Samurai Fiction (SF: Episode One)

 Samurai Fiction is a Japanese oddity that straddles the lines between being a homage, a piss take, and a deconstruction of classic samurai films. Plus, it cheekily reclaims Japanese cool from Tarantino. It works mostly because it plays its plot relatively straight and only adds goofy shit afterwards; It excels because it's got a great sense of fun and one seriously badass villain.

 Well, "villain" is probably more apt - Kazamatsuri (Tomoyasu Hotei) is more of an antihero, a ronin who impresses a local clan leader when he helps a serf couple get revenge on some bandits. For this and his fighting skills, he's granted custodianship over the clan treasure, a sword given to the family by the Shogun.
 Kazamatsuri is admiring the sword in his quarters when an overzealous/jealous clan officer bursts in and accuses him of trying to steal the sword and attacks. Kazamatsuri, who's not the type to suffer fools lightly, kills him and elopes with the treasure.

 Bur Kazamatsuri is the villain, remember? The actual protagonist is Inukai (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), the clan leader's son, who takes it upon himself to retrieve the sword and kill the thief. But when he catches up to Kazamatsuri, he's easily beaten and one of his friends is cut down. He survives thanks to an intercession from Hanbei (Morio Kazama), a local healer who pacifies the ronin and takes the wounded noble back home with his daughter (Mari Natsuki).
 Kazamatsuri then heads over to a nearby town and shacks up with the owner of the local gambling den; Meanwhile, Hanbei and his daughter try to disuade a healing Inukai from going after the ronin again. There's some added complications with a bunch of clan ninjas and the relationship between the ronin and the criminals that run the town, but other than that the plot is relatively... maybe not straightforward, but simple.

 It is a little unconventional, though, in the sense that Inukai - whom the movie treats as its protagonist with a straight face, even giving him narrator duties - is kind of ridiculous, a conceited noble dipshit who needs to be reined back and appeased before he gets himself killed. It falls to Hanbei, who's  a pacifist, to try and resolve the Kazamatsuri situation and try to recover the heirloom.

 It's a very playful film. Shot almost completely in black and white with flashes of colour, it features a great soundtrack from Hotei which starts out with the traditional Taiko drums, but soon switches to different styles of old-school rock.
 There are also a lot of comedy elements. Some of the jokes are pretty funny, most of them are very, very broad, but despite the film's heavily referential nature the majority of the humour is character-based and all the silly stuff never quite derails the plot. The tone is good-natured and likeable to a fault.

 Director Hiroyuki Nakatano started out as a music video director, so he manages to squeeze a fair bit of style in. The frequent fights are well choreographed with an eye towards them looking good rather than realistic and are a lot of fun. As for the acting... well, it's of the more... exaggerated school of Japanese acting. Thankfully the two main characters of the movie are pretty great; Hanbei is very relatable as a man put in a complicated situation, trying to find a peaceful resolution, and Kazamatsuri... well, Hotei (who reminds me a little of Adam Driver) is an actual rock star, and he brings all of his charisma to bear on the role. The film in turn recognizes this and gives him a lot of screentime and a bunch of great lines.

 So yeah, I liked this one a lot. I'm not that familiar with Samurai movies (just the classics) so I'm sure there's tons of references I missed. Still found it very enjoyable; thanks Eff for the recommendation.

Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell (Jigoku no Chimidoro Muscle Builder)

  'Lovely' may be a strange way to describe a movie where faces are shot in half, bodies chopped to pieces, and a head is squashed like a grapefruit - but Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell is such a pure, enthusiastic bit of Evil Dead fan-art that it's hard not to fall for its daft charms.  Writer/Director/Protagonist/Cameraman/Special Effects Artist (and probably /Caterer) Shinichi Fukazawa sunk more than fifteen years of his life to get the movie made; It's a wonder it got finished at all, and I'm very glad it did- the end result is entertaining as all hell. Sometimes inept, always at least a little cheesy and silly, but I can't be down on something as inventive as this, or as eager to please.

 The first part is not very promising, especially a prologue where a woman tries to kill her boyfriend for sleeping around and gets murdered instead. The guy uses a shovel and an axe to hide her body under the floorboards of his tiny flat; In a nice touch, both tools will make a return appearance. Other than that the whole prologue is kind of laughable, and not really in a good way.

 Cut to thirty years later. Shinji (Shinichi Fukazawa), the titular bodybuilder (the bloody muscles and hell part comes later) is contacted by Mika (Asako Nosaka), an old flame who writes articles about hauntings and such. She's after a picture of a creepy house owned by Shinji's late father; soon after she contacts him for access to the place, and asks him to give her and her psychic friend (Masaaki Kai) a tour.

 Once they arrive the psychic gets clocked (literally!) and rendered unconscious. You'd think all the hair lotion he's got on would cushion his head from the blow, but no. Soon after - twenty minutes in, almost a third of the movie's barely-over-an-hour runtime - things finally pick up as he finds a knife and gets possessed by the crazy lover from the introduction. Then it's on; It's all mayhem from here on out.

 Mika and Shinji get trapped in the house with the murderous possessed psychic. They fight back - successfully! - with knives and the established axe and shovel. An early eye-popping stabbing had me laughing out loud, and there's a bit with Shinji chopping up a body off-frame, severed limbs flying up into the shot whenever he takes a swing.

 It's a deeply, deeply silly film, with some honest-to-god funny gags and a lot of self-conscious nods to Sam Raimi. It's also relentless in its invention, with severed limbs reattaching themselves into crazy configurations and flesh melting and taking improbable forms via the dark arts of claymation. Buckets of blood are spilled, an amulet animates itself and digs into someone's lacrimal duct, and the protagonist has the epiphany that his muscles are the secret weapon and hulks out. Hell yeah I'm in.

 Shot completely in super-8 with enthusiastic amateur actors, a non-existent budget and (save for a couple scenes) a complete disregard for cinematography, it's... not a great looking movie. Especially when the transfer on Shudder seems to add digital noise (this may actually be a result of all the digital corrections the director had to pay for to even out tons of reshoots that looked wildly different). There's also animated stills with some crude animation overlaid which I'm guessing were needed to tie the film together in editing when footage wasn't available; it looks jarring, but it also gives the film a jolt of Gilliam-esque weirdness. All the effects are home-made and it shows... and honestly that's part of the allure here.

 It's an excellent example of the let's put on a show spirit, and a grand example of someone making the exact movie he'd like to see; I've seen enough sub-indie regional productions and amateur films to know this sort of thing seldom works out as well as this, so- well done!

