The Black Widow

Along Came
A Spider Woman

The Black Widow
USA 1947
Directed by
Spencer Gordon Bennet & Fred C. Brannon
Republic Pictures

I really love the old cinema serials... starting right back from my passion for Feuillade’s silent French serials and with more than much love for the American talkie serials, which met their ultimate demise at some point in the 1950s. I mean Universal, Republic, Columbia... they all had their own, distinct style of serial making and I could watch these things forever. So it brings me no joy to say that The Black Widow, a theatrical serial I wanted to see so much I had to look for it as a non-commercial release (if you catch my drift), is probably my least favourite of them all... although it’s still quite watchable and has at least a little entertainment value for sure.

I don’t know what went wrong with this one though. It’s got all the ingredients of being another fast and furious serial from Republic which, if you know their serials, means the odd car chase and lots of fist fights where everything at a location or interior set which isn’t nailed down will, within the course of a few minutes, get thrown or used as a breakable weapon by protagonists and antagonists alike. And The Black Widow looked like a real good one... not only that but it’s directed by the team of Spencer Gordon Bennet & Fred C. Brannon, who both had a very good track record with directing exciting serials. And it’s even got special effects by Howard and Theodore Lydecker, who did absolutely fantastic work in many a Republic serial. Think of the cave melting effects of the decimator in King Of The Rocket Men (a serial I hope to revisit in a high definition restoration very soon) or their work on getting the title characters in that and The Adventures Of Captain Marvel (reviewed here) to fly to their destinations in various shots.

Okay, so this one is about Sombra, aka The Black Widow... a fortune teller who is a female spy working in the USA, under the instructions of her father who will sometimes teleport to her headquarters in a puff of smoke, instructing her in which secret gadgets and inventions to try and steal from the American authorities to hinder their war effort and help their own. Now it’s not really said which foreign power she’s working for but the implication is that she’s supposed to be Japanese, I think... although the ‘yellow face’ make up job is pretty unfathomable most of the time and she just seems like the US girl she is... played here by all American gal Carol Forman (who made a name for herself playing leading villainesses in similar productions and who would, of course, go on to play the lead villain, The Spider Lady, in the first Superman serial a year later).

Anyway, the big flies in her ointment here are the two main protagonists, detective fiction writer Steve Colt, played by Bruce Edwards and his ‘side kick cum damsel in distress’, lady reporter Joyce Winters, played by Virginia Lee. These two, week after week, put themselves in danger trying to thwart The Black Widow’s plans for world domination. Except, there’s no chemistry between the two at all, it seems to me and not much interaction besides the odd argument as Steve tries to stop Joyce from going along with him on dangerous missions. It just all feels kinda limp and there’s not even a hint of romantic interest suggested between the two leads either so... yeah, these two are not helping the serial much, it has to be said.

And that’s even with the inclusion of a number of neat gadgets and ideas littered throughout the ‘13 exciting chapters’ of this one. Such as the fact that Sombra can disguise herself as anyone via a mask and impersonating their speech, making for many shenanigans and plot twists reminiscent of the modern Mission Impossible films. This obviously wasn’t a new idea then, of course... Fantômas was doing the same thing back in the 1913 serial and the books which pre-date that but, this may well have been one of the earlier American examples of the ‘mask madness’ which we’re all so familiar with today... the impossibility of which is always overlooked by whichever film maker is going with it.

Other interesting novelty features for the serial are a fake looking black widow spider that pops out from a compartment in a chair and bites Sombra’s victims to death and also a drug which feigns death by slowing the victims heart so it looks like they’ve passed on. Sombra uses this heart stopping pill to escape from jail at one point. There’s even that neat trick which I’ve seen used in a couple of other serials (such as Batman in 1943) where, at the flick of a button, the fleeing enemy car changes its colour so the good guys miss it... but even that is badly done here on two occasions, where it looks nowhere near as good in this serial as I’ve seen done elsewhere... I was surprised at how this turned out for the Lydeckers, to be honest.

