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Twilight aka Szürkület (1990): I found György Fehér’s adaptation of a much-adapted Dürrenmatt novel to be a rather frustrating experience. There are moments here, many moments even, where its Hungarian slow cinema style, the long shots of foggy, murky landscape accompanied by an ominous score create an incredible mood of dread, a feeling of wrongness highly appropriate to its plot about child murder and a retired policeman obsessing over the case.

But whenever characters start to speak, that very sinister spell was broken and I felt thrown into what I could only read as a parody of the same Hungarian slow cinema style, dialogue scenes that go on and on and on (and on and on) because characters pause for endless seconds after every second or third word in a sentence, as if the actors had painful trouble remembering every single word in every damn line they say. Call me a barbarian, but that ain’t art.

Seedpeople (1992): Probably not art either is this Full Moon Production film directed by the typically entertaining Peter Manoogian. Instead, it’s a seed-based version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, but with more gloopy rubber monsters. It’s rather good fun in its very undemanding low budget movie manner, and while the acting is nothing to write home about, and the script doesn’t really add much (and subtracts a lot of subtext) from its, ahem, inspiration, you can’t argue with gloopy rubber monsters, or at least I’m not going to.

Mostly because they use mind control, and/or turn you into a plant person.

Get Away (2024): Speaking of things that are undemanding but good fun, this horror comedy by Stefan Haars about a British family coming to a remote Swedish (shot in Finland) island to witness a curious play and stumble into a plot of folk horror and perversity isn’t terribly deep either. You’ll either notice its big plot twist early on, or get distracted by those wacky, creepy Swedes (portrayed by Finns), and you’ll enjoy the very, very bloody climax, or you won’t.

If this sounds as if I’m going for the classic “you’ll like this sort of thing if you like this sort of thing” move here, indeed I am, because there’s little else to say about the movie apart from that. Well, it’s always great to see Nick Frost.

Three Films Make A Post: Where there is no more death we shall meet again.

Laurin (1989): This is that rare example of an interesting, moody German horror movie. Of course, director Robert Sigl shot in Hungary with predominantly Hungarian actors and crew, so few Germans were actually involved in the production.

This is an example of Gothically inflected, psychological horror concerning the business of a girl starting to grow up, a serial killer, and possibly ghosts, slow-moving yet emotionally and metaphorically intense. Sigl is rather good at imbuing small gestures with a depth of complicated meanings, which traditionally tends to be the sort of thing I like. This being a serious German movie, certain weaknesses show whenever there’s a need for traditional suspense (which isn’t something we do in Germany), but the mood of childhood nightmare is so thick, I won’t blame Sigl for not understanding how to stage a chase scene effectively.

Black Cab (2024): On the plot level, Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab isn’t a terribly original mix of urban legends and contemporary horror tropes, but as a mood piece, it has considerable strengths.

There’s a dreamlike unreality to the various night drives under duress here that make the involvement  of the outright supernatural utterly plausible via the mood provided. Another strong element is a pleasantly deranged performance by Nick Frost as a very sinister taxi driver that greatly strengthens the impact of some well-chosen moments of the kind of dread women suffer from terrible men on a daily basis.

If this sort of thing works for you, you might be as willing to forgive the film the weaknesses of its plotting as much as I did.

Suzhou River (2000): Finishing today’s trilogy of vibes (see how hip I am, fellow kids?), Lou Ye’s play on (and with) elements of noir and Vertigo is all ambiguous doublings of characters, moments and movement, hand-held camera that signals subjectivity instead of authenticity, mermaids and the curious beauty of an industrially wasted river.

Lou’s play with the meta-level of his narrative mostly manages to avoid getting annoying (there’s typically little worse than a filmmaker getting precious about this sort of thing to me) by the amount of ambiguity it shows: this isn’t meta to show how many movies the director has seen, nor to make a precise point, but because it is a movie about ghosts and phantoms, on the screen and off, and the ghost of old movies are ghosts as real as any other.

Three Films Make A Post: FEAR THE FAMILIAR.

1st Summoning (2018): Your usual troupe of student filmmakers does the POV horror thing. These particular guys and gal are – eventually – visiting an abandoned factory building in the middle of the woods (do Americans really build their factories there?) that’s said to be used in Satanic pact rituals. The whole affair is not terribly involving or exciting, though director Raymond Wood goes for a somewhat cleaner style than most POV horror movies have, and there is at least some interest in characterisation shown.

Alas, the pace is needlessly slow, the horrible happenings aren’t really that interesting to watch, and the little clever twist the film goes for in the end is rather too obvious to work and not actually all that clever. Though, to be fair, the movie plays far fairer with it than is typical.

Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018): Speaking of needlessly slow films, how about this horror comedy by Crispian Mills that only gets around to the horror after fifty minutes or so of not exactly unexpected “British private schools are classist and crap” shenanigans have passed. Now, the “school is hell” trope is a classic for good reasons, but the way the film presents it is terribly bloodless. It doesn’t help that the “comedy” part of the “horror comedy” never really manifests. The script’s just not very funny though it is trying rather hard, and even a cast consisting of perfectly capable young things like Finn Cole, Hermione Corfield and Jamie Blackley can’t do much with comedic writing where about every tenth joke actually hits. Even Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are mostly unfunny in this one, which usually takes some doing, or a terrible Scottish accent.

Crucible of the Vampire (2019): Which curiously enough leaves me with Iain Ross-McNamee’s very indie – and therefore cheap - lesbian vampire movie as the best film in this particular bunch. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the movie is full of problems. The acting’s only ever half on point and especially Florence Cady doesn’t make a very good lesbian vampire at all, I have to say. The direction hits some sweet spots of sleaze and/or mild creepiness only from time to time but just as often looks amateurish and cheap without the sense of goth-y poetry that makes up for much in an amateurish and cheap movie in this particular sub-genre. There’s some pretty cool and interesting vampire lore in here, at least.


