Three Films Make A Post: Even if I kill you, I won't forget.

Werewolves (2024): This werewolf plague movie by Steven C. Miller is absolutely a SyFy original movie script of the style before these films discovered “irony” someone threw a bit of money at. As such, it is pretty dumb, doesn’t think about any of the actual implications – the mind-breaking horror and utter trauma - of its set-up that would make for a more interesting movie, and instead turns into a Frank Grillo and company versus werewolves shoot ‘em up with occasional cool gore effects.

Which I’d be fine with if Miller’s direction were a bit more inspired, or a bit more dynamic, or a bit grittier instead of being workmanlike and okay, and so full of lens flare some scenes genuinely look as if someone had farted light at the screen.

Flow aka Straume (2024): If it were nothing else, this is a brilliant example how much individuality and personality can fit into unashamedly digital animation – these things really don’t all need to look like Pixar. Of course, there’s quite a bit more to Gints Zilbalodis’s tale of a cat and her increasingly large group of animal friends roaming what looks a lot like the more pleasant part of a post-climate apocalypse world. There’s no dialogue here, but a lot of expressive animal noises (watching this at home with a cat would prove interesting, I believe), and animation so emotionally expressive, I certainly wasn’t missing dialogue or voice overs.

There’s a sense of wonder as well as one of melancholia running through the film, and where its plot is at its core simple and very generic, its artistic impression is singular and individual, leaving an immense emotional impact.

Heavier Trip aka Hevimpi reissu (2024): Where the first Heavy Trip was a delightful example of a comedy about misguided but loveable enthusiasts, its sequel by original directors and writers Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren is rather less successful.

Too much of the film consists of re-treads of rock music comedy standards that hit only about half of the time; everything here feels more generic than it did in the first film, less heartfelt and more professionally competent.

Which doesn’t turn this into a terrible film, just one I don’t see myself returning to very often, or at all.

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.

In short: Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

At the beginning of the 70s, Sixto Rodriguez made two good to great folk rock albums, only to disappear from the public stage (well, there was a late 70s/early 80s comeback in Australia, but the film at hand doesn’t mention it and probably genuinely doesn’t know about that part of the story). Unbeknownst to anyone in the US – certainly the artist – Rodriguez’ output became something of a key cultural artefact for the white anti-Apartheid counterculture in South Africa, with some of his songs being veritable black market hits.

Following the end of Apartheid – which also brought with it official versions of the records Rodriguez apparently saw as little money off as from the bootlegs because the record industry sucks – and a lot of pretty unbelievable rumours about Rodriguez’ death – “best” of them the one about him committing suicide on stage in front of an audience unappreciative of his music – some of the man’s South African fans start to dig into the case of their lost idol. Eventually, they not just find out where he lived – Detroit, which comes as little surprise given the Motown connection of his records – but also that he’s actually still alive (or was, as Rodriguez unfortunately died just this August). Which leads to a triumphant tour in South Africa.

There’s something special about Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man that doesn’t lie in its effectively used but still pretty standard music documentary format. Probably, this special quality has a lot to do with how it resonates with the Romantic in many a music lover, the way it portrays how music taken out of its original context can take on different, important, (personal) world-changing qualities in a different part of the world. There’s something at once hopeful and strange about this, art resonating in different ways as planned that are still sympathetic to its source.

It is doubly nice that this is one of the handful of films and stories about rediscovering a lost musician that end happily, even quietly triumphantly, with the artist not just being alive but also happy, not having recorded further music but having had what feels like a full and interesting life, and was still living it when this was shot.

In short: Sisu (2022)

1944. The Nazis are leaving Lapland, but not without following through with scorched earth policy. As if the landscape weren’t already pretty bleak. Gold digger Aatami (Jorma Tommilla), escaping a violent past and the loss that came with it, has actually struck gold and is now transporting his find to the next town. Meeting Nazi troops ends in rather a lot of violence, for it turns out that our protagonist is a crazed veteran of the Winter War, dubbed Koshchei by his Russian enemies then, which does not bode well for Nazis out to take his gold and his life.

As far as low(ish) budget action movies with a bone-dry sense of humour and a love for the old ultra violence go, Jalmari Helander’s Sisu is rather great. There’s a wonderful sense of flow as well as of escalation to the film, a forward momentum that never quite becomes breathlessness – our hero’s a quick, methodical killer, after all, though also a messy one.

