Three Films Make A Post: It's Light… It's Bright… It's 100 Proof!

Ghost Train (2025): YouTuber Da-kyeong (Joo Hyun-young) revives her ailing horror channel with stories about Korea’s most haunted subway station as told to her by one of the men working there. At first, these stories seem like disconnected tales, but eventually, they entwine with Da-kyeong’s own life in ways she probably didn’t hope for.

For an anthology movie, the single tales in director Tak Seo-woong’s film can feel a little slight at first, particularly since they do tend to go for the standard tropes and shocks of Korean horror, with more than a smidgen of the Japanese 2chan style. However, each episode here does feature at least one strong, creepy image, and the way everything eventually comes together is pretty satisfying as well, so things are far from being as bland as the film’s beginning – or its title - would suggest.

Hue and Cry (1947): Directed by Charles Crichton, this film about a bunch of older boys in post-War London spoiling the plans of a master criminal did put British Ealing studios on the road to the sort of comedy we now know as the Ealing style of comedy, following the more traditionally comedian-centred efforts they made before. There’s a sharp eye for darkness and human foibles here, yet also a subversive sense of the little guy (in this case young men and boys somehow manoeuvring the direct post-war world), mostly ignored by the powers that be, sticking up for themselves as a community.

In this case, the kids are up against robbers who use not-Sexton Blake Brit pulps for children to message one another, as well as various forms of grown-up cowardice and hypocrisy. More importantly, the film is paced like race car, still genuinely funny in many regards, and makes great use of the rubble of the post-war years.

Whisky Galore! (1949): Speaking of Ealing comedies, in this one, directed by by Alexander Mackendrick, a Scottish island population, dried out of the Water of Life, attempts to steal many cases of whisky from a stranded government ship transporting it. Along the way, the film pulls at stiff upper lips, puritanical religion, and even solves two different romances with a sense of humour that goes from silly to subversive to the outright bizarre. There’s a bit concerning the power of a good bagpipes blow-out you really have to see to believe.

Only, there are very few Scotspeople involved here, so expect many a risible fake accent – I’m convinced Joan Greenwood doesn’t know the difference between Scotland and Wales, though her Welsh accent is really dreamy – and ideas about Scottish national identity that might not stand the sniff test. On the other hand, this is still a movie about a Scottish island getting one over the Brits in the name of alcoholism, so…

Three Films Make A Post: Let Don Lee’s Fist Come Unto Thee

Holy Night: Demon Hunters (2025): This horror action film about a trio of exorcists for hire – the shamanistic medium with demon powers (Seohyun), the shlub (Lee Da-Wit), and the dude who will punch the demon right out of you (Ma Dong-seok aka Don Lee) – take on a particularly difficult case during which all of the exorcism movie clichés will appear, barely comprehensible lore will be spouted, and Ma Dong-seok will punch everything – demons, minions, a portal to hell, the furniture. As directed by first-timer Lim Dae-hee, this is fast, low-brow fun that pretty much knows the kind of pulp joys it wants to deliver and goes about this business with enough verve to distract from how little substance this actually has.

Plus, you can learn about the six stages of exorcism.

Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards! aka Kutabare akutô-domo: Tantei jimusho 23 (1963): It’s pretty impossible to live up to this title, and Seijun Suzuki clearly doesn’t want to. Though while this has a couple of very fun action sequences, it mostly demonstrates everything the Nikkatsu higher ups didn’t like about Suzuki: his unwillingness to just tell a simple, straightforward story, his bizarre sense of humour, his intense distractibility. All of this does get in the way of building even the least amount of tension, but leaves Suzuki and his audience much space to enjoy all kinds of colourful – also literally, because give Suzuki a colour film and he’ll colour the crap out of it and your eyes – bits and pieces of comedy, strange sexual hang-ups, and Jo Shishido saying “yes” to everything Suzuki throws at him.

This never reaches the genuine unity of bizarre artistry of something like Tokyo Drifter or Branded to Kill but is still pretty damn fun, unless you go in expecting a straightforward crime film. But why would you?

The Shaolin Plot aka 四大門派 (1977): This Golden Harvest production directed by Wong Fung marks a rather important point in the career of Sammo Hung – here, he has clearly reached early mastership in the art of martial arts choreography, has a fun, prominent villain part (featuring some fascinating hairstyle decisions), and has assembled much of the team that’ll accompany him in the following years, when he’d go on to make his own films.

Stylistically, this very much wants to be a Shaw Brothers shaolin movie, just with very different ideas about choreography – much more physically brutal and directly acrobatic – and a script – also by Wong Fung – that lacks the easy competence of the sort of thing Ni Kuang would have written. While the martial arts are utterly fantastic, there is, particularly in the middle part, an unfocused and dragging quality to everything else, with scenes that never seem to want to end for no good reason, and surprisingly little personality – even short-hand one – to most of the characters.

This is what keeps the film from being a real classic of its style in my eyes, though the fights alone make it pretty unmissable for anyone interested in the transitionary phases of Hongkong cinema between the reigns of Shaw and Golden Harvest.

Three Films Make A Post: Fear The Darkness

The Black Water Vampire (2014): This piece of POV horror directed and written by Evan Tramel is a bit of a strange one. At times, it is a clever bit of myth-building, and culminates in a surprisingly exciting climax with actual special effects. At other times, it mindlessly reproduces beats from The Blair Witch Project regardless if they actually fit into its plot and concept or not.

