Rumours

 There's a tiny subgenre of action that pits world leaders (well, ok, usually the US president) against terrorists or some other threat. It's never been very popular, but for whatever reason there's been a spike in their production lately (I won't get into the politics of it, but it is pretty concerning, particularly in the current climate). One of them even takes place at the G20 summit.

 I'd say Rumours is a direct response to that one movie, but it came out before it. It pits the members of the G7 as they face an unexpected siege by the wanking dead (no, that's not a typo and no, I won't expand on it). As you might  expect from a movie written and directed by Guy Maddin and frequent collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, it attacks its material at a rather... oblique angle.

 The premise an obvious joke, if a pretty good one: The leaders of the free world convene to tackle on some (unspecified) world crisis only to be faced with a more immediate and dangerous one... and they dissolve into an ineffectual muddle of infighting, grandstanding, and incompetence.

 They're all so self-absorbed and so far removed from any real issues that they can't deal with one that directly threatens their survival, and I have to admit that I laughed several times even when the punchlines were only slightly different variations on a theme. I also laughed when the French President starts to look for hidden meaning within the events of the night, which feels like Maddin and co. gently poking fun at themselves and trolling their audience.

 The cast is very, very game and a lot of  fun to watch; The Chancellor of Germany (Cate Blanchett) awkwardly tries to hold things together. The president of Canada (Roy Dupuis) is basically a stroppy teen; The POTUS (Charles Dance with his native English accent) is an artifact stuck firmly in the glories of the past. The Japanese PM (Takehiro Hira) is pretty much a non-entity who goes along with anyone else's plan, and the French president (Denis Ménochet) is a pretentious windbag. The UK PM (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is stuck as the voice of reason along with the German Chancellor. And the Italian president (Rolando Ravello) is a sweet idiot who's just happy to be included, and provides some of the biggest laughs in the movie.

 Oh, and Alicia Vikander (adorable) puts in a short appearance as the leader of the European commission.

 While technically this is a zombie movie, this is first and foremost a bizarre surreal movie that's only barely interested in being a comedy, much less a horror film. It does find a couple of moments to play with genre aesthetics (a garishly-lit 80's style scene in the woods, and a beautiful mist-bound scene at a ferry dock drenched in sodium light), but other than some ambiance the scarce horror elements are strictly there for  laughs or as a surrealist sting.
 The satire, meanwhile, is a mixed bag; Some of its barbs are clear and cogent, like the president of France making pompous, grandiloquent statements while being carried in a wheelbarrow by the leaders of other countries. Others are way too obvious, like the US president falling asleep and being generally out of it (I do wonder if this movie would have been more interesting had the it been released a year or two later). The general thrust of the script - Germany timorously trying to herd a bunch of unruly idiots in order to perform a clearly ineffectual, unnecessary exercise, everyone being completely unable to prioritize or competently take charge of the situation - remains funny throughout . And there is, of course, a whole lot of surrealist What. The. Fuck.

 If you're tickled by the premise, well then, you'll remain tickled by the premise, but as with all of the movies from these filmmakers, it's somewhat hostile to the viewer. Guy Maddin is, for good or ill, unable/unwilling to produce surrealism that still functions within the genre it inhabits, as opposed to someone like Quentin Dupieux.

 I personally don't regret watching this, but found the experience of getting through it often exasperating; It feels like it could have worked much better at half its length. But... I can't discount a film with situations as funny as a man trying to thread the line on how much pedophilic flirting is appropriate, or lines as gloriously unhinged as when someone proclaims that a giant brain is female, because "it's not as big as a male giant brain".

Dark Match

 I've never really been interested in wrestling at all, even though I spent a couple of formative years in the States during Hulkmania. I've seen movies about these small upstart wrestling companies like the one at the heart of Dark Match before, but I have no idea what they're all about - some kind of travelling show, maybe? I don't know any of the lingo and I'm not really predisposed to buy into its manufactured drama. Would I have enjoyed the movie more if I knew anything about its world, or had any nostalgia for it? Probably not; This is one rickety B-movie.

 The small wrestling company in question is SAW, and they feature a varied roster of heels (villains - hey, I knew this bit of lingo!) and faces (good guys) who fight in dingy warehouses to the delight of even dingier crowds. One good day their manager (Jonathan Cherry) gets hired to give a performance at a remote rural compound full of trashy rock'n'roll loving deviants. After some ominous partying, they are roped into a tournament where the crew are forced to compete against each other in gimmicky, elemental-coded fights... to the death. All for the benefit of a mysterious 'leader' (Chris Jericho) who looks like a bargain-bin Mickey Rourke character and doesn't even pretend not to be some sort of diabolic cult leader.

 Writer/director Lowell Dean seems to be perfectly happy making kind of likeable, haphazard horror filler; This is the type of film that informs you that it's set in the eighties by having a character awkwardly say "hey, it's 1988!". You know, in case it wasn't clear from the brightly coloured jackets, the walkmen, the music, the lurid lighting schemes, or the frequent stretches where the film goes through a degraded VHS-like filter. Plus, it's very poorly shot and completely lacks any sense of style- it just looks cheap; If for some reason you have any problem with Joe Begos's filmography, this one should at least give you some appreciation for his craft.

 Dark Match also takes a little too long to get to the fun parts - the titular dark matches; It barely hangs together as a coherent story and is full of the type of dialog that good actors would struggle with. Not that the acting here is, well, good: The protagonist (Ayisha Issa) has a good, glowering screen presence, and her rival (Sara Canning) also acquits herself well - but everyone else... well, at least they look like they're having fun.
 Everyone except pro wrestler Chris Jericho (who also produces), who seems invested enough to take his ridiculous character completely seriously and tries to give us a convincing, scary villain. It really, really doesn't work.

 Lowell's piss-poor script can't even begin to support a number of unlikely plots that include romances and rivalries within the crew, a very inconsistent conspiracy, and the possibility that the whole tournament is some sort of satanic ritual. Its ninety-odd minutes go by quickly, though, thanks to a relatively quick pace, absolute lack of pretension, and an agreeable amount of decent, completely practical gore effects. Don't ask anything else out of it, roll with its dumbness, and you should be OK.

Grave Encounters

 The 'paranormal investigators run into the real thing' subgenre of found-footage horror is actually older than Paranormal Activity or even The Blair Witch Project; It started with Ghostwatch, a legendary 1992 BBC program that fooled many of its viewers into thinking it was the real thing thanks to its pitch-perfect, deadpan execution. It's a bit of a legend here in the UK even among those who didn't watch it when it originally aired.

