Three Films Make A Post: You're in for a shock.

Blood Red Sky (2021): If you want to play cliché bingo with this German Netflix “Die Hard on an airplane with a vampire lady standing in for Bruce Willis” movie, be advised that doing the drinking version might actually kill you. And this abomination directed by Peter Thorwarth (who also co-“wrote”, if that’s the word to use for cribbing this egregious, with German TV veteran Stefan Holtz) really isn’t worth your life. This is the sort of copyist filmmaking that simply can’t get up even an ounce of creative energy, cribbing left and right in the most soulless and joyless manner, ripping off superior movies without the tiniest bit of fun, charm or intelligence but a whole lot of stupidity. Indeed, it’s a movie so stupid, it believes Dominic Purcell is a good casting choice for Die Hard’s John Rickman character, and that it’s tedious repetition of well-worn tropes should scratch on the two hour runtime mark.

On the positive side, it does teach that watching people in vampire makeup running through an airplane does get boring pretty fast.

Jolt (2021): Over at Amazon, Kate Beckinsale is cast as Jason Statham with breasts in a crime action fantasy about a woman so irascible she develops super powers and needs electric jolts to calm herself down hunting down the killers of her prospective boyfriend. It’s also very clichéd, but has a fun, snarky sense of humour and shows some imagination in the way it puts its clichés together. Some scenes show that director Tanya Wexler doesn’t have much experience staging action scenes, but there are just as many that are good bread and butter action fun. It’s a good time right now if you want to see some skulls cracked and balls kicked by a woman (and when wouldn’t you?). I don’t think I exactly need the sequel a surprise Susan Sarandon apparently wants to sell me, but I’d certainly not be set against it completely.

The Scary House aka Das schaurige Haus (2020): Back again at Netflix, we have this Austrian family friendly bit of horror cinema for the YA crowd directed by Daniel Prochaska. You know the drill: after the death of a parent, the rest of the family moves far away into a house in the sticks and encounters ghostly shenanigans caused by a dark secret of the (near) past. The haunting gets resolved, the kids acquire some friends, and some evildoers are punished while the rest of the cast learns a valuable lesson. The film doesn’t treat its material with more originality than the other two flicks in this entry, but Prochaska is pretty good at creating a sense of place for the Austrian village right on the border to Slovenia this takes place in and does deliver some pleasant kid friendly spooks, as well as a couple of effective suspense sequences.

While plot and structure are well-worn, the film takes care to present them with enough conviction they still have weight, so the result is a nice afternoon’s entertainment that features a surprisingly unpleasant backstory – as befits a haunting but isn’t exactly what you’d expect in a movie for the kids these days.

Three Films Make A Post: You will believe …

Haunted (1995): Why this plushy attempt by veteran director (every single piece I’ve ever read about this movie seems to call him that, and it’s certainly true) Lewis Gilbert at adapting one of those later James Herbert novel where the writer – artistically rather successfully – attempted to escape his pulp instincts is pretty well regarded is beyond me. The script snails its way to a big twist the book handles and seems to understand much better, dialogue and plotting are otherwise completely forgettable, and a theoretically decent cast does little to improve things by being typically wooden (Kate Beckinsale), atypically panto (Aidan Quinn), or nearly not in the movie (John Gielgud). Lewis shows little understanding on how to film the haunting scenes, overlighting every scene (nights are basically as bright as days in this haunted house), and doing not a lick of mood building beyond the mood of a postcard. Intelligent use of shadow or colour simply doesn’t happen; instead, the score by Debbie Wiseman swells, because the filmmakers think the film’s material is best treated as a romance. Which it might be, if the script actually constructed one.

The Devil’s Hand (1961): I had quite a bit more fun with this early 60s indie horror movie about a guy seduced into becoming a member in the cult of “Gambu, the great spirit of Evil”. As directed by one William J. Hole Jr. it feels a lot like the adaptation of a Seabury Quinn story sans Jules de Grandin that never made it into “Weird Tales”. Consequently, it does contain rather a lot of weird ideas about non-western cultures – the cult’s lair is kitted out with bits and bobs from all kinds of non-Anglo cultures that have sod all to do with one another – but then, it does mostly seem to consist out of white people from LA, so that’s a somewhat ironic (and certainly inadvertent) fit. The acting’s very stiff, as is the dialogue, but the film goes as far with the masochist elements implicit in the tale of a man falling for a femme fatale as it could get away with at the time, doesn’t drag its feet, and is genuinely engaging as a piece of pulpy horror. From time to time, Hole even catches on a truly weird idea or two, which is more than you can say for a lot of movies.

Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet aka Adéla jeste nevecerela (1978): Speaking of weird, this farce by Oldřich Lipský is a perfect example of the peculiar Czech sort of slapstick, deeply silly in a way that always feels somewhat subversive. Apart from that, it also functions as a loving homage to the more lively kind of silent cinema (and certainly silent cinema serials), Jules Verne (including what today reads as proto-steampunk elements), and whatever else the filmmakers find enjoyable, from Czech beer to dime novels (the hero is, after all, Nick Carter). The visual effects are at least in part designed and realized by the great Jan Svankmajer, so there’s quite a bit to gawk at between overcranked action sequences, silly romance, and bizarre revenge plots surrounding a giant man-eating plant who only dines when called with the sweet sounds of a Mozart lullaby not actually written by Mozart.

Three Films Make A Post: Adventure lives forever.

Torque (2004): In 2004, the fast cars and macho men sub-genre was already big enough in mainstream cinema, the hipster impulse to do them ironically could not be supressed. To wit, Torque, as directed by Joseph Kahn, a film that spends the whole of its running time pointing out how stupid and lame it is, which indeed it is very much. As all films of this ilk, it never attempts to do anything but point out its own failures, never bothering to, just for example, not be stupid. That, I can’t help but assume, would take effort, whereas empty irony clearly does not. The end result is a film that will neither entertain an audience coming for a fast cars and macho men movie – because an un-ironic film of that genre would at the very least attempt to not be aggressively shite – nor one perhaps expecting an actual parody of the genre, which, again, would take effort this film just isn’t in the mood to make.

Van Helsing (2004): After realizing the error of my ways regarding Stephen Sommers’s Mummy movies, I had high hopes of recognizing Van Helsing as another film I had unfairly maligned. Well, I shouldn’t have worried my pretty little head, because Van Helsing is even worse than Torque above, foregoing the empty irony for some of the worst jokes in film history. As if the jokes weren’t painful enough, Sommers also manages to get a completely lifeless performance out of Hugh Jackman, pairing him up with the typically wooden Kate Beckinsale until a negative number of romantic sparks fly. Somehow, Sommers also lost the ability to stage fun and exciting action sequences, of pacing a movie, and of being rather clever while pretending to be really dumb. Because that’s clearly not bad enough, we also get Richard Roxburgh as the what I believe to be worst Dracula in movie history (porn Draculas not excepted)  giving a performance that’s so bad, the mind boggles what anyone involved was thinking (if anyone was indeed thinking and not just snorting coke).


Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991): But let’s end this post on a movie that isn’t obnoxiously bad, Craig Baldwin’s collage pseudo-documentary that tells the horrible history of US “intervention” in various Latin American countries. The film avoids the preachiness as well as the dry didacticism that could come with this kid of topic by pretending to be a right-wing conspiracist screed telling the tale of the heroic US fight against evil aliens and their co-conspirators, hilariously imitating the tone of the looniest parts of conspiracy theorist thinking, obviously mostly setting it into picture via footage taken from older SF and horror movies, saying what it actually has to say by inversion. Which manages to make the film funny and inventive as well as informative; given my predilections, the particular footage the film uses adds to the enjoyment, of course.

In short: Contraband (2012)

Once, Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg), was the best smuggler there was. By now, he has retired to the more bourgeois wife (Kate Beckinsale) and kids stuff, working as the owner of a security tech firm. Unfortunately, his wife’s little brother Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) is attempting to step into his old comfy smuggling shoes, which works well enough until he has to drop a load of drugs into the sea to avoid it and him falling into the hands of the coast guard. Not surprisingly, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), the guy whose drugs these were, isn’t at all happy. Why, he’s giving Andy only a couple of days to come up with quite a bit of money. Otherwise, Andy’s dead, and going by Briggs’s logic, his debts will fall on his wife and her family.

Because he can’t find any other way to come up with the money, and because he’s certainly not going to let his brother in law get killed by a raving lunatic, Chris decides to make one last big smuggling run. It’s the sort of smuggling run where whatever could go wrong does indeed go wrong, so he has to fight the vagaries of a really rude ship’s captain (J.K. Simmons doing his thing), work with unreliable contacts, take part in an impromptu armoured car assault, and so on and so forth. That’s all before we come to various betrayals on the home front, mind you.

Baltasar Kormákur’s Contraband is the sort of everything and the kitchen sink thriller that you’ll either loathe with a passion for its various crimes against plausibility and coherent writing or sort of enjoy because it is decently entertaining for what it is. It is certainly a film absolutely disinterested in emphasizing the more interesting parts of its narrative - which could turn this into a gut-wrenching film about betrayals, people falling back to their worst selves in case of danger, and the inability to ever escape the past – in favour of spending most of its time adding one bizarre complication after the other, with a side-line in a particularly yawn-inducing version of ye olde family under threat subplot.

