The Head Hunter (2018)

directed by Jordan Downey
USA
72 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Where did this come from? I generally am leery of medieval dark fantasy films because for some reason I can't stop noticing historical inaccuracies, but at heart I really do love that stuff. It's just hard to get it right, and boy does this one get it right. This movie is so good; I get why people say it seems like it would be better as a short film but also I would absolutely watch 100 more minutes of this sad beardy man chopping heads off monsters and grunting.

I've said in the past about certain films that they're good because they really have no room to be bad, and this is a prime example of what I mean when I say that. Two actors, little dialogue (aside from the grunting), primitive practical effects, and it's excellent. I personally enjoy films about solitary people in which they stay solitary for the whole film, because there's no unnecessary interpersonal drama, and although it can be difficult to make an entire movie focusing on one person, The Head Hunter does it well because that person has such good screen presence. A movie can be one dude hunting monsters, doing occult stuff, distilling corpse juice, and not having any help with any of those things. And this doesn't mean the film lacks story- for example, all without the presence of other people, it's established that the kingdom the hunter lives on the outskirts of has a bit of a monster problem, and every so often they seem to send out notices that a particularly brutal beast is roaming around and hey, if anybody cares to go chop its head off that'd be just great.

Aesthetically this film is perfect as well. So much detail packed into such little space. I feel like I needed a slow lingering video tour of the hunter's little shack to give every small object and nook & cranny the attention it deserved. The hunter himself is practically a walking set piece- his armor may not, again, be historically accurate, but it makes him look super cool.

It blows my mind that the people who made this also made Thankskilling of all things, but it goes to show that an interest in practical effects, even if used to make something goofy and non-serious, can be channeled into something meaningful as well. You don't just watch the hunter emotionlessly kill monsters, there's a real sense of the mental and physical toll it takes on him. This movie is what I might call well-rounded. What it lacked in budget and profusion of actors, it made up for in pretty much every other area. I want to say that I didn't like the twist ending but honestly... that last line was just so perfectly diabolical in a cartoonish way that I loved it.

Radioactive Dreams (1985)

directed by Albert Pyun
USA/Mexico
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This is one of those movies I don't know how I haven't seen already because its plot is just so inherently good: two guys are stuck in a bunker for 15 years during and after a nuclear apocalypse, their only reading material being pop culture stuff from the 40s that their fathers left there. When they finally break out of the bunker, they decide to become private eyes. As you do. This seems like a fantastic way to stay sane: instead of pining for a world you never really knew that doesn't exist anymore, adapt to the world you've spent 15 years imagining yourself into.

The world the pals emerge into seems to be one where everybody more or less had the same idea as them, only their decision to adopt different personas is probably built more off of a loss of grip on reality as opposed to a coping mechanism to hold onto it. Everybody has made of themselves whatever they wanted to be but couldn't due to "society": throwbacks to the 60s and 70s, foul-mouthed children in white disco suits, cannibals, motorcycle gangs, anything you can imagine or ever desire to be is somewhere in the wastelands of post-nuke, post-pop-culture America. Crucially, the two boys were left with the keys to the single remaining nuclear missile not detonated during the war, which of course leads to an all-out death race to get to them first.

The question of how people got the electricity to power such utterly extravagant rock shows, nightclubs, fog machines and other 80s necessities was big in my mind at all times during this. But there's something I inherently love about a society that, collectively, decides to use what electricity and infrastructure it can scrounge out of the wastes to build a world of hedonism and neon lights instead of slaving away in the dirt and rebuilding society in a "reasonable" manner. This is a "enough with subsistence, we want to party!" type of living. Evidently nobody is all that great at actually getting food, judging by all the cannibals, so it is clear that more energy is going into party time than the basics of life, but hey, if you use all your energy to power your guitars, you won't have any left over to launch the nukes.

