Three Films Make A Post: "Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad."

Warning: this is a “short rants about genuinely crap movies” edition

Touch Me (2025): First in today’s trilogy of the terrible is Addison Heimann’s insufferable tentacle sex horror comedy about a woman’s (Olivia Taylor Dudley who does her best, which is more than I’d suggest about anyone else involved here) relationship with an alien with an addictive tentacle touch, and her obnoxious gay best friend. Apart from having really pretty colours, this is just terrible: the characters are obnoxious one-note clichés; the film believes stating having themes of co-dependency and abusive relationships equals actually saying anything about them; and it is painfully unfunny, particularly thanks to dialogue that manages to be unnatural, dumb and – I didn’t expect to use that word in public – cringeworthy to the highest degree.

How to Make a Killing (2026): Supposedly “inspired” by the great Kind Hearts and Coronets, this is actually a proper remake, which is to say, a movie that does everything worse than the original even though it keeps pretty closely to it. Which comes as a particular disappointment from director John Patton Ford, whose Emily the Criminal was sharp, focussed, and very much not a bad clone of anything.

It is pretty funny that a film made seventy years or so later than the original’s critique and comical analysis of class matters is actually less insightful on them – but then, Americans still have trouble talking about class even while their country is on the verge of turning back into a feudal state (not that we Germans are great about that, mind you). As a comedy, this suffers from a slouching, disjointed pace and the fact that Glen Powell – who frankly can’t act his way out of a wet paper bag on the best of days - is not simply no Dennis Price but attempts to get through the whole film with two expressions: a punchable smirk that is supposed to be charming, and some confused rodent mugging I can’t even begin to parse. Also, as in Touch Me, very little of this actually funny, or has anything to say.

“Wuthering Heights” (2026): Look, I’m okay with the fact, that Emerald Fennell didn’t want to actually adapt the novel – after all, none of the earlier film versions ever bothered with it – but turning this into a glossy, empty, and emotionally dead adaptation of her favourite romance novel covers is not a decision to endear her film to me. Nor does the lack of any depth to anything or anyone in here help, where everything that’s actually difficult, or painful, or truly unpleasant about the kind of love this is supposedly about gets sanded down until it is a mere kink, add much for me apart from inducing a feeling of actual loathing for the film. Which isn’t a feeling I often get, so well done there?

Sure, the production design looks kinda spectacular, but the showy way Fennell shoots it gives off the whiff of a bad music video directed by someone who really has no idea how to say something with their pretty visuals. Hell, even creating an actual mood seems beyond the director. It’s just there, in a garish, soulless and ironically boring way, like an ad for something I’m certainly not going to be.

I also have to agree with parts of the internet that Margot Robbie – who is not an actress I find particularly compelling at the best of times - is too old for her role here. That’s not her fault, however: every adult actress would be, seeing how Fennell writes Cathy as a thirteen year old throughout.

Three Films Make A Post: They were divided by war. He united them in song.

The Choral (2025): This is the sort of very competently made, somewhat life-affirming drama that appear to only be made in the UK anymore. Some of its elements do strain historical believability a little – surely, the climactic choral performance is too modern(ist) in this context? – and there are a couple of scenes that don’t have the emotional impact they are supposed to have on me – the compassionate masturbation bit particularly comes to mind.

Otherwise, director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett evoke a time and a place and use this evocation to tell us something about people in times of social upheaval without it ever feeling didactic. Rather, this is done with grace, compassion, a sense of humour, and populated by actual characters brought to life by a brilliant cast – Ralph Fiennes really has quite a couple of years right now.

H Is for Hawk (2025): Staying in the UK, Philippa Lowthorpe’s adaption of an autobiographical book about a female academic (Claire Foy) who is avoiding coping with her grief about the death of her father (Brendan Gleeson) by hyperfocusing on training a goshawk contains one of the most believable portrayals of a real depressive episode I’ve seen in cinema – at least the kind of depression I have experience with (your symptoms may vary). Foy’s performance here is quite brilliant, nuanced and very human indeed.

Even though the film gets a bit too third act dramatic for real life in (surprise) its third act, this turns out not to be a film about a woman “getting over” mental illness by getting close to a bird as you’d probably expect, but something much messier, more complicated and more real that feels much closer to actual mental illness and the ways we cope with it than the easier version would have been. Which doesn’t mean this isn’t also full of perfect footage of a goshawk doing goshawk things, for just because the bird won’t save your life doesn’t mean it is of no import to it.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025): Belgian filmmakers Hélène Cattet’s and Bruno Forzani’s project of reflecting and intensifying the beautiful surfaces of European genre cinema of mostly the 60s and 70s – though in this one, there’s also quite a bit of Louis Feuillade added to the mix – until they turn even more abstract and weird than they already are continues. As with any good reflective surface, these films can be used as a mirror of whatever thematic interest or interpretative approach you prefer – I’m particularly fond of reading this one as a critique of the gender politics of European super spy films that still really likes looking at swankily dressed or nude, hot people; or as a meditation on the aesthetical losses of aging.

Though, honestly, I mostly prefer to fall into these films as dreams of exceeding, perhaps excessive, beauty.

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to the new west.

Americana (2023): Tony Tost’s crime comedy was savaged by a lot of people, but as far as films that desperately want to be Coen Brothers films go, this has more than a few moments that actually, genuinely work and even suggest Tost may very well be able to make a film that’s made by himself instead of the sum of his influences.