As in most great action movies, Sisu demonstrates an absolute willingness to leave the laws of physics (those old bores) behind for the joys of iconic and sometimes grotesque action, and very specifically understands the joy of Platonic pulpiness – having half a dozen female Nazi captives armed with machine guns mowing down a truckload of Nazis, a grizzled guy hitching a ride on the outside of a plane with a pick-axe, that sort of thing. At the same time, the film never presents these moments with a sense of ironic detachment – the audience is supposed to get sucked into this and feel it, instead of admire it from the outside, and at least for me, this approach to the material worked splendidly. But then, I prefer the absurdly awesome and the awesomely absurd presented to me with a straight face instead of a wink.

On a less visceral note, the film is very successful at portraying its version of Lapland as something that looks a lot like the movies have told me a post-apocalyptic wasteland looks, providing the proper mood for the grim and over the top violence going on in it; it certainly beats the warehouses you so often get in the cheaper action movies. The score and some scenes, as well as the film’s generally grim outlook do suggest the Italian West as a neighbouring realm as well; one would not be surprised meeting Franco Nero dragging a coffin with a special surprise inside around here. There’s certainly a lot of squinting going on, and our protagonist does have the proper air of mythic brutality, as well as one can only assume to be Wolverine's healing factor.

Three Films Make A Post: On the other side of death, on the other side of regret, on the edge of mystery…

Children of the Mist aka They aka They Watch (1993): This Showtime TV movie by John Korty turns Rudyard Kipling’s delicate story “They” about the loss of a child and grief into melodramatic pap, and also features the least frightening child ghost I can remember seeing; it doesn’t help that it makes overdubbed owl noises.

Nobody involved really seems to want to bother putting effort in: Edithe Swensen’s script turns everything into a cliché, Korty mishandles melodrama and ghosts alike, and the actors mostly seemed to have checked out mentally. Vanessa Redgrave gives a non-performance quite below her usual level, and I’m not even sure what Patrick Bergin thinks he’s doing at all. He’s certainly not acting like anyone who has encountered a grieving human being before.

The Other Side of Hope aka Toivon tuolla puolen (2017): This Aki Kaurismäki movie about a Syrian refugee looking for his sister and a place to be, and a former salesman’s increasingly absurd attempts at running a restaurant does cover similar ground to Le Havre, made six years earlier. This one isn’t quite as optimistic about the kindness of the working classes anymore (shitty racist Nazi types have arrived in Kaurismäki’s world, though never unopposed), but it is also not as hopeless about it as it could be. There’s still solidarity, compassion and kindness to be found, as well as the small happinesses that keep us alive. Formally, this breaks up the heart-breaking story of the Syrian Khaled (Sherwan Haji) with Kaurismäki-style shenanigans, which never feels like the cop-out it could be, but like the statement of a guy who doesn’t really want to put a divide between tragedy and farce. Which sometimes means that the farce helps the character from the tragedy survive (see also, curiously enough, Ladyhawke).

The Scythian aka Skif (2018): Rustam Mosafir’s sort of historical adventure movie is quite the thing. Always willing to turn everything – non-plausibility, fights and men’s friendship, betrayal, and general craziness – up to eleven, this often feels like the grandchild of cheap Italian sword and sorcery movies in its wild abandon, just made with more money, and most probably talent. There’s little scepticism towards warrior cultures and manly men doing manly stuff on display, of course, so if you can’t or won’t cope with these things, this is just going to make you angry. On the other hand, the film also has an anti-imperialist streak a mile wide, clearly coming down on the Barbarism side on the Howard Barbarian versus Civilisation scale while it’s at it.

It’s also simply a great, riveting piece of adventure filmmaking full of clever and fun set pieces, craziness and awesome manly bullshit.

Three Films Make A Post: In the Arthouse, there are no taglines

Le Havre (2011): I’ve always had a fondness for the films of Finnish master of the absurd deadpan and delicate emotions often hidden behind a façade of the farcical Aki Kaurismäki, though I haven’t really followed him for some time. This one’s a pretty special film, positing the kind of individual solidarity between the white European working class and refugees that leads to solidarity and genuine kindness instead of burning refugee centres. From today, that’s a rather optimistic view of these things, but Kaurismäki makes it convincing by underplaying everything sentimental in a way that reaches genuine emotions exactly by not making a big thing out of them.

