The Invisible Man

James Whale's The Invisible Man is a delinquent's delight, a film completely disinterested in anything other than the chaos perpetrated by a mad man who cannot be seen. Played by Claude Rains, Dr. Jack Griffin has toiled in secret, discovering a way to make his body disappear. This boon thanks, in part, to an Indian drug with uncommonly powerful bleaching abilities. These experiments have rendered him permanently transparent, with an antidote for this affliction just beyond the good doctor's scientific grasp. Although griffin's stuffier former colleagues talk up the psychosis associated with the miracle drug that forms the basis of his studies, there's ample evidence here that simply being beyond any conventional sense of redress have allowed this man to completely unravel. 

Whether wrapped in gauze or animating a pair of stolen trousers, Griffin can be heard ranting and raving like a lunatic. Rains' voice is a thundering, ever-present instrument that squats over the soundtrack and overenunciates every syllable available to it. His booming sentences register as a series of jabs and swipes; a tongue that clatters like a machinegun aimed at anyone unfortunate enough to be sharing space with him. What makes Griffin's mania even more entertaining though is the overt cloddishness of his victims: the citizens of the town he terrorises are slow-witted and screeching; the police who attempt to trap him are similarly clumsy and doltish. These dragnets offer absolutely zero amusement when measured against an amoral spectre who is perfectly happy to crater the heads of choking policeman. Even Griffin's contemporaries pale in comparison. So-called equals, such as William Harrigan's Dr. Kemp, can do nothing but tremble at the ungodly terror that is able to breeze in and out of their homes. 

The Specials - Ghost Town (Extended Version)

Hookjaw by John McCrea

Caribou - Honey

Arachnophobia

Not satisfied with the alien malevolence implied by the sneering confidence of your average house spider, director Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia, written by Don Jakoby and Wesley Strick, imposes a hierarchical, hive-based structure upon these creepy crawlies. For, you see, somewhere in Venezuela, deep in the core of a table-top mountain, there exists a tree that is home to dozens of species of undiscovered butterfly and a generalissimo spider that can pump out its own, subordinate colony. Setting aside the kind of farcical war on drugs-era alarm that a South American import could, slowly and methodically, infiltrate small town America, Arachnophobia is still unusually strict about how it separates its villain, in this instance a terrifyingly fertile prehistoric spider, and its many rosy-cheeked victims. The spiderling scions sent out from the collapsing barn of Jeff Daniels' newly rehoused GP are not only pure, prowling evil but seem to be laser-target at the elderly. 

These adventurous and resoundingly unsympathetic arthropods knit themselves into an older lady's lamp, or they trample their way into the abundant snacks of an aging mortician, then lie in wait to deliver their deadly venom. The elimination of the more doddery inhabitants of this picturesque, Californian village coincides with the arrival of Daniels' Dr. Jennings and, perhaps more crucially, his snubbing by a mummified practitioner who had promised this San Francisco import the inheritance of his medical beat. This would seem to be a persistent source of comedic exasperation for Jennings, but this doesn't quit pan out. Although a Doctor Death label is briefly proposed by his cagier neighbours, it fades into the background once secondary characters like the late Julian Sands' softly spoken entomologist or John Goodman's bug exterminator begin gobbling up everybody's attention. Although handsomely photographed by Mikael Salomon, Arachnophobia is a touch too genteel to really dazzle. Like many of its Amblin stablemates, the film is a high concept in desperate need of the neurotic mania that a director like Steven Spielberg (or Joe Dante) is able to, effortlessly, access. 

Bert Jansch - Needle of Death

The Monster by Mizmaru Kawahara

MF DOOM - ?

