2020 Over

Funny year this, one more survived than lived, with swathes of the country shut down and closed up for months at a time including most of the cinemas. This meant that the films mostly came from the small screen this year, there's no '10 favourite new films I saw in a cinema' because I only saw 10 films in a cinema, one of them was Akira and at least two of the other nine were utter shit. However on the screen that never shut in my living room there was plenty of good watching to be had, whether it be through watching various film festivals that went online or by dipping into the continuous flow of content from the streaming giants. So I thought I'd just go with a general 10 favourite new films of the year, regardless of the size of screen I watched them on.

 

10 Favourite New Films

10: Lucky

Finds an unexpected sweet spot in its blend of bland home invasion horror tropes and abstract expressionism. I do like a film that makes sense by not making sense.

9: St. Maud

The slowest burn of the year, so slow at times it would almost go out, but when it finally explodes there's magnificence to be had.

8: Death Ranch

Does not waste a minute in getting to its point, that point being here's the KKK doing bad shit and the main characters are going to fuck them up for it, something that starts happening roughly ten minutes in and does not let up till the end.

7: The Swerve

Frightfest's best online offering this year wasn't really a horror film at all. Though it was a deeply unsettling gut punch of a movie, and they don't come along all too often, so I'm happy they showed it.

6: The Color Out Of Space

Picturing Lovecraft's shrieking insanities on screen has always been a challenge, to get around this the production got a real life shrieking insanity in the form of Nicholas Cage and then ensured all the CGI madness eclipsed him in levels of pure shrieking insanity. And Alpackas.

5: Another Round

I was worried that without a strong knowledge of Danish drinking culture I maybe wouldn't get any deeper subtext on offer, but with film-making this good there's still plenty to enjoy and by the end I found I had also acquired a strong knowledge of Danish drinking culture.

4: Tenet

This fi[LOUDMUSICMOUDMUSICLOUDMUSIC]uite remarkab[HELICOPTORNOISETHUDTHUDTHUD] time [GUNSHOTSBANGBANGLOUDMUSICLOUDMUSIC] loved it.

3: I'm Thinking Of Ending Things

Kaufman at his very best enriching a story that was already unconventional and spinning it off further into the depths of the bizarre, uncanny and weird.

2: Parasite

A story where every development is a revelation, where every action is viscerally felt and which all culminates in sudden controlled intense madness. Remarkable.

1: Possessor

The one film this year that made me gasp at the goopy violence on display, thrill at the head melting technologies envisaged and made my jaw physically drop as it romped into its unflinching home stretch. An incredible movie.

10 Shittest Films I Sat Through

10. 6 Underground

The Netflix approach of non interference with film makers is a clear litmus test of true film making talent yielding a huge range in quality of finished product, so for example somebody like Scorcese will make an opus and then somebody like Michael Bay will shit out this screaming turd instead.

9: The New Mutants

I understand that this had a troubled production history which made it difficult to get a quality movie up on the screen. I understand this mainly because I made the mistake of watching it.

8: Ballad In Blood

Somebody clearly wanted to see Cannibal Holocaust director Ruggero Deodato make a movie again after all these years though on the evidence of this it wasn't Ruggero Deodato because he clearly has no intention of making a movie, he just wants to film a lot of tits.

7: Ava

Cannot remember the last time I laughed this hard at a gritty spy thriller. I was crying with laughter. I had to stop it at one point because I was whooping with hilarity, which would be great if that was the intention of this gritty spy thriller, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

6: Secret Santa

Hinges on a scene where everybody is meant to quite suddenly turn in to hideous unlikeable wankers making their actions surprising by contrast with their earlier selves. Spoilt by everybody acting like hideous unlikeable wankers from the start.

5: Tarzoon: Shame Of The Jungle

Offensive, badly animated but worst of all unfunny. How on earth is it possible to make anthropomorphic cocks unfunny? Here's the answer.

4: Bad Boys For Life

A sequel that absolutely nobody asked for and which Michael Bay couldn't even be bothered to make, though he does turn up in a cameo to ensure it maintains his usual standards. Of bollocks.

