2022 Favourite Movies

 

My 20 Favourite UK
First Run Movies Of 2022

Okay, so I basically said on Twitter that I wasn’t going to bother posting a ‘best of year’ list for 2022 because, as seems to be the case the last ten years or so, my main ‘first run’ diet has consisted almost entirely of movies made in America. Not that there’s anything wrong with American movies (even the stupid blockbusters) but... it gets a bit boring if you keep having chocolate ice cream and neglect the cherry, vanilla and cookie dough flavours. That being said, disappointment was expressed by certain followers and people who know me so, I had a quick look at what my films of the year list would actually be and discovered that, although the top two or three are US made, the list is actually a little more diverse than that (although many of the films are still English language). So, what the heck, judge me as you will but here’s my list of my favourites from the year and, where I’ve managed to get the reviews up so far, a link to my initial ramblings. Please note, some of these films are dated as 2021 but they didn’t get any kind of proper ‘out of festival’ release over here in the UK until 2022. Please also note that I missed quite a few movies this year so, another reason why a list like this isn’t all that relevant at the moment, perhaps. Oh... and I’d definitely put Diabolik on this list (reviewed here)... but I’m still waiting for a UK release.

20. Thor - Love And Thunder
Australia/USA Directed by Taika Waititi
The only Marvel film in the list and pretty much one of only two traditional super hero movies that made the cut (although Black Adam came close). My review here.

19. The Batman
USA Directed by Matt Reeves
And here’s the other super hero movie... although technically Batman isn’t actually a super hero, just incredibly well trained. Also... and this is his talent emphasised in this particular iteration of the character... he was often referred to as/marketed as the world’s greatest detective, in the comics. This film is not big on action but it does carry some weight in both the atmosphere and mystery departments. My review here.

18. The Unbearable
Weight Of Massive Talent
USA Directed by Tom Gormican
Nicolas Cage playing a public facing parody of himself makes for great fun. I don’t usually watch that many comedies but anyone who has the gall to include the old ‘climbing a wall’ gag and its clichéd pay off certainly has my vote. My review here.

17. Orchestrator Of Storms -
The Fantastique World Of Jean Rollin
USA Directed by Dima Ballin & Kat Ellinger
Nicely researched documentary which is a good starting point for people who have not imbibed on this director’s unique movies. My review here.

16. Prey
USA Directed by Dan Trachtenberg
Never thought I’d put a movie from the Predator franchise in an end of year list but this stealth prequel, the seventh in the series, which throws native American indians in against the fierce alien hunter is maybe the best of these films. My review here.

15. Violent Night
USA/Canada Directed by Tommy Wirkola
One of what I hope will be a franchise... this one has David Harbour playing Santa, punishing the bad guys in this 1980s style, action flick homage with extra gory bits. Hope all concerned pick this one up for another couple of movies. My review here.

14. Troll
Norway Directed by Roar Uthaug
This one basically comes off like, as one character puts it in the movie, a ‘Norwegian Godzilla’. Lots of trollduggery abounds in this stylish monster movie. What’s the Norwegian for Kaiju? My review here.

13. Emily The Criminal
USA Directed by John Patton Ford
I dunno, if Jules Dassin were alive and well and living in the USA today, I can’t help but feel he might be churning out movies like this. My review here.

12. Occhiali Neri aka Dark Glasses
Italy Directed by Dario Argento
You know what? It’s just nice to see Dario Argento returning to form and producing a pretty decent giallo again... although, let’s not mention the snakes scene, okay. My review here.

11. X
USA/Canada Directed by Ti West
I don’t really like US slasher movies but, this one is so nicely filmed and edited, not to mention doing some nice stuff with genre clichés. Really enjoyed this one way more than I thought I would and I’m looking forward to catching up with the back-to-back prequel and sequel very soon. My review here.

10.  Pleasure
Sweden/Netherlands/France Directed by Ninja Thyberg
An enlightening dramatisation of somebody attempting to break into the American porn industry, I’m surprised this didn’t get more exposure in the UK. I’ve not gotten around to scheduling my review of this one yet but I’ll try and get it up within the next couple of weeks. Which has now happened and you can read my review here.

9. Christmas Bloody Christmas
USA Directed by Joe Begos
Ha. This is a real throwback to 1980s Christmas horror genre. Again, another US slasher which is a genre I profess to dislike but this one... about a rogue Robo Santa that won’t stop coming... has great performances, a great ear for dialogue (courtesy of The Mighty Begos) and is just loads of fun. A new Christmas standard. My review here.

