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.

In short: The Omen (1976)

When the baby of ultra-rich American ambassador Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife Katherine (Lee Remick) is stillborn, Robert all too quickly accepts the offer of a shady priest (Martin Benson) to secretly adopt a child born orphaned. Without even telling his wife, obviously.

As we all know, that turns out to have been a very bad idea, because little Damien is the Anti-Christ, as evidenced by various bizarre deaths that begin to occur around him once he’s a couple of years older (and played by Harvey Stephens), deaths which he seems to cause by very vigorous and loud playing (now that’s what I call true horror). Eventually, thanks to the efforts of a doomed priest (Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor himself) and an equally doomed but more long-lived photographer (David Warner), and because Satan’s really very unsubtle about his work, Thorn does find out what’s what, but alas, the forces of good in this one are just terrible at their jobs.

No, seriously, given how big a thing the Anti-Christ is, and how obvious the stuff going on in Richard Donner’s film, it’s pretty weird that there’s not a whole commando unit of exorcists sticking magic knives into the kid. But then, it’s also pretty weird that rich guy Thorn never bothers to acquire or simply hire some practical help when it comes to fighting off Satanists, evil doggies and so on. That’s really the film’s major problem: a script by David Seltzer that’s often painfully implausible even if a viewer is perfectly willing to accept its idiot version of pulp Christianity. Not that it’s terribly good at characterisation, either, for the Thorns, and even the gosh-darn anti-Christ stay half removed from the audience, or from much of what you’d want to interpret as believable impressions of actual human emotions. Don’t confuse this with the Italian approach to horror though, these people are deeply uninvolving and boring instead of strange and moody. While I’m bashing the script, it’s also sometimes dragging its heels painfully, coming in at twenty minutes or so longer than the material can carry.

However, there’s one saving grace to Seltzer’s script, namely the ability to come up with weird, often disquieting murder set pieces, which fits perfectly with director Donner’s ability to stage them. Indeed, it is Donner’s work at letting these weird elements come to life by using every camera trick, every skewed angle, every moody matte painting or creepy set he can come up with, throwing basically the whole visual history of horror cinema up to this point on screen that has turned this into a perennial classic. In fact, Donner’s so good at creating a mood of the Gothic in a contemporary guise, all the film’s weaknesses feel more like small problems than the critical failures they should be, so a film that should objectively be a bit of a polished turd feels rather a lot like a classic of its genre. I blame the Anti-Christ.