It’s a genuinely confusing mix of the inept, the effectively creepy and the clever, and one’s liking for it will most probably be based on how little that first bit turns one off.

Nightmare (2000): This South-Korean movie directed by Ahn Byeong-ki (who would soon go on to the much superior Phone) attempts to ride two of the horror waves of its time at once. There’s certainly a world where you could mix the Asian ghost movie revival following Hideo Nakata’s Ringu with the American teen slasher revival, and have a successful little movie.

Unfortunately, this drab concoction isn’t from that world and has little to offer beyond its dark, moody photography and an ensemble whose prettiness gives any US teen slasher cast a run for its money. The pacing is too slow and the supernatural elements and the I Saw What You Did Last Summer business don’t really do much for each other. Worse, the film’s narrative structure with flashbacks inside of flashbacks is way too much for the very basic plot to carry, and the only thing it does is hold back that our supposed protagonists are even more horrible people than they at first appear to be for an hour or so.

I was rooting for the ghost, and not just because she is played by Ha Ji-Won.

Coma (2022): In some scenes, Bertrand Bonello’s mix of essay film, science fiction and COVID induced coming of age fantasy is nearly brilliant, attempting to feel its way into the mind of an eighteen year old girl (Louise Labèque), suffering from a particularly bad case of teenage desperation at a world that’s clearly made to make us all desperate and what I’d describe as a parasocial infection. In others, it is that kind of nearly insufferable type of French art house movie which hides its intellectual simplicity by expressing its simple ideas in as complicated and obtuse a manner as possible.

And let’s not even start on the film’s start and finish, when Bonello explains exactly what his film is supposed to mean - which may lead the more cynical among us to the suggestion he may have tried to make a movie whose themes viewers can understand by watching it and thinking about it.

Three Films Make A Post: The monkey that likes killing our family …it's back.

The Monkey (2025): It has finally happened – Oz Perkins made a movie I don’t adore. In fact, I’d go as far as calling this bit of monkey business based on a Stephen King short genuinely bad. It’s the kind of horror comedy that believes a handful of gore gags and watching a bunch of characters the film itself can’t seem to find any interest in do little of note somehow does a movie make; that making this thin bit of nothing look slick (Perkins certainly doesn’t suddenly stop being a technically accomplished director) and professional somehow helps things along; that watching a film torture characters it clearly loathes for laughs is somehow funny.

Dark Nuns (2025): This takes place in the same nonsense version of exorcist South Korean Catholicism as The Priests. As such, I was hoping for a film with an equal amount of involuntary humour as that dubious bit of horror. Alas, Kwon Hyeok-jae’s spin-off doesn’t reach the heights of a movie whose dramatic climax is priests hunting for a possessed piglet; it is certainly as pompously self-serious as the original film, but never becomes quite weird enough with it to be interesting.

As a straightforward horror film, this suffers from the fact its – not completely uninteresting – attempt at mixing Shamanist and Catholic exorcism movie tropes only leads to double the amount of clichés, as much effort as poor Song Hye-kyo as a renegade exorcist nun puts into the whole thing.

International Gang of Kobe aka Kobe Kokusai Gang (1975): With Noboru Tanaka taking time out from his brilliant Roman Porn work for Nikkatsu to make a jitsuroku style yakuza film for Toei, and Ken Takakura and Bunta Sugawara in the leads, this should by all rights be a slam dunk. Despite appropriate amounts of sex and violence, it isn’t, alas. There’s a lack of focus and coherence, and while some scenes look and feel well enough, they never cohere into much of a whole. Even Takakura’s and Sugawara’s performances seem slightly distracted and off, as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide if they needed them to act or to take on their star personas, leaving them adrift somewhere in the limbo between these states.

Three Films Make A Post: Winning is all in the execution.

The Killer’s Game (2024): J.J. Perry’s undemanding action comedy mostly recommends itself through a series of increasingly strange set pieces – blandness certainly isn’t a problem here – and through featuring a bunch of actors I always have time for: Dave Bautista, Ben Kingsley, Sofie Boutella, Terry Crews, Alex Kingston, Scott Adkins (with an outrageously silly Scottish accent) and more – all seemingly having fun doing their part with comically broad stereotypes, general silliness, and bloody murder.

Bautista and Boutella are actually able to sell their romance well enough you can’t help rooting for them – that’s more than most action comedies manage, if they even try.

Project Silence (2024): Keeping with bread and butter fun, Kim Tae-gon’s film about super soldier military dogs on the rampage on a bridge mixes elements of the disaster movie with those of horror and action film, stirs in some sneering at the political caste and a bit of conspiracy business and makes an enjoyable enough movie out of it.

This isn’t one of those Korean movies that first fulfil all genre expectations to then go off into the more interesting directions they have in mind, but one that’s simply aiming to be a straightforward piece of genre cinema. It does this with enough of a sense of pace and style to never overstay its welcome.

The Sadness (2021): For thirty minutes or so, I actually found myself believing the (a couple of years ago) hype Rob Jabazz’s extreme version of the infected style zombie movie had going for it. For a time, Jabazz’s slick direction, the very human performances by leads Berant Zhu and Regina Lei, and the gratuitous (at times sexual, generally grotesque) violence really promise something rather special, but the film quickly loses steam, going off on tangents of ultra-broad satire, and the kind of edge-lord business meant to shock that these days only manages to annoy me. Still looks great, mind you, and you could probably make a great fifty minute long short from the film’s best material.

