Three Films Make A Post: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Witches’ Well (2024): A successful horror writer (writer/director/producer/editor/cinematographer Amanda K. Morales) on a research trip to Edinburgh encounters a stalker faking supernatural phenomena, and perhaps something supernatural as well.

This short and to the point piece of POV horror by (nearly) one woman band Morales is a pretty neat piece of work that tells a simple but not too simple story efficiently, doesn’t overstay its welcome with its one hour runtime and even gets a couple of decent stabs at the nature of belief in.

An Unknown Encounter: A True Account of the San Pedro Haunting (1997): This “documentary” about an actual paranormal case as directed by Barry Conrad, one of the men who concocted (or experienced, if you’re the eternal optimist) it, is a glorious mix of bullshit, genuinely creepy nonsense, bad science, bad faith, the kind of “actual footage” that manages never to film anything supernatural occurring because (what a surprise) nobody ever points the camera in the right direction at the right time, and perfectly cheesy “recreations” of everything these guys didn’t manage to capture on film (which is basically everything supernatural that couldn’t be easily faked).

While I believe not a single word of it – and abhor the obsession with orbs, the last resort of the desperate paranormal bullshitter – the whole thing is great fun when taken as the fiction it is. Bonus points for being a wonderful time capsule of the unsexy 90s I remember from my teenage years and featuring some excellently overblown narration and presentation by Ferdy Mayne.

The Widow (2020): Clearly heavily inspired by elements of my beloved Blair Witch Project, though only intermittently using POV horror elements, this Russian production by Ivan Minin is a perfectly fine little horror movie that features some impressive Russian forests right out of the most gothic of folk tales, and all the greatest hits of lost in the woods stalked by a witch horror, shot moodily and paced well enough for a fun evening of people dying in various somewhat horrible ways. There are even some moments here that go a bit further – shots of people whose faces shaded by hoods may not exist, haystacks randomly stacked up in the forest for no reason beyond the folkloric (the best reason) – these are the sorts of things I watch random cheap horror for.

Three Films Make A Post: Hear how it all began.

A Quiet Place: Day One (2024): I wasn’t terribly fond of the first Quiet Place movie and consequently never bothered with the second one (unlike with the films of M. Night Shyamalam, that I can’t seem to give up on, despite their general suckiness).

But people with interesting taste recommended this prequel, so off I went, and found myself really rather taken with Michael Sarnoski’s film. Clearly, the writer/director only finds the monsters of the franchise of limited interest, and instead focusses on the human impact of their apocalypse. The film is full of scenes of genuinely touching humanity (at its worst and at its best) centred around a fantastic performance by Lupita Nyong’o and a basically immortal cat. This doesn’t mean Sarnoski doesn’t apply himself fully to the monster set pieces – in fact, the way he uses a quiet/loud dynamic in many of the suspense scenes is often brilliant and inventive, making the best out of pretty run of the mill monster designs (the xenomorph still has a lot to answer for) via the wonders of proper sound design.

Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957): While they are of course ultra-cheap AIP monsters, Paul Blaisdell’s creatures in this Edward L. Cahn teens versus space invaders film do have a certain something, even if that something is just the kind of lovely grotesqueness that gets my private sense of wonder working overtime.

For once, a director of one of these things actually makes proper use of Blaisdell’s work, only showing bits and pieces of the designs, hiding the rest behind shadows, tree branches and in between frames, so that they sometimes – there’s a great attack sequence on some innocent livestock – even feel actually threatening.

On the negative side, there’s a lot of painfully knowing camp to get through, which is exactly the sort of thing that’ll make it pretty difficult for me to get through a seventy minute movie. Hipper daddy-os may have a different mileage there.

Succubus (2024): One of these days, a director making a film called “Succubus” will actually know what a succubus is traditionally supposed to be. Until then, Serik Beyseu’s Russian movie (not to be confused with another film of the same title coming out this year)about a bunch of horribly horny and rather stupid people on a cultish couple’s retreat will have to do.

At least, the film attempts to deliver on the expected thrills of direct to whatever movies, so there’s some lame sex, the kind of “twisty” plot you can come up with while scribbling on the back of a propaganda flyer, and, surprisingly enough, a couple of half decent horror set pieces.

These are never enough to make the film actually interesting or effective, but in the realm of direct to streaming low budget horror, a couple of decent scenes and a pretty cool looking monster reveal are better than what you can typically expect, so I’ll take this as a win.

Three Films Make A Post: On the other side of death, on the other side of regret, on the edge of mystery…

Children of the Mist aka They aka They Watch (1993): This Showtime TV movie by John Korty turns Rudyard Kipling’s delicate story “They” about the loss of a child and grief into melodramatic pap, and also features the least frightening child ghost I can remember seeing; it doesn’t help that it makes overdubbed owl noises.

Nobody involved really seems to want to bother putting effort in: Edithe Swensen’s script turns everything into a cliché, Korty mishandles melodrama and ghosts alike, and the actors mostly seemed to have checked out mentally. Vanessa Redgrave gives a non-performance quite below her usual level, and I’m not even sure what Patrick Bergin thinks he’s doing at all. He’s certainly not acting like anyone who has encountered a grieving human being before.

The Other Side of Hope aka Toivon tuolla puolen (2017): This Aki Kaurismäki movie about a Syrian refugee looking for his sister and a place to be, and a former salesman’s increasingly absurd attempts at running a restaurant does cover similar ground to Le Havre, made six years earlier. This one isn’t quite as optimistic about the kindness of the working classes anymore (shitty racist Nazi types have arrived in Kaurismäki’s world, though never unopposed), but it is also not as hopeless about it as it could be. There’s still solidarity, compassion and kindness to be found, as well as the small happinesses that keep us alive. Formally, this breaks up the heart-breaking story of the Syrian Khaled (Sherwan Haji) with Kaurismäki-style shenanigans, which never feels like the cop-out it could be, but like the statement of a guy who doesn’t really want to put a divide between tragedy and farce. Which sometimes means that the farce helps the character from the tragedy survive (see also, curiously enough, Ladyhawke).

