Michael Walters
Notes from the peninsula
Afire
Director: Christian Petzold
Release year: 2023
Writer Leon travels with his friend Felix to a remote house to finish his book. Felix’s cousin, Nadja, unexpectedly joins them, as well as local lifeguard Devid, and Leon’s obsession with his work over all else becomes a source of humour and friction. When Leon’s publisher arrives, forest fires are threatening the house, and Leon has to face reality.
Petzold’s last film, Undine, made my favourites-of-the-year list in 2022, and the lead actress in that, Paula Beer, plays Nadja here. Leon’s pretentious, self-absorbed manner initially shocks the sensitive Felix, but Felix knows the power of intuition and connection, and he thrives when he escapes Leon’s baleful eye and brings Devid and Nadja into his holiday—whereas Leon just wants to be alone. Leon is so heavy with ambition he can’t write anything good, but Felix’s light touch brings a grace to his photography that Leon refuses to see. Leon’s envy and fear of failure is crushing.
Felix finds love with Devid, but Leon is too afraid of vulnerability to be a friend to Nadja. Nadja persists in trying to open Leon up to what’s going on around him—he is comically unlikeable right up to the final scenes. The fear of actual death (rather than of not being successful) seems to finally break through his armour of unpleasantness and brings a small redemption. Life comes before art, kids.
Black Bag
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Release year: 2025
George works for a British intelligence agency in London and is tipped off someone in the service is trying to sell a deadly secret. Known for his tenacity, he quickly assembles a list of suspects and begins to unpick their various motivations, but his wife, Kathryn, is also on the list.
It’s great to see a highly-skilled, middle-aged couple in a spy film, helped no end by the fact they are both supremely sexy in their own ways. George is relentless and loyal with a knack for spotting liars. Kathryn is an ambitious department head who used to be a computer hacker. Setting out to find the traitor, George gathers the suspects for a memorable dinner party that involves a drug-laced curry, and the resulting emotional chaos is a wonder to behold. At heart, it’s a portrait of a marriage, but one within a profession that requires everyone to be liars.
It’s a simple film in some ways, a mix of spy film and whodunit, but it feels sophisticated in Soderbergh’s hands, with a layer of luxury that comes with having Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in the lead roles. The whole cast is top-notch, and the script smartly allows some wonderful dry humour to sneak in when you don’t expect it. It’s a brilliant little film. Simple things done with great skill are good for the soul.
Mickey 17
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Release year: 2025
Mickey Barnes owes money to sadistic loan shark Darius Blank. To avoid a tortuous death, Micky enrols on a colonising mission to a new planet as an ‘expendable’, a person digitally copied so they can be endlessly recreated after kamikaze scientific tasks. But Mickey 17 doesn’t die before Mickey 18 is created, which makes them both question everything.
The trailer gave strong cartoonish comedy vibes, and that’s true of the film as a whole, but it’s also dark and icky with a twist of philosophy and a relentless anti-capitalism message. The lack of subtlety is deliberate. The monstrously narcissistic mission head, Kenneth Marshall, has the mannerisms of Donald Trump mixed with the space-conquering seed-spreading racism of Elon Musk. The mission is filled with MAGA surrogates. In the script, this must have been a roll of the dice that Trump would lose, but it feels despairing in our current reality, and more like a helpless fantasy.
Nasha is a great character, full of life, a mixture of dark and light, and a vibrant mirror for Mickeys 17 and 18. All the actors bring something unique and cartoonish to their roles, which makes the grim universe they’re inhabiting more bearable to be in for two plus hours—but they all treat Mickey as expendable. I enjoyed much of it, and the central foursome of Mickey 17/18, Nasha and Kai keep things emotionally interesting, but it goes on too long saying the same thing.
