by ·Comments Off on The Furious (2025, Kenji Tanigaki)

Handyman’s daughter is kidnapped, the police are useless and hostile and corrupt, deciding to investigate him instead of the crime. Fortunately, the handyman is ballsy and badass, tracks down the baddies, crashes into their clubs and warehouses and makes a mess of their henchmen. He runs into a reporter guy whose wife is also missing and they team up against various child trafficker tough guys, including Mad Dog from The Raid as a cop-killing bowman, and the rich Heir Trafficker who accidentally murders his own pregnant bride in the movie’s most digital-bloody scene.

There’s a lot of cool fighting but it felt more ridiculous than thrilling at the end – I wonder if Baby Assassins is better. From the director of Enter the Fat Dragon, with Sub-Zero as the journalist, also featuring one of the buttplug guys from Everything Everywhere All at Once.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: B (I)

Black Box (1979, Beth B & Scott B)

Kidnapper/torturer Lydia Lunch wants “to cure you, to free you from error.” Man leaves his hot girl and crappy apartment for a sec, gets kidnapped off the sidewalk. Lydia keeps threatening him with the black box, then throws him inside. It’s a small room where you have to listen to Beth B’s music while someone flicks the lights on and off, so, exactly what the viewer of this film is going through. Just a few shots, real talky, with dialogue that feels improvised except for the Doctor’s and Lydia’s big speeches, not so much an actual movie as Decoder was.

The last thing you see before going into the black box:

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I-94 (1974, Bette Gordon & James Benning)

Flicker film, strobing between a woman walking away from camera and a man walking towards, with a man’s and a woman’s voice talking about the way they’re seen by other people, the tapes running at the same time but each voice distinct so you can focus on one person’s story or the other (but not both). Among the earliest work by either director.

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69 (1969, Robert Breer)

Thin-lined geometric shapes swing through white 3D space, then flicker fill colors are added, until the whole thing goes bonkers in the last minute.

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70 (1970, Robert Breer)

Escalation of 69, the color-flicker shapes are still swinging through space, with added sprays and blobs, and less chaos.

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Fuji (1974, Robert Breer)

My favorite of his, conceptually. A few shots of a train ride past Mt. Fuji have been traced and re-traced, rotoscoped with different treatments, until the mountain becomes a vague spray pattern, a triangle, a line, all rapidly and entertainingly shuffled together.

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Now You Tell One (1926, Charley Bowers)

Very good Bowers stop-motion adventure (he has a magic potion that can make anything grow, such as shoelaces, or a tree full of cats) wrapped in a needless backstory (he tells his tale at the local Liars Club and they give him a medal) with a good punchline (“sir I’m in love with your daughter” / “you idiot, that’s my wife”).

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A Visit from the Incubus (2001, Anna Biller)

Great theme song, explaining the Incubus tale. The rest of the songs don’t measure up, but the colors and costumes are top notch, and she gets real mileage out of having modern actors act like they’re in a 1950s technicolor musical western. Her long-awaited follow-up to The Love Witch should be coming any month now.

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Matin’s Breakfast (1974, Patrick Bokanowski)

The most interesting bits are when an actor appears to have been graphicized, or he’s running through a composited picturebook scene. But sometimes I wonder if they didn’t film the titular breakfast scene (chaos in a kitchen) and it wasn’t working, so they turned the footage into a slow-mo/freeze-frame avant-Begotten art film.

by ·Comments Off on Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962, Albert Zugsmith)

Odd human trafficking spy/rescue story, less furious than The Furious but overall better, set in 1900ish San Francisco. Yet another movie where newspaper men have to solve local crimes themselves, sneaking around to find kidnapped brides held in bamboo cages. All the dialogue is philosophical quotes. Costarring every Asian guy they could round up to play Chinese (including the Chinese-Hawaiian Richard Loo, who played Japanese in The Steel Helmet, and the Korean-American Philip Ahn, who’d play a doctor in Shock Corridor), I found nothing wrong with the movie’s politics except when it scared a cockatoo into trying to fly while tied to a perch.

Vincent Price is a rogue element stepping into the middle of a gang war filmed on Western sets, hmm. Nice freakout scene with masks, skulls, funhouse lenses, and zoo animals. In the middle of the rescue operation Price has a couple hours to kill until the girl auction starts, so he stops to smoke some opium. Soon afterwards when he’s accosted by baddies, the drug has given him super-slo-mo powers.

Feels like a Messiah of Evil / Carnival of Souls indie. Zugsmith produced a couple Sirk films and Touch of Evil before cementing his legacy with MST3K-bound pictures about wayward high schoolers. As far as I can tell, the source book by Thomas De Quincey (best known as originator of Suspiria) is an 1810s drug memoir and contains no human trafficking thriller story. The Monthly Film Bulletin review excerpted on wiki is spot on, just add “(complimentary)” to the end of each sentence.

