Oh! the Horror! – The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018) and The Harrowing (2018)

06 Thursday Dec 2018

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Arnold Vosloo, Cadaver, Demons, Diederik Van Rooijen, Drama, Grey Damon, Horror, Jon Keeyes, Matthew Tompkins, Morgue, Psychiatric hospital, Review, Shay Mitchell

The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018) / D: Diederik Van Rooijen / 86m

Cast: Shay Mitchell, Grey Damon, Kirby Johnson, Nick Thune, Louis Herthum, Stana Katic, Maximillian McNamara, Jacob Ming-Trent

Megan Reed (Mitchell) is an ex-cop still suffering the lingering effects of PTSD from a shooting that saw her partner killed. Getting back on her feet, she takes a job working the night shift at the Boston Metro Hospital morgue. Working alone in her part of the building, her main responsibility is to see in any “new arrivals” and get them processed into the system. Her first night on the job passes by without incident, but on the second night something more out of the ordinary happens: the body of a young woman (Johnson), the victim of a deranged killer who has hacked her body and tried to burn it, is brought in. Alerted to the fact that the killer is still at large, Megan sets about trying to process the body, but her equipment fails at every turn. Later, while seeing in another body, a man (Herthum) slips into the morgue, and hides away. Later still, Megan becomes aware of his presence, and finds him trying to haul the young woman’s body into the incinerator. She overpowers him, and it’s then that he tells her that the young woman, Hannah Grace, isn’t dead…

A modest little horror flick from Sony/Screen Gems, The Possession of Hannah Grace has slipped into cinemas recently, and though there’s always the temptation to think that if it’s in cinemas then it must be better than the usual horror fare released these days, in this case that wouldn’t be entirely appropriate. Originally entitled Cadaver, this has good production values for its budget, a good central performance from Mitchell, and a handful of creepy moments that are as much to do with its setting as it’s title character. However, the story holds about as much water as a paper bag, and the details of Hannah’s possession can best be described as “flaky to the max” (and that’s being generous). This flakiness is the excuse for the supporting characters to be picked off one by one, but on each occasion, the contrivance is obvious and perfunctory. Van Rooijen keeps the scares simple if predictable, but is unable to rein in the preposterousness that runs rampant through the screenplay. The end result is a movie that falls short of being as gripping, or frightening, as its setting should have made it, and which relies too heavily on its title character’s ability to make weird clacking noises when she (inevitably) moves around.

Rating: 4/10 – another frustrating horror movie experience foisted on our cinema screens, The Possession of Hannah Grace is unlikely to bother anyone who’s seen any of the four million other possession movies released in the last few years, or indeed, anyone coming to the genre for the first time either; dull in stretches, with a back story for its heroine that is as unnecessary as these things usually are, it does at least have an ending, and thankfully, not one that sets up a sequel.

The Harrowing (2018) / D: Jon Keeyes / 111m

Cast: Matthew Tompkins, Arnold Vosloo, Arianne Martin, Michael Ironside, Damon Carney, Hayden Tweedie, Michael Crabtree, Susana Gibb, Morgana Shaw, James Cable

Ryan Calhoun (Tompkins) is a vice cop working a sting operation with his partner, Jack (Carney), and newbie, Greenbaum (Cable). While he’s out getting coffee, something goes wrong in the apartment they’re monitoring, and when Ryan gets there, he finds the prostitute who’s been working with them, her trick, and Jack all dead, horribly mutilated, and apparently killed by Greenbaum. Greenbaum attacks Ryan, who shoots him dead, but not before Greenbaum has mentioned something to do with demons. Although he’s removed from the case by his superior, Lieut, Logan (Ironside), Ryan does his own investigating, and discovers that Greenbaum was a patient at a psychiatric facility before joining the force. Electing to go undercover at the facility, which is run by Dr Franklin Whitney (Vosloo), Ryan looks for answers as to why Greenbaum would have committed such a terrible act. Soon he learns that Greenbaum wasn’t the only patient who believed in demons, and that both himself and the other patients are in danger from something truly diabolical…

Beginning with a prologue that proves entirely superfluous to what follows, The Harrowing is a less than sure-footed attempt at blending a variety of genres, from the humble police procedural to the psychological thriller, and with a heavy coating of supernatural drama ladled on top. There’s the hint of a neat little mystery here, but it’s buried under a welter of kaleidoscopic lighting effects, more cutaways than could ever be necessary, and a fragmented screenplay that has a defined ending in mind but which doesn’t know quite how to get there without tripping itself up along the way (and more than once). There’s certainly ambition on display here as well, but writer/director Keeyes has opted for visual and aural excess over subtlety in telling his story, and the result is a shouty mess that lacks the coherence needed to keep the viewer intrigued or motivated to keep watching. Things aren’t helped by a truly awful performance from Tompkins, and a number of very questionable directorial decisions made by Keeyes as he tries to create a nightmare fusion of reality and fantasy, but succeeds only in creating a nightmare that the viewer is forced to navigate. By the end, it’s hard to care how it all turns out, and when it does, it does so abruptly – which is some consolation at least given the extended running time.

Rating: 3/10 – when veterans of this sort of thing like Vosloo and Ironside look as if they’d rather be elsewhere, then you know there’s a problem, though for The Harrowing it’s just one of many; another example of low budget equals low return, Keeyes has been doing this sort of thing for a while now, something that begs the question, isn’t it time to try another genre altogether?

