Hawk and Rev: Vampire Hunters

 I should by all rights hate a movie where everyone is constantly mugging for the cameras, or where most of the jokes barely qualify as humour. It shouldn't work. Hell, I'd say it doesn't work for most of its runtime. But Hawk and Rev: Vampire Slayers is so relentlessly good-natured and likeable that it's almost impossible to be down on this goofy, weightless little indie film.

 Writer/director Ryan Barton-Grimley stars as Philip 'Hawk' Hawkins, a stunted man-child whose life was derailed after killing another soldier at boot camp with a 2x4 because 'he was a vampire'. Unfortunately, the flashback doesn't really show how he managed to do it.

 Hawk now camps out on a tent at his parent's yard after they threw him out of the house, splitting his time between a dead-end security job and doing tai chi at the beach with his best bud Rev (Ari Schneider), a hippie in all but name.

 The plot, such as it is, kicks off when Hawk sees a bunch of goth dudes sneaking into one of the warehouses he's supposed to watch over. After surveiling them for a while with Rev's help, they decide to go on the offensive, and enlist the help of a guy Hawk met at prison (Richard Gayler) as a vampire-hunting mentor. They're later joined by the clerk at a the santeria they buy holy water from (Jana Savage), who also starts dating Hawk.

 There is a twist, of sorts, but the film mostly consists of Hawk and Rev or some combination of the cast fooling around, seemingly trying to make each other laugh. It's absolutely shameless - I wasn't kidding before when I said everyone keeps mugging all the fucking time, or that the humour barely works; There are multiple slow-motion montages where our heroes strut for the cameras to the music, and someone usually stumbles - you know, basic, lowest common denominator comedy.
 But Barton-Grimley and his crew add a bit of unexpected panache to every other scene; I'm not going to say it looks good, because it's amateurish as hell, but it's clear they're experimenting with different techniques, going for a certain Edgar-Wright-like energy... and sometimes, it's close enough. The soundtrack is fairly good, too - a surprising amount of folk-adjacent rock alongside the expected original 80's mid-tempo butt rock ballad about how Hawk and Rev save the day/fighting vampires and chasing them away. I mean, honestly, when that song comes on with a hilariously abrupt edit over a spot-on '80s throwback title card... I laughed, hard. That aspect of the film at least is genuinely well-made.

 This is basically outsider cinema, with a budget at the level of a regional production - the film's profile was raised a little thanks to COVID wiping the cinematic slate when it came out, but it's got the DiY ethos of a bunch of friends entertaining themselves. The few special effects there are, in particular the CGI bloodshed, look absolutely terrible - but then again, they're pretty epic for this movie.
There are long stretches where the film is almost painfully to watch - Rev's antics, in particular, will break many viewers; He's got the same type of really grating energy that Michael Moriarty displays on Q: The winged serpent - but less actorly and way more 'wacky'. But soon afterwards someone will pipe up with a completely bizarre line or a joke that's so off-beat, it just works; By the end I was mostly on the film's side, and a series of pretty funny vignettes that run alongside the end credits cemented that. I can't in good conscience recommend this movie to anyone, but God help me, I actually found it enjoyable.

Fried Barry

 Barry (Gary Green) is a waste of skin - a strung out old junkie who only lives for his next heroin fix and mistreats everyone around him, including a wife (Chanelle de Jager) and a young son. So when said skin is taken over by mysterious aliens who want to hijack a local to experience life in Cape Town, it's no big loss. It's sort of like Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, but in this one the alien gets injected into Barry's body through his uretra. Complete with an explicit shot of (a prosthetic) lil' Barry.

 Alien Barry walks around Cape town for the next few days encountering the seedy side of town's Troma-like misfits and miscreants. He quickly discovers drugs and dance clubs - a combination that gets him laid almost immediately. It's good that he has some moves, because... well, because he looks like this:

Minus the blood, of course. Though I wouldn't be surprised if that was also a turn-on for the ladies in this film.

 It's a shaggy dog story, one where the metaphorical dog spends most of its time metaphorically licking its anus for our benefit. It's not nearly as skeevy or exploitative as it could have been if, say, Lloyd Kaufman and friends had told the story, but it's nevertheless sleazy and willingly confrontational; Most of the humour consists in Barry being confronted with some bizarre situation (usually involving sex or drugs) and then... barely reacting. It's pretty funny, if you click with the film's rhythms and sensibilities. Later things escalate to a couple more involved, sillier and stranger encounters, but the film never really goes completely nuts; it's more subdued than you'd think. And it's got a not insignificant thread of humanity running through it, which keeps it from collapsing into a nihilistic mess.

 Writer/director Ryan Kruger expanded his own short (called... Alien Dick) to feature length, and while it has all the problems that tends to bring with hit he's successful in keeping things varied enough that the film remains mostly enjoyable to the end - it could have done with some tightening, but the film's rambling nature is an integral part of its... well, let's call it charm.

 Most of the acting is fine if you consider most are probably non actors, and there's a heavily improvisational vibe to the whole endeavour. Gary Green is a good foil for everyone around him going full ham - At least going by IMDB, the guy seems to be mostly a stuntman, so good job Ryan Kruger for getting him an actual role. The other person who stands out is Chanelle de Jager, who acts as if she was in a Cassavetes family melodrama - which of course makes the jokes funnier, and imbues her eventual arc with an odd sweetness. A few other characters make an impression - a motormouth friend (Sean Cameron Michael) and a surprisingly convincing psycho (Jonathan Pienaar) in particular.

 It sounds great, with the band Haezer providing a pulsing techno soundtrack that goes well with the action (the mix is a bit off at times, though) and it looks pretty good for a near 0-budget production, too; Kruger and cinematographer Gareth Place scoring some fairly cool-looking shots. There's next to no special effects, barely any bloodshed, and the couple of action scenes are serviceable but pay more attention to, say, a guy shitting on the floor than to the shootout around him.

 And that is, I think, the film in a nutshell in a nutshell. Someone running around some hallways taking potshots with an automatic rifle, but the most important thing in the frame is some random dude taking a dump on the linoleum. The same director and some of the cast got to remake 80's oddity Street Trash last year, and they all seem like a perfect fit for the material; Can't wait to check it out.

Tales of the Uncanny

 COVID hit while Severin films were working on a documentary about the history of horror anthology films. This ended up being a godsend, as it gave them ready access through online video to a bunch of industry experts who had nothing to do. They rack up an impressive sixty-one talking heads - from appreciative bystanders and fans like Ramsey Campbell and Simon Barrett, to people who've actually been involved in crafting one or more anthology films - people like Joe Dante, Roger Corman and Kevin Connor.

 It's intended more as a broad survey than any sort of exhaustive history, and at times it just feels like a hangout movie where a bunch of people enthusiastically stump for movies they love; There's very little negativity to be found here.
 It's also almost 90% fluff. But given the amount and scope of talent assembled, there's bound to be a lot of little interesting bits of information on the films being discussed.

