Saturday night after the close of the current session of the Space Opera game I run for friends, yes, Space Opera the RPG system from Fantasy Games Unlimited we’re doing throwback to the 80’s for our RPG’s this time around, I watched the horror movie The Vault.

The film came up on Netflix as a recommendation and I was intrigued enough to add it to my growing queue. The premise is that a gang of bank robbers having taken customers and employees hostage during a robbery are suddenly faced with a supernatural threat from the bank’s haunted vault. Starring Francesca Eastwood and James Franco The Vault is a modest to low budget movie that tries the make the most of it limited setting. Overall, I wasn’t bored during the film’s brief 90-minute run time, which fit perfectly with my tired and ready to do nothing mindset after an evening of gamemastering. Ms. Eastwood was perfectly fine as the leader of the small gang who have been driven by desperation, circumstance, and greed into that crime. Mr. Franco plays the bank’s assistance manager who, in a bid to keep the robbers who are edgy and not fully in control of themselves, assists the robbers with vital codes and information about a large score in the bank’s old secret vault.

Haunted is the right word because The Vault is a ghost story and as with most ghost stories there is a secret that must be unraveled before the circumstances of the plot can be fully understood. There was one set-up involving a robbery from 1982 and a masked killer that was never captured or unmasked that caused me to guess wrong about one of the twists and I actually liked that. The twist that was revealed worked and played fair. The greatest fault in the movie is that the director or editor showed too much too soon. There’s a sequence where some of the robbers have been separated and one is confronted by spectral figures while others watch on the bank’s security monitors. The characters watching on the monitors do not see the ghosts and I think the film would have had great tension if the audience had not seen them yet either. If like the witnessing characters, we couldn’t understand of fully hear the attack but frequent cuts to the action and the supernatural violence stripped the sequence of all tension.

Still for a late-night brain mostly off evening The Vault was perfectly serviceable. It is not overly graphic but there is blood and effect work that may disturb some.

Robert Eggers, the writer and director of 2015’s Puritan nightmare The Witch,  is back with another historic tale of terror.  The Lighthouse set in the 1890’s, is a film about two men on a desolate and distance rock of an island stationed as lighthouse keepers. Willem Defoe plays Thomas Wake, the senior lighthouse keep, a sea dog retired by injury but for whom the love of the sea has never subsided. Robert Patterson plays Ephraim Winslow, the young and junior man learning the trade and subject to Wake’s order and whim.

Filmed in stark black-and-white, it’s been reported that the film stock had to be manufactured in order for the camera to roll on this production, and with a tight compressed aspect ratio  The Lighthouse  is a confined claustrophobic movie with a stark spare setting contrasted with expansive performances by both Defoe and Patterson the threaten to shatter the frame. The photography is deliberately disorienting as sea, fog, and land blend in endless greys heightening the sense that the rest of the world as vanished over the horizon and that for these men there is nothing but the grueling work, their own clashes of personality, and the ever encroaching madness. The combination of Egger’s passion for historical detail, the bleak black and white cinematography, along with the ever present fog horn create a verisimilitude that absorbs the audience into the film’s reality.

Hallucinatory and with an unreliable narrator The Lighthouse  is not standard mass-market movie making. People who are expecting kills, jump scares, and a spot of violence every ten minutes are sailing for disappointment with this film. Closer in kin to David Lynch or Cronenberg’s Videodrome, The Lighthouse is a tale of madness and isolation that is powered by the stellar performances trapped with its close quarters. Much like Egger’s previous film The Witch  this movie is not easily accessible and is likely to spark a sharp divide between its critical reception and general audience reactions. Though not as symbolic as Lynch, Egger’s film requires active interpretation by the audience with scene after scene that depicts the tenuous grasp of sanity and its loss as the isolation breaks each man in his own manner. Personally I was more thrilled with The Witch on my first viewing but now even eight hours later I find the sounds and images of The Lighthouseto be haunting my thoughts and provoking deeper contemplation. It is a film that cannot be fully assessed with a single viewing and mark’s Eggers as a talent of bold cinema that is willing to color well outside of the lines.

The twin monster hits Frankenstein  and Dracula  made Universal Studios the home of horror in the 1930 thru the 1950s and stars of Boris Karloff and Bella Lugosi but a lesser know film of that same year that is worth viewing is the Spanish Language version of Universal’s Dracula.

