Three Films Make A Post: When it rains it pours…BLOOD!

The Corruption of Chris Miller aka La corrupción de Chris Miller (1973): This Spanish giallo directed by Juan Antonio Bardem is about as close to Sergio Martino in his most erotic/sleazy mode as you can imagine, carrying the same sense of actual decadence. Bardem isn’t quite the stylist his Italian peer is, but then, late Franco era Spain isn’t exactly an easy place to do eroticised, violent glamour and glamourous violence in, and given the context, this is beautifully done.

Plus, Jean Seberg and Marisol are fantastic as the film’s core psychosexually messed up duo taking in a drifter who may very well be a serial killer but is most definitely a 70s kind of guy in all other ways.

Carnival of Sinners aka La main du diable (1943): Vichy era France wasn’t a great place to make films in that weren’t running with the Nazi party line – though quite a few French filmmakers managed – so there was a tendency to retreat into more fantastical material, as this tale of a talentless painter who buys a talisman in form of a hand – sometimes moving – that turns him very talented indeed. Of course, this also means he’s made a pact with the devil – here a small bureaucrat without a bit of Milton in him – and thus his talent doesn’t actually buy him the happiness he craves.

All of which isn’t exactly easy escapist material, and one can’t help but read rather obvious political points into Maurice Tourneur’s film. The film has its lengths – particularly in its middle part – but there’s the poetic power of dark legend in its scenes more often than not, typically intercut with surrealist imagery and a bit of humour.

Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl aka Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken (2009): Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu, this belongs to that school of often pleasantly insane, cheap, gore comedies a small group of Japanese directors tuned out in the early 2000s. These aren’t movies making promises they can’t keep, so the title is definitely program, the humour is broad, and blood – curiously digital and practical – is as copious as a sense of crazy, often very funny and grotesque body-shifting fun (personal favourite: Frankenstein Girl using her legs as a propeller to fly).

This does take some time to get going and tests the audience’s patience early on with what amount to not terribly funny comedy skits about high school subcultures, but the film’s second half is a series of increasingly bizarre and inspired bloody nonsense that’s bound to put a smile on the face of anyone watching a movie with this title on purpose.

Empusa (2010)

When out and about with his best buddy, fisherman Victor (Antonio Mayans), former actor turned beach bum, tarot reader, writer on the occult and lover of all kinds of substances, Abel Olaya (Paul Naschy, sometimes dubbed by another actor, because he didn’t figure out the trick of speaking from beyond the grave, to everyone’s disappointment), finds a severed female underarm (including the hand) on the beach. Despite vigorous protests from Victor, Abel doesn’t call the police but takes the arm with him to research the mysterious tattoo on the arm, storing it in his fridge for the duration, right above his salami.

Turns out, empusas – in the film’s interpretation hot, very old, more durable female vampires – are slowly invading the quaint coastal town, turning the old men populating it into normal vampires through the powerful lure of hot goth girl sex, and plan to do something or other. Eventually. One supposes. They are also nibbling on Abel a little, but since he’s extra special – Naschy does after all script and direct – they have more interesting plans to acquire his “wisdom”. He, on the other hand, believes he’s destined to kill all empusas.

Though this isn’t the last film that came out starring Spanish horror king Paul Naschy, it is the last film he directed and wrote before his death in 2009. By this time, he had made something of a minor comeback, starring regularly in direct to video films that weren’t as fun as those he made during his heyday, but typically provided a couple of scenes of Naschy doing Naschy things like turning into a werewolf or a vampire and charming all the decades younger ladies with his increasing decrepitness, or wisdom, or whatever.

While nobody would ever call Empusa a good film, or even a consistently entertaining one, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as anybody’s first Naschy film, there’s a good-natured, ambling quality to the cheap looking thing that at the very least makes it a rather likeable film for the Naschy enthusiast, which I certainly am. In part, Naschy simple goes through many of the greatest hits of his interests – apart from lycanthropy – by now having grown out of the bitterness that made some of his 80s films pretty hard to watch. Spending one’s final years making silly horror movies with some friends and a surprising number of pretty young women willing to pretend one is the hottest thing on legs, do silly dances, or just drop their clothes in front of the camera does seem like the proper way for Naschy to go out on.

This feels companionable rather than exploitative, in large part because Naschy makes many jokes about the absurdity of the whole affair in the tone of somebody who knows very well who he actually is, but has fun embodying a fantasy version of 70s manliness, continued into old age, and there’s very little meanness in any of the jokes and asides here that could spoil this impression.

Rather than an attempt at some kind of no budget late period masterpiece that would only break everyone’s hearts (just look at Jess Franco’s final years), Empusa is the product of a guy who is just having a bit of fun at the end of his life, and who could blame him?

The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966)

Original title: Miss Muerte

When somewhat mad neurologist Doctor Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) explains his somewhat bizarre theories at a conference, he is laughed and scorned out of the room. Since he explains he has found the parts of the brain that control “good” and “evil”, as well as a way to stimulate or shut them down, so evil will be forever ended, some scepticism shouldn’t come as a surprise here. Still, the good Doctor promptly dies, cause of death: criticism (no, I don’t know how that works, either).

A couple of months later, Zimmer’s daughter and assistant Irma (Mabel Karr) fakes her death in a car accident – hitchhikers are so useful when you need a stand-in corpse – and proceeds with her plans to take revenge on the three scientists she specifically holds responsible for her father’s death. She already has a former killer (Guy Mairesse) suborned by her father’s SCIENCE and his mind controlled nurse as useful helpers, but she decides these men have to die in a more interesting manner.

Being a Jess Franco character, Irma finds herself inspired (and clearly a bit turned on) by the dance choreography of nightclub dancer Nadia (Estella Blain). It’s no wonder, for Nadia’s bit as “Miss Muerte” is all about seduction and murder by freakishly long fingernails, things that resonate with all of us, particularly when we’re planning vengeance. So Irma kidnaps Nadia, puts the mind-control whammy of her father’s SCIENCE on her, somehow poisons her nails, and sends her out to seduce and kill the scientists one by one.

The police, under leadership of a character played by director Jess Franco himself, seem rather confused by the whole thing, but Nadia’s boyfriend (Fernando Montes) – who also happens to be Irma’s short-term flirt and a neurologist himself – seems rather more capable, and certainly more motivated when it comes to uncovering the weird menace plot.

