V/H/S/2

 Within just nine months after V/H/S was released, the fine folks over at Bloody Disgusting rounded up another bunch of new and returning miscreants to make another sleazy, gory collection of found-footage horror shorts. V/H/S/2 runs about thirty minutes shorter than the first movie, and that tightening really pays off. And while it's still sleazy as hell (we get a pair of boobs and a dong within the first few minutes), but it's noticeably tamer than the first film; I'd only choose "degenerate" as the sixth or seventh adjective to apply to this one.

 The wrap-around this time is about an entertainingly amoral private dick (Lawrence Michael Levine) who, along with his partner (Kelsy Abbott) is hired to find a missing college student. They track him down to a house that looks suspiciously like the one in the first film (and we even see a little footage from some recurring assholes) - there are a load of tapes everywhere, but no corpse this time around.

 I'd forgotten these films implied a shared universe, though it always seemed a bit half-arsed. This segment is written and directed by a returning Simon Barrett, but it's pretty forgettable aside from a goofy-looking bit of gore later on.

 Barrett returns for the first story (Phase I Clinical Trials) as a scriptwriter, paired as usual with director Adam Wingard. It follows one Herman (played by Wingard), the recipient of an experimental electronic eye that connects directly to his brain and records everything he sees (justifying the PoV approach).

 The problem is that the eye is a little more keen than is useful, as a cute woman (Hannah Hughes) who's run into similar usability problems explains later on. It's an excellently creepy little ghost story; Between this and V/H/S/94's Empty Wake, Simon Barrett is responsible for probably the most traditionally scary segments on these anthologies.

 Next are Eduardo Sánchez (mis-spelled as Edúardo in the credits) and Gregg Hale, both alums of the found footage film that kicked it all (Sánchez co-directed, and Hale produced) in a zombie segment that has a pretty fun first-person twist on the zombie genre. It's quick, vicious, technically accomplished, and the premise carries it a fairly long way.

 And then comes what's easily the best segment of the movie, and possibly in the whole series: Garth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto's Safe Heaven. An Indonesian documentary (Fachri Albar, Hannah Al Rashid, Oka Antara and Andrew Suleiman) crew go visit the remote compound of a mysterious and controversial cult leader (Epy Kusnandar)... on the same day that their promised rapture comes.
 The tension is built beautifully as the increasingly discomfitted documentarians keep discovering just how fucked up things are, only for things to get more and more fucked up. There's a ton of gore, a lot of weirdness, and the action is shot with the sort of tense energy that both Tjahjanto and Evans can do so well. I've met some people who hate that it ends with a really goofy joke, but not me. I love this one.

 Unfortunately, I don't have anywhere near the same amount of appreciation for the last story, Jason Eisener's Slumber Party Alien Abduction, where a bunch of obnoxious teens and pre-teens face off against each other in an escalating series of pranks before a bunch of feral aliens come to try and abduct them. It's remarkably energetic, but it doesn't go anywhere interesting, and the characters are hateful except for one very good boy who is cruelly put down. If that's intended as a provocation... well, good job: I fucking hate it with a passion.

 Aside from that bum note, V/H/S/2 is a blast: a high-energy collection of fairly distinct, gory tales - it's a shame that it chooses to go out on its weakest link, souring the experience somewhat. But on the whole it's easily one of my favourite modern horror anthology films.
 It was followed one year later by V/H/S Viral; I don't remember it being very good, but it was so poorly received it sidelined the series for seven years - which seems like an exaggeration. I'll revisit that one soon.

Ugetsu

 It's always surprised me how little so many classic samurai movies romanticize their roaming warriors. I probably shouldn't be, given that most of them were made while world war two was in living memory. Ugetsu was made less than a decade after the war ended, and its depiction of the samurai is possibly the most unremittingly vicious.

 The script, by Matsutarō Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, takes inspiration from an 18th century book of ghost stories (some them influenced by the same traditional stories which would go on to influence Kwaidan a decade later). But it's almost forty minutes before anything even remotely supernatural happens.

 Not that you'd notice, because director Kenji Mizoguchi makes the war-torn 16th century Japanese countryside into an uncanny, limbo-like expanse, and the roaming bands of wild-eyed samurai into chaotic, ravenous demons.
 In the eye of the storm lies a small village, where Genjurô (Masayuki Mori) and Tôbei (Eitarô Ozawa), two potters, see an opportunity to profit by selling their wares to noblemen while supply is at an understandable low. Their greed gets the better of them, and after an initial venture they decide to head to a nearby city with their families. The trip, even the preparations for it, are harrowing, since their village is soon invaded by rampaging soldiers. 

 The journey is tense and masterfully presented, with a jaw-dropping centerpiece: a gorgeously shot lake-crossing that's unnervingly otherworldly.

 At the gates of the city, a concerned Genjurô sends his wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and his infant son back to the village; he soon lets himself be seduced by a local noblewoman (Machiko Kyō, who might be the first instance of a pottery groupie I've ever seen); Tôbei, meanwhile misplaces his wife Ohama (Mitsuko Mito) while assholishly pursuing his dream of getting some armour and becoming a samurai himself.

 So this is the part where the men let their greed ruin their lives, as foretold early on by a a village sage. Tôbei lucks out in battle, and his dishonourable means gain him great favour from a warlord - only to find that his fortunes came at the metaphysical expense of his wife's. As for Genjurô, he finds that his would-be paramour lives in a derelict mansion with her handmaiden and is clearly, let's say, vitally-challenged. That doesn't stop him from... kind of tacitly accepting a marriage proposal.

 There are a couple of elements in his story shared with a couple of Kwaidan's tales, possibly due to the common sources of inspiration; That impression becomes more pronounced once Genjurô finally makes his way back home for one final supernatural twist. Tôbei's story is simpler, and his fate harder to relate with since he's such a buffoonish idiot. Poor Ohama.

 I actually preferred the journey to the destination and the harrowing war survival story to the ghostly escapades, which is rare for me. Maybe that wouldn't be the case if I had seen this before Kwaidan (which came out more than a decade later), but I'd like to think it's more of a testament to how well those early war scenes are handled. It's a lovely, unique movie that despite some missteps (the final monologue is pretty enough, but works against the film's spell) has aged exceptionally well. And the lake scene really is an all-timer.

Marrowbone (El Secreto de Marrowbone)

 Rose (Nicola Harrison) brings her children to rural Maine from the UK escaping their father (Tom Fisher). They get a new house in the boondocks, and carefully start building a new life for themselves as the Marrowbone family.

 But Rose is very sick, and soon dies, making her eldest son Jack (George MacKay) promise to keep her death a secret until his 21st birthday so the family won't be split apart. And shortly after her death a man (presumably dad) comes back. With a hunting rifle.

 Cut to the credits, and then six months later, with the Marrowbones carrying on as their mother requested - Jack goes to town every now and then, maintaining the fiction that her mom is still alive (albeit sick) and courting a local girl (Anya Taylor-Joy) while his siblings (Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth and a very young Matthew Stagg) remain cooped up in the house.

 The kids live in terror of some sort of ghost haunting the house, there's a pesky lawyer (Kyle Soller, who's also a romantic rival) insisting on house visits, and some missing money - but the film is mostly structured around the mystery of just what went on in those missing six months.

 It's a handsomely mounted gothic tale clearly modelled after The Others, written and directed by The Orphanage scribe Sergio G. Sánchez under the auspices of executive producer J.A. Bayona; That's a pretty good lineage! I wish I could be more positive about it.

