Three Films Make A Post: The tide is turning.

Aquaman – Lost Kingdom (2023): Even though I’m not writing about the current crop of superhero movies all that often, I haven’t jumped on the superhero hate train, and “superhero fatigue” just fatigues me.

However, most everything bad you’ve read about this second Aquaman movie is unfortunately true. For much of its running time, this doesn’t feel like a proper, finished movie from a big studio at all, but the rough cut of something that doesn’t appear to even have had a finished script, with characters just dropping in and out of the plot for no good reason, no dramatic arc, and an absolute inability to sell the film’s tonal shifts; actually, I don’t even see attempts at selling them, for James Wan has apparently not just decided to direct this as if it were a TV movie, but given up on doing his job completely.

Making matters worse are special effects that often appear to simply not be finished, with many a scene that takes place in what looks like raw sets you’d find in 80’s Doctor Who serial instead of intricate greenscreen work. It’s just a complete train wreck of a movie, and not even an entertaining one.

The Marvels (2023): Also much maligned is this second Captain Marvel movie directed by Nia DaCosta. Here, I really can’t see the problems I’m supposed to notice. Sure, the film can get silly as all get-out, but most of the time, its jokes are actually funny and imaginative, and the script has no trouble shifting from this to the more serious stuff.

Unlike certain parts of the internet, I also enjoy watching a superhero movie carried by a trio of women where the male characters simply aren’t terribly important without the film making much of a thing of it one way or the other (call it the Claremont approach). But then, I am a simple man.

Detective vs Sleuths aka 神探大戰 (2022): If you’re like me, you’re missing classic Hong Kong cinema rather badly. As this extremely energetic mix of action movie and twisty thriller suggests, classic Hong Kong filmmakers do so as well, so long time Johnnie To cohort Wai Ka Fai’s film isn’t just a big damn action movie that follows many of the rules of modern blockbuster cinema to perfection and with considerable verve, but that also contains more winks and nods towards the tradition of post-80s Hong Kong cinema than you can shake a stick at, some of them very subtle, others very obvious indeed. Lau Ching-Wan playing another Mad Detective really is only the beginning there, and before the film is through, we’ll even have gone through a moment of baby juggling.

That all of this works as an absurd but absolutely riveting action film of the highest order instead of sinking into some kind of retro mire is a particularly wonderful achievement.

Three Films Make A (Grumpy) Post: A new vision of terror.

Malignant (2021): Surprise, I don’t like the newest James Wan movie, like nearly every other film he made. Unlike with somebody like Rob Zombie, I’m always disappointed when a Wan movie yet again doesn’t click for me, for Wan is so clearly a ridiculously talented director.

Alas, he’s also one apparently not the least bit interested in applying his powers to material worth a damn. This non-Conjuringverse movie clearly wants to be a Dario Argento giallo circa Opera, seeing how many elements the film cribs and how much it quotes from that era and style. But where the good (and often the mediocre) giallos manage to use their style as substance, the film at hand is just a series of barely coherent, very pretty, and completely pointless scenes that barely manage to make a movie at all. In a particularly catastrophic development for what he film is going for, there really doesn’t even seem to be one unified style to it, there’s no plot or theme to speak of anyway (though there is, of course, an expectedly stupid late movie “revelation”), so all we’re left with is a film whose scenes only connect via their colour scheme.

My Son (2021): In an act that tragicomically completely misunderstands the strengths and weaknesses of improv, this remake by Christian Carion of his own film sees poor James McAvoy stumble through a complicated plot without being provided with a script or dialogue, whereas every other actor is. The result of course consists of many a scene of McAvoy – who also doesn’t seem to have been provided with prompts to tell him what any given scene is supposed to be about – floundering or going off in directions the rest of the film doesn’t want to follow, because everybody else isn’t there to improvise with him, but to unsubtly push him into the directions the script says he must go. Which is the absolute opposite of what improvisation is supposed to be about.

Much of this is shot very prettily, but this prettiness works not at all with the lack of direction this filmmaking approach can’t help but produce. The pacing is dreadful, obviously, and while McAvoy is certainly doing his best, the whole affair is custom built to make him fail.

Crescendo (1970): Because this is apparently not a day to talk about films I enjoyed, how about what I take to be the by far worst thriller Jimmy Sangster wrote for Hammer? The script has openings for all the little clever bits, the subversive push and the great use of well-worn tropes as the other movies in the cycle did, but in practice, everything about it feels the wrong kind of tacky, terribly conservative in its conception of psychosexual hang-ups, and simply just not that interesting.