In 1966, Jess Franco was still a somewhat conventional filmmaker, putting some effort into making pulpy horror science fiction thrillers like this one with an audience in mind instead of ascending/descending completely into his world of personal obsessions and perversions. Which in turn means Franco could actually acquire decent budgets to work with. There’s a degree of slickness in Miss Muerte’s black and white photography Franco’s body of work would soon enough lose in favour of the languid, sometimes boring, idiosyncratic phantasmagoria his style would soon enough turn into.

Here, Franco seems to be at an absolute sweet spot between the old and the new. The – somewhat – higher budget inspires him to more concise storytelling, and his love for interesting/weird camera angles is here paired with some wonderful play with shadow and light that often creates as thick of an atmosphere of Franco-ness as his later, more difficult, work.

Many of Franco’s obsessions are there and accounted for: some of his favourite kinks, the nightclub scenes – though there’s no stripping and zooming on crotches here, in fact, very little zooming at all –, his very specific ideas about seduction, dominance and sado-masochism, and many a plot element we’ll encounter again and again in his films. Just here, these kinks seem still to be in service of the pulp horror plot instead of the other way around. From time to time, the film descends into delicious weirdness – the moment where Nadia seduces Howard Vernon’s neurologist character is incredible – but this weirdness still seems controlled.

In fact, Miss Muerte suggests a Franco might have been very effective in subsuming his personal weirdness, at least a little, to make more conventionally accessible yet still highly worthwhile genre movies. Being who I am, I am glad he let his freak flag fly rather sooner than later, but this does not make Miss Muerte any less of an interesting, fun bit of pulp horror.

Strange Love of the Vampires (1975)

Original title: El extraño amor de los vampiros

aka Night of the Walking Dead

A small European village apparently a good way off from any proper town in the 19th Century (or thereabouts) has been the playground for occasional vampire attacks for decades. By now, it has become customary to stake every corpse left behind by those vampires, despite the protestations of the city-bred town doctor. What the villagers don’t realize is that these vampires are clever enough to remove those stakes and keep up their numbers. But then, these villagers will turn out to be spectacularly bad at organizing anti-vampire measures, even when they know exactly what to do and to whom.

Young Catherine (Emma Cohen), daughter of the village’s head bourgeois, has never been a ray of sunshine. Understandable, given the place where she lives, and the fact that she’s diagnosed with one of those romantic illnesses that will kill her young and decoratively. Her proto-goth disposition grows yet more maudlin after the vampire death of her sister Miriam (Amparo Climent), followed by the betrayal of her lover Jean (Baringo Jordan). Jean prefers other female companionship, for he is apparently afraid of her because he “only sees death in her eyes”. So Catherine is just the right candidate to fall for the (genuine) romantic advances of oh so tragic head vampire Rudolph of Winberg (Carlos Balesteros), despite his penchant for mass murder and self-serving philosophising about Good and Evil.

Their romance comes just in time for the yearly big vampire party.

León Klimovsky certainly was one of the work horses of Spanish horror of the 70s; at times – most often when paired with Paul Naschy, who’s not in this one – he managed to turn the flaws films of this place and time seemed to acquire as their birth right into genuinely engaging movies. Well, engaging for people like me, that is, the mileage of civilians and viewers unaccustomed to the rhythms and illogic of this kind of European horror will vary considerably.

If you are one of us, Strange Love turns out to be one of Klimovsky’s best films: it is languid, has very specific and peculiar ideas about the erotic (as well as love, life and death), and carries off that dream-like, occasionally nightmarish, feeling I love so well with aplomb.

It also is nearly plotless, features characters that pop in and out of the film as if they slipped the dreamer’s/director’s mind until they become useful props again, and makes vague gestures at actually being about something. What that is, I’m not sure. Mostly, because the various directions the film pushes in seem to have too little to do with each other to make any kind of logical sense. Sometimes, the vampires feel like walking metaphors for social outcasts, in the next scenes, they are simply murderous monsters; Winberg’s philosophical approach has no conceivable through line; and the film’s attempts at painting him in a tragic light suffer from the fact that his only pleasant acts are in service of looking good for the (much younger) woman he wants to bang. Something the filmmakers clearly don’t realize does just make him look even worse.

Instead of that boring theme and logic stuff, Klimovsky delivers the obligatory amount of sleaze – early on, the film regularly threatens to become a sex farce – as well as quite a few moody, archetypal scenes of horror. Catherine coming face to face with her dead sister through a closed window, saved by a cross her mad mother has scratched into the glass; the vampires rising in a very bright night (cough) out of graves that ooze fog; vampires dragging away screaming victims as snacks for the vampire party – all of these are moments that simply get the feel of gothic horror in its 70s European guise so right, their lack of coherence is absolutely beside the point.

In its final act, Strange Love perpetually hovers at the point where the dream-like becomes downright surreal. Particularly the vampire party is a thing to behold: cheap costumes, coloured balloons (!) and other New Year’s accoutrements, as well as the emotional cruelty of an EC comic culminate in a sequence where Winberg shows Catherine bizarre visions of what his minions are feeling right now, or are dreaming off, which is apparently the sort of thing that makes a girl get rid of her cross right quick.

It is fantastic in a way you simply couldn’t get away with in a time where people even complain about the lack of exposition in something as clear and linear as Hellboy: The Crooked Man, and pretty damn beautiful to boot.

Three Films Make A Post: Will you win, Godzilla? Will you win, Kong? The battle of the century!

Copycat (1995): There are two reasons why Jon Amiel’s serial killer thriller is anything more than a slick adaptation of an overconstructed script. And since these reasons are called Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, and both are in their fullest screen presence modes, this silly concoction about a serial killer who is basically a serial killer cover band turns into a tour de force commanded by two actresses who drag every bit of possible substance out of very little. This sort of thing can absolutely elevate mediocrity into a greatly entertaining movie, as the film thoroughly proves.

Malasaña 32 (2020): Some of the set pieces in Alberto Pintó’s movie about a Spanish family in the 70s moving from the country into what turns out to be a haunted apartment are very well done and effective. However, this is the type of horror movie that can only ever treat and see its supernatural threat as a reason for set pieces and plot twists, and never manages to cohere the political troubles of the time it suggests, the family’s experience moving from the country to the city in hopes of a better life, and the backstory of the supernatural threat into any kind of thematically coherent argument.