The Scythian aka Skif (2018): Rustam Mosafir’s sort of historical adventure movie is quite the thing. Always willing to turn everything – non-plausibility, fights and men’s friendship, betrayal, and general craziness – up to eleven, this often feels like the grandchild of cheap Italian sword and sorcery movies in its wild abandon, just made with more money, and most probably talent. There’s little scepticism towards warrior cultures and manly men doing manly stuff on display, of course, so if you can’t or won’t cope with these things, this is just going to make you angry. On the other hand, the film also has an anti-imperialist streak a mile wide, clearly coming down on the Barbarism side on the Howard Barbarian versus Civilisation scale while it’s at it.

It’s also simply a great, riveting piece of adventure filmmaking full of clever and fun set pieces, craziness and awesome manly bullshit.

Side Effect (2020)

Original title: Pobochnyi effekt

Following a home invasion and an attempted rape that resulted in the loss of their unborn child, the marriage of singer Olya (Marina Vasileva) and architect Andrey (Semyon Serzin) is on the ropes. They’re now separated from each other, with Andrey desperately trying to win Olya back and somehow drag her into better mental health at the same time; not a winning combination, that.

We’ll never quite figure out what Olya thinks about what happened and Andrey’s guilt in the proceedings until very late in the film, but Andrey himself feels particularly guilty for not having done some stupid violent thing that would only have gotten him killed to protect her. Eventually he is desperate enough to go to the witch Mara (Aleksandra Revenko), whose fungi-based spellcraft is supposed to be the absolute state of the magical art. Andrey simply wants a spell to make Olya forget what happened, which surely will make his own guilt disappear as well, and bring their marriage back on the old track, right?

As it happens, Mara not only provides a fine little fungus for Andrey to secretly – what’s “consensual”? – feed to Olya to do the partial amnesia job, but also wants the couple to housesit her large apartment in a constructivist nightmare of a building. Apparently, so that the spores in the air there can do their job on Olya, and Mara’s fungi will be properly fumigated while she’s away.

At first, things go as Andrey had hoped, and Olya not just gets back with him the very same night she has imbibed a fungus-enhanced cake but actually seems to feel somewhat happier. To nobody’s surprise but Andrey’s, things don’t stay positive once the couple moves into Mara’s apartment. While Olya indeed begins to forget parts of her trauma and even the traumatic event itself, she gets flashes and spurts of the rape attempt that seem even worse than before because they now lack in any real life context she can remember. Other disturbing things begin happening as well, of course. Why, it’s as if Mara – a rather present absence in her apartment – has some sort of very unkind plan for the couple.

Aleksey Kazakov’s Side Effect is rather different from the somewhat more generic Russian horror movies I’ve seen during the last few years. There’s something rather more serious-minded about the film, and it is clearly an honest attempt at exploring the results of trauma and guilt on a relationship through its tale of pretty nasty witchcraft. Even our villainess’s evil is the result of a trauma of her own, just that her reaction to it is an attempt to perpetuate her own suffering on others unlucky enough to remind her of it.

The further the film gets into its plot, the more it expresses its interests through a mix of surrealism and the folkloric, using potent images from Slavic folklore to position itself right at the border between a very dark fairy-tale and more free-floating strangeness to try and speak of dark and sad psychological currents through the lens of the Weird.

It’s a very interesting attempt at this kind of exploration, making much of moody as well as meaningful production design, and taking on an increasingly nightmarish as well as metaphorical quality, where someone’s death can be easily reversed only to increase a person’s suffering, and where the ghosts of the past can put a very physical effort into helping out the living.

In short: The Ninth (2019)

Original title: Devyataya

The late 19th Century, Petersburg. A serial killer murders women, using occult symbols in his bloody practice, seemingly working some kind of ritual. Policeman Sergey Rostov (Evgeniy Tsyganov), a man characterised by the improbable combination of a deep sense of responsibility and a death wish, investigates with the help of his underling Ganin (Dmitriy Lysenkov). A pentagram painted on an egg (hard-boiled, if you need to know) the killer has replaced the newest victim’s heart with sees Rostov looking for an occult expert. The occult researcher Golitsyn (Yuri Kolokolnikov), not really purposefully, points Rostov in the direction of British spirit medium Olivia Reed (Daisy Head, doing some pretty fun scenery-chewing), who has a successful Petersburg run with her very showy and theatrical spiritist revue, including an awesome/absurd costume.

At first, Rostov isn’t at all impressed with Olivia. She’s clearly faking a lot of her supposed powers, but she does indeed have visions that just might point Rostov in the direction of the killer. There’s a closer connection to the case, too, for the masked mystery maniac does use a ritual taken from a grimoire he has stolen from Olivia.

Nikolai Khomeriki’s The Ninth fits snugly into the realm of those high budget movies mixing traditional mystery, adventure movie tropes and a smaller or larger degree of supernatural business that makes these films nice fits for the Halloween season; it’s the same sort of thing you find in Guy Ritchie’s version of Sherlock Holmes or Tsui Hark’s version of Detective Dee, just with less genius thinker and martial arts.

I do have a large place in my heart for this sort of film, seeing as it mixes some of the bits of popular cultures the world round I enjoy the most. The Ninth isn’t as fun as the first Ritchie Holmes, nor as breathtaking as Hark’s Dee films, but Khomeriki and his scriptwriters (apparently this is based on a comic written by Marina and Sergei Dyachenko, who are rather wonderful novelists) are pretty good at transplanting the genre tropes into Russia. Petersburg in the late 19th Century is an excellent place to set this kind of tale, too, with its extreme contrasts between the rich and the poor, its imperial grandeur, and some damn fine architecture for a film to use. Sense of place, even if it is not a naturalistic portrayal of a place, goes a long way with me.

