Knocking (Knackningar)

 Molly (Cecilia Milocco) is having a rough time of it. After some time institutionalized for an unspecified reason (which one assumes has something to do with the loss of her partner in a mysterious beachside incident) she's let free to go to a small apartment to continue her life.

 The problem is that she doesn't have much of a life to go back to, which, well, doesn't do wonders for her mental state. Neither does a once-in-a-decade heatwave.
 So when she starts hearing knocking sounds (and later cries) coming from one of the apartments on the floor above her and convinces herself that a woman is being tortured, well... you can imagine how well her efforts at investigating that go.

 Knocking is a bleak, slow-burn Swedish psychological thriller that's filmed like a horror movie, a claustrophobic chamber piece that works more as a character study than as any sort of genre exercise because there's just not much to the story besides its deeply empathetic presentation of Molly's character. Everything is filtered through her point of view as she sinks into depression, seems to suffer from delusions, and is treated with varying degrees of wary hostility by others.

 The technical aspects are impeccable: Frida Kempff's direction is assured, with an eye for interesting shots, and the cinematography (by Hannes Krantz) is beautiful. Above all, the film revolves around an incredibly vulnerable performance from Cecilia Milocco, who manages to instill her character with a huge amount of humanity despite the limited range of emotions displayed during the movie. It's got to have been a thankless task, and she does an incredible job.

 There are some stunning images spread throughout the film, but while watching the character is riveting, following the story around her isn't; It's a standard thriller, with no real surprises and a shrug of a 'twist' at the end. It doesn't really do anything wrong, and I liked how it tends to leave things unexplained, but... well, there's just not a lot going on here.
 It's the sort of film I feel I should have liked more than I did, but there's just too little for me to latch onto.

V/H/S/85

 Ever since the V/H/S anthology series of movies found a new home over at Shudder, they've been released at a yearly schedule, gotten a bit better at maintaining the found-footage gimmick, and they've gotten a year appended to the title that works as a theme - more a suggestion than a mandate, but it adds some color to each installment.

 The latest film in the franchise takes aim at 1985 - stylistically, if nothing else; Don't expect any insights about the Regan era, and the few references to the time period feel pretty forced.

 Mike P. Nelson kicks things of with your standard bunch of loud, horny people heading to a remote lake to get killed. They're not quite as repellent as they could have been in slasher-movie terms, so it's a little upsetting once they start getting shot to pieces.

 It takes its time to get to the fireworks factory, but things get memorably gruesome once a hidden sniper starts picking them off. There's a fun, very silly supernatural twist later on, but it kind of fizzles out without a real resolution. Or... does it?

 Then we jump to the film's weakest link, as writer/director Gigi Saul Guerrero takes us through a survival story about a film operator and his rescue team trying to escape a tall building after a nasty quake in Mexico City caves in a broadcast studio. As they make their way ever downwards, they discover a mythical threat amongst the bones of the city. It's got some gore and a couple of cool images, and the found footage angle does add a lot of immediacy to their predicament... but overall I thought this was missed opportunity.

 I did find it funny that it's got a comedy asshole Argentine dude, a trope I've noticed pop up mainly in Spanish films (Rec 2 and Sleep Tight come to mind); Other Latin peoples really don't like us, it seems.

 TKNOGD follows, directed by Natasha Kermani off a script by Zoe Cooper; It's a filmed performance art piece/one-woman-show where the speaker (Chivonne Michelle) invokes the god of technology using some silly VR gear. It's a short, not very interesting segment that builds towards an entirely predictable but satisfying and darkly humorous ending - and one of the most memorable bits of bloody mayhem in an already very gory movie. It was a struggle not to spoil its final shot as the header image for this review, but it deserves to be seen with fresh eyes. There's a joke in there somewhere, but I'm to lazy to go rooting around for it.

 Ambrosia marks the return of Mike P. Nelson with a fun little story about a family reunion that turns to be, surprise surprise, a lot darker than it seems. To-the-point, inventive, and hugely satisfying.

 For the last segment Scott Derrickson makes his debut in the series with the agreeably nasty Dreamkill. The story (co-written with Derrickson's regular writing partner C. Robert Cargill) follows a detective (Freddy Rodriguez) and his 'forensic videographer' (James Ransone) investigating a series of grisly murders; The twist is that the police has received videotapes chronicling the murders from the killer's point of view... three days before each killing.

 It's a simple story, constrained a little by the short running time, but very effective. By far the most impressive looking short of the bunch (and the only one not in a 4:3 ratio), it uses a variety of film stocks and soundscapes to give it a dreamlike feel. The filmed murders are very, very nasty Giallo-inspired fever dreams. In one a a straight razor reprises its role from Un Chien Andalou, another one overlays a brutal slashdown with Throbbing Gristle's Hamburger Lady to channel a version of Skinamarink where things actually happen.

 And it ends with a bang. Many, many bangs. There's so much to like here.

 The fifth or sixth story, depending on how you're counting, is V/H/S series vet Richard Bruckner's framing device which takes the form of a cheesy TV documentary chronicling a group of university scientists studying some sort of alien shape-shifting life-form; They keep it locked in a room watching non-stop TV shows.

 The documentary elements - especially the host - are spot-on, and it does build some tension as we get fed scraps of information in between the other stories. But it's a little too overblown for what ends up being the pay-off; the heavily foreshadowed massacre it's been heading towards is pretty tame compared to the shit that took place on most of the shorts. Thankfully it's all capped with a gloriously goofy punchline.

 As a send-off things wrap up with the standard V/H/S cheesy song, in this case a (pretty funny!) eighties-inspired pop number that riffs on the events of the movie.

 If I have to be objective, V/H/S/85 is messy, uneven, and the found-footage nature combined with the VHS conceit and low budget means that a lot of it looks like ass. But as ever with this series there's a lot to like, with a couple of honest-to-god kick-ass segments. Here's looking forward to next year's tape.

Becky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Count (El Conde)

  I'll just let the premise speak for itself:

 Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) is a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old vampire. Born Claude Pinoche, he was a soldier of the king's army in France during the revolution, and the experience left him with two driving obsessions - becoming a king, and destroying all insurrectionists and revolutionaries.

 Setting his sights on a long strip of a (mostly) desert nation in the ass-end of the globe, he decides to build his kingdom there. He rises through military ranks, stages a coup, and the rest is history. Then he fakes his death and goes off to an island somewhere around Santiago with his wife (Gloria Münchmeyer) and his manservant (and former head torturer) Fyodor (Alfredo Castro). There, in a large, run down manor, he loses the will to live: he can cope with his country calling him a murderer, but a thief? The nerve! (later on, when accused of stealing millions, he casually agrees, but demurs by saying his wife put him up to it).