And, yeah... not much more for me to say in this one. It’s got the usual quota of fights and chases (none of which were that exciting here, it seemed to me) and it’s got plenty of cliffhangers where the director has to reveal a slightly different sequence of events the next chapter, to allow our hero or heroine to survive the certain death we’d witnessed the week before). So, yeah, The Black Widow is certainly still fun but, I dunno, I prefer the other 20 to 30 serials I’ve previously seen to this one so... it was okay. I’m not done with the serials though... I’ve just bought a nice Australian Blu Ray set of seven restored Republic serials, five of which I’ll be revisiting and, with the other two, I’ll be making my acquaintance with them for the first time. So there will definitely be more serial reviews coming to the blog at some point... but I will be watching them an episode a week so, there will be gaps between the reviews, for sure.

Holy Spider

Murder She Saeed

Holy Spider
Directed by Ali Abbasi
Denmark/Germany/
France/Sweden/
Jordan/Italy 2022
Mubi Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spider spoilers within.

Well this is a stunning film. I think it may be a bit political too but I’m not the best person to pick up on stuff like that.

Holy Spider is based on a real life incident which happened in Mashhad in Iran and it starts off, for the first ten or fifteen minutes, following a sex worker who works the streets of the area to support herself and her young child when said child is asleep. We see the bruises on her naked back as she dresses up to go out in the search for clients. And we follow her on her routine as she works a couple of tricks, has a break to do some drugs and then gets on a potential client’s motorcycle as he takes her back to his home (on the regular night he knows his family stays over at his mother in law’s home). The director then pulls a ‘Marion Crane’ on the audience and this person who you thought was the lead protagonist is strangled by the guy, wrapped in a scarf and then driven and dumped some distance away. When the camera moves up and away from the killer’s speeding motorcycle, we take in a view of this beautiful city at night and the many lights make it look a little like a spider’s web, as the main title of the film appears.

Okay, so from here on in we meet the real main protagonist, a young journalist called Arezoo Rahimi, played brilliantly by Zar Amir Ebrahimi,... a character who was fired from her last job for refusing the affections of her boss. We see exactly how things are in this culture and religion right from the get go, as she is refused a room at the local hotel she has booked because of a technical error (that error being that the manager didn’t realise she was a single woman and not accompanied by a husband). She changes the man’s mind when she shows him her journalist’s ID and, suddenly the error is magically fixed. He asks her to cover her hair more with her head scarf but she refuses. And, yeah, this sets the tone for the whole film where… and it always amazes me how women in these kinds of countries tolerate this… stupid religion and beliefs are used as a way to control women and ‘keep them in their place’. It never fails to anger me.

So Arezoo has seen what a mess the police are doing of catching this ‘spider killer’ (not sure why he’s called that, it’s never really made clear other than he leaves some mark on them… something which I either misunderstood or we don’t see) and wants to break the story and catch him herself. But she faces all this discrimination because of her sex and even the local police chief just wants her to sleep with him rather than do the job. The police do not come out of this whole thing well, it has to be said and, I suspect... rightly so.

After a street walker who Arezoo was trying to help the night before becomes the killer’s umpteenth victim (with an MO so ridiculous that it’s implied the police should have been able to catch him fairly quickly), she goes undercover as bait and works the streets with a colleague watching over her, nearly getting herself killed in the process by the killer.

There’s no mystery maintained past the post credits sequence about just who the killer is either. He’s  a family man and ex-military guy Saeed, played equally skilfully by Mehdi Bajestani, who turns in a blisteringly good performance of a man a little mentally unstable but who believes himself to be doing the work of God, cleansing the streets of the immoral women who hire their bodies to a willing crowd. It’s not a one dimensional performance here… it’s not a film about too many black and white issues of morality and Bajestani gives the character a certain nuance and subtlety that serial killers in other movies often don’t receive.

