Sinister

 When Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) uproots his family to move to another town for work, it doesn't go down all that well. Especially since his work is writing about true crime; His wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance) is particularly cautious, but Ellison reassures her with a promise that "we haven't moved a few doors down from a crime scene again". Notice the very specific wording there.

 Yep, the very house they're the proud new owners of is very much a crime scene; the previous residents, the Stevensons (a family of five) were all hanged from a tree out back - all except one of the children, who remains missing. Ellison stakes out an office and sets up one of those conspiracy boards to map out his book. He's barely started preparing when he runs into an unexpected breakthrough: In a box conspicuously placed in the middle of an empty attic, he finds a box with old Super-8 recordings and a projector.

It's horrific because he's watching the video in Apple Quicktime

 Luckily, Ellison's a dab hand with obsolete electronics (I'd have no idea how to even spool the reels), and soon he's watching a collection of five home movies - which begin with some footage of families going about their normal lives, only to then cut to them being restrained and murdered in cold blood in various ways. Starting with the hanging of the Stevensons, an event that took place not ten meters away from the spot Ellison is watching the movie. He's understandably shaken, but nevertheless successfully resists his scruples and decides not to share the films with the police and do his own investigation instead. You can imagine how well that works out for him.

 As he delves into the tapes with the help of a friendly local police officer (Derrickson regular James Ransone, bringing some very welcome humour), a series of events of increasing freakishness start convincing him that there's something... occult going on - that whoever is behind the murders might not be wholly human.

 Sinister's gathered a bit of a reputation since it came out in 2012; It regularly comes up in a pretty high in any list of the scariest movies ever made, and people still talk about a couple of 'legendary' jump scares that, to be honest, I've always found a bit silly. Rewatching it now, all these years later... yeah, I'm still not entirely convinced. Which is a shame, because so much of this movie works beautifully.

 Especially those fucking home movies. They remain supremely... well,  sinister, and are still viscerally effective on a rewatch - so much so the director's used the exact same trick on later projects. Derrickson and his team have always been adept at finding freakish soundtracks to pair these vignettes to, and here they use experimental and drone/noise bands to double down on the intensity of already disturbing imagery. The only one I recognized was Ulver, but holy shit there's some amazing stuff in here. The result - sound, image, subject matter - is creepy as all fuck.

 The acting is also excellent. Hawke is one of those actors I'm always happy to see pop up; He always gives whatever it is he's on, genre or arthouse, his all. Rylance is very good, Ransone is likeable and so is Vincent D'Onofrio in a bit part. The script, which Derrickson co-wrote with regular collaborator C. Robert Cargill, gives them all good characters to inhabit and a cool, twisted supernatural mystery to fall victims to. It stumbles a few times but the information is parceled out nicely, the pacing is fine, and the ending's got a nasty bite to it. As for the direction, Derrickson already had a good grasp on both the mundane and on building a solid horror atmosphere.

 So why don't I like it more than I do? Without going into spoilers... it's the supernatural menace, particularly the entity that's at the root of the goings-on. It's... well, there's no other word for it - it's fucking tacky, and the couple of jump scares it's a part of feel like they come from a much trashier movie (like, say, 75% of distributor Blumhouse's output). There is, to my mind, a tonal clash that the film doesn't resolve between its more grounded, nihilistic horror and the schlockier take on its ghosts and ghouls. I'm all for both of those approaches, but have a clear preference for the former - so this mix doesn't do it for me. Not the way it's executed at least.

 I don't begrudge this movie its success, though, nor its reputation. It's just a good film that rubbed me the wrong way.

Wallace & Grommit: Vengeance Most Fowl

 The Wallace & Grommit shorts and films are some of the funniest, most colourful and creative animated stories out there - absolutely crammed to the gills with of bad puns, quaint English humour and warm-hearted satire. If you've seen any of them, you know what to expect. If you haven't, you're in for a treat: Start out with the original shorts and go up from there. They're all at the very least delightful.

 This one is not Aardman at the top of their game, but even a weak Wallace & Grommit outing is a good egg. Series creator Nick Park returns as a writer/director, with co-director Merlin Crossingham and co-writer Mark Burton. It's the first film without Peter Sallis as the voice of Wallace, but replacement Ben Whitehead does a good enough job that I never noticed. Joining him are Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Reece Shearsmith and Diane Morgan (Cunk herself!) with characters old and new. But the main draws are voiceless: Grommit, the most long-suffering dog in all of England... and Feathers McGraw, masterminding a new heist after being being incarcerated at the end of The Wrong Trousers more than thirty years ago. It feels like cheap bid to invoke nostalgia,  but I can't argue with the results.

 The plot is serviceable, a collection of silly events that serves more as a joke dispensing machine than anything else - the quality of the humour is variable (I wasn't a fan of most of the police scenes) but there are some very good conceits in here (the use of a James Bond-style musical sting is alone worth the price of admission) and as usual there are some fine potshots at quintessentially English cultural touchstones - chief among them a hilarious, climactic long boat chase.

 It should go without saying that it's a technical marvel. Aardman can really make stop-motion sing.

 There's not a lot to dissect here - it's Wallace & Grommit, innit? Seriously, just go watch them all already.

Wolf Man

 After lending a (pretty enjoyable) feminist twist to The Invisible Man, writer/director Leigh Whannell turns his attention to another Universal monster with the modestly-budgeted Wolf Man. And as it starts it looks like he's got a somewhat similar angle for it, too: first with a young boy being subjected to a mildly toxic upbringing, and then showing that same boy all grown up thirty years later turned into a stay-at-home-dad, wearing lipstick (long story) while his wife returns from work with short hair and a suit.

 Not much comes of it, though, which is actually kind of cool: with the exception of factors completely out of his control, Blake (Christopher Abbott) remains a committed dad to his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) and a loving partner to his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) throughout the movie - it's a good reversal of expectations, playing as it does against what the film seemed to be setting up (and this is a fairly minor spoiler). Unfortunately, it does make the script feel a bit messy and unfocused.

 When Blake's father is officially declared dead after being missing for years, Blake convinces his wife, whom he feels is growing distant, to go on a family outing and take a look at his dad's estate out in rural Oregon (replaced by locations in New Zealand on the film). On the way there they have a horrifying accident thanks to a mysterious humanoid figure standing on the middle of the road. The family survives and makes it to the house while being hounded by the mysterious figure, but Blake is wounded by it. Uh oh.

 It's a kind of brilliant premise: the family is cut off and trapped in a strange house by the hungry monster prowling outside, trying to figure a way to escape, while Blake is laid low by a slow transformation into a bloodthirsty beast. I guess it's a classic zombie movie situation, but since it involves having two werewolves going at each other's throats (while at least in theory being a threat to everyone else around them) it feels like a fairly novel take.

 It drags a tiny bit on its middle section, but other than that there's plenty to enjoy: some damn good body horror, good tension, and a few truly excellent scenes where the film seamlessly shifts into Blake's point of view to show us his growing disconnection from reality and his loved ones. One of them, designed to show us his senses becoming more and more acute, made me laugh - it doesn't make a single lick sense, but it's the kind of weird touch I adore. Good sound design.
 Whannell also likes to use the camera a little more adventurously than most other directors do, but only in short bursts - kind of like he did in Upgrade. There are some lovely little flourishes where simple lighting techniques are used to portray a character's isolation or to shift focus from one character to another. Unfortunately the theater I watched this at left some of the lights on while the film rolled, which made an already murky movie a little harder to parse than it should have been.

