V/H/S: Viral

 So... was it bad as I remembered?

 Well, yes, it's pretty fucking bad. And I don't seem to be alone in thinking that; This third V/H/S anthology derailed the series from its yearly schedule, kicking the next film seven years into the future.

 The framing story (by Marcel Sarmiento) is beefier than usual - I suspect that if you add all its parts together, they'd add up to as much as any other of the segments. Unfortunately, the story does not. Add up to anything, I mean. It's a non-starter about a dude who gets obsessed with a slow car chase which has something to do with his girl disappearing and with people going nuts all over the place. It's bad.

 Once it cedes its spot to the first proper short things get immeasurably better - Dante The Great (by Gregg Bishop) is a mockumentary about the rise and fall of the titular illusionist (Justin Welborn), a loser who somehow gets a hold of a magical cape which has some unfortunate demonic tendencies. Things get out of hand, resulting in a sort-of live-action re-enactment of Pixar's short Presto but with an R rating. Silly, well-made, well-paced and featuring the rare V/H/S protagonist (Emmy Argo) you actually want to root for... if anyone's looking for a segment in any of these movies that needs to be rescued and transplanted to a better anthology, this one would be a really good candidate.

 Dante's a hard act to follow. Nacho Vigalondo tries his best with Spanish-language parallel dimension tale Parallel Monsters, which has some clever conceits and a good WTF reveal, but none of it did much for me.

 At least it's nowhere near as bad as Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Bonestorm, though. It's the usual tale of some insufferable skater dickwads who cross the border to Mexico to do some ollies or whatever and then have to face off with a bunch of zombie-like Dia de los Muertos entities. Taken as a near-experimental exercise in how far found footage can be stretched, it's kind of interesting... but it's also near painful to watch, and there's absolutely no narrative reason to sit through it.
 That these guys made both this and Spring in the same year still boggles my mind.

 All of this would have been rounded out by Todd Lincoln's Gorgeous Vortex, but it was cut out of the anthology because the director forgot to make it as a found footage film. And maybe because it's sucks, but given the rest of the material, I somehow doubt that. I have no idea what the hell this one's supposed to be about; Self-consciously arty, slow as molasses, and as obtuse as humanly possible... The protagonist (Jayden Robison) is truly gorgeous, though, and spends the most of her time running around in various skimpy outfits - so I guess there is at least that.
 The last short is available on the bluray after the credits, or up in various streaming sites if for some reason you don't want to spend any money on this. And to be clear, you shouldn't spend any money on V/H/S/Viral, I don't care how good Dante The Great is.

From the Dark

 This one's an Irish movie about a vampire who's freed from being pickled in peat by a guy with a shovel (I think this might be the first time I see peat mining depicted in a movie.)

 A squabbling young couple (Niamh Algar and Stephen Cromwell) has their car break down within the creature's haunts, and must survive the vampire's attacks by using light, which keeps the children of the night away. Writer/Director Conor McMahon and co-writer Demian Fox have some problems with plausibility and consistency (the vampire seems perfectly able to smash  out headlights, but is unable to blow out a candle) but overall it's a neat, focused little vampire siege movie. Low budget to a fault and a little one-note, but it's well-crafted and has tons of shots of the vampire moving around unseen in the background, if that type of thing works for you.

Black Mountain Side

 Oh, goddammit. This could have been something special.

 Black Mountain Side is an indie Canadian horror film about a group of archeologists stuck between a dig site way out in the frozen north and a small compound consisting of several bungalows tied together with a generator-powered electrical grid. They've just uncovered an ancient temple under the permafrost, one where the native populations didn't have any settlements. As the film begins the expedition lead, Jensen (Shane Twerdun), welcomes an expert (Michael Dixon) to validate their findings.

 It's in this introduction that the movie is at its absolute best; It's full of procedural detail of the running of a remote camp like this, gorgeous footage of the surrounding frigid valley, and lots of authentic-sounding archeological shop talk.

Poor Fleetwood Addison-Szostakiwskyj :(

 But this is a horror movie, and soon strange enough things start happening. The escalation is well handled: The local help disappears, an animal is found sacrificed at the site, people start behaving erratically - that sort of thing. And then it's discovered that the unearthing of the temple has freed up some sort of pathogen that's infected the crew, one that affects them psychologically as well as biologically. That revelation in turn pits everyone against each other as paranoia sets in. Sound familiar? Well, just in case one obvious influence isn't enough, there's some bonus talk about the foreign cells becoming... cephalopod-like.

