Epic scope and scale on a bargain-basement budget. That might be the best way to describe DTV action auteur Jesse V. Johnson’s newest film, Boudica: Queen of War, starring Olga Kurylenko, who has carved quite a niche for herself in this realm.
The Elderly, from Spanish co-directors Raul Cerezo and Fernando Gonzalez Gomez, taps into a number of primal, deep-seated fears. Ideas of our bodies aging and betraying us touch on body horror; there’s the dread of losing our autonomy, in both a physical and mental capacity. It has something to say about how society values, or more accurately, doesn’t value the aged, attends to the looming specter of Spain’s fascist past, which may not be as far in the rearview as many believe, and even copes with the threat of climate catastrophe.
I think I love the way Brian Duffield’s brain works. Spontaneous is easily one of my favorite and most re-watched movies of the last few years; Love and Monsters, which he wrote but didn’t direct, is great; and now we can add his latest multi-hyphenated endeavor, No One Will Save You, to this pile as it does not disappoint. At a base level, this is an alien-home-invasion story, but the reality is so much stranger and more complicated than that.
A young woman, frantic and covered in blood, flees unknown pursuers. An older woman, a fixer with an as-yet-undefined degenerative condition, is tasked with tracking her down and stopping her from crossing the border. So begins writer/director John Rosman’s taut horror-thriller New Life.
The easiest, most obvious comparison point for director Kim Jae-hoon’s Devils is John Woo’s 1997 Face/Off. While not an exact one-to-one correlation, the two are similar enough that it’s definitely worth a mention and provides a good idea of what to expect. Both revolve around a cop and a serial killer who swap bodies and the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse, though Kim’s film works more in thriller territory than Woo’s bonkers action realm. None of this is meant to be dismissive, and though they walk similar lines, Devils does enough by the end to differentiate itself and make excellent an intriguing use of its core concept.
It’s hard to make a movie about two people alone in a car compelling. It’s been done, but unfortunately for Sympathy for the Devil, that’s not one of the film’s strong suits. Even Nicolas Cage fully let off the leash to riff and ramble and devour scenery and rant about the Mucous Man sprinkling boogers into his childhood nose isn’t enough to make this interesting or save an otherwise tepid, humdrum thriller.
Wait, it’s been a year already? I guess that’s what happens when time loses all meaning. The good news, however, is that since a year has passed it’s already time for the 2023 installment of the Fantasia Film Festival in ye olde Montreal.
