Pulse (2001)

I don’t know how director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and his collaborators pull this off, but in an opening sequence of Pulse (2001) where we observe a young woman visit a friend’s apartment, cutting from her travel in a bus interior to walking down a street to walking up the apartment block stairs, all of this is rendered as eerie and unsettling. She is always alone in the frame and everything feels empty. Emptiness is a feeling explored to unsettling effect in this J-horror movie, which much like Kurosawa’s previous masterpiece, Cure, unnerves through absence and suggestion more than jump scares and extended violence.

When people start dying strangely, taking their own lives after withdrawing from the world, several characters notice the connection to computers and the internet, specifically a website that displays grainy video footage of people in their apartments. While the technology might have vastly improved in the prevailing decades since Pulse’s release, you can’t beat the creepy noise of an internet dial-up tone and that technological screech. The lo-fi quality of the technology displayed, the basic monitors and the pixelated images on the computer screen just add to the creepiness. When a character enters something called “the Forbidden Room” and comes face-to-face with a ghost, it is a masterclass sequence that gets under the skin. Much like other Japanese horror movies of this era, the horror is in being in the presence of a ghost and the slow advance towards you.

Unexpectedly veering towards the apocalyptic in its second half, and losing some of the sustained tension, Pulse still remains an effective horror movie, which is more about the horror of loneliness, disconnection and nothingness. I also appreciated Haruhiko Kato’s slacker energy as a character which serves him well through the growing chaos. And if Cure made the visual of a black “X” against a wall a creepy sight to behold, the use of red tape against doorways is also a great use of imagery. Available to stream on Kanopy and Tubi (US). Recommended.

Petrol (2023)

Petrol (2023) is a new Australian film from director Alena Lodkina. I had only caught up recently with her first, Strange Colours, which screened at Revelation Film Festival and is a father-daughter drama set in the Lightning Ridge opal mining bushlands of New South Wales, which I found to be authentic and artful, patiently compelling. Petrol is set within urban Naarm/Melbourne and is both similar in style and tone to her previous film to a degree, a clear sense of control and taste in evidence, but also completely different in effect.

The film focuses on Eva played by Nathalie Morris (from the TV show Bump) who is a film student living at home with her Russian immigrant family – a background shared by the director Alena, though this is not an autobiography at all. While recording sound out on a coastal hillside for one of her final year film projects, Eva secretly observes a performance on the shore by a small group of people, filming characters dressed up as vampires reciting arch prose. The star performer is artist Mia (Hannah Lynch). Though they never speak, there is something about Mia that captivates Eva. Later while walking through the city at night, Eva spies Mia along, deciding to crash. They meet in the party conversation over wine and eventually become friends, to the point where Mia who is living in an apartment, apparently paid for by a wealthy benefactor, offers Eva a room to stay in.

This is the starting point of the film, but the great thing about how it unfolds was that I was never sure where it was heading. There are everyday moments of Eva getting along at film school or spending time with her mother or grandmother. And then there will be a surreal or odd moment, sometimes revealed to be a dream, other times possibly drug-induced. Mia talks of a sister who died when she was young, and there is possibly the presence of a ghost. Petrol’s style often flirts with becoming a horror movie, or a thriller, but then will also disarm you with something humorous and charming. Petrol is a singular, unique film working in the arthouse tradition that uses mystery and dream logic to communicate a familiar feeling. Of being young and defining your identity, falling in love with people because of what they represent rather than who they are, and trying to fit in when people are elusive and indeterminate.

The performances are really good, particularly Nathalie Morris who is the central character and whose experience guides the perspective of the film. Morris projects empathy through her introverted, thoughtful and uncertain manner. At points, I was reminded of playful, surrealist auteurs from the 1970s like Jacques Rivette or Apichatpong Weerasethakul – even Jean Rollin with characters wandering a cold looking beach wearing coats and cloaks. With its use of dream logic and subconscious imagery, it’s also hard not to compare to David Lynch. But there’s a different tone and impact here – this is not a crime movie or a horror, but uses the cinematic language here to convey something about existentialism, identity and relationships. Great cinematography by Michael Latham, particularly of how it makes the inner-city Naarm look at certain points and its contrast with the countryside landscape, and the score is by musicians Mikey Young and Raven Mahon.

Petrol is out in cinemas now and it’s definitely a strange, surreal experience. Not for everyone, but I’m very keen that there should be more Australian films like this. Recommended.

School In The Crosshairs (1981)

I remember seeing Hausu a long time ago (presented by Kenta McGrath at the UWA Film Society) and my memory of it has always been an all-encompassing, wild, super-visual horror dream. Keen to see further films from Hausu’s director Nobuhiko Obayashi, particularly since a few of them are available in HD on the Rarefilmm website. With the plot description involving “psychic battles” and “high school warfare”, School In The Crosshairs (1981; aka The Aimed School) couldn’t help but grab my attention.

