Three Films Make A Post: He always takes one

The Collector (2009): When I initially watched Michael Dunstan’s film, I judged it to be deeply indebted to Saw and the piss-coloured aesthetics of that school of filmmaking. Today, I rather see it as a variation on Home Alone where Kevin has grown up, is breaking into peoples’ houses and turns them into trapped murder holes, which makes me a lot happier.

It’s still more a decent film than a great one, mind you, lacking in something that makes it truly special, or that’s as insane as its killer’s chosen method. That would come in the sequel, fortunately.

Sana aka Everybody’s Song (2023): Takashi Shimizu, decades away from his J-horror heights, does still regularly churn out horror movies of highly variable quality. Sana has some delightful moments of dread and terror and a complicated twisty backstory to its haunting that actual earns those twists; it also goes on a little too long, and spends a bit too much time on also being an ad – there’s even a song with lyrics subbed on screen, so you can karaoke to it, as well – for the boy (well, men) band Generations. These guys aren’t bad actors for male idols, and the film isn’t pulling its punches too badly in their treatment in the plot. Still, I can’t help but think that a film concerning a fictional pop group could have gone into rather more interesting places with them as characters.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024): The newest entry into Legendary’s kaijuverse is about as silly as giant monster movies from the USA will get, which is to say, pretty damn silly indeed, and if you’re looking for even the shallowest puddle of depth, you’ll be rather disappointed in it. If you’re willing to accept that this thing is just going to revel in a large number of giant monster fights - all realized in the fakest most colourful digital art Hollywood money can buy -, grin at you, make up bizarre lore and waste Rebecca Hall on a role even a muppet could play, you may very well have a very good time after all.

For one thing is clear: Adam Wingard is doing his damndest to entertain his audience here, to never bore, to ignore the human drama nobody cares about (that’s what that Apple TV show about bigamy is for), and to just turn out a fun piece of popcorn cinema, the sort of thing that’s pure sensation, nothing else.

I’m perfectly fine with that approach to filmmaking and thus felt myself perfectly entertained by the film; I rather enjoy the contrast between this and what Toho does with Godzilla on his home turf, as well.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Up to this point, the Monsterverse US kaiju movies have been rather reluctant to fully and openly embrace their chosen genre’s silliness, playing things more or less dramatic, an approach that has resulted in at least one of the best giant monster movies ever made (that would be Kong: Skull Island, for the barbarians among my imaginary readers), but also in the idea that Kyle Chandler looking as if he had very bad case of constipation makes for an engaging human anchor.

Chandler’s still in this movie, but you might miss him if you blink, for the only human character from the last Monsterverse film this one cares about is Millie Bobby Brown’s Madison, which seems to be a fair assessment of the situation. And while Brown’s subplot here doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense, and suggests that Evil Elon Musk (yup, that’s our human villain) has never even heard of the concept of operational security, or just plain security, it does go through a lot of the sort of conspiracy and weirdness human subplots the non-monsters in a kaiju movie are supposed to go through. With a smile on its face and whistling a merry tune.

The other humans of note are Alexander Skarsgård as the rogue geologist version of Fox Mulder – and the way Skarsgård plays it, he knows he’s Mulder – and Rebecca Hall trying to chat with a very huge gorilla with the help of an honest to gosh Kenny. Well, because we now live in 2021, the Kenny’s actually a mute little Inuit girl (Kaylee Hottle), but that’s certainly an improvement over a little Japanese boy in short trousers. Also eventually involved will be a little trip into the Hollow Earth. That old Fortean chestnut is presented through some genuinely beautiful and bizarre effects, and seems like the logical next step (before the alien invasion I hope for in the next film) for the series to take.

So this time around, those pesky humans do get some interesting stuff to take part in again, but Adam Wingard’s (coming off his terrible Death Note thing for Netflix and the dire Blair Witch swinging) film is pretty clear about what’s the main event (see the title of the damn movie) and goes all in for the big damn kaiju action in lovingly staged fights that lay waste to quite a few pretty cities this time around. There’s a wonderful sense of abandon to those fights, comparable to that phase in the Showa era when the films were becoming sillier but were still using that silliness to put their audience – kids at heart, sometimes in body – in a state of awe and wonder and the sort of giddy excitement that can come about when movies show you something that just can’t be seen in real life (cf., why the movies are better than life) – just with a different style of special effects.

Speaking of those, whoever is responsible for the motion capture and animation of Kong here is an absolute genius, providing personality and weight in spades; only in comparison does Godzilla look like a grumpy old lizard.