 For one, the tone - which goes a little too thick on a sort of deeply nostalgic 'gee whiz' innocence - put me off immediately; The film opens with someone browsing a home-made diary with plush covers labeled 'Our Story', and a narration that's prone to make all sorts of melodramatic pronouncements.
 The characters are all just barely defined; Jack is the responsible one, Allie (the local friend) is infinitely understanding and forgiving, and loves Jack very much, and the younger siblings also can be described with a couple of adjectives each. Sollner's lawyer villain is a bit more fun, though the script often contrives to make him more of a menace, to provide a momentum that the film sorely lacks.

 The film gets by for a while thanks to some beautiful cinematography by Xavi Giménez and a drip feed of revelations regarding the situation at La Casa Marrowbone. But these revelations get more convoluted and more melodramatic as the story heads towards its conclusion; There's one admirably brutal secret at the heart of the film, but the way its consequences spread outwards to explain all the weirdness can get bracingly stupid. The script twists itself into knots trying to explain away every detail, and while there's some interest in seeing how the pieces fall into place, the whole ends up being a disappointing mess.

28 Years Later

 Twenty-three years later... director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the zombie movie that pretty much made them (yeah, yeah, I know, The Beach, but who's talked about that one in the last couple of decades?) The thing is, they don't really seem all that interested in following up on 28 Days Later.

 The British isles have been quarantined and left alone in the last twenty-eight years since the rage virus broke out and turned most of the population into feral, fast-moving zombies. Survivors were left to fend for themselves.

 In this brave new world, one population's been doing pretty well for itself: a tiny, self-sufficient community at Holy Island off the coast of Scotland, cut off from the mainland by a causeway that is submerged under the ocean come high tide.

 The film follows one of the villagers, Spike (Alfie Williams) - a 12-year old whose father (Aaron Taylor Johnson) is pushing to go for a coming-of-age ritual zombie hunt in the mainland. It goes about as well as you could hope, but upon returning a rift opens between young Spike and his father. Disillusioned, and learning that there may be a doctor further inland, he resolves to slip away from the community and take his ill mother (Jodie Comer), to see the physician.

 28 Years Later is an excellent movie with some fairly idiosyncratic choices which may or may not impact your enjoyment of it... I don't know you, what do you expect me to say? I really liked it.

 The first of those choices is a shift in genres: this is not, on the main, really a horror movie; Boyle and Garland use the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop for a coming of age drama instead. That's not a criticism, by the way, just an observation; It's a fine coming of age drama. Just be aware that it's closer to, say, Vesper than 28 Days Later.

 The second point of contention is that the movie feels fairly experimental in its visuals and editing. 28 Days Later came out in the early 2000s, so it had plenty of frame-skipping and shaky cam, and that goes double here: The film's signature visual gimmick is that the action will frequently do a small freeze-frame as an arrow pierces some zombie body part - shots also jump jarringly between different angles, and we still get hyperactive shaky cam and frame-skipping shenanigans. To be fair, Boyle's been tinkering with highly personal ways to shoot action pretty much since he started; These mini-action beats can go into the 'misses' pile.

 Outside of the zombie hunts, the experimental touches are a little more successful - footage from old war and medieval movies is intercut into the proceeds fairly often to give a feel for the mood at the Holy Island community, and the editing gets a little too frantic whenever tensions ratchet up. The cinematography (by a returning Anthony Dod Mantle) is lovely, and scores a lot of really interesting visuals by juxtaposing the natural beauty of the North with zombie grotesquerie. The music, by hip-hop band Young Fathers, is bloody excellent.

 The last thing to have in mind is the project was approached as a trilogy; The film ends with a bit of a cliffhanger and a very strange tonal shift. It tells a complete story and I like what it seems to be setting up next, but that ending really is a bit jarring.

 Other than that, the film does introduce some slight tweaks to its zombie lore - mainly, it tries to show the ways in which people infected by the rage virus are actually different from zombies. My favourite new element were the alphas, powerful zombies that look like raging Ted Nugents - swinging donkey dicks and all, and give the movie a much needed shot of energy. Also interesting (and diametrically opposed) are the infected equivalent to bottom feeders, the series' creepiest creation yet. There are a decent amount of chases and whatnot, and they're fun even if some of them seem to be viewed through the eyes of someone suffering a seizure.

 There's also some lovely footage of the North being seized back by nature, complete with huge herds of roving deer, and a couple shots of the sycamore gap tree before it was cut down. A friend who knows the area confirmed that the protagonist's itinerary seems plausible, which is neat.

 The acting is excellent, with both Comer and Williams giving two great performances. A third well-known actor pops up later as a major character and gives a characteristically soulful performance.

 I love that they took all these chances with what the studio must consider a franchise, even if not all the risks pay out. You just know there's going to be a somewhat deserved backlash. But now I'm really interested in finding out what they do for its two planned sequels, if they ever come to be.

Howl

  Howl's a rare thing: a modern attempt to make a honest horror B-movie here in the UK. With werewolves, no less!
 OK, so it really is setting itself up for failure, since there's no way it can live up to Dog Soldiers, right? Right. To be fair to it, it doesn't even try; Howl is perfectly happy to wade neck-deep in clichés, stock characters and pull all its plays from the beginner chapters of the siege horror playbook. The thing is that for a while, it works; It sets expectations low, and within that space it manages to be pretty charming. Again, for a while; glaring script issues soon bring it crashing down.

 Joe (Ed Speleers) is a put-upon train guard who the script quickly establishes as having a terminal case of wounded masculinity. I mean, the script comes out and has an alpha idiot (who got the supervisor promotion Joe was also gunning for) accusing him of not being man enough. It apparently took two people (Mark Huckerby and Nick Ostler) to write this shit.

 Joe is browbeaten into working on the last service to a far-away station. The only bright spot is that his crush (Holly Weston) is also on the train, serving drinks. She's nice to him, but of course the film shows her being flirted with by more effective, manly men. Everyone else on the passenger train is either mean or disrespectful to poor little Joe.

 But soon a chance to man up comes up: While crossing a dark patch of woods, the train rolls over a deer, which causes it to stop.* The conductor (Sean Pertwee, in a fun callback to Dog Soldiers) goes out and disappears, causing a sort of passenger mutiny led by an alpha douchebag in a suit (are you seeing a pattern here?); Everyone tries to trek back towards civilization, against Joe's better judgement - but they're soon attacked by a werewolf, so they go back and hole themselves in the train.

Joe's looking pretty unimpressed with the creature design there.

 And this is where things get kind of interesting, because even as some tensions rise, the crew and passengers actually make an effort to reach out to each other and work together to survive the night. And for a while, it's engaging enough: it's not an original theme by any conceivable metric, but compared to the meat-headed rise-to-the-occasion bullshit the film seemed to be headed towards, it's pretty refreshing. There's a couple of solid jokes, e ven a likeably daft 'rallying the troops' speech delivered over the train's PA system. Dumb, but cute. It works better than you'd expect, especially when it becomes clear that the film is not fucking about with its furry menaces - people are wounded and killed at the drop of a hat with a head still in it, and the gore effects are plentiful and surprisingly graphic.

 So yeah, for a while I actually got my hopes up. But unfortunately the script gets stupider as it gets along, and once again its macho macho themes are pushed to the forefront. That could work in a better-written movie, but here the protagonists heroically establish that no one gets left behind... only to leave behind the (by far) most heroic character in the movie to the wolves (literally) without a single fucking comment. The last thirty minutes are a depressing mess of incompetent narrative choices and dumbass posturing, all in pursuit of delivering an incel-friendly fantasy to its obvious conclusion while taking the dumbest possible route at every turn. Oh, and it has the balls to completely rip off John Murphy's work on 28 days later for its final scene. Fuck this noise.

