The Theatre Bizarre

 A young woman visits the seemingly abandoned Guignol theater, only to be greeted by an MC (Udo Kier!) who introduces, mime-like, five stories with varying (but tending to high) levels of depravity and bloodshed.

 The original Grand Guignol theatre in France specialized in plays featuring graphic displays of gore and sex, to the point where the words today are used to describe over-the-top, sadistic violence and splatter (sex, not so much). Most of the stories in this anthology film certainly do try their best to live up to that- or down, depending on your taste. Well, with one exception, but we'll get to that.

 The wraparound segment with the woman at the theater and Udo Kier is directed by Jeremy Kasten. It does have a premise of sorts, but really it's just a cheesy way to introduce the different stories. It's fine for what it is, though personally I find the would-be-creepy human puppets look like shit.

 First up is the folk horror/Lovecraft mashup of 'The Mother of Toads', an adaptation of a (good) Clark Ashton Smith story, tied closer to the wider Cthulhu mythos by avowed Lovecraft fan Richard Stanley.

 It's pretty fucking terrible.

 Two American tourists (Victoria Maurette and Shane Woodward) fall under the spell of a witch (the legendary Catriona McColl, with porn star Lisa Belle subbing in for some... key scenes) while touring France. She lures the man promising access to a copy of the original Necronomicon, only to seduce him after poisoning him with mulled wine. There are loads of cute toads, a Creature from the Black Lagoon with two sets of tits and a cool corpse puppet, but just about everything in this short is atrocious - from the acting (at least McColl seems to be having fun) to a complete lack of tension or anything interesting going on. They completely mangle the original story, and do without its amazing ending (which, to be fair, would have been hell to shoot, especially with this budget).

 At least the scenery is nice (Connecticut passes for the fictional province of Averoigne). Other than that, this is a complete waste of twenty minutes.

 Things get better, thankfully, with Buddy Giovinazzo's 'I Love You'. It's a Berlin-set tale of a disintegrating marriage (between André Hennicke and Suzan Anbeh) that ends with a simple, but effective twist, followed by a bleakly humorous capper. The acting is much, much better, as is pretty much everything else.

 Then comes Tom Savini's turn; The man's built a bit of a secondary career directing horror shorts. It's a fun, lurid Tales from the Crypt-style shocker depicting a Sandman-esque scenario of nested nightmares ... about genital mutilation. That's fine, since we get plenty of chances to root for the protagonist's (James Gill) wiener getting chopped off - the guy is a massive piece of shit. Debbie Rochon plays his no-longer suffering wife, and Savini hams it up as a sleazy psychologist. Features a plate of severed penis and mash, plus a 'Lovecraftian vagina' (their words, not mine).

 'The Accident', by Douglas Buck, is a complete outlier: an entirely tasteful reverie built around a frank conversation about death between a mother (Lenna Kleine) and her very young child (Mélodie Simard) after they witness a gruesome accident.

 It's not a particularly deep conversation, but it is heartfelt and real in a way films, particularly genre films, struggle to get right.

 The music is great and the filmmaking is on-point, with some staggeringly beautiful roadside scenery and a dying deer so realistic I stuck around the credits to make sure the 'no animals were harmed in the filming of this picture' disclaimer popped up (it did). The acting is as naturalistic as the script. A gorgeous little short, its power magnified several times over for being nestled between all this cheerfully depraved material.

 And then we're back to the muck with Karim Hussain's 'Vision Stains', although it's quickly apparent some of the previous story's lyricism rubbed off on it. Unfortunately, its lyricism is of the florid, pretentious sort, as a woman (Kaniehtiio Horn) provides constant narration as she gruesomely harvests the memories off the junkies she murders. If you're not a fan of the part of the Venn diagram where eyes and needles intersect, you might want to sit this one out.

 The problem is that the narration's prose is infuriatingly overwritten (just like my reviews!) and delivered in a dead-voiced monotone. Things get a sorely needed shakeup when an extremely unlikely development leads to the woman getting a sort of metaphysical comeuppance... Maybe the script didn't buy into its own writerly bullshit after all.
 This one was a bit of a chore to get through, but it's well made, has some indelible imagery, and it's beautifully shot - Hussain's an established cinematographer with some impressive credits over the last decade or so. In light of its final twist, I'd say it's a keeper.

 David Gregory goes last - he's a prolific director of genre documentaries and featurettes. His segment, 'Sweets', is a garish, borderline surrealist story about the romance between two food fetishists (Lindsay Goranson  and Guilford Adams) and its inevitable conclusion.

 In an anthology centered around the grotesque and the bizarre, this one holds the honour of making me look away. It's not the gore that did me in, though (though there's some fun stuff here) - it's all the feeding and vomiting. Turns out I'm definitely not into whatever these people are into.

 Even if it weren't for that, I didn't like this one. Its frequent gross-out moments, shitty art-school satire and over-the-top sleazy aesthetic are calculated to repel and... guess what? It repelled me.

 The whole film mostly suffers from a flat, digital look (with The Accident and Vision Stains as honourable exceptions) and the sound mix is often off, with overblown music often threatening to swallow everything else in the mix. The gore effects, on the other hand, are top-notch.

 The Theatre Bizarre certainly delivers on its title, and on the gleeful descent into debauchery and bloody mayhem promised by its invocation of the Grand Guignol spirit - with The Accident both anchoring it and unexpectedly elevating it; Even with two complete misses, and at a very long two hours, I'd say it's a worthwhile collection.

The Price We Pay

 If there's a pawn shot in a movie, odds are something violent is going to happen in it. In Ryûhei Kitamura's The Price We Pay, it's a botched robbery.

 Three robbers go in: Cody (Stephen Dorff), the professional, principled one, Alex (Emile Hirsch), the hotheaded psycho, and John (Jesse Kinser), the fuck-up who gets shot in the leg and brought in a getaway driver that leaves them all in a lurch as soon as guns are fired.

 Alex unnecessarily kills an innocent man, and is about to kill another person, Grace (Gigi Zumbado) until Cody steps in and points out they may need a hostage and alternate means of egress.