Three Films Make A Post: The World Has Come To An End The World Calls Upon The Hunter

Badland Hunters aka 황야 (2024): Hei Myeong-haeng’s post-apocalyptic action movie is good fun, with Ma Dong-seok (or Don Lee, if you prefer) and Ahn Jiy-hye making pretty great action heroes – the latter really throws herself into her action scenes while looking totally focussed – a hissable villain of the highest degree, and often very effective action choreography. It also has quite a few elements that remind me of the abandon of good, classical post-apocalyptic exploitation cinema, which isn’t as good for it as that may sound. This way, it becomes rather more obvious how much the film pulls its punches, how nice it feels at its core when it could use a bit of nastiness there to go with the theoretically nasty things it features.

Tora-san, His Tender Love aka Otoko wa tsurai yo: Fûten no Tora (1970): There’s a certain, well, a big, actually, be-there done that quality to much of the Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man film series as far as I know them, even this early in the cycle. However, this isn’t really to the detriment of the films when watched responsibly (Tora-san is only to be binged in the most dire of circumstances), but provides the films a comfortable shoe kind of quality. You know the characters, the kind of jokes the film’s going to make, Tora’s faults and foibles, and so on and so forth, but there’s something comforting and kind to the knowledge that fits its main character’s fits of – often badly applied – kindness beyond the fool’s bluster curiously well.

Last Night at Terrace Lanes (2024): Speaking of cinematic comfort food, sometimes you just want to be comforted by the tale of an estranged father and daughter bonding again through the fight against math-based cultists who are attacking the bowling alley they once bonded in, slaughtering all and sundry there.

Because this is 2024, there’s also a bit of Lesbian teen romance in here.

Jamie Nash’s film is never original or deep, but it does the classic low budget movie thing of telling a simple story taking place in a confined space effectively rather well. There’s really nothing at all wrong with that.

Three Films Make A Post: First There Were Ten…

And Then There Were None (1945): This mystery directed by René Clair is the first of a considerable number of adaptations of Agatha Christie’s best novel (and thankfully uses the US version of the book’s title, for while I’m all for not pretending the past was nicer or better than it was, I’d rather not have to type that one out) wherein ten people isolated on an island are murdered one by one in ways based on nursery rhyme that also mirror some hidden unpunished crimes they committed. Once the plot really gets going and the first characters have been killed, Clair’s direction turns increasingly moody and tense; things take on a feeling of Gothic dread mixed with a rather more modern paranoia.

It would be a perfect version of the material if not for the fact it replaces the grim ending of the novel with a ridiculous happy ending for at least a couple of characters. But then, many of the adaptations that follow will make the same – dubious – decision and this version of it does not ruin the film in any way; it just provokes raised eyebrows.

Righting Wrongs aka Above the Law aka 執法先鋒 (1986): A Hong Kong police Inspector (Cynthia Rothrock) on the trail of a prosecutor turned vigilante murderer (Yuen Biao) uncovers the much worse misdeeds of a colleague. A lot of pretty damn brutal violence ensues.

Despite some painfully obvious stunt double replacements – would it really have killed them to give the guy a Rothrock-style wig? – for some of the most dangerous stunts, the fights in this Corey Yuen Kwai joint are impeccable, highly creative and at times so brutal I felt myself wince on impact of bodies with hard surfaces. In the plot around the action, the film shows a total commitment to let terrible things happen to the kind of people who’d be absolutely taboo in US (or German, if we had action cinema, for that matter) films, providing proceedings a dangerous edge as well as a great basis for its melodramatic elements. Combined, it’s a bit of a classic.

Kill Boksoon aka 길복순 (2023): Boksoon (Jeon Do-yeon) is a hassled single mom as well as a legendary professional killer working for one of these absurd and fun organizations of killers movies about killers adore so much. Eventually, inter-organization political intrigue puts her on the kill list of her employers, which turns out to be a bit awkward for the bunch of killers and killer adjacent fools she’ll have to dispatch.

Byun Sung-Hyun’s action movie is very much on the stylized, comics (manhwa?) affine side of this sort of thing (and most probably influenced by the John Wick films), clearly having a lot of fun creating the underground world Boksoon is eventually going to smash while providing space for ample amounts of cool to brilliant action.

Three Films Make A Post: They're all alone in this together.

The Holdovers (2023): It’s not generally a great sign to someone of my tastes when basically every single review about a film describes it as “heart-warming”, but then not too many movies manage to be heart-warming without becoming kitsch, so this isn’t completely my failing. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers the kitsch by an insistence on all that’s crappy in life existing for its characters as well; its uplifting quality lies in saying “all this is true, but still…” and finding the positive in the small yet life-changing things. All the while, the humour runs a perfect line of sarcasm of the kind that’s quotable and will still be funny after you’ve quoted it a hundred times. The performances of the core trio of actors – Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa – are point perfect, and Payne directs like someone putting himself completely in the service of the story he is trying to tell (which is a difficult thing if you’re also going to tell it well).

Lot No. 249 (2023): For 2023’s Ghost Story for Christmas, Mark Gatiss went to the Arthur Conan Doyle well. This is probably one of the Gatiss era’s lesser offerings, but I say that rather regularly about these things and then find myself returning to them with great joy later on, so ask me again about its greatness or lesserness in a couple of years.

