Three Films Make A Post: Can you keep a secret?

The Housemaid (2025): On paper, I absolutely appreciate Paul Feig’s attempt to update the old erotic thriller formula for the 90s, but in practice, I found the resulting movie mostly dull. It is much, much too long for what it is – there’s at least half an hour of redundant repetition in here – and its self-conscious trashiness neither reaches the joys provided by simple, actual trashiness nor does it do much that’s really surprising in any way in its twists on the formula.

I also wish Feig had found a shared tone for his actors: Amanda Seyfried is all turned up to campy eleven, Sydney Sweeney aims for slightly zoned out naturalism, and Brandon Sklenar stays on “sleepy” even when he’s supposed to become anything but.

Blood Beast of Monster Mountain (1975): This is its very own, one-of-a-kind type of nonsense: one Donn Davison (“world traveller, lecturer and psychic investigator”) tries to bend a ten years old unfunny bigfoot comedy into a Legend of Boggy Creek shaped form. He can’t, so the audience is threatened by everything that’s horrible about bad low budget comedy – the film’s “funny” protagonist is called “Bestoink Dooley” as a marker of the ensuing horrors – with the added frisson of watching multi-un-talented Davison “interview witnesses”.

If you’re suffering from the same kind of movie sickness as I do, this probably does sound at least somewhat fun, but in actuality, you’re better off gazing into the abyss than at this one.

We Bury the Dead (2024): On the other hand, I was very positively surprised by Zak Hilditch’s treatment of a localized zombie apocalypse as an excuse to explore grief and guilt. Daisy Ridley is actually a fine actress for this sort of thing, and while this is not going to make anyone happy who is looking for a gory zombie apocalypse film, this is a very pleasant example of a a movie about a personal apocalypse.

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.

The Waves of Madness (2024)

Agent Legrasse (director, writer, editor and so on Jason Trost), a special ops style operative for a mysterious organization involved in paranormal research and defence is sent to a cruise ship that has sent out a somewhat peculiar distress call, intimating cult activity and things of the squamous type.

The ship is in fact infested by things eldritch and unpleasant that attempt to stretch their slimy tentacles right into Legrasse’s mind. Fortunately, a mysterious woman named Francis (Tallay Wickham), who has for some reason been locked up in a cell – all cruise ships have those, right? – turns out to be a helpful ally. She’s great with a knife and with exposition and may very well not be completely real – what more can any agent ask for?

This Australian – say the movie databases and half of the accents – or US – say the ending credits and the other half of the accents – very indie production will probably give its viewer the more joy the more they enjoy the its obvious influences. If pulpy black and white, side-scrolling videogames, survival horror video games of about the PS1 and PS2 eras, the pulpiest mode of Lovecraft’s Mythos, perhaps a smidgen of Delta Green or a Hellboy-less BPRD and home made special effects are your thing, you’ll probably find a lot to delight you here. In fact, the film isn’t just influenced by side-scrollers but actually shot as a green screen version of one, even including the loading screens, I mean elevator rides. Which is quite an aesthetic choice to make, and one Trost really, really doubles down on with admirable stubbornness.

I’ve never been much into sidescrollers on the gaming side, but otherwise, everything the film’s auteur Jason Trost is very clearly into, I’ve had or have room in my life for as well, so there was little chance of me resisting Waves’ cheap, homemade and enthusiastic charms, even if I would have been able to ignore the project’s ambitious indie creds. If this is what Trost makes in his living room with a handful of friends, he’d probably take over the world if you gave him a budget.

And yes, sure and obviously, the acting isn’t always great, the effects are sometimes more charming than exactly good, and the script drags a little in the middle even with a seventy minute runtime, but there’s so much genuine enthusiasm, love, and raw ability on screen, these flaws feel beside the point for The Waves of Madness.

Three Films Make A Post: Revenge has never been sweeter.

You’ll Never Find Me (2023): There’s a lot to admire in Indianna Bell’s and Josiah Allen’s thriller about a stormy night in an Australian trailer park home, a nightly visitor, and a lot – and I mean a lot – of meaningful stares and portentous dialogue: the sound design is fantastic, the performances are focussed, and it has some genuinely interesting things to say about the violence some men love to inflict of women. However, for me, there’s not enough material here for anything longer than a forty minute short film, so at full length, things feel rather repetitive and drawn out, and everything seems to be restated thrice until the film can lumber to its excellently realized if obvious conclusion.

Thelma (2024): I am genuinely disappointed I didn’t enjoy Josh Margolin’s comedic variation on action movie themes and old age as much as everybody else appears to. It’s not that this is a bad movie, but it is (again!) also a very obvious one: its insights about old age, while played wonderfully by June Squibb and Richard Roundtree, are not exactly incisive – and do tend to the treacly – and the play with action movie tropes stays just as surface level. The humour, as well, never is all that involving.

Taken on the surface level the film actually operates on, it is a fun time and genuinely well done, just don’t go in expecting something that has ambitions beyond making you feel good about your own future of slow decay and dissolution, and everybody you know and love dying (which the film actually tries to make a joke of, because old age loneliness is funny, apparently).

Bad City (2022): Whereas Kensuke Sonomura’s violent cop movie holds more than the homage to classic Japanese V-cinema I was promised. In fact, for being that other movie, it’s not quite violent and crazy enough, and much too interested in character work.