As it stands, this is a movie with many good scenes that never quite cohere to a really good movie, with a game cast – who knew Halsey could act? – having to cope with one-note characters, and a plot that really doesn’t need the Tarantino-style told out of order thing.

But, at the very least, it has a very good taste in songs.

Phantom Thread (2017): I’ve been successfully avoiding Paul Thomas Anderson’s dressmaker drama for quite a few years, but, as it turns out, I really shouldn’t have been afraid of this actually being the movie about British peoples’ inability to connect with their feelings it sort of sells itself at. Instead, this is a BDSM romance where people don’t actually fuck but make dresses or poison mushroom omelettes instead, a movie about power and love and the kind of lust that’s more complicated than one would expect, expressed via some of the most elegant filmmaking imaginable. It is also, in a peculiar way, yet another Anderson film that is very much like an exploitation movie in many aspects, until it isn’t.

The Naked Gun (2025): From the sublime to the ridiculous, but keeping with movies I didn’t actually expect to like, Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun requel is the return to silly, random nonsense comedy I didn’t know I needed in my life, with a barrage of jokes that run the gamut from the tasteless, to the mildly political, to the impressively stupid, park for a time to have some fatty food, and then throw even more bullshit at the audience.

At least two thirds of the thousand jokes and sight gags are actually funny, so there’s no way to find fault with what this provides, unlike you’re too afraid of house favourite Liam Neeson’s still gigantic hands.

Super Happy Forever (2024)

Sano (Hiroki Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) visit a coastal resort motel in the last days of its existence. Sano is clearly beside himself, walking around in something of a fugue, looking for a red ballcap lost there five years ago. Soon enough, we learn he has good reason for his state of mind, for he has lost his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) just a couple of weeks ago. The hotel and the town are where they first met five years ago, and Sano appears to still half be looking for Nagi, or signs of her passing.

After forty or so minutes, the film turns back to the past of five years ago. Now, shown from Nagi’s perspective, we see how the couple first met and learn to understand some of the echoes of their encounter left five years later during Sano’s return.

Beginning slowly and not terribly interested in explaining itself at first, Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever turns out to be a film about loss, love, the physical presence of the past in the now, and the small, hidden connections between people and places. It is also a love story told through absences: at first, we can only perceive the shape of Nagi’s absence in the now, Sano’s moments of short memories and the things about their relationship his behaviour hints at. But then, the flashback, while filling in some of these holes also doesn’t fill in any of the actual relationship between Sano and Nagi (which apparently wasn’t all that happy) – we’re only ever witness to its beginning and its aftermath, and none of the joy or pain in between.

There’s nothing sentimental about the film’s approach to this, or of the patness of esoteric bullshit Miyata has fled into, but nor is there any cynicism here. Instead, this is a film of genuine sadness, genuine love and a genuine longing for human presence and connectedness – coming together into a form that feels quite special, in a way that’s self-contained and lacks showiness, and never indulges in the painful overintellectualization arthouse cinema can fall into.

Honeydripper (2007)

The early 50s in the Deep South, Alabama. The Honeydripper Lounge, the juke joint of pianist Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) has seen better days – the music doesn’t excite, it probably doesn’t help that Tyrone doesn’t allow guitarists into his place, the audience doesn’t leave enough money, and most everybody appears to have lost patience with Tyrone’s attempts to save his place hustling. Not even to speak of his debts, particularly to a landlord who comes calling with a weekend ultimatum. Thus this weekend will be Tyrone’s last chance to save his place – for this he even breaks his “no guitarists” rule and has managed to invite famous New Orleans electric guitarist Guitar Sam. Obviously, things do not run as smoothly as Tyrone hopes.

Despite being set a couple of decades later, and being far less interested in plot or vampires, John Sayles’s Honeydripper would make an interesting double feature with Sinners, seeing as it centres around a dive bar in deep Alabama, music, and all aspects of the surrounding culture. Of course, this being a John Sayles film, it uses its plot as an incitement to begin exploring a community of people – what keeps them together, what keeps them apart, and in this particular case, how do you live when a racist system is always stacking the deck against you to lessen your triumphs and make all of your fuck-ups much worse. So the film spends just as much time on the disillusionment and potential religious conversion of Tyrone’s wife Delilah (LisaGay Hamilton), the dreams of his daughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta) for a very modest idea of a better life, the hopes of young guitarist Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) for a life in music, and so on and so forth as it does on Tyrone’s increasingly desperate and immoral attempts to keep his head above water. There’s a plain matter-of-factness to the film’s portrayal of day-to-day racism, the way the local Sheriff (Stacy Keach) takes his corruption as his simple due as a white man lording it over black people that’s perhaps more painful than if it were showing the extremes and deepest horrors of these injustices (knowing Sayles, he probably wouldn’t think it his place to do so).

The film features a nearly all-black cast of Sayles veterans, character actors, musicians, and young actors on early gigs, and everyone appears deeply engaged with their craft here, even if they are just in the film for a scene or two. Glover does give one of his career best performances, projecting a complex mix of desperation and sadness, but also a genuine hopefulness that feels lived and earned. Nobody else here falls below that sort of level of performance.

Visually, Sayles sometimes strains against his budget, with some shots and camera set-ups that feel more as if they belonged into a contemporary cable TV movie, and an all-around cheapish look to the photography. Fortunately, Sayles’s script, the great performances and, yes, the quality of the music are more than enough to keep Honeydripper engaging and emotionally involving.