Seen, Read: 2024
- FILMS IN ALL CAPS (C if in cinema)
- Books, by author, on end date (with start date)
- Short stories in italics
In the spirit of Steven Soderbergh’s media list:
- 01.01 SILENT NIGHT
- 02.01 Assembly, Natasha Brown (01.01)
- 06.01 Infidelities, Kirsty Gunn (31.12)
- 07.01 PRISCILLA (C)
- 10.01 OLD HENRY
- 13.01 SISU
- 14.01 THE ACCOUNTANT
- 21.01 THE HOLDOVERS (C)
- 23.01 SHOWING UP
- 27.01 ALL OF US STRANGERS (C)
- 30.01 SLY
- 07.02 ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL
- 11.02 ARGYLLE (C)
- 13.02 August Blue, Deborah Levy (07.01)
- 15.02 THE ZONE OF INTEREST (C)
- 17.02 AMERICAN FICTION (C)
- 24.02 APOCALYPSE NOW
- 04.03 THE KILLING
- 06.03 CASABLANCA
- 08.03 THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR
- 10.03 DUNE: PART TWO (C)
- 11.03 HOLLYWOOD DREAMS & NIGHTMARES: THE ROBERT ENGLUND STORY
- 13.03 THE TASTE OF THINGS (C)
- 16.03 NO HARD FEELINGS
- 19.03 BREATHLESS
- 20.03 PERFECT DAYS (C)
- 21.03 BLUE JAY
- 23.03 GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE
- 24.03 GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE (C)
- 27.03 IMMACULATE (C); The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks (18.03)
- 29.03 CELL
- 30.03 THE BEEKEEPER
- 31.03 GODZILLA × KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE (C); Luster, Raven Leilani (29.03)
- 05.04 KUNG FU PANDA 4 (C)
- 07.04 GOLDENEYE (C)
- 10.04 THE TOMB OF LIGEIA
- 14.04 CIVIL WAR (C)
- 15.04 THE PIGEON TUNNEL
- 16.04 The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories, Edgar Allan Poe (14.03)
- 20.04 ABIGAIL (C)
- 22.04 TAKEN
- 24.04 DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)
- 25.04 ZOMBIES CREEPING FLESH
- 26.04 MONOLITH; A Man Named Doll, Jonathan Ames (17.04)
- 27.04 HOUSE OF USHER (1960)
- 28.04 MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (C)
- 04.05 X; PEARL
- 06.05 THE FALL GUY (C)
- 11.05 Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land’s End, ed. Joan Passey (08.04)
- 13.05 ROLLING THUNDER
- 15.05 You Were Never Really Here, Jonathan Ames (15.05)
- 17.05 STEVE! (MARTIN) A DOCUMENTARY IN 2 PIECES
- 19.05 BLUE BLOOD
- 19.05 KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (C)
- 20.05 The Sea Inside Me, Sarah Dobbs (16.05)
- 23.05 FALLEN LEAVES
- 25.05 RESULTS
- 26.05 FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (C)
- 31.05 All Fours, Miranda July (26.05)
- 03.06 LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL
- 04.06 CASINO ROYALE (C)
- 06.06 DARIO ARGENTO: PANICO
- 08.06 THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE
- 12.06 A Far Cry From Kensington, Muriel Spark (03.06)
- 13.06 THE CAT O’NINE TAILS
- 15.06 GODZILLA MINUS ONE
- 16.06 INSIDE OUT 2
- 17.06 FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET
- 18.06 THE GODFATHER (C)
- 19.06 Parade, Rachel Cusk (12.06)
- 21.06 DEEP RED
- 06.07 SUSPIRIA (1977); MAXXXINE (C)
- 07.07 A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE (C)
- 08.07 INFERNO (1980)
- 09.07 TENEBRE
- 12.07 UNDER PARIS
- 13.07 DESPICABLE ME 4 (C)
- 17.07 TWISTERS (C)
- 21.07 FLY ME TO THE MOON (C)
- 22.07 In Ascension, Martin MacInnes (09.07)
- 23.07 LONGLEGS (C)
- 27.07 PHENOMENA; Double Fault, Lionel Shriver (27.07)
- 28.07 DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE (C)