Don’t get me wrong – the action is plenty violent (though, alas, rather MMA-based), pleasantly chaotic and balancing right on the edge of cartoonish fun and brutality appropriate for the material. But this is a film deeply interested in also giving characters proper motivations and relationships it then uses to drive the plot that in its turn is the engine that drives the action sequences. During this, it uses clichés and tropes, and discards them or revels in them as it finds most fitting. It thus actually manages to achieve – between funny-bad jokes and a bit of carnage – a series of emotional beats that actually work. Hell, I found myself caring for the characters as characters, and how often can you say that about an action movie?

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.

Monolith (2022)

Disgraced after failing to do some crucial background checks during an investigation, a journalist (Lily Sullivan) coming from a wealthy background has turned solo podcaster with one of those “unsolved mysteries” style endeavours.

When she is sent the contact of a woman who once came into contact with a mysterious black brick, the journalist starts on a series of phone interviews that suggest a number of these bricks exist. People who are somehow touched by them, or perhaps are only hear or think about them enough, begin to suffer from hallucinations and strange obsessions, drifting towards violence and madness, or change in disturbing, perhaps unnatural, ways.

Our interviewer, clearly an obsessive personality already, is no exception to these effects. While her podcast becomes a bit of sensation, she appears to become increasingly unhinged by what she learns, sliding towards a confrontation with the lies and omissions at the core of her life as well as whatever force is embodied in the black bricks.

Matt Vesely’s Monolith is a wonderful example of contemporary weird fiction filmmaking. It uses some very of the moment cultural artefacts and concepts – true crime/weirdness podcasting, conspiracy culture and its online and real life consequences – but doesn’t quite tell the story you’d expect it to tell with them.

There’s a strong through line of cultural criticism embodied via in its protagonist running through the film, but apart from some to on the nose metaphorical work in the end, much of Monolith manages to keep the feeling of metaphors and meanings not quite resolving that I believe to be one of the more exciting and defining elements of the Weird. The interesting point in this kind of film to me is never the clear explanation, but the scenes when possible meanings float just before they coalesce. Once they do coalesce here, they do lose some of their special vibe, but thankfully there’s nothing wrong with the story the film is then telling. Apart from it telling a very specific one, but that’s my problem, not the movie’s.

That the landing on actual meaning works out as well as it does for the movie has a lot to do with Lily Sullivan’s performance. Sullivan never loses a quality of basic humanity even once we learn less than great things about her. Of course, it does help that the film never seems too interested in having her go through judgement and punishment as much as it is in a painful transformation towards betterment – at least in my reading of the movie.

Formally, Vesely manages to make a film consisting of a single woman looking at screens and talking on the phone with various people we only ever get to hear in a clearly expansive but also pretty expensive house feel dynamic and exciting, or tense and claustrophobic, depending on the needs of the film.

The use of short, enigmatic scenes that describe the feeling of the things the interviewer hears rather more than precisely show what she is told strengthens the truly Weird (in the sense that needs the capital W) mood of the first two acts wonderfully, and provides Monolith with a very specific rhythm that is great joy to experience.

Three Films Make A Post: Those which change. Those which never change. And those that don't want to change.

Shin Kamen Raider (2023): Hideaki Anno’s version of good old Kamen Raider is the most bonkers entry into what we’ll probably just call the Shin Trilogy around here (even though New Trilogy isn’t exactly specific or sexy). It condenses a whole fifty episode plus season of the first Kamen Rider series into an updated thing of crazy beauty, taking place in a world populated with weirdoes only able to speak in a very Japanese version of High Pop Philosophizing, transforming weirdly.

The production design manages to evoke the cheapness of the early Kamen Rider without falling into the trap of pure nostalgia, and Anno’s direction pays homage, deconstructs and wallows in the hallmarks of early tokusatsu TV, all the while condensing what Anno clearly loves about the genre into a two hour package. It’s absolutely brilliant in its earnest weirdness, but also so specific to early Kamen Rider mirrored in the now I’m hard pressed to imagine an audience outside of core nerds and otaku. Which isn’t a bad thing for me, of course.

Older Gods (2023): Tubi originals don’t exactly have a high betting average, but David A. Roberts’ cosmic horror movie about a man’s encounter with the cult that killed his friend is rather an exception to the rule. It’s certainly a very indie and very cheap movie, but also one that uses that as an opening to do things - in tone, rhythm and style - nobody’d throw a couple million dollars at you to put into a film. The whole affair feels personal and individual, at times perhaps a bit too earnest in tone for contemporary tastes (not for mine, mind you), features some genuinely creepy cosmicist imagery and does its best to add some idea of redemption and freedom to a philosophical outlook on horror that's generally not made for these feelings.

I’m not quite sure Older Gods is completely successful at convincing me of its redemptive moments, but I certainly found myself respecting it rather a lot for trying.

Sky Pirates aka Dakota Harris (1986): Trying certainly isn’t something Colin Eggleston’s dire Indiana Jones rip-off with John Hargreaves as its Indy stand-in does. In fact, I have seldom seen a film that seems quite so disinterested in even trying to make a basically Italian rip-off league of “borrowings” from other movies interesting or fun in any way, shape or form. A film with this wild a plot of adventure, adventure fantasy and pulp tropes and ideas really couldn’t or shouldn’t be what Sky Pirates manages quite effortlessly to be: boring as heck.

Three Films Make A Post: No soul is safe.