 As for its more modern, cynical form - one that takes into account shitty ghost-hunting reality TV shows and youtubers, the ur-text is probably the very enjoyable Canadian shocker Grave Encounters from 2011. I've been thinking about it off and on for a while now - since watching Gonjeam: Haunted Asylum and The Deadtectives, at least. And yeah... its influence is undeniable.

 The film kicks off with an introduction from the producer of a reality TV show called, of course, Grave Encounters, who explains that the show was cancelled after its whole crew went missing during the filming of the sixth episode. Which is a pretty solid reason for cancellation, if you think about it; No amount of online petitions are going to help there. Anyhow, the footage they shot during the filming of that episode - set in a spooky abandoned mental hospital - was retrieved after their disappearance, edited from hundreds of hours into ninety minutes for our viewing pleasure.

 The crew consists of:
 Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), the host, your typical charismatic faker.
 Sasha (Asheligh Gryzko), a goth-y occult specialist, the true believer (though she's still pretty cynical).
 T.C. Gibson (Merwyn Mondesir), the main cameraman and all-round 'fuck this noise' type.
 Matt White (Juan Riedinger), Tech wizard, laid-back.
 And last but not least Houston Gray (Mackenzie Gray), a fake medium and amiable charlatan.

 They're all douchebags who are not above slipping some money to a gardener to make up a ghost story about the building they're going to be covering on the show (the film can be pretty funny when it wants to, as in that aside). They're not influencers, so they come off more as entertaining grifters/hacks than as complete wastes of flesh. The film proceeds pretty much as you'd expect: a long introduction where we learn about the characters and the building they're going to be spending the night on, the surveillance setup, the 'supernatural hotspots' which may or may not figure prominently later, etc.

 When weird shit starts happening, it's also the usual gradual ramp-up from gentle weirdness: for a while it's all mysterious noises, equipment failures, and things moving on their own. The film finally hits its stride when the panicked crew try to leave the building, which leads to a House of Leaves-style twist and the strongest moment in the film (complete with a very funny callback to an early laugh*); From there things get a lot more hectic, with some pretty cool horror moments as the hospital's ghosts torment our crew. Cheap CGI does mar the proceeds... as does a whole lot of wandering around dark hallways with swinging flashlights and/or night vision cameras.

 It's this ratio of thrills to a very specific type of tedium that makes this horror subgenre somewhat hard to recommend; I think that, thanks to some pretty cool horror scenes, Grave Encounters lands comfortably on the green, but I'd be lying if all the hysterics and wobbly-lit running down darkened passages didn't wear on my nerves.
 The cast do a decent job; Even if their characters remain little more than sketches, they're likeable enough that it keeps this from having the audience rooting for the ghouls. Writer/Directors The Vicious Brothers have some neat ideas for their scares, but the format they're working on mercilessly thrusts function over form. Or rather: the more artless its form, the more effective it is - there's some really good horror imagery, but its impact is conceptual, not visual, if that makes any sense.

*: Death Awaits indeed.

The Void

 A father (Daniel Fathers) and a son (Mik Byskov) ruthlessly shoot and burn a woman on the doorstep of her cabin. Another of the cabin's occupants (Evan Stern) escapes, wounded; "Won't get Far," says the father, before driving off in pursuit. Meanwhile a white-robed figure observes from the treeline, a black triangle -the same one we saw on the front door of the cabin- stenciled on the front of his closed veil.

 The survivor makes it to a nearby road before collapsing, where he's picked up by sheriff Carter (Aaron Poole) and taken to a local hospital. This being a horror (and low-budget) movie, the hospital is being renovated after a fire and currently only hosts a tiny skeleton crew and a couple of patients. Oh, and the head nurse is Carter's estranged wife (Kathleen Munroe), to add some (very) mild drama to the proceeds.

 Things go to shit very quickly: not ten minutes go by when one of the nurses goes into a trance and stabs a patient to death with a pair of medical scissors, and then attacks Carter, who shoots her dead. A state trooper appears to take custody of the wounded man Carter brought in (his disappointment in Carter's shoddy resolution of the nurse attack is pretty funny)... but then the both of them run into the resurrected remains of the nurse, who's turned into a shambling mountain of hungry flesh - an extremely cool monster, done entirely in practical effects.

 I think we can all agree all this qualifies as a pretty busy night, but things are just getting started. Carter and co. haven't even dealt with the gooey monstrosity formerly known as nurse Beverly when the father and the son from the opening rush into the hospital waving a rifle around, looking for the one who got away. At the same time a horde of stab-happy hooded cultists start forming a cordon around the hospital, knifing anyone who tries to leave the facilities.

 From there the film turns into a series of expeditions into increasingly dark and derelict corridors, as people find different excuses to go into the hospital's bowels and are chased by some freaky monsters. An explanation of sorts for the night's madness is put forward, but while there are some cool concepts at play, the plot depends on all of the events being tied together with a lazy patchwork of coincidences and contrivances.

 I've now watched 2016's The Void three times, and I've still got the nagging feeling that another watch is going to do the trick, that next time I'm going to fully click with it for sure. I like it well enough, but I should probably accept It'll never live up to the movie I want it to be. There is a *lot* to like here, but I can't deny that it feels like it's missing something vital.

 
 It's a movie that's clearly attempting to recapture the magic of John Carpenter's incredible run of 80s horror movies - you don't even need to squint to see the overt attempts to invoke the ghost of The Thing and Assault on Precinct 13, with a healthy showing of The Fog, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness. Clive Barker's Hellraiser is heavily summoned for the third act, as well.

 It makes sense that this comes from the writing/directing team of Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie, both of whom are alumni of the Astron-6 film collective - at the time this movie came out they were best known for grindhouse pastiches Father's Day, Manborg and The Editor (Konstanski would go on to do the wonderful Psycho Goreman and Frankie Freako).

 It's not like any of those films just stole stuff and hoped for the best, but whereas those movies took every chance to wink at their audience, The Void is dead serious - and the script does not manage to hold it together. The characters are a little weak, the second act drags a little, and the ending feels a little rushed. It's clear that a lot of thought and effort went into trying to make this more than the sum of its borrowed parts, but as it turns out, it wasn't enough.

 None of that takes away from all the coolness in the film. It oozes ambiance and menace, manages some striking visuals, and of course it sports some truly wonderful monsters. The Creature effects were crowdsourced, and no one could ever accuse Kostanski and his crew of taking the money and making a runner; every cent is on-screen, and it looks a whole lot better than many studio movies.
 There's a cool sense of mystery I really respect to the story, too. This keeps the characters opaque, which prevents investment in any of their interpersonal drama, but it also makes this one of the very rare movies that actually feels like it understand what makes cosmic horror work. I may not like many of the plot specifics, but they still manage to paint an intriguing mystery that feels successfully otherworldly, all the way to a pretty cool final shot.

