Strawberry Mansion

 There's a quote in Waking Life where a guy basically goes "You know when people tell you that they're going to tell you about a dream they had, you're in for a boring fifteen minutes". I'm paraphrasing heavily here, but it's stayed with me for the couple of decades since I've last seen it - It's proven true over and over again. Dreams are personal; You lived through it, it was real for you. For others, not so much.

 That hasn't stopped people from trying to portray dreams in their stories and in their movies. They range from Inception's "Why did they bother making this happen in dreams if it was going to be so realistic?" to Nightmare On Elm Street's horror with extra craziness to Waking Life's surreal attempt to portray a pseudo-lucid dream. That's not even going into Surrealism proper or the use of dream logic in other genres.

 Strawberry Mansion opts for the surrealist approach, but it's an overtly twee, suffocatingly precious take. Not saying it doesn't work, but it's the sort of dream that would be portrayed in an oversized picture book with rococo illustrations and very curly writing. Cute but cloying.

 Set in a of those retro-futuristic futures that mashes up the fifties with a tiny bit of future-tech, the main thing as far as the movie is concerned is that everyone can record and play back their dreams. Also, the government has found a way to audit and tax people's dreams, because... that is a perfectly sane and logical thing that would totally happen. It's a funny idea, well executed (we actually see a little of how it works).

 The story follows Preble (co-director Kentucker Audley) - a tax auditor who sports a trilby and a bad moustache - as he is sent to interview an older woman who is suspected of tax evasion.

 And that is correct; The woman, Arabella (played by Penny Fuller, Bella from here on out) never bothered to update her dream-recording hardware, so she has several years of unaudited recordings on her top-loader VHS (more than two thousand tapes, she says). She welcomes Preble, and once the extent of his task becomes clear, she gives him room and board. Bella's a little batty, but a very gracious host.  

 Preble settles in and starts going over the tapes; And as he starts auditing the tapes, he starts falling in love with Bella's younger dream persona (Grace Glowicki).

 Meanwhile, in real life, the waking Arabella shows him that it isn't just the government that is getting into people's dreams. She opens Preble's eyes to a... well, a shockingly obvious conspiracy, but at least it gives the film some, none-too-alarming, stakes. Time folds in on itself, dreams intrude into reality, and a few other very gentle mindfucks are deployed. If it works, it works, if it doesn't make sense, well, what do you expect? It's purposefully silly, it's dreamlike, etcetera etcetera. Seems like a copout, but the movie is charming enough to pull it off. Also, criticizing this movie too much would feel like kicking a kitten.

 It embraces whimsicality wholeheartedly. That's not my thing, but its daft, home-made special effects (which mix stop motion, bad green screen compositing and giant papier-mâché masks) are pretty endearing. Also, the story takes so many leaps it kept me engaged if only to see where it would go next; The way things keep looping back to reality might not really cohere, but they keep things interesting.

 The love story at its center is feather-light - young Bella is too much of a passive, cutesy figure, and not a whole lot else - but it's sweet... as is the movie as a whole. The acting is uneven but enthusiastic, with Audley doing a pretty good job of anchoring things. He co-wrote, co-directed, and co-edited the film along with Albert Birney. The cinematography (Tyler Davis) is digital but with a very grainy filter and saturated colours. While it's not always distinctive, it does manage a some pretty cool images every now and then. Dan Deacon rounds things up with an excellent, synth-driven soundtrack.

 For all its annoyances, Strawberry Mansion is distinctive, and it leaves behind a good impression (for context, I was one of those people that kind of hated Swiss Army Man). It's extremely mannered but its earnestness feels genuine, and its goofy twists never feel manipulative or contrived.

  Plus, it really helps that it is can be very, very funny when it wants to.

Skyline

 A bunch of thinly drawn, unlikeable dimwits (Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, Brittany Daniel, Crystal Reed, David Zayas, and Donald Faison) converge on an LA penthouse (it's supposed to be swanky, but feels a little low-rent) to celebrate a birthday. Honestly, it's not worth differentiating them; Even the ones we're supposed to root for are poorly written and often behave like unrelatable pricks.

 Aliens invade while they sleep off the afterparty. At first it's falling swirls of blue light, then huge motherships that drop off smaller craft and big ground walkers that reminded me a little bit of those giant quadrupedal tanks in Halo. Their look borrows more than a little from the Michael Bay transformers - overcomplicated, slinky, and full of lens-flare causing blue lights - but because directors Greg and Colin Strause let us get a good look at them, and because they are supposed to be scary, I think the designs compare favorably against Bay's movies (or Battle Los Angeles, or Battleship). Even when the budget used to render them is several magnitudes smaller.

 In any case, the film follows these dipshits (and later, another one played by David Zayas that should be more likeable but soon proves otherwise) as they try to escape the building, get foiled, and then try to flag down the US army as they attack the aliens.

 There isn't a single worthwhile sci-fi idea here, and the story... well, the story literally undoes everything its protagonists achieve two thirds of the way in, and finishes with a ludicrous non-ending that pits differently coloured brains against one another (red versus blue, obviously). It's a B-movie through and through, played completely straight. I'd be up for that, if the execution were up to it, but I'd need to give a shit about the characters or at least get a lot more action. And... well, none of that happens.

 The action, surprisingly, is pretty decent, even if the camera is often a bit shaky and the effects are mostly dated (and looked cheap even back when this came out). There's also some surprises along the way - but any fun is undone by the seriousness with which the shoddy, generic character drama is treated, and its preponderance.

 More than anything else, this is clearly a low-budget effects showcase; It shouldn't surprise anyone that the Strause brothers were mainly CGI special effects artists before this. It's worth noting that both of them were working doing effects for Battle of Los Angeles (a similarly bad ground-level, LA-set alien invasion movie) when this was released. Sony took them to court over that, and later dropped the lawsuit. Oh, and they had also directed the sequel to Aliens vs. Predator, but I don't think anyone sued them over that... somehow.

 This wasn't a good movie when it came out back in 2010, and the intervening years have not improved it at all (it does happen, sometimes). However, it's become an unlikely action franchise, one that knows enough to get some key players from The Raid plus Frank Grillo, Daniel Bernhardt and even Scott Adkins for the latest, unreleased one. I did catch the first sequel and it's bonkers, good fun. We shall see if the rest of them at least maintain that level. In the meanwhile I had to rewatch the first two to have the deep lore of the franchise fresh in my mind - how else am I supposed to know which colour of brains I'm supposed to root for?

The Fall Guy

 Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) is the go-to stunt guy for huge Hollywood megastar Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), one of those vacuous, insecure types. But that's all right, because at the same time Colt is dating beautiful camera operator Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt); He's doing what he loves, working alongside someone he's starting to suspect he loves - until a crane mishap gives him a minor injury and a severe case of self-doubt and depression. In a deep funk, he drops off the map for a year and a half, ghosting Jody in the process.

That funk ends when a producer (Hannah Waddingham) calls him out of the blue, saying Jody is getting a shot at directing a huge sci fi vehicle with Ryder in the main role, and asked for Colt by name. So Colt goes over to Australia, shoots a car chase that ends in a pretty sweet cannon roll (which, incidentally, got the Guinness world record for most spins in real life) and starts reconnecting with Jody in a pretty funny scene where Jody makes him explain himself very very publicly. As in, with megaphones. Suddenly, all's good in the world. The twist: Jody very much did not ask for him by name.

 But there's more. Ryder's missing in action, and when Colt goes out looking for him at the producer's request, he finds a corpse in an ice-filled bathtub. Shortly afterwards he's getting chased around by beefy PMC-types all over Sydney in a plot that gets sillier and dumber by the second, all the way to a contrived and, frankly, pretty fucking stupid final gambit; But that's ok, because the film has an infectious sense of fun... and more importantly, it gives director David Leitch and stunt designer Chris O'Hara free reign to come up with all sorts of the sort of craziness studio 87North shines at, this time with an emphasis on vehicular and falling stunts (though there are some really good fights in there too). Just to be clear, the movie earns essential status just based on the stuntwork. It's truly amazing.