From the opening sequence, there’s such memorable, hyperreal imagery. Teenager Yuka (Hiroko Yakushimaru) is introduced getting ready for school, and her bedroom is rendered in desaturated cool-blue and white, while outside picture-book exteriors radiate with colour; it feels like a MTV music video from this period and shows off Obayashi’s background in avant garde art and commercial advertising. The film itself is mostly a charming high school story about Yukal helping out her crush, Koji (Ryôichi Takayanagi) with his passion for Kendo training. Like a wholesome episode of a teen high school drama, which eventually becomes a sci-fi supernatural moral story about anti-authoritarianism. Yuka has emerging psychic abilities that manifest while a demonic alien (Tôru Minegishi) from Saturn who dresses like Captain Planet but acts like a PG-rated Freddy Krueger, turning up in both her dreams and waking life, wanting to take over her and also her school. Eventually another student, Amamiya (Kaori Mizushima) arrives with similar psychic powers to battle Yuka – winning over classmates and teachers in the student elections, and starting up a fascistic group of “hallway monitors”.

While not as strong or total in its impact as Hausu, the visual flair in School In The Crosshairs is very dynamic and engaging, with scene dissolves, painted backdrops and animated sparks and rays. Somewhere in the maelstrom of comic-books, animated cartoons and pop art, this movie exists, a bright confection underwritten with a fantasy parable about education and strict laws, and ultimately adolescent play versus the rise of dictatorships. On the surface, it seems like a wild ride from its description, but is more like an upbeat daydream in effect! Recommended

House On Haunted Hill (1999)

The ghost of an ooky kooky spooky 1950s William Castle is haunting the set of the Nine Inch Nails ‘Closer’ music video (or vice versa). That’s the experience of House On Haunted Hill (1999), the first movie from Dark Castle Entertainment, a production company from Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver and Gilbert Adler, initially set up to remake the movies of William Castle. The original House On Haunted Hill is one of my favourites, available widely since it’s out of copyright, and even with the dated, creaky effects, it is lots of fun, especially with the great Vincent Price’s lead performance. This Halloween I have been catching up with a lot of the Dark Castle Entertainment productions as I never saw them on release (Thir13en Ghosts, Ghost Ship), and this has been the best of them alongside the House of Wax remake. A wealthy theme park designer Steven Price (Geoffrey Rush) with a taste for games and pranks hosts his wife’s (Famke Janssen) birthday party at the “House on Haunted Hill”, a deserted art deco mansion. Back in the 1930s, the mansion was an institute for the criminally insane, presided over by a murderous doctor (a great, silent Jeffrey Combs from Re-Animator). Invited to the party are five strangers – Taye Diggs, Ali Larter, Peter Gallagher, Bridgette Wilson and Chris Kattan (!) – who are offered a million dollars each if they successfully spend the night there. What was a nasty parlour game turns deadly within this evil, living house. The House On Haunted Hill remake is a great meeting point between old school schlock and goth-horror cliches from the time, even some gloopy CGI near the end, and era-defining casting (how about singer Lisa Loeb and Spike from Buffy in supporting roles? That late Nineties enough for you?). But there’s mostly practical effects and dashes of style (Riami, Lynch, etc) from director William Malone with an eerie, pumped up score by Don Davis (The Matrix). Much like a lot of big budget horror from this time, it becomes a bit of an action movie by the end with quips and explosions. Yet it’s a fun, eclectic cast (its great in particular to see Famke cut loose like this) that doesn’t outstay its welcome with a 90 minute run time. While it might be that scary, and would have been a perfect gateway horror flick back then, there’s still some eerie moments (such as the post-credits silent stinger) along with its over-the-top theatrics. Recommended.

Tales From The Crypt (1972)

One of the many horror anthologies that British studio Amicus produced in the 1970s, Tales From The Crypt (1972) is based on the William Gaines EC comics well before HBO revisited them with a quippy animatronic ghoul in the 1990s. Here, the Cryptkeeper is played by Sir Ralph Richardson, basically wearing brown robes and acting quite imperious as sits down five wayward strangers who have become lost during a tour of a graveyard’s catacombs. Five strangers, five self-contained stories, transplanting their American comic-book origins into drab domestic interiors with reliable British character actors. I really had a fun time with Tales From The Crypt. To cover five tales in 90 minutes, well, it doesn’t mess about and gets stuck into each plot, with enough variety between the tales of terror and enough memorable bits of style and horror imagery to satisfy. I have a fondness for these old British anthology horrors as they can feel a bit quaint while conjuring a classic spooky tone, and this one is a rather satisfying entry in the genre, comparable to Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors and even Romero’s Creepshow. It carries on the spirit of the comics in that the tales are mainly nasty people receiving a nasty fate through some strange turn. The cast includes a young Joan Collins, Patrick Magee (from A Clockwork Orange), Ian Hendry (from Get Carter), and of course, Peter Cushing (who apparently took his role, a more sympathetic one of a kindly neighbourhood widower, as a way of coping with the loss of his own wife). Directed by Freddie Francis who was also a successful cinematographer, particularly later on in Hollywood (Scorsese’s Cape Fear, Lynch’s The Straight Story) later on. Available to stream on Tubi. Recommended.