Bring Her Back

 Two teen Siblings (Billy Barratt and Sora Wong) are assigned a foster home when their dad dies, only to find their new foster mom (Sally Hawkins) and creepy stepbrother (Jonah Wren Phillips) may not have their best interests at heart.

 Bring Her Back is a cruel, intense, and unsparing horror film. It represents a huge leap forward for writer/directors Danny and Michael Philippou, too, with much better-rounded characters and pitch-perfect execution of some rather nasty set-pieces and brilliantly sustained tension.

 The script is very well put together, too; The drama is compelling, and it avoids exposition while still handing us enough information that it's easy enough to put things together in a satisfying fashion. There are a ton of clever touches, up to and including the way it sets up Hawkins's character as a former counsellor - this both sets up her skill at manipulating the kids, as well as a possible source for a VHS tape that acts as a sort of catalyst for everything that's going on.

 Definitely in the running for the best horror movie I've seen this year; I seriously doubt any performances will top Hawkins and Barratt's, at the very least.

Life After Fighting

 Life After Fighting is a passion/vanity project from Aussie martial artist and stuntman - and now writer/director/star Bren Foster. Like most vanity projects, it's a little clumsy, a little indulgent... but unlike the vast majority of them, it's a magnificent showcase for some truly talented performers to strut their stuff. Eventually. But most of the rest of it is pretty enjoyable, too.

 Foster plays the protagonist Alex Faulkner as one of those invulnerable, almost-perfect sweethearts; even his major trauma/flaw would count as a humble brag for anyone else (he didn't loose his undisputed world champion title, you see - he threw that fight because his heart wasn't in it).

 This sort of thing is usually pretty fucking annoying, but Foster is so damn nice and likeable in the role it's all but impossible to hate this square doofus. Alex runs a dojo, loves kids, tries to stay out of trouble, starts a sweet relationship with the mom of one of the kids (Cassie Howarth) when she asks him out... low-key, relatable stuff, shown at a leisurely pace with lots of footage of him training with his students.

 There is some drama: There's a hungry young martial artist making the rounds trying to get Alex to come out of retirement, his new girlfriend's ex (Luke Ford) is one of those creepily possessive dudes who also tries to start some shit with him, and two strangers show up at his class, beat up his students and insult Alex's martial arts (a classic).

 I'd actually have liked this movie a lot more, I think, if it had stayed a slightly digressive indie drama with a few fights thrown in here and there. But if you've seen the trailer, you know that a child trafficking ring derails everything by kidnapping the children of the dojo's receptionist (Annabelle Stephenson). Jerks!
 To its credit, the film tries to do justice to its grim subject matter by treating everything extremely seriously, so the film becomes first a drama and then a thriller before it can go back to being about people beating the living shit out of each other.

 This approach unfortunately comes with more than a few problems.

 The drama is fine, but staid, and it feels a little like a TV movie; The thriller aspects don't fare as well. The law of narrative economy dictates that the plot tie back to one of the prior conflicts, so the identity of the villains ends up being both unsurprising and uncomfortably contrived. And once our protagonists discover what's going on, their choices start getting pretty... well, dumb. Let's just say that this movie would have been a hell of a lot shorter if Alex had remembered he was carrying a mobile phone.
 And yes, I'm perfectly happy ignoring plot holes or handwaving when a script's trying to move things from fight A to fight B, but here everything's taken seriously enough to bloat the running time to beyond two hours, so I think it's fair to put it to task.

 It's still enjoyable, but the film does sag quite a bit in its middle section, and it gets pretty dark; I'm used to tonal whiplash from Asian films, but I was surprised here at how far Life After Fighting was willing to go with normally taboo subjects. The good news is that once all the chips fall in place, the last forty or so minutes of the movie consist of a prolonged fight pitting Alex against a platoon of very hateable evil assholes. It's just as good as you'd hope it could be.
 Alex faces off against a mostly interchangeable rota of thugs; Of the two exceptions, one is a guy he handily defeated previously, and the other (the 'boss') chooses to keep a balaclava on through the whole fight, denying us the pleasure of hateful stares, shocked expressions and moments of begrudging respect. The fights are complex and very well filmed; The edits mostly consist of long takes, the cameras have a habit of moving along with the action, and everyone displays an admirable Hong-Kong-like willingness to be thrown against the furniture, breaking wood panels, windows, and in a particularly painful-looking move, a glass display case. The choreography (also by Foster) does get a little repetitive at times but it's expertly delivered by everyone involved and it mixes a variety of styles to great effect. I'm no expert, but I counted Tae Kwon Do, Muay Thai/Kickboxing, Krav maga and a whole lot of Jiu Jitsu.

 That last epic battle does a lot to redeem the film; It truly does belong in the canon of great western martial arts fights. Most of the film's problems are self-inflicted by tackling a plot that's a little too dark for a film where a knife does an exaggerated swish! sound every time it swings, and a little too complex for the somewhat clumsy script to deliver on successfully. But all this also kind of makes the whole endeavour endearingly ambitious, and the villains all the more hateful.

 Let's hope Mr. Foster has a few more like these in him, or that it gets him some well deserved recognition, and hopefully a starring role.

The Tunnel

 In 2007 the Australian government decided to tap into huge reservoirs of water that had filtered through to the abandoned tunnels beneath Sydney. The move gained some notoriety thanks to worries about a transient population of homeless people living underground, but it all came to nothing - the project was suddenly swept under the rug, quietly cancelled.

 That's the fictional basis for The Tunnel, an Australian found footage film that follows a film crew that tries to find out what the story was behind the sudden, mysterious death of the controversial water-recycling project. After being stonewalled by the government, journalist Natasha Warner leads a small news crew (illegally, and under false pretenses) into the darkness beneath the city. Where, of course, they are stalked and picked off one by one by... something.

 The film is framed as a documentary looking into what happened in this expedition, alternating between talking head interviews, the footage they shot both before and during their doomed underground jaunt, and incidental footage from surrounding security cameras. There's a surprising amount of buildup covering the office politics at the newsroom, and it informs the inevitable character conflict when things go wrong later; The film's premise also gives a credible justification for everything being on film (although, as usual, that gets a little contrived late in the game) and it allows the movie to look a little better than it would were it just people waving cameras around. You get footage of the film discussing how to get interstitials and pickup shots, and you also get to see those shots as well, which is rather clever.

 The characters are simple but well-developed. The technical crew (Steve Miller and Luke Arnold) are a pair of knuckleheads who have a very credible dynamic, and their producer (Andy Rodoreda) is pretty good as the one trying to hold things together.
 It's interesting that while the film makes it perfectly clear that Warner's carelessness is 100% responsible for the crew's dire straits (and a couple of deaths), she still comes off as sympathetic thanks to a near-constant stream of casual chauvinist comments from the people that are supposed to be supporting her.