 The script... the script (by Drew Pearce) is all right. It's big, loud and dumb by design, and even its (shockingly frequent) clever conceits, like a discussion on split screen that takes place in split screen where Colt and Jody talk around the way they split, are a bit too self-satisfied. Same problem as Bullet train, except that here a lot (not all) of the jokes work; and that makes all the difference. That split screen scene, for example, is immaculately executed, and it gets some big laughs because Jody is testing out some of the costumes at the time; so for a lot of the conversation, she's naturalistically gesturing with a giant alien hand. By the time she ends up leaning her chin on it pensively... I haven't laughed so much in a long time.

 It really does try to shine a spotlight on the world of stunt workers, with a pleasing emphasis on technical details (like the impact of the density of the sand on a beachside car chase) as well as on the eye-popping stunts themselves. If you want to be mean, it also feels like they're taking some pot shots at a certain actor who shares Tom Ryder's name and puts undue emphasis on doing his own stunts. There's a lot of fun references to a ton of other stunt-heavy movies, direct and indirect - I laughed when someone produces a Miami Vice stunt team jacket and then gets involved in a motorboat chase at Sydney Harbour. Of course they jump over a huge explosion. My favorite, though, has got to be a surprisingly high-profile nod to a forgotten 1983 trashy sci fi movie.

 On the whole it's a mixed bag, but I mostly lean positive because enough of the jokes work, and also because it's... well, cute. It's a cute movie. What with its central romance - one that has very little passion (seriously, when are we going to get love stories that feel like they aren't made for thirteen year-olds?) but one in which the stars share a huge amount of chemistry. What with its earnest reverence for stunt work in all shapes and forms. Despite a lot of cruft and artifice, it feels sincere.

 Also, I respect that they don't do that stupid, formulaic romantic comedy thing where they pretend that the couple has any real difficulties in their reconciliation. And I really do like the reason Colt gives for ghosting Jody - Yes, it's an easily avoidable mistake, but it feels real and relatable in ways a more convoluted explanation wouldn't.

 I know I've already done my share of complaining, but if you'll indulge me, let me whinge a little more: The movie-within-the-movie Jodie is making looks like flaming garbage - when they show a trailer for it, it reminded me of an even lamer version of that Zak Snyder Star Wars thing. Wouldn't it be cooler if it looked like, well, something you'd actually want to see? It's far from the only instance in which they let comedy get in the way of good story choices or actual coolness. For example, making Tom Ryder a complete clown - wouldn't the movie be more interesting if the guy actually had some chops? He'e enough of a buffoon off-screen.

 A lot of the scenes drag on for a little too long, too; The film's only two hours long, and to be honest that's a good duration for the amount of stuff that's crammed in there... but it still feels a little bloated. This should be a lot breezier than it is, especially towards the end.

 And fuck the fact that they explain away the initial accident that drives Colt away from being a stunt man. That's the worst kind of stupid and manipulative script decision.

 Don't have any complaints about the action. Maybe that they make a lot of fuss about doing an early brawl as a oner, and then when you see it it's all chopped-up and kind of messy? The rest of the movie more than makes up for it.

 The acting is excellent all around. I sometimes miss Gosling's serious side, but he's a very gifted comedian. Blunt gets the thankless role of being the straight man person, but she gets some good lines and gags in, and is basically adorable. I didn't know Hannah Waddingham (turns out she's mostly done TV) but she rehabilitates some really clunky lines and makes them funny. And in what seems to be becoming a sort of studio 87North's trademark, there's a very good boy in there too. A very good boy indeed.

 On the visual front, cinematographer Jonathan Sela captures the action well, but that's about it. It's not a particularly atmospheric movie. The music is fine, too, with several fun classic rock needle drops - no Journey, though.

 That actually brings me to an interesting point - there's a lot that's missing in the movie from the trailers. I'm actually more than OK with that, because based on them this just looked like an unfunnier Bullet Train (I went into the theater kind of expecting to hate this based on its marketing). But most of the terrible, terrible jokes from the trailer are nowhere to be found in the finished product. I do think Any Way You Want It would have fit the film's silly, generous, overindulgent ethos to a T, though.

The Day of the Beast (El Día de la Bestia)

 Not a lot of movies out there are anywhere near as funny as the first fifteen minutes of Álex de la Iglesia's 1995 sophomore effort. In it a meek, provincial priest (a perfectly cast Álex Angulo) is convinced - after a brilliantly staged and hilarious Omen-like accident - that he has worked out the date and place of the birth of the Antichrist. So, he reasons, he needs to damn his eternal soul and commit as many sins as possible so he can get in with the satanists and maybe get an opportunity to kill the spawn of Satan when they're at their most vulnerable. Kind of the methodology of the Augustine order of hellbound saints, but the priest here makes them all look like a bunch of posers; This guy's fucking hardcore.

 It's the way he goes around doing it that kills me every single time I watch this movie. From the moment he gets off the bus at Madrid, the priest commits a string of crimes of opportunity that range from stealing someone's luggage to telling a dying man he'll burn in hell (and pocketing his wallet) while performing the extreme unction to casually pushing a mime down a stairwell. It's the way Angulo portrays his steely determination while tamping down on the inner turmoil it obviously causes him, and the incongruity of this mousy, naive, lovely old man of the cloth earnestly trying his best to damn his eternal soul.

 And the man is a theology professor, so he gets really creative; at one point he burns crosses on the soles of his feet, so he can tread on the cross with every step he takes. Seriously, the hellbenders have got nothing on this guy.

 The priest quickly gains a disciple in José María (genre stalwart Santiago Segura) when he goes to a record store to buy some heavy metal records from a hilariously misspelled list. From there on they try to enlist a third for their unholy trinity, Italian TV personality and supposed expert in the occult Professor Cavan (Armando De Razza), whom they think will help them get in contact with Satan himself.

 The script (by de la Iglesia with his constant writing partner Jorge Guerricaechevarría) is unpredictable and very, very sharp. It stages all sorts of madness - from slapstick violence to farce-like chases and near-misses, from daring stunts to an effectively creepy seance. It's not scary (name one horror comedy that is), but it feels thrillingly dangerous and transgressive even after all these years. This is, after all, a movie where a priest is working his way towards murdering a baby.

 It's a shame, then, that it seems to lose its way for twenty minutes or so in the third act. The climax itself is a good one - and it's a great example of de la Iglesia's penchant for using Spanish landmarks in all sorts of creative ways - but I've never really understood the specifics of what happens there. Looks great, though.

 Still. This is an essential movie that remains just as powerful and funny now as it was when it came out. Del la Iglesia and his actors show impeccable comic timing, and the cinematography (by Flavio Martinez Labiano) often finds creative ways to frame the action - such as long shots in a building's stairwell to show our heroes evading the police - as well as some cool imagery in the film's fever-dream finale.

 There's just so much to like here, but I keep coming back to Angulo's quintessentially Basque priest, beret and everything, pushing that mime down a subway entrance, or how he politely tries to explain whatever insane, horrible thing he's up to as if it was the most natural thing in the world. What an incredible creation.

In the Land of Saints and Sinners

 A solid action/thriller set in Ireland at the height of The Troubles, In the Land of Saints and Sinners is an old-fashioned yarn that patiently positions Finbar, a recently retired contract killer (Liam Neeson, playing an Irish variation of his usual melancholy badass widower) in a collision course with a cell of IRA terrorists.

 Finbar is based off the sleepy town of Glencolmcille, where he takes orders from a local handler (Colm Meaney) and when he's not off killing people, he spends his days palling around with the local Garda (Ciarán Hinds) and his neighbour (Niamh Cusack).