 The main issue for me, and one that hugely impacted my enjoyment of it, is the werewolves. The makeup and prosthetics are pretty impressive, but... they just don't really look anything like wolves; It's like the monsters are stuck in the initial stages of a werewolf transformation in a movie with better werewolves.

 They look like fucking cavemen. And since the main character is confused and understandably shocked at his transformation, he spends most of the time looking sad. A tragic troglodyte.
 There's also an issue with the inconsistency of the threat the non-dad other werewolf presents - but I guess I can just chalk it down to it being a little incompetent at the whole werewolfing thing. Still call bullshit on the whole greenhouse scene, though.

 Putting aside the creatures' looks and a slightly meandering middle section, the movie's not bad at all. And even with the silly-looking werewolves, things could be a lot worse: Universal's original plan was an entry in their (aborted) MCU-like 'Dark Universe' continuity, with The Rock rumoured to play the protagonist. Also consider that the last movie Blumhouse dumped in a January was Nightswim; A low blow, I know, but still a precedent.

 It's a shame the script doesn't manage to wrangle its on-the-nose themes to say something more interesting (or even cogent), but at least the story is satisfying, the family drama at the film's heart is well-handled, and there's enough cool genre stuff to satisfy me. I kind of liked it, mopey caveman and all.

A Dark Song

 The Abramelin ritual is a taxing, months-long set of occult processes performed with the aim to purify yourself enough to contact and ask a boon of your Daemon - or, in more traditional, theurgic versions of the ritual, your holy guardian angel. It's probably best known for being a ritual Aleister Crowley bailed out of; he was reportedly never the same again afterwards.

 This ritual is at the center of A Dark Song's story - and that, in and of itself, is pretty pretty impressive! But even better, the whole of the film makes an effort to portray occult practices in a somewhat realistic light*. Realistic being a relative term here, of course**, but I'm heavily predisposed to like a movie that mentions Gnosticism and then calls its main character Sophia.

 Sophia (Catherine Walker) hires a house out in the Welsh countryside to perform the ritual (which can take anywhere from six months to a year and a half, and can't be safely interrupted once started) and the services of Solomon (Steve Oram), a Brit occultist for hire, to guide her through the process. He gets almost one hundred thousand euros, plus the chance to also ask a boon of the daemon at the end of the rite. She says she does it to talk with her dead infant son; The truth is, of course, a little more complicated.

 The meat of the movie revolves around a complex set of evolving rituals as Sophia migrates between the different circles scored on the living room floor in a slow trawl towards purification - all the while enduring both ritual-mandated deprivation and abuse from her chosen guru, who may be as much of a danger as the occult forces they're playing with.

 An occult psychological horror chamber piece, then - how's that for a subgenre label?

 Writer/director Liam Gavin, production designer Conor Dennison, set decorator Ciara O'Donovan and cinematographer Cathal Watters carefully mark out the progress of the ritual by making the magic(k)al diagrams on the living room floor ever more intricate and messier. There's a little bit of blood and a few special effects later on as the ritual kicks in and unmoors either the house from reality or poor Sophia from her senses, but the film is carefully calibrated to work well within its small-ish indie budget. A wonderfully effective scare is achieved with just shadows, a cigarette ember, and great sound design; It's a beautifully crafted movie.

 You may find the film's slow-burn approach a bit, well, slow if you're not interested in the procedural detail of hermetic magic, but the central relationship is intense, dramatic and well-drawn enough that I think the film should still work. Both actors are excellent, and I found Sophia's arc very moving. Outstanding.

 

*: The only other movie I can think of that pays this much attention to the nerdier aspects of the occult is The Alchemist's Cookbook, also from 2016; The stars were obviously right that year.

**: For obvious reasons. Also, I'm sure it's not an entirely accurate portrayal of the workings involved, not with Reiki symbols making an appearance... though that sounds to me like exactly the sort of syncretic practices occultists do all the time. In any case, I don't know enough about it for it to bother me.

Seance

 I have a lot of time for Simon Barrett, a writer who's mostly known for scripting most of the films of his director buddy Adam Wingard - as far as I'm concerned, the duo have a lifetime pass for their early work: You're Next, a couple good segments in the first two V/H/S films, and (especially) The Guest.

 Seance is Barrett's only full-length movie as a director so far (he wrote it as well). It's not that great, but it's dumb, cheesy fun.

 Camilla (Suki Waterhouse) arrives at the exclusive Edelvine Academy for Girls, a replacement in the middle of the year for another girl who died in mysterious circumstances.

 She soon runs into trouble by picking a fight with the school's mean girl clique, and gets locked into detention with them. As it turns out, the dead girl used to be a part of their group, and her death came soon after they performed a ritual to invoke the Edelvine ghost, a local legend rumored to haunt the school halls. The whole ritual was a prank, but we all know ghosts can't really tell the difference.

 Having learnt no lesson at all, the girls decide to perform a new seance to find out what really happened to their friend, and they're all surprised to find the ghost is pretty talkative (they use an improvised planchette to do automatic writing); The spirit, as spirits are wont to do, warns of bloody murder. And sure enough, one of the girls gets stabbed while walking the school grounds that night.

 You know the drill; while the girls stage their own investigation, someone stalks them and picks them off, one by one, until there's a final confrontation. The story falls mainly within the category of mystery-focused slashers, but it also includes a minor splash of the supernatural with a sprinkling of visions, nightmares and ghost sightings.
 The solution to the masked slasher mystery is one-half extremely obvious, one-half absolutely ridiculous and out of the blue; There's also one more (unrelated) twist afterwards that's absolutely bullshit - a fun idea that makes little sense on its face and further falls apart if you give it any amount of thought. All this dumbness is offset by the film being knowingly trashy while still treating its preposterous story with all seriousness, which I appreciate.

 The other thing that won me over is that the film gets progressively gorier as it trundles on. The first few deaths are very PG13, but things take a turn about an hour in with a close-up of a throat slashing that's clearly a reference to Italian horror, and from there there's a fair amount of well-realised gore. Things sadly don't ever cross over into full-on action the way The Guest did, but there's a similar feel as one of the characters reveals not-very-well-hidden reserves of badassery.

 The acting is... fine. Everyone's playing very predictable, well-established types, and that includes Waterhouse, who otherwise gives a very enjoyable performance as a take-no-shit style lone wolf. The filmmaking doesn't particularly call attention to itself, but what little action there is is clear and the film is fairly atmospheric, with some good suspense-building. There are a few scenes shot in the dark which the digital cameras turn into a murky visual soup, but maybe I'm just over-sensitive to that sort of thing at the moment (I've just watched Nosferatu.)

 All in all, it's fine - vacuous, teen-friendly horror with precious little of the smug, glib tone that turns me off from, say, Kevin Williamson's work. Maybe it's that close-up of a throat wound, but it really did remind me of the crappier horror films Italy would put out by the dozens in the early eighties. Lacking as it does the sort of madness that would put it over the top, I doubt I'll remember any of it in a year or so - but I don't regret watching it at all.

Gaia

 Gaia is a decent little eco-horror film from South Africa that is notable for a) some truly gorgeous shots of the local jungle and b) featuring monsters that look like escaped from the sets of The Last Of Us. The filmmakers protest they'd never even heard of the games until they were in the middle of production and that they were inspired by the same Cordyceps footage from Planet Earth that inspired that game's designers; Which is perfectly reasonable, except that they then gave the fungus zombies in their movie the same clicking noises as in the games.

Can't be that big a surprise, the guy was clearly terrible at his job.