How people were getting their electricity wasn't the only plot hole in Radioactive Dreams, though. For one, how the two kids actually survived in a bunker for 15 years was never really addressed. The idea of a life-and-death struggle for the keys to the last bomb didn't make a lot of sense either considering that in the introduction it's stated that, during the war, every single bomb was detonated. If it took every bomb on the planet to render the world into a barren wasteland (with streaks of spandex and hairspray here and there), why does it matter if a single bomb is left over? What could one bomb do that every other bomb hadn't already done? I suppose it could have been a rare, ultra-huge bomb capable of ending civilization for good, but that's never explicitly said. This film is 100% style over substance, despite being built on an interesting plot, and you know? That's how it should have been.

Excursion (2019)

directed by Martin Grof
U.K.
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I watched this without knowing much about it, didn't look up reviews, just read the plot and it sounded funny to me so I threw it on. A Czech communist from the 80s traveling to the present time to make sure communism is still doing okay? That sounds great. Typically when I watch things without knowing anything about them I get burned, because I rely heavily on Letterboxd to tell me if something is at least watchable, which is why I was very surprised that A. This movie is excellent and B. It is not on Letterboxd at all.

I think I can say with confidence that this would not pass muster if judged by an actual Czech person, as it was made in the U.K. and doesn't have any Czech actors. They all seem to be speaking the language okay, but as soon as they switch into English they either lose the accents almost entirely or put on a Generic Slav™ accent. While personally I thought this was a good movie, if I were Czech I might feel a little insulted by all this, even though the film doesn't really make any broad statements about Czech people as a whole; all it does is bungle their accents. The way I got past this was by thinking of the whole thing as a kind of thought experiment- it doesn't matter what accent everybody has or doesn't have if their only purpose is to serve as a cog in the metaphor, not to actually be any particular nationality.

The quality of the film falls off a bit once the third character, Alexandra- and her terrible wig- shows up, because up until then there was little room for anything to be truly bad: the set looked really nice, the color palette was subtle and nothing clashed, and the back-and-forth between the two versions of the same man was intriguing and didn't reveal too much all at once. I liked Alexandra a lot as a character, however I think 99% of Excursion's budget went into cameras and editing, which left them approximately $1.50 for wigs. I used the thought experiment excuse to rationalize this as well: "All that matters is that this character is a different version of herself, and the wig is there to remind us of that, not to look perfect".

Given all of this, I can't say I'm confident that the whole "yo communism still good?" plot was the best way to go, seeing as it doesn't seem like the filmmakers had access to everything they needed to make it 100% believable, but at the same time I enjoyed this film so much I didn't care if it was believable, it was good. I was willing to suspend my disbelief in favor of getting absorbed into this idea and these characters, because they all had screen presence despite their shaky accents. Maybe half of my enthusiasm about this is due to expecting garbage and getting something much better than garbage (it wouldn't be the first time I've gotten false hope about a film due to that) but I'm sticking by my assertion that this is an ambitious and interesting movie that I was very fond of. 

The New Gulliver (1935)

directed by Aleksandr Ptushko
Soviet Union
75 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Where do we draw the line between propaganda and a film with a strong political message? Is there a line or can any film with political undertones be considered propaganda? I'm not sure why it never occurred to me to think about these things before, but after The New Gulliver, I definitely am.

So this is a communist retelling of Gulliver's Travels, and that fact is very obvious- the film begins with a team of young scouts loudly extolling the virtues of labor, setting out to sea on a boat they all built and are crewing together. One of them is gifted a copy of Gulliver's Travels, and shortly after, he begins to fall asleep and imagine himself marooned on an island full of capitalist Lilliputians who he eventually saves from the error of their ways. I think a big part of the propaganda distinction is whether or not the media in question attempts to rewrite history: this isn't true for all propaganda, as it's often so subtle you can barely notice it, but a big red flag is when a film tries to make it look like the political party it's supporting is the only good thing in the world. Fortunately The New Gulliver does not try to make us believe Gulliver's Travels was a communist allegory from the start, but it is guilty of engaging really heavily in the promotion of colonialism.