 Early on he takes a contract where his 'customer' waxes philosophical in the face of death. Finbar goes through with the hit, but when he gets back he hands in his resignation and retires to do gardening and, he hopes, some good for the community.

 But you know how retirement usually goes for hitmen. Here it's not the criminal underworld that reaches back for him - instead, he notices that a little girl in the community is being abused. He quickly figures out that the culprit is one Curtis (Desmond Eastwood), and he resolves to come out of retirement temporarily to rid the world of the one asshole.

 It doesn't go smoothly, and Finbar has to be rescued by another hitman (Jack Gleeson, very funny and perfectly cast as a the very image of a 70's sociopath) who was keeping an eye on him. Even worse, the target happens to be the brother of one Doireann (Kerry Condon), the leader of an IRA cell that's gone to ground after a bombing that had a lot of collateral damage back in Dublin.

 Doireann starts shaking heaven and earth to find out what happened to her brother, and it doesn't take her long to find a trail that leads back to Finbar. So it's down to him to resolve the situation while keeping the damage contained. Not an easy ask when dealing with a bunch of terrorists with access to explosives.

 It's a simple story, well crafted, and magnificently acted. Condon makes for a fierce, unpredictable villain, and Neeson... well, it's easy to make fun of him for playing to type, but there's a reason he's allowed to do it time and time again. He's particularly soulful here, and there's something incredibly appealing to how he's trying to stave off his crushing world-weariness by trying to do some good, and his disappointment when it leads to more violence. The script (by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane) has a lot of Western overtones (Finbar literally hangs up his rifle!) which are underlined by a lovely soundtrack by the Baldenweg siblings. The dialog is excellent all around, with a couple of nice literary references and a surprising amount of pretty affecting grace notes towards the end.

 The action is good, but very straightforward and over with quickly - these are categorically not John-Wick-style assassins. Director Robert Lorenz focuses instead on the escalating tension and small character moments, with precious few stylistic flourishes, but he and cinematographer Tom Stern still manage to capture some very cool images.

 It's not, by design, the sort of movie that'll set the world on fire. But it is very, very satisfying.

Death Whisperer (Tee Yod)

 A dark spirit haunts a small rural community in Western Thailand. It gruesomely kills off a young girl in the film's cold open just for funsies, and then sets its sights on the middle daughter of a large farming family.

 After that initial jolt, the film goes through a morass of trite family drama and cheesy jump scares. The sisters enjoy a close bond, but once Yam (Rattanawadee Wongth ong) gets possessed, she starts going on night jaunts, eating raw meat, and lying to get her loving older sister (Denise Jelilcha Kapaun) into trouble. Meanwhile, eldest brother Yak (Nadech Kugimiya) arrives from a stint with the military to show off his physique and take a more hands-on approach in fighting off the invading spirit.

 The drama is unconvincing - very saccharine and basic - and for a while there, the horror side of things isn't a lot better: creepy figures staring from afar, jump scares, and even that old tired chestnut of scary children's drawings. Slow burns are just slow when they're this tired and trite. No haunted toys, at least.

 But as creepy events pile on, the film gathers a little momentum and gets a lot more fun. There's a great scene among the cornstalks where Yak, shotgun in hand, confronts the spirit that convinced me this was going to be worth it... and yeah, the film does get a lot better.

 By the time a family friend (Ongart Cheamcharoenpornkul) and an exorcist (Phorjate Kanpetch) get involved around the halfway mark, the film starts churning out crazy, energetic scenes that very clearly out director Taweewat Wantha as an Evil Dead fan. It's derivative, never scary, and the pacing is still a little slow (this movie had no business being two hours long), but there's enough over-the-top gory action to satisfy any deadite cravings. 

 The acting is stilted and overtly earnest, the effects are fun but clearly low budget, and the writing is a little on the corny side, but I think the one thing that most bothered me (besides the bloated running time) is the soundtrack by Terdsak Janpan; it's hilariously overbearing, piling on the saccharine during the cutesy sisterhood scenes and trite horror signifiers during any bit where the spirit is even mentioned.

 All the supernatural stuff purports to be 'based on real events', which led me to think there was some folklore behind the story, but it's actually based on a sort of Thai creepy pasta published in 2015, which the same author Krittanont then adapted into a novel. I guess he claims that it all actually happened to him; Sure, buddy. The script's by Sorarat Jirabovornwisut and Thammanan Chulaborirak.

 At the very end there's a goofy scene setting up a sequel; As long as it follows up more on this movie's climax than its languid first half, I'm all for it.

One Missed Call (Chakushin ari)

 One Missed Call's premise almost reads like a parody of J-Horror: Young people in Tokyo start receiving a voice message from themselves, timestamped from a couple days in the future, which plays out their last few seconds before they die. And once they inevitably bite it, someone in their contacts list gets a similar message. Oh, and these calls always arrive with a creepy ringtone!

 Not even the Mighty Takashi Miike can save this story (screenplay by Miwako Daira, from a novel by Yasushi Akimoto). He can, however, make it look stylish (there's some terrible-looking camera effects early on, but luckily it simmers down quickly - the rest of the movie goes down very easy). And the sub-genre's conventions - already ossified back in 2003, when this came out - are almost always engaging.

 The plot of the movie hews very, very closely to the template set down by The Ring. Once it becomes apparent that there's some sort of supernatural menace preying on her university friends, Yumi (Kô Shibasaki) starts trying to find out more about the curse, with the help of a mysterious slightly older man (Shin'chi Tsutsumi) who's been on the case since the beginning. The investigation leads them to a family with a history of violent abuse (a major plot point) and a few pretty effective scares.

 No psychics in this one, thank goodness; Well, actually, there is one -an exorcist- but he's part of a fairly funny subplot about a TV show that catches wind of the ghostly phone calls. One of the few cases of a J-horror movie (successfully) sneaking in some satire - the only other one I can think of right now is Suicide Club.

I wonder if Marie Kondo ever had to deal with shit like this. Now there's an idea for a J-horror movie!

 The investigation -a traditional element of the ghost story which almost always lends structure to J-Horror- is interesting, and while the plot ends up tangling itself into knots by piling on multiple twists and red herrings and a (very obvious) Ringu-style fake-out, there are some genuinely cool reveals. Most of the time, though, it's dumb and derivative. Not to the extent that it stops the movie from being fun, but enough that it overshadows almost everything else.

 Miike's pretty restrained here - it could almost pass for a normal teen-oriented J-horror flick. A good-looking one, though, with good atmosphere. And he and his frequent editor Yasushi Shimamura pull off some unshowy but interesting sequences where the past intrudes seamlessly into the present. There is some fun stuff with the hapless police department (led by regular Miike collaborator Renji Ishibashi), the aforementioned TV production crew, and an excellent, very disgusting apparition later on.

 To be perfectly honest, some of the dumb parts are pretty fun, too, like a severed hand busily operating a clamshell phone, or an attempt to foil the curse by cancelling a mobile plan. I mean... come on, that's pretty funny; I did wonder if the whole thing was taking the piss, which is something I've found myself pondering a lot over the years while watching even the most craftsmanlike of this particular director's movies. It's an auteur thing. If this one is tongue in cheek, though, it's plays it too safe, staying too faithful to other, oh-so-serious J-Horror staples.

Scare Us

 A group of aspiring writers meet up periodically in a small bookstore to share themed stories they've written. The theme for tonight? 'Scare Us', which is pretty apropos, given that there's a serial killer doing the rounds in their hometown.
 After a... very indie horror snippet of the serial killer serial killing some extras at a local cinema, we get to meet the authors of the night's entertainments as they arrive at the bookstore and start talking and snipping at each other.

 Yes, it's yet another low-budget horror anthology film. The premise this time around is a bit on the nose, but it allows for a few cute conceits: We get to meet all the authors and watch them interact, their actors star in their segments, and the idea is that their concerns and personality inform their stories (this is not exactly successful, with the characters unconvincingly stating the way their circumstances are mirrored in the stories).

