MOVIEJOURNAL 2017 (PART SIX)

[smogo]

What follows is a list of all the films I've watched this year, excluding films that I'd seen before. My 4-star rating system uses * to indicate shite to be avoided, *** to indicate films worth seeing and **** to indicate works of brilliance. Everything else gets a "meh"-like **.

Index
*** ABC's of Death 2.5
** All Hallows' Eve
*** All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
* Annabelle: Creation
*** Attack of the Adult Babies [aka Adult Babies]
*** The Black Room
* Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf [aka Blind Beast vs. Dwarf]
*** Cult of Chucky
*** A Ðark Søng
*** Death Note
**** Death Note
*** The Demolitionist
** Demonoid
** The Devil's Chair
** Dhogs
*** Fashionista
*** Final Destination 2
*** Final Destination 3
**** The Final Destination
*** Final Destination 5
* Final Girl
*** Freehold [aka Two Pigeons]
** Ghostkeeper
**** A Ghost Story
** Hellions
*** Hounds of Love
** El Incidente (The Incident)
** Inside
** It: Chapter One
* Jackals
*** Kedi (Cat) [aka Nine Lives: Cats in Istanbul]
*** Kuso
** Kwaidan
* Leatherface
** Mal Nosso (Our Evil)
*** Miracle Mile
**** Mother!
* Mountain Fever [aka Dead Certain]
* Session 9
** Soul Survivors
* The Spanish Chainsaw Massacre
*** Tales from the Hood
*** Victor Crowley
** Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope
*** XX

All reviews


TALES FROM THE HOOD (USA 1995 / Rusty Cundieff)
***
Clarence Williams III gives a weird-assed, bug-eyed performance as an undertaker in the wraparound of this horror anthology, telling stories about his dead clients' fates. First up, a politician who fights police brutality is murdered by racist cops, but he won't stay dead and returns to wreak revenge. Too many anthologies have an entry that's closer to kiddie fantasy than horror, and that's the second story here, though the domestic violence theme gives it a nasty edge all the same, and the voodoo-ish ending is quite funny. By the third tale, it seems that ideas are running short, because it's about a racist politician who's tormented by a voodoo-ish doll that won't stay dead and wreaks revenge. Each segment thus far has been straightforward and fairly predictable, with only a different style of special FX to distinguish it: gore, surrealism and stop-motion respectively. Fortunately the last one is more interesting, even if its premise of behavioural modification is lifted directly from A Clockwork Orange; it involves a gang-banger being made to realise the self-defeating futility of killing his fellow black brothers, and has an unredemptive denouement that's daring but unsatisfying, and even a bit depressing. Rent the movie, but buy the soundtrack album.

ABC'S OF DEATH 2.5 (USA 2016 / various directors)
***
A compilation of 26 losing entries to an amateur filmmakers' competition was never going to be as good as the proper ABCs of Death films, but there's still plenty to enjoy in this collection of "M"-themed three-minute shorts. Fortunately, there's nothing as bad as Ti West's M entry in the original ABCs of Death, though the arachnophobic MOTHER is abrupt and pointless enough to come close. As ever, there's some animation, with perhaps my favourite segment being the stop-motion surrealism of MEAT, in which a man made of ham feeds himself to a turkey leg. Most of the shorts go big on gore, but not in a particularly memorable way, and there are a couple of gross-out episodes (the coprophiliac MESS and the necrophiliac MUNGING) that, unfortunately, are going to be hard to forget. The wisdom of ordering them alphabetically is called into question with the run of MIND MELD, MIRACLE and MOBILE, which all wallow in torture in a less interesting way than the strangely beautiful MARTYR. But it's the more light-hearted entries that stand out, such as the fantasy beat-em-up of MAGNETIC TAPE, the 8mm bikesploitation spoof MARAUDER, or the laugh-out-loud "Krampus the Christmas cunt" British comedy of MERRY CHRISTMAS.

XX (USA/Canada 2016 / various directors)
***
A quartet of horror shorts that are varied and well-paced enough for the movie to pass in a breeze despite none of the individual segments being anything special. Opener THE BOX features members of a family succumbing to an eating disorder as they learn a secret, but Radiohead's "Just" video told a similar story in a quarter of the time. The last segment, HER ONLY LIVING SON, also has a mystery at its heart; it turns out that it could be considered an 18-years-later sequel to Rosemary's Baby, but I wasn't enamoured with its earnest, moody tone. The two in the middle are more fun. DON'T FALL is a straight-up horror story about a monster attacking a group of campers, but at just 13 minutes it has no depth at all. That said, there's nothing to suggest that it would work better at feature length, so perhaps the short film format is preferable. My favourite segment is the black comedy THE BIRTHDAY PARTY, if only due to an adorable performance from Melanie Lynskey (and a starring role for her distracting cleavage) and its absurdist, Inside No.9-like vibe, as a woman discovers her husband dead, and her main concern is not to have that ruin their daughter's birthday.

ANNABELLE: CREATION (USA 2017 / David F Sandberg)
*
Six orphan girls relocate to a family home with a tragic past, and some poorly-defined horror occurs. At the start of 2014's Annabelle, the titular doll became cursed when a satanist's blood dripped into her eyeball. So why would you want a movie set before that point? Could this be the first example of an "uncursed doll" horror movie? Well, it's hard to say, because the writers don't seem to have a handle on the cause of the supernatural goings-on, exactly. If you're being generous, you could explain it as the work of a demon who can make it look like dolls can do things they shouldn't be able to do, make dead kids come back as ghosts, make people hallucinate evil versions of good people, disguise themselves as other things, control objects, and basically anything else that the film thinks might be scary. And "scary" in this case, unfortunately, consists of little more than turning the lights out for a moment and then making a loud noise, repeatedly. But there's nothing consistent or tangible to actually fear; there's no chance of building a sense of dread when it's so unclear what you're supposed to be scared might happen. And when it does happen, it hardly ever involves the still-underused headlining doll. Dismal stuff.

