Baby Assassins

 Baby assassins is about two assassins that act like big babies, not assassins that go about assassinating babies - If that's what you're after, you'd be better off hiring The Killer instead. You monster.

 The two titular assassins are Mahiro (Saori Izawa) and Chisato (Akari Takaishi) - two girls just out of high school under the employ of one of those shady assassin agencies we keep hearing about. To keep their cover after graduation, the agency suggests they both get an apartment together, and get a part-time job as a cover (as their handler explains, the agency is more scared of tax men than law enforcement). Very low-key hijinx ensue.

 The movie is bookended by two excellent fights, but spends most of its time indulging in low energy slice-of-life comedy that honestly feels too slight to even qualify as a sitcom - it's more like filler updates on a web comic.

 There's a plot of sorts where the girls inadvertently start a fight with the Yakuza, but it's an afterthought; just the bare bones to give a little structure to the proceeds and provide a big brawl at the end. More is made of the assassin's attempts to get a job, or the very polite, very mannered squabbles resulting from their convivence. For, you see, Chisato is bubbly, outgoing, and quirky (in a very specifically Japanese way that I find pretty fucking annoying), and Mahiro is an antisocial wallflower who can't be arsed with anything that doesn't involve killing (and she even moans about that). Both are complete sociopaths too, which makes their matter-of-fact handling of their assassin duties a pretty funny running gag. Especially when the actress playing Mahiro also happens to be an accomplished stuntwoman, and she can move; The movie really comes to life whenever she gets the chance to flex her muscles.

 Baby Assassins is a pretty anime-damaged film - both girls are pretty trope-filled characters, as is the type of stuff they get up to. Still, there's a lot to like here - they have a lot of chemistry together, as proven by the dialog where they start making fun of the type of unsolicited wisdom a certain type of man might spout. The film frames their job as distinctly un-glamorous and not very well paid, which is a relatively novel take, and there are some pretty solid jokes sprinkled here and there.

 Unfortunately the film spins its wheels for far too long and delves into Japanese cultural aspects that set my teeth on edge (namely, an extended plot point that involves a stint in an extremely childish maid café.) It frequently splits the line between cute and cutesy, amusing and annoying... and the proportions are not always flattering to director Yugo Sakamoto's very loose script.

 Ultimately, though, I think it's successful, just about. The fights, though definitely not the focus of the movie, are a big part of that: they're quick, brutal, and feel hard-won. Izawa is a terrific, scrappy performer who athletically weaves in and out of holds - her fight against the heavy (Masanori Mimoto) easily makes the movie worth a watch; The action director is Kensuke Sonomura, who directed Bad City, so that tracks. There's a lot of blood, all of it digital and distractingly bad, but the rolling around is so good it's easily forgiven.

 More importantly, despite all the stuff that grated and the cultural differences, both actresses are pretty good and their characters ultimately come off as at least somewhat charming (one much, much more than the other; Sorry, Chisato).

 I mean, it's a movie where both assassins ride a single bike on their way to the climactic battle - and once there, they fret about whether it's ok to leave it out in the street. Weebs will lap this stuff up, but there's just about enough here for the rest of us too.

Last Shift

 A rookie cop (Juliana Harkavy) on her very first day is assigned the task of looking after a decommissioned police station - the Last Shift, you could say, before disposals turn up to get rid of some hazardous waste and the building can be fully shut down.

 It's a one crazy night film in a horror key, in other words, with the poor officer having to deal with escalating weirdness as the night unspools. Doors open, things move on their own, TVs turn to creepy channels... Poltergeist-style stuff - literally, at one point, when the ghosts decide to pile up office chairs in one of the rooms. 

 It's indicative of Last Shift's problems that that particular scene in Poltergeist was played for laughs; Here, it's dead serious... just another one of the low-level scares, jump scares and mild creepiness that constitutes most of what passes for a plot here. To be perfectly honest, I didn't find this movie very compelling even before the nature of the haunting - and its connection to our protagonist - becomes clear and the film lost me completely. It's all well-trod stuff, competently made but not enough to make it interesting.

Boot visits one nasty kindergarten

 There's no complaints about its quality; Director Anthony DiBlasi and his crew, working off what's very clearly a limited budget, keep the supernatural phenomena coming at a constant clip, leaving the door open for everything to be just in the rookie's mind. It's all done with energy and a little panache, and that goes a long way.

 All that effort does make the more low-key stuff work pretty well: being alone on a creepy institutional building is scary (and relatable) enough, and the atmosphere is strong. For all the craziness to come, a couple of encounters with a deranged homeless man end up striking the hardest.
 The sound design is outstanding and there are some good makeup effects later on. The acting is... variable, but it's mostly a one-woman show and luckily Harkavi does a pretty good job; She's believable in the role and has an engaging screen presence. And the action, simple and (very) limited as it is, is well staged and manages a great sense of immediacy.

 Everything above makes it all the more disappointing when the script (by DiBlasi and Scott Poiley) gets less interesting as it goes on, up to the point where the film just ends up being a Blumhouse-like barrage of clichés built around a subject matter that I never found all that scary to begin with.

 DiBlasi is an interesting director - he worked with Clive Barker developing a series of projects, and his first movie was an adaptation of the short story Dread (which I remember being just OK). Figures - there's something pretty Cenobite-y about a couple one of the creatures here. 

 Even if his other films don't sound very appealing to me, the guy's clearly got chops. What most strikes me, though, is that he remade Last Shift nine years later (as Malum) to escape the VoD ghetto. It sounds like too faithful a retread to bother with - this movie's problems are not the sort that will be fixed by throwing more money at them.

The Bikeriders

 Johnny (Tom Hardy) - a truck driver and family man - forms his motorcycle club, The Vandals, after watching Rebel Without a Cause. It's funny, sure, but it's also key.

 But The Bikeriders is not Johnny's movie. Nor is it Benny's (Austin Butler), the club member who epitomizes the biker way of life - a biker's biker, so to speak... but little else. No, the movie centers on Kathy (Jodie Comer): a young woman who, to her surprise, falls in love with Benny and spends the rest of the film somewhere between affectionately putting up with the life and the extended family it comes with, and trying to peel her partner away from it.