Oh! the Horror! – Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015) and Sinister 2 (2015)

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Brit Shaw, Bughuul, Chris J. Murray, Ciarán Foy, Custody battle, Dan Gill, Demons, Drama, Ex-deputy So-and-So, Gregory Plotkin, Horror, Ivy George, James Ransone, Murder, Sequels, Shannyn Sossamon, The Midwives, Toby

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015) / D: Gregory Plotkin / 88m

Cast: Chris J. Murray, Brit Shaw, Ivy George, Dan Gill, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Chloe Csengery, Jessica Tyler Brown, Don McManus, Michael Krawic, Hallie Foote

Promoted as the series’ entry that ties everything together and explains all that’s happened in the previous five movies, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension has arrived at a point where rounding off the convoluted storyline begun (quite simply) back in 2007 has ceased to be of any interest. It’s likely that most people, even fans, gave up after Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), as the producers attempted to make each instalment part of a bigger whole. This led to Katie Featherston’s character popping up in unlikely places to ensure some kind of continuity, and the slow but inevitable decline in both plausibility and scares.

But with this concluding entry, the makers have decided to ignore the events of Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) and Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014) and bring back the younger versions of Katie (Csengery) and Kristi (Brown) in a game of video charades. With a new couple, Ryan (Murray) and Emily (Shaw), who move in to a new home with their young daughter Leila (George), set up as prospective victims of the entity now known as Toby, the movie adds a semi-live-in nanny, Skyler (Dudley) and Ryan’s visiting brother Mike (Gill) to the mix, and once a box full of old video tapes and a video camera that looks like a parody of a boombox is found, begins to wrap things up very untidily indeed.

As Ryan becomes obsessed with going through the tapes, strange things begin to happen in the house – strange, that is, if you haven’t seen the previous five movies (though perhaps the strangest thing is the Xmas tree, which keeps changing in size throughout – now that’s spooky). It soon becomes obvious that Leila is the focus for all this weird activity, and Ryan and Mike set up cameras around the house to film it all. It’s not long before we see a strange black figure coalescing in Leila’s room at night, or emanating from the upstairs ceiling. It’s aggressive, it’s trying to become fully formed, and it doesn’t register on every camera (this is meant to be unnerving, but serves only to make us watch even more static shots where nothing is happening). And amongst a whole slew of “explanations” for what’s happening, Ryan and Emily discover that the house they’re in has been built over the location of Katie and Micah’s house (from the first movie) that burnt down (which again is meant to be unnerving, but just seems like one “coincidence” too far).

Thanks to the familiarity and the structures of the previous movies, this (hopefully) final movie soon finds itself painted into a corner. Toby makes more progress toward human form in this movie than in all the others combined, which makes you wonder why it’s taken him this long. The scares still consist of things rushing at or past one of the cameras, and the slow build of tension that made the first movie so effective, has now become so devalued that instead of feeling anxious, the viewer is more likely to feel bored. And the characters still insist on carrying cameras around with them when the ectoplasm hits the fan, a problem none of the movies has been able to address with any confidence.

If this is to be the last in the franchise – and there’s no reason it should be, given the final outcome – then it will qualify as the least in the series thanks to the tired nature of the narrative, and an unwillingness to do anything that might be innovative or surprising. And as if to confirm – if confirmation were needed – just how devoid of originality the movie is, the Ghost Dimension, so hyped up before the movie’s release, proves to be just… another… room.

Rating: 3/10 – unable even to sign off satisfactorily, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension sees the series grind to a creative halt amid a welter of dull scenes that rarely relate to each other let alone the rest of the franchise; with such a disregard for its own legacy, the series deserves to be laid to rest now, but if a seventh movie is on the cards, then it needs to ignore everything that’s gone before and come up with a brand new story entirely – because this one is broken beyond all repair.

Sinister 2 (2015) / D: Ciarán Foy / 97m

Cast: James Ransone, Shannyn Sossamon, Robert Daniel Sloan, Dartanian Sloan, Lea Coco, Tate Ellington, John Beasley, Lucas Jade Zumann, Nicholas King

The original Sinister (2012) was a surprise, both in its inventive storyline and writer/director Scott Derrickson’s confidence with the material. Its principal villain, the demon Bughuul (King) – looking like a badly scarred Nick Cave – was kept largely in the shadows and his motives went largely unrevealed. It was a mostly effective mix of horror movie and mystery drama, and was bolstered by Ethan Hawke’s committed performance. But as with any horror movie that achieves even limited success at the box office, the inevitable sequel is here at last.

With Hawke’s character no longer around for the viewer to follow up with, we’re left with Ransone’s secondary, unnamed character as our guide to what follows. As the now ex-deputy (called So-and-So in the credits), he’s begun following the trail of killings related to Bughuul and is travelling around the US burning the buildings that these killings have taken place in, the idea being that Bughuul’s legacy can’t be continued in the same place by future inhabitants. At one such place he encounters Courtney (Sossamon), a mother with two sons, Dylan (R. Sloan) and Zach (D. Sloan), who is hiding from her abusive husband (Coco) pending a custody battle. Of course, the ex-deputy is already too late. Dylan is spending most nights in the basement watching snuff movies with the likes of Bughuul protégé Milo (Zumann) and his equally dead friends. Once Dylan has watched all the movies they have to offer, then he can make his own and become the latest in the long line of Bughuul’s victims.