How much of that is Alan Gibson’s rather bland and ineffective direction, how much Sangster having an off month is anybody’s guess.

Three Films Make A Post: The Legend You Know. The Story You Don’t.

Mary Poppins Returns (2018): This musical is a terribly charming throwback to 50s Hollywood entries into the genre, updated with light but sure hand by its director Rob Marshall. There are a plethora of adorable little moments, scenes that understand to milk magic out of the very artificiality of the musical as a form, and lovely performances by Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda (as a cockney lamplighter, obviously).

Despite all these charms, it never comes quite together as anything but a series of deeply charming and fun vignettes. The thematic throughline is weak (even for a musical), and there’s really not enough substance to justify the running time of 130 minutes. Of course, I do understand why Marshall didn’t cut two or three musical numbers – they are all so very lovely, and would have been darlings particularly difficult to kill. But then, that’s what directors are sometimes supposed to do.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018): This perfectly deserved Academy Award winner by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, on the other hand, demonstrates how to make a film full of wonderful little moments and details and more ideas than your typical Hollywood director will have in a lifetime, and still let it come out as a perfect whole, full of life, intelligence and love, carried by what feels like love for and excitement about all things Spider-Man. There are so many little nods to artists and writers that worked on these characters and version of these characters before, so many different animations styles and ideas but they are all perfectly weighed parts of the whole, important to the film’s understanding of the kind of heroism the webslinger is supposed to be about (something the Andrew Garfield Spidey movies generally missed by a mile).

That the film is also perfectly joyful (even in its sad and knowing moments), and inclusive in that way that embraces everybody who wants to be embraced, just make the whole thing more wonderful and more fun.


Aquaman (2018): Also very fun (though not on the level of Into the Spider-Verse), is watching DC finally stumbling onto the insight that superhero films are indeed allowed to be goofy, silly, and imaginative. That James Wan of all people is the guy who gets this is a bit of a surprise if you’re me and basically hated everything he made in horror movies, but get it, he clearly does, so his film – after the mandatory bad first twenty minutes even Wonder Woman and this are apparently mandated to have by the gods of DC themselves – turns into a series of four-colour incidents permanently fluctuating between the silly, the absurd, the semi-operatic, and the colourfully strange. Which is so much better than another attempt at making superheroes so grimdark the whole hero bit falls by the wayside (which is not a problem Marvel Studios ever had, even when their films get dark).

Three Films Make A Post: Boy meets girl, girl unimpressed, boy starts band

The Conjuring 2 (2016): By now, I don’t think James Wan’s idea of what is terrifying and my own will ever converge, unless I’ll ever be converted to the gospel of the jump scare as the most important thing in any horror movie. Otherwise, it’s the usual Wan stuff: high technical abilities put into the service of delivering jump scare after jump scare after jump scare (which generally works on me for half an hour and then quickly becomes annoying) and a script whose only substance is some generic Christian demon stuff, a bit of whining about sceptics, and some advertisements for Bill and Lorraine Warren, whose film versions are still the blandest yet supremely sanctimonious psychic investigators alive, seeing as their only character trait is being holy. To me, Wan’s movies are the emptiest of empty spectacle, that is to say, spectacle I can’t even enjoy as spectacle because I find it utterly uninvolving. Of course, given who well these things sell and how much lots of horror fans and critics love them, they must work better for others.

Goosebumps (2015): To reiterate that I do indeed enjoy me some spectacle, take this family friendly horror comedy by Rob Letterman based on the books by R.L. Stine, who also appears as a character played by a Jack Black who for once doesn’t seem to be playing his Jack Black persona. It’s deeply harmless, loud, and fast fun with competent young actors, lots and lots of CGI monsters, and not too many scenes of people learning valuable lessons to annoy me. There’s never a boring moment, likeable characters who don’t get into speeches about God at the slightest provocation and also don’t look as if they were at a 70s themed costume party. Even better: most of the ideas the film comes up with are actually fun and clever, with many a call-back to horror classics (and I suppose Stine’s work, though I can’t say I have any personal experience with it), even most of the jokes don’t seem to be written down to some assumed brain-dead twelve year old. If I had kids, I’d absolutely tie them to a chair to watch this with me.

