POMO

Many of my friends and acquaintances don't understand how I can like horror movies. Why I voluntarily expose myself to something that is, in their opinion, negative and makes me anxious and scared. I try in vain to explain to them that horror movies are not negative for me, that they don’t make me feel anxious and that, at most, they put me a little “on edge”, which is even more true of the high-quality dramas that they watch. I try to explain to them that horror is genre entertainment, built on the director’s skill in playing with viewers and their emotions and, at the same time, with a filmmaking form that requires far greater innovation than the highest-quality relationship dramas. I can watch five horror movies in a day and thirty over the course of a film festival. That makes me enjoy them all the more and gives me an even bigger appetite for them. Because I want to dwell in their creators’ fantastical world of limitless imagination that only the sci-fi genre can match in terms of variety. ____ But what is horror to me, in the same sense of the word as it is perceived by those uncomprehending critics of the horror genre, are things like this miniseries. Built not on the imagination of creative and enthusiastic filmmakers, but on the real foundation of documentary filmmaking that uncovers an incomprehensible anomaly, a harmful element of our world personifying the ultimate disgust and evil. It’s enough for me to see things like this series once a year. Before this, it was the Hungarian film Son of Saul, which also reflects that reality, paradoxically without the “horror” label appearing among its official genres.

Dogtooth is a psychological study of the behaviour and perception of the world on the part of three teenage siblings whose parents never allowed them to leave the fenced-in grounds of their family home. Unawareness, solidarity, incest, animalism. And the parent’s perverse intention to thus protect their children from the “evil world”, an intention that must inevitably spiral out of control. Yorgos is a psychological animal with an absolutely unique, almost scientific approach to writing and directing extreme subjects, which he evidently enjoys immensely. With the conclusion of his experiment – the last shot of the film – he deliberately pisses off the viewer, sparks a wave of discussion and almost purposefully takes one of the prizes at Cannes. Cunning.

Though the second instalment in the franchise lacks the unique dark atmosphere and the weight of the curse that elevated the fourth film, the arrangement of the characters and their actions are sufficiently entertaining. Generally, the screenwriter’s idea of sending a horde of skeletal Templars on horseback into an enclosed square packed with people dancing and having a good time is cool. Of course there is no lack of the signs of trash filmmaking in the movie’s individual aspects, but overall it has a good, well-developed concept.

Don’t look for logic here. This film is an atmospheric, almost hypnotic horror experience with slow-motion shots of zombie-knights on horseback and dark music with demonic chants. The plot moves forward in such a way that it is never boring even for a moment. The uncovering of the mystery of the cursed coastal town is continuously carried out in brief sentences. And the weight of that mystery is the film’s main driving force, together with the great (even by today’s standards!) masks of the demonic “nazguls” and the impressively rendered gloomy sets. Of course, the film contains a certain amount of naïveté, but there’s not even a hit of the ridiculous.

The screenwriters meant well with the motif of "fulfilment of any wish" as a double-edged sword. They constructed a thoughtfully concise story on that foundation. I didn’t even mind waiting 80 minutes for the first action scene after the opening one. When there’s something to watch and it’s nicely handled in the Hollywood way (of which there was a dearth in 2020), I’m happy to wait. As a fairly long whole, WW84 is dramaturgically sloppy, sometimes needlessly slow and at other times too fast-paced, and mainly in its treatment of the subject matter, it’s naïve almost to the point of self-parody. I’m giving it a third star – very much for it’s guilty-pleasure aspect – because of my weakness for Gal Gadot, whom I like as Wonder Woman even more than my favourite Avenger. And for Zimmer, who reaches (yet another) peak here. With amazement and wonder, I listen to the soundtrack every day now, some tracks two or three times on repeat.

The sailor characters could have been further developed other than through clichéd family ties to their wives and children, but the admirals on the surface richly compensate for that with their varied motivations and political backgrounds. Colin Firth is as well suited to the captain character as Tom Hanks. Not to mention the communist Soviet admiral played by Max von Sidow, who turns in a goosebump-inducing performance. The casting in general is very well done here; I hadn’t realised until now how much Schoenaerts and Seydoux have “Russian faces”. But what I appreciate most about Kursk is its thematic balance and complexity. To the same extent that Kursk is about the tragedy of men under water, it is also about the political conflict above the surface and the absurdity of the Soviets’ approach to the event. It’s about a rotten system that betrayed its own people because of false ideas. The second Chernobyl in 14 years. The film gains its key value from the skirting of the story through a young boy, the son of one of the submariners, and his understanding of the situation and his reaction to it.

The low-budget Pyewacket is simple in terms of its subject matter and filmmaking, but it is visually attractive and, mainly, scary. At least in the climax. Most viewers will probably find everything that comes before the climax to be shallow fluff about a withdrawn emo teenager with half-baked scares. True, the subject matter would be enough for one of three storylines in a feature-length movie. For me, however, it still provides atmospheric satisfaction. Those who are patient and like forests and very dark stories, and want to be scared, will get their money’s worth.

With a dream rental house on the California coast, this movie entertains by arousing curiosity about what kind of shit is going to go down, how and in what quantity. It is a well-thought-out thriller psychologically built on the relationships between the characters. You anticipate and wish for the horror outcome, and you will not be disappointed. Only its explanatory epilogue could have been more imaginative. In contrast to the screenwriting skill that preceded it, it comes across as a bit banal.

1BR is a small yet passable cult-focused thriller with a solid claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere of helplessness. It turns out that there are even worse HOAs than those that I’ve had experience with.

The ending has heart, but everything that comes before it is unfortunately thin on plot and slightly naïve in its expectation that it would in any way appeal to viewers. Of the two thrilling scenes, one rips off Gravity and the other is hackneyed, like almost everything else in the film. The only things that stand out are the interesting concept of blood from weightless space and the interior design of the ship, as if it were a futuristic designer’s luxury apartment. Exactly between two and three stars.