 What follows is a pretty cool exercise in psychological horror with some fantastical elements that sadly fails to gel because it feels like the script never really seems to settle on what it wants to be about. There's that poorly-defined mysterious illness (nothing comes out of all that cephalopod talk), whispering in the dark, self-mutilation and a mysterious animalistic figure; But to be brutally honest, the film's attempts at cosmic horror are laughable - a gravelly voice speaking to each character in turn, trying to get them to kill each other? That's fine. But as soon as it tries to claim to be all-powerful or to be more than a delusion... well, it's clearly bullshitting. We just saw you communicate through some wall-mounted furniture, buddy. You're not fooling anyone.

 The thing is that even as the script (by director Nick Szostakiwskyj) flails and fails to find a coherent approach, the characters remain believable and the deaths are as chilling as anything I've seen lately (most of the violence is quick and almost underplayed, and all the more effective for it). At its simplest, it's an extremely effective (if derivative) movie about an isolated group of people going nuts, which leaves me in the odd situation of kind of wishing they'd ditched the more outré Carpenter and Lovecraft influences. Not something I'd expect to be saying very often.

 It's such a disappointment. The whole thing is beautifully shot, the acting is well pitched between heightened and mundane, there makeup effects are pretty cool, and the choice to not have any music whatsoever pays off some big dividends. It ends with a killer punchline, too, its humour black as the endless gulf between the stars. But there's a hollowness at the film's center that an excellent setup and a modest amount of very well-executed creepiness and carnage can't really make up for.

 I really wanted to like this so much more than I was able to.

Last Shift

 A rookie cop (Juliana Harkavy) on her very first day is assigned the task of looking after a decommissioned police station - the Last Shift, you could say, before disposals turn up to get rid of some hazardous waste and the building can be fully shut down.

 It's a one crazy night film in a horror key, in other words, with the poor officer having to deal with escalating weirdness as the night unspools. Doors open, things move on their own, TVs turn to creepy channels... Poltergeist-style stuff - literally, at one point, when the ghosts decide to pile up office chairs in one of the rooms. 

 It's indicative of Last Shift's problems that that particular scene in Poltergeist was played for laughs; Here, it's dead serious... just another one of the low-level scares, jump scares and mild creepiness that constitutes most of what passes for a plot here. To be perfectly honest, I didn't find this movie very compelling even before the nature of the haunting - and its connection to our protagonist - becomes clear and the film lost me completely. It's all well-trod stuff, competently made but not enough to make it interesting.

Boot visits one nasty kindergarten

 There's no complaints about its quality; Director Anthony DiBlasi and his crew, working off what's very clearly a limited budget, keep the supernatural phenomena coming at a constant clip, leaving the door open for everything to be just in the rookie's mind. It's all done with energy and a little panache, and that goes a long way.

 All that effort does make the more low-key stuff work pretty well: being alone on a creepy institutional building is scary (and relatable) enough, and the atmosphere is strong. For all the craziness to come, a couple of encounters with a deranged homeless man end up striking the hardest.
 The sound design is outstanding and there are some good makeup effects later on. The acting is... variable, but it's mostly a one-woman show and luckily Harkavi does a pretty good job; She's believable in the role and has an engaging screen presence. And the action, simple and (very) limited as it is, is well staged and manages a great sense of immediacy.

 Everything above makes it all the more disappointing when the script (by DiBlasi and Scott Poiley) gets less interesting as it goes on, up to the point where the film just ends up being a Blumhouse-like barrage of clichés built around a subject matter that I never found all that scary to begin with.

 DiBlasi is an interesting director - he worked with Clive Barker developing a series of projects, and his first movie was an adaptation of the short story Dread (which I remember being just OK). Figures - there's something pretty Cenobite-y about a couple one of the creatures here. 

 Even if his other films don't sound very appealing to me, the guy's clearly got chops. What most strikes me, though, is that he remade Last Shift nine years later (as Malum) to escape the VoD ghetto. It sounds like too faithful a retread to bother with - this movie's problems are not the sort that will be fixed by throwing more money at them.

Horns

  Once upon a time, the son of the King of horror published two great books, one right after the other (in addition to a killer set of short stories). One of them was an incredibly cinematic yarn, ready made with iconic J-Horror-style imagery. The other one was a bizarre romance/horror/comedy hybrid that seemed designed to drive any foolish scriptwriter who took it on insane for their troubles.

 Guess which got a movie adaptation?

 To be fair, there's still hope that we'll see Heart-Shaped Box in one form or another; Neil Jordan wrote an adaptation and almost got it made way back in 2007, maybe he'll be able to rescue it from limbo at some point... or someone else will. It seems inevitable now people can put "From the author of Black Phone" on the movie poster.

