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.