Express Train (1967)

Aoki (Kiyoshi Atsumi) is the proud, veteran conductor of an express sleeper train. At the time, this didn’t mean he’d just be checking tickets, but is actually commanding the small army of personnel on the train and shooting all kinds of trouble.

Aoki does so with a mixture of warmth, sternness, and the everyman awkwardness Atsumi is so good at portraying. He’s too self-serious not to be always at least a little ridiculous but he’s also kind and compassionate to a fault, so it’s impossible not to be kindly disposed towards him even if he’s being silly or mildly embarrassing.

In this first of four Train movies with Atsumi produced by Toei, he has to take care of passengers like a child with a dangerous heart problem, a somewhat rowdy drunk ladies’ party, as well as a pregnant passenger who will of course give birth on board of the train.

He’s also going to fall in love again with a woman (Yoshiko Sakuma) he developed a crush on when she was just a late teenage passenger on another line – this being a Japanese move from the 60s, that’s not to be read as anything creepy in the world of the movie. Now very much grown up, her marriage is on the skids, and Aoki’s own marriage isn’t terribly satisfying. Of course, she’s also completely unreachable as a realistic romantic prospect for Aoki.

And if all of this sounds rather a lot like a train-based predecessor to the long, long, very long-running Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man series Atsumi would star in for Shochiku starting some years later, apparently every single person watching this – including me – agrees. This is the absolute blueprint of the sort of thing Atsumi would go on to play and be on screen in the future. There are of course some differences here – despite being a bit of a fool sometimes, Aoki is actually pretty good at his job, and feels at least more grown up than Tora will do. He also doesn’t have episodes of lashing out at everyone around him.

Masaharu Segawa directs with an appropriate sense of gentleness – the tone is gentle, the humour is gentle, and there’s an air of day-to-day kindness here that does smile at human folly more than damn it, using the train and its conductor as a model of a late 60s Japan that never quite was but that looks like a place I’d rather like to live.

Three Films Make A Post: "Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad."

Warning: this is a “short rants about genuinely crap movies” edition

Touch Me (2025): First in today’s trilogy of the terrible is Addison Heimann’s insufferable tentacle sex horror comedy about a woman’s (Olivia Taylor Dudley who does her best, which is more than I’d suggest about anyone else involved here) relationship with an alien with an addictive tentacle touch, and her obnoxious gay best friend. Apart from having really pretty colours, this is just terrible: the characters are obnoxious one-note clichés; the film believes stating having themes of co-dependency and abusive relationships equals actually saying anything about them; and it is painfully unfunny, particularly thanks to dialogue that manages to be unnatural, dumb and – I didn’t expect to use that word in public – cringeworthy to the highest degree.

How to Make a Killing (2026): Supposedly “inspired” by the great Kind Hearts and Coronets, this is actually a proper remake, which is to say, a movie that does everything worse than the original even though it keeps pretty closely to it. Which comes as a particular disappointment from director John Patton Ford, whose Emily the Criminal was sharp, focussed, and very much not a bad clone of anything.

It is pretty funny that a film made seventy years or so later than the original’s critique and comical analysis of class matters is actually less insightful on them – but then, Americans still have trouble talking about class even while their country is on the verge of turning back into a feudal state (not that we Germans are great about that, mind you). As a comedy, this suffers from a slouching, disjointed pace and the fact that Glen Powell – who frankly can’t act his way out of a wet paper bag on the best of days - is not simply no Dennis Price but attempts to get through the whole film with two expressions: a punchable smirk that is supposed to be charming, and some confused rodent mugging I can’t even begin to parse. Also, as in Touch Me, very little of this actually funny, or has anything to say.

“Wuthering Heights” (2026): Look, I’m okay with the fact, that Emerald Fennell didn’t want to actually adapt the novel – after all, none of the earlier film versions ever bothered with it – but turning this into a glossy, empty, and emotionally dead adaptation of her favourite romance novel covers is not a decision to endear her film to me. Nor does the lack of any depth to anything or anyone in here help, where everything that’s actually difficult, or painful, or truly unpleasant about the kind of love this is supposedly about gets sanded down until it is a mere kink, add much for me apart from inducing a feeling of actual loathing for the film. Which isn’t a feeling I often get, so well done there?

Sure, the production design looks kinda spectacular, but the showy way Fennell shoots it gives off the whiff of a bad music video directed by someone who really has no idea how to say something with their pretty visuals. Hell, even creating an actual mood seems beyond the director. It’s just there, in a garish, soulless and ironically boring way, like an ad for something I’m certainly not going to be.

I also have to agree with parts of the internet that Margot Robbie – who is not an actress I find particularly compelling at the best of times - is too old for her role here. That’s not her fault, however: every adult actress would be, seeing how Fennell writes Cathy as a thirteen year old throughout.

Three Films Make A Post: Getting in is hard, getting out is hell.

Do Not Enter (2026): A group of YouTube Urban Explorers get in over their heads when they enter an old abandoned hotel where they’ll not only have to cope with a violent group of rivals led by an ex-colleague but also a mysterious murdering monster (Javier Botet doing his usual shtick).

Surprisingly enough, director Marc Klasfeld doesn’t stage this as a piece of POV horror – there’s only very little footage of the sort in here – but shoots it like a “proper movie”. Which seems like a curious decision, given the set-up, but then, this is not a film demonstrating too many sensible behind the camera decisions. All changes to the clockwork-tight David Morell novel this is based on are either superficial modernizations the movie then does nothing of use with, or feel made to slow things down and make them less interesting. The sets are pretty nice, and if you’re into heart-based gore, there’s something for your specific kink in here, but otherwise, this is such a generic piece of cinema, one might just as well not bother with it.

Kanto Street Peddlers aka Kantô Tekiya ikka (1969): At their height, even the more mediocre and generic outings of Japanese studios like this contemporary ninkyo eiga about battling street peddlers produced by Toei and directed by Norifumi Suzuki, were impossibly entertaining.

This does waver sometimes awkwardly between earnest, leftist, ninkyo and the kind of goofy nonsense comedy Suzuki loved so much to drag into every single one of his films, but also contains a bunch of Toei house actors – Bunta Sugwara is our hero, Minoru Oki is actually playing a good guy; Bin Amatsu at least is still evil – I can’t help but love to watch even in lesser material, and looks and feels so much of its time and place it is fascinating even when it isn’t exactly good and a bit slow. Plus, this ends on a fantastic climax that hits all the ninkyo clichés – our hero strutting manly through the rain to the final slaughter while he sings terribly on the soundtrack – which it presents with much verve, imagination – the POV shot start to the battle alone is worth the whole movie – and all the blood one could wish for.

Bored Hatamoto – The Mansion of Intrigue aka Riddle of the Snake Princess’ Mansion (1957): This is still the earliest (between the 22nd and the 25th, depending on source) in the long-running series of jidai-geki pulp detective films starring Utaemon Ichikawa as the titular hero with the moon-shaped scar you can find with English subtitles.

It’s not one of my particular favourites of the series – three comic relief characters plus a teen sidekick are a bit much for me even though we get a really good seppuku joke late in proceedings – but there’s still a lot to like here. Director Yasushi Sasaki stages some fine battles (we’re still in the bloodless and noiseless stage of screen fighting in Japan here), there are Japanese actors in whiteface pretending to be Dutch, and there’s a wonderful pulpy energy to proceedings, all dominated by Ichikawa’s commanding presence. Plus, as if this were a 70s Bollywood masala, our hero infiltrates the main villain’s lair by taking part in a sweet dance number.

Kuei Chih-Hung’s Hex Trilogy (1980-1982)

(which is only a trilogy because the Shaw Brothers said so, but those are the rules of exploitation filmmaking.)

Hex (1980): The first Hex falls right into the middle of one of the Shaws’ small early 80s commercial renaissances, when suddenly, their black magic movies were a real commercial, centipede-filled proposition. Hex, though, particularly reminds me of a cross between Les Diaboliques and a Japanese kaidan, with only the last act that includes an incredible, beautiful and very very weird, colour-gel filled exorcism, going full on HK-weird when most movies would be starting to put their feet up for an epilogue.

Here, an abusive husband is drowned by his ill, long-suffering wife (Tanny Tien Ni not doing the femme fatale for once; I actually prefer her in this mode) and her new maid, only to apparently return as a ghost. There follow quite a few twists – even a few twists too many for my usual tastes, but Kuei (who also co-writes) times every reveal so well, I didn’t find myself caring about the implausibility and strained logic of certain “natural” explanations.

