V/H/S

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

 The brainchild of Brad Miska and some other 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 Bruckner in between two other excellent anthology entries (one for The Signal, the other one a career-best for Southbound). Ti West between Innkeepers and Sacrament. Glenn McQuaid, whose other work I haven't seen. Joe Swanberg in what I think is still 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 played by Wingard and Barrett!) who engage in such exuberant youthful shenanigans as vandalism and sexual assault, filming everything to then sell the footage. Tired of the soulless grind of just producing #content, these artistic souls 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. As our intrepid protagonists start watching some of them to figure out which one it is they were meant to take, they're hunted by something. So they (presumably) get killed, 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 horny asshole kids (Mike Donlan. Joe Sykes and Drew Sawyer) who go out into the night 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, some sort of 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 horny, idiot young adults (Norma C. Quinones, Drew Moerlein, Jeannine Yoder, and Jason Yachanin) who go visit a remote lake in the middle of the woods guided by a girl they just met. They have a nice picnic, enjoy some consequence-free extramarital sex, and leave happy and contented to lead long, fruitful lives.
 Oh, wait, no- they all get killed. My bad.
 It's standard slasher stuff with yet another assortment of basic dickweeds and relatively uninteresting kills, but the short uses video glitches and weirdness in a really interesting way to depict whatever it is that's haunting these woods. The plot doesn't really go very far and the characters are a non-starter, but this unexplained weirdness keeps it fresh.

 We're next left in the able hands of Joe Swanberg, who provides the strangest segment of the film. It's presented as a series of video chats between two childhood sweethearts (Helen Rogers and Daniel Kaufman) as they 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. Early on 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 raging assholes. It also gets one of the best, most original justifications of why everything gets filmed out of any found footage film I've ever seen: the main character's 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 things get appropriately hectic. There's some really dodgy, low budget CGI and the whole thing looks about as tacky as the logo animation at the start of Blumhouse movies, but the concepts are good fun and the goofy tone sells it well. Make sure you look up the alternate ending, too - personally I think it fits the tone of the short better.

 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 beyond which provocation curdles into bad taste, and this really crossed that for me.

 I liked the movie much better this time around, and I think it might have one of the better overall quality levels out of the now long-running anthology film series. Weirdly, I'd still don't rate it all that highly mostly becase 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. And it's not a bad thing, but it did surprise me just how sleazy it is, too: Several full frontals, including a bunch of floppy bananas along with the expected amount of melons (that would be: many pairs of melons). It's a pretty raunchy movie.
 A lot of that horniness is unpleasant by design; Male toxicity is absolutely a running theme (even within the "happily" married couple, the guy tries to pressure his wife into something she doesn't want to do), but I didn't really feel it's taken anywhere more interesting than on any given Tales from the Crypt morality play. Except maybe for Swanberg's short, which is just nuts in the best way possible.

 It's definitely worthwhile even with these few caveats - A very solid collection of shorts, and as usual the high points are pretty high. Wonder if I'll like V/H/S:Viral more this time around, too.

*: I originally mis-typed this as universitites at first; Proof that this sick filth truly has a degrading effect on impressionable, innocent minds like mine. Oh no, the Daily Mirror was right all along!

The Possession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sinister

 When Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) uproots his family to move to another town for work, it doesn't go down all that well. Especially since his work is writing about true crime; His wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance) is particularly cautious, but Ellison reassures her with a promise that "we haven't moved a few doors down from a crime scene again". Notice the very specific wording there.

 Yep, the very house they're the proud new owners of is very much a crime scene; the previous residents, the Stevensons (a family of five) were all hanged from a tree out back - all except one of the children, who remains missing. Ellison stakes out an office and sets up one of those conspiracy boards to map out his book. He's barely started preparing when he runs into an unexpected breakthrough: In a box conspicuously placed in the middle of an empty attic, he finds a box with old Super-8 recordings and a projector.

It's horrific because he's watching the video in Apple Quicktime

 Luckily, Ellison's a dab hand with obsolete electronics (I'd have no idea how to even spool the reels), and soon he's watching a collection of five home movies - which begin with some footage of families going about their normal lives, only to then cut to them being restrained and murdered in cold blood in various ways. Starting with the hanging of the Stevensons, an event that took place not ten meters away from the spot Ellison is watching the movie. He's understandably shaken, but nevertheless successfully resists his scruples and decides not to share the films with the police and do his own investigation instead. You can imagine how well that works out for him.