The Invasion

Even without the knowledge that director Oliver Hirschbiegel's original cut of The Invasion was deemed too dull by producer Joel Silver (then taken back to the drawing board by new writers Lana and Lilly Wachowski, as well as reshoot director James McTeigue), the finished product betrays an obvious feeling of bifurcation. Once a rolling start is packed away to be returned to later, introductory scenes are icy and tinged with misanthropy, as if preparing to detail a microscopic invasion using the syntax of a self-satisfied political thriller. Despite the dryness of the acronyms firing around, Nicole Kidman's prescription dispensing psychiatrist is shot to be luminous; cinematographer Rainer Klausmann arranging the frame around the light and heat rolling off this star. In the non-harried pieces of the film that can (presumably) be attributable to Hirschbiegel, Kidman betrays the blonde, Hitchcockian glamour of a Tippi Hedren or a Kim Novak. Later, when the film has defaulted to a checkpoint sprint with dozens of drone people hanging off a speeding sedan, Kidman is green and frazzled. Sunken deeply into a diet of Mountain Dew and pearlescent poppers as she struggles to stay awake. The Invasion then is trapped between these two clashing wavelengths: one frequency tuned to the buttoned-up description of a planet plunging into somnambulism. The other a much trashier take on human paranoia that allows Kidman's Dr. Carol to subject neighbourhood children to alarming head trauma or mow down advancing supermarket employees while her perspective slips in and out of focus. Neither element feels entertaining enough to really stake a claim on this film though. Instead, the two incompatible tones work against each other, undermining this strangely pod positive piece. 

VIQ - I See

Electronic Visions - Forest Language

Amityville II: The Possession

Director Damiano Damiani's Amityville II: The Possession doesn't sit around. As soon as the Montelli family move into the film's fateful Dutch Colonial residence, the evil spirits within begin their campaign of terror, slamming doors and daubing lurid graffiti all over bedroom walls. Burt Young, as this family's father, is something of a stumbling block for these apparitions though. Rather than twig to the supernatural happenings in his new household, Young's Anthony instead batters at his youngest children, lashing them with his belt and snarling cruel invective at his screaming, defeated wife. Before long his oldest son, played by Jack Magner, is possessed by a leering entity but it's clear that this family was already shaking itself apart long before demons intervened. Anthony is a tyrannical presence, using his heft and unrepentant manner to dominant his cowed family. In that sense Magner's Sonny is positioned as something of a corrective influence in the household, at least initially. His mother and sisters seem to recognise that Sonny is the only one of them who will be able to summon up the physical strength to put this horrid little man in his place. Although Damiani's film builds its latter half around a fairly entertaining exorcism and James Olson's guilt-ridden priest, it's the first portion of Amityville II that leaves the strongest impression: the strange sympathy, or adulation, that Rutanya Alda's Dolores and Diane Franklin's Trish have for Sonny. Both mother and daughter consider him in ways that are, very obviously, completely unstuck from typical, familial affections. 

Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas

The Bride of Frankenstein by Mizmaru Kawahara

Lucy in Disguise - Digital Campfire

Exhuma

Writer-director Jang Jae-hyun's Exhuma begins with a spiteful, intrafamilial haunting. An elder ancestor, whose agitated spirit apparently loathes the place where it has been laid to rest, exerts a cross-continental hold on its descendants. This bony grip afflicts the children of Kim Jae-cheol's Park Ji-yong, smothering out their young lives just as they are struggling into the world. And so this wealthy, Korean American real estate developer gathers a team in South Korea - including Oldboy's Choi Min-ski as a feng shui expert and a strikingly composed shaman played by Kim Go-eun - to excavate a remote gravesite, overlooking the North, in the hopes that this will appease the jealous spirit. Told on bitter grounds that teem with supernatural pests, Exhuma strikes an unusual note when describing its ghosts. Jang's film is less interested in the interpersonal strife of this autophagic family than expected, leaving damning tales of abuse or neglect unspoken. Instead, Exhuma prefers to examine the kind of rotten bastard that would smother its descendants in their cots on a much broader canvas, one that encompasses the destruction of Korea as a unified country and this great-grandparent's collaboration with the insidious, colonial designs of a foreign power. Jang's film is told in a series of ceremonies, each given power and meaning by those practising these many, clashing rituals. Unlike, say, The Wailing, in Exhuma we are always in the company of experts, all of whom are desperately trying to make sense of a haunting that seems unending, or perhaps more accurately, unquenchable. 