Point Blank (À Bout Portant)

 I love me a prelude that doesn't fuck around, and French action/thriller Point Blank's got a damn good one where a wounded man (Roschdy Zem) getts chased by two goons. It's ridiculously loud and energetic; doors get kicked, people slam into walls, and the whole thing ends with a surprise bit of violence that made me laugh out loud with joy.

 Once that madness is done, we get to spend a little time with the movie's actual protagonist - Samuel (Gilles Lellouche), an everyman spending some quality time at home with his very, very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya). He works as a nurse's aide over at a local hospital, and one of the patients most recently put into his care is - oh shit, the guy that was being chased in the introduction! On his next shift he notices one of the goons who were after patient x is back at it, trying to asphyxiate his quarry disguised as a doctor. Samuel chases him away.

 When Sam gets back home he starts humbly bragging about his good deed... and then gets knocked out as his wife is kidnapped.

 When he comes to, he gets a phone call: the bad guys have his wife, and will kill her unless he gets patient x out of the hospital. And instead of calling the police, that's what he does: first he has to outwit the police protection guarding the patient, then he shoots the patient full of adrenaline and manages to extract him successfully. But when Hugo (the patient) tries to go his own way once set free, Samuel pulls the gun he stole from the police guard and forces him to take him to his wife.

 From there, besides having to keep an eye on Hugo, Samuel needs to avoid the police, the goons from the beginning... and a third faction of led by a shady policeman (Gérard Lanvin, very effective) whom the movie does a very poor job disguising might be involved somehow.

 None of the characters have a lot of depth -the script is too lean to spend time developing anyone- but the mains are very likeable, and I really enjoyed how Samuel remains opposed to violence even as his ethics seem pretty malleable. Hugo is cool as hell, too, and the way his character's role in the movie keeps morphing as the backstory comes to light is really well done.
 The pacing is relentless; there's a lot of excellent stunts and action (including a few brilliant and very tense foot chases; Director Fred Cavayé really outdoes himself there), the plot twists and revelations come quick and steady, and there's not an ounce of flab in sight. Things do end up making sense... mostly. Many of the developments stretch credulity, but that's ok: It's all exactly the right kind of ridiculous.

She Never Died

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lighthouse

  While reading up on 1944's Dead of night, I discovered there's at least two other movies with the title. One is Bob Clark's excellent Deathdream, the other one is a 1999 British indie horror movie better known as Lighthouse which various people seem to defend online. The trailers looked terrible and it didn't get good reviews, but it's got to have something interesting for it to become borderline culty, right?

 Well... no. It's a derivative, clumsy, and pretty dumb piece of crap. But then again, it does get memorably bad at points. Maybe that's what people like about it.

 The black and white prologue introduces us to Dr. Kirsty McCloud (Rachel Shelley), overacting her heart out with all the solemnity of a B-movie actor playing a Very Serious Role, while the camera dramatically zooms into her face with a whoosh and cuts to her typing, news clipping, and footage of bloody crime scenes. She's muttering some vague platitudes about evil as she writes a report about a dangerous serial killer entitled A MIND OF EVIL. LEO ROOK? Which, I have to say, made me laugh - Guess I'm easily amused.

 So that's the level of scriptwriting we're working with here. The filmmaking is kind of ambitious, including a dissolve from desk lamp to a lantern and a tracking shot as a police team examine one of Leo Rooks?'s (mind of) evil lair, but sadly it's full of visual clichés and tacky shots. Not poorly made, exactly, but it's also pretty far from actually good. TV movie level craftsmanship, though it at least shows some ambition.

 So we know we're in trouble before the credits even come on. The story concerns a police transport boat running a few criminals over to wherever. The cargo includes, of course, the mind of evil himself, Leo Rook? (Christopher Adamson), who soon breaks free and steals a boat. He reaches the nearby Gehenna Island (appropriately named; it's about as hospitable as LV-426), kills off all the lighthouse keepers, and breaks the lighthouse light just in time so that the boat he escaped from crashes into the coastline.
 If you're thinking "wait a minute, how could the timing for that possibly work out?", well... that's not the last time the script fucks up. Not even close.

 The shipwreck survivors, which include Dr. McCloud, a few cops, and a few criminals, band together and start getting hunted by Leo Rook?. It's not a bad slasher movie setup! But unfortunately, this is not a good slasher movie.
 Its main crime is badly mishandling the amount of suspense buildup any given scene needs, resulting in too many scenes of the killer shambling, zombie-like, towards a victim that last for way too long, or letting people argue for a hilarious amount of time, so they don't hear someone banging at the door to be let in before he's murdered. Any accumulated tension quickly turns into unwitting comedy.
 There's a worthwhile scene in a bathroom which sets up a few moving pieces and then knocks them down, domino-like. It's really really dumb, but at least there's a sense that it's meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek. The same goes for the finale, which goes above and beyond in the amount of death dealt to Leo Rook? - a parody of 80's action movie villain deaths.
 I shouldn't forget to mention a "creepy" dream sequence that had me in stitches. It's... well, it's fucking terrible, and as nineties as it possibly could be.

 But there's not nearly enough good/bad stuff like that to sustain an hour and a half. It's... basically, it's about on-level with the average direct-to-video release of the time, which means it's kind of fucking dire, even as its general technical competence and some flourishes make me want to rate it a bit higher. Then I remember all the dumb shit you need to wade through, all the mediocrity, how generic it feels, and any goodwill drains away.

 The acting is pretty bad, though given the material, I wouldn't blame any of the actors. It's got an early role for James Purefoy playing a generic heroic hunky inmate, and I especially liked Paul Brooke as a melancholy old drunkard. His easy camaraderie with Dr. McCloud was much better than the chemistry between the two principals.
 The visual effects are... well, they're OK for the budget level and time it was made, but they still look pretty bad. The all-practical gore fares a little bit better, but it's mostly arterial spurts, and there's only so much you can do with those. Given the film's originality quotient, you bet some blood's going to get splashed on a bare lightbulb at one point, bathing a room in red light.

 The photography is ok - it manages some atmosphere at times, though the illumination for the scenes is highly variable from shot to shot. I'm much less enthused by the filming choices on display, which feature Dutch angles and lousy-looking slow motion; It feels like everyone involved was very enthusiastic, but unfortunately it hews too closely to then-current trends and the execution remains pretty bad. Entertainingly bad, sometimes, but still bad. 

