CLIMAX [FRIGHTFEST 2018]

Climax

Salo. A Serbian Film. Cannibal Holocaust. What is horrific cinema? Provocateur Gaspar Noé made a name for himself with Irreversible’s enduring rape shot and with Climax he returns with a party of X-Factor type wannabes who find fame might be a bad trip. It is beautifully made and has a soundtrack featuring the likes of Aphex Twin, but the storyline’s is not far off par from the average goss mag.

Perhaps based on a true story, a crew of star-chasers start off expository-docu style for the trip of a lifetime. By baring their souls to an audition tape watched on a TV (surrounded by books on the film’s influences, obviously), they stand to dance their way into the Culture club. They deserve it – the dance pieces are utterly inspiring and in the process, we learn gradually about the interrelationships that influence their styles and make them tick. Of course, tics also breed irritation; soon someone is out to get them and the party turns sour.

The performers are magnificent. You will rarely have seen more vacuous, self-serving group of characters. Noé’s excruciatingly long birds-eye view section shows these preeners in a group hug of a dance that descends into something between (but not daring to be) a brawl and an orgy as they vogue and cast shade at each other only 30 years after Madonna brought the style to the mainstream.

Sucked into the action via melted-sweet lighting, you watch a significant proportion of Climax at an upside-down Dutch angle with a soundtrack consisting largely of pounding music and undulating screams. It’s atmospheric and disorientating, but also pretty hard for it not to be. This becomes more the case as the film includes Noé’s almost obligatory (but easily disentangleable) structural interferences.

Thematically, tensions appear in the troupe’s races, politics, habits, sexualities, and genders and there is some shockingly realistic violence, but shocking because of who commits it rather than the violence itself, which is short and then done with. If this is amoral or an indictment, Noé perhaps needs to update his playbook on identity politics. Woozy is then the order of the day as the dancing veers from hyper-speed technical experiment to grotesque inhuman morph regardless of the out of control party in the living quarters. The mood becomes quasi-comic. Several situations that seem outrageous when shot at a strange angle are actually quaint in Noé’s determination to be avant-garde or outrageous if you have actually been to a student party this century, and horrific tableau seem sweet in showing remaining humanity savoured. It is a pity, mind, that some of the more extreme sights promised either never come to visual fruition or are simply telegraphed.

Climax is a technical masterpiece, and that’s not surprising considering Noé’s clout and experience. As a story, it’s a standard indictment of the nature of modern media culture. That its violence is realistic is laudable; that its confused, ‘edgy’ politics are antiquated is embarrassingly not.

CLIMAX / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: GASPER NOÉ / STARRING: SOFIA BOUTELLA, ROMAIN GUILLERMIC, SOUHEILA YACOUB / RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 21ST

CLICKBAIT

CLICKBAIT

Bailey is a previous darling of video sharing site str33ker, whose unprecedented run on the top spot was brought to an end by a rival vlogger gaining public sympathy by dying of cancer. Soon afterwards she and her flatmate Emma begin being stalked, with the masked prowler posting their exploits to the same site, giving Bailey’s popularity a much-needed boost and leaving her reluctant to see an end to the proxy harassment. Although, with Los Angeles’ most staggeringly inept police officer on the case, there’s not too much chance of that anyway.

Satirising the desire for internet fame is trickier than you might think. Something that largely comes about through people’s desperation for validation through notoriety is such a ridiculous concept to begin with that any attempt to ridicule it can easily look inherently redundant. However, Clickbait craftily sidesteps the problem by its subject not so much being the desire for fame, but rather the absurdity of the material with which people attain it, and by extension that of those who readily consume it.

