Three Films Make A Post: Prey. Slay. Display.

The Girl on the Train (2016): Tate Taylor’s thriller cleverly plays with the – often somewhat problematic – expectations his audience will have concerning female characters in thrillers, not only subverting these expectations and clichés but also making it a functionally important part of the plot.

Apart from this, the film is also recommended for the general flow of Erin Cressida Wilson’s script – that finds time and place to put a human face on characters who usually don’t get that honour, well, apart from the main villain, that is, but there’s just no way to do that for him without destroying the plot – as well as its brilliant leads in Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson and for Taylor’s elegant direction.

Belladonna of Sadness (1973): Eiichi Yamamoto’s non-generic anime (if you take anime to mean all types of Japanese animations) is not just a trippy and heady mix of exploitation, enlightenment and pure weirdness but also a perfect way to recognize the po-faced traditional critic who just can’t recognize art when it’s not presented to him (and it’s invariably a him) in three hour slabs of equally po-faced movie directed by a director permanently in tears about the state of the world or by Fellini, and who always feel the need to reassure themselves they are following a deeply dignified path, where no jokes are allowed, and everything is horrible, and grey. Particularly grey. Why, yes, I looked at some of the reviews this type of reviewer gave this one with the new restoration, how do you know?

In other words, this is a film awesome, and beautiful, and bizarre, inappropriate, and bonkers, stupid, and clever, and exploitative, and sad all in equal measures, taking its art style seemingly from a pop art/LSD-inspired idea of Beardsley and running with that while supposedly adapting Michelet. One really rather watches this one than writes about it.

Ludo (2015): This Bengali horror movie directed by two guys going by the definitely not search engine optimized monikers of Q and Nikon is a curious mixture of the crude, the creepy, the highly generic and the original, as probably behoves a movie concerning the adventures four teens encounter with a cursed ludo variant in a closed for the night shopping mall. Visually, there’s quite a bit to like here, while the storytelling is more than just slightly awkward yet does get into my good books by combining the deeply generic and the locally specific to arrive at its horrors.

Tonally, there seems to be a heavy influence of 70s grindhouse cinema in play, mixed with some kicking against Indian cinematic taboos, and interesting monsters. This doesn’t add up to a particularly tense movie, but it is one that clearly goes its own way for its own reasons after a point, something I can’t help but respect.

Three Films Make A Post: Watch. Learn. Don't have nightmares.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014): If you’re like me, and going into Mark Hartley’s documentary expecting to learn anything more about Cannon and its films than you could via a Wikipedia entry, you’ll quickly realize you’ve come to the wrong film for that. This is nearly exclusively a series of chronologically sorted anecdotes and jokes as told by various talking heads once involved with Cannon. Some of the anecdotes are funny, and the film is well paced, but I can’t say I found myself all that riveted by this one, perhaps because I expect from a 100 minutes plus documentary to actually have something to say about its object, or because I found the large swathes of irony the filmmakers use to hide their own opinions about Cannon and what it was annoying. It’s a rather un-visual film too, with a lot of short, often decidedly random feeling clips from Cannon films breaking up lots of footage of interview subjects sitting in front of a black background, and very little reason for this not to be a piece made for the radio. But then, I’m quite clearly not the audience this was made for.

Last Shift (2014): Rookie cop Jessica’s (Juliana Harkavy) first shift as an actual cop is the last shift in an old police precinct, where she’s working a night watch job alone. Unfortunately, the station is haunted as all get out, and a past concerning a dead cult leader and Jessica’s own father just won’t stay buried. For most of its running time, Anthony DiBlasi’s satanic cult leader ghost movie (that’s a genre, right?) is a rather focused and effective little number. Sure, there’s a decided lack in originality on display, and the film has the tendency to throw in the whole kitchen sink of spooky phenomena but DiBlasi handles most of this stuff with enough aplomb it results in a rather entertaining, if not particularly new feeling, time.

Enter the Void (2009): I had avoided this particular void until now because most of what I had read about Gaspar Noé’s inspiring and self-indulgent head trip of a movie let me assume this to be one fast, flashy, loud, yet still very long piece of sensory overload.

It’s rather the opposite, apart from the sensory overload, though, the film winning its often dream-like quality through a calm and floating approach to, well, everything, Noé hitting the spot where a just ridiculously showy sounding visual approach feels rather natural, and like the only way this particular narrative could have been realized. The floatiness of, well, being dead, makes a fantastic contrast to the rawness of the characters’ emotions.

From time to time, particularly in the last third or so, the film does drift off into moments I don’t think are supposed to be funny yet are, pat Freudianisms make themselves known, and the silliest money shot never to have made it into a porn movie makes an appearance. Of course, Noé makes up for that with what looks like a deep compassion for some deeply messed up characters to me, as well as with the little fact there’s  little else quite like Enter the Void.