Three Films Make A Post: Do not overlook any anomalies.

Exit 8 (2025): A man (Kazunari Ninomiya) finds himself trapped on an ever-repeating subway station floor. He learns he has to identify anomalies in his surroundings to find his way out, and learns some valuable lessons along the way.

I’m just a few years too old to have ever gotten into the habit of watching other people play video games on the Internet, and never found enjoyable watching people doing something fun instead of doing it myself. Thus, Genki Kawamura’s videogame adaptation’s approach of being pretty much exactly that doesn’t work too well for me, especially with the highly repetitive set-up it uses.

Eventually, the film does some mildly more ambitious things than have a guy wander around the same corridor, forever, and it is certainly well shot for what it is, but the constraints it put itself under just don’t do much to this viewer. Additionally, the ham-fisted way it attempts to speak of alienation in the modern world is one of those cases where I agree with the thesis, but find the artistic execution lacking.

The Accountant (2016): If I were in a snarky mood, I’d congratulate director Gavin O’Connor for finding a way around Ben Affleck’s problems with being expressive by having him play a man whose form of autism sees him finding expressing feelings difficult, but really, that would be selling an action movie short that’s clever, inventive, fun, and uses its main character’s neuroatypicality and how it makes him relate to the world and the world to him in more nuanced and interesting ways than movies, and certainly genre movies, usually do. It is also still often joyful action movie nonsense, but the kind of nonsense carried by an actual heart and a brain for other things.

The Accountant 2 (2025): Whereas this belated sequel written and directed by the same people suggests that nobody involved in the first part actually had any clue about what made it work.

Here, we’re back with autism as a superpower and nothing but, and you can most certainly cut the clever, inventive and fun from the first movie’s description as well. For some reason, this is now also a comedy, just one of those comedies nobody bothered to actually make funny, or write any jokes for. That it’s also unpleasant, aggressively stupid and without any charm does not exactly help it in any way.

Three Films Make A Post: Blood, sweat and tutus.

Pretty Lethal (2026): A small troupe of perpetually quarrelling ballerinas – I’d be thankful if someone could explain the minor ballerina genre movie wave of the last twelve months or so to me – get on the bad side of some Hungarian gangsters and ex-ballerina Uma Thurman and thus have to apply their skills rather differently from their usual norm. Though, it turns out, ballet is a martial art.

For easy direct-to-streaming cinema, Vicky Jewson’s little film is a decent enough watch, pleasantly short and clearly sure of the kind of thing it wants to be. I’d rather have preferred it to have taken its own silly set-up a little more seriously instead of going the lazy route of being ironic about it, but of the three “ballerinas doing violence” movies I’ve seen in the last year or so, this is at least the most entertaining. Which doesn’t say too much, but hey, I take what I can get.

Afterburn (2025): A solar flare destroyed the Eastern hemisphere, leaving Europe a mess of minor warlords and grey ruins. Treasure hunter Jake (Dave Bautista) works for the perhaps not quite as terrible would-be king of Britain (Samuel L. Jackson), somewhat unwillingly, and is tasked to liberate the Mona Lisa from the continent. The plot will involve an evil Russian general (Kristofer Hivju) with fascist world (or what’s left of it) domination on his mind, as well as a beautiful freedom fighter (Olga Kurylenko). Also, a plot twist concerning the Mona Lisa nobody will ever have seen coming (ha).

I genuinely admire both Bautista and Kurylenko quite a bit, and always feel a bit sad when they waste their talents on something like this deeply uninspired action movie by J.J. Perry. Their presence, as well as Jackson’s willingness to put some effort into even the lamest nothing of a role, do their job of pulling this from being completely uninteresting into the realm of the vaguely watchable. Though for a guy coming from stunt and action work, Perry’s not terribly adept at directing stunts and action.

Raw File (2025): I found this piece of low budget POV horror about an investigator (Monica Oprisan) and her trusty cameraman (the voice of Alexander Bishop and the camerawork of director Aaron Dobson) having a very bad night in a large apartment complex while looking into a curious suicide to be a pleasant surprise. Once this gets going, the film shows some actual ambition: neat bits and pieces of lore and worldbuilding that cross ideas of the demonic with those of high strangeness are slowly revealed, some actual action is staged, and everything is presented without overstaying its welcome, leaving me pretty happy.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following his rather unwise decisions during the course of the second movie, everyone’s favourite dog-loving assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is on the run, hunted by the rest of the series’ weirdo assassin underworld, and excommunicated from all useful services of their underground world. He’ll have to call in old favours and murder an astonishing amount of mooks and mid-level bosses to perhaps get a chance at survival.

My first time watching Parabellum (which, adorably, will turn out to be a Latin/ammunition-based pun), I really loathed the film (and I’m not going to link to that short piece, because Now-Me is obviously right, until I’m going to change my mind again in the future). Clearly, that's not the case anymore. In fact, I’ve come around to really rather loving it.