Out Come the Wolves (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

Winter’s Flower (1978)

Original title: Fuyu no hana

After fifteen years spent in prison for murdering a friend and traitor to his group, yakuza Kano (Ken Takakura) is released.

Not much awaits him outside. Well, there’s an empty apartment bought for him as a make-up gift for his sacrifice, and, for complicated reasons, the now teenage daughter of the man he killed. While he was in prison, Kano wrote letters “from Brazil” to the girl, pretending to be her uncle, while providing her with money and protection through his yakuza friends. Now, outside, he’s circling around the borders of her life. She has turned into a symbol of a life not lived where guilt and the daughter he never had meet, and he’s sad and wise enough to know that actually meeting the girl would not lead anywhere good.

So the sad middle-aged man goes back to the yakuza life. He’s doing so only reluctantly, and he is encountering old friends and associates that mostly seem just as dissatisfied with it as he is, just less conscious of how much they are going nowhere. Unlike Kano, they are blaming the times instead of themselves.

Mirroring what happened fifteen years ago, there’s pressure for Kano’s group to unite with another, bigger, more powerful, more modern and more ruthless one. Very much despite of himself(or is it because of himself?), Kano is letting himself be drawn into repeating the same bad choices he made when he probably didn’t know any better.

Yasuo Furuhata’s Winter’s Flower is very typical of the yakuza films Ken Takakura starred in at this stage in his career, when the genre wasn’t as successful anymore, and Takakura had been doing predominantly other types of films for quite some time. In the yakuza films he still made, often directed by Furuhata, and not really fitting into the ninkyo/jitsuroku divide, Takakura was always a man of his actual age, either having left the yakuza life only to be drawn in again, or not quite managing to in the first place.

These are films dominated by a quiet, very middle-aged, sadness and melancholia. It’s not the railing at the skies of the young, but the quieter kind of desperation of lives badly spent, promises broken and hopes that have just faded away, perhaps alleviated by a hope for some kind of simple, quiet contentment that the men in these films inevitably can’t quite keep their grips on. These are qualities Takakura embodied as much as those of the upright yakuza of his earlier years, with a subtle, and never whiny, gravitas that feels as if it came from lived experience – his performances in this part of career are all deep gazes and small gestures as far away from melodrama as possible, and feel as true to an actual inner life expressed this way as I can imagine.

This is how Winter’s Flower works as a whole – there are opportunities to great melodrama and violence in the plot, but Furuhata decides to focus on quieter readings of situations and characters that develop the pull of truthfulness by an insistence on quietly observing Kano and his world. Melodrama is for the young, and this is a movie neither about, nor for, them, and so the unflashy, steady direction doesn’t try to sell this tale to them.

As a middle-aged guy myself, I can relate.

The Lady Assassin (1983)

Original title: 清宮啟示錄

The Qing emperor (Ching Miao) has come to his final years and is beginning to think about his successor. His favourite for the role is the 14th Prince (Max Mok Siu-Keung). Fourteen is young, he’s inexperienced and, as events will show, more than just a bit of a shallow idiot, whose more interested in looking righteous than the difficult business of actually being it. But least, he appears to not be actively malevolent. This can’t be said about the 4th Prince (Lau Wing) – he’s a man deeply in love with himself, palace intrigue and more often than not being evil for evil’s sake. Four has gotten wind of who his father plans to make his successor, and is not at all against murdering his own brother (well, half-brother, one hopes for the women involved).

The 4th Prince’s problem when it comes to assassinating his rival is that his brother has a very capable bodyguard and advisor in form of virtuous and highly efficient martial arts expert Tsang Jing (Norman Tsui Siu-Keung) – coming pre-packaged with his two female servants/martial arts students/probably lovers Jade (Yeung Ching-Ching) and Pearl (Daisy Cheung King-Yu) – and Tsang Jing isn’t just making the 14th Prince look like a better man than he actually is, he’s also easily thwarting most assassination attempts.

Eventually, the 4th Prince will acquire his very own martial arts expert in form of the ambitious Min Gen Yiu (Jason Pai Piao), but even then, a successful assassination seems doubtful and risky. So much so, the 4th Prince seeks out the help of Han revolutionary leader Lui Liu Liang (Ku Feng), promising him to get rid of the laws that suborn the Han Chinese under their Manchu conquerors. If, that is, Lui Liu Liang, or rather, his redoubtable martial artist niece Lui Si Niang (the incredible Leanne Lau Suet-Wah) help him access the decree in which is father has set down his designated successor.

Of course, helping out a man like the 4th Prince might not turn out as happily as one would want.

And that’s only about half of the plot of Tony Lou Chun-Ku’s breathless Shaw Brothers palace intrigue/wuxia mix The Lady Assassin, a film that somehow manages to run breathlessly through an amount of narrative that would provide for three or four seasons of a modern streaming TV show, features about a thousand different fights, yet still has room for rather a lot of complicated characterisation.

In most wuxia films, Lau Wing’s villain would be a one-note moustache twirler, but here, the guy’s abhorrent but also much more nuanced than you’d expect. As an example, the scene in which he convinces Lui Liu Lang and his family to throw their lot in with him by perfectly emulating a man of honour and conscience is a perfect portrayal of the kind of narcissist who always appears to believe in his own lies and empty promises a little (if you’ve never seen such a thing in real life, I can’t recommend the experience), and always finds a bad excuse for not acting on them he also appears to believe, however untrue it may be. Still, enjoying his own ability to pretend to be an honourable man, he will even try to implement his promises, until he gets the tiniest pushback. Then, he folds like the utterly weak man he is at his power-grubbing core.