Good Morning aka Ohayo (1959): When people recommend Ozu movies for beginners to the man’s body of work, they do tend to go for the (quietly) emotional wringer of something like (the incredible) Tokyo Story rather than this comedy about a small neighbourhood, and the the sort of quotidian problems, wins and loses movies have their trouble making interesting for anyone but film critics. The film includes many of the director’s thematic preoccupations, especially his much favoured generational rifts, but treats them in a decidedly non-quietly-heart-breaking manner. It’s not that Good Morning lacks the emotional depth of Ozu’s more obvious movies, it is just lighter in its approach, and therefore in its emotional pressure on an audience. It also features rather more fart jokes than you’d probably expect, and is all the better for it.

Osaka Elegy aka Naniwa ereji (1936): I have seen rather fewer Mizoguchi movies than those by Ozu, apart from the obvious ones for a guy of my tastes (so Ugetsu and that hammer to the head made film, Sanjo the Bailiff). Watching an comparatively early film by the director like this drama with comedic elements about a telephone operator becoming the mistress of her lecherous boss to help her family out of various troubles only to become ostracized for it doesn’t quite bring up great revelations to me, though I do see the quality and individuality in Mizoguchi’s approach; his long shots and ability to build emotion in a style nearly completely eschewing close-ups is damn impressive. Just one thought (and by the rules, one thought is enough for a “Three Films Make A Post” entry into this blog): if this were an American movie made at about the same time, this would have become a screwball comedy, where the sexual elements of the plot wouldn’t have been quite as clear, but where our heroine would have gone to some kind of happily-ever-after.

Past Misdeeds: The White Reindeer (1952)

Original title: Valkoinen Peura

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The birth of Pirita stands under a bad star, with her mother  desperately racing through the snows of Lapland to give birth to her in the warmth of somebody's tent, and then dying during birth. The owners of said tent take Pirita in as their own daughter. They may be relatives of her mother, but the film does not explain this, nor why Pyrite's mother wasn't giving birth at her home, nor if she even had one, but the staging of the scenes makes it quite clear that the baby's birth is not exactly accompanied by good omens.

Still, Pirita (now played by co-writer and wife of director Erik Blomberg Mirjami Kuosmanen) grows up into a beautiful and happy young (well, Kuosmanen was close to forty at that point, but that's not really a problem here) woman. She and strapping reindeer herder Aslak (Kalervo Nissilä) fall in love and marry. However, as a herder, Aslak is away from home for long stretches, and Pirita misses him painfully. So she goes to visit the local shaman (Arvo Lehesman) to ask him for a love potion.

The shaman agrees to help her, but questioning the spirits doesn't exactly achieve the results anyone would have hoped for. The shaman prophecies Pirita will be irresistible to all men if she sacrifices the first living thing she sees on her return home at an altar, but the shaman also foresees a fate too horrible to speak of. Something - perhaps based on her birth - takes possession of Pirita at that moment, and she is fated to continue the process she has begun, walking through the next scenes like somebody submitting to the inevitable. So even though the first living thing Pirita sees on her return home is a white reindeer calf her husband gave her as a token of his love, she still can't escape sacrificing it.

Afterwards, Pirita becomes quite popular with the male population, though she seemed to attract men before she let the spirits put a spell on her quite well already, and Aslak never was anything but in love with her. The truth about the spell is something quite different anyway: by the light of the full moon, Pirita turns into a white reindeer that irresistibly draws men into hunting her, following her alone into the wilderness. Once the animal is alone with them, far from help, it turns back into a Pirita with fangs and claws who kills the man she has drawn away.

In a population as close-knit and full of knowledge of the old ways (it's impossible to call it superstition, for in the context of the movie, it's all true), this sort of situation can't hold up for long, and soon every Lapp in the area knows that the white reindeer is a witch killing men. It's only a question of time until they make spears of cold iron and kill her; and if you know the sort of story this is, you'll already know who will be the man to do it in the end.