 We also get to hang out with a colourful cast of characters: Zipco (The one and only Michael Shannon) as a burnt out bullshit idealist, easy-going Cal (Boyd Holbrook), a guy who defects from The Hell's Angels (Norman Reedus) because he likes the vibes in Johnny's crew better - they all make an impression. It's easy to see why they'd try to hang on to what they have together even when it's clearly not going to end well.

 As an eventful year passes, Kathy narrates to a photographer (Mike Faist) how everything went to shit once the group got too big for its own good and the new guard pushed to shift Johnny's social club into a gang. Things will be what they got to be, to paraphrase the film spelling out one of its main themes.

 It's a simple movie that isn't really interested in the rise and fall story its superficial similarities to Scorsese-influenced crime epics suggest - except in how they inform the characters who drive that action. When, say, a critical challenge for the club's leadership comes, it's almost comically underplayed; The fireworks are reserved for loaded conversations, the devastating fallout from an attempted sexual attack, or a falling out between friends that's subtle and understated and as final as a gunshot.

 The acting is beautifully calibrated, the script (by director Jeff Nichols) is sharp and often very funny, and all the surfaces are immaculately kept: The soundtrack features a wealth of not-only-the-biggest-hits from the era, the cinematography (by Adam Stone, who came up with Nichols on Shotguns Stories and has worked with him since) gives the film a grounded, documentary feel while remaining very cinematic, and the sound mix never lets you forget how powerful the beasts these people ride in are.

 For all its energy, it's an oddly passive film. The script was very loosely adapted from a seminal book of biker photographs and interviews by Danny Lyons, and his (as played by Mike Faist) talks with Kathy provide structure to the movie, hopping around chronologically to give the thin narrative a little more impact. The trickery works, but it also makes the film feel deceptively slight.

 Stay for the credits for the now-standard real-life pictures, and even better, a Lucero song that almost acts as a recap of the movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-style. The song is almost twenty years old (from 2005's Nobody's Darlings, a cast-iron classic) and based on the same interview that forms the backbone for the movie; Ben Nichols, the songwriter, is Jeff Nichol's brother and turned him onto the book.

 This is a deceptively great film, one that gets better as I unpack it. I hesitate to say it's deep - many of the things it does have been done before - but it's all done uncommonly well, with character moments and song selections carefully reinforcing its handful of themes. I keep coming back to Johnny, mesmerized by Rebel Without a Cause, his family and day job momentarily a distant concern. Enthralled by a vision of an open road, his adoring buddies at his side. Funny, sure. And more than a little tragic.

From Beyond the Grave

 The great Peter Cushing plays the unnamed proprietor of an antique shop just off a busy London street. We know there's something up with it because the film (via a visible but clever edit) arrives at it after a spooky graveyard jaunt for the credits, accompanied by a great old-school horror soundtrack.

 Cushing stalks the people who come off the street to look at his wares, all humble civility, the perfect shop owner even as people try to cheat, lie, or even steal to get whatever it is they're after. Did I mention that the shop is called Temptations Ltd.? You can almost catch a whiff of brimstone as the owner world-wearily lights his pipe, watching each customer make off with a dishonestly obtained bargain. They'll pay for it, one way or another; their thrift fuel for this excellent Amicus horror anthology.

 The framing device is unobtrusive and a lot of fun until a weak finale. Noticeably, it imposes the classic Tales of the Crypt (which Amicus adapted in 1972) format -outsized comeuppance for lapses in morality- upon stories that are largely disconnected from it. It's a clever setup, but not exactly seamless (the objects bought at the store have variable importance in the stories that feature them). The framing story is an original creation, while the shorts that make up the anthology are all adaptations of R. Chertwynd-Hayes short stories.

 The first one concerns a hipster douchebag (David Warner) who bamboozles a mirror out of the store to put on the wall of his bizarre swinging flat (a single-room affair where he entertains his guests in a living room presided by his four-poster bed). 'It looks like something a medium would use', one of his guests says, which prompts an impromptu (and beautifully filmed) spiritist session. And you know how it goes, their fooling around with forces that they don't understand wakes something in the mirror, a creepy old dude (Marcel Steiner) who is soon coercing the hipster to feed him the blood of prostitutes.

 It's a fun story well told even as it goes almost exactly where it's supposed to go. Satisfying, but no surprises.

 The second customer, a nebbish businessman played by Ian Bannen, tries to escape a miserable home life by engaging with a fellow ex-soldier (Donald Pleasence). The problem is that he spent the war behind a desk, so he decides to steal a medal from the display at Temptations Ltd to impress his fellow veteran. It works, and they becomes good friends; Soon the businessman is spending more time with his friend and, especially, his odd duck of a daughter (Angela Pleasence), leading to some witchy business and a fun final twist.

 Next comes the tale of a pompous prick and his elemental. Reginald (Ian Carmichael), the pompous prick, does the old switcheroo to get a snuff box for a fraction of its price. Seriously, a snuff box*? In any case: on the ride home, he's accosted by a snooty old woman (Margaret Leighton) who insists he's got an elemental affixed to his shoulder - and wouldn't you know, it's the worst kind of elemental, the murderous kind.

 Reggie laughs the whole incident away, but that same night strange things start happening - his dog runs away, his wife is attacked by an invisible force. It gets bad enough to convince the both of them to call the old woman to perform a sort of exorcism.

 The tone is overtly comedic and gives Leighton vast amounts of scenery to chew on, which she does with relish; Honestly, she's good enough to make the whole endeavour kind of delightful. It helps that the premise is slightly off-beat (an elemental?) and that it reserves enough venom to keep things from being too light-hearted.

 To close things off we have the history of William (Ian Ogilvy), a money-strapped young man who buys a door after haggling its price down a bit. Then he's left alone in the shop, with the cash register left open, his money conspicuously there for the taking...

 The door, once installed, sporadically opens into an ancient-looking blue room. Director Kevin Connor stretches his muscles a little bit on this segment - there's some pretty clever transitions and use of colour. The plot, though, is as simple as it gets, with a Stuartian warlock making a bid to feed first on poor William, then his lovely wife (Lesley-Anne Down). Besides having the coolest set, it also hosts the lion's share of film's (modest) special effects, including a lovely montage of a corpse grinding down to dust. The ending playfully tweaks the film's formula, too.