 There's a lot of running around in dark tunnels, of course, and lots of murky scenes shot with night vision cameras. Director Carlo Ledesma doesn't find a way to make all the scrambled footage cinematic, but a good ambiance, some grisly findings, a very clever "oh shit, we're being watched" moment and a couple of well-placed jump scares keep the tensions running high.
 All the darkness also keeps whatever lurks in The Tunnel nice and mysterious. It's a gamble made necessary by the film's very low budget, but it works beautifully here; The few glimpses we get of it are extremely effective. The director and Writers/producers/editors Julian Harvey and Enzo Tedeschi do a good job of leaning into their limitations.

 The Tunnel seems almost forgotten these days - seemingly eclipsed by As Above So Below, which came a couple of years later and is inferior to this one in most ways that count. It's a very solid entry into the found footage horror pile.

The 13th Floor

 I should probably clarify that this is the Australian 1988 movie The 13th Floor and not the unrelated, big-budget American movie about simulated realities that came out eleven years later. This one features just this single review on its Rotten Tomatoes page:

 "I hate this movie. Because the movie has bad quality. And I really don't like the quality."

And there you go, you can stop reading now. How could I possibly compete with that?

 At first it looks like it's going to be a decently fun slice of low-budget very late eighties cheese.
 Young Kylie, seven years old, watches her father (Tony Blackett) murder a man and his young son in cold blood on a construction site. Thirteen years later, a grown-up Kylie (Lisa Hensley) is on the run from her dad with some incriminating documents and goes to squat on that same thirteenth floor where the prologue took place, which we learn is unoccupied because of constant electrical problems. Did I mention that kid at the beginning was killed by electrocution?
 You probably can see where this is going. And you're probably right, in the broad strokes. But how things end up getting there... well, that'd be a lot harder to predict - mostly because writer/director Chris Roache doesn't seem to have the slightest idea of how to construct a basic storyline.

 Kylie doesn't really seem to have a plan to do anything. Despite being some type of anti-establishment type, and bringing her anti-establishment friends to squat with her (Miranda Otto and Paul Hunt), they're just there... to squat. Oh, and she's an utterly unlikeable jerk.
 Her father sends a private detective to track Kylie down - an enjoyably sleazy foil for our protagonist - but the guy finds her and is defeated by the electric ghost of the boy from the prologue not even a third of the way in.

 From there on, the story just seems to give up. It's a random assortment of lousy comedy, romance and suspense that barely hangs together, all the way to the end when the film decides it's time to finish things off with a fun but underwhelming lightshow that could just as well have happened within the first twenty minutes after the prologue. As that anonymous Rotten Tomatoes reviewer stated, the movie has bad quality.

 It does, however have a couple things going for it. Not a lot, mind you. The 80's style lightning effects are fun, as are a couple of makeup effects. Everything is pretty tame, as I'm pretty sure this was a TV movie (there's a 'tasteful' and thoroughly unsexy sex scene, and frequent cuts to black in random places.) There are a couple so bad it's good moments, but not enough to make it enjoyable, plus the sort of unwitting, dumbass little details that make me laugh - like a dude pulling out a Commodore Amiga manual to hack a password on a PC. Screw the Transformers or Star Wars, the Amiga is my nostalgic sweet spot.
 What is often, unambiguosly good is the cinematography (DP: Stephen Prime). Not just in the sense that even movies like this paid more attention to it back when they had to shoot on film - it genuinely has some lovely-looking shots:

 The... ahem, improvisational qualities of the script also maintain a certain morbid interest in where the hell the film is going to head next. Not that it goes anywhere interesting, but at least it's kind of unpredictable.

 Other than that, this is a near-complete misfire; I can safely say I really don't like the quality either. This would be director Chris Roache's first and last job as a director, which is a shame because he seems to have a good eye. Since then he's been a pretty prolific writer for Aussie TV shows - hopefully he's gotten better at that.

Otherlife

 TLDR: God, I fucking hated this movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Demon Disorder

 Graham (Christian Willis) hasn't seen his brothers Phillip (Charles Cottier) and Jake (Dirk Hunter) since the patriarch of the family (John Noble) passed away. The old man apparently spent the last years of his life stricken by some sort of dementia which led him to harm his children. A dementia that's portrayed in flashbacks as a kind of demonic possession, which... hmmm*. It's probably not the most responsible of narrative devices, but it can work.

 Anyhow; Jake suddenly pops up at Graham's workplace, sporting a madman's beard and demeanor, and tells him the youngest, Phillip, has caught the same sort of insanity dear old da had. There's tension between the two - that old "you left us to deal with an ancient family curse on our own" chestnut. But they put their differences aside to help their little brother, and Graham returns to the creepily derelict family farm to confront something something father's sins etc.

 There's a glimmer of an interesting idea in the lousily named aussie creature feature The Demon Disorder: that of a curse as a fleshy, fleshy entity that desperately seeks to escape and take ever evolving forms like a refugee from an 80's horror movie. It's the debut film from Steven Boyle, a veteran effects designer and technician, and it's cleverly planned around both a limited budget and Boyle's areas of expertise. Expect a bunch of cool practical effects, with a decent variety of creatures and a smattering of effective body horror.

 Unfortunately they're sprinkled too sparingly in an otherwise unremarkable film. The script, by Boyle and Toby Osborne, never really takes its story of literal family demons anywhere interesting. The actors are game - watching Graham and the semi-deranged Jake interact is always entertaining - but their dialog, and the way conversations are framed, often strain to add an intensity that's not really warranted by the material. Worse still, by the time the third act rolls around the script kind of falls apart, with a series of idiotic decisions spiralling out of control in a not particularly entertaining manner.

 This'd be a stronger recommendation if the film could harness its premise better, or at least muster a better finale. For a mostly unpretentious creature feature, though, it's not that bad. I think the mayhem and the monsters make this one worth it. Just about.

*: That's the tasteful version - there's always The Taking of Deborah Logan, too. This film never really dares to actually make any parallels, which is both part of its problem and probably for the best.

Blur

 There's a specific kind of film on the low-budget spectrum I loathe. The sort of movie that's got a reasonably profesional sheen and fuck all else going for it. Movies that don't have a clear reason to exist other than to fill out the further reaches of the streaming service genre lists. I've gotten pretty good at avoiding them over the years - not that the ones I do end up choosing are all winners, not by a long shot... but they will usually at least have something interesting, or at least fail in some interesting way.

