TERRIFIER 3: MORE THOUGHTS

So I definitely appear to be in the minority on this one. Everyone seems to be going out of their way to express their deepest and most abiding love for Terrifier 3 and Art The Clown, and I seem to be one of the very, very few that care for neither. Well, that's fine: we can't all like (or hate) everything and there's nothing essentially wrong with wildly different subjective responses to a movie.

I haven't been back to see the film: I thought it was tedious, childish garbage, easily the worst film of the year and quite possibly the decade and I'm absolutely not putting myself through that again. Indeed, the more I think about it the more it bothers me: not just the pointless callousness, the sadistic brutality and the wanton wallowing in gory excess, but the joy with which it's been received. How come I didn't get it? How come I emerged from the cinema not just bored out of my mind but actively offended? Does the film count as actually evil? Hard to say, honestly, but I think it's interesting that the auteur's name is Damien.

But there were two particular arguments made on social media in Terrifier 3's favour that I frankly don't understand. The first is the defence of Art The Clown's odious murder of young children, which for most of the Great Horror Icons is never part of their routines. Now I'm no horror newcomer: I've been watching splatter and gore movies since the 1980s and very, very rarely have I been tempted to bail on the grounds of grotesque bad taste; the only times I have abandoned the film have mostly been projection problems and only once have I upped and walked solely because the film was just unwatchable rubbish. Admittedly DVDs and streams have a lower tolerance threshold and they will get switched off if they're plain bad movies. But the specific moments at which I seriously questioned whether I could just go home now, were the two moments when Art casually murdered small children. And they are children, rather than the countless teens in slasher movies, from Scream to Friday The 13th to A Nightmare On Elm Street. Yes, technically at least some of those are indeed "kids", but those in Terrifier 3 are single-digit-aged, going to the Mall with Mummy to see Santa, and getting blown up by a parcel bomb.

Those defending this particular line being crossed have not only cited numerous other movies in which kids have been killed, but pointed out that yes, Art is evil and horror is all about crossing the lines, and kudos to Damien Leone for vaulting over that particular line, for smashing that particular taboo. And it's true that kids get killed in horror movies all the time - plenty in Stephen King alone, from Pet Sematary and Children Of The Corn to It and Salem's Lot. But usually there's some kind of a reason rather than merely the villain's enjoyment of it. Conal Cochrane in Halloween 3 isn't planning to slaughter countless thousands of children just for the lols: he has some nonsensical plan to sacrifice them because of his old Oirish paganism. The shark in Jaws does eat Alex Kintner, but it's a shark. (It also eats the dog.) The death in Hereditary is an accident caused in part by a drug-addled driver. And so on. In Die Hard With A Vengeance, Jeremy Irons' villain is threatening to blow up a school, but the bomb is actually a fake: "Of course not, I'm...not a monster." Whilst in Die Hard 2, William Sadler's villain crashes a jet full of innocent passengers (including children) merely to teach John McClane a lesson in that otherwise ridiculously enjoyable film's only real misstep.

I found it curious that the two instances of pedicide in Terrifier 3 mirrored the exact moment I first felt that urge to wave the white flag: watching Hobo With A Shotgun, specifically when the villain's goons board a school bus and kill all the children with a flamethrower. In Terrifier 3, Art leaves a parcel bomb in Santa's Grotto. Where's the joke in that? Where's the humour? Why is that so "funny"? What is it that makes Art such a supposedly colourful and attractive character, when he's slaughtering primary schoolers for his own personal amusement and nothing else? It's the gloating sadism that makes me uncomfortable: Art The Clown and Damien Leone both know exactly what they're doing and are enjoying it, perhaps a little too much. In the same way that those venerable old video nasties The House On The Edge Of The Park, Last House On The Left and I Spit On Your Grave seem to be enjoying their sexual violence rather more than they should, and are expecting the audience to enjoy it as well.

The second argument in Terrifier 3's supposed favour is that it's raking in an absolute shedload at the box-office: internationally it's taken more than $60m and counting on a $2m budget. It's the highest grossing Unrated movie of all time, it knocked Joker: Folie A Deux off the top of the charts. Well, that may well be true - in fact I don't doubt it for a second - but obviously something was going to displace Joker 2: it wasn't going to sit there forever. Terrifier 3 is currently at #7 in the US (and no longer placing at all in the UK), knocked down the rankings by Smile 2 and the new Venom movie and Conclave the following week. More importantly: just because it's reached the top of the charts doesn't mean it's any good. The Exorcist: Believer reached #1 at the US box office. Tenet reached #1. All three of the Fifty Shades movies reached #1. Hell, even The Flash and Indiana Jones 5, two of last year's worst films, reached #1. Conversely, untold hundreds of great movies have failed to reach #1, or even chart. There's absolutely no correlation between box-office and quality.

And why should we give a damn about the numbers anyway? We're not accountants, we're not studio bean counters. Furthermore, this idea that Terrifier 3's financial success is indicative of horror's lucrative potential is entirely redundant given that horror is pretty much the only reliable genre there is. Look, the horror audience will almost always turn out: the films are pretty much critic-proof, and they don't cost $200 million plus the way that Marvel and DC films seem to (and to far less return on the investment). A low-budget slasher movie is a much better risk than an expensive superhero epic: how the major studios don't go bust spending such ridiculous amounts of money, when there simply aren't enough people in the world to put their films into profit, is beyond me.

