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Ken and Robin Consume Media: Last Bullet, Die Nibelungen, and John Buchan’s Template for Folk Horror

June 3rd, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

The Pinnacle

Die Niebelungen Part I: Siegfried (Film, Germany, Fritz Lang, 1924) Teutonic hero Siegfried (Paul Richter) kills a dragon and steals the cursed treasure of the Niebelungs on his way to woo Kriemhild (Margarete Schön), princess of the Burgundians. Richter is a stiff, but even that might be on purpose in Lang’s obsessively composed, highly stylized take on the medieval epic poem. Nearly every shot is one that generations of filmmakers will later swipe, which makes watching the original an experience in fantastic deja vu.—KH

Die Niebelungen Part II: Kriemhild’s Revenge (Film, Germany, Fritz Lang, 1924) When her weakling brother King Gunther (Theodor Loos) refuses to execute his adviser Hagen (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) for the murder of Siegfried, Kriemhild (Margarete Schön) marries Attila the Hun (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to get revenge on her countrymen. As wild and dark as Part I was orderly and bright, this film strips the fantasy from legend, leaving behind only cruelty. Schön’s superb face-acting carries and centers the film, which might otherwise fly apart in chaos; even Klein-Rogge’s Attila is weirdly passive despite a lot of shouting.—KH

Last Bullet (Film, France, Guillaume Pierret, 2025) Hard-kicking, high-speeding driver Lino (Alban Lenoir) returns from custody in Spain to reluctantly help ex-partner Julie (Stéfi Celma) protect Areski (Nicolas Duvauchelle), killer of his mentor and his brother, until he can testify against his even worse corrupt cop boss. Astutely starting in mid-action and letting us catch up on the plot reset as we go along, this rounds out the Bullet trilogy in a suitably rousing rain of shattered vehicle parts.—RDL

My Heart is That Eternal Rose (Film, HK, Patrick Tam, 1988) Now an assassin for hire, a man (Kenny Bee) returns to Hong Kong to reunite with his teenage love (Joey Wang), who became a gangster’s girlfriend to secure his safe escape from the city. Dreamy heroic bloodshed in which romance replaces brotherhood as the central motif, with Christopher Doyle cinematography, a baby-faced Tony Leung Chiu Wai in the Nick Carraway role, and Gordon Liu cast against type as a sleazeball.—RDL

T’n’T: Telzey and Trigger (Fiction, James H. Schmitz, 2000) Eight stories, mostly written between 1970 and 1972, continue Schmitz’ super-tech, psionic, interstellar “Federation of the Hub” future to its near conclusion. Three superb novellas (“Child of the Gods,” “Ti’s Toys,” and “The Symbiotes”) effectively blur the line between seemingly omnipotent SF and stark horror; the only flaw of “Glory Day,” the promised team-up between super-psi Telzey and crack shot Trigger, is that it’s only novelette length. In “Compulsion,” the two tackle a threatening ecology from both ends, a little less thrilling if a little more clever.—KH

Trigger & Friends (Fiction, James H. Schmitz, 2001) A different, not quite as perfectly blended mix of heist adventure and space-monster (“Lion Loose”) and the somewhat opaque (not well served by Eric Flint’s edits) novel Legacy are the high points of this collection of six tales written between 1956 and 1974. Effectively spanning Schmitz’ career without showcasing it as well as the other three collections in the Baen series, this is perhaps the least essential. That doesn’t make it bad at all, and the hero of “Lion Loose” runs a fun version of the Yojimbo maneuver worth reading on its own.—KH

Violent Streets (Film, Japan, Hideo Gosha, 1974) Retired yakuza (Noboru Andô) just wants to run his Ginza district flamenco bar, but the botched kidnapping of a singer managed by his now-corporate ex-bosses pulls him back in. Poetically lurid gangster flick builds to a crescendo of bloodshed.—RDL

Witch Wood (Fiction, John Buchan, 1927) During the War of the Three Kingdoms, an idealistic neophyte minister assigned to a rural village discovers that the elders of his church perform Satanic rites in the surrounding deep woods. Theologically minded historical novel dense with Scottish lingo and references is not folk horror but nonetheless sets the template for it.—RDL

Good

The Passionate Friends (Film, UK, David Lean, 1949) Conflicted woman (Ann Todd) gets a surprise second reunion with the loving academic (Trevor Howard) she spurned to marry a dispassionate, wealthy banker (Claude Rains.) Affecting, thanks to Lean, Rains, and Howard, even as the Eric Ambler script carefully excises the entire point of the H. G. Wells source novel, and with it any chance of understanding the protagonist’s behavior.—RDL

Psychomania (Film, UK, Don Sharp, 1974) Aided by their sly sorcerer butler (George Sanders), the insolent scion of a wealthy occultist family (Nicky Henson) enlists his motorcycle gang in his scheme to wreak further havoc after returning from death by sheer force of will. Like most UK delinquent flicks, this odd fusion of the bike gang and folk horror genres regards youth rebellion with appalled disgust. I see the vibes responsible for its recent critical revival but due to its cursory narrative development can’t fully get on board. —RDL

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