 In any case, the cordyceps-like fungus zombies are only a minor part of the story, which mostly follows the misadventures of two rangers who get lost inside the preserve they're supposed to be patrolling. One of them is a dumbass who's almost immediately (and deservedly) consumed by the aforementioned fungus monsters. The other ranger, Gabi (Monique Rockman), gets injured by a trap while looking for a downed drone and is taken in by a father-and-son duo who've gone native and have been living in a rickety shack in the middle of the jungle for more than a decade.

 Gabi doesn't know if she's a prisoner, a prospective victim/sacrifice, or if she's free to go, which is not helped by the father (Cerel Nel) giving off some serious unabomber vibes. The son (Alex Van Dyk), meanwhile, has lived all of his life in the shack and is understandably attracted to Gabi.

 As weeks go by and Gabi heals, she learns a bit more of her hosts, of their relationship with the local monsters (who attack the shack every few nights, Minecraft-style), and of the weird religion the father and son share, one that's devoted to a bizarre local lifeform. Tensions escalate as she decides to go back to civilization... and to take the son with her against the father's wishes, and those of the entity in the jungle.

 It's a decent mix of elements which sadly don't entirely cohere into a satisfying narrative even when some overtly biblical themes are introduced. It's relatively interesting, though, and beautifully filmed - director Jaco Bower and cinematographer Jorrie van der Walt make really good use of some gorgeous local scenery. The acting is pretty good, the monsters are great (though, again, they barely figure in the story) and the effects are fine, especially for a low-budget movie like this one. It's never particularly scary or exciting, but there's a little bit of effective body horror, some minor psychodelia and some cool imagery, Just enough to make it worth your time, but maybe not enough to allow those mycelium to dig in too deep.

Nosferatu (2024)

 It's common knowledge now (if it wasn't before) that the original 1922 Nosferatu is Dracula with the serial numbers filed off - just enough changes to try and avoid a lawsuit from the Stoker estate (which ended up happening anyway, and nearly wiped the movie from history). Think about it. The first mockbuster; The Asylum is totally Murnau's fault.

 Robert Eggers is a fan, and has been trying to get a remake off the ground ever since he hit it big with The VVitch almost ten years ago (this was going to be his second film, once upon a time). The reverence he holds for the material is easy to see - as carefully constructed spectacle goes, this one is just as impressive as your Dunes or Mad Maxes. It's just that instead of nuclear explosions or a thrilling attack on a vehicle convoy, you get immaculately desolate Carpathian ridges and people talking in a reconstructed dead language. Eggers gonna egg.

 I barely remember either of the previous Nosferatus, as I was pretty much a teen when i watched them (Werner Herzog also had a go at remaking it back in the 70s) - the one I remember the most is Shadow of the Vampire, a pretty clever deconstructionist horror film set during the filming of the original. So I can only compare it against Dracula... and yeah, it really is Dracula with the numbers filed off - the same characters running through a very similar plot with many of the same elements.

 Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a young real estate agent is called to ratify some documents by an eccentric rich foreigner to buy a nearby property. The catch is that the count lives in a remote corner of the Carpathians, forcing our hero to leave his young, mentally fragile newlywed wife Mina Ellen (Lily Rose Depp) alone. Unbeknownst to everyone, the Count is laying a trap for the man, as he's got his sights on stealing his paramour.

 The rest of the film is, beat for beat, pretty similar; as the count exerts some dread long-distance influence over Ellen, causing her to behave erratically, which forces Ellen's exasperated doctor (Ralph Inneson) to consult with his mentor - Von Franz (Willem Dafoe, who played Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire), a crackpot hermeticist and the Van Helsing surrogate in this story.

 The vampire arrives on a ghost ship with a host of plague rats, who start spreading diseases all over town - a neat visualization of the count's influence. Thomas, who survived the Count's trap, also arrives, and starts trying to mount a resistance along with Von Franz and some friends. It all leads to a confrontation that, to put it lightly, veers left from Dracula's.

 

 What Eggers adds as a writer here is a couple of more modern touches to the story to give Ellen a little more relevance and agency, which I think work pretty well.

 On the one hand, I love that Ellen is something... other, more akin to the legendary vampire than to the rest of humankind. She originally wakes the fiend, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) by praying to him in a state of complete solitude (and, it's heavily implied, sexual frustration), therefore setting the events of the film in motion. The film also pays more attention to her mental health and posits them as part of her otherness - which her Victorian-like peers of course treat as hysteria.

 These changes do recontextualize the original film's famously downer of an ending... a little. But what's unclear is how they add a cogent message to the movie, or add any depth to a character whose faith still was decided by a cast of men, or whose way to save the day... is pretty unconventional*. It's messy.

 Of course the other thing Egger brings to the table are his considerable chops as a stylist and a gift for bringing to life time-distant cultures. And in that respect, this film is an unmitigated success - I'd go as far as saying that it's just as crazily stylized as Coppola's wonderful take on Dracula, but instead of going for high operatic camp, Eggers goes the other direction, giving us a muted, gothic take on the material whose precise camerawork and intricate production design I can only describe as Wes Anderson on a minor key**.

 The film is shot on 35mm and looks absolutely stunning at almost all times, never more than throughout a stretch of Thomas's Transylvanian jaunt where the colours drain out until it becomes a black and white film for a while, with a scene that pays homage to another classic B&W film, The Phantom Carriage at its heart. The cinematographer is Egger's regular collaborator Jarin Blaschke, and he really earns his pay here - it's a thematically and literally shadow-drenched film often only lit with natural lighting from meager candles. There's a recurring complaint that modern horror is too murky (I tend to not agree), but few use shadows as well as this one does, and everything is clearly discernible except when it isn't supposed to be. It looks luscious.

 The acting is mostly great. Depp is incredible as Ellen in a very demanding role, Inneson is as baritone as ever, Dafoe plays his likeable cook with predictable flair, and Skarsgård has a lot of fun devouring the scenery with an outrageously ridiculous accent, which I guess is the prerogative of those playing vampire nobles. Oh, and Simon McBurney as the Renfield equivalent is a huge amount of fun, too.

 I'm much less enthused by the young gentlemen of the piece - Hoult is... all right, though I must admit I've never found him particularly interesting; I'm convinced his high cheekbones, and the way they throw shadows on the rest of his face, were at least a factor in his casting. His friend (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), I found completely unconvincing.

 Is it worth it? Well, for me, absolutely, but aside from the technical side I found this to be Egger's least rewarding film. I'm sad to report I thought it dragged a little at times. People are actually saying pretty nice things about it, though, which surprised me but I'm glad to hear. It's not arthouse ('elevated') horror, it's a proper gothic vampire tale. But it's also stilted as all hell, most of its elements are pretty shopworn, and despite an incredible sense of menace (and a really cool vampire) I wouldn't really rate it very highly as a horror film.

 Fans of Twilight disappointed with the amount of vampire weenage on display in that series should note that Orlok's withered, diseased penis is on full display here. Maybe that's why people like it so much.

 I don't want to sound too negative here. Lesser Eggers turns out to still be essential, and those technical aspects count for a whole lot; This one demands to be seen in the biggest screen possible. After that crossroads-set carriage scene, I would love it unconditionally even if it was half as good.

*: My proposed interpretation is much more boring: forget the psychosexual angle, and consider Orlok as a manifestation of her untreated mental illness.

**: This is meant as unqualified praise, by the way.

The Deadtectives

 Ghost hunters are an easy target. Especially the ones with shows on TV and streaming; They're often pretty far within self-satire territory anyways.