The movie cheats a bit at the start by showing us a snuff movie that we’ll see the making of later on (and which turns out differently), and it delves perhaps too deeply into the origins of its villain, making him into a kind of globetrotting malevolent entity who can pop up anywhere, and in any culture. Thanks to the same judicious use of his appearance in the movie as the first one though, Bughuul remains as scary in appearance as he did before, but with the sense of threat firmly linked to Milo and the other children, his occasional appearances lack the intensity of the first movie.

The central plot – Dylan’s recruitment by Milo – is enhanced by the snuff movies he’s encouraged to watch. These are the movie’s grim highlights, their 16mm nature proving as effective as they did in part one. One, Fishing Trip, is perhaps the nastiest (and well made), though Sunday Service gives it a run for its money. But when the movie stops for us to see one of them, it serves also as a reminder that this is where the movie really works, not with its soap opera style romance between the ex-deputy and Courtney, nor the domestic violence dramatics once Courtney and the kids are back with daddy. These are necessary to pad out the running time and give us some breathing space between the moments of horror, but are equally those moments you wish the movie would get through more quickly.

The performances are average, with Ransone’s shy, reclusive nature soon becoming annoying, and Sossamon finally eschewing the ragged fringe look we’ve seen way too often. The brothers Sloan are okay, with Dartanian looking at times like a younger Ryan Lee, but Zumann gives such a mannered and off-putting portrayal as Milo that you wish he had less screen time (this is definitely not one of those movies where the children give easily the best performances).

In the end, Sinister 2 has a hard time justifying its existence beyond being an opportunistic cash-in on the back of an unexpected success (though some horror movie sequels have been made for even less exalted reasons). It doesn’t further the original story in any meaningful way, and has less to say about the nature of evil, something the original did with some degree of interest and flair. There are no prizes for guessing the outcome, nor that the last scene will feature a groan-inducing “scare”, and equally there’s very little chance that this will be a movie you’ll want to come back to, even if someone asks you to.

Rating: 5/10 – horror sequels such as Sinister 2 exist in a parallel world of movie making where it’s assumed that people want more of something that’s been successful, but really, that’s rarely the case; a largely by-the-numbers approach that will remind many viewers of horror sequels from the Nineties, this is a movie that never tries to be anything but a movie trying to be successful off the back of its predecessor.

Hellions (2015)

08 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Bruce McDonald, Children, Chloe Rose, Demons, Drama, Halloween, Home invasion, Horror, Pregnancy, Review, Robert Patrick, Rossif Sutherland, Thriller

D: Bruce McDonald / 82m

Cast: Chloe Rose, Robert Patrick, Rossif Sutherland, Rachel Wilson, Luke Bilyk, Peter DaCunha, Emir Hirad Mokhtarieh, Joe Silvaggio, Sydney Cross

Dora Vogel (Rose), is a seventeen-year-old who lives with her mother, Kate (Wilson), and younger brother Remi (DaCunha). She has a boyfriend, Jace (Bilyk), who she’s intending to go to a Halloween dance with, but the news that she’s four weeks’ pregnant gives her pause. Afraid to tell her mother who has high hopes for her, Dora decides to stay at home and not go to the dance, but she doesn’t tell Jace. When her mother and brother go out trick or treating, Dora discovers that being home alone isn’t as comforting as she’d hoped, not least because of the oddly costumed child that calls at her door. Deciding she will go to the dance, she gets dressed up but now two children call, and this time one of them places their hand on her stomach leaving a bloody handprint. Shortly after, Dora begins to experience painful stomach cramps and calls her physician, Doctor Gabe Henry (Sutherland), to come over.

The cramps subside but when they do there’s a further knock at the door. Angry, Dora throws the remainder of the candy into the children’s sack – and sees something else there that shocks and petrifies her. She calls the police and while she’s on the line to the police dispatcher the house is seemingly possessed by a violent storm that sees various items hurled around by a powerful wind. The line goes dead and in time the storm subsides, but now Dora can see that there are more and more children outside, all wearing odd costumes. The arrival of an injured Doctor Henry sees the nature of what is now a siege intensify, and he and Dora lock themselves in the basement. But the children show tenancity and find their way in; Dora escapes through the laundry chute but the doctor isn’t so lucky. Dora tries to escape the house, and in the kitchen she comes face to face with one of the children. In her efforts to escape, Dora throws whatever comes to hand at the child, with no effect, until a salt shaker hits the child and the salt causes it to dissolve.

Now outside, Dora finds the sky transformed thanks to a bloody full moon that saturates everything in an eerie reddish-pink colour. She hides in an outhouse where the voice of one of the children speaks to her in her mind. It tells her they want her baby, the baby that is now growing at an advanced rate. Scared and horrified, Dora is found by Officer Corman (Patrick). They prepare to leave but hear Doctor Henry’s voice calling to them from the house. They go in, but Henry’s survival proves to be a cruel joke, but it’s one that allows Corman to realise what’s happening, and just how much danger Dora is in…

In 2008, Bruce McDonald gave us one of the most cleverly assembled zombie movies of the last ten years in the deliciously quirky Pontypool. Since then he’s laboured mostly in television, with the occasional feature thrown in (his last, The Husband (2013), is well worth checking out). Returing to the horror genre, McDonald has done his best to make a movie that combines a creepy, single-location setting with a broader supernatural raison d’etre (the children are demons looking to swell their ranks with Dora’s unborn child). In bringing Pascal Trottier’s script to life, however, McDonald is unable to overcome the deficiencies of the script, and as the movie breasts the hour mark and descends into fever dream territory, the tightness of the script up til that point drifts off into a soup of elliptical imagery and random occurrences that seem designed to pad out the remainder of the movie instead of bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion.