As a whole, this is one of those wuxia where the most honourable characters – Tsang Jing and Lui Si Niang are genuinely good people – find themselves tied to the will and plans of characters whose nature is abhorrent to them once revealed, and can only break free from obligations, rules, and lies through acts of insane violence. Being in any contact with power can apparently only be cleansed through blood and vengeance.

Speaking of acts of violence, the martial arts choreography by Poon Kin-Kwan is absolutely insane – fast, vicious and only occasionally totally fantastical, this is all about speed and movement. Director Lou stages the fights – like everything else in the film – exclusively in angles and shot compositions of maximalist dramatic impact. There’s not subtlety to the direction, but as Lou uses his hammer here, everything doesn’t just look like a nail but indeed is one. It’s pretty incredible, as is how powerful much of the acting is – Lau Wing is a particular standout, but the burning fierceness of Leanne Lau’s gaze, or the dignity only slightly marred by the cynicism of permanent defeat of Ku Feng’s performance, are just as impressive.

To my eyes, The Lady Assassin is an absolute classic of the late period Shaw output, a film as perfect as its final freeze frame.

Crazy Heart (2009)

Outlaw country musician Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) is going nowhere. An aging alcoholic, he’s stopped writing songs and is mostly working the nostalgia and bowling alley circuit with his old hits, pick-up bands, whiskey and an air of bitterness. Bad’s former, much younger and sexier, sidekick Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) has hit the big time of country music stardom, but his intermittent attempts at helping out feel more like dominance plays and the kind of hand-outs that do not sit well with the rest of dignity Bad still possesses somewhere.

Bad comes to a crossroads when he meets younger journalist and single mom Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and falls for her – or perhaps the idea of falling for her and the different kind of life she stands for.

Sometimes, it’s okay for a director to step back and let their leads, their script and – particularly in this case – their musical experts do most of the work. There’s an admirable ability to shut off one’s director’s ego for a bit needed to do that properly, and Scott Cooper apparently possesses it, and can use it without making a film that looks and feels bland. Rather, this one’s simply focussed on performance and tone, centring Bridges and to a degree Gyllenhaal (whose story this isn’t it, but who always shows she possesses one outside of Bad’s life).

Bridges is in finest form, presenting a character as a relatable human being who might have become either a caricature or just unpleasant in the wrong hands, without attempting to make Bad better than he actually is. He’s also a really great old man outlaw country singer when provided with the right material.

There is a deep sense of compassion running through the film and its treatment of Bad that doesn’t make excuses, either. Yet Crazy Heart carries with it a not uncomplicated hopefulness that feels grown-up and deserved instead of perfunctory and calculated for its market.

It is also a joy to see a film that treats country music with an actual eye from the inside, with many small telling details about this particular intersection of showbiz and working class art that demonstrate how much the filmmakers get it. The involvement of T-Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton and Ryan Bingham on the musical side will certainly have provided some of the stuff of reality for the film – in any case, these guys do provide Crazy Heart with a tonally and sonically perfect soundtrack.

Three Films Make A Post: Where the cashiers have no name

Supermarkt aka Supermarket (1974): If you know German director Roland Klick mostly for his psychedelic noir western Deadlock or his Dennis Hopper coke freak-out White Star, you’ll be in a for a whole world of pain in the form of an hour of very earnest Hamburg-set naturalism pasted onto the beginning of a pretty great, naturalist, heist film. Needless to say, simple guy as I am, I don’t appreciate this approach much.

However, it’s not that Klick isn’t good at the earnest naturalism bit – one could imagine him going on to become a German Ken Loach figure in a more interesting German cinema – the problem is all mine. I just find earnest naturalism the least interesting mode for a fictional narrative possible and have never seen the point to it. Surely,if you want to go for straightforward representation of the world as it is, why not make a reportage or a documentary? Hell, I might even praise you for that one (if only with backhanded remarks that I prefer Herzog style documentaries all about poetic truth, of course). As it stands, this just isn’t a film for me.

Only the River Flows aka He bian de cuo wu (2023): Speaking of films that aren’t for me, this arthouse crime drama for the Cannes crowd by Wei Shujun suffers from what I see as a weakness of most of the minor wave of mainland Chinese arthouse noir cop films of this style: an attempt to make genre films so critical of their genre they go out of their way to extract all joy and excitement from it. No thrills in our serial killer thriller, sir! No excitement to finding the killer! Hell, not actually finding the killer clearly is the way to go.

This particular example of the form eventually descends into a vague kind of surrealism, akin to Lynch without a sense of humour or a heart (so not very much like Lynch at all), without the power to actually make its surrealism feel like anything of substance or with a point; indeed, things are so opaque in the end, I have no idea why the film exists at all.

Admittedly, it is very well shot, and decrepit 90s China is evoked just as well – I don’t have any idea why, though.

Fantomas (1947): This second attempt to drag Fantomas into the sound film era after one in 1932, as directed by Jean Sacha, certainly has no ambitions at being anything more than a potboiler.

As such, it has decent entertainment value eighty years later: there are a handful of nice, mad science-y sets, some of the action is staged on a more than decent level, and after pacing issues early on, things zip along nicely, and mindlessly. The whole affair suffers from a very flat Fantomas performance by Marcel Herrand, but kinda makes up for it with a very young Simone Signoret running circles around every other actor as the villain’s virtuous daughter Hélène.