 The Deadtectives doesn't really find an interesting take on the fairly well-populated 'fake paranormal investigators run into the real thing' subgenre, but that's fine - it's perfectly content leaning heavily towards the comedy side of the Horror/Comedy divide, and with not bringing in anything new to the table.

 The show within the movie is a long-running series on one of the 'documentary' channels (Whale Wars is mentioned in passing) where a crew of vacuous idiots go around faking supernatural events so they can 'clean' them.

 The host, Sam (Chris Geere), expertly portrays the breathless fake excitement of every other youtube host ever, only to flip to a very Joel McHale-like aggressively cynical mode as soon as the cameras are not on him. Their producer Kate (Tina Ivlev), who is also engaged to Sam, yearns for the days where they debunked myths and not milked them for money. Rounding out the team are Sam's brother Lloyd (David Newman), a tech wiz and actual paranormal expert/believer, and Javier (José María de Tavira), who's even more cynical than Sam.

 Their show is hot garbage - to the point that their agent, sick of the spineless crap Sam whips up, gets them a hotshot new producer (Martha Higareda), a flakey FX wizard (Mark Riley), and sends them south of the border to 'the most haunted casa in all of Mexico' for an extravagant season finale that stands a chance of getting the show renewed with the network.
 And so it is that the Deadtectives run up against their first brush with actual spirits: the ghosts of a father and the family he butchered. The casa is well and truly haunted, and the pater familias is perfectly willing and capable to keep on killing from beyond the grave.

 There's a little scooby-doo-style farce where the Deadtectives run into some random ghostly apparition and they blame it on the special effects guy, but that's mercifully cut short by a couple actual murders and undeniable supernatural goings-on. What follows is an agreeable, often funny timewaster that's given a tiny (very tiny) bit of gravitas by the ghostly victims, who add a touch of creepiness to the proceeds.
 The effects are good for a lower-end independent production like this, and the gore is mild but harsher than the PG13-like tone would lead you to believe. Director Tony West (who co-wrote, along with David Clayton Rogers, Mark Riley and Chris Rice) opts to film it as a traditional comedy, not as found footage, and his style, along with Andre Lascaris's cinematography, are crisp and slick.

 The script is also slick, if a bit over-familiar. The tone gets a little too loud at times, which I'm not a fan of (there's a lot of screaming, especially early on) but a respectable amount of jokes land successfully. The humour can get very broad, but all in all it's a pretty good-natured film that mostly knows how far to push most of its characters' dickishness without becoming grating. I tend to prefer horror comedies that feel a little bit less like a sitcom, but this one's all right.

A Quiet Place: Day One

 I'm not that huge a fan of the Quiet Place movies. I liked the first one well enough - it's a well executed gimmick horror film - but I still struggle to buy into the premise: animalistic aliens that hunt by sound alone arrive on Earth in numbers high enough to bring our civilization to heel. I mean, you can defeat them by throwing a noisemaker and calmly walking in the other direction, right?

 A Quiet Place: Day One is a prequel that hinges around events we've already seen in the best scene of the second movie in the franchise - the alien D-Day, the moment when the large humanoid mantis-things arrive in meteorites and start wreaking havoc amongst an unsuspecting populace. It moves the action to New York, and away from the family central to the the first two movies to a new cast.

 

 Sam (Lupita Nyong'o) is spending her last days as a terminal cancer patient in a hospice in New York with her cat Frodo (Schnitzel and Nico). She reluctantly agrees to go on a field trip to go see a show downtown, mostly because it'll allow here the chance to nip out and grab a slice of pizza. Sam is pretty big on pizza, for dramatic reasons that will become clear later.

 The show gets interrupted due to an unknown disturbance, and as the group starts boarding the bus, the meteorites hit the ground and the aliens emerge and start attacking everyone.

 Sam has a few close calls, bands in with other survivors as people quickly figure out that noise equals death, and then decides to strike out on her own on a suicidal quest for pizza. She then runs into a shellshocked British expat (Joseph Quinn) who insists on sticking with her, and as they travel together a tentative friendship develops between the two. 

 It's a simple, affecting story that focuses on the mundane elements and its relatable characters despite the constant alien threat. It helps a lot that the drama is a clear upgrade over the first two movies; I can certainly empathise more with an embittered, dying woman's rage against the dying of the light than with a couple whose act of defiance is to have a baby despite the fact it's probably going to doom their whole family. The minimalistic script does a lot of the heavy pulling, as does the always excellent Nyong'o, particularly expressive and intense here.

 Unfortunately, the aliens are much less convincing this time around; Their hearing and hunting skills, even when they do that cool move where they open up their head like a pinecone, vary depending on the script's needs... but as a rule they end up feeling incompetent to the point that whenever someone dies it feels like it's their own damn fault. A downgrade from the more effective hunters from the previous movies (which, to be fair, also had this problem, just to a lesser degree).

 The cat is also... well, it totally fails to behave like a real cat for some of its major scenes (including one particularly ridiculous bit where it would have sunk its claws up to its elbows in its poor bearer).

  On the plus side, the wrecked city scenery (hard not to think of 9/11) looks incredible, thanks to some beautiful visuals from writer/director Michael Sarnoski and cinematographer Pat Scola (who had previously worked together on the wonderful, and tonally similar Pig). They handle the requisite tense 'skulking around the aliens' scenes well, but I was more taken by their impressionistic focus on the details of the devastated city - a shoe poking out of the rubble, an abandoned basketball court, or the shuffle of a refugee crowd, all filmed in a style that felt to me indebted to Lubezki's work with Malik. Not bad for the second sequel of a horror franchise!

 Back on the genre side of things, the effects sell the mass of the aliens exceptionally well - in one particularly effective scene, the danger doesn't come from being hunted, but from being crushed by a fast-moving stampede.

 The sound design is also excellent, though that's probably a given with this series.

 I love this sort of thing: a (no pun intended) quieter, more experimental offshoot of an established genre franchise. Even better when it's put out by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes imprint. There's been a third a core quiet place movie in the works for a while now, but I'd much prefer more side-trips like this one.

The Cellar

 I really enjoyed The Pilgrimage, a historical VOD action movie where Jon Bernthal gets medieval while protecting a few monks and a relic of (perceived) mass destruction. So of course I'm going to watch a movie from the same writer/director (Brendan Muldowney) about, going by the trailer, a haunted house with demonic equations, alchemy and a passage to some sort of Sheol.

 The good news is that Muldowney remains pretty good behind the cameras, and cinematographer Tom Comerford returns as well: it's a nicely atmospheric movie, with some beautiful panoramic shots of the Irish countryside and some well-constructed (if generic) genre moments.

 The bad news is that it's kind of a mess, and not the fun kind of mess.

 Keira Woods (Elisha Cuthbert) has just moved to a huge new house with her husband (Eoin Macken) and her two children: a nasty, deeply unlikeable teen (Abby Fitz), and a weirdo tween (Dylan Fitzmaurice Brady). The elder Woods-es run an ad agency using influencers or something, and if there's a combination of words that would make me lose sympathy with anyone... well, that'd be high up in the list. Especially when they talk about the specifics of the campaign. That shit is more horrific than anything in the movie.

 Anyhow! Ellie, the teen, is basically in complete, unlikable stroppy little turd mode from the first moment we see her; So when the cellar of the house devours her and she goes missing, I half-expected the family to shrug, cut their losses and carry on as usual.

 But no - Keira goes on the warpath instead, and when the police can't turn up any clues and assume instead her daughter ran away, she starts investigating on her own. She finds that the stairs her daughter went missing on has numbered steps and a formula inscribed at the bottom, and Judaic characters inscribed on random places around the house.

