SMILE 2 - Naomi Scott is Skye Riley, a singer trying to make a comeback after a drug-fuelled car trip tragedy. She might feel that the mind-warping machinations of fame are bad enough, but then supernature also proves a dab hand at cracking things up for her - enter that sinister smile and the demonic presence behind it. I thought the original 'Smile', a 2020s updating of last decade's multiplex paranormal tendencies with added J horror, was good if nothing too exciting. 'Smile 2' is a couple of notches up from there, and stretches beyond its baked-in tropes to appear actually quite nightmarish in places - it's a film whose frame-for-frame sense of reality is so adamantly on the verge of flipping that it puts even the likes of 'Jacob's Ladder' to shame. Recommended, one of the best of a strong year.
WATCHER IN THE ATTIC - I watched this (in my attic, actually) long ago via a substandard presentation on a pretty sucky UK dvd... consequently, very little of its sullied charm registered and I forgot all about it. It's based on early 20th cent horror scribe Edogawa Ranpo's novel of the same name and is known primarily as 'that clown cunnilingus movie'. This is true only up to a point; it's more an elliptical take on the dynamics of a serial killing duo a la the likes of 'The Honeymoon Killers' or 'Alleluia', done with mid-seventies Japanese erotica-arthouse dreaminess and detachment. Good-looking nihilism, the sort of stuff I still go in for; then again, I'm the kind of guy who can be entertained by five minutes of someone on a mattress blowing smoke at their fingers. Horses for courses and all.
BEAU IS AFRAID - I can sort of see why this one got shot down a little after 'Hereditary' and 'Midsommar' - "love your movies Ari, but three hours of a reasonably dull bachelor's existential crisis?" Even if that's not an altogether lazy sentiment, this bloated and surreal bildungsroman is too loaded with mad ambition and operatic overstatement to shoulder easy dismissal. Beau is afraid - primarily of himself and his relationship with his mom - and that basically sums up his careening road trip through grotesque slumland nightmare to bizarre woodland freakshow commune via a sickly household that you imagine Tod Solondz might've visited once or twice. What all this has to do with the cock monster in the attic is anyone's guess. See it, it makes more sense than my write-up, and it's not a trek; one hundred and eighty minutes, and for me they flew by.
STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER - Like 'Nightmares In A Damaged Brain', it's wearing its scum cinema status like a badge of pride. A bit plusher than the '42nd Street' affair its moniker might suggest, 'Strip Nude For Your Killer' is an almost archetypal mid-seventies giallo that, with its fashion house setting, la la la soundtrack, and Edwige Fenech, might as well be wearing the T-shirt along with the badge. Director Andrea Bianchi piles on enough 'era specific' attitude to guarantee at least mild opprobrium today but really pulls in the neon and grime of the urban night with his visuals, making the whole thing seem a bit more haunting than its latent silliness would normally allow.
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