 All that's left is for the proprietor to close down shop while gently breaking the fourth wall. A little cheesy, but Peter Cushing sells it with his near infinite reserves of dignity and charm.

 It's as good a sendoff as any not just to the movie, but to Amicus's storied run of horror anthology films; It'd be their last. The producers behind most of them, Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky**, would try to save the studio with a couple of adventure films (also directed by Connor), but Amicus would soon close down for good.

 I hadn't seen this one before, but it's an extremely solid collection that shows the studio at top form: charming and clever, well-made and a whole lot of fun. Not particularly scary - not to my jaded sensibilities, at least, but most of the stories here (adapted by Robin Clarke and Raymond Christodoulou) have a respectable amount of meanness and a fair bit of conceptual flair; I've never read any Chertwynd-Hayes, but based on this I probably should correct that.

 RIP Amicus. You folks were all right.

*: It does, at least, lead to an absolute gem of a one liner: "I hope you enjoy snuffing it". Cushing's delivery alone makes this movie worth the price of admission.

**: Fun fact: Subotsky spent the 80s and 90s pretty much exclusively producing Stephen King movies - the ones people tend to gloss over, and two of the most infamous. Hey, at least he was living the horror fan dream.

Inside (À l'intérieur)

 The first thing we see in Inside is a fetus floating snugly in its womb - then something happens and the baby hits the camera lens with its face, a cloud of blood invading the frame. Extremely unconvincing CGI aside, it's one hell of a way to kick off a movie.

 The cause for the baby's discomfort soon becomes apparent as we get our first glimpse of our pretty pregnant protagonist, Sarah (Alysson Paradis), in the aftermath of a horrific car crash. She's survived; Her partner, unfortunately, didn't.

 As it turns out, her baby survived the crash as well, something Sarah seems a little ambivalent about when we catch up with her a few months later. It's the day before Christmas, riots are rocking suburban Paris, and it's the day before she's due to go to the hospital to have her baby delivered. Sarah goes around in a haze of depression, still clearly struggling to come to terms with facing the rest of her life - and looming maternity - alone.

 That night, a mysterious woman (Beatrice Dalle) knocks at her door and asks to be let in - and later appears in her garden. Sarah is justifiably unnerved, enough to call the police, who promise to patrol the area and check in later. It's no good; As soon as she goes to sleep, the stranger breaks in and wanders her house, watches her sleep, brandishes a very nasty pair of scissors a little too close to her belly...

 After a brutal, wince-inducing attack at about the half-hour mark, Sarah ends up locked in the bathroom while the stranger paces outside, demanding Sarah gives herself up for butchery. The movie never lets up, going through a handful of established characters that meet various horrifying ends. It's a relentlessly brutal, extremely gory and harrowing home invasion that quickly leaves poor Sarah covered in blood from head to toe.

 Besides being one of the poster girls for the horror branch of the French New Extremity 'movement', Inside marked the debut of the writer/directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, who've since built up a pretty cool and varied body of work within the genre. This one remains their bloodiest and their best.

 It's very much of a piece with the other horror movies from the 00s, except much better than most. The CGI baby - who pops up multiple times to give the film an even more jagged edge - is a great bad-taste concept, but unfortunately the execution is so laughably bad that it counts against the movie even as it makes it more memorable. The same goes for other scenes where CGI is used, including a conceptually cool but visually botched face-torching moment.

 Elsewhere, though, the computer imagery is not that bad, mostly because the film wisely limits their time on screen to very quick flashes. The more prevalent practical gore effects are appropriately disgusting and over the top - expect blood to cascade down stairs and shoot out in almost comical high pressure from puncture wounds. There's face explosions, disembowelments, and more stabbings than you can shake a pair of oversized scissors at. The carnage is graphic, extremely well made and brutal enough to undercut a gorehound's glee. Almost.

 More than anything else, it's an excellent and particularly bloody single-location slasher. The script hits a couple of bum notes but mostly nails the give-and-take between suspense and mayhem all the way to a fucking excellent, bleak-as-all-hells finale.

 The two women at the center of the film are great characters - one melancholy and relatable in her orneriness, the other one inscrutable and batshit insane; There's more than a little Audition in this movie's DNA, including gearing up its psycho in a memorable getup that almost doubles as fetish gear. 

 Visually It avoids the boring, desaturated look that most American horror of the time was affecting by bathing everything in soft, mostly amber lights (cinematographer: Laurent Barés). Like most Bustillo/Maury joints, it's fairly stylish and very energetic.

 Highly recommended as long as you have a stomach for this sort of thing.

Ghost stories

 For whatever reason, I always thought this'd be a classy, staid attempt at horror. I shouldn't have worried; The title card itself is cheesy as all hell and doubles as a jump scare.

 Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman) is one of those paranormal investigators who loves to expose spiritists and mediums. He starts the movie talking to the camera, explaining his methods as if we were watching his TV show, hinting at a film footage approach that soon falls by the wayside in favour of a more cinematic take. Just as well.

 Soon he's contacted by a better-known fraud exposer, one that had been somewhat notorious in the 70s, and an influential figure on Phil while he was growing up. The good doctor had vanished in mysterious circumstances, so Phil hurries to meet him.

 The old professor turns out to be an amusingly cantankerous asshole in obvious old-man makeup living in squalor in a near-derelict caravan. After implying our protagonist is a fool for being closed to the possibility of the occult, he gives him a folder with three cases he couldn't explain that - it's implied - made him lose faith in rationality. Determined to prove the old man wrong, Goodman dashes off to explain away the unexplainable.

 Yes, somewhat surprisingly it's an anthology movie. The three segments cover a night watchman (Paul Whitehouse) getting spooked in a creepy old abandoned asylum, a kid (Alex Lawther) who gets hunted by weird creatures while he drives home through a dark forest at night, and a successful financier (Martin Freeman) who is haunted by a poltergeist in his high-end flat.