The horror pieces themselves tend to the grab-bag approach where thematic coherence or coherence of mood never appear to be of interest to the filmmakers, either. All the easier to borrow heavily from all kinds of sources, be it Poltergeist – a much superior film – or creepypasta.

Embrace of the Serpent aka El abrazo de la serpiente (2023): There’s a certain kinship between Ciro Guerra’s film and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Cobra Verde and Fitzcarraldo in the way naturalism and sudden outbreaks of the surreal intertwine, as well as in its location.

However, this is a film made by someone from a very different time and place, so there are as many differences in approaches and world view as there are similarities – Guerra certainly isn’t a Herzog cover band. The film’s treatment of colonialism, Western scientific and Amazonian traditional culture comes from a very different direction, but Guerra generally doesn’t simplify and keeps certain differences unresolved, philosophical questions answered from two opposing directions at once.

As a film this is an act of deep worldbuilding, making ways of looking at and being in the world understandable by slowly drawing a viewer into them, full immersion in a style only a handful of directors use these days (Robert Eggers comes to mind).

Marlowe (2023)

1939. Bay City/Los Angeles. Morally upright private eye Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is feeling his age quite a bit, but he’s still working a job that involves getting shot at, conked on the head, used by the police and clients to do their dirty work, and so on.

This week – one must not assume but knows this sort of thing happens to Marlowe regularly – ravishing Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) hires Marlowe to find her lover Nico Peterson (François Arnaud) who has apparently disappeared without even a goodbye, which simply isn’t a thing that happens to the lady, or so she explains. Marlowe soon enough finds out that Nico is supposed to be dead, his head smashed by a car at the back of a club; eventually his client discloses that she knows about this, but has seen Nico after his supposed death, looking rather chipper for a zombie.

That is of course not the final omission or outright lie Marlowe is going to hear from his client. Cavendish does at least tend to soften her lies and obfuscations by quite a bit of spirited flirting. Other members of the lying persuasion Marlowe encounters in the following days do tend to prefer violence to sweettalk. And, this being Los Angeles in the late 30s, there are a lot of shady people trying to lie to a private eye who is soon up to his eyebrows in liars, killers, pimps and drug pushers – among other charming people. Every single one of them is played by someone like Jessica Lange, Danny Huston or Patrick Muldoon.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is based on John Banville, not Raymond Chandler, but the film is very much clued into Chandler’s idea of what the private detective of the hard-boiled model is supposed to be and do, so expect this version of Marlowe to be a knight in somewhat aged armour, manoeuvring the corrupt world of Hollywood and surroundings while doing his utmost not to be corrupt himself and leave a positive footprint, for someone at least.

Jordan as a director is at his most playful here. His approach to the film’s stylized but often incredibly fun dialogue is to emphasize the artificiality of what characters say and how they speak, which fits nicely into a film that does a rather nice job at pretending Spain is Los Angeles. While this certainly isn’t anything to make the friends of naturalism happy, I do find an ironic joy in a film all about characters to whom pretence and lying has become second nature – again, this is set in Hollywood – pretending to take place where it certainly isn’t with a wink and a smile.

It’s the nature of this particular beast that Jordan pays homage to classic noir and hard-boiled material rather a lot, with many a shot that stands in direct dialogue – let’s say, instead of borrowed - with comparable shots in the classics, but also by drenching this material not in black and white, but rather the colours of 90s neo noir. This does put further emphasis on the artificiality of the whole affair, but it’s a kind of artificiality I found engaging throughout – joyful even.

The Ninth Gate (1999)

Rich and ruthless collector of books about the Devil Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) hires sleazy and also pretty ruthless bookhound Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) for a somewhat delicate job: to verify the authenticity of Balkan’s copy of the snappily titled The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. The only other copies still known to be in existence are in the hands of two other collectors, and Balkan is sure that only one of the three copies is actually not a fake – he’s just not sure if his own is the right one.

So Corso is to get access to the other books, find out which of them is the right one, and, if Balkan doesn’t happen to have lucked into the the original, acquire the true Nine Gates by means fair or foul.

Corso is game for a lot of misdeeds, and likes the heap of money Balkan is promising him, so he begins to travel Europe looking for the other copies. On his way, he will get into rather more trouble than he probably expected, stumble upon a number of dead bodies, cultists and dangers to life and limb, and make increasingly immoral decisions, while smoking in the presence of rare books wherever he goes. A Girl (Emmanuelle Seigner) Corso believes to be working for Balkan seems to work as his guardian, ahem, angel, though she has somewhat different plans for him than he initially believes.

Up to this point, I appear not to have written a single word about this meeting of the toxic asshole titans Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp. These men, very much like Corso, are of great talents and dubious personal ethics, which may bother any given viewer a little or very much indeed. Me, I prefer to take the good people like them put into the world while damning them for the bad, but if your mileage varies, I’m not going to blame you.

I like The Ninth Gate rather a lot. In part, I love the chutzpa of turning Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s literary entertainment “The Club Dumas” into the Dennis Wheatley potboiler version of itself, replacing the book’s somewhat mild-mannered mood with a wilder and edgier playfulness.

Yet playfulness this still is. Polanski seems to have a hell of a time going through bits and pieces of Satanic conspiracy thriller tropes, crossing them with elements of hard-boiled detective fiction and watching what pretty sparks fly when you just mash them together like a child with a somewhat destructive idea of fun. This approach lends the film a mood of sardonic humour even before Depp encounters the line of European and American character actors – Jack Taylor and James Russo in one movie! - playing twisted eccentrics who make up most of the cast. This is the noise of a director having fun with his material.

The direct horror elements, and quite a bit of the rest of the movie, do carry a very late-90s kind of cheesiness that actually mixes rather well with the overblown Gothicism of Polanski’s set pieces, especially when set to Wojciech Kilar’s even more overblown – and utterly wonderful – score. There’s an air of deep un-seriousness about the whole affair, yet it is not exactly irony that seems to be the driving force here. Rather, it’s as if the sardonicism of the plot is actually the film’s main philosophy, so that a certain kind of winking sneer is the only appropriate tone for this tale about a pretty horrible little man who either loses the rest of his soul or wins the exact kind of enlightenment that’s appropriate for him.