As a member of the order of forgettable popcorn cinema, thriller division, the film isn’t without merit, though, for while only very few of the complications in the path of Marky Mark (who makes all the facial expressions a serious actors makes when tasked with a silly thriller, don’t you worry, and only half phones his performance in) make much sense, there’s something to be said to the film’s repeated shrugging of its shoulders, mumbling “whatever”, and throwing a quick security van heist or whatever other nonsense just came to mind in. It is certainly never boring, though not quite coherent enough in tone, style and pacing to be as fun as it could be. The regular popping in with the indignities Beckinsale’s character has to go through doesn’t help with the latter much, particularly since the film never gives her anything more to actually do than be the helpless wife. And I’ve seen more interesting examples of those too.


Ribisi and Ben Foster as Wahlberg’s traitorous best friend put some enthusiastic efforts in, at least, and the action is competent and fun enough to watch. Just don’t expect to remember anything about Contraband a couple of weeks after you have seen it.

Three Films Make A Post: Can You Take It? More Startling . . . More Blood-Curdling Than Anything You've Ever Seen!

The Disappointments Room (2016): I dunno, but unlike much of the rest of the internet, I think D.J. Caruso’s movie about a family escaping a tragedy to a supposed rural dream home, only to have the mother (played by a surprisingly effective and human Kate Beckinsale) start seeing ghosts, is a perfectly acceptable bit of contemporary mainstream horror, with perfectly okay ghost bits. There’s also a semi-competent effort at updating the old “is the woman MAD?” trope into something more palatable, perhaps even meaningful to contemporary eyes. It’s not quite as feminist as it probably thinks it is in its approach there, but like the rest of the film, it’s thoughtful and interesting enough to get a vague thumbs up from me.

The Go-Getter (2007): Martin Hynes film concerning a teenager (Lou Taylor Pucci) going on a road trip in a stolen car to find his long-time absent brother, meeting strange people, falling in love with the owner of the car (Zooey Deschanel), and perhaps doing some growing up in the progress on the other hand is more than just deserving of a vague thumbs up. Stylistically, it’s very much inside of the indie mainstream of its time, but Hynes uses the genre (and believe me, this sort of thing is just as much part of a “genre” as is a slasher or a vampire movie) with warmth, a sense of poetry and obvious liking for his characters – including their fault lines and flaws – while getting fine performances out of Pucci, Deschanel and usual suspects like Judy Greer and Jena Malone.


Le parapluies de Cherbourg aka The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964): Jacques Demy’s musical is of course a stone cold classic, applying things learned from the nouvelle vague and the director’s very personal idiosyncrasies to a conception of the musical that seems – also thanks to the sung dialogue – to try to apply approaches of the opera to the kind of people most traditional opera doesn’t care about, consequently also using quite a different kind of music. Compared to his next musical, the surface-friendlier Young Girls of Rochefort (which I slightly prefer) the material’s dark elements aren’t pretending to be as light (Rochefort doesn’t even make a deep emotional thing out of a serial killer). This is the sort of musical romance that doesn’t get a traditional happy ending because life usually doesn’t have one, and it is one that really wants to talk about actual life in an artistically heightened way. It also happens to be a film that is so drop dead gorgeous (and not just because its actors are) in sound, shape, and movement, the “realistic” sadness of its ending seems to be the least interesting thing about it.

In short: Stonehearst Asylum (2014)

aka Eliza Graves

Following the incredible Session 9, Brad Anderson’s directing career has a series of ups and downs in film as well as on TV, with nothing I’ve seen quite up to the level of a film that might feel like a bit of a millstone around the neck of anyone who made it. It has always been obvious, though, that Anderson is a director very much in control of his material, with a sense of style and mood, just not always provided with the right scripts - and one can’t help but speculate the right circumstances – to make the most of his talents.

Stonehearst Asylum again isn’t quite up to the level of Session 9 but is still quite a delightful experience. Now, it might be possible my huge enjoyment of the film is based on it hitting so many of my pleasure buttons, what with it being freely “based on” (which means, taking a basic idea and doing something completely different with it) a Poe story, exploring the realm between “madness” and “mental health” in a way that is at once conscious of the constructedness of these descriptors as of the actual pains of suffering from a mental illness. I’m also quite fond of the way it uses sensationalized ideas of mental illness and psychiatry in a playful manner that always makes clear scriptwriter Joe Gangemi and Anderson do know they are using the popular ideas of psychiatry and mental illness rather than the things themselves, sometimes letting very different interpretations of what they mean collide, which probably will offend someone somewhere, but so will everything.

And because that’s clearly not enough for one film, it also makes merry use of all kinds of gothic romance elements – often twisted in fun and clever ways and always used with just the right tone and in just the right mood - and (slightly ironic) Romantic nonsense about the curative powers of love, thinks about the troubles of building a utopia when you’re surrounded by fallible human beings who need to eat and be warm and when you yourself are a rather hurt human being too, even carries some mildly feminist elements (if you want to read them that way, that is), and, finally, reaches an improbable but perfectly likeable and deserved kind of happy end. And, thanks to the film’s Gothic structure and Anderson’s general brilliance, Stonehearst Asylum does makes this overload of ideas and concepts work, more often than not dance, with one another, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

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