Dir - Abe Forsythe
Overall: GOOD
A quasi-musical/rom-com/zombie hybrid from Australian filmmaker Abe Forsythe, Little Monsters has an adorable premise and enough of a wacky juxtaposition between cutesy schmaltz and gore-ridden profanity to give it an edge within the tired walking corpse genre. Filmed in Sydney with a couple of original ditties as well as ukulele renditions of Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" and Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline", (that latter mercifully omitting the dreaded "bah bah baaaahhh" sing-along bit), it uses its musical components narratively as a kindergarten teacher and student's deadbeat uncle try and keep the children upbeat while a horde of undead surround them during a family farm field trip. Both Alexander England and Lupita Nyong'o turn in wonderful performances as the type of desperately opposite characters that only find true love in the movies. Unfortunately, Josh Gad's nonredeemable scumbag television personality is dreadfully unfunny and gets way too much screen time, only serving the purpose for the audience to revel in his inevitable demise by way of a zombie with a sock-puppet. Thankfully though, everything else that transpires is a hoot, from genuinely well-behaved and likeable kids to some laugh-out-loud dialog and set pieces that do not flinch on either the violence or the filth.
Dir - Takashi Shimizu
Overall: MEH
J-horror mainstay Takashi Shimizu's first of three haunted village movies takes on another urban legend in the bloated though occasionally interesting Howling Village, (Inunaki mura). Opening with some found footage to perhaps mislead any audience member who is going in blind, it quickly settles into a conventional supernatural enterprise from a stylistic standpoint, one whose narrative continues to pile on the ingredients until things are overflowing. Taken individually, all of the ideas in Shimizu and co-screenwriter Daisuke Hosaka's script could have carried a film on their own, but instead, none of them are given enough attention as the running time swells towards a sluggish third act that indulges in genre cliches while it continues to just go on and on and on. Characters stand perfectly still instead of running for their lives while screaming at obvious danger, other character's stubbornly refuse to answer questions that would easily clear a lot of things up, exposition dumps run rampant, little kids act all stoic like no kids ever do, and some of the otherworldly rules are strictly adhered to while others seem to be made up on the fly.
Dir - Miguel Llansó
Overall: MEH
A madcap throwback of Euro espionage film, midnight movie WTFness, Cold War thriller, lunchador drive-in cheapie, absurdist comedy, and virtual reality sci-fi, Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway is easily unlike anything else that was released in 2019, regardless of what country it was from. A Euro co-production that was shot in Ethiopia and writer/director Miguel Llansó's second full-length, the plot line is as ridiculous and convoluted as they come, having something to do with CIA agents who are sent into a VR game to stop a Russian computer virus from corrupting the world with some kind of green goo. Also, somebody claims to be the second coming of Christ, a president is dressed like Batman with the famous insignia blurred out for copyright reasons, (right?), physically deformed actor Daniel Tadesse wants to open a pizza restaurant while his hefty wife has dreams of running a kickboxing academy, plus the aforementioned virtual game is shown in stop-motion animation and with avatars wearing crude, cut-out masks of Richard Pryor, Robert Redford, and Joseph Stalin. Weird for the sake of weird, making heads or tails of such nonsense will likely cause an aneurysm, but the viewing experience is enjoyable in parts due to how hopelessly wacky it all is, as well as for how many stylistic motifs accurately recall low-budget genre cinema from the 1960s through the 1980s.
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