The Offering (2022): Oliver Park’s attempt at using Jewish Orthodox mythology productively for horror is a rather frustrating outing. If treated right, this tale of a rather horrible demonic entity, familial guilt and pregnancy could have been quit the thing, subtly exploring human and inhuman depths, as a sort of somewhat higher budget sibling to the brilliant The Vigil. Alas, the film wastes most of its potential on trying to be some kind of low-rent Conjuring affair (as if those weren’t already trite enough), so expect a film that appears to believe that horror is the genre all about making sudden loud noises. The jump scares are often nearly comically badly placed, turning moments that should be creepy or meaningful or sad into nothing but an idiot shouting boo at the wrong moment.

I’m also not exactly fond of Nick Blood’s central performance that too often feels like he’s out of his depth with the emotions he’s supposed to portray. Of course, the rest of the movie offers no help whatsoever to him.

Departures aka Okuribito (2008): Somewhat puzzlingly, this drama/comedy by veteran director Yojiro Takita won the Oscar for the best foreign movie when it came out. Well, it’s not too difficult to see why the film’s mixture of earnest but superficial pondering of death and a guy growing into a new life did go over great there, what with the award’s propensity for films that treat serious themes, but never so deeply they might actually hurt, but usually eschewing honest entertainment. This doesn’t make the film at hand good, though. Rather, it’s a movie that never goes to places you won’t expect, can never quite hit the emotional notes it goes for honestly, and when in doubt, will add another scene of our cellist turned funeral man scratching away at his instrument emotionally. Particularly the latter scenes did raise the question if this perhaps started as a parody of the kind of films it shares its half-empty head with.

Carnifex (2022): In the realm of the misguided and the awards-baiting, this perfectly serviceable nature-in-form-of-a-cryptid strikes back movie is king, at least of this particular post. Sean Lahiff’s movie takes a degree of care with the characterization and makes the comparatively slow pacing work okay, while the actors are likeable enough and the monster at least something we haven’t quite seen this way before.

Alas, there’s something lacking in the movie, a bigger spark of life, enthusiasm or simply excitement, so this is more the sort of thing you’ll watch once on a rainy evening and forget soon after, never to think of it again.

Three Films Make A Post: Some Live to Climb. They Climb to Live

Sherpa (2015): What starts as a bit of a picture postcard paean to the Sherpas – particularly the nearly record book touching mountain guide Phurba Tashi Sherpa - doing all the hard work for the hordes of hardcore tourists packaged by professional climbing businesses, turns serious after the great avalanche of 2014 kills sixteen Sherpas. Growing anger and frustration with the danger and exploitation inherent in the work lead to what’s really a strike movement. Director Jennifer Peedom raises to the unplanned occasion and turns out to be just as good at getting people who really aren’t into sharing their inner feelings to talk and to explain, showing how capitalism ruins everything – even the ability for some decent people to be honest to themselves - as she is at filming spectacular climbing scenes. Much of the film suggests the filmmakers truly care about the Sherpas and their situation.

The only element of it I’d criticize is its overuse of a clichéd and treacly emotionally manipulative score by Antony Partos that’s so over the top, it sometimes sounded like satire to my ears.

Slash/Back (2022): Nyla Innuksuk’s Inuktitut teen horror movie is a little wonder. Wearing some of its influences proudly on its sleeve – or rather, it feels like on its heart – it uses these influences to make the kind of horror film that has all the good qualities of local/regional horror filmmaking of decades ago. So expect the local applied to genre tropes, on one hand, to make both strange and new, on the other to be able to talk about things – here the lives and feelings and divisions between young Inuktitut girls living in the kind of small town at the polar circle where a solstice dance is pretty much the most exciting thing their parents generation experiences in a year.

Innuksuk touches her scenes with a light hand, never letting them getting swallowed by the horror tropes, but also never going the other way either. So things stay fun but never dumb, unless dumbness is point of the fun.

Alta tensione: Il gioko aka School of Fear (1999): The late 90s were not a good time to make horror or giallo in Italy. Still, Lamberto Bava did from time to time manage to get some money for a mini series anthology or two from Italian TV, like the series this fine TV movie is part of. It is often cleverly written (by Roberto Gandus and of course Dardano Sacchetti), using creepy kids tropes as well as a discomfort with conservative institutions to great effect, finishing ambiguous and dark, and surprisingly coherent.

Bava’s direction often creates genuinely suspenseful and creepy moods, usually finding some way to make every scene more interesting and effective. There’s also some fine locations work, which you don’t always get in TV work.

Gold (2022)

In some near, post-economic/post-ecological collapse future, a forever nameless Man (Zac Efron), is on his way from what’s left of a city to a supposedly golden opportunity for work in a camp somewhere in the deepest desert that once was the countryside. He’s got a kind of rideshare arrangement with another man without a name, let’s call him Man Two (Anthony Hayes), for in the grim future of 2040 (or thereabout, I presume), everybody’s too tired and cranky to have a name. Also, as every film school student will tell you, not giving your characters names means they are stand-ins for the human condition; therefore. existentialism can ensue.

On their ride through the big nowhere, the men (or would that be Men?) stumble upon a humungous chunk of gold. So huge is it, they’ll need heavier machinery to dig it out and cart it away than a nearly broken-down car. Man Two thinks he can provide; Man Two talks Man into staying with the chunk while he gets said heavy machinery in by using the old con-man reverse psychology style of “I don’t think you can stand staying here”. So Man stays to protect their find, in case some roaming heavy machinery operator drives through the middle of nowhere.

Turns out he’s really not the ideal candidate for spending time with barely enough resources to survive in the desert. He’s got a particular talent for wasting water. It certainly doesn’t help there that Man Two – who at least left a satellite phone – takes much longer for his job than expected, so that Man’s water and food rations are shrinking rapidly even without him not being a great survivalist.