 I'll introduce them and their stories at the same time:

 Naomi (Michelle Palermo) is a stuffy and standoffish - her story, 'Night Haul', is about a woman who gets trapped in a storage locker facility with a monster. This one is very straightforward - it's got a good, creepy vibe, but what little action there is is very sloppy, it struggles a bit to fill out its runtime, and the monster isn't great.

 Next comes young Daniel (Ethan Drew), who tells 'Untethered' - a very lightly fictionalized tale about a teenager whose home life turns into a nightmare thanks to a bizarre spate of murder/suicides erupting in his town. This one is by far the best out of the bunch, an unnerving, surrealist, nasty bit of weird horror that does wonders with its tiny, tiny budget.

 As if that wasn't enough, this one also has my favorite detail in the whole movie: there's quite a bit of TV news report narration going on in the background, and it's clunky, portentous and riddled with grammar errors - and it feels very much like how a teenager would write it. Best thing is that the film never calls attention to it. You could say it's not intentional, but given the quality of this short and the generally solid writing elsewhere, I don't think that's the case.

 Following that up isn't easy, but Diego (Michael C Alvarez) does a pretty good job; He's one of those self-consciously cool and laid back dudes, and has got some past history with Naomi about which they snipe at each other incessantly. His story is about a drifter who runs into some bizarre beings at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. There's no plot, not really, just a situation that doesn't really go anywhere interesting, but it's well shot and the monsters, which are wisely kept shown only from afar, and even then from the back, are suitably bizarre. It kind of feels like a Tales From the Darkside episode cut down to ten minutes.

 Next is Claire (Charlotte Lilt), a perky busybody, whose story 'The Resting' is a solid but pretty uninspired tale of an unwanted legacy that honestly I've seen way too many slight variations of by now.

 Last - and absolutely least - comes Peter (Tom Sandoval), the host and owner of the bookstore, polite and deferential... but his main character trait is that he wears a fucking bowtie. His tale is a piss poor slasher exercise with no surprises, poor execution and absolutely dreadful writing. Way to send out the film out on a bum note.

 Scare us is very much not perfect, and it shows some very common microbudget, regional indie movie issues: The acting is just passable - very stilted and somewhat exaggerated, some of the writing isn't all that great, and the action is unambitious by necessity. But there's obviously a lot of effort from everyone involved and its heart does seem to be in the right place... which makes me feel like a dick for criticizing it.

 The cinematography (Aiden Chapparone, Rich Robles and Jacen Sieversby) is a strong point; The film looks good, very professional, and there's a clear attempt to differentiate the segments visually. Each short even gets a short title card with fonts that try to evoke the subgenre they're going for, and at least a couple of them made me chuckle. The music, by Room Full of Hammers, is pretty good, too. The film seems to have been put together by Carl Jensen IV, and he co-directs one of the segments. Also directing are Ryan Kjolberg (who does Untethered), Charlotte Lilt, Tom J. McCoy and Jordan Pillar.

 Ultimately, too many of its shorts feel a little too perfunctory, or just fail outright. It's got a few redeeming qualities, though, at least until the final story, and I kind of loved Untethered. Personally, I think that makes it much more worthwhile than whatever ten-episode bit of #content Amazon or Netflix are trying to ram down my throat; Your mileage -as always- will vary. 

Kandisha

 Kandisha follows a group of friends over summer break in the French Baineaus - the sort of place that films like Bac Nord would consider enemy territory. Three teenaged friends in particular: Amélie (Mathilde Lamusse, white), Morjana (Samarcande Saadi, Arab) and Bintou (Suzy Bemba, black). If you're wondering why I'm listing their ethnicities... well, it's because the girls themselves bring it up every time they can, teasing each other good-naturedly; Whether it might be tied to what's coming once the plot kicks in... well.. yeah, it does factor in. Bintou also gets ribbed as belonging to the bourgeoisie because she moved out of the ghetto, which might be the Frenchest thing I've seen in a while.

 These young women and their extended social group are brash, dumb and a little obnoxious - which, yeah, it tracks: they're teenagers. But the girls in particular have a lot of chemistry and are pretty funny, and the script does a great job of establishing how much they care about each other and their families. Which kind of sucks because they all reside in a horror movie.

 After a night out Amélie is attacked by her ex-boyfriend - it's pretty horrific, but at least she manages to defend herself successfully. Still in shock, she remembers a Moroccan tale Morjana told her about an avenging demon that can be summoned to punish menfolk; all it takes is drawing a pentagram in blood and calling her name - Aisha Kandisha.

 Which she, of course, does. And it works! Kandisha appears as a beautiful woman almost completely covered by a burqa and chases the creep until he's squished by oncoming traffic.

 But what sort of horror movie would this be if the summoning didn't have terrible consequences? That'd be like... I don't know, remaking Candyman so that the titular demon ends up being a force of social justice. So Kandisha, once summoned, can't go back to hell or wherever she came from until she's killed six men. And - no cheating, no killing people who might deserve it; She immediately goes after people Amélie and her friends love.

 The meat of the movie consists of the girls trying to find a way to get rid of the summoned demon to protect the others... all while said demon goes around butchering said others. It's a pretty good monster! It really is based on an old bit of North-African folklore, and evolves throughout the movie from an almost human-seeming succubus, a giant demon thing, and something in between the two. The depictions I've seen of her all tend towards the normal-sized succubus, but I'm not going to complain about getting a cool creature too. All of her forms have hooves, which figure prominently in the film's most memorable death.

 Script-wise it's a mixed bag. The plot is derivative, extremely predictable, and unless my maths have failed me, it suffers from a pretty glaring plot hole... but some excellent character work (for a teen movie) gives it a kick most slashers lack; The movie builds up some good tension just by following around people on their day-to-day lives, making you wonder if they're going to get creatively brutalized by a goat woman (spoilers: they are). The acting is mostly good, with some rough patches, and everyone is pretty likeable. Except the ex-boyfriend, fuck that guy. (But even he gets a small scene showing he realized he screwed up before he gets flattened off-screen).

 There's no real message to the film, but it does play with France's colonialist past - Kandisha is said to be the ghost of a Moroccan woman killed by the Portuguese, and it's 'the white one' that summons her in the first place, wreaking havoc on all the other immigrant's lives. That 'the white one' did it out of victimhood just makes it more interesting.

 The cinematography (by Simon Roca), like the script, takes a few pointers from Bernard Rose's Candyman - which, let's be honest, can only be a good thing, at least when it's done well as it is here: Lots of long establishing shots, derelict environments, and a great atmosphere. Effects and gore, meanwhile, are a mixed bag: There's an extremely lousy death by CGI fire that made me laugh out loud (when will people learn?), but the rest of the kills are at the very least nasty fun, even when they lean silly. There's a couple of gruesome standouts - the movie was written and directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, after all, and they haven't lost any of their gorehound edge since Inside.

Seriously: When will people fucking learn?

 That gnarly gore aspect doesn't really prevent the movie from feeling like it's aimed at teens, and I suspect it might be pretty good in that respect: a short (eighty-five minutes) runtime, a cast of likeable, photogenic knuckleheads, a straightforward story with ample shock factor... hell, even the film's lack of originality. Yeah, it'd probably go down great at a slumber party.

Boy Kills World

 We live in a decade that's given us a ton of high-energy, high-budget action movies with carefully choreographed combat - all with an excellent level of quality that's got to be a statistical anomaly.
 I guess that's where Boy Kills World comes in; Something's got to balance the scales.

