Quint

While West's previous film X leaned on the atmosphere of 70s slasher and porn films, its prequel Pearl is a homage to classic Hollywood, combining the dark tale of the protagonist's descent into madness with the aesthetics of colourful Technicolor melodramas and live-action Disney films from the 50s. It features a boisterous orchestral score, overwrought musical numbers and artificially picturesque scenery, but it also gradually breaks down Hollywood glitz and subverts the conventions of the aforementioned films, like in the the way the main character treats the animals. The story can be seen as a wacky variation on The Wizard of Oz. Pearl is a lonely farmer girl who dances and talks to the animals on a fairy-tale farm and dreams of becoming a big Hollywood star instead of cleaning up cow poop. But circumstances force her to stay in a depressing reality (and have sex with a scarecrow in a field). Over time, her unfulfilled fairy-tale dreams of a world "over the rainbow" have terrifying consequences, and Pearl transforms from "Dorothy" to "the Wicked Witch." This is no gorefest full of scares, but an old-fashioned psychodrama with long takes and carefully crafted mise-en-scene. The film has even been praised by Martin Scorsese himself, who has said that the love of cinema can be felt in every frame. And it really is a treat for cinephiles. The main driving force is once again Mia Goth's performance. Her ability to play a seamless transition from a sweetly naive farm girl to a bloodthirsty murderous psychopath is unparalleled. The climactic final scene then builds to her long monologue, which is shot almost entirely in one unbroken take.

Terrifier 2, a 138-minute (!) slasher flick about a murderous clown, drew attention for the fact that viewers reportedly vomited and fainted at its screenings, while it scored a surprising 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and was even praised by Stephen King himself. The $250,000 independent film, financed through crowdfunding, made its way into the horror mainstream and grossed $6 million in its first three days. The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity did something similar, but in this case it's an extremely brutal "video nasty" gorefest that has absolutely no inhibitions and still remains "unrated" in the US. You wouldn't want to describe in polite company the things that happen in this film. It stands primarily on imaginative perversity, first-rate practical effects, which the makers sent out at the request of the fans to fight for an Oscar, and a terrifyingly grotesque performance by David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown, basically a kind of silent, pantomime Freddy Krueger. A wild, outrageous and extremely disturbing old-school grindhouse for gore movie lovers only and for those who want to test the limits of their jadedness.

X brilliantly evokes the period feel of early slasher films with honest practical effects, while subverting their moral stereotypes and the idea of the immaculate "final girl". The killer this time is a sexually frustrated retiree who takes out her pent-up desires on the young, horny filmmakers and porn actors making a movie in a conservative rural area. But she kills them not to punish them for fornicating, but out of envy (her motivations are deepened by the excellent prequel Pearl). Ti West manages to harmoniously blend two often despised genres, porn and slasher, which share many common elements. The result is an unconventional mix of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Boogie Nights, and it is breath of fresh air among other recent slashers that only unsuccessfully attempt to emulate their illustrious predecessors. And Mia Goth is absolutely phenomenal in the central dual role.

Like the first one, not quite a typical shark horror film, which again takes place deep underwater. This time in the ruins of a flooded Mayan city, a visually refreshing element, but unfortunately also the film's biggest weakness. It spends most of its time just wandering cluelessly in the murky underwater caves, and instead of evoking a sense of dread of sharks lurking in the dark, it spends most of its time focusing on the main characters' (indistinguishable in their diving masks) efforts to get out. The sharks are blind this time, and so the tension should logically come from whether the characters can be sufficiently “quiet” in their presence. Surprisingly, the film doesn't work with this very consistently. The shark attacks are often unrelated to how much anyone moves, and are staged more in the form of random scares. The tension only slightly kicks in at the action-packed conclusion, when we move to the open sea and the still-slow sharks pick up full speed. But then it becomes a typical shark horror movie. So the attempt to make a shark version of The Descent didn't really work.

When in today's flood of zombie movies someone can still come up with something fresh, it's very gratifying. All you have to do is combine a zombie film with the wordless post-apocalyptic subgenre of last man on earth, lock the protagonist in an apartment building and watch the zombie apocalypse purely from his limited perspective, through a window. And as is the way with last men on earth, they gradually get bored. So the hero is fighting boredom and loneliness most of the time rather than zombies (at one point he even tries to befriend his zombie neighbor). While there are moments when the boredom gets to be too much and we start to get a little bored with him, most of the time we enjoy the refreshingly minimalist concept full of off-the-wall ideas that we don't normally see in zombie movies. The zombies themselves are a little different here than how we know them. They don't make any sounds. They are completely silent, which is not only chilling, but also interestingly corresponds with the fact that this is actually a silent film for the most part.