Add to this natural dangers like sandstorms, wild dogs that seem to be rather better at desert survival than our Man, and an encounter with a strange but rude wanderer (Susie Porter), and things don’t look great for Man, neither physically, nor mentally, nor, as it turns out, ethically. Why, it’s as if he has been set up. Not surprisingly, the credits feature Nick Cave’s version of “People Ain’t No Good”.

Which is the first and only joke Anthony Hayes’s Gold makes, and it is a rather good one, particularly after ninety minutes of people being horrible to each other, nature not being much nicer, and everyone being doomed by a script that writes them so.

Which isn’t a criticism of the film’s tone, mind you, for it clearly wants to argue for the human condition as being an incessant, pointless drag from cradle to grave, exacerbated by the global and local results of our own greed and stupidity, and that everyone is a total shit – human and animal alike. In this world view and movie, our slightly less horrible Man is quite obviously doubly doomed; and not just doomed to die but first to suffer, then suffer, then suffer some more, become as morally corrupt as the rest of the world, suffer some more, and then die horribly. So, cheery stuff, really. It’s just not quite as convincing as it should be because the script does so obviously strain to get the character into his predicament and keep him there you might come to the conclusion everything’s quite as bad as it is not because of nature (human and otherwise) but because the writers want it to be thusly.

Hayes stages this with some flair, using the desert location as yet another way to strengthen the plot’s nihilistically oppressive mood, dwarfing Efron’s character through sheer emptiness. The further Efron’s basically sympathetic character falls into suffering and despondency, the more hallucinatory things become, but never so much as to suggest any actual spiritual element or the possibility of any transcendence – or even just development - through suffering. The only thing suffering gets you in this one is getting ripped apart by a pack of wild dogs, while some asshole watches and chuckles.

Alison’s Birthday (1981)

Warning: there will be (some) spoilers, especially for the film’s structure and ending!

When she was sixteen, young Alison (Joanne Samuel) had a rather too exciting home-made Ouija board experience. During it, something purporting to be the spirit of her father (her parents both died in a car accident) possessed one of her friends to warn her not to return home to her uncle and aunt for her nineteenth birthday. After which something else manifested and telekinetically killed her friend.

Now Alison is nearing that nineteenth birthday, and she’s not really planning to go home for the day. What a surprise. She’s a bit busy with her life as a record saleswoman and her radio DJ boyfriend Peter (Lou Brown) anyway. Our heroine does change her mind when her aunt Jennifer (Bunney Brooke) suggests that her uncle Dean (John Bluthal) doesn’t have long to live. She does bring Peter with her, even though he isn’t going to sleep at her family’s place.

Not surprisingly, very strange things start to happen that just might suggest that the deadly warning from beyond of a couple of years ago was right on the money, and that the nice aunt and uncle couple may very well have some terrible plans for their niece. In the end, it’s going to be up to Peter to save Alison, which may or may not turn out to be great for the people involved.

Ian Coughlan’s folk/occult horror movie Alison’s Birthday had been quite difficult to see for decades, so my expectations for it were probably a bit higher than was good for my appreciation. There was a degree of disappointment when I finally got to see the film, for it is not, as one may have hoped for, a long lost masterpiece of its sub-genre(s), but a sometimes awkward mix of two very different kinds of horror film that doesn’t quite come together as perfectly as too high expectations would want it to.

However, looked at realistically, this is a fine little bit of horror with a handful of truly great scenes, and otherwise mostly solid ones, which (those are the rules) makes it a rather good film, just not the return of one’s favourite godhood on celluloid.

The film’s structure is peculiar: for its first half, we follow the misadventures of Alison, her exploration of the hidden secrets of her old home (major finds being a mini-Stonehenge in the supposedly snake-infested backyard, where “backyard” is interpreted in a very Australian way, and a genuine crone in the attic), her growing distrust of what functionally were her parents for much of her childhood, her trying to escape the cloying pressures of people being creepily nice and loving – all of which ends with her being drugged and hypnotized and losing her protagonist role.

At which point the film turns into a Dennis Wheatley-ish (if you can imagine Wheatley without his ultra-competent asshole heroes and weird rants about communism and Satan) occult conspiracy tale in which Peter uses his surprisingly good investigative skills to find out what’s going on, and then tries his much less impressive two-fisted hero bit on the cultists he has discovered, while he’s thwarted by their basic competence at being evil at every turn.

Turns out, the would-be macho guy may steal the female protagonist’s occult gaslighting tale right out of her hands, but that doesn’t mean he will not screw up her rescue rather badly, so that she has to bear the brunt of a film’s shock ending.

And it’s a really good shock ending, too, Coughlan hitting a nasty, disturbing and pretty cruel note with true creepy vigour, providing the movie with the true 70s (functionally, 1981 is still the 70s for horror) downer ending poor Alison doesn’t deserve, and which does make up for a scene or two too many of Peter flailing at the hero bit.

It’s certainly an interesting way to tell this particular story, though I do find the Alison-led half of the film more engaging. In part, because Samuel is simply a much better actress than Brown, in part because her slowly figuring out what’s going on with the people supposedly closest to her and trying to escape them without breaking the social contract is just thematically and emotionally much more resonant and engaging, dramatizing the horror of growing up very well indeed. Whereas the tale of an incompetent dude trying to save his girlfriend just doesn’t quite have the same interest.

