Longlegs (2024)

After demonstrating what may or may not be some ESP abilities, young FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is drafted into the hunt for a peculiar serial killer. The killer, let’s call him Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), doesn’t actually appear to lay hands on his victims, but somehow gets them to kill each other, following his own ritualistic specifics.

There may or may not be black magic or Satanism involved; in any case, Lee is going to find herself drawn into proceedings rather more personally than a member of any police force would hope to.

If anyone expected me to be part of the backlash against Oz Perkins’s newest film, a rather wonderful example of weird and highly individual genre cinema also making a surprising amount of money and pleasing many a critic, they probably don’t know me. This thing was made with someone with my tastes as its ideal audience, and I’m certainly not going to pretend otherwise.

While this was certainly very consciously schooled on the aesthetics of Silence of the Lamb and what follows (though Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s wonderful Cure is probably more important here), Longlegs makes clear very early on that it isn’t trying to be even a dramatized “realistic” police procedural or serial killer thriller. It is rather a film that uses elements and tropes of these genres to lure an audience into something stranger and a little more subversive, a world and a headspace built on the kind of nightmare logic that nearly appears to make sense but tends to shift and get blurry around its edges in the moments when you’re not exactly thinking or looking.

Which, really, is pretty much what I expect of Perkins by now. Particularly the way in which the film’s metaphors are well-built to suggest certain interpretations (here about alienation and family), and the plot could nearly neatly resolve but then doesn’t quite is very much in keeping with the director’s modus operandi in his earlier films. This isn’t Perkins being unable to make a movie that is soluble like a crossword puzzle, but him aggressively rejecting the kind of naively rationalist world view that can still believe in such a thing as an expression of reality. Instead of neat resolutions and explanations, this is a film about slowly building dread, the horrors of facing one’s nightmares and still not ending them, and those very bad moments in the middle of the night when you can’t quite discern if there’s a difference between nightmare and waking life.

Needless to say, there are certain, sometimes innocuous, shots in here that I still can’t shake days after having seen the film.

That Longlegs manages to hold up this mood for the whole of its runtime is a little, dark, wonder; that it does so while also offering a perfect, naturalistic performance by Monroe at its core is particularly clever; and that rather a lot of viewers can’t or won’t go where Perkins leads with this one, I won’t blame them for.

I, on the other hand, cannot imagine watching another film this year that’s quite so much me and for me.

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner in one of my favourite performances of hers) has the middle-aged blues. Her marriage to her high school sweetheart Charlie (Nicolas Cage) is practically over, and she doesn’t seem to quite have had the life she hoped for when she was young. There must have been some happy years with Charlie in-between, though, and they produced a daughter (Helen Hunt) who clearly has turned out fine and loves both of her parents.

Still, her daughter’s emotional support notwithstanding, Peggy Sue’s feeling bad, and she’s even worse because she has to go to her 25th high school reunion right when she’s having the worst time of her life. When she faints while being crowned reunion queen, she suddenly awakes in 1960, her graduation year, in the body of her younger self (though the film keeps us seeing her as Turner).

Peggy Sue has no idea what’s happening to her, but with twenty-five years of experience and a knowledge of her accumulated mistakes, she decides she’s going to correct what must have gone wrong with her life. Though she just might add some new mistakes of the “live a little” type on the way.

Looking at Francis Ford Coppola’s career beyond the obvious classics, one can regularly encounter semi-hidden gems like Peggy Sue Got Married. On the surface, this is a pretty typical time-shift comedy probably made possible by the success of Back to the Future. Consequently, it goes through quite a few jokes of the kind you’d expect from the set-up – see Peggy Sue’s parents freak out over her sudden grown-up behaviour, see Peggy Sue predict the technological future – and has some space for what you’d probably call boomer nostalgia for pop culture.

There’s nothing wrong with these aspects of the film to my eyes – the jokes are good and the nostalgia actually feeds into the narrative effectively and thoughtfully. If the film were only that, there’s still be a lot to like about it. However, Coppola fills a lot of the proceedings with a genuine sense of melancholia and quiet sadness. This is core to the film’s emotional honesty: whenever it talks about who Peggy Sue was as a teenager and who she grows up into, it avoids seeing the teen perspective as wrong and the more cynical adult one right or the other way around. Instead, the film emphasises again and again, it’s a matter of perspective born in the moment, and life’s not an abstract.

Which also means that Charlie – played with a mix of mania and insight by Cage that’s pretty damn irresistible - does turn out not to be a mistake to be avoided but a guy who genuinely cares about Peggy Sue deeply – in the sort of young person’s way we tend to forget we could feel when we get older – and whose own growing into imperfect middle age is not a thing to be changed by clever tricks but a process that can’t be avoided, though perhaps understood and thereby gotten through as much as Peggy Sue’s own middle-aged sadness can. The film presents no easy answer there but a quiet hope.

In general, there’s a quiet kindness to the way the film treats its characters, which in many ways is mirrored by the small kindnesses middle-aged Peggy Sue as young Peggy Sue spends on most of the people around her this time around, be they useful to her plans of building a better future, or not. One of the philosophical main tenets of Peggy Sue Got Married appears to be “don’t be an asshole”, and why would anyone want to disagree with that?

Three Films Make A Post: Never have so few taken so much from so many.

The Great Train Robbery aka The First Great Train Robbery (1978): This Michael Crichton movie, also written by Crichton, and based on his own historical fiction bestseller, has a really fabulous climactic action scene in the titular robbery. To get there, the film slogs through what clearly is supposed to be a semi-comedic romp through mildly satirized Victorian period detail. Alas, the word that actually describes this is “dull”. Crichton, never a man to know which details to cut, shows no feel at all for pacing dialogue scenes – even a sure winner of an innuendo-laden scene between Sean Connery’s mastermind character and a married lady goes down like a lead balloon – or timing jokes, leaving the main cast of Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley-Anne Down to fend for themselves while they are crushed by all that – never telling – period detail. Even that trio can’t win against such odds.

Exist Within aka 사잇소리 (2022): This thriller by Kim Jung-wook about the noises a young woman hears from the apartment above her, and the nasty surprises that follow, is about as middle of the road as South Korean productions get. There’s not much of the subversion of tropes going on that most genre movies from the country eventually at least dabble in, the pacing is never quite as effective, and the tone never quite as surehanded as it could be.

However, making a thriller of this type entertaining can also be achieved by the simple virtue of technical expertise, and though that is not the way a classic is birthed, being a genuinely fun time is an achievement in itself.