- 31.07 OPERA
- 07.08 TWO EVIL EYES
- 10.08 BORDERLANDS (C)
- 11.08 TRAP (C)
- 12.08 TRAUMA
- 14.08 SHARK SKIN MAN AND PEACH HIP GIRL
- 15.08 Seraglio, Graham Swift
- 16.08 The Tunnel, Graham Swift
- 17.08 TWISTER; The Lonely Songs of Lauren Dorr, George R.R. Martin
- 18.08 ALIEN: ROMULUS (C); Sun and Moon, Katherine Mansfield
- 20.08 THE STENDHAL SYNDROME
- 22.08 CHILDREN OF MEN
- 28.08 Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, Terrance Dicks (27.08)
- 01.09 JAWS (C)
- 09.09 UNRELATED
- 14.09 BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE (C)
- 15.09 LEE (C)
- 21.09 HIT MAN
- 27.09 A HISTORY OF HORROR
- 28.09 WHITE HOUSE DOWN
- 29.09 WOLFS
- 01.10 Alison, Lizzy Stewart (20.09)
- 06.10 JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX (C)
- 13.10 GLADIATOR (C)
- 18.10 BLOOD AND BLACK LACE
- 31.10 The Last Supper, Rachel Cusk
- 03.11 PIG
- 04.11 BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA
- 10.11 PADDINGTON IN PERU (C)
- 12.11 ANORA (C)
- 13.11 THE CAR
- 15.11 AMERICAN MOVIE
- 16.11 ENYS MEN
- 17.11 THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER
- 19.11 DRACULA
- 21.11 THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
- 22.11 GOTHIC
- 24.11 GLADIATOR 2
- 25.11 SLEEPLESS
- 28.11 THE CARD PLAYER
- 29.11 RED ROOMS
- 30.11 CONCLAVE (C); The Labyrinth, Amanda Lohrey (23.11)
- 02.12 I SAW THE TV GLOW
- 03.12 THE APPOINTMENT; Next to Nature, Art, Penelope Lively (01.12)
- 04.12 THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS
- 05.12 THE DAY OF THE BEAST
- 07.12 BLITZ
- 08.12 SAINT MAUD
- 09.12 CHRISTMAS BLOODY CHRISTMAS; VIOLENT NIGHT
- 10.12 Orbital, Samantha Harvey (03.12)
- 11.12 SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT
- 14.12 IN A VIOLENT NATURE; ANNA AND THE APOCALYPSE; The First Bad Man, Miranda July (09.12)
- 15.12 NIGHTMARE CITY
- 16.12 Hide and Seek, Dennis Potter (15.12); MANIAC COP
- 21.12 MOTHER OF TEARS
- 22.12 GIALLO
- 22.12 WHAM!
- 23.12 THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
- 23.12 Binary, Michael Crichton (17.12); MADS
- 24.12 TWISTERS
- 25.12 REBEL RIDGE
- 26.12 ARGENTO’S DRACULA
- 27.12 DARIO ARGENTO: PANICO
- 28.12 DARK GLASSES
- 29.12 CUCKOO
- 30.12 THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS
- 31.12 The Music of Chance, Paul Auster (23.12); BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)
Black Christmas
Director: Bob Clark
Release year: 1974
In the days before the Christmas break, a killer breaks into a sorority house and begins to pick off the girls one by one. The girls are also being plagued by obscene phone calls from someone who calls himself Billy. When a concerned parent involves the police, can they find the killer before he kills again?
This film didn’t do well when it was released and was disparaged by critics, but has gone through a reappraisal in recent years as one of the first slashers, after the Italian giallo films of the early seventies but before Halloween. It is well acted with plenty of heart in how the girls are presented, and funny, knowing the younger audience it’s aiming at. The killer, Billy, is disturbing, the effect made almost entirely by voice as he talks to himself in the attic and to the girls on the house phone. His garbled obscenities got under my skin.
