Whistle (2025)

New kid at school Chrys (Dafne Keen) finds an ancient Mesoamerican whistle in her school locker. Soon, someone makes the mistake of blowing it, cursing all the teens present, who are now being haunted and killed by their future deaths in various more or less imaginative ways. Hooray for them, I suppose.

Despite a theoretically decent enough cast of young actors and in Corin Hardy a director who knows his way around around a mid-budget horror set piece (his The Nun being one of the few Conjuringverse movies I genuinely appreciate), this tale of teens cursed by a Mayan whistle (the Internet talks about an Aztec death whistle, but the film quite explicitly says Mayan – it’s nonsense in both regards anyhow) is as dire as everyone says it is.

Owen Egerton’s script is a total mess, lacking consistency and even the kind of out-there logic you can easily get away with in supernatural horror, and instead features wonky characterisation and character motivation, as well as a completely messy time line. And not in the classic Italian way of weirdness I delight in, but in the “we don’t actually give a crap, it’s just a horror movie anyhow” kind of way I particularly do not. Nothing here makes sense – hell, even the inscription on the whistle is in our Latin alphabet (and wouldn’t be something you could translate via an Internet translator, come to that), and what’s worse, nothing in the film carries any weight of mood or thematic connection.

What’s left are bits and pieces cobbled together from various teen horrors, and signifiers of It Follows, Final Destination and Smile that not only make the dangerous mistake of reminding me of much better movies but also make it clear that nobody involved in the production actually understood what they were trying to imitate.

But to finish on the only positive note I can come up with about this mess: I did genuinely appreciate how simply normal the film treats the fact its heroic lead romance is a Lesbian one.

Shelter (2026)

Mason, a man with a mysterious violent past because he’s played by Jason Statham, is hiding away alone on a pretty pathetic fallacy-prone Scottish island (actually portrayed by an Irish island, perhaps caused by a bout of whisky-based confusion). His only contact to the outside world are supply runs a man we’ll later learn to be an old friend makes for him. Said old friend also tends to bring his niece, the otherwise orphaned Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) with him on these runs. Not that Mason interacts with them, mind you – he stays in his former lighthouse, looking down, drinking, and being manly and sad.

Then, two catastrophes follow shortly after one another to shake up everyone’s life: First, Mason’s buddy is killed in a storm, and he saves and takes in Jessie, if she wants to or not. While the two are slowly warming to each other, the hermit’s former boss, publicly disgraced MI-5 boss Manafort (an evil Bill Nighy!), gets wind of our hero’s location and uses his old contacts, some manipulation, and his illegal electronic surveillance network to get Mason and the inconvenient as a witness Jessie killed. Clearly, their working relationship didn’t end on great terms.

The thing is, Mason is rather more difficult to kill than Manafort might like, particularly when he’s also needed to protect a child from harm, and does have some old contacts of his own.

Historically, I have never really loved Jason Statham’s body of work, but like an old, comfy, hairless, shoe, he has grown on me during the years. There’s a highly likeable quality to an actor who understands his strengths and his limitations in range and just proceeds to work inside them, at least from my perspective. Of course, the last two Statham vehicles, the insufferably stupid The Beekeeper and the MAGA-hat-wearing A Working Man, were still terrible movies with little entertainment value.

Shelter is more like it. Directed by variable journeyman director Ric Roman Waugh, this is a very standard back to basics “hardass protects young girl” kind of film, with a few accidental (?) jibes against the surveillance state, and a good handful of straightforward and effective action sequences. I found myself particularly enjoying the action here because it isn’t attempting to be crazy, or big, or particularly loud, but looks and feels like the product of a kind of sure craftsmanship that fits an aging Statham better than any attempt to get back to Crank.

And, though the Stat is a limited actor, a mix of experience with this kind of material, actual screen presence and some great chemistry with his young co-star Breathnach, do sell the relationship between these two, even if it is built on clichés. So much so, I found myself caring about the action not just because I like to watch action scenes in my action movies (who’d have thunk) but because I also bought into the film’s emotional stakes. More people directing Statham should try this approach.

As it stands, to me, this is a return to form for Statham. Or perhaps I should say a return to making the kind of movies I like to see Statham in.

R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead (2025)

Following the in today’s grief-struck horror mood obligatory death of the father of the family, Cassie (Kendra Anderson) and her sons, seventeen-year old Finn (Seth Isaac Johnson) and thirteen-year old Sam (Bean Reid) move to a small farming community in what I can’t help but call the sticks.

Sam is particularly unhappy, not just because he’s a kid in puberty who has lost his father and is moving town, but also because he feels more than just a little excluded from the closer, easier, relationship between Cassie and Finn. As kids do, he acts out. Unfortunately, he decides to steal the annual “Prized Pumpkin” (actually an ugly thing nobody would want to eat, or even look at) of the farmer the locals somehow see as responsible for the town’s agricultural luck turning to the better some years ago. Finn, who is a perfectly good brother, decides to help Sam avoid some nastiness with the farmer by bringing the pumpkin back for him the night of the deed.

Alas, Finn has a rather nasty supernatural encounter on the farm and doesn’t return home. Worse still, none of the grown-ups, not even Cassie, can remember Finn ever existed at all, and can’t even perceive any proof of his existence. As the Sheriff’s daughter Becka (Adeline Lo), who had already befriended Sam and warned him against having anything to do with the farm, explains, this sort of thing happens somewhat regularly in town – kids disappear, people who hit the age of eighteen or are above it forget them, crops grow. She’s willing to help Sam in his attempt to get his brother back, whatever has happened to him. Also involved will be the local hermit Rusty (Matty Finochio), a nasty protective scarecrow thing with very bad breath, and one of those grimoires of the facebook type.

Tubi Originals tend to be less than great movies, often lacking in verve and cleverness as much as in budget. Jem Garrard’s Pumpkinhead – based on the favourite kids and teen horror writer of a lot of North Americans of a certain age – is only a bit lacking in the last one, but never lets this lack of funds stop it from doing basically everything right for the kind of kids horror film old-ass people like me can enjoy as well.

The characters are simply but effectively drawn, the young actors are doing pretty well – Lo could certainly have an actual career in front of her – and the script finds the fine balance between goofy humour, proper horror, and knowing winks to tropes and genre conventions. “You don’t come to the forest hermit for a straight answer” is pretty great, to take the most obvious example for the last one.