Plus, of these three films, Crucible seems to be the only one genuinely trying to be the best film it can be; that this doesn’t necessarily translate into a good movie, especially when resources and time are strained, is just one of the little cruelties in life.

Three Films Make A Post: Aliens Invade! Mankind fights back!

The Wolverine (2013): After the apocalypse of crap that was the first Wolverine movie, I didn't expect anything at all from James Mangold's sequel, so it was a rather pleasant surprise to find it to be a highly entertaining mix of action movie tropes, good-natured Japan clichés, appropriate comic book silliness, and even half-way poignant moments. Add to these points the production's decision to cast the Japanese characters with actual Japanese actors instead of any Asian looking guy or girl they could grab from the street, and the (for contemporary blockbuster cinema) surprising amount of time The Wolverine has for its female characters. The film has reached the point where Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima are actual female leads again, and not just the girls on screen to look pretty and motivate the lone hero.

And isn't it a fine thing too that the film's usually very lone hero actually needs a lot of help to get by, which the film treats as a strength and not as a weakness?

The World's End (2013): I think I've repeatedly gone on record as a big admirer of Edgar Wright, so it won't come as much of a surprise to anyone that I really, really like the last film in the thematic trilogy that started with Shaun of the Dead. Having said that, I also think it’s fortunate the film at hand is the final film in the thematic trilogy because it's hard not to see that things begin repeating themselves now, and it's probably good Wright is doing something probably quite different next with Ant-Man (as he did, to be fair, with Scott Pilgrim, a film many sad people seem to hate for reasons inexplicable to me). At this point, The World's End repeats Wright's favourite themes and character types on a still highly entertaining and clever level. It's also at its core probably Wright's saddest movie, though this is the kind of film that really isn't out to make its audience sad; the sadness is just there if you're of the temperament to see it.

Children of the Night (1991): Tony Randel's vampire horror comedy is a bit of a strange egg. Tonally, it rather undecidedly jumps from broad small town satire to gore to really stupid comedy to slightly less stupid comedy to grotesque semi body horror to dark fairy-tale and back again, putting quite a few moments of actual magic in between triteness, annoying stupidity and stupid fun. The permanent tonal shifts make it impossible to a) get a very good grip on the movie as a whole and b) to ever be as much drawn into the film's very weird world as one would wish. Still, there's as much to like as to hate in here, and this is the sort of small town horror movie whose true hero isn't one of its theoretical leads (Peter DeLuise and Ami Dolenz), nor Karen Black chewing scenery, but Garrett Morris as said small town's black town drunk. Which is to say, a film worth fighting through the unfunny moments for the actual surprises it contains.

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In short: Attack The Block (2011)

Distracted from their mugging of nurse Sam (Jodie Whittaker) by an alien falling from the sky, the group of friends around Moses (John Boyega) decide to slaughter the ugly little thing, and drag it into the council estate they - and, as will later turn out, Sam - live in, in hope for that elusive internet fame.

The thing the kids killed was only the first part of something of an invasion. Soon, there's a whole bunch of additional creatures falling from the skies, all black fur, glow-in-the-dark-teeth and gorilla-dog demeanour. The creatures seem to concentrate a bit on the kids' block.

During their attempts to fight and flee the aliens, the kids will also have to survive the tender mercies of the police, the ire of the block's drug kingpin Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter), who does not understand the concept known as "a misunderstanding", and team up with the woman they mugged at the beginning of the evening. There might be time for blood, unexpected heroism, and changes of heart before the night's through and the minor alien incursion can be fought off.

Watching Joe Cornish's Attack The Block did once again drive home what's for my taste missing from a lot - though certainly not all - of contemporary low budget movies - a willingness to not only go through the motions of genre cinema but to mix the generic and therefore expected parts with a contemporary reality, possibly even that reality lying outside the experience of white rich Americans.

Consequently, Attack The Block wins major points with me by having a group of poor, mostly black teenage soon-to-be-real-full-time-criminals as its protagonists, and, while never pretending that mugging people and working up to worse stuff is harmless or loveable, still treating them like actual human beings with pasts and futures and hopes and reasons for doing what they do, but without going into the poverty porn direction of looking down at them mumbling "oh, the humanity!". That's called not looking away from complexities where I come from.

Of course, using actual social complexities as the background and thematic underpinning of your SF horror comedy (the latter part often oh so very dry, by the way) does not necessary make it good as a SF horror comedy.

Fortunately, Cornish's got his audience's back there, too, and does not walk into the traps I would have expected him to walk in. There's nothing of that "aliens as a metaphor" crap here - a black gorilla-like alien with green glow-in-the-dark teeth out to kill you in this movie isn't a metaphor for the police state or the characters' mothers but is primarily a black gorilla-like alien with green glow-in-the-dark teeth, and therefore something that makes an excellent basis for a surprisingly ruthless (I absolutely can't see this one being made in Hollywood without getting a major re-write in the direction of the dishonest and and the mawkish), well-paced and unassumingly clever film in the best low budget traditions like this.

To make a pretty great film even better, the film's handling of its "change of hearts/characters learn a valuable lesson" parts is highly effective and far away from the sentimentality these scenes could have devolved into. Especially in these (dangerous) scenes, the young actors do some very effective and economical work that fits Cornish's unsentimental yet sympathetic treatment of their characters perfectly.

Attack the Block could have been a gimmick film on the level of garbage like Leprechaun In Da Hood, but it turns out to be my favourite kind of film: a B-movie that's as clever as it is entertaining.

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