Oh! the Horror! – Kantemir (2015) and February (2015)

20 Wednesday Jun 2018

Tags

Ben Samuels, Bromford School, Daniel Gadi, Diane Cary, Drama, Emma Roberts, Horror, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, Murder, Oz Perkins, Review, Robert Englund, Stage play, Thriller, Winter break

Kantemir (2015) / D: Ben Samuels / 81m

Cast: Robert Englund, Diane Cary, Daniel Gadi, Justine Griffiths, Alanna Janell, Stuart Stone, Sean Derry

John Larousse (Englund) is an actor whose career has bottomed out thanks to being an alcoholic. Given the chance to start afresh, he travels to an out of the way country estate where he and a group of actors have been assembled to work on a play. The director, Nicholas (Gadi), is secretive about the play’s content, only revealing that it’s an historical piece and that the characters are involved in a doomed romance. As the rehearsals begin, each actor starts to display the traits of their character, and they often refer to each other by their character names. Only John seems to be aware of the strange transformation that the cast is undergoing, and when he discovers that one of them has been killed, the reluctance of the others to believe him is further undermined by their increasing commitment to the play, and Nicholas’s strange hold over all of them…

If Kantemir has anything going for it, it’s Englund’s performance (though even he struggles with some of the cliché-ridden dialogue dreamed up by co-writers Mark Garbett and Ralph Glenn Howard). Englund is the glue that keeps the movie from coming unravelled altogether, which is something that’s needed, as the script, and Samuels’ sloppy direction, conspire to obscure just what kind of movie it is. On the one hand it’s a horror movie, but at times it’s also a mystery and a thriller, and an historical romance, and at a stretch, a psychological drama. What it isn’t is coherent or able to connect any two scenes to each other without making it seem as if another one has been cut from between them. Englund’s experience carries him through – just – but otherwise the performances are awkward, mannered, and unconvincing. The back story that explains it all doesn’t make any sense either, which further undermines the movie’s credibility, and John Rosario’s gloomy cinematography ensures the movie isn’t attractive to look at either. It’s not entirely a chore to sit through, but any rewards are minimal, and even then, very hard to find.

Rating: 4/10 – with its patchwork screenplay and ill-considered scenario, Kantemir is the kind of low budget horror that gets made hundreds of times each year – and which provides evidence (if it were really needed) that they shouldn’t be made in the first place; admittedly, it’s hard to come up with something truly original in the horror field, and this may be an attempt to do that, but the vast gulf between idea and execution is displayed here a little too obviously for the movie’s own good.

February (2015) / D: Oz Perkins / 94m

aka The Blackcoat’s Daughter; The Devil’s Daughter

Cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar, Lauren Holly, Greg Ellwand, Elana Krausz, Heather Tod Mitchell, Peter James Howarth

It’s February at the Bromford School for girls, a Catholic establishment preparing to see its pupils and staff head off for winter break. Two students however – Kat (Shipka) and Rose (Boynton) – remain behind at the school thanks to their parents being unable to collect them on the allotted day. Kat is a freshman, prone to staring off into the distance and behaving oddly. Rose is a senior who has just found out she’s pregnant; the school head has also asked her to chaperone Kat during the break (though two nuns are there as well). Meanwhile, a young woman named Joan (Roberts) has left a psychiatric hospital some distance away; at a bus station she meets and accepts a lift from Bill (Remar), a good Samaritan who reveals in time that she reminds him of his daughter, who died nine years before. He and his wife, Linda (Holly), are travelling to Bromford to lay flowers on her grave. Kat’s behaviour becomes increasingly bizarre, and Rose begins to fear for her safety, something that is given credence when the headmaster (Howarth) returns to the school and makes a horrifying discovery…