There is still enough of interest going on in Peter’s half of the film to never make Alison’s Birthday boring, mind you, with some delightful moments of bizarre cult activity and a dollop of sequences of people doing research (which always delight me to no end) keeping things at the very least engaging throughout.

In short: Innocent Prey (1984)

Cathy Wills (P.J. Soles) witnesses her husband Joe (Kit Taylor)murdering a prostitute. Because being married to a serial killer apparently isn’t a turn on for her, she helps folksy Dallas sheriff Baker (Martin Balsam) arrest him. Alas, Joe very quickly breaks out of one of those very low security “high security” establishments, and makes his way to kill Cathy. He doesn’t quite manage that, but ups his kill count by at least three cops and has some fun decoratively putting up a female cop head under great time pressure. And while Cathy escapes, Joe does so, too.

Sensibly, our heroine decides leaving Dallas for at least as long as Joe stays uncaught is a good idea. Fortunately, her friend Gwen (Susan Stenmark) has invited our heroine to stay with her in Australia, which seems a good bit away from Texas. Alas, once Cathy has arrived and starts to relax a little, she encounters another man of dubious sanity. Gwen’s neighbour and landlord Phillip (John Warnock) loves spying with hidden cameras, murder by electricity, and has rather interesting ideas about female purity. He’s obsessed with Cathy on first encounter. Because that’s not trouble enough, Joe has found out where she is hiding, and is beginning to make his way to Australia. Oh, and did I mention there seems to be something a little off about Rick (Grigor Taylor), the man Cathy feels drawn to?

I do tend to complain about overly constructed horror movies and thrillers, but I find it pretty difficult to resist the charms of this Australian example of the form directed by Colin Eggleston. It’s a very efficient film, packing two continents and two and a half psychos into a running time of less than ninety minutes, while still managing to sort of connect all the more or less nonsensical dots.

There’s a lot to love about the film: the contrast between Joe’s traditional slasher methods and Phillip’s ridiculous high tech as of 1984 oriented ways, how hilariously obvious the two (as well as the next one on the list) are as movie crazy people yet still manage to keep Cathy guessing for a bit, the exoticizing of Texas in Joe’s half of the film – it’s all very good fun.

When he puts his mind to it, Eggleston can actually compose a perfectly decent thriller sequence, as proven by Joe’s attack on his former home, which makes all the improbable ideas, the scenery chewing – particularly Warnock is a bizarre joy – and the dubious taste all the more delightful.

Three Films Make A Post: Take The Trip

Stone (1974): This Australian bikie (thanks for that term, Australia) exploitation movie is a weird thing. It starts out as a paranoid acid trip (that is to say, pretty awesome), turns into a nearly anthropological look at its version of bikie culture - with some added fun violence in between, of course – and ends with the sort of 70s downer business that really puts all that talk about honour in the scenes before into a rather brutal perspective.

One-time feature director and occasional actor Sandy Harbutt has quite the eye for going from 70s psychedelia, through the scenes that feel documentary, to the cheap and fun action, dropping some acerbic bits about class, and getting back to the bad trip quality while making things feel natural.

Hell Drivers (1957): There’s also quite a bit of class commentary in Cy Endfield’s curious mix of melodrama, truck action, and noir tropes. Unlike in many a 50s British movie, one can even imagine the director having met working class people before. The film also shows for its time surprising sympathy for its Italian “Gastarbeiter” character (though he is played by the decidedly not Italian Herbert Lom), and generally seems to have a good working idea of how a certain type of working class pride can easily be exploited to destructive ends.

On a less theoretical level, for my tastes, the film comes down a bit too hard on the side of the melodrama, putting the action and the noir elements sometimes too far in the back. The cast is pretty amazing however, not only featuring Lom, Patrick McGoohan, Stanley Baker and Peggy Cummins in the leads, but having pop up William Hartnell, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, and even Sean Connery in small before they were famous parts.

The Comeback Trail (2020): George Gallo’s remake of the Harry Hurwitz movie is one of those comedies that sometimes go out of their way to repeat a joke for the slow audience members, likes to mistime perfectly fine punchlines, and often shows surprisingly little talent for staging its jokes as best as it could. Frome time to time, the script’s very funny indeed (particularly if you like your low budget movies), but just as often, it seems to coast on some basic ideas in it being funny without actually bothering with turning them into funny scenes.

That the resulting film is still watchable and entertaining enough (in an undemanding manner) is mostly the responsibility of the actors, well, really mostly Tommy Lee Jones, Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman (a trio frankly much too good for the film), who put quite a bit of effort into classing up the joint. As an addendum for your nightmares, please appreciate how much Emile Hirsch looks like a young, thin, Jack Black in this one.

Three Films Make A Post: Carrol Jo Hummer--A working man who's had enough!

White Line Fever (1975): I know that this film by Jonathan Kaplan about an independent trucker played by Jan-Michael Vincent taking on the long-haul version of The Man has quite a few admirers. However, for me, the mix of traditional trucker exploitation, hicksploitation humour and earnest working class “Organize!” doesn’t really quite come together. Taken alone, every given scene is a perfectly fine example of its given genre, together, they result in a film of wildly fluctuating tone and uneven pacing that really would have needed to decide where it wants to put its emphasis.

Kill Me Again (1989): This is the first of now quality TV director John Dahl’s neo noirs after his time as a music video director, a series of films that would lead to at least two absolute classics of the genre. For its first two acts, this is nearly on its way to that status as well. Dahl uses his slick and polished style and the desert sun to perfectly replace the play of shadow and light of the classical noir, letting his characters go through variations of classic tropes that get enough of a twist to feel new. Val Kilmer (before he apparently started to believe that the main job of an actor is to sabotage the movie he is in), his then wife Joanne Whalley and Michael Madsen fit into this surface bright noir world perfectly.