And the whole film crosscuts between Arezoo and Saeed’s worlds, as we wait for their paths to intersect. And then, just when you think it’s all over and she manages to turn in the spider killer to the police, after surviving his brutal attack… the film has a fairly long end game and, it’s a little disturbing because, like I said at the start, this film is based on true events that happened in the city in the early 2000s.

Arezoo is convinced that this man’s world in the justice system is going to side with Saeed and let him ago and, to be fair, this is almost what happens. By the people in the streets, Saeed is seen as a hero for his murders of ‘corrupt women’, not a killer and, as he says himself, that his hands are clean. There are massive protests outside what passes for halls of justice in Mashhad and right until nearly the end of the picture, the director will have those not familiar with the facts guessing as to Saeed’s final fate. Spoilers here though because, I want to discuss the last scene of the movie so… look away, go somewhere else while I say…

Saeed is executed for his crimes, midst massive protest and friendly faces. At the end of the film Arezoo returns to where she came via a bus and, on that bus ride, she watches a video news item. It’s a video of Saeed’s young son demonstrating, with the aid of his even younger sister, just how his dad, ‘the hero’ would creep up on the girls and cleanse them, showing how his father might stand on their necks if they weren’t yet dead. A chip off the old block, so to speak. It’s a grim coda for a film which already is full of the terrible cultural malaise which lets these kinds of attitudes thrive. It’s a film full of equally grim moments too, such as when Saeed’s wife comes home a day early and he’s making love to her on the floor next to a rolled up carpet containing the body of his latest victim from ten minutes before… pounding into his wife as he notices the toes of the woman sticking out from the end of the carpet.

And as I said, it’s not a one dimensional movie. Nearly all of the girls working the streets are shown to be there, excepting possibly one, not by choice but by circumstance and, though they are not trafficked women, they are in this line of work due to necessity. Now I don’t believe that’s the full picture for that industry at all but the writer/director does take time to contemplate the women and show something of their circumstances in this regard. And, indeed, when one fights back and nearly escapes, one who seems to be there by choice rather than what she’s been forced to become, she comes alive again in Saeed’s head and he has to kill her again. And later on, when his defence is trying to get him off the hook, he refuses to recognise in front of the court that he is crazy… which might well have helped him escape the death sentence.

Now, as I said, the film looks absolutely spectacular. Mashhad is nothing, if not a beautiful looking city and the cinematography and different kinds of shots employed to capture it and certain details (such as a cam strapped on an actress so that her head is completely still as she rides the back of Saeed’s motorbike towards her death) are nothing short of spectacular. And it’s such a jarring clash when you think about the prevalent attitudes of the culture and religion represented by the film. In various Star Trek shows and movies they had the Prime Directive of non interference in cultures and beliefs to stop the characters acting on moral judgements and interfering with the development of the specific world they were on but, in real life it seems to me that something similar to this must be coming into play, when the outside world looks on.  

And just to drive that message home, as I finish up on the brilliance of Holy Spider (which I would whole-heartedly recommend to most people), the lead actress herself,  Zar Amir Ebrahimi, was only supposed to be the casting director. However, at the eleventh hour, the actress they had chosen dropped out as she didn’t want to run the risk of being seen on film without her head coverings. And so, Ebrahimi took the role and won the best actress Oscar at Cannes for doing so. However, here’s the thing… the film is pretty much condemned in Iran (presumably for showing the truth) and she and many of the cast and crew have had multiple death threats for their involvement with this one. All I can say, aside from noting the troublesome and obvious condemnation of a dominating religion that lets this kind of attitude survive, is you really need to take a look at Holy Spider if you want to see the women of the Iranian culture shown in a fairer and, perhaps more accurate, way.

Paddington In Peru

Dear Peru Dance

Paddington In Peru
Directed by Dougal Wilson
UK/France/Japan/USA 2024
Columbia
UK Cinema Release Print.