Although it suffers from issues with pacing, and the story it tells borders on being uncomfortably slight, February is a lean and atmospheric chiller from the fertile mind of its writer/director. Perkins has an offbeat dramatic sensibility, and it’s as a writer that he’s most effective – see Removal (2010) and The Girl in the Photographs (2015) for further evidence. Here, what you see isn’t necessarily what you can believe, as the narrative weaves in and out in a non-linear fashion that keeps the viewer from fully understanding just what’s going on and why. The performances, particularly Shipka’s, are accomplished, and they ensure that the mystery is maintained for as long as possible. Perkins also throws in themes relating to grief and personal responsibility, but is unable to make certain scenes as effective as they could be, mostly due to their being stretched beyond any real benefit. The wintry locations add to the sense of unease, and the way in which the movie escalates the level of violence and horror towards the end is persuasive as well. Some viewers may find the movie’s first hour somewhat difficult to get through, but if they stick around, they’ll find that perseverance is its own reward.

Rating: 7/10 – not entirely successful, but doing more than enough to warrant the casual viewer’s attention, February is a deceptively effective horror thriller that takes its time and doesn’t give away all its secrets at once; too many longueurs hamper the movie’s pace and rhythm, but the material is strong enough to offset these faults and provide a pervasive sense of menace that is handled astutely and in appropriately cool fashion.

Monthly Roundup – January 2017

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Action, Animation, Ariel Schulman, Auli'i Cravalho, Chester Morris, Chris Wedge, Chris Williams, D.J. Caruso, Dave Franco, David Yates, Disney, Don Hall, Donnie Yen, Dwayne Johnson, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Roberts, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, George Sherman, Gerry O'Hara, Guy Hamilton, Heart of a Dog, Henry Joost, Horror, Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom, Ian McShane, J.K. Rowling, January 2017, John Musker, Laurie Anderson, Lolabelle, Lucas Till, Moana, Monster Trucks, Monthly roundup, Movies, Nerve (2016), Oliver Reed, Rat terrier, Ray Enright, Reviews, Richard Conte, Ron Clements, Sean Patrick O'Reilly, The Party's Over, The Pleasure Girls, The Sixties, The Sleeping City, Tomorrow at Seven, Vin Diesel, xXx: Return of Xander Cage

Nerve (2016) / D: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman / 96m

Cast: Dave Franco, Emma Roberts, Emily Meade, Miles Heizer, Juliette Lewis, Kimiko Glenn, Marc John Jefferies, Colson Baker, Brian Marc

Rating: 6/10 – an online game of Truth or Dare quickly escalates into something more dangerous than expected when Vee (Roberts) decides to escape her comfort zone and take on the game’s challenges; less than subtle criticisms of the Internet and social media can’t hide the fact that this kind of scenario – teens (mostly) take risks to become “cool” in the eyes of the world – lacks immediacy and a real sense that its characters are in any actual danger, leaving Nerve to flirt with its ideas but never really take them out on a first date.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) / D: David Yates / 133m

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Colin Farrell, Alison Sudol, Samantha Morton, Ezra Miller, Faith Wood-Blagrove, Jenn Murray, Jon Voight, Ronan Raftery, Josh Cowdery, Ron Perlman, Carmen Ejogo

Rating: 5/10 – in New York in 1926, young wizard, Newt Scamander (Redmayne), arrives with a case full of fantastic beasts (what else?) and finds himself in the midst of an evil plot to boost Warner Bros.’ take at the box office; despite being written by J.K. Rowling, Fantastic Beasts... is littered with characters we never get to know, clumsy demarcations between the wizarding world and that of the Muggles (or No-Maj’s as they’re known here), features another tedious series of destruction-porn episodes, and fosters the overwhelming sense that, despite protestations to the contrary, this is a franchise cash-in and nothing more.

Moana (2016) / D: Ron Clements, John Musker, Don Hall, Chris Williams / 107m

Cast: Auli’i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Rachel House, Temuera Morrison, Jemaine Clement, Nicole Scherzinger, Alan Tudyk

Rating: 6/10 – when a curse threatens the island she lives on, chief’s daughter Moana (Cravalho) goes in search of the one person who can put things right: the cause of the curse, demi-god Maui (Johnson); following on from the delightful (and fresh) Zootopia (2016), it’s shocking to see just how lightweight Moana is in comparison, with little depth to the characters, and a plot so flimsy it’s almost see-through, all of which leaves the movie’s stunning animation as the only thing that makes an impact.