 Andrew Miles Broughton's Blur is, sadly, one that got through my filter: a bewildering, boring shrug of a film - one that seems to have been improvised from one scene to the next, not in a good way. And then you read that it was shot over two year's worth of weekends... and yeah, it makes perfect sense.

 It seems like it's off to a good start. Sophie (Abigail Bianca), an attractive academic, is on her way out of Syria (Palmyra is mentioned) after saving some precious relics from fundamentalists with hammers and a lack of respect for ancient history. On her way to the airport, she runs into a (very poorly CGI'd) stretch of ruins, and she snaps a picture of an off-brand Pazuzu statue.

Jaunty little chap, innit? Then he gets pissed off when people take pictures of him. Asshole.

 Back at home, she has a very stilted, awkward conversation with her vapid bestie Jade (Casia Stelmach). By the way, this is the only type of conversation this movie trades in. In any case, off-brand Pazuzu does off-brand Pazuzu things, like popping up in silhouette in the background in Sophie's apartment while she remains unaware. Until it drives her to stab her hand with a knife. Everyone in this movie seems to have an aversion to calling emergency services, so I'm going to chalk it a point for Darwin when Sophie gets Janet Leigh'd soon afterwards, decapitated with a wire trap. OK, it's absolutely ridiculous, but that's the right kind of ridiculous, you know? I can have fun with that sort of thing.

 Except that now Sophie is dead, Jade becomes the lead by default. And that is a problem because Stelmach simply isn't a good actress. Not at the time this was filmed, not in the disjointed way the movie was put together, not with the material she's working from - any one of the last two would be huge hurdles for any actor, I'd think, and neither is a challenge she's even remotely equipped to handle.

 The director seems to recognize this, and tries to make up for it putting her in short skirts and shorter shorts so the camera can shamelessly leer at her (admittedly very nice) legs. So, you know, there is that.

 After proving to be a pretty handy murderous telekinetic bastard, off-brand Pazuzu starts biding his time with piddly horrors - one of his signature moves becomes (I wish I was making this up) setting in motion one of those executive toys - you know, the five balls on a cradle, or putting up a color chart on any available screen. You suck, off-brand Pazuzu.

 There's about half an hour (probably more) of this movie that wastes our time with portentous music playing over either nothing at all or paranormal phenomena so minor I'd have to ask off-brand Pazuzu to hand in his off-brand spook registration card.

 There's a hilariously botched attempt to hint at some trauma and a friendly neighbour (Kiera Rosenburgh) and a policeman (Guy Mandic) are introduced, but nothing sticks. Writer/Director/Producer Andrew Miles Broughton finds some interesting, playful shots which keep the movie from looking completely soul-less despite the flat digital cinematography, but his script is basically plotless, dumb, and it often got me wondering just how it could get basic human behaviour so motherfucking egregiously wrong.

 On its way to a finale that finally amps up the supernatural mayhem to eye-rolling effect, it does stumble upon an instance or two of effective body horror, but seriously - they don't even begin to justify the film's existence.

 Just about nothing works in this movie. Plot points go nowhere (what's the significance of that ancient key the police found in Sophie's stomach?), the humour is unfunny, and the film never picks up any steam once Sophie dies within the first thirty minutes. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

 It's a hard movie to talk about without spoiling, but I'll try; You know its bones anyways. Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is a little girl, abducted from her family in a hidden, verdant land in the middle of post-apocalyptic Australia. She will at some point grow up and become a complete, stone-cold badass (Anya Taylor-Joy), lose an arm and gain the trust of a petty tyrant warlord (which she'll betray by sacrificing everything to do the right thing in the next movie).

 Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (sans the Mad Max) fills in those fifteen years by creating an antagonist for Furiosa, the Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). He's the one responsible for abducting her, he's the one who kills her mother, and he's the one who introduces her - in a way - to Inmortan Joe.

 And what a fantastic creation he is; A megalomaniac asshole with an irresistible swagger who just absolutely knows he's the protagonist of the piece - at one point he starts narrating his own, twisted hero's journey. A truly despicable villain whom the script (by George Miller and Nico Lathouris) provides with a wealth of choice Mad-Maxisms, those wonderfully playful word-nuggets which Hemsworth milks for all they're worth. Also, his main toady is called Smeg. We've reached peak art, people, stop trying. It can only go downhill from here.

 Events follow Furiosa's character as she grows up bouncing back and forth between Dementus and Immortan Joe across five discreet chapters, aided by a mentor in badassery: The previous imperator (Tom Burke). Their mutual loyalty in the face of insurmountable odds gives the movie several kicks of bittersweet humanity.

 This is the first movie in the series where you don't have to do a huge amount of mental gymnastics and overlook a bunch of stuff to slot its continuity with the movie that came before; It's as straight a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road as we could have expected (not a given, with this director).
 Furiosa is 100% the same character, a lot of the degenerates from the 2016 movie make a return, and it carefully seeds many of the elements that would bear fruit later. Or earlier, depending how you look at it. We get to see how Furiosa loses her arm and where she got the idea for her facepaint (or is that a badge of her station? Hmmm). We go to places only alluded or seen from far off before (both Bullet and Gas town feature prominently). Hell, it even confirms a fan theory about what the Fury Road is.

 Compare this with the previous Mad Maximilians, where each one seemed to be a recounting of a tall tale maybe loosely based around the same historical character. It fulfills its prequel duties admirably without feeling forced, and what's more important, it finds a story to tell that stands on its own merits while also informing and deepening the themes of Fury Road. It's of a piece with that movie, and when we consider it's still one of the best action movies of... well, possibly ever - I can't think of higher praise.

 I do however think that this one is at a slight disadvantage - it would probably kick all sorts of ass to watch them in chronological order, but Fury Road is more perfect as a standalone movie, while this one gains a lot of power from knowing how things will shake out, the resonance certain actions will have. Not to mention a few visual references to other movies in the series.
  So I'd still recommend watching them in the order they came out, with this one as the capstone.

 The action is brutal, thrilling, elaborate, imaginative, and it made me laugh out loud multiple times with excitement (and also just laugh out loud, because a lot of it *is* pretty damn funny). Cars crumple in every which way, things explode real good, and bodies are hurled around with abandon, often while on fire. There may be nothing quite as memorable as the pole cats, but I won't hold it against a movie that is as wildly inventive with its violence and stunts as this one is.

It looks great in motion, very stylized - some (not a lot) of it looks a little too aggressively artificial but, well, that's a trait it shares with part Fury Road, and we later learnt from the internet that absolutely all of that movie was 100% real, absolutely no CGI or digital trickery except for some colour grading (I especially like that part they shot in Australia's famous fire tornado zone; All those brave stuntmen definitely didn't die in vain).