 You know what they probably won't put in the poster? Joe Hill's previous big screen adaptation: 2013's Horns, which to be perfectly honest, is not a bad stab at filming a pretty unconventional novel. I'd avoided it for ages on the back of some bad reviews, despite liking most of director Alexandre Aja's movies. And now I've seen it... yeah, I get it, it's not great - definitely not a patch on the book - but it's still pretty good a lot of the time.

 The first line of the movie: "Are you horny?" Is indicative of one of the film's main problems, which is a sort of flippant, low-effort smart-arse-ness going on on the script that doesn't really work. It's uttered by Merrin Williams (Juno Temple), who's been going out with Ig Perrin (Daniel Radcliffe) ever since they were in grade school, as they lay side-by-side in a sunny patch of woodland. Then comes the film's best moment: The camera pans downwards from this idyllic scene, through the ground, and comes out the other side with an inverted, bleak-as-hell shot of Ig passed out in alcoholic stupor on his kitchen floor.

 On the nose? Sure, but it's also a phenomenal - and fun! - bit of visual storytelling.

 Merrin is dead - found raped and murdered in (presumably) the same stretch of woods we saw her in with Ig earlier. Ig is the prime suspect, but the ongoing investigation has stalled, even if everyone - including the police - have condemned him in their minds.

 Ig's life is, understandably, in a downward spiral. And soon it takes a turn for the weird when horns start sprouting from his head.

 Not that people pay attention to them; They can see them, but somehow they find them hard to remember or get worked up about; No, the main effect they have is to get people to confess to their darkest urges. To bring them to the fore. This leads to some pretty effective, if broad, black comedy as Ig acts as a sort of unknowing advocate for people to indulge in their base impulses. Similar to a superhero learning to use their powers, but with more public sex.

 It doesn't take long before Ig starts using his newfound abilities to try and find Merrin's killer. The whodunnit aspect is undone by a fairly weak villain and a beyond terrible, rote resolution, but the film does have a fair amount of fun getting there.

 French madman Alexandre Aja directs from a script by Keith Bunin. Aja fails in the predictable ways - he's more attuned to creating mayhem than character work, but his sensibility does give the film a bit of a kick, and he's more than happy to make the film pretty... well, horny, including an athletic sex scene. Remember when films had sex scenes?

 The tone, which was always going to be tricky, given the source material, is all over the place, but there's a definite attempt to drown out the black comedy as the film heads to darker places. It doesn't completely work, but it's reasonably well handled - and it's a very pacey movie even at two hours.

 I'm not a fan of a couple of attempts to paint Ig as an avenging, uh, angel, which feel a bit extraneous and out of character for both Ig and the movie, and as mentioned before the ending is a complete misfire. I suspect the movie would be much better remembered if they had found a better way to cap things off.

 The acting is mostly good. Radcliffe makes for a surprisingly compelling put-upon weirdo, and is pretty convincing as an American (though I should probably say that, as a non-native English speaker, my ear for accents is pretty iffy). There's also a handful of old pros giving the film a bit of class (Kathleen Quinlan, James Remar and David Morse), an extremely fun turn from Heather Graham, and a very likeable one for Joe Anderson as Ig's big brother. I did have some big issues with one of the roles, but I'll skip that because it'd edge into spoiler territory.

 Effects-wise it's mostly ok, though the main fireworks come out during the film's weakest moment. Aja wisely reins back his bloodlust, and the handful of gore shots are well made and are appropriately upsetting when they need to be. The cinematography (from Frederick Elmes) is good - all chilly Northeastern ambiance - and there's a couple of fun shots throughout the movie (none as good as that opening).

 The elephant in the room is the novel, which... well, yeah, it towers above the movie in pretty much any aspect you can think about. It's a complex one, so that was always going to be the case. Besides the loss of its more literary qualities, my main issues are that two important characters - Merrin and the killer - have been cut down in ways that do a huge disservice to the story, and the necessities of a Hollywood movie shift the story focus more to the whodunnit and revenge aspects, which were relatively minor in the book and result in a pretty unsatisfying conclusion to the story. Especially when it's all "Revenge is bad, OK?" and then it still tacks on the book's more upbeat ending in a way that feels completely unearned.

 Then again, book=good / movie=not-as-good is hardly news. It's still decent fun: funny, off-kilter, well-made and interesting - even if it's not in any way essential like the book is.

Late Phases

 There are a surprising amount of good werewolf movies out there, all things considered. Late Phases - known as Night of the Wolf in some spaces (and as Night of the Wolf: Late Phases in Amazon UK) - takes a very decent swing at it and mostly succeeds thanks to a pretty sharp script that focuses on its compelling central character. It doesn't skimp on the monsters, either... sometimes to its detriment.