Philip Ahn and Vincent have the same tattoo:

The late Richard Loo faked his death, joins Price for the final fight:

Angelo/Master has a cameo:

by ·Comments Off on Bugonia (2025, Yorgos Lanthimos)

So soon after Train Dreams, here’s another new movie people are attacking for botching its adaptation of an original work (in this case the Korean movie Save The Green Planet!) but which I watched in blissful ignorance of the original work and greatly enjoyed. Theoretically not a fun movie, as a conspiracy obsessive and his dim relative kidnap and torment a businesswoman into confessing that she’s a space alien, but I cackled more than once, then floated away happily after she escapes to her ship and kills all the humans.

Stone and Plemons and his cousin Aidan Delbis are the whole show, though Stavros Halkias shows up as a perv cop just long enough to get murdered by bees. Not until after the kidnapping and head-shaving does Jesse let us know that he thinks she’s an alien. More of his craziness is gradually unveiled (he’s a loner whose mom told him about mind control, he tells Stone “everybody denies it at first” revealing she’s not his first victim, she runs the major company where he works a menial job) and he seems to be making up space alien stuff as he goes along, so all his stories being true was the only decent twist the movie could have. I guess he and the cousin didn’t have to have their heads blown off after Jesse is tricked into murdering his comatose mom, and Stone escaping from an ambulance and running back to the crime scene seemed like padding, but the payoff is worth it.

Jesse flashes his tascam, pretty sweet:

Not all life! Just the humans:

by ·Comments Off on It Was Just an Accident (2025, Jafar Panahi)

Original title A Simple Accident was more elegant, presumably referring to the inciting car crash. A mechanic thinks he recognizes the wrecked driver as his government tormentor, kidnaps him and shops him around to other formerly-imprisoned people (photographer, about-to-be-wed couple, unhinged guy) to get identity confirmation and a decision on further action. But the more people become involved, the cloudier the plan of action, until they end up helping the guy instead of murdering and burying him. Chilling ending, just the back of the mechanic’s head and the sound of the man with the artificial leg walking up behind him.

“This film is made for a time for which there is no history yet.” Inspired by a post-Offside adaptation of Death and the Maiden, per a contentious Vulture interview:

It’s sneakily funny and thrillingly paced, a story about vigilante justice punctuated by long one-take shots in which the characters debate the ethics of violence and what’s worth fighting for … Better than any director working today, Panahi understands how detention can change a person on an atomic level, chipping away at their humanity.

Won the top prize at Cannes versus Die My Love (which I saw the previous day), The Phoenician Scheme, and a bunch I have yet to watch: Sentimental Value, Resurrection, The Mastermind, Sirat, Sound of Falling, The Secret Agent, Eddington, Alpha, Nouvelle Vague.

by ·Comments Off on Dangerous Animals (2025, Sean Byrne)

After Alone, why not watch another girl get kidnapped by a serial killer and try to escape her fate. This time things are more complicated – we see other victims, there’s an attempted rescue, and the maniac is a boater who feeds captured surfers to sharks while filming them on VHS.

Surfer Zephyr (of Southbound) has a lovely time with new friend Moses, then she drives to the beach, gets kidnapped by a maniac and locked on his boat with fellow victim Heather. Really Good Guy Moses keeps searching for her, connects the clues, and arrives only to be kidnapped himself, then Z chews off her own thumb to escape from the cuffs Saw-style. Byrne is two for two, now I’ve gotta catch The Loved Ones. Everyone else who watches this already knows who villain Jai Courtney is – I’ve only seen him in Edward Furlong cosplay as a lead-in to Yoga Hosers.

by ·Comments Off on Alone (2020, John Hyams)

Most straightforward story of the season: Jess is kidnapped by creepy mustache man (who recently played a cop in Companion), escapes getting serial-killed by fleeing into the woods, then jumping into a river, then playing the most dangerous game (with hunter Robert as collateral damage). She does manage to kill the dude and get rescued, but her biggest triumph is grabbing his cellphone and trash talking him to his wife (who thought he was on a business trip).

by ·Comments Off on Bring Her Back (2025, Danny & Michael Philippou)

People seem unhappy with this movie because it’s full of cliches, is All About Trauma, and it torments and abuses and murders children. But I had a pretty good time watching Sally Hawkins learn about demonic resurrection rituals on bootleg VHS then bumble around until her plan gets so out of control that she kills herself. Also fun because both Foster Mom Sally and her cat-strangler son are dangerous, and we don’t learn until late that she has got him possessed by demons and wants to do the same with her new blind ward Piper, painting P’s older brother Andy as a problem child to get him sent away. And her cat is named Junkman, pretty good name.

by ·Comments Off on Come Drink With Me (1966, King Hu)

The second time I’ve watched Tsai/King movies back to back, this time by accident. Pale guy in white robe (Chen Hung-Lieh) kidnaps the governor’s son Master Chang until Golden Swallow (Jade Fox herself) shows up to set things right. But she gets poisoned, then rescued by Drunken Cat (House of 72 Tenants star Elliot Ngok Wah), whose archrival Abbot Liao Kung (One-Armed Swordsman villain Yang Chi-Ching) teams up with the pale guy for a showdown. The action in this is slower and less fluid than usual, but the people on the internet say it’s actually great, so what do I know.

Swallow vs. Pale Guy:

Abbot vs. Drunken Cat: