Three Films Make A Post: A man's got to know his limitations.

Magnum Force (1973): Probably not untouched by the accusations of fascist leanings levelled against Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, this second movie concerning the ridiculously violent police inspector – and let’s be honest here, incompetent investigator - Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood), sees the guy fighting a group of vigilante cops who plan what amounts to a fascist coup in San Francisco of all places. At one point in time, ladies and gentlemen, fascists were indeed not ruling most countries in the world anymore. Just imagine.

Anyway, Ted Post’s film never really manages to explain why Harry is set against his vigilante colleagues, though it does attempt to make something of a strength out of it by having Eastwood look somewhat puzzled about it himself. In other regards, this is simply a very solid 70s action movie, with a couple of excellent set pieces, a lead actor who appears to be enjoying himself, and a finale full of dead Nazi cops.

Black Magic (1975): I remember having had not as much time for Ho Meng-Hua’s first Black Magic movie for the Shaw Brothers when I saw it last. On a rewatch, I have rather warmed to the film, especially the brutal way in which Ho lets overheated melodrama, exploitation and the ickiness of South East Asian black magic horror – here at its inception point for Hongkong cinema, as far as I understand – crash into each other, until things can only be solved through one of those absurd and wonderful magic battles one can’t help but love wholeheartedly.

I still prefer the second Black Magic, mind you.

Hardware (1990): These days, films like Richard Stanley’s trippy unauthorized adaptation of a 2000AD strip, with their nature destroyed by human hands, corrupt authorities and corporate rule do feel rather more poignant than most of us would have hoped for even a couple of decades ago, so this in part very silly movie about a rampaging bit of military technology hits harder than ever before in this regard.

If you can get through that, there’ still great delight to be found here: Stanley shoots his science fiction horror not like James Cameron, but as a giallo, with moments that manage to suggest the mythical or the supernatural without outright speaking of them, and a surprisingly daft hand at drawing dysfunctional relationships.

Three Films Make A Post: The Pressure is Rising, The Adrenaline is Rushing, The Clock is Ticking

Run Lola Run aka Lola Rennt (1998): As a German born in the second half of the 70s, I really should have been all about Tom Tykwer’s hyperactive little action movie with an alternative timeline twist at the time. In actuality, I’ve watched it for the first time this week, and find myself half impressed by how much mileage Tykwer gets out of all the hallmarks of 90s cinema that usually make films ugly, if not just unwatchable.

Here, as is in some of the films of Dominik Graf, all of the stylistic excesses of a time of filmmaking turn into an actual style that feels like the only correct way to tell this particular story; or really, the style is the story here. Which does lead to my major problem with the film: its main characters may be really good at running, but are also spectacularly shitty people we are somehow supposed to care about because they are in love. Or something?

It’s not a deal breaker – I’ve cheered on even worse people in other movies after all – but also not exactly something to endear a movie to me.

The Last Sacrifice (2024): Speaking of not endearing, there’s this thing, a film that takes a Wikipedia-look level at an actual crime, uses bits and pieces of horror cinema that never really fit the voiceover talking at us to portray it, and suggests an influence of said crime on folk horror it never takes any effort to actually substantiate. It also tries to connect it to the cultural development of the UK without ever showing much of a grasp of that development beyond the most superficial talking points.

Like most true crime documentaries, and especially those with a horror bent, it’s shoddy, thoughtless and always more than a little offensive.

fuji_jukai.mov (2016): For quite some time, Katsumi Sakashita’s POV horror movie where footage of a film crew interviewing people of what we usually call Aokigahara forest in the West – and the film mostly calls jukai – is intercut with that supposedly shot by a girl going into the forest to commit suicide, accompanied by two other girls she met on the web who just want to watch, had been more of a rumour than an actual film outside of Japan.

It is a fine, low budget example of its form that sometimes shows its constraints in the performances and some unideal set design. Its emphasis on very human horrors and a central twist reminded me more than a little of the wonderful Banned from Broadcast series (more about them on a later date), but it certainly is on a level of accomplishment where that comparison is a compliment instead of to a film’s detriment.

Shelter (2026)

Mason, a man with a mysterious violent past because he’s played by Jason Statham, is hiding away alone on a pretty pathetic fallacy-prone Scottish island (actually portrayed by an Irish island, perhaps caused by a bout of whisky-based confusion). His only contact to the outside world are supply runs a man we’ll later learn to be an old friend makes for him. Said old friend also tends to bring his niece, the otherwise orphaned Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) with him on these runs. Not that Mason interacts with them, mind you – he stays in his former lighthouse, looking down, drinking, and being manly and sad.

Then, two catastrophes follow shortly after one another to shake up everyone’s life: First, Mason’s buddy is killed in a storm, and he saves and takes in Jessie, if she wants to or not. While the two are slowly warming to each other, the hermit’s former boss, publicly disgraced MI-5 boss Manafort (an evil Bill Nighy!), gets wind of our hero’s location and uses his old contacts, some manipulation, and his illegal electronic surveillance network to get Mason and the inconvenient as a witness Jessie killed. Clearly, their working relationship didn’t end on great terms.

The thing is, Mason is rather more difficult to kill than Manafort might like, particularly when he’s also needed to protect a child from harm, and does have some old contacts of his own.

Historically, I have never really loved Jason Statham’s body of work, but like an old, comfy, hairless, shoe, he has grown on me during the years. There’s a highly likeable quality to an actor who understands his strengths and his limitations in range and just proceeds to work inside them, at least from my perspective. Of course, the last two Statham vehicles, the insufferably stupid The Beekeeper and the MAGA-hat-wearing A Working Man, were still terrible movies with little entertainment value.