 These are all 'ghost stories' rather than ghost stories - one of them does not involve ghosts at all. All of them have the simplistic structure of a campfire tale, jump scares and all: A series of events of rising spookiness, culminating in something revealing itself... and that's it, no real resolution, no real story - nothing except an attempt to get under your skin. I respect that; even if on a narrative level it's all pretty weak there's a sense of fun to the proceeds, tone and atmosphere are tightly controlled, and the scares are effective. Not to mention some truly great jokes: at one point a fake psychic, trying to convince a mark that he's talking to her dead, leukemia-afflicted son, can't think of anything better to say than 'My blood hurts, mommy!'
 A pretty cool, unselfconscious and extremely British throwback to the horror anthologies of yore, then - even if it lacks the relative sophistication of the Amicus films it seems to be modelled after, which usually managed better stories.

 Sadly, the film isn't content with all of that. Elements recur both in the stories and during the framing device - dead birds, a figure in a hoodie, a child's doll - leading up to a spectacularly terrible explanation/conclusion to Phil's story, a seriously disappointing last flourish that undoes a lot of the good work the film had been doing for a solid hour or so - even as the script seems to revel in its perceived cleverness. To be brutally clear: it's a fucking disaster. As a twist, it's valid (if a bit shit), but thematically it's completely disconnected from the rest of the movie up to it. Its particular strain of mindfuckery has been around for at least a century, and it's been thoroughly overused (and parodied) for decades in mainstream TV shows.

 The film was written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, based on their stage show; Nyman, of course, also stars as Philip Goodman, which he apparently did on the show as well. It's a shame the script's plot got away from them, because their control over tone - particularly their ability to put in a lot of humour without diluting the horror aspects - is pretty on-point. Maybe next time.

Inside Out 2

 We didn't really need a sequel to Inside Out. Its final five minutes, which left the protagonist's head and its anthropomorphized emotions to give us a glimpse of what was going in the heads of a bunch of other people (and a cat) was worth a whole franchise.

 It's a near perfect scene, riotously funny and fiercely inventive in a way no follow-up could ever hope to be. And that's coming at the tail end of one of Pixar's best films. Talk about salting the earth.

 Inside Out 2 is not as good as the first one - how could it? But it's a clever, often hilarious, often moving film in its own right.

 The film once again tracks the five emotions that 'drive' young Riley (Kensington Tallman) just as she hits thirteen years. The emotions are Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling), Fear (Tony Hale, replacing Bill Hader) and Anger (Lewis Black). All the lovely representations of Riley's psychological makeup remain from the first movie - the 'islands' that comprise her identity, the little memory-holding, emotion-tinged orbs and the way they're sent to permanent storage - with the wrinkle that Joy and co. have decided to start sending all the memories that make Riley uncomfortable to a dump somewhere at the back of the mind. Sounds healthy.

 There's a couple of lovely additions, too. The emotions have discovered that certain memories can be set aside to together organically build a sort of woven effigy of Riley's sense of self. It's a great concept that the script (by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein) uses pretty effectively later on.

 The emotions figure it's all smooth sailing - until puberty hits. Then the console they use to influence Riley is changed for one that's seriously out of whack - any adjustments they make go way overboard. Soon afterwards, new emotions come onboard.

 The new emotions are Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Ennui (Adéle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser, who only gets one really lame gag). All of them are gorgeously realized and like the original emotions they're vividly expressive, beautifully voice acted, and just funny to watch as they go about doing their stuff.

 While all this goes on within, without doesn't lack for problems: Riley is faced with the prospect of losing her best friends when they're assigned to a different high school, and then has some complications at a hockey camp where she feels she needs to choose between them and her passion (which comes with an impossibly cool new social group).

 This causes a mutiny in Riley's mind, as the new emotions - led by Anxiety - 'bottle up' the others (literally!); like in the previous movie, the emotions - this time all of the old ones - need to trek through Riley's psyche to make things all right again. And while that's going on, Riley, driven by anxiety, makes all sorts of terrible choices; The new incumbents have decided to ditch Riley's identity, using the same mechanism that Joy and co. used to jettison unwanted memories.

 It all tracks. Following in the footsteps of first part's helmer Pete Docter, director Kelsey Mann and his crew have crafted a story that works beautifully as entertainment and achieves that rarest of things in films nominally aimed at children: emotional honesty. And Pixar have a knack for coming up with elegant, resonant, concrete and easily understandable metaphors for abstract processes (see also: Soul's 'in the zone' zone), which is on full display here.

 After a slightly shaky start, which was a little too hectic and energetic for my taste - too standard modern animation - the film settles down and gives its ideas a little time to breathe. And there are some killer gags too*.

 Compare this to the trailer for the newest Despicable Me, which is all naked pandering, manipulation and manic mugging at the cameras.

 Technically, of course it's a marvel, one that manages stylization with a photorrealistic level of detail. Nothing stands out as being particularly visually impressive, but as a whole it looks great. The soundtrack this time around is by Andrea Datzman. It's fine, but it has the unenviable task of living up to Michael Giacchino's incredible main theme from the first movie; She never stood a chance, as it makes a comeback, expertly deployed, in a particularly emotional scene. Sorry lady!

 It's not a perfect - there's a more than a few groaners, a few things are a little too played out. Not that it matters much; the trailers for all those shitty kid's movies just before the film actually help put into focus just how good Pixar is at this sort of thing.

 I made my dad watch the transformers movie when I was a kid, something that still makes me laugh when I think about it; For context, my dad made me watch Bicycle Thieves at... probably at around the same time. I really screwed him over with that exchange rate.

 It's not as if I've ever needed an excuse to watch animated stuff since, but having a kid has thrown into relief just how much care and craft is expended on the story department for stuff nominally aimed at children these days. I think we'll be fine if Pixar ever shut down their doors; For every Despicable Me 4 there are a bunch of Nimonas or Puss In Boots - that's our baseline level of quality, and there are enough people out there these days that aim to provide kids with a little more than empty calories.

 We have it so much better than our parents.

*: There's an extended riff on repressed emotions that got a huge reaction from the audience I was with - it gives a Cloud Strife-alike Shamus Aran's funniest power-up, and a separate spoof has one of the best fourth-wall breaking conceits I've seen in ages. This is what happens when you let the nerds run the show, and I love it.