I couldn't find out much about the era in the Finnish film industry when Valkoinen Peura was made (there's quite a bit of material online about the 1930s and 40s and then the 90s and onward, but little specifics about the period in between) though I am quite sure that Erik Blomberg's film wasn't typical of the output of the country's three major studios. The film seems too personal and too idiosyncratic for a pure entertainment, yet also seems far away from everything that would later become arthouse movies. If you're from Finland and know better, please correct me.

Stylistically, the film uses two very different approaches to filmmaking. The parts of the film concerned with the day to day life of the Lapps are filmed close to the style of a documentary (Blomberg having made more documentaries than feature films, this isn't exactly a surprise) with a major eye for the telling detail, and the patience to just let things happen on screen in their own time. These scenes make clear that Blomberg is highly interested in a feeling of veracity and authenticity, treating Lapp culture with a respect you don't generally see in films of the 50s for anything or anyone not in the mainstream culture of the country they were made in. If Blomberg got everything right about Lapp culture is quite another question, though not one I'm knowledgeable enough to answer. For the purposes of the film and this review it's probably enough to know that Blomberg strives for and achieves a feeling of veracity.

At first, this documentarian part of the film seems to rub against the way Blomberg stages most of the appearances of the supernatural, with highly expressionist lighting and editing that might just as well have been taken from a German silent movie of the 20s; even the acting tends to a certain wide-eyed and melodramatic style in these scenes, and Blomberg clearly prefers silent actors making expressive faces while dramatic music plays to dialogue - in fact, quite a few scenes seem to be shot without sound at all.

Instead of lending a schizophrenic feel to the film, both stylistic directions are well integrated into each other: all scenes that deal with day to day practicalities are shot in the more mundane documentary style, and the moments that deal with the vagaries of the human heart and the supernatural are made all the more emotionally powerful by being staged quite differently. This is particularly effective when Pirita's curse (really, I'm tempted to use the word "wyrd" here, even though it is culturally inappropriate) begins to infect her daily life with her husband and a scene that would have been shot bright and clear at the film's start, now is full of shadows and ambiguity.


If I were in a blithe mood, I'd call Valkoinen Peura the best movie about a were reindeer you'll ever see, but apart from being, you know, blithe, it would also mean selling the film quite short. There aren't many movies trying to take on the feeling of myth and legend while at the same time attempting to be truthful towards more mundane realities, and even fewer succeeding at it. Blomberg's film absolutely nails the right mood, and tells the right story in just the right way, resulting in a film singing with its own bleak kind of poetry.

Heavy Trip (2018)

Orginal title: Hevi reissu

Friends Turo (Johannes Holopainen), Jynkky (Antti Heikkinen), Pasi (Max Ovaska) and Lotvonen (Samuli Jaskio) live in a small Finnish village whose only claim to fame seems to be reindeer farming (ranching?). The only thing that’s breaking up the boredom is the guys’ shared love for metal. They’ve been a practicing death metal act for a good twelve years now, as a matter of fact. You need to take that practicing part literally, by the way, for the band has never had a gig, does not have a single self-written song in their repertoire, goes without a name, and has only ever played in the basement of the farm of Lotvonen’s parents. But things start to change: dreaming of fame, fortune, and the heart of local flower shop gal Miia (Minka Kuustonen) motivates Turo to really get serious about the whole being a band thing. Why, they even manage write their first own song.

Things become intense when a guy (Rune Temte) running a Norwegian metal festival comes to the farm to buy reindeer blood, as you do. After accidentally dousing him in blood, they give him their demo tape. Clearly, they are a shoe-in for the festival! Once Turo uses the fantasy gig to show off to Miia, the whole village that formerly treated them as shitty dudes with too long hair is cheering them on. So it is rather unfortunate there’s actually no space for them at the festival. But as you know, crazy dreams can come true in the world of metal. Insert devil horns here.

What you really don’t expect going into a film about a Finnish backwoods death metal band is to encounter something as sweet and heart-warming as this one turns out to be. Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren’s movie really doesn’t have a nasty bone in its body, treating characters like its protagonists whom most films would play as sad sacks to laugh about as incredibly nice, if perfectly weird, young men you can’t help but root for in any crisis. Even Turo’s nemesis, the sleazy lounge singer and used car salesman Jouni Tulkku (Ville Tiihonen) is only treated with mild derision, a reaction that actually fits his character’s failings more than going to extremes.

