Warning: Do Not Play (Amjeon)

  This one didn't really do a lot for me. It's a pretty standard movie about an obsessed filmmaker (Seo Yea-ji) who's trying to track down an indie horror movie that's rumoured to a) get people who watch it in some sort of trouble and b) to be shot by a gh-gh-gh-ghost!

  This dumps her into an investigative spiral which will, of course, have some pretty dire consequences for her and other people caught up in the quest. It begins rather well (if a bit uninspired), but not a lot of time goes by before she's doing a few questionable and/or deeply stupid things to track down the film. Since she doesn't really have a strong motivation to do those things (beyond "I'm under pressure to do my own horror movie", which really doesn't cut it) or a proper justification for her obsession, it's hard to sympathise with her when the inevitable spooks come a-knocking.

 The cast is good, the cinematography (by Young-soo Yoon) is good, and Director Kim Jin-won clearly has chops - his film has some good ambiance and a couple of decently creepy moments - but as a whole neither the story (also by Jin-won) nor the horror coalesce into something substantial or even particularly interesting. Oh well.

Tales From the Lodge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sea Fever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 For good or for ill, this one didn't leave much of an impression, but that's probably just me.

Lake Artifact

 A group of young adult friends (Thomas Brazzle, Catharine Daddario, Anna Shields and Chris Cimperman) plus a mysterious, affable hitchhiker (Dylan Gunn) they meet on the road head out to a remote lake cabin to enjoy a few nights of very mild partying. But the site they've chosen is a paranormal hotspot, as foreshadowed by several locals interviewed on-camera by a mysterious man.

 The strange phenomena pile up without much in the way of rhyme nor reason - I mean, sure, the roads loop and time seems to transcur unevenly for our protagonists, but what's the deal with the mysterious printer that spits out pictures no one seems to remember taking?
  There's a very muddled, barely sensical explanation involving some poorly-sketched multiversal conflux, but Coherence, this ain't - things barely make any sense and they don't amount to much dramatically, either. Even when people are trying to kill each other all over the place. 

 Writer/director Bruce Wemple keeps things rolling with constant developments, and the film looks pretty good for its non-existent production values. But events don't assemble into any sort of compelling picture, and the characters - through no fault of the actors playing them - and the situations they find themselves embroiled in fail to generate the sort of empathy needed for us to get invested in their fates. And so Lake Artifact fails at both of the genres it straddles.

 I try to cut these low-budget efforts a lot of slack, but aside from a fun twist late in the game, there's barely anything going for this one aside from the competence with which it's made.

The Wild Goose Lake (Nanfang chezhan de juhui)

 A series of escalating petty rivalries within a motorbike-stealing cartel result in Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) shooting a cop to death. The police mobilize en masse and track him down to Wild Goose Lake, a remote lakeside community where crime runs rampant.

 When the police offer 300000 yuan to anyone who turns Zhou in, he hatches a plan with a couple of close associates to be "handed in" for the reward money - he's got no illusions that the police (which the movie frames in parallel with the criminals several times) will let him live, so he might as well leave his estranged wife some money after he's gone. But because everyone involved has a criminal record, they have to enlist the help of Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-mei), a 'bathing beauty' - a sex worker who makes a living from lakeside tourists to act as the informant.

 Meanwhile, the asshole who stirred the shit that got Zhou into the whole sorry mess is still around, with eyes on the reward as well. As for everyone else, that amount of money might give people ideas... maybe shift some loyalties.

 The plot is loose, even a little disjointed, and it leaves a lot open for the viewer to interpret. Writer/director Diao Yinan doesn't really neglect the twisty, pulpy plot, nor the expected lurid action. But his attention wanders easily, and the meticulously composed scenes often follow its characters while they go on with their lives without doing anything that might impact the story - if it wasn't so carefully crafted, it'd look heavily improvised.

 It's wryly funny as well - there aren't any real jokes in the script, but Yinan has a real appreciation for the ridiculous. The most over the top example is an unorthodox (and very bloody) use Zhou finds for an umbrella, but there are a few minor sight gags, humorous (at least to me) abrupt cuts and surreal tableaus. Elsewhere the script bogs down (in an enjoyable way) to show, say, some of the finer points of motorcycle stealing (in a scene that reminded me, not for the last time in the movie, of Emily the Criminal), or an improvised disco night where the dancers, for lack of a light-up floor, wear light-up shoes.

 The film is structured as a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards as the various characters and the police circle around each other warily. There's next to no exposition, and none of the main characters are very expressive; You're expected to keep up with all the various factions (or not).

 This complexity does give the film a jittery, paranoid vibe. The suspense tips over into violence several times over; Short bursts only (don't expect complicated choreographies or extended shootouts), but what's there is enjoyable and doesn't shy away from getting a little silly.
 More than anything else, it's an exercise in mood-setting, with almost every languid, morose scene dripping with neo-noir atmosphere (cinematographer: Dong Jinsong).

 I'm not that convinced of its substance, but with this much style, it's a moot point. It requires some patience, but I liked it a lot.

Portals

 Those silly scientists are at it again, running their particle accelerators and trying to create a black holes...

 Luckily for everyone, they don't succeed at creating a (presumably tiny) singularity. Those things are a pain, dropping down into planets and starting to eat them from within as they see-saw around their core like a nightmarish, all-consuming 3D spirograph. No, Portals is content to just be a horror movie. So instead of a black hole we get worldwide blackouts and evil 2001-style monoliths popping up all over the place.

 The monoliths -portals- are at least somewhat sentient and seem to have an agenda. They can communicate telepathically with whomever they choose, control others, and they can take those they're interested in when they touch their vinyl-like black surface. The invader's motivations are kept mysterious, but are generic enough that their antics never really roused my interest.

 Portals tells three stories set around the time the portals make their appearance. It starts with Adam (Neil Hopkins), who wants to take his family out of the city, away from the blackouts and this mysterious threat the news keep talking about.

 First impressions are good - it got me excited, at least, because the writing is pretty good; The story isn't anything special and it gets worse as it goes on, but the characters are believable and very likeable (Hopkins does a pretty good job, and Ruby O'Donnell, his on-screen daughter, is adorable). This segment (which recurs throughout the movie, later moving to a spooky hospital) is directed by Liam O'Donnell, writer of all the skylines and director of the much better sequel (I haven't seen the latest one yet).