Horns

  Once upon a time, the son of the King of horror published two great books, one right after the other (in addition to a killer set of short stories). One of them was an incredibly cinematic yarn, ready made with iconic J-Horror-style imagery. The other one was a bizarre romance/horror/comedy hybrid that seemed designed to drive any foolish scriptwriter who took it on insane for their troubles.

 Guess which got a movie adaptation?

 To be fair, there's still hope that we'll see Heart-Shaped Box in one form or another; Neil Jordan wrote an adaptation and almost got it made way back in 2007, maybe he'll be able to rescue it from limbo at some point... or someone else will. It seems inevitable now people can put "From the author of Black Phone" on the movie poster.

 You know what they probably won't put in the poster? Joe Hill's previous big screen adaptation: 2013's Horns, which to be perfectly honest, is not a bad stab at filming a pretty unconventional novel. I'd avoided it for ages on the back of some bad reviews, despite liking most of director Alexandre Aja's movies. And now I've seen it... yeah, I get it, it's not great - definitely not a patch on the book - but it's still pretty good a lot of the time.

 The first line of the movie: "Are you horny?" Is indicative of one of the film's main problems, which is a sort of flippant, low-effort smart-arse-ness going on on the script that doesn't really work. It's uttered by Merrin Williams (Juno Temple), who's been going out with Ig Perrin (Daniel Radcliffe) ever since they were in grade school, as they lay side-by-side in a sunny patch of woodland. Then comes the film's best moment: The camera pans downwards from this idyllic scene, through the ground, and comes out the other side with an inverted, bleak-as-hell shot of Ig passed out in alcoholic stupor on his kitchen floor.

 On the nose? Sure, but it's also a phenomenal - and fun! - bit of visual storytelling.

 Merrin is dead - found raped and murdered in (presumably) the same stretch of woods we saw her in with Ig earlier. Ig is the prime suspect, but the ongoing investigation has stalled, even if everyone - including the police - have condemned him in their minds.

 Ig's life is, understandably, in a downward spiral. And soon it takes a turn for the weird when horns start sprouting from his head.

 Not that people pay attention to them; They can see them, but somehow they find them hard to remember or get worked up about; No, the main effect they have is to get people to confess to their darkest urges. To bring them to the fore. This leads to some pretty effective, if broad, black comedy as Ig acts as a sort of unknowing advocate for people to indulge in their base impulses. Similar to a superhero learning to use their powers, but with more public sex.

 It doesn't take long before Ig starts using his newfound abilities to try and find Merrin's killer. The whodunnit aspect is undone by a fairly weak villain and a beyond terrible, rote resolution, but the film does have a fair amount of fun getting there.

 French madman Alexandre Aja directs from a script by Keith Bunin. Aja fails in the predictable ways - he's more attuned to creating mayhem than character work, but his sensibility does give the film a bit of a kick, and he's more than happy to make the film pretty... well, horny, including an athletic sex scene. Remember when films had sex scenes?

 The tone, which was always going to be tricky, given the source material, is all over the place, but there's a definite attempt to drown out the black comedy as the film heads to darker places. It doesn't completely work, but it's reasonably well handled - and it's a very pacey movie even at two hours.

 I'm not a fan of a couple of attempts to paint Ig as an avenging, uh, angel, which feel a bit extraneous and out of character for both Ig and the movie, and as mentioned before the ending is a complete misfire. I suspect the movie would be much better remembered if they had found a better way to cap things off.

 The acting is mostly good. Radcliffe makes for a surprisingly compelling put-upon weirdo, and is pretty convincing as an American (though I should probably say that, as a non-native English speaker, my ear for accents is pretty iffy). There's also a handful of old pros giving the film a bit of class (Kathleen Quinlan, James Remar and David Morse), an extremely fun turn from Heather Graham, and a very likeable one for Joe Anderson as Ig's big brother. I did have some big issues with one of the roles, but I'll skip that because it'd edge into spoiler territory.

 Effects-wise it's mostly ok, though the main fireworks come out during the film's weakest moment. Aja wisely reins back his bloodlust, and the handful of gore shots are well made and are appropriately upsetting when they need to be. The cinematography (from Frederick Elmes) is good - all chilly Northeastern ambiance - and there's a couple of fun shots throughout the movie (none as good as that opening).

 The elephant in the room is the novel, which... well, yeah, it towers above the movie in pretty much any aspect you can think about. It's a complex one, so that was always going to be the case. Besides the loss of its more literary qualities, my main issues are that two important characters - Merrin and the killer - have been cut down in ways that do a huge disservice to the story, and the necessities of a Hollywood movie shift the story focus more to the whodunnit and revenge aspects, which were relatively minor in the book and result in a pretty unsatisfying conclusion to the story. Especially when it's all "Revenge is bad, OK?" and then it still tacks on the book's more upbeat ending in a way that feels completely unearned.

 Then again, book=good / movie=not-as-good is hardly news. It's still decent fun: funny, off-kilter, well-made and interesting - even if it's not in any way essential like the book is.

Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Watchers

 Mina (Dakota Fanning) is on the run from her past, working a menial job at a pet store in Galway. She hates herself so much she pretends to be someone else whenever she goes out at night, and of course there's some old unresolved family trauma behind it all.

 One good day her boss convinces her to drive a parrot out to a zoo in Belfast; Your typical "Go out and see the lovely Irish countryside!" "Drive down increasingly scenic and derelict roads!" "Get trapped in a haunted forest when the car inevitably breaks down!" You know, the usual. Never mind that Google tells me it's a four-hour drive down major roads.

 Lost in the woods Mina, bird cage in hand, is saved from... things scuttling beyond the treeline by Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), an old woman who rushes her into a brutalist-looking one-room house with one entrance (a reinforced iron door) and a huge one-way mirror that takes up a whole wall; Things outside can see in, but the occupants of the house can't see out.

 There's others in the house: Ciara (Georgina Campbell), whose defining characteristic is being distraught over the loss of her husband (whom we saw get taken by unseen assailants down a burrow in the prologue), and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), a brash kid whose thing is being a sullen idiot.

 No time for introductions, though - as darkness falls, lights turn on in the house and the things that chased Mina in the woods congregate outside to watch her and the rest... do not much at all. Must get really boring out in the forest for the monsters to find whatever these four get up to to be entertaining at all.

