Shimmy shimmy ya, indeed. If there’s one thing Hong Kong movies have in store, it’s always plenty of sequels. And yet, we welcome those here with open arms.

Directed by Lau Kar-leung, this is the spiritual second film in a trilogy. Unlike the first and last movie in said triad, Gordon Liu does not play San Te, but instead an imposter monk Chu Jen-chieh, who just so happens to look like the master of the 36th chamber.

After using his likeness to the famed warrior to help his friends — a scheme that doesn’t last all that long — Jen-chieh runs to the temple, where he’s soon kicked out. Only when he meets San Te is he given the opportunity to build scaffolds all around the temple and renovate the entire complex.

From high above the school, Jen-Chieh is able to watch all of the forms of the monks. Finally, when asked to dismantle his work, he rebels and runs through the chambers with ease. That’s because he changed his work to practice each of the forms, which was exactly the plan of the smiling San Te.

In spite of himself, our hero has become an expert at kung fu. Another lesson from San Te. Jen-Chieh saves his village and continues his training.

Directed by Alice Maio Mackay (T-Blockers, Bad Girl Boogey, So Vam), who co-wrote the story with Benjamin Pahl Robinson, this film follows Lola (Jeremy Moineau), who returns home of Purdan for the holidays. It’s the first time she’s been back since she transitioned and the town may seem like it’s changed, but it’s also filled with secrets, like a killer known as the Toy Maker.

Lola is also an investigator and true crime podcaster, so when the murders hit a bit close to home, she’s on the case. Like all of Mackay’s movies, this has more LGBTQ+ representation than pretty much every mainstream movie this year put together. Also: who knew that Australian Christmas was in the summer?

I love that her town has changed to the point that her sister Danielle (Dominique Booth) is proud to take her out, that a former teacher is now a drag queen who runs a queer bar, that Lola is so capable and that this has a neon look that’s helped by taunt editing by Vera Drew (The People’s Joker’s). It’s just 70 minutes long and in that time, it tells a complete story, has a fair bit of red herrings and ends with a killer that makes sense.

Mackay is barely out of the teens and has made six movies already. Each has improved and grown more confident, making each film festival where I encounter one a joy. We can always use more seasonal slashers, sure, but we definitely need more filmmakers doing the work and expanding consciousness like Mackay.

I watched Carnage for Christmas at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

Directed by Louisa Warren and written by Harry Boxley, Cinderella’s Curse starts with a woman named Phil (Sarah T. Cohen) asking her husband Jacob (Sam Byrne) not to kill her. He opens a book that he has taken from her, as the pages animate into existence, and Terrortures show up to serve him. This leads us to Cinderella (Kelly Rian Sanson), who serves as a slave to her stepmother Lady Dyer (Danielle Scott) and stepsisters Ingrid (Lauren Budd) and Hannah (Natasha Tosini).

This stepfamily is somehow worse than the fairy tales that inspired this movie, as they torture and kill another maid, Anja (Helen Fullerton), and force Cinderella to bury the body. She soon finds the magic book and uses it to bring her fairy godmother (Chrissie Wunna) to her, but again, unlike what Disney or any other storyteller would do with this tale, she has no flesh and her offer of help comes with a price.

The creators of this movie have told fairy tales before — Tooth Fairy, Return of Punch and Judy, Jack and Jill 3 — and that may be because they’re shocking in the way the same company’s Winnie the Pooh slashers are — Warren acted in one of those — and also material you don’t need to pay to film.

The biggest difference in this story is that the stepsisters have been in a throuple with Prince Levin (Sam Barrett) and they are luring Cinderella to the dance to torture and kill her. But this movie decides to rip off Carrie along the way and those glass slippers get used as weapons.

This is trash but you know, sometimes that can be enjoyable. I’m sure the filmmakers want you to know that these fairy tales started off quite bloody, but then again, they didn’t have wanna-be cenobites in them.

I watched Cinderella’s Curse at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

Director and writer JT Mollner — working with producer and cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, who shot this in 35mm — has created a twisty tale that is “one day in the twisted love life of a serial killer” yet also one that unfolds in the narrative technique that Tarantino used in Pulp Fiction. Read that as time doesn’t matter and expectations are continually dashed.

