Three Films Make A Post: Expose the corruption. Protect the hive.

The Beekeeper (2024): Somehow, for reasons only known to the Hollywood gods who keep good directors out of work, David Ayer still ends up with decent budgets for his movies. This Jason Statham vehicle is John Wick minus the style and the weirdness, with added bee metaphors (so many bee metaphors) and shows our hero boringly killing his way through the usual hordes of incompetent caricatures. There’s never a second where he appears actually threatened, which doesn’t exactly up the excitement ante, and the staging and filming of the action sequences is blandly competent without any sparks of visual or kinetic imagination.

The plot is silly, but never so silly it ever threatens to make the movie fun, and Ayer’s direction lacks style, visual imagination and character to a nearly disturbing degree. Bees and Jason Statham deserve better, as do people who want to actually be entertained by their dumb action movies.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023): On the positive side, The Beekeeper does at least have a vague idea of what its audience might expect of it, it’s just not terribly good at delivering it. This (first and only?) Kaijuverse streaming show as produced for Apple doesn’t, or rather, it appears to believe that what an audience wants from a show named after a secret giant monster hunting organisation are endless scenes of badly written soap operatics, mostly done by C&W style pretty young actors lacking the gravitas and actorly depth that might draw interest out of this nonsense.

Things tend to pick up whenever a monster appears or when the show spends time on flashbacks into the early years of Monarch, but most of its running time is wasted on moves that were old when Dallas made them. Apart from being clueless about what an audience may want from it, the show is also unlucky: take for example, the stunt casting of Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt as the younger version of Kurt’s character. This sounds clever on paper but suffers from the younger Russell’s inability to act his way out of a wet paper bag.

Lord of Misrule (2023): It probably shows my skewed tastes that William Brent Bell’s critically drubbed folk horror movie is the one of these three pieces of media I’d actually recommend to anyone. It’s not that I disagree with the general gist of its critical reception: this is indeed a best of folk horror tropes compilation tape that has little of its own to add to the canon, and isn’t always great at connecting the tropes sensibly.

However, I happen to like these folk horror tropes, and am perfectly okay with the way Bell arranges them here, especially since the production design is derivative as hell, but also looks and feel pretty good. Thus, Bell manages to create at least a handful of decently creepy scenes for Tuppence Middleton to be dramatic in. Which to me makes for a decently good time.

In short: Orphan: First Kill (2022)

Warning: spoilers to come!

This somewhat unexpected – and a lot cheaper looking – prequel to 2009’s Orphan tells of the earlier adventures of child-impersonating little person serial killer Leena (Isabelle Fuhrman, reprising her role). After escaping from an Estonian asylum and a couple of murders, our protagonist manages to convince the authorities of being a lost American heiress.

Impersonating Esther, the daughter of the stinking rich Albrights – painter Dad Allen (Rossif Sutherland), mother Tricia (Julia Stiles) and rich jock son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) – comes naturally to our murderous heroine, but Leena’s customary love for Daddy only as well as some rather off-beat revelations regarding the family make her life rather more interesting than she probably expected.

For the first forty, forty-five minutes or so, Orphan: First Kill is a pretty terrible movie. It looks more like a cheap TV movie than an actual film (shot for streaming or not), director William Brent Bell bravely striding away from the technical merits of the Jaume Collet-Serra original into the lands of random indoor fog, shoddy lighting and an editing rhythm so generic and lifeless, it’s some kind of achievement. Parts of the visual and direction problems do of course come from the stunt idea of again casting the now fully grown Isabelle Fuhrman as Leena, a young woman who is most certainly neither a Little Person nor a child, so all kinds of cheap and obvious looking camera tricks have to be taken to at least make her look small; she also does a lot of acting on her knees. All of which doesn’t exactly lend itself to improve the visual style. Nor does it ever distract from the little problem that nobody would believe Fuhrman to be nine years old even if she were small, which turns much of the film ridiculous.

That the script does neither hold up to even the tiniest bit of logical scrutiny nor manages to deliver enough cool and interesting murder set pieces to distract from it does of course not improve things at this point, either.

Until, at about the half-way mark, First Kill turns into the most fucked-up and bizarre Lifetime movie imaginable, a movie where everyone but painter dad is a murderous psychopath and expresses this in the most delightfully overblown way possible, until Leena starts to look like the sane one. Bell’s direction and the whole Furhman not being a child anymore business still get in the way a little, but Fuhrman, Stiles and Finlan deliver a lot of vigorous scenery chewing. Even the script suddenly seems to realize that being (more than) a bit dumb is something that doesn’t have to get in the way of being entertaining in a trashy, twisty, over the top manner and begins delivering preposterous but fun nonsense by the minute.

Three Films Make A Post: Fall under her spell into the depths of terror.

Deep Trap aka Exchange (2015): Kwon Hyeong-jin’s film is your typical South Korean backwoods thriller, less interested in cannibalism than in sexually loaded violence, and therefore generally a bit nastier than its US counterparts today. It’s not a particularly impressive entry into the genre though: sure, the direction is slick, the acting good, and the script tight, so I can’t imagine anyone being bored by this, but the film lacks a bit in substance, not going through with some elements the basic set-up suggests and not digging as deeply into the subtext than I would have wished, turning to the standard tropes of its genre without need when it has a way to more interesting (and possibly even more unpleasant) pastures right in front of its nose. It’s perfectly fine entertainment, though, at least if you can be entertained by a film with stuff like rape and semi-realistic violence.

The Boy (2015): By all rights, I should like this one quite a bit more than I actually did, what with the fake English Gothic setting (including Rupert Evans as the poshest grocery delivery guy you could imagine), the pleasant production design, and the good old call of the creepy doll at its centre. However, for most of the time, this plays out like a best of of scenes from other creepy doll movies, adds a sprinkling of crawlspace horror and tries to tie everything up through an in theory damaged protagonist as given by Lauren Cohan.

The whole thing just doesn’t work very well: William Brent Bell’s direction is strangely reticent, lacking the gothic conviction the sets deserve and never getting intense enough to make one forget the very silly set-up (not to speak of the even sillier third act). Cohan never convinced me of being someone who has gone through some heavy shit in her recent past, either.

Paranormal Sex Tape aka Sex Tape Horror (2014/16): This is a bit more interesting than the title suggests, seeing as it isn’t a desperate attempt at a “sexy” found footage movie but rather an amateurish one at making some sort of erotic horror movie by throwing all the digital effects, filters and avantgarde movie tricks it can muster at its audience in between the sex scenes. There’s nearly no location sound, little dialogue (and what there is of it is dubbed in afterwards and sounds atrocious), and a plot that regularly breaks down into five minute bits of psychedelic filter mania or repetitions of scenes we’ve already seen. Sometimes, this approach does even induce the mood of dream-like irreality the film probably is going for; there are even a moment or three in here I found vaguely disquieting.


Of course, the other eighty percent of the film are a bit of a boring slog that could have used some judicious cutting down from a seventy minute sort of feature to a thirty minute short film, but at the very least, director Dick Van Dark’s (winner of this week’s prize for the silliest nom de plum in a movie) film fails attempting something somewhat interesting.