 The films discussed are loosely organized by date, starting with their origins in German silent films, which were then imported into the United States as filmmakers like Fritz Lang emigrated there before the war. A lot is made of Dead of Night, and there's a fun discussion about Amicus films, including a running commentary from people who were involved with various of their productions.

 There's a big section on TV anthologies - a couple movies Dan Curtis made from Richard Matheson stories, and TV shows like Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone, Night Gallery and Tales from the Darkside - before returning to more cinematic offerings. Creepshow 1 & 2 have an outsized presence, while other films are barely mentioned; it feels a little counterintuitive to spend so much time on films most people with even a passing interest in this format would have already seen, but there you go.

 It's still a fun, breezy overview over a genre that sometimes slips under the radar; If nothing else, it's given me a list of films that I need to track down now.

The Toll / The Toll Man

 After some delays with her flight, Cami (Jordan Hayes) arrives too late after a cross-country flight to get a lift from the family she's come to visit. So she gets a ride from an app on her phone, and hopes for the best. The best, at least in that area at two in the morning, seems to be Spencer (Max Topplin).

 I have no idea what the other end of, say, the Uber app looks like for the driver, but here it's a tinder-like affair where Spencer gets to swipe through several people asking for rides near him until he settles on Cami. To drive the point home, it even includes a profile picture. It might be unintentional, but this already sets up an interesting imbalance between the driver and the passenger.

 As if being chauffeured through the backwoods late at night by a stranger wasn't already fraught enough, Spencer also acts like a total creep - oversharing, making inappropriate comments, listening in and commenting on a personal call. Its enough to make Cami discreetly reach for her mace even before Spencer mentions he likes to hunt with bows and arrows, and jokes about human prey. Dude.

 The tensions come to a head when the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, after taking a side road that Cami does not recognize, but Spencer swears was on the GPS. Unfortunately for them that stretch of road is haunted by Toll Man - a supernatural creature with reality bending powers who won't let anyone out of its domain unless he's paid his due.... in blood! (cue the screen slowly turning red.) Now these two people who barely trust each other must band together to try and survive the night.

 

 The Toll Man is actually an interesting concept - I won't spoil what he's all about, but there's a little exposition delivered by a crazed-looking passerby (Rosemary Dunsmore) that outlines the bones of a pretty original and fairly cool mythology. Sadly, his methods of fucking around with his prey are mainly low-level manipulations and manifesting representations of deeply held traumas in a way that comes off as both sleazy and superficial. He's also not much of a presence in the film, leaving most of the dirty work to a band of unscary masked helpers and a bunch of hallucinations.
 It's all pretty far from being either original or cool, and coupled with some further tiresome bickering between the two leads, it brings down most of the third act. To top it off there's a weak twist that fails to add anything to the story, recontextualize things, or even surprise in any meaningful way.

 Things are fine on the technical front - it looks decent, only faltering when attempting to convey the uncanny with a budget that doesn't stretch far enough to even get some decent costumes for the ghouls. Aesthetically it's got a couple nice images (I liked the play of headlights on the treeline, for example) and it looks fairly slick, but other than that it's your typical modern, too-dark night-in-the-woods filmmaking.

 The acting is probably the film's strongest point, and both characters are easy to sympathize with - Spencer, as it turns out, is seemingly just awkward and a bit of a dumbass, while Cami's a resourceful and observant young woman in a very relatable bind from the get-go. Writer/Director Michael Nader supports both of them with his script, to a point, although it descends into having them just blurt out their fears and motivations every so often.

 Sadly, things get sillier and sillier once the supernatural elements come to the fore. It doesn't help that most of the would-be scares and revelations feel like padding, making an eighty-minute film feel longer than it has any right to.

 Shame, because both the setup and the actual premise of the movie had some potential. Those strengths, and the execution of the movie's first half almost makes me want to overlook how badly it botches things afterwards. Almost.

Spiritwalker (Yucheitalja)

 Kang I-an (Yoon Kye-sang) wakes up in a car crash, his memory gone; Whenever he looks in any reflective surface (and there are a lot of them at hand in this movie), he sees another man's face. It's unclear how, but it seems he knows he's not in his own body, something that's driven violently home when a few hours later reality shifts around him and he finds himself in the body of a completely different man.

 Every twelve hours, like clockwork. he's dropped in the shoes of a someone from within a group of what ends up being a bunch of really shady people. Making things more complicated, the people he inhabited are still walking around, the twelve hours he spent in their body completely forgotten.

 Kang I-an (Ian? Ian!) enlists the help of a (pretty unfunny) homeless comedy sidekick to try and figure out what's happening, and finds that everyone he's been possessing is part of some ill-defined conspiracy. What's more, they're somehow related to the fate of a certain badass lady (Lim Ji-yeon) he feels compelled to seek out and protect.

 Ian Spiritwalker's situation is immediately engaging, but it loses a lot of steam very quickly: unwieldy dialog, a confusing throughline, and a rotating cast of poorly defined characters to act as the protagonist often threaten to do the movie in. The prosaic, boring conspiracy at the heart of the movie and a hilariously terrible explanation for Ian's superpower don't exactly redeem things either.

 It's that slickness, along with a relatively fleet pace and some pretty good action, that ultimately make the movie a success. Director Yoon Jae-geun can't quite hammer his script into a good narrative, but it's expertly seasoned with car chases, close-quarter scraps and firefights (which end up becoming a close-quarter firefight for the obligatory John Wick-influenced finale). There's not nearly as many action sequences as I would have liked, but they're all a lot of fun and full of neat stunts which the sometimes over-busy camerawork captures well. I also appreciated how analog a lot of it is (not always a given with modern Korean cinema), especially an excellent car chase and some very chunky explosive work to mark bullet impacts.

 It's a little too slick for its own good - a fun time, but not particularly memorable. The acting is fine, and I imagine everyone involved relished the challenge of differentiating their normal personas from those times they're being puppeteered by Ian. You can definitely tell who was good with the martial arts and who wasn't based on the editing style used for their fight scenes (which are a little too reliant on quick cuts even at their best).

 The only distinct character besides the mystery woman and comedy indigent is (I think) Yoo Seung-mok, playing a coked-out corrupt cop who's channeling the same over-the-top villainy as Gary Oldman in The Professional. Elsewhere, a betrayal from a supposedly major character treated by the movie as a momentous event barely even registers, which is oddly emblematic of the film's problems.

Dead

 He's a straight-arrow supercop who may not be that straight after all. He's a sweet-natured slacker who can see ghosts when he gets high. They fight crime!

 And that's enough of these early internet proto-memes; Am I showing my age or what?

 I first found out about Dead, a New-Zealand horror comedy (what else could it be?) after reading up a bit about last year's lovely Loop Track. As it turns out, co-stars Hayden J. Weal and Thomas Sainsbury had written a movie together previously - they're both in front of the camera as well, but Weal directed. I'm glad I checked it out, it's a good time.

 Tagg (Weal) is... Dead - the seventh victim of the very serial killer he was trying to catch. That obviously qualifies as leaving unfinished business, so he comes back as a ghost eager to catch the killer and avenge his own murder. Luckily, he happens to know a medium...

