#Black blade two steps from hell movie full#

The eventual in-world explanations make the noncommittal crafting even more bizarre in retrospect. Some scenes tease playing with negative space in fun and unique ways, though Wan frustratingly refuses to follow that instinct. Stray shots of him escaping crime scenes vaguely hint at some kind of reversed or backward motion, though no one who catches a glimpse of this strangeness ever seems to comment on it.Įven the way the killer interacts with physical space feels like a decision half-committed to, wherein sometimes he’s ethereal, sometimes he veers in and out of corporeal form, and sometimes he’s a physical being with enormous strength.

A pair of detectives, Kekoa (George Young) and Regina (Michole Briana White) - broad cutouts on the cusp of self-awareness - claim that the killer leaves upside-down handprints. Who was Gabriel? How is he connected to Madison? And who is the grungy, leather-clad killer who targets medical mal-practitioners with a sword fashioned from a HIPPA symbol? The film takes its time in having its characters parse out the logistics, but in a dramatic and visual sense, the answers all fit together awkwardly for the film’s first hour.

Madison herself doesn’t feel like she exists outside of the way other people’s actions define her, but the film has enough momentum (and enough wild and flashy distractions) that its eventual metaphors for loss of agency don’t veer too far toward offensive.

#Black blade two steps from hell movie full#

The theme rarely feels woven into the horror specifics, no matter how much Wan and screenwriter Akela Cooper attempt to bring the story full circle. While the film largely follows Madison’s sudden, phantasmagorical visions of gory real-world murders - committed by a bloody, disfigured, long-haired man in a leather trench coat, who seems to target doctors with shady pasts - the specter of abuse and related coping mechanisms is never far from its lips. It’s an amusing character facet with no real narrative purpose, except to create texture.Īt first, these flourishes and oddities clash wildly with the film’s main plot, about a pregnant woman, Madison (Annabelle Wallis), whose controlling, violent husband Derek (Jake Abell) may or may not be responsible for several of her miscarriages. But no matter how much the film goes on to overexplain its central villain, it somehow never touches on Gabriel’s electric nature, beyond this passing mention. Both these things re-occur throughout Malignant, as little visual and aural indicators that something spooky is afoot. In a stray line of dialogue, someone notes that Gabriel can “drink electricity” - hence the flickering - and it communicates with the doctors by sending signals through a nearby radio.

The garish lighting flickers as bodies are flung left and right, and the camera dips and swoops around to capture the sudden mayhem. The film evokes pulpy sci-fi in its prologue, about a mysterious, grotesque, largely unseen figure dubbed “Gabriel” by doctors at a sanitarium. Malignant is rarely scary, but its outlandish bits likely didn’t happen by accident - not when it culminates in scenes so ludicrously over the top that they invite both fist-pumping cheers and wheeze-inducing laughter. But when it finally gets to where it’s going, it devolves into a goofy, nonsensical, hilariously enjoyable final act that feels like it was yanked out of a completely different movie. In Malignant, he tells a story much smaller in scale than his action blockbusters, and one that doesn’t fit together by any basic narrative measure.

eventually in the last third it's a generic power fantasy and you start wondering why this song was even called Starfleet in the first place.Ĭompare with Freedom Fighters (used in the trailers for the first Star Trek reboot film), the difference is night and day.James Wan cut his directorial teeth on intense horror movies like Insidious and The Conjuring, but his latest horror outing leans into the loony cartoon sensibility he brought to Aquaman and Furious 7.

but ~33 seconds in a choir suitable for a medieval knights scene kicks in, which gradually starts drowning out the scifi feel.

then builds on that with a sweeping sound evoking honor and optimism (think Star Trek TNG).

it starts out nice and ominous with a rigid military-scifi theme, perfect for a star fleet.

To illustrate this, take Starfleet from Skyworld as an example: The newer albums tend to have this annoying issue - they only have a few great standout songs (like Cry in Sun) that stay really good from start to finish (building up while keeping a cohesive identity) and then a lot more that start out great, then fizzle out about a third way in - either they lose their momentum and start retreading or they turn generic and what made the particular song original is lost. These are my top three, I loved more than 95% of the tracks: