Hostile

 A post-apocalyptic zombie movie, intecut with a cute romance story which is a) surprisingly integral to the film, and b) intended for women, which is still pretty rare in this type of film. Yes, I am deliberately not counting Twilight or other YA movies as 'serious horror'. Bite me.

 Juliet (Brittany Ashworth) is a rough, no nonsense driver out scavenging for supplies for some survivor settlement out in an arid, zombie-infested wasteland. She has a spectacular crash, and has to fend off both living and unliving menaces while dealing with a serious injury (an exposed fracture, of course) and trying to get a rescue organized.
 While she does this, different prompts cause her to have flashbacks to her life in New York before the zombie outbreak as she met and fell in love with rich French dreamboat Jack (Grégory Fitoussi)

 The love story is very well made, and a little too romantic for my taste. Jack is, in his own way, just as implausible as your regular Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Steady Wealthy Dedicated Dreamboat?) - someone who's utterly smitten by and devoted to Juliet right from the beginning, sensitive, assertive (sometimes to an uncomfortable degree, but always to his paramour's benefit), rich (but conflicted about his priviledge), ludicrously handsome.
 None of those criticisms are valid as that's exactly what it wants to be; I'm just not wired to like this sort of thing - I'm more of a Before Midnight than a Before Sunrise person, and found it all a bit too cloyingly sweet and, well, idyllic despite featuring at least a little darkness. My preferences aside, this is at its heart the rare romantic horror film and it should be celebrated for that. Everything is obviously leading up to a grand romantic tragedy in both of its timelines, and honestly, the lead-up is fine.

 The problem is just where it's all leading to; There's a climactic, wildly implausible development that will severely test anyone's faith in the script, and it also paints much of the preceding action on the post-apocalyptic sections of the movie as a bit of an idiot plot, if I'm going to be a dick about it. In its defense it's the whole point of the film, but... it's rather a lot to take in.

 Still. There's a lot to like here. Both halves of the movie are well-made, with distinct filming styles, and structurally it's sound (even if the prompts for switching to the flashbacks are a little flimsy). Writer/director Mathieu Turi has a good eye for low-budget action (there's a very amusing early scene where the film shows - or rather, doesn't  - a fight against a zombie from outside of a camper van) and manages some really striking shots (the post-apocalyptic segment is mostly set around the upturned wreck of Juliet's car, and it manages to  look eerily beautiful; Turi and cinematographer Vincent Vieillard-Baron manage to do a lot with mood lighting). There's some gnarly, brutal gore (including a very well-made skull crushing) and the makeup effects for the creatures are pretty good.

 Ashworth is good in the main role, and her character is fairly well-rounded. I just wish Jack was a little less of a generic fantasy fulfilment hunk, but... well, I'm not the intended audience here. The twist is a bigger hurdle, even if it is baked into the story. Warts and all, though, it's a likeable film, a very solid bit of survival horror, and it tries to do something unusual; That counts for a lot around these parts.

Marrowbone (El Secreto de Marrowbone)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Errementari

 I tend to be down on Netflix original movies, but that's a stance heavily coloured by their would-be blockbuster attempts - the shit they put out with Snyder or the Russo brothers, for example. But in their eternal hunger for ever more content, they've also done the world a favour giving money to, say, German or Spanish martial artists to fund their action epics, not to mention giving funding to people like Jeremy Saulnier and Pablo Larrain, or snatching interesting projects like Nimona from oblivion.

 This is a really roundabout way to say I really appreciate it when they use the some chump change (from the money they got by breaking movie business with their unsustainable practices) to help get stuff like Errementari made.

 The title sounds like the beginning of a racist joke, but it just means Blacksmith in Basque; It refers to a scattering of ancient European folk tales (according to some ethnographers, one of the oldest known) about a blacksmith who makes a deal with hell and ends up getting the better of old scratch.

 The blacksmith in question is Patxi (Kandido Uranga); A man so evil, so cruel, the animated prelude informs us, that the devil himself would learn to fear him. He spends a good part of the first act off-screen, an ogre-like hermit cooped up in his old smithy.

 The film instead follows some of the regulars of the local inn as they try and help a visiting government official (Ramón Agirre) in locating some gold the smith was said to have stolen during the first Carlist war - and also Usue (Uma Bracaglia), a little bullied girl who may have some relationship to the old man.

 The inn crowd runs afoul of Patxi soon enough, setting the residents of the small town in a collision course with him. Usue, meanwhile, steals away into the smithy, and ends up freeing the demon the Smith had imprisoned in an iron cage. Oops!

 The script (by director Paul Urkijo Alijo and Asier Guerricaechebarría) is all over the place, especially in the early going, but the shambolic structure helps give the film a strangely offbeat, authentic feel, and when things go to hell (figuratively at first, then literally) it's hard to predict where the story is going. But the focus remains on the characters and their destination is, thank goodness, hugely satisfying - I have a lot of time for a movie that manages to juggle sweetness and badassery.

 It never even attempts being scary, but that's ok - this is horror only by default, and it's better to think of it as dark fantasy or even a fairy tale. It certainly looks like one. Colours are tightly controlled - it looks a little fake in one or two shots, but most of the time it's beautiful; The movie owns its artificiality. Paul Urkijo Alijo and cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreu also use non-standard framing to make things feel a little mythical; For example, I love a scene that tracks Usue as sneaks into a room, but she's in the background, out of focus - the camera stays on the smith's sleeping face throughout. It feels like a scene out of Jack and the Beanstalk. And as you'd expect out of a dark fairy tale, the film also takes some visual cues from Guillermo Del Toro.

 But things never get quite as dark as its closest touchstone, Pan's Labyrinth. There's quite a bit of humour threaded throughout: some of it home-baked (got to love those ubiquitous bear traps), some of it courtesy of a faithful display of the visual wit of medieval demonology (expect faces in inappropriate places). The themes are heavy, but not too much so, and while it's rooted in medieval Christianism there are more than a few welcome modern touches, such as the Sandman-like detail that human souls go to hell because they want to be punished.

The effects are excellent for the modest budget - a mixture of really great makeup with digital touch-ups for that signature Bosch/Bruegel look. The acting is mostly strong - there are a couple of iffy child actors, and it took me a while to warm up to Bracaglia's Usue, but I was fully on-board with her soon enough. What kept throwing me off, as a native Spanish speaker, is that the Basque language falls into a sort of uncanny valley where it really sounds like Spanish but I couldn't make out a single word. Pretty disconcerting, but obviously neither a major problem nor something I can blame on anyone but myself.

 Despite a slow start, this was a lovely treat - imaginative, unique, and affecting - an idiosyncratic take on a folk tale, tweaked for modern sensibilities but fairly faithful to the mostly medieval mindset that spawned it. Well... except for a certain sympathy for the devils, but that's a given in these degenerate, godless times.

Vampire Clay (Chi o sû nendo)

 When Yuri Aina (Asuka Kurosawa), the owner of a small rural art school discovers a large lump of clay buried near her atelier, she thinks nothing and adds it to the pile of materials her students are due to use. Unfortunately for her and her class... it's haunted. Soon it will be eating people alive, consuming those who would shape it and transforming them into flexible clay/flesh puppets. 

 Unfortunately for us -or for me, at least, since most of you degenerate heathens seemed to somehow enjoy Battle Royale- to get to the good bits we need to trudge through some seriously tedious Japanese teen melodrama. The students, you see, are trying to prepare for the entrance test to a prestigious Tokyo art school - and the teacher is dealing with some rote drama of her own, too, which she takes out on her students. Morale isn't high. There's some rivalry, some supremely underwhelming romance ("oh no, I prepared a bento box for him but he's eating with that other hussy!") and... ugh.

 In between the shallow character beats, there's some mild mayhem as the protean clay blob - which at first seems content to play very basic pranks on the students - picks off the students one at a time, and then uses their shapes to go after the rest. It's a simple premise, but as a story it's an ungainly mess that keeps juddering to a stop only to slowly start shambling towards multiple unsatisfying ending.

 The film's saving graces are its practical effects, which include tons of makeup effects, stop motion, and a little puppetry. Some of it is great, and everything looks very hand-made - I particularly liked a scene where they show someone from the inside out using some cheekily cheap papier maché innards. The bulk, unfortunately, features too many scenes of actresses flailing some half-clay-eaten limb unconvincingly.

 The monster keeps shifting shapes, but when it settles on its true form it looks like a frigging mascot - I think it's supposed to mimic one of those mannequins artists use to model the human form? Not very scary at all.

 The script, by director Sôichi Umezawa, seems a bit more inspired by the body horror of Junji Ito's work than on more traditional J-Horror, but it completely misses the point and over-explains everything, giving the monster a backstory that's simultaneously banal and nuts, unloaded in yet another exposition dump that stops the story dead on its tracks for a while.

 I wanted to like this, I really did... and in very short spurts, it does achieve the sort of absurdity that could have made it special. But then it winds down to focus on its boring-ass characters or its inane plot and fuck that, I'm out of here.

Otherlife

 TLDR: God, I fucking hated this movie.

 Otherlife is a 2017 indie Australian sci fi movie. Let me list the positives first, because it does do some things right and it's important to recognize them before I open the floodgates and let the bile flow.

 On a surface level, it looks and sounds great - director Ben C. Lucas does wonders with his budget, and the resulting film is slick as all hell. The premise is handled in a way that cleverly limits the need for special effects, the music is kind of cool, the cinematography (by Dan Freene) is propulsive and polished. More importantly, the acting is pretty good on average, and the film is more than ably anchored by Jessica De Gouw, who brings a good amount of prickly intensity to her character.

 It's also got a very powerful nightmare scenario at its core; It would make for a great short if you removed all the crap around it.

 Its premise is the limpest of soft sci-fi: a Black Mirror-inspired setup where Ren, a young scientist (De Gouw) both develops eye drops that cause the user to live through a whole experience as if it were real, and codes the dreams that the drops deliver. Sort of like Strange Days, but the experience isn't recorded, it's programmed whole-cloth, like a virtual reality scenario.

 Ren founds a company to market her (well, it's not really hers - it's complicated) invention along with a douchebag executive type (T.J. Power). The product they intend to launch is the expected 'holiday' vignettes (skydiving, snowboarding, that sort of thing), but T.J. is already wheeling and dealing with dodgy elements of the Australian government for some... less than wholesome applications of the technology in the penal sector. And on a slightly less unethical violation of their partnership, Ren is in turn using the technology on the sly to try and bring her brother out of a coma.

 An unfortunate mishap gets Ren in hot water with the law, and she's offered a deal to get out of it that's so fucking stupid it nearly broke me. I mean... it's not the even the situation itself, which is plenty stupid, but the way it's all set up - the script (by the director and Gregory Widen) just doesn't seem to understand or give a shit about plausibility, the way organizations work or even basic human behaviour. It's a scene so moronic it immediately annihilated what little suspension of disbelief I had left at that point.
 And if there's anything this movie needs, it's goodwill. It's rare that I get angry at films these days, but this one had me seething for a full hour or so.

 That sorry twist leads to the film's best scene, a nasty Twilight Zone-esque (or Black Mirror) low blow that's genuinely evil fun. But that's the last good idea the film has, and it's over and done pretty quickly. From there it devolves into an extremely shitty conspiracy with a very obvious twist, and it ends with a way to get its villain to get a... let's call it crowd pleasing comeuppance that's almost admirable in its willingness to get even dumber than all the idiocy that comes before it.

 The story is fucking rank. A collection of plot holes, clichés, hand-woven elements and terrible character work that's all the worse for its self-seriousness. Bullshit, all bullshit. Something like Moonfall is probably dumber, but at least it knows it's dumb.

 As for the science fiction elements... ah, hell.

 Other than some very basic talk of 'nanites' (which is code for 'we couldn't be arsed to think of a proper scientifically plausible explanation') and 'memories are chemistry anyways', the film doesn't even try to make sense of the magic technology at its center, which... fair enough, we're just meant to accept it as a premise. I'll even let it pass uncommented (well, besides this comment) that injecting a memory wouldn't involve the sense of living it in the present, as the film shows, complete with decision making, because I could fill in the blanks for that (the decisions were illusory, etc.) But the fact that the film doesn't even begin addressing any of this... well, it shows a complete and characteristic disregard for the science part of its chosen genre.

 Science fiction has a long used dodgy or impossible science to then use at least a measure of intellectual rigour in the exploration of how those flawed concepts would impact both societies and individuals.

 No such luck here; Not even an appreciable attempt. It keeps setting up rules it quickly breaks - one moment it's hard to go for more than a day in a simulation, then they just go and put someone in for a whole bloody year, just like that. It puts emphasis on regulations and societal controls over new technology to then reveal Ren's been mainlining her eye drops like a dope fiend, and an important plot point (the one that broke me) has the government basically says yes, let's just use it in this highly risky, untested way, can't see a problem with that.

 It is basically one insult to your intelligence after another, delivered with a sort of potboiler intensity that I might excuse as pulpy weren't it so relentlessly stupid. It kind of pains me to say this about something into which so much effort was obviously sunk in, but for fuck's sake stay away from this brain-dead pile of shit.

Ghost stories

 For whatever reason, I always thought this'd be a classy, staid attempt at horror. I shouldn't have worried; The title card itself is cheesy as all hell and doubles as a jump scare.

 Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman) is one of those paranormal investigators who loves to expose spiritists and mediums. He starts the movie talking to the camera, explaining his methods as if we were watching his TV show, hinting at a film footage approach that soon falls by the wayside in favour of a more cinematic take. Just as well.

 Soon he's contacted by a better-known fraud exposer, one that had been somewhat notorious in the 70s, and an influential figure on Phil while he was growing up. The good doctor had vanished in mysterious circumstances, so Phil hurries to meet him.

 The old professor turns out to be an amusingly cantankerous asshole in obvious old-man makeup living in squalor in a near-derelict caravan. After implying our protagonist is a fool for being closed to the possibility of the occult, he gives him a folder with three cases he couldn't explain that - it's implied - made him lose faith in rationality. Determined to prove the old man wrong, Goodman dashes off to explain away the unexplainable.

 Yes, somewhat surprisingly it's an anthology movie. The three segments cover a night watchman (Paul Whitehouse) getting spooked in a creepy old abandoned asylum, a kid (Alex Lawther) who gets hunted by weird creatures while he drives home through a dark forest at night, and a successful financier (Martin Freeman) who is haunted by a poltergeist in his high-end flat.

 These are all 'ghost stories' rather than ghost stories - one of them does not involve ghosts at all. All of them have the simplistic structure of a campfire tale, jump scares and all: A series of events of rising spookiness, culminating in something revealing itself... and that's it, no real resolution, no real story - nothing except an attempt to get under your skin. I respect that; even if on a narrative level it's all pretty weak there's a sense of fun to the proceeds, tone and atmosphere are tightly controlled, and the scares are effective. Not to mention some truly great jokes: at one point a fake psychic, trying to convince a mark that he's talking to her dead, leukemia-afflicted son, can't think of anything better to say than 'My blood hurts, mommy!'
 A pretty cool, unselfconscious and extremely British throwback to the horror anthologies of yore, then - even if it lacks the relative sophistication of the Amicus films it seems to be modelled after, which usually managed better stories.

 Sadly, the film isn't content with all of that. Elements recur both in the stories and during the framing device - dead birds, a figure in a hoodie, a child's doll - leading up to a spectacularly terrible explanation/conclusion to Phil's story, a seriously disappointing last flourish that undoes a lot of the good work the film had been doing for a solid hour or so - even as the script seems to revel in its perceived cleverness. To be brutally clear: it's a fucking disaster. As a twist, it's valid (if a bit shit), but thematically it's completely disconnected from the rest of the movie up to it. Its particular strain of mindfuckery has been around for at least a century, and it's been thoroughly overused (and parodied) for decades in mainstream TV shows.

 The film was written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, based on their stage show; Nyman, of course, also stars as Philip Goodman, which he apparently did on the show as well. It's a shame the script's plot got away from them, because their control over tone - particularly their ability to put in a lot of humour without diluting the horror aspects - is pretty on-point. Maybe next time.

Paradox (Shā Pò Láng・Tān Láng)

 When Chinese teenager Lee Wing-Chi (Hanna Chan) disappears while abroad in Thailand, his father Lee Chung-chi (Lois Koo), a Hong Kong police detective, decides to follow her to Thailand to put his particular set of skills to good use.

 His particular set of skills are, of course, being a police detective. He strikes a good rapport with the Chinese ex-pat detective Chui Kit (Wu Yue) who's assigned the case, and soon they're working together trying to find the missing daughter; You'd have thought it'd take more paperwork than that, but I'll take it.

 The first lead they find is a red herring, but it sets an extremely promising tone for the rest of the movie: After a clever investigation where they commandeer business CCTVs to trace the missing teen, there's an excellent bar brawl that devolves into a frantic foot chase that's punctuated with a couple of very, very cool moves. The action choreographer is Sammo Hung - this feels a little grittier, a little more brutal than his usual wheelhouse, but the fights are unafraid to break out some silly/awesome maneuvers and slight bending of realistic physics. It's a lot of fun.

 The bust ends up being... well, a bust, though, and Lee becomes persona non-grata and thrown off his unofficial post in the investigation. No worries, he just goes off to do some investigating of his own.

 Both him and Chui Kit, running on parallel tracks, establish that Lee's daughter was kidnapped by an organ-trafficking ring led by a delightfully sleazy American (Chris Collins) who goes around in a short-sleeve t-shirt, suspenders and hat ensemble like a lost member of the Entourage cast, which automatically marks his as a douchebag. That, and leading an organ trafficking ring, of course. 

 Lee, now fallen from grace, gets there through torture: Chui through an investigation that reveals a cover-up within the police and leads to the film's highlight fight scene - a  multi-stage brawl that ends with sidekick Tony Jaa (!), who's possibly got psychic powers (!!), fighting against the organ-trafficking douchebag on a rooftop. It involves children being thrown off buildings as a distraction; Fun!

 But then the film veers towards... if not full-on grimdark, towards all-pervading bleakness; As it happens, Lee Wing-Chi's heart is vital to save an important politician's life, so her fate seems preordained. There's a pivotal car crash that highlights the script's tendency for metaphysical soap operatics (Writers: Nick Cheuk, Lai-Yin Leung). The story hinges on what are effectively extreme coincidences and contrivances, but since it's built off them by design, it comes off as bleak fatalism and karmic retribution.

 This sort of thing doesn't do a lot for me (unless it's much better crafted) but I can't deny the power of that tangle of story threads during that crash scene, or the complexity that's added once it's revealed how much of a rotten father Lee was.

 And at the risk of spoiling the tone it settles on, it's a very pessimistic film. It would have had more impact on me if its tone were more consistent, or if the script had made the tiniest gesture to feeling authentic (the level of political operators we see here would never get their hands as dirty as they're seen here; it's like we're missing a whole layer of fixers) - but if you can look over that sort of stylization, it will probably pack a pretty hefty punch.

 Most of that is down to HK legend Louis Koo - his excellent, layered acting adds a lot to what in the end is a fairly clichéd thriller character. We know he can do shootouts and some stunts, but sadly he doesn't handle himself too well in the elaborate hand-to-hand fights; A decent trade-off, since the movie is more about drama than fisticuffs anyhow. Jaa doesn't get a huge amount to do, but he gets up to some memorable weirdness and a really great fight. Wu Yue is extremely likeable as the moral center of the story and picks up the slack from Koo in the fights department. And Tony Jaa is Tony Jaa; his role here is officially a 'special appearance', but he gets a good fight and some memorable weirdness. As welcome a presence as he always is.

 Wilson Yip's direction is assured and, until some jittery editing during the final fights (mostly to hide Koo's lack of martial arts training) it keeps things cristal clear.

 I only found out after watching it that it is the third entry in the SPL / Killzone series - the only ties are thematic, some elements, and in the talent involved - oh, and in the Chinese title. I guess I should have realized it once the pointed coincidences, heightened melodrama, and the organ traffickers came into play. This one is completely overshadowed in the action department by the first sequel (quality and quantity), but I think it works slightly better as a story; its grimness is uncompromising.

Beyond Skyline

 Skyline has a severe case of unlikeable characters; And as it's a movie that asks us to spend a lot of time with them... well, it absolutely is a deal-breaker. Seven years after that, writer Liam O'Donnell returned with a sequel, this time as a director as well. His fix for the first movie's problems? Casting Frank Grillo as the lead. Problem solved.

 It helps that O'Donnell keeps the character drama to a bare minimum, as this time around the script seems to recognize we're here for the alien invasion thread, not some idiot bickering. But Grillo is always an asset - it's not just that he's a very credible action protagonist, his world-weary pleasantness gives the movie a huge boost. I couldn't be arsed to give half a nugget of shit about any of the bozos in the first movie, but Grillo's easy charisma got me invested in his (fairly standard) family problems almost immediately.

 He plays Mark Corley, an LA cop who's on a never-explained hiatus. He's just picked his son Trent (Jonny Weston) from the department, a surly twenty something with attitude problems, and is on his way home in the subway when the alien invasions from the first movie hits the city. (Having recently watched Skyline, it seems to me that the subway looks a little too busy for the early AM - but as the script soon makes clear, this is not a film that's particularly concerned with plausibility. Fair enough!)

 The switch in perspective to allow us to witness the invasion from a ground level is a pretty cool idea, and the first act of this movie is basically a streamlined version of Skyline once it finally got going: a group of survivors evading the aliens to get to an extraction point. We get the Cliff's notes to the alien capabilities: a hypnotic blue light that lures helpless humans to their tractor beams, large humanoid tanks (yes, the big aliens are basically mechs) and a large human-harvesting mothership that can rebuild itself after a direct hit from a nuke (spoilers for Skyline). It's a distilled version of the first movie's events, better in pretty much every respect, not the least because all the character drama goes out the window in favour of action-movie interactions. Mark and Trent are joined by a cute TSA employee (Bojana Novakovic, who was so good in The Hallow; She's pretty much reduced to eye candy here) and a blind veteran (Antonio Fargas).

 The extraction fails miserably, leaving a reduced cast abducted in the mothership. After a crash landing the action moves to the jungles of Laos, where Mark teams up with local drug traffickers (which include Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian!) to (in no particular order) save his son, whose brain has been transferred into an alien drone, protect the daughter of the protagonists of the first movie, whom we meet as a baby and is growing at an exponential rate, and finally maybe find a way to defeat the aliens. No pressure.

 Like the first movie, this is a budget effects showcase which relies a little too much on CGI. But in pivoting towards being a more of a straightforward action vehicle*, this sequel gains a sense of fun. The hand-to-hand action is very decent; O'Donnell's penchant for more immediate, unstable handheld takes doesn't show it very well, and the fights are almost always with CGI-enhanced aliens against blue screens - but the choreographies, which seem to have been devised by Uwais, Ruhian and their frequent collaborator Very Tri Yulisman, are fast and brutal. There are a few pretty cool stunts, including people being thrown through walls and furniture, which is always cool.