Panic Beats (1983)

Original title: Latidos de pánico

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Paul de Marnac (Paul Naschy) is the descendant of noble family, but has grown up in what he calls poverty. That’s not what we call living in a mansion and having enough money to go to university around here. Anyway, he has managed to marry rich Geneviève (Julia Saly), and has apparently worked pretty hard in her family’s company.

When Geneviève is diagnosed with a dangerous heart condition, Paul convinces her to leave her beloved Paris with him and go live in his old family mansion. There, they are supposed to live a quiet life with Paul’s old housekeeper Mabile (Lola Gaos) and Mabile’s young, sexy niece Julie (Pat Ondiviela), who Mabile has taken in after some unpleasantness at reform school.

There’s a gothic pall hanging over the house, though. Mabile and Julie both dive into the tale of Paul’s ancestor Alaric de Marnac (also Paul Naschy, of course), who brutally murdered his wife when she was unfaithful to him. Alaric is said to return every century or so to kill any de Marnac wife he encounters. And wouldn’t you know it, his hundred years are nearly over.

Geneviève takes the tale rather seriously, and soon begins to see Alaric in his plate mail whether she’s awake or asleep. Snakes appear and disappear in her room as well whenever she is alone, and someone does just love to put something into Mabile’s tea that makes her very sleepy indeed, so she is of little help. Why, you might think someone’s trying to induce a fatal heart attack in Geneviève.

So yes, this entry into the body of work of house favourite Paul Naschy starts out as one of those thrillers in which the villains attempt to kill or drive crazy their rich wives to better get at their victim’s money. Making matters morally even worse, it’s not as if Geneviève were keeping Paul on a short leash – she’s clearly very much in love with him; he, is very much in love with that guy as well.

Which does of course make Paul a typical Naschy protagonist in his darker period beginning in the 80s. Where Naschy’s various versions of wolfman Waldemar Daninsky in earlier years always had a whiff of gothic tragedy around them, Paul is an utterly despicable bastard who is only pretending to have any kind of moral core when it fits into his plans, and instead of tragedy, Paul has put some irony in his way. Namely, that he encounters a partner in crime in Julie who is even worse than he is – as well as more patient.

So the film turns into a different kind of thriller in the middle, one where the villains first have to cover up their deeds by committing further murders – there’s a brilliantly sharp and brutal bit where Julie kills Paul’s other lover – and then eventually turn on each other.

That’s not enough for Naschy, however. Just showing terrible people being terrible to one another is all well and good, but letting the final survivor stumble into a horrible supernatural end by exactly the force they pretended to be earlier is a delight. Particularly since Naschy – also in the director’s chair this time around – decides to realize this bit in a pitch-perfect scene of EC comics imitation, with the grim, grinning delight in dramatically ironic carnage the best – and most of the other – EC horror stories had.

Before Panic Beats gets there, Naschy also delivers a mansion-load of gothic atmosphere, obvious but still highly effective twists, and some moments of the kind of bitter misanthropy that increasingly began to dominate his films without ever quite hiding the big, monster movie loving heart of our hero.

In short: The Sea Serpent (1985)

aka Hydra, the Sea Serpent

Original title: Serpiente de mar

The Sea Serpent concerns a giant sea serpent (surprise) created by an experimental H-bomb (cue five minutes or so of hilariously silly and contrived “coded” language between pilots and their home base, which does not look like a room in a military installation at all). A trio, sometimes quartet, of weirdos who witness various serpent attacks - a particularly grumpy looking Ray Milland, Timothy Bottoms, Taryn Power and Jared Martin as the on-again, off-again friend/enemy who believes Bottoms is responsible for the death of his brother only to join the fight once he finally sees the serpent as well.

If you’d tell me there were two Spanish genre directors called Amando de Ossorio, I’d absolutely want to believe you. It’s a more interesting explanation for the insanely varied quality of his work than the truth of luck, opportunity and what probably wasn’t a willingness to gilden any old crap.

Alas, this one was made by the lesser de Ossorio, so if you’re coming in expecting some moody sea serpent action, a bit – or a lot of – sleaze, and other more serious joys of a giant monster movie, you’ll be sorely disappointed. To be fair, given the quality of the sea serpent puppet, de Ossorio does his best with it, letting the adorable thing squish lighthouses or molest ships as often as he can afford it. Which, alas, isn’t all that often.

Thus much of the film has to be filled with the sort of cheap business you get up to when you have no budget for anything of visual interest and only a limited degree of imagination available. This starts with the much too long military code babble sequence and will continue through boring human interest – why the hell was the brother of Martin’s character not at least killed by the sea serpent instead of bad luck to make things at least a little less random and more dramatic? –, a conspiracy angle that makes little sense and is dropped whenever the film gets bored with it, and exciting sequences like Bottoms breaking Power out of a psychiatric clinic by putting her into a white coat and then simply wandering off with her until they encounter a guard who is beaten by some absurdly awkward flirting. An exciting giant monster movie, this is not.

Having said that, I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy my time with The Sea Serpent. There’s certainly something about the crappiness of the monster that’s more charming than annoying, and the superfluous business between the monster scenes is certainly neither clever nor relevant but also kind of fun if you’re in the mood for filler instead of a main course.

Venus (2022)

Warning: there will be last act spoilers!

Lucía (Ester Expósito), a dancer in a techno club run by organized crime, absconds with a large bag full of little blue pills that belong to her employers. On her way out with her loot, she manages to get through an altercation with the chief bouncer alive. She is however injured enough she flees to her estranged sister Rocío (Ángela Cremonte) instead wherever she was initially planning to run to.

Rocío lives with her daughter Alba (Inés Fernández) in a run-down, nearly empty apartment building, the Venus Complex. I imagine it’s situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of the buildings from Evil Dead Rise and Satan’s Slaves 2.

When Lucía arrives, Rocío is just in the process of fleeing the building in terror, panicked by poltergeist style occurrences and, as we’ll soon enough learn, Alba’s tales of a woman (?) living in the empty apartment above them. The Servant, as Alba calls her, supposedly enters their apartment through nightmares, leaving creepy and curious gifts (a jar full of children’s tears, a nasty little knife, and so on) for Alba. Which would make me want to run as well. But estranged as the sisters may be, a bleeding Lucía is enough to convince Rocío to stay another night.