While this is a film about music very often all about burning the world down and dancing in the ruins, it does understand that it, as well as the music is champions, is also about the joy of playacting, of using a pose to become larger-than-life to play music that’s larger than life, too. So our protagonists are, at heart, just really nice guys who want to finally fulfil their dreams and a have a bit of an adventure in the process instead of mythic rock gods. And while all this obviously leads to funny situations for the characters, the film never makes fun of their dreams or their having dreams, presenting itself as a nice antidote to the South Park and Deadpool schools of humour whose makers hate dreams, hopes, and their characters too much to ever make a joke I’d find funny.

And funny Heavy Trip is basically non-stop, with good enough comical timing that even projectile vomiting becomes pretty hilarious. Among other highlights are Pasi’s black metal face paint, which makes him look like the sad clown of metal, the scene where Jouni sells the gang a horrible van by dressing it up as The Van of Death with many murders and accidents connected to it, Turo’s, ahem, encounter with his spirit animal (who, we can assume, is the best at what it does, but what it does isn’t very nice), the acquisition of a replacement drummer by kidnapping of a black Laplander (Chike Ohanwe) from the mental institution where Turo works as a particularly nice nurse (it’s funnier than it sounds, really), and so on and so forth.


It’s a brilliant movie, the sort of comedy you go out of not just having laughed parts of your anatomy off (which is pretty metal, right?), but also with a big smile of actual joy.

Mindhunters (2004)

Warning: there are some structural spoilers ahead!

Controversial FBI profiling guru Jake Harris (Val Kilmer) is just about through with the newest bunch of psychologically highly volatiles trainees trying to become profilers. Their final test after training exercises that seem to have fuck all to do with profiling (which is a somewhat dubious “science” anyhow, but I digress) is to be dumped on an island for a weekend where they are supposed to hunt a fake serial killer.

The can of meat (Christian Slater, Kathryn Morris, Jonny Lee Miller, Will Kemp, Clifton Collins Jr., Eion Bailey, and Patricia Velasquez with bonus LL Cool J as a cop who’s there as an observer) will soon learn that that there’s something more going on than just a training exercise when a real serial killer starts picking them off one by one, apparently following their greatest strengths, or weaknesses or whatever. Will they soon turn on one another in the way that makes the least possible sense? You betcha!

Ah, the early oughts serial killer thriller, a genre that has caused more pain and suffering than the fictional serial killers in it ever could. How many films about improbably competent killers murdering a bunch of people in absurd and contrived ways do you need to screw in a light bulb, exactly? Clearly, director Renny Harlin wasn’t too sure about the genre being enough to carry another film either, so his Mindhunters does go on a spree of crosspollination with other genres. Most obviously, this is also a bit of a mystery in the And Then There Were None manner, bringing together a bunch of characters in an isolated place trying to figure out who is killing them off one by one. Just without characterisation, which is replaced by rather more unconvincing digital body parts flying hither and yon than you usually encounter in Aggie Christie’s work. And with no butlers in sight. The killings, though very much in the same spirit as Saw - which may or may not be a coincidence, since both films must have been shot at about the same time – also from time to time suggest the way Death in the Final Destination series works, only without the supernatural agency that makes their complicated and contrived manner plausible.

Because that’s clearly not enough of a melange, Mindhunters also aspires to be a twist-laden thriller, with mixed results. On one hand, one early character death in the spirit of Psycho does play well with an audience’s expectations about who is the lead character and star in this particular piece, when the film kills off the character that must seem most threatening to the killer first. On the other hand, the final twist regarding the identity of the killer is absolutely idiotic, making the way LL Cool J’s character acts in the scenes just before that completely inexplicable. That’s a sort of thing all too common in twist-heavy thrillers, but here it seems particularly egregious because it’s not just preparing the final sting but the actual finale. A finale, by the way, that consists mostly of two characters having a shoot-out underwater, for of course, there’s a bit of Renny Harlin-style action movie in the film too.

If you haven’t noticed by now, imaginary reader, Mindhunters is a film that very much wallows in the absurd and the contrived, seemingly on purpose choosing the least plausible and believable elements of all the genres it pilfers, so that Harlin can shoot them in a nearly absurdly slick mid-budget style. Turns out that adding gloss might not make anything going on in the movie more believable, but it sure makes it fun to look at.