 Nick Damici stars as Ambrose McKinley, a blind, ornery Vietnam vet who moves into a new retirement community with his seeing eye dog Shadow (Raina). It's a nice enough place, more suburban neighbourhood than retirement home... except for all the murders.

 Ambrose learns of the murders the very first night spent on his new house, when the werewolf breaks into the neighbouring house and murders Delores (Karen Lynn Gorney), a sweet old lady. It's a tense, very effective scene, made more unsettling because the sight of a disemboweled senior citizen is not something you run into very often (never mind that her intestines are piled on her stomach like a birthday cake - the gore effects on the movie are fairly good otherwise). The other problem is that we get a relatively good look at the monster, and... it's not a great design: a lanky guy in a goofy suit, with a face that's more Ghoulie than Dog Soldier. That's going a problem that's going to hound (ha!) the movie moving forwards.

 Not a lot, mind you, not until the home stretch. Ambrose narrowly survives the night - the werewolf comes looking for him after killing dolores, and it's only driven away after it kills his poor dog. It doesn't take long for the veteran to put together the pieces: claw marks, the fact that it was a full moon, tracks that lead to the forest... and he knows better than to go to the indifferent cops with his concerns. Especially since they've completely bought into the whole animal attacks bullshit and seem unconcerned that it keeps happening month after month.

 So Ambrose has a month to prepare for another werewolf attack, which allows the script to slow down and showcase its protagonist. And it's a good one! Amici does a lot of the heavy pulling, and he's engaging, charismatic and badass - it does feel like a slight retread of his work on Stakeland, but he's so good at it that it doesn't matter all that much. Ambrose starts sleuthing around, especially around church, which brings with it two pretty compelling lycanthropy suspects (the priest, played very charismatically by the ever-dependable Tom Noonan, and a shifty local by the name of James (Lance Guest), while at the same time going around and getting silver bullets for the gun he keeps waving around (the movie has a lot of fun pointing out time and time again that it's not illegal for the blind to own firearms) and putting his affairs in order. And maybe straightening things out with his adult son (Ethan Embry).

 Spanish director Adrian Garcia Bogliano (I haven't seen any of his other work, but most of it seems to involve posessed teens and children) does a good job jugging events and suspects with the moon as a ticking clock in the background. I'm not convinced he nails the tone, which veers a little to sharply from comedy to drama to suspense and back again. But it's a complex balancing act and I think he's ultimately successful, thanks to considerable help from Amici and scriptwriter Eric Stolze - they keep things anchored with Ambrose's fierce commitment to remaining independent and seeing things through his way.

 The film admirably doesn't let piddly budget concerns get in the way of providing a lot of monster action. So by the time the climax rolls around and the werewolves make an appearance... well, it's cool on paper, but the execution sadly tends towards ridiculous rather than scary.

 Werewolves are a notoriously hard monster to get right visually - effects-wise the transformation is a good one: more about ripping skin to reveal the monster within than flesh becoming malleable and shifting towards lupine. But the film screws the pooch (not literally!) by not only showing them in all their slightly goofy glory, but also by trying to have them do things that the stiff furry suits are ill-suited to, like running on all fours. The best-known person on the special effects team is Robert Kurtzman, who's done a lot of amazing stuff over the years (including work on some of my all-time favorite movies), but to do these scenes justice the crew would have needed way more time and money than they clearly had.

 Still; despite some missteps (not just in the effects department - there are a few jarring character moments baked into the script, and parts where it scores satirical points at the expense of the more grounded aspects of the movie) this is a good, fun werewolf yarn. One more for the surprisingly substantial pile.

The Guest

 Before writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard completely missed the point of The Blair Witch Project and moved on to make a couple of silly american Kaiju movies, they put out a couple of pretty cool horror movies and early contributions to the V/H/S series. Out of all of them my favorite is 2014's The Guest, which sort of straddles the line between their nastier slasher films and the more over-the-top stuff that followed by way of a pastiche of gritty, mid-budget '80s genre stuff.

 As a homage, it's an unqualified success - it really feels like a relic from that time, to the point where it's a bit jarring when someone pulls out a laptop to burn a CD mixtape (which is already a time capsule in its own right; Ugh, I feel old). But the movie's neatest trick is that it wrangles all of its influences to power a really fun, knowingly silly story played (at least until the very final line) with a completely straight face.

 The Petersons - particularly mom (Sheila Kelley) and dad (Leland Orser) - are still mourning their son Caleb, lost in combat somewhere the Middle East.
 Enter David Collins (Dan Stevens), who pops up unannounced on their front door one fine summer day; David was a friend of Caleb's in the army, and he's following up on a promise to check in on his family.