Jess, the girl who lasts to the final scenes, is pregnant by a manipulative boyfriend, Peter. She is clear she wants an abortion, and he won’t listen, the outcome of which leads to the semi-ambiguous ending. Billy speaks to Jess the most on the phone, talking about something terrible he once did to a baby, and one reading of the film is that Jess is being tormented by a patriarchal society for her decision to terminate the pregnancy.
It’s a richly layered film with plenty of political meat on its bones for what could have been a cheap thriller for teens.
2024: Films, books, music
More lists! Nine films came out in the UK in 2024 that I gave 5 stars and a heart to on Letterboxd. (A heart means it’s to my particular taste). That rule of nine continued with nine film discoveries, nine books that got my brain engaged, and the nine albums I listened to the most on Apple Music.
My favourite films of 2024 (in order of preference)
- Civil War
- Hit Man
- Red Rooms
- The Taste of Things
- Perfect Days
- Conclave
- Anora
- The Zone of Interest
- In a Violent Nature
My favourite film discoveries (in order of preference)
- Showing Up (2023)
- Monolith (2023)
- Gothic (1986)
- Results (2015)
- The House with Laughing Windows (1976)
- Enys Men (2022)
- Death Race 2000 (1975)
- Old Henry (2021)
- Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Books that pulled me in (in order of reading)
- Assembly, Natasha Brown (2021)
- All Fours, Miranda July (2024)
- A Far Cry from Kensington, Muriel Spark (1988)
- Rare Singles, Benjamin Myers (2024)
- The Labyrinth, Amanda Lohrey (2020)
- Next to Nature, Art, Penelope Lively (1982)
- Orbital, Samantha Harvey (2024)
- Hide and Seek, Dennis Potter (1973)
- The Music of Chance, Paul Auster (1990)
Albums I listened to most on Apple Music (in order of listens)
- Radical Optimism, Dua Lipa
- The Past is Still Alive, Hurray for the Riff Raff
- Tension I/II, Kylie Minogue
- The Ballad of Darren, Blur
- Harry’s House, Harry Styles
- Dear Happy, Gabrielle Aplin
- Snow, Angus & Julia Stone
- The Visitors, ABBA
- Toxicity, System of a Down
Director: Pupi Avati
Release year: 1976
Stefano arrives in a half-empty Italian town at the behest of the mayor to restore a fresco inside a local church. The fresco shows the suffering of St. Sebastiano and was painted by a long-dead artist, Bueno Legnani. The locals seem to always be listening to Stefano’s conversations, and when he has to move from his hotel to a remote local house, he discovers in the attic a tape recording of a man’s voice who he begins to believe is Legnani, sending him down a rabbit hole he might not come out of alive.
Highly recommended on podcasts and online, I had no idea from the title what to expect, but this is impeccably crafted and scuzzy Italian folk horror. There is a yellow tint that makes the viewer feel dirty, and the barren landscape of river inlets, abandoned houses and deserted roads is endlessly unsettling. The fresco looks disturbingly modern in the old church, and the gradual uncovering of morbid details adds to the increasing sense of dread.
It’s described as a giallo, but it’s not. There are few deaths. Instead, there is a skillful ratcheting up of tension through artful use of the camera, the deserted locations, and the script taking its sweet time revealing key details through Stefano’s conversations with local townsfolk. The final fifteen minutes are wild and strange. The quality of the print on Amazon Prime wasn’t great—this deserves to be in HD.
Dario Argento: Panico
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2024
This is the documentary that gave me the idea to watch all of Dario Argento’s films this year, and it was interesting to watch it again at the end of the project. It’s a good inclusion for #31DaysofBlackXmas as well. Knowing the list of Argento’s films in advance made it more of a chore, whereas with #31Days I could twist and pivot as my mood took me. I wish I wasn’t so susceptible to the power of a list. Perhaps keeping it organic and taking some pressure off is something to try in 2025.
The documentary’s conceit is that Argento is going to a hotel for a few weeks to finish writing a manuscript for his next film, which is something he’s done all his life, and a film crew will interview him while he’s there. We see the maestro arrive, and we see him leave, awkwardly and sweetly interacting with the staff all the while. The main section is a series of interviews with him about his life and career, backed up with the views and memories of family members and key collaborators.