 (In case you missed the obvious parallel, the only thing to watch in the house is an old DVD with one of those reality shows where sexy bone-headed idiots do whatever it is people do in reality shows. Har har.)

 Mina and company can wander out into the woods during daylight, as long as they follow a set of rules that Madeline somehow worked out. Mina causes some mild trouble, but not a lot happens until the gang find that there was a whole bunker under the house the whole time; It only took them months and months to find it. If I ever have to play an escape room, these jackasses are the last people I'd pick to help.

 Down in the bunker they find logs left by the creator of the whole place that hold explanations - stupid, stupid explanations - for the building and the beasties outside. Armed with that knowledge the crew plans an escape, and (in a fairly neat move that lends the movie a slightly non-standard structure)  there's an extended 'twist' that leads the film to a slightly more interesting resolution.

 It's well crafted, but not particularly good. While director Ishana Night Shyamalan shares her father's knack for building atmosphere and setting up interesting compositions (the cinematographer here was Eli Arenson, who worked on the very creepy Lamb), she stumbles badly in the script department with some really clumsy exposition and shoddy character work. It's probably safe to say Mina's underwhelming character arc and the pretty shoddy mythology comes courtesy of A. M. Shine's source novel, so she's off the hook for that.

 And it really is a terrible mythology. What could have been an interesting folk-horror exercise is unmoored from any real-world lore, replacing it with some high fantasy twaddle that's completely divorced  from reality to explain away the monsters. Other favorite dumb moments in the script: The fact that it apparently takes the same amount of time to demolish a reinforced metal door as it does to break down a huge pane of (already fractured) glass, and the whole explanation for how the building was built - one of the dumbest, most ludicrous things I've seen in a while. And have in mind I watched Alienoid recently.

 The horror is strictly PG-13 and relies overtly on jump scares - it rustles up a decent atmosphere to fuel its gothic aspirations, but sadly there's next to no tension. Effects are decent, there's a few creature FX shots, and the production uses its fairly low budget well.

 Whatever you might say about nepotism (and have in mind this movie was self-financed by M. Night Shyamalyan), Ishana Night Shyamalyan does well by the material; I'm much less of a fan of her script, but it's not as egregiously horrible as some of the stuff her father's put out over the years. It'll be interesting to see what she does next.

Alienoid: Return to the Future (Oegye+in 2bu)

 I was actually looking forward to the sequel/conclusion/second half of Alienoid, a Korean action movie that uncomfortably mashed together a wuxia epic and chintzy sci-fi spectacle - each half set in separate timelines, cobbled together with a mess of haphazardly plotted time travel and a very poorly thought-out alien conspiracy.

 While the modern sci-fi section was terrible, the wuxia storyline was surprisingly excellent; And by the end it seemed that, with most of the main characters stranded in the past, that would force the sequel to play to its strengths.

 And for all of maybe half an hour, it seems like it's working. The first few scenes follow the mysterious gun-toting woman - who we now know is Lee Ahn (Kim Tae-ri), the kid from the first movie, all grown up (to add to the confusion, there are two timelines set in the past, ten years apart).

 She now possesses a MacGuffin which will allow the evil aliens to return to the future to enact their cataclysmic terraforming plans, so all the bad guys are going after her. Trying to (mostly) help her are Dosa Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol) and his two cat/human hybrid servants and two other magicians played by Yum Jung-ah and Jo Woo-jin.

 That's a very decent setup! All of these characters are fun, and the first fight - against some mercenaries - is a lot of fun, a very traditional Chinese-style fight where Lee Ahn doesn't let her opponent unsheathe his sword. The way it's shot is not great, but the choreography is. The action/stunt director is Sungchul Ryu, returning from the first movie. There's some good wire work later on.

 What follows - which focuses on the sorcerers chasing Lee Ahn - is admittedly not as good, but it's all mostly fun. And then... it all goes to shit.

 First we, uh, return to the future to reunite with Min Gae-in (Lee Hanee). She was an extremely minor character in the first movie, the custodian of Lee Ahn's BFF whose main thing was being 'comically' smitten with Lee Ahn's 'dad'.

 Well, she turns out to be a badass... customs officer, and via an extremely convoluted set of contrivances she finds out about the alien conspiracy. She's also the descendant of a badass warrior monk (Jin Seon-kyu), who was blinded by the aliens when they took over a Dosa monastery.

 By the time we get back to the Wuxia side of things, the plot has spread like an ugly infection, squeezing the fun and joy out of the plot with convoluted revelations about the true nature of several of the protagonists, and more unengaging, effects-based action.

 Once all characters are yanked to the sci-fi timeline it's almost impossible to care about whatever the hell is happening - writer/director Choi Dong-hoon has let all of his worst tendencies subsume everything. All that's left is lousy plotting full of people shrugging off seemingly mortal wounds, terrible jokes, chintzy-looking special effects and deeply unexciting, CGI-dependent action with some occasional posturing. It seems to consciously go for the feel of a Marvel movie.

 It's an ignoble end for something that had a fair amount of potential.

Initiation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pensive / We Might Hurt Each Other (Rupintojelis)

 "A bunch of teens partying on a remote lakeside cabin get massacred by a mask-wearing lunatic." That's about as straightforward a premise as possible for a low-budget horror movie, but Pensive seems somewhat uncomfortable with the possibility of being labeled as 'just' another slasher. This is both good and bad news.

 We're introduced to said bunch of (questionable) teens in their high-school graduation ceremony. They're a diverse bunch of stereotypes - the long-haired bohemian slacker (Povilas Jatkevicius), the golden boy jock (Kipras Masidlauskas), the popular girl (Gabija Bargailaite), the cool outsider (Saulė Emilija Rašimaitė), a zonked-out party dude (Martynas Berulis) and a bunch of others who don't really get any sort of personality assigned to them. They've all got their futures worked out - all of them except for our point of view character, Marius (Sarunas Rapolas Meliesius), who seems to be a bit of an outcast. The kid's so boring that, hilariously, his parents have already mapped out a career in insurance for him.