8. Everything Everywhere All At Once
USA directed by Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
The multiversal action comedy pitches the great Michelle Yeoh as an inadvertent defender of the multiverse and, Short Round from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom as her husband. This film shouldn’t work at all but it’s just so charming and never gets dull. My review here.

7. Benedetta
France/Belgium/Netherlands Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Paul Verhoeven somehow manages to get away with directing a good old sexy nunsploitation picture which is every bit as exploitative and trashy as the heyday of the genre in the early 1970s... just hiding under the guise of ‘arthouse’ (yeah... it really isn’t). Nunsploitation or is it... funsploitation. My review here.

6. Crimes Of The Future
Canada/Greece/UK Directed by David Cronenberg
Cronenberg returns with a movie which feels like a summing up of his early body horror films but, with more of a sense of humour and an incredible ending. Really good stuff. My review here.

5. Mad Heidi
Switzerland Directed by Johannes Hartmann & Sandro Klopfstein
Billed as the first ever Swissploitation movie... I’m not sure if that’s true or not... Mad Heidi is a pure dose of fun and ‘zombie cheese nazis’ silliness, which needs some kind of physical Blu Ray release please. My capsule review is here.

4. Three Thousand Years Of Longing
Australia/USA Directed by George Miller
Finally a romantic movie that's perhaps a tad reminiscent of some of the kinds of films that Powell & Pressburger used to make. I don’t know why everyone else hated it enough that it actually ended up on a major news outlet’s ‘Worst Movies of 2022’ list but, they obviously have no heart or soul. Or perhaps they’re not used to the kind of quirkiness that this kind of genre cross bred with a large slice of fantasy has to offer. My review here.

3. Memoria
Mexico/Qatar/UK/China/USA/Switzerland
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Wait... what? My review here.

2. Clerks III
USA Directed by Kevin Smith
The 8th of Smith’s live action Jay And Silent Bob movies is also, bizarrely, the most moving film of the year. To say I left the cinema with a tear in my eye would be a bit of an understatement. Weeping buckets on a bus load of embarrassed passengers more like. My review here.

1. Confess, Fletch
USA Directed by Greg Mottola
Finally! Despite the rights to the character of Flynn evading the producers, we finally get a Fletch movie done pretty much straight to the book on which it was based (it even survives the technology update to a contemporary setting pretty well). A worthy successor to the Chevy Chase original which fans of the novels have been waiting for now for decades (let’s not mention Fletch Lives and forget that ever happened). My review here.

Halloween Frightfest 2022

For Your Fright Only

Halloween Fright Fest 2022
Sat 29th October - Sun 30th October 2022
Comprising Tripping The Dark Fantastic,
Gnomes, Freeze, Mad Heidi, Outpost,
On The Edge and The Offering

Well, it’s good to be back at the Halloween edition of Fright Fest again. I attended a few films at the regular August edition of Fright Fest but I’ve always had a soft spot for the endurance experience of their Halloween movie marathons and this was my first post-lockdown attendance of that edition (but not post outbreak people, be careful out there). This one began at 10.45am on Saturday morning and finished a bit before 1am the next morning, so almost 15 hours of non-stop movies with just ten to twenty minutes between each Q&A with various of the cast and crew at the end of each movie until the next one. So, yeah, eke out those loo and snack breaks wisely, is always good advice.

This year's was a particularly strong line up and I’m not going to exhaust myself giving long reviews of each one... especially not after that N29 night bus ride a few hours ago. Instead, I’ll just do my usual with a few lines on each one, to give you a flavour of the event and films in question. All of the films shown were either World or UK premieres and so I’m hoping some, if not all, can be revisited on some kind of physical media at a later date. Also... and this has happened before to me with reviews... please be aware that at least a couple of the movies screened are still works in progress and haven’t had their final edit locked in yet.

Tripping The Dark Fantastic
Directed by L. G. White
Tripping The Dark Fantastic is a visual melange of concert footage and documentary talking heads (both contemporary and of their time) of a live show film composer Simon Boswell put on with his band a couple of years ago. His son is also in the band (and an excellent guitar player) and his lead vocalist Lola, who is also his wife, directed, edited and created the various graphic overlays and typographical assaults which are part of the DNA of this movie. It’s good stuff and it was nice hearing some of the stories behind some of Boswell’s key scores over the years, as well as getting to hear their live counterpart versions and hearing others talk about him. Guests in the film included Dario Argento, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Richard Stanley, Iggy Pop and Ewan McGregor.