 And it's shot beautifully. George Miller keeps making a case for being one of our greatest living directors, and the crew he's assembled keep justifying how essential they are. The blocking on some of the action sequences, the way the camera tracks a character while, say, showing a motorcycle circling and later crashing messily behind them (action designer: Guy Norris), or the way heavy colour filters are used to give the desert a hellish bent (Cinematographer: Simon Duggan, the rare newcomer to the series), or the way the footage is cut in a way that keeps building up a hellish, chaotic energy while still keeping the action crystal clear (editors: Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel). And the music (by Tom Holkenborg), even without the Doof Warrior to provide it diegetically (except for a cameo), is incredible.

 There are so many wonderful, weird, detailed and beautiful inventions and developments here that are so idiosincratic to the way George Miller's brain works. So many indelible images. I adore that he very pointedly makes it so that the  movies don't fit perfectly together - even if it's an almost straightforward prequel/sequel duet, they still feel like whoever's telling the story is assembling it from different sources at some point in a distant future... and every so often says 'oh fuck it, this doesn't make sense but it's too cool to leave out'.

 George Miller is a very smart cookie who's obviously thought a lot about what makes stories work. He's even made a movie explicitly about that.
 The guy was blessed and talented enough that he could create a modern-day classic in Fury Road, a story that many of us have internalized the same way our predecessors did the tales of Cú Chulainn, Odysseus, Coyote or the Monkey King*.

 With this movie he both delves into that classic and heightens it, providing a number of shots and scenes that echo what came before - what will come after, strengthening its impact. It might not tell as perfectly a self-contained a story, not quite, but its power - alone and paired with its sequel - is undeniable. The Saga in the subtitle is warranted.

 Make it epic? Fuck that, he's made it mythical.

*:  Insert .gif of someone making exaggerated wanking motions while rolling their eyes here.

Winchester

 "Inspired by true events"

 Hollywood to English translation: Tidal wave of bullshit incoming.

 Anyone with an interest in supernatural odds and ends might be familiar with the Winchester mystery house. It begun its life as a large farmhouse, and it was slowly expanded into a haphazard mansion of 500-odd rooms and twisty passages by the heiress of the Winchester fortune (as in Winchester rifles), who designed the extensions and oversaw construction herself. Reputedly it's one of the most haunted houses in the US - the strange architecture was supposed to confuse and trap the ghosts of the victims of the fruits of her family business; As you might imagine that reputation was created whole-cloth half a century after her death to lure morbid tourists. Even the more innocuous factoid that says the construction work on the house carried on without reprieve for years, day and night, is completely made up. Oh well.

 Not that there's any danger of anyone ever taking anything presented in Winchester, the fictionalization of this fiction, seriously. It's an incredibly silly movie.

 One fine day in 1906, or so the movie would have us believe, The Winchester company approached Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke) to evaluate Sarah Winchester's (Helen Mirren!) mental health with a view to remove her from the board of directors.

 Dr. Price is a really fun character; His tragic backstory will predictably weigh the plot down later, but he gets a great introduction as a laudanum junkie entertaining three hookers with prestidigitation and crappy self-help hokum, and he remains a bright and agreeably agnostic presence for most of the movie. When confronted with a barrage of spooks and haunts in the house, for example, he just assumes he's tripping balls.

 The good doctor arrives at the house (it would only be called the mystery house when it was turned into a tourist attraction) and meets the lady of the house's niece (Sarah Snook) and her young son (Finn Scicluna-O'Prey), who, despite good performances, are only ever there to give the film a child in peril plotline.

 The niece explains to Dr. Price that he'll need to follow the house rules, which is an excuse to lay out the more earthly elements of the house mythology (confusing architecture, a ridiculous staircase, trap corridors, a horde of people working on it at all times), with a few very cheesy jump scares to (not very subtly) hint at the supernatural component of the story.

 Once the doctor finally starts running his sessions with the Winchester scion, he finds out she's a fiercely intelligent and willful old woman who nonetheless entertains a bunch of truly batshit notions. To wit: the spirits of the people killed by the rifles that bear her name come to the house, where she lures them into rooms custom built for them, and she tries to talk them into shedding their earthly burdens. Or something like that. It's a needlessly complicated metaphysical construct that makes entirely too much cheesy sense: on the one hand it's stupid enough to make you wince, on the other it lacks any mystery whatsoever.

 The fun arrives with a murderous spirit that is not willing to talk things over. His arrival coincides with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (which did actually topple a tower in the house) and it adds some sorely needed urgency to the movie. But the script (by Tom Vaughan and directors Michael and Peter Spierig) can't really find a satisfying way to handle the plot, leading to some ridiculous developments that are neither satisfying nor scary nor wholly fun. It's kind of interesting, at least?

 The story is a bust, but the script is not a complete loss. The characters are mostly well written and their dialog is engaging (except when providing exposition); This is the rare horror movie that's better when nothing fantastical is happening. All the actors do a great job, too - pretty much a given, with the talent involved.

 And the surfaces of the film are also top-notch. The directors were given mostly free reign to shoot in the real Winchester mystery house, and they, along with their regular cinematographer Ben Nott, beautifully capture the bizarre mansion in moody, creepy detail and elegant camera sweeps. If only their talents were in service of a better script... Still, can't really absolve them, seeing as how they did enough revisions to it to be credited as co-writers.

 I mean, they could have removed the (multiple!) jump scares featuring spooky roller skates, at least.

 

 Yes, it's an extremely dumb movie that's not nearly as much fun as it should be. But it's handsomely made, and engaging, in its own daft, intermittent way. It's a shame that it seems to have driven the Spierig brothers away from making movies, because their technical work here (and elsewhere) is excellent.

Late Night With the Devil

 The late night TV wars have been going on for longer than I thought; In the late 70s Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian, a young radio personality from... I want to say Milwaukee? took up arms to run against Johnny Carson with a new show called Night Owls. As you might expect, he was destined to fail - even a very special episode with a very candid interview with his terminally ill wife (Georgina Haig) failed to put him at the top. Two weeks later she was dead and the show went on hiatus... only to return a month later, but it would never recover its previous level of success.

 The show went on, going through increasingly desperate stunts for a while until on Halloween night on 1977, Dalton invited a few experts on the supernatural and a very possessed little girl, with disastrous results. Or so Michael Ironside (!) informs us in a voiceover, before he presents us with the original tapes, and some additional footage, of that fateful final show.