Told in six out of order chapters and an epilogue, this is the cat and mouse survival battle between The Demon (Kyle Gallner) and The Lady (Willa Fitzgerald), as well as the people pulled into their storyline, often at the cost of their lives, such as Genevieve (Barbara Hershey) and Frederick (Ed Begley Jr.).

An opening text explains that — just like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — that we’re about to see a real story. Except just like that film, this sets us up for a true crime experience that isn’t. There’s even Jason Patric’s voice narrating a true crime story later in the film. The truth in every frame of this movie, every single moment in fact, is subjective and ever-changing.

It even knows when to slow down, as the leads discuss a sexual encounter before it happens. The Lady says, “Do you have any idea the kind of risks a woman like me takes every time she decides to have a little bit of fun?” She declares that women love casual sex just as much as men. The difference is, they don’t die more often when they have it.

While I’d love to tell you more, I want you to go into this as cold as I did. Just let me tell you, it combines giallo style lighting, as well as the forms embrace of kink and ambiguous motivations. Some may be put off by the fact that it narratively takes such wild jumps, almost feeling like a totally different film from moment to moment. Yet that’s the joy of this, a movie that is going to win over audiences if they give it just 15 minutes.

It’s as close to perfect cinema as I’ve seen this year with Fitzgerald making the kind of star turn that young actresses often only dream about.

I watched Strange Darling at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

Directed and written by Ludvig Gür, Gudstjänst — which is being released in the U.S. as In the Name of God — is about Theodor (Linus Walhgren), a priest who is often the only person at his masses. The worshippers are dying off and his wife Felicia (Lisa Henni) wonders if they should move on. He’s happy that his mentor Jonas (Thomas Hanzon) has come to town. The problem is that it seems like he may be deranged. After all, he just killed a dove right in front of him and sprayed him with hot blood.

Yet when Felicia collapses and is soon hospitalized, dying from a mysterious ailment, Jonas offers to save her if Theodor follows him just as he did by going into the priesthood. Now, he must accept the true priesthood of God and kill sinners to save his wife’s life.

Jonas has already captured a rapist and all the younger man has to do is snuff out his sinful life. He does. His wife is healed. He becomes known as a faith healer and people come back to the church. His wife is with child. God has a plan.

Yet to make the prayers of his new followers come true, he must keep killing. Because the God who has listened to Theodor is the Old Testament one, the vengeful demander of sacrifice, the God that asked Abraham to murder his own son just to see how far he would go.

This is the very definition of a moral quandary. Isn’t murder a sin? Yet aren’t the people who Theodor is hunting and destroying evil incarnate? Isn’t all this murder making the world a better place? And if he can make miracles happen at the same time, isn’t that God’s will? Can you become addicted to creating magic happen in the lives of those who follow your teachings?

I watched In the Name of God at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

When I first saw The Hitcher, I was probably 14 years old and saw it as a straight-ahead story of violence on the highway. I probably cheered at the end when Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) blew a hole into John Ryder (Rutger Hauer). But age and the miles wear on every man and now when I watch it, it does more than make me raise my fist in the air and shout. It makes me ruminate on the journeys life has taken me and how I’d rather be launched through a window and blasted down a hillside than live a slow, tedious and quiet death.

Halsey starts the film with the kind of confidence that someone at the end of their teens has. He picks up Ryder, who immediately confides to him that he’s killed someone else. But he says something else. Something we don’t expect. “I want you to stop me.”

That’s the whole point of this film. Ryder will transform Halsey into the empty man he is, whether through attrition or forcing him to blast him into oblivion. This road only goes one way.

What does it take to get Halsey to realize this isn’t a nightmare, but reality? Of course, it’s easy to think that this could all be a dream, in the same way that long stretches of drives with no one speaking seem to be visions that last and last. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m still driving and every moment up until here, up until this realization, is just me imagining my life and any moment now, I’m going to wake up with my fiancee asleep next to me.

For our hero, it takes seeing trucks plow into truck stops, station wagons filled with the blood of all American families and the typical movie love interest torn in half by two semis.

Halsey is stripped of his identity, not just because his license and keys — let’s face, the manhood of most red-blooded boys — have been taken away. Everything he may have believed was true — the goodness of giving someone a ride when they need it, that love can conquer fear, even that the role models and lawmakers that society sets up can protect us against one lone man who isn’t just unafraid to die but willingly chases it — is a lie.