 Good movies get your complicity in suspending your belief. For a while, I didn't really care how patently ridiculous the idea of a ravenous tribe of werewolves living in a stretch of woods not ninety minutes away from London. Let alone highly infections werewolves that can turn a lovely old woman into a ravening cannibal beast in a matter of hours. So that's a lot of goodwill the film managed to piss away.

 As mentioned earlier, there's a secondary character who basically is the hero of the piece, though the movie hilariously fails to recognize it. And the tiny bit we get of his backstory is a thousand times more poignant and interesting than the shitrag that passes for a protagonist. I do wonder if the other guy was actually supposed to be the protagonist for a while, that'd explain at least some of the script's problems.

 Director Paul Hyett, a veteran makeup and regular F/X artist (the guy has a really impressive CV), has a good grip on low-budget atmospherics - it's pretty funny that he worked on most of Neil Marshall's movies... except Dog Soldiers. The effects crew does an admirable job with CGI-assisted practical makeup effects and wolf suits. The critters sadly, don't look all that great - they belong to the goofy orc / cavepeople tribe of Garou - but at least they have triple-jointed hind legs. That's a very cool, difficult touch, pulled off pretty well... but they still look pretty goofy; The film's final, supposedly badass closeup of a werewolf had me (wait for it) howling with laughter. The perfect capper to a mismanaged, ill-conceived train (please kill me) of events.

* As someone who's often travelled in these exact same trains, I can attest that just about anything can bring them to a halt - from "the wrong kind of rain" to, my favorite, "leaf blow".

V/H/S

 Well, here it is - the little indie horror found-footage anthology film that could, with seven sequels and counting. And... the thing is that as much as I've grown to love the series over the years, I didn't really care that much for this one when it originally came out; A little too hit and miss. It was only with the second one that I sat up and really started paying attention.

 The brainchild of Brad Miska and some other folks over at Bloody Disgusting, the series came out the door with a truly impressive roster of horror luminaries: Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, between You're Next and The Guest. David Bruckner in between two other excellent anthology entries (one for The Signal, the other one a career-best for Southbound). Ti West between Innkeepers and Sacrament. Glenn McQuaid, whose other work I haven't seen. Joe Swanberg in what I think is still his only horror directorial detour (the guy was insanely prolific during that period). And last but not least, the Radio Silence team (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez and Chad Villella) - this was their first properly distributed gig, and it's one of the good ones.

 The framing story, from Wingard and Barrett, stars a "delightful" bunch of delinquent assholes (two of which are played by Wingard and Barrett!) who engage in such exuberant youthful shenanigans as vandalism and sexual assault, filming everything to then sell the footage. Tired of the soulless grind of just producing #content, these artistic souls accept a gig to steal a special V/H/S tape from an old man in his run-down home. When they get there the homeowner is dead, and there are plenty of tapes with creepy stories on them strewn around the house. As our intrepid protagonists start watching some of them to figure out which one it is they were meant to take, they're hunted by something. So they (presumably) get killed, and we get shown the shorts; It's a win-win, at least for us.

 David Bruckner starts things off properly with Amateur Night, the tale of three horny asshole kids (Mike Donlan. Joe Sykes and Drew Sawyer) who go out into the night to pick up some chicks, try to get into their pants, and film everything with a pair of spy glasses. Unfortunately for them, one of the girls they pick up (Hannah Fierman) turns out to be weirdo and, more importantly, some sort of succubus. It's a basic structure the V/H/S series would reuse several times over, but this is by far its best execution thanks to Fierman's fierce performance, unrestrained sleaziness, great gore and some great, intense filmmaking from Bruckner. It's really good, but you might feel like you need a bath afterwards.

 Ti West classes up things with his segment, second honeymoon, where a couple (Joe Swanberg and Sophia Takal) go out on a road trip down route 66. They do inconsequential, touristy stuff during the day, and at night someone enters their room and films them with their camera. The night segments are really creepy and the couple have a really well-developed, lived-in relationship, but it takes too long to get to a fairly underwhelming payoff.

 Glenn McQuaid takes us back to a bunch of horny, idiot young adults (Norma C. Quinones, Drew Moerlein, Jeannine Yoder, and Jason Yachanin) who go visit a remote lake in the middle of the woods guided by a girl they just met. They have a nice picnic, enjoy some consequence-free extramarital sex, and leave happy and contented to lead long, fruitful lives.
 Oh, wait, no- they all get killed. My bad.
 It's standard slasher stuff with yet another assortment of basic dickweeds and relatively uninteresting kills, but the short uses video glitches and weirdness in a really interesting way to depict whatever it is that's haunting these woods. The plot doesn't really go very far and the characters are a non-starter, but this unexplained weirdness keeps it fresh.

 We're next left in the able hands of Joe Swanberg, who provides the strangest segment of the film. It's presented as a series of video chats between two childhood sweethearts (Helen Rogers and Daniel Kaufman) as they keep their long-distance relationship alive while at different universities*. Sweet as it is, we still get some gratuitous boobage, because of course we do. Early on the young exhibitionist confesses that she thinks her department is haunted, and soon manages to capture some proof on video... which leads to a nasty bout of self-harm, a couple of good things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scares, and a truly batshit series of revelations. It's pretty evil, and a whole lot of fun.

 The last segment is by Radio Silence, and it's another good one. Here we follow another bunch of kids (the Radio Silence crew), but, amazingly, they're just good-natured dopes, not raging assholes. It also gets one of the best, most original justifications of why everything gets filmed out of any found footage film I've ever seen: the main character's costume is one of those stuffed-toy nannycams!
 The kids are out looking for a Halloween party but get lost and end up in a real, honest-to-god haunted house. The early bits use that old Scooby-Doo trope of the kids thinking it's all make-believe and making fun of the paranormal stuff, but it's well executed, and when shit hits the fan things get appropriately hectic. There's some really dodgy, low budget CGI and the whole thing looks about as tacky as the logo animation at the start of Blumhouse movies, but the concepts are good fun and the goofy tone sells it well. Make sure you look up the alternate ending, too - personally I think it fits the tone of the short better.

 And there you have it. The only thing left is the standard song at the end which remixes some of the footage from the movie, including, ugh, the sexual assault. There's a line beyond which provocation curdles into bad taste, and this really crossed that for me.

 I liked the movie much better this time around, and I think it might have one of the better overall quality levels out of the now long-running anthology film series. Weirdly, I'd still don't rate it all that highly mostly becase at two hours, it feels a little too drawn out, and some of the shorts really overstay their welcome. That's especially true when you have to endure some pretty loathsome kids. And it's not a bad thing, but it did surprise me just how sleazy it is, too: Several full frontals, including a bunch of floppy bananas along with the expected amount of melons (that would be: many pairs of melons). It's a pretty raunchy movie.
 A lot of that horniness is unpleasant by design; Male toxicity is absolutely a running theme (even within the "happily" married couple, the guy tries to pressure his wife into something she doesn't want to do), but I didn't really feel it's taken anywhere more interesting than on any given Tales from the Crypt morality play. Except maybe for Swanberg's short, which is just nuts in the best way possible.

 It's definitely worthwhile even with these few caveats - A very solid collection of shorts, and as usual the high points are pretty high. Wonder if I'll like V/H/S:Viral more this time around, too.

*: I originally mis-typed this as universitites at first; Proof that this sick filth truly has a degrading effect on impressionable, innocent minds like mine. Oh no, the Daily Mirror was right all along!

Exhuma (Pamyo)

 When they discover a rich man's infant son is cursed and haunted by the spirit of one of his ancestors, two shamen (Kim Go-eun and Lee Do-hyun) enlist the help of two geomancers (the great Choi min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin) to try to exhume said ancestor and pacify him. Things... do not go smoothly; Thanks to one doomed idiot and to a further secret buried under the ancestor's grave, things go pretty much the opposite of smoothly.