 Boy (Bill Skarsgård) is a deaf-mute dude who lives with a Shaman (Yayan Ruhian!) in the middle of the jungle. He was taken in as a kid after the evil head of the totalitarian city nearby (Famke Janssen) killed his mom and little sister; The shaman knew his mother, so he subjects boy to a brutal training regimen to turn him into a killing machine with the sole objective on getting revenge against this Van Der Koy family who run the government or... something; this a very, very thinly drawn dystopia that insists on portraying its ruling family more as hacky Hollywood parodies than anything political*. The movie makes a token show of establishing what a bunch of dicks they are - casual oppression and mass murder, a yearly televised culling of known dissidents, being a very superficial caricature of celebrity culture, that sort of thing. 

 One of the film's main gimmicks is that while boy is deaf mute, his inner voice is provided by none other than Bob Belcher himself, H. Jon Benjamin, with a near-constant stream of smartass comments that aim for humorous and consistently, sometimes catastrophically, miss their mark. This is an extremely, uncomfortably unfunny movie that telegraphs all of its piss-poor punchlines. You know that lame Marvel-style joke where someone starts saying something cool, the music swells, and suddenly they fall down or fuck up or whatever? Yeah, that's the sort of thing you can look forward to here.

 Making H. Jon Benjamin not funny is some kind of feat, but writer/director Moritz Mohr makes it look easy.

 Anyhow. Boy fights his way up the Van Der Koys (Sharlto Copley, Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, and Brett Gelman) on his way to the matriarch in a series of fights and shootouts that mimic the progression of a videogame - I'm going to say that's intentional, since Boy's inner voice was taken from an off-brand Street Fighter clone. It's absolutely the sort of game I'd be desperately hitting buttons to skip cutscenes.

 There's a deeply stupid, nonsensical twist near the end, and even worse, the movie seems to get ever-so-slightly more serious - suddenly it clearly expects us to give a shit about its plot and characters! The moment I realized this provided the only laugh I had during the entire movie;  For context, this comes right after a scene in a televised show where innocents are "comically" murdered by people dressed up as goofy cereal mascots.

 The tone shift at least leads to a pretty brutal final fight which is still spoiled by poor filmmaking, but it's much, much better than all the faff preceding it.

 Just about nothing in this sorry mess works. It's meant to be a style over substance affair, but the style fails to look interesting. The comedy aspects... there are a few bits that are funny on paper - like a guy (Isaiah Mustafa) whose lips Boy can't read, so he keeps spouting Pootie Tang-style nonsense, a fight at least partially inspired by a famous Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene (he's got issues), and a wince-inducing tactical use of cheese graters - but the execution is botched at every turn. That's when the script bothers with actual jokes; a lot of the humour is a sort of incidental, really forced wackiness like the mascot fight.

 And the action! What a fucking waste. The choreographies (action coordinator: Dawid Szatarski) are involved and seem fun, but are ruined by disorienting camerawork and choppy editing that rarely let us get a good long look at what's going on; some of those camera moves are interesting (a couple takes, for example, use drones to zoom through a pretty busy brawl), but this showiness comes at the expense of momentum and clarity. It's really frustrating, because there are some really good moves and stunts in there; But I can only remember one short part of a longer warehouse fight where the camera didn't seem to me to be at odds with the action.

 Blood is mostly CGI, providing another layer of artificiality to the proceeds. I tend to roll my eyes at CGI blood in the best of cases, and this movie is a really a good argument in favour of squibs and practical effects; In that surprisingly non-jokey final fight, you'll often see a huge burst of goopy, comic-style blood, followed by a shot showing a floor that's completely free of any splatter.

 At least the acting is pretty good, even if it's in the service of these non-entities. Rothe is cool when she's not donning a stupid, unfunny helmet the movie insists on saddling her with (You know you're in trouble when you're ripping off a character from a Ubisoft game), Copley is... well, he's one likeable weirdo, and seems to be having fun. But the movie belongs to Skarsgård; His full-on action hero debut is impressive, and the mix between his comical idiocy mixed in with what's basically peak human form is almost - almost! - enough to make some of the material work. Let's get the man a better John-Wick-like next time.

 *: You could say that's a solid satirical point these days, but there's no way I'm giving this movie that much credit.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II

  Hellraiser hadn't even hit theaters when New World pictures greenlit a sequel. Clive Barker could not fit it in his schedule, so he only remained on as an executive producer... though he provided the basic story and by all accounts was frequently on set and involved in many of the decisions.
 Fortunately most of the rest of the Hellraiser crew stayed on and, against all odds, good replacements were found for Barker: Tony Randel (who'd done some uncredited editing on the first movie) on the director's chair, and more importantly, Peter Atkins on scripting duties. Atkins, a long-time Barker collaborator (along with Doug Bradley) from his time in avant-garde theater, didn't just get Hellraiser at a fundamental level, he was somewhat ahead of his time in the way that he didn't just deliver more Hellraiser - he and Barker delved into it, expanded it, deconstructed it, made it even weirder.

 It's relatively similar to the way Aliens exploded, chest-burster-like, out of Alien, so it's funny both movies share Lt. Gorman in a key secondary role.

 Hellbound kicks off with a time-honoured cost-cutting measure: padding the runtime with a recap of the previous film's final scenes*. Just hours after facing off against S&M demons, a rapey undead uncle and an evil stepmother, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) wakes up to find herself as an inmate in a psychiatric institution under the care of smarmy, ridiculously posh doctor Channard (Kenneth Cranham) and his hunky, earnest aide Kyle (William Hope).

 Kirsty recounts the events of the first movie to them as if she was reconstructing what happened - I love the dialog for this scene and how it's paced, though some of her guesswork is conveniently too accurate (and it's another excuse to recycle more footage from the first movie).

 Realizing, in another improbably leap of logic, that the mattress Julia died on could be used to bring her step-mother back, she asks the doctors to burn it. But as soon as the interview is over, Dr. Channard calls the police and asks that they send the mattress to his place.

 Kyle overhears that phone conversation and, his suspicions aroused, does what any normal person would in that situation: he breaks into Channard's house later that night to see what the deal is. And lo and behold, Channard's studio is full of occult diagrams and carefully preserved cenobite memorabilia... including three of the hell-raising puzzle-boxes. Oh, and the blood-stained mattress in the middle of the floor.

 Before he can take off, Channard gets home, accompanied by one of the inmates - one of those movie nutjobs who hallucinates bugs are crawling all over him. I'm imagine that's been at some point at least a real thing, but it seems to be really overrepresented in fiction.

 Anyhow! Channard sits the inmate (played by uncle Frank himself, Sean Chapman) on the mattress, gives him a straight razor, and just observes as he cuts himself to ribbons; it's a very effective, pretty horrific scene even before skinless Julia, summoned by the blood, comes out of the mattress and finishes off the poor sod. Then, in her weakened state, she asks Channard for help, and he reluctantly pushes the mattress towards her with his foot.

 Can I just point out how fantastic the villains are in these movies? Channard is such hateable, sociopathic asshole, and the ways he keeps finding ways to do 'disagreeable' things without dirtying his hands is truly great writing. And Julia, of course, gets a chance to go big this time around - the script thoughtfully hands her many variations of Frank's lines from the first movie, and even lets her get a little payback.

 Once the carnage is finished Kyle finally manages to escape and extracts Kirsty from the asylum. Meanwhile, Channard is busy providing Julia (Clare Higgins) with victims so she can reconstitute herself. There's a confrontation which Kyle doesn't survive [spoilers, don't read the preceding sentence if you haven't seen the movie], and afterwards Channard puts in motion a plan where he uses Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), a previously-introduced autistic girl who's a puzzle-solving prodigy to solve one of his cubes. The whole second half of the movie literally goes to hell, which in the Hellraiser universe is a giant labyrinth full of surreal little nooks, presided over by Leviathan - an unknowable monolithical god that looks like a rhomboidal lighthouse that spews darkness instead of light.

 Oh, and the cenobites pop up for a little bit but they don't get a lot to do; if you'll remember, the movie was already in full production before the first one even came out, so no one had any inkling of how big Pinhead would become. This is Kirsty's and Julia's movie, with a side of Chanard and Tiffany; the demons are barely supporting characters.