 The shootouts aren't quite as good, with the guns themselves feeling very underpowered (must be a trade-off for having infinite ammo), and no squibs, just CGI. Speaking of, most of the blood is done in post-production, and it looks particularly terrible. The alien vehicles and creatures are still cool, although the focus on quantity of F/X shots over quality means that some of their big scenes are a little ropey. Still pretty impressive for its budget level, mind.

 We also get a little exposition on the alien invasion and why they're going around harvesting people and using our brains to run their machines - it's not good sci-fi by any stretch, but I appreciate they're making an effort. Also appreciated: the craziness of the endings on both movies, with this one following up on the fate of the baby Mark was protecting in an awesomely batshit (if iffily rendered) epilogue.

 I can't resist a movie where someone gets their arm torn off and they just keep fighting with their other one. Beyond Skyline is a solid B-movie elevated by some choice craziness and a lot of energy. I may have jumped the gun on revisiting the series - the fourth one, which will feature a Debt Collectors reunion to add to its The Raid reunion, will apparently only come out in 2025 - but until then, I guess I have one more to look forward to.

*:Relatively straightforward - it's still about an American ex-cop teaming up with a Laotian drug cartel to fight off an alien invasion.

The Ritual

Five middle-aged friends meet up in London, trying to work out where to go for a laddish holiday. One of them stumps for a hiking trip in Sweden, and is shot down by his mates, who want to go to Vegas or Amsterdam. While still deciding, two of them - Luke (Rafe Spall) and Rob (Paul Reid) duck into an off-license to buy some booze.

 Still talking about the trip, the two notice a terrified, wounded woman lying in a corner. Luke manages to hide behind the shelves just before two robbers come out from the back. There's a discussion, a scuffle, and then Rob is dead, with Luke petrified not two meters away, still in hiding, unable to act.

 Six months later, the remaining four are in Sweden, honoring their lost friend at a particularly scenic stretch of mountains.

 Luke is consumed by grief and guilt, and feels (correctly, it turns out) judged by the others. Hutch (Robert James-Collier) is the most gregarious, trying to keep the group together and insisting that they're having fun; Phil (Arsher Ali) is mostly quiet, and Dom (Sam Troughton) is the standard-issue asshole of the group. The way others complain about him when he's out of earshot is pretty amusing, and the dynamic felt pretty realistic to me.

 No one except Hutch seems very happy with the hike, and things get complicated quickly when Dom has a fall and twists his leg. Dreading the long trek to the next shelter with Dom complaining every other step, Hutch decides to take a shortcut through a wooded valley. They find a gutted deer strung up on high on the trees (hey, that looks familiar!) and still press on.

 Before you can say 'cabin in the woods'... that's exactly what they run into. A derelict one with a creepy antlered pagan idol in the second floor; but it's raining outside, so the group decides to bunk up inside anyways.

 Bad choice; they all wake up screaming the next day, wrapped up in nightmares. Luke finds himself outside (after a pretty nifty dream where the off-license mixes with the forest- a cool bit of imagery that keeps reoccurring throughout the movie) with a strange wound in his chest, Dom is near catatonic, Hutch's pissed himself, and poor Phil is discovered upstairs, naked, prostrated in front of the idol. Should make for a fun war story back at home; "It was just like that time in Vegas!"

 Except that, you know, this is a horror movie, so they probably won't make it back. Spoilers, probably.

 Luke keeps seeing something out in the forest, a big and nasty something that at some point is going to get tired of just toying with our hapless hikers. After an hour or so of careful setup, the movie finally pulls out its claws and goes nuts, to good effect. It's not entirely successful, but there's a respectable amount of mayhem and weirdness.

 The script by Joe Barton (adapting a novel by Adam Nevill) is functional, with a decent ear for dialog and some interesting imagery. Luke's failure to act during Rob's death seems to be an addition for the movie, which makes sense because while it's seamlessly integrated into the events, it nonetheless feels a little extraneous and doesn't really add much to the proceeds. I'm glad they put it in, though, because Luke hallucinating bits of what Americans would call a drugstore into the middle of the woods, fluorescent lighting and all, makes for some amazing visuals. Barton also keeps any explanations mysterious, besides some vague mythological handwaving, which seems like the right choice.

 The effects are good. We do get a good look at the monster and luckily it's pretty great, though the film's budget doesn't really allow it to do as much as I'd like. We know it can uproot trees, for example, since the hikers witness the aftermath several times - but it never does it while the camera is on it. There's some pretty graphic gore, but not a huge amount. What's there is made all the more disturbing by how matter-of-fact it is; but the film's best and creepiest scenes are all down to set design.

 David Bruckner's proven to be a good director several times over - first with his segments on The Signal and the V/H/S series, then with The Night House and the recent Hellraiser reboot. I have my reservations with the latter two - especially Hellraiser 2022, but they're both interesting, well crafted and engaging; This one's no different. It looks as great as his movies usually do, but with Sweden's natural beauty in its corner (cinematographer: Andrew Shulkind).

 What I most admire about Bruckner is that while his movies are... a bit staid, to be brutally honest, he's got an appetite to portray a level of weirdness that feels missing from most horror at the budget levels he's been working with lately. Whether it's the living void at the center of the Night House, Hellraiser's gorgeously batshit final scene, or a few bits and pieces here: the monster, an incredibly creepy (and way too short) scene in an attic- the guy's got one fucked-up imagination and a knack for pouring it successfully onto the screen. He's one of those directors I keep rooting for; One of these days, mark my words, things are going to come together just right and he's going to show us all how it's done.

24 Hours to Live

 24 Hours to live doesn't make a great first impression. Warning bells were set off by a Chinese production logo at the start - I love Chinese cinema (and I've got the write-ups to prove it!*) but their western co-productions seem, in my experience, to play it safe and skew to the sort of extremely dumb and crass would-be-blockbuster crap I tend to get very annoyed at. Think The Meg, with Meg 2 as the exception that proves the rule.
 The other early warning sign is a prologue where an Interpol convoy transporting an American whistleblower (Tyrone Keogh) who's about to present a declaration against a powerful PMC. They get attacked at a checkpoint between South Africa and Namibia, and the agent in charge, Lin, (Qing Xu) and the prisoner barely make it out alive.
 It's a fine action sequence, with lots of shooting and a couple of really good stunts. But... it's choppy - very choppy, to the point where you can barely see one of its best stunts (a guy climbs onto a car and then gets thrown off when it crashes). Not a good precedent on a movie that bills itself as Ethan Hawke's John Wick.

 Then the movie proper begins, and most of my reservations melted away. We're introduced to Hawke's character (going by the excellent action movie moniker Travis Conrad) as he's bantering drunkenly with his father in law (holy shit, it's Rutger Hauer!) on a beach. After some (pretty funny) back and forth, they work up the will to do what they're there for: to spread the ashes of Travis's wife and son, who've died a year prior. Unfortunately Hauer barely appears after that; I'd watch the hell out of these two talking shit for ninety minutes.

 But the plot must go on, and the movie goes about this business efficiently. Travis senses trouble when two thugs enter the strip club he's buying coke at, and preemptively ambushes them in a pretty funny scene where he locks them in a bathroom and incapacitates them with cleaning products out of a janitor's closet (I'm guessing he mixes bleach with ammonia - I did that once by mistake, and yeah, I totally buy that it could be weaponized).
 He runs into his handler (Paul Anderson) at the bar when he returns from the incident with the thugs; turns out they were just there to set up the meeting, I guess? As established by the way he dealt with those two, Travis is an assassin - the best in the business, of course - and his new job (pay: 1M/day, courtesy of the ever-present PMC) is to hunt down the whistleblower from the prologue and end him.