 Director Simon Hunter would later go on to direct Mutant Chronicles, a green screen/CGI fest that nonetheless managed to be a lot more fun than this. It was similarly derivative, but if I'm not misremembering, it wedded war movie clichés to an obscure, Warhammer 40k-ish RPG sci-fi setting and it let Ron Perlman and Tom Jane run amok.
 It's an easy recommendation over this one; Lighthouse is a movie that honestly deserves its relative obscurity.

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.

Dead of Night

 I'm only passingly familiar with the Ealing studios movies, and like most people I identify them with their comedies- so I was surprised to learn that Dead of Night, which predates Kind Hearts and Coronets by almost five years, was also put out by them.
 It's a movie that has a certain reputation with horror geeks, and I'm glad I finally got to it - it hasn't aged perfectly, but it's a fun, clever, well-written anthology film with the rare wraparound sequence that kicks as much ass as its individual stories.

 A few caveats: It's from 1945, so you have to adjust for the storytelling conventions of the time, and overlook some truly... expressive acting, especially (but not always) from the younger actors. There are also two versions going around - the 102 minute UK theatrical release, and a 77 minute US cut that, based on a quick comparison seems to cut out two of the stories completely.

 Fun fact: the film's plot structure caused Fred Hoyle to postulate the steady state model of the universe. How many horror flicks can brag about directly inspiring an important cosmological theory?

 The main story follows one Walter (Mervyn Johns) as he arrives at a rural home and is introduced to the group of people there. As introductions are made, Walter seems miles away, and soon explains that he's had recurring dreams of arriving at the house and meeting these people; he's able to provide details about some of his hosts, which he's never met before, and also predict a few events before they happen. His memories from the dream are very vague, but he does know that it turns into a nightmare by the end.

 His hosts are piqued, and in a fun turn of events, kind of delighted by this bizarre tale- they start testing his claims and throw out theories as to what's happening. The stodgy psychiatrist of the group (Frederick Valk) tries to explain it with science, to expose it as a delusion; The rest of them take turns sharing supernatural things that have happened to them.

 This is, as you might guess, where the anthology aspect of the movie kicks in, with each story its own little short. A racecar driver shares how a premonition saved his life, a teenager tells a spooky little ghost story, a woman brings up that one time a cursed mirror  almost drove her groom-to-be insane.

 The owner of the place then tries to lighten the mood with the tale of two golfers and a rivalry that would extend beyond death - a comedic tale that's notable for having Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne almost-but-not-quite reprising their very similar roles from The Lady Vanishes, and for being based off an H. G. Welles short story; other than that it's cute and mildly funny, but kind of boring, and it's understandable that the US version would cut this one. 

 And when the evidence that something is amiss piles up enough that even the psychologist can't deny something is definitely up, he commits a flagrant breach of patient confidentiality and shares his weirdest case - an excellent and really fun yarn about a haunted puppeteer.

 Once all the tales are told, the finale has the wrap-around story reach its final nightmarish destination in a great climax that does some really clever things with structure (let's just say the wrap-around moniker is wholly deserved here). This movie really does stick the landing.

 The writing is really on-point, with well-rounded characters and interesting relationships between them. Their dialog is a little stilted, and there's a bit too much psychobabble, but other than that it's full of wit, understated humor, and some choice lines. It's aged pretty well. Plot-wise It's interesting that the film justifies how perfunctory some of its segments are by framing them as anecdotes, which is a great solution to a problem a lot of these movies have (especially ones that try to tell more than three stories). And as mentioned before, the structure for the film as a whole is inventive and very clever.

 The film looks great, with a lot of variety in the sets and some lovely photography, especially when it goes full gothic for Sally's ghost story. I also probably shouldn't leave the creepiness of that fucking puppet uncommented on; Makes sense it seeded nightmares for generations! There are barely any special effects whatsoever - most of them are on the golfer's story, which makes sense as most of the other stories are pretty grounded.

 The score, by George Auric is a little intrusive at times but pretty effective, especially when recurring themes emerge and comment on the action.

 I often feel I get to movies like these too late, that there's too much cultural distance for me to appreciate them properly, but I enjoyed this one.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

  I tend to avoid writing about comedies because they're intrinsically hard to write about in a meaningful way (not that my usual writing is meaningful, but I do try). Also, the stuff I find funny does not tend to align with most people's opinion, something that seems to have gotten worse over the last couple of decades because I'm a sad old bastard.
 Case in point: Judd Apatow, whose bloated, unfunny, overtly self-indulgent films make me want to drink myself into a stupor. Which is a feat, because I never drink (...wine).

 Counterpoint: Walk Hard. But also Adam McKay's older movies, released during the post-Apatow drought of good Hollywood comedies. They're not great movies, exactly -except maybe Step Brothers- but they're goofy fun and often manage to cram in some inspired craziness.
 Talladega Nights is probably the weakest one of these, but I still have a vague soft spot for it.

 It recounts the story of one Ricky Bobby, beginning with a bit of mythologizing (he was delivered at the back of a muscle car, because his father was going too fast and overshot the hospital).

 He grows up to be Will Ferrell, who becomes, along with his inseparable best friend/second fiddle Cal (Dewey Cox himself John C. Reilly), the top NASCAR driver. Success, as it usually does in this kind of story, turns him into a mild asshole.
 And of course his dominance is soon upended. This time by a very, very French F1 driver Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen, in top form), who easily bests him and challenges his 'winner' alpha male identity (in more ways than one; Jean is very openly gay). Humble pie is eaten, mojo is regained, something redemption, yadda yadda yadda.

 It's often funny. Very, very funny in its specifics; The biggest laugh is probably when you find out he called one of his twin sons Walker and the other one Texas Ranger ("if we wanted wussies, we would have named them Dr. Quinn and Medicine Woman!"). I mean... just that makes me kind of love the movie right there. There's also some excellent absurdism, like Cal just not understanding that stealing your buddy's wife and home is Not Cool, or Jean's choice of reading material while driving.

 But... it's two hours long, and the heavily improvisational quality impacts the script (credited to Ferrell and McKay). There are a lot of great jokes, but they're spread out in between a lot of overtly indulgent filler, meaning that It really, really drags in places. Funny as it is, it really could do with going a little faster.