 What follows is a loving sendup of '70s TV culture wrapped around a ridiculous but clever and effective demonic horror yarn. The show has four guests lined for the night: psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), insufferable smug asshole and paranormal fraud exposer Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), and the main act - June (Laura Gordon), a paranormal investigator, and her tween ward Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), who was rescued from a satanic cult and suffers from sporadic possessions.

 Things do not go smoothly. Christou has to... ahem, leave early, Haig is way more belligerent than expected, and June has some serious misgivings (a little too late for that) about exposing sheltered Lilly - not to mention her passenger - to the wider world. There's a cheeky sense of humour and a whole lot of parody to the film's portrayal of the TV broadcast, which is a great example of found footage being used in a clever and effective way; We get both the original show as transmitted, and a bunch of supplemental material as people panic during the commercial breaks. If nothing else, it lets Delroy deliver a very foreboding summary of what's going to happen... followed by a chirpy "...but first a message from our sponsors."

The production design (Otello Storfo) and music (Roscoe James Irwin and Glenn Richards) are spot-on, the wardrobe (Steph Hook) is believable and fun, but writer/directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes' biggest scoop is Dastmalchian on the central role; He comes off as very believable as a somewhat sleazy talk show host whose eyes widen when he recognizes good TV is happening, no matter the cost, and also as a slightly more decent than you'd expect human being. There's a version of this script somewhere that's a lot more cynical and way less interesting, so credit the Cairnes brothers for not going in that direction when writing the character. Leaving some humanity in the satire makes the horror more effective.

 The occult elements of the script are well handled, too - no deep cuts, but it's all very cleverly put together, and when things properly go to hell, the payoff is outstanding both in the gruesome and the cool visual ideas department.

 Appropriately for the time period, I guess, hypnosis is treated more like a superpower than anything that's ever within sighting distance of plausibility; It does provide for one of the script's funnier flourishes, though, so that's OK. I was more concerned when the exorcism rites got trotted out, but I shouldn't have worried: this is not a movie that's going to waste your time with a puke and rebuke (thank you My Best Friend's Exorcism). It's got its sights set much higher (or lower, depending on how you look at it) than that.

Carnifex

 Carnifex is a very traditional low-budget creature feature with a heavy Australian twang. Set shortly after the recent real-life brush fires, it follows two biologists (Harry Greenwood and Sisi Stringer) and a documentarian (Alexandra Park) as they track the devastating effects the fires had on the distribution of local wildlife.

 As our protagonists trek through the brush, we get to see snippets of a mysterious predator eating a couple of animals and a poacher. Except for those asides, the first hour or so of the movie is fairly uneventful. It's got a nice procedural feel as the scientists go around checking cameras and cataloguing fauna, looking for rare local species that might allow them to cordon off a section of the forest from industrial logging.
 They're good company, these three - none of them get a huge amount of detail or character development, but they're likeable enough that it's fun to watch them as they go about doing their job. It also helps that the background scenery is beautiful, and that what they're doing is interesting.

 Things finally get going once the scientists recover footage of a rare wallaby... just as it suddenly gets attacked by a large shadowy mass; Based on that and some claw marks on a nearby tree, one of the biologists wonders if it could be a prehistoric Australian beast- It doesn't sound like a particularly scientific conjecture but it makes sense for the character to posit it because the guy's a bit of a space cadet. And we know he's right because, well, genre conventions. 

 As soon as night falls the thesis is suddenly proven true when the monster drops by to eat a nearby goat, and the movie falls apart a little as it switches gears to survival horror. There's something nifty to the idea of an arboreal hunter who hunts by pouncing from the treetops and then quickly shuffles back into the woods, dragging its prey, but it ends up making for a pretty undynamic threat.
 The monster itself is mercifully shown very little because once we do get a clear view of it, it's a pretty goofy design; And even if it weren't so damn cuddly, the low-budget CGI lacks the means to give it the physicality it would need to be menacing.

 There's a wee bit of gore, some good tension, and a nice resolution that meshes with the film's conservationist ethos - Neither director Sean Lahiff nor writer Shanti Gudgeon do anything majorly wrong, and the film is reasonably well put together. The horror elements all feel very familiar, however, and the monster and mayhem are pretty underwhelming; I ended up finding the film's low-stakes setup more engaging than its action-filled payoff.

Next of Kin

 Linda (Jacki Kerin) returns home after however many years upon her mother's death - home being, in this case, an old manor house in the middle of nowhere that's been converted into a retirement community. Feeling a bit adrift, as the business seems to be run efficiently by the capable Connie (Gerda Nicolson), Linda spends a lot of the first two acts basically just haunting the building, hanging out with an old flame (John Jarratt), and poking around her mother's stuff.

 Soon after her arrival one of the clients is found drowned in a bathtub (in an excellently creepy scene - he's found when someone tries to get in the tub and steps on the corpse's face!). This awakens some mildly Shining-esque memories in Linda where she walks around as a child, holding a red ball.
 Poking around some more on her mom's old documents, she finds some irregularities on the ledgers, and some weird events that had happened twenty years ago. There's also the fact that she hears someone roving the old house at night, opening windows and leaving faucets open. She even catches the odd glimpse of a figure looking at her. It all eventually leads to bloodshed. Eventually.

 Next of Kin's a pretty solid 1982 thriller from down under. It takes a long time to get going, but the characters are likeable and the film's got an off-beat sense of humor I really enjoyed: When a terrified Linda goes to get her beau's help, for example, she finds him asleep at the saddest pep rally I've ever seen. No jokes, just odd characters and situations.
 Director Tony Williams also knows when to add some discordant touches - the first corpse in this movie is really shocking - and his roving camerawork carries a lot of the film. The photography is also beautiful, very colorful; DoP Gary Hansen tragically died in a helicopter crash on the same year this came out.
 The bloody finale has a little bright-red giallo-esque gore and a couple of great action beats, but it ends almost as abruptly as it arrived. As for the mystery itself, I guess its solution makes sense, but it's pretty silly. It's also marred by an unintentionally funny slow motion sequence which also slows down Linda's screams, to hilarious effect.

 It's probably not the sort of film that will blow anyone away, but on the other hand it's an almost gothic, extremely good-looking movie that uses its location - both the retirement home itself and the fact that it's so remote - very effectively. 

Red Christmas

 Here we go: The worst movie I've written up yet. A nasty, dumb, ugly slasher I hoped would be good because I'm usually a fan of antipodean horror. You're in the shitlist for this one, Australia.

 Writer/director Craig Anderson comes up with one excellent 'finger up the ass' premise for a slasher movie: The slasher is the protagonist's (Dee Wallace!) survivor-of-an-abortion son, come twenty years later one Christmas day to confront her. Why don't you love me, mummy?