The film isn’t afraid to be a bit grotesque when it needs to be – the final pumpkin head form is not something I’d have expected in a contemporary kids’ movie made for the US market, even if it is actually made in Canada like this one, and the scarecrow thing is genuinely creepy, as well as enthusiastically played.

Pumpkinhead is worthwhile in other regards as well. Character motivations and their emotional background make sense (at least for the kind of world this takes place in), and the film clearly knows what it is doing when it is talking about love and friendship by example instead of moral. It’s not terribly deep, but it’s genuine and believable in context. Because it does emotions this well, it also manages to sneak in an ending that actually becomes darker the more you look at it in context of what the characters fear and desire here, not the usual horror movie bullshit ending but a genuine price to be paid.

Visually, this is nothing fancy, but Garrard knows how to create mood and tension, and works around the budgetary constraints of the production really well. There’s nothing here that seems truncated, missing, or undeveloped, which leaves R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead as one of my surprise highlights of this Halloween season.

Out Come the Wolves (2024)

Sophie (Missy Peregrym) and her fiancée Nolan (Damon Runyan) have come to Sophie’s old cabin home in the sticks so Nolan can have an actual hunting experience he feels he needs for an article he’s writing. Sophie isn’t into hunting anymore and has even turned vegan, so she has asked her childhood friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky) to take Nolan out hunting for a day while she stays at the cabin. Kyle comes complete with a never resolved and pretty damn unhealthy longing for Sophie and an alcohol problem you can practically smell through the screen.

Tensions mount between the three even the evening before the hunt, and it is this very human shittiness that’ll make the situation much worse when the hunters encounter a pack of very hungry wolves in the woods and things devolve from there in exactly the ways you’d fear them to.

Most people, me most certainly included, go into animal attack movies for the animal attacks, and expect the human business to be relegated to filler and other things you really want a movie to get over with to get to the meat of proceedings.

That’s not at all the case with Adam MacDonald’s Out Come the Wolves – here, it’s the naturalistic portrayal of a very human situation that might have ended in violence even without the wolves that drags you in and hold you. The actor trio clearly understand this, and so really get their teeth into their roles and the performances, treating the human business as a serious drama that’s just as important as all the wolf fighting later on. This creates an impressive amount of tension before the hunt starts, and leaves a viewer with the proper amount of dread, the more cosmicist sibling of suspense. It is not at all about the question that things will go wrong, it’s only how they will go wrong. If you want, you can even read the wolves more as a hungry metaphor bringing to life all the repressed feelings of the characters, nature, particularly the red in tooth and claw kind of the hunt, bringing out the worst in people.

MacDonald presents the action part of the film with an admirable relentlessness, a direct brutality that makes a wonderful contrast to the cold beauty of his nature photography. There’s a sense of desperation to the final act most films of this kind can’t hope to grasp – but then, most films of this kind don’t put this much effort into creating actual characters to confront nature (the outside one as well as their own).

In the Lost Lands (2025)

In a post-apocalyptic future that has turned into something of a weird fiction style fantasy world. Ageless witch Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) plies her trade in what is apparently the only city left – a hellhole of slavery and inquisition-based religion ruled over by a by now very old Overlord. Alys is hunted by the inquisition, but manages to escape regularly from their clutches, and even the gallows, accidentally putting revolutionary ideas into the heads of the enslaved populace on the way.

For reasons never explained, Alys is bound to fulfil any wish somebody pays her for. The fulfilment of these wishes, as she warns as a matter of course, doesn’t usually work out as pleasantly as her customers hope.

Surprisingly even to Alys, the Overlord’s Queen (Amara Okereke) comes by with a very specific, and somewhat peculiar, wish – she wants to acquire the power of a shapeshifter. To find one to rob of his powers, Alys has to travel into the Lost Lands, the dangerous wastelands surrounding the city. She needs a guide through these places, and chooses the drifter Boyce (Dave Bautista), who just happens to be the secret lover of the Queen. On their travels, fighting their way through various dangers and hunted by a train carrying Alys’s arch enemy, the Inquisition’s main Enforcer (Arly Jover), they do of course fall in love.

In between, we pop in on the Queen and her palace intrigues.

Here I am again, enjoying a Paul W.S. Anderson movie. He’s not always making it easy – his insistence on casting his wife Jovovich who still can’t act her way out of a paper bag is certainly a particular stumbling block for me. But say what you want about the guy, he’s clearly doing the auteur thing where he puts all of his personal obsessions into his movies, and doesn’t give a crap if they are en vogue or not. He’s very much like Wes Anderson in that way, but with more monsters.

Visually, tonight’s Anderson has clearly become fascinated by the colours grey and brown, going for a wasteland so desaturated and woozily shot, the insane spotlight glint in Bautista’s eyes coming with its own lens flare tends to be the most colourful thing on screen. And yes, in Anderson’s world, eye glints have their own intense – and I mean intense - lens flare effect, as have torches, skulls and everything else the polishing-mad wasteland maid I assume roams the place just off-camera has polished to a sheen.

Ill-advised and ugly as it may be, this is certainly a conscious aesthetic decision, making the supposedly ugly post-apocalyptic wasteland indeed pretty damn ugly.

As ugly as his world looks, and as grimdark as things get, there’s a palpable sense of fun here that also made Monster Hunter rather enjoyable. The monsters, the incredible gothic train, the fucking werewolf, the mediaeval Mad Max costumes are all things Anderson clearly has a blast with getting on screen. Quite a bit of that enjoyment makes its way at least to this viewer. Plus, I always appreciate Bautista. See also, rule of cool.

Three Films Make A Post: Their thoughts can kill!

Scanners (1981): This is sometimes treated as one of the lesser movies in David Cronenberg’s incredible run as a director from 1977 to 1996, but there’s so much to love in this version of the 70s conspiracy thriller as seen through the eyes of Philip K. Dick. Performances that are spot on or so weird they actually are spot on exactly because of their weirdness (Stephen Lack), a plot that starts in the realm of semi-plausible spy-fi but drifts further and further into the realm of the outright surreal, and a direction whose by now proverbial cool eye is all that stands between the material and utter, screaming lunacy. Plus, exploding heads are inherently cool (unless it’s your own head exploding).