 Obviously, I need to watch it at least one more time. Ask me again how I like it in four years or so,

  

Black Mountain Side

 Oh, goddammit. This could have been something special.

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

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

Poor Fleetwood Addison-Szostakiwskyj :(

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

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

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

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

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

Silent Night (2012)

 1984's Silent Night, Deadly Night isn't a great slasher movie, but it must have done something right: it beat out bona-fide classic Nightmare on Elm Street at the box office when they released on the same date, got four sequels (I only got to the second film, and that was bad enough to turn me off the franchise), provided the internet with an early meme (Garbage day!)... and eighteen years later, it got a cheap Canadian 'remake' of sorts.

 Although calling it even a loose remake might be pushing it - the only scene I recognized from the original is a kill by antlers (the victim of which was OG scream queen Linnea Quigley). I haven't watched the original in more than twenty years, but looking it up they only share a very basic premise (Killer Santa rampages through town) and a couple other scenes that function more as nods than anything else. And yes, the garbage day line from part two also gets referenced.

 This 2012 edition focuses more on the cops - mainly deputy Aubrey Bradmoore (Jaime King), an insecure but earnest second-generation police deputy - as they try and track down a mysterious, murderous psycho in a Santa suit who's going around punishing anyone who breaches his personal ethics code.

 This all happens during the anual Santa parade, in which people from all around come over donning their best jolly Coca-Cola-inspired getup. The heavy emphasis on the police side of things is slightly distinctive, but both the cop drama and the investigation is murky and uninspired - basically, it's a bunch of red herrings passing for plot development until the mystery basically solves itself.

 As for the slasher side of things, it's not very good either; Most of the victims are either portrayed as spectacular douchebags or sleazy sex workers - the only sympathetic one (at least until very late in the game) is a stripper who gets the cruelest and closest to inspired kill in the movie. She's also chased across half of the town topless. It's pretty tasteless, but it also happens to be about the only time the movie shows a pulse.

 What does that leave us with, then? Well, not much. Director Steven C. Miller (whose new werewolf movie I'm looking forwards to, giving me an excuse to watch this) does well by the material - it's a slick, slightly impersonal movie, and a little too reliant on the du jour desaturated '10s horror palette - but it looks a lot better than most VoD horror, and the production allows for a few expansive scenes with a lot of extras. The kills, as alluded to before, are pretty mediocre, but there's at least a couple good gore effects.

 The veneer of competence on the visuals pushes to the fore the ugly emptiness in Jayson Rothwell's script, which keeps bringing up the 'dark side of Christmas' without really saying anything about it; Repeatedly mentioning a theme doesn't make it relevant to your story. The killer is a cypher until the very end, his code for killing very suspect - the only thing he's got going is a pretty cool mask and a couple of scenes with a flamethrower (including one pretty impressive stunt where he fires it very close to an extra).

 The Santa parade element is also underused; it provides a scene that's almost indistinguishable from any other there's-a-killer-at-a-parade bit (there's quite a few of those) without indulging in the sort of madness that could make this movie memorable - say, getting a few innocent Santas gunned down by panicked cops, or Christmas-sweatered families trampled to death in the ensuing panic.

 There's a little humour thrown in, mostly taken on by a tough-talking sheriff (played by Malcolm McDowell in full ham mode - his slumming goes a lot further back than I realised) acting like he's the hero in a Clint Eastwood movie. It's marginally amusing. Other than that, I don't know what to tell you; It's a slightly off-putting but well-crafted nothing of a slasher movie. Better than the original, I think -it's been a while- but that's not a high bar to clear, and it's not enough to make this one worthwhile unless you're a franchise completist.

 Except: this is another one of those movies Amazon's subtitled with their high-tech AI thingamajig, and there were a couple of misfires which were funnier than the film's actual jokes. Case in point: When a person gets killed off-screen, his unintelligible last word is subtitled as "Triforce!"

 Zelda fans represent.

Hey, turns out AI is good for a laugh, at least!

A Christmas Horror Story

 So a few years ago someone recommended to me a Christmas horror anthology film with a title so generic, I immediately forgot it. Lo and behold, what surfaces in my streaming recommendations nearly ten years later? Well, I think this is the one, at least - the painfully generic title and time frame seem to confirm it. I remember a killer Santa came up in the conversation, too, though that hardly narrows things down.

 Well... if it was this one, whoever it was that recommended it deserves a lump of coal.

 It kicks off with the twin horrors of autotune and bargain bin CGI; The autotune is in the process of murdering the Carol of the Bells, a gag that was used to much better effect by some youtuber appropriating it for Portal (if you don't know it, look up the Carol of the Turrets - it's great). The lyrics are changed somewhat from the original, but not in a particularly fun or clever way. The title sequence ends on Santa on his North Pole base, all bloodied and being attacked by... something.

 The movie then shifts to William Shatner as Dangerous Dan, a wholesome-ish but somehow also sleazy (or just Shatnery) radio DJ stuck broadcasting small talk and carols for the good folk of Bailey Downs. From there we're introduced to four stories that will intertwine throughout the rest of the film:

- Santa (George Buza) is beset by a zombie-like outbreak at his North Pole fortress, and has to deal with a small horde of foul-mouthed, murderous elves.

- A group of students break into their school on Christmas Eve to shoot a media class assignment about the murder of a couple that took place in a closed-off section of the facilities.

- A husband and wife notice that their son is acting like a wholly different person after he got momentarily lost in the woods.

- And an annoying dysfunctional family face off against Krampus.

 The stories are... well, they're kind of OK, brought down by having too much filler, flat acting and even flatter filmmaking. A couple of the stories have potential on paper, but the way they're intercut tends to deflate any momentum they were developing - chances are that any given decent scene will be followed by one from a different story at a point where it's just treading water.

 They're all connected, but don't expect said connections to mean anything - they don't illuminate anything, nor do they provide any sort of clever intersections between the four threads.

 There is, however, some mild cleverness, at least one good jump scare, and a very decent (unguessable) twist for the Santa story. There's also a scene where a tiny kid molests his sleeping mother, which is the kind of actually disturbing, fucked-up shit this movie could use a whole lot more of. The climactic ghost for one of the other segments comes close, I guess, though it looked too silly to be scary.

 Although most of the tales are played surprisingly straight, a cheesy, impish sense of humour runs throughout the film - especially the Santa thread, which even throws in a fairly hefty action sequence that's ruined by some duff shutter speed choices. Directors Grant Harvey, Steven Hoban and Brett Sullivan otherwise don't really do much visually to distinguish the film from any other middle-of-the-road VoD horror offering, other than to include some very crappy CGI for the exteriors of Santa's fortress. The gore fares a little bit better, with a lot of severed head prosthetics (or the same one used multiple times, as in an excellent gag in The Last Videostore). The Krampus here is also a fairly impressive creation for a movie of this budget.