The morning after some bitter sisterly rows that do not keep Lucía up to date about the potentially supernatural nastiness going on, Rocío is suddenly gone. Lucía may not have been the best sister or aunt, but she’s certainly not going to leave her little niece without any grown-up supervision, which traps her in the Venus building.

Worse still, Lucía’s former employers have managed to narrow down her whereabouts to a couple of blocks; soon enough, her boss’s boss’s specialist for difficult problems, one Calvo (Francisco Boira), will narrow that down even further with the help of a hairball spitting clairvoyant.

While the gangsters are closing in, and other complications from that side ensue, Lucía has to cope with the increasing weirdness of what happens in the apartment: horrifying nightmares and strange visions, a folder of research about the Venus Complex left by her sister that suggests a history of cult activity, child sacrifices and cannibalism, and so on. The place is a horror show – and that’s before Lucía or the audience understand anything of what’s actually going on. At the same time, a mysterious, inexplicable astronomical body moves between the Earth and the Sun, promising a rather unplanned for by science eclipse right in time for the film’s climax.

Even though the plot of Jaume Balagueró’s Venus is more of a mix of very traditional bits of occult horror, just as traditional noirish crime movie tropes, and old-fashioned moments of pulpy weirdness, and is thus somewhat lacking in the originality stakes, I find myself enjoying the film and its approach to horror quite a bit. Given my predilections when it comes to horror, I am probably the ideal audience for this film, its general vibe of tropey goodness bloodied up a bit by a couple gallons of blood, made prettier by its director’s hand for slick yet moody visuals. I am especially enamoured of its complete disregard for logic and proper narrative sense for the climax. Plus, the tropes the film so lovingly reproduces are exactly the ones I can’t get enough of in horror, its story of a weird cult trying to conjure up something terrible for no good reason while colliding with a group of realistically shitty gangsters and a young woman who becomes increasingly, absurdly heroic once push comes to shove, pushing all of my narrative buttons while doing nothing that would annoy me.

Why, I’m even okay with the bizarre ending that goes high pulp in ways I actually haven’t seen before quite like this, but lacks in cohesion with the rest of the film. But then, once you accept the story’s basic conceits about the weirdness the cultists (who are a delightful mix of SM cosplayers, elderly guys who seem to have tentacles coming out of their anuses, and cultivated crazy elderly ladies) are concocting and how they do it, logic and cohesion stop being the point at all. As a matter of fact, even if you’re not as enamoured with the film’s whole vibe as I am, you might need to admit its last scene twist may be badly prepared by anything that came before, but does quite a wonderful thing by standing the classic horror movie bullshit ending on its head, providing a bizarre happy end that works well enough as an idea and a mood to be acceptable for the high pulp world the final act most certainly takes place in.

The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

1987. Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe), the Vatican’s very own exorcist, is in some troubles with church politics. A young career cardinal has made himself the speaker of people who find the whole exorcism thing rather problematic in the modern world, and tries to push Amorth out of office, making a pretty grumpy – when he’s not winking at nuns - old man even grumpier. The Pope (Franco Nero, logically cast as the Polish pope in a movie where Russell Crowe is supposed to be Italian) is on our rebel establishment hero’s side, though, so it’s clear right from the start of the movie that nothing will come out of this for Amorth. Why the sub plot is in the movie anyway, only god or the pope will know.

Anyway, once that business is pushed aside, the Pope sends Amorth to Spain. There, an American widow (Alex Essoe, again wasted in a plot point role, alas) and her teenage kids (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney and Laurel Marsden) have moved into an old abbey her husband has mysteriously bequeathed to her, and are soon in rather dire possession troubles. The abbey, it appears, harbours a particularly dark secret, that will need all of Amorth’s experience to uncover. Things are so dangerous, even the Pope will be affected.

As regular readers of my diatribes and vague ideas here will know, I’m not much of a fan of Western possession horror; I don’t even like The Exorcist. There’s just something about the sub-genre as it is practiced in American and British movies that sticks in my atheist craw, even though I’m usually perfectly capable of appreciating religious art and sometimes even thought. All too often, I find this sort of affair comical rather than horrific, even when it is not sprinkled with problematic moralizing like the Conjuring films (which to me stand in the direct tradition of things like The Exorcist).

Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist certainly is not the exorcism movie to convert me – or anyone else for that matter – to exorcism movies as a serious or effective horror sub-genre (I hope), but I found myself having one hell of a time with it. Though, it has to be said, probably not for the reasons the filmmakers wanted.

It is clear from the very start that this is a Very Serious Movie that goes for an overblown, turned up to Eleven tone, Big Dramatic Flashbacks, and Deep Dark Secrets (capitalization probably in the script this way) – it really is pompous as all that. What makes the film so amusing is that this pomposity is in the service of a story that may start as a drab, overly plotted exorcism-by-the-numbers tale but increasingly drifts off into the realm of extremely pulpy nonsense with gates to hell in abbey cellars, possession double play and blood-puking popes which rub against the self-serious nature of the storytelling in ways that can’t help but be incredibly entertaining. The film’s final act gets absolutely bonkers with this stuff in a way that I’d call absolutely gleeful, if the film’s general air didn’t suggest it’s simply not intelligent enough to actually be this way on purpose. Which does not make it any less entertaining, of course.

Watching an over-emoting, unkindly aged Russell Crowe with a terrible Italian accent throw himself into this nonsense with the full force of his old star personality is pretty great, as well; I’m not quite sure he’s buying into the absurdity or does mean his performance seriously, but I do salute his effort to make (weird) decisions and go with whatever is thrown at him; mostly it’s blood, as a matter of fact.

The Pope’s Exorcist gets special bonus points for an ending that desperately wants to open up the possibility of a Pope’s-Exorcistiverse, with potentially 199 other films. Personally, I hope for The Pope’s Exorcist vs Sadako next.

Three Films Make A Post: Tell Me Why You Don’t Like Sundays

Phenomena aka Fenómenas (2023): This Netflix production by Carlos Therón isn’t the remake of the Argento movie one might fear, but rather a film that seems to imagine the Conjuring series, but with bickering middle-aged women (one of them the inevitable Belén Rueda) replacing the sexed up version of two right-wing con artists. Which is such an obvious improvement, one wonders why nobody did something like it earlier.