Chanthaly

 There aren't that many movies from Laos - 40, according to IMDB, maybe half of them released after Chanthaly. It's a very traditional, still staunchly communist country, with that regime's mistrust of anything fantastic. So Mattie Do's and spouse Christopher Larsen's achievement of making three horror movies over the last decade or so is impressive on multiple levels - not the least of which is that they all kick major ass.

 This was their first feature, after only a little experience in Laotian TV, and it shows. Made wholly in the couple's house at the same time they lived in it (the film took about a year to complete), it's a little bit rougher, a little bit less assured, but it's recognizably of a piece with Dear Sister and The Long Road, which was one of the best movies I saw last year.

 Chanthaly (Amphaiphun Phommapunya) lives with her father in a walled-off house in Vientiane; for all her adult life, she's been taking in the world outside in small snippets when the car gate opens, zealously guarded by her dad (Douangmany Soliphanh, who co-wrote). She has a heart disease, the same one her father insists killed her mother at childbirth. Which is strange, because she carries with her some vague memories of her mom, including a particularly upsetting one where she watched her die.

 And then she starts seeing her at night.

 

 The first two acts of the movie revolve around Chan's attempts to discover the truth about her mother, and to try to determine if she's actually seeing her mother's ghost, or if she's hallucinating due to the drugs she's taking to keep her condition in check.
 That plot's a very slow burn, interweaved with more mundane dramatic concerns - a possible suitor (Soulasath Souvanavong), a childhood friend (Soukchinda Duangkhamchan) who obviously carries a torch for her, and her clashes with her dad as she rebels against his rule. It's very well written but a little bit staid, a very traditional gothic yarn... until a twist contorts the movie's third act into a completely different beast.

 That it's a first movie comes across in the certain clumsiness to how some of the early scenes are structured - the pacing seems a bit off, but either it quickly gets better or I got into sync with its rhythms, because I stopped noticing after fifteen minutes. The sound design is a much bigger problem, with the thrum of machinery or night sounds way too high in the mix on most scenes.

 It's not really scary, at least not to these jaded eyes, but the horror elements are very well handled; no visual or practical effects to speak of, just clever framing, editing and blocking. The film just looks good in general, with careful compositions and good use of different color schemes; Not bad for someone whose formal training was being given a book on directing by her husband and watching other people do it while working as a makeup artist. The actors are great, too, particularly Phommapunya, whom Do met while on the makeup department of a TV show.

 Fun fact: The movie was effectively made open source as a stretch goal towards funding their next movie. You can watch it on youtube or download it from the Internet Archive; there was even a contest to remix all the footage (used and unused) to tell a different story.

 It's a really good movie, is what I'm saying. I have no idea if these films are so enthrallingly weird because of their maker's sensibilities, all the tiptoeing around political strictures, or the incorporation of local customs and superstitions. Likely to be some mix of all three, I guess. We're lucky they seem to have managed to gather an immense pool of talent around them; Can't wait to see what they come up with next.

The World We Knew

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

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

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

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

The Young Master

  Jackie Chan kicked off the '80s in grand style, writing, directing, starring and singing the end credits song on The Young Master for Golden Harvest. His ongoing ascent had been kicked up a notch with Yuen Woo-Ping's The Drunken Master, and it wouldn't really falter for at least a couple of decades. This one certainly didn't hurt his career, as it was a huge success in Hong Kong and other Asian countries; True success in the west would evade Chan for (arguably) another decade and a half and Rumble in the Bronx.

 It's got a really great, distinctive start. Chan plays Dragon, an orphan whose big brother Tiger (Pai Wei) is a pro at manning one of those Chinese dragon puppet things you see in parades, but the shortbus version - only two people. Their sifu (Tien Feng) runs a school that prides itself in being the best dragon puppeteers in the region, Tiger being his main star.

 As the yearly festival where they need to do the puppet show approaches, Tiger has an accident and injures his leg, so Dragon is tapped as the head puppeteer.
 One thing that may not be clear - the dragons don't really parade, they face each other in a sort of cross between puppet dance-off and an obstacle course. So the first action scene in the movie is the contest between Dragon's Golden Dragon against a rival school's Black Dragon. And it's great! Not just the acrobatics, but of course the Black Dragon plays dirty, so there's a little unconventional fighting as well.
 In the middle of the contest Dragon (this is getting confusing!) discovers his brother had been faking his injuries, and is actually puppeteering the rival Dragon! He's cut a deal with the rival school to get money for whoring. After some cool stunts and dirty fighting, the Black Dragon ends up victorious.

 Tiger's deceit is short-lived - The sifu soon finds out what he did and expels him. After some (mostly ineffective) drama and pretty terrible comedy the sifu regrets exiling Tiger and sends his brother after him. There's a slight problem, though - Tiger's fallen into a life of crime, and he's helped free the dangerous criminal Kam (Hwang In-Shik). Because his distinctive thing is to carry a white fan, an affectation Dragon shares... well, mistaken identities and all that. Dragon ends up being chased by the law and has to duel Kam to redeem his brother. The whole dragon puppeteering deal sadly never rears its wonderful papier-maché head again.

 This is a Jackie Chan movie through and through, though one set earlier in his career, so the fight choreography is not quite as imaginative, elaborate or as plain awesome as some of his later stuff (or as he had under other directors).  There's still a lot of cool stuff, mind, and Chan was already singularly funny with his physical comedy, at least during the fights. There's a lot of variety to the action, including a duel with wooden benches, some inspired sword dodging, and use of long skirts in battle. The final fight overstays its welcome badly at something like fifteen minutes, but I have to say its resolution makes it worthwhile.
 The comedy outside of the brawling is... well, it's a Chinese martial arts comedy. Broad as hell and mostly unfunny, but it actually does score a few great jokes; Not the least that at one point a character powers up from drinking the water from an opium pipe. As for the drama, the plot has a lot of potential, but not with these actors, the slapstick-y tone, and cross-eyed comedy characters.

 Stylistically it's a bit of a mix. The filmmaking is pretty straightforward, except there are a lot of dramatic zooms (at one point so exaggerated I wondered if it was being done for comedic effect) and a couple of speed ramps. There's some nice scenery, especially at the last fight, but nothing special. The film does benefit from Chan's clear approach to filming action. Fun fact: this movie does not have Chan's trademark use of outtakes - he would cameo at Cannonball Run later on the same year, and he'd like their use of outtakes at the end of that movie so much that he would steal it for use it on most of his own movies from there onwards.

 This is not a bad film -far from it- but I'd rank it relatively low in this extended period of Chan's career where almost everything he put out was a classic. Far below the Police Stories, any of the 'three brothers' movies, Rumble in the Bronx, or the mind-blowingly good Drunken Master 2, if you're aching for a period piece like this one.

Burnt Offerings

 The name Dan Curtis rang a bell, but it wasn't until I looked him up that I realized he's the creator of Dark Shadows. Burnt Offerings is one of the handful of horror movies he directed, and one of the few that wasn't made for TV. It... still very much looks like a TV movie.

 Based on a novel by Robert Marasco, adapted by regular Curtis collaborator William F. Nolan (no relation), this is a very seventies horror movie that's got some cool ideas but unfortunately doesn't really justify itself until the very last couple of scenes. It does, however, have a truly unhinged performance by Oliver Reed, whose acting notes must have consisted of 'more apoplectic!' over and over again.

Not pictured: a whole lot of blubbering.

 Reed plays Ben Rolf, who moves to a palatial manor in the middle of nowhere for the summer with his family - his wife, Marian (Karen Black), his aunt (Bette Davis) and his young son David (Lee Montgomery. They rent the place from a couple of elderly loonies (Eileen Heckart and Burgess Meredith!) who seem like sweethearts but ask inappropriate questions and do that thing where they're kind of creepy even when they're all smiles. Major Rosemary's Baby vibes. They set two conditions for the Rolfs: they need to take care of the house, and they need to take care of their unseen mother, who'll keep to her room at the attic.

 The house is a little run down, but other than that their vacation is idyllic. Marian takes to her new home maybe a little too much, though. And Ben gets possessed by something and tries to roughhouse his son to death (in a hilariously drawn-out scene). The house seems to be draining dear auntie of her lifeforce, too, and also tries to murder little David several times... you know what? When I said idyllic, what I meant to say is that their vacation fucking sucks. That place would never get rented out in these days of online reviews, even at $900 for a season.
 As the house terrorizes the Rolfs, it starts rejuvenating - getting new wallpapers, retiling the pool, etc. You know the residents notice because Marion explains that it's happening out loud once - but they take it weirdly into stride otherwise. At least until Ben sees the house shedding its old shingling like a snake sheds its skin (a cool concept, very well executed), which results in him finally trying to run away and getting waylaid by the shrubbery (another cool, but cheesy scene). It all leads up to a very strong ending, of the sort that kind that almost puts the preceding hour and something under a better light.

 Almost... but nope, not quite. I wouldn't describe it as miserable, but the experience of watching the movie wasn't great either. The filmmaking is kind of uninspired, with very broad, sometimes soap-opera-like acting, dramatic zooms and a cheap-looking soft-focus effect to convey a dreamy atmosphere. Worse still, the pacing is completely off: a lot of the events depicted just aren't that interesting, and while there is some escalation, the atmosphere of dread it's clearly trying to build up lags behind where it should be at right until the end. Changing wallpapers and other supernatural home renovations are a cool idea, but neither particularly scary nor cinematic.
 What it is is often unintentionally funny, especially Ben's recurrent 'horrific' hallucinations where he's haunted by the guy who drove the hearse at his mothers funeral. Oh no! the guy smiles at him! Jeez, Ben, maybe he was trying to be nice. You asshole. Reed is one of those actors where I can see why people liked him. He's fun to watch and could be very charismatic when he wanted to, but here... here he's just unhinged. His bewildered, craven fury during his frequent panic attacks (see the screen capture above) do make the movie much more entertaining, but maybe not in the way it was intended.

The Roundup

 The Roundup chronicles the further adventures of detective Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong-seok, but I'm going to start calling him by his chosen anglicized moniker of Don Lee) and his merry gang of police brutality enthusiasts, last seen in 2017's very enjoyable The Outlaws. We first get a look at him when he stops a nutjob who's holding a grocery store at knife-point. He gets annoyed at the would-be stabber and actually stabs him lightly in the ass a few times after brutally putting him down. Then, when the newspapers (correctly!) call out undue force, he and his buddies chuckle over the headlines!

 It's... I mean, I think it works within the tone of the movie, which is basically a more comedic, over-the-top Dirty Harry were Clint was a wise-cracking uncle who's not afraid to show some tough love. As with The Outlaws, it operates in a heightened world where torture works, regulations only hinder honest folk who want nothing but to do their job well, and Ma is basically an uncorruptible, infallible engine of justice. I'm ok with it because that's the buy-in to enjoy the film, and I can find it funny. But I'd understand it if others might not... so take this as a trigger warning, there is a lot of  shit in this film that should rightly horrify any right-thinking person.

 With all that out of the way: it's another fun outing for Don Lee and the gang. This time around they're sent out to Viet-Nam to extradite a Korean criminal; Detective Seok Do and his chief (Choi Gwi-hwa) are all set to take it as a holiday, but soon they discover that the real reason why their charge has turned himself in is to escape from a nasty psycho (Son Suk-ku) who's targeting Korean tourists abroad. Of course they decide to go out and investigate, even though it's completely out of their jurisdiction, and from there things get a little more complicated as their quarry angers the wrong millionaire and starts getting hunted down by mercenaries.

 I actually like the structure of the movie a lot - the movie starts with a brutal kidnapping, and the rest of the plot grows out of that organically; it's a good script, even if it often gets a little too ridiculous and kind of loses the plot by the final act.

 Don Lee remains the main attraction here, with a lot of cool dad energy (he even delivers a beatdown with his belt!) and comedic chops. It's a pretty funny film, and a lot of it is based on how inappropriate the shit they pull off is. They even sort of repeat the torture scene from the first movie and kind of turn it into a running gag. Bad Detectives: Port of Call Ho Chi Minh, except that the movie is completely, uncritically on their side.
 Most of the cast returns from The Outlaws; all of the cops and even some of the criminals are given supporting roles. The action is also great, a little upgraded from the first one - not just in that Don Lee now delivers some super-powered punches and knocks out someone with a slap, but the main antagonist gets a very respectable one-take knife/machete/cleaver brawl that starts out like the hallway fight in Oldboy but then spreads out into the surrounding house. Lots of cool stunts, people going through lots of furniture, some good vehicular action.

 All in all I think I liked the first one better, even if this is a better case - some of the stuff here just went a little too broad for my taste, especially how much they get away with over in 'Nam. It's also a clear case of a sequel that delivers more of the same, but louder, bigger, and sillier. That's fine, but let's set some higher goals for the third one.

Luz: The Flower of Evil

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

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

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

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

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. 