Closed Circuit aka Circuito chiuso (1978): This Italian TV movie by Giuliano Montaldo does overstay its welcome a little, so that its turn from the locked room murder mystery to the outright fantastical doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could in a more concentrated form, but there’s much to recommend it: a clear love for the cinema experience of the time grounded in an ability to actually show the way cinemas at this time and place worked procedurally, a cast that has fun with the range of characters (all with secrets that have nothing to do with the case, of course) on offer, and the joy of seeing that most mock-rational of genres (as much as I have grown to enjoy golden age style murder mysteries, their ideas about logic and reason are utter nonsense) break down into the realm of the kind of fantasy that admits it is one.

The Kingdom of Jirocho aka Jirocho sangokushi (1963): This is the first film in the second cycle of films Masahiro Makino made about yakuza boss Shimizu Jirocho (Koji Tsuruta) – a real historical figure that had turned into something of a folk hero, and the embodiment of that most ridiculous of ideas, the good yakuza, honourably helping solve problems wherever he goes. This is really all set-up, showing the first meetings between Jirocho and the core members of his clan, but it does its business in such a light-handed and fun way, I hardly missed the presence of an actual plot.

Makino, apparently well-known for being a quick worker, clearly isn’t a sloppy one. Rather, there’s a lot of camera and character movement here, so much so, you’re never surprised when the protagonists break into song, as they regularly (though not quite regularly enough to call this a musical) do. There’s a joyous quality to the whole thing, unexpected from a film that finds a director repeating a greatest hit.

For fans of 60s/70s Toei ninkyo eiga – as I certainly am – there’s the additional joy of encountering a lot of the usual character and side actors, as well as a very very young Junk Fuji as a flirtatious bar maid (and alas not the female lead).

Dark Match (2024)

Some time in the late 80s. A wrestler going by the nom de plume of Miss Behave (Ayisha Issa) has grown unsatisfied with her lot as a heel in a low-rent part of a big wrestling federation. She still dreams of championships, but given her actual position, her gender, and her blackness, there’s really not much of a future there. So she sleeps with sweet has-been colleague Mean Joe Lean (Steven Ogg), and gets increasingly angry at her counter-face Kate the Great (Sara Canning) – blonde and corn-fed enough to have hopes for the big time.

Things take a turn when the troupe’s manager agrees to a private side gig in the backwoods for them. Their employers are surprisingly happy to see the wrestlers, given their actual status on the wrestling totem pole; they give good parties; and they are also a probably dangerous cult under a mysterious leader (Chris Jericho), who’ll make himself known a little later.

The little private competition will turn out to be somewhat more deadly than expected.

Dark Match by Wolf Cop director Lowell Dean is the first real movie surprise I’ve encountered this year. The Wolf Cop movies were fun enough for what they were, but this, an at once very silly but also much more serious piece of horror is miles beyond these earlier films.

It’s only a comedy to a minor degree, but the kind of Wrestling horror movie Santo would never have partaken in, with some lovingly created practical effects, a zippy, twisty but not annoying plot and a sense of drive, fun and purpose that reminded me of the low budget movie traditions of decades past as much as it did of my beloved lucha cinema.

Dark Match looks absolutely fantastic, thanks to Karim “Mandy” Hussain’s photography in all colours of the neon rainbow, full of clever little visual touches that add excitement and impact to what could be a somewhat rote affair in lesser hands. Same goes for the production design – there’s a loving touch to these aspects of the production that suggests filmmakers who care about their silly little wrestling horror movie, so much so it doesn’t actually feel all that silly anymore when you’re watching it.

Speaking of care, the other pleasant surprise in Dark Match is the quality of its characterization. The film shows an impressive amount of love and respect for these people on the lowest rung of their chosen profession, and never aims scorn or its jokes at their places in life. In a move not always common in gory low budget horror, the film clearly likes its characters, and manages to impress this, as well as a sense of compassion with them, on the viewer.

This opens doors the actors – again playing on a much higher level than the film strictly needed – are more than willing to walk through, and suddenly, this is a silly wrestling horror movie populated by characters one can’t help but like and root for.

It’s a lovely achievement all around, particularly since this also does very well with its action and horror elements. Dark Match feels like a film that is exactly what it wants to be, in tone, style and mood, and I find it absolutely impossible not to love it for this.

Three Films Make A Post: What would you ask your older self?

Haunted Ulster Live (2024): For much of its running time, this is  painfully unfunny Ghostwatch but as a comedy business – very much something nobody asked for, but if they did ask for it, probably imagined done much better than this thing is. The non-funny business always gets in the way of the elements of the film that are actually interesting: the emulation of 90s Northern Irish television, some nearly clever bits and pieces of characterization to the TV personalities the film will always drop for the next tedious joke, and some genuinely cool ideas about the how and why of the haunting.

Alas, when that last part came onto the screen in full force, at least this viewer’s patience had worn much too thin for it to have much of an effect.

Things Will Be Different (2024): Michael Felker’s SF (with a smidgen of horror) time-shenanigans movie was produced by Benson and Moorhead, and it very much feels like the kind of project that much beloved (certainly by me) duo of filmmakers will get up to on their own. To my eyes, it also demonstrates how genuinely great Benson & Moorhead are at their high concept SF/horror with genuine humanity on a shoe-string budget art – by not being terribly effective at all, particularly in comparison.

The pacing here is just off, with all revelations about the weirdness around the protagonists coming at least one or two scenes later than they should. Worse still, I found myself not at all interested in the sibling family drama between the main characters, and never found much of a thematic or connection of mood between the weird fiction part and the characters.

My Old Ass (2024): As a very good-looking feel bad feel good movie, Megan Park’s My Old Ass is rather successful. The acting, especially by Maisy Stella and the typically wonderful Aubrey Plaza, is fine as well.

My core problem with the film is this: while it talks a lot of about the acceptance of pain (or at least of the possibility of pain), bitter-sweet coming of age crap as seen in a thousand US indie movies, and so on, it never actually faces the horrible reality of pain, loss and suffering head-on, the moments when this sort of thing isn’t polite, or hopeful, or the thing that’ll teach you some valuable lesson about life, but a profoundly destructive force that leaves only trauma in the ruins of its wake.

Depending on the mood one is when watching this, that’s either a perfectly alright decision for a movie to make – they don’t all have to dig deep – or it is one that can piss a viewer off considerably.

