In short: Meander (2020)

Original title: Méandre

Warning: some major plot spoilers are pretty much unavoidable in this case!

After getting picked up by car driven by a killer, and going through some sort of altercation with the nasty guy, Lisa (Gaia Weiss) wakes up in a gauntlet of tunnels and small rooms full of traps and unpleasant surprises that only start with the body parts of her predecessors. She’s also got a nifty new outfit, as well as a large bracelet she can’t take off that sets countdowns for her way through the curious place – if she isn’t fast enough, she can look forward to a nice incineration.

At first, the viewer of Mathieu Turi’s Meander will probably assume that this is a bit of Cube meets Saw business in which the crazy person from the beginning is punishing Lisa for some perceived sin in her past (which you will be not surprised to hear is indeed tragic and contains the by now mandatory dead child) using his exceptional talent for homemade traps, electronics and architecture and his fascination for seeing people crawl. However, in a rather positive development, this particular maze of death turns out to have been constructed by aliens, which may not be exactly an original development but certainly helps the writer/director to push our heroine’s trials and travails into more extreme and sometimes strange directions than the serial killer escape room business would have allowed. So there’s time and space between the more typical acid, fire and rotting corpses for gravitational tricks and traps, fake dead daughters and even some fun creature effects as well as some techno-organic variations in the décor.

All of this certainly helps keep things quite a bit more lively than these kinds of film sometimes get, providing opportunities for quite a few fun set pieces. Plus, aliens are inherently more interesting than serial killers (even should they just be there for an anal probe).

All of this happens on a rather slight budget, but Turi uses what he has with verve, pacing things very well indeed, and always adding a new dangerous development before things threaten to become repetitive. I’m particularly taken with the film’s often very clever use of lighting to suggest claustrophobia, to then suddenly open up physical spaces and possibilities with sometimes surprisingly subtle shifts in light and colour.

Add to that Weiss’s fine physical performance (she is pretty much the only actual character on screen throughout), Turi’s sometimes pleasantly weird imagination, and an ending that puts our heroine right into a 70s SF paperback cover, and you’ll hear little to no complaints from me about Meander. And not a joke about meandering was made.

In short: The Legend of Hercules (2014)

Warning: contains rampant misuse of parentheses, but then the film at hand contains rampant misuse of any viewer’s time, so I can still feel morally superior to it. Which I do.

As long-suffering victims of this blog know, I have a high tolerance for all kinds of things in movies that make sane people cry, so when a film is as generally reviled by mainstream critics as Renny Harlin’s CGI epic about everyone’s third-favourite Greek half-god, I’m not too fussed by it. Unfortunately, this time around, it turns out I can’t disagree with the consensus at all, for this Hercules version really makes the baby Eros cry.

There’s bad writing (and I don’t mean bad writing in a “I don’t like the film’s world view, or want it to be exactly like something I would have written” way the phrase often means on the internet but in the “these people don’t actually know anything about writing for movies, not even blockbuster style ones where the writing flavour of the year takes care of most of your plotting anyhow”), dialogue to make one’s brains bleed with its combination of insipidness and lack of style (it’s high-falutin’ EPIC MOVIE talk time written by people who just don’t get how this sort of thing works, and wouldn’t have an ear for it even if they did), acting that is all too often bad in the most boring manner (except for Scott Adkins as – I kid you not – Amphitryon -, who clearly will make a great scenery chewer one day when his buffness has diminished and all evil ninjas have been ass-kicked), and special effects with a big emphasis on the “special” (and partying like it’s 1999). In fact, I have seen Asylum movies with better CGI. Well, and with better scripts, now that I think about it.

To really top things off, Renny Harlin – who really should know better – presents this mess as a piece of cargo cult filmmaking that takes the idiot surface of things like 300, The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones without a) realizing that these films and shows actually have diametrically opposite styles and approaches to storytelling from one another, and without b) understanding what functions any given stylistic element actually fulfils in them. It’s enough to make one look forward to Brett Rat(t)ner’s Hercules version, if only in hot expectation of the ways in which that guy will be able to make things even worse.

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