I still believe it is not an ideal choice to finish an action film with epic ambitions like this on several fights between Keanu and actors who are simply much better screen fighters than he is - the man certainly has the right spirit, but even in his Matrix days, he has always been a bit stiff and awkward when tasked with unarmed fights, which does tend to look worse when he’s set against more naturally limber opponents like Mark Dacascos or Yayan Ruhian. But then, he does throw himself into the fights with full conviction.

Otherwise, today’s me finds it difficult to argue with Parabellum’s digital neon aesthetics, its commitment to absurd body counts achieved via complicated choreography, or its increasingly pulp baroque world building that’s at once absurd and wonderous.

Even the circular there and back again of the plot that irritated me the first time around makes thematic sense on my second go at the film. It is emblematic of how our dubious hero is trapped in an endless cycle of awesome/pointless violence and rules that only serve the rulers, with the added irony that it is exactly his historical adherence to these rules that lets others in his subculture cut Wick rather a lot of slack.

Three Films Make A Post: A man's got to know his limitations.

Magnum Force (1973): Probably not untouched by the accusations of fascist leanings levelled against Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, this second movie concerning the ridiculously violent police inspector – and let’s be honest here, incompetent investigator - Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), sees the guy fighting a group of vigilante cops who plan what amounts to a fascist coup in San Francisco of all places. At one point in time, ladies and gentlemen, fascists were indeed not ruling most countries in the world anymore. Just imagine.

Anyway, Ted Post’s film never really manages to explain why Harry is set against his vigilante colleagues, though it does attempt to make something of a strength out of it by having Eastwood look somewhat puzzled about it himself. In other regards, this is simply a very solid 70s action movie, with a couple of excellent set pieces, a lead actor who appears to be enjoying himself, and a finale full of dead Nazi cops.

Black Magic (1975): I remember having had not as much time for Ho Meng-Hua’s first Black Magic movie for the Shaw Brothers when I saw it last. On a rewatch, I have rather warmed to the film, especially the brutal way in which Ho lets overheated melodrama, exploitation and the ickiness of South East Asian black magic horror – here at its inception point for Hongkong cinema, as far as I understand – crash into each other, until things can only be solved through one of those absurd and wonderful magic battles one can’t help but love wholeheartedly.

I still prefer the second Black Magic, mind you.

Hardware (1990): These days, films like Richard Stanley’s trippy unauthorized adaptation of a 2000AD strip, with their nature destroyed by human hands, corrupt authorities and corporate rule do feel rather more poignant than most of us would have hoped for even a couple of decades ago, so this in part very silly movie about a rampaging bit of military technology hits harder than ever before in this regard.

If you can get through that, there’ still great delight to be found here: Stanley shoots his science fiction horror not like James Cameron, but as a giallo, with moments that manage to suggest the mythical or the supernatural without outright speaking of them, and a surprisingly daft hand at drawing dysfunctional relationships.

Three Films Make A Post: The Pressure is Rising, The Adrenaline is Rushing, The Clock is Ticking

Run Lola Run aka Lola Rennt (1998): As a German born in the second half of the 70s, I really should have been all about Tom Tykwer’s hyperactive little action movie with an alternative timeline twist at the time. In actuality, I’ve watched it for the first time this week, and find myself half impressed by how much mileage Tykwer gets out of all the hallmarks of 90s cinema that usually make films ugly, if not just unwatchable.

Here, as is in some of the films of Dominik Graf, all of the stylistic excesses of a time of filmmaking turn into an actual style that feels like the only correct way to tell this particular story; or really, the style is the story here. Which does lead to my major problem with the film: its main characters may be really good at running, but are also spectacularly shitty people we are somehow supposed to care about because they are in love. Or something?

It’s not a deal breaker – I’ve cheered on even worse people in other movies after all – but also not exactly something to endear a movie to me.

The Last Sacrifice (2024): Speaking of not endearing, there’s this thing, a film that takes a Wikipedia-look level at an actual crime, uses bits and pieces of horror cinema that never really fit the voiceover talking at us to portray it, and suggests an influence of said crime on folk horror it never takes any effort to actually substantiate. It also tries to connect it to the cultural development of the UK without ever showing much of a grasp of that development beyond the most superficial talking points.

Like most true crime documentaries, and especially those with a horror bent, it’s shoddy, thoughtless and always more than a little offensive.

fuji_jukai.mov (2016): For quite some time, Katsumi Sakashita’s POV horror movie where footage of a film crew interviewing people of what we usually call Aokigahara forest in the West – and the film mostly calls jukai – is intercut with that supposedly shot by a girl going into the forest to commit suicide, accompanied by two other girls she met on the web who just want to watch, had been more of a rumour than an actual film outside of Japan.

It is a fine, low budget example of its form that sometimes shows its constraints in the performances and some unideal set design. Its emphasis on very human horrors and a central twist reminded me more than a little of the wonderful Banned from Broadcast series (more about them on a later date), but it certainly is on a level of accomplishment where that comparison is a compliment instead of to a film’s detriment.

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.

Legend of the Shadowy Ninja: The Ninja Dragon (1990)

Original title: Kûsô-kagaku ninkyô-den: Gokudô ninja Dosuryû

For centuries, the bloodline of the Nindo yakuza clan has been protected by three magical ninjas whenever real trouble reared its head . After the ninja appear to high school age Nindo daughter Shinobu (Etsuko Araoda) in a dream and gift her a magical protective amulet that she takes with her into waking life, the girl quickly learns why ninja protection can be needed.