 When Adam and his family run into a portal in the middle of the highway the movie shifts into the second story, one set in a 911 call center facility. Again, it's initially interesting, and it's a great way to give a sense of the world (or at least, the corner of the world closest to the call center) going to hell, with the lines overloaded with people calling in about weird occurrences. It devolves to hokum pretty quickly once it introduces your typical conspiracy theorist with that laziest of lazy signifiers: a notebook full of creepy portal-related drawings. When a portal appears in the middle of the office, he grabs a gun and starts forcing his co-workers into it, but the situation fails to go anywhere interesting. Directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale.

 After a short catchup with Adam the action moves to Jakarta, where sisters Sarah (Salvita Decorte) and Jill (Natasha Gott) get stuck in a multi-story car park with a monolith. This one's almost a zombie movie- the monolith takes over multiple nearby people and forces them to chase after Sarah and her sister. Very well-made on what's clearly a shoestring budget, it's got some impressive and very high-energy stunts (mostly to do with a slow-moving vehicle) and some very, very creepy business involving a pram. I shouldn't have been surprised when I found out it was directed by Timo Tjahjanto; I can't say it redeems the movie or anything, but it's a lot of fun.

 The last real segment finishes off Adam's story - it gets a few nice images, an extremely shit Scanners-style headsplosion (CGI, sadly), and some effective nastiness, but especially compared to its strong opening, it's a bit of a disappointment.

 Then there's a cool bit of credits, and a surprise fourth mini-story featuring a couple of scientists (Georgina Blackledge and Dare Emmanuel) who gave some exposition as talking heads early in the movie. I love this sort of formal experimentation, but unfortunately the short is completely disposable, a hollow non-story with a poorly rendered gory finale.

 So... this one's a bust, sorry. It got made by some of the same brains behind Doors, which came out two years later, including the Boulderlight production company, Brad Mishka, and creator Chris White. They'd get it much better on their second attempt, which for me merits a qualified recommendation- this one's not really worth a watch despite Tjahjanto's best efforts.

DreadOut

 After the Mo brothers went their own ways, Timo Tjahjanto probably got the lion's share of attention - putting out one of the best action movies of the '00s will do that. But his former partner in crime Kimo Stamboel's didn't do too badly - he directed his own, pretty great action movie, and then did a movie adaptation of everyone's favorite Indonesian videogame/fatal frame... 'homage'. 

 Yes, DreadOut got a movie. There's even a couple of scenes that replicate the game's first person mode. It's a game I've only played a couple of hours of, and a long time ago, so I can't really comment on how faithful it is, but I will say that Stamboel is absolutely one of the best possible directors they could have gotten; When it's good, it sings. Unfortunately he also writes, and, well, he's not so good at that side of things.

 The first scene is excellent - a couple of really great, evocative establishing shots, and then it's right into the mayhem as some sort of cult are coercing a woman to perform a ritual on their behalf. By threatening her little girl, in her own apartment. It's a really tense scene even before it becomes clear that the tied-up bundle in the coffee table, within a ritual circle, contains some sort of demon. The cult succeeds in pulling a ceremonial knife out of the demon's mouth, but the police arrives and stops whatever it was that they were planning to do to celebrate.

 Some years later Linda (Caitlin Halderman), the little girl who was present at the ritual, is in high school, and grown into a teenaged version of your stereotypical final girl: she's serious and holds a job to take care of her father while all the other idiots party around her. And said idiots are fucking despicable influencer wannabes that whine about how few followers they have; Even the supposed 'nice guy' of the group joins in on bullying some younger students. Good thing we're in a horror movie, right?
 The teens (Jefri Nichol, Marsha Aruan, Ciccio Manassero, Susan Sameh and Irsyadillah) have a plan to go into a nearby 'haunted' apartment block to do a livestream- and we know that it's actually haunted, because it's the same building from the prologue, abandoned since that incident. The catch? The groundskeeper won't let them in. Luckily Linda knows him, so they convince her to skip her shift and go with them.

 Nothing much happens in the building until the kids, drawn by the police tape, wander into the same apartment where the cult did their thing all that time ago. There they discover a ritual circle and some weird red leather pages with Sanskrit (love that a high schooler can recognize Sanskrit! Or is that a thing in Indonesia?); One of the pages seems blank, but when her phone flashes on it Linda sees some sort of writing no one else can see.
 And... she reads it aloud. That's it, I'm done, she can fucking die along with all the others as far as I'm concerned. I'm officially rooting for the deadites. The ritual words (the same ones her mother was forced to read once upon a time) convert the ritual circle into a whirling pool of black water, and all the kids are drawn in.

 Linda and one of the others end up in a jungle somewhere, but as the film is desaturated and blue-tinted, it's clear that it's a horror jungle. She soon gets attacked by zombie-like monsters, but her phone flash burns them like some sort of weapon. And from there starts a running battle with a powerful spirit who can possess the kids and throw them around telekinetically, who's still sore after the cult stole her favorite knife. Meanwhile, the others kids back in the real world and do a lot of nothing in the most annoying way possible.

 The main thing to have in mind about this movie is that, despite first appearances and Stamboel's track record, it's aimed straight at teenagers. So any hopes of the shitty teens getting sliced and impaled like satay quickly evaporates. The other thing is that the script is incredibly stupid. Sometimes to humorous effect, like all the ridiculous leaps in logic people make (which of course are always absolutely correct), or the groundskeeper taking a quick look at the swirling black portal and nonchalantly blaming it on a leaky pipe (making him my favorite character in the movie by a country mile).
 Most of the time, though, it's just bad. Painfully bad, even. Which is a shame, because there are a lot of good ideas and cool shots; Stamboel's direction is assured, energetic, and sometimes inspired (a shot of a striking axe, filmed along the path it travels, is very Raimi-esque). There are also some amazing sets,  with a couple of striking tableaux which I'm guessing come straight from the games, well captured  by cinematographer Patrick Tashadian. 

 The shitty script, along with the film pulling nearly all of its punches (See? Teens really do ruin everything!) means that I can't conscionably recommend this. Or... Maybe? If it's easily available to you, or if you have more tolerance for this sort of thing. All the good stuff doesn't quite make up for the inane story, but it's close.

Soul (Roh)

 I don't think I've ever seen a Malay film before, despite them having what looks like a burgeoning horror industry. Based on Roh, I should probably correct that.

