Three Films Make A Post: Romance is dead.

Culloden (1964): Once upon on a time at the BBC, someone like Peter Watkins actually got commissioned/allowed to make a film about the Battle of Culloden in the form of a fake verité documentary with a gigantic angry, anti-colonialist, anti-classist streak that was really not par for the course for its place and time. Or any place or time, truly.

From time to time, there’s a certain awkwardness to the proceedings, mostly in those scenes when Watkins can’t or won’t hide the artificiality of the fighting, or when the amateur actors so beloved of certain arthouse filmmakers can’t quite manage to hit the right notes (because they’re not actors). The film’s loathing for those that send others to their deaths without even a twitch of their consciences make this, alas, painfully timeless a film.

Ghosts of East Anglia (2008): This documentary about the ghosts and ghouls of East Anglia by Andrew Gray is mostly an excuse to present various bits of archive footage taken from TV presentations of many decades past. Thus, this is a fascinating treasure trove of “true” supernatural stuff. If you’re as interested in ghost stories of this type and the way they exist in the cultural mainstream as I am, all of this – tales of black shuck, haunted manors and haunted council flats - is highly fascinating and fun; if you’re not, it’s archive footage with a bit of a dramatic presentation around it.

Heart Eyes (2025): A couple hating killer murders only on Valentine’s Day. Not yet a couple Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding) will have to get through their romantic comedy under duress, the occasional spurt of blood, and rather a lot of dead bodies. Meet cutes don’t usually work this way.

You really can’t blame Josh Ruben’s romantic horror comedy for not going all out with both of its genres. The film’s total commitment to its shtick is absolutely admirable, even more so since Ruben’s direction often very cleverly shifts between the stylistic coding of romantic comedy and horror.

As many a high concept movie, this is a bit slight, but then, most holiday based slashers as well as most romantic comedies are, and we don’t necessarily love them less for it.

Three Films Make A Post: Want to hear a scary story?

Bring it On: Cheer or Die (2022): Turning this perennial cheerleading movie franchise slasher-wards is a goofy idea that’s also all kinds of brilliant. Alas, the execution of this idea, as directed by Karen Lam with a screenplay credited to Alyson Fouse, Rebekah McKendry and Dana Schwartz, is about as limp, uninspired and un-fun as this could have turned out. The PG-13 rating surely doesn’t help the film, for where other horror sub-genres can survive without getting to gruesome, a slasher without creative kills lacks an important ingredient to work as it should. That the film only does much of anything with its cheerleading core in its final act when it turns out that cheerleading is a type of martial arts is another disappointment. Also not helpful are jokes that don’t hit (this is apparently supposed to be a horror comedy, though it’s difficult to notice), a cast that couldn’t handle funny lines anyway, and direction I’ll politely call uninspired.

Devil’s Workshop (2022): A struggling actor (Timothy Granaderos) in the running for a role as a demonologist spends a weekend at a real demonologist’s (Radha Mitchell) who pulls him into a bit of a supernatural psychodrama. At least half of the time, Chris von Hoffmann’s film actually is the twisty, blackly humorous, psychologically thrilling two-hander it so clearly wants to be, with some clever moments where a character’s inner life is supernaturally brought to the outside. Alas, it is a bit too distractible to quite reach its full potential, wasting too much time on the travails of our protagonist’s arch enemy (Emile Hirsch at his weaselliest); setting up a punchline really shouldn’t take up twenty minutes or so of screen time.

Mitchell does one hell of a job being ambiguous, weird and intense; Granaderos, while no slouch in the scenery chewing business sometimes can’t quite keep up with her.

Scare Me (2020): Speaking of actor’s workshops, this movie about two horror writers – one successful (Aya Cash), one would-be (writer/director of the film Josh Ruben) – acting out horror stories in a cabin during a power failure sometimes has a certain whiff of that sort affair. However, it’s a workshop where both main parties act and imagine their asses off in the best possible way, and whose director may be a bit showy, but also brilliantly effective in his showiness, building tension and mood out of thin air and sheer inventiveness. Unlike in our first entry, the sardonic humour hits nearly every time, and the script is much deeper and more clever than it at first appears; unlike in our second one, both leads are on the same level and wavelength throughout.

I suspect this is going to be a bit of a marmite film: its very specific type of cleverness and its go-for-broke intensity and personal weirdness will rub some people the wrong way. I found myself, unexpectedly, loving this approach to talking about scary stories, success and jealousy, and the kind of human interactions that can only end in tears and/or blood quite a bit.

In short: Werewolves Within (2021)

When forest ranger Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson) arrives in Beaverfield, a tiny community at the edge of nowhere he is going to (sort of) police for the foreseeable future, he gets rather more excitement on his first day and night than one typically hopes for when starting on a new job. Apart from everyone – well, everyone but extremely lovely and adorable postal worker Cecily (Milana Vayntrub) – being your typical kind of comedy movie crazy, the village is also divided on the issue of a new gas pipeline that’s supposed to run through town soon enough, making for something of a less than peaceful environment. Things really escalate when a storm knocks out all connections – including the road – to the outside world. Someone (or something?) knocks out the town’s generators, too, and soon, a bit of a killing spree starts. The perpetrator seems to be a werewolf (SCIENCE says so), so the killer really could be anyone among the population, which doesn’t help the sense of distrust and paranoia between these people at all. You wouldn’t exactly need a werewolf for murder among these people. Finn – who is nice, communicative, into cooperation and extensive quoting of Mister Rogers to a fault – and Cecily are pretty much the only ones in town able to keep their heads.

At first, I didn’t quite get the raves Josh Ruben’s videogame based movie Werewolves Within received from all corners. Mostly because the film starts out very slowly indeed, putting what seems to be way too much time into characters that are mostly one-note comedy stock. And really, most of them never acquire that much coveted second dimension, but Ruben isn’t actually introducing the characters as much as he is seeding the murder mystery clues of the piece and introducing the audience to the physical set-up of Beaverfield, both elements that will turn out to be much more important than most of the characters involved are as characters.

It is exactly their slow and subtle introduction that makes these things work ones the film gets going, turning this into a very cleverly constructed mystery and, once the final act starts, a really great series of murder and chase set pieces. While the characters do mostly stay one note (well, apart from spoiler and spoiler, of course), our protagonists are very likeable (great credit to Richardson for turning a character who could be just too nice to be likeable into a guy so likeable you just gotta like seeing him being excessively nice) indeed, and the mystery and mood develop quite a bit of pull, an effect the film would not have managed to achieve with a faster start.

Plus, the werewolf is pretty great, the murders become rather fun indeed, and most of the jokes in the second half hit with great precision.