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Little Evil (2017)

03 Sunday Sep 2017

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D: Eli Craig / 95m

Cast: Adam Scott, Evangeline Lilly, Bridget Everett, Clancy Brown, Owen Atlas, Kyle Bornheimer, Chris D’Elia, Donald Faison, Tyler Labine, Sally Field, Brad Williams

Depending on the circumstances, the three scariest words in the world are either, “I love you”, or “starring Liam Hemsworth”. But now, there’s another contender, one that can also strike fear and panic into even the sturdiest of hearts, and that is: “a Netflix film”. They’re coming along thick and fast these days, but for every well received movie, there are three or four others that are cinematically dead in the water, snoozefests that should have been cancelled at the first idea stage. In this fashion, Netflix, by taking a scattershot, let’s-make-it-anyway approach, have foisted a number of dire movies on its members over the last few years, and they show absolutely no sign of stopping. Let’s face it: for every Okja (2017), there’s a Special Correspondents (2016) or a Sandy Wexler (2017).

And now there’s Little Evil, a comedy horror where the two are indistinguishable from each other, and its spoof elements land with huge resounding thuds. It’s a movie that strives to be a comedic spin on The Omen (1976) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), but which succeeds only in reminding the viewer of just how iconic and original those movies truly are. You have to ask yourself, why did anybody – least of all writer-director Eli Craig – think this was a good idea? A spoof of two movies that between them are forty-one and forty-nine years old respectively, and have stood the test of time as classics of the horror genre? Who needs that now? And who in their right mind allowed this movie to go ahead? This isn’t a movie that’s going to be regarded with anything like the fondness or respect that The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby have accrued over the years; chances are it won’t be remembered at all a year from now – and that’s just by its stars.

The plot is straightforward: realtor Gary (Scott) has recently married single mom Samantha (Lilly). She has a son, Lucas (Atlas), who will soon be six, but he’s a little withdrawn, doesn’t speak much, and likes wearing clothes similar to those worn by Harvey Stephens in the 1976 classic. Strange events happen around Lucas quite often, but Samantha always brushes these things aside, while Gary starts to notice that maybe, just maybe what’s weird is Lucas himself. Footage from his and Samantha’s wedding shows the priest speaking backwards and charging Gary with protecting Lucas from hellfire and brimstone, while a subsequent outbreak of freak weather sees the child unaffected in the midst of it all. There are further clues: Samantha revealing that Lucas was conceived during a ceremony that took place at the cult she was a member of, and the coincidental arrival in town of biblical end of days preacher Reverend Gospel (Brown).

Gary gains help through some of the members of a stepfather support group he finds himself joining (don’t ask). But while he begins to get them to accept the idea that little Lucas is the Antichrist, Lucas takes the issue by his father’s horns and buries Gary in the backyard. Rescued by Samantha (who takes Lucas’s side and doesn’t believe her son has any issues at all; it’s Gary’s fault for not bonding with him!), Gary, who has done his research, tries one last time to connect with Lucas, and finds himself succeeding. But just as Gary is making headway in getting Lucas to believe he can be “anyone he wants to be”, the boy is kidnapped by Gospel’s followers, and so is Samantha. Cue a race against time to stop Lucas being sacrificed and Lucifer allowed to use his body to come into the world. Will Gary and his friends from the stepfather support group (Everett, D’Elia, Faison, Bornheimer) be in time to save the world from Satan? Will Gary get his new family back (minus the Satanic influences)? And will anyone really care if he doesn’t?

The answers to all those questions are as obvious as the cracks in Craig’s screenplay. But this isn’t a movie that’s interested in creating a believable milieu for its story to play out against, and nor is it a movie that’s been carefully thought through from beginning to end. Like many spoofs, it operates in a world that’s so far removed from the real one that any attempt at trying to get it to fit in is redundant – and so it proves. Samantha shows the kind of denial over Lucas’s actions that make no sense and can’t be rationalised, no matter how hard Craig or Lilly try, while Gary shrugs off being buried alive with all the resilience of a man who has to because the script says he does. But even with all this – and there’s much, much more – there’s no reason for things to be so disjointed and credibility-free. Craig cleverly created a world that operated within its own skewed logic when he made the wonderfully irreverent Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010), but the knack has deserted him here, and the silly tone and generic narrative seriously undermine his efforts in telling an enjoyable story (though there is one great joke involving cornfields; inevitably, it’s in the trailer).