 It's got a lot going on, and not everything works. Hellbound definitely lacks the elegance and simplicity of Hellraiser, but it makes up for it in ambition and weirdness. The film never quite follows the course you'd expect - still, despite some silliness and a fuzzy plot, most of its events make sense.

 Because the crew from the first movie is almost all in place, everything that was good there remains good in the sequel. Robin Vidgeon's cinematography really benefits from the enlarged sets, and does well by some wonderful visual ideas like a sterile, completely white apartment - all the better to frame Julia's skinless form. Bob Keen and his team provide some really great work, including a brand new cenobite that makes lovely use of stop motion, and Christopher Young delivers another classic soundtrack - it's not as fresh as the one for the first movie, but it expands on its themes beautifully.

 In case you can't tell by now, I'm a fan. I can see the seams and that many things don't strictly work, but it's still a wildly imaginative and original movie. Hellraiser is one of the movies that in many ways made me me, one I rewatch every few years. Hellbound, I hadn't revisited for a long time - more than a decade and a half, probably - but along with Aliens and Dream Warriors, I've considered it the platonic idea of what a sequel should be. Warts and all, I'm very happy to find it still is.

*: While New World provided a bigger budget for the sequel, the movie started filming just as the dollar's value fell precipitously against the British pound - and as the movie was filmed in London (at the legendary Pinewood Studios, no less), the crew suddenly discovered that their budget had been slashed down by a significant amount; Whole planned sequences had to be scrapped. Due to this and studio interference, it's been described by people who worked on it as 'heavily compromised'; It still kicks ass.

Prospect

  Damon (Jay Duplass) and his daughter Cee (Sophie Thatcher) are 'floaters' - space drifters, basically, trying to make a living in the lawless frontier of the far reaches of civilized space. Damon, a very Duplass goofball played straight (though he does get stoned in one scene), has a lead on a prospect on a distant verdant moon, a toxic planet covered in budget-friendly earth-like forests: the location of a valuable pod of organically-generated gems.

The long-distance starship that ferries them to the moon's vicinity is doing its last run, so they risk being left stranded if they don't rendevouz with it three days later when it slingshots back from a nearby star. So of course things go wrong from the outset: their beat-up lander breaks down on entering the planet's atmosphere.

 That's only the start of their problems. While trekking to their destination they soon run into another couple of scavengers led by one Ezra (Pedro Pascal); The encounter proves disastrous, leaving Cee alone in the moon with a broken-down lander.

 Ezra tracks her down, and Cee enters into an uneasy alliance with him to try and find her father's big score and find a way off-planet.

 It's a slow, methodical movie that occasionally bursts into spurts of ugly, desperate violence - an expansion on a short from 2014, but it does more than enough to earn an extended runtime. The setting is well realized; While it's pretty jarring to see people in spacesuits walking through obviously terrestrial woods, the amount of detail in the world - coupled with some wonderfully functional-looking machinery, spaces and tools (production design: Matt Acosta, costumes by Aidan Vitti) ends up making it feel fairly convincing.

 The script, by the directing team of Zeek Earl and Christopher Caldwell, also provides a lot of cool character detail. Cee listens to space indie pop and fills her notebook with a reimagining of a beloved novel she's lost, and Ezra is a Mal Reynolds-style motormouth who keeps spouting all sorts of stories and bizarre facts in a very compelling, flowery patois (yes, the Firefly influence is very strong in this one). The roster acting is superb from everyone involved.

 It looks great, too. Co-director Zeek Earl acts as the cinematographer and he gives the movie the look of a faded polaroid; It's a weird choice for a sci-fi film, but it's a colorful, cohesive aesthetic that fits the film's down-to-earth, subdued action very well. There's a little bit of blood - including a pretty gruelling field surgery, and the practical effects used on the meaty alien flora(?) that serves as the story's McGuffin are pretty cool.

 Daniel L.K. Caldwell provides a gorgeous, very memorable soundtrack. Seriously, it's very, very good.

  Not sure what's up with harsh, cruel sci-fi with young women as protagonists -this would pair well with Vesper- but it does give me hope that we could get an adaptation of Alastair Reynold's Revenger one of these days. I wouldn't want to hype this one too much, as it's a bit on the slight side, but I liked it.

Portals

 Those silly scientists are at it again, running their particle accelerators and trying to create a black holes...

 Luckily for everyone, they don't succeed at creating a (presumably tiny) singularity. Those things are a pain, dropping down into planets and starting to eat them from within as they see-saw around their core like a nightmarish, all-consuming 3D spirograph. No, Portals is content to just be a horror movie. So instead of a black hole we get worldwide blackouts and evil 2001-style monoliths popping up all over the place.

 The monoliths -portals- are at least somewhat sentient and seem to have an agenda. They can communicate telepathically with whomever they choose, control others, and they can take those they're interested in when they touch their vinyl-like black surface. The invader's motivations are kept mysterious, but are generic enough that their antics never really roused my interest.

 Portals tells three stories set around the time the portals make their appearance. It starts with Adam (Neil Hopkins), who wants to take his family out of the city, away from the blackouts and this mysterious threat the news keep talking about.

 First impressions are good - it got me excited, at least, because the writing is pretty good; The story isn't anything special and it gets worse as it goes on, but the characters are believable and very likeable (Hopkins does a pretty good job, and Ruby O'Donnell, his on-screen daughter, is adorable). This segment (which recurs throughout the movie, later moving to a spooky hospital) is directed by Liam O'Donnell, writer of all the skylines and director of the much better sequel (I haven't seen the latest one yet).

 When Adam and his family run into a portal in the middle of the highway the movie shifts into the second story, one set in a 911 call center facility. Again, it's initially interesting, and it's a great way to give a sense of the world (or at least, the corner of the world closest to the call center) going to hell, with the lines overloaded with people calling in about weird occurrences. It devolves to hokum pretty quickly once it introduces your typical conspiracy theorist with that laziest of lazy signifiers: a notebook full of creepy portal-related drawings. When a portal appears in the middle of the office, he grabs a gun and starts forcing his co-workers into it, but the situation fails to go anywhere interesting. Directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale.

 After a short catchup with Adam the action moves to Jakarta, where sisters Sarah (Salvita Decorte) and Jill (Natasha Gott) get stuck in a multi-story car park with a monolith. This one's almost a zombie movie- the monolith takes over multiple nearby people and forces them to chase after Sarah and her sister. Very well-made on what's clearly a shoestring budget, it's got some impressive and very high-energy stunts (mostly to do with a slow-moving vehicle) and some very, very creepy business involving a pram. I shouldn't have been surprised when I found out it was directed by Timo Tjahjanto; I can't say it redeems the movie or anything, but it's a lot of fun.

 The last real segment finishes off Adam's story - it gets a few nice images, an extremely shit Scanners-style headsplosion (CGI, sadly), and some effective nastiness, but especially compared to its strong opening, it's a bit of a disappointment.

 Then there's a cool bit of credits, and a surprise fourth mini-story featuring a couple of scientists (Georgina Blackledge and Dare Emmanuel) who gave some exposition as talking heads early in the movie. I love this sort of formal experimentation, but unfortunately the short is completely disposable, a hollow non-story with a poorly rendered gory finale.

 So... this one's a bust, sorry. It got made by some of the same brains behind Doors, which came out two years later, including the Boulderlight production company, Brad Mishka, and creator Chris White. They'd get it much better on their second attempt, which for me merits a qualified recommendation- this one's not really worth a watch despite Tjahjanto's best efforts.

No One Will Save You

 M. Night Shyamalan famously tried to milk suspense out of an alien invasion from your conspiracy-standard grey aliens. Successfully, even - the problem with Signs wasn't the threat, it was the extremely writerly conceits Shyamalan ballasted his script with. Because a doomsday scenario isn't enough to keep viewers engaged, I guess.