DEMONOID (Mexico 1980 / Alfredo Zacarías)
**
Evil Dead II knew that severed hands with lives of their own are stupid and funny to look at, which is why it played the idea for laughs. There's no such self-awareness in this hot mess of cheap Mexican horror, which must have come as a heavy bump back to earth for Samantha Eggar, having worked with David Cronenberg and Oliver Reed the year before. Witness a plot that meanders around for ages before finally settling down, some pathetic fight scenes, a hilariously inept performance by Roy Jenson, who can't do anything convincingly, at least two references to The Exorcist (the demon statue and the boxing priest), out-of-place car stunts, and a lot of hands being cut off and coming to life. It's the sort of movie where a cop tells someone that a person's been found dead with the words, "I've got some good news and some bad news". The first thing we learn is that "mines get very jealous, like most females" - something that makes no sense either at the time or later on. It's pretty awful, but much like Scalps - another film that has the sense of having been subject to an attempted rescue job in the edit room - it's probably best viewed after midnight, while heavily inebriated.

THE DEMOLITIONIST (USA/Canada 1995 / Robert Kurtzman)
***
In a near-future city riven by violence and corruption, a vicious gang leader tortures and kills a young police officer whose body is then used by the authorities as the basis for their new, experimental crime-fighting cyborg. Yep, if this movie was Indonesian it'd be called Lady RoboCop. In fact, so many story beats are lifted from RoboCop that you'd be forgiven for assuming that this is a Bruno Mattei joint to pair with his Terminator II (except, you know, competent). Bruce Abbott, who plays the Demolitionist's creator, even seems to be copying Miguel Ferrer's voice in one suspiciously familiar scene! The main difference is that this cyborg has her technology inside - nano machines coursing through her veins - rather than a shiny exoskeleton. Well that, and the fact that this movie isn't nearly as good as Verhoeven's, not least by being disappointingly light on splatter. Actually, it's not even as good as Lady Terminator. But it's fun all the same, helped along by a cast of cult faves, including Heather Langenkamp, Jack Nance (whose piss causes someone to get electrocuted!) and Tom Savini, among others. It looks pretty sweet too, all dutch angles and music video lighting, giving a future-fantasy vibe that reminded me of Café Flesh, of all things.

KWAIDAN (Japan 1964 / Masaki Kobayashi)
**
Anthologies are good for telling multiple tales in a short space of time. Not so Kwaidan, though, which takes over three hours to get through its four ghost stories. And "stories" is pushing it; really they're just ideas that are padded out with plenty of silence and "mood". The first is a simple "be careful what you wish for" cautionary tale about a former samurai who leaves his poor wife for a wealthy woman, with an ending that comes down to little more than "and then a skeleton popped out". Next is the tale of a secret never to be told, which has an anticlimactic ending but a refreshingly ambiguous message, and at least looks gorgeous, full of colour and with some interesting painted backdrops. The last segment is a silly throwaway thing in which a scholar reads an unfinished manuscript, and then discovers the (not massively horrifying) ending for himself. Kwaidan is filmed at a deliberate pace, with that "every frame could be a painting" artistry. But it's insufferably boring, thanks mainly to the feature-length third story, which concerns a young blind musician, and which takes almost a whole hour to start getting to the point. That part should've been released as a standalone movie, so that I wouldn't ended up having to suffer through it.

WOLF GUY: ENRAGED LYCANTHROPE (Japan 1975 / Kazuhiko Yamaguchi)
**
In theory, I'm all in favour of movies that keep you on your toes, hopping from genre to genre in an unpredictable fashion. But only if they get better with each tonal shift. I was well into Wolf Guy: Enraged Lyncanthrope at first, as we're thrown into a bizarre scenario in which an already-bloodied man is slashed to death by an invisible tiger. The sole witness, Akira, becomes amateur detective thanks to a clue left by the victim: the name Miki, who turns out to be a heroin-addicted singer, herself the victim of a gang rape committed by the men - former members of a punk band - who are now being picked off by said invisible tiger. So far, so intriguing, and Akira's developing relationship with Miki gives the story a decent structure. The revelation that Akira is a werewolf ought to make things even more interesting, but weirdly it seems to put the brakes on the investigation I'd been enjoying. Also, being a 1970s Japanese film starring Sonny Chiba, there are a number of extended combat scenes in which Akira brawls with whole gangs of fighters, and that's a real turn-off for me. There's a weird science experiment scene, an olden-times flashback and a climactic dust-up in a quarry, but sadly this film lost me long before the end.

HELLIONS (Canada 2015 / Bruce McDonald)
**
An unusual home invasion horror (and probably womb invasion allegory) that keeps you guessing. Mainly it keeps you guessing whether it's about to get really good, or turn to shit. It begins with 17 year-old Dora finding out that she's pregnant, so she decides not to go to the Halloween party that night and stay indoors instead. But before she can change her mind, she's being terrorised by child trick-or-treaters in weird masks, who at one point present her with her boyfriend's severed head in a bag. Suddenly the nighttime photography switches to day-for-night shoots, coloured purple to give an especially heightened and unreal effect, an exciting storm rages inside Dora's house, and her home turns into a maze with a pumpkin field outside. You have no option but to put your faith in director Bruce McDonald - who's best known for the unique Pontypool, in which a zombie outbreak was spread by speech - and hope he's leading us somewhere worthwhile. For me, that faith was misplaced. On paper, Hellions has a Lynchian nightmare quality that could be terrifying, but McDonald has neither the skills nor the budget to pull it off, his actors are dogshit, and colouring everything purple for an hour is not a good look.

THE DEVIL'S CHAIR (UK 2006 / Adam Mason)
**
Numerous films lead their viewers up the garden path just so they can pull the rug and spring a major twist towards the end. But what to make of a movie that does so by tricking the audience into thinking that they're watching what the narrator eventually admits in voiceover is a "poorly-written, badly-acted bullshit B-movie"? That narrator is Nick, an asylum inmate who, four years ealier, witnessed his girlfriend being torn apart when the strange old chair she was sitting in came to life, while she was tripping on acid and masturbating no less, in an admittedly excellent opening sequence. By now Nick's been persuaded that he in fact murdered her, but an elderly psychiatrist wants to find the truth by taking him back to the chair, along with three young assistants. I was ready to criticise everything, from the increasingly silly plot, to the bizarre casting of comedian Matt Berry in a serious(-ish) role, to the laddish voiceover that takes time out to comment on a character's breasts just as the climactic action is beginning. But then the movie became self-aware. What follows - what's left of the running time - is an improvement, for sure. But it's little more than a sick punchline. And you have to sit through that dismal B-movie to get there.