 Mom is immediately won over and invites him to stay over a few days as a houseguest. Dad takes a tiny bit more convincing, but David proves so effortlessly charming that he's soon confiding his office troubles with him over drinks.

 Luke, the troubled son (Brendan Meyer), takes to him quickly - especially after he beats up his high-school bullies in a hilarious, brutal bar brawl. That leaves Anna (Maika Monroe), the adult daughter, who tries to be wary of him for a while... and is soon making him that mixtape CD I mentioned earlier.

 And it makes sense; David has the larger-than-life looks and charisma of Dan Stevens. But as soon as no one's around, he switches off and stares off into the distance. It's a brilliant, funny portrayal of sociopathy, and the first time I watched it all those years ago it had me wondering if the movie was going to go into sci-fi (think: The Terminator) territory. Not quite... but almost.

 The movie is nearly half-done before David kills some people on-screen, and the movie brilliantly keeps his motivations and plan fuzzy for a while longer. It's a moot point, anyhow, as when the military find out where he is and send a team of mercenaries headed by the great, late Lance Reddick, those plans are scuppered. The movie briefly shifts gears from thriller into action territory, before settling in for a more intimate, blood-soaked finale which, OK, does pay its respects to Cameron.

 It's a brilliant mish-mash, totally convincing under any of the disguises it dons. The thriller aspects are suitably outrageous (love David's sage counsel to Luke), and the action is meaty and knows to show the casings from a light machinegun bouncing in slow motion on the dusty floor; Incidentally, I really miss when low-ish-budget stuff like this could still use explosives to depict bullet hits on a house and not CGI sparks and weak-ass dust puffs.

 The cinematography (by Robby Baumgartner)is great and unshowy, and the script manages to get a few interesting locations. The acting's really good across the board, with Stevens and Monroe stealing the show.

 The film's secret weapon is the soundtrack - excellent synth-driven original music from Steve Moore, and a bunch of goth and goth-adjacent rock from the 80s, which do as good a job at positioning the movie as the plot devices and unfussy action; it's set in a version of the modern world in which young people really seem to be into Front 242, and Anna can be a fan of Clan of Ximox, Sisters of Mercy and Love and Rockets. A key scene is scored to the opening of Clan of Ximox's A Day, which is about as cool a music choice as you can make.

 Unlike most of the nostalgia-fuelled films of the last couple of decades, The Guest feels more like it could sit comfortably among its influences rather than just stare at them from a distance; I've filed it away in my mind next to The Hitcher, in all its (Roy?) batty glory. And that's really high praise, dammit!

As the Gods Will (Kamisama no iu tôri)

  You can't be prolific and consistent; That's just common sense. And when you're as insanely prolific as Takashi Miike... well, you're definitely going to have some turds composting in between the folds of your bloated filmography. To reach those sort of numbers, you simply can't give a fuck about what you're making a lot of the time.
 If Blade of the Immortal was Miike's 100th film, then by my count As the Gods Will was his 94th - the second and final film he made on 2014. And it is an absolute stinker.

 Shun (Sôta Fukushi) is a whiny piece of shit of a high-schooler, one of those insufferable "woe is me, my life is so boooooring" pieces of shit characters that's got not one but two beautiful girls pining for him*. So of course he gets a sort of supernatural intervention, in the form a group of sentient toys that hijack all the high schools in the world and force the students in them to play children's games... to the death.
 It actually starts out pretty promising! Juvenile, sure, but it opens up in media res, with a bunch of students up to their ankles in beheaded classmates, and cuts back and forth in a pretty engaging way until it's clear that an animated daruma doll popped out of a teacher's head and is now playing red light, green light with the kids - and if it catches anyone of them moving, their heads explode in a shower of blood and red marbles.

I give this movie one finger out of ten. Doesn't even deserve two.

 But as soon as we're all caught up, the kids start talking and the script (by Hiroyuki Yatsu) rears its misshapen, incompetent head. It's based on a Manga by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Akeji Fujimura, and holy fuck is that ever obvious; all the typical bottom-of-the-barrel formulaic manga stench wafts out and immediately overpowers anything else, voiding any chance that this could ever be any good; Constant pauses (...), people just muttering each other's names and constantly explaining what just happened to each other, tropes instead of characters, screaming, cheap melodrama. Plot holes, constant dramatic emphasis, bullshit philosophies and folks acting in deeply stupid ways to 'enhance' the drama. Fuck. This. Shit.
 Plotwise, Shun keeps making it through increasingly bizarre, deadly games (shooting hoops with a giant good luck cat statue, playing werewolf with an extreme snowboarding bear) and running into fellow high-school survivors - two love interests (Shoko Takase and Hirona Yamazaki) and Takeru (Ryunosuke Kamiki), your stereotypical anime psycho. But honestly, the only game that holds interest is the first one. While things do get admirably ridiculous now and again - you can see why this, on paper, would have caught Miike's eye - unfortunately it's all diminishing returns after that first game.

 This might call to mind Squid Games, but... honestly? It's just more tripe in the vein of Battle Royale (a movie I personally kind of despise, but is still miles better than this) - teens forced to kill each other to arbitrary and bizarre rules equals easy symbolism without the need to have anything to say; let the critics and viewers fall over each other to say it for you.

 Worst of all is that Miike is on full professional mode and shows way too much restraint by only implying most of the carnage, or diluting it with magical realist touches like the red marbles at the beginning (which, to be honest, was pretty cool; it's the only good one, though). Dammit, I want to see those pieces of shit get carved into smaller pieces of shit; Here, when someone gets a deadly case of the splits, we never see flesh tearing or get to linger on the aftermath- just a glimpse of a little blood pooling. This, from the guy who brought us Ichi the Killer! Who the fuck thought it'd be a good idea to hobble him with the Japanese equivalent of a PG13 rating?

 It's not a complete complete waste of time. There's flashes of fun every now and then, some amusing cruelty, and the material brings out a little of Miike's anarchic spirit every now and then. The X-TREME polar bear is funny. Not enough - not even nearly enough to justify watching the whole thing, though.
 I'm sure it's not even near the bottom of this director's films quality-wise - I've only seen, at a guess, twenty or so, and the very worst probably never made it out of Japan. But it definitely is the worst one of his I've seen, and I really wouldn't want to see him doing worse than this turgid, bloated (almost two hours!), inane, fucking stupid pile of reheated, anime tropes that were never above piss-poor to begin with.

*: Also, he sucks at Resident Evil 6, and by extension sucks at choosing Resident Evil games. Fuck that dude.

Cold in July

 Joe R. Landsdale is a ridiculously prolific author, but aside from Bubba Ho-Tep he's never really made it big in movies. Hap & Leonard, a few short story adaptations, umm, Johah Hex - the guy's written more for comics than movies.

 Cold in July is his other big feature film adaptation, and it's a good one: a pulpy Texan neo-noir that ends up in some pretty strange places.
 Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall in a mullet) is an everyman texan who gets stuck at the beginning of the movie in  a situation that'd count as a certain type of American citizen's wet dream: Armed with a gun, facing down an unarmed intruder in his home.
 He's not that certain type of American citizen, though - so when he's startled and kills the thief, it affects him deeply.

 There are some cool scenes after that, while we wait for the other shoe to drop: I really liked the one where Richard and his wife (Vinessa Shaw) have to clean up the mess once the police are done. But before they can return to normalcy, the father of the guy Dane killed (Sam Shepard) pops up and starts not-very-subtly menacing Richard's own son.
 For a while it looks like the movie is going to be about that, the Danes against this psycho old timer, and he obliges by pulling some very cool, very effective thriller shit. But then Richard starts discovering that maybe the police are keeping a few secrets of their own.

It's like a christian rock album cover, but with guns.

 So yeah, that's where the movie goes off the rails and becomes something a bit different. For a while it's excitingly unpredictable, and when it does settle down, it's on a different genre. A private investigator played by Don Johnson will factor in heavily, and there's a bit with what I think is the first time I see the old 'blood falls on a light source and stains the whole room red' trope outside of horror.
 It gets a bit silly, is what I'm saying, but in all the right ways.

 Nick Damici and Jim Mickle adapt the Landsdale story well - calling it lean is not very accurate, but even at close to two hours there's no bloat; Just a lot of incidents and bizarre developments. Mickle, who made his name with the excellent Stakeland, is a great, no-nonsense director with a gallows sense of humor and a very assured hand. Shame about the cinematography- the movie as a whole gets some really good ambiance when it's nighttime, but otherwise looks drab and a little flat.

 All the principals  are great in their roles, playing very different characters. Hall turns in a nuanced, sensitive performance, Shepard is scary as fuck and Johnson is all charm and laid-back cool. It really is a great cast to watch playing off each other.

Housebound

 Kylie Bucknell (Morgana O'Reilly) is... Housebound.

 As in: she's sentenced to house arrest for eight months due to a string of petty crimes. Because the judge feels she needs stability, he decides that the sentence is due to be carried out in her mother's house.

 Things don't go well at first; though her mother Miriam (the inestimable Rima Te Wiata, funny as always) welcomes her home, Kylie remains in a passive aggressive funk, choosing to vegetate in a couch watching TV and being generally unpleasant. Her stepfather (Ross Harper) is a shy, retiring man who chooses to stay out of the way.

