The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Following Fox’s first Holmes movie with the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce double act rather quickly, this second movie is already the end of the short Fox cycle featuring these two. The studio apparently had problems wrangling the rights for further movies out of the Doyle estate, and perhaps not as much interest in continuing the series anyway.

Probably making negotiations less important for the studio that this film was neither much loved by the studio bosses nor – apparently – audiences, so fighting Adrian Doyle might not have been worth it to them in any case.

The Adventures doesn’t attempt to adapt any particular Holmes tale, but spins a complicated yarn about a plot of Professor Moriarty (who is much more common in adaptations than in the canon, and here played by the typically fun George Zucco) to thwart and humiliate Holmes and get rich in the process.

Not being a studio boss or a 1939 audience, I prefer this second Fox Holmes to the Hound. The plot is more lively, Alfred L. Werker’s direction is workmanlike but at least effective and from time to time even atmospheric, and Rathbone and Bruce really have gotten a grip on the character they are never really going to lose for as long as they will continue to play these characters (as much as I loathe Watson as an idiot, but you know that already). Unlike in the first movie, there’s also at least one memorable part among the younger actors surrounding our heroes – Ida Lupino (early in her career here) imbues her theoretically typical heiress in distress with as much personality and backbone as she can get away with, which does wonders for much of the plot she is involved in.

This – like most of Hollywood Holmes – is very much Holmes in pulp mode, so expect as much action as ratiocination, and delightful moments like the scene in which Moriarty’s butler has forgotten to water the man’s beloved plants and faces the ensuing threats of death and doom with the most movie butlerish face ever encountered. It is all very good fun. Apart from the actual jokes, of course, but that’s par for the course.

Express Train (1967)

Aoki (Kiyoshi Atsumi) is the proud, veteran conductor of an express sleeper train. At the time, this didn’t mean he’d just be checking tickets, but is actually commanding the small army of personnel on the train and shooting all kinds of trouble.

Aoki does so with a mixture of warmth, sternness, and the everyman awkwardness Atsumi is so good at portraying. He’s too self-serious not to be always at least a little ridiculous but he’s also kind and compassionate to a fault, so it’s impossible not to be kindly disposed towards him even if he’s being silly or mildly embarrassing.

In this first of four Train movies with Atsumi produced by Toei, he has to take care of passengers like a child with a dangerous heart problem, a somewhat rowdy drunk ladies’ party, as well as a pregnant passenger who will of course give birth on board of the train.

He’s also going to fall in love again with a woman (Yoshiko Sakuma) he developed a crush on when she was just a late teenage passenger on another line – this being a Japanese move from the 60s, that’s not to be read as anything creepy in the world of the movie. Now very much grown up, her marriage is on the skids, and Aoki’s own marriage isn’t terribly satisfying. Of course, she’s also completely unreachable as a realistic romantic prospect for Aoki.

And if all of this sounds rather a lot like a train-based predecessor to the long, long, very long-running Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man series Atsumi would star in for Shochiku starting some years later, apparently every single person watching this – including me – agrees. This is the absolute blueprint of the sort of thing Atsumi would go on to play and be on screen in the future. There are of course some differences here – despite being a bit of a fool sometimes, Aoki is actually pretty good at his job, and feels at least more grown up than Tora will do. He also doesn’t have episodes of lashing out at everyone around him.

Masaharu Segawa directs with an appropriate sense of gentleness – the tone is gentle, the humour is gentle, and there’s an air of day-to-day kindness here that does smile at human folly more than damn it, using the train and its conductor as a model of a late 60s Japan that never quite was but that looks like a place I’d rather like to live.

Kanto Street Peddlers: Clan Violent Loyalty (1970)

After having spent only a couple of years behind bars for his role in the climax of the first movie, Bunta Sugawara now roams Japan in this second movie of the street peddling focussed ninkyo eiga series to keep out of Tokyo trouble.

As will surprise nobody who ever watched a ninkyo eiga or two, Bunta soon falls in with group of deeply honourable street peddling yakuza who control an important festival site, but are beleaguered by the intrigues and occasional casual violence of a gang of proper baddy yakuza who want to get at that turf and its riches by any means necessary.

This sequel was again directed by Norifumi Suzuki, who spent a lot of his time in the ninkyo realm before he found his true calling in pinky violence and dubious comedy.

Here we find the director pulling his preferred comedy shenanigans back for much of the film beyond a couple of comical interludes. Instead he concentrates on melodrama and bad yakuza nastiness (even in the less extreme ninkyo eiga variant of the yakuza movie, things could get a bit unpleasant at this point in time, as long as only the villains were doing the really bad stuff). Despite some inelegant shuffling out of and into the movie of characters – some actors probably shot another movie for Toei in parallel, or ten – the film is rather more focussed than its predecessor. This provides Suzuki with opportunity to put more effort into creating more complex character relations and go deeper into the politics of the street peddler world. All this is then used to make the melodrama more intense once the shit hits the fan, until everything culminates in the expected beautiful bloodbath.

That climax isn’t quite as wonderfully done as the one in the first Kanto Street Peddlers, though Suzuki still puts a lot of effort into creating an energetic fight that doesn’t use the standard by the book camera set-ups or blocking of such scenes. In general, Suzuki appears very interested in using all kinds of tricks to make the genre standards Seiko Shimura’s script goes through visually memorable and through this emotionally involving. This works rather well for the movie, and also demonstrates a side of the directors that’s easy to overlook when he’s throwing naked female wrestlers and pratfalls at the camera: he’s genuinely good at the quiet emotional moments, and knows how to provide the Toei stable of thespians with openings to really strut their stuff. As it usually goes when a director does this, they repay him with giving a little extra.