On the level of plotting and direction, the film is competent but not spectacular. The characters are moved through the set pieces well enough, and Khomeriki certainly makes things look slick, so it’s difficult not to feel entertained by the mix of light horror and action. From time to time, I would have wished for the film to do something a little bit cleverer than it strictly needed to or something more off-beat, but it always stays good popcorn cinema.

Which is never meant as any kind of damning criticism from me. As experience shows, even if some people can’t seem to see that because they are distracted holding their noses at something meant only to entertain, it’s not actually terribly easy to make this sort of film well, just ask DC. The Ninth, on the other hand, entertains me just fine.

Three Films Make A Post: They Beat Him, Shot Him, Framed Him For Murder-But They Couldn't Stop Him From Busting The BLACK OAK CONSPIRACY

Black Oak Conspiracy (1977): Well, really, it isn’t – as usual – as exciting as the tagline promises. Rather, this is a very middle of the road example of hicksploitation, avoiding the weirdness of the more interesting films in the genre, or politics of any kind. In combination with the pretty low exploitational values the film has in the sex and violence stakes, this gives the whole affair a pretty bland feel, despite a perfectly okay lead in Jesse Vint (playing a guy who calls himself Jingo Johnson, so there’s that, at least), perfectly decent direction by Bob Kelljan, a perfectly decent script, and whatever else you can give that sort of adjective.

It’s just not a terribly exciting film.

Mørke aka Murk (2005): This Danish thriller by Jannik Johansen about a man (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) who begins to believe the widower (Nicolas Bro) of his sister might be a serial marrier and killer of handicapped women with a suicidal past is very much a thriller in the French mould a la Chabrol. So it moves very slowly indeed, taking the utmost interest in drawing a complicated character portrait of its protagonist, but eventually coming up to a suspense finale that’s highly engaging and dramatic exactly because the film has put so much care and thought into the work of creating its central characters. Ambiguities about suicidal ideations, the various forms of guilt in survivors, the bereft, and the terminally sad abound, but the film’s darkness never quite becomes hopeless, suggesting ways out of all kinds of misery without having to stretch into the unbelievable.

The Alien Girl aka Chuzhaya (2010): This Russian crime movie with more than just a small neo-noir influence directed by Anton Bormatov on the other hand does have a pretty nasty streak, avoiding not a tiniest bit of the shittiness of character you’ll probably find in real world gangsters but still making a viewer care at least a little about these clearly doomed fools by also not denying them the softer and more human parts everybody will inevitably have. The film also does a couple of interesting things with Natalya Romanycheva’s femme fatale, giving her more ambiguity as usual while also making her just as doomed as everyone around her, suggesting a world where everyone is corrupt, corrupts others, and so can’t help but end badly, for even the wins you achieve by betrayal are only very temporary.

Three Films Make A Post: You'll never see them coming.

Deadsight (2018): I have to admit that I by now belong to the sad group of people who could live without another zombie/infected movie for about the next billion years. Having said that, I found Jesse Thomas Cook’s viral zombie style indie horror film surprisingly decent. At the very least, It is focussed and the the main cast do their jobs well. Why, Cook even manages to wring some genuine emotion out of some zombie movie standards by virtue of effective and efficient direction.

There are also some tiny yet not unimportant changes to your typical zombie movie rules, where infected are still conscious to a degree, which makes this particular version of the zombie plague rather more tragic, and turns at least some of the infected into people suffering horribly instead of merely dangers for the protagonists (Liv Collins, who also co-wrote, and Adam Seybold) to get through.

A Whisker Away aka Nakitai Watashi wa Neko wo Kaburu (泣きたい私は猫をかぶる) (2020): This Toho anime by Mari Okada about a middle school aged teen, her awkwardly (or creepily if you're really sensitive) expressed crush on a classmate and the troubles that come with turning oneself into a cat is a prime example of how much of an influence Studio Ghibli films still are on parts of anime filmmaking, seeing as this one quite desperately wants to be a Ghibli film, hitting as many buttons, tropes, and favourite Miyazaki concepts as it can get its paws on.

That’s only a bad thing on the originality front, though, for while this certainly can’t compare to Ghibli at its best (which is one of the troubles a film will get into when it prays so clearly at other films’ altars), it’s still a genuinely charming film that speaks about the pains of growing up with real affection and insight, doing the Japanese version of Magical Realism with charm and style. The final act could have used some trimming for my tastes, but otherwise, this is as good as pseudo-Ghibli is going to get.

Hoffmaniada (2018): More than a decade in the making, this Russian puppet stop motion animation directed by Stanislav Sokolov uses the great German Romantic writer (and not quite so great composer) E.T.A. Hoffmann’s life and elements of his work to talk about the borders between imaginary lives and real ones, the difficulty of more traditionally artistic temperaments to live in the world instead of their heads (also to recognize the difference between a woman and a freakish automaton), and the cruelty of said world to them. Which is about as Romantic as they come.


Quite appropriate for something with and about Hoffmann, the film contains a healthy dose of the grotesque, and while the animation isn’t always exactly slick (though never amateurish), that more handmade quality actually adds to its charms, turning Hoffmann’s world stranger than Hollywood slickness would, something that’s very appropriate to the film and its themes.

Three Films Make A Post: Based on a true story....that isn't over yet.

The Entity (1982): In Asian horror, movies with rapey ghosts are a dime a dozen, but western cinema has generally shied away from this particular combination of the crassly exploitative and the supernatural. Whereas this particular unpleasantness usually tends to be an extra bit of extremely icky titillation in those Asian movies, Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity (at least based on something of an actual case which of course doesn’t make anything of this true) puts this element of its plot front and centre, very much to the film’s detriment. The problem here is Furie’s direction that eschews the subtlety this theme would need if you really wanted to treat it seriously, replacing it with sledgehammer shocks so primitive, they make The Conjuring look reserved. This is one of those films that think that, as long as they present a deeply unpleasant idea, they magically become effective horror movies, as long as the soundtrack bleats loudly when the audience is supposed to be shocked. There are attempts here at providing the tale with a more psychological level, but those are doomed by the preposterousness of the script’s theories as well as the film’s vapid idea of horror.