 Mak (Farah Ahmad) lives in a bamboo house out in the jungle with her two kids Along (Mhia Farhana) and Angah (Harith Haziq). Soon they find another kid in the jungle and take her in: a cute little girl (Putri Qaseh) covered in grime and blood, wielding a knife.

 They clean her up and feed her, and wake next morning to find her eating their chickens, raw. Then she tells them they will all be dead when the moon is full, and slits her own neck. Now, I don't really know about Malaysian customs, but that seems rather extreme; just leave a one-star review, lady.

 More creepy weirdness ensues - there's a lot of amazing (and amazingly creepy) imagery in this movie, from the prologue where the little blood-soaked girl wanders among burning buildings, to a deer hanging from a tree, to some other scenes later that it'd be best not to spoil. There's not that much of a plot, just the family enduring a gauntlet of supernatural horrors, which seem to somehow be related to an old lady (June Lojong) and a grieving hunter (Namron) who wander by every now and then.

 The events are heavily tinged by local folklore and Muslim beliefs - things end up making a certain amount of (mythical) sense, but I imagine I'm missing a lot of detail; the feel of it reminded me at times of Indonesian black magic movies, which I guess makes sense.

 It's beautifully directed (by Emir Ezwan) and shot (by Saifuddin Mussa), with lots of static and slow tracking shots, a gorgeous earthy palette and excellent use of darkness. The soundtrack (by Reinchez Ng), mostly droning synths, do a lot to prop up the film's atmosphere. It's a simple, slow-burn movie punctuated by some startling, nasty shocks and a whole lot of weird folklore-based shit. Of course I loved it.

Becky

 One way to make me perk right up: reference the Into the Void opening credits in your movie's opening credits*. Do it on a notebook with animated teen doodles, as Becky does, and we're in business.

 Becky Hopper (Lulu Wilson) is a sullen thirteen-year old girl who's still mourning her mother a year after bereavement. She's a troubled girl, introduced as she's bullied at school and seemingly implied to be somewhere in the spectrum on some of the early scenes. She's bright and pretty funny, but you can imagine how hard it would be to live with someone as a parent.

 Pity her dad, then, for trying to move on. He takes Becky on holiday to a beloved lakeside cabin, and spoils everything by inviting his new girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel) over... and telling his daughter he intends to re-marry. It goes as well as you'd expect.

 After Becky's run away to her hiding spot to brood, a murderous neo-nazi gang freshly escaped from prison and led by one Dominick (Kevin James) takes over the cabin looking for a key they'd hidden before they were put away. A key (marked with a proto-germanic symbol) that, of course, Becky has found and taken for herself.
 Kind of a Die Hard situation, then, with a (record scratch) thirteen-year-old girl wearing a cute woven animal hood in the McLane role. And it works brilliantly! Mostly because the character of Becky reminded me more of a latter-day Liam Neeson action role more than a Bruce Willis one, but on the opposite end of the unlikely-age spectrum.

 It's a stew of genres and influences: an indie drama frequently checking in on Becky's memories of her mother, a thriller with some very effective, tense scenes, a sprinkling of extremely bloody action. Home Alone and the aforementioned Neeson vehicles are a reference point, and it invokes the ghost of a slasher movie with its bloodlust and music (a cheeky, lively Friday the 13th-ish mix of music and breathy panting). I think my favorite thing about it is that despite having a rich seam of bloody gallows humor, the film plays all of its elements dead straight.

 The premise may be silly, but it's mostly rendered plausible by the way the script (by Nick Morris and Ruckus & Lane Skye) grounds its elements. The protagonist's shift from terrified teen to deranged killer feels earned, and the progression of events makes sense. The action is brutal and takes into account Becky's physical disadvantage at all times; She does spring back a little too quickly after being brutally manhandled, and also ignores a convenient gun at one point, but that's well within genre conventions.

 There are a few instances of overt humor here and there (the most obvious a rambo-2-referencing 'suiting up' montage that involves a star-shaped mirror) but that's pretty rare; most laughs come instead from how extreme things get.

 The filmmaking is great, with the cinematographer (Greta Zoula), editor (Alan Canant)  and directors (Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion) staging some elaborate scenes that cut between, say, the thugs escaping and some fragments of Becky's school life, or getting creative when Becky and Dominick talk over walkie-talkies. The film gets more traditional as it progresses, but things are always cleanly staged. The music (by Nima Fakhrara) is a good mix between ambiental Indie music and crazy mix of vocals and instrumental weirdness.

 And while all the actors are good in this, both Lulu Wilson and Kevin James do an excellent job with their characters; Wilson really sells both Becky's pain and her psycho determination, and James displays the sort of cult-leader charisma you'd expect out of his Manson-like character. The guy's deluded enough that he thinks he can win Becky over with a "we are not so different, you and I" spiel near the end.
 I also really liked his second in command Apex (Robert Maillet), who has a significant role as the lone thug with a little humanity. 

 Cap it off with some extreme levels of gore - wet, chunky, and detailed, more so than most horror movies (the FX crew clearly pulled out medical reference texts for this one), and we've got something special on our hands. It's a simple movie, but a wildly, viciously entertaining one.

*: Or maybe they're more indebted to Spiderverse, but I choose to think otherwise.

Come to Daddy

 Come to Daddy is a twisty thriller with a deadpan comedic tone. It's... all right.

 The story follows one Norval Greenwood (Elijah Wood) who gets a summons from his father to a remote cabin in the beautiful American northwest. Seeing as to how he hasn't seen his dad since he was five, the meeting is a bit awkward.
 And dear old dad (Stephen McHattie) doesn't make things easy. The film's at its best here, with both actors expertly playing off each other- Norval's anxieties and full-of-shit-ness against dad's ruthless assholism. Then... well, I'm going to have to spoil an early development, because otherwise this review would be even shorter: an attempted filicide turns into a death by heart attack, and Norval is left in the cabin alone, dealing with the local authorities to take care of his father's corpse.

 Of course there's more - this is all done by the half-hour mark. So weird stuff happens as Norval is stuck at the cabin; Strange sounds coming from below the cabin, figures in the woods, a cheesy ringtone going off at weird hours in the night.

 After a series of twists the guy is fighting for his life against a couple of thugs, most notably a guy who looks and acts like reject from Spinal Tap (Michael Smiley). Things have a decent explanation, and while the mystery lasts it's kind of interesting, but it's hard to avoid the sense that the movie ran out of steam as soon  as McHattie got out of the picture.