What becomes clear is that Dario is a complicated man, and in the first half of his life he carried a lot of anger and competitiveness to be successful because, as he openly says in a seventies interview clip, he wanted to be loved. His mother was a famous film star photographer, and his father was a film producer, Salvatore Argento, who backed his son’s films right up to his death in the late eighties. He seems to have been brought up in great privilege, but also to have a lack that he was always trying to fill. He was a maverick, a risk-taker, a public personality, and he used film as a way to channel his darker instincts.
After his father died, his daughter Asia became a muse, and she starred in many of his later films. Asia’s thoughts on her father and family are the most poignant in the whole documentary. Some of the fire went out of his films in the nineties. Yes, television money became dominant and contracts required less violence, but he was still writing the scripts (with collaborators), and the later films lack the vitality and narrative quality of earlier ones.
There is almost always something to admire in even a disappointing Dario Argento film. Dracula and Giallo are the only true stinkers. He describes his need to continue to make films as an ongoing investigation of the depths inside himself. He seems to have lived the classic Jungian arc of creating a career and family with the first half of his life, then switched to a more inward journey in the second. It’s inspiring.
Cuckoo
Director: Tilman Singer
Release year: 2024
After her mother dies, Gretchen moves with her estranged father’s family to a resort in the German Alps. To stave off boredom, Gretchen takes a job at the resort reception, where she notices the odd behaviour of the residents and of her boss, Herr König.
I don’t want to say much more than that, because it’s a fun story with a few surprising twists. The tone switches skilfully from unsettling to amusing to frightening, but it’s held together by Gretchen’s grounded teenager vibe.
Hunter Schafer is sensational as Gretchen and commands every scene she is in. I loved her facial responses to the increasingly disturbing events, first surprised, then disbelieving, and she always makes sensible decisions. She also plays guitar, has a liaison with a flirty customer, and knows how to use a switchblade. Top drawer heroine.
Dark Glasses
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2022
Diana, a sex worker, is chased by an unknown assailant, leading to a car accident that kills the parents of a young boy and leaves her blind. She slowly adapts to her new life and temporarily takes in the orphaned boy, but the killer returns to finish the job.
This was the final Dario Argento film in my 2024 challenge and an interesting contrast to what’s come before. Giallo was modern, but still had an otherworldly quality because of the flashbacks and Adrien Brody’s energy in his dual performance. Dracula was a straight-up homage to Hammer. Dark Glasses is a straight thriller that feels like it was made today, but includes classic Argento moves—the blind protagonist and child (as in Cat O’ Nine Tails), a random animal attack (see Inferno), a black-gloved killer, and a pounding soundtrack.
This is Argento reckoning with all the people he’s killed in his films, mostly female, and presenting a more empathic view of what it might be like to survive an attack by one of his murderers. Ilenia Pastorelli does an excellent job of playing a woman who goes through incredible trauma only to have it continue when she’s most vulnerable.
I can’t think of an Argento film before this one where we see an actor really act. That’s quite a statement, right? One of the joys of his earlier films are the lightness of the characters while terrible things happen. People show emotions, but his characters don’t go through an arc—they don’t change. The Stendhal Syndrome’s Detective Anna Manni is the closest I can think of, but Asia Argento was young and relatively inexperienced, and her transformation was from sane to insane. Diana’s world is portrayed sensitively and the horrors of her blindness not ignored.
That realism also makes the film less fun. The initial draw of Dario Argento was the wildness, the unexpected, the ideas, the return always to art, theatre, performance, architecture, and the charismatic faces, the variety of characters, the roving camera. Empathy seems to have replaced experimentation, but that can be no surprise in a director who is eighty-four years old. I wonder if he has another film in him?
Argento’s Dracula
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2012
There’s a moment when Rutger Hauer’s Van Helsing arrives two-thirds in and my spirits lifted because perhaps the film could be saved, but the moment he started to say his lines, I knew it was actually a stake through my heart.