Mermaid: The Lake of the Dead aka Rusalka: Ozero myortvykh (2018): Despite also having a bit of interest in sex of the not terribly consensual sort Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy’s movie about the kind of business a rusalka gets up to and the transcendent power of complicated rituals to get rid of supernatural creatures is rather less tacky than Furie’s film. It is not as if this were the height of contemporary horror, but it certainly is not as extremely generic a film as Podgaevskiy’s earlier Queen of Spades, which might as well have been called “PG-13 Horror: The Movie”. The director again merrily mixes Creepypasta-style ideas about rituals with folkloric elements but puts quite a bit more of an emphasis on the reworked folklore, which makes things at the very least more interesting. There’s also actual thematic work concerning the relationships of the main characters in connection with the supernatural threat going on, also giving the film some resonance the director’s earlier one lacked. The horror sequences themselves are still not exactly original, but they do show a decent sense of timing as well as a tendency towards the surreal, which all together does make the whole film quite a bit more interesting to watch than I feared going in.


Guests aka Gosti (2019): Staying in Russia, let’s finish on Evgeniy Abyzov’s tale of a group of tweens doing a guerrilla party in the wrong house. For my tastes, this is probably the best of the three films in this post, seeing as it is the most effective one at creating the proper mood of Crimean Gothic you’d hope for in a horror movie set there. It’s a bit slow, but its slowness is part of an approach that really is more interested in this being a character based bit of horror than the ghost fest you’d expect. Of these three film’s it is certainly the best at connecting its shocks and its characters; with its use of mold and decay as a sign and method of the supernatural, it is also the most effective there, even though about half of its set pieces still tend to be a bit too generic for my taste. It also has a bit of dark melodramatic romance on offer, and who doesn’t prefer that to ghost rape?

In short: Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite

Original title: Pikovaya dama. Chyornyy obryad

A group of Russian kids of surprisingly mixed ages play around with a mirror based ritual somewhat akin to good old Bloody Mary, conjuring up an entity known as the Queen of Spades. The Queen of Spades is a shorn-haired spectre with a nasty disposition and the habit of cutting a lock of hair from her victim of the moment as a sort of bad luck foreplay, and consequently, the mortality rate among the kids rises dramatically.

Eventually, the father of Anna (Alina Babak), the youngest of the kids, becomes involved, slowly starting to believe his daughter’s strange story, and doing his best to protect her and the other survivors.

PG-13-style horror movies are alive and well and apparently being made in Russia too, for director Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy’s Queen of Spades belongs to that part of the horror realm to the core, with all the problems that brings with it. The film’s main problem, and really a problem nearly all movies of this horror bracket suffer under, is a certain harmlessness even a handful of dead teens can’t hide, where nothing is ever allowed to have full emotional impact on audience or characters. There’s a heavy reliance on formula visible, with only very little attempt to do something terribly interesting with said formula and also disappointingly little about the film’s monster that seem culturally specific. The Queen of Spades could be directly transplanted into an American horror movie without any changes or cultural translation necessary, making the film’s central villain a bit more generic than you’d hope for.

However, while Podgaevskiy doesn’t move from the teen horror formula one iota, he does realize that formula more than just a little competently, with a series of perfectly competent and reasonably effective horror scenes – not all of them jump scare based – packaged into a well-paced movie.

It is most certainly a slick looking little film, the director really squeezing his budget – which did probably make Blumhouse look like Marvel - for all it is visually worth.


So Queen of Spades may not be a terribly exciting proposition if you’ve sat through a lot of films of its style, but I can’t honestly pretend it is not a well-made film.

In short: Dislike (2016)

A grab bag of the worstmost popular vloggers in Russia are invited to a sponsored event that’ll see them drinking some dumb energy drink while meeting up in some villa in the middle of snowy nowhere. Nobody of them seems to be the least bit curious about the fact that there’s no actual human being apart from a voice coming from a loudspeaker awaiting them at the villa, so what happens next seems a lot like natural selection in action. They are, of course, going through a Saw (repeatedly mentioned in the film, so we at least can’t blame it for being dishonest) and slasher crossover, with the difference that there are no actually cruel games to win or lose, and there’s something of a lack in torture, so dying and infighting is pretty much all that’s in the cards for the foreseeable future.

As far as I know, the horror sub-genre of the Internet personality slasher is still waiting for an actually decent film for everyone else working in it to copy; Pavel Ruminov’s Russian version certainly isn’t that one. Though, to be fair, it is neither the worst film in its sub-genre, nor is the rest of the film quite as bad as its first half hour. But then, said first half hour consists mostly of the set-up for the backstory of our mandatory heroine and the online shenanigans of the other six idiots the film will then start to whittle down.

Not unexpectedly, there’s not a single interesting character in the bunch, and the film’s attempts at satire stay completely on the surface level, leaving the audience to go through a film concerning the fate of a bunch of mostly uninteresting (and obviously unlikable) nonentities. While the film shows a certain amount of low budget movie slickness in its presentation, it’s not enough to overcome the core problem of having a cast of characters nobody watching will give a crap about. There are some decent bread and butter kind of horror film moments and some classic red and green lighting in what would be the climax in a better film, but even this Dislike’s muddles up with a double plot twist. The first of these twists is risible, while the second takes about then minutes of build up with the kind of “satire” that isn’t actually more clever than the things it makes fun of, for a pay-off it should have come to in one minute.


Nothing new in the world of movies about Internet people getting slaughtered, then.

Three Films Make A Post: Some mysteries should not be unlocked

Not of This Earth (1988): This Roger Corman-produced remake of a Corman joint is directed by the dread Jim Wynorski pretty early in his career of tits and boredom, so it is indeed full of female nudity (though not quite as much as in later Wynorski epics, you gotta decide for yourself if that’s for better or worse) and a metric crapton of boredom (just as much as in later stage Wynorski).