 Sainsbury plays that medium, Marbles, introduced in a stunning (and very funny) sequence that cuts across a few of his "jobs" as he counsels people who think they're haunted. Marbles patiently relays messages between a widow and her recently dead husband, confirms to another woman her husband doesn't seem to have lingered on after his death, and tells another man that the ghost of his hairdresser has 'curdled' in the downstairs loo ("Do you have another bathroom? Well, use that, I reckon"). He doesn't even charge the last two customers.

 It's an impressively written scene - funny, heartfelt, beautifully edited, and it does a great job both establishing the rules of this movie's ghosts and the character of Marbles (basically: what if Michael J. Fox's character from The Frighteners was an amiable stoner with a heart of gold?)

 Tagg's ghost zeroes in on Marbles, and conscripts him to help in his post-mortem investigation. The case spreads out to encompass Tagg's intense sister (Tomai Ihaia, very funny in a too-small role), Marble's mother (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) and a few other colourful characters.

 Sadly, the first act is by far the best. Somewhere around the middle things get more than a little contrived, and although the script straightens away most of the coincidences, it never really recovers. That, combined with its very low-key humour (there are some good jokes, but unevenly spread, and even the best are more likely to get a chuckle than a laugh) conspires to make the movie feel like a little bit of a misfire.

 But it'd be a mistake to focus on that. There's a lovely (if trite) message about the importance of grieving and letting go that's fairly well integrated into the story, the buddy comedy works very well - as in Loop Track, both Weal and Sainsbury are fun to watch and have good chemistry together - and the film's gentle sense of humour makes it easy to root for the movie even as it gets lost in the woods for a while with a subplot about a predatory creep played by Cameron Rhodes.

 Asides from some pretty effective makeup effects (which dress up ghosts who are too far gone as zombies), the script cleverly lays things out in a way that its supernatural elements can be portrayed with very affordable effects (color correction, mostly, to show when Marbles is under the influence). Weal's direction is professional enough, except for a couple of sequences that try to show Marble's drugs taking effect.

 Shame about the plot, but at a breezy ninety minutes, that's not a deal-breaker. It's the characters that make this one worthwhile. 

 

Initiation

 Initiation, or to use its proper name, initiexclamationmarktiation is a fairly cool American slasher movie from a couple of years back.

 I almost checked out at first, as the movie tracks some idiots at a university frat house and a sorority and all the stupid shit they get up to. I mean, it's a good way to get me to look forward to some asshats getting butchered, but it still means that we need to endure watching such hallmarks of university culture like hazings and pledges and all that shit. It's a subject that holds negative interest to me.

 Thankfully it's not long before the movie mostly drops that aspect and gets to be at its most harrowing: When well-liked sorority member Ellery (Lindsay LaVanchy) is alerted that one of the her girls went upstairs and hasn't come back, she goes up running to find a frat douche standing guard in front of a locked door. After much knocking, she finds the girl, Kylie (Isabella Gomez) completely passed out on a bed, and two frat brothers -one of them Ellery's brother (Froy Gutierrez)- nonchalantly milling about.

 It's a really intense, extremely unsettling scene. Ellery and a friend carry Kylie off, and the way everyone tamps down on what they're obviously thinking to maintain appearances adds another nasty layer to the whole shitshow.

 Ellery is torn between protecting her brother (who already had some nasty allegations filed against him, mostly covered up by the university) and trying to find out what really happened, so she starts investigating on her own. Kylie is convinced that she was assaulted, but is terrified of reporting it. Meanwhile the frat douchebags carry on as they would...

 ...until the murders start. First up: Ellery's brother and likely rapist Wes, who gets pinned to a wall by a killer with a metallic mask and a power drill. And then we're off to the races; The police arrive, headed by a detective played by Yancy Butler, and start butting heads with the powers-that-be at the university (mostly Lochlyn Munro as the principal). Both are powerless to stop further murders.

 It's one of those slasher movies that tries to function as a whodunnit, though the mystery aspects are (as usual) completely botched; Don't even bother trying to figure things out, as it's one of those where all the clues are withheld from the audience until after the killer is revealed. The film even does one of those recaps pointing out how it seeded hints as to the slasher's identity, to which my reaction was way closer to "seriously?" than the "oh, right" it was trying to elicit.

 So that's a pretty big strike against the script (by director John Bernardo plus Lindsay LaVanchy and Brian Frager). There are also a few weak points on the plotting department, some pacing issues, and the ending doesn't make any damn sense, but I guess those are things you'll inevitably run into with an attempt to make a (slightly more) realistic slasher movie.
 On the positive side, it successfully humanizes its characters - a tall order after we've seen them willingly subject themselves to some of the stupidest power structures in existence (some spotty acting doesn't help). The story it tells is also mostly enjoyable, and there are a couple decently suspenseful scenes. Technically it looks professional enough, and not much else - there's a couple of scenes backlit with a lurid, giallo-esque red light, but they seem more of a happy accident than any sort of attempt at an aesthetic; The kills themselves are bloody but unimaginative, a fairly minor component of the movie.

 The script is not subtle or particularly deep about its themes; Social media plays a role, with overlays detailing what people are doing on their phones or how others are reacting, but it doesn't really impact the plot a huge amount - even a dumb subthread that explains the exclamation sign in the movie's title comes off as an afterthought. It's also disappointing that the victim of the sexual assault ends up being a minor footnote in the events that follow, overshadowed by someone who is part of the problem. Well, ok, that last part is kind of cool, if intentional.

 It's all right. Slightly meatheaded, but also a little more mature and nuanced than I expected. Another non-standard, likeable slasher.

Caveat

 Isaac (Johnathan French) is recovering from an accident that made him lose some of his memory when Moe (Ben Caplan), a friend, offers him some money to go look after his niece Olga (Leila Sykes).

 The first caveat is that the girl lives alone in a remote, nearly uninhabited island. Her mother's gone missing, and she needs someone around because she suffers from some sort seizures that leave her catatonic for a while. The other, slightly major caveat is that Isaac is forced to wear a sort of leather harness chained to a flagstone in the basement that severely restricts his movement around the house. Moe insists that Olga will not allow him to stay in the house otherwise, but it's still a bit of a dick move to spring that at the very last minute; That guy's probably up to no good.

 Olga, when she's not under a catatonic spell, wanders around with a crossbow (which she explains she uses to hunt foxes). She mentions that her mother was quite mad before going missing, and that her dad killed himself when he got locked up in the attic (he shot himself out of extreme claustrophobia).

 For a while Isaac wanders around the house's dilapidated halls and rooms, experiencing mild hauntings of the sort that just might have a non-horror movie explanation. But then he finds a creepy-ass clockwork rabbit with bulging eyes that acts as a dowsing rod but for scary shit, and it helps him find the missing mother's corpse immured in the cellar.

 He confronts Olga about it, and things get a bit complicated - the mystery hinges on some of his lost memories, and as things develop he's forced to fight for his life to escape a tiny conspiracy that keeps shifting shapes as new events come to light.