Paddington In Peru is the third in the staggeringly successful and popular series of films based on Michael Bond’s eponymous bear and let me say up front that, as far as I’m concerned... yes, this is perhaps ‘the least’ of the big screen Paddington adventures. And I think there are some very specific reasons for that, which I’ll probably get into in a minute but, it would also be remiss of me to not say that this is by no means a bad film. Like the previous installments it’s fun, entertaining and has a lot going on for it. It just pales slightly in comparison to those first two but, what other family films don’t these days?

The majority of the former cast are all present and correct, with people like Ben Wishaw doing the voice of Paddington, Hugh Bonneville as Mr. Brown and Julie Walters as Mrs. Bird. That being said, I did really miss one of my favourite modern British actresses, Sally Hawkins, in the role of Mrs. Brown. Alas, my understanding is that she has a medical condition which prevents her from filming overseas at the moment so... yeah, it’s a damn shame because she was my favourite thing about the Paddington movies, to be honest. Having said that though, this is not to detract from her replacement, Emily Mortimer, who steps into her shoes really well and still manages to hold the family unit together as they embark on their adventures.

And it’s a fair old romp. Olivia Colman plays the nun in Peru in charge of the Home For Retired Bears but, as she writes to Paddington, Aunt Lucy has gone missing. So Paddington and the Browns (and Mrs. Bird) all fly off to ‘Darkest Peru’, as it was always known in the books, to find her... accidentally getting involved in a quest to find the lost gold of El Dorado with ‘interested parties’ turning up and coming out of the woodwork, including the captain of a river boat they charter, played by Antonio Banderas. The game is afoot, so to speak and Paddington is off on new adventures, of course.

So, yeah, it’s all very good but I have to say, this one makes a little mistake, I think, in terms of the idea of what makes the Paddington franchise tick. It’s not, I believe, the fault of the new director, who absolutely does an excellent job here... it’s more the fault of the writing or, more specifically, the story idea. You see, Paddington is from Peru and the comedy hijinks he gets involved in are often of the fish out of water variety (or should that be bear out of forest), relying on the bear’s unfamiliarity with the trappings and rituals of British life, it seems to me. However, we don’t really have that charming part of the equation here for this one... the opening of the movie (asides from yet another flashback to Paddington’s childhood) is once again set in London but it really isn’t long before the family have upped stakes and transported themselves to Peru. Consequently, some of the comedy and, I would say, some of the wonderfully creative ideas of its cinematic forebears (pun absolutely intended) are not in abundance in this installment either. It all seems to run out of steam fairly early, once the novelty wears off.

But, honestly, it’s just a minor gripe and I still had a fairly good time with it, it has to be said. And it’s not creatively dead by a long shot. For instance, Banderas’ character speaks to his various ghostly ancestors and the way one of them suddenly appears to him as a 3D version of his painting is masterfully done. I also, truth be told, shed more than a tear at some of the more moving scenes towards the end of the movie which, it’s fair to say, is not unusual in a Paddington movie, for sure.

People who are fans of the previous movies will want to hang around for the post credits and mid-post credits sequences too, where a much loved character from the previous installment appears in two mini scenes, although the actor is only billed as the character name ‘playing himself’ in the end credits.

And that’s me done with Paddington in Peru, I think. Not the best of the series but good enough to keep me entertained and I certainly hope there will be another one in a few years time. Hopefully located firmly in the British Isles this time. If you’re a fan of the previous two then you’re certainly not going to hate it... just don’t raise your expectations too high, I would say.

Man Made Monster

The Elec-Strickfaden Man

Man Made Monster
aka The Electric Man
aka The Atomic Monster
USA 1941
Directed by George Waggner
Universal/Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Man Made Monster, directed by George Waggner, was adapted from a short story, The Electric Man, by Harry Essex, Sid Schwartz and Len Golos and was originally intended to be a vehicle for Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi before being put on hold for a little while. It stars Lon Chaney Jr as Dan, the titular horror and, well, it was a very important movie, despite it not being one of the best remembered horrors from Univeral at the time. Not only was it important to the careers of Chaney and director Waggner... it also was important, ultimately, to a famous comedy team of the 1940s and 1950s... I’ll get to all that in a minute.