But hey, I'm not an accountant or a studio bean counter. I'm a customer and consumer, a longtime aficionado of the genre, from slashers to hauntings to aliens to mad scientists to the remorseless undead, from social relevance to scattered entrails. I'm absolutely not averse to paint-the-room-red gore. But in this particular instance I'm not just deeply uncomfortable, but baffled as to Terrifier 3's appeal and applause. And whilst I felt it unlikely after the appalling Terrifier 2 that I'd bother with this third one, it's now an absolute certainty that I'll never sit through any more of these wretched films.

TERRIFIER 3

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Well, I've only myself to blame. I did wonder, when I saw Terrifier 2 a couple of years ago, whether I'd bother with a third instalment in a series that started very unremarkably and plummeted immediately into the lowest kind of loathsome, noxious sludge. It seemed unlikely that the series would immediately improve to the point where it suddenly became quality horror and its bogeyman figure Art The Clown would attain the status of bona fide slasher icon, up there at the top table with Michael and Jason and Leatherface. Yet even with the lowest of expectations, I was unprepared for just what a miserable, joyless and utterly boring experience this film turned out to be. On at least two occasions I was tempted to walk out because this is easily one of the worst, most despicable horror movies I've seen in years, if not decades. If there is such a thing as the pornography of violence then Terrifier 3 is probably as close as you'll get. 

The synopsis of this mindless, infantile drivel is basically: Art The Clown turns up yet again and butchers a bunch of people. He seems to be targeting Sienna (Lauren LaVera) from the first two movies, but will happily also hack to pieces pretty much anyone who turns up. Sienna has been in a psychiatric hospital since Terrifier 2 and is now released to extended family; meanwhile the reborn Art has sat in a chair for five years until a couple of demolition guys turn up to knock his hideout down. Then it's carnage galore: it's Christmas so Art dresses up as Santa... and butchers a bunch of people.

The trouble with Terrifier 3 is exactly the same as with Terrifier 2: it doesn't know when to stop. That's because Damien Leone, the auteur responsible for this utter garbage, doesn't know either. He's not even aware that there is actually a line in the sand, or that the line might be there for a good reason. Art's first victim here is a boy of about nine, hacked to death with an axe for absolutely no narrative reason at all. (The actual killing happens off camera, but the bloody mutilated corpse is presented for us all to enjoy, hahaha, pass the popcorn.) And midway through the film is a scene in which Art The Clown leaves a parcel bomb in a shopping centre Santa's Grotto to be opened by a small child. It's a cheap, tawdry shock moment that's only there for a sick laugh: if this is a joke, it's an Arthur Fleck joke. Even Leone is surely aware at this point of that line being crossed as one character reacts to the news coverage: "was it a terrorist incident?". To which the answer is actually yes, it was, and Art The Clown is actually a figure that should be dealt with by the FBI, SWAT teams, the Secret Service and Chuck Norris, and not a traumatised teenage mental patient with a magic sword.

The result is a film that wallows in its bloodshed and slaughter, that rejoices in the carnage and dismemberment, because that's all it knows how to do and that's all it wants to do. It doesn't have a charismatic villain: Art The Clown is a boring zero of a wannabe slasher icon: just pure unreasoning evil. In Halloween, Dr Loomis suggets that what was living behind Michael Myers' eyes was pure evil, but, as Kim Newman observes in Nightmare Movies (an essential tome, by the way), Myers "seems to enjoy scaring people more than killing them." Art is not interested in scaring people, merely killing them as bloodily and viciously as possible. Nothing Art ever does is remotely funny: granted, nothing Jason and Michael do are particularly funny either but the crucial difference is they're not supposed to be (let's ignore the fact that clowns aren't funny anyway). Art is enjoying himself far too much with the random killings and if we're supposed to be joining in the fun, we need some semblance of a reason. All the other horror icons of that pantheon, that Art so desperately and pathetically wants to join, have just enough story to make them scary - hell, just a few sentences - but (at least in their earlier episodes) not enough story to diminish them. Art has nothing, and is nothing.

So why do it? Leone must surely know that he can't actually make a good film, nor even a half-decent one, but what he can do is pile up the blood and entrails. He doesn't give a damn about character, about nuance, about storytelling: all he's interested in is getting to the next brutal overkill as quickly as possible and then gloating over it. Because that's all he's got. Like the previous instalment, this exists purely as a showcase for the prosthetics and make-up work and yes, that's a very impressive rendering of a guy being rectally chainsawed. But making the bloodiest slasher movie is like shooting the most explicit porn film, or playing the longest jazz accordian solo. These just aren't records anyone's really interested in breaking any more. Leone seems unaware that the highlights of the horror genre do not, as a rule, dwell on the splat for reels at a time: Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre operate on almost Merchant Ivory levels of bloodshed, and are acknowledged classics.