Two improbably strong and hardy people are murdering yakuza left and right – the film never bothers to tell us if the victims are part of the Nindo-gumi – as part of some vague yakuza domination to country domination to world domination plan of the also freakishly strong Go Ranjuji (good old Rikiya Yasuoka). Shinobu, though, Ranjuji doesn’t want to see murdered. He wants to marry the high school kid so she can produce “thousands and thousands of eggs” for him, as you do. This really is a job for magical ninja.

This OVA/V-Cinema movie is anime and manga royalty Go Nagai’s only foray into directing live action, and what it lacks in having anything like an actual narrative, it does make up for in cool, cheap, and pretty damn awesome practical effects. Ever wanted to see Rikiya Yasuoka rip a guy’s face off and then lick what’s below? Ever wanted to see Rikiya turn into a thing out of Screaming Mad George’s dreams? Go Nagai has all your Rikiya needs covered.

Visually, there’s a budget conscious mix of cramped frames and sudden bursts of Steadicam, and at least an attempt to provide visual interest in every single scene, even when it’s just letting the camera slowly move from one off-kilter angle to another. There’s a certain amateurish energy to Nagai’s direction here that works well for a film that doesn’t really want to tell anything amounting to a story, and while I wouldn’t recommend this to civilians, if you have any interest in Nagai, or practical effects-based direct to video movies from Japan, or films that include a random scene in the climax where Cutie Suzuki wrestles, unconvincingly, or just films where ninjas fight aliens, you’ll probably have a reasonably good time here. I certainly had, but that’s only to be expected.

Doctor of Doom (1963)

Original title: Las luchadoras contra el médico asesino

Mexico City is in a panic: young women are kidnapped, only to be found dead days later with curious head injuries.

As we the audience learn early on, a masked and mysterious mad scientist and his helpers are responsible for the dastardly deeds. They’re not actually out to kill these women, but “only” need them as subjects for their brain transplant experiments. Alas, or so the mad scientist explains, normal human bodies are just too weak to withstand the awesome power of this kind of science, therefore the dead women. But unwilling sacrifices need to be made, right?

There only survivor (Gerardo Zepeda) of earlier experiments is slowly devolving into an ape-man, but is at least useful when it comes to fighting off the police. Not that those guys are of much use, mind you.

Somewhat fortunately, the villains’ latest victim is the sister of luchadora Gloria Venus (Lorena Velázquez), who, together with her new partner, US import Golden Rubi (Elizabeth Campbell), will involve herself in the investigation with rather more success than the cops.

For an early 60s lucha monster movie, René Cardona’s Doctor of Doom is rather surprisingly explicitly feminist in form and function, treating the female wrestlers as the same kind of hero you’d expect of their male colleagues, just having to present more glamorously while going about their business of fighting mad science and mad science’s products.

Though, again to my surprise, Cardona also portrays the kind of nonsense women have to go through El Santo never had to put up with, like having to romance mostly incompetent cops that talk as if they were solving the case while the luchadoras do all the work. There are some delightful reversions of lucha tropes here as well, like when romantic lead cop number one gifts one of those genre-typical radio watches to Gloria so she can call him when she needs help, only to be the one needing to use it to call her and Rubi to get him and his comic relief colleague out of a death trap. Also delightful is how sarcastically Campbell flirts with said comic relief colleague (while towering over him) – where the script might mean this as serious flirtation, the actress clearly doesn’t.

Apart from this inspiring and, again, delightful, feminist content, Doctor is the full load of everything awesome about lucha cinema, made at a time when the budgets where comparatively high, and really moody black and white photography was possible. Expect every joy of pop and pulp cinema you can imagine, treated with verve, a smile, and more than one good mad scientist rant, and delight as Velázquez and Campbell project a sense of fun not all of their masked brothers got, while also having much bigger hair.

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to a world of hurt.

Predator: Badlands (2025): Objectively, this film about a young, outcast Predator ending up with an RPG party, is a terrible mistake following returning director Dan Trachtenberg’s clever Prey. It’s silly, self-indulgently so, weirdly shaped and goes out of its way to rob the Predators of their last remaining mystique. However – and this is going to be a bit of refrain in this post – it is also a whole load of fun, following the rule of cool with such wild abandon critiquing it for a lack of substance would make me one of those people who eat puppies. Also also, Elle Fanning is much better as a funny, wisecracking sidekick than anyone could have ever expected.

Honey Don’t! (2025): The general tenor towards Ethan Coen’s solo films – or in actuality, his films made in co-operation with Tricia Cooke who happens to also be his wife – is harsh to a degree that nearly made me miss this lesbian noirish private eye comedy until it’s not thing, as it did with the film he made before. Sure, this is not a resounding, eternal masterpiece, nor a deep comment on the shape of the world (though the shape of the world is very much visible in it), but then, it’s pretty clear that’s simply not the kind of film Coen & Cooke set out to make. Instead, this is a film all about the filmmakers having fun with plot elements, ideas and tropes they like, namely Lesbians, hard-boiled private eyes, small evils that believe themselves to be big evils, noir, serial killers, and all kinds of weirdness. The result isn’t focussed, sometimes goes off on tangents that don’t quite pay off, but most of the time, is as fun as the filmmakers appear to be having with it. Plus, Margaret Qualley manages to go through all of the film’s tonal shifts in a way that makes it look easy.