With so much of the movie playing out without any kind of regard for dramatic structure or comedic flow – this has all the hallmarks of a movie where the director was the last person to be consulted over any decisions that needed to be made – it’s left to Scott to keep us interested, and good though he is, the material defeats him time and again. Spare a thought for the likes of Brown and Field as well, used to little effect in a movie that’s going through the motions and which sometimes feels like it’s been designed that way. The humour wears thin pretty quickly, and the real horror is that there’s no horror to speak of (unless you count Atlas’ performance). In the end it all feels like a movie made by committee rather than a writer-director who should be able to make more of an impression than he does here, but maybe that’s what “a Netflix film” is: a movie made by Netflix and not by real movie makers.

Rating: 3/10 – a barebones parody of two of the finest horror movies ever made shows the paucity of the ideas involved within the first fifteen minutes, and then slides inexorably downhill from there, making Little Evil a fruitless experience that just keeps on disappointing its audience; when a movie’s idea of humour is to repeat a joke about a step-parent defecating into their son’s school bag then you know it’s in trouble.

Monthly Roundup – May 2015

31 Sunday May 2015

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There’s a phrase that everyone will be familiar with: “Too many [insert item here], too little time”. When it comes to the number of movies that I watch in any given month, that phrase is apt in relation to the ones that get reviewed here on thedullwoodexperiment. I would love to have the time to post reviews of all the movies I see, but it’s just not practical; and besides which, some movies just don’t merit the attention (Annabelle (2014), for instance). Sometimes it’s a case of choosing one movie over another, sometimes Life gets in the way of blogging and a movie falls by the wayside. To combat this, and to give these “other” movies their due, I’ve decided to present, at the end of each month, a brief “review” of all the other movies I’ve seen. There won’t be any synopsis, or proper full-length analysis, just the title, director, running time, cast, and then the traditional two sentence ratings summation. So, let’s see which movies didn’t quite make the cut in May 2015.

The Forger (2014) / D: Philip Martin / 96m

Cast: John Travolta, Christopher Plummer, Tye Sheridan, Abigail Spencer, Anson Mount, Marcus Thomas, Jennifer Ehle, Travis Aaron Wade

Rating: 5/10 – Travolta’s art forger comes out of prison to spend time with his dying son (Sheridan) and pull off an audacious robbery; a derivative, occasionally unappealing crime drama that tries to do something different with its dying child angle, The Forger is nevertheless a movie whose “one last heist” scenario has been done to death elsewhere, and with far better results.

Forger, The - scene

The Gunfight at Dodge City (1959) / D: Joseph M. Newman / 81m

Cast: Joel McCrea, Julie Adams, John McIntire, Nancy Gates, Richard Anderson, James Westerfield, Walter Coy, Don Haggerty, Wright King, Harry Lauter

Rating: 6/10 – Western legend Bat Masterson (McCrea) tackles corruption supported by Haggerty’s devious sheriff in Dodge City and faces romantic problems as well from minister’s daughter Adams and saloon owner Gates; a middling, mildly diverting Western, The Gunfight at Dodge City benefits from McCrea’s solid, no-nonsense performance and Newman’s underrated abilities behind the camera.

Gunfight at Dodge City, The - scene

Comet (2014) / D: Sam Esmail / 91m

Cast: Justin Long, Emmy Rossum

Rating: 7/10 – Long and Rossum are the soulmates whose on-again-off-again relationship is examined over the course of six years; with the narrative continually fractured and reassembled, Comet is replete with the kind of “serious” romantic musings that sound alternately pretentious and profound, but the two leads have a definite chemistry and this helps immensely in making the movie as enjoyable as it (largely) is.

