Three Films Make A Post: Two bad people are about to meet two worse people.

Some Kind of Hate (2015): Whereas I thought that director Adam Egypt Mortimer’s follow-up film Daniel Isn’t Real (perhaps later more about that one on a later date) was a brilliant horror film about mental illness and the idea of “normality”, this, Mortimer’s first feature really doesn’t work at all. This one’s about the trauma of bullying and an undead girl taking vengeance on bullies and taking things rather too far. Apart from obvious structural problems like terrible pacing and way too much repetition, what this one suffers under most is a certain heart on its sleeve quality that suggests filmmakers a bit too close to the theme they want to talk about and therefor unable to step away from it enough to turn it into functioning art. A couple of the kills are pretty cleverly staged and imagined, at least, but it’s clear throughout that the film has much greater ambitions than being a slash fest it simply can’t fulfil.

Meek’s Cutoff (2010): Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist (post-revisionist?) Western on the other hand seems to be able to fulfil all of its ambitions easily, but then the comparison between a debut horror movie by a young guy just starting out and an experienced director like Reichardt at the top of her game is completely unfair of me, probably to both films. Anyway, Reichardt’s ambitions here are many: at once to show a naturalistic, detail-focussed tale of settlers on the Oregon trail but also to sip from the mythic well that has been built over the bones of such settlers; talking about America today by talking about its past; facing the complexities of societal misogyny and racism head-on. She’s doing all that in a film shot with some of the starker values of post 2000s US indie cinema – the very digital camerawork, the realistic sound (though leave it to Reichardt to make it a highly constructed realistic sound clearly designed), the paucity of a classical dramatic plot, the slow pacing. Which shouldn’t work terribly well at all, but in practice, the whole film has a nearly magical quality of slowly growing intensity and will eventually feel at once naturalistic and utterly not of this world.

The Ladykillers (1955): And now for something completely different, a classic British black comedy about criminals and old ladies by Alexander Mackendrick (made for Ealing Studios who had a bit of form for this sort of thing) that’s about as subversive about society, to be precise about how a classist society reads social cues and roles and the way this twists even the people who think themselves clever enough to use this for their own profit, as can be.


It’s classically stylish British comedy cinema of this type, with actors like Alec Guiness, Katie Johnson, Cecil Parker, a young Peter Sellers, or Herbert Lom treating their roles with an arch humour that never can quite disguise the actual humanity behind characters that aren’t treated terribly compassionately by the film they are in.

Three Films Make A Post: Seclusion. Seduction. Survival.

The Detained aka Deadly Detention (2017): Ah, detention horror, the more high-school-y sub-genre of the corridor runner. Well, usually, it is. In the case of Blair Hayes’s The Detained, the corridors our detained high school kids run up and down and forwards and backwards and around in, above or under belong to a closed-down prison, for their high school has been closed because of an opossum infestation. Yup, this is one of those films that excuses all sorts of lame (and perhaps a wee bit lazy) aspects of its script by being all ironic and shit. So the main characters aren’t walking and talking clichés but ironic walking and talking clichés. We all know the drill by now. Does the “irony” add anything to the film? Does it help uncover any interesting insights? Of course not. To be fair, I have seen much worse in ironic horror, and much worse corridor runners. At least, the acting is decent, about every tenth cheesy joke is actually funny, and the basic aspects of filmmaking are perfectly competent. Hooray?

Jackals (2017): Plotwise, Kevin Greutert’s 80s set movie about the members of a family and a deprogrammer having to fight off a siege by a group of rather creepy cult members from whom they’ve stolen the family’s son back, is a very sparse film. The characters aren’t terribly deep either, but they are brought to life by a fine cast – Deborah Kara Unger, Johnathon Schaech, Stephen Dorff among them – and Greutert has an eye for using character archetypes in just the right way for the kind of film this is. Visually, Jackals is very atmospheric, and there are quite a few clever little touches: the cult’s use of animal masks and Greutert’s tendency to shoot them in silhouette is a prime example of how to make your antagonists feel ever so slightly worse than human. The pacing is excellent, and while I hoped in vain for an escalation in the direction of the supernatural, the whole film is just a tight, exciting little package in the best low budget movie tradition. Why, I even liked the kicker ending!


Wendy and Lucy (2008): This Kelly Reichardt film featuring Michelle Williams and a dog named Lucy might be among the saddest films I have seen in a long time. Plot-wise, it’s not about much more than an impoverished woman and her dog stranding on their way to Alaska in some horrible little town, with little outwardly happening, and that slowly. In truth, it’s a film about a personal apocalypse, a life that has turned to a dead end without the woman living it having quite noticed it (or perhaps rather admitted to herself), a society that replaces kindness with an insistence on proper procedures, bureaucracy, and money, and can’t even imagine not filtering everything through the lenses of these things. It’s also a film about what it means to be poor in the western world today (well, 2008, and things haven’t exactly improved, have they?), and how the worst cruelty is inflicted on people by other people who probably can’t even see it. There’s also an absolutely horrifying encounter with a half-crazed man played by Larry Fessenden that puts further emphasis on the way poor women have it even worse. It all adds up to something so sad, filmed and acted with such care, words – my words at least – can’t really do the film justice.