Drive-Away Dolls (2024): Having had this amount of fun with Honey Don’t! did obviously lead me directly to also watching Coen & Cooke’s earlier film, also starring Margaret Qualley (among many other delightful thespians, of course), containing even more lesbians, even more off-beat humour, and rather less darkness. Being a road movie comedy, this does get even shaggier than Honey Don’t!, sinks its brow quite a few inches, and contains some ill-advised moments that point directly to The Big Lebowski, but keeps a sense of fun and a heart that can’t quite be cynical all of the time, which is the kind of heart I can identify with the most these days.

Honestly, if Cooke & Coen make films like these two for the – hopefully very, very long – rest of their lives, I’ll be there to watch them.

Primitive War (2025)

Warning: there will be some spoilers, but since this is all pure pulp nonsense nobody should be too afraid to read on

During the Vietnam War. Colonel Jericho (Jeremy Piven in a performance so bad you have to admire the rest of the cast can keep a straight face around him) sends Baker (Ryan Kwanten) and his “Vulture Squad” of soldiers of dubious renown but high efficiency on a somewhat vaguely defined rescue mission into a particularly deadly valley. The Green Berets our protagonists are supposed to rescue there were meant to do something about a research base hidden deep in the valley, but that’s all need to you and apparently our soldiers don’t.

Turns out the valley is full of dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes that, ahem, “fell through a wormhole in the past”. Said wormhole was created by evil experiments devised by evil Soviet general Borodin (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) – yes, like the composer but then, there’s also a Soviet character named Tolstoy which I believe is what goes for wit in this one – who attempts to do something – presumably evil and most certainly world-threatening – with particle accelerators.

Eventually, after many an adventure with dinosaurs, heroic sacrifice, and teaming up with an Eastern German scientist and dinosaur exposition expert (Tricia Helfer, whose bad German accent attempts actually sound like very bad Russian accent attempts), our heroes will have to take the fight to Borodin’s base.

It is very difficult to argue against a film that fulfils that old childhood dream of every good nerd to see soldiers fight against dinosaurs – as long as one doesn’t expect Luke Sparke’s movie (apparently based on a novel by one Ethan Pettus, but I’ll just take the film’s word for it) to be actually a properly good movie. Fortunately, this one does fall deeply under the “it’s not a good movies, it’s a great movie” umbrella where its myriad of flaws also happen to be insanely entertaining.

Firstly and foremost, this is such a deeply stupid movie it’s actually impressive – starting with the whole dinosaurs dropped, sorry, fallen, through a wormhole (probably landing with a big whomp sound effect) by Soviet mad science during the Vietnam War business, the film’s utter inability to convince anyone this actually takes place in 1968 however much CCR plays on the soundtrack (kudos to whoever managed to get the rights for the songs), and dialogue of such deep, clichéd stupidity it becomes nearly transcendent. Personal favourites here are the scene where Baker radios in his squad’s dinosaur problems to his superiors, and one of the dumbest “big rousing” speeches I’ve ever experienced, which is certainly not helped by Sparke’s decision to loosen the tension with a fart joke. No, really.

The special effects are all over the place – turns out cheap CGI dinosaurs with feathers are even more difficult to realize than dinosaurs without them – but make up for their wavering quality by the quantity and diversity of included dinosaurs. Plus, while it isn’t always good effects work, it is still done with visible love and enthusiasm.

While deeply, unironically stupid, this love and a sense of earnestness are really why this is so fun. Someone here must actually have put thought into details like the noise T-Rex jaws barely missing a victim must make – though the resulting noise is pretty damn silly. Which makes it somewhat bizarre that nobody put the same amount of thought into plot, dialogue, pacing or narrative structure, but hey! Soldiers versus dinosaurs and every damn war movie cliché plus every damn dinosaur movie cliché in a single movie! And even some romance – between two T-Rexes, in fact.

So thanks, Australia, this was deeply stupid, but also incredible.

Three Films Make A Post: Dare to play.

Night of the Reaper (2025): For that part of its running time when it is a period-set throwback slasher with a procedural element that reminds more of a giallo than a cop movie, Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper is an exemplary and quite entertaining low budget movie that looks and feels the part it wants to play very well indeed. For its final third, it does turn out to be a very 2020s kind of film, alas, and we end up in the realm of “clever” plot twists that not only strain belief in the context of what the audience has seen before (or not been allowed to see on a pretty obnoxious level) but also replace what should be an exciting climax with fifteen minutes of the movie explaining itself to us.

It’s a shame too, for before that, this is a really fun little movie.

