VIQ - Red Night

Ready or Not

It's difficult to not immediately compare Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's Ready or Not to Adam Wingard's 2011 stunner You're Next. Both films feature an Australian actress (both veterans of the never-ending seaside soap opera Home and Away) racing around a massive mansion pursued by murderous in-laws armed with crossbows. In her Wingard directed showcase, Sharni Vinson had to cope with shrieking subordinates and an ever-changing landscape of intergenerational loyalties. Samara Weaving's Grace is less encumbered, obliged to slink around an unfamiliar household while still wearing the remains of her wedding dress. Where Vinson got to tap into an expertise for mangling (one that no film since has expected of the actress), Weaving instead runs an emotional gamut, scrunching up her makeup model good looks as she forces her shredded gown though a succession of shocks and snares. Of the two, Ready or Not proves to be the lighter proposition. Its characters are caricatured and confused rather than sexually deviant trust fund children who climb all over each other while their mother rots inches from their rut. As well, and despite a large cast of bumbling oafs, Ready or Not does not adopt the tick 'em off structure that so electrified You're Next either. Grace's initiations into the pacts that underline the fortunes of her husband's parlour game obsessed family are instead centered around a harried avoidance. Ready or Not then greedily holds onto its ingrates and cack-handed buffoons, denying Grace a piecemeal vengeance just so her tormentors can suddenly ripen during the thwarted ritual that closes the film.

Daði Freyr - Whole Again

ＪＰＪジェイ・ピー - Wave Sequence

The Transformers #1 (UK) by Geoff Senior

Emil Rottmayer - Burn

Evil Dead Rise

Cursed with a wraparound that sets up precisely nothing of interest and a toothy volume of the Necronomicon that looks like it's escaped from Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter sequel (presumably the many rubbery DVD special editions issued by Anchor Bay have rendered the original design quaint in the eyes of these filmmakers), Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise is, otherwise, an excellent modern update of tape era horror. Rather than have a gang of semi-strangers abandon themselves to a rundown cabin in the deepest darkest woods, Rise builds itself around a single-parent family's attempts to escape a dilapidated apartment complex. These victims are not brought together by strange social obligation or misbegotten romantic overtures, they are all, instead, bonded in blood. These deeper connections trap them in cracked rooms, demanding that they fight and fight until their dying breath. So, after a sacred burial site is disturbed by a crate-digging teenager (the mausoleum in question explicitly cross-pollinating Sam Raimi's more animistic mayhem with the strained Judeo-Christian efforts to constrain it), a particularly cruel demon is unleashed into this mouldering would-be demolition site. 

Writer-director Cronin uses this atypical, for this series at least, set-up as a way to pick and prod at a household's worth of strained relationships. A pair of prickly teenagers aside, Alyssa Sutherland's Ellie, the mother in this group, feels abandoned by her sister. Lily Sullivan's Beth, the sibling in question, has sacrificed her own personal life (or perhaps more accurately, the familial aspect of it) in her efforts to climb the ladder in the concert touring industry. This ambition, clearly dear to Beth, is summed up in stark, reproachful language by Ellie. Remarks that, given how the building's other residents refer to Beth, Ellie does not keep to herself. In the original Raimi films, the possessed bodies of former friends and lovers were transformed into engines of pure torment. This violent mockery goes beyond just humorous torture in Cronin's instalment. The afflicted creatures attacking the ever-dwindling survivors are not simply spirits puppeteering the meat of a lost family member, they're an intelligence that has sunk into the memories and prejudices of their hosts, able to vomit up insults that genuinely sting. Beth clearly does believe she has failed in her obligations as both a sister and as an Aunt. Rise's Deadites never let her hear the end of it. 

Samia - Sea Lions

ADMO - Always

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Disney's Marvel films no longer need to introduce or describe their heroes. We're so deep into the never-ending machinations of the various phases that the idea of a central character has become outmoded or even useless. Rather than just focus on either of the title heroes, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania also has to find space and axis for Michelle Pfeiffer's quantum cast away Janet Van Dyne, Michael Douglas' ant enthusiast Hank Pym, and Kathryn Newton as Cassandra Lang, Ant-Man's ebullient daughter. This overabundance of gallantry can't help but affect the basic language of Peyton Reed's film: shots and assembly must account for several distinct and constantly evolving perspectives, often in the same scene. Take this group-based coverage and add to it a fantastical sub-atomic realm that must be created with purely digital tools and you have a film that often feels unduly synthetic and theatrical in its presentation. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being directed at a mise-en-scène that feels innately disconnected from human view and touch. We're seeing a foreground space of abandoned actors having to imagine their immediate surroundings while a cauldron of background information swirls behind them. Quantumania is built to be fantastical but it's not a psychedelia any one of the onscreen people seem to be actively experiencing. 

Division Street - Reflections (feat. VIQ)

Ratboys - Black Earth, WI

Ryu by Quasimodox

Adieu Aru - Innocence

Cat Chaser

A film entirely lacking in a main character who behaves decisively. Instead larcenous events spin out of control with multiple unclarified players appearing, out-of-the-blue, then disappearing just as quickly. Occasionally, these roomy suits find the time to hassle Peter Weller's laid-back former marine before they permanently exit the proceedings. Adapted from Elmore Leonard's 1982 novel, Cat Chaser initially proposes an American soldier traumatised by his participation in the Dominican Civil War who has become fixated upon a young woman who he believes saved his life. The film begins with a glimpse of these deeply internalised events: the memories of Weller's George Moran are a fast cut black-and-white montage that adopts the frenzied visual language of an embedded war reporter. The camera of cinematographer Anthony B Richmond crowds at the feet of this soldier as he fires heedlessly at rooftops, our perspective that of a cowering journalist pinned down by unseen assailants. 

Fleeting and barely intelligible as anything other than vivid (but bullet point) trauma, this nightmare is one of the few moments where the manic hand of director Abel Ferrara feels truly detectable. Sweat-inducing night terrors barely established, the film then abandons itself to staid and leisurely noir, overseen by an elderly, omniscient voice-over that often works against the hacked-up highlights that are appearing on screen. Despite a striking opening gambit Cat Chaser almost instantly becomes a film preoccupied with voluminous hotel rooms and the rigid bodies that inhabit them. The smart aleck clip of Leonard's dialogue is broadcasting but it doesn't have any of the author's moment-to-moment intrigue to anchor it. Another sign of life does (eventually) make itself known though, just as the central swindle has begun to circle the drain. Charles Durning's overripe henchman Jiggs Scully discovers in himself a streak of real cruelty: a gloating murderous smugness exacerbated by whispering pistols and his proximity to suitcases filled with folded fortune. 

The Smashing Pumpkins - Starla

Forhill - Wither

Ben Kenobi by Artyom Trakhanov

Scream VI

It seems churlish to criticise a Scream sequel for being so relentlessly self-referential. After all, the entire series is built out of its characters' acute awareness that the slasher movies they have experienced as viewers can now be used as ammunition against the costumed assailants trying to stab them. The frazzled lectures of each film's terminally aware film freak then function as pitch meetings: the fiction itself speaking to its audience about how they can expect events to be framed from that point on. They either lay out all the twists and turns, with an ironic inflection, or firmly establish a daunting step-by-step that will then be subverted. By Scream VI though, co-directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, this sustained commitment to metatextual reproduction has transformed into navel-gazing. Despite a New York setting, this is a strangely routine sequel. An instalment happy to churn, adoringly, through the sights and sounds of its own immediate predecessors rather than, say, the 1970s and 1980s horror films that defined the (by now long forgotten) tape rental era. So while Wes Craven's Scream 2 might have featured a sequence based around screenwriter Kevin Williamson's memories of Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Scream VI simply regurgitates the invincible supporting cast and university setting of its own ancient ancestor, Scream 2.

Moose Dawa - Fantasi