Three Films Make A Post: Some mistakes are better left in the dark

Vampire Vs Vampire aka One Eyebrowed Priest aka 一眉道人 (1989): On one hand, it’s nice that Lam Ching-Ying’s long stint playing the same Taoist exorcist character with different names – if he gets one at all – finally bought him the possibility to direct his own adventures for once.

On the other hand, Lam is just another example of an actor whose work in front of the camera didn’t teach him what he needed behind it, and the resulting film is one of the weakest in the expanded Mr Vampire cycle, an endless, tedious, series of jokes that mostly don’t land and slapstick action sequences that lack the joyful and goofy imagination of the better films of this sub-genre. Lam seems to lack the ability to create the kind of flow the film desperately needs – which is particularly difficult to ignore when he was in so many other films of the same style whose flow was perfect.

From Black (2023): I loved the brilliant A Dark Song, concerning a long and desperate magical ritual and its psychological weight on the woman committed to it. Thomas Marchese’s From Black is very much a variation on the older film, only one that seems less grounded in an indie sensibility and extrapolated research about actual, real-life ritual magic and a lot more in what the movies teach us about magic.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad film – as the more mainstream variation on a theme it wants to be, it is actually rather successful, containing as it does a handful of genuinely creepy scenes, an excellent central performance by Anna Camp, and the proper downward movement of many a good horror film. Basically, this exchanges some depth for downbeat fun, and is very successful at what it does.

Southern Journey (Revisited) (2020): This documentary by the wonderful duo of Rob Curry and Tim Plester follows in the footsteps of the Southern journey of Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins in 1959 and 1960, revisiting some of the same places, not so much checking in with any sense of nostalgia, but in an attempt to find change a swell as traces of the past, attempting to understand specific parts of the Southern US experience through the virtues of openness and genuine interest and the way other people live. In this way, it actually feels like an actualisation of what Lomax’s approach never quite managed to achieve: letting subjects speak for and about themselves without bringing too much of the documentarians’ own interpretation in. That there’s quite a bit of great music and a wealth of interesting people involved rather comes with the territory.

Three Documentaries Make A Post: For these are the lands of my forefathers. And these are the dances of my ancestors.

Way of the Morris (2011): Despite the tagline – which is for once used in the film – this documentary directed Rob Curry and Tim Plester is not made for that clientele, but rather a very personal exploration of Morris Dance that is interested in the dance as a rural, social, working class phenomenon that’s clearly also deeply personal for one of the filmmakers. There is some diving into the history of Morris dancing, but it, too is focused on the local and the personal connection between today’s Adderbury Morris dancers, the hard cut World War I meant for many folk traditions, as well as unexpected connections to the folk revival.

It’s often a genuinely beautiful film that’s all about community as a web of personal connections.

The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later aka Les glaneurs et la glaneuse… deux ans après (2002): Keeping with documentary filmmaking deeply informed by personal connections between people – and a great, unpathetic sense for human kindness – Agnès Varda returns to some of the subjects of her utterly brilliant The Gleaners and I. If you’re of the complaining type, you’ll probably mutter that she doesn’t add anything truly new with her return to the subjects of the first film. However, there’s such an emotionally true sense of life passing and people changing in Varda’s re-encounters with these people, it’s not really a criticism I see applying. Rather, I see Varda insisting that these people, mostly poor, disenfranchised or a little too weird for polite society are worth engaging with seriously, worth being looked at not with the the eye of the social worker (nothing against social workers) but with one that truly faces them eye to eye.

Tales of the Uncanny (2020): Coming out of the same bubble of Severin films also responsible for the incredible, deeply exciting, folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) – a film desperately in need of a German distributor – this isn’t directed by Kier-La Janisse (who does appear as a talking head) but by David Gregory. It’s about the long and pretty exciting history of the horror anthology movie, with a particular emphasis on Amicus. As a Corona lockdown project, this doesn’t go quite as deep as I would have wished – while there are dozens of talking heads, there’s a bit too much vague gushing about the general awesomeness of any given movie for my tastes. Also disappointing is the complete lack of any mention of the long series of Filipino, Hong Kong and Thai series of anthology movies like the “Shake, Rattle and Roll”  or “Troublesome Night” series.

On the plus side, there’s also a lot of very insightful commentary (Ernest R. Dickerson talking about Bava alone would be worth the price of admission). The use of archive footage and film clips is also very well realized, often juxtaposing talking head and footage in incisive and clever ways while also finding a genuinely exciting approach to presenting the films talked about.