In short: The Magnificent Seven (2016)

While Antoine Fuqua’s remake of John Sturges’s brilliant remake of Kurosawa’s awesome – in the old sense of the word – film is a perfectly entertaining big budget mainstream western kind of thing (a sentence I’m getting used to having opportunity to write again), it is also a bit of a mess.

Fuqua never seems to be able to decide what kind of film he is actually making: is it a fun action adventure? A film all about the exciting but unpleasant violence? A revisionist western that gives people who aren’t white (and if you squint, even those that aren’t male) their due? A film about what violence does to the men habitually committing it? A would-be Tarantino western? The script has perfectly fine scenes belonging to each of these concepts but it doesn’t even make much of an effort to tie them together into a satisfying whole, so the film is always lesser than the sum of its parts.

Apart from this main flaw, the filmmaking is another example of Antoine Fuqua’s position as a director without any visible personality whose movies look and feel as if they might have been directed by anyone technically competent, which is increasingly sad when a guy has directed movies since the early 90s and should have developed something of a style of his own by now. I’m also rather unhappy with the yellowish colour lying over everything here, a colour obsession I thought movies had finally gotten over again; for the Western genre, this is a particularly bad fit, particularly in a film full of shots of grass that’s supposed to be green (or so I've heard).

I’m also confused why the production went with a mostly utterly indifferent score by James Horner and Simon Franglen that only comes alive when it’s directly quoting Elmer Bernstein’s score for the Sturges film? Also about who thought Vincent D’Onofrio’s (who usually can’t do wrong with me) accent was a good idea, and last but not least why, when you go with a Tarantino style talkative neurotic main villain you then don’t take the extra step and give him decent dialogue (well, monologues, really) nor cast someone who is actually good at playing this sort of role?

All this does make The Magnificent Seven sound like a worse film than it actually is. It really is a watchable film, if in a very frustrating manner.

Three Films Make A Post: Prey. Slay. Display.

The Girl on the Train (2016): Tate Taylor’s thriller cleverly plays with the – often somewhat problematic – expectations his audience will have concerning female characters in thrillers, not only subverting these expectations and clichés but also making it a functionally important part of the plot.

Apart from this, the film is also recommended for the general flow of Erin Cressida Wilson’s script – that finds time and place to put a human face on characters who usually don’t get that honour, well, apart from the main villain, that is, but there’s just no way to do that for him without destroying the plot – as well as its brilliant leads in Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson and for Taylor’s elegant direction.

Belladonna of Sadness (1973): Eiichi Yamamoto’s non-generic anime (if you take anime to mean all types of Japanese animations) is not just a trippy and heady mix of exploitation, enlightenment and pure weirdness but also a perfect way to recognize the po-faced traditional critic who just can’t recognize art when it’s not presented to him (and it’s invariably a him) in three hour slabs of equally po-faced movie directed by a director permanently in tears about the state of the world or by Fellini, and who always feel the need to reassure themselves they are following a deeply dignified path, where no jokes are allowed, and everything is horrible, and grey. Particularly grey. Why, yes, I looked at some of the reviews this type of reviewer gave this one with the new restoration, how do you know?

In other words, this is a film awesome, and beautiful, and bizarre, inappropriate, and bonkers, stupid, and clever, and exploitative, and sad all in equal measures, taking its art style seemingly from a pop art/LSD-inspired idea of Beardsley and running with that while supposedly adapting Michelet. One really rather watches this one than writes about it.

Ludo (2015): This Bengali horror movie directed by two guys going by the definitely not search engine optimized monikers of Q and Nikon is a curious mixture of the crude, the creepy, the highly generic and the original, as probably behoves a movie concerning the adventures four teens encounter with a cursed ludo variant in a closed for the night shopping mall. Visually, there’s quite a bit to like here, while the storytelling is more than just slightly awkward yet does get into my good books by combining the deeply generic and the locally specific to arrive at its horrors.

Tonally, there seems to be a heavy influence of 70s grindhouse cinema in play, mixed with some kicking against Indian cinematic taboos, and interesting monsters. This doesn’t add up to a particularly tense movie, but it is one that clearly goes its own way for its own reasons after a point, something I can’t help but respect.

In short: Hardcore Henry (2015)

There’s really no need for even the tiniest plot synopsis here, for there is so little plot here, and what there is such a bunch of vacuous crap, it might as well not exist at all.

Who’d have thought that having as a film’s only feature the gimmick of it being shot exclusively in a First Person Shooter style POV vision created by strapping a cheap digital camera to a stunt man’s head is not enough to make a movie that’s actually interesting for more than the fifteen minutes or so it takes to gawk at said gimmick? Even king of the gimmick William Castle added an actual movie to his gimmicks! Unfortunately, director/”writer” Ilya Naishuller is no William Castle (shit, he isn’t even Neveldine-Taylor), so all we get here is a series of action set pieces that might have been interesting to look at if they weren’t exclusively shot through a jittery camera that has little to do with the far more stable view of one of the actual FPSs the movie pretends to be inspired by, and even less with the way the actual human eye presents the world. Unless, that is, everyone but me sees the world through a shaking fish eye that is screwed onto their heads.

Not surprisingly, the novelty of seeing action scenes in this way decreases quickly, leading first to annoyance at the awkward and un-cinematic manner the film presents what might be rather great stunt work, then to boredom caused by the visual sameness of it all, and then, worst of all, moments when you can’t help but start thinking about the film’s plot. Or rather, how stupid and irrelevant the plot is, and how its presentation is even worse than in the video games it is badly attempting to copy. This thing makes the yearly Call of Duty look like a narrative masterpiece, and Far Cry: Blood Dragon like clever satire – let’s not even speak about those shooters that actually have a few brain cells to rub together, or actual movies. Even Steven Seagal movies have better writing.