 When plans for the graduation party fall through, Marius seizes on a chance to try and score some social points (and impress the popular girl) by proposing everyone go to a remote cabin his mother mentioned was vacant - one with a nebulous tragic story. The others enthusiastically take him up on it, and so the stage is set for a massacre.

 The cabin, it turns out, is populated with creepy life-sized wooden sculptures, which the teens proceed to gleefully deface... as the camera repeatedly observes from hiding places in the underbrush. Uh oh.

 The film sticks with the teens and their drama for a while - it's not until about the halfway point when the slasher bursts out of the treeline and starts massacring the statue-defacing intruders.

 From there on it's the familiar series of deaths, chases and frantic hiding, except that Pensive doesn't really seem all that interested in the nuts and bolts of your typical slasher. For one, the kids try to stick together, at least at first, so there's a couple of attacks that are unusual in that the killer basically wades into a small crowd flailing implements of death.
 But the main difference is that the action is more interested in the kids' reactions rather than on the ways they bite it.

 There's a cool (and silly) gimmick to the kills: since the murderer's been watching everyone all along, he knows how they defaced his statues - and he dispatches each kid according to how they treated his creations. So if someone used a sculpture for firewood they get burnt to a crisp, or if they smashed a bottle on it they get their face cut in two, etcetera. Besides a considerable bloodlust, the guy's got good memory.

 The problem is that with one honorable (and agreeably brutal) exception, most of the deaths are almost perfunctory - the vast majority, in fact, happen off-screen.

 It ends up being all about Marius and a handful of survivors, and the way they interact and react to the massacre; A sort of fucked-up coming of age story set against a teen bloodbath. There's a few twists on the way - nothing hugely surprising, but it's all appropriately grim and grimly funny.

 Director Jonas Trukanas (who co-wrote the script along with Titas Laucius) knows the genre well, and his roving camerawork gives the movie a lot of energy. Neither he nor cinematographer Rokas Sydeikis figure out how to make the frequent night in the woods scenes very interesting, but they do manage to get some memorable shots (especially when things start burning).

 Despite a considerable amount of violence and distress, there's just a tiny amount of gore, and much of the mayhem is more implied than shown.
 I had next to no sympathy for any of the characters, save for the outcast and the bohemian; Almost everyone manages to show some at least some flashes of humanity, but just about the only aspect we see of these people is their douchey party-loving personas... something I've never had any time for.
 So without the vicarious pleasure of annoying teens getting picked off in creatively bloody ways, the focus is instead their survival, and honestly I couldn't give a single fuck about that. I did like where the film eventually headed, at least.

 The title card reads We Might Hurt Each Other, but the film its sold here in the UK as Pensive - a literal translation of its original Lithuanian title, so I'll go with that. It references a traditional type of wooden sculptures that feature Christ either during supplice or bummed out at the prospect of said supplice, it's unclear. I've had this on my to watch list for ages based on some positive festival buzz, and while I personally didn't find it wholly successful It's still pretty good arthouse-adjacent take on the subgenre.

Matriarch

 Laura (Jemima Rooper) is a hot mess. A successful career woman, sure, but she's struggling with bulimia, spends her days perpetually drunk, and is prone to partying her way through the night before heading into the office in a cocaine haze.

 She's not really having a good time, though. Her interactions with others are a weird mix of tentatively reaching out and then snapping at them whenever she's shown any kindness. Not hard to guess there's a lot of unresolved issues there.

 That lifestyle claims its due not twenty minutes into the movie, and she collapses from a coke overdose after an all-night bender. As she lies dying on her bathroom floor, a black oil spill crawls from outside the frame and into her; It causes one truly horrifying nightmare, and then she wakes up on her sofa, as if nothing had happened.

 The next day she receives a call from Celia (Kate Dickie), her estranged mom, with whom she obviously has a strained relationship. Tired and confused, still reeling from her near-death experience, she quits her job - after some choice, unwarranted nastiness towards her (too-nice and understanding) boss - and heads out back home, somewhere in rural Scotland.

 As soon as she's crossed the threshold of her childhood home, the poisonous spite Laura's bottled up throughout the years overflows - her contempt and hate for her mom are tangible. Celia, meanwhile, takes it in stride and is all conciliatory, manic cheerfulness, desperately trying to paper over years of bad parenting.

 And there's clearly something odd going on at the village. There's weird charms hanging from the local trees, old acquaintances look a lot younger than they should, and there's clearly some ulterior motive behind Celia's newfound interest in her daughter (her attempts to placate Laura are transparently - hilariously - self-serving), and it's easy to see she can't stand her. Best of all, Laura is so self-absorbed (and, to be fair, caught up in some pretty out there weirdness) that she's nearly oblivious to it all.

 There's also the matter of the black ooze that keeps welling up from Laura's flesh... and Celia's.

 Matriarch is an American-produced slice of very British folk horror - a particularly indecent take on the sub-genre, with a wicked streak of humour. Explanations are produced eventually, leading to a satisfying, bizarre finale that features some nice cosmic horror-adjacent imagery that's pretty impressive for a low-budget production like this.

 Writer/director Ben Steiner keeps things simmering nicely until they boil over, the dialog is sharp, and the actors seem to be having a blast portraying two extremely toxic people - one of them because she doesn't know any better, the other one irredeemable. I wasn't initially convinced by Rooper's acting, which felt too mannered, but it grew on me - it fits her character well. Dickie is (as ever) a delight, and she gets the lion's share of the laughs, but both actresses have strong scenes and a very good sense of comedic timing. Which is an odd thing to praise in a horror movie, but there you go.

 In case I've given the wrong impression: it keeps a tight enough leash on the mood, and has enough effectively disturbing imagery that it never really tips over into comedy - or even horror comedy territory. I'd describe it as a hornier, less out-there companion piece to that other weird folk horror movie from 2022, Men; It's not scary, but it can be unsettling - there's some pretty disgusting body horror, a cool story served with a thick helping of atmospheric uncanniness, all sorts of sex-tinged weirdness and the sort of behaviour from both leads that would curdle milk and make monocles shatter violently. Great fun for the whole family, in other words, as long as the family consists of perverts.

 All that plus a sex druid and something I can only describe as Cunthulhu. What else could you possibly need?