While the principal cast and crew came in during the day and filmed the now classic 1931 Dracula during the evening hours an entirely different crew and cast, using the same set and script, albeit in Spanish, filmed a version for the Spanish language world. This version is often included as bonus content on Blu-rays and better collections featuring the Lugosi Dracula. Considered lost until the 1970’s when a print was discovered and fully restored.

With more daring costuming and a more sensual atmosphere this edition has fans around the world. It is interesting to compare the leads in each film. Lugosi, of course became a star, though of course his terrible drug addiction, first caused for pain treatment for wound he suffered in World War I, severely damaged his career and outside of the Spanish film world Carlos Villarias is virtually unknown. An interesting element to Villarias’ performance is that it strikes dramatically different tones as the characters shifts between charming and vampiric. When he is suave and sophisticated Villarias’ performance strikes me as superior to Lugosi’s, effortless carrying off the easy confidence and command of a person infused with his or her own sense of nobility. However when the blood lust and thirst takes the character Villarias’ performance becomes so overly expressed with his eyes bulging wide and his face contorting into strange expressions that the performance becomes comic and far inferior to Lugosi’s classic composure.

Released in 2017 Revenge  is a French movie about Jen (Matilda Lutz) her rich married boyfriend Richard (Kevin Janssens) and his pair of hunter pals Stan and Dimitri. Jen has flown with Richard to his isolated landed estate in the desert for a weekend affair but their assignation is interrupted by the early arrival of Stan and Dimitri who are to accompany Richard on a hunting trip. After an evening of music, dancing, and drink, Richard departs for business and while left alone Jen is raped by Stan and Dimitri does nothing to stop the assault. Richard attempts to buy Jen’s silence with a check but things spiral out of control until it becomes a fight for survival and revenge with Jen pitted against the three men.

Over all I found Revenge  to have not lived up to its hype. I remember hearing about from corners of my film community and it even played at a local micro-theater but I never got the chance to see it until watching it in Shudder. Despite being directed by a woman, Coralie Fargeat, the staging, costuming, and framing of Matilda Lutz struck me as overly objectifying. I never fully engaged empathically with Jen, her terrible plight, or her struggle and I think that comes down to two major factors. The first is the leering nature of the photography it seemed to constantly present Jen only something of a sexual desire keeping me at a distance from her as a character. The second major reason for my emotional disconnection is my shattering of disbelief when presented with unreal and impossible physical damage that characters not only survive and but remain fighting functional. It would appear that the scriptwriter has never been exposed to the concept of internal bleeding or exactly why you can’t run with your major abdominal muscles torn or ruptured.

My viewing coming quickly after another recent film on Shudder  about a young woman who has to survive after a terrible assault I could not help but compare this with The Corpse of Anna Fritz. Anna Fritz  while produced on a much smaller budget and with far fewer sequences of action, was a film where I never lost a tense and fearful emotional connection with the character of Anna. Watching Revenge  I was mostly bored but during Anna Fritz I was engaged and concerned, desperately hoping for Ann to escape this unjust and unfair situation. There is far more nudity in Anna Fritz  and yet it is presented in a manner that did not feel leering or objectifying but rather exposed and terrifying.

I cannot recommend Revenge and if you have Shudder  go with Anna Fritz  instead.

Man, I loved Zombieland  and the best thing I can say about Double Tap  is that I’m happy to see the original cast back but the bets bits are all in the trailer.

The original film was a charming, funny, and ultimately touching movie about the power of found family. The sequel is a collection of gags strung together with barest of plots and utterly devoid and any real story.

It’s been ten years since the Zombie Apocalypse and our heroes have taken up a stable residence but haven’t changed or grown much as characters, When Little Rock, in the original film the characters avoid the painful memories of their previous lives referred to themselves by significant destination and not their names, who has now become a young woman and is feeling the isolation of no romantic companion ship and her sister Wichita, feeling strangely stifled in her relationship with Columbus, suddenly leave, Columbus and Tallahassee are forced out of their routine and embark on an odyssey. They face many new dangers and meet many new characters before the entire family emotionally returns back to where they had started.