 As he delves into the tapes with the help of a friendly local police officer (Derrickson regular James Ransone, bringing some very welcome humour), a series of events of increasing freakishness start convincing him that there's something... occult going on - that whoever is behind the murders might not be wholly human.

 Sinister's gathered a bit of a reputation since it came out in 2012; It regularly comes up in a pretty high in any list of the scariest movies ever made, and people still talk about a couple of 'legendary' jump scares that, to be honest, I've always found a bit silly. Rewatching it now, all these years later... yeah, I'm still not entirely convinced. Which is a shame, because so much of this movie works beautifully.

 Especially those fucking home movies. They remain supremely... well,  sinister, and are still viscerally effective on a rewatch - so much so the director's used the exact same trick on later projects. Derrickson and his team have always been adept at finding freakish soundtracks to pair these vignettes to, and here they use experimental and drone/noise bands to double down on the intensity of already disturbing imagery. The only one I recognized was Ulver, but holy shit there's some amazing stuff in here. The result - sound, image, subject matter - is creepy as all fuck.

 The acting is also excellent. Hawke is one of those actors I'm always happy to see pop up; He always gives whatever it is he's on, genre or arthouse, his all. Rylance is very good, Ransone is likeable and so is Vincent D'Onofrio in a bit part. The script, which Derrickson co-wrote with regular collaborator C. Robert Cargill, gives them all good characters to inhabit and a cool, twisted supernatural mystery to fall victims to. It stumbles a few times but the information is parceled out nicely, the pacing is fine, and the ending's got a nasty bite to it. As for the direction, Derrickson already had a good grasp on both the mundane and on building a solid horror atmosphere.

 So why don't I like it more than I do? Without going into spoilers... it's the supernatural menace, particularly the entity that's at the root of the goings-on. It's... well, there's no other word for it - it's fucking tacky, and the couple of jump scares it's a part of feel like they come from a much trashier movie (like, say, 75% of distributor Blumhouse's output). There is, to my mind, a tonal clash that the film doesn't resolve between its more grounded, nihilistic horror and the schlockier take on its ghosts and ghouls. I'm all for both of those approaches, but have a clear preference for the former - so this mix doesn't do it for me. Not the way it's executed at least.

 I don't begrudge this movie its success, though, nor its reputation. It's just a good film that rubbed me the wrong way.

Silent Night (2012)

 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't a great slasher movie, but it must have done something right: it beat out bona-fide classic Nightmare on Elm Street at the box office when they released on the same date, got four sequels (I only got to the second film, and that was bad enough to turn me off the franchise), provided the internet with an early meme (Garbage day!)... and eighteen years later, it got a cheap Canadian 'remake' of sorts.

 Although calling it even a loose remake might be pushing it - the only scene I recognized from the original is a kill by antlers (the victim of which was OG scream queen Linnea Quigley). I haven't watched the original in more than twenty years, but looking it up they only share a very basic premise (Killer Santa rampages through town) and a couple other scenes that function more as nods than anything else. And yes, the garbage day line from part two also gets referenced.

 This 2012 edition focuses more on the cops - mainly deputy Aubrey Bradmoore (Jaime King), an insecure but earnest second-generation police deputy - as they try and track down a mysterious, murderous psycho in a Santa suit who's going around punishing anyone who breaches his personal ethics code.

 This all happens during the anual Santa parade, in which people from all around come over donning their best jolly Coca-Cola-inspired getup. The heavy emphasis on the police side of things is slightly distinctive, but both the cop drama and the investigation is murky and uninspired - basically, it's a bunch of red herrings passing for plot development until the mystery basically solves itself.

 As for the slasher side of things, it's not very good either; Most of the victims are either portrayed as spectacular douchebags or sleazy sex workers - the only sympathetic one (at least until very late in the game) is a stripper who gets the cruelest and closest to inspired kill in the movie. She's also chased across half of the town topless. It's pretty tasteless, but it also happens to be about the only time the movie shows a pulse.

