Dir - Ian Tripp/Ryan Schafer
Overall: MEH
Too bland to be egregious, the full-length debut Everybody Dies by the End from the filmmaking duo of Ian Tripp and Ryan Schafer is detrimentally predictable and has few if any redeemable qualities. Issues arise immediately with Vinny Curran's quirky and pretentious B-movie director protagonist; an obnoxious and burly blowhard who utilizes jolly intimidation at top volume as if nobody can hear him. At one point early on he apologizes for being so intense, but the intensity never stops as he comes out of retirement to make his self proclaimed magnum opus with a two-man skeleton documentary crew, (which includes director Tripp), who are brought on to capture the bizarre ordeal. To say that Curran is a bit much would be an understatement, but his entire staff are similar levels of eccentric, and much of the movie's humor seems to stem from the odd situation. As the title clearly spells out, the problem is that there is no mystery even though the film pretends that there is, so watching Tripp and his cameraman go through the motions as everything is plainly laid out, (with undercooked occult and/or supernatural elements thrown in), is a continuous bore. In order for any of the nyuck nyucks to land, there needs to be characters to care about and sinister details to intrigue. Instead, we just have an awkward waste of time.
Dir - Jirô Nagae
Overall: MEH
The 2004 2channel urban legend about a woman mystery winding up in a seemingly non-existent area via train ride and posting about her experience in real time before vanishing all makes for ideal J-horror material in filmmaker Jirô Nagae's Kisaragi Station. While the pre-creepypasta story of the same name is more unsettling than the resulting movie which tweaks and fleshes-out many of the details, there is still enough bizarreness here as well as a persistently eerie mood to appease genre fans who are unfamiliar with the source material. Nagae and co-screenwriter Takeshi Miyamoto take an adventurous approach, telling the initial tale in a hazy, blue/green-filtered flashback and mostly from a POV perspective where university student Yuri Tsunematsu is interviewing a fictionalized version of the initial 2channel poster about her experience. Tsunematsu then of course takes it upon herself to see if the story is legit, at which point the third act retreads the same events as a series of checkpoints, many of which are bypassed to achieve a different yet still ambiguous outcome. Nothing is resolved in any satisfying sense and the entire thing has the feel of being made up as it goes along, (plus the CGI effects are unforgivably poor for 2022), which makes this a missed opportunity despite its sinister aspirations.
Dir - Ben Steiner
Overall: MEH
It is difficult to pull off a movie with no redeemable or even likeable characters, and the protagonist in Ben Steiner's full-length debut Matriarch is problematic from the moment that we meet her, which does not bode well for her even more unsympathetic mother that enters the picture before too long. A film that fails to deliver on what it builds up, (which is such a common ailment in horror that it is nearly a prerequisite), just as many things work as do not. Both Jemima Rooper and the always rock-solid Kate Dickie are wonderful in their respective roles as a ludicrously dysfunctional mother/daughter duo, Rooper returning to her home village after twenty years with a nine ton chip on her shoulder. Dickie was allegedly not the world's greatest mom, and we believe both the direct and indirect evidence judging by her curious behavior, not to mention the equally alarming way in which seemingly everyone else in Rooper's ole traumatic stomping grounds is behaving. A folk horror aura hangs over the entire thing, and Steiner's script gives us many curious bits along the way, several of which are left lingering in order to indulge in some icky pagan strangeness that is more head-scratching than satisfying. The third act falls apart spectacularly, biting off a lot to chew on in a rushed fashion that underwhelms despite its sincere attempts to shock. This is a shame since the performances are so good and the mystery is so compelling, at least until a point where the gloves fly off, the old people get naked, the black bile spews, and the unconvincing CGI takes over.
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