Eternal Bad Luck Charm: Nothing Bad Can Happen (2013), The Gallows (2015), and Phantoms (1998).

Nothing Bad Can Happen (2013)

Apparently based on a true story, Nothing Bad Can Happen feels like a very precise mix of Let The Right One In and The Snowtown Murders—and as inspirations go, you'd be hard-pressed to find better ones.  (The comparison to Martyrs on the poster is misplaced; this is barely a horror movie.) It's the story of Tore, a homeless Christian punk living in Hamburg, and how he moves in with a family living on an allotment garden. From there, as with any horror movie, bad things do in fact happen. What's really interesting about Nothing Bad Can Happen is that, unlike Snowtown, it's not a portrait of psychopathy; Benno, the film's antagonist, certainly behaves monstrously, but he's no John Bunting. This film is really about the delicate power dynamics of families—especially ad-hoc, improvised ones—and how easily they can be disrupted by petty jealousies and resentments. As a persistently irreligious person myself, I found myself occasionally bristling at Tore's casual outpourings of faith, just as Benno and his family do—which made me feel bad, since Tore is more or less the sweetest guy in the world, rewarded with nothing but cruelty and torture. (Remind you of anyone?) I wonder about the title: I don't speak German, but "nothing bad can happen" seems like a broad translation of Tore Tanzt, which I kept thinking had to be a Biblical allusion of some kind. Very interested to see what director Karin Gebbe does in the future.

The Gallows (2015)
Execution is everything. A lot of horror is basically just riffing on Beowulf, and that's fine, because there's a reason we're still telling stories that have been around thousands of years. There are countless horror movies with prosaic setups (e.g. "vacation goes awry"), but there's a world of difference between Vacation Slasher 2349 and, say, Wolf Creek. But The Gallows actually has a really cool premise: the title is the name of a high school play that ended with its lead actor dead by hanging, and 20 years later the same school is ready to try again, despite the objections of the school board. The Gallows absolutely nails the high school milieu, with a setting that looks real and a believably teenage snottiness; the kid holding the camera is a colossal dick who reminded me a little of Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The friend that I saw it with said that, at first, it felt almost like a dark version of Glee—but once the horror movie stuff starts happening, it takes a sharp turn into mediocrity. I haven't soured on found footage, and I maintain that most of its detractors probably haven't seen the best it has to offer (e.g. Trollhunter, The Bay, Lake Mungo) but The Gallows definitely feels like FF by the numbers. Which is too bad, because it also feels like it could've been great.

Phantoms (1998)
Phantoms is the best Resident Evil movie ever made. Forget about Paul W.S. Anderson's overwrought films, because this one captures the gleeful, gruesome spirit of the original PS1 games much more successfully. It actually hit theaters in the same week that Resident Evil 2 (recently greenlit for a remake!) arrived in stores, which feels more like fate than coincidence given their similarities: a ruined town menaced by impossible creatures; soldiers in gas masks storming through damp sewer tunnels; a cop and a pair of civilians trapped in the middle. And like RE, Phantoms is a B-movie at its most joyfully unpretentious; it's not often you get to hear Peter O'Toole bellow lines like "This thing is what wiped out the dinosaurs—it's a pretty tough fucking customer!" (And Liev Schrieber, eternally professional, also embraces his role as a scenery-chewing grotesque without a hint of ironic distance.) It loses a little steam once all the questions have been answered, but along the way it's a hell of a lot of fun, and some of the effects hold up surprisingly well given their vintage. Plus, the "Ancient Aliens" style ending is a riot—hey Hollywood, how about a reboot?