In an uncommon move for 1947, Hélène is a rather competent heroine who even takes part in the physical parts of the plot, which obviously is the sort of thing I like in my pulpy nonsense films.

Der Skorpion (1997)

Josef Berthold (the inexplicably popular-in-Germany at the time Heiner Lauterbach) heads an anti-drug crime department of Munich police. He’s rather on the zealous side, so his relationships with his wife Lili (Renate Krößner) and his insufferable late teenage son Robin (Marek Harloff) are increasingly strained.

For the local drug lords, Josef is just too damn successful. In what appears to be an attempt to demonstrate certain dangers to him, Lili is drugged in a restaurant and nearly dies in an accident caused by her state. This doesn’t exactly suggests a reason for backing down to Josef. Rather, he’s now out for blood instead of putting people behind bars; at the same time, his relationship with Marek further deteriorates.

Marek flees into a rather sudden relationship with a porn actress (Birge Schade), drugs, and general teenage raging.

While that’s going on, someone appears to begin killing their way up the chain of the local drug business, particularly the parts most probably connected to the attack on Lili. Josef would be the obvious suspect here.

The films of Dominik Graf, with their often somewhat crazed intensity, their intense, rough, brilliant 35mm camera work and their love for maximalist low budget genre filmmaking are a curious fit for German TV, yet still, he’s been making this sort of thing for decades and is somehow still at it, even getting a good number of German TV prizes for material these things would typically not take a second look at. Hell, he even managed to smuggle a very late, nearly perfect giallo into the world of German crime TV in 2011 in  form of the astonishing “Polizeiruf 110” Cassandras Warnung.

This much earlier TV movie made for the ZDF (Germany’s second public TV channel) is Graf at his most intense, featuring a plot that includes general crime business, a giallo-esque serial killing (with a totally not giallo-esque solution), many highly improbable random turns, and heightened family melodrama. Added to this is the most teenage scenery chewing ever to chew scenery by Marek Harloff - who manages to be so improbably annoying his extremity makes him feel like a real teenager again or rather like all of them at once - gratuitous sex and nudity, highly effective suspense sequences, and sudden bursts of quiet nearly as intense as the film’s breathless loudness. It’s as if a bit of worthy, bland German crime TV had been bitten by a radioactive Italian filmmaker or possessed by the ghosts of certain 70s attempts at establishing a German genre film (something Graf made two documentaries about).

It’s the visual and narrative energy that holds this whole thing made out of disparate parts together, a willingness to just follow through with weird ideas, but also Graf’s skill with every disparate part taken separately: he can do the melodrama, the thriller, the arthouse coming of age, the German cop show business, and appears to never have heard you’re not supposed to do them all at once. I’m certainly not going to disagree with the man.

Tarry-Dan Tarry-Dan Scarey Old Spooky Man (1978)

I found this British TV movie via this excellent post.

A Cornish coastal town. Teen Jonah Grattan (Colin Mayes), working-class scruffy and the kind of dead-end rebellious that’ll guarantee he’ll end up in the same kind of nowhere his social class would nearly guarantee him however he acts, becomes obsessed with the town’s very own creepy tramp Tarry-Dan (Paul Curran).

There’s something truly strange going on with the man: children have been singing a mocking playground ditty about him for generations, as if he’d been a feature of the town’s life from the beginning, and Jonah has dreams about the man and a battle – presented as animated version of a stained-glass window – that somehow concerns himself as well as the strange old man. The teen becomes convinced that the old man is evil, and he is somehow destined to slay him; the truth is rather less nice.

Directed by John Reardon in a very typical late 70s BBC style of moody 16mm outside location shots and drab shot on video interior sets, this was written by Scottish TV playwright (that was an actual thing once upon a time) Peter McDougall, who otherwise appears to mostly have been involved in more socially realist endeavours.

As often happens when this kind of writer turns towards the supernatural, there’s an especially strong sense of the predominantly metaphorical around the non-realist bits – being cursed here turns out to be very much the same thing as being from a no-future working class background just with rather a lot more drama – but McDougall makes up for this sin by his ability to easily, and seemingly off-handedly, portray the drab world of Jonah and his small group of not-really friends, which in turn makes the elements of folk horror (or more properly myth horror, I suppose) more grounded.

It’s a lot like a Cornish version of a Bruce Springsteen song with added folklore, the old tale of a poor, not necessarily nice, young man finding himself trapped in a life he had no hand in choosing.

Which probably wasn’t – even expressed as folk horror – exactly new to anyone in 1978, and certainly isn’t today, but then, cycles repeating themselves is built into this narrative for a reason. In any case, Tarry-Dan tells this tale with tightness, insight and a sense of the local, and is much too good at it to be damned to an existence as a blurry VHS rip on YouTube.

But why not have a look yourself:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Girl in a Swing (1988)

Alan Dresland (Rupert Frazer), a dealer in antique ceramics, leads a somewhat boring, placid life. Stuck up in a very British kind of way, he doesn’t really seem to have much of an actual life beyond working upper class “responsibilities”. That changes when he travels to Denmark on business, and finds himself in need of some clerical help fluent in Danish, English and German.

