Semya Vurdalakov (1990)

directed by Igor Shavlak and Gennady Klimov
Russia/Soviet Union
82 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

This is a vampire movie from the Soviet Union, and I can't find out whether it's actually from Russia or one of the countries that are now separate from the SU. The dialogue is in Russian, anyway. When we talk about vampires in this case, we're talking the old-school, Eastern-European conception of a vampire, not the vampire that pop culture has produced in the West. A lot of the characteristics of the vampire(s?) in Semya Vurdalakov bear little to no resemblance to what's typically thought of as a vampire, and in fact probably the only recognizable thing is a scene where we see a few drops of blood on an unconscious boy's neck.

At one point I actually got to thinking about the emphasis horror movies place on showing evil or dangerous characters walking differently from everybody else, and I had something longer and more thought out to write about that, but now it doesn't sound like it makes any sense. I was just wondering why we read so much into a person walking very slowly, with heavy footsteps, maybe some shuffling, too. A person walking at normal speed can be a normal person but slow them down and give them some Doc Martens and suddenly they're a menacing ghoul stalking around in the moonlight. As with most things, this probably stems from fear of disability, but it's one of the stranger byproducts of that fear and one of the least easily recognizable as such.

Semya Vurdalakov starts off relatively bright and cheery, and our main character, insofar as we know anything about him at all, seems to be a pretty happy, work-oriented guy. On assignment, he goes to visit a family in a rural farmhouse where somebody has just died, and that's where the whole movie changes dramatically. It may have been intentional, but the contrast between the "before" picture of the protagonist as a sunny go-getter immersed in his work and the "after" of an unshaven, unkempt, haunted-looking guy living with a family who doesn't really want him there is very jarring. Also, there's a good deal about this movie that I just had no idea what to make of, so forgive me if I kind of glaze over certain details that I didn't quite catch.

I don't feel as bad about missing those details as I normally would, because this movie is about 99.9% atmosphere. And what an atmosphere it is- like I said, it only kicks in once the main character leaves the city, but before too long this film is in the domain of shifting darkness, creaking wooden floors, whispered prayers in the night, and a flimsy, often invisible line between "living" and "dead". I still don't know what was going on at any point during this but it's perfect viewing for a cold, damp, dark night. There's been eerie Russian films before but this one feels unlike most I've seen.

Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Present (2005)

directed by Yûdai Yamaguchi
Japan
49 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

Grab a bucket of KFC and get ready! There's probably other Christmas movies from Japan, but I'm not sure if there's any other Christmas-themed horror movies, or any other Christmas-themed horror movies based off of famous manga. I can't judge this on how faithful it is to Kazuo Umezu's original work, because I've never read it, but it's not too bad on its own provided that you stick with it for a while- the beginning isn't too enticing. It helps to know beforehand that this director deals in the type of splattery, gooey, nasty horror flicks the parents in Present warn their little girl not to watch.

The acting isn't that great and the plot is incomprehensible, but honestly, this was better than I expected. It starts off when the main character is a little girl, being told as many parents inexplicably tell their children that Santa isn't just there to reward her for being good, but also to punish her for being bad. Then we jump ahead to her as a young adult, being a little bit bad at a (love?) hotel with her more extroverted friends and the guy she likes. I don't want to give too much away, but the two different versions of the protagonist aren't as separate as the movie wants us to think. All that we see or seem is but a dream within a Japanese Christmas TV special.

The set design in this is vaguely surreal; I'm not sure if that was a byproduct of slapdash construction or something deliberate, but the interior of the hotel (which most of the movie takes place in) is expansive and dreamlike. Hallways and stairwells are too wide, with not enough furniture in them. It looks like it wasn't designed with actual people in mind. And there's a lot of mixed religious imagery, predictably, including Santa Claus getting very mad at people for "desecrating the Holy Christmas"- even though it doesn't make sense for Santa to be the one up in arms about not being celebrated, seeing as it's not exactly called Santamas.

There's some complexity in the concept behind the villain, and more layers to the plot than appear on the surface, but I think those things only struck me as interesting because they were unexpected. I'm not even that big a fan of splatter movies so the extensive scenes with icky body parts weren't quite enough to keep me intrigued. I can't recommend something this gross for Christmas viewing. It's better watched in the middle of July or some other time. I just wanted to bring something new to the table for everybody else who's tired of the usual Christmas traditions.

Better Watch Out (2016)

directed by Chris Peckover
USA/Australia
89 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

I got off to a bad start with my semi-annual Christmas horror marathon by somehow accidentally watching a pro-life movie, so I was hoping that Better Watch Out would set me back on track. Fortunately it did, and then some, and now I feel like all the other movies I watch after it will fail to stack up. I advise anybody reading this not to read any further, because this one really depends on you not knowing anything about it. It's a home invasion movie, that's all you need to know. Go no further if you haven't seen it already.

Anyway. One thing I particularly liked about this is that, in contrast to the trope where a much younger boy tries hard to woo his hot older babysitter, the inherent creepiness of older teenagers playing along when actual children have the hots for them is highlighted. I've quit movies halfway because this mentality or "joke" or whatever people think it is is taken too far- see The Babysitter. It's just gross, not cute or funny. There's a bit of "I-got-a-crush-on-you"-type banter in Better Watch Out, but it's just banter, it's not like the movie itself goes along with it like nothing is wrong.

I actually really liked all the banter in this, to the point where I was sad when the parents left the picture and things turned more serious. When the film switches over to home invasion mode, everything falls into a sequence of events that, while taking cues in large part from older movies within the home invasion subgenre, never felt predictable. What I felt when the characters were trying hard to evade a perceived intruder in the house wasn't the type of fear that gets me personally afraid at home, but I believed that the characters were afraid themselves. I got invested in seeing these people survive, rather than waiting for the bad guy to jump out at them. It's not like one of those overdone slashers where you know what's going to happen before it happens.

This film is so well done, in fact, that when it goes in a completely different direction and pulls an entirely new plot out of left field, I didn't feel betrayed, although I had become engaged in the home invasion story. The thing that came after that felt like a solid continuation of the same movie rather than a venture into entirely new territory. Most of this hinges on the actors being really believable in any situation, which they were- actually they're all so good that even though I could tell the majority of the cast were Australians faking generic American accents, it didn't stop them from being really good at their roles. This is a good movie if you like Christmas and it's a good movie if you hate Christmas, or even if you don't celebrate it.

The Worthy (2016)

directed by Ali F. Mostafa
United Arab Emirates
98 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

The Worthy is noteworthy (sorry, I had to) for being one of a few movies made and set in the United Arab Emirates. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, so as happens often, I was hoping for some emphasis on the apocalypse, but never got it. I wanted to see more of what happened as the world ended rather than hear about it in an opening narration by the main character. The scenario in which society crumbled is where The Worthy's anti-terrorism message comes in, telling us about a future where paramilitary factions' skirmishes between one another escalate to become all-out global wars until one of them successfully poisons a water supply.

I enjoyed this movie's post-societal worldbuilding because I felt like it hit on several critical points that help to establish the danger of a world in which basic resources are no longer obtainable without effort. Vast importance is given to having a steady and reliable water supply, which isn't even speculative, it's just the reality of living in a desert. There's a lot of guns, like a whole lot of guns, and a lot of knives too, and I think that's a fairly accurate part of what a world after this one will look like. I think there's going to be easy access to things that can kill people and not a lot of access to things that could help people live. Also, the compound where most of this movie takes place has an interesting design- instead of subterranean tunnels or a bunker or anything like that, it's an abandoned aircraft wing factory, and it's huge. The survivors aren't frightened people burrowing into the smallest, most undetectable corners of the Earth, they've got a gigantic, wide-open space to command, at least for a little while.

However, the fact that many synopses of this hail it as "visually spectacular" should be a little worrying. It's pretty fancy-looking, but it doesn't have nice cinematography at all, it just has that aesthetic movies get when they have a massive budget to work with and want to show it off. It's so overblown it's almost comical at times: so much unnecessary slow-mo, lots of shots of characters just barely ducking out of the way of some weapon or projectile, gratuitous usage of CGI blood and fire, et cetera. It's visually frontloaded and that might be impressive but it doesn't translate to something that's pleasant to look at.

I would say that this is a decent movie, but maybe not as good as everybody thinks it is, but it appears that people don't actually think this is that good. So maybe I should just say it's a decent movie. It might be because I watch and read a massive amount of post-apocalyptic fiction but this didn't come off as very original to me. I think I also would have liked it a lot more if any women had survived until the end.

The Brain (1988)

directed by Ed Hunt
Canada
94 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

I accepted that this movie would be bad from the outset and only watched it to fill some time, and for the most part it did turn out to be pretty trashy, but what I didn't expect was that it would also be so wild. Although it firmly confines itself to the parameters of a cliche late-80s horror/sci-fi hybrid and doesn't bring anything new to the table, it has moments where it's genuinely pretty fun to watch. 