There are shades of Phenomena in the wildlife and insects being sometimes sentient, but here they are in league with the villain. This Count Dracula has lots of powers not given to the 1959 Hammer Dracula, and seems closer to the original novel. He can project an image of himself into others’ minds, has telekinesis, can transform into animals, and mesmerise people to do his will.
I wonder what changed between the rather good Mother of Tears in 2007, the troubled (and terrible) Giallo in 2009, and this monstrosity. It was made in 3D, which might explain the bad CGI. Perhaps they were the bits that would have come out of the screen. The scene where Dracula is a seven-foot preying mantis and ripping a man to pieces in a hallway wouldn’t look good in any format. I don’t know what happened. Was there no money? Did something go wrong behind the scenes? What’s the story behind this film?
MadS
Director: David Moreau
Release year: 2024
Romain tries a new drug from his dealer before going to a house party in the suburbs of a French city. On the way he picks up an injured woman covered in bandages who can’t speak and is in distress. From there things get progressively darker as he tries to work out if the drug is playing tricks on his mind or if there is an infectious plague sweeping across the city.
As an older guy, watching young people freak out and lose control of their minds and bodies is upsetting. The performances are naturalistic and the camera follows them closely, over their shoulders, in their faces, constantly moving and making it feel like a found footage film. It looks as if it was shot in one take, moving from house to house by foot, on bikes and in cars. Once you get used to the kinetic style it sweeps you along on its nightmarish current.
The four lead actors are all excellent. Romain’s girlfriend Julie has an extended breakdown in the toilet at a bar that shows how it might feel to see your body become something alien and how the voices of the infection might close in to make you do violent things. It’s disturbing, but also a creative and fun new take on a zombie-style apocalypse.
Director: Terence Fisher
Release year: 1959
Renowned detective Sherlock Holmes sends his friend and helper Doctor Watson to Dartmoor to protect Sir Henry Baskerville, new owner of Baskerville Hall, after his uncle dies in mysterious circumstances. There is a convict on the loose, the villagers are not friendly, and there might be a monstrous hound prowling the moors.
This was a dose of good cheer after watching Dario Argento’s Giallo. A Hammer Studios production, Peter Cushing, André Morell and Christoper Lee, as well as a supporting cast of luminaries, play off each other beautifully. Fisher made this not long after Dracula, and the sets and costumes are similarly lush.
The opening is surprisingly vicious. I couldn’t remember the original Conan Doyle story well enough to recognise changes to it, but I was surprised at the working class anger driving the core of the story. Everything British has class in the mix, and as clearly evil as the plot to kill Sir Henry is, the ruling classes (from Sir Henry to the local Bishop and even Holmes) have a contemptuous streak, and I couldn’t help being a little on the side of the ones who had been stolen from and were seeking revenge.
Giallo
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2009
Inspector Enzo Avolfi specialises in finding serial killers. In Turin, someone is cutting up and killing beautiful young women, and when model Celine fails to arrive to meet her sister, Linda, Avolfi has to help her search the city before Celine becomes another victim.
Could you have a more generic plot than that? Perhaps after finishing Mother of Tears Argento wanted something simpler to work with. Ironically, this isn’t a giallo, it’s closer to Silence of the Lambs or Seven in its story structure. We still get flashbacks to childhood that reveal motivation, but the inspector gets them far more than the killer, who has a deformed face and the rather obvious desire to deface beauty in others.
The script has nothing to it. There are several gratuitously ugly torture scenes whose only purpose seems to be to make sure we know how fucked up the killer is. Once we see him sucking on a baby’s dummy and masturbating to photos of cut up faces, it’s fair to say no more proof-of-fucked-up-ness is required. Put some story in there instead, screenwriters!
Adrien Brody played both the killer and the cop, and he also sued the producers of the film for not paying his full fee, blocking it from being released in the US. Argento has disavowed the film, saying he didn’t like the producer’s cut of it, but he also was saying at the time he felt blacklisted in Hollywood because it couldn’t get distribution. It’s a depressing state of affairs all around.