A business friend lends Alan one of his secretaries. Karin Foster (Meg Tilly, with an accent so painful, it actually adds to the inherent weirdness of the character she’s playing) is very beautiful, somewhat reticent, impulsive and exactly the kind of woman Alan is bound to fall in love with, what with her tendency to quote German Romantic poetry and swoon at classical music in a most spellbinding manner while looking like, well, Meg Tilly.

For reasons only known to herself, Karin genuinely reciprocates Alan’s feelings, and after a two week courtship, he proposes marriage, despite the fact that Karin is clearly keeping secrets, telling him nothing of her past. She insists on getting married in England, so she need not produce her friends nor family. She also does not want to get married in a church.

Still, the couple’s early married life is full of fine, if a bit weird, companionship and sex that reaches from good to transcendental, and Karin charms friends and family as much as she did Alan.

From time to time, the shadow of Karin’s undisclosed past rears its ugly head – there’s a recurring motif of drownings, as well as the metaphorical shade of a child.

That latter part will become increasingly intense until it turns into a proper haunting.

There’s a languid quality to Gordon Hessler’s darkly fantastic The Girl in a Swing that isn’t exactly conducive to a solidly paced narrative. But then, I don’t think a solidly paced narrative is something this adaptation of a novel by Richard Adams actually aims for. Rather, much of the film is about creating a specific, allusive as well as elusive, mood, influenced by the (early, despite the Heine quotations) German Romantics, the Greek myths, and a very Greek idea of tragedy. In fact, there’s a properly pagan heart hidden in rather a lot of scenes here that Hessler puts in dialogue with his film’s more Christian elements (again, very much in a way the German Romantics would have understood).

All of this does sound rather fantastic, and is certainly a mood and idea space fantasy/fantastic cinema doesn’t explore all too often, or at all. However, in practice, Hessler isn’t quite good enough of a director – or scriptwriter – to turn a concept into a movie in a consistently effective manner. The languid eroticism can feel pompous and overloaded with symbols in a way I find deeply bourgeois (or really, the German version of bourgeois, bürgerlich), aiming for a depth and complexity of feeling it doesn’t quite manage to reach. As beautiful as all the beautiful shots of Meg Tilly’s (beautiful) face are – and as much effort as she clearly puts into embodying a character that’s purposefully difficult to grasp – that isn’t quite enough to realize the greater ideas about sexuality and repression, guilt and forgiveness, and so on Hessler is aiming for.

Despite these failings, I can’t help but admire the film (and not only Tilly) for trying for this heightened tone, for the classical and Romantic allusions, even for the callousness with which it treats the reveal of the reasons for Karin’s feelings of guilt, for an attempt at resonance with cultural lines movies in 1988 just weren’t thinking along at all.

Three Films Make A Post: If you can't smoke it, drink it, spend it or love it… forget it.

Payday (1973): Sleazy country star Maury Dann (Rip Torn) is on the road, lying, bullying and sliming his way across the USA while growing increasingly deranged.

I’m a big fan of 70s grimdark, but this nearly plotless portrait of a horrible man doing horrible things, horribly, by Daryl Duke actually beats me. It’s not that I can’t appreciate its skewering of the 70s country star, Duke’s version of hyperrealist style, or the great, though somewhat one-note performances, it’s just that I miss some moments of genuine humanity to measure Maury’s horridness against. Or, come to think of it, Maury showing one or two not redeeming but not horrible character traits to put some shading into the black and black of the movie at hand. Hell, the guy can’t even sing.

Tiger Zinda Hai (2017): This Bollywood piece of action-heavy super spy cinema sequel certainly charms with its series of overblown, wonderfully unrealistic action sequences, its treatment of BIG EMOTIONS that makes its predecessor look downright restrained, and its larger than life (in the best way) star performances by Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif.

Director Ali Abbas Zafar (who also co-wrote) also puts a lot of effort into fulfilling the increasingly mandatory quota of Indian jingoism while at the same time doing subtle and not so subtle things that complicate and humanize this jingoism, in ways I’m not at all sure I’m interpreting in the way they are meant to be understood. It’s a fun big damn action blockbuster in any case.

Girl in the Case (1944): A lawyer (Edmund Lowe) who is also an expert on safecracking and lockpicking (it’s a hobby) and his wife (Janis Carter) are sucked into an increasingly complicated case, concerning Nazi spies, a locked trunk, and a particularly stupid police force.

Tonally, William Berke’s B-movie marries mystery and screwball comedy, probably in an attempt to reach the same tone as the later of the Thin Man films. Lowe and Carter are no Powell and Loy – and really should acquire a dog – and Berke no W.S. Van Dyke, but there’s a breezy quality to the film, and a likeability to its basic silliness that makes it pretty difficult to dislike it. If one is at all interested in this era’s mystery comedies, obviously. I’m always happy about movies concerning mismatched couples solving crimes while cracking jokes.

Three Films Make A Post: “The Best Film of the Year”

Fallen Leaves aka Kuolleet lehdet (2023): I’m not quite as enthused about this Aki Kaurismäki film as most professional critics seem to be, and would prefer his previous two movies to this romance with difficulties, but then, I always found that Kaurismäki’s directing style, his use of Brechtian/Mamet-type acting, his love for stiffly posing characters in the frame, works better in his more comedic films. Here, where humour is still there and accounted for but really not at the centre of attention, the conscious distancing and stiffness gets a bit in the way for me, overemphasising concepts in favour of characters in what is for all sense and purpose actually a character piece.