Shelter is more like it. Directed by variable journeyman director Ric Roman Waugh, this is a very standard back to basics “hardass protects young girl” kind of film, with a few accidental (?) jibes against the surveillance state, and a good handful of straightforward and effective action sequences. I found myself particularly enjoying the action here because it isn’t attempting to be crazy, or big, or particularly loud, but looks and feels like the product of a kind of sure craftsmanship that fits an aging Statham better than any attempt to get back to Crank.

And, though the Stat is a limited actor, a mix of experience with this kind of material, actual screen presence and some great chemistry with his young co-star Breathnach, do sell the relationship between these two, even if it is built on clichés. So much so, I found myself caring about the action not just because I like to watch action scenes in my action movies (who’d have thunk) but because I also bought into the film’s emotional stakes. More people directing Statham should try this approach.

As it stands, to me, this is a return to form for Statham. Or perhaps I should say a return to making the kind of movies I like to see Statham in.

Three Films Make A Post: They were divided by war. He united them in song.

The Choral (2025): This is the sort of very competently made, somewhat life-affirming drama that appear to only be made in the UK anymore. Some of its elements do strain historical believability a little – surely, the climactic choral performance is too modern(ist) in this context? – and there are a couple of scenes that don’t have the emotional impact they are supposed to have on me – the compassionate masturbation bit particularly comes to mind.

Otherwise, director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett evoke a time and a place and use this evocation to tell us something about people in times of social upheaval without it ever feeling didactic. Rather, this is done with grace, compassion, a sense of humour, and populated by actual characters brought to life by a brilliant cast – Ralph Fiennes really has quite a couple of years right now.

H Is for Hawk (2025): Staying in the UK, Philippa Lowthorpe’s adaption of an autobiographical book about a female academic (Claire Foy) who is avoiding coping with her grief about the death of her father (Brendan Gleeson) by hyperfocusing on training a goshawk contains one of the most believable portrayals of a real depressive episode I’ve seen in cinema – at least the kind of depression I have experience with (your symptoms may vary). Foy’s performance here is quite brilliant, nuanced and very human indeed.

Even though the film gets a bit too third act dramatic for real life in (surprise) its third act, this turns out not to be a film about a woman “getting over” mental illness by getting close to a bird as you’d probably expect, but something much messier, more complicated and more real that feels much closer to actual mental illness and the ways we cope with it than the easier version would have been. Which doesn’t mean this isn’t also full of perfect footage of a goshawk doing goshawk things, for just because the bird won’t save your life doesn’t mean it is of no import to it.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025): Belgian filmmakers Hélène Cattet’s and Bruno Forzani’s project of reflecting and intensifying the beautiful surfaces of European genre cinema of mostly the 60s and 70s – though in this one, there’s also quite a bit of Louis Feuillade added to the mix – until they turn even more abstract and weird than they already are continues. As with any good reflective surface, these films can be used as a mirror of whatever thematic interest or interpretative approach you prefer – I’m particularly fond of reading this one as a critique of the gender politics of European super spy films that still really likes looking at swankily dressed or nude, hot people; or as a meditation on the aesthetical losses of aging.

Though, honestly, I mostly prefer to fall into these films as dreams of exceeding, perhaps excessive, beauty.

Three Films Make A Post: It's Light… It's Bright… It's 100 Proof!

Ghost Train (2025): YouTuber Da-kyeong (Joo Hyun-young) revives her ailing horror channel with stories about Korea’s most haunted subway station as told to her by one of the men working there. At first, these stories seem like disconnected tales, but eventually, they entwine with Da-kyeong’s own life in ways she probably didn’t hope for.

For an anthology movie, the single tales in director Tak Seo-woong’s film can feel a little slight at first, particularly since they do tend to go for the standard tropes and shocks of Korean horror, with more than a smidgen of the Japanese 2chan style. However, each episode here does feature at least one strong, creepy image, and the way everything eventually comes together is pretty satisfying as well, so things are far from being as bland as the film’s beginning – or its title - would suggest.

Hue and Cry (1947): Directed by Charles Crichton, this film about a bunch of older boys in post-War London spoiling the plans of a master criminal did put British Ealing studios on the road to the sort of comedy we now know as the Ealing style of comedy, following the more traditionally comedian-centred efforts they made before. There’s a sharp eye for darkness and human foibles here, yet also a subversive sense of the little guy (in this case young men and boys somehow manoeuvring the direct post-war world), mostly ignored by the powers that be, sticking up for themselves as a community.

In this case, the kids are up against robbers who use not-Sexton Blake Brit pulps for children to message one another, as well as various forms of grown-up cowardice and hypocrisy. More importantly, the film is paced like race car, still genuinely funny in many regards, and makes great use of the rubble of the post-war years.

Whisky Galore! (1949): Speaking of Ealing comedies, in this one, directed by by Alexander Mackendrick, a Scottish island population, dried out of the Water of Life, attempts to steal many cases of whisky from a stranded government ship transporting it. Along the way, the film pulls at stiff upper lips, puritanical religion, and even solves two different romances with a sense of humour that goes from silly to subversive to the outright bizarre. There’s a bit concerning the power of a good bagpipes blow-out you really have to see to believe.

Only, there are very few Scotspeople involved here, so expect many a risible fake accent – I’m convinced Joan Greenwood doesn’t know the difference between Scotland and Wales, though her Welsh accent is really dreamy – and ideas about Scottish national identity that might not stand the sniff test. On the other hand, this is still a movie about a Scottish island getting one over the Brits in the name of alcoholism, so…

Three Films Make A Post: Dangerously close to human.