 When a rash of horrible killings rock Santiago all of Pinochet's children, sensing their father's hand behind it, go to the island to see what's up - and to check if they can wrest an inheritance out of the old vampire. They contract an accountant to help with that, but as it turns out, she's a plainclothes nun (Paula Luchsinger) sent with the mission to exorcise the old demon. Or to kill him.

 And then things get weird.

Watch out, lady! There's a Chilean fascist dictator vampire right behind you!

 Director Pablo Larraín is no stranger to making films about Pinochet's regime -both as straight historical pictures and oblique genre exercises- but this... This is something else. Angry, arch, bizarre, twisted and funny as hell, full of surprisingly violent, gruesome deaths, and a truly out there surreal, satirical edge. All swaddled up in gorgeous black and white cinematography (by Edward Lachman) and timeless classical music.
 It's fucking great, is what I'm saying. I feel I should qualify that by saying that it's for people who enjoy the bizarre and all that, but I think that should be pretty clear by now. It's also got a languid pace, a very slight plot full of out of nowhere developments, and minor characters that are more targets for (very funny) barbs about hypocrisy and obliviousness than actual, you know, characters. If you use the word artsy at all, it applies to this film.

 The script, by Larraín and Guillermo Calderón is full of funny, clever twists and imagery - the funniest of which is probably Pinochet's going out in his full regalia and using his vampire powers to fly out into the night, flowing cloak and all (the narrator describes him as looking like 'a pimp in the hide of a banana republic mafioso', and backs it up with photographic evidence).
 There's some truly audacious ideas here as well (the reveal of the very British narrator's identity got a big belly laugh from me). It doesn't short-change the genre elements, either - it's too ridiculous to ever be scary, but it's got an effective sense of menace, it gets pretty gory, and the film's minor vampire lore variations do inform the narrative and allow for some cool stuff, namely a stunning wire-assisted scene where a fledgeling vamp spreads her wings for the first time.
 The dialog is sharp, with a real ear for how people justify both the most heinous and the most banal of evils - I guess it gets a little too on the nose, politically; Its targets are too obvious, if you're sensitive to that sort of thing, but that's not a criticism I have a lot of time for in this particular case. This shit really is worth getting angry about.

When The Lights Went Out

 When the Lights Went Out is a surprisingly enjoyable take on a real-life 1974 poltergeist haunting up in Yorkshire. So yes, "based on real events", quotation marks and all. That's not usually a good sign.

 The unlucky family moving into a haunted bit of council housing this time is the Maynards - Len (Steven Waddington), Jen (Kate Ashfield) and their thirteen-year-old daughter Sally (Tasha Connor). As usual, the spook latches onto the kid, staging some scares with her toys. It's pretty ridiculous, but I can't not appreciate a homage to The Changeling that replaces the downstairs ball with a Slinky. I mean, come on, that's brilliant.
 On the red side of the ledger, it's got another instance of a haunted etch-a-sketch. Cut that out, folks. Wasn't scary in Toy Story, still isn't.

This scene was filmed at Fountains Abbey, which I highly recommend visiting if you get a chance.

 At first it looks like the ghosts are going to hassle the poor girl while the parents think she's acting out, but... no; these poltergeist are not at all shy, and soon the whole family is terrified by telekinetic storms, cold spots, and living patches of darkness. When they call the newspaper, the reporter initially scoffs at their story before the ghosts sock him right in the face. Ridiculous, but fun.

 It's a thoroughly working-class ghost story, so the family can't just up and move off to a different house. But as they try to cohabit with their supernatural housemate, they discover that the spook is a bit more Canterville than Amityville; Though it's sometimes violent, the nature of its attacks are more often puckish than dangerous (something that's actually explained later). Sally strikes a friendship of sorts with the spirit, which she discovers used to be a girl about her age; Jen tries to make the best of it and ignore it. And Len... well, he tries organizing ghost tours of his home, and enjoys his new reputation as a local celebrity.

 The film spends a bit of time on how all the weirdness affects the Maynards. There's also a bit of drama involving Sally and her family (slapping children was all the rage back then) and her social life - but it's pretty underdeveloped. The thrust of the plot is that, as things evolve and explanations arrive, it's clear that the ghost's intentions are not all friendly.
 It all leads into the film's greatest weakness, a series of climactic confrontations that skew too far towards cheese and clichés to be forgiven. They don't quite undo all the great work that preceded them, but it's a shame that such a weird, likeable tonal mishmash of a movie veers so hard into tired, lazy genre tropes and poor CGI - particularly for the final confrontation; The preceding exorcism is cheesy as hell, but at least it's got a sense of fun and includes someone saying "flippin' hell!".

 Writer/director Pat Holden has a great feel for his characters and setting, which are the movie's greatest strengths - the genre stuff is fun, and has some solid scares, but it's definitely not as good. The actors are more than up to the task, and the wall-to-wall northern accents are a joy to listen to. The cinematography (DP: Jonathan Harvey) is moody as hell and the production design (by Jane Levick) does a great job at evoking a sense of time and place; that can't have been easy on this budget.
 I also liked the music (by Marc Canham) - piano driven, sometimes accompanied by strings, growing atonal when the ghosts are up to something.

 Some of the film works, some of it doesn't, but overall it's a lot of fun. It's a shame it botches the landing so bad, but what are you going to do; It's still a pretty unique take on haunted house tropes.

The Stranger

 Don't take my word for this, but I don't think this movie is based on that French book famed driver Jean Girard famously read during his NASCAR races.
 It's also not the 2014 Chilean horror film I was originally searching for, nor the well-regarded Joel Edgerton crime movie that came... ouch, in 2022, just like this one. That's got to suck for discoverability. No, this one's a British no-budget horror film from writer/director team Mike Clarke and Paul Gerrard.

 I'd love to say I enjoyed it more than I did, but it's a film that struggles a bit too much with its limitations to be really effective; The situation that it sets up - of a supernatural pack of hunters that chase and kill whoever catches their fancy, and then go after anyone else he may have come in contact with - is a cool one, but not a lot is done with it.

 It starts with an unrelated event (after a short prelude): the killing of one Greg (Jake Francis), loving husband and father, during a robbery. His wife Amanda (Jennifer Preston) decides to pack everything up and move to the countryside to run a bed and breakfast with her daughter Karli (Isabella Percival) - who, of course, doesn't take to being pulled out of Uni very well.