 I dunno; Maybe I'm being a little too harsh on a goofy, good-natured holiday-themed horror movie that puts in a respectable effort to deliver its genre goods. But to be brutally honest, it mostly didn't work for me - I found it a little bit of a chore to get through.

The Last Videostore

  There's no denying the amount of love poured all over The Last Videostore, another goofy, affectionate Canadian homage to the pre-blockbusters VHS era. Whether it will work for you if you don't have a fondness for the era depends on your patience with scrappy, low-budget horror comedies.

 It at least provides a point of view character for the uninitiated: Nyla (Yaayaa Adams), a woman who couldn't give less of a shit about the b-movies the film relies on for meaning. She's just returning a pile of overdue tapes to Blaster Video on behalf of her dad, a pile that includes as an added bonus... The Videonomicon, a spiky, lovely little sample of cool prop design.

 Kevin (Kevin Martin),  the enthusiastic owner of the store, fawns over each one of the movies and gives Nyla (and us) a short rundown for each: You've got a 90's cheap CGI sci-fi creature feature about a mantis-like alien that causes its victims to trip out while it eats them, a cheesy piss take on Friday the 13th where the Jason surrogate wears a hockey mask with implied beaver teeth (his name is Castor, yuk yuk yuk), and a crappy actioner with a viper-themed hero (but who has a cobra in his jacket). Bonus points for also including a Dakota-Harris-style Indiana Jones ripoff, which will eventually provide one of the film's biggest laughs.

 But the Videonomicon, he doesn't recognize, and Nyla agrees to give it a spin to see what it's all about. Bad idea.

 As the tape spins, it reaches out to the other tapes in Kevin has in his multi-play set up, summoning first the cheesy alien mantis monster, then the knock-off Jason to the shop. Hijinks ensue as the duo tries to survive, with a couple other fictional characters getting pulled from their movies to provide help, hindrance, additional gags and cheesy kills.

 It's a good time! Directors Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford ably mimic some of the movie styles they're spoofing, including a fun training montage when an action star enters the story, garish lighting schemes, and a cool and well realised (if overly familiar at this stage) 80's-derived aesthetic. The effects are cheap, cheerful, and can get to be pretty cool, especially a mantis-fuelled CGI acid trip which I thought looked terrific.

The jokes are uneven, but they're invariably delivered with good cheer, and the pacing keeps things varied despite the very limited locations and some obvious stuffing. My main issue with the script (by co-director Tim Rutherford and Joshua Roach) is that it could stand to be a lot more clever; The film sets up situations where Kevin's extensive b-movie knowledge will save the day, but beyond one (very funny) desperate call for an ally and invoking "the power of friendship" to try and get empathy from a masked slasher, there's not a whole lot of that. Instead we get a metric shitload of eye-rolling and wide-eyed disbelief from Nyla and lots of pontificating about old movies that... honestly, are mostly off-base or a bit obvious, like a stick-in-the-mud slasher victim played by Matt Kennedy (Frankie Freako himself) - all these years, and we're still joking about thirty year olds playing teens? At least his delivery did make me laugh. And the less said about "the power of friendship" in the context of slasher tropes, the better.

 So... yeah, some of the jokes land, but honestly the film succeeds more on the strength of its warmth towards its characters and setting than on the merits of its humour.

 Oh, and a near perfect ending; I've talked before about how a botched finale can make a movie feel disproportionately worse than it deserves, and this is a good example that the reverse is also true.

 Even if the observations on the movies they're spoofing are a bit suspect, there's a lot of clearly heartfelt passion on display, along with plenty of nods to other people sharing the same toybox. The shop floor where most of the action transcurs is not a set, it's one of the few remaining video stores in the Edmonton area (and Kevin is its actual owner!). A short by some of the folks behind the lovely Turbo Kid is repurposed (do go and look up the fake trailer for Demonitron: The Sixth Dimension, it's a work of art). The Astron-6 crew is all over the place - Matt Kennedy, of course, plus Adam Brooks (hilarious, as usual) put in an appearance, Steve Konstanski provides a wonderful stop-motion final threat, and posters for their movies plaster the store. 

 The acting can be best described as amateurish but enthusiastic, which is fine, as it compliments the film's charm. Most of the FX are digital, but all the gore is practical - there's not a lot, but it'd be enough for an R rating. And the whole endeavour looks pretty good, if, as mentioned before, a bit clichéd.

 It's a hard movie not to like, from its lovely opening crawl to a climactic ending where one of the characters cracks up. It might not have made me laugh all that much, but were my soul not a shrivelled, dusty thing, I may have smiled all the way through.

Frankie Freako

 Eighties (and early nineties) nostalgia doesn't get much more specific than Frankie Freako, writer/director/editor Steve Kostanski's love letter to cheapie Gremlins knock-offs, kid-friendly comedy/horror/sci-fi like The Gate or Suburban Commando, and all things Charles Band. It coasts on enough weirdness and an odd likeability that it gets to be the rare bad-on-purpose movie that manages to be worthwhile. Just about.

 Conor (Conor Sweney) is the caricature of a drip, a ridiculously square office worker and a fuddy goodie-two-shoes whose idea of being adventurous consists of getting two different types of cheese on his pizza, and who's brought to orgasm within seconds by just holding hands with his loving but understandably frustrated wife (Kristy Wordsworth). When a series of events at the office with his boss at the office (Adam Brooks) bring to his attention that maybe he is a bit... boring, he gets a bit of an identity crisis.

 Bristling at the temerity of such a baseless accusation, Conor calls a party hotline hosted by Frankie Freako, a diminutive, ugly red dude voiced by Matthew Kennedy, and soon three lovingly realized but slightly stiff puppets are running amok in his house, thrashing the place in the course of their partying.
 Part of the film is Conor pitting his wits against the tiny invaders (he's hopelessly outmatched) plus a side of comically inane corporate intrigue, and then the back half expands the scope to explain a little about the Freakos and enlist Conor in a really mild interstellar adventure.

Here's an early attempt of me trying to find out how to watch this. PSA: Winners don't use AI!

 The music's pretty good! A couple of dead ringers for the sort of obnoxious party rock that dominated teen horror at the time, plus some excellent synth-driven tracks from Blitz/Berlin that are similar to, say, College in that they sound more like we think the eighties sounded than they actually did.
 The puppets' design is very solid (one of them is a pretty direct homage to Puppet Master), but they really don't animate that well. By design, of course, but if you're expecting the sort of low-budget practical effects wizardry Kostanski is known for you'll have to wait until things go haywire at about the halfway point. It's totally worth sticking around, in case you're wondering.