ALL HALLOWS' EVE (USA 2013 / Damien Leone)
**
In this coulrophobic anthology movie, babysitter Sarah is looking after a friend's two young children on Halloween night, when one of them finds an unlabelled VHS cassette in his bag. Sarah cautiously plays the tape, and unsurprisingly it contains a trio of short horror films. Unfortunately, the content of these shorts is less interesting than what's happening in Sarah's house, as she and the kids are stalked by the same evil clown that features in the three unremarkable films. Those segments are all pretty similar, with far too much time spent with women in peril who are cowering and crying as they await their fate at the hands of - respectively - a demon, a metallic alien and the clown himself. Gorehounds might want to ponder on whether they prefer the chopped off limbs in the first segment or the third: both similarly violent, but achieved using very different makeup effects: stark and cheesy in one, gritty and gruesome in the other. What All Hallows' Eve does have going for it is an unusual level of cruelty; by the end, even viewers like me who don't find clowns inherently scary will be glad that we'll never have to meet this particular one.

CULT OF CHUCKY (USA 2017 / Don Mancini)
***
Andy Barclay's back! And more importantly, so is Chucky, whose harmless (though still living) shotgun-blasted head he keeps in his apartment. So why is there another Good Guy doll displaying Chucky's evil traits, at a psychiatric hospital somewhere snowy? That's where we catch up with Nica, a Curse of Chucky survivor, along with her fellow inmates who include one guy who seems to be a spoof of James McAvoy's character in Split. For this seventh film in the Child's Play/...of Chucky franchise, as ever, has its tongue buried deep in its cheek, with plenty of in-jokes of variable quality. Even though there are (at least) two Chuckys this time, you don't see enough of him/them for large chunks of the film, but when he does appear it's a joy. Thing is, Cult of Chucky is an enjoyable-enough asylum-set thriller in which Chucky is the icing on the cake, whereas what you really want is some thrilling icing on a Chucky-based sponge. Like most of the Child's Play sequels, it's as good as any movie with a wisecracking anti-hero killer doll could hope to be, though with the bonus of not skimping on the gore.

DEATH NOTE (USA 2017 / Adam Wingard)
****
We've all thought about it, right? A teenager with the unlikely name of Light finds a book, attached to a death god (a spiky black demon played by Willem Defoe of all people), that allows him to arrange the death of anyone he chooses: enemies, strangers, the lot. But with great power comes great responsibility, and so he uses it for good, killing organised criminals, terrorist leaders and generally making the world a better place. But, hey: satire - the CIA and FBI don't like it, and try to track him down. I haven't seen the Japanese film of the manga that this is adapted from, so maybe it's not my place to say, but I very much suspect that Adam Wingard's remake is superior. I say that because he manages to make it feel like a Japanese comic book movie in several ways, but without the obscure brooding tone that they often have: this is in-your-face, easy to follow, and exciting from beginning to end, without losing any of the weirdness you'd want to see. Yes, Defoe is more clownish than scary, yes Wingard's obsession with cheesy 80s power ballads is self-periodic... but this is a big, bold supernatural thriller like I haven't seen in a long, long time.

FREEHOLD [aka Two Pigeons] (UK 2017 / Dominic Bridges)
***
Hussein is an estate agent who dresses sharp for work, but smokes loads of weed and is prone to letting his small flat become a pigsty when his girlfriend Mel's not around. This leads to amusing scenes in which his secret lodger Orlan - who he has no idea exists, and who only emerges when he's out - has to leave everything in exactly the same disgusting state as he found it, after using tiny amounts of Hussein's food, drink and toiletries to keep himself alive and relatively hygienic. When Mel returns to London, Orlan's antics escalate, as he messes with their things to orchestrate rifts in their relationship, while also contaminating the kitchen equipment and poisoning Hussein's bathroom products. The couple's arguments take the form of naturalistic, probably improvised bickering; I'd have preferred something scripted and witty, but this works too. Of course, if you've seen 2011's Sleep Tight, then a lot of this will feel very familiar, and that's the film's big glaring flaw, especially given that Sleep Tight did it on a grander scale whereas here we never leave the confines of Hussein's home. Kudos has to go to Javier Botet, who appears as Orlan in an unhealthy-looking but utterly convincing state of emaciation.

FASHIONISTA (UK 2016 / Simon Rumley)
***
Amanda Fuller gives an awards-worthy performance as April, a woman surrounded by clothes - she co-owns a vintage fashions shop with her husband Eric, after all - whose world starts falling apart when she suspects him of infidelity. Looking for a revenge fuck, she meets a super-wealthy sleazebag who leads her into a world of violent pornography (of some very puzzling, never-quite-revealed flavour) and insanity. The first thing that strikes you about Fashionista is how convincingly Simon Rumley and his team have managed to make a film that looks like it could've come from the late 60s out early 70s, give or take a bit of mobile technology. It's got Anna Biller / Peter Strickland levels of authenticity, and it's a shame that the garish colours fade as the story gets darker. Not only does it get darker, but Rumley starts messing with the timeline, playing scenes out of order in a way that's, cleverly, more disorienting than confusing. What doesn't work quite as well, I think, is the very unexpected and tricksy ending. I get the point he's trying to make, and it certainly makes you reassess everything you thought you knew about April, but it feels a little bit trite and unhelpful in a story about mental illness. Fuller, though... she's stunning.

DHOGS (Spain 2017 / Andrés Goteira)
**
It's rare that I've seen a promising film go downhill quite as fast as Dhogs. It's about a young single woman, Alex, whose decision to go out and find a stranger to have a one-night stand with is punished, in true moralistic movie fashion, by a horrible ordeal. But ahhh, everything we see is being watched by an audience, sometimes on a cinema screen, sometimes on a stage, and in the final section, as a video game. The movie is split into three chapters, and the first one is a lot of fun, with Alex's flirtation with a middle-aged businessman in a hotel bar sexy and funny (gotta love the cutaways to the other two people in the bar who are witnessing all this). And that chapter ends, for some reason, with a cross-dressing butchery demonstration; who knows what the hell that's about?! It's chapters 2 & 3 where it all goes wrong, as Alex is kidnapped and subjected to some grim and tedious torture. The viewer/player of all this in the final section is a man at home with his young son who, whether by accident or design, looks like the boy in A Serbian Film. If this was the first movie to turn its camera back on its bloodthirsty audience, wagging its finger disapprovingly, it might be onto something. But it's been done before, and much better.