Gnomes
Directed by Ruwan Suresh Heggelman
This six minute short depicted a woman out jogging in a forest getting attacked and recycled by a bunch of tiny gnomes. Quite gory with no dialogue and, once I’d seen it... it made perfect sense that this was more a calling card of a film (probably to help secure financing) and the director is hard at work on a feature length version... which I suspect will maybe start off with this six minute sequence, or a remake of that.

Freeze
Directed by Charlie Steeds
Freeze is a tale of a bunch of sailors who travel to somewhere in the Arctic (I think... it was shot on location in Norway), to find a friend of the captain who went missing in the region a couple of years before. I won’t ruin the plot but it does involve fish people and one of the reasons I was looking forward to this one was because it sounded from the synopsis just like H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness and, indeed, there are certainly riffs of this which the director was obviously going for as that title is name checked in a line of dialogue... as is Dagon and, well, the ship piloted by the crew is called the Innsmouth so, yeah, of course it was going to be fish people. The film was entertaining and well acted but it seemed to me to be just a little over ambitious for its small budget, truth be told. Felt maybe a little more like 1980s era BBC Doctor Who or Blakes Seven than a horror epic but, still, quite fun.

Mad Heidi
Directed by Johannes Hartmann and Sandro Klopfstein
Mad Heidi was easily the darling of this year’s Fright Fest. Billed as the first Swissploitaiton movie, it took some great exploitation genres of the past such as blacksploitation, women in prison movies, revenge movies and blended it altogether into a cheesy romp of a fun filled time. Loads of action, gore and pinches of nudity. Sights to be seen such as death by cheese anal insertion, death by Toblerone bar and ‘ultra Swiss cheese’ induced zombie super soldiers. I sincerely hope this one gets a Blu Ray release sometime soon... not to be missed and easily one of the most fun filled films I’ve seen at Fright Fest, with some of the best audience reaction. A real crowd pleaser.

Outpost
Directed by Joe Lo Truglio
Written and directed by comic actor Joe Lo Truglio and starring his wife Beth Dover as the film’s main protagonist, Outpost is an amazing tale about a woman suffering from the aftermath of domestic abuse from her ex-boyfriend. So she takes a volunteer job on the top of a mountain outpost, as a look out spotting forest fires, for the relative isolation the job offers her. But there’s more going on than the audience might at first realise and Dover’s incredible acting, coupled with a long, slow stealth reveal makes for a taut and, in my opinion, very commercially viable movie. I hope this one gets picked up for some proper distribution soon and that the director helms some more movies.

On The Edge
Directed by The Soska Sisters
On The Edge is the very new, surprise lock down film conceived, written, directed by and starring the Soska Sisters with Aramis Sartorio (aka porn star Tommy Pistol, who was truly great in this) as the lead protagonist. Sylvia Soska plays his wife and Jen Soska plays Mistress Satana... a dominatrix he hires for a 36 hour session but, is she merely a dominatrix or a version of the devil? This one had a completely different but equally interesting audience reaction to the earlier Mad Heidi. This one gets very ‘edge play’ intense and the audience were so caught up in it that, when the soundtrack gets low, you could almost have heard a pin drop. It’s got a welcome, underlying message of the curative properties of the BDSM lifestyle (especially within the world of BDSM as a profession and I can certainly relate to this message, although I’m not going to go into why here) but I wondered if certain aspects of the movie might possibly not be totally accepted by the BDSM community at large. In that, the introduction of alcohol, drugs and psychedelic states of mind (depending on your interpretation of certain scenes) might not necessarily be seen to embrace SSC or RACK to an extent.* Either way though, it makes for a great movie and another hit for the incredible Soska twins. I hope this one gets an uncut Blu Ray release for sure.

The Offering
Directed by Oliver Park
The last film of the evening, The Offering, was the one ‘old school’ chiller of the films shown at this year’s Halloween Fright Fest and, yeah, it was a really great entry dealing with a fractured father/son relationship in the Jewish community and a demonic entity intent on taking the unborn child of the son’s wife. This one had some nice scares and a good, creeping atmosphere to it. Also, some really nice special effects when he goat-faced demonic entity made appearances. A good one to end the night on I think.

So that’s me done with this year’s Halloween Fright Fest and, well, a good time was had by all, I suspect. I can’t wait until next year’s two Fright Fest blocks and am hoping to snag a few of these ones on Blu Ray at some point in the future. Thanks muchly to the organisers of the event, who always show the audience a terrific time and help make a caring, sharing community of horror movie fans.

*Safe Sane Consensual and Risk Aware Consensual Kink ways of playing.