The great gore movies use their gore for a reason, to make a social comment or a satirical point, but they never use it for wanton cruelty and heartless sadism the way Terrifier 3 does. Merely emptying the steaming offal bucket over the audience does not make a horror classic, but empty schlock rubbish of the Olaf Ittenbach and Andreas Schnaas ilk. This is not a film from a Romero or a Carpenter or a Hooper or a Cronenberg or a Craven, it's a film from the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy who's spent too long under the bedcovers with the dregs of Troma Films and has no conception of the word "Enough", and he really, really needs to grow up. Terrifier 3 ends as a setup for Terrifier 4, and while I wondered whether I would come back for this instalment, I can guarantee that I won't be there for the next. Unlike Damien Leone, I've got better things to do with my time.

*

Further thoughts on Terrifier 3 here:

JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX

CONTAINS SOME MAJOR SPOILERS AND A LITTLE SADNESS

Maybe in hindsight it's hardly surprising that the new Joker movie didn't exactly wow me. Firstly, I wasn't a huge fan of the first one: it seemed to be as deliberately offputting as possible, a film that set out solely to make the viewer (and specifically me) uncomfortable and uneasy. Secondly, I have largely given up on Marvel and DC comicbook movies anyway on the grounds that I'm just fed up with them (The Flash still remains the only film I can think that's killed an entire subgenre stone dead for me). And I was largely right in my preconceptions: while I remain ambivalent about Joker I'm absolutely not so both-sides about Joker: Folie A Deux, a film that annoyed me far more than it entertained me, and a film which didn't do anything I might have liked but did a whole lot of things I definitely didn't. The main one of those is that it's a musical, one my my very least favourite genres: there are maybe five musicals that I can actually take and this absolutely is not one of them. 

We are back in the miserable world of hopeless standup Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), in the midst of being assessed for competency to stand trial for the five (or six) murders Fleck/Joker committed in the first film. Is he sane enough to face the death penalty or is he unfit to plead, sending him to proper psychiatric care? In a music therapy group he meets and connects with Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), who's obviously some version of Harley Quinn - but is she connecting with him or Joker? Is it actual love, or just the obsession of a superfan? Even as the trial proceeds (with Harvey Dent as prosecutor, lest we forget this is a Batman spinoff), the chanting mob gathers outside...

Much of Joker: Folie A Deux is a prison drama and courtroom drama, but interspersed with stylised song and dance numbers taking place within Fleck's mind. Personally I found this distracting and with a running time of 138 minutes I could have cheerfully lost them, especially since there seem to be so many of them. (There were three points at which I almost said out loud "Oh, no, they're going to sing again, aren't they?" And they did!) And for a reported budget of $190 million plus: where's there big screen spectacle? A dialogue heavy film taking place in two main interior locations, and with no huge setpieces or endless CGI overkill, really should cost half that much at most. Worse: for any of us who might have actually been invested in Fleck's story and character, and who had given them 260 minutes over two films, the ending will feel like a swindle. Still, at least it rules out Joker 3...

Is it at least better than Joker? I'm not sure that it even clears that fairly modest bar. The first one was obviously trying to do something different with the whole DC/Batman mythos, but neither the Joker nor the perpetually downtrodden Fleck were particularly enjoyable company and to be honest it's the same here. It's hopelessly grim throughout (Hildur Gudnadottir gives us yet another glum cello-led score that's not going on any of my playlists), devoid of joy and lightness - why so serious? Frankly it's small wonder Fleck keeps escaping into showtune fantasias. That's obviously the point, but if you want to smuggle in an Author's Message about mental illness and insanity pleas then maybe this isn't the right vehicle for it.

As for the sadness: this was the last film at the Bedford Cineworld which closed Sunday night after thirty-three years. Since New Year's Eve 1990 I've seen precisely 1,037 films in that sixplex and it's a shame it's closing. Obviously I had to be there for the last house, whatever they were showing. But it's also a shame that they bowed out on such a whatever of a film: underwhelming, far too long, occasionally unbelievable, riddled with annoying songs and with a sour ending even for the sourest of characters. Though I liked the visual palette of the film, and I'm not about to deny the performances, it never wowed me, it never came to life and, even though one of the characters actually sets light to the building, it never catches fire. Maybe the joke's on me, maybe it's on all of us. But no-one's laughing.

**

MEGALOPOLIS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Well, it's a failure: a frequently ludicrous spectacular that has more going on in its excessive length and scope than any mainstream studio release this year, or indeed from the last few years. It's an allegorical fable that seeks to draw parallels (not necessarily subtly: some are less drawing parallels and more screaming "Do You Get It???" into your face through a luminous bullhorn) between the fall of the Roman Empire and the decline of the modern/future America, but there's also a pleasing parallel between the smaller story of a man determined to build his Megalopolis City Of The Future at whatever cost, his way, and Francis Ford Coppola's 40-year determination to make his beloved Megalopolis movie, at whatever cost, his way. Because that's what Coppola's done: sold his wineries and put up all the $120 million himself rather than compromise his vision for the moneymen. He is the moneyman: his dime, his rules, there is no-one standing behind him with a big stick telling him to stop it. And frankly I'd like this to happen a lot more: for films to be made by filmmakers with a need to tell stories rather than accountants with a need for a new Porsche.