MAL NOSSO (Our Evil) (Brazil 2017 / Samuel Galli)
**
One of those unfortunate films that has the sense of having been ill-advisedly expanded from a short treatment to feature length. Because the first half hour is quite brilliant, a tense and disturbing story with a gob-smacking punchline. What follows, though, are two lengthy and very different flashbacks that show how we got to that point. The movie as a whole is about a middle-aged man, Arthur, who's hired a hitman that he's found on the dark web. In the first flashback, set in the 1980s, he's a depressed teenager who's plagued by a cool-looking zombie girl. In the second, set about a decade ago, he seems to be some kind of amateur exorcist who's dealing with the brutal demonic possession of a young mother. The film has a lethargic pace that I liked, because all the characters seem really tired and the filmmaking matches their condition. It does get a bit silly when you find that Arthur's been that tired his whole life, though; it's amazing that he's made it this far! If the three vignettes (for that's what they are, essentially) had been ordered chronologically, this would be a much stronger film. It could also lose the two long dream sequences in which Arthur meets a sad clown in a circus top, neither of which seem to add anything useful at all.

LEATHERFACE (USA 2017 / Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury)
*
How could they get it so wrong...? Texas Chainsaw is the franchise with the least respect for continuity - or "mythology", if you must - meaning that every new entry is a clean slate. The previous good sequels have been variously wild (2), weird (The Next Generation), stupid (3D) and, erm, "oh well, at least it tried" (III) Only the two Platinum Dunes entries really pair up narratively, and they're incredibly boring. Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo direct the eighth one, and they've really made a movie for the fans... of the Platinum Dunes films. Which is to say, it's set in the past and is grounded in a wannabe-gritty reality of corrupt cops, ineffectual lawyers and manky hospitals. There's not much of a plot: family gets done for murder, family breaks out of the asylum they're inexplicably incarcerated together in, family walks aimlessly cross-country. That breakout, incidentally, is fast-paced, action-packed and very violent, but has absolutely no visceral or emotional impact, because you can't root for anyone involved. One family member is presumably going to become Leatherface, but then it turns out to be a different family member. Who honestly gives a shit? I think it's time to admit that the directors' debut, Inside, was a brilliant fluke.

MOUNTAIN FEVER [aka Dead Certain] (UK 2017 / Hendrik Faller)
*
Bookish young man Jack (played by Tom Miller, who really doesn't have the screen presence to carry a whole film) is holed up in his parents' house in rural France, a safe refuge from the apocalyptic virus epidemic that's decimated the population. A Ukrainian woman, Kara, breaks in, followed soon by a pair of French intruders, and although the enemy is theoretically that virus (the symptoms of which seem to be limited to some unspectacular coughing up of blood, so sorry if you were hoping for some Cabin Fever-style splatter), the real problem is paranoia, as no one is able to trust anyone. In other words, this is a very low-budget version of the recent It Comes at Night, but if It Comes at Night was really, really insufferably boring. Being shot in the Alps, you'd hope that at least the scenery would be pretty, but most of the action is confined to the indoors, so you don't even get that. At one point Jack goes a bit psycho, calls one guy a "French cunt" and threatens to shoot Kara "in the twat", and it's absolutely laughable, but it's literally the only moment of enjoyment I got out of the whole sorry thing.

INSIDE (Spain/USA 2016 / Miguel Ángel Vivas)
**
What kind of fucking idiot would watch the awesome 2007 movie À l'Intérieur, a film that revels in blood-drenched excess, pushes the boundaries of good taste to breaking point, and brings real terror into an ordinary suburban home, and decides that it needs a safely R-rated remake with a new ending that relocates the action to a more typical spooky horror house? Until those awful, awful last 20 minutes, there's not really anything wrong with this version, because it sticks very closely to the original plot points, the simple but nasty premise (a heavily pregnant woman is terrorised in her home by a mad woman who wants to cut her baby out of her belly) remains compelling, and the frequent twists are great fun. But as with another unnecessary home invasion remake, 2007's Funny Games, everything's softened... not just the violence, but the characters too: the expectant mother isn't lovably grumpy and negative in this take, she's bland and nothingy, while the villain looks like Mary Poppins compared to Beatrice Dalle's gap-toothed, mad-eyed psycho. But there's only one Beatrice Dalle, and let's face it, there's only one Inside worth bothering with.

JACKALS (USA 2017 / Kevin Greutert)
*
A young man, Justin - though he calls himself Thanatose these days - is abducted on order of his estranged family, and brought back to them for an intervention. For he has been brainwashed by a cult that turns out to be into devil worship and mass murder. He's a bit of a cunt, in other words, and it's unbelievable that his family would want to take him back. But then, they're not exactly the Brady Bunch. Not only have they hired this violent guy (the ever unlikable Stephen Dorff) to bundle Justin into his van, but they're constantly bickering with each other, they each have a flaw that can be (in)conveniently exposed when the screenplay requires it, and on top of everything else Justin's dad has a really shit and annoying beard. You know what doesn't make good drama? Five or six arseholes arguing for an hour and a half. The stakes are eventually raised when "Thanatose"'s new brothers and sisters amass outside the family home in cool masks, looking very menacing, but nothing that follows ever matches or even comes close to the film's blatant high point, a first-person home invasion and family slaughter sequence that takes place before the titles roll.

ATTACK OF THE ADULT BABIES [aka Adult Babies] (UK 2017 / Dominic Brunt)
***
There comes a point where you realise that you're watching a bunch of elderly men in oversized nappies (including legendary absurdist comic Charlie Chuck) being chased by a bunch of pretty women in PVC nurse outfits around a massive country house that's posing as some kind of hospital, and wonder what the fuck you're doing with your life. But it doesn't matter because it's funny, and it only gets funnier the longer it goes on and the stupider and grosser and more insane it gets, culminating in a claymation sequence directed by the great Lee Hardcastle, by way of graphic chainsaw evisceration and even more comedy shitting than The Human Centipede II, whose star Laurence R Harvey appears here as one of the snout-faced adult babies, appropriately enough. What's particularly funny is that it comes on as some sort of satire about rich white pig men, but descends into meaningless scatological farce, as a middle-class family accidentally gets involved in the thieving of a maguffin from said hospital, and all of a sudden there's a boss who can't stop wanking, people getting sawn to bits and a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style trip. I mean, the actual narrative loses its way and everything goes stupid, but I'm down with that.