Characters in good fiction have needs and wants, and note that those are usually not the same thing, a character may want something but need something that is the opposite to complete their emotional arc. The characters of Double Tap  have wants but few needs of any kind and what they do want is the most plot driven of objectives. While the film is populated with talented actors who can turn a fine comedic performance the lack of an emotional story that is compelling ultimately make the movie hollow and empty. There are gags, and many of them are on display in the trailer, but there is no theme. The film is in the end not about anything at all. The script feels like one that has had many comedic hands working the sequences and the jokes are decent, but without a compelling story none of it really matters. If during the running of your film I am thinking to myself just how lovely Emma Stone’s eye are then you have lost me because I simply do not care what happens on the scree.

I cannot recommend Double Tap  and your time would be better spent putting in the Blu-ray and watch Zombieland  again.

While I saw the theatrical cut of this year’s Midsommar  twice during its release I unfortunately missed the brief run of the film’s director’s cut. At nearly three hours and combined with it quite limited time in theaters I simply never managed to clear my schedule enough to make room for the feature. Now it has been released on home video, the longer cut available exclusively from Apple, and I can give my opinion on it versus the original version.

Director’s cuts of things are not always a blessing. The example that best comes to mind at this moment is the musical Little Shop of Horrors. The director’s cut has an extended sequence at the end where the plants have grown to monstrous size and are kaiju  stomping about the world’s cities eliminating humanity. However by this point ALL of the major characters are dead and there is no emotional tie for the audience making for a dull, plodding, and ultimately boring end to the movie/ The theatrical version is far superior.

Gladly this is not the case with Midsommar. Writer/Director Ari Aster has mostly expanded scenes in this version, carrying various sequences a bit further and greatly expanding the depth of his characters and illuminating more of their natures. There is one wholly new sequence, another ritual by the Swedish cult that follows in the evening of the day after the visitors have witnessed the horrifying attestupa. This evening sequence along with a further dissolution of Dani and Christian’s relationship further isolates the non-cult members and gives Dani’s character a moment to shine as the brightest among the visitors.

Midsommar’s  director’s cut is a deep careful exploration of the themes and wholly satisfying. I can say without reservation that it is my deeply preferred version of Aster’s vision.

One of the things that my sweetie-wife and I enjoy is British horror films, particularly of the Hammer variety and Shudder has a few offerings in that vein including the later period Hammer movie Twins of Evil.

Hammer horror films, iconic color movie that made stars out of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee started in 1958, though the studio had been well established before that, and pretty much ended production with To The Devil A Daughter  in 1976 so Twins of Evil  represents the dying gasps of the once great horror house.

The movie stars Mary and Madeleine Collinson as twin sister Frieda and Maria, recently orphaned and now sent from their home in Vienna to live with their stern Uncle Gustav (Peter Cushing), a devote man who  leads The Brotherhood a collection of men that hunts and burns suspected witches attempting to purge the area of a festering evil. The two sisters chafe under their unyielding uncle and each becomes enamored with local men, Maria with the rationally minded and atheistic Teacher Anton and Frieda with the decadent Count Karnstein, who, under the protection of the Emperor, publicly flaunts his wickedness.

Cushing is his usual professional and talent self, convincingly playing a man so devoted to his singular vision of virtue that he is untroubled by the frequent execution of young women without even the flimsiest evidence of witchcraft. The rest of the cast vary from competent working actors to Damien Thomas chewing the scenery as Karnstein and ended on the Collinson twins who were most likely cast by Hammer to take advantage of the status of Playboy  centerfolds.

The pacing of the movie is off, starting, despite the repeated instance of women being burned at the stake, out quite slow but once the film reaches the second half and vampirism appears in the plot the film moves quite deftly towards its somewhat uneven conclusion.

Production is overall well done with interesting set and well designed costuming but the movie does suffer from some of the worst day for night shots every committed to film. Lengthy forest sequences set in the dead of night are clearly shot in bright sunlight with the characters appearing quite ridiculous as they hold up their torches for illumination.

With some violence, an explicit beheading, and brief nudity this movie will not be to everyone’s taste but I appreciate that Shudder  presented the feature unedited. Twins of Evil  is far from Hammer’s best horror film but it also far from their worst and there are worst ways to spend 90 minutes.