 The humor and over-the-top, bloody violence keeps it aloft, somewhat. This is one of those movies that operates at a remove or two from reality, where every character is a container of quirks and off-kilter responses. Some of these work, like local coroner Gladys (Madeleine Sami) - an awkward, oversharing, friendly sort. Others, like a policeman that profiles people by the shapes of their eyes, not so much. There's a few laughs here and there, but not a lot of jokes; It's got more of a barrage of weird situations and bizarre details approach going on, aiming more for absurdity than punchlines. I guess it never got weird enough for me.

Blood Vessel

 A bunch of people stuck in a life raft are picked up by a nazi ghost ship... and then they're killed one by one. Not by a deranged/possessed George Kennedy; It's been way too long since I saw 1980's Death Ship, so I can't really say if there are any homages here, but barring that the only thing these two movies share is the premise.

 The castaways here are the survivors from the torpedoing of a hospital ship by a U-boat. It's a diverse bunch, but time and genre limits constrain them to caricatures - you can pretty much describe all of them with a couple of adjectives: You've got New Yorker Asshole (Mark Diaco), Tough Black Guy (Christopher Kirby), Australian Cowboy (Nathan Phillips), Compassionate Nurse (Alyssa Sutherland), Snooty Brit (John Lloyd Fillingham), and Stoic Russian (Alex Cooke).

 After a short credit sequence (which includes a very nice take of the life raft shot from underneath during a thunderstorm), the survivors run into and manage to board a nazi corvette. It's an out of the pan into the fire kind of choice, since their rations had run out, but lucky for them there doesn't seem to be a living soul on the ship.

 Or maybe not so lucky. As they search the ship they find some grisly, butchered bodies, a creepy young girl with an antique doll who constantly asks about her family in Rumanian, and... vampire hunter paraphernalia. Oh, and a pretty cool-looking carved sarcophagus, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the plot. 

Aww, they're funpires!

 It takes a while for the Vampires to run amok. That's not a huge problem, as I thought the first part was pretty effective - there's not a lot of mystery as to what's actually going on, but the way the discoveries are dispensed, and the way the cast bounces off each other is pretty entertaining; while the characters never get any development and some of the acting is a bit iffy, they do butt heads and share some fun badass moments. And failing that, they get killed at an acceptable rate even before someone opens the chained coffin.

 Once that happens and the vampires (sorry - Strigoi) come out the pace picks up with regards to character deaths, but it remains weirdly inert. Mostly because apparently Strigoi don't like moving much; a lot of the movie is them looking creepily at the camera, making hand gestures to control the people they've bitten and reacting to stuff from a distance, which... to be honest, looks pretty goofy. They do attack a couple of times, but the (excellent) practical makeup effects must prevent them from moving much because it's all quick edits that show very little actual action.

 Despite that there's enough mayhem to keep things fun. Nothing special, but still a good time. It's creepy, especially at the beginning, but it's never scary - the vibe is closer to a grim action/survival movie than actual horror. It also has precious few jokes and never descends into winking despite the brilliant pun title; That's something I can respect.

 The effects are solid, low-budget work, with some excellent designs; the cramped ship interiors make for great sets, and I loved the various creepy carvings the Nazis had looted from Rumania. The vampires are a bit more animalistic than usual, and the main Striga looks a bit like the monster in The Night Flyer. As mentioned they look kind of goofy, but in a fun way, especially when their eyes light up.
 I also really liked the cool mold-like effect on the walls near the various corpses, to show the corruption in their blood. And there's also an absolutely brilliant maquette explosion. This movie packs quite a bit of nice eye-candy; Director Justin Dix is an F/X guy, and it really shows.

 So we end up with a solid B-movie, which is nothing to sneeze at. I'd prefer the monsters to be a bit more dynamic and the action a bit better, but what we get here is still worthwhile.

She Never Died

  It's tough, being a cannibal immortal. That was already the case for Jack (Henry Rollins) in 2015's He Never Died, and it's still true in 2019 for Lacey (Olunike Adeliyi).
 The Experience has warped them in pretty different ways, though; Both are what you'd call antisocial, but while Jack lived as a recluse and ethically drank blood smuggled out of hospitals, Lacey has gone almost feral, is homeless, and freely murders/eats people as long as they're assholes.

 Not so much a sequel as a superficially similar story set in the same world but with another set of characters, you don't really have to know anything about the first movie to enjoy the sequel - but I'd still recommend watching both, because they're both really good.

 The plot's not that complex, but it's got a lot going on. A police detective (Peter McNeill) is monitoring the site of a suspected human trafficking ring group when Lacey just breaks in and kills a guy (who, to be honest, has it coming, playing Russian roulette against a dog for a live stream). During the altercation Lacey gets shot in the head, which doesn't even phase her, and she cuts off various chunks of the guy after gruesomely putting him down.
 The detective follows her to a nearby café, and in a very funny exchange, finds her to be surprisingly straightforward in her answers: Yes, she did cut off the guy's fingers, she was planning to snack on them; they're easy to carry, and have a lot of marrow.
 He takes it in stride, and ends up giving her a dossier on another douchebag, one he wants dead; in exchange, he offers Lacey his old apartment, complete with a fridge for her to store the severed body parts so she can nibble on them at leisure.

 The whole deal with the detective does end up making sense later, but for a while there the whole thing really sounds off. Good job MacNeill for making that work as well as it does.

 Meanwhile, the siblings who run the trafficking ring / snuff studio (Michelle Nolden and Noah Dalton Danby) become obsessed with obtaining Lacey. You'd think she'd be a goldmine for snuff filmmakers, right? She's basically a renewable resource; But no, they intend to sell her off to the highest bidder, since she's become a bit of a star on the ol' dark-webs. Seems like a waste.

 The movie is filled with fun/cool characters, but these two villains are by far the funniest; two young go-getters who deadpan great, ridiculous lines at a clip, like alternating between fussing over each other's health and then talking about torture and murder in the most frivolous way possible.

 There are some complications - Lacey gets saddled with a young adult (Kiana Madeira) who takes an interest in her situation and follows her around - but overall you can probably guess where things are headed. It's well put together, and the script (written by Jason Krawczyk) excels in adding weirdo details and humorous but completely deadpan asides. It's not quite as much of a comedy as He Never Died, but it's still a pretty damn funny movie.