 The trio and their captive make it far into the New Mexico back roads before their car breaks down, and then they take shelter in a nearby farm where a fidgety teen (Tyler Sanders, who died a few months after production wrapped - the film is dedicated to him) nervously lets them take over one of the farmhand bungalows.

 It's clear that there's something iffy even before a curious Alex discovers a huge underground facility under the barn. Our heroes have stumbled into an organ harvesting operation, and soon they're all strapped into gurneys under the tender care of the Doctor (Vernon Wells) and his gigantic underling.

 Yes, this movie can accurately be summarized as what if From Dusk Till Dawn but if it left-turned into Hostel instead.

 Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of Hostel-style "hey, all the characters are now helpless captives, let's torture them for a bit until they manage to find a way out!" plots. There's some pretty impressive carnage (and a really fun use of a gas canister) once the tables are turned, but it's too little, too late. The script, by Christopher Jolley, fails to give any of the characters any depth, and completely lacks the intelligence needed for any of the verbal sparring - be it between Cody and Alex, Grace and the kid, or anyone and The Doctor - to be halfway entertaining or even tense. And the monologue that gives the movie its title is just painful.

 There's also the fact that... well, nothing much happens throughout. And that, coupled with a dour, joyless tone kind of robs the film the chance to devolve into the sort of b-movie fun it could have gone for.

 Dorff and Hirsch are both credited as producers, and they both give themselves fairly showy roles. They do well, as does Zumbado, but none of them can do much to prevent their characters from simultaneously feeling both poorly defined and like walking clichés.

 I'm not a huge fan of Kitamura as a director, though I do respect that he's kept some of that deranged excess and energy from Versus. That excess unfortunately carries over to the style here (jittery zooms, whip pans, choppy editing). It's a shame, especially when the first half showed better filmmaking. It didn't bother me  too much, but I didn't enjoy it either. Which, come to think of it, is basically how I'd describe the movie as a whole.

Carnage for Christmas

 Lola (Jeremy Moineau), a true crime podcaster, has got a kick-ass origin story for a Nancy Drew-style character: In the town she lived in as a kid, there was an abandoned house in which a toymaker snapped, killed his family, and hid the remains all over the place before hanging himself in the attic. The police never found the body of one of his kids.

 In a lovely animated segment (provided by editor Vera Drew) narrated by Lola on her podcast (the Nancy Crew), the kids in town force her young (pre-transition) self to go in to try and summon the ghost of the Toymaker. The results are unexpectedly chaotic (a local drunk was squatting in the place), but during the chaos Lola notices some loose boards... and ends up finding the bones of the missing victim.

 A call from a listener called 'Spring-heeled Jack' (which the podcasters mistake for a Jack the Killer reference; Tut tut) convinces Lola to go back to her home town to put together an episode about the Toymaker. She's never been back since transitioning to a woman, for reasons that will quickly become clear.

 Very quickly. The town of Purdan is a small Australian (did I mention the film is Australian?) conservative backwater, and most people Lola meets very quickly show some degree of transphobia. There are some bright spots, too - her sister Danielle (Dominique booth) is endlessly supportive, and she's built a network of queer friends based off a local nightclub that immediately welcome Lola as one of their own.
 The bad news is that the night she arrives, someone in a santa suit (and a really creepy mask) kills two women with a hammer and starts leaving Christmas cards for Lola. The police are no help - in fact, they seem to be actively hindering the investigation - so Lola starts digging around with a little help from new friends and old acquaintances.

 It's a well-written film (by director Alice Maio Mackay and Benjamin Pahl Robinson), full of warmth, wit, fun dialog and great characters. Lola herself is resourceful, endlessly empathetic and smart - a great protagonist, beautifully realized by Moineau. The rest of the acting is mostly at the unprofessional but enthusiastic level, and with a few exceptions everyone is pretty likeable. I'm less enamored of the mystery itself, which entails a generic, very poorly drawn conspiracy and developments that come out completely from the blue; The fact it's a bit shit hurts the movie as a whole, since it's central to the film (it's closer to a giallo or a standard detective yarn than a slasher or a horror film).
 There are a few kills, but there's next to no tension to them, especially as the film's aggressively punky, DIY style tends to gets in the way of the action. The editing and overlay of different effects on the first toymaker attack are so over the top that it actually reminded me of Hausu*. I actually found that endearing, but... yeah, mileage will vary,  and aggressively, I expect.

 Elsewhere the experimentation is slightly less wild, but there are a ton of garish, bizarre transitions, superpositions, and very artificial lighting schemes. I wouldn't say it's a great-looking film overall, but for its budget level (think regional production)... well, it does look amazing, and consistently maintains a lot of energy. Elbow grease by the barrel.
 It's also gory, but in mostly a pretty silly way that piles on clean, pink butcher's remains - shambles, in its original inception. And just in case you don't feel old already: Alice Maio Mackay is only twenty, and this is her fifth feature film. 

 I liked it, would subscribe to the Nancy Crew podcast, hit like, follow, and all that.

*: An extremely experimental Japanese film which might as well appear in the dictionary next to the words Crazy, Batshit. Highly recommended if you're after that sort of thing.

I Come in Peace / Dark Angel

 Director Craig R. Baxley knows what he likes: Explosions. Car chases. Shootouts. Wild stunts, often including explosions. Car chases with explosions. Fights. Explosions. Shootouts with explosions.

 Mr. Baxley, in other words, is an admirer  of all things awesome, and for a short stretch in the late eighties (as far as action cinema is concerned, the 80s stretched a couple of years into the next decade) he was allowed to become a purveyor of some of the most awesome B-movie mayhem via his trilogy of Action Jackson, Stone Cold, and the movie I'm about to start wittering on about: I Come in Peace.

 An idiot yuppie gets distracted because the DVD player on his car (cutting edge technology!) starts skipping when playing a Christmas carol. He narrowly misses getting hit by a truck, but he gets swiped into a Christmas tree lot. And when he gets out to survey the damage (wishing a merry fucking Christmas upon the pine trees), a meteorite totals his car. The burnt remains of the DVD land at his side (the scene contains a very noticeable continuity error) in a cheesy foreshadowing of things to come.
 And then, out of the flaming wreckage of his car comes out a huge humanoid alien (Matthias Hues), intoning "I come in peace." He does not come in peace.

