Warnings about new and emerging technology run amok has been a common theme in movies since damn near day one. From Frankenstein to Wells to the Terminator franchise, we’ve been counseled against the hazards of unchecked science we don’t fully grasp yet. With his debut feature, Appofeniacs, prolific music video director Chris Marrs Piliero uses a post-Pulp Fiction maze of rapid banter and intersecting narratives to raise a cautious eyebrow at the use of AI and deepfakes. What lands, lands solid, especially the frequent and ample violence, but what misses whiffs, and the mixed bag of a film winds up mostly a cautionary tale about aggrieved edgelords with no real problems and too much time on their hands.
Within a span of a couple of months we’ve received remakes of early-1980s cult favorite swords-and-sorcery epics. First out of the gate was M.J. Bassett’s take on Red Sonja, and now we have Psycho Goreman mastermind Steven Kostanski’s version of Deathstalker. While the former knows it’s goofy, it plays things relatively straight. The latter, however, leans into the campiness with a winking, over-the-top glee.
Fumika (Akari Takaishi, Baby Assassins) is your average college student. She has a crappy job, constantly fends off creepy men pestering her, and she’s very clumsy. Seriously, she falls down. A lot. Things change a wee bit, however, when she meets the ghost of a vicious hitman, Kudo (Masanori Mimoto, First Love), who occasionally possesses her and takes control of her body. It’s like Upgrade or even Venom at times as the two consciousnesses occupy the same space. (Or All of Me with fisticuffs?) After some coaxing, she agrees to help him exact revenge against the people who killed him. So goes the plot of Kensuke Sonomura’s new action-oriented ghost story Ghost Killer.
Isaac Ezban’s Parvulos: Hijos del Apocalips is very literal in its title. These are actual children of the apocalypse. Salvador (Farid Escalante Correa), Oliver (Leonardo Cervantes), and Benji (Mateo Ortega Casillas) are three brothers, the oldest, Sal, a young teen, surviving on their own after a virus causes the end of the world. They do all the typical apocalyptic things, scrounge food, do their best to get through every day, and tend to the dark, sinister secret lurking in their basement.
Stop me if you’ve heard this. Five college friends—an alpha male, an outdoorsy type, a tomboy, a hot girl, and a nerd. A spooky, remote cabin in the woods. (Actually, a spooky, remote Dutch villa in an Indonesian jungle, but the idea is the same.) A cemetery. A well. An old caretaker. No cell service. No power. Things get weird and people start dying. That’s customary horror fare. But from this basic framework, The Draft director Yusron Fuadi tweaks the formula in clever, inventive ways and crafts a fun, fresh take on what the movie calls “cheap Indonesian horror films,” and the oft-repeated tropes of the genre across national boundaries.
If you didn’t already think Christopher Lee was cool, one, really? Two, you may very well change your tune after watching The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, the latest documentary from Jon Spira (Elstree 1976). As one might expect from the title, the film delves deep into the life and times of the iconic actor—don’t call him the King of Horror, he did not appreciate that—exploring every nook and cranny along the way.
“Can we speak ill of the living before it’s too late?” asks Magpie (Emma Appleton) in writer/director Dean Puckett’s The Severed Sun. It’s certainly one of those situations where if people had taken a moment to talk it out, many if not all of the more unfortunate events of the film could have been avoided. But then we wouldn’t have this moody, engaging, occasionally quite gory, if a bit spare entry into the folk horror canon.
Do people still like movies where Elijah Wood walks around the New Zealand wilderness? Because there’s a great deal of that in Bookworm, the latest directorial effort from Ant Timpson (Come to Daddy). It may not be quite as epic as the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s impossible for that landscape to not look incredible, and there’s plenty of adventure on this sweet, earnest journey of reconciliation between a long-estranged father and daughter, a journey that also happens to be something of a cryptid hunt.
When you hear about a DIY Estonian horror-musical that took the filmmaker (Sander Maran served as director, writer, editor, cinematographer, songwriter, and probably more roles) a decade to make, you can’t help but be curious. And Chainsaws Were Singing is all of that and so, so much more. This is a bizarre, wild time that goes way, way out in the wilderness and is something fans of movies like Cannibals: The Musical and Hundreds of Beavers need to check out.