What’s definitely fine here is a surprising performance by Kit Harington, a cameo by not-Sherlock Holmes quite a few people not me apparently found annoying, and subtext about gayness, (self-)repression and the arrogance of Empire that has lost all of the sub.

The Childe aka Sad Tropics aka 귀공자 (2022): This South Korean action film by Park Hoon-jung concerns the misadventures of a young man looking for his father who learns that some fathers are better not found. A violent three-way-tugging match about with him as the rope ensues. The film features some fun, sometimes – the climax! - brilliant, action set pieces and a handful of performances so cartoonish, one will either find them very fun or very annoying, and very little else worth talking about. Enjoyable, the film certainly is, and I’m not against cartoons in any way, shape or form.

Three Films Make A Post: A Comedy of Elf-fish Proportions

Elf (2003): That it has taken me two decades to see this apparent Christmas classic by Jon Favreau about a guy (Will Ferrell) who has grown up as one of Santa’s elves and goes to New York to connect with his true, human father (James Caan) certainly has a lot to do with my general dislike of Ferrell. I still believe the film at hand could have been improved by casting somebody who is actually funny in the lead role, but it’s pretty great anyway. In part, that’s on account of an otherwise great cast – James Caan alone would make this one worth anyone’s time – but mainly the film thrives through the absolute commitment to the bit of David Berenbaum’s script. Or rather, to commit to the bit and then use it to do actual worldbuilding with it, which is further enhanced by the film’s clear love for the kitschiest parts of US Christmas lore. The film’s tone always appears carried by the kind of genuine good naturedness that doesn’t preclude snark but always puts it in the service of heart, and pretty much makes this one of the perfect Christmas movies.

Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman aka 천박사 퇴마 연구소: 설경의 비밀 (2022): Some of the special effects in Kim Seong-sik’s fantasy-tinged horror movie about a scammy shaman (Gang Dong-won) finishing the work of his actual shaman father when called in to exorcise a young girl look pretty much as if taken directly out of a JRPG (I’ve never encountered a KRPG, sorry). Otherwise, this is a fun, if not terribly deep, film with a couple of fun set pieces – there’s a glorious scene where our hero has to fight off a series of possessed people while fleeing through a village with our female lead (Esom). It’s a basic story told efficiently and effectively, and carries itself with a general satisfactory air of an unfussy, straightforward genre piece done well.

The Abandoned aka Cha wu ci xin (2022): This Taiwanese serial killer thriller by Ying-Ting Tseng is at its best whenever it focusses on calm, careful character work, observing its handful of depressed core characters (particularly Janine Chun-Ning Chang) when confronted with an especially nasty series of murders on female itinerant immigrant workers and these characters’ various degrees of guilt. Whenever the film drifts in the direction of more traditional thriller scenes it can’t help but feel derivative of the hundreds of movies and TV shows that have gone through the same sort of material.

Until it arrives at its final act, that’s not happening terribly often, but once the film reaches its climax, one can’t help but think one is watching a film that’s losing sight of its best qualities in favour of a mediocre riff on tropes we’ve seen a hundred times before done better.

Three Films Make A Post: Never have so few taken so much from so many.

The Great Train Robbery aka The First Great Train Robbery (1978): This Michael Crichton movie, also written by Crichton, and based on his own historical fiction bestseller, has a really fabulous climactic action scene in the titular robbery. To get there, the film slogs through what clearly is supposed to be a semi-comedic romp through mildly satirized Victorian period detail. Alas, the word that actually describes this is “dull”. Crichton, never a man to know which details to cut, shows no feel at all for pacing dialogue scenes – even a sure winner of an innuendo-laden scene between Sean Connery’s mastermind character and a married lady goes down like a lead balloon – or timing jokes, leaving the main cast of Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley-Anne Down to fend for themselves while they are crushed by all that – never telling – period detail. Even that trio can’t win against such odds.

Exist Within aka 사잇소리 (2022): This thriller by Kim Jung-wook about the noises a young woman hears from the apartment above her, and the nasty surprises that follow, is about as middle of the road as South Korean productions get. There’s not much of the subversion of tropes going on that most genre movies from the country eventually at least dabble in, the pacing is never quite as effective, and the tone never quite as surehanded as it could be.

However, making a thriller of this type entertaining can also be achieved by the simple virtue of technical expertise, and though that is not the way a classic is birthed, being a genuinely fun time is an achievement in itself.

The Old Way (2023): This revenge western directed by Brett Donowho manages something you don’t see every day – getting a performance from Nicolas Cage that makes the high energy thespian look unengaged. Much of Cage’s performance gives the impression of watching him doing a second run-through of the material rather than actually putting his full force into a scene. If you’ve seen Cage emoting loudly and sometimes quietly but distinctly, throwing himself into whatever a script has to offer for most of your movie watching life, this is a rather disquieting thing to watch, like a night sky turned hot pink for no reason.

There’s little else to distract here: the script is about as rote a revenge western as is possible, the performances are uneventful, and Donowho directs with the blandness of a shrug.

In short: Ballerina (2022)

Original title: 발레리나

Our protagonist Ok-joo (Jeon Jong-seo) has a background in the security business Ballerina never really explains but that provides her with all kind of badass abilities. Apart from her close friendship with ballerina/cake shop seller Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), she seems to be virtually friendless, a loner by inclination. One might suspect a traumatic past, what with this being an action movie made in the 21st Century, but the film is never showing us one.