 What does that leave us with, then? Well, not much. Director Steven C. Miller (whose new werewolf movie I'm looking forwards to, giving me an excuse to watch this) does well by the material - it's a slick, slightly impersonal movie, and a little too reliant on the du jour desaturated '10s horror palette - but it looks a lot better than most VoD horror, and the production allows for a few expansive scenes with a lot of extras. The kills, as alluded to before, are pretty mediocre, but there's at least a couple good gore effects.

 The veneer of competence on the visuals pushes to the fore the ugly emptiness in Jayson Rothwell's script, which keeps bringing up the 'dark side of Christmas' without really saying anything about it; Repeatedly mentioning a theme doesn't make it relevant to your story. The killer is a cypher until the very end, his code for killing very suspect - the only thing he's got going is a pretty cool mask and a couple of scenes with a flamethrower (including one pretty impressive stunt where he fires it very close to an extra).

 The Santa parade element is also underused; it provides a scene that's almost indistinguishable from any other there's-a-killer-at-a-parade bit (there's quite a few of those) without indulging in the sort of madness that could make this movie memorable - say, getting a few innocent Santas gunned down by panicked cops, or Christmas-sweatered families trampled to death in the ensuing panic.

 There's a little humour thrown in, mostly taken on by a tough-talking sheriff (played by Malcolm McDowell in full ham mode - his slumming goes a lot further back than I realised) acting like he's the hero in a Clint Eastwood movie. It's marginally amusing. Other than that, I don't know what to tell you; It's a slightly off-putting but well-crafted nothing of a slasher movie. Better than the original, I think -it's been a while- but that's not a high bar to clear, and it's not enough to make this one worthwhile unless you're a franchise completist.

 Except: this is another one of those movies Amazon's subtitled with their high-tech AI thingamajig, and there were a couple of misfires which were funnier than the film's actual jokes. Case in point: When a person gets killed off-screen, his unintelligible last word is subtitled as "Triforce!"

 Zelda fans represent.

Hey, turns out AI is good for a laugh, at least!

Judge Archer (Jian shi liu bai yuan)

 China, 1917. Martial artists are running around the country wreaking havoc, as they usually do - either as soldiers serving many clashing warlords, or at martial arts schools. And as we know from countless martial arts movies over the years, martial arts schools aren't any better, always challenging, stealing sacred objects from, or insulting each other.

 Somewhere in the countryside, a man (Yang Song) traumatized after witnessing an atrocity is given a new lease on life by the local monks - they they allow him to drop his previous life and run out into the word cleansed; The first words he hears, they tell him, will be his new name and identity.
 As it happens, those first words are "Judge Archer!", shouted in a forest after some sort of scuffle. Our protagonist finds a wounded old man, who asks his name. When he responds "Judge Archer", the old man tells him that's his name too, and decides to take him under his wing.

 Judge Archers are, as the opening blurb informed us, the people who keep all the martial arts schools in line. Cut to six years later, and the new Judge is now a powerful martial artist; We get to see him in action for a while (he can perform his job even while blind drunk) until the plot kicks in.

 That plot involves Erdong (Yenny Martin), a femme fatale who convinces Judge to kill an old master (Chenghui Yu) who's thrown in with a powerful warlord. Judge (is it ok if I use his first name?) proves he's not being seduced into doing it by literally fighting off her advances in the bedchamber (an amazing and dryly funny fight where the main weapons end up being a length of string, a pair of knives and a chair), and then agrees to her request anyways.
 (And if that last run-on sentence doesn't sell you on the movie, I don't know what to tell you.)

 Things end up being even more complicated than they seem at first (which is plenty complicated) when a beautiful opera singer (Chengyuan Li) keeps interrupting Judge's attempts on the old man's life until he falls in love with her.

 It's a confusing, frustratingly obtuse story that keeps everybody's motivations cryptic. I'm used to just rolling with Wuxia storylines without fully understanding them, but it's especially frustrating here because you get the feeling that there's a well thought-out story full of interesting themes, sitting tantalizingly half-out of reach. It does make sense, mostly, by the end, but there's plenty of bewildering choices, hindered no doubt by cultural distance.