The Old Way (2023): This revenge western directed by Brett Donowho manages something you don’t see every day – getting a performance from Nicolas Cage that makes the high energy thespian look unengaged. Much of Cage’s performance gives the impression of watching him doing a second run-through of the material rather than actually putting his full force into a scene. If you’ve seen Cage emoting loudly and sometimes quietly but distinctly, throwing himself into whatever a script has to offer for most of your movie watching life, this is a rather disquieting thing to watch, like a night sky turned hot pink for no reason.

There’s little else to distract here: the script is about as rote a revenge western as is possible, the performances are uneventful, and Donowho directs with the blandness of a shrug.

In short: Sympathy for the Devil (2023)

A man we’ll only ever really know as The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) is just on his way to the hospital where his wife is in heavy labour. He’s rather nervous, for a first birth some years ago did go sadly. Unexpectedly, the Driver is carjacked by a guy we’ll just call The Passenger (Nicolas Cage). The Passenger is a bit of a ranting, raving maniac, supposedly only threatening the Driver with death and violence to get a ride from him, but it quickly becomes clear that he hasn’t chosen his victim randomly. The Passenger seems to test and prod the Driver, searching for certain reactions whose nature will become clear during the course of the movie.

Eventually, during a climactic scene in a diner, all else will become clear as well.

How much you’ll like, or even just tolerate, Yuval Adler’s Sympathy for the Devil will very much depend on your love or tolerance for Nicolas Cage in his all-out mode, when neck muscles tense, eyes bug, and expressions become barely human contortions, while dialogue spews and spits forth as by a man possessed by something nasty. Me, I could watch doing Cage this sort of thing for hours. Over the years, Cage’s very particular sense for being larger than life has grown to mean a lot to me, and he’s delivering that in spades here.

He’s not doing it pointlessly or without purpose, though, and one of Sympathy’s specific joys for me is to watch his interplay with Kinnaman’s demonstrative normalcy, what it suggests about the characters and what it actually means once the plot has run its course. I really can’t overstate how important Kinnaman’s performance here is, his ability to not get drowned out by what Cage does, despite having to use an acting approach that’s the exact opposite for the film to make sense.

Adler’s direction is also very strong indeed, not just because I’m a sucker for prettily shot neon night ride movies (though I am), but because he actually copes with Cage’s performance and makes use of it for the film, emphasising or decreasing the loudness of Cage in the appropriate moments. Not an easy task, I would assume. He’s also rather great at creating a classic suspense scene. when needed. The diner climax is as good as this sort of thing gets, edited to a perfect rhythm and breathless in its sense of threat, violence, and its feel of transgression.

So, for anyone who doesn’t actively hate Cage (and really, are you sure you’re at the right place here?), this might turn out to be a fantastic thriller.

In short: Renfield (2023)

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), has been Dracula’s (Nicolas Cage) slave for many decades now as the submissive part in a pretty messed-up co-dependent abusive relationship. Well, at least he gets superpowers from eating insects, now, so I wouldn’t say Dracula never did anything for him.

Our protagonist is struggling badly with the horrors of Dracula, however, the guilt that comes with his complicity in many an outrageously bloody deed. By now, he’s at least an observing participant in a self help group for people with the less supernatural version of his relationship troubles, and feeds his peers’ abusers to his vampiric masters. In a couple of decades, Renfield might even have started on getting away from Dracula, but the vagaries of an increasingly idiotic plot drag him there rather earlier.

What’s good about Chris McKay’s Renfield is easily summed up in the words “Nicolas Cage”. His performance as this movie’s Dracula is incredible, channelling an amped up, combined version of earlier portrayals (most obviously those by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee) into the vampire as an embodiment not of some romantic bullshit, or animal magnetism, but of masculinity at its worst. There’s a sense not of actual intelligence about this version of Dracula, but some kind of violent cleverness, something so human it feels deeply inhuman even before we get to the evil vampire powers and the teeth.

Alas, this performance and the very sound and interesting basic idea are completely wasted in a movie that really rather would like to be some godawful noisy action comedy with random bouts of gore. Everything that could be thoughtful and clever is buried under reams of bad and obvious jokes and mediocre action sequences that are not improved a wit by being obnoxiously loud.

It’s just a waste, as is Awkwafina’s walking, talking plot device of a character or the usually dependable Nicholas Hoult who just looks bored and confused most of the time.

In short: Running with the Devil (2019)

Somewhere on its way from South America into the USA and further north, the cocaine of a big drug cartel gets “enhanced” with something rather deadly. We learn very early on that the problem zone lies in the US, with a character the film only, in a pretty annoying effort to pretend to talk about archetypes but which really feels more like it is being too lazy to come up with character names, calls The Man (Laurence Fishburne). The Man is a keen customer of his own product, and plans to find just the right mixture to let him continue to steal cocaine from his very dangerous bosses; he’s an idiot, obviously.

Some of the victims of the guy’s new and improved cocaine turn out to be the sister and brother-in-law of a DEA agent, or, sigh, The Agent in Charge (Leslie Bibb). Said agent gets rather angry about this, and is only too happy to use tools like torture and murder to get at the people responsible.

Of course, the cartel isn’t happy about customers dropping dead quite this early in their careers as addicts, either, so they send a middle manager we will only know as The Cook (Nicolas Cage) to follow the supply chain northwards right from its start.

Jason Cabell’s Running with the Devil got quite a critical drubbing by the few professional reviewers who bothered with it, and it’s really not much of a surprise. Its whole “Sicario as an exploitation movie” shtick must be rather infuriating to quite a few critics. As someone who thinks the Villeneuve movie is – like most of his output – massively overrated, I don’t feel the outrage myself. Instead, I can’t help but think the film at hand has just as little of substance to say about the complexities and horrors of the drug business and the idiot attempts to curtail it with the heaviest hand possible as its more upmarket cousin.

My main problem with Running isn’t even that it is lacking in insight, it is how badly it uses its on paper ambitious and interesting drug picaresque structure. On one hand, it doesn’t trust into having a truly episodic structure enough to just skip a traditional main narrative altogether; on the other hand, its main narrative itself is much too fragmented to work straightforwardly. There are also decisions I find simply bewildering. For example, why tell the audience so early in the movie that Fishburne is the man responsible for the whole plot, and make Cage’s travels so even more pointless on the narrative level?

Additionally, there are painfully awkward tonal shifts, so we go from the film’s handful of scenes of actually tight and interesting crime business to what I can only assume is meant to be comedy, though it certainly isn’t funny. It’s a bit of a shame, too, for more of those tighter scenes could have been combined into a pretty great crime movie.

But at least Running is the one movie you’ll encounter in your life where Fishburne chews the scenery and Cage stays cool throughout.

Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

A man who doesn’t speak (Nicolas Cage) finds all wheels on his pretty swanky looking car destroyed while driving through nowhere, USA. He’s close to one of those small towns that always spell trouble in any horror movie, and the local mechanic’s unwillingness to accept a credit card as well as the absence of a working ATM, do indeed not bode well for him.

On the positive side, the mechanic is perfectly willing to accept payment through work, and quickly our protagonist finds himself tasked by one Tex Macadoo (Ric Reitz) to clean up an indoor amusement arcade full of creepy and weird animatronic dolls singing creepy songs nobody in their right minds would ever unleash on children. But then, these were created by a group of serial killers of kids. The man doesn’t seem to be too bothered to be locked in there for the night; neither does he lose his cool when some of the animatronics start to attack. But then, if I were that good at killing the things, I probably wouldn’t be either. The man does insist strictly on his regular pauses and intense pinball playing, though.

Also becoming involved will be a band of teens lead by Liv (Emily Tosta), out to burn down Willy’s Wonderland to stop the regular human sacrifices (like our guy, in theory) made to the animatronics by their elder townies, and mostly ending up pretty dead. The things, you understand, are possessed by the spirits of those serial killers who once ran the arcade thanks to a Satanic ritual, as these things go.

For a gimmick movie about a speechless Nic Cage kicking the furry asses of animatronic mascots as portrayed by people in suits, Kevin Lewis’s Willy’s Wonderland is actually pretty great. At the very least, it’s a very fun little movie with a genuinely weird sense of humour, and a wonderful willingness to not explain a single thing about its main character. What’s with his autism spectrum style adherence to pause times? Why does he take possessed animatronics quite this much in stride? Are his energy drinks like Popeyes’s spinach? Where did he learn fighting monsters? The film sure isn’t telling.

That’s perfectly okay, though, for Cage has us covered, providing the character the credits call The Janitor (he is absolutely deserving of capitalisation) with all kinds of annoyed, smouldering, grumpy, non-plussed but never confused facial expressions, doing so much great and funny work via face and body language, the on paper bizarre idea to have Nicolas Cage not speak in a movie turns out to be absolutely brilliant, showing off the great man’s insane prowess at larger than life acting to the fullest while also reminding this viewer of how funny Cage can be when he wants to.

Because this has become a bit of a tradition by now, the film’s also drenching its hero in various fluids.

It’s not all Cage all of the time, of course, but even though none of the younger actors or character actors does reach the exalted level of the guy, they do know how to deliver punchlines; even better, most of the punchlines are actually pretty funny, so the scenes without Cage don’t provoke the wish to get back to the real business but are indeed just as entertaining as the rest. Which is not at all a given with this sort of project, and, added to Cage and the general weird yet somewhat creepy and certainly creatively funny aspect of the whole affair, turns Willy’s Wonderland into what I really didn’t expect it to be: a film that’s fun and funny as a film beyond its gimmick and The Cage.

Three Films Make A Post: Get a Lift

Harry and Tonto (1974): Having lost his home to city development, and not really jibing with living with his son and his family, elderly New Yorker Harry (Art Carney) and his cat Tonto (Tonto) go on a road trip through the USA, encountering old flames and new experiences, living parts of life Harry never did before. Among other things, for this Paul Mazursky comedy is stuffed full with humanity and human encounters big and small, feelings simple and complicated, treating aging and old age and the loss that comes with it with as much dignity as humour, exhibiting an openness to different ways of seeing the world that seems to be utterly alien to today’s “you’re either for us or against us” world.

Mazursky creates (or sees) an America made out of very different people believing very different things that still express a shared humanity, never making a grand gesture out of this, but treating his characters kindly, even those that might not completely deserve it.

A Man Called Sledge (1970): This is one of two movies directed by actor Vic Morrow, though producer Dino DeLaurentiis apparently robbed him of the final cut, and there may or may not be material included shot by Giorgio Gentili instead. Despite an American cast, director and US money, in feeling and tone, this is a lot like an Italian Western, starting with its treatment of the Southwestern setting, over the “sweat and dirty shirts” production design, and certainly not ending in its pretty cynical view of the world. The film also includes a pretty hefty heist movie element and ends up as a Treasure of the Sierra Madre variation.

It features James Garner in one of his grimmer performances as the titular gunman Sledge, and moves through its set pieces of dust and mud with a degree of vigour. It never quite manages to reach the allegorical heft the director – at least going by the final act – clearly wants it to have, but then, I dislike allegories anyway. In the state it is in, it’s a solid enough movie, not as well directed as the best Italian westerns (nor as crazy as these can get) but entertaining enough for what it is.

Jiu Jitsu (2020): On the plot level, this thing directed by Dimitri Logothethis is a completely bizarre attempt to mix martial arts movie traditions with a Predator rip-off, plus the dreaded amnesiac protagonist (Alain Moussi is our hero, such as he is) syndrome. And Nicolas Cage is a crazy jiu jitsu swordsman veteran (jiu jitsu in this film has little to do with the actual martial art, by the way), so you can expect a couple of scenes of Cage flipping out entertainingly, doing his best in martial arts fight scenes against people who are actually good at this sort of thing, and doing an Obi Wan (just louder). Also appearing are action and martial arts film darlings like Tony Jaa and Frank Grillo, but they only get a couple of fights in. Moussi is good in his action sequences but pretty terrible at the whole acting thing. He was probably much cheaper than those members of the cast who can do both; but then, the script is so utterly bad at stringing the decent, sometimes fun, action scenes together, even a great actor might have not gotten through the affair with dignity intact.

In short: Grand Isle (2019)

The South, USA. Buddy (Luke Benward), a young husband and father working handyman-style small jobs to survive, is questioned by a policeman (Kelsey Grammer) who doesn’t cop to fancy city stuff like lawyers and phone calls in connection with some sort of violent crime. Buddy certainly looks as if he has gotten put through the wringer by someone. Most of the film takes place in flashback, Buddy telling Mr Cop a sordid tale that begins with him tasked to repair a fence for alcoholic vet Walter (Nicholas Cage) and his very, very hospitable wife Fancy (KaDee Strickland), continues with him stranded in the couple’s house by a hurricane, contains (awkward) sex, murder plans and a bag full of money and doesn’t quite end with a terrible discovery in a cellar.

Stephen S. Campanelli’s Grand Isle suffers from a bad tendency to drag its plot hither and yon, clearly aiming for the erratic feel of a Southern Noir yet still often making the impression of a film that doesn’t quite know what exactly it wants to be: said noir or a twisty modern thriller or a trashy 90s erotic thriller or serial killer chiller or whatever kind of movie those final scenes think they belong to? The film can’t decide, instead jumping through elements of all of these genres, bizarrely missing exactly the themes that so often connect them.

