Room 237 (2012): Because I didn’t get along with Rodney Ascher’s sleep paralysis doc The Nightmare, I never did get around to this much-praised earlier documentary about a handful of rather intense, sometimes obsessive interpretations of Kubrick’s The Shining. The thing is, Ascher’s neutral and somewhat sensationalizing approach works rather better when used on art than on a medical phenomenon, because there’s no objective truth that could be buried under reams of bullshit, only people and their ideas and emotions when confronted with art that clearly touches something in them deeply. I also prefer the director’s use of archival footage from many a movie to visualise what his interviewees see in The Shining to the bad horror movie re-stagings of the later film.
Of course, now living in a world where QAnon is a thing that has sucked all joy out of conspiracy theories as folklore and turned them into weapons, I do wish the film wouldn’t have included the ravings of that moon landing conspiracy guy, but that’s the sort of thing that can happen to the best of films.
Haunted School: The Curse of the Word Spirit (2014) aka Gakkou no kaidan: Noroi no kotodama: There’s quite a bit of fun to be had with Masayuki Ochiai’s tale of a haunted school experienced through the eyes of three different groups of people whose temporal and spatial connection will only become clear late in the film. The plot is not without interest, and quite a few of the spooky sequences film around the lack of a decent effects budget rather well – this is the sort of film that can do something surprisingly effective with the set-up of a corridor, a mirror, and a soft drink can.
On the negative side, there are a couple more larger speaking roles in the ensemble cast than decently capable actors available – noticeable even if you don’t speak Japanese. Ochiai also has a bit of a tendency to stay way too long in certain scenes late in the movie, apparently assuming that every explanation needs to be iterated at least three times to get into a viewer’s thick skull.
Encounter of the Spooky Kind aka 鬼打鬼 aka Close Encounter of the Spooky Kind aka Spooky Encounters (1980): Inexplicably, I had never seen Sammo Hung’s utterly wonderful pioneering martial arts/ghost movie before this week. It’s my own loss, obviously, for its mixture of incredible kung fu choreography, slapstick, and general weirdness is just as irresistible as one would hope for. Sammo’s in great form in all of his jobs here – actor, director, and choreographer –, jokes are funny (that’s not a given, particularly with the language barrier between the film and this viewer), the martial arts inventive and often funny and brutal at once, and the script about the travails of our protagonist fighting off hopping vampires, black magic and an evil rich guy is zippy, clever, and has a pretty great shock ending as well, leaving this as a perfect example of its genres.