The set up is simple and effective, and the children – decked out in sackcloth hoods, unnerving masks, and surprisingly sinister metalware – are menacing, freakish and nightmarish to look at. Part of their effectiveness lies in their costumes, corrupted versions of children’s characters such as Raggedy Ann and Pinocchio; there’s nothing innocent about these kids, or what they want. McDonald highlights this horror at every opportunity, and even the kid wearing a tin bucket on his head (the leader, appropriately named Buckethead in the credits) is uncomfortably menacing. The children are the movie’s best asset, and whenever they appear the horror of Dora’s situation is more apparent and more terrifying.

What is less successful is the lame attempt to explain that this isn’t the first time they’ve done this, as Patrick’s dogged officer recalls the same thing happening to his wife, and the legacy of Carrie (1976) is resurrected in a superfluous final “scare” that fans of the genre will see coming a mile off. Elsewhere, Halloween is used as a backdrop for the supernatural shenanigans, but there’s no clear connection between the occasion and the children’s actions, and the field of exploding pumpkins is a triumph of unconvincing CGI. As a home invasion movie, Hellions is on firmer ground, and Rose’s performance is the glue that knits all the disparate elements together, from her shocked gaze at learning she’s pregnant, to her annoyance with the first child to knock (“Good luck with puberty”), to the moment when her realisation that salt can kill the children offers her a brief respite from being scared out of her wits.

Although the script’s unevenness hurts the movie overall, there’s more than enough to keep the viewer interested, even if it does go off the rails in the last twenty minutes. Dora is a sympathetic heroine, and it’s not hard to root for her, even if at one point she’s incapable of navigating her way through several hanging bedsheets. The various violent encounters are well handled, and the movie is refreshingly free of the post-modern irony and self-awareness that’s blighted so many horror movies in recent years. And the movie may be the first of its kind to make the colour pink seem ominous and sickly at the same time.

Rating: 6/10 – making a virtue of its restricted setting and an intelligent performance from Rose, Hellions is an above average horror/thriller that features some truly scary demon children and intuitive direction from McDonald; spoiled by a dilution of the threat towards the end, and a lack of focus the longer it goes on, it’s still a movie worth catching up with, and another example of what its director can do on a limited budget.

Captain Z & the Terror of Leviathan (2014)

03 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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1714, Aleen Isley, Amulet, Captain Z, Comedy, Demons, Leviathan, Madison Siple, Pirate, Review, Ritual, Riverwood Ohio, Spoof, Steve Rudzinski, Zachariah Zicari, Zoltan Zilai

D: Steve Rudzinski / 80m

Cast: Zoltan Zilai, Steve Rudzinski, Madison Siple, Aleen Isley, Seth Gontkovic, Ian S. Livingston, Cerra Atkins, Josh Devett, Scott Lewis, Joshua Antoon

1714, the town of Riverwood, Ohio. Having taken possession of some of the townsfolk, a band of demons attempt to raise the dark god Leviathan using an amulet and the sacrifice of a redhead. With their victim about to be offered up, the infamous pirate captain Zachariah Zicari (Zilai) comes to her rescue and kills the demons’ human forms but in the process the demons and the captain are absorbed into the amulet, which ends up at the bottom of the nearby river.

2014. The Toy & Train Museum is celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of Captain Zicari’s triumph over the demons, an event that has come to be thought of as more of a local legend than historical fact. Under the auspices of museum head Mr Kincaid (Lewis), the staff there, intellectually challenged redhead Heather (Siple), inappropriate J.T. (Antoon), abrasive Samantha (Atkins) and Kincaid’s son Neal (Devett), all have their roles to play in the upcoming celebrations. The arrival of a paranormal researcher and author, Glen Stewart (Rudzinski), who’s come to investigate the legend and maybe find the amulet, prompts the museum staff to help him with his research.

Meanwhile, by the river, two of the locals, Jake (Livingston) and his son Judd (Gontkovic) are fishing. Jake lands the amulet and they take it home with them. Judd’s sister, Bobbie (Isley), looks it over and finds there’s writing on one side. She reads it aloud; this releases the demons – who promptly possess Bobbie, Jake and Judd and the rest of their family – and Captain Zicari. The Captain fights his way out and takes the amulet with him. Further along the river, Glen, Kincaid and Heather are pondering the possibility of the amulet being found when Captain Zicari appears. Although he tells them about the demons, it’s not until proof is provided by the arrival of one of Bobbie’s family (who kills Kincaid by ripping his heart out), does anyone believe him.

Killing the demon’s human form, Glen and Heather bow to the captain’s wishes and head for J.T.’s place, where he’s having a party. While the captain indulges in sex and rum, the demons trace him there and try to retrieve the amulet. The trio escape, and head back to the museum. There they bring Neal and Samantha up to speed on what’s happening, but before long Bobbie, Jake and Judd (now called Vepar, Barbatos and Bune respectively), turn up and various showdowns ensue, which lead to Barbatos and Bune being killed, but Vepar getting away with both the amulet and Heather. Now it’s up to the captain and Glen to stop Vepar from completing the ritual to summon Leviathan, and save the world… as we know it.

Every now and then, a movie comes along that aims to spoof a particular genre or sub-genre of movie. Usually, those movies are pretty dire – anyone who’s seen just one of the Scary Movie series will know what I mean – but sometimes, on even rarer occasions, the spoof movie proves to be inspired, and well worth tracking down and watching. Such is the case with Captain Z & the Terror of Leviathan.