To add insult to injury, this is also one of those films that pretend the lazy, disinterested nonsense they call their writing is ironically bad, and therefore good, quite ignoring the fact that not giving a shit isn’t made any better by winking at the audience about one’s failure. Just watch Sharlto Copley in the most annoying “funny” multi-character role this side of Peter Sellers and still try to tell yourself that anything has ever been improved by being bad on purpose.

The Hole (2009)

Single mother Susan (Teri Polo) moves with her late teenage son Dane (Chris Massoglia) and her youngest Lucas (Nathan Gamble) from Brooklyn into a house in one of those proverbial peaceful small towns US horror – and perhaps parts of US society - likes to obsess about. The family is clearly moving away from something depressing that has caught up with them again and again, but what exactly that is, we’ll only learn much later.

Dane isn’t happy at all with the move (which is only one of many), not even when he insta-crushes on their neighbour Julie (Haley Bennett) who isn’t just cute and nice but also the kinda gal who is reading Dante – not the director - in her free time. Barely moved in, the kids discover a hatch secured by multitudinous locks in the cellar. They open it, and find a deep dark hole below. Some experiments suggest it’s bottomless, and utterly impossible. There’s also something living inside it, and soon Dane, Julie, and Lucas are threatened by their deepest fears. On the positive side, their ordeal should safe them from years of counselling. Well, if they survive it, that is.

Watching The Hole after Joe Dante’s newest film, the hatefully bad Burying the Ex is bound to give one whiplash, because where the later film doesn’t at all manage to be the film it wants to be (I’ll give Dante the benefit of the doubt here insofar as I’m not going to suggest the Burying that exists is the film he actually had in mind), The Hole tries to be the platonic ideal of a very specific type of teenage horror – in the sense of The Gate not of Generic PG-13 Horror Movie, The Sequel – and succeeds very well indeed.

So the film is very good at short-hand sketching quite believable teenage characters with problems, giving even the the older Dane and Julie a rest of child-like whimsy to go with their problems, and, while not exactly going out of its way to be original when it comes to their characters, avoids turning them into slasher stereotypes. Which also, quite pleasantly, results in a film whose teenage and younger characters don’t act like stupid horror movie fodder at all once the shit hits the fan. Consequently, it’s easy to root for these kids, even though they are impossibly pretty.

For the more grown-up part of the film’s audience (let’s pretend the film actually had found its audience, which it undeservedly didn’t), there are some weaknesses in the film I suspect younger viewers won’t mind. Mainly, that the most secret fears attacking the kids aren’t all that horrible to watch. Sure, psychologically, it’s all heavy stuff, but in execution, Dante rather goes for “fun” horror effects than things that are truly frightening to look at, or all that disturbing. This directly fits to my second larger problem with the film, the comparative easiness with which the characters conquer their darkest fears, suggesting that just facing your fears will automatically end them, and making it rather easy for the characters to do that too. In this film, there’s no price to be paid for conquering one’s fears, and trauma doesn’t seem something you have to learn to cope with, but something you can power through. It’s, well, a bit dishonest, even though I’m sure it’s not necessarily meant that way.

However, putting these grown-up reservations on this pleasantly teenage film isn’t exactly fair, and I might just as well praise Dante and his scriptwriter Mark L. Smith (who also wrote the coming remake of my favourite piece of New French Cruelty Martyrs) for trying to take on the more optimistic mind set of a teenager so well without being as condescending as I am right now.

And, in the end, there’s also the undeniable fact that I just had a lot of fun watching The Hole, even though I’m clearly not the target audience for Dante’s film, which I think is not something to be sneezed at.

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In short: Kristy (2014)

An internet-based cult kills young women it dubs “Kristy” (insert some random crap about purity and stuff). Their newest victim is Justine (Haley Bennett) a hard-working student spending a lonely Thanksgiving weekend on a depopulated college campus.

They’ve chosen a bad victim this time around, though, because – “surprise” – after the usual series of terrorizing gestures and murders, Justine is rather good at turning the tables on her would-be killers, and soon the hunter becomes the hunted, etc.

I’m generally not very fond of home invasion and hoodie horror movies, because far too many of these films are thinly veiled excuses for bourgeois filmmakers to express their resentments towards poor people, with generally little of substance or interest to say about class. Oliver Blackburn’s Kristy doesn’t bother with this sort of thing at all, at first making small gestures that might suggest a film willing to do something with class based horror but quickly deteriorating into a film with so little visible passion for its material it doesn’t even get around to being reactionary. Apart from the whole “evil Internet people” thing, of course, but that’s really only an excuse for a few pseudo-cell camera shots, and green and red letters on black background.

Now, of course this sort of thriller doesn’t necessarily need to be rich in subtext – and I for my part can particularly live without another film telling how devious we poor people are – but Kristy (also known as Random or Satanic during various production stages) just isn’t good enough at being thrilling to be able to convince me. That’s partly because Blackburn isn’t very good at making his bad guys very threatening (which is understandable, giving that one of them is Ashley Greene, who isn’t becoming a better actor just because you put some bad make-up and piercings on her), partly because the film just never really grabbed me. It’s certainly competent in its application of jump scares but falters in the more subtle and more effective art of suspense, leaving this viewer with the feeling of watching something technically competent but completely lifeless, the sort of thing that suggests to me I’d rather have watched a really bad movie than one this competently mediocre.

The only thing that rises above the fold here is Haley Bennett’s performance as the film’s victim turned killer but there’s little the film does with her performance. At times, I got the impression Kristy is this dramatically neutral on purpose, attempting to raise really nobody’s hackles, and certainly eschewing any idea of substance (emotional or intellectual). Seen positively, this is for once a horror movie I have a hard time imagining anyone being offended by. Hooray.

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