The film’s main feature is the copious amount of footage taken from a load of other Corman productions, usually used for no good reason but to get the film up to length, of course, a far cry from the clever secondary usage in something from Corman’s glory days like Targets, but comparing Bogdanovich and Wynorski is really rather unfair of me. Otherwise, poor Traci Lords seems to be the only person on screen even vaguely conscious of that thing known as “acting”, little happens, horrible jokes of a sort that makes Scary Movie look funny are made, and my eyes are getting heavy just thinking about this one again.

The Body Tree (2017): Following a Wynorski film that doesn’t even seem to have the ambition to entertain, this Russian-Spanish-US coproduction directed by Thomas Dunn about a group of young horror movie characters travelling to Siberia to take part in a ritual meant to calm the spirit of a murdered friend but alas provoking a demon feels like pure cinematic gold. At least, it clearly has ambitions to be a bit more than the spam in a cabin movie you’d expect from the set-up.

Unfortunately, the film’s attempts at psychological depth come up against writing that’s just not sharp and insightful enough to sustain many, many scenes of characters arguing, and arguing, and then arguing some more, performances that mostly can’t cope with these attempts at psychological depth, and the plain fact that about half of these characters are such unpleasant assholes I just didn’t want to hear them shouting at one another for what felt like hours. But at least The Body Tree fails while actually trying.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003): Let’s finish this on a high note, though, with Andrew Douglas’s attempt at capturing something like the heart of the weird, white American South in a sort of road trip following singer-songwriter and, ahem, “eccentric” Jim White through poverty, bars, various examples of what looks like horrifying religious mania to my atheist eyes, and sometimes awkwardly staged encounters with various alt.Country musicians from David Eugene Edwards, over Lee Sexton, over the Handsome Family, to Johnny Dowd (ironically, about half of these musicians were probably better known here in Germany than in the US at the time the film was made). The great writer Harry Crews pops in for a bit too.


I’m not terribly sure anyone will understand this South any better after watching the film, but it surely should convince one to try.

Ghouls (2017)

aka Vamps

Original title: Vurdalaki

Russia, some time in the 18th Century (I believe). Nobleman Andrej (Konstantin Kryukov), an aide-de-camp of the Czar, and his cowardly comic relief servant have travelled far from Russia’s capital to find the priest Lavr (Mikhail Porechenkov) who has been exiled to a small village. Apparently, the Czar has changed his mind about the man and wants him back. Lavr doesn’t want to come, however, for the village and its surroundings are in dire need of him. After a long absence, the local Vampire count – cape and all – has returned; not only to rekindle his traditional reign of terror but to become a daywalker.

His plan, as far as we will learn it, is to first re-establish a foothold in the area and then grab and bite young, beautiful Milena (Aglaya Shilosvkaya). Milena, you see, is a half-vampire (for once not called a dhampir here), and once turned, she - or her blood, the film’s not terribly clear on that account and the subtitles I watched it with are more than a little suspicious – will provide all the daywalking power a vampire can hope for.

Fortunately for the world, Lavr is the two-fisted stake-wielding kind of priest, and once he’s fallen in love (as is obligatory) and starts believing in vampires, Andrej’s pretty handy at murdering bloodsuckers too. Because this was made in the 2010s, Milena’s not a wilting violet either, so our big bad has his work cut out for him.

Sergey Ginzburg’s Vurdalaki feels like an attempt to reconcile urban fantasy and more traditional gothic horror – this is supposedly based on Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s novella “Family of the Vourdalak” like the best episode of Bava’s Black Friday and does indeed feature some core elements of the piece if in a changed context - for a contemporary audience, and while I don’t think it’s a completely successful film, I do think it is a very entertaining one certainly worth anyone’s time, showing some very good ideas besides the half-baked ones.

The film’s main problem apart from two romantic leads who seem to be cast more for their exceeding prettiness than for their thespian gifts - in itself of course a tradition in much of gothic horror – is that it not always manages to fuse the gothic mood it aptly creates –particularly in the earlier vampire scenes - with the urban fantasy tendency to create a somewhat lame parallel mythology that seems much too fascinated with explaining its own mechanisms. At least, it never goes as far down the urban fantasy rabbit hole as to present a hunky vampire special forces guy nor an eminently marriageable alpha werewolf. Whereas the film’s urban fantasy elements really want explain themselves to you (please don’t run away!), the gothic does of course live on the ambiguous, on supernatural powers that aren’t clearly categorized and on a sense of doom and dread.

I’m also not terrible happy with the big more action movie style final stand our heroes get up to near the end. There’s a lot of excited and exciting build-up to it, but once it actually starts, it’s short, not terribly exciting and goes out on a whimper. It certainly doesn’t help here that the film suddenly decides the up until then competent and active Milena shouldn’t participate in her own final defence.

While all these problems – also adding the painful comic relief guy – are there and accounted for, this might make Vurdalaki sound quite a bit less enjoyable than it actually is. Particularly its first hour contains many an effective scene in the gothic style given a Russian twist selling the feel of a village under an invisible pall more often than not. The generally beautiful – and by night appropriately creepy – landscape location shots certainly add to this too.


The scenes – you can imagine which ones – that really parallel the Tolstoy story are very effectively done, achieving an undertone of dread that might not be Bava-esque but is certainly working well, emphasising the horror of betrayal when family member feeds on family member without feeling the need to make it explicit. And while the action movie tendencies sometimes feel a bit grating, Ginzburg does have a decent eye for swashbuckling and even a cheesy heroic death or two, so these scenes – apart from the last stand sequence – are at least fun to watch. Plus, how many modern vampire movies remind one at least a little of Captain Kronos?

Past Misdeeds: Prikosnoveniye (1992)

aka (The) Contact

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Olga Nikolayevna kills her little son Kolya and then herself. Andrey (Aleksandr Zuyev), the most laid-back and friendly cop in Russia, gets on the case. His investigation leads the policeman to Olga's lover. At first, the man - who has an undefeatable alibi - tries to warn Andrey off from any further enquiries, but when the cop persists and waves off any danger, the man explains that he knows well why Olga and Kolya died: Olga's father had convinced her that the afterlife needed her, life on Earth being no good anyhow, and after a long time of pushing and prodding, she agreed. The most troubling part of that story is the fact that Olga's father has been dead for twelve years. Supposedly, the father's shrouded ghost had been visiting his daughter regularly for years.