Be warned though: this movie looks incredibly cheap (the set representing Bobbie and her family’s home wouldn’t look out of place in a Seduction Cinema release). The opening scenes in 1714 are woefully acted, directed, shot and edited, and some viewers may think, “Uh uh, no way I’m watching any more of this”. But that would be the wrong idea, because with its extra-ropey prologue out of the way, the movie can begin to flourish, and its true purpose becomes clear: it’s an amateur production that wants to look even more amateurish in order to raise quite a few laughs – and intentional ones at that.

What Rudzinski and co-writer Zilai have done is to take the accepted style of a low budget horror movie, with its lame dialogue, low production values, and low rent special effects, and make these very drawbacks the whole point. This is a movie that knows it’s bad, and the great thing is that it’s all been done deliberately, from the terrible CGI to the rickety sets, from the arch, often over-ripe dialogue to the mannered, stereotypical performances; it’s all done with an absurdist air that helps make the movie far more enjoyable and self-reflexive than the viewer has any right to expect.

Throughout there are nods and small homages to other movies, and in-jokes that bear witness to the movie’s knowing attitude. At one point, Glen revs up a chainsaw and says he’s always wanted to say this: “Groovy!” And there’s a scene where Zicari and Neal share an emotional moment that ends with Heather saying it’s like in a comedy or action movie where it has to get real for a moment. It’s at times like these that the true intention behind the movie shines out, and any accusations that Captain Z & the Terror of Leviathan is low budget trash or completely unredeemable, crumble away to nothing. Sure, the sets look shoddy, and sure the framing usually has trouble fitting in more than two people in any given scene, and sure some of the editing looks to have been done with a pair of blunt scissors, but it truly does add to the charm of the piece, and makes it a lot more enjoyable.

Rudzinski and his cast and crew clearly know what they’re doing. The basic plot is silly and stupid, the characters act and behave as if they’ve never interacted with real people before, the dialogue is clumsy and leaves the characters looking like English isn’t their first language, the cast cope “awkwardly” with said dialogue, and despite all this, the movie just plain works. There’s a knowing attitude here, an approach that invites the audience to join in with the gag, that this movie is so bad it’s actually very good, that what the viewer sees has all been planned ahead of time and thanks to Rudzinski’s confidence in the material and the way in which it’s been put together, it provides more entertainment than anyone could envisage.

However, it should be noted that there are times when the in-jokes and the laughs aren’t as effective as they should be, and while some of the performances may seem as bad as they’re meant to be, a couple really are that bad, particularly Devett and Antoon. Siple is maddeningly good as the bubble-headed Heather, and in a role that often confounds the viewer: is she really this bad, or is she just really good at being bad? You decide, but anyone who can deliver the line, “I learned how to talk to cats today” in such a guileless way as Siple does, deserves to be congratulated rather than condemned. Elsewhere, Zilai isn’t the most convincing of pirates, while Rudzinski is obviously having too much fun to care. It all adds up to a movie with a definite agenda, and one that has clearly been achieved.

Rating: 7/10 – with some wicked moments of unforced hilarity in amongst all the superficial “errors of judgement”, Captain Z & the Terror of Leviathan is a Z-movie fan’s dream: continually witless, defiantly odd, and apparently awful; if you see only one spoof movie this year, make sure it’s this one, or the captain might just have something to say about it.

Borgman (2013)

18 Saturday Apr 2015

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Alex van Warmerdam, Angels, Civil rights, Demons, Drama, Hadewych Minis, Holland, Incubus, Jan Bijvoet, Jeroen Perceval, Murder, Psychological thriller, Review, Thriller

D: Alex van Warmerdam / 108m

Cast: Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Jeroen Perceval, Sara Hjort Ditlevsen, Tom Dewispelaere, Alex van Warmerdam, Eva van de Wijdeven, Annet Malherbe, Elve Lijbaart, Dirkje van der Pijl, Pieter-Bas de Waard, Mike Weerts

In a forest, three men (including a priest) hunt for a man (Bijvoet) who lives in an underground hideout. The man escapes and alerts two others, Pascal (Dewispalaere), and Ludwig (van Warmerdam), to the presence of the three men. The man heads into a nearby town where he tries to find somewhere to have a bath and clean up. At the home of the van Schendel’s he’s rebuffed by the husband, Richard (Perceval), until he says that he knows his wife, Marina (Minis). Although she denies this, Richard becomes angry and attacks the man, knocking him to the ground. Later, after Richard has gone to work, Marina finds the man, who is called Camiel Borgman, hiding in their summer house. She lets him have a bath and some food and he persuades her to let him stay in the summer house for a few days, though Marina makes it clear he has to avoid being seen.

However, Borgman is soon finding reasons to be in the house, and is seen by her three children and their nanny, Stine (Ditlevsen). As problems in their marriage become apparent, Marina begins to lean towards Borgman for support and he stays for longer than planned. Borgman asks if their gardener is a friend or someone they’re close to; Marina says no. The next day, the gardener is shot with a poisoned dart by Borgman who takes him to his home and where he arranges for two of his associates, Olinka (van de Wijdeven) and Brenda (Malherbe) to meet him. The three of them kill the gardener and his wife and later dispose of the bodies.