Adam Driver is Cesar Catalina, chairman of the Design Authority of New Rome, trying to build his dream city from this revolutionary new material he's either discovered or invented called Megalon. He's fiercely opposed by the corrupt and unpopular Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who just wants to build a casino there; his banker is Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), his mistress is TV presenter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and his new-found muse is the relatively normal-named Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who just happens to be Cicero's daughter. Oh, and he has a superpower for some reason.

So it's part The Fountainhead, part Caligula (only without all the humping). Much of it is actually pretty interesting and enjoyable, though there are times when Coppola feels the need to chuck in weird and surreal visual touches, like he did with his Dracula but he absolutely didn't do with The Godfather. (One of those is a great film, one of them isn't, and you know which is which.) The political machinations should be the most interesting thing, but sadly some of the dialogue is howling at the moon terrible, plot threads which should be seismic are resolved quickly and simply abandoned (Cesar is involved in a fake sex tape; ten minutes later it's forgotten), and Cesar himself isn't a sufficiently engaging character to make us care very much. Even a brilliantly timed shock moment doesn't really have any impact.

There's no question that it's a mess. Yet it's constantly fascinating, occasionally baffling, frequently barking mad and genuinely unique. And it's only out there at all because of the way FFC has done it: if he'd kept his wineries and let Netflix dictate terms for a limited series it would have just disappeared into the vague noise of a thousand other streaming shows. In the end, Megalopolis might be remembered more as a colossal financial and critical flop, or one crazy old man's last roll of the dice, rather than for its own merits. And it's a lot better than Twixt or Youth Without Youth. (I've never seen Jack: should I?) Some have said Megalopolis is one of the worst movies they've ever seen: all I can say is that they need to see more films because this isn't the worst movie I've seen this week. By a long shot.

***

HUNT KER KILL HER

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Tedious, arguably misogynistic drivel in which a young woman is chased round a factory by homicidal maniacs for no reason other than what might charitably be described as a study of toxic masculinity, and less charitably as brutal, knuckleheaded entertainment for lowlifes and sadists, suggesting that we really haven't moved on since the despicable likes of I Spit On Your Grave. "Women in peril" has been a staple of cinema for over a century but rarely has it been as crass, thuddingly nasty and devoid of entertainment value as it is here. If this had come out forty years ago it would have been straight on the banned list before you could say Deodato. Now it's somehow escaped with a 15 certificate. That's progress, I suppose.

Halfway through divorce proceedings and with an unwell child, young mother Karen (Natalie Terrazzino) takes a job as a night cleaner at a local factory. But on her first shift she is menaced by masked intruders intent on killing her. Why? Because one of them is her violent wifebeating ex and the others are his equally violent (and incredibly stupid) buddies out to murder her so he can get custody back. Extended scenes of run, hide and fight ensue: mostly shot in semi-darkness at best and none of them having any real impact.

You could wonder why his dumbass buddies continue to chase her after she starts fighting back and killing them - indeed you could wonder why they showed up at all as accessories to murder - and you could wonder how the hell the dumbass ex-husband thinks he's not going to be a suspect given that he's already murdered someone else. While we're at it, why didn't these idiots just bring a bunch of shotguns? Finally, you might ask why anyone thought this tiresome, thicko macho garbage was any kind of good idea: it's not as if there's anything more to their persecution than "kill the bitch". Of course she's the Final Girl, but she's the Only Girl. She's going to win out at the end, but she has to go through Hell to get there and the balance between them is off: there's too much victimisation and nowhere near enough vengeance.

Hunt Her Kill Her (there's no comma in there) is honestly a chore. Story and character this thin and shallow and simple-minded means you don't have to think about them, but there's nothing else in there to think about, so all that's left is chasing and fighting and none of that's remotely interesting here. Coralie Fargeut's Revenge, as an example, was done with energy any vitality and style, but there's nothing like that here: it's just nasty and unpleasant, like its male characters. And also like its male characters, I hated the time spent on it and was glad when it was finished with.

*

WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY II

CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS

The atrocity continues. Not content with making a sleazy and senseless splatter movie out of (supposedly) beloved childrens' characters purely because the copyright had expired, they've done it again: gorier, stupider, nastier and, for all the increased body count and upfront flesh-ripping, far duller. Reimagining Pooh, Tigger, Owl etc as homicidal maniacs dismembering pretty young idiots is a one-joke idea that would make for a semi-decent post-watershed sketch on Comic Relief, but not a full feature film and sure as hell not an ongoing saga that looks to be leading to a cinematic Poohniverse.

Christopher Robin (a different actor, but no less punchable) is now in therapy, not just for the massacre from the first film but also the childhood disappearance of his younger brother. He and his family are still hounded and blamed for the events of the first film: a succession of bellends keep wandering into the killing grounds of Hundred Acre Wood and getting ripped to pieces, and a bunch of local teens are planning a massive rave. But then Christopher's therapy uncovers a lost memory of his brother's abduction, ultimately leading to the horrifying truth about those creatures in the wood...