MF DOOM - Red and Gold

The Wolf Man by Mizmaru Kawahara

Bert Jansch - Black Water Side

Type O Negative - (We Were) Electrocute

Freddy vs. Jason

Structurally and stylistically, Freddy vs. Jason is far closer to the A Nightmare on Elm Street side of its family than anything hailing from Camp Crystal Lake. So, as well as focusing on hallucinations and the special effects showcases they can facilitate, this film's prospective victims are much more emotionally damaged than the mosquito country regulars. Instead of stoner teens knowingly circling the drain, Freddy vs. Jason's cast are tranquilised, middle-class children; double-damned by parents who conjured up a vengeful ghost then lulled their offspring into an addled fog in their attempts to thwart it. This idea of unwilling subordination extends to the title characters as well, with Ken Kirzinger's Jason Voorhees tricked into the role of an understudy, toiling on behalf of a truly noxious interpretation of Freddy Krueger. 

As if to vanquish all memory of the quipping slasher that found purchase in 80s pop culture, Robert Englund's movie maniac is re-introduced in a sequence that elevates the paedophilic underpinning of the character from unspoken (but obvious) into vivid, repulsive text. It's not enough to imply that Krueger has murdered a little girl then cremated her body in his furnace, we have to see him licking a copy of her school portrait before stamping the image into his serial killer scrapbook. The uncomfortable darkness emanating from Krueger, which elsewhere demands that a father jab his tongue at his daughter's screaming mouth, is offset by the comparatively humdrum fantasies coursing through Jason Voorhees' skeletal remains. Six feet under, Jason dreams of chasing topless co-eds through endless woods, their flight thwarted by the kind of ineffectual motion found in real-life night terrors. 

In director Ronny Yu's film, Jason is a violent, lumbering expression of childhood helplessness. Even freed from memories in which this physically disabled boy is bullied to his death, Jason's feedback loop is one premised on expectation and denigration. His mother, a screeching phantom conjured by Krueger, screams at him to redress her own demise while Freddy himself is positioned as a repellent, patriarchal influence that demands Jason labour, thanklessly, for his new master's gain. Yu, a Hong Kong film industry veteran responsible for The Postman Strikes Back and The Bride with White Hair, approaches these creatures with neither the scraping awe of a fan or the bored indifference of a jobbing director. He's here to work, finding new perspectives on everything from the killers themselves to the steaming environments they inhabit. In one instance, when Krueger has an advantage over a soaked, cowering Jason, Yu and cinematographer Fred Murphy dial up the shadows then blasts Elm Street's broiled menace with greens, transforming Freddy into Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West.

Similarly, the tracks of repetition that have been worn into Jason's decayed mind are framed here as almost Sisyphean in their monotonous and unending futility. While at the mercy of a gloating Krueger, Jason retreats into his safe space: imagining himself relentlessly gathering the bodies of brutalised, naked teens only to hurl these cadavers into an infinite void that lingers just beyond the confines of his well-stocked wardrobe. This en suite exists in the kind of comfortably well-off, suburban boy's bedroom that this engorged, single-parent child has, likely, never actually inhabited. A dream inside a dream then. For Jason the nascent twang of an adolescent sexuality - thwarted not only Jason's childhood death but by an overbearing, nagging mother - has curdled. The drive to embrace and hold onto someone has been transformed into something horrible and inhuman. Similarly, an idea of clashing objectives, to be expected in a film titled Freddy vs. Jason, is expressed here in stronger terms than a simple, blood-splattered battle. These two invincible sex criminals track in on this film's unusually unhappy cast (cosmetic surgery and substance abuse are recurring fascinations), each vying to be that special someone who will snuff out their miserable little lives. 