Three Films Make A Post: No safe space.

V/H/S/Beyond (2024): The much-vaunted pivot to SF horror changes nothing whatsoever about the principles of bro horror still followed by the VHS series. In fact, where S-VHS showed some ambition, this is mostly dire, over tuned nonsense by directors that have done much better work under different circumstances.

There’s no substance, no characters and no ideas in most of the segments, all of which play out like all VHS movie segments ever, without anything beyond an occasional cool monster design or bit of gore, or a rip-off of Tusk. The big exception is the final segment, Kate Siegel’s “Stowaway”. This one has cool effects ideas, but also an actual emotional core, a heart, and a sense of bitter irony that makes the gore crap that came before look even more creatively bankrupt.

Caught (2017): Jamie Patterson’s conjuration of the High Strange is a much more evocative piece of work than most of the VHS attempts at using it for horror. The film is tense, it is tight, and its British variation on the Men in Black trope uses the elements of this kind of encounter in a much more interesting and intelligent way than you’d at first expect. There’s gore here, as well, but there’s also the feeling of the main characters encountering something that isn’t totally comprehensible, as well as the realization that the something can’t comprehend them totally either.

The film also dares to go as weird and as emotionally brutal as it can afford, ending its version of a home invasion in a deservedly harsh manner.

Godforsaken (2020): For its first forty minutes or so, Ali Akbar Akbar Kamal’s POV horror film about what happens after a young woman in a Canadian small town comes back from the dead changed, transcends its amateurish acting by the effective way it handles the dread of a cosmic (or is it religious) revelation that shatters and changes people in ways which become increasingly creepy. There’s a wonderful sense of the small town community it is corrupting as well.

Unfortunately, the final act turns into disappointingly generic zombie business; the amateurish acting becomes an incessant cacophony of amateurish screeching.

The thing is, the earlier two thirds are so strong – the resurrection alone is worth your time – I’d still recommend anyone interested in existentialist or cosmicist horror to take a look at Godforsaken.

The First Omen (2024)

Warning: there will be (some) spoilers for this as well as for Immaculate!

1971. Young Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), raised as an orphan by the Catholic church, is sent to Rome to take her vows as a nun in a convent-orphanage. After early moments of genuine female companionship with the other nuns and an invitation to the pre-vow wild life by the place’s other novitiate, the not terribly nun-like Luz (Maria Cabellero), Margaret’s time at the nunnery turns increasingly nightmarish.

There appears to be something very wrong with one of the orphans, Carlita (Nicole Sorace), and the older nuns’ treatment of the child seems rather extraordinarily strange and cruel, particularly when you compare it to their usual behaviour towards the children in their care. Margaret herself is increasingly plagued by visions connected to creepy demon fingers touching her, bad sexual experiences and pregnancy; nightmare and reality become increasingly difficult to keep apart.

When the rogue priest Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), contacts Margaret with a highly unlikely tale about what’s really going on at the orphanage, our protagonist isn’t quite ready to believe him yet, but she’s certainly beginning to look at the things that might be hidden in plain sight all around her.

Apart from movies about spiders, this is apparently a year for movies about young women having to fight the not so tender attentions of Catholic Church breeding programs (one would be tempted to defend the Church against horror scriptwriters, but given its history, it has to fend for itself there). Though only one of the latter movies has a scene where a woman smashes the little baby Jesus, second edition, with a rock. The movie at hand is not that movie.

But seriously, even though The First Omen does share quite a bit with its out of wedlock sister film Immaculate – namely the feminism, the Church breeding program and the palpable love for the weirder corners of 70s horror – it does have a feel of its own.

Mostly, that’s because director Arkasha Stevenson’s visual imagination quickly transcends the quotes from the original Omen, numerous stylish Italian horror films, and 70s horror in general, and instead starts using the visual elements taken from there to create a language of horror that feels personal to her as a filmmaker.

Stevenson has an indelible eye for the freaky shot, for short, metaphorically loaded tableaux, a command of mood that drags her protagonist – as well as at least this viewer - ever further in the direction of dread and the weird. The big horror sequences don’t just work as set pieces, but are always also metaphorically loaded for bear, creating the kind of film that does little of its metaphorical work through plot or character work and instead puts all emphasis on mood and style as carriers. Again, very much in the spirit of the era of horror filmmaking it builds much of its aesthetic grounding on.

I wouldn’t say the film’s subtextual interests are terribly original: a young woman trapped in a system that only sees her as a breeder for the men that are going to be really important; a sense of paranoia where nearly every paranoid thought our protagonist has is based on truth, and where even her own identity doesn’t truly belong to her; childbirth as a form of body horror. However, the way it puts these interests into movement, colour, and sound makes them feel like things you’ve never seen or heard about before quit this way. Which is quite the trick in a prequel to a franchise that on paper really didn’t need one.

The Fall Guy (2024)

Having broken his back during an accident, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), stuntman to the insufferable star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), does recover bodily, but finds himself in lowest of spirits. During his recovery he has driven away his girlfriend, budding director Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), and has decided to park cars for a living instead of jumping canyons in them.

However, Ryder’s manager and producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) lures Colt back to stunt work by the simple expediency of telling him Jody asked for him to work on her directorial debut Metal Storm, a SF epic about the power of love, violence and cheesy speeches, that does, alas, seem to lack Jared Syn. What the film also lacks is Tom Ryder, for he has gone missing – possible on a drug bender – which wouldn’t be atypical for the guy. Gail wants Colt to find him before anyone else notices he is gone (most people on set don’t). All the while, Jody is rather nonplussed to find her ex-boyfriend suddenly working on her movie – she certainly didn’t ask for that.

Soon, Colt will need all of his considerable stunt person superpowers to survive his surprisingly dangerous search for Ryder; in between being drugged, getting run over by cars, and so on, there’s also a bit of a possibility to restart the relationship with Jody he so efficiently sabotaged after his accident on a more equal footing.

Saying I went into David Leitch’s The Fall Guy with low expectations would be selling them rather high, even though I loved Leitch’s Bullet Train. The combination of modern high budget action comedy, a needless revival of a mildly beloved old IP (shudder), and Ryan Gosling (whose general unwillingness to express emotions via facial expression or body language simply isn’t my idea of acting except in very specific circumstances) did not promise a good time.