The Party’s Over (1965) / D: Guy Hamilton / 94m

Cast: Oliver Reed, Clifford David, Ann Lynn, Katherine Woodville, Louise Sorel, Mike Pratt, Maurice Browning, Jonathan Burn, Roddy Maude-Roxby, Annette Robertson, Alison Seebohm, Eddie Albert

Rating: 7/10 – an American businessman (David) comes to London to persuade his fiancée (Lynn) to return home and get married, but he finds himself battling against her friends (led by Reed’s anti-Establishment poser), and her sudden disappearance; seen today, The Party’s Over has all the hallmarks of a Sixties curio, but at the time it pushed quite a few boundaries, and fell foul of the British censors, forcing Hamilton to remove his name from the credits – but not before he’d made a fascinating and striking movie that’s only let down by a handful of weak performances and an ending that matches them.

The Sleeping City (1950) / D: George Sherman / 85m

Cast: Richard Conte, Coleen Gray, Richard Taber, John Alexander, Peggy Dow, Alex Nicol

Rating: 6/10 – the murder of a doctor at New York’s Bellevue Hospital prompts the police to place three undercover officers there in an attempt to flush out the killer; beginning with an awkward endorsement of the Bellevue staff by Conte (whose inability to read from cue cards is obvious), The Sleeping City soon settles into its film noir trappings but while it’s diverting enough, it doesn’t know what to do with Conte’s lead detective, or how to make its central plot more interesting than it is.

Heart of a Dog (2015) / D: Laurie Anderson / 75m

With: Laurie Anderson

Rating: 8/10 – a tone poem, an essay, a treatise on the unconditional love a dog has for its owner, and a wider examination of grief and loss allied to the events of 9/11 – this isn’t just about Laurie Anderson’s relationship with her beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle, but about the various ways that love and loss can affect us; at its core, Heart of a Dog is not a documentary, but a collage of distressed film stock, abstract sound and sound effects, Anderson’s performance persona, visual memories, heartfelt imagery and reminiscences, poetic reality, and Anderson’s own unique view of the world and the essential poetic nature of it all, all of which combines to provide the viewer with one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking movies of recent years.

Tomorrow at Seven (1933) / D: Ray Enright / 62m

Cast: Chester Morris, Vivienne Osborne, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Henry Stephenson, Grant Mitchell, Charles Middleton, Oscar Apfel, Virginia Howell

Rating: 7/10 – the Black Ace is a master criminal/murderer who predicts the time he’ll kill each of his victims, and he never fails, but crime writer Neil Broderick (Morris) is on his trail, and with the help of Black Ace expert, Thornton Drake (Stephenson), is determined to catch him; an old dark house mystery that features light relief (or major annoyance – take your pick) from the double act of McHugh and Jenkins as two of the stupidest cops on the force, Tomorrow at Seven does a good job of playing cat and mouse with the audience, but with so few suspects on display, the identity of the Black Ace is, sadly, all too obvious.

The Pleasure Girls (1965) / D: Gerry O’Hara / 88m

Cast: Ian McShane, Francesca Annis, Mark Eden, Klaus Kinski, Anneke Wills, Tony Tanner, Rosemary Nicols, Suzanna Leigh, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Carol Cleveland

Rating: 6/10 – Sally (Annis) comes to London to be a model, and soon falls in with a like-minded group of young women looking to find their way in the world – and have a lot of fun at the same time, even though it doesn’t always work out like that; though the focus is in on Sally, her friends, and the various relationships they form, The Pleasure Girls makes more of an impact thanks to its male cast, with McShane, Eden and Kinski (very good) all standing out thanks to strong characterisations and having less soap opera-style dialogue than that of the female cast, and O’Hara’s direction appearing to wander whenever two or more of the girls are on screen.