So the film starts out with a bus crashing into an electrical pylon, killing the driver and five of the six passengers. That surviving passenger is Dan, played as I said by Lon Chaney Jr in what was pretty much his first starring role in a Universal picture, although he gets second billing behind the mad scientist character Dr. Rigas, played by Lionel Atwill. Anyway, Dan survives the crash and is invited by kindly Dr. Lawrence, played by Samuel S. Hinds (who played George Bailey’s dad in It’s A Wonderful Life, reviewed here), to stay with him at his laboratory/home for pay and food so he can study the condition that Dan seems to have. Dan had a sideshow carny act involving electricity... or rather electrickery, much like the shows I suspect Ken Strickfaden was involved with in real life, many years before. And, certainly, Stirckfaden’s marvellous machines feature prominently in this movie (you can read my review of a biography of Strickfaden and find out his importance to mad science movies everywhere here).

However, while Dr. Lawrence is away for a science conference, Rigas starts experimenting with Dan and gives him daily charges of superhuman amounts of energy. Eventually Dan becomes a shadow of his former self because he comes to depend on the electric treatment for his strength. Of course, a side effect is he can shoot electricity from his fingers and so on... so another movie which I’m sure comic book gurus Stan Lee and Steve Ditko would have seen and been influenced by back in the day. Of course, when Lawrence twigs what’s been going on, with a little insight from his daughter played by Anne Nagel and her newspaper man boyfriend Mark, played by Frank Albertson (who would go on to play... Hee Haaaw... Sam Wainwright in It’s A Wonderful Life), things turn sour and Rigas gets Dan to kill Frank and uses hypnotic powers over him, to make him confess to the killing (and forget everything else about it). But, when he is given the electric chair for his perceived crimes, of course, thing take the expected turn, leading to one of those ‘Just’ but, tragic endings that Universal did so well with some of their horror pictures.

And it’s great. A really nicely put together slice of ridiculous pseudo-scientific gobbledy gook played for drama and a cautionary tale (the Second World War had just started and Rigas wants to build an army of such electric supermen). It’s well acted by all the principal cast but the outstanding actor in the crowd is Corky... as Corky The Dog. He’s Lawrence’s canine who takes a shine to Dan and does funny, doggy things throughout the movie, including some clever tricks. He’s the one character I was most afraid might come to harm but, spoiler, he survives the movie to give a touching performance as he rests his arms and head on the lifeless body of Dan at the finale. The only problem with his performance was that you can occasionally catch him looking off screen to see what his owner wants him to do next but, this is something many porn actresses have also been caught doing on camera over the years in many productions so, I think I can cut the four legged thespian some slack here.

It’s an entertaining film and clocks in at just under an hour. It also has some nice shot compositions in it too, which is something I always find astonishing considering the 4:3 aspect ratio of these pictures. For instance, there’s a scene where Lionel Atwill is standing over Lon Chaney Jr’s body on a medical table, using his stethoscope to figure out if he’s accidentally killed him or just made him faint. A loop of wire from one of Strickfaden’s marvellous machines loops down from above into the foreground of the shot just above Chaney’s horizontal slab and, of course, Atwill is perfectly framed within the loop. Some nice noirish moments too, where the shadow of the police guard is seen only as a bold silhouette against the wall, as it approaches the lever for the electric chair. Yeah, there’s some nice stuff in the movie, for sure.

And, like I said, it’s also important. In that it was well liked enough that it gave director George Waggner and star Lon Chaney Jr their next picture together, released later that same year. That picture was, of course, The Wolf Man (reviewed by me here) and without it, the Universal werewolf movies that followed (if there had been any at all), would certainly have turned out a little differently. Would they have contributed to the later ‘monster rally’ movies and therefore, at the end of the 40s, have contributed significantly to saving the career of two comedy stars on the wane, Bud Abbot and Lou Costello, when their combined project Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein (which included Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and The Wolf Man, reviewed by me here) took in big bucks at the box office? Who knows what would have happened if this director and actor hadn’t done this picture together.