 Exhuma is an excellent, handsomely produced horror movie (and the top-grossing movie of 2024 in its native South Korea).

 It's composed of two very different halves; In the first, quieter part, the four paranormal experts carefully grapple with the menace posed by the interred body, and try to unravel why it's become a nasty occult minefield. The second part gets surprisingly over the top as several spirits (several of them based on Japanese Yokai) come out to play, and a couple of them go ballistic on the rich man, his family, some locals, and a whole lot of pigs.

 Just about everything in the film works beautifully. The acting is excellent, and writer/director Jang  Jae-hyun keeps an impeccable atmosphere and a beautiful autumnal palette (cinematography: Lee Mo-gae). It's not hugely bloody (most of the gore in the film belongs to farm animals), but there are some pretty cool, very tasteful special effects later on. No matter how strange things get the film, while never dour, maintains a carefully controlled, serious tone throughout.

 The mystery is slightly perplexing, coming at it from a western perspective, but it's relatively easy to parse - and I love that at its core it is indeed a geomantic puzzle. Plus, it keeps things fresh: I'd love it if more western curse/possession movies had floating fireballs, a small tribute to Kwaidan, coffins wrapped in prayers and barbed wire, and tiny human-headed snakes.

Jeruzalem

 Jerusalem, but with zombies and a very shitty eschatological (scatological?) bent.

 Two deeply uninteresting but hot twenty-somethings (Rachel Klein and Sarah Pullman) head out to Israel for a short holiday. One of them has a Hololens-style mixed-reality camera glasses she got as a present, so that's the conceit for the found footage angle of the movie; It's kind of a fun idea, with facial recognition and maps popping into the frame every now and then, but the execution is all low-hanging fruit (cat videos start intruding at one point) and it doesn't really end up adding much to the movie.

 The two girls meet an anthropology student (Yon Tumarkin) on the flight to Israel who's kind of interested in how dead people are coming back to life as 'dark angels' all over in Jerusalem, something that the three major religions (Judaists, Muslims, Christians) are covering up for some reason - I dunno, I think incontrovertible proof of some sort of afterlife would be a pretty good boost for their credibility. We know that this is true, by the way, because the film begins with a short where a bunch of religious figures try to exorcise one of these resuscitated demons; It's pretty funny that the priests have a gun in their box of exorcism essentials.

 Nothing really happens for about fifty minutes; We just follow a bunch of insufferable characters around Jerusalem while they do inane party girl shit and some light tourism. At least the city is interesting, I guess. When shit finally hits the fan the night of Yom Kippur, the demons come out and our protagonists go on the run from rarely seen zombies and a zombie kaiju that's stomping on stuff off-screen as the army tries to contain the situation. The film is extremely indebted to Cloverfield, but deeply, irredeemably stupid and uninspired.

 It's one of those movies where absolutely nothing makes sense - one of the tourists has a nervous breakdown and is immediately sent to a mental asylum (which is later explored, and has immediately become one of those spooky derelict horror movie/game asylums over the course of a single  evening's events). Our protagonist consistently makes terrible - just fucking terrible - decisions, which no one else in her group contests successfully despite them being clearly stupid. And there's no coherence to the action even in the short term; A cave might be full of zombie demons one moment, only for them to disappear while some stupid shit goes on, and then they're all back chasing our merry band of idiots.

 I can't really think of anything good to say about this one, other than that it has an interesting backdrop. The effects are mostly ugly, cheap-ish CGI, the direction is artless (although at least you can blame that on the format). The acting is atrocious (the anthropologist in particular is painful to watch) and the script is pure half-arsed bullshit.
 I almost didn't watch this one thanks to its dumb title - should have gone with my gut.

Sea Fever

 From A Dark Song to Oddity, the Irish have neatly bookended the last decade with some of my favorite low-budget horror films. 2019's Sea Fever... doesn't rank anywhere as high, and to be brutally honest I doubt I'll remember much of it in a couple of months. But it's a solid, well-crafted bit of modern nautical horror.

 Siobhan (Hermione Corfield) is a socially awkward marine biology student who books a slot on a fishing trawler to work on her PhD. The ship (the Niamh Cinn Óir, named after a little-known member of the mythical Tuatha De Danaan clan) is fairly small, and its crew of six immediately balks at taking on a red-haired passenger, as it's a sure sign of bad luck. Siobhan balks in turn at their superstition... but guess what? They're all in a horror movie. Superstition turns out to be correct, much like that excellent 'curse' gag in Master and Commander.

 In this case, bad luck means that when the boat ventures into an 'exclusion zone' chasing after a large shoal of fish, it's captured by something that starts causing several spots in the wooden hull to rot away, awash in a weird blue slime. When Siobhan gets in her diving gear and goes out to see what's causing it, she finds a beautiful giant creature that looks like an upside down bioluminescent jellyfish, with its tentacles latched onto the hull.

 The crew manage to get free of the creature's clutches, but soon they find that it's left a virus-like contagion in the ship. And then people start dying.

 It's... all right. I didn't feel the script, which starts out very promising, goes anywhere particularly interesting - the middle section, especially, feels very aimless and unstructured. The characters are relatively well drawn, but once they find that they're trapped in the ship they unravel in ways overtly familiar from a hundred movies like this. The same is true of the situations the crew must work their way through- It's all oddly perfunctory, a little too familiar, and the science is pretty iffy. The bones of a good science thriller are there, but the flesh is all second-hand and not assembled very well, and it lacks the spark that would bring it to life.

 Speaking of flesh: there's quite a decent amount of gore, thanks to the messy way the infection makes an egress out of its human hosts. Nothing too extravagant, but it's solid and it results in a hanful of decent horror moments. The atmosphere is well developed, too; I'm not a fan of Neasa Hardiman's script, but her direction is fairly impressive, especially given the budget she's working with.
 At this point I could stretch my already tortured Frankenstein's monster metaphor and say something like the skin of the creature is well stitched together and the makeup gives it at least a semblance of life. But, dear reader, know that I respect your time too much for such shenanigans. I would never dream of wasting precious minutes of your life with even a single sentence of such pointless drivel, not even were I to deliver it in pointlessly convoluted, flowery prose.

 Right. Where were we? Oh, yeah: the actors are all decent - the cast is rounded out by Connie Nielsen and Dougray Scott as the captain and her second-in-command, plus Olwen Fouéré, Jack Hickey, Ardalan Esmaili and Elie Bouakaze. They're a decent bunch to spend ninety minutes with, even if the script doesn't have a lot of time for them.

 For good or for ill, this one didn't leave much of an impression, but that's probably just me.

Ballerina

  Any doubts about whether Ballerina will be a worthy addition to the John Wick universe are quickly dispelled by its prologue. Not by an early action scene where a bunch of assassins attack a cabin; It's a decent sequence, but not up to the series' ridiculously high standards. No, we know it's a proper John Wick movie because when we first meet the Ballerina (Victoria Comte) she's a just-orphaned, tiny little girl clutching a blood-splattered music box. Meat-headed symbolism, right from the get-go! All it's missing is someone solemnly intoning a world-weary "CONSEQUENCES"... but don't worry, that comes later.

 The little ballerina is taken in by the concierge for the New York Continental hotel for civilized assassins (Ian McShane). He then takes her to the academy for young ballet dancers who are also badass tattooed assassins, and hands her over to the mistress there (Anjelica Huston). If you haven't seen any John Wick movies this will likely make no sense to you, and yes - it's exactly as silly as it sounds.