Primate (2025): In some of the circles I move in, Johannes Roberts’s rabid chimpanzee movie has caught a decent amount of praise as a throwback to the better animal attack movies of our pre-CGI past.

Alas, I don’t really see it. Sure, there are some nice enough gore gags – though they never go quite as far as you’d hope for, so a face may be ripped off but isn’t in danger of being eaten by a rabid chimpanzee – but a bit of the old blood and guts isn’t enough to distract from the film’s massive pacing problems, the characters’ lack of interest, or the general generic blandness of the script when there’s nothing else to get excited about.

My Learned Friend (1943): The last comedy Will Hay made for Ealing Studios before his death, directed by Hay and Basil Dearden, does put the comical duo of Hay and posh straight man Claude Hulbert against a serial killer (Mervyn Johns), prefiguring the dark humour to be found in later Ealing outings like Kind Hearts and Coronets. There’s not as much subversion as you’d hope for if you’re coming to the film from later Ealing comedies, and it does drag a little even with a short runtime of 74 minutes, but there are a couple of moments of genuine inspiration here, and whenever inspiration fails, always the basics of good filmmaking to fall back on.

Oily Maniac (1976): I’d love to enjoy Shaw Brothers exploitation maestro Ho Meng-Hua’s tale of a lowly, handicapped lawyer (Danny Lee Sau-Yin in one of his better performances) turning into the titular Oily Maniac to murder various assholes like an oily, murderous Hulk more than I actually do. But this one seems so fixated on rape, and loves to stop the little plot it has for side-tracks that are simply not terribly interesting, I really only love the scenes where Lee empties oil over his head to transform, and the monster suit does its monster suit business. The rest of the film is either too unpleasant or just a little bit dull – a curious yet deadly combination.

Three Films Make A Posthouse

The Eternal Daughter (2022): I generally tend to avoid the style of arthouse movies concerning the horrible suffering of posh people from some Freudian bullshit or other or moaning about the oh so terrible emptiness of their lives Joanna Hogg deals in, but when a film is supposed to conjure up the shadow of the 70s Ghost Stories for Christmas, I can’t really resist. And yes, there are some inspired moody shots of the kind Lawrence Gordon Clark dealt in to be found here, and those are certainly artfully done. But there’s also the fact this thing purporting to be a ghost story about grief often seems more like one about a rich person suffering from a bad experience with the hotel staff, which, personally, mostly makes me grief the lack of a guillotine in the hotel’s backroom.

At least Tilda Swinton must have been happy, for she gets to play one of those double roles she clearly relishes.

Summer of Demon (1981): While I’m complaining about ghost stories that don’t build an emotional connection to me as audience, Yukio Ninagawa’s version of Yotsuya Kaidan manages the unthinkable, namely, to make me feel nothing about the tale of Oiwa’s ghost. Coming from a successful career as a director of plays – apparently particularly Shakespeare – Ninagawa overcompensates for his inexperience in screen direction with a lot of distracting, busy camerawork that typically adds nothing to a scene and a lack of focus on the core of the story he’s telling. Kenichi Hagiwara makes a flat Iemon, and Keiko Takahashi’s Oiwa isn’t interesting alive or as a ghost here.

It doesn’t help Ninagawa’s case that I have seen Tai Kato’s much superior version just some months ago, and so have ample comparison points to the detriment of this one.

Posthouse (2025): Thus, the best of this entry’s bunch of movies is Nikolas Red’s tale of an (actually real) lost Pinoy silent horror movie, bad family business, and the danger of obsessing about art. You do need to have some patience with this one, though: the acting is never quite sharp enough for the complex emotions the script suggests, the visual side has a rather cheap, digital look, and the fake silent movie pieces are creepy but never convince as what they are supposed to be.

Still, there’s something genuine, serious and interesting about this one that makes it well worthy of some attention and some thought.

Three Films Make A Post: Is that a werewolf in your stomach?

Diva in the Netherworld aka 歌姫魔界をゆく(1980): An idol pop duo – one of whose members happens to be an ex-wrestler as well as a vampire – and their manager – who in turn happens to be a werewolf – strand in the mansion of a cannibal (she might be an oni) and her stop motion pet dragon. Given that description, its miniscule budget and its pleasantly short runtime of 63 minutes, Takafumi Nagamine’s weird little movie should be a very fun time of the old “oh, those crazy Japanese” kind. In actuality, most of the film is terribly, so much so even its pieces of loveable insanity – like the moment in the last act when the wrestling vampire lady does a proper henshin into a silver-faced bat heroine – don’t hit very well.

Also, to whoever wrote the plot synopsis that’s all over the internet – please learn the difference between idols and opera singers.

Stigmatized Properties: Possession (2025): Where his old J-horror cohort Takashi Shimizu – to take an obvious example – has kept a core of a personal style, Hideo Nakata from about the 2010s on has turned into something of a faceless journey man director who is making technically proficient films that typically lack any kind of personality. This highly episodic horror comedy about a rookie actor trying to enhance his profile by sleeping in haunted properties is a case in point – it’s not a terrible movie, but there’s such a lack of invention and interest in the material in Nakata’s approach, I dislike it more than I’d do a simple failure. Failures, after all, imply someone is trying.