Snoop Doggy Dogg - Murder was the Case

The Invisible Man by Mizmaru Kawahara

Dr. Dre & Ice Cube - Natural Born Killaz

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D

Rather than plot a fresh excursion into Konami's blighted burg, writer-director MJ Bassett's Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is a straight follow-up to Christophe Gans' 2006 film. This explicit connection means that Revelation is conceptually hobbled, forced to build upon a big screen scenario that had already been, bloodily, settled. So, even though the fanatical citizens of this tephra-town were previously revealed as tormented ghosts using a scarred, thwarted saviour to hang onto our reality, Bassett's take ties itself in knots to make them a plotting, physical threat, able to send out scions that flatter and cajole. Still, this is a horror sequel. Of course it picks at the bones of its predecessors rather than try something a little more daring. Unfortunately, Revelation's issues don't end there. Whereas Gans was able to conjure up an all-consuming feeling of concussed dread, Bassett's sequel defaults to a boring, syrupy skulk through a haunted house attraction. Teenager Heather Mason, as played by Adelaide Clemens, isn't as compelling as Radha Mitchell's single-minded mother either. Mitchell's interpretation of the sullen line-readings found in the early Silent Hill games was equally flat but still betrayed an unusually intense determination. The actress therefore able to communicate an idea of being spellbound and unable to turn away from the task at hand. That performance was an agreeable reading of a video game character, a state of being that demands a person consistently and willingly place themselves in incredible danger. Clemens enjoys no such detail in her direction. 

Jeff Danna & Akira Yamaoka - Armless / The Missionary Attacks

Dracula by Mizmaru Kawahara

Eagle Eyed Tiger - Annihilation

Jeff Danna & Akira Yamaoka - Sanity

Silent Hill

Although a significant departure from the themes and events of the video games being adapted, director Christophe Gans' Silent Hill does capture something of the actual, linguistic experience of a player puzzling through this type of interactive story. Screenwriter Roger Avery even apes the structural and narrative devices employed by both Konami's Team Silent and the similar, largely Japanese development studios who specialised in survival horror during the PlayStation 2 era. To wit: expositional flashbacks instantly impose themselves on the unfolding action following the activation of some inscrutable trigger and Radha Mitchell's despairing mother, Rose, finds herself in a safe, congratulatory space after having surmounted a climactic danger. Keys are also crucial to Rose's basic progress within an environment that is smothered with low resolution textures and shifts in then out of relative safety. These solutions are scavenged and context-sensitive; premised around the tiny, everyday inventory that Rose is able to hold. Of course, these items are then immediately lost after their use. Whereas other video game adaptations work hard to translate the sprawling mess of interactive entertainment into a tight, three-act structure, Silent Hill instead attempts to emulate the dissociative quality experienced when playing Japanese video games that are themselves inspired by an American film or television series. Those messy, parapsychological doomsdays that have been transcribed and reinterpreted back-and-forth between two languages that read in completely different directions. Gans' film, which centres around a Bible Belt town's revulsion at the idea of a messiah born out of wedlock, even finds time for the listless wandering that occurs when players are unfamiliar with their brand new maze. 

Jeff Danna & Akira Yamaoka - Night Drive

Spawn by Peach Momoko

Madara 1000 - DDDDDD

Deadpool & Wolverine

Ryan Reynolds, who is already plastered all over Disney+ with his Welcome to Wrexham documentary series, finally makes his presence known in the big screen Marvel universe with Deadpool & Wolverine, a long-promised meet-up that keeps some plates spinning for a cinematic slate that is, we are repeatedly told here, no longer in the rudest of health. Rather than immediately have Reynolds' talkative (or annoying, if you prefer) avatar brushing shoulders with what remains of The Avengers, director Shaun Levy and his co-writers, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, and Reynolds again have concocted a slightly more metatextual premise for their crossover event, one that uses the Whovian claptrap present in cancelled streaming serial Loki to draw in characters from films that were either made when Marvel was happily licensing off any property it could to stay solvent or released under regimes now obliterated by enormous, monopoly-flouting mergers. 

So, as well as an eternally reliable Hugh Jackman essaying a particularly grumpy take on The Wolverine, Jennifer Garner's Elektra is wished back into being, along with Dafne Keen's X-23 (from Logan) and Channing Tatum as a version of Gambit that never quite made it out of development hell. All are welcome distractions from the relentless motor-mouthing - particularly Tatum who ably demonstrates the difference between genuine, comedic irreverence and a strain of humour, otherwise omnipresent in this film, in which the audience often feels like they've been taken hostage by a brand ambassador - but it's the film's use of Wesley Snipes as an older, grouchier Blade that turns out to be the biggest double-edged sword. Of course, in the week that Kris Kristofferson has passed away, it's wonderful to see Snipes back in his tacti-Goth get up, now with a fine line of grey creeping up the knife-edge of his hairline, but the brief machete-twirling seen here is not an adequate resolution for a performance and persona that has cast such a massive, sun darkening shadow. 