I've spoken before about how I believe it's better to have patience when showing off a monster, and not rush into it and overdo it, spoiling the sense of mystery for the audience, but then there's The Brain, where pretty much the very first scene is of a giant tentacled brain. There it is, no doubt about it, here's the brain you all expected. Honestly, when the practical effects are this inventive and amazing-looking, and when the rest of the movie is so campy that any sense of genuine mysteriousness would basically fizzle and die, it's much less important to hide your monsters. I scream, you scream, we all scream for tentacle-brain.

It almost makes me sad that creature design like the brain in this movie would be so out-of-context if made today, and would probably be banished to being seen as a gimmick or an intentional throwback, because this brain thing is pretty awesome. It's never explained where it comes from, why the villain is trying to spread its ideas, or, perhaps most importantly, what the brain's end goal is for when it finishes taking over the world. It's just there, this gigantic brain with a face, a huge, snarling face that looks like a cross between a pug and a mountain lion, shuffling around on its brainstem (which is apparently NOT a tail, and the bad guy will admonish you if you say so). If not showing your monsters is my first rule of good creature design, not explaining your monsters could be my second.

Unfortunately, our friend the brain is the only thing this movie has going for it. The characters are all awful. The main character is a high school prankster who suddenly becomes the only guy who can single-handedly save the whole town. The most amusing thing about this is watching everybody run full-tilt everywhere because for some reason there's a foot chase scene about every two minutes. Like I said, it's fun if you have the right mindset, and I liked how simple it was and how "pure" it feels as a horror/sci-fi popcorn flick, but I don't think it deserves too big a spot in the history of the genre. Also, although it's never mentioned, it is Christmastime in this movie. So this counts as a seasonal review.

Everything Beautiful Is Far Away (2017)

directed by Pete Ohs & Andrea Sisson
USA
91 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

The premise of this one doesn't need much summarizing: a girl, a guy, and a robot head trek across the desert of another planet in search of a mythical lake. The worldbuilding is definitely one of the strongest, if not the strongest point in this film, because this desert has all the right stuff to look subtly futuristic and alien, yet still have the atmosphere of a place that humans call "home". There's strange technology discarded and buried in the sand, and the edible flora of the desert have names that aren't quite what we'd call things here on Earth, but as a colonized planet it's certainly believable.

I want to address the only real problem I had with this movie before I go any further. It wasn't necessarily a problem with the larger framework of the movie itself, just something it perpetuates that a lot of other movies also do. The girl, Rola, is written to be the heart to Lernert's head, she follows emotion where he follows reason, and it isn't inherently wrong to have two characters play off each other like this, but almost every time, the airy-fairy, risk-taking party is the woman. Lernert is there to oh-so-patiently mansplain to her, and rescue her when she eats poisonous roots, and remind her to do very basic things. She's there to be magical and beautiful and not know much of anything practical at all. I found this infantilization very irritating even when I was otherwise enjoying this movie.

I did, however, do a lot of enjoying. It's a latecomer, but I really think this is one of the most visually gorgeous films of the year. The aesthetic is really, really homogeneous, there's impressively little variation in color, and I know that two implausibly pale people venturing across an implausibly pale desert where everything is only beige, blue, or green may be, for some, tiring to look at for an hour and a half. But I feel like you have to admit that the cinematography in this is ridiculously well-done even if it's not personally your favorite color scheme.

I almost gave this five stars because there's basically nothing wrong with the way it's made. There are boundaries to plot and setting that it sets up for itself (desert environment, only three main characters, one fixed goal for the two of them) and it works within these boundaries perfectly. Maybe it's not as ambitious as your Alien: Covenants or your District 9s or your Cloverfields. It doesn't have as large a scope, despite being set in an absurdly large desert. But it's more than beautiful enough to be fascinating throughout every minute of its running time, and most of all it actually made me feel uplifted and optimistic about being a human being, living a human life, which is something I haven't felt in a long, long time. Just a pleasant and gentle movie.

The Survivalist (2015)

directed by Stephen Fingleton
Ireland
104 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

The Survivalist is both a very complex and a very simple movie, I don't really know how to explain it other than that. There are standards it adheres to in order to fit the post-apocalyptic model but as a whole it's not quite like anything else I've seen before.

The title doesn't refer to the kind of doomsday prepper type you may think of nowadays when you see the term "survivalist". Well, technically I can't be certain what it refers to, since I don't know the filmmakers' intent, but I would guess that surviving in this context refers not to a particular method or methods of living post- societal collapse, but to the overall notion of just surviving in such a world, doing whatever is necessary to ensure you go on living day-to-day. It's startling how much inhumanity is in this film, not brutality or intentional evil, but a total absence of anything that would betray any of the characters as having human feelings. This is truly a post-societal landscape.

It really drives home the point as well that if you can get yourself far enough from anybody else, you can do whatever you want. You can wear an elaborate hairstyle and have weird gardening practices and play the harmonica (possibly the film's only human touch) and there's nothing anyone can do to judge you, because the laws that governed behavior don't exist anymore. A lot of post-apocalyptic films don't get into that, they show survivors doing the same routine over and over of venturing out on some journey somewhere with a large backpack and some beef jerky, but they don't show what people would do if they could sustain themselves alone on a farm and not have to make a trek to find other survivors.

I know this is slow and I know it barely has any dialogue, and it might even border on invoking the P word (pretentious), but it's so well made and sticks so firmly to its premise of not showing any trace of manners or social niceties that I'm kind of amazed by it. There were points when the younger of the two women who came to stay on the protagonist's farm would say something too forward to him, and I almost expected the older woman to remind her not to upset the man, but this kind of calculated survival of two unarmed people against one armed person goes much further than just being polite to him. They survive around him on a more tactical level, one where it matters less if you insult him and more if you can manage to grab his shotgun shells while he thinks you're trying to get him off, or slip poison into his meal one day. What a well-constructed and unconventionally scary film. Not so much about how the world got to be this way as it is about how the new environment shapes human behavior.

Angst (1983)

directed by Gerald Kargl
Austria
87 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

Belonging to the category of "German-language films that make us uncomfortable", this movie is well-known for being extremely effective in depicting a serial killer from the inside out, with narration switching back and forth between a separate cold, clinical voice explaining the backstory and previous doings of the killer and his own inner monologue, similarly cold and clinical in locution.

The opening scene is a stark look at the killer doing his thing, and I noticed that the actor seemed to be wearing some kind of steadicam rig. I noted this but didn't think anything of it until he said to his first victim "I'm shooting now", and I thought "huh". Because to me, the actor supporting his own camera rig and then his character saying that he was shooting- that felt like a double metaphor, like an acknowledgement of the fourth wall. He's shooting a gun / he's shooting a movie. This, of course, could be a completely moot point depending on whether or not the German language uses the same word "shoot" to refer both to shooting a gun and shooting film, which for all I know it might not, I'm just going off of subtitles here. Whether or not that specific instance was meant to brush up against the fourth wall, this is certainly a film that draws the viewer into it and makes sure you can't ignore a single thing that's going on.

The one element of this that I couldn't figure out, by which I mean I personally enjoyed it greatly but didn't understand why it had been included in the film, was that there's a little dog who stays around for a very long time. I immediately got bad vibes when they showed the dog, because considering that it's mentioned many times that the main character has tortured animals, I was sure the dog was eventually going to get done in. But it never does! It's just there, and they kept showing it running back and forth between places and barking at the murderer, which was honestly really funny and it's a testament to how otherwise disturbing this movie is that having a little dachshund named Kubo running around didn't bring down its disturbing nature at all.

Overall this is just a really well-made film that does a lot with no embellishment. I was disappointed in its assertion that childhood trauma can cause a person to grow up into a monster, but I suppose in 1983 that notion may not have been challenged as much as it is today. The main actor is perfect and probably the reason so much of this works so well. He was in Das Boot, too! I'm not sure why I find that amusing.

Woodshock (2017)

directed by Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy
USA
100 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

I was planning on watching this on Thanksgiving but I didn't want to make myself sad after a nice day. As it turns out I would have been perfectly fine if I had watched it then, because unless a movie being very, very boring makes you sad, and unless you have very raw wounds from the death of a parent, Woodshock will most likely fail to sway you in any meaningful way.

Since this comes from A24, the studio who brought you basically every critically acclaimed horror movie in recent memory, the hype has been rather high for this in certain circles, but it doesn't seem to be quite up to par with the rest of A24's offerings. Reviewers have mostly come to the consensus that it's a nice film but it's extremely empty, and more boring than poignant. I don't feel like it's bad enough to be categorized with the plethora of "fake deep" dramas that have come out recently, but it's getting there.

To be fair, I was trying to make sure there were genuine differences between it and any other films that I personally enjoy, but that I know could subjectively be called "boring", and I'm fairly confident that those differences do exist. Woodshock doesn't seem to actually be saying anything with those lengthy scenes in which nothing happens but everything is very pretty. The sole message culminating from all of its efforts at aesthetic purity seems to be "I am sad", and if we wanna be fancy, "I am sad because _____ happened", but more frequently it doesn't even connect the sadness to anything. The imagery in this is very free-floating and airy, and undeniably beautiful, but disconnected from the narrative and only there because it looks nice. Which is not a crime! I'm an advocate for putting things in films because they look nice. But this tries to be poignant and thought-provoking when in reality it doesn't provoke any significant thoughts at all.