Shortly after their talk, Andrey's witness hangs himself.

Not surprisingly, the policeman doesn't buy the dead man's story completely, but since his own theory is that a group of mobster uses hypnosis and psychological tricks to drive people to suicide, one can't exactly call him a sceptic. Andrey's further investigations lead him to Olga's sister Marina (Maryana Polteva). Marina, too, says she is regularly visited by her dead father, and has now also had a little visit by her sister and nephew. Her father, she explains, belongs to a class of creatures called the Forzy. These "Forzy" are ghosts who spend their time driving good people to suicide because these people are supposedly needed in the afterlife and not on Earth. Consequently, Marina's dad has been haranguing her to be a good girl and kill herself for years now.

Andrey's relative scepticism soon enough dissolves, because he too witnesses things he can't explain in any natural way. One suspects that Andrey falling in love with Marina also quickens his growing belief in the supernatural.

When the rude dead people try to kill Marina's little daughter to make her mother more susceptible to suicidal thoughts, Andrey tries to make a pact with Marina's dead father. He will stop being a good person if the dead guy will only leave him, the two people he already sees as his family and his beloved dog in peace. That pact is easier made then held, though, for these are ghosts that can already be angered by hearing Andrey's catchphrase "life is amazing and beautiful", which is a bit of an overreaction to sentimentality if you ask me.

There's way too little information about Russian genre movies of the early 90s online in any language I can understand, so I have to treat a movie like Prikosnoveniye as an artefact of a time and place for filmmaking that is somewhat strange and impenetrable.

What is clear is that Albert S. Mkrtchyan's movie was produced on a pretty low budget. Special effects - even when they would be useful to further the film's cause - are few and far between, and what there is of them is of the kind that gets the idea of what they are supposed to represent across, but not much more. Fortunately, Mkrtchyan was obviously conscious of this problem, and so decided to trust his audience's imagination and just don't show much of the supernatural for large parts of the film, instead using hints and ambiguity. The best demonstration of the director's technique in this regard is surely the scene in which Andrey makes his pact with the dead man. Andrey talks to the unmoving picture of his enemy on a gravestone, and is answered (or is he?) via announcements over the speaker of a railway station that is situated close-by. It's a wonderfully budget-conscious way to connect the supernatural and everyday life. Because Prikosnoveniye is even stranger at heart than that, the scene's end finds Andrey suddenly in Kiev, far from the graveyard he has been in before, without the faintest idea how he got there.

The budgetary problems only become visible as problems once the movie has reached its final act and an action sequence and a collapsing building are called for. The former is staged incredibly awkwardly, while the latter is frankly a bit crap. Both sequences fit the dramatic escalation of the plot, but are tonally at odds with the slow sly cleverness of the rest of the movie.

Which is a bit of a problem seeing as how the movie's rather philosophical tone in its first two thirds is its greatest strength. Said tone is - at least for eyes like mine not terribly accustomed to the way Russian and Soviet films works - strange in the best meaning of the word. Formally and visually, Mkrtchan's film has a feeling of dry, sometimes even bland, realism, full of scenes that go on slightly too long and that put more observational energy on the quotidian (watch Andrey play with his dog, watch Andrey's colleague make dinner while they discuss stuff the audience already knows, etc.) than is usual even in horror films that are about the break-in of the exceptional into the quotidian. Even the scenes where Andrey and Marina discuss the ghostly conspiracy are filmed in this way, giving them a veneer of normality the patently outrageous ideas expressed in them should have nothing to do with.

Under the film's seemingly bland and calm surface, though, lies an undertone of true strangeness and a world view that borders on the nihilist. The film never comes right out and says if it agrees with the ghosts, and never defines if they are malevolent or on the level with their disgust for life as we know it, but that makes the philosophical horror behind it them more effective than a more direct Liggottian statement about the absurdity of life would have done.

Beside its nihilist side and its distressed realism, the film has even more to offer. There's another underlying level where Prikosnoveniye also uses the structure of a fairy tale for its purposes - the relative easiness with which everyone accepts the supernatural, the pact with the dead and the ruination of the pact through the repeated (of course thrice) utterance of a very specific phrase all belong into the realm of the fairy tale, and seem to dance a very peculiar dance with the film's surface blandness as well as with its philosophical horrors.


What Prikosnoveniye isn't, is a horror movie that does much (or, if you're only used to horror films of the last few decades, anything) that's horrifying on its surface level. That's no problem at all for me, but if your tastes run to films more directly scary, this will most probably not be your cup of tea.

Mute Witness (1995)

Mute special effects make-up artist Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina) is working on a rather entertaining looking slasher her sister Karen’s (Fay Ripley) boyfriend Andy (Evan Richards) directs in Russia. When she’s accidentally locked in the shooting location, Billy witnesses what some of the Russian crew get up to with the equipment when everyone else has gone home. It’s not pretty, for the guys are shooting a snuff film. Worse, they soon realize they aren’t alone in the building and start chasing Billy.

In a series of tense scenes, she manages to evade capture and ends up in the arms of Karen and Evan who proceed to contact the police. The bad guys manage to convince the police that they weren’t shooting a snuff film, though, so things should come to an unpleasant end, yet still an end. Unfortunately for Billy, these guys are only tiny cogs in a big prostitution, drug, and snuff film racket, and their boss, only known as The Reaper (the upper body and head of Alec Guinness in a tiny cameo) doesn’t like loose ends. Even less fortunate for Billy, there’s also a McGuffin involved the bad guys think she possesses for no reason. So soon, she has to fight for her life again.