The Family (2013): But then, I also mostly enjoyed this very violent comedy with Robert de Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer as the parents of a psychopathically inclined mafia family in witness protection under the tutelage of a typically grumpy Tommy Lee Wallace in France, as directed by Luc Besson. To my own surprise and confusion, I found myself laughing a lot, despite my usual reaction to humour in Besson’s films being along the lines of running away screaming. Of course, part of the film’s charm are meta moments like the scene where de Niro’s and Wallace’s characters are witnessing a screening of Goodfellas (in my book probably the best gangster film ever made with or without de Niro), which of course results in some tearful reminiscing by de Niro’s character. Otherwise, there’s quite a bit of humorous ultra-violence, and jokes that reach from the dubious to the stupid, all filmed by Besson with his typical relish.


The moral of the story seems to be that Americans are dangerous lunatics, but families are good, though I might be wrong.

Dead Silence (2007)

Poor Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten doing his usual decent if frequently open-mouthed nearly acting thing). Not only does an anonymous donator send him a package containing a creepy ventriloquist dummy but when Jamie’s away buying roses and food for his wife Lisa (Laura Regan), the ventriloquist doll and a supernatural presence it brought with it murder Lisa, rip our her tongue and pose her in the marital bed. I’d say poor Lisa, too, but given everything that’ll happen after her death, she has hit the jackpot through her early departure.

The investigating Keystone Kop, Detective Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), does of course go by the old rule of “the husband did it”, and understandably cares little about Jamie’s tales of how ventriloquist dolls are seen as a bad omen in the town he and Lisa came from, how it reminded Lisa of an old creepy children’s line about one Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts), or that Jamie heard Lisa’s voice calling him into their bedroom when she must have been already dead. Being a Keystone Kop, he does of course not follow up with a thorough investigation but will stalk and threaten Jamie for the rest of the film until he can’t escape the supernatural himself anymore. Jamie for his part brings Lisa’s body to their old home town to be buried.

There he’s attacked by various ventriloquism based horrors, and the doll-like old woman ghost of Mary Shaw herself, whom you can only fight off if you do not scream (though you seem to be allowed to shout stuff, unless it’s “noooooooo”). So Jamie will do a bit of investigating too and learn the tragic tale of an evil female ventriloquist, the search for the perfect doll, and encounter all kinds of creepy shit until the film culminates in a hilarious plot twist.

This is the film James Wan and Leigh Whannell rather seem to like to pretend doesn’t exist, which is a bit weird from the people responsible for the Saw movies, and jump scares. Consequently, as somebody who could care less about these guys’ body of work (or would like to, if only they weren’t so influential on mainstream horror), this is the one film they’re responsible for I actually think worthwhile.

It’s mostly the film’s inherent weirdness that gets me, its obsession with ventriloquist dolls, the audacity to actually use an idea as strange as a ghost ripping out her victims’ tongues and adding them to her own(!), and the rip-roaring, transcendent absurdity of its final plot twist. It’s a bit as if in mentally working their way up to the weird parts – which is to say, the good parts - of Insidious, Wan and Whannell had accidentally stumbled onto a mode of filmmaking not based on ruining weirdness with jump scare after jump scare after jump scare (after jump scare), but actually going with it, just putting one piece of weirdness after the next, not caring too much about a plot throughline as long as the as any given scene contains its quota of creepy strangeness concerning dolls, dummies and ventriloquism as living metaphors gone mad.

It’s pretty fantastic, really, with the film doing nothing at all to establish its world as anything else than a weird dream where mad women talk to stuffed ravens (while living in a town called Ravens Fair, obviously), where a US small town has a huge, now dilapidated, absurdly Gothic theatre on a lake that once belonged to a ventriloquist, and where a decade long series of murders by tongue-ripping has not made its way to any outside authorities despite the town clearly being connected to the outside world like any normal town. Visually, Wan here seems highly – and unexpectedly – influenced by Bava and Argento, keeping most of the pseudo-cool editing techniques and bullshit camera angles that made Saw so annoying in check. For once in his career, Wan successfully creates a mood of vigorous yet dream-like dread and bizarre horror and actually manages to keep it up for the whole of the film.

That the film’s narrative only makes the most basic of sense and that some of its ideas are as silly as they are strange seems neither here nor there to me when talking about Dead Silence, for making sense in this way doesn’t seem what it is aiming for at all. Instead Wan here continues the more Continental tradition of making films about the inexplicable that don’t try to keep it in check by explaining it too much. Of course, I’d not at all be surprised if the filmmakers themselves now see Dead Silence as a failed attempt at starting a Mary Shaw franchise. But then again, that’s not anything I need to care about.

In short: The Conjuring (2013)

It's 1971. Carolyn Perron (Lily Taylor, putting her considerable talent to dubious yet effective use), her husband Roger (Ron Livingston) and their truckload of children have put all their money - which isn't much - into buying a beautiful house out in the middle nowhere. Unfortunately, as soon as the family has moved into its new dream home, Weird Shit™ begins to happen. Frequent horror movie goers will at once identify their troubles as sure signs of Demonic Infestation™.

