(1985)
Dir - George Mihalka
Overall: MEH
The Blue Man, (Eternal Evil), comes from Hungarian-born Canadian filmmaker George Mihalka, and it is a soft, meandering bit of supernatural horror that never picks up any momentum. We get several POV shots of ethereal astral projection, (including the movie's opening), as well as one or two moments where invisible forces attack people, but they are done on a cheap and ineffective scale at best and an embarrassing scale at worst. It is a case of a conservative budget wearing itself on its sleeve where bottom-barrel effects shots and incessant keyboard music are the only things giving the movie any oomph to compensate for its lackluster story. Said story has to do with an bitter and unlikable film director who is reduced to making commercials in order to pay the bills, all while he soul journey's outside of his body, argues with his wife, yells at his kid, and just comes off as an overall stick in the mud. Karen Black is also on board and does her noble best as a hippy dippy magic practitioner who goes fully baddie by the finale, (revolving around two elderly people who are psychic vampires and jump into host bodies before the moment of death), but even her star power is hardly enough to save it.
(1986)
Dir - Didier Grousset
Overall: GOOD
Written and produced by famed French filmmaker Luc Besson, Kamikaze also serves as the directorial debut for Didier Groussett. A police procedural in structure, it is one that is equipped with a unique and borderline ridiculous premise of a recently laid-off and disgruntled scientist deciding to make a microwave-powered death ray that is miraculously able to murder people via television waves; people who are situated in front of the camera and broadcasting live. This is all treated matter-of-factly, yet there is also a subtle undercurrent of dark comedy, which is a good thing to help such absurdity go down easier than it otherwise would. Michel Galabru makes for an excellent grumpy pants asshole, only to become humanized in the closing moments where he is finally confronted and comes off as someone who has simply become broken by the corporate machine, unleashing his boredom and rage with a shattered moral compass. As the detective tasked with tracking him down, Richard Bohringer exhibits a sly and smirky charm, yet he still approaches his assignment with a determined logic in the face of a scientifically impossible scenario. The deaths are humorous in their abrupt brutality, and Grousset maintains a flash-less tone that strips things down instead of playing things too sincere or too revved up in either direction.
(1989)
Dir - Michael Haneke
Overall: MEH
Various works in Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's oeuvre cannot be easily classified, as they routinely examine a type of exaggerated emotional detachment that is too purposely inexpressive to label in conventional terms. His movies are certainly not melodramas, but they are also certainly not thrillers as film-goers recognize them, instead presenting a fly on the wall look at troubled and dark human behavior without any of the common movie manipulation that we are used to. Haneke's debut full-length The Seventh Continent, (Der siebente Kontinent), arrives fully-formed as the first in an unofficial "glaciation trilogy", and it is a sobering and difficult watch of complacent deterioration and hopelessness. A family of three go about their menial existence with little joy or any breaks from their locked-in routine, eventually becoming victims of such civilized contentment. We are never given any clear answers to why the characters do what they do, since Haneke utilizes an approach that is void of sensationalism. There is little dialog, no musical score, and most of the shots are static and contain trivial information, on purpose to showcase the boredom that they, (and now us), are going through. It is a film that can be appreciated more than it can be enjoyed, but one cannot argue that it achieves its deadly serious goal to provoke and upset.
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