The film is riddled with stylistic references to past horror masters, in particular Dario Argento and John Carpenter, where nightmares both figurative and literal are made manifest in a surreal and lurid world recognisable as a slightly skewed facsimile of reality, which allows the sardonic concept to seem credible within context. The featured content is no less ridiculous than some of the attention-seeking nonsense YouTube is awash with, but since as a society we ironically hold our fiction to higher standards of internally consistent plausibility than we do our everyday reality, the off-kilter setting renders the histrionics more palatable. Thus, the notion of people cheerfully lapping up the exploits of a potentially psychotic murderer as he invades the lives of two young women is something not too difficult to accept.

The director duo of Sophia Cacciola and Michael J Epstein again deftly construct a self-contained world, this time a corner of the internet where status is the only thing that matters. The social commentary comes out a little more heavy-handed than the likes of Ten or Blood of the Tribades, but to be fair much of internet stardom is the result of being completely shameless, so in accurately portraying it anything even remotely resembling subtlety would have been the first thing to go out the window.

What little we see of Bailey’s actual filmmaking is decidedly unremarkable, and the recognition she attained from it juxtaposed with similar popularity as a result of her being stalked by a masked maniac slyly and tacitly comments on people’s willingness to watch anything so long as they can ogle a pretty girl while doing so.

A scathing observation of the habits of the internet age, Clickbait asks us to take a hard look at our online viewing habits and the true reasons for our enjoyment of the darker things that appeal to us, and demands we truly consider the kinds of things we might be inadvertently complicit in.

CLICKBAIT / CERT: TBA / DIRECTOR: SOPHIA CACCIOLA, MICHAEL J EPSTEIN / SCREENPLAY: JEREMY LONG, MICHAEL J EPSTEIN / STARRING: AMANDA COLBY STEWART, BRANDI AGUILAR, SETH CHATFIELD, RYAN JAMES HILT, IKAIKA JONATHAN, MAKEDA KUMASI / RELEASE DATE: TBA

THE BESTOWAL

Boy, this was quite an experience… Written and directed by Andrew de Burgh, The Bestowal is a 90 minute drama that tells the tale of a businessman who is on the brink of suicide, but is then visited by an inter-dimensional being who appears in the form of a beautiful woman and proclaims herself to be “Death”. What follows is a feature-length morality debate about life and death, good and evil, and the forces of the universe and religion coming together as one.

Having done a number of short films in the past, de Burgh describes this film as being “a dialogue heavy film that explores the meaning of life”, as well as other themes including “God, parallel dimensions, time, age, the universe, the devil, human existence and love”. This film tackles those themes in huge detail, providing arguments along the way about how technology is ruining the Earth, how sin corrupts humanity, and so forth, and while that can lead to some very insightful storytelling, this film has a tendency to play out like a 90-minute philosophy lecture. For this reviewer, it was a real struggle to become fully engaged and encapsulated by it on an emotional level, and it’s highly likely that not everyone will be on board with this type of storytelling and filmmaking, probably going so far as to be frustrated by it.

However, there is something that is peculiarly fascinating and unique about it that suggests that in years to come, possibly when de Burgh has become more experienced with his filmmaking, this film will no doubt be looked back upon more fondly. Filmmakers like Gregg Araki are a great example in this case since he started out making movies that were frankly cold and alienating, but as time went on and he became more experienced by making remarkable gems like Smiley Face, Kaboom and White Bird In A Blizzard, the more everyone felt compelled to go back and examine his earlier works and look upon them with more of a positive mindset after seeing the roots of his road to success.

In the end, The Bestowal is an odd, peculiar beast that is unique, challenging and thought-provoking, yet frustrating, unengaging and, from this writer’s mindset, impossible to become emotionally attached to. But even with its problems, there is the spark of something that is quite special that makes the film an admirable attempt, even if it doesn’t completely come together in the end.

THE BESTOWAL / DIRECTOR: ANDREW DE BURGH / SCREENPLAY: ANDREW DE BURGH / STARRING: SAM BRITTAN, SHARMITA BHATTACHARYA / CERT: TBC / RELEASE DATE: TBC

THE DAWNSEEKER

There is a point in The Dawnseeker where our “heroes” are captured by a rival group of military types. As night descends, the camp comes under attack from the titular beastie and a firefight ensues. All of which is fine, in theory. But given the battle takes place at night – lighting is a constant issue throughout the film – and you’re never quite sure who’s doing what to whom and why, it all gets a little confused and disjointed. Which rather sums up Justin Price’s sci-fi actioner.

