Three Films Make A Post: His Battle To Save The Alaskan Wilderness And Protect Its People Can Only Be Won…

On Deadly Ground (1994): Steven Seagal can’t act, Steven Seagal can’t fight, Steven Seagal can’t direct, yet he’s still doing all of it, at this point in his career at a major studio budget level with a cast that includes Michael Caine, Joan Chen (playing an Alaskan native American, because of course she is), Billy Bob Thornton and a horde of beloved character actors. There’s a commendable pro-eco message (including an absurd lecture in the bored tones of Seagal himself after he has murdered his way through dozens of people) that’s permanently made absurd by Seagal’s bully asshole thug persona, and the huge amount of “Native Spirituality” kitsch that’s funnier than it is offensive.

Also very funny are Caine’s attempts at pretending to be American, Seagal’s attempts at philosophy, and Seagal’s attempts at looking like a badass instead of the guy who pays you so you pretend he beats you up.

Schrei – denn ich werde dich töten! (“Scream – for I am going to kill you!”) aka School’s Out (1999): At the turn of the century, German cable TV did hope for a bit of that sweet, sweet Scream money. Thus this low-gore slasher by Robert Sigl (who once made the pretty wonderful Laurin but then had to make his way through the German cinematic and TV wastelands) with a script by German weird fiction luminary – though you wouldn’t notice here - Kai Meyer.

As far as Scream-offs go, this is one of the less comedic attempts at the style, and, apart from the bits Sigl nearly quotes directly from the Craven film, more like a mid-level giallo with teens and more competence than stylistic brilliance on screen.

It’s pretty good fun on a rainy Sunday morning, though.

Das Mädcheninternat – Deine Schreie wird niemand hören (“The Girls’ Boarding School – No one will hear your screams”) aka Dead Island: Schools Out 2 (2001): Sigl and Meyer re-team for this sequel that finds final girl Nina (Katharina Wackernagel) getting into trouble with a killer in a nun costume in an island boarding school/mental health institution. There’s less direct Scream in here than in the first movie and even more giallo, though this again doesn’t come together as well as one could hope for given the actual talent involved on director’s chair and script. The acting isn’t bad either, yet there’s a certain lack of energy here that gets in the way of any actual tension.

This, too, isn’t a bad little movie if one is in the appropriate mood, mind you.

Three Films Make A Post: Where there is no more death we shall meet again.

Laurin (1989): This is that rare example of an interesting, moody German horror movie. Of course, director Robert Sigl shot in Hungary with predominantly Hungarian actors and crew, so few Germans were actually involved in the production.

This is an example of Gothically inflected, psychological horror concerning the business of a girl starting to grow up, a serial killer, and possibly ghosts, slow-moving yet emotionally and metaphorically intense. Sigl is rather good at imbuing small gestures with a depth of complicated meanings, which traditionally tends to be the sort of thing I like. This being a serious German movie, certain weaknesses show whenever there’s a need for traditional suspense (which isn’t something we do in Germany), but the mood of childhood nightmare is so thick, I won’t blame Sigl for not understanding how to stage a chase scene effectively.

Black Cab (2024): On the plot level, Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab isn’t a terribly original mix of urban legends and contemporary horror tropes, but as a mood piece, it has considerable strengths.

There’s a dreamlike unreality to the various night drives under duress here that make the involvement  of the outright supernatural utterly plausible via the mood provided. Another strong element is a pleasantly deranged performance by Nick Frost as a very sinister taxi driver that greatly strengthens the impact of some well-chosen moments of the kind of dread women suffer from terrible men on a daily basis.

If this sort of thing works for you, you might be as willing to forgive the film the weaknesses of its plotting as much as I did.

Suzhou River (2000): Finishing today’s trilogy of vibes (see how hip I am, fellow kids?), Lou Ye’s play on (and with) elements of noir and Vertigo is all ambiguous doublings of characters, moments and movement, hand-held camera that signals subjectivity instead of authenticity, mermaids and the curious beauty of an industrially wasted river.

Lou’s play with the meta-level of his narrative mostly manages to avoid getting annoying (there’s typically little worse than a filmmaker getting precious about this sort of thing to me) by the amount of ambiguity it shows: this isn’t meta to show how many movies the director has seen, nor to make a precise point, but because it is a movie about ghosts and phantoms, on the screen and off, and the ghost of old movies are ghosts as real as any other.