Alas, the film breaks down nearly completely in the final act, with too many implausibilities even for a noir, and a bad case of random plot twist syndrome.

The Dry (2020): While I respect it and its approach, I can’t say I really enjoyed Robert Connolly’s adaptation of Jane Harper’s novel as much as I’d have liked too. There’s certainly a great sense of the dry Australian outback it takes place in on display, and the film also makes the book’s flashback structure flow much more organically than its source.

But for my tastes, the film is a bit too distanced from the crime(s) and the people at its heart, using a clinical look on its characters and their travails that makes it difficult to empathise with them, packing little emotional heft despite being about things of great emotional weight.

Three Films Make A Post: Descend into Fear

Black Water: Abyss (2020): Two couples plus one go on a caving expedition and find themselves stranded thanks to a shock flood, as well as threatened by a very hungry large crocodile. Survivalist standards and soap operatic character stuff ensue. Andrew Traucki’s belated not-really sequel to his decent 2007 evil crocodile movie Black Water is an okay enough film, if you’re in the market for decently – the film’s no The Descent that’s for sure - realized caving horror with a hungry animal. If the filmmaking were sharper, some of the shots wouldn’t suggest that it’s mostly dark down there because it’s cheaper to shoot, and the character stuff were a bit less annoyingly superficial, this would probably even be worth an actual recommendation. As it stands, you might as well go and watch one of the better survivalist animal horror films out there.

The High Note (2020): On the other hand, when it comes to feel good movies about the music biz with a romance plot and some genuinely thoughtful scenes on how race can play into the question of commercialism versus art, and a ridiculously happy ending, you can do much worse than Nisha Ganatra’s The High Note. Plus, unlike quite a few films about music and musicians I’ve seen in the last year or so, I have the impression that someone involved actually likes and gets music (even in its most commodified forms).

Also recommended for an expectedly nice performance by Dakota Johnson (who apparently can do no wrong for me after her incredible work in Suspiria), Tracee Ellis Ross giving a character that could be a cliché life, Ice Cube doing a really fun cliché manager, and a late and lovely side turn by Bill Pullman.

Keeper of Darkness aka 陀地驅魔人 (2015): Doing a bit of the very Hong Kong genre mixture of horror, ghost romance, melodrama and comedy, Nick Cheung Ka-Fai’s (who is also his own star), film is not always successful in every genre it tackles – especially some of the comedy is pretty risible and badly timed – but has an – I assume purposeful – air of a bit of a dirge for this kind of HK film, films wilder, less slick and more alive than what the rules of mainland China cinema seem to allow right now, interesting even when they are not exactly good.


This melancholic undertone works very well with the human/ghost romance (while not as much with the human/human romance) too, the film’s subtext making the somewhat kitschy text it has little to do with otherwise rather more impactful than it should be.

Three Films Make A Post: Lust for Blood.

Vampyres (2015): I didn’t hate Víctor Matellano’s remake of José Ramón Larraz’s genre-defining lesbian vampire movie as much as I expected, so put that down as a win. Perhaps Larraz’s involvement with the screenplay (however much here was actually done by him) helped? It’s not as if this were actually better or even vaguely as good as the original: the film is certainly slow going even in comparison with a film from the 70s, the acting’s often ropey in a pretty irritating manner, and even the staging can seem somewhat amateurish for about half of the film. The other half does from time to time reach moments of the kind of intense aestheticization (bordering on the fetishist) of blood and pain that at the very least explains why this remake exists on an artistic level, and while it never comes together as the original did, it does do a bit more than just try to exploit old exploitation fans like me.

The Last Days of American Crime (2020): This abomination financed by Netflix, on the other hand, deserves all the kicks anyone can get in. It’s terrible from start to finish, beginning with the drab, boring and bland design of its near future and certainly not ending with a running time of astonishing 150 minutes that any sane production had cut down to about a hundred in the script stage, while adding something like a throughline to the plot that’s certainly not to be found in the 150 minutes I suffered through. Also generally terrible – as well as drab, boring and bland – is the acting, Edgar Ramírez mumbling and not-emoting through the movie like a sleepwalker, and most everyone else following suite.

As is all too typical for something directed by Olivier Megaton, the explosiveness strictly stays in the director’s name, while the on-screen action has a perfunctory (and yes, drab, boring and bland) quality to it that’s pretty astonishing in what’s supposed to be a professional production made by a man who supposedly specializes in the loud and the dumb. I could go on, but I’ve already wasted 150 minutes of my life on this thing.

The Last Wave (1977): While some of the ways Peter Weir’s classic uses Australian Aboriginal spirituality, setting it against the Western love for rationality arts and philosophy tend to posit (while the Western world acts perfectly irrational), are probably deemed “problematic” right now (though I am too old to be quite as ideologically righteous, I’m never perfectly happy with anything using this particular dichotomy and pitting the spiritually wise brown people against the coldly logical white ones who haven’t a clue myself), it is really hard to argue with the conviction and subtlety Weir uses the reinforce his theme. Nor do I know many other films quite as great at portraying reality slowly dissolving into states of the dreamlike and the supernatural, nor many that structurally use the “as above, so below” dictum with quite so much intelligence.


On a more pedestrian level, one also can’t help but admire any director able to get a really great performance out of Richard Chamberlain in this stage of his career as Weir does here.