Mother of Tears
Director: Dario Argento
Release year: 2007
A grave containing a rune-covered box is discovered outside a churchyard in Rome. Art restoration student Sarah Landy helps her tutor open the box, which contains magical artifacts including a tunic that bestows great power to the still-alive medieval witch Mater Lachrymarum. Landy escapes an attack by demonic creatures and goes on the run as Rome falls into chaos, but Landy learns she is the daughter of a powerful witch and might be able to stop Mater Lachrymarum from bringing the second age of magic.
That’s a lot of plot. Also, the police are chasing Sarah, a gang of partying goth witches are roaming the city, Sarah’s friend and lover Michael loses his son to the Mater, an alchemist gets involved, and Sarah’s dead mother can talk to her from another realm. Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi were inspired to write the “Three Mothers” films (Suspiria, Inferno, Mother of Tears) by Thomas de Quincey’s 1845 prose poetry collection, Suspiria de Profundis. That explains the involved and detailed lore that the characters discuss, which adds a layer of mystery and weight to the story, but also can be pretty confusing.
There’s a flavour of The Omen to the scenes Rome residents start doing terrible things. The brutality of the violence seems like an attempt to capture medieval tortures mixed with a vision of hell seen as the cruelties people will inflict on each other. The Mater likes to lick the tears from her tortured victims.
There are a few Argento flourishes with the camera, and towards the end there’s a subtle variation of the original Suspiria soundtrack by Goblin, which is fun. It’s a flawed film, but full of energy and life, and I respect a trilogy of films that are in the same universe with the same overarching story, but which are stylistically and in the pacing of things so different.
Maniac Cop
Director: William Lustig
Release year: 1988
The VHS cover for Maniac Cop was iconic to video shop-haunting teens like me who were too young to rent it, not really interested in a New York police film anyway, but saw it in every horror section. I did not know Bruce Campbell was one of the stars, although it’s hard to know if Evil Dead 2, which came out in 1987, had taken off at this point, so he might just have needed a gig.
Tom Atkins plays Tom Atkins as detective Frank McCrae, hunting a mysterious police officer who’s killing innocent people on the streets of New York. He believes two-timing officer Jack Forrest (Bruce Campbell) has been set up for the murders and enlists the help of Forrest’s girlfriend, Teresa, also a cop, to hunt the real killer down. But is the killer alive or dead?
The script by Larry Cohen is awful, but it’s directed competently and the acting talent does a great job with what’s there. The maniac cop’s face is cheap and cheerful in HD—they wisely hide it until close to the end. The final car chase is impressive but, you know, none of it makes any sense. Somehow, I still had a good time.
Nightmare City
Director: Umberto Lenzi
Release year: 1980
A radiation incident is reported in an anonymous Italian city moments before a military plane lands at the civilian airport. Mutant humans pour out and begin a city-wide massacre, killing indiscriminately, drinking victims blood, and infecting everyone who manages to survive.
The most surprising and entertaining part of this film is the frenzy with which the mutants go at innocent bystanders, using whatever implements are to hand, seemingly impervious to bullets, leaping and mauling—if you told me the mutants were from a musical or dance company, I would believe you. It’s fun!
The “radiation” spreads like the rage virus in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Lenzi’s cameras are constantly moving around the action, zooming and panning, and he loves to end a kill with a shot of a mutant wiping his mouth with satisfaction, or rolling his eyes as he looks for his next victim.
The standout scene is the mutant takeover of a TV station where dancers in aerobics outfits are murdered with ridiculous gusto, although there are several other set pieces just like it. The pace is relentless. When things do slow down, ideas are touted about why this is happening, and even in 1980 they knew mankind couldn’t be trusted with the increasing powers of technology.
At the beginning of the film, Jessica, the artist girlfriend of General Warren, unveils a bust she’s working on that makes him look like a mutant. People in the late seventies were frightened of nuclear power and nuclear war. Her work is a premonition of what is to come. Jessica’s studio is full of strange sculptures and paintings. Dario Argento would have approved.