Witchboard (2024): This remake (of a very free kind) of Witchboard by veteran director Chuck Russell isn’t so much a throwback to the more freewheeling world of 80s/90s horror but simply a film made by a director who lived the time and apparently has no interest in changing his way of filmmaking. This is messily plotted and loves to go off on wild tangents, but what it loses in tightness thereby, it wins in the joys of wild abandon. This is a movie that’s probably going to go there, or find something that’s even more there to go to. Add an openness to add some sleaze/sexiness (often completely absent from horror these days, because people apparently don’t fuck anymore) to the gratuitous – and often pretty awesome – violence, and you have quite the concoction of the best clichés, tropes and bad yet awesome ideas a viewer could hope for. Well, if you can ignore the digital blood splatter, which never works.

Blood Ritual aka 血裸祭 (1989): Speaking of wild abandon, this Hongkong horror/action/comedy/kitchen sink CATIII wonder directed by Lee Yuen-Ching wavers so wildly between non-supernatural cult horror, sleazy softcore sex, brutal action choreographed by Tsui Siu-Ming, broad romantic comedy and info dumps about “evil religions” at least this viewer got quite dizzy. Which probably is the right state of mind to appreciate a film that seems to be a perfect expression of the kind of maximalism for a minimal budget HK cinema at this point in time was particularly fantastic at.

Three Films Make A Post: Let Don Lee’s Fist Come Unto Thee

Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025): This horror action film about a trio of exorcists for hire – the shamanistic medium with demon powers (Seohyun), the shlub (Lee Da-Wit), and the dude who will punch the demon right out of you (Ma Dong-seok aka Don Lee) – take on a particularly difficult case during which all of the exorcism movie clichés will appear, barely comprehensible lore will be spouted, and Ma Dong-seok will punch everything – demons, minions, a portal to hell, the furniture. As directed by first-timer Lim Dae-hee, this is fast, low-brow fun that pretty much knows the kind of pulp joys it wants to deliver and goes about this business with enough verve to distract from how little substance this actually has.

Plus, you can learn about the six stages of exorcism.

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards! aka Kutabare akutô-domo: Tantei jimusho 23 (1963): It’s pretty impossible to live up to this title, and Seijun Suzuki clearly doesn’t want to. Though while this has a couple of very fun action sequences, it mostly demonstrates everything the Nikkatsu higher ups didn’t like about Suzuki: his unwillingness to just tell a simple, straightforward story, his bizarre sense of humour, his intense distractibility. All of this does get in the way of building even the least amount of tension, but leaves Suzuki and his audience much space to enjoy all kinds of colourful – also literally, because give Suzuki a colour film and he’ll colour the crap out of it and your eyes – bits and pieces of comedy, strange sexual hang-ups, and Jo Shishido saying “yes” to everything Suzuki throws at him.

This never reaches the genuine unity of bizarre artistry of something like Tokyo Drifter or Branded to Kill but is still pretty damn fun, unless you go in expecting a straightforward crime film. But why would you?

The Shaolin Plot aka 四大門派 (1977): This Golden Harvest production directed by Wong Fung marks a rather important point in the career of Sammo Hung – here, he has clearly reached early mastership in the art of martial arts choreography, has a fun, prominent villain part (featuring some fascinating hairstyle decisions), and has assembled much of the team that’ll accompany him in the following years, when he’d go on to make his own films.

Stylistically, this very much wants to be a Shaw Brothers shaolin movie, just with very different ideas about choreography – much more physically brutal and directly acrobatic – and a script – also by Wong Fung – that lacks the easy competence of the sort of thing Ni Kuang would have written. While the martial arts are utterly fantastic, there is, particularly in the middle part, an unfocused and dragging quality to everything else, with scenes that never seem to want to end for no good reason, and surprisingly little personality – even short-hand one – to most of the characters.

This is what keeps the film from being a real classic of its style in my eyes, though the fights alone make it pretty unmissable for anyone interested in the transitionary phases of Hongkong cinema between the reigns of Shaw and Golden Harvest.

Three Films Make A Post: Run for your life before they devour you

Halabala (2025): This Thai production directed by Eakasit Thairaat about an killer cop and a handful of idiots hunting a crazy killer in a haunted forest is a bit of a frustrating mess. It never can decide on a tone, wavering between Thai gore, psychological horror, ill-advised post-Tarantino-isms, and whatever else you can come up with. Whenever it actually hits on something creepy or interesting in a scene, it’s going to undermine it completely in the next; the climax is a particular mess, and a waste of a perfectly good monster suit to boot.

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (1992): This is the first of three unconnected Kamen Rider V-cinema movies. It is also the longest and the least artistically successful one.

It is actually a great idea to double down on the body horror element inherent to Kamen Rider as a whole – crossing people with bugs and all that – but the film doesn’t really commit to the horror for too long, finds itself not clever enough to rip off the relationship bit from The Fly properly, and shoots a third of its action scenes via bug vision, so the audience can’t actually see what’s going on in them. Which is a bit of a shame, for the rest of the action sequences are full of the great joys of direct-to-video action and tokusatsu. Hell, they could even afford a helicopter for the climax.

The film isn’t without its charms – Geena Davis should have had a foetus shooting golden light from her abdomen as well – but it’s also not as fun as the film you’ll see in your mind when you hear “Kamen Rider body horror”.

