Loop Track (2023)

Socially extremely awkward Ian (Tom Sainsbury) is going on a walk through the forests of New Zealand to get away from all those pesky people, and perhaps some concrete aspect of his life he believes he has screwed up particularly badly.

Instead of peace and quiet, he soon finds himself socially pressured into walking together with three randos he meets and that won’t leave a guy completely unable to actually tell them he wants to be alone go on his way alone. Increasingly, Ian believes there’s something bad going on in this beautiful forest. Someone or something seems to be following them, though his attempts at convincing the others of it only make them look increasingly askew at the guy who didn’t want to be involved with them from the start.

Tom Sainsbury’s Loop Track attempts to fuse the comedy of social anxiety and people being people, the expectedly pretty landscape of New Zealand (filmed low-key) with a bit of the monster movie tradition. While certainly a well-made film, it never comes quite together for me – there’s such a heavy emphasis on the social anxiety there’s actually very little room for the monster movie parts here, and – even as a sufferer of some of Ian’s symptoms – I never found myself quite connecting to him, and certainly not the other characters and their single defining character traits.

For a film that appears to be this interested in the characters’ psychology, I found everyone rather lacking in complexity, with every character’s first scene already defining everything about them.

The stalking is played too low-key, and despite a fantastic monster reveal, I’m really not sure why this needed the horror elements at all – it’s not as if it puts them into dialogue with Ian’s internal life.

Having said that, I didn’t exactly mind the film – I just don’t think it does anything much with its potential.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Sisters Beth (Lily Sullivan) and Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) haven’t always seen eye to eye, historically, but when Beth has a problem, as she has at the beginning of the movie, she still comes back to Ellie – and Ellie’s kids Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), Danny (Morgan Davies) and Kassie (Nell Fisher). Right now, Ellie’s family has problems of their own, though: the father of the kids has left them, and the high rise they live in is going to be demolished in a month, with no new place to live on the horizon.

So the family reunion isn’t without its troubles. Troubles which will be rudely interrupted when an earthquake open ups a hidden bunker under the building and Danny grabs the grimoire stashed there in the hopes of selling it off to get everyone out of trouble. Soon deadites and fountains of blood will redecorate the building’s interior.

The new Evil Dead film is not at all the kind of film I’d have expected out of Lee Cronin. Where the director’s short films and his The Hole in the Ground are rather slow, cerebral and thoughtful, Evil Dead Rise is fast, bloody, and often wonderfully fucked up perfectly in keeping with the tradition of the franchise. Cronin turns out to be really good at this sort of thing, as well, timing shocks, freak-outs and nasty suspense masterfully, while keeping the characters interesting enough for him to be able to slow down strategically whenever necessary or useful to the film’s mood.

There are, of course, a lot of nods to the other films of the franchise here (there’s a particularly wonderful/creepy variant of the old “DEAD BY DAWN!”, turned into an actual chant here), but Cronin – who also scripted – also adds some flourishes of his own that manage to keep completely in the style of the series but also feel new and individual enough to move it forwards, in a much more organic way than the new Hellraiser tried and failed to do it. The final creature – to spoil that one would be a crime – is a great example for this. It’s certainly in the mind space Sam Raimi works in when doing horror, but it’s also something I really haven’t seen before, or indeed imagined to see in the fifth movie in a franchise that also already spawned a TV show.

For a movie that’s aiming for the mainstream, this can get surprisingly nasty – not just in the blood showers but also in its willingness to kill characters who would be taboo in most mass market fare, in its general sense of gruesomeness and in its sheer macabre visual imagination.

Between the crazy effects, the blood, and the horrific action, Cronin has also managed to include elements that resonate on a different level. Apart from being a movie about possession, blood and unpleasant transformations, this is also very much a film playing on a very basic human fear. To my eyes, it is not the “evil mother” thing certain people get so cranky about (because all mothers in real life are awesome I assume against better knowledge?) but rather the fear of your loved ones turning against you or changing beyond recognition, turning into monsters literal and metaphorical. There’s a certain perverse glee in the way Evil Dead Rise plays with this fear, first setting up family relations that are close but not too idyllic, and then destroying them in ways none of the characters deserve.

If you start thinking about it, Evil Dead Rise is really very dark indeed – it just puts this darkness into such a sweet mix of macabre and perversely fun carnage, not everyone watching will even notice that darkness.

Three Films Make A Post: Long live adventure… and adventurers!

The Tank (2023): I’m not really sure why this movie from New Zealand directed by Scott Walker is trying to pretend it’s American, even though there’s no reason at all for this to be taking place anywhere specific. But then, I’m equally unsure why this has to be a period piece, either. Or, come to think of it, why the film has to drag its feet for nearly an hour until anything of interest happens in it – the character work certainly isn’t so deep it needs the time.

What the film has going from it – apart from a perfectly capable cast – is a really great monster design; the monster just comes in much too late.

Sideworld: Haunted Forests of England (2022): If I were a cynical man, I’d look down on George Popov’s documentary for being quite as cost-consciously produced as it obviously was: the film’s tales of dark folklore, myths and rural legend are told from the off, accompanied by creepy low angle shots of British forests and art from the public domain, and everything is accompanied by dark ambient – and that’s really all there is to it, formally.

However, the script by Jonathan Russell puts the well-worn and not not so well-worn tales the film tells into efficient little packages, and Popov applies his background in indie folk horror filmmaking of the more directly fictional variety nicely to the material, shaping the minimalist set-up into something effective and interesting.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975): John Huston’s adaptation of the Kipling tale is a well-loved classic, and that’s no wonder at all: not only is this one hell of a traditional colonialist adventure movie full of invention, charm, and one great damn thing after another; it is also a film that has a lot to say about what’s wrong about colonialist adventures and the mind-set they are born from, as well as the kind of men they tend to champion. Still, it never feels schizophrenic in its approach, but manages to be a film about the joys and the horrors of the same ideas at the same time.

That it also contains wonderfully larger-than-life performances by Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer only adds to the film’s specific magic.

Shadow in the Cloud (2020)

Warning: I’m going to spoil one of the very last scenes, because only a saint could not!

It looks like just another mission of mortal danger for the crew of a B-17 during World War II. However, once a last minute guest calling herself Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz), coming complete with a British accent and carrying a mysterious package, arrives, things become rather wild, and not just because all the men on board a rampant misogynists whose mouths most guys I know would probably apply bleach to. Our somewhat mysterious protagonist is accidentally locked into a gun emplacement for a while, where she discovers the plane isn’t just in danger from Japanese airplanes, but also from an actual, plane-munching Gremlin.

After that, a series of increasingly idiotic plot twists begins, heroic action heroine deeds are committed, and nothing makes much sense.