Past Misdeeds: The Guest (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

The Peterson family – mother Laura (Sheila Kelley), father Spencer (Leland Orser), nearly of age daughter (who’d be of age for nearly three years in my country, and legally drinking beer for nearly five) Anna (Maika Monroe) and teenage son Luke (Brendan Meyer) – are still grieving for the death of their eldest son in combat in one of America’s recent wars. One day, a stranger calling himself David (Dan Stevens) shows up at their door, introducing himself as a war buddy of the son come to pay his respects and give them a final message of love from him.

David might feel just a little bit off, but he’s also charming, attractive, attentive and seems honestly interested in each family member and their respective problems, calming the mother, buddying up to the father, half-charming the more sceptical Anna, and helping Luke out with his bully problems. Quickly, a short stay for a night or two turns into an unspoken and indefinite agreement about his staying on as a live-in family friend. However, further developments might just reveal that David’s more than he pretends to be, and perhaps even a danger to everyone he comes into contact with, in particular those people towards whom he has good intentions.

After my general dislike for You’re Next and my honest puzzlement about the critical cheering – at least in horror circles – Adam Wingard’s film got where less smug movies suffered a polite shrug, I did not expect anything much to my tastes going into his next film The Guest. What I got, however, is a truly excellent film that not just avoids nearly everything I found problematic or pretty damn annoying about its predecessor but turns it around and into an asset.

So Wingard still demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge of genre film history, but where demonstrating it felt like a pointless, and rather smug, gesture to me in You’re Next (So you’ve seen a lot of movies? So have I. So what?), The Guest seems to be all about actually learning from the movies that came before and then applying that knowledge to improve the film at hand and turn it into a more effective piece and telling its story better. Thus making an understanding of early John Carpenter, the same neon 80s aesthetic that dominated Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, and all those thrillers about mentally ill people worming themselves into bourgeois families, a natural part of the film’s language.

While Wingard keeps being interested in a subversion of genre expectations, his approach here goes far beyond “ironic” quotes or making a handful of obvious changes to the formula that play better with an contemporary audience, leaving The Guest not as a film about older movies (or even a critique of them) but a thing standing on its own that organically uses those techniques and effects that will best serve its purpose to tell a story of its own. A story I have consciously been quite vague about here because I don’t want to rob anyone of the experience of just watching this particular film for the first time without much more than the expectations you’ll have about a genre film with its particular set-up. Now, fortunately, this does not mean The Guest is a film that’s all about one big plot twist, but only that all its little twists and turns are perfectly worth experiencing on one’s own for the first time. All too often, a film having plot twists means it will make grand, dramatic gestures about developments that have little logical or thematic connection to what came before in a story, whereas here, these things all feel like natural developments and are perfectly in the flow of what came before.

It’s this flow, an organic feel, that impresses me particularly about The Guest, a feeling that each single element in plot, design, direction and acting truly feeds into the film as a whole, leaving one with the feeling of having watched something of perfect inner logic, with no single element that could disabuse one of that notion hogging the spotlight for a second too long. So this is a film with a wonderful cast – Monroe, Stevens and Meyer are particular high points – tight direction, often very inventive camera work and editing, as well as a script that is much cleverer than it pretends to be, where again all these single elements just feed into the movie as a whole. It is quite difficult to single out any one of these elements as particularly remarkable, not because of their quality or lack of such but because the film is so much of one piece, looking at the single parts it is made off seems to be completely beside the point, unless you have an academic interest in talking about film.


Of course, in theory, that’s how all films are supposed to work. However films where things come together quite this way and that still make it look easy and natural, without artifice exactly thanks to their high degree of artistry (which is by nature artificiality) aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. Again, the early John Carpenter comes to my mind the most, and that’s really how The Guest feels to me: a movie so great it deserves comparison to the best.

In short: Death Note (2017)

It is rather interesting to compare Adam Wingard’s manga adaptation for Netflix with the Japanese live action version. Where the Japanese movies were apparently trying to copy the complete plot structure and include every pointless bit of minutiae from the (very good, for those who don’t know it) original manga without any thought for the needs of a different medium, and therefore ended up slow as molasses and very much on the tedious side, Wingard’s adaptation takes great liberties with the source material but races through the plot beats and characters it keeps with wild abandon. It’s enough to give anyone whiplash, so much so that the movie often feels not so much like an actual movie but like an attempt to cut the material of one or two whole seasons of a TV show into a film-like thing.