Comet - scene

Murder at Glen Athol (1936) / D: Frank R. Strayer / 67m

Cast: John Miljan, Irene Ware, Iris Adrian, Noel Madison, Oscar Apfel, Barry Norton, Harry Holman, Betty Blythe, James P. Burtis

Rating: 5/10 – two murders and a dying confession confuse matters for a detective (Miljan) who’s just trying to take a vacation – next door to where the murders have taken place; packed full of seemingly endless exposition and no shortage of suspects, Murder at Glen Athol is a sprightly murder mystery that packs a lot in but not always to its best advantage.

Murder at Glen Athol

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015) / D: Paul Tibbitt / 92m

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Tom Kenny, Clancy Brown, Bill Fagerbakke, Rodger Bumpass, Mr. Lawrence, Carolyn Lawrence

Rating: 7/10 – when the formula for Krabby Patty is stolen by the notorious Burger Beard (Banderas), SpongeBob (Kenny) is forced to team up with Plankton (Mr. Lawrence) to get it back… and venture above the surface; freewheeling fun with the denizens of Bikini Bottom that features lots of gags and the usual bright visuals, but takes an awfully long time in getting to the “sponge out of water” part.

SpongeBob Movie, The

Chappie (2015) / D: Neill Blomkamp / 120m

Cast: Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, Ninja, Yo-Landi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Sigourney Weaver, Brandon Auret, Johnny Selema

Rating: 6/10 – with a robot police force firmly established in Johannesburg, the introduction of artificial intelligence leads to one robot, named Chappie, learning what it’s like to be human; disappointing outing from Blomkamp that never quite gels or seems sure of what it’s trying to do or say, but does feature an excellent performance from Copley.

Chappie

Impact (1963) / D: Peter Maxwell / 61m

Cast: Conrad Phillips, George Pastell, Ballard Berkeley, Linda Marlowe, Richard Klee, Anita West, John Rees

Rating: 5/10 – when newspaper reporter Jack Moir (Phillips) is framed for robbery by arch-nemesis “The Duke” (Pastell), he swears to get even when he gets out of jail; a low-key crime drama that seems busier than it is and which gets bogged down in the mechanics of Moir’s revenge plot, Impact does allow for a welcome appearance by Berkeley aka Fawlty Towers‘ Major, and an above average performance by Pastell.

Impact

The Loft (2014) / D: Erik Van Looy / 103m

Cast: Karl Urban, James Marsden, Wentworth Miller, Eric Stonestreet, Matthias Schoenaerts, Isabel Lucas, Rachael Taylor, Rhona Mitra, Valerie Cruz, Kali Rocha, Elaine Cassidy, Margarita Levieva, Kristin Lehman, Robert Wisdom

Rating: 6/10 – the discovery of a woman’s dead body in the loft apartment shared by five married men for their secret liaisons prompts them to suspect each other of the crime; alternately gripping and implausible, The Loft is a modern day cautionary tale that loses credibility with its solution then recovers with a great twist, but still has the air of a thriller that its writer never quite got to grips with.

Loft, The

Unfinished Business (2015) / D: Ken Scott / 91m

Cast: Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco, Sienna Miller, Nick Frost, James Marsden, June Diane Raphael, Britton Sear, Ella Anderson, Uwe Ochsenknecht

Rating: 5/10 – Swarf salesman Dan Trunkman (Vaughn) has to overcome all sorts of obstacles to land the contract that will save his fledgling company from going under, including a visit to a Berlin gay bar; a bit of a strange fish, Unfinished Business suffers from being two separate movies joined at the hip: one a raucous comedy, the other a thoughtful study of bullying, but together they don’t make for a cohesive whole, and it’s yet another movie where Vaughn coasts along on former glories.

Unfinished Business

John Dies at the End (2012)

04 Friday Apr 2014

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John Dies at the End

D: Don Coscarelli / 99m

Cast: Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Paul Giamatti, Clancy Brown, Glynn Turman, Doug Jones, Daniel Roebuck, Fabianne Therese, Jonny Weston, Jimmy Wong, Tai Bennett

Adapted from the cult novel by David Wong, John Dies at the End has two things working against it from the start: condensing the novel into ninety minutes was always going to mean a shed load of situations, characters, storylines and nuances being left out, and whatever situations, characters, storylines and nuances were included were never going to marry up convincingly.  And so it proves, with the movie throwing everything it can at the screen and the audience in the hope that some of it will impress or resonate.