Nachtschatten (1972)

Businessman Jan (John van Dreelen) stumbles upon a lonely house belonging to a village in the Lüneburger Heide (heath/moorland in Germany’s Lower Saxony). He feels drawn to the woman living there, Elena Berg (Elke Haltaufderheide), for she’s mysterious, seems in turn vaguely seductive and vaguely defensive, and speaks mostly in vague sentences while using the long, empty stares with lack of eye contact beloved of German filmmaking. A habit Jan shares, incidentally.

Elena wants to sell her house, apparently, and Jan might be interested in buying it, but once it comes to inquiries about concrete details like a price, vagueness sets in again. Jan is also interested in getting into Elena’s pants in the dubious ways beloved of 70s toxic masculinity. She keeps rebuffing him, but she also appears to want him to stay with her for as long as possible and makes many an oblique remark about her brother (wherever he is), death, and love.

Niklaus Schilling’s Nachtschatten – which translates so nicely to “Nightshade” it even keeps its ambiguity - is one among the very manageable number of German sort of arthouse horror movies. Neither the Autorenfilm (West Germany’s version of arthouse) nor the country’s movies made for an actual audience were very keen on delving into Germany’s deep well of the fantastical, so there’s no coherent tradition of this kind of filmmaking here post World War II, and thus the few films of the kind that were somehow made all feel somewhat disconnected from each other.

By virtue of the leaden pacing and disconnected acting style dominating the Autorenfilm, and in something of an ironic twist, Nachtschatten feels related to the kind of film Jess Franco or Jean Rollin were making, though without these directors’ sense of personal obsessions, and only a very mild kind of eroticism instead of full-on obsessive kink. It does manage to feel languid rather than stodgy for most of its running time, though, and from time to time, its slowness and unwillingness to say anything directly if it can instead have a character stare into empty air for a bit takes on a quality of poetic, dreamy unreality I’m unsure Schilling was actually going for.

Visually, this is a curious mix of the Gothically coded – the Heide is about as gothic as my part of Germany gets – and drab 70s interiors shot as if the director were willing them into becoming something more fantastical, dream sequences and characters that go through their daily life as if they were dreams – until it becomes some stiff German art business for a couple of scenes again.

It’s certainly an interesting effort, at least halfway towards becoming something special.

Yokohama BJ Blues (1981)

Apparently, you can’t make a living by being a singer of mediocre Japanese blues rock alone in early 80s Yokohama, so singer BJ (Yusaku Matsuda), also works as a private detective. Well, maybe it’s the other way round.

Be that as it may, a long-time friend of BJ’s, and also married to BJ’s former flame Tamiko (Mari Henmi), is making his own living as a corrupt cop, taking payments from a criminal organization known as “The Family”. He wants out, though, and is just about to tell all to the non-corrupt parts of the police. Alas, while he’s explaining all this to BJ during a semi-clandestine meeting, he is shot with a high calibre bullet.

For reasons quite divorced from facts and evidence, the dead cop’s partner hold BJ responsible for the killing – he just can’t prove it (mostly because it’s not true, one supposes) – so it behoves our protagonist to find out who really killed his friend not only for reasons of revenge but also of self-preservation.

His investigation appears to mostly consist of a slow, drifting movement through Yokohama’s night and dawn life, where he encounters members of The Family, yakuza, a gay biker gang, a barely legal rent boy runaway he’ll have a gay frolicking montage with. Some of those less interesting in frolicking do rather want to murder BJ, as well.

I’ve mostly seen chambara and jidai-geki from Yokohama BJ Blues’ director Eiichi Kudo before, most of them rather energetically directed and fast-moving (at least as I remember them). This film is not like them at all. Rather, it is dominated by a sense of late night languidness, or really, the more specific late night languidness of people who have spent years drifting through nights and dawns.

The film projects a sense of a melancholia that has hardened to the glass jar feeling of clinical depression, so that every movement its characters make seems aimless, joyless, and generally slow and effusive. Human relationships for the most part appear vague, unfocussed, dominated by loss and betrayal, but loss and betrayal whose emotional impact BJ holds at arms’ length. He’s just too tired and melancholic to even feel them, it appears.

It’s really only some of the musical performances and the scene where BJ – presented as clearly bisexual in the most wonderfully normalized manner possible – frolics with the male prostitute that break through the fog. Lifted fog can’t keep in the slow noir world of the film, of course.

This leads to a movie that’s so slow and loose, most of its dramatic gestures and its complicated plot seem mired in some kind of brain fog – there’s really little conventional tension here, and even what would be an action climax in other films is here very consciously turned abstract and distant by Kudo. For make no mistake, this isn’t an aging filmmaker having lost his touch, but one using the opportunity the ruins of the Japanese studio system of the time offer to stretch in interesting and different directions and speak in ways he couldn’t quite before.

Seen as a thriller or a straightforward crime movie, this is of course no success at all. As a film that’s ultra-focussed on turning the sense of ennui and alienation its protagonist, or the whole of Japanese society as it is portrayed here, suffers from, it is a rousing success, full of incandescently beautiful shots of the ugly parts of a slowly decaying Yokohama and a central performance by Matsuda that lets his natural cool curdle into a detachment beyond hopelessness.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

Victorian England. Consulting detective Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and his friend and partner Doctor Watson (Nigel Bruce) are asked to help ensure the safety of Sir Henry Baskerville (Richard Greene), who has come to England to take possession of his inheritance in the Great Grimpen Mire of Dartmoor. Rumours of a supernatural hound haunting his lineage abound, and many secrets are kept on the moors.