Man Made Monster is part of Eureka Masters Of Cinema’s recent(ish) Blu Ray set Three Monster Tales Of Sci Fi Terror, alongside The Monolith Monsters and Monster On The Campus. It’s treated as well as all the other sets they’ve recently been releasing in a similar vein, which means it has some nice commentaries and, frankly, is about as good a transfer and print as you’re ever going to see it in. So, yeah, lovers of Universal Horror might want to check this set out and I’m very pleased to now have these wonderful films on the shelf, so to speak.

Halloween FrightFest 2024

Bull’s Eye

Halloween FrightFest 2024
ODEON Luxe 1st and 2nd November 2024

Well that rolled around quickly again... as the years frequently do when you get to my age. The Halloween edition of this year's FrightFest was held over two days again, the first day starting around 6pm and finishing just after midnight and the second starting at 11pm and finishing around the same time as the first day. So three new movies on the first day and six on the second. As usual, these were all either UK premieres or world premieres of the films in question and some of them are still waiting for distribution deals to be inked out (or whatever the digital equivalent of that is these days). And, also as usual, this is going to be a series of very short capsule reviews (not really even reviews, probably, more quick sketches) of the films in question, just to give a flavour of the tone of the festival (which I’m glad to say was, once again. all over the place... good for them). If I revisit any of these at a later date, I’ll review them properly then.


DAY ONE

Magpie
Directed by Sam Yates
UK/USA
First up was Magpie, starring Daisy Ridley (and based on her story which was written as a screenplay by her husband, Tom Bateman), Shazad Latif and the absolutely brilliant Matilda Lutz (who top-lined Revenge, reviewed here). This is a somewhat dark tale of marital erosion as Ridley plays the housewife looking after one of the kids while her writer husband takes the other kid to work, shooting a major movie. It’s pretty intense and features a lot of close ups of Ridley as we study the emotional turmoil within her (which is a good thing, she’s always worth a watch). It reminded me a just a tad of Polanski’s Repulsion, to be honest. It’s not really a horror movie, more a thriller but it’s got beautiful cinematography and is only let down a little, perhaps, by the obvious twist which I suspect most people will see coming from about a third of the way into the picture. But a pretty good movie, nonetheless. It was nice seeing Ridley and a few others in person too... almost all the screenings had cast and crew intros and Q & A sessions this year. 

Parvulos
Directed by Isaac Ezban
Mexico
Directed by Isaac Ezban, the incredible Mexican genre director behind the likes of The Incident (reviewed by me here) and The Similars, Parvulos was one of the two really stand out films of the festival this year, for me. A post-apocalyptic zombie tale about three brothers (two of them very young) trying to get food to survive after everything has ended while keeping alive two zombies in the basement, for reasons which will be made clear as you get into the narrative. Visually, the colour palette is so knocked back that most of the time it feels like you are watching a monochrome movie, apart from the odd smudge of strong colour deliberately placed here and there. As usual, Ezban pulls no punches and you won’t see every beat coming as the tale develops.  Another outstanding film from this director. 

 

Advent
aka The Krampus Calendar
Directed by Airell Anthony Hayles
UK
This movie has a similar central idea to the far superior French movie The Advent Calendar (reviewed here) and is told in a fake documentary using ‘found footage’ style. Alas, although a couple of the main performances are nice, the film seemed a little badly executed and, I dunno, just felt like it could have used a lot more money pumped into it to make the central idea work better. Kinda cheap and tacky, I thought. I hate typing that because I know these movies are hard to make and there are some nice moments but... it just didn’t work too well for me, I guess.