 There's also the words Solve Coagula, which, along with a picture of someone posing with his two fingers facing up (but not the other two facing down, which kind of defeats the occult purpose) are a very clear reference to a famous alchemical image.

 Everything points to the occult, as Keira confirms when she consults with a math professor (Aaron Monaghan) and discovers the previous owner of the house was an alchemist as well as a mathematician. Incidentally, the math teacher she talks to used to be a normal lunkhead until he hit his head a couple years prior and kablam! instant math prodigy. I... yeah, I have no idea what they were thinking. It's played completely straight. That whole character introduction is bewildering.

 The mystery is interesting, but all of the answers are deeply half-arsed and underwhelming; The film plays with some cool ideas but fails to do any of them justice. It's not entirely witless - I do like the concept of someone walking down some stairs further than there are steps, for example. Which, incidentally, was the basis for the original short that got expanded into this movie. That never seems to work out, does it? You have a short built around a single cool idea, you better make sure you have a few more to fill out a feature - eighty minutes or so is a lot of time to fill!).
 Oh, and I've been remiss on reporting possessed toys in haunted house movies lately (there was a slinky in Shock, I think, as well as a swing used as the means to a curse). It doesn't begin to make up for my lapse, but here we get a nod to The Changeling with a ball falling down a set of stairs, and a haunted abacus. That one might be new!

 The acting is a little iffy, but I can't really fault the actors for failing to breathe life into these characters. As mentioned earlier, at least the technical side of things is well handled; It's a good-looking low-budget film. Things also do at least get a little nuts towards the end. I don't want to raise anyone's expectations - It's a clear case of too little, too late, but you know, at least there is some craziness. The puzzle-solving aspect should have been the film's strongest draw, but unfortunately the script is in no way able to deliver answers worthy of the questions asked or the subjects raised.

Older Gods

 Chris (Rory Wilson) drops out of his life over at the US to travel to Wales without telling anyone and rent a cottage out in the countryside. An old friend, Billy (Ieuan Combs) recently committed some unspeakable act and killed himself - but before doing so, he sent Chris a large bundle of documents and a video asking him to go over his research.

 What's in the folder? Documents, a seeming murder weapon, and pictures detailing, Chris soon discovers, the activities of a shadowy cult that murders anyone who learns anything about them... and their families. Well gee, Billy, thanks for that, you sure are a good friend. Very considerate. My soon to be butchered wife says hi.

 The movie openly bills itself as a bit of Lovecraftian fiction, and it does feature the aforementioned cult of titular Older God worshippers. There's a flash of tentacles and everything. But the film doesn't really engage with cosmic horror as a genre beyond these superficial signifiers. More than anything else, it feels like a premise in search of a story.

 It's a solid, if silly premise: Billy's research started looking into people suffering what he ominously termed 'primal fear', which the rest of us will probably recognize as garden variety existential dread - grappling with the fact that existence is unimaginably large, and we're all insignificant in the scheme of things.

 But the people Billy studied didn't deal with it by going to therapy or reading some Sartre. No, most of them killed themselves, and those who didn't... went on to discover an entity that promised them an end to reality and transcendence into some other state that'd be meaningful. Just as long as they behave like deranged lunatics killing whoever gets too close to them; The standard cultist package deal. And while studying them, him Billy and his team became their next targets.

 While Chris comes to grips with Billy's discoveries, he must also deal with the god and his followers - first psychically, then physically as they start popping up right outside his shack. It's an exceedingly slow burn that only ever builds up to a little flickering and a wisp of smoke; The ending, while kind of sweet and hinting towards a sort of message, seems like another stumble in a script that never really found a consistent direction for its horror or a decent throughline for its story.

 Given that it's a pandemic project put together by a about a dozen people with a total budget of half a million pounds, it's easy to forgive the film's faults. It looks pretty slick, with writer/director David A. Roberts and cinematographer Shaun Bishop effectively grounding the film's drama with some crisp imagery, and a very decent soundtrack by Gerald Buckfield.
 The acting calls a little too much attention to itself ('hey, look at me, I'm acting!'), but everyone puts in a decent effort. Technically, it's a well-made film.

 But while I respect the effort that went into it and the talent needed to end up with a professional-looking product like this, I'm finding it really hard to find a reason to recommend it. There's just not a lot there.

Monstrum (Mulgoe)

  At some point during the embattled Joseon dynasty in early 16th-century Korea, someone wrote an off-hand comment in the official record of reports of a monster near the capital. And you know what that means: a thoroughly silly horror movie BASED ON HISTORICAL EVENTS, baby!

 And so it went that the faction that brought King Jungjong (Park Hee-soon) to power is now conspiring to take him down. So when his ministers bring him news of a monster spreading plague and eating peasants on the borders of his kingdom, the king rejects their plans to deal with it - afraid they're plotting to overthrow him - and calls on an old ally instead to lead the investigation: an old general that resigned in disgust at the court's amoral maneuvering.

 The general, Yum Kium (Kim Myung-min), is living the peasant life in the impoverished countryside, along with another general who followed him into exile (Kim In-kwon) and an adopted daughter (Lee Hye-ri). They quickly accept the king's request and start investigating the alleged monster's depredations which, strangely, come in two separate flavours: People brutally torn apart, and people being half-mauled to death, infected with a strange plague.

 What follows is, depending on how you approach it, either an extremely ridiculous horror movie or a fairly ridiculous action/adventure yarn as our trio, accompanied by a court officer (Choi Woo-shik) face off against court intrigue and/or a monster that may or may not exist.

 Before we engage in spoilers, I'll just say that the movie is a fair amount of fun - despite a couple of scenes set at the sites of grisly mass murders, it ends up being a silly, humorous adventure that gets a bit too preposterous for its own good. There are a lot of tonal shifts but while a ton of innocent people get slaughtered, hey, don't worry, our protagonists mostly make it through and there's time for a few fart jokes. In that sense it's definitely closer to the Detective Dee movies than, say, Brotherhood of the Wolf. 

 In any case, SPOILERS: Yes, there is a dastardly court scheme of the extremely moustache-twirling (or wispy beard stroking, in this case) kind to overthrow the king, and yes, there is a monster who's doing its own thing in parallel, and events conspire so that they both strike at once. The monster boasts an excellent design - it looks a little bit like a giant foo dog afflicted by a nasty plague, one that's at once distinctive, menacing and a little cute. It's unfortunate that the surprising (given the budget) amount of time it's on-screen, coupled with an all-CGI execution, end up wearing out its welcome.

 The action itself is just ok. Director Jong-ho Huh shoots his fights with quick edits that rob the choreography of any impact, and the most involved battle is shot with a sort of pulsing zoom effect that looks kind of cool but makes the action pretty illegible. The run-ins with the monster fare a little better, but for good or ill (mostly ill) it's the sort of CGI-heavy spectacle we've seen many times by now, and nowhere near as good as on The Host.
 The script (by the director along with Heo Dam) gets more and more overstuffed as it goes along, culminating with a series of finales of increasing absurdity. But it does keep things moving apace, and the comedy, while not all that funny, keeps things light even when people are dying all over the place.

 I realize I'm maybe coming off here as a bit more negative than intended. It's a decent, fairly original creature feature that does a good job of mixing in some action and intrigue elements before going a bit brain-dead. I enjoyed it, but it's definitely one of those where you need to adjust your expectations as it goes on.

The 13th Floor

 I should probably clarify that this is the Australian 1988 movie The 13th Floor and not the unrelated, big-budget American movie about simulated realities that came out eleven years later. This one features just this single review on its Rotten Tomatoes page:

 "I hate this movie. Because the movie has bad quality. And I really don't like the quality."