This first in its series of Sherlock Holmes movie produced by Fox , in this case directed by Sidney Lanfield, was a major hit in its time. Apart from the natural and perennial popularity of Holmes, this is certainly thanks to the casting of Basil Rathbone in the role, who has the accent, the profile, the energy and the acting chops to pull off an interesting Great Detective; he also has great chemistry with his Watson, real-life friend Nigel Bruce.

I’ve never liked the Bruce Watson much – he’s too stupid to be believable as a doctor, a military veteran that survived anything more dangerous than stepping over a puddle or as a friend to Holmes. In fact, in his worst moments – most of them to come in later films of the duo – this too stupid Watson tends to damage his Holmes, because this version of Holmes apparently needs to travel with the dumbest person alive to feel properly clever and is the kind of guy who drags around the learning disabled to berate them for being “bunglers”.

My tastes in Watsons aside, while The Hound is the most popular, and certainly the best, of the Holmes novels, it is a curious case to start a series with a particularly weak Watson with. For here, Watson is really meant to take the lead role in the investigation for at least half of the narrative, something Bruce’s character never believably manages in between comedy routines and empty bluster. He isn’t helped at all by being surrounded by the sort of extremely unmemorable actors Old Hollywood loved as their young romantic leads. Only Lionel Atwill provides some memorable moments.

The script pretty much makes a hash out of Doyle’s novel, changes everything that might be morally complex even more so than the Production Code would have necessitated, and just barely manages to get in some of the book’s set pieces. Those certainly are made very pretty by the use of some nice looking sets. Sidney Lanfield’s direction is generally unremarkable, and at its most effective whenever he just lets Rathbone or Atwill do their respective thing, which, unfortunately, isn’t all too often.

Color of the Night (1994)

Somehow, the erotic thriller wave of the early 90s even enabled the creation this particular movie, in which psychoanalyst(!) Bruce Willis flees to Los Angeles after a patient traumatized him into red/green colour-blindness by throwing herself through – the film says out of, but she’s going right through the closed thing – his office window, only to get dragged into a series of murders surrounding the hilariously dysfunctional therapy group of his soon to be dead frenemy Scott Bakula (heightening the improbable psychoanalyst stakes quite a bit). Also, he starts an affair with a very young lady (Jane March) he’d recognize from somewhere if he and everyone else in the movie didn’t apparently also suffer from face blindness. Hilarity and a complicated and pretty damn bizarre plot ensue, while director Richard Rush – whose epically long director’s cut is the way to go with this one – overdirects the hell out of the barely comprehensible screenplay by Billy Ray and Matthew Chapman, which treats as a revelation things the film has already shown to the audience ninety minutes earlier.

There’s really no connection to anything amounting to actual psychoanalysis, group therapy or human psychology here, and thus enables a cast filled with beloved character actors - Lance Henriksen! Brad Dourif! Lesley Ann Warren! Eriq La Salle! Rubén Blades! and so on! – to absolutely let loose with every single bit of actorly business they choose to use, because Rush is clearly a “yes, and” and a “yes, yes, yes” kind of guy when presented with any idea anyone could come up with. Plus, if we cast Willis often enough as a psychologist, analyst, etc, people will just have to believe it, right?

At the time, critics mostly focussed on the nonsense – without recognizing its function as beautiful nonsense, of course - and on Willis’s shlong (which makes something of a surprise appearance), but really, this is such a generous and serious attempt at making sweet, sweet love to the aesthetics of the giallo by way of Brian DePalma it seems nearly beside the point that it isn’t actually all that good of a movie.

Banned From Broadcast (2003-2008)

Banned from Broadcast is an occasional series of initially six short – about forty-five minutes – documentary-style POV horror movies made for Fuji TV that by now has also spawned three theatrical features and a surprise return episode in 2017. The episodes as well as the films were all directed and written by Toshikazu Nagae, who has worked quite a bit in the realm of direct to video and TV horror with tiny budgets.

When doing Banned from Broadcast, he actually reveals himself as a master of the form on the level of beloved house favourite Koji Shiraishi. But where Shiraishi uses his ability to mimic all kinds of media – as long as they are cheap – to create a crazy, idiosyncratic world of cosmic horror and existential absurdity, with only occasional trips into the horrors of humanity itself, Banned from Broadcast is nearly exclusively – apart from the very first episode – about human horrors rather than supernatural ones.

On the surface, all episodes, be they about a poor, large family with rather more problems than their documentary format likes to admit to, or a village of people with suicidal ideation are meant to be sensational or cloyingly sentimental TV segments that didn’t make it to broadcast for one reason or another, the filmmakers apparently able to emulate the tone and style of such things as they are done in Japan to a T. But there are secrets hidden in the background – sometimes literally – and so the stories the films are apparently telling aren’t what they are actually about. Particularly early in the series, the films expect the audience to figure things out for themselves – there are usually no big exposition dumps or explanations about what really happened. You either figure things out, or you don’t, or you look up enthusiastic interpretations on the Net.

Later in the series, things do end on explanatory montages, and while these certainly make comprehension of the series’ undercurrents easier, these montages still lack full explanations; ambiguity and the series’ trust in an audience’s willingness to play detective stay strong throughout.

Banned from Broadcast, however, does always play fair with its clueing. If you’re looking in the right direction at the right time, you can figure things out early, rather like a video-based shin honkaku detective.

What is going on is usually based on a somewhat cynical view of humanity and especially contemporary Japan, apparently a place filled with cruelty, vengefulness, cults and conspiracies, a nastiness lingering right below the consciously quotidian shooting style. Typically, the fictional filmmakers and one other character are duped in some way – often for revenge – and everybody else is playing up to their expectations to achieve something unpleasant. There’s a pervading sense of paranoia and distrust running through most of the episodes, made even stronger through the authentic feel of the presentation. In these films, everybody lies, and more people than you’d imagine are prepared to do horrible things to someone else, for reasons good or bad.