 To make things extra-fun, on the day of her abortion the clinic was bombed (is that even a thing in Australia?) and the one responsible for taking the still-living fetus home and raising him was the terrorist himself.

 Oh, and the killer ex-fetus is named Cletus. He's got Down Syndrome. Har di har.

...Damn, this shot makes the movie seem way more fun than it is.

 In case things weren't already set up for maximum discomfort, the family he's slashing at is a sort of rainbow of hot button demographics: There's a priest, his uptight, humorless, very religious wife, a man with down syndrome, two liberal dope-smoking dipshits, and a fucking insufferable smartass who's also extremely pregnant. Oh, and an adopted girl that's set up to fool you into thinking she'll be a final girl, I think, but she barely registers.

 Some effort is spent making at least some of the characters... if not likeable, at least a little fleshed out. But they're up to all sorts of stupid shit even before the killings start, and as soon as the (mercifully short) first act is done and the first family member is split in two with a single axe stroke, their idiocy ramps up exponentially.

 Once he starts his rampage, the killer appears and disappears arbitrarily, his competence as a slasher varying wildly as the script dictates. The less said of his victims' attempts at survival, the better; most of the scurrying around feels like a waste of time until someone gets killed; no clever plans, no decent action, nothing of interest.
 Mom gets to be the straight character, the one that's reasonable and the target for all the emotional abuse the movie throws. Wallace does an excellent job of making her seem like a rounded human being, but the script is so manipulative and, well, fucking dumb that somewhere around the middle I just started rooting for even her to die so the movie could be over and done with.

 Aside from the knowing quality of the setup, the slasher's name, a couple lines and some asshattery in the first act, this is not really a comedy; It's a supposedly brutal horror romp that kills off characters we're expected to come to care about. Well, that's a bust, as their general unlikability, coupled with the amount of stupid decisions they make plus the laughably manipulative script mean that all the drawn-out suspense  scenes fall completely flat.
 Worst of all, the movie also unforgivably skimps on the gore department, leaving most kills to be implied or shown in very quick bursts. There's a couple of good deaths - a ridiculous blender-related incident, and a bear-trap-related injury, both of which somehow shed way more blood than someone being cut in half -  and some of the others have a good concept behind them. But they're so ineptly staged they don't even begin to compensate for the rest of this shit. Not all movies can have a good FX/makeup department, and that's fine. But... well, maybe don't do a gruesome-kill-heavy horror movie, then. You're going to make a film this tasteless, we want to see more than a couple jets of blood.

The actors are actually all right; it's the material that fails here. The film looks like ass, which is a problem with many of these low-budget deals, but unlike any good indie horror, there's no craft, sense of fun, no good ideas, or... anything, really, to uplift the whole thing. It sometimes works up a little bit of energy, but for most of its duration it's kind of a dreary slog.

 It's an artless, charmless, unfun bit of shit hoping that the empty provocation and bad taste at its core will dupe someone into thinking there's more to it. No such luck- it's bad even for shitty holiday (and abortion) exploitation horror standards. Keep well away.

The Last Wave

  Hasn't the weather been strange... could it be a warning? Asks the oddly worded poster for The Last Wave, Peter Weir's 1977 follow-up to Picnic at Hanging Rock.
 Like his previous film, it's another languid, atmospheric take on a mystery that's never really resolved. Or rather, it is, kind of, but it's a vague resolution that just raises more questions. It's complicated.

 Things kick off in a tiny school somewhere in the Australian outback on a cloudless, sweltering summer day. Suddenly thunder rings out, then driving rain; the children get herded back into the classroom shortly before huge hailstones start coming down, breaking windows, hurting one of the kids and scaring them all half to death. A great scene.

 A short time later, rainstorms are hammering Sidney, but at least these ones have the grace to come from cloudy skies. There we meet our protagonist, David (Richard Chamberlain), a corporate tax lawyer.
 Because he's offered some advice to humanitarian organizations in the past, he's asked to help mount a legal defense for a group of aboriginals who stand accused of killing another man. Feeling unqualified, but intrigued, David takes the case.

 As the days go on, David is assaulted by vivid dreams - including a creepy one where a whole street is drowned, and one where he sees one of the aboriginals in his house; a neat trick, since he hasn't met them face-to-face yet. When he later recognizes him from his dream, he starts getting convinced that something supernatural is going on. He tries to get explanations from the aborigine in his dream (David Gulpilil) and their shaman (Nandjiwarra Amagula), and gets... well, something about being a 'Mulkurul', a made-up term that the Wikipedia entry for the movie tells me has to do with 'a race of spirits who came from the rising sun bearing sacred objects with them'.
 The weird stuff is intriguing, but not a lot gets explained - just a few tantalizing connections, like David being from South America, and then discovering what look like Mayan drawings and artifacts in the sewers beneath the city. 

 It's an appropriately dream-like movie, glacially paced and drenched through (ha!) with water imagery. Almost every scene features running water in some capacity, and it turns out to be an eerily effective motif. The film oozes atmosphere thanks to some great cinematography (courtesy of Russell Boyd) and a cool electronic-and-didgeridoo-powered soundtrack (from Groove Myers).

 Unfortunately, that is most of what it's running on - Atmosphere. Also: Fortean phenomena, a vague apocalyptic sense of menace, a few woolly mysteries, and some nice visuals. The narrative is too much on the thin side, and to be honest I found it a bit of a chore to get through.
 Weir has stated that he wanted to explore what happens when a modern pragmatic person gets a premonition, and David's journey from rationalist to believer is engaging (aided by a very likeable performance from Chamberlain and Olivia Hamnett, who plays his wife). Though I did laugh when he starts talking about sorcery as a murder weapon at a courtroom, silly wig and all.
 Meanwhile the native actors do a good job of playing a closed-knit group trying to gauge this intruder's attempts to poke at a body of knowledge no one ever shows any interest in.

 I don't know; This is the kind of movie that I suspect I would have liked if I had watched it on a day when I'm more in tune with its wavelength - it's certainly well-made and weird enough to merit a revisit someday.

Talk to Me

 Talk to Me is a clever, funny, imaginative and above all creepy as fuck horror movie from Australian youtuber siblings Danny and Michael Philippou. Well done, you guys; Next time I yell at the kids to get off my lawn, consider yourselves exempt.

 The film revolves around a porcelain hand that a couple of dodgy teens (Zoey Terakes and Chris Alonsio) lug around in a backpack and pull out at parties; When you light a candle, hold the hand, and say "Talk to me", you see dead people. Then you invite them in so they can possess you for a bit.

 So people do this, egged on by other partygoers, and everything gets filmed and everyone has a laugh. It feels genuine - yeah, of course people would use a tool to contact the dead that way. The Ouija board has historically been as much a party favour as a tool to strip money from the credulous.