 Enter the stranger, Kyle (Damien Ashley). We'd seen him before, in a weird scene during the prelude where he basically explains the premise of the movie to his mom. Here he charms Karli into letting him stay the night even though the B&B isn't open yet, and then starts playing stupid mind games to drive a wedge between her and her mother - kind of like Dan Stevens in The Guest, but here the mindfuckery doesn't serve much of a purpose, just to add some artificial tension during a long stretch of movie where nothing much happens.
 That is, until Kyle pulls out a gun and holds the women hostage. He explains that the hunters are outside, but they won't come in unless they know for sure he's in there. So he has to hole up until dawn, and he needs the women not to give his presence away.

 This is the sort of film you grade on a curve, as its lack of appropriate funding is so clear that it feels wrong to slam it for that. It does avoid the pitfall of feeling like uninspired hackwork in the same way that, to take a recent example, Hellblazers does. But it's still pretty rough.
 Even at seventy-nine minutes, it drags a bit, struggling to fill out its runtime. There are a lot of dark scenes - have in mind that I don't really mind this sort of thing and don't usually complain about them - that are only worsened by the digital cinematography, and most of the action is... well, a bit amateurish.

 On the plus side there are a couple of oddball glitches that I really appreciated. One is a dramatic scene that for some reason is scored with horror music, and the other is a whole scene where it's supposed to be raining - the characters mention it, the character is supposed to be soaking wet... but... there's no rain. Not a drop. I can only imagine they had some problem with the rain machine and said fuck it, let's do it as scripted anyway. I really respect that.
 Finally there are a few short interstitial shots of chitinous limbs - beetle legs and the like - interspersed throughout the movie, scored with ominous music, which I guess are there to remind us something weird is going on? The bad guys aren't particularly insectile.

 The script has a lot of padding and some of the developments and character interactions are less than convincing, but the characters themselves are all right (except for Kyle and his bargain-bin manipulations); They're likeable enough. The actors are all game and do a pretty good job.
 The film also won me over slightly with the things it does spend money on; Greg's death is due to an excellent, very bloody slashed throat, and later on there's a really cool alien mask and some good makeup. There's some good use of a creepy darkened bus depot in a tense scene that isn't ever really tied to the rest of the movie satisfactorily.

 The bad guys are just people in full bodysuits and masks - they often look silly, but also get a really effective scene where Karli needs to walk through a hallway full of them.
 I also like that the movie maintains a sense of mystery. There's very little backstory, the menace is just... well, some sort of supernatural menace that likes fucking with its prey. And that's enough, that's all we need.

 So no, I wouldn't really recommend this one, nor would I consider it a good film, but it is interesting - I don't regret watching it. And I'd definitely have a look at what these folks come up with if given more money.

Come to Daddy

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

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

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

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

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

Tigers Are Not Afraid (Vuelven)

 Originally titled Vuelven ("They come Back"), Tigers are Not Afraid is a Mexican magical-realist horror/drama about a bunch of kids running feral in a cartel-ravaged Mexican border town.

 It's also about fantasy. As the credits roll, Estrella (Paola Lara) sits in a class while the teacher asks the kids to come up with the elements of a fairy tale; Then she asks the kids to write their own story using those elements. Most of those elements will factor in some way, or at least be name-checked, later.

 The assignment's interrupted when a shootout erupts just outside the school. As they huddle beneath their desks, the teacher gives Estrella three pieces of chalk, and tells her each one of them is a wish.

 The school closes indefinitely. When Estrella gets back home, she finds she's alone; Her mother's disappeared, presumably taken by the cartels.
 When she uses one of her wishes to ask for her mother to come back, her ghost appears and starts haunting the poor girl. 

 Estrella eventually falls in with a gang of orphans headed by El Shine (Juan Ramon López), who live in a sort of rooftop pillow fort and make a living off of petty theft. An early scene where Shine lifts a gun and a phone from a cartel member is almost unbearably tense.

 The gang gives Estrella a hard time until they decide to test her: If she goes into a cartel thug's house and shoots him (with the Gun Shine stole from him earlier!) they'll let allow her in.

 From there things spin off in various directions, but the main thrust is that the cartel starts actively hunting down kids, and all the while Estrella gets more and more ghostly visitations.

 It's all, as you might have gathered, pretty grim. The film's tone is not overtly oppressive, though, and not just because of the fantastical elements - the whole thing has a fantastical sheen even when as it deals with more realistic situations. The cartel only consists of four thugs, for example, and their evil is so cartoony that they come across more like fairy-tale ogres than any sort of actual real criminal enterprise; they torture and kill people because that's what they do, not in, I dunno, reprisal or for human trafficking or whatever. The stories the kids weave about them end up being closer to the truth than the news reports that mention them.

 There are also long stretches where the film is content to just follow the kids goofing off. Some of these scenes are pretty funny (like when they run across an empty stage and reenact a reality TV talent show), some of them beautiful (as when one of the kids grabs an umbrella and dances under the rain). Some of it is a bit too precious, most of it feels pretty natural. 

 The fantastic elements help lift the mood as well. Most of the supernatural stuff is of the highly poetic variety - a line of blood sinuously runs through many scenes, trying to lead Estrella on and pointing at where things will inevitably lead. The resin dragon from someone's phone case flies sprightly away, and a graffiti tiger prowls the walls of the neighbourhood. There's also ghosts - lots of them, of the angry variety.

Bleak, cruel, but never hopeless, then, and possessed of a singular beauty both in its ideas and in its imagery. Especially as it builds towards one hell of an emotional, poetic punch towards the end.

 All the actors are pretty good, which is a minor miracle given that most of them are children. Both Lara and Ramon López convey the steeliness, vulnerability, and underlying innocence of their characters ridiculously well. They're not well translated, though, as the subtitles at least in Shudder try to make their dialogue overtly gritty and thuggish compared to the original lines' more subdued realism.

 The cinematography is beautiful (DP: Juan Jose Saravia). The colors are a bit desaturated, but most shots manage to find at least something beautiful in the squalor - be it an ornate window frame overlooking the city or a glorified puddle that's been taken over by carps. The camerawork alternates between handheld shots for more immediacy and more traditional steadicam work on the scenes that need it.

 The shadow of Guillermo del Toro. especially The Devil's Backbone, looms heavily over this movie: many of the surrealistic touches are used in a very similar way, and the overall tone and development is similar. It's not a comparison that's kind to this movie - that would be unreasonable, as few movies match the tightness and ambition of Backbone's script. But writer/director Issa Lopez successfully keeps it distinct and separate from its inspiration, it never feels like a knock-off.

 The influence may be clear but we get so few movies going for this sort of thing that, honestly, I'm happy to have one more. Especially when it's as bloody excellent as this.

Talk to Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insidious

  Twenty-eight years later... we finally got to see the ghost-world. Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist is a near goddamn masterpiece, but it has a fatal flaw (at least to pre-teen me, and I stand by this assessment): when Steve gets sent to the land of the dead to rescue Carol Anne, we never get to see anything.