 Two decades later we get another movie that attempts the exact same thing... and fails for pretty much the exact same reasons.

 Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives alone in a big old house in the outskirts of a small town. She seems happy, except for her mom being dead and some unspecified trauma. Perky, enthusiastic, and... well, a little too quirky, to be honest, but that's mainly down to the film's gimmick: there are barely any spoken lines at all, so to compensate Dever is directed to emote like there's no tomorrow. The few times anyone does talk, it's way down in the mix, almost unintelligible.

 Brynn's exaggerated, cartoonily upbeat demeanor only lasts until her first interaction with a neighbour (and, it's implied not too subtly, potential crush), who returns a friendly wave with a similarly over-emoted, withering look of disgust. Brynn deflates in a way that all but demands a sad trombone playing in the background.

 As it quickly becomes apparent, Brynn is a social outcast - everyone in town hates her and makes no bones about it, despite her being friendly to a fault. This is, of course, is all part of her mystery trauma, with clues as to its nature carefully parcelled out throughout the movie. It also explains the silence that smothers the whole movie; It's a cute, if glaringly blunt, conceit.

 The alien invasion happens on that same night we meet Brynn. She wakes up to some noise downstairs and finds a very noisy, very clumsy little grey man stumbling around. It's a pretty cool variation on a home invasion scene, especially when the alien reveals telekinetic powers. It does raise the same question Signs did - to wit, how the hell did these (space) clowns ever get to interstellar travel?*

 Brynn, plucky heroine that she is, survives the attack, and the next morning opts to get the hell out of Dodge - which reveals the next stage of the alien invasion in probably the movie's most effective scene. From there it's a series of confrontations with the greys, putting the poor woman through the wringer, while at the same time slowly explaining why she's a pariah.

 Technically it's very well shot, with writer/director Brian Duffield providing a few tense, well paced sequences and some cleverly blocked shots. The beautiful cinematography comes courtesy of (hello again!) Aaron Morton. The effects are excusably shoddy for a low-budget picture like this, with some nice, weird imagery and fun variations on standard alien iconography offsetting some pretty dodgy physicality in the scuffles with the monsters and terrible-looking effects for things wriggling under the skin (and to be fair, that's a type of effect that's defeated much better-funded movies). The practical effects fare better, with some clever use of lighting to depict future technology.

 Dever's the best thing in the movie, and is wonderful as Brynn- She makes a hugely artificial character work through sheer effort and talent.

 So there are enough pieces in play for a nasty, effective little thriller... but ultimately it's all let down by the writing; The script in this thing is fucking terrible.

 I'm not going to treat it as a science fiction movie, because it's only wearing that skin to tell a... I guess a fable about self-forgiveness and the crushing weight of guilt and public censure intertwined with a straightforward run-away-from-invading-aliens yarn.

 As far as the plot goes the aliens are nicely inscrutable, even if their actions made me laugh a few times (they have a fondness for spelling out alien letters with their bodies like lanky, creepy cheerleaders). That's... well, not all good, but all good fun, and I like bold choices like that even if they don't work. What bothers me is that they are fucking incompetent, their technology inconsistent from one scene to the next, and their threat level varies arbitrarily from situation to situation depending on whatever is convenient for the script.

 Even worse is Brynn's story and the way it integrates with that plot - It's handled so cack-handedly it's hard to take seriously. And when the secret is out... don't get me wrong, it's a horrible thing to happen to anyone, but it's also deeply underwhelming. It completely fails to upend your understanding of the character in any way, and it renders her situation even more simplistic, the society that's shunned her for a decade that much more a caricature.
 The whole film is yoked to an idea that doesn't really work and has very little weight. Had her crime been less mundane, harder to forgive - something actually shocking, like, I dunno, a school shooting - maybe it'd be on to something. As it is, there's no substance, no impact.

 Why do the aliens find her situation so fascinating? I have no idea; I suspect it's just the script writing itself into a corner yet again. But at least it leads to a deeply contrived, but also really fun ending that finally shows a little of the wit that the rest of the movie sorely lacks.

* No offense to the Killer Klowns from outer space, which are legit. Also: how would they be able to take over any town in America? Brynn manages to take a couple down with her tiny frame, blind luck, and improvised weapons - what happens when they try to invade an average home in the ol' US of A, which I'm led to believe holds multiple John-Wick-style weapon lockers?

Doors / Portal

  Millions of sentient structures appear all over the planet. They're big stone-slate things, each one different, covered in constantly rippling living metal (think iron filings on a big magnet). Anyone who touches them disappears, and only sometimes come back... changed. Scientists somewhat unimaginatively call the structures doors (I assume because Portals is the title of a similar 2019 movie).

 The doors communicate with some people, and millions just walk up to the doors of their own volition and go away elsewehere.

 The pretty cool conceit behind this movie is that the premise is communicated in the interstices, via text infodumps, background chatter and a 'wake up, sheeple!' style podcaster (David Hemphill). The meat of the movie is split in between four shorts, each one set at a specific point during this bizarre invasion, with a focus on the small picture that obscures as much as it illuminates, keeping things mysterious. It's a really lovely idea for an anthology.

 The first segment, 'Lockdown', follows a bunch of high-schoolers stuck in detention right when the invasion begins. It's got a nice paranoid feel as the kids hear sirens and helicopters zoom by outside, their phones all going off at once from within a locked cupboard, and their professor abandons them. Pretty shitty of him, to be honest. But unfortunately it quickly loses steam and kind of flounders when the kids run face to face with one of the newly arrived doors.

 Then it's time for 'Knockers', which is the dumb name given to the people who go into doors to try to document everything within (for science!). This is dangerous, we learn, because most of these explorers succumb to some form of psychosis if they stay inside for longer than ten minutes or so.
It begins with some rather beautiful nature footage, as one of the knockers (Lina Esco) muses on her overbearing life partner (Josh Peck)... who's also a knocker. Very Terrence Mallik. But the main influence here is quickly revealed to be Alex Garland's Annihilation as they venture into the other side of a door that's bisected a beautiful woodland house. This is the clear standout story in the movie; The alternate house the party of knockers ventures into is eery, weird, and pretty cool, and while the relationship drama ends predictably, it's narratively satisfying in a way that the rest of the film doesn't really ever manage again.

 In 'Lamaj' we catch up with the deadbeat teacher who abandoned the kids in 'Lockdown' (Kyp Malone). He's gone full survivalist out in the woods and has managed to communicate with one of the Doors using some homebrew equipment. The Door is surprisingly friendly and communicative - it's all fairly interesting until he invites a fellow scientist and her plus one, and then some extremely clunky relationship drama ensues again.

 Finally it's Midnight Mike's turn, the guy who runs the podcast we've been listening to throughout the movie. He gets an interview with an expert on parallel realities (Darius Levanté), who acts like a spaced-out cult leader and provides some more information on what may be going on. Again, it's  kind of interesting - anything that reminds me of Childhood's End will make me perk up and pay attention - but dramatically it's completely inert, and that's a terrible way to wrap up the film.

 This is a tough movie to gauge. I really enjoyed its general vibe - and despite a very low budget, it always looks great, with 'Knockers' being again a highlight. I also dug the experimental nature of the filmmaking, which splices in text, drone shots, and abstract images into its narrative with abandon. The scripts (all written by different people) vary wildly in quality, but none of them are particularly great, with some incredibly clunky exposition (the way characters just blurt out their motivations in Lamaj is near unforgivable). As science fiction none of it has any rigour, nor does it explore any of its ideas satisfactorily, but I do appreciate how much leeway it leaves by design for you to fill in between the lines.

 Brad Miska of V/H/S fame is one of the producers, and it's created by Chris White, but the driving force here seems to be Saman Kesh (who also directed 'Knockers'), with Jeff Desom and Dugan O'Neal taking care of 'Lockdown' and 'Lamaj' respectively.

 Much as I like a lot of it, overall it's a bit of an unsatisfying mess. An engaging unsatisfying mess.