 There the Ballerina grows up to be Ana De Armas and learns the dual arts of ballet dancing and beating the shit out of people real good. There's some stuff about the dancers being trained to protect people, complete with a silly Slavic mythological connection* - but once the Ballerina graduates she's then shown killing loads of people for money, so I call bullshit on that.

 Anyhow, during the course of her work she runs into one of the assassins that killed her father (they have one of those convenient tatoos/scars that identifies them in a pretty visible place). This sends the Ballerina on an unsanctioned mission against an assassin cult led by a philosophizing asshole (Gabriel Byrne). Things get... pretty nuts, in the best way possible; The script takes the Wickiverse's conceit that every other person is an assassin, and it takes it to its absolute illogical conclusion. The film's last forty minutes or are made up of an escalating series of confrontations - the early stages reminded me of Gymkata**, and it builds up to a staggeringly awesome flamethrower duel that must last something like ten minutes. It is fucking glorious.

Seriously - if they don't get an oscar for this, fuck the oscars.

 The script, by Jay Hatten, was an independent piece written shortly after John Wick 2, and was retrofitted for the series once Lionsgate bought it. It also got Hatten a gig co-writing the latter Wick films, and he used the opportunity to introduce the threads that would lead to Ballerina in Part Parabellum.

 The connection to the assassinating world hurts the movie a little in that by becoming part of a franchise, it loses its potential identity. There are frequent visual callbacks, which include some action gimmicks (a few overhead shots of the action, a fight in a cavernous discotheque) and a lot of the elements of the John Wick world (some of which, at this point, Hatten had helped establish): Pneumatic tubes, the tattooed old lady operators, hidden shops catering to an assassin clientele. I did like that when they show the concierge for another branch of the Continental, it's Anne Parrillaud; Cute action movie homage there.
 The good thing is that within its guard rails it also manages to tweak expectations a little - the script is way more playful than it seems. I loved that one of the bigger massacres in the movie isn't shown at all, we just see someone navigating the aftermath... the action only comes crashing in (literally) just when the camera starts panning out. Beautiful concept, perfectly executed. There's also another fun subversion of a now-standard John Wick gearing up scene, and I cannot overstate how crazy the setting for the whole third act is.

 I've long thought of Len Wiseman as a good action director with bad taste (or luck) for projects, and Ballerina is actually excellent proof of that; Having to work within limits established by a franchise, and having access to one of the best stunt teams in the business lets him rip with near-constant, top-tier action. He flounders a little with the close quarters combat - his editing schemes and blocking are nowhere near as good as Chad Stahelski's (or David Leitch's) and he struggles to capture the action with the clarity the intricate choreography and wince-inducing stunts deserve. He fares a lot better in all the other types of action, of which there's a huge variety. I don't think it reaches the height of the last two Wicks aside from the aforementioned flamethrower cookout (which is an all-timer)... but it comes very close several times.
 Cinematographer Romain Lacourbas also does a good job aping the look of the main series, and manages to expand the palette with some wintry, alpine action later on.

 Ana de Armas looks great, and gets to wear a lot of cool-looking outfits***, but her character is a bit of a blank. And yes, you could say the same of Mr. Wick, but Armas lacks Reeves's presence, world-weariness, and flair for action. She's lithe, and manages some pretty impressive gymnastics, but even when the film insists that she had to learn to 'fight like a girl' (this translates to frequent nut shots, but doesn't really come into play all that much), she's just not badass enough to pull off the character convincingly. I wasn't a fan of The Princess****, but that movie had a better handle in how a small woman might fight off huge grizzled warriors, and Joey King sold her grit much better - Ballerina also puts the protagonist through the wringer, but it feels slightly off.

 So that nagged at me while watching the movie, but we're talking about a series with armour-plated designer suits and people who routinely take on superhuman amounts of punishment. She's definitely fun to watch, and that should be more than good enough for anyone. Please feel free to disregard me.

 Ballerina has a slight but distinct second-hand feel, and the thin connective tissue between all the action won't convince people who aren't in it for the action. On the other hand it's relentlessly paced, loud, and proudly ludicrous, with some truly incredible stunt work, excellent choreographies, and some lovely over-the-top moves. But all this - good and bad - is a moot point, because the movie has a flamethrower fight. And a then water hose versus flame thrower fight (sadly spoiled in the trailer) that looks like a practical-FX version of one of those stupid Harry Potter magic beam fights, but cool. That alone makes this an eleven out of ten.

*: The Kikimora, which these ballerinas call themselves after, are basically house elves. Not as silly as calling the John Wick the Baba Yaga, I guess. John Witch!

**: Just to be clear, this is a good thing.

***: Even a flame-retardant suit looks fashionable.

****: I realize I said exactly the same about Joey King on that one, and I kind of stand by that, but King's acting was nowhere as vulnerable as Armas's here. The main issue in The Princess is still that the protagonist is completely eclipsed by Veronica Ngo.

Bramayugam

 Hey, what about a two-hour and something black and white Indian folk horror epic? I promise it's a good one!

 Bramayugam (which translates as Age of Madness) tells the story of Thevan (Arjun Ashokan), an ex-slave escaping the destruction of his former master's estate in some unspecified conflict. While travelling in the jungle he narrowly escapes the attentions of a Yakshi, a murderous nature spirit, and stumbles upon a dilapidated manor house. There, the cook (Sidharth Bharathan) takes him to the master of the manor - the sorcerer Kodumon Potti (Mammootty); When the old man finds out that Thevan is a folk singer of the panaan, he delightedly takes him in.

 Saved from starvation and the dangers of the wilderness, Thevan soon finds his situation in the mansion is almost as precarious. His host is a fickle lecher who seems to eye him with alternating paternalism, contempt, and hunger. The cook, meanwhile, is almost comically passive aggressive towards both Potti and Thevan. There are also stories of former guests who displeased the master, forbidden chambers, some mysterious entity chained up in the cellar... all that good stuff.

 It's a simple story that could definitely do with some tightening up, but the filmmaking and the characters are strong to support it. Mammootty, in particular, plays a magnificent asshole - it's pretty easy to see why the film gives him one of those rock star entrances where everything pauses as the camera pans from his feet upwards. Ashokan is also very good as the meek Thevan; you can almost hear the gears whirring in his head as the precariousness of his situation sets in.

 Writer/director Rahul Sadasivan and cinematographer mount a handsome production; The black and white isn't quite as visually striking as in Egger's The Lighthouse (another story centered around small number of perpetually sweaty men warily circling each other), but it still succeeds in giving the film a lot of character. There's very little in the way of special effects and next to no bloodshed, but the glimpses that we get of otherworldly stuff are very effective. The film looks gorgeous. It sounds great, as well. 

 The script is easy to follow, but it's hard to say how much I'm missing thanks to the cultural distance, both in the mythical and temporal realms. Power corrupts is a pretty universal message, but I'm left wondering if, for example, Thevan belonging to the Panaan (a historically oppressed people, Wikipedia tells me), carries other points. And it might give the film's ending a bit more meaning, I suspect.

 But the film remains perfectly enjoyable without that dimension. It's not particularly scary, but it's extremely atmospheric, with a great, pervasive sense of menace and many elegant, fairy-tale-like story beats. Recommended.

Broadcast Signal Intrusion

 It is 1999, and James (Harry Shum Jr.) works at the archival section of some Chicago TV station. It's a lonely job: transferring tapes to CDs all evening, the only communication with another human (his supervisor, who works the other shift) handled via sticky notes. All this suits James just fine - he's still a mess after the disappearance of his wife Hanna four years prior.