 Cue the title sequence, during which a bunch of criminals steal a buttload of Heroin and blow up a police building in a pretty impressive fireball. That's a very Craig R. Baxley detail: the credits aren't even done and he's already racked up two explosions.

 The criminals barely get the chance to take the drugs to their boss when the alien pops in, says he comes in peace*, kills most of the bad guys with a ricocheting throat-slashing disc (see what I meant about the CD foreshadowing something?), and helps himself to the drugs. What does an alien want with enough heroin to kill a herd of horses? That's actually integral to the plot, and it's ridiculous enough that I'm not going to spoil it. Seriously, just watch the movie.

 And finally we get to our protagonist, Jack Caine (Dolph Lundgreen), a rugged, cocky, plays-by-his-own-rules New York vice detective who was nearby monitoring the drug deal but got distracted by one of those convenient action movie convenience store heists. He's in trouble with his boss, but because he's already in the case he's assigned a new partner: a stuck up, by-the-book FBI agent (Brian Benben). And I mean by-the-book literally; He's got a little notebook which he pulls out every so often and reads out rules from it out loud.

 A classic mismatched buddy cop premise, then - but as always the devil's in the details. For example: the drug gang Jack's earned the ire of, The White Boys, is comprised entirely of rich asshole yuppies who go around in three-piece suits driving Maseratis. I've alluded to the alien's plan, which he puts into motion and involves killing a bunch of people, but there's another mysterious alien who pops up to try and stop him. They have guns that fire explosions. Let me repeat that: their guns fire fucking explosions.

 Caine, his on-and-off-and-on-again girlfriend (Betsy Brantley) and his new partner are stuck between the duelling invincible aliens and a bunch of disgruntled yuppie mafiosi. The way out involves some gunfights, some martial arts, a couple of car chases and a ridiculous amount of very, very impressive pyrotechnics.

 Lundgreen's main strength, besides his looks and athletic skills, has always been to be likeable. Here he's given a bit more to do than usual, and... well, he doesn't do great. Benben doesn't manage to breathe life to his cartoonish FBI agent, either, but by the end you can't but help to root for these two lunkheads. At least Lundgreen gets a killer action hero name and an excellent final one-liner.

 I've shat on scriptwriter David Koepp before, and I stand by the fact that he's mostly done hackwork in the last couple of decades, but here, along with Jonathan Tydor, he's come up with a great collection of action b-movie-isms. The moment-to-moment dialog isn't great, with a corny sense of humour that often has broad jokes and outlandish characters that thud lifelessly into the screen, but it's got so many great ideas and fun moments that I can't help but to give it a pass. The premise is kind of genius, the idea of The White Boys alone makes it a keeper, and it provides ample excuses for Baxley to insert action scenes.
 And it's the action that makes this a classic. Baxley's enthusiastic generosity when providing action spectacle, at this budget level, is nothing short of heroic. It's a shame that it came a little too late, when people were already turning away from this sort of thing; He got to make Stone Cold after this (another really great action movie), but afterwards he seems to have been  exiled at TV land.

This was originally going to be a review of Red One, but I couldn't make it past thirty minutes - it's too much of a kid's movie, and the sub-par, Marvelesque action defeated me. So I was left scrabbling for something else to watch when this popped up on the streaming lists and I happened to remember it was set around the holidays. So this movie literally saved Christmas. There you go: add it to your stocking, it's a good one!

*Yes, they beat Tim Burton to that joke by half a decade.

Carry-On

 The Carry On films have a long, storied trajectory here in the UK - a series of slightly racy, slapstick, pun-filled farces, each one themed around a loose concept: Carry on Camping, Carry on Matron, even a Carry on Screaming (a Hammer films spoof.)

 I guess after more than sixty years it was time for a change, but a gritty, American-based reboot that dispenses almost entirely with the jokes and double entendres seems a bit extreme.

 The good news is that despite being a terrible Carry On film, Carry-On is a pretty fun action thriller in the Phone Booth mold. Set almost entirely, like Die Hard 2, in an airport on Christmas day, it follows the adventures of TSA officer Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) in what turns out to be an unexpectedly fraught work day.

 Ethan's an easy going guy who gets a bit of an existential crisis at the news that his partner (Sofia Carson) is pregnant. Trying to jolt himself out of a long-standing rut*, he asks, and is allowed, to man one of the carry-on luggage scanning stations.

 The problem: there was a sophisticated terrorist operation that depended on coercing the guy whose post he just replaced to allow something to be smuggled through security. So the terrorists scrabble to find information on poor Ethan (they have one of those magical hackers who can dig anything up on anyone almost immediately, and has full access to all the airport's systems - one wonders why he can't just hack the scanning equipment and get it done with). Soon Ethan is forced to wear a wireless earbud and is in direct communication with the very charismatic terrorist mastermind (Jason Bateman) - to ensure his cooperation, his girlfriend (who works in the same airport) is being targeted by a sniper.

 Thus begins a game of one-upmanship between the scrappy Ethan and the seemingly omniscient terrorists. It gets more than a little silly at times, but the script (by T.J. Fixman, who was previously responsible for scripting the Ratchet & Clank games from the PS3 onwards) ratchets (pun not intended) the tension and moves at a rapid enough pace that has you all but skipping over the copious plot holes.
 As the film advances a detective (Danielle Deadwyler) gets involved in the investigation and things get even more ridiculous as multiple pairings of heroes and terrorists chase each other all over the facilities.

 At almost exactly two hours, the film overstays its welcome, and suspension of disbelief gets more than a little bit strained; The terrorists veer wildly between being impossibly competent and making stupid decisions, as required by the script (pro-tip: if you're an expert gunman and sniper, a van is probably the worst tool of assassination you've got at your disposal).