To my eyes, all of this isn’t just very fine horror but also feels like a conscious update on the golden age mystery formula that’s so big in Japan. Just that where Kosuke Kindaichi can usually at least help establish some form of justice or order, we can only watch, aghast, and think.

Scream 7 (2026)

Because they fired Melissa Barrera for her anti-genocidal stance (clearly mightily controversial a position to have these days) and Jenna Ortega clearly knew a sinking ship actually captained by the damn rats when she was on one, this episode of the never-ending series of films about yet another killer dressing up like the one from the original Scream who will be revealed without any emotional or dramatic impact returns to the misadventures of the now married (to sheriff Joel McHale) Sidney (Neve Campbell). Because even the guys who directed the atrocious Scream 6 (to be fair, also the wonderful Ready or Not) have some standards, Kevin Williams isn’t just allowed to crap out a script that mostly suggests he hasn’t learned anything about writing in a very long career, but is also allowed to attempt to direct this shit show. And because Williams has heard about H20 and Halloween, there are bits and pieces of Jamie Lee Curtis’s stints as trauma mum in here, when Sidney’s daughter Tatum (Isabel May) – yup, named after the garage door victim - is threatened by yet another version of Ghost Face.

Is it a returning from the dead Matthew Lillard, or is the real killer deep faking with AI? And look, nerds! The unkillable Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox and all of the botox) returns. Not that anyone cares, because Williamson, who was once pretty good at this sort of thing, really can’t or won’t provide a script that bothers to make us care about any of the characters, particularly not the generic fodder that makes up Tatum’s peer group. On the plus side, killed characters in this one at least stay dead (for now).

Look, I can cope with a film made by people who are morally bankrupt – this is Hollywood after all, and I have enjoyed art made by even shittier people and companies – but couldn’t they have at least put their feet down and made something good? Hell, with this one, watchable would have been an improvement over Scream 6 already, but somehow, this entry into the franchise manages to be even worse. This leaves out everything that was good about NuScream – mostly the lead actresses, if we’re being totally honest – and doubles down on everything that’s bad, particularly the increasingly brain-fogged scripts, the non-characters, the way a series that once was proud of superficially criticizing slasher tropes now cannot even seem to attempt to escape those it created itself.

This time around, we are also attacked by weaponized nostalgia, none of which hits, because if anyone wants to see Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox in a Scream movie, they can do that in films that are at the very least well-crafted and not made by people who have left their conscience behind for Paramount’s sweet sweet MAGA money.

Deform (2020)

Original title: 変容

A group of nine students play at paranormal investigation and enter a derelict building upon which some kind of flying, glowing thing has supposedly descended. Ignorant of genre rules, the kids split up for their search of the building. One after the other, they are infected by a, curious, wormlike creature that spits mini-mes and transform them into creatures rather beyond my abilities of description, and most probably beyond comprehension. There’s also a creepy guy with a very peculiar dress sense running around, whose presence will be explained in a wonderfully cosmicist way that adds a bit of weird plot meat to the body horror meal.

Someone – not me – should really write an essay or ten about how much the sub-genres of body horror and cosmic horror have converged over the years in ways poor old HPL could never have imagined while getting grumpy about early Universal horror. Case in point is this lovely – at least by my very broad definitions of the term – piece of claymation by Shigeru Okada.

Claymation, a style of animation that’s all about physically transforming the sculptures you work with, is obviously an ideal style for body horror – all of these transformations we are allowed to witness are indeed real. Okada’s imagination lets his characters break out and down into some fascinatingly grotesque things – at least one of which suggests one of the Elder Things from “At the Mountains of Madness” to me – which I mostly have not seen quite like this before (which curiously lines up with the Brian Paulin gore movies I’ve also been watching these weeks).

These transformations aren’t just great, but also the absolute stars of the show, so much so, that about two thirds of the film’s slightly more than an hour of runtime consist exclusively of them. One can certainly argue there are a couple transformations too many here for the Deform to be genuinely well-paced, but then, I wouldn’t have known which ones to cut either, were I in the filmmaker’s shoes.

All of this culminates in a wonderful and awesome (in all meanings of the word) sequence that adds an exquisite sense of wonder to the grotesquery, and made me rather happy, as does Deform’s mere existence.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following his rather unwise decisions during the course of the second movie, everyone’s favourite dog-loving assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is on the run, hunted by the rest of the series’ weirdo assassin underworld, and excommunicated from all useful services of their underground world. He’ll have to call in old favours and murder an astonishing amount of mooks and mid-level bosses to perhaps get a chance at survival.

My first time watching Parabellum (which, adorably, will turn out to be a Latin/ammunition-based pun), I really loathed the film (and I’m not going to link to that short piece, because Now-Me is obviously right, until I’m going to change my mind again in the future). Clearly, that's not the case anymore. In fact, I’ve come around to really rather loving it.

I still believe it is not an ideal choice to finish an action film with epic ambitions like this on several fights between Keanu and actors who are simply much better screen fighters than he is - the man certainly has the right spirit, but even in his Matrix days, he has always been a bit stiff and awkward when tasked with unarmed fights, which does tend to look worse when he’s set against more naturally limber opponents like Mark Dacascos or Yayan Ruhian. But then, he does throw himself into the fights with full conviction.

Otherwise, today’s me finds it difficult to argue with Parabellum’s digital neon aesthetics, its commitment to absurd body counts achieved via complicated choreography, or its increasingly pulp baroque world building that’s at once absurd and wonderous.

