs- but nothing your typical kid can't handle these days. I've seen worse in other Japanese kid's movies, so I wouldn't really blame them on Miike.