It begins with an amusing prologue that helps give the viewer an idea of the approach the movie’s going to take with the material, being both surreal and off-kilter.  From there, we meet Dave (Williamson), a nervous-eyed slacker getting ready to meet journalist Arnie Blondestone (Giamatti).  Dave begins to tell Arnie about his experiences in the previous two years, and while Arnie is sceptical, as Dave tells him about all the strange things that have happened to him, Arnie’s credulity is tested at every point.  Because Dave’s story is very strange indeed, and includes a rasta street magician; a black substance, nicknamed ‘soy sauce’ that when ingested gives a person the ability to read minds, see the future, and all manner of other psychic abilities; John calling Dave on the phone despite being dead; the involvement of the police represented by a world-weary detective (Turman); possession by entities from another dimension; a dog that may be more than he seems; renowned paranormal investigator Dr. Albert Marconi (Brown); a trip to another dimension; an evil entity called Korrok; exploding eyeballs; a girl with a prosthetic hand; “the mall of the dead”; and a man called Roger North (Jones).

John Dies at the End - scene

With so much – and more – being thrown into the mix the result is an uneven, occasionally unappealing movie that aims squarely for cultdom but never quite achieves it.  Director and writer Coscarelli (the Phantasm series) is an obvious choice for the material but with so much to choose from the novel, the finished product looks like he used a cherry picker.  It’s a scattershot movie, one that struggles to maintain a through line and ill-advisedly uses a non-linear approach to the material, giving it a stop-start, stutter-like feel.  Some scenes follow each other without the barest connection between the two, and characters generally lack both conviction and coherent motivation, leaving the viewer to either go with the flow and just accept what’s happening, or head for the exit in frustration.

If you do stick around then there are some incentives.  Despite being one of the barmiest movies in recent years, it’s somehow held together by Williamson’s bemused and confused performance, and – paradoxically – the fact that you can’t predict just what will happen next, or which odd tangent the movie will drag itself along.  John Dies at the End has so many WTF? moments it’s a little impressive, even though they don’t help the movie as a whole.  But Williamson finds a way to make Dave as fully rounded a character as possible, and finds able support from Mayes as the goofy John of the title.  Both actors intuit the material in a way that helps immeasurably in grounding things (however tenuously), and prove themselves a great team in the process.  There’s also a good line in black humour (though it’s as inconsistent as the rest of the movie), and there’s a couple of great sight gags.

The rest of the cast fare as best as they can but are largely ill-served by Coscarelli’s script.  Brown’s appearance amounts to a cameo, while Turman seizes his chance and makes his detective the only character in Dave’s story we might recognise in the real world.  Giamatti delivers the best performance and in truth that’s not much of a surprise, but it’s good to have him aboard, especially when he sees what’s in the back of Dave’s car.

There are many books and novels that are regarded as “unfilmable”, and while John Dies at the End certainly presents more than its fair share of problems for the aspiring adaptor, a more focused version could be made.  Until that happens, it’s likely that fans of the novel will be disappointed, and newcomers to Dave and John’s universe(s) are likely to be left asking themselves, “What the hell was that all about?”  A shame, as under the right conditions, and with the right script, that version of John Dies at the End would definitely be the cult classic this adaptation is aiming for.

Rating: 5/10 – a mishmash of ideas and plot threads that often wither and die before they’re fully developed, John Dies at the End gives us fantasy for fantasy’s sake in lieu of a decent plot; an incoherent mess given a boost by some creative low-budget visuals.

Homefront (2013)

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

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Homefront

D: Gary Fleder / 100m

Cast: Jason Statham, James Franco, Izabela Vidovic, Winona Ryder, Kate Bosworth, Marcus Hester, Clancy Brown, Rachelle Lefevre, Omar Benson Miller, Frank Grillo, Chuck Zito, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Austin Craig

Adapted by Sylvester Stallone from Chuck Logan’s novel of the same name – and once considered as the basis for a Rambo movie – Homefront finally makes it to the big screen with fellow Expendable Jason Statham in the lead role instead.