In a Violent Nature
Director: Chris Nash
Release year: 2024
It’s rare that a film comes along in the horror space and asks questions about the form. Cabin in the Woods did it back in 2011, and this does it with the slasher genre, subverting its conventions in pointed and interesting ways. I knew too much in advance of seeing this for it to be a surprise—I can imagine this would have been even more impactful if I’d gone in blind.
A group of teens explore woods where a man, Johnny, was killed decades before, and find a locket hanging on a pipe in an abandoned hut. One of them takes the locket for his girlfriend, not realising it’s on Johnny’s grave. Johnny climbs out of the earth to methodically track the teens through the woods to get the locket back, picking them off in increasingly violent ways.
The camera tracks Johnny from behind for most of the film. It’s a video game point of view that goes back to the original Lara Croft. Nature is ever-present on the soundtrack, with bird calls, the crunch of grass underfoot, wind in the trees, the buzz of flies, but all Johnny is listening for are human voices and car engines. At the ranger station he looks at the displays and lifts a photograph. When he walks into a house and sees a similar locket, he remembers his father giving it to him as a symbol of love from his mother.
The only character of note amongst the teens is Kris, accidental holder of the locket, who sees Johnny’s bottomless pool of rage at the locket’s theft, and who wisely leaves it for him to collect. On the road, she’s picked up by a woman who tells a story about the random violence of bears, but that’s a misdirection—we’ve seen the killer is not random, has suffered terrible losses, and his fury doesn’t stop even in death.
Anna and the Apocalypse
Director: John McPhail
Release year: 2017
Staying festive, a Scottish zombie musical about a girl longing to escape a small town, the tricky relationships we navigate as teenagers, with peers, parents and teachers, and the power of musical theatre to kill the undead.
Anna has bought a flight to Australia in her gap year without telling her dad. Her friend John has a secret crush on her and, while he wants to go to art school, doesn’t want her to go so far away. Steph’s parents have left her alone for Christmas. The three band together with a handful of others to try to escape the hordes of zombies attacking their town.
The songs and choreography are decent, but I’m no musical aficionado, and that didn’t stop the gore from being intense when they use whatever they can get their hands on to crush undead heads. It’s heartfelt, and the youngsters suffer real hardship in the second half, so it becomes increasingly bleak. Ella Hunt should be in more films, she’s luminous here as Anna, and so is Paul Kaye as increasingly unhinged headteacher Arthur Savage.
Director: Charles E. Seller Jr
Release year: 1984
On the way home from visiting his grandfather on Christmas Eve, young Billy Chapman watches his parents slain by a robber dressed as Santa Claus. At an orphanage, Billy is punished repeatedly by the Mother Superior for not coping with the trauma. His first job at eighteen is at a department store, and when Christmas Eve comes and Billy has to dress as Santa Claus, wearing the costume triggers his own killing spree.
This is a surprisingly rich stew of repressed trauma and violence that manages to be brutal, odd, amusing and quite moving in places. The child actors are excellent. In the opening scene, Billy meets his hospitalised grandfather, who terrorises him with the idea Santa Claus punishes children who are not perfect. He then witnesses the murder of his parents that includes the sexual assault of his mother by an unhinged assailant in a Santa Claus costume. Later, at an orphanage, he is punished for making a violent drawing, and when he observes through a keyhole a nun having sex with her boyfriend, he hears them beaten with a belt by the Mother Superior.
Billy learns through beatings to keep his mouth shut. It’s both funny and tragic that his homicidal rage comes out as Father Christmas. Violence, sex and Santa Claus make a combustible combination! In one chillingly amusing scene, a girl refuses to admit any naughtiness and so, unable to punish her, Billy begrudgingly gives her his blood-covered knife as a gift. The same scene in Christmas Bloody Christmas results in a more modernly obnoxious child getting an axe to the head. I prefer the original.