 The way he does this is by seducing agent Lin - a very clever scene where he uses the information he's got on her to subtly win her over. Also, this is fucking Ethan Hawke with charm turned to 11 we're talking about, so all the footwork and hacking was probably superfluous. But it's still appreciated.
 I'd just like to say that the script for the movie (by Ron Mita, Jim McClain and Zach Dean) is pretty damn on point, especially for a VoD action movie like this; It's got its problems, but when it's good, it's really good. And while we're doing an aside: Qing Xu is great- very charismatic, and we get to see a few sides to her character. Unfortunately she doesn't get that much to do, she's just an accessory to Travis's story. A redemption hook.
 Ahem! In any case, Travis is about to kill Lin as she's in the shower next morning - even has one of those gotcha scenes where he goes through and then we see he was just planning how'd it go - but decides against it and sneaks out instead. Bad idea: Lin (I guess) notices he hacked her phone, tracks him down, and after a short (and very cool) shootout, puts two bullets in his chest.

 So here's the twist in the movie, and this will be a spoiler if you haven't seen its trailers or read its premise (just skip until after the picture): he gets brought back by techs from the PMC that hired him - they've been developing a way to bring soldiers temporarily back from the dead; This is actually what the whistleblower was going to testify about, as they unethically (in my opinion) tested the procedure on dozens upon dozens of poor African civilians first ("some real Mengele shit").
 It's only a temporary reprieve from death - Travis has 24 hours before his brain shuts down, and he's given a handy implant in his wrist with a countdown (the script can be pretty dumb). Side effects include hallucinations, which is useful for storytelling purposes, too.
 In any case, the PMC just brought him back to get the location of the whistleblower; They try to get rid of him immediately afterwards, which, if you've seen any amount of action movies, you'll know is a Big Mistake. Faster than you can say "remorseless killer develops a conscience and seeks redemption", Travis kills all the PMC soldiers on the site and sets out to foil their plans to kill Lin and the whistleblower. 

A good boy almost got flattened during the making of this picture.

 What follows is pretty standard action fare, but well made, grounded by some great character work, and with some superb conceptual flourishes. I loved a bit where Travis enlists the help of some civilians to stop the PMC. It's a really dumb setup: Yeah, let's stop a heavily armed military convoy by waving axes and knives at them - but the kicker is that he gets a resurrection-related seizure just before shit hits the fan, and is forced to watch the carnage in slow motion without being able to do anything. There's a bit where a dog almost gets run over when a Humvee drives through house - I hope he got hazard chow. Anyhow, it's a really great scene.

 The movie does run out of steam towards the end, with a very standard and pretty forced final act, but it's still exciting enough, and it comes by it honestly after all the setup the movie went through. Also, there's a callback to that first conversation between Travis and his father in law at the beginning of the movie that's both affecting and hilarious. Yeah, the script is a mixed bag, but there's some really superb writing in there.

 I was really impressed by director Brian Smrz (not a typo). The guy's only ever directed this and another one from 2008 - Hero Wanted, which I should check out sometime - but he's racked up an impressive resumé as a second unit director and stunt coordinator. Like, seriously impressive, in quantity and popularity if not quality. And he handles himself really well here.
 The action here is not quite up to the standards of the 87North production the movie's marketing invokes, but it's still really good modern action. Shootouts improve a lot after the one in the prologue, with a little more clarity, and the bullets causing an impressive amount of destruction - at one point a sniper uses a gun to shoot multiple people clear across a room. There's also some impressive vehicular action. I'm less enamored of the digital blood and a hilariously bad explosion close to the end, but that's all easily excusable given the budget.

 Other than that it's a well-shot, expansive movie with great cinematography (by Ben Nott) and a little world-hopping flair. It's not quite Ethan Hawke's John Wick - probably something more like Ethan Hawke's The Accountant - but it's still a great action movie with some excellent drama, way better than my glib comparison makes it sound like. And at the heart of it lies an outstanding performance from Hawke, a great actor who's always willing to give it his all for interesting genre stuff. One of the good guys.

* Chist, I sound racist... "Some of my best friends are Chinese movies!"

Pyewacket

 Here's some trivia for you: Pyewacket was the name 'extracted' from a poor woman as one of her familiars by the self-proclaimed witchfinder general (and all-round sleazebag) Matthew Hopkins. I was pretty proud to have caught the reference, but of course it's the third google entry when you search for the name, right under the two entries for this film. You can't one-up the internet.

 Pywacket (film) is a very solid indie Canadian horror/drama about a teenager who summons a demon in a fit of rage. Yeah, that always works out.
 The teenager is Leah (Nicole Muñoz), a goth/metal girl whose backpack sports Carach Angren, HIM and Ministry patches - way to cover all bases! She's into the occult, because of course she is, and one early outing in the movie with her friends is to a book signing by some sort of paranormal expert who may or may not provide demon-wrangling counselling later on. They later discuss the book in an appropriately pretentious manner.
 I actually really liked the movie's portrayal of Leah and her friends: They listen to poppy techno and Lords of the New Church - it might not be very authentic (you'd think at that age they'd be a lot more self-conscious about what they listen to), but it underlines that they're well adjusted and basically seem like happy kids. There's no bullying from the outside, they (well, with one exception) genuinely care about each other and there's only the mildest of internecine drama, at least until the supernatural intrudes.
 Canadian cliques seem to be a lot more wholesome than their American counterparts.

 But while her social life is pretty good, Leah is Going Through Shit. Her dad's died recently, and her mother (Laurie Holden) is introduced as a wreck, drinking and crying all the time. I was a bit worried about that at the beginning -she screeches into the film like a belligerent, one-note harridan- but writer/director Adam MacDonald wisely eases back on confrontation, letting Leah's character deal with her in a much calmer manner than you'd expect from a movie teen.
 The drama gets a tiny bit strident at times, but it's well observed and shows a lot of humanity.

 So Leah seems to be holding things together... until her mom drops the bomb: she's sold the house, and they're moving to a house in the middle of nowhere a two hour's drive away.
 After a few more confrontations with her mother, Leah has enough, digs up her occult manuals and performs a (pretty cool) ritual that's somewhere between Wicca and the lesser key of Solomon to call upon an entity named Pyewacket to kill her mom.

 And then... not a lot continues to happen. There's a couple of effectively creepy scenes as... something makes itself known, but the most important development is that Leah's mom, mortified by some of the things she's said (and worried her daughter is doing self-harm due to her ritual injury) scales back on the aggression and they manage to patch up the relationship. Oops!

 There's some scares, of course, including an excellent incident with Leah's BFF (Chloe Rose), but this is an extremely slow burn, a very simple story that prioritizes drama over supernatural mayhem until the very last fifteen minutes. And that's fine, because the characters are great, the naturalistic script still finds  the time to imply a sense of creepy menace off in the wings, and Muñoz easily carries the film with a very sensitive, internal performance. And yeah, it does work its way to a memorably evil ending. Don't fuck with demons, y'all.

 The filmmaking is great, with a lot of handheld camera work that complements the material well - and at one point a cool Evil Dead forest flyby to imply whatever was woken has definitely not gone back to sleep. The scenery is fantastic, all autumnal Canadian forests, giving the film a naturally limited palette.

 I'm not a fan of the trope that the protagonist got into the occult because her dad died - couldn't she just think it's cool, like 99% of nerds everywhere? But if that's one of your biggest complaints in a movie, it counts as a stealth compliment. I also immediately assumed Leah and her friends were on the more adult side of the teen years, and the script works a lot better if you tweak that down until they're fifteen or so. Despite the casting, it's an easy mental adjustment to make.

 Niggles aside, this one's pretty good. Just know that it's more on the quiet side than the trailer lets on.

Security

  Security is an American B-movie shot in Bulgaria by a French-Canadian director with a Spanish protagonist and a British villain. It doesn't really distinguish itself on the action front from many other DTV movies, but it's a fun take on the Die Hard formula - or maybe Assault on Precinct 13, since the criminals don't control the mall for much of the movie - with likeable protagonists and just enough personality to make it enjoyable.