 This hand thing always works; People infallibly see ghosts, they get a huge buzz from getting possessed, and there are no side effects as long as you keep the ghosts in only for ninety seconds. And it's all fine, because who's going to be stupid enough to break that simple rule?

 Now would be as good a time as any to introduce Mia (Sophie Wilde), a troubled teen who's still not over the death of her mother two years ago. She's gotten a bit better, thanks in part to her BFF Jade (Alexandra Jensen) - but on this night, the anniversary of her mother's death, she's feeling down and wants to go see what's the deal with all the people shaking hands with the dead on her social media. And of course she tries it, and of course she exceeds the time limit. Not by a lot, but enough for the spooks to cling to her, it seems.

 Soon enough there's another party and the hand gets brought out. All's fun and games until Jade's little brother Riley (Joe Bird) wants a turn with the hand. It's an uncomfortable scene even before things inevitably go south, as it drives a wedge between Jade and Mia. And yeah, then it goes south. Things get real in an extremely gruesome way - the makeup department for the film lists more than a dozen people, and whatever they got, they deserve a raise.

 The spookshow doesn't end there, of course, but a lot of the rest of the movie has to do with the psychological fallout for Mia, who wasn't in the best place to begin with. It's an unpredictable movie, and  it's genuinely thrilling to see where the script goes (credit goes to Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, based on an idea from Daley Pearson, the guy who played Thor's roommate in those silly shorts they did in between the Marvel movies.)

 There are a lot of themes and motifs to decode here - some silly, like Mia's repeatedly bringing up that she's held hands with Jade's boyfriend; har-de-har. Some are mysterious, like Mia's recurring nightmare where she can't see herself in a mirror (notice that many of the ghosts that haunt her only appear on reflections). And some overt, like how people drive others away without meaning to, leaving others to deal with their grief alone. This focus on grief and trauma might put some people off, especially as the movie is distributed by A24, which some people associate with 'elevated' horror. But the parallels are used powerfully here, driving the plot and inextricably tied to some properly scary supernatural shit. Great stuff.

 One thing that it does share with other A24 horror movies is that it's not a 'fun' horror movie. I mean, it is fun (and really, really funny - Miranda Otto, as Jade's mom, gets some great lines in.) But It's not meant to be a ride in the same way a James Wan movie is; this is meant to fuck you up, it's meant to be uncomfortable.

 It's a great movie - extremely well acted, well-observed, properly scary and pretty damn original. Work's already begun on a prequel and a sequel; We'll see how those turn out (if they do come out at all), but franchises have been built on much, much less.

Spirits of the Air - Gremlins of the Clouds

   1988's Spirits of the Air - Gremlins of the Clouds (what a title!) puts its best foot forward. As its credits roll, they're intercut with footage of a man clad in black advancing through the desert, walking by some pretty stunning bits of near-surrealist wreckage: Oversized crooked utility poles, a car graveyard where the cars are the headstones, a ridiculously complex set of wooden rigging. When he arrives at a dusty farm, he scares a woman who was playing along to the beautiful title song on what looks like a mixture between a shamizen and a kokyu; he promptly collapses of exhaustion as the woman panics and goes to get her brother.
 It's one hell of an opening, as beautiful as anything I've seen in a while.

I could fill this thing with screenshots; it's a gorgeous movie.

 The hiker is Smith (Norman Boyd), a drifter running away from... let's call them bad guys - for unspecified reasons. It doesn't matter. The woman, Betty (Melissa Davis), is a religious nutjob who dons a new elaborate outfit, makeup and hairpiece for almost every scene, and her brother Felix (Michael Lake) is wheelchair-bound and flight-obsessed. Yep, it's going to be a weird one.

 Especially when you realize that the movie is, more than anything else, a willfully quirky psychodrama. Felix takes Smith in and nurses him back to health, much to his sister's chagrin (she's convinced he's the devil). Once the newcomer comes back to, Felix talks him into helping build his flying machines, luring him with the prospect of getting over the mountains that bar the way north. And so the household settles into a routine - Felix and Smith try to get their creations off the ground, while Betty seethes in the background, with the unspoken threat that her insanity might escalate beyond childish hissy fits and bizarre passive-aggressiveness into actual violence.

 It's a very, very weird movie, but if (and this is a very big if) you can get over its languid pacing and the sometimes very broad acting, there's a lot to like here.
 Not the least the production design. This was Alex Proyas's first movie, and the amount of detail and invention on the sets is really impressive. Every scene has been fussed over and has at least a couple of cool touches; "MTV video directors" was a charge levied at a lot of people a few decades ago who tried to inject some style into their movies (Proyas's fellow Aussie director Russell Mulcahy was a perennial target), and... well, yeah, this is a very 80's-MTV-video looking movie. It definitely tends to put style before substance.
 Most people have gotten over using that particular zinger to put down movies a long time ago, especially when the style is as good as it is here. The ridiculously elaborate sets and costumes combine with some great cinematography (DP: David Knaus), saturated colours and a couple instances of Proyas's penchant for unorthodox camera placement to great effect.

 The near lack of a plot is probably the biggest problem here. The script (written by Proyas) is not bad - the dialog is sometimes clunky but it mostly works, and the siblings at the heart of the story do eventually get a little depth; Enough to allow for some effective bits of pathos towards the end (some of it ably aided by the production design (Sean Callinan) - Felix's room is a good example) which I at least found pretty affecting.
 But, as far as actual plot... nothing much happens.

 I'd be lying if I said it didn't drag at points, but the film had me firmly under its spell for the duration after those amazing first few minutes. Australia is a pretty dependable source of genre oddities, and few of them are as odd, cool looking, or beguiling as this.

Undead

 Here's another Australian zombie apocalypse movie directed by two brothers that gets by on cheap CGI effects, lots of gore, an outlandish concept and industrial amounts of enthusiasm. Made about a decade before the first Wyrmwood film, too.

 Undead was written and directed by Michael and Peter Spierig, who pooled their life savings to finance it (giving them the producer role as well, by default). It's a very bloody piss take on 50's sci-fi schlock with a plot that's got more than a passing resemblance to Plan 9 From Outer Space.

 Things kick off with René (Felicity Mason, doing a lot of her acting just with her striking grey eyes) trying to get out of the small Australian fishing town of Berkeley on the same day that meteorites start falling from the sky and turn people into ghouls. The undead invasion puts a hamper on her plans, so she's forced to take shelter in a derelict farm along with a young couple (Rob Jenkins and Lisa Cunningham) and two police officers (Dirk Hunter and Emma Randall). Said farm is actually something called "Marion's World of Weapons", and Marion (Mungo McKay) lurks inside, armed to the teeth.

