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psyberwyche
Reviews
Malum (2023)
Pales in Comparison to its Predecessor
I've come to this review in a slightly unorthodox way compared to other reviewers. Going in, I knew *nothing* about this movie. I enjoyed the first half, but very much disliked the second, and afterwards came to IMDB to see what people were saying. That's when I discovered it was a remake by the same director of his own movie.
Lots of people were saying that the original was superior, despite the tiny budget, but I put it down at first to people always hating on remakes. But there was enough promise in the opening 20 minutes of Malum to make me wonder what the original idea was. And so, just a few days later, I tracked down Last Shift.
Oh. My. God.
Last Shift is such a superior movie, it's not even a contest. It made clever use of its budget, built gradually, contained spooky ghost story material and jarring scares, and had an ending that made sense. Compare to Malum, which goes off the rails into Surrealville very quickly, so that nothing can be scary because we don't know if anything is 'real', and they're two very different experiences.
For me, this isn't a director saying "Now that I have a bigger budget, I can present my perfect vision to the audience". Instead, it's a director saying "How can I recycle my old premise and make something more commercial?" It looks like he saw the rave reviews films like Hereditary were receiving, and decided to basically copy it. And 'pastiche' is definitely in DiBlasi's toolbox - after all, the ending of Last Shift essentially took the twist from festive offering A Christmas Horror Story, immediately followed by what looked like the final frame of Krampus - similarities far too specific to be coincidence. But in Last Shift, other than a couple of moments where the practical effects looked a little silly, everything worked better. Officer Loren's reasoning and actions mostly made sense; her backstory wasn't needlessly tied to the weird cult, so we didn't have to spend so long on the setup; she didn't accept the crazy goings-on at the police station so readily; she actually saw things that led her to uncover a ghostly mystery, as opposed to Malum's overwhelming bombardment of fragmented images and ambiguous scenes.
In a nutshell, Malum takes what was a coherent story, and tries too hard to make it ambiguous in the style of an a24 movie, but without much actual content to work with. A completely bizarre decision by the filmmaker.
The Droving (2020)
So bad it's bad
The good points of this film start and end at the locations. All of the actors are unconvincing amateurs, with cringey delivery of a poor script. The lead actor is completely unconvincing as a hardened military vet. The fight choreography is terrible. Most of the plot, such as it is, gets delivered via exposition by an old man in a shack (but he's so bad he may as well have been reading his lines off post-it notes). And then just when you think it might actually kick in and we might finally see this 'droving' festival everyone's been talking about for 80 minutes, the film ends.
At least it's short, I guess.
The reviews have to be fake. Friends and family of the crew maybe? One to avoid.
The Watcher in the Woods (1980)
Dated, tame PG 'horror'
I rented this movie last night mainly based on all of the 9 and 10-star reviews on IMDb. Seriously guys, I'm starting to lose faith in the movie-reviewing public! The positive reviews all use the same clichés: (a) it's aged really well, (b) the acting is great, (c) the scenes with the girl in the mirror are really creepy, even by today's standards.
Umm... no. (a) It hasn't aged well. It looks awful, the special effects are below par even for it's time considering it's Disney (it was the year after Star Wars and Jaws...), the plot is very sparse and very linear. (b) The acting is wooden at beast. The supporting cast are awful, David McCallum is underused, Bette Davis looks bored, and she was right: Lynn-Holly Johnson *is* a lousy actress. (c) The scenes with the girl in the mirror are tame - it's an ordinary girl, looking all 'fuzzy' and 'ethereal'. If the people who think this is frightening ever sit down to watch Ringu or the Woman in Black, they'll probably die of fright.
But the most dire thing about this movie is the plot and its conclusion. It starts out a bit like Poltergeist or Amityville, but then becomes so repetitive and simplistic that it's just boring. In those movies, you have one parent who's a sceptic, one who's worried about the kids, and the kids themselves who're possessed. In this feature, one parent is never present, and one is completely oblivious to the danger her kids are in until she sees the possession for herself, at which point she does an immediate u-turn and tries to get outta dodge. No tension or character development whatsoever.
There is no real logic as to how our heroine, Jan, actually works out that the hauntings aren't caused by a ghost, but by an interdimensional being. Then there's no logic as to why she messes up trying to send said being home - by putting herself in the same position as the victim all those years ago, then surely she's destined for the same fate? Sure enough, she is - she's *that* stupid.
The saving graces of this film are that it's short, and the musical score is good. Unless you're desperate to relive the dubious side of 80s cinema, however, I'd give this one a miss.
Schalcken the Painter (1979)
Nostalgia is a wonderful, untrustworthy thing
Having read several 10 out of 10 reviews for this TV play, I have to say that the reviewers must be high on nostalgia. This play has not aged well. The print quality is terrible, the acting minimal, the atmosphere non-existent.
It is overlong and tedious. It is actually quicker, and more gratifying, to read the short story upon which this play is based. Too much time is taken up with pointless long shots of irrelevant action - 4 minutes of close-up on a goldsmith testing the quality of coins AFTER the narrator has told us what he's doing - absolutely awful. 5 minutes of just watching a room full of students paint a still life, with no dialogue or music, and no narration? Just boring.
The action really kicks in 10 minutes from the end, where we actually find out what's going on. Up to that point, we have almost an hour of virtually silent footage telling us the most simple story imaginable (art apprentice falls in love with master's daughter, but has no chance), coupled with a narrator reading out sections of the original text.
If you're tempted to watch this wooden old effort - don't. Read the short story, and then go and seek out some of the BBC's MR James adaptations instead for some real chills and decent acting.