The Incredible Robert Baldick: Never Come Night (1972): I didn’t know the BBC did the whole “testing the waters for a TV show via TV movies” thing like her US siblings, but this is indeed such a film that never made it to series. Written by Terry Nation – as you know, Jim, a rather important writer in the early years of Doctor Who – this was apparently thought of as a potential Doctor Who replacement, which fortunately didn’t happen.

Unfortunately, this does feel like the start of something rather special. As a standalone filmlet, this is a lovely piece of telefantasy, operating very much in the idea realm of 70s Who and Nigel Kneale, full of fun ideas for its central character and his world that would have been nice to see explored in a series. Apart from a fun and fast supernatural – or is it? – plot, there are some excellent bits and pieces here about class – the madeira scene is brilliant –, the value of knowledge, and the nature of belief.

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to the new west.

Americana (2023): Tony Tost’s crime comedy was savaged by a lot of people, but as far as films that desperately want to be Coen Brothers films go, this has more than a few moments that actually, genuinely work and even suggest Tost may very well be able to make a film that’s made by himself instead of the sum of his influences.

As it stands, this is a movie with many good scenes that never quite cohere to a really good movie, with a game cast – who knew Halsey could act? – having to cope with one-note characters, and a plot that really doesn’t need the Tarantino-style told out of order thing.

But, at the very least, it has a very good taste in songs.

Phantom Thread (2017): I’ve been successfully avoiding Paul Thomas Anderson’s dressmaker drama for quite a few years, but, as it turns out, I really shouldn’t have been afraid of this actually being the movie about British peoples’ inability to connect with their feelings it sort of sells itself at. Instead, this is a BDSM romance where people don’t actually fuck but make dresses or poison mushroom omelettes instead, a movie about power and love and the kind of lust that’s more complicated than one would expect, expressed via some of the most elegant filmmaking imaginable. It is also, in a peculiar way, yet another Anderson film that is very much like an exploitation movie in many aspects, until it isn’t.

The Naked Gun (2025): From the sublime to the ridiculous, but keeping with movies I didn’t actually expect to like, Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun requel is the return to silly, random nonsense comedy I didn’t know I needed in my life, with a barrage of jokes that run the gamut from the tasteless, to the mildly political, to the impressively stupid, park for a time to have some fatty food, and then throw even more bullshit at the audience.

At least two thirds of the thousand jokes and sight gags are actually funny, so there’s no way to find fault with what this provides, unlike you’re too afraid of house favourite Liam Neeson’s still gigantic hands.

Three Ghostly UK TV Movies Make A Post

Traditionally, the British were better with tales of the weird and the supernatural on TV than the most other nations. At least it looks so from over here in Germany, and going by the surprising number of TV plays, TV movies and random anthology episodes you can often only find in blurry VHS rips on YouTube. In these cases, the blurriness does enhance the mood.

Three cases in point (all of which I’ve encountered thanks to the efforts of writer Ray Newman to make all of us watch more obscure British TV on YouTube:

“Haunted”: The Ferryman (1974): This fifty minute shortish TV movie based on Kingsley Amis finds Jeremy Brett as a freshly baked bestselling writer on vacation with his wife (Natasha Parry) at a country inn. The place shows increasingly disturbing parallels to the supernatural thriller he wrote, until he’s basically stepping into the role of his own doomed hero.

This, a Granada production as directed by John Irvin, is a particularly nice discovery: Brett projects a believable mix of arrogance and self-doubt, Parry is excellent as the woman who has to cope with it, and the plot escalates from playfully weird meta to the truly creepy, helped by the kind of calm shooting style so typical of this strand of British filmmaking, where creepy shots are insisted upon until they cause quite a bit of lingering dread.

“Dramarama”: Snap (1987): This twenty-five minute piece directed by Michael Kerrigan concerns a boy who may be on his way to a mild form of juvenile delinquency getting dropped off in some marshland by his father for an ill-defined school photography project (British schooling in the 80s must have been rather peculiar). There, he encounters a supernatural power very interested in his dark side.

I wouldn’t have expected a piece of children’s television to be quite as visually inspired as this is by the proto-Ghost Story for Christmas Whistle and I’ll Come to You, but this borrows a couple of central shots, as well as the mood of a desolate landscape where even human habitations seem to be infused with a degree of wrongness and runs with it to a really pleasantly dark ending. The central child actor isn’t great, but the film quotes well from the right sources and carries its sense of genuine creepiness right through to the end.

“Ghosts”: Three Miles Up (1998): Last but not least, this BBC production directed by Lesley “Ghostwatch” Manning adapts Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “Three Miles Up”, from the phase when she wrote weird fiction influenced by but highly distinctive from the works of her then boyfriend Robert Aickman.

In visual mood, this does with the British canal system what Snap did with marshland, so expect slowly lingering shots of a landscape that feels simply not like a place meant for humans when looked at long enough. I’m not too fond of some of the acting here – TV attempts at psychodrama are generally not my bag – but there’s a sense of strangeness in some of the human interaction here besides the loud attempts at TV Bergman that fits nicely into the strangeness of landscape.

Three Films Make A Post: Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night Edition

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025): Scott Cooper’s Springsteen biopic focussed on the making of “Nebraska” (certainly one of my favourite albums of all time) is a deeply frustrating experience. At its best, this is a calm, meticulous and thoughtful portrayal of the creative process, and about trying to go forward when something in one’s past always holds one back.

At its worst – all too often – this just dumps the greatest hits of biopic clichés onto that better movie, the kind of bullshit neither life nor art deserve and that runs against the attempts at truthfulness of the film’s good third. It doesn’t exactly help that the the film’s ideas about psychology tend to the reductive or even the outright stupid, and that Cooper also likes to do things like show Springsteen looking up at a mansion on a hill and then cut to him writing “Mansion on the Hill”, as if the writer/director were either an idiot or assumed his audience to be.