Ok-joo does acquire some acute trauma in any case when she finds Min-hee dead of suicide. Min-hee left a note in which she asks Ok-joo to avenge her, complete with a mildly cryptic hint about what the hell she means with that. Soon, Ok-joo is on the trail of mass rapist, killer, and all-around shitheel Choi (Kim Ji-hoon), who raped and enslaved Min-hee, causing her suicide.

Under normal circumstances, killing Choi would be about an evening's work for Ok-joo, but it turns out he’s just part of a large drug, forced prostitution and murder racket, which makes things rather more difficult for her.

Lee Chung-hyun’s Ballerina is a nice little action movie, with some post-John Wick style gun fu, moments of absurd humour that seem to pop in from a different world than the rest of the film, and the attitude to genre tropes we know and love from South Korean genre cinema: tropes are excellent things, fun and really rather useful, but when the mood strikes, they are also optional.

There’s no large restructuring of the elements of the revenge flick here. Lee’s clearly trying to make an effective example of the form right in the mainstream of the cinematic language of our time for such a thing, just one that from time to time likes to turn things a couple degrees away from the completely straight and narrow, which keeps affairs more lively.

Colour schemes, camera work and editing scream POP! so much I’m pretty sure this is going to be a movie we’ll be able to read as a platonic ideal of how action filmmaking in the 2020s looked when we’re ten, fifteen years in the future. It’s certainly a fun example of its form and style, and though it doesn’t exactly have more substance than is strictly necessary for it to function, it still is a fine time.

A Record of Sweet Murder (2014)

Original title: Aru yasashiki satsujinsha no kiroku

Journalist Soyeon (Kim Kkobbi) is suddenly contacted by her old childhood friend Sangjoon (Yeon Je-wook). They haven’t seen each other for twenty years, ever since Sangjoon had been hospitalized in a mental institution, following some accident the film will get into eventually when they both were seven years old.

Sangjoon is out now, escaped, and has supposedly committed eighteen murders; still Soyeon agrees to meet him at a place of his choosing only accompanied by a Japanese cameraman (Koji Shiraishi playing a cameraman named Tashiro, as is his wont). Sangjoon is very insistent on the Japanese cameraman, for reasons he will explain later. When they meet up in an old, run-down apartment, Sangjoon quickly starts ranting and raving and tells an odd story: he hasn’t “only” committed eighteen murders but actually twenty-five, with two additional murders to come. He’s not killing for no reason, or so he explains. Ever since the childhood accident that killed one of his and Soyeon’s friends, God has spoken to Sangjoon, eventually convincing him that he has to murder twenty-seven people after his twenty-seventh birthday to bring their friend back from the dead. Sangjoon’s victims will apparently come back to life as well, or so God says. In his mind, Sangjoon connects all of this to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which actually will make some kind of sense later on, in a wonderfully perverse way.

Soyeon doesn’t believe Sangjoon’s story at first, of course, but further developments suggest at the very least that either something very weird is going, or the laws of causality are so broken, unpredictable things will as a matter of course happen exactly like Sangjoon predicted.

When other directors sleep, Japanese master of the highly individual and weird POV horror movie Koji Shiraishi shoots another movie, TV show, or direct to whatever thing. This is a fine example of the man’s style, not as brilliant or complicated as Noroi or Occult but still following many of the director’s thematic obsessions. These films, together with the Senritsu Kaiki series, do seem to take place in the same universe, not just because Shiraishi tends to pop up as the actual DP as well as the guy playing the camera operator in many of them, but because their cosmological and thematic elements seem so closely related. Even the design of the godhood(s) having their fun with Sangjoon belongs into the same conceptual world as those in much of Shiraishi’s other works, and A Record’s climax (which I don’t want to spoil) is very much in keeping with the later episodes of Senritsu Kaiki. Just that here, developments feel rather more serious and focussed, where the series tends to the consciously silly and eccentric.

In fact, A Record of Sweet Murder is a rather tight movie, setting up a situation, dropping a handful of characters into one room, and then letting madness, tension, and camera waving escalate. I’m pretty sure if he wanted, Shiraishi could be a successful director of mainstream thrillers and horror movies, he just chooses to be eccentric and individual; at least he’s as tight and controlled here as anyone could wish from this kind of movie. For Shiraishi, this is one of the bloodier and more exploitative movies of his career, which only irregularly dips into the nasty stuff. But even here, the ending’s not going to satisfy the more gore-minded viewer because the film takes one of those wild swings its director/writer/etc likes so much and ends on a completely different note than you’d probably expect.

A note I might have found rather annoying myself if the film hadn’t actually subtly prepared it very well throughout, and if it weren’t executed as well as it is.

Three Films Make A Post: He's a Modern Day Devil Hunter He's a Master of the Martial Arts He's… MR VAMPIRE!

Magic Cop aka 驅魔警察 (1990): In what is sometimes sold as a direct continuation of the Mr Vampire series, Lam Ching-Ying plays a policeman who does rather more Taoist movie monk work than policework. Here, he’s on the trail of a Japanese sorceress who uses the walking dead as drug mules, for reasons the film never gets into. The film isn’t quite as slapstick heavy as some of the Mr Vampire movies, but has a lot of fun milking the differences between Lam’s character and Wilson Lam Jun-Yin’s big city cop.