Not even suicide can save our hero.

So who is at fault for all the crimes that come out of this spree? If Halsey just shot Ryder in the truck, while Nash (Jennifer Jason Lee, looking like the gorgeous girl who surely will survive all of this madness, right?) is tied between it and another, life would be different.

Look, when a killer says, “I want you to stop me,” you listen.

Eric Red wrote this story while traveling across America, wondering about the lyrics to The Doors “Riders On the Storm.” Pretty simple, really: “If ya give this man a ride, sweet memory will die. Killer on the road, yeah.”

Critics hated it. Both Siskel and Ebert gave it zero out of four stars, with Ebert even decrying the film by saying, “I could see that the film was meant as an allegory, not a documentary. But on its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible.”

Whatever.

The end of this film, as Halsey stands against the sunset and smokes as we process what has just happened just attacks the viewer. The credits just stand there as we feel no celebration or victory. Maybe not even relief, because while it seems like this is over, there’s no way it is over.

The fact that this movie spawned a sequel and a Michael Bay remake are two things that I have added to the many things that I have tried to forget so that I can keep on living my life*. Kind of like how director Robert Harmon makes the Jesse Stone TV movies for Tom Selleck now instead of getting to create more movies like this (that said, I’ve heard good things about They, a movie he did with Wes Craven and I kind of don’t mind his Van Damme film Nowhere to Run). Red would move on to write a few other films that break the mold and are on my list of favorite films: Near Dark and Blue Steel.

The last thing that this movie makes me feel is loss. Rutger Hauer is such an essential part of my film nerd stable of actors, someone who always makes a movie way better than it seems like it will be just by his presence. Nighthawks is so intense because of him. Films like Wanted Dead or Alive, The Blood of Heroesand Buffy the Vampire Slayer (with Hauer getting to finally play the vampire lord that Anne Rice, who always wanted him as Lestat, saw him in) are actually great because of Hauer. And Blade Runner means nothing without him as Roy Batty.

Hauer astounded the stunt people in this movie, pulling off the car stunts by himself. And he also intimidated Howell, scaring him even when they weren’t acting. He even knocked out a tooth when he flew through the windshield himself. There is no one who could have played this character quite so well and stayed with me so long after the film was over.**

*The fact that René Cardona III made a Mexican version of this called Sendero Mortal does give me the energy to keep on living.  I’d also like to recommend the absolutely insane Umberto Lenzi in America  Hitcher In the Dark, which makes me wish that more Italian directors made their own versions of The Hitcher.

**Hauer said in his autobiography, All Those Moments, that Elliott “was so scary when he came in to audition that Edward S. Feldman was afraid to go out to his car afterward.”

I watched The Hitcher at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.

Produced by six-time Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot) and directed by John Farrelly, this is the first Irish language horror film ever made.

In 1852, during one of the worst famines in Ireland’s history, Éamon Finegan (Tom Kerrisk) and his daughter Máire (Livvy Hill) take on a caretaker role at an isolated mansion, renovating it during an unforgiving winter. I think if I’ve learned anything from horror movies, it’s never work in an large hotel or house during the winter, because there’s definitely going to be something inside the house that either possesses or tries to off you.

As he works to improve the estate, Éamon has an accident and slams his axe into his foot, leading to him having to stay in bed. Máire works on the property and takes care of him as he begins to drink and lose his grasp on reality. As she hides from his rage, she also must beware the specters that exist on the grounds. She’s been haunted before and thought she had escaped. But now, within this home and the elements beating the windows, she’s trapped all over again.

What happens when a third party, the land steward (Anthony Murphy) arrives? And is the ghost who has followed Máire for years, Alexander, real? The close of this movie, with its strobing imagery and overlapping faces, is incredible and unlike anything I’ve seen in film. If the ghost isn’t real — and Máire says that she wishes that it was — then what horror has she truly gone through?

I watched An Taibhse (The Ghost) at Pigeon Share FrightFest. It’s the UK’s best, brightest, and largest independent international thriller, fantasy, and horror film festival and has three major events each year in London and Glasgow. Learn more at the official site.