It Was Just An Accident aka Yek tasadof-e sadeh (2025): Whereas this is Jafar Panahi channelling quite a bit of his own suffering under the Iranian regime into a movie that is never going for the simple and the easy and transfiguring what must be a lot of actual pain into a film of astonishing compassion with even those the director would have every right to see as beyond having any right to be treated with it.

Also included are moments of righteous anger turned righteous art, complex characterisation of characters a film like Cooper’s above would have treated as walking, talking tropes, genuinely riveting discussions of the morals of vengeance and mercy, and emotions genuine yet still filtered through the thoughtful complexity of these discussions. There’s also a dry sense of dark humour running particularly through the middle act that’s often actually delightful.

Here We Come A-Wassailing (1977): Coming to something rather different, this short-ish BBC documentary directed by great British folk rock musician Ashley Hutchings (whose Albion Band also scores the film) looks at various local yuletide/midwinter/Christmas traditions in different villages on the British Isles. It’s an often fascinating document of rites that by the time this was shot were curiously disconnected to the actual life of those people still holding to them. What must have been deeply meaningful at one point to the communities involved here looks like a nice lark to get up to while getting very, very drunk – to be lost in the next decades, and then in parts revived again through new generations stumbling onto the traditions and filling them with hopefully new meanings.

In any case, it’s fantastic just to be able to see some of this stuff, to speculate on the meanings these traditions might have had, and to watch people enjoy doing pretty damn strange things that would puzzle anyone living farther away than three villages over.

The Breakthrough (1975)

His superiors in the scientific government bureaucracy send young scientist Saunders (Simon Ward) to a somewhat isolated research facility to check out what lead scientist Maclean (Brewster Nichols)is actually doing with the project’s time and the government’s money. Instead of closing anyone’s purse strings, Saunders quickly finds himself drawn into the project. That’s little wonder, for the researchers appear to be surprisingly close to an answer to the question what truly happens to their consciousness at the moment of a person’s death. Sure, they are using a mentally ill child as a kind of medium and a dying man as their core research subject, but that’s just science, right?

This seventy minute TV movie was part of the BBC’s “Playhouse” strand of teleplays, based on a tale by Daphne Du Maurier. Despite her huge commercial footprint at the time, Du Maurier today looks like a bizarrely underrated writer of often very interesting and thought-rich supernatural tales and weird fiction, as well as her core modernized gothic interests.

It was adapted by Clive Exton (who’d end up as one of the credited scriptwriters for the Brigitte Nielsen Red Sonja movie, of all things, and did write the incredible, for a long time underrated, original Ghost Story for Christmas “Stigma”, in between, among other things) and directed by Graham Evans. There’s a lovely mix of the “serious, scientific” approach to the supernatural so beloved of the 70s (see Nigel Kneale, Legend of Hell House, parapsychological research in the real world, and many other examples), as well as suggestions of the truly unmeasurable in the film’s ideas, and some wonderfully atmospheric landscape shots, as typical of this strand of British TV.

The movie does suffer somewhat from – also typical of British TV of the time – fact that only its exteriors are shot on film, and there’s only a very limited degree of mood to be squeezed out of shot on tape interior sequences. So there’s a lot of talk – most of it interesting –, a bit of mood and only a limited amount of the kind of actual action (in the sense of “things happening”) that would cost money. And much of what happens can be a bit overshadowed by the – also very typical of this time and filmmaking place – tendency of actors to perform emotion exclusively via DRAMATIC SHOUTING. But then, mid-70s TV sound and picture probably needed that approach to reach an audience watching on TVs very different from what we use today.

In any case, there’s quite a bit to recommend The Breakthrough: the already mentioned moody, calm exterior shots, the mixture of science and the supernatural, as well as the film’s willingness to present ideas and ambiguities and – despite the shouting – let the audience sort out what to think about the whole thing for themselves.

Three Films Make A Post: He's every parents' worst nightmare.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025): For once, this is an entry in the typically boring PublicDomainsploitation canon I’d actually watch a second time instead of rueing the moment I pressed play. It’s still a movie that turns a public domain children’s story into a mid 2020s slasher, but it does so with a degree of competence, with decent acting, an actual script and direction – responsible here is British low budget regular Scott Chambers – that does understand the rules of straightforward horror films.

Even the characterisation is not without interest this time around, and the film’s interpretation of Peter Pan as a delusional drug user feels less tacky in practice than it sounds. The whole thing is an actually well-made low budget slasher, daring to follow through on some of its ideas.

Hotspring Sharkattack aka Hot Spring Shark Attack (2024): I went into Morihito Inoues sharksploitation film expecting a lot of sleaze and a bit of gore. What I actually got was very little sleaze but an absurdist and ambitious sharksploitation epic that lovingly mocks everything from urban development to amnesiac protagonists. The film’s reason for being is to turn everything shark movie up to eleven, make Sharknado look like a sensible little tale, and throw all kinds of genre elements and clichés on-screen with wild abandon, yet also a curious sense of control. This film knows where it is going: the dream underworld of bad CGI and hand puppet shark bites Joseph Campbell wrote about in his little-read sequel “The Hero’s Journey II: Sharks, so many sharks”.