 The pacing is a bit glacial, but that goes with its 'modern gothic' subgenre; A little too slow in parts, but it methodically builds up towards some truly effective scares. The requisite atmosphere is strong, thanks to some great work from cinematographer Kieran Fitzgerald and a very solid production design (that rabbit, crafted by Lisa Zagone, is a fucked-up wonder). It's an impressively realized, very focused low-budget production.

 Writer/director Damian Mc Carthy keeps his cards close to his chest at all times, giving out morsels of information with very little exposition to go with them. It's never arbitrary, though - there's a strong sense that there's a solid explanation for everything that's going on, including the seemingly supernatural events; Just what that explanation is, though, may vary from person to person.
 I'm still poking at it, trying to figure out this or that, the exact way its elements hang together - Caveat lingers in the imagination, and that's an unequivocal sign of success.

Shadows

  Alma (Mia Threapleton) and Alex (Lola Peticrew) live with their mother (Saskia Reeves) in a derelict hotel in the middle of the woods. An unspecified cataclysm has come to pass, making daylight dangerous for the girls due to some unspecified presence. Only the mother goes out to hunt, and even then, always at night time.

 They've staked out a pretty good life for themselves; Mother is a bit of a survivalist, so she's a good provider, and the hotel provides enough comfort and space for the two teens to explore and play.

 But all's not well at the Starlight Hotel; The younger one, Alex, chafes under Mother's strict discipline, getting Alma repeatedly into trouble. And Mother, always overprotective, becomes increasingly erratic and threatening as her control over the girls seems to wane.

 Italian/Irish co-production Shadows is a fairly straightforward... let's call it post-apocalyptic psychological thriller; There's something almost old-fashioned about it, a confident, unhurried pace that lets us spend time with the girls as events escalate towards an inevitable confrontation with their Mother. There's a couple of twists - one of them fairly easy to guess, the other one completely unnecessary, both of them unoriginal - but it's a satisfactory ending nonetheless.

 It's a slight movie that slightly overstays its welcome and doesn't really do a lot to imprint itself on memory, but it's very, very accomplished. The script (by Damiano Brué, Fabio Mollo and Vanessa Picciarelli) has a good feel for dialogue, rendering the teens likeable and lending tension to their fraught relationship with Mother. There's not a huge amount of psychological depth to these characters or their relationships, so it's a good thing that the three leads are more than up to the task of breathing life into them, with the siblings in particular sharing a great, lived-in chemistry; They easily carry the film.

 Director Carlo Lavagna carefully maps out their life in the hotel, and along with cinematographer James Mather imbues the exterior, both daytime and nighttime, with a sense of menace. They do experiment a couple of times with shots that try to capture the girls' subjective experience, with mixed results.

 Meanwhile the reedy soundtrack by Michele Braga, featuring lots of '70s-style atonal winds, further reinforces the film's classic feel.

May the Devil Take You Too (Sebelum Iblis Menjemput: Ayat Dua)

 Not even two years after surviving a demonic ordeal that would wipe out their family, Alfie (Chelsea Islan) and Nara (Hadijah Shahab) are approached by a group of young orphans who suffered their own brush with another demon-summoning father figure.

 When I say approach, what I mean is that they break into their apartment with ski masks and kidnap them. The orphans are enthusiastic, but really, really not very bright; It makes for a high-energy home invasion scene, at least, and it keeps tensions high later when Alfie is understandably angry at these idiots, even after they apologize and explain their situation.

 Sadly, that's a running theme in this sequel to May the Devil Take You: It sacrifices sense and intelligence in an unholy pact to keep its energy high at all times. It's sporadically successful, but it makes for a pretty dumb movie.

 Other than that the basic setup is decent... if you can get over the whole abduction scenario. Sigh. Like the first movie, it starts off with very slightly more "subtle" scares (if you can call ghouls jumping straight at the camera or leering very visibly in the background subtle) as ghosts haunt Alfie and her new acquaintances. Then Alfie is tricked to read from a leatherbound journal that bears a striking similarity to the Necronomicon Ex Mortis from Evil Dead, allows the ghost of the orphans' father to come back from the dead... and the film starts putting the new cast through the wringer one by one.

Not sure why, but the specters in these movies look really jolly to me.

 The orphans (Widika Sidmore, Baskara Mahendra, Lutesha, Karina Salim and Arya Vasco) are all thinly drawn types, so even after Alfie warms towards them a tiny bit their demises don't really register. The level of mayhem is kept up admirably, though, even when it's a cavalcade of concepts borrowed from other horror movies with a special place set, as always, for Evil Dead (besides the book, there's also a satanic basement with a familiar-looking trap door and several other direct lifts from Raimi's body of work; It's definitely upfront about its inspirations).

 All that said there's a lot of fun to be had in seeing what writer/director Timo Tjahjanto does next and how he goes about it, and the movie as a whole is enjoyable as an unpretentious slice of low-budget nastiness. Its story is not as effective as the first movie's, but it goes about its grim business with similar aplomb and a sense of humour, and there's enough variety that it's never boring.

Because the register is always kept as high as possible, most of the acting is dialled up to eleven; there are a lot of screamed conversations in this movie, and some unfortunate overacting. I liked Chelsea Islan's work as Alfie in part one, but she's no Bruce Campbell (not a slam; only one person is), and her deranged emoting on a few key scenes here, while clearly modelled after Ash, doesn't work very well as the tone is closer to the original Evil Dead than to the more comedic sequels.

 The film does get a little more ambitious in its third act, though not in a particularly interesting way, and it's underserved by its budget (it attempts to use CGI to portray both fire and things crawling under the skin, two types of effects that remain notoriously difficult to pull off even for productions with much more money at their disposal). Still, it does take the series in a different direction; We'll see where the upcoming second sequel ends up, but I'm up for a Sebelum Iblis Menjemput: Ayat Tiga / May the Devil Take You Thrice where the victims get a little more agency.

Ghosts of War

 OK, let me pull up a chair for this one, it's a lively one.

 Five airborne troopers are tasked to guard a French chateau at the very tail end of world war 2. The group consists of a bunch of walking war movie clichés: The intellectual (Skylar Astin), the all-American brash idiot (Alan Ritchson), the idealistic leader (Brenton Thwaites) and another one (Theo Rossi). The most interesting one is Kyle Gallner as a sort of sadistic space cadet; He's a lot of fun.

 The war movie aspects are mostly well done for a B-movie like this - a pulpy encounter with a nazi jeep on the way to the chateau is a good one, and later there's a defense of the house where the gang gets some unexpected assistance from... gh-gh-gh-ghosts.

 Ghosts of War is firmly on the tacky, gleefully cheesy side of horror. Think the shittier Blumhouse stuff - or even the production logo they put before their movies: Lots of jump scares, with the spirits basically lining up to pose all spooky-like for the camera.
 Here's an example: One of the soldiers is sweeping the manor grounds with his sniper scope, looking for nazis. He passes by a few statues on plinths quickly, except that last one was a creepy zombie statue? When he turns the scope back to double-check, the plinth is empty - And then the creepy zombie statue puts his zombie face right in front of the scope to growl at the soldier. Tell me that doesn't sound like something out of Scooby-Doo or Looney Tunes.

