Magic Story (1987)

directed by Lau Bing-Gei
Taiwan
85 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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It's too bad this doesn't go by its alternate title of Kung Fu Vampire Buster. So what if there's no kung-fu in the movie? It sounds cool. 

This movie is about a little boy who's a hopping vampire, and the efforts of various people- a Taoist priest, an autopsy technician/doctor/embalmer(?), a bunch of corrupt government officials- to catch him and use him for their own gains. Mostly, they want him because there's a reward for capturing vampires and bringing them to the doctor to study. But the clumsy doctor's assistant and the girl he's sweet on (who spends the whole movie dressed like a five-year-old) eventually begin to care for the mini vampire, and most of the film is spent with them trying to secret him away from people who just want to vanquish him or sell him to science. There's also a super-powerful lady vampire who shows up sporadically as well.

For all its comedy, this feels like a good and natural depiction of Chinese vampire folklore. A lot of movies made with intentions of showing off specific cultural traditions end up feeling really forced and awkward, but I'm not sure if there was any kind of push for Magic Story as a Taiwanese film to follow the more rigid guidelines for filmmaking imposed by China. So we get to not only see a lot of traditional Chinese vampire folklore but we're also presented it in a format that's fun and lighthearted.

But also, it's really concerning to remember that this adorable little boy everyone is trying to save is very dead. Like, something bad happened to him, possibly a long time ago, and now he's dead, can't speak, can't even walk properly, and will never get to enjoy being living again. Maybe the point of this is to de-anthropocentrize one's perception of the value of life as a human. But to me it seemed pretty tragic when I actually stopped and remembered that the littlest vampire is indeed among the undead.

Most of the time the plot does make sense to some degree, which is decent praise for a hopping vampire film considering how they can get too zany for their own good sometimes. Magic Story is outlandish and over-the-top slapstick, and uses a lot of visual gags that belong in cartoons or Three Stooges episodes, but to me it was still genuinely funny. It also features a song-and-dance number that's really cute if you can forget that it's about a dead child playing with a living one. Still, even though it's all meant as humor, less fatalistic attitudes towards death are always something I like to see.

The Ritual (2018)

directed by David Bruckner
UK
94 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I had just finished the book a couple of hours prior to watching this, and I thought it would be best to see the movie as soon as possible, because the book is the sort of thing that keeps you in a specific mental state for a while after you read it. I can't say the movie has the same effect, because reading a book obviously takes longer than watching a movie, but I think the film does do the book justice, for the most part.

The Ritual is a good, solid, refreshing horror movie, and even if you separate it completely from its source material it can stand on its own. We've all seen movies about strange things happening in the woods, but The Ritual handles it in a way that imparts explicitly upon the viewer how old, how unlike anything else on Earth, this particular forest and what it contains is. The film is prone to big gestures, to going with things that almost seem too dramatic but work anyway. Thankfully, the full reveal of the thing in the forest is kept tantalizingly away from viewers until the right moment, but beginning to end, this movie deftly juggles subtlety and absolute terror.

I was very curious to see how they would adapt the second half of the book because even while I was reading it, it took me a while to get adjusted to the tonal shift between the first half (in the forest) and the second half (in the house). They did change a whole lot about this second half in the movie, and I actually feel like this is where it makes its biggest mistake- instead of having the four specific characters that the book has, the movie puts in a gaggle of essentially anonymous cultist types, and I think involving that many people ruined the sense of isolation a bit.

The book was really about it, Moder, the forest God, whatever you want to call the thing in the forest, even when it didn't seem like it. Even in that second half when our attention is briefly shifted to Luke's attempts to escape from some people with bad intentions for him, it commands everything behind the scenes. Unexpectedly, this absence of the explicit presence of it renders it into an even more powerful force, because the book manages to impress upon us that it's always there somehow, and its presence dwarfs Luke's struggles. I didn't get this in the movie, nor did I see the full mythology- the people in the attic, for example, are shown in one very good and true-to-source scene, but they're not explained adequately, and are turned into an isolated disturbing image rather than an important facet of an ancient belief system. All of these are flaws that only present themselves if you've read the book, however.

This is genuinely a scary movie, and like I said, it feels really inventive and fresh despite its basis in the "friends on holiday encounter horrors" trope. This is the first time in as long as I can remember that jumpscares have actually managed to surprise me. All the acting is also perfect and visually it's a treat. Basically: please read the book because it's fantastic, but please also see the movie because it is also great but in different ways.

A Photograph (1977)

directed by John Glenister
UK
75 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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A single photograph is the catalyst for the events of this installment of Play For Today, but its complexity isn't limited to just the photograph. It opens with a man receiving an unmarked envelope containing an unmarked photograph of two girls sitting in front of a caravan. He doesn't know the girls, he doesn't know the caravan, he doesn't know anybody in the town the envelope was sent from, and neither does his wife. But the photograph drives an already-there wedge between the two even deeper, until eventually "I got this weird photo in the mail today" escalates into "I only ever married you because you were pregnant and then you went and lost the baby".