Cult aka Sekte (2019): But let’s end on a comparative downer note with another amnesiac protagonist finding herself tucked away in an isolated house full of weirdoes who will turn out to be a Satanic cult. Director William Chandra manages a couple of atmospheric scenes here – I was particularly impressed by the one in which protagonist Lia (Asmara Abigail) finds the cult’s corpse depository – but for much of the running time, the film’s in the business of presenting as deeply mysterious a mystery its own damn title already reveals. So yes and alas, this is the kind of movie that climaxes on an endless series of flashback-filled “reveals” that bring every bit of the momentum the film might have developed before to a screeching halt with an astonishing amount of stupid ideas.

Three Films Make A Post: Elvis Has Left the Building

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015): It wouldn’t have been difficult to tell this specific tale as an utter freakshow. It is, after all, the of story a horse breeder with musical ambition and a voice naturally a lot like that of Elvis Presley who got roped into the role of “Orion” – a masked singer heavily insinuated to be Elvis returned shortly after his death, somewhat bigger, buffer, and younger, and built to make Sun Records (the Nashville version, so no bad thoughts about Sam Phillips necessary) a whole lot of money, at least for a time.

Director Jeanie Finlay doesn’t at all, but instead creates a sympathetic portrayal of a guy who had a dream he finds fulfilled in a way that’s making him painfully unhappy, and the curious cultural impact of Elvis on the more peculiar parts of American culture. It’s a lovely thing, and that most pleasant of surprises – a documentary about a curiosity that turns out to be a film about people.

Bored Hatamoto: Island of No Return (1960): In this outing of the jidai geki pulp detective series, the Bored Hatamoto (as always embodied quite wonderfully by Utaemon Ichikawa) makes his way to the shadowed streets and the foreigners’ quarter of Nagasaki, where he finds a lot of moody filmmaking by Yasushi Sasaki, who makes much of the sets, those exotic foreigners (like the same two red-headed Western guys wandering through the background of many a scene, or the Japanese guys in blackface wearing turbans), yet another plan to dispose of the shogun (this time via the drug trade), musical numbers, running sword battles and my very favourite trope in this sort of movie – the Japanese actors very badly pretending to be dastardly (sigh) Chinese who turn out to indeed be meant to be Japanese villains pretending to be Japanese.

This is particularly rollicking good fun, with everyone involved in top form. There’s really something to be said for industrialized studio filmmaking, at least when it comes to Toei films from this era (and the next two).

Crimson Bat, the Blind Swordswoman (1969): Apparently, every studio in Japan wanted a slice of the blind swordsperson cake after the success of the Zatoichi films. Shochiku gave us this comparatively short-lived – four entries are next to nothing for a Japanese movie series – entry in the canon, following the adventures of blind swordswoman Oichi (Yoko Matsuyama), in this first film directed by veteran director Sadatsugu Matsuda.

The film’s pacing suffers a bit from too much flashback backstory, but whenever the pretty delightful Yoko Matsuyama stops crying (about her run-away mum, having been blinded by lightning, and years later a murdered gramps) and goes to business with her red sword cane, Matsuda does direct like a young man instead of one right at the end of his career, with some pretty fancy choreography, excellent bad guys (among them eternal villain Bin Amatsu as a gent named “Devil” Denzo), and frame compositions to die (be killed by blind swordswoman?) for.

Havoc (2025)

Bent policeman Walker (Tom Hardy) is in more than one kind of trouble. Domestically, he’s not only divorced but a horrible father, the kind of dad who somehow manages to forget that old obscure tradition of buying one’s spawn decent presents for Christmas.

He’s also involved in decidedly shady business with a group of colleagues lead by a character played by Timothy Olyphant (still one of Tolkien’s finest) that may or may not have involved some amount of cop killing in the near past. Furthermore, because he’s flexible in all kinds of bad directions, Walker is also beholden to real estate mogul and mayoral candidate Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who has some sort of hold over him beyond just Walker being on the take.

The consequences of all of these different corruptions will come crashing down on what goes for our protagonist here when Beaumont’s son Wes (Jim Caesar) and Wes’s girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) are at the wrong place at the wrong time and become witnesses and suspects in the rather spectacular murder of a triad boss. Soon, the triads – the killed boss’s mom is a real piece of work -, the other corrupt cops, and the real cops are after the couple. Beaumont only wants his son to live, and if that means involving Walker, that’s going to happen. Apart from an ever-growing amount of violence, there will be betrayal and confused loyalties, as one should expect.

Gareth Evans, as much as I love his first three films, is a much better action director than is he one of complex narratives, so Havoc’s first forty or fifty minutes are somewhat heavy going, with a dozen or so characters whose relationships – and even names – are often much more confusingly presented than is necessary. It’s not that their relations or the budding plot are lacking interest, but the pacing of the introductory scenes feels off and the storytelling lacks in clarity without a need for it to do so.

Once the various groups of assholes and morally bankrupt shitbags begin murdering each other – at more than one point in three or for way fights – Evans finds ample opportunity to demonstrate his brilliance at staging action scenes that are frenetic, chaotic, spectacularly, sometime poetically, violent, and absolutely controlled. While he’s putting a heavy emphasis on fast cuts and jittery camera work, Evans doesn’t use these stylistic elements to obfuscate weaknesses in the stunt work – as a matter of fact, all the havoc (sorry) and chaos on display is also clear and wonderfully easy to parse. This is just a guy directing the hell out of these scenes because the stuntpeople aren’t the only ones allowed to have fun.

