by ·Comments Off on A Chinese Ghost Story III (1991, Ching Siu-Tung)

Tony Leung is our buffoon young monk, taking over while Leslie was off filming Once a Thief. Jackie Cheung returns as the swordsman and Joey Wong as the ghost, but I can’t even tell if there’s character continuity (it does open with the title “100 years later”) or if they keep remaking part one with the same cast and different action scenes. Either way, all three movies are wonderful and mad.

Tony and his Master are hiding out at the dilapidated temple after greedy townspeople glimpsed their golden buddha, where Tony falls for Joey but has to keep his ghost gf a secret from his ghost-banishing master. Introduced giving each other sexy tattoos, Joey has a frenemy in Nina “Wife of Jet” Li, both of them in the power of the Tree Demon Priestess. Epic fights and aggressive praying ensue, but mostly… tongues. Evil ghosts have mile-long tongues, and the tongue-POV shots kill me every time. I guess Tony ascends from the earthly plane and becomes the new golden buddha to save them all.

by ·Comments Off on Dead Talents Society (2024, John Hsu)

Masterful mashup of different ghost movie premises, dead girl is forced to Monsters Inc before she Back to the Futures, joins a misfit team of has-beens and together they thrive.

by ·Comments Off on Dead End (2003, Andrea & Canepa)

A Marilyn Manson joke in the movie’s opening seconds, paterfamilias Ray Wise driving his daughter Laura, the camera hovering over the center line – somebody’s got a thing for David Lynch. It’s a Christmas road trip movie, petty griping from the back seat, until the ordinary gets interrupted by a Woman In White holding a dead baby. Figuring out what to do about the WIW the family members get separated, then they find what’s left of the daughter’s boyfriend Brad aside the road.

“This reeks of alien activity, you guys.” They appear to be on a loop road like the one in Freddy’s Dead, and whenever the Woman In White kills someone the survivors see them being taken away in a black car. After her son disappears mom goes nuts and shoots Ray in the leg, then she’s next. It all turns out to be a purgatorial fantasy when the daughter wakes up and is told she survived the car crash that killed the others.

Not a bad movie, though the music is a great crime. Most of the people who made this never worked again. The DP did an Elijah Wood thing, an exec producer worked on Voyage of Time. The mom is horror regular Lin Shaye, in Critters and The Hidden and New Nightmare, the WIW was a beer spokesmodel, and the daughter was in a Sid Haig / Bill Moseley movie that Rob Zombie had nothing to do with.

by ·Comments Off on Out of the Dark (1995, Jeffrey Lau)

Parody of The Professional, I think, but instead of a hit man Leon (Stephen Chow) is a crazy guy who sees ghosts. Blondie from Fallen Angels is there, and Sammo Hung-reminiscent police captain Lo Hung (apparently no relation). A very silly movie – not really sure how it escalates into cops getting chainsawed to death, it’s not important, nor should we interrogate why the survivors make magic hats out of newspaper and fly safely away from the evil ghost at the end.

by ·Comments Off on Litoral (2008, Raoul Ruiz)

Lost Ruiz miniseries, made between Klimt and Mysteries of Lisbon. Cortinez has been onboard the ship Lucerna all week without seeing any other crew members, they assemble and tell him their own (or each others’) ghost stories. “We’re here either to tell stories or to jump into the water.”

The captain grows horns whenever his wife has affairs, a sailor is set up with a woman who lives 70 years in his past. A demon sets a guy up in the business of selling dead men’s clothes. They might all be dead, or imaginary, or miniaturized on the toy boat of a rich man. “What you see in here, don’t remember it even in dreams.”

by ·Comments Off on Enter the Void (2009, Gaspar Noé)

Long-take first-person camera to the point of absurdity, with eye blinks. Our guy, swearing to himself he’s not a junkie, smokes some bad drugs. We are Oscar, but it turns out you shouldn’t yell “I have a gun, I’ll shoot” to the police, and then we become Ghost Oscar floating above his body then roaming the city, clipping through walls.

Your first destination as an invisible ghost: the strip club, to watch your sister have sex with some guy in a back room. Sister (Paz de la Huerta, who got naked in The Limits of Control) flashes back to her happy childhood with Bro Oscar until their parents die in a car crash, while Bro remembers meeting Cool Alex who lent him a book of the dead. I guess Oscar’s obsession with his sister, watching psychic steam emanate from sexual encounters, leads to his getting reborn through her?

me, watching this movie:

We’re all watching this because of his Region Centrale camera, right? It bounces back and forth in time but never gets more than a half hour into his post-death, repeats and belabors its points too much, should’ve taken more hits from Je t’aime, je t’aime. Follow-cam with head-piercing sounds, not such fun to watch – Massive Attack’s “Protection” video is both cooler and shorter. At least it’s funny that, in retrospect, by the time Noe made his 3D porno Love, it was the most tame thing he’d done.

by ·Comments Off on Anhell69 (2022, Theo Montoya)

Self-portrait of the suicidal trans youth of a hopeless city, with sober narration from a coffin.

The director cast Camilo in his gay ghost dystopia film, but Camilo died, and half his friends followed, real ghosts in an actual dystopia.

by ·Comments Off on Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman)

Watched the miniseries version, which lived up to its high reputation. Kids grow up in wealthy theater household, where everyone’s got their eccentricities and all the husbands are sleeping with the maids. Theater owner dad (Allan Edwall, who bought a theater after appearing in this) has an episode during a rehearsal and dies, then after a year, mom Ewa Fröling marries bishop Jan Malmsjö (Scenes from a Marriage) and moves the kids into his severe, forbidding household.

Family members have been pathetic or horrible, but mostly in an entertaining way, while the new stepdad is horrible in a horrible way. Knowing how Bergman loves mixing religion and punishment, I figured this would be the bulk of the movie and lead to everyone’s ruin, but the kids’ grandmother and her friend Isak (Erland Josephson, Hour of the Wolf baron and Nostalghia madman) plot a successful rescue operation.

L-R: the bishop, uncle Jarl Kulle (guy who loves dueling in Smiles of a Summer Night), uncle Börje Ahlstedt (I Am Curious x2)

“I don’t understand why I always have to see dead people,” says Alexander, ahead of his time. In addition to theater, there are ghosts and dreams and stories and magic in every episode. In the last half hour, instead of simply wrapping up, the movie introduces trans psychic Ismael, giving the sense that the kids’ lives will stay richly weird for a while longer.