What's up, doc?

 I'm not saying I'm against it- this sort of thing can be enjoyable, and it's well made enough to be entertaining. Just... don't expect it to actually be good.
 So spooky stuff starts happening almost immediately as the soldiers are haunted by the family that previously occupied the manor, all of whom, Brainy GI quickly determines, were killed in some sort of nazi ritual (obligatory reference to the nazi higher-ups being a bunch of occult nutjobs).

 Things come to a head when the nazis mount an attack to retake the chateau, and, as mentioned earlier, the ghosts step in to get a piece of fascist-killing action. In the aftermath the sense that things are truly off mounts, and not just because of the haunting - Incident at Owl Bridge gets brought up preemptively, characters behave erratically, someone screams "THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM!" repeatedly.
 It turns out things are indeed not what they seem, leading to a late-movie twist that's incredibly dumb, poorly handled, and batshit fucking insane.

 Writer/director Eric Bress, bless him, seems truly proud of his Shyamalan-esque turn, and commits to it with a passion. There's a very, very poorly written and poorly staged scene showing the why the of the ghosts, Billy Zane (who also has a producer credit) pops up to drop a ream or two of exposition, and the script then proceeds to gleefully point out all the ways that it had foreshadowed the twist throughout the movie. It's all so bad it's inspired, and I couldn't stop laughing.

 It could have worked... maybe, but the heightened spookablast, B-movie tone was never going to carry it.  I guess it's one of those things where they had to try it but it didn't gel. The end result is a pretty bad (but entertainingly so) haunted house yarn going off the deep end in a howlingly funny fashion; I loved it for all the wrong reasons.

 Obligatory apparition of a haunted toy: A piece of string, I guess: it's a game of cat's cradle. Honestly, it's the best part of the movie - part of a tale that's revisited and it keeps getting creepier every time it's told, the one horror element that is truly effective in the movie. It even gets an appropriately over-the-top origin story in the film's ridiculous twist.

She Dies Tomorrow

 Existential horror is not that big a genre - there's horror that gets existential, of course (my go-to would be Kairo; It Follows would be a more recent, popular option), but few genre movies (and probably few non-genre movies, too) are as purely, unapologetically existential as She Dies Tomorrow.

 A jittery anxiety attack of a movie, it drops us off with Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) who's in what at first seems like a deep, deep depression. We watch her as she boozes, sadly browses the internet, rubs herself against the floor and random plants as if she'd just done ecstasy for the first time, and has a sad, awkward conversation with a friend over the phone.

 It's... honestly, it drags. A lot. Be prepared for a lot of moping about. Things pick up a little when the friend she called earlier, Jane (Jane Adams) pops by, and Amy explains to her that she will die tomorrow. No reason, no cause, just the certainty that it will inevitably happen. Her friend, understandably exasperated, leaves her to her funk... but on her drive home realizes that she too will die tomorrow. And on it goes, as Amy spreads thjs conviction at a party to a bunch of other people. Everyone ends up convinced that they will die tomorrow, and the film spends some time with them and tracks how they decide to spend their last twenty-four hours on this earth, and how they spread the misery around.

 It's a deeply bizarre and very leisurely film. There's no central thesis, just people dealing with this sudden certainty; Genre elements are limited to the premise and some imagery to convey people coming to this understanding. There's some very, very understated humor - some of it drily funny, but it's so gentle it barely registers. Very, very little happens.

 I ended up liking it - it's very original and well made (the sound design especially), and I liked how it conveyed irrational thinking. A good mood piece with some sharp writing; Writer/Director Amy Seimetz completed the film before the pandemic hit in full, which makes it remarkable how much the film captures the surreal feel of those couple years.

 Some parts were a bit of a chore to get through, and it left a remarkably small footprint on my mind - I only watched it yesterday and I'm already unclear on some of its details - but yeah, I enjoyed, slight tedium and all.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Dorosute no Hate de Bokura)

 The premise is irresistible: a fly-in-the-wall's view of how a bunch of friends and co-workers find a window in time that connects two monitors. Whether one of them is anchored two minutes in the past, or the other two minutes in the future, is not a useful way of looking at it - For this bunch of goofballs, it's enough that they can chat with their future selves, and prank their past ones.

 Café owner Kato (Kazunari tosa) discovers the time window when he closes up shop and heads up to his apartment one flight of stairs up. There he receives a message in his Apple TV from himself, who's downstairs, two minutes in the future; so when he incredulously runs to the computer screen downstairs, he finds himself repeating the message he gave himself.

 From there the situation spirals as his much more enthusiastic friends (Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Masashi Suwa, Yoshifumi Sakai and Aki Asakura) get involved, all incredulous at first and then desperate to play with the possibilities allowed by this breach of physics.

 They soon devise an ingenious, Primer-like hack to be able to extend the amount of time they can see forward/back to (by bringing the two monitors to the same room, like a pair of mirrors facing each other), get into trouble with petty criminals, use their time powers to survive, and finally run into the movie's highest-concept time conceit, which comes straight from either a silver-age sci-fi classic or a great 90's action/sci-fi movie, take your pick.

 It's breezy, slight, often very funny, and ridiculously well-made. The film is put together as a series of extremely long takes edited together seamlessly, but unlike obvious inspiration One Cut of the Dead, it doesn't really call attention to the gimmick. The shots are carefully planned and shot with an unobtrusive handheld camera that follows one character or another; Director/cinematographer/editor Junta Yamaguchi deserves a lot of praise for how crisply he presents the action devised by scriptwriter Makoto Ueda.

 The film is terrified of losing anyone to the mild mindfuck at the heart of the story - every time a complication is added, most of the characters basically huddle and explain things to each other, trying to cut things into as small pieces as possible (I was surprised no sock puppets came out at any point). This is the film's biggest problem, as it kills pacing several times in the movie; At least some of it is due to cultural differences, as I've noticed these sort of exposition issues in a lot of Japanese media. The same goes for character's slightly exaggerated personalities and acting.
 The other issues are minor - there's a couple of chicken/egg script problems, as well as a couple of too-convenient elements (just how long are Apple TV cables anyhow?)

 But it feels petty to hold these issues against an otherwise what's essentially an immaculately crafted trifle; It's slight, sure, but it's also ridiculously clever, inventive, and full of energy. The characters are likeable and their fooling around with a potentially mind-breaking glitch in reality entirely endearing.

History of the Occult (Historia de lo Oculto)

 Long-running Argentinian news program 60 Minutes to Midnight aired its last episode in 1987; By then it had been involved in an almost year-long investigation into the death of a John Doe believed to have ties to then-president Belasco.

 Facing backout by all sponsors, censure by the government and a soured relationship with the channel hosting them, the showrunners intended to go out with a bang; Included within the last's episode's guest list was Adrián Marcato (Germán Baudino), an industrialist with deep ties to the president who had cut ties with the government and the company he had helped found to turn into a preacher for the end times. It'd be a last-ditch attempt for the host (Hector Ostrovsky) to try and get the man to tell the truth about the murder... and the president's possible involvement with it.