The film’s visual style goes for a version of the neo noir – the city is clothed in the colours of darkness and neon, beset by digital grain for neither rain nor snow are going to touch this particular Christmas – and everyone living in it seems to have taken on the moral qualities this suggests. This America, not unlike the real one, is dominated by two things – money and violence – and any kind of innocence or genuine human feeling is bound to get a character killed nastily rather sooner than later. Even redemption, of a kind, is found only under a mound of dead bodies.

There’s no place like America today, as the poet said.

Bull (2021)

Warning: there really will be spoilers this time around!

A rather angry gentleman named Bull (Neil Maskell) kills his way through the underlings of gangster Norm (David Hayman) in a brutal and somewhat gratuitous manner, certainly not leaving their family business out of the business of dying. Before he kills he asks for the whereabouts of his son Aidan.

Flashbacks slowly reveal that ten years ago, Bull was working for Norm, but marrying your boss’s daughter can have dire repercussions when the marriage goes to shit. Custody battles can turn even uglier than those among civilised people and end even worse.

So much so that a trail of dead bodies years later can be their consequence.

I know very little about the surprising number of direct to streaming (and so on) action and gangster movies that are being churned out by various low budget filmmakers in the UK for at least a decade or so now. But I am well able to identify Paul Andrew Williams’s Bull as the kind of answer/climax movie that takes all of a genre’s tropes, joys and problems and turns them into something monolithic and forceful in what’s not so much a critique as the platonic ideal of its form.

So Williams’s film is nasty in its depiction of violence, often shockingly so, treating vengeance as the undignified and cruel business it is in a manner that goes from the grimly cruel to the disquieting by simply thinking the brutality through to its end. Bull – a guy with an action movie name if ever there was one – is not just the blunt object his name suggests but turns out to be something darker than just a man on a vengeance trip in a late turn towards the explicitly supernatural. And not in sweet baby Jesus Pale Rider way – this is High Plains Drifter territory, but nastier.

Williams’s direction is based on a kind of kitchen sink hyperrealism that regularly drifts in the direction of the feverish and the surreal, using the ugliest bits of the reality of Britain and turning them into thin places. There’s certainly a sense of flow and rhythm to the filmmaking here, but one that often takes stops and starts that very consciously break up the very satisfying structures of the vengeance movie, thereby mirroring and emphasising Bull’s brokenness.

Maskell’s performance is fantastic – the subtle differences he shows between the already horrible but also human Bull of the flashbacks and the horrifying machine of violence and resentment that borders on a more talkative slasher movie killer he turns into are as believable and effective as are his handful of emotional freak-out scenes in the Nic Cage manner. Thanks to this, the difference between what the character was and what he becomes carries an air of genuine sadness. Not because Bull ever was a good man, but because he was the kind of man who could have been good and now is something irredeemable.

And yes, the religious undertones are certainly there on purpose, as the final reveal makes perhaps a bit too clear.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

A Spanish coastal town that harbours quite a number of British expats, between the wars. The local lush living is dominated by beautiful Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner). Every man wants to destroy himself for her, every woman hates her (secretly or loudly), yet Pandora is mostly bored and disenchanted. Even when she convinces a race car driver to push his self-built vehicle into the ocean to prove his love, or gets her very own love suicide going, this only provides her with some flickering excitement for a minute or two. She’s not only lacking in human compassion but also all deeper human connection.

Things change when Hendrick van der Zee (James Mason) arrives om town on his yacht, and a mythic pull develops between these two. The old tale of the Flying Dutchman might have more truth to it than most people would expect.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’s director Albert Lewin was a very successful Hollywood producer, first for MGM, then for Paramount. From time to time, he directed a movie himself. These aren’t the films of a dabbler, but of a director and scriptwriter very consciously aiming for art in a deeply earnest and just as deeply bourgeois manner that should make them pretty much unwatchable in their serious, classics-quoting way. Yet somehow, this member of the educated classes showing off his education didn’t just strain for art but actually manage to reach it, perhaps in spite of himself.

Case in point, and Lewin’s best movie as far as I know, is this incredibly ambitious concoction of bohemian melodrama, ancient Greek myth and somewhat more modern European legend. Often, Pandora feels like Powell and Pressburger – this is nominally a British film - at their most melodramatic seen through the lens of Hollywood with arthouse aspirations.

There’s a sensually languid quality to the film’s look and feel that stands in stark – and pretty magical – contrast to its literary and (sometimes too) knowing dialogue, its allusions to culture and cultural detritus, and its palpable love for all manner of cultural production – be it music, Shakespeare, the poetry of Omar Khayyam or Ava Gardner’s face (though the last might be the point where culture and languidness meet). The film’s straining for the mythical qualities of Pandora (very much an embodiment of the old hat of the destructive force of female sexuality that makes quite a bit of European bourgeois culture rather awkward) and the Flying Dutchman is often a visible and palpable effort but it is that uncommon kind of strain that eventually reaches and envelops (is enveloped by?) what it wants to touch, until the overload of allusion and emotion becomes magical and hypnotic.

Part of this magic most certainly lies in Jack Cardiff’s lush photography and Lewin’s fearless – of ridicule, of too much emotion, of the wrong emotion, of overload – direction, but there’s also the brilliance of the performances that hit the unreal notes the material needs again and again, and the willingness of Lewin’s script to go to places scripts (certainly not one written by big shot Hollywood producers) in 1951 simply didn’t go – neither in theme, nor in eroticism, nor in frank honesty about the harshness of mythic love.