And while the film really is as dumb as a whole congregation of rocks (having a rock party together on a rock island, I presume), it is not just fun to look at but indeed very fun to watch, for Harlin uses practically every single stupid idea in the script (and there are legions of stupid ideas in there) as the basis for some kind of exciting set piece, or at least a moment whose idiocy makes a guy like me chuckle in delighted disbelief. That last description also fits the clunky dialogue rather well, where no sentence sound good, or like anything an actual human being would say. Unless it’s a one-liner, then all bets are really off.


All these joys do make Mindhunters a highly entertaining watch, but the most glorious thing here is Jonny Lee Miller’s attempt at what I think must be meant to be some kind of US accent – Texan, perhaps? – as dreamed up by somebody who has only read about the way Americans talk. It is quite the thing to hear.

In short: Shopping Tour (2012)

Original title: Shopin-tur

A month or so after the death of the family father, a mother (Tatyana Kolganova) – let’s call her Mom – and her son Stas (Timofey Yeletskiy, I assume) participate in a bus shopping tour from their native Russia to strange, exotic Finland, where people are much friendlier, laid back and civilized. Mom also gifts Stas a brand-new camera phone with what appears to be a magical battery, and we all know what that means: the footage we are about to see is of course shot on it.

There’s a bit of time for Mom and Stas to bicker and argue (and not just about the fact that Stas didn’t know they were going on a shopping tour instead of a real bus tour to Finland) but soon, they have more serious troubles to cope with: turns out the bus operation screwed up and brought its busload of shoppers to Finland on the one day in the year when everybody there turns into a foreigner-eating cannibal. Oops.

When it comes to ultra low budget POV horror movies about Finnish cannibals, Mikhail Brashinskiy’s Shopping Tour is certainly the cream of the crop. It might be the only entry in this rather specific little sub-sub-genre, but that’s neither here nor there.

Even if you take a slightly broader view of it, the film’s still a cheap and fun little thing, often staging its shots rather cleverly, moving at just the right pace, and including interesting facts about Finland. There is, obviously, not terribly much depth to the whole affair but there’s such a nice flow to the film, and none of the annoyances that mar quite a few POV horror films it’s really worth watching, particularly if you partake of a more sardonic sense of humour. And really, didn’t we all suspect there’s something unhealthy about shopping tours?

On Exploder Button: Icy May: Valkoinen Peura (1952)

aka The White Reindeer

We agents of M.O.S.S. defy your oppressive assumptions about seasons in the northern hemisphere. To prove you (yes you!) wrong, May will be all about ice, snow and everything cold for us. Everything is better in winter, after all. And what other climatic conditions could bring us a movie about a were-reindeer?

Valkoinen Peura not only happens to contain said reindeer but is also a very fine film in other particulars. If you want to know more, click on through to my write-up on ExB!

Technorati-Markierungen: finnish movies,reviews,other places,fantasy,horror,erik blomberg,mirjami kuosmanen,kalervo nissilä

In short: Kuutamosonaatti (1988)

Because she was mildly naughty, her agency ships model Anni (Tiina Björkman) off for a few days away from the limelight. Anni ends up in a hut somewhere far out in the Finnish countryside, with her teenage brother Johannes (Kim Gunell) supposedly bound to follow the next day.

Of course, we all know about the pleasures of country life from many a horror movie, so it'll come as no surprise when Anni's closest neighbours turn out to be rather peculiar. The Kyyröläs consist of a religiously crazy Mum (Soli Labbart), her panty-stealing giggling crazy son Arvo (Kari Sorvali) and Sulo (Mikko Kivinen), the son so crazy the family locks him up in the root cellar so he doesn't roam the snowy woods at night, howling like a wolf.

Needless to say, pretty Anni soon awakens the interest of Arvo, whose particular type of country hospitality becomes increasingly threatening. Cue "Dueling Banjos".

As is obvious by now, Olli Soinio's Finnish backwoods horror film Kuutamosonaatti (which translates into "Moonlight Sonata") sets out to prove that the language of evil, unwashed country people hunting much prettier city folk is very much an international one. And what could be better than to use the rural landscape of your (sometimes metaphorical) backyard if you're making a low budget movie?