But here’s the thing: Gosling emotes! Well, that’s one of several things, as a matter of fact. Instead of the completely empty pap I expected, this is a lovely cross between two genres that only very seldom meet – the romantic comedy and the action comedy, and one where both genres are equally important to the film.

That Leitch does absurd action very well is no surprise; his expert sense of romantic timing very much is. But then, Drew Pearce’s script goes out of its way not to reproduce the way relationships are usually treated in action movies, nor does he fall into the trap of many a male-centric romcom where the protagonist’s girlfriend-keeping character change feels self-serving and dishonest. Colt Seavers isn’t just working out his bullshit, he’s also genuine about his feelings and going through that whole parallel action comedy plot at the same time; Blunt’s Jody is never just a prize but has some actual agency, as well as dreams and hopes that belong to her. Blunt’s also as fun in the Romcom stuff as she is in the more action oriented bits of the film. In fact, the way romcom and action comedy collide and change one another’s clichés is one of the most surprising elements here – much of the film can be read as meta commentary on the differences and parallels of genres that are typically female and male-coded, and suggests some things they might learn from each other.

The absurd action for its part is as expected: fun, fast, often very clever with the stupid jokes and very much centred on actual stunt work instead of CG, as is only right and proper when it comes to a film about a stuntman. The film’s also genuinely well plotted, with a central mystery that works and an eventual solution to our heroes’ problems that very consciously uses movie magic to come to a proper movie solution.

Because that’s what The Fall Guy is as well: a paean to genre films, the absurd things we are willing to love, the clichés we embrace and those we embrace while laughing about them, the things we want to believe in movies, the special moment when something preposterous and artificial touches one’s heart just as if it were the real thing, only better.

Here for Blood (2022)

Because she needs at least half an evening off juggling part-time jobs and learning for her college exams, student Phoebe (Joelle Farrow) convinces her boyfriend, underpaid and dumb but buff and tenacious pro-wrestler Tom O’Bannon (Shawn Roberts), to fill in for at least half a shift of babysitting while she spends some time actually focussing on learning.

Little Grace (Maya Misaljevic), the kid in question, is good as long she gets her dose of digital entertainment, so things shouldn’t go too far off the rails.

Alas, a group of masked weirdos invades the home of Grace’s parents, and attack Tom during an attempt to abduct the kid.

Given Tom’s joyful enthusiasm for physical violence, their plan - if you want to call it that - doesn’t go terribly well for the bad guys. Unfortunately, these aren’t just your garden variety home invaders but members of a cult worshipping some nasty entities from the Outside, so Tom is soon beset not just by armed assholes for him to beat up but also needs to cope with undead, possessed and very hard to kill guys for him to chop up. Things become rather high stakes for him personally as well, once Phoebe and two of her friends arrive to take over the other half of the babysitting gig; though Phoebe turns out to be a decent hand with a meat cleaver.

After a somewhat rough first fifteen minutes or so, where the jokes don’t hit and the filmmaking feels rather lacklustre in a particularly indie horror kind of way, Daniel Turres’s gory horror comedy hits its stride the moment the violence starts. Suddenly, drab camerawork turns exciting, indifferent editing effective, and the series of quips and one-liners may stay stupid but also becomes actually funny.

Turres is very, very good at milking his practical effects budget for all it is worth, and even though there’s clearly no possibility to do much beyond doing great make-up jobs on men of varying beefiness, the film does so with a surprising amount of hilariously nasty imagination. Enough of it, proceedings never descend into the realms of cheap gore comedy where the same gag is repeated far too often; instead Here for Blood demonstrates an impeccable sense of timing and pacing, where no incident is kept with for too long, and no scene hangs on for too long because somebody in the production was a afraid of ending a sentence instead of keeping it going (he wrote in a run-on sentence).

Unlike how one might probably imagine a Canadian movie to be, this is a decidedly, nay proudly, low-brow affair that puts a considerable amount of cleverness into being likeably dumb without ever becoming the nasty kind of low-brow that wants to bring back fascism. This is as fun as a movie full of decapitation, mutilation, squirting blood and a wrestler body-slamming a guy’s head to mush can be; it enjoys being that sort of thing, and will probably look at you funny if you complain about it being what it is. It’s too polite a film to feed naysayers to an ever hungry very old head, though. Probably.

In short: It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)

On paper, doing a modern gimmick horror version of Capra’s insufferable, inevitable It’s a Wonderful Life sounds like a grand idea, for its vague politics and Capra’s peculiar world view really could use a bit of an update; plus blood and guts go well with anything.

In the hands of director Tyler MacIntyre and writer Michael Kennedy, this doesn’t turn out to be a worthwhile effort. The film never seems to be sure what kind of story it actually wants to tell, and for the handful of clever, fun or funny moments it squeezes in while not really telling much of one, there are dozens that simply fall flat. Unlike the film this is taking its basic idea from, the dystopic hellscape the town turns into when the slasher isn’t dispatched by our heroine is just too flat – dope smokers are now into crack instead! – and the curious attempt to change the role of our heroine when compared to the non-slasher version of the material neither makes much sense for the plot, nor does it result in anything much worthwhile thematically.

The attempts at doing the “society’s outsiders are awesome; lesbians are great” thing are certainly likeable, but never really come to life more than stating the obvious generally does.

Knife isn’t much clearer in its treatment of its supernatural elements, particularly when Justin Long’s evil mayor also turns out to have some random hypnotic powers or something, for some reason the film isn’t going into and the characters don’t seem to believe worth even thinking about. I can’t help but think rather a lot of things were lost between various versions of the script, and the film this ended up as is some curious undead abomination made from scraps.

The Dead Inside (2005)

The years following World War II. Lola Morgandy (Bronwyn Lee) and John Katzen (Chuck Depape) have apparently been a team ever since she – working as a spy – saved him from Italian imprisonment. The two work as paranormal investigators in the more pulpy occult detective vein – there’s clearly some backstory there we’re never told.

Right now, they’ve been tasked to explain and more importantly end the disturbing occurrences in a large-ish mansion in Victoria, BC. It’s a really troubled place: people tend to move in, but then rather quickly disappear without a trace – certainly without taking their belongings. And even those who only spend a night or so there are plagued by nightmares too terrible to be normal. The laws of physics also don’t appear to be always working as they should in the house – there’s a gravitational anomaly in a certain corner that would probably break most physicists.