There's also the fact that the subject matter is not revolutionary or anything you couldn't find in a different movie that takes a less roundabout, more conventional approach to its themes. Kirsten Dunst with flowers, Kirsten Dunst with butterflies, Kirsten Dunst crying in some nice lingerie. I could even raise the point that this movie has a lot of nerve to romanticize a white lady doing something terrible on weed while untold numbers of non-white people are wrongfully imprisoned for doing nothing wrong while on weed, or under suspicion of having been on weed. If you want to watch this because it's pretty and Kirsten Dunst is talented, go right ahead, just don't expect to actually be moved by it.

The Visitor in the Eye (1977)

directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi
Japan
100 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

So I'm a big fan of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, and like most people, my favorite movie of his is Hausu, because it's also one of my favorite movie in general. But he's also directed a substantial amount of short films that more closely follow the conventions of Japanese new-wave cinema, as well as some advertising work. I like to watch his shorts when I have nothing else to do because I can be guaranteed they'll be good. But I'm less familiar with his other feature-length movies, like this one.

The Visitor in the Eye appears to be based on some kind of manga that I've never heard of, and as such I think there's a lot of characters who are inside jokes from the source material that I didn't get the full context behind. The main character in the manga looks to be the roguish, Phantom of the Opera-looking mad doctor (played by the always fantastic Jô Shishido!) who is brilliant and successful but kind of broody and weird. But to me, not having any knowledge of this manga, the main character in this movie looks to be a young girl who gets her eye put out in a tennis accident and, upon receiving a replacement cornea, begins to have strange visions.

I think the reason why people don't talk about this movie as much as Hausu is because, to be blunt, it really isn't as good. I was hoping I'd come away from this telling people about a virtually unknown second Ôbayashi masterpiece that was equally deserving of love as Hausu, but it's just not all that. I absolutely love the way it looks, the cinematography has that painted-backdrop feel to it, unique to Ôbayashi, where everything looks vaguely fake but in a deliberate and aesthetically pleasing way. There's random screams for no reason and less surreal imagery than you might expect, but again, this seems to be an adaptation, so the director may have had less room to work with when it came to creative license. But despite looking perfect, there's no getting over the fact that this is just boring for about 95% of its running time. The beginning is interesting enough, but in the middle it lapses severely into a weird love triangle between the girl, her mystery dream lover, and the girl her mystery dream lover killed, and it never recovers. Good if you like soap operas, not so good if you like Hausu.

It also makes me really, really uncomfortable that the doctor character in this has a little girl living with him who refers to herself as his wife despite clearly being maybe six years old. I kept trying to figure out a way in which this was not disgusting- maybe she's joking, she's doing that kid thing where kids insist they're really adults because how dare anybody treat them like babies; maybe she's supposed to be a grown woman with a little kid body. But there is like no way to parse that that makes it not awful. I don't feel so bad about disliking this because that's just such a gross and bizarre element that I didn't understand the purpose of.

Lemme also leave a link here to where you can watch a bunch of Nobuhiko Ôbayashi shorts for free, legally, in case you also need to pass some time. "Emotion" is probably the best and longest on there, and involves vampires.

Where Have All the People Gone (1972)

directed by John Llewellyn Moxley
USA
74 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

A good movie for those who are fatigued from the Black Friday crowds today, considering it takes place in a world with almost no people whatsoever.

Apparently this was a made-for-TV movie, although its content is a bit different from what I'd think to expect flipping through channels for a movie to watch. It's about a band of survivors trekking through California after some mysterious solar event wipes out a large portion of the population, and up until its suspiciously optimistic ending, it's actually pretty grim. Save for Peter Graves' hair. You could power a whole city on how bright that man's hair is.

This movie shows a little bit of the American attitude of the time towards nuclear bombs and the threat of war, and the characters have an obvious bias towards their own country in terms of who they believe can and can't have a bomb dropped on them. They all have a kind of "immunity"/"accident" attitude, wherein nothing could possibly happen to the USA, they're "immune", so any nuclear disaster that might be to blame for their circumstances must certainly be an accident. I don't even think they refer directly to being bombed, they either say it's a nuclear accident or assume it's the army testing something nearby- which by itself has a lot of connotations about the license the military gets to do whatever they want, but I won't get into that now. At one point one of the characters is brooding about her situation and mentions having seen "some pictures of Hiroshima", but if she'd really seen those photos, she would have recognized that the area her group was in couldn't have been atom-bombed, because trees would be flattened and there would be significantly more smoldering wreckage in and around their persons.

This isn't a bad movie, and it's fun to imagine viewers in the 70s having their day interrupted by this drama about a group of people coming to terms with the death of their loved ones along with nearly everybody else in the world, but it's too lighthearted and vaguely nationalistic to feel like a good exploration of war or even a good exploration of solar flares. This certainly couldn't have been made today, considering how the widespread nature of the internet makes the importance of electricity even more dire now than in 1974. And the ending is almost comically out of left field- the characters disregard practical difficulties and suddenly assume everything will be perfectly fine. "Well, we'll just have to get to farming! What do you mean by minimum viable population size?"

From the Pole to the Equator (1987)

directed by Yervant Gianikian + Angela Ricci Lucchi
Italy
98 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Most of the time when I talk about found-footage movies, I'm talking about horror movies like The Blair Witch Project, [REC], or Cloverfield that claim their contents were "found" by somebody else in the aftermath of some terrifying event, usually on a battered camcorder or cell phone. But the term was used earlier to describe a particular kind of experimental film that re-assembles old, degraded film stock to form a narrative entirely different from that which the material originally depicted. The two directors of From the Pole to the Equator are quite prolific in this format, while some other notable names are Peter Delpeut, Pere Portabella, and individual films such as Mother Dao the Turtlelike.

Often, the goal of these films is to make explicit undertones that were never intended to come to light in the original materials. These films can be overtly political and I would go so far as to say that the format has its origins in radical leftist politics. With From the Pole to the Equator, the goal is to dismantle and examine the colonial gaze and the nature of tourism. The footage it employs has a heavy focus on early ethnographic work, the kind that was mostly intended to use populations of distant parts of the globe as showpieces to bolster the intellectualism of high-class white academics.

In the beginning, all we see is a series of trains, and then a montage of polar explorers shamelessly butchering various animals. The recontextualizing of these expeditions in which polar bears, walruses, seals, and other large game were shot puts human beings in a threatening light, and dehumanizes them to a great extent- the animals become helpless, the humans become strange figures with branchlike limbs and round heads who advance mercilessly to employ their killing machines against the wildlife. With no expressions they use their machines to trap the bears, machines to kill the bears, machines to haul the bears onto their sea-faring machines after they've killed them.

The footage isn't just presented without alteration, it's sped up, slowed down, and replayed in order to highlight each intricate detail in which the colonial gaze can be seen reflected. A woman shrouded in layers of clothing meant to shade her unacclimated skin slowly, very slowly, teaches a class of young children somewhere in Africa how to cross themselves, clasp their hands in prayer, raise their arms above their heads. Behind the camera, a phantom voice can almost be heard encouraging its subjects to perform whatever action they want to capture. Repurposing these travelogues and exposing the racism and othering inherent in them shakes out the pockets of these disintegrating nitrate films to give them one last chance to say their piece before becoming lost to time.

Kedi [Cat] (2016)

directed by Ceyda Torun
Turkey
79 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

If you ever find yourself considering the plight of humanity, then this is the film for you, because while we may be having a time of it right now, these lovely, beautiful, and talented street cats in Istanbul are not. Possibly there are cats in the city that don't have it as good as the ones in this film, possibly it's an unfair depiction of feline life. But it sure looks like the grand majority of them get taken care of like finicky pets who refuse to come inside.

This movie is as simple as the title implies, it really doesn't employ any special tricks or narratives to show the furriest citizens of Istanbul and the people who love them. You can even overlook the fact that it's a YouTube Red Original Movie (perhaps the only decent one?). This is a well-made and very warm-feeling portrait of a city through the eyes of those animals who live there "incidentally", who weren't brought there on purpose but who nevertheless made it home and continue to live alongside humans in a sort of semi-domesticated state- whatever it is, it feels wrong to call them "feral".

What struck me about the relationship between the cats and the people is that like I just said, the cats weren't something that was intentionally put into the city for the humans' benefit. We build movie theaters, fancy restaurants, bars, clubs, spas, salons, and anything else you could possibly think of in cities for our own amusement, and you could argue that we've brought dogs along as companions too. But the cats are just there for themselves, and the fact that people enjoy petting them, feeding them, and taking care of them is something that neither the people nor the cats seem to have planned, though everybody profits from it. We think about ancient Egyptian civilization as being the OG cat lovers, but from what I understand, there wasn't a whole lot of "owning" cats going on then, and the situation was much like in this film- cats went around and did what they wanted, and humans admired and cared for them, but only a few people actually kept cats like pets.