Consequently, everything about the film is superficial: there’s no time for characterisation, certainly nothing of the depth of ethical discussions of the manga (how much thought can you put into the thirty seconds you have before you need to race to the next plot point, after all?), and scenes that should have emotional impact never hit because the film never takes the time it would need to build an emotional (or intellectual) connection with the viewer.

Emotional connections aren’t the only things Death Note doesn’t bother to build: there’s no atmosphere because you’d need to spend time on building it; no suspense because again, you’d need to build it up; and no tension not based on characters acting like tropes instead of people because, surprise, the film never takes its time to establish anything about them beyond the barest clichés – and that of course as quickly as possible.

I’d criticize the acting, as well, but then, there isn’t anything in the script that gives the actors much to work with, and there’s – of course – no space in the film to let them breathe a little anyway. Only Lakeith Stanfield as L leaves any impression at all, and that’s more because the film keeps many of the behavioural tics and visual cues of the original character, which at least makes him interesting to look at, than on account of much actual acting; not his fault, obviously.


As a whole, the film doesn’t so much feel like a narrative but like the summary of one, and lacks any kind of tension, or any drive beyond hurtling from plot beat to plot beat to plot beat for no reason at all. Death Note is pretty to look at, at least, but if ever a film deserved the old cliché about nothing waiting beyond the pretty surface, it’s this one.

Blair Witch (2016)

A video supposedly found in the haunted woods around Burkittsville (now only nominally located in Maryland but actually shot in the well-worn woods of British Columbia every horror fan knows so well by now they’ll never look strange or frightening again) appears on the Net. James (James Allen McCune), the brother of Heather of “vanished in Blair Witch Project” fame, believes he recognizes his sister in a reflection and decides to rope in his best friend Peter (Brandon Scott), Peter’s girlfriend Ashley (Corbin Reid), and film student Lisa (Callie Hernandez) to look for any trace of Heather.

At first, James’s project seems rather more organized than the outing of Heather and her friends but once they are in the woods – taking on Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry) the people who found the video that incited the whole thing too – GPS, a cute little drone, and the superior technology of 2014 don’t help them any better than the slightly lower tech did the people they’ve come looking for.

Adam Wingard’s (as always written by Simon Barrett) new sequel to one of my favourite horror films of all time is one of those films I wish I liked more than I actually do. This is not a cynical, unlikeable cash-in, I believe, at least not from Wingard’s and Barrett’s position (Lionsgate, on the other hand…).

The filmmakers harbour obvious love and respect for the original Blair Witch - though I’m pretty sure they and I would disagree in many points about what makes it special - yet also are clearly going in with the intent of not just repeating the film’s beats and ideas. It’s not an attempt at deconstructing the original as it is one of giving its ideas slight twists while never outright contradicting any established lore, which isn’t that difficult when working from a film amongst whose strengths was the mythical vagueness to much what was going in it and around it.

These new twists are generally clever, and usually well executed, alas they are to a large degree also going in exactly the direction you’d expect a modern horror movie to go. The inherent weirdness and semi-professionalism of the original is replaced by a slick competence that only rarely leaves space to treat the supernatural as something that feels wrong. Even with one truly weird turn in its final act, this is a genre film in all the least interesting ways. So its Blair Witch is a a large monster that’ll only kill you when you look directly at it, a thing of high concepts easily described to a Hollywood producer, instead of the thing of folklore and legend that doesn’t have a clearly definable shape and only vague rules because folklore and legend are always shifting around cores that are ideas not monsters you can make an action figure out of.


If you’d rather see Blair Witch Project dragged down into the realms of the conventional, well-made horror film, this should make you very happy. If, on the other hand, you’re me, you’ll enjoy the film well enough for the kind of thing it is but can’t help and ask yourself what exactly the point of the whole sequel is when it doesn’t do anything with the material its working off that’s new and exciting, or actually all that frightening.

On ExB: The Guest (2014)

Given how little I enjoyed Adam Wingard’s You’re Next, I didn’t expect anything from his next movie.

What I got was a film I have a hard time not calling a masterpiece, so please follow this handy link to my gushing about it over at the venerable Exploder Button.