If I were rating this solely on the quality of the stop-motion puppetry I would give it an instant five stars. Aleksandr Ptushko spent three years on the animation and it shows in every single frame. It's not just detailed, it has details stacked on top of details- my mind was fully blown during the scene where they show people even smaller than the Lilliputians. The intricacy (not realism, but intricacy) of the puppets is amazing, their range of motion and expression, the way no two characters- even in a crowd- look the same is just so admirable that I'm saddened to think of this film being overlooked because of its political message. Even if you watch it on mute, you have to see this puppetry some way or another. Some of the puppets apparently had 200-300 different heads that were switched out to create the expressiveness that you see in the film.

It also needs to be said that the young lead actor is doing a genuinely great job. Not just the kind of awkward child acting you see in fantasy films often, but really grasping his role. I found out just now that the actor himself was killed in action nine years after this, in Tallinn. I was already thinking a lot about how practically everyone involved in making this would be gone by now, but that fact really makes it upsetting. Watching movies made during a time of upheaval or in a place that was undergoing instability, even if the films themselves were produced in wealthier areas that saw little chaos, is always kind of a strange experience because of the knowledge of what was going on in the lives of the people who would be watching these films.

The Wind (2018)

directed by Emma Tammi
USA
86 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I had been looking forward to this one for a long time with high hopes, and I always, always want to see more women-directed horror, so I'm going to be gentle, but I'm also not going to skirt around the fact that this let me down a little. This is entirely my fault, or almost entirely- I had an idea of it that was impossible to live up to, and I still think it's a great and well-made film, just... not quite how I expected.

So I was under the impression that this was a remake or at least a tribute to 1928's "The Wind", but after watching it I'm not so sure about that. I kept thinking to myself "They wouldn't do THAT in the 1920s", so unless the entire thing got a drastic overhaul and is only a remake in spirit or, like I said, a tribute, I don't see how the two could be related. Cousins, yes, but not directly related. That being said, the thought of what a film with these themes might be like in the 1920s was a good springboard for other thoughts about the way frontier living was perceived versus how it's perceived now. In an older film, themes of intrusion upon the privacy of a homesteader living in newly white-settled land would have been recognized and portrayed as an infringement of personal property, something the settlers had an assumed right to. But now, I think we're (at least somewhat) moving away from a romanticized idea of the Wild West, and I think it's impossible to look at 2018's The Wind without reading at least a small bit of settler colonial guilt into it.

This movie is billed as a kind of psychological horror/western, which may have been part of why I was hoping it would give me The Witch vibes, but it's not quite in-depth enough to get under your skin like that. The thing I found really strange about it was that despite its attempts at doing a slow-burn, my favorite parts of the film by far were when it felt like a traditional horror movie. The scenes with the reverend were excellent, and everything towards the last quarter of the film where the protagonist is confronted in a more direct way with the thing she's been battling against was also very well done and were some of the only parts of the film I really felt engaged with. I couldn't get behind the nervous pregnancy stuff or the weird antagonism between the four characters. The only things that moved me were when you could see for certain that there was a demon or something out on the plains.

I feel like this movie could also have benefited from either a totally linear plotline, or more distinction between when the scenes we were seeing were taking place, because at times I had no idea whether I was looking at the past or the present. But again, I really did like this film and I felt like there was vision and passion behind it for sure- Emma Tammi is going places without a doubt. I would love to see what she can do in something that isn't a period piece and something that presents its horror in a more straightforward way than The Wind.

Siren (2016)

directed by Gregg Bishop
USA
82 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I resisted watching this when it first came out because of its poor reception, but hey sometimes you get really bored and need a movie to watch. The original short was definitely not my favorite from V/H/S, but Hannah Fierman's performance as the "monster" was very memorable, and as long as she would be reprising her role, I had at least some small hope for Siren.