Monster Trucks (2016) / D: Chris Wedge / 105m

Cast: Lucas Till, Jane Levy, Thomas Lennon, Barry Pepper, Rob Lowe, Holt McCallany, Amy Ryan, Danny Glover, Frank Whaley

Rating: 7/10 – an oil-drilling operation leads to the release of three “monsters” that live deep underground, but while the oil company captures two of the creatures, the third ends up befriending high school senior, Tripp (Till), who in turn helps it to avoid being captured as well; an innocuous throwback to the kind of fantasy movies made for kids in the Eighties, Monster Trucks is a lot of fun if you let yourself just go with it, and though its message of tolerance and understanding of “foreigners” seems at odds with current notions of US nationalism, it’s still a message we can all stand to hear one more time.

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) / D: Sean Patrick O’Reilly / 83m

Cast: Kiefer O’Reilly, Sean Patrick O’Reilly, Jane Curtin, Ron Perlman, Christopher Plummer, Alison Wandzura, Tyler Nicol, Doug Bradley

Rating: 5/10 – young Howard Lovecraft (Kiefer O’Reilly) finds himself transported to a strange kingdom of ice which is inhabited by equally strange creatures, and where he finds himself searching for both a way back, and a way to reassure his father (Nicol) (who’s locked up in an asylum) that his ravings about other worlds and said creatures are all true; a curious blend of children’s animation and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom is quite straightforward in its approach, but is let down by poor production values, an animation style that makes it look like a video game from the Nineties, and a script that juggles motivations and dialogue like a one-handed man in a chainsaw-catching competition.

xXx: Return of Xander Cage (2017) / D: D.J. Caruso / 107m

Cast: Vin Diesel, Donnie Yen, Deepika Padukone, Toni Collette, Ruby Rose, Kris Wu, Tony Jaa, Nina Dobrev, Rory McCann, Michael Bisping, Samuel L. Jackson

Rating: 4/10 – the world is in peril from yet another technological McGuffin, and it’s up to extreme sports enthusiast/secret agent Xander Cage (Diesel) to save the day; with Diesel unable to get The Last Witch Hunter (2015) off the ground as another franchise earner, it’s no surprise that he’s returned to a character he left behind fifteen years ago, but this is as uninspired and as predictable as you’d expect, and only Yen’s (always) impressive physicality makes any kind of an impact.

Ashby (2015)

27 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Assassin, CIA, Drama, Emma Roberts, Football, High School, Mickey Rourke, MRI scanner, Nat Wolff, Old people, Review, Sarah Silverman, Tony McNamara, Wide receiver

D: Tony McNamara / 103m

Cast: Mickey Rourke, Nat Wolff, Emma Roberts, Sarah Silverman, Kevin Dunn, Zachary Knighton, Michael Lerner, John Enos III

Seventeen year old Ed Wallis (Wolff) and his mother, June (Silverman), have moved into a new neighbourhood following June’s divorce from Ed’s father. Ed is a self-contained, quietly determined, well-read teenager who is struggling to make sense of his life and where it’s going. When his English teacher instructs Ed’s class to write a report about an “old person” – one they actually have to talk to – Ed decides to write his report about his neighbour, Ashby Holt (Rourke).

Unknown to Ed, Ashby has a brain tumour that has left him with only three months left to live. When Ed knocks on his door, Ashby tales advantage of the situation, and in return for talking to Ed about his life, gets him to drive Ashby around. On their first trip, Ashby tells Ed he was a napkin salesman, but later, when Ed helps Ashby through a potential seizure, he discovers that this particular “napkin salesman” has a small arsenal of weapons in his basement and a clutch of passports in different names. Despite Ed’s attempts to cover his tracks, Ashby knows what’s happened, and the next day he and Ed go for a drive where he reveals that he was actually a CIA assassin, and has killed over ninety people. When Ed asks him if he has any regrets or doubts about what he did, Ashby’s response isn’t as unequivocal as Ashby himself would have liked.