 A late-movie twist in Insidious corrects that [retroactive spoilers!]. That it was done on a tiny budget ($1.5 million!) just makes me love it all the more.

 It starts out as a deceptively conventional haunted house movie. Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) Lambert have just moved house along with their brood - pre-teens Dalton (Ty Simpkins) and Foster (Andrew Astor), plus a baby girl. They have barely settled into the house when Dalton... just doesn't wake up; he's gone into a coma state that no doctor can explain.

 Months pass without his condition changing, and in the meanwhile, ghostly activity has gone haywire. The house had strange little quirks - stuff would get misplaced, thrown out of the shelves, supernatural pranks like that. But now random spooks are appearing all over the place, triggering the alarms at night... it gets to the point where the family has to pack up and move to another huge house.
 How they can afford that, with only one working adult (a secondary school teacher, at that!) is probably the most unrealistic event portrayed in the movie.

 Anyhow. The haunting resumes almost immediately at the Lamberts' new home, leading them to contact a team of parapsychologists led by a psychic (Lin Shaye) to try and figure out what's going on. And... that they do: the third act of this movie kind of goes off the rails, in a good way. The explanation is kind of goofy but internally consistent, original and fun. More importantly, the stage is set for some really imaginative low-budget madness of the underworld-spelunking kind.

 It's not (unlike Poltergeist) perfect. The low budget means that ghosts are basically presented as regular people in spooky makeup, which does drain their mystique a little, and there's even a sloppy brawl with one of them. The main bad guy kept reminding me of the villain from Episode One (Darth Insidious?)
 But the atmosphere is expertly judged and the filmmaking is so precise and energetic (DPs: David Brewer and John Leonetti) that these are minor complaints; the film is as well-crafted during its slow burn as it is when at full manic mode, building a land of the dead out of a collection of dimly lit rooms.
 There's excellent use of negative space throughout, a lot of neat tension-building devices, some pretty effective, well-paced jump scares and more than a few cool camera angles. A particularly showy one shows a scene through the whirring blades of a ceiling fan- no wonder director James Wan would later homage Russell Mulcahy in Malignant.

 Both Wan and writer Leigh Whannell made their name with Saw, a movie I still think fucking sucks; They have since redeemed themselves several times over, together and separately. The Conjuring might be their most popular film, but this one remains the scariest thanks to an edge that movie lacks (despite this being PG13, and The Conjuring having an R-rating). It's a silly, sometimes ridiculous horror movie, sure- but it packs a punch nonetheless.

32 Malasana Street (Malasaña 32)

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Blood Vessel

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

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

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

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

Aww, they're funpires!

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

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

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

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

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

The Heroic Trio

 The Heroic Trio is a Hong Kong superhero movie from 1993 that I remembered pretty fondly, mostly for being absolutely batshit crazy. And yeah, that's still pretty much the main takeaway. 

 Here's a small list of what you can expect out of it:
 - A house viewing devolves into someone jumping out a second floor window, using the tendrils of ivy outside both as a Tarzan-style brachiation aid and as a lasso to catch a thief.
 - An invisible assailant steals two babies from police custody, and a female superhero comes to stop it; There's running across electric wires, a falling baby (a running theme throughout the movie; not all of them survive), and all sorts of crazy stunts.
 - The invisible assailant, who turns out to be Michelle Yeoh, reaches an evil underground lair and is gratuitously attacked by a crazed kung fu guardian.
 - We meet this guy:

 - When a child falls from a (different) tall building, someone jumps after her, falls faster and rescues both the kid and her cute kitten.
 - Some criminals hole up in a chemical plant with hostages; All the police can do is look on helplessly while they gun down a helpless woman. Then a mercenary shows up, puts some dynamite in an open empty barrel, sits on it as if it were a horse, and uses the explosion to vault into the second floor and take out all the criminals with her trusty shotgun. It's just as silly/amazing as it sounds.
 - A crazy man goes into a maternity ward to, in his words, "kill all the babies". He's foiled.

 And all of this happens within the first half hour! And I didn't even mention all the cheesy melodrama, corny comedy scene setting with the police and other random shit.

 The plot involves some sort of undead eunuch trying to set up an Emperor for China by kidnapping a bunch of babies. He's coercing Invisible Woman (Michelle Yeoh) to do his evil bidding, and is opposed by straight-laced superhero Wonder Woman (Anita Mui) and fun-loving mercenary Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung). As the title of the movie implies, the Invisible Woman may have a change of heart at some point.
 It's a Hong Kong take on American four-color comic stories, and it does a pretty good job of merging both types of madness. The results are never boring, but unfortunately the childish plotting, whiplash-inducing tone swings, wall-to-wall posturing, extremely broad humor, mawkish melodrama, and forced camp does kind of bring it down a few notches.

 It just doesn't ever pause to catch a breath. Everything is always dialed up to eleven; the constant barrage of heightened drama gets tiring, and the lack of anything substantive to latch onto -and the sense that the writer (Sandy Shaw) is just making it up as she goes along- makes it almost impossible to care about any of the events or characters. Even when it's a cute, doomed baby.

 Mui and Yeoh unfortunately don't get to do a lot with their characters - Mui is the earnest, glamorous, properly heroic one, and Yeoh gets the lion's share of all the angsty melodrama. They both look amazing, though. Cheung plays the sassy one - bad news is that she gets most of the shitty comedy bits, but at least she looks like she's having fun.
 The film is directed by Johnnie To, but this is a very, very different To than the one who'll eventually direct Election or The Mission; here he just piles on the scenes without any concern for pacing or coherence. It looks great, if you can get over the overtly campy tone. At least there's ample warning as the movie opens with a reference to the sixties batman series.

 And there's a lot of cool stuff. There's a bit where a motorcycle is driven off a wall and hurled, spinning horizontally, at a bad guy wielding a weapon straight out of Master of the Flying Guillotine. The villain's final form is an organic take on The Terminator's skeletal robot, one that opens its ribcage, traps Michelle Yeoh in it, and then puppeteers her to fight her teammates.
 The action is good, but except for a couple of fights it's the less exciting style of Hong Kong fights: pirouettes and twirly acrobatics rather than intricate combat, with a focus on things looking cool and fast, not so much on detail. Lots and lots of wire-assisted stunts, a lot of which look pretty silly but are a lot of fun.

 It's completely nuts in a way that works for it just as much as it works against it; I still like it a lot, but it's a hard movie to recommend to people who aren't used to this sort of thing.

Grandmother's House

 Holy crap, we have struck... something. This is the sort of thing that makes trawling the further reaches of the streaming lists worthwhile.