Obviously Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey II is utterly terrible. Whether it's better or worse than the first one is like asking whether Alsatians or Golden Retrievers produce the turds you'd least like to step in. Mean-spirited, with dozens of teens wheeled on merely to be slaughtered, and indifferently staged outside of the splatter highlights, it boasts an appearance by Simon Callow for no obvious reason, a search engine called Milne, occasional narration from the kind of voice that normally recommends Mr Kipling's Almond Slices, and a hilarious instance of Chekhov's Dishwasher. Fans of decapitations and wanton bloodshed might get a few laughs out of it, but really it's just poo(h).

*

PANDEMONIUM

AVEC LES SPOILIERES

The first 25 minutes of this French afterlife horror are brilliant: a dialogue on a snowy mountain road between Nathan and Daniel: two men realising they've both been killed in a car accident and that they're suddenly ghosts. What to do now? Are they stuck at the crash site for eternity? Or will they be guided into an afterlife? Heaven or Hell? What a crying shame that Pandemonium immediately nosedives into two thoroughly uninteresting stories of death, a surprise nod to Lucio Fulci and a genuinely bleak view of what comes post-bucket kicking.

While Daniel walks reluctantly through the (definitely not pearly) gateway and is never seen again, Nathan follows and finds himself in the last scene of The Beyond: a desolate corpse-strewn wasteland. And he discovers he can experience the crimes and cruelties that led those people there. One is a child who murdered her family, one is a woman who ignored her daughter's schoolyard persecutions. And then he finds the true meaning of hell and the punishment for his own crimes...

It's not as if either of the two illustrative stories had some kind of ghoulish twist in the tale a la Creepshow. You just watch these extended vignettes thinking there must be more to them that this - but there isn't. But it's not as if either of them had any bearing on Nathan's own story or there are any lessons to be learned because the film's own take on the afterlife is eternal suffering and despair regardless of earthly conduct (even though that explicitly doesn't happen at the start, although this is Hell and the demons might be lying), which makes no sense at all. And the final coda is completely out of nowhere and makes even less sense.

Some would argue that ghost stories are optimistic: they suggest life after death, that (as Stanley Kubrick said) oblivion is not the end. This depiction of What Happens Next emphatically is not optimistic: eternal, meaningless punishment without purpose or reason. Thanks for sharing your vision, Quarxx (whose real name is the far more normal Alexandre Claudin, apparently). Sadly, the intriguing promise of the first half hour is completely lost and the result is a film which got steadily more annoyed and irritated with, to the extent that I only just managed to resist the temptation to switch it off.

*

THE CROW

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

And the big question is.... why? Why bother doing another Crow movie? And. more specifically, why bother doing another Crow movie when you're not going to do anything that remarkable or massively innovative with it? What's the point? Surely there are plenty of other comic book stories - even ones in a similar vein - that haven't been tackled once yet, let alone four times? Ah, who cares, there must still be some money left in this IP, let's drag it out again and flog some more coins out of it.

Beyond a couple of character names and the basic thrust of avian-aided revenge from beyond the grave, this incarnation of The Crow doesn't appear to have much to do with the 1994 version, a film rendered uncomfortable due to the on-set death of Brandon Lee (leading the makers to finish the film with doubles and CGI). Eric (Bill Skarsgard) and his girlfriend Shelly (FKA Twigs) are still murdered, but this time it's because Shelly has an incriminating video of gangster Roeg (Danny Huston); because of Shelly's sins she's doomed to Hell, but Eric can only save her soul if he returns from Purgatory and kills Roeg and his associates...

It's okay. Save for the fact that it's one of those very rare occasions when someone from Blake's Seven turns up (Josette Simon), it's nothing remarkable, it's nothing innovative, it's nothing special. But who goes to the cinema for unremarkable? Yes, it's got enough blood and violence to get an 18 certificate (still a rarity these days): the sequence in which Eric slaughters all of Roeg's goons at an opera house alone would qualify for that. It does also have a soundtrack full of (what to me at least is) absolutely terrible music! The Crow 2024 has no less than forty-six producers of one stripe or another (co-, executive, line and so on) and one has to wonder what the hell they were doing all day: three minutes each? It just about gets by but it's entirely redundant and is that really enough for fifty million dollars? Personally I don't think so.

**

THE CRITIC

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS AND BIG WORDS

To the cinema once again, dear readers, and the latest motion picture from Mr Anand Tucker, which proves to be a modestly engaging little contrivance which might rank as a perfectly passable period potboiler were it not for the occasional sense that it might be pretending to profundity. One is always grateful for the film industry to step away from the wearyingly familiar from time to time, and amidst the mostly unremarkable summer attractions for the massed audiences, any offering that is not aimed primarily at easily distracted simpletons is to be seized upon immediately.

Jimmy Erskine is The Critic of the title, the Daily Chronicle's longstanding reviewer of the legitimate theatre and columnist of greasepaint gossip. He is, one must acknowledge, not a particularly pleasant fellow: too fond of the alcohol and certain other vices which, let us merely hint, are still against the law in 1934. He is also too cheerfully addicted to the vituperative vitriol of the reviewer's art: regularly denigrating the hapless thespians' nightly efforts with an almost childishly sadistic glee. Faced with the Chronicle's new owner, a man unwilling to subsidise his sybaritic lifestyle, Erskine concocts a fiendish plot against him, with the assistance of an actress whose performances he has viciously abused in print. Inevitably, however, his machinations must fail...