In short: The Dustwalker (2019)

Something that may be a meteorite or may be something just a tiny bit worse goes down near a small town in the Australian Outback. Shortly thereafter, something damages the dishes responsible for the town’s cellphone traffic, isolating the community right when people start getting infected by something that turns them into the creepy starer/occasional murderous shouty runner type of infected. Well, they also like to jump, but the less said about that, the better.

That’s not all, though. A big, bug-like monster is also starting to make regular appearances. Which would be a bit of a spoiler if the cover and one-sheet didn’t show it already. Local authority Joanne Sharp (Jolene Anderson) has got her work cut out for her.

For the first half, perhaps two thirds of its running time, I was pleasantly surprised by Sandra Sciberras’s (who directed and scripted) variation on the old, worn-out zombie apocalypse. It’s the sort of film you wouldn’t exactly call original (because you will have seen most of the elements at play here in one movie or another before), but that approaches the state of originality by putting the emphasis on other elements than most films of its genre do. To wit, where most of the film’s contemporaries go for zombie masses and a survivalist, heavily armed approach, this one’s more interested in the more personal horror of a situation where friends, relatives and acquaintances – and in a town this small, everyone is one or the other – suddenly turn at first creepy and then feral. Why, the characters are even repeatedly discussing if their increasingly violent handling of the infected is actually ethically correct. They don’t, after all, know if this isn’t a perfectly curable disease and they are basically slaughtering the sick.

As long as the film stays with this sort of thing, it manages to create a decent amount of suspense, making much of moments like a man with bloody hands staring creepily at people and suggesting a lot of the violence it can’t afford to show pretty effectively. Scriberas also makes good use of the natural feeling of isolation of its outback locale, adding another degree of tension to the zombie business.

Alas, the final act can’t really hold to what the rest of the film promised. There’s a good, and certainly interesting enough, core idea surrounding the increasingly important large monster, but the film also needs to show way too much of a pretty terrible special effect to actually put that idea into plot, and loses most of its tension while trying to sell its audience on its big idea. Worse, the otherwise solid editing also starts to slacken in the final third, what amounts to the film’s big climactic set piece falling flat because the rhythm of the whole affair has become completely off.


But hey, two thirds of a good little genre film is more than the Michael Bays of this world have ever achieved in a whole career, so I’m not going to complain too loudly here.

Three Films Make A Post: A Reign Of HORROR... a man-made monster on the loose!

Black Friday (1940): Arthur Lubin’s gangster brain transplant movie with Boris Karloff as a rather mad scientist and Stanley Ridges as a mild mannered English literature professor who gets parts of a gangster’s brains grafted on to save his life (and Karloff’s ego) with the expected results seems a bit like an attempt by Universal to poach on Warner’s territory. The mix of gangster film and mad science yarn doesn’t exactly play to Universal's strengths as a studio, though, curiously enough, it’s not the gangster movie parts that don’t work but the mad science. Lubin shows a decent eye for the former and very little flair for the latter. Karloff’s as good as always and Ridges works his double role rather well. Bela Lugosi pops in for a couple of scenes too but doesn’t really have much to do here. Otherwise, this is exactly the movie you’ll expect it to be, for better or for worse.

The Song Keepers (2017): I was a little disappointed by Naina Sen’s documentary about the history of Aboriginal Women’s Choirs singing German Lutheran hymns translated (and wonderfully and wondrously changed) into their respective languages and one contemporary choir’s travel to Germany to perform these hymns there. It’s the kind of film you really want to like - it’s about people who more than deserve their moments, fascinating (and pretty beautiful) music, and the messiness of colonial history, after all. But its execution is rough, with way too many scenes of everyone complimenting everyone else on their awesomeness, scenes that seem to belong into a private holiday video more than into a documentary, intercut with interviews that reach from the bland, to the informative, to the sort of thing that’ll make every sane person cry, all mixed with little focus or artistry in a manner that often borders on the random. It’s a shame, really, because these women and their stories are much more interesting and important than the film’s presentation makes them out to be.


I Know Where I’m Going (1945): One of the strengths of The Archers – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – was to make films that combined a sense of place and landscape – here the coast of Scotland – and a naturalistic feel set apart from the stagey predilections of much of British cinema of their time with a sense of mood and metaphor that was (and still is) anything but naturalistic. This is the sort of artistry that never feels contrived and artificial even if it by all rights should, so a film like this which puts its critique on a very specific type of materialism into the form of a romance of slow self-discovery with heavy folkloric undertones seems perfectly logical and natural, and not at all contrived. It’s also a film about the very British interpretation of the connection between people and landscapes, a love of rural communities that never becomes that sickly kind of love that tends to end in pogroms, about superstition and folk belief, and the dangers of straight lines.

Three Films Make A Post: The Phoenix Will Rise!

The Marshes (2018): This Australian horror movie by Roger Scott about three biologists encountering something or someone pretty nasty in some marshland right out in the middle of nowhere brings me back to my old favourite concept of “boring competence”. There’s nothing really wrong with the film at all: it is competently structured, competently written (though lacking in any originality), competently staged and competently acted. Yet, despite the film’s worst sin being the pretty harmless tendency to keep the cameras close to the characters in scenes where showing a bit more of the landscape would actually be more threatening and claustrophobic, it all adds up to a film I find much less enjoyable than all this competence would suggest. There’s just a total lack of any adventurous spirit on display here I find rather dispiriting.