 Grandmother's House is an obscure indie horror movie that's kind of breathtaking in its singular shittiness, a perfect storm of ineptitude, enthusiasm and wrong-headedness; The mythical so bad that it's... well, still pretty fucking bad, but in interesting and very funny ways. 
 If you're in the right frame of mind, it's an absolute blast; Friends and alcohol absolutely recommended.

 Siblings Lynn (Kim Valentine) and David (Eric Foster) have just lost their father. As orphans (their mother having died a few years prior) they're sent to, well, Grandmother's House, to be cared for by their maternal grandparents (Len Lesser and Ida Lee); They'd lived there as kids, but after mom died dad took them to the city.
 The first night at the house David sees Grannie and pop-pops dragging a woman's body into the basement. David is discovered as gramps is going to butcher the woman, so he gets killed too.
 But no! It was all a nightmare. Or was it? The young woman from the dream (prolific Z-movie actress Brinke Stevens) exists and seems to be making her own way to Grandmother's House; She's first seen almost causing a bus crash by jaywalking, then she's picked up by a green van.

 The next day the kids are taken to a pool. David sees the mysterious woman from his dream, but more importantly, Lynn reconnects with a rakish young gentleman: Kenny (Michael Robinson).
 The dude deserves his own paragraph; his seduction techniques rely on eye fucking Lynn, then when she acts mildly embarrassed, diving underwater and ogling her even more from every angle. The camera, of course, leers right along; this was pretty uncomfortable as I thought the character was meant to be fifteen or so, but let's give the script the benefit of doubt and say she's supposed to be nineteen, same age as the actress playing her.
 In any case, she calls him out for being a pervert, so he lunges and forces his tongue down her throat. And... she seems into it.
 (Later on, a friend asks Lynn what rating she'd give Kenny - she says "an eight... but that's only because I've never given anyone more than an eight." Given her tastes, maybe it'd take a Harvey Weinstein to break that record.)

 Anyhow. As the family make their way back to the farm, they pass by a bunch of policemen fishing an old man's corpse out of a nearby pond - an abandoned green van nearby. This would make for an effective thriller, if the movie knew how to milk tension better.
 Soon after a neighboring family pops over for a barbeque. David and another kid go off to play with fireworks (and cause a pretty great-looking explosion). When they get back, David sees grandma and grandpa dragging... a young woman's body - the one from his dream, even.
 The old timers suspect he's seen them, so there's a bit of a cat-and-mouse chase as David sneaks around gramps, who makes a show of maybe not having the best of intentions. That's even before he grabs his gun.

 And now I'm going to spoil the shit out of a mid-movie twist, so skip to after the picture if you're not into that sort of thing: As it turns out, it looks like it's the woman, the supposed victim, who's a complete psychopath, and the grandparents were trying to protect the kids from her. And don't worry, there's a few more left turns ahead.

 There's more chases as David and Lynn try to outwit their pursuer, leading to the film's best-looking scene as the kids run through an orange grove pursued by an antique truck. It's dumb as all hell, and never convincing, but it does look good.
 And it all ends with yet another twist that's so out of the left field and... I don't want to say bold, it's more like holy shit this completely ignores any good storytelling sense and completely derails the movie; It made me burst out laughing, so I'm all for it.

 It's madness. Poorly paced madness with a lot of filler and more plot holes than plot, but it's still got enough crazy shit and energy to be fun in a way many -most- of these movies are not.

 Acting-wise, the kids actually do relatively well - they over-emote, but hey, child actors. As for everyone else... holy shit are they bad.
 Kenny can't even walk convincingly, his every action so mannered I honestly wondered if his character is supposed to have some sort of mental problem. The grandparent's acting is broad and hammy as hell, like something out of a pantomime. As for the mysterious woman, the faces she pulls are something to behold, for sure; I've seen Stevens elsewhere, and while she's never struck me as a good actress, well, she could only improve after this.
 Even minor characters are memorably bad - the family friends that pop over? The patriarch is introduced waving a huge barbeque sausage, screaming "What does this remind you of?" It's like the characters all came out from the "I'd buy that for a dollar!" show in Robocop.

 Director Peter Rader makes some weird choices, but the filmmaking is actually all right. There's some good scenes here, a couple that even manage a measure of suspense. Niko Mastorakis produces, and his trashy sensibilities show through a little bit, I think.
 The music is all cheesy synths and clean guitars (regular Mastorakis collaborator David Zimmer wisely chose to stay the hell away.) I have no idea if it was done to save on costs or if there was some sort of problem, but all the lines of dialog are dubbed in, and it gives this Z- grade movie an even lower-rent feel.

 Despite the film being rated R (justifiably so), most of the movie plays like a shitty thriller aimed squarely at kids. It hews to David's point of view pretty closely, and a lot of the tropes are of a piece with other kid's movies of the time. It even maintains bloodshed to a minimum - this would easily pass as PG-13 if it wasn't for the adult situations and that crazy-ass ending. Everything feels miscalculated, and the film's... unique storytelling style makes it fairly unpredictable. Part of its natty charm.

 It's got all sorts of cool little things interspersed within the crap; The bit where David goes off with his dipshit friend feels pretty naturalistic and well observed, it captures 80's fashion in that unsanitized, unglamorous way only z-movies seem to manage, and some of the production design is pretty good, too - I liked the house's backyard, full of monolith-like rusted engine parts. And that title sequence!

That moon rises as the credits go on. Classy!

 Most of all, it shares that drive to entertain, that gleeful B-movie energy that Mastorakis's films have. I can't say it succeeds on its own terms, but it absolutely succeeds on mine.

The Boogeyman

 Serious representations of grief have been a trend in horror movies for a while now, to the point where it's kind of become a joke. The Boogeyman is a very, very dumb film, but it does one clever thing: Its titular monster is attracted to grief-stricken victims. That way it can have its cake and eat it; It is (or at least tries to be) a serious meditation on bereavement, and it's also a creature feature with an actual, pretty cool monster that's emphatically not a metaphor.

 This is made pretty clear in a pretty ruthless prelude where the monster sneaks into a very young kid's room and kills her. The scene is pretty stylish: floating dots resolve into points of light shed by one of those rotating night light things and the camera roams the room, making what's happening clear while keeping the monster obscured. The whole thing oozes atmosphere and the monster gets a cool conceptual touch as it mimics the voice of the girl's father. Poorly, as if it didn't understand the words it's uttering. A good way to kick off a movie.

 Once that and the title credits are out of the way we're introduced to the Harpers: Sadie (Sophie Thatcher, the troubled teen) and Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair, the youngest one) and Will (Chris Messina, the dad). They've recently lost their mother/wife and are clearly struggling with the loss; their exchanges are so poorly written and blunt that it's kind of funny. That's unfortunately a running theme in the movie.