As far as the violence goes, the film at hand is on the more harmless side of its genre. There aren't all that many characters to kill off gorily, and the film prefers a mixture of dry, off-beat humour which my very basic knowledge of Finnish film and music interprets as typical of the country, and classic tricks of suspense and thriller filmmaking as brought down to us by Hitchcock (who even has a kind of guest appearance).

While that may disappoint the gore hounds among its audience, Kuutamosonaatti's suspense scenes were effective enough to keep me interested. Sure, there's a degree of silliness to the set-up of various scenes you need to ignore to enjoy the film on a straightforward level, but if you do, there's a pretty tight low budget movie to enjoy.

Additionally, if you've seen as many backwoods horror movies as I have, you learn to enjoy the slight differences in local colour, and Kuutamosonaatti's well photographed snowy North of Finland provides a marked and pleasant difference in a genre generally taking place in the woods somewhere in Backwoodlandia, USA. There are also too few tractor chase scenes in the genre outside of Finland.

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In short: War of the Dead (2011)

aka Stone's War

This Finnish/Lithuanian/American/Italian co-production about a Finnish/US commando troop in Finland after the Winter War trying to blow up a bunker but encountering zombie-like undead instead at least has a strained production history to excuse some of its numerous flaws, but understanding why director Marko Mäkilaakso's film is a rather drab affair does not make it any better, and the time spent with it any less boring.

It's a bit of a shame, too, for there are a few elements buried under a cornucopia of rote war movie clichés and some not exactly exciting zombie action that could have been exploited to produce a much more interesting tale. Especially the political situation the film is taking place in could have made for emotionally complex, probably even educational zombie cinema, but the exploration of Russian/Finnish relations is as drab and tepid as everything else on screen. That part of the movie is also probably not exactly easy to understand for the audience a film shot completely in English is going for; products of the US education system, at least, generally seem to have problems enough to accept that there were other nations taking part in World War II than the Germans, themselves, and the Japanese, so it might have been useful to ease them into the historical situation a little. But since the film also never attempts to give the part of its story where the last survivors of different nationalities have to work together against the zombies either any sort of twist or enough depth to make it actually worthwhile, making at least its historical dimension clear would have been too much to ask for.

War of the Dead is not made more exciting by characters that are written so emotionally distant it would be hard to even keep them apart if not for their faces. Not that they do much with those faces, mind you, for the acting is as lethargic as the characterization. I wouldn't speak of bad performances, but rather of non-performances.

And then there's the part that usually saves me from being bored by any given World War II zombie movie, the action: expect lots and lots of slow motion, some decent choreography, and a desperate feeling you have seen all this before in movies that either had some emotional depth (that is to say, any emotional depth at all) or were funny, or just knew how to be exciting instead of vaguely, dispiritingly competent. That, alas, is War of the Dead in a nutshell.

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In short: Iron Sky (2012)

Usually, the proper reaction for me when I hear words like "camp" and descriptions like "instant cult classic" buzzing around a movie is to keep as far away from it as humanly possible, even though this goes against the spirit of hopeful masochism I otherwise cling to in my movie watching decisions. Fortunately, I made an exception to this sanity-defending rule for the Finnish, German and Australian co-production Iron Sky, and while my sanity probably is not the better for it, my mood surely is.

For this campy comedy about a Nazi invasion of Earth that moonlights as a silly yet bitter satire on contemporary political culture (and perhaps even human nature, but that does make the film sound rather pretentious, so let's just say that there's a surprising large amount of Dr. Strangelove in its gene pool) is actually good; more surprisingly, it's so funny I found myself snorting, even regularly laughing, about more of its jokes than I usually do when it comes to comedy. Of course not every moment is a hit in that regard, but then, humour tends to be as personal a thing as sexual preferences.

What - besides it actually being funny - differentiates Iron Sky from many other attempts at being consciously camp is its utter lack of laziness. While plot and worldbuilding are patently absurd, they are also pretty damn well thought through, adding fittingly absurd details that logically derive from absurd premises. That seems especially fitting when it comes to Nazi ideology, for what else is it than atrocity based on absurd and grotesque premises?