 People just won't call the cops on our criminals, but at least that results in an annoying comic relief character getting stabbed. And it's not like law enforcement is balked at - a single LAPD detective is able to quickly halt operations in an airport's busiest day with the slightest of proof, and at some point I just stopped counting how many times Ethan would have been shot - or at least detained - in real life by the police or airport security while running around all over the place like a deranged lunatic.

 None of this really matters all that much. Director Jaume Collet-Serra's a pro at this sort of thing by now, having made the similar Liam Neeson vehicles Non-Stop, Unknown and The Commuter. This one's a bit lighter in tone, but his direction remains quietly assured, expertly conveying Ethan's process as he tries to figure out where his opponent is calling from, or going loud in a stunning shootout during a massive highway pile-up.

 This is the sort of movie people (wrongly) insist doesn't get made any more**: a slick, propulsive, cleverly constructed thriller that takes its time to get to the explosion at the fireworks factory. Well acted, shot and scripted, to boot. It's not a classic - it drags a little too much, its plot twists are a little too baroque and implausible. But for a one-time holiday viewing, it's pretty great.

 A warning about the film's politics: the film is clearly in the pocket of Big Airport, what with its depiction of empathetic, dedicated employees, or of the airport itself as anything but an obstacle course where joy and hopes go to die. Please do better, Netflix/Dreamworks. 

Full points for featuring a Toy Story 2-inspired action scene, though.

*: See, if this was a proper Carry On film, I'd be saying something like 'Ooh, matron!' at about this time.

**: For proof, read the first line of the previous paragraph again.

Silent Night (2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Zelda fans represent.

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

A Christmas Horror Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- And an annoying dysfunctional family face off against Krampus.

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

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

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

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

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

Blood and Bone

 Back around the late 2000s, while mainstream action was having a bit of a... fallow period, shall we say, the Direct-to-Video/Video-on-Demand (VoD from here on out) and the international markets provided a good alternative. It's a similar situation to the resurgence of gore and cruelty in horror a little earlier, and the same root cause is arguably behind John Wick and the dominance of the 87eleven action design style a few years - pendular motion.
 In 2009, the same year the Neveldine/Taylor menace gave us both a Crank sequel and Gamer, John Hyams provided some counterprogramming with his first excellent sequel to Universal Soldier and genre/budget-level stalwart Isaac Florentine did his first Ninja movie with Scott Adkins; Elsewhere in the world Gareth Evans teamed up with Iko Uwais for the first time, Tony Jaa used a freaking elephant as a prop for an incredible climactic fight, and  Johnnie To released his cool as ice Vengeance. (Future VoD king Jessee V. Johnson was still working on lower quality English potboilers).

 But the MVP that year was unquestionably Michael Jai White, who starred in two very different stone-cold  classics: Black Dynamite, an absurdist love letter to all things blaxploitation, and the film we're discussing tonight: Blood and Bone, a throwback to all those '80s and '90s underground fighting tournament movies.

 The first image - of White silhouetted against the sun, purposefully walking towards the camera with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder - is clean and striking enough that at first I thought it was a production logo. That cuts to a kick-ass cold open where White's character, Bone, gets accosted in a prison bathroom by a gang of shank wielding thugs. It... doesn't go well for them, and the final kick of the fight imprints the film's title on the screen. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you usher in an action movie.

 The story itself starts when Bone hires a room at the house of a nice family (led by Nona Gaye). First thing he does is to hit up the local neighbourhood illegal fight ring and convince the local organizer Pinball (Dante Brasco, in an annoying role he and the script manage to make somewhat endearing) to give him a chance and throw some fights his way. Bone seems to be targeting local hoodlum James (Eamonn Walker) and his prize fighter, the 'roided out Hammer Man (Bob Sapp).

 There is a reason for that, of course, one that gets revealed as Bone makes his way up the tournament ladder and impresses James enough to be drawn into his inner circle; The plot will involve a woman (Michelle Belegrin), a rich racist Brit (Julian Sands), and a buttload of MMA and martial artists (Sapp, Gina Carano, Kimbo Slice, Matt Mullins and Ernest Miller).

 It's a solid plot that uses one of my least favorite type of protagonist: the mysterious, infallible, morally unassailable badass who's both indestructible and always four moves ahead of all his opponents*; I'd say it's a Clint Eastwood-style character, but in bringing him down to earth it ends up closer to Steven Seagal. It's a testament to Michael Jai White's outsized charisma that he manages to imbue this  fantasy wish-fulfillment character with a semblance of an inner life. Beyond that, he deploys all his usual likeability, and he looks like a Greek statue come to life. Of course he makes it work.

 But James, the villain, makes just as big an impression: a suave, deeply callous asshole who gets two startling scenes that show how evil he is (one of them set to Wang Chung), but feels he's above the street-level shit and considers himself to be some sort of Samurai. I love how this sets up a [slight spoilers] late-film swordfight, one where Bone chooses to dishonour him by using only the sheath of the Chinese sword he's proffered. Even if I wasn't completely on-board by then, I'd be delighted.

 The fights maybe cut a little more frequently than I'd prefer, but everything is always established and shown clearly, with many varied styles shown off. I shouldn't have to say this, but White's fighting is on-point. There's a little bit of shoddy CGI blood, but what are you going to do.

 Michael Andrews's script adorns the admittedly basic story with a lot of fun little moments, good characters, snippets of wry humour, and solid badass lines. And the direction, by Ben Ramsey, is bloody excellent; Along with cinematographer Roy H. Wagner's constantly roving cameras, they get a very slick, good-looking and propulsive film - I think that out of the action VoD crowd only John Hyams makes better-looking movies.
 It's a shame that an apparently disastrous Dragonball movie derailed Ramsey's career to the point where he hasn't been able to get another film off the ground yet. Much as it was championed by Outlaw Vern and others, this movie also remains sadly underseen when compared to the other two MJW VoD action classics. We never got the brother-avenging sequel that was set up here. That iconic shot of Bone walking out of the sun would never grace another film.

 If this sounds like it might even be marginally enjoyable to you, then it's extremely recommended.

*: This, of course, is established while he's playing chess with a friend.