For its first fifteen minutes or so, Roseanne Liang’s Shadow in the Cloud actually seems to be a neatly filmed, low-scale tale of individual horror, but things soon explode into a series of plot twists so increasingly outlandish, nobody involved can have meant most of the script seriously. It’s Liang’s own fault too, for she co-wrote with the never subtle and usually underwhelming Max Landis.

So it’s really important to go into this one with the right mind-set, perhaps a little (or a lot) drunk, accepting this as the kind of preposterous low budget action movie with horror elements it’s clearly meant to be. Once I got into the proper mindset (and had recovered from the whiplash), I actually rather enjoyed myself a lot here. Liang uses her series of improbable but neatly conceived set pieces in combination with middling special effects for the kind of loud and kinetic effect you know and love (or if you’re one of those people, loathe), from things like the Fast and Furious films. The film’s really hitting the spot for preposterous nonsense action.

Moretz seems to enjoy playing the improbable badass a lot, too, throwing herself into the job physically, while always pretending the emotional beats make any actual sense (they don’t). If ever everything unfortunate happens to that woman’s mainstream movie career, she’ll have no problem dominating direct to home video action movies.

Shadow in the Cloud also is an explicitly feminist movie, in a way that doesn’t work well as any kind of reasonable argument for equality (which would be absurd in the context of the plot), but is really a series of “fuck yeah, women” asides that are at once deeply silly and deeply likeable, perfectly keeping in the action movie tradition the director is working in. So this is indeed a film in which what amounts to the male main character (calling him a “lead” would really go much too far) spends most of his on-screen time doing little except for holding a baby (don’t ask) while the female lead (or really, only actual lead character that isn’t a gremlin) gets to do all the cool stuff.

This all culminates in a climax in which Moretz has an escalating melee fight with the (bad) CGI gremlin, and, after winning, swaggers towards the surviving cast, and proceeds to grab the baby and breastfeed it on screen. You really got to see it to believe it, but if you’re like me, that’s the sort of absurd directorial posturing you’ll actually enjoy seeing.

As any kind of argument for feminism, this sort of stuff (and really anything else the film has to say about the matter) is of course completely useless, and probably counter-productive towards convincing the needlessly serious who somehow still haven’t been convinced. Fortunately, I don’t believe the film is trying to make some serious argument meant to convince anybody of the merits of feminism. There should, after all, really be no need for any convincing there anymore, that train having taken everyone on board worth talking to already, one suspects, and so Shadow in the Cloud proceeds to let is action heroine do what the male versions of that type have done for decades: do preposterous, fun things in an absurd yet awesome manner.

Three Films Make A Post: A family like no other

Spookers (2017): Florian Habicht’s documentary about what is apparently “the most successful scare park in the Southern hemisphere”, family run and populated by performers who have become a wonderful family by choice themselves, is in large parts a love letter to the concept of the family of choice that is so important to most of the broken and the bent among us; it’s also a love letter to strangeness, to people letting out those parts of themselves they have to hide in real life, and being accepted as they are. As a horror fan, I also can’t help but love the film’s many shots of visitors of the place being joyfully scared, glowing with freed emotions.

The filmmakers have a lot of fun of engaging with their subjects in a playful and human way, sharing into their outlet and companionship in a way that seems particular lovely right now and right here, giving a film about a group of people scaring the bejeezus out of others an air of the humane and the hopeful.

Blood of Dracula (1957): This AIP production about the resident (female!) mad scientist at a boarding school turning the new girl into a were-vampire to somehow end the nuclear arms race (I use the word “mad” for a reason) as directed by Herbert L. “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein” Strock is one of the more enjoyable ones from the 50s not touched by the hands of Corman. At least, Strock knows how to pace things properly, structuring things economically.

The script has a decent grip on how a teenage girl after the loss of her mother, and cursed with a father who marries a gold digger only six weeks later, might act and feel, the vampire bit really expressing the return of the things 50s society wants a girl to repress, which is more than you can expect of a late 50s monster movie.

See No Evil (1971): Directed by Richard Fleischer and written by the great Brian Clemens, this is an excellent early 70s thriller about a recently blinded (in a riding accident) character played by Mia Farrow returning to her family’s country home for a spell, only to find herself beset by someone who will turn out to be much worse than your typical stalker. Farrow’s performance adds some spine to her patented victim shtick, so it’s a bit of disappointment she isn’t really saving herself in the end, but the film’s so tightly made, this sort of theoretical problem only comes to mind afterwards. While actually watching the film, I found myself far too involved in excellently built suspense sequences – some of which are truly horrifying in conception, like the one in which Farrow discovers she has been sleeping in a house full of the corpses of her loved ones – to bother about this sort of thing.

Three Films Make A Post: The horror is real

Hoax (2019): Welcome to plot twist land, a planet quite like our own, yet where the best way to bring a godsawful bigfoot movie (without any of the charms that make many a godawful bigfoot movie rather lovely) to a climax is to turn it into an even worse piece of hillbilly horror that seems to attempt to rip-off the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre for fifteen minutes or so but only ends up as the Hillbilly Cannibal Massacre Blues. Despite the presence of semi-regular okay genre stalwarts Brian Thompson and Ben Browder and a cameo by Adrienne Barbeau, there’s really nothing to recommend Matt Allen’s stinker, unless you’re really into unfunny humour, awkward plotting, character arcs that go nowhere and crap bigfoot costumes.

Gwen (2018): Quite a different kind of not good (in comparison to Hoax, it’s of course still a masterpiece, because it is an actual movie) is this beautiful looking film directed by William McGregor about the travails (and travails, and more travails) of the female members of a farmer family living near a Welsh mining town. It’s the sort of film that’s heaping doom and gloom, more doom and gloom and even more doom and gloom on its characters with such abandon, and so little thought as to make any of the doom and gloom stick dramatically, the Red Wedding feels subtly underplayed. It clearly does aim for a The Witch type of modern folk horror vibe but is too squeamish to actually fully to commit the supernatural route, and has little of the American movie’s sense of pacing and threat, nor much actual sense of folklore. In this one, everything’s dark and painful and patriarchal evil, but also weirdly vague (which is not the same thing as being ambiguous), and the misfortunes come down so thick on our protagonists, I started asking myself if all of this was meant as a parody of historically minded poverty porn. Alas, it isn’t.


The Quiet Earth (1985): This film from New Zealand directed by Geoff Murphy about a scientist (Bruno Lawrence) who wakes up one morning, perhaps being the last person on Earth, on the other hand, is a minor classic. Particularly the first third in which Lawrence’s character slowly explores the now empty world and goes a bit insane, is utterly brilliant, as is the brilliantly ambiguous last scene, all shot with a genuine sense of mood and place. The rest of the film, once a couple of other characters come in, isn’t quite as great, mostly because the love triangle is really rather conventional and pretty underwritten, and because the film does tend to hammer the things it wants to say about the contemporary anxieties of the mid-80s home a bit too hard. However, whenever The Quiet Earth seems to lose its way a bit, there’s one striking image or another putting it back on its feet again.