VICTOR CROWLEY (USA 2017 / Adam Green)
***
The piss-takey meta-sequel seems so old-hat, such a 1990s thing to do (think Gremlins 2, Scream 2, etc), but that's what Adam Green's decided to go with for the revival of his Hatchet franchise. And so we get not one but two groups of potential victims who go to New Orleans's swamplands to make movies about Crowley's 2007 massacre. And when they get there, the whole place has been turned into a cheesy Victor Crowley tourist experience. This movie goes big on the comedy, and is fortunately very funny, though to be honest the messing around starts to outstay its welcome; for a movie called Victor Crowley, there's not a great deal of Victor Crowley action. When he does appear it's pretty great - he's still able to commit several super-gory murders - but there's a nagging sense that this isn't all it could be. The camera cuts away from some kills, and the excessive amount of time we spend in a crashed plane suggests that this was not only filmed on the quiet (having only been announced days before its premiere), but on the cheap too. And how is Crowley brought back from the dead? Voodoo. YouTube. Whatever. The film doesn't seem to care, so neither should you. Maybe he just comes back every 10 years.

KEDI (Cat) [aka Nine Lives: Cats in Istanbul] (USA 2016 / Ceyda Torun)
***
This observational documentary about the feral and semi-feral street cats of Istanbul is 80 minutes of cuteness. With probably no more than 5% of shots not containing at least one feline, it's impossible to imagine any cat lover not getting a kick out of the film, though if you're not into the creatures then it might not be quite so enjoyable. There are also interviews with many of the human residents, mostly shopkeepers, who have found themselves with one or more of these free-roaming animals attaching themselves to them... always for food rather than company, but then cats are pretty single-minded things. And that makes the film's one "dramatic" sequence, involving territory battles, all the more amusing. It's funny to witness the mafia-like thuggery of some of the harder cats, because it's impossible to look truly threatening to human eyes when you're big-eyed and furry. This section is immediately followed by a montage of feline athletics, with one contributor talking of his admiration for the animals' apparent superpowers. We get to know some of the individuals with the biggest personalities (catalities?) and, because of the lack of spaying, there are loads of adorable kittens to look at too.

A GHOST STORY (USA 2017 / David Lowery)
****
The more pig-headed half of a not-quite-right for each other couple dies in a car crash, but returns home as a ghost. Most of the first half of this sly drama is very quiet, and constructed from very long takes, often with a static camera. His accident isn't depicted - only the silent aftermath is shown - and there's a lengthy scene of him and his partner in bed that's incredibly intimate without ever becoming explicitly sexual. As a ghost, he can only watch helplessly as she grieves, copes, and begins to move on. If this all sounds unbearably sad, then don't worry: it is bearable, thanks in part to a gorgeous string-based score that occasionally nods towards horror-type themes, and some subtle humour. There's even a laugh-out-loud bit where he meets and has a brief conversation with another ghost, though that quickly becomes tragic in the same understated way in which most of the film operates. What could easily be a relentlessly serious 90-minute mope about death is cleverly undercut by dressing the ghost up in a white sheet, with two big black eyeholes; you can't even see the dead man's face beneath those eyeholes. Writer & director David Lowery turns an unpromising premise and made something artful, beautiful and very satisfying.

EL INCIDENTE (The Incident) (Mexico 2014 / Isaac Ezban)
**
I do like a big, bravua explanatory montage, scored to equally big, bombastic music, that goes back over the events of the film you've just watched, picking out key shots and showing us new angles for the first time, so that we finally get a handle on what was behind the central mystery. The Saw movies have made them one of their trademarks, but here the technique is used in the service of a quirky comedy-drama. After a short and context-free sequence involving two brides - one young and one very old - we meet a pair of criminal brothers, whose apartment is raided by a cop. But the three of them soon find themselves in a stairwell that never ends - it has no top nor bottom - though it does have a conveniently well-stocked (infinitely stocked, it will turn out) vending machine. Also, 35 years earlier, a family is driving round and round in endless circles, while their daughter is suffering an asthma attack. How these stories link is quite intriguing, but I'm not convinced that there's any great meaning that you can really take away from it, beyond a mild admiration for the unusual thing that this film does with a concept more familiar from science fiction.

GHOSTKEEPER (Canada 1980 / James Makichuk)
**
By most normal standards, Ghostkeeper should be regarded as terrible, almost unwatchable even, not least because a 90-minute slasher movie really needs more than three potential victims, plus all three of them are badly acted. To make things even worse, they've broken away from a larger group because they found the others boring. We never meet the others, but if Jenny, Marty & Chrissy are supposed to be the three interesting ones, then the mind boggles. Anyway, J, M & C, holidaying in the Alberta mountains, run into a bit of trouble with their snowbikes, and take shelter in an abandoned hotel... except it's not entirely abandoned, and the movie becomes Attack of the Decent Actor. Because they encounter a creepy middle-aged woman played by one Georgie Collins, who never became famous outside of her hometown, but was clearly a proper character actor who really elevates the film just when it most needs a boost. Of course, with such a tiny cast not a lot happens that doesn't involve them slowly walking around corridors in the dark. But if you're a fan of the weird, off-kilter charms of Scalps and Satan's Blade, then there'll be something for you here. Not much, admittedly. But it's not the total disaster it should be.

SESSION 9 (USA 2001 / Brad Anderson)
*
You can't blame them for trying. Given access to a genuine abandoned hospital, housed inside an imposing gothic building, and where there's not even any need for much production design because it's been left in such a perfect condition for a horror movie, of course a team of low-budget filmmakers would leap at the chance of setting their next feature there. But after the initial spectacle of seeing what is ostensibly the ideal location, Session 9 starts to fall flat. There's just too much in it that I find uninteresting: an all-male cast, psychiatric histories that are supposed too be inherently spooky, and endless walks around corridors in the dark. Plus there's a mismatch between the cheap slasher script and the decent production values: the crisp digital photography remains crystal clear 16 years on, and it stars name actors David Caruso and Peter Mullan. The latter (who puts in a great performance, incidentally) plays the boss of an asbestos removal company who only have a week to clean the entire hospital - and that's another problem... I simply don't buy that Caruso's character would have the time to sit around listening to the old reel-to-reel tapes that unleash that horror.

