POMO

Wrong Turn is a laughable attempt to push the well-known B-movie slasher franchise in the direction of thematically more substantial horror flicks like Midsommar. And what’s more, it does so with would-be clever genre clichés in mold of The Cabin in the Woods. Unfortunately, this attempt is just as dumb as the preceding films, and not as entertaining as a guilty pleasure without the admitted stupidity. It’s watchable only out of curiosity as to what other unexpected twists will pop up to make the film seem innovative, even though it just mechanically borrows everything imaginable from everywhere (the final stylisation of the female protagonist into the archer from The Hunger Games confirms who the film’s target audience is supposed to be). But the ending left me a bit puzzled. It was brilliant, like Jordan Peele’s work at the time of Get Out. And for the first time in the entire film, Bill Sage didn’t come across as a cheap B-movie version of Ray Winstone.

Ron Perlman’s hairstyle and make-up in the opening scene give us a hint of what’s to come. And then everything in the film only gets better. Monster Hunter is a videogame-based ultra-farce with an utterly primitive plot, but it’s even more of an admittedly guilty pleasure that’s just straight-up entertaining. The explicitly dry humour made me laugh more than I do with most forced comedies. And with visual effects that only a few top-tier Hollywood productions can boast (Godzilla vs. Kong). Otherwise, Paul W.S. obviously steals from everywhere, from Aliens to Dune (or Transformers or Star Wars) to The Lord of the Rings, sometimes so blatantly (a group of soldiers walking across a stone bridge to a hellish mountain covered in burning lava) that it’s rather more a declaration of love for those films than a case of creative helplessness. Conversely, the monsters themselves are magnificent and the visual dynamics of the action are highly polished. And there is an abundance of that here. One slaughter after another. Plus nice locations. Despite that, take my third star with a grain of salt, because I’m giving it for the gut-punching sound. My downstairs neighbour is on vacation, so I’m running Atmos in the living room with an unmuffled subwoofer. And with this movie, it was almost an orgasmic experience.

A militaristic action movie without western stars, filmed (evidently) in the authentic setting of the ruins of a post-war Iraqi city. We spend the whole time with a unit of local soldiers who are the only ones to have abandoned the fight against ISIS. And we follow their mission with a classified and quite surprising objective. We get a superficial look into the film’s characters, but otherwise it is just starkly realistic, dusty infantry action, redeemed by a more spirited, emotional conclusion.

The Crew is a standard French crime flick in which the protagonists are “honorable thieves”, but the plan goes off the rails and they have to become killers in order to survive. Of course, the most charismatic of them draws the rest of the crew, including his younger brother, into a life of crime, and his own mother condemns him for it. And even he would prefer to give it up and get back together with his pretty ex-wife, but... Cliché stacked on top of cliché, but it’s entertaining as an action flick with a flowing plot.

Pacino turns in a great performance in a heist movie with a banal plot. Or am I, as a viewer, supposed to be thrilled by the twist when a young man in a bathrobe appears on the scene as his wife, for whose sex change Pacino is doing all of this? His real wife and especially his mother just complete the bizarre circle of characters that make this an unintentional comedy. The depiction of Brooklyn and the situation in the US at the time is praiseworthy, but as a human drama, this classic didn't impress me.

This B-movie thriller is handicapped by naïveté and poor directing (improbable situations, silly moments, inability to carry off certain suspenseful scenes). The film’s producer and lead star, Paula Patton, wants to draw attention to the issue of human trafficking in a genre flick with undertones of girl-power heroism, but she chose a very inappropriate filmmaking team to do that.

Finally, a clown who treats kids like they deserve to be treated. And who looks ugly and scary, at least in the final stage of his transformation. Its thus a shame about the absolutely mishandled balance between serious horror drama and unintentionally ridiculous B-movie bullshit. Or rather it’s not so much mishandled, but lacking self-awareness. Which is even worse.

The Dig is a beautiful, lyrically told film in which someone with determination makes the greatest archaeological discovery, someone unfulfilled finds the love of a lifetime, and someone extremely important to someone.... Set to piano music, feelings of anxiety from the onset of war and relaxed sunsets, and existential thoughts associated with art and its eternal nature. All of the actors are top-quality and the editing is atypical in places for effect. No one could say they didn’t like it, or vice versa.

The Night Stalker is a solid TV movie about the dialogue-based relationship between a serial killer and the journalist who visits him in prison, and about a “fragile woman’s” fascination with evil in the form of an attractive “male spider”. The subject matter is similar to the main storyline of The Silence of the Lambs, except in this case it is about a real killer and inspired by the female fans he gained after his arrest thanks to his masculine magnetism (he even got married in prison). In order to understand and appreciate the film, it is necessary to know the story of Richard Ramirez, the horrifying nature of his actions, and his later cynical reflection on them. Lou Diamond Phillips does a good job of portraying Ramirez and the film also works in the psychological aspect, as it reveal the reasons for the journalist’s weakness for the killer’s tantalising, animal magnetism.

Carrying supplies to a mountain cottage as a lifestyle. The core of this documentary consists in the conflict of memories from the erstwhile real world “down below” with the current performance of the hardest possible work in the mountains. Seniors who will not give up what they are doing for anything as long as their bodies allow them to keep doing it, because it fulfils them more than, for example, playing in an orchestra at the most prestigious concert hall in the world. They have the wisdom the comes with knowledge and the possibility to compare, which few people get in life (due to which people are dissatisfied and often unhappy, even though they have no reason to be). Inner peace and harmony are the reward for all of their “wonderful toil”.