Decided to list five heroes and five villains that summed up my film world of 2022. They left an impression on me - be it positive or negative.
Heroes
Damien Leone: Terrifier 2 might not be one of Dada Dada's best films of 2022, but it's definitely amongst the most respected for what it's accomplished. Other than flossin' his dope Class of 1984 poster for his Zoom interviews, Leone, a self-taught make-up expert and film maker, delivered what was arguably the greatest success story of the year. An unrated and ultra gory slasher that managed to rake-in approximately $11.5M at the worldwide box office on a miniscule budget of $250K. Little wonder a number of film studios have approached Leone since then. In an interview, Leone dreamt of rebooting the Friday the 13th franchise, or helming a Romero-esque zombie film with Sylvester Stallone. That boy is the golden goose, let him make them.
Hanna Bergholm & Siiri Solalina: Two of the best debuts this year were by director Hanna Bergholm and her young lead, Siiri Solalina for the body-horror fable Hatching (2022). Bergholm claims inspiration from Luca Guadagino's Suspira (2018) remake, but I won't hold that against her as Hatching is an incredible debut film; thanks in part to Solania's strong performance and Bergholm's wonderful eye for visual splendour. Also, props to Bergholm for not letting Hatching be another cliched horror film that's a metaphor for puberty.
S.S. Rajamouli: Hollywood is like cunnilingus: for anyone who won't; there's somebody who will. It's tragic that the epic action movie has mostly become appropriated into superhero flicks, while the traditional action forumla has been mostly relegated to straight-to-video, B-movie hell. When Rajamouli delivered a stellar, Michael Bay-esque, bromance of a blockbuster which ran for over three hours, heads weren't ready for this spectacle from India. It came immediately after the Covid lockdowns and sated the appetite of many nostalgic action anorak pining for something with more real heart than Tony Stark's. Netflix took note of the film's success which ushered in a potential new audience opening eyes towards action cinema from the Indian subcontinent. One of those rare times I won't shit on Netflix. Props to Rajamouli's success.
Joseph Winter & Vanessa Winter: This husband and wife team are also graduates from the Class of '22. Newbies who not only managed to breathe fresh life in a tired old format we know as the found footage subgenre with Deadstream, but also managed to rescue V/H/S/99 (2022), an excrutiatingly dull horror anthology, with the short story, To Hell and Back; which does exactly what it says it does on the tin. The Winters are relative unknowns in the game, but their work this year has me interested in whatever further films they might be working on.
Peter Bradshaw: More often than not, myself and Poncey Pete never crossed the streams since he seemed happier than Larry Clark at a youth centre covering pretentious film shite, or mourning over an overrated hack; however, I've enjoyed reading some of his reviews this year, like his belated Robocop review for instance. His pièce de résistance is undoubtedly telling it like it really is regarding the massively, overrated Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). The clapback that ensued in the comments section for his review from hive-minded morons, who were incapable of accepting a difference of opinion, was way more entertaining to me than the actual film.
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Peter Bradshaw after posting his Everything Everywhere All At Once review.
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Villains
Mark Kermode: How the mighty have fallen. One of my favourite critics now suffering from a latelife crisis. His increasing tendency to discuss issues irrelevant to his film expertise became more apparent this year. From March 2022, Comrade Kermode was no longer under the watchful scrutiny of the BBC, thus his petulant, political tweets (foreign and domestic) began to manifest more bluntly into his professional film reviews. The Quiffed One is from Chipping Barnet and blessed with a very privileged educational background; thus, whenever he rides his moral and ideological high horse, championing some shitty slacktivist's film, because it has the right politics rather than it containing any genuine artistic merit, it smacks of every elitist, crusty performer preaching their sermon on stage to the trustfund masses at Glastonbury. If only he was self-aware enough to see how at odds he appears. Allegorically at odds with himself in the same way his quiff serves as a combover to his bald patch.
Jordan Peele: Film makers tend to have a habit of failing up in Hollywood. Peele is a good example as he's only had one genuinely great movie in his catalogue and has been producing slop ever since. This swill has been lapped up by both critics and gullible simpletons with the misguided belief he’s the next Alfred Hitchcock. Having to slog through one hundred and thirty minutes of Nope (2022), which I found so terribly dull that even Daniel Kaluuya looked bored out of his skull in it, was a task I never want to repeat ever again. To add further salt, Peele, the writer and producer, has been to existing intellectual properties what Dr. Harold Shipman has been to his patients; writing and producing The Twilight Zone (2019 - 2020), and one of the worst films I watched from last year Candyman (2021), has been lethal.
David Gordon Green: Not content with helming the absolute turd that was Halloween Kills (2021), David Gordon Green capped off his rebooted sequel trilogy with an even worse offering, Halloween Ends (2022). For any self-respecting horror fan, the writing was horrendous since Michael Myers played second fiddle in his own climactic movie. What was even more farcical, was the fact that it took four awful writers (including Danny McBride) to come up with a plot that they knew would piss off a large contingent. Subversion is one thing, but not to the detriment of a franchise that is beloved by many. Can't respect it, then leave it be! Too bad Green feels the need to tackle another reboot sequel trilogy; this time The Exorcist, no less. Perhaps this will finally give Kermode his mojo back.
Sight and Sound's G.O.A.T films poll: Expected this once in a decade, overrated film poll being a shitshow time ago; what I didn't predict, however, was just how much worse it would be. Hats off to all of those esteemed plebians who voted for the sake of being edgy and managed to piss off even the ponciest of film snobs with the likes of Ingmar Bergman only getting one film in, while P.T. Anderson stans were all in a tizzy on Reddit when their god had no film listed. The uproar was almost worth the poll's villainy since it got Paul Schrader to post a thinly veiled "fuck you!" post on his Facebook. Still, the orchestrated controversy might have backfired and killed the only prestigious aspect about S&S, proving just how toxic many of its voters really are in the wake of this predicatble travesty.
Kier-La Janisse's followers: One of the greatest film related books published over the last ten years was Kier-La Janisse's House of Psychotic Women: An Autobigraphical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation, largely because I liked all the glossy pictures. That book made Kier-La a popular figure for journo-types and hipsters; one that has turned her into a pied-piper of genre cinema. Imagine my horror recently when I spotted Queen Kier-La this year wearing a Massacre at Central High T-shirt - one of my favourite exploitation films from the seventies, I knew then that the kulcha vulchas would have a field day ruining one of the best kept secrets in seventies cinema. R.I.P!
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Kier-La Janisse's followers. The pits.
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