 Eduardo Deacon (Antonio Banderas) has hit a rough spot after returning from the Middle East - his introduction at a job centre, where some unspoken issues with his psychiatric evaluation make him hard to employ, is excellent: It gives him good action bonafides (he made captain and did three consequent tours), establishes the stakes (he's nearly broke, has an estranged wife and daughter) and his personality traits (humble and willing to do whatever it takes to pull through)... plus, it's just a good, empathetic scene all around. The movie puts its best foot forward, and I honestly don't know how well it'd work if it had botched this part or if it had chosen a more standard action scene to kick things off. Well done, movie.
 In any case: after some back and forth and some begging, Deacon manages to land a minimum-wage job as a night watchman in a mall in a some nearby-ish shitty neighbourhood.

 His luck, meagre as it is, doesn't hold. That same night, the USA Marshalls Service (yeah, I know, their spelling, not mine!) is transferring a state witness on a convoy when they get hit by a team of criminals that operate with military precision and are somehow able to jam both police scanners and cell signals. All the feds are killed, but the witness - Jamie (Katherine de la Rocha), a little girl - is able to escape into the woods.

 As that's going on Deacon is getting inducted at the new job by Vance (Liam McIntyre, a pompadoured and be-sidemuttoned jackass who's all but coded to be annoying. As it turns out the mall is located between two meth-stricken urban wastelands, so the overnight security team is three people plus Ruby (Gabriella Wright), whose deal isn't really clear but she seems to crash in the security room to sleep off her hangovers often enough that they're all used to it.

 Jamie reaches the mall and runs into Deacon just as he's completing his first rounds of the night - and conveniently passes out in his arms. As the team discuss what they're going to do with her, someone else pops up outside and... oh shit, it's Ben Kingsley! He first tries to trick them into giving the girl to him, then he tries to bribe them into it, and finally he threatens to kill every single one of them when they refuse his terms.

 And that's it: Our small team of mall cops (plus Ruby) need to protect Jamie from a couple dozen highly trained mercs. They refreshingly almost immediately rally behind Deacon to lead them, which is just common sense but I was dreading some head-butting, especially when the script foreshadowed that Vance might put up some resistance.
 As it turns out one of them has experience with explosives because... the internet, Ruby knows how to shoot a bow, Vance knows his way around guns, etcetera - all stuff that will come in useful later. A couple other plot points are carefully seeded (Vance has a gun on his truck in the parking outside, there's a trike in the show floor that's apparently really fun to drive..) and I'm happy to say the script (by Tony Mosher and John Sullivan) duly follows up on them.

 The action is not that great - this is firmly in the direct-to-video quality bracket, and Desrochers is no Jessee V. Johnson or John Hyams. On the other hand, it is better than some of the action that did make it to the cinemas at around the same time (like, say, London Has Fallen).
 There's some hand-to-hand combat, a lot of shootouts, a couple explosions, clever use of home-alone style traps and even a little vehicular action. It knows enough to add some colorful villains for our heroes to fight, including MMA vet Cung Le in a pretty fun main henchman role.

 There's a lot of posing, but no follow through - so you'll get a really good scene of, say, Banderas sliding through the floor shooting guns akimbo, but it's all close shots and poorly edited so it's not really fluid. At least the posing itself looks pretty cool.

 The dialog is clunky, but it succeeds in making the characters likeable and has some good moments - I liked the way one of Deacon's co-workers (Chad Lindberg) reacted to killing someone for the first time; yeah, it tracks. Kingsley scores a few cool lines as well towards the end, when he's trying to turn the girl to his side, or maybe just trying to get a reply so he can shoot her. Either way, it's fun.
 But the movie belongs to Banderas, who blesses a very likeable character with a great, soulful performance. There's a bit of formulaic feel-good shit in his relationship with Jamie, but it's ok, Banderas earns it.

Pilgrimage

 Somewhere in the southeastern coast of medieval Ireland, a tiny monastery keeps watch over a holy relic - the stone that was used to brain Saint Mathias more than a millennium prior (an event that's depicted in the film's prologue).

 Enter Frére Geraldus (Stanley Weber), a devout Cistercian monk who comes with a papal charter calling for a pilgrimage to bring the relic to the pope - Innocent III hopes the relic will help separate "the faithful from the faithless" for the next crusade, which is a really amusing detail given how the fourth crusade a few years before the events of this movie ended with the sacking of Constantinople and the pope's condemnation of the ensuing massacre.
 I have no idea if this was intended by scriptwriter Jamie Hannigan, but if so: hats off.

 A small problem: the relic seems to be cursed - both given the tales spun around it, and the visual language the film uses to depict it. Still, orders are orders, so a small group of monks is conscripted to take it to Rome. The group includes worldly, wise father figure Ciarán (John Lynch), young, idealistic Diarmuid (Tom Holland), and a mute layman in service to the monastery who's played by Jon Bernthal and thus predestined for badassery.

It's a matter of historic record that the only reason Jerusalem was lost was because they sent Jon Bernthal off.

 The pilgrimage is to take place through contested lands - at the time Ireland was being conquered by the Normans, so Geraldus asks the Baron de Merville (Eric Gordon) to help protect them from Gaelic warbands. The baron agrees, in exchange for absolution from his sins, and sends his son Raymond and a squad of knights to accompany them. It's quickly apparent, though that Raymond is up to no good, and soon the monks are running for their lives through hostile woods and moors and bogs. Good thing they have Jon Bernthal with them! By then it's established he has a crusader past, and it turns out he's pretty handy with a sword. And a shield. And... well, pretty much anything he gets his hands on.

 The action is brutal, gritty and pretty bloody - alas, mostly digital blood. The focus is more on the chases than in the fights, but what fights there are still have fairly complex choreographies; While they're not designed to show everything that's happening clearly, director Brendan Muldowney blocks things well and does a good job of keeping the flow of combat readable and engaging.
 The film is highly entertaining even when the monks aren't fearing for their lives. There's a lot of period detail to every scene, and while I'm sure that it's not all perfect, the fact that it's there is appreciated - I very much doubt that the French the English occupiers speak is period-accurate, for example, but, well, you've still got French-speaking Normans - who are at one point described as "grey foreigners" - invading Ireland for their king.

 Despite a fairly simple plot, it's a fairly complex, thorny movie that does right by the genre and even supports a little reading into as Diarmuid and Geraldus come to opposite interpretations of their travails. Add in some beautifully shot landscapes (cinematography: Tom Comerford), great music (Stephen McKeon), and a wealth of hilariously terrible haircuts, and we're cooking.

Verónica

 Back in 1991, a girl suffered some hallucinations after running a séance with some friends at school. She died soon after, and there were reports that the house was haunted afterwards and whatnot. It's a popular occult pseudo-urban legend in Spain, and supposedly the first instance of paranormal phenomena documented on a police report, at least in that country.
 Director Paco plaza, who co-wrote (along with Fernando Navarro) Verónica, a movie based on that incident, basically takes the premise and a couple details and twists everything up into a pretty standard horror yarn. But you know, it gets a 'Based on true events' disclaimer. That's important for marketing.

 The titular Verónica (Sandra Escacena) is a teen living in a large apartment with her younger siblings (Bruna González, Claudia Placer and Iván Chavero), whom she looks after while her widower mother (Ana Torrent) is out all day working to make ends meet. The movie has an excellent sense of place and immediacy, which helps immensely as the supernatural elements creep into the well-established domesticity. The spooky stuff comes into play when Verónica tries to use an Ouija board to contact her late father along with some friends at school while everyone else is out catching a glimpse of a total eclipse*.

 The spirit summoning ritual goes wrong, of course, and Verónica starts seeing an apparition around the house that starts threatening her and her family.

 It's a possession story, but one that's mercifully secular, despite there being several nuns involved ('You keep god out of this, he's got nothing to do with it' one of them says). There's no exorcism, other than an attempt to run another séance, and a few effective, creepy scenes as the ghoul pops up here and there. There's a large overlap between possessions and hauntings in horror (cue all the 'The Haunting of *' movies), and this feels more like the latter, which I prefer.