Of course, the film never comes to a consistent portrayal of its protagonist either, leaving Buddy with the weak backbone of a noir, erotic thriller etc protagonist but without other character traits, moral values or what have you which you’d usually be able to better explore thanks to that noir backbone. It’s a series of scenes, usually not even bad ones, that never gel into a movie.

The acting side doesn’t help with the Buddy problem either: Benward does not have the kind of presence capable to work on the same level of Cage even when he’s more going through the motions than outright crazy as here, or as Strickland’s frighteningly sexually aggressive Fancy, so the film misses yet another possible throughline here.

In short: Kill Chain (2019)

A bag of diamonds makes its way through the hands of various killers and lowlifes (played by lovely actors like Enrico Colantoni or the generally okay Ryan Kwanten) until it ends up in the hands of a Woman in Red (Anabelle Acosta) – the film’s using descriptions like this for most of the characters in its credits though (or because) most of them have several names – who wanders into a decrepit hotel run by a guy with a violent past (Nicolas Cage). The Lady’s trying to outrun a, nay, The Very Bad Woman (Angie Cepeda), and the hotel manager might just be the guy to help her out.

This interesting attempt of using traditional tropes and clichés of movies and books about violent men and women to turn their well-known plots existential and archetypal as written and directed by Ken Sanzel is probably simply a bit too cheap and quickly made to quite achieve what it seems to set out to do. The pacing drags sometimes, and its self-consciousness can border on the smug (or, if you’re easier annoyed by cleverness than me, step across the line quite a bit), with some of the deep and meaningful talk not being quite as deep and meaningful as it’s supposed to sound, the dialogue straining for a gravitas it can’t quite reach.

There’s something about the movie, though. In part, I’m charmed by how its shaggy dog tale structure reminds me pleasantly of films like Winchester 73 (or eternal favourite Fish Story), even though I would have preferred if it hadn’t gone the 2010s movie road of everything in it being part of some clever plan that’s actually less plausible than mere chance. Then there’s the fact that I genuinely still enjoy the archetypes and tropes the film so clearly also adores, as I do Kill Chain’s love for scenes of people telling tales (with more than a handful of meanings to them). And even though this was clearly made on the comparatively cheap, the film features quite a bit of acting talent apparently getting into the spirit of the piece very well, Cage underplaying more than typical yet still applying himself, and everyone selling their archetypes wonderfully.


Sanzel’s pretty good at visually creating a decrepit little part of Tijuana (clearly situated more in a Mexico of pulp imagination than the real place, and meant to be there) out of some ugly buildings, cheap neon signs and a lot of grimy looking darkness, the sort of place your noir character flees to before the past catches up on them again.

Three Films Make A Post: They Say No One Can Save The World. Meet No One.

6 Underground (2019): Obviously, not being named Rex Reed, I usually talk about movies here I have stayed awake watching throughout, and seen all the way through to the bitter end. However, given the clear disrespect – if not even outright hatred - Michael Bay shows for us poor idiots watching this particular thing, and having inflicted half of it on myself, I think I do deserve at least a little compensation (like a couple of months of free Netflix, the other party responsible for this roaring garbage fire). So, even having only seen half of the film, I can most certainly say that Bay is still completely unable to stage and film action sequences, he’s even worse than he was when he shot the unparsable car chase in The Rock. Today, his action isn’t just over-edited and makes no structural sense, it has also learned to shake and strobe like a Tony Scott movie, adding the epilepsy to the headache. The “script” was written by the guys who brought us Deadpool, Zombieland and Life, so you know it was going to be some smug meta-masturbation at best, but is just probably cocaine-addled and deeply mean-spirited nonsense by writers who are so much less clever than they obviously think they are. Screw, Michael Bay, seriously.

Dog Eat Dog (2016): This Paul Schrader film with Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cook as luckless and pretty stupid small time crooks getting themselves killed over their inability to kidnap a baby sort of fits 6 Underground. Not because it’s also one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen but because it is pretty damn mean-spirited and excessive, too, Schrader apparently trying to very belatedly make the kind of black comedy which feels heavily influenced by all those would-be Tarantinos that cropped up after Pulp Fiction. The characters are your typical Schrader troubled males with violent tendencies (or in the case of Dafoe’s aptly named “Mad Dog” more than just tendencies) but drawn with a meanness that turns them into nasty caricatures, something the film, as well as the actors clearly revels in. It’s what you call an “interesting effort” while stroking your chin thoughtfully. Also features Nicolas Cage doing a Bogart imitation, it you’re into that.


Scrooged (1988): I know, Christmas is over, but Richard Donner’s version of the old Dickens number with added media critique that still seems rather fitting today, with Bill Murray despite being in a very bad mood during production actually giving a fantastic performance, fits these other two films rather well in its often very mean-spirited vibe. Unlike the other movies in this post, it is an actual artistic success, though, and does its very best to use said mean-spiritedness to say something to, as well as do something with the audience. Even if it is only to upset us pretty terribly about humanity (our Scrooge stand-in isn’t even the worst person in the movie) and then make up for it by having Murray give a “be kind to one another” speech where he seems to be teetering at the edge of an actual breakdown. Which, I’d argue, is exactly the right way to go here, for what the more polite versions of the material tend to gloss over is that we witness a man whose every belief (nasty as those may be) has just been curb-stomped and who is trying to recreate himself as a human being live on camera.

Three Films Make A Post: The most corrupt cop you've ever seen on screen.

211 (2018): To be honest, going into a contemporary movie with Nicolas Cage I do tend to hope it provides the great, strange actor with opportunity to do great, strange acting, so when I encounter him in a more bread and butter action thriller like York Alec Shackleton’s 211, I do find myself a little disappointed. However, if you are able to get over that little problem, you may find this to be very decent film. Shackleton’s direction is a bit too network TV like to really thrill me, but the film’s story is clearly told, and clear effort is  put into characterizing everyone involved, certainly putting this above the level of a lot of low budget shoot ‘em ups.

It’s not really the film’s fault I’d rather watch something crazier than this perfectly decent little number.