The Great Chase (1975): To avenge her father, race car driver and karate ace Shinobu (Etsuko Shihomi) has joined up with a secret government organisation. Her investigation, during which she also turns out to be a mistress of disguise (she does old ladies, dapper young men, and even older ladies from Cambodia) and a fashion icon (some of the costuming choices alone would be worth the price of admission), eventually leads her not only to the man who killed her father, but also the guy responsible for it: Bin Amatsu, who likes to rape women while wearing a furry suit (including a head), accompanied by loud classical music. Afterwards, he stuffs the traumatized victim in full plate mail, because why not.

So yes, this is indeed a Norifumi Suzuki movie, full of stuff that is as problematic as it is outrageously fun, as well as half a dozen cool fight showcases for the ever wonderful Shihomi, and a choice Toei funk soundtrack. It’s not his most extreme or outrageous Suzuki joint – Shihomi had certain standards – nor his most offensive but it is certainly still quite a bit of fun.

Striking Rescue (2024)

Bai An (Tony Jaa), a man with a rather expert talent for inflicting physical punishment on dozens of goons at once, is going on a bit of a personal crusade through the underworld of a South East Asian (or the censors would never allow some of the elements of the plot if it took place in China) country. Turns out murdering his pregnant wife during the course of some corporate/criminal business wasn’t the villains’ greatest idea.

Because movies – supposedly - need a bit more of a plot, Bai An rescues the teenage daughter of the corporate overlord he takes to be the man behind the murder, and finds himself drawn into protecting her while still murdering his way through the underworld and what turns out to be a conspiracy.

This Chinese direct to streaming action movie by Siyu Cheng is positioned as something of a return to form of its leading man, troubled Thai action star Tony Jaa, and if you’re an old-fashioned lover of watching Jaa smash his elbow (and other parts of his anatomy) into bad guys’ heads like me, you’ll be quite happy with the fact that Jaa is indeed still a fantastic screen fighter up to all kinds of inspired physical shenanigans. One whose elbows you want to keep far away from your head.

The plot, such as it is, is decent enough to hold the action scenes together, though the film could have lost its final scene that’s built on a misguided believe we care one way or the other for a certain character, or feel the need to see them punished, as well as the Chinese morality police mandated text about how Jaa’s character is going to be punished for his violent acts off-camera, because order and virtue and blah blah blah.

Even the subplot about the teenager, the sort of thing that can get pretty annoying right quick, meant to humanize proceedings and our violent protagonist, works well enough, also thanks to a perfectly decent performance by Chen Duo-Yi (I believe) as said teenager.

The action itself is brutal and varied – as we like it around here. Cheng knows what he has in the screen fighters, martial artists and stuntpeople assembled here, and appears to see it as his job to make them look as good as possible doing their things. Which, obviously, should be a given when you direct an action movie centred on a beloved martial arts star, but I’ve seen too many directors obfuscating instead of enhancing what’s happening in action scenes to take this sort of approach for granted.

So, yes, Striking Rescue is indeed the comeback we were promised, possibly the one we deserved.

Ghost Killer (2024)

Passive and more than a little alienated college student Fumika Matsuoka (Akari Takaishi) goes through life with only the minimum required amount of enthusiasm. She likes to introduce herself with “just another college student”, which might be the purest expression of non-suicidal youthful ennui possible. Her life takes quite a turn when she picks up a bullet casing on her way home.

Suddenly, Fumika finds herself haunted by the ghost of murdered assassin Kudo (Masanori Mimoto), one of those near-mythical super-fighters doing that kind of job in the movies instead of the boring psychopaths of real life. When she invites him in by giving him her hand, Kudo can even possess Fumika and pilot her body. Kudo believes that he might be able to pass on if Fumika lends him her body to kill the people responsible for his death, which might be preferrable to having a middle-aged dead guy hanging around you for the rest of your life.

Fumika, a woman of a generally non-murderous disposition, isn’t into the idea of lending her body for bloody vengeance at first, but after Kudo helps her out with some toxic masculinity problems that turn out to be not completely unrelated to his former business, his vengeance might also save her life.

Kensuke Sonomura is the action and martial arts choreographer of the rather wonderful Baby Assassins movies, but his own directorial efforts until now suffered from scripts too bare-bones even for action movies. Getting Baby Assassins writer/director Yugo Sakamoto to do the scripting honours and teaming up straight action actor Mimoto with half of Baby Assassins’ leads in form of Takaishi finally brings out the best in the guy – turns out Sonomura’s love for intricately choreographed and highly technical martial arts fights also mixes wonderfully with Sakamoto’s sense of humour and humanity when Sonomura’s the man on the director’s chair. There’s a sense of human stakes here Sonomura’s earlier films lacked for me. As in the Baby Assassins films, Takaishi’s style of expressive acting is a wonderful foible for the more limited talents of a great action actor/actress in this regard, while she is by now able to show off some pretty great on-screen action chops as well, though the film does shift to Mimoto’s body for about half of the action.