Visually, this is a deeply moody film, full of the darkest shadows, highly dramatically expressive weather, and drenched not only in rain showers but in all the colours of Hongkong horror, all of which fit melodrama as well as horror and the thriller form and its plot twists.

Hex vs Witchcraft (1980): So, following the success of Hex, the Shaws apparently felt the need to put a sequel out as quickly as possible. This went to cinemas only three months after the first film. How many centipedes had to die for the black magic needed to manage that magic trick? Apparently none. Instead, the studio got by simply renaming the next film Kuei was working on, a goofy gambler and ghost comedy in which a shiftless, luckless and deeply unlikable gambler (James Yi Lui) is pressed into marrying a female ghost who proceeds to wreak well deserved havoc on his life, and occasionally turns into a skeleton-faced ghost in a black widow’s dress that looks rather like a German Edgar Wallace krimi villain.

Apart from this having sod all to do with the first film – for obvious reasons – HvW also suffers from not being a great comedy. Now, it is true that comedy often doesn’t translate very well over language and cultural borders, so maybe there’s some great, clever wordplay here, or really funny dialogue. Though, given how much emphasis Kuei puts on “funny” noises on the soundtrack to remind the audience some bit of slapstick is supposed to be funny, I rather doubt the existence of hidden depths.

Be that as it may, physical comedy and slapstick do tend to translate well enough, and here, too, the film just falls flat. The timing of those scenes is off more often than not, and there’s also very little imagination on display when it comes to the set-up of the general physical goofiness. It’s all very bland and generic, and not even particularly interesting to look at.

Hex After Hex (1982): The final Hex keeps with the gambling and ghost comedy, but is an all around more accomplished film than its predecessor. Perhaps because our ghost Rosy’s (Nancy Lau Nam-Kai) new husband is portrayed by Lo Meng, whose martial arts training does give him a leg up in the realm of physical comedy (though you wouldn’t confuse him with Jackie Chan), or perhaps because the film generally has better ideas for its slapstick set-ups and includes a couple of the moments of copyright-smattering insanity so beloved of Hongkong cinema of this era – here, Rosy transforms first into a dime store yoda and then into a version of Darth Vader that has clearly studied magical girls anime – or perhaps because Kuei does at least from time to time display a bit of the visual imagination that makes his better movies so exciting.

This still isn’t a masterpiece, mind you, well, perhaps the climax is, but it is a marked improvement on the middle film of the not really trilogy.

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.

Dracula: A Love Tale (2025)

In a more honest world, this would be titled “Luc Besson’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula By Yet Another Guy Who Didn’t Read The Damn Book”.

Given how much this attempts to rip off Coppola’s version of Dracula in places, this should be a nice way for the old vintner to recoup some of those Megalopolis losses. But then, I wouldn’t want to be connected to Besson’s movie-shaped object either, even for a lot of money, so Besson is probably save. When I say Besson rips off Coppola, I actually mean to say he tries to remake Coppola’s Dracula, but apparently can’t recreate anything of that movie’s idiosyncratic vision of never contained horniness, mood of gothic excess, or visual and stylistic pull.

Everything taken from other sources here is like a bad xerox copy, a shadow that only reminds us of other films that made the same thing but with artistic intent and vision, or at least a hold on simple craftsmanship.

The things Besson adds are goofy, inane and just plain stupid – I’ve been arguing that Besson simply either isn’t very bright or believes his audiences aren’t for years – to a degree that should actually make the film enjoyable as the product of someone’s rampaging Id (somewhat like Argento’s version of Dracula, which I genuinely enjoy and thus prefer to this one). After all, this is a film that replaces the standard sexy vampire brides with crappy CGI gargoyles, has a time-skipping montage during which Dracula invents a rape, sorry, seduction perfume that causes women to find Dracula irresistible and to break out in musical numbers you have to see to believe, and features a tower of horny nuns, so it should at least be more than a little entertaining. Unfortunately, apart from the few moments of insanity, this is simply dull, leadenly paced – there’s no reason for this to be more than two hours long, seventy minutes feel about right – and for most of its running time simply lacks what saved some of Besson’s other, just as deeply stupid, films from being boring: visual imagination.

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 Post: Can you keep a secret?