Because there’s science to be done they don’t feel quite up to, our heroes invite physicist Professor Fallstead (Theodore Trout), his assistant Betty (Bettina May), and scientist suffering from heavy SAN loss Dr Koeppler (Chris Tihor) to help them investigate.

Obviously, things will become dangerous rather quickly, because whatever slips through the cracks in our reality in the house is very dangerous indeed, and loves to attack people with nightmares and twisted visions of past traumatic experiences, something most of the characters have a considerable amount of.

This very indie Canadian production directed, written, produced, edited (and so on, we know how this kind of semi-professional production works) by Brian Clement is a rather fun film. Unlike many a movie on this budget and infrastructure level, The Dead Inside has little interest in presenting the holy duality of gore and tits, nor in working through much personal directorial angst. Instead, it attempts to tell a fun occult detective tale with certain Lovecraftian undertones, mixed with a bit of actual character psychology, in as effective a manner as it can get away with under the circumstances of production.

For my tastes, it succeeds rather well at this goal. The Dead Inside is certainly a much better paced film than most of its peers, getting in and out of scenes like a champ - which only sounds like faint praise to someone who hasn’t seen much independent genre cinema. The characters may be archetypes but are also consistent, have the degree of inner life needed for the film, and make sense as parts of the world of the film, while the actors are generally well capable of doing what the script asks of them – a couple, Lee most certainly, probably more.

In general, Dead Inside does have some rough visual edges – the framing tends to be a bit cramped, for example, I assume for production reasons rather than ones of lack of visual imagination. Yet there’s also a much more important sense of filmmakers putting love and effort on screen, an eye for the telling detail and how to get it into your scenes with little money, so there are some clever touches to production design, acting and writing, and a continuity in mood between scenes that makes them feel like parts of a whole.

In tone and style, the narrative does give off a bit of the vibe of a Call of Cthulhu RPG investigation. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that tabletop game had been an influence – Lovecraft is certainly mentioned in the credits and in spirit - though of course, a good dose of Hellboy and 30s and 40s pulp occult detective tales might as well explain it. This isn’t a complaint in any case: there’s nothing at all wrong with these influences, I love them all dearly, as regular visitors and random strangers know. In fact, I found the feeling of those influences to be a not inconsiderable part of the movie’s charm. There are, after all, not so very many occult detective movies in this vein around, and even fewer that are quite as much fun as this one is.

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Warning: contains dolphin-related spoilers!

This write-up is based on the clearly superior Japanese cut of the movie. Why is it superior? Because it features more of Takeshi Kitano and Dolph Lundgren and its third act vaguely makes sense, if you squint.

The close cyberpunk future of 1995+whatever. Okay, it’s 2021, but really and of course, it’s 1995’s 2021. Johnny (Keanu Reeves) works as a data courier, which is to say, he has replaced the part of his long term memory used for his childhood memories with sensational 80GB of data so he can literally carry data around in his head. He’s even upgrading to humungous 160GB right at the start of the movie, so take that, SanDisk!

Alas, the super secret and extra dangerous data his middle-man Ralfi (Udo Kier) has lined up for him that is supposed to pay for getting Johnny's childhood memories back, is much larger than that, which leads to dangerous side effects the longer the data is in Johnny’s head. In two days or so, his head will – figuratively or actually, we don’t know – explode.

That’s not even the biggest of Johnny’s problems. The data is hardly in his head when a team of Yakuza doing the dirty work for an evil pharma corporation ambush him and his clients. Johnny barely manages to escape – he’s luckier there than his clients are – but only has one third of the codes needed to encrypt the data – the only way to get it out of his head.

Hunted by the Yakuza, – we regularly pop in with their boss Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano) who is going through the early stages of grief for the loss of his child – and the corp, and betrayed by Ralfi, our hero’s quest for getting rid of the data is supported by street samurai/bodyguard Jane (Dina Meyer) and the anti-corporate resistance whose leader isn’t actually Ice-T like we might at first think but a damn dolphin. Also involved are a crazy, evil, cybernetic street preacher (Dolph Lundgren dressed up as post-apocalyptic Moses), and barely coherent, yet awesome, monologues during which Johnny wrestles with his conscience as well as the importance of room service.

Some movies don’t age gracefully; others, like Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic get better – well, immensely more entertaining – once they’ve got a couple of decades behind them. Today, it is easy to enjoy this as an intensely 90s movie, whereas during the 90s, it was exactly its extreme 90s-ness that made it practically unwatchable.

Today, when we have reached a state of practical corporate ownership (he said, using a Google site to post this on) that just doesn’t look as sexy and absurd as the one portrayed in the movie, the film’s bad future seems incredibly attractive. It is, after all full of hot people dressed up like extras from an Italian post-apocalyptic movie, contains a cyberspace that looks like a digital psychedelic light show instead of being the place where crazy people shout at each other for all eternity, and has 160GB of RAM in its head (and very little else).

I respect the hell out of Johnny Mnemonic as a bizarre high-ish budget cyberpunk as pulp movie as well: the brazen absurdity of its awesome, nonsensical production design, the straight-up nuttiness and glorious dumbness of its action set pieces, William Gibson’s deep if you’ve imbibed enough, otherwise nonsensical  philosophical monologues poor Reeves has to get through, the willingness to go with silly, “cool” ideas instead of aiming for boring depth – it’s all good in a “how did they manage to get a budget for this” way, and great as popular cinema no populace in its right mind actually watches gets.

To really draw in an audience of me, the film features a wish list of cult movie favourites in roles large and small: Keanu is at that point in his career when he has learned enough basic acting skills to get through scenes without falling over his own feet and shows the awesome ability to keep a straight face even when he shares a scene with Moses Lundgren and a dolphin, or when Henry Rollins rants into his face. He’s also young enough to be agile and fast in action sequences without too much help from the editing room. I very much suspect his back hurts less, as well. Then we get Kitano (who has something of a plausible character arc in the Japanese cut) being Kitano, Kier as ready for anything as he ever was, Dolph looking as if he really enjoys himself, Ice-T doing his usual shtick for non-cop roles, Meyer aiming for intense and dangerous but often only hitting cute, Barbara Sukowa as an AI (don’t ask)… It’s pretty fantastic.