In short: My Talks With Dean Spanley (2008)

Before I encountered this film from New Zealand directed by Toa Fraser, I didn’t even know there were any movie adaptations of the works of Lord Dunsany. It’s not the Pegana movie I secretly dream of, but it’s certainly a fine – and strange – little film. It’s taking place in a lovingly – and knowingly – reconstructed Edwardian Age. Fisk Junior (Jeremy Northam) a man of what was probably called great melancholy in his time, is haunted by the unspoken grief about a brother who died in the Boer War and the difficult relationship to his father, the elderly Fisk Senior (Peter O’Toole), whom he meets once a week, but with whom he doesn’t ever discuss anything of actual import to their emotional lives.

While on what goes for a spiritual quest when you are an Edwardian gentleman (that is, listening to the mindnumbingly boring lecture of a swami about reincarnation), Fisk Minor encounters the dean Spanley (Sam Neill). The dean has the somewhat peculiar habit of entering a kind of fugue state whenever he drinks Tokay, vividly remembering his past life as a dog; in roundabout ways, Fisk Minor’s fascination with this aspect of the man, and his obsession with getting the poor cleric drunk on Tokay to hear more about his life as a dog, will bring father and son Fisk together.

And really, if that description does sound intriguing rather than plain stupid to you, you’ll probably, like me, enjoy the film’s peculiar sense of irony, as well as its reconstruction of an Edwardian state of mind, and share in the special and unexpected joy of watching Sam Neill – in the most Edwardian language possible thanks to Alan Sharp’s tonally perfect script – reminisce about his time as a dog.


It’s really a lovely film, perhaps a bit too mushy and nice to its characters in the ending stretch - or I’m perhaps simply not quite as optimistic when it comes to radical change in people as the film is. It is full of lovely (that’s really the perfect word to describe this), sometimes wickedly funny, detail fitting to its time, and featuring a bunch of actors (Bryan Browne and Judy Parfitt are in there, too) doing justice to what really is a pretty damn peculiar project. That the film isn’t ever turning its plot wild and wacky is another of its virtues – this is one of those endeavours that take a preposterous thing, realize that one of the great things in the movies is to turn a preposterous thing into something tangible and real, and use it with dignity and love.

Three Films Make A Post: No Rules. No Law. No Order.

American Animals (2018): Bart Layton’s film about four young guys committing a book heist (one of the most heinous crimes imaginable) is “based on a true story” in some kind of post-ironic way, regularly cutting away to the actual characters the film’s characters are based on to pretend to say something profound about the construction of truth; and clearly, you need to use as many distancing stylistic choices as possible for talking about truth. Too bad the film never actually gets around to saying something profound. Its philosophy rather belongs to the sound bite world where nothing that can’t be said in a single sentence is of interest. Of course, that’s no way to actually understand human beings, so the characters stay lifeless types, something that’s further exacerbated by the film’s indecision if it wants to mock its characters or honestly explore them, ending up doing neither effectively. And of course it fails at being an effective heist movie thanks to all the tiresome distancing and look-at-me filmmaking.

The Changeover (2017): As regular readers know, my tolerance for YA movies is relatively low, me not at all being in the assumed audience of the genre. And I do indeed find the YA romance parts of this film to be its greatest weakness as well as not actually belonging into what is otherwise an intriguing, stylish and increasingly dream-like tale of young adult female empowerment through magic. Young Laura Chant (Erana James) has, as the genre demands, some growing up and learning about herself to do when her little brother is threatened by a spiritual parasite (portrayed by the great Timothy Spall in a performance to make one’s skin crawl). She herself is a sensitive, but she just might have to go through a ritual of spiritual change to become a witch to protect her family. Which sounds really rather typical, but the director duo of Miranda Harcourt and Stuart McKenzie is very good at turning the typical specific, drawing Laura’s social world, the drab place she grows up in, the way loss feels to a young person with a realist hand until the supernatural increasingly slides in, colours, perceptions, and the editing rhythm changing in kind.

The Lost Boys (1987): Talking about teenagers, everyone’s third or fourth favourite vampire movie of the 80s may very well be Joel Schumacher’s best film. Here, he’s cutting down on his excesses so much, what’s left of them does actually turn into the style of this Peter Pan-influenced teenage vampire tale. And stylish the thing certainly is, in a way that perfectly encapsulates 1987, for better rather than worse. It’s not quite Fright Night or Fright Night 2 as a comedy but most of the jokes sit, and, particularly important, Schumacher knows when to cut it with the jokes and turn things properly menacing.


There’s a really great sense of mood here, clearly aiming to turn the fictional California coastal town the film takes place in into a kind of 80s version of a Gothic horror stricken town from Universal backlot Europe; it’s a clever bit of modernisation of old tropes particularly because Schumacher finds just the right kinds of over the top aesthetics to evoke exactly the right mood. Generally, the film convinces through its world building, making an improbable place feel curiously plausible.

The Field Guide to Evil (2018)

As we regular viewers of things like them know, horror anthologies are often a bit of a mixed bag, never more so than when they operate like The Field Guide to Evil does and bring together thematically linked short features from different directors. In The Field Guide’s case, these directors are also from different countries and apparently found themselves tasked with making movies based on the ghosts and ghoulies of local folklore, so the tonal connection is often loose to non-existent.

That’s not much of a problem for me, for a collection of eight interesting short films isn’t anything to sneer at, and giving money to filmmakers that wouldn’t necessarily make shorts anymore is a thing to praise. Stylistically, most of the segments come down on the more artsy side of genre filmmaking, which isn’t much of a surprise given the involvement of directors like Peter Strickland (of Berberian Sound Studio fame), Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure), or Can Evrenol (Baskin). These are not the kind of directors you go to when you want to make a bro horror anthology in the spirit of the VHS films. I’m quite happy with that, though I have to admit this does result in a film that’s very uneven in tone and style, which may be weakness to some viewers but a strength to others.

My personal favourites are the first tale, “Die Trud”, as directed by Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, that recommends itself as a fantastic example of how to do the supernatural as metaphor right, while also hitting my personal sweet spot by being in mood and style a lot like an Austrian version of The Witch, creating a very deft picture of a specific time and place, as well as containing a pretty great looking monster.