3: Blind/Hall

It was difficult to seperate this pair of nadirs from this year's online Frightfest, both were excruciating in how bad they were, both became closer to being an endurance test the closer they got to ending and both made me swear at the telly copiously because both of them were eye-rolling shite.

2: Cats

It's not easy to explain how something so bland can become such an unpleasant experience but I imagine it’s somewhat similar to the sensation you'd get if you were chewing on cardboard and suddenly hit a hard bit of nasty meaty gristle. Ick.

1: Verotika

Only down lower than Cats because somewhere round the halfway mark it gave up any pretence on telling a story, being a film or for that matter being remotely watchable in any way. Utter, utter piss.

Dawn Of The Dead: The Argento Cut [Zombie]

Fascinating insight into how editing and score can affect a movie. It would appear that rather than fiddle with Romero’s cut, Dario Argento has assembled this from original elements which means despite the fact this is exactly the same Dawn Of The Dead, it feels like a completely different film with alternate takes, dialogue and score used throughout. Most interesting is that it no longer feels like a Romero movie, despite the fact that it is.

Office Christmas Party

Went into this with a full expectation of the level of inane, vacuous shittiness that always comes along with this kind of comedy but I was just looking to wallow in bland easy laughs, delivered ably here by the obligatory ‘straight person is accidentally given a lot of drugs’ scene that always comes along with this kind of comedy, and then the plot delivered a denouement of such inane, vacuous shittiness that I ended up fucking hating it anyway. Which always happens with this kind of comedy.

Secret Santa

An atrocity on every level.

Anna And The Apocalypse

Teenagers belting out saccharine eighties power pop numbers during a zombie apocalypse should be something I hate but the sheer conviction in mashing together two disparate genres whilst insistently making zero concession to either makes this a joy.

Await Further Instructions

Has a script that tries to pass comment on race and class divides in the country whilst railing against white middle class stupidity and sermonising on the evils of TV but the execution is somewhat lacking and all they really manage in the finished film is the stupidity and an evil TV.

Circle

Attempts to be a philosophical treatise on societal morals, values and judgements but ends up with stark nihilism as nothing actually matters and everybody dies.

Ava

Laughably shit nonsense about a recovering alcoholic returning home to face up to her past after an eight year absence and who in the intervening time has trained up as a contract killer working for a high powered organisation who want her dead because she keeps asking her targets what they did wrong. Packed to the gills with cliche, hand brake turn tone shifts and overpowering music at all the wrong moments.

From Bedrooms To Billions

It’s very strange watching people recontextualise stuff you did as a kid for fun as a world changing revolutionary event. Who would have thought that typing swear words into text adventures to see what they said back was part of something so major.

House 4: The Repossession

Not released as a La Casa movie in Italy, but was released as House 4 in the USA which confused them because they didn’t have a House 3. Follows the theme of the others in that it’s another unrelated story set in a house, though somewhere late in production somebody decided it should be related and hastily wrote in the main character from the first movie without explaining why he now has a new wife, a daughter instead of a son, a second haunted house, an evil step brother and a native American best friend.

House III: The Horror Show

Taking the biscuit a little bit in that the story has no connection to the other House movies, neither is any house integral to the plot, this wasn’t even released as a House movie in the USA. It was however released as a La Casa movie in Italy, though it had to be titled La Casa 7 because Joe D’Amato had already reserved La Casa 6 for his own project that never got made.

The film itself is a dull rip-off of Wes Craven’s Shocker with nothing to make it stand apart, which is probably why they tried to fool people into seeing it with all this ‘House’ bullshit.

House II: The Second Story

This would be a fucking awful kids adventure movie if the cast consisted of kids, but everybody’s an adult so instead it’s a fucking awful kids movie made worse by everybody desperately trying to pretend it isn’t. Has no connection to the first House movie whatsoever, though given it features a House with portals to alternate dimensions it does have a vague commonality with the Italian La Casa series, of which this is unofficially considered to be part 6 despite being released before parts 3, 4 & 5.

