1.

Watched somewhat effective but ultimately slightly average Japanese hospital horror Infection (2004). A perfect setting for horror, places of safety, healing and restoration turned to their opposite, by accident or design, against the vulnerable and trusting. Infection begins well, set in the dark, run down Central Hospital, with an absent director and what few staff it still has overworked and underpaid. It has a queasy, tense atmosphere, a feeling that something simply has to give, and give it does, with an accidental death through administration of a wrong drug. Meanwhile an ambulance with a very sick patient, getting liquefied by a mysterious infection gets turned away, but as doctors and nurses cover up their accidental killing the patient turns up anyway. And things really start to go awry...

This could have been something quite special, a combination of traditional supernatural scares and more up to date gooey nastiness. But it doesn't quite work. The first big problem is a lack of sympathetic characters. It's perfectly understandable that these people aren't perfect, might well make bad mistakes, but over and above being overworked and underpaid most are also dangerously disillusioned, incompetent or just plain mean. Rare are the moments, especially once things really get moving, of positive, likeable effort. Sure, it makes things pretty ominous, but ultimately in a depressing and slightly dull rather than interesting way. Also the plotting, with the exception of a bit of weak reality bending, is over-simple and kind of just tapers out. And most frustratingly, there's very little outright gooiness. A bit of pleasing painful, squirmy gore, but it really needed more gooiness.

Fortunately, the pace is compelling and the direction slick and assured. I've not seen anything else from director Masayuki Ochiai, though I do mean to catch the apparently excellent Shutter at some point, but he wrings maximum atmosphere from the location, makes fine, desperate tension out of the cover up and pulls off some good scares, with the highlight just a quiet encounter with a visitor. The performances are solid, haunted, riven, fretful, the cinematography is suitably grim and sickly, the score shivery. With a better ending it could all have just about worked fine. As is, not exactly bad, but there are plenty far better. Worth a watch if this sort of thing is really your jam, otherwise stick with the better.

2.

Watched quirky and likeable blackly comic troubled teen flick I Am Not A Serial Killer. John Wayne Cleaver is a Midwestern small town high schooler who works in the local mortuary with his mom and aunt and likes to write school reports on famous serial killers. Not a serial killer himself (it says so in the name!) but he is a diagnosed sociopath who makes almost everybody around him nervous, and has to live by a set of rules to stop himself from harming anybody. He gets along, more or less, but things get a little tricky when he discovers that there really is a local serial killer and sets out to stop them.

Something like this needs a strong lead and it has one in Max Records, still a teen himself at the time. Smart, fearless, independent and outgoing, but awkward, alien, callow, vulnerable and volatile. Records's performance is honed and precise, compelling, appealing, but sinisterly suggestive inside. One gets the impression that the dark waters people like to see in all teenagers really do run strong and deep in young John. Solid support comes from Laura Fraser as John's mom, run down by everything but soldiering on, Christina Baldwin as his Aunt Margaret, with a sort of good cop routine, Karl Geary as John's dedicated and sympathetic therapist and especially Christopher Lloyd, entrancing as ancient but infinitely dignified neighbour Mr Crowley.

This could have been really quite something. The horror is a little out there when it gets moving but it works, with director Billy O'Brien (previously of decent downbeat farmhouse creature feature Isolation) bringing ample chilly atmosphere and passages of gripping tension, but also a warm feel for character. The quirkiness and humour is reasonably unselfconscious and happily John is treated as a person rather than a stock cool weirdo or damaged hero. There are lots of good scenes, even a scare or two. But alas it doesn't come together as strongly as it might have. An episodic, time skipping structure leaves characters and relationships not fully developed, gives things a slightly truncated feel. And while there's plenty of cat and mouse tension, only towards the end does the film really get into psychological tension and even then it's a bit too straightforward. The film ends well, is even touching, but there's a distinct feeling that it could have been more. I could have gone for a full two hours rather than sub 100 minutes myself. A bit more gore could have really raised the game too, there is some but perhaps not enough for a proper sense of the macabre.