The Sonata (2018): In comparison, Andrew Desmond’s film about a violinist (Freya Tingley) finding an unpublished violin sonata in her estranged father’s (flashback late great Rutger Hauer) estate and the somewhat devilish consequences thereof should actually be a lesser movie. At least, its direction – while hitting some great moments of modern gothic atmosphere – is less slick, the film’s budgetary constraints are quite a bit more visible (don’t mention the CGI Devil). However, the film tells its old-fashioned tale of music and the devil with much more conviction, as well as an organic sense for the proper atmosphere the Australian movie lacks despite its higher technical values.


Captive State (2019): Completely unrelated to any of this is Rupert Wyatt’s film about a secret resistance operating in a post alien invasion USA (as is tradition in these films, it doesn’t care about the rest of the world) whose new alien overlords have taken rather a lot from the playbook of the contemporary demagogue. It’s a fantastic, dark, and moody piece for as long as Wyatt is following a great cast (counting among its numbers John Goodman, Ashton Sanders and Vera Farmiga and other fine actresses and actors) to explore this brave new world. There’s a nice eye for the telling and weird detail and a general sense of calmness and control to Wyatt’s direction in these parts of the film that make the slow progression of things enormously convincing. Alas, once the PLOT truly rears its ugly head, all of this gets subsumed by one of these contemporary Hollywood “clever” plans which can only work if everyone involved acts exactly like the planner expected – and often not in terribly convincing or psychologically sound ways either.

Past Misdeeds: The Babadook (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Amelia (Essie Davis), widowed and quite isolated from the rest of the world ever since her husband died in an accident while driving her to the hospital when she was in labour, lives alone with her little son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Even more than six years after her husband’s death, Amelia has still not managed to really cope with it, finding herself alone and with a difficult child, her main human contacts being a pretty horrible rich girl friend, her elderly neighbour, and a colleague at work whose obvious interest in her she can’t or won’t notice. Her situation certainly isn’t improved by a shit job as a nurse for the sick and elderly, by the fact that Samuel has major behavioural problems nobody seems to bother to actually treat (his school’s only answer to the problems is wanting to pull him out of class and into one-to-one-tutoring, as if the concepts of child psychiatry and psychology had never been invented), and by Amelia’s own untreated mental health problems.

Right now, things are bad, and the cracks in Amelia’s and Samuel’s life are beginning to grow too large to just ignore, but the true downward spiral starts when Amelia reads a children’s pop-up picture book she doesn’t remember buying at all to the always over-anxious and over-imaginative Samuel . “The Babadook” as it is called, frightens Samuel to death. He becomes convinced the book’s titular monster is lurking in their home, meaning them ill. This does of course make his behavioural troubles even worse, which in turn worsens Amelia’s psychological deterioration, until she too begins to encounter strange and inexplicable things. It might be a shared delusion, it might be a big fat metaphor for child abuse, or it might be that something truly horrible has stepped into lives that weren’t all that happy to begin with.

There’s really little else I can do when confronted with as individual, clever, ambiguous and strange a horror movie as Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook than lavish it with praise. Sure, from time to time, if you want to, you can see the film’s probably miniscule budget showing. However that’s really only something that applies when you look for the signs of it, for The Babadook is a film finely focused on what it can do instead of attempting those things it can’t afford to.

So it only features a handful of actors, but all of them are great – with Essie Davis giving an absolutely outstanding tour de force performance that is utterly convincing even in her most violent mood swings and never ever feels like the actress just showing off, and Noah Wiseman really managing to at once make his Samuel so believably exhausting it’s no wonder Amelia has difficulties coping even ignoring her copious other problems, yet also making believable the boy’s joy, his love for his mother and his sadness, turning what could be caricatures in lesser hands into people.

Kent does some fantastic things with her basic set-up, not only keeping the outward truth of what we see in the film ambiguous but also making its supernatural (or not) elements so meaningful and expressive of a lot of things – like the kind of negative feelings towards their children parents aren’t allowed to admit, the slowly growing resentment coming from a life that went off the rails one day and never got back there, with little visible opportunity for things turning around, the fear of losing one’s child as well as that of losing one’s mind, and so on - their actual reality inside the film’s real world seems to be beside the point. And we’re not talking about the horrors of allegory here, where everything has to have a specific meaning and no thought needs to be put into establishing the world surrounding the allegory as believable, but the point where a film’s constructed reality becomes so easy to accept, several completely divergent interpretations of what’s going on in it can be true at the same time, characters locking their horrors up in the cellar and feeding it worms being real and a metaphor at the same time, one way of looking at it actually strengthening the other.

Kent never makes a false step throughout the whole of the movie, neither on the directing nor on the writing side, presenting the illogical and the strange as a (un)natural part of the film’s world, setting up terrific moments of suspense and executing them just as brilliantly, as if this were the easiest thing in the world. Even more impressive, Kent, in her first feature film, already has a visual language all her own, most probably based on a deep knowledge of the horror films that came before, but feeling characteristic, personal, and completely disinterested in using the horror film techniques that are in fashion when they don’t fit the situation at all. Consequently, jump scares are replaced with a creeping dread, and mood and suspense become supremely important.


I’m also very, very fond of The Babadook’s clever use of special effects that is - not just in the monster design - influenced by the expressionist silent films it very expressly champions (as well as by Edward Gorey, I suspect). And how often can you say a phrase like this about a film and not mean “Tim Burton Gothic” (not that I have much against Burton, traitor against opinions I’m supposed to have that I am) but – again – something that seems much more to be part of a personal vision?