Marina and Richard’s relationship continues to deteriorate, and when Borgman applies for the job of replacement gardener, Richard doesn’t recognise him, and he’s hired straight away. His friends Pascal and Ludwig arrive to help with the work needed to be done. Suffering from nightmares in which Richard is violent towards her, Marina grows ever more distant toward him and closer – at least on her part – to Borgman. With the children and Stine beginning to act strangely, and Marina becoming more and more desperate to be with Borgman, she asks him if there is something he can do about Richard. He can, and events converge on the night of a dinner party that includes Marina’s family, Borgman and his two friends, and Stine and her boyfriend, Arthur (Weerts).

The first Dutch movie in thirty-eight years to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival, Borgman is a dark, psychological thriller that comes replete with supernatural overtones. It’s a strange movie, uneven in places, disconcerting in others, and too much of its narrative feels arbitrary, or is left unexplained, for it to work fully. The mystery of Camiel Borgman and his associates is never completely revealed (though there are clues sprinkled throughout the movie), and the relationship between Marina and Richard lacks sufficient exploration to be completely convincing. And yet the movie is deceptively fascinating despite all this, taking hold from the start and keeping the viewer’s attention until the very (disappointing) end.

What stops the movie from being as rewarding or effective as it could be is the curious motivations behind Borgman’s activities and those of his associates. With writer/director van Warmerdam appearing unsure of which side of the coin he wants to come down on – are they angels or demons? – the resulting uncertainty is reflected in the tone and the imagery of the movie. There’s a repeated visual reference to Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, where an incubus sits atop a sleeping woman (several times Borgman is seen astride Marina while she sleeps), but there’s also a scar on Borgman’s back that may represent the absence of wings. This causes a fair degree of confusion about the character’s motives and his reasons for choosing the van Schenkels as his targets (at first it seems as if they’ve been chosen at random but as the movie continues it seems more appropriate to think of them as having been picked out deliberately). It also leads to an unsatisfactory conclusion that is as puzzling as it is abrupt.

With the movie proving inconsistent – even though it’s absorbing at the same time – it’s left to the cast to help maintain any semblance of continuity. Bijvoet is mesmerising as the title character, his remote gaze and dispassionate regard for the people around him so exactingly portrayed it makes his performance completely unnerving; you just never know what he’s thinking. There’s a degree of urbanity about him that’s contrasted by his manipulative behaviour, but Bijvoet handles the various differences in the character of Borgman with ease. As the troubled, frustrated Marina, Minis is equally as good, and equally as mesmerising as Bijvoet, and she helps ground the more elaborate, metaphysical aspects of the script. Alas, Perceval isn’t given enough leeway to make Richard anything more than a bully and a probable victim of Borgman’s scheme to see the pair fall into his trap. With the remaining characters used to widen the narrative, but often to very little effect, the movie remains essentially a two-hander.

But again, Borgman is consistently absorbing and intriguing, and van Warmerdam works hard to stop the movie from becoming too abstruse, creating a tone that combines mystery, very dark humour, and psychological suspense to impressive effect. He’s aided by Tom Erisman’s clinical photography and Job ter Burg’s ascetic editing style, each adding to the somewhat distant effect used by van Warmerdam to highlight the dysfunction of the characters and their actions. There’s also some clever lighting effects used when necessary, and the score by Vincent van Warmerdam is cleverly suited and adapted to the material’s even pace and disturbing moments.

Rating: 6/10 – with the resolution of its central mystery proving so unsatisfying, Borgman wastes a lot of time setting things up only to forget to follow through; Bijvoet and Minis make for superb protagonists but can’t prop up van Warmerdam’s unwieldy script enough to save it completely.

Mini-Review: The Possession of Michael King (2014)

30 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Angels, Bereavement, David Jung, Demons, Found footage, Horror, Possession, Review, Shane Johnson, Supernatural, Tomas Arana

D: David Jung / 83m

Cast: Shane Johnson, Julie McNiven, Jed Rees, Ella Anderson, Cara Pifko, Cullen Douglas, Freda Foh Shen, Patricia Healy, Dale Dickey, Tomas Arana

Following the tragic demise of his wife, Samanatha (Pifko), distraught Michael King (Johnson) decides to make a film about the search for the existence of the supernatural. By placing himself at the centre of the search, and by allowing all sorts of demonologists and occult practitioners to involve him in their spell-castings, Michael hopes they’ll all fail, thereby reinforcing his belief that it’s all just hokum. Aided at first by cameraman Jordan (Rees), Michael’s initial endeavours bear little or no fruit until a meeting with a mortician (Douglas) leads to a ritual that doesn’t go as expected. Plagued by fugue moments, unexplained phenomena, and a persistent noise like interference that only he can hear, Michael begins to suspect that something has happened to him.

He retraces his steps but everyone he’s spoken to or encountered, including the mortician, wants nothing more to do with him. Rebuffed, and with his behaviour slowly but surely estranging him from everyone else around him, including his pre-teen daughter Ellie (Anderson) and sister Beth (McNiven), Michael struggles to control the often violent transformation he begins to experience, as well as trying to ignore the voice he can hear beneath the interference – a voice that urges him to harm his daughter.

Let down by the stupidity of its central character, The Possession of Michael King is a hyper-stylised found footage movie that throws logic out of the window at the first opportunity and never looks back. With a visual style that’s reminiscent of Se7en (1995) (albeit without the constant rainfall), first-time writer/director Jung assembles a woeful mess that rehashes motifs and camera angles from the Paranormal Activity series, as well as a hundred other found footage movies. In short, there’s little that’s new or original here, although Michael’s reasons for making his film are certainly some of the dumbest heard for a long time.