 While the main show transmitted from its Channel 6 stage, a handful of the programme's journalists (Nadia Lozano, Casper Uncal, Agustín Recondo and Iván Esquerre) toiled away at a remote location, working on a plan that's revealed to be increasingly bizarre as midnight approaches.

 History of the Occult is set in a parallel Argentina where the Falklands have been reclaimed as the Malvinas, native actress Andrea del Bocca starred in The Exorcist, and Rosemary's Baby seems to have been a national production (the film goes on to feature more than one reference to Polanski's masterpiece). It's filmed in black and white with a few shots that evoke noir, and on a 4:3 aspect ratio that keeps the action tight and claustrophobic.

 There are cultural references beyond some specific mentions and the all-pervading, typically Argentinian wariness towards anything government-related. Marcato seems to be pretty clearly modeled after López Rega, an extremely murky historical figure who was linked to both (allegedly) the occult and to far-right death squads; He was known as El Brujo (the warlock), just as Marcato is here.
 A major plot point in the movie involves [MAJOR PLOT POINT SPOILER!] the government erasing people from reality, to the point where no one can remember they ever existed - which mirrors the disappeared (desaparecidos) of semi-recent Argentinian history.

 But the script is very, very oblique, and its themes of hidden power universal enough that I don't think it's necessary to have any grounding in South American history to enjoy this very, very clever and deeply strange  movie. Writer/director Cristian Ponce weaves a tale of intrigue and paranoia that has far-reaching metaphysical implications, leaving vast swathes of its mysteries unexplained and trusting us to pick up enough pieces to build our own interpretation.

 The dialog is sharp, most of the acting is fairly good (with a couple of exceptions), and the cinematography (by Franco Cerana and Camilo Giordano) and sound design ooze atmosphere. It's impossible to miss that this was done with a very low budget, but it works smartly within its limitations without sacrificing the scope of its story.

 I can easily see how someone would find it unsatisfying, but the execution and the drip of new information is handled expertly, and it's a rare movie that attempts to portray weird fiction this weird. It's something truly special.

The Night House

 Top marks for setting the title credits of the movie with Richard and Linda Thompson's Cavalry Cross. Top. Marks.

 The Night House is a solid, weirder-than-it-seems horror movie from director Richard Bruckner, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski: the same team would go on to do 2022's Hellraiser. Freed from comparison to a bona fide masterpiece, I think Night House fares a little better.

 Beth (Rebecca Hall) is a high-school teacher who's recently become a widower - her husband, she explains matter-of-factly in a hilariously awkward confrontation she has with a student's mom, rowed out to the middle of the lake in front of her house, got naked, put a gun to his mouth and... pow.
 As you might surmise from the above, Beth is not taking things well. She understandably does not give a fuck about anything, and there's a brazen abrasiveness to the character that's an absolute joy to watch. I  know people who would handle pain in a similar way, and while I wouldn't necessarily enjoy her company in real life, she makes for an awesome horror movie protagonist. That's something, incidentally, the new Hellraiser also did really well; I'm pretty sure I wrote something along these same lines for that movie's protagonist. But that one didn't have Hall, who's on another level.

 Besides her already fraught psychological state, Beth has to deal with the standard imagery for bereaved spouses. Well-worn stuff, but well-realised and relatable, too: Waking up to see an empty half of the bed, with an indentation still visible on the pillow, or the way everyone hushes when she walks into the room.
 Add to that the standard gauntlet of minor haunting stuff, because, well, this is a horror movie. Cavalry Cross is used that way, blasting out of a stereo in the middle of night. She gets waken up by the sound of a gunshot, has some nightmares, sees barefoot footprints around the house, that sort of thing.

 While cleaning out the house her husband built, going through his stuff, she runs across a few weird things that call her attention: Some drafted house plans which include a reversed, mirror-image set of plans, a couple of occult books (one of them replete with labyrinths, full of notes on how to trick otherworldly entities). A picture of her husband with a woman who looks like her, which leads Beth to find a whole raft of pictures of lookalikes. A miniature reproduction of her house across the lake.

 Beth, whose resentment, confusion, grief and acerbic wit provides her with endless reserves of what we Spanish speakers call Mala Leche (a very rude way to describe aggressive ill will, basically) picks at these threads until she unravels the secrets her husband was keeping from her. It's a pretty cool mystery, a lot more convoluted and crazy than the generic ghost story the movie sets up.
 The main problem is... well, the movie gives us enough information to work everything out before it's even halfway done. Maybe I'm too much of a horror nerd, but there were precious few surprises past a certain point.

 It's very well made, though, with an extremely original 'monster' that kind of makes this flawed movie essential. You know how horror movies use negative space to enhance tension? Well... without spoiling anything, the villain here uses it in a... different way. It's a brilliant, mind-bending conceit I'd never seen before, and Bruckner, his effects team and cinematographer Elisha Christian do a pretty great job of bringing to life. That's worth a lot.

 While the mystery doesn't surprise, it's an excellently creepy movie throughout, with a great handle on creeping dread and a sparingly used but very effective jump scares. The monster is a little too talky for my taste, and that really hurts its mystique, but other than that that and a few other minor issues is a very solid horror movie elevated by Hall's performance and one hell of a concept for the adversary.

 You know how they could have made it better, though? They should really let Cavalry Cross play all the way through. Or least until the guitar solo. #ReleaseTheThompsonCut.

Books of Blood (2020)

 Books of Blood is the second adaptation of the title story (The Book of Blood) in Clive Barker's 1984 non-blood book of stories Books of Blood. It follows 2009's interesting but flawed Book of Blood. All three are about a guy who gets used as a book. Not of blood, but a bloody one.

 I consider myself a lapsed Barker fan, and I completely missed this one until now - that might be because it's a "Hulu original", a service that doesn't exist here in the UK. It has the distinction of being the last Touchstone Television production made before that producer was swallowed whole by Disney.

 Yes, it's a TV movie, but I guess these days that means that it was made for streaming, so there's no shortage of gore or swears. The budget is pretty limited, though. It clearly had aspirations to become a pilot for a series or the first of several anthology films, a la V/H/S, but that never happened.

 After a short prologue where a bookseller tries (unsuccessfully) to not be murdered by some thugs by giving them the location of a book that's purportedly worth millions, we launch the first story: Jenna.

 Jenna (Britt Robertson) is a troubled young woman recovering from some unspecified trauma with her family. Whatever happened, it left her hyper-sensitive to sound, forcing her to wear noise-cancelling headphones.
 Jenna runs away and hops on a bus to San Francisco, but she keeps seeing someone following her. Trying to escape her pursuer, she ends up in a bed and breakfast run by a friendly older couple. Her paranoia ends up being justified when she makes a series of horrifying discoveries, and the reveal of the horror elements of the story is a fun one... but by the time they arrive it's too little, too late. The story is poorly constructed, and meanders back and forth along its forty-minute runtime providing plenty of red herrings and unnecessary detail but no clear reason to care about anything that's happening.