Still a totally worthy effort, recommended to modern indie horror fans.

3.

Watched Reincarnation (2005), an ultimately splendid supernatural chiller from Takashi Shimuzu. Most will be familiar with his Ju-on films (I am very fond of the 2002), a few with his bizarre gem Marebito, and Reincarnation sits somewhere between them. Not quite as well developed as Marebito, but still confidently exploring the further places that popular Japanese ghost cinema can go. For me it also helps that the subject is a particular interest of mine.

Before the credits several characters are bound by ghostly manifestations, but after it soon becomes clear that the lead is one Nagisa Sugiura, a young actress. Though not keen on horror films she auditions for one as she wishes to be killed on screen, having been killed in a past life. The film, set in a hotel, concerns a professor who murdered his children and multiple staff and fellow guests before killing himself. Nagisa gets the role of the professor's daughter, despite her nerves director Masumura is impressed by her story. But she is troubled, and gets a lot more so fast, when the cast go to the actual hotel in which the murders took place to take in the atmosphere for their performances. The filming continues, and there's investigation too, and building towards a climax that I don't think I exaggerate in calling awesome.

Like the Ju-on features, this is hardly subtle. There is no doubt from the opening moments of the film on that there are ghosts afoot, a fair few of them, and that they aren't altogether friendly. It isn't as creepy as the Ju-on films, and borders on goofy overkill in spots, but even as events may be goofy, foundations are being laid. The ghosts are important, but so too is the way the production and investigation disturbs the past, stirs it to new life, warps the present, reality. There's skilfully edited muddling of past and present, some fun and interesting insight in to film-making and motivation. Whether the camera is still or roaming, Takashi Shimuzu has a great way with place, and with a central setting of actual hotel past and present and movie set hotel present, he can really get ingenious. So despite any titter or eye roll inducing moments, everything is coming together.

And then there's the climax. A superbly controlled (quite coherent despite what some reviewers would have you think) extended (some 20 odd minutes) sequence of nightmarish reality shifting with an oddly touching and creatively creepy pay-off. It's just the sort of thing that first got me really in to Asian horror way back in the when and I loved it.

All in all I would recommend this quite highly. Perhaps not for casual fans of this sort of thing, definitely benefits from having seen a fair few, and it isn't quite perfect, but still. If you're still reading this you should really go for it.

4.

Watched creepy, touching supernatural mystery/headfudge Spider Forest (2004). One of those films, not the most fresh, not the most thrilling, that reminds how important good old fashioned committed quality film making and performances are. Because it just plain works, consistently interesting and ultimately effective even if it shouldn't be necessarily.

It begins with a woman standing in a forest, trees bare, snow falling, framed in a window, camera drawing in. She faces away. Then a man coming to, dazed, on the forest floor, getting up, going to a cabin. He finds a dead man and dying woman, bloodily slain by sickle, sees a stranger, killer perhaps, and gives chase. And is knocked flying down by a car in a tunnel. When he comes to in hospital 14 days later his friend Detective Choi is keen for his story, as he blabs about the bodies pretty quickly. And so we learn the story of Kang Min, TV producer, widowed, despairing, and the eponymous haunted forest.

[If you haven't seen this and it sounds interesting you should probably stop here and watch it. I won't say more of the plot but it's best first seen without too many preconceptions]

I divide this sort of film very roughly in to two categories. Interior, films chiefly concerned with the mind, its workings and breakings, that illuminate through abstraction, poetry, the mind being fundamentally unknowable. And exterior, films about emotions and actions in bold, universals, love, loss, fate and so forth, in which what is on screen fits together clearly to produce a clear effect. Spider Forest is mostly the second kind, though with some flavouring of the first. Mostly straightforward, excepting perhaps one plot point, though it does all require proper attention. All the expected time shifts and plot turns. Its intrigue for the most part resolves faster than the characters manage it, and in the end it's a little bit pat, especially the ending. But writer/director Song Il-gon and star Kam Woo-sung follow through every point, develop everything as it needs, with great heart. And all the supporting cast are strong. It looks lovely, there's some bloody violence, distinct eeriness, and a real connection to the universals it seeks. It simply works.