The Housemaid (2025): On paper, I absolutely appreciate Paul Feig’s attempt to update the old erotic thriller formula for the 90s, but in practice, I found the resulting movie mostly dull. It is much, much too long for what it is – there’s at least half an hour of redundant repetition in here – and its self-conscious trashiness neither reaches the joys provided by simple, actual trashiness nor does it do much that’s really surprising in any way in its twists on the formula.

I also wish Feig had found a shared tone for his actors: Amanda Seyfried is all turned up to campy eleven, Sydney Sweeney aims for slightly zoned out naturalism, and Brandon Sklenar stays on “sleepy” even when he’s supposed to become anything but.

Blood Beast of Monster Mountain (1975): This is its very own, one-of-a-kind type of nonsense: one Donn Davison (“world traveller, lecturer and psychic investigator”) tries to bend a ten years old unfunny bigfoot comedy into a Legend of Boggy Creek shaped form. He can’t, so the audience is threatened by everything that’s horrible about bad low budget comedy – the film’s “funny” protagonist is called “Bestoink Dooley” as a marker of the ensuing horrors – with the added frisson of watching multi-un-talented Davison “interview witnesses”.

If you’re suffering from the same kind of movie sickness as I do, this probably does sound at least somewhat fun, but in actuality, you’re better off gazing into the abyss than at this one.

We Bury the Dead (2024): On the other hand, I was very positively surprised by Zak Hilditch’s treatment of a localized zombie apocalypse as an excuse to explore grief and guilt. Daisy Ridley is actually a fine actress for this sort of thing, and while this is not going to make anyone happy who is looking for a gory zombie apocalypse film, this is a very pleasant example of a a movie about a personal apocalypse.

Three Films Make A Post: Welcome to a world of hurt.

Predator: Badlands (2025): Objectively, this film about a young, outcast Predator ending up with an RPG party, is a terrible mistake following returning director Dan Trachtenberg’s clever Prey. It’s silly, self-indulgently so, weirdly shaped and goes out of its way to rob the Predators of their last remaining mystique. However – and this is going to be a bit of refrain in this post – it is also a whole load of fun, following the rule of cool with such wild abandon critiquing it for a lack of substance would make me one of those people who eat puppies. Also also, Elle Fanning is much better as a funny, wisecracking sidekick than anyone could have ever expected.

Honey Don’t! (2025): The general tenor towards Ethan Coen’s solo films – or in actuality, his films made in co-operation with Tricia Cooke who happens to also be his wife – is harsh to a degree that nearly made me miss this lesbian noirish private eye comedy until it’s not thing, as it did with the film he made before. Sure, this is not a resounding, eternal masterpiece, nor a deep comment on the shape of the world (though the shape of the world is very much visible in it), but then, it’s pretty clear that’s simply not the kind of film Coen & Cooke set out to make. Instead, this is a film all about the filmmakers having fun with plot elements, ideas and tropes they like, namely Lesbians, hard-boiled private eyes, small evils that believe themselves to be big evils, noir, serial killers, and all kinds of weirdness. The result isn’t focussed, sometimes goes off on tangents that don’t quite pay off, but most of the time, is as fun as the filmmakers appear to be having with it. Plus, Margaret Qualley manages to go through all of the film’s tonal shifts in a way that makes it look easy.

Drive-Away Dolls (2024): Having had this amount of fun with Honey Don’t! did obviously lead me directly to also watching Coen & Cooke’s earlier film, also starring Margaret Qualley (among many other delightful thespians, of course), containing even more lesbians, even more off-beat humour, and rather less darkness. Being a road movie comedy, this does get even shaggier than Honey Don’t!, sinks its brow quite a few inches, and contains some ill-advised moments that point directly to The Big Lebowski, but keeps a sense of fun and a heart that can’t quite be cynical all of the time, which is the kind of heart I can identify with the most these days.

Honestly, if Cooke & Coen make films like these two for the – hopefully very, very long – rest of their lives, I’ll be there to watch them.

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 Films Make A Post: When it rains it pours…BLOOD!

The Corruption of Chris Miller aka La corrupción de Chris Miller (1973): This Spanish giallo directed by Juan Antonio Bardem is about as close to Sergio Martino in his most erotic/sleazy mode as you can imagine, carrying the same sense of actual decadence. Bardem isn’t quite the stylist his Italian peer is, but then, late Franco era Spain isn’t exactly an easy place to do eroticised, violent glamour and glamourous violence in, and given the context, this is beautifully done.