 Predictably, he doesn't seem to have much of a personal life, either; his only activities seem to be repairing video equipment in his spare time and going to a support group for bereaved partners. So when he discovers the creepy titular Broadcast Signal Intrusion (BSI from now on) while transferring some news programme, he's got nothing better to do than to start poking around to see if he can find something out about it.

 A BSI is just what it sounds like; a pirate signal "highjacking" the daily programming, replacing whatever was on with home-made content. Primitive trolling. This one consists of a woman wearing a blank latex mask moving robotically, while electronic noises blare in the background. It's creepy enough, I guess - I thought it was trying too hard to be weird, but I suppose that makes it look authentic.

 James, who clearly needs a hobby, dives head-first into a series of rabbit holes, led on by (what else?) the internet - or rather, BBSs: in a cute detail, because the footage was originally released in the mid-90s, all the relevant information is still hosted on bulletin boards. 

 Morbid curiosity soon turns personal when he finds out a theory that links the intrusions (of which there are more than one) to missing women... and one of the intrusions took place the day after James's wife disappeared.

 And of course, weird stuff starts happening. James' place gets trashed. Some weird people contact him and some other weirdos follow him around. And all that's on top of the BSI footage itself, which keeps yielding additional information under close scrutiny. Soon James, with the help of a mysterious woman (Kelley Mack), hits the road, trying to track the mysterious TV pirate. It put me very much in mind of a 70s paranoid thriller (with some surreal elements); And sure enough, director Jacob Gentry mentions Alan J. Pakula as an inspiration.

 It's all really well handled, and the mystery and subsequent investigation is very engaging for a while. And therein lies a problem, because the film has an agenda, and it conflicts with the whole investigative aspect. I love the conclusion the film eventually arrives at, but it requires reframing what came before in a way that can be more than a little frustrating; It's a fairly big problem that I can't really go into without some major spoilers. Just be aware that you may need to be patient with some nonesense for a while.

 The director acquits himself nicely; this is a great-looking indie movie* with an excellent paranoid atmosphere courtesy of cinematographer Scott Thiele and an ominous soundtrack from Ben Lovett. I'm not a fan of the acting - Shum is a little too keen to let us know just how much pain his character is bottling up at all times - but he's not too bad otherwise.

 The script, by Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall is respectably willing to remain obtuse to the end, and its use of obsolete technology is pretty endearing - any movie that mentions phreaking ("with a ph-") is all right by me. There's some stilted dialog, and at least one instance the old technology fetish gets a little too on-the-nose (gratuitous Betamax was better than VHS discussions ahoy), but it's all pretty enjoyable if you're an old nerd and it shouldn't be too off-putting for the rest of humanity.

 So it's another hard one to recommend. If you're willing to meet it in its own terms, though, and give it the benefit of doubt until it has its say, I think it's very much worth your time. I liked it a lot.

*: It even includes a pretty solidly shot fight -  of the sad/pathetic kind, though.

La Chimera

 La Chimera is a deeply lovely Italian comedy/drama hybrid that's suffused with strangeness, mythic undertones and some interesting themes. Not bad for a movie that takes more than an hour to lay its cards on the table.

 Arthur (Josh O'Connor) is a British expat somewhere in Italy, sometime in the '80s. He cuts a dashing, standoffish figure in his cream suit. It's enough to make the local girls swarm to him, although his surly disposition quickly scares them off.
 The man is a fallen archeologist, just out of prison for tomb robbery. We follow him for a while as he visits his old home (a run-down shack in the shadow of a huge medieval wall), goes to visit the mother (Isabella Rossellini) of an old flame, and is accosted by his old partners in crime - a jolly gaggle of misfits who call themselves the Tombaroli - until he accepts to join them again.

 The thing is that Arthur is critical to their operation, which sees them roam the countryside looking for Etruscan burial sites to despoil: The archeologist is an eerily effective dowser who can sense nearby tombs. Conflict finally arrives surprisingly late in the movie, as his nose for treasure leads him to a spectacular find. Its fate - along with a tentative romance with a local woman (Carol Duarte) the film has been patiently building - sends the archeologist into an existential crisis.

 It's a slow, slow character study that happens to be charming as hell and pretty funny in that boisterous, slice-of-life Italian way while mostly steering clear of melodrama in a way that requires more than a little patience. But writer/director Alice Rohrwacher adds a lot more to it: a red thread (almost literally!) runs through the movie, serving as both an incarnation of the protagonist's restlessness and a nod towards Theseus and Ariadne, and the story also references the Orpheus myth. Hell, there's even a couple of musicians that follow the Tombaroli and sing a couple of songs that comment on the action like a Greek chorus. All that on top of many slightly surrealist (or magic realist, I guess) touches.

My favorite movie poster in ages. I mean, look at this thing - it's glorious!

 Arthur clings to memories of a happier time, as does Rosellini's character. Italia, Arthur's new love interest, unknowingly articulates the Tombaroli's justification for stealing historic artifacts (it they belong to everyone, they belong to no one?) and later turns it on its head. It's not a hugely deep movie, and there are some misfires such as a scene where a powerful woman compares the Tombaroli with tiny cogs in a huge machine... and then proceeds to frame Arthur between huge, gyrating engines. But on the main it's all pulled off with grace and wit; There's quite a bit going on here.

 The filmmaking is beautiful - lots of film grain and bright primary colours - and Rohrwacher and DP Hélène Louvart sneak in some clever camera moves and some fun touches like slightly undercranking a  ridiculous police chase. The acting is also incredible - O'Connor is incredible, as is Duarte, and most of the side characters are given memorable performances.

 As with so many of these movies that scratch deeply personal itches (eww!), I find it really hard to gauge how well it would play for others. As always, I can only try to articulate why I feel it might be worth your time. If any of the above sounds appealing, you can probably do a lot worse.

Redline

  Here's the plot for Redline: Sweet JP (Takuya Kimura) really wants to win the Redline, an interstellar racing championship, all the while nursing a crush for rival racer Sonoshee (Yū Aoi). He blows his chance to qualify, but gets lucky when two other racers pull out for the championship and he gets voted into the final lineup.

 Unfortunately, the reason people are pulling out is because the race is going to take place on Roboworld - the home planet of race of fun-hating fascist cyborgs (there's a redundant statement for you), a whole race of Galactus wannabes that would like nothing more than to crush anyone who lays rubber on their homeland, in the name of peace.

 And... that's pretty much it. There's a corrupt agent and an interlude in a demilitarized nearby moon where the racers mingle and prepare their rides ahead of the race, but the plot on this movie is minimal; The focus is squarely on the insane detail spilling from every frame. Not just on the action, which is frequent, furious and beautifully animated - but even quiet, minor scenes such as the one where JP tries to buy cigarettes is a visual treat where we get to see the weird nervature on alien currency, a weird, funky rabid merchant, and some gorgeous Mignola-esque corridors in the background.

 The art style on this thing is gorgeous - both scratchy and detailed - and the visual imagination is staggering. The story barely hangs together, but that doesn't matter because this movie is first and foremost about looking cool, and that's something that Redline does exceptionally well.

 Everything gets thrown in the blender. You've got a rockabilly protagonist and his zeppelin-breasted object of desire (who is shown topless while she complains about the angles the news choose to show her from). There's a magic-using race of hot space elves whose racing candidates also function as a J-pop group, and two intergalactic bounty hunters whose visual inspiration clicked for me halfway through the movie, making me laugh very loudly. The last third of the movie is a protracted battle scene that includes the expected racing shenanigans, but also mechs, Robotech-style flying battles, and a giant baby-shaped energy monster. It's a pummeling mix of driving (sorry!) techno, eye-watering visuals and a serviceable but surprisingly sweet-natured storyline. Exhausting, but glorious.