Set a couple of hundred years in the future, the Earth’s sun is threatening to wipe out all humanity. A group of mercenaries is dispatched to a far-off planet to collect stardust, a rare mineral that can somehow replenish the sun and save the world. For some reason, on board their ship they have a Dawnseeker, an alien creature built for, well, killing stuff. Inevitably things go wrong, and they find themselves fighting for their lives on the hostile planet’s surface.

Writer and director Price is clearly a genre fan. The Dawnseeker is peppered with references to weighty works from Blade Runner to Predator; the creature here even bears more than a passing resemblance, and seems to have visited the same galactic hardware store. But Price is far too stoic with his film, building an intense, earnest severity into the story rather than retaining a necessary sense of humour. With a pounding industrial score – something that appears in many low budget sci-fi films, it seems – that further darkens the already twilight-inspired visuals, The Dawnseeker takes itself far too seriously. Long, suspiciously padded scenes offer little narrative development, and moments where a little brevity – think Aliens for the one-liners – would draw the audience in are played entirely straight. What remains are unrelatable characters doing unrelatable things for no discernible, relatable reason.

With low budget filmmaking there is a risk of trying too hard, pushing against the constraints of tight budgeting. Much of the CGI in The Dawnseeker simply doesn’t work to the film’s advantage, whether it’s the erratic laser fire or the creature design that varies from “man in a rubber suit” to a strangely odd moment of 80s visual effects. Again, and at the risk of repetition, if the tone of the film was played a touch lighter these might have worked better, being almost tongue in cheek homages.

Sadly, the more Price and his cast and crew have strived for genre credibility, the more they have pushed on down a path that leads only to disappointment. As admirably ambitious as The Dawnseeker may be, the resulting film is a confused, elongated short with awkwardly poor effects.

THE DAWNSEEKER / DIRECTOR: JUSTIN PRICE / SCREENPLAY: JUSTIN PRICE / STARRING: FRANZISKA SCHISSLER, KHU, ALEXANDER KANE / CERT: UNRATED / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

HORROR AT GALLERY KAY

A lesbian couple in the throes of a fraught break-up visit a therapist at the insistence of one of the pair who is desperate to convince the other not to walk out of their shared home. It’s the opening gambit for an indie art-house movie that evolves into something very different from the everyday relationship flick.

The counselling session is an intimate setting, where explosive emotional truths can be exposed in the interaction between patient and analyst. The opening act of Horror At Gallery Kay establishes the dynamic between the three characters (who are pretty much the film’s entire cast) and sets out a context in which such hidden secrets can emerge. It gives no hint of the direction in which the film is ultimately headed.

The power balance between the two lovers appears to be decidedly uneven. The fragile and vulnerable Olive (Rosebud), is pleading with her lover not to dump her. Petra (Maine Anders) is far less committed, wants more excitement, and appears to be far more psychologically self-sufficient. Olive is hoping to win an ally to her cause, but to her disappointment therapist Claremont Bozill (Brian Silliman) insists his role is to clarify the realities of their relationship, and not to save it.

Shot in black and white (with colour reserved for flashbacks), and staged in a strongly theatrical style, it’s an effective and well-structured opening delivered through some polished performances. Silliman has the best role, and he’s excellent in it; particularly as he establishes and enforces the “ground rules” of his therapy room. But when Petra recounts a bizarre personal experience that she’s told at numerous storytelling events (of commuters apparently slipping into a parallel world through a hidden doorway) things quickly shift gear and the film becomes something else entirely.

Without giving away any more of the plot, suffice to say that the story relocates to the titular gallery where a short series of (unexpectedly gory) horrors unfold, and the power dynamic between characters shifts irrevocably.