Even the circular there and back again of the plot that irritated me the first time around makes thematic sense on my second go at the film. It is emblematic of how our dubious hero is trapped in an endless cycle of awesome/pointless violence and rules that only serve the rulers, with the added irony that it is exactly his historical adherence to these rules that lets others in his subculture cut Wick rather a lot of slack.

Kuei Chih-Hung’s Hex Trilogy (1980-1982)

(which is only a trilogy because the Shaw Brothers said so, but those are the rules of exploitation filmmaking.)

Hex (1980): The first Hex falls right into the middle of one of the Shaws’ small early 80s commercial renaissances, when suddenly, their black magic movies were a real commercial, centipede-filled proposition. Hex, though, particularly reminds me of a cross between Les Diaboliques and a Japanese kaidan, with only the last act that includes an incredible, beautiful and very very weird, colour-gel filled exorcism, going full on HK-weird when most movies would be starting to put their feet up for an epilogue.

Here, an abusive husband is drowned by his ill, long-suffering wife (Tanny Tien Ni not doing the femme fatale for once; I actually prefer her in this mode) and her new maid, only to apparently return as a ghost. There follow quite a few twists – even a few twists too many for my usual tastes, but Kuei (who also co-writes) times every reveal so well, I didn’t find myself caring about the implausibility and strained logic of certain “natural” explanations.

Visually, this is a deeply moody film, full of the darkest shadows, highly dramatically expressive weather, and drenched not only in rain showers but in all the colours of Hongkong horror, all of which fit melodrama as well as horror and the thriller form and its plot twists.

Hex vs Witchcraft (1980): So, following the success of Hex, the Shaws apparently felt the need to put a sequel out as quickly as possible. This went to cinemas only three months after the first film. How many centipedes had to die for the black magic needed to manage that magic trick? Apparently none. Instead, the studio got by simply renaming the next film Kuei was working on, a goofy gambler and ghost comedy in which a shiftless, luckless and deeply unlikable gambler (James Yi Lui) is pressed into marrying a female ghost who proceeds to wreak well deserved havoc on his life, and occasionally turns into a skeleton-faced ghost in a black widow’s dress that looks rather like a German Edgar Wallace krimi villain.

Apart from this having sod all to do with the first film – for obvious reasons – HvW also suffers from not being a great comedy. Now, it is true that comedy often doesn’t translate very well over language and cultural borders, so maybe there’s some great, clever wordplay here, or really funny dialogue. Though, given how much emphasis Kuei puts on “funny” noises on the soundtrack to remind the audience some bit of slapstick is supposed to be funny, I rather doubt the existence of hidden depths.

Be that as it may, physical comedy and slapstick do tend to translate well enough, and here, too, the film just falls flat. The timing of those scenes is off more often than not, and there’s also very little imagination on display when it comes to the set-up of the general physical goofiness. It’s all very bland and generic, and not even particularly interesting to look at.

Hex After Hex (1982): The final Hex keeps with the gambling and ghost comedy, but is an all around more accomplished film than its predecessor. Perhaps because our ghost Rosy’s (Nancy Lau Nam-Kai) new husband is portrayed by Lo Meng, whose martial arts training does give him a leg up in the realm of physical comedy (though you wouldn’t confuse him with Jackie Chan), or perhaps because the film generally has better ideas for its slapstick set-ups and includes a couple of the moments of copyright-smattering insanity so beloved of Hongkong cinema of this era – here, Rosy transforms first into a dime store yoda and then into a version of Darth Vader that has clearly studied magical girls anime – or perhaps because Kuei does at least from time to time display a bit of the visual imagination that makes his better movies so exciting.

This still isn’t a masterpiece, mind you, well, perhaps the climax is, but it is a marked improvement on the middle film of the not really trilogy.

Whistle (2025)

New kid at school Chrys (Dafne Keen) finds an ancient Mesoamerican whistle in her school locker. Soon, someone makes the mistake of blowing it, cursing all the teens present, who are now being haunted and killed by their future deaths in various more or less imaginative ways. Hooray for them, I suppose.

Despite a theoretically decent enough cast of young actors and in Corin Hardy a director who knows his way around around a mid-budget horror set piece (his The Nun being one of the few Conjuringverse movies I genuinely appreciate), this tale of teens cursed by a Mayan whistle (the Internet talks about an Aztec death whistle, but the film quite explicitly says Mayan – it’s nonsense in both regards anyhow) is as dire as everyone says it is.

Owen Egerton’s script is a total mess, lacking consistency and even the kind of out-there logic you can easily get away with in supernatural horror, and instead features wonky characterisation and character motivation, as well as a completely messy time line. And not in the classic Italian way of weirdness I delight in, but in the “we don’t actually give a crap, it’s just a horror movie anyhow” kind of way I particularly do not. Nothing here makes sense – hell, even the inscription on the whistle is in our Latin alphabet (and wouldn’t be something you could translate via an Internet translator, come to that), and what’s worse, nothing in the film carries any weight of mood or thematic connection.

What’s left are bits and pieces cobbled together from various teen horrors, and signifiers of It Follows, Final Destination and Smile that not only make the dangerous mistake of reminding me of much better movies but also make it clear that nobody involved in the production actually understood what they were trying to imitate.

But to finish on the only positive note I can come up with about this mess: I did genuinely appreciate how simply normal the film treats the fact its heroic lead romance is a Lesbian one.

Cryptic Plasm (2015)

David Gates (Joe Olson) and his camera operator buddy Brian O’Reilly (the film’s auteur Brian Paulin) are filming cryptozoological investigations for a rather shady guy who promises David the moon, though doesn’t actually publish the footage the two shoot.