Pleasantly, and frankly surprisingly, given how Japanese films often go, there are no attempts at sexualising the relationship of the main characters – in fact, the early victims of some righteous ass-whupping are the only creeps of that sort on screen here. In fact, one of the ways the film justifies the increasing violence is by showing us an action-movified version of the kind of crap women all too often have to go through in real life.

While the action is as fast (and I mean fast), furious and regular as one would hope for, and the jokes as well-timed as expected, the emotional beats are just as important to Ghost Killer, so these characters in their somewhat absurd world and situation feel believable  and real enough to care about. And even though Kudo is quite the bad-ass, this isn’t the case of a Steven Seagal bully “hero” – there are physical and emotional stakes here that turn this into more than a pure action display.

Three Films Make A Post: Torment is just the beginning.

The Butterfly House aka Pernikahan Arwah (2025): A couple’s wedding preparations are disturbed when the groom’s family curse starts making things difficult. For reasons of symmetry, this curse has quite a bit to do with weddings.

I found Paul Agusta’s piece of Indonesian horror to be a pleasant example of the form. It is neither as gruesome as some horror films from the country, nor as soap operatic, instead inhabiting a middle ground of the perfectly decent, with nice enough horror sequences, good enough acting and a decently flowing script.

1978 (2025): I expected a little more of a film set during the Argentinean military dictatorship where some torturers and their victims encounter something perhaps even worse than themselves. Unfortunately, Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s film makes little use of the metaphorical space screaming to be filled here – the torturers could be any random shit heels from any place and time in history and nothing at all would change about what happens to them and how they react to it, and the occult forces unleashed are run-of-mill Satanic business.

It’s not a terrible movie – some of the effects and monster designs are really neat for this budget bracket, and the directors know how to keep things flowing – but there’s nothing of real interest going on here.

The Big 4 (2022): As much as I usually like the films of Timo Tjahjanto, this action comedy about violent idiots killing other violent idiots for reasons of FAMILY is dire. That the humour is unfunny and ill-paced is bad enough, but somehow, the deeply action-affine director also can’t seem come up with any action set pieces of note. The problem isn’t just the humour, or the somewhat slighter amount of blood and gore than usual in Indonesian action. The film shows a lack of imagination and weight – or the proper kind of weightlessness – I find genuinely confusing coming from this particular filmmaker.

Mutant Ghost War Girl (2022)

In the confusing future of 2077. Superpowers acquired through gene editing are apparently now a thing, and international gangs/companies of evildoers use this technique to build themselves fighters they apparently mostly use for blood sports and only the occasional assassination.

An operative known as Ghost (Muqi Miya, apparently a Chinese-internet-famous yoga instructor) is sent to infiltrate the evil Medusa Company/Network to acquire super-secret data of some kind. This she does indeed acquire, but she is also mutated by the bad guys before her colleagues can rescue her. Now, after a rescue mission gone bad, she’s on the run from Medusa Corp through the mean streets of future South Korea.

Zhou Yang (Li Mingxuan), some kind of Korean intelligence agent is helping her out, though not via logical things like calling in any reinforcements. Instead he’s hiding her at his place for a bit, until they team up to acquire more of the mutating juice for…reasons.

Eventually, there’s a climactic fight with the leaders of the bad guys.

If all of this sounds vague and confusing, that’s firstly because Liu Binjie’s Chinese cyberpunk-y science fiction action movie comes with a set of subtitles that completely defies comprehension for at least half of the time, and defies sense even when the words used manage to combine into something you might confuse for a proper sentence. I’m not sure this is to the movie’s detriment, for this may very well be the sort of film made more enjoyable if you don’t understand what’s supposed to go on. At the very least, this incomprehensibility does add to Mutant Ghost War Girl’s mood of deep peculiarity.

Liu clearly loves western science fiction and superhero media so the film is as stuffed with quotes, borrowings and stolen parts from these films as much as Zhou Yang’s place is stuffed with fan tat (he even proudly displays a bust of Iron Man, Marvel’s trademark lawyers be damned). Liu does tend to like very peculiar parts of his western idols – you will encounter a character who is Jared Leto’s Xtreme Joker, and a scene borrowed nearly directly from the atrocious Ghost in the Shell abomination with Scarlett Johanssen, but again, this of course only adds to the film’s personality.

While all of this is pleasantly weird, MGWG also shows off some more than decent filmmaking chops: the production design is weird in a coherent and always fun to look at manner – mixing Western ideas of Cyberpunk Asia with actual Asian aesthetics – and the action scenes are fast, imaginative and silly in the best rule of cool manner.

Hell, even Muqi is a pretty good CGI action star for a yoga instructor.

Three Films From 2025 I Didn’t Care For Still Make A Post

Ballerina (2025): I’m of two minds about the John Wick movies – no, really, I think half of them are pretty brilliant, the other half very much not – and alas, spin-off Ballerina, as directed by Len Wiseman belongs to the very much not  part of this equation. Featuring pointless cameos, not a single interesting (or just fun) idea and an interminable number of action sequences that are technically very accomplished but also bland and empty as these things get (one might suggest the term “soulless”), this is a joyless example of franchise “content” nobody involved seems to actually wanted to create. Why we are then supposed to want to watch it is anyone’s guess.