Dirty Ho (Lan Tou He)

 Now this is a movie title.
 According to martial arts movie critic Tony Rayns it was an attempt to cash in on Dirty Harry, but... come on. I'm sure some ex-Shaw Brothers employee is still bragging about coming up with it.

 The title sequence for this is a good one. It's a set of three abstract fights for both of the protagonists (alone and later together) against a stark white background and an extremely seventies tune, where the action prefigures the events of the movie. Cool in concept as well as execution.

 Yue Wong plays the titular Ho Jen, who's introduced partying with a bunch of courtesans at a flower boat. When he notices his favorites have gone missing, he gets the madam to go fetch them - the problem being that they're attending to a jewel merchant going by the name of Mr. Wang, who's played by none other than Gordon Liu.
 They immediately start competing with each other, giving the girls more and more lavish gifts of jewelry and money so they'll stay with one or the other. Things end with a police crackdown, and Mr. Wang bandies around a royal seal to get the police to ignore the fact that Ho is a jewel thief, but he also steals all of Ho's jewels.

 So begins a game of one upmanship between the two, one in which Ho is hopelessly outclassed. Mr. Wang's kung fu is so subtle - and Ho so dumb - that he doesn't even realize that Wang is fighting him, as he disguises attacks as accidents and happenstance. This climaxes with a ridiculous (and ridiculously awesome) fight where Mr. Wang dubs a courtesan his bodyguard, and uses her as a puppet to kick Ho's ass.

 In that same fight, Ho gets wounded with a poisoned blade. Wang explains that he will provide the antidote in doses, as long as Ho agrees to be his student. Ho sullenly agrees.
 This leads to a pretty cool visual storytelling device where the size of the medicine patch on Ho's forehead denotes the passage of time as the welt gets smaller.
 It's implied that that Wang likes Ho and takes him on as a project, to refine him and make him his servant, but Ho is such a clod that it's hard to see why he's worth the bother. Cultural distance and all that.

 In any case, this is where the actual plot of the movie kicks in. It turns out Mr. Wang is actually the eleventh son of the emperor, and has fled the Forbidden City to sample southern spirits and art. Seizing that opportunity, another one of the emperor's heirs has decided to do away with his brother. So he sends a number of assassins after Wang, baiting his traps with opportunities for wine tasting and to examine antiquities.

 The next couple of sequences are really fun, as both the hosts/assassins and suave Mr. Wang keep a veneer of civility and forced smiles over their vicious fighting. Once again, Ho is oblivious to what's actually going on - the humor can get pretty broad, almost pantomime, but the idea is funny as hell, and the choreography is so fun and inventive it's hard to resist. The last ambush gets a little too close for comfort, claws come out and the illusion is shattered. Ho rushes to his master's aid, but is too late and Mr. Wang is seriously injured.

 Incapable of facing the forces arrayed against them, Wang decides to train Ho properly, which leads to a couple of really awesome training sequences - and the parts I remembered the most clearly from when I originally watched the movie as a kid. To master his style, the Hidden Kick, Ho must keep his shoulders completely still; So Wang sets saucer candles on his shoulders, and whenever Ho fucks up scalding wax and burning wicks pour over him. Cruel, but very, very cool and creative.

 From there it's a straight run to the climax - There's a couple fights on the way - a very homophobic fight against a band called the seven agonies, and on the plus side, a great fight set in a beautiful soundstage recreation of an abandoned town (it looks like something right out of Labyrinth) where they fight a deranged Mongolian torero and a bunch of archers.
 The final fight is unfortunately the least interesting in the movie- a very drawn out melee that doesn't have any distinguishing features other than a hinged bo staff. It's still got some amazing stunts, of course.

 Dirty Ho was directed by HK legend Lau Kar-leung, and distinguishes itself from his other films by being more comedic; Not a single revenge plot in sight.
 It's still a shaw brothers movie, and while the tone is a little less silly than what Chan and Hung would soon do over at Golden Harvest, it's not going to win any converts - the usual issues with this sort of thing are out in the open: broad humor and even broader acting, ridiculous sound effects, fights that prioritize spectacle and athletics over any sort of realism, beard-stroking and moustache-twirling... all pluses in my book, but as always you have to be open to liking this sort of thing. If so, you're in luck: this one's awesome.

I Was a Simple Man

 "Maybe we don't deserve to... go so easily" someone says at the beginning of I Was a Simple Man, while discussing a botched suicide. Those words are spoken to the protagonist, Masao (Steve Iwamoto) and hang heavy over the rest of the movie.

 Set in Hawai'i, mostly in run down suburbs and back roads with the island's natural beauty in the background, the film calmly follows Masao in his daily routines and eases us slowly into his world. A widower grandfather of three with an uneasy, somewhat distant relationship with his sons, he lives alone with his regrets and grapples with the onset of an unspecified terminal disease.

 As his condition worsens first his daughter (Chanel Akiko Hirai), then a grandkid (Kanoa Goo) come to attend him and the film's point of view disassociates from Masao and starts tracking not just his family, but their memories, filling us in on the specifics of how this broken man failed his children, and later on, why. These memories don't just take the form of flashbacks; Early on the ghost of his wife Grace (Constance Wu) takes a permanent place by Masao's bedside.

 The cast, consisting mostly of unknown/TV actors (plus Constance Wu), is uniformly great, and so are the compositions (DP: Eunsoo Cho). There are a lot of elements I probably missed, as the film specifically addresses Japanese and Chinese Heritage in the island, and the island's induction into statehood (something also addressed by civilization receding on many of the flashbacks, and later as Masao's condition unravels and the jungle consumes his world).

Writer/director Christopher Makoto Yogi has crafted a beautiful, compassionate drama tinged at the edges with surrealist and supernatural, or more accurately spiritual, touches. It's a sedate, stately film with an almost Malikian appreciation of the natural world that builds to some very powerful scenes as the threads start melding into each other (in another Malik-like touch). The deliberate pacing and extremely melancholy tone may be a bit of a hurdle, but it's worth persevering. I liked this one a lot.

Air

 There's one thing I look for in shoes - wearing one has to be better than not wearing any at all. I do not give a flying fuck about Air Jordans, and just about the only thing I know about Nike (other than their inhumane treatment of workers) is that it provided scion Travis Knight with the funds and leisure time to make his crazy dream of making a stop-motion animation studio possible.
 I know next to nothing about sports, let alone basketball, and have a hefty distaste for corporations and advertising. It was financed by Amazon. Why the hell should I watch this movie?