After an experience in an empty town that has supposedly been influenced by a wormhole – or, as we the audience know, whatever it brought with it - that leaves particularly David shaken, the money guy commands them to shoot an exorcism, despite this not being David’s area of expertise.

During the exorcism, things go very wrong indeed, and soon demonic and cosmic influences are dragging various bodies apart.

I’m generally not the greatest fan of nor expert on underground gore style horror, so I’m somewhat surprised at finding myself delving quite vigorously into the filmography of New England indie gore auteur Brian Paulin. Though this certainly helps, it’s not only that I can’t help but admire the drive of someone who – together with recurring collaborators – has been making movies on home budgets since the early 90s, it’s that Paulin’s films show genuine power and invention.

Sure, the acting often isn’t terribly great, but it’s also earnest and serious in ways that keeps it from being a source of mockery, and has generally grown more sure over the years. And yes, on the visual side of the craft, the filmmaking is often pretty damn rough, yet it is rough in exactly the kind of way films that are all about mental and bodily transformations, rot and the many improbable and therefore awesome ways human flesh might be destroyed, transformed and turned into gloop, goo, and other g-words that surely must exist, should be. Even better, Paulin, in film after film, does come up with new and grotesque shapes to form his physical – no CG here, that’s for sure – material into forms I haven’t seen before. This way, the gore isn’t just an incredibly impressive demonstration of what you can make out of cheap materials but also feels individual and personal to Paulin’s imagination.

Cryptic Plasm, which was initially planned to be a web serial, shows the filmmaker at a point in his career where he’s clearly grown extremely sure of his craft, and so can add elements of POV horror to his arsenal that fit his general visual approach nicely and thicken the general thick, if certainly never pleasant, mood of proceedings further. The film’s pacing will probably be a bit leisurely at the beginning for some tastes, but this very specific vision of cosmic horror as gore freakout can use a bit of room to breathe before it truly gets going. And once it does, there’s no stopping until the entire cast has been turned into a mess of gloop, slime, blood and pus in ways that can make one more than a little queasy, in the best possible way.

Shelter (2026)

Mason, a man with a mysterious violent past because he’s played by Jason Statham, is hiding away alone on a pretty pathetic fallacy-prone Scottish island (actually portrayed by an Irish island, perhaps caused by a bout of whisky-based confusion). His only contact to the outside world are supply runs a man we’ll later learn to be an old friend makes for him. Said old friend also tends to bring his niece, the otherwise orphaned Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) with him on these runs. Not that Mason interacts with them, mind you – he stays in his former lighthouse, looking down, drinking, and being manly and sad.

Then, two catastrophes follow shortly after one another to shake up everyone’s life: First, Mason’s buddy is killed in a storm, and he saves and takes in Jessie, if she wants to or not. While the two are slowly warming to each other, the hermit’s former boss, publicly disgraced MI-5 boss Manafort (an evil Bill Nighy!), gets wind of our hero’s location and uses his old contacts, some manipulation, and his illegal electronic surveillance network to get Mason and the inconvenient as a witness Jessie killed. Clearly, their working relationship didn’t end on great terms.

The thing is, Mason is rather more difficult to kill than Manafort might like, particularly when he’s also needed to protect a child from harm, and does have some old contacts of his own.

Historically, I have never really loved Jason Statham’s body of work, but like an old, comfy, hairless, shoe, he has grown on me during the years. There’s a highly likeable quality to an actor who understands his strengths and his limitations in range and just proceeds to work inside them, at least from my perspective. Of course, the last two Statham vehicles, the insufferably stupid The Beekeeper and the MAGA-hat-wearing A Working Man, were still terrible movies with little entertainment value.

Shelter is more like it. Directed by variable journeyman director Ric Roman Waugh, this is a very standard back to basics “hardass protects young girl” kind of film, with a few accidental (?) jibes against the surveillance state, and a good handful of straightforward and effective action sequences. I found myself particularly enjoying the action here because it isn’t attempting to be crazy, or big, or particularly loud, but looks and feels like the product of a kind of sure craftsmanship that fits an aging Statham better than any attempt to get back to Crank.

And, though the Stat is a limited actor, a mix of experience with this kind of material, actual screen presence and some great chemistry with his young co-star Breathnach, do sell the relationship between these two, even if it is built on clichés. So much so, I found myself caring about the action not just because I like to watch action scenes in my action movies (who’d have thunk) but because I also bought into the film’s emotional stakes. More people directing Statham should try this approach.

As it stands, to me, this is a return to form for Statham. Or perhaps I should say a return to making the kind of movies I like to see Statham in.

Species (1995)

Some years before the start of the movie, SETI actually did get an answer from an alien source. Following some goodwill plans for a clean, inexhaustible energy source (still waiting on that one here), the aliens sent genetic information to be implanted in human egg cells to grow, well, who knows?

The government decided creating a human alien hybrid was worth a crack, so scientists under the leadership of one Fitch (Ben Kingsley) created a girl from the alien DNA plans – because women are more docile, donchaknow. Sil (as a young girl played by Michelle Williams), as they call her, grows up at a rapid tempo and appears to be exceptionally strong and agile. She does seem pleasant enough for someone growing up in a cage, however. Yet when she also develops the disturbing habit of growing H.R. Giger-style mutations under her skin, the decision is made to kill her and end the perhaps ill-advised experiment. Because who could have expected alien DNA to be alien! Obviously, the girl makes a dramatic escape.

On the run, while committing the occasional murder, Sil turns into a rather attractive young woman (Natasha Henstridge), who, as is tradition in certain cultures, goes to Los Angeles to procreate and thereby create who knows how many more aliens.