Plus, Jean Seberg and Marisol are fantastic as the film’s core psychosexually messed up duo taking in a drifter who may very well be a serial killer but is most definitely a 70s kind of guy in all other ways.

Carnival of Sinners aka La main du diable (1943): Vichy era France wasn’t a great place to make films in that weren’t running with the Nazi party line – though quite a few French filmmakers managed – so there was a tendency to retreat into more fantastical material, as this tale of a talentless painter who buys a talisman in form of a hand – sometimes moving – that turns him very talented indeed. Of course, this also means he’s made a pact with the devil – here a small bureaucrat without a bit of Milton in him – and thus his talent doesn’t actually buy him the happiness he craves.

All of which isn’t exactly easy escapist material, and one can’t help but read rather obvious political points into Maurice Tourneur’s film. The film has its lengths – particularly in its middle part – but there’s the poetic power of dark legend in its scenes more often than not, typically intercut with surrealist imagery and a bit of humour.

Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl aka Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken (2009): Directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu, this belongs to that school of often pleasantly insane, cheap, gore comedies a small group of Japanese directors tuned out in the early 2000s. These aren’t movies making promises they can’t keep, so the title is definitely program, the humour is broad, and blood – curiously digital and practical – is as copious as a sense of crazy, often very funny and grotesque body-shifting fun (personal favourite: Frankenstein Girl using her legs as a propeller to fly).

This does take some time to get going and tests the audience’s patience early on with what amount to not terribly funny comedy skits about high school subcultures, but the film’s second half is a series of increasingly bizarre and inspired bloody nonsense that’s bound to put a smile on the face of anyone watching a movie with this title on purpose.

Three Films Make A Post: Ghoulish Delights

Halloweenville (2011): Gary P. Cohen, of Video Violence fame, and one Paul Kaye, document the intense Halloween shenanigans in Lambertville, New Jersey, which turns into a giant, tacky and lovely piece of Halloween kitsch for a week a year. Embedded in cheesy commentary and the cheapest default editing tricks the directors’ editing suite can provide, are interviews with various local Halloween enthusiasts and many a verité (or awkwardly framed, if you prefer) scene of the place’s insane Halloween festivities. It’s enough to make any ghoul cry tears of joy.

While this is certainly not done artfully, there’s so much genuine enthusiasm here, presented fully in the cheesy version of the spirit of the season, it’s impossible not to love this.

The Raven (1963): This adaptation of Poe’s poem as a comedy has never been a particular favourite of mine among the films of Corman’s Poe cycle. On this recent rewatch, I actually fell in love with the film. Price, Lorre and Karloff mugging it up in this tale of duelling wizards, Hazel Court doing a femme fatale bit, and young Jack Nicholson looking confused in front of Daniel Haller’s gorgeous gothic sets, filmed by Corman with the élan they deserve – what’s not to love?

Particularly when I’ve actually grown old enough to find the general silliness rather diverting, find myself actually laughing at jokes I’ve shrugged at a decade ago, and enjoy how much Corman and company make fun of a style they themselves put a lot of effort into creating.

Plus, the climactic sorcerous duel is one of the prime moments of pure, silly, imagination in cinema.

The House of Usher (1989): Speaking of Poe adaptations that don’t exactly keep to the text, Alan Birkinshaw’s bit of late 80s cheese is pretty fun if you accept it as what it is and what it isn’t – there’s certainly joy to be had in Donald Pleasence running around with a drill hand pretending not to be mad, Oliver Reed being dastardly while chewing scenery, some tasteful mutilation and decapitation, a rat eating a guy’s penis, and come curiously fine set design that goes for some sort of modernist gothic. All of this doesn’t make terribly much sense, but certainly looks pretty great.

Loop Track (2023)

Socially extremely awkward Ian (Tom Sainsbury) is going on a walk through the forests of New Zealand to get away from all those pesky people, and perhaps some concrete aspect of his life he believes he has screwed up particularly badly.