Adult Swim Yule Log / The Fireplace

 You know those fireplace videos everyone keeps putting up on youtube and streaming services? They're basically animated backgrounds, a long, fixed take on a fireplace (usually), meant to be played on a loop as a fancy-ish decoration.

 A couple years ago, Adult swim put out a generic one. It looks like any other entry in its genre... until a couple minutes in you hear a conversation, see some legs go by in the foreground; A woman is cleaning the room the fireplace is in, talking on the phone. Then there's a break-in, a horrific-sounding sexual assault... and all the time, the camera stays fixed on the fireplace.

 The camera was set up by Alex (Justin Miles), who has a side business doing YouTube yule log videos . He's booked the cabin for a romantic getaway with his girlfriend Zoe (Andrea Laing). When they return to the cabin, they almost catch the maniacs just after they've cleaned up their crime. Alex zooms out from the fireplace to encompass the whole living room, and next thing you know it's a long, drily funny conversation where the focus keeps shifting every now and then to show a reflection of the murderers on a champaign bottle in the foreground as they peek into the room.

 Then the sheriff and his goofy deputy pay a visit, warning the couple of another murder nearby. He also notices that the yule log they're burning is from a nearby cursed tree, and after putting it out he warns them to never light it up again - he even admonishes Alex to delete the video, lest the curse spread, J-horror style. Later the cast increases as a group of stoned podcasters intrude (they've timed their edibles to take effect on arrival), there to investigate the area, which is apparently, some sort of "hillbilly Bermuda triangle".

 The maniacs are still lurking just off-screen, and in a lesser movie they would be the villains. But this was written and directed by Casper Kelly, who gained viral fame with his 'Too Many Cooks' bizarro fake trailer (which also aired on Adult Swim), so things get proper weird; There's a genteel, time-travelling southern gentleman in a David-Lynch-inspired-room behind the fireplace who seems to be trying to undo overpopulation one birth at a time, the cursed tree provides the titular menace, and there's a late-movie... let's call it complication which is so ridiculous - even after all the ridiculous shit already in the movie - that it made me laugh.

 All this is intercut with time-warping vignettes that show us the cabin as it was at different times in its existence, showing us the tragic events that befell a few of its prior inhabitants. A theme emerges, and though it's more open questions than any sort of cogent message (or maybe a meta-commentary about how so much horror these days is about individual or shared trauma?) it provides yet another undeniable jolt of surrealist coolness.

 It's not a great-looking film, to be honest, but it's very impressive technically. The first twenty minutes consist of a single unbroken take, the time warps line up just so, the sound design is great, and I really liked that the camera finally unmoors itself from the living room wall when the story's main murderous force literally takes flight, locking the film into a more traditionally shot horror movie.

 As ridiculous as it is, the time warps, especially, as well as some good gore, some uncomfortable moments and its batshit craziness give it a bit more heft than your typical horror comedy. The acting is a bit flat except for Laing, who's pretty good. The script has a penchant for quietly funny dialog, with some killer lines every now and then.

 If you have any sort of fondness for Adult Swim's specific brand of drug-addled comedy, or the films of Quentin Dupieux, this is a very easy recommendation. Otherwise it'll depend on how much tolerance for nonsense you can deploy before it overwhelms you; There's enough imagination and craft on display here though that I think it's worth giving it a chance.

 It's a shame that it's not really a very Christmas-y movie, really - there's barely any elements of the holiday in it, aside from the log itself. But given that it'd be almost impossible to innocently stumble upon this in the spirit it was originally intended, if you can engineer a situation where you can surprise other people with the film's stealth horror in a yule log video conceit... well, that would be a Christmas miracle.

Nutcrackers

 David Gordon Green is truly eclectic - in the two decades and a half that he's been making movies, he's dabbled in lyrical indie dramas, stoner comedies, low-key action films, and a series of high-profile horror reboots. I tend to like his stuff, though he's produced his share of shitty films (here's looking at you, Your Highness!).

 Nutcrackers is his take on the highly formulaic family dramedy. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Mike (Ben Stiller), a big-city hot-shot executive, has to drive to a small rural town for a family emergency...
 Yeah, it's that sort of movie, and despite Gordon Green's best efforts and a great cast... well, it's still very much that sort of movie. The family emergency is that his sister and her husband have just died, and someone needs to look after their four rambunctious children (real-life siblings Homer, Ulysses, Arlo and Atlas Janson) while they're shuffled out into foster homes. Will the four almost feral but sweet kids melt their new guardian's stuck-up heart, and will his newly gained humanity find a real connection with the good-hearted social worker (Linda Cardellini) who's trying to find them a new home?
 Will there be a big dramatic gesture towards the end to give the movie some shape? Will Mike say something nasty about the kids while they're within earshot leading to conflict?

 Yes, yes, yes and yes; Add some truly terrible, beyond on-the-nose lines ("Mom always said you were incapable of love" or "haven't you learned anything?" when the protagonist makes it clear he hasn't learned anything) and by this point I'd normally be tapping the fuck out. The plot beats are downright ossified, to the point where the only thing missing is that Mike does not miss their recital because he had to go to a big meeting. So it's a testament to everyone involved that the movie isn't actually bad.

 I have no idea what the story is behind the production, but the feeling I'm left with is of tension between a hoary script (by Leland Douglas) that could easily belong to a straight to TV Disney movie from the 80s, and the weird hippie weirdness injected by David Gordon Green and the collaborators he's brought along (which includes the kids, who are family friends.) There are fart and poop jokes - Stiller's character is introduced stepping on poop with his fancy city slicker shoes - and a lot of the gags seem to be improvised by (very young, very enthusiastic) kids, but on the main the film eschews humour to tell a more ramshackle, messy story that sometimes manages to overpower the clichés baked into its events. It made me laugh more when it's being willfully weird, as in our introduction to the kids, where one of them dresses up like one of the baddies in the videogame Hotline Miami (see above) to creep Mike out.

 "Sometimes rising above a morass of clichés" isn't exactly glowing praise, but it is true that the film does find its own groove after a while, even if it's still shaken out of it by some trashy plot development or another. There are some good scenes, it settles onto a very cute finale, and the acting is excellent throughout - Stiller and Cardellini do wonders with characters that are basically stock material, and the kids are wholly believable as bereaved kids - ornery and raw - and the film laudably does not really do a huge amount of work to put you on their side (no such subtlety is extended to any of the other characters).

