From writer/director Alex Garland, screenwriter of 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd, Ex Machina, and Annihilation and director of the final pair of that list comes the strange horror film Men.

Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley), retreating for two weeks in a rental house in the English countryside following the traumatic loss of her husband James, finds that all the men in the local village, all played by Rory Kinnear, are demanding, disturbing, and vaguely threatening,

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from the tween insisting on playing hide and seek with her to the naked vagrant who follows her home. Harper is confronted by both internal threats, guilt, and sorrow over her husband James, and external, the men of the village, while trying to come to a new emotional balance.

Rory Kinnear’s multi-part performance is non-diegetic, Harper shows no reaction to the fact that all the men she encounters are all variations on the same individual and as such it is a symbolic expression intended solely for the audience.

Garland’s previous scripts can be roughly divided into straight forward descriptive narratives, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd where the images on the screen represent an objective reality, and symbolic expressions such as Annihilation, where the scenes represent emotional, psychological states of the characters. Men lives deeply in the symbolic side of Garland’s creative process. The film follows its own nightmarish dream logic, particularly in its third act when objective reality is apparently discarded entirely. And yet the final sequences of the movie would seem to indicate that the fantastical events of the story climax were also reality the chaos’ detritus is seen by characters beyond Harper.

Men is a brilliantly crafted film that luxuriates in long shots and sequences that layer tension but the open to interpretation and symbolically charged elements of the imagery I found, while expertly executed, difficult to connect with and unclear in their meaning.

This movie is no doubt someone’s jam, and I have no question that it will be divisive, but I found it impossible to lose myself in the film as I was constantly battered by the question if I should be taking this literally or symbolically? Garland never gave me a clear direction on that and so I left the theater confused and without any strong emotional reaction.

Men is highly subjective, and it is a film that is impossible to either recommend or oppose as each individuals reaction is likely to be highly idiosyncratic.

The Secret Morgue, hosted by Film Geeks San Diego, is a one marathon festive for themed horror films with 12 hours of movies, munchies, and madness where the titles of the presentations are secret until actually screened.

Returning after a two-year pandemic hiatus the theme for Secret Morgue #3 was ‘witches.’ IN addition to the films and catered food we were treated to a lecture on the history of witches and witched in Comics.

Film #1: HAXAN (192) From Sweden this silent film, in a beautifully restored edition, if part ‘history’ and part narrative focusing on the myth of witches in the Middle Ages. I had never seen this movie and it was a pleasure.

Film #2: The Witchfinder General (AKA The Conqueror Worm) (1968) Vincent Price stars as Mathew Hopkins self-proclaimed Witch Finder General dur the English Civil war of the 17th century. The story presents no actual witches but the very real terror of unchecked power and prejudice. My sweetie-wife reminded me that we had watched this on DVD together but somehow I had forgotten it entirely.

Film #3: City of the Dead (AKA Horror Hotel) (1960) A flawed film with a bunch of brits pretending to me Americans as a small New England town is beset by a witch burned there in the 17th century. College students and professors arrive searching for a missing friend and unravel the mystery. With a better budget and script the core concept could have been quite good but a lackluster production and meandering script undercut what works.

Film #4: Inferno (1980) Written and directed by Dario Argento this is the middle film of Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy, between Susperia (1977) and The Mother of Tears (2007). The narrative of the movie is quite fractured, split among several viewpoint characters, most of whom come to grizzly ends, and as is typical of Argento’s work, mood, image, and style supersede story. It doesn’t quite have the dream logic of a David Lynch film nor the defined narrative of a typical story leaving it somewhere in a no man’s land between the two.

Film #5: Black Sunday (AKA The Mask of Satan) (1960) Director Mario Bava worked in a number of genres, mystery, Giallo, and of course horror. This film stars Barbara Steel in two roles as the 16th century witch, condemned along with her vampire lover, and the 18th century princess destined to be the witch’s vessel to revivification. Set in the eastern European country of Moldova, Black Sunday is a stylish gothic horror with impressive in camera transformation effects.

Film #6: Lvx Aeterna (2019) Written and directed by Gasper Noe of Irreversible fame this film is in a mock documentary style following two actresses, playing fictionalized version of themselves, who are about to portray witches burned at the stake. It is a short film, 50 minutes, but the late hour, my exhaustion, the foreign language soundtrack, and promised intense flashing sequences cause me to fear a possible migraine trigger and I instead left early but this is in no way a comment on the film’s quality only my own self-preservation in face of possible intense agony. (Driving into headlights at night with a migraine is not recommended.)

Well, it has finally happened A24 has released a film that utterly disappointed me.

X, and man I would have worked for a better title, is the story of five twenty-somethings and one

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forty-something traveling to a secluded rural Texas farm in 1979 to film a pornographic film and the night of terror, violence, and murder that ensues.

The sub-genre that X best fits into is hicksploitation, represented by such diverse films as Deliverance and Gator Bait and of course the movie X is most often compared to, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, X has been overly praised.