And there you go, you can stop reading now. How could I possibly compete with that?

 At first it looks like it's going to be a decently fun slice of low-budget very late eighties cheese.
 Young Kylie, seven years old, watches her father (Tony Blackett) murder a man and his young son in cold blood on a construction site. Thirteen years later, a grown-up Kylie (Lisa Hensley) is on the run from her dad with some incriminating documents and goes to squat on that same thirteenth floor where the prologue took place, which we learn is unoccupied because of constant electrical problems. Did I mention that kid at the beginning was killed by electrocution?
 You probably can see where this is going. And you're probably right, in the broad strokes. But how things end up getting there... well, that'd be a lot harder to predict - mostly because writer/director Chris Roache doesn't seem to have the slightest idea of how to construct a basic storyline.

 Kylie doesn't really seem to have a plan to do anything. Despite being some type of anti-establishment type, and bringing her anti-establishment friends to squat with her (Miranda Otto and Paul Hunt), they're just there... to squat. Oh, and she's an utterly unlikeable jerk.
 Her father sends a private detective to track Kylie down - an enjoyably sleazy foil for our protagonist - but the guy finds her and is defeated by the electric ghost of the boy from the prologue not even a third of the way in.

 From there on, the story just seems to give up. It's a random assortment of lousy comedy, romance and suspense that barely hangs together, all the way to the end when the film decides it's time to finish things off with a fun but underwhelming lightshow that could just as well have happened within the first twenty minutes after the prologue. As that anonymous Rotten Tomatoes reviewer stated, the movie has bad quality.

 It does, however have a couple things going for it. Not a lot, mind you. The 80's style lightning effects are fun, as are a couple of makeup effects. Everything is pretty tame, as I'm pretty sure this was a TV movie (there's a 'tasteful' and thoroughly unsexy sex scene, and frequent cuts to black in random places.) There are a couple so bad it's good moments, but not enough to make it enjoyable, plus the sort of unwitting, dumbass little details that make me laugh - like a dude pulling out a Commodore Amiga manual to hack a password on a PC. Screw the Transformers or Star Wars, the Amiga is my nostalgic sweet spot.
 What is often, unambiguosly good is the cinematography (DP: Stephen Prime). Not just in the sense that even movies like this paid more attention to it back when they had to shoot on film - it genuinely has some lovely-looking shots:

 The... ahem, improvisational qualities of the script also maintain a certain morbid interest in where the hell the film is going to head next. Not that it goes anywhere interesting, but at least it's kind of unpredictable.

 Other than that, this is a near-complete misfire; I can safely say I really don't like the quality either. This would be director Chris Roache's first and last job as a director, which is a shame because he seems to have a good eye. Since then he's been a pretty prolific writer for Aussie TV shows - hopefully he's gotten better at that.

Invoking Yell

  Of the myriad of the more extreme metal subgenres, black metal is probably still the one most people would think of as dangerous. Part of it is the music, part of it is how seriously it takes itself, but to be honest it's mostly going to be about a bunch of church burnings and a high profile murder case up in Norway.

 That reputation casts a shadow over the Chilean found footage Invoking Yell. Set in the 90s, when the events were still fresh in everyone's memory, three young women embark out to a rural area outside of Santiago to shoot a video for their 'depressive suicidal black metal' demo tape. It's almost a running joke for the subgenre that all of its videos, particularly the early ones, consist of the band out in the woods with a shitty camera - so to use that as the premise for a movie is honestly kind of genius.

 There's a few things that the band have in their favour: by their reckoning they're probably the first Chilean Black Metal Band, definitely the first all-female black metal band anywhere, and they use EVP - the voices of ghosts, recorded on magnetic tapes - in their songs.
 Throughout the afternoon and the ensuing night band members - Andrea (María Jesús Marcone), the more serious, pretentious and, prickly one, and Tania (Macarena Carrere), more outgoing, expound on the methods and virtues of their music for a sort of 'making of' documentary of their demo tape, which is shot by Ruth (Andrea Ozuljevich), who the girls recruited simply because she has a decent video camera.

 Invoking Yell is not just a found footage film, it's an extremely low-budget footage film, so be aware that most of its running time is going to be devoted to following these goofballs around a stretch of woods as they fool around and talk shit to each other in ways that often seem at least partially improvised. It all but demands to be graded in a curve, almost falling under the 'a bunch of friends go out and film a movie' category of filmmaking.
 Whether the film succeeds or not will not just depend on your tolerance for that sort of thing, but also whether you can stand the characters; Luckily, they all give fine performances and all feel fairly well fleshed out. Having grown in a neighbouring country at around the same time and within some of the same subcultures... well, I'm probably a lot more predisposed to like this than most other people. But I do think the characters are often genuinely funny, especially the recurring dynamic of the surly (but not humourless) Andrea bouncing off the other two more bubblier girls.
 The script (by director Patricio Valladares plus Barry Keating) also has no illusions about just how much of a self-serious dipshit young creative people can be (as a monologue about tapping into 'universal suffering' makes clear), and the characters feel fairly vivid and real.

 It is a horror movie, though, and eventually things take a dark turn during an invocation to the spirits that supposedly haunt the region, the ghosts that Andrea had taped earlier.
 The twist is fairly brutal and threatens, but doesn't quite, edge the film into torture porn territory; It's pretty implausible, but it makes for some uncomfortable and deeply unsettling viewing... so: mission accomplished.
 Sadly it's all capped off by a deeply stupid epilogue which depends on someone behaving in a particularly brain-dead fashion; I really could have done without that.

 As with all found footage films that prioritize making its shit look raw, the film looks like... well, raw shit, without  much in the way of special effects. The pacing will depend on whether you enjoy the characters' company before the invocation - I suspect many people are going to switch this off within the first twenty minutes - but if you're ok with them, you're golden. The finale has all the staples of found footage (running through the woods in the middle of the night!), and while a tight shooting schedule and the lack of budget means that they are forced to keep some of the action off-screen, it still works pretty well thanks to the immediacy lent to it by both the shooting style and the intensity borrowed from real-life associations surrounding its chosen music subgenre.
 There's also a slightly exploitative mental health element as Andrea is implied to suffer from bouts of schizophrenia, so if that sort of thing bothers you... On the other hand, it's truly a minor plot element.

Avenging Eagle (Leng xue shi san ying)

  Two men meet in the desert. Chi Ming-sing (Ti Lung) is rescued from death by dehydration by Chao Yi-fan (Alexander Fu Sheng); In form of payment, like the proverbial scorpion Chi screws Chao over for his kindness, and steals his horse, food and drink.

 Chao manages to catch up to Chi - understandably miffed, butt he's happy just chastising the other man for behaving like a bandit.

 One man wears white, the other black. One broods all the time, the other one is outgoing and keeps making dumb jokes. They sit at opposite sides of the law. The symbolism is pretty clear.

 Oh, and as if to drive the point home, one likes light and the other one doesn't. That leads to a huge, elaborate, ridiculously fun fight the first night they camp together, as one of them wants to light a fire and the other one doesn't; I like to believe that whenever two people want to watch two different TV shows over in Hong Kong, it always results in a delightful kung fu tussle.