KUSO (USA 2017 / Flying Lotus)
***
An aggressively surreal, free-form gross-out musical consisting of numerous sketches, skits and segments and the barest suggestion of a plot, only really connected by the fact that the skin of most characters are covered in horrible boils (for no evident reason). In one scene a young woman lives with two furry monsters who fling their shit at her; she leaves the room to take a shit, and ends up shitting on a man who's hiding in her toilet. In another scene an overgrown schoolboy takes a shit in a forest, and then smears his shit on a giant tongue that's poking out of a huge, disembodied anus. In another scene, actual George Clinton plays a doctor who tries to cure a patient of his fear of breasts by - you guessed it - shitting on him. If this movie was the work of one deranged individual, it'd be understandable. But it's a proper, well-made film, with a crew, actors, special effects artists, animators, etc, and I just can't understand how it got made, or how and why anyone agreed to be involved. If nothing else, at least it's unique. But it's also very strange, extremely silly, funny and disturbing, endlessly surprising, and definitely an experience. It feels like the end of the world, with much more farting than expected.

FINAL GIRL (Canada 2013 / Tyler Shields)
*
Not the slasher satire that the title and woodland setting might have you expect, Final Girl would probably be a lot better if it did try and do whatever it is it's doing with a smirk on its face. But it seems to be very serious, even as it demands that you accept a whole lot of absolute nonsense. Firstly, you have to accept that some shady, possibly government-approved organisation has decided that a good and efficient way to fight crime would be to allocate one man to train one girl from the age of five to become good at punch-ups. Then, when she's 17, she gets sent out to infiltrate a quartet of known teenage killers, and slaughter them. She helps herself out by plying them with alcohol spiked with a drug that makes them hallucinate exactly what she wants them to hallucinate, somehow. And yet, after acquiring an axe, she uses it to kill one guy before leaving it behind and turning up to the next battle unarmed. And even though those four villains are cold-blooded, self-described "hunters", none of them bothers bringing a firearm to their hunt. If none of these numerous gaping plot holes bothers you, then knock yourself out, you might enjoy the beat-em-up action. But it's totally idiotic, and not even in a fun way.

BLIND BEAST VS. KILLER DWARF (Japan 2001 / Ishii Teruo)
*
As fans of certain Italian horror directors can attest, it's tragic when a once-great filmmaker - whether due to a lack of funds or a loss of talent, or both - ends up making dross that's not only really dull, but technically inferior too. Ishii Teruo is best known for 1969's Horrors of Malformed Men, a flawed film that nevertheless has a haunting artistry about it. His swansong, on the other hand, is shot on video - or should that be "shit on video"? - and an absolute mess. It veers uncontrollably from, at its best, surreal horror to, as its worst, an incredibly stilted detective story, with half-hearted slasher elements and a bit of pinku-style nudity thrown in for luck. It's about the disappearance of a showgirl and the subsequent murder of another woman, in which a blind madman and a diminutive servant appear to be involved. Investigating this are a crime writer and a detective who happen to be two of the most boring men ever given major screen roles. There's a lot of business with mannequins, which gets confusing because the real severed limbs in the story look exactly the same as the plastic ones, and the whole thing looks horrifically cheap.

SOUL SURVIVORS (USA 2001 / Stephen Carpenter)
**
Philosophy student Cassie has questions of her own about life and death following the car accident in which her boyfriend dies, but she and her friend and her ex (who are now a couple), walk away from. This all happens after an evening at one of those only-in-the-movies goth/metal nightclubs where everyone's wearing fetish gear yet there doesn't actually seem to be a dress code, given that our normally-dressed heroine is allowed in. Cassie tries to get on with her life, but she's haunted by spooky masked men from the club, who may or may not exist, and clearly we're supposed to think that her head injury is causing her issues. But this film's big problem - aside from the fact that it's simply not very good - is that, following 1981's The Survivor and 1983's Sole Survivor, any horror fan worth their salt is easily going to predict how a film called Soul Survivors is going to pan out. With its frequent scenes set in a sinister hospital emergency room (they really get their money's worth out of that set), this is also heavily indebted to Jacob's Ladder. But, you know, for kids, with its industrial rock soundtrack, and its aspirational focus on students who can somehow afford to live alone in trendy loft apartments.

ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (USA 2006 / Jonathan Levine)
***
This is a fairly standard 21st century teen slasher, in that it's populated with obnoxious college kids drinking out of coloured plastic cups, snorting coke and talking about little else than who they want to fuck, smothered in tasteful Insta-filtered photography while irrelevantly paying homage to a film or films of old, in this case The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with its rural setting, shots of a blood-drenched woman running through fields, and a tell-tale close-up of a windmill. But bearing all that in mind, this ain't a bad little movie. As per the title, Mandy Lane is good-looking and popular, but to everyone's frustration she's a "good girl", never overdoing the drink, avoiding the drugs, eschewing skinny-dips, and apparently still a virgin. (*whisper it*: actually she's quite boring and lacking in charisma.) She and five friends head to the countryside for a weekend of partying, and one by one they're violently killed off... whoever could be to blame? I'm not hugely keen on slashers where the victims "deserve" to die, because how are you meant to fear their fates? You certainly can't root for the rapey boys and bitchy girls you get here. But it's a fast moving 85 minutes, with a satisfying conclusion.