I knew it would be from the start, but this is a very misogynistic film. The catalyst of the plot is how men treat women as their conquest. The entire thing is almost ritualistic: the stag party, the last night before they're chained unwillingly to one woman and forced by societal expectations to stay with that woman, "fat" as she may be (as claimed by one of the bros). The final chance to prove your manhood by going to seedy places and claiming strange women. It would be nice if the titular creature acted as a subversion of that, but she's another stereotype that wouldn't exist without misogyny. All she really is is men's fear of women viewing them the way men view women.

As an expansion of the original short I think it does a good job because it brings in more mythos behind almost every aspect of the original, plus, like I said, without Hannah Fierman there would be no Siren. I liked seeing more of the nightclub, even though "shady, occult nightclub" is kind of a cliche at this point. Sometimes the dialogue is extremely funny, and even when it's not, the actors are good enough that they felt like real people (which is sometimes a bad thing). That's about all the realism there is in this, though, which leads me to my final point and possibly biggest grudge against it, outside of the misogyny: This movie is sometimes really cheesy right where it hurts the most. 

The CGI itself is not as bad as it could have been, but I'm unused to seeing characters with wings and a very... prehensile tail in a film that I am supposed to take seriously. The Siren's singing was also horribly underwhelming and honestly I would have much preferred if they'd gone in sort of a metaphorical route. All in all I feel like Siren doesn't quite have the impact it should have, but then again I can't even tell if they were trying to have an impact. For something with elements of the taboo and boundary-pushing, it feels remarkably tame.

The Burial of Kojo (2018)

directed by Sam "Blitz" Bazawule
Ghana
80 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I was excited to see this on Netflix because I think I've only seen two films from Ghana (the other, Nakom, was a favorite of mine). I think Netflix is too focused on multi-million-dollar deals for producing mediocre TV series to ever become a truly viable option for distributing films made by people who otherwise wouldn't get their films screened internationally, but here and there are some gems from places other than the U.S. and England, and The Burial of Kojo is one of them.

You really shouldn't go by what Netflix says about this film because it makes it out like the titular burial is the one main event in the film, when in reality it's something that the film eventually builds up to that only happens towards the end and takes up far less time than the synopsis would have you believe. This story starts at the beginning- the main character/narrator introduces us to her worldview and the way she processed the things going on around her as a child, and also shows us things happening to people in her immediate circle that occurred outside of her perception. People in this are all connected, and the narrator is a presence even when she isn't speaking. I really liked that the person interpreting events and showing us the story was a woman telling her experiences as a young child- it helps to interrupt the standard of men as the sole arbiters of what happened.

My only real issue with this movie is that I felt like it didn't go much further than a surface level. When I say that, in this specific case I'm not talking about being shallow the way a bad TV show is shallow, where nobody has to use brainpower because none of the characters' decisions are that important. I'm talking more about a pure aesthetic: the images used in The Burial of Kojo represent what's being said directly, if there is a man with a crow's head, onscreen will be a man with a crow's head, and it won't feel like it means anything more than what we're told it means. I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a lot of ideas in this and not all of them felt connected or coherently expressed.

But in practice, when you're watching it, it's very easy to forget that and just be drawn into what's happening. The colors are gorgeous and every scene could be a painting (I wish Netflix would let me take screenshots). Nothing is "wrong" with this that made me feel like it wasn't a good movie. This director obviously has a bright future. I would love to see a Ghanaian art-house movement, but if it does happen- or if it's already happening, I don't know- we shouldn't look to Netflix as the only source of films. I also liked that this film has China's presence in Africa as a plot point because not enough people know that's going on.

Pet Sematary (1989)

directed by Mary Lambert
USA
103 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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 Like a lot of people are probably doing, I re-watched the original Pet Sematary to gear up for the remake. I'd seen it several years ago, but I remembered very little, other than that I thought undead baby Gage was the cutest thing I'd ever seen in my life, and as it turns out I still think that. I do hope the remake manages to make that character a little more menacing because it was truly distracting how adorable he was.