There can be a fine line between the profound and the pretentious in the work of art-house auteurs, and the insights of Horror At Gallery Kay certainly teeter on the very edge of that border. It’s arguable that the film’s central dramatic conceit is a metaphor for something to do with the surface and the subterranean in the human condition, but it’s not completely clear what that message might be.

That said, this remains an inventive, genre-bending story that’s well-acted and very competently directed. While the film’s split personality (part In Treatment, part They Live) will limit its appeal, if you’re willing to take an experimental punt you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll rarely, if ever, have seen anything quite like it.

HORROR AT GALLERY KAY / WRITER: MAC ROGERS / DIRECTOR: ABE GOLDFARB / CAST: MAINE ANDERS, ROSEBUD, BRIAN SILLIMAN, KRISTEN VAUGHAN / CERT: TBC / RELEASE DATE: TBC

BLACKkKLANSMAN

“Black detective infiltrates Ku Klux Klan” is the six-word pitch with which producer Jordan Peele brought director Spike Lee on board BlacKkKlansman. It sounds absurd; the plot of a forgotten ‘70s blaxploitation movie, maybe. And yet, it’s true.

In 1979, Colorado Springs police officer Ron Stallworth, recently transferred to the intelligence section, saw a Klan recruitment ad in the local newspaper. He called the number, posed as a virulently racist white man, and soon found himself invited to meetings. To solve the obvious problem here, a white officer doubled as Stallworth when any face-to-face meetings were necessary, and the two of them gathered intelligence on the KKK over a nine-month investigation.

Lee, one of the most celebrated directors of African American stories, takes this real life account, as told in Stallworth’s 2014 memoir, as a base and really runs with it, piling on the style. His take on Stallworth, portrayed by John David Washington in what should rightfully be a breakout role, is all charm and swagger, dressing like a character from Shaft, Coffy, or one of the other cult black movies he quotes, never dropping composure as he constantly one-ups the Klan. The movie’s sharp sense of humour is at its peak in our hero’s phone calls to Klan head David Duke, who remains utterly oblivious to teases of Stallworth’s true identity.

You can tell Lee’s taking liberties with the truth when Duke decides to visit Colorado Springs in person, a visit conveniently juxtaposed with a black power rally and a bomb plot, but it all adds up to a movie that’s a delight to watch. At the black gathering, Harry Belafonte cameos as an activist telling a heartbreaking anecdote, which is intercut with the Klan members watching notoriously racist film The Birth Of A Nation; cinema historians will relish the irony here – Birth Of A Nation pioneered this technique of parallel editing.

And that’s just one example of how BlacKkKlansman has more depth than you may think on first glance. There’s a lot of careful character work going on, notably in Adam Driver’s Flip Zimmerman, the detective chosen to be the white Ron Stallworth. Zimmerman sees the investigation at first as nothing but another job, but seeing the hate espoused by the Klan, including towards his own Jewish heritage, soon comes to question his own approach.

That said, BlacKkKlansman is not a subtle movie, and it won’t be to everyone’s tastes. Lee’s fellow director Boots Riley has publicly criticised the film for portraying the police in too positive a light, and indeed it does seem odd how quickly Stallworth’s white superiors are won over by his plan. At one point towards the end, it looks like loose ends are being tied up in one way-too-neat bow.

But then, Lee twists the knife, ending the film on a shocking reminder that the racial issues explored in the film are all too relevant today. BlacKkKlansman is provocative political filmmaking, and a hilarious, empowering piece of entertainment too. That combination may not always provide the smoothest ride, but it’s essential to watch, and to talk about.