 On the other hand, the movie looks absolutely sumptuous. Director Xu Haofeng has an incredible eye for visuals and tying scenes together in a very compelling way; He also writes, edits and does all the choreography, which is a really impressive list of credits given how well it's all done. The art direction (by Yong Xie) and cinematography (by Tony Wang) are beautiful, and the wardrobe (by Tingting Liang) looks amazing. The film easily earns a ton of goodwill by virtue of just how good it looks and sounds (the music, by Wei An and Fan Wang, is also fantastic).
 And the acting is good. Judge Archer is a damaged weirdo prone to strange pauses, but he's a convincing, very charismatic damaged weirdo. Kuang is a great villain, believably capable and equally likeable, and both of the women are very good as well, although their roles are the most inscrutable.

 It's a thoughtful film full of quiet moments, punctuated by frequent and very cool, very varied fights. There's a series of close-up duels which have people sitting on benches, right on front of each other with their knees almost touching, relying a lot on elbows and the insides of the forearms. Other fights use the aforementioned piece of string, arrows wielded as wands, and pole fights that turn into spear fights when the combatants sharpen the tips by tapping them on a hard object. A lot of attention is paid to footwork, which is something I adore in these movies.
 All great stuff, much less flamboyant than most wuxia but still a tiny bit heightened and very imaginative.

 Set against the rise of the Chinese republic and the ensuing wane of martial arts ("there won't be another Judge Archer", someone says), the story and its themes are quietly affecting- especially when we learn of the fate of the Judge's sister, the catalyst that set the whole story into motion, and compare them to see how their lives diverged.
 Xu Haofeng is serious about all this stuff: he's a researcher into martial arts and its role in history, a well-known novelist in China, probably most famous here in the west for being one of the writers behind Kar-Wai Wong's The Grandmaster. He's appeared once in this blog already, as the writer of the novel Monk Comes Down the Mountain is based off; given just how good Judge Archer is, he will absolutely appear again.

When The Lights Went Out

 When the Lights Went Out is a surprisingly enjoyable take on a real-life 1974 poltergeist haunting up in Yorkshire. So yes, "based on real events", quotation marks and all. That's not usually a good sign.

 The unlucky family moving into a haunted bit of council housing this time is the Maynards - Len (Steven Waddington), Jen (Kate Ashfield) and their thirteen-year-old daughter Sally (Tasha Connor). As usual, the spook latches onto the kid, staging some scares with her toys. It's pretty ridiculous, but I can't not appreciate a homage to The Changeling that replaces the downstairs ball with a Slinky. I mean, come on, that's brilliant.
 On the red side of the ledger, it's got another instance of a haunted etch-a-sketch. Cut that out, folks. Wasn't scary in Toy Story, still isn't.

This scene was filmed at Fountains Abbey, which I highly recommend visiting if you get a chance.

 At first it looks like the ghosts are going to hassle the poor girl while the parents think she's acting out, but... no; these poltergeist are not at all shy, and soon the whole family is terrified by telekinetic storms, cold spots, and living patches of darkness. When they call the newspaper, the reporter initially scoffs at their story before the ghosts sock him right in the face. Ridiculous, but fun.

 It's a thoroughly working-class ghost story, so the family can't just up and move off to a different house. But as they try to cohabit with their supernatural housemate, they discover that the spook is a bit more Canterville than Amityville; Though it's sometimes violent, the nature of its attacks are more often puckish than dangerous (something that's actually explained later). Sally strikes a friendship of sorts with the spirit, which she discovers used to be a girl about her age; Jen tries to make the best of it and ignore it. And Len... well, he tries organizing ghost tours of his home, and enjoys his new reputation as a local celebrity.

 The film spends a bit of time on how all the weirdness affects the Maynards. There's also a bit of drama involving Sally and her family (slapping children was all the rage back then) and her social life - but it's pretty underdeveloped. The thrust of the plot is that, as things evolve and explanations arrive, it's clear that the ghost's intentions are not all friendly.
 It all leads into the film's greatest weakness, a series of climactic confrontations that skew too far towards cheese and clichés to be forgiven. They don't quite undo all the great work that preceded them, but it's a shame that such a weird, likeable tonal mishmash of a movie veers so hard into tired, lazy genre tropes and poor CGI - particularly for the final confrontation; The preceding exorcism is cheesy as hell, but at least it's got a sense of fun and includes someone saying "flippin' hell!".