The black magic in this one is also seriously creative, with things I haven’t seen quite like it in other Hong Kong films featuring black magic; the climax does of course become, as is tradition, properly mind-blowing. Director Stephen Tung Wai – who did much more work as an actor – may not be one of the great horror comedy directors from Hong Kong, but he certainly knows how to make the most out of what martial artists and effects people offer him.

Time aka 殺出個黃昏 (2021): Staying in Hong Kong, though a couple of decades later, Ricky Ko’s film concerns the travails of three former triad badasses played by Patrick Tse Yin, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo and the great Lam Suet, who are now elderly, lonely and depressed, with nobody, a family that doesn’t love them and a prostitute being their only connections to life, respectively. Their ties as friends, and a very small-scale plot concerning a troubled girl who adopts Tse’s character as her grandfather do return hope and a bit of light into their life. In between, there’s seriously played semi-naturalistic drama, a bit of funny martial arts, and some ironic but always empathetic variations on classic gangster movie tropes.

It’s a lovely little film, clearly harbouring a lot of love for the actors, the archetypes they represent here and people who haven’t really had any luck in life.

The Ghost Station (2021): But let’s not end on a positive note today: on paper, this tale of a young, bottom feeding online reporter (Kim Bo-ra) stumbling upon a cursed subway station and accidentally unleashing a curse on rather a lot of people who’d never had encountered it without her, sounds like a nice enough bit of South Korean horror. Alas, director Jeong Yong-ki never manages to turn the film into anything but a series of disconnected scenes I’ve seen realized much more effectively in other movies, never building up the creepy and spooky mood that’s needed for his movie to work. He doesn’t even manage to turn the subway station into a proper liminal place, which is quite an achievement given that they are liminal by nature.

Actually making good use of the social commentary about a certain style of online media and responsibility inherent in the plot is of course just as beyond the film.

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Gate aka 게이트 (2017): Shin Jai-ho’s comedic heist movie suffers from the general lowbrow-ness of its humour, a certain tackiness in the presentation of its melodramatic moments, and never gets to the point you find in so many South Korean genre movies when they just straight out break iron-clad genre rules to go and do their own thing.

It’s still watchable enough: Shin certainly is a slick director, and the cast do their best to fill out their thin characters enough to at least make them halfway fun to watch.

Freeze (2022): Clearly, Charlie Steeds never stops making movies for a second. This time around Steeds and his usual ensemble go for a tale of Arctic horror with clear traditional Lovecraftian signifiers like murderous, weird fish people, and books that should not be read. Between the wonderful hand-made gore, this one puts particular emphasis on Steeds’s brand of home-made surrealism, turning parts of the proceedings so dream-like, the film’s weaknesses – some of the sets really only suggest what they are supposed to be instead of portraying it, and the acting is often decidedly un-naturalistic – only emphasize the peculiar mood of the whole affair. Half gory low budget fish people action and half surrealistic cheap nightmare is a pretty irresistible combination, if you ask me.

One Ranger (2023): Jesse V. Johnson is certainly one of the better directors working in low budget action today, so there’s always at the very least a solid standard to the basic filmmaking in his movies, as well as action sequences that tend to look much costlier than they are.

This time around, Johnson seems to have been able to work on a slightly better budget than usual, but the resulting film isn’t one of his best. I appreciate the film’s peculiar sense of humour, its attempts at giving its villain an actual character arc, and I’m certainly happy to see a “The Expanse” reunion with Thomas Jane (pretending very hard to be Texan) and Dominique Tipper in the leads, as well as short appearances by John Malkovich and Patrick Bergin.

However, the structure of the film as a whole just seems off, rather as if this wasn’t shot following a proper script but a first draft of one – and while people who have no clue will tell you action movie scripts only need action scenes, flow is incredibly important for the genre. And flow is what One Ranger lacks.

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Kung Fu Elliot (2014): Depending on one’s position this film about Newfoundland’s very own self-made action hero and delusional dreamer turned manipulative asshole is either a pretty dull mockumentary (for once, I like the this term for a movie), or a documentary made by filmmakers who are either manipulative sociopaths themselves or completely incompetent. The filmmakers seem to insist on this being an actual documentary, which makes them look terrible: either, they begin a documentary with no research whatsoever on a subject, or they know things they only disclose to some of their subjects later own for maximum cinematic impact while egging on a guy who certainly is a manipulative liar but also psychologically not well at all, only to turn on him with the most hypocritical moral outrage imaginable.

If I had made this, I’d insist on it just being a very dull fake variant on American Movie, but if people insist on looking bad, who am I to disagree?

The Housemaid aka Hanyo (1960): I’m rather less happy I didn’t find much to connect with in Kim Ki-young’s classic of South Korean cinema. This is, after all a highly influential film on many of my favourite filmmakers from the country. Sometimes, I can appreciate the subversiveness of the film, and nod sagely at its social criticism, but for much of the running time, I found myself appalled at the melodramatic gyrations of plot and characters, none of which ever rang true to me even in the heightened realm of the emotional eleven this takes place in.

On an abstract level, Kim’s filmmaking is clearly stylistically very interesting indeed, but at this point in my movie watching career not in a way that works for me.

