Dir - Ping Lumpraploeng
Overall: WOOF
Pushing Hitchcockian, minor-detail suspense into ridiculous, miserable, nail-biting annoyance, Thai filmmaker Ping Lumpraploeng's The Pool is an unintentionally silly bit of survival horror. The first and most glaringly obvious faux pas on Lumpraploeng's part is opening the film six days after the rest of the main story takes place, with a scene that replays later in the movie anyway. By doing so, the next ninety-minutes of our lone, functional character trying to escape are rendered completely tension-less as we know good and well that he remains in his predicament until the flashback catches up to the beginning. Granted, it is a movie and one would assume that every time that the people on screen are mere centimeters and milliseconds away from freedom, such a thing would of course result in more torment, yet thus lies the fundamental problem with such a premise. It would work far better as a short than as a full-length movie and with various elements veering into torture porn, neglected common sense to drag out the running time, far-fetched plot points, killing the dog, Thai swimming pools apparently not believing in built-in ladders, and one of the worst CGI animals in recent memory, yeah, just forget this one.
Dir - Jerome Pikwane
Overall: MEH
An incoherent cliche fest and the debut from director/co-writer Jerome Pikwane, The Tokoloshe is a South African boogeyman story and a messy one at that. The biggest problem is the editing which seems to bypass necessary scenes and makes every character on screen underwritten to a fault. It has the look and feel of a straight-to-video 90s horror film, with lame, loud, manipulative music playing through every scene and busy camera work capturing laughably grimey scenery and awful, (though thankfully only occasional), CGI in an attempt to be creepy. The performances are on the straight and narrow and there is some semblance of heavy subject matter involving child abuse, (subject matter which is poorly conveyed in such a choppy form), but it comes off like a bombastic schlock-fest, just minus the schlock. When the audience is never clear on what the actual folkloric menace is supposed to be or why it is doing what it is doing, on top of unintelligible plotting driving the whole thing to an anti-climax that leaves a frustrating amount of questions dangling in the air, there are sadly no chills to be had, as well as a feeling that there may be a better, actually intelligible movie hiding in here somewhere.
Dir - John McPhail
Overall: MEH
A full-length reworking of Ryan McHenry's short Zombie Musical, Anna and the Apocalypse has its heart in the right place but fails to achieve the type of quirky uniqueness of the films that is is deliberately tailored after. Clear nods to High School Musical, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shaun of the Dead, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Once More with Feeling", to name but a few all co-mingle in a standard manner that is not likely to turn any viewer's heads in amazement. Tonally it is a bit all over the place, but the characters are likeable, (save for an obnoxious principal whose eccentric douchebaggery is never explained), and several of the inevitable death-by-zombie-bite moments are touching due to the solid performances. Being a burst into song musical, said songs are obviously important and Robby Hart and Tommy Reily give all of the numbers a contemporary pop sheen that is equal parts cringy and loaded with hooks. The movie ultimately makes the same mistakes that most modern comedies do in that it exchanges cleverness for jokes and there is nothing here that is laugh out loud funny, yet some of its coming-of-age, rated-R spoofiness and violence is at least worth an adorable chuckle or two.
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