 Writer/director Pat Holden has a great feel for his characters and setting, which are the movie's greatest strengths - the genre stuff is fun, and has some solid scares, but it's definitely not as good. The actors are more than up to the task, and the wall-to-wall northern accents are a joy to listen to. The cinematography (DP: Jonathan Harvey) is moody as hell and the production design (by Jane Levick) does a great job at evoking a sense of time and place; that can't have been easy on this budget.
 I also liked the music (by Marc Canham) - piano driven, sometimes accompanied by strings, growing atonal when the ghosts are up to something.

 Some of the film works, some of it doesn't, but overall it's a lot of fun. It's a shame it botches the landing so bad, but what are you going to do; It's still a pretty unique take on haunted house tropes.

Chanthaly

 There aren't that many movies from Laos - 40, according to IMDB, maybe half of them released after Chanthaly. It's a very traditional, still staunchly communist country, with that regime's mistrust of anything fantastic. So Mattie Do's and spouse Christopher Larsen's achievement of making three horror movies over the last decade or so is impressive on multiple levels - not the least of which is that they all kick major ass.

 This was their first feature, after only a little experience in Laotian TV, and it shows. Made wholly in the couple's house at the same time they lived in it (the film took about a year to complete), it's a little bit rougher, a little bit less assured, but it's recognizably of a piece with Dear Sister and The Long Road, which was one of the best movies I saw last year.

 Chanthaly (Amphaiphun Phommapunya) lives with her father in a walled-off house in Vientiane; for all her adult life, she's been taking in the world outside in small snippets when the car gate opens, zealously guarded by her dad (Douangmany Soliphanh, who co-wrote). She has a heart disease, the same one her father insists killed her mother at childbirth. Which is strange, because she carries with her some vague memories of her mom, including a particularly upsetting one where she watched her die.

 And then she starts seeing her at night.

 

 The first two acts of the movie revolve around Chan's attempts to discover the truth about her mother, and to try to determine if she's actually seeing her mother's ghost, or if she's hallucinating due to the drugs she's taking to keep her condition in check.
 That plot's a very slow burn, interweaved with more mundane dramatic concerns - a possible suitor (Soulasath Souvanavong), a childhood friend (Soukchinda Duangkhamchan) who obviously carries a torch for her, and her clashes with her dad as she rebels against his rule. It's very well written but a little bit staid, a very traditional gothic yarn... until a twist contorts the movie's third act into a completely different beast.

 That it's a first movie comes across in the certain clumsiness to how some of the early scenes are structured - the pacing seems a bit off, but either it quickly gets better or I got into sync with its rhythms, because I stopped noticing after fifteen minutes. The sound design is a much bigger problem, with the thrum of machinery or night sounds way too high in the mix on most scenes.

 It's not really scary, at least not to these jaded eyes, but the horror elements are very well handled; no visual or practical effects to speak of, just clever framing, editing and blocking. The film just looks good in general, with careful compositions and good use of different color schemes; Not bad for someone whose formal training was being given a book on directing by her husband and watching other people do it while working as a makeup artist. The actors are great, too, particularly Phommapunya, whom Do met while on the makeup department of a TV show.

 Fun fact: The movie was effectively made open source as a stretch goal towards funding their next movie. You can watch it on youtube or download it from the Internet Archive; there was even a contest to remix all the footage (used and unused) to tell a different story.

 It's a really good movie, is what I'm saying. I have no idea if these films are so enthrallingly weird because of their maker's sensibilities, all the tiptoeing around political strictures, or the incorporation of local customs and superstitions. Likely to be some mix of all three, I guess. We're lucky they seem to have managed to gather an immense pool of talent around them; Can't wait to see what they come up with next.

Entity

 A British TV show called Darkest Mysteries joins a local author (Branko Tomovic) in Russia at a site where 34 people were found dead under mysterious circumstances in the middle of the woods.

 The crew for the show consists of the presenter (Charlotte Riley), a surly cameraman (Rupert Hill) and an enthusiastic one (Oliver Jackson).