Back in high school, Ed attracts the attention of Eloise (Roberts), a student whose class project involves her studying the effect of violent collisions on the brains of the football team. Ed wants to be a part of the team, but his slight frame and nerd-like appearance doesn’t inspire much confidence, but when he reveals his talent as a wide receiver, he wins his place. Meanwhile, Ashby becomes concerned that one of the people he killed wasn’t as deserving as he believed at the time. When he looks into the man’s life and career, Ashby discovers that his bosses lied to him, and he determines to make amends before he dies, even if it means their deaths. While Ashby searches for redemption, Ed tries his best to deal with his mother’s habitual dating (and inferred one night stands), his father continually failing to visit him, his fear of being hit during a football match, and navigating the tricky waters of his relationship with Eloise. And then he learns about Ashby’s latest “mission”…

A coming-of-age tale that features a handful of winning performances, and an uneven but engaging storyline, Ashby is an independent feature that just about works thanks to the spirited commitment of its cast and the relative originality and quirkiness of the script by director McNamara, who also made the wonderful The Rage of Placid Lake (2003).

As a coming-of-age tale the movie relies heavily on making Ed a bit of a coward, and he’s whiny too, justifying his reluctant behaviour at every turn and always making excuses for the people around him, such as his father, whom he always speaks well of, even when they don’t deserve it. Ed is continually defending these people, even the jock who assaults him; he spends so much time understanding why people treat him so badly, this very “understanding” marks him out as one of Life’s perennial victims. He also complains too much when things don’t work out as he’d like them to, which leads to Ashby telling him he’s got to stop “bitchin’ like a sheep on crystal meth”. With all this, it’s a tribute to Wolff’s performance that the viewer doesn’t dislike Ed on principle, and it’s a further tribute that when things do start to go right for him, the viewer is completely on his side and urging him on.

But while Ed’s journey is paved with good intentions rarely achieved, Ashby’s is more soulful and melancholic. As he helps Ed manoeuvre the minefield that is becoming an adult, Ashby looks to put his affairs in order before he’s reunited with his wife and daughter in the afterlife (even though he knows there’s no guarantee he will be). There’s a sombre, religious and philosophical consideration here that doesn’t quite fit in with Ashby’s character as a whole, and there’s a scene where he visits the local priest (Knighton) for absolution that holds up the movie and feels out of place, mostly because this takes place during the period he’s looking to “take care” of his old bosses. That said, Rourke is on terrific form as Ashby, his usual mannered approach to a role here left off and replaced with a restrained, careful take on a character that could so easily have been a caricature if it weren’t for the combination of Rourke’s portrayal and McNamara’s writing (and for once, it looks like Rourke is really enjoying himself).

Where McNamara does stumble though is in his treatment of the secondary characters, with Roberts’ Eloise possessing the kind of confidence and self-awareness that only teenage females in the movies have, while Silverman’s love-hungry June openly admits to Ed that she likes sex in a scene that again, is only likely to happen in the movies. The writer/director also has trouble judging the length of a scene, leaving some to run on (the locker room scenes), while others feel truncated (the early scenes between Ed and his mother). But even though these problems intrude from time to time and break the movie’s rhythm, they’re not enough to ruin the mood of the piece as a whole, which finds clever ways to celebrate both the beginning of one adult life and the end of another.

First and foremost a drama, Ashby finds room for some much-needed and relishable humour, from some terrific one-liners to occasional visual gags that are as unexpected as they are hilarious, and McNamara is often on surer ground in these instances. But it’s Rourke and Wolff who make this work so well, their scenes together displaying a keen sense of timing with both actors sparking off each other to great effect. Aided by some very crisp, stylish photography from Christopher Baffa, and a succinct, gently supportive score by Alec Puro, the movie overcomes many of its failings to become a heartfelt, meditative examination of an unlikely but mutually rewarding friendship.

Rating: 7/10 – some viewers may feel that Ashby is too good-natured or lightweight to be entirely successful, but it has a likeable, winning nature that’s hard to ignore, and what it has to say it says without too much prevarication or pontificating; with Rourke giving one of his best performances for quite some time, and Wolff reminding audiences just why he’s one of the best young actors working today, the movie is a small-scale treat that would have benefitted from some judicious script editing and a more streamlined storyline, but still retains a charm all its own.