What can happen in a 90-minute film about someone stuck in a deep plunge pool with a crocodile? A surprising number of things. And it's immensely entertaining to watch the ingenuity with which writer-director Ping Lumpraploeng manages to keep the main character at the bottom of the pool and the viewer in constant suspense the entire time. It's astounding the creepy subtlety with which he can continually throw sticks at his hero's feet. The law of causality here gradually escalates to enormously absurd proportions. The hero is constantly offered ways to escape, but then something always goes wrong by accident and he is worse off than before. In this respect, The Pool is perhaps the most vicious film I've ever seen. Or rather the most malicious feature film, because the writers are only this cruel to the villains in cartoons like Road Runner. The Pool is a similarly wacky entertainment in which logic and probability have nothing to do. I confess I guiltily enjoyed it more than this year's crocodile horror The Crawl.

Nostalgia for the 80s can be felt in any film today, but the way The Strangers: Prey at Night approaches it is not something you see right away. After the mandatory routine exposition, and after exhausting all possible slasher clichés, the film unexpectedly morphs into a wonderfully abstract, visually bloated almost-musical that ironically combines 80s pop with violent scenes. What's more, the whole thing begins to feel as if the director threw away the script in the course of filming and decided to remake John Carpenter's Christine instead of making a sequel to The Strangers. From the car radio of a pickup truck of a trio of masked assassins, driving slowly inside a deserted caravan park, there is a constant 80s pop that sends shivers down your spine. The story may be set in the present day, but the titular psychopaths seem to have styled themselves as 80's slasher killers who can't do without 80's tunes even when they get out of the car. Highlights of the film include a fight scene in a neon-lit swimming pool, with “Total Eclipse of the Heart” playing, or the heroine being chased by a burning car to the accompaniment of “Making Love Out Of Nothing At All”.

A hallucinatory neo-noir that pokes fun at audiences who revel in solving unsolvable movie puzzles, conspiracy theories and the internet generation's unhealthy obsession with pop culture. How much you enjoy it or get bored with it depends on how much you accept its absurd logic. It's reminiscent of the logic of the old adventure video games from the 80s and 90s, in which you as the player explored different locations collecting various items and had to figure out how to combine them to progress further. The way you combined them was often illogical, which drove you insane with an obsessive urge to constantly combine everything with everything (“is this old magazine a regular magazine, or can it be used for something important?”). But you didn't rest until you found out, for example, that if you scratched the James Dean statue, the King of the Homeless would appear and lead you to a mysterious underground. So does the protagonist of Under the Silver Lake, whose search for a missing neighbor leads him to unravel a pop culture super-conspiracy behind the curtain of picturesque Los Angeles. After he starts discovering coded clues all around him (in commercials, songs, and movies), he can't help feeling that everything is connected. David Robert Mitchell, the director, deliberately frustrates his audience with the aforementioned absurd logic, but manages to reward them with an immersive atmosphere and an entertaining play on audience expectations and genre conventions.

A rather novel shark horror film that impresses by the fact that it doesn't take place on the surface, but deep underwater in complete darkness, where you can't do without a flashlight and oxygen. While director Johannes Roberts doesn't work with open underwater space with the same visual imaginativeness as, say, Alfonso Cuaron did with outers space in Gravity, he still manages to successfully evoke a chilling sense of helplessness and uncertainty in the unfathomable depths, which are immensely vast, full of chasms and predators, and yet you can't see beyond your nose in them. Could there be a better place for horror?

Jean-Claude Van Damme, Christopher Lambert, Mike Tyson, and The Mountain from Game of Thrones in the sequel to Kickboxer? That doesn't sound bad at all. At least to a certain group of fans. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, everything. The whole point of arena fights is that you just have to root for the protagonist. You can't do it without that. For it to work, it has to win your sympathy somehow. Alain Moussi may have a good physique, but he lacks Van Damme's charisma and distinctive style. That was the basis of the first Kickboxer, which was extremely dilettantishly shot but had its charm thanks to JCVD. While Kickboxer Retaliation constantly tries to visually stun you (a fight in a prison in one long take, a fight in a mirrored room lit up with ultraviolet light, a fight on the roof of a moving train - there are, god knows, two of those!), it fails to captivate you. The characters are bland and unmemorable, the action is devoid of juice, tension, emotion, escalation and proper timing – instead of living it, you rather survive it. The final fight with The Mountain is so drawn out that I almost fell asleep during it. The non-action scenes are confusingly narrated and oddly edited. It can be appreciated only by hardcore MMA connoisseurs, who can be satisfied with seeing their favourite fighters on screen. Better watch Brawl in Cell Block 99 instead. It has a very similar plot and is the best exploitation film of the year.