This doesn’t mean I don’t see this as a worthwhile or artfully made film. It’s just not one I’m burning to revisit soon.

Return to Seoul aka Retour à Séoul (2022): Staying with arthouse favourites that didn’t quite connect with me, I found Davy Chou’s years-spanning tale of a French woman (Park Ji-min) with Korean birthparents repeatedly returning to Korea often visually stunning, but also rather frustrating in its unwillingness to connect some dots about its main character Freddie for the audience. Where mainstream films tend to overexposit and feel the need to explain every damn thing in them, Chou goes the other way, never expositing or explaining, even when a bit of a hint or two might provide a deeper understanding of Freddie. As it stands, her behaviour often feels random and a bit disconnected from what we know about her, her trauma an abstract thing rather than one to empathize with.

And yes, yes, I get it, this does of course mirror Freddie’s lack of deeper connection to the people and the world around her, as caused by her issues, but that doesn’t mean it is a satisfying way to go for a movie; it’s more an abstractly interesting one, and I’m not terribly interested in the abstract in my film watching experience. I can feel disconnected very well on my own, thank you very much.

Mad Fate aka 命案 (2023): On the other hand, I did connect with this complicated film about the horrors of destiny, the weight of grief, and the nastiness of coincidence/the gods, rather a lot more than with the first two in this entry. It’s not as if director Cheang Pou-Soi is out to make anything easy for his audience. His characters – including deeply disturbing performances by Gordon Lam Ka-Tung and Yeung Lok-Man – are certainly not what you’d normally call “relatable”, while the plot is as finicky as you can expect from a film where the destructive force of destiny hangs over the characters like a badly-humoured cat. The whole affair has a somewhat curious disposition as well,where it finds a degree of hope in a manner bound to make you uncomfortable.

Yet there’s a drive to push the audience into the film’s world Return to Seoul only has visually, Fallen Leaves not at all, and a willingness to let the audience into the head of the characters as well as its ideas the other two films of this entry lack, and that really makes this something special.

Three Films Make A Post: They're all alone in this together.

The Holdovers (2023): It’s not generally a great sign to someone of my tastes when basically every single review about a film describes it as “heart-warming”, but then not too many movies manage to be heart-warming without becoming kitsch, so this isn’t completely my failing. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers the kitsch by an insistence on all that’s crappy in life existing for its characters as well; its uplifting quality lies in saying “all this is true, but still…” and finding the positive in the small yet life-changing things. All the while, the humour runs a perfect line of sarcasm of the kind that’s quotable and will still be funny after you’ve quoted it a hundred times. The performances of the core trio of actors – Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa – are point perfect, and Payne directs like someone putting himself completely in the service of the story he is trying to tell (which is a difficult thing if you’re also going to tell it well).

Lot No. 249 (2023): For 2023’s Ghost Story for Christmas, Mark Gatiss went to the Arthur Conan Doyle well. This is probably one of the Gatiss era’s lesser offerings, but I say that rather regularly about these things and then find myself returning to them with great joy later on, so ask me again about its greatness or lesserness in a couple of years.

What’s definitely fine here is a surprising performance by Kit Harington, a cameo by not-Sherlock Holmes quite a few people not me apparently found annoying, and subtext about gayness, (self-)repression and the arrogance of Empire that has lost all of the sub.

The Childe aka Sad Tropics aka 귀공자 (2022): This South Korean action film by Park Hoon-jung concerns the misadventures of a young man looking for his father who learns that some fathers are better not found. A violent three-way-tugging match about with him as the rope ensues. The film features some fun, sometimes – the climax! - brilliant, action set pieces and a handful of performances so cartoonish, one will either find them very fun or very annoying, and very little else worth talking about. Enjoyable, the film certainly is, and I’m not against cartoons in any way, shape or form.

In short: Fire in the Sky (1993)

This is a dramatization of one of UFOdom’s favourite incidents, when Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney), a member of a group of loggers in Arizona disappears in the wilderness. His returning colleagues – as led by Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick) and numbering characters played by mainstays like Peter Berg, Craig Sheffer and Henry Thomas – get back into town only to tell the somewhat unbelievable tale of how Travis was sucked into the sky by a UFO. Police person in charge Frank Watters (James Garner) believes he smells a rat, but he’s not thinking hoax, but rather more ambitiously, murder.

What follows for Mike and his buddies is a bit of a nightmare of press hysteria, public outrage, Watters’s weird ratiocinations, lie detector tests and marriage crises. Until a naked and traumatized Travis appears, apparently without any memory of what happened to him.

Robert Lieberman’s film, long missing from home video until a short time ago, has a bit of a reputation among the cognoscenti. That reputation is mostly built on two scenes – Travis’s abduction and his late movie flashback to his experience with some truly frightening and traumatizing versions of the good old greys. Those scenes are indeed as great as their reputation suggests. Lieberman’s tight direction, a perfect use of some of horror’s favourite colours and note perfect production design come together to form two truly nighmarish moments. The slight variation on the typical Grey design alone would be enough to make the experiment scene great, but as Lieberman shoots it, there’s a special quality of suggested horrors about it that’s indelible.

The rest of the film, on the other hand, is a somewhat sober portrait of a handful of working class men under outside pressures they have no control over, mostly shown via, still very well directed and acted, dialogue scenes. It’s not a bad approach to the material in any way, shape or form, but it certainly isn’t the one you’d expect to encounter in a movie with two scenes like those. If this makes Fire in the Sky a better movie or a worse one will depend on any given viewer’s expectations more than on anything else, I believe. Me, I would have loved to see more of Lieberman’s SF horror stylings, but found myself rather hit by the drama.