 It's adorable to see how every kitty has their own personality, usually inherent to them but supplemented by these mythologies that the humans made up- this one's a ladies' man, this one is tough, this one's a big baby, etc. It's lovely to see so many grown adults enjoying themselves in a lighthearted manner. The people gain something wonderful from living with the cats, and this documentary makes you wonder which of the two benefits the most from their interactions.

The Place Where the Last Man Died (2010)

directed by Ivan Perić
Croatia
86 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

One of the only Croatian sci-fi/horror films I've heard of. This takes place in the somewhat far future: the population is stated to have reached seventeen billion, there's been time enough to have at least one more World War followed by some kind of a plague or biological weapons outbreak, and technology has regressed to almost a 1950s-like level after much time and degradation. There's a whole lot of doom and gloom in this one and certainly a very realistic atmosphere of post-disaster societal breakdown, even though the most society we ever get to see is a group of four people.

The main character is responsible for ending the human race and seems quite happy with himself about that. From his narration we learn that as a military scientist he apparently had the means to wipe humanity off the planet, and decided to do it because he judged that too many people were suffering while a select few enjoyed paradise on Earth. Which does hit the nail on the head, but to see the only solution to it as... global genocide? Instead of redistributing wealth and resources from the pampered elite to those in dire need? End the world for all of us because life is unfair, instead of working towards making it fair? There's some shaky logic in that decision.

Predictably, because it would be more surprising to not have any stragglers, the main character meets some survivors. They all have on gas masks the whole time, which is a decision I had trouble seeing the symbolism behind, because it felt counterproductive: the gas masks, to me, suggested anonymity, when in reality it would basically be the opposite of anonymity to be one of four people who are maybe the last humans left alive. Because I couldn't see anybody's face, I couldn't get attached to them, and the acting seemed to suffer as well since I had no idea what expressions anybody had at any given time. I also mixed up the characters quite a bit as three of them are men who all have roughly the same build.

Like I said, this is impressive in how it manages to worldbuild with very little, just the Croatian countryside with some gritty filters laid over it and a whole lot of rubble and debris. I actually didn't care for the filter at all, because it looked like something meant for an industrial music video and not a full-length, professional movie. What's black and white and vaguely greenish all over? This movie. But it's still very interesting, and I'll watch basically anything post-apocalyptic, bonus points if it includes some horrible tragedy where humanity is decimated. I love that doom and gloom. I'd just like to have an actual story to go along with it.

The White Reindeer (1952)

directed by Erik Blomberg
Finland
70 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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It seems like there's a decent amount of horror movies coming from Finland today, but as far as early forays into the genre go, The White Reindeer is among the oldest I've seen. If there wasn't such a consensus that it's definitely a horror movie, I might not even regard it as such, but I guess certain elements- the air of general mystery, some weird vampire-like business, and a feeling of danger- do place it firmly enough in genre territory.

I was surprised at how little happens in the first half of this movie, and for maybe ~50 minutes you could watch this and be unaware that it has any kind of horror bits at all. The majority of it is just reindeer stuff. As a rule of thumb I don't trust dramatized films to have any kind of ethnographic bent or be an accurate window into whatever kind of cultural practices they attempt to depict, but there's shots in this that would have been difficult to show had they not taken place during actual, non-staged reindeer herding events. In other words, there's just too damn many reindeer in here for all of it to be staged. So if you're into reindeer and/or reindeer herding, this is the film for you.

The plot appears to have been based off of a folktale, and I'm guessing that the fact that folktales are often just large blocks of plot with little extraneous material between them is responsible for why it was necessary to spend so much time on filler to make this not be 45 minutes long. It follows the standard format of many folktales and fairytales where a woman gets punished in various ways for doing something deemed inappropriate for a woman to do. In this particular case, she gets lonely when her husband is away for a long time, so she takes matters into her own hands and visits a shaman who makes it so that "no reindeer herder will be able to resist her". Somehow this goes wrong and she becomes... basically a vampire, except instead of turning into a bat, she turns into a reindeer. For a brief moment her character wields power, escaping life as a woman and becoming an unstoppable reindeer, but she's eventually brought down in the end.

What was surprising to me was that this movie just feels so chill. It's very beautiful, and the score got stuck in my head all night afterwards which almost never happens with orchestral scores. It progresses down the road these things usually progress down, and ends tragically for everyone involved, but for a while there it's just fun snowy shenanigans. It stands out from cheesier 50s horror (and boy, did horror go through a cheesy period in that decade) by using lingering shots of faces and longer, tracking outdoors shots to create a haunting and sometimes powerful atmosphere. Black and white is probably the best format for this to have been in.

Litan (1982)

directed by Jean-Pierre Mocky
France
88 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

After having searched for somewhere to watch this for ages, it's different than I expected: I thought of something more rural, but this is too hectic to be bucolic, or to be much of anything other than oneiric and slightly distressing. The plot is anybody's guess, but it revolves around a woman and a man trying to evade certain death in a town inhabited by people with a drive to either put themselves in grave danger or injure others with reckless abandon. It's established that much of what happens during this film was foreseen by the main character during a dream just prior to the beginning of the movie, but of course nobody believes her because if you ask people in a dream if they're in a dream, they'll usually try to deny it, or at least that's been my experience, anyway. Whether or not this movie actually takes place in a dream is left open to interpretation.

The subtle hints of surrealism couched in more overt surrealism are a driving force here. We see several characters along the way who we never get to know the backstories of; like a cross-eyed man who pines for an undisclosed past life, a babushka-looking woman speaking a dialect different from all the other characters, musicians in skull masks, non-musicians in skull masks, the living dead, a guy who looks like Willem Dafoe and Peter Cushing had a baby whose second cousin is Robin Wright, and more. These people are encountered again and again, but the influence they have on the main character is either negligible or unclear. I guess you could argue that everything in the town is acting in sync to harass the main character and her companion- that the people are all only facets of a larger dream/nightmare who fit together like puzzle pieces.

Many people are in masks, doing strange, non-everyday activities, and supposedly this is because the protagonist and her travelling companion ended up in the town on "Litan's Day"- a holiday which Google provides no clues as to the existence/non-existence of- but this explanation seems feeble to me. It looks more like this is always how the town is, or at least that it's always how the town is beneath the surface, and on this day the true nature of the townspeople is allowed to be let loose. Everybody dresses up like death so nobody can figure out who the real Death is. This motif is represented by the overwhelming presence of the color red in almost every scene. Death could be everywhere- it is everywhere- but the layperson still can't tell where it is.

This whole thing is structured almost exactly like a dream in that it doesn't have a clear beginning or end and the main character seems to always be running from one place to the next with no goal in mind. Here is there, scene lays over scene so that many things can happen at exactly the same time. Narrative magic. Where the asylum ends and the rest of the village begins is not clear. Possibly the whole of the village is inside the asylum. The water is to be avoided. Possible better in concept than execution, but a good one for fans of Jean Rollin or some of Louis Malle's work.

1922 (2017)

directed by Zak Hildich
USA
101 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

This came out right alongside Gerald's Game, another Stephen King adaptation, which I'm assuming was done on purpose. I was surprised to see that it was directed by the dude who did These Final Days, a strangely bro-y Australian apocalypse flick, because the atmosphere of 1922 is the exact opposite of that. Which is admirable, and I was glad that that weird bro-ness didn't show up in 1922.

The first thing to know is that you will either absolutely hate Thomas Jane's performance in this or you'll love it. At first I thought he was ridiculous, but as it went on I realized that those affectations he was putting on for the role were exactly in line with how I heard Wilf's voice in the original short story, despite how silly it initially sounded to hear it out loud. Thomas Jane the actor is borderline unrecognizable as himself in this. Molly Parker could have (and did!) also contributed a great deal, but I felt she was underused.

I'm glad that so much of the dialogue was kept, because the way the novella was written is very specific and I don't think anybody else's words would have fit so cleanly with the idea of a 1920s middle-American dialect that King had constructed for his protagonist. But the one thing that I didn't see in this movie that I felt would have added a lot was the emphasis on the hatred Wilf feels towards the prospect of his river being sullied with pig guts. This may seem like a small detail, but it's mentioned repeatedly in the book yet is lost almost entirely in the movie, and it's something that stuck with me. Because when you think about it, when Wilf murders his wife for the sake of keeping the tract of land she planned to sell to the hog farm out of the hands of the butchers, he proves that he values hog guts (or rather, the absence of hog guts) more than he values his wife. He would rather have a pristine stream free of hog guts than a living, healthy wife.

The central murder was also underwhelming in the film adaptation of this story. I think it may have been intentional to show the murder as something relatively fast in order to highlight how one quick deed ruined multiple lives, but in the book the impression I got of the act was that it was a horrible, drawn-out process that none of the characters, no matter how jaded, were prepared for.