DAY TWO

The Bitter Taste
Directed by Guido Tölke
Germany
Well this was kinda interesting. A well made action adventure, sc-fi, horror movie that was well shot, had some great performances and went along at a fair lick. It was certainly a rich and diverse movie but, yeah, that’s a double edged sword for this production, I reckon. It felt like everything and the kitchen sink had been thrown into the film to make a very dense narrative which I feel isn’t easy to process in one go. I honestly felt that this story would have been better served as either a serialised comic or a TV mini series. I also thought the score could have been dialled down in the sound mix just a little in a couple of places. However, it was certainly an ambitious project and you have to admire a lot about the end result, even if it doesn’t all jell well in one installment.


Alien Country
Directed by Boston McConnaughey
USA
Directed by Boston McConnaughey and starring his wife Renny Grames and K.C. Clyde, this one is a comedy ‘aliens in the desert town’ movie as a bunch of people are thrown together trying to stop an alien invasion force consisting mostly of big, insect like predators. This was pretty entertaining, had some good jokes and some nice visuals. Can’t fault this one... would play well as part of an all-nighter with your mates with liberal doses of alcohol on a Saturday night.

The Draft!
aka Setan Alas!
Directed by Yusron Fuadi
Indonesia
Five students go to a remote location from which they can’t escape while they slowly get picked off by a killer. I won’t reveal too much about this because they don’t want spoilers going out ahead of its release but this didn’t quite make it for me. When I noticed a large, seeming ‘continuity error’ involving a suddenly appearing bunch of tea cups early in the picture, I got kinda interested because I knew it must be there deliberately. Unfortunately, the film tips its hand too early on in the process and, again without giving too much away, sometimes a joke can go on forever and lose its power completely. Not a good one for me.


Time Travel Is Dangerous
Directed by Chris Reading
UK
This is another one which didn’t really work for me. A ‘fun comedy’ with two leads who get next to last billing because they’re shop owners and not actresses and are essentially playing themselves (and doing a very good job of it) this one has a huge support by British comedy A listers. About two ‘retro store’ ladies who go back in time to get brand new historical artefacts to sell, it kinda falls flat and dull fairly early on, I think. I know I’m not alone in thinking (the guy sitting next to me reacted similarly) that it just went on too long and, to paraphrase him, fun should not be this much hard work. Would have made a great short film though... which apparently it was at some stage.


Catch A Killer
Directed by Teddy Grennan
USA
This was a kind of fun one for fans of American horror and also slasher movies, with lots of references which are actually built into the DNA of the thing and which an ex-police inspector uses to try and catch the killer. It’s a bit obvious (really no surprises here) but it’s a solid, consistent movie which is rather well made and lands its ending nicely. Not a bad little thriller... very entertaining.


Animale
Directed by Emma Benestan
France
Animale was the other outstanding movie of the festival. Absolutely brilliant with a knockout performance by Oulaya Amamra as Nejma, the film’s central protagonist who wants to work with bulls. Now, it was the last film of the festival and I was exhausted and sleepy but this one transported me, dream-like, to another level. I definitely need to research and pay more attention to both the lead actress and director. A real high to end this year’s festival with.

Heretic

Die Agnostic
Evaluation

Heretic
Directed by Scott Beck
and Bryan Woods
USA/Canada 2024
A24
UK Cinema Release Print.

There are a couple of things that bother me about the new movie Heretic and I’m going to mention those first to stop them getting in the way of what should be a, mostly, very positive review.

Firstly, well... regular readers will probably remember I have quite rigid ideas about what makes a horror genre movie and so... I don’t appreciate going out on Halloween night to see a preview of a new horror movie (I would be at FrightFest for the next two days so it was the only day I could fit it in) only to find out by the end that it wasn’t a horror movie at all... just a thriller (albeit a very good one).