 The second story, Miles, is a loose but fairly faithful adaptation of the original The Book of Blood tale. In it a scientist (Anna Friel) who's recently lost a seven-year old to Leukemia, is confronted by a medium  (Rafi Gavron) who says he can help her get in touch with her son.

 The seance goes well, and the scientist and the medium end up in bed, and also later launching a foundation to promote investigation into paranormal phenomena. The medium is a fake, though, and ghosts are not known to be very forgiving.
 This one is actually pretty good, despite some ropey CGI and a cheesy spooky kid. It plays around with chronology a little in ways that are fun and help the story flow a little better, and the characters are well written and acted.

 The last story - Bennett - follows the gangsters from the introduction as they search for the Book of Blood, which takes them to the same house the second story took place in; in a fun twist, the ghosts taking their revenge on the medium also turned the whole neighbourhood into a sort of post-apocalyptic haunted wasteland. Things do not go well for either thug. This one's an extremely loose adaptation of the short story On Jerusalem Street from the source material, but aside from a couple of neat scenes and checking back in with characters from the other stories, it's a non-starter.

 Finally, there's a sort of epilogue that explains what was up with Jenna from the first story, and her ultimate fate. It's a remarkably fucked-up finale that does a lot to redeem how boring the first segment was.

 Director Brannon Braga and Cinematographer Michael Dellatorre don't manage to inject a lot of personality into the film, but it's not a bad-looking either and there's some great use of aerial footage. Their big score is a cliffside building with giant windows that allows us to see two groups of characters going about their life separately, like two vignettes in a comic book; The movie doesn't find a way to use it in any meaningful way, but it still makes for a couple of great shots.
 The effects are too CGI-dependent for their own good, and at this level of budget that can be a pretty big liability. The gore, despite being graphic, is pretty tame compared to what you'd expect from a Barker adaptation; It also carries none of his trademark horniness, with the film's sole sex scene fading tastefully to black - this is especially egregious after a pretty sensual, non-conventional bit of foreplay as the scientist rubs down the medium looking for hidden devices. Meanwhile, the script (by Braga and Adam Simon) fails to capture Barker's energy, choosing to deliver home-brewed lifeless dialog despite being given a few opportunities to quote the original author verbatim.

 The acting, however, is pretty good, with both Robertson and the ever-dependable Friel turning in good performances.

  So... yeah, I don't know. This is definitely a mixed bag. It ended up winning me over, but it's still pretty damn slight; For anyone interested in this story I'd recommend the 2009 edition. Or better yet, the original books.

32 Malasana Street (Malasaña 32)

 The Olmedo family moves to Madrid from the impoverished countryside, tying what little money they have into an unforgiving mortgage for a fully-furnished apartment.
 Among the furnishings, but not in the brochure: the ghost of the previous resident.

 While the parents (Beatriz Segura and Iván Marcos) go off to their jobs, teenaged sons Amparo and Pepe (Begoña Vargas and Sergio Castellanos) are left to look for jobs and care for an infirm grandfather (José Luis de Madariaga) and tiny five-year-old Rafita (Iván Renedo).

 Of course the ghost takes an interest in little Rafita. She abducts him early on, setting off a chain of events that will eventually pit the whole family against the supernatural. 
 Beyond a couple of really questionable choices and a pervading gerontophobia, the film doesn't really do a lot to distinguish itself. There are some interesting themes about Spanish societal intolerance and conservatism - there's a reason this is set in 1976, with the non-literal specter of Franco still haunting the proceeds; The script does try to weave both its ghost and the family's predicament into them, but to be honest those attempts, or any other story considerations, are drowned out by the film's seeming primary mission to deliver a near-constant barrage of jump scares and horror clichés.
 In other words, it's more interested in behaving like a trashy, mid-tier Blumhouse production.

 

 The jump scares come frequently and cheap, punctuating pretty much every scene and starting right at the prologue. There's fake-outs, ghostly irruptions, orchestral stings, even an angry cat at one point; seriously, no cliché goes unused. They completely crowd out the cooler, quieter conceits (I liked a part where Amparo sees the ghost using a tinted window) and some clever setups.

 This sort of thing can work, but not without a lot more care and craft. As presented here it feels forced and lacks the wit or originality of its more obvious inspirations.
 Instead we get a haunted etch-a-sketch and a mind-bogglingly terrible scene where the ghost addresses Rafita via a TV puppet show with a silly panto voice. No idea if that's some sort of Spanish cultural trauma (in the same way 70's Eastern European animation shorts were for me) but holy shit it seems like a miscalculation. That's where the movie completely lost me.

 As for questionable choices: there's a twist to the ghost story that, given the themes, I think is well-intentioned, but still feels a bit tropey and off. More problematic is the film's use of a paraplegic woman as a possible magical solution to the family's problem. To add insult to injury, it's explained that her mental issues mean that ghosts can easily take over because there's not a lot going on there. Fuck your inner life, lady!

 It's a handsome movie, with some beautiful photography (DP: Daniel Sosa), good acting, and some great staging. The problem is that there's not a lot there beyond a cavalcade of clichés and those iffy twists. I can't really say that director Albert Pintó makes the wrong call by filling it to the brim with cheap shots; Might as well try to scare the few teens that haven't seen this sort of thing a dozen times over, right?

The World We Knew

 British indie horror/crime hybrid The World We Knew is pretty impressively crafted - a consummately professional film that hides its low budget extremely well. It's so well made that it's easy to overlook that the script doesn't really do much with its cool premise ('a bunch of criminals hole up in an haunted hideout') other than let the criminals hang out and maybe see a ghost now and again. Maybe that's enough, when the movie is as engaging as this.

 The criminals are Barker (Struan Rodger), the old hand, experienced and theatrical; Gordon (Johan Myers), boisterous, unpredictable; Stoker (Kirk Lake, also has a writing credit along with director Matthew Jones), who's in it to go legit; And last but not least Poe (Alex Wells), the audience surrogate, a reluctant criminal who nonetheless shot a cop. They're laying low after a job gone wrong (left, as in Reservoir Dogs, an obvious inspiration, off-camera) that left a policeman and one of the criminals dead, and another one of theirs shot and bleeding to death upstairs.
 The location is an old abandoned house in the countryside, and they're left to the tender care of Carpenter (Finbar Lynch in a very Mark Strong role), another criminal who's higher up in the chain and is charged with figuring out what to do with the sorry lot. And when it starts looking like they were set up, that involves making them all stay the night to find out what really happened.