 Well.. I like Ben Affleck's movies. The guy's an amazing director, even when he's leaning populist as with Argo. And as it turns out, Air is a really good populist movie. Much better than Argo. Very engaging even if you're not interested in the subject, immaculately shot and paced, and full of snappy, funny dialog that recalls Sorkin but isn't quite as showy and twisty (the script is by Alex Convery, who has no other credits to his name so far).

 After a short barrage of nostalgia bait - the movie is set in 1984, and by golly it's not going to let you forget it - we're introduced to Sonny (Matt Damon), a guy who scouts talent for Nike's struggling basketball shoe division and the only guy who seems to give a damn about basketball there. After watching Michael Jordan (Michael Jordan) throwing a ball at a metal ring multiple times on his VCR one night, Sonny realizes that he's got to risk everything on hiring him to represent their shoes, despite the fact that more successful companies are courting him.

 So... well, he risks everything, wheels and deals until he manages to get Nike's director (Ben Affleck) on his side, and with a small team (Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker and Matthew Maher) he beats the odds and yadda yadda.
 I mean, there's no suspense here, you know how this is going to end. On top of that, as good as Damon is in the role, it's one of those characters that never fucking makes mistakes - the guy is honest, passionate, unnaturally shrewd and infallible in his instincts; the only thing he gets wrong is kind of a humble brag. A primum mobile character; Everything that happens in the movie is driven by him except for that little mistake (which provides the CEO a chance to dramatically step up).

 It should be annoying, but unless you're set on hating the movie, it's so well done it works. The character interactions are sometimes a bit didactical, but always fun, the story moves effortlessly and  is full of great secondary characters: special mentions go to Chris Messina for an inspired string of insults, and as always Viola Davis steals the show as Michael Jordan's mom; It's a really powerful performance.

 If I had to strain for something to dislike, it's the fact that this really is a pure crowd-pleasing film, mostly shiny surfaces and easy sympathy plays, about a corporate success story.

 There is a timid stab at pointing out the inequality in play, walls full of pictures of white millionaires look predatorily at the athletes they will profit off on, and some mention of the particulars of Jordan's ground-breaking deal with Nike, which I'm guessing is common knowledge to someone who knows something of the subject. But it's too little, and too celebratory of everything Nike to actually make an impression.

 Oh, I do actually dislike something, and it's a pet peeve: the soundtrack, with only a couple of exceptions, only chooses the most obvious, overplayed songs from the era, and edits them so that you get an intro and then the most famous part.
 Then again, it fits the bubblegum nature of the film; Something like, I dunno, Blasphemous Rumours wouldn't have fit very well. But still, come on - lots of other stuff to choose from. The 'Mats put out Let It Be that year; Just saying.

Entity

 A British TV show called Darkest Mysteries joins a local author (Branko Tomovic) in Russia at a site where 34 people were found dead under mysterious circumstances in the middle of the woods.

 The crew for the show consists of the presenter (Charlotte Riley), a surly cameraman (Rupert Hill) and an enthusiastic one (Oliver Jackson).

 They also bring along a psychic (Dervla Kirwan). This is one of those movies where psychics aren't just the real deal, they're infallible. Ruth, who tends to make grand pronouncements in breathless mumbles that I could only understand about half the time, immediately sees dead people all over the place (which we're shown in pretty cheesy detail) and correctly identifies the site where the bodies were found, the place where the first victim was dug up, and leads the party through the woods to the nearby abandoned building where they were killed.

 There the medium sees more phantasmagoria, including the Russian army methodically shooting a bunch of people in the head. From there she zeroes in on one specific room in the facility, a room we recognize because it was shown in a prologue, where a creepy crazy naked dude did creepy crazy naked dude things and levitated and moved things with his mind. Then there's a couple of jump scares, everyone freaks out, and one of the cameramen disappears.

 There is very, very little to this movie. The plot is simple and its mysteries easy to piece together, the characters barely fleshed-out, and the few twists it bothers to throw at us predictable and uninteresting. It's a good-looking movie for its budget - the premise all but screams found footage movie, but for x reason writer/director Steve Stone opted to alternate traditional shots in with the first person cams, which is honestly welcome as the cinematography for the non-diegetic shots is decent and very atmospheric. 

 All the actors are pretty good and are very believable despite their thinly sketched roles. The location itself is probably the film's biggest asset: A huge institutional-style abandoned facility, with all sorts of darkened rooms and hallways for our urban explorers to trudge through with their flashlights.

 But none of this makes up for the fact that barely anything interesting happens throughout, definitely nothing you haven't seen elsewhere. That's not a huge problem while the tension is mounting, but when things come to a head it's disheartening that most of the film's scares consist of either jump scares or POV shots where the camera is waved all over the place except where the action's happening while people scream their hearts out. That's fine as a choice, but this sort of chaotic horror blue-balling needs to be done much better than this to be effective.

The Zero Boys

 The Zero Boys is another bit of fun nonsense from Greek director Nico Mastorakis. It's a little messier than his later effort, Nightmare at Noon, and the budget is a lot lower, but it's still an interesting mix of action and horror. This time around the scales lean towards the scares: the premise is that a bunch of paramilitary dweebs and their girlfriends have to face off against a couple of backwoods slashers.

 Things kick off in media res with a shootout at a small Mexican town. Just a bunch of doofuses in different getups going after each other; I like that at first it's a couple of  dudes in what could pass for shitty Mexican costumes, then a bunch of military cosplayers come in (one of which sticks a picture of Rambo to the wall and says "eat your heart out, Sly!") and finally we get to a dipshit in full nazi costume.
 Once the nazi fucker bites it, it's revealed that it's a paintball game, complete with spectators off to the side cheering for the champions.
 It's a cheesy, fun scene, brought down a little by the low budget (at one point a weird editing glitch makes it look like someone just stares someone off a bridge).

 The winners are The Zero Boys: noble leader and Stallone-disrespecting Steve (Daniel Hirsch), seriously unfunny 80's comedy sidekick Rip (Jared Moses), and Larry (Tom Shell), who's given no traits other than being good-looking. They're the rockstars of the wargame circuit - they even get a "you broke all the rules but we'll let it slide because you're so awesome" speech from the paintball venue owner. They've just beat their paintball nemesis, so they win from him an admission of inferiority, a wad of money and... uh, his girlfriend Jamie (Kelli Maroney) for the weekend. Yeah, it's very much a movie of its time, but more on that later.