 It's got a lot of fun gore, a couple of good fights and stunts (for a horror movie) and it pulls off a couple of fun gags just with editing. Director Audrey Cummings does a great job of keeping things engaging. She's helped by the cast - I wasn't a fan of the surrogate daughter character, who gets a surprising amount of screen time, but other than that they all make for good company. Otunike Adellyl does a particularly great job with the titular She - Lacey is a great creation, alternately savage, vulnerable, brutally honest and tortured, so it can't have been easy to pull it all off half as well as she did, and make her this fucking cool in the process.

 As on the first movie, things get a little biblical, and by the end the stage is set for an apocalyptic end to the trilogy. I hope they get to make it.

Luz: The Flower of Evil

 An overtly arthouse folk horror film in which barely anything of consequence happens. Luz is a Colombian movie about a preacher (Conrado Osorio) who lives with his three adult daughters (Yuri Vargas, Sharon Guzman, and Andrea Esquivel) leading a small commune in the wilds. He runs it as a cult with guns, bluster, and eschatological rants.

 It's a great looking film - the color correction so integral to it that the company that did it (wemakecolor) gets two separate entries during the title credits; Kudos to them and art director Hugo Blandon. The saturated tones and exaggerated grain are somewhere between a film from the sixties and a fever dream. The premise is initially intriguing, as well: the script makes an attempt to lay out some themes and puzzles out for the viewers to put together.

 But the film has a terminal case of focusing on the visuals and opaque pronouncements, mostly from the father; endless, shallow mystical ramblings. It's counterpointed by a running narration from one of the girls that fails to shed any light on her internal life and mostly ended up reminding me of You Won't Be Alone... A comparison that could only hurt this movie.
 Things do eventually happen, but they mostly escalate to people histrionically screaming at each other, or result in near random actions that don't really lead anywhere. Early on one of the daughters finds a cassette player, and the preacher warns her that the devil likes wearing beautiful disguises; That setup ends up with an unintentionally very funny scene that tries to milk tension and imply satanism on a girl knitting in the woods to reedy, easy listening classical music. Which is a pretty funny portrayal of the fundamentalist mindset, I guess, but that's not really how it comes across. Especially when you factor in the (very cute) demonic goat and creepy whispers.

 It's very much a movie about the evils of patriarchal religion, though writer/director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate has the grace to muddy up the waters a little and add what at least could be interpreted as an actual  supernatural menace. It's hard to care about anyone involved, though - for all its breathy dialog the movie fails to sketch out any worthwhile characters, and the almost random nature of the events make it near impossible to give a shit about where things are ultimately headed.

Here Comes Hell

 Here's an intriguing idea: What if we do a modern, Evil Dead-riffing horror film, but dress it up so that it's indistinguishable from an old B&W one?

 I'd love to see it done well. Think about something like I Walked With a Zombie that suddenly burst out with Tom Savini gore effects, for example. Exploiting what we traditionally think of as classy for shock purposes. That could really work!
 As you may have guessed from my hedging, that goal's a little too ambitious for director/co-writer Jack McHenry to pull off. So instead we get a goofy little oddity where you can tell everyone making it had a blast, but it comes off as... well, watching a bunch of enthusiastic friends putting on a show.

 Good on them; This is clearly a labour of love, and a lot of effort went into it. But that still doesn't make it enjoyable.

 Let's start  with what I liked: The movie begins with a 'classy' presenter who tries to scare us away. Going for either a theatrical Agatha Christie vibe, or maybe William Castle; Eh, either's fun. And Ben Pearson's music is very well done, though it hops in styles and time periods a bit too much. A jazzy number pops up for the credits, with this production company logo:

 

That got a laugh.

  As far as the story goes, a bunch of rich young friends (plus a plus one) get together in a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside. There's a suave athlete (Timothy Renouf), his middle-class girlfriend (Jessica Webber) a gruff, sad and very Texan oil tycoon (Tom Bailey), a beautiful, sophisticated mean girl (Margaret Clunie) and the host for the evening, an ineffectual dilettante scion (Charlie Robb) misspending the last of his late parents' fortunes.

 And here's where the plot finally kicks in. For, you see, the dilettante's latest craze is the supernatural, and he's hired a medium (Maureen Bennett) to contact the ghost of the mysterious occultist that owned the manor, and was rumoured to have opened a gateway to the land of the dead.

 It's a decent setup for some comedy horror, but it takes up half of the movie's lean, under-eighty-minutes runtime. And it's filled with clumsy exposition and weak character work. The actors, while very game, are... well, none of them are good enough to breathe real life into their roles. I appreciate it's trying to replicate a specific, talky 40's horror melodrama style, but it's neither well-written nor well-acted enough for all the waffling to be enjoyable.

 Once things get rolling, they momentarily get off to a great start when the film's best practical effect bursts (or is burst, I guess) into the scene. But then it starts treading water, throwing in random ideas, and leaning a little too hard on Evil Dead 2 without finding a good balance between its comedy and its horror.

The 4:3 aspect ratio and old-timey filters are ok for the budget level - they don't make the obvious mistake to go overboard with the grain and negative damage effects... In fact, I'd go as far as to say they go underboard with them, as it never really looks like anything except digital footage in black-and-whiteface.
 The effects are a mix of practical and digital effects, and they're all over the place - you can tell where they spent some of the budget, and where they ran out of money and used a crappy toy for a non-sequitur instead. I really enjoyed one of the deadites, which is clearly the crew's pride and joy as it gets a lot of deserved screentime. As for the rest... eh.

 Everyone involved definitely puts in the work, and it was made for something like twenty thousand pounds; All of which is really admirable! It also must be said that doing something that looks bad on purpose for comedic purposes is not something a lot of people can pull off successfully- not at feature-length, at least.
 I hope it works as a calling card and gets these folks better opportunities. But to be brutally honest, to me it felt like watching a bunch of people playing live-action role-playing, or some sort of semi-improvised dinner theater. They're clearly having fun, but there's just not nearly enough there for the rest of us.

Avengement

 A prisoner (Scott Adkins) is taken from jail, under heavy police custody, to the hospital where his mother lies dying. They arrive too late.
 As the title card takes up the whole screen, we hear the sounds of a scuffle and muffled groans... and cut to Adkins leaving an elevator full of fallen policemen and quietly escaping the hospital. To get his Avengement, you'd presume.