Instead of peace and quiet, he soon finds himself socially pressured into walking together with three randos he meets and that won’t leave a guy completely unable to actually tell them he wants to be alone go on his way alone. Increasingly, Ian believes there’s something bad going on in this beautiful forest. Someone or something seems to be following them, though his attempts at convincing the others of it only make them look increasingly askew at the guy who didn’t want to be involved with them from the start.

Tom Sainsbury’s Loop Track attempts to fuse the comedy of social anxiety and people being people, the expectedly pretty landscape of New Zealand (filmed low-key) with a bit of the monster movie tradition. While certainly a well-made film, it never comes quite together for me – there’s such a heavy emphasis on the social anxiety there’s actually very little room for the monster movie parts here, and – even as a sufferer of some of Ian’s symptoms – I never found myself quite connecting to him, and certainly not the other characters and their single defining character traits.

For a film that appears to be this interested in the characters’ psychology, I found everyone rather lacking in complexity, with every character’s first scene already defining everything about them.

The stalking is played too low-key, and despite a fantastic monster reveal, I’m really not sure why this needed the horror elements at all – it’s not as if it puts them into dialogue with Ian’s internal life.

Having said that, I didn’t exactly mind the film – I just don’t think it does anything much with its potential.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Original title: Baron Prásil

Landing on the moon, an astronaut (Rudolf Jelínek) is greeted by the men who came there before him: the protagonists of Verne’s “De la Terre à la Lune”, Cyrano de Bergerac, and last but not least the great Baron Münchhausen (Milos Kopecký) - as he’s called here in Germany. It’s Baron Prásil in Czechia. Because they don’t need silly science stuff like space suits, the gentlemen assume our astronaut who very much does need one, to be a proper moon man.

Münchhausen decides to take the young man under his wing and show him the wonders and adventures of Earth, which indeed he does. Once there, Münchhausen also insists on getting in a love triangle between the men and Venetian princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová), though none of the young people is actually that into him.

All of this really doesn’t describe the beauty, wonder and utterly unbridled imagination of Karel Zeman’s version of the Münchhausen material – here mostly based on Bürger and particularly Doré’s illustrations to Bürger’s narrative. Technically, this is a mixture of live action and all kinds of animation you could even imagine in 1962, at once naïve, deeply aesthetically constructed, real and unreal thanks to the many ways Zeman mixes special effects techniques and real people. The film is ever shot like a moving paean to the human imagination and filled to the brim with a sense of wonder that should make every viewer a child again for at least an evening.

The characters are of course, not surprisingly given their placement in a series of beautiful and bizarre tall tales, archetypes without normal psychological depths, but from time to time, whenever he finds space between a dozen sight gags and coming up with sights no human being has beheld before on a movie screen, Zeman does hint rather heavily that archetypes are archetypes because they have quite a bit to say about the unchanging parts of the human psyche. Just because young lovers aren’t original or deep does not mean a pure and naïve idea of love isn’t real or important.

But really, if there ever was a movie that exists just to be experienced instead of interpreted or talked to death film school style, it is this one.

Three Films Make A Post: Dare to play.

Night of the Reaper (2025): For that part of its running time when it is a period-set throwback slasher with a procedural element that reminds more of a giallo than a cop movie, Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper is an exemplary and quite entertaining low budget movie that looks and feels the part it wants to play very well indeed. For its final third, it does turn out to be a very 2020s kind of film, alas, and we end up in the realm of “clever” plot twists that not only strain belief in the context of what the audience has seen before (or not been allowed to see on a pretty obnoxious level) but also replace what should be an exciting climax with fifteen minutes of the movie explaining itself to us.

It’s a shame too, for before that, this is a really fun little movie.

Witchboard (2024): This remake (of a very free kind) of Witchboard by veteran director Chuck Russell isn’t so much a throwback to the more freewheeling world of 80s/90s horror but simply a film made by a director who lived the time and apparently has no interest in changing his way of filmmaking. This is messily plotted and loves to go off on wild tangents, but what it loses in tightness thereby, it wins in the joys of wild abandon. This is a movie that’s probably going to go there, or find something that’s even more there to go to. Add an openness to add some sleaze/sexiness (often completely absent from horror these days, because people apparently don’t fuck anymore) to the gratuitous – and often pretty awesome – violence, and you have quite the concoction of the best clichés, tropes and bad yet awesome ideas a viewer could hope for. Well, if you can ignore the digital blood splatter, which never works.

