Robert Eggers, the writer and director of 2015’s Puritan nightmare The Witch,  is back with another historic tale of terror.  The Lighthouse set in the 1890’s, is a film about two men on a desolate and distance rock of an island stationed as lighthouse keepers. Willem Defoe plays Thomas Wake, the senior lighthouse keep, a sea dog retired by injury but for whom the love of the sea has never subsided. Robert Patterson plays Ephraim Winslow, the young and junior man learning the trade and subject to Wake’s order and whim.

Filmed in stark black-and-white, it’s been reported that the film stock had to be manufactured in order for the camera to roll on this production, and with a tight compressed aspect ratio  The Lighthouse  is a confined claustrophobic movie with a stark spare setting contrasted with expansive performances by both Defoe and Patterson the threaten to shatter the frame. The photography is deliberately disorienting as sea, fog, and land blend in endless greys heightening the sense that the rest of the world as vanished over the horizon and that for these men there is nothing but the grueling work, their own clashes of personality, and the ever encroaching madness. The combination of Egger’s passion for historical detail, the bleak black and white cinematography, along with the ever present fog horn create a verisimilitude that absorbs the audience into the film’s reality.

Hallucinatory and with an unreliable narrator The Lighthouse  is not standard mass-market movie making. People who are expecting kills, jump scares, and a spot of violence every ten minutes are sailing for disappointment with this film. Closer in kin to David Lynch or Cronenberg’s Videodrome, The Lighthouse is a tale of madness and isolation that is powered by the stellar performances trapped with its close quarters. Much like Egger’s previous film The Witch  this movie is not easily accessible and is likely to spark a sharp divide between its critical reception and general audience reactions. Though not as symbolic as Lynch, Egger’s film requires active interpretation by the audience with scene after scene that depicts the tenuous grasp of sanity and its loss as the isolation breaks each man in his own manner. Personally I was more thrilled with The Witch on my first viewing but now even eight hours later I find the sounds and images of The Lighthouseto be haunting my thoughts and provoking deeper contemplation. It is a film that cannot be fully assessed with a single viewing and mark’s Eggers as a talent of bold cinema that is willing to color well outside of the lines.

The twin monster hits Frankenstein  and Dracula  made Universal Studios the home of horror in the 1930 thru the 1950s and stars of Boris Karloff and Bella Lugosi but a lesser know film of that same year that is worth viewing is the Spanish Language version of Universal’s Dracula.

While the principal cast and crew came in during the day and filmed the now classic 1931 Dracula during the evening hours an entirely different crew and cast, using the same set and script, albeit in Spanish, filmed a version for the Spanish language world. This version is often included as bonus content on Blu-rays and better collections featuring the Lugosi Dracula. Considered lost until the 1970’s when a print was discovered and fully restored.

With more daring costuming and a more sensual atmosphere this edition has fans around the world. It is interesting to compare the leads in each film. Lugosi, of course became a star, though of course his terrible drug addiction, first caused for pain treatment for wound he suffered in World War I, severely damaged his career and outside of the Spanish film world Carlos Villarias is virtually unknown. An interesting element to Villarias’ performance is that it strikes dramatically different tones as the characters shifts between charming and vampiric. When he is suave and sophisticated Villarias’ performance strikes me as superior to Lugosi’s, effortless carrying off the easy confidence and command of a person infused with his or her own sense of nobility. However when the blood lust and thirst takes the character Villarias’ performance becomes so overly expressed with his eyes bulging wide and his face contorting into strange expressions that the performance becomes comic and far inferior to Lugosi’s classic composure.

Released in 2017 Revenge  is a French movie about Jen (Matilda Lutz) her rich married boyfriend Richard (Kevin Janssens) and his pair of hunter pals Stan and Dimitri. Jen has flown with Richard to his isolated landed estate in the desert for a weekend affair but their assignation is interrupted by the early arrival of Stan and Dimitri who are to accompany Richard on a hunting trip. After an evening of music, dancing, and drink, Richard departs for business and while left alone Jen is raped by Stan and Dimitri does nothing to stop the assault. Richard attempts to buy Jen’s silence with a check but things spiral out of control until it becomes a fight for survival and revenge with Jen pitted against the three men.

Over all I found Revenge  to have not lived up to its hype. I remember hearing about from corners of my film community and it even played at a local micro-theater but I never got the chance to see it until watching it in Shudder. Despite being directed by a woman, Coralie Fargeat, the staging, costuming, and framing of Matilda Lutz struck me as overly objectifying. I never fully engaged empathically with Jen, her terrible plight, or her struggle and I think that comes down to two major factors. The first is the leering nature of the photography it seemed to constantly present Jen only something of a sexual desire keeping me at a distance from her as a character. The second major reason for my emotional disconnection is my shattering of disbelief when presented with unreal and impossible physical damage that characters not only survive and but remain fighting functional. It would appear that the scriptwriter has never been exposed to the concept of internal bleeding or exactly why you can’t run with your major abdominal muscles torn or ruptured.

My viewing coming quickly after another recent film on Shudder  about a young woman who has to survive after a terrible assault I could not help but compare this with The Corpse of Anna Fritz. Anna Fritz  while produced on a much smaller budget and with far fewer sequences of action, was a film where I never lost a tense and fearful emotional connection with the character of Anna. Watching Revenge  I was mostly bored but during Anna Fritz I was engaged and concerned, desperately hoping for Ann to escape this unjust and unfair situation. There is far more nudity in Anna Fritz  and yet it is presented in a manner that did not feel leering or objectifying but rather exposed and terrifying.

I cannot recommend Revenge and if you have Shudder  go with Anna Fritz  instead.

Man, I loved Zombieland  and the best thing I can say about Double Tap  is that I’m happy to see the original cast back but the bets bits are all in the trailer.

The original film was a charming, funny, and ultimately touching movie about the power of found family. The sequel is a collection of gags strung together with barest of plots and utterly devoid and any real story.

It’s been ten years since the Zombie Apocalypse and our heroes have taken up a stable residence but haven’t changed or grown much as characters, When Little Rock, in the original film the characters avoid the painful memories of their previous lives referred to themselves by significant destination and not their names, who has now become a young woman and is feeling the isolation of no romantic companion ship and her sister Wichita, feeling strangely stifled in her relationship with Columbus, suddenly leave, Columbus and Tallahassee are forced out of their routine and embark on an odyssey. They face many new dangers and meet many new characters before the entire family emotionally returns back to where they had started.

Characters in good fiction have needs and wants, and note that those are usually not the same thing, a character may want something but need something that is the opposite to complete their emotional arc. The characters of Double Tap  have wants but few needs of any kind and what they do want is the most plot driven of objectives. While the film is populated with talented actors who can turn a fine comedic performance the lack of an emotional story that is compelling ultimately make the movie hollow and empty. There are gags, and many of them are on display in the trailer, but there is no theme. The film is in the end not about anything at all. The script feels like one that has had many comedic hands working the sequences and the jokes are decent, but without a compelling story none of it really matters. If during the running of your film I am thinking to myself just how lovely Emma Stone’s eye are then you have lost me because I simply do not care what happens on the scree.

I cannot recommend Double Tap  and your time would be better spent putting in the Blu-ray and watch Zombieland  again.