 Unfortunately, there's also few surprises and a whole lot of cheese. It's a shame; The film does a great job of making the characters sympathetic, but the more formulaic nature of the scares rob them of impact. For those of you keeping track of haunted toys in these movies, there's a haunted Simon here. It's used to great effect, flashing red and blue lights that mirror the police arrival in the scenes that bookend the film.

 While the film isn't particularly scary (many of the scenes are more likely to cause an eye roll rather than a gasp) it's still pretty fun. It doesn't have a lot of time for humor, but there are some pretty funny bits (like when Verónica gives a toddler an occult encyclopedia and tells him to copy the symbols on the walls; the kid ends up switching pages and drawing Solomonic demon seals).
 It's also well-paced and very, very stylish (cinematographer: Pablo Rosso); I knew I was on board when, on one of the first scenes, the camera sticks to an opening car door and shows an interlocutor within the rearview mirror. Brilliant. The ghost is creepy enough and, as mentioned, scores some good scenes, a few cool supernatural stunts, to go along with its less successful showings.

 Above all, the film works hard to ground the story, making Verónica's internal, domestic and social life compelling; It's a shame the supernatural threat is a bit too uninteresting to collect on the stakes.

 *: I checked, and there were no total eclipses visible from Madrid in the 90s. For shame, Veronica, I thought you were based on a true story!

Terrified (Aterrados)

 The poltergeists in Terrified do not fuck around. At first they seem happy just taunting poor Clara (Natalia Señorales) with voices from the pipes and banging from the other side in the wall. That's until her husband Juan (Agustín Rittano) finds her later that night being hurled telekinetically from wall to wall, face smashed to a pulp.

 The same spooks are content to harass neighbour Walter (Demián Salomón) with more standard ghostly hijinks; moving his bed at night, making all sorts of noises, and generally causing disorder. The poor guy is a nervous wreck (it's never explained why he just doesn't go to a hotel or something), and spends his time at work trying to get a paranormal investigator to go check his house.

 He finally succeeds convincing her when he gets footage of a mysterious naked emaciated man wandering around his house; By the time she finally pops up, though, Walter's gone missing.

 The most horrifying - or, terrifying, I guess - event is reserved for poor Alicia (Julieta Vallina), whose ten-year-old son digs himself out of his grave after getting rolled over by a bus and props himself, unmoving, at the dinner table. After leaving muddy footprints everywhere. Fuck that noise.

 Funes, the policeman in charge of the scene (Maximiliano Ghione) contacts Jano (Norberto Gonzalo), another policeman who seems to have experience with this sort of thing to help out. Jano in turn runs into Dr. Albreck (Elvira Onetto), the paranormal expert from the previous story as she's taking pictures of Walter's house, and brings her up to speed. Recognizing  that this sleepy Buenos Aires neighbourhood is somehow turning into some sort of locus of paranormal activity, they bring in a Yankee (George Lewis) and set up shop to try and figure out what the hell is going on, one of them stationed on each house. The ghosts don't take it well at all.

 It's a very episodic movie that doesn't ever really cohere into a whole and doesn't end up offering a satisfying narrative -  but the individual elements are so well made that it doesn't really matter. It's creepy as hell, tense, cheerfully nasty, and features some beautifully mounted jump scares. A fun time, in other words.

 Writer/director Demián Rugna and his crew work wonders with a low budget, offering up some neat ghosts, a fair amount of gore, and some pretty effective framing. The characters aren't very memorable, but the script does a good job of making them sound fairly authentic, and the actors sell their parts pretty well. Some of the scenes feel a bit stretched out - there's a lot of arguing, for example, about what to do about the ambulatory corpse - but other than a few scenes like that the film moves at a fair clip.
 There's also a good sense of mystery. Some possible explanations are bandied about, but the entirely fallible experts in this film don't ever clarify anything - there's no apparent motivation, no sense of a plan or rules, no seeming goal to the manifestation. Sometimes ghosts are just evil.

Tigers Are Not Afraid (Vuelven)

 Originally titled Vuelven ("They come Back"), Tigers are Not Afraid is a Mexican magical-realist horror/drama about a bunch of kids running feral in a cartel-ravaged Mexican border town.

 It's also about fantasy. As the credits roll, Estrella (Paola Lara) sits in a class while the teacher asks the kids to come up with the elements of a fairy tale; Then she asks the kids to write their own story using those elements. Most of those elements will factor in some way, or at least be name-checked, later.

 The assignment's interrupted when a shootout erupts just outside the school. As they huddle beneath their desks, the teacher gives Estrella three pieces of chalk, and tells her each one of them is a wish.

 The school closes indefinitely. When Estrella gets back home, she finds she's alone; Her mother's disappeared, presumably taken by the cartels.
 When she uses one of her wishes to ask for her mother to come back, her ghost appears and starts haunting the poor girl. 

 Estrella eventually falls in with a gang of orphans headed by El Shine (Juan Ramon López), who live in a sort of rooftop pillow fort and make a living off of petty theft. An early scene where Shine lifts a gun and a phone from a cartel member is almost unbearably tense.

 The gang gives Estrella a hard time until they decide to test her: If she goes into a cartel thug's house and shoots him (with the Gun Shine stole from him earlier!) they'll let allow her in.

 From there things spin off in various directions, but the main thrust is that the cartel starts actively hunting down kids, and all the while Estrella gets more and more ghostly visitations.

 It's all, as you might have gathered, pretty grim. The film's tone is not overtly oppressive, though, and not just because of the fantastical elements - the whole thing has a fantastical sheen even when as it deals with more realistic situations. The cartel only consists of four thugs, for example, and their evil is so cartoony that they come across more like fairy-tale ogres than any sort of actual real criminal enterprise; they torture and kill people because that's what they do, not in, I dunno, reprisal or for human trafficking or whatever. The stories the kids weave about them end up being closer to the truth than the news reports that mention them.

 There are also long stretches where the film is content to just follow the kids goofing off. Some of these scenes are pretty funny (like when they run across an empty stage and reenact a reality TV talent show), some of them beautiful (as when one of the kids grabs an umbrella and dances under the rain). Some of it is a bit too precious, most of it feels pretty natural. 

 The fantastic elements help lift the mood as well. Most of the supernatural stuff is of the highly poetic variety - a line of blood sinuously runs through many scenes, trying to lead Estrella on and pointing at where things will inevitably lead. The resin dragon from someone's phone case flies sprightly away, and a graffiti tiger prowls the walls of the neighbourhood. There's also ghosts - lots of them, of the angry variety.

Bleak, cruel, but never hopeless, then, and possessed of a singular beauty both in its ideas and in its imagery. Especially as it builds towards one hell of an emotional, poetic punch towards the end.

 All the actors are pretty good, which is a minor miracle given that most of them are children. Both Lara and Ramon López convey the steeliness, vulnerability, and underlying innocence of their characters ridiculously well. They're not well translated, though, as the subtitles at least in Shudder try to make their dialogue overtly gritty and thuggish compared to the original lines' more subdued realism.

 The cinematography is beautiful (DP: Juan Jose Saravia). The colors are a bit desaturated, but most shots manage to find at least something beautiful in the squalor - be it an ornate window frame overlooking the city or a glorified puddle that's been taken over by carps. The camerawork alternates between handheld shots for more immediacy and more traditional steadicam work on the scenes that need it.

 The shadow of Guillermo del Toro. especially The Devil's Backbone, looms heavily over this movie: many of the surrealistic touches are used in a very similar way, and the overall tone and development is similar. It's not a comparison that's kind to this movie - that would be unreasonable, as few movies match the tightness and ambition of Backbone's script. But writer/director Issa Lopez successfully keeps it distinct and separate from its inspiration, it never feels like a knock-off.

 The influence may be clear but we get so few movies going for this sort of thing that, honestly, I'm happy to have one more. Especially when it's as bloody excellent as this.

I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore

 I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore opens with barrage of low key, quotidian assholishness heaped on poor Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) by random people. You know the type: people cutting in line,  not picking up their dog poop, littering - not giving a fuck about others and just being generally shitty. The first of these incidents gets the biggest laugh in the movie: a dying woman dies in the middle of a horrible tirade right in front of Ruth at the hospice she works in as a nurse... later, surrounded by her grieving family, she's asked if there were any last words.
 She doesn't have the heart to tell them the last words were "Keep your gigantic monkey dick out of my good pussy."

 Linskey is aways good, but especially so here playing a quiet, decent person who feels increasingly out of step with the rest of humankind.

 When she gets back home after this particularly shitty day, she finds someone's broken in and stolen her laptop, some silver that belonged to a late, favorite family member, and meds. It's a shitty thing to happen to anyone, and Ruth's reaction to it all - a sort of resigned heartbreak mixed with impotent rage -  is spot on and like so much of the rest of the movie, very relatable.

 When the police get there they basically brush her off and give her a hard time for not locking her front door. Cold.

 After stewing over it for a couple of days, Ruth starts sleuthing around and is able to track down some of her missing stuff; So she enlists the aid of one of her neighbours for backup - Tony (Elijah Wood, in a pseudo-mullet with a rattail and a Saxon T-shirt), an introverted weirdo who seems to be less of a dick than everyone else. And off they go, on an initially successful quest across their little Texan suburb to get Ruth's shit back.

 As their crusade goes on, Ruth gets a little too much into it. Not that it turns into a proper vigilante movie or anything - her plan is simply to confront people and maybe get them to, at most, explain themselves. Get them to be at least a little ashamed. But unfortunately for Ruth and Tony, part by skill and part by dumb luck, they do eventually manage to catch the attention of the people that originally robbed her place - a trio of strung-out petty thieves (led by David Yow!) who'd barely register as mooks in your standard vigilante movie, but drip with menace here.

 Writer/Director Macon Blair became known after playing the lead in Blue Ruin, and this, his first movie, is definitely in tune with that film's sensibilities. Describing it as Blue Ruin but played as a comedy is a bit glib, but fair - at least if we're thinking of comedy more in the ancient Greek sense; There are some good jokes here and a pervasive bleak sense of humour, but it's undercut by a nasty intensity, a queasy sense of danger that seems to promise things will not go well. And.. well, they don't. Should anyone make it through alive, you can be sure they'll have earned getting to the finish  line.

 There is some action, and it is suitably brutal, deflating any glamour or the more vicarious thrills this sort of movie might offer. The film doesn't stay pinned on Ruth's viewpoint, either; other characters get a chance to expand on theirs too, and a lot of these make a lot of sense. The script remains sympathetic to Ruth and Tony to the end, but it never completely romanticizes the action or loses sight of how fucked up, dangerous, and just plain stupid some of the stuff they get up to is.

 Some of the events towards the end get a little far-fetched, but it's easy to forgive a little silliness given how grounded most of the movie feels at that point. It's a good one.

Kuso

 Well, stop the search. This year's prestigious "The Fuck Did I just Watch?" award goes to...

 Kuso is an unhinged, deeply bizarre surrealist comedy in the vein of Tim Heidecker and Eric Warheim's Awesome Show shot through with an unhealthy amount of body horror.
 And if that doesn't tell you anything, well, congratulations: that puts you one peg closer to normalcy. Tim and Eric are a couple of anti-comedians who do purposefully tacky, off-putting shows for Adult Swim that try to recreate the most cringe-inducing, crappiest lows of public access television.

This film's the brain-child of Rapper Flying Lotus (Steve Ellison), who's obviously a fan of Tim and Eric, and whose music has featured in some Adult Swim shows. It's a series of alternating vignettes set in a plague-ridden Los Angeles where reality was disrupted in weird ways by a series of earthquakes.

 (I'm going to go into the film in some detail now. Kuso goes all-out in an attempt to offend and/or disgust, and absolutely revels in bad taste... so, well, be warned. It qualifies as a pretty extreme movie.)

 Does the Phrase 'David Cronenberg porn' sound amusing to you? The man himself has gotten close to pornography a few times in his own, clinical way -he certainly never shied away from sexual themes- but this movie gets explicit with it. I won't spoil it, but that's basically the most apt description for the punchline to one of the stories here.

 A more concrete example, and a spoiler for the most unhinged thing in the movie (skip until after the capture to avoid it): There's a subplot where a man gets cured of his crippling fear of boobs (mastophobia?) by drinking the juices from the nipple of an insect residing in George Clinton's gaping anus.
 Yes. George Clinton. I love that he would lend himself to this. And yes, we get a perspective shot from within Clinton's bowels, looking out his sphincter; Bless this movie for giving me the chance to write that sentence.

Wait, George Clinton does what now?

 And here are some more bits, out of context: people jam things in their dickholes. Insects get bitten in half. A bloody, recently aborted fetus gets thrown around like a football. A dead child is used on a throwaway gag. All sorts of bodily fluids get thrown around and smeared on people.
 It's all purposely pretty fake-looking and over the top, so it can still be funny... But even so some of the stuff still made a little queasy. 

 Stylistically most of the stories are live action on a shoestring budget, but there are a few cheap-looking CGI interludes and some pretty creative Terry Gilliam-esque collages (he gets name-checked via a big-ass book on a shelf early on).

 I won't detail all the 'plots'; In case you're interested, here's a Wikipedia entry that goes pretty in-depth into them (and explains some details I completely missed while watching.)
 Some of the skits are followed up on, and three or so narrative threads emerge - don't expect a proper story, but they do build up to something approximating a punchline, and some of them are even funny. All are creative as hell, but there's a fairly low hit ratio for the material - which will probably be lower for most people, and higher for those that prefer to chemically enhance their movie watching, the Adult Swim crowd should be satisfied.

 The effect the whole thing has is hard to describe. I found it off-putting, but it did make me laugh several times; When it's funny, it's really fucking funny, and that makes it infinitely better to me than some of its more straight-forward competitors.
 There were long barren stretches that were a bit of an endurance test, though. It's not just that there's a (sometimes literal) shitload of gross-out... well, some of it is humour - and that it's actively unpleasant in every possible way Flying Lotus can conceive of.

 My issue is that a lot of it is weird for weirdness's sake, and the result isn't all that interesting. While the bizarre imagery and concatenation of ideas kept me from fast-forwarding through any of it, this is not something I'd enjoy sitting through again to expose my friends to it the way I routinely do with something like... I dunno, Boxer's Omen.

 Ellison directs and has a writer credit on all of the segments. Rapper Zack Fox co-wrote the funniest short (the one with George Clinton). David Firth, he of Salad Fingers fame, collaborated with Ellison on the weirdest one - guess that won't surprise anyone.

 I should probably say some nice things about the music and sound design. While there are a few random fart and shitting sounds that kind of work against the movie's... ah hell, let's call it spell- the music side of things is very well made. I can't claim to know any Ellison's stuff, but he got Aphex Twin and Akira Yamaoka working on the soundtrack, and I really enjoyed what they all did on that front. My favorite detail comes during a hilarious turn by, um, Lexington Steele -dunno him from anywhere, no sir!- where his lines are underscored by short staccato strings; a bizarre, funny touch I genuinely loved.

 Oh, and since we're listing actors now: Tim Heidecker puts in a short appearance, waving his pasty white bum at the camera as usual. Rapper Busdriver also does a very cool, pretty funny number at the beginning with some great practical effects.

 So yeah, your mileage will very much vary on this one. I suspect you'll know whether you'll like it -whether you can like it, maybe - going in. God help me, despite all my misgivings I really dug it.