 The acting is also bad on purpose, with some truly odd choices from the cast (I'm still not sure what Wordsworth's accent is supposed to be - sounds like a mix between Australian and a made-up Eastern European country?). I wouldn't be surprised to find out there was a lot of improvisation on-set; At least everyone looks like they're having fun, which makes sense as many of the actors and crew go way back to at least Father's Day.

 The oddest misfire is the script, which packs in plenty of jokes but often forgets to make them funny, possibly in a sly wink to such comedic masterpieces as Munchies or Hobgoblins. Maybe it's on purpose? Arch, good-natured postmodernism, played straight. Maybe. I'm not sure! But I kind of love that uncertainty.

 It's all abetted by an obvious affection for the material it's spoofing, and leavened with the same type of transgressive humour that made Kostanski's Psycho Goreman so essential (but dialed all the way back to one or two). Only mildly amusing and kind of half-arsed, but weird and agreeable enough that it never outstays its welcome, Frankie Freako seems destined to be another bit of Canadian low-budget weirdness for stoners to obsess over as they stumble upon it in the dankest reaches of the streaming lists over the coming years.

In A Violent Nature

 In a Violent Nature is a new(ish) Canadian horror movie that's been doing the rounds - the rare low-budget slasher that makes it to the big screen in my (wrung) neck of the woods. I only found out it had been on once its week was done, sadly.

 I was a little worried about it because it's got a bit of a gimmick: the cameras cleave mostly to the killer's back as he leisurely carves his way from victim to victim. Kind of like a modern third-person videogame, which is funny because there is a game genre colloquially called 'walking simulator' which fits this movie pretty well for a lot of its run time. Critics were comparing it to Terence Malik or the Dardennes, of all people, so it made me worried it'd be a horror movie that wanted to distance itself from the genre (AKA 'elevated horror').
 That's not usually a problem for me, but in a slasher it seemed especially dishonest, so I was a bit leery. I was wrong, though:  Writer/Director Chris Nash has cooked up a love letter to early slasher films that despite an unorthodox approach and a fair bit of arty prickliness never felt to me like a deconstruction or post-modern wankery. It comes from a genuine place (going as far as being shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio to honor the memory of watching these on old TV sets) without wholly dropping a very smart-arse attitude.

 Thing is, the skimpy story would fully work in one of its inspirations if it were so inclined. The killer, Johnny (Ry Barret), is an undead revenant who comes to life in the first scene after some douchey twenty-somethings steal a locket from his unmarked grave. His backstory, as told by he same group of vacationers around a campfire (one of the rare times the film undocks from the behind-the-killer POV) is solid, pretty creepy, and a clear tip of the hat to Friday the 13th. While homing in on the locket at a shuffling gate, Johnny murders his way through a bunch of people until there's just a final girl (Andrea Pavlovic) and.... well, that's basically it.

 But the cool thing is that as he's lurking in the background, we get to see snippets of the vacationers and hear parts of their conversations - and that accounts for a lot of the tropes from old-school slashers. The horny pair that slinks away and gets killed, the callous douchebag who pushes his girl away from him and gets the group in trouble, the guy with a history with the killer...

 The unconventional framing works at least as well as a more normal take, I think. My favorite part is when Johnny accidentally lets himself get photographed; nothing comes out of it at the moment, but the next day, after a bunch of murderin', we hear that they saw him in the picture, and it clearly rattled them. You can see how that would work from their perspective, but seeing it second-hand like this is novel, and putting the pieces together yourself is engaging in its own way.

 Other than the storytelling approach the film's style, languid pace, and complete lack of non-diegetic music work together to foment a sense of low-key realism that gives the kills a lot more impact.

 And what a wide array of excellent kills it is - from understated to over the top, comedic to upsetting, near-Terrifier-level-graphic to mostly implied. All technically very well made, and full of really cool details. I loved it how when someone gets two separate nasty injuries. the mixture of pooling blood comes in both arterial and venous tones of red. I have no idea if it's realistic or intended (he said, nervously, for the record) but if it's at least the second, it shows a clear commitment to excellence.

 It's also very, very funny when it wants to. One of the kills (a solid pun on yoga flexibility) stands out, but the bit that made me laugh the hardest comes right after a walkman-wearing dumbass gets sort-of decapitated; The killer is then shown walking from behind with his victim's head in one hand, dragging the rest of the body with the other. But the headphones are still on the head, still playing, and you can clearly see the cable going from one body part to another. That's just brilliant. That both human remains are used as tools a little later is just a bonus, and also functions as a fun callback to Jason's throwing-bodies-through-windows shenanigans. Layers!

 Johnny's a good, distinct slasher figure: a patient, inscrutable, hulking killer in the Kane Hodder mould. He gets a couple moments of characterization, a distinctive mask and choice of weapons (axe and chained hooks). All good.

 Much as I enjoyed it, I'm not that enamoured of the pacing; Even at 90 minutes it's far from lean, and all those shots of Johnny walking around do pile on. It also tends to hang onto to a scene after it's organically ended for a little too long, a little like Werner Herzog keeps his cameras on the interviewees on his documentaries after they've said their piece. This is definitely not a movie to watch while sleep-deprived, recovering from a long bout of flu.

 The ending is also a bit of a... well, a non-ending, even if it's kind of thematically interesting; It leaves  you with a different type of dread that the ending stingers for these films usually go for, something a bit more existential.

 On the whole I think I liked it more than loved it, but I did like it a lot. An easy recommendation if you're up for some experimentation with a form that's sometimes a little too rigid for its own good.

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.

Scanners

 Scanners is the first movie in a prequel trilogy to the Scanner Cop movies. For this one, the producer behind all the movies in the series, Pierre David, tapped relatively well-known fellow Canadian David Cronenberg to write and direct.

 Of course, Cronenberg had little idea that his producer would run a decent streak of B-movies (most of them terrible) out of the back of his tight, mostly serious-minded little thriller. It's based on a couple different scripts Cronenberg had been thinking about pitching to Roger Corman for a while... influenced more than a little by Stephen King's Firestarter and Carrie, going by the finished product.

 To claim government subsidies (those Canadian commies) the film was hurried into production way before it was ready - Cronenberg has commented that he was writing the script the morning for scenes that he would shoot later in the day. Not that you can tell that much - the film is a bit strangely paced and structured, but not more than you'd expect from the director of Rabid and The Brood.

Headsplosion!

 The plot follows one Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a weirdo who walks into a mall driven to distraction by the voices in his head - which are quickly revealed to be the thoughts of people around him. 

  He's chased down by a couple of shady characters, who shoot him with tranquilizer darts and put him under the care of Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan, having a lot of fun chewing the scenery). The good doctor informs Cameron that he's a scanner - a person born with telepathic and psychokinetic powers. After a little training, he conscripts Vale as a sort of superpowered spy to infiltrate a sort of underground terrorist cell led by rogue scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside).