Blood Ritual aka 血裸祭 (1989): Speaking of wild abandon, this Hongkong horror/action/comedy/kitchen sink CATIII wonder directed by Lee Yuen-Ching wavers so wildly between non-supernatural cult horror, sleazy softcore sex, brutal action choreographed by Tsui Siu-Ming, broad romantic comedy and info dumps about “evil religions” at least this viewer got quite dizzy. Which probably is the right state of mind to appreciate a film that seems to be a perfect expression of the kind of maximalism for a minimal budget HK cinema at this point in time was particularly fantastic at.

R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead (2025)

Following the in today’s grief-struck horror mood obligatory death of the father of the family, Cassie (Kendra Anderson) and her sons, seventeen-year old Finn (Seth Isaac Johnson) and thirteen-year old Sam (Bean Reid) move to a small farming community in what I can’t help but call the sticks.

Sam is particularly unhappy, not just because he’s a kid in puberty who has lost his father and is moving town, but also because he feels more than just a little excluded from the closer, easier, relationship between Cassie and Finn. As kids do, he acts out. Unfortunately, he decides to steal the annual “Prized Pumpkin” (actually an ugly thing nobody would want to eat, or even look at) of the farmer the locals somehow see as responsible for the town’s agricultural luck turning to the better some years ago. Finn, who is a perfectly good brother, decides to help Sam avoid some nastiness with the farmer by bringing the pumpkin back for him the night of the deed.

Alas, Finn has a rather nasty supernatural encounter on the farm and doesn’t return home. Worse still, none of the grown-ups, not even Cassie, can remember Finn ever existed at all, and can’t even perceive any proof of his existence. As the Sheriff’s daughter Becka (Adeline Lo), who had already befriended Sam and warned him against having anything to do with the farm, explains, this sort of thing happens somewhat regularly in town – kids disappear, people who hit the age of eighteen or are above it forget them, crops grow. She’s willing to help Sam in his attempt to get his brother back, whatever has happened to him. Also involved will be the local hermit Rusty (Matty Finochio), a nasty protective scarecrow thing with very bad breath, and one of those grimoires of the facebook type.

Tubi Originals tend to be less than great movies, often lacking in verve and cleverness as much as in budget. Jem Garrard’s Pumpkinhead – based on the favourite kids and teen horror writer of a lot of North Americans of a certain age – is only a bit lacking in the last one, but never lets this lack of funds stop it from doing basically everything right for the kind of kids horror film old-ass people like me can enjoy as well.

The characters are simply but effectively drawn, the young actors are doing pretty well – Lo could certainly have an actual career in front of her – and the script finds the fine balance between goofy humour, proper horror, and knowing winks to tropes and genre conventions. “You don’t come to the forest hermit for a straight answer” is pretty great, to take the most obvious example for the last one.

The film isn’t afraid to be a bit grotesque when it needs to be – the final pumpkin head form is not something I’d have expected in a contemporary kids’ movie made for the US market, even if it is actually made in Canada like this one, and the scarecrow thing is genuinely creepy, as well as enthusiastically played.

Pumpkinhead is worthwhile in other regards as well. Character motivations and their emotional background make sense (at least for the kind of world this takes place in), and the film clearly knows what it is doing when it is talking about love and friendship by example instead of moral. It’s not terribly deep, but it’s genuine and believable in context. Because it does emotions this well, it also manages to sneak in an ending that actually becomes darker the more you look at it in context of what the characters fear and desire here, not the usual horror movie bullshit ending but a genuine price to be paid.

Visually, this is nothing fancy, but Garrard knows how to create mood and tension, and works around the budgetary constraints of the production really well. There’s nothing here that seems truncated, missing, or undeveloped, which leaves R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead as one of my surprise highlights of this Halloween season.

Empusa (2010)

When out and about with his best buddy, fisherman Victor (Antonio Mayans), former actor turned beach bum, tarot reader, writer on the occult and lover of all kinds of substances, Abel Olaya (Paul Naschy, sometimes dubbed by another actor, because he didn’t figure out the trick of speaking from beyond the grave, to everyone’s disappointment), finds a severed female underarm (including the hand) on the beach. Despite vigorous protests from Victor, Abel doesn’t call the police but takes the arm with him to research the mysterious tattoo on the arm, storing it in his fridge for the duration, right above his salami.