In part, Anthony Waller’s Mute Witness is a huge, sloppy kiss on the mouth of all the things the films of Alfred Hitchcock teach about making a thriller. Indeed, the film is pretty much, and rather showily, adapting the textbook the creepy genius never got around to writing. For the first half of the film or so, until the film leaves the shooting location, things work out rather excellently. There’s a tight focus on Billy, her plight, and the inventive ways she uses to avoid her would-be killers, with intense editing and camera work that does deserve an adjective like “breath-taking”, while Sudina manages to believably project vulnerability and strength at the same time.

Alas, once that part of the film is over, things start to go off the rails fast: instead of continuing to focus on Billy, the film spends too much time on other characters, repeatedly breaking its own tension and rhythm and generally acting as if Waller doesn’t quite know how to escalate properly. Instead Mute Witness broadens in a deeply awkward manner and loses sight not just of its main character but also of that imaginary rulebook on how to make a thriller. Usually, this particular sausage isn’t made by stopping for comic relief and such. Sure, Hitchcock often got away with this sort of thing, but unlike Waller, Hitchcock unerringly knew how to turn seeming digressions into elementary parts of the plots of his films.

Waller just digresses. Thanks to these digressions, and the lack of distracting excitement, it becomes increasingly difficult to accept the implausibilities of the plot, or the way neither the heroes’ nor the villains’ moves make even a lick of sense for the goals they want to achieve. In this context, Waller’s visual pizazz starts to feel stale and disconnected to what’s actually going on in the film. What started exciting turns into a slog of a movie that randomly throws in twists it didn’t bother to prepare or think through, with some of the most gratuitous nudity you’ll find outside of a 60s exploitation movie thrown in as a dubious bonus.

The first thirty minutes would still make a fine short film, though.

In short: Shopping Tour (2012)

Original title: Shopin-tur

A month or so after the death of the family father, a mother (Tatyana Kolganova) – let’s call her Mom – and her son Stas (Timofey Yeletskiy, I assume) participate in a bus shopping tour from their native Russia to strange, exotic Finland, where people are much friendlier, laid back and civilized. Mom also gifts Stas a brand-new camera phone with what appears to be a magical battery, and we all know what that means: the footage we are about to see is of course shot on it.

There’s a bit of time for Mom and Stas to bicker and argue (and not just about the fact that Stas didn’t know they were going on a shopping tour instead of a real bus tour to Finland) but soon, they have more serious troubles to cope with: turns out the bus operation screwed up and brought its busload of shoppers to Finland on the one day in the year when everybody there turns into a foreigner-eating cannibal. Oops.

When it comes to ultra low budget POV horror movies about Finnish cannibals, Mikhail Brashinskiy’s Shopping Tour is certainly the cream of the crop. It might be the only entry in this rather specific little sub-sub-genre, but that’s neither here nor there.

Even if you take a slightly broader view of it, the film’s still a cheap and fun little thing, often staging its shots rather cleverly, moving at just the right pace, and including interesting facts about Finland. There is, obviously, not terribly much depth to the whole affair but there’s such a nice flow to the film, and none of the annoyances that mar quite a few POV horror films it’s really worth watching, particularly if you partake of a more sardonic sense of humour. And really, didn’t we all suspect there’s something unhealthy about shopping tours?

In short: Hardcore Henry (2015)

There’s really no need for even the tiniest plot synopsis here, for there is so little plot here, and what there is such a bunch of vacuous crap, it might as well not exist at all.

Who’d have thought that having as a film’s only feature the gimmick of it being shot exclusively in a First Person Shooter style POV vision created by strapping a cheap digital camera to a stunt man’s head is not enough to make a movie that’s actually interesting for more than the fifteen minutes or so it takes to gawk at said gimmick? Even king of the gimmick William Castle added an actual movie to his gimmicks! Unfortunately, director/”writer” Ilya Naishuller is no William Castle (shit, he isn’t even Neveldine-Taylor), so all we get here is a series of action set pieces that might have been interesting to look at if they weren’t exclusively shot through a jittery camera that has little to do with the far more stable view of one of the actual FPSs the movie pretends to be inspired by, and even less with the way the actual human eye presents the world. Unless, that is, everyone but me sees the world through a shaking fish eye that is screwed onto their heads.

Not surprisingly, the novelty of seeing action scenes in this way decreases quickly, leading first to annoyance at the awkward and un-cinematic manner the film presents what might be rather great stunt work, then to boredom caused by the visual sameness of it all, and then, worst of all, moments when you can’t help but start thinking about the film’s plot. Or rather, how stupid and irrelevant the plot is, and how its presentation is even worse than in the video games it is badly attempting to copy. This thing makes the yearly Call of Duty look like a narrative masterpiece, and Far Cry: Blood Dragon like clever satire – let’s not even speak about those shooters that actually have a few brain cells to rub together, or actual movies. Even Steven Seagal movies have better writing.

To add insult to injury, this is also one of those films that pretend the lazy, disinterested nonsense they call their writing is ironically bad, and therefore good, quite ignoring the fact that not giving a shit isn’t made any better by winking at the audience about one’s failure. Just watch Sharlto Copley in the most annoying “funny” multi-character role this side of Peter Sellers and still try to tell yourself that anything has ever been improved by being bad on purpose.

Three Films Make A Post: Know the Mark

Mystery Road (2013): I am full of admiration for Ivan Sen’s rural Australian crime movie: admiration for the photography of huge, empty spaces that suggests a lot of what they mean to the people inhabiting them; admiration for the calm way it approaches rural power structures based on racism and disinterest, somehow managing to not yell about a truth and making it even starker by just telling it; admiration for the film’s unwillingness to look down; admiration for its calm and silent empathy; admiration for the way it tells so much through small gestures, glances and avoided glances; admiration for Aaron Pedersen’s central performance; admiration for the decision to not explain the crime plot to the smallest detail but let the audience sort it out for themselves; admiration, finally, for the sheer flow Sen gives his film without ever avoiding the fact he has something important to say about a very specific time and place.