Secondly, the title is a bit of a nonsense because a ‘heretic’ is, by dictionary definition, somebody who disagrees with beliefs that are generally accepted, in this case religion but, honestly, the beliefs of the main antagonist, played brilliantly by Hugh Grant, do not define him as a heretic because, well, I think a large amount of people on the planet would probably have come to the same conclusion about just what organised religion is from an early age. And to just underline my own conclusion of these things, which pretty much mirrors Grant’s in the movie but I won’t reveal what his ‘one true religion’ is in case it’s a spoiler... I’ll just acknowledge that, religion doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the belief in God (whatever that is for you), it’s something else very much man made... so it’s possible to believe in God without being in any way religious, I suspect.

Anyway, other than those two points... Heretic is a mostly cracking movie with, perhaps, just a little of a disappointing denouement but it was still an okay enough ending. It’s not, as I said, really a horror movie, although various genre trappings are brought into play because, right from the offset, the directors certainly seem to want you to think it is.

It opens strongly with two mormons, Sister Paxton (played by Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (played by Sophie Thatcher, who was so good as the young version of Juliette Lewis’ character in Yellowjackets) talking about an amateur porn film. Around them... and this is the best part of the film for me... is some superb typography showing the title, cast and crew etc, creeping around the edges of the frame as the two talk. They then go on with their chores which involves checking their list and going around town, knocking on the doors of people who have expressed an interest in joining their religion and trying to convert them. The last stop on their journey tonight is the house of Mr. Reed, played by Hugh Grant.

Once they’re inside his home, however, it soon becomes clear that he’s a religious scholar and that he has them there for a purpose... he’s not letting them go anytime soon. And the majority of the film is fairly slow paced but that’s okay, it’s pretty riveting dialogue and the discussions around religions and Reed’s metaphors likening the various religions as a series of boards games is all pretty great (and I seriously have to check up on the origins of Monopoly now... that’s just so wrong). As the girls are taken down a winding, conversational path, it isn’t too long before they find themselves in the first of a series of lower levels to the house, as they try and find a way out of their situation (I’m pretty sure something important about the layout of this area may have been cut which was in one of the original trailers but I think I’ll need to revisit those trailers again to make sure).

And that’s where I’m leaving the story dangling... like I said, I don’t want to get into any spoilers past what you know from the trailer. But I will say that the movie is less like the horror film it’s trying to fool the audience into thinking it is and much more like one of those small scale, two hander plays/movies such as Sleuth and Deathtrap, albeit this involves a few more characters at various stages. Now, the cinematography is great and I’ve mentioned the strong, typographically excellent opening (which feels more like something Wes Anderson might use). There are also some outstanding shots such as the way the directors play with the syntax of the visual language by, at one point, showing one of the girls running through a scale model of the house from above in a room as a short hand metaphor and, when she reaches that specific room with the model in it, the camera just pans up to show her arriving in that room.

However, the film’s power comes from a well written script and the powerful performances of the three central characters, all of whom work really well together. Especially Grant... I’ve seen him playing comic villains before such as in films like Dungeons And Dragons - Honour Among Thieves (reviewed here) but he really does have a chance here to remind the audience about just how good an actor he can be and he certainly seizes the opportunity.

Now, the ending, which I will try and discuss but not spoil, does seem to me like it’s totally not horror but, it has to be said, there is more than a hint that something supernatural does occur by the movie’s end but, it’s more of a choice on the behalf of the particular viewer, I believe... and could be interpreted a number of ways. It could be argued, for example, that a certain ‘deus ex machina’ moment in the movie is just exactly that, in the literal translation of the phrase but, I personally didn’t necessarily plump for this ‘is it or isn’t it a miracle?’ moment myself... especially considering the aftermath of the moment. But it doesn’t matter because, I’m sure some people will take certain things as a positive message about religious faith and others will, I suspect, not even realise that it’s built into the DNA of the movie as a possible ingredient.

Either way, although I felt the ending was a little lacking I certainly enjoyed the journey and, despite it not really being a horror movie, I think fans of that genre will still certainly get a kick out of Heretic. So, yeah, I’d happily recommend this one to people although, I’m not sure I’d buy it on Blu Ray because I don’t know if I could sit through it a second time. Very good movie though.