 Will runs his psychological practice off a room in the house, and one eventful day a guy called Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) pops up without a booking and starts talking about how a monster started stalking his kids after the youngest died of natural causes, and how the monster ended up killing them and he should have believed them and now everyone thinks he killed them and his life is ruined  and etc. etc. Will, understandably concerned, stalls for time and tries to get the police in, but while he makes the call Lester goes and hangs himself in a closet.

 From there Sawyer, the youngest, starts getting harassed by the monster, who's been transmitted from the Billings to the Harper family through their grief (how very J-Horror of it). Sadie at first doesn't believe her, but soon enough she has a couple of run-ins of her own with The Boogeyman, and starts doing some investigation of the Billings family, tries to come up with plans to kill it, and so on.

 The script, by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman, is, and there's no other way to put this, extremely fucking dumb. The dialog is laughable, there are a ton of plot holes and little stupid details, and its message manages to be both muddled and trite. But - but! it's filled with pretty imaginative sequences that allow director Rob Savage to deliver some pretty great monster stalks and attacks. Some of these are enabled by the script's stupidity, like a bit where the monster comes into a candle-filled room, blowing them out as it goes. Seriously, candles... but they look good, so there they are.

 And it is a good looking, well-made movie in all respects save for the writing. The actors are pretty great, giving good readings of mostly terrible lines, and somehow maintaining a sombre tone even as it's undercut by, oh, I don't know, the psychologist father avoiding talking about trauma by doing the conversational equivalent of running away blocking his ears and singing at the top of his voice. God, it's stupid.

 And no, you can't blame this on the Stephen King short story this is based on. It's been a very, very long time since I read it, but it's just a slip of a tale- basically, Will's session with Lester, less than five percent of the runtime of the movie. The rest is all on the good folk wot writed this.

 Anyhow. The monster effects are good - CGI, but it suits with the spindly, weird-looking bugger. Its appearance is kept vague for a good chunk of the movie, and while it doesn't really change over the film, there's a good trick where we get to find out what its weird-looking teeth actually are late in the movie.

 It does try to do CGI fire in a couple of scenes, which... well, that's usually a mistake; It looks terrible.
 
 It's a very teen-friendly, rabidly PG-13 movie, so blood is kept to a minimum. A couple of the scenes feel a little too tame as a result, but honestly I found it mostly well-judged; This movie doesn't really need gore.

 The cinematography (DP: Eli Born, who did last year's Hellraiser) is excellent, with great use of darkness, sinuous camera movements and ambiance by the bucketful.

 Oh, and points for including a surprising amount of footage from the excellent (and beautiful-looking) game The Pathless in the background on one scene.

 As I grow older I find myself being a lot more forgiving of dumb movies, especially when they've got fun scenes like this one. But The Boogeyman is brought down by a kind of narrative uncanny valley where it looks and sounds like a serious, thoughtful movie, so when you actually pay attention and see how poorly it's written it becomes harder to forgive. That, and a kind of generic, modern horror vibe manage to undo a lot of the goodwill it would have gotten if it wasn't trying and failing so hard at saying something that could be construed as profound.

Hellblazers

 It's an old, old trick in the world of Video on Demand to cast well known actors on small roles to give a film a visibility boost. Hellblazers does it specifically to attract genre nerds: Meg Foster! Tony Todd! Adrienne Barbeau! Bruce Dern! Billy Zane! John Kassir!
 It also does that time-honored mockbuster thing of naming the movie after something famous (in this case a long-running horror comic previously adapted as Constantine and a TV show) in the hopes someone will be fooled/piqued by it.

 That cast, though, coupled with a deceptively decent-ish trailer, suckered me into watching what ends up being the worst kind of bad movie: a low-effort mediocrity.

 After a terrible-looking, long-ass credit sequence (gotta fill up that run-time!) there's a promising prologue with Billy Zane as a cult leader, obviously having a lot of fun (when his underlings hesitate to throw a sacrifice into a pit to hell, he prods them by saying "Steve didn't dig a hole to hell for nothing, put him in there!"; That's unfortunately the last good joke in the movie, by the way.) The cult's efforts manage to raise a (pretty good looking!) demon.

 Unbeknownst to them their ritual is observed by Bruce Dern. A character played by Bruce Dern, not Bruce Dern himself - that would be a far more interesting/funnier movie.

 The movie is set in a tiny burg in rural California in the eighties - I guess it's meant to tie into the era's satanic panic, but that goes pretty much uncommented on. The ostensible protagonist, Joe (Ed Morrone), is a New York cop who's recently for unspecified reasons moved out and become the sheriff of this podunk town. 

 He and his acting-impaired deputies soon get a visit from Bruce Dern, who proceeds to chew the scenery as he recounts the whole damn prologue, at length. Good as he is, his scenes are so obviously there to extend the running time it's not even funny. Joe goes out to investigate Bruce's claims and pretty much vacates the movie until the very end, leaving his deputy Teddy (the awesomely named Crash Buist) in charge; from here the movie gets a bit more episodic as we're introduced to several of the soon-to-be-demonically-besieged town residents.

 As the day goes on there are a couple of supposedly creepy incidents - a couple necking in the middle of nowhere get eaten by the demon in a hilariously inept scene, and a few robed, hooded cultists stand in the background menacingly looking at people like a really bad remake of The Void.

 When night falls the cultists finally attack, and the movie turns into a low-rent, low-energy action movie; Though they act in pairs at most, the cultist numbers are seemingly endless, giving the proceeds the feel of a video game. Until, finally, they're all gone, the sheriff returns and in a hilariously unclimactic confrontation deals with the summoned demon.

 There's no pacing, no tone, and no rhythm to anything; The antagonists have no agenda, no discernible plan other than to be a kind of ineffectual physical menace. The script is fucking awful, full of boring banter and squabbling that's there to only inflate the running time, people reacting to things in extremely stupid ways, senseless 'heroic' self-sacrifices; It seeds a chainsaw only for it to be used in the most underwhelming way possible, has the most hilarious bit of inept policing I've seen in a while... I could go on and on.

 The acting is as variable as you'd expect. The vets anchor the movie and provide some very badly needed quality - Todd, Foster and Barbeau are all great in their clichéd roles; The film repays this by unceremoniously killing them off or, in Barbeau's case, completely forgetting her character in the finale. At least Tony Todd gets a fight scene in.

 Bruce Dern is given too much latitude with an extremely broad character, and Zane is barely there; Both of them seem to belong to a completely different movie. As for the young people... I kind of liked Morrone's deadpan turn as the sheriff, but that's it. It's an uncharismatic bunch, with a big "look, I'm acting!" energy about them; It's not like they could do much with the lines they're given anyways.