The government throws together a team consisting of Fitch, assassin style fixer Press (Michael Madsen), molecular biologist Laura (Marg Helgenberger), computer guy Arden (Alfred Molina) and empath Dan (Forest Whitaker) to catch and kill Sil before it is too late for humanity.

Leave it to the 90s to cross the genes of the erotic thriller with gigeresque alien ickiness on a mainstream budget, give it to not always inspired yet highly competent journeyman Roger Donaldson to direct, and make a commercial success out of it.

On the plot level, this is of course pulpy nonsense, but it’s the kind of pulpy nonsense that moves from one hormonal high and one great set piece to the next, has – apart from the badly aged CGI – absolutely great effects and sells every awesome bit of nonsense that comes to its mind with complete seriousness.

Of course, you can read the whole thing as a misogynist tractate about male fear of being seduced into fatherhood but occasionally murderous women (or something of that manner). You can also, if you want to, put a very different reading on the whole thing, and read it as the story of a young woman crushed by forces she has no control over whatsoever – one of them her own biology, the other parents whose only answer to her awakening sexuality and/or difference is to hunt and kill her when she steps out of line.

In any case, on this re-watch, years after I last saw the film, I’ve also realized how good Henstridge’s performance is, quite apart from her willingness to undress. The way she shifts from Sil’s childish naivety into ruthless predator mode, the little notes of regret and desperation – it’s probably more than the film’s script asked of her. Otherwise, the impressive cast doesn’t care they are in a pretty silly kind of science fiction/horror/action exploitation flick, and though there’s little substance to the characters, everyone offers presence, the small actorly notes that bring these kinds of roles to life and a sense of taking their craft seriously.

The older I get – and, perhaps ironically, the less important a generous heaping of nudity becomes to me – the more I’ve learned to appreciate Species. Make of that what you will.

Dracula: A Love Tale (2025)

In a more honest world, this would be titled “Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula By Yet Another Guy Who Didn’t Read The Damn Book”.

Given how much this attempts to rip off Coppola’s version of Dracula in places, this should be a nice way for the old vintner to recoup some of those Megalopolis losses. But then, I wouldn’t want to be connected to Besson’s movie-shaped object either, even for a lot of money, so Besson is probably save. When I say Besson rips off Coppola, I actually mean to say he tries to remake Coppola’s Dracula, but apparently can’t recreate anything of that movie’s idiosyncratic vision of never contained horniness, mood of gothic excess, or visual and stylistic pull.

Everything taken from other sources here is like a bad xerox copy, a shadow that only reminds us of other films that made the same thing but with artistic intent and vision, or at least a hold on simple craftsmanship.

The things Besson adds are goofy, inane and just plain stupid – I’ve been arguing that Besson simply either isn’t very bright or believes his audiences aren’t for years – to a degree that should actually make the film enjoyable as the product of someone’s rampaging Id (somewhat like Argento’s version of Dracula, which I genuinely enjoy and thus prefer to this one). After all, this is a film that replaces the standard sexy vampire brides with crappy CGI gargoyles, has a time-skipping montage during which Dracula invents a rape, sorry, seduction perfume that causes women to find Dracula irresistible and to break out in musical numbers you have to see to believe, and features a tower of horny nuns, so it should at least be more than a little entertaining. Unfortunately, apart from the few moments of insanity, this is simply dull, leadenly paced – there’s no reason for this to be more than two hours long, seventy minutes feel about right – and for most of its running time simply lacks what saved some of Besson’s other, just as deeply stupid, films from being boring: visual imagination.

The Discarnates (1988)

Original title: Ijin-tachi to no natsu

TV movie writer Hidemi Harada (Morio Kazama) has been having rather a hard time of it at the beginning of the movie. He might be very successful at his job, but he has just gotten divorced, his relationship to his teenage son is basically non-existent, and he has reached the point in life where one takes a good long look in the mirror and can’t lie to oneself anymore about one’s flaws of character or conduct. He’s also thinking a lot about the past, especially the loss of his parents when he was just twelve years of age.

Harada has moved into a nearly empty apartment building, where only one other apartment appears to be rented out. The inhabitant of that apartment, a woman we’ll later learn is called Kei (Yuko Natori), would really rather get to know Harada very closely, but her first, weird, nightly attempt at throwing herself at him is harshly rebuffed by him.

A summer night or so later, Harada ends up in Asakusa, the quarter of town where he spent his early childhood when his parents were still alive. Here, he meets his father (Tsurutaro Kataoka), looking the same age he was when he died, and acting as if their meeting were a completely normal occurrence. Invited home to what looks a lot like their old place, Harada is also reintroduced to his mother (Kumiko Akiyoshi), also looking very lively and very young.

Because spending time with these two brings back an amount of happiness he can barely remember ever having felt, Harada returns to spend time with the couple again and again. At the same time, he also starts on a romance with Kei, who has some curious hang-ups about showing him her breasts, which he respects in a way you’d not at all expect from Japanese man in the 80s.

It would be a happy time all around, if not for the fact that Harada’s typically good health starts to fail rapidly. Why, looking in a mirror, he looks rather like one would imagine one of the walking dead.

One of my movie plans this year has been to watch more of the body of work of Nobuhiko Obayashi beyond the glorious Hausu, and by now, it has become clear that thematically rich insanity is only one of the strains of Obayashi’s work. Another one is that of a knowing nostalgia, a nostalgia that is perfectly clear about how memories are constructed and re-shaped into stories we tell ourselves, yet treated in a way that’s also not willing to simply discard these stories, or their impact upon one’s life, as foolishness.