IT: CHAPTER ONE (USA 2017 / Andy Muschietti)
**
It's interesting that (the first half of) Stephen King's 1986 novel It is set in the late 50s, and this 2017 adaptation is set in the late 80s. It's as if his stories about children have an inherent nostalgia about them that just wouldn't work if they were set in the modern day. Either that, or the language, mannerisms and behaviour he writes for them is just so unbelievable that you have to place them three decades ago so that it's conceivable that that's just what kids were like back then. As such, the King-based film that this most resembles is Stand By Me, and indeed it's the relationships between its young characters - some quite annoying, others rather sweet - that It: Chapter One is likely to be remembered for. Because the horror parts sure don't work. One boy's little brother has gone missing - he's been killed or abducted by a sewer-dwelling clown called Pennywise - and soon he and his friends are being attacked by Pennywise and sundry other CGI monsters. If the movie had restricted these apparitions' appearances to scenes involving drains and plugholes - as in the two most effective sequences - it could be good. But when they can just pop out anywhere, for any reason, that ain't scary, it's just stoopid.

THE SPANISH CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Spain 2013 / Manolito Motosierra)
*
You don't have to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre, but if you're after a Spanish one, then you're best off sticking to Pieces rather than this shamelessly retitled splatter comedy. And it's a dreadfully unfunny, incredibly broad and puerile comedy at that, about a sex-obsessed rock band with very questionable personal hygiene, whose tour takes them to a fatal stop-off in a backwards, backwoods village populated by murderous weirdos. If you think fart sounds are inherently amusing, then knock yourself out as you witness people farting while getting a blow-job, farting while trimming their pubes, farting while preparing a meal, etc. Fortunately for gore fans, the graphic violence is equally over the top, but for every fountain of blood and guts there's a childish explosion of diarrhoea or spunk. Yes, it does sound like the sort of thing I enjoy, but for these sort of gross-out gags to work, you have to feel that they're socially inappropriate, massively embarrassing faux pas. But this film takes place in a town where everyone's openly shitting, wanking and whatever else all the time anyway; if anything, the band members have merely found themselves among like-minded people, and as such probably don't even deserve to die.

HOUNDS OF LOVE (Australia 2016 / Ben Young)
***
A grim tale of suburban horror, in which scummy couple John & Evelyn have a hobby of abducting teenage girls and keeping them in their Perth bungalow for their own sexual gratification. Quite what they do with their victims is only hinted at, but one of the film's strengths is the way that it uses just props, pulsating bass sounds and blood-curdling screams to make the viewer imagine the worst. Another of its strengths is Emma Booth, who plays Evelyn; at times she reminded me of Julia Davis's selfish, flirtatious comedy monsters, though there are no laughs here. Although the couple's crimes have apparently been going on for some years, we focus on the abduction of just one girl. But it never really feels as though she's going to get out of this alive, which unfortunately makes it a less tense plot than it could be. There are a couple of developments in her favour, but they feel like cinematic contrivances - one involving a secret code, the other a minute or two where John & Evelyn unconvincingly take their eyes off the ball. Otherwise, though, the depressing and realistic tone remains consistent, so if you like that sort of thing, this might be the sort of thing you like.

THE BLACK ROOM (USA 2016 / Rolfe Kanefsky)
***
You could quite easily show the prologue of this "sexy" comedy horror to someone and tell them that it's leaked footage from the upcoming Insidious: Chapter Four, and they'd believe you, for it features Lin Shaye as an old woman who knows more than anyone else about the evil entity that emanates from the "black room" in her cellar, and who tries to save her granddaughter from being ravished by it. Two years later, a married couple, Paul & Jennifer, move into the house, and are almost immediately brought to heightened sexual states by unseen spirits. This seems like fun at first, but soon Paul undergoes a personality change, having been possessed by the evil. What follows is genuinely quite sexy at times, with lots of nudity and lustful panting, plus there are good makeup effects as people are killed and/or mutilated. It does get a bit repetitive, as ever more victims are invited into the home, only to be slaughtered by Paul, supernatural slasher style. But it's an entertaining 80s throwback type of movie, without having to resort to the usual obvious winky-faced references, with the casting of Species babe Natasha Henstridge as Jennifer the only explicit nod to cult horror of days gone by.

A ÐARK SØNG (Ireland/UK 2016 / Liam Gavin)
***
Steve Oram, with his trademark brash, no-nonsense accent that could equally be taken as friendly or sinister, is perfect casting as Mr Solomon, an occult expert who gets paid large amounts of money to perform magick and summon gods and/or demons for people in dire need. Well, he's done it three times anyway, and of those it's worked once. His latest client is bereaved mother Sophia who, it seems, wants Solomon to help her contact her dead son. And so begin several months of torturous rituals, with sleep deprivation, ice water showers, sitting in one spot for days as a time, and abstinence from anything fun. The first half of this is fascinating, with Solomon's endless mumbo-jumbo about circles, squares and triangles, and the necessity for him to bully and trick Sophia into compliance so that this whole thing stands a chance of working. For me it peaks when, following several "signs" that may just be coincidental, something indisputably supernatural finally happens. After that, the film seems unsure where to go, and so just throws a bit of everything into the mix: zombies, violence, fantasy, some exciting action bits, some more downbeat existential bits.... A brave, original, flawed two-handed take on an old trope.

MIRACLE MILE (USA 1988 / Steve de Jarnatt)
***
Hours after he's met Julie, the girl of his dreams, while in Los Angeles, likeable jazz musician Harry picks up a wrong-number phone call at a late-night diner, and learns that the USA has launched a nuclear attack, with the retaliation due to hit the west coast in 70 minutes. Immediately the diner's staff and regulars pile supplies and themselves into a truck, with the intention of somehow getting a flight far away, but Harry's priority is to find Julie and ensure that she's saved too. What makes Miracle Mile so exciting is that it swerves all the usual 80s war games clichés by focusing not on an attempt to prevent armageddon, but on the panic that builds over the next hour or so as word spreads, whether it's based on fact or not. The downtown LA setting is familiar from numerous other movies, and is populated by every kind of stereotype, which in this instance is used in a good way: to avoid the need to get bogged down in characterisation and backstory, and just get on with the time-critical action. The script is over-reliant on eyebrow-raising coincidences, however, such as the Pentagon expert who just happens to be a regular in that diner, or the fact that Harry goes to an all-night gym to look for a helicopter pilot(!)... and finds one(!!!).