 
 The action is, to be positive and mildly heretical about it, about as OK as the brawls and shootings on most of its inspirations - with the huge, huge difference that no self-respecting eighties action B-movie is going to skimp on squibs and blood splatters the way this one does. It's also completely devoid of character or coolness or elaborate set pieces; Literally Bloodless, as well as metaphorically.

 At least writer/director Justin Lee makes it look like a real movie. It's mostly competently shot, which I guess counts for something.

 Hellblazers is a Tubi original, which would have kept me away from it as I've heard (and now confirmed) bad things about them, but here in Britain it's not marketed that way at all.
 Distributors High Fliers films, a UK company that according to themselves "...capitalize on the potential of producing their own low risk commercially viable feature films...", were on my radar thanks to the surprisingly classy and enjoyable The World we Knew and because their products have now flooded my streaming recommendations list. Going to be a lot warier with them from now on.

 Either due to limitations, not giving a shit, a lack of talent or a combination of some or all of the above, Hellblazers completely misses just about everything that makes this sort of movie work.
 #Content for the #Content gods and a payday for some beloved actors, a fucking waste of time for the rest of us.

Strays

 Strays is the sort of film that's kind of immune to criticism - a gleefully dumb, very R-rated comedy about four talking dogs on a quest to bite someone's dick off. Unless they completely fuck up the jokes, you pretty much know if you're going to like it going in, don't you?
 So... they mostly  don't fuck up the jokes. There's some funny stuff, some weirdness, and a lot of cute dogs. And There's a bunch of good gags that weren't on the trailer. There you go, make of that what you will

.

 Will Ferrell plays Reggie, a very cute, terminally optimistic Border Terrier with a dipshit owner (Will Forte) who hates his guts. Reggie is blind to just how badly he's being mistreated until his owner abandons him in the middle of the city.

 There he's taken in by Bug (Jamie Foxx), a no-bullshit Boston Terrier that introduces him to the stray lifestyle and his two friends Maggie (Isla Fisher with her native accent because she's playing an Australian Sheperd) and Hunter (Randall Park), an overtly genial cone-wearing Great Dane.

 Horrified when Reggie tells them about the 'good times' he's had with his owner, the other dogs help Reggie realize that he's in a toxic relationship. Pissed off, he vows to go back home and bite his owner's dick off. The others, partly because they're drunk (from drinking bin juice outside a pub) encourage him and decide to tag along.

 The problem: Reggie's house is out in the boondocks, and all he's got is a few landmarks to go by. But he's nothing if not optimistic, so off they all go. The trip includes a psychedelic freakout, a run-in with police dogs on the hunt for a missing girl, and a bunch of other misadventures. Also: lots of jokes about humping, shitting, pissing, and Hunter's enormous dick; it's as profane as they could make it, which is fine because decent amount of jokes land.
 There's also a lot of simple, observational dog humor. This ranges from them talking about sex positions (there's only one: normal style), staging a fireworks scene as if it was the end of the world, chats about how much they hate mailmen, and some funny business about spinning around before going to sleep. It's been done a thousand times before (particularly that hoary mailman thing - that dates at least from the fifties), but the voice cast is very game, the writing is decent and the dogs are lovely.

 Writer Dan Perrault (with, I'm guessing, an ad-libbing assist from the crew? There are some very Ferrell lines in this, though he didn't get a credit) does allow the script to go off on some bizarre, funny tangents - my favorite has got to be a Labrador Retriever (Josh Gad) who constantly narrates the events of his owner's life in a folksy drawl while gentle music plays in the background. These people know their dog movies. Unfortunately most of the script isn't as inspired as that, but there are a few other good, goofy non-sequiturs in that vein there.

 Not everything works. The film takes real canine footage and digitally adds in the lip sync, which is a problem when the dialog is shot like human dialog - you've got a mostly still dog whose lips are moving in an unnatural way; it doesn't look great. The film seems to recognize this and tries to make its scenes more dynamic (and the dogs, and their trainers, do a great job of it) but not nearly enough. The directing (by Josh Greenbaum) is, as in most comedies these days, unobtrusive and fairly personality-free.

 Not all of the jokes work, but that's to be expected. Also to be expected, but always disappointing, is that there are some rote life lessons that aren't quite subverted - your typical case of modern comedies wanting to have their cake and eat it. But that's ok. The film remains likeable, its heart is in the right place, and just look at all those very good boys and girls!

The Hallow

 This is a well-made but very goofy Irish horror movie from 2015 that I'd had in my radar for a while because, well, killer faeries. It doesn't quite deliver on that - or rather, it does, but it gives a 'scientific' explanation to rationalize faeries that somehow involves Cordyceps. David Attenborough has a lot to answer for.

 The Hitchens family - Adam (Joseph Mawle), Clare (Bojana Novakovic), their baby Finn (Wren Hardy) and their dog Iggy (Toddy) have moved to the backwoods of Ireland for work: Adam's been contracted by a logging company to do some scientific prep work in the preparation to cut down some ancient stretch of woodland.

 The locals don't take kindly to his presence, but it's not because he's working for corporations that are exploiting the forests for foreigners - the closest neighbour, Colm (Michael McElhatton), is leaning on them pretty heavily to go away because the woods belong to the hallow - mythical woodland beasties like Banshees or Leprechauns. It's an effective use of outsiders vs. locals social tension, but it never really goes anywhere, especially because it's pretty clear that the residents are never going to be the true menace. Just a bit of empty bluster, and a red herring.
 We're aware that there are monsters in the background, but Adam remains resolutely unconvinced there's anything odd going on, even when black rot chokes out the engine of his car.

 Luckily it's not too long - maybe halfway through - before the faeries hallow come out into the open and lay siege to the Hitchens family home. It's too silly to be scary, and the characters make so many bad decisions that it's hard to root for them; But on the plus side, it's very, very atmospheric, the monsters are good (think zombie Groots), there a couple of pretty out-there visuals and director Corin Hardy keeps things lively.
 It's not a good movie, but it's got plenty of things going for it. 

 The effects are all pretty good - it's not a very gory movie, but there's at least one wince-inducing bit of nastiness and some really neat imagery. The cinematography (by Martijn van Broekjuizen) is outstanding, providing a lot of cool-looking variations on people doing stuff in the dark. All the actors do well by the parts they're given.
 The issue here is the script (by director Corin Hardy and Felipe Marino). The cordyceps angle was not very original even when it came out (The Last of Us had come out two years prior), and to be honest, the way it's used is just as silly as if they had gone with goblins, Sidhe. or scary undead faeries. It also tips its hand early by showing some images on a book that predict how things will go later, fails to make the characters compelling and makes them behave like complete idiots several times...
 None of these are necessarily fatal mistakes, but there are enough problems that that they took me out of the movie. It's a shame because the script does do a few things right and hits upon a few cool images and ideas. Oh well.

