J*A*S*M

A nice and entertaining exercise in style with a not very satisfactory ending. Hop, hop, and that’s it. Among the relatively numerous intimate thrillers, this one’s rather average.

It has a couple of nice sequences and ideas, but overall it’s hurt by the fact that most of the humour is repeatedly based on the idea that “LARP is a bit cringe, but also quite cute fun”, which gets boring. The battle with the rubber cushion at the end is just cringe, unfortunately. Cute, not even by chance.

Well, it’s not nice to mess around with sects… I hope that Ti West will improve things this year with The Sacrament because Holy Ghost People is too unremarkable. One foot inside, one foot outside. Nothing downright bad, nothing downright outstanding. Yeah, there is something, the leader of the sect was really sleazy, as it should be. 6/10

I’m surprised, but this redneck/zombie quasi-parody was pretty good fun. It’s a straightforward snack that (in a nice way most of the time) quotes from what it can, has good cinematography and pretty fun (though not likeable) characters. OK for me.

I didn’t like all that pseudomysticism, at all. There are moments with a decent atmosphere, but the, without exception, unlikeable characters don’t let you get into the story. A weak average.

Different from the previous two episodes, but I’m not complaining about that, I don’t care – actually, I’d consider a different approach to the template as a plus. What bothers me is that things become incredibly stupid after some time, especially considering how seriously the film takes itself. Patient Zero is relatively effective in some of the scenes (for instance, the underground sequence is nicely atmospheric, and the gore – for those who are into gore – is also good), but when you look at the bigger picture, it’s laughable, rather. Dime a dozen contagion horror, without any original ideas, which shouldn’t be a surprise coming from the director of the awful Altitude. And the one “memorable scene”, I’ve seen it somewhere, I think it was lifted from Excision. PS: I would give it two stars, but that’s what I gave the first one by Roth and this one is significantly worse.

The border between entertaining and energetic madness and annoying and overcooked bullshit can be bloody thin sometimes. For about 60 minutes, I was having fun rather than suffering, but some time around the entrance to the underground, Iglesia stopped paying attention to things and the witches started to lean into the bullshit territory.

After looking at the poster or watching the trailer nobody could expect an ambitious horror movie. The story is like out of the 90s, with A LOT of nudity and even more cheap one-liners, but I was expecting more blood and fun. A weak third star for the performance of Paz de la Huerta, which is so (I hope) intentionally silly that’s impossible to forget. 5/10

I surprisingly liked this piece of Japanese brutal nonsense, unlike other nonsense from Japan. It’s a weird mix of mysterious and unsettling perversion and very black humour that’s hard to rationalise (especially by the end, the last 15 minutes are utter insanity). This time I liked it, probably because I enjoy stories about people that get into conflict with secret sects, clubs, powerful societies, etc. It’s true, however, that R100 is a tad more bizarre and absurd than other similar movies, so, to fully understand it, I will have to wait another 80 years or so. PS: The earthquake breaks were probably the best thing in the movie.

I’m giving it the only one star as a proud native of Budějovice for the Budvar that the American kids are drinking in the opening scenes (with the background of LA’s Hollywood sign), but there’s no reason for any more stars. I find this kind of brutalised aesthetic from the 1980s pretty uninteresting.