If he wants to, Obayashi can be a deeply controlled director, and so much of The Discarnates consists of dramatically heightened yet precisely observed scenes of human interaction; until very late in the film, where a short yet wonderful freakout is accompanied by some choice Puccini, the supernatural is suggested through colour scheme rather than special effects. Specifically, the colours of the world Harada steps into with his parents are, like the colours of remembered childhood, richer, more intense and warmer – certainly, this is what the idealized happiness of the past must look like (though Obayashi prefers sepia tones for this sort of thing in many of his others films).

Eventually, the film does take on darker shades, when melancholia and guilt become dominant shades and textures, but these, Harada (eventually) and the film accept as an organic part of the world, and the way it shapes people. There’s nothing cruel about Obayashi’s treatment of Harada, here or anywhere – like Harada, he’s conscious of failings but also believes in growth, and a kind of change that is strengthened by being rooted in the past instead of eternally living in it.

So, like much of Obayashi’s work, this is a film about growing up, just this time around the growing beyond we do in adulthood, when we’re lucky.

Return to Silent Hill (2026)

Having received a letter from his dead wife Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), artist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) returns to Silent Hill, the place where they were once happy (or actually weren’t more often than not going by later flashbacks), but that is now consumed by recurring quotes from the videogame this adapts, which appear with little rhyme or reason and are completely divorced from the rich metaphorical quality they had in the game. Also, lots and lots of these flashbacks, establishing things that don’t need to be established, while also showing us things that make the idea of James returning to Silent Hill for any reason utterly preposterous.

Despite the amounts of harsh criticism thrown at Christophe Gans’s return to the Silent Hill franchise (sorry), I went into this one with a degree of optimism. Gans’s first foray into the world of Silent Hill did take some years to be appreciated, after all, and this does attempt to adapt an absolute masterpiece of a game rich in suggestion and ambiguity which also manages to be richly metaphorical in every part of its design.

However and alas, I can’t imagine any reappreciation happening to this abomination, a film that manages to at once overexplain everything and be nearly completely incoherent, that attempts to squeeze in every single bit of iconic imagery of the game – there are way too many shots that attempt to reproduce damn cut scenes – while clearly having not the faintest idea what that imagery actually means. As an adaptation, this seems to have been created by someone without any comprehension of the material they are working with – which is curious since this is made by the same guy who clearly did show such comprehension two decades ago.

But then, this doesn’t feel at all as if it was made by the same Christophe Gans who made Brotherhood of the Wolf or Silent Hill – or hell, even Crying Freeman. There’s none of the visual flair on display here that once was the director’s strength, nor of his ability to present bullshit with such conviction it becomes utterly captivating and even rather convincing. Instead, this version of Gans can’t even handle simple establishing shots properly.

Though, it has to be said, Doppelganger-Gans and his Return to Silent Hill do manage to provoke the kind of reaction in me that doesn’t happen all that often these days when it comes to movies – they make me genuinely angry.

The Vampires of Coyoacán (1974)

Original title: Los vampiros de Coyoacán

Warning: there will be some third act spoilers!

A horrifying elderly luchador known as El Espectro (Nathanael León aka Franquestain) kills his opponents in the ring, despite moving as slow as an old man, um, zombie. Apparently, making a habit of this sort of thing is okay per Mexican law as of 1974 as long as it happens in the ring.

While the elderly threat is hanging in the background, lucha heroes Mil Máscaras (Mil Máscaras) and, alas, Superzan (Superzan) are called in by one Dr Thomas (Carlos López Moctezuma) to help him out with a little family problem: his daughter Nora (Sasha Montenegro) is suffering from a strange illness. How strange? The good doctor is utterly convinced she is being targeted by a vampire, who regularly visits her to slowly suck her dry. Mil and Superzan are easier convinced of the supernatural threat than the more sceptical El Santo or Blue Demon would have been, so they are soon staking out creepy mansions, watching a group of little people vampires carrying a coffin through the darkness and wrestling said little people vampires (because this is an Agrasánchez production), as well as hipster vampires. They are ably assisted by paranormal investigator Dr Wells (Germán Robles, cast as a vampire hunter instead of a vampire, probably to confuse us).

And what of El Espectro? He is obviously part of the vampire problem.

If you are into the joyfully cartoonish side of lucha cinema – or like me, into all of its sides, except the one featuring mostly filler or comedians whose shticks don’t translate – Arturo Martínez’ Vampires of Coyoacán is a rather wonderful experience. That is, unless you’re wrestles into submission by its beginning, which features a fifteen minutes lucha sequence with no importance to the film’s plot at all, shortly followed by another one, that at least kicks off the El Espectro subplot. Though it has to be said that the cut-able lucha sequence is dynamically choreographed enough not to put one to sleep, which isn’t always that way in Agrasánchez films.

Following that, it’s all acid rock driven joy: rubber bats, cheap but cheerful Mexican 70s gothic production design lit in all the colours of horror as instituted into law by Maestro Bava in Italy, shot by Martínez with surprising enthusiasm, borrowings from Dracula as well as from Doctor Mabuse, the usual luchadores versus vampires battles, little people that are indeed vampires this time around, luchadores versus younger more gothy/hipsterish vampires (who are even somewhat creepy) business. Whatever you can ask of this sort of thing, the film offers it in spades, all driven by a huge amount of pulpy energy that isn’t always a given at this developmental stage of the lucha genre.

It does of course help that Mil and his funky wardrobe are among the liveliest presences in lucha cinema – that man can dress as well as move – so much so even the dreaded Superzan doesn’t manage to annoy me.

From time to time, the film even makes clear that it is indeed a product of the more downbeat 70s, so you also get elements of a decidedly unhappy ending, where a young vampire woman first murders here father and then, realizing what she’s done, sets herself on fire and dies screaming. Which is quite the thing in a silly movie about luchadores fighting vampires.