Elemental

 Elemental is a cute Pixar love story that (once again) functions as commentary on the immigrant experience. In this case, it's got Aristotelian elements as stand-ins for ethnicities/cultures. So you've got people made of fire, people made of water, etc.

 The water, air (they look like clouds, which is cheating!) and earth people live together in seeming harmony in a huge, utopic metropolis called Element City. The fire people are much rarer; Their culture is a mix between a bunch of eastern cultures - there's a lot of the Chinese and Indian, a little Polynesian, a little Arabic maybe; That it's rooted in fantasy makes it lose specificity, but I guess more people in the foreign markets will identify with it. It's a shame they didn't dare come up with something a bit more alien or more original; I don't think what's here is cynical, but I don't think it works all that well, either.

 In any case, a couple from fire land come to town and, after running into some systemic discrimination (some well-intentioned, some not) they set up shop (literally; they build a shop) on a derelict part of town and become the seed (or kindling) of a thriving fire community.

 Ember (Leah Lewis), our protagonist, is set to inherit the store from her hard-working dad (Ronnie del Carmen). The only thing holding her back is her temper, which is literally explosive whenever she gets too stressed out. This gets her in trouble when a complicated chain of events leads to the basement of the store getting flooded, and with her getting mixed up with Wally (Mamoudou Athie), an... overtly emotional water-dude inspector from City Hall.

 Together they try to find out why there's water being routed to the fire neighbourhood. They learn about each other, they fall in love, they have a fight, etc. etc.

 It's a cute movie, and it can be very very funny when it wants to. It also does get a bit more sophisticated in the exploration of its themes than you'd expect: it touches on the obvious stuff, sure, but one of the main drives of the plot is the second-generation immigrant's guilt- the debt they feel to their parents for having sacrificed so much so they could have a better life. It's well handled, even if the answers it finds are pat. It's a kid's movie, after all.
 And there's a scene where Ember and her dad are denied entry somewhere that I thought was pretty devastating.

 Technically, it's a marvel: The city is as well realized as any Pixar metropolis, and there's more than a few beautiful scenes peppered throughout the film. All the actors (the most famous, at least to me, would be Catherine O'Hara in a minor role) do a great job, the character designs are cute and very distinctive, and there's a lot of imagination and humor on display everywhere.

 Overall, I did find it a bit underwhelming though. Maybe we're close to taking Pixar for granted, maybe I've been spoiled by all the years they put out classics pretty much back-to-back. But the script this time felt off. It's mostly fine moment-to-moment, but there were a few too-tidy resolutions, and the way it deploys a couple of deus ex machinas really put me out.

 I also had many, many problems with the 'rules' of the world. People make fun of Cars for having a world that doesn't make sense, but I don't really have a problem with it (despite disliking the films); the world is silly, but consistent. Thinking about why they have steering wheels and passenger doors is fun, but it's also kind of a dumb thing to criticize; it's part of the buy-in.

 Not so here. The rules don't make sense, which... in a world that includes sentient farts, I can roll with. But they're also very inconsistent. Why can ember handle some flammable substances but then can't seem to be able to avoid burning others? Why does Wade melt (evaporate?) sometimes but seems fine on other similar situations? The movie seems to be making everything up as it goes along without real consistency, which is a problem when these issues become plot points in the narrative. And that makes the drama feel arbitrary and at least on one instance, manipulative.

 Nothing fatal to my enjoyment of the movie. I'd consider this 'minor' Pixar... which, as usual, is still a good time.

Europa Report

 At some point in the near future, a company sends out six people on a manned mission to one of Jupiter's moons to look for life under its thick icy crust. Six months, less than a third of the way to their destination, there's a huge solar storm, and comms are lost completely.
 Some time later, the Europa corporation puts together and releases the Europa Report, a documentary about the fate of the expedition. And that's what we're watching.

 This is a film that strongly commits to its bit, and it nails the tone, music, visuals, and the format (talking heads, split screens, aspect ratio changes) down to the smallest detail. Coupled with a hard sci-fi edge and a mostly unsentimental approach to its story, it all makes for pretty compelling viewing; unfortunately it relies on a puzzle box structure to cover up that not a lot happens during the movie. There are a lot of incidents, but the plot itself is a bit too simple and ultimately a little unsatisfying.

 Being cobbled together from camera footage from all around the ship and inside the crew's helmets, it fully qualifies as found footage movie. One of the least contrived ones I've seen; All the cameras make sense in-universe, not a single asshat waving a camcorder to be seen.
 The editing jumbles up the timeline to give a little more drama to the proceeds, which is OK because the story itself is pretty straightforward and consciously unmelodramatic - don't expect anyone to, I dunno, start worshipping the sun and killing off crewmates. Everything is kept low-key and people remain reasonable to the end. Literally.

 Yes, it's clear from the beginning that things do not go well; the script (by Philip Gelatt) pulls some tricks to make it hard to gauge exactly how not well, but it's clear that at least a few people won't make it back. First with the permanent loss of communications, then an accidental death that leaves the team understandably shook and demoralized (the details are left until late in the movie) and finally with a series of technical issues once they finally reach their destination and everyone takes a lander down to the frigid moon's surface.

 Once there they run into some anomalies which lead to the film's more out-there element. It's well handled and kept pretty mysterious.

 The crew consists of the captain (Daniel Wu), the pilot (Anamaria Marinca), a techie (Michael Nyqvist) and a few science people (Christian Camargo, Karolina Wydra and Sharlto Copley; remember when he was in every other movie?). They're not particularly detailed, but they're all likeable people played by pros. And the script and the actors work together to give them a lot of implied history with just a few details - a phrase in Russian, a knowing stare...
 As mentioned throughout, all the technical aspects are excellent; the cinematography (by Enrique Chediak) and environmental designs are excellent, and it's expertly directed by Ecuadorian Sebastián Cordero. It's a shame the movie never coalesces and feels a little hollow, a bit less than the sum of its parts. But most of those parts are so good, dammit.

 *: While I'm here, I should also point out that there was a plot hole near the end that brought the movie down a peg or two for me - namely that [SPOILERS!] they fixed the comms by cannibalizing life support on the lander? In ten minutes? Why didn't they do that earlier? Less of a problem, but still funny, is that the person who first bites it is the one who talks all the time about his family. Might as well have called him Dead Meat.