Skunk (2 Stars)

This is the 20th film in the Stuttgart Fantasy Film festival.

I'm standing alone here. There was loud applause when the film ended. Everyone liked it. Everyone except me.

The film is about Liam, a 17-year-old boy who grows up with abusive parents. He's put in a care home, where some of the boys bully him, but as time passes he makes friends.

I have an aversion to films like this. I don't like to see children being abused. I don't like watching the violence in children's homes. I tried to have sympathy with Liam, but he had too many bad traits for me to be able to relate to him.

Ignore my rating and watch it if you're curious. You'll probably like it more than me.

Bim (2 Stars)

I always try to be lenient in my rating of children's films. I do my best to put myself into the mindset of a child. Would I have liked the film when I was six? More to the point, does my seven-year-old grandson Oliver like it?

The film begins in an unnamed town in Holland, where the church bells ring every day of the year, except for Easter Sunday. On that day, the bells have to fly to Rome in order to fetch a magic elixir that will make the bells ring and start spring. Yes, it's a magical town where all the bells have wings. That's a strange concept, but I did my best to accept it. I tried to suspend disbelief, as difficult as it was.

There's a competition in the town to decide which bells are the most suitable to make the journey. Surprisingly, the small bell Bim is picked as one of the four bells, even though he can only fly slowly. He sets off with Aurora, Pi and Bommel. On the way Aurora separates herself from the others. She wants the elixir for herself to make herself look more beautiful. When crossing the alps she gathers a gang of evil cowbells to help her in her task, promising to marry the cowbell who serves her best.

At this point I gave up. Even Oliver was confused. "Why are the bells flying?" he asked me innocently. I had no answer for him. When Bim, Bommel and Pi started collecting diamond eggs in Rome, not previously mentioned, I felt like my brain was hurting. What a load of rubbish!

I've given the film a two star rating, but even that is generous. What was the screenwriter thinking? The only thing the film has in its favour is the beautiful imagery, a mixture of real life photography and computer animation.

Speak No Evil (3 Stars)

This is the 18th film in the Stuttgart Fantasy Film Festival.

Before the film began, the hosts quoted audience reactions from the premiere at the Sundance Film Festival:

"The director has to be mentally examined. I've seen many horror films over the years and this one is one hundred percent the most psychopathic of them all".

"Horrible, horrible film. If the film wants to get you in a bad mood, the film is pretty successful".

"This film should not be recommended to human beings. It should not be recommended as a film".

"I really hope I will forget this bad experience very soon".

So what's the film about? It starts with a Danish couple, Bjorn and Louise, meeting a Dutch couple, Patrick and Karin, while on holiday in Italy. They get on well together, and a few months later Patrick invites Bjorn and Louise to visit them. It's a beautiful house in a remote part of Holland, without any neighbours for miles. At first the guests enjoy themselves, but then they have a feeling that something is wrong.

The film is a slow burner. For the first hour so little happens that I was puzzled by the negative quotes. It's only in the last 20 minutes that the real horror of the situation becomes apparent.

Does the film live up to the quotes from the Sundance Festival? Not really. I didn't see anyone running out of the theatre screaming. On the other hand, there were several disturbing scenes, and I don't want to watch the film again.

Moloch (3 Stars)

This is the ninth film in the Stuttgart Fantasy Film Festival.

There are a lot of different things happening in this film, seemingly unconnected, but they all tie together at the end. Betriek is a young woman who believes that her family is cursed. Her grandmother committed suicide and her husband was murdered. Now she lives alone with her daughter Hanna. A foreign company is digging nearby. One of the workers intrudes on her property, looking through her window, so she complains to the company's boss. Another worker kills himself. A third worker enters her home and tries to kill her mother. The boss has known the workers for years and can't explain their strange behaviour. Female corpses are found buried. A yearly festival is about to be held to remember a servant girl who was wrongly accused of witchcraft by a king after she became pregnant by him.

Confusing? Yes. Maybe I've given this film too low a rating. I'd like to see it again.

Control [2017] (4 Stars)

This is the first film in the Stuttgart Nights Festival.

This year's Stuttgart Nights Festival kicked off with a crime thriller, an adaptation of the 1990 novel "Double Face" by the Belgian author Jef Geeraerts. He wrote a series of books about the police detectives Eric Vincke und Freddy Verstuyft, and this is the third of the novels to be filmed. Eric Vincke (on the right in the picture above) is an efficient policeman who does everything by the book. Freddy Verstuyft (on the left) relies on his instincts to solve cases, cutting corners when he thinks the rule book is holding him back. Which method of police work is more efficient? I don't think it's a spoiler for me to tell you that criminal cases need a combination of the two. That's why Eric and Freddy are partners, even if they're constantly arguing about what to do next.

The film takes place in a town in the Dutch-speaking area of Belgium. Six dead women are found buried close to one another near the woods. They're all naked, and all of their heads have been removed. The bodies were buried over a period of about two years. Further investigation shows that there was a similar unsolved case in Germany: three headless bodies were found near Cologne (Köln) that had been buried between 1981 and 1983. The detectives concentrate their investigations on people who had lived in Cologne before moving to Belgium.

Eric, working by the book, calls in a distinguished psychological profiler from Holland to help determine what sort of killer they are dealing with. Freddy ridicules the opinions of the profiler. He's more interested in a woman found hiding naked in the bushes near the woods. She seems to have been drugged and is suffering from partial memory loss. Freddy thinks that she should have been the next victim, but the killer let her go when he was disturbed by the digging in the woods. Eric thinks she has nothing to do with the case and tells Freddy to stop investigating her.

I'm not a big fan of crime thrillers, but this is a very good film. I'd like to see the other two films starring the detectives Vincke and Verstuyft.