BLACKkKLANSMAN / DIRECTOR: SPIKE LEE / SCREENPLAY: CHARLIE WACHTEL, DAVID RABINOWITZ, KEVIN WILLMOTT, SPIKE LEE / STARRING: JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON, ADAM DRIVER, LAURA HARRIER, TOPHER GRACE / CERT: 15 / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT [FRIGHTFEST 2018]

The title The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot may put you in mind of an ‘ardman “celeb” (playing himself) hollering one-liners at CGI whilst running through the Essex woodland. Starring Sam Elliott (Roadhouse) showing determination wrought through the years, Robert D. Krzykowski’s stunning first feature as director is anything but. Krzykowski manages to rearrange the importance of history even with the silliest (real) beastie you ever did see.

Calvin Barr is old now. Possessed of Elliott’s voluminous moustache and hair his brother Ed (Larry Miller) occasionally cuts for him while coaxing him to open up, Elliot flashes back to a youth where (as Poldark’s Aidan Turner) he went behind enemy lines to the Nazis in World War 2. His mission was to kill Adolf and, hopefully, fascism itself. Years later, two suspicious specimens arrive on his doorstep and ask him to take out an “old man” yeti whose existence also threatens to wipe out humanity.

With cinematography that makes even imminent extinction seem something to savour, we are shown the power of myth and memory in terms of how much an individual’s actions change the course of humanity. The soundtrack forces you to focus on senses other than simply seeing, and you almost smell the wood in the Reich’s offices as you feel a niggle in Calvin’s shoe and mentally stretch down with him to prise it out. The focus on the shared irritations of everyday life leads us to empathy and joint wonder at more abstract and inescapable terrors. Will Calvin make it to the end? Krzykowski’s pacing is absolutely exquisite.

The acting is incredible. Elliott is known for his wild west roles and, considering his own advanced age, it’s not surprising that he brings a sense of determination here. He also has the ambivalence of someone old enough to realise there are rarely easy answers, but that the more mistakes we make, the more we want the answers to be there. Turner has less emotional depth than his senior partner, but he makes up for it with a sandpaper jerkiness that cracks into life when he is with those he loves and things have a chance of being okay. That is when the stakes are highest. Caitlyn Fitzgerald is heartbreaking as his love, and there’s also a superb sequence in which the importance of self-care is put in a political context.

The main query in the cast is Mark Steger (Stranger Things) as Bigfoot. The action and costume are rather excitable (at one point going full-on Drag Me To Hell), but ultimately this underscores the idea of mortality as something grave and utterly insensible. The film is reminiscent of everything from The Shawshank Redemption through to Pan’s Labyrinth and back to St Vincent.

The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot moulds the hellishly real with the whimsical to get us to question our place in the world. It is malevolent, hopeful and incredibly moving – a fantasy for the ponderous imagination.

THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT / DIRECTOR: ROBERT D. KRZYKOWSKI / SCREENPLAY: REBERT D. KRZYKOWSKI / STARRING: AIDAN TURNER, SAM ELLIOTT, SEAN BRIDGERS / CERT: TBC / RELEASE DATE: TBC

THE MOST ASSASSINATED WOMAN IN THE WORLD [FRIGHTFEST 2018]

Imagine a life where your art is the daily endeavour of creating your own death in the most exquisitely horrific manner possible. This was the pact of Paula Maxan, the stage name of Marie-Therese Beau and the real-life star of the French Grand Guignol theatre. She inspires director Franck Ribiere’s poetic partial biopic, The Most Assassinated Woman In The World. Mixing a documentary quality with an expressive mood that demands witness, it flicks between the blooded playhouse boards and a side story of the actors and crew who work it, finding both their lives and livelihoods threatened by the coming of cinema and a more mysterious killer.

Anna Mouglalis (Kiss Of The Damned) stars as Paula, the woman whose composition of sensuous mime and powdered speech connect with her audiences as, night after night, they see her stabbed, burned, beheaded and mutilated for their (but also her) beautification. Mouglalis is wonderful in the role, combining a willingness to engage in the mental marionetting that makes her one second a business woman just doing her job and the next a patient engaged in one long drama-as-therapy session as she tries to cover her tracks. Additionally, Niels Schneider (as Jean) combines enough knowledge of the sleazy hackery demanded of him as a rookie journalist with maintaining an almost secret idealism in that twitch of his moustache that you root for him regardless. It is pretty vital considering there is a real killer dans le rues. Elsewhere, while all of the staff of the theatre are hard nosed, none of them fall into crude stereotypes once the greasepaint is removed. The rest of the cast lends similar support.

For lovers of technique, it is a banquet. The theatre’s gore effects are lovingly deconstructed then demonstrated in a manner that increases appreciation for their science and, importantly, the human genius that sparks the connection alive. Similarly, the lighting is as atmospheric as you could want, with the cobbled streets of Paris a dangerous and tantalising place where the well-heeled will happily have their evening dress spotted with grue to add a little frisson, and danger offers performers the chance to see if some higher human understanding can be reached. This is, however, also where the film’s main concern lies: it falls in love with its own vision rather too much. While utterly understandable, it does mean the middle section of the narrative drags endlessly and risks the audience losing sight of the beauty of the composition simply because it becomes over-exposed. This also rather meddles with the tension for which the Grand Guignol was itself famous.

The true beauty of The Most Assassinated Woman In The World, however, is its arc. Rather than bequeathing dry instruction on performance history, the wraparound story uses era-specific storytelling techniques to ensure the audience is in on the secret and yet can mull its central mystery beyond the confines of the celluloid. That magic means the medium will live on regardless.

THE MOST ASSASSINATED WOMAN IN THE WORLD / DIRECTOR: LAURENT BARES / SCREENPLAY: JAMES CHARKOW, DAVID MURDOCH, FRANCK RIBIERE, VERANE FREDIANI / STARRING: ANNA MOUGLALIS, NIELS SCHNEIDER, LEAN-MICHEL BALTHAZAR, JULIE RECOING / CERT: 18 / RELEASE DATE: TBC

BOAR [FRIGHTFEST 2018]

The lineage of giant killer pig movies stretches right back to 1984’s Razorback and… sort of stops right there. Chris Sun (director of 2015’s fairly dire Charlie’s Farm) has gone back to the trough, however, and delivered this messy, fitfully enjoyable horror monster thriller which gets more right than it gets wrong, although it’s a close-run thing at times.

It appears that there’s an unnaturally large, grunting, snuffling pig – a boar, if you prefer – rampaging about the Australian outback, goring to death anyone who crosses its path. It cheerfully offs a few random holidaymakers and boozy locals before turning its attentions to the Monroes, a largely good-natured family spending some time with mum Debbie’s man-mountain brother Bernie (Jones). A nice day out turns into a nightmare when the boar comes calling and the blood and gore starts flowing.

That’s pretty much it for your basic story but there’s a bit more flesh on Boar’s bones than meets the eye – and a bit less too. This is a significant step up in quality from Sun’s risible Charlie’s Farm, but Boar’s main problem is its curious and slightly frustrating story structure. We meet the Monroe family – mum, stepdad, lovey-dovey daughter and her snarky boyfriend, and bratty younger son as they travel to meet big Bernie – and then they disappear for well over half an hour to the point that we’ve actually pretty much forgotten all about them. The film turns its attentions to the grungy bar run by Sasha (Melissa Tkautz) whose father Ken (Jarrett) is off to spend a night hunting with his mate. Time spent with Jarrett is never time wasted, of course, and here he plays a character not a million miles away from his iconic role as murderous Mick Taylor from the Wolf Creek franchise yet with all the psychopathic tendencies removed (he’s actually a nice guy here, which seems wrong in every conceivable way). This, along with a couple of other disconnected sequence featuring characters we’ve not met before, seems like an odd and overlong deviation from what’s supposed to be the core narrative of the story, but these scenes at least offer a few opportunities for some nicely wince-inducing gore sequences as our monster mangles and dismembers its victims.

When Boar finally gets back on track though, it’s a lot of fun and the last forty minutes or so are pretty much non-stop as Bernie and the Monroes are forced to flee through the night pursued by the apparently inexhaustible boar. The creature itself is realised by a combination of practical effects (the “live” boar is an effective, blood-drenched but often quite static prop which manages to look suitably terrifying – and a bit tasty, to be honest) and less effective, sparingly-used CGI. Structural issues and a couple of porcines… sorry, poor scenes aside, Boar is a pleasantly unpretentious creature feature blessed with a decent workmanlike script, agreeable performances (we’ll give the rather wooden Jones a pass because he’s bloody enormous) and a swine of a monster and it represents a significant turnaround (it’s probably saved his bacon, in fact) for a director whose previous film was an entirely different kind of bore. Oink.

BOAR / DIRECTOR: CHRIS SUN / SCREENPLAY: KIRSTY DALLAS, CHRIS SUN / STARRING: NATHAN JONES, BILL MOSELEY,JOHN JARRETT, ERNIE DINGO, TRUDI ROSS, SIMONE BUCHANAN / CERT: TBC / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW (VOD, AUS)

PUPPET MASTER: THE LITTLEST REICH [FRIGHTFEST 2018]

A small figure is silhouetted against what appears to be two far larger dummies when it properly lets rip. The sound effects are gorgeous. The larger couple fall to the floor with not an eyelid batted towards realism… and that’s just the way we like it. Charles Band’s Puppet Master is back, this time with The Littlest Reich. Comrades, it’s beautiful!

For the uninitiated, the Puppet Master films follow a general mythology whereby a master puppeteer called Toulon created intricate marionettes with the key to life itself , and promptly committed suicide when hunted down by the Nazis. This film is different as it is set in a parallel universe where Toulon is in fact a Fuhrer-follower himself. Far from this being a plot that you should discover for yourself, it has a massive impact on the film’s tone. Rather than the tiny terrors being little antiheroes or even simply ambivalent, here they are actually tools of the Third Reich. Believe it or not, Wither’s Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund’s direction means you think of ethics in a killer doll film. And it’s a good thing. Really.

We open on the 30th anniversary of the shootout that ended Toulon’s life, and a group of marionette memorabilia collectors has descended on a convention to trade the toys and take the carnage site’s gore tour. Among these are couple Ashley (Jenny Pellicer) and Edgar (Thomas Lennon) and Edgar’s inappropriate boss, Markowitz (Nelson Franklin of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World). They’re joined by a variety of folks from suspiciously different backgrounds, and when they begin to die outrageous deaths after their puppets go missing, The Shelter’s Michael Pare turns cop to sort things out.

The puppets perform as expected (nope, never wooden). Many of the classics are here and you get close ups and gore shots to your hearts’ content. What is impressive is the acting. The plot feels like it matters here because of the historical context, and that makes a few killer scenes unexpectedly affecting. This means that even some jokes in truly awful taste actually feel appropriate as they become incredibly cathartic, and credit goes to Nelson Franklin for his straight-faced but angry dignity. That said, this is still Puppet Master and amongst the contractual carnage you can’t fail to note horror royalty Barbara Crampton. She gets the big scream duties this time around. Flesh For Frankenstein’s Udo Kier appears as a tut-tutting Toulon who walks into a bar and gets upset when the dolls don’t focus on him. For all that some films are crowbarring diversity quotas into their casts at the minute, Puppet Master is rather bizarrely one that makes it count.

The Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich’s ending is delightfully peculiar, but that’s hardly a surprise. It’s also setupsville for the sequel. With Fabio Frizzi’s famous theme music still ringing in our ears, we’re excited already.

PUPPET MASTER: THE LITTLEST REICH / DIRECTOR: SONNY LAGUNA, TOMMY WIKLUND / SCREENPLAY: S. CRAIG ZAHLER / STARRING: CHARLYNE YI, KENNEDY SUMMERS, TINA PARKER, THOMAS LENNON / CERT: TBC / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW (USA)