 There is good tension between the characters, and some intrigue - who set them up? Is Carpenter gearing up to kill them all as loose ends? Is Gordon going to snap and shoot up the place? Later things take a supernatural bent as the past starts intruding on the present. All of the plot points fizz out ineffectively, though; there is a twist at the end, but it barely registers. What remains is a quiet, atmospheric character drama, and while most of the characters are fairly stereotypical, they're no grandstanding motormouth gangsters. Everyone's given at least some depth and the dialog is written well enough to keep things interesting.
 That is, as long as you can understand it; the sound mix, which sometimes buries the actors' lines, plus the heavy British accents and sometimes mumbled dialog can sometimes make things hard to follow. The acting is pretty good, with most of the actors displaying the required gravitas, regret and/or menace, and the soundtrack (from French band The Limiñanas) is excellent, sounding like an indie psych-rock band doing a spaghetti western set - plus some cool synthy tracks thrown in for good measure.
 The filmmaking is also good, with a strong command of ambiance and well-considered handheld shots (DP: Laurens Scott, directed by Matthew Benjamin Jones and Luke Skinner). This is a movie that punches far above its weight in almost all respects.

 It fumbles a few times. Mostly in the plot department, but there's also a pivotal scene with Eddie confronting his sins that's a bit cringeworthy. And even when it's well written, there are some scenes that seem to be there just to pad out the run time: I'm all for a lovely retelling of the Orpheus myth, but to be honest if there's a thematic link other than the whole underworld business... I didn't catch it. Points for trying though.
 All these weaknesses don't do much to dilute its strengths, particularly when it's over at a lean eighty-two minutes. I hesitate to call it a horror movie; even with all of the principals named after famous horror authors and directors, it doesn't really even attempt to be scary. But whatever the genre, it's pretty damn good.

Alone

 I'd joke that you could call this one Incidents On and Off a Mountain Road, to honor the great Coscarelli, but there's no mountain here. Also it gets a little more Off action than you'd expect. Also also, the joke barely makes sense- it's just a reference. In any case, don't hold that against Alone, it's a good movie.

  Jessica (Jules Wilcox) is introduced playing storage Tetris in a small U-Haul tow trailer and leaving town in her car. After some driving on scenic Oregon backroads, she picks up a tail: some dude in a black Jeep (Marc Menchaca) who by way of introduction almost feints her into a head-on collision with a truck. He then keeps messing with her in an obviously threatening way that he could just blow off as a misunderstanding whenever they run into each other. And they do keep running into each other: in the road, at the motel she stays in overnight, at a rest stop... You get to know the sound of the Jeep's engine, and the movie uses it as if it were the Jaws theme.

 This first half hour is the movie at its best: the filmmaking is tight as hell, the storytelling is economical, and the stalker oozes menace. There are a lot of interesting, technically well-made scenes - I particularly liked the showiest one, where the activities of a few bystanders at the rest stop are tracked while keeping Jessica firmly in the shot, out of focus. A great way to convey her mental state.

 Then the stalker turns into an abductor, and the movie switches tack a couple of times; It's divided into titled chapters, each one of them giving the action its own spin. It's cool in that it bucks expectations, a little - only a little as it's always variations on a theme, after all. But the latter chapters unfortunately lack the invention of the first one, and they're not nearly as lean, either. Even at a hundred minutes it feels like there's a little too much flab to some of these episodes.

 But Alone remains an expertly crafted thriller even when it's not at its best, and an excellently brutal action climax does make it go down easy.

 The acting is pretty great; Menchaca is enjoyably despicable and Willcox gives a lot of personality to a character that spends most of her time being terrorized. While we do get a little glimpse into the duo's internal life, I wouldn't say the dramatic aspects add a whole lot to the movie. But they do give it some flavour, and some of it is used in a very satisfying way in the finale.

 I'm less enthused with some of the contrivances the script uses and abuses to keep the action going. Most egregious is the stalker's magical homing murderbeacon: It's a bit dodgy how he always seems to find Jessica while they're both driving, but I was willing to give that a pass since he could just know the area really well (he admits to as much.) But later, when they keep finding each other across acres and acres of woodland? Oh, come the fuck on. There isn't even a bullshitty scene of the stalker looking at cracked branches or something. He just keeps finding her, like a deadly Pepe le Péw*.
 And this is yet another movie where people don't lock their phones or i-pads. Is that a thing? Fuck that.

 Other than that the script, by Mattias Olson, is full of clever details; When it's not being lazy (see above), it's pretty well constructed. And since it's set in Oregon, we also get plenty of natural beauty (cinematographer: Federico Verardi). 

 The film is helmed by John Hyams, a criminally underrated director who's probably best known for making the actually great later sequels to the Universal Soldier series. That this guy is still confined to VoD is a disgrace.

 *Not to say Le Péw is not deadly. The red flags are all there; How many of his old 'conquests' lie under his floorboards?

12-Hour Shift

 Mandy (Lucky McKee regular Angela Bettis) works as a nurse at one of those minimal-security movie hospitals where the staff can just grind meds and snort them in side rooms, people just wander wherever they want as long as they're wearing  scrubs, and any sort of post-mortem investigation is non-existent. The perfect place to run an organ-smuggling operation, then.

 It's a simple setup: With full complicity from the head nurse (Nikea Gamby-Turner), Mandy either waits for someone to die or Kevorkians terminally ill patients (her favorite method seems to be to use bleach - and if you wonder how that never raised any red flags, remember: movie hospital). She then pops by the mortuary to retrieve the organs once the coroner is done with the bodies. Finally Regina (Chloe Farnworth), a cousin by marriage, picks the grisly package up and delivers it to the mob in her pink barbie sportscar.

 The problem: Regina is a complete idiot and forgets the organs on her way out after a pickup. Aggravating this: Regina is a fucking psycho, so when she goes back to the hospital and doesn't find the package, she decides she can just kill someone else and take their kidneys.
 You'd think that'd be enough for a 'one crazy night at the hospital' story, but you'd be wrong. A dangerous convict is brought in (David Arquette, sporting a co-producer credit) and escapes thanks to Mandy's meddling; Her brother is wheeled in, OD'd. A couple of police officers get involved once bodies are discovered (Only a couple, because the movie is set in '99, and most of the police force is doing preparations for Y2K). And to top it off, the mob sends a hitman to collect on the kidney Regina didn't deliver. Hers, if none other is available.

 Writer/director Brea Grant (who's done her share of acting in indie horror movies), works off a shoestring budget and keeps things lively and fun... if not always smooth; By the end, after multiple crescendos, things do get a little too forced. Regina's appetite for murder is a too cartoony from the get-go, and some of the stuff with the mob enforcer is a little too much. But the tone is great, with some pretty funny stuff emerging effortlessly from character work and bizarre situations rather than jokes. 

 Besides the direction, the film has two great strengths: Angela Bettis, whose insouciant behaviour is really fun to watch (a less imaginative, or more marketing-driven title for this could be Bad Nurse), and has the chops to infuse her character with some humanity by the end. It's rare to see her get a role this juicy, and she does wonders with it.

 The other vital asset is composer Matt Glass (who also shares a producer credit). The soundtrack he's come up with is outstanding: a lovely, propulsive as hell mixture of drums, strings and opera singing that weaves between different styles depending on the scene, lending a huge amount of energy and not a little personality to the film.

 It's a bloody movie, but not a particularly gory one; The body count is fairly low and the carnage is explicit but not over the top... and that's OK. It gets by on pulpy energy and general craziness just fine.