Three Films Make A Post: Party Like It’s 2022

Mandrake (2022): Sometimes, I really don’t know. Objectively, Lynne Davison’s clever mix of traditional British social drama and neo folk horror is a fine, perhaps even great film. The acting, particularly by Deirdre Mullins and Derbhie Crotty, is great and absolutely on point, Davison’s visual language is creepy without only ever going for the obvious effect, and the script clearly knows what it wants to be about as well as how to express it. In practice, I didn’t connect with it at all. Despite my love for clever variations on folk horror and good filmmaking this might as well have been Generic Blumhouse Horror Number 9855, for all I felt and thought. Which says very little about the film, obviously.

Beast (2022): To be fair to myself, for most of the time, I had the same reaction to Baltasar Kormákur’s animal attack movie in which Idris Elba needs to protect his family from lions. But here, it’s the proper reaction. As you might expect, the film milks the whole “a man needs to protect his little girls” so incessantly, you can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop and the movie to deconstruct this notion. To nobody’s surprise, the other shoe never does drop, and it’s just a case of very low effort character writing.

On the plus side, Elba is good even if he has very little to do, the young actresses playing his daughters deserved better as well, and Sharlto Copley does – as usual – a great portrayal of Sharlto Copley playing a likeable ranger. Too bad the film has no ambitions beyond being as generic as possible, wasting the talents of everyone involved on the kind of movie that’s simply there.

Barbarian (2022): Because I didn’t want to go into spoiler heavy territory with this one – let’s just say there’s a really clever, effective and actually meaningful structural thing or three that happen – I can end the post on a positive note.

For Zach Cregger’s Barbarian truly is as good as everyone says – apart from one bit I found somewhat too smugly on the righteous side of our times which would involve heavy spoilers to get into – using parts of today’s social conversation in intelligent ways to surprise. It’s the case where a movie has something to say, knows how to say it, and also how to make a pretty fantastic horror movie out of it. Add some really great performances by Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long, and you have something really rather special.

Three Films Make A Post: When She Sings Nobody Can Touch Her!

The H-Man aka Bijo to ekitai ningen (1958): This might be my least favourite among the respectable percentage of films by the great Ishiro Honda for Toho I have seen. It’s not so much that the film treats much of its monster movie element as something to be hidden behind the ninety percent of it which are a crime movie that bugs me. The problem is that said crime movie is such a tepid one, without a compelling mystery or captivating characters. What we get is a bunch of smug know-it-all cops, some very polite yakuza, and a scientist and a fainting-prone nightclub singer who are trying to convince said cops there’s something more interesting going on than a very boring criminal investigation. This goes on for about an hour or so and includes of course the obligatory crap nightclub sequences all mediocre crime movies are bound by law to possess. Now, from time to time, Honda seems to remember his talents, and there’s a scene of human interaction that hints at more interesting things going on behind the flat surfaces of the characters, or a horror sequence pops in that’s actually as effective as one expects of the director. Mostly, though, this is a bit of a slog with only minor pay-off once the crime elements finally take a back seat.

Tank 432 aka Belly of the Bulldog (2015): Going from tepid to really just bad, there’s this thing directed by Nick Gillespie. A bunch of soldiers or something (do you smell a plot twist?) and their two captives manage to trap themselves in an armoured vehicle. Hilarity, that is to say, lots of dollar store surrealism, bad madness and awkward attempts at building suspense ensue; decent actors are wasted; then a plot twist that explains everything – or as a matter of fact nothing at all – happens, the end. There is, indeed, a difference between a film being confusing and it being confused. This one strictly comes down on the latter line, leaving sense behind for what goes by hallucinatory filmmaking only when you have a pretty stunted imagination. The ending is deeply dissatisfying (and honestly explains nothing at all about the random nonsense the film has inflicted on its audience before), but then, so is the rest of the movie, with nothing in it ever feeling like it has made the step from a vague idea to an actual film.

The Dark Mile (2017): Much less underwhelming than the other two films today is Gary Love’s British/Scottish film about a lesbian couple (Rebecca Calder and Deirdre Mullins) going on a riverboat vacation in the Highlands in an attempt to heal the wounds of something the film won’t explain too quickly. As it happens, the locals on the river are of the country hick type, starting with behaviour between deeply unpleasant and downright horrible to easily end up on criminal. Why, some of them might even be cultists!


This isn’t a film that’s exactly a thrill a minute, but rather one that carefully and slowly builds up its characters and their past, and just as carefully ratchets up the tension, making good use of the atmosphere the Scottish landscapes and a talented DP provide, as well as of a convincing cast. Once the more typical elements of this sub-genre really kick in, the film manages to stay tense and interesting despite not exactly being original in its basic plot or the way it develops. There’s a pleasure in an old story told anew, particularly since Love varies the old story with his obvious care for his characters and many scenes that evoke a nice, creepy sense of a place where not too many horror films take place.