 They also bring along a psychic (Dervla Kirwan). This is one of those movies where psychics aren't just the real deal, they're infallible. Ruth, who tends to make grand pronouncements in breathless mumbles that I could only understand about half the time, immediately sees dead people all over the place (which we're shown in pretty cheesy detail) and correctly identifies the site where the bodies were found, the place where the first victim was dug up, and leads the party through the woods to the nearby abandoned building where they were killed.

 There the medium sees more phantasmagoria, including the Russian army methodically shooting a bunch of people in the head. From there she zeroes in on one specific room in the facility, a room we recognize because it was shown in a prologue, where a creepy crazy naked dude did creepy crazy naked dude things and levitated and moved things with his mind. Then there's a couple of jump scares, everyone freaks out, and one of the cameramen disappears.

 There is very, very little to this movie. The plot is simple and its mysteries easy to piece together, the characters barely fleshed-out, and the few twists it bothers to throw at us predictable and uninteresting. It's a good-looking movie for its budget - the premise all but screams found footage movie, but for x reason writer/director Steve Stone opted to alternate traditional shots in with the first person cams, which is honestly welcome as the cinematography for the non-diegetic shots is decent and very atmospheric. 

 All the actors are pretty good and are very believable despite their thinly sketched roles. The location itself is probably the film's biggest asset: A huge institutional-style abandoned facility, with all sorts of darkened rooms and hallways for our urban explorers to trudge through with their flashlights.

 But none of this makes up for the fact that barely anything interesting happens throughout, definitely nothing you haven't seen elsewhere. That's not a huge problem while the tension is mounting, but when things come to a head it's disheartening that most of the film's scares consist of either jump scares or POV shots where the camera is waved all over the place except where the action's happening while people scream their hearts out. That's fine as a choice, but this sort of chaotic horror blue-balling needs to be done much better than this to be effective.

Antiviral

 Celebrity culture is a pretty low-hanging fruit for satire. So much so that it's kind of hard to take the piss out of it effectively; how can you, when it's already a piss-take? If you're going to go after such an obvious target, you better have a unique twist.

 Antiviral, a kind-of-Sci-Fi 2012 thriller from Brandon Cronenberg, does a pretty good job of it, and makes it both as cerebral and uncomfortable as you'd expect from a Cronenberg scion. It's set... not exactly five minutes into the future, but a couple of steps to the side of our reality, in a society where celebrity worship is a mite more extreme.

 There's a (pretty funny) running gag about increasingly intrusive celebrity scoops, clandestine (?) restaurants that serve beef grown from celebrity flesh, and, more central to the film's plot, a few biotech enterprises that allow fans to get a little closer to their objects of adoration in some pretty twisted ways.

 Syd (Caleb Landry Jones, spending most of the movie looking like he's just about to keel over) works for one of the bigger and more legitimate of these enterprises, a clinic that specializes in harvesting illnesses from a small stable of celebrities, locking the viruses down so they won't be contagious (you know Monsanto or Cargill would be all up in that shit) and infecting clients with them for a price. Syd's introduced selling Herpes from their biggest celebrity, Hannah Geist (Sara Gadon), to a young man - he injects the kid with the virus on the left side of his mouth, because, as he explains. that's where she would have transmitted the chancre if she had kissed him in person.

 Syd looks pretty unhealthy, and that's because he's moonlighting by smuggling illnesses out of the clinic in his own body. He incubates them and sells them to the black market (he has a stolen virus-encoding machine at home to unlock them). This is why, when he's tapped to pick up a new Illness from Ms. Geist, he injects himself with a sample first, hoping for a big payday.
 Unfortunately for him, Ms. Geist's mysterious illness turns out to be fatal. And to add insult to injury, his being infected turns him into a target for various groups to vie after. It's an effective thriller set up, and it's played surprisingly straight as a compelling, satisfying corporate espionage story, with cool (if not always completely credible) twists and turns.

 

 A very low budget gets in the way a little - some of the sets don't entirely convince, the pacing is a bit uneven, and some of the actors are slightly off- but Cronenberg has his father's knack for clean, clinical shots and upsetting imagery; the sound design is on-point as well.