For a film with a comparatively small budget of 7.5 million Euro (that's what, five minutes of - the of course awesome - John Carter?), Iron Sky also manages to squeeze in a very impressive amount of CGI. Even better, it's the right kind of digital effects work that puts effort into letting objects look as if they had an actual physical presence. Plus, the sense for the funny and telling detail that runs through the film's writing is clearly visible in the designs of moon zeppelins and space ships too.

The effects, like just about everything else in Iron Sky, are the product of filmmakers who care about their film and don't just shrug off problems with a handwaving "it's supposed to be bad".

 

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Sauna aka Filth (2008)

After 25 years of war between Sweden and Russia, the year of 1595 finds both countries busy with redrawing their borders. In the 16th century, the drawing of borders was a physical act, a work of practical cartography as well as taxation.

The Finnish brothers Erik (Ville Virtanen) and Knut (Tommi Eronen) Spore are the Southern agents of the Swedish crown deciding on the exact course of the border between the Swedish territory of Finland and Russia. Shortly before they are supposed to meet their Russian counterparts to coordinate and finalize their efforts, the brothers get themselves into trouble in a small village. Erik, a soldier with the charming (and not serial killer-like at all, oh, no) habit of counting the people he has killed (it's getting up to 73 now) slaughters a farmer (let's call him number 74) for the sin of hiding some of his taxable property from him, while Knut, a scientist by trade, very nearly rapes the same farmer's daughter. Unlike Erik, Knut is very much afraid of what he is capable of, stops himself and locks the girl in a cellar, to keep her safely away from harm as well as to not to have to deal with his own emotions. In a moment to delight every hobby Freudian, Knut asks his brother (who is still quite bloody from murdering someone) to free the girl from the cellar. Erik promises to take care of it, and of course doesn't.

Some time later they meet up with their Russian counterparts led by a certain Semenski (Viktor Klimenko), a man who is mostly interested in getting the whole border business over with and finally be able to live in peace. They are nearly through with the work. Just one more pesky swamp and the thing will be over. Semenski is willing to just say that the border is running right through the middle of the swamp without doing any real cartography or putting any markers down in it, but Erik, still fighting the war, insists on real exploration.

Unfortunately for the men, there is in fact something of interest in the swamp, something people as guilt-ridden and morally troubled as Erik and Knut, who has started to see the apparition of a certain dead girl even before, should better stay away from.

It's not the village of war refugees the men find that will be at the core of their troubles, it's an ancient sauna built a little further off in the swamp. But instead of cleansing sins, this sauna was built (if it was in fact built) to make one see one's sins more clearly, in preparation the other things it also shows.

Sauna is one of those films that seem to get better the more crappy contemporary shot on video horror you have seen, but I am not completely sure that it really is as good as It felt like. It is possible, even probable, that the siren song of a film that was not written by a bunch of morons and filmed utilizing mobile phones as cameras with the "director"'s family doing the "acting" is so strong that it makes me overlook certain weaknesses more than I should.

So, let's start with the weaknesses, which can mostly be found in the script. If you take away the historical setting, this is close to a lot of horror films from the last couple of decades, mostly those supernatural horror films which took something different from the Asian horror wave than the jump cuts, but it is at least a film about adults with emotional baggage instead of another film featuring our old friends Final Girl, Slut, Funny Black Guy and so on. Still, deeply original this is not, even less so when you take the bluntness of the film's psychology and metaphors (a girl locked away in a cellar, huh?) into account. On the other hand, Sauna's characters do at least have a psychology.

Then there's a underdeveloped sub-plot about gay attraction in it that is problematic in the way it couples homosexuality and violence, as well as a very unsubtle way to get rid of some characters.

Nearly as ill-advised is the final bunch of special effects. Those might have looked very good on paper, but just don't work in their execution. I am less than sure about their necessity either - for me, the film would be stronger without showing what it shows.

These are all flaws I am willing to live with, though, because these are all flaws that only come into play through the things the film does right. The psychology seems sometimes too reductionist because the acting is good enough to let you believe in the characters as persons; the special effects are problematic because the film is so excellent at setting an initial mood through light and landscape without showing much of anything; the answers are too blunt because the questions are so interesting.

I think the point I am trying to make through my rambling is that Sauna is an excellent film that has the type of flaws a lesser movie won't have because the lesser movie will have failed before it will even have reached the point where these flaws can come into play.

 

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