The characters of X are sketched in only the barest contours and what is there that passes as characterization does little to endear much sympathy. I do not believe that this is the fault of the performers but rather of the script. There is little to recommend this film beyond Mia Goth’s dual performance as characters separated by more than 60 years in age. (From this point onward, I will be revealing spoilers, though not the ultimate ending, for the movie.)

The movie repeatedly shattered any suspension of disbelief I might have possessed. The character RJ has artistic aspirations of making a ‘good dirty movie,’ referring to avant-garde French Cinema and yet he is making a movie without any lights, reflectors, or even a single tripod. The movie hangs a hat on this incongruity when Wayne, the old man and producer, yells at Maxine for being absent and that RJ is ‘losing the light’ as the sun sets but then everyone rushed into a darkened barn to film, where there is no fricking light.

Later in the movie, after RJ feels betrayed and has attempted to abandon everyone his girlfriend and sound recordist enlists Wayne’s help in searching for him. Wayne wanders out into the Texas brush, at night, wearing one underwear and no shoes. Because apparently not one of the native Texans has ever heard of ‘chiggers’ (bush-mites), snakes, fire-ants, or even just thorns.

In addition to displaying a lack of any concern about insects or plants the film to hampered by situations around the character of Jackson Hole, the sole male performer in their ‘dirty movie.’ As a black man, engaging in interracial sex, and deep in rural Texas, with a shady elderly white man prone to brandishing a shotgun showing little more than antipathy towards these young people, he acts far too cavalier about his own safety to be anything other than a cinematic ‘professional victim.’

X boasts one really nicely crafted scene of dread and suspense amid it jarring editing and reliance on jump scares. When Maxine goes skinny dipping in a pond and is hunted by an alligator the entire sequence plays out beautifully but ultimately only serves to establish the ‘gator so that it can be used later in an attack that possess none of the slow stalking dread exhibited earlier.

X proved to be a waste of my evening but at least with the AMC A List subscription it cost me no extra money. My advice is to wait for streaming or cable and then miss it.

August of 2021, I returned to the theaters for the suspense/horror film The Night Houseproduced by and starring Rebecca Hall. Over the past two weekends I have revisited the movie on Blu-ray. (Amazon had a sale with the disc over half off its retail price.)

I am pleased to report that the film works perfectly well on a second viewing as it did on its first.

Rebecca Hall plays Beth a public-school teacher and skeptic who is dealing with the sudden and inexplicable suicide of her beloved and devoted husband. After events prompt her to investigate his cell phone, she discovers that Owen took hundreds of photos of women, all strangers to Beth, who bear an uncanny resemblance to her. Plagued by nighttime visitations and visions that may be the product of overwhelming and suppressed grief Beth gradually moves from Skeptic to a believer in the supernatural with the possibility that Owen’s spirit has returned from beyond the grave to her.

The Night House is a sterling example of how a horror film can have real tension, real stakes, without requiring a body count or a monstrous example of violence every ten minutes. This is not to slag on those movies that work that way, the beauty of the genre is that it is wide and deep enough to welcome as film such as The Night House where an ambiguous ending leaves open the possibility that everything was the product of a grief shattered mind to the nine films of the Texas Chain Saw franchise that exists on its devotion to blood and violence. Personally, I am more drawn to films like The Night House where slow building dread drives the terror but far be it from me to denigrate what works for others.

The internet gives us access to news and popular culture from around the globe and sometimes that access prompts frustration.

This morning as I ate my customary breakfast of toast and eggs, yes, I live such an exciting life, one of the social media sites threw up the news that this year there was going to be a Norwegian werewolf movie, Vikingulven (Viking Wolf), complete with trailer.

Man, that looks good, and it had a Norwegian release date of August 27th but as of the time of this writing no US distribution. (Disappointed werewolf whimper.) There are few really good werewolf movies and this looks promising.

I guess I will have to wait and hope that one of the streamers picks it up. (Yes, I am looking at you Shudder.)

Despite what the title might lead you the think the 1958 Norwegian horror film Lake of the Dead contains zero zombies or undead.

Instead, it is the story of six adults friends, none of them remotely close to being a teenager, who vacation at a remote cabin that boasts a horrific and ghostly legend. Fairly quickly it is suggested that the ghost of the peg-legged murder may be possessing the vacationers and the clock is ticking for the group to solve the mystery of the lake as the dangers grows.

I wish I could say that I liked Lake of the Dead, but while it did not tempt me to switch it off nor did it fully engage me. The story is told entirely in flashback so on one level there are at least a set of character the audience is aware are going to survive their experience. I do appreciate the approach that had different character holding vastly different theories concerning the existence of the supernatural. However, a trained psychiatrist simply pronouncing the fact of telepathy as something as routine as antibiotics grated me in an entirely wrong manner. That said this film undoubtedly works for some and is competently crafted.

Lake of the Dead is currently streaming in Shudder.