I gave it four stars, though, since I think this is enough of a complex and atmospheric film to stand on its own, but it doesn't escalate as satisfyingly as the book does, and the impression of something truly supernatural going on- in the way Wilf knows, actually knows things he couldn't possibly have known unless his dead wife quite literally rose from her grave and told them to him- is rushed, as is Hank's downfall. But I have to say that what I'm most disappointed by is the film's total refusal to recognize Stephen King's obvious fixation on the word "snood" that had been so memorable in the original material. Snood!

Rammbock: Berlin Undead (2010)

directed by Marvin Kren
Germany
63 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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So we start with the typical invasion/outbreak: The city is overrun, our protagonist is separated from his lady friend, and the newscasters begin spreading rumors of politically-motivated terror. The creatures in this film are not technically undead, just infected with a rage virus a la 28 Days Later, but considering that the term "zombie" in its root form never referred to a dead person, I feel fine calling the people in this film zombies.

One of the first glimpses of the zombies that we get to see as viewers is an infected riot cop preying on civilians, and regardless of whether or not there's specific intent behind it, I think the image of a zombified/ghoulified cop has meaning on its own. Later, in one of the news segments the characters have on in the background, we can hear somebody talking about the outbreak and asking "Is this Germany's 9/11?" It took me a moment to connect that statement to the film as a whole, and it still may have just been an offhand comment with no intention, but thinking back to the zombie cop gave me pause- because when I think of the response to 9/11, one of the first things I think of is widespread abuse of innocent people by law enforcement.

I think to some extent this movie intentionally looks at the way violence and terror attacks play out, using the zombies as a metaphor for an uncontrolled populace, but I'm not sure to what extent that message was specific to terrorism and what of it was simply done the way it was done because the writing was meant to portray the generic expected response to any national disaster. The curveball with regards to how the zombie virus develops- the fact that if you stay very, very calm, the disease won't propagate itself in you- makes me think about the mentality after a disaster that if everybody could just be rational, level-headed, and normal, nothing further bad will happen.

These theories of a representation of hysteria following a terror attack are thin threads that barely connect, but they were things spurring me on throughout an otherwise fairly unremarkable movie. I appreciated the total normality of the protagonist most of anything; that he wasn't an action hero but also not the played-for-laughs slacker made to face an insurmountable challenge, he was just a guy. The zombies themselves are particularly nice too- not too gory, not too stereotypical. I'd say this is a good example of the German zombie film.

Paperhouse (1988)

directed by Bernard Rose
UK
92 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

A lot of the people involved in this didn't go anywhere: its main actress never acted again, despite giving a fantastic performance here, and despite also directing Candyman and Immortal Beloved, Bernard Rose never made anything else of note, save for a modern-day Frankenstein adaptation that was so terrible it made me angry. It's unfortunate that this has to be viewed as a kind of cinematic isolate, but its influence on other films and the influences it took from other films mean that Paperhouse does at least live on in the realm of genre cinema as a whole.

It's interesting to see this widely interpreted as a coming-of-age film because to me, while I was watching it, it didn't seem like it was very specific about what age the protagonist was coming to or what exactly that entailed. It's mentioned that she's almost 11, she hangs out with a slightly older friend who she puts on makeup with, she mentions hating boys, et cetera; but all of this felt incidental. When you look at it more in-depth, though, there's a lot in here pertaining to how a child deals with adult issues- the titular house felt like a metaphor for a child trying to do adult things, for example. The house is mysterious and a little lopsided, it's cobbled together from what a kid imagines a "normal house" to look like, and it's something that the main character has to explore and figure out before she can begin to grasp how it works, like figuring out how to deal with autonomy and self-determination as you get older.

   

I was also very interested in how this film deals with childhood illness, and in fact I would go so far as to say that more than anything else, this movie is about childhood illness. Even though I never spent extended time in a hospital as a kid I felt like I knew the specific kind of hazy warmth and tiredness that the scenes where Anna is in the hospital conveyed: a feeling of comfort in being in a soft bed surrounded by cards and flowers but also anxiety at the same time, due to wanting to go home. Paperhouse as a whole has a vibe of taking place inside a bubble of childhood memory, something experienced once as a child and then possibly forgotten or re-contextualized as an adult.

   

Bernard Rose isn't opposed to using ambiguity to further the backstories of his characters, which is something I appreciated in this and also appreciated in Candyman. With that film, there are aspects of the killer's backstory that should be "impossible", but these facts don't preclude him from being a flesh-and-blood murderer anyway. And in Paperhouse, the fact that the majority of the action takes place during the main character's dreams doesn't explain it or make it have any less influence on the waking world. The lack of a drive to push things into little plot boxes and justify every act was a refresher from films that try too hard to ground themselves in reality in order to be scarier.

Double feature: Bread Dream (2012) / Teluki (2013)

directed by Abdul Zainidi
Brunei
13 minutes / 9 minutes
4 out of 5 stars collectively
----

I don't usually do this- "this" being review short films- but since there aren't too many films from Brunei available, I wanted to give these two some more recognition.

Bread Dream is the longer one, with Abdul Zainidi also playing the title role (I believe?) of a young man at that point in his life where his family becomes very demanding about his need to get a job and preferably also get married. Most of the film deals, whether directly or through metaphor, with the psychological stress of being a young adult who doesn't want to pursue the path one's family would have one be on, but it's not that simple. The director is apparently a fan of David Lynch and that comes out in Bread Dream's use of surreal imagery and what would appear to be total randomness- most notably a croissantphone. Which makes sense, if you think about it: You put a seashell to your ear, you hear the sea; you put a croissant to your ear, you hear a French person.

But the surreal imagery in this one seems to take after David Lynch in that it doesn't feel like it was put there because somebody thought "haha what if we had a talking croissant". It definitely feels like there was care taken in choosing what went where and when and why. I think I enjoyed this most of the two shorts.

Teluki is a story about a folkloric creature (called a Teluki) that takes and eats children. The fan response to it seems to be largely negative because apparently people can't get behind the fact that everyone has a different way of telling the story they want to tell and that way is not always filtered through a Hollywood studio with Matt Damon along for the ride.

Personally I love films like this where ghosts and other supernatural creatures don't look any different from humans, or I guess I should say that there's no aura around them suggesting they're anything but a human. The Teluki looks like a stooped-over, shambling old person in a black cloak that obscures their head and face, but otherwise it's perfectly corporeal, and this is my favorite way to depict anything paranormal. It's just like you and me, it has a physical component and is part of the world just like plants and animals and people, but because we're explicitly told that it is not a normal part of the physical world, we still believe it, even though our eyes tell us otherwise.

The short mostly seems to be viewed through the perspective of the child who's been taken, which is interesting. We see him as he does something strange with egg tarts (again, prepare for things to not always make sense) which appears to lead to the Teluki taking him. How this affects his family is briefly shown, and after he's taken he becomes a liminal being, but again, he still doesn't look any less like a normal human. I would love to see a full-length version of this or at least something longer than 9 minutes that explores these concepts but doesn't attempt to put shiny special effects on them.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

directed by Denis Villeneuve
USA
163 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I held off on writing a review for this until I had my thoughts together because it deserves more than just the initial hype I felt after I had left the theater. It is absolutely worthy of that hype, but it's also worthy of more than the one-dimensional praise I would have written had I written this review straight away.

I'm not an expert on this storyline- I've never seen the original, and I've only read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? once. But 2049 makes the series immediately accessible to anyone who happens upon it whether they have intimate knowledge of the context or not, and if I know anything about the internet and elitist film fans, that's not going to go over well; people will claim the film is pandering and making itself too easy. But after the title card lays everything out in simple terms, the next 162 minutes speak for themselves: this isn't an "easy" film, but it doesn't rely on holding things just out of reach of the viewer to be a work of art like so many other art-house pictures do.

The more I watch movies where society crumbles and nature retakes human-made structures, the more I realize that that is an ideal apocalypse, not necessarily the most likely one. There's a shot in Blade Runner 2049 of the landscape of "new" Los Angeles from above that shows endless blocks of grimy concrete structures with a handful of thin veins of neon light running between them, and it's far from the film's most devastating picture of post-civilization Earth, but I think it sums up humanity's place on a mostly destroyed Earth: clinging to those neon veins, but ultimately slowly joining the blackened apartment blocks and mounds of trash.

The imagery used in Blade Runner 2049 is incomparable. The lengths it goes to show us a planet wrecked by the decadence of a very small number of its inhabitants and the flimsy lives lead by the last people who now have to live in a polluted, inhospitable world are staggering. The scenes in the wreck of Las Vegas, those surreal, hundred-foot-tall sculptures of naked women, silent and open, a picture of desirable youth and health that now serves to titillate no one but colonies of bees, are singularly some of the best images I've seen in film this decade.