 Revok is -by far- the best thing in the movie, an amoral badass played with unhinged ferocity by Ironside. He's introduced assassinating a rival scanner in one of the most iconic gore moments of the '80s, a messy headsplosion (achieved by someone shooting a prop with a shotgun!) that's still a beauty to behold. That's immediately followed by a great escape scene as he gets a bunch of guards to kill each other off using his scanner powers. Cronenberg is always great when he indulges his more basic genre leanings; And here we even get from him that most eighties of action conventions, the car that is immediately engulfed by a fireball upon crashing. It's glorious.

 Unfortunately -and this is always the bit I forget when rewatching this- we're stuck with Cameron for most of the running time, and he's a complete bore of a character, a bland leading man with absolutely nothing going for him except good looks and a killer action hero name. Lack is pretty wooden in the role, but there's not that much anyone could have done in his place; It's about as generic a thriller protagonist as you could come up with.

 All this is brought into sharp relief later when, while searching for Revok he runs into Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill) -  the leader of a new-agey cell of scanners who reject the people trying to manipulate them and use their powers for self-enlightenment. Even though she -in true '80s genre movie fashion- barely gets anything to do besides watching from the sidelines, she's immediately a much more human, interesting character than the protagonist's robotic plot pawn.

 The story beats are fairly standard - Vale and Obrist unravel a shady, barely-developed conspiracy as he tracks down Revok, all the while dodging or killing assassins sent to hinder them. Many of the plot's particulars remain elusive, and the pacing -while brisk- feels a bit off. Given the circumstances behind the film, though, it's amazing it works half as well as it does. 

 There are multiple action scenes, all pretty well done and fairly exciting even when the shotgun-toting bad guys' hilariously awful marksmanship would make a Star Wars Stormtrooper tut-tut disapprovingly. The suspense is really well handled, too - I love a sequence where a bunch of gunpeople approach a barn where our hero is investigating - and there are a few neat visual ideas peppered throughout. The barn above, for example, belongs to an avant-garde artist, and he has a conversation with Vale inside a giant hollow head. 

 Not so successful: the mind battles between scanners, which look like two of the world's most constipated people trying to take a dump in front of the camera.

 Everything else is pretty top-notch. The cinematography (by Mark Irwin*) is chilly, and Howard Shore's atonal synth-based score complements the action well. And the effects, of course, are spectacular. Watching this on a big screen from a new transfer, the fidelity is high enough that you can easily spot the latex fake skin patches used for some of the F/X. This, not that the planet is soon heading for an environmental disaster, is the hideous cost of modern technology.

Pyewacket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Breach

 When an adrift canoe carrying a horribly disfigured body ruins a family picnic, it falls to the sheriff of the nearby tiny town of Lone Crow (Allan Hawco) to try and figure out what happened.

 And it's a tricky one, because the body has been emptied, shredded from the inside-out ('Where did the bones go?' The sheriff asks the spectacularly douchey coroner played by Wesley French.) Luckily, the ID turns up nearby - the body belonged to one Cole Parsons (Adam Kenneth Wilson), 'THE ELECTROMAGNETIC TSAR OF OZARK UNIVERSITY' , the Oklahoma Times proclaims. I shit you not. He'd rented out a cabin in the woods nearby some time ago, after his daughter disappeared mysteriously.

 So the sheriff contacts Meg (Emily Alatalo), the last person to see TETOOU, who is, awkwardly, also the sheriff's estranged girlfriend. She doesn't have a lot of info, but agrees to take him, and the douchebag coroner, up the river to TETOOU's cabin.

 Hold on a minute - Involving Meg kind of makes sense, she knows the way. But why the hell does the coroner need to go to the site? Especially when it's established they can't stand each other? Well, as it turns out, he was Meg's previous boyfriend. So yeah, he's literally only there to provide some conflict.

I appreciate you, wall-dude.

 TETOOU's cabin is the expected semi-derelict deathtrap, full of scientific doodads and doors that mysteriously close on their own and stains that shift while people aren't looking. A couple of unexpected guests arrive, um, unexpectedly, and it turns out that, shock!, TETOOU was experimenting with things wot mens wern't ment to fiddle, and soon there are people wearing their insides on the outside invading our protagonists' personal bubbles.

 It starts out pretty engaging - the mystery seems cool, and I like the procedural vibe it carries for a while. Hawco is pretty good, and he's got more chemistry with his aide than with his girlfriend. But as the weirdness ramps up, it completely fails to develop properly, becoming more of a collection of horror moments than a coherent existential menace. As presented, the film is closer to a pretty rote body snatchers yarn than the cosmic horrors that it promises. scriptwriter Ian Weir, working from a book by Nick Cutter (An Audible Original! the credits specify) fails to develop the premise into anything interesting, and the same goes for the belabored relationships between the characters.

 Guns n' Roses guitarist Slash has a prominent credit as an executive producer and helped compose the excellent opening theme, which I guess is what's going to bring a lot of people to the movie. It's not clear if he's involved in the rest of the soundtrack, as the film actually attributes most of the songs to James Zirco Fisher. The cheesy guitar noodling when the film gets a little sentimental is a bit much, but other than that it's a pretty decent, if a little uneven horror score that does all right by the scenes it accompanies.

 Director Rodrigo Gudiño makes good use of a low budget; The film is distributed by Raven Banner, and from my experience they tend to value good-looking films. All the actors are at least professional, with Hawco the clear standout - the rest don't really get all that much to do.

 Effects-wise all the gore is strictly post-mortem, but it's pretty good, the monsters are cool and there's some agreeable weirdness like a wall dude who unfortunately just gets the one appearance and completely fails to influence the movie in any way; Just providing some creepy imagery, carry on ignoring me. On that vein, someone later puts on random cultist robes, because by Cthulhu this is cosmic horror so we got to have at least one cultist here. Even if it doesn't make the slightest lick of sense.

 If I were feeling mean, I'd say that other than the decent acting and production, it's more Garth Marenghi than H.P. Lovecraft. It's not that dire, obviously, but... well, it's still pretty bad.

Beyond The Black Rainbow

 Beyond The Black Rainbow is a hypnotic, languid, glacially paced mood piece/acid trip that's nominally a science fiction story, but seems more interested in evoking a very specific drug-hazed '70s and early '80s texture, or the memory of watching Solaris or 2001 as a kid without really understanding them.

 Elena (Eva Allan) is a captive in an underground research lab belonging to one Arboria Institute, a cultish group that is devoted to some poorly defined 'better living through technobabble'. There the girl is tormented by Dr. Nyles (Michael J. Rogers), who subjects her to frequent interrogations that include some barely concealed barbs to try and get a rise from her.