 If needles scare you, brace yourself; There are lots and lots of lovingly shot injections here, often in close-up. Also, the sort of biological aberrations you'd expect, low-key body horror, people choking on blood... you know, continuing the Cronenberg family business.

 The sci-fi is pretty soft, but some of the weirder conceits are based on real science. The biotech, sure, but also the technology used to encrypt the viruses, based on facial recognition, which is incredibly dense with information for human observers. It's there as more of a thematic, unique visual touch - doesn't entirely make sense as used, but it is grounded on existing technology.

 Meanwhile almost everything is held at an arm's length, distant. Syd's a scuzzy sociopath working for a loathsome industry who gets a little sympathy when he's involved in the machinations of bigger fish, then pisses it off in a huge (and grimly hilarious) way. We never know what the celebrities are famous for - it's not important, they're just celebrities - but the one we do see is by far the most sympathetic character in the movie, and she's also purely a victim. True to her name, little more than a ghost. Nothing here is particularly subtle, but... well, what would you expect when dealing with celebrity culture?

 

Hellbenders

 Hellbenders is a gleefully blasphemous horror comedy about a bunch of warrior exorcist priests -the Augustine order of hellbound saints- who commit to a regime of sins to make their souls attractive to demons; they're basically waking spiritual honeypot operations to draw out spooks from their possessed victims. And, as a last resort, they're trained to kill themselves so they'll take the demon back to hell with them.

 For a little bit during the introduction it looks like the movie is going to be a bit too much - too in. your. FACE! - but luckily that aggressive tone is quickly scaled back somewhat. Some creative cursing, fun character work, a few good jokes and motherfucking Clancy Brown pick up the slack and help make up for the very low budget and sometimes meandering plot.

 The Hellbound Saints live together in a New York apartment and are a fairly varied bunch of (mostly) likeable assholes. The movie gets a lot of comic mileage out of how sinning is basically in these folk's job description- one of them carries a ledger of misdeeds around, and keeps nagging them on how they're falling behind on their unholy quota. The nature of the sins themselves is sometimes suspect -an arbitrary slap counts as Wrath, for example- but I guess you need to hold back a little if you want anyone to root for your characters... and it also pokes fun at bible literalism (at one point someone says something along the lines of 'don't come to me with those bullshit Leviticus sins' - that got a big laugh.) Also, this is the sort of movie that falls apart under any close scrutiny, so it's better to just go along.

 Which brings us to the plot. It's ok, serviceable: an ancient god is trying to open a gate to hell just as the Hellbenders are being audited by an (understandably) unsympathetic church servant. There are some documentary-type asides, which do serve a purpose, but consistency is an issue as, for example, one of the characters is introduced talking to the camera for a scene and never does it again. Other than that the dialog is sharp (if  juvenile), and there are a lot of cool concepts and weirdness thrown into the mix. In the end there's too little heft and detail to the fight against demon/god Surtr to really carry the movie, but it allows for a lot of fun character moments and bloody exorcisms.

 The whole endeavor has a sort of puerile energy that I found very easy to like, and unlike the vast majority of similar films it doesn't push its lore upon you. There's no pace-killing glut of exposition (hello Nekrotronic!) and it doesn't feel like it's trying to set up a franchise or a string of sequels. It's slight to a fault, it's never scary, and it doesn't really pull off a satisfying finale, but that's fine. It's a goofy, blasphemous lark.

 The humor doesn't all come from inventive swears and casual blasphemy. A weird aside to why there aren't any classic superheroes called Clint gets a killer, flamboyantly delivered punchline for example, and a few of the jokes and jargon are relatively deep theology or occult cuts: Besides the previously mentioned Leviticus dig, for example, I got a chuckle out of the auditor being revealed as a member of the Opus Dei and the crew's reaction to that. It's... a weird movie, and a game cast led by the redoubtable and stentorious Clancy Brown really elevate it.

 Writer / Director J. T. Petty does a pretty great job on both counts with a tiny budget; Between this, Mimic 3 (way better than it had any right to be), Soft for Digging and The Burrowers (highly recommended) he's more than proven to be worth following. He seems to have a career in videogames now, and I hope it's lucrative, but it'd be great to see him make more films.