 Fortunately for everyone, he's the good kind of well-armed survivalist nutjob: one who had a forewarning of the doomsday, and turned out to be right. He carries around a triple shotgun (reminded me of the sword from The Sword and the Sorcerer) and pulls silly/cool moves like throwing his guns in the air, shooting a zombie with a shotgun, then catching the guns again and shooting two more zombies. His usage of spurs got a chuckle.

 Because this is a zombie movie, you have to have internecine tension. In this case, the policeman turns out to be an incompetent dick, and no one trusts poor Marion despite the fact that he saves their bacon multiple times. And there's also the matter of this not being your garden variety day of the dead; there's a sort of acid rain, rays of light sucking people and crickets up into the sky, a newly-built wall around the whole of the town, mysterious robed figures...

 The plot ends up making some amount of sense (as long as you don't look at it too closely or start asking questions), but the script is... well, it's not very good. That it's mainly a purposefully kitsch comedy excuses a lot of the internal consistency and logic issues, but then you're left with gags that just aren't very funny, and the actors aren't up to redeeming either the comedy or the action. Poor McKay really struggles with selling Marion as an Ash-like badass, and the less said of some of the others' relentless mugging the better.

 It strikes me as a film that was designed with the visuals in mind, and had the rest hitched to them later. And there's some varied and striking imagery to be found here; It's heavily stylized, too, which helps it look good despite its homemade quality and desaturated palette. The gore is also fun, with maybe a little more in the way of physical blood and prosthesis than other films like this (though some of the CGI, being low budget and two decades old, is pretty bad).

 Despite its superficial similarities, it's unfair to compare it to the Wyrmwood movies - those were much more straightforward in their ambitions. Unfortunately, Undead kind of fails in its own terms, but it's an interesting, likeable, and entertaining sort of failure. It did serve its purpose as a calling card, letting the Spierigs go on to helm two of the more idiosyncratic sci fi films of the following decade. 

Wyrmwood: Apocalypse

  Wyrmwood: Apocalypse is the eight-years in the making continuation of the Wyrmwood saga. That's the one where they use zombie breath to fuel cars, in case you've forgotten.

 Siblings Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Brooke (Bianca Bradey) are still running around, trying to survive - Bianca, who was injected with some weird fluorescent zombie juice in the first one by a mad scientist, is basically a zombie herself now, though a more reasonable one.
 Not reasonable enough to avoid biting the neck of one of another pair of siblings Barry and she are running with now, though. Understandably, the sisters, Grace (Tasia Zalar) and Maxi (Shantae Barnes-Cowan) take offence/are horrified at this and decide to split post-haste.

 At this point the action starts following a mercenary named Rhys (Luke McKenzie), the twin brother of a soldier Barry had to deal with (fatally) in the first movie. His introduction is really great, as he goes around his small compound and follows his morning routine; the guy's got the post-apocalypse all figured out.
 Rhys's job is to fetch people and bring them to a tiny underground facility that's run by, oh shit, is that supposed to be the mad scientist from the first movie? How did he survive?
 Well, maybe he isn't, since he's played by a different actor (Nicholas Boshier.) In any case, Rhys thinks he's rounding up people so they can work on a cure, and it's assumed he doesn't suspect they're doing the sort of shit we know they do down there. So he's a good guy working for bad people, though he should really fucking know better.

 Things kick into gear when Rhys ambushes Grace and Maxi and manages to take Grace to the lab. Maxi, in turn, manages to catch Rhys unawares later, and forces him to help him rescue her sister. In due course Rhys's eyes are opened to the sort of shit the government-type shady bastards are up to, and they get together with Barry and Brooke for a couple of climactic confrontations.

 The plot is more than a little loopy, but it's fun and propulsive, and the amount of conflicts between the characters keeps things unpredictable. The Roche-Turner brothers have gotten better at the modest sort of spectacle they enjoy delivering, increasing the scope a little without losing any of the energy or the sense of fun. The action here is varied, including car chases, a giant mutant zombie fight, big explosions, an air cannon, a gatling gun, and of course, lots of zombies, though they take a back seat as most of the fights are against soldier-types.

 More of the same, and in this case that's not a bad thing at all. As long as they keep making them, and keep this level of crazy, early Raimi/Miller-style vibes, I'll keep watching them.

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mad Max: Fury Road

 First Avatar, now Fury Road. Damn my decision to write down a few words for everything I watch (which I've failed to do a few times, but shhhhh.) So: what could I possibly say about Fury Road?

 It's the coolest thing ever, and every time I see it it feels exactly like watching Road Warrior as a not quite jaded pre-teen. (Road Warrior was of course the coolest thing ever before Fury Road usurped its place). If you like action cinema at all and somehow haven't seen it, go see it. It's mandatory.

 If you want to read a cogent dissection of what makes it so great I'd point you to OutlawVern's epic, factually and objectively 100% correct review. I feel anything I could say has already been said better there and in a hundred other places.

 Instead, I'll mention that this last time I saw it with someone who hasn't seen a lot of movies, especially not action movies.

 A guy my age, who liked the look of the trailer and was curious about it.

 He liked it (or at least was polite enough to say some nice things about it), but the movie is so relentless, so manic that he had trouble following the plot and missed a ton of stuff.

 For example, he was surprised when they show Immortan Joe's corpse at the end; He'd completely missed his death earlier on, which, to be fair, is awesome but pretty anticlimactic. He did not get why they were using Max as a blood bag and other worldbuilding details. The movie overwhelmed him, it was literally too much too fast for him to absorb.

 He's a really intelligent dude in his forties, and doesn't normally have issues following twisty movies (although talking to him I did notice he has trouble when things get a bit meta. For example, he liked Knives Out a lot, but had trouble with the meta elements of See How They Run, which is a much simpler movie.)

 Got me thinking that it goes to show watching a movie is also a skill that needs to be trained, and that different genres come with their on very particular set of skills. I think of Fury Road as the apex of crystal clear action cinematography, but it's an evolution that incorporates lots of disparate elements over hundreds of movies, and that most of us have internalized because we grew up with the genre. It's a very specialized machine that we've come to understand over time. I used to think Fury Road was... if not universally appealing, at least a movie any person who liked action cinema would at least enjoy. But this guy likes Die Hard, Ronin, Bond movies and, ahem, Stranger Things, and he couldn't really get into this one, beyond the imagery.

 Maybe spare a thought for those that watch Fury Road and only see a clanking, bewildering monstrosity.

 Now excuse me, I'm going to see if I can convince him to watch Road Warrior.