 This is the closest I've seen any studio come to the lush animation of Ghibli and classic Disney, and it's all in service of bringing all sorts of cool stuff to life under the guise of something I'd vaguely describe as the love child of Speed Racer and Wacky Races. I don't really read a lot of comics or manga, so I could only identify a few the many, many references here (Kirby for the Roboworld crowd, some Tesuka, and even a huge spider-limbed nod to master Miyazaki) - I expect proper comic and anime fans will have a field day playing spot-the reference here.
 But even without that dimension, it just looks gorgeous, and the designs are phenomenal and often hilarious. I mean, look at this guy:

  Redline is pure joy, from start to finish. A lush love letter to everything its creators (director Takeshi Koike, with some heavy input from producer Katsuhito Ishii and others from Studio Madhouse) hold dear. It reportedly took them seven years to bring it to fruition and it nearly bankrupted them, so the least you can do is spend a hundred minutes taking it in. Trust me, it's worth it.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter

 There's so little nautical horror out there, that's it's kind of a shame to write off this handsome, well-crafted movie as "eh, it's pretty solid, I guess."

 The Last Voyage of the Demeter is famous for being based on a single chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula - the one where the novel takes a break from its epistolary format and instead transcribes the contents of the captain's log for the doomed vessel Dracula hired to make his overseas voyage to English shores.
 Appropriately enough, the film is better known here in the UK for completely disappearing after its US release, only to wash up without fanfare on the barren coasts of Amazon prime a year later. Vampires are no match against the true horror that is international licensing rights.

 Corey Hawkins stars as Clemens, a doctor who signs on to the crew of the Demeter to seek passage back to the UK after a bad job interview. Once on the ship he finds a woman (Aisling Franciosi) entombed on one of the many wooden containers in the hold, rescues her, and nurses her back to health. Unbeknownst to him and the rest of the crew, the woman was to be the good count's meal... and so everyone becomes fair game instead.

 It's a very serious movie - dour, even, which fits director André Øvredal's sensibilities to a tee. Technically, it's impeccable; The ship is beautifully realised, and a prelude set at a Romanian port shows off some pretty high-end production values - horror or otherwise. Tom Stern's cinematography, meanwhile, beautifully captures the allure of the nautical setting during the daytime, and drips with atmosphere once the monster starts prowling above and below deck.

 Said monster is, some slightly dodgy CGI aside, pretty good: Good old Vlad at his most bestial, basically looking like a leather gargoyle. His methods are very enjoyably brutal (I'd recommend a visit to doesthedogdie.com if you have any such triggers), and Øvredal gives him a few really effective horror moments and some neat moves.

 Sadly there's just not enough there... and as shiny as all the surfaces are, they don't manage to cover a lack of anything of substance underneath. Writers Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz (and some others along the way) provide a plot that is both basic and generic, with a heavy helping of really dumb decisions. You'd think that in the more than three decades the script spent being rewritten in development hell, someone would have thought of some justification as to why the crew, once they figure out what's going on, don't use the daylight to their advantage... but no such luck. There's the odd good line (The captain gets a killer line when discussing steam boats), but other than that the film completely relies on its budget, technical aspects, the setting, and some excellent acting (Besides Hawkins, the mellifluous Liam Cunningham and a brooding David Dastmalchian make a big impression as the captain and his very slavic second in command) to do all the heavy lifting.

 And maybe that would have worked on a shorter, punchier movie. But at nearly two hours, the good just barely outweighs the bad.

Close Range

 A generic name for a fairly generic movie. For those who keep an eye on modern, low-budget action, it stars Scott Adkins and is directed by Isaac Florentine. For those who don't know them, it's got a poster with a giant gruff guy with a gun towering over some hoodlums. There's a big sniper scope painted behind him, a smaller explosion sending a car flying (which never happens in the movie) and a helicopter in the background (which never makes an appearance).

 That's fine, it's aspirational; It feels like a movie that would have included explosions and helicopters, if it had the money to put them in. Truth-ish in advertising. Unless you expected Adkins to actually be giant-sized, swatting helicopters out of the sky and kaiju-ing his way through a bunch of gunmen; I can't really help you if that's what you got out of that poster, but I agree that would have been more interesting.

 The big (not literally) gruff guy in the poster is Colt McReady (Adkins), an ex-soldier badass who left the forces after disobeying dishonourable orders, but not before assaulting his (dishonourable, presumably) superior officer. Since then he's been doing some sort of (honourable, presumably) criminal stuff. An opening crawl explicitly compares him to ronin, which makes sense given his military background, but less sense when you realize the movie is very much going for a Western feel.

 We first meet McReady as he kills a few dozen people in a Mexican building while rescuing a woman (Madison Lawlor). It's an excellent running battle, well-filmed and featuring a fun, if slightly subdued (for Adkins's standards) choreography. 

 We later find out the woman is McReady's niece, who was taken by a cartel because her deadbeat father tried to screw them over in a drug deal. When they're back they, plus her mom (Caitlin Keats) try to run away before the inevitable cartel reprisal, but they're held by a corrupt local sheriff (Nick Chinlund).
 So the cartel boss (Tony Perez) and a dozen or so interchangeable henchmen arrive and lay siege to the house, trying to kill McReady and retrieve one of those convenient USB drives with critical drug business information.
 There are some flourishes, but... that's basically it. Close Range is a very meat-and-potatoes low-budget action movie: uncomplicated, unpretentious, kind of dumb, well-executed. The moment-to-moment action is excellent - gritty but with some acrobatic flourishes, and it's got a few ideas and memorable images, such as pitting Adkins's martial arts against a speeding SUV or a very painful-looking stab to the taint. Lots of people shooting through walls, too, a little-loved action trope I tend to enjoy.
 Speaking of which: The film features some wonderful, wholly practical squib and explosive work to give its frequent shootouts more heft; After what feels like a steady diet of middling CGI substitutions on that department lately, I can't overstate what a pleasure it is to get a full meal like this.

A pantry fight results in a rain of cheerios. As it should.

 As good as the action is, it doesn't flow very well; There's no drama to it, and most of the final third of the movie feels like people shooting the shit out of a house without hitting anyone for ages. It looks great, but the film feels oddly drawn out. That's exacerbated by some pretty egregious filler and some pretty weird choices: There are a few scenes early with the cartel where we get a hilarious amount of reaction shots of various thugs reacting to their boss chewing out and then murdering an employee, for example, and soon afterwards we're introduced to each one of these goons in turn, complete with a freeze frame and a helpful name tag. That'd be cool if they were interesting characters, or if they had even a tiny bit of colour, but that's not the case.
 Out of the great occidental action VOD director triad, Florentine remains a distant third favorite (after John Hyams and Jesse V. Johnson); He's got great technical chops, but I don't think I've found any of his movies convincing in the drama department after Undisputed 2. He needs a Michael Jai White-level presence to offset his corniness.

 The script (by Shane Dax Taylor and Chad Law) doesn't really come up with much to give the film any personality, either, and the dialog is often atrocious. Adkins is fine - this is hardly a challenge for him, as he mostly has to act angry all the time (his American accent sounds convincing to my ears, but we already knew that). The acting quality from everyone else varies a lot, unfortunately, but I guess that's not a huge strike against this sort of thing.

 Solid, in other words. A bit disappointing that it fails to gather any steam, but worth it for the different kinds of kind of low-key mayhem everyone gets up to.  

Feast II: Sloppy Seconds

 Holy shit, what a way to piss away the little goodwill you got from your first movie.