In other words, this one really is in dire need of a reassessment from the larger cult movie audience, because it is a wonderfully entertaining piece of bizarro nonsense that’s also a time capsule of an in hindsight simpler, quieter, and certainly more hopeful even in its dystopias time.

Three Films Make A Post: Don't meddle with the devil.

Saturday Morning Mystery aka Saturday Morning Massacre (2012): This low budget horror comedy by Spencer Parsons posits an edgy version of the Scooby Doo cast with filed-off numbers visiting a supposedly haunted house that does end in a bit of a massacre for them.

This isn’t really my kind of humour: “just imagine the gang having sex while on LSD”, “let’s kill the dog!” just doesn’t do much for me as jokes go, particularly since the movie doesn’t do terribly much with the set-up. To be fair, the gory bits are nicely realized and staged.

Moonfall (2022): This Amazonbuster mixes Roland Emmerich’s main interests as a director: big dumb fun science fiction, big dumb unfun disaster movies, and not giving talented actors much to do. Well, I’m unfair about the third point, for the lead is played by Patrick Wilson, who is just his usual voidal self and is probably not playing below his possibilities there.

Whenever the film stays in the big dumb SF area – with a bit of idiot conspiracy theories and a cameo by Donald Sutherland – and makes a drinking game out of the word “megastructure”, it is actually a lot of brainless fun. Alas, whenever the disaster movie parts turn up, particularly in the otherwise wonderfully bonkers second half of the film, it’s the usual drag of Emmerich disaster types going through the Emmerich disaster movie motions. Though the film gets bonus points for squeezing a completely out of leftfield Fast and Furious CG car chase in.

Sweeney! (1977): Sweeney was a very popular ITV series that turned up the amount of sex and the violence allowed for a British TV show of the time. It was popular enough for two movie spin-offs which dial up the sex a bit and the violence even a lot more when compared with what the producers could just get away with on the TV. This first one, directed by David Wickes, does a version of the Profumo affair – a bit of an evergreen in the UK – but with rather a lot more murders to hush the affair up, and even more loathing for the political class than you’d expect going in.

Everybody is ugly, brutish and not terribly clever, London looks ugly, grimy and unpleasant, and our hero (John Thaw) eventually wins the day with an act of astonishing amorality. So, even if you’re like me and have seen not a single episode of the series, this is probably going to be a whole lot of fun as a nasty little bit of 70s crime/conspiracy cinema.

Devil’s Diary (2007)

Warning: I’ll have to spoil some of the film’s middle act twists.

High schoolers Dominique (Alexz Johnson) and Ursula (Magda Apanowicz) are low on the totem pole in the brutal hierarchy of their school, but at least, they have each other – and actually at least a handful of friends, more than most kids in their situation in the movies usually get – to keep the usual combination of jocks and cheerleaders off. Dominique is the one with the better game face, protecting Ursula and herself with gallows humour and an excellent pose of not giving a shit. At the same time she’s hiding most of her own hurts, like a rapey stepfather.

While they are farting around at a graveyard, lightning strikes a grave and uncovers an old book. Ursula feels particularly drawn to the improbable things, and discovers that writing in it as if it were a diary makes her wishes come true. Alas, not all of her wishes, but only those based in hatred and other negative feelings, so very quickly, the nastiest of the jocks and cheerleaders are having increasingly brutal accidents. The more Ursula uses her newfound power, the angrier and nastier she becomes. Once Dominique realizes that Ursula isn’t “just” having a breakdown but is becoming possessed by an evil supernatural power, she does her best to save her friend. Parts of the cheerleading squad also get wind of what is actually going on, and decide to steal the diary.

As it turns out, an evil cheerleader is not a pleasant alternative.

Apparently, this is how Lifetime movies looked in 2007. Given its Lifetime movie status, Farhad Mann’s film has some surprisingly nasty moments – the special effects aren’t any great shakes, but this is not a film afraid showing a teenager dying puking out all of her teeth or another get his face melted off by acid. It’s certainly not tasteful, but I can’t help but respect the film for it.

The staging of the death scenes is generally on the crude and tacky side, but that appears to be the tone the whole film is very consciously going for, be it there or in its emotional moments. Even the way it escalates its plot and the degree of the supernatural threat has a certain tacky superficiality. Typically, you’d find this material handled as the tale of a female friendship under pressure destroyed by a supernatural threat that weaponizes the trauma of one of the friends. Devil’s Diary seems to get bored by this approach early on, and so begins to let the diary wander into cheerleader hands and eventually even draws a secretly Satanist catholic priest out of its hat. Of course, given how one-dimensional the characterization of every single character not named Dominique – she’s got at least two dimensions – here is, staying on the more psychological lane would simply not have played to the film’s strengths.

Having realized that subtlety really isn’t the ballpark it wants to play in, the film kills off Ursula in the middle in a particularly unpleasant way and then goes off to the races of increasingly absurd plot twists, bizarre scenes of a cheerleader who has turned herself dominant towards all men (and doesn’t have the imagination to do the same to women as well), an attempted rape by stepfather, and said secretly Satanist priest. It’s a wonder of tacky, pulpy, absurdity, and really rather a lot of fun, if one is in the right mood.

Mann isn’t exactly a great director, but his blunt, bad music video on a budget, style fits the content of the film rather wonderfully. He also leaves enough space for the young actresses – the male characters don’t have terribly much to do here – to chew the scenery quite enthusiastically. There is so much evil glowering, evil staring and evil catfighting (don’t ask) going on here, you could use it to make two other movies.

And if that doesn’t recommend Devil’s Diary to you, I don’t know what could.

Out of Mind: The Stories of H.P. Lovecraft (1998)

An uncle he never really knew about bequeaths a mysterious package to young artist Randolph Carter (Art Kitching). Inside that package is a curious book written in a language Carter does neither know nor understand. Nonetheless, in a move that discloses a horrifying lack of genre knowledge, he reads aloud from it.

Afterwards, Carter falls into a series of waking dreams and nightmares that seem connected to the works of the late, great H.P. Lovecraft (Christopher Heyerdahl, making a great Lovecraft for what the film sets out to do), who has been regaling the audience with excerpts from letters and essays even before we met our protagonist. Carter will become somewhat obsessed with Lovecraft’s body of work and uncover some strange connections between it and his uncle. What he finds out will probably not save him from inevitable doom, but at least he gets to go on a walk with Lovecraft in his dreams, which is rather a lot more than most of us get.