In short: Taxi Hunter (1993)

Original title: 的士判官

Mild mannered insurance salesman Ah Kin (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) seems to have regular run-ins with Hong Kong taxi drivers. As the film portrays them, taxi drivers are basically a gang of greedy scammers and rapists, and Ah Kin is so good-natured, he is an obvious victim for any bully. When his pregnant wife (Perrie Lai Hoi-San) dies in a brutal taxi driver caused incident, Ah Kin at first falls into a deep hole of depression and alcohol not even his best friend, hero cop Yu Kai Chung (Yu Rongguang) can get him out of.

He gets somewhat better when he throttles yet another asshole taxi driver in a spur of the moment loss of sanity. Made somewhat happier by the deed, Ah Kin starts on a new side-line as a serial killer, punishing taxi drivers with bad professional ethics whenever he encounters them. He’s rather realistically not really great at physical violence, so much so he’ll eventually buy a gun to make kills meet.

If you go into Herman Yau’s serial killer movie Taxi Hunter expecting something as dedicated to the gross-out as the director’s The Untold Story (made in the same year as this one, also starring Wong) or his later Ebola Syndrome, you might be somewhat disappointed by this one’s often consciously awkward and comparatively quiet violence. Yau actually has quite a talent for staging more awkwardly realistic action in a dramatic and exciting way, and he uses this ability to pull the serial killer thriller down on the level of the human.

In fact, Taxi Hunter’s greatest strength does not lie in its moments of suspense and mild horror – expertly as Yau works them – but in the way the film has a humanizing view on each of its main characters, showing so much – often unexpected - compassion for Ah Kin, his best friend who is of course the cop tasked with catching the taxi hunter, Kai Chung’s comic relief partner (Ng Man-Tat), and the partner’s reporter daughter (Athena Chu Yun), the whole film ends up playing like a tragedy much more than your typical serial killer or revenge movie. Unless you’re a Hong Kong cab driver, then you’re apparently just an asshole (though killing you is still wrong, as Kai Chung will explain).

This unexpected amount of humanism is packaged inside of a fast-paced Hong Kong thriller that flows so well, for once even the comedic interludes fit.

Die Pest in Florenz (1919)

Some time during the renaissance. The beautiful courtesan Julia (Marga Kierska) comes from free-loving Venice to stuffy Florence, a town dominated by the church on one hand and a deeply conservative council of elders on the other. Her beauty inflames the already existing frictions between the old and the young, particularly putting the lord of the town (Otto Mannstaedt) and his son Lorenzo (Anders Wikmann), who both fall for her instantly, against each other.

Lorenzo kills his father when the old man attempts to rape Julia, and makes himself king of Florence, driving away the churchmen and the elders. With Julia, he starts a reign of incessant partying and what goes as orgies on screen in 1919, getting the intertitles all in a tizzy about their immorality while the 2023 audience whistles a happy tune.

Only a hermit monk named Medardus or Franziskus (depending on which version of intertitles you watch this with, in any case played by the grandly gesturing Theodor Becker) sets himself against the horrors of people fucking. But Julia is so beautiful! And into weird looking monks! And still hot even when they visit hell together in a vision! So Medardus is set up for a bit of a fall, to be portrayed through ever more gesturing and bugging of eyes, of course. Though, to be fair, Becker is rather brilliantly in the scene in which he murders Lorenzo in cold blood. Eventually, God gets so annoyed by the scenes of people frolicking drunkenly, or perhaps the murder, he sends the plague in the direction of Florence.

Otto Rippert’s silent movie epic Die Pest in Florenz may not be an obvious choice as part of my October two-step of horror love on this blog, what with much of it being a historical costume drama with what I can’t help but read as a lot of high-handed conservative moralizing and hand-wringing. It does, however, contain quite a few seeds that would in the future grow into the dark woods of gothic horror on screen. Medardus’s vision of a hell that includes a river of writing bodies and a fire-breathing (one-headed) dog certainly belongs into the realm of the macabre, and there’s a sense of true eeriness surrounding the film’s deeply medieval personification of the plague as an emaciated figure strolling, sometimes dancing, while all around it its victims fall down in pains of death. Medardus’s flight through the catacombs is another moment you’ll find repeated in different forms again and again in the future, as if writer Fritz Lang (in one of his last attempts at writing for someone else) had stumbled upon and scratched free some of the cornerstones of horror, but couldn’t quite bring himself to focus on them. An influence of the macabre was of course part of the zeitgeist of the 1910s and 1920s, so it might simply be Lang living in is time and place.

Parts of the film are often called an adaptation of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”, but really, there’s only a tiny bit of inspiration from the tale on screen when Medardus crashes Julia’s last party in a locked down Florence.

In general, there’s a mood of the eerie and the macabre running through the film particularly in its second half, a sense of supernatural doom hanging over its characters. Interestingly, Rippert realizes this mood without using many of the techniques of expressionism; Rippert is more of a naturalist, often positioning his astonishing number of bit players in large arrangements that amount to moving versions of picture puzzles, to be gawked at in the just as astonishing production design.

So, while this isn’t exactly a horror movie as we’ve come to know them, it is certainly of interest to anyone interested in the roots of the genre, like rather a lot of early silent movies.