POMO

An educational video for high-school history and biology students, and perhaps for those studying Italian. The historical stage of the Nazis’ campaign from Kiev to Stalingrad, told among the German leaders and social workers with a weakness for uniforms. Oral, missionary, lesbian S&M. There is a suspicious lack of the last of these in the Italian cut. I want the longer French version. And a CD soundtrack with an exhaustive booklet.

I haven’t read the novel, so I’m reviewing this strictly as a war movie. In technical terms, it’s fine. There is nothing to criticise when it comes to the sets, costumes, camerawork or the depiction of the battle and negotiation scenes. However, the detailed portrayal of the characters and, mainly, the dialogue come up short, feeling flat and failing to emotionally engage the viewer. The film lacks a strong screenwriting focus on the personal stories of the protagonist and several other characters.

After an hour of making the viewer cringe, Hellhole somehow manages to justify its own predictability, but there is no excuse for the bits of silliness in the film (the priest with the camera is shocked by the flaming cross, the loaded pistol sitting on the table...). Nor does the interesting climax make up for the embarrassing impression that the film makes in the run up to it. But Hellhole deserves a third star for that climax, because the filmmakers took it farther than a major studio horror movie would have dared (on the other hand, the first hour would have been better thought out). And the sets are okay.

Ben Steiner trips on shrooms and has a distorted idea of what viewers want. The fact that all of the characters (with the exception of the insignificant role of the blonde mistress) are unlikable and unreadable wouldn’t matter so much if they fit into the concept of the plot. But all of the gradual revealing of the mystery surrounding the mother and the black secretion is just bizarre and irrelevant, not scary and shocking. Utter bullshit.

She-Joker. Meticulously crafted in psychological terms, Pearl is an interesting and polished profile of an unstable asocial that crosses the same boundaries that the award-winning hit with Joaquin Phoenix did. The setting with a hillbilly family in a house in rural Texas is even more appealing to me. In fact, Ti West suggests here how idyllic the origins of other famous Texas families could have looked... The kitschy fairy-tale-like retro-stylization contrasts with the dark tones of the soundtrack, indicating the presence of a hidden evil and gradually paving the way for the outburst of that evil. The main character delights fans of the genre not only with a pitchfork and axe in hand, but also with a long one-shot confession about her own shattered mental state. Mia Goth is great. And the audiovisual flashes of Kubrick and Hitchcock... Pearl is a formalistic delight for those who are interested.

It’s a fine thing that Disney+ is debunking the myth of family VoD and premiering interesting horror movies. But Barbarian is overhyped. Screenwriter and director Zach Cregger enjoys playing with form and he respectably builds up the suspense associated with the unknown in the first third of the film. But the later uncovering of the mystery reveals the creative weakness of merely borrowing key elements from the groundbreaking works of the genre and slides into unintentional self-parody in the climax, while thinking it’s cool. This should have been made by an inventive butcher, ideally with European roots, who wasn’t afraid to exploit the potential of the terrifying content of the videotapes.

In terms of its technical execution, Old People offers a decent level of craftsmanship. The beginning, which culminates with the scene in which the main character figures out what's going on, is a great horror treat. But the bizarre idea of angry, murderous pensioners on which the whole film is based comes across as silly. The filmmakers failed to elevate the subject to the level of social allegory and remained with the mental optics of a pure zombie horror flick, which made Old People embarrassing to the point of being ridiculous.

Funny Games turned on its head and made more conventionally, without formalistic filmmaking gimmicks. Nocturnal Animals without the artistic multilayering. However, Speak No Evil is still a great psychological escalation of insecurity and the feeling of “something is wrong here”, with its cards held close to the vest and a surprising climax. This is a powerful yet cruel and evil film that I can recommend to only a few people.

Better than the previous, superfluous Halloween Kills. Though Michael Myers is sidelined here, the storyline with the new Corey character interestingly relativizes the causes of the origin of absolute evil (the responsibility of the society around us) and functionally parallels Myers himself. When have we ever seen a mainstream Hollywood movie in which the main character, whom we understand and support, develops in this way? It’s a unique and bold approach. That, however, is not to say that I wouldn’t have preferred to see the conclusion of this cult franchise in different hands and conceived differently...

Forests and meadows shrouded in fog are a great setting for a werewolf horror movie. The historical period with costumes to match give the film the mark of a solid drama. However, the viewer pretty much checks out by the time the horror scenes start to work at least a little. Those scenes are unusually badly directed at first and later evoke emotions only because we already know the characters better and we are experiencing the drama with them. I’m giving this a weak third star for the drama, not for the horror.