‘Reflection in a Dead Diamond’
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the directing duo behind “Let The Corpses Tan” and other stylish giallo-inspired thrillers, are back with another fun slice of retro Euro-horror pastiche. This time they’re serving a maximalist mélange of James Bond, “Death in Venice,” lurid science fiction and 1960s soft-core pornography.
As in most Cattet-Forzani films, the story is frustratingly opaque; here it has something to do with a magic ring and a suave secret agent who gets busy breaking hearts and busting bones on the Côte d’Azur. Forget trying to follow the time-jumping narrative and instead savor the dizzying camerawork of dissolves, fast cuts, spins and plunges that almost never let up. The slow-motion animated silhouettes in saturated jewel tones, like those in the opening credits of “Dr. No,” are a hoot.
The film features many bravura, rapid-fire fights that made my jaw drop. In one extraordinary scene, an assassin in a creaky leather bodysuit kills her victims using a foosball table and her own metallic red nails. In the other, a seductive operative with a grill like Jaws — the Bond villain, not the shark — shoots sequins off her dress like projectile saw blades. This is show-off moviemaking, and it’s a thrill.
‘Deathstalker’
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
When it comes to eyeball-popping violence, you can count on the prolific genre auteur Steven Kostanski (“PG: Pycho Goreman”) to mean business and not waste your time. His latest feature opens on a battlefield that looks straight out of a death metal album cover, and includes a scene of a warrior using his giant sword to gruesomely saw a head in half — the most stomach-churning scene I’ve seen since a chain saw ruined a couple’s shower in “Terrifier 3.”
Kostanski’s film is a reboot of Roger Corman’s 1983 sword-and-sorcery action movie of the same name, a cheeseball delight that rode the coattails of “Conan the Barbarian.” Here, Daniel Bernhardt plays the title he-man who, with help from his wizard sidekick Doodad (voiced by Patton Oswalt), fights the dark magic unleashed by an ancient amulet. Deathstalker slays monsters too; my favorite was the creature with two heads where breasts would be. Fans of the costumed heavy metal band GWAR will be in heaven.
I had a hard time caring much about a story that practically begs me not to take it seriously. But why does it matter when Kostanski’s film offers such unapologetically gross-out, straight-to-VHS, geeky teenage joy.
‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’
I’m not a huge fan of the “Conjuring” franchise. I enjoyed the 2013 original with Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as fictionalized versions of the real Ed and Lorraine Warren, married paranormal researchers. But in the sequels, I was never taken by the stakes, and don’t get me started on the wigs. (Plus, I want Wilson back on Broadway.)
If you’re a “Conjuring” fan, it’s worth checking out this sequel, the fourth and ostensibly final film, more for completist reasons than for fresh horror movie pleasures. Directed by Michael Chaves, it’s set in 1986 and revolves around the Warrens and their daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), as they investigate a haunting in suburban Pennsylvania that involves a demon that tried to kill Judy while Lorraine was pregnant.
It’s all dressed up in the comforting “Conjuring” conventions you all have come to expect and love, including antique mirror jump scares, possessed toys and a really loud exorcism.
‘The Decedent’
The writer-director Andrew Bowser does something neat with his slow burn, low-fi possession thriller set one night at a Pittsburgh funeral home: He uses only glitch-prone camera footage, including from body cams, a console of security cameras and a tutorial video (with one very realistic commercial). It’s like a found footage “Autopsy of Jane Doe.”
Bella (Zoe Graham), a young mortician, spends the night shift attending to the body of a man who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and needs his face reconstructed for his open casket funeral. Emptying his pockets she finds a note in which he despairingly confesses that he’s “a haunted man” who took his life after having been possessed by a sinister entity.
What we see through cameras that neither Bella nor the funeral home’s maintenance man see is that they are not alone, and instead are being watched and tracked by someone or something. I had a ball scanning the multiple camera angles that fill up the screen to see where this entity might be lurking, a testament to Bowser’s knack for direction and misdirection.
‘Meat Kills’
Stream it on Screambox. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB9PwbW9-_c
If your holiday meals will include Christmas ham, you may want to skip Martijn Smits’s ultraviolent film about battles to the death between animal rights activists and the pig butchers whose slaughterhouse they infiltrate. On the other hand, Scrooges should dig in.
The Dutch-language film takes place one night as the family that runs a slaughterhouse goes to war with the masked activists who sneak in on a mission to document the horrors of pig processing. The warmth of the family’s home, where a sick little girl recovers in bed, contrasts with the bloodletting at the heart of the family’s business, an emotional tug of war that mirrors the film’s debates over the politics of meat.
As the butchers scald and slice open their captives, as they do pigs, and the activists turn the tables, Paul de Vrijer’s script becomes more of an exercise in cat-and-mouse brutality than a serious examination of animal rights. (For that there’s “White God.”) Good luck sitting through the extreme close up of a crazed pig feasting on a face. I hope the actors were treated to some tasty vegan craft services because they were put through the ringer.
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