 Elena only stares at the floor and barely reacts; Is she consciously ignoring him? Is she tripping balls? Who knows. But there's a bit more going on beneath the surface, as she communicates telepathically with the man (and asks to see her father), and the Doctor uses some sort of giant prism to counter her latent powers.

 As the movie develops, tiny scraps of information are slowly - very slowly - revealed that give you some tools to extract a vague sense out of things; We meet the institute's founder (Scott Hylands), see a (gorgeous, chemical FX-realised) flashback where Dr. Nyles is sent to another dimension (or something), and get a feel for Elena's life in the Institute before she manages to escape, the good doctor always a couple of steps to the side, manipulating things. Oh, and there are a couple of random mutants thrown in for effect, as well as a couple of pimply metal nerds to up the body count.

 It's a very narrow-slice pastiche of styles and elements shot in gorgeous, grainy 35mm with special attention to the production design, a beautiful synth-y score, and lush colour schemes (courtesy of Bob Bottieri and Jeremy Schmidt off psych-rock band Black Mountain, and Norm Li, respectively). Whether you like it or not will depend on how much tolerance you have for this sort of thing, your patience, if you don't mind movies that shoot for style over substance, and if you click with its particular aesthetic.

 Personally, I'm much more of a fan of Writer/director Panos Cosmatos's Mandy, which managed to have a lot more going on while still keeping this careful attention to aesthetics and devotion to old-school weirdness. I had some trouble sticking to this one, and nodded off a couple of times - it's absolutely a late-night movie, but not one to approach if you're even marginally tired. On the plus side, you probably won't miss anything vital if you doze off.

 It is beautiful, though, and compelling at times; I could easily see myself falling under its spell upon a rewatch in different circumstances. But the few scraps of story it contains can't really sustain it, not even before the almost hilariously underwhelming final confrontation runs its course.

Infinity Pool

 James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing at a vacation resort in Li Tolqa (filmed in Croatia); James is a failed writer struggling to write a follow-up to his first book, Em comes from money; Their marriage isn't going that great.

 After a startling, low-key violent incident with one of the locals they meet fellow tourists Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert). Gabi comes on strong to James, having read and loved his novel. His ego stoked, James becomes a lot more social (to Em's resentment) and soon both couples are off on an unsanctioned visit to the countryside to sample the local sights.

 It's a mild outing, except for the part when Gabi creeps up on James as he's taking a piss and gives him a handjob- complete with an on-screen (prosthetic) dick and money shot. As you'd expect from any of the Cronenbergs, it's a spectacularly unsexy sex scene and plays almost like body horror. It's a running theme, just like the resort is shot to be pretty much the opposite of paradisiacal. Camberley-esque, is I believe the word for that.
 And then as James is driving the group back, he runs over and kills a local.

 Things develop similarly to The Forgiven: they don't call the police and instead head back to the compound, but are found out anyways. Then the police show up and take them away.
 It's a familiar nightmarish scenario for anyone who's been a tourist: guilt and the intrinsic fear of the foreign, compounded by multiple hints about local resentment and corruption, and the contrast between the resort and the impoverished countryside.

 As it turns out, Li Tolqa has a very creative approach to justice. According to their legal system, manslaughter - even involuntary - is punishable by death, the execution to be carried out by the victim's next-of-kin.
 But because tourism is one of the few ways the country has to make money, there's a way to get out. Li Tolqa happens to have the technology to build fully developed clones of people who share all their memories (shhh, just go along with it). So if a foreigner is willing to part with a lot of money to build one of these clones, he can have this clone be put to death as a surrogate. Oh, and he needs to witness the killing.

 It's a major contrivance, but... well, that's what the movie's about. More importantly, it's a deeply but subtly horrific conceit at an existential level. Not for James, though; he's weirdly entranced by seeing his copy be brutally stabbed to death, while Em is horrified; another wedge between them. When they get back to the resort - effectively getting away with murder, James is inducted to a group of expats who've been indulging in the possibilities that Li Tolqa's cloning technology allow for years. And from there the movie spirals out in all sort of debauched, inventive, and bizarre tangents.

 Infinity Pool is unnerving, grimly hilarious, enthralling and wince-inducing in equal measure. It's a weird, weird movie that's hard to get a handle on, which gives it a queasy power. This is strengthened by writer/director Brandon Cronenberg's careful, clinical direction, Karim Hussain's beautiful, washed-out cinematography, and a cool, pulsing, cacophonic score by Tim Hecker. Even the weird typography for the title card and credits.
 Skarsgård gives his character's bizarre arc a lot of heft - getting over self loathing through self-murdering, only to later have his ego crushed in a way that gave me sympathy for a very closed-off, unsympathetic character; the guy specializes in recklessly brave, vanity-less performances, and this is a memorable one. But he's outshone by Mia Goth often in full-on crazy mode, playing a wonderful role that evolves through the movie, always emerging in a weirder shape than before. Funny, terrifying and terrifyingly sexy in equal measure - between this and Pearl, she should win all the actor awards this year. All of them.

 I think I love it? I'm not sure, I'm still digesting it - there's a lot to unpack in this movie, tons of interesting stuff going on beneath the tourists run amok surface reading. Ask me again later.
 But yeah, I'm pretty sure I love it.

Incendies

 Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), two twenty-something twins, get an unusual bequest from their late mother Marwan (Lubna Azabal): Two envelopes, one to be delivered to their father (whom the twins thought was dead), and one to be delivered to a third brother (whom the twins knew nothing about).

 Until these are delivered, the mother is to be buried naked, face down, and with no tombstone - as befits an oathbreaker.

 It's an immediately enthralling premise. Simon wants nothing to do with this madness, but Jeanne travels back to her mother's fictional Middle East homeland (the film was shot in Jordan, but the story echoes some Lebanese events) to slowly uncover her mom's history. Which includes a forbidden love, all sorts of turmoil, a radicalization, imprisonment - the twins soon become background characters as Marwan's story is told in fragments, her arc slowly becoming apparent. It's an extremely novelistic approach that works beautifully as the individual parts are compelling and the mystery is an interesting one.

 Until the very end, which contains a couple of very contrived, extremely improbable coincidences which... well, which kind of break the movie. Not just because they strain any possible suspension of disbelief - they're integral to the movie's development, so you could take it as a sort of magic-realist development - but because of the light they cast on Marwan's bequest. I mean, it was always going to be a overtly writerly plot device, but it ends up looking like a cheesy psycho masterplan - the sort of thing you'd see in SeSevenven or the Saw movies.

