Three Films Make A Post: A new M. Night Shyamalan experience.

Trap (2024): Not surprising anyone who has ever heard anything I said about his films, I did have a very typical M. Night Shyamalan experience with this one, in so much as I found myself in turns annoyed, exasperated and bored by his usual approach of setting up something that could go somewhere interesting but only ever follows through to the lamest possible direction.

To the usual Shyamalan problems (I don’t feel the need to list them yet again), this one adds a dollop of nepotism when our director/writer/producer casts his daughter Saleka as a basically angelic popstar, the facts she’s not great at the whole popstar bit as well as an aggressively terrible actress notwithstanding. Josh Hartnett for his part apparently believes he’s in a comedy, and so mugs and grimaces his way through his cartoon serial killer shtick without any fear of embarrassment.

Well, at least he seems to enjoy his time with the film.

#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead (2024): I found the first thirty minutes of Marcus Dunstan’s slasher comedy/sledgehammer satire on influencers hard going – it’s not easy spending time with characters this broadly drawn to be ridiculously horrible, nor did the first kills really catch my interest. However, once the cast is whittled down a bit and things get into a groove, Dunstan lets some of his instincts for suspense come to the fore, as well as some additional character traits in the gaggle of idiots to be destroyed.

Plus, some of the cheap nastiness actually becomes somewhat funny.

Luminous Woman aka Hikaru Onna (1987): As a lover of the weird and the woolly, I’ve often been rather disappointed with my regular inability to get much out of this sort of thing when approached from an arthouse angle. Case in point is this Shinji Somai joint full of nonsense like hairy holy innocents from Hokkaido, or underground wrestling matches that come with their own opera singers that should be just the kind of things that delight me. Yet I never found myself able to connect with any of it.

That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate Somai’s artful direction, the inventiveness of his framing of scenes, his – famous - long shots, or the way he folds time and space when he feels the need to in a way only cinema can do. In practice, however, I don’t connect to any of this, neither intellectually nor emotionally nor aesthetically, more’s the pity.

In short: Unhuman (2022)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

The bus harbouring the usual bunch of contemporary high school clichés on a field trap crashes, with an apparent big explosion of blood. The minor injuries incurred thereby will be the least of the kids’ and their cynical idiot teacher’s problems, though, for some mysterious chemical incident does cause a bit of a rage zombie issue. The survivors manage to get into a large, dilapidated building in the woods, where you get a mixture of bad, “psychologically insightful” monologues and some siege action.

Until a particularly idiotic plot twist turns the up until now already pretty terrible movie into something downright insulting. Spoiler: it’s not zombies, but a bizarre, nonsensical plan of the two (male and white, of course, because it’s just that kind of movie) outsider kids to get closer to girls and express their pain (or something equally stupid) going very wrong indeed.

The best thing that can be said about Marcus Dunstan’s Unhuman is that it made me realize how unfairly I have underrated the movies of Christopher Landon until now. This really, really wants to be a Landon-esque mixture of broad, often physical, comedy, bloody horror, social consciousness and serious exploration of teenage emotion, but where Landon is always in control of his material and shows impeccable timing with most of his tonal shifts, Unhuman just wavers from tonal shift to tonal shift, stumbles over the stupidity of its plot, and couldn’t land a joke to save its life.

Of course, to do any of what it attempts successfully, it would need a script – unlike the one it has by Dunstan and Patrick Melton – that includes joke that are actually funny, characters that are more than the most basic clichés interacting in exactly the ways you’d expect, or an idiot plot. The filmmakers certainly aren’t helping their case by bringing up Breakfast Club as a comparison, which only brings the lack of substance and quality in their dialogue to the fore, as well as the lack of young actors playing their asses off.

Also, what’s with all the slow motion?

In short: The Neighbor (2016)

Not to be confused with other films about problematic neighbourhoods; also, there will be spoilers.

John (Josh Stewart) and his wife Rosie (Alex Essoe) work for John’s uncle Neil (Skipp Sudduth) as drug trafficking middlemen. They’ve put enough money aside to retire from their life of crime and move somewhere nicer far, far, away, hoping Neil won’t hunt them down and murder them. They didn’t steal from the man, mind you.

Unfortunately, the couple will have rather more trouble at their hands than an easily ticked-off Midwestern country drug lord. While John is making his final delivery to Neil, Rosie witnesses their neighbour Troy (Bill Engvall) murdering a young man. When John returns, Rosie is gone, supposedly run off, as Troy suggests to him. Only, if Rosie had wanted to leave John the day when they were splitting anyway, she probably would have taken the bag full of money in their house too, or at least some of it. So John knows Troy is lying, particularly since their last encounter the night before had already suggested something to be very wrong with the guy. Yes, wrong even from the perspective of someone in the drug trade.

Consequently John stealthily breaks into the house of Troy and his two sons (Ronnie Gene Blevins and Luke Edwards) to find Rosie, learning quite a bit more about their family business than he wanted to in the process, starting a night from hell for everyone involved.