 Feast II: Sloppy Seconds loses absolutely everything that made the first film watchable and proceeds to waste our time with a beyond pointless story that quickly goes nowhere, uninteresting characters, and edgelord provocations that are so poorly executed that you can't help but to make fun of the people behind it rather than be shocked.
It's a film that's so tasteless in their tastelessness, so ugly in its ugliness that I'm left struggling to figure out why I should spend any effort writing a few paragraphs about it - and lamenting the time I wasted watching it. 

 The movie picks up shortly after the events of the first one. A gang of lesbian bikers arrive at a small town after it's been attacked by a bunch of rape monsters, there to hunt a guy from the first movie. When the creatures attack, a small bunch of survivors* must band together, bicker endlessly amongst each other, and maybe survive the night. Or not.

 Because you know what? The film doesn't care about storytelling, plot or characters, so neither should you. The script (again by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan) only has a few gags in mind, and it incorporates them into its story in the shoddiest way possible. So at one point one of the film's cast of asshats decides he needs to do a creature autopsy. He's not a doctor, there's nothing he could conceivably get out of it - but the brain trust behind this turdfest wanted to have a long, long scene of a corpse posthumously jizzing on its female cast... so monster autopsy it is.
 Want to have a (predictable) gag where a baby dies? Never mind that the first movie had a decently shocking child death. Here, instead of properly weaving the baby into the story, they have him suddenly wake up and start crying a full day into the creature invasion. And then the joke itself is drawn out into an overlong, mind-bogglingly ugly-looking sequence. Audacity alone will not carry your jokes, folks.

 The amount of bad decisions from everyone involved is staggering. Gone is the propulsive, simple survival story of the first movie, along with its production values and excellent practical effects; They're replaced with a series of disconnected, arbitrary incidents and extremely shoddy-looking CGI. John Gulager's direction, meanwhile, hasn't improved in the slightest, so the result predictably looks cheap, ugly and uninteresting.

 There's exactly one joke in the whole movie where the delivery isn't botched to hell**. Other than that, this is just plain cynical, uninspired, deeply unfunny shit.
 There's a Feast III out there, but after this one you'd need to pay me to watch it.

 

*: The cast includes two Mexican little people luchadores, because... comedy, I guess.

**: If you must know, the bit where they're trying to work out how much of the grandmother they need to get rid of. I never said it was a great joke, but at least they don't ruin it.

Ninja Terminator

 Godfrey Ho's name is synonymous with legendary terrible movies. The guy was so prolific, and his output so truly awful that his name is one of the few I remember from my martial-arts watching era as a kid; I didn't recognize Chang Cheh by name then, nor Ching Siu-Tung - but whenever uncle Godfrey's name popped up at the beginning of a movie, there would be a collective groan.

 The insanely prolific writer/director/producer started his career at the Shaw Brothers, but he soon branched out and formed a company with the like-minded Joseph Lai called IFD. There their MO would be to cheaply get the rights for some random Asian movie, cut it into pieces and shoot some supplementary footage with a stable of slumming western actors*; They'd then splice everything and re-dub it into a poorly stitched hybrid of old and new material which they call some random combination of buzzwords in a bid to win over the western markets. And hey, it worked; I rented several of their movies back in the 90s.

 Ninja Terminator follows this process to the letter. The 1984 South Korean film The Uninvited Guest Of The Star Ferry would provide the source material, and Ho would then append additional footage of grown men skulking around in pijamas. The result is an astoundingly bizarre fever dream, a perfect storm of incompetence and chutzpah. If the concept of 'so bad it's... still bad, but also funny as hell' appeals to you at all, this is essential viewing.

 Just how bad is it? Well, to be perfectly honest the Korean half of the equation is not bad at all. Cheesy as all hell, and probably pretty dumb even before Ho imposed his "vision" upon it, but it looks like it was a decently fun action flick. It stars Jaguar Wong (Jack Lang), a cocky, assholish cop who goes up against a crime syndicate led by a heroin dealer in a beyond ridiculous He-Man wig (Hwang Jang-lee).

 The plot has been completely rewritten and re-cut to incorporate Ho's ninja shenanigans, but the fights are both frequent and very good, with fairly complex choreographies that succeed in giving Jaguar a recognizable personality. They don't quite stack up with what folks were doing over at Hong Kong in that same time frame, but it's a honorable effort, and Lang has a great screen presence even if his character is an unlikeable dick.

 So half of the movie is a perfectly enjoyable martial arts police actioner. And then there's Ho's contribution: an incompetent, obviously tacked-on ninja yarn that frequently had me in stitches.

 The 'story' concerns an evil ninja empire that has finally reunited the three parts of a statuette that grants invulnerability. Concerned that it will be used for evil, three of the ninjas (Richard Harrison, Jonathan Watts and a third one that I think is never shown) defect and steal parts of the statue.

 The evil ninja master sends a red ninja (the ubiquitous Phillip Ko) to try and retrieve the statue pieces. He kills off the anonymous third ninja, and in response one of the good ninjas - named, I shit you not, Ninja Master Harry - calls Jaguar Wong from the other movie to get him to protect his dead comrade's sister.

 To give him a bit more gravitas, all of Ninja Master Harry's calls are placed from a Garfield phone. This... fucking... movie.

 So there's your link; In the Ninja Terminator version, Jaguar Wong is not a cop trying to stop a heroin smuggling syndicate while trying to protect an old flame, he's doing the bidding of a secretive cabal of ninjas who spend their free time bowing down to a chintzy cheap prop like an otaku venerating a bust of his favorite anime waifu.

 All the Ninja hijinks are categorized by wall-to-wall incompetence, terrible acting, stilted action, gratuitous cartwheeling, incoherent plotting and all sorts of ludicrous, hilarious touches. Here's a short, non-comprehensive list to give you a taste of the sort of batshit craziness you can expect:

- Ninja Master Harry's wife gets attacked by crabs while trying to cook them; His husband protects her by throwing a kunai at one of them. Cue a shot of a poor crab walking around with a blade stuck in its back. In case the animal cruelty doesn't provide enough drama, this scene has multiple dramatic zooms.

- Ninja Master Harry demonstrates his prowess with a katana by slicing a watermelon. It's such a thrilling sequence that another ninja master repeats it later on.

- The Evil Ninja Empire delivers ultimatums by VHS tapes borne by... a tiny, dime-store wind up robot toy. The robot (like the Garfield phone) has a surprising amount of screen time.

- Here's a short image sequence of a ninja master receiving an ultimatum from the bad guys. Imagine it set to the most overblown music possible, complete with sci-fi bleep bloop robot sounds:

 And there is so much more. Right up to a hilarious final shot, Ninja Terminator is a gold mine for this sort of shit. I have no idea if anyone involved possessed any self-awareness whatsoever; Is the Garfield phone Ninja Master Harry uses to communicate with the other movie a self-consciously ridiculous touch, or did they think that it would go down well with American audiences? I have no idea, and I don't care. Death of the author and all that - bottom line is, it made me laugh. Good on them if they did it on purpose, but given how shoddy this whole endeavour is it's hard to give anyone involved any credit.

 The links between the two movies-within-the-movie are tenuous, but sometimes pretty involved; I have to give Ho credit for that one scene where Ninja Master Harry and his wife watch part of Jaguar's story on a (robot-delivered!) VHS tape. The way Ho's script ties itself into knots to link both stories together just adds to the overwhelming schadenfreude.

 It's so bad it's glorious and if you're in any way inclined to enjoy this sort of shit, it is a fucking delight. The whole thing is available on youtube and, to be honest, given the way Ho exploited his stars and source material, pirating this is probably the best way to watch it. Gather a group of friends, maybe some alcohol and/or chemical assistance, and your night is sorted.

 

 *: This was standard practice for American re-releases of Godzilla and other Japanese movies; Corman's AIP indulged in this sort of thing too.