In the wake of the Rapture, a devout religious enclave has forsworn the “sin of speech,” living a wordless existence in relative isolation. (Their whistling, however, does feel a bit like cheating at times.) When a young woman the credits tell us is named Azrael (Samara Weaving, Ready or Not) is set to be sacrificed to zombie-like creatures that inhabit the woods, she attempts to escape with her lover (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Candyman) and must fight to avoid being torn limb from limb.
If you could go back in time and offer advice to your younger self, what would you say? What wisdom would you impart? Invest in a particular stock early? Follow a certain career path? Maybe don’t eat that burrito you left sitting out overnight that one time? That’s the basic concept of My Old Ass, a gentle, moving, light sci-fi coming of age story from writer/director Megan Park (The Fallout). This feels like one of those movies that has the potential to become a generational touchstone. It’s lovely and earnest, deeply emotional, and achingly bittersweet in poignant ways.
Fumika (Akari Takaishi, Baby Assassins) is your average college student. She has a crappy job, constantly fends off creepy men pestering her, and she’s very clumsy. Seriously, she falls down. A lot. Things change a wee bit, however, when she meets the ghost of a vicious hitman, Kudo (Masanori Mimoto, First Love), who occasionally possesses her and takes control of her body. It’s like Upgrade or even Venom at times as the two consciousnesses occupy the same space. (Or All of Me with fisticuffs?) After some coaxing, she agrees to help him exact revenge against the people who killed him. So goes the plot of Kensuke Sonomura’s new action-oriented ghost story Ghost Killer.
Stop me if you’ve heard this. Five college friends—an alpha male, an outdoorsy type, a tomboy, a hot girl, and a nerd. A spooky, remote cabin in the woods. (Actually, a spooky, remote Dutch villa in an Indonesian jungle, but the idea is the same.) A cemetery. A well. An old caretaker. No cell service. No power. Things get weird and people start dying. That’s customary horror fare. But from this basic framework, The Draft director Yusron Fuadi tweaks the formula in clever, inventive ways and crafts a fun, fresh take on what the movie calls “cheap Indonesian horror films,” and the oft-repeated tropes of the genre across national boundaries.
If you didn’t already think Christopher Lee was cool, one, really? Two, you may very well change your tune after watching The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, the latest documentary from Jon Spira (Elstree 1976). As one might expect from the title, the film delves deep into the life and times of the iconic actor—don’t call him the King of Horror, he did not appreciate that—exploring every nook and cranny along the way.
“Can we speak ill of the living before it’s too late?” asks Magpie (Emma Appleton) in writer/director Dean Puckett’s The Severed Sun. It’s certainly one of those situations where if people had taken a moment to talk it out, many if not all of the more unfortunate events of the film could have been avoided. But then we wouldn’t have this moody, engaging, occasionally quite gory, if a bit spare entry into the folk horror canon.
We’ve all been there. We’re in the middle of extra-legal incursion into a foreign country, we’ve been shot, we’re bleeding out, not long for this world. Our old friend cradles our head as we take our last breath, and we use these last moments on this mortal coil to utter our final words…and we make a joke about our dick size. This has happened to all of us, right? No? Hmm. Well, this happens in Long Gone Heroes, to a significant character, late in the game when this should carry substantial weight, and it really nails the mentality of this movie.