The movie also suffers from a final third that seeks to inject some menace via Michael’s attempts to kill his daughter, attempts that are about as frightening as her being chased by a Care Bear. To be fair, there are some effective moments where Jung employs some uncomfortable body horror but these are few and far between. Johnson gamely struggles against the script’s more absurd quirks and foibles, and in doing so, saves Michael from being a complete idiot and elicits some much-needed sympathy by the movie’s end. However, by then, like Michael, you’ll be praying for a way out from all the misery.

Rating: 3/10 – despite several attempts to be cleverer than the average found footage horror movie, The Possession of Michael King undermines itself by having its title character behave as stupidly as possible at pretty much every turn; for found footage, or possession movie completists only.

Knights of Badassdom (2013)

28 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Comedy, Demons, Fantasy, Gore effects, Horror, Joe Lynch, LARPing, Live action role playing, Peter Dinklage, Review, Ryan Kwanten, Steve Zahn, Summer Glau

D: Joe Lynch / 86m

Cast: Steve Zahn, Ryan Kwanten, Summer Glau, Peter Dinklage, Margarita Levieva, Jimmie Simpson, Brett Gipson, Danny Pudi

When heavy metal loving Joe (Kwanten) is dumped by his girlfriend, Beth (Levieva), his best friends Eric (Zahn) and Hung (Dinklage) try to cheer him up by taking him on a larping weekend. Larping is short for Live Action Role Playing, the province of fantasy game players who want to act out their roles for “real” as well as doing so online. Eric is an enchanter, and has obtained a copy of a rare book said to have been written by Dr John Dee as an attempt to conjure angels but which was subsequently hidden when Dee found he was conjuring demons instead (though Eric thinks it’s just a prop he got off the Internet). Challenged by games organiser Ronny (Simpson) to come up with a casting spell that will allow Eric, Joe and Hung – accompanied by Lando (Pudi), Gwen (Glau) and Gunther (Gipson) – to progress to the games’ next level, they use an incantation from Dee’s book.

Unaware at first that in doing so they’ve raised a succubus – and that it’s taken on the form of Joe’s ex-girlfriend – the three friends and their new companions continue with the games. As the succubus begins killing stray larpers, it’s only when Hung, Ronny and Lando encounter her later that night that anyone becomes aware of what’s happening. She kills Hung and Lando but Ronny runs away; while he tries to find his way back to where the gamers are camped overnight, Joe and Gwen find Hung’s body and are joined by Eric and Gunther. They too try to get back to the campground but they run into the succubus; Eric recites another incantation to try and send it back to hell and the succubus runs off, apparently hurt. When Ronny sees the book he recognises it straight away and is horrified to learn what’s happened, and lambasts Eric for his stupidity, telling him that if he spoke Enochian (the book’s language) he would have known that the incantation wasn’t for sending the succubus back to hell, but for transforming it. Now the succubus is a demon, Abominog, and it’s down to the remaining group to stop it from feeding on the souls of anyone it encounters, and to destroy it.

Originally filmed in 2010, Knights of Badassdom has had a chequered history. A cut of the movie was shown at 2011’s Comic-Con but was held back from distribution by producers IndieVest Pictures (IVP). Rumours that IVP were cutting the movie without Lynch’s involvement were rife, and it seemed that the movie might end up being released in a bowdlerised version, one that didn’t match Lynch’s vision. Eventually a cut of the movie was screened in March 2013 and it was picked up by distributors Entertainment One. How the movie would have turned out without all that having happened we’ll probably never know, but even if Lynch did have a different approach to the one we’re presented with, it’s unlikely it would have saved the movie from being so bad.

The problem, mainly, is the movie’s tone. It wants to be a hip, clever horror comedy in the vein of Evil Dead II (1987), but where that movie was successful in its combination of extravagant, gory horror with laugh-out-loud sardonic humour, Knights of Badassdom is a crude misfire in comparison, providing lame jokes, gags that are shouted for emphasis by its cast, and which relies on Zahn’s intimidated baby face reactions to criticism as a humorous device. There’s also an over-reliance on having the cast speak in mock-Shakespearean English before relapsing back into modern-day slang or swearing; what the movie’s makers have failed to realise is that it’s not even funny once, let alone the numerous times it’s trotted out over eighty-six laborious minutes.

There’s a woeful lack of characterisation as well, with Joe turning out to be one of the blandest heroes to reach our screens, and the rest of the characters are given little to do but run around and shout a lot. Zahn does a watered-down version of his usual comedy schtick, Glau looks pretty but loses out to Levieva as the woman to watch (she gets far more to do as the bloodthirsty succubus), and Kwanten defaults to looking perplexed throughout (as well he might be). Only Dinklage makes an impression, embracing the intrinsic absurdity of getting dressed up and running around in the woods playing fantasy games, and having as much fun as possible; when his character is killed off, his presence is sorely missed.

With an emphasis on the gore that overwhelms the comedy (such as it is), Knights of Badassdom further demonstrates its inability to strike a balance between the two, leaving the viewer to wonder if Kevin Dreyfuss and Matt Wall’s screenplay really was this artless to begin with, or if the rumoured tampering is to blame. Either way, the movie fails on so many levels that by the time Abominog is despatched in a blaze of ill-conceived coloured lighting, the viewer can only heave a sigh of relief that it’s finally over (and for once there’s no hint of a possible sequel).

Rating: 3/10 – pleasingly old school gore effects aside, Knights of Badassdom has so little to recommend it that the viewer could well end up rooting for Abominog in its efforts to feast on the characters; dreadful and dire in equal measure and a warning to anyone trying to make a modern-day horror comedy.