Out of Mind is one of the more peculiar documents of Yogsothery I’ve encountered on the screen. This is a French Canadian TV production, directed by Raymond St-Jean, and includes a surprising amount of sometimes disparate material: there are the scenes of Lovecraft talking stiffly – in a wonderfully proper and awkward 30s to camera style – at the audience that seem to come from a more whimsical kind of documentary, dream versions of some of HPL’s tales, or variations thereof, until you realize that Carter’s tale itself is actually a variation on “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” where much of the Providence focus and the historical tales within the tale have been replaced by what the production could actually afford.

The film isn’t always successful with this approach – the bit that is meant to remind us of “Herbert West, Reanimator” for example, must by the rules of TV be pretty tepid and indeed is – and there can be a certain randomness to the way Lovecraft’s material pops up or not. When it works, though, Out of Mind is genuinely successful at evoking not the details of Lovecraft’s plots or mythology (which was never precise when Lovecraft used it anyway, because that’s not what it’s for), but the feeling of reading his work at the right moment, under the right circumstances. There’s an undercurrent of a dream-like and feverish intensity you lose a bit once you’ve gone through the body of work in so many different forms and so many times as I have by now, and I’m genuinely thankful to the film at hand for reminding me of it. Particularly since St-Jean clearly knows his Lovecraft well enough to have drawn out some of the writer’s main themes. Particularly the mix of love for the past and inheritance and the abject fear of what one might learn about it and oneself when one looks a little too closely, that to me always felt much more important to Lovecraft’s work than the racism ever was (though of course not always separated from it).

One might criticize here that the film focusses on the most flowery elements of early and mid-period Lovecraft, yet this feels like the proper choice to me for something that has to work on a TV budget, with TV opportunities for locations, and a TV effects budget. I genuinely don’t believe you could do justice to Lovecraft’s more clinical moments under these circumstances, and I’m glad St-Jean did what he could actually pull off.

Three Films Make A Post: A simple trip to Mars will become the journey of a lifetime

Kung Fu Elliot (2014): Depending on one’s position this film about Newfoundland’s very own self-made action hero and delusional dreamer turned manipulative asshole is either a pretty dull mockumentary (for once, I like the this term for a movie), or a documentary made by filmmakers who are either manipulative sociopaths themselves or completely incompetent. The filmmakers seem to insist on this being an actual documentary, which makes them look terrible: either, they begin a documentary with no research whatsoever on a subject, or they know things they only disclose to some of their subjects later own for maximum cinematic impact while egging on a guy who certainly is a manipulative liar but also psychologically not well at all, only to turn on him with the most hypocritical moral outrage imaginable.

If I had made this, I’d insist on it just being a very dull fake variant on American Movie, but if people insist on looking bad, who am I to disagree?

The Housemaid aka Hanyo (1960): I’m rather less happy I didn’t find much to connect with in Kim Ki-young’s classic of South Korean cinema. This is, after all a highly influential film on many of my favourite filmmakers from the country. Sometimes, I can appreciate the subversiveness of the film, and nod sagely at its social criticism, but for much of the running time, I found myself appalled at the melodramatic gyrations of plot and characters, none of which ever rang true to me even in the heightened realm of the emotional eleven this takes place in.

On an abstract level, Kim’s filmmaking is clearly stylistically very interesting indeed, but at this point in my movie watching career not in a way that works for me.

Cocaine Bear (2023): Then there’s this thing, a movie about a cocaine snorting serial killing bear that somehow manages to contain more continuity problems and gaffes than any film not shot in a backyard has any right to have. Also there and accounted for are gratingly unfunny humour, acting that’s all over the place and a script that’s trite, in love with an intelligence that’s never actually on display, and full of amateurish pacing problems.

From time to time, director Elizabeth Banks stumbles upon a cool gore gag or two, or manages to get a decent character note out of a cast – Keri Russell, Ray Liotta in his final role, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and so on – that could and should do so much more. Of course, as weirdly as this thing is edited, I’m not convinced coherent and great performances haven’t been left on the cutting room floor.

Three Films Make A Post: A Disgrace to Criminals Everywhere.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): After more than two decades, I’m still not sure if I exactly like Guy Ritchie’s debut movie, but then, I’ve been known to have problems with movies whose main characters are all arseholes and idiots, particularly when  the film they are in appears to loathe them (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). What has endeared the film to me from the perspective of today is how insanely it is of its time: starting with the piss-coloured non-colour scheme, the showy editing, the post-Pulp Fiction ideas about coolness, and certainly not stopping with its very specific kind of digressive storytelling. As a time capsule, this is about as pure as it gets, and when the inevitable late 90s revival is coming around, this will be one of the aesthetic core texts.

Infinity Pool (2023): I was a great admirer of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, but this sometimes body horrific critique of the late-capitalistic mindset which is here exemplified in extreme hedonistic exploitative tourism doesn’t work too well for me. Often, it appears to be rather too in love with exactly the things it wants to criticize, but my main problem really is how little I found myself caring about anything and anyone in it going through their surrealisted-up version of rich people problems: Alexander Skarsgård’s doing his by now usual “weak man” shtick without ever finding a note from which to empathize with the guy, and Mia Goth’s ultra femme fatale is certainly riveting to watch but also empty of any nuance or humanity. The only actual identifiable human being, Cleopatra Coleman’s Em, is shelved relatively early, and from then on out, the movie is all about rich people being surrealistically horrible. The rather more interesting elements of the film concerning Philip K. Dick-style identity problems never really go anywhere interesting, so I found myself a bit bored by a very well shot film that uses the most obvious metaphorical systems in the most obvious manner.

Re/Member (2022): What would we be without time loop movies? Because you can time loop anything, Eiichiro Hasumi’s example of the form unites some typical YA business with ghosts and the fascination of Japanese pop culture with weird rules. Which does at least lead to a bit of originality, for there are very few movies about a group of teens bonding while time-looping through the experience of searching for the body parts of a dismembered little girl while being hunted by a monster.

The character work is very much like you’d expect in a Japanese teen movie, and Hasumi does tend to lay it on a little too thick in melodramatic sequences, but on the other hand, there’s also a sense of playfulness and fun on display when it comes to changing up the ways in which a group of teenagers might be ripped to pieces, farting around with game rules, or making third act twists entertaining.