Erskine is a gift of a role for Mr Ian McKellen, an actor always worth watching both for moments of quiet, intimate subtlety or declamatory grandstanding, and here he does get to play to the close camera as well as the gallery. I must confess at this point that I yield to no-one in my ambivalence towards Ms Gemma Arterton, an actress whose work for some unfathomable reason has never particularly appealed to me, be it the schoolyard shenanigans of St Trinians or the cavorting around South America with James Bond (although in all fairness I was a great admirer of Byzantium); but here she does have the difficult task of playing a not-very-good actress, which I should say she accomplishes. She does well to differentiate between the "real" Nina and the "stage" Nina, though on at least one occasion she is aided by the production in which she is appearing being a clearly unspeakable disaster.

Having said all this, at least in its current form (following reshooting that substantially restructured the story) The Critic is a reasonably enjoyable yarn: sombre though not without humour, with excellent attention to period detail, a mixture of the glamorous and the grubby, as well as an insight into the nature and function of the critic (and whether he can create his own drama rather than merely report on others'). It is scarcely one of the greats - for one thing there are a few too many handy connections between the characters - but it is a mostly solid and well mounted melodrama that takes perhaps too much care to never really catch fire. Ultimately, however, it is Mr McKellen's show and, whether he's being mischievous, bitter or conspiratorial, you can not take your eyes off him. One wonders what Jimmy Erskine would think of it: for my mere part, dear readers, I commend it to the house, albeit with reservations, and exit with a flourish, stage left.

***

THE SUBSTANCE

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND YIKES

Yikes. I mean, yikes. If you've been waiting impatiently for a genuinely extreme body horror, something totally unrestrained and boasting a final act that is honestly up there with the last reels of Peter Jackson's Braindead for sheer blood flood, then here it is. The Substance is one of the best full-on horror grossouts in years, possibly decades and, as a longtime genre fan, I obviously loved it. Finally: here's a movie that doesn't hold back, doesn't cut away, doesn't tone it down for the softer sensibilities, and also has so much to say in between the grotesqueries.

It's not about being old (to quote Citizen Kane, "old age is the one disease you don't look forward to being cured of"); it's about looking it. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, 61 and absolutely going for it) is a fading Hollywood star, fired from her regular fitness TV show because she's starting to look her age and Harvey (Dennis Quaid), the crass-to-the-point-of-caricature studio head, wants somebody younger and sexier instead. A young doctor gives her a thumb drive promoting The Substance, an apparently simple set of syringes, chemicals and nutrients which cause her to graphically birth her a younger, better version of herself (Margaret Qualley) - a spectacular scene in a cold, white-tiled bathroom. Calling herself Sue, the "newborn" replaces Elisabeth as the network's fitness star and is an immediate ratings smash. But whilst the procedure comes with very clear rules, she is so enamoured with her new self that, as Sue, she immediately starts breaking them...

The final act of The Substance is an all-stops-out overdose of monster mayhem: a body horror with the grisly flesh-twisting mutations of The Fly, The Thing and Society (along with the prom night spectacle of Carrie) presented with genuinely startling practical and prosthetic effects, now mixed with hilarious yet absurd comedy. Strangely, the closest film it's referring to is actually a comedy, Death Becomes Her (which even starred Mr Demi Moore): the quest for eternal youth and vitality at whatever cost, and the physical horror of when it goes wrong. (There's also an old Stanley Baxter sketch, substituting plastic surgery for body-cloning serums, in which the process goes spectacularly and hilariously awry at the presumed moment of triumph.) And yet it doesn't shy away from moments of actual humanity: after a chance encounter with an old school friend, who says she's still beautiful, Elisabeth is so thoroughly conditioned to the importance of youth that she can't conceive of the idea of just going out for the evening and looking her age. (Specifically this is more relevant for women: men are allowed to look like decrepit physical wrecks with no problems, but woe betide any womrn who shows the slightest signs of not looking like the Prom Queen any more.)

Questions do remain, however, concerning the procedure itself and the "science" behind it. If the mind and consciousness are transferred between the new and old bodies, then why are both Elisabeth and Sue active at the same time in the later stages of the film? And if they're separate people, then where's the benefit for Elisabeth? It's also left unexplained, though it probably doesn't matter, who's marketing this stuff and why, how it's ever supposed to be commercially viable or where it even comes from. And it's odd, though convenient, that Elisabeth doesn't appear to have any friends or family (or even assistants or domestic staff) to visit her in her massive apartment.

I'm delighted that The Substance is actually getting a wide UK cinema release rather than briefly playing a few arthouse screens before dropping onto streaming, though I do wonder how the Friday night popcorn audience will respond to what Coralie Fargeat has achieved. (The running time of 140 minutes might count against it as well.) But for my part, I thought it was terrific. The Substance is superbly made, funny, shocking, and consistently inventive (whether illustrating Elisabeth's decline through the construction and subsequent neglect of her star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, needle-dropping an apposite cue from Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score, or just including queasy closeups of an eye with multiple irises). Do see it.

