Three Films Make A Post: A Scream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

Screamboat (2025): In the realm of the PublicDomainsploitation slasher, something like Steven LaMorte’s murderous Mickey Mouse effort is basically a masterpiece. That’s not saying terribly much given a sub-genre that usually makes 90 SOV slashers look brilliant in comparison. So outside of its particular little pond, it’s a basically competent by the numbers slasher with pop culture jokes. Which is to say, it’s a little dull.

Unlike with many a film of its kind, those pop culture jokes are actually standing in dialogue with the thing it has been inspired by – the next step would be to make this dialogue actually interesting, or more of the jokes funny. But I’m optimistic that some day, one of these movies will actually do more than drop jokes and have children’s characters do the slasher thing. This one’s half way there, after all.

Rape of the Sword (1967): Even in 1967, Griffin Yueh Feng’s vengeance-based wuxia must have felt a bit old-fashioned. The film featuring two female heroines in form of Li Ching and Li Lihua as its lead right at the end of this cycle of the domination of female-led wuxia (despite what some writers say, swordswomen leading never went completely away before the next big revival) is the kind of old-fashioned I like, obviously. Yueh’s filmmaking as well as the choreography are a bit dusty as well, though never in a way that lacks in charm when seen from half a century away, while the narrative is very standard and trope-heavy. Again, not unpleasantly so, if one enjoys the genre – I certainly do again, these days.

Burning Dog (1991): This early V-cinema movie directed by Yoichi Sai doesn’t go as heavy on the sleaze and the insanity as one might expect when one has mostly seen more extreme examples of the form. Instead, this is basically a 70s heist movie, starring Seiji Matano trying to look like a badly aged Yusaku Matsuda, and other middle-aged guys of some experience.

The pacing is slow and careful, the action, once it comes, feels rather too methodically staged, but there’s also an unhurried calmness to Sai’s approach to the crime movie which makes it worth watching. Again, as with Rape of the Sword, there’s a lot of joy to be found in somewhat middling genre entries for me.

Three Films Make A Post: Blood is Coming

Revenge Ride (2020): With a female director in Melanie Aitkenhead and omni-present genre movie actresses like Pollyanna McIntosh involved, I suspected this “female biker gang on a rape revenge ride” movie to be a bit more interesting than your usual entry into this genre. It has a couple of moments you probably wouldn’t see in a male-centric film of the type, and it’s certainly not going for exploitative rape scenes (thankfully), but otherwise, most of the film is just terribly tepid.

In fact, this doesn’t play at all out like the subversive version of the rape revenge movie you’d hope for, nor as a clear-cut exploitation movie, but feels like a melodramatic TV movie with neither emotional nor intellectual depth enough to be able to allow itself to be this bland as a piece of exploitation filmmaking.

Crime Hunter – Bullet of Range (1989) aka クライムハンター 怒りの銃弾: This V-cinema action film directed by Toshimichi Ohkawa is apparently the first film in a long-running series. In typical V-cinema style, this is barely an hour long and still manages to pack an actual plot, copious action scenes and a handful of mildly crazy ideas in.

The film follows the attempts of a cop (Masanori Sera) in Little Tokyo, USA to avenge the (too early) death of his partner (Riki Takeuchi!) while hopped up on very strong painkillers. Also involved are a gun-toting Catholic nun (Minako Tanaka) who does undercover stripper work (no actual nudity involved though), as well as a criminal with pretty awesome hair (Seiji Matano). There’s much shooting, manly wearing of sunglasses and a finale with a really high body count, all shot with rather impressive efficiency. If that sounds like low praise for Ohkawa, I don’t mean it that way: there’s an art to pack an actual film, even one with a simple plot like this one has, into a runtime this short and still make it feel like a movie instead of a series of random scenes, and Ohkawa does this perfectly.


Daguerréotypes (1976): This is a relatively early long-form documentary by the great Agnès Varda, portraying the predominantly elderly small shop keepers on the street she lived on for decades. At first, the film does seem to border on the cute a bit too much, until you realize that Varda has looked at these seemingly very bourgeois people and found people marginalized in their place and time, country people and immigrants having come to the city decades ago, now suggesting a part of Parisian life – and a way of life - that’s coming to an end. And because this is Varda, she treats her subjects with kindness and compassion, not setting out to make fun of them, or reveal their hidden depths in a dramatic fashion, but looking at them and consciously seeing them as something different than the quaint background to other people’s lives.