Personally I was floored by the depiction of apocalypse-in-progress, but there is also a very strong undercurrent running through this film that asks us what personhood is and how an artificially-engineered being might view itself in a world still relatively unused to the idea of its having any kind of independence at all. The debate about whether or not robots can have feelings and deserve rights is almost secondary, and now instead we turn to questioning which robots deserve rights, which ones we will accept responsibility for creating and which ones we have to convince ourselves are insensate and deserve a life of slavery. The viewer also has to contend with the prospect of not just robot life but holographic life- something that's not really been explored yet, to my knowledge.

See this. See it if you don't know anything about Blade Runner. See it if you hate science fiction. See it if you think you might fall asleep during a movie that's over two and a half hours long (a valid point, but it feels closer to 90 minutes in actuality). See it now, because while I advocate that viewing a film on an iPad screen doesn't change its inherent value, the experience of sitting back in a plush seat while this movie's irradiated neon haze and physically oppressive bass score washes over you is something you only get once.

Contact (1992)

directed by Albert S. Mkrtchyan
Russia
92 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I'd be lying if I said half the reason I watched this wasn't because its original Russian title, Prikosnoveniye, is one of my favorite Russian words (as someone who knows few Russian words). But it has appeal outside of that as well- the Grim Reaper-type skull on the poster art also had me interested in what this movie had going on. Which turned out to not be nearly as much as the poster would have you believe.

In the beginning it's a very standard crime movie where a chill cop investigates a murder-suicide because there's something stranger behind it. Unfortunately for the viewer this means there's a lengthy stretch of set-up where nothing is interesting and we have to watch a fictionalized idea of a cop go about his job. But fortunately, the boredom helps when the supernatural elements start to come in, because if you've been lulled into a trance by the lack of action, the gradual addition of the paranormal can give the whole film an almost phantasmagorical vibe, as if there was never any question that ghosts and other shades exist, and accepting their growing influence on the world is not a difficult thing to do.

I'm surprised at how similar this plot is to the movie Kairo. It seems to be implied that if the protagonist in Contact is experiencing these things, it means the rest of the world is next, which felt quite close to the weird global paranormal plague going on in Kairo. And the aims of the ghosts in both movies are similar enough that I have trouble believing Kiyoshi Kurosawa wasn't at least aware of Contact before making Kairo. But Kairo also has that component of internet-induced isolation that was a little bit after Contact's time, and in an entirely different context.

This movie also doesn't have the feel of being "just" a ghost story. It's possible to see it as a reflection on class systems in society. I'm not entirely sure how the fact that this came out shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union plays into that interpretation of it. But there's a lot of things that describe a place or a system that is only open to certain people- only the intelligent, strong, useful people get in, and people who are supposedly dumb, violent, brutish nobodies are left behind, with no chance of ever accessing it. It's implied that the world available to the "higher" individuals is so incredibly beautiful and meaningful that it makes normal human life seem like a disease in comparison, and- most importantly- people are killing themselves to get a chance to live that good life. What I'm saying is: that sure sounds to me like an analogy for capitalism and the myth that amassing more money will somehow make your life worth living.

Mr. Wrong (1986)

directed by Gaylene Preston
New Zealand
88 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

This slept-on horror film is very bad Friday the 13th viewing if you have intentions of getting into the Halloween spirit, because it's lacking in any kind of frightening images or lasting terror, though it's quite good nonetheless. I hope I've reviewed enough movies by women for it to be apparent that I'm not just saying this because it's directed by a woman. This is genuinely one of the most lovely, almost comforting horror movies I've ever seen and it takes talent and skill to make this sort of thing, the same way it takes talent and skill to make something disturbing.

Mr. Wrong is a take on the haunted car subgenre where a single woman buys a nice Jaguar after moving out of her parents' house in an attempt to be more independent, but ends up regretting it when it turns out the car may or may not be haunted by the ghost of a murdered young woman who previously owned it. Also present in the protagonist's life are several men trying to get up in her business- and one who isn't, but who, amusingly, always seems to get tied up in the doings of the more nefarious men, though he's harmless and only trying to hang out with a girl.

Like much about it, this movie's aesthetic is low-key, but it's got a look that's really gorgeous, although hard to pin down. I'm going to borrow a term from another reviewer here and call it "brass and woodwind", because that's one of the only accurate ways I can think to describe it even though it doesn't make much sense. It's this sort of analog, wood-colored, done-by-hand feeling. If you've seen Jan Švankmajer films, it's like that without quite the same level of intricate construction. Overwhelmingly brown but somehow not in a bland way.

The other thing people seem to agree upon about this movie is that it has feminist intentions, with one person even calling it "heavy-handed" in doing so. Part of me wants to argue that women protecting women shouldn't have to be labelled feminism, that it should just be what women do for each other, and a larger part of me wants to argue that if you do consider it feminism, women saving women certainly shouldn't be regarded as "heavy-handed". But mostly I agree that at the core of this movie are feminist beliefs: that women need to look out for one another, up to and including prioritizing women's safety over men's feelings. I think there does exist a narrative created by patriarchal oppression that women need to divide themselves over things like class, looks, race, life experiences, etc. and so the act of sticking up for other women in the face of that artificial division is, in a sense, feminist.

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

directed by Daniel Haller
USA
90 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

This particular attempt to adapt H.P. Lovecraft somehow lost the ominousness and creeping terror that accompanies the majority of his work along the way. A part of it takes place at Miskatonic University, and it's quite funny to see it adapted to the movie's time of release- it isn't some dark, clandestine academy full of cobwebs and secrets, it's a university with young folks, where you can go and browse the Necronomicon basically any time you want. The difference between this and other Lovecraft adaptations is honestly pretty jarring. Watching Ed Begley go on about other dimensions and the Old Ones is perhaps more amusing than it should have been.

It's interesting how many different interpretations there can be of one author's work. For somebody who obviously was very attentive to the way his writing came off, Lovecraft inspired media that ranges from being imbued with insidious horror to films like this version of The Dunwich Horror that are full of bleached, hairsprayed youths; mild women; the importance of upholding the law; and, I should mention, a disproportionate amount of randy nude rituals.

I ultimately wasn't fond of any of this, because even though it's a different approach to Lovecraft than is often taken, it still feels like a failure. It takes all the distinctiveness out of the source material and turns it into a monster movie (produced, of course, by Roger Corman). It's fairly well-made in a technical sense and actually has one of the most remarkably pretty opening credit sequences I've ever seen, but it falls flat as a horror story due to the generic nature of everything it tries to do. Cliche mental patient, cliche orgiastic rituals, cliche triumph of good over evil.

The #1 best thing about this movie is its portrayal of the title subject. I was expecting for this to either never show its monster or to pull out some rubbery octopus thing at the last minute. But- and I advise you to read no further, because not knowing the look of the thing is what makes it so surprising- it does eventually thrust the Horror itself into the viewer's faces, and it's not my favorite imagining of a Lovecraft monster, but for the time and for the ability of practical effects, it's one of my favorites. Only at the (slightly disappointing) end reveal do they show us a solid body, before then it's just a hallucinatory mass of squirming limbs. I appreciated the way that the color went haywire whenever it was onscreen because that lent another dimension to it; it felt like the creature was manipulating perception and reality in the way that original Lovecraft monsters should. This was, however, the only slight high point to an entirely flat and dull movie.

Lost in New York (1989)

directed by Jean Rollin
France
52 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I don't know a lot about Jean Rollin and I never really cared to watch his stuff, but I feel like I should because there seems to be a consensus among people who watch his movies that there's something else about them, something that goes deeper than the average Eurotrash flick would think about. I figured Lost in New York could be a good introduction to his work for me seeing as it's described as his "most personal" and is also very short.

It's easy to see that this is a pretty personal film because of the way it heavily deals with nostalgia and friendship, although the latter of those things is maybe not explored very deeply. It's about two little girls in an undisclosed time period who discover that they can transport themselves within the pages of storybooks with the help of an ancient(ish?) wooden idol of a "moon goddess". They can also transport themselves to New York, for some reason. I guess to two children, New York might seem as much a faraway fantasy-land as what they read about in books.

The deeper meaning of this appears to be that the girls are not only connecting with random stories through this moon goddess idol, but with the whole of womanhood/femininity (I don't particularly wish to equate the two, but this movie certainly seems to) as if it's one solid continuum that any woman can tap into. All minds of women are one, all stories about women are ultimately about one persona, one single All-Mother that contains multitudes: transcendent womanhood. It's not explicitly mentioned in the film that this is what's going on, but it's very obvious that the concept of a continuum of womanhood is the ultimate background for this story.

It's also worth mentioning that this doesn't delve into what truly makes up the experience of womanhood and the fact that for every single woman and woman-aligned person on Earth, that experience is vastly different and occasionally (in fact very often) is a massively oppressive thing. We don't get any deconstructions of forced femininity here, this is not a film aiming to produce social awareness or critique oppressive concepts. This is an almost airy-fairy meditation on the concept of We Are All One™ with a bit of flashy sexuality and generic "earth goddess" business. I appreciate it as a movie and I think it has several layers to it that I am probably not going to be able to unpack, but its message doesn't feel revolutionary or beneficial to women- which, granted, it doesn't have to be, because it's fun anyway.