 Would I recommend it? Eh, maybe. If it sounds like your sort of thing, it might be your sort of thing. But even then I'd go for David Gordon Green's utterly excellent George Washington over this, which also shows off his remarkably light touch with kid actors while completely avoiding all this Hollywood bullshit. Or Riddle of Fire, which lets the kids have the sort of movie they truly deserve. They're not Christmas movies, though, so there is that.

The Final Master (Shi fu)

 Chen Shi (Liao Fan), an older Wing Chun master, arrives in Tianjin to establish a martial arts school. This means, of course, that he must defeat the masters of eight of the nineteen established dojos in the city first. Martial artists have the best bureaucracy.

 Because this is a movie written and directed by the great Haofeng Xu, though, things are rather more complicated than that. After arriving in town, Chen first meets with Zheng (Chin Shih-chieh), a local grandmaster. After duly being impressed by his skills, Zheng informs him of several wrinkles in his plans: As a foreigner, Chen can't just go around kicking everyone's ass - he'd be disqualified even if he won. So he must take on a local disciple to do it in his stead. The catch? After winning, his disciple must fight a duel with a local grandmaster, and will be banished from town no matter what the result is so the local establishment can save face.
 Zheng is pretty sure he will be the one that will be called on to duel the disciple, so he asks Chen to take him on as a secret second apprentice, and teach him everything he knows so that he runs no chance of losing the duel.

 All this is fairly simple, as far as the arcane vagaries of honor and traditions go, but don't worry, there are plenty of byzantine twists to keep things confusing.

 To keep the heat off him, Chen pretends to be a lowly commoner, and after a local waitress (Song Jia) gives him a little lip, he takes her on as his wife to help keep appearances. Chen soon finds Geng (Song Yang, Judge Archer himself), a young, uncouth coolie who turns out to be a prodigy, and starts training him in the ways of Wing Chun even though he knows that he's in it to try and steal his wife. And once Geng starts methodically trouncing all local champions, he runs afoul of Master Zou (Jiang Wenli), a delightfully evil woman who runs the city's dojos as if they were a cartel, and Lin Xiwen (Huang Jue), a ruthless colonel and a an old student of Zheng who's trying to bring the martial arts academies under the heel of the military. This is when Chen's devious plan becomes a little bit clearer.

 As with Xu's previous Judge Archer, the film basically drops you in the deep end and slowly gives you just enough information to put things together. It's hard going at times; Some of it is due to cultural remove, but now I've read a couple of translated Chinese reviews that seem similarly bewildered, I don't feel as bad. His script pays special attention to how honour and appearances bind the characters, which ironically leads them to take actions that are... less than honourable, and certainly run counter to their desires.
 It's a rich, confusing tapestry that's very rewarding to work out, but leaves the plot pretty hard to follow; I was lucky in that I watched this with my wife, who's watched a lot less Wuxia than I have, so I had to pause and try to explain what was going on a few times - these conversations and breathing space helped me work things out as I went along.

 She ended up liking it a lot, even if she gave up on fully following the plot at some point. That is largely because the major story beats are solid and dramatic, and also because the script keeps a light touch, with a lot of surprising warmth for its fully fleshed-out characters, a wry sense of humour, tight editing, some incredible visual storytelling, and... of course, a lot of excellent, varied fights.

 Xu's choreographies are quick, precise, and utterly badass - you often get the feeling that the result has been decided beforehand in the opponent's heads. This leads to an astonishing running final battle, where instead of having a protracted showoff between a handful of opponents, a single master faces a whole city's worth of martial artists in a series of minimalistic duels. It's exhilarating.

 The fights also underscore character moments, of course - there's a wonderful scene where Chen bares his soul to his wife while fending off a crowd of angry extras with a bamboo pole, daintily sitting with her in a bench, and the aforementioned final battle is both fuelled by a suitably tragic development and marks a strong character development.

 It looks beautiful, the acting is excellent, and like all of the Haofeng Xu-related movies I've seen so far it feels like there's a lot of thought and care put behind it - strong themes, wonderful characters, and a lot of humanity contortioned into strange shapes by rigid social structures and tradition. The way the plot keeps us at a distance holds it off from greatness - I'd recommend Judge Archer over this one - but it's still well worth it. 

 Sadly it's a bit of a pain to get access to Xu's other movies around these parts: his latest (100 Yards) remains without a UK release date, The Hidden Sword seems to have been completely annulled by Chinese censors for not toeing the party line, and I can only find his first (The Sword Identity) as an overpriced DVD. I'll keep at it.

The Last Videostore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Otherlife

 TLDR: God, I fucking hated this movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never Let Go

  Never Let Go is a solid post-apocalyptic horror film from the very reliable French genre craftsman Alexandre Aja. It looked a little too similar to any number of recent offerings, but thankfully it's got a little more on its mind than trying to be the next A Quiet Place.

 Momma (Halle Berry - that's her character's name in the credits) lives alone with her two children at a cabin in the woods. She insists the world outside has been taken over by an inchoate, shape-shifting, mind-affecting Evil, and that. The three of them are the last human beings on earth, and the Evil hungers for them.

 Whether this is a highly allegorical delusion or not is basically fuels the whole movie. Her sons - Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins), the eldest, is dutiful and responsible, while Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) is a little more rambunctious and questioning of her mother's... well, patently batshit insane worldview. Then again, this is a horror movie.

 The invading Evil manifests in ghosts that only Momma can see, taking on the shape of ghosts from her past: her mom, her husband (whom, we soon learn, she both killed when she discovered they had been taken over by The Evil). I like that it's made explicit that they won't show themselves to her children to drive a wedge of incredulity between them. In any case, a single touch from The Evil is all that's needed for it to be able to possess you thoroughly. 