With its throwback style reminiscent of Seventies action movies such as Walking Tall, and Gator, Homefront settles into a familiar groove from the start, with undercover DEA agent Phil Broker (a badly bewigged Statham) having infiltrated drug dealing bikers The Outcasts.  When an attempt to bust them goes wrong, it leaves Outcasts kingpin Danny T (Zito) swearing revenge on Broker and his family.  Two years on and Broker has recently moved to the sleepy town of Rayville; in the meantime his wife has died and he’s left to bring up their nine year old daughter Maddy (Vidovic) all by himself.  A playground altercation with bully Teddy Klum (Craig) – Maddy gives him a bloody nose – leads to Teddy’s mom Cassie (Bosworth) seeking revenge.  She enlists the help of her brother, Gator (Franco), a local meth dealer.  When Gator finds out about Broker’s past he decides to let the remaining Outcasts deal with him; using his girlfriend Sheryl (Ryder) as an intermediary, Gator works out a deal where the Outcasts will distribute his drugs nationally in exchange for Broker’s whereabouts.

With its surprisingly leisurely pace, Homefront is a formulaic and professional Hollywood action movie, competently made, with no surprises and reminiscent of every other stranger-comes-to-town movie you’ve ever seen.  It allows Statham to stretch his acting muscles a little, sets up Franco as the baddest badass on the block only to renege on the deal two thirds in, puts Brown in uniform as the dishonest sheriff in Gator’s pocket (but does nothing more with it than that), gives Bosworth a chance to release her inner skank for a while, and sidelines Lefevre as Broker’s potential love interest at around the halfway mark.  Stallone’s script is full of these undeveloped story lines, and character arcs that are either cut short or allowed to peter out, all in order to allow more time for the action beats and the extended section where the Outcasts are brought back in.  It’s this part of the movie that is the most disappointing as the running time is padded out unnecessarily: Gator tells Sheryl to contact Danny T’s lawyer (Vince), Sheryl contacts him, he speaks to Danny T, Sheryl reports back to Gator, Sheryl meets Danny T’s lieutenant Cyrus (Grillo), and then the Outcasts travel to Rayville.  It all takes way too long, and all to set up the final showdown between Broker, Gator and the bikers which ends up being a two-part affair (and poorly edited at that).

Homefront - scene

While it’s always good to see Statham kick ass – a fight at a gas station is probably the movie’s highlight – here he’s asked to be conflicted about his violent abilities.  It’s not entirely successful, focusing as it does on the effect Broker’s activities have on Maddy. The problem is that Broker has taught Maddy self-defence already (that’s how she gives Teddy a bloody nose) and is really pleased with her for standing up for herself.  And yet when he has to defend himself and Maddy witnesses it, she acts horrified and troubled.  This raises the question of whether she knows what Broker did for a living (after all she’s old enough to know); it’s never referred to, though, and remains just another loose end in a movie that litters them like confetti.

The deficiencies of Stallone’s script aside, Homefront at least looks good, its Louisiana locations shot in that slightly rosy glow beloved of so many cinematographers (here Theo van de Sande), and Statham acquits himself well.  Vidovic is captivating, Franco and Ryder do their best with roles too underwritten to care about, there’s too little screen time for Brown, and for once, the “black sidekick/friend/new acquaintance” (Miller) doesn’t get killed in the crossfire, but actually kills one of the bikers when they attack Broker’s home.  The only real surprise is Bosworth, raging at the mouth, swearing like a motherf*cker, and fit to explode from the anger she has pent up inside her.  Sadly, the script requires her to undergo a sea change, and this unfortunately robs her character of any further credibility, but for the first thirty minutes or so she steals the movie completely.

Rating: 5/10 – a misfire on so many levels, Homefront suffers from an unpolished script and lacklustre direction; technically solid with a couple of good fight scenes involving Statham (which you’d expect anyway), this never really matches up to its potential.

Film4 Frightfest All Night Special 2013

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

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Taking place at the Empire cinema in Basildon, Essex here in the UK, the Film4 Frightfest All Night Special 2013 started at approx. 11:00pm on 2 November and finished at approx. 6:15am on 3 November.  The following four films were shown.