I, Frankenstein (2014)

03 Saturday May 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Aaron Eckhart, Action, Adam, Angels, Bill Nighy, Demons, Frankenstein, Gargoyles, Mary Shelley, Miranda Otto, Monster, Review, Victor Frankenstein

i-frankenstein_8f851d11

D: Stuart Beattie / 92m

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, Miranda Otto, Yvonne Strahovski, Jai Courtney, Socratis Otto, Aden Young, Caitlin Stasey, Mahesh Jadu, Nicholas Bell

Dispensing with Mary Shelley’s novel in the first five minutes, I, Frankenstein – the title doesn’t mean anything until the very end – takes the basic template established by the Underworld movies but to avoid accusations of complete plagiarism, swaps vampires and werewolves for angels (in the form of gargoyles) and demons, and allows Kate Beckinsale a well earned rest from all the leather-clad slaying she had to do. Now it’s Aaron Eckhart’s turn to shoulder the hopes of a would-be franchise opener.

Sadly, he’s hamstrung from the start. Victor Frankenstein (Young) – having perished in the northern wastes searching for his creation (Eckhart) – is about to be buried in his family cemetery by said creature when a band of demons attack the monster. Nearby, gargoyles watch the scene with interest, but before Frankenstein’s creation can be captured – and Frankenstein’s journal detailing his experiments – the gargoyles intervene and the demons are “descended” – sent back to Hell from whence they can never return. Brought back to their hideout, the creature learns that the gargoyles are, in fact, angels, sworn to defend mankind from the threat of Naberius (Nighy) and his demons. Their Queen, Leonore (Otto), names the creature Adam, and seeks his aid in defeating the demons but he chooses to leave and go his own way; Frankenstein’s journal stays with the gargoyles.

Over the next two hundred years, Adam devotes his time to tracking down and killing demons wherever he can find them. In the present day, an encounter leads to the death of a human. Outraged by this, the gargoyles capture Adam and plan to keep him that way to avoid any further human casualties. Leonore’s second-in-command, Gideon (Courtney) is all for destroying Adam, but she refuses; however an assault on the gargoyles’ base by a horde of demons led by Zuriel (Socratis Otto) makes it all a moot point as Adam is released to defend himself and aid the gargoyles. In the melee, Leonore is captured. An exchange is set up: the journal for Leonore’s safe return, but Adam intervenes, saving the Queen but letting Zuriel escape with the journal.

The journal’s importance becomes clear as we learn of Naberius’ plan to reanimate thousands upon thousands of corpses using Frankenstein’s work. He employs Terra (Strahovski) to solve the problem of reanimation but she has no idea of his true motives. Adam infiltrates the demons’ hideout and discovers (quite easily) what’s going on. He escapes (with the journal), and later coerces Terra into helping him. Naberius forges ahead with his plan, forcing Terra’s colleague Carl (Bell) to finish the process. Adam leads the gargoyles to the demons’ hideout for one last ditch effort to stop the corpses being reanimated and inhabited by fallen demons (and by extension, save mankind etc. etc.).

Based on the comic book by Kevin Grevioux (who also has a small role and was responsible for the Underworld series), I, Frankenstein conforms to that series’ visual styling, with thick greys and steely blues dominating the palette throughout with only the bursts of flame that signify a demon’s descending to alleviate the gloom. There’s the usual over-reliance on wanton destruction and well-choreographed if now slightly generic action beats, a plot that puts a stranglehold on logic and common sense, character motivations that often change from scene to scene, emotive outbursts that come and go without acknowledgement, twists and turns that you can see coming from a century away, acting that veers from unintentionally hilarious to po-faced in its attempts to be serious, direction that makes the action sequences feel flat and uninvolving (as well as confusing), dialogue that even the most dedicated actors – and Eckhart, Nighy and Otto in particular are no slouches – could ever add credibility to, and a stubborn refusal to be anything other than a mess of half-realised intentions and sub-par dramatics.

The problem with I, Frankenstein (and pretty much all the other action fantasy movies that clog up our screens) is its inability to give even its target audience something new to enjoy. Any fan of this particular genre will be disappointed by the lack of invention here, and while no one’s expecting Shakespeare, would it really have hurt the process to provide some depth to things, some gravitas? The story of Frankenstein’s creation is a tragedy, but here the character is reduced to the kind of hate-filled killing machine that wouldn’t look out of place in a vigilante movie; it’s a one-note characterisation that undermines both the character’s legacy and its iconic status. (In the end credits, Mary Shelley receives Special Thanks, but it’s hard to tell if the filmmakers are being ironic or genuine.)

Movies like this will always be green-lit by studios or find investors because they generally make their money back through ancillary sales – and hey, bad movies get made every day anyway – but what galls this particular reviewer is that nobody seems to want to make a movie that isn’t so derivative of every other movie like it. There’s something to be said for giving the audience what they want, but as the box office returns for I, Frankenstein have proved, too much of a (relatively) good thing can be off-putting. At this stage a sequel is probably inevitable and if it is, let’s hope whoever takes up the reins decides to take a little more care with the material and its presentation, and maybe tries something a little bit more interesting and/or different (though I’m betting they won’t).

Rating: 3/10 – a bad movie through and through with some dreadful performances (Courtney, Strahovski) married to a dreadful script and direction (both courtesy of Beattie), and a dreadful misappropriation of a classic literary character; I, Frankenstein should be avoided at all costs, and doesn’t even rate as a guilty pleasure.