****

THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER

CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS, IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK THAT WAS WRITTEN 127 YEARS AGO OR SEEN ANY OF THE HUNDREDS OF MOVIES BASED ON IT

Finally! This was actually supposed to come out in October 2023, but it's taken this long due to the original distributors being bought by another company and it's taken going on a year to sort out the legalese. And it's generally been worth the wait: a welcome return of full-on period Gothic Horror, and a new yet familiar representation of one of the genre's principal towering figures. What a pity it's taken so long.

If you didn't know already, given the vast number of Dracula adaptations there have been over the years, the Demeter was the ship on which Count Dracula travelled from Bulgaria to England, until it broke up on the rocks near Whitby. The disappearances of the Demeter crew are detailed in the Captain's log, presented as half of one chapter from Bram Stoker's original novel; this fills in all the gaps as to what we all know actually happened on board, as the crew are picked off one by one by a terrifying creature that surely doesn't have anything to do with either the fifty large crates of earth in the hold, or the mysterious, barely alive young woman who has apparently either stowed away in the hold or fallen out of one of the boxes.

One of the best things about The Last Voyage Of The Demeter is that it presents Dracula not as a tortured romantic lead or a suave and charismatic aristocrat, but a twisted, repulsive monster of the Nosferatu ilk. Which is absolutely right: the price for immortality should be a miserable existence spent forever in the shadows and darkness. The only real trouble is that by nature of most vampire tales the bulk of the horror takes place at night and sometimes, with events lit only by moonlight and candles, the film is visually too dark - a technique that's becoming increasingly prevalent for no apparent reason. I would recommend that you pick a cinema where they do actually turn all the house lights off, but unfortunately that's not an option as the film will be heading straight to home viewing platforms with no UK theatrical release. What a shame when terrible films like Tarot and Baghead get the wide exposure they frankly don't deserve, and a nicely crafted, serious horror movie like this one is pretty much thrown away. The Last Voyage Of The Demeter is still definitely worth your time, but do turn the lights out.

****

TRAUMATIKA

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SPOILERS

The trouble with Traumatika isn't that it's a bad film: rather it's two perfectly good films that don't belong together. One is harsh, nasty and deals with very difficult issues and subjects that really need to handled very delicately and sensitively and should come with a battery of trigger warnings; the other is a satirical maniac-chases-women horror comedy that is far lighter and more typically entertaining. There's nothing wrong with either of them, in the way there's nothing wrong with, say, Munich and Carry On Matron: but they absolutely shouldn't be bolted together and the tonal shift is jarring.

Discounting a brief scene in which an unholy artefact is buried in the North African desert in 1910, the bulk of the first half concerns that newly discovered object's new owner, who opens it and becomes possessed by the evil within it, leading him to abuse his own young daughter, Fleeing, she aborts the unwanted pregnancy but is then compelled to abduct young children from the local area and raise them as potential vessels for the demon. All of this is bleak and deeply uncomfortable viewing, and rightly so. But twenty years after she was killed by the sheriff who found the bodies in the basement, her younger sister appears on a tacky true-crime TV show to tell her side of the story, as the evil appears to have returned just in time for Halloween...

And it's that part of the film which is lighter, jokier, and looks and feels like a more traditional horror movie, with satirical observation about crass media sensationalism, creepy trick-or-treat kids, actual gags (the masked maniac suddenly coming back for his hat), and the final sting that suggests It Might Not Be All Over and you should come back next year for Traumatika II. Which, again, is perfectly fine, but the gear change halfway through is too abrupt: incest and dead children don't belong in a multiplex popcorn horror, and Boo! jump scares and familiar genre tropes don't belong in a confrontational drama about rape and abortions. Either segment as its own separate movie would be fine: they're both well made and they're both interesting and absorbing, but the hitching of one to the other weakens both of them and the film as a whole.

**

BOGIEVILLE

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS

I don't want to spend too much time on this very low-budget British vampire movie (why should I? They didn't) but I suppose it should be mentioned in passing. A young couple on the run stop off at an abandoned caravan park and find themselves trapped there as caretakers to the resident warring vampires. Fine, except that it's set in Atlanta, Georgia yet is quite clearly and undisguisedly shot in Surrey: Godalming may be in the South but it's not the Deep South. All that has been done to suggest the setting is to have the all-Brit cast speak in American accents and drive a bunch of left-hand drive cars: they haven't even changed the road signs or redressed the obviously British petrol station to reflect US gas prices.

The best thing about Bogieville really is the vampire teeth that most of the cast have to wear; the trouble is they have to speak through them as well and a lot of dialogue is pretty well indecipherable. Some of the effects for the vampires burning in sunlight are perfectly okay, though Near Dark looked a hell of a lot better and that was over thirty years ago. It's fairly bloody, but there's really not enough in the movie to maintain interest.

*

ALIEN: ROMULUS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Hurrah! The Alien series gets back on track and back to its roots with this terrific SF horror. Whilst I absolutely loved Prometheus and kind of enjoyed Alien: Covenant enough (and rewatching them this last week generally confirmed both responses), it's nice to get away from the creatures' backstory as favoured by Ridley Scott and throw the saga back to a bunch of variously sympathetic types picked off by the supremely scary monsters as in the first four films. Alien: Romulus is littered with callbacks to those films - some subtle, some not so - and while much of it works magnificently, there's more than one colossal legacy callback which feel distracting and entirely unnecessary. The signs are promising right from the start - the film immediately looks like it was shot back in the 1980s, you can hear the flutes in Benjamin Wallfisch's score, and even the titles and credits font is identical to that of Alien.