 Where were we? Oh, yeah. The man in black's past soon catches up to him, in the form of three assassins from the Iron Boat Clan. The leader of the cult-like organization, Yu Xi-hong, takes orphans and cruelly raises them to become heartless martial artists (any display of emotion is grounds for a brutal beating), and... yes, you guessed it, our man Chi has defected - he used to be the ninth eagle, one of the most feared of the clan's thirteen assassins, each one a master of a different kung fu weapon and decked in a different bright colour. Got to love multicolour villains.
 All this is explained to Chao after he steps in and aids Chi in the fight against the other, still loyal eagles, in the form of a couple of pretty long flashbacks that go into what drove him away from the organization. It's a pretty damn good story.

 Chao obviously has some stake in all of this, although he keeps his cards close to his chest - the 'twist' is easy to see coming and, to be fair, the film knows this and reveals it to us before it does to Chi. The growing respect and developing friendship between the two men, despite Chi's mistrust, is a pleasure to watch unfold.

 The kung fu mayhem is copious, and thanks to the variety of weapon masters, extremely varied. We get many types of swords and knives, spears (pointed and bladed), one chain with knives and another with a flail head, Chi's three-part staff, something that's between a sai and a trident, hatchets, claw gauntlets, a pony tail and more. Seriously, it's a ridiculous lineup and all of them get at least a little time in the spotlight.
 While they're not as intricate or exciting as other films (even in the older, more stylized kung fu movie tradition), they're all a huge amount of fun and have plenty of cool stunts. Director Chung Sun's style is stately and, to be honest, not very interesting or energetic, but he does get right in the middle of the action a little more than usual. He also adds a lot of slow motion shots and still frames to give the action a little more impact. Most of it looks a little jarring to me, but I respect what it's going for. He also uses a lot of natural scenery, which helps distinguish the movie a little from the more usually stagebound Shaw Brothers look.

 The script, by Ni Kuang elegantly lays out the parallels between the two protagonists and their history before sending them out on a joint quest for revenge (I'll overlook that a major development relies on a pretty huge coincidence). A lot of these movies share themes and tropes with the Western genre, but this one seemed to me to lean a little more heavily on them... or maybe it's just the scenery, which includes mostly barren landscapes and a (nearly) abandoned ghost town.
 As usual, some things don't translate all that well - Chao's mugging and humour, for example - but Ti Lung's Chi more than makes up for it in both intensity and presence, and that their journey together ends up being affecting. The rest of the cast includes a killer's row of talent from the Shaw stable, including the great Ku Feng, Wang Lung and Eddy Ko, all of them very effective.

 It's another good one. I'd personally start with something a bit more impressive in the martial arts department, but this one's compelling story would make great entry point if you can avoid getting distracted by the hilariously weak eagle squawk in the title sequence or by all the luscious sideburns on display.

Shock

 I'm way more familiar with the work of those who built upon Mario Bava's career than with the work of the man himself, which is something I really should remediate. Looking up his last movie, Shock (directed with the help of his son Lamberto) seems to be regarded as a relatively minor work.

 That... sounds about right. It's still pretty good, though!

 Dora (Daria Nicolodi), her young son Marco (David Colin Jr.) and husband Bruno (John Steiner) move back to the house where Dora lived with her first husband, who went missing at sea seven years ago. Strange things start happening almost immediately, especially around young Marco, who keeps finding his way into the basement and acts strangely around a suspiciously bricked-off section of a wall. This is despite the us being shown that Bruno zealously keeps the basement locked and even lies to Dora that he doesn't know where the keys are.

 It soon becomes apparent that Marco is, if not possessed, at least being influenced by the ghost of Dora's deceased husband. This is at its funniest when, while Dora is getting it on with Bruno in the floor below, Marco suddenly sits up in bed and start screaming Filthy! Filthy! Filthy!. It's at its most disturbing when, while roughhousing, Marco gets on top of Dora and starts making making sex grunts. Along with A Christmas Horror Story, this is the second movie I see in the last few days that has a pre-teen get extremely oedipal. I regret nothing!

 In any case, while there are some jump scares (a couple of them pretty effective!), it's all mostly within the realm of plausible deniability as to whether something supernatural is going on or not... especially when we see Bruno surreptitiously spiking Dora's drinks. As things go on some doubt is cast as to what really happened between Dora and her first husband, too, as she seems to have blacked out everything that happened (electroshock therapy is mentioned). The film keeps its cards close to its chest up to the finale, which wraps up the mystery a bit abruptly but in a fairly satisfying way.

 The soundtrack, by the band Libra, is an extremely '70s funky prog deal that's jarring enough to earn a few laughs, but nevertheless scores a creepy calliope-like refrain whenever the ghost seemingly exerts its influence over Marco, and a lovely piano main theme for the movie.

 Effects are kept at a minimum - this is a very low budget movie with very little in the way of gore, but most of them are pretty effective and in a couple of cases, very ingenious. The cinematography and editing can get pretty drab except for a few standout sequences. The script, which went through a few iterations over almost a decade, is reasonably put together. Its story is compelling enough, and though there are some minor plot holes and clichés, it sets up recurring visual images - like a deeply ugly porcelain hand sculpture, which will be echoed by repeated hallucinations of a ghostly zombie hand - beautifully.

 The acting is great - particularly Dora, who is often heartbreaking in her vulnerability. She also gets a couple chances to look into the camera and say 'Marco!' with relish, which is the sort of script/acting choice that never fails to amuse me.

 Shock is an old-school slow burn that's a bit too subdued for its own good, and a little too artless at times. It's got a handful of truly great imagery and sequences, though, and its story remains compelling throughout. It might not be as visually polished as I expected but I enjoyed it.

Vampire Clay (Chi o sû nendo)

 When Yuri Aina (Asuka Kurosawa), the owner of a small rural art school discovers a large lump of clay buried near her atelier, she thinks nothing and adds it to the pile of materials her students are due to use. Unfortunately for her and her class... it's haunted. Soon it will be eating people alive, consuming those who would shape it and transforming them into flexible clay/flesh puppets. 

 Unfortunately for us -or for me, at least, since most of you degenerate heathens seemed to somehow enjoy Battle Royale- to get to the good bits we need to trudge through some seriously tedious Japanese teen melodrama. The students, you see, are trying to prepare for the entrance test to a prestigious Tokyo art school - and the teacher is dealing with some rote drama of her own, too, which she takes out on her students. Morale isn't high. There's some rivalry, some supremely underwhelming romance ("oh no, I prepared a bento box for him but he's eating with that other hussy!") and... ugh.

 In between the shallow character beats, there's some mild mayhem as the protean clay blob - which at first seems content to play very basic pranks on the students - picks off the students one at a time, and then uses their shapes to go after the rest. It's a simple premise, but as a story it's an ungainly mess that keeps juddering to a stop only to slowly start shambling towards multiple unsatisfying ending.

 The film's saving graces are its practical effects, which include tons of makeup effects, stop motion, and a little puppetry. Some of it is great, and everything looks very hand-made - I particularly liked a scene where they show someone from the inside out using some cheekily cheap papier maché innards. The bulk, unfortunately, features too many scenes of actresses flailing some half-clay-eaten limb unconvincingly.

 The monster keeps shifting shapes, but when it settles on its true form it looks like a frigging mascot - I think it's supposed to mimic one of those mannequins artists use to model the human form? Not very scary at all.

 The script, by director Sôichi Umezawa, seems a bit more inspired by the body horror of Junji Ito's work than on more traditional J-Horror, but it completely misses the point and over-explains everything, giving the monster a backstory that's simultaneously banal and nuts, unloaded in yet another exposition dump that stops the story dead on its tracks for a while.

 I wanted to like this, I really did... and in very short spurts, it does achieve the sort of absurdity that could have made it special. But then it winds down to focus on its boring-ass characters or its inane plot and fuck that, I'm out of here.