 And it's a shame, because so much of the movie is so good. Denis Villeneuve was already an established director when this was made, and his style is in top form, keeping events flowing cleanly and the sense of menace ever present - the film runs over two hours, but the expert pacing and well-developed script (by Villeneuve and Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne, based on a play by Wajdi Mouawad) more than justifies it. It's also punctuated with a deeply upsetting action scene (of the war-is-hell variety) that's as good as anything he's ever shot and casts a long shadow over the events of the back half.

 All the actors acquit themselves admirably, with Azabal especially good as Marwan - she carries a lot of heavy scenes pretty much on her own. Cinematographer André Turpin gets in a lot of striking shots, including a beatiful and disturbing opening shot featuring soon-to-be child soldiers set to a song from Radiohead's bleakest period.

 Overall I really liked the movie, as I feel its strengths compensate for its one eventual weakness, but those late-film revelations make it really hard to recommend. That's always a risk with this sort of puzzlebox approach to scripting. I get that it's aiming for a literary feel, more of a Russian novel than a mainstream film, but it ends up coming across too much like a telenovela.

Crimes of the Future (1970)

 Before David Cronenberg became known for such mainstream, crowd-pleasing entertainment as The Brood, Shivers and Rabid, he wrote, directed, shot and edited a handful of arthouse films and shorts. 1970's Crimes of the future - an hour-long movie that only shares a couple of elements with the 2022 film of the same name - is his second feature.

 Yes, it's about as fucking weird as you'd expect an experimental Cronenberg film to be.

 The movie is shot almost entirely within hallways, foyers and courtyards belonging to huge brutalist structures (what youngsters these days would call liminal spaces) around the Toronto area. There's no dialogue whatsoever; The  stop-start soundtrack consists of glitchy, atonal synth sounds, gurgling water, moaning people... or, distressingly often, complete silence. The script is about as opaque as it comes - good luck making sense of it if you haven't read a synopsis.

 The 'plot' is dispensed by the protagonist Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik) in short snippets of narration that at first sound random, but slowly do cohere into a (very slight) narrative. I knew going in that the story takes place in a world where a plague's wiped out all women, but if that information is in the movie, I completely missed it. We follow Mr. Tripod as he holds a few different jobs, all of them weirdly sexual (a phrase that I guess fits most of this particular director's work): Running a skin clinic, trafficking women's clothing, doing foot massages - until he falls in with a few conspirators attempting to... well, let's just say that the titular Crimes of The Future, as imagined five decades ago, remain pretty shocking. 

 It's interesting, troubling, and, despite some excitement towards the end... kind of boring. Every scene takes way longer than it should, and there's no getting around that you're watching a film with no dialog about a people doing pseudo-random things in public spaces. Even at an hour, it drags a little.

 I did end up liking it though; There's enough cool stuff here, like a guy who collects random cancer mutations harvested from his body (Cronenberg would pick that idea up again fifty-two years later; Fifty-two years!). A deadpan scene where a couple grown men lustily rubbing huge metal orbs. Way to sublimate your sex urge, guys. Some amazing early seventies fashion. Plus, those few final scenes... holy shit.

 It's got a good atmosphere going on; The soundtrack isn't entirely successful, but combined with the weirdness of the events depicted and Cronenberg's clinical filmmaking (already fully developed at the point he made this), it all adds up to an effectively unnerving picture. 

 The film prefigures many of the filmmaker's interests - hell, it prefigures his son's interests, with a throwaway idea that would inform all of Antiviral. It's a worthwhile, rewarding slog.

Antiviral

 Celebrity culture is a pretty low-hanging fruit for satire. So much so that it's kind of hard to take the piss out of it effectively; how can you, when it's already a piss-take? If you're going to go after such an obvious target, you better have a unique twist.

 Antiviral, a kind-of-Sci-Fi 2012 thriller from Brandon Cronenberg, does a pretty good job of it, and makes it both as cerebral and uncomfortable as you'd expect from a Cronenberg scion. It's set... not exactly five minutes into the future, but a couple of steps to the side of our reality, in a society where celebrity worship is a mite more extreme.

 There's a (pretty funny) running gag about increasingly intrusive celebrity scoops, clandestine (?) restaurants that serve beef grown from celebrity flesh, and, more central to the film's plot, a few biotech enterprises that allow fans to get a little closer to their objects of adoration in some pretty twisted ways.

 Syd (Caleb Landry Jones, spending most of the movie looking like he's just about to keel over) works for one of the bigger and more legitimate of these enterprises, a clinic that specializes in harvesting illnesses from a small stable of celebrities, locking the viruses down so they won't be contagious (you know Monsanto or Cargill would be all up in that shit) and infecting clients with them for a price. Syd's introduced selling Herpes from their biggest celebrity, Hannah Geist (Sara Gadon), to a young man - he injects the kid with the virus on the left side of his mouth, because, as he explains. that's where she would have transmitted the chancre if she had kissed him in person.

 Syd looks pretty unhealthy, and that's because he's moonlighting by smuggling illnesses out of the clinic in his own body. He incubates them and sells them to the black market (he has a stolen virus-encoding machine at home to unlock them). This is why, when he's tapped to pick up a new Illness from Ms. Geist, he injects himself with a sample first, hoping for a big payday.
 Unfortunately for him, Ms. Geist's mysterious illness turns out to be fatal. And to add insult to injury, his being infected turns him into a target for various groups to vie after. It's an effective thriller set up, and it's played surprisingly straight as a compelling, satisfying corporate espionage story, with cool (if not always completely credible) twists and turns.

 

 A very low budget gets in the way a little - some of the sets don't entirely convince, the pacing is a bit uneven, and some of the actors are slightly off- but Cronenberg has his father's knack for clean, clinical shots and upsetting imagery; the sound design is on-point as well.

 If needles scare you, brace yourself; There are lots and lots of lovingly shot injections here, often in close-up. Also, the sort of biological aberrations you'd expect, low-key body horror, people choking on blood... you know, continuing the Cronenberg family business.

 The sci-fi is pretty soft, but some of the weirder conceits are based on real science. The biotech, sure, but also the technology used to encrypt the viruses, based on facial recognition, which is incredibly dense with information for human observers. It's there as more of a thematic, unique visual touch - doesn't entirely make sense as used, but it is grounded on existing technology.

 Meanwhile almost everything is held at an arm's length, distant. Syd's a scuzzy sociopath working for a loathsome industry who gets a little sympathy when he's involved in the machinations of bigger fish, then pisses it off in a huge (and grimly hilarious) way. We never know what the celebrities are famous for - it's not important, they're just celebrities - but the one we do see is by far the most sympathetic character in the movie, and she's also purely a victim. True to her name, little more than a ghost. Nothing here is particularly subtle, but... well, what would you expect when dealing with celebrity culture?