Ice Station Zebra (1968): If you thought the bloated, overlong, substance-low Hollywood film is an invention of the blockbuster age, or at least of 70s disaster movies, think again. This two and a half hour thing directed by the usually – though not this time – brilliant John Sturges (who started having quite a few off-days at this point in his career) based on the inevitable Alistair MacLean novel is basically a fun, 90 minute cold war thriller bloated up to 150 minutes, mostly by things like an overture, a musical intermission (as if Michel Legrand’s annoyingly over-present score weren’t bad enough during the actual movie), and many a scene of rousing music playing while the camera stares at an atomic submarine for no dramatic reason at all, also dithering. Just imagine the first half hour of the first Star Trek movie trampling on your face forever.

There’s a great cast with Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown and Patrick McGoohan but following the rules of this sort of film, they basically have sod all to do, which is something of an achievement in a film this long, but then, at least it manages to achieve something.

Spores (2011? 2013?): Clearly, if study of the cheap and the curious in world cinema has taught me anything, it’s that there is such a thing as a universal human tale speaking Deep Things about the Human Condition. Like Russian director Maksim Dyachuk’s Spores, these tales are all about a bunch of young people – clichés all - going to a remote place (in this case a ruined factory building) to mostly die by something evil (in this case alien CG creatures). I’m still not quite sure what exactly this says about the Human Condition but I’m working on it.

Be that as it may, I found this Russian version of the age-old story on the more entertaining side: the acting is semi-professional at best but at least the worst actors die first; the CG monsters look bad, but at least they are not badly designed; the film has a competent flow and decent photography, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. That’s a win in my book.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,australian movies,american movies,russian movies,crime,adventure,horror,ivan sen,aaron pedersen,john sturges,rock hudson,jim brown,ernest borgnine,patrick mcgoohan,maksim dyachuk

Winter of the Dead (2012)

aka Meteletsa

It’s snowing in July over a Russian town. Curiously, at the very same time, the phone lines are going down and the cell phone networks become unavailable, so it might be even more than climate change going on here. In fact, before you can say “zombie apocalypse”, there’s an outbreak of slow yet somewhat shouty zombies. Muscovite TV reporter Kostya (Mikhail Borzenov) and his crew were in town to film some sort of protest, but Kostya soon teams up in running for their lives with Iskra (Tatyana Zhevnova), who is handy with a nail gun and also just happens to be the daughter of Khan (Sergey Shirochin), a gangster/businessman aiming for the governor’s seat of the region.

The rest of Kostya’s crew runs into Khan and his well-armed group of thugs, giving the film opportunity for some slight satiric jabs at oligarchs of this particular type as well as providing the opportunity to have some parts play out in our beloved/hated POV horror style. You can pretty much imagine the rest. Just add Khan’s arch enemy, part time tough guy Knyazev (Dmitriy Kozhuro), Khan’s wife/Knyazev’s girlfriend Dariya (Yuliya Yudintseva), and a priest (Aleksandr Abramovich) who’s very good at fighting zombies with axes.

So, how is the first Russian zombie movie I have encountered? In a lot of ways, like half of all the other zombie movies from around the world I’ve seen, going through the same time tired plot beats in generally the same ways. Could we call a moratorium on the “loved one becomes a zombie thing” at least? I know, the concept as it is still is horrifying but the tireless repetition of it in every damn zombie film ever made has turned what should be an archetypal fear into a tired cliché, so why not not have it in your film?

Not surprisingly, Nikolai Pigarev’s film is at its best when it doesn’t concern the traditional plot beats, and when it attempts to turn the facts of Russian life into fodder for its zombie apocalypse. We haven’t seen the particular unpleasant tough guy type represented by Khan in many horror movies, for example, which makes his final destiny slightly disconcerting, seeing as it does suggest a degree of approval for him from the side of the film. At least, there’s no page in the zombie filmmaking rule book for him.

For my tastes, there’s really not enough of this more individual stuff in the film, and – apart from haircuts and fashion – a lot of what takes place here could happen the very same way everywhere from Timbuktu to Gdansk. Well, apart from the mild religious undertones to parts of the proceeding, but, given how little I know about the Russian Orthodox church and its ways, I’m not sure how seriously I’m supposed to read them.

Fortunately, and not totally surprising for me in a Russian film after some of the late period Soviet movies of the type Western film critics never talk about because they’re too busy pretending each country in the world only produces one type of movie I’ve seen, Winter of the Dead also finds its feet whenever it tries to be a cheap, cheesy action movie with zombies. Particularly the last third has quite a few fun moments concerning improbable acts of shooting, the eternal fight between construction machinery and zombie horde, and a big damn explosion (which our survivors escape not by the classical running away from it but by the hopefully soon-to-be classic driving away from it on a train). While this doesn’t make the tiredness of the zombie apocalypse tropes go away it does give the film a bit of a personality of its own, and should be enough to entertain people who enjoy a bit of cheap and cheesy action cinema in their zombie movies. Which I, of course, do.

Technorati-Markierungen: russian movies,in short,horror,action,nikolai pigarev,mikhail borzenkov,tatyana zhenova,aleksandr abramovich

On ExB: Bram Stoker’s Burial of the Rats (1995)

My final column of the year over at the delightful Exploder Button concerns this little Roger Corman/Mosfilm production about Bram Stoker’s adventures with a cult of sorta feminist, thong and bikini (etc) clad rat women. It’s probably obvious why you might want to click on through.

It’s also my last utterance on here for the rest of this year. So, whatever holidays you may or may not celebrate, I’ll see you on the other side.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,russian movies,reviews,gothic,adventure,dan golden,adrienne barbeau,maria ford,kevin alber

On WTF: Prikosnoveniye (1992)

aka (The) Contact

One of the true delights of this movie reviewing lark is that from time to time, you will stumble upon wonderful little films like this Russian pearl of philosophical low budget horror with a fairy tale influence you'd never have encountered otherwise.

As always, my write-up on WTF-Film will tell you more.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: russian movies,horror,reviews,other places,aleksandr zuyev,maryana poltevy,albert s. mkrtchyan