But like I said, there's more to this than an ugly quarrel. As with a lot of the British made-for-TV movies I've seen, I was surprised at the layers of social critique that are nowhere to be found in the American television I watch. There's an underlying theme of how mentally ill women are socially stigmatized and how they perceive themselves, which was very interesting because it was such a vastly different cultural response to mental illness than I'm used to. 

Certain elements of thinking about mental illness in this film were attitudes that I wish could be transplanted into American society, such as the way it's explicitly understood that mental illness is not a fault in personality but an actual, physical sickness, but some of it was alarming. There's a very gendered feeling of "this isn't who I am", which, to an extent, is also a good thing, because depression does change a person, but it's also tied up in a need to hurry up and rid yourself of your depression as if it was a nasty haircut you had to grow out or a mole you want to have removed. This attitude seems to place a lot of the blame for not getting better fast enough onto the individual and ignores the root causes of unhappiness.

There's also a vibe to this that, like a lot of Play For Today episodes, is extremely subdued but at the same time more unsettling than a whole lot of more on-the-nose horror films out there. Somehow the mystery of the photo is an immediate and threatening thing- the presence of these two completely unknown girls is so obtrusive that they might as well be there in the flesh, staring unblinkingly at the couple, taunting them to figure out their identities. This tone of mystery is preserved throughout the whole thing, even right up to the end when all the loose ends are basically tied up; even when we see who orchestrated it and know the truth behind the girls, there's still a lingering feeling of something having happened that's very not right. 

The Passing (2015)

directed by Gareth Bryn
Wales
87 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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The story begins when a young couple crashes their car in a river while on the run for some mysterious reason and are taken in by a guy named Stanley, who lives alone in a dilapidated old house. He's a bit of a strange guy, and he digs a well. That's just what he does; works on the well. Stanley's got a bit of that "creepy old reclusive caretaker" vibe that I might more strongly associate with a watchman at a cemetery or something, but as it turns out Stanley is pretty much the least disturbing thing about this whole deal. His past is more tragic than anything else, but his secrets are no less deep, either.

The Passing has an overall very strange atmosphere, but it takes a little while to really "become" something- for a long time nothing happens, but everybody is still very shifty and suspicious for no reason, and there's a meandering softness to everything that some might describe as "wishy-washy". You want it to commit to something or make some big statement so you can get into it, but it just keeps drifting around through sheer curtains and misty rains and mossy ground. This is a big Atmosphere™ movie in general; if you've seen Woodshock, I feel most comfortable comparing it to that in terms of how the imagery is more outspoken than the storytelling.

An underlying theme in this is the point when a guest begins to transition into an invader, and how much you can bend a person's hospitality before you start to outright abuse their generosity. The couple stays with Stanley for what's implied to be a long time and eventually they seem to get to thinking his place is rightfully theirs, and they aspire to take it over and live largely off the land like he does because of what I mentioned before about them being on the run from something. The reveal of what they're on the run from is truly great, by the way, a real shocker moment and wonderfully disguised by the rest of the film leading up to it. Yet when it's made clear what their secret is, a lot of things suddenly make more sense. That's how sudden twists should be.

The ending is as ambiguous as everything that came before it, with a kind of "did it really happen" edge to it that I would typically eschew but didn't mind here because it didn't feel like it lessened the importance of the events of the film. It's a kind of half-place that doesn't seem to be either wholly psychological or wholly physical, a liminal space existing in between the two. I think this is probably my favorite Welsh-language movie as of now, but I've seen so few that I'm welcome to having that opinion challenged.

The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

directed by Julius Onah
USA
102 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I'd advise you not to read this review if you haven't already seen the film, because I think this franchise is deliberately going for the effect of being much better if you don't know anything about the movies beforehand.

In classic Cloverfield fashion, the lead-up to this film's release was non-traditional: first a trailer dropped during the Superbowl, and then it was on Netflix in full after the game. That's kind of a bold move for Paramount and everybody involved- the experience is vastly different between going to a theater and seeing the new Cloverfield, and firing up Netflix on your iPad and seeing the new Cloverfield. I'd like to be less ambiguous about whether or not I think it's a gamble that paid off, but unfortunately I'm not wholly certain it did.

I kept comparing this to Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane, which I know was wrong, considering how the franchise seems to be moving in a direction of mostly self-sustaining films, but I did it anyway. And I came to the conclusion that the reason The Cloverfield Paradox feels different from its predecessors is because by now the jig is up. 10 Cloverfield Lane worked so well because if you went into it with no idea what it was about, you could genuinely get caught up in the story without wondering where the connection to the first film was. But with The Cloverfield Paradox, you know that sooner or later the monsters are going to show up, and all you have to occupy your time before that happens is a somewhat undercooked science fiction film.

This isn't a bad movie at all, and I don't want to imply that, but around 40 minutes in I just found myself wanting it to commit to something. It doesn't feel like it develops any one storyline enough to be satisfying. The things that happened, barring a few logical progressions, mostly seemed like weird for the sake of weird. Why would crossing over to a mirror dimension make a wall consume a guy's arm, and then reanimate the arm with a consciousness of its own? Why would it make another guy explode into a shower of worms? There's no reason for most of the strange things that happen in this film to have happened, and no explanation for any of it besides "we're in another dimension so stuff is weird now I guess". But why would a dimension that seemingly did not diverge in any significant way from ours also have conscious talking arms? This is a question for the ages.