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In short: You’re Next (2011/13)

Sometimes, I feel more than a little disconnected from horror fandom and assorted critics. Case in point is the general adoration and praise lavished on Adam Wingard’s You’re Next, things I don’t feel the movie at hand actually deserves.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I do appreciate Wingard’s obvious abilities when it comes to making his low budget movie look so good the budget really never comes to mind when watching it. I do also appreciate the cast of veterans, young pretty people, and the mandatory cameos by Larry Fessenden and Ti West (the latter of whom can’t act at all, I’m sorry to say), as well as the 80s horror vibe of the soundtrack.

Unfortunately, I don’t really watch movies to be impressed by technical achievements but rather for emotional and/or intellectual involvement, and these aren’t things I get out of You’re Next. The former is hindered by the film’s thick patina of irony and self-consciousness, as well as by the fact the film never bothers to give its audience the slightest reason to care about any of its characters, seeing as they are all ironic ciphers only held together by actors much too good for what they’re doing here. What they are doing is pretty much exactly what you suspect, which is what stands in the way of any intellectual involvement on my part. Sure, there are some mild trope reversals, and an obvious but mildly clever plot twist (which of course does make it superior to a lot of other plot twists that seem made up on the spot and not part of the actual movie you’ve seen leading up to them), but the film never goes anywhere too interesting with it and stays well inside the most conservative lines of horror film writing. After all, a tiny bit of self-consciousness and cheap irony are expected of a horror film in the 2010s, and I’d probably more surprised by a movie not featuring them.

There’s a feeling of pointlessness that runs through the whole film, nothing really seems thought through to reach any kind of conclusion beyond the most obvious and least interesting one. What’s going on is this: there’s a bit of violence you can see everywhere else, the trope reversals come yet are done in a way that is neither very interesting nor points towards any new insights about the horror genre or humanity, some jokes are cracked I don’t find very funny, and the old “the rich are decadent and evil” bit I have seen done with more energy and nastiness in giallos of more than forty years ago is sung. It all comes together to form a movie-like object that’s just kind of there without ever being willing to commit to anything and see it through to the bitter end – neither the irony, nor the thoughts it threatens to have, nor the basic horror thriller set-up. If this sort of thing is the future of horror, the future of horror will be even more boring than The Conjuring.

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Three Films Make A Post: Come to the asylum...to get killed!

V/H/S (2012): I actually think the anthology movie is a logical direction for the POV horror sub-genre to take, but despite the inclusion of directors like Ti West and Adam Wingard, V/H/S isn't really doing much for me. It's clear the stories that make up the film are attempting to use the immediacy of the form for some urban legend style horror with a bit of a messed up ick factor, but the end product leaves me cold at best. It's difficult to bring up much interest for stories that tread well-trodden horror movie paths even when they are going for surprises, and it's equally difficult to have any interest for what happens to characters when they are only some mumbled dialogue, some shaky close-ups and nothing else; especially when most of the episodes go out of their way to also look like utter crap. I know, that's a stylistic choice (and the only time the word "style" can be used when talking about the film's aesthetic), but I'm really more interested in films that make stylistic choices about the way they picture the things their audience sees rather than the choice to shake-shake-shake that camera and put some mock-VHS post-production effects on.

Dead Hooker In A Trunk (2009): This indie movie by and with the Soska sisters Jen and Sylvia on the other hand seems to have its style well in hand, despite an obvious backyard budget. What this one has going for it are a sense of fun, an often rather uncontrolled imagination and the resulting weirdness. It's far from slick, but a great reminder what's actually good about the possibilities of contemporary filmmaking: that a handful of semi-professionals (I had too much fun with the film to use the term amateurs, plus there's more professional filmmaking coming from this direction) can just go out and make a movie full of private jokes, silliness and bits and pieces of the films they love, and it might even be one other people will be able to enjoy too like Dead Hooker. In this particular case, the film works via energy, attitude, some decidedly clever low budget direction and editing, and the fact that at least half of its jokes are pretty funny.

Toshi Densetsu Monogatari Hikiko (2008): A one-part OVA that looks like ass, full of characters with plastic faces and horrifying teeth that move through low detail backgrounds with all the grace of zombies while pulling faces that don't have anything to do with humanity as I know it; in other words, visually, this is your typical piece of CGI animation.

However, what the piece lacks in visual graces, it contains in its script (and voice acting), telling a creepy and rather disturbing tale of quotidian bullying and abuse, just as quotidian cowardice and the inability to face up to the truth. That tale is emphasised by expertly timed ghostly going-ons which mirror and amplify the short film's more natural horrors. It's a demonstration of the concept that timing and an intelligent script can make up for a multitude of flaws in a movie.

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