Ju-rei: The Uncanny (2004)

directed by Koji Shiraishi
Japan
76 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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If I haven't mentioned this already: Koji Shiraishi is My Guy, that one director who I'll watch anything from no matter how obscure or how questionable the quality. He has a couple of movies that are just about pitch-perfect, and also some that are... less fortunate, but I love them all. Some of the poorer ones, I even like more than the better ones. And fortunately Ju-rei is one of the best.

I wasn't expecting this movie to be full of bizarre ennui, and yet it was. The opening scene stands out as striking in its absurdity: A group of four girls dance hip-hop style in front of a closed store window in the middle of the night, in perfect sync, for no real reason. I mean, presumably they're doing it to practice, but it just comes off, like I said, as girls dancing at night for no reason whatsoever. The tinny music, the lack of personalization with just the backs of the girls' heads facing the camera, the nighttime setting- I don't know why, but it feels like Something™.

The weird vibe of introspective dread doesn't stop there, either. The whole movie takes place on the cusp of something that feels decidedly horrific yet is only peeking over the horizon, much like the pair of ghostly white hands reaching over the side of the bed in one scene. It feels strangely like an epidemic is coming, like we're seeing a city slowly become gripped by some plague of horror, silently claiming its victims. The incidents all follow a single family and the people associated with them, but nevertheless it feels more widespread than that. It's a curse that doesn't stop once it's claimed one person. These are ghosts that hunger.

I don't think a single minute of this film takes place during the daytime hours, and that serves to provide the vast majority of its unsettling, uncomfortably "foreign" vibe. This isn't a pitch-black, "who's out there", can't-see-two-feet-in-front-of-you dark. This is city dark. Street lamps and lit apartments don't do much to dissuade the awareness that you're the only person out at that hour and no one is there if you need help.

The ghosts take after every single other Japanese yūrei movie ever, but who says that can't be creepy? Particularly frightening is a single-line insight into what happens to a person after those white hands drag them off beyond the end of the scene: somebody muttering about being taken "into the place with nothing...", a fate that rivals the distorted faces of victims of the Ringu curse in terrible implications. This movie will probably appeal more to people who already know that they like this type of Japanese horror, as opposed to those who are tired of it, but I recommend it because it has an ambiance that I really haven't seen anywhere else. This is as scary as the more famous Noroi: The Curse and much more compact.

Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (2011)

directed by Jon Foy
USA
86 minutes
5 stars out of 5
---

The Toynbee Tiles are a series of messages embedded in roads all over the upper east coast of the United States as well as South America. They're alluring because it's so hard to conclusively prove who did them, why, or what they mean. Nearly all of them read "TOYNBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE 2001/RESURRECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER", sometimes substituting "Kubrick's 2001" for "Movie 2001" but always referring to the same basic concept: An idea by historian Arnold Toynbee, shown in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, that the dead can be brought back to life on Jupiter.

I think the most compelling thing about the tiles is that it proves that at the tail end of the 20th century and even into the 21st, you can do something like this and there's still a good chance no one will find out who you are. In an era where it's relatively easy to find out who somebody is, where forensic technology and, likewise, technology used to do less scrupulous things like doxx people is on the rise and getting stronger, the Toynbee Tiles serve as a reminder that you can still disappear in the world. This is why the tiles are meaningful to me.

And this phenomenon is also a striking example of the fact that the world changes massively from generation to generation- one of the conclusions of the film is that at some point in the past, the Toynbee Idea was an active force, and the buzz around it today is merely a resurgence. In the early 80s when there were real efforts by the organization behind the tiles to get people involved, it wasn't just crack investigators ferreting out the smallest bits of information, there was a network of people associated with the idea, but now the people reviving the mystery are too young to know that, and the people who were around at the time aren't inclined to adopt new technologies. The true story behind the Toynbee Tiles is not dead, not erased from the surface of the planet- it simply exists in the minds of people who happen to be relatively difficult to find.

This is one of the best documentaries I've seen and one of the most sympathetic in its portrayal of someone who doesn't want to be found. Justin Duerr, the man who the doc focuses on the most, seems like a genuinely kind and understanding person fueled not by a desire to know who the hell this "crazy, delusional weirdo" is but to find someone who he admires and cares about. Too many documentaries about outsider art dehumanize their subjects when they assume that they are mentally ill or otherwise part of The Other, invading privacy and taking work out of important context because people who aren't in on it can't empathize with anyone they assume to have mental health issues. Resurrect Dead acknowledges the importance of respecting someone's privacy and individuality. This may in fact be my new favorite documentary on any subject, ever.

Frontier Blues (2009)

directed by Babak Jalali
Iran
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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So this movie is set in and around Iran's northern border with Turkmenistan, and it involves issues of both countries but the main theme is universal human boredom and isolation. It follows four different men (mostly- the other people around them are sometimes involved as well) whose stories overlap with each other as they go about their routines, stuck in a place where it's hard to live and be anything other than "stuck". This is not presented as overtly tragic nor is it something to look down on as inferior, it's simply a look at a region that's barren and dry in many senses of the word.

It's difficult to believe that this was Babak Jalali's first film because it's so good at framing shots and putting unspoken yet intimately understood information and implications in shots that, at first glance, just look sparse- people isolated against an expansive steppe landscape, a man and his donkey, life inside a chicken factory, all of these things become more than they are when put in the context of something like Frontier Blues. It not only has a keen understanding of what it's like to live in boredom but also a sharp and occasionally absurd sense of humor to accompany the feelings of loneliness on that frontier.

I really appreciate that Jalali is an Iranian-born director who put a character in this movie who is from Tehran and is a portrayal of the way foreigners come to someplace they deem to hold some element of exoticism that they couldn't find in their home country and photograph people in situations intended to show the reality of their country that are, in actuality, totally set up by the photographer, and not anything that would occur in real life. The Iranian photographer in Frontier Blues follows around a Turkmen guy and four children and tries to capture them living "authentic, majestic Turkmen life" which is really a background propped up by what the Iranian guy believes Turkmen life to entail. The Turkmen guy is not amused by this.

It would seem that in attempting to capture the folly of people attempting to capture the magical spirit of whatever region of the world they romanticize, this film has accurately captured something of the actual spirit of the few-man's land between Iran and Turkmenistan.

Blood and Carpet (2015)

directed by Graham Fletcher-Cook
UK
72 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

So this movie is about a couple who commit a murder in late 1960s England and have to deal with the dirty work of disposing with the body. Unfortunately- considering that this was the main draw for me- the story doesn't only follow the process of covering up the murder, but also covers marital disputes between the couple as well as their nosy "friend" and the wife's general dissatisfaction with life. All while they happen to have a body stashed in their bathroom.

It's very bare of set pieces or anything to embellish the visuals aside from some nice costuming and being shot in black-and-white, but this still feels novel despite the plethora of late-60s period pieces cropping up lately. It feels much, much more like a classic English play than a regular old movie; definitely don't go into this expecting schlock or anything less than actors putting in 110% despite the ordinariness of their surroundings. This is why I liken it to a play rather than a traditional movie: People acting the hell out of their script in a sparse, non-showy background.

Because of the divergence from the meat and potatoes of a conventional murder film, there's some stuff that doesn't feel satisfyingly resolved and some questions I wanted answered that weren't. If it's ever stated who the first body is in the beginning, I didn't catch it. I thought more than once that the characters were going to kill somebody and then the two narratives would join, because it looks like multiple different points in this film could plausibly match up to one another and ultimately lead to an explanation for why there's a body in the bathroom at the very beginning, but that body is consistently mentioned throughout the film, so nothing in it could truly have taken place prior to the events of the opening scenes.

I actually feel a little embarrassed for being confused by a modest 72-minute crime flick with a £3000 (about $4,060, less than rent for some studios in Manhattan) budget in which we know who the killers are and there's basically only two or three truly important characters. But I guess that could be seen as a good thing. I wasn't confused due to inept writing, it's just that even though it's lacking visually, this still manages to pack in a lot of angles that don't reveal themselves to a viewer all at once. It is also remarkably good at casting actresses who resembled the main actress for those shots of her as a child and an elderly woman. I want to wrap up this review so I'm going to stop talking now, but I wanted to mention that that final shot of the protagonist as an old woman was brilliant for many reasons, but largely because it gave us a connection to our time, it let us look at her as somebody whose story still existed in the present day after we had been contextualizing her throughout the whole movie as somebody belonging to a time firmly in the past.

Road (1987)

directed by Alan Clarke
UK
67 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I already knew that Alan Clarke was probably my favorite director working with television, but even so, this movie blew me away. There's no real props to speak of and very little set embellishment, but it does more with its sparse nature than the majority of movies I've seen recently.