 The only protection is the house itself, which The Evil can't breach. What's more, this protection can be extended via ropes tied to a post in the attic; As long as Momma and the children are tethered to them, The Evil can't touch them as they go outside to hunt and forage for food. Momma's developed a sort of quasi-religious series of rituals centered around the house, an easy analog for traditionalism and belief.

 It all fits in very nicely with the recent streak of horror movies that have rules that seem like something straight out of children's games.

 After a particularly brutal winter (which drains the family food reserves in a rather lovely montage), tensions come to a head between Momma and Nolan. There's a pretty fun development that sends the third act in a slightly different direction than I expected, but all in all it's a really simple survival-focused story with a possibly supernatural, blatantly allegorical edge.

 As a genre film, it's a bit of a mixed bag. I lean positive, because it's got some excellent, very tense scenes, a commendable sense of cruelty, and a solid throughline. It's full of little vignettes like an anecdote Momma tells about finding a wounded hiker and forcing herself to watch as she slowly died as a sort of test of faith (everyone but her family is possessed in her worldview); Fucking hell that's grim. But... I'd be lying if I didn't say I found the script (by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby) frustrating.
 Its ideas seem are fairly derivative, and the refusal to commit to any given interpretation (depending on how reliable you deem the camera's point of view to be) is not very satisfying; Ambiguity needs to give us a lot more to chew on to not feel like a cop out - and however you chose to interpret the events here, there's simply not a lot to either choice. That one of the final shots of the film is yet another flip-flop kind of soured me on it (as always, movies that end on a bum note have it harder than worse films that manage to stick the landing).
 Also funny: The Evil is heavily snake-people-inspired. Dear reader, snake people! David Icke was right all along!

 But for all its flaws, I do think most of the movie is good. Slow, but enthralling. Aja obviously knows his way around an intense horror scene, and his unfussy but stately direction (which includes novelistic chapter headings) adds a lot to the proceeds. Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, meanwhile, gives the moss-shrouded British Columbia woods a downbeat, sometimes otherworldly feel, and the effects are decent. The acting is a highlight: Halle Berry is fierce and, to be honest, fucking scary in a sort of Carrie's mom deluded fundamentalist way, and the two kids - who are convincingly, heartbreakingly tiny - are terrific; The film gets an enormous, if exploitative jolt of energy by putting them up against starvation, Momma's 'teachings' and more metaphysical dangers.

 Both critics and audiences were less than kind, and the film remains a box-office bomb with a slightly tepid reputation. I get it, I really do. This isn't one of those cases where I feel the need to champion a maligned masterpiece or anything like that. Apparently they already had a prequel and a sequel developed in the works, and that's the sort of empire building I really can't get behind.
 Flawed as it is, though, it's still a cool little survival story with some good, jagged horror shrapnel deeply embedded on its lean meat.

Oculus

 Before Mike Flannagan became mostly known for a string of thoughtful horror/drama miniseries, he directed (and often wrote) a string of excellent, varied horror movies - all of them thoughtful, even his sequel to Ouija, a mediocre franchise starter if there ever was one. If I had to chose a favorite I'd have to pick Doctor Sleep, but 2013's Oculus is a very close second.

 Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) is released from a mental institution eleven years after killing his father (Rory Cochrane). To be fair to Tim, his father had just killed his mother (Katee Sackhoff), and was coming after him and his sister Kaylie (played as an adult by Karen Gillan) next. And to be fair to the authorities that sent him away, Tim was convinced a haunted mirror caused the murders.

 His long stint under psychiatric care has disabused Tim of that notion, and he's keen to resume his life as a free, well-adjusted person. The problem is that his sister is still very much convinced the mirror possessed their father; She's got a plan to prove it... and she wants Tim to help her.

 Kaylie's been stalking the Lesser glass (as the mirror is known) over the years, and has positioned herself to work at the high-end auction house that is holding it in storage. The old family home was held for her while she was going through the foster system. Now her brother is free, she arranges for the mirror to be sent to the old house, which is almost in the same state they left it. She's rigged the place with cameras and a clever killswitch that will destroy the mirror if she doesn't constantly reset a mechanical timer.
 She doesn't just want revenge - she wants to prove her father was a victim, not a murderer - one more in a long series of souls the mirror has ruined. She's also had more than a decade to plan everything, and the plan she's come up with is clever: The mirror manipulates people's perceptions, hence all the cameras and failsafes. It feeds on the lifeforce of plants and animals, so there are plants arranged everywhere to measure how far its influence reaches... as well as a cute Boston terrier Kaylie puts in a cage in front of the mirror for it to devour; I stewing on something for almost half your life will leave you at least a little unhinged.

 All of this naturally alarms Tim, who wants nothing more than to return to a quiet life, and has more rational explanations to explain the death of their parents - but he lets himself be drawn into his sister's designs, and as the day draws to a close the past bubbles forth, giving us glimpses into the final days of the older generation of the Russell Family (Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan Ewald play Tim and Kaylie as pre-teens). The script (by Flannagan and Jeff Howard) deftly weaves the two storylines, slowly growing darker as the mirror awakens and exerts more and more influence in both the present and the past, each  strand's events reflecting* each other all the way to an inevitable, delightfully evil conclusion.

 It's a remarkably dark psychological horror tale that focuses on perception being distorted until the characters don't know what's real and what's not. This can be frustrating - I rewatched this partly due to being somewhat annoyed by Smile 2's foray into similar territory - but I think Oculus does it the right way by putting this element front and center, both in its plot and its themes - and it never feels like it undoes what you thought the movie was about. The (minor) supernatural mayhem is substantial, too, with plenty of creepy imagery and some nasty unpleasantness. There are a couple of jump scares, but the film tends far more towards sustained dread.

 Flannagan's direction can usually be best described as elegant, and this was already the case this early in his career. It doesn't call much attention to itself here, but it blocks the actors and action beautifully and gives the house a great sense of place. Much of the film takes place during the day or in well-lit spaces, giving the murky finale a little bit more of a punch.

 More than anything else, though, the film thrives thanks to the care and depth with which Flannagan and Howard have lavished their characters, beautifully played by the cast. Gillen in particular stands out, her no-nonsense determination not quite covering up for a decade of hurt, but honestly everyone in this is really good.