Caveat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Late Phases

 There are a surprising amount of good werewolf movies out there, all things considered. Late Phases - known as Night of the Wolf in some spaces (and as Night of the Wolf: Late Phases in Amazon UK) - takes a very decent swing at it and mostly succeeds thanks to a pretty sharp script that focuses on its compelling central character. It doesn't skimp on the monsters, either... sometimes to its detriment.

 Nick Damici stars as Ambrose McKinley, a blind, ornery Vietnam vet who moves into a new retirement community with his seeing eye dog Shadow (Raina). It's a nice enough place, more suburban neighbourhood than retirement home... except for all the murders.

 Ambrose learns of the murders the very first night spent on his new house, when the werewolf breaks into the neighbouring house and murders Delores (Karen Lynn Gorney), a sweet old lady. It's a tense, very effective scene, made more unsettling because the sight of a disemboweled senior citizen is not something you run into very often (never mind that her intestines are piled on her stomach like a birthday cake - the gore effects on the movie are fairly good otherwise). The other problem is that we get a relatively good look at the monster, and... it's not a great design: a lanky guy in a goofy suit, with a face that's more Ghoulie than Dog Soldier. That's going a problem that's going to hound (ha!) the movie moving forwards.

 Not a lot, mind you, not until the home stretch. Ambrose narrowly survives the night - the werewolf comes looking for him after killing dolores, and it's only driven away after it kills his poor dog. It doesn't take long for the veteran to put together the pieces: claw marks, the fact that it was a full moon, tracks that lead to the forest... and he knows better than to go to the indifferent cops with his concerns. Especially since they've completely bought into the whole animal attacks bullshit and seem unconcerned that it keeps happening month after month.

 So Ambrose has a month to prepare for another werewolf attack, which allows the script to slow down and showcase its protagonist. And it's a good one! Amici does a lot of the heavy pulling, and he's engaging, charismatic and badass - it does feel like a slight retread of his work on Stakeland, but he's so good at it that it doesn't matter all that much. Ambrose starts sleuthing around, especially around church, which brings with it two pretty compelling lycanthropy suspects (the priest, played very charismatically by the ever-dependable Tom Noonan, and a shifty local by the name of James (Lance Guest), while at the same time going around and getting silver bullets for the gun he keeps waving around (the movie has a lot of fun pointing out time and time again that it's not illegal for the blind to own firearms) and putting his affairs in order. And maybe straightening things out with his adult son (Ethan Embry).

 Spanish director Adrian Garcia Bogliano (I haven't seen any of his other work, but most of it seems to involve posessed teens and children) does a good job jugging events and suspects with the moon as a ticking clock in the background. I'm not convinced he nails the tone, which veers a little to sharply from comedy to drama to suspense and back again. But it's a complex balancing act and I think he's ultimately successful, thanks to considerable help from Amici and scriptwriter Eric Stolze - they keep things anchored with Ambrose's fierce commitment to remaining independent and seeing things through his way.

 The film admirably doesn't let piddly budget concerns get in the way of providing a lot of monster action. So by the time the climax rolls around and the werewolves make an appearance... well, it's cool on paper, but the execution sadly tends towards ridiculous rather than scary.

 Werewolves are a notoriously hard monster to get right visually - effects-wise the transformation is a good one: more about ripping skin to reveal the monster within than flesh becoming malleable and shifting towards lupine. But the film screws the pooch (not literally!) by not only showing them in all their slightly goofy glory, but also by trying to have them do things that the stiff furry suits are ill-suited to, like running on all fours. The best-known person on the special effects team is Robert Kurtzman, who's done a lot of amazing stuff over the years (including work on some of my all-time favorite movies), but to do these scenes justice the crew would have needed way more time and money than they clearly had.

 Still; despite some missteps (not just in the effects department - there are a few jarring character moments baked into the script, and parts where it scores satirical points at the expense of the more grounded aspects of the movie) this is a good, fun werewolf yarn. One more for the surprisingly substantial pile.

The Devil's Candy

 The Hellmans are moving house. And because this is a movie written and directed by Sean Byrne -his sophomore feature after the excellent The Loved Ones- the horrors will go a little beyond a looming mortgage and financial insecurity.

 Yes, it's a haunted house film, or maybe about demonic possession - these things overlap (as evidenced by all the "the haunting of..." films). The previous owners were murdered by their adult son Ray (Pruitt Taylor Vince) when they wouldn't let him play power chords on his flying V guitar to drown out the voices that come from one particular spot in one particular wall (a sort of musical satanic litany provided by the drone metal band Sun O)))). The police wrote it off as an accident, though, and he's still hovering around his old house, lost and forlorn - and free to go around murdering children at the behest of the voice from the wall.

 Ray's spirit-banishing metal playing is not just a cute way to signal channeling dark impulses towards the artistic (a minor theme in the movie that sadly is there to provide some satanic distractions than anything else); It ties in with the film's aesthetic, which is suffused in heavy metal lore, and not just in the soundtrack. The Hellman family - at least Jesse, the father (Ethan Embry, looking weathered as fuck) and Zooey, the daughter (Kiara Glasco) are full-on metalheads, rocking Metallica, Slayer and Sun O))) shirts throughout the movie; All bands are represented in the (great) soundtrack, along with original music from Michael Yezerski.

 The mother, Astrid (Shiri Appleby), is the odd one out - the heaviest she seems to get is Queens of the Stone Age. She's also the breadwinner, providing for her husband's more bohemian lifestyle.

 They're a likeable, loving bunch, which the film cannily exploits when it starts turning the screws: First by having the voice from the wall reach out to Jessie, infusing his painting with some creepy overtones, and then by having Ray make a house visit and setting his sights on poor Zooey.

 What follows is a harrowing series of escapes and confrontations - the supernatural elements provide some strong imagery, but most of the horror is more mundane and extremely effective.

 It's a nasty, brutal little film, suffused with enough energy and moving at a quick enough pace that the nastier elements don't detract from its fun, but still provide enough menace to make any outcomes uncertain. There's a bit of bloodshed, but the film relies more on realistic suffering to give it a kick, which understandably might turn some people off.

 It's a shame Byrne can only seem to get a project off the ground once a decade; there's a distinctly Australian sense of fun to his brand of bleak cruelty I really appreciate.