Three Films Make A Post: Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they can't see you.

Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch (2024): I still find Durch Marich’s Horror in the High Desert movies some of the most likeable projects in American (the Japanese side operates on a whole different level) POV horror low budget cinema. But with film number three, I – not a viewer typically needy for explanations – do find myself growing rather impatient with the film’s unwillingness to even show or say so much you’d need an explanation for it. In film number three, there’s great set-up work in the first act, much flabby nothing in the middle and a climax that has two or three shots but delivers so little it’s difficult to truly think of it as a climax, and not just a stopping point for the inevitable fourth movie, in which again little of import will happen (not happen – you know what I mean).

Beautiful Noise (2014): Eric Green’s music documentary is billed as an “in-depth exploration” of the roots of the genre the film goes out of its way not to call shoegaze, but in truth, it is a painfully  superficial and surface-level exploration of it. Instead of focussing on a handful of bands as a core for style and sound, this tries to squeeze a dozen or more of them into ninety minutes, chasing through soundbites and interview bits and pieces that could be revelatory in the proper context without ever arriving at anything like an argument or a point. There were bands, they were making music, their sound was sort of revolutionary and very influential, and that’s all we truly are allowed to learn through this approach.

Then there’s a terrible reliance on interviews with “famous fans”: Billy Corgan is rambling, on drugs, wearing the worst hat, and has no clue (as expected), Wayne Coyne appears comparatively sober (gasp!) and has little insight to add, and only The Cure’s Robert Smith appears to provide any musical insight.

Mayhem! aka Farang (2023): Despite the excitable English market title, this (mostly) Thailand set French action movie by Xavier Gens with the excellent Nassim Lyes as a man with a past finding his new-found family peace disturbed by old grudges is a rather slow affair for the first hour or so of its runtime. What’s there of action early on seems rather perfunctory, and the too-slow build-up of all the expected clichés of this sort of affair make the first two thirds a bit of a slog to get through, though certainly a professionally shot one.

Once the action comes, it certainly is gritty, bloody, and competently staged, yet I found myself watching it from a certain remove, too much of it having been spent on building up the expected early on, and a just as expected “plot twist” later.

I also have to say that I’m a bit tired of action movies killing off the female lead to motivate their male heroes to violence. At least when it’s done in as mechanical a fashion as it is done here.

Three Films Make A Post: Give the devil his due.

Under Paris aka Sous la Seine (2024): Apparently, there was a a clearance sale for shark movie clichés in France, and Xavier Gens managed to catch them all. He also brought all of the screenwriters, for he shares various writing credits with six other people here. Given that the whole film plays out like a shark movie as written by ChatGPT (no surprise some film company suits believe replacing writers with AI is a near future prospect), that’s some kind of achievement at least.

As is how unoriginal and culturally unspecific a movie about sharks in goddamn Paris can feel if the filmmakers only not apply themselves properly to their craft. For much of its running time, this isn’t even stupid fun, for the film lacks the energy needed to pull that off, as it does apparently lack the intelligence to realize how silly it is.

This last problem actually turns into a virtue in the final twenty-five minutes or so, when a degree of entertainment manifests – most probably through the magical power of the script’s impressive amount of accrued bullshit becoming sentient.

The Mysterians aka Chikyu Boeigun (1957): It is curious to compare Ishiro Honda’s alien invasion movie with its temporal genre siblings from the USA. Both strands do share a – in Honda rather surprising – today uncomfortable trust in institutions and the military – the latter even more surprising in Honda – but where the Americans most often feel rather po-faced and stuffy, there’s a poppy playfulness surrounding the Japanese film I find irresistible.

This is often a question of design: not only the film’s colours – which do indeed pop – but the colourful and silly-awesome environment suits with capes the Mysterians wear, how the kaiju the aliens use looks a bit like Ro-Man’s cockroach brother, and so on. There’s very little here that doesn’t align itself with a certain idea of directness, brightness and fun.

The Hangman (2024): For at least half of its scenes, Bruce Wemple’s (written by Wemple and lead LeJon Woods) movie is an exemplary piece of low budget cinema, with a sense of mood and forward momentum, and a good idea of the kind of ambitions it can actually pull off, budget-wise. The other half of its scenes tend to meander through ideas, tone, and way too much exposition, and action movie one-liners that have little connection to the emotional core about fathers, sons and trauma, leaving a film that’s generally competent enough to be entertaining but could have used quite a bit of tightening to fulfil its eminently reachable deeper ambitions as well as one would have wished it to.

Three Films Make a Post: Turning eighteen is going to be hell.

Book of Monsters (2018): Calling a horror comedy inoffensive is not exactly the highest praise, but then, Stewart Sparke’s female-centric film is one of those horror comedies that seems terribly nice and friendly even though quite a few people get ripped to shreds in it. It’s just that the characters we are supposed to like all make it, so there’s a certain lack of tension running through the whole affair. The jokes are all over the place, some are exactly the ones you’ll expect going in, some are not quite as obvious. Generally, this is a likeable film though, using its clearly not terribly high budget as well as possible to provide its audience with a good time, and while I never got terribly excited watching this, I did enjoy myself with it more than I didn’t.

Bumblebee (2018): Given that it is comedic, YA-ish, likeable and female-centric, Travis Knight’s entry into the Michael-Bay-haunted Transformers franchise feels a bit like the big sister of Book of Monsters. Just that big sis has all the money in the world to make things as slick and streamlined as possible, where its low budget sibling has to fight for every scene to come together on a simple technical level.

While it isn’t exactly deep, unlike the other Transformers films, this one actually understands little things like character arcs, human feelings, and even has thoughts about what growing up means for a young woman still mourning the loss of her father. Knight is able to put all this into a slick and mainstream compatible movie featuring a very charming Hailee Steinfeld that also includes fun robot fights, explosions and some really rather cool chase sequences. Basically, this is the first Transformers movie that actually seems to be made by people with a degree of respect for their audience and their characters, who also happen to be really good craftsmen. It’s not a deep exploration of grief and loss, obviously, but it is a really entertaining film that’s not utterly brain dead in a franchise known for the exact opposite. Also, the robots have different colours.

Cold Skin (2017): Xavier Gens’s adaptation of Albert Sánchez Piñol’s novel must be an excellent one, seeing as it left me with pretty much the same feelings as the book did, the impression of having watched/read a very competently and eloquently realized story that never quite gets around to saying as much of interest about the human condition, colonialism or just the human heart as it seems to set out to. Curiously enough, for something taking place in 1914, the film (as the book) seems to be held back by too great a love for the narrative and philosophical habits of 19th (instead of 20th) century fiction, never really reaching the point where it should take a good long look at its own assumptions about how to speak about the things it is clearly most interested in.


As a horror adventure story, it is rather convincing, though, even though its fish people design is disappointingly derivative and conservative. It mostly disappoints because it seems so desperate to be something more.