Then there’s Can Evrenol’s “Al Karisi” that shares the same nightmarish quality that made his feature Baskin so impressive, expressing a young woman’s anxiety about pregnancy, child rearing, loneliness and loss of identity via a goat-based demon that is as bizarre as it is disturbing.There are, by the way, quite a few goats in the film.

Equally nightmarish is Smoczynska’s “The Kindler and the Virgin”, that takes the more unappetizing elements of a traditional folk tale, puts them into a drily funny (but not comedic) short film, adds some acerbic social commentary and some appropriate imagery and is over so quickly I found myself a bit stunned by it all.

Also lovely in a completely different way is Strickland’s entry “The Cobbler’s Lot”, which takes the most fucked-up version of a traditional fairy-tale (and those can get pretty messed-up if you read beyond children’s books), adds more foot fetishism, shoes made out of human skin and sexuality expressed through dance, and then films it in a mock silent-movie style (with sound effects). It’s the sort of thing that will probably have some people mumbling something about pretentiousness, but to me, style and content fit together here rather more comfortably than I would have expected and are certainly doing right by the Weirdness of folklore and fairy tales.


I didn’t connect as well with the other short films in here – and frankly have no idea what was going on in Yannis Veslemes’s “Whatever Happened to Panagas the Pagan?” – but that’s probably more on account of personal taste than them being objectively weaker, so I found myself still rather satisfied with the film as a whole. It is, to emphasize it again, really meant for people who enjoy art house horror, so just don’t go in expecting something more mainstream in its sensibilities.

Mortal Engines (2018)

Welcome to yet another version of the post-apocalypse. This time around, the post-apocalyptic wastelands are roamed not by new wave biker gangs but by, huh…moving cities who consume each other in what looks to me like a rather dubious use of resources. Well, there is a country with a Chinese name with a rather international population “in the East” that does think the same and guards against the aggressive cities via a big ass armed wall.

Anyway, the film starts in the moving city of London that has made its way to what was once continental Europe to grab resources where only tiny citylets roam. Or that’s the official version, but if you think whatever kindly archaeologist/engineer Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving) is building in St. Paul’s isn’t some kind of super weapon, I have something for you to rub on the soft parts of your neck. And indeed, the newest eaten city brings with its influx of newbies – hats off to New London for not murdering the population of the cities they eat - one glowering young adult named Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar). Her manifold kinds of glowers and her tendency of hiding a decorative scar under a fetching red scarf clearly mark her out as our heroine; and her first act of business upon arriving on London is to attempt to kill Valentine who has apparently murdered her mother. Inigo Montoya understands. That murder attempt does of course go pear-shaped (else this would be a rather short movie), not the least thanks to the intervention of one Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan), a young historian of the underclass. Tom then proceeds to chase Hester through the innards of London; at the end of the chase, she lets drop some details about Valentine’s evilness before she falls through, well, the literal ass end of London. Which is where Valentine pushes Tom through too, for he can’t have anyone knowing he’s an evil mad scientist.

Fortunately, our young heroes have the survival abilities of cartoon characters, so all is set up for the two first learning to grudgingly respect one another, then to love. All the while, they are traversing the bizarre post-apocalyptic earth. Also appearing are slavers in absurd giant vehicles (because everything in this world is ten times as large as it makes sense for it to be); a spy/revolutionary with awesome anime hair (Jihae), a robot undead named Shrike (Stephen Lang); awesome airships with awesome roguish captains of various races and genders; a base in the clouds; and other goofy yet awesome crap. From time to time, we also pop in to Valentine being evil and scenes of his boring daughter (Leila George) and some equally boring guy (who cares) finding out that the guy the audience know is evil is indeed evil.

If all this sounds to you rather implausible and goofy even for the standards of a big fat blockbuster based on a popular YA novel, you are absolutely right. The film also suffers from an overload of standard big fat blockbuster clichés coming thick, heavy and often rather pointlessly (why is the “I am your father” bit even in there, for example!?), and a script so mechanical, you can hear its clockwork ticking so loudly it is impossible to ignore. It’s a pretty inefficient clockwork too: is it really necessary to cut away from our heroes having awesome adventures and our villain being villainous to Valentine’s daughter so the film can be sure we remember her later on when she has the important plot function of braking a city?

For a film as goofy as it is, Mortal Engines also is surprisingly, often nearly absurdly, po-faced, taking itself so seriously, treating the most obvious dramatic clichés as if they were really clever and hot shit. It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from a film based on a script by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (and Philippa Boyens), who certainly aren’t afraid of standard tropes and clichés but have quite a bit of experience in selling them convincingly.

Here’s the thing however: seeing all these weaknesses, I found myself enjoying Mortal Engines immensely. In part, the film’s insistence on rote clichés and ultra-traditional plotting told in an overly earnest manner might be stupid and ill-advised, but it is also charming as hell, rather like listening to an overenthusiastic kid telling us all about this awesome adventure story she has just come up with. Consequently, as long the film follows either Weaving’s patented villainy or the likeable couple of Hilmar (who really has an astonishing number of different glowers in her repertoire; I’d recommend her for a role as the masked vigilante of your choice) and Sheehan and their crazy adventures, I found myself grinning about this dumb nonsense like a loon. Only the handful of scenes with Valentine Jr. let down the film here, but there’s not too much of that to suffer through.


Then there’s the film’s other strength. Director Christian River’s was apparently Peter Jackson’s storyboard editor (though he also directed the short film Feeder (see Minutes Past Midnight), and clearly brings with him a great ability to put the film’s impressive, absurd, and clearly anime/manga/French language SF comic inspired production design front and centre. So while few of the contraptions and places we see make much sense once you start thinking about them, they are so impressive and beautiful, realized with so much imaginative detail, their silliness just makes them all the more beautiful. Because that’s what movies are there for too: showing us things we haven’t seen or imagined before just because they are wonderful (in the sense of “full of wonder”) not because they have to make sense. Rivers is also pretty good at actually using all the beautiful stuff in the action sequences, so all of it isn’t just a pretty backdrop but the heart and soul of the action.

Past Misdeeds: Mr Wrong (1986)

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.


Meg (Heather Bolton perfectly embodying a mixture of inexperience/naivety and hidden strength) has left her country home for the big city (I'd insert a joke about what "big city" means in New Zealand here, but that would be oh so inappropriate seeing where I live), where she works in an antiquities store. To make it easier to visit her parents over the weekends - and probably as a symbol of her freshly won independence - the young woman buys a used Jaguar.

Her first long drive with the car does not go quite as well as Meg would have hoped for. When she stops by the side of the road to take a night nap, she's awoken by hard and pretty unhealthy sounding breathing noises from the back seat of the car that start whenever she turns off the interior lights. Worse, or at least even more frightening to her, there's nothing and nobody to see on the back seat.