*: Sorry! In my defence, I almost used mirroring.

Lord of Illusions

 It's always surprised me how few neo-noirs there are out there that pit detectives against the supernatural; It seems like such a natural cinematic pairing for a genre film.

 Out of the ones I've watched, 1995's Lord of Illusions is by far my favorite, something that should absolutely surprise no one who knows me even in passing. Grass is green, sky is blue, and Rodrigo liked a a batshit crazy Clive Barker film where an origami man sics a flaming amphisbaena on the protagonists. Well, duh.

 The cold open is one for the ages: Three ex-cultists, led by Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), wander into their ex-compound with shotguns looking for Nix, their levitating, fire-juggling ex-messiah (Daniel von Bargen) to rescue a little girl. After a short confrontation, Swann and co. shoot him multiple times. Knowing a few bullets aren't going to do much against the dishevelled magician, Swann's come prepared with a very cool looking iron gimp mask to bind Nix - one that requires it to be screwed against its recipient's flesh. It's immediately clear that you're in a movie from the mind that spewed forth Hellraiser into the world.

 Mission accomplished, high fives all around, surely it's all over and done with and nothing will ever come out of this.

 Then the movie jumps to New York thirteen years later to follow Harry D'Amour (Scott Bacula), a hard-boiled detective whose cases seem to always run up against the occult; He's introduced in the middle of some sort of scandal after some sort of mess with a possessed kid.
 When he's offered an insurance fraud investigation (hello, In the Mouth of Madness!) case in a LA, it seems like good way to make a clean break from the media shitstorm. 

 No such luck. That investigation soon gets sidetracked when D'Amour runs into a murder in progress: A heterochromic fey man (Barry Del Sherman), whom we last saw fleeing the cult compound in the prologue, and a crony are busy sticking scalpels into a fortune reader whom we also last saw in the prologue, accompanying Swann. The detective chases the murderers off and gets some cryptic information from the victim before he expires. (Also present at the murder scene: the ten of swords card from the Waite-Smith tarot deck, which shows a man being skewered by ten blades. Cute.) Then the police arrive and, just like that, Harry D'Amour is again in the front pages involved in more occult shit.

 This captures the eye of Dorothea (Famke Jenssen in her big-screen debut), the beautiful trophy bride of our boy Swann, who's now a big-time illusionist with shows in Vegas and everything. She hires D'amour because she's worried that her husband, who insists on his 'magic' being just tricks, is acting particularly weird lately.
 Things quickly spin out of control when Swann has a very messy, very public, very foreshadowed death (that is one load-bearing Waite-Smith tarot card!). You'll surely be surprised to learn that the whole Nix situation from the prologue was not, as everyone thought, done and dusted.

Only nine swords, though. Tut tut.

 Clive Barker directs, produces (along with JoAnne Sellar, who's since produced Paul Thomas Anderson movies almost exclusively) and writes, adapting his own story The Last Illusion. The film only shares the premise, characters and some details with its source, but in expanding it to feature length Barker crafted a hugely entertaining script full of great lines, bizarre ideas, and a punchy pacing that juggles investigation, oddball digressions, and horror beats expertly. The narrative line never falters despite detouring into some weird spaces and being fueled by a couple of truly out-there character motivations.
 It's this seamless stitching of sun-drenched neo-noir detective story and weird supernatural horror that to my mind puts this so far ahead of similar stories like Angel Heart or Cast a Deadly Spell; The finale gets maybe a little too strange for the way the plot has been superficially set up - I can see how people could find it underwhelming, but I'm very much on-board with the non-standard resolution.

 It looks great, too. It never develops a distinct visual identity like Hellraiser did, but it's slick and handles its many disparate elements unobtrusively (cinematographer: Rohn Schmidt). The physical makeup and gore effects are as good as you'd hope, though there aren't that many of them and they're fairly restrained by Barker's standards. The design work is also excellent, and while some of the early CG looked pretty cheesy even when it came out, the concepts on display are bizarre enough that it doesn't really matter.
 As for the music... well, it sounds like Hellraiser* - so much so I was surprised the soundtrack is not by Christopher Young, but by Simon Boswell (who's a legend in his own right). Wonder if Barker requested it that way or if Boswell voluntarily gave a Young impression; In any case, I really like it.

 Bakula's never been better, giving a deeply sympathetic, relatable but quietly badass performance, and femme fatales don't get any more... well, femme than Famke Janssen; She doesn't get to do much but as far as looks go, I like her much better here than in Goldeneye, which hit theaters a few months after this.
 O'Connor doesn't leave that much of an impression, but Del Sherman does with his weirdly feral bundle of queer menace as the main heavy. I also really liked Von Bagen as another deeply unorthodox character: more hobo than saviour, more self-absorbed than menacing - and one of a long line of Barker villains who wants to destroy the world not because he's on a power trip, but just because he finds it distasteful. The plot's basically driven by the fact that he doesn't want to be alone at the end of everything, a pretty sympathetic goal all in all.

 Sadly the movie did not do very well in theaters, and Barker would never direct another film. Some severe studio interference led to a bunch of important connective tissue as well as a little sex and gore getting cut out - this is one of the cases where the director's cut improves on the film dramatically (overwrought pun intended). Barker's gone on record saying that having to deal with this sort of shit was a big factor in why he stopped making movies... so thanks a bunch, UA.
 Lord of Illusions doesn't pack the same wallop as Hellraiser or Nightbreed, partly by design - it spends too much time on its detective story to go as far out the as the other two movies do - but it's still very much of a piece with them, part of an oeuvre that almost qualifies as outsider art, given the oblique angle at which Barker tackled genre filmmaking.

 In a better world we would have a Harry D'Amour trilogy, maybe a TV series, but I guess this was a little too ahead for its time. It'd play a little better now, probably, and I honestly think Barker, and the way his imagination (however slightly) tweaked pop culture towards weirdness, is a not insignificant factor in that.
 I fucking love this movie.

A David Bowie impersonator and a Queensÿche fan walk into a theatre...

*:In case it's not clear, that's a compliment.