David Cronenberg’s CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022) is top-notch sci-fi thick with his signature body horror and fetishization of the grotesque. Critics liked it but audiences apparently didn’t; the film bombed at the box office. Me, I absolutely loved it as something close to a work of genius.

It’s the future, the world is in decline, and humanity goes on evolving both naturally through strange mutations and artificially through strange advances in biotech. Humans don’t feel pain anymore, heal quickly, and don’t suffer infections. In this world, a performance artist couple, Saul Tensor (Viggo Mortensen in an example of perfect casting) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) performs live surgeries for adoring fans. Saul’s body, we’re told, continually produces mysterious new organs that must be removed, and Caprice removes them in art shows.

The couple form a collision point for two forces. On the one side, the government and its bureaucrats, special police, and assassins are okay with people modifying themselves as long as they register their aberrations and don’t pass them onto future generations in an effort to keep humanity, well, human. On the other side, a group of revolutionary mutants regard their new bodies as the future of the species. Saul’s mind is on one side, though his body may be on the other. In the end, we discover where his true allegiance lies.

This movies is just crazy. It has the same tickling weirdness of Cronenberg’s NAKED LUNCH while offering an alien future that feels utterly lived in. Terrific ideas are presented in a familiar way, such as mutation being a form of self expression that has meaning, surgery as performance art with the artist literally giving a part of himself to the audience, bodily mortification becoming a sexual experience in a species that doesn’t feel pain, and so on. Thematically, the idea of what makes someone human and across what line they become something else is intriguing and actually relevant, considering biotech may enable genetic modification in the future, resulting in biological haves with vital advantages and have-nots who can’t afford it or won’t do it. The special effects are squirm-inducing, the odd juxtaposition of grotesque and fetish jarring, the actors all perfectly inhabiting their roles.

On the downside, it’s not super coherent. The characters speak with a variety of accents, and Viggo Mortensen is always growling or rasping as he’s constantly sick, which made the dialogue a bit hard to follow at times. The overall narrative isn’t as coherent as I’d have liked, ending suddenly and leaving you to tie it all together in your head after it’s over. Overall, it didn’t feel quite complete. I would have loved to see this be a limited series rather than a movie. It would have been mind-blowing.

Anyway, despite these things, I totally loved it and hope Cronenberg isn’t done making movies like this. Highly recommended.

In THE ETERNAL (1998), a woman returns with her husband and son to the remote Irish mansion she’d fled as a child, only to discover herself in thrall to an ancient druid who wants to return. Art house in flavor, shot in a seventies horror style, and downright flippant, this horror film isn’t very loved by viewers or critics, but I had fun with it.

The film starts with a fun-loving husband and wife couple, Jim (a young Jared Harris) and Nora (the very sexy Allison Elliott). Nora has been having strange episodes and memories, leading to her doctor warning her and her alcoholic husband to quit their drinking. Nora, however, feels drawn to go to Ireland and see what’s left of her family. They bring their young son Jimmy, a quiet and shy boy who plays along but kinda looks like he’s slowly being traumatized by his parents’ antics and is bound to grow up to be a fuddy-duddy.

At the mansion, they meet Nora’s eccentric uncle Bill (Christopher Walken), a girl named Alice who seems to be the only sane adult in the place, and Nora’s witch grandmother (Lois Smith). It turns out Bill has disrupted things in several ways, including keeping the mummy of a 2,000-year-old Druid woman in the basement. When the Druid arises, all hell breaks loose on one long night.

I’d never heard of this movie, so when I saw it was available and who was in it, I jumped on it. Overall, it’s pretty weird. The horror touches are stylish and interesting, though never scary. There’s some terrific humor in the characters that pops up in little bursts, though it’s not a comedy. The villain isn’t ominous so much as eccentric, and the monster is interesting and relentless but never really frightening. The sudden arrival of IRA types is right out of left field. And then there’s Jim and Nora, the laughing and blithe alcoholic couple, blundering through everything and for the most part not taking it terrifically seriously, with Jim making little quips (including a hilarious out of nowhere impersonation of Christopher Walken) and interacting with the overly serious Alice in bits that had me laughing out loud.

So I’d recommend THE ETERNAL but caution it takes an open mind. It’s not great horror nor great comedy, but somehow it came together for me to be oddly compelling and a pretty fun time.

In MEN (2022), a young woman faces the embodiment of the domination she suffered from an emotionally manipulative and abusive husband she tried to leave, only for him to kill himself as he promised her he’d do. This is an excellent horror film with an interesting social theme that is obvious yet not rubbed in the viewer’s face, while standing as a very creepy tale without it.

In this film, Harper leaves London for a few weeks’ relaxation at a rural English cottage following her husband’s suicide, which he’d threatened if she left him, and the guilt and anguish over it that now hang over her. Odd events start to occur as the village largely appears empty of women, and she finds herself having various strange or outright hostile encounters with the men who live there, which pile up to a nightmarish night under siege. These “men” may be a part of her guilt, a representation of the types of men who’ve hurt her in her life, or an entity, we’re not sure, but it all ties together nicely and offers her a choice at the end, only one of which will set her free.

As for the social theme, it’s about how some men treat women, outside my experience but a take I could respect. We see a patronizing cop, a vicious schoolboy, a hooligan, a repressed vicar who holds women responsible for his own sexual desires, and more. This aspect, delivered by Rory Kinnear in a mind-blowing performance matching if not eclipsing Jessie Buckley as Harper, is done in an extremely jarring and creepy way, particularly the body horror climax.

Overall, I quite liked this one, which I found well done and affecting for its highly focused premise.

I recently rewatched RE-ANIMATOR (1985) for the first time since the 1990s. Roughly based on a novelette by HP Lovecraft, it’s basically another of the era’s splatter flicks, but it distinguishes itself with the wacky, obsessive, and compelling character of Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and a comical touch. It didn’t quite hold up for me after all this years, but overall, it’s still a fun time for horror buffs, earning the cult status it gained over the years.

The story focuses on Dan, a med student at Miskatonic University, and his fiancee Megan, who is the dean’s daughter and the object of sexual obsession by one of the dean’s colleagues, Dr. Hill. A strange, humorless, and obsessive new student–Herbert West–arrives at the university and rents a room from Dan, drawing him into a series of experiments to raise the dead. The serum works, only they don’t really know what they’re doing and proceed without any real controls or ethics, resulting in the dead rising as homicidal maniacs. When Dr. Hill finds out about the experiments, he sees a way to claim Megan and the discovery for his own, with even more horrific results.

It’s a pretty crazy movie, notably for its fast pace, outlandishness, and Jeffrey Combs bringing the obsessive, amoral Herbert West to life. This is a young man who will do anything, sacrifice anyone, and cause any amount of grisly mayhem to get what he wants, which is to solve death once and for all using science. Most of the comedy in the movie comes from his antics as an anti-hero, splattered in blood and playing with body parts with enthusiastic scientific interest, along with the villain acting as basically two parts after resurrection.

Overall, it’s still quite a fun popcorn flick for horror fans, worth a watch or a rewatch. I haven’t caught the two sequels yet, but I may have to catch up.