Coyote Lake (2019): Sara Seligman’s film about a mother-daughter duo (Adriana Barraza and Camila Mendes) who run a bed-and-breakfast practically on the US/Mexican border which they use to murder, rob and drown men working for the cartels, isn’t exactly a crazy film either. But here, the insistence on telling a tale that would usually make for a pretty extreme exploitation movie by avoiding practically all exploitative elements one way or the other, and instead focussing on a pretty horrible mother-daughter relationship, is actually what makes it interesting as well as pretty admirable. Seligman has a good grip on the elements of the material she has chosen to focus on, the actors are doing very good work (which is particularly important in a film that’s not at all focussing on the violence inherent in the material), so things come together nicely, creating an unassumingly effective film about family, freedom and weaponized capitalism.


Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): The second Spider-Man film taking place in the MCU with Tom Holland – and again directed by Jon Watts – is a strange little (huge) film. It is strange in the best way, daring a weird teen comedy vibe, destroying beautiful European cities as seen through US tourist eyes and using well-loved  elements of the Spider-Man myth and the MCU to goof off. Frankly, all of this shouldn’t work at all, and while this is indeed a surprisingly messy film whose structure doesn’t bode well for the MCU-less future of our friendly neighbourhood wallcrawler, it is also a whole lot of fun, suggesting a bit more of a freewheeling approach than typical in this kind of blockbuster realm.

Between Worlds (2018)

Long haul truck driver Joe (Nicolas Cage) is at the end of his rope. Following the death of his wife and kid, he has lost whatever grip he had on life – it clearly wasn’t terribly tight to begin with - and turned into a (probably unwashed) alcoholic who’s bound to even lose his truck soon enough. And, as Joe will explain, a man without a truck isn’t a man. No, seriously.

Anyway, while at a rest stop, Joe saves a woman we will soon enough learn is called Julie (Franka Potente) from being choked to death. His rescue attempt was a bit misguided, though, for Julie wanted to be choked. You see, she can contact the spirit world, but only when she is suffocating. So says the script, and who are we to roll our eyes? And right now, Julie needs all the suffocation she can get, for her daughter Billie (Penelope Mitchell) has fallen into a coma following an accident. As you do in this sort of situation, Joe helps Julie by at first driving her to the hospital, and later getting on with some helpful hospital stairway choking. Lo and behold! It helps, and Julie seems to have gotten her daughters spirit back into her body.

She also gets Joe into her pants right quick, and things could be fine – as much as any relationship with a character played by Cage can be fine – with Julie having a new horrible relationship obviously doomed to crash and burn and her daughter being alright again. But as it turns out, Julie didn’t get the spirit of her daughter back into her body, but somehow opened up the body to the ghost that had been hanging around Joe, his dead wife Mary (sometimes played by Lydia Hearst). Of course, Billie manages to convince Joe soon enough she is indeed his wife, and he does what any rational guy played by Cage would do, and starts an affair (including very special sex techniques like reading poetry aloud during sex) with the spirit of his dead wife inhabiting the body of his new girlfriend’s daughter. As you can imagine, nothing can go wrong there.

You may or may not believe it, but that is indeed the plot of writer-director Maria Pulera’s Between Worlds, following a script that somehow must have convinced someone wearing a suit to provide enough of a budget to hire Cage, Potente and Mitchell and have enough money left to shoot a film that looks perfectly professional, if haunted by a tendency to stage everything in the most trashy way possible. The sex scenes alone, with Cage huffing and puffing, and mugging and reading poetry, and the director thinking it a great idea to intercut various sex adventures into one single scene of epic weirdness are a thing to behold; Dutch angles crop up; suspense is based on the big question of Joe being able to get his pants back on quickly enough.

And if all of this sounds to you like a Lifetime movie gone mad(der than typical), that’s what the film suggests to me too, just with a bit more (and perfectly unappetizing, because who the hell wants to see Cage do this?) sleaze, and a script that throws out bizarre and goofy ideas by the dozen. Whereas the modern Lifestyle movie defaults to camp as its tone, though, I never quite understood what tone the film at hand is actually going for. Am I supposed to take any of this seriously? Is the director? The actors apparently don’t know either, with Potente (who doesn’t work great with Cage here) looking as if she’s just barely holding off giggling fits, Cage doing that thing where he’s making perfectly sensible acting decisions for the bizarre material he is given about half of the time, but going all-out Cage-crazy for the other half, and only Mitchell seeming to be able to decide on a tone and keep to it. Is that what the filmmakers wanted? Who knows?


What I do know is that, even though the film obviously is a bizarre mess of curious ideas, dubious execution and Nicolas Cage cageing out, it is also highly entertaining. I might not have cared about the supposed psychological damage of any of the freaks on screen, and never found myself pondering the conundrum of a guy wavering between hot sexy times with the spirit of his wife in the hot young body of the daughter of his girlfriend and said girlfriend, but I sure as hell was always looking forward to the next bit of strangeness Between Worlds came up with. For like its male lead, the film may have a tendency to dubious decisions (some may call them “bad”) but those decisions are always interesting, surprising and genuinely entertaining. Also, in terribly bad taste, but who cares?

The Rock (1996)

General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) has had enough of the guv’mint not acknowledging the service of his black ops soldiers and not even paying their dependents any money when they get killed! Clearly, the best and most obvious way to change this once all official recourse has failed is to get together a gang of other military idiots, steal a chemical agent and a bunch of rockets, take hostages from a tourist tour on Alcatraz, hole up there and threaten San Francisco with a chemical holocaust. What would you have done, gone to the press!? This is a perfectly sensible plan, really.

Fortunately, the powers that be have kept former SAS man John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery) secretly locked up for stealing the microfilms that contain stuff like the truth about Roswell and who shot JFK (that is seriously in the script), and Mason is the only man who ever escaped from Alcatraz. After a lot of farting around and the worst car chase ever, a team of soldiers accompanied by Mason and FBI biochemist Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), who ain’t a slow man it seems, infiltrate Alcatraz only to be slaughtered by Hummel’s men. Well, you know who doesn’t get slaughtered, so now it’s on Mason and the not terribly excellent at violence Goodspeed to play Die Hard on Alcatraz.

Whenever a certain type of film fan wants to make a case for Michael Bay once having made non-horrible films, they dig up this Jerry Bruckheimer production, as well as Bad Boys II, which I’m not going to touch with a ten foot pole.

In The Rock’s case, I don’t believe these people are completely wrong. Sure, the film is dumb as a rock (tee-hee), and all attempts to try and sell me on Harris’s character as an action movie villain who isn’t an actual villain but more of a tragic figure really dies with me needing to believe in a character who actually expects this plan wouldn’t end with a lot of dead people and nothing else, his unwillingness to actually fire the rockets notwithstanding. Not that Harris doesn’t do his best (and that’s, him being the great Ed Harris, a lot) to sell this nonsense. There’s a lot of exciting tense staring, glowering and quoting Thomas Jefferson, and some really great dramatic shouting in Harris’s repertoire here, and while the script is just too dumb to actually pull this off, Harris is certainly providing a highly entertaining performance that is as close to a human being as anyone in the film.