Abigail

  Six thugs kidnap a young ballerina (Alisha Weir) and take her to a Resident-Evil-style mansion at the behest of one Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) with a promised reward of a few million each. Once the deed is done, they need to hole up there and babysit the kid for twenty-four hours until the ransom is paid.

 Simple. Except that, as the movie's trailers and marketing make abundantly clear, the kid is a vampire.

 Imagine how good a twist that'd be if it hadn't been spoiled months before the movie came out! It's easy to understand why they've done this - it'd be a hard sell otherwise. But it's harder to swallow that the movie acts as if it was a big twist for the whole of its first act. And while the vampire isn't turning the screws, we're expected to give a shit about half a dozen of poorly written caricatures traipsing through sub-standard tough-guy (and gal) posturing and some pretty lame attempts at humor.

 The crew are: Joey (Melissa Barrera), the soulful one who balks at inflicting violence on a little girl; Frank (Dan Stevens), a domineering asshole; Peter (Kevin Durand), a dimwit muscle-head and piss-poor comic relief; Rickles (William Catlett), a nice-guy sniper cypher; Sammy (Kathryn Newton), a perky hacker; And finally Dean (Angus Cloud), a mushmouth sleazebag. The actors are clearly having a lot of fun chewing the scenery, and they're all talented and charismatic enough that they often make it work - but the lines provided to them fall way short of the achingly clever, witty banter the script clearly thinks it's delivering.

 Things pick up considerably once the vampire finally bares its fangs and starts chasing these idiots around, acting for all purposes like a blood-splattered, murderous version of Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory. The script (by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick) remains pretty fucking dumb, but the mayhem is well choreographed and the gore is pleasingly over-the-top. It's pretty watchable until it gets to the home stretch and it starts piling up twists like the world's stupidest pancake stack, especially during a final confrontation against a new menace that pissed away any goodwill the film had accrued up to that point.

 Directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin (who did segments for V/H/S and Southbound, and then cashed in their success with their excellent feature debut Ready Or Not to do a couple of Scream sequels) bring the movie to life whenever the undead menace is prowling (it's never scary, which is par for the course in horror comedies, but the action is well staged) but don't really do enough to elevate the shitty script in its slower moments. Oh well - at least they (and DP Aaron Morton, who's been pretty busy between this and First Omen) make some of the scenes look very good, almost monochrome. Some are sepia, but one of the exterior shots is all subdued pinks, which I thought was cool and unusual in a scene not set in Miami.

 They also give (an abbreviated version of) Blood and Tears an airing in an appropriately bizarre dance number - I know she's rich and all, but It's still pretty impressive how Abigail got a hold of a shellac edition of Danzig II for her gramophone.

 It's hard to criticise a movie that's clearly going for 'dumb fun' for being dumb, even when that equation leans maybe 75% dumb and 25% fun. But there's a point where cheap contrivances, plot holes and hoary dialog start reeking of half-arsedness, and this movie crosses that threshold fairly early on; I only have myself to blame for the mild annoyance, because it was clear from the trailer that the writing would be terrible. 

The First Omen

  Like probably a lot of people my age, easy access on TV meant I watched The Omen early and often. I don't think it was particularly formative (embarrassingly, the killer cat in Uninvited featured a lot more in my nightmares than anything lil' Damien and his satanic rottweilers ever got up to), but its emphasis and slow build up to its bizarre deaths and general bleakness must have fucked me up somehow, even if I have next to zero nostalgia for it.

 And now, thanks to god knows what satanic shenanigans, we finally get a prequel answering a bunch of questions no one asked themselves in the intervening forty-eight years. Maybe they'll try to remake the original again in a couple of years in time for its fiftieth anniversary.

 If nothing else, it's a movie that gets The Omen at a fundamental level, but isn't afraid to have a lot of fun with it too. Witness the prelude to the movie, where two priests -father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, whose voice gave the subwoofers at the cinema a pretty good workout) and father Harris (Charles Dance) meet to discuss some Matters of Grave Import. We know Brennan survives to be in the 1976 movie, but as for the other guy... the film has a lot of fun building up to his death, slathering on tension and compounding it with multiple shots of rickety scaffolding and stained-glass windows being hoisted high up by cranes. And when the inevitable death comes, it's both gruesome and slyly funny.

 But it's not time for Brenan yet - he's just a supporting character. The protagonist is Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American orphan who arrives in Rome to take her vows under the auspices of Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy).

 Margaret is to work at a church-run orphanage under the careful watch of sister Silva (Sonia Braga), and boards with Luz (Maria Caballero), a smoking, sexy novitiate who seems cool and goes out clubbing every night.

 Things settle into your usual horror-movie-nunnery rhythms quickly; Margaret is a hit with the (adorable) Italian girls she's looking after, and quickly develops a special bond with social castaway Carlita (Nicole Sorace) who's constantly locked in her room for bad behaviour.

 At night, Luz takes her out on a night of debauchery, so it's not all bad. And of course, strange incidents begin to mount: A nun hangs herself in a direct reference to the original Omen (and also sets herself on fire and breaks a window while doing it - it's 2024, a straight hanging would be too quaint!), Margaret observes some shady goings on with the senior nuns, there's a horrifying birth scene, that sort of thing.

 So when father Brennan returns from the prologue and warns Margaret that something is horribly wrong, it doesn't take much convincing before she's looking for clues about some sort of horrific satanic conspiracy surrounding her ward Carlita. One thing leads to another- in this case, a series of pretty effective, gruesome scenes with an emphasis on body horror, and a deluge of clumsily dosed exposition.

 Yes, it's predictable, and having to contort to the shape of a prequel to a movie that seriously didn't need one to begin with hurts it a lot. The shape of its narrative is bent out of whack, and while the mystery starts out being compelling, it's easy to see where the pieces will fall, leaving an obvious twist that leads to the foreordained conclusion - and the way the script (by Tim Smith, Director Arkasha Stevenson and Steve Thomas) cheekily subverts it - an oddly underwhelming experience.

 So while The First Omen's story is a bit of a bust, it's full of likeable characters and indelible images. Director Arkasha Stevenson and her cinematographer Aaron Morton craft a lusty, creepy, atmospheric and often gorgeous movie that's highly horror-literate (check out those references to Rosemary's Baby and Possession!). It's not perfect - there are a few too many cheesy jump scares, some dodgy effects, and the big supposedly horrific aftermath to a car accident is handled so ineptly that it had most of the people at the theater I saw this on laughing out loud, which is probably not the intended reaction. But mostly it succeeds, and a couple of standout sequences manage a ridiculous level of intensity.

An eye or a mouth? Guessing the second, based on the prominence of a medieval picture of Satan devouring a fool later. In any case, it looks amazing.

 The themes are strong, if a bit blunt, especially with regards to women's rights over their own bodies; The scenes where they're most made manifest correspond almost one-to-one to the film's best, most harrowing moments. It stumbles when trying to update the original movie's very '70s paranoia for modern audiences (who will probably, and justifiably, tend to mistrust anyone belonging to the catholic church anyways) in a  deeply stupid retroactive change to the series' conspiracy trappings. Yes, making a modern-day omen was always going to be an uphill battle, but I'm not about to cut them some slack for a fight they picked.

 Nell Tiger Free is a highlight - not that you could tell from her subdued performance, but her Possession-like freakout is towering. Ineson is as likeable (and his voice as uncanny) as ever, and Braga and Nighy are the consummate professionals they've ever been, even if they don't really get a chance to show the young ones how it's done. I found Mark Korven's soundtrack occasionally annoying, but it's faithful to Jerry Goldsmith's original score, and its attempts to replicate a theremin with human voices are pretty entertaining.

 More than anything else, Stevenson assured vision marks the addition of another talented, unique voice to the genre - based on this and The Dream Door season for Channel Zero, I can't wait to see what she does next.