Three Films Make A Post: He always takes one

The Collector (2009): When I initially watched Michael Dunstan’s film, I judged it to be deeply indebted to Saw and the piss-coloured aesthetics of that school of filmmaking. Today, I rather see it as a variation on Home Alone where Kevin has grown up, is breaking into peoples’ houses and turns them into trapped murder holes, which makes me a lot happier.

It’s still more a decent film than a great one, mind you, lacking in something that makes it truly special, or that’s as insane as its killer’s chosen method. That would come in the sequel, fortunately.

Sana aka Everybody’s Song (2023): Takashi Shimizu, decades away from his J-horror heights, does still regularly churn out horror movies of highly variable quality. Sana has some delightful moments of dread and terror and a complicated twisty backstory to its haunting that actual earns those twists; it also goes on a little too long, and spends a bit too much time on also being an ad – there’s even a song with lyrics subbed on screen, so you can karaoke to it, as well – for the boy (well, men) band Generations. These guys aren’t bad actors for male idols, and the film isn’t pulling its punches too badly in their treatment in the plot. Still, I can’t help but think that a film concerning a fictional pop group could have gone into rather more interesting places with them as characters.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024): The newest entry into Legendary’s kaijuverse is about as silly as giant monster movies from the USA will get, which is to say, pretty damn silly indeed, and if you’re looking for even the shallowest puddle of depth, you’ll be rather disappointed in it. If you’re willing to accept that this thing is just going to revel in a large number of giant monster fights - all realized in the fakest most colourful digital art Hollywood money can buy -, grin at you, make up bizarre lore and waste Rebecca Hall on a role even a muppet could play, you may very well have a very good time after all.

For one thing is clear: Adam Wingard is doing his damndest to entertain his audience here, to never bore, to ignore the human drama nobody cares about (that’s what that Apple TV show about bigamy is for), and to just turn out a fun piece of popcorn cinema, the sort of thing that’s pure sensation, nothing else.

I’m perfectly fine with that approach to filmmaking and thus felt myself perfectly entertained by the film; I rather enjoy the contrast between this and what Toho does with Godzilla on his home turf, as well.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Up to this point, the Monsterverse US kaiju movies have been rather reluctant to fully and openly embrace their chosen genre’s silliness, playing things more or less dramatic, an approach that has resulted in at least one of the best giant monster movies ever made (that would be Kong: Skull Island, for the barbarians among my imaginary readers), but also in the idea that Kyle Chandler looking as if he had very bad case of constipation makes for an engaging human anchor.

Chandler’s still in this movie, but you might miss him if you blink, for the only human character from the last Monsterverse film this one cares about is Millie Bobby Brown’s Madison, which seems to be a fair assessment of the situation. And while Brown’s subplot here doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense, and suggests that Evil Elon Musk (yup, that’s our human villain) has never even heard of the concept of operational security, or just plain security, it does go through a lot of the sort of conspiracy and weirdness human subplots the non-monsters in a kaiju movie are supposed to go through. With a smile on its face and whistling a merry tune.

The other humans of note are Alexander Skarsgård as the rogue geologist version of Fox Mulder – and the way Skarsgård plays it, he knows he’s Mulder – and Rebecca Hall trying to chat with a very huge gorilla with the help of an honest to gosh Kenny. Well, because we now live in 2021, the Kenny’s actually a mute little Inuit girl (Kaylee Hottle), but that’s certainly an improvement over a little Japanese boy in short trousers. Also eventually involved will be a little trip into the Hollow Earth. That old Fortean chestnut is presented through some genuinely beautiful and bizarre effects, and seems like the logical next step (before the alien invasion I hope for in the next film) for the series to take.

So this time around, those pesky humans do get some interesting stuff to take part in again, but Adam Wingard’s (coming off his terrible Death Note thing for Netflix and the dire Blair Witch swinging) film is pretty clear about what’s the main event (see the title of the damn movie) and goes all in for the big damn kaiju action in lovingly staged fights that lay waste to quite a few pretty cities this time around. There’s a wonderful sense of abandon to those fights, comparable to that phase in the Showa era when the films were becoming sillier but were still using that silliness to put their audience – kids at heart, sometimes in body – in a state of awe and wonder and the sort of giddy excitement that can come about when movies show you something that just can’t be seen in real life (cf., why the movies are better than life) – just with a different style of special effects.

Speaking of those, whoever is responsible for the motion capture and animation of Kong here is an absolute genius, providing personality and weight in spades; only in comparison does Godzilla look like a grumpy old lizard.