Cocaine Bear (2023): Then there’s this thing, a movie about a cocaine snorting serial killing bear that somehow manages to contain more continuity problems and gaffes than any film not shot in a backyard has any right to have. Also there and accounted for are gratingly unfunny humour, acting that’s all over the place and a script that’s trite, in love with an intelligence that’s never actually on display, and full of amateurish pacing problems.

From time to time, director Elizabeth Banks stumbles upon a cool gore gag or two, or manages to get a decent character note out of a cast – Keri Russell, Ray Liotta in his final role, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and so on – that could and should do so much more. Of course, as weirdly as this thing is edited, I’m not convinced coherent and great performances haven’t been left on the cutting room floor.

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Emily the Criminal (2022): This fine crime movie about what living in a capitalist hell hole can do to a person’s moral self (which makes it something of a neo noir, now that I think about it) by John Patton Ford (who also scripts the film) was a bit ignored when it came out last year, unfairly so, I must say. It’s not an outwardly spectacular film, but one that follows the downwards drift of its protagonist (Aubrey Plaza in a fantastic performance) with an observant and careful eye, finding tension as naturally in the set of Plaza’s shoulder as in the slowly evolving plot, and doing so brilliantly.

Project Wolf Hunting aka 늑대사냥 | neuk-dae-sa-nyang (2022): Kim Hong-seon’s South Korean action horror movie on the other hand only ever wants to do things that are outwardly spectacular. Mostly, this combination of “Die Hard without a proper protagonist on a prison transport ship”, a zombie super soldier, various conspiracist plot twists and so on, manages to do this quite entertainingly. I’m convinced the production sucked up all the movie blood in Korea, bloody and gloopy as things get. Kim shows himself as quite adept at finding new ways to deliver carnage for the full two hour runtime, so he deserves all the blood he can buy.

Apart from the typical outrageous and pretty nonsensical plot twists you’d expect (which are fortunately delivered with verve and proper earnestness), there are also a couple of very South Korean moments when the film shifts and twists a little against genre rules, killing off the “wrong” characters at the “wrong” times to keep the audience on their toes.

Winterskin (2018): How much one will appreciate this predominantly cabin-bound movie by Charlie Steeds, working with his usual coterie of actors, may very much depend on one’s tolerance for fake American accents, done badly. For this tale of a young man looking for his father in the wilderness and getting stranded in a cabin with an old woman of dubious mental health is a cornucopia of dubious American accents whose horribleness it is difficult to ignore. If a viewer can make their peace with them – I did, though perhaps with some cursing and gnashing of teeth particularly during more dramatic sequences involved – they may very well appreciate how much good Steeds does in other regards: how tight and interesting his framing of the central log cabin sequences; how much a film taking place in a fake American snow wilderness uses ideas of the macabre that belong very much in the US tradition of someone like Bierce; how cleverly the film escalates its threats and gore to the over the top yet still on budget climax.

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Urban Ghost Story (1998): I’ve seen Geneviève Jolliffe’s British low budget piece of kitchen sink horror taking place in Scottish housing estate mentioned as a hidden gem from time to time, particular in the last couple of years. I don’t see it, though. That’s mostly because the film’s attempt to pair the typical poverty tourism of British kitchen sink drama (if you want believable portrayals of poor people in their actual emotional complexity, look in a different genre) with a very low key poltergeist style haunting is always rubbing against how melodramatic the film’s plot actually is, leading to a piece that doesn’t have the tone it seems to believe it has. There are also a lot of the more embarrassing hallmarks of cheesy 90s direction on offer: particularly Jolliffe’s love for “emotional slow motion” often borders on self-parody, as does the perfectly stupid happy end following an absurdly melodramatic climax.

Hell’s Trap aka Trampa Infernal (1989): Pedro Galindo III’s Mexican slasher Hell’s Trap, that imagines a Rambo-style vet (with a surprisingly effective mask) as a slasher, while also trying to cash in on the paintball fad, does not have any such crises of identity. This is a piece of prime Mexican late 80s cheese, and it knows it. Characters are dumb and pretty – also pretty unlikable – the kills are sometimes surprisingly effective, and the series of bad jokes, broad characterisation and murder moves sprightly enough. Plus, how many other slashers do you know whose killers use a claw glove “inspired” by Freddy Krueger as well as an assault rifle?

The Whispering aka 속닥속닥 Sodak Sodak (2018): On the cusp of college, a group of teens stumble upon a cursed amusement park. Murderous ghosts hunt them down one by one.

The resulting film really is as generic as that makes it sound. If you’ve seen any other movie that sounds a little like this one, you’ve basically seen this one as well, sometimes done better, sometimes somewhat worse, I expect. From time to time, the film manages to achieve a comparatively effective set piece, but those moments are neither frequent nor creepy enough to make this memorable.

It’s not a terrible film – there are perfectly okay basic filmmaking chops on display, and the actors do what they can with the little they are given – but it’s so aggressively mediocre I rather wish it were.

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021): I already wasn’t terribly happy with the first Venom movie, what with its combo of a crap script and uninventive action, but compared to this second attempt at a movie, that thing was a masterpiece. Instead of even a bad script, this is based on what really just a series of badly connected memes that’ll probably go well on Instagram but certainly do not a movie make, terrible acting by a bunch of people who can do so much better, some of the worst effects you will see in this budget bracket, and direction by Andy Serkis that suggests he’s not even acquainted with the concept of tone, much less able to provide this nonsensical mess with one.