When weird turns dangerous, the Perrons ask demonologist couple Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) for help. The diagnosis isn't promising, because the family's troubles are the worst case of Evil™ the Warrens have encountered in their career until then and it'll take all of their resolve to get rid of the unwanted entities.

While I wasn't looking, James Wan turned into quite a horror director. Sure, he still wouldn't recognize subtlety it fell on his head, but he has obviously learned to use loud and garish, even more loud and garish, and incredibly loud and garish so well, his The Conjuring is something of a fun time, if a very empty one. In particular, Wan has now learned to use jump scares in a manner that doesn't induce eye-rolling and loud sighing from me, seeing as he mostly uses them as pay-offs for long and surprisingly effective suspense scenes.

One could argue that a really good director would probably just keep the suspense scenes and get rid of the jump scares completely but that would be too subtle for The Conjuring. For where Wan's efforts are hitting the mark, the script by Chad and Carey Hayes is the sort of concoction I expected (before I read other reviews online) even the mildest of viewers would have a hard time not to describe as outrageously stupid or just plain idiotic. There's really not a single thought to be found in the film beyond "demons bad", "family good", "Jesus awesome", "buy the books of Ed and Lorraine". For most of the time, the script tries to distract from that absence of anything, and from its manifold plotting troubles (just look how plain stupid the Warrens repeatedly act, despite having their own museum of haunted artefacts, and oh so much experience), by throwing one shouty, hopefully creepy set piece after the next at its audience. Thanks to Wan, this distraction manoeuvre is quite effective, though the film never reaches the point of transcendent stupidity, that is to say, the point where stupid turns into awe-inspiringly strange, nor the point where I stopped caring about the stupidity going on.

The Conjuring is always at its weakest when it feels the need to work as an advert for the real-life Warrens and their "demonology" bullshit, really not giving the on-screen couple any mentionable flaws beyond their stupidity, whose existence the film doesn't even seem to realize, and not putting a single thought into what it would actually mean to live in a world as haunted by the supernatural as it and the Warrens argue it is. But then, that would lead to a film that actually has something interesting to say, and we can't have that, now can we?

Still, as far as intellectually and emotionally empty experiences that try to distract from their failings by copious amounts of - real and metaphorical - shouting go, The Conjuring is pretty awesome.

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Three Films Make A Post: Many Motion Pictures Promise You Terror But This One Is Truly Frightening!

Proie aka Prey (2010): The male members of a family owning a rural chemical plant are trying to hunt down an overly aggressive boar, but eventually have to defend themselves against a whole pack of mutant killer boars. Of course, they are responsible for the boars' existence and of course tensions in the small group make their survival exceedingly more difficult than the boars alone could. Man is after all - and please repeat after me - the greatest monster of them all.

While I couldn't shake the feeling to have seen Antoine Blossier's film more than once before, I also felt decently entertained by it. This is, after all, a well-paced, well-acted, and well-shot film that manages to make good use of the old "you're mostly just hearing the monsters" trick. The only thing it truly lacks is an identity of its own.

 

Kishin Houkou Demonbane (2006): On paper, a mecha/fight anime sprinkled with terms taken from Lovecraft and Western magic(k)al traditions where the Al Azif is a Magical Girl sounds like a surefire win of the bizarre and silly to me. Alas, the copious use of Lovecraftian names is basically all this twelve-episode show has to offer. The rest is dire fanservice, horrible animation, characters more generic than the word "generic", and fight scenes as lazily animated as the producers could get away with. It's as if all the show's creative energy had flown into the use of Lovecraftian words, so that nothing was left for minor things like decent plotting, pacing, or even just a basic interest in entertaining one's audience beyond showing the panties of the Necronomicon to it. Which is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write. Oh well.

 

Insidious (2010): As much as I sympathize with Saw director James Wan's and Saw writer Leigh Whannell's attempt at making a more subtle piece of ghost-oriented horror, I can hardly call the result of that attempt a successful film, for if there's one thing the pair seems to be unable to do, it's being subtle. Neither the attempts at building psychological tension nor the theoretically creepy scenes work, mostly because there's never any proper build-up to them, and even if there were, in the end, Insidious prefers to PLAY VERY LOUD MUSIC AND SHOUT at its audience instead of actually going through with that subtlety thing. If you think a guy suddenly jumping at you shouting "BOO!" is the height of horror, you'll have a heck of a time, though.

 

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