Notice the cheese grater gauntlet; I love this movie.

 The twist here -the first of many- is that the house turns out to be haunted. Kylie at first rolls her eyes at her mother's stories, but she comes around quickly when a hand grabs her ankle at the basement... and then the craziness starts.
 Not in a Poltergeist sense, mind you; That's the least of the film's insanity.
 When Miriam and Kylie mention their suspicions to Amos (Glen-Paul Waru), the technician in charge of looking after Kylie's ankle monitor, he turns out to be an amateur paranormal investigator; Soon he's setting up the requisite cameras and sensors these type of movies take so much joy in. Some investigation also turns up that there was a murder in the house, and a likely culprit in a next-door neighbour. And then more revelations come, one after another, to overturn everything that was established before.

 Housebound keeps throwing plot developments and pulling the rug out from beneath the viewer with manic abandon, its carefully calibrated, deadpan sense of humor complementing the crazy twists extremely well. It's a horror comedy, but one without any winking whatsoever, relying instead on the ridiculous situations and excellent, very funny characters. Clever and knowingly stupid in equal measure.
 Kylie, for example, is ridiculously competent and badass, at least until the film forces her into a more traditional victim role. But it's a joy to watch a horror heroine who's just as likely to punch the ghost in the face as she is to scream. And Miriam is a delight, a daffy busybody who always has some daft or inane comment at hand but still gets a couple of relatable scenes of exasperation at her daughter's asshattery.
 It is a fucking blast.

 Gerard Johnstone writes, edits and directs. His script is maybe too twisty - you get the feeling that he writes himself into a couple of corners later in the movie, but the tongue-in-cheek tone is well established enough by then for the implausibility not to matter that much. More than anything else it's got a real energy going for it, an unpredictability that keeps you constantly guessing, and just enough grounding to make the payoffs satisfying as well as hugely entertaining.
 There's a remarkable sweetness to the movie as well, grounding Kylie's journey towards not being as much of a dick much better than movies that don't have to juggle a crazy plot like this one, and reserving a surprising amount of empathy even minor characters.

 Aside from the positive buzz, this movie was one of the main reasons I was excited for M3gan last year. It's a shame Johnstone didn't manage to helm any other movies until then, and now he's stuck sequelizing his breakout hit. I'm still looking forward to that, but it'd be good to see him try to walk the line between Sam Raimi and early Peter Jackson again.

Paddington

 Of course I think it's great. I'm not that dead inside yet; give it a few more Zach Snyder movies.

 Paddington is a ridiculously British, ridiculously cute, and very very funny 2014 adaptation of a popular series of extremely British picture books that go all the way back to the '50s. The titular character (voice courtesy of Ben Whishaw, and image courtesy of a bunch of talented computer artists) is a bear from Darkest Peru who sneaks illegally into the country by boat, and... well, that's as far as I can stretch that joke, because the movie has a pretty un-British-like sympathy for illegal immigrants. At least a couple of characters do put on a stony front for a while, but they can't keep it up for long because Paddington is obviously an exception, one of the good immigrants, not like all those others, you know, some of my best friends are immigrants, etc. etc.

 Ahem.

 How does a bear find his way to old Blighty from Darkest Peru? That's explained in a spiffy prologue that's filmed in the style of an old adventure documentary and contains some of the film's best jokes; that's not a slam on the rest of the film, which is chock full of great gags and very funny lines.
 Turns out a daring British explorer (Tim Downie) met Paddington's uncles during a geographical survey, way back when. He befriended them, taught them to speak when he learnt that they could mimic him ('LON-DOHN,' says the bear; 'Good Lord!' replies the overwhelmed explorer. Then, without missing a beat, conversationally: 'Now try Stratford-Upon-Avon'...), and regaled them with  tales about the wonders of the empire. Finally, when it was time to go, he promised them that they would always be welcome at his home in London.

 Many years later, the bear couple who the adventurer befriended have become proper posh British wannabes, voiced by Imelda Staunton and Michael Gambon, no less. When an earthquake strikes and leaves them with nothing, they decide to send their nephew back to London, thinking that he'll receive a warm welcome there (the tales they tell him of refugee children left at train stations don't really match up with the prologue's time frame, but it's a cute detail.)
 So begin the adventures of young Paddington, asylum seeker. So named because his bear name is unpronounceable to most humans, and he was found in Paddington Station. After some misadventure, he's taken home by the Brown family. The mother (the always welcome Sally Hawkins) is quite taken by the soft-spoken, extremely well-mannered young bear, but the father (Hugh Bonneville) is much more of a... well, let's say he's a Daily Mail reader.