Patrick (2013)

Patrick (2013)

D: Mark Hartley / 90m

Cast: Charles Dance, Rachel Griffith, Sharni Vinson, Peta Sergeant, Damon Gameau, Martin Crewes, Jackson Gallagher

A remake of the 1978 movie of the same name, Patrick is the first feature from documentary filmmaker Mark Hartley.  Taking the same basic premise as the original – coma patient uses telekinesis to manipulate and murder those around him – Hartley’s version is a grim yet stylish offering that sits comfortably alongside its predecessor.  Dr Roget (Dance) runs a private clinic where he is attempting to “re-awaken” coma patients.  Following the disappearance of one of his nurses, he employs Kathy Jacquard (Vinson) to take her place.  Under the watchful eye of Matron Cassidy (Griffith) and the helpful ministrations of Nurse Williams (Sergeant), Kathy soon finds herself assisting Dr Roget in his treatment of “the patient in room 15”, a young man named Patrick (Gallagher).  As time passes, Kathy begins to realise that Patrick is capable of communicating with her… at the same time that strange things start happening to those around her, in particular, prospective love interest Brian (Crewes), and recently separated husband Ed (Gameau).  And so begins a cat-and-mouse game between Kathy and Patrick as she fights to keep those around her safe from harm, and Patrick becomes increasingly homicidal.

Patrick (2013) - scene

Patrick is an effective shocker, solidly done with a serious approach that works well (no jokey one-liners here).  Justin King’s script provides straightforward motivations for each character and ramps up the tension until the final showdown.  There are some narrative lapses along the way, and some of the dialogue sounds a little contrived, but on the whole Patrick delivers an often brutally efficient retake on the classic original.  The cast help immeasurably, everybody giving committed performances and proving that a little Grand Guignol can go a long way.  Patrick also benefits from a great score by Pino Donaggio, and splendidly nasty gore effects courtesy of the makeup department.  Aside from the aforementioned narrative lapses, it’s Patrick’s back story that strikes the only false note in the movie, an unnecessary sequence of flashbacks that would have been better presented as a suitably chilling piece of exposition by Dr Roget or Matron Cassidy.

Rating: 7/10 – gloomy interiors and deliberately low-tech effects work bolster this first feature from Hartley; and as the very last credit has it: Patrick vive.

 

Discopath (2013)

Discopath

Original title: Discopathe

D: Renaud Gauthier / 81m

Cast: Jérémie Earp-Lavergne, Katherine Cleland, Ingrid Falaise, Pierre Lenoir, Ivan Freud, François Aubin

This Canadian-lensed homage to the heady days of low-budget 80’s slasher flicks is so on the money it’s scary all by itself.  The movie opens in 1976.  Duane Lewis (Earp-Lavergne) is fired from the New York diner where he (badly) flips burgers.  On his way home he meets Valerie (Cleland).  They hook up, and later that evening she takes Duane to Seventh Heaven, a trendy nightclub that plays disco music.  The music triggers a murderous rage in Duane and soon he’s fleeing the country, heading for Montreal before the cops, led by Detective Stephens (Freud), can arrest him.  The movie then skips forward to 1980.  Duane is now working in a Catholic girls’ college as a sound and video engineer.  He wears hearing aids that block out any music that might trigger one of his murderous outbursts.  But when two of the girls decide to stay in their room one weekend while everyone else is away, the music they play causes Duane to revert to his homicidal urges.

Discopath - scene

Psychopath is a loving recreation of all those cheesy, hard-to-believe shockers that somehow found themselves “Banned in Britain” and whose video covers usually featured a girl in chains being approached by a maniac wielding his weapon of choice.  It’s a cheerfully ‘bad’ movie, with deliberately ‘bad’ acting, stilted dialogue, awkward scene transitions, off-kilter camera compositions, and plenty of gratuitous gore effects.  Writer/director Gauthier has crafted the kind of grindhouse movie that both Planet Terror and Death Proof should have been but weren’t.  It also throws a linguistic curveball when the action moves from New York (all dialogue in English) to Montreal (all dialogue in French-Canadian), and amps up the exploitation angle by throwing in some nudity and a tasteless slo-mo moment involving a female corpse tumbling out of a coffin.  Great fun, but not for everyone.