Perhaps the writer of the next Venom movie might take a look at some of the better comics runs of the characters and just crib from there?

The Hypnosis aka 최면 (2021): In comparison, this deeply mediocre horror movie by Choi Jae-hoon with its much too obvious twists, its indifferent character writing and its never more than okay staging at least feels like it is at trying for coherence in tone, style and narrative. Sure, it mostly only manages to land there in the blandest manner imaginable, and ends up being the kind of film you’ll watch and forget in a manner of minutes, but at least it isn’t going out of its way to become a bad time.

The House on Straw Hill aka Trauma aka Exposé (1976): By all rights, this pretty sleazy British thriller with Linda Hayden and Udo Kier (and barely anyone else) as directed and written by James Kenelm Clarke should be a much better time, if in a pretty unpleasant way. There are certainly all the elements here that make comparable exploitation movies (mostly from Italy) a good bad time, but things never come together as they should: the sleazy bits feel more awkward than anything else, the thriller narrative is much too predictable (not helped by a narrative style that shows always too much or too little), and the film’s attempts at being artsy (always useful for exploitation, obviously) manage to at the same time weaken the sleaze and feel like a put-on.

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Psychomania aka The Death Wheelers (1973): For the longest time, I didn’t get along with this particular bit of British bikersploitation/folk horror by Don Sharp at all. It’s not a complete surprise, for the film does have some undeniable drawbacks: the pacing is – rather atypical for Sharp – leaden, until it suddenly isn’t because it’s time for a stunt sequence; the bikers seem awfully well-groomed and polite even when they are undead and working for Satan; and the script never seems to agree with itself on the proper tone for the affair. On the other hand, and that’s what rather worked for me this time around: the stunt sequences are really great in mixing Sharp’s excellent instincts for action with a very British looking mundanity, and the folk horror tale has moments of proper weirdness that very consciously resemble folk tales about deals with the devil, until everything culminates in a set piece that absolutely should be part of a modern (as of ‘73) version of an actual folk tale.

Antlers (2021): I’m honestly more than a bit confused about what to make of this film by Scott Cooper. It’s at once an attempt to use a version of the wendigo myth to talk about circles of abuse and poverty, and a monster movie (with an awesome looking creature) so traditional, it could have been on the SyFy Channel before they go lost in the bad jokes. Which might have worked out fine indeed, if the script had ever found a way to actually connect its disparate impulses to build a proper whole.

Instead, the narrative drags the characters back and forth between two very different kinds of movie, without ever even seeming to make an attempt to convince its audience why they belong together.

The Negotiation aka 협상 | hyeob-sang (2018): That sort of thing could never happen to this ultra-slick South Korean thriller by Lee Jong-seok about a very intense hostage negotiation that turns into a series of twists and revelations. It’s all very professionally done, acted well (particularly Son Ye-jin as our hostage negotiating heroine does a wonderful star turn), and really rather exciting.

It is also somewhat predictable for anyone who knows this style of movie – it’s just made so well I didn’t actually find myself caring it is in a terribly negative way – and mostly surprises by not going for the sort of deep formal or thematic turn many highly commercial films from Korea love to take despite this sort of thing supposedly not how highly commercial films are done.

In short: Guimoon: The Lightless Door (2021)

Original title: 귀문 gwi-mun

In 1990, a janitor at a country community centre goes on a killing spree with a shovel, murdering quite a few visitors and colleagues. Afterwards, the building is haunted by strange acts of violence, and is quickly condemned, Yet even then, it seems to draw people to their doom, keeping their spirits trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead. Particularly the last night of the Lunar Year is a dangerous time, for then, the moon of the afterlife rises above the building, opening the titular lightless door that seems to transcend space and time.

More than half a decade after the killings, an experienced shaman attempts to cleanse the building and free the trapped spirits, but is overwhelmed and killed herself instead. Some years later, in 2002, her son Do-jin (Kim Kang-woo), armed with years of research, the basic abilities that come with his lineage, and a spirit-exorcising dagger, enters the building on the last night of the Lunar Year to finish what his mother started.

He encounters, ghosts, ghoulies, as well as spatial and temporal shifts that let him cross ways with a group of film students exploring the place in 1995. He’ll also learn what actually causes the rather spectacular hauntings.

I had a lot of fun with Shim Duck-geun’s Guimoon. At its core, it’s yet another film that nearly exclusively consists of groups of people trampling through creepy modern ruins encountering supernatural stuff, and proceeds to present a series of not terribly original creep-outs set pieces in the manner of your basic haunted house ride. However, while there’s a certain lack of originality in the scares, and very little characterisation and character development on display beyond character set-ups necessary for the plot, the film isn’t lacking in variety. Shim seems to be very adept at all basic horror techniques, pacing moments of suspense and jump scares with quite a bit more mood building than movies about people walking through haunted ruins usually get up to.

The film also does quite a bit of effective work with the timey-whimey stuff. It uses the temporal shifts and crossings of times and space not just to fill in backstory in a visually more exciting manner than having Do-jin go through files would provide, but clearly also aims to engender a feeling of confusion in its viewers, very effectively turning your basic industrial ruin into a stranger and more interesting place than it would otherwise be.

All of which suggests filmmakers that have watched about as many of these kinds of horror movies as I have, have managed to identify their major problems, and decided not to copy others’ mistakes. Consequently, Guimoon turns into a fun, spooky time.