Therón does a good job of mixing the expected stylistic interests of modern mainstream horror with a very Spanish sense of humour without things ever exactly turning into a horror comedy. The spooky business isn’t original but fun and done competently enough to make this a very pleasant surprise.

The Seventh Grave aka La settima tomba (1965): This often amateurish Gothic horror meets Old Dark House piece directed by one-time filmmaker Garibaldi Serra Caracciolo is certainly not what you’d call a good movie, or a hidden gem, but recommends itself to the likes of me through moments when exactly the film’s flaws – terrible continuity, dubious lighting, stiff yet overheated acting, and a complete lack of aesthetic taste – turn it interesting. It’s a very traditional psychotronic film in that way, blowing one’s mind a little by seeming devoid of any actual understanding of how to make a “proper” movie.

Terror in the Streets aka Akuma ga yondeiru (1970): The first third of this horror-tinged mystery by Michio Yamamoto portrays the increasing social and economical isolation of its heroine (Wakako Sakai) as if by some shadowy evil force that seems to prefigure 2020’s Invisible Man with wonderful paranoid and melodramatic intensity in a way that might even suggest some kind of feminist thought being involved. Any idea of that disappears in the middle of the movie, when things become increasingly silly and surreal, with an utterly bizarre nightclub marriage without consent scene as a particular high point.

Yamamoto unfortunately can’t keep the tension or the sheer hypnotic bizarreness of what came before up in the third act. But then, who wouldn’t crash and burn when tasked to tie up what came before in a standard mystery knot?

Demon Witch Child (1975)

aka The Possessed

Original title: La endemoniada

Mr. Barnes (Ángel del Pozo) rules his Spanish town with a bit of an iron hand, it seems. When a baby disappears, he suggests (ahem) a group of wandering “gypsies” (I use this term because “Romani” seems to be a completely inappropriate description for what we see in the film) is at fault. As will turn out soon enough, he’s absolutely right, because these aren’t your typical travelling folk, but actually a wandering Satanic cult led by an old woman with a very distinctive face who calls herself Mother Gautère (Tota Alba). The bumbling and ineffective chief of police (Fernando Sancho) and his henchpeople manage to arrest the old gal, surprisingly enough, but during interrogation, she jumps out of a window, committing suicide before she can be injected with pentothal.

Of course, Mother Gautère’s second in command (Kali Hansa) swears vengeance, especially on Mr Barnes and his family. Rather quickly, Barnes’s daughter Susan (Marián Salgado) is possessed by the spirit of Mother Gautère herself, sacrificing babies, imitating voices and strangling men many times her weight. Only the local young priest, Father Juan (Julián Mateos) can help, but he is regularly distracted by some melodrama between him and the woman he left to turn to the priesthood, and her disappointed life as a prostitute.

I’ve repeatedly gone on record with my general dislike for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Its fears and theological arguments don’t work for this hard-headed atheist, and it is because it is as serious and well-made a film actually about its themes as it is that it also doesn’t work as a horror movie for me.

Fortunately, there’s a whole load of cheap, trashy and deeply unserious films inspired by/ripping off elements of Friedkin’s film I am able to enjoy. Amando “Blind Dead” de Ossorio’s Spanish example of the form, Demon Witch Child, certainly is cheep and trashy, as well as pulpy, sometimes hilariously mean-spirited, and a lot of fun for my by these virtues. I could have done without the business about the Father Juan’s prostitute troubles (alternatively, this element of the film could have simply been better written, but let’s not be unrealistic here), and the whole “travelling folk as baby murdering Satan worshippers” angle is rather distasteful, but otherwise, what’s not to like?

To whit: apart from the more usual possession business with floating, head rotating and spitting, possessed Susan is a bit more proactive than many of her peers. She regularly takes on the face of Mother Gautère and goes out strangling people, who are properly freaked out by the surprisingly creepy “old face on child’s body” make-up. She also likes to have her little jokes. So an implied after-murder castration (whose beginning even suggests a bit of necrophilia de Ossorio apparently decided to leave to Italian filmmakers), and gifting the nicely packaged, ahem, package to the victim’s fiancée is all in her program, as are voice imitation to confuse all kinds of matters and other general nastiness.

All of which is filmed in a manner rather typical of many de Ossorio films I’ve seen, where about half of the scenes look incredibly shoddily blocked and staged and edited with a hatchet, whereas the other half is full of Dutch angles, threatening camera movements and every other trick to make a scene creepy you can use when you don’t have much of a budget. Thankfully, the film’s general air of unhealthy imagination and its lurid energy are more than enough to help one through the rough patches, and enjoy the weird and inspired scenes of witch-faced children and Dracula-style wallcrawling.

In short: Cuadecuc, vampir (1970)

Supposedly, this started out as a behind the scenes documentary about the making of Jess Franco’s version of Dracula. But something must have happened with director Pere Portabella on the way, for what we actually get is a film that uses the behind the scenes material, B-roll from the Franco movie, and assorted footage to tell its own version of Dracula in the proper chronological order. Shot in beautifully grainy black and white this looks like the somewhat more concise ghost of the Franco movie.

To make matters more interesting, Portabella doesn’t use dialogue or location sound for most parts of the movies – until Christopher Lee gets the final word, as he so clearly loved to have. The soundscape instead consists predominantly of electronic and not so electronic drones, manipulated jazz orchestral music and indefinable noises composed by Carles Santos. This not only adds to the movie’s avantgarde score card (or is it a bingo card?) but also combines with the atmospheric quality of the footage and Portabella’s often striking editing rhythms to produce a curiously eerie mood.

More often than not, things feel downright spooky, and even perfectly normal and natural moments like the application of a bit of bloody makeup on Soledad Miranda’s face (which Portabella quite sensibly seems to love as much as Franco did) can take on a tense, perhaps even mildly disturbing, quality. Other viewers’ mileage may vary considerably, of course, for my mood of ineffable eeriness might very well be yours of goofy camp, imaginary reader. Which either demonstrates the magic of filmmaking, or the pointlessness of all movie writing, depending on one’s mood.

In short: The House of Snails (2021)

Original title: La casa del caracol

Warning: I’ll have to spoil the next-to-last twist!