Turns out, empusas – in the film’s interpretation hot, very old, more durable female vampires – are slowly invading the quaint coastal town, turning the old men populating it into normal vampires through the powerful lure of hot goth girl sex, and plan to do something or other. Eventually. One supposes. They are also nibbling on Abel a little, but since he’s extra special – Naschy does after all script and direct – they have more interesting plans to acquire his “wisdom”. He, on the other hand, believes he’s destined to kill all empusas.

Though this isn’t the last film that came out starring Spanish horror king Paul Naschy, it is the last film he directed and wrote before his death in 2009. By this time, he had made something of a minor comeback, starring regularly in direct to video films that weren’t as fun as those he made during his heyday, but typically provided a couple of scenes of Naschy doing Naschy things like turning into a werewolf or a vampire and charming all the decades younger ladies with his increasing decrepitness, or wisdom, or whatever.

While nobody would ever call Empusa a good film, or even a consistently entertaining one, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as anybody’s first Naschy film, there’s a good-natured, ambling quality to the cheap looking thing that at the very least makes it a rather likeable film for the Naschy enthusiast, which I certainly am. In part, Naschy simple goes through many of the greatest hits of his interests – apart from lycanthropy – by now having grown out of the bitterness that made some of his 80s films pretty hard to watch. Spending one’s final years making silly horror movies with some friends and a surprising number of pretty young women willing to pretend one is the hottest thing on legs, do silly dances, or just drop their clothes in front of the camera does seem like the proper way for Naschy to go out on.

This feels companionable rather than exploitative, in large part because Naschy makes many jokes about the absurdity of the whole affair in the tone of somebody who knows very well who he actually is, but has fun embodying a fantasy version of 70s manliness, continued into old age, and there’s very little meanness in any of the jokes and asides here that could spoil this impression.

Rather than an attempt at some kind of no budget late period masterpiece that would only break everyone’s hearts (just look at Jess Franco’s final years), Empusa is the product of a guy who is just having a bit of fun at the end of his life, and who could blame him?

Swing Girls (2004)

aka Suwingu gâruzu

After accidentally poisoning their school’s brass band through the power of raw fish, heat and tardiness, a group of girls decide it’s best to roll with the punches and use this opportunity to get out of their summer school maths class by replacing the original band members.

The problem: apart from the still standing cymbal player of the original band Takuo (Yuta Hiraoka) who is actually a pretty decent piano player, most of the girls do not play an instrument or are actually motivated to learn music – at least at first. There aren’t enough members for a proper brass band anyway, but a swing big band seems somewhat doable to Takuo.

Despite keeping up appearances for teenage disengagement, some of the girls really do take to the whole band thing, and even when the return of the real brass players should put a stop to their band ambitions, a hard core around Tomoko (Juri Ueno, doing some of the choicest cute camera hogging known to humanity) and Takuo decide to continue turning into a band that might even manage to keep time.

Swing Girls’ director Shinobu Yaguchi is something of a specialist in the very specifically Japanese kind of feelgood movie where a group of people of dubious talent and motivation come to learn to work together to achieve something quite special.

At its worst, this sort of thing can feel disingenuous and downright unpleasant and unkind towards the many, many people who fail at things and never manage to play an awesome version of “Take the A-Train” without any fault of their own.

At its best – and Swing Girls certainly is this sub-genre at its best – these films can feel like a shot in the arm of a condensed mix of hope, actual good cheer and appreciation of people in all their difference. As Yaguchi does it here, avoiding the pitfalls of kitsch and bad faith storytelling looks easy – a quality of genuine humanity runs through scenes of broad and not so broad comedy, plain silliness and quiet contemplation, touching coming of age tropes without wagging a finger and teaching us all a valuable lesson.

The film does occasionally allow us to laugh at its characters, but it does so in a way that suggests we do so recognizing our own foibles in them; the film’s kindness is of a type that even allows us to be kind to our own failings.

Yaguchi’s main trick for avoiding the horrors of making this feel either treacly or unpleasant lies in this ability to look at his characters with kindness yet also show their failures and strengths and the connections and fissures in their relationships with great precision. There’s a lot of slapstick here, and a lot of very movie-like good cheer, but also a clear appreciation of emotional truths. It’s quite the thing, really, additionally delivered with perfect comedic timing.