Rating: 7/10 – outrageous, awful (but deliberately so), corny, hammy, gory, stupid – all these things are true…and it’s great!

 

The Station (2013)

Station, The

Original title: Blutgletscher

D: Marvin Kren / 98m

Cast: Gerhard Liebmann, Edita Malovcic, Hille Beseler, Peter Knaack, Felix Römer, Brigitte Kren

Scientists working in the German Alps discover a mysterious red substance that acts as a mutating parasite when it comes into contact with living creatures.  As the team comes under increasing attack from a variety of mutated creatures, a party of visitors including Minister Bodicek (Kren) are hiking towards them, unaware of what awaits  them.  The Station is a clever, intriguing movie that creates a fair amount of tension without quite making you grip the edge of your seat.  The characters are well-drawn despite being standard archetypes – a rugged loner who just sees the creatures as needing to be killed (Liebmann), doubtful scientists who see value in the creatures’ existence (Beseler, Römer), a resourceful Minister and her assistant (Malovcic) who also had a previous relationship with the rugged loner, and the usual creature fodder – and the cast acquit themselves well.

Station, The - scene

The location photography is often spectacular without undermining the insular nature of the narrative, and director Kren marshals everything to good effect.  What lets the movie down however is the incredibly shoddy creature design and execution; they’re largely puppets and look like it.  This leaves the attack sequences bereft of any real menace and it’s up to the cast to sell it all.  There’s also a “Bond-in-the-shower” moment when the Minister, forced to remove a parasite from a young girl’s thigh, opens her up with an ordinary pair of scissors!  These problems aside, The Station works largely because of the committed cast, and the underlying subtext relating to climate and eco-change, giving the movie a depth and resonance most creature features lack.

Rating: 7/10 – a big step-up from Kren’s first feature, Rammbock, The Station is a fine addition to the roster of movies where Nature turns against Man.

 

Nothing Left to Fear (2013)

Nothing Left to Fear

D: Anthony Leonardi III / 100m

Cast: Anne Heche, James Tupper, Clancy Brown, Rebekah Brandes, Jennifer Stone, Ethan Peck, Carter Cabassa

Based in part on the true-life legend of Stull, Kansas, Nothing Left to Fear sees new pastor in town Dan (Tupper) and his family, wife Wendy (Heche), daughters Mary (Stone) and Rebecca (Brandes), and son Christopher (Cabassa) become the focus of a satanic ritual set in motion by on-the-point-of-retiring pastor Kingsman (Brown).  As strange events and incidents begin to happen around them it’s only Rebecca who realises that not all is what it seems and that the smiling, welcoming faces of the townspeople hide a deeper, disturbing secret.  And that secret is… well, frankly, a mess.  In the hands of first-time screenwriter Jonathan W.C. Mills, Nothing Left to Fear staggers under the weight of lacklustre plotting, hazy motivations, perfunctory characterisations and unconvincing dialogue.

Nothing Left to Fear - scene2

By the movie’s end it’s given up altogether, bogged down by an over-reliance on demonic movie tropes and all-too-familair CGI effects.  And the movie’s basic premise is further undermined by the movie’s coda, which sees another pastor and his family on their way to Stull…  (For anyone now thinking, Oh great, that’s a spoiler and a half, don’t worry, you’ll be more annoyed with the movie by then than you’ll ever be with this review.)  Of the cast, Heche and Brown should have known better, while Brandes and Stone at least make an effort, as does Peck as Rebecca’s love interest Noah.  Director Leonardi III, whose first feature this is, seems unable to generate any real tension or sense of impending horror, and badly mishandles an extended sequence where one of the children becomes possessed and attacks their siblings: what should be a terrifying experience for the audience becomes a game of cat-and-mouse that cries out for a quicker, more shocking resolution.  On the plus side, the score by Slash (also a producer) and Nicholas O’Toole is effective without being intrusive, and the production design by Deborah Riley adds a level of charm to small-town life that becomes pleasingly distorted by the movie’s denouement.

Rating: 4/10 – a muddled, narratively incoherent movie that promises much but fails to deliver almost entirely; there’s nothing left to fear except the movie itself.