As Deadpool & Wolverine rattles ever closer to a resolution, the false expectations engendered by its premise become more apparent, even glaring. The fourth-wall breaking muddies the conceptual water: are these heroes refugees from their own, individual franchises or orphaned ideas tossed off from our higher, indifferent reality? Is the plane of existence that we, the viewer, inhabit something that can be accessed by the onscreen characters? If Deadpool can directly address the audience, shouldn't his allies harbour some resentment for, if not the cinemagoer that did not turn up for each of their individual instalments, then perhaps the executive regimes that so mishandled their incredible destinies? The crumbling edifice of the 20th Century Fox logo is frequent background flavour in a topographical realisation of a desktop recycle bin but is that really enough to sate our collective bloodlust? Basically, is The Daywalker cleaving David S. Goyer, the writer-director of New Line's Blade: Trinity, in twaine a realistic expectation for post-modern, early-2000s nostalgia bait or is it merely the delusional desire of this terminally chippy weirdo? 

Regardless, Ryan Reynolds' latest charm offensive absolutely peters out, content to build for itself yet another world-destroying machine then have it be destroyed. Like a great many Marvel films then, Deadpool & Wolverine peaks while the credits are rolling. Although, unusually, the entertainment being extracted here isn't premised on even more completely unrealistic (or, in their more recent instances, unlikely to be referred to again) expectations. Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) by Green Day plays over interlaced B-roll footage from the Fox era and, for once, it feels like the shattering of motion picture kayfabe is being leveraged in a genuinely affectionate, rather than cynically advantageous, way. As a device, these behind-the-scenes glimpses are typically limited to comedies, deployed as a way to reassure anyone watching that of course the crew were absolutely delighted to be on set that day when the highest paid actor decided to waste everybody's time by ad-libbing. Here though, the effect is sincere and cumulative, tracking through a couple of decades worth of both success and failure; most of which hinge upon the unfailing likeability being broadcast by one Hugh Jackman. A superhero actor who, at this point, is surely second only to Christopher Reeve in terms of being able to remain dignified, even immune, when surrounded by hare-brained nonsense.

Geordie Greep - The New Sound

Frank's Monz by Buster Moody

Burial - Dreamfear

Walter Rizzati - Tema Bambino

The House by the Cemetery

Free association filmmaking from writer-director Lucio Fulci that combines the creepy au pair of The Omen with the housebound, psychic maelstrom of The Shining to little actual effect. These lifts aren't conceptual fragments that fellow screenwriters Dardano Sacchetti and Giorgio Mariuzzo have plotted their story around, they're blaring instruments that are (infrequently) deployed to keep the film's wheels spinning. Ania Pieroni's babysitter may gaze longingly at her employer, Paolo Malco's Dr Norman Boyle, but Fulci's film has neither the time nor the inclination to suggest the beginnings of an affair, even when it becomes clear that a previous tenant of the building they inhabit brutally murdered his own young mistress. Lucasian rhyming couplets be damned then. 

Similarly, when Pieroni's Ann wakes early to robotically smear the blood that has seeped out of the cellar and into the kitchen, it may seem that she is being driven by some unseen, supernatural force to cover their tracks but, if she is, this lingering horror isn't above immediately trapping this governess under the building so she can be mauled by a mummified monster. Set in and around a decaying, Boston mansion, The House by the Cemetery is packed with clashing, contradictory ideas; all of which are being tipped into a steaming, maggoty slop, faster than they can congeal. As with The Beyond, whose original, Italian release was less than six months before this feature, Cemetery's stand-out moment is a truly tremendous animal attack. This sequence, in which a plump bat attaches itself to Norman's hand, is both alarmingly violent and, in terms of the filmmaking techniques used to detail the assault, massively distended. The fanged ambush goes on and on, battering back-and-forth between treacly repulsion and a more comedic kind of over-indulgence. 

Walter Rizzati - I Remember