There's nothing much that really happens in this movie: Some people argue, some other people make a very slow suicide pact, a guy rambles to you about The Good Old Days, some more people attend the world's most ominous-looking dance party- but it's what's being said that you have to pay attention to. I'm not kidding when I say that this is some of the best acting I've ever seen combined with some of the best writing I've ever seen. The actors deliver these monologues that are incredibly well-constructed and engaging, yet manage to avoid falling into the trap of "nobody actually talks like this" syndrome. It's the context and the situation that make that dialogue feel appropriate rather than silly. If they were speaking to another person it would feel a little overblown. But just people, walking along, ripping into themselves and the people around them and more than anything the state of the country they live in-  it's like nothing I've seen before. I'd like to mention also that a lot of work that went into this: One monologue was done sixteen times. A quarter of a mile walk and a scathing, emotionally raw speech that took sixteen takes to get perfect. And good lord does it achieve that perfection.

I think I've said something like this already, but I'm impressed that this was shown on mainstream TV. Here Stateside I'm used to anything with this much genuine anger and depictions of class struggle and dereliction being relegated to the loosely-defined sphere of the "underground" because criticism of government and displeasure with the capitalist system is not a worldview that garners favor among bigger-name studios and certainly not big-name television studios. "Road" is pain, real naked visuals of the consequence of a government that sucks out the livelihood from its people, this is a society with no prospects. Evidently this is life under a Tory government, and I'm not familiar with British politics, but I am familiar with the looks of things in Road, and I can agree that this is a state of being no pocket of any country should ever be forced to endure.

I do wish that this spoke to issues of class-based racism or oppression based on religion or status of being LGBT+, because it is overwhelmingly white. I appreciate wholly the focus on class struggle, economic depression, and its myriad of effects on one's life and being outside of just the usual "got no job got no money wanna drink m'self to death" that anybody can think up. But there is a whole other layer of oppression that this doesn't even touch upon, and I can tell that if it did, it could have done so powerfully and potently.

Bluebeard (2009)

directed by Catherine Breillat
France
80 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

This is one of those movies that earns five stars for not doing anything wrong. Each shot can be described as "painterly" and the tableaux of images it offers up, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, is rich in color and style. I knew that Catherine Breillat was a great director just from watching Fat Girl but now I think I should probably go deeper into her filmography.

This is an adaptation of the story of Bluebeard, a violent lord who murders all of his wives, and it's also a story in miniature of two little girls reading the tale between period-piece flashbacks of it happening. This adaptation of Bluebeard takes a considerably kinder stance on its titular character than the original, even though the sisters reading it seem to be more familiar with the tale in all of its violence as opposed to in the gentler version being shown onscreen. Bluebeard is depicted as a world-weary old man, a fatherly character to his much younger and consistently much physically smaller wives. He has a seemingly endless supply of kindness to give them- he tells the sister he ends up marrying that she can roam around the castle as much as she likes, he gives her her own small, secluded room when she requests it, though he would like to give her lavish riches and as much room in the castle as she wants, and overall he seems to just be thankful for her presence.

I think there are a lot of underlying statements about gender relations in this, and the fact that the unexpectedness of Bluebeard's kindness comes off as shocking may have been a statement itself: that we're at a point where it's surprising when a man isn't careless towards his wife or girlfriend. But it is inevitable that he does turn on her in the end, and the violence he exhibits when it comes time to do this isn't hateful, just... disappointed. It's almost like he's a symbol for how social conditioning allows any man to exert power over a woman just by default of his gender, even if he himself is a nice man and doesn't want any part of that. I think Bluebeard was a character who recognized that he had a great amount of status to uphold, not only as a lord but as a man.

The story of Bluebeard is not, however, entirely about Bluebeard, and it would be a big mistake to twist this review into something that only talks about him. In the story, the two sisters quite plainly do whatever they want, and this is shown and written in a way that's contrary to a lot of stories about "female empowerment" that put on airs; ones that pretend to be empowering and show girls that are advertised as having individualistic, forward-thinking mindsets, but in reality are shills for whatever beauty product is being peddled in that moment. The sisters in this film go out on their own, make their own choices, do whatever they want to do for them- up to and including marrying guys for their money, something often looked down upon as trashy. The Bluebeard story ends up having a semi-happy finish, but I don't know why I expected the rest of the movie to, considering Breillat.

Ring 0: Birthday (2000)

directed by Norio Tsuruta

Japan

99 minutes

5 stars out of 5

----

I've been burned by Ringu sequels many times, occasionally encountering ones that were so bad I couldn't finish them, so unfortunately that's the mindset I have whenever I check out a new one, since it never seems like they can match the quality of the original. But in Ring 0: Birthday, I've found something that not only matches the original film and builds upon the tone that it sets but may in fact be better than the original 1998 Ringu.

Ring 0 follows a human Sadako as she struggles to get past the trauma of her childhood by joining a drama troupe. I'm not as up on my Ring lore as I would like to be, so I'm not sure how much depicting Sadako as a normal yet stressed-out young woman goes against what was established in the first films. I also know that on a deeper level Sadako takes characteristics from older kwaidan stories, some of them folktales that have been in Japan for ages, and I don't know how well this movie reconciles a somewhat modern Sadako with her older origins. But I do know that this movie is a great case for the fact that dread is universal, and that even though it might not hold the same meaning to me as someone who never grew up hearing the specific ghost story that Sadako came from, I can still understand when this movie wants me to that something is terribly terribly wrong.

I'm surprised by just how terrifying this movie manages to render the prospect of having extra-sensory abilities like telekinesis and the ability to see the future, because the majority of movies about psychic powers tend to end up being goofy as hell. Ring 0: Birthday has its main character's brush with Fortean powers shown as something jarring, revolting; almost a body horror feeling.

I would argue that this film is frightening because it has an almost primal perspective on psychic ability: that the fear of premonition is an instinctual fear of violating the laws of the universe, which say people can't see the future, nor can they heal someone by laying hands on them. Regardless of whether one uses their powers for good or bad, the fact that they have them is an inherent violation of what should be true, and if you can do things that break the laws of physics, chances are the break isn't restricted to you. So I think a lot of the horror in Ring 0 lies in a fear for the status quo.

This film is dead serious where a lot of others use unnecessary screaming and inappropriate orchestral scores. It holds up incredibly well despite the 17 years between its original release and now. Hideo Nakata did a great job with Ringu and continues to do a great job with other movies, but Norio Tsuruta makes of Sadako not only the recognizable figure with long, thick black hair but also a deeply tragic figure whose fate was not under her control. And no matter how many sequels and prequels and loosely-associated films I watch, this is now my accepted version of Sadako. And I'll know from now on that she wasn't a child unceremoniously dumped into a well while either too confused or too young to fight. This Sadako fought hard, and it's the fact that she lost when she didn't deserve to that now casts a different light across all incarnations of her on film.

Ascension (2002)

directed by Karim Hussain
Canada
108 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

You may know Karim Hussain better as the cinematographer for several other very distinctive films, including Antiviral, Hobo With a Shotgun, Territoires, the recent and quietly successful We Are Still Here, and a couple of episodes of NBC's Hannibal. If you know him you know him: his sense of pervasive darkness is often the defining quality of a film, Hobo With a Shotgun excepted.

Ascension is an attempt to take on an absolutely massive concept: the murder of God at the hands of some other incredibly powerful entity, and the subsequent transformation of the entire human species into a race of little gods who can create miracles. Unsurprisingly, this is not used to mutual benefit- the world looks pretty grim. But I found it unrealistic that there wasn't actually more chaos, and it seemed like there were some unsaid rules to humanity's power. I would think that there wouldn't be any shortage of people who, for various reasons, would decide to end the human species as a whole if given boundless power. This alone is a great source of questions, because maybe if one person didn't want humanity to end, they alone could prevent multiple people from ending it? This is speculative fiction if ever there was any.

The one catch to such an immense and wide-reaching undertaking is that Ascension takes place essentially within the boundaries of a single stairwell in an impossibly tall building. This is actually what turned me off from watching the film for a very long time, but I don't want anybody else to feel the same way, because although the setting never changes much, it doesn't feel like it's confined to a stairwell. The three women ascending the stairs in order to kill whatever is at the top (which is implied to be God's murderer) converse among themselves in a way that not only offers us a bit of backstory on the world outside, but also a look into the prevailing worldview of the survivors of the "miracle plague" and, on an individual level, a look into the psyche of the women themselves.

There's a scene where all three women are in conversation where the actors are changed for a split second to completely different people, and the message behind this is fairly clear as far as I could see: that these people don't actually matter; the identity of whoever's going up those stairs to do that deed isn't a concern. The overwhelming feeling behind this movie is an utter disregard and even disgust for the physical, a statement of the meaninglessness of the body without action, the use of the body as nothing but a vessel for important actions to be performed.

I think this narrative works because there's so much left unsaid. The only time that ambiguity got on my nerves was the ending, which I felt was a little cliched and didn't seen satisfying, although I doubt if anything would have been given that this is basically 105 minutes of buildup. But the world this is based in, the bleakness of it and the uncertainty, is something that you can think about for longer than the movie runs.