Antonio Prieto (Javier Rey), full-time writer with writer’s block as well as part-time prick, moves to a small Spanish village for inspiration. Because it’s apparently that kind of day, he acquires a dog nobody shows any interest in and a potential love interest in one Berta (Paz Vega) while he’s still arriving. Though it’s not all good, for he also begins to encounter the first of a lot of curious superstitions and rituals the villagers hold to. Some, though by far not enough to be good for a movie title, are snail-related. Most of the superstitions, however, concern the village curse which is supposed to explain the large number of deformations among the local population. Apparently – this is something Antonio will take some time to find out – every decade or so, someone is possessed by (or begins embodying) an evil spirit and rips and tears through the population until killed.

Of course, this is also the kind of place where a mentally ill man is locked up in a shed in the woods, so one might doubt the veracity of the tale.

All the while, Antonio gets closer to Berta, and pisses off most everyone else in the village, until a series of killings – first of animals, then of a girl – starts. You’ll never guess who the killer is, right?

Or at least, that’s what Macarena Astorga’s film genuinely seems to believe. I suppose the film is working from the theory that most viewers will never have seen a movie with a ridiculous twist in their lives, and so will eventually play that “reveal” of something most viewers will have feared is going to be the explanation of the plot in excruciating detail that nearly borders on parody. This so-called big twist is only made more palatable by the fact that the film’s final twist is even more hair-raisingly contrived. Hooray?

It’s a bit of a shame, too, for whenever the film pretends to be more of a folk horror film than a stupid example of psychological horror, it’s perfectly decent, even with a couple of cool little flourishes when it comes to the villagers’ beliefs. Sure, Astorga’s work at creating mood is still only middling here, at best, but I’d rather have continued watching the decent, middling folk horror movie than the braindead bit of psycho horror it becomes.

In short: The Sacred Spirit (2021)

Original title: Espíritu sagrado

This sort-of arthouse dramedy with certain genre connections by Chema García Ibarra is one of those sad cases of a movie much praised by most every critic writing about it that does nothing whatsoever for me even though I do understand and see the artistry it is lauded for. Alas, it’s artistry in service of nothing I personally have any interest in.

That’s because Ibarra is all about techniques I usually – and specifically here – just can’t stand in a movie: consciously static visual language that’s supposed to distance the viewer from the characters and their world, where I see immersion into a world (even an unpleasant world) as one of the goals of cinema. The cold, emotional distance the film keeps to its character and their inner worlds, where I really want to understand their emotions and inner lives, perhaps even feel for them/with them or against them instead of just looking at them from the outside like a tourist without a guidebook. The monotonous delivery of every single line of dialogue, often described as naturalism by certain critics, even though it is no such thing for anyone not exclusively talking to robots, but rather what happens when you take amateur actors without experience and don’t show them how to emote on camera, another distancing technique I particularly loathe. Add to this humour so deadpan you probably need to be dead to laugh about it, and you can count me out, however interesting some of Ibarra’s ideas are on paper.

Grand Slam (1967)

Original title: Ad ogni costo

Retiring from his job as a professor at a Brazilian girl’s school, James Anders (Edward G. Robinson) goes to visit a childhood buddy of his, Mark Milford (Adolfo Celi), with a plan a lifetime in the making. On paper, the former academic has a complicated yet eminently feasible and thoroughly thought out idea for getting at a considerable amount of diamonds from a building right across from his old school. While the good Professor was teaching, Milford has become quite an exalted member of the mob, so he should be able to provide Anders with a specialized crew for the job.

In fact, Milford has an index catalogue worth of criminals on offer, sorted by keywords like “Playboy”, “Vatican”, or “Syndicate Killer”. So off Anders goes to instruct a military man (Klaus Kinski), a playboy (Robert Hoffman), an electronics expert (Riccardo Cucciolla) and a safe cracker (George Rigaud) in his plans.

Once in Rio, the Professor is mostly going to be hands-off, leaving his team to sort out various snatches in the plan – for example, it turns out seducing a Hollywood-frumpy middle-aged woman (Janet Leigh) is more difficult for our playboy than expected – and go through the old dance of shouty discussions and double-crosses without him.

Giuliano Montaldo’s Grand Slam is a somewhat typical example of the kind of crime and heist movie made as a European co-production – and therefore carrying a somewhat higher budget – that occurred pretty regularly in the latter half of the 60s. In this particular case it’s an Italian, Spanish and German co-production, but fortunately, the Italian side provides most of the behind the camera workforce. The money is otherwise well used in some globe-trotting location shots.

There’s the usual cast of European character actors and Hollywood stars on the downwards trajectories of their careers. All of them mix rather well here. Robinson nicely uses a certain grandfatherly quality to underplay how ruthless his character actually is. Leigh does more with the role of the seduced than you’d expect in this sort of thing. Everybody else is excellently cast to type, with Kinski for once not playing an outright psycho but a mostly calm, cool, and exceedingly dangerous professional, and he’s doing it rather well.

On the technical side, Grand Slam is utterly competent filmmaking that provides exactly the kind of suspense and the reversals of fortune you’ll expect going on in a satisfying and effective manner, without ever climbing quite the heights it should need for greatness. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, though it really leaves me with relatively little to write about.

Very little, that is, apart from the fact that Grand Slam quietly and off-handedly pulls no punches when it comes to showing how shitty our criminals actually are. The seduction plot most other films would play as a bit of a joke, for example, is deathly serious. Montaldo is very clear about the cruelty of this particular approach, and Leigh is only too happy to act accordingly. Because of this, the inevitable double crosses feel purposefully constructed to be such, instead of being a trope; and the film’s final, deeply cynical twist doesn’t come out of nowhere but is perfectly in keeping with everything Grand Slam taught us before about what kind of people we’re watching here.

In short: Scarab (1983)

Politicians and scientists around the world are committing suicide after getting stung (or something) by dead scarabs somebody hides in their clothing. The responsible party is a guy calling himself Khepera (Rip Torn) who likes to rant and rave in a dark chamber, dressed in excellently stupid “Egyptian” garb. He may or may not be a former Nazi scientist; now, he believes he is the reincarnated high priest/lover (or something) of another god (or something) he’s trying to resurrect. When he’s not shouting angry nonsense, he is surrounded by a bunch of half-naked high priest/god/whatever groupies who apparently enjoy being groped by an ugly older guy. There’s also some business about Khepera getting cockblocked by his sex partner’s lower half turning into that of a pig. Who knows what that’s about?