Elements here leave me uncomfortable: the film, like its male characters, seems unable to admit to the existence of a kind of love that isn’t based on destruction, death and sacrifice; Pandora’s commitment to being the belle dame sans merci is disquieting, particularly in a film that so clearly wants us to find her tragic. Yet, like with all capital-A art Lewin’s film is in dialogue with, feeling uncomfortable with it isn’t an argument against it.

The Gorge (2025)

Two highly skilled and emotionally messed up sharpshooters (Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller) from what a couple of months ago were still the big international enemy blocks are stationed on opposite sides of a mysterious gorge of unknown location that’s covered with mines and auto-firing guns.

They are there to watch out for some kind of threat climbing up from the gorge. Communication between the two sides is forbidden – but apart from a dangerous abyss, there’s nobody around to police these rules.

So obviously, the two fall in love pretty much on first sight (who could blame them?) and end up learning quite a bit more about the place than the powers that be like. Also, they will shoot a lot of monsters and cause a more than sufficiently large explosions.

The Gorge is contrived, The Gorge is more than just a little silly, yet I found myself highly entertained by Scott Derrickson’s mix of horror, action and romance. It’s the sort of film that will always prefer a cool idea to a serious one, but it does so with the sense of joy and excitement, and the hidden glee at hiding away some cleverness you could find in the best films of Corman’s New World cinema phase.

Thus, this feels like the product of filmmakers enjoying themselves with the Apple money they somehow managed to get for making their high budget low budget movie, doing their best to get their audience to loosen up enough to enjoy themselves, as well. That’s how it worked out for me, at least.

Plus, Joy (whom I’d watch in anything, anyhow) and Teller have a pleasant degree of chemistry, there are some fun monster designs, sometimes great art direction, and the action is staged with verve as well as the expected professionalism. What’s not to like?

Three Films Make A Post: Romance is dead.

Culloden (1964): Once upon on a time at the BBC, someone like Peter Watkins actually got commissioned/allowed to make a film about the Battle of Culloden in the form of a fake verité documentary with a gigantic angry, anti-colonialist, anti-classist streak that was really not par for the course for its place and time. Or any place or time, truly.

From time to time, there’s a certain awkwardness to the proceedings, mostly in those scenes when Watkins can’t or won’t hide the artificiality of the fighting, or when the amateur actors so beloved of certain arthouse filmmakers can’t quite manage to hit the right notes (because they’re not actors). The film’s loathing for those that send others to their deaths without even a twitch of their consciences make this, alas, painfully timeless a film.

Ghosts of East Anglia (2008): This documentary about the ghosts and ghouls of East Anglia by Andrew Gray is mostly an excuse to present various bits of archive footage taken from TV presentations of many decades past. Thus, this is a fascinating treasure trove of “true” supernatural stuff. If you’re as interested in ghost stories of this type and the way they exist in the cultural mainstream as I am, all of this – tales of black shuck, haunted manors and haunted council flats - is highly fascinating and fun; if you’re not, it’s archive footage with a bit of a dramatic presentation around it.

Heart Eyes (2025): A couple hating killer murders only on Valentine’s Day. Not yet a couple Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding) will have to get through their romantic comedy under duress, the occasional spurt of blood, and rather a lot of dead bodies. Meet cutes don’t usually work this way.

You really can’t blame Josh Ruben’s romantic horror comedy for not going all out with both of its genres. The film’s total commitment to its shtick is absolutely admirable, even more so since Ruben’s direction often very cleverly shifts between the stylistic coding of romantic comedy and horror.

As many a high concept movie, this is a bit slight, but then, most holiday based slashers as well as most romantic comedies are, and we don’t necessarily love them less for it.

Three Films Make A Post: The Greatest High Adventure Ever Filmed!

Festival of the Living Dead (2024): After having started out strong, the Soska Sister Jen and Sylvia don’t seem to be able to get a movie together that’s even vaguely in the ballpark of American Mary. It’s all sequels, ill-advised remakes and cheap guff, typically decently enough made but well beyond the filmmakers’ talent levels.

This Tubi Original flirts a little with being an actual sequel to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but mostly, it’s a movie of braindead idiots sleepwalking through zombie movie tropes. Energy levels are low, and there’s little on screen here to tell me why I should watch this above the other dozen crappy zombie movies coming out every month.

Companion (2025): If there’s one thing holding too many “progressive” horror movies back right now – and I say that as a socialist much closer to their political ideals than MAGAs, incels and other real life horrors – its the smug self-satisfaction about the rightness of their world view that reminds me of myself in my twenties, with its complete inability to realize that it’s all to easy to win arguments when all you ever do is argue against straw men. Worse, this brand of smugness tends to lend films a particular self-satisfied air with any little twist, any half-bright idea in their scripts, and an inability to look at one’s own work and see its flaws.

This goes very much for Companion, a film of middling twists it very clearly believes to be incredibly deep and intelligent, and a slick surface of ultra-competent filmmaking that has very little of any depth or interest going on below its polished surface.

The only thing this really has going for it is the rightfully admired Sophie Thatcher. Who also happens to be in Heretic, a great example of how to do progressive horror without intellectual shortcuts.

The Guns of Navarone (1961): Speaking of intellectual shortcuts, during the course of the German election, I really needed to watch a movie where a lot of Nazis are killed. J. Lee Thompson’s war/spy movie classic fit the bill nicely. It also has a starry cast playing your typical Alistair McLean bunch of competents, rather a lot of great action scenes – during which indeed a heart-warming amount of Nazis die – and a couple of absolutely icy war is hell moments.

Gregory Peck is particularly great in this one, mixing the reticence of a man who has already seen and done too much in this war with the coldness of a man willing to do even worse if necessary.