MOTHER! (USA 2017 / Darren Aronofsky)
****
That Escalated Quickly: The Movie. Jennifer Lawrence stars as a young, houseproud woman who's married to a famous poet some 20 years older than her, and aside from his writer's block and their sexless relationship, she's basically happy. That is, until her husband starts inviting increasing numbers of a rather unpleasant family over to stay. The camera largely stays tight on Lawrence's head and shoulders, Son of Saul-style, forcing the viewer to feel her helplessness as her nice life crumbles around her. The awesome centrepiece is a long, genuinely anxiety-inducing sequence in which a family wake turns into a rowdy house party. It's a strange kind of home invasion horror, with no violence, just a terrifying loss of control. Is it as effective the second time, when it happens again just a few minutes (though several months of narrative time) later? You wouldn't think so, but yes, because of how ridiculously extreme the nightmare becomes. It's a film that wrong-foots you at every turn. It comes on like a Rosemary's Baby-aping paranoid conspiracy flick, turns into what I assume is a depiction of anxiety disorder, before ending on a note of satisfying surreality. Satisfying, because it seems to be simultaneously about nothing and everything.

FINAL DESTINATION 2 (USA 2003 / David R Ellis)
***
With only one of Final Destination's two survivors still alive - and she's gone mad - a new set of death cheaters is introduced for the sequel. (Incidentally, why the bloody hell does this film kill off the original's lead character in backstory, rather than on screen? I guess the actor wasn't available, too busy living off his Eminem video fame....) This group of strangers, thanks to a teenage driver's gory premonition, weren't on the highway during a massive pile-up, and for some inexplicable reason most of them start hanging out together in the subsequent days. Where this film improves on the original is by sacrificing the barely-telegraphed, sudden shock deaths in favour of several highly elaborate - literally - accidents waiting to happen. Entire scenes fraught with danger come and go with nobody actually being killed, which only makes the eventual bloody punchline all the more hilarious. It is still lumbered with an ultimately unkillable villain - Death itself - which means that, going by this movie and its predecessor, there'll never be such a thing as a satisfying finalé in a Final Destination movie. And there's some terrible CGI too: I don't really think that's what it looks like when someone's face gets burnt, guys...! But it's a fun adventure all the same.

FINAL DESTINATION 3 (USA/Germany 2006 / James Wong)
***
You'd think that a rollercoaster disaster would be the perfect tragic accident to kick off another Final Destination sequel. But a real thrill ride broke up recently in Ohio, and the blurry phone footage of that is way more horrifying than the confusing mess filmed here by director James Wong, returning to the franchise having sat out the second movie. With very few narrative links to the earlier stories, save for some nice references to the Flight 180 that kicked it all off, the threequel takes a slightly different tack, lifting the idea of photographic clues from The Omen. And so, following that tragedy at a high school fairground party, a girl looks through all the pictures she took for suggestions as to how her friends are going to be killed, the idea being that she can look out for real-world equivalents and try to prevent the relevant accidents from happening. Although, when your school gym has actual sharp metal cutlasses mounted on the wall above the weights machine, then all hope is lost, really. Despite how that sounds, Wong sadly cuts back on the knowing humour introduced in the previous installment, making this a bit tired at times, but two consecutive showpiece events in the third act ultimately give FD3 the edge over his original.

THE FINAL DESTINATION (USA/Germany 2009 / David R Ellis)
****
If it's an even-numbered Final Destination movie, then it must be David R Ellis's turn to direct again, though by now he'd made the brilliant and funny Snakes on a Plane, and if you liked that then you ought to enjoy this too. This time the teenager who has the life-saving premonition is nice guy Nick, who sees imminent carnage at a speedway event. That opening disaster is incredibly gory, and features some of the most awesome 3D I've ever seen. I have to say, I'm a bit bored now of virtually every accident being caused by some spilt liquid. If it's flammable, it'll ignite; if it's water then someone will slip on it or it'll get electrified. But never mind. Nick's subsequent visions take the form of bombastic and stupid, abstract CGI sequences in which he sees sharp objects flying around, giving us a tantalising hint of the horror to come. This entry gives us some of the most over-the-top and gruesome death scenes so far in the franchise, plenty of grim laughs, and a kind of meta bit where we watch people watching a 3D film without wearing their stereoscopic glasses. The basic plot is exactly the same as in the previous three instalments, but - as promised by the eye-popping opening credits - the ingredients are better than ever before.

FINAL DESTINATION 5 (USA/Canada 2011 / Steven Quale)
***
When Things Get Knocked Over, Spill, or Fall Out of Cupboards: The Movie. Even Friday the 13th had started playing with the formula by its fifth installment, but the final Final Destination sticks with exactly the same storyline we've seen four times already. And so, a young guy has a vision of a catastrophic bridge collapse, convinces some of his fellow passengers to escape before it happens, and then they're pursued by Death in the order they should have been killed. There's some comedy to keep things interesting, and there are elaborate and often unexpected death scenes, though because we know that Death is working to a specific plan, a scene set in a professional kitchen, where there are blades and hot oil literally everywhere, lacks the suspense it should have, because we know it's not the chef's time to die. However, some of the deaths look incredibly painful, and almost all elicit a gasp, especially the one at a gymnasium, which also happens to be the most thrilling scene because there are so many things that could go wrong. 3D seems wasted on the movie, aside from two or three bits, but it boasts not one but two clever punchlines, so even if the big twist has been spoilered for you, there's something even cooler still to come.

DEATH NOTE (Japan 2006 / Shûsuke Kaneko)
***
Fantasy crime thriller about a teenage serial killer, Light, who owns a supernatural notebook: anyone whose real name is written on its pages (while the writer is picturing that person) will die, of a boring old heart attack unless otherwise specified. And Light is either too unimaginative or not sadistic enough to specify more elaborate deaths, which is a shame. He's been using the notebook to rid the world of criminals, resulting in fandom, ethical debates and an international police investigation, but as the authorities close in on him, he has to start killing them off too. Light is accompanied throughout by the amusing-looking, floating "death god" who gave him the notebook, a silly bit of CGI that keeps things, erm, light. And that's the problem, really: shot almost entirely in flat daylight settings, in unexciting modern buildings, it never really takes off. On the contrary, the final half hour is quite dull, an exposition- and flashback-heavy, anticlimactic denouement revolving around one character's all-too convenient mistake (she keeps her real name a secret from Light, yet tells him who she's engaged to!), and a sequel-setting epilogue that makes no sense. Adam Wingard's far flashier 2017 remake is much better.