 And you'd presume right. An unspecified amount of time later he breaks into a pub full of gangster types, pulls out a shotgun, and holds everyone hostage. As he makes his demands and spars (verbally and physically) with assorted hoodlums, the movie flashes back to fill in the blanks of Cain's (groan) backstory and motivations.

 Avengement is the third and latest collaboration between Adkins, director Jesse V. Johnson, and writer Stu Smalls. This is a lot grittier than Accident Man and quite a bit more dour than The Debt Collectors. Its story is both simple and razor-focused on Cain's quest for revenge, its time-jumping organically incorporated into the dialog: segues followed as Cain recounts and remembers the chain of events that ended up with him going after his brother's blood.

 Everything gets explained away; Obviously, important things like who the hell this Cain character is anyhow, what he's up to, and why... but even minor details get filled in, ranging from where he got the shotgun to (in a pretty funny touch) an origin story for each one of his scars.

 And of course those asides include a ton of fights. Brawls, more like, don't expect any wall-running or acrobatics; While very well choreographed and shot, they're kept simple and (mostly) realistic. There's an appropriate focus on brutality and on the bloody aftermath of the attacks, a lot of wince-inducement to go with all the excitement.
 The low-and-dirty tone extends to the locations (which show London at its dingiest even in the obligatory nightclub action scene), the plot points (which include some really loathsome petty organized crime activities), and the acting, which has everyone at peak nasty bloke. I'm not an expert on British accents, but everyone seems to be having a lot of fun putting on their cockney.
 I had some trouble buying Adkins as a dangerous badass, but that's mostly on me for watching too many of his podcasts and interviews (the guy is as pleasant and good-natured as they come.) He's got a lot of makeup (scars) on him here, and does pretty well by the material despite my minor misgivings.

 It's not without its grace notes. Cain's relationship with his mum (Jane Thorne) is touching, and there's a redemptive arc which feels a bit forced but kind of welcome after being submerged under all this scum for more than an hour. There are also a few pretty funny lines here and there and a minor role for Louis Mandylor.
 I sometimes felt like it was trying a little too hard, but all in all it's a great little bit of genre meanness: lean, punchy, and badass. Cain describes himself at one point as a hardened, rusty nail, a great line that also fits the movie.

Fuck You Immortality

  Its title later sanitized to the more streaming services-friendly "You Can't Kill This!", Fuck You Immortality is a mockumentary that follows a burnt-out hippie couple (Bill Hutchens and Josephine Scandi) as they try to track down Joe (Brutius Selby,) an old acquaintance that, they slowly come to realize, is immortal.

 For such an oddball indie bit of a genre goof, it's got surprisingly high production values: It looks great, it's well paced, includes fun and very gruesome practical gore effects, and has a bunch of good needle drops. It also scored a huge win with its two leads - Tony is a quintessentially British space cadet sweetheart, and Kacey's preternaturally even-handed and wry. They're both a lot of fun to watch and have an easy chemistry together that's extremely charming; it's easy to believe they've remained a loving couple for years and years.

 It's a shame that the film around them never really manages to find itself. The story is fairly engaging at first, as the couple hit the road with a documentary crew following the scant leads as to Joe's eventual fate - one found by chance, and more later after they set up a website and ask others for information. Then (spoilers for a bit that's a major part of the trailer) Joe suddenly turns up... and the movie doesn't really seem to know where to go from there. It manages some mildly amusing scenes, and remains pleasant for the duration until it settles on an tonally discordant ending that... well, way to harsh my mellow, movie.

 Even before those issues come into play it's clear that the movie is mostly just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, with an extremely episodic setup that allows the central couple to meet various colourful characters and get themselves into crazy situations. Hutchens and Scandi do wonders to prop it up even as the film flails manically with forcedly quirky conceits like having Tony deliver exposition while he plays with rubber ducks in a bathtub, or Kacey sing a song as Tony dances in the background.
 Most of the actors besides them don't fare as well. The various nutjobs they run into run the gamut from mildly amusing to annoying scenery chewers; often both at the same time. That also sadly applies to Selby, who strains a bit too hard to sell Joe's intensity. No one is helped by a script that's a mix of R-rated dad jokes, broad stereotypes, non-sequiturs and cheap shocks. A lot of it is interesting in concept but doesn't really work in practice; I was often left thinking that I should have found a given scene a lot funnier than I ended up doing.

 There are also a lot of asides such as a sizzler reel of the Ninjasploitation movies that Joe was up to in the 80s, or a fun segment that showcases Tony and Kacey's various bloody attempts to grant Joe a final death. The filmmakers clearly had a lot of fun with these, and their love for genre fare is pretty endearing.

This one they call "The Predator"

 It had a few things that made me chuckle, and one actual laugh late in the movie with what's probably the best vegan joke since Scott Pilgrim. But despite its punk-rock title, shock humor and purposefully downer ending, this is mostly an inoffensive, pleasant time waster. I feel bad saying this about a movie that includes a maneuver it calls 'the Fulci' that fully lives up to its name... but to be perfectly honest, this is probably best left running in the background.

First Love (Hatsukoi)

 Takashi Miike's done just about every genre in his ridiculously prolific career, and quite a few of them have been Yakuza movies.
 First Love, from 2019, is one of his more restrained efforts - and by that, I mean restrained by his standards; It's still pretty nuts. It almost passes for a normal Yakuza movie most of the time, and a damn good one at that. A funny, twisty delight with some pretty damn memorable characters and scenes. So many cool little details and unexpected touches; Very highly recommended.

 As the title implies, the film's got two young lovers at its heart. Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a disaffected youth, a boxer who fights only because he's good at it, without joy or passion. His life is turned upside down when he gets diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor. Meanwhile, Yuri (Sakurako Konishi) was basically sold into sex slavery by her father, and she starts the movie with withdrawal-induced hallucinations of her dear old dad coming after her wearing only his underwear.

Hey, I think I played this part in one of the Yakuza games.

 And then there's the crime story. As the local Yakuza slowly lose ground to changing times and Chinese triads, Kaese (Shôta Sometani,) a mid-ranking officer, decides he's had enough and wants out of the family. His plan: Steal a bag of meth from a couple of goons, kill said goons, give the drugs to a crooked cop (Miike regular Nao Omori,) and frame the Triad. Meanwhile, he'll turn himself in for another crime and serve a few years. His hope is that by the time he's out, his family will have been wiped out by the Triad.
 Oh, and it just so happens that the goons that are marked for death are Yuri's pimps.