Speaking of human beings or not, apart from an army of fine character actors (David Morse, William Forsythe, Tony Todd, and so on, and so forth), there’s a pretty embarrassing outing by Sean Connery on display who counteracts Harris’s acting by just barely bothering to show up and coasting on being Sean Connery. Which makes a hilarious contrast to the actor he’s interacting most, Nicolas Cage. Cage, as always when he’s in the hand of a director who doesn’t know how to direct actors that don’t do it themselves like Harris, goes completely insane, delivering line after line of the inane dialogue he’s cursed with with wild abandon, bizarre emphasis and all physical, bug-eyed tics he can come up with. It’s pretty awesome, actually, particularly in a film where an actor really needs to shout to be heard over all the explosions and what may very well be Hans Zimmer’s worst score, seeing as it consists exclusively of musical clichés. Though, come to think of it, that might actually be Zimmer making a comment on the rest of the film.

Fortunately for my poor beleaguered brain, the film’s explosions and stunts are mostly pretty great, and it’s here where we can indeed see a younger, more competent Michael Bay. Sure, he’s never heard of the concept of holding a shot, and he really rather cuts than moves the camera in any sensible direction, but most of the action is much more readable than is typical for later Bay. And when you can actually see the fast, loud, and slickly bombastic action, it becomes really rather entertaining. There is, however, a scene that already encapsulates everything that makes later Michael Bay films so unwatchable: the early car chase is a completely unparsable mess of shot-cut-shot-cut-shot-cut-cut where it’s never clear how the cars chasing each other are positioned, what obstacles they are actually facing, or why shit around them explodes. Actually, I’m convinced the car chase consists of random shots of cars, explosions, people in wheelchairs, the scrunched up faces of Cage and Connery just hacked together for no good reason.


All this adds up to a film that’s a complete mess, dumb as all hell but entertaining on that basic level that lets you waste your life in front of a TV drinking beer and belching rhythmically to the noises of explosions. I’m pretty happy contemporary blockbusters are actually made by thinking human beings now.

Mandy (2018)

Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) and Red (Nicolas Cage) live absurdly peacefully in a home in the deepest darkest forest. Both clearly have pasts of the complicated kind - he, as it will turn out, the kind that teaches a guy how to forge a battle axe that looks like abstract art or rather a lot like the Celtic Frost logo (good taste) - but have found a place for themselves that looks like an eternal now. This of course can’t last. The leader of one of those hippie murder cults roaming all American backwoods, one Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), happens to spot Mandy walking through the woods, and wants to possess her in all imaginable ways and those you’d rather not.

So Jeremiah’s henchmen attack Red’s and Mandy’s home with the help of an associated gang of mutant (it’s the drugs!) bikers; and when Mandy’s reaction to being drugged, played Jeremiah’s bad self-written psych folk record and getting shown his penis is to laugh, he does react rather like you’d expect by burning her alive. The cultists leave Red for dead, which turns out to be a bit of a mistake, for fuelled by what is clearly a returning alcohol habit, hallucinations and visions of Mandy, drugs, and sheer bloody rage, the walking wreck of a man slaughters his way up the mutant biker/cultist food chain.

I absolutely loved Panos Cosmatos’s first film, Beyond the Black Rainbow, for its complete insistence on film as an aesthetic experience instead of a plot-driven one, among other things. When it comes to this approach to filmmaking, Cosmatos’s second feature Mandy continues on the path the first film set. It is basically everything the first film was, but more so.

So we get something in theory inspired by an early 80s exploitation movie and heavy metal cover aesthetic that in practice looks and feels like no film or album cover made in that era actually does, but rather like a fever dream recollection of one, taking the idea of what this sort of film is and does and intensifying it so much it becomes stranger and stranger – and these films were often pretty damn strange already. That Mandy’s plot, such as it is, is a series of clichés, but turned up to eleven again, is just the logical conclusion to Cosmatos’s aesthetic approach; it’s also as beside the point as a criticism as it is in my other great favourite example of a film whose aesthetics and their meaning are the point rather than the plot or the meaning the plot contains, Argento’s Inferno. A lot like metal or a symphony, these are films best approached by experiencing them and viewing their plots as frames to be filled with the visual, aural, etc elements that are the actual things they are about. Which doesn’t mean there’s necessarily a lack of a point or theme to the film, it’s just not made in the way many a viewer is still most used to. At least to me, it is difficult not to see Mandy as a film very concretely making visual the inner world of a man broken by the loss of his wife, speaking through their private codes and shared artistic preferences. Cosmatos, fortunately, never pulls the sort of “it was all a hallucination” kind of reveal that would make this too obvious and too concrete, understanding that your evil hippie cults and mutant bikers can very well be real for the characters and real in the world they inhabit yet still carry other meanings.

Cosmatos also finds room for some great, larger than life – because only people larger than life can exist in this sort of dreamscape - performances here. Riseborough’s presence is rather special. Even though the role of the woman killed to induce a murderous rampage is usually an unthankful one, her performance suggests a woman who found the sort of knowing innocence some, very few people, reach after they have gone through some pretty horrible things, and makes the cliché painfully real. Cage has by now developed actual control over his personal style of overacting, where a decade or so ago it looked very much as if it were the other way round (I sometimes imagine him possessed by a crazier version of himself riding on his back). He is going big here, obviously, but he’s going exactly as big as any given scene needs him to, an often unrecognized art; he might be turning into Vincent Price in his old days.


If it’s not perfectly clear already, Mandy is a film that’s as if it were exactly made to my personal specifications, therefore coming with the warmest recommendation for any viewer that’s me.

Three Films Make A Post: Stephen King took you to the edge with The Shining and Pet Sematary. This time......he pushes you over

Matchstick Men (2003): A film about con men seems to be a really weird proposition for Ridley Scott, for this particular genre thrives on the proper sense of timing and pacing, both not elements of storytelling many of Scott’s film suggest much understanding of. Consequently, the – terribly obvious if you’ve seen a couple of films from the genre – con part of the movie sputters and stops awkwardly, not exactly helped along by how bland the whole con is. Of course, this is the sort of film that thinks itself rather above the concerns of a proper genre film because IT HAS SOMETHING TO SAY! Alas, what it actually does say is neither terribly interesting nor insightful, so this bit does fall pretty flat too.

I’m also not terribly happy with the film trying to get most of its humour out of making fun of the mentally ill, as excited as Nicolas Cage seems to be to play this sort of thing. Doesn’t help much here that the jokes often just aren’t terribly funny.

El bar (2017): Which is also something that troubled me about Álex de la Iglesia’s comedic thriller about a group of people stranded in a bar with a deadly virus, all Man being the greatest monster of them all tropes imaginable locked with them inside, and a really stupid government conspiracy outside. The mix between comedy and thriller never quite worked out for me not just because the jokes aren’t funny (there’s only so many times you can laugh about a hipster beard), but because the characters are comedy characters – too broadly drawn to make the thriller and psychological side of the film convincing, a decent cast notwithstanding.
As an old pro, de la Iglesia does know how to stage this sort of thing competently and somewhat excitingly, but to my eyes, this is the plot of a forty minute short film stretched out to feature length by adding random clichés about how horrible people under pressure are.


Sisters of the Plague (2015): Jorge Torres-Torres’s New Orleans set mumblecore arthouse horror film (seriously) about ghosts, possession, and relationship troubles certainly isn’t generic, on the other hand. Given the mumblecore aspirations, its slowness (though unlike with Matchstick Men this seems at least the consequence of an actual directorial decision) and the film’s general air of conscious spurning of many filmic conventions, this one’s going to be hard going for many a viewer. I got something out of it – Josephine Decker, Isolde Chae-Lawrence and Thomas Francis Murphy certainly play their behinds off, and while I found the heavily metaphorical use of the supernatural and quite a few of its moments of purposeful sloppiness (it’s the mumblecore influence, I’m sure) not much to my taste, there’s a sense of place and an air of the Weird about parts of the film that I found at least fascinating, sometimes even riveting.

Mom and Dad (2017)

The Ryans are probably your typical movie white suburban family. Looking pretty rich to someone like me, they are still a friendly bubble of neuroses: father Brent (Nicolas Cage) is deep in the throes of a male midlife crisis with added existential dread, mother Kendall (Selma Blair) has the version of it allowed to women, while teenage daughter Carly (Anne Winters) and younger son Josh (Zackary Arthur) show all the symptoms of their respective ages. But hey, these people do seem to love each other even when they are making their lives about as much worse as they make them better.

Alas, a mysterious syndrome possibly caused by alien invaders or terrorists hits the USA (like so many American films about apocalyptic events, Mom and Dad never bothers to even acknowledge the existence of the larger part of the world), and soon all that precious parental love all parents apparently carry turns into murderous, insane rage. The Ryan kids and Carly’s boyfriend Damon (Robert T. Cunningham) - who will spend much of the film battered and unconscious only to repeatedly pop up to save everyone’s bacon and then get knocked down again in what I’m not too sure is actually supposed to be a running gag – will have a hell of a time surviving the day.

Mom and Dad’s director and writer is Brian Taylor, one half of Neveldine/Taylor, so nobody should go into this one expecting an ultra-serious film about generational gaps expressed through bloody violence. Instead, it’s mix of not exactly subtle, sardonic suburban satire, some mild splatstick, with a smidgen of disturbing moments that can turn grotesque and darkly funny at a moments notice, and an occasional sense of creepiness mostly based on the elder Ryans still acting like a suburban couple even when they are attempting to murder their children. They are very bourgeois child murderers, is what I’m saying.

The film does have a handful of serious scenes among the carnage, and the scenes of Cage and Blair running around shouting wildly, moments that handle the emptiness of these oh so unhappy rich people and their lives rather delicately, and to my great surprise – given Taylor’s general predilections for not having a single human being in his movies - effectively. While he’s playing crazy in the patented Cage style I rather love, the actor does also have some quiet moments he handles with equal effectiveness to suggest that Brent really was pretty close to murdering his family even before whatever happened to suburbia happened. Blair’s performance is more subtle, suggesting more complexity to Kendall than to Cage’s character, while avoiding getting drowned out by Crazy Cage; she’s also great in her creepy moments, selling the emotional horror involved.

It is interesting to for once watch a film that reverses the more typical evil kid trope, which of course allows a different kind of critique of the suburban US lifestyle by actually keeping the usual family power dynamics.


While all this doesn’t quite add up to a film I outright love – that would need a greater shift away from the blunt satire to the emotional horrors of the story – Mom and Dad is a highly enjoyable, sometimes disturbing, often very funny, piece that runs along sprightly and looks stylish without being overstyled while giving a fine showcase for Blair’s and Cage’s talents. Plus, there’s a fun appearance by the great Lance Henriksen as Nicolas Cage’s father, a casting decision so brilliant, I want to hug the people responsible for it.

Pay the Ghost (2015)

During a Halloween parade, Charlie (Jack Fulton), the seven year old son of academic Mike Lawford (Nicolas Cage) disappears without a trace after saying something about “paying the ghost”.

With the first anniversary of his disappearance closing in, Charlie is still missing. Mike and his wife Kristen (Sarah Wayne Callies) have separated, and Mike’s still – understandably – obsessing about what happened to his son, making himself an annoyance to the detective on the case (Lyriq Bent), and spending a lot of time in front of the traditional newspaper clip and photo wall every obsessed person and every serial killer in the movies calls his own. Maybe, Mike’s even going crazy, for he is beginning to have visions of his son, seeing what might be signs pointing him in the direction of a supernatural solution to the mystery.

In fact, the evidence for the supernatural is piling up so fast, soon Kristen, Mike’s work BFF (Veronica Ferres), and even the detective begin to believe.

Horror movies made for a mainstream audience are blessed and cursed by the fact they aren’t made for a genre-savvy audience: blessed, because they don’t have to go through the rituals of fanservice and might just look at old ideas from a different perspective; cursed, because they might not realize they are actually walking well-trodden paths, and because they aren’t allowed to dig as deeply into certain uncomfortable zones as their core genre siblings.

Uli Edel’s adaptation of a Tim Lebbon novella is more an example for the curse than for the blessing (well, it’s a horror movie after all), because boy does it avoid to actually dig into the emotional horror that losing a child must be for a parent, instead keeping to the middle-ground of okay melodrama where even the most hurtful things don’t make the people they happen to actually unattractive, and where obsessions are so mild, they can be expressed by a man posting flyers and getting slightly miffed with a cop. The film’s acting the same way when it comes to the treatment of horrible things happening to children too, never actually stopping and thinking what a series of yearly disappearances and murders of three children over centuries in the same area actually means. And no, it isn’t being subtle, it’s just avoiding the horrifying as much as it possible can.

In fact, the script is so tepid when it comes to these things, the film can count itself lucky it does at least have Nicolas Cage, who is at the same time doing his utmost to not play a cartoon character as per his more usual and really putting more effort in than the script deserves, making the film feel much more alive and human than it has any right to be. I had forgotten how good Cage can be at this sort of thing.

The rest of the cast – including Stephen McHattie in a minor role with big dreadlocks which alone would make the film worth watching at least once – is rather good too. They also just aren’t given much to get their teeth into. It’s all very professional, and competent, but totally lacking in anything comparable to actual human emotions or actions.

Uli Edel’s direction does little to help things into a more interesting (or, you know, creepy) direction – it’s slick, it’s competent, and it completely fails at making anything here resonate emotionally. He’s also just not very good at managing scare scenes, the film ending up completely unable to even stage a simple jump scare effectively, much less turn what should be the film’s moments of actual horror into anything else than a mild repetition of visual motives we all have seen in better films. It’s all very tasteful, at least, except for the finale when things become utterly ridiculous, but good taste can only get you so far with a film that by all rights should be about horrible things happening to people who not at all deserve them.

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In short: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011)

Wait just a minute, Internet! Wasn't the second Ghost Rider movie as directed by the terrible couple of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (shouldn't they have a better shared director name like "The Explosion Twins", by the way? Neveldine/Taylor doesn't really cut it.) supposed to be utterly dreadful?

To my surprise, I found myself highly entertained by the film's silly shenanigans and its clever dumbness when I finally dared watch it. Of course, my enjoyment of Ghost Rider: SoV might have something to do with lowered expectations, seeing as I did not expect anything from the directors of the overrated and annoying Crank movies and the improbably horrible Gamer, and surely not a movie that gets the dubious allure of Marvel's Ghost Rider character. That allure, as if I need to tell anyone, is that of a bad metal album cover; we are, after all, talking about a biker with a flaming skull on his shoulders riding a burning motorcycle, hitting people with chains and eating souls.

SoV gets that, and so mostly consists of CGI Rider doing appropriately burning and chainy things while clichéd guitar noises play on the soundtrack. Because that sort of thing might get boring once in a while, the directors also delight us with some nonsensical mythology (OMG! The Ghost Rider was the angel of justice before he was dragged into hell and corrupted by a diet of flashing TV violence!), dumb-clever quips, and Idris Elba as a French alcoholic religious bad-ass fighter.

And then there's Nicolas Cage. Clearly, the only directorial advice Neveltaylor (that's better, isn't it?) had for Cage was to tell him "go insane", so that's what he did, gibbering, grunting, chewing and spitting his absurd lines with the greatest enthusiasm while pulling his face into various monkey-like positions. It's quite a performance, even in a career that is as full of all-out scenery slaughter as that of Cage.

So, Dinotayl, I salute you (for once).

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,mark neveldine,brian taylor,nicolas cage,idris elba,ciaran hinds,action,horror

Season of the Witch (2011)

Not to be confused with George A. Romero's Season of the Witch, but then, you wouldn't.

It's the 14th century. After having slaughtered the pope's infidel of the day for a few years, crusaders Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) have become a bit disillusioned by their work. Especially Behmen is quite nicely on his way to being a heretic, what with his doubting the Church's ability to speak for the will of their God.

Behmen is so disgusted by the state of affairs that he and Felson not just desert from the crusades (which, historically speaking, was their right after forty days of service, but, you know, Hollywood), but also manage to piss off the Pope himself before they do.

Obviously, the pair try to stay incognito once they've returned to Europe. Life at home hasn't improved during the crusaders' absence, for the plague has arrived and is killing off people left and right.

Worrying about dying from a horrible death might just be an academic question for our protagonists, though. They're recognized as deserters in the first city they enter, and could probably look forward to a nice execution, if the plague-sick cardinal of the place (self-important horror icon Christopher Lee) did not have need for their services. The Church, you see, is convinced the plague has been caused by a single witch (Claire Foy) they just caught and can be stopped through a ritual that can only be performed by monks living in a monastery about 300 miles away. Because the plague has somewhat reduced the numbers of able-bodied men, the cardinal would very much like Behmen and Felson to help transport the girl to where she belongs. Only after a night in jail and a meeting with the supposed witch that convinces Behmen she looks somewhat innocent to him, does he agree to do the Church's work again, yet only if the girl will be guaranteed a fair trial.

Now Behmen, Felson and a small band of man (first guy to die, priest, young man who wants to become a knight, and rogue-ish guide, you know the deal) will only have to survive travelling through places with charming names like "Wormwood". Surely, no additional trouble will await them at their destination.

Season of the Witch looks like a bit of a dubious candidate for the critical mauling it has received to me. Sure, the film's historical accuracy leaves a lot to be desired, but I somehow doubt that a film full of witches, demons and zombie monks is in any way or form meant to be historically truthful. In fact, it's the sort of historical pulp fantasy that treats all elements of medieval beliefs - or to be more precise, its own very contemporary interpretation of what these beliefs were - as if they were true, giving itself a fine grab bag of supernatural fun to work with. None of the film's ideas about the supernatural, nor the way it treats Behmen's crisis of faith, are in any way, shape or form original or even just a bit clever. They are, however, the perfect basis for an adventure movie full of decently done genre standard scenes (though I was disappointed by the lack of a bandit attack), and the usual clichéd character work any Hollywood writer can probably do in their sleep. This surely is not a film to set new intellectual standards, but compared to the Steven Somers school of dumbness in pulp adventure, Bragi Schut's script is perfectly fine - possibly even coherent.

The film's director Dominic Sena (remember when he had only made a few music videos and the decent Kalifornia, and still was a talent to watch?) does not exactly present his audience with visual brilliance. He's comparatively point-and-shoot-y for a contemporary mainstream director. This directorial style is, however, a pleasant reprieve from the world of bad slo-mo, whoosh-cutting, and obfuscating staging many of his colleagues inhabit. Only some of the CGI sequences could have used a bit of that kind of obfuscation for my tastes - the initial battle sequences are looking especially phony.

It's also nice to see Nicolas Cage slightly back on track again in that he doesn't overact every darn second of the film as if he had to use up Bela Lugosi's and Sharukh Khan's combined scenery-chewing reservoir in every single scene he does. I'd even suggest some of Cage's acting here has nuances. Obviously, I always love Ron Perlman.

Now, I'm pretty sure somebody like Neil Marshall could have taken the same basic ideas and made a much better, and more exciting film out of them, yet if there's one thing the still very small but growing movie genre of historical neo-pulp fantasy truly needs, then it's movies like Season of the Witch that are neither unwatchable shite nor awesome, but the entertaining middle-ground a genre needs to thrive.

 

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