The ending is excellent, though, and it definitely gives everybody what they came for. It's a payoff that makes the other 90 minutes feel slightly more worth it. But the severe lack of explanations and the random, uncontrolled way the plot seemed to progress at times made me question what in the world the director and writer were doing. If there is another Cloverfield film, I will definitely still see it, but at this point it'll have to do a little bit better than this to not make me feel like I'm just waiting around for a scene like the one at the end of The Cloverfield Paradox.

Fires on the Plain (2014)

directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
Japan
87 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Shinya Tsukamoto might be my favorite director of all time, I've seen almost all of his movies and I love them all. But I categorically dismissed Fires on the Plain when I first heard about it because I saw that it was a war movie, and mistakenly thought I wouldn't like it because of that. I was also hesitant because this is a re-interpretation of a book that I've never read, that was also made into a more famous movie by Kon Ichikawa that I've never seen. I shouldn't have doubted my favorite director, though.

It is about a group of Japanese soldiers in the Philippines in the last days of WWII, trying to survive the combined forces of faceless American attackers, local guerilla groups, and the harshness and scarcity of their environment. Tsukamoto himself plays the lead role, and I think he's the best he's ever been in it. This whole film is one of his best, and by the French acclaims in the opening credits, it looks like maybe "high cinema" has decided to finally give him the recognition he deserves as well.

Saying that this is a harrowing film is giving only a sparse description of exactly what it entails. It's at the same time very typical of the director and also very new for him. This is a strong contrast to his earlier works that focus on scrap heaps, rusty metal, car crashes, and all manner of things industrial, but a lot of the same trademarks carry over, like those scenes you find in the Tetsuo movies and others where the cameraperson basically throttles the hell out of the camera in the middle of loud noises and twisted metal. The difference is instead of hunks of steel and concrete, the camera is throttled in the midst of thick jungles, gunfire, and human flesh.

The transition from an urban/industrial environment to a jungle environment is really interesting to see here- I was thinking a lot during this about the temporality of war, the delineation of it. The backdrop of this film is strikingly green and beautiful, and when the blood and guts are absent from the shot, there's no visible differences between the thick forest in this and the "untouched" greenery advertised in tourist brochures to get people to come visit. There's the war fought by heads of state and country in far-removed war rooms, and then there's the war fought by the individual soldier. A good portion of the beginning of Fires on the Plain consists of men fighting over yams or trying to acquire more yams. Is that war? Does that count among the plans governments make to occupy one another's territory? I think one of the messages of this is that no matter how anybody plans out a war, there's always going to be individual soldiers enduring unimaginably dehumanizing conditions like shown in this film.

This feels extremely personal as well, and I deeply respect it in terms of filmmaking, because everything comes together so seamlessly to create something that looks and feels traumatic. Half of the ideas about the temporality of war I talked about only came to me because I just had to break my focus from what was onscreen from time to time. This is definitely not a good introduction to Shinya Tsukamoto because it's so unlike the rest of his work, but it's also definitely one of his best.

The Imp (1981)

directed by Dennis Yu
Hong Kong
95 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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At the risk of sounding like one of those people who tries to compare everything to Eraserhead, this movie reminds me of Eraserhead. Not because it's surreal or nightmarish or involves a protagonist with a distinctive hairstyle, but because both movies deal with the anxiety of new fatherhood manifesting itself as a bizarre, possibly supernatural encounter or series of encounters. The main character in The Imp is an underpaid night security guard with a pregnant wife at home, and while his anxieties may not specifically be towards the prospect of having a child, he's certainly got enough on his plate in the prospect of taking care of a child to warrant a stress ghost sighting or two.

Something about this movie feels "with it"; not in a hip, slang-abusing way, but in a way that feels strangely modern even now, almost 40 years removed from its release. I got some vibes from this that reminded me of movies like Candyman or The People Under the Stairs, or other 80s/90s horrors that take place in "urban" environments. It's dated, but it holds up well as a respectable time capsule of its era, genre, and origins. The humor is zany but also universally funny through the use of occasional non-sequiturs, like a character wearing a shirt that says "Am I A Girl?" and then later one that says "NO! I Am A Man".

There really aren't a lot of imp sightings at all in this movie, but the payoff is good. When we do see the physical manifestation of the spirit, it looks surprisingly striking. And in the meantime we get these ridiculous, overblown death scenes, guys elaborately choking to death on food and bursting into flames inside their cars, stuff like that. For a Hong Kong horror movie, this unfortunately doesn't have much in the way of ooey-gooey practical effects, but at the climax there is a ghostly visitation scene with some genuinely creepy prosthetics.

All in all I really did enjoy this one, barring a couple stretches where it got either boring or off-topic and lost me for a bit. It's a little bit goofy but never enough to get in the way of taking the film seriously or make it feel entirely like a comedy. I always love seeing movies deal with specific types of supernatural entities that are separated from the typical Western construct of "ghost", and I like them even better like this when the supernatural just is, and the reason why it's there isn't overly important.