 From there on you get bear-out-of-jungle incidents as the amiable ursine explores human contraptions, and cutesy bits as he slowly but surely starts winning his new family over, even as the patriarch tries to get rid of him. And as Paddington searches for information on the explorer who invited his uncles to London so long ago, he comes to the attention of a shady taxidermist (Nicole Kidman) who wants our protagonist stuffed for an exhibit at the London Museum of Natural History.

 Most of it goes as you'd expect. Paddington is a very sweet movie, and it's much funnier and more inventive than it needs to be, but it is still a kid's movie, so it does point its sights down a little as a result. It's at its weakest as the plot finally kicks into gear in the final third, but even before that it's perfectly willing to dip into dreary panto territory. It's never not fun, but it's so good when it's good that it's a bit of a shame when it goes for low-hanging fruit.

 Thank goodness, then, that it's got an ace up its sleeve in director (and co-writer) Paul King. This is an extremely good-looking movie, one that pays a lot of attention to frame composition, inventive shots and interesting set design. That's rare these days even in films for grown-ups. King is a veteran of the very psychedelic, extremely acid tinged show The Mighty Boosh; Here he understandably tones down the show's more out there sensibilities, but keeps all the exuberance, resulting in a film that's often a joy to watch:

Trust me, these look much better in motion...

 There are a lot of side-on shots, both static and with lateral movement (a la Wes Anderson,) and carefully composed visual gags. Add to that some lovely flourishes, some magical realism, and a salsa band providing diegetic music at appropriate moments, and you've got yourself something pretty special.

 Want more good news? OK: the sequel is even better.

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead

 Wyrmwood's apocalypse is weird.
 On the one hand you have an airborne...something... that turns people into zombies, brought on by a meteor shower. There's the rare individual who's somehow immune, but for everyone else, it's gasmasks or zombiehood.
 So far. so good. But whatever happened, it also rendered all oil inert; gas won't burn, and, more importantly, gasoline doesn't work as fuel for cars any more. It'd be a weird detail, except that later on people figure out that zombie breath (and farts) are not just flammable, but work as a perfectly acceptable fuel substitute.
 It's a... creative way to kick off a Mad Max / Zombie mashup, to be sure.

 Wyrmwood is a 2014 Australian action/horror/comedy hybrid written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner (his brother Tristan co-writes and produces). It starts on the same night everything goes to shit, following two siblings separately - Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who both happen to be immune to whatever's causing people to turn undead.
 Well, actually it starts in media res, in a scene from the middle of the film they later just repeat, but let's skip that.

 In any case: Brooke is an artist who barely survives an attack in her studio from her now-zombified model and assistant. She calls her brother to warn him something bad is happening, to get out of town, and is then taken by some sort of military group.
 Barry in turn deals with a home invasion (in a particularly brutal fashion; the dude acts like he's in a zombie movie long before he realizes he actually is in one) and takes his family on the road until they discover gasoline is no good any more. Luckily, they all have gas masks; The bad news is that, well, they're not very good at using them. Barry's wife and child don't share his immunity, and it's not long before he has to put them down.

 This leaves him understandably suicidal; lucky for him, another survivor pops by and stops him from finishing himself. Before long, Barry's found himself a group of survivors, and they discover that they can use zombies as fuel; so they do what any bunch of zombie movie protagonists would; they suit up with paintball armor until they look like the baddies in a 1980s SNK game, convert a pick-up truck into a tank and plug in some zombies into the engine to harness their burps as fuel. Y'know, the usual.

 Meanwhile, Brooke is handcuffed to the wall in some sort of laboratory where a mad scientist, working with the military, is running ethically dubious and painful tests on a bunch of people who are immune to the disease. Can't say I agree with his methods, but you have to respect that he was already set up and working on a plan pretty much on the eve of when things went to shit; that's way more foresight and organizational ability that I'd be willing to credit any governmental agency with. In any case, in between being experimented on and trying to escape, Brooke... uh, discovers that she can take control of zombies telepathically.

 And honestly, that's ok. Because if we've accepted zombie farts can magically power internal combustion engines, pretty much anything goes at this point, right?

 What the movie lacks in consistency, budget or sanity, it makes up for with a manic, likeable energy. It's not a good movie, exactly -to be honest, I'm don't think it's even aiming for quality; But it's seriously entertaining.
 By the third act the pieces have fallen into place, the two plot lines intersect, and it turns into the Mad Max B-movie it wanted to be all along; Despite all the rough patches, jittery action, crappy CGI blood splatters, dubious character work and the mad libs script, it's almost impossible not to enjoy the ride.