MIDSOMMAR — SHOCKTOBER!

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Punk heart still beating.

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Writer/director Ari Aster's brilliant horror/social satire is a film that would make M. Night Shyamalamadingdong jealous, very jealous.

"Midsommar" is everything that M. Night imagines his movies to be, but are not. Namely, being truly terrifying, albeit with a keen wit regarding theme and plot development. Smart.

Bold.

You want "character-driven"?

Well here it is.

Carried by Florence Pugh's flawless performance, "Midsommar" could have yet been improved upon with a good 12 minutes of editing.

Nonetheless, Ari Aster isn't afraid to shock his audience into submission. If ever there was a Halloween movie guaranteed to shock you, "Midsommar" is it.

Prepare for the worst.

This is one brutal movie. Not for the faint of heart.

"Midsommar" will not be everyone's cup of tea.

That said, if you're down with Aster's nuanced restraint, even his graphic depictions are engaging.

The violence is just literal enough, but you can clearly make out rubber from flesh.

The cycle of life, as carried out in a dystopic Swedish cult community, is the social Petri dish that Ari Aster uses to examine death, for the complex confusion and fear that it instills in all humanity.

Indoctrination is an essential part of the cult plan.

There's even a slasher-film aspect to "Midsommar" that tips its hat to black comedy.

All you need to know going into this transgressive (if surrealistic) film is that it covers: animal abuse, cannibalism, incest, suicide, matricide, homicide, and some serious fucking.

My work here is done.

Get thee thinking cap on.

Rated R. 148 mins.

HOUSE — SHOCKTOBER!

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Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 surrealistic satire regarding the overwhelming aftermath of America’s atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a virtuosic fantasy horror movie unlike any other.

Of the atomic bombs’ 200,000 causalities, all of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s childhood friends were among the deceased.

Nobuhiko Obayashi was just eight years old at the time of the attacks. Clearly, he never lost sight of his pals, or his loss. Here, Obayashi throws a cinematic extravaganza party to celebrate the lost potential of a generation.

Extreme teenage Japanese punk power pop! You bet.

We’re way beyond “Rocky Horror” baby.

“House” takes the cake, the dining room table, the piano, and most certainly the title’s house of horrors that devours seven teenage girls via a very hungry piano.

Chomp, chomp, chomp.

“House” shows Obayashi’s encyclopedic mastery of state-of-the-art filmmaking, from a deeply personal approach to meeting the sugary commercial demands of the film’s producers.

This insanely ambitious movie puts George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to shame with pure inventiveness.

Obayashi received story ideas from his eleven-year-old daughter, Chigumi. A blood-spewing white cat piles on the film’s cartoonish tone of outrageous evil consuming every body that steps in its path.

Nobuhiko Obayashi uses every filmic technique at his disposal, in order to transmogrify the grief, pain, and sense of incalculable loss that he and so many others experienced. What results is a cinematic phantasmagoria overflowing with humor, expressions of love, and deep-seeded fear of the unknown.

Visually and viscerally stunning from start to finish, “House” is much more than a mere masterpiece.

Not Rated. 88 mins.

ENTER THE VOID — SHOCKTOBER!

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Gaspar Noe specializes in brutally grueling films of sex and violence. Anyone who has suffered through his 2002 film "Irreversible" knows well the feeling of seeing something that you would never want to see again.

"Enter the Void" is such a virtuosic, if orgiastic, piece of experimental exploitation cinema that the audience is simultaneously repulsed and mesmerized by the bold attack on the senses that Noe assaults the viewer with.

Set in Tokyo, "Enter the Void" captures the most immersive subjective viewpoint for its drug addicted protagonist that any filmmaker has ever achieved. Through the eyes of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), we experience a casual conversation with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) that leads to a mind-melting drug trip after she leaves.

Psychedelic to the extreme, the visually stupefying sequence goes far beyond even Stanley Kubrick's groundbreaking visuals for "2001: A Space Odyssey). It's only when Oscar finally faces his bathroom mirror that we finally see what he sees, his surprisingly young and innocent face.

The story progresses in real time until Oscar's life takes a shocking turn inside a bar bathroom. Oscar's and Linda's back story about the car crash that took their parents' lives when they were small, informs their dodgy lives in Tokyo where he makes his living as a drug dealer, and she as a stripper. The filmic odyssey is eventually brought low by its own excesses.

At 137 minutes, there is too much brain-hammering repetition of headache-inducing segues of flamboyant neon color and grotesque physical elements to serve the filmmaker's bizarre vision. With a good 30 or 40 inessential minutes excised from it, "Enter the Void" could have been truly amazing. However, in its current form it is a traumatic film that wears out its welcome.

Not Rated. 137 mins.