Three Films Make A Post: It's Light… It's Bright… It's 100 Proof!

Ghost Train (2025): YouTuber Da-kyeong (Joo Hyun-young) revives her ailing horror channel with stories about Korea’s most haunted subway station as told to her by one of the men working there. At first, these stories seem like disconnected tales, but eventually, they entwine with Da-kyeong’s own life in ways she probably didn’t hope for.

For an anthology movie, the single tales in director Tak Seo-woong’s film can feel a little slight at first, particularly since they do tend to go for the standard tropes and shocks of Korean horror, with more than a smidgen of the Japanese 2chan style. However, each episode here does feature at least one strong, creepy image, and the way everything eventually comes together is pretty satisfying as well, so things are far from being as bland as the film’s beginning – or its title - would suggest.

Hue and Cry (1947): Directed by Charles Crichton, this film about a bunch of older boys in post-War London spoiling the plans of a master criminal did put British Ealing studios on the road to the sort of comedy we now know as the Ealing style of comedy, following the more traditionally comedian-centred efforts they made before. There’s a sharp eye for darkness and human foibles here, yet also a subversive sense of the little guy (in this case young men and boys somehow manoeuvring the direct post-war world), mostly ignored by the powers that be, sticking up for themselves as a community.

In this case, the kids are up against robbers who use not-Sexton Blake Brit pulps for children to message one another, as well as various forms of grown-up cowardice and hypocrisy. More importantly, the film is paced like race car, still genuinely funny in many regards, and makes great use of the rubble of the post-war years.

Whisky Galore! (1949): Speaking of Ealing comedies, in this one, directed by by Alexander Mackendrick, a Scottish island population, dried out of the Water of Life, attempts to steal many cases of whisky from a stranded government ship transporting it. Along the way, the film pulls at stiff upper lips, puritanical religion, and even solves two different romances with a sense of humour that goes from silly to subversive to the outright bizarre. There’s a bit concerning the power of a good bagpipes blow-out you really have to see to believe.

Only, there are very few Scotspeople involved here, so expect many a risible fake accent – I’m convinced Joan Greenwood doesn’t know the difference between Scotland and Wales, though her Welsh accent is really dreamy – and ideas about Scottish national identity that might not stand the sniff test. On the other hand, this is still a movie about a Scottish island getting one over the Brits in the name of alcoholism, so…

Three Films Make A Post: A Scotch Mist...A Girl Never Kissed...A Yank Who Missed...and Landed HIGH AND DRY

The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020): After the actually watchable first Babysitter, this is a step back into his old crappiness for director McG(odawful). The film’s more a compilation of badly realized and badly staged pop culture references, with a script that interrupts any scene that should be perfectly entertaining when just left alone for some smug “joke” that’s generally about as funny as getting murdered. The final act is total catastrophe, the film pretending it has emotional character arcs (it would need actual characterisation for that) and going for an ending that’s supposed to connect this one better with the first film but mostly feels random and shoe-horned in to get the most out of a shooting day with Samara Weaving.
And please don’t get me started on the thing’s tendency to point out that it has just made a joke, suggesting the filmmakers believe their audience consists of actual cave dwelling monkeys. It’s genuinely dreadful.

The Wind (2018): A completely different kind of film is this piece directed by Emma Tammi. Told slowly and out of chronological order, it isn’t the easiest film to get into or understand initially, but a fantastic performance by Caitlin Gerard, wonderfully creepy and beautiful shots of wide, empty plains and fields do ease one nicely into the uncanny atmosphere. It’s a tale of the supernatural and of madness that keeps things just ambiguous enough to work, exploring the uneasiness of the settler in a very strange land with particular emphasis on the strains this kind of life puts on women.

It’s also an insightful psychological portrait of a murderer, using the strange and the supernatural, mental illness and delusions as ways to understand things difficult to.

The ‘Maggie’ aka High and Dry (1954): This British comedy by Alexander Mackendrick has obvious parallels to the brilliant I Know Where I’m Going, but without that film’s undertow of the mythical, and does not quite reaches its heights. That’s not a shame, really, for not being Shakespeare doesn’t after all necessarily mean you’re a bad playwright. At the very least, the film is funny, using certain clichés about Scots and Scots working class people in contrast to an American businessman with American business work ethics without getting preachy or embarrassing about it.


But then, when the film isn’t setting up its jokes, it does spend so much time and love on its characters that they stop being short hands for ideas or butts of jokes and become people, the film genuinely trying to understand where everyone is coming for, what got them there, and what they might learn from each other. That’s so not 2020, but really rather refreshing.

Three Films Make A Post: Two bad people are about to meet two worse people.

Some Kind of Hate (2015): Whereas I thought that director Adam Egypt Mortimer’s follow-up film Daniel Isn’t Real (perhaps later more about that one on a later date) was a brilliant horror film about mental illness and the idea of “normality”, this, Mortimer’s first feature really doesn’t work at all. This one’s about the trauma of bullying and an undead girl taking vengeance on bullies and taking things rather too far. Apart from obvious structural problems like terrible pacing and way too much repetition, what this one suffers under most is a certain heart on its sleeve quality that suggests filmmakers a bit too close to the theme they want to talk about and therefor unable to step away from it enough to turn it into functioning art. A couple of the kills are pretty cleverly staged and imagined, at least, but it’s clear throughout that the film has much greater ambitions than being a slash fest it simply can’t fulfil.

Meek’s Cutoff (2010): Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist (post-revisionist?) Western on the other hand seems to be able to fulfil all of its ambitions easily, but then the comparison between a debut horror movie by a young guy just starting out and an experienced director like Reichardt at the top of her game is completely unfair of me, probably to both films. Anyway, Reichardt’s ambitions here are many: at once to show a naturalistic, detail-focussed tale of settlers on the Oregon trail but also to sip from the mythic well that has been built over the bones of such settlers; talking about America today by talking about its past; facing the complexities of societal misogyny and racism head-on. She’s doing all that in a film shot with some of the starker values of post 2000s US indie cinema – the very digital camerawork, the realistic sound (though leave it to Reichardt to make it a highly constructed realistic sound clearly designed), the paucity of a classical dramatic plot, the slow pacing. Which shouldn’t work terribly well at all, but in practice, the whole film has a nearly magical quality of slowly growing intensity and will eventually feel at once naturalistic and utterly not of this world.

The Ladykillers (1955): And now for something completely different, a classic British black comedy about criminals and old ladies by Alexander Mackendrick (made for Ealing Studios who had a bit of form for this sort of thing) that’s about as subversive about society, to be precise about how a classist society reads social cues and roles and the way this twists even the people who think themselves clever enough to use this for their own profit, as can be.


It’s classically stylish British comedy cinema of this type, with actors like Alec Guiness, Katie Johnson, Cecil Parker, a young Peter Sellers, or Herbert Lom treating their roles with an arch humour that never can quite disguise the actual humanity behind characters that aren’t treated terribly compassionately by the film they are in.