Three Films Make A Post: Something has put the fear of death in the living and sent the dead running for their lives

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013): It seems somewhat obvious to compare Jean-Pierre Jeunet to Tim Burton: both directors have very distinctive styles, both have aesthetics deeply rooted in the grotesque and the strange. But unlike Burton on his bad days, Jeunet seems to be easily able to find the volume knob for the grotesque and the weird and fit it to the necessities of the narrative he’s telling. T.S. Spivet is a case in point, for it shows the director mellowing the grotesque into the whimsically strange while keeping his ability to create a world not really like our own that still feels perfectly logical and following its own rules and which is rooted in recognizable human feelings. So this is not just a film that’s great to look – and sometimes to gawk excitedly – at but also an example of that mythical “heart-warming” quality, a quality Jeunet – as is his wont – reaches without ever seeming to stretch for it, and that never feels in conflict with the film’s stranger elements but rather a part of them.

Christine (2016): Antonio Campos’s 70s period piece about a reporter for a local TV station who ends her own life in front of a running camera thanks to a toxic cocktail of clinical depression, rejection, male chauvinism, her frustration at the state of the world (which always looks even worse when you’re suffering from depression), stupidity, and the tragic inability of the people who do love her to actually enable her to seek help (not that this would have been easy at this point in time). You might say it is a bit of a downer, but it is also a film that stretches to let Christine be more than just a freak we gawk at and watch die inside and outside, that attempts to understand Christine not just as that thing we know as “a depressed woman” but as a living breathing person who is/was more than just a mentally ill woman with a sensationalist exploitable end. Rebecca Hall’s central performance is highly nuanced, insightful and utterly humane.

U Turn (1997): In comparison, Oliver Stone’s neo noir is not much of a film, even though it is one of the director’s best – and certainly least annoying – ones. Stone’s direction is expectedly showy and nervous, the characters are absurd caricatures utterly divorced from actual human beings or even what we usually accept in movies as human beings, and the plot is a series of tonally wildly wavering episodes about how horrible everything and everyone is. I’d call it a nihilistic film, but for that, I’d have to take Stone’s habitual posing seriously. As it stands, I’m more reminded of The Big Lebowski’s “Autobahn”.


The thing is, I also find the combination of the overblown direction, the great actors (and Jennifer Lopez) playing cardboard cut-outs as loudly as possible, the noir clichés and the badly digested philosophy highly entertaining, running on an energy that might be Stone’s typical screeching about how awesome and deep he is (which he isn’t) or just the result of a group of people having a wild time making a really silly film.

Three Films Make A Post: From a dimension beyond the living, a terror to scare you to death.

Ghoulies II (1988): The first Ghoulies us the sort of take it or leave it post-Gremlins proposition I’d rather leave than take, but this sequel, directed by producer Charles Band’s father (and veteran low budget director) Albert is rather more entertaining. It does help that it takes place on a carnival – supposed soon to be reorganized by a malevolent money man – and really puts out all the stops when it comes to the positive carny clichés. The film is full of fun (and silly) performances like the one of Phil Fondacaro as small Shakespearean thespian (at least that’s what he says) Sir Nigel Penneyweight that could be cruel and unpleasant but turn out loving and fun. Plus, there aren’t too many horror films in which the demons threatening the heroes are beaten by conjuring up a bigger (adorable) one, or the traditional “last monster nobody manages to kill” hides away in a toilet.

The Gift (2015): This small, LA-set thriller directed by Joel Edgerton (who also plays one of the main characters, together with Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall) is pretty much a perfect example of its genre: it is clever, twisty, ambiguous and often truly disquieting without ever needing to show the worst things going on in it. Thanks to a wonderful script (also by Edgerton), acting and direction, it does manage the particularly fascinating trick of being character-driven while keeping the motivations and true nature of said characters at least partially hidden. I’d say more about it but this one of those films where telling much about anything going on in it really could spoil the first impression needlessly.


Body Parts (1991): Eric Red’s horror film about body part transplantation, mad science, pointless murders, and the question if evil (whatever that may be) sits in the serial killer arm transplanted onto psychologist Jeff Fahey is as entertaining as its basic idea is silly. For most of its running time, it even manages to treat its rather absurd set-up with the utmost seriousness, doing its best to avoid turning out like Oliver Stone’s The Hand. Fahey’s performance is a fine bit of middle class paranoia, and his descent into what we’re actually pretty sure from the outset isn’t madness works particularly well because Red does manage to actually make the family unit threatened this time around sympathetic without getting treacly about it. As a bonus, there’s a bonkers ending and Brad Dourif for once is not playing the killer.