Three Films Make A Post: There are places you should never visit. This is one of them.

Indigenous (2014): Your usual young tourist types visit Panama and go off with a local to tourist up a forbidden waterfall. There, they encounter the Chupacabra. The usual mix of running through the jungle, screeching, and “I’m so sorry”s ensues. Well, you can’t blame Alastair Orr’s film for rampant originality, or pretend it does anything with the characters that’ll make you care for them even the tiniest bit. The whole film is shot competently enough but terribly dull even if you’re like me and okay with generic horror films being generic. There’s just nothing to grab one even a little bit here.

Dollman vs. Demonic Toys (1993): On the other hand, at least Indigenous doesn’t reek of complete loathing for the audience that pays the filmmakers’ bills. This Full Moon abomination, on the other hand, directed by Charles Band himself, does reek so quite a bit. At one hour of running time, at least fifteen minutes of which are taken up by the credits and flashbacks to Dollman, Demonic Toys and Bad Channels, it’s difficult to shake the feeling of watching a really bad clip show episode of a horrible TV show (or Phantasm IV, for that matter). It doesn’t help that the plot of what’s there of actual new footage makes little sense even for a Full Moon film, the jokes are tepid, and most of it feels like filler with little of interest happening whatsoever. Not even Tim Thomerson and Tracy Scoggins reprising their roles from the earlier movies can save anything here, because there’s no attempt on screen to do anything but dupe us suckers paying for Full Moon films into literally buying crap.


Three O’Clock High (1987): Fortunately, this 80s high school comedy rides to the rescue. This is not exactly in my genre of choice but Phil Joanou’s film recommends itself even to people like me with a non-generic story made out of very generic elements and a focussed script that plots comedy nearly as tightly as a good thriller. Which is a good fit for Phil Joanou’s breathless direction that really goes in for the living nightmare elements of the plot, as if this were a Hitchcock film, and Casey Siemaszko one of Hitchcock’s everyman protagonists going accidentally stumbling into a convoluted plot. Just that it takes place in high school, and there are jokes which are actually funny. There’s no boring second here.

Three Films Make A Post: So deadly, it may be the last movie you ever see.

The Veil (2016): Despite some very decent acting and a fine enough basic idea, director Phil Joanou quickly falls into the usual traps and trappings of modern mainstream horror: there’s the script that needs to isolate its characters but can only find the most stupid way to do it, a colour palette so muted the film’s greyish brown and boring to look at, and of course an idea of horror that loves jump scares so much more than anything else it can’t live without at least one every five minutes. And there’s obviously the lame twist ending too.

Witchville (2010): This SyFy movie was for some reason and to good effect shot in China, giving the affair some local visual influences on the production design. There are also Chinese actors in smaller roles. It’s basically a cheap sword and sorcery movie with Luke Goss enriched with mild wuxia elements, and as such Pearry Reginald Teo’s film pushes a lot of my buttons quite adeptly. It’s merrily paced, has a lot of perfectly decent Sword and Sorcery ideas about witches and the way people fight, adorably small armies, and is good, stupid fun all around.

The Mystery of Mr. X (1934): Edgar Selwyn’s film about a cracksman (Robert Montgomery) hunting a serial killer of policemen because he’s under suspicion himself (without much actual evidence, mind you) on the other hand is very slow going. It seems to have the reputation of being a hidden gem in classic Hollywood lover circles but I does very little for me. I’m a sucker for the “charming thief hunts worse criminals” kind of tale, but I could do little with Montgomery’s performance here, that for my tastes was more smug and self-satisfied than roguishly charming.

The romance angle doesn’t work for me either, the romantic plot moments and the mystery always getting in each other’s way while they’re only competent looked at separately. So we’re safely in the area of “boring competence” here again, and that’s something I have no love for in films made now or in 1934.