While Prometheus and Covenant (and even the first Alien Vs Predator movie) centred around experts and scientists, Alien: Romulus goes back to the first four instalments, using regular characters who have absolutely no idea what they're suddenly dealing with. Rather than space hauliers or prisoners, they're basically youngsters stuck on a miserable mining colony, with no hope of passage to any other planet where there might actually be sunlight. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her companion Andy (David Jonsson), a damaged synthetic, reluctantly agree to help raid a suddenly discovered spaceship, to steal the cryogenic pods that will enable them to hypersleep long enough to reach another, better world. But, inevitably, the craft is not entirely deserted...

From there on it's ticking most of the expected boxes: armies of facehuggers skittering like spiders, rotating lights and clanking metal corridors (the production design is a glorious recreation of the original Alien look), people trapped in rooms with the monsters, a strong female lead (even standing in a Ripley pose at one point), physical effects rather than digital (the CG is mostly reserved for the exteriors and the planet's rings). Much of this is exciting and enormously enjoyable, spectacularly mounted, solidly put together and well played (David Jonsson's android gets an upgrade halfway through and becomes a completely different character). And, unlike Fede Alvarez' earlier Evil Dead movie, it's actually scary in places.

Skip this paragraph if you don't want the really big spoiler. What lets it down is the use of callbacks, many of which are mere background touches and perfectly good fun, such as another appearance of that drinking-bird toy, or musical nods to the earlier scores (Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner are both included in the end credits). Others are more serious, two in particular. Much has already been said of the other synthetic on board, a CG simulated Ian Holm pasted in a la Rogue One, reprising his sinister android role with several lines of verbatim dialogue. This makes no narrative sense: Rook is not Ash, and is never suggested to be Ash, so given that Ash didn't look like Bishop or Call (or indeed David or Walter), why should Rook look like Ash? And if Rook and Ash were the same android model, then why didn't the original Nostromo crew recognise him/it immediately? Secondly, the iconic Aliens line "Get away from her, you bitch!" is dropped in, but out of context it's just taking a sledgehammer to the fourth wall for no logical reason beyond fan service.

To be honest I could have done with a little less of the council estate swearing and a little more depth to the characters besides Rain and Andy. You could also ask why no-one other than the Double Deckers has noticed this massive spaceship that's suddenly appeared out of nowhere. And perhaps it starts to flag a little in the last stretch with a new creature suddenly introduced, that to be honest the film didn't really need. Or you can put all that aside and just enjoy the movie for what it is: a gory (15-certificate) horror romp with scary monsters big and small, and enough Big Ideas to engage the brain without getting in the way of the thrills. I had a great time watching it and whilst I still do like the previous two films, I'm really happy that the Alien saga has gone back to basics and back to what it does best.

****

IN A VIOLENT NATURE

CONTAINS A FEW SPOILERS

Unstoppable masked killer picking off teens? Check. Maniac's origin story told as a cruel and tragic campfire legend? Check. Annoying young victims, at least two of whom frankly deserve it? Check. Local law enforcement powerless to assist? Check. At least one outrageous gore highlight? Check. And yet... not. Because while In A Violent Nature certainly ticks all the boxes on the eighties slasher template, it does them in completely the opposite way. This is the antithesis of the standard woodland slasher, which does the exact opposite of everything that makes a typical teenkill horror movie. This is the anti-Jason, the anti-Cropsy, the anti-Madman Marz.

In content, it is precisely what you remember and love from the Friday The 13th sequels, The Burning, Madman and all those other slight variations on those themes. His wasteland grave disturbed by a bunch of charmless youngsters, the wordless, remorseless bogeyman figure Johnny rises, methodically tracks down the intruders and dispassionately kills them. And that's it. Where this film differs from the Fridays and similar is in its style: shot in 4:3 squarevision, with minimal editing as the camera forever hovers behind Johnny's shoulder as he stalks and slashes, accompanied by the sound of utter silence rather than shrieking violin stabs or low sawtooth synths; the film has no music score. The shouldervision and lack of editing also means it allows us to fully relish the ludicrous overkill of one particularly gruesome death scene, by not cutting discreetly to a blood spurt or something else entirely while the murder continues off-screen.

It's an interesting experiment: to take the standard 80s stabfest and rip out any semblance of artifice or style. But what you end up with is a series of very slow plods through drab fields and woods as you just traipse along behind the monster murderer. We're obviously not getting the killer's POV you'd expect, because he's on screen pretty much the whole time, but we hardly ever get anyone else's perspective either. Only in the final reel, when it looks like the Final Girl might actually be getting away, does our viewpoint tear away from Johnny's shoulder blades.

Is that enough? Personally I'm not sure: this new angle on familiar territory dispenses with a lot of the usual tropes and techniques, but those are the things I liked about those slasher movies - Harry Manfredini's strings, subjective camera, editing to speed the movie along. Not to suggest that The Final Chapter or A New Beginning were particularly involving, but In A Violent Nature absolutely and deliberately isn't.

**