This won't be for everyone, closer to David Lynch than the average Asian horror but also closer to the average Asian horror than David Lynch. The sort of thing apt to be called pretentious and nonsensical, even though it isn't. It isn't perfect, but it is really solid at the very least. Recommended.

5.

Watched Paganini Horror (1989), Luigi Cozzi on characteristically barmy but less successful than usual form. Still enjoyable, but a bit too much of a mess, falling a little flat. It begins very well, a little girl goes home via gondola, carrying her violin. She gets in, does some practice (Paganini's Witches Dance), and then electrocutes her mother in the bath with a hair dryer. Next up an mostly girl cheese-rock act performs a rip off of You Give Love A Bad Name, earning a drubbing from their producer. The one guy in the group goes off and buys an original copy of an unpublished composition by legendary violinist and Faustian pactist Nicolo Paganini from a shifty Donald Pleasance. Shifty Donald Pleasance is soon revealed to be an agent of the Devil himself. The band go off to a boarding house to make a song and music video incorporating Paganini's composition, with a proper horror style to it. Intro, murder, the works. And that's when things start to get weird.

This could have been all kinds of awesome, but it turns out to be one of those unfortunate late 80's Italian horrors that loses it's way in a bad way instead of being amazing like Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 or Demons 6 : De Profundis. Cozzi, and friend and co-writer Daria Nicolodi first can't decide whether their killer should wield what seems to be a spiked wrought metal treble clef or a spiked violin and then kind of drop both for a cursed architecture angle with a couple of completely different kinds of deadliness. They don't really establish interesting or likeable characters, or much in the way of relationships, the plotting is pretty one note and the action, other than a bit of fun grisly death, is basically walking or running around being confused. There's some ever welcome unnatural lighting but the sets are bland and the music doesn't stand out. Things rally for an asinine but loveable climax and pay off though.

I can't exactly recommend this but I don't want to be too negative, I had an ok time. It's one of those films which does score if you dig its scene in general and just tick off all the engagingly weird and silly moments, even if they don't all come together. A couple of the gore gags are reasonably uncommon, which always helps. Also Donald Pleasance is awesome. Watch it if you will.

6.

Watched Nicolas Cage revenge horror/fantasy/artsploitation delight Mandy (2018). On paper, in short, a throwback, live action cartoon, another Drive Angry. In practice? About as close as any couple of hours in the past couple of decades gets to actually being young and watching the classics for the first time all over again.

The plot is simple. Taciturn logger Red lives with his metal and fantasy novel loving girlffriend Mandy, in Shadow Woods, in a cabin by Crystal Lake. On her way to work as a gas station cashier one morning Mandy attracts the attention of hippie freak failed folk musician turned cult leader Jeremiah. He sends his people, the Children of the New Dawn, and demon bikers the Black Skulls to fetch her and Red. She rejects his advances and is ceremoniously burned, and then, as they say, it is on.

It's not so simple though. Yes, Nicolas Cage howls in grief and pain and rage, takes drugs and bloodily slays sinister scumbags. There is memorable gore, some great Nicolas Cage moments. But writer/director Panos Cosmatos, particularly as director is more concerned with context. The action is a fraction of the two hour film. What it is more about is the power of love, and of fantasy, make believe, and what happens when people try to make make believe real. Terrible things. And the style is attuned. Minimal dialogue, because there's language in colour, in stillness and movement, in looks. Deep reds and blues, the heart, love, heat, blood and fire and death and magic, but water and sky too, togetherness, coolness, cleansing, purifying, releasing. Mists of nature, and strange, sickly green, alien, intruding. Stillness of moments frozen in time and eyes and hearts, sudden violence, but also blurring, repetition, echoes. Worlds unsaid, though a score of dark ambience and a pleasing veer into sludge plays a part. What is said doesn't let the side down either. The characters and plot, its point and meaningful ambiguity, come through finely. It goes without saying that Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough are wonderful, but Linus Roache as Jeremiah very much deserves a mention, banal, pathetic yet magnetic, and quite terrifying.