 Kaese's worked everything out well in advance, so it's especially funny when absolutely everything goes awry as soon as things get going. He manages to kill one of the goons, but ends up infuriating the dead man's girlfriend (Japanese personality Becky), who basically goes berserk and spends the rest of the movie in a hilariously unhinged quest for revenge. The movie's MVP.

 The crooked cop doesn't fare a lot better; He was supposed to pose as a John, take Yuri somewhere quiet and kill her. But Yuri, who's hallucinating as a result of going cold turkey, sees him as his father and asks a random passer-by to help* her.
 The random passer-by turns out to be Leo, still in a daze from learning he's got only a little time left to live. Acting on impulse, he punches the cop out cold, and leads Yuri away.

 And so the two have to run away from both the Yakuza and the Triads, who think Yuri has the drugs, while Kaese and the Cop try to eliminate them to erase their tracks. It's a contrived, but very effective setup, and it's milked for all it's worth.
 It's billed as a romance, but to be honest while the relationship between Leo and Yuri is very sweet, it's not a very romantic movie - Leo is too indrawn for overt romantic gestures, and Yuri too damaged. But they both watch out for each other and behave selflessly, and their blooming friendship/romance is pretty affecting.

 I should probably mention the soundtrack, which is wonderful - a very muscular sort of jazz that goes very well with the rest of the movie.

 Miike's always been a great director, and while this is not the showiest of his movies, he gets a lot of chances to shine. The gore is tame for Miike's standards but still pretty gruesome - one of the first scenes is of a headless corpse stumbling around like a headless chicken, while his head blinks confusedly an alley away. The action is also pretty great.
 Miike can't help but to let some of his usual weirdness and wicked sense of humor seep in, but it's mostly done within the boundaries of the world and story - most impactfully on a very funny, very cute scene that shows that sometimes laughter can really chase away your demons. But you also get someone rubbing meth into an open wound to get John-Wick-ian superpowers... so, you know, Miike stuff.
 He also seems to get bored by the end, and the movie dips a little into symbolism and even an animated interlude (which I suspect was done due to budget issues, not being able to work out a realistic out to the situation, or both.)
 But it's only a little, and it doesn't derail the whole thing. The earth doesn't explode in this one. The man's getting softer in his later years.

*: Taskete (help) is one of the few Japanese words I know, mostly because of Ryoshi Kurosawa's Pulse. When my son started to babble, I tried to teach it to him in hopes he would repeat it randomly.
 I figured if my son started repeating it in the vicinity of someone who had watched Pulse, that person would shit themselves. I have no idea if it worked, but I dearly hope it did.

Polar

 Polar is a John-Wick-like Netflix production that came and went, like most Netflix stuff, without any fanfare or promotion back in 2019. Playing an assassin already legendary in the world of assassins this time is Mads Mikkelsen - codename: Black Kaiser.
 It's a shame that these movies copy everything off John Wick, but none of them have carried on the tradition of calling their protagonists after legendary witches. They could have called Mikkelsen's character Wicked Witch of the North. I'm sure that's probably why no one seemed to like it.

 Polar (I have no idea why it's called that; if it was explained, I missed it) distinguishes itself from the pack of John Wick clones by being a lot more tasteless than the rest, having a slightly more sedate pace, and to be honest, by not having all that great action.

 And by tasteless, I mean it absolutely wallows in being crass. It's a pretty sleazy movie: one of the first scenes fixates on the slowly deflating tentpole erection on a corpse; seems fitting that said corpse is played by Johnny Knoxville. The same team of assassins that killed that guy is later trying to kill a morbidly obese man, and they can't get through the neck fat as he struggles and throws food at them. A cute French Bulldog gets shot as a kind of funny joke/John Wick reference. It's that sort of movie.

 The premise is ridiculous and kind of funny: to keep its financial books in the green, a company that manages assassins decides to activate a clause where if one of their employed assassins dies, their pensions go back to the company. The way to activate it is by assassinating said assassins, of course. Might be just me, but that doesn't sound like a great long-term strategy... might not foster a lot of confidence in the assassins you send to kill the senior assassin employees. And of course, they didn't count on one of their assassins being so preternaturally good that he can assassinate the assassins sent to assassinate him, and a small army besides. Sorry, got carried away; Assassin is a fun word.

Ol' Kaiser is a couple of weeks off hitting fifty, the mandatory retirement age at his company, so his grotesque goblin of a  boss Blut (Matt Lucas, a British comedian I dislike whose main schtick is being cringeworthy) sends him off to kill a target in Minsk. Of course it's a trap, but in a clever move Kaiser kills the target just after formally accepting the job, so the ambush is foiled.

 Blut then sends the A-team after him, which takes a whole chunk of the movie as they track Kaiser via the information they got from his accountant. The A team are a bunch of young hotshots that dress in very tacky outfits and callously kill all witnesses. Not a great bunch of characters, but memorable, and the movie does a good job of making them hateable.

 Meanwhile Kaiser-let's start calling him by his name, Duncan, this is getting a little weird. Meanwhile Duncan, beginning his retirement on a small town in the American north (polar?) befriends his young neighbour Camille (Vanessa Hudgens), who's carrying some obvious damage around. I'm guessing this is why Netflix's stupid little blurb describes the film as " 'John Wick' meets 'The Professional' ".

 As you might expect, the storylines converge and the A-team try to take Duncan out in his cabin (with a honeypot trap that features highly acrobatic sex; Duncan is indeed good at everything.
 And that includes taking out teams of assassins. In a surprising move, the whole A-team except one is killed while we're still in the second act. So Duncan then needs to go face off against Blut and the rest of the organization (a bunch of faceless goons, booo) to save Camille. There's a few complications (a surprising amount of stuff happens during this movie), but things get resolved more or less as you'd expect.

 It's pretty comedic in tone, and the jokes are very hit or miss... I guess the good news is that some of them are pretty funny, then. The action is not great (very quick edits, and the moves are fairly basic - nothing approaching the grace or invention that we'd seen by then in the Wicks and Atomic Blonde). But director Jonas Åkerlund has been doing videos since forever, so it's pretty stylish; a lot of that style is unfortunately channeled towards the annoying 'in your face!' aforementioned crassness, but there are a lot of good bits too, and it always shows Mikkelsen in the most badass of lights possible, which is the correct approach in this sort of film.
 The soundtrack is pretty good, too, courtesy of Deadmau5.