Tokyo Grand Guignol

 Four French directors, working with a mainly Japanese cast and crew, are given equal (tiny) budgets, schedules, and a mandate to shoot something in Tokyo that explicitly invokes grand guignol tradition of gleeful carnage. No frills, no framing story, just four shorts of varying fucked-upness. Let's go!

 First off is Yann Moreau's Endless Love, where Shinichi (Hiroyuki Mori) gets stuck in a time loop. Time loops aren't that great, but the day Shinichi is stuck in is particularly bad - his beloved wife's died less than a month ago, and the Yakuza he borrowed money from to pay for her operation keep sending thugs to put pressure on him. After contacting a suicide agency (as you do!), he finds out that the agency had someone else on file with the same problem - and apparently, they found a way out of the loop... by sacrificing someone else.

 Shinichi successfully tests out the hypothesis with one of the Yakuza, and quickly figures out that it has a second, undocumented side effect - one which he can exploit to travel through time. But that will need a lot more sacrifices.

 It's a silly, mostly non-sensical tale that works mostly thanks to a very committed performance from Mori, slinky, crisp, very stylish digital cinematography, and very solid, Dardenne-esque handheld camerawork - especially during a couple of chases through the city's narrow streets and byways. It looks lovely. There's even a pretty cool one vs. many action sequence with some decent choreography, though it's marred with some truly terrible CGI gore (more on this later).

 Then comes the highlight of the collection: Trahison (treason), by François Gaillard, a director who seems to specialize in Giallo homages. As exemplified by his contribution here, a gorgeous, tale of supernatural menace that goes heavy on dream logic and ambiance.
 Nami (Megumi Nasano) spends her nights dancing alone at nightclubs and drinking moping around her apartment after a nasty breakup. But when she tries on an evil hairpin (we know it's evil because the excellent retro synth soundtrack helpfully turns ominous), she starts being harassed by her creepily smiling reflection (I do wonder if Parker Finn saw this). There's not a lot of story, just some cool supernatural weirdness: A slumbering Nami is molested by her shadow, a hapless neighbour (Haruka Yamamoto) gets killed with the hairpin, mysterious phone calls, an inscrutable cat...
 It all looks beautiful - the lighting and production design brings out the requisite blue and red hues that are what most people take from Suspiria, but pulled off with more elan than usual. There's a lot of off-kilter coolness, some very cool editing, and the lone kill is a vicious, wonderful throwback to the Italian masters. You know the ones I'm talking about. This one's worth the price of admission alone.

 Gilles Landucci's Shadow Hunter is a very otaku fantasy - a pixie-ish twenty-something woman (Satomi Kurebayashi) belongs to a shadowy conspiracy that sends her out to hunt demons (or ghosts) only she can see, to kill them with a special high-tech phosphorus gun.
 The demons are... well, they're basically fucking mimes with the ability to jump into shadows. One of her quarries (Shuhei Ohkawara) ends up getting curious about her, starts haunting her, falls in love, all while Eri deals with some of her own personal shit.
 It's a kind of cute story, but it's slight as all hell and it doesn't hold much interest neither on the story nor the visual department. 'Mimes. Why does it always have to be mimes?', muttered no one, ever.

 And finally we get to Nicholas Alberny's Good Boy, which is... how do I even describe this one. If you were desperately looking for a graphic depiction of exactly what happens to someone's penis during a werewolf transformation and Wolf Cop did not tide you over, you're in luck!
 It follows the (mis)adventures of Hidesaburo (Jigoroh), a callous asshole first seen calling his mistress a whore in no uncertain terms and then carving a rude message on a Tokyo landmark with his penknife. The landmark is the Hachikō statue (which gets its own, very shoddy animated prologue), a depiction of a dog that exemplifies loyalty; Hachi takes exception to this mistreatment at Hideboro's hands by turning into possibly the worst digital effect I've seen on film in a very long time - it looks like a really shitty motion comic, a 2D image poorly manipulated to give some semblance of life:

It looks even worse in motion. A hell of a lot worse.

 The dog bites Hidesaburo and goes back to statue mode. The bite victim then wanders off in a daze, walking through the red light district until Momo (Ayumi Tomiyama), a prostitute, takes him off the street.
 Hidesaburo is, of course, turning into a werewolf, and imprints on Momo immediately, following her everywhere with puppy eyes. This unsettles the clientele and workers at the brothel, leading to a confrontation with the local Yakuza. Unlucky for them, then, that it's a full moon outside...

 Where to even start with this? The 'plot', such as it is, is all kinds of terrible. And it looks appallingly bad: Not just the CGI, which remains terrible throughout, but the flat, desaturated digital video they went with drains every scene of life. The werewolf makeup, for the record, is pretty fun
 But if you can ignore how it looks, it's a fucking riot. There are a lot of really great jokes (my favorite one being a novel use for a weird stool with a hole in the middle). The morphing penis I mentioned above also got a huge laugh, as did a hapless Yakuza who tries to intimidate the werewolf by flashing him his badass yakuza cat tattoo, Momo servicing a client in multiple ways as she fields a phone call, and a few more very silly gags.
 As an excuse to go all out on ridiculous ideas, it's a success. Shame about the execution. The director of this short also worked on some effects for the others, and a quick search reveals a failed IndieGogo campaign to complete the film (12% of approximately £8000). I guess that explains that. My guess is Trahison wasn't affected because it was conceptualized as practical effects from the beginning.

 On the whole, though? As mentioned above, one of the shorts alone is reason enough to recommend it. The rest are at least ok; I think the main problem, besides that they ran out of money [citation needed] is that most of these are too long: the first one struggles to fill out its prescribed 30 minutes, and the runtime seriously sinks Demon Hunter, which barely has material for half its length. On the plus side, all the shorts have a distinct look and sound, most of the acting is pretty decent, and they all frame different aspects of Tokyo in appealing (or at least interesting) ways.
 With some bits excised out, maybe another pass at the effects, I'd be much more enthusiastic about singing its praises; As it is, I'd happily recommend it on the strength of Trahison, with some heavy caveats for the rest.

Tales of the Uncanny

 COVID hit while Severin films were working on a documentary about the history of horror anthology films. This ended up being a godsend, as it gave them ready access through online video to a bunch of industry experts who had nothing to do. They rack up an impressive sixty-one talking heads - from appreciative bystanders and fans like Ramsey Campbell and Simon Barrett, to people who've actually been involved in crafting one or more anthology films - people like Joe Dante, Roger Corman and Kevin Connor.

 It's intended more as a broad survey than any sort of exhaustive history, and at times it just feels like a hangout movie where a bunch of people enthusiastically stump for movies they love; There's very little negativity to be found here.
 It's also almost 90% fluff. But given the amount and scope of talent assembled, there's bound to be a lot of little interesting bits of information on the films being discussed.

 The films discussed are loosely organized by date, starting with their origins in German silent films, which were then imported into the United States as filmmakers like Fritz Lang emigrated there before the war. A lot is made of Dead of Night, and there's a fun discussion about Amicus films, including a running commentary from people who were involved with various of their productions.

 There's a big section on TV anthologies - a couple movies Dan Curtis made from Richard Matheson stories, and TV shows like Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone, Night Gallery and Tales from the Darkside - before returning to more cinematic offerings. Creepshow 1 & 2 have an outsized presence, while other films are barely mentioned; it feels a little counterintuitive to spend so much time on films most people with even a passing interest in this format would have already seen, but there you go.

 It's still a fun, breezy overview over a genre that sometimes slips under the radar; If nothing else, it's given me a list of films that I need to track down now.