After that experience, Meg becomes increasingly nervous and afraid of the car, a state of affairs that is certainly not improved by further peculiar happenings surrounding it. After Meg has had a nightmare centring on a long-haired woman, she sees the exact same woman standing by the side of the road trying to hitch a ride in her waking life. For whatever reason, Meg stops for her.

However, the woman isn't alone. A man (David Letch) gets in together with her, but he doesn't seem to actually be together with the woman as Meg assumes. In fact, he doesn't seem to know about the woman's presence at all, which becomes understandable but not exactly less peculiar when she suddenly just disappears from the car. The guy is more than just a bit creepy too, and Meg has a hard time getting rid of him.

This experience is nearly enough to convince Meg of getting rid of her car as soon as possible, and when she learns that its last owner was a young woman about her age who was murdered, and whose killer has never been caught, our heroine does indeed try to sell it off.

That, however, is much easier said than done, for the car begins to sabotage Meg's efforts in ways that could be explained away by bad luck, if it weren't clear to the young woman her car was haunted.

While all this is going on, a mysterious someone begins to send Meg roses - surely, this won't have anything to do with the rather more horrible things going on in her life right now?

I know little about the movie scene in New Zealand (with the exception of being quite intimate with the films of Peter Jackson and Jane Campion and some random bits and bobs here and there), so I can't really say how typical Gaylene Preston's Mr Wrong is for the cinematic output of the country in the mid-80s. What I can say is that it is a pretty fantastic little film in mode and mood of the clever - and quite weird - ghost story. Given that this is based on one of the handful of supernatural tales Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote, the "clever and weird" part isn't too much of a surprise; it is, however, quite a positive surprise how well the Weirdness of Howard's story and Preston's naturalistic eye on the New Zealand of the 80s complement each other.

As frequent readers of my ramblings will know by now, I am an admirer of low budget films that make use of the cheapest of all special effects - local colour - to set the mood of their stories, and am even more of an admirer of films that are letting the very real of a specific place and time collide with the Weird and the peculiar, so I am predisposed to liking Mr Wrong, as it is a film whose whole modus operandi is very much based on these techniques. Even better, Preston really knows what she's doing in this regard, showing herself to be equally at home with taking a - slightly sarcastic - look at her central character's live and times (I wouldn't be too surprised if there was a certain autobiographical element at work here, either) and with slowly showing the seams and cracks of Meg's existence where the disquiet and the strange can enter through, cracks, the film seems to say, even the most unspectacular of lives has. Are, after all, Meg's life and that of her unhappy predecessor in car ownership all that different from each other? Preston doesn't overstretch the parallels between the woman and the haunt. In fact, if you don't want to see this aspect of the movie - that is most probably there to demonstrate something about the way a woman still has to fight for her independence (in the sense of self-ownership) - you will probably never notice it at all. It's always excellent when a director is subtle with the treatment of her film's metaphorical level.


From time to time, Mr Wrong is a bit rough around the edges, but it's the kind of roughness that comes with the territory of making movies for little money in a place where making a movie can't have been all that easy to begin with, and is offset by direction that can be creative and imaginative without feeling the need to show off. After all, it's clear to see for everyone that the director really knows how to use the idiom of the ghost story and the thriller without any need for her to point it out to her audience like a bad Hollywood actor trying once in a blue moon for actual acting. Instead, Preston's film impresses through an unassuming intelligence.

Three Films Make A Post: All guns. No control.

23 Paces to Baker Street (1956): This is a rather heavily Hitchock-indebted thriller by – sometimes brilliant – journeyman director Henry Hathaway, taking place in a London that is traditionally dark, foggy and rainy. Blind playwright and champion in self-pity Phillip Hannon (Van Johnson) overhears a curious, potentially sinister, conversation in a pub and becomes rather obsessed with solving what increasingly looks like a case (though not to the police). The film doesn’t quite have the psychological resonance of the best films of its sub-genre, and Johnson tends to overplay his character so desperately I wanted to punch the guy to shut up the melodramatic outbreaks more often than I found myself rooting for him. However, Hathaway knows how to stage a suspense scene as well as any director of his generation, the script – based on a novel by Philip MacDonald - is clever and twisty in the best way, and Milton Krasner’s photography is as pretty to look at as it is atmospheric, the film making excellent use of a London (even when parts of it are actually the Fox studios) that is still marked by World War II.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016): Taika Waititi’s wonderful New Zealand movie is about a kid (Julian Dennison in a drily witty performance that never becomes precocious or annoying) kinda-sorta absconding into the bush with his decidedly grumpy foster father (Sam Neill, decidedly grumpy and wonderful) after the death of the foster mother, the ensuing manhunt and the pair’s sometimes funny sometimes sad adventures. It’s a film that comes by the description of being “heart-warming” as fairly as the director’s What We Do in the Shadows, creating a slightly off-kilter world but putting characters into it one can’t help but care about. There’s an astonishing amount of whit, wisdom and imagination in the film, often wickedly funny humour, and New Zealand looks rather spiffy too.


Nightwing (1979): I don’t know why you’d want to hire Arthur Hiller, never a man known for his grip on action, of all possible candidates to direct your nature strikes back project based on a Martin Cruz Smith novel I suspect to be rather more tightly plotted than the film at hand, but the ways of Hollywood are wild and mysterious. One wouldn’t usually cast Nick Mancuso as a native American sheriff either. Not surprising anyone, the film is a bit of a mess, with generally competent bat attack scenes followed by brain dead 70s paranoia bits, and some mock-native American mythology stuff ripped right out of a 30s pulp tale, and therefore rather cringeworthy, though at least not meant in bad faith. David Warner takes on Robert Shaw’s mantel from Jaws to take a big bite out of a lot of scenery, Kathryn Harold is attractively frightened, and Stephen Macht is an evil rich guy, so while nobody would confuse Nightwing with a good movie, it most certainly is never a boring one.

In short: The Dead Room (2015)

After paranormal phenomena have driven a family to panicked flight from their house situated in some so rural it looks like wilderness to this German part of New Zealand, three paranormal investigators are sent there to find out what’s what. On first look sceptical – though not so sceptical that it borders on insanity as many a horror film seems to like a sceptic - scientist Scott (Jeffrey Thomas), less sceptical scientist Liam (Jed Brophy) and young medium Holly (Laura Petersen) don’t find too much, but quickly there’s a lot of bumping going on ever night around every 3am. Holly also sees a very tall and very threatening man producing these effects.

To make things even more curious, there is one room inside the house that seems ghost-proof, immune against the tall presence and whatever it brings.