I didn’t quite expect director Marcus Dunstan to follow up his silly yet wonderful The Collection with a clever little thriller making some caustic subtextual remarks about the American Dream™ like The Neighbor but I’m certainly not complaining.

This is the sort of relatively small-scale production that does basically everything right: the acting is fine throughout, the script effective and the direction is tight and focused, quickly introducing us to what’s what with the characters and then never stopping escalating their situation from there. There’s a sharpness (plus a whole lot of Kurtzman-created blood) to the proceedings even though The Neighbor does have something of an happy end, however ironic the film presents it. But then, one of the main points of the film is to show America (or at least the part of America it concerns itself with) as a place where it’s impossible not have blood on one’s hands.

Which doesn’t mean we’re not supposed to like John and Rosie; they are, after all, the only characters on screen who actually do something for others beyond taking care of their own survival, while their guilt for other people’s suffering through drugs and what comes with them is twice removed, them being middlemen (middlepersons?), after all.

If you’re really looking for something to complain here, it’s probably the basic set-up that’ll make you (un)happy there. It is a bit difficult to swallow that these particular people should end up to be neighbours but starting off from an improbable place as The Neighbor does is certainly a typical thriller move – Hitchcock certainly did it more often than not. And if I can suspend my disbelief for ghosts and zombies, I certainly can do the same when it comes to difficult neighbours.

Otherwise, The Neighbor is as fine a contemporary low budget thriller as you’re likely to find.

The Collection (2012)

A bizarre serial killer called The Collector (Randall Archer) has made his way into a sequel. His modus operandi sees him locking up a group of people somewhere and slaughtering them with the help of physics-sceptical death traps as well as more hands-on efforts until only one victim is left. Him or her, he loads into a neat little trunk and carts to his murder castle (quite traditionally situated in an old hotel building named after Dario Argento) where he has fun with torture, drugs, and the creation of modern art of the sort I suspect Rob Zombie would love.

For reasons, the Collector likes to bring an earlier trunked victim to his next crime. Which affords thief Arkin (Josh Stewart), the survivor of the first film I believe, an opportunity to escape the crazyman while he’s killing a horde of teenagers on a warehouse party in various hilarious way. The Collector then trunks survivor Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick) and carries her home to have his various ways with her. Elena, it turns out, was not a terribly good choice of victim. She’s a ten out of ten on the Final Girl effectiveness scale, and I’m pretty sure she’d kick the guy’s ass herself rather well.

However, she doesn’t have to do the job alone, because she’s also the child of a very rich father as well as under the protection of a rather effective security guy named Lucello (Lee Tergesen). Lucello convinces Arkin to lead him and a small band of mercenaries (among them Andre Royo and Shannon Kane) to The Collector’s murder palace. Arkin has seen Aliens so he’s not willing to lead Lucello and his people any further than the entry to Collector central but once there, their guns are rather convincing for him to change his mind.

Now they only have to fight their way through a bunch of the killer’s drugged up zombie victims, survive a cornucopia of death traps, and somehow find Elena in this somewhat creepy labyrinth. It’s good for all involved that Elena can take care of herself and that Arkin will find his heroic spirit.

I thought Marcus Dunstan’s The Collector was a pretty useless Saw-alike crossed with a slasher with even less substance, care and style than that series or that genre show; Dunstan’s own sequel, on the other hand, doesn’t just beat the Saw movies by a wide margin but also has a personality of its own. Sure, its personality is stitched together out of the parts of other movies but it’s the right parts put together in the right way, presented with an eye for the lurid and the outrageous.

While nobody – certainly not I - would suggest The Collection to be subtle, it is a rather more clever and coherent film than I expected it to be. Early on, around minute eleven or so, the film establishes that it isn’t taking place anywhere that might be confused with the real world through the rather fun, rather absurd and rather cool party slaughter scene. After that point, one might expect the film to continue to just throw random disjointed crap at its audience but the first fifteen minutes or so actually establish the specific kind of luridness and craziness the film is going for, and Dunstan just follows through for the rest of the movie, turning what by all rights should be a warehouse horror piece about people wandering from one random shock to the next (and dying) into a film that is lurid as hell but also of one piece – while still being all about people wandering through a warehouse, being shocked, and dying.

There’s an unexpected sense of aesthetic coherence on display into which the Collector lair’s Goth Metal cover look and feel fit perfectly well, making sense in context and providing the film with a coherent mood and style, as do the set design and the film’s very un-2012 thoughtful use of colours that reminded me of some of the better bits of 80s horror.

Even the writing works rather well, with the script going out of its way to add surprising little moments where a character’s action comments on other actions that happened before. Clearly a lot of effort is put into keeping the film’s main victims more than just meat for the killer to slaughter; this being the rare slasher film that actually realizes its killer is a right prick. I also very much enjoyed the little bits of action movie cheese that are sprinkled throughout the film, keeping things pleasantly crazy while never going so far as to breaking the established rules of the film’s world.