This is apparently not for everyone. I have read more than one report on people leaving screenings being quite vocal about it being one of the worst films ever made. It isn't a film for those who like natural lighting, fast and elaborate plotting, lots of action, even events just playing out at regular speeds. But it is easily one of the best films of the last few years. Strongly recommended.

7.

Watched Malevolent (2018). Now, I don't especially like to give a film a drubbing, but sometimes it has to be done. A Netflix Original botch job, hybrid of supernatural chiller and squirmy nastiness too charmless to even get points for effort. To be fair, the plot did attract me. Siblings Angela and Jackson run a ghostbusting scam with their cameraman buddy Elliot and Jackson's girlfriend Beth, Jackson is the business end and Angela's the "psychic". Jackson needs money and they have a strong bond, their mother, a real psychic, possibly, left them, went mad and gouged her own eyes out. Angela wants out, she has a funny turn on a job and begins to think that she might really have powers, but Jackson owes money to some dangerous people so he persuades her to take on a particularly lucrative job. Putting some murdered children to rest for shrewd but scared Mrs. Green. Of course things go a bit awry...

There are a few little pluses here. Florence Pugh is fine as Angela, trapped, conflicted, run down but grinding on, ultimately doing what she needs to keep on. Celia Imrie goes above the call of duty as Mrs. Green, the role is underwritten but she wrings out every word, her conviction carrying through to the end and providing most of the films few effective moments. Side roles do their best, Scott Chambers is almost sympathetic as Elliot. The film moves fast and evokes a little low level gloomy, mildly creepy mood. Unfortunately that's about it. The plotting is sloppy, there's no development of Angela's first scare and no real development of Jackson's money problems or their mother. All these things just exist as contrivances. Ben Lloyd-Hughes is just plain irritating as Jackson, and even if he weren't, there isn't enough here on characters or their relationships. The child murder main back story is sketchy and later developments confusing/nonsensical. The grimness leaves a bad taste rather than scaring and the film is way short of the gore or madness to work at a bad taste level. Essential scares are eminently forgettable apart from a pre credits jump, the climax is naff and the coda weirdly disconnected and not in a good way. If I were feeling kind I might wonder if a clueless distributor had hacked chunks out of this before release but the film does not dispose me to kindness and I'm pretty certain that didn't happen anyway.

There are a lot worse out there, and as Florence Pugh seems to be moving up in the world Malevolent may have some cultural-historical interest. But it really is pretty bad and I can't recommend it. So not recommended.

8.

Watched worthy but dull Stephen King adaptation 1922 (2017). It's been quite a few years since I last read King, his penchant for crazy pants marching powder plotting spoiling pretty decent and even scary writing wiped me out (The Library Policeman was the last straw). I've not read the source story for 1922, it may well be quite good, but as a film I actually wanted some of those old crazy pants. Never bad exactly, but an old fashioned overly simplistic morality tale without much in the way of fun trimmings.

The year is 1922, and taciturn farmer Wilfred James wants to nearly double his land with his wife Arlette's recent inheritance from her dad. She wants to sell it instead, get a divorce and move to the city with their son Henry. Wilfred does not take kindly to this, and enlists Henry in a drastic solution. This does not go terribly well for either...

I really wanted this to be better than it is. The set up could lead into a Great American Tragedy, and the performances are spot on for same. Thomas Jane captures the stubborn, haunted, sneaky and ultimately desperate path of Wilfred very well, Molly Parker is awkward but clearly not actually unreasonable as Arlette, Dylan Schmid handles the malleability, buffeted yearning and ultimate folly of youth. The cinematography of Ben Richardson is suitably hot, dusty and lonesome, Mike Patton's score nice and rootsy. It has its grisly moments, and has potential to really develop. Especially given the over 100 minute length, good time for plot and atmosphere to breathe. But it just doesn't. Character, moral and plot complications are kept to a bare minimum and are unimaginative, so too are the scares, which also lack gusto. This is a very predictable experience, and with the exception on some slight upturns in the final 20 minutes or so, a pretty flat, undynamic one. The end, when it does come, is all too brief. The moral force the film should have had is almost all leaked away in disinterest. I love a good slow burning atmospheric piece, have nothing against minimal happenings, not too much against simplicity even, but they all have to come together and actually interest. 1922 doesn't really interest.

This has its fans and I can't call it outright bad, certainly not by my standards. But it ultimately didn't do enough for me and annoys me the more I think about it. Should have been 70 minutes, 75 tops. And still a bit more actually interesting. Not recommended.

9.

Watched nifty little supernatural chiller I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016). Indebted to The Haunting (1963) yet forging its own low key and lightly cryptic path, unashamedly high minded yet always a straight up genre film, it doesn't seem to get a lot of love but I found it richly satisfying.

Ruth Wilson plays home nurse Lily, looking after reclusive, quietly demented former bestselling creepy mystery novelist Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss). As the long, solitary days wear on, turning to weeks, and months, mysterious mold, noises and other occurrences lead Lily to investigate. It would seem that Iris had some real inspiration for her most popular novel, The Lady in the Walls, and something is still afoot...

This is slow, wordy and minimal, built on dialogue and methodical uncovering of creepy detail. For much of the time there's just Lily, fortunately Lily is effortless to spend time with. Smart, kind and committed, lonely, timid and keeping herself on a leash she doesn't even know is there. Wilson is smooth, effortless and deep, with an easy likeability and poignant distance to her performance. Paula Prentiss brings a scary but still sympathetic edge as Iris, while Bob Balaban has a few moments of ordinary comforting professionalism as estate manager Mr Waxcap. There's little action, just the aforementioned mold, noises, some eerie occurrences and flashbacks, a few appearances of a distorted apparition. Occasional voice-over narration musing on the nature of haunting lets us know from the start what the film is about but what's going on takes attention and thought and there are little to no pulse pounding jolts to giggle or relax to. The look and the score are all cleanliness and efficiency, austere, the better to focus us. I suppose the overall point is a study in the way the mind can let the dead in. Oddly moving in the end.

It would seem to be the case that more find this tedious and threadbare than enjoy it. Certainly it follows its own path at its own pace and is unconcerned with the usual tactics to grip or thrill. Like "quiet horror" literature for the screen really, best for readers of same. So definitely not recommended for everyone, but at the same time, definitely recommended.

10.

Watched ace French Canadian zombie horror Ravenous (2017), originally Les Affames. I don't find that I really need many modern zombie/infected/possessed horrors, as horror genres go these days more than grindhouse throwbacks but less than say, just about anything else really extant. But a surprisingly interesting review caught my attention, and even more surprisingly, didn't mislead me. Not be the fastest or grisliest of zombie horrors but it is very satisfying, but with heart, smarts and good zombies, Ravenous is richly satisfying.

The plot, set in rural Quebec, draws together Bonin, patrolling, joking and killing with his friend Vezina, wife and mother Celine, alone but for her machete, Tania, with what she claims is a dog bite, little girl Zoe, elderly insurance man Real and his nameless shotgun toting young pal, and also elderly Therese and Pauline, either sisters or a couple, most definitely hard worn badasses. They aren't all connected, none especially stand out and the plot doesn't stretch to meet them, but meet they do and go their way together. But of course things won't go so well. There are a lot of hungry living dead out there...

Relaxed characterisation and plotting was a big plus for me. Sure, I can dig hissing at the villain, awwing at the cute dog/child, tearing up at the sacrifices, but only up to a point. All too often I find it all overly contrived, manipulative, just irritating. The characters here feel real, ordinary, decent, if sometimes flawed people, no big heroes or villains, they go their way and act much as any of us might do. They die because they make decent, honest mistakes or because the situation is bad and luck is not on their side, not because plot or heartstrings just demand it. The path of the plot may be predictable, but it works. Straightforward and uncluttered, with characters (and performances) that work. And zombies that work. They can be fast, they can be loud, they'll bite and infect, or bring down and tear our throats, but they're like a flip side of the protagonists. Not terrifying monsters, just people going their way, doing what needs to be done. Real, just, you know, zombies. With a nice quirk that reminds of the original Dawn, just more sombre and touching. The characters, the zombies, the straightforward, uncluttered plotting, they all come together. Simple, but tightly, skilfully woven, gripping and emotional without forcing it, turning predictability into heavy inevitability. And even as the pace mounts towards the end and things go as they must, turning unusually, memorably poignant and ambivalent.

I could have done with a smidgen more grue perhaps. The pace is measured, which I appreciated, more stillness and attractive countryside than mayhem, everything has room to breathe. There's restraint at times when most other films would quite literally go for the jugular, and I appreciated this too, because we've seen this stuff a thousand times and it has long lost its shocking power, become pat, tawdry, and the characters deserve better. Ravenous is by no means tame and dry, but just a little more grue would have clarified and heightened things to their absolute full potential. Still, it wasn't a great loss, and at least there weren't lame gore gags or faux thrilling shakey cam action.

Altogether, one of the best zombie films I've seen in recent times. Sober, serious, slow, "arty", less concerned with trends or coolness or "fun". Not just not bad, which I find the pretty unpromising average, but actually really good. Highly recommended, though not for everyone.

11.

Watched Apostle (2018). Something of a left turn for director Gareth Evans, who having mastered the slick, ultra violent modern martial arts action film with The Raid and its sequel, could have just settled in and become a legend making more of the same. Apostle, a historical action-fantasy-horror with a timely and important twist, is quite its own beast. And if not masterful, its a big step in the right direction.

Dan Stevens plays taciturn tough guy Thomas Richardson, heading out to a small Scottish island in search of his sister, kidnapped by a mysterious religious cult. Leader Brother Malcolm (Michael Sheen) doesn't seem like such a terrible sort, but with curfews, execution and forbidden love afoot, it definitely isn't a safe place to be. As Thomas really gets investigating things get out of hand, and he discovers more strangeness than he had anticipated...

There's a lot here and Evans manages it well structurally. Different genre elements flow and blend, horror, intrigue, taut suspense, bloody action, flights of fancy, seamlessly together, following plot and theme. 130 odd minutes long and it has that good old feel of a film that needs to be that long, and wants to be, without straining. Doesn't feel bloated, that is, nor rigorously working through every angle just to stay tight.

The fantasy and horror doesn't totally come off mind you. The elements are there, the idea very nice, but the execution is a bit workmanlike. It doesn't really chill or transport as it should, doesn't get inside the images and make them explode in the minds eye. Evans can chill and transport with action, he doesn't yet have the quieter parts down. But he can handle suspense very well and there are some fine scenes, and he can handle actors. Dan Stevens is a great hero, tough but human, sympathetic, vulnerable, deeply wounded but grimly striving, from the start a man who will do whatever it takes, whatever it does to him. Michael Sheen is on quality form as well, he's deluded and clearly bad, but more politician than monster, he is trying his best, ultimately wants what's right, and he knows he falls short but can't stop. Others touch the right notes when needed, weary, haunted, tender, fanatic.

So it all holds together very well until the inevitable spiralling bloody violence, and Evans is in his element, the climax is cracking. Some good stabbing and grinding. For some the underlying message might be a bit too blunt, I would say that it certainly isn't subtle but the lack is warranted, it really needs to be as clear and loud as it is. Also, for some, not all elements will appeal, some may want more of some things than others, be bored at times. I think that while something more straightforward might have been more directly enjoyable, the approach taken is ultimately more effective for the broader scope and purpose.

So, well recommended.