Watch Me When I Kill [Il gatto dagli occhi di giada/ The Cat’s Victims]

A later giallo, by which time the films were becoming fairly indistinct, this being no exception.

Jason X

A thoroughly enjoyable mix of outrageous death, self awareness and bare midriffs.

Eyeball [Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro]

An Agatha Christie style parlour mystery where every time there’s a stabbing the entire cast turn up just afterward ensuring they all remain under suspicion for the entire duration of the movie, which might make sense in a parlour but this is set on a coach trip around Barcelona.

The Dark Half

Romero’s last movie, before studios would only give him money if his titles ended in ‘of the Dead,’ is a pretty decent doppelgänger slasher movie with some impressive sparrow wrangling in the back half.

Beauty Water [Cosmetic Solution]

This Halloween I watched something that pretended to be about the superficiality of beauty but was really about gooey skin that allowed a serial killer to graft his victim’s faces to his knee. Pushed further into absurdity by some outrageously incorrect subtitles that insisted on renaming the main characters as Artistry and Glazed Panel.

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm

Less a movie, more a feature length episode of Baron Cohen’s phenomenal Who Is America? with some additional narrative scenes shoved in to give it the appearance of a movie. Which is no criticism, the levels of callousness, ignorance and blind stupidity that get neatly skewered and displayed for all to plainly see are frankly astonishing. But it’s not really a movie.

Lucky

Home invasion thriller that leans into the weird from the off, making for something absolutely superb and absolutely nothing to do with home invasion thrillers by the end.

The Stylist

Giallo from the other side of the blade. Ace.

For The Sake Of Vicious

A first half of tense set up that uses contrived ambiguity to cover any stretches of plausibility then, at the point where an explanation would usually turn up, a biker gang turns up instead and everything quickly devolves into spectacular carnage.

Rebecca

Pastoral Wheatley clearly revelling in having a bigger budget at his command, so many extras! So many costumes! Such extravagant sets! All allowing him to confidently deliver on a tale you think you know, but probably don’t.

Possessor

I’ve sat through two online horror film festivals this year and didn’t see anything as excessively gooey or unflinchingly brutal as this. It’s also utterly fucking brilliant.

Another Round [Druk]

Beautifully observed and phenomenally acted piece about how alcohol is the answer, until it isn’t.

Fried Barry

A Gaspar Noe remake of Brother From Another Planet is the closest I can get to describing this. Also made me think of Frank Hennenlotter movies, The Greasy Strangler, Lynch and the Smack My Bitch Up music video. Mostly made me think ‘what the fuck am I watching?’

Death Ranch

Superbly nasty bit of exploitation trash featuring a trio of siblings running afoul of a cannibalistic chapter of the KKK, and then quickly turning the tables and wreaking hideous cathartic revenge. Ace.

Anonymous Animals [Les Animaux Anonymes]

An abused dog found chained to a tree is made to fight another dog, deer are coldly hunted through a forest and a herd of cattle are slaughtered and butchered. Only all the animals are played by humans and all the humans are played by humans with fake animal heads to emphasise the inhumane cruelty, I know! It’s almost too clever!

I felt let down that there was nothing about the industrial milking of cows.

Ropes [Cordes/ Prey]

Monkey Shines, only with the monkey replaced with Cujo.

Triggered

In what may be the most complex, expensive and just plain idiotic revenge scheme I’ve ever seen on film, a bunch of bickering dickheads are lured into the remote wilderness by their high school science teacher (!?) and strapped into explosive, unbreakable vests that also contain proximity sensors, life sign sensors, the ability to communicate with other vests and a full three colour lighting rig so everybody knows at a glance who will die next. The group then splits in two with one half trying to kill the other half who spend most of their time meeting up in random parts of the woods to yell exposition at each other. This is done until there’s only one person left. Why one person left alive in a revenge scheme that is clearly aimed at killing everybody? Never explained.

I Am REN [Jestem REN/ Panacea]

Usually malfunctioning android stories are all about what it is that makes us human, but this one questions reality too. Very good.

The Unhealer

Neat little story about a bullied teenager who picks up a neat little superpower that means whenever somebody tries to hurt him they receive the painful consequences of it. As fun as it sounds.

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones

Has the look and feel of a Channel 5 True Story movie but then characters would start quoting Lovecraft poetry, or a tentacle would squirm out of a vagina, or somebody would get raped by a sea monster and I couldn’t help but be entertained by such ludicrous juxtaposition.

They Reach

Feels very much like the second draft of a much better movie that everybody involved is still yet to make.

Unearth

A dull as fuck take on Colour From Out Of Space that doesn’t so much lose the plot, more clumsily abandons it two thirds of the way in.

The Special

A cautionary tale of drug addiction and the slow motion spiral of self destruction that it wreaks, only with all the drugs replaced with wanking.

Stray [Tvar]

Hands down the worst CGI baby I have, or will ever, see. Though, to be fair, the rest of it was shit too.

Alone

Another psychopath stalking a lone woman situation where refreshingly characters act intelligently and make sensible decisions but frustratingly the story still steers them into the same old cliches.

Akira [IMAX]

Still getting better every time I watch it.

Saint Maud

Eighty minutes of slow burn dread. So slow in fact that I began to question whether it was actually any good, then some stuff happened at the end that made me change my mind.

Relic

A horror film adaptation of dementia.

X-Ray [Hospital Massacre]

A film about a lady picking up some test results at a hospital that is inexplicably locked in a nightmare dream state meaning none of the doctors listen to her, she has to keep taking her clothes off and the corridors keep filling up with smoke, usually just before a stabbing.

La Casa 5 [Beyond Darkness]

The first film in the series since Evil Dead 2 to actually be a sequel to the film that went before it, but only in that it features a witch dragging people through portals to hell in a house again, and even that’s forgotten by the end as it wildly flip flops between being a cheap, tacky Poltergeist rip off and a cheap, tacky Exorcist rip off instead.

Beyond The Darkness [Buio Omega/ Blue Holocaust]

A clear attempt at being the most fucked up movie it could possibly be with ever escalating atrocities paraded about whilst any story is quietly kept to a background minimum that’s ultimately reduced to just a silly punchline.

Bill & Ted Face The Music

Against all odds I really enjoyed it.

Seven Blood Stained Orchids [Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso]

Methodically ticks nearly every tick box you could want a Giallo to tick.

La Casa 4 [Witchcraft (Evil Encounters)/ Witchery/ Ghosthouse 2]

Despite all the titles trying to convince you otherwise the only connection this has to the other films in the series is that it’s set in a house. Not that the house has anything to do with the story in this one either, it’s actually about a witch who drags people through portals into hell where utterly horrific acts are rendered laughable by shoddy special effects work. Originally intended to be a Luigi Cozzi project, but he passed because he felt the script wasn’t up to scratch, which tells you exactly how good this is.

The New Mutants

Just can’t get away from the fact that everybody involved wanted to make an X-Men horror movie so the main character is a mutant whose power is to turn everything into a horror movie. That’s the level we’re at folks.

Amuck! [Alla ricerca del piacere/ Hot Bed Of Sex/ Leather And Whips]

It’s definitely Italian. The numerous extended slow motion sex scenes are certainly sleazy. The plotting is contrived and confused in a way that could be interpreted as mystery and, though it takes its time to finally turn up, there is eventually a stabbing. So it’s a Giallo, but barely.

I’m Thinking Of Ending Things

Acts as both a mouthpiece for Kaufman and a display of his superb grasp of generating an uncanny vibe.

Aenigma

Late period Fulci that bucks his usual M.O. with a mostly coherent plot and a boredom to lunacy ratio that gleefully leans into the madness. King.

Death Smiles On A Murderer [La morte ha sorriso all'assassino/ Death Smiled At Murder]

Struggles to function as its own story, but is particularly effective as a greatest hits of Italian cinema of the time featuring heavy handed gothic atmospheres, Klaus Kinski nonsensically swaggering about, spurious Poe references, a razor blade killing, special FX make-up that looks like whatever was closest to hand heaped onto faces, POV shots of a killer stalking victims that run slowly and finally all rounded off with some obligatory severe eyeball trauma.