 It's not a bad movie, exactly, but the story kind of deflates like that erection at the beginning, and the various resolutions end up being somewhat unsatisfying. There's way too much time spent with Hudgens character that doesn't seem to be going anywhere - nice character building moments, to be sure, but a bit extraneous - and when the twist arrives that finally makes sense of her character, it almost feels like an afterthought after she's been fridged for so long. I dunno, Mads Mikkelsen as John Wick deserved better than a forgettable Netflix #content catalog filler, but I wouldn't be against watching a sequel.

Scare Package I & II

 The Scare Package movies are a couple of goofy low-budget horror comedies consisting of a bunch of skits tied together by a ridiculous framing device that ends up being a little more involved than that - I'd say the framing device takes up about a third or more of each movie. Their main thing is being very meta, and all about horror.

 The first movie starts very promisingly. The first sketch is about the guy who goes around in the background of the horror movies we watch, making it so that scary things can happen: he changes the road signs so that the tourists end up at the abandoned mental asylum, he cuts the lights when the babysitter is home alone, he rents out the house with the obvious ghost to the unsuspecting couple. Scene-setting, basically, but within each movie's fiction. It's a fun, clever concept, and they manage to take it to some respectably ridiculous places.

 Once that's done the framing device kicks in - it turns out this first sketch was somebody telling Chad, a video store owner about his idea for a movie (called, wait for it... 'Cold Open'). There's a new guy starting work at the store, so it's an excuse to show a couple more sketches - the second one is a doozy, a not particularly clever but very funny bit of mayhem about... Jesus, something about a weird lycanthrope and a serial killer going at it on a couple's retreat in the middle of the woods. It's a lot of fun, and boasts some pretty great gore.

 After that, unfortunately, the movie goes a bit downhill. The skits from there on range from merely ok to terrible, and the last forty minutes go back to the framing device, where the video store guy gets forcefully inducted into a sort of facility where scientists are studying an actual slasher. The slasher breaks free and starts murdering everyone, the good guys fall into horror 'types', with Chad the video store guy pointing out the tropes and shit. It's kind of fun and reasonably clever, but all the ground it covers has already been covered, and better, a few times before.

 Now, humor of course is subjective, so I can see someone really enjoying this thing; on the other hand, a typical joke is someone getting graphically disembowelled and saying "Owie!". So...

 All in all, I guess I'd describe it as 'cute'. You could turn it off after the first few skits, but the rest is honestly not too bad. I wish I could say the same about the sequel.

 Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge is an absolute pile of crap I would steer anyone away from, even people who loved the first one. It's a fucking joyless slog that didn't make me laugh a single time. It looks a bit slicker than the first one, more assured, but the contents - including the gore, which is nowhere near as memorable - are pretty cringeworthy. And while the first one was full of references, this one enshrines specific references as jokes. It's not quite as bad as a Friedman/Seltzer movie... wait, you know what? Yes, yes it is, exactly as bad. And I can think of no worse insult to a would-be-comedy.

 The only thing to recommend it is a British sketch that pastiches Re-Animator, Pet Cemetery and a couple other movies, but with pretty young kids as the protagonists and gets respectably gory. It's not great, but it's as good as it gets here, and gets a pretty good joke as the mom character says she's going to soundproof the basement for no reason.

 Oh, and there's a mildly funny spoof of Dr. Loomis in another sketch (that's itself a sequel to a sketch from the first movie.) And that's it. I've run out of nice things to say about this one.

 

Get Duked

 This one's a very slight, pretty likeable horror comedy about a bunch of lads who get dragged into being the most dangerous game while tripping balls on a hiking trip in the Scottish highlands.

 The lads in question are a trio of misfits played by Lewis Gribben (the dumb the dumbest one), Rian Gordon (the down to earth one) and Viraj Juneja (a vain would-be hip hop star who calls himself DJ Beatroot). They're forced to take part in the Duke of Edinburgh award to atone for burning down a bloc of toilets while trying to find out if shit is flammable. Yes, it's that kind of movie.

 The Duke of Edinburgh award is a (real-life) UK scheme to get teens to do sports, community work, outdoor activities, that sort of thing; in this case our boys have to complete a two-day hike across the Scottish highlands, overseen remotely by their teacher (Jonathan Aris). The lads are joined by a nerdy, middle-class kid (Samuel Bottomley) who voluntarily signed up for the challenge because "it'll look good on my CV".

 The foursome set into the wilderness and immediately get into some mild misadventures involving teen idiocy, electrified fences, and magic mushrooms. The humour is all low-key, affable, and the movie's sympathies rest squarely on the kids; There's some awkwardness between them, but none of the bullying or drama you might expect from a story focusing on three problem students lumped in with a more affluent, nerdy one. Just a bunch of goofy knuckleheads given just enough depth to give the movie a little bit of a thematic kick, portrayed affectionately by writer/director Ninian Dorf even as he constantly takes the piss out of them. They're the film's biggest asset.

 The horror (and I use the term loosely) kicks in when they start being chased around the hills and heaths by an armed posh gentleman (Eddie Izzard) and his wife (Georgie Glen), who keep spouting classist drivel about how they need to cull the herd of insouciant (read: low-class) teens; Subtle, this ain't.
 But it is pretty funny that the lads think he's the actual Duke of Edinburgh.

 Ostensibly a horror-comedy, the horror side of things is all but inexistent even as it drives the plot. It's all about character-based humour and a welcome absurdist streak.
 Besides the character stuff, Get Duked scores some of its biggest laughs with its most gruesome (it's not very gruesome) black-humor joke: some business involving a little vehicular manslaughter (and I've just realized it might be a reference to Terry Jones's Erik the Viking. Is that a first?) It also includes a full meat-headed hip hop song courtesy of DJ Beatroot, of course, and some fun running gags. 
Quite a bit of the jokes don't land, though: everything to do with the provincial police officers sniffing around the edge of the goings-on, for example, is pretty unfunny (even the great Kate Dickey can't save that drivel.) There are also some low-rent psychedelic scenes that didn't really work for me... but to be honest that's the sort of filler you'd expect in a low-budget stoner-adjacent comedy like this.

 It's a likeable but wafer-thin movie that struggles to fill out its allotted eighty-seven minutes. Good thing the dumbasses at its heart are decent fun to hang around with.