 Steve has the grace to at least look ashamed about taking Jamie as a prize, but luckily for him she's so pissed off at her (ex-, hopefully) boyfriend she goes along with Steve just to spite him. So off the Zero Boys go, along with their girlfriends (Nicole Rio and Crystal Carson) to the woods for some R&R and heavy necking.

Into the murderbarn (a genuinely cool and atmospheric sequence)

 There's some hiccups - Jamie sees a woman running for her life and no one else believes her, and some other indications that the genre is slowly entering horror territory. But for a while their picnic goes well; Jamie and Steve bond, despite themselves, the others have a good time, and when they discover a seemingly abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods they settle in for a wild night. Which... yeah, yeah, be careful what you wish for, etc.

 Things escalate quickly: One of the couples see someone spying on them as they have PG sex, one of the killers shows himself, waves a knife and disappears, and a lot of skeletons are found around the premises. Soon one of their number is abducted, and they find themselves hunted by a pair of snuff-movie-making rednecks (one of them  played by Joe Estevez!).

 But The Zero Boys won't take it laying down. They're professional paintball warriors - and as such, they carry a case of illegally-modified semi-automatic weapons and a shitload of ammo, because that's what they practice with out in the desert. America!
 Despite all the guns, I did like the fact that it never really turns into an action film - more of a tense series of encounters and ambushes, a gauntlet they need to get through. More Southern Comfort than Golan/Globus.

 The film was written in two weeks and shot in less than three, and it really, really shows. On the one hand it's really energetic and unpredictable as a result; On the other... well, it's kind of a mess. Luckily the pacing is hectic and the movie likeable enough that it's easy to forgive it when the bad guys seem to teleport all over the place (a slasher special) or people keep making nonsensical decisions, and events often seem to happen just to provide some incident to the movie, with no follow-through. And don't underestimate that unpredictability, which cuts through the macho bluster of the premise kind of like Predator would one year later.

 Technically it's a well crafted B-movie, with unoriginal but very effective cinematography (lots of bright shafts of moonlight going through foliage), a couple cool stunts and one outstanding explosion. The only real characters are Jamie and Steve, and while the acting is about what you'd expect with the lines they're given, both end up being fairly likeable (the former much more than the latter, but then again Maroney had much more acting experience). In fact, Jamie turns out to be the most well-rounded character in the film, and the girls manage to fight back at least as effectively as the guys; Wittingly or not, the script ends up being pretty enlightened in that respect.

 I probably should say that this wouldn't really qualify as a good film. But it's good, bone-headed fun, takes some interesting turns, and it's constantly throwing stuff at you so that it never becomes boring.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

 I never really got into the Ninja Turtles stuff as a kid - Loved the videogame, watched a few cartoons, was aware of and liked them well enough but it wasn't really my thing. I only really watched the 00's Nickelodeon series when my son got into it, which was pretty fun.

 Mutant Mayhem, though, is on a whole other level. Co-directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears borrow a little flair once again from the recent Spider-verse animated movies (after doing it earlier on The Mitchells vs The Machines) to adapt a script from writing team Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Jeff Rowe tweaked things enough to also get a co-writer credit) that takes a lot of the elements from the decades-spanning comics/cartoons/series and puts its own gentle spin on them. It's fairly faithful to what I've seen of the originals, except that it sets up a fairly different status quo for any possible follow-ups.

 So here are the basics for this iteration of the story: A mysterious ooze gets thrown into the sewers, transforming a rat and four baby turtles into furries. Scalies? I think they're still called furries. Anyhow.

 The rat furry - Splinter (voiced by Jackie Chan, whose English has gotten a lot better) adopts the turtles and, to protect them from the menace of the humans (whom he insists, in a bizarre but funny running gag, will try to milk them) he trains them in the ninja arts with youtube tutorials, old workout videos and older martial arts movies (including Jackie Chan and Shaw Brothers stuff!)

 But as the wee mutant ninja turtles become teenagers, a life of lurking in the sewers with occasional incursions into to the city for supplies and watching Ferris Bueller from a distance isn't enough. And when they're discovered by a human teen would-be-journalist (Ayo Edebiri), they seize on the opportunity to try and become heroes so that people will look over the fact that they're mutants. This brings them into conflict with the shady organization behind the mysterious mutant-making ooze (led by a mad scientist voiced by Maya Rudolph) and, more importantly, another group of mutants let by Superfly (Ice Cube)

 The plot, to be honest, is not that great, and has its share of corny shit and clichés and obvious joke setups. But the film is so lively, the moment-to-moment writing so good and funny, and the characters - including pretty much all of the ostensible villains - are so likeable, that it barely matters. Even in the early going, where it's more of a teen comedy than anything else, it's a joy to watch, and very funny to boot. The turtles are voiced by relative newcomers - Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu and Brady Noon, and they all do a great job. Most of the heavyweights are on the villain's corner; Besides Ice Cube (who sneaks in a six 'n the mornin' reference) you've got John Cena, Rose Byrne, Seth Rogen, and a bunch of others. Giancarlo Esposito turns in what's almost a cameo.

 There are quite a few fights, well choreographed (Splinter gets a very Jackie-Chan fight) and very well paced - including an inventively staged scene that cuts between five separate brawls. The art style takes a page from the Spider-verse movies, but where other influencees have focused on its hectic mishmash of styles, Turtles settles on one of them and makes its own - a skewed, slightly asymmetrical style where straight lines are scarce, there are graffitti-esque scribbles all over the place, and a lot of the coloring is done out of lines. Sometimes it adds some scratchy animation for good measure, but it's a very coherent, considered look. It's often gorgeous, and always interesting.
 The creature designs are faithful to Eastman and Laird's creations, and in their conversion to the new style they often achieve something I value a lot - they make me laugh just by looking at them; I mean, that's half a battle won already, right? Whoever gave Leatherhead those goggles deserves a raise.

 The needle drops are all a lot of fun, very nineties-focused, which I guess betrays a little the secondary target audience for the film. But it's a pleasure to hear relative deep cuts like this after the incredibly lame selection from the Super Mario movie. Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor provide a great, synthy soundtrack.

 It's great, and I say it as someone who doesn't really have any nostalgia for non-videogame katana/bo/sai/nunchuk-wielding turtles. Honestly, on everything except on a technical level I'd say I liked this one a whole lot better than this year's Spider-verse sequel.

Alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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