Womanizing sleazy reporter Murphy (Robert Ginty) somehow stumbles upon some of the vague and impenetrable facts of the matter. Mostly because he realizes a woman we will learn to be called Elenea (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) who sometimes dresses up as a nurse appears at several of the more public suicides. And because he’s a sleaze and she’s a reasonably attractive woman, he starts following her around.

Turns out Elenea is something like a white witch working against Khepera for reasons. She’s also, as it happens, the ideal body Khepera needs for his reincarnation business. Eventually, everyone ends up wherever the villain is shacked up, where low budget Aztecs and Egyptians become one single group of horrible costuming, and a bizarre climax ensues.

If this description of Steven-Charles Jaffe’s weird adventure/horror movie Scarab sounds a bit confused and somewhat woozy, then that’s because watching the film has the quality of walking through somebody’s half remembered dream – and not just because of the whole thing’s worn-out VHS source.

There’s a meandering quality to proceedings I usually connect more with Italian genre cinema. The plot doesn’t follow any kind of sensible narrative structure, instead scenes of Torn shouting mad mastermind nonsense, Ginty being an aw shucks sleazoid, exposition that explains very little indeed, adventure movie tropes on the cheap, and random utter weirdness like that thing with Torn and the suddenly pig-bodied lady just happen whenever and however the movie seems to feel like it. Later, we also get an evil witch for Elenea to psychically/magically (the film doesn’t tell or explain, of course) duel, a horde of henchmen in sackcloth and lucha ski masks for Ginty to fight, much of it shot from peculiar angles and drenched in what’s either print damage or dry ice.

Very little here connects, makes sense, or has any depth, but as a waking dream, Scarab is a rather fantastic experience; most certainly, it’s never even the tiniest bit boring.

Veneciafrenia (2021)

A rather loud and somewhat obnoxious group of Spaniards arrives at Venice for a bit of partying and general mayhem as a sort of send-off before Isa (Ingrid García Jonsson) gets married to her absent fiancée. But don’t call it a hen party, please.

As it goes in these films, the gang gets into trouble soon enough, or really, more than one kind of trouble. There’s a murderous, stinky guy in a harlequin costume going around murdering tourists in silly, brutal ways, for one, but there may also be a greater conspiracy between parts of the Venetians who have had enough of the loud and unpleasant type of tourist arriving on a ecologically problematic cruise ship. Despite their best efforts, our Spanish protagonists actually take some time to get into truly dangerous situations, but once the first member of the group has disappeared, there’s little hope for the rest of them anymore. Particularly since these idiots are rather bad at providing the local police with any worthwhile hints or suggestions. Why, Isa can’t even produce a single photo of her own brother! And no, this isn’t setting up a plot twist.

I have a curious relationship with the body of work of director Álex de la Iglesia. His films are much beloved by many people whose opinions about these things I appreciate, but mostly, his general air of shrillness and crudity, often presented with an added bit of misogyny, does very little for me.

So, ironically as well as logically, those films of his I do enjoy are usually exactly those everybody else seems to have a problem with. This Venice-set modern giallo is a case in point, apparently, and most de la Iglesia fans seem to think this a very minor example of the director’s art and style. I, on the other hand, enjoyed this mix of giallo and somewhat ugly foreigner abroad tropes, with a pinch of conspiracy based on a very real problem. (Though de la Iglesia goes out of its way to not pretend every Venetian anti-cruise ship activist is a lunatic movie murderer).

I found myself particularly fond of the leisurely plotting of the whole affair, where long scenes of our tourists acting out and annoying the locals are used to very slowly build up tension and paranoia. Even though De la Iglesia is not the kind of visual stylist the great giallo masters in whose steps he follows here were, he finds quite a bit of creepy imagery. Carnival masks and cities going to ruin are of course gifts that keep on giving in this regard, but the film is also genuinely good at creating a general air of tension (rather than a more precise feeling of it) through many a shot of pissed-off Venetians, of dark canals and streets, and many a masked person who may or may not be involved in any of the plot(s). This does of course not for a zippy film make. I believe this works to this particular film’s advantage, though, and is most certainly keeping in the spirit of the giallo, as are some rather strained examples of randomness throughout that don’t really make much sense.

The film’s pace is a bit peculiar in other regards, as well. Particularly the climax is placed strangely. The actual dramatic centrepiece of the film happens rather earlier than you’d expect, and what comes after builds up to another big confrontation that then never actually comes to pass. This kind of refusal of gratification only a director of great experience and eccentricity could pull off – or even just be interested in - and de la Iglesia certainly is that, whatever else I may think of him.

In short: Love Brides of the Blood Mummy (1973)

Original title: El secreto de la momia egipcia

The 19th Century, or thereabout. One member of that breed of noblemen who also tend to be mad scientists acquires the ancient remains of an Egyptian prince. Despite the promise of the title, it’s not actually a mummy, for the guy was purposefully preserved to be revived in the world of the living, not that of the dead. And wouldn’t you know it, our nobleman/scientist believes that modern science, particularly the works of Mesmer (science, I tell you, science!) and Galvani, combined with the papyrus how to guide on reanimation of the dead helpfully included with the dead man, will find a way to bring this particular dead body back to life.

He’s right, too. Alas, even revived, the Egyptian gentleman is in dire need of fresh blood, preferably coming from nubile young women. To help in the acquisition, not-Mummy Guy puts the mind-whammy on our scientist’s servant and imprisons his reanimator. From then on out, the film devolves into a long, long series of sequences in which either the servant or the not-Mummy chase young women around the castle or a bit of country-side with a very dramatic coast line, whip them, and do some blood-drinking.

And if I say “long”, I mean that at least eighty percent of Alejandro Martí’s film consist of these scenes, eschewing the goofy and potentially creepy promise of early proceedings for what amounts to nothing of any interest whatsoever. To make matters even more boring, the yellowed-out, wobbly, though fan-subbed, VHS version of the film that seems to be the only way to see it is obviously a Spanish censor-friendly cut, so that there’s not just a lack of entertainment value but also one of exploitational value. Indeed, this version – it simply can’t have been the only one - is so squeamish, people are even whipped while being fully clothed, something that could be an interesting quirk in a movie not this pointlessly, endlessly lacking in any points of interest.