Drop (2025): In the case of Drop, the problem may be as much me as the film. It is not exactly director Christopher Landon’s fault that I find US dating culture as presented in movies not just difficult to relate to but aggressively boring. Nor is it his fault that I find twisty thrillers generally a bit of a hard sell.

What is Landon’s fault is that most of the twists here are painfully generic, the surprises perfectly unsurprising, and much of what is presented too absurd to work in the way it is presented. Stylistically, this often feels like a show reel for its director instead of a movie, something you can get away with when you are Brian DePalma; Landon, as much as I enjoyed some of his earlier movies, is not.

Murder at the Lighthouse (2025): This little Lifetime movie at least has an excuse for not being any good – it being a Lifetime movie comes with a decided lack of budget as well as a dearth of talent before the camera – although everybody including the crazy stalker cop ex-boyfriend looks absurdly well groomed.

Director Eric D. Howell clearly liked Misery, so much so he’s eventually getting up to turning this into a decidedly lesser version of the King adaptation (or the King novel). On the plus side, this lacks the painful camp and irony of too many Lifetime thrillers, so at least Howell was trying instead of just throwing his hands up going “it’s all ironic, you see”.

Three Films Make A Post: What We Fear We Create

Fight or Flight (2024): I really enjoyed Bullet Train, and apparently, so did James Madigan. In fact, he enjoyed the film so much, he made his own version of it, with the brilliant twist of making everything in it a little – or a lot – worse. So we get an airplane instead of a train, Josh Hartnett instead of Brad Pitt, crappier hallucinations, less absurdly fun characters and inferior action choreography.

The result is one of the more puzzling films I’ve seen this week – I really can’t quite figure out why it exists.

Project MKHEXE (2025): Whereas Gerald Robert Waddell conspiracist POV horror that turns into cosmic horror clearly exists as a labour of love. It’s a film full of genuinely good ideas, well realized. It includes some moments of genuine eeriness, and shows a willingness to end on a downer note that’s deserved instead of cliché.

I particularly enjoyed all the little bits and pieces taken from different styles of POV horror that make up much of the film’s middle part – this solves the problem of the genre’s tendency to have boring middles quite nicely and provides the film with a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the scope of what’s going on in it without breaking the bank.

As to weaknesses – well, the acting’s not always quite up the ambition – particularly when it comes to the grief horror parts of the film – and the film’s ten minutes or so longer than it exactly needs to be. For this kind of indie project, these are hardly problems worth mentioning, however.

Stranger (1991): The early days of Toei’s V-Cinema subdivision really were an anything goes time, apparently, so between classic exploitation, yakuza comedy, insane low budget action, or 70s heist revival, there was also space for this suspense thriller by Shunichi Nagasaki about a loner female taxi driver (Yuko Natori) finding herself stalked by what turns out to be a killer. There are a couple of obvious influences – Spielberg’s Duel for the rather wonderful car action parts and the usual suspense suspects – but Nagasaki’s film is such a great portrayal of loneliness as well as of a woman under threat protecting herself, these influences begin to pale behind the tight, focussed, filmmaking and the general intelligence of the film.

Three Films Make A Post: Family over everything.

Shadow Force (2025): Joe Carnahan always has been a bit of a hit or miss filmmaker for me, though when he hits, he does tend to find the bullseye.

This piece of action cinema, though, does feel like the product of someone who can’t even be bothered to look in the direction of the target. Everything here, from the bland direct to DVD actioner look (this is not actually a direct to whatever movie), the lifeless script without character or style, the blandly generic action choreography to a script that can’t even be bothered to be interesting enough to be called clichéd, and finally the deeply dull performances by a cast that could do so much better, lacks so completely in personality and life, it’s difficult to even call this a movie. Hell, even “content” might be too friendly a description for something this lacking in soul.

Invader (2024): Certainly not lacking in personality is this brutal serial killer movie by Mickey Keating. This time around, the stylistically very varied director goes all out on jittery, nervous energy, often shaking, handheld camera that perfectly puts into picture the sense of looming threat and paranoia its main character (Vero Maynez) suffers as a foreigner in the USA. Particularly this USA, at this point in time. And though this is mostly a highly efficient, condensed, and often quite nasty, horror movie about a woman threatened by a killer, it works all too well as a mirror of how its time and place feels.

The Executioner (1974): One can’t help but hope the Japan of 1974 did feel like this Teruo Ishii action movie starring beloved Sonny Chiba as the youngest descendent of the Koga ninja clan, gone down in the world to steal a bunch of drugs from the Japanese franchise of the Mafia with a former policeman and a sex pest. For its combination of bizarre violence and the violently bizarre is pretty delightful.

Sure, Ishii has directed weirder things – he’s mostly doing Man’s Adventure with tongue planted firmly in cheek here – and Chiba has been in weirder and/or better movies, but if I’d start judging their movies, or any movies, on that bar, there’d be a very limited amount of joy to be found in my movie watching world.

As far as the world of silly, violent Toei exploitation movies go, this is doing its job of entertaining me more than just fine.