My opinion still stands that this is really dated, but the one thing they get right is the foreboding appearance of the "semetary" itself. Other than that though, I couldn't shake the feeling that everything I was watching was only a very abridged summary of the book. It almost felt like I was watching a trailer for the book the way I'd watch a trailer for a movie, only the trailer lasted 103 minutes. I've never actually read the book, but even so, I could tell what dialogue was taken directly from it and what was added in, and the amount of cut-and-paste that was done made for vastly uneven quality throughout the film.

The thing I've been trying to puzzle out since I first saw this is why the offense of bringing a loved one back from the dead is treated with such absolute scorn in our culture. I mean, I'm not trying to say it's not a terrible idea, dead really is better most of the time, but even the slightest thought of actually going through with some necromancy here and there as opposed to wringing out your grief in the standard, acceptable way is met with shock and horror whenever it comes up in pop culture. I think I finally understand: This has to do with our perception of time as being strictly linear. I hate the old "Indian burial ground" trope, but its presence in Pet Sematary adds to this hypothesis. Prior to colonialism, many ways of looking at time existed wherein the ceasing of bodily functions was not necessarily the same as what we think of as "death". But white settlers brought over their idea of time as flowing in one direction, and now the suggestion that our perception of time may not be the only one is regarded as gravely wrong and deeply sacrilegious. We're trying so hard to make our way of seeing the only way that being reminded that not everybody thinks of time that way causes deep cognitive dissonance.

Despite all its cheesiness, this film explores a little bit deeper into why we're so afraid of revenants than the purely surface level answer of "because they should be dead and are not", and I appreciate it for that. There is something far more frightening than a pure zombie film here. In particular I thought it was a little unnerving how Pascow's ghost has influence over a much wider range than the area he died in- if he can hold open doors and whisper into rental car clerks' ears from hundreds of miles away, are we to assume ghosts from the other side of the world routinely nudge us in certain directions according to their whim? I think Stephen King really did tap into something primally frightening with this concept, and that's why I find this film so creepy despite being extremely corny.

Blood Beach (1980)

directed by Jeffrey Bloom
USA
92 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Should have been called Death Beach: The Beach That Eats. File under "movies that are really good for no reason". Everything about this leads you to believe it's going to be a trashy B-movie, but in actuality it's... something else. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but it's certainly something.

Maybe most people would just call it slow, but there's something about Blood Beach that feels way too mature for a horror movie where people get sucked into a beach and die. If you cut out the finale and the actual death scenes, this is a strange, lingering detective drama about mysterious disappearances and a troubled romance. The romance was definitely the worst part about it, but it's also yet another bit that feels extremely out-of-place in such an otherwise ridiculous movie. This whole thing almost feels like it was written by one person, and then at the very last minute another person came in and said "You know what? I'm going to add in a beach that kills people" and it got okayed and released like that. I'm comparing this to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats because, even though literally nothing can come close to the singular masterpiece of ennui that is Death Bed, they both have a very similar tone in spite of their unlikely premise.

Blood Beach is also very, very regional (to L.A./southern California in general) and it makes me miss my home. The dialogue is all fairly realistic although some of it does feel like generic cop/detective banter sometimes. I guess there could be a case made that the beachmonster is some type of metaphor for the willingness of young people to do stupid things for the hell of it, but the real meaning of this film feels more obtuse than that. That could possibly be because there was no intended meaning, other than to simply be a monster movie, but if so- why all this drama? Why make a monster movie in which the monster is only shown for about five seconds and the rest of the runtime is spent debating and despairing over why everybody is being eaten by a beach?

Overall I'm just happy this didn't turn out to be a quicksand movie because those may be my very least favorite sub-genre of horror (What do we call it? Sandsploitation?). I'm probably alone in thinking this film was anything meaningful or deeper than a killer beach flick, but I couldn't ignore the pervasive feeling of darkness and loneliness those final scenes in the abandoned, rotting building under the beach gave me. The scene where that lady describes in detail to the cop what her husband was wearing when he got beach-eaten almost made me cry. She remembered every last single thing about him and that felt so tragic.