POMO

A lot of nudity in titillating compositions that do not lead to any sex scenes. Successive Slidings is just a jumble of almost dreamlike scenes, whose meaning viewers have to figure out for themselves in the context of the plot. I didn’t much enjoy that, as I found it rather boring instead.

An irresistible excursion into human deviancy and the things in the basement that we don’t talk about. A panopticon of characters with every possible perversion, surprisingly literal and open, molded into an obscure sociological comedy. Seidl succeeds not only with his selection of the most cartoonish representatives of various realms of fetish, but primarily with the absurd manner of filming them and peculiar image composition, as well as with the sensitively constructed mosaic of their diversity.

The villains are alright, the winding roads of Côte D’Azur are spectacular and the two main female characters are much more pleasant to look at (starting with their faces) than the entire swimsuit-clad cast of Baywatch (which I had watched right before this movie, God help me). But in trying to deliver one plot twist after another with an increasing cast of characters on both sides, the screenplay turns it into a cheap failure of a B-movie. Especially when you compare it, for example, to The Italian Job, which had much more remarkable actors in its cast. Eastwood Jr. and Freddie Thorp are suited to the roles of the seventh and eighth fallen soldiers in the second action sequence of the sixth installment of Transformers.

The first “point” occurs to you in the first few minutes, in a one-second flashback from the hospital, and the second comes about an hour later. Overall, the film is a jigsaw puzzle of familiar sci-fi and thriller motifs in which you will also find improbabilities in the logic (the development of the dialogue with artificial intelligence). Or, rather, you would find them if you wanted to seek them out, which you don’t, because it’s quite nice to watch – Aja’s directing is at a high level as usual, Mélanie puts in the work, and the last quarter of the film is a sci-fi visual caress.

Surprising! This mystery is skilfully sustained by a narrative that cleverly switches between the events of three different characters, with a densely dark atmosphere, but also some surprisingly irritating and almost amateurish moments, all culminating in a particularly surprising kick in the ass for hardened genre connoisseurs.

Rose Williams is fine, but the directing in the revelation of the “terrible secret” is inattentive and full of needless things whose sole purpose is to frighten. And they don’t succeed.

In many moments, Saint Maud is a psychologically focused and visually brilliant story about losing oneself through sliding into religious madness, but which doesn’t develop into anything satisfying in the end. This is a psychological horror flick from the dark mind of a socially perceptive and intellectually highly developed filmmaker, whose aim, however, doesn’t much appeal to me.

If there’s no budget for a monster, we’ll have a female astronaut raped to death by a monster. The attractive, always thoroughly made-up female members of the space-station crew and their charismatic colleagues act as if they are at a casting call for extras, and the suspense and action are laughable. Inseminoid is very bad sci-fi B-movie.

In terms of form and acting, Strait-Jacket is a likeable old-school thriller, psychologically well told and acted, with deep trauma, axe murders, a pretty daughter and a young George Kennedy. It’s just a shame that it crosses the line into B-movie foolishness at the end with a would-be shocking twist that, in the way it negates all of the characters' previous behaviour, is basically an acknowledgement of the film’s sole and regrettably modest aim of only momentarily tricking the viewer.

This Italian slasher borrows the character of the killer from the previous year’s classic Anthropophagus, without that film’s atmosphere and tragic mystery, but rather with the simple storyline of “a monster on the run goes on a killing spree”. The intense soundtrack and the character of the priest chasing the “boogeyman” suggest inspiration in Carpenter’s Halloween, but instead of any filmmaking inventiveness, it plays on crude violence, cruelty and gory brutality. Absurd is an average though still decent Eurotrash horror flick in the context of the subgenre. **1/2