There’s quite a bit to like about Jason Stutter’s ghost house movie The Dead Room. Obviously, originality is not very big among these things, but the film does use some interesting variations on standard haunted house narrative devices. The house this takes place in, for example, is much smaller than is typical in the genre, clearly not too old either, going against many a gothic surface trope while still having the same kinds of hauntings you’d expect going on. Horrors, it turns out, are not exclusively a thing of the most distant past.

The presentation of the haunting is interesting too. The audience, as do Liam and Scott, only ever get to see things moving, hear knocks, feel the house shaking, while only Holly ever is able see the tall man. Stutter’s clearly following the old adage that the things you can’t see are much more frightening than those you can, and it works out well for the most part, giving what is on paper a series of very conventional and tired scares some life. It’s also something I haven’t seen a film use quite the way The Dead Room does in a very long time.

In general the film is appropriately moody, using the small location and the three person main cast expertly, and while there are certainly no particularly deep characters on display, they are lively and real enough to evoke a degree of empathy when they get the crap scared out of them; plus, they’re definitely not annoying, so I never felt myself wishing for anyone’s early death.

Unfortunately, the film pisses away a lot of the goodwill it has produced when its final ten minutes turn into carnival barker style horror nonsense of the worst and most well-worn type. It’s probably meant to be the kind of tonal shift that surprises and shocks the viewer with its audacity, but in practice, the whole thing feels as tacked on as it is tacky, as if the film’s proper ending had been replaced with footage from a different, and pretty damn bad, film.

The Dead Lands (2014)

New Zealand before the invasion from the West. Megalomaniac chieftain’s son Wirepa (Te Kohe Tuhaka) attempts to convince his tribe of his glorious warrior spirit and assuage the spirits of his unburied ancestors by slaying a tribe his people were once at war with in their sleeps. The only (male, for women don’t really seem to count when it comes to tribal business of this sort, it alas seems) survivor of the massacre is teenage chieftain’s son Hongi (James Rolleston). Despite not being much of a warrior himself Hongi decides to follow Wirepa and his men and slay them in vengeance.

This plan would most probably end quite badly for Hongi, but Wirepa thinks he still hasn’t proved his worth quite enough, and so decides to make his way back home via the titular Dead Lands, a place once inhabited by another tribe that vanished over night in some sort of catastrophe. The place is supposedly home to a man-eating demon now who kills anyone who dares enter. After a helpful little chat with the spirit of his grandmother (Rena Owen) – or an ancestral spirit he calls grandmother - Hongi decides to try and win the demon’s help for his cause. The demon turns out to be rather human. He is a mighty, embittered Warrior (Lawrence Makoare) who does indeed kill and eat everyone entering his territory; Hongi’s quest sounds like just the thing to him to redeem himself in the eyes of his ancestors (and probably himself, though the Warrior is clearly too much in pain to be able to see it that way). Of course, even together with his new, rather frightening, partner, the odds aren’t terribly in Hongi’s favour, for it’s still two people against a whole war band.

For The Dead Lands, director Toa Fraser opts for a full immersion approach to pre-colonisation Maori culture, shooting the film in Maori, with Maori actors, and trying to look at the culture and its perks and flaws from inside instead of outside, eschewing the eye of the distant observer and with it any attempts to exoticize the culture. This matter of fact treatment of things even like ritualized cannibalism (or in the Warrior’s case, not ritualized cannibalism) works rather well too and makes it easy to get into the right mind set for the film; one might tut at it for not making a stand against cannibalism or the culture’s gender biases but then I don’t really need a film to tell me that cannibalism’s not okay and gender inequality is a very bad thing, or berating people and places long gone for not following our contemporary ideas of what’s appropriate. That’s just not what the film’s about. Instead Fraser does his best to let a past culture come to life on sympathetic terms. How correct the film’s interpretation of Maori culture of that time actually is, I honestly can’t say. What I can say is that the culture – or rather the slice of culture - it presents seems coherent and of a piece, which is all I ask of a film not presenting itself as a documentary or providing the whole historical truth.

Of course, to hook a contemporary audience, a film has to look for the potentially universal among the specific. Unlike a film with arthouse sensibilities would, Fraser (and writer Glenn Standring) seek the relatable by presenting a tale of vengeance as you can find it anywhere from the western through martial arts cinema through the bible, violence unfortunately being one of the big threads running through all of human history and humanity’s stories about ourselves. There are of course some differences in emphasis and presentation depending on the time and place any given tale of vengeance was made in or for but the core of these stories stays basically the same, and should be relatable enough even in film that otherwise doesn’t explain the culture it takes place in to its audience beyond showing it.

This expectation towards its audience to look at and understand Maori warrior culture as it presents it without giving awkward explanations, to be able to see parallels and differences without having them pointed out explicitly is to my eyes one of the greatest strengths of the film. The filmmakers trust in their audience getting it.

The Dead Lands’ other strengths are quite obvious. There’s the visual heft of the proceedings it draws from the beauty of a landscape it sometimes imbues with a haunted quality; strong – if shouty but that seems to be a Maori warrior thing as is expressive grimacing as part of their martial arts – performances throughout; the willingness to take the characters’ spiritual concepts as seriously as everything else about them.

The action scenes are very strong too, with a bloody brutality not really hidden beneath the physical elegance of the fighting that reminded me most of (martial arts film master) Cheng Cheh’s approach to this sort of thing -  in spirit, if not exactly in style. The film’s ending, on the other hand, does not feel like something by Cheng Cheh at all. Where the Hong Kong director bought into bloody vengeance and its results completely, and couldn’t imagine an out from an endless cycle of violence other than death, Fraser’s film finds its now seasoned in the shortest of time Hongi using the same sort of logic and context that births the cycle of vengeance to end it, as much as it is in his power, with cleverness and compassion that doesn’t feel like the film putting its modern values on him but seems like an inherent possibility in everything we’ve seen before.

Three Films Make A Post: See the real poor white trash!

Dead of Night (1945): This Ealing studios production is of course a much-lauded classic of the horror anthology movie format; particular since this choice of decidedly supernatural tales was made at a point in film history when horror films actually aiming to creep their audiences out where rather thin on the ground. Being an Ealing production of its time, the anthology is rather on the classy side production-wise, too, with a well-rounded cast of characters and four rather excellent directors.

On the other hand, and looking at the film from today, it starts out a bit too harmless (even though this harmlessness does provide a nice escalation to proceedings), with the short “Hearse Driver” and “Christmas Party” segments feeling rather too harmless and obvious for a post-M.R. James world, and the comedic “Golfing Story” seeming completely misplaced. Fortunately, before the golfing bit, there’s Robert Hamer’s quietly creepy tale of a haunted mirror and after it, well, there’s Alberto Cavalcanti’s perfect and still immensely effective “Ventriloquist Dummy”, a tale to give Thomas Ligotti nightmares (or ideas, one suspects), and the clever wrap-up of the films linking story. So, I don’t think the film’s perfect, but once it gets going, it becomes so good I’d still use that (always dubious) masterpiece term to describe it.

Spooky Town aka Phantom Town (1999): As far as direct-to-DVD kids horror goes, Jeff Burr’s film is actually rather entertaining. Sure, it won’t scare anyone but the little ones (and I’m not sure in their case) but it’s got a bunch of surprisingly effective monsters, buckets of red goo, and a heart for rather weird turns more often than not. In fact, the plot is a lot like a classic Weird Tales story with added family values, so if you can cope with the latter, the former will probably entertain you quite decently.

Deathgasm (2015): Given my personal tendency to absurd earnestness and my distaste for pure gore movies (thanks, my fellow Germans, for the latter), I did not go into Jason Lei Howden’s film expecting much, even though the film adds “New Zealand”  and “Metal” to the gore comedy (which is generally a better sign). So, as I so often am (you really need to try the whole “low expectations” thing, it can work out oh so delightfully) I was very positively surprised by the film, found myself guffawing at a lot of its jokes, appreciating the gore, and the metal, but most of all I found myself delighted at encountering that really uncommon kind of gore comedy that does stuff like actually build (some of its) characters, have a plot, and know about basic narrative techniques like escalation, making the jokes about possessed eyeless people killed with dildos all the funnier.

But seriously, this one’s a true keeper, spirited, dumb in a clever way, and as slickly made as these things go.

Slow West (2015)

Young Scottish upper-class guy Jay (Kodi Smit-McPhee) makes his way westward through an Old West in its final stages. So there are still natives being massacred, and outlaws roaming, but the end of the old ways, and what we might for better or worse call the dawn of US civilization, is in sight. Jay’s looking for Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius), the woman he loves (even though it becomes pretty clear rather quickly she doesn’t love him that way), who has fled to America with her father after they accidentally killed Jay’s uncle in what was more a comedy of errors than murder.

Fortunately for Jay, whose mixture of mildness of manner, naivety and optimistic kindness is not fit for survival in the place and time he’s wandering through (one is a bit surprised he survived even Scotland until now), he encounters outlaw Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender). For a bit of money, Silas promises to lead Jay to Rose safely. Unfortunately, the outlaw isn’t quite honest with Jay, for he knows about a bounty placed on the heads of Rose and her father all the remaining outlaws and bounty hunters of the area (the difference is fluid) are itching to cash in. So, perhaps, he’s just using Jay to find Rose. That, however, along with the question of Rose actually wanting or needing to be found or rescued by Jay, is something that’ll only come up after a slow trail through the surreal cruelty and cruel surreality of the West and the people dwelling there.

I am generally very, very suspicious of artists with talent and a career in one type of art moving onto a completely different one, so I did go into former Beta Band member John Maclean’s first full feature film with an undignified degree of scepticism for someone whose main wish when approaching movies is to actually enjoy them. As always when I use this kind of intro in a write-up, I was wrong, wrong, oh so very wrong, and can happily report that Maclean is quite the director. In fact, Slow West just might be the best surreal – or at least non-naturalistic - European art house Western I’ve seen in a long time, moving from one strange yet meaningful encounter to the next with unhurried grace and style, as well as with a methodical approach to letting even its strangest moments carry meaning for its characters and its world.

The film’s West, as in many a European Western, is a state of mind, and a place you really don’t want to get your head into (nor the other way round), turning promises of freedom and new beginnings into lies carried by the rule of cruelty, a place without any protection from the grim humour of the universe or the meanest parts of the human spirit. Well, actually, it’s very much like I imagine Los Angeles to be now, which is only fitting, given that city’s location. But I digress. On the other hand, I don’t believe this is meant to be any kind of deconstructive Western, or indeed a film very much interested in talking about the genre in which it is situated in a meta way; it’s more taking an approach where you use what you need and find interesting and useful about a time and place and genre, and discard the rest without a second thought.

Unlike many Western of the past (the small yet powerful bunch of contemporary films of the genre pool made in the last few years is quite different there), Slow West does take pains to paint its West as a place not populated exclusively by white men, so, even though our nominal heroes are indeed pretty white and male, there’s more than room for everyone else too, with Native Americans, people who are clearly the immigrants all Americans were, and so forth, and so on, shown in all the places popular culture has so often denied them. There’s nothing showy about this approach here: Maclean doesn’t seem out to prove a point, but only does what is natural and true. And really, it’s also a nice opportunity to have three Congolese gentlemen sing a love song (as universal as death, Jay knows), which feels more surreal than it actually is thanks to one’s expectations of what the West was. Ironically, it’s also probably an absolutely realistic scene, which might tell us something about how we decide what is real and what not.

Maclean does something similar with the relationship of Rose and Jay, not actually telling a a story of a guy saving a girl yet also not just going on a rant about how evil and paternalistic this would. The film’s criticism is more polite, more compassionate, and also quite a bit sadder than that.

So, yeah, it’s quite the film.

In short: Black Sheep (2006)

Sheep farmer’s son Henry Oldfield (Nathan Meister) has not chosen the best day to return to the family farm to sell his share of it to his asshole brother Angus (Peter Feeney) in an attempt to find closure and perhaps lose his phobia of sheep (based on a cruel prank his prick brother played on him the day their father died).

For today isn’t just the day when Angus is planning to present his new genetically modified super sheep to interested parties but it is also the day when bumbling eco-activists Experience (Danielle Mason) and Grant (Oliver Driver) will accidentally cause the beginning of the sheepocalypse. That’s the sort of thing just bound to happen when one hires a mad scientist (Tandi Wright) to perform illegal genetic experiments on sheep, of course.

Well, at least the ensuing rise of the zombie sheep and zombie sheep people just might help Henry get over his sheep problems.

I don’t know what it is with New Zealand and gory (though in this case not on the early Jackson level of gore) horror comedies, but I’m glad these things always turn out so well. In the case of Jonathan King’s Black Sheep the film’s even funny enough I don’t exactly need to call it something like “the best zombie sheep movie ever made”, though it most certainly is that.

Apart from the film being funny (it’s a comedy thing), it also recommends itself through some adorable sheep people zombies courtesy (as the rest of the effects) of WETA Workshops that would also look good in a future were-sheep film, sheep fart jokes, not very mean-spirited jokes about chakras and other “alternative” nonsense up to the use of acupuncture when you fight sheep people zombies, some nastily-funny gore effects and a script that realizes that sheep jokes will only get you half-way through a film, yet family trouble and trauma treated through the lens of sheep zombie-ism aren’t just comedy gold but also a fine way to have a film that feels serious enough in certain ways not to end up as only a series of sheep jokes.

King is rather good at the sort of half-comedic (these are still and always zombie sheep, after all) suspense and zombie sheep defence scenes George Romero never includes in his films (because he doesn’t know about sheep, I suppose), so that Black Sheep stays as riveting as it is funny throughout.

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In short: Next of Kin (1982)

Following the death of her mother, Linda (Jacki Kerin, in a wonderful tour de force performance) inherits the private and rather understaffed – we’re talking herself, one nurse and a regularly visiting doctor here – retirement home her mother and her – also dead – sister had turned the family mansion into to actually be able to repair and keep it. For Linda, inheriting the home means moving back to a place she left a long time ago to do something she doesn’t seem too sure she actually wants to do.

The finances of the place are less than ideal, too, but these things will quickly turn out to be lesser problems. Someone (or is it something?) seems to haunt the house, perhaps echoing things that happened in the home a long time ago, slowly and at first subtly suggesting secrets and threats to Linda. Of course, it’s also possible she’s just losing it.

Given the quality of Next of Kin – an Aussie/Kiwi co-production – it’s quite a disappointment its director Tony Williams didn’t have a career in feature film afterwards, for the film suggests an exceptional talent for the thriller and horror genres.

What is particularly effective about Next of Kin is for how long and how thoughtfully it avoids laying its cards on the table as to what exact sub-genre it belongs to, keeping the audience adeptly insecure: is it a slasher? A ghost story? A film whose main character will turn out to be the movie equivalent of an unreliable narrator? Or is it a “drive the heiress insane” type of thriller? I’m certainly not going to spoil the answer, so let’s just leave it at pointing out how good the film truly is at keeping its audience guessing until the (somewhat overeager) finale comes along. This puts audience is in a situation comparable to that of Linda, who also has to work from assumptions, suggestions, and hints that all just may turn out to be wrong, so it becomes even more easy to identify with her.

Stylistically, Williams keeps things interesting by taking bits and pieces from everywhere. There are moments reminding of the more classy arm of the slasher, a big dollop of the giallo (though without the sleaze), and quite a few moments that – just like the plotting – reminded me a lot of Hammer’s post-Psycho thrillers. In quite an impressive show of magic, Williams also manages to make these on paper somewhat disparate elements come together organically – he’s really using certain stylistic elements to achieve a goal in his own way, and not just quoting other films.

Next of Kin is truly a wonderful film, and one that doesn’t lose more than the first moment of delight once you’ve seen it and know what’s going on.

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Three Films Make A Post: Enter the mutant

Blackwood (2014): I found Adam Wimpenny’s film immensely frustrating. On one hand, I really appreciate the efforts it makes to do something different with the most clichéd haunted house movie set-up you can get right now (psychologically troubled man, wife and kid move to a lone house in the country to retry the whole family thing; spookiness ensues), as well as Wimpenny’s eye for landscape and the fine cast (including Ed Stoppard, Sophia Myles and Russell Tovey). On the other hand, for a film that is completely character based, the characters never really come to life, with most of the character development that happens feeling more like a contrivance to keep the plot going. And then there’s the whole climax that’s just a big heap of your usual horror movie bullshit that pretty much managed to sour me on the film completely. Filmmakers don’t seem to know, but it’s actually legal to end a supernatural tale in a quiet way.

Housebound (2014): Gerad Johnstone’s horror comedy on the other hand, is neither frustrating nor prone to tone deafness, but rather a joy from beginning to end, starting with the central performances by Morgana O’Reilly, Rima Te Wiata and Glen-Paul Waru, a flawless pace, and a sure sense for how to shift the tone around between the silly, the macabre, and the pleasantly grotesque while never betraying one’s characters and ending with some joyfully clever subversions of various genre clichés. This one would really deserve a longer piece instead of being sandwiched between two films I’ll never want to see again but how many words do you really need to call a film brilliant?

A Dandy in Aspic (1968): When it came out, this final film of the great Anthony Mann (finished by its leading man, Laurence Harvey) got roundly trounced by critics; by now, there’s a bit of a critical renaissance for it. Frankly, though, I think the old guard was absolutely right about this one. At the very least, the film’s a terrible mess, permanently fluctuating between the more greyish realist elements of the spy film and the kind of psychedelia you get when a director of 60 years tries to make a movie for the kids (which is to say, people under fifty) without the psychedelic elements ever making sense in the context of the film. Add to that an incredible annoying performance by Mia Farrow as a 60s manic pixie dream girl, and Harvey’s typical lack of affect, and you can count me among the displeased.

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In short: What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

It looks like I need to rethink this blog’s stated stance regarding the intrinsic crappiness of horror comedies. At least, the last few years have found me encountering too many horror comedies that are actually worthwhile and can’t in all honesty continue to prophylactically dismiss the whole sub-genre until a given film can conquer my prejudices.

Case in point is Jemaine Clement’s and Taika Waititi’s (both also acting, writing and producing) fake documentary about a group of vampire flat-sharers in Wellington New Zealand, which is as good as anything you’ll get to see, comedy or not. It is – see also that whole “comedy” thing – a very funny movie that just happens to also have a lot of thoughtful things to say about life at large, the need to accept change, the nature of outsider-dom and probably half a dozen other things. All of it is realized without any preachiness, without the film ever feeling the need to look at the audience to explain that it isn’t a mere horror comedy but actually a film out to say IMPORTANT THINGS, most probably because its makers seem not to see any difference between these two things; having seen What We Do, I don’t see one either.

While the film’s at it, it also does some really clever stuff with standards of vampire mythology, finding its humour in the absurd and the slightly off yet just as often by just taking various versions of vampire lore at face value, working on the logical assumption that a life that goes on long enough will turn into a farce sooner or later. Even though the film does make fun of its characters in various ways, its position is less one of superiority than of a sort of slightly exasperated sympathy, the kind of approach you’ll have towards a friend with a tendency to just fuck things up, or, if you’re lucky with these things, towards your own flaws. Consequently, the film – despite containing a fine amount of pressure pump blood bursts (aka The Japanese Blood Fountain) – carries not a single cynical bone in its body. It’s difficult not to use the term “heart-warming” here for me, given how much the film made me smile at its characters whose not exactly quotidian (yet also clearly very quotidian for them) travails do mirror those we non-blood drinkers go through quite a bit, at least those of us who don’t fit very well into society’s ideas of matureness, sense, or sanity.

By the by, the directors also do a lot with the little money they have available, gathering a wonderful cast (including themselves) using special effects from the ridiculous to the surprisingly great (whichever is more appropriate for any given scene), adding a fun, off-beat soundtrack. It’s just an all-around fantastic achievement for living and undead alike.

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