Black Gate

Don’t Say Its Name is a feature film from director Rueben Martell, co-written by Martell with Gerald Wexler, that had its world premiere at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival. It’s a film set in a northern Indigenous community divided by an offer from a big mining company promising money in exchange for the rights to tear up the land. But then murders start happening, some of them apparently supernatural.

The story starts with the murder of anti-mining activist Kharis Redwater (Sheena Kaine) one night on an isolated icy road. As law enforcement investigates, in the person of middle-aged Betty Stonechild (Madison Walsh), other killings happen — violent deaths, victims torn apart by some invisible force in front of witnesses. Betty deputises Park Ranger Stacey Cole (Sera-Lys McArthur, also at Fantasia this year in the short “She Whistles” in the Born of Woman showcase). But even her experience fighting in Afghanistan, which has left her with a bad case of PTSD, is tested by the mysterious entity.

The film’s been billed as a horror movie, but I’d call it dark fantasy. This genre quibble speaks to the effect of the film. There are horrific killings, and there is a supernatural entity responsible, but the main characters aren’t terrified by it. They’re cautious, of course, as they’d be cautious of a creature like a maddened bear or wolf, but their actions aren’t driven primarily by fear, they don’t break down in terror or even come close, they never panic. Confrontations with the creature are marked by desperation but not mindless terror. The point of this is that the story is not one of an isolated community terrorised by the supernatural, but a story of resourceful and determined women trying to protect their home and loved ones.

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The Duellists (UK, 1977)

In the wake of the surprise success of Richard Lester’s 1973-74 Musketeers movies, there was a spate of swashbuckler films in the mid to late Seventies attempting to replicate Lester’s success — some by Lester himself. The trend peaked in 1977 with a trio of notable films all based, like The Three Musketeers, on classic Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. The Salkind brothers, who’d produced Lester’s Musketeers films, tried again with Crossed Swords, based on Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper and following Lester’s example with another all-star ensemble cast. Britain’s ITV, which had done well a couple of years before with an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo starring Richard Chamberlain (The Three Musketeers’ Aramis), followed up with another Dumas adaptation, The Man in the Iroin Mask, also starring Chamberlain. Best of all was a movie not inspired by the Musketeers films, though it did use their outstanding fight director, Bill Hobbs: The Duellists, directed by Ridley Scott in the vein of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). Let’s check them out.

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“Reklaw” is a 12-minute short by Polaris Banks, starring Lance Henriksen playing somewhat against type as the pacifist ringleader of a group of talented vigilantes who drive around trying to keep people out of jail by destroying evidence before the police arrive. We learn this through watching one specific case where they attempt to save a woman from the law only for violence to rear its head. The film moves well, with an interesting structure and a few clever ideas, and there’s a good mix of men-at-work humour with serious commentary on society. But the backstory’s opaque, and probably could have used more room to breathe. There’s an interesting idea here, which could make a feature film or a TV show (and indeed Banks has said the short’s a proof of concept), but is probably not displayed at its best in a single 12-minute short.

Bundled with the short was Yakuza Princess. It’s a Brazilian film, from director Vicente Amorim, who co-wrote with Kimi Lee, Tubaldini Shelling, and Fernando Toste. They were working from a graphic novel called Samurai Shiro, by Danilo Bayreuth, which I have not read. It’s an action movie based in the Japanese community of Sao Paolo, Brazil.

20 years ago there was a massacre of a Yakuza clan in Japan. Today, Akemi (Masumi) is a young woman in Sao Paulo’s large Japanese community who has grown up studying swordplay but unaware of certain key truths about her family. Elsewhere in the city, a young man (Johnathan Rhys-